The Poetics of Gregor Strniša Between Physics and Metaphysics

Abstract

Gregor Strniša is considered one of the most important Slovenian poets and dramatists of the twentieth century. His literature is hermetic and often difficult to understand because it is based on a specific poetics that Strniša developed based on concepts from modern physics.The article attempts to explain the basic concepts of Strniša’s poetics and their implementation in his poetry and drama. The basic finding, supported by the analysis of examples of poems (“Brobdingnag”, “Dreams of the Year”) and the play “Dryad”, is that Strniša takes up physical concepts as metaphors and as means of shaping his poetry. The central concept of his poetics is “cosmic consciousness” as a description of the standpoint of the lyrical Self in his poetry.A detailed observation of the use of physical concepts in Strniša’s poetry and drama shows a development that begins already in the collection Mozaiki and is completed only with Strniša’s last volumes of poetry Škarje and Jajce. Initially, he describes cosmic consciousness through various metaphors, the most important of which is the mosaic as an image of a unified whole made up of many parts. In his last collections, Škarje and Jajce, cosmic consciousness is no longer described, but forms the shape of a poem in the most general sense, namely by using concepts from modern physics, especially the principles of uncertainty and complementarity, and the relativity of time and space.He transforms the relativity of special and general relativity into the relative and absolute transcendence of the literary text. For Strniša, transcendence means above all experiential inaccessibility, even illogicality. Yet it is precisely the latter that, from the point of view of Strniša’s poetics, is the central source of both poetic and scientific creation, since it is imaginative creation that – by analogy with the principle of indeterminacy – can transcend the rule of the excluded third and approach the true reality of the world.The same is true of Strniša’s dramas, except that there the social context is somewhat more pronounced, since the setting/time of his plays is usually modernity, but always in a complementary relation to an immaterial, spiritual/imaginary space that appears behind the individual images and transcends the temporal and spatial determinants of the world of experience. By analysing Stniša’s radio play Driada, which is his last dramatic work, I show that uncertainty is the source of his imagination, from which both the poet and the scientist draw, and without which there would be no real value, no meaning.