ABSTRACT And concrete diction

Carl Jonas Love Almqvist’s Drottningens juvelsmycke (The Queen's Tiara; 1834) is, along with Amorina, the work primarily associated with the ”poetic fugue” – a concept the author develops in ”Om enheten av epism och dramatism; en aning om den poetiska fugan” (”On the unity of epism and dramatism; a notion of the poetic fugue”; 1821); an essay often considered vague and theoretical by researchers in the field. The meaning of the poetic fugue has been regarded unclear, but mainly considered as some kind of synthesis of epic and dramatic writing. This essay argues that that is not the case, and that this one-dimensional approach both limits the interpretations of the essay and the poetic fugue as a whole. From a multidisciplinary perspective, with myself and my own reader as a part of the fugue itself, the aim of this essay is to highlight a very important overseen aspect of the poetic fugue, and Almqvist’s writing in general – the connections to mathematics, the analogies between abstract and concrete levels, and how these are deeply intertwined. The results in this essay are derived from a close reading technique based on mathematical problem solving called the ideotic method (den ideotiska metoden), and analyzed with Douglas Hofstadter's theory of Strange loops in Gödel, Escher, Bach – an eternal golden braid (1979). This analysis shows that this analogy is not just about the composition of a poetic piece of art, a synthesis of epic and dramatic writing, or the relation between music and text. Instead the results do point to an alternative interdisciplinary interpretation, where the relations between parts and units, realities and fictions, readers and texts, make the poetic fugue more of an analogy for the universe as a whole – a living and breathing ”animal coeleste” in contrast to the Newtonian ”mechanical coeleste”. An analogy which, thanks to its mathematical construction and way of looking at time as non-linear, is connected to both Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum theory – the science of the very big and the very small, parts and units, of everything, including ourselves.