Språkets begränsningar och det outsägligas figurationer

Virtuella figurer i Gunnar D Hanssons Tapeshavet

Abstract

This article examines the poetics of inexpressibility in Gunnar D Hansson’s 

Tapeshavet (2017). Despite its seemingly transparent, prosaic language and commitment to local specificity, the collection persistently thematizes language’s inability to render the singular and heterogeneous. Unlike modernist traditions that seek a “new” authentic language, Hansson embraces failure and inadequacy as poetic strategies. The article introduces the concept of the “virtual figure” (modified from Allen Grossman) to analyze how Tapeshavet gestures toward an ideal, unattainable poetry—a “better” language that could articulate a place’s unique “here-quality” without subsuming it under generalizing concepts.

Through close readings, the article shows how Hansson’s poems repeatedly foreground their own shortcomings: they speak about what they cannot express directly, frame themselves as damaged examples of unrealized ideals, and evoke a lost poetic origin. Drawing on Adorno’s critique of identity logic, the article argues that these negative figurations—missed ambitions, failed renderings of the singular, nostalgic allusions to poets like Inger Christensen—paradoxically affirm the existence of a real, though virtual, object of desire. This is a secular paradise of unmediated presence and collective understanding, thinkable only through its absence.

The article concludes that Tapeshavet’s distinctive solution to the contemporary version of the crisis of reference lies in its use of deliberately inadequate forms (traditional meter, essayistic prose, citational fragments). Rather than overcoming language’s limits, the collection makes them productive. The persistent disappointments become the very means by which hope for a non-identical, non-homogenizing language is kept alive. The virtual poem—the ideal that cannot be actualized—is negatively prefigured in every failed attempt to write it.