Hans Magnus Enzensberger a teorém bezespornosti

This paper deals with the issue of interdisciplinarity in literature, tracing the mathematical influences — and particularly those of the incompleteness theorems by Kurt Gödel — on the literary works of Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Our attention is focused on Enzensberger’s publications in mathematics, on his poem Hommage à Gödel, and his montage epos The Sinking of the Titanic. This paper submits a new, interdisciplinary interpretation of the poem Hommage à Gödel as a kind of art manifesto, and comes to the conclusion that the reason Enzensberger finds the incompleteness theorems so interesting is that they offer a scientific basis for undecidable problems and paradoxes. He applies Gödel’s theorems to literature, where they enable a creative, playful oscillation between two positions or aspects of an undecidable problem and self-reference in literature.