Kommunikativ ambivalens i Joel Petterssons Måndagsmorgon

• Matthias Pirholt Uppsala universitet

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30665/av.74844

Abstract

Communicative Ambivalence in Joel Pettersson’s Måndagsmorgon

In my paper I investigate the presence of communicative ambivalence in Joel Pettersson’s story Måndagsmorgon (Monday Morning), which was written in great haste in 1921 and published posthumously in 2004. The story cannot be seen as a unified work, rather, it is a sort of an amalgamation of autobiography, myth, and anecdote. The communicative ambivalence of the story is detectible in the tension between oral narration and written narration, a tension that is materialised in what I label Pettersson’s writing. The term “writing” suggests the style of the work in a very concrete sense and includes motifs, themes, vocabulary, orthography, syntax, handwriting, and the visual appearance of the handwritten manuscript. On one hand, Pettersson’s frequent use of dialectal words and syntax simulates oral language. On the other hand, the story displays a great fascination with written language and the act of writing as such. However, written language and simulated oral language respectively undermine each other, engendering a form of writing that is essentially ambivalent. This is visible in how Pettersson writes his text: its uninterrupted, unedited, and inconsistent flow of words indicates the presence of, and a conflict between both oral and written language.