Ett hål i känseln : Om språkupplevelsens fenomenologi i Ann Jäderlunds författarskap

Sammanfattning: This thesis aims to analyze and interpret a number of central works – Vimpelstaden (1985), Som en gång varit äng (1988), Blomman och människobenet (2003), I en cylinder i vattnet av vattengråt (2005) and Vad hjälper det en människa om hon häller rent vatten över sig i alla sina dagar (2009) – by the Swedish poet Ann Jäderlund (1955-) in the context of phenomenology and affect theory. The analysis consists of three chapters and proceeds chronologically with technical scrutinies of separate phases of Jäderlund’s œuvre – from the aphasic-like treatment of established phraseologies in Vimpelstaden and frozen expressions of the botanical discourse in Som en gång varit äng, to the uncanny focus on perceptual patterns as such in her later works. Throughout these analyses the thesis observes a series of techniques with which the author presents us with a kind of sensory paradox, through a) creating language-based complex appearances, non-appropriable by means of the normal perceptual patterns of embodied perception, while still b) simulating, and thus implicitly emphasizing, these appearances as something already concretely looked at and felt. In short, to experience what cannot be experienced, to live the unlivable. Many of these technical observations made are pinned down analytically using concepts from the field of cognitive poetics, namely George Lakoff and Mark Johnsons findings of experiential image schemata underpinning spoken phraseologies and their influential theories on conceptual metaphors. The interpretative conclusion following these observations is that Jäderlund handles her writing aesthetically as a kind of sensory material in a very literal sense, a “being of sensation” in the terminology of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Not as means of experiential or intellectual representation, not as some sort of critical enterprise through mere language-gaming of free- floating signifiers – but as a material able to preserve and perform sensory processes immanent to its own material compilation, a tendency that earlier research fails to grasp or simply ignores altogether. Thus the affectivity immanent to the literary material – often being the starting point of studies in affect theory and cognitive poetics – is here proven to be a characteristic, thereby playing the role more of a conclusion than a field of inquiry. The aesthetics of interrogating the limits of sensory experience, introducing a sort of crisis to embodied perception through the experience of poetic language – and the experience of it as having a “metaphysical significance”, as French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau- Ponty puts it – is articulated in the thesis against the background of influential readings of modern art carried out by Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze.