JACOBSENIANA - J. P. Jacobsen Selskabet - Aarhus Universitet

Elsewhere, I have introduced the term “compositional heterogene-
ity” as the most proper designation for the main principle of com-
position in J. P. Jacobsen’s oeuvre (Erslev Andersen 1998). In the
case of Fru Marie Grubbe, this principle results in a poetics of
various or unstable levels of style, now interacting dialectically
into the same textual sequences, now establishing a contrapuntal
serial order of contrasting parts of the text as poly-stylistic pro-
cess with the overall effect that the different tableaux are only
loosely interconnected in a narrative logic, if interconnected at all.
The switch from one tableau to another, from scenery to scenery,
is abrupt and unmediated, producing no illusions of connection
between the scenes, of any organic unity.
The two kinds of velocity posed in the novel concern two as-
pects of the same entity, Marie Grubbe, identified with both cha-
racter and novel. Only a few narrative trajectories in the novel can
be ascribed to bodily desires, that is to naturalistic or Darwinist
concepts of sexual instincts as a basic human principle. At the
same time, the character Marie Grubbe, as well as the novel itself,
is basically unpredictable, monstrous, and desultory, portraying
the narrative logic of the crossings of inner and outer qualities.
Here, one may be reminded of Spinoza’s Aristotelian reflections
on bodily motion:
A body in motion or at rest must be determined to motion or rest by
another body, which was also determined to motion or rest by another,
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