Mellan ordet och döden : Rum, tid och representation i Lars Noréns 70-talslyrik

Sammanfattning: This dissertation explores mainly metapoetical features in the poetry written by the Swedish author Lars Norén (1944-) during the 1970s. The main focus is on the collections Kung Mej och andra dikter, 1973 (King Me and Other Poems), Dagbok augusti-oktober 1975, 1976 (Diary August-October 1975), Order, 1978 (Order) and Den ofullbordade stjärnan, 1979 (The Unfinished Star). A common feature of the metapoetic aspect, is the tendency of the text to simulate the neutralization of its own materiality. The poem attempts in different ways to escape its own disintegrating conditions, thus simulating the re-creation of a presence. The first chapter captures this transcendency through different understandings of distance explicitly referred to in the poetry of the early 70s. This notion of distance relates to a variety of elements, e.g. reproductions outside the poem itself, which can be seen as strategic pathways in the poem's attempt to escape its own supposed lack of reproductive force, a lack that in its turn appears through different renderings of a negative capacity in the poetical language. Another aspect of this transcendency appears in different configurations of space and time. In the early and mid 70s Noréns poetry often produces transfigurations of established rooms or scenes, where the neutralization of temporal characteristics functions as a step in the projection of a seemingly pure spatial dimension. This neutralization of time is often accompanied by the abandonment of a referential and narrative mode of description. The shift from a time-dominated to a space-dominated scene, can thus be understood as an aestheticising movement where the supposed ability to reproduce a presence outside the poem is closely associated with the faculties of a purely spatial dimension. In the analysis, the term that covers these transgressive movements, is called the anatope. In the later poetry this shift between temporal and spatial categories almost disappears, in favor of a more rhetorically reduced and hermetic text. The two final chapters observe how this gradual change also involves an increased significance of the distinct address employed in the poem, an address closely related to a number of notable elements. The analysis thus suggests a perspective where the decidedly contradictory shape of the invoked object or person, is associated with the outstanding features of the poem itself, as with language in general. Instead of thematizing a distance to a recognizable reality outside the text, the poem thus tends to establish itself as the very reality to which it relates, thereby striving to create rather than re-create a presence beyond disintegration.