JACOBSENIANA - J. P. Jacobsen Selskabet - Aarhus Universitet

the novel Niels Lyhne. Especially Niels Lyhne lacks any kind of
main thread, not only in the portrait of the protagonist, but also in
the composition of the novel and the outstanding use of various
forms of stylistic patterns that are themselves lacking any kind of
‘inner’ coherence.
Thus the texts are similar to what Jacobsen calls the mind or
spiritual side of a human being. Every single text has its own
characteristics, often resulting in new genre forms as fx the ara-
besques, the sketches (“Fra Skitsebogen”, “To Verdener”) and the
stylistics and sequential sceneries of the novels. The complexity
of the single text is created by elements gathered from very dif-
ferent places and sources, and the complexity is thus due to the
impact of very different conditions, facts and circumstances. The
various texts in Jacobsen’s oeuvre are to be characterized as non-
organic. Nonetheless, they create criss-cross connections through
the distinctive use of a textual sewing technique, the texts are not
oriental Romantic carpets but rather patchworks of various frag-
ments sewn together in ways, that make the intersections bear
most of the signifying endeavour.
This is the most significant principle of the poetics of the lack-
ing red anchoring rope. The red thread is, at least in Danish, a
common idiom for the pattern of coherence of a talk, a text, a
piece of art and so on. But instead of having a “red thread”,
Jacobsen has an “anchoring rope”. The result is a neologism, a
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