The Euphuria of the Text - on the Market, on Man, and on Melody, i.e.: Poetry

Af : Finn Barlby

Om The Journey on Foot from Holmens Canal to the East Point of Amager, The Shadow and Auntie Toothache.

The explicit and implicit narrators of the three Andersen texts are all to be found in or circle around the decisive threshold situation, which really means something and inevitably will prove to make a difference – even all the difference:
   The poetical subject – and this is true whether it is narrated or narrating – has been launched or lauched itself into an obsessive confrontation with conditions and possibilities. Come hell or high water, the attempt must be made. “I want it!” as the little mermaid says in "The Little Mermaid".
   The poetical subject, entirely on its own, must find its bearings itself and fight its own fight. It stands alone - is unique. This is true, for exam­ple, about the first‑person narrators of The Journey on Foot and "Auntie Toothache". But at the same time, they are more than this. They are double or rather bi-valent. The first-person narrator of The Journey on Foot is both a would-be poet and a real poet, for indeed it is he who narrates or makes the whole thing up. The same thing is true about "Auntie Toothache", where it might look as if there are two narrators (a narrator of the frame story and a fragment narrator). But in reality they are one and the same person, and it is only pretence, but of course most meaningful, that this person splits himself into two.
Metaphorically speaking, the situation consists of New Year's Eve (The Journey on Foot), emerging from sleep and standing behind the curtain ("The Shadow"), and in being "a living rescue institution" ("Auntie Toothache"). Together this means that the old is becoming the new, that there is hesitation because something new is about to occur, and that saving literature is the same as saving oneself.
   But to continue:
   The situation is that the poetical subject is standing at a crossroad, where he can either perish or go his own way.
   The threats to the poetical activity are in a way clear enough. If litera­ture too anxiously and literally adapts to prevailing liberal market con­ditions, it will in the end perish in sentimentality and convention, super­ficiality and simple entertainment. Even serious literature may get into difficulties, if it is not carried by an engagement which renews it. This is what happens to "the scholar" in "The Shadow", even if he does not manage to recognize it, because he has definitively been put out of play.
   The almost amorphous market conditions have annihilating limita­tions and represent a free play of forces, if only limitation norms are respected. Force and freedom, freedom and force. Both on the one hand, and on the other hand.
   This means that there are possibilities, indeed a possibility to burst the fetters of the whole cosy Biedermeier‑idyll, as it is so aptly de­scribed in the conclusion of "Auntie Toothache":
   "The fire was burning in the stove. The samovar was on the table. My room appeared quite cosy, although not as cosy as Auntie's, which in the winter has heavy curtains in front of all doors and windows and double carpets on the floor, with three layers of newspapers underneath. At Auntie's, one feels as if one were inside a properly corked bottle filled with hot air. But, as I said, even my poor room grew cosy, while the wind blew outside."
   It is possible to get out of the isolation and move beyond the teatable, exploring all topographical and geographical, meteorological and psy­chological - and tropological differences and ressources which might help to shape new stories. It is tricky and edgy and more easily said than done, but in a way it is only in meeting with what is contingent that sparks begin to flow and the situation becomes poetically interesting. It is only by going beyond the usual limitations, challenging generally ac­cepted opinions, that it becomes possible to see through the whole mess.
   Exploiting these possibilities requires adequate luggage, which must be both constructive and subversive enough. The poet narrator of The Journey on Foot has thus equipped himself for his journey by putting E. T. A. Hoffmann's great novel, Die Elixiere des Teufels (1815-16) into his pocket, "in order to have a little fantasy left over, if my own was not sufficient".
"The Shadow", then, rests on the ability to name things and "stamp" them, to be able to identify and shape them.
"Auntie Toothache" rests on rhetoric and the text as play, and in play. “Rhetoric”, Barbara Johnson has said, "clearly, has everything to do with covert operations".
   It is the play and tension between the obvious and the hidden which is decisive, or, as Wolfgang Iser puts it: “The Play of the Text”.

Fra Hans Christian Andersen: A Poet in Time
Odense University Press, 1999

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