Kierkegaard, Literature, and the Arts Engraving, ca. 1837, by Carl Strahlheim showing the Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin, with what was then the Schauspielhaus, or Theater ( center )—now the concert house of the Konzerthausorchester Berlin—flanked by the German Cathedral ( left ) and the French Cathedral ( right ). Pictured in the background to the immediate right of the theater is the building, still standing today, in which Kierkegaard lodged during his four stays in Berlin, in 1841– 42, 1843, 1845, and 1846. It was there, as noted by a plaque outside, that Kierkegaard wrote the first drafts of Either/Or , Repetition , and Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard, Literature, and the Arts Edited by Eric Ziolkowski northwestern university press evanston, illinois Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2018 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2018. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ziolkowski, Eric Jozef, 1958– editor. Title: Kierkegaard, literature, and the arts / edited by Eric Ziolkowski. Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2018. | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017029795 | ISBN 9780810135970 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810135963 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810135987 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813–1855. | Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813– 1855—Aesthetics. | Literature—Philosophy. | Music and philosophy. | Art and philosophy. | Performing arts—Philosophy. Classification: LCC B4377 .K4558 2018 | DDC 198.9—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017029795 Except where otherwise noted, this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. In all cases attribution should include the following information: Ziolkowski, Eric. Kierkegaard, Literature, and the Arts . Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018. The following material is excluded from the license: Illustrations and any previously published versions of chapters For permissions beyond the scope of this license, visit http://www.nupress .northwestern.edu/. An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. More information about the initiative and links to the open-access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. Contents List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations xi Introduction 3 Eric Ziolkowski Part I. Literature The Bonfire of the Genres: Kierkegaard’s Literary Kaleidoscope 39 George Pattison Kierkegaard’s Disruptions of Literature and Philosophy: Freedom, Anxiety, and Existential Contributions 55 Edward F. Mooney Kierkegaard’s Existential Play: Storytelling and the Development of the Religious Imagination in the Authorship 71 Marcia C. Robinson Kierkegaard’s Christian Bildungsroman 85 Joakim Garff Part II. Performing Arts Beyond the Mask: Kierkegaard’s Postscript as Antitheatrical, Anti-Hegelian Drama 99 Howard Pickett A Theater of Ideas: Performance and Performativity in Kierkegaard’s Repetition 115 Martijn Boven Kierkegaard’s Notions of Drama and Opera: Molière’s Don Juan , Mozart’s Don Giovanni , and the Question of Music and Sensuousness 131 Nils Holger Petersen “Let No One Invite Me, for I Do Not Dance”: Kierkegaard’s Attitudes toward Dance 149 Anne Margrete Fiskvik Part III. Visual Arts and Film Painting with Words: Kierkegaard and the Aesthetics of the Icon 177 Christopher B. Barnett Kierkegaard’s Approach to Pictorial Art, and to Specimens of Contemporary Visual Culture 193 Ragni Linnet Kierkegaard’s Concept of Inherited Sin: A Cinematic Illustration 223 Ronald M. Green Part IV. Comparisons The Moravian Origins of Kierkegaard’s and Blake’s Socratic Literature 239 James Rovira Don Giovanni and Moses and Aaron : The Possibility of a Kierkegaardian Affirmation of Music 261 Peder Jothen Kierkegaard, Dylan, and Masked and Anonymous Neighbor-Love 281 Jamie A. Lorentzen Contributors 301 Index 303 vii Illustrations Carl Strahlheim, Ansicht des Gensd’armen- Marktes mit dem Schauspielhaus , 1837 frontispiece Figure 1. Tightrope dancing with balancing prop from Trondheim, 1751 161 Figure 2. Ferdinand Piloty, Romeo and Juliet’s Farewell Kiss , 1875 202 Figure 3. A. C. T. Neubourg, Portrait of Bertel Thorvaldsen , 1844 205 Figures 4 and 5. Theseus and Ariadne , 1760 208 Figure 6. J. Th. Lundbye, Søbyvang , 1841 209 Figure 7. Copy of Raphael, The Entombment , 1507 212 Figure 8. Napoleon Haunting His Grave , ca. 1820 215 Figure 9. Raphael, The Sistine Madonna , 1513–14 216 Figure 10. Owlglass , 1515 218 ix Acknowledgments A number of people deserve my heartfelt thanks for having helped to make possible this volume, which draws together essays by fourteen authors from five different countries. Andrew Burgess and Sylvia Walsh, former co-chairs of the Kierkegaard, Religion, and Culture Group of the American Academy of Religion, encouraged this project from the outset, and they facilitated my initial contact with several authors from whom I solicited revised versions of papers originally presented on panels sponsored by that AAR Group. At every stage of its consideration, review, and production at Northwestern University Press, the volume has benefited from the expertise, meticulousness, and generosity of the individuals involved there: Henry Lowell Carrigan Jr., Maggie Grossman, Liz Hamilton, Marianne Jankowski, Nathan MacBrien, Gianna Francesca Mosser, and J. D. Wilson. The published volume is also stronger as a result of the helpful comments and suggestions made by the anonymous reviewers of its manuscript. Malene Anthon and Ingrid Langhoff of the Ordrupgaard Collection in Copenhagen are to be thanked for granting the permission for, and provid- ing the digitized reproduction of, Johan Thomas Lundbye’s 1841 landscape Søbyvang , which Marianne Jankowski has incorporated so handsomely into this volume’s cover layout. Here at my own institution, Lafayette College, I remain always thank- ful for the dedication and efficiency of both Laura McKee, secretary of the Department of Religious Studies, and the entire staff of the David Bishop Skillman Library. To Lee Upton, my gratitude is in perpetual and ceaseless competition with my boundless admiration for her. xi Abbreviations A Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art . 2 vols. Trans. T. M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon, 1975. ASKB Auktionsprotokol over Søren Kierkegaards Bogsamling ( The Auc- tioneer’s Sales Record of the Library of Søren Kierkegaard ). Ed. H. P. Rohde. Copenhagen: Royal Library, 1967. Citations by list- numbers: e.g., ASKB 3567 (= ASKB + volume list number 3567). BA Søren Kierkegaard, The Book on Adler . Ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. BB See SKS. CA Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety . Ed. and trans. Reidar Thomte in collaboration with Albert B. Anderson. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980. CD, CCLA Søren Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses and The Crisis and a Cri- sis in the Life of an Actress [and “Addendum: Phister as Captain Scipio” (“PCS”)]. Ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997. CDP The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters . Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Bollingen Series 71. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961. CI Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony and “Notes on Schelling’s Berlin Lectures.” Ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989. Cor Søren Kierkegaard, The Corsair Affair . Ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982. CUP Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript . 2 vols. Ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992. CWA The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation 2 vols. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Bollingen 71, no. 2. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984. DD See SKS. EO Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or . 2 vols. Ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987. EPW Søren Kierkegaard, Early Polemical Writings . Ed. and trans. Julia Watkin. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990. Contains From the Papers of One Still Living xii Abbreviations EUD Søren Kierkegaard, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses . Ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990. FSE , JFY For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself! Ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990. FT , R Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and Repetition Ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983. GWFHW Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’’s Werke . 18 vols. Ed. Philipp Mar- heineke, Johannes Karl Hartwig Schulze, Eduard Gans, et al. Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1832–45. ASKB 549–65, 1384–86. JFY See FSE. JJ See SKS. JP Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers . 7 vols. Ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, assisted by Gregor Malan- tschuk. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967–78. KBHA Kongelige Bibiliotek, Håndskriftssamlingen KJN Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks . 9 vols. Ed. Niels Jørgen Cap- pelørn, Alastair Hannay, David Kangas, Bruce H. Kirmmse, George Pattison, Vanessa Rumble, and K. Brian Söderquist. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007–. LD Søren Kierkegaard, Letters and Documents . Trans. Henrik Rosen- meier. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978. Each letter is assigned the same number (no.) it appears under in vol. 1 of Breve og Aktstykker vedrørende Søren Kierkegaard . 2 vols. Ed. Niels Thulstrup. Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1953–54. MLW Søren Kierkegaard, “The Moment” and Late Writings . Ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. NB See SKS. Notesbog See SKS. NRSV Bible, New Revised Standard Version P Søren Kierkegaard, Prefaces and Writing Sampler . Ed. and trans. Todd W. Nichol. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997. Pap Søren Kierkegaards Papirer . 16 vols. Ed. P. A. Heiberg, V. Kuhr, and E. Torsting (I–XI). Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1909–48. 2nd., augmented edition, ed. Niels Thulstrup (XII–XIII). Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1968–70. Index, ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn (XIV–XVI). 1975– 78. A Roman numeral indicates the volume ( bind ); a super- script Arabic numeral (following some but not all volume numbers) indicates the volume’s separately bound part ( afdeling ): e.g., XI 1 (= vol. 11, pt. 1), which is bound separately from XI 2 (= vol. 11, pt. 2). Papir See SKS. PC Søren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity . Ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991. “PCS” See CD. Abbreviations xiii PF Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments and Johannes Climacus, or De omnibus dubitandum est . Ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985. PL Patrologiae cursus completus. Series latina. 222 vols. Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1844–55, 1862–64. PV Søren Kierkegaard, On My Work as an Author: The Point of View for My Work as an Author and Armed Neutrality. Ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. R See FT. SK Søren Kierkegaard SKS Søren Kierkegaard, Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter . 28 vols. Ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Jette Knudsen, Johnny Kondrup, Alastair McKinnon, and Finn Hauberg Mortensen. Copenhagen: Gads Forlag, 1997–. BB, DD, JJ = among the titles by which Kierkegaard designated ten of his journals, written 1833–46. Notesbog 1 through 15 = titles by which Kierkegaard designated fifteen notebooks written 1839–49. NB, NB2, NB3, etc., to NB36 = titles by which Kierkegaard des- ignated thirty-six of his journals, written 1839–49. Papir = Loose paper. SKS K Kommentar til Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter . 28 vols. Søren Kierke- gaard Forsskningscenteret. Copenhagen: Gads Forlag, 1997–. SLW Søren Kierkegaard, Stages on Life’s Way: Studies by Various Per- sons . Ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988. SUD Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psycho- logical Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening . Ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980. SV 1 Søren Kierkegaard, Samlede Værker . 14 vols. 1st edition. Ed. A. B. Drachmann, Johan Ludvig Heiberg, and H. O. Lange. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1901–6. TA Søren Kierkegaard, Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Pres- ent Age. A Literary Review . Ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978. TDIO Søren Kierkegaard, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions . Ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. UDVS Søren Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits . Ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. WA Søren Kierkegaard, Without Authority . Ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997. WL Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love . Ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995. Kierkegaard, Literature, and the Arts 3 Introduction Eric Ziolkowski Thirty years ago, the late Nathan A. Scott Jr. observed, “Certainly Western philosophy . . . has only very rarely permitted itself to be fructified by the poetic imagination.” 1 Among modern theologians, he added, Søren Kierke- gaard and John Henry Newman were the sole exceptions in “hav[ing] been influenced in any decisive way by poetic methods and modalities” and in taking literature and the arts “to be fecundating materials for theological reflection,” rather than employing them—as did Paul Tillich, Nikolai Ber- dyaev, and Jacques Maritain— mainly as “cultural barometers of the cultural situation requiring to be addressed by Christian theology.” 2 Today, Scott’s observation may not elicit raised eyebrows. George Pattison, in opening his essay in the present volume, rightly notes that it is “no new discovery” to realize “that Kierkegaard might be read in the perspective of literature and the arts.” On the contrary, this insight was first registered in Kierkegaard’s own time and has found expression off and on to the present day, though it has never held a dominant sway. Generally speaking, with some notable exceptions, the reception of Kierke- gaard over the past century and a half has tended to emphasize the philosophical and theological dimensions of his writings at the expense of the literary and artistic. This is undoubtedly due, at least in part, to his extreme anomalous- ness as an author. As Edward F. Mooney puts it in his own contribution to this volume, Kierkegaard “enacts a kind of disordered, anomalous, hybrid status for himself,” serving as “a literary philosopher (or philosophical littérateur ) and a cultural and existential provocateur ,” an inventor of “countergenres, parabooks, unclassifiable publications.” Confronted with such an anomaly as Kierkegaard, readers have often not known what to make of his and his pseudonyms’ pervasive literary and artistic concerns. This is largely because the sequential progression of the existential stages charted and plumbed in his writings appears to promote a movement from the aesthetic, through the ethical, and into the religious—what Hans Urs von Balthasar termed Kierke- gaard’s “banishment of the aesthetic from the realm of theology.” 3 The present volume focuses on the reverse direction of that movement, that is, backward toward the aesthetic, and to the formal media of expression associated with it, presenting a wide, variegated array of perspectives on Kierkegaard in relation to literature, music, opera, theater, dance, visual art, and film. 4 Eric Ziolkowski Here, an immediate qualification is in order. Despite the concentration of this volume on the relation of Kierkegaard to literature and the arts, he himself cannot be categorized as a poet, novelist, or story writer in any con- ventional sense. Nor was he a practitioner of any of the other arts. For all his and his pseudonyms’ manifest love of music, particularly of Mozart, Kierkegaard played no musical instrument, nor sang, nor does he or any of his pseudonyms, when discussing music, broach the sorts of questions that musicologists and music theorists conventionally treat—that is, concern- ing key, harmony, rhythm, and so forth; indeed, there is no evidence that he could read music. Dance and the visual arts, as the essays by Anne Margrete Fiskvik and Ragni Linnet demonstrate, likewise bear significantly upon Kier- ke gaard’s writings (in ways unappreciated heretofore). Yet he wrote relatively little about dance and visual arts and set forth no theory of them. Moreover, his artistic skill, in Pattison’s words, “seems to have been limited to some rather primitive caricatures in the margins of the journals,” and he never performed ballet. As Fiskvik suggests, despite his personal acquaintance with the ballet master August Bournonville, it would be difficult even to imagine Kierkegaard on the ballroom floor. As for his pervasively literary nature, 4 his self-image as “only a singu- lar kind of poet [ en egen Art Digter ]” ( SKS 12:281 / WA 165) or “hardly anything but a poet [ næsten kun en Digter ]” ( SKS 13:25 / PV 18), and his predilection for the theater, which led him to contemplate “transform[ing] [his personal] struggle into literary works, even present[ing] it on the stage as straight drama” ( SKS 24:193, NB22:164, n.d. 1851 / JP 6:6718), his compul- sion to engage in “creative writing” is undeniable. His journals and papers up through the 1840s record any number of ideas and plans for, and occasion- ally sketches or drafts (none of them completed) of, stories, novels, dramas, and various other literary-artistic writing projects, the most fully developed of which is an Aristophanic burlesque play ( SKS 17:280–97, DD:208, n.d. 1837 / KJN 1:272–89). 5 Consistent with certain hints by the pseudonyms, some of the pseudonymous writings have previously been read as novels, 6 and in the present volume Pattison and Joakim Garff read Either/Or and Prac- tice in Christianity as Bildungsromane; Howard Pickett ascribes a “theatrical form” to the entire pseudonymous corpus, especially Concluding Unscientific Postscript ; and Martijn Boven finds the whole authorship, especially Repeti- tion , functioning as a “theater of ideas.” However, the fact remains, none of Kierkegaard’s published works was written for the stage, and none presents itself as a traditional novel. In the final analysis, if there could ever be such an analysis of Kierkegaard, we would have to agree with Mooney: “Kierke- gaard did not deliver novels or plays or poems, but he easily could have . He had other fish to fry. Something diverts his attention from becoming only a literary figure.” There is another point to acknowledge before examining Kierkegaard in his relation to literature and the arts. Ultimately, those writings, let alone that Introduction 5 relation, cannot be considered in isolation from the life of Kierkegaard, a life that was overtly none too exciting. To be sure, there were his painful break on August 11, 1841, from the single love of his life, Regine Olsen, and then, five years later, his publicly humiliating, yearlong imbroglio with the local tabloid, The Corsair ( Corsaren ), whose cartoonist caricatured him as both a cruel cad and a skinny hunchback, a kind of foppish Quasimodo in a top hat, overcoat, and trousers with uneven legs. 7 Closing out the twilight of his relatively brief life, there was also his fierce, bold attack upon his nation’s established church, homing in on Denmark’s twin ecclesiastical icons at that time, the recently deceased bishop Jakob Peter Mynster and his episcopal suc- cessor, Hans Lassen Martensen. Still today, imposing, larger-than- life busts of these two clerics flank the north side of Copenhagen’s Church of Our Lady (Vor Frue Kirke), statuary centurions on guard, as if to assure their flock of protection against the likes of Kierkegaard. The latter’s own most conspicu- ous memorial, a full-body statue of him seated and writing, is situated blocks away, in the somewhat secluded, innocuously secular, tree-shadowed space of the Royal Library garden. Nonetheless, Kierkegaard’s life seems rather undramatic, unless one per- ceives in it, as Mircea Eliade did (rightly or wrongly), the recurrence of an ancient mythic pattern. The Romanian-born novelist, story writer, and his- torian of religions likened Kierkegaard to, of all people, Achilles, on the grounds that both men were lifelong bachelors. In Eliade’s view, Achilles resisted the happy, fruitful life that had been predicted for him, had he mar- ried, because in that case he would have given up his becoming a hero and his uniqueness and immortality that came with that status: “Kierkegaard passes through exactly the same existential drama with regard to Regina [ sic ] Olsen: he refuses marriage in order to remain himself, ‘the unique,’ to be able to hope for the eternal, by rejecting the modality of a happy existence in the ‘general.’ ” 8 Otherwise, aside from the highly public Corsair debacle and assault on Christendom, Kierkegaard’s life offers little external drama, nor even much physical movement outside the chambers of the successive Copenhagen houses and apartments he inhabited over the years. Aside from his daily walks about the city, his random chats with people on the streets (his “people baths,” as he called them), his theater and concert-going, his occa- sional carriage rides through the nearby countryside, and his five trips abroad (once to Sweden, in 1835, and four times to Berlin, in 1841–42, 1843, 1845, 1846), what confronts us is a most unconventional drama of intensely pri- vate, introspective, and yet obsessively recorded, inscribed, and transcribed existence that revolved around incessant reading, reflecting, and writing. The sheer verbosity of Kierkegaard, a basic and at times perhaps irritating aspect of his work, justifies Garff’s diagnosis of him as a graphomaniac, a sufferer of hypergraphia. 9 This led Johan Ludvig Heiberg to characterize the “two big, thick volumes” constituting Either/Or as “a monster [ Monstrum ] of a book,” 10 introducing several size-related associations— bigness , thickness ,