JACOBSENIANA - J. P. Jacobsen Selskabet - Aarhus Universitet

ture by using very loose wordstrokes. It has a proverb in which
two pages discus matters of happiness and un-happiness. The
pages are, in the tradition of the Middle Ages, young men played
by young women. The text puts some stress on this double-sided
gendering of the players. First, they are presented as young boys,
then the text presents some biographic details of the female play-
ers. This sudden change in the text from ‘he’ to ‘she’ is easily
compared to the double-bound play of the text itself, that is, its
oscilation between being a wordstroke and a text about reality and
illusion.
All of Jacobsen’s texts have at least one significant changing
of stylistic features. They change between being on the one hand
very long and metonymic passages, in the sense of Roman Jakob-
son, loaded with exquisite adjectives and, on the other hand, very
short, condensed and often rather cutting sentences. The changing
between these two modes often follows the same scheme. First
the text presents a vast metonymic description of a person, an in-
terieur or a scenery of nature. Then the text cuts this description
off by putting a short down-to-earth phrase at the endings of the
descriptions. This pattern could of course easily be considered an
interplay between an écriture feminine and a penetrating, and thus
‘fallic’ way of writing. I am not stating this as a fact, only as a
possibility.
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