Narratological Aspects of Lyric Cyclic Form: The Case of Josip Murn’s “Fin de Siècle”

Abstract

The composition of lyric cycles is strongly linked to their narratological features. According to Reinhard Ibler’s typology of lyric cycles, these are classified depending on which of the two aspects of composition, paradigmatic (with equivalence between songs) or syntagmatic (with syuzhet), they emphasize. In this analysis, I consider ways in which the methodology designed by scholars from the University of Hamburg under the leadership of Peter Hühn and Jörg Schönert is applied to the narratological analysis of a lyric poem on the level of the syntagmatic cycle. I highlight these issues on the example of the threepoem cycle “Fin de Siècle” by Josip Murn, a poet of the Slovenian moderna. I perform a chronological analysis, drawing on cognitive concepts of schema, script and frame on the level of presentation, also affected by focalization and mediating entities (the empirical/abstract author or the subject of the composition, the speaker/narrator and the protagonists). I focus both on the narratology of individual poems as well as on the cycle as a whole. Based on Hühn’s classification of five structural scheme combination types, I recognize in each of Murn’s poems, as well as in Murn’s cycle as a whole, a combination of two types: consequential changes and contrasting alternatives. The initial frame in which the subject is torn between the idealized spiritual love and the demonized sensuality, typical of decadence, is eventually substituted by the frame of asexual, metaphysical spirituality, typical of symbolism.