Didaktik utan tendens

Boccaccios falk och Per Hallströms novell ”Falken”

Abstract

Didactics Without Tendency. Boccaccio’s Falcon and Per Hallström’s Short Story, ”The Falcon”

This essay focuses on the issue of how and why a pre-modern didactics is incorporated into a modern aestheticist short story – namely, Per Hallström’s ”The Falcon”, in the collection Purpur [Purple] (1895). Such didactics are incorporated without any overt moralizing on the part of the author. Even so, subtle, edifying tendencies emerge. Hallström accomplishes this by displaying aestheticist devices in an implicit (hypertextual) dialogue with a pre-modern classic: the story of the falcon in Boccaccio’s Decamerone (5:9). The overarching device is an inverted (chiasmic) logic, manipulating such dialectics as: give/take, love/desire, feed/devour, self-sacrifice/voracity, and scapegoat/predator. With respect to this latter point, the article also discusses Paul Heyse’s so-called ”Falcon theory”. Theoretical perspectives utilized in the analysis include: short story theories of restriction and intensity (Allan Pasco, Kay Dollerup); Gérard Genette’s concept of ”hypertextuality”; and René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire and the need for a scapegoat.