Alfred Kubin’s The Other Side and the subversion of contradiction

Abstract

Alfred Kubin's artistic and literary work is characterised by the blurring or, rather, subversion of the boundaries between reality and fiction. To deepen this argument, and ponder the terms that sustain it, this article begins by conjuring up significant evaluations of the work by prominent contemporaries of the author. The aim, however, is to propose a new reading of Kubin's only novel, The Other Side - a fantasy novel dating from 1909. Kubin's imagination, as it unfolds in his narrative and writing, emanates from a compositional and inventive work that explores the limits of what has form and what is deformed, in a 'bizarre' or 'baroque' morphology that blurs, and re-evaluates, the relationship between the formal and the informal as opposites. Ultimately, the possible world of the novel returns us to the collapse of the utopia/dystopia binomial. The allegorical value of Kubin’s narrative depends on this productive collapse.