Ting, minne og identitet hos Inghill Johansen II

Abstract

In the second part of my article on Inghill Johansen’s short prose, the focus is on the conception of body memory. Past and present are merged in the body, and hence the narrator’s melancholy, if we follow Sigmund Freud’s conception of melancholy in his famous “Mourning and Melancholia” from 1917. According to Freud, a melancholiac is a person who identifies with the object he or she has lost. Furthermore, as Johansen’s narrator compares her life and writing with a black hole, she can be interpreted as a melancholiac who uses the black hole metaphor to formulate a poetology. The last part of this article tries to explain Johansen’s enigmatic texts as part of her poetological strategy.