The Double Demon by Alfred Kubin

Abstract

At the end of his novel, Die Andere Seite (1909), Alfred Kubin concludes: “The demiurge is a hybrid”. The same hybridity was indeed already announced in the title of a work, which aims at telling about the “other side” – the other side of rational consciousness, the imagination, as well as the other side of writing, the image. In the novel by the demiurge Kubin, writer and draughtsman at a time, text and image build an inseparable unity, in which each of the two “sides” is indispensable to the construction of meaning. This paper aims at rereading Kubin’s novel in the light of its continuous exchange between word and image, which goes far beyond the mere reception of themes and figures coming from the archive of literature and art. The analysis of the unpublished drafts of the novel will throw light on how, in Kubin’s work, writing and drawing are intersecting processes, giving back the protean image of a double talent’s creative process.