Skriften og døden

Tre positioner i J.P. Jacobsens sene forfatterskab

Abstract

This article identifies a specific motif and traces its development in the last texts written by the Danish author Jens Peter Jacobsen (1847-1885): the relationship between writing and death. In the short story “Fru Fønss” (1882), Jacobsen presents the reader with the notion of writing as a medium for the writer's appropriation of death and for transgression of death in a state of “artistic transcendence”. This notion is slightly modified in the poem “Saa standsed’ der og den Blodets Strøm” (1884) and the epigram “Lys over Land” (1885), where the writer’s transgression of death is accompanied by a renunciation of individual identity, which is handed over to the dynamic development of history. Drawing on the French author and literary critic Maurice Blanchot's reflections on the relationship between writing and death, the article opposes these depictions of the relationship between writing and death to the one that is presented by Jacobsen's prose fragment “Doktor Faust” (1885). In this text, the writer's confrontation with death is detrimental to his ability to write with the effect that the work decomposes. However, this decomposition opens up the text to the world; in this case the world of the reader.