JACOBSENIANA - J. P. Jacobsen Selskabet - Aarhus Universitet

of nature will bear any kind of fruit at all, be it an exact philologi-
cal attempt, or be it in terms of an allegorical tour de force of
theoretical interpretations.
At the very beginning of the reflection natural science is said
to be overloaded, so to speak, by evolutionary history, whereas
works of fiction hardly bear any sign of it. The differentia speci-
fica of the link between nature, natural science and fiction is elu-
cidated in the launch of what Jacobsen later calls “the real history
of evolution”. The explanation of this real history is rather ellipti-
cal, he only explains it by offering it as an imperative, a rather
odd linguistic gesture, embedded in parenthesis and put in in-
verted commas, to indicate that it is either a quotation or a spoken
sentence, and in a foreign language: “voir venir les choses”, that
is, “size things up”, or, in contemporary American, “check things
out” (in Danish: “se tingene komme/se tingene an”). The impera-
tive “size things up” should in this context mean something like:
“confront yourself with reality, take a look at things as they really
are.” This has nothing to do, actually, with Darwinism, athiesm or
natural science. It is an endeavour to capture reality in its pure na-
kedness, to grasp, that is, the real evolutionary history for those
capable of doing so. It is astonishing that those capable of doing
so are the artists and not the scientists. The scientific strive for
sober consideration in sizing things up is then linked to a neoteric
attempt to create fictional characters embedded in a real evolu-
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