The “insane” narrative of Adelheid Duvanel

The article gives careful consideration tot he peculiarities of the so-called “insane” narrative of the 20th century Swiss writer Adelheid Duvanel. The main role in her miniature stories is played by people who are excluded from society, who are outsiders or castaways. Outwardly following the idea of “new subjectivity” in literatu- re, Duvanel goes much further: behind the individual characters there are no common problems, they do not try to fit into reality, but escape from it in every possible way. Her works are full of insanity of various forms: both madness in the medical sense, and poetic madness as a deviation from the norm in the direction of absolute subjectivity. Duvanel’s heroes are often bifurcated, the boundaries between the characters, like the boundaries between reality and sleep, are unsteady. Not only the characters are mad, but also the narrative. Thus, madness is characteristic of the chronotope of miniatures, where the real space replaces the imaginary one, reflecting movements of the heroes’ souls. Duvanel deliberately conceals the dreams of the heroes, one of the most important elements her poetics, covering them up with deep wounds, but a lot is revealed through the unexpected associative series and metaphors that these dreams complement. Associative connections, in which the hero thinks, are so subjective that it is sometimes impossible to understand them, which indicates the uniqueness of the hero and his logical connectives. The article proves that for Duvanel madness is a manifestation of the individual’s exclusivity, but not in the romantic sense of his genius, but in the universal humanistic sense of the uniqueness of any individual, even the smallest one and the most insignificant one. It is insanity as the triumph of absolute subjectivity and the inner world of the hero that gives him the dignity he lacks in the world around him.