JACOBSENIANA - J. P. Jacobsen Selskabet - Aarhus Universitet

tered with a sluggish, violent and lethal resistance from that part
of the world which lays beyond the world of dreams: Nature in
itself, the corporeal body, time and death. This leads to the obvi-
ous possibility of establishing an ongoing schism in all of
Jacobsen’s texts, namely between a monstrous human nature and
a biological indifference, both of which can be understood as ac-
tive forces, and as existing simultaneously. In the early and post-
humously published sequence of poems called “Hervert Sperring”
the main character has Hervert’s grandiose ideas of his own death
cut off by real death in a rather harsh and ironical way. In “Fra
Skitsebogen” a real lizard suddenly interrupts the description of
an ‘Italian’ page-scenery, and in Jacobsen’s last and unfinished
text “Doktor Faust”, broken off by his own death, death has no
meaning unless it is accepted as part of life instead of being re-
pressed by dreams.
Such sudden and often brutal dream and death interactions are
in Jacobsen’s texts redoubled textually and stylistically by the use
of demolishing principles of composition. These principles of
composition of the texts are close to being textual quantum leaps:
A non-organic and non-growing material transformation of cer-
tain poetic quantums. The leaps demarcate as well as link together
the various pieces of the single text, whereby they mark the most
advanced signifying endeavours of Jacobsen’s poetics.
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