Ellen Einan's fictional world in poems

Eva Pitronova of the Faculty of Humanities and Education has submitted her thesis entitled «Jeg skaper meg en ny klode». Fiktive verdener og Ellen Einans lyrikk and will defent the thesis for the PhD degree, 14 April 2023.

Summary of the thesis:

Lyric genre is most often associated with sound, melody and rhythm. This thesis, however, aims to investigate the fictional dimension of lyric poetry through both a theoretical discussion of the fictional worlds of poetry in the theory section, and a fictional reading of the Norwegian poet Ellen Einan in the analysis section.

Fictional world as a concept

The starting point for my approach to the text is an idea of fictional worlds in poetry. This term originally comes from modal logic which speaks of 'possible worlds' as alternative world models used for various hypothetical purposes. In literary studies, a special type of possible worlds, i.e. fictional worlds, are imaginary world constructions created by and in the text. They do not appear as logical models, but as specific structures within which the text develops.

The fiction-making poetry

Lyric poetry has traditionally been described as mostly non-fictional and non-narrative, and discussion of its fictionality can be perceived as almost radical. However, it does exist some research that focuses on the fictional and narrative dimension of poetry, and I build my arguments on this research. By pointing out underlying narrative lines and focusing on the lyric I as the centre of the fictional world, I establish a theoretical basis for my further analysis.

Ellen Einan's forgotten writings

Ellen Einan (1931-2013) is a little-known poet from Northern Norway who had a fabulous career in the 1980s and 1990s. In total, she has published 14 collections of poetry and written hundreds of poems, all of which were created through automatic writing. Einan's poetry is characterised by remarkable contradictions and bizarre events, and specific to her writing is the frequent use of innovations and repetitive references to mythical rituals. Because of all this, she has been perceived as an incomparable poet, but her writing has also been described as difficult to interpret and incomprehensible.

In the analytical part of the thesis, I examine Einan's recurring use of motifs and certain narrative structures. These work best when all the poems are merged into a bigger narrative with a single assembled fictional world. My interpretation also connects to an earlier tradition in the reception of Einan that is precisely characterised by the focus on the astonishing poetic universe she creates. There is, however, no major study of Einan's oeuvre, and this thesis is also the first one to consider her private archive. Einan was also a talented illustrator and has left a large collection of poetry manuscripts with original drawings. In this monograph, I thus introduce a previously unknown part of her poetry, explore the visual dimension of her poems and present the complexity of her writing in an entirely new manner.

Understanding the incomprehensible          

By rethinking poetry, bringing to the fore those aspects that are conventionally downplayed, we can acquire new knowledge about certain works that seem difficult to understand in other ways. In Einan's case, the elucidation of the fictional potential of the poems has led to a more complex interpretation that does not ignore the enigmatic and inexplicable, but tries to interpret all this in the context of the poems' own world and its rules.