Jensens ekphrasis in “The King’s Fall” as “interference”

Abstract

The article analyzes an example of ekphrasis from the novel “The King’s Fall” (1901) by Danish Nobel prize-winner Johannes V. Jensen as a space of interaction between visualization strategy and rhythmic organization of prose. The idea of “interference” as a principle of mutual influence of waves in Physics is dear to the writer at this early stage of his career and is present in the title of the poem in prose from 1901. His turn-of-the-century poems and prose often combine high and low, emptiness and fullness, and different kinds of media. As a historical novel describing the epoch of the 16th century, “The King’s Fall” borrows the pictorial features and structural principles of Baroque painting as well as the essential ideas of the epoch’s memento mori, reflected in the paintings of H. Holbein, P. Bruegel the elder and still-lifes of Flemish and Dutch masters from the Vanitas series. The ekphrasis under consideration is presented as a piece of memory unfolding before the eyes of an observer, as a painting from the epoch with its frame, light, perspective, horizon line, colours and viewer. Furthermore, thanks to rhythmicity, repeated syntactic, lexical groups and alliteration, the focus shifts to the creative act, betraying the presence of the creator and the narrator.