"Alt jeg så liknet en salme." Dag Solstad som poetisk "Augendenker"

The beautiful waking dream of flying experienced by the fictionalized author Dag Solstad in the novel 16.07.41 (2002) takes the form of a classical ecstasy that contains paradisiacal visions which provide the author with a powerful sense of well-being. These ecstatic visions culminate in the gaze of his long-dead father, and this gaze compels him to venture into his own vision in order to meet with his father. But this meeting with his ghostly father is the subsequent cause of experiences of angst in him. And it also provides him with a task to complete through his writing. The article considers this dream’s privileged rôle as a writing-inspiring force in the context of the novel, one that can be seen from a number of intertextual and theoretical perspectives that have their starting-point in the economy of desire, the phenomenology of spirit, the philosophy of religion and the poetics of modernism.