Jens Peter Jacobsen, Compositional Heterogeneity and Poetic Thinking
By : Jørn Erslev Andersen
To remain with the subject of composition, the compositional
heterogeneity already indicated seems to rest on a principle of
quantum-leaping change rather than on organicity. The process
of development is not non-organic, for there is life. Nor is it a
harmonious growth or process of development, but on the
contrary rather in the nature of material transformations of
quantum-like minimum units in which the actual process of
transformation takes place in catastrophic leaps from one state
to another. It is in the ways in which these elements are brought
together, i.e. in the impacts and consequent distances between
the individual parts, that crucial dimensions of meaning are
created. In all Jacobsenīs texts, the developments, the changes,
are primarily determined not by subjective predispositions and
calculated intentions in the protagonists, but by objective or
external changes in the given environments. The organisms, i.e.
the protagonists, react almost amnesiacally to changes in the
situations in which they find themselves. There is no question of
deterministic heredity/environment thinking, but of a difference
between the continuity of the reactive pattern and the
discontinuity of the intellectual development in which neither is to
be seen as a kind of initial determinant. The basis for this
reactive behaviour is coded into the organism in the form of
certain inherited predispositions and the configurations of instinct
and drive. Crucial, however, is the fact that these predispositions
are not changed in themselves or developed or improved or
spoiled or anything of the kind. They are, in fact, constant. What
changes is the mental dispositions of the organisms, what Jens
Peter Jacobsen in his letter to Edvard Brandes calls " a personīs
spiritual side", which thanks to the interchange with and the
reactions against widely different situations, events and human
relationships leads to equal parts of non-development (the
characters remain undeveloped and tied to the same reaction
pattern) and total change (the charactersī contacts with the
world change along with unpredictable and unavoidable events in
the surrounding world in the form of death, violence, real or
non-human interference in an imagined order etc - we can here
think of deathīs ironical and brutal intervention in Hervert
Sperringīs grandiose notions concerning his own death or the
lizardīs inopportune intervention in the scheme of things so
painstakingly built up by the narrator in "From the Sketchbook",
to name only a couple of extreme instances). The predispositions
lead to reactive actions, but they have no formative or qualitative
effect on the changes; this is left to the shifting environments
portrayed, which everywhere in Jens Peter Jacobsen are
presented as a chain of incongruent states, perhaps most
elegantly demonstrated in "From the Sketchbook" and most
precisely formulated by Marie Grubbe in her conversation with
Ludvig Holberg in which she insists that everyone lives his own
life in such a way as is possible under the vicissitudes of the
conditions under which he lives, that it is not certain that a
person only has one soul, and that he dies his own death without
guilt.
Jørn Erslev Andersen: "J.P. Jacobsen, kompositorisk
heterogenitet og poetisk tænkning" in: Spring 12, Copenhagen.
Translated by Glyn & Kirsten Jones
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