Kierkegaard often wrote using pseudonyms. Either/Or engages quite a cast of pseudonymic characters. The introduction, by one Victor Eremita, claims to have found all the essays as loose papers in an old desk. Eremita labels the writers A and B. One piece, "The Diary of the Seducer," is written by someone calling himself Johannes. A claims to have found it himself in another old desk. (Or perhaps he just doesn't want to take responsibility for it.) B, then, may or may not turn out to be Judge William, an older and wiser character whose essays appear in letter-like form to the younger acquaintance A.
A writes glowingly of the quest for the beautiful. He is part and parcel of nineteenth-century European romanticism, which admires beauty, nature, hopeless love, noble savages and mad geniuses. Kierkegaard writes some fascinating and funny contradictions into this character. "The Immediate Erotic Stages of the Musical-Erotic," a celebration of Mozart's opera Don Giovanni, begins by extolling what a superior piece of music it is. Indeed, Don Giovanni is now the yardstick by which all other operas must be judged. A goes on for some time describing the way Mozart creates musical form and language that perfectly coincides with the content, and so on. But midway through it becomes clear that the main reason A admires the opera is the character Don Juan: his "passionate genius," his potency (of course), and most of all, his quest for womanly beauty in general, with no one particular woman being any more important to him than any other.
"Diapsalmata," the essay with which A's section opens, presents a number of scattered thoughts from the silly to the sad, along the lines of Pascal's Pensées but not as deep. He aspires to write brilliant poetry with "a voice as penetrating as the gaze of Lynceus, as frightening as the sigh of the giants, as enduring as a sound of nature..." (16) He extols a life of pleasure with the marvelous line "And now the innocent pleasures of life. We must recognize that they have one fault: that they are so innocent." (17) Yet A acknowledges that a life of superficial pleasure, even the highly developed pleasures of the arts, is by itself meaningless.
My life is completely meaningless. When I consider its various epochs, then my life goes like the word Schnur in the dictionary, which means first a string, and secondly a daughter-in-law. The only thing missing is that the word Schnur in the third place should mean a camel, and fourthly, a dust brush. (23)
Although this acknowledgment comes right up front, right at the beginning of A's section, it changes nothing about his approach to life. He distracts himself from his despair with more of the same lively, pretty pursuits.
"Diary of the Seducer" may be my favorite piece of unreliable-narrator literature so far. The memoirist Johannes (maybe A, maybe not) presents himself as part Don Juan and part Romantic poet/thinker. He has no doubt in his ability to seduce the girl Cordelia, even to control her feelings and behavior from their first meeting. His reasons go beyond simple lust, though--he yearns for the beautiful and "the interesting." He wants to excite Cordelia's imagination and make her grow intellectually and personally. He wants to play out the drama of seduction slowly, over many months, so that the drama itself may be as beautiful as possible. He describes everything in the most Romantic, Idealist terms possible. Yet as in the best unreliable-narrator work, there are constant hints that Cordelia isn't on the same page as Johannes. At first it is because we can guess she just isn't that into him:
Gradually I am beginning to move closer to her in my attack; to pass over into a more direct attack. If I were to describe this change on my military map of the family, then I would say that I have turned my chair so that I now turn my side to her. I have more to do with her, speak to her, draw out her answer. ... She would really like to drive the sun chariot across the arch of the heavens, to come too near to earth and singe people a bit. However, she does not place her trust in me; up to now I have prevented every approach, even in an intellectual aspect. (110)
Later, as Johannes succeeds in becoming engaged to Cordelia, sleeping with her, then breaking the engagement and dropping her, it's clear that she is never in on his private thoughts. She is not actually involved in the creation of the beautiful drama between Johannes' ears; she's a prop. (The breaking off of the relationship, of course, creates a beautifully painful situation artistically; it is also a convenient choice for someone who did not intend an actual meeting of hearts, despite his talk of Beautiful Souls and whatnot.)
Now in my relation to Cordelia have I been constantly faithful in my pact? That is to say, my pact with the aesthetic, for it is that which makes me strong, that I constantly have the idea on my side. ...
Why can't such a night be longer? If Alectryon could forget himself, why can't the sun be equally compassionate? But now it is over, and I never want to see her again. ... I shall not say farewell to her; nothing is more repulsive to me than women's tears and women's prayers, which change everything and yet really mean nothing. I have loved her, but from now on she can no longer concern my soul. (131, 134)
It makes us wonder who the performance is for. If no one knows his thoughts, how can the beautiful drama have an audience of more than one? Or did he create the whole thing for the sake of writing about it in his diary? (in which case, does it matter whether it actually happened?)
By the way, there are many scholars far more accomplished than I who believe A's section of Either/Or is thinly veiled autobiography about Kierkegaard's own failed relationship with a woman named Regine. Although encountering this book for the first time, I'd like to give Kierkegaard's imagination a little more credit than that--in part because the two essays about romance, "First Love" and "Diary of the Seducer" are so different.
The same scholars also see the whole of Either/Or as a response to Hegel: Hegel's notion of synthesis forecloses the possibility of making a dramatic choice away from one center of life and toward another, even when such a choice is profoundly necessary in order to escape paralysis and unreality. I wouldn't dispute that, but I do think Either/Or stands on its own quite magnificently; there is much value in the book even if it isn't read as being all about Hegel.
B's section, and an analysis of the contrasts between them, coming in part 2.
0 comments:
Post a Comment