JACOBSENIANA - J. P. Jacobsen Selskabet - Aarhus Universitet

ing of this passage may be a reasonable starting point for an expo-
sure of his contribution to modern European literature and literary
theory in the complicated realms of natural science and literary
creativity. I would like to draw attention to the following topics
embedded in the long quotation by dividing it up and relate it to
three topics: 1) Natural science versus works of fiction, 2) The
mind (spiritual) aspect of a human being, and 3) The poetics of
the lacking red anchoring rope.
These three topics will serve as headings or as guidance for the
presentation of the core of this paper.
NATURAL SCIENCE VERSUS WORKS OF FICTION
What Jacobsen had in mind when writing about natural science
and theories of evolution is not at all clear, on the contrary, it is a
topic of intense debate even today. In his very recommendable
monography in German, Jens Peter Jacobsen, Bengt Algot
Sørensen presents some interesting, but to my mind not all con-
vincing, arguments that the German ‘spiritual’ Darwinist Ernst
Haeckel had the most significant impact on Jacobsen’s way of
thinking and writing. The Norwegian Jacobsen scholar Erik
Østerud argues in a sequence of essays that Jacobsen’s concept of
natural science, Darwinism and nature conclude in allegories of
nature (Østerud 1995a, 1995b, 1996, 1998). I am not sure whether
such attempts to figure out the true nature of Jacobsen’s concept
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