Naturens fördubbling : Från symbol till allegori i Ola Hanssons tidiga författarskap

Mattias Pirholt, Naturens fördubbling. Från symbol till allegori i Ola Hanssons tidiga författarskap. (The Duplication of Nature: From Symbol to Allegory in Ola Hansson’s Early Work.) This study deals with the Swedish writer Ola Hansson’s work from the 1880’s and early 1890’s and the shift from a symbolical to an allegorical mode of writing. Hansson’s early work, Dikter (1884, Poems), Notturno (1885), Sensitiva amorosa (1887) and Parias (1890), plays a significant part in the realistic and naturalistic movement of the 1880’s in Sweden, and the author is considered to be one of the central figures in what has been called the modern breakthrough in Scandinavian literature. In the late 1880’s, Hansson discovered Friedrich Nietzsche, whose work had a great impact on Swedish literature in general and on Hansson in particular. His encounter with Nietzsche resulted in a collection of prose poems, Ung Ofegs visor (1892, Young Ofeg’s Ditties), and an extensive essay on the German philosopher. Nietzsche’s ideological influence on Hansson is well documented, as well as his influence on Hansson’s style in Ung Ofegs visor, whose prophetic and pseudo-biblical style bears great resemblance to Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra. Hansson’s work prior to Ung Ofegs visor is dominated by a symbolical mode of writing, i.e., a mode of writing that is constituted by thematic and linguistic unity. The romantic conception of the symbol, as it is developed in the early 19th century by, among others, J. W. von Goethe, F. W. J. Schelling and G. W. F. Hegel, stresses the synthesis of the signifier and the signified. The symbol is, according to the romantics, the representation of the absolute. It is in the particularity of the intuitive symbol and not in the conventionality and generality of the allegorical mode that the absolute is expressible. In allegory, in contrast, the signifier and the signified do not merge. Rather, the very difference between the constituents of the sign becomes productive. In the criticism of Friedrich Schlegel in the 19th century and of Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man in the 20th century, allegory replaces symbol as the central semontological trope, which, contrary to the symbol, separates being and meaning, signifier and signified. It is represented by decay and destruction (the corpse and the ruin) and characterises the conventionality and arbitrariness of language in general. The poems in Dikter and Notturno and the short stories in Sensitiva amorosa conform to the strong romantic tradition of the symbol. The intimate relations between man and nature and between subject and object are repeatedly expressed as a reciprocal movement, flowing and growing in both man and nature. The language of the human sphere is applied to the natural and vice versa. Hansson depicts a joint and intertwining force that runs through the world and that is the cause of both growth and deterioration of all living things. Unlike earlier studies on Hansson’s poems, this paper does not want to describe the relation between man and nature as a translation of spiritual phenomena into nature, but as a reciprocity that dissolves the boundaries between the experiencing subject and the experienced world. The symbolic mode also applies to Hansson’s political poetry in Dikter and Notturno, where the writer argues for a society based on unity, and to the linguistic and metapoetical level, where writing is symbolically depicted as a natural phenomenon, interlacing the language of the poet with nature. Hansson’s collection of prose poems, Ung Ofegs visor, does not only imitate the allegorical style of Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra, but also radically breaks with the symbolical conception of man and nature in the early work. The experience of the world is no longer founded on unity and the amalgamation of life by an omnipresent force. On the contrary, both nature and the social relations of men are permeated with a ubiquitous dualism: between good and evil, strong and weak, free and enslaved etc. The allegorical mode violently breaks the bonds that previously formed a totality of man, nature and language. Nature is transformed from a living unity into an artificial and allegorical sign, into a language that is unable to connect the subject with the object. The allegory in Ung Ofegs visor, however, remains an isolated experiment in Hansson’s work. During the 1890’s and the early 20th century, he returns to the symbolical mode of writing of the earliest work