“A Crevice through Which the Infinite Peeped Out”

“A Crevice through Which the Infinite Peeped Out”

1843

Either/Or

“Here I stand, then, face to face with the reading public at this important moment. I confess my frailty: I have written nothing, not a line. I confess my weakness: I have no part in the whole thing, or in any of it—no part, not in the slightest way. Be strong, my soul: I confess that there is a good deal of it which I haven’t read.”

This penitential confession was put forward in the article “Public Confession,” which Kierkegaard felt compelled to publish in Fædrelandet on June 12, 1842. The occasion was his embarrassment at having for some time had the honor of being regarded as “the author of quite a number of weighty, informative, and witty articles.” This recognition was completely undeserved, however, and therefore Kierkegaard now politely requested “the good people, who take an interest in me, never to regard me as the author of anything that does not bear my name.”

This sounds almost too humble to be true. And it was, in fact, neither humble nor true. Compounded equally of literary smoke and mirrors, on the one hand, and a giddy satire of his times, on the other, the “Public Confession” was in fact a dose of deceit, a part of the massive marketing campaign that Kierkegaard set in motion in the period leading up to the publication of Either/Or. Seen in the light of a (presumably) reliable retrospective view he wrote in the summer of 1848, it is clear that the reason he disavowed responsibility for the articles in question—“which, in fact, no one had attributed to me”—was to increase the confusion (read: “curious customers”) that would be generated by the pseudonym “Victor Eremita.”

In a lengthy epilogue to the “Public Confession,” Kierkegaard issued a rejoinder to Frederik Beck, who had been an opponent ex auditorio at the defense of his dissertation and who had further developed his position in a lengthy review of On the Concept of Irony, published in two issues of Fædrelandet on May 29 and June 5, 1842. The review was positive, but on the last page Beck had criticized the language in the dissertation. Beck found it laudable that the work was “free of narrow-minded scholastic terminology,” but he really would rather have been spared the many insider “allusions and innuendoes.” “Because,” as Beck explained, “what may be pleasing or acceptable in an informal chat or in a conversation while walking in the street makes quite a different impression when it is expressed with the pretensions that accompany the printed page. It certainly cannot be denied that it can be amusing—and it has indeed amused the present reviewer—but it is not to the author’s advantage.” After Kierkegaard’s rejoinder, which was a dialectical drubbing of the sort one does not easily forget, the reviewer was probably considerably less amused.

Kierkegaard took the opportunity to direct attention to his own works. And there was more of this sort of thing. There is a manuscript entitled “Urgent Request,” which was signed “S. Kierkegaard, Magister Artium [Latin: ‘master of arts’],” dated February 22, 1843 (thus with the date of publication planned to follow immediately upon the appearance of Either/Or), and intended for the newspaper Berlingske Tidende. The “Urgent Request” was addressed to Victor Eremita, whom Kierkegaard begged to give up his “pseudonymity so that I can once again live in peace and quiet.” Kierkegaard had also planned for Victor Eremita immediately to publish a reply in Fædrelandet in the form of an “Open Letter to Mr. Kierkegaard, M.A.” in which he would express sympathy for the magister’s difficult position which nonetheless, according to Victor Eremita, was Kierkegaard’s own fault: “Are you completely certain that you have not been deceived by your mental state, by the sort of hypochondria one often sees in learned people? The more distraught a person becomes about his situation, the more pleasure people take in teasing him.” For his part, Victor Eremita would gladly be of assistance—that was not the problem. The problem was that he, too, was ignorant concerning the identity of the actual authors of the book and was therefore unable to conclude with certainty that Kierkegaard himself might “not be one of them.” The whole business was pure fiction and was signed “the Magister’s respectful servant, Victor Eremita.”

Kierkegaard never published this scurrilous colloquy with himself. After his death the two articles were found among his papers, neatly folded in their respective envelopes. The seal on the envelope containing Kierkegaard’s “Urgent Request” had been broken; it contained a letter stating that Kierkegaard’s servant was to return immediately with the article if Nathanson, the editor of Berlingske Tidende, could not run it in his newspaper on the evening of that day. Apparently, Nathanson was unable to publish the article immediately, so Kierkegaard left Victor Eremita’s reply (the “Open Letter”) in his desk drawer, unsealed. And it was probably just as well, because everyone who could put two and two together would surely have had no difficulty in arriving at the conclusion that Victor Eremita claimed to be the editor of a work which in reality had been written by a certain Copenhagen magister who, as time passed, was not an utterly obscure person.

In doing all this Kierkegaard went to extremes, but he broke none of the rules of the literary game. The times practically teemed with false names. Indeed, pseudonymity came close to being an unspoken aesthetic requirement, and this sort of literary mystification held great appeal for Kierkegaard. So, less than a week after the publication of Either/Or, he felt the need to send Fædrelandet a different lengthy article, a sort of whodunit titled “Who Is the Author of Either/Or?” Using various internal and external bits of evidence, the piece shrewdly attempts—though understandably without success—to track down the author of Either/Or. The article was signed “A. F…. ,” which presumably stood for Af Forfatteren [Danish: “by the author”].

Preposterously enough, Kierkegaard himself came to doubt who was really writing with whose pen: “There is something odd about my little secretary Mr. Christensen. I bet he’s the one who in various ways is scribbling in the newspapers and in little pamphlets; because not infrequently I encounter an echo of my ideas, not as I tend to write them, but as I let them fall casually in conversation.” Kierkegaard presumably had in mind the article “Literary Quicksilver, or a Venture in the Higher Madness, with Lucida Intervalla,” which had been published anonymously in Ny Portefeuille on February 12, 1843. Six months later Christensen repeated his dirty tricks when he anonymously published a piece entitled With What Right Is Theology Called a Lie? Kierkegaard felt himself a victim of theft and became despondent: “And I, who treated him with such kindness, paid him so well, conversed with him for hours at a time—for which I paid him so as not to mortify and humiliate him because his lack of money made it necessary for him to work as a copyist…. It really wasn’t very nice of him. After all, he could have confided in me and told me that he had a desire to become an author. But his writings do not have a clean conscience. He himself probably notices that I have changed a bit, even though I am still just as polite and kind to him. On the other hand I have weaned him off his inquisitive snooping around my room. He must be kept at arm’s length; I hate all plagiarists.” Christensen left Kierkegaard’s employ shortly thereafter.

Most people who took an interest in the matter knew the identity of the author of Either/Or. On February 20, 1843, the very day on which the book was published, Henriette Wulff wrote to Hans Christian Andersen, who was then in Germany: “Recently a book was published here with the title Either/Or! It is supposed to be quite strange, the first part full of Don Juanism, skepticism, et cetera, and the second part toned down and conciliating, ending with a sermon that is said to be quite excellent. The whole book has attracted much attention. It has not yet been discussed publicly by anyone, but it surely will be. It is actually supposed to be by a Kirkegaard who has adopted a pseudonym: Do you know him?” Indeed, Andersen did.

At about the same time Peter Christian wrote in his diary, “I hear today in Sorø that Søren’s work Either/Or has been published, but under the pseudonym Victor Eremita.” And on February 27 the happy news went off to Brazil; Henrik Lund wrote to Peter Wilhelm: “At my first opportunity I will send you a book that has attracted much attention and is being read ‘by almost every cultured person.’ The title of the book is Either/Or, and people assume that Søren is the author.” This assumption was also voiced in the first public mention of Either/Or, which appeared in the February 22, 1843, issue of Dagen: “Internally the entire work bears the stamp of a remarkable consistency in spirit and outlook, and externally, with its light tone and linguistic mastery, it is similar to a well-known academic work and to various articles from the hand of one of our true philosophical geniuses—so much so that it has not surprised us to hear the work attributed to him.”

With all its titillating ambivalence, the mystification of the identity of the author succeeded grandly; sales went very briskly and word spread about the unusual book. On April 7, Signe Læssøe was able to inform the flighty Hans Christian Andersen, now in Paris, about the latest news from Copenhagen: “A new literary comet (I think it looks like I wrote ‘camel,’ but I mean a comet) has soared in the heavens here—a harbinger and a bringer of bad fortune. It is so demonic that one reads and reads it, puts it aside in dissatisfaction, but always takes it up again, because one can neither let it go nor hold on to it. ‘But what is it?’ I can hear you say. It is Either/Or by Søren Kierkegaard. You have no idea what a sensation it has caused. I think that no book has caused such a stir with the reading public since Rousseau placed his Confessions on the altar. After one has read it one feels disgust for the author, but one profoundly recognizes his intelligence and his talent. We women must be especially angry with him: Like the Mohammedans, he assigns us to the realm of finitude, and he only values us because we give birth to, amuse, and save menfolk. In the first part (this is a work of 838 octavo pages) he is aesthetic, that is, evil. In the second part he is ethical, that is, a little less evil. Everyone praises the second part because it is his alter ego, the better half, which speaks. The second part only makes me the angrier with him—it is there that he ties women to finitude. In fact, I only understand a small fraction of the book; it is altogether too philosophical.”

A couple of weeks later Andersen replied to Signe Læssøe, revealing his envy: “What you have sent me about Kierkegaard’s book does not exactly excite my curiosity. It is so easy to seem ingenious when one disregards all considerations and tears to pieces one’s own soul and all holy feelings! But this sort of thing has an effect. It is reasonable to assume that Heiberg has for the time being been dazzled by the philosophical brilliance!”

Andersen was very much in error with respect to this last point.

“A Monster of a Book”

Of course, we cannot exclude the possibility that indignant ladies like Signe Læssøe and Henriette Wulff were better informed about the literary scene than was J. L. Heiberg, but it is not likely. Heiberg was presumably very well aware of the identity of the pseudonymous editor who concealed himself behind the works. On March 1, ten days after the publication of Either/Or, Heiberg published a critique of it, entitled “Literary Winter Seed,” in an issue of his Intelligensblade. He chatted elegantly about books that had been published since the beginning of the year: Christian Winther’s Poetical Works, Hans Peter Holst’s Abroad and at Home, plus Thiele’s Folk Legends. Then Heiberg took a deep breath: “Furthermore, a monster of a book has just recently come crashing down upon our literary world, like lightning out of a cloudless sky. I am referring to Either/Or by ‘Victor Eremita,’ in two heavy volumes, comprising 838 closely printed pages. So it is primarily with respect to its bulk that the book may be called a monster, because one is impressed by its sheer mass even before one becomes acquainted with the spirit of the work, and I have no doubt that were the author willing to place himself on exhibit for money, he would earn as much from that display as he would from permitting people to read the book for money. The book’s enormous size is only a passing inconvenience that one must ignore. One reflects, ‘Have I the time to read a book of this sort, and what assurance do I have that the sacrifice will be rewarded?’ One feels strangely intrigued by the title itself, for one applies it to one’s own relationship to the book and asks oneself, ‘Should I either read the book, or refrain from doing so?’ We no longer live in the Golden Age, but as everybody knows, in the Iron Age or, more specifically, in the Railroad Age. So, what sort of odd anachronism is it that has induced someone to come forward with this kind of farrago in an age where the main thing is to cover the greatest distances in the shortest time?”

Heiberg overcame his hesitations, however, and leaped into the first part of the work. He reports on it as follows: “Thus, first of all, one finds oneself in Either, and at first one doesn’t feel so well because one notices that one is not having nearly as good a time as the author. It has an unpleasant, unrhythmic gait, so that one continually has a sense of wanting to get ahead of the person who is holding one by the arm. One encounters many piquant thoughts, some of which, perhaps, are even profound. One cannot be sure of this, because when one thinks one has espied a point (which the author continually calls a ‘pointe’) one again becomes disoriented. One grows impatient because the author’s exceptional brilliance, learning, and stylistic sophistication have not been combined with an organizational ability that would permit the ideas to emerge properly formed. Everything seems dreamlike, amorphous, and ephemeral. In the hope of finding at least some positively firm ground amid all this negativity, one leaps into a critique of Scribe’s comedy The First Love, but here one discovers that the author has transformed the positive, given material into his own castle in the air. He wants to turn a pretty little bagatelle into a masterpiece and attribute to it an underlying tendency that is exactly the opposite of what Scribe claims it to be. One hurries onward to ‘The Seducer’s Diary,’ for here the title itself implies that this piece of work may be more creative than critical. And, in a way, these expectations are not disappointed. But one is disgusted, one is nauseated, one is revolted, and one asks oneself not whether it is possible that a human being could be like this seducer, but whether it is possible that an author could be the sort of individual who could take pleasure in imagining himself to be such a character, and who could create such a character in his private thoughts. One looks at the book, and the possibility is established. One closes the book and says ‘Enough! I have had enough of Either, I will not have any of Or.’ ”

After being exposed to these obscenities, Heiberg had had more than enough. But he did not miss the opportunity to rejoice over the furor and the row that would result when the book reached the philistine public of “prudes, battle-axes, and doughty moralists,” all of whom—apparently excepting Heiberg himself—“could benefit greatly from it.” Heiberg could not restrain himself, however—he started reading the second part, which captivated him in quite a different fashion. In this part he encountered a series of “bolts of intellectual lightning, which suddenly clarified entire spheres of existence,” while at the same time he found the “organizing force” he had vainly sought in the first part. So the work was the creation of a “rare and highly gifted intellect who, out of a deep well of speculation, has drawn forth the most beautiful ethical views,” and who “laces his argument with a stream of the most piquant wit and humor.” The speculative material was of course right up Heiberg’s alley, and he had now come to believe that he truly grasped the point of the book: “The second volume is absolute; there can be no question of an either/or here.”

It was no love fest, but for all his harshness Heiberg was more generous with praise than was his custom. If Kierkegaard nonetheless became furious and was wounded by this “impertinent and dandified review”—Heiberg’s “little slap”—it was in part because he had regarded himself as a loyal aesthetician of the Heiberg school. Kierkegaard’s attack on Andersen had been, among other things, a tactical move to curry favor with Heiberg, just as he had also made overtures in his dissertation on irony, the final pages of which mention Heiberg by name in the company of no one less than Goethe himself. Kierkegaard had also expressed his veneration privately. When a little pseudonymous piece, Johan Ludvig Heiberg after Death, was published in 1842, Kierkegaard had made it known to Hans Brøchner that he was displeased at seeing Heiberg made the object of facetious comments, and he warmly insisted on Heiberg’s importance as his “generation’s aesthetic educator.” Nor had Heiberg been shortchanged in Either/Or; on the contrary, he was accorded an especially prominent place: An entire treatise is dedicated to an analysis of Scribe’s one-act play The First Love, in Heiberg’s translation. Heiberg’s retelling of Molière’s Don Juan is emphasized at the expense of Molière’s version. Heiberg is praised for having “the sure aesthetic eye” with which he always “understands his task, the taste with which he knows how to make distinctions.” Indeed, in Heiberg the comic element is “purer than it is in Molière,” which is largely owing to “Heiberg’s easy, flowing verse.” Kierkegaard did not limit himself to praising the genius of Heiberg alone—the poet’s brilliant consort, the entire national theater, and Heiberg’s favorites were included in his homage: “If I wanted to show a foreigner our theater in all its glory, I would say, ‘Go and see The First Love.’ In Mrs. Heiberg, Frydendahl, Stage, and Phister, the Danish theater possesses a quartet who here manifest themselves in all their splendor.”

It would have been difficult for Kierkegaard to have expressed greater praise without having it begin to look like sheer pandering. And then Heiberg reacted as he did, mocking the work in which he himself was deified. Who did he think he was?

Therefore, four days after Heiberg’s nefarious winter seed, Victor Eremita published a rejoinder in Fædrelandet, entitled “Thank-You to Professor Heiberg.” Heiberg was thanked in rather strident tones for having shown so satisfactorily how “one” reads Either/Or. Thus, “with the assistance of the ‘category of winter seed,’ Heiberg has helped Either/Or through a successful birth and into a thriving life in the world of literature.” It was almost inconceivable that Victor Eremita, the conquering hermit, could have authored such a tactless thank-you, and it was equally obvious that every hope of a tolerable (not to mention a favorable) relationship with Heiberg and his circle was now completely out of the question. Kierkegaard had in effect opened hostilities with the coterie associated with Intelligensblade, which was published as four small pamphlets between March 1842 and March 1844, and which had come by its name honestly: Its contributors included such established talents as Mynster, Martensen, Holst, Hertz, Rasmus Nielsen, and A. P. Adler, all of whom, as time went on, were to run afoul of Kierkegaard. With the cynical acuity of vision that characterizes profound bitterness, Kierkegaard noted in his journal: “The Lord bless thy coming in, Prof. Heiberg! I will surely see to thy going out.”

A series of journal entries in which the budding writer attempted, with varying success, to ironize his way out of his wounded vanity makes it clear that his “thank-you” was far from being the end of the affair. Indeed, he was propelled into an entirely new genre, the satirical song, in which he wrote two genuinely perfidious lines that deserve to be printed in their entirety:

Prof. Heiberg is a phony fellow. Vitta-vit-vit-boom-boom.

Embittered as he was about Heiberg’s critique, Kierkegaard scarcely seems to have noticed that other reviewers were giving Either/Or all the notice they could muster. As early as March 10, 1843, Goldschmidt made merry in The Corsair about all the attention that had been lavished on the book—and especially about its bulk: “The entire press, from Dagen to Aftenbladet, from Berlingske to Intelligensbladene, let out a cry of amazement, said a few words about it, of course, but began and ended by saying ‘My goodness, what a thick book.’ ” And Goldschmidt hadn’t seen the whole of it. On five successive Sunday editions, from March 12 to April 9, an anonymous writer for Forposten produced “Fragments of a Correspondence,” which dedicated nearly twenty-two large columns to a detailed discussion of the work. True, the reviewer’s profundity was not exactly proportionate to the enormous quantity of printer’s ink expended, but in any case Kierkegaard could not complain about a lack of attention. Or sympathy. Indeed, the reviewer did all he could to rehabilitate Kierkegaard, directing his sarcasm at the anonymous “one” Heiberg had used in presenting his views. Forposten’s reviewer was critical, in particular, of Heiberg’s critique of “The Seducer’s Diary.” The diary (according to said reviewer) was to be understood as the “reproduction” of an aesthetic “life view” and as such it was “a work of art”: “ ‘One’ will surely not deny that Goethe’s Faust is such a work, and in the present case isn’t the idea related to Goethe’s? To those who might be tempted to believe that they are reading a true story, I will simply point out that the piece is titled ‘The Seducer’s,’ not ‘A Seducer’s’ Diary; this is in itself sufficient to imply that the entire piece is a problem, a thought experiment.” Kierkegaard welcomed these last lines. In his own copy of Either/Or he underlined “The” in “The Seducer’s Diary,” and in the margin he added this comment: “In a review in Forposten I see it quite properly pointed out that this tale is not called ‘A Seducer’s Diary,’ but ‘The Seducer’s Diary,’ which of course indicates that the main point is the method, not the portrayals of Johannes or Cordelia.”

The critique in Den Frisindede was harsher, however. Under the headline “Episode from ‘The Seducer’s Diary’” was this rather sophomoric suggestion: “One could be tempted to call upon the moral censors of the Society for Freedom of the Press to excommunicate the author; one could ask that the police morals squad confiscate the work and burn the unknown author in effigy …; but at the same time one must admit that in any case those who read this book will scarcely be harmed by it.” Kierkegaard underlined this last sentence, the part about the diary being harmless, which annoyed him so much that he immediately drafted a “Warning to Den Frisindede,” in which, disguised as Victor Eremita, he pointed out to the anonymous reviewer that it was impermissible to comment on the diary without placing it in the context of the entire work. “When one finds, in a published work entitled Either/Or, an article called ‘The Seducer’s Diary,’ one certainly does not read it first, nor does one read it in isolation. After having read it in isolation, one does not permit oneself to have an opinion of the work, or—if one has such a quasi-opinion—to express it. Or if one absolutely must express it, one does so quite softly in one’s own room. Or, if one absolutely must share one’s views with others, one does so orally.” Then Kierkegaard provided guidelines for the review Den Frisindede ought to have published, which, in his view, should have begun with the following words: “A work has been published that the average reader of this newspaper would scarcely be able to understand.” These remarks were probably intended in all seriousness, so it was a stroke of diplomacy when Kierkegaard left them in his desk drawer. Instead—in his journal—he mounted the following omnibus assault on all critics: “Absolutely no reviews whatever, please. Because I find reviewers as disgusting as the barbers who roam the streets, who come running with their shaving water, which they use for all their customers, and fumble about my face with their clammy fingers.”

Detailed discussion of Either/Or continued on May 7 with the publication of the first of what would be three issues of Fædrelandet, all of them entirely given over to J. F. Hagen’s thirty-two-column review of Either/Or. Hagen was a degree candidate at the theology faculty and two years later would earn the licentiat degree with his dissertation Marriage, Viewed from an Ethical-Historical Perspective. He was thus no common journalistic scribbler but a conscientious researcher who scrutinized the various sections of the work, all the way from the “Diapsalmata” of the first part, through “The Rotation Method” (which, Hagen asserted, contained something as amusing as “the necessary prophylaxis against boredom”), to the “Ultimatum” of the second part. Like others, Hagen showed respect for the brilliant material, modestly labeling himself a “dilettante” in aesthetic matters; nonetheless, he remarked perceptively that Aesthete A repeats a series of conflicts that Kierkegaard had discussed in his dissertation. Indeed, Hagen would in fact note what Kierkegaard didn’t manage to write in his dissertation: “We recall having read in a Catholic author that the irony that is proclaimed by an emancipated aesthetics is a logical consequence of the entire outlook proposed by Protestantism, and can therefore serve as a convincing argument against it: Because Protestantism sanctions doubt, it eo ipso sanctions the irony with which doubt makes its case.”

If only Hagen had not been named Hagen, but Heiberg, Kierkegaard would certainly have been able to value this diagnosis in accordance with its merits. True, as mentioned, Hagen was not an inspired critic. At times he resorted to a paraphrased presentation of the work under review, which was the mark of an amateur, but when it came to judging “The Seducer’s Diary,” Hagen was significantly better than Heiberg and many later interpreters who have felt so called upon to point an accusing, moralistic finger that they have been incapable of discerning the psychological and literary qualities of the seduction story. With an unfriendly recollection of Heiberg’s infuriating critique of the diary in mind, Hagen wrote: “All the while one is reading it, one exclaims, ‘It isn’t possible. This practice of irony is only a postulate, a diabolical thought experiment….’ And yet the diary contains nothing but the praxis that logically would have to develop—if the aesthetic view could completely emancipate itself from the moral life and base itself on itself as an independent life.” In reality, Hagen continued, Johannes the Seducer is “much too intellectually developed to be a seducer of the vulgar sort. His seduction is a system. He wants to enjoy, but only in slow drafts.” In like manner, Cordelia’s nature is “genuine, uncorrupted, feminine. But she is also intellect, so here there is an infinity of pleasure; here an interesting relationship can develop. Here is a girl worth seducing because she has something to surrender. Now the tactic will be to encase her very being within a cocoon of fine, invisible threads, so that in the end she sees but one purpose in her freedom, to surrender herself—so that she feels the whole of her salvation in doing so.”

Diametrically opposed to Heiberg, Hagen ranked the first part of Either/Or above the second part, about which he wrote: “We may regret that the lack of intellectual concentration which was quite characteristic of the previous essay (’The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage’) also leaves its mark quite clearly in the present essay (’The Equilibrium between the Aesthetic and the Ethical in the Composition of the Personality’). The investigation frequently ventures into diffuse territory, and since the author has to make one fresh start after another, one often encounters tiresome tautologies. And the overall idea is disturbed by the (in the long run, somewhat boring) flirtatiousness that the ethicist directs at the aesthete, despite all his opposition to him.”

What Hagen is saying here, in his own gentle manner, is that now and then Judge William’s two encouraging letters to Aesthete A can be pretty dull, and that it is therefore unlikely that they will succeed in convincing the already-skeptical fellow of the aesthetic validity of marriage, much less of its affiliated bliss. Furthermore, the final sentence cited from Hagen contains an insightful observation: It is in fact quite true that the ethicist flirts with the aesthete, whose erotic escapades he of course condemns—even while lavishing on them a lascivious curiosity that is unseemly in a married man of William’s type. Thus there are indications that Hagen sensed that the ethicist, properly understood, is a product of lip service only, a bit of a caricature. Presumably because the author’s true element—as he had confided to Boesen—was above all the aesthetic.

Literary Exile

On his walks with Hans Brøchner, Kierkegaard was capable of speaking rather freely about the success of Either/Or, dwelling in particular on “the poetic element in the first part” or explaining in lively fashion how “at many points the motif of a poem was indicated but purposely not carried out.” Brøchner himself was enthusiastic about the book, and Kierkegaard was most definitely not unreceptive to appreciative remarks: “One day I remarked that not since I had read Hegel’s Logic had any book set my thoughts going as had Either/Or. He was obviously pleased by this remark.” His disappointment at Heiberg’s reaction was great nonetheless, and H. P. Holst, who was a frequent caller at the Heiberg home during these years, related that a recurrent theme in the conversations he had with Kierkegaard was the complaint that Heiberg “would never really involve himself with his [Kierkegaard’s] writings or recognize him as a philosopher.” This is quite believable—Brøchner also mentions Kierkegaard’s “displeasure” in this connection—and the Heibergian “one” compulsively haunted the journals of the rejected suitor, awakening furious anger every time: “He isn’t alone; he has muses and graces—and to be on the safe side he has taken on a new coworker, ‘one,’ an energetic coworker who demands no fee and puts up with every sort of treatment.”

Heiberg’s description of “The Seducer’s Diary” as a piece of literature by which one is disgusted, nauseated, and revolted naturally helped spur sales, since everyone who had eyes to read with ran out and bought the work in order to be properly nauseated by its disgusting and revolting portions, which people viewed in the context of the offensive business of the magister’s engagement, already the subject of much talk. Despite the fact that a succès de scandale is perhaps a good bit better than no success at all, Kierkegaard was quite rightly convinced that he and his work deserved a nobler fate, and at one point in March 1843 he wrote proudly: “Even if I did not prove anything else by writing Either/Or, I have in any case proved that one can write a work in Danish literature, that one can work without needing the warm cloak of sympathy, without needing the incentive of expectations; that one can work when the current is against one; that one can be diligent without seeming to be so; that one can concentrate in private while almost every poor wretch of a student presumes to regard one as an idler. Even if the book itself were meaningless, its genesis would nonetheless be the pithiest epigram I have written over the philosophical drivel of this age.”

If Kierkegaard raged at Heiberg, however, it was not merely because of wounded literary vanity; it was also because, despite all the pseudonymity, his works were profoundly personal. “If people were to discover the real motive,” Kierkegaard wrote with respect to Either/Or, they would probably imagine a “profoundly deep reason … and yet it is entirely a matter of my private life. And the intention? Indeed, if people discovered this, I would be declared raving mad.” Thus, though it is naive simply to identify Kierkegaard with Johannes the Seducer, it would be equally simple-minded to suppose that Kierkegaard could have produced such a figure without having had his amorous experiences with Regine. Nor is it likely that the extensive reflections on marriage would have occurred to Kierkegaard if the engagement had not collapsed. Still, it is hard to disagree with Troels-Lund, who was on the verge of declaring his uncle “raving mad”: “It was quite a peculiar activity for the runaway villain, who had broken up with his sweetheart in Copenhagen, to sit in a hotel in Berlin, despite winter cold, arthritis, and insomnia, so that he could labor strenuously and restlessly on a work—in praise of marriage.” This wonderment is entirely justified and demonstrates in exemplary fashion how inseparable the work was from its author. Thus Henriette Hanck wrote to Hans Christian Andersen in mid-May 1843, “I’d like to see Kierkegaard; I bet he is Either—or—Or, hardly both of them. He himself probably stands (if this admits of being thought) halfway between the light and the shadow.”

Oddly enough, even though Kierkegaard had just returned from abroad, Heiberg’s critique of Either/Or, a work which had been written in exile, had the effect of transforming Kierkegaard into a sort of literary exile in his own country. Still, Heiberg’s thumbs-down also had the effect of making Kierkegaard want to be Kierkegaard, an immortal writer, a literature within literature, concerned less about contemporary readers than about future ones. At some point in the summer of 1843 he jotted down some tumultuous lines that could serve as a sort of a literary manifesto for the willful and profoundly original body of writings he had just begun: “Little by little, being an author has become the most contemptible thing. He is generally compelled to present himself like the advertising icon in Adresseavisen, which depicts a gardener’s helper, hat in hand, bowing and scraping, recommending himself to us with his good references. How stupid. The person who writes must understand what he writes about better than the person who reads it, otherwise he shouldn’t write.—Or one must take care to become a slippery lawyer who knows how to hoodwink the public.—I won’t do that, I won’t do that, I won’t do that, no, no. The hell with the whole business. I write as I want to, take it or leave it. Then of course other people can do what they want, refrain from buying, from reading, from reviewing, et cetera.”

Even though Kierkegaard’s enormous productivity from Either/Or up to and including the Postscript could hardly be explained as one, extended, indignant protest against lack of recognition by Heiberg, it is striking that in the course of a relatively short time he altered his entire enterprise, which in its disdain for Goethe and Hegel was now diametrically opposed to everything that Heiberg and his circle worshipped and lionized. Of course, this demanded a formidable talent, but Kierkegaard had what it took, as he is pleased to inform us in his journal. “I know very well that at the present moment I am the most gifted thinker of the entire younger generation,” he wrote in 1843 in a display of exuberant self-consciousness, but then—thank God—he remembered that he was also a theologian and quickly added that he knew very well that this talent “could be taken away from me tomorrow,” indeed, even before he was finished with the sentence he was writing.

He did, however, manage to finish quite a number of sentences before the talent he had been granted ran out, for his talent was both wide-ranging and deep-reaching and could therefore also be employed for the purpose of edification.

Spiritual Eroticism

Two Edifying Discourses is a modest little book of fifty-two pages, published on May 16, 1843, at a price of thirty-two shillings. The discourses are dedicated to “Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, formerly a hosier here in the city” and are accompanied by a preface dated May 5, 1843, the edifying author’s thirtieth birthday. It would have been difficult for the preface to have been more reverential, but Kierkegaard nonetheless suddenly had doubts about its propriety. For it seemed to him that the preface “concealed within itself a certain spiritual eroticism,” which was quite unseemly for the genre, so he decided to change his text: “I rush over to the printer’s. What happens? The typesetter pleaded in favor of the preface. I did laugh a bit at him, but in my heart of hearts I thought that he, indeed, might be the ‘individual.’ Delighted by this thought I at first decided to have only two copies printed and present one of them to the typesetter. It was really rather beautiful to see how moved he was—a typesetter, who you might think would have become just as weary of a manuscript as the author!”

If the little preface concealed within itself a spiritual eroticism, that eroticism was very well hidden. With a self-abnegating gesture, he sent the two discourses out into world of readers, poetically imagining the book’s adventures in foreign parts, where it would wend “its way down lonely roads or walk alone on the main thoroughfare,” finally encountering “that individual whom I with joy and thankfulness call my reader, that single individual whom it seeks, toward whom it stretches out its arms, so to speak; that single individual who is kind enough to permit himself to be found, kind enough to receive it…. And when I had seen that, I saw no more.”

The fear of spiritual eroticism thus had less to do with what was being communicated than with the person to whom the communication was directed—because it was Regine whom the edifying discourses embraced with such passionate longing. “I came to understand the matter of ‘that single individual’ quite early on,” Kierkegaard wrote in an 1849 journal entry in which he squarely admitted that when he used the expression “that single individual” for the first time, in the preface to Two Edifying Discourses, it was a “little nod to her” and thus was not understood in the sense it later took on, of referring to a particular category. In this same journal entry, incidentally, Kierkegaard informs us that “The Seducer’s Diary” was another little nod to Regine. Sheer disgust at the story was supposed to have freed her from their relationship, while the discourses, on the other hand, were supposed to show her that in the final analysis “The Seducer’s Diary” had had a religious intent.

The discourses were reviewed in Theological Journal, where it was stated that the author, familiar to those who had read On the Concept of Irony, was Magister Kierkegaard, whose spiritual individuality was characterized in particular by a tendency to track down illusions and contradictions everywhere, and this placed him closer to critical scholarship than to the dogmatic disciplines. Kierkegaard was not entirely devoid of “substance and depth,” however, because even though dialectical play certainly got the upper hand on occasion, he did not push it to the same extreme as many other young “devotees of scholarship.” After these authoritative remarks followed a discussion of the two discourses. The reviewer found the first discourse much more successful than the second, but this was not necessarily much in the way of praise, because the second of the discourses must probably be designated a failure: “There are a number of unfortunate expressions in the discourse, an unusually large number of interrogative sentences, and a much too generous use of direct address. Similarly, the affectedly exquisite language is often more worldly than churchly.”

There was more substance, for example, in the work of Mr. Branner, a fellow from the provincial town of Nakskov who was reviewed on the same page and received the following evaluation: “In this sermon, based on the last portion of the [Gospel] text for the day (Matthew 8:1–13), the author has treated the relationship of the head of the household to his servants in an instructive and sensible manner.”

Here was something a person could understand, and it is not likely that Mr. Branner’s book was burdened with much in the way of affectedly exquisite language.

Regine’s Nod

After returning from Berlin, Kierkegaard was not only occupied with the completion of Either/Or; there was also the matter of seeing Regine again. Unplanned, but nonetheless by some miraculous coincidence, they had a wordless encounter every Monday morning between nine and ten o’clock along the short stretch of street on which their regular routines in the city overlapped. In mid-April this ritual coexistence took a dramatic turn: “At the Church of Our Lady during vespers on Easter Sunday (during Mynster’s sermon) she nodded to me. I don’t know whether it was beseechingly or in forgiveness, but in any case so affectionately. I had sat in an out-of-the-way place, but she discovered me. Would to God she hadn’t. Now a year and a half’s sufferings are wasted, all my enormous effort. She doesn’t believe that I was a deceiver after all, she has faith in me. What ordeals now await her! The next will be that I am a hypocrite. The farther up we go, the more terrible it will be. That a person with my inwardness, my religiosity, could behave in such a manner!”

Kierkegaard subsequently obscured this journal entry with wavy lines of ink; about halfway through, the entry touched on the Monday encounters and thus apparently became so private that posterity was not to be permitted to read it. But in 1849 he returned to the subject of Regine’s nod during vespers and gave a more detailed explanation: “She nodded twice. I shook my head. That meant, ‘You must give me up.’ Then she nodded again, and I nodded in as friendly a manner as possible. That meant, ‘You still have my love.’ ” Shortly afterward they met on the street. Regine greeted him in a friendly and sympathetic manner, and now Kierkegaard understood absolutely nothing. He merely stared at her in amazement and shook his head.

Indirect communication is ambivalent and is therefore risky business, for the recipient of the communication can attribute quite a different meaning to it than the sender intends. Moreover, if the communication is a wordless gesture, things can go completely awry. And that was what happened when Regine nodded that third time in church and Kierkegaard gave a friendly nod in return. What he had intended to do was to indicate to Regine that she could be assured of his love, but instead he convinced Regine that he had given his blessing to her engagement to Fritz Schlegel. It was in fact the relationship with Fritz which had occasioned Regine’s repeated signals and about which Kierkegaard had not had the faintest idea.

In that case, he might have shaken his head instead. Or his face would have been forced to assume a completely blank expression.

Berlin Again

This misunderstanding of a signal was repeated three weeks later, on Monday, May 8, 1843, when Kierkegaard traveled to Berlin for the second time. He sailed (once again) on the Königin Elisabeth, traveling via Ystad, Sweden to Stralsund in Germany, where the passengers spent the night in a hotel. The next day he continued by coach to Stettin (now Szezcin, Poland), from which there was a railroad connection via Angermünde to Berlin. This meant that the trip could now be completed in significantly less time than it had taken previously: “Thanks to the half-completed railway,” an advertisement in Adresseavisen stated, “the trip from Stettin to Berlin can be made in nine to ten hours.”

Kierkegaard boarded the train in Stettin and positioned himself comfortably in an armchair in an empty first-class carriage. But after the train had passed a couple of stations he heard the conductor—who was sitting on a bench just over his head—blow his whistle. The train stopped. The conductor shouted, “Sie haben mit der Gardine gewinckt” [German: “You waved the curtain”]. For a moment Kierkegaard was embarrassed for having until then thought of a train trip as a prosaic matter, for it was in fact quite poetic that a train would stop merely because someone had waved a curtain at a passerby. He remembered a bit of verse about a lady who stood on the battlement of a castle, waving her veil. No sooner had he remembered the verse than the conductor again shouted “Sie haben mit der Gardine gewinckt.” Kierkegaard now sensed that the conductor wanted to talk with him, and he quickly took out his dictionary in the hope of finding an appropriate reply. He was unable to find anything suitable, and with a note of despair in his voice the conductor now shouted “Um Gotteswillen” [German: “For God’s sake!”]. Kierkegaard put his head out the window, looked up at the conductor, and shouted the only German sentence he knew by heart: “Bedencken Sie doch, Ihre Hochwohlgeboren, dass ein Mann, der so viele Universitäten …” [German: “But you don’t think, dear sir, that a man with so many universities …”]. Then the conductor signaled and the train started off again, as did Kierkegaard’s train of thought. He vainly sought to understand the entire scene, and he shuddered a bit at the thought that when he alighted from the carriage everyone would be able to see that it was himself, one person, who had been the cause of all the confusion and delay. It was not until they reached the station in Angermünde that the conductor was able to explain the actual situation to Kierkegaard. The conductor had not been shouting to him; there had a been a passenger in the carriage ahead of him who had suddenly begun waving his curtain vigorously, and according to the established railroad procedures this meant that the train was to be brought to an immediate halt. Normally one was supposed to use a little flag that was rolled up and tucked under the seats in each compartment, but in this case the passenger involved had evidently decided to resort to the curtain. Or rather, he hadn’t done so, because in fact the curtain had been set waving when the cord that was supposed to have kept it in place had torn loose. Thus the conductor had misunderstood the signal, whereupon Kierkegaard had misunderstood the conductor. Just as he had misunderstood Regine and she had misunderstood him during vespers in the Church of Our Lady.

On the day after his arrival in Berlin, Kierkegaard was close to collapsing from exhaustion. When he had overnighted at the hotel in Stralsund, a young girl in a room on the next floor had nearly driven him mad with a silly piano medley. She had played Weber’s “Last Waltz,” which, strange to say, was exactly the piece of music that had been among the first things Kierkegaard had encountered on his previous trip to Berlin, when he had heard a blind man perform it on a harp in the Tiergarten. Even while he was still in Stralsund, everything seemed to remind Kierkegaard of his previous journey, and when he had arrived in Berlin and had once again taken up lodgings at the Hotel Saxen—at the corner of Jägerstrasse and Charlottenstrasse—with a view of the water, everything seemed like a weird déjà vu.

Out of these motley states of mind and travel weariness arose the idea for a new work, Repetition, which he mentioned in a few half-manic lines in his first letter to Boesen: “Yesterday I arrived. Today I am at work. The arteries in my forehead are bulging…. At this moment the busy thoughts are once again at work, and the pen is flourishing in my hand…. I have recommenced my old promenades up and down Unter den Linden. As always when I travel, I am a silent letter which no one can pronounce and which does not say anything to anyone.” As on earlier occasions, “Yours, S. Kierkegaard” was followed by a postscript: “By the way, you must not burden anyone with news concerning me. I have no desire to satisfy the least bit of curiosity in any way.” Nor did Boesen learn what the blossoming pen in Kierkegaard’s hand had accomplished, for as the secretive author wrote in his journal: “The real brooding over the idea ought to remain hidden from every sort of profane knowledge and from the interference of outsiders, just as a bird will not continue to sit on her eggs if someone has touched them.”

Kierkegaard did not post the letter to Boesen, but four days later he wrote a new one in which he reported: “In a certain sense, I have already attained what I could have wished for, something which I had not known would take an hour, a minute, or half a year—an idea, a hint…. As far as this is concerned, I could just as well come right home again. I won’t do so, however, but on the other hand it is not likely that I will travel any further than Berlin.” It is not clear just exactly what Kierkegaard had managed to accomplish so completely that, merely a week after his arrival in Berlin, he could just as well have returned to Copenhagen, but ten days later, on May 25, when he wrote his third and last letter, it was clear that his idea had become a reality: “In a little while you will see me again. I have finished a work that is important to me. I am working full speed on a new work, and I need my library as well as a printshop. At first I was sick, but now I am reasonably healthy—that is to say, my spirit swells within me and will presumably kill my body. I have never worked as hard as now. I go out for a brief walk in the morning. Then I come home, sit uninterrupted at my desk until close to three o’clock. My eyes can hardly see. Then I take my walking stick and steal over to the restaurant, but I am so weak that if anyone shouted my name out loud I would keel over and die. Then I go home and begin again. In my indolence, I have pumped up a mighty shower during the past several months. Now I have pulled the chain, and ideas are pouring over me—healthy, happy, thriving, cheerful, blessed children, easily born, yet all bearing the birthmark of my personality. Otherwise, as mentioned, I am weak, my legs shake, my knees creak, et cetera.” At the bottom of the page Boesen could read: “If I don’t die on the way, I think you will find me happier than ever. It is a new crisis. It means either that I will now begin to live or that I must die. There could also be another way out: I could lose my head. God knows that. But however I come down, I will never forget to uphold the passion of irony in justified opposition to those inhuman halfphilosophers who understand nothing whatsoever, and the whole of whose talent consists in scribbling digests of German philosophy.”

On Tuesday, May 30, 1843, the steamship Svenska Lejonet arrived in Copenhagen harbor at ten o’clock in the morning. Kierkegaard was back in town. This time his baggage contained the manuscripts of two new works that would appear on October 16, when readers who had perhaps scarcely managed to turn the last page of Either/Or could enlarge their Kierkegaard library with Repetition, Fear and Trembling, and Three Edifying Discourses, consisting of 157, 135, and 62 pages respectively.

Repetition

One day in the late summer of 1843, when Repetition was just beginning to take shape at Bianco Luno’s print shop, Kierkegaard giddily wrote in his journal: “This is the way literature ought to be, not a nursing home for cripples, but a playground for healthy, happy, thriving, smiling, vigorous little scamps, well-formed, complete beings, satisfied with who they are, each of whom has the express image of its mother and the power of its father’s loins, not the aborted products of feeble wishes, not the afterbirth that comes of postpartum pains.”

Repetition is such a “playground,” a noisy laboratory in which each individual concept is made the object of more or less every possible sort of investigation. As far as that goes, Repetition is also happy, conscious of itself, and smiling, but it is debatable how thriving or well-formed it is, because its form is fragmented, unsteady, replete with sudden changes of direction. If it would be of any help, one could say that Repetition is an example of romantic irony’s reluctance to be subjected to any structure—not merely to the structure of the novel, but even to the structure of writing itself—which makes it easy to explain why in the postmodern era Repetition was, early on, the darling of deconstructionists.

But despite its quirks, Repetition has a plot. Indeed, it has more than that: The plot of Repetition in fact is about plot, or about things that happen, either entirely accidentally, because things just happen, or because someone else, God, wants it that way. In any event, Repetition has certain difficulties that need clearing up, and doing so pulls the work in two different directions; in an aesthetic direction that packs the text with the wrong sort of repetitions, and in a religious direction that links the proper sort of repetition to God.

The two different directions are represented by two figures. The wrong repetitions are represented by a man who in fact has repetition inscribed within his name, Constantin Constantius. He is not only the book’s narrator, he is also a character in his own tale, embarking, among many other things, on an expedition to Berlin in a rash attempt to ascertain the actual extent of repetition. Existentially he is mired in the aesthetic, but intellectually he soars to the most rarified atmosphere and is responsible for the theoretical terminology found in the book. The second figure is an unnamed young man, who for want of anything better is simply called the Young Man. He has been incautious enough to have fallen in love with a young woman, and over the course of the book he attempts to shape himself into a spouse and to come closer to the religious, which probably succeeds (incidentally, at the very point when everything looks most hopeless). He appears to recover himself, and to this extent he undergoes the good sort of repetition.

“ ‘Repetition’ is a good Danish word, and I congratulate the Danish language on a philosophical term,” Constantin Constantius writes at one point, and although this sounds nice, it is, however, only a half-truth. For the word “repetition” is not a philosophical term, a point that Repetition—which is not merely a theme with variations, but has in fact made variation into its theme—emphasizes with its rhetoric, which is so steeped in ironic and silly posturing that the term never takes on its identity as a technical term and has to make do with fervent fantasies of being a weighty philosophical category. Thus if we attempt to approach the concept of repetition by going behind the rhetoric we will probably seize hold of what is least important. More than any other work, Repetition must be read—again and again.

Nonetheless, Repetition is not an unphilosophical piece of writing. Very near the beginning we encounter Constantin Constantius, who is eagerly preoccupied with some reflections about the possibility of motion: “As everyone knows, when the Eleatics denied motion, Diogenes stepped forth as an opponent. He actually stepped forth, for he didn’t say a word, but merely walked back and forth several times, and by so doing he believed that he had provided a sufficient rebuttal of their position.” Thus Diogenes opposed theoretical skepticism with factual practice, and it is by means of this juxtaposition, this opposition, that he functions as an exemplar for Constantin Constantius, who cherishes certain ambitions on behalf of repetition: “Repetition is a decisive expression for what ‘recollection’ was to the Greeks. As the Greeks taught that all cognition is recollection, the new philosophy will teach that all of life is a repetition…. Repetition and recollection are the same movement, but in opposite directions. For what is recollected has been, is repeated backwards. Genuine repetition, on the other hand, is recollected forwards.” A qualification that Constantin Constantius quite suddenly inserts into his text a few pages later makes it clear, furthermore, that repetition is an inescapable prerequisite for every problem in the area of dogmatics. Thereby these analyses of cognitive theory take on an existential perspective whose ultimate standpoint is beyond all conceptual calculation. Repetition is the concept of the inconceivable, which is why the truth is not something one must appropriate retrospectively, but is something to which one is exposed, an experience—the truth happens. Consequently a repetition is not something one brings about oneself; on the contrary it is something brought about by someone, an other: God.

After Constantin Constantius had spent several pages formulating these theories, he wanted to travel to Berlin to test them out in practice. Like his author, he had been to Berlin previously, but just as he was going out the door the Young Man showed up, insisting in no uncertain terms that he was unhappily in love. He had repeatedly wanted to call on a young woman, but each time his courage failed him, and now he has instead called upon Constantin Constantius, whom the Young Man wants as a companion on a diverting carriage ride. While they wait for the carriage, the Young Man restlessly paces back and forth in the parlor, citing with melancholy emotion a verse by Poul Martin Møller:

Then comes a dream from my youth

To my easy chair,

I have longed so deeply for you,

Thou bright sun, woman fair.

Now Constantin Constantius understands that the Young Man has begun to recollect his love and in so doing has gone beyond the young woman who had originally been the cause and the object of his love. And a couple of weeks later the Young Man could also sense the obscure objective of this displaced desire: The young woman has awakened a poetic instinct that is stronger than the eros that awakened it, and in so doing she has unknowingly written her own “death sentence.” But the confused youth cannot bring himself to explain to the young woman about “the confusion, the fact that she was merely the visible form, while his thoughts, his soul, sought something else, which he attributed to her.” Constantin Constantius therefore suggests that he employ a radical strategy: “Destroy everything, transform yourself into a despicable human being whose only pleasure consists in deceit and deception…. First, try, if possible, to make yourself a bit unpleasant to her. Don’t tease her, it will incite her. No! Be inconsistent, driveling, do one thing one day, something else the next, though without emotion, in a total rut…. Rather than any of the delights of love, generate a sort of cloying quasi-love, which is neither indifference nor desire. Let the whole of your conduct be as unpleasing as watching a man drool.” Constantin Constantius openly confesses that he himself finds the strategy “indelicate,” but nonetheless (or perhaps precisely for this reason) he offers to procure a seamstress with whom the Young Man must be seen frequently enough to encourage the spread of rumors concerning a dubious alliance between the two. The Young Man approves of the plan, and the seamstress is engaged for a year. But just as the show is about to begin the Young Man disappears. Constantin Constantius never sees him again and has to content himself with noting that the Young Man lacked “the elasticity of irony,” which is what one needs if one is to surmount the difficulties presented by actuality. “My young friend had no understanding of repetition. He did not believe in it and did not will it strongly.”

Constantin Constantius could now embark on his long-planned journey, and it began well—that is to say, the journey in the stagecoach was just as dreadful as it had been the previous time, and this opened the bright prospect of more such repetitions. So no sooner did he reach Berlin than Constantin Constantius sought out the tastefully furnished apartment where he had stayed during his first visit. Unfortunately it turned out that the apartment was already leased, and Constantin Constantius had to make do with renting a small room. His disappointment turned to hope, however, when he learned that the Königstädter Theater, located at the corner of Alexanderplatz and Alexanderstrasse, was presenting the same posse (a sort of farce or burlesque bit of total theater) that had afforded him such an unforgettable experience on his previous visit. The posse was The Talisman, with a libretto by Johann Nepomuk Nestroy and music by Adolf Müller. (It was also a great success when it was performed as the inaugural presentation at the Casino Theater in Copenhagen on December 26, 1848.) Constantin Constantius dedicates a fair number of pages to a discussion of the production, giving special attention to Beckmann and Grobecker, a brilliant acting duo. He also emphasizes how the planless impetuosity of the posse can transport the audience to an exalted, almost ecstatic condition. Constantin Constantius remembers how, on that previous visit, he had exulted in his shadowy little theater box while waves of laughter rolled over him from every side, liberating repressed childhood images from within his inner being, while opposite him sat a lovely young woman like a shining promise of happiness. She sought out his eyes amorously, but also, he thought he could recall, so chastely that it did her no harm.

The whole business seemed heaven-sent, totally unplanned and yet so perfectly ex nihilo. And it was precisely this exuberance that Constantin Constantius desired to repeat, but in vain. The box was taken, Beckmann and Grobecker were not the least bit amusing, and the young woman was not there. Utterly depressed, Constantin Constantius spent half an hour in the theater, whereafter he concluded that repetition did not exist. Nonetheless he repeated his attempt and paid yet another visit to the theater, but the only thing repeated was the impossibility of repetition, after which he decided to leave town: “My discovery was not significant and yet it was curious, for I had discovered that repetition absolutely did not exist, and I had come to certainty about this by repeating it in every possible way.”

The only thing remaining was the slender hope that seeing his home again would turn into a sort of repetition. But even this was not to be. In the absence of his master, Constantin Constantius’s servant had initiated, though not yet completed, a major housecleaning that had turned everything upside down: “I realized that no repetition exists, and my previous view of life had won out. How ashamed I felt, that I, who had been so cavalier with that young man, had now been placed in the same position. Indeed, it seemed to me as though I myself were that young man, as though my grandiose words, which now I would not repeat for the world, had only been a dream from which I had awakened, allowing life ceaselessly and faithlessly to take back [Danish: tage igjen] everything it had given—without having given a repetition [Danish: Gjen-tagelse].”

For Constantin Constantius the result is the negative (but not unimportant) knowledge that one cannot “calculate on the basis of uncertainties.” A thing happens when it happens, but it does not happen if one wills that it must happen. Constantin Constantius was thus “entirely convinced” that if he had not journeyed to Berlin in order to investigate the extent to which repetition was possible, he would have had “the time of [his] life doing precisely the same things.”

“Long Live the Post Horn!”

As repetition is a break in the immediate regularity of things, chance is a break in the normal predictability of things. Repetition and chance are thus names for a sudden happening that can intervene and change the course of things for shorter or longer periods of time. These two, repetition and chance, mirror each other, but repetition is religious, while chance is aesthetic. A person cannot will either of them, repetition or chance. Both of them happen by happening, but when they happen they give existence its fullness.

For example, at one point Constantin Constantius is reminded of how, six years earlier, he had stayed at a country inn and enjoyed a fine meal. Just as he had been standing there enjoying a steaming cup of coffee he had suddenly looked through the window and seen a young woman on her way into the courtyard of the inn, from which he drew the “conclusion” that she was on her way down to the garden. “One is young. So I bolted down my coffee, lit a cigar and was just about to follow fate’s beckoning and the young woman’s footsteps when there came a knocking at my door, and in stepped—the young woman.” She nodded most winsomely and inquired sweetly whether she might have a ride to Copenhagen with Constantin Constantius in his carriage, and the spontaneous trust with which she made her inquiry so surprised him that he immediately lost “sight of the interesting and the piquant,” and without the least ulterior motive he offered the young woman a ride back to town. Indeed, he was convinced that even a “more irresponsible person” than himself would have forgotten his sly desires: “The confidence with which she entrusted herself to me is a better defense than all feminine cunning and cleverness.” Thus his own strategy of seduction had been vulnerable to a sudden display of trust that had destroyed the “conclusion” he had been in the process of reaching and had caused him to forget his original, manipulative motives. The young woman did not become Constantin Constantius’s victim. On the contrary, it was he who became the victim of her trust, after which he could conclude: “A young woman who wishes for the interesting becomes the trap in which she herself is caught. A young woman who does not wish for the interesting believes in repetition.”

One can no more will trust than one can will a repetition or a chance event, just as the self does not have control over the factors that bring about the action, the situation, the phenomenon. And Constantin Constantius tells a moving story about a couple of little girls in a baby carriage who suddenly found themselves in a clearly dangerous situation when a coach bore down on them at full speed. Thanks to the nursemaid’s quick-thinking maneuver with the baby carriage, however, they just barely escaped catastrophe. Everyone had been full of anxiety, excepting only the little girls themselves, for one of them had been sleeping soundly while the other, without batting an eye, had continued to pick her nose. “She probably thought, what business is it of mine? It’s the nursemaid’s responsibility.” Here again, the point of the story is the relation between human initiative and the inevitable, whose essence, of course, is to happen by happening. And indeed, Constantin Constantius could well have added, with reference to that nose-picking little girl: She believed in repetition.

Related to this (though undeniably quite different) was the personal occurrence about which Constantin Constantius reports as follows: “I arose one morning and felt unusually well. Unaccountably, this sense of well-being increased all morning long. At precisely one o’clock I was at the highest point and glimpsed the dizzying apex that is not to be found on any scale of well-being, not even on the poetic thermometer. My body had lost its terrestrial weight. It was as though I had no body, precisely because every function was entirely satisfied, every nerve delighted both in itself and on behalf of the whole, while every heartbeat of the restlessness of the organism only called attention to the pleasure of the moment…. It was as if the whole of existence was in love with me, and everything quivered in a momentous rapport with my being. Everything in me was full of portent, and everything was mysteriously transfigured by my microcosmic bliss…. As mentioned, at exactly one o’clock I was at the highest point, where I could sense absolute sublimity. Then something suddenly started to irritate one of my eyes. Whether it was an eyelash, a speck, a bit of dust, I don’t know, but this I do know: At that very instant I plunged down almost into the abyss of despair. This will be readily understood by everyone who has been as high up as I had been and who, while at that point, has also concerned himself with the theoretical question of the extent to which absolute satisfaction is attainable at all.” The tale of this heavenly morning can be read as a parody of the mystic’s ecstasy, and the repeated emphasis upon the exact hour of its culmination—precisely one o’clock—should hardly be taken too seriously. But the point of the story is the suddenness with which bliss appears, its cause unpredictable, its disappearance inexplicable. And precisely because it has evaded Constantin Constantius’s control, it evinces similarities with the sudden appearance of the trusting young woman and with the absolute non-willing of the little girl—in brief, with repetition.

Scarcely had Constantin Constantius recounted the story of his euphoric morning, however, when, in a sort of renunciation of the deceitful character of repetition, he started to sing the praises of the chance happening, which from then on would serve as his principle: “Long live the post horn! It is my instrument for many reasons and especially because one can never be certain of coaxing the same note out this instrument. For an infinity of possibility resides within the post horn, and the person who places it to his lips and deposits his wisdom in it will never be guilty of a repetition. And the person who, instead of making a reply, provides his friend with a post horn, such a person says nothing but explains everything. Long live the post horn! It is my symbol. As the ancient ascetic kept on his table a skull, the contemplation of which constituted his view of life, so will the post horn on my table always remind me of the meaning of life.”

And with this the first part of Repetition concludes. The second part can begin.

To Become Oneself Again Is to Become Someone Else

After being reinstalled in his pleasant apartment, Constantin Constantius has difficulty passing the time. Armed with a “fly swatter,” he pursues “every revolutionary fly” that might attempt to disturb the peace, but it is only when he unexpectedly receives a letter one day that the story comes back to life. The letter was mailed from Stockholm, written by the Young Man, whose critical condition proves to be unchanged. The erotic conflict had made a far deeper impression on him than Constantin Constantius had at first assumed, and therefore, he argues unhesitatingly, “there is nothing left for him except to make a religious move.”

Taught by bitter experience, Constantin Constantius ought to know that this sort of thing is more easily said than done. And perhaps he does, for a bit later he explains that it is precisely because the Young Man has realized that “humanly speaking” his love is impossible that he is situated at “the boundary of the wondrous,” and this is why his love can only be realized “by virtue of the absurd.” From Constantin Constantius’s point of view, however, what the Young Man is concerned with is by no means the young woman—it is “not possession in the stricter sense”; rather, it is “the recurrence in a purely formal sense.” In other words, it is not the young woman whom the exiled youth must regain by virtue of the absurd, it is himself. If he could return to her and reconcile himself with her, he would have atoned for his guilt, which would have been taken back. And such repetition would be forgiveness.

Of the eight letters the Young Man sends to Constantin Constantius, the first is the longest. In it he confesses his fearful fascination with Constantin Constantius, whose heartless reasonableness has imparted cool clarity to his amorphous passions. Soon thereafter, however, the passion is displaced backwards onto a well-known figure and an unexpected fellow sufferer from the Old Testament, the tormented Job, in whose nameless sufferings and harsh fate the Young Man sees his own situation adumbrated. Thus he relates how he takes “joy in copying down, over and over again, everything he [Job] said, sometimes in Danish script, sometimes in Latin, sometimes in one format, sometimes in another,” after which the copy is laid “upon my sick heart like a dressing made from the herb called ‘God’s Hand.’ ” But this was not a pure, unalloyed inwardness, for he could have the entire house illuminated so that he could recite a portion of the book of Job—“with a loud voice, almost yelling”—just as he would occasionally open a window “and shout his words out into the world.” If his love had once been directed at a woman, his passion was now for the book of Job, and in a quite literal sense, for just as the Young Man and Job share the dinner table, so do they also share the bed—“thus I take the book to bed with me at night!”

As the young woman has been replaced by the book, so too has the erotic passion been replaced by the passion of reading: “Even though I have read the book again and again, every word in it remains new to me. Every time I approach it, it is born anew or it becomes something new in my soul. Like a drunkard, little by little, I imbibe all the intoxication of passion until this slow sipping makes me almost unconscious with drink.” The Young Man has projected all his love onto the writing, onto the book of Job; he has wedded his sexuality to its textuality, but when he removes his lustful gaze from the page, it is as though the text takes back the repetition, leaving the youth in a despairing state that receives its clearest expression in the letter dated October 11: “My life has been brought to its uttermost point. I am disgusted with existence, it has no savor and is without salt or meaning. Even if I were hungrier than Pierrot, I still would not eat of the explanation offered by men. One sticks a finger in the ground in order to tell by the smell what country one is in. I stick my finger into existence, it smells of nothing. Where am I? What does that mean, ‘the world’? What does that word mean? Who has tricked me into this entire affair and now leaves me standing here? Who am I? How did I come into the world? Why wasn’t I consulted? Why was I not made acquainted with the customs and rules, but instead thrust into the ranks, as though I had been shanghaied by a military recruiter? How did I acquire a share in the great enterprise they call reality? Why do I have to have a share in it? Isn’t it a matter of free choice? And if I am to be forced to do this, where is the manager, because I have something to say? Is there no manager? To whom shall I direct my complaint? Existence is a debate, after all, so might I ask that my views be taken into consideration? … Will no one answer? Isn’t this of the greatest importance to all the gentlemen involved? … How did it come about that I became guilty? Or am I not guilty? Why, then, am I labeled as such in every language? What sort of a wretched invention is human language, when it says one thing and means another?”

Here the Young Man has rewritten Job’s questions in a modern, absurdist manifesto whose furious call for meaning fades into silence. While Job had God as the focal point of his conflict, the Young Man cannot even find “the manager” who could guarantee that there is a meaning behind the meaninglessness and abolish the irony that is afoot in language, which “says one thing and means another.” The distance between true and false language repeats the distance between the Young Man and the story of Job. For at the very moment he identifies himself with Job, he must make the painful admission that this identification does not give him a new identity. “Job’s tormented soul bursts forth with a mighty cry. I understand these words and make them my own,” he writes characteristically. But then, smiling and suffering in equal measure, he continues: “At the same time, I sense the contradiction and I smile at myself as one smiles at a little child who has put on his father’s clothing.” The Young Man is aware that he is incapable of repeating Job’s story because however passionately he reads himself into the story and inscribes himself in it, it always remains one size too large!

Gradually, as his febrile fascination subsides, the Young Man gives a more subdued account of the greatness of Job, which in his opinion inheres in the unyielding manner in which Job insisted that he was right. Job knew that he was right, but he did not know the extent to which he would get his rights, and therefore the entire interval, all the way up until his final assurance, remained an ordeal—“for since an ordeal is a temporary category, it is eo ipso defined with reference to time and must therefore be abolished in time.” The Young Man explains himself: “Job is blessed and has received everything double.—This is what is called a repetition. My, doesn’t a thunderstorm feel good!”

Since this is the first time the Young Man uses the word “repetition” in his letters, it is disappointing to see him use it so literally as almost to render it banal, assigning it a quite different meaning than Constantin Constantius had given it in the book’s introduction. Matters do not improve when the Young Man then tells us that he himself is now simply awaiting a “thunderstorm—and repetition.” Despite his several attempts to explain his meteorological metaphor, he remains rather foggy. “What is this thunderstorm supposed to bring about?” he asks quite properly. And he answers his own question: “It is to make me fit to be a husband. It will crush the whole of my personality. I am ready. It will make me almost unrecognizable to myself…. If the thunderstorm does not come, I will become sly.”

And the reader, too, is beginning to become a bit sly, entertaining the sneaking suspicion that something is about to go completely haywire here. Therefore the reader applauds when Constantin Constantius inserts a protest between the Young Man’s last and next-to-last letters. It is clear from this protest that, like the reader, Constantin Constantius has had a difficult time taking this matter seriously: “He suffers from a misplaced melancholic high-mindedness that has absolutely no place anywhere except in a poet’s brain. He awaits a thunderstorm that will make him into a husband, a stroke perhaps. It is completely the reverse.” And Constantin Constantius adds that he finds it absurd to relate oneself to a being who holds a thunderstorm in his hand as his trump card.

Constantin Constantius chooses—once again—to abandon the Young Man, but no sooner does he make that decision than yet another letter arrives, the last in the series, proclaiming in its opening lines: “She is married. To whom I do not know. Because when I read it in the papers it was though I had been struck by a blow. I lost the newspaper, and since then I have not had the patience for any more detailed investigation. I am myself once again. Here I have repetition. I understand everything, and existence seems to me more beautiful than ever.”

The Young Man understands everything. The reader does not. The young woman has married someone else. It was in the newspaper. Period. All the definitions with which the book was supposed to add intellectual weight to the category of repetition disappear into thin air at the gentle push of a chance event. “It did indeed come like a thunderstorm,” the youth wrote in high-strung fashion. But the little thunderstorm simile is well-chosen, and he does not shrink from adding a final, humiliating clause, “even if it is to her generosity that I owe the fact that it happened.” And this is undeniably the case, so in relation to the Young Man, the woman thus assumes the same place occupied by God in relation to Job. The Young Man’s repossession of himself is thus not a repetition in the truest sense of the term. This fact is involuntarily confirmed by his rhetorical questions, with all their imploring gestures: “I am myself once again. Here I have repetition…. The division that had been a part of my being has been resolved. I am unified once again…. So isn’t this a repetition? Didn’t I get everything back double? Didn’t I get myself back again, and precisely in such a fashion that I was doubly able to sense its significance?”

The work is not able to live up to the theological requirements of repetition as forgiveness, which had been the book’s original point of departure. So it is altogether fitting that the Young Man concludes his final letter with a moving paean to the woman’s generosity, since as mentioned, it was she, and not God, who had been the occasion of the self’s reconciliation with itself: “The goblet of intoxication is offered to me once again. I am already breathing in its bouquet. I already sense its effervescent music. But first, a libation to her. She saved a soul that sat in the loneliness of despair: Praised be feminine generosity! Long live the flight of thought! Long live risking one’s life in the service of the idea! Long live the danger of battle! Long live the festive celebration of victory! Long live the dance in the maelstrom of infinity! Long live the crashing of the waves that conceal me in the abyss! Long live the crashing of the waves that fling me beyond the stars!”

Cheers, indeed! But before we raise our glass we might just take note of the fact that repetition is not included in this otherwise so saucy series of toasts. And when the wine has begun to take effect and the truth must come out, we might consider whether there perhaps is not more honesty in the ode to the “post horn” with which Constantin Constantius testified to his pessimism than in the Young Man’s misleading paean of jubilation.

Reality Intervenes

Printed at right angles across the entire next page is a rectangular frame containing the words: “To the worthy Mr. X., the real reader of this book.” There is nothing else on the page, but this is apparently sufficient to induce the reader to sneak over to the next page, where he encounters the following words: “My dear reader! Forgive me for speaking to you in such a familiar tone, but we are alone, after all. Even though you are in fact a poetic figure, to me you are in no sense a plural entity, but only one person, so we two are still just you and I.”

This sort of familiarity tempts a reader to become “Mr. X,” the real reader of the book, who is capable of making himself deserving of the appellation. And indeed, before long, the intimate tone is replaced by a more emphatic one, ending with the complaint that nowadays no one cares to “waste a moment on the quaint thought that it is an art to be a good reader, much less spend the time it takes to become one. Naturally, this deplorable situation has its effect on the author, who in my opinion does the right thing when, like Clement of Alexandria, he writes in such a manner that the heretics are unable to understand him.”

As we subsequently learn, Constantin Constantius is responsible for this arrogant remark, and he soon raises painful doubts as to whether the reader has understood the book’s inner workings. Things do not get any better when, not quite six pages from the end of the book, Constantin Constantius reports that the “progression” of the work is “inverse,” that is, backwards, so that the reader must now turn around more or less literally and begin a rereading of Repetition, which, among other things, possesses the peculiar characteristic of taking back not a little of what it had given during the first reading. For example, the book had given the impression of being two separate and independent sequences, completed and delineated by Constantin Constantius and the Young Man, respectively. But now we are to understand that Constantin Constantius invented the Young Man in order to shed light on the psychological bases and factors that lead a person to become a religious exception. “The Young Man, whom I have called into being, is a poet,” Constantin Constantius writes, ostensibly without blinking, and then he adds this dry, technical detail: “My project has been for me an exclusively aesthetic and psychological activity.”

At this point Constantin Constantius makes the transition from being one of two narrators in the tale to being the author of the tale itself. Thus it was he, and not the Young Man, who wrote the letters from Stockholm. So it was not entirely accidental that these letters occasionally bordered on parody, referring back to the book’s baroque opening section and to the trip to Berlin. Nonetheless, Constantin Constantius believes that the Young Man did not grasp the concept of repetition and still lacked a deeper, religious sounding board for the “dithyrambic joy” that he expressed, particularly in his final letter. But had he had a more solid religious foundation he would have had the “seriousness” that makes it possible to disdain “all the childish pranks of actuality.”

Yet Constantin Constantius does not stop at the simple revelation that he has invented the Young Man. He goes a step further and blankly confesses, “I have included myself in it.” The full meaning of this confession is not clear, but it is plain that in his postscript Constantin Constantius wants to seal a pact both in blood and ink with his own unfortunate creation, the Young Man, for whom Constantin Constantius—according to his own report—has always had great affection. He willingly admits that things might have looked a bit otherwise now and then, but this was merely a “misunderstanding” that he “caused” in order to illustrate the Young Man as a type. “Every move I have made has had the sole purpose of illuminating him. I have always had him in mind. Every word I have spoken either was ventriloquism or was spoken with reference to him…. So I have done what I could for him, just as I am now making an effort to serve you, dear reader, by being yet another person.”

At this point it is probably high time to lodge a protest or at least to register a bit of skeptical disapproval. However much charm and refinement Constantin Constantius attempts to summon up, his postscript disturbs the fundamental concept of the work in a manner that does not seem particularly productive. We may be able to forgive him for revealing himself to be the poetic author of the Young Man, even though, in so doing, he verges on abolishing the distance between the work’s first, overtly parodic section and its second, ostensibly serious part. But what is much worse is that he has “included himself in it,” because this makes the characters in the work so amorphous that they begin to dissolve into utter formlessness. And things get no better in the postscript, when Constantin Constantius turns to the reader in an altogether too helpful fashion, obligingly offering himself to us in yet another form, for there is nothing in the work itself that necessitates this sort of mutability.

Nonetheless the mutability is necessary. The perspectival relativism of the postscript is less the product of a desire to exercise aesthetic cunning than of a need to conceal the work’s compositional collapse—which appears to reflect the psychological collapse of the work’s actual author. And this person, my dear reader, is of course not Constantin Constantius at all, but a man who calls himself Kierkegaard.

The peculiarity of the work is clarified somewhat when one inspects the manuscript of Repetition, which consists of two rather ordinary notebooks of different size and with different colored paper, one of a bluish shade, one yellowish. These notebooks, totaling 160 pages, served both as the draft and as the printer’s manuscript, so the work proceeded rather expeditiously—though this celerity does not argue that it was a simple, straightforward matter. A mere glance at the variants of the title page reveals a remarkable indecisiveness. Repetition had been the work’s title all along, but there had been trouble with the subtitle: “A Fruitless Venture” was deleted to make way for “A Venture in Discovery”; this was soon crossed out, after which Kierkegaard yet again tried “A Fruitless Venture.” This was once more deleted in favor of “A Venture in Experimental Philosophy,” which in turn was crossed out and replaced by “A Venture in Experimenting Philosophy,” with the last word crossed out and replaced by “Psychology.” The author was listed as “Constantinus de bona speranza”—a name that alternated with “Victorinus”—after which Kierkegaard finally (though not before trying out “Walter”) decided on “Constantin Constantius” as the work’s pseudonymous source.

“I have finished a work,” Kierkegaard wrote Boesen proudly from Berlin on May 25, 1843. Kierkegaard had Repetition in mind, but it is unclear how similar the work in his luggage was to what would end up as the finished book. The surviving textual materials do not permit any real reconstruction of the work’s genesis, but it is clear that Kierkegaard had felt himself compelled to revise and extend his tale, making drastic changes in the plot. For the Young Man was originally supposed to have committed suicide, and it was presumably in this lifeless state that he arrived in Copenhagen. But in the course of June or July, the Young Man was revived in a series of maneuvers that can be seen at various points in the manuscript—for example, where Kierkegaard deleted the parenthetical material in the following statement: “He confided in me with a charming frankness (which I will not abuse, since he is dead) that the reason he called on me was that he had need of a confidant.” And when the Young Man refused to accept the cynical strategy that Constantin Constantius had proposed for him, the explanation was that he did not have “the strength to carry out the plan,” though in the manuscript Kierkegaard had originally written “he shot himself.” At another point, in similar fashion “the memory of his death” is changed in the margin to “the memory of his disappearance.”

It cannot be determined when the suicide originally took place, because after the Young Man’s next-to-last letter, dated February 17, Kierkegaard used a pair of scissors to rid himself of five leaves from his manuscript notebook, of which at least four had definitely been written upon. Judging from the scanty bits of writing that survive along the inner margins, next to the binding, these five leaves (constituting ten small pages) seem to have contained critical commentary about the Young Man’s tempestuous expectations of an imminent repetition, which might indicate that the text had some similarity with the protest-filled passage Constantin Constantius inserted into the final version. This still leaves seven mysterious pages which, it may be assumed, also contained a dramatic scene, for it must have been at this point that the unhappy youth terminated his terribly young life, presumably in despair over the absence of repetition.

True, putting a bullet in one’s head is not an original literary solution to crises of the soul, but the various interventions in the text were not undertaken with an eye to originality. If our young hero first committed suicide because of the absence of repetition—and was thereafter revived in order to proclaim a parody of repetition—it was because, during the time that elapsed between the writing of the first lines in the first manuscript notebook and the writing of the final lines in the second, the book’s real reader had quite definitively disappointed the author’s hope for a repetition: In July 1843 Regine had become engaged to someone else. Period. But whereas in Repetition, the Young Man had contented himself with losing the newspaper in which he had read of his beloved’s engagement, Kierkegaard himself lost faith in Repetition as an indirect communication to Regine. Thus Repetition was originally to have served as a rejection of a possible repetition of their relationship, and this had been symbolically expressed by the suicide of the Young Man. After Regine’s engagement, however, this indirect communication had become meaningless, and the Young Man could therefore be revived so that Kierkegaard could claim that the repetition he had concerned himself with was not a repetition of the relationship with the woman, Regine, but rather a religious repetition that makes possible a person’s recovery or reacquisition of himself. A confusing displacement now arises between the repetition that had originally been intended and the one that actually took place, and Constantin Constantius attempts to minimize the problem by appealing to the reader’s goodwill and dedicating his work to the “dear reader,” as well as by appending a postscript in which he rehabilitates the Young Man in both moral and religious respects. The passage preceding Constantin Constantius’s epistle to the reader also shows signs of having been radically reworked, and the manuscript is a veritable tornado of clashing intentions, with additions and deletions layered one upon the other. This was the only way that Kierkegaard could be sure that Repetition recalled what had been its message to Regine.

1:50

No one knows when or from whom Kierkegaard received the news of Regine’s engagement, but it hurt. The misogynistic tendencies that we sense in Constantin Constantius’s interpolation between the next-to-last and last letters in the final version of the work fairly leap out at a reader of Kierkegaard’s draft, where he used a great deal of ink to render indecipherable the vile suggestion that a young woman who employs religious means in the service of erotic beguilement “not only [ought] to be recognizable by a black tooth—no, her entire face ought to be green. Though that is probably too much to ask, for in that case there would be an awful lot of green girls.” That was intended for Regine, right between the eyes, and the journal fairly overflows with spleen: “Dialogue: An individual with a sense of humor meets a girl who had once assured him that she would die if he left her. When he now meets her she is engaged. He greets her and says, ‘May I thank you for the kindness you have shown me. Perhaps you will permit me to show my appreciation.’ (He takes two marks and eight shillings out of his vest pocket and hands it to her. She is speechless with rage, but remains standing there, hoping to intimidate him with her gaze. He continues): ‘It’s nothing. It’s to help out with your trousseau, and on the day you get married and put the finishing touches on your act of kindness, I promise by all that is holy—by God and by your eternal salvation—to send you another two marks and eight shillings.” One cannot deny that these lines radiate a desire for vengeance, and indeed, in her memoirs Eline Boisen made a perfect slip of the pen, giving Repetition [Danish: Gjentagelsen] the wrong title, Revenge [Danish: Gjengjældelsen].

If the repetition had actually taken place and Kierkegaard had become a married man, Repetition would certainly never have been written. Now it was written, and it served as a sort of compensation for the absence of repetition. It is curious that the only person for whom repetition succeeded was Regine, who was united once again with Fritz and could begin again—thanks to Kierkegaard, who had busied himself with a tale about the importance of chance events. For what if he had not responded to Regine’s nod that day in church, thereby unknowingly giving his blessing to her relationship with Fritz? Constantin Constantius thus seems to be correct in asserting that “existence” is infinitely profound because “its governing power knows how to intrigue in a fashion entirely different than that of all the poets taken together.”

In any event, on October 16, 1843, for the sum of five marks (or eighty shillings) one could acquire a copy of Repetition, finally subtitled A Venture in Experimenting Psychology. And then, indeed, everything began to repeat itself, even Heiberg, who gave the book a once-over in his usual chatty fashion. In Urania, which appeared on December 19, 1843, he published an article titled “The Astronomical Year,” in which he went through the book and among other things raised the objection that repetition does not belong to the world of philosophy but to that of nature, where it forms a tranquil counterpart to such spiritual maladies as melancholia and spleen and is thus one of “the principal keys to the true wisdom of life.”

Misunderstood by Heiberg—who, after all, was usually held to be a careful reader—Kierkegaard felt induced to write an “Open Letter” in order to state his case very plainly: “When one defines repetition in this way, it is transcendent, a religious movement by virtue of the absurd, and when one has come to the boundary of the wondrous, eternity is the true repetition. So I think I have expressed myself rather intelligibly to the book’s real reader.” One might think so, but Heiberg looked at the matter quite differently, and Kierkegaard therefore lambasted him with corrections up one page and down the next, so that the proportion between Heiberg’s critique and Kierkegaard’s rejoinder was on the order of 1:50, totally out of proportion, something Kierkegaard eventually realized, so he consigned the whole business to a little packet that he labeled “I ought not waste my time.”

And he was right about that. There was, in fact, other business to attend to.

The Retracted Text

“If I had had faith, I would have stayed with Regine. Thank God that I have now realized this. Lately, I have been close to losing my mind.” These words date from May 17, 1843, and are thus from Kierkegaard’s second stay in Berlin, where he completed the first version of Repetition and began Fear and Trembling. Kierkegaard subsequently obscured the journal entry about Regine with a great many ink curlicues, but with the help of a microscope the trained eye can reconstruct the text he retracted: “In an aesthetic and chivalrous sense I have loved her far more than she has loved me, for otherwise she would neither have been haughty toward me nor would she subsequently have caused me anxiety with her shrieking. So I have begun a tale entitled ‘Guilty-Not Guilty,’ which would of course contain things that could amaze the world”—but that did not amaze Kierkegaard himself, however, because he contained within himself “more poetry than all novels put together.”

The leap from the shrieking to the writing—from pain over the loss of Regine to the self-conscious proclamation of the start of a new work—was made with peculiarly compensatory directness, but it is unclear how far the expatriate actually got with his “tale.” In any event, there is no surviving manuscript, only a couple of fragments that he placed in his “black Berlin folder” which was then laid in a “mahogany box” from which the pages first emerged the following year, when Kierkegaard began working in earnest on ‘Guilty?’/‘Not Guilty?’ The one fragment consists of a romantic sigh over having been born old and as a perpetual outsider, while the other describes, with a sort of effervescent melancholia, a sixteen-year-old girl who owns nothing at all, not even a chest of drawers or a cupboard, and who consequently has only the use of the lowest drawer in her mother’s bureau, where she keeps her confirmation dress and her hymnal: “Fortunate is the person who has so few possessions that he can dwell in the drawer next to hers.”

There is an emphasis both on the pain of being an outsider and on the hope of gaining some firm grounding in real life. These concerns point directly toward the theme—and variations—on which Kierkegaard was working in the manuscript of Fear and Trembling, a work that focuses to a great extent on the conditions that would make it possible for a person to regain an immediate relation to himself and to the world. Kierkegaard had the best imaginable qualifications for describing this problem from within, but we come to understand that he wanted to limit the use of autobiographical materials as much as possible. Thus, in the retracted text he explained that the relationship with Regine must not be “evaporated into poetry,” because it possessed a “quite different sort of reality.” Regine was a definitive fate, not merely a poetic impulse. He believed that he had treated her generously by sparing her his pain, and thus “from a purely aesthetic standpoint [he] had acted with great humanity” which he believed was also attested to by the fact that he had not spoken with any young woman since the break with Regine. Thus, he was far from being the “villain” people thought him to be, “because in truth it was certainly….” Certainly what?

We never find out. The manuscript continues with a few indecipherable words which soon peter out into nothing, because Kierkegaard removed pages 52–53 from his journal. Presumably he had written something too intimate and—afterwards—had therefore quite coolly decided to cut off posterity’s access to the important details. The text resumes abruptly at the top of the next page in the journal: “It would certainly have happened. But in a marriage everything is not sold in the condition ‘as is’ at the fall of the auctioneer’s hammer. In a marriage what matters is being a bit honest about the past. And here, too, my chivalry is clear. Had I not honored her, as my future wife, more than I honored myself; had I not been more zealous for her honor than for my own; then I would have held my tongue and fulfilled her wish and mine, and I would have permitted myself to marry her. There are so many marriages which conceal little tales. I did not want this to be the case with me, for then she would have become my concubine. I would rather have murdered her.”

Then the retracted text continues, giving Kierkegaard’s explanation, which (perhaps) is also the explanation of why he wanted to obliterate his confidential words from the paper: “But [had] I explained myself, I would have had to initiate her into the most frightful things, into my relationship with Father, his melancholia, the eternal night that broods deep within, my going astray, my lusts and excesses—which, however, are perhaps not so terrible in God’s eyes, because, after all, it was anxiety that caused me to go astray. And where could I seek shelter when I knew or suspected that the only man I had admired for his strength and power wavered?”

The relationship to Regine was incompatible with the relationship to his father, who long after his death was still capable of warping his son’s eros and hindering his ability to give of himself. Kierkegaard could not explain this to Regine: She did not possess any basis for understanding it, and he himself lacked the requisite courage, strength, or faith. This was what he had come to realize in his hotel room in Berlin. Immediately following the retracted text he appears to lay out some principal features of this insight: “Thus faith hopes for this life as well—but it does so by virtue of the absurd, of course, not by virtue of human understanding; otherwise it would be only common sense, not faith.” Several entries later, this position is reinforced: “It is precisely in the little things that it is important that one be able to have faith in God, for otherwise one is not in a proper relation to him…. Thus it is also important to bring God into the reality of this world, where he of course is in any case. So when Paul was on the boat that was about to founder, he prayed not only for his eternal salvation, but also for his temporal salvation.”

It was Saint Paul who inspired Kierkegaard with the title of the work. In his letter to the Philippians, Paul calls on them to “work” for their salvation “with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12). It is impossible to say how much of the manuscript of Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard had completed before he arrived at this redemptive insight, but it is quite certain that his own personal situation is more or less the best introduction to the work. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that in Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard was writing his way toward his own salvation, toward greater self-understanding. The work turned out to be one of Kierkegaard’s most perfect creations, and he found its perfection edifying in several respects. In the late summer of 1849 he noted proudly in his journal: “O, some day after I am dead, Fear and Trembling alone will be enough to immortalize my name as an author. Then it will be read and translated into foreign languages. People will practically shudder at the frightful emotion in the book.”

In writing this, Kierkegaard revealed the depth of his personal involvement with the work. Indeed, he honestly admitted, the work “reproduced my own life.” But what does that really mean? How can a book reproduce or depict a life? And what is the source of this biographical trembling?

The first inkling of an answer to this question seems to be concealed at the end of a little note Kierkegaard sent to Emil Boesen in the latter part of October 1843. Boesen lay sick in bed and wished to borrow “Blicher’s Short Stories.” Kierkegaard could not satisfy that request, so instead he sent Boesen “the best I possess, my Isaac.” With this elegant gesture, Boesen was presented with Fear and Trembling, but that was by no means the end of Kierkegaard’s symbolism, for he signed himself “Yours forever, Farinelli.” He had done this once before, also in a letter to Boesen, specifically in the letter he had sent Boesen from Berlin in 1841, asking him to send a copy of The First Love. That time Kierkegaard had crossed out the name, presumably because he had had last-minute regrets about the self-revelation implied by signing himself as the castrato singer. Thus not quite two years later, when he again made use of the signature, there must have been very special reasons for doing so, for Kierkegaard could of course have given himself a great many other names—Johannes de silentio or Constantin Constantius, for example. But he didn’t do so, he called himself Farinelli, and in so doing he used a code that Boesen had to break. But which code?

The matter can only be cleared up by reading. So we must now turn to the work.

Fear and Trembling

“In general, if poetry paid attention to the religious or to the inwardness of the individual, it would take on far more meaningful tasks than those with which it occupies itself at present.” This programmatic declaration is inserted in a footnote a bit less than twenty pages from the end of Fear and Trembling, but it could quite deftly have been inserted earlier in the book, and in the main text. For Fear and Trembling possesses a markedly aesthetic consciousness of religion and of the inwardness of the individual. It is no accident that the title page of the work is adorned with the complex genre definition “Dialectical Lyric.”

If one makes a one-sided, prosaic attempt to extract the dialectical from the lyrical or to coax the lyrical free of the dialectical, one infringes on the integrity of the work. In this respect Fear and Trembling closely resembles Repetition. But there are even more similarities. For one thing, both works are based on narratives from the Old Testament—the stories of Abraham and Job, respectively—but both works are also driven by a powerful epistemological interest in the anatomy of the miraculous, and they are constantly carrying out preparatory exercises for the leap, the paradox, for faith by virtue of the absurd, which is situated beyond every sort of knowledge and thought, every sort of rationality. Unlike Repetition, however, Fear and Trembling has a very firm structure, which is to some extent attributable to the fact that Johannes de silentio (as the pseudonym is called) is not personally implicated in his work to the same degree as was Constantin Constantius. For the most part, Johannes de silentio roams freely about the outer boundaries of his work, frequently uttering comments that proclaim his personal limitations with respect to the Old Testament story he is retelling. He insists that he is only a “supplementary clerk,” for whom writing is a “luxury that is all the more pleasant and noticeable, the fewer there are who buy and read what he writes.”

The pseudonymous author has silence—the Latin silentium—inscribed into his very name. But his name is not so much the result of his rather coy awareness of the fate that awaits his work in an age that has “crossed out passion [Danish: Lidenskaben] in order to serve scholarship [Danish: Videnskaben]”; rather, the pseudonymous author’s name is to be explained by the fact that the work itself is obsessed with the impotence of language, with nonverbal communication, with signals, and with the far-reaching significance of the silent gesture. Thus, on entering the work one encounters a motto by the German philosopher Johann Georg Hamann that concerns itself precisely with the communicative capacity of wordless signs: “What Tarquinius Superbus said in his garden by means of the poppies was understood by his son but not by the messenger.” This sounds cryptic and needs explaining: Tarquinius Superbus had a son, Sextus Tarquinius, then in the city of Gabii, which he was supposed to add to his father’s dominions. The son sent a message to his father in Rome, inquiring what he ought to do next. His father did not trust the messenger, however, and said nothing. Instead, he went out to his garden and, using his stick, he lopped the heads off all the tallest poppies. Puzzled, the messenger reported this scene to Sextus Tarquinius, who shrewdly understood how to draw the meaning out of this silent gesture and soon thereafter killed the most powerful men in the city. The father and son had thus communicated via a third party who had merely stood there gaping, understanding nothing himself.

In his retelling of the primeval tale from Genesis 22 about Abraham who went to Mount Moriah to sacrifice his son Isaac, Johannes de silentio is almost as zealous in his hermeneutical activity as Tarquinius Superbus had been in his garden. Johannes de silentio wanted to lay bare the dialectic contained within the narrative in order to show “what an enormous paradox faith is, a paradox that is capable of making a murder into a holy act, pleasing to God.” This demonstration takes place in three separate sections—labeled Problema I, II, and III, respectively—in which questions are posed concerning the possibility of the purposive setting aside (or the teleological suspension) of the ethical. These questions are never directly answered but are cast in the form of hypotheses: If there is no such teleological suspension, if faith is not a paradox that makes it possible for the individual to break from the universal and enter a relation with God, then Abraham is a wretched criminal, a perverse thrill killer who ought to be locked up. Conversely, but no less hypothetically, it naturally follows that if there is a justifiable exception, if inwardness is incommensurable with the exterior and therefore cannot be directly observed, if the individual is higher than the universal, then Abraham is the father of faith and an exemplar for all subsequent generations.

“One cannot weep over Abraham. One approaches him with a horror religiosus [Latin: “religious terror”] as Israel approached Mount Sinai,” Johannes de silentio writes. He is fully aware, however, that this is precisely what we do not do, we do not approach Abraham in religious terror. For over time the story has been worn down into a tale of yet another narrow escape, in which things certainly could have gone terribly wrong, but which had a happy ending, thank God: “We all know—it was only a trial.” As an antidote to the present age’s easy and indolent triumph over the unbearable portions of the story, Johannes de silentio wishes to reendow the story with its original terror and insist on Abraham’s tale as the story of the impact of the alien and the terrifying, the demonically sublime.

Johannes de silentio continually employs aesthetic methods to accomplish his purpose, but early in the book, in a bit of compositional elegance, he brings the uncorrupted gaze to bear on the Old Testament narrative. This is done under the rubric “Tuning Up,” where Johannes de silentio recounts the following: “Once there was a man who as a child had heard the beautiful story of how God tempted Abraham and of how Abraham withstood the temptation, kept his faith, and, contrary to expectation, received a son for the second time…. The older he became, the more often his thoughts turned to that story; his enthusiasm for it became greater and greater, and yet he was less and less able to understand the story. Finally, the story caused him to forget everything else; his soul had but a single wish, to see Abraham, but one longing, to have witnessed that event…. His desire was to follow along on the three-day journey when Abraham rode with sorrow ahead of him and Isaac beside him. His wish was to be present at the moment when Abraham lifted up his eyes to see Mount Moriah in the distance, at the moment when he had the donkeys remain where they were and went up the mountain alone with Isaac. Because what concerned him was not the artistic fabric of the imagination, but the shudder of the thought.”

Having established this uncorrupted gaze, which is the gaze with which the reader ideally ought to read, the reader is presented with four different versions of the Old Testament story. Thanks to this re-narration (and co-narration) of the biblical tale—an art at which Kierkegaard (verbosely disguised as Johannes de silentio) is a veritable virtuoso—the story is endowed with a modern, existential emotional intensity, and with its adroit rhetoric it vaults well above the hidebound official translation of the Danish Bible from 1740.

“It was early morning”: This is the fine, rhythmic opening of each of the four versions, all of which consist of an “a” section and a “b” section. Each “a” section treats Abraham and Isaac, while the “b” section depicts how a mother blackens her breast in order to wean her child. Even though the “b” section is clearly separated from the “a” section typographically, the two sections are connected not only in style and tone, but also thematically, because each of the four “a” sections, along with its accompanying “b” section (as well as all four pairs viewed successively) describes a movement from a successful deception to an unsuccessful deception.

Of the four versions, the first and longest is derived from a journal entry from late March or early April 1843 titled “Plan,” in which Kierkegaard meditated on “Abraham’s conduct,” calling it “genuinely poetic, magnanimous, more magnanimous than everything I have read about in tragedies.” Then, with the same stroke of the pen, Kierkegaard searches for “the contemporary poet who senses such collisions.” After this search he produced a sketch of the missing person, and a rhetorically reworked version of this sketch ended up as the first of the four retellings of the Old Testament story. If we compare the published version with the sketch, it is immediately obvious that Abraham’s inhuman brutality had originally been depicted in much more elaborate fashion; it was as though a terrifying episode, an appalling primal scene, had broken through the armor of repression and been granted its freedom. On this page of the present volume, where the text is divided into two columns, the final form of the first retelling of the Old Testament tale is in the left-hand column, while the sketch is reproduced in the right-hand column: “It was early morning. Abraham arose early. He had the donkeys saddled, left his tents, and Isaac was with him, but Sarah watched them from the window as they went down the valley until she saw them no more. They rode in silence for three days. On the morning of the fourth day Abraham said not a word, but lifted up his eyes and saw Mount Moriah in the distance. He left the servant boys behind and went alone up the mountain, taking Isaac by the hand. But Abraham said to himself, ‘I will not conceal from Isaac where this path is leading him.’ He stood still, placed his hand upon Isaac’s head in blessing, and Isaac bowed down in order to receive it. And Abraham’s countenance was fatherly, his gaze was gentle, his speech admonitory. But Isaac could not understand him. His soul could not be lifted up. He clasped Abraham’s knees. He pleaded at his feet, he begged for his young life, for his sanguine hopes. He called to mind the joy in Abraham’s house, he called to mind the sorrow and the loneliness. Then Abraham lifted the boy up, walked hand in hand with him, and his words were full of consolation and exhortation. But Isaac could not understand him. He climbed Mount Moriah, but Isaac did not understand him. Then Abraham turned away from him for a moment,

but when Isaac looked upon Abraham's countenance the second time, it was trans-formed. His gaze was wild. His very form was terror. He seized Isaac by the breast, threw him to the ground, and said: 'Stupid boy, do you think am your father? am an idolater. Do you think this is God's command? No, it is my desire.

and when he again turned to him, he was unrecognizable to Isaac. His eyes were wild. His countenance was chilling. The venerable locks of his hair bristled like furies above his head. He seized Isaac by the breast. He drew the knife. He said: 'You thought it was for the sake of God that was going to do this? You were wrong. am an idolater. This desire has again awakened in my soul. want to murder you. It is my desire. am worse than any cannibal. Despair, you foolish boy, who imagined that was your father. am your murderer, and this is my desire.'

Then Isaac trembled and cried out in his anguish: ‘God in heaven, have mercy upon me. God of Abraham, have mercy upon me. If I have no father upon earth, then be Thou my father!’ But Abraham said softly to himself, ‘Lord in heaven, I thank Thee. It is better, after all, that he believe that I am a monster than that he should lose faith in Thee.’”

What is significant is the repetition of Isaac’s failure to understand the situation, which is reflected in the multitude of optical metaphors, in the frequent mention of the eye. This empties the scene of words, as it were, and fills it with silence. We do learn that Abraham speaks, but we do not learn what he says—the text is like a screen or a scrim with pictures and no sound—and if we cannot hear Abraham it is because what he might have to say would not make sense. In a sense Abraham does not speak at all: “If I cannot make myself understood when I speak, then I am not speaking.”

The story has thus been transformed into a dark and demonic parable, but we are simultaneously led, line by line, into a biographical rebus containing signs with deep, symbolic meaning. Thus, in the margin of his first sketch, Kierkegaard added: “One could also portray Abraham’s previous life as a life not devoid of guilt, and then let him ruminate quietly upon the thought that this was God’s punishment, perhaps even let him have the melancholic thought that he must assist God by making the punishment as severe as possible.” The sketch of this character borrows easily recognizable traits from the hosier named Kierkegaard, whose guilt-infested past not only made him subject to the soul-searching chastisements of melancholia but also, by transforming him into a demonic “monster,” directed his child’s gaze upward, to another—heavenly—father.

This (so to speak) pious fraud is carried further in the first “b” section: “When the child is to be weaned, the mother blackens her breast. It would of course be a shame for the breast to look so inviting when the child must not have it. So the child believes that the breast has changed. But the mother is the same, her gaze is as loving and tender as ever. Lucky the person who has not had need of more terrible means to wean the child!” Among others, Georg Brandes has argued that Abraham was not only Kierkegaard’s father, who offered his son as a sacrifice, but Abraham was also Kierkegaard himself, who sacrificed Regine. But the allegorical elements are far more elegant than that: The “b” sections in fact discuss Kierkegaard’s relationship with Regine by employing portraits of a mother who must wean a child and who, under the best of circumstances, does not have to resort to methods as powerful as those Kierkegaard himself was compelled to employ when he had to repel Regine. To deflect the biographer’s gaze from his text, Kierkegaard has subjected himself to a grammatical sex change operation and made himself into a nursing mother who, precisely because she cares for her child, blackens her breast and withdraws her love.

In the second version, the tempo of the situation is sharply reduced, and everything takes place in a sort of slow motion. Abraham performs his actions with mechanical resignation. He binds Isaac, draws the knife, but then sees the ram, which he sacrifices in Isaac’s stead: “From that day forth, Abraham was old. He could not forget that God had required this of him. Isaac continued to grow and prosper, but Abraham’s eye was darkened and he saw joy no more.”

In the third version, the field of vision is filled with an Abraham who rides alone out to Mount Moriah, more and more disturbed and amazed at the fact that he had once been “willing to sacrifice to God the best he possessed.” When he reaches the foot of the mountain he prostrates himself on the ground and asks God to forgive him, Abraham, for having forgotten his duty to his son, “for what sin could be more terrible?”

In the fourth and final version, the focus shifts decisively from Abraham to Isaac. The old man and the boy have reached the mountain, and the situation is almost idyllic: “Abraham made everything ready for the sacrifice, calmly and gently, but as he turned aside and drew the knife, Isaac saw that Abraham’s left hand was clenched in despair and that a shudder went through his body.—But Abraham drew the knife.

“Then they returned home again, and Sarah hurried out to meet them, but Isaac had lost the faith. Not a word is mentioned about this in the world. Isaac never told anyone what he had seen, and Abraham never suspected that anyone had seen it.”

Whereas in the first version Abraham pretends to be cruel so that Isaac could seek refuge with his heavenly father, in the fourth version he reveals himself inadvertently. Isaac sees what he was never to have seen: Abraham’s left hand is clenched in despair and a shudder goes through his body. Even though Isaac’s gaze only catches sight of a hurried grimace, it obtains fateful intelligence about Abraham’s weakness and doubt. Under the reader’s gaze, fear and trembling, the two words in the book’s title, are simultaneously sent off in different directions but are soon reunited, enriching each other: Trembling is not just another word for fear; trembling is a physical action or an external manifestation through which fear, an inner, psychological phenomenon, becomes outwardly visible. There is very little phonetic or phenomenological distance from “trembling” [Danish: Bæven] to the “shudder” [Danish: Skjælven] that goes through Abraham’s body right before the terrified Isaac’s eyes. Trembling is the very act of the emotion becoming visible, it is inwardness giving itself away, and when Isaac loses the faith it is because in Abraham’s trembling he is suddenly able to suspect that not even Abraham, the father of faith, possesses faith unconditionally: “And where could I seek shelter,” Kierkegaard had written in his retracted text, “when I knew or suspected that the only man I had admired for his strength and power wavered?”

Abraham and the Knife: Agnete and Farinelli

If the “a” sections are about an assault on a child, the “b” sections are about the significance of that assault to the child when he becomes an adult: the inability to give oneself to another. The frightful consequences of this are developed toward the conclusion of Fear and Trembling, where Johannes de silentio retells the legend of Agnete and the Merman. “I have considered,” Kierkegaard wrote in an undated journal entry from 1843, “examining an aspect of Agnete and the Merman that has probably not occurred to any poet. The Merman is a seducer, but after he has won Agnete’s love he is so moved that he wants to belong to her entirely. But, alas, he cannot do so because then he would have to initiate her into the whole of his painful existence, of how he becomes a monster at certain times, et cetera. The church cannot give them its blessing. Then he despairs and in his despair dives to the bottom of the sea and remains there, but he leads Agnete to believe that he had only wanted to deceive her. That is poetry, not that wretched, pitiable nonsense in which everything revolves around ridiculous stuff and tomfoolery. This is the sort of knot that can only be untied by means of the religious (hence its name, because it unties all spells) [‘religion’ is related to Latin religare, ‘to bind’]. If the Merman could have faith, then his faith might perhaps transform him into a human being.”

Once again, both in its themes and in its terminology, the poetic sketch about Agnete appears to be rather intimately associated with the retracted text about Regine, whom Kierkegaard, like the Merman, was unable to “initiate” into frightful things; this was something Kierkegaard attempted more and more emphatically to make clear to her during the period of their engagement—when, in fact, the legend of Agnete and the Merman came up quite frequently.

The person Kierkegaard’s journal entry accuses of having turned the legend into wretched, pitiable nonsense was most likely Hans Christian Andersen, because Andersen’s Agnete and the Merman had been performed at the Royal Theater on April 20 and May 2, 1843. The piece, by then almost ten years old, was a flop.

In his new version of the legend, Johannes de silentio frees himself from every trace of saccharinity and chooses instead to emphasize the Merman’s demonic qualities. This is accomplished by means of an entire series of variations, of which one, several, or perhaps all, explain why things went—or, rather, why they didn’t go—as they did between the two characters. First Johannes de silentio provides a sketch of the traditional treatment of the legend: “The Merman is a seducer who emerges from the concealment of the deep. In his ferocious desire he grasps and shatters the innocent flower that had stood by the shore in all its loveliness, thoughtfully bowing its head toward the sighing of the sea. This has been the view of poets in the past. Let us transform it. The Merman was a seducer. He has called out to Agnete. With his smooth talk he has coaxed forth what had been concealed within her. In the Merman she has found what she had sought, what she had looked for down on the bottom of the sea. Agnete is willing to go with him. The Merman seats her upon his arm. Agnete twines herself about his neck. She gives herself trustingly and wholeheartedly to the stronger one. He is already standing on the shore. He crouches to dive down into the sea with his prey.—Then Agnete looks at him yet again, not fearfully, not doubtfully, not gloating over her happiness, not intoxicated with desire, but in absolute trust, in absolute humility, like the humble flower she believed herself to be. With this gaze [Danish: Blik] she entrusts the whole of her fate to him in absolute confidence.—And look! The sea no longer surges; its wild voice falls silent. The passion of the natural world, which constitutes the Merman’s strength, abandons him; it becomes as still as glass [Danish: Blikstille].—And Agnete continues to look at him in this manner. Then the Merman collapses. He cannot resist the power of innocence; his element has failed him. He cannot seduce Agnete. He takes her home again; he explains to her that he had only wanted to show her how beautiful the sea is when it is calm. And Agnete believes him.—Then he returns alone, and the ocean rages. But the despair within the Merman rages even more fiercely. He can seduce Agnete, he can seduce a hundred Agnetes; he can charm every girl.—But Agnete has won, and the Merman has lost her. Only as prey can she belong to him.”

As Abraham’s deception was revealed by the shuddering of his body, here nature votes against the Merman’s plan. He cannot resist loving devotion; he cannot bear it when Agnete greets his shady intentions with unreserved confidence. The descriptive terms—“absolute trust,” “absolute humility,” and “absolute confidence”—are extraordinary, and they can scarcely have occurred to Johannes de silentio by mere coincidence: Agnete has the trust, the humility, and the confidence that Abraham lacked, and this was something his son—to his terror and to his damnation—was able to see. And Johannes de silentio not only chooses his descriptions carefully, he also understands how to employ taste and discretion in the placement of the dash—which in the first three instances is directed toward the gaze, toward vision, the eye. Agnete says nothing at all, she only sees, just like Isaac. But with this gaze (which makes the world “as still as glass”) she gives herself so entirely to the Merman that he collapses in impotence and cannot seduce her. He must therefore pretend that he had only wanted to show her the sea—“and Agnete believes him.”

In his journals Kierkegaard almost without exception has Regine enter into history entirely without words, silent. She is recalled as having been in a situation or is recollected in an interior scene, in which she is observed and commented upon. But in these scenes and situations she herself is capable of suddenly turning toward Kierkegaard and, the next instant, of seeing through him, almost directly into the reader. During his first stay in Berlin, Kierkegaard wrote in his journal: “And when she stood there, clad in her finery—then I had to leave. When her delighted, lively gaze met mine—then I had to leave.—Then I went out and wept bitterly.” The choice of words is quite extreme, because it was Peter who “wept bitterly” after having denied Christ three times. Like some sort of Merman, Kierkegaard made the following note during a subsequent stay in Berlin: “Sometimes it occurs to me that when I return, she will perhaps have decided with certainty that I was a deceiver. Suppose she had the power to crush me with her gaze (and that is something outraged innocence can do)—I shudder to think of it, it is dreadful to me—not the suffering, I would be quite willing to suffer if I knew it was for her benefit, but the frightful toying with life implied in this, in being able to do whatever one wishes with a person.” Regine’s devoted gaze caused pain because it reminded Kierkegaard of the natural immediacy he himself had lost. In her gaze he saw himself as he once had been when he had been someone else, a person from whom he was now eternally separated. And with this he was painfully reminded of his father, because it was he who had cut him off from natural immediacy.

In Fear and Trembling, the symbol of such cutting is the knife that Johannes de silentio has Abraham employ with such sinister choreographic precision. Apart from the first version, which sketches a successful deception, the knife figures in the three subsequent versions as something more than a mere stage prop. The choreographic employment of the knife is even reflected at the level of typography, where dashes and paragraph changes help to produce pauses and voids that raise doubts about what Abraham has been doing with his knife before he catches sight of the ram. The uncertainty about this matter begins to make itself felt in the second version, where a semicolon immediately after “the knife” indicates a breath being held. But the ambiguity breaks forth in earnest in the third version, where the words “He climbed Mount Moriah, he drew the knife” are followed by the indention for a new paragraph. Only the reader, in his or her private reflections, knows what else takes place in the narrow strip of blank space between the lines. Finally, in the fourth version, the sketch of the unsuccessful deception, Abraham carries out his task with a sort of defiance: “But Abraham drew the knife.” And it should be noted that he drew the knife before the text managed to supply him with a ram. If we count the number of times the various words occur, the biographical shudder is no less disturbing: In the four versions there appear, in all, four knives—versus only one ram!

Do we now have a better understanding of why, in his note to Boesen, Kierkegaard signed himself as the castrato Farinelli?

“A Crevice through Which the Infinite Peeped Out”

There is a biographical layer immediately beneath the artistic treatment of the material. The impetus behind the new version is the traumatic experience, the unbearable pain, that art can assuage but never completely banish.

But even though it might take a certain will to abstraction in order to ignore the obvious and not read Kierkegaard biographically, works such as Repetition and Fear and Trembling naturally treat something other—and greater—than Kierkegaard himself. The two works raise implicit and explicit questions about the status of the Old Testament texts in the modern era, questions about the degree to which they remain usable, and for Kierkegaard these questions take the form of a reflection about whether these texts are susceptible of repetition. If the texts belong to a bygone era, then for the present age they are only museum artifacts that therefore ought properly be kept at arm’s length. Or, on the contrary, do these texts reveal depths, fundamental existential situations and eternal conflicts, that time consequently cannot render obsolete?

In a way, the answer is already given in Johannes de silentio’s modern representation of the Old Testament figures and legendary characters, but this same Johannes de silentio also likes to resort to more tangible examples. Thus there is the famous and notorious poetic production of someone people call the tax collector, a sort of idealized version of the “knight of faith” as he might appear during his comings and goings in Kierkegaard’s Copenhagen. Like Abraham, the tax collector has made the double movement of faith, that is, he has definitively surrendered everything (as Abraham surrendered Isaac) while at the same time, by virtue of faith as the final, absurd possibility, he has received everything back again (as Abraham received Isaac back again through the obedience of faith). “Here he is,” Johannes de silentio writes, “the acquaintance is made, I am introduced to him. From the very moment I lay eyes on him, I immediately thrust him away and I myself jump back, clasp my hands together, and say sotto voce: ‘Good Lord! Is this the man, is this really the one, for he looks just like a tax collector.’ It is indeed he, however. I draw a bit closer to him, watching for the slightest movement that might reveal a little incongruous bit of telegraphy from infinity, a gaze, an air, a gesture, a sadness, a smile, that would betray the infinite in its heterogeneity with the finite. No! I scrutinize his figure from head to toe to see if there might not be a crevice through which the infinite peeped out. No! He is solid through and through.”

Like a shadow that cannot be shaken off, Johannes de silentio pursues his tax collector up one street and down the next, up one page and down the next, in order to find the little “crevice,” through which the infinite might peep, but in vain. Instead he becomes the astonished witness to how the tax collector goes on walks in the woods and goes to church with equal ease and naturalness, assuming with no apparent difficulty whatever role the situation requires. And toward evening the tax collector gets the idea—as if in parody of Abraham’s sacrifice, the ram, which was the miraculous deliverance in the biblical story—that his “wife will surely have a special little hot meal for him when he comes home, for example, roast head of lamb with vegetables.”

Not surprisingly Johannes de silentio has some difficulty reconciling himself to the fact that the tax collector is a knight of faith and not merely the sleek bourgeois his inane behavior seems to indicate, but of course this ambiguity is precisely the point: The tax collector is proof that there is an “inwardness that is incommensurable with the outer.” Thus it is not so much despite his exterior as by virtue of it that the tax collector is a knight of faith. Johannes de silentio elucidates the dialectic: “He is continually making the movement of infinity, but he does so with such accuracy and deftness that he always expresses finitude, and not for a second does one sense anything else.”

In the fourth version, however, this was exactly what Isaac did: He sensed something else—he sensed fear in Abraham’s trembling. Johannes de silentio keeps a watchful eye for similar clues in the figures he experimentally conjures up in his text. And since he is a persistent fellow who does a thorough job, he observes them as though they were stage actors whose every movement and gesture indicate degrees on a scale of inwardness he can read from his seat in a private theater box, where he also observes the “double movement” of faith, appreciating it as pure, objective inwardness. For example, he informs us that “the knights of infinite resignation” can be identified by their step, which is “light and daring.” This is also true to some extent with respect to the “knights of infinity,” because they have “elevation.” Though their upward leaps are splendid, when they come back to earth again they are incapable of immediately assuming the proper position. They hesitate for a brief instant, and in so doing they reveal themselves: “One does not need to see them in the air. One need only see them at the instant they touch and have touched the earth—and one recognizes them.” The ability to leap into a particular position in such a manner that “in the leap itself ” one assumes “the position” is reserved solely for the knight of faith, whose inwardness can be detected “when one consults the scale.” Johannes de silentio concludes by remarking: “Lucky the person who can make these movements. He performs a marvel, and I will never tire of admiring him. Whether it be Abraham or the servant in Abraham’s house, whether it be a professor of philosophy or a poor serving maid is a matter of complete indifference to me, I look only at the movements. But I do indeed look at them, and I do not let myself be fooled, either by myself or by anyone else.”

Johannes de silentio has no doubts about his own talent. Nonetheless, if he is not occasionally fooled, if he always judges correctly what he has seen, it can only be because inwardness does reflect itself in the character’s outer aspect and is thus not incommensurable with it. If this were indeed so, the tax collector would be lost, because he of course gained inwardly and invisibly what he had lost externally and visibly; so in his case if we had focused exclusively on his “movements” we would have only followed a chance figure on a random walk in Copenhagen. Thus the example of the tax collector makes it clear that it is “by faith that one resembles Abraham, not by murder.”

Things go much worse in the tale of an unnamed person who has been so completely captivated by the story of Abraham that he has been unable to close an eye, but has become sleepless. It began quietly enough. One Sunday in church he heard the Old Testament story and then went home and “wanted to do just as Abraham had done.” No sooner had he made his decision than he was paid a visit by the pastor, who cannot exactly be said to have given the plan his blessing: “Abominable man, scum of society, what Devil has possessed you thus, that you wish to murder your son?” To this the sleepless man answered simply: “It was only what you yourself preached about last Sunday.” The story is quite brief, and Johannes de silentio then offers his commentary on this peculiar episode: “The comic and the tragic here contact each other in absolute infinity. In itself the pastor’s speech was perhaps ridiculous enough, but it became infinitely ridiculous in its effect, and yet this was quite natural.”

The little concluding clause is alarming, for it says, after all, that despite everything the sleepless man’s behavior was “quite natural.” And why? Because unlike what the dimwitted pastor assumes, the sleepless man is not possessed by the Devil, he is possessed by the story, which he therefore quite naturally wishes to repeat. In this repetition he bears a certain similarity to the tax collector, but the difference between them can literally be seen: For what the tax collector repeats in his “interior,” the sleepless man has a notion to repeat in the “exterior”—which the pastor thus managed to prevent, but had he not arrived in time, the catastrophe would have taken place and the son would have been slaughtered. Ten pages later Johannes de silentio reenacts the scenario on his textual stage: A pastor has told the story of Abraham, but has done so in such a boring manner that the entire congregation has fallen asleep, with the exception of that single individual who “suffered from sleeplessness.” After church services he strolled home to reflect further upon the matter, but as time passed and the idea began to take hold, the pastor stepped forward, exclaiming, “Wretch, to let your soul sink into such foolishness; no miracle will take place.” To this the sleepless man once again replied with subtle simplicity, “It was only what you preached about last Sunday.”

The pastor is here portrayed quite mercilessly as a hypocrite who condemns what he himself has set in motion. “How does one explain a contradiction like this speaker’s?” Johannes de silentio asks. “Is it because Abraham has acquired a time-honored, customary right to be regarded as a great man, so that whatever he does is great, and when someone else does the same thing it is a sin, a sin that cries out to heaven? In that case I do not wish to participate in such thoughtless praise. If faith cannot make being willing to murder one’s son into a holy act, then let Abraham be subject to the same judgment as everyone else.” In saying this, Johannes de silentio has sided with the sleepless man, and he cannot keep himself from writing a short postscript: “Presumably [he] was then executed or sent to the madhouse. In short, he became unhappy in relation to so-called reality; I do think, though, that in another sense Abraham made him happy.” Once again, the concluding phrase is startling. The sleepless man ends up either on the scaffold or in a mental institution. And yet Abraham makes him happy. Why? Because the truth is always on the side of the insane? Because the truth is never situated in the middle? Perhaps. But presumably also because the story had given the sleepless man a narrative identity that released him from the confines of the pallid bourgeois notion of fate. And Johannes de silentio ends by saying, “If Abraham is not a nobody, a phantom, a glamorous diversion, then the error can never be that the sinner wants to do likewise.”

It is no accident that Johannes de silentio sympathizes with the sleepless man, because sleeplessness is not only the appropriate reaction to the religious terror of the story—sleeplessness also emphasizes that it is to the eye that the tale directs its message: “For the person who has once been exposed to these images can never be free of them again.”

Freedom from these images—images that perhaps resemble those Johannes de silentio produced in his four versions of Abraham—will never come to the sleepless man. And this is precisely the source of his sleeplessness, which is why Johannes de silentio also concludes by taking the sleepless man’s side in asking the following rhetorical question: “There were countless generations that knew every word of the Abraham story by heart, but how many did it make sleepless?”

In Fear and Trembling, Johannes de silentio does not succeed in elucidating the relation between inwardness itself and its external symptoms. Nor did Kierkegaard possess the final answer. While in Berlin, between May 10 and May 17, 1843—thus quite close to when he wrote the retracted text about Regine—he reflected on this problem in the form it would assume if its main character were no longer a figure from the Old Testament, but the principal person in the New Testament: “The absolute paradox would be if the Son of God became man, came to the world, went around in such a manner that absolutely no one recognized him; if he became an individual human being in the strictest sense of the word, a person who had a trade, got married, et cetera…. In that case God would not have been God and Father of mankind, but the greatest ironist…. The divine paradox is that he becomes noticed, if in no other fashion, then by being crucified, by performing miracles, etc., which means that he is recognizable, after all, by his divine authority, even if faith is required in order to solve its [divine authority’s] paradox.”

These lines contain the quintessence of the problem treated in Philosophical Fragments, where the question of God’s making himself known, and the related issue of faith’s knowledge of itself (“the autopsy of faith”), will absorb an enormous amount of the pseudonymous Johannes Climacus’s attention. Neither this second Johannes nor Johannes de silentio can completely subdue the desire to draw conclusions from the external with respect to the internal—which could indicate that their author suffered from a predilection for this sort of thing and that thus, when all was said and done, he could not bring himself to leave inwardness in its sanctum, undisturbed. But that is another story. Or, rather, it is the story we are—also—in the process of following: As time passed, from having been the implacable defender of inwardness, Kierkegaard became its no less implacable prosecutor. This is why his writings can be read retrospectively as an elaborate history of the abolition of inwardness, an abolition that in work after work pushes its behind-the-scenes manager, the actual author Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, forward into the front lines, so that by the end no one would have any doubt about who was doing the talking.

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