Dark temples brimming with sweetness from the shared impulse of all living things

Kristjan Haljak

doi:https://doi.org/10.54013/kk794a5

Keywords: early 20^th-century Estonian literature, psychoanalysis, Jaan Oks, subject in process, avant-garde, gender

This article delves into the modernist/avant-garde subject that emerges in Jaan Oks’ poetic prose, utilizing psychoanalytic theories. It aims to elucidate how the libidinal-impulsive dynamics of the psyche manifest within the context of the poetic revolution seen in the texts under scrutiny, expanding the concept of the subject beyond fixed identities and the conventional portrayal of selfhood as something stable and permanent. Key concepts include Julia Kristeva’s subject in process and the Freudian oceanic feeling: these concepts are employed to describe various movements of this elusive modernist subject as, for example, atomization, flowing, and disintegration, thereby framing different phases in the avant-garde rejection of illusory wholeness to unveil the fundamental fragmentation of the psyche. In doing so, the article also explores the emergence of a complex sexual paradigm in Oks’ poetics and its potential transgressive semantic associations with the possibilities inherent in the subject’s gender identity.

Kristjan Haljak (b. 1990), MA, French philologist, poet, translator and teacher; PhD student at Tallinn University, School of Humanities (Narva mnt 25, 10120 Tallinn), kristjanhaljak@gmail.com

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