Existing in a linguistic room : On the relation between language and existence in Göran Tunström's novel Skimmer

Captured in the room of Göran Tunström’s spoken language, fenced behind his barrier of manic words. This essay is about the limit of language and world’s necessity to be spoken to be experience, about telling as a manufacturer of meaning and a subject’s motion between fiction and reality. Based on the novel Skimmer from 1996, my purpose is to identify “a linguistic room” in Tunström’s narration and show how this room is given an existential character by its temporal and spatial dimensions. The linguistic room is an abstraction of the virtual experience of a story and how this virtual room seeks to transform into reality, the same way as language tries to capture its reference by being its referent. Using Jacques Derrida’s and Roland Barthes’ structuralist ideas about language as a complex referential medium, Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope and Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenological and psychoanalytic theory about the poetics of room, I examine the linguistic room as habitation for the protagonists in Tunström’s novel and how richness of language could turn into experience of insufficiency. Language giving the subject nutrition to prosper and outgrow its existence depends on its ability of making it bigger by recreating, specifying and defining experience of life. Not only living it but also verbalizing it makes the existence vaster but at the same time insufficient since the insight will come about world’s inability to be captured but only referred to by linguistic instruments. Thus this essay studies the relation between language and existence and how narration concretizes this relation into a linguistic room