Half-Digested Memory

Abstract

In 1789, during the outset of the French Revolution, Jens Baggesen (1764–1826) embarked on a journey traversing Germany, Switzerland, and France. His experiences were later crystallized into a two-volume travelogue, Labyrinten, published between 1792 and 1793. In a similar vein, in 1793, Adam Moltke (1765–1843), a close friend of Baggesen, visited the besieged city of Mainz and subsequently chronicled his experiences in Reise nach Maynz (1794), also a two-volume work. Both authors, profoundly impacted by their travels, expressed a compulsion to write as an outlet. Intriguingly, their texts employ alimentary and metabolic metaphors to depict the act of experiencing as a form of ingestion, where impressions are consumed, assimilated, and eventually transformed into written narrative. This portrayal of memory and writing as a bodily process sharply diverges from the classical ideals of artistic and literary purity. This article argues that these alimentary and metabolic metaphors represent a subversive poetics, challenging conventional literary norms and offering a novel perspective on the interplay between human experience, bodily processes, and literary creation.