Volume 12, Tome III: Kierkegaard's Influence on Literature, Criticism and Art: Sweden and Norway (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources) [1 ed.] 9781409465133, 1409465136

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
List of Abbreviations
Part I Sweden
Lars Ahlin: Kierkegaard’s Influence—an Ambiguous Matter
Victoria Benedictsson: A Female Perspective on Ethics
Lars Gyllensten: Inventor of Modern Stages of Life
Selma Lagerlöf: “More clever than wise”
August Strindberg: Along with Kierkegaard in a Dance of Death
Carl-Henning Wijkmark: Paradoxical Forms and an Interpretation of Kierkegaard and Dacapo
Part II Norway
Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson: Kierkegaard’s Positive Influence on Bjørnson in His Youth and Adulthood
Henrik Ibsen: The Conflict between the Aesthetic and the Ethical
Edvard Munch: The Painter of The Scream and his Relation to Kierkegaard Hans Herlof Grelland
Index of Persons
Index of Subjects

Citation preview

Kierkegaard’s Influence on Literature, Criticism and Art Tome III: SWEDEN AND NORWAY

Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources Volume 12, Tome III

Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources is a publication of the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre

General Editor Jon Stewart Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Editorial Board FINN GREDAL JENSEN Katalin Nun peter Šajda Advisory Board Lee c. barrett maría j. binetti IstvÁn CzakÓ Heiko Schulz curtis l. thompson

Kierkegaard’s Influence on Literature, Criticism and Art Tome III: Sweden and Norway

Edited by Jon Stewart

First published 2013 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Jon Stewart and the contributors 2013 Jon Stewart has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editor of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice .. Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Kierkegaard’s influence on literature, criticism and art – Sweden and Norway. Tome III. – (Kierkegaard research ; v. 12) 1. Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813–1855 – Influence. 2. Swedish literature – History and criticism. 3. Norwegian literature – History and criticism. 4. Art and philosophy – Norway. I. Series II. Stewart, Jon (Jon Bartley) 198.9–dc23 The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Kierkegaard’s influence on literature, criticism, and art : Sweden and Norway / edited by Jon Stewart. p. cm.—(Kierkegaard research ; v. 12, t. 3) Includes index. ISBN 978-1-4094-6513-3 (hardcover) 1. Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813–1855—Influence. 2. Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813–1855—Literary art. 3. Criticism. I. Stewart, Jon (Jon Bartley) B4377.K5124 2012 198’.9—dc23 2012026885 ISBN 9781409465133 (hbk) Cover design by Katalin Nun

Contents List of Contributors List of Abbreviations

vii ix

Part I  SWEDEN Lars Ahlin: Kierkegaard’s Influence—an Ambiguous Matter Hans-Erik Johannesson

3

Victoria Benedictsson: A Female Perspective on Ethics Camilla Brudin Borg15 Lars Gyllensten: Inventor of Modern Stages of Life Camilla Brudin Borg

27

Selma Lagerlöf: “More clever than wise” Elise Iuul53 August Strindberg: Along with Kierkegaard in a Dance of Death Ingrid Basso

65

Carl-Henning Wijkmark: Paradoxical Forms and an Interpretation of Kierkegaard and Dacapo Jan Holmgaard

89

Part II  Norway Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson: Kierkegaard’s Positive Influence on Bjørnson in His Youth and Adulthood Esben Lindemann

109

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Henrik Ibsen: The Conflict between the Aesthetic and the Ethical Eivind Tjønneland  Edvard Munch: The Painter of The Scream and his Relation to Kierkegaard Hans Herlof Grelland

145

Index of Persons Index of Subjects

195 201

177

List of Contributors Ingrid Basso, c/o Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, Farvergade 27 D, 1463 Copenhagen K, Denmark. Camilla Brudin Borg, The University of Gothenburg, Department of Literature, History of Ideas and Religion, Box 200, 40530 Göteborg, Sweden. Hans Herlof Grelland, Faculty of Engineering and Science, University of Agder, Service Box 509, 4898 Grimstad, Norway. Jan Holmgaard, Stockholm University, Department of Comparative Literature and the History of Ideas, 106 91 Stockholm, Sweden. Elise Iuul, Society for Danish Language and Literature, Christians Brugge 1, 1219 Copenhagen K, Denmark. Hans-Erik Johannesson, The University of Gothenburg, Department of Literature, History of Ideas and Religion, Box 200, 40530 Göteborg, Sweden. Esben Lindemann, c/o Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, Farvergade 27 D, 1463 Copenhagen K, Denmark. Eivind Tjønneland, Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies, Box 7800, NO-5020 Bergen, Norway.

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List of Abbreviations Danish Abbreviations B&A

Breve og Aktstykker vedrørende Søren Kierkegaard, vols. 1–2, ed. by Niels Thulstrup, Copenhagen: Munksgaard 1953–54.

Bl.art. S. Kierkegaard’s Bladartikler, med Bilag samlede efter Forfatterens Død, udgivne som Supplement til hans øvrige Skrifter, ed. by Rasmus Nielsen, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1857. EP

Af Søren Kierkegaards Efterladte Papirer, vols. 1–9, ed. by H.P. Barfod and Hermann Gottsched, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1869–81.

Pap. Søren Kierkegaards Papirer, vols. I to XI–3, ed. by Peter Andreas Heiberg, Victor Kuhr and Einer Torsting, Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1909–48; second, expanded ed., vols. I to XI–3, by Niels Thulstrup, vols. XII to XIII supplementary volumes, ed. by Niels Thulstrup, vols. XIV to XVI index by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1968–78. SKS Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, vols. 1–28, vols. K1–K28, ed. by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Jette Knudsen, Johnny Kondrup, Alastair McKinnon and Finn Hauberg Mortensen, Copenhagen: Gads Forlag 1997–2013. SV1

Samlede Værker, ed. by A.B. Drachmann, Johan Ludvig Heiberg and H.O. Lange, vols. I–XIV, Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandels Forlag 1901–06. English Abbreviations

AN Armed Neutrality, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1998. AR On Authority and Revelation, The Book on Adler, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1955. ASKB The Auctioneer’s Sales Record of the Library of Søren Kierkegaard, ed. by H.P. Rohde, Copenhagen: The Royal Library 1967.

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BA The Book on Adler, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1998. C

The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1997.

CA The Concept of Anxiety, trans. by Reidar Thomte in collaboration with Albert B. Anderson, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1980. CD Christian Discourses, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1997. CI The Concept of Irony, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1989. CIC The Concept of Irony, trans. with an Introduction and Notes by Lee M. Capel, London: Collins 1966. COR

The Corsair Affair; Articles Related to the Writings, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1982.

CUP1 Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 1, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1982. CUP2 Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 2, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1982. CUPH Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 2009. Either/Or, Part I, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: EO1 Princeton University Press 1987. EO2 Either/Or, Part II, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1987. EOP Either/Or, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1992. EPW Early Polemical Writings, among others: From the Papers of One Still Living; Articles from Student Days; The Battle Between the Old and the New Soap-Cellars, trans. by Julia Watkin, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1990. EUD

Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1990.

List of Abbreviations

xi

FSE For Self-Examination, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1990. FT Fear and Trembling, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1983. FTP Fear and Trembling, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1985. JC

Johannes Climacus, or De omnibus dubitandum est, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1985.

JFY Judge for Yourself!, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1990. JP

Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vols. 1–6, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, assisted by Gregor Malantschuk (vol. 7, Index and Composite Collation), Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press 1967–78.

KAC Kierkegaard’s Attack upon “Christendom,” 1854–1855, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1944. KJN Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, vols. 1–11, ed. by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, David Kangas, Bruce H. Kirmmse, George Pattison, Vanessa Rumble, and K. Brian Söderquist, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press 2007ff. LD Letters and Documents, trans. by Henrik Rosenmeier, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1978. LR A Literary Review, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 2001. M

The Moment and Late Writings, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1998.

P Prefaces / Writing Sampler, trans. by Todd W. Nichol, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1997. PC Practice in Christianity, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1991. PF Philosophical Fragments, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1985.

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PJ

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Papers and Journals: A Selection, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1996.

PLR Prefaces: Light Reading for Certain Classes as the Occasion May Require, trans. by William McDonald, Tallahassee: Florida State University Press 1989. PLS Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. by David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1941. PV

The Point of View including On My Work as an Author, The Point of View for My Work as an Author, and Armed Neutrality, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1998.

PVL The Point of View for My Work as an Author including On My Work as an Author, trans. by Walter Lowrie, New York and London: Oxford University Press 1939. R Repetition, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1983. SBL

Notes of Schelling’s Berlin Lectures, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1989.

SLW Stages on Life’s Way, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1988. SUD The Sickness unto Death, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1980. SUDP The Sickness unto Death, trans. by Alastair Hannay, London and New York: Penguin Books 1989. TA Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age. A Literary Review, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1978. TD Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1993. UD Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1993. WA

Without Authority including The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air, Two Ethical-Religious Essays, Three Discourses at the Communion on Fridays, An Upbuilding Discourse, Two Discourses at the Communion

List of Abbreviations

xiii

on Fridays, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1997. WL Works of Love, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1995. WS Writing Sampler, trans. by Todd W. Nichol, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1997.

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Part I Sweden

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Lars Ahlin: Kierkegaard’s Influence—an Ambiguous Matter Hans-Erik Johannesson

Lars Ahlin (1915–97), one of Sweden’s most distinguished authors of the twentieth century, was both an outsider and a good representative of his time. As a realistic narrator of the conditions of the working class, he joined a broad movement in the literature of the century. But being a convinced Christian with an interest in the inner life and existential conditions of the individual, he differs from the majority of people today. For this reason his books have not reached many readers, but nonetheless they have still had a deep impact on Swedish intellectual life. Ahlin’s authorship is connected to different literary movements and traditions. Through an early engagement in communism, his work is rooted in the Swedish proletarian literature, a strong and important movement virtually without a counterpart outside Sweden. But Ahlin was also involved in literary modernism, which was introduced into Sweden in the 1920s and 1930s and saw its final breakthrough in the 1940s. The literary group of the 1940s that dominated the literary scene gave form to the ideas of existentialism, especially those of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) and Albert Camus (1913–60). Ahlin, by contrast, was close to these authors in some aspects, but he differed from them with his commitment to a new religious movement with certain traits in common with existentialism. Ahlin also developed a deeply personal religious prose style, strongly related to the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81). Theologically Ahlin’s fiction is influenced by Karl Barth (1886–1968) and the Swedish theologian Anders Nygren’s (1890–1978) view of love and the relation between “eros” and “agape,”1 but it also shows an interesting use of Søren Kierkegaard’s life and work. As early as the early 1930s Ahlin was involved in Christian and theological questions, which caused a conflict between his Christian world of imagination and the communist belief of his youth. This confrontation was decisive for Ahlin’s aesthetics, a sort of “reformist aesthetics,” where the social and the existential dimensions coincide. Characteristic of Ahlin’s authorship is the connection of the popular and the intellectual, and on the aesthetic level, a combination of realism and non-realism. Ahlin thus creates a literary universe where concepts such as person, individual, and equality are significant. The tension between the external and the internal dimension can be explained by Ahlin’s Lutheran interpretation of Christianity, where humor plays a dominant role and where Kierkegaard has had some importance. 1 Anders Nygren, Den kristna kärlekstanken genom tiderna. Eros och Agape, vols. 1–2, Stockholm: Svenska kyrkans diakonistyrelse 1930–36.

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What is then characteristic of Ahlin’s Christianity? According to Torborg Lundell, “Ahlin is a Christian, but in the same sense as Kierkegaard was, rejecting any association with the established religious community.”2 Instead there are traits of mysticism in Ahlin’s texts. For instance the main character, Aron, in Pious Murders (1952),3 stands out as a representative of the via negativa of mysticism, “like St. Paul, Augustine, Luther or Kierkegaard.”4 On the basis of these religious ideas, Ahlin developed an authorship that to some extent was influenced by Kierkegaard’s life and work. Kierkegaard regarded his task to be that of a “poet” (Digter) with a moral and religious mission. This is a point where Ahlin and Kierkegaard converge. With regard to its characteristics, Ahlin’s authorship also displays an original view on the artistic word and its function. Typical of this aesthetics is the role of the reader and the relation between the author and the reader, the acceptance of the text (compare here Kierkegaard’s “reduplication”) and enlightened understanding, “epiphany.” The foundation of Ahlin’s authorship is a pedagogical project, with concepts such as “place” and “person.” In Ahlin’s literary universe one finds a theory of value, sin, and grace, and also a materialistic view of love. Furthermore, there is the break with the aesthetics of beauty and humanistic moral principles. One theme is the relativity of traditional cultural values.5 In some ways these themes have a connection to Kierkegaard’s work. Kierkegaard’s “theological poetry” has also had a considerable impact on Swedish culture and literature, starting with the Modern Breakthrough in the second part of the nineteenth century. His direct influence on Swedish literature is obvious up to the 1960s, when Kierkegaard was a natural point of reference in literary criticism. After that it is difficult to separate Kierkegaard’s themes and motifs from other existentialist streams that have had an impact on Swedish literature. There certainly is a Kierkegaardian influence, but often indirect and hidden, as in Lars Ahlin’s case. Lars Ahlin treated the religious questions in an original way. His critics have referred to a “religious aesthetics” built on conflict and contradiction between belief and knowledge.6 “As long as I live, I live in contradiction, for life itself is contradiction,” Kierkegaard writes in an entry in his Journal JJ.7 I. Offense and Humor One element of Ahlin’s view on literary work is a maieutic method with a communicative model, which implies that the text is to give offense as a preparation Torborg Lundell, Lars Ahlin, Boston: Twayne Publishers 1977, p. 19. Lars Ahlin, Fromma mord, Stockholm: Bonniers 1952. 4 Gunnar D. Hansson, Nådens oordning. Studier i Lars Ahlins roman Fromma mord, Stockholm: Bonniers 1988, p. 35. 5 Gunnar D. Hansson, Den svenska litteraturen, vols. 1–3, Stockholm: Bonniers 1999, vol. 3, pp. 251–2. 6 For example, ibid. 7 SKS 18, 223, JJ:261 / KJN 2, 204. 2 3

Lars Ahlin: Kierkegaard’s Influence—an Ambiguous Matter

5

for the reader’s acceptance, an idea with a biblical and Lutheran origin. In Practice in Christianity Kierkegaard writes, “The possibility of offense is to deny direct communication.”8 Kierkegaard’s concept of “reduplication” is close to Ahlin’s concept of the reader’s response and acceptance: “to exist in what one understands is to reduplicate.”9 But even if the proximity to Kierkegaard’s thinking is obvious, it is probable that Ahlin was inspired to think about the problems of offense from older sources, especially Luther. Hansson puts it this way: “If a Kierkegaard influence concerning the formulation of the category of offense in the chapter ‘The Small Words’ in Pious Murders (p. 13) only can be assumed or hypothetically presupposed, the influence of Luther is obvious.”10 Ahlin also adopted Luther’s concept of humor; according to Hansson, Luther’s concept is closer to Ahlin than Kierkegaard’s concept is.11 Arne Melberg writes, “Ahlin’s ‘existentialism’ has complications which are not to be found in the usual expositions of the French or the German school or of Kierkegaard….Ahlin’s ‘existentialism’ is strongly socially conditional.”12 It seems that Kierkegaard’s ideas in some cases functioned more as a confirmation than as a direct influence. Ahlin’s connection to Kierkegaard can be described with some key concepts: dialectics, the doctrine of stages, the role of the author, and the pedagogical project. Kierkegaard’s theory of indirect communication probably had an importance for Ahlin’s opinion of the relationship between author and reader, with an accent on the progress of the individual. These are the central features of Ahlin’s literary work with the most important motifs and themes. There is a definite consistency in Ahlin’s literary work. Much of it has to do with his encounter with Luther, with Anders Nygren’s theology, and with Karl Barth and other theologians, but it also has to do with his interpretation of Kierkegaard’s aesthetics and theological views. It is an interesting fact that critics of Ahlin generally claim that Kierkegaard has exercised a strong influence on him, but when it comes to pointing out concrete textual passages they have recourse to calling this a “possible” influence or intertext.13 In one way it is justified to talk about an influence. It is hard to deny that Ahlin took notice of Kierkegaard’s life and his general attitude to literary problems: for instance, Kierkegaard’s dialectics, his pedagogical project, and his ideas about the individual and subjectivity. On the other hand, these questions have been commonplace ever since Plato and existential philosophy. Therefore, one can understand that Ahlin’s critics both stress a clear Kierkegaardian influence and at the same time speak more vaguely in terms of a possible influence.

SKS 12, 142 / PC, 139. SKS 12, 138 / PC, 134. 10 Hansson, Nådens oordning, p. 112. 11 Ibid. 12 Arne Melberg, På väg från realismen. En studie i Lars Ahlins författarskap, dess sociala och litterära förutsättningar, Stockholm: Gidlunds 1973, pp. 205–6. 13 For example, Hansson, Nådens oordning, pp. 110–11.

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Lars Furuland notes that Ahlin only briefly mentions Kierkegaard in the 1930s,14 but in the debut novel Tåbb with the Manifesto (1943)15 Kierkegaard’s presence is obvious. As Ekman also has shown, in the story of the main character’s confrontation with the young girl Anna one can see a parallel to Søren Kierkegaard’s relation to Regine Olsen and his attempt to repel her. Also, the forming of the stages on life’s way seems to be inspired by Kierkegaard’s literary art, as is the element of indirect communication in the episode with the poet Staffan Hyrell,16 who at a distance and by means of an exemplary story inspires Tåbb to make a life-changing decision.17 But it is also in this novel that we see how Ahlin takes a position on Kierkegaard’s concept of humor.18 In an essay on humor and irony from 1950 Ahlin takes his point of departure in an experience of man’s unequal conditions and connects his discussion to Kierkegaard: Socrates meant a great deal for Kierkegaard….But how many people can exchange coins with Socrates? In order that the relationship between Socrates and the pupil shall not be offensive and that none of them shall be corrupt, Socrates and his pupil must be equal. But this is not possible. The difference is inevitable; exactly this is Socrates’ tragedy and the tragedy of our human communion. The order of above and below poisons our communion….In order that tragedy shall disappear we have to be shaped for a wholly different life. And that cannot happen, without offending our dignity, in any other way than by the creator stepping down and making himself an equal of the lowest person.19

According to Torborg Lundell, Ahlin in his first published short story also benefits from Kierkegaard’s technique of using pseudonyms.20 Ekman writes, “In what way Ahlin accepts Kierkegaard’s speculation we do not know until the publication of Tåbb with the Manifesto. After that the relationship to Kierkegaard is more visible in his books, for instance, in Pious Murders and Night in the Market Tent.”21 Ekman believes that Ahlin has both an open and a hidden reference to Kierkegaard. Ahlin advocated a form of literary art that is critical of illusion. In the essay “Fiction in the First and the Third Person,”22 we find ideas on realism and literary illusion with Kierkegaard involved: 14 Lars Furuland, “Lars Ahlin—ursprungsmiljö och bildningsgång,” in Synpunkter på Lars Ahlin, ed. by Lars Furuland, Stockholm: Bonniers 1971, p. 37. 15 Lars Ahlin, Tåbb med manifestet. Historien om hur Tåbbs livsstil växte fram, Stockholm: Tidens förlag 1943. 16 Ibid., pp. 187–254. 17 Hans-Göran Ekman, “Humor och ironi i Natt i marknadstältet,” in Synpunkter på Lars Ahlin, p. 116. 18 Hans-Göran Ekman, Humor, grotesk och pikaresk. Studier i Lars Ahlins realism, Stockholm: Bo Cavefors 1975, p. 59. 19 Lars Ahlin, “Den ringastes like,” in Bekännare och förnekare, ed. by Allan Fagerström, Stockholm: Bonniers 1950, pp. 40–1. 20 Lundell, Lars Ahlin, p. 28. 21 Ekman, Humor, grotesk och pikaresk. Studier i Lars Ahlins realism, pp. 59–60. 22 Lars Ahlin, “Dikt i tredje personen och i första,” in his Estetiska essayer. Variationer och konsekvens, Stockholm: Bonniers 1994, pp. 99–106.

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In Kierkegaard’s small but cruel debut book he points out with almost sadistic generosity that he does not intend to forbid H.C. Andersen from letting some figure go mad, if there must be madness. But, Kierkegaard says, it should not be done in the way that madness in the third person is replaced by madness in the first person, in the way that the author himself takes over the madman’s madness. There must be an immortal spirit in the novel, surviving it all, K. continues. I am sorry to say there is no such spirit in young H.C. Andersen’s writing….When his hero dies, Andersen also dies, and as the last impression the reader highly enjoys a sigh for both of them.23

On the illusion of reality in literature Ahlin writes further on: “You may think like Kierkegaard somewhere, that it is a matter for young girls (Piger) to be easily impressed by literary illusion.”24 In a collection of short stories, No Eyes Await Me (1944),25 and in the novels My Death is My Own (1945)26 and If… (1946),27 we find a tension between realism and literary experiment, where Kierkegaard’s literary art possibly had some general importance. According to Lundell, Ahlin benefits from “Kierkegaard’s technique of using pseudonyms”28 in his first published short story, and in Ahlin’s first novel, Tåbb with the Manifesto (1943), the main character believes that like “Kierkegaard’s religious man…his suffering will be uplifting.”29 In If…, Ahlin creates “an ironic distance similar to the one created by Kierkegaard’s many pseudonyms in Either/Or.”30 In Pious Murders the cleaning woman Dora is “one of Ahlin’s many Kierkegaardian characters, people, who like Kierkegaard’s tax collector, disguise their Christian nature under a pedestrian or ‘lowly’ social image.”31 In Lundell’s view, when the religious man Matti in the novel The Great Amnesia (1954) goes to church,32 he “sits so far back that he cannot hear what the minister says because, in his Kierkegaardian opinion, priests preach their own word and not God’s pure word.”33 Like many of Ahlin’s other novels, Maiden in the Open Air (1847)34 is composed “dialectically according to the principle ‘language–counterlanguage.’ ”35 It reminds one of Karl Barth, one of Kierkegaard’s most important Reformed interpreters.36 In Pious Murders—according to Hansson—the Kierkegaardian pitch is often clearly audible, not least of all with what concerns the aesthetics of anti-mimesis

Ibid., p. 105. Ibid., p. 101. 25 Lars Ahlin, Inga ögon väntar mig, Stockholm: Tiden 1944. 26 Lars Ahlin, Min död är min, Stockholm: Tiden 1945. 27 Lars Ahlin, Om, Stockholm: Bonniers 1946. 28 Lundell, Lars Ahlin, p. 28. 29 Ibid., p. 31. 30 Ibid., p. 80. 31 Ibid., p. 67. 32 Lars Ahlin, Stora glömskan, Stockholm: Bonniers 1954. 33 Lundell, Lars Ahlin, p. 97. 34 Lars Ahlin, Jungfrun i det gröna, Stockholm: Bonniers 1947. 35 Furuland, Synpunkter på Lars Ahlin, p. 39. 36 Ibid. 23 24

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and anti-illusion.37 But there are not many specific traces of Kierkegaard, although there is a general connection. In a brilliant book that analyzes six of Ahlin’s novels, the Danish critic Erik A. Nielsen has drawn attention to a connection between Pious Murders and Fear and Trembling, more exactly the former’s definition of faith and the latter’s “The Knight of Faith.”38 According to Kierkegaard,39 it is not possible to see in a person whether he is a knight of faith or not. Faith is an inward matter. Aron is occupied by this question throughout the novel, but it is not Aron who stands out as a “knight of faith” but Dora, the communist cleaning lady, a Christian in disguise.40 For the account of Aron’s character it is rather another of Kierkegaard’s publications that is relevant, specifically The Sickness unto Death. This book, according to Hansson, sheds light on Aron’s condition, his despair. Real despair is not “despair over something” but has to do with lack of belief. Formulations in Pious Murders, in the chapter “Little Stigmatization,” seem to evidence a reading of Kierkegaard’s journals, for instance. But, as Hansson writes, there is more of Luther than Kierkegaard to it. Faith is “determined as Kierkegaardian-Lutheran.”41 The Pauline expression “the thorn in the flesh” (Pælen i Kjødet), often used by Kierkegaard, occurs in a mocking way in the introductory chapter of Tåbb with the Manifesto: He was an old, meager man with a grey beard, dressed in a torn slouch hat and a green suit with trouser legs as narrow as drainpipes. They called him “The Prophet.”…He spread Christian pamphlets which he had written himself. He had even founded a sect of his own, which he called “The thorn in the flesh.” He was the only member himself, because that was the way it should be.42

The expression “the thorn in the flesh” is also used in Pious Murders.43 For Kierkegaard, “the thorn in the flesh”44 is connected to the question of revelation and faith. A Kierkegaardian interpretation of Aron’s overwhelming experience is problematic. Aron does not appear to be a witness of the truth. He is negatively determined through his captivity and being an outsider. Ahlin transforms a key phrase in Kierkegaard (and St. Paul) and gives it a new significance.45

Hansson, Nådens oordning, p. 97. Erik A. Nielsen, Lars Ahlin. Studier i sex romaner, Stockholm: Bonniers 1968, p. 106. 39 Ibid. 40 Hansson, Nådens oordning, p. 171. 41 Ibid., p. 173. 42 Ahlin, Tåbb med manifestet, pp. 42–3. 43 Ahlin, Fromma mord, p. 226. 44 The expression is often used, for example, in The Sickness unto Death; see SKS 11, 192 / SUD, 78. 45 Hansson, Nådens oordning, p. 175. 37 38

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II. Individual and Subjectivity In the essay “Facts and Fiction” (1960)46 Ahlin polemizes against his author colleague Lars Gyllensten in a discussion about the individual,47 and he also takes subjectivity into consideration. Helen Andersson writes that the “connection between Kierkegaard’s view of subjectivity and the concluding chapter of Night in the Market Tent is remarkable, as is the dialectics between individual and social, between the ‘open’ and the ‘hidden’ confession.”48 Pious Murders contains a confrontation between a Platonic and a Lutheran understanding of love, a theme recurring in Night in the Market Tent (1957) and Bark and Leaves (1961).49 According to Hansson, there is in Pious Murders a temporary “Kierkegaardization” of Ahlin’s text, but there is not much evidence for this opinion. However, in Night in the Market Tent (chapter “Black Pepper”), Alexis Bring gives a long speech on Kierkegaard and humor as indirect communication, and on the maieutic method and ironic attitudes.50 His speech “culminates in a discourse on Kierkegaard’s treatise on subjectivity and the concept of the individual.”51 In a jesting way Alexis Bring introduces Kierkegaard: If I speak openly, I suppose it will occur to me like it posthumously occurred to Kierkegaard. He has really had bad luck. Subjectivity is the truth, the little sybarite said down there in Copenhagen, once over a cup of coffee….Will a murder become an exemplary murder if it is committed with true subjectivity?…Subjectivity and objectivity in connection with truth; Kierkegaard is conscious that his use of these terms is peculiar to himself. People do not understand me even in this respect, he complains. Rationality affirms that subjectivity is the untruth; it is objectivity that is truth. Now, Kierkegaard does not play off a subjectivistic theory against an objectivistic one, for he says goodbye to his beloved teacher Socrates and to Socratic wisdom, which he summarizes in the thesis that subjectivity is the truth. For Christianity declares that “Mennesket ikke er Sandheden, at Subjectiviteten er Usandheden.” It is God who is truth. It is quite right, the isolated subjectivity in the meaning of the present age is also evil; but a cure with “objectivity” is not a bit better. This is Kierkegaard’s position.52

In a letter to the author Lars Gyllensten (from December 1955) Ahlin criticizes Gyllensten for—in a newspaper article—having placed Kierkegaard in a scholastic tradition. Against this opinion he places Kierkegaard in a tradition represented

46 Lars Ahlin, “Fakta och fikta,” in his Sjung för de dömda! Sjung för dem som lever mellan tiderna!, Stockholm: Bonniers 1995, pp. 59–69. 47 Helen Andersson, Det etiska projektet och det estetiska. Tvärvetenskapliga perspektiv på Lars Ahlins författarskap, Stockholm: Symposion 1998, p. 456, note 48. 48 Ibid. 49 Lars Ahlin, Natt i marknadstältet, Stockholm: Bonniers 1957; and Lars Ahlin, Bark och löv, Stockholm: Bonniers 1961. 50 Ekman, Humor, grotesk och pikaresk, p. 138; p. 147. 51 Lundell, Lars Ahlin, p. 124. 52 Ahlin, Natt i marknadstältet, pp. 435–6.

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by Ockham, Luther, and Kant. Ahlin also discusses Kierkegaard’s concepts of “contemporaneity” (Samtidighed) and “the moment” (Øieblikket).53 After Bark and Leaves Ahlin was silent for many years. This novel deals with aesthetic and existential matters in an intriguing way and was an important point of reference in the Swedish literary debate during the 1960s and after. It is not until the novel The Fruit of Your Life (1987) that we find a text by Ahlin that has close connection to Kierkegaard.54 In The Fruit of Your Life Lars Ahlin returns to Kierkegaard in several ways. The main character is called Johannes (the name of quite a few characters in Kierkegaard’s texts). Of him it is said that he lacks a “self.”55 Johannes says, “It is empty, dead. This is how I see it.”56 There are also some remarks and a discussion of despair and choice,57 where Johannes (Ahlin’s alter ego) plays the role of an opponent against Sartre. The word “self” is used in The Fruit of Your Life in a way that reminds us of Kierkegaard’s definition at the beginning of The Sickness unto Death (1849), and we find frequent allusions to Kierkegaard. In the chapter “Ur en ännu levandes papper” (From the Papers of One Still Living) there is a quotation from Kierkegaard.58 Johannes talks about an “essay on Nietzsche,”59 but also about an essay on Kierkegaard (that was never to be written). Johannes says, “I appointed myself… to be a still living person. Kierkegaard! The Dane had his debut with an aestheticcritical publication in which he very brutally attacked the sensitive H.C. Andersen. The book was called From the Papers of One Still Living. Only 25 years old, K was surprised that he was still alive.”60 In The Fruit of Your Life Kierkegaard’s life and letters are more present than ever before in Lars Ahlin’s world of imagination. Johannes compares himself with Kierkegaard and says: I cannot speak of myself like Kierkegaard does. The Dane—or one of his many pseudonyms—speaks like this: “From the outside a Christian can look like a ‘Spidsborger’ (the philistine whom he otherwise could make fun of). From the outside you cannot see in me, like a person who is despairing over himself and the world, a Social Democrat.” When you vote, you do it secretly. As a Social Democrat I remain invisible.61

Elsewhere Johannes offers some reflections on choice and freedom,62 and notes further on: “I think that Kierkegaard has said that a simple Christian, ‘den jævne mand,’ can lead a richer poetical life than the most famous poet.”63 Speaking about Lars Ahlin, Breviarium, Stockholm: Bonniers 1996, p. 36. Lars Ahlin, Din livsfrukt, Stockholm: Bonniers 1987. 55 Andersson, Det etiska projektet och det estetiska, p. 120. 56 Ahlin, Din livsfrukt, p. 41. 57 Ibid., p. 64. 58 Ibid., p. 90. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid., p. 558. 61 Ibid., p. 42. 62 Ibid., p. 64. 63 Ibid., p. 126. 53 54

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his own riches, Johannes refers to Kierkegaard’s financial situation: “Without any other comparison you may bear in mind that the unhappy bachelor every year spent three professor’s salaries on himself alone—that waste was necessary for the development of his demanding authorship, he thought. The unfaithful man evidently absorbed a lot of faithful life,” Johannes thinks.64 There are still more reflections on Kierkegaard’s life, finances and social behavior.65 And Johannes also refers to Kierkegaard as “the brightest mind and most remarkable stylist in Scandinavia.”66 The religious themes of Ahlin’s early production were primarily influenced by Martin Luther and Karl Barth, and only in a second degree by Kierkegaard. In Ahlin’s late works quotations and allusions to Kierkegaard are more frequent than before. In the novel The Fruit of Your Life Ahlin often refers to Kierkegaard, but these references are mostly comments on Kierkegaard’s life, and to a lesser degree on his literary work. The significance of this fact is a matter for further comparative research.

Ibid., p. 188. Ibid., p. 284. 66 Ibid., p. 126. 64 65

Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Ahlin’s Corpus Tåbb med manifestet. Historien om hur Tåbbs livsstil växte fram, Stockholm: Tidens förlag 1943, pp. 187–254. Inga ögon väntar mig, Stockholm: Tidens förlag 1944, pp. 5–16. Min död är min, Stockholm: Bonniers 1945, passim. Om, Stockholm: Bonniers 1946, passim. Jungfrun i det gröna, Stockholm: Bonniers 1947, passim. Huset har ingen filial, Stockholm: Bonniers 1949, pp. 9–33. “Den ringastes like,” in Bekännare och förnekare. Åtta moderna diktare deklarerar sin inställning till kristendomen, ed. by Allan Fagerström, Stockholm: Bonniers 1950, pp. 33–41. Fromma mord, Stockholm: Bonniers 1952, passim. Stora glömskan, Stockholm: Bonniers 1954, passim. Natt i marknadstältet, Stockholm: Bonniers 1957, passim. Bark och löv, Stockholm: Bonniers 1961, p. 54. Din livsfrukt, Stockholm: Bonniers 1987, passim. “Dikt i tredje personen och i första,” Estetiska essayer. Variationer och konsekvens, Stockholm: Bonniers 1994, pp. 99–106. “Fakta och fikta,” in Ahlin’s Sjung för de dömda, Stockholm: Bonniers 1995, pp. 59–69. Breviarium, Stockholm: Bonniers 1996, pp. 19–45. II. Sources of Lars Ahlin’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Barth, Karl, Der Römerbrief, 2nd ed., Munich: Kaiser 1922, pp. v–vi; p. xii; pp. 15–16; p. 71; p. 75; p. 77; pp. 85–9; p. 93; p. 96; pp. 98–9; p. 114; p. 141; p. 145; p. 236; p. 261; p. 264; p. 267; p. 319; p. 325; p. 381; p. 400; pp. 426–7; p. 455; p. 481; pp. 483–4. Bohlin, Torsten, Kierkegaards dogmatiska åskådning i dess historiska sammanhang, Stockholm: Diakonistyrelsens förlag 1925. Hirsch, Emanuel, Kierkegaard-Studien, Heft 1: Zur inneren Geschichte 1835–1841; Heft 2: Der Dichter; Heft 3, 1–3: Der Denker, Gütersloh: Bertelsmann 1930–33 (Studien des apologetischen Seminars, vol. 29; vols. 31–2; and vol. 36).

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III. Secondary Literature on Lars Ahlin’s Relation to Kierkegaard Andersson, Helen, Det etiska projektet och det estetiska. Tvärvetenskapliga perspektiv på Lars Ahlins författarskap, Stockholm: Symposion 1998, passim. Ekman, Hans-Göran, Humor, grotesk och pikaresk. Studier i Lars Ahlins realism, Stockholm: Bo Cavefors 1975, pp. 59–60; p. 116. — “Humor och ironi i Natt i marknadstältet,” in Synpunkter på Lars Ahlin, ed. by Lars Furuland, Stockholm: Bonniers 1971, pp. 122–51. Furuland, Lars, “Lars Ahlin—ursprungsmiljö och bildningsgång,” Synpunkter på Lars Ahlin, ed. by Lars Furuland, Stockholm: Bonniers 1971, pp. 9–42. — (ed.), Synpunkter på Lars Ahlin, Stockholm: Bonniers 1971, p. 37. Hansson, Gunnar D., Nådens oordning. Studier i Lars Ahlins roman Fromma mord, Stockholm: Bonniers 1988, passim. — “Lars Ahlin,” Den svenska litteraturen, vols. 1–3, ed. by Sven Delblanc & Lars Lönnroth, Stockholm: Bonniers 1999, vol. 3, pp. 248–56. Lundell, Torborg, Lars Ahlin, Boston: Twayne Publishers 1977, p. 19; p. 28; p. 31; p. 67; p. 80 et passim. Melberg, Arne, På väg från realismen. En studie i Lars Ahlins författarskap, dess sociala och litterära förutsättningar, Stockholm: Gidlunds 1973, pp. 205f. Nielsen, Erik A., Lars Ahlin. Studier i sex romaner, Stockholm: Bonniers 1968 [1967], p. 97; p. 171; p. 173.

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Victoria Benedictsson: A Female Perspective on Ethics Camilla Brudin Borg

Victoria Benedictsson (originally Bruzelius, 1850–88), or Ernst Ahlgren as she chose to call herself as a writer, is, together with August Strindberg (1849–1912), regarded as one of the most important authors of what is known as “The Modern Breakthrough,” that is, the realistic and naturalistic movement in Sweden at the end of the nineteenth century. The ideal during this period was to “put problems to a debate,” as the famous Georg Brandes (1842–1927) demanded.1 During four intensive years, Benedictsson published four books and several articles. At her premature demise, she left her entire literary accomplishment, including several manuscripts and personal notebooks, to her close friend Axel Lundegård (1861–1930). She asked him in a farewell letter to proceed with her works in the way he himself found to be the most appropriate. Benedictsson and Lundegård were very close as authors and friends, and they also wrote the play Final: A Play in Three Acts (1885)2 together during her active period as an author. Soon after her death, he completed and published many of her manuscripts, and continued to publish letters and parts of her journal. In this way he gave her constant publicity even after her death. But Lundegård has also been accused of having benefitted too much from her talent and of having rewritten much of what he published after her death.3 Most of her papers and letters have now been made public due to Lundegård and later through the great effort of the editor Christina Sjöblad.4 The Swedish Academy has also recently published Benedictsson’s works in the series on Swedish Classics.5

Georg Brandes, Hovedstrømninger i det 19de Aarhundedes Litteratur. Emigrantlitteraturen, in Samlede Skrifter, vols. 1–12, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1899–1902, vol. 4, p. 5. 2 Victoria Benedictsson and Axel Lundegård, Final. Skådespel i tre akter, Stockholm: Z. Hæggström 1885. 3 Lisbeth Larsson, Hennes döda kropp, Stockholm: Weylers 2008. 4 Victoria Benedictsson, Stora boken, vols. 1–3, ed. by Christina Sjöblad, Lund: Cavefors 1978–85. 5 Victoria Benedictsson, Ord på liv och död: Kortprosa, drama, dagbok, ed. by Ebba Witt-Brattström, Stockholm: Atlantis 2008 (Svenska klassiker). This edition has also being criticized for making use of the manuscript that was rewritten by Lundegård, see Lisbeth Larsson, “Akademien sviker Victoria,” Dagens Nyheter, October 15, 2008. 1

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Benedictsson’s breakthrough was made by the novel Money (1885),6 which tells the story of a young girl, Selma, who is persuaded to marry the older, but wealthy, landowner Pål Kristersson. The novel is a critique of the laws concerning marriage and the fact that a girl could be married at sixteen even though she did not reach the legal age of an adult until 25. The book was preceded by her debut as an author, a collection of short stories called From Scania (1884)7 which gives an excellent depiction of farmers from the south of Sweden. Her masterpiece, the novel Mrs. Marianne (1887),8 is also a contribution on the topic of marriage, which at the time was a matter of constant debate. During her lifetime, The Life of Common People and Little Stories (1887)9 was also published. The Mother (1888)10 and Spirited Away (1890),11 and collections like Second Harvest (1890),12 are examples of drafts posthumously published by Lundegård. Four studies deal directly with Benedictsson’s relationship to the writings of Søren Kierkegaard: Sten Linder’s Ernst Ahlgren in her Novels (1930),13 which also is the most consistent study to be found on the topic of Kierkegaard and The Modern Breakthrough in Sweden. Nils Åke Sjöstedt’s study Søren Kierkegaard and Swedish Literature (1950) covers the period from 1850 to 1900.14 Margit Norrman’s In the Hand of Life (1978) is focused on the religiousness of Benedictsson’s authorship.15 The legacy of Kierkegaard in the late nineteenth century is also mentioned in several other studies and articles.16 My article “The Performance of Mrs. Marianne” deals with the ethics of Benedictsson and tries to see the connection to Kierkegaard in terms of a metaphorical “performance.”17 Søren Kierkegaard has generally been regarded as the source of what is called “the spirit of the eighties” in the early research on the literary Modern Breakthrough in the Scandinavian countries. The movement has often been seen as consisting of a Victoria Benedictsson, Pengar, Stockholm: C.E. Fritze 1885. Victoria Benedictsson, Från Skåne. Studier, Stockholm: C.E. Fritze 1884. 8 Victoria Benedictsson, Fru Marianne, Stockholm: Z. Hæggström 1887. 9 Victoria Benedictsson, Folklif och småberättelser, Stockholm: Z. Hæggström 1887. 10 Victoria Benedictsson, Modern, Stockholm: Z. Hæggström 1888. 11 Victoria Benedictsson and Axel Lundegård, Den bergtagna. En kärlekens tragedi, Stockholm: Z. Hæggström 1890. 12 Victoria Benedictsson, Efterskörd, Stockholm: Z. Hæggström 1890. 13 Sten Linder, Ernst Ahlgren i hennes romaner, Stockholm: Bonniers 1930. 14 Nils Åke Sjöstedt, Sören Kierkegaard och svensk litteratur. Från Fredrika Bremer till Hjalmar Söderberg, Gothenburg: Wettergren & Kerbers Förlag 1950. 15 Margit Norrman, I livets hand. En studie i Victoria Benedictssons religiösa föreställningsvärld, Avesta: Verbum 1978. 16 Nils Åke Sjöstedt, “Swedish literature,” in The Legacy and Interpretation of Kierkegaard, ed. by Niels Thulstrup and Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1981 (Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, vol. 8), pp. 40–53. 17 See Camilla Brudin Borg, “Fru Mariannes uppförande: Søren Kierkegaards Antingen—eller i Victoria Benedictssons roman Fru Marianne,” in Tilltal och svar. Vänbok till Beata Agrell, ed. by Jenny Bergenmar et al., Stockholm and Stehag: Symposion 2009, pp. 98–108. 6 7

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primarily individualistic and a heavily moralistic tendency. The movement was also social and critical in attitude, consisting of rigorous demands of honesty and truth to oneself. Sten Linder emphasized that ultimately these features must be traced back to Kierkegaard’s philosophy and that the attitude was derived from the upright spirit in which Kierkegaard attacked the Danish Church (1854–55).18 The attitude developed in the Nordic debate is also seen as transmitted through the readings in and engagement with Kierkegaard by Georg Brandes in his critique, and through Henrik Ibsen’s (1828–1906) understanding and use of Kierkegaard’s ideas in his plays. Because of Kierkegaard’s influence, Scandinavian naturalism, according to Linder, became very idealistic and moralistic in a way that makes it slightly different from French and Russian naturalism.19 This distinction between Nordic and French naturalism has been discussed subsequently and modified, but the description of Nordic naturalism has not essentially been altered.20 The ideal was to put problems to a debate, and women’s emancipation and questions concerning marriage and marital morality were of special interest during the period of Benedictsson’s work. Intellectual and artistic sources of reference were among others: Henrik Ibsen’s Love’s Comedy (1862)21 and Georg Brandes’ translation of John Stuart Mill’s (1806–73) The Subjection of Women (1869).22 Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or and Stages on Life’s Way have been shown to have indirect but important influence on the discussions of ethics, love, and marriage. Kierkegaard depicted the difference between ethical and aesthetic love, and his distinction reflects the discussion of marriage, ways of life, and attitudes between the sexes.23 Other major themes were subjectivity and the demand of being true to oneself. Sten Linder has, before others, shown that Benedictsson was an adept to this demand of severe honesty in the way she and her fellow colleagues received Kierkegaard.24 I. The Diary: Confession-Book or Workbook? Victoria Benedictsson grew up in the south of Sweden and married very young, against her parents’ will, the much older postmaster Christian Benedictsson (1822–99), a widower with five children. She moved to the small village Hörby where she gradually came to suffer from a feeling of being trapped and confined in a life with little intellectual stimulation, which she strived to remedy through her numerous journeys and her intellectual contacts in Sweden as well as in Denmark and Paris. Her biography gives the impression of a very hard and often unhappy life, due to a painful disease in her knees, her marriage, bouts of depression, financial Linder, Ernst Ahlgren i hennes romaner, pp. 102–4. Ibid., pp. 7–9. 20 Thure Stenström, Den ensamme. En motivstudie i det moderna genombrottets litteratur, Stockholm: Natur och Kultur 1961, p. 29. 21 Henrik Ibsen, Kærlighedens komedie, Kristiania: H.J. Jensen 1862. 22 John Stuart Mill, Kvindernes Underkuelse, trans. by Georg Brandes, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1869. 23 Linder, Ernst Ahlgren i hennes romaner, p. 100. 24 Ibid., pp. 103–4. 18 19

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difficulties, and finally, because of the, for her part, destructive relationship to Georg Brandes, whom she met in 1886, and who did not live up to her expectations of being an intellectual companion. There is a great deal of extant information about Benedictsson’s life since she chose to keep a diary and to pass her papers on to posterity. Her literary accomplishment consists of several different kinds of material, now in the care of Lund University Library. She made brief notes in a calendar (1876–88), and these notes and her many letters reveal what she read, whom she met, and so on. There is also a famous diary, which is partly coded, and usually referred to as The Great Book (1882–88). It consists of literary drafts, diary notes, letters, and more. Through this material it is possible to gain information about some of her knowledge of Kierkegaard’s writings. In a letter to Frans von Schéele (1853–1931), at the time the editor of the magazine Fyris, she describes some of the books that she owns. Søren Kierkegaard’s Stages on Life’s Way (1845) is one of them, as is Georg Brandes’ book Søren Kierkegaard (1877). She also states that she had read the entire corpus of the Norwegian author Alexander Kielland (1849–1906), who was well known to be an intense reader of Kierkegaard. It should be noted that the letter is dated January 11, 1884, which is before her relationship to George Brandes.25 There is also a note in the first part of The Great Book. In a portrait on District Court Judge Quiding (1808–86) from Malmö, she writes: “He ‘lives’ in all his rooms, sometimes dwells in one of them, sometimes in another, just like Kierkegaard.”26 This comment has been interpreted by Nils Åke Sjöstedt to be an allusion to Brandes’ Søren Kierkegaard.27 This remarkable diary has been the main source of information for several biographical interpretations that especially focus on Benedictsson’s unhappy relationship to Brandes, as well as her tragic suicide in 1888. In these cases the diary is used to reflect the true thoughts of the author.28 But since Benedictsson, in her final will, decided to make her diary public, it has been suggested that she also was inspired by Kierkegaard’s Efterladte Papirer, which was made public just a decade before. Another famous author, August Strindberg (1849–1912), was at the time also keeping an experimental diary. Margit Norrman’s suggestion that Benedictsson’s diary should be read as a workbook, investigating and performing an important part of the fictive authorship, rather than just as a book of confessions, is quite credible. It is known that Benedictsson showed different sides of herself, performed different social “roles” in her letters. A helpful distinction when reading the diary is to separate Benedictsson as an author, experimenting with and investigating reality, and her ordinary personality, which is not to be found in an easy way in the diary.29 Christina Sjöblad has also made a detailed exposition of other famous diaries that Benedictsson, Stora boken, vol. 1, Dagbok 1882–1884, p. 285. Sjöstedt, Sören Kierkegaard och svensk litteratur, p. 304, and Benedictsson, Stora boken, vol. 1, p. 250. 27 Ibid. 28 See, for example, Fredrik Böök, Victoria Benedictsson och Georg Brandes, Stockholm: Bonniers 1949. 29 Norrman, I livets hand, pp. 18–20. 25 26

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Benedictsson knew, such as Lord Byron’s (1788–1824) letters and diary and JeanJacques Rousseau’s (1712–78) Confessions. II. Motifs with a Connection to Kierkegaard Early comparative studies on Victoria Benedictsson and Kierkegaard have shown that several motifs and themes, traceable to Kierkegaard’s works, are to be found in her writings. The clergyman in Money, Selma’s uncle, is depicted with a slight ironic and critical hand. This ironic portrait is, for instance, often connected to Kierkegaard’s critique of bishops and clergymen in the latter half of his authorship.30 The short story “When Mrs. Svensson Performed Devotions” has been read by several researchers as a typical satire upon the kind of Christianity that Kierkegaard criticized.31 Nils Åke Sjöstedt has detected some motifs with connection to Kierkegaard in the short stories and fragments that originate from the period when she was confined to bed due to a bone disease. The short story “Among Wretched Creatures,” in which she writes about “the dull feeling of suffering from being an exception to the rule,”32 contains echoes of Kierkegaard’s thoughts about suffering and individuality.33 In the short story “Falaska” (1885) Sjöstedt finds in the story the kind of anxious uncertainty depicted in Either/Or and “Guilty/Not Guilty” in Stages on Life’s Way.34 The love and thoughts of Maria in this short story show similar characteristic features to those exhibited by the female victims of reflected sorrow depicted in “Shadowgraphs” in Either/Or, Part One.35 There is also an early entry that concerns Benedictsson’s view on literature noted under the heading “Realistic Literary Art,” which was probably written around 1883.36 The short note alludes to the beginning of Stages on Life’s Way and the distinction between memory and recollection: Kierkegaard says that there is a great difference between recollecting and remembering. He is right. Recollection produces pieces of art, memory only photographs. What one remembers is a seed that is lowered in the soul. When one forgets, it is thought to be dead. But that is not the case. Deep down in the soul, the seed is quietly growing and comes to life. This life is what Kierkegaard calls “recollection.” When the recollection grows and assumes a particular form, it is called a poetical work.37 See Linder, Ernst Ahlgren i hennes romaner, pp. 105–6; and Sjöstedt, Sören Kierkegaard och svensk litteratur, p. 306. 31 Victoria Bendictsson, “När Fru Svensson höll husandakt,” in Efterskörd, Stockholm: Z. Hæggström 1890, pp. 56–78. See also Sjöstedt, Sören Kierkegaard och svensk litteratur, p. 306; and Norrman, I livets hand, pp. 91–3. 32 Victoria Bendictsson, “Bland stackare,” in Efterskörd, pp. 3–26, see p. 13. 33 See Sjöstedt, Sören Kierkegaard och svensk litteratur, p. 306. 34 Victoria Benedictsson, “Falaska,” in Berättelser och utkast, Stockholm: Z. Hæggström 1888, pp. 91–103. 35 Sjöstedt, Sören Kierkegaard och svensk litteratur, pp. 308–9. 36 Benedictsson, Stora boken, vol. 1, p. 209. 37 Ibid., p. 209. 30

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Realistic literary art is, in Benedictsson’s view, according to this note, neither a mimetic depiction of reality, nor a production of fantasy, but pieces of an experienced reality that are filtered through the “soul” and the mechanism of recollection. It is seen as something opposed to things simply remembered. Sjöstedt has pointed out that this formula is valid for her own writings as well. Her depictions have a solid core of reality, but they never tend to be simple reproductions.38 Recollection gives the experienced material “a life of its own.”39 It is important to view what is written in Benedictsson’s diary, or workbook, from the last part of her life that includes the dramatic relationship with Georg Brandes, with this perspective in mind. III. Mrs. Marianne and the Battle of Ethics Mrs. Marianne was a book close to Victoria Benedictsson’s heart, and it was published in 1887. The novel was partly conceived during the long evenings when she waited in vain for Georg Brandes to come to her hotel room.40 She sent the novel to him accompanied with the words: “To G.B. with fear and trembling, but in a good mood, from his devoted scapegoat, the author.”41 The phrase is jocular and gives the impression that it is playing on some mutual understanding, oxymoronic in its way of combining the gravity of Kierkegaard’s book Fear and Trembling with a lively and bright “good mood.” It is as if she were conscious that she was going to sacrifice herself. Brandes is the great judge who, like God in the tale of Abraham and Isaac, has the power to both give and take life. Her book was clearly written to make a serious statement on the topic of the relationship between the sexes, but his delayed, self-pitying answer was a catastrophe to her: Dear Lady! That you didn’t hear from me is not due to an uneasiness to write. I do not have a grudge against it—that is not the question. But I wish I could have liked Mrs. Marianne better than I do. I do not reject the good sides of it, but it is to too great an extent a ladies’ novel. But between us—also I have some sorrows and reasons for resentment. The entire press mob has attacked me in my absence. Apart from that, no further news. I am still lingering in Russia; it is like I am still there. Yours G.B.42

Brandes did most likely note the allusion to Kierkegaard in her dedication, but how did he understand it? It is possible to interpret his own answer as another allusion to Kierkegaard—to Kierkegaard’s famous answer to the Swedish author Fredrika Bremer (1801–65) when she asked for a meeting with Victor Eremita. Kierkegaard did not grant her a meeting; he was annoyed and blamed her for having created for him a reputation of being “a ladies’ author.”43 Brandes’ answer could very well be Sjöstedt, Sören Kierkegaard och svensk litteratur, pp. 309–10. Ibid. See also Ingrid af Schultén, Ernst Ahlgren. En litterär studie, Helsingfors: Söderström 1925, pp. 184ff. 40 Benedictsson, Stora boken, vol. 3, Dagbok 1886–1888, p. 173. 41 Quoted from Fredrik Böök, Victoria Benedictsson och Georg Brandes, Stockholm: Bonniers 1949, p. 200. 42 Ibid., p. 201. 43 See SKS K22, 176. 38 39

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read as a dismissal of her understanding of Kierkegaard, which is quite paradoxical since Brandes himself had tried to free himself, as well as the time, from the influence of Kierkegaard’s Romanticism. Brandes also criticized Kierkegaard for not being able to develop an independent ethical perspective.44 Brandes was also a supporter of free and true love independent of the institution of marriage. Here it will be suggested that the novel Mrs. Marianne is a serious attempt further to develop the ethical point of view from Either/Or, also represented in Stages on Life’s Way, and to improve Judge William’s perspective to cover a female point of view as well. The novel portrays the young Marianne Björk as a south Swedish, skånsk [Scanian] Madame Bovary, who, very young and naïve, marries the farmer Börje Olsson. The novel depicts the first year of a marriage. The story is narrated by an omniscient, concealed narrator, and it is for the most part filtered through the perspective of the slowly awakening young girl. After the marriage Marianne moves to Börje’s farmhouse in the countryside. The novel shows her discomfort in her marriage and new life. The situation is changed when Börje’s old friend, Pål Sandell, shows up and moves in with the couple. He tries to seduce Marianne, but she chooses Börje when she discovers that she will become the mother of his child. Benedictsson has made the husband Börje into an ethical kind of person, and Pål Sandell, the seducer, is modeled on the aesthetic and reflected seducer of Kierkegaard’s “The Seducer’s Diary.” The latter was an overly popular character of the late nineteenth century, divided in his sense of reality as well as in his psychological constitution. Kierkegaard, according to Linder, created the most important depiction of this reflected kind of person in the seducer Johannes.45 In the novel Mrs. Marianne, the young Marianne feels repentant. She makes an important personal decision and undergoes a metamorphosis as an individual and as the wife of Börje. The greater part of the novel thus describes a marriage, and would as such have been to the taste of Judge William. In “The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage” in Either/Or, Part Two, he argues that all romantic books and stories stop when the interesting part is still to come, that is, after the wedding.46 The maturity of Marianne from a “dollhouse-wife” to a “capable housewife and mother” resembles the way Judge William describes the transition from the aesthetic stage to the ethical.47 According to the fiction set up in Either/Or, Judge William is writing a letter to the aesthete A, and the aim of the letter is to make a convincing case for the validity and beauty of marriage.48 In the letter, Judge William discusses cultural clichés about love and marriage as they are presented in fairy-tales, romantic novels, and in the popular burlesque comedies of the time. He makes a distinction between three circumstances and perspectives on love: (1) the immediate love as in the formula 44 Georg Brandes, Søren Kierkegaard. En kritisk Fremstilling i Grundrids, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1877, pp. 154–6. 45 Linder, Ernst Ahlgren i hennes romaner, pp. 326–46. 46 Ibid., p. 355. 47 Sjöstedt, Sören Kierkegaard och svensk litteratur, p. 309. 48 SKS 3, 15 / EO2, 5.

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“see her—love her,” which is the ideal of the romances of chivalry, (2) the reflected and ironic view of love as represented by A in the first part of Either/Or, (3) the eternal view of marriage and love, which is the kind of love Judge William is trying to persuade A to adopt. He is trying to show A that true romantic love “can be united with and exist in marriage.”49 This is also the main and most important topic of the novel Mrs. Marianne, which is structured and narrated by means of three different genres according to the scheme from Either/Or: (1) romantic love, (2) ironic love, (3) marital love. The first part of Benedictsson’s novel shows an excessive play with references to romantic novels and clichés within the romantic genre. The heroine reads such novels and dreams of “the moment” when love will enter her life. The romantic paradigm is elaborated in the first part of the novel but slowly breaks down together with Marianne’s disappointment with her marriage. The second part of Mrs. Marianne shifts to the kind of ironic mode that was a common literary ideal in the 1880s. It echoes Judge William’s criticism of A’s perspective on love. Pål Sandell, the aesthetic seducer, brings a new literary ideal into the novel together with the new literary taste of the time: French naturalism and decadence. Pål resembles the Kierkegaardian seducer, even quoting from Stages on Life’s Way when he says: “To recollect is by no means the same as to remember.”50 In the novel, Pål tries to do to Marianne what Johannes does to Cordelia. But Benedictsson’s main character breaks out of the seduction and puts herself in the position of making an active choice. In the last stage of Marianne’s development, the novel shows the stylistic features of a realistic novel. This is also the part of the novel were Marianne chooses to enter marital love, that is, an aesthetically valid marriage. It starts with Marianne feeling a deep anxiety. Her examination of herself soon makes her determined to take responsibility for herself and her marriage. She makes an explicit choice and chooses herself, and to be active in her own life. “She was not Marianne anymore, not the Marianne of the novels, not the enchanted and delightful being, the feminine riddle, the being an exception; she was created only to love and to be loved. She was a woman who was about to become a mother. A woman like a thousand others.”51 In the first part of the novel, Marianne strives for something outside herself, but in the end, when she has transformed and chosen herself, she is fully concentrated on the internal story of her marriage and everyday life. The novel shows the process of development of Marianne, but it also shows a literary development in three stages in terms of different genres. This structure follows parts of the argumentation of Judge William and his use of different kinds of attitudes towards love, and of different depictions of love, as described above. The criticized reflected way of love becomes analogous with the ironic and decadent mode of love of the 1880s. Judge William makes use of two concepts to make a distinction between two different ways to approach love. Either love is conquered, which is the seducer’s way of relating to love, or it is a possessing, a constant acquiring, which is the mode SKS 3, 38 / EO2, 31. SKS 6, 17 / SLW, 9: “At erindre er ingenlunde identisk med at huske.” 51 Benedictsson, Fru Marianne, p. 313. 49 50

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practiced by the married husband. But he also says that the “possessing nature has the conquering nature intrinsically.”52 A simile explains this idea: it is “like a farmer who does not place himself at the head of his hired men and drives his neighbor away, but conquers by digging in the earth. Thus true greatness is not making a conquest but in possessing.”53 Benedictsson has made the husband Börje a farmer, which can be taken as a proof of the fact that she was trying to develop the ethics of Either/Or, since the perspective in itself does not really seriously include the female part. Thus it is an attempt to go further than Kierkegaard’s ethics and transgress his narrow view on equality between the sexes in the ethical paradigm. It may also be added that there are more metaphors in Benedictsson’s novel that reflect Either/Or: both texts use “the flying Dutchman” as a picture for the aesthetic drifting around alone in life. Benedictsson even uses the famous picture of standing “at the crossroads.”54 In Mrs. Marianne it represents a woman who is about to be married. From a female point of view in the late nineteenth century, it becomes an emblem of the (female) eternal choice: “There she was at the crossroads. A woman’s most important guide.”55 As has been shown above, at many levels of the narrative construction of her novel Benedictsson constantly refers to Either/Or but changes it and presents the ethical perspective from a female point of view. In contrast to Brandes’ critique of Kierkegaard and the incomplete ethical stage and his personal devotion to an aesthetic point of view, Mrs. Marianne is a statement in favor of the ethics, loyal solidarity and true friendship between the sexes. In Victoria Benedictsson’s magnum opus, man and woman are moving towards an equal relationship as human beings.

SKS 3, 135 / EO2, 132. Ibid. 54 SKS 3, 155 / EO2, 157. 55 Benedictsson, Fru Marianne, p. 112. 52 53

Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Benedictsson’s Corpus Pengar, Stockholm: C.E. Fritze 1885. Fru Marianne, Stockholm: Z. Hæggström 1887, p. 218. “Falaska,” in Berättelser och utkast, Stockholm: Z. Hæggströms 1888, pp. 91–103. “Bland stackare,” in Efterskörd, Stockholm: Z. Hæggström 1890, pp. 3–26. “När Fru Svensson höll husandakt,” Efterskörd, Stockholm: Z. Hæggström 1890, pp. 56–78. Stora boken, vols. 1–3, ed. by Christina Sjöblad, vol. 1, Lund: Cavefors 1978, vols. 2–3, Stockholm: Liber förlag 1982–85, vol. 1 (Dagbok. 1882–1884), p. 209; p. 250; p. 273; pp. 285–6 (Letter to Frans von Schéele, January 11, 1884); vol. 3 (Stora boken och dagboken. Dagbok 1886–1888), p. 279. II. Sources of Benedictsson’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Brandes, Georg, Sören Kierkegaard, trans. by O.A. Strindberg, Stockholm: Jos. Seligmann 1877. –– Søren Kierkegaard. En kritisk Fremstilling i Grundrids, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1877. III. Secondary Literature on Benedictsson’s Relation to Kierkegaard Brudin Borg, Camilla, “A Philosopher of the Heart—Who Did Not Dance: The Swedish History of Reception of Either/Or,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2008, pp. 305–26. –– “Fru Mariannes uppförande: Søren Kierkegaards Antingen—eller i Victoria Benedictssons roman Fru Marianne,” in Tilltal och svar. Vänbok till Beata Agrell, ed. by Jenny Bergenmar et al., Stockholm and Stehag: Symposion 2009, pp. 98–108. Linder, Sten, Ernst Ahlgren i hennes romaner. Ett bidrag till det litterära åttiotalets karaktäristik, Stockholm: Bonniers 1930, p. 100; pp. 102–4; p. 306; pp. 326–46; p. 355. Norrman, Margit, I livets hand. En studie i Victoria Benedictssons religiösa föreställningsvärld, Avesta: Verbum 1978, pp. 18–20; pp. 91–3. Sjöstedt, Nils Åke, Sören Kierkegaard och svensk litteratur. Från Fredrika Bremer till Hjalmar Söderberg, Gothenburg: Wettergren & Kerbers Förlag 1950, pp. 304–11.

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–– “Swedish Literature” in The Legacy and Interpretation of Kierkegaard, ed. by Niels Thulstrup and Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1981 (Bibliotheca Kierkegardiana, vol. 8), pp. 40–53.

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Lars Gyllensten: Inventor of Modern Stages of Life Camilla Brudin Borg

Lars Gyllensten (1921–2006) was one of the most productive Swedish authors during the twentieth century; he was active from the end of World War II to the release of his last book in 2004. When he concluded his literary production it consisted of 42 novels, essay collections, and a multitude of reviews and articles in the daily press. He was also a full-time researcher and tutor in the medical field of histology and embryology; he defended his dissertation in medicine in 1953, and became assistant professor in histology in 1969. He produced about sixty scientific reports and was active as a scientific researcher until he became a full-time author in 1973. For his novels he was awarded the Pilot Prize in 1978 and the Selma Lagerlöf Prize in 1991, among others. To the international literary community Lars Gyllensten was famous in his function as the Swedish Academy’s Permanent Secretary (1977–86). He was elected as a member of the Swedish Academy in 1966, but left the Academy in 1989 as a direct act of protest against the Academy’s unwillingness to officially take a condemnatory stance toward the fatwa (that is, stated opinion or religious edict) issued by Ayatollah Khomeini (1902–89) on Salman Rushdie (b. 1947) because of the blasphemy of The Satanic Verses (1988). In Gyllensten’s work as an active cultural-political critic in the daily press, as a literary creative author, and in other kinds of academic and free intellectual work, he always defended the human rights of the individual and a complex and profound interpretation of existence. The metaphor he often used to characterize himself and his major role in public was the iconoclast. He wanted to be a critic of his contemporaries and the ideas of his time, constantly playing the role of the iconoclast in debates. In his literary art he tried to expose and analyze unethical or egoistic aims behind political or cultural rhetoric. The source of inspiration or forerunner of the idea of “the iconoclast” is clearly Søren Kierkegaard. In an interview in 1965 when asked about his programmatic oppositional stance and its connection to faith, Gyllensten said that “through the person of Kierkegaard and his authorship, I have had an intense experience of how it could work [being religious]. And Kierkegaard stands out as the one who has— maybe as far as it is possible—concretely lived as iconoclast, as Cain, as rebel.”1 Interview with Lars Gyllensten by Inge-Bert Täljedal, Vår Lösen, vol. 9, 1965, p. 435. All translations of Lars Gyllensten’s words in this article are made by Camilla Brudin Borg, if not stated otherwise.

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Saying this, he looks back at Kierkegaard’s attack on the Danish Church in 1854–55, which was established quite early as the principal understanding of Kierkegaard’s character in the general Swedish reception. The interpretation of Kierkegaard as extremely severe and demanding with regard to ethical and religious issues was especially strong at the end of the nineteenth century, but this narrow understanding also dominated the first part of the twentieth-century Swedish literary reception of Kierkegaard.2 Lars Gyllensten’s public literary debut was made when he and the fellow medical student Torgny Greitz (b. 1921), together under the pseudonym “Jan Wictor,” got their parody of modernistic lyric poems, Camera Obscura (1946),3 accepted by a famous publishing house in Stockholm. The book received fairly good reviews by the advocates of the lyrical modernistic movement. But the circumstances and the joking intention of the book were soon made public, and the scandal was followed by a fierce debate on the topic of incomprehensible poetry. This entrée into the public literary field was paradigmatic for Lars Gyllensten’s critical and ironic authorship to come. The idea of using a pseudonym as a shield for critical ideas when entering the literary field is clearly an imitation of Kierkegaard’s own ironic literary debut and its implicit attack on the Hegelians of his time in Either/Or in 1843. The reference to Kierkegaard is also carried out in the dialectical trilogy which opened his authorship after Camera Obscura, starting with Modern Myths (1949),4 where an aesthetic, distanced point of view towards the clichés of reality is mimicked, and contemporary philosophy, such as French existentialism is parodied. In this book the author uses the attitude and technique of Kierkegaard when he mocks his contemporary thinkers, i.e., Martensen et consortes and their ideas, through A’s attitude in Either/Or (1843). The author of Modern Myths is not to be taken as Gyllensten, even though “Lars Gyllensten” is the name on the cover. The book was accompanied by a “Prescription,” ambiguously meaning “preface” as well as “instruction” [pre- and script], where Gyllensten defines the “pseudonym” or “attitude” of the book as being in the manner of the medieval painter Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516). Bosch is a parodist according to the author of the book. He “lives in an endless sequence of incarnations. Every single, individual descent is in itself ridiculous, grotesque and meaningless….But there is no other way of living than individual and single.”5 Gyllensten in this way makes a caveat about every individual “incarnation” (that is, essay, attitude, character, idea) in the book: they are not to be confused with his own opinions, but the author also wants to draw special attention to the deep and serious problems the book addresses. He is ironic in the manner of Kierkegaard whom he is imitating, and the author interprets the irony of

Sten Linder, Ernst Ahlgren i hennes romaner. Ett bidrag till det litterära åttiotalets karaktäristik, Stockholm: Bonniers 1930, pp. 102–5. 3 Lars Gyllensten and Torgny Greitz (pseudonym, Jan Wictor), Camera obscura, Stockholm: Bonniers 1946. 4 Lars Gyllensten, Moderna myter, Stockholm: Bonniers 1949. 5 Ibid., p. 9. 2

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Kierkegaard as being serious and ironic at the same time.6 This method of writing was a deliberate stance taken by Gyllensten as a necessity and consequence of his diagnosis of the time. The motto of the book is Creo quia absurdum (I create because it is absurd), a variation on Tertullian’s Credo quia absurdum (I believe because it is absurd).7 The variation actually sheds a clear light on the main difference between Gyllensten and Kierkegaard: belief is replaced by artistic creation. The absurdity of existence is deeply investigated from different perspectives in the first books. The pseudonymous authorship of Kierkegaard became of immediate interest to Gyllensten, who was confident that it no longer was possible or ethical to try to represent an objective reality in an objective manner after the two World Wars. Several debates concerning political, scientific, and moral issues were taking place at the time, and the connection between literature and politics (or ideologies) was scrutinized. Gyllensten declared “the bankruptcy of the naiveté”8 and turned away from the naturalistic belief in an objective reality. He also stated that he was not going to write “single books”—his intention was “to create a whole body of writings.”9 The books were supposed to create a network of communications “talking to, polemizing, supplementing and shedding light on each other.”10 He was interested in earlier literary tradition such as the Romantic paradigm, from which he selected individual ideas such as the dialectical method and the stages of life, but he developed and experimented with the techniques in his own fashion.11 Gyllensten worked with a great number of images and metaphors functioning on a meta-level, reflecting the textual situation he wanted to create. The metaphors were meant to enlighten the many possible interpretations of his books, and the images, taken together, created a network of connections through the whole body of his writings. Gyllensten collected these metaphors from different contexts and discourses, such as science, existential philosophy or theology, and tried in this way to transfer meaning from one language field to another: “stages,” “artifact,” and “model” have already been mentioned; “prayer,” “invocation,” and “icon” are taken from the religious field; “palimpsest,” “camera obscura,” and “cave” are examples of other such multi-dimensional metaphors or “heteroglossia.”12 He also described

Hans-Erik Johannesson, Studier i Lars Gyllenstens estetik. Hans teorier om författarskapets villkor och teknik t.o.m. 1978, Göteborg: Skrifter utgivna av Litteraturvetenskapliga institutionen vid Göteborgs universitet 1978 (1973), pp. 53–4. 7 See SKS 1, 357 / CI, 329. SKS 19, 13, Not1:2 / KJN 3, 9. SKS 21, 313, NB10:109 / JP 6, 6373. SKS 18, 39, EE:103 / KJN 2, 35. 8 Gyllensten, Moderna myter, p. 175. 9 Lars Gyllensten, Ur min offentliga sektor, Stockholm: Aldus 1971, p. 175. 10 Ibid. 11 Johannesson, Studier i Lars Gyllenstens estetik, p. 134. 12 The term “heteroglossia” is a term used by Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) in the essay “Discourse in the Novel,” published in English in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. by Michael Holquist, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press 1981, and it connotes the existence of a multitude of languages within a national language. 6

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his books and the possible meanings they were supposed to open up as “possible worlds,” closely connected to possible world theories.13 I. Truth is Subjective Gyllensten early found a precursor in the writings of Kierkegaard whom he admired for his ideas but in particular for the method in which he communicated them. Gyllensten has said that he had the feeling of intellectual affinity when he made his first acquaintance with Kierkegaard, which was at the same time as he started to read Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) at the end of the 1930s when he was about 18 years old.14 In his autobiography, though, he mentions that he became acquainted with Kierkegaard through Johannes Hohlenberg’s biography of Kierkegaard (1943).15 Gyllensten attached his own ideas to famous formulations such as “The world as will and idea” (Schopenhauer) and “Truth is subjective” (Kierkegaard), but during his authorship he scrutinizes and invests these statements with different meaning. Language was primarily taken to be the basic condition of man’s ability, in fact, his only tool to reach and to understand an external reality, and as a consequence the experiments in language have always been the primary focus in Gyllensten’s novels. Words and phrases are given different meanings depending on the aim of his writings and the publishing situation. A way of understanding how Gyllensten interprets “Truth is subjective” is to look at it as a boundary drawn by Kierkegaard, as a confession to the fact that we cannot step out of our own values and methods, ways of thinking, images, similes and temptations, historical or private, universal and in formations of groups, arbitrary and inevitable, etc. We cannot find an objective guarantor, and there is no greater power than our own engagement to support our own confidence.16

In this passage Gyllensten highlights the abyss between the human and the inhuman (the unreachable reality or the eternal). Subjectivity is here an ontological condition for Gyllensten’s epistemology. But there have also been other ways of interpreting Kierkegaardian subjectivity. In 1964, Gyllensten wrote a review of the translation of Martin Buber’s (1878–1965) Der Weg des Menschen nach der chassidischen Lehre (1948).17 In the article, the meaning of subjectivity to the individual is “to seek the Lars Gyllensten, “Possible Worlds—A Chorus of a Multitude of Souls,” in Possible Worlds in Humanities, Arts and Sciences. Proceedings of Nobel Symposium 65, ed. by Sture Allén, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter 1989, pp. 272–92. 14 Johannesson, Studier i Lars Gyllenstens estetik, in a letter to Johannesson August 28, 1971, see p. 12, and Gyllensten, Ur min offentliga sektor, p. 182. 15 Johannes Hohlenberg, Sören Kierkegaard, Stockholm: Bonniers 1943 and Lars Gyllensten, Minnen, bara minnen, Stockholm: Bonniers 2000, pp. 166–8. 16 Gyllensten, Ur min offentliga sektor, p. 214. 17 Gyllensten’s copy of Buber’s Der Weg des Menschen nach der chassidischen Lehre, Den Haag: Pulvis Viarum 1948, see Lars Gyllensten and Georg Klein, Hack i häl på Minerva. Ett brevsamtal om vetenskap, dikt och moral, Stockholm: Bonniers 1993, p. 77. 13

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individual’s own individual way, decided by her own character, because that is the only way she can find the consummate experience and action that will make her life true and real. There is much in Buber’s words that could have been Kierkegaard’s— ‘Truth is subjective.’ ”18 Here subjectivity is an inherent condition in human beings, necessary to gain their happiness and harmony. Partly, both ways of interpreting Kierkegaard’s subjectivity are fruitful, but neither is open to Kierkegaard’s faith in the eternal and God. The later books of Gyllensten often carry a forcible struggle with an absent God, and Thure Stenström has, as an example, shown that The Cave in the Dessert (1973)19 has themes close to the via negativa and Meister Eckhart’s mysticism.20 As the scientist that he was at heart, Gyllensten was most likely not seeking the absent God, but used “devil, “icon,” “god,” and other religious words as metaphors in his constant investigation, trial and critique of the immanent reality which neither was strictly accessible nor objectively understandable from this point of view.21 II. The Reception of Kierkegaard: Dependence and Anxiety Gyllensten made his very first acquaintance with Kierkegaard through Hjalmar Helweg’s psychological study from 1933.22 He then started to read Kierkegaard’s own books, but he cannot be taken to be entirely trustworthy when he says, in an article on Kierkegaard from 1949, that he immediately stopped reading Kierkegaard’s books halfway through Either/Or.23 He found the stylistic manner of Kierkegaard contagious, his way of life a splendid solution to the problems of his own time, but the method Gyllensten wanted to create was already fully explored by Kierkegaard. Gyllensten was pushed away and concluded: “it could be a good idea to have a self oneself.”24 It obviously created a dilemma for the young Gyllensten when he was asked to write about his first strong impression of Kierkegaard in 1949 for the magazine Utsikt. In the article, “Sören Kierkegaard,” Gyllenstein criticizes contemporary Kierkegaard authorities—such as “a bishop,” that is, the Swedish theologian Torsten Bohlin (1889–1950), for making Kierkegaard into a theologian, and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) for making him a “coffeehouse philosopher.” The critique targets a frequent tendency to appropriate Kierkegaard’s ideas to the writer’s own system of ideas. Gyllensten tries to solve the dilemma by writing an ironical pastiche in the vein of “Diapsalmata” and its famous aesthetic agonizing over the choice:25 Lars Gyllensten, “En judisk existentialist,” in his Ur min offentliga sektor, p. 127. Lars Gyllensten, Grottan i öknen, Stockholm: Bonniers 1973. 20 Thure Stenström, Gyllensten i hjärtats öken. Strövtåg i Lars Gyllenstens författarskap, särskilt Grottan i öknen, Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis 1996, pp. 311–13. 21 Camilla Brudin Borg, Skuggspel. Mellan bildkritik och ikonestetik i Lars Gyllenstens författarskap, Skellefteå: Artos/Norma Bokförlag 2005, pp. 127–31. 22 Hjalmar Helweg, Søren Kierkegaard. En psykiatrisk-psykologisk studie, trans. by Julia von Sneidern, Stockholm: Sveriges kristna studentrörelses förlag 1933. 23 Lars Gyllensten, “Sören Kierkegaard,” Utsikt, vol. 3, 1949, pp. 14–15. 24 Ibid. 25 SKS 2, 47 / EO1, 38. 18 19

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Camilla Brudin Borg Write about Kierkegaard, and I will regret it; do not write about him, and I will also regret it. Write about him or do not write about him and I will regret it either way. Whether I write about him or I do not write about him, I will regret it either way. Now, I have not written about Kierkegaard, and I will be regretting it. If I want to be an absolute being, it remains for me to regret the other alternative as well. It remains for me to regret that I have written about him. Because of this, I will now perform a small causerie, in diminuendo, so that I both have written about him and not written about him; then I can regret both.26

The above quotation is a clear case of what Harold Bloom calls “the anxiety of influence.” In this view of influence, intertextuality or imitation, the author (“the ephebe”) is doomed to always walk behind his own great precursors. The conflict consists in that the author, on the one hand, wants to imitate but, on the other hand, also wants to be original.27 What is obvious through the critique of Bohlin and Sartre, taken together with the cited passage, is that Gyllensten is much more influenced by Kierkegaard and better informed about studies on Kierkegaard’s authorship than he pretended early in his career in 1949. Gyllensten actually opens the article by saying that he has found a diary in a desk drawer which he has decided to call “A’s diary.”28 The entry from September 2 reads “Søren Kierkegaard has made all future writing unnecessary.”29 The whole article is a pastiche on Kierkegaard’s method of “including allegedly authentic diaries.”30 Hans Isaksson, who introduced Lars Gyllensten to American readers, concludes that Kierkegaard had been significant for Gyllensten’s own writing on several different levels: first in consideration of Kierkegaard’s “philosophic and ironic prose style”; on a second level he has “to a significant extent taken up ideas and motifs from Kierkegaard’s writing in his own novels.”31 At the third, and most important, Kierkegaard became an early model for Gyllensten, who adopted the basic method of Kierkegaard, but also modified it for his own needs. Where Kierkegaard’s stages of life have their ultimate goal in the religious stage, Gyllensten is “testing and forming the different possibilities for life in his time.”32 The dialectical method of Kierkegaard was combined with modern scientific ideas and methods from the medical and scientific profession and further matched with pragmatic language theory. It is often pointed out that Gyllensten made the method of Kierkegaard his own and combined his “writing in stages” with the idea of “the infinite inquiry” coined by C.S. Peirce (1839–1914), and that he often described his method (or methods) as analogous to different scientific ways of using parallel descriptions of reality. Gyllensten here refers to the principle of complementarity by Niels Bohr Lars Gyllensten, “Sören Kierkegaard,” pp. 14–15. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1973. 28 Gyllensten, “Sören Kierkegaard,” pp. 14–15. 29 Ibid. 30 Hans Isaksson, Lars Gyllensten, trans. by Katy Lissbrant, Boston: Twayne 1978, pp. 38–9. 31 Ibid., p. 39. 32 Ibid., pp. 39–40. 26 27

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(1885–1962), who stated that items could be separately analyzed as having different but not compatible properties. One example is light that could be described as both waves and streams of particles. This idea is combined with Kierkegaard’s way of creating different stages, but in Gyllensten’s writings the stages were not automatically to be taken as progressing towards better or more refined ways of experiencing and appreciating life. From this point of view, they are simply different, and (almost) equally valid ways of describing reality. But Gyllensten, as mentioned above, often refers to C.S. Peirce and “the infinite inquiry.” Peirce’s epistemological posture is, however, not entirely consistent with Bohr’s complementarity, since for the former there is a necessary qualitative difference between different descriptions of an item. As those two epistemological models are combined with the idea of “stages of life,” they constitute a most refined way of interpreting Kierkegaard and the ironic and Romantic way of writing a philosophical literature (or literary philosophy).33 III. Kierkegaard Appropriated Gyllensten interprets Kierkegaard’s authorship from many angles in several articles that have the works of Søren Kierkegaard as their topic. A few themes reappear such as the tension between Kierkegaard’s faith and disbelief and the problems concerning the pseudonymity. Gyllensten regards Kierkegaard as a rationalist, not associated with irrational “sentimentalists such as Rousseau,”34 and he considers Kierkegaard to be his spiritual relative, a humanistic skeptic, and as someone who has realized that the objective doctrines are invalid. He sometimes does not even regard Kierkegaard as a Christian.35 The article “Sören Kierkegaard” (1949) consists of an uncommon, ironic interpretation of Kierkegaard and the pseudonymous technique: Sören Kierkegaard is a dandy in dilemma, who makes himself a priest in defense. He is a prevented priest, who makes himself a dandy in defense. Because of this he is neither dandy nor priest, for the priest can never trust that he is not a dressed up dandy. The dandy cannot be sure that he is not a priest in disguise. Whether he is a dandy, or he is a priest, he regrets it either way. He always has to entangle himself, and therefore he is always treacherous. Either he is one who entangles dishonestly against the one whom he unrighteously entangles, or is the one who is being entangled dishonestly against the one who righteously entangles him. The highest of all is to be an absolute being. But each possibility can be regretted, and that, though, is a little something to make use of.36

Brudin Borg, Skuggspel, pp. 35–9. Lars Gyllensten, “Tidlöst jubileum,” Dagens Nyheter, November 11, 1955; also in his Nihilistiskt credo, Stockholm: Bonniers 1964, pp. 45–6. 35 Thure Stenström, Existentialismen i Sverige. Mottagande och inflytande 1900–1950, Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis 1984, p. 226. 36 Gyllensten, “Sören Kierkegaard,” pp. 14–15. 33 34

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The image of the entangled and treacherous dandy/priest in the above quotation is of course ironic in style. But the same kind of imagery returns in other articles on Kierkegaard and points to the fact that Gyllensten, at the beginning of his acquaintance, cherished an image of Kierkegaard as being torn between two opposite appearances. The enigma and the mysteries around Kierkegaard did not pass Gyllensten unnoticed, and he interprets the method of writing as a way of insisting on the mystery and giving the reader no final solution. His image of Kierkegaard has a lot in common with Georg Brandes’ reading of Kierkegaard’s personality as being torn between piety and reverence and with the unsettled mysteries and enigmas of his life.37 In “Synpunkt på Sören Kierkegaard” [Viewpoint on Sören Kierkegaard] (1950),38 Gyllensten describes Kierkegaard as a believer who can only approach his God as a desperado, always walking the long road like Ahasverus, the wandering Jew. In Gyllensten’s opinion, Kierkegaard is constantly trying to realize the artifact (a “man-made,” created art product), and Kierkegaard’s faith was an artifact, according to Gyllensten. Kierkegaard had to make the single individual real and had to create the experiences of the completely seductive situation in the Garden of Eden. He regards Kierkegaard as the single individual who only through his own fall could experience God and because of that “had to create his own tower to fall from.”39 A human being has to be both “creator and creature,” and this situation is her sin and punishment, but also her salvation.40 Gyllensten does not, as was common at the time, interpret Kierkegaard’s “stages of life” as a developing chain of stages; he does not put the religious as the final goal: His [Kierkegaard’s] poetry is ritual; it is interwoven in a falling that becomes possible by the word. The religious will not sublate the aesthetic and the ethical. The tension in his writings does not just lie in the synthesis, but in the totality of thesis, antithesis and synthesis: in the form, the triad. The seductive lies in the fact that he in any case will always be the Seducer.41

The title of the article was, as mentioned above, “Viewpoint on Sören Kierkegaard,” and behind this heading lies the interpretation of “a viewpoint” as “an excuse to aim at” or “come in view of” something. It is an allusion to Kierkegaard’s own The Point of View for My Work as an Author. Through Kierkegaard, Gyllensten is trying to provoke a fruitful interpretation of reality, of faith or other things of immediate interest. As an example, in the article a critique is initially developed of “the attitude of the opponents of women clergymen”42 and the idea of God as “a nice caring

Georg Brandes, Søren Kierkegaard. En kritisk Fremstilling i Grundrids, Copenhagen: Gyldendals 1877. 38 Lars Gyllensten, “Synpunkt på Sören Kierkegaard,” Prisma, vol. 2, 1950, pp. 72–3, reprinted in Nihilistiskt credo, Stockholm: Bonniers 1964, pp. 23–7. 39 Gyllensten, “Synpunkt på Sören Kierkegaard,” p. 26. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 37

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father.”43 Gyllensten pushes forward instead the image of “God as the Devil” and uses his own understanding of Kierkegaard’s faith and disbelief to create this image. Anders Olsson has in Läsningar av intet [Readings of Nothingness] (2000) criticized this interpretation of Kierkegaard. Olsson studies “the demonic character” of the writings of Kierkegaard, and “the demonic” is understood by Olsson as something that appeared when the boundary line between God and the image of God created by human beings was transgressed during Romanticism. According to Olsson, Kierkegaard uses a demonic form to communicate the “system” and his concepts. The form is in itself a kind of demonic feature that Olsson relates to the seducer of Either/Or, and which covers the center from which the theory also emanates.44 Olsson concludes that Gyllensten, on the other hand, transforms the negative theology of Kierkegaard into a nihilistic searching that in its structure undermines the actual existence of God. What is left of Kierkegaard’s faith is a romantic creation of myths; God becomes an artistic artifact, and thus it will be impossible to keep the concept of God intact against the distrust of nihilism. God is a demon; the border between heaven and abyss has been abolished.45

Olsson in this way criticizes Gyllensten’s ways of projecting several of his own ideas onto the image of Kierkegaard. Gyllensten projects his own ideas and paradoxes on Kierkegaard, but the reading is nevertheless interesting in its provocative design. Five years later Gyllensten made a major attempt to rescue Kierkegaard from the grip of the existentialists and the image of Kierkegaard as “the father” of the existentialist tradition. Gyllensten, a medical scientist, was at the time essentially attached to the paradigm of empirical philosophy and did not want to see his chief mentor in the hands of the, at the time very popular but also criticized, existentialist movement of France. It has been pointed out that what Gyllensten on one occasion voices strong reservations against, he happily embraces in other articles.46 Isaksson also notes that Gyllensten’s essays sometimes show inconsistencies and states that these are due to the occasion and the circumstances of the publication. Gyllensten also probably took on “roles” and acted as a kind of pseudonym in cultural debates.47 There is a very important parallel between Gyllensten and Kierkegaard when Gyllensten, in a fictive interview with Kierkegaard, asks questions about the connection between the pseudonymous authorship and the authorship in Kierkegaard’s own name. Gyllensten detects a crack in the image of the religious critic and the iconoclasm at the end of Kierkegaard’s production. Gyllensten is, for instance, puzzled over the fact Ibid. Anders Olsson, Läsningar av intet, Stockholm: Bonniers 2000, p. 11. Anders Olsson traces different manifestations of “nothingness as a figure” which connote “a relative concept that occasionally becomes conjuring and takes on the character of a rhetorical figure.” 45 Ibid., pp. 112–13. Anders Olsson is talking about the image of God created in the essay “Synpunkt på Sören Kierkegaard.” 46 Stenström, Existentialismen i Sverige, p. 225; Hans Isaksson, Hängivenhet och distans. En studie i Lars Gyllenstens romankonst, Stockholm: Aldus/Bonniers 1974, p. 19; Borg, Skuggspel, p. 103. 47 Brudin Borg, Skuggspel, pp. 102–14. 43 44

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that Kierkegaard himself, on the one hand, was living on the interest of his inherited capital and, on the other, fiercely criticized the clergymen and bishops for having too high an income. Where should one draw the boundary line between the pseudonyms and Kierkegaard himself, Gyllensten asks? What is to be taken as poetry and what as seriousness? Gyllensten draws the conclusion that even things that Kierkegaard wrote in his own name, such as the edifying discourses and the final attack on the Danish Church, have to be interpreted as written by a kind of pseudonym; at least the author is not to be taken to be consistent with Kierkegaard’s private biographical self. The last production has to be read more as recommendations, and not to be confused with the life of the individual and private Kierkegaard.48 As with many of Gyllensten’s sometimes eccentric interpretations, these originate from his own authorship and are created to support the way he constructed his own “whole body of writings” and the relation between his private and subjective self, as mentioned above. On the occasion of the 100-year anniversary of the death of Kierkegaard, Gyllensten wrote an article, “Tidlöst jubileum” (Timeless Anniversary) (1955),49 where he makes a daring and brave attempt to characterize Kierkegaard’s thinking as scholastic. He declares the basic opinion that Kierkegaard was a poet of ideas and his stages were purified, brutal but consistently carried out, constructions of ideas without any autobiographical content. Kierkegaard was, according to Gyllensten, a spiritual and speculative writer in the same vein as G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831), Immanuel Kant, and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1716) who, as he stated, were not primarily interested in social history or politics, and in this sense were not empirical thinkers. Surprisingly, Gyllensten then places Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) and the Vienna school in the same tradition as Hegel and Kierkegaard. To understand this way of forming a tradition and naming it “scholastic,” one must see that the basic criterion is only to have a principal interest in things outside of time, for example, a life in Christ, in ideas or in an ideal reality clearly separated from depictions of a realistic reality. Kierkegaard is a philosopher of subjectivity, but he is not “self-willed, he is paradoxical but not irrational, he is aristocratic but not brutal,”50 Gyllensten concludes, and continues that Kierkegaard was “an aristocratic-anarchist and a reactionary scholastic”51 who had more in common with the empirical logicians than with existentialism, or with philosophers like Nietzsche and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78). Then Kierkegaard, Gyllensten’s own “idol,” could safely be excluded from the existentialists, whom, according to Gyllensten, had appropriated Kierkegaard unjustly.52 Gyllensten also conjured Kierkegaard to life by simulating an interview with the author in “Intervju med pseudonymen Sören Kierkegaard” (Interview with the 48 Lars Gyllensten, “Intervju med pseudonymen Sören Kierkegaard,” Vintergatan 1963; also in Nihilistiskt credo, pp. 83–92. 49 Lars Gyllensten, “Tidlöst jubileum,” Dagens Nyheter, November 11, 1955; also in his Nihilistiskt credo, pp. 41–46. 50 Stenström, Existentialismen i Sverige, p. 231. 51 Gyllensten, Nihilistiskt credo, pp. 41–6. 52 Ibid.

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Pseudonym Søren Kierkegaard) (1963).53 The article opens with an expressive scene: a carriage with Kierkegaard is slowly coming down a small road in the vibrating heat of the Danish summer. Gyllensten asks to have a ride with the poet, and here starts a dialogue, at times an intense quarrel, between the two. Gyllensten accuses Kierkegaard of being a friend of “easily bought success,” but Kierkegaard defends himself by saying he is actually a critic of “spicy success,” and Gyllensten goes on: But is not the author of “The Seducer’s Diary” a friend of spicy details? Is not the writer who over and over used the intriguing details from his own engagement, a friend of easy success? Are not all the ironies and the pastiches just evasive ways of escaping all attacks? Kierkegaard answers, through Gyllensten’s pen, that he was the author “whose function was to put his contemporaries to the test and to be a general offense to his time.”54 The pseudonyms’ function was then to be a constant reminder that the pseudonyms and their way of life were not for real—but could be—if someone were to embrace the attitude and make it his own.55 Reviewing Finn Jor’s and Frithiof Brandt’s books on Kierkegaard in 1956,56 Gyllensten connects Kierkegaard to his own way of using different roles as a writer: “The author [Kierkegaard] is like a director in the theater who works with parts and characters that combine their own interests in consequence of their type and nature, and at the same time they speak for the author on a principal level.”57 Gyllensten even detects examples of when the author is arguing against his characters in Kierkegaard’s work.58 To conclude, some of the theme and topics that Gyllensten himself addressed in his early articles on Kierkegaard, it is important to emphasize his struggle to make Kierkegaard his own and “to rescue” him from the at the time popular but also criticized existentialists. One strategy was to make Kierkegaard part of “the scholastic tradition,” another to create a close dialogue with his precursor, even though this dialogue at times looks more like accusations and quarrels. Gyllensten often uses Kierkegaard’s own literary techniques, such as when he writes a pastiche on “Diapsalmata” and famous aphorisms, or even when he uses the biography of Kierkegaard, for instance the young Søren’s fantasy walks with his father in their living room, as a model for his interview with Kierkegaard.59 This way of appropriating Søren Kierkegaard was, of course, not left unchallenged. Lars Ahlin (1915–97), himself an important Kierkegaard-interpreter with a Christian perspective, had to reply. Ahlin criticized the way Gyllensten places Kierkegaard in the scholastic tradition. He raises the question of faith and knowledge, and points to the fact that these two things are incommensurable, since they are absolutely Lars Gyllensten, “Tidlöst jubileum,” Dagens Nyheter, November 11, 1955. Gyllensten, “Intervju med pseudonymen Sören Kierkegaard,” pp. 83–92. 55 Ibid. 56 Frithiof Brandt, Søren Kierkegaard, Stockholm: Natur och kultur 1955; Finn Jor, Sören Kierkegaard. Det levda livets tänkare, Stockholm: Svenska kyrkans diakonistyrelses bokförlag 1955. 57 Lars Gyllensten, “Introduktioner till Kierkegaard,” Dagens Nyheter, March 12, 1956 (review of Frithiof Brandt’s and Fin Jor’s books on Kierkegaard). 58 Ibid. 59 Gyllensten, “Intervju med pseudonymen Sören Kierkegaard,” pp. 83–92. 53 54

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separated in Kierkegaard’s way of thinking: “they neither agree, nor disagree.”60 Ahlin also objects to Gyllensten’s view of Kierkegaard as a rationalistic philosopher, and to the characterization of him as an “anarchistic aristocrat.”61 Instead Ahlin brings out the religiousness and a deeper understanding for the non-aesthetic side of Kierkegaard’s works. Ahlin especially underlines the theme that, for Kierkegaard, subjectivity was untruth “because the human who is a sinner, lacks the possibility of coming into contact with the truth,” or God, “as the infinite necessary subjectivity.”62 As described above, Lars Gyllensten imitated Kierkegaard’s method in his own way, and he interpreted Kierkegaard’s ideas in a very personal manner, but he also used several mythical heroes, themes, and motifs from Kierkegaard’s works. Many have tried to understand the essential method of Gyllensten and how it relates to Kierkegaard, and the studies have been numerous over the years. Some examples of ways of characterizing the essential features in the academic studies have been: as primarily dialectical,63 as a thinking in myths and as creating with mythological material,64 as role-playing,65 as a searching for an absent God,66 or as a secular and cultural-critical focused deed,67 and many more. In the next section, light will be shed on some important themes in Gyllensten’s works and their connection to Kierkegaard. IV. The Mythical Method Lars Gyllensten’s first book after Camera obscura was, as mentioned above, called Modern Myths, and the title points to the significant topics—modernity and its myths—that were going to follow Gyllensten all the way through his authorship. His method of using myths and religious motifs was very consciously elaborated and was transformed to function from a point of view that was relevant to his own time. Saga Oscarson has pointed out that in all of his books Gyllensten was using a mythological ritual “through death to life” as a developmental formula which has its original idea in Fear and Trembling and in the sacrifice of Isaac that turns into a “rebirth” when Abraham gets his son and “everything back.”68

Lars Ahlin, “Brev till Lars Gyllensten. Stockholm den 11 december 1955,” in Breviarium, Stockholm: Bonniers 1996, p. 24. 61 Ibid., p. 40. 62 Ibid. 63 Isaksson, Hängivenhet och distans, pp. 46ff. 64 Saga Oscarsson, Gyllensten som Orfeus. En studie i Lars Gyllenstens mytiska diktning, Stockholm: Bonniers 1992, pp. 53–60. 65 Kerstin Munck, Gyllenstens roller. En studie over tematik och gestaltning i Lars Gyllenstens författarskap, Lund: CWK Gleerup Bokförlag 1974, pp. 33–7. 66 Bo Larsson, Gud som provisorium. En linje i Lars Gyllenstens författarskap, Stockholm: Verbum förlag 1990, and Benkt-Erik Benktson, Samtidighetens mirakel. Kring tidsproblematiken i Lars Gyllenstens romaner, Stockholm: Bonniers 1989. 67 Brudin Borg, Skuggspel, pp. 13–18. 68 Oscarson, Gyllensten som Orfeus, pp. 59–60. 60

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Abraham is also the name of the leading character in The Blue Ship (1950),69 but he is not, as in Fear and Trembling, “the father of faith,” but he is just a young boy living on the archipelago boat “Framåt Gunga” (Forward Roll). The sacrifice in The Blue Ship is rather, according to Oscarson, a sacrifice of the young boy’s childhood. His mother Emma, the all-encompassing Mother, leaves the crying Abraham in the last chapter, “The Sacrifice of Abraham,” and walks away on the sea like Jesus, leaving the boy alone in the world, as an image of the condition of the lonely modern man who has been left by his God. The sacrifice is thus not made by a father but by the boy himself, or by the mother/God. In the four “lyrical songs” of Fear and Trembling, a mother is described weaning her child in various ways. The mother and the child is in Kierkegaard’s books an allegory for the story of God and Abraham told by Johannes de silentio. The four different lyrical songs are molded from the perspective of Johannes, who cannot understand the frightful content of the mythic tale, where God demands that Abraham sacrifice his own beloved son. In The Blue Ship, the mother is metaphorically weaning her son Abraham and finally leaves him lonely in the world. It only depends on himself if he can make the final leap. As Oscarson has shown, the Abraham motif of the The Blue Ship alludes to other Kierkegaardian themes as well, such as the dizziness, the spiritual awakening through the Fall of Man, and the sacrifice. Abraham is thus a combination of Kierkegaard’s Abraham and Adam of The Concept of Anxiety. He has just discovered the possibilities of his freedom and his sexuality; he falls and feels the dizziness connected to the anxiety described by Vigilius Haufniensis, and this anxiety concerns “nothing.”70 Oscarson also analyzes Diarium Spirituale (1968),71 which is read as a metanovel showing how a literary artwork is born as a parallel to the ways that images of reality are created. She shows how Gyllensten tried different combinations of ideas when he was about to develop a new mythical role and transfer himself to the mythical hero; this was a strategy intended to find a new “stage of life” to investigate. In Gyllensten’s notebooks, she has detected how he tries to combine the myth of Orpheus and Kierkegaard’s break with Regine Olsen. He wants to understand why Orpheus turns his head and fails, a central point for the interpretation of the mythological hero.72 Gyllensten also tries to imagine Judge Wilhelm as a seducer and elaborates the concept of duty beyond Either/Or and Kierkegaard’s ethical stage. The ethical attitude is hereby given a new function—the duty to break every love relation, “the duty to put oneself in the state of liberty,” “the duty to constantly betray and tear down.”73 As mentioned above, this is the position of the iconoclast, which is constantly present in the work of Lars Gyllensten, who above all acted as a critic of his own time and always had in mind Kierkegaard’s attack on the Danish

Lars Gyllensten, Det blå skeppet, Stockholm: Bonniers 1950. Ibid., pp. 62–8. 71 Lars Gyllensten, Diarium Spirituale, Stockholm: Bonniers 1968. 72 Ibid., p. 159 and “Lars Gyllensten’s Notebooks June 24, 1968–July 1970,” printed as an appendix in Oscarson, Gyllensten som Orfeus, unnumbered, see July 1, 1968. 73 Ibid., pp. 174–5. 69

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Church. The necessity of the ethical is combined with the aesthetic treacherousness in the myth of Orpheus and tried out as a possible stage or role for a coming book. V. The Dialectic Modern Myths, as mentioned above, is a collection of ironic short stories and essays. The Kierkegaardian subtitle reads “Dialektisk fantastik” (Dialectical Fantasia) and is an allusion to the subtitle of Fear and Trembling: Dialectical Lyric. The following novels The Blue Ship (1950) and Childbook (1952), were constructed in a triad together with Modern Myths and could be seen as demonstrating a thesis, antithesis, and synthesis structure, not in the Hegelian but in a modernistic, experimental way. These were Gyllensten’s first attempts to remodel Kierkegaard’s “stages of life,” or to “write in stages,” but in a new pragmatic manner where every stage, or point of view, is formed by a coherent language world.74 The first book uses an ironic idiom demonstrating an ironic attitude towards life. The second book uses “a sentimental and naïve” language that tries to understand the belief in the absurd. Finally, Gyllensten makes these two languages and attitudes clash in a third book, Childbook, to illustrate the indefensible naïveté of the time. He does not repeat the Romantic hierarchical three-part idea of the stages of life, nor does he treat it as a development inherent in man himself. Instead, he experimented with the idea of an infinite number of possible language-created worlds as representatives for different ways of describing existence and as a tool to criticize tendencies of his own time. A key distinction depicted in the first triad of books is “the necessary” versus “the possible,” which is rooted in the thinking of Kierkegaard and the Romantic paradigm. Stenström points to Kierkegaard’s definition of the category of the possible in The Concept of Anxiety, and states that most circumstances point to the fact that Gyllensten had this distinction in mind when modeling his own aesthetics.75 Gyllensten himself described his first books as “a projection of what could be according to something that could have been, not according to what is. This complication is understood as the Kierkegaardian attitude, at least from an aesthetic or technical point of view.”76 Gyllensten turned to the religious language worlds of biblical interpretation theory, and to the Church fathers like Origen, St. Augustine, and Tertullian in the 1970s. The three-part possible interpretation of Origen suited his way of understanding how textual meaning is created, in a way that was very close to the ideas of reader response theory. He connected Origen’s theological model of interpretation, divided into a historical, a moral and a spiritual reading, to all kinds of later reader response theories. But he also went further and saw “a model for Kierkegaard’s three stages of existence, which according to him also was divided into three different stages of writing—the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious stage. Strangely enough, I have never seen anyone call attention to this parallel between Kierkegaard’s stages Johannesson, Studier i Lars Gyllenstens estetik, pp. 116–20. Stenström, Existentialismen i Sverige, p. 231. 76 Lars Gyllensten, “Böcker 1952. Recenserade av författarna själva,” Svensk Litteraturtidskrift, 1953, pp. 18–20. 74 75

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and early Christian metaphysics and exegesis of the Bible,” as Gyllensten writes in an essay on Paul in 1980.77 Some of the novels are described by the statement historiae non narrantur—stories are not told here—meaning that the content is to be taken seriously, as is the case with Baklängesminnen (Backward Memories) (1978). The opposite is said in Rätt och slätt (Simply) (1983), historiae narrantur—the book is simply telling stories and the narrator explains: “The world is not a parable— history is not a continuation school—life is not a lesson.”78 These examples come from the later part of the authorship and show that the basic idea of writing the stages of life is still active, but Kierkegaard is combined with new points of view, and the inquiry continued. VI. Repetition as Theme and Method As early as 1953 Gyllensten described the movements in his authorship and the connection between his books as “a return” to old ideas but on a new and higher level. The idea to return to the same problems and ideas, but with new perspectives, is still better described in Diarium Spirituale (1968), as “a spiral-movement,” and is depicted as “a hawk in rising and sinking circular movements over the same neighborhood, over the area were the prey is to be found, returning to similar motifs and vocal pitches again and again, but on a new level.”79 Kjell Espmark has, in a famous essay on “Gyllenstens Gjentagelser” (Gyllensten’s Repetitions) (1974/1985),80 studied how Gyllensten uses several techniques associated with the work of Kierkegaard. Espmark calls attention to the recurring triadic composition of books that are connected, with clear roots in the three stages of Kierkegaard, such as Modern Myths, The Blue Ship, and Childbook. The latter is also part of a new triad called “the age-sequence”: Childbook, Senilia (1956), and Juvenilia (1965). In the late authorship, Backward Memories (1978), Calvarybook (or Skullbook) (1981), and Simply (1983) can also be read together as mirroring and talking to each other. Espmark points to the fact that Kierkegaard also returned to the same problems or key questions, also in a kind of “spiral movement,” even though “the circling by the hawk” was much freer in the authorship of Gyllensten.81 Judge William discusses the power of customs and habits in Either/Or, Part Two,82 as an answer to Lars Gyllensten, “Paulus med Janusansiktet,” in Såsom i en spegel. En debattbok om Paulusbilden och kristendomstolkningen, ed. by Johan Unger, Älvsjö: Skeab 1980, pp. 52–3. See also Hans-Erik Johannesson, “Att läsa Gyllensten,” in Perspektiv på prosa, ed. by Birgitta Ahlmo-Nilsson, Sverker Göransson, and Hans-Erik Johannesson, Gothenburg: Litteraturvetenskapliga institutionen vid Göteborgs universitet 1981, pp. 189–99. 78 Lars Gyllensten, RÄTT och SLÄTT. Anteckningar från det där pensionatet som jag bodde på när jag skulle lära upp mig till EN BÄTTRE MÄNNISKA, Stockholm: Bonniers 1983, p. 8. 79 Gyllensten, Diarium Spirituale, p. 160. 80 Kjell Espmark, “Gyllenstens gentagelser,” in Dialoger, Stockholm: Norstedts förlag 1985. 81 Ibid., pp. 102–10. 82 SKS 3, 127 / EO2, 127–8. 77

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A’s restlessness. Also, Constantin Constantius treats repetition, in an ironic way, in Repetition (1843). Kierkegaard also used his own engagement-story over and over in his pseudonymous books, and Gyllensten used parts of his own biography in his novels. But whereas Kierkegaard restricts himself to a set number of points of view, Gyllensten constantly tries new stages and possibilities of life. Espmark concludes that Gyllensten’s dialogic answer to Kierkegaard lies in the unbounded movement that revolves around the same vital existential questions.83 “Repetition” is also a constantly recurring theme which originated in Modern Myths. The short story “Kvinnotornet” [The Tower of Women] depicts monotonous, dull repetition: the kind of repetition that A of Either/Or, Part One, is trying to keep at a distance in “Crop Rotation.” The lead character visits a new woman at the tower every day of the week, and repetition is made into a circular system. The problem of repetition is here made concrete in the relationship between man and woman. BenktErik Benktson, who treats the problem of time in Lars Gyllensten’s authorship, has profoundly discussed this short story and shown that a circular conception of time underlies the category of repetition in Gyllensten’s first book Modern Myths.84 But the ethical attitude to repetition is also manifest in the prayer pastiche “Stora vardag” (Great Weekday).85 The monotonous everyday repetition is here instead passionately honored and the “Great Weekday” becomes a prayer to worldly circumstances. Benktson connects this attitude to Johannes Climacus, and his tribute to “the ordinary” in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846).86 Don Juan in In the Shadow of Don Juan (1975)87 seduces women over and over again. In this novel Gyllensten on the other hand polemicizes against “the honored kind of everyday repetition,” but the repetitiveness is converted in yet another way in the dialectical answer The Return of the Shadow (1985).88 In this book “the return” is given meanings such as the return of Death, the return of Don Juan, and the return of Don Juan’s servant, in the book called Juanito (Little Juan). Juanito is, by the narrator, “given a second chance” and is granted to live his life “a second time.” The Return of the Shadow is a depiction of “a life in the renewed reading,” as is said several times in the novel. But Juanito’s new life is preceded by a crisis as in the story of the young man in Repetition.89 Again, the return and the repetition is put forward as something positive and desirable. “To begin again” is also, in the latter authorship, connected to the Romantic and hermeneutical circular movement, from part to totality, as well as to the above-mentioned spiral movement and thus to the method of writing in stages.90 Repetition as connected to memory and recollection reappears in The Palace in the Park (1970) were Don Juan also has a function. The book echoes with many Espmark, “Gyllenstens gentagelser,” pp. 102–10. Benktson, Samtidighetens mirakel, pp. 30–1. 85 Gyllensten, Moderna myter, p. 173. 86 Benktson, Samtidighetens mirakel, pp. 35–7. 87 Lars Gyllensten, I skuggan av Don Juan, Stockholm: Bonniers 1975. 88 Lars Gyllensten, Skuggans återkomst eller Don Juan går igen, Stockholm: Bonniers 1985. 89 Benktson, Samtidighetens mirakel, p. 325. 90 Ibid., pp. 302–37. 83 84

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reminiscences of Either/Or, Part One and of Johannes the Seducer’s self-creating method of recollection of the image of the young girl: Recollection is a strange bird. He is restlessly searching for the past; he pursues it in its restless flight to capture and reconcile with it, so to make it fade away at rest, eternity and dignity. But when he is occupied with thinking that he has captured these dead or half-dead memories…then the roles are reversed: the master is becoming the slave, and it is not the bird that is captured, but it is the cage that is fettered and reigned by the bird within….He is transformed into a tool of his experiences that he himself thinks he is searching for or creating.91

Man in The Palace in the Park is depicted as consisting of his own memories and ideas—he is a slave to the memories that he imagines he controls. Don Juan courts these memories, trying to lure them out and to make them enlighten himself with vibrating life again, chasing after the epiphany. The Don Juan of this novel is not in control at all; contrary to the seducer of Either/Or, he is desperately seeking a way to find a new meaning in life in spite of God being at a great distance (or maybe not existing at all). VII. Epiphany The Blue Ship ends with a scene where Emma the Mother is walking away on the water, leaving Abraham on his own. In the postscript, the author says that the book has tried to demonstrate a belief in the absurd, not like Abraham in Fear and Trembling or in the Bible who believes “against all caution,” but trying “against all reason, to bet on the miracle,” as Gyllensten writes.92 Bertil Palmqvist notices the strong dialogue with Fear and Trembling: “The Patriarch is described as carrying out his sacrifice. Gyllensten ends his story when Abraham is standing on the edge of the path of miracles. We are never to see what happens—if it [the leap into the unknown] ‘works’ or ‘kills.’ ”93 The Blue Ship is a very early example of the investigation of the absurd and the paradoxical. Sven-Eric Liedman has pointed out that Gyllensten sometimes tries to make existential philosophy too rational, but Benktson shows that Gyllensten understands the paradox of Kierkegaard as something not irrational or random.94 The investigation of the absurd in the early books continues all through the authorship and is later given the name “epiphany.” The epiphany of Gyllensten has a close connection to “the moment” in the thinking of Kierkegaard, as a moment when the veil is torn away and the past, the present, and the future are present at the same time. Even though the term “epiphany” originates from a Christian context, meaning the appearance of Jesus to the Three Wise Men, it is a concept that often has been Lars Gyllensten, Palatset i Parken, Stockholm: Bonniers 1970, p. 159. Lars Gyllensten, Det blå skeppet, Stockholm: Bonniers 1950, p. 180. 93 Bertil Palmqvist, “Satsa på undret,” in Bonniers Litterära Magasin 1963, p. 285. 94 Sven-Eric Liedman, “Mänskligt och omänskligt. Opperationalism och existentialism i Lars Gyllenstens författarskap,” in Svensk litteraturtidskrift, Lund: C.W.K. Gleerups Förlag, utg. av samfundet de nio, 1966, p. 31, and Benktson, Samtidighetens mirakel, p. 42. 91 92

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used by secular literary studies and by modernistic novelists, such as James Joyce (1882–1941). Among the modernists, the epiphany was used to designate “a sudden moment” in the novel, the moment when the characters are enlightened with a kind of new understanding very similar to what happens to the young man of Repetition after he has experienced “a thunderstorm.”95 But the concept is also used to describe a sudden shift of interpretation, prepared by the author in the text to make the reader suddenly see the story or something in the story from a new angle. In The Return of the Shadow, there are examples of several kinds of epiphanies: the main character, “the artist,” who is seeking to understand his life, is granted a strong experience of being removed out of time just in the beginning of the novel. But the narratological arrangements in the complex novel at the same time try to lead the reader to a kind of (secular) revelation, using repetition, metaphors, and the techniques of the holy icons and image-interpretation.96 VIII. The Individual The situation of modern man, after the disasters of two World Wars, when all faith in objective perspectives and all-embracing ideologies seemed impossible, was the constant object of investigation by Lars Gyllensten—from the first novel to the last book. An important focus of his authorship was to analyze this new and desperate situation of modern man, by investigating his possibilities, his weaknesses, and his strengths. He sought new and better ways to understand and describe time, and by the act of using language, created new “worlds,” perspectives, and “stages of life.” One such attitude of “the individual” is investigated in the novel on Socrates, The Death of Socrates (1960).97 Gyllensten’s interpretation of Socrates does not resemble “the Platonic creator of systems, or the practical philosopher of Xenophon, or the many mediations of modern science, or the Nietzschean vagabond of the streets,” according to Sven-Eric Liedman.98 Socrates in Gyllensten’s novel is better compared with the Kierkegaardian image of the ancient philosopher who always asks questions but never has answers of his own. He is, as in Kierkegaard’s thesis The Concept of Irony (1841), an ironist. “Like Kierkegaard, Gyllensten devotes less attention to Xenophon’s Memorabilia than to [Plato]. Unlike Kierkegaard, he follows the description of Socrates given by Diogenes Laertius in his Lives of Eminent Philosophers.”99 Gyllensten is constantly moving and is in continuous transformation, which according to Liedman was also the characteristic of his intellectual approach at the time when the book was written. But Socrates is also a personification of the ideology, which, like Socrates in the novel, is prepared to give SKS 4, 87–8 / R, 220–2. Brudin Borg, Skuggspel, pp. 190–8. 97 Lars Gyllensten, Sokrates död, Stockholm: Bonniers 1960. 98 Liedman, “Mänskligt och omänskligt,” p. 31. 99 Barbara Lide, “Lars Gyllensten’s Sokrates död. Intertextuality and the Lucid Spirit,” Scandinavian Studies, vol. 66, 1994, p. 211 and Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. by R.D. Hicks, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 1987 (Loeb Classical Library), pp. 402–17. 95 96

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up everything to preserve a principal flexibility. Socrates, as emphasized in the novel, chose death, not caring about his family and “the little life.”100 The characterization of Socrates’ daughter Aspasia, in Socrates’ Death, is shown by Lars O. Lundgren to resemble a young girl in Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript, who is going to the beach to meet her beloved.101 The girl is very clever and already knows what Socrates knows, but there is a boundary between different kinds of knowledge in Kierkegaard, according to Lundgren. In several books, Gyllensten tests the aestheticism of the late twentieth century. The main mythological figure, who in several books represents the individualistic Western man, is Don Juan. There is an affinity between Albert Camus (1913–60) and Gyllensten in the use of Don Juan in an existential tradition with roots in Kierkegaard. They both used mythical characters as representatives for ideas, and they both made Don Juan represent “the absurd man who is able to create despite living an existence without meaning.”102 Don Juan’s first appearance in Gyllensten’s authorship is in the poetic novelette Lotus in Hades (1966).103 The dreamlike exposition shows a seducer who lives in an all-encompassing present and can be interpreted as a critique against escapism and the liberal singleness and individuality. The Hades of the book represents a complete “liberation from a cruel world,” and the lotus fruit the inhabitants of Hades eat “both liberates from painful experiences and shuts out the realities which it is necessary to register.”104 The theme and critique of Western liberalism as shaped in the form of the seventeenth-century old libertine clearly can be traced to the unique way of treating the Don Juan theme of Either/Or, Part One. Kierkegaard’s Don Juan is the immediate and sensitive seducer who, through the music of Mozart (1756–91), is conjured up as an appearance without rational thinking, according to A’s essay “The Immediate Stages of the Erotic, or Musical Erotic” in Either/Or, Part One. As a contrast to this sensual Don Juan, Johannes the Seducer stands out as the rational and calculating seducer. This seducer was often used in literature and drama from the end of the nineteenth century and onward, but Gyllensten uses the contrast between these two different interpretations of the myth to investigate the individual and “the self-made man” of Western society. The Don Juan motif and the theme of the Western individualism (that according to Georg Brandes started with Kierkegaard inventing the category of the single individual, hin enkelte) is yet varied in other ways in Gyllensten’s books dealing with Don Juan in the triad In the Shadow of Don Juan (1975), The Return of the Shadow (1985), and Seven Wise Masters on Love (1986).105 He created a very close adaptation of Either/ Or in Seven Wise Masters on Love (1986). The sex roles of “The Seducer’s Diary” are turned upside down and the seduced Cordelia reappears in the shape of a seduced, male artist when the story starts. In seven incarnations, composed as seven short Liedman, “Mänskligt och omänskligt,” p. 31. Lars O. Lundgren, Den Svenske Sokrates. Sokratesbilden från Rydelius till Gyllensten, Lund: Humanistiska förbundet 1980, pp. 186–8; and SKS 7, 87–8 / CUP1, 88. 102 Munck, Gyllenstens roller, p. 50. 103 Lars Gyllensten, Lotus i Hades, Stockholm: Bonniers 1966. 104 Isaksson, Lars Gyllensten, p. 129. 105 Lars Gyllensten, Sju vise mästare om kärlek, Stockholm: Bonniers 1986. 100 101

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stories, the gender perspective is turned around and many of their points of view are derived from “Shadowgraphs,” and its suffering women such as Donna Elvira and Margarethe. Gyllensten’s short story “The Melancholy of the Spoonbill” especially uses A’s “Crop Rotation” and its restless, despairing aesthetics as an intertextual source.106 The book is structured as a continuous changing of stages of life, not as an ascending progression, but playfully pictured as reincarnations between humans and animals, wakefulness and dream. Gyllensten most likely continued his radical examination of Western individualism and its autocratic backside in this book, but the “seduction” is interpreted in a quite postmodern fashion, focusing on the different languages at work and on the artifactual character of the written word.107 IX. Despair The last theme that will be presented here, and which also is omnipresent in Gyllensten’s books, is human despair and questions concerning worldly suffering, sickness, and death. There are several pieces of evidence that Gyllensten read The Sickness unto Death very closely and that he was in a constant dialogue with Kierkegaard on the topic of despair.108 The early book Childbook depicts the loneliness and despair of modern man, with no God or other external guarantee to comfort and guide his life. The main character Karl-Erik is not able to live a harmonious life and, according to Oscarson, develops a “demonic despair.”109 He finally commits murder and kills a child, symbolically “the childish” part of himself. There is also an identical child-murder committed in Juvenilia, and the topic of the “desperado” is followed up in the book Desperados (1962).110 Especially in The Senator (1958)111 and Cain’s Memoirs (1962),112 the characters are depicted in deep despair: either they have lost their faith in ideology and are desperately seeking something to hold on to, or they cannot believe that there is a God, and must face the fact that only brutal death awaits man at the end of his life. In The Cave in the Desert (1973),113 the discussion concerning despair is kept very close to the Christian tradition.114 The third part of Calvarybook consists of meditations upon the topics of despair, alienation, and the question of whether man, by an act of will, can make a Kierkegaardian leap “or at least through a ‘belief in the miracle,’ is able to break the state of despair.”115 Ibid., pp. 35–48. Camilla Brudin Borg, “Lust och lärdom. Gyllenstens Sju vise mästare om kärlek och erotiska motiv hos Kierkegaard,” Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap, vol. 1, 1999, pp. 86–104. 108 The discussion on despair follows Stenström, Existentialismen i Sverige, pp. 147–8. 109 Oscarson, Gyllensten som Orfeus, pp. 71–8, and SKS 11, 181–7 / SUD, 67–74. 110 Lars Gyllensten, Desperados. Noveller, Stockholm: Bonniers 1962. 111 Lars Gyllensten, Senatorn. En melodram, en bildningsroman, en bildningsmelodram, Stockholm: Bonniers 1958. 112 Lars Gyllensten, Kains memoarer, Stockholm: Bonniers 1963. 113 Lars Gyllensten, Grottan i öknen, Stockholm: Bonniers 1973. 114 Stenström, Gyllensten i hjärtats öken, pp. 148–9. 115 Stenström, Existentialismen i Sverige, p. 148 and Lars Gyllensten, Huvudskallebok, Stockholm: Bonniers 1981, p. 102; pp. 173–4; p. 200; p. 206; p. 208; pp. 215–16. 106 107

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The Heavenly Symposium (1990)116 is, finally, a pastiche on Kierkegaard’s Stages on Life’s Way and Plato’s Symposium. The symposium takes place in Heaven (or in the Antechamber of Heaven). The dreamlike speakers are called “The Fellowship of the Dead” (Συμπαρανεκρωμενοι), but they are not only metaphorically and ironically “dead” like the members of the association in Either/Or, Part One, but they are also literally dead. The topic of Gyllensten’s symposium is the meaning of life—and death—and “the edifying in that God, after he created the world found it to be good.”117 But the speakers of the symposium cannot see how the world with all its suffering and problems could really be a good place. They tell and retell the same story by continuing the story that is initiated by the first speaker: the florist. He relates a conversation that took place between God and Saint Peter. Saint Peter asks God to grant him the favor of choosing only one individual in history who is to be given eternal life. God grants him the favor and the story goes on, but its course ends in despair and disaster. The second narrator gives “the individual” eternal life and omnipotence, but this tale also ends in failure and despair. All of the tales are about sterile repetition and despair, except for the very last one, the story of an actress. It is about the good and beautiful in life—that coexist with its darker sides. A choir is interleaved with the stories, and its function is to comment on them, as in the ancient Greek tragedies: “Despair is the sickness unto death—a painful contradiction, a sickness in the self: to constantly die—to die the death.”118 The choir sings about a sickness in the soul, a sickness in the essence of human being. Maybe one of the deepest reasons behind Lars Gyllensten’s authorship and one of the strongest themes connected to Søren Kierkegaard, all through his writings, is the topic of despair. In his books the vanitas motif and the problem of human mortality is always stressed, and Lars Gyllensten is therefore called upon to speak and to conclude this article. The topic is our human mortality: I have just returned to a couple of my mentors—Kierkegaard, Pascal. I am standing with my back towards them, so that they are standing behind me like the slave, placed behind the Roman emperor to whisper: Remember that you are going to die! But these two are not slaves, and they do not whisper—they shout, they roar: remember that you are mortal!119

Lars Gyllensten, Det himmelska gästabudet, Stockholm: Bonniers 1990, p. 27. Ibid. 118 Ibid., pp. 253–55. See also Heléne Bengtsson, “Förtvivlan och försoning. En analys utifrån Lars Gyllenstens roman Det himmelska gästabudet,” in Modernistetens ansikten. Livsåskådning i nordisk 1900-talslitteratur, ed. by Carl Reinhold Bråkenhielm och Torsten Pettersson, Nora: Nya Doxa 2001, pp. 217–37. 119 Lars Gyllensten, Lapptäcken—Livstecken. Ur arbetsanteckningarna, Stockholm: Författarförlaget 1976, p. 164. 116 117

Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Gyllensten’s Corpus Moderna myter, Stockholm: Bonniers 1949. “Sören Kierkegaard,” Utsikt, vol. 2, no. 3, 1949, pp. 14–15. Det blå skeppet, Stockholm, Bonniers 1950, p. 9; pp. 173–6. “Synpunkt på Sören Kierkegaard,” Prisma, vol. 3, no. 2, 1950, pp. 72–3 (reprinted in his Nihilistiskt credo, Stockholm: Bonnier 1964, pp. 23–7). “Pastor Hjelm, biskoparna och Sören Kierkegaard,” Dagens Nyheter, March 1, 1951. “Böcker 1952. Recenserade av författarna själva” (Gyllensten’s review of Children’s Book), Svensk Litteraturtidskrift, 1953, pp. 18–20. “Senilia,” Bonniers Litterära Magasin, vol. 8, 1955, pp. 618–22. “Tidlöst jubileum,” Dagens Nyheter, November 11, 1955 (reprinted in his Nihilistiskt credo, Stockholm: Bonnier 1964, pp. 41–6). “Introduktioner till Kierkegaard,” Dagens Nyheter, March 12, 1956 (review of Frithiof Brandt’s Søren Kierkegaard and Finn Jor’s Sören Kierkegaard. Det levda livets tänkare). “Reflexer,” Vintergatan, 1960, pp. 51–61. “Intervju med pseudonymen ‘Sören Kierkegaard,’ ” Vintergatan, 1963, pp. 27–35 (reprinted in his Nihilistiskt credo, Stockholm: Bonnier 1964, pp. 83–92). “Sören Kierkegaard—150 år,” Dagens Nyheter, May 5, 1963. “Problemet Kierkegaard upplöst” (review of Arnold Ljungdal’s Problemet Kierkegaard), Dagens Nyheter, September 30, 1964. “En judisk existentialist,” Dagens Nyheter, November 11, 1964 (reprinted in his Ur min offentliga sektor, Stockholm: Aldus 1971, pp. 124–8). Diarium Spirituale, Stockholm: Bonniers 1968, p. 71; pp. 94–5; p. 135; p. 154; p. 162. Palatset i Parken, Stockholm: Bonniers 1970, p. 11; p. 159. “Existentialism och experiment,” in his Ur min offentliga sektor, Stockholm: Aldus 1971, pp. 124–8. “Postscriptum,” in Ur min offentliga sektor, Stockholm: Aldus 1971, pp. 213–20. Lapptäcken—Livstecken. Ur arbetsanteckningarna, Stockholm: Författarförlaget 1976, p. 10; pp. 17–18; p. 24; p. 43; pp. 79–80; pp. 101–5; p. 164; pp. 168–9; p. 173; p. 177; p. 216; p. 220. “Kierkegaard—författare för människor i kris,” Dagens Nyheter, April 25, 1977 (review of Brita K. Stendahl’s Søren Kierkegaard and Henning Fenger’s Kierkegaard-Myter og Kierkegaard-Kilder). “Paulus med Janusansiktet,” in Såsom i en spegel. En debattbok om Paulusbilden och kristendomstolkningen, ed. by Johan Unger, Älvsjö: Skeab 1980, pp. 51–71

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(reprinted in Så var det sagt. Essäer, artiklar, inlägg, Stockholm: Bonniers 1992, pp. 194–212). Huvudskallebok, Stockholm: Bonniers 1981, p. 102; pp. 173–4; p. 200; p. 206; p. 208; pp. 215–16; p. 236; pp. 289–90. RÄTT och SLÄTT. Anteckningar från det där pensionatet som jag bodde på när jag skulle lära upp mig till EN BÄTTRE MÄNNISKA, Stockholm: Bonniers 1983, p. 129; p. 200. Skuggans återkomst eller Don Juan går igen, Stockholm, Bonniers 1985, p. 69; pp. 127–34; pp. 154–5; p. 205; pp. 289–92. Sju vise mästare om kärlek, Stockholm: Bonniers 1986. Just så eller kanske det. Ur arbetsanteckningarna, Stockholm: Bonniers 1989, pp. 81–92. Det himmelska gästabudet, Stockholm: Bonniers 1990, p. 27; pp. 253–5. “Magister Kierkegaard om ironi,” Res Publica, vol. 22, 1992, pp. 7–19. “Premiss människor—och rakikala,” Så var det sagt. Essäer, artiklar, inlägg, Stockholm: Bonniers 1992, pp. 26–32. Lars Gyllensten and Georg Klein, Hack i häl på Minerva. Ett brevsamtal om vetenskap, dikt och moral, Stockholm: Bonniers 1993, p. 9; pp. 22–3; p. 77; pp. 101–7; pp. 262–3. Kistbrev, Stockholm: Bonniers 1998, p. 139. Minnen, bara minnen, Stockholm: Bonniers 2000, p. 56; pp. 165–8; pp. 305. Med andras ord, och egna, Stockholm: Bonniers 2004, p. 19; p. 28; pp. 99–102; p. 125; p. 159; p. 184; p. 197; p. 200; p. 267; p. 275; p. 277; p. 297; p. 304. II. Sources of Gyllensten’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Brandt, Frithiof, Søren Kierkegaard, Stockholm: Natur och kultur 1955. Fenger, Henning, Kierkegaard-Myter og Kierkegaard-Kilder, Odense: Odense Universitetsforlag 1976. Helweg, Hjalmar, Søren Kierkegaard. En psykiatrisk-psykologisk studie, trans. by Julia von Sneidern, Stockholm: Sveriges kristna studentrörelses förlag 1933. Hohlenberg, Johannes, Sören Kierkegaard, trans. by Karin and Sven Stolpe, Stockholm: Bonniers 1943. Jor, Finn, Sören Kierkegaard. Det levda livets tänkare, Stockholm: Svenska kyrkans diakonistyrelses bokförlag 1955. Lindström, Valter, Efterföljelsens teologi hos Sören Kierkegaard, Stockholm: Diakonistyrelsen 1956. Ljungdal, Arnold, Problemet Kierkegaard, Stockholm: Norstedt 1964. Sjestov, Lev, Kierkegaard och den existentiella filosofin, trans. by Stefan Borg, Guldsmedshyttan: Nimrod 1994. Stendahl, Brita K., Søren Kierkegaard, Boston: Twayne 1976.

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III. Secondary Literature on Gyllensten’s Relation to Kierkegaard Ahlin, Lars, “Brev till Lars Gyllensten. Stockholm den 11 december 1955,” in Breviarium, Stockholm: Bonniers 1996, pp. 21–45. Bengtsson, Heléne, “Förtvivlan och försoning. En analys utifrån Lars Gyllenstens roman Det himmelska gästabudet,” in Modernistetens ansikten. Livsåskådning i nordisk 1900-talslitteratur, ed. by Carl Reinhold Bråkenhielm and Torsten Pettersson, Nora: Nya Doxa 2001, pp. 217–37. Benktson, Benkt-Erik, Samtidighetens mirakel. Kring tidsproblematiken i Lars Gyllenstens romaner, Stockholm: Bonniers 1989, pp. 27–32; pp. 37–44; p. 50; pp. 59–61; pp. 88–9; p. 105; p. 110; pp. 118–19; p. 177; p. 180; pp. 199–204; p. 207; p. 213; p. 221; p. 251; pp. 265–70; pp. 283–5; pp. 298–9; pp. 313–37; p. 345; p. 348–53; p. 362; p. 369; p. 389; pp. 396–8; pp. 403–5; p. 411; p. 413. Brudin Borg, Camilla, “Lust och lärdom. Gyllenstens Sju vise mästare om kärlek och erotiska motiv hos Kierkegaard,” Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap, vol. 1, 1999, pp. 86–104. –– Skuggspel. Mellan bildkritik och ikonestetik i Lars Gyllenstens författarskap, Skellefteå: Artos/Norma Bokförlag 2005, p. 20; p. 72; p. 114; p. 126; p. 136; pp. 146–8; p. 154; p.171; p. 185; p. 191. Espmark, Kjell, “Gyllenstens gjentagelser,” Samlaren, vol. 95, 1974, pp. 112–18; also in his Dialoger, Stockholm: Norstedts förlag 1985, pp. 102–10. –– “Gyllenstens uppenbarelser,” Dialoger, Stockholm: Norstedts förlag 1985, pp. 111–30. Foconi, Stefan, “Skiss till avhandlingskapitel om Sokrates död, ingående i Lars Gyllenstens dialog med Sören Kierkegaard,” Unpublished typescript 1984. Isaksson, Hans, Hängivenhet och distans. En studie i Lars Gyllenstens romankonst, Stockholm: Aldus/Bonniers 1974, pp. 46ff. –– Lars Gyllensten, trans. by Katy Lissbrant, Boston: Twayne 1978, pp. 46–50. Johannesson, Hans-Erik, Studier i Lars Gyllenstens estetik. Hans teorier om författarskapets villkor och teknik t.o.m. 1978, Göteborg: Skrifter utgivna av Litteraturvetenskapliga institutionen vid Göteborgs universitet [1973] 1978, pp. 106–20. Larsson, Bo, Gud som provisorium. En linje i Lars Gyllenstens författarskap, Stockholm: Verbum förlag 1990, pp. 25ff.; pp. 148–72. Lide, Barbara, “Lars Gyllensten’s Sokrates död. Intertextuality and the Lucid Spirit,” Scandinavian Studies, vol. 66, 1994, pp. 204–30. Liedman, Sven-Eric, “Mänskigt och omänskligt. Operationalism och existentialism i Lars Gyllenstens författarskap,” Svensk litteraturtidskrift, Lund: C.W.K. Gleerups Förlag 1966, pp. 24–39. Ljungdahl, Arnold, “Gyllensten, Kierkegaard och mysticismen, Dagens Nyheter, October 13, 1964. Lundgren, Lars O., Den Svenske Sokrates. Sokratesbilden från Rydelius till Gyllensten, Lund: Humanistiska förbundet 1980, pp. 179–88. Munck, Kerstin, Gyllenstens roller. En studie over tematik och gestaltning i Lars Gyllenstens författarskap, Lund: CWK Gleerup Bokförlag 1974, pp. 33–7. Olsson, Anders, Läsningar av intet, Stockholm: Bonniers 2000, pp. 112–13; p. 118.

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Oscarson, Saga, Gyllensten som Orfeus. En studie i Lars Gyllenstens mytiska diktning, Stockholm: Bonniers 1992, pp. 53–60. (Appendix: Lars Gyllensten Notebooks June 24, 1968–July 1970.) Palmqvist, Bertil, “Satsa på undret,” Bonniers litterära magasin, 1963, pp. 282–88. Stenström, Thure, Existentialismen i Sverige. Mottagande och inflytande 1900–1950, Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis 1984, pp. 219–43. –– Gyllensten i hjärtats öken. Strövtåg i Lars Gyllenstens författarskap, särskilt Grottan i öknen, Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis 1996.

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Selma Lagerlöf: “More clever than wise” Elise Iuul

In a letter dated 1 November 1899, the Swedish author and Nobel laureate Selma Lagerlöf (1858–1940) wrote to her friend Elise Malmros (1849–1937): “I have not read any Kierkegaard for a long time, but it is certain that you become overwhelmed in many ways when you read him, though I have to say that I find him much more clever than wise.”1 The letter was written two years after Lagerlöf’s outstanding debut with Gösta Berling’s Saga (1891),2 and two years before the first volume of the great work Jerusalem (1901–02) was published.3 The letter to Malmros is apparently the only place where Lagerlöf refers directly to Kierkegaard. This challenges the aim of this article which is to analyze the places where Kierkegaard appears as a source in the writings of Lagerlöf. In the beginning, Lagerlöf was regarded by her critics as a naive storyteller who wrote with great intensity and imagination but did not know of a world in conflict; however, today it is beyond doubt that she was a widely read author. She surrounded herself with the pronounced intellectuals of the time, especially the women, and was a member of the Swedish Academy. In her correspondence one finds many discussions of both modern and classical literature. Especially during her years as a student at Högre lärarinneseminariet (a teachers’ training college) in Stockholm (1882–85), she was introduced to great writers such as Kierkegaard. In his dissertation, Søren Kierkegaard and Swedish Literature: From Fredrika Bremer to Hjalmar Söderberg (1950), the literary scholar Nils Åke Sjöstedt (b. 1916) has researched where Lagerlöf could have come upon Kierkegaard.4 Sjöstedt calls attention to Lagerlöf’s teacher of Christianity, Gustaf Jakob Keijser (1844–1916), Quoted from Selma, Anna och Elise. Brevväxling mellan Selma Lagerlöf, Anna Oom och Elise Malmros åren 1886–1937, vols. 1–2, ed. by Lena Carlsson, Landskrona: Litorina 2009, vol. 1, 1886–1913, p. 209 (my translation). The letter is also quoted in Ulla-Britta Lagerroth, “ ‘Liknelsen om punden är min egentliga religion…’ Några brev från Selma Lagerlöf till Elise Malmros,” Lagerlöfstudier, Malmö: Allhem 1958, pp. 39–40. 2 Selma Lagerlöf, Gösta Berlings saga, Stockholm: Frithiof Hellberg 1891. (English translation: Gösta Berling’s Saga, trans. by Lillie Tudeer, London: Jonathan Cape 1933.) 3 Selma Lagerlöf, Jerusalem, vols. 1–2, Stockholm: Bonniers 1901–02. (English translation: Jerusalem, trans. by Velma Swanston Howard, Honolulu, Hawaii: University Press of the Pacific 2003.) 4 See Nils Åke Sjöstedt, Søren Kierkegaard och svensk litteratur. Från Fredrika Bremer till Hjalmar Söderberg, Göteborg: Wettergren & Kerbers Förlag 1950. 1

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who was well informed about Kierkegaard and, among other things, supplied the college library with Kierkegaard’s Either/Or (1843) and Practice in Christianity (1850) together with the Swedish theologian Waldemar Rudin’s (1833–1921) book on Kierkegaard.5 Sjöstedt also mentions that a passage from The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air (1849) and a one-page discussion of Kierkegaard are found in Lagerlöf’s textbook from her years of study.6 However, the traces leading to Kierkegaard are few; often in the essayistic part of her authorship, Lagerlöf points out her sources of inspiration but never mentions Kierkegaard.7 At the National Library of Sweden in Stockholm, there are catalogues of Lagerlöf’s libraries: both one of the family estate, Mårbacka, in Värmland which was Lagerlöf’s home as a child, and which she regained as a grown-up, and one of Falun where she lived at the beginning of her career as an author. Neither of the catalogues has works of Kierkegaard registered, and in the rest of the Lagerlöf Collection which contains most of Lagerlöf’s posthumous material, no copies of Kierkegaard’s works exist.8 However, Lagerlöf owned many books where Kierkegaard is treated. First of all, she had Georg Brandes’ (1842–1927) influential book on Kierkegaard, Søren Kierkegaard: A Critical Presentation in Outline (1877),9 and in the library of Mårbacka there are also books on Kierkegaard by professor of philosophy Harald Høffding (1843–1931) and the Grundtvigian Carl Koch (1860–1925), plus two books by the doctor and Kierkegaard publisher Peter Andreas Heiberg (1864–1926) on Kierkegaard’s religious development.10 See Waldemar Rudin, Sören Kierkegaards Person och Författarskap. Ett Försök, Uppsala: A. Nilsson 1880. 6 Sjöstedt, Søren Kierkegaard och svensk litteratur, pp. 312–13. On Keijser’s book donations, see also Gunnel Weidel, Helgon och gengångare. Gestaltningen av kärlek och rättvisa i Selma Lagerlöfs diktning, Lund: CWK Gleerup Bokförlag 1964, p. 32. Parts of Kierkegaard’s religious works were rapidly translated into Swedish; the non-religious ones were not translated until the turn of the century, cf. Jonna Hjertström-Lappalainen and LarsErik Hjertström-Lappalainen, “Sweden: Kierkegaard’s Reception in Swedish Philosophy, Theology, and Contemporary Literary Theory,” in Kierkegaard’s International Reception, Tome I, Northern and Western Europe, ed. by Jon Stewart, Aldershot: Ashgate 2009 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 8), pp. 173–96, see p. 173. Lagerlöf, however, did not have problems reading the Danish editions. 7 See, for example, Lagerlöf’s collection of essays in Selma Lagerlöf, Höst, Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag 1933. Cf. Bengt Ek, Selma Lagerlöf efter Gösta Berlings saga. En studie över genombrottsåren 1891–1897, Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag 1951, p. 75. 8 The National Library of Sweden, The Lagerlöf Collection, signum L1:335:3: “Alfabetisk förteckning över boksamlingen på Mårbacka 1919–,” vol. 1, 11/10-1949; “Förteckning över Selma Lagerlöfs bibliotek på Mårbacka,” vol. 1, 1952 (Acc. 1953/23); “Förteckning över Selma Lagerlöfs bibliotek i Falun,” by Dalarnas museum in Falun, I–II, vol. 1, Falun 1985 (Acc. 1986/103); “Selma Lagerlöfs bibliotek i Falun,” by Anna-Karin Albertsson, Borås: Högskolan i Borås 1990. 9 Georg Brandes, Søren Kierkegaard. En kritisk Fremstilling i Grundrids, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1877. 10 Data from the library catalogues (with my additions): Georg Brandes, Samlede Skrifter, vols. 1–11, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1899–1902; Harald Høffding, Den nyere 5

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An indirect testimony for the case that Lagerlöf read Kierkegaard is to be found in the works of Elin Wägner (1882–1949), who writes in her biography Selma Lagerlöf (1942), “While she wrote Gösta Berling’s Saga, she read Kierkegaard,” without giving any documentation for this claim.11 Wägner was an author, journalist, and feminist who was acquainted with Lagerlöf. As such, she had a personal approach to Lagerlöf’s works at the same time as she could draw on the experiences of Lagerlöf’s dear friend and secretary Valborg Olander (1861–1943); at Olander’s house, Wägner wrote some of her biography. In the Danish translation of the biography which was published only one year after the Swedish edition (i.e., in 1943), her assertion has meanwhile been toned down. Here instead it says: “While she went to the teachers’ training college, she read Kierkegaard.”12 In the Danish translation, thus, it is only confirmed that Lagerlöf read Kierkegaard while she was a student at the college, and with this the direct connection between Kierkegaard and Gösta Berling’s Saga is gone. I. Lagerlöf—(Brandes)—Kierkegaard In the history of literature, Lagerlöf already appears as a representative of Swedish symbolism in the 1890s, with her first novel Gösta Berling’s Saga.13 The period is characterized by being influenced by the Modern Breakthrough while at the same time it distances itself from the thorough naturalism which was the ideal of the authors at the beginning of the Modern Breakthrough. In symbolism, it becomes valuable again to move beyond experience and to write about faith and superstition as sources of knowledge. Accordingly, in her novels Lagerlöf reveals an experiencebased view of the world, which she, however, tests the limits of by means of a sensuous expression, not only epistemologically, but also ethically and religiously. She collects the material for her books both from her home in Värmland and from great classical works, such as Shakespeare.14 The frontrunner of the Modern Breakthrough in Scandinavia was the influential Georg Brandes. Lagerlöf describes her relationship with him in her autobiographical Filosofis Historie, vols. 1–2, Copenhagen: P.G. Philipsens Forlag 1894–95; Carl Koch, Søren Kierkegaard, Copenhagen and Kristiania: Nordisk Forlag 1908. Data from Sjöstedt, Søren Kierkegaard och svensk litteratur, p. 313 (with my additions): Peter Andreas Heiberg, Et Segment af Søren Kierkegaards religiøse Udvikling, Copenhagen and Kristiania: Nordisk Forlag 1918; Peter Andreas Heiberg, Søren Kierkegaards religiøse Udvikling. Psykologisk Mikroskopi, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1925. 11 Elin Wägner, Selma Lagerlöf, vols. 1–2, Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Forlag 1942, vol. 1, p. 135 (my translation). 12 The Danish translation was published by Gyldendal in Copenhagen in 1943 (p. 139). There is no remark to explain why this change appears in the Danish edition. 13 Vivi Edström, Selma Lagerlöfs litterära profil, Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren 1986, p. 187. 14 Evident, for example, in relation to the novel The Emperor of Portugalia (1914), which Lagerlöf herself calls a Swedish King Lear in a letter to her publisher Karl Otto Bonnier. See Selma Lagerlöf, Brev I–II, i urval, vols. 1–2, ed. by Ying Toijer-Nilsson, Lund: Gleerups Forlag 1967–69, vol. 2, p. 138.

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essay, “The Open Door,” published in Höst (1933).15 Here she writes about how Brandes started her career with a very laudatory review of Gösta Berling’s Saga in Politiken on January 16, 1893. At the beginning of her career as an author, he figured as a kind of literary mentor to her,16 but as her career developed, Lagerlöf became more and more independent, and the roles between them changed. Now Lagerlöf, who had become a member of the Swedish Academy, could be the one who tried to help Brandes win the Nobel Prize, which he—as is well known—never did. The influence from Brandes and—what is relevant in this context—not least his book on Kierkegaard can even be seen in the above-quoted letter to Malmros, where Lagerlöf writes that she is overwhelmed by Kierkegaard but at the same time says that she finds him more clever (shrewd) than wise (sensible, having a good experience-based judgment).17 In many ways, this emphasis on wisdom at the expense of shrewdness, as I read it, and at the same time the critical approach to Kierkegaard that lies therein, strikingly reminds readers of Brandes’ representation of Kierkegaard. Brandes describes Kierkegaard as an orthodox and austere pietistic author whose philosophy of “that single individual” is ground-breaking, but who does not, as the time demands, think ethics free from Christian dogmas.18 In his book, he gives a psychological portrait of Kierkegaard and writes critically about his youth, for example: “Nothing would have brought him more luck than a deep dive into the English philosophy of experience; because, while the theory of knowledge which is based on ideas of reason results in prejudices, that which is based on experience leads to impartial examination.”19 In the letter to Malmros, Lagerlöf continues her critique of Kierkegaard and calls for a more empirical approach to ethics and religion, just as Brandes does: I have not read any Kierkegaard for a long time, but it is certain that you become overwhelmed in many ways when you read him, though I have to say that I find him much more clever than wise. The longer I live, the closer I get to the conclusion that we are here on earth to live the earthly life, do its work and enjoy its pleasures as long as they do not do us any harm. People who always want to live with their eyes on heaven, become quite dull to others and probably even to themselves. Do you understand what I mean when I say that I think that we prepare ourselves better for heaven on weekdays than on Sundays? I have often wondered why I found what was abstract-spiritual, spiritual books and lectures, and reflections so difficult, and it was impossible for me to live this kind of ascetic life in which most of what is earthly is regarded as something evil. But as I said, I no longer believe this is right, on the contrary, we have to dive deep Lagerlöf, “Den öppnade dörren,” Höst, pp. 62–71. Here, for example, Lagerlöf writes: “The works of the great literary historian were familiar to me; I had read and studied them with the greatest admiration,” quoted from Selma Lagerlöf, Höst, p. 65 (my translation). 16 See, for example, Jørgen Ravn, Menneskekenderen Selma Lagerlöf, Copenhagen: G.E.C. Gads Forlag 1958, pp. 132–3. 17 Lagerlöf uses the words klyftig and klok. The definitions and translations of the words can be found in Ordbok över svenska språket, published by Svenska Akademien (SAOB), Lund: C.W.K. Gleerup 1898–. 18 Georg Brandes, Søren Kierkegaard. En kritisk Fremstilling i Grundrids, in Samlede Skrifter, vols. 1–18, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1899–1910, vol. 2, p. 348. 19 Ibid., p. 272. 15

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into what is earthly and change it. Because it needs change….I believe in God more than ever, but I do not believe in priests. And notice that God does not like religions. Nothing becomes more distorted and ruined than a religion. I believe that he would take it easy if we all became free-thinkers, if we just did our work, trained our ability and left the earth with a bit more capacity, self-control, moderation and humility than we had when we came here.20

Thus, Lagerlöf understands Kierkegaard as religious in an abstract-spiritual way and as an ascetic who considers what is earthly as something evil; in this way, she regards Kierkegaard’s religiousness as being just as biased, narrow, and strict as Brandes does. She herself advocates a more practically oriented religion which, on the contrary, finds something good in what is earthly, and in life combined therewith. Though, unlike Brandes, Lagerlöf is no atheist; she believes in God according to the Lutheran Protestant faith, however, in such a light version that the “free-thinkers” of the Modern Breakthrough can be a part of her religious world-view. Lutheran Protestantism and its religious rootedness in daily life and labor instead of in church services is therefore Lagerlöf’s positive alternative to a strict Pietism. In many of her novels, Lagerlöf shows this through the final statements of the works and maybe most distinctly in Jerusalem which precisely takes up the question of religion for discussion. The letter to Malmros was written in 1899, that is, only a short time before Lagerlöf went to Jerusalem together with her literary friend Sophie Elkan (1853–1921), and two years before the first volume of the great work came out. The book treats the conflict between the undermining of the traditional, authoritative church and the construction of a new one, and the disastrous consequences such a reconstruction can have for a community. The farewell of the new religious society, the Hellgumianians, their emigration from their little parish in Dalarna to the Holy City, Jerusalem, and their hopeless project of building a thousand-year reign there where they are no longer in their natural context, comes close to ending up in madness and disintegration despite all their good intentions. The project, however, is saved by the peasant Ingmar Ingmarsson, who has refused to join the new religious community, and who has only gone to Jerusalem to bring home with him the love of his youth, Gertrud. By common sense and the will to labor, Ingmar Ingmarsson reactivates the Hellgumianians who in their belief in God’s redemption and omnipotence have become passive, and by this he re-establishes satisfaction in the new community. Lagerlöf shows how distorted and utopian a new religious world-view can become if we do not remove those religious dogmas which already rule, and if we do not base it on the law of nature and the experiences of the individual human being. Read like this, the plot in Jerusalem has the same structure as Brandes’ description of Kierkegaard; as was mentioned earlier, Brandes asserted similarly that Kierkegaard went astray with his philosophy of religion despite new breakthroughs, because it remains in the dogmas of Christianity. Brandes, though, has been criticized by various Kierkegaard researchers for concentrating his account on Kierkegaard’s religious works in a too biased way and not appreciating the aesthetic and especially Carlsson, Selma, Anna och Elise, p. 209 (my translation).

20

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ethical works enough.21 In the end, Brandes’ book tells us more about himself and his project of emancipation than about Kierkegaard, various critics think. Meanwhile, Lagerlöf’s connection to Kierkegaard likewise does not seem so straightforward. No parallel can be drawn between Kierkegaard’s conception of Christianity and the content of the Hellgumianians’ new belief which Lagerlöf distances herself from. Whereas Hellgumianism is collectivistic and demands that its followers abandon their individual history and personal relations, Kierkegaard’s conception of Christianity is much more focused on the individual and emphasizes the subjective perspective in religious faith.22 Lagerlöf’s critique of Hellgumianism similarly stresses the idea that the connection between the existence of the single human being and the common good should not be lost. In Jerusalem, what holds things together is love, which Lagerlöf, though, never gives an unproblematic or naive account of; the people involved are often faced with the dilemma of whether to follow their devotion to or lust for another human being or give up their personal needs in favor of the community and a greater justice. Thus Ingmar Ingmarsson has to give up his love for Gertrud to regain the family estate and to re-establish order in their society. In Lagerlöf’s perspective, love is paradoxical evidence of how the eternal exists in the temporal, and how there is a justice which is bigger than human beings, and which we cannot control—and on this point Lagerlöf resembles Kierkegaard. Jerusalem ends with a strong statement about a justice of love which becomes Lagerlöf’s proposal for a positive ethics.23 As mentioned above, Brandes did not believe that he could find a positive, autonomous ethics in Kierkegaard because the latter’s ideas remain bound within the religious. In relation to this, it can, however, be added that not only in Either/Or, but also, for example, in Works of Love (1847), Kierkegaard describes a similar ethics of love, a claim for charity which indeed is not independent of a Christian world-view, but nevertheless is an ethical statement at least as strong as Lagerlöf’s. With this, the picture of the connection between Kierkegaard and Lagerlöf is clarified in an ambiguous way: with Brandes as her mentor, Lagerlöf rejects, in the letter to Malmros, Kierkegaard’s religious philosophy, but in her works there are ethical statements, often revealed in the strict plots, which are comparable to Kierkegaard’s thoughts on charity and the notion of coming into existence. To

See, for example, Johnny Kondrup, “Kierkegaard og Brandes,” in Kierkegaard inspiration. En antologi, ed. by Birgit Bertung, Paul Müller, Fritz Norlan and Julia Watkin, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1991 (Søren Kierkegaard Selskabets populære skrifter, vol. 20), p. 78; and Rudin, Sören Kierkegaards Person och Författarskap, which Malmros mentions in the correspondence that she has just read (see Carlsson, Selma, Anna och Elise, p. 208). 22 Sjöstedt, Søren Kierkegaard och svensk litteratur, pp. 348ff. 23 A similar, final statement is to be found almost in all of Lagerlöf’s works and only gets stronger as the years go by. See, for example, Elise Iuul, “Skriven och oskriven lag. Selma Lagerlöf läst inom forskningsområdet ‘Rätt och Litteratur,’ ” Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap, vol. 3, 2007, pp. 78–9; Ulla-Britta Lagerroth, Körkarlen och Bannlyst. Motiv- och idéstudier i Selma Lagerlöfs 10-talsdiktning, Stockholm: Bonniers 1963, pp. 239ff.; Weidel, Helgon och gengångare, pp. 291–417. 21

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emphasize this, the Lagerlöf researcher Vivi Edström (b. 1923) states: “Selma Lagerlöf had met the ethical man of will both in Ibsen and in Kierkegaard.”24 II. Kierkegaard in Lagerlöf Research In her biography, Wägner already points out the connection between Kierkegaard and Jerusalem. Right after she has mentioned that Lagerlöf read Kierkegaard, she asks: “Here is another problem to be solved. Where in Lagerlöf’s works are the impressions from this study revealed? Is perhaps some of the Either/Or problematic to be found in Jerusalem?”25 As already mentioned, Sjöstedt investigates the matter in his dissertation on Kierkegaard and Swedish literature; Lagerlöf research in general only treats the connection to Kierkegaard sporadically and most often with Sjöstedt’s dissertation as a reference.26 However, Sjöstedt fails to find any quotations where Lagerlöf directly uses Kierkegaard as one of her sources.27 Sjöstedt, then, looks through the entire list of works in the search of themes which Lagerlöf could have been inspired by during her study of Kierkegaard. In the chapter on Lagerlöf, he draws on a broad selection of Kierkegaard’s works, but also refers to a more general Kierkegaard perception.28 In his dissertation, Sjöstedt passes on an understanding of Kierkegaard’s conception of Christianity as being strict and pietistic, just as Brandes did, and he admits that Lagerlöf’s emphasis on love and charity as an ethical foundation does not correspond with this.29 Sjöstedt reads Lagerlöf’s texts closely and points out the concrete instances where she may have collected material from Kierkegaardian themes and use of language. Most of Sjöstedt’s attention is given to Gösta Berling’s Saga which tells us the story of the hedonistic and beauty-loving gentlemen or “cavaliers” and Gösta Berling’s existential struggle for how to become both happy and good in life, a struggle which makes him break with the life of a cavalier and in the end become a conscientious workman and husband.30 The book describes a refusal of the aesthetic way of living in favor of an ethical one, and thus it has the same structure as Either/Or in its basic formula. Sjöstedt is supported by the Danish Lagerlöf researcher Jørgen Ravn, who Edström, Selma Lagerlöfs litterära profil, p. 63 (my translation). Ibsen was of great importance to Lagerlöf; Sjöstedt, for example, also describes how it was often through Ibsen that Swedish literature encountered Kierkegaard at the end of the nineteenth century (p. 292). 25 Wägner, Selma Lagerlöf, p. 135. 26 See, for example, Vivi Edström, Livets Stigar. Tiden, handlingen och livskänslan i Gösta Berlings saga, Stockholm: Svenska Bokförlaget/Norstedts 1960, p. 210; p. 215; p. 218; p. 244; pp. 275–6; p. 297; p. 306. 27 Sjöstedt, Søren Kierkegaard och svensk litteratur, p. 312; Sjöstedt did not know about the letter to Malmros quoted above. 28 Sjöstedt mentions: Either/Or I–II (1843), Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), Four Upbuilding Discourses (1843), Repetition (1843), Fear and Trembling (1843), Stages on Life’s Way (1845), Practice in Christianity (1850), and The Moment (1855). 29 Sjöstedt, Søren Kierkegaard och svensk litteratur, p. 359. 30 Ibid., p. 315. 24

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writes, for example, that “Gösta Berling’s Saga is an unsurpassed illustration of Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or,”31 and also by Koch, who in one of his books uses Lagerlöf’s cavaliers to illustrate Kierkegaard’s aesthetes: But when the sun shines on them, they resemble the cavaliers in Gösta Berling’s Saga who do not do anything wise or useful at all, but only what is cavalier-like. These knights of a hundred fairytales are more innocent and simpler than S.K.’s aesthetes, but the aesthetic motto (from Stages), “In vino veritas,” could easily have been written above the main entrance to Ekeby.32

Also, Lagerlöf researcher Jenny Bergenmar includes Kierkegaard in her description of the cavaliers and quotes Høffding, among others.33 Sjöstedt exemplifies the connection between Gösta Berling’s Saga and Either/ Or among other things by the fact that Gösta Berling, who is both a disgraced priest and a poet who does not even write a word, is a Don Juan type. The horse, for example, on which he carries off the young Anna Stjärnhök, bears the name Don Juan. Gösta Berling, though, is not a seducer as is described in “The Seducer’s Diary”; he is not calculating or reflective but lets himself involuntarily get carried away in moments of a sensuous ecstasy of love: “I am Gösta Berling,” he shouts, “the lord of ten thousand kisses and thirteen thousand love letters. Hurrah for Gösta Berling! Catch him if you can!”34 Therefore, the comparison of Gösta Berling with Don Juan/Don Giovanni leads one’s attention to “The Immediate Erotic Stages or the Musical-Erotic” in the first volume of Either/Or where Don Giovanni is described: “Therefore, even if I go on calling Don Giovanni a seducer, I nevertheless do not at all think of him slyly laying his plans, subtly calculating the effect of his intrigues; that by which he deceives is the sensuous in its elemental originality, of which he is, as it were, the incarnation.”35 In this way, Sjöstedt points out a number of instances where the resemblance to Kierkegaard is striking; in his book, he finds examples of themes such as anxiety and despair, suffering, the sacrifice of the beloved, and the moral duty to be open. He also shows how Lagerlöf uses the same narrative techniques as Kierkegaard. An example of this can be found when Lagerlöf vividly depicts the degradation and suffering of Christ through the eyes of a child, just as Kierkegaard depicts it in Practice in Christianity.36 Sjöstedt admits, however, that the traces of Kierkegaard are not too striking after all. Wägner’s statement and Sjöstedt’s arguments for Kierkegaardian features in Gösta Berling’s Saga are supported by a review in Kvinden og Samfundet from 1893, that is, the same time period as Lagerlöf’s work. In this review, the critic Nicoline Nobel Ravn, Menneskekenderen Selma Lagerlöf, p. 52 (my translation). Koch, Søren Kierkegaard, p. VII (my translation). 33 Jenny Bergenmar, Förvildade Hjärtan. Livets estetik och berättandets etik i Selma Lagerlöfs Gösta Berlings saga, Stockholm/Stehag: Symposion 2003, p. 163. 34 Quoted from Selma Lagerlöf, Gösta Berling’s Saga, trans. by Lillie Tudeer, London: Jonathan Cape 1933, p. 221. Cf. Sjöstedt, Søren Kierkegaard och svensk litteratur, p. 316. 35 SKS 2, 104 / EO1, 101. 36 Sjöstedt, Søren Kierkegaard och svensk litteratur, pp. 324–5. 31 32

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Sperling (1844–1917) connects Gösta Berling’s Saga to Kierkegaard and quotes him during her description of the cavaliers: In the case of Gösta Berling, what S. Kierkegaard has written about aesthetics is true— because he is the aesthetic itself: “Of all the branches of knowledge, aesthetics is the most faithless. Anyone who has really loved it becomes in one sense unhappy, but he who has never loved it is and remains a pecus (dumb brute)!”37

Lagerlöf explicitly acknowledged the review in a letter to her Danish translator and friend Ida Falbe-Hansen (1849–1922) dated 19 February 1893. In the letter, Lagerlöf writes: “I was of course deeply impressed by Miss Sperling’s review. I found that she gave me back exactly what I put forward in the book. She reads it in the same mood as I was in when I wrote it.”38 Here, Lagerlöf herself recognizes Sperling’s comparing Gösta Berling’s Saga with Kierkegaard. In spite of this documentation, Sjöstedt’s dissertation has been criticized by various Lagerlöf researchers because he insists on demonstrating a connection between Lagerlöf and Kierkegaard even though the traces of this are few. The Swedish Lagerlöf reseacher Bengt Ek writes, for example, in his dissertation about the years after Gösta Berling’s Saga: Without any doubts, Sjöstedt is right that many resemblances can be found. The question, though, remains whether he has pushed his subject too far when it comes to Selma Lagerlöf. In her statements from her late years, Selma Lagerlöf never neglected to point out representative authors and thinkers from whom she collected strong impressions.39

Ek subsequently claims that it is probably through Ibsen that Lagerlöf has found inspiration for her Kierkegaardian themes. III. “I am, after all, a bit afraid of preaching” The critics of Sjöstedt seem to be right; the connection to Kierkegaard is indefinite and indirect and can only be vaguely documented.40 In any case, there is no doubt that Lagerlöf read Kierkegaard; she writes about Kierkegaardian themes, and in her works she deliberately discusses the complicated theological and philosophical questions of which Kierkegaard is a very essential part (which is also documented in her correspondence). The Kierkegaardian themes play a role in establishing a 37 Nicoline Nobel Sperling, “Selma Lagerlöf: Gøsta Berlings Saga,” Kvinden og Samfundet, vol. 9, no. 1, Copenhagen: Dansk Kvindesamfund 1893, p. 11 (my translation). The Kierkegaard quotation corresponds to SKS 4, 187, note / FT, 97, note. 38 Toijer-Nilsson, Brev I–II, vol. 1, p. 136 (my translation). 39 Ek, Selma Lagerlöf efter Gösta Berlings saga. En studie över genombrottsåren 1891–1897, p. 75 (my translation). 40 At present, Litteraturbanken, Svenska Vitterhetssamfundet, and the National Library of Sweden are planning publication of a Selma Lagerlöf Archive in which all of the material from the National Library regarding Lagerlöf will be made available electronically. Maybe this will create new possibilities for discovering unknown connections between Lagerlöf and Kierkegaard.

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psychology in Lagerlöf’s works which is pre-Freudian and closely linked to an existential ethics as it is in Kierkegaard. This is true not least of all in relation to love which is both part of the psyche of the individual and at the same time turns towards other human beings in its works. In Kierkegaard, the problem is not love in itself, but to act according to it; this is demonstrated again and again in Lagerlöf’s works.41 In the above-quoted correspondence between Lagerlöf and Malmros, on November 17, 1899 Lagerlöf writes some characteristic words about her own poetics: …I am, after all, a bit afraid of preaching. Certainly, I am a changeable person who now believes this, now that. No, the poets should clean the souls of their readers and make their souls beautiful, then later on, the beautiful seed will certainly grow. I imagine that we have an effect like rain in the summer and sunshine, we are neither those who plough nor seed, but instead those who provide growth.42

Like Kierkegaard, Lagerlöf understands the problematic part of preaching. What authority does she have as an author to preach? This is why in her stories she does not explicitly want to pass on new dogmas or truths about the nature of the world. And maybe it is here, in the poetics and epistemology that the influence of Kierkegaard seems to be most striking. Like Kierkegaard, Lagerlöf sees the problem in promoting one’s subjective beliefs to objective, ethical truths. The positive, ethical statement which in any case still remains in the end of each of Lagerlöf’s works becomes wrapped in a complicated net of narrators and passed on like this in an indirect communication which reminds us of Kierkegaard’s or Socrates’ technique of assisting people to “give birth” to themselves, and which makes her works unsentimental.43

Kresten Nordentoft, Kierkegaards psykologi, Copenhagen: G.E.C. Gad 1972, p. 467. Carlsson, Selma, Anna och Elise, p. 215 (my translation). 43 For an analysis of Lagerlöf’s narrative techniques see, for example, Iuul, “Skriven och oskriven lag.” 41 42

Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Lagerlöf’s Corpus Letter to Ida Falbe Hansen, February 19, 1893, in Selma Lagerlöf, Brev I–II, i urval, vols. 1–2, ed. by Ying Toijer-Nilsson, Lund: Gleerups Forlag 1967–69, vol. 1, pp. 222–3. Letter to Elise Malmros, November 1, 1899, in Selma, Anna och Elise. Brevväxling mellan Selma Lagerlöf, Anna Oom och Elise Malmros åren 1886–1937, vols. 1–2, ed. by Lena Carlsson, Landskrona: Litorina 2009, vol. 1 (1886–1913), p. 209. (This letter is also quoted in Ulla-Britta Lagerroth, “ ‘Liknelsen om punden är min egentliga religion…’ Några brev från Selma Lagerlöf till Elise Malmros, presenterade av Ulla-Britta Lagerroth,” Lagerlöfstudier, Malmö: Allhem 1958, pp. 39–40.) II. Sources of Lagerlöf’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Brandes, Georg, Søren Kierkegaard. En kritisk Fremstilling i Grundrids, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1877. Hammerich, Martin, Danska och Norska Läsestycken, med upplysningar om språk och litteratur, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1865, pp. 23–7; pp. 459–60. Heiberg, Peter Andreas, Et Segment af Søren Kierkegaards religiøse Udvikling, Copenhagen and Kristiania: Nordisk Forlag 1918. — Søren Kierkegaards religiøse Udvikling. Psykologisk Mikroskopi, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1925. Høffding, Harald, Den nyere Filosofis Historie, vols. 1–2, Copenhagen: P.G. Philipsens Forlag 1894–95. Koch, Carl, Søren Kierkegaard, Copenhagen and Kristiania: Nordisk Forlag 1907. Rudin, Waldemar, Sören Kierkegaards Person och Författarskap. Ett Försök, Uppsala: A. Nilsson 1880. III. Secondary Literature on Lagerlöf’s Relation to Kierkegaard Bergenmar, Jenny, Förvildade Hjärtan. Livets estetik och berättandets etik i Selma Lagerlöfs Gösta Berlings saga, Stockholm and Stehag: Symposion 2003, p. 21; p. 163; p. 166; pp. 219–20. Edström, Vivi, Livets Stigar. Tiden, handlingen och livskänslan i Gösta Berlings saga, Stockholm: Svenska Bokförlaget/Norstedts 1960, p. 210; p. 215; p. 218; p. 244; p. 275; p. 297; p. 306.

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— Selma Lagerlöfs litterära profil, Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren 1986, p. 63. Ek, Bengt, Selma Lagerlöf efter Gösta Berlings saga. En studie över genombrottsåren 1891–1897, Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag 1951, pp. 74–5; p. 318. Nobel Sperling, Nicoline, “Selma Lagerlöf: Gøsta Berlings Saga,” Kvinden og Samfundet, vol. 9, no. 1, Copenhagen: Dansk Kvindesamfund 1893, pp. 9–14. Ravn, Jørgen, Menneskekenderen Selma Lagerlöf, Copenhagen: G.E.C. Gads Forlag 1958, p. 12; p. 52; p. 57; p. 242; p. 248. Sjöstedt, Nils Åke, Søren Kierkegaard och svensk litteratur. Från Fredrika Bremer till Hjalmar Söderberg, Göteborg: Wettergren & Kerbers Förlag 1950, pp. 312–62. Wägner, Elin, Selma Lagerlöf, vols. 1–2, Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Forlag 1942, p. 135. Weidel, Gunnel, Helgon och gengångare. Gestaltningen av kärlek och rättvisa i Selma Lagerlöfs diktning, Lund: CWK Gleerup Bokförlag 1964, p. 23; p. 32; p. 163; pp. 331–2; p. 354; p. 361; p. 363; p. 382.

August Strindberg: Along with Kierkegaard in a Dance of Death Ingrid Basso A personality does not develop autonomously, but it sucks a drop from every other soul with which it comes into contact, just as the bee gathers honey from millions of flowers, in order to mingle it again and pass it off for its own.1

I. Introduction: Strindberg’s Stages on Life’s Way When the young future Swedish dramatist and writer,2 Johan August Strindberg (1849–1912), read Søren Kierkegaard for the first time, he felt deeply disturbed.3 August Strindberg, Jäsningstiden. En Själs Utvecklingshistoria (1867–1872) (Time of Ferment), Stockholm: Bonniers 1886, pp. 281–2. (Reprinted in Samlade Skrifter, vols. 1–55, ed. by John Landquist, Stockholm: Bonniers 1915–26, vol. 18, p. 450.) 2 This kind of definition is perhaps still insufficient to define August Strindberg’s personality and work: he was, indeed, not only a dramatist and a poet, but he also wrote philological, scientific, and occult speculations, essays on social, psychological, and aesthetic questions, diaries, notebooks, and letters; moreover, he was also a highly regarded painter: “It is not at all too much to say…that next to Goethe Strindberg was European literature’s most universally equipped author…because in his many aesthetic, ethical, and metaphysical endeavors Strindberg actually aspired to become Europe’s last Renaissance man” (John Eric Bellquist, Strindberg as a Modern Poet: A Critical and Comparative Study, Berkeley: University of California Press 1986, p. 1). 3 For an account of Strindberg’s life and work see especially the standard works by Martin Lamm, Strindbergs dramer, vols. 1–2, Stockholm: Bonniers 1924–26; Strindberg och makterna, Uppsala: SKDB 1936, and August Strindberg, Johanneshov: Hammarström & Åberg 1986. See also Olof Lagercrantz, August Strindberg, Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand 1979 (English translation: August Strindberg, trans. by Anselm Hollo, New York: Farrar-Straus-Giroux 1984), and Olof Lagercrantz, Eftertanken om Strindberg, Stockholm: Författarförlaget 1980; Gunnar Brandell, Strindberg. Ett författarliv, vols. 1–4, Stockholm: Alba 1983–89; Michael Meyer, Strindberg: A Biography, London: Secker & Warburg 1985. For a survey of the secondary literature on Strindberg see, for example, Michael Robinson, “Sesquicentennial Strindberg: an Anglo-Swedish Editorial Note,” Scandinavica (special issue on Strindberg), vol. 38, no. 1, 1999, pp. 5–11; Anders Ollfors, August Strindberg i bibliografisk och bibliofil belysning, Borås: Norma 1987; Sven Rinman, “Femton års Strindbergsforskning,” Strindbergiana, 1985, pp. 81–108; Sven Rinman, “Bibliografi: Strindberg,” Ny Illustrerad Svensk Litteraturhistoria, vols. 1–4, 2nd ed., Stockholm: Natur & Kultur 1967, see vol. 4; Göran Lindström, “Strindberg Studies 1915–1962,” Scandinavica, vol. 2. no. 1, 1963, pp. 27–50. See also the Strindbergian bibliographies that appear in Scandinavian Studies and Samlaren. 1

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He found in the philosopher the new presence of a writer destined to have a decisive effect both on his intellectual formation and on his work.4 The 21-year-old student Strindberg received Either/Or on loan in October 1870 from Josef Linck (1846–1901), a member of the student literary circle in Uppsala called “Runa,” of which Strindberg was a founder. The dramatist would say that he read the book “with fear and trembling”5 but differently from the way that his fellow students read the Danish author. They considered Kierkegaard a genius and appreciated his style. Strindberg was also deeply influenced by Kierkegaard, as usually happens, he added, “when the reader is similar to the author.”6 The statement will be better understood if it is read in its correct interpretative light, as we will try to do later. When Strindberg wrote these words, he was 37 years old; many important things in his extremely tumultuous life had already happened, and, thanks to his novel of 1879 I Röda Rummet (The Red Room), he had already been recognized by the critics as the champion of the definitive “breakthrough” of realism in Sweden, the so-called Modern Breakthrough7 in Scandinavian literature—even if later the development of his work would show much more than the mere image of “a Swedish Zola.”8 Thus, he was by this time already a successful writer, and he was welcome in his country in the circles that counted. He was in touch with the Danish brothers Edvard (1847–1931) and Georg Brandes (1842–1927),9 and through them, with the Strindberg, Jäsningstiden, pp. 203ff.; Samlade Skrifter, vol. 18, pp. 386ff. Strindberg, Jäsningstiden, p. 203; Samlade Skrifter, vol. 18, p. 386. 6 Ibid. 7 See Georg Brandes, Det moderne Gjennembruds Mænd, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1883. 8 See August Strindberg, Brev, vols. 1–20, ed. by Torsten Eklund (vols. 1–15) and Björn Meidal (vols. 16–20), Stockholm: Bonniers 1948–96, vol. 1, p. 123. English translation, Strindberg’s Letters, vols. 1–2, ed. and trans. by Michael Robinson, London: Athlone 1992, vol. 1, p. 88. On this topic and on the role and the peculiarities of Strindberg’s work and style in the literary critical context of the time, that is, on Strindberg between realism and expressionism see, for example, Gunnar Ahlström, Det moderna genombrottet i Nordens litteratur, Stockholm: Kooperativa Förbundets Bokförlag 1947, pp. 447ff.; Mario Gabrieli, “August Strindberg,” in his Le letterature della Scandinavia, 2nd ed., Florence and Milan: Sansoni-Accademia 1969, pp. 210–53. “Right from the beginning, his [Strindberg’s] naturalism had been satiric-caricature: not a mere impassive portrait of an external reality, but the emphasis on the hidden meaning of this reality, its ruthlessly violent deformation as a revenge on an unconquered idealism.” Ibid., p. 213. Even Thomas Mann once called Strindberg “the first Surrealist” (Altes und Neues, Frankfurt am Main: S. Fisher 1953, p. 234). On this topic see also Bernhard Diebold, Anarchie im Drama, 3rd ed., Frankfurt am Main: Frankfurter Verlags-Anstalt 1925, pp. 155–249; Karl Åke Kärnell, Strindbergs bildspråk, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell 1962; Carl Öhman, August Strindberg and the Origin of the Scenic Expressionism, Helsingfors: Mercators Tryckeri 1961 (Michigan Studies of Theater); Børge Gedsø Madsen, Strindberg’s Naturalistic Theater: Its Relation to French Naturalism, 2nd ed., Copenhagen and Seattle: Munksgaard and University of Washington Press 1973; Carl E.W.L. Dahlström, Strindberg’s Dramatic Expressionism, 3rd ed., New York: Arno Press 1980; Arnold Weinstein, Northern Arts, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2008. 9 On the relationship between Strindberg and especially Edvard Brandes see, for example, the interesting article by Carl Reinhold Smedmark, “Edvard Brandes and August 4 5

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Norwegian writer Alexander Kielland (1849–1906) as well as the Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen (1847–85). Although he was involved with the so-called radical current of “det Unga Sverige” (the young Sweden), Strindberg would always hold a critical and nonconformist position in order to carry on his own ever inflamed polemical points of view against the hypocrisy of the “pillars of the modern society.”10 During these years, moreover, when he was in France and Switzerland Strindberg also saw the radical circle surrounding the Norwegians Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (1832–1910) and Jonas Lie (1833–1908), but he would soon break with them especially because of his radical position on the question of the emancipation of women and the excesses of his struggle against the feminist movement.11 Then, with the first part of the collection of short stories Giftas (Married), written between May 25 and July 4, 1884 in Ouchy and Chexbres (Switzerland), Strindberg distanced himself from Bjørnson’s moralism and instead chose to follow a Rousseauian point of view on sexual morality. Because of the harshness of his attack on Nordic feminism and on the Ibsenian “modern and idealistic gallantry that makes women angels and men devils”12—a paradoxical “radical-conservative” attack,13 which was actually directed against the entire Swedish society—and especially because of a “blasphemous” statement against the sacrament of the Eucharist,14 Strindberg had Strindberg: Encounter between Critic and Artist,” in Structure of Influence: A Comparative Approach to August Strindberg, ed. by Marilyn Johns Blackwell, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1981, pp. 165–82. 10 With polemical reference to Ibsen, Strindberg defined The Red Room as “an unmasking of the ‘pillars of society’ ” (Strindberg, Samlade Skrifter, vol. 17, p. 111). Before this novel, in 1875 Strindberg had also written an unpretentious play titled Anno fyrtioåtta (Year 1848) which anticipated it in its thematic point of view. With The Red Room Strindberg meant to depict the image of the so-called “new” Sweden, as it was after the parliamentary reform of 1866, on the way to the reactionary conformism of the reign of Oscar II (1872–1907). In this work the author meant to describe the contrast between the Bohemian life of the impoverished intellectuals who were regular customers of the “Red Room” (a room of the restaurant Berns of Stockholm, where Strindberg went in 1872) and the sharp businessmen and the powerful men of the country, whose society was a tissue of lies. Soon after, in 1882, Strindberg would also publish the satirical pamphlet Det nya riket (The New Kingdom), which, with a Rousseauian perspective, criticizes with a high degree of causticity the bureaucracy and the formalities of a reign which had completely forgotten the natural dimension of the human being. This work marked Strindberg forever as a lawless rebel, and it caused a scandal that forced the author to leave Sweden and travel around Europe for about seven years (1883–89). 11 The so-called sedlighetsfejden (“morality controversy”), which developed around the problem of premarital chastity for men and for women that was discussed by Bjørnson’s play of 1883 En hanske (A Gauntlet), actually dissolved the unity between the Nordic writers, since it complicated the question of the emancipation of women. See, for example, Smedmark, “Edvard Brandes and August Strindberg: Encounter between Critic and Artist,” pp. 166ff. 12 Strindberg, Brev, vol. 4, p. 312; Strindberg’s Letters, vol. 1, p. 139. 13 See, for example, Georg Brandes, “August Strindberg,” in Nordiske Moderne, vol. 4 of his Udvalgte Skrifter, vols. 1–9, Copenhagen: Tiderne Skifter 1984–87, p. 169. 14 In the short story Dygdens lön (Virtue’s Reward), Strindberg presented a kind of autobiographical sketch of his confirmation, with an incisive description of the hypocrisy of religious education in society. See Strindberg, Samlade Skrifter, vol. 14, pp. 63–4. (English

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to stand trial in his country in October and November of the same year. The writer was, however, acquitted and defined himself, among other things, as a “deist.”15 But after that Strindberg’s prestige started to diminish, as well as his success as a writer. This was the beginning of a period of deep crisis that was made more acute by his troubled relation with his first wife Siri von Essen (1850–1912),16 the Finnish extranslation: Asra, in August Strindberg, Married: Twenty Stories of Married Life, trans. by Ellie Schleussner, Boston: J.W. Luce 1913, p. 40.) 15 “I did not blaspheme God, since I am Deist….Then, if by saying ‘God’ one means Christ, I have to remark that the negation of his divinity has never been considered blasphemous to the present day.” See “Giftas-processens protokoll,” in Tidskrift för Folkets Rättigheter, no. 4, 1884, pp. 5ff. On the whole affair see Strindberg i offentligheten: Giftas-striden, 1884–1885, ed. by Gunnar Brandell, Uppsala: Litteraturvetenskapliga Institutionen, Uppsala Universitet 1980 and Ulf Boëtius’ commentary to the most recent (but not yet completed) critical edition of Strindberg’s works, August Strindbergs Samlade Verk, vols. 1–72, ed. by Lars Dählbäck et al., Stockholm: Amqvist & Wiksell 1981–, vol. 16, Giftas, pp. 198ff. A very good account of the issue has been also given by Franco Perrelli in his introduction to the Italian translation of the story collection Giftas, Sposarsi, trans. by Carmen Giorgetti Cima, Milan: Mursia 1995, pp. V–XXXII. 16 Of course, this is not the right place to analyze in depth the relationship between Strindberg and his first wife Siri von Essen. In a certain sense, to talk about this relation is like talking about Strindberg himself and his entire literary production. He met Siri von Essen in 1875 and married her two years later. They had four sons (but the first died immediately after birth) and divorced in 1892. Siri took care of the children—hence Strindberg’s desperate sense of desolation and abandonment. During these years, there arose in Strindberg a kind of “aristocratic individualism” in which one can see the influence of Nietzsche, with whom Strindberg had a correspondence. In September 1887 the writer started to delineate a kind of marriage novel in French that had rather the tone of an autobiographical confession. It was finished on March 19, 1888. Le Plaidoyer d’un fou (A Madman’s Defence) was written precisely in order to liberate Strindberg’s character from the representation made of him by others, especially his wife (see, for example, Karin Smirnoff, Så var det i verkligheten. Bakgrunden till Strindbergs brevväxling med barnen i första giftet. Skilsmässoåren 1891–92, Stockholm: Bonnier 1956, p. 203; Harry Jacobsen, Strindberg og hans første hustru, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1946; Michael Robinson, Strindberg and Autobiography, Norwich: Norwich Press 1986, pp. 62–3; Poul Houe, “Writing with Vegeance: A Madman’s Defence—an ‘Otherness’ Called Suspense,” in August Strindberg and the Other: New Critical Approaches, ed. by Poul Houe, Sven H. Rossel, and Göran Stockenström, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi 2002, pp. 149–65 [p. 155]). It was also in the same years that Strindberg wrote some of his masterpieces: the novel Hemsöborna (The Natives of Hemsö) and the dramas Fadren (The Father), Fröken Julie (Miss Julie) and Fordringsägare (Creditors), where the anti-feminism of the author was elaborated together with the biological Darwinist theme of the battle between the sexes, and the psychological-psychiatric ones of the Hjärnornas Kamp (The Battle of the Brains). Strindberg had, indeed, since 1886 begun to study in depth the psychology and psychiatry of his time; thus he read the works by Martin Charcot, Théodule-Armand Ribot (1839–1916), Henry Maudsley (1835–1918), and Hippolyte Bernheim (1840–1919) (see John Landquist, Litteraturen och psykologien, in Alf Ahlberg et al., Dikten, diktaren och samhället, Stockholm: Bonniers 1936, pp. 7ff. The theme of the so-called “psychic murder,” in which the woman becomes the “vampire” of man’s energy, now became apparent as Strindberg’s attention was directed toward the precise relation between two human beings, male and

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baroness Wrangel, who in 1877 had left her first husband in order to marry the young dramatist and dedicate herself to a career in acting. Amidst financial difficulties, ideological crisis, and family troubles, the writer conceived the socio-psychological project of an autobiography.17 Thus, in March–April 1886, inspired by Jules Vallès’ (1832–85) contemporary autobiography Jacques Vingtras,18 he wrote the first part of Tjenstekvinnans son (The Son of a Servant), which was immediately followed by a second part, Jäsningstiden (Time of Ferment), a third in 1887, I Röda Rummet (In the Red Room),19 and the final one, Författaren (The Author), written in 1886, but not published until 1909, all together commonly referred to under abovementioned provocative title of The Son of a Servant,20 I, II, III and IV, or, less commonly, by the subtitle of En Själs Utvecklingshistoria (The Development of a Soul). It is precisely from the second book of this work that our analysis of Strindberg’s relationship to Kierkegaard will start, since this is the place in which the author explicitly deals most with the figure of the Danish philosopher and tells about his first encounter with him sixteen years before. In Jäsningstiden Strindberg recounts his own life, under the “mask” of the protagonist Johan (the author’s first name), during the years he spent as student at the University of Uppsala, from 1867 to 1872, where he had begun to study aesthetics and modern languages. Soon after his move from Stockholm, he had found the smalltown Uppsala terribly monotonous, the academic atmosphere stuffy, and the lectures dull. Moreover, his poverty at that time was unbearable; thus in October 1868 he interrupted his studies and accepted a position as a teacher at Klara folkskola in Stockholm. Then he became tutor in the house of doctor Oscar Sandhal, and later for the son of the famous doctor Axel Lamm. Thanks to the Lamm family, during this female, rather than toward the whole of society. He started to examine in depth the themes of suggestion and hypnosis, which would later bring him to dedicate himself to occultism and to create the mental dream-like atmosphere of his novel Inferno (Hell) and dramas like Dödsdansen I–II (The Dance of Death, 1900), Till Damaskus I–III (Road to Damascus, 1898–1904), Ett drömspel (A Dream Play, 1901), and Spöksonaten (The Ghost Sonata, 1907). 17 See, for example, The letter to Edvard Brandes written at that time: Strindberg, Brev, vol. 5, p. 306; Strindberg’s Letters, vol. 1, p. 196. 18 See Strindberg, Brev, vol. 5, p. 277. Not translated in Strindberg’s Letters. 19 Not to be confused with the abovementioned novel of 1879 Röda rummet (The Red Room). 20 Ulrika Eleonora Norling (1823–62), Strindberg’s mother, was the daughter of a servant of Södertälje, who became later the porter of a wholesaler. When in 1834 her father died, she had to work as a servant in the homes of good families, then as a barmaid in Liljeholmen, where she met Carl Oscar Strindberg (1811–83), the writer’s father. Carl Oscar came from a family of grocers from the old part of Stockholm; he was well educated and seems to have enjoyed a relatively good social position. They married in 1848: they had already had three children (only two of which survived), and August, who would be the fourth of seven children, was born only a few weeks after the marriage, after his father had gone bankrupt, and so the family lived for some years in somewhat strained circumstances. When Ulrika Eleonora died at the age of 39, Carl Oscar married in 1863 the young nursemaid of his children, Emilia Charlotta Petersson, an event that excited the discontent of August. The writer wanted to interpret his position like that of Ismael in the Bible, the “son of a servant,” Hagar, forced to live as an outcast from society and a rebel.

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period Strindberg came into contact with intellectuals and artists—famous actors and actresses of the Scandinavian stage were habitués of the doctor’s home—and with the neo-liberal political currents. In 1869 Strindberg himself decided to become a doctor, and so he went back to Uppsala again, where he took the examination in chemistry, but failed. But his interest in science remained, and he drew upon his knowledge of medicine and chemistry in several of his works. Now, stimulated by the literary and artistic interests evidenced by doctor Lamm’s family, Strindberg thought that he might become an actor; he presented himself at the Royal Theater, but even there he failed. He finished by performing awkward parts as an extra. He was disgusted with life and even thought of committing suicide, but thanks to the director and dramatist Frans Hedberg (1828–1908), who saw in him “the little hidden spark” of the playwright,21 he finally discovered his real vocation. Therefore, he began to write, and the first result of this new life was the lost play of 1869 En Namndagsgåva (A Name Day’s Gift). On Hedberg’s advice, he came back to Uppsala once more and again took up his study of aesthetics, but he spent most of the time writing. After the first play there followed in the same year Fritänkaren (The Free-thinker) and Det sjunkande Hellas (Greece in Decline), which was reworked as Hermione in 1870. In February, together with the comrades Axel Jäderin and Joseph Josephson, Strindberg founded the above-mentioned literally society “Runa,” with a neo-Gothic program, whose object was the study of pan-Scandinavian literature and culture in its idealistic and nationalistic aspects. Before his comrades, Strindberg read Hermione and the tragedy Blotsven (the manuscript of which he would later burn together with another work entitled Erik XIV in 1870). He wrote also I Rom (In Rome), a one-act play on an episode of Bertel Thorvaldsen’s (1770–1844) life; this was the first play by Strindberg to be produced by the Royal Theater, premiering in 1870. Under the influence of the spirit of the Runa society, Strindberg wrote in 1871 Den Fredlöse (The Outlaw), which dealt with paganism and Christianity in Iceland and the pagan North. This work won for the author a stipend from the King of Sweden, Charles XV, for the continuation of his studies.22 It was in these years that Strindberg found a copy of Either/Or placed in his hands, a book which perfectly set up the conflict between the ideal and the real and stated that there could be no compromise between the aesthetic and the ethical life. II. Søren Kierkegaard’s Cryptic Message to the Artist as a Young Man Zerrissen, “grief,” is the title of the chapter in which Strindberg introduces the figure of Søren Kierkegaard, and this is already a meaningful sign of his first reaction to the enigmatic philosopher. At that time the young Strindberg felt confused and guilty. First, he had a sense of guilt because his father had provided him with money so that he could finish his studies in literature at Uppsala University, but instead of studying, he continued to write, breaking in this way the promise he gave Strindberg, Brev, vol. 1, p. 49; Strindberg’s Letters, vol. 1, p. 13. But the King died in September 1872, and Strindberg found himself again extremely poor. 21 22

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to his father. Then he was puzzled about the fact that anyone who took up writing as a profession because he enjoyed it would be leading a guilty aesthetic life rather than an ethical one.23 He suffered greatly during this period as he tried to come to a decision about his own life. This is why Kierkegaard’s work of 1843 had such a massive impact on him. As he stated, “All the prerequisites for Kierkegaard’s entrance into his [Johan’s (i.e., Strindberg’s)] life were already at hand.”24 After the reading of Either/Or, Strindberg said that he felt “like a ball pitched back and forth from one theory to another.”25 He said that he read the first part by the aesthete A and now and then was enraptured by it, but he always felt ill at ease as if he were at the bedside of someone ill, and when he finished this first part he was in a state of shock: “The ‘Diary of the Seducer’ he [Johan] found to be the fantasies of someone who was impotent or a born onanist, who had never deceived a girl.”26 Strindberg’s first impression of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or is interesting since it seems to present the features of a genuine reading without any kind of prior knowledge; it appears to be the simple reading of an intellectual man, young and sensitive, looking for an answer to his own existential troubles, and who joins in an ideal conversation with the young author of a kind of novel that seems to have been written just for him. And it is just because he did not have any kind of criticaltheoretical previous knowledge of the Danish philosopher that the message of the latter could penetrate so deeply and genuinely into his soul. Strindberg in fact said that he would only come to understand the philosopher many years later, precisely at the age of 37, in the period in which he was writing his autobiography, when he could finally reconcile the aesthetic enjoyment that derived from his activity as a writer with the concept of duty as Kierkegaard had proclaimed it. Strindberg realized first that a solution could have been not just writing mere fiction but polemical works against the corruption in the social system, and thus his production would have belonged not merely to the category of the aesthetic but also to the ethical.27 He concluded that Kierkegaard’s message was strictly religious and thus destined for the priests, and only in this context was its rigor the right thing, but at that time Strindberg considered himself a “free-thinker.”28 He wrote, Kierkegaard was not the man who could settle the troubles. Only the evolutionist philosophers could have restored peace between enjoyment and duty. They should do away with that treacherous concept of “either/or” and preach the concept of “both/and,” See Strindberg, Jäsningstiden, pp. 206–7; Samlade Skrifter, vol. 18, pp. 388–9. Strindberg, Jäsningstiden, p. 208; Samlade Skrifter, vol. 18, p. 390. 25 Strindberg, Jäsningstiden, p. 204; Samlade Skrifter, vol. 18, p. 387. 26 Strindberg, Jäsningstiden, p. 203; Samlade Skrifter, vol. 18, p. 386. 27 This point has been discussed widely by Loftur L. Bjarnason in his Ph.D. dissertation, Categories of Søren Kierkegaard’s Thought in the Life and Writings of August Strindberg, Stanford University 1951, especially pp. 132ff. 28 Some years before, Strindberg had been under the influence of the liberal doctrines advocated by Theodore Parker (1810–60), whose broadminded religiosity and worship of nature brought him to verge toward Rousseau by way of Rydberg’s critical theology and Boström’s thought. 23 24

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Ingrid Basso giving the flesh its due and the mind that to which it is entitled. He attained, only after many years, clarity as to Kierkegaard’s real meaning, when he perceived him to be simply the Pietist, the ultra-Christian, who desired to realize the two-thousand-year-old oriental ideal in a modern society. But Kierkegaard was right about one thing: if it was to be Christianity, then it should be true Christianity; Either/Or was intended primarily for the priests of the Church who claimed to be Christian....The mistake consisted in putting into contrast the aesthetical and the ethical, because they can be perfectly reconciled. But Johan could not do that before the age of thirty-seven, when, after an endless struggle, he began an attempt of compromise, and he understood that even work and duty come under pleasure, and that enjoyment turned to proper use, was a duty.29

Nevertheless, Strindberg continued, that book [i.e., Either/Or] “came to haunt him,”30 and he became angry with the other students when they treated it merely as a work of belles lettres. Moreover, as we will see, this statement applies not only to the period in which Strindberg read Kierkegaard for the first time but also until the end of his life, and it concerns of course not only the decision between an aesthetic and an ethical way of living,31 but also the religious choice, an inner decision that, for Strindberg, was determined more radically in terms of the meaning of the life. The so-called “Inferno crisis” of the years 1894–97 testifies to this.32 But now let us return to Strindberg’s years as a young student and see his first impression of Kierkegaard. As we said, his reading was at that time without any prior knowledge, and just because of this there was all the more reason why the “machinery” devised by Kierkegaard in Either/Or could work perfectly. A posteriori, indeed, Strindberg would say that the work obtained the desired effect,33 that is, it smuggled in Christian ethics with its spirit of abnegation and its sense of duty by means of an aesthetic story.34 Strindberg declared that at that time he did not know Strindberg, Jäsningstiden, p. 208; Samlade Skrifter, vol. 18, p. 390. Strindberg, Jäsningstiden, p. 208; Samlade Skrifter, vol. 18, p. 390. See also Jäsningstiden, p. 261; Samlade Skrifter, vol. 18, p. 433: “He had Kierkegaard in mind.” 31 Also because, Strindberg wrote, he was still further puzzled by the fact that “when he finished reading Either/Or, he realized that also the moralist was in despair and the whole theory of duty had only created a philistine” (ibid., p. 390); indeed, once he had finally understood the real meaning of Kierkegaard’s message, he wrote that “whether you are an aesthete or a moralist, however, you have to cast yourself into the arms of madness, that is Christ” (Jäsningstiden, p. 208; Samlade Skrifter, vol. 18, p. 390). 32 On this see again Bjarnason, Categories of Søren Kierkegaard’s Thought in the Life and Writings of August Strindberg, p. 145: “The Inferno years were…years of severe crisis in Strindberg’s life….This crisis was brought on by an inability on the part of Strindberg to reconcile his religious views with what he felt had been proved as truth by the sciences. Indeed, it was not merely the supposed conflict between religion and scientific truth that bothered him, but also that same problem which had plagued him ever since, as student at Uppsala, he had first read Kierkegaard, viz., to what extent he was justified in considering writing as an ethical rather than an aesthetic occupation. Still the suffering that he underwent during the Inferno period is a clear indication that even then he had not completely solved this problem for….his Inferno crisis was a direct manifestation of a deep-seated spiritual conflict.” 33 Strindberg, Jäsningstiden, p. 203; Samlade Skrifter, vol. 18, p. 386. 34 Ibid. See SKS 16, 26 / PV, 44: “Therefore the religious author first of all must try to establish rapport with people. That is, he must begin with an esthetic piece. This is earnest 29

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that Kierkegaard was Christian because he did not know his upbuilding discourses.35 Thus, the young Strindberg intended to refuse Kierkegaard’s message: If then he had read the upbuilding discourses, he would have probably taken one step toward Christianity; maybe, it is difficult to say now; but coming back again to Christ was like replanting a tooth that had fallen out, and that had been thrown away to one’s great satisfaction together with the toothache.36

Strindberg’s apparently strange words have a peculiar and precise meaning connected with a previous spiritual phase of his life, that is, his religious formation. Strindberg’s home, indeed, was essentially Pietistic. In the 1860s especially his mother, then his young stepmother, had been influenced by the severe Pietism of the charismatic preacher of Bethlehem’s Church, Carl Olof Rosenius (1816–68), who was very popular at that time. Even the young Strindberg followed his family in this, especially after the death of his mother, when he found in Pietism a kind money. The more brilliant the piece is, the better it is for him….Therefore he must have everything prepared in order, yet without any impatience, to bring forth the religious as swiftly as possible as soon as he has gained their attention, so that with the momentum of being engrossed in the esthetic the same people come face-to-face with the religious.” 35 Ibid. One could open here a wide parenthesis on Kierkegaard’s reception in Sweden, in order to understand better what Strindberg could have learned about Kierkegaard before 1870, even without reading him directly. For an exhaustive survey on this topic, see the recent article by Jonna Hjertström-Lappalainen and Lars-Erik Hjertström-Lappalainen, “Sweden: Kierkegaard’s Reception in Swedish Philosophy, Theology, and Contemporary Literary Theory,” in Kierkegaard’s International Reception, Tome I, Northern and Western Europe, ed. by Jon Stewart, Aldershot: Ashgate 2009 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 8), pp. 173–96. Here one can say that at the time that Strindberg was reading Either/Or (1870–72) very little critical literature had appeared that could guide the eager young student (see Bjarnason, Categories of Søren Kierkegaard’s Thought in the Life and Writings of August Strindberg, pp. 4ff.). Thus, without Kierkegaard’s journals and papers and without the critical aids, Strindberg had to ferret out Kierkegaard’s message for himself. The only critical instruments that could have been at Strindberg’s disposal were some writings in which Georg Brandes mentioned the Danish thinker: Kritiker og Portraiter that was printed in Copenhagen in 1870, and then in the first part of his Hovedstrømninger i det nittende Aarhundredes Litteratur, entitled Emigrantliteraturen, appeared in February 1872. We know for sure from Strindberg’s own words that he read carefully the first book as soon as it came out (see Jäsningstiden, in Strindberg, Samlade Skrifter, vol. 18, p. 376) and it was definitely important for his aesthetic shaping, “like a bolt of lightning, illuminating the darkness of doubt and shedding a new light on the whole world of aesthetics.” Then, he also read Emigrantliteratur, and this book especially influenced Strindberg’s reading of Kierkegaard, since the Liberal Brandes saw in the Danish philosopher an “abstract idealism” with an overtone of asceticism and anti-humanistic austerity, while in the rest of Europe, literature had already awakened to the call of the modern world. This reading seems to have been decisive in Strindberg’s rewriting of the prose version of Mäster Olof. Strindberg also commented on Brandes’ work in a letter to his friend Eugène Fahlstedt dated May 1872, in which he stated that Kierkegaard was Christianity’s last cry for help before it sank, see Strindberg, Brev, vol. 1, p. 103. Strindberg’s Letters, vol. 1, p. 23. 36 Strindberg, Jäsningstiden, p. 204; Samlade Skrifter, vol. 18, p. 387.

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of expression for his congenital melancholy, now sharpened by the sorrow for his loss.37 Moreover, in Pietism he also tried to find shelter from his sexually motivated feelings of guilt,38 and so he became a fanatic. But soon his spiritual restlessness and his several readings led him further, and he began to explore different fields of religious thinking: David Friedrich Strauss (1808–74), Abraham Viktor Rydberg (1828–95), Christopher Jacob Boström (1797–1866), Ernest Renan (1823–92) and then, finally, Theodore Parker (1810–60).39 “Sermons without Christ and without Hell: that was just what he needed….Christ the Inquisitor was overthrown; predestination, eternal punishment, all fell down since it had been ready to collapse for a long time now....It was like freeing oneself from clothes that were too tight and taking new ones.”40 It is difficult to understand what Strindberg meant when he talked about his first rejection of Kierkegaard, even if he himself had to admit a kind of feeling of “anxiety”—in a Kierkegaardian sense—towards him, since he was simultaneously afraid of and attracted to the Danish philosopher. This is certainly the reason why he would never abandon him. III. The Hidden and Explicit Presence of Kierkegaard in Strindberg’s Writings A. “Idealism and Realism,” The Free-thinker, Mäster Olof In order to become a candidate for a degree at the University, in the spring of 1871 Strindberg had to write a thesis, and he chose to evaluate “the most tragic personality of Danish literature after Kierkegaard,”41 namely, Adam Oehlenschläger (1779–1850), and his work Hakon Jarl. Strindberg applied to this study the critical

See Tjenstekvinnans Son. En Själs Utvecklingshistoria (1849–1867) (Tjenstekvinnans Son I), Stockholm: Bonniers 1886, p. 108. (Reprinted in Strindberg, Samlade Skrifter, vol. 18, p. 94.) 38 Tjenstekvinnans Son. En Själs Utvecklingshistoria (1849–1867), p. 183; Samlade Skrifter, vol. 18, p. 159: “Johan became a Pietist from many reasons. Bankrupt on earth, since he was doomed to die at twenty-five without spinal bone marrow or a nose, he made heaven the object of his search. Melancholy by nature, but full of activity, he loved what was melancholy. Tired of textbooks, which contained no living water because they did not come into contact with life, he found more nourishment in a religion which did so at every turn.” The notion of dying without bone marrow or a nose is a reference to a theory about the results of masturbation expounded by the German pietist Dr. Six Carl von Kapff in 1862 in the popular pamphlet En ungdomswäns warning för ungdomens farligaste fiende (Warning of a Friend of Youth Against the Most Dangerous Enemy of Youth), Stockholm: Flodin 1862. 39 See David Friedrich Strauss, Das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet, vols. 1–2, Tübingen: Osiander 1835–36; Viktor Rydberg, Bibelns lära om Kristus, Göteborg: Handelstidningen 1862; Christopher Jacob Böstrom, Anmärkningar om helvetesläran, Uppsala: Esaias Edquist 1864; Joseph Ernest Renan, Vie de Jésus, Paris: M. Lévy frères 1863. 40 Strindberg, Tjenstekvinnans Son. En Själs Utvecklingshistoria (1849–1867), p. 187; Samlade Skrifter, vol. 18, p. 159. 41 Strindberg, Jäsningstiden, p. 231; Samlade Skrifter, vol. 18, p. 408. 37

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method which he had learned from Brandes.42 Using Oehlenschläger’s abovementioned work as a background, Strindberg intended to discuss the eternal conflict of idealism and realism in literature, and he alluded especially to Shakespeare, Brandes, and Kierkegaard. Actually, the young Strindberg wrote a kind of literary essay rather than an objective analysis, and so his thesis, submitted to the professor Carl Rupert Nyblom (1832–1907), obtained a very low grade, with the remark that “it seemed most suitable for the lady readers of the Ny Illustrerad Tidning.”43 But Strindberg’s thesis, as is outlined in Time of Ferment, was intended to be reminiscent of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, even to the point of being entirely composed of letters exchanged between “A” and “B.”44 Indeed, the conclusion of the whole work was as follows: Let us then become serious with our doubts. Let us finally despair in earnest, so that we may constantly recognize that we are in despair. But when, then, will our Johannes come, who will show us the way to truth and to life, or has he, perchance, already appeared? He has, indeed, come; he was born in 1813, very properly crucified in 1855, and forgotten by 1871! Søren Kierkegaard was his name. I will gladly expound his ideas and above all to you who still remain at the standpoint of the aesthetic. But no, let him speak for himself! You simply must read Either/Or. You shall read the first book and feel a sword pierce your soul. You shall read the second book and despair, so fundamentally that you will quiver to your innermost foundations and experience all the tortures of hell. Later, you shall read, yes, what? His Practice in Christianity? I don’t know, for I stand also in the middle of the battle, but I do not believe that I could read myself into anything further, but only fight for…what? Again a question mark!...The individual, See Jäsningstiden, p. 190; Samlade Skrifter, vol. 18, p. 376 and note 35 in the present article. Strindberg’s thesis is also reproduced in Jäsningstiden, Chapter XI, “Idealism och Realism,” pp. 217–58; Samlade Skrifter, vol. 18, pp. 397–430. 43 That is an illustrated weekly; see Jäsningstiden, Chapter XI, “Idealism och Realism,” p. 258; Samlade Skrifter, vol. 18, p. 430. 44 See Jäsningstiden, pp. 256–7; Samlade Skrifter, vol. 18, p. 429: “The purpose of the dissertation was: 1) to give the professor an idea of the author’s grasp of aesthetics in general and his knowledge of Danish literature in particular; 2) to define for the author himself his point of view. Following Kierkegaard, he [Strindberg refers to himself in the third person] had attacked himself and the point of view which he had relinquished as personified by ‘A.’ He who writes göjemånad [i.e., February in the ancient Nordic calendar] instead of ‘February’ is the brother in the Runa society who worships the national. The brother ‘A’ begins with his doubts as to an absolute judgment, but cannot unravel the tangled skein. He strikes out with his studies of the National Museum and comes then directly onto Hakon Jarl. The brother ‘B,’ who already uses the word ‘February,’ takes the brother ‘A’ to task and portrays himself in caricature….He presents his views of Danish literature in such a manner that he, in order to show that he has an independent interpretation, feels compelled to attack the views of Professor Dietrichson [i.e., Lorenz Dietrichson (1834–1917), who had fostered the study of Danish literature at Uppsala]. Thereupon he interpreted Shakespeare from the point of view of Brandes and stumbles finally onto Kierkegaard.” On this point see again Bjarnason, Categories of Søren Kierkegaard’s Thought in the Life and Writings of August Strindberg, pp. 115–22, who remarks that also one of the greatest Strindberg scholars, the Swedish literary critic Martin Lamm (August Strindberg, p. 19) would not have grasped the large extent in which Kierkegaard and Kierkegaardian ideas are discussed in Strindberg’s thesis of 1871. 42

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One can find here confirmed the impression that Strindberg would later describe in his autobiography about his first reading of Kierkegaard: he could not distinctly grasp what the philosopher really meant. Moreover, he could not find help in the critical literature or discussion, since, as he stated, Kierkegaard seemed to have been “forgotten by 1871.”46 He was also amazed that Oehlenschläger was not also influenced by the philosopher, since Kierkegaard’s period of productivity coincided with the latter part of his life.47

Strindberg, Jäsningstiden, pp. 254ff.; Samlade Skrifter, vol. 18, pp. 427ff. See footnote 35 in the present article. Nevertheless, Bjarnason, Categories of Søren Kierkegaard’s Thought in the Life and Writings of August Strindberg, p. 9, note 15, informs us that as early as 1851, the Swedish Albert Theodor Lysander had published in Uppsala a book on Kierkegaard: Søren Kierkegaard. Litterähistorisk Teckning, and another Swede, Oskar Patrick Sturzenbecker, participated in Kierkegaard’s polemic against the Church by publishing the article “Den officiella kristendomen är icke det nya testamentets kristendom. Framställning af Dr. Søren Kierkegaard’s polemik mot statskyrkan i Danmark” (The Official Christianity is Not the Christianity of the New Testament. Presentation of Dr. S.K.’s Polemic Against the Established Church in Denmark), which appeared in a Copenhagen pamphlet (without a publisher given) in 1855. Then, a number of Kierkegaard’s shorter discourses had been translated into Swedish as early as 1870: see Svenskt Boklexikon, Åren 1830–1865, ed. by Hjalmar Linnström, Stockholm: H. Linnströms förlag 1883, quoted by Bjarnason, Categories of Søren Kierkegaard’s Thought in the Life and Writings of August Strindberg, pp. 108–9. This catalogue lists sixteen works by Kierkegaard that were translated into Swedish during these years. The same catalogue for the years 1866–75 lists one book containing three of his short essays. Between 1876 and 1885 four more works were translated. Nevertheless, although all these works were available, Strindberg may not have read them, at least not until after he had read Either/Or. Anyway, even if Strindberg’s statement seems to be a bit exaggerated, it is true that, despite the absence of any language barrier, he seems scarcely to have known and appreciated Kierkegaard at all. The real “rediscovery” of Kierkegaard seems to have come about as the result of Brandes’ short volume Søren Kierkegaard. En kritisk Fremstilling i Grundrids, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1877, which appeared also in German as Søren Kierkegaard. Ein literarisches Characterbild, Leipzig: Barth 1879. On Strindberg’s reading of Kierkegaard’s own works see especially Nils Åke Sjöstedt, Søren Kierkegaard och svensk litteratur. Från Fredrika Bremer till Hjalmar Söderberg, Göteborg: Elanders Boktryckeri Aktiebolag 1950, pp. 146–291. Another useful tool is Hans Lindström’s exhaustive survey of Strindberg’s own library (from the auction catalogues), Strindberg och böckerna, vol. 1, Biblioteken 1883, 1892 och 1912. Förteckningar och kommentarer, Stockholm: Svenska Litteratursällskapet 1977 and vol. 2, Boklån och läsning. Förteckningar och kommentarer, Stockholm: Svenska Litteratursällskapet 1990. See also Michael Robinson, “Something from Nothing: Strindberg’s Reading,” Scandinavica, vol. 31, no. 2, 1992, pp. 221–9. 47 Strindberg, Jäsningstiden, p. 247; Samlade Skrifter, vol. 18, p. 421. 45 46

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Nevertheless, even if Strindberg himself states that Kierkegaard had been forgotten by 1871, some critics hypothesize, however, that he could have received a vague and probably “implicit” idea of Kierkegaard’s thought through reading Ibsen’s Brand (1866).48 Although Kierkegaard’s influence on Brand is itself a muchdiscussed topic,49 it seems that Strindberg could have met with Kierkegaardian thinking also through Ibsen’s work. Strindberg stated that he read Brand for the first time in 1869, and his judgment about it is definitely similar to the one he gave after the first reading of Kierkegaard. He wrote that Ibsen’s play kept the terrible ascetic morality of Christianity and Brand mocked the contemporary tendency of humanity to compromise. But then he concluded that Brand was a Pietist, a fanatic who dared to think he was right against the whole world, and, moreover, Johan felt similar to this terrific egoist, who was also wrong. No half measures, always go on, demolish and destroy whatever stands in your way, since only you are right. Brand stunned his sensitive conscience, which continued to make him suffer because he was afraid to do harm to his father or his friends. One must rend every particular bond of affection, for the sake of the “Cause.”50

Actually, Brand seems to have influenced the earliest play by Strindberg, Fritänkaren (The Free-thinker), a one-act drama, which was written in the autumn of 1869 and published in 1870. This work, indeed, dealt with the appearance of the concept of martyrdom and especially that of choice: Brand’s famous intet eller alt (“all or nothing”) corresponds to the Kierkegaardian enten-eller! (either/or). In the figure of Karl Larsson, the protagonist of The Free-thinker, Strindberg meant to represent himself at the time when he was most enthusiastic about Parkerism, and he clashed with his friends, his parents and the Church because of his views. He was, thus, the opposite of a Pietist, but he had formally the same attitude and principles, “all or nothing” to the death. The real figure of a Pietist, who tries to dissuade him from his ideas, was embodied by the character of Gustav, the brother of Karl’s beloved Agda. 48 See for example Bjarnason, Categories of Søren Kierkegaard’s Thought in the Life and Writings of August Strindberg, pp. 160–2, see also Sjöstedt, Søren Kierkegaard och svensk litteratur. Från Fredrika Bremer till Hjalmar Söderberg, p. 149. 49 Speaking about Brand, Ibsen asserted that he had read little of Kierkegaard and had understood even less. See Ibsen’s letter from Dresden of October 28, 1870 to Peter Hansen (Breve fra Henrik Ibsen, vols. 1–2, ed. by Halvdan Koht and Julius Elias, Copenhagen and Christiania: Gyldendal, Nordisk Forlag 1904, vol. 1, p. 214. It was actually Brandes who “officially” ratified Kierkegaard’s influence on Ibsen’s Brand, with his article from 1867 “Henrik Ibsen” (in Dansk Maanedsskrift, no. 2, 1867, pp. 228–55) in which he stated that almost every idea expressed in Brand “was expressed already by Kierkegaard, whose life was an example for the building of Brand’s life. Ibsen really seems to have aspired to the honor of being called the poet of Kierkegaard (the article was revised in 1898; it is reprinted in Brandes, Samlede Skrifter, vols. 1–18, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1899–1910, vol. 3, pp. 257ff.). For a wider bibliographical survey of the position of the critics on Ibsen’s relation to Kierkegaard, see my article “Il riflesso del tragico antico nel Brand di Ibsen. Una lettura kierkegaardiana del dramma poetico,” in NotaBene. Quaderni di Studi Kierkegaardiani, 2008, vol. 6, pp. 161–85 (see pp. 161–4). 50 Strindberg, Jäsningstiden, p. 202; Samlade Skrifter, vol. 18, p. 385.

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We have here an interesting similar way of supporting two opposite views, which could be identified in the formal features of the Pietistic attitude, apart from the contents of its claims. Thus, apart from the certainty concerning the fact that in The Free-thinker Strindberg was not presenting Kierkegaard’s own ideas, which at that time were unknown to him, through the mediation of Ibsen, one can say that a very strong similarity among the ideas expressed by Ibsen’s protagonist and Strindberg’s really does exist. This similarity can be identified, as we said above, in the Pietistic attitude that always seems to have had an affinity with Strindberg’s own intransigent personality, apart from his beliefs, which actually continued to change. It is quite curious that when Bjørnson met Strindberg in Paris for the first time, he wanted to define his friend as “a Pietist who, in spite of many revisions, is still a Pietist, not religiously, but morally speaking.”51 Even more interesting for the analysis of Kierkegaard’s influence on Strindberg was the troubled composition of the historical drama Mäster Olof—which he began already in 1871, but which only played for the first time in 1881, after it had gone through several rewritings. This is unanimously considered by the critics the first important work written by Strindberg. The drama deals with the history of the “Swedish Luther,” the reformer Olaus Petri (1493–1552), and his conflict and then compromise with the King Gustav Vasa (1496–1560). Strindberg made several drafts of this play before 1872, and all of them are dominated by the unyielding figure of Olof, who fights without compromise to carry on his religious ideal of purity. In the first version of the work, the influence of the theme of Kierkegaard’s radical choice is evident. This was actually the period in which Strindberg was reading the Danish philosopher, and so his Olof championed the absolute validity of the ideal against all demands of the everyday world.52 The drama was refused by the Royal Theater of Stockholm, and not only was it not to be played, but it was not even to be published. Strindberg wrote to his friend Eugène Fahlsted on September 26, 1872: My Mäster Olof! I will not change that word “renegade”! Otherwise, I would become that. If I had been thinking of a possible triumph, I would have deleted that word in order to see the drama played! But that I cannot! Therefore my drama will not be performed! And I never shall be able to say what I wanted, I will incur debts so I will have to shoulder some other work and I shall not say anything more! …I have looked up Even Jonas Lie considered Strindberg as a kind of hypersensitive evangelist, always engaged in a fight against art, aesthetics, power, opulence, “everything, which represents the modern Jerusalem,” although he was at the same time a sensual nature, just the synthesis between a preacher and Mephistopheles, “who fight within his character and influence and color his style, rending unceasingly his soul, his restless, tumultuous, damned heart.” For both descriptions see August Strindberg, vols. 1–2, ed. by Stellan Ahlström, Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand 1959–61, vol. 1, pp. 130ff. 52 The most complete analysis of Kierkegaard’s influence in Strindberg’s Mäster Olof are still those ones by Sjöstedt, Søren Kierkegaard och svensk litteratur. Från Fredrika Bremer till Hjalmar Söderberg, pp. 167–91, and Bjarnason, Categories of Søren Kierkegaard’s Thought in the Life and Writings of August Strindberg, pp. 187–213. See also Kristofer Benzow, “Strindberg och Kierkegaard,” in his Idealitet och Religiositet, Lund: C.W.K. Gleerups Förlag 1921, pp. 48–66. 51

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Kierkegaard again. He is gloomy! But he whirls one along with him in a dance of death! That is just my man!53

In evaluating this statement, one should also consider that in the spring of 1872, Stockholm’s Aftonposten, the journal where Strindberg had been employed, was discontinued, and the writer was left without a position. So, unemployed, Strindberg, in a very black mood, spent the summer at Kymmendö, in the Swedish archipelago, living on the kindness of friends. There he wrote the prose version of Mäster Olof, which he submitted to the Royal Theater and which was rejected because it was too free in the treatment of the historical material and too bold in the use of everyday speech. But the most important thing that happened at this time for understanding Strindberg’s relation to Kierkegaard is his reading of Georg Brandes’ Emigrant Literature,54 and Henry Thomas Buckle’s (1821–62) The History of Civilization in England,55 two works that introduced the young writer to the positivist atmosphere and made him reinterpret what he already knew in a new light. That was especially the case of Strindberg’s understanding of Kierkegaard in 1872. He was, indeed, so enthused by Brandes’ literary essays that he immediately adopted the latter’s ideas almost in their entirety, including the understanding of Kierkegaard in his “abstract idealism” and “extreme asceticism.”56 Thus, it is possible to notice the differences in the various plans of Mäster Olof before and after the reading of Brandes’ interpretation of Kierkegaard. As Loftur L. Bjarnason emphasizes, the early version of the work, begun before Strindberg left Uppsala, bears the unmistakable imprint of what Brandes derived from Kierkegaard. Master Olof typifies, indeed, the “either/or” of Kierkegaard, and the “all-or-nothing” of Ibsen’s Brand. In Kymmendö, between June 8 and August 8, 1872, Strindberg wrote, as was said above, a new version of Strindberg, Brev, vol. 1, p. 121ff. My emphasis. See note 35 above. Strindberg read Brandes’ book in the spring 1872. It was published in February of that year and reproduces a series of lectures on the writings of the French emigrants, delivered by Brandes at the University of Copenhagen between November 3 and Christmas 1871. Brandes championed an overcoming of both Romantic sentimentality and a spiritless intellectualism. The so-called “modern world” was liberal and progressive, and the world of literature in Scandinavia should have followed the example of the rest of Europe, instead of fighting the new tendencies by taking the form of an abstract idealism, with an overtone of asceticism and anti-humanistic austerity. These were all features embodied in the figure of Kierkegaard. 55 Henry Thomas Buckle, The History of Civilization in England, vols. 1–2, London: J.W. Parker and Son, 1857–61. 56 See also, for example, Brandes in the second volume of Hovedstrømninger, on Den Romantiske Skole i Tyskland: “Kierkegaard, for example, is in religion orthodox, in politics a believer in absolutism, toward the close of his career a fanatic. Yet—and this is a genuinely romantic trait—he all his life long avoids drawing any practical conclusions from his doctrine; one only catches an occasional glimpse of such feeling as admiration for the Inquisition or hatred of natural sciences.” Brandes, Hovedstrømninger i det 19de Aarhundredes Litteratur, in his Samlede Skrifter, vol. 4, p. 206; English translation: Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature, vols. 1–6, trans. by Diana White and Mary Morison, New York: Macmillan 1905, vol. 2, p. 11 (quoted by Bjarnason, Categories of Søren Kierkegaard’s Thought in the Life and Writings of August Strindberg, p. 196). 53 54

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the work. Now the drama represented Olof as no longer agitated; Kierkegaard’s influence could still be traced,57 but the protagonist realized that the ideal was not obtainable and recanted, asking the King’s forgiveness, since he understood that a compromise was necessary if he was to continue the spiritual fight. In another letter to Fahlsted written in May 1872, Strindberg testified to this new attempt to understand Kierkegaard through Brandes: Brandes is one hell of a fellow—only a Jew could reach such heights—because he doesn’t have to lug a mass of blasted Christian baggage along with him as well as the other prejudices that we’ll never be able to shake off….I’m now beginning to divine the mission of the incomprehensible Kierkegaard and of [Ibsen’s] Brand—it’s something like this: —according to Brandes, they belong to the literature of Reaction—and as a Reactionary, Kierkegaard, consciously or unconsciously, has shown by the logic of the “old” = Christianity = suffering and the paradox, that everything is going to blazes— Kierkegaard is one of the grindstones against which the new is to be honed, he is Christianity’s last cry for help before it sinks, the old man who is a conservative because he doesn’t understand the new and therefore he fears it; he feels the thunder in the air and commits an act of folly in order to save himself, he was born into an empty enquiring age, he himself seeks something positive but can’t find it; therefore he takes the desperate, and as he himself recognizes, insane “leap,” and casts his exhausted soul into the arms of the paradox; he is himself aware that this is madness, but he is a philosopher, and as such a slave to his dialectical method; his reason tells him it is unreasonable, but his method shows him the way etc., etc., though I’m still not clear about the rest of it.58

B. From the “Inferno” to the Redemption Even apart from the explicit references that Strindberg makes to Kierkegaard in his own writings, one cannot deny that certain parallel psychological traits exist between the two authors—also quite independent of direct influence—and Strindberg himself never misses an opportunity to point this out.59 Also the first part of their biographies shows some similarities: the strict religious upbringing dominated by the figure of an austere father, thus the introduction to the Christianity of the cross and suffering rather than of enjoyment, and hence the time of “despair” that followed the period of the rebellion during the years at the university and the constant feeling of guilt. Then there was the predilection to melancholy, the so-called thorn in the flesh60 and, Especially in the distinction in Olaf’s life of a first “aesthetic” stage (before he decided to start his fight) and then the ethical-religious one. Moreover, Olof is interested only in spiritual reform and does not concern himself with politics: he only intends to combat ethicalreligious apathy. 58 Strindberg, Brev, vol. 1, p. 103; Strindberg’s Letters, vol. 1, p. 23. 59 See Strindberg, Jäsningstiden, p. 203; Samlade Skrifter, vol. 18, p. 386. 60 See August Strindberg, Till Damaskus. Tredje delen, in Samlade Dramatiska Arbeten I, Romantiska Dramer 3, Stockholm: Hugo Gebers förlag 1904, p. 236; in Samlade Skrifter, vol. 29, p. 241: “I never enjoyed anything, for I was born with a thorn in my flesh; every time I stretched out my hand to grasp a pleasure, I pricked my finger and Satan struck me in the face.” (English translation: The Road to Damascus, trans. by Graham Rawson, introduction by Gunnar Ollen, London: J. Cape 1939, New York: Grove 1960, p. 192.) 57

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above all, the firm belief of being a martyr, whose duty it was to be sacrificed for the good of others, that is, the idea of being predestined to suffer.61 In the third book of The Son of a Servant (The Red Room) Strindberg himself analyzed the reasons for Kierkegaard’s melancholy and recognized that his “mad upbringing”62 (vanvettig uppfostran) conditioned his later work as an author. It is important in this case to notice that Strindberg seemed to know a lot about Kierkegaard’s life, and it suggests that at that time (1887) he was acquainted with Kierkegaard’s The Point of View for My Work as an Author, a work that was published posthumously by Kierkegaard’s brother in 1859. Even for Strindberg then, the mission of writing was predominant, as a kind of existential duty, and Kierkegaard in this sense represented for him a model, also in the way in which he dealt with his characters.63 It is quite curious, indeed, if one can judge by Strindberg’s words in his autobiography, that he considered the existence of an “experimental psychology” in Kierkegaard’s works as something 61 See Kierkegaard, SKS 16, 58 / PV, 79: “As a child, I was rigorously and earnestly brought up in Christianity, insanely brought up, humanly speaking—already in earliest childhood I had overstrained myself under the impression that the depressed old man, who had laid it upon me, was himself sinking under—a child attired, how insane, as a depressed old man. Frightful!” SKS 16, 60 / PV, 81: “Very far back in my recollection goes the thought that in each generation there are two or three who become sacrificed for the others, are used to find out in frightful sufferings what is beneficial for others. That is how I sadly understood myself, that I was designated for this.” See also SKS 20, 421, NB5:126 / JP 6, 6185: “in every generation there were a few individuals who were destined to be sacrificed for others….” 62 See August Strindberg, I Röda Rummet. En Själs Utvecklingshistoria (1872–1875) (Tjenstekvinnans Son, vol. 3), Stockholm: Bonniers 1887, p. 47. (Reprinted in Samlade Skrifter, vol. 19, p. 45.) 63 See Kierkegaard, SKS 16, 38 / PV, 57: “In these days and for a long time now we have utterly lost the idea that to be an author is and ought to be a work and therefore a personal existing. That on the whole the press, representing abstract, impersonal communication, is demoralizing, especially since the daily press, purely formally and with no regard to whether what it says is true or false, contributes enormously to demoralization because all the impersonality, which in turn is more or less irresponsibility and impenitence.” See also Strindberg, Brev, vol. 1, p. 190; Strindberg’s Letters, vol. 1, p. 39: “Anyone who has experienced something has a story to tell, anyone who has a story to tell is a writer!” Strindberg, Brev, vol. 15, p. 223; not translated in Strindberg’s Letters: “My writings are myself.” On this point see Michael Robinson’s article “Strindberg and Autobiography: Opening Up the Question,” Scandinavica, vol. 23, no. 2, 1984, pp. 119–36, especially p. 123: “and the truth about him is to be found not in the world, but in ‘the thousand printed pages’ [Strindberg, Samlade Skrifter, vol. 19, p. 278] wherein their author is dispersed….Every word must be available for the reader to be in a position to ‘see into a soul as far as can be seen’ [Strindberg, Brev, vol. 6, p. 298; Strindberg’s Letters, vol. 1, p. 255], for like Kierkegaard he conceived of the work as a whole, shaped and orchestrated and yielding itself only to the informed reader. It is a play of signifiers in which he has ‘multiplied himself’ [Strindberg, Samlade Skrifter, vol. 18, p. 459] and where his self is distributed throughout the totality of texts from which ‘the enlightened reader’ [Strindberg, Samlade Skrifter, vol. 18, p. 459] may reconstruct the author and his life from amid the cluster of…characters in whom Kierkegaardian pseudonymity is sometimes coupled with Balzacian recurrence in separate novels, plays, and autobiographies....‘And if his collected works were ever to be published, not a word should be changed, but all the contradictions resolved in the common Kierkegaardian title: Stages on Life’s Way.’ ”

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clear. Speaking about the presumed brilliance of a friend, Strindberg said of him that his “experimental psychology derived from a smattering of Kierkegaard.”64 One should recall that Kierkegaard gave a subtitle to many of his works that indicated that they were a kind of psychological investigation; in Either/Or, for example, the essay entitled “Silhouettes,” (1843) had the subtitle of “Psychological Diversion,” Repetition, (1843) had the subtitle of “A Venture in Experimenting Psychology,” and The Concept of Anxiety (1844) had that of “A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin,” and then also “Guilty?/Not Guilty?” was designated an “Imaginary Psychological Construction.”65 Strindberg was very interested in psychology, and he also followed the developments of positivistic psychology in the works by Théodule-Armand Ribot (1839–1916), Henry Maudsley (1835–1918), and Hippolyte Bernheim (1840–1919). In these same years, after a deep psycho-physical crisis due to his married life, he declared in a letter to his friend, the Swedish novelist Gustaf af Geijerstam (1858–1909),66 that he had fallen into a kind of spiritual bankruptcy, in which he did not know what to believe in. He started to analyze the phenomenon of “the battle of the brains”—the feminine and the masculine—and he invented a new kind of writings, the so-called Vivisections.67 These were various texts in which he dissected by means of a psychological point of view the deviant personalities of his contemporaries. So he adopted French as the language of his works and used the same analytical method in his autobiographical Le Plaidoyer d’un Fou (A Madman’s Defence),68 in which he analyzed his married life, which was now near its conclusion. In these years Strindberg went through an atheistic period, which came to an end some years later after a spiritually hard process that the author, in Kierkegaardian terms, called a “repetition.” The fruit of this process was the play Till Damaskus (The Road to Damascus), a trilogy which was written between 1898 (Part I and II) and 1901, in which Strindberg, deeply influenced by his fellow countryman Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), endeavored to symbolize his interpretation of Kierkegaard’s category of “repetition” in dramatic form.69 Strindberg, Jäsningstiden, p. 212; Samlade Skrifter, vol. 18, p. 393. See respectively SKS 2, 163 / EO1, 165. SKS 4, 7 / R, 125. SKS 4, 309 / CA, 1. SKS 6, 173 / SLW, 185. 66 Strindberg, Brev, vol. 5, p. 1181. 67 See August Strindberg, Vivisektioner, Stockholm: Bonniers 1914; in Samlade Skrifter, vol. 22, pp. 101ff. On these themes see especially Sjöstedt, Søren Kierkegaard och svensk litteratur. Från Fredrika Bremer till Hjalmar Söderberg, pp. 239–58; John Landquist, “Litteraturen och psyckologien,” in Dikten, diktaren och samhället aktuella debattinlägg, ed. by Alf Ahlber et al., Stockholm: Bonniers 1935, pp. 71–121; Franco Perrelli, Introduzione a Strindberg, Rome and Bari: Laterza 1990, pp. 35–66. 68 See August Strindberg, Le Plaidoyer d’un Fou. This work was first published in an 1893 German translation with the title Die Beichte eines Toren (Berlin: G. Müller Verlag 1893). It was subsequently released in a French version under the title given here in 1895 (Paris: Albert Langen). Samlade Skrifter, vol. 26. 69 For a very accurate reading of this work in relation to Kierkegaard, see again Bjarnason, Categories of Søren Kierkegaard’s Thought in the Life and Writings of August Strindberg, pp. 113ff. and especially pp. 235–62; John Carson Pettey, “The Stranger’s Return: Strindberg, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche,” Orbis Litterarum, vol. 46, 1991, pp. 13–26; Evert 64 65

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IV. The Conversion on “The Road to Damascus” Yes it is certainly a poem with a terrifying half-reality behind it. The art lies in its composition, which symbolizes the “Gentagelse” [repetition] that Kierkegaard talks about; the action moves forward to the Asylum; there it collides with “the pricks” [sc. as in Acts 26:14] and is thrown back, the pilgrimage, the repetition, the humiliations; so it begins again at the same place; the game ends where it began. Perhaps you haven’t noticed how the scenes unfold in reverse from the Asylum, which is the backbone of the play and which winds up and encloses the action. Or like a snake which bites itself in the tail.70

The Road to Damascus is closely related to his novel Inferno; it treated the same material as Inferno, the search for the “subjective truth,” but in a mystical form. Strindberg was consciously trying to symbolize the spiritual concept of “repetition.” The three parts of the play are circular in a way that one can follow these sequences of the major theme: Part I, eros; Part II, contrition; Part III, conversion. Thus the analogy with the three “stages” of Kierkegaard is evident, even if not in an univocal sense. The story deals with Strindberg’s autobiographical experience of his turbulent marriages, and each part of the trilogy begins and ends with a Kierkegaardian “choice.” The main characters of the “Lady” and the desperate “Stranger” are found in a dream-like atmosphere, in which the guilty feelings struggle with the death of the hope for the happiness of a meaningful life. The process of redemption is long and hard, and it must be measured step by step. One must suffer through the transitional stages in order to attain the goal. The goal is the overcoming of desperation due to resignation. This means the renunciation of oneself, but in a way that in Strindberg remains problematic, because after the “conversion”—which seems to be more a rational and ultimate attempt to get rid of desperation than an authentic feeling of faith—the Stranger takes the name of “Johan.” But “Johan,” as has been noted,71 is both the one who preached in the wilderness72 and Strindberg’s first name. This seems to imply that rather than becoming a new man, the Stranger-Strindberg is just going to come back to himself, to his original personality before the changes in his tormented life. In the second to last scene of the play, one reads these ambiguous words pronounced by father Melcher: Young man, or rather, comparatively young man! You began life by accepting everything, then went on to denying everything on principle. Now end your life by comprehending

Sprinchorn, “Hell and Purgatory in Strindberg,” Scandinavian Studies, vol. 50, no. 4, 1978, pp. 373ff.; Alessandro Pellegrini, Il poeta del nichilismo. Strindberg, Milan: Rosa e Ballo 1944, pp. 35–96; Sjöstedt, Søren Kierkegaard och svensk litteratur. Från Fredrika Bremer till Hjalmar Söderberg, pp. 258–78. 70 Letter to Gustaf af Geijerstam, March 17, 1898, Strindberg, Brev, vol. 12, pp. 279–80. 71 See Luciano Codignola, “Mimesi e tempo in ‘Verso Damasco,’ ” in August Strindberg, Verso Damasco I–III, trans. by Luciano Codignola and Mady Obolensky, Milan: Adelphi 1974, p. 314. 72 Matthew 3:1–2. Strindberg, Till Damaskus. Tredje delen, p. 322; Samlade Skrifter, vol. 29, p. 361; The Road to Damascus, p. 284.

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And before abandoning life in a symbolic way by lowering himself down in a grave, the Stranger answers for the last time the Tempter who is trying to make him speak, that “Speaking in the end becomes a vice,”74 against which only the silent inwardness can end in triumph.

Strindberg, Till Damaskus. Tredje delen, p. 321; Samlade Skrifter, vol. 29, p. 359; The Road to Damascus, p. 283. 74 Strindberg, Till Damaskus. Tredje delen, p. 322; Samlade Skrifter, vol. 29, p. 361; The Road to Damascus, p. 284. 73

Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Strindberg’s Corpus “Letter to Eugène Fahlsted,” May 1872, in Brev, vols. 1–20, ed. by Torsten Eklund and Björn Meidal, Stockholm: Bonniers 1948–96, vol. 1, p. 103. “Letter to Eugène Fahlsted,” September 26, 1872, in Brev, vols. 1–20, ed. by Torsten Eklund and Björn Meidal, Stockholm: Bonniers 1948–96, vol. 1, p. 121. “Letter to Edvard Brandes,” July 29, 1880, in Brev, vols. 1–20, ed. by Torsten Eklund and Björn Meidal, Stockholm: Bonniers 1948–96, vol. 2, p. 167. Jäsningstiden. En Själs Utvecklingshistoria (1867–1872) (Tjenstekvinnans Son, vol. 2), Stockholm: Bonniers 1886, pp. 207–8; pp. 217–58; reprinted in Samlade Skrifter, vols. 1–55, ed. by John Landquist, Stockholm: Bonniers 1915–26, vol. 18, pp. 389–90; pp. 400–30. I Röda Rummet. En Själs Utvecklingshistoria (1872–1875) (Tjenstekvinnans Son, vol. 3), Stockholm: Bonniers 1887, p. 47; reprinted in Samlade Skrifter, vols. 1–55, ed. by John Landquist, Stockholm: Bonniers 1915–26, vol. 19, p. 45. “Letter to Gustav af Geijerstam,” March 1898, in Brev, vols. 1–20, ed. by Torsten Eklund and Björn Meidal, Stockholm: Bonniers 1948–96, vol. 12, pp. 279–80. Till Damaskus. Tredje delen, in Samlade Dramatiska Arbeten I, Romantiska Dramer 3, Stockholm: Hugo Gebers förlag 1904, pp. 319–20; reprinted in Samlade Skrifter, vols. 1–55, ed. by John Landquist, Stockholm: Bonniers 1915–26, vol. 29, pp. 357–8. En Ny Blå Bok, Stockholm: Björck & Börjesson 1908, p. 724; reprinted in Samlade Skrifter, vols. 1–55, ed. by John Landquist, Stockholm: Bonniers 1915–26, vol. 47, p. 704. “Minnen från Danmark,” Politiken, January 22, 1912; reprinted in Samlade Skrifter, vols. 1–55, ed. by John Landquist, Stockholm: Bonniers 1915–26, vol. 53, p. 557. “Letter to Tor Aulin,” February 4, 1912 (unpublished letter quoted in Walter A. Berendsohn, Strindbergs sista levandsår. Tiden i Blå Tornet, 10 juli 1908–14 maj 1912, Stockholm: Saxon & Lindströms Förlag 1948, p. 174). II. Sources of Strindberg’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Brandes, Georg, “Henrik Ibsen,” Dansk Maanedsskrift, vol. 2, 1867, pp. 228–55; see p. 237, p. 248 (an expanded version is printed in Brandes’ Samlede Skrifter, vols. 1–18, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1899–1910, vol. 3, pp. 237–354; see p. 257, p. 270, p. 281, p. 288, 294, p. 300, p. 324, p. 351).

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— Kritiker og Portraiter, Copenhagen: Gyldendalske 1870, p. 53; pp. 155–6; p. 159; pp. 248–9; p. 329; p. 331; pp. 358–9; p. 391; p. 407. — Hovedstrømninger i det 19. Aarhundredes Litteratur. Emigrantlitteraturen, Den Romantiske Skole i Tyskland, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1872, p. 25; p. 191; p. 212; pp. 250–1; p. 269. Brøchner, Hans, Problemet om Tro og Viden. En historisk-kritisk Afhandling, Copenhagen: Philipsen 1868, p. 3; p. 29; pp. 118–22; pp. 124–6; pp. 130–3; p. 212; pp. 215–24. — “Erindringer om Søren Kierkegaard” in Det Nittende Aarhundrede, Maanedsskrift for Literatur og Kritik, vol. 5, March 1877, pp. 337–74. Ibsen, Henrik, Brand, Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandels Forlag 1866. Rudin, Waldemar, Sören Kierkegaards person och författarskap. Ett försök, Stockholm: Nilsson 1880. Vodskov, Hans Sofus, Spredte Studier, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1884, pp. 1–30. III. Secondary Literature on Strindberg’s Relation to Kierkegaard Ahlenius, Holger, “Søren Kierkegaard, en dansk biografi och en svensk diskussion,” in Vår Lösen, 1929, pp. 82–7. Benzow, Kristofer, “Strindberg och Kierkegaard,” in his Idealitet och Religiositet, Lund: C.W.K. Gleerups Förlag 1921, pp. 48–66. Berti, Cristina, “Georg Brandes e l’incontro tra Strindberg e Nietzsche,” in Studi Nordici, vol. 10, 2003, pp. 75–81. Bjarnason, Loftur L., Categories of Søren Kierkegaard’s Thought in the Life and Writings of August Strindberg, Stanford University 1951 (Ph.D. dissertation). Cain, Geoffrey, “The Truth-Seekers. Ibsen, Strindberg and Kierkegaard as Seen by Georg Brandes,” in Nordisk baltisk litterært symposium: foredragssamling, ed. by Leon Nikulin, Viby: Diapason 2000, pp. 41–55. Codignola, Luciano, Mimesi e tempo in “Verso Damasco,” in August Strindberg, Verso Damasco I-III, Italian translation by Luciano Codignola and Mady Obolensky, Milan: Adelphi 1974, pp. 287–321. Hjertström-Lappalainen, Jonna and Lars-Erik Hjertström-Lappalainen, “Sweden: Kierkegaard’s Reception in Swedish Philosophy, Theology, and Contemporary Literary Theory,” in Kierkegaard’s International Reception, Tome I, Northern and Western Europe, ed. by Jon Stewart, Aldershot: Ashgate 2009 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 8), pp. 173–96; see p. 176. Houe, Poul, “Play with Unauthorized Dreams: A Strindbergian Alternative to Freud, Jung and Others,” Scandinavica, vol. 41, no. 2, 2002, pp. 207–34; see pp. 219ff. Kloeden, Wolfdietrich von, “Der junge A. Strindberg und Kierkegaard,” in Biographisch-bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon, Herzberg: Verlag Traugott Bautz, vol. 11, 1996, pp. 57–61. Liedgren, Emil, “Kierkegaard i Sverige. Några anteckningar til hundraårsminnet av hans födelse,” in Vår Lösen, vol. 93, 1913, pp. 177–82. Pellegrini, Alessandro, Il poeta del nichilismo. Strindberg, Milan: Rosa e Ballo 1944, pp. 35–96.

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Pettey, John Carson, “The Stranger’s Return: Strindberg, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche,” Orbis Litterarum, vol. 46, 1991, pp. 13–26. Sjöstedt, Nils Åke, Søren Kierkegaard och svensk litteratur. Från Fredrika Bremer till Hjalmar Söderberg, Göteborg: Elanders Boktryckeri Aktiebolag 1950, pp. 146–291. Sprinchorn, Evert, “Hell and Purgatory in Strindberg,” Scandinavian Studies, vol. 50, no. 4, 1978, pp. 371–80; see pp. 373ff.

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Carl-Henning Wijkmark: Paradoxical Forms and an Interpretation of Kierkegaard and Dacapo Jan Holmgaard

Carl-Henning Wijkmark (b. 1934) belongs to the second generation of twentiethcentury modernist writers in Sweden. He made his debut rather late, in 1972, at the age of 37, in the middle of a political and sexual revolution. It is therefore understandable that The Hunters at Karinhall contains quite a fair amount of sex and politics.1 Yet it is not really a contemporary novel. The story is set in Nazi Germany in 1936, at the time of the Olympic Games in Berlin. Hermann Göring is preparing a grandiose hunting party for prominent Nazi party members and distinguished foreign guests at his country estate Karinhall. It is a dark tale about the evil and perverse desires of mankind. It not only teaches us how power corrupts the soul but also demonstrates how a collective disorientation and degradation of human values inevitably leads to self-destructive violence. Wijkmark is not a moralist in the traditional sense of the term. Rather, his world is one of melancholy. Such a world, with its sense of lost meaning and of a lost identity, is a recurring theme in many of Wijkmark’s later books, such as Red and Black (1976) and The Inspection Trolley (1983).2 But there are other main themes featured in his first novel which also appear in later works. One such theme is Wijkmark’s fascination with history, not only with more contemporary history such as that of Nazi Germany, but also with history as a cultural and human manifestation in general. Wijkmark seems especially intrigued by the tension between the strength and power of history, on the one hand, and the loss of identity inherent in modern man, on the other. Another important theme in Wijkmark’s writing concerns the use of desire and sexuality as a means of exploring one’s identity in relation to others. In Wijkmark’s hands, this theme becomes paradoxical. Passion and desire sooner or later open the human soul to an empty void, leaving the self painfully alone. In Wijkmark’s case this is not necessarily an entirely bad thing, since it actually brings the self closer to what is at the core of the human heart, a sort of truthful state of loneliness.

Carl-Henning Wijkmark, Jägarna på Karinhall, Stockholm: Norstedt 1972. Carl-Henning Wijkmark, Rött och svart, Stockholm: Cavefors 1976; Carl-Henning Wijkmark, Dressinen, Stockholm: Norstedt 1983. 1 2

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Closely tied to the themes of melancholy, desire, emptiness, and loss of self, is another major literary topic, death. To Wijkmark, death is not only an existential question, and maybe the most important one, but also a topic with immense moral and political implications. When his book Last Days (1986)3 was first published in Germany, it created a debate of substantial intensity. The book addresses a very sensitive question, that of euthanasia, and the German debate even resulted in no less than two contemporary theater plays on the topic. His latest book to date, The Coming of the Night (2007),4 is a deeply touching story about old age, hospitalization, and how to mentally prepare for a farewell to life. It clearly demonstrates the devotion, strength, and consistency of Wijkmark’s authorship, and displays his ability to maintain and to further develop an important theme. That same year the book was awarded the August Prize, which is Sweden’s most prestigious literary award after the Nobel Prize. Wijkmark is far too well versed in German and French culture and history to be called a typical Swedish author. In fact, he knows the great European culture intimately, and there are a large number of literary and cultural references in his works. He often also displays an earnestness to treat aesthetical experiences with a certain existential depth. This very rarely occurs in Swedish literature. Wijkmark has translated into Swedish works by complex writers such as Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) and Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), and he is a keen reader of Kierkegaard, although the novel Dacapo (1994) is actually the only book to my knowledge where Kierkegaard’s influence on his work is clearly visible. I. Irony In Fragment no. 48 of Kritische Fragmente (1797), Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) writes: “Irony is the form of the paradox. Paradox is everything that is both good and great.”5 Paradox should not here be understood as a theorem, not even as a concept. Rather, it is to be interpreted as a collective name for a whole literary apparatus that includes devices such as opposites, contradictions, and even ambiguities. These paradoxical forms may appear in a single rhetorical trope, such as the oxymoron, or in complex narrative structures. When Schlegel therefore speaks of irony in this context, he does not refer to the figure by which, to put it simply, you say one thing and mean the opposite. He is after something more profound and fundamental, a playful and ironic version of classical dialectics. These paradoxical forms include the dialectics of the infinite and the finite, thesis and antithesis, subject and object, reality and idealism, closeness and distance. But within a context of irony, these opposites are never reconciled into a unitary form or way of thinking. This has also

Carl-Henning Wijkmark, Sista dagar, Stockholm: Norstedt 1986. Carl-Henning Wijkmark, Stundande natt, Stockholm: Norstedt 2007. 5 See Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, vols. 1–35, ed. by Ernst Behler, JeanJacques Anstett, and Hans Eichner, Paderborn: Schöningh 1958ff., vol. 2, p. 153. 3 4

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been convincingly argued by commentators such as Paul de Man (1919–83) and Werner Hamacher (b. 1948).6 Søren Kierkegaard knew that irony could not be used to formulate a higher unity. In The Concept of Irony (1841), Kierkegaard joins Schlegel in using the contradictions and ambiguities of irony in order to define a modern understanding of the poetic. It is through irony that the poetical receives its unfinished and endless character: “it is clear that that higher actuality that is supposed to emerge in poetry nevertheless is not in the poetry but is continually becoming.”7 This “higher reality,” with its ability to overcome the contradiction between, say, reality and idealism, is not, can never be realized. Instead, it is always becoming, always unfolding its own potentiality from within. In this sense, irony opens poetry to its own endlessness. Schlegel also occupies himself with this idea of the unfinished and endless dimension of poetry. In fact, to him it is a crucial element in defining the very idea of the Romantic. In Athenäum fragment no. 116, he writes: “The romantic art of poetry is yet in progress; yes, that is its actual Being, that it can forever only progress, and never be completed.”8 The way in which irony operates with irreconcilable contradictions and ambiguities, opens the discourse to selfreflection. In the Literary Notebooks, Schlegel writes: “Irony is analysis of thesis and antithesis.”9 But such an analysis can never be finalized. Irony only leads to an endless and unfinished act of reflecting. If the history of literature teaches us that irony can define Romantic poetry in general, irony itself makes us aware of the effect it has on literature beyond such historical boundaries. The implication of Schlegel’s introductory statement not only is of relevance to the time in which he lived, but should in fact be valid for any temporal setting, including our own. Irony does not rely on time, but on repetition, as de Man points out,10 and therefore it will keep appearing as long as there is literature (or at least “great” literature). Irony of course comes in a variety of shapes, but from a fundamental point of view, and according to Schlegel, the paradoxical forms intrinsic to irony are crucial to defining any literature aspiring to “everything that is both good and great.” To one extent, the formula seems simple enough: a piece of art or a novel receives its artistic quality of greatness through its use of paradoxical forms—not primarily in order to reaffirm an idea of the Romantic, but rather as a confirmation of artistic and literary greatness in general. In this sense, Schlegel’s statement is meant to have universal validity. That is, at least, the working hypothesis of this article. Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness & Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, London: Methuen 1983, pp. 187–228, see p. 220; Werner Hamacher, “Position Exposed: Friedrich Schlegel’s Poetological Transposition of Fichte’s Absolute Proposition,” in Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan, trans. by Peter Fenves, Stanford: Stanford University Press 1996, pp. 222–60, see pp. 226–7. 7 SKS 1, 349 / CI, 319. 8 Schlegel, Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, vol. 2, p. 183. 9 Friedrich Schlegel, Literary Notebooks 1797–1801, ed. by Hans Eichner, London: Athlone Press 1957, Fragment no. 802. 10 De Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” p. 220. 6

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II. Descending Twice In Carl-Henning Wijkmark’s novel Dacapo (1994),11 paradoxical forms, as I will try to demonstrate, are predominant. Opposites, contradictions, and ambiguities are used to create the ironic structure of the novel. This certainly does not imply that Dacapo is a Schlegelian novel. It is merely a prerequisite for demonstrating the validity of Schlegel’s thesis—nothing more and nothing less. Dacapo takes place in autumn 1989, at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. A middle-aged, divorced Swedish photographer by the name of Frank Thulander travels to Munich to discuss a joint venture with the Vienna-born, American-Jewish writer Sam Honig. The idea is to write a book in which Europe is described as a gigantic sepulchral chamber, filled with cultural relics of vast historical importance, a “Necro-Europe” or a Necropa. Honig wants Frank to photographically capture this idea, and to let his pictures accompany Honig’s own texts on the subject. In this way, Frank’s European journey becomes a descent into a kingdom of death, with Sam Honig as his guide. Not only is Honig obsessed with the theme of death, he is also a dying man. Moreover, Munich is the place where Frank spent his adolescent years as a student. The journey to Munich therefore also includes a second descent into a kingdom of death, this time into his own lost past. The search for a lost identity, or rather the search for a European identity based on something already lost, a Necropa, is thus matched by the search for Frank’s personal identity in his own past. Wijkmark has constructed this story around opposites. The search for Necropa takes Frank on various journeys across the continent. He is constantly taking pictures of tombstones, dead objects in museums and empty houses where no one lives any more. He is trying to capture the cultural and spiritual quality present in these artifacts, as if they were all part of a big secret, remnants of a grand civilization lost to us, but still whispering to us from the shadows of death. But in Dacapo, Wijkmark also occupies himself with contemporary events. This is 1989. The Berlin Wall is about to fall. The Cold War is over. Thousands of people are coming to the West from every corner of the former Eastern Bloc. Borders are opening up. A political system is on the brink of collapse. Everything is set in motion and nothing is what it used to be. These two opposite themes together create a paradoxical form. On the one hand, we have death, and a lost culture. On the other hand, we have contemporary life, and great political changes. But these two themes are never reconciled into a higher unity in the novel. The past is not used in order to shed light on the great changes taking place in contemporary Europe. And simultaneously, there is very little in these events that seems to contribute to an understanding of a lost past. The two perspectives do converge from time to time, but at heart they are irreconcilable. At one point, during a trip to Prague, Frank is overwhelmed by the great changes he is witnessing. He feels forced to completely abandon the theme of death in favor of life and the changes appearing in front of his very eyes. “He had believed in this project. Carl-Henning Wijkmark, Dacapo, Stockholm: Norstedt 1994. I have used an unpublished English translation by Ken Schubert, with the kind permission of the author and the translator. All English translations of Dacapo are from this translation. 11

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Its guiding principle hadn’t been his, but he had been glad for the chance to work on it….The day-by-day events and the rapidly changing political climate in Europe put Honig’s grand concept—which had been his driving force for all those years—in an impossible light.”12 The opposites never merge to form a unitary perspective. Instead, a relationship based on unresolved tensions is set up. This relationship is indeterminate at best, and irreconcilable, as in the example above, at worst. In this sense, the basic narrative structure of Dacapo is imbued with paradoxical form. The ironic aspect is further reinforced by the fact that Necropa, as a project, remains somehow unreachable to Frank’s photographical perception, whereas his immediate impressions of the world surrounding him, though without any purpose or goal, come to engage him to the extent that he goes from being a mere observer to actually participating by taking action in order to help people. The prologue to the Necropa-theme is illustrative in this sense. On his way to Munich, Frank makes a stop in Copenhagen in order to take a few pictures of Søren Kierkegaard’s grave. The problem is that he cannot find it. He searches the entire cemetery, but finally has to give up. As an absolute contrast to that little episode, one can point to the chapter in which he arrives in Prague to observe the political changes taking place. Not only does he become totally absorbed by what he sees, but he also becomes morally and politically involved and actually helps a young woman to escape across the border. Irony is also prevalent in the story about Frank’s descent into the second kingdom of death, with Munich as its playground. The search for a lost European identity, a Necropa, is beautifully contrasted in the novel by the main character’s search for his own lost identity, which he seems to have left behind in the Bavarian capital many years ago. If the first theme is distinguished by Frank’s many journeys all over the continent in search of various relics, the latter seems to have immobility as its most significant feature. These opposites are further emphasized by Wijkmark’s use of two contrasting secondary characters. First there is Frank’s childhood friend Jussi, a Finnish truck driver who acts as the incarnation of a modern homo mobile—always traveling, always relentlessly on the move. He even sleeps in his car. On the other side of the fence, there is Kari, Frank’s old girlfriend. She does not believe that people ever change, and she is herself a manifestation of immobility. She is firmly rooted in Munich and rarely leaves her apartment. For all their differences, both characters engage in critical dialogue with Frank from time to time, questioning his behavior and motives, and in this sense they both act as the author’s critical tool in the portrayal of the main character of the novel. The contrast between mobility and immobility, between the search for the identity of a continent, and the search for Frank’s personal identity, is ironically constructed. As opposites, the two perspectives are never allowed to be reconciled in a higher unity. But they are not kept entirely apart either. They are actually intertwined in a variety of ways typical of the complexity of a paradoxical form. On the level of the plot, the tension between these opposites is crucial to the story, but it also reveals some interesting common elements. The very first morning upon his arrival to Munich, Frank is called to the local police station. It turns out that someone has stolen his identity and has lived and worked in the city under his name for more Ibid., p. 267.

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than three decades without regularly applying for a work permit. Frank decides to play the game, not to clear up the misunderstanding, determined as he is to expose the imposter, who eventually turns out to be his old friend Axel Karg. Karg has not only stolen Frank’s name and identity, but also his old girlfriend, Kari. As the plot unfolds, it becomes evident that Frank’s journey is a carefully set up plan designed by Sam Honig and Axel Karg together. Honig has tricked Frank into coming to Munich so that he can complete his project before dying. Karg, on the other hand, has an entirely different reason for wanting Frank to come: he needs his old friend to engage in a strange menage à trois with Kari and himself as a victim in order to revitalize his passion for the woman he has now divorced. But there are many other examples of how Wijkmark stages this opposition in a playful and ironic way. Take for example Kari, Frank’s old girlfriend. She not only embodies immobility and lack of change in human beings. She is also the main reason that Frank chooses to stay on in Munich, and try to relive his old life. On another level, she is an intertextual reference. Wijkmark has named her after the main character in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s play Der Schwierige,13 Count Hans Karl Bühl, with the nickname Kari. The play is quite important to the story in Dacapo, especially in connection with the Necropa theme. One evening in Vienna, Sam Honig and Frank go to the theater to see the play. Its melancholy description of a lost, aristocratic Vienna, becomes crucial to Frank’s understanding of the idealism surrounding Honig’s main idea about Necropa. Just like the main character in the play, Frank’s girlfriend Kari can only identify herself through her lost past, unable to accept the present, and thus always nostalgically looking at herself in the mirror of the past. With the help of Hofmannsthal’s play, these two kingdoms of death, Necropa and Munich, along with the search for a European identity and Frank’s search for his own self, are played out in their endless, ironic form. III. Repetition If the city of Vienna represents death and the idealism of a lost culture, Munich signifies an exceptional part of Frank’s life, the one time that he has felt truly alive. It is this exceptional quality of a lost past that entices Frank to pursue his own little investigation that first morning at the police station. The idea of trying to find his own double, and thereby also to retrace his own past, is much too tempting to be resisted. But Wijkmark makes an ironic reversal of this theme. In order to properly display this reversal, we have to understand the role played by the concept of repetition in Dacapo. There are a couple of places in the novel where Wijkmark makes explicit reference to Søren Kierkegaard’s ideas about repetition. And there is one place in particular. In a dialogue with his friend Jussi, Frank discusses some key features of repetition with reference to Kierkegaard. Through his remarks, it also becomes

Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Der Schwierige. Lustspiel in drei Akten, Vienna: BermannFischer 1921.

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quite evident why he has chosen not only to return to Munich, but also to relive his adolescent years: You spoke of repetition. Kierkegaard advances a doctrine about repetition. He argues—I believe—that someone who is stumbling about in his life and is about to lose himself ought to take as his starting point a vivid period from his past—not necessarily a happy one—and attempt to relive it. Not in order to bury himself there, but rather to grope his way forward, striving to make more of the opportunities presented to him than he could the first time. And most importantly: he goes beyond the juncture at which the original course of events was truncated or took a wrong turn and something new and unwished for took over. Instead of being sidetracked, this time he continues on and breaks new ground—a kind of rebirth. You understand the idea behind it: it’s not mechanical repetition or imitation. More like a retake as in a film studio, so as to arrive at a more favorable outcome, from which he can proceed on in the story-line to that which has yet to be enacted.14

Frank is not claiming to do justice to the complexity of Kierkegaard’s concept as it is presented to us by his pseudonymous writer Constantin Constantius in the book Repetition (1843). But it is quite clear that Wijkmark is making use of some of the introductory remarks in that book concerning repetition and its possibilities. In the very first pages of Repetition, Constantius makes an important distinction between recollection and repetition: Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backward, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward. Repetition, therefore, if it is possible, makes a person happy, whereas recollection makes him unhappy….15

Constantius continues by connecting this idea of happiness through repetition to the theme of love: Recollection’s love [Kjærlighed], an author has said, is the only happy love. He is perfectly right in that, of course, provided one recollects that initially it makes a person unhappy. Repetition’s love is in truth the only happy love. Like recollection’s love, it does not have the restlessness of hope, the uneasy adventurousness, but neither does it have the sadness of recollection—it has the blissful security of the moment.16

Frank not only re-establishes his relationship with his former girlfriend Kari. He also claims that it is only now, in repeating the relationship, that he truly loves her. Towards the end of the novel, he confesses this to her: “Let’s be honest about it; I had been a shadow in your life—and in Acke’s—then I came back and turned into a ghost. Just as you two have become ghosts to me. The new thing was that I realized I was in love with you. In love now, not back then.”17 In this way, Frank seems to be able to demonstrate that love actually is possible through repetition. It comes beyond Wijkmark, Dacapo, p. 71. SKS 4, 9 / R, 131. 16 SKS 4, 9 / R, 131–2. 17 Wijkmark, Dacapo, p. 276. 14 15

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“the restlessness of love”18 and “the sadness of recollection,”19 to quote Constantius once again. Does Frank’s journey to Munich thereby answer Kierkegaard’s fundamental question, as it is put by Constantius at the beginning of the Repetition, as to whether repetition is possible or not? Let us have a closer look at this problem. Constantius opens with the following reflection: When I was occupied for some time, at least one occasion, with the question of repetition—whether or not it is possible, what importance it has, whether something gains or loses in being repeated—I suddenly had the thought: You can, after all, take a trip to Berlin; you have been there once before, and now you can prove to yourself whether a repetition is possible and what importance it has.20

He later travels to Berlin in order to find the answer to his own question. Upon arriving in Berlin, he immediately goes to his old lodgings on the famous Gendarmenmarkt Square. What then follows is a very precise description of the beauty of the rooms. The problem is that it is a mere recollection of the way the rooms looked the last time he visited Berlin. This time, everything has changed, and the rooms are not even for rent anymore: “But here, alas, again no repetition was possible.”21 This experience becomes symptomatic of the journey as a whole. Repetition is not possible. In Wijkmark’s Dacapo, Berlin has been replaced by Munich, and Constantius by Frank Thulander. Unlike Constantius, Frank discovers that repetition is not only possible, but is in fact an uncanny reality. One day, while walking the streets of Munich, Frank suddenly finds himself outside his old favorite café. He decides to go in. Once inside, he immediately notices that nothing in the interior has changed in three decades. What is even worse is that in one corner of the place, he sees a young man whose face looks very familiar to him: The premises were as dimly lit as ever, the windows still concealed by thick curtains. Looking around he realized that nothing else had changed either. He took a couple of pictures and sat down; a waitress brought him a cup of coffee. Then something peculiar happened; rather, it didn’t happen, it materialized, like a hallucination. In one corner of the room, seven or eight meters away, sat a young man whom he was sure he had seen before, right here in Munich, when he was twenty. The face was so distinctive— almost albino white, with a protruding chin—that he couldn’t possibly be mistaken. But it was absurd; the man was quite young, and this was thirty years later. Insane— but nevertheless it was the same man. At the point of swallowing his incredulity, he experienced a feeling of nausea that was a kind of flight from something unbearable, something that was drawing near and that, in some inexplicable fashion, the man in the corner portended. He looked around again; still no change, not since he had come in, not in thirty years.22

SKS 4, 9 / R, 131. SKS 4, 9 / R, 132. 20 SKS 4, 9 / R, 131. 21 SKS 4, 28 / R, 152. 22 Wijkmark, Dacapo, p. 22. 18 19

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The passage works as a direct antithesis to Constantius’ return to Berlin in Kierkegaard’s Repetition. There, everything was impregnated with sweet memories in a world that had changed to the point that no repetition was possible anymore. Here, Frank meets a world unchanged by time. The unbearable side of it is that it is not based on recollection, that is on Frank’s remembrance of a lost past that he can control to some extent through a voluntary act of memory. On the contrary, it is a place from the past appearing in the present, thereby eliminating the natural order of time. Except for the jukebox, which has been replaced by a refrigerated counter, there are no traces whatsoever of any changes. Frank becomes a shadow of his youthful self in that room, a temporary guest in a seemingly timeless past to which he once belonged, but not any more. His is a demon coming from a future that has already been. This is the ironic turn in Wijkmark’s version of repetition. He does not stage, as one would expect, a dramatic narrative where the main characters of the story are haunted by the shadows of the past. It is rather the contrary: his characters come back to their own past to haunt it. They appear as demons from the present in the landscape of the past. They move like shadows of their former selves in the landscape of the past. They are claustrophobically caught up in a past which no longer belongs to them. They are estranged from their own past, and from themselves, by the very presence of that past. Or to repeat Frank’s confession to Kari: “I came back and turned into a ghost.”23 Wijkmark thus manages to demonstrate that repetition is possible in at least two ways: first in the sense that reality can be experienced again, in a universe forever frozen in its own spatiality beyond time; second in the sense that love can also fail a second time. In both cases the figuration of repetition completes itself in Dacapo where Kierkegaard would rather insist that repetition is not possible. Wijkmark has inverted the ideas of his predecessor. Yet at the same time, he seems to concur with Constantius’ idea that repetition is to be regarded as a movement “forward,” creating something new. It is in the repeated relationship with Kari that Frank truly falls in love with her. In that sense, repetition can achieve something that is unreachable to the mere act of “recollection.” But in order to fully grasp this aspect of repetition in Dacapo, not the least because the love affair between Frank and Kari is, after all, also a second failure, we really have to test this idea against Constantius’ doctrine of love and repetition as “the blissful security of the moment.” Does that really happen in Dacapo? And if so, how? After all, it is in that moment of happiness that the possibility of love and repetition is constituted. This idea of the bliss of the moment leads us to the theme of eroticism, which plays an important part in Wijkmark’s attempt to join love and repetition in the novel, especially with respect to the description of the relationship between Frank and Kari. If there is something that repeatedly occurs during the various Munich episodes in the story, it is their frequent late night adventures in the bedroom. Making love seems to be detached from, and completely unaffected by, everyday hardships. The author calls it, and one has to assume a certain amount of irony here, the “nocturnal cruiser,” which sets sail every night and drifts out into the dark sea of love. But how does this repeated act of love correspond to the idea of the blissful moment, or more Ibid., p. 276.

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precisely, to quote Kierkegaard again, to “the blissful security of the moment”?24 Let us put it to the test. The first erotic encounter after Frank’s return to Munich after 30 years of absence, is symptomatic, not only because the tension between recollection and repetition becomes very obvious in that episode, but also because the erotic is transposed, in the tradition of Schlegel’s Lucinde, into a state of reflection: She was different than he remembered her, but he willingly followed her lead. No words, no divisive small talk, just find each other anew. Unite as one, together. She gave off an aroma that he recognized immediately, that existed simultaneously in the moment and in his memory. In the moment it was keen and tantalizing, but it was blended with a memory, and there was something in the remembered aroma that was slightly suffocating, coupled as it was with a tangible sensation of pleasure and satisfaction, but also with a kind of heaviness of heart.25

Through the act of making love, Frank becomes aware of the ambiguity of the whole situation. Kari’s scent, there in the dark, while they are together, “existed simultaneously in the moment and in his memory.” Making love becomes a repetition, something new, in the moment, but not without the unwelcome taste of the past. Repetition in the erotic sense of the term, is an ambivalent experience from the very beginning; it is a pleasure of the moment that cannot free itself from the chains of the past. Repetition seems indeed to be a possibility in the erotic moment, but not in the comforting way described by Constantius, with his claim about “the blissful security of the moment.” Maybe it is no coincidence that Wijkmark here speaks of a “tangible sensation of pleasure,” which primarily comes from memory? Therefore, repetition, in this erotic sense of the term, is doomed to failure. The ambivalent emotions awakened in the erotic moment, finally become unbearable. Wijkmark describes this with great precision, not the least because he, yet again, manages to transform the erotic into a state of self-reflection: But for Frank it now seemed that the joy of rediscovering each other after so many years had been compounded with something else, something darker and more dangerous. The sensuality was pursued by a shadow of anxiety, which issued out of his wordless commingling with another person, a person whom he furthermore was unable to see, since she demanded that the lights be extinguished. Out of a proximity that was not fully anchored in the here and now grew an irritation, a kind of itching, and finally a rage that, though it had the features of passion as well as its physical effects, was something totally different. He was certain that she didn’t share his feeling and had noticed the change in his attitude. His caresses had lost their joyous sybaritic rhythm, their original warmth diminishing with every attempt to hold onto it, and he descended into chilly depths that tasted of metal and loneliness.26

Love thus fails a second time, and in that sense repetition indeed becomes a reality. But this form of repetition does not seem to adhere to the idea of an experience of SKS 4, 9 / R, 132. Wijkmark, Dacapo, p. 113. 26 Ibid., pp. 133–4. 24 25

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the blissful moment, “the blissful security of the moment.” This is probably also the reason that it fails. IV. Identity Frank is not only a “ghost,” to use his own words, a mere shadow of his former self, searching in vain for his identity while trying to walk in the footsteps of his own past. His identity is also of a paradoxical nature. His adolescent years in Munich, as well as his attempt to repeat this episode 30 years later, hold a special place in his life. It is the one time in his life that he has felt truly alive. The rest of his life has been empty and seemingly meaningless, offering a reality from which Frank feels utterly estranged, as he walks around in it like a “zombie,” to use his own term again. Therefore, it is quite paradoxical that he should only feel revived and alive in Munich, as he descends into a kingdom of death where he becomes a mere ghost of his former self, and where he does not even seem to have the right to his own name. If Frank is his own ghost, Axel Karg is his double. He has stolen not only Frank’s name, but also his girlfriend. For three decades, he has lived in Frank’s shadow, and, as a double, this is also how he would legitimize his own existence. He loves Kari simply because Frank does. When Frank therefore discovers his true feelings for her the second time around, Axel’s desire for Kari is also re-awakened. He has no love of his own to offer. As Frank’s double, repetition through imitation is what his life is all about. He can love Kari only if Frank does. Any other solution would force him out of his shadowy identity as a double, out into the light where his non-identity would be exposed. There is one more erotic dimension to the relationship between Frank and Axel to consider, one that takes us beyond their mutual feelings for Kari. Towards the end of the novel, the two former friends meet for the last time. Axel has carefully chosen the place for this showdown. It is to be held in a small hotel at Schlehdorf am Kochelsee in the south of Germany. Together with Kari and Axel’s former girlfriend, they had experienced an ecstatic night together at this inn some 30 years previously. From this sexual experience there rose a peculiar bond between them, a special feeling that had an immense impact on Axel. Later that night, and under the influence of drugs and too many drinks, the two friends swear eternal allegiance to each other. It is a very bizarre pact. In Axel’s own words: “We solemnly swore that if one of us were to kill himself, the other would do so as well, within a specified time frame that I don’t remember.”27 For Axel, being the double, this pact must mark the very height of his existence. His life suddenly becomes exchangeable for the life he is imitating. Should the person he is imitating choose to take his life, his own life would also have to end. And should he, as a double, choose to terminate his life, the one person he is actually imitating, would also have to kill himself. That must be the ultimate dream for a double who lives his life through self-denial. Naturally, Frank has no recollection of this pact. He has forgotten all about it and has to be reminded of it by Axel. Ibid., p. 307.

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But the question is: how, then, does a true identity take shape in Wijkmark’s novel? Neither the ghost nor the double seem to have access to a dimension of the self beyond the shadowy existence portrayed so far. A possible answer might be found in two of the novel’s important digressions, which are worth investigating with the help of the concept of parekbasis. V. Parekbasis The term “parekbasis” takes us back not only to Schlegel but also to the idea of irony and its paradoxical forms. Schlegel quite frequently uses the term when discussing the influence of irony on literary form. He often starts with the example of parabasis, that place in Greek comedy when the play is suddenly interrupted as the actors leave the stage and the chorus moves forward to address the audience directly. What seems to fascinate Schlegel is the way in which the form and the symmetry of the dramatic story is exposed to a complete interruption and cancellation.28 Breaking the story paradoxically becomes part of its form—an “anti-form,” as Schlegel expresses it,29 that paradoxically takes place within the very framework that it simultaneously shatters and breaks. It is important to remember that Schlegel, in spite of his usage of the example parabasis, thinks about digression in the broadest sense of the term, as a parekbasis. In Roman rhetoric, digressions could present themselves in many ways, even if there were clear ideas as to when in the disposition they should appear in order to have the strongest possible effect. In a wider context, as in Schlegel’s use of the term, digression can appear anywhere and in many forms. The important thing is to break the narrative, shattering its structure by suddenly sending it off into a different direction, or simply destroying it. Schlegel is not the first to discover the intrinsic possibilities of digressions in literature. We only have to remind ourselves of the satirical and experimental use of parekbasis in the eighteenth-century novel, for instance in Tristram Shandy, to understand the paradoxical importance of digression in the development of literary form. With Schlegel’s arrival upon the stage, the concept of parekbasis is contexualized and thus included in the overall idea of the paradoxical forms of irony that to him constitute the very potentiality of literature. The figure of digression shatters the order of the narrative, forces it out of its pre-established form while simultaneously creating an endless possibility or potentiality through the very breaking point it effectuates. In an unfinished fragment of his Literary Notebooks, Schlegel writes: “Parekbasis and chorus necessary (as potency) for every novel.”30

See Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, vol. 2, p. 88. In his Literary Notebooks Schlegel writes: “Parekbasis can just as well be absolutely mimetic or absolutely fantastic; actually both, however, entirely and purely together, thus the highest anti-form and nature poetry.” See Schlegel, Literary Notebooks 1797–1801, Fragment no. 395. See also Hamacher, “Position Exposed: Friedrich Schlegel’s Poetological Transposition of Fichte’s Absolute Proposition,” pp. 247–9. 30 Schlegel, Literary Notebooks 1797–1801, Fragment no. 1682. 28 29

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In Dacapo, we find at least two important digressions that can live up to this idea of the true potentiality of the novel. They appear at the very beginning and at the end of the book. In this sense, they create an odd sort of framework for the story. The first digression displays silence, the second the sublime. Not only do these digressions point beyond the boundaries of narrative form, but from a thematic point of view they also seem to point toward something that lies beyond the expectations of the story itself. In the digression of the story, in breaking with it, something else is revealed, something that does not belong to the logical structure of the story, but is still very much part of it. The digression opens the story to the hyperbolic, to that which literally exceeds the narrative by breaking away from it. In this way, the novel is allowed to explore its own potentiality, to expand and to reach for the silence and the sublime that take place in the digressive anti-form known as parekbasis. Both of these passages are characterized by a traditional Romantic figure: the solitary self and the landscape. A. The Silent Landscape Even as you gaze into nothingness, a simile will appear. This also happens in the opening scene of Dacapo. The scenery is filled with stillness and silence, and is then transformed, with the help of a simile, into a graveyard: His last picture taken, the photographer lowered the camera to his chest and looked out over the great sea of birds lying in a state of total repose. Not a person in sight, not a house; hundreds of white birds unmoving, silent, eerily and uniformly spread out over the green and windless surface. It struck him that they looked like crosses in a war cemetery, and he realized at once that he scarcely would have noticed the similarity at another time or standing before another lake.31

The camera lens has been turned off. The eyes close, and give way to that inward eye which is the bliss of imagination. The simile is actually the first expression of this interiorization of the landscape. The second one, as we will see, comes shortly after, when a cosmic vision is announced. Then something peculiar happens. The sensation of the landscape becomes an acoustic phenomenon. The reduction is clear enough: first a gaze at the scenery, followed by its interiorization, where the pictures of the landscape are remodeled by the imagination. Then also the inward eye turns blind, and the only thing that remains is a kind of listening to the acoustic sensation of a lost landscape that can no longer be seen. This is a classic Romantic reduction, but Wijkmark has very nicely given it a paradoxical touch. What Frank is actually listening to, after the landscape and its pictures are all gone, is the silence left in his mind. That silence is the last reminder of the landscape and has becomes the silence within himself: He continued to stand there minute after minute, increasingly absorbed. It seemed to him that an enormous, transparent vault—filled with vague musical strains that were perhaps nothing more than absolute silence—was descending over the surrounding countryside. He couldn’t see the pictures anymore, he couldn’t see the watchtower on Wijkmark, Dacapo, p. 5.

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the opposite shore that he had just taken a picture of, he couldn’t see the birds that had the barbed wire and the anti-personnel mines to thank for their seclusion.32

This opening scene is the only long passage in the book printed in italics. It is the prologue to the story, a beginning before the actual beginning—a beginning that seems to start at the very end of any human story, where emptiness, silence and nothingness prevail. But suddenly there is a shift, a turn, and the silence is broken. This is the moment of initiation, the moment when something is set in motion, and the story can actually begin: He heard the hissing of a flock of magpies from somewhere inland, quite close but as if from another epoch. Then the pressure eased—the birds, the watchtower, the silence, everything that had grown oppressive—and a new rhythm emerged that spurred him to action.33

This listening, which had been reduced to a paradoxical listening to silence itself, suddenly throws him back to outer reality, “as if from another epoch.” The sound of the birds initiates the action that breaks the standstill. At that moment the self also abandons an existential state of mind based on silence. It is hardly a coincidence that the first thing Frank sees after setting himself in motion is a deformed image of himself: He turned abruptly and left the cape. Blind to everything save his own absurdly foreshortened reflection, he retreated along the frontier that followed the narrow sound. Photographing the distorted image, he proceeded towards the bridge where his rental car was parked.34

The camera lens has been reactivated. The photographer has resumed his usual existential position. The silence within is gone. The distorted image of himself works as a premonition of his shadow-like existence later in the novel, the “zombie” and the “ghost,” Necropa and Munich. To some extent, these deformed identities are already overcome in the opening scene, with the self intimately listening to the silence within. There, in that very moment, something appears that can be realized only as part of a digression, as something that points beyond the story, something that can appear only before, within or beyond the words of the story; it is the silence that is present not only in the self, but also in (and outside) the story. The “anti-form” of parekbasis makes that silence appear, renders it part of the potentiality of the novel. B. The Sublime Landscape The second digression appears at the end of the novel, and comes as an ecstatic aftermath to Frank’s and Axel’s meeting in Schlehforf am Kochelsee. The entire area is threatened by a natural disaster. The large dam is about to overflow and everyone Ibid. Ibid. 34 Ibid. 32 33

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except Frank has been evacuated. Wijkmark elegantly connects the opening scene of the novel to this final scene by way of a stylistic figure. The description of the opening passage, with the silent landscape at Schaalsee, ends with an imperative in English: “Walk from here.” Those words mark the end of the first digression and the beginning of the actual story. Now, that story seems to have reached its end. The walk is over. The next digression takes its place: “There was total silence. Once more all alone at a lake. The end of the road.”35 In a way, the novel presents a cyclic composition. It ends the same way as it begins. But this second digression actually points beyond the silence of the first one. It is in fact more digressive and more hyperbolic than the former. It does not describe the silence of the landscape (as it turns inward), but rather a landscape in commotion. How, then, do we ask ourselves, does the self position itself in this second parekbasis? The scene is very well structured. To begin with, the raging landscape seems to implant in Frank an extra sense of vitality, a vibrant and uplifting emotion. The threat of nature, and the agitation it creates, is matched by his level of excitement. The landscape is transposed into pictures and surfaces, as Frank hides his true self behind the photographer in him. A black cloud of sod and pebbles rose up in front of the neighboring village and obscured it completely. The water foamed high up in the air as it heaved itself into the breach; at the next moment the entire inn quaked, rattling the windowpanes. The photographer pressed the shutter. The sun shone unabated, but the disturbance rippled over the surface of the water, and a glitter of light danced like a repulsively gelatinous hologram on the wall of rocks as the water undulated slowly by; he photographed it time after time. He fancied that the camera had achieved an extra sharpness that stung his eyes and wouldn’t tolerate contradiction.36

In the next phase, the perspective changes. The premonition of an up-coming disaster, and the sense of fear it causes, is held back by the help of a consciousness at work. At the same time, the scene now demonstrates one of the most significant features of the aesthetics of the sublime, the solitary self and the sense of being able to overcome the power of nature. It is a momentary, hyperbolic, emotional experience: But he wasn’t afraid. On the contrary, he felt light and exhilarated. The exhilaration wouldn’t have been possible without his sense of relief in the aftermath of the showdown with Axel and the decision to relinquish Kari, but it went far beyond that. He had found a way to participate in his own life, to be present. The road from Schaalsee had been long, his steps erring and clumsy. But now he was there. He had achieved a real sense of devotion, authenticity. He fancied that he was invulnerable.37

But as these reflections are being transformed into pictures, Frank is actually able to maintain the distance between the sublime experience and himself: “He saw the movie, the dream, the reality—and he was part of it, picture by picture by picture.”38 Ibid., p. 320. Ibid., p. 321. 37 Ibid., p. 322. 38 Ibid. 35 36

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To really be able to reach the sublime moment, he has to achieve a state of mind that would take him beyond all the pictures and the thoughts, leaving his self alone with the inexplicable. Finally, the horror takes hold of him: “My monologue is over, he thought, all the pictures are taken, never more.”39 This prepares us for the arrival of the apocalyptic dimension of the sublime, a dimension that reaches beyond comprehension, but is nonetheless put into words: “Then something happened that was incomprehensible, something outside the realm of experience and imagination, but which the photographer nevertheless perceived with perfect clarity”40 This is the climax of the sublime scene in the novel, and also the beginning of its end: There was no indication that anything was in the works, and the helicopter was the only sign of human life in the vicinity of the power plant. Suddenly an entire little mountain peak loosened itself from its base and tumbled down into the cleft that the water had bored. The scene was made doubly unreal by virtue of its being enacted in the blinding sunshine, and by its absolute soundlessness—the boom from the explosion didn’t come until a couple of seconds later. The photographer was in a state of shock, as if witnessing a horror scene from the end of the world, and he couldn’t have been more astounded if a bit of the sun had torn itself loose and hurtled to earth. But apparently the mountain had fallen precisely where they had intended, since the flow of water abated conspicuously at that point; perhaps that had been the real turning point, the deliverance.41

This passage is announced with a contradictory statement that what happens is “incomprehensible.” This is a common literary strategy, for example in Dante, and is usually followed by a bold simile. Wijkmark chooses a different path. He brilliantly balances between distance and apocalypse, between a sense of being secure, and the feeling of being on the verge of extinction. The apocalyptic-sublime vocabulary is omnipresent in this passage: “tumbled down,” “the cleft,” “the boom,” “the explosion,” “shock,” “a horror scene,” and “the end of the world.” But this vocabulary is balanced by a set of simple devices that restrain the presence of the apocalyptic. One, for instance is the “helicopter,” that becomes the human sign in the sky and compensates for the absence of other human beings around him. Another is the small, but quite important reference to that “little mountain peak” which tumbles down into the abyss. The whole scene also has something unreal about it: the blinding light and the delayed sound contributes to that feeling. It retains a distance between the observer and the dramatic events being observed. The simile appearing in the passage, where the mountain peak is compared to the sun, is not used to add emotional intensity to the passage, but rather has the characteristics of a dead metaphor. By restraining the apocalyptic dimension in such a fashion, the digression soon allows us to return to the original story. This means that Frank can quickly reclaim his old existential position: “…he felt himself stiffen, sensed his face settling into the zombie’s familiar features.”42 In a way, Frank does not seem to have achieved anything throughout this story, except for an insight into the possibilities and failures Ibid., p. 324. Ibid., p. 325. 41 Ibid., p. 325. 42 Ibid., p. 327. 39 40

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of repetition. Everything was now back to where it began: “Life was back to the point at which the whole journey had begun, where he had gotten out of the car on the bridge at Schaalsee and started walking.”43 But the point is that something actually preceded the act of walking, something that took place in a digression of silence, pointing toward the silence of the self, beyond the state of the “zombie,” and beyond the “ghost.” In the same manner, the digression of the sublime points towards an experience of the moment which lies way beyond the story of the novel, pointing beyond its comprehensibility, reaching for the moment when the self is set free from within: “If nothing else, Schlehdorf had restored his health. The sodden pressure in his back had eased. The vitality of immortal longings had swept through his being and purified him.”44 Only a paradoxical form, fully exposed to its own potentiality, in the parekbasis that is the anti-form of the novel, can allow us, if only in a glimpse, to open the door slightly to the experience of such a dimension of human existence. Would that not also imply that great literature has been accomplished?



43 44

Ibid., p. 272; p. 327. Ibid., p. 272; pp. 327–8.

Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Wijkmark’s Corpus Dacapo, Stockholm: Norstedt 1994, pp. 11–12; pp. 70–2; pp. 101–2. II. Sources of Wijkmark’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Adorno, Theodor W., Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck) 1933. Billeskov Jansen, F.J., Studier i Søren Kierkegaards litterære kunst, Copenhagen: Rosenkilde og Bagger 1951. — Kierkegaard. Introduktion til Søren Kierkegaards liv og tanker, Copenhagen: Rhodos 1992. Henriksen, Aage, Søren Kierkegaards Romaner, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1954. III. Secondary Literature on Wijkmark’s Relation to Kierkegaard Undetermined.

Part II Norway

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Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson: Kierkegaard’s Positive Influence on Bjørnson in His Youth and Adulthood Esben Lindemann

It can seem like an insurmountable task to have to assess Kierkegaard’s influence on the Norwegian author Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (1832–1910). At the outset, it appears that the differences between these two individuals are far more conspicuous than are the similarities. Bjørnson is known for his great commitment to humanity and his unfailing optimism. He grew up in Romsdalen in Nesset Parish, where his father had a position as a minister. In 1850, Bjørnson moved to Christiania (today Oslo), where he studied for the examen philosophicum in preparation for his theological studies. Bjørnson, however, discarded this plan and instead attempted a career as a poet. Early on, however, he first made his mark as a theater and literature critic. Traditionally, Bjørnson’s life is divided into the years of youth and the years of adulthood.1 In 1857, he had his breakthrough with his famous peasant stories and a number of historical plays that are based on Norway’s saga era. The young Bjørnson also wrote poems, for example, “Ja, vi elsker dette landet” (1859), which was chosen as Norway’s national anthem. In his years of youth, Bjørnson completely retained his childhood faith from the minister’s home, and in 1860 he joined the Grundtvigian Danish-Norwegian folk high school circles. However, during the first half of the 1870s, he ended up on a bad footing with these circles. From the mid-1870s, he therefore chose to embrace positivism and the leader of the Modern Breakthrough, Georg Brandes (1842–1927). In terms of literature, this shift found its expression in contemporary plays, where modern-day problems were debated; religiously, it led to Bjørnson cutting his ties to the church at the age of 55, and, instead, professing Darwin’s theory of evolution. This marks the beginning of Bjørnson’s adult years. Throughout his life, Bjørnson remained very active in social debate, and he gained great political influence. Furthermore, Bjørnson achieved great recognition through his gift as an inspiring and charismatic speaker. As one might assume, Bjørnson’s

Per Amdam, Bjørnson og kristendommen 1832–1875. Selvhevdelse og selverkjennelse, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget 1969; Per Amdam, Bjørnson og kristenarven 1875–1910. Selvhevdelse og selverkjennelse, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget 1977.

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oeuvre is extensive and motley. He worked within every imaginable genre. In 1903, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.2 It is clear that the extroverted and positive-minded Bjørnson differed markedly from the more introverted and melancholy Kierkegaard—both in his personal life and his oeuvre. But, as I will attempt to elucidate, Kierkegaard exercised a far greater influence on Bjørnson than appears at first glance. The assumption that a connection exists between the two authors is based on the following four pieces of evidence: First, we know that Kierkegaard, in general, exercised great influence on Norwegian intellectual life after publishing The Moment in 1855, perhaps even more so than in Denmark.3 Second, we know that Bjørnson, in an article from 1900 in the Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang, admits to having been influenced by Kierkegaard’s thoughts, in the immediate wake of The Moment: “It was in those days following the publication of The Moment, the thoughts were as clear as lightning, the thunder was still to be heard rumbling in the distance, Søren Kierkegaard pervaded our thoughts.”4 Third, we know that Bjørnson studied Kierkegaard’s works intensely in 1854.5 Fourth, we know that Bjørnson meticulously read Kierkegaard’s Efterladte Papirer in 1871.6 It may be debated to what extent Bjørnson’s familiarity with the Kierkegaardian texts left traces on his consciousness. There is a tendency within Bjørnson research to claim that a positive influence from Kierkegaard predominantly comes to light in connection with Bjørnson’s break with the church during his transition into his adult years, but that a positive influence during the years of his youth is as good as non-existent. The thesis in this article will be that Kierkegaard exercised a positive influence on Bjørnson’s life during both the years of youth and adulthood. This will be substantiated primarily through letters and articles in which Bjørnson directly expresses his views on Kierkegaard or on themes that are related to Kierkegaard’s authorship. When relevant, references will be made to Bjørnson’s poetry.

Per Amdam, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson—kunstneren og samfunnsmennesket 1832–1880, Oslo: Gyldendal 1993; Aldo Keel, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. En biografi 1880–1910, Oslo: Gyldendal 1999. 3 Harald Beyer, Søren Kierkegaard og Norge, Kristiania: Aschehoug 1924; Valborg Erichsen, “Søren Kierkegaards betydning for norsk aandsliv,” Edda. Nordisk tidsskrift for litteraturforskning, vol. 19, 1923, pp. 209–429. 4 Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, “Slettensagen,” Verdens Gang, August 12, 1900 (republished in Artikler og Taler, ed. by Christen Christian Dreyer Collin and Hans Thure Smith Eitrem, vols. 1–2, Kristiania: Gyldendal 1912, vol. 2, p. 430). I would like to thank Olav Balslev for his translations of Bjørnson’s works that appear in this article. 5 Christen Collin, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson—hans Barndom og Ungdom, vols. 1–2, Kristiania: Aschehoug 1923, vol. 1, p. 112. 6 Letter from Bjørnson to Rudolf Schmidt, June 13, 1872, in Bjørnstjerne Bjørnsons brevveksling med danske 1854–1874, vol. 1–3, ed. by Øyvind Anker, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1970–74, vol. 3, p. 236. 2

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I. Rejection of Kierkegaard Until his religious crisis at the end of the 1870s, Bjørnson mentions Kierkegaard almost exclusively in a negative context, and one may conjecture to what extent Bjørnson can be said to be under any positive influence from Kierkegaard during this period. It has been suggested that Kierkegaard’s influence on Bjørnson was predominantly one of revulsion.7 Others have suggested that Bjørnson’s religious and ethical views were indeed influenced negatively by Kierkegaard, but that he, by contrast, was influenced positively by Kierkegaard in terms of psychology and style.8 In this section we will examine what in this debate has been highlighted as Bjørnson’s derogatory remarks about Kierkegaard prior to the religious crisis. In September 1861, Bjørnson wrote to his loyal friend, the highly respected Danish literature and drama critic Clemens Petersen (1834–1918), regarding the latter’s use of the word “melancholy”: It appears to me that you are somewhat generous with this label—in the same way that it, because of Kierkegaard, has become fashionable to assume a state of melancholy. However, sentiments yet undeveloped, with serene, perhaps deep longings to become something in and for the world, or to attain greater enlightenment and elucidation in matters religious, cannot offhandedly be called melancholic. Similarly, not everyone who stays in his shell—a characteristic to which Danes have a proclivity—can be labeled melancholic. Melancholy may be of such a light nature that it is but a habit, in which the individual finds his own solace.9

Bjørnson here seems to be criticizing Kierkegaard’s concept of “melancholy,” and this passage has indeed been interpreted as a critical rejection of Kierkegaard.10 However, if we scrutinize it further, it is not Kierkegaard’s concept per se that Bjørnson is attacking, but rather how the concept has been used by posterity. It must suffice here to state that Bjørnson is critical with regard to the effect that Kierkegaard had on posterity but not vis-à-vis Kierkegaard himself. However, ten years later, we do see a clearer example of a direct negative critique of Kierkegaard. Bjørnson, having read Kierkegaard’s recently published Efterladte Papirer, writes to his Danish friend Margrete Rode (1846–1918): I have read considerable amounts of Kierkegaard, which I did read with some interest, but which otherwise exerted no particular influence on me. His writings are so sick that I could only read snippets at a time; I read him solely for his psychological piquancy; as an edifying preacher, he is devoid of love, and only by love am I taken in. He is of broken mind, but a genius as rarely is seen in the world; his cry for “wholeness” derives from his mental lamentation and privation. Never have I come across a human being Collin, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson—hans Barndom og Ungdom, vol. 2, p. 342. Beyer, Søren Kierkegaard og Norge, pp. 194–6. 9 Letter from Bjørnson to Clemens Petersen, September 15, 1861, in Brev—Grotid, vols. 1–2, ed. by Halvdan Koht, Kristiania: Gyldendal 1912, vol. 1, p. 306. 10 Collin, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson—hans Barndom og Ungdom, vol. 2, p. 343; Beyer, Søren Kierkegaard og Norge, p. 192; Amdam, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson—kunstneren og samfunnsmennesket 1832–1880, p. 276. 7 8

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Esben Lindemann as vain and self-tortured. With regard to his relationship with his girlfriend: to slander yourself only to be hated by the one person he loved the most. Disgust takes me. Is that not like wearing your breeches inside out to attract the attention of the street urchins, only to subsequently assume a Christ-like martyr position?11

In connection with the very same Efterladte Papirer, Bjørnson six months later writes to his Danish co-editor Rudolf Schmidt (1836–99) at the magazine For Idé og Virkelighed: “Kierkegaard’s final work, which I have read conscientiously, can at times provoke a feeling of the type of dizziness that is accompanied by the desire to regurgitate. I could write a book about his book—to this degree it has repulsed me.”12 These two quotations clearly show that Bjørnson felt repulsed by Kierkegaard, and, according to Bjørnson himself, Kierkegaard exercised no influence on him. He is disgusted by the Danish philosopher’s mindset, which he describes as sickening. Bjørnson sees Kierkegaard’s need to project himself as a martyr as stemming from vanity and a ruined personality. It is evidently Kierkegaard’s proclivity for self-torture and isolation that conflicts with Bjørnson’s optimistic and extroverted personality.13 Kierkegaard’s focus on the individual stands in conflict with Bjørnson’s distinctly social views. For Bjørnson, the focus is the community. The individuals are all part of the same whole, and each individual carries a unique responsibility for society’s welfare. Bjørnson, unlike Kierkegaard, does not see a disparity between the masses and individual interests. Bjørnson does not consider the “masses” a term of abuse; on the contrary, he sees it as a sign of sickness that Kierkegaard wishes to position himself apart from the masses. In this respect, one might say that Bjørnson has a more realistic view of Kierkegaard’s pathological state of mind than, say, Henrik Ibsen, who appears to have idealized the mindset of the Danish genius.14 However, as early as 1870, Bjørnson thanked the Danish author Erik Bøgh (1822–99) for the anti-Kierkegaardian statements which Bøgh put forward in his book Søren Kierkegaard og St. Søren-Dyrkelsen.15 Bjørnson says: “As you already know, I agree with the point of view you put forward in your little book on Kierkegaard, inasmuch as your view is positive; and it is from the point of view of positive Christianity and healthy human nature that he should be judged.”16 It is precisely Kierkegaard’s insistence on the importance of suffering for the development of the human spirit that Bøgh criticizes, a criticism which Bjørnson applauds. At this point in his life, Bjørnson distances himself from the non-harmonious aspects of

11 Letter from Bjørnson to Margrete Rode, October 26, 1871, in Brev—Brytningsår, vols. 1–2, ed. by Halvdan Koht, Kristiania: Gyldendal 1921, vol. 1, p. 43. 12 Letter from Bjørnson to Rudolf Schmidt, June 13, 1872, in Bjørnstjerne Bjørnsons brevveksling med danske 1854–1874, vol. 3, p. 236. 13 Beyer, Søren Kierkegaard og Norge, p. 193. 14 Collin, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson—hans Barndom og Ungdom, vol. 2, p. 342. 15 Amdam, Bjørnson og kristendommen 1832–1875. Selvhevdelse og selverkjennelse, p. 217. 16 Letter from Bjørnson to Erik Bøgh, May 7, 1870, in Bjørnstjerne Bjørnsons brevveksling med danske 1854–1874, vol. 3, p. 6.

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Kierkegaard’s mindset and argues in favor of a more positive and harmonious life philosophy.17 During this period, Bjørnson was still inspired by Grundtvigianism. At the outset of 1874, he was very preoccupied by the Danish Grundtvigian Frederik Jungersen’s (1836–1912) book Dansk Protestantisme. Bjørnson seconds Jungersen’s claim that Protestantism is in a state of disintegration, and that one is faced with the choice of either embracing Catholicism, or understanding Lutheran Christianity through an interpretation of N.F.S. Grundtvig (1783–1872), Rasmus Nielsen (1809–84), and Kierkegaard.18 In a letter to Jungersen in January, 1874, Bjørnson assesses Jungersen’s book as follows: Apart from slightly too much Danish self-feeling in this book, there is a suffering, albeit in small amounts, that is repulsive in Kierkegaard’s, less so in Nielsen’s, and very little— but it is there!—in your writing. It is a reverberation of frivolous Copenhagen expressing itself on lofty subjects. I realize that Kierkegaard has done so to pass the threshold into the sphere of their understanding, but circumstances are not merely chosen, they are born. He was not free of what he was fighting against, and I have admired the stringent and relentless way, by which you dismiss him in certain passages in this book.19

In other words, Jungersen is both praised and criticized. It might be so that the new understanding of Lutheran Christianity is accessed through an interpretation of Grundtvig, Rasmus Nielsen, and Kierkegaard, but, according to Bjørnson, Jungersen is wise to stringently and relentlessly reject Kierkegaard’s view in several places. It is precisely Kierkegaard’s either/or, replete with suffering and inhumanity (according to Bjørnson), which must be rejected during this period.20 Furthermore, we see that Bjørnson scoffs at what he refers to as “Copenhagen frivolity,” by which he means an expression of an aesthetic, cautious, and excessively reflective attitude toward life, which, according to Bjørnson, is particularly characteristic of intellectual life in Copenhagen.21 It is evident that Bjørnson views Kierkegaard as representing this aspect of Copenhagen, although he himself fought against it. If one were to summarize Bjørnson’s negative statements about Kierkegaard in the former’s letters up until the end of the 1870s, one could say that there is a strong indication that it is in fact true when Bjørnson claims not to have been under the influence of Kierkegaard. However, there is reason to take a literal understanding of Bjørnson’s statement with a grain of salt. First, there is the possibility that Bjørnson himself was not conscious of the influence which Kierkegaard in fact exerted on him. Secondly, it appears that Bjørnson was very aware that his letters at some point Amdam, Bjørnson og kristendommen 1832–1875. Selvhevdelse og selverkjennelse, p. 217 and p. 243. 18 Amdam, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson—kunstneren og samfunnsmennesket 1832–1880, p. 404. 19 Letter from Bjørnson to Fr. Jungersen, January 13, 1874, in Bjørnstjerne Bjørnsons brevveksling med danske 1854–1874, vol. 3, p. 282. 20 Amdam, Bjørnson og kristendommen 1832–1875. Selvhevdelse og selverkjennelse, p. 249. 21 Beyer, Søren Kierkegaard og Norge, p. 193. 17

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in time would be published. At the time when the decisive negative statements on Kierkegaard were written, Bjørnson had already been in a position for a long time where he was not writing letters without giving publication a second thought.22 Especially given that a number of these letters were written during Bjørnson’s Grundtvigian period, he may have had his reasons to distance himself markedly from Kierkegaard. Furthermore, there is much evidence to the fact that the selfconscious Bjørnson wished to underscore his own originality,23 and that for this reason he attempted to underplay any influence that might have been exerted by other authors. In this connection, it is worth noting that Bjørnson at least confirms that he read several of Kierkegaard’s works, and that he expresses fascination with the “psychological piquancy” found in Kierkegaard’s writings. His thorough study of the Efterladte Papirer even made an impression on him to such a degree that he found himself capable of dedicating an entire book to analyzing it. Bjørnson, in other words, not only read several of Kierkegaard’s writings, but he did so thoroughly and even found parts of them interesting. One may therefore conjecture that Kierkegaard’s influence on Bjørnson during this period was greater than what Bjørnson himself wished to admit. However, such influence must be found implicitly in the authorship, by comparing Bjørnson’s direct statements in the letters with other texts, where he discusses the influence in a more indirect manner. I will attempt to do so in the following sections. II. The Theater Critique Bjørnson made his debut as a theater critic at the age of 22. At this point, he still had not had his breakthrough as a poet and had no experience with stage art. Many people have therefore wondered how the young critic was able to write in such a reflected manner and carry out such in-depth analyses of an artist’s development, as was the case in his critiques of that time. Attempts have been made to explain this almost abnormally precocious critical sense by suggesting that Bjørnson must have sought help from without, and that this help could have come from Kierkegaard’s work “The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress” from 1848.24 A central character in Bjørnson’s first theater critiques is the young Norwegian actress Laura Svendsen (1832–98), who at the age of 17 made her debut at the Kristiania Theater. She instantly spellbound critics and audience alike. Svendsen was particularly excellent as Juliet in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. But as time passed, the young actress could no longer live up to expectations, and just three years later the critics’ praise fell silent. Bjørnson was offended by this and came to Ms. Svendsen’s rescue in a general analysis of how the artist had developed. On March 25, 1854, Bjørnson wrote in the daily Morgenbladet: “The help from without, however, did not last long. 22 Amdam, Bjørnson og kristendommen 1832–1875. Selvhevdelse og selverkjennelse, p. 249. 23 Beyer, Søren Kierkegaard og Norge, p. 194. 24 Valborg Erichsen, “Bjørnson og jomfru Svendsen,” in Til Gerhard Gran fra 9. Dec. 1916 fra venner og elever, Oslo: Aschehoug 1916, p. 257; Amdam, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson— kunstneren og samfunnsmennesket 1832–1880, p. 133.

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Inanely, one exclusively demanded first-class performances every time she entered the stage. No thought was given to the vast difference between playing instinctively well, and playing reflectively and consciously.”25 Here we see a heralding parallel to Kierkegaard’s analysis of the development of the celebrated Danish actress Johanne Luise Heiberg (1812–90). Kierkegaard similarly differentiated between acting instinctively well, and acting reflectively or consciously. According to Kierkegaard, it is impossible for a young girl of 17 to be an artist since her only foundation is her spontaneous instinct. In order to become a true artist, she must go through a metamorphosis, that is, ascend to a higher, reflective level, where she can regain her initial spontaneity, or in the words of Kierkegaard, “be a servant of her idea.”26 To thrill an audience at the age of 17 is, according to Kierkegaard, nothing but mere chance. It is only when the actress is capable of maintaining a reflective distance from her role that she is able to regain her initial spontaneity and thereby is no longer subject to the vagaries of chance. Only then will she have been transformed into a true artist. According to Bjørnson, the Norwegian critics do not understand this, and he carries on with his analysis of the young Ms. Svendsen in Morgenbladet on December 2, 1855: Many of us did share the faith that Ms. Svendsen here would create a lasting incarnation of Juliet, but were—along with many others, it seems—left disappointed. To an extent, the blame for this should be placed on us, who praised her highly for her coquettish, cunning rendition of the Countess in Frieren og hans Ven, and did not stop to reflect that a young actress, who to such an extent has worked on and succeeded in subjecting her own feelings to reflection and consciousness, cannot—by a touch of a magic wand— disclaim the hegemony of reflection, and when merely given a sign, release her feelings once again with the ease that a bird is let out of its cage, as if it had never been entrapped. The first flight after imprisonment would necessarily falter; the concept of the extent of space could not immediately be grasped, and hence we were presented with a forced, coquettish Juliet, who concentrated on looking and behaving beautifully, on uttering lovely declamations, on giving equal amounts of energy to each and every scene, to walk with grace, to fall beautifully, to lie beautifully; we were not presented with the Juliet, who with exaltation succumbs to great passion, who swiftly and generously gives all she has in the heart, thoughts and mind.27

In other words, Bjørnson agrees with the critics about Ms. Svendsen’s first performance as Juliet. He also shares their disappointment following the second performance. However, he feels that their understanding of the actress’ developmental process is too shallow. They do not sense that Ms. Svendsen is situated in a crisis, heading toward the metamorphosis. With age, she has become more reflective, and hence her acting has become more calculating. Bjørnson sees this as a natural development and blames Ms. Svendsen’s critics for not understanding that it requires reflection and consciousness to develop to the point at which she once again can allow emotions to Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, “De norske Skuespillerinder,” Morgenbladet, March 25, 1854, p. 1 (in Artikler og Taler, vol. 1, p. 65). 26 SKS 14, 106 / C, 322. 27 Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, “Christiania Theater—Romeo og Julie,” Morgenbladet, December 2, 1855, p. 1 (in Artikler og Taler, vol. 1, p. 87). 25

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reign freely. It takes time to become the sort of artist that Ms. Svendsen—according to Bjørnson—has the potential to become. The Norwegian critics do not demand this sort of development from her; all they require is that she perform exceptionally, each and every time. In other words, they are superficial in their judgment of Ms. Svendsen, and Bjørnson’s criticism here has a likeness to Kierkegaard’s characterization of theater critics and audiences in Denmark. Kierkegaard illustrates this in “The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress” in the following manner: “The gallery wants to see Miss Juliet, a devilishly lovely and damnably pert wench of eighteen years who plays Juliet or passes herself off as Juliet, while the gallery is entertained by the thought that it is Miss Jane Doe. Therefore the gallery can, of course, never get it into its head that in order to represent Juliet an actress must essentially have a distance in age from Juliet.”28 Bjørnson also uses the phrase “to have a distance in age,” reminding us that this distance is a necessary prerequisite in order to carry out the role in the correct artistic manner. A first indicator that Bjørnson gathers inspiration from Kierkegaard is that, in the 1854 article, he proposes that the older “aestheticians” in Norway should be responsible for art criticism, as was the case in Denmark at the time: It would be welcome, as well as natural, if our older and more trustworthy aestheticians would exercise critique to a certain extent. In Denmark, for example, we see that the older and greatest aestheticians, who long have served art, and who once were the subject of critics themselves, do not rest on their laurels once they have rescued themselves from the more dangerous aspects of criticism; instead, they use their experience to help others, to critique, and thereby to save the younger artists from the precipice of immature judgment, from the random axe of the hoi-polloi.29

One of these older Danish “aestheticians” referred to by Bjørnson could very well be Kierkegaard and his article on Johanne Luise Heiberg. Another indicator that Bjørnson was inspired by Kierkegaard in this context is that Bjørnson—like Kierkegaard—takes the role of Juliet from Romeo and Juliet as his point of departure and structures his critique in exactly the same manner.30 They respectively compare Ms. Svendsen’s and Mrs. Heiberg’s performances as Juliet at the age of 17 with the performances as Juliet at a later point in the actresses’ lives. Admittedly, Ms. Svendsen has not undergone her entire metamorphosis, but in Bjørnson’s analysis, there is an implicit precondition that she will do so one day, and that she will become “a servant of her idea,” precisely like Mrs. Heiberg. It is this mode of thought that saves Ms. Svendsen from the “precipice of immature judgment, from the random axe of the hoi-polloi.” A third indicator that supports the idea that Bjørnson sought inspiration from Kierkegaard in this context is that Bjørnson admits to not having seen Ms. Svendsen’s first performance as Juliet.31 It is conspicuous that Bjørnson is able to SKS 14, 105 / C, 321. Bjørnson, “De norske Skuespillerinder,” p. 1 (in Artikler og Taler, vol. 1, p. 63). 30 Valborg Erichsen, “Bjørnson og jomfru Svendsen,” in Til Gerhard Gran fra 9. Dec. 1916 fra venner og elever, Kristiania: Aschehoug 1916, p. 263. 31 Ibid., p. 264. 28 29

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give such a subtle and detailed analysis of a performance which he has never seen. Ms. Svendsen’s first performance is, after all, a crucial element in Bjørnson’s analysis of the metamorphosis that takes place in the artist’s ideal development. A final indicator which suggests a convergence of the two authors’ description of the respective artists’ development is that they both attempt to elucidate their reasoning by drawing a parallel between the development of an actress and a poet. Bjørnson writes: How many a swain, for example, has not at the age of sixteen or seventeen written poetry, which he himself found impeccable, and which was lauded far and wide by acquaintances, because they assessed it with respect to his age. Thus led astray, he perhaps thought himself perfect, scorned outside support, scorned advice from others, and wrote wildly. But then, with age, came reflection, his eyes opened to the importance of form; he no longer wrote with lightness, because he no longer wrote with inviolability….But if he senses the voice of talent cry a defiant “no” from within, he continues, he looks, thinks and tries. Soon he stands victorious over the challenges of form and taste, and his thoughts once again stand free and proud.32

With age, both the poet and the actress begin to reflect: a crisis on the path toward the joyous metamorphosis, in other words, the transition from spontaneous to conscious art. Kierkegaard’s example goes as follows: There is a lyricism that might be called the lyricism of youthfulness; every young person erectioris ingenii [of more gifted nature] has a little of it. But then there is a young man who qua youth has this lyricism of youthfulness and also has genius, the idea of which is the lyricism of youthfulness. Now the question is, when will he produce his best lyrical poetry—in his twentieth year? By no means. His best lyrics will come at a somewhat older age, when time has taken away the fortunate accidentals of his youthfulness so that he now relates himself to his idea purely ideally and thereby, serving, also relates himself in a profounder sense to his idea.33

The similarity between the two examples need not be commented on any further, but one could add that Bjørnson not only found help for his own theater critiques in Kierkegaard’s “The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress,” but has also found an understanding of his own development as a poet. As mentioned, he was still yet to make his breakthrough as a poet at this point in time. He made a couple of attempts but discarded them, and he had probably realized that being a poet demanded so much more than merely “the lyricism of youthfulness.”34 To support the assertion that Bjørnson was influenced by Kierkegaard in the realm of theater criticism in general, one might point to the fact that Bjørnson— much like Kierkegaard—displayed enthusiasm for the French playwright Eugène Scribe (1791–1861). In this connection it is probable that Bjørnson draws inspiration for his reviews during the mid-1850s from one of Kierkegaard’s best-known works, Bjørnson, “De norske Skuespillerinder,” p. 1 (in Artikler og Taler, vol. 1, p. 65). SKS 14, 105 / C, 320. 34 Erichsen, “Bjørnson og jomfru Svendsen,” p. 261; p. 265; Amdam, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson—kunstneren og samfunnsmennesket 1832–1880, p. 135. 32 33

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Either/Or. Bjørnson and Kierkegaard have something in common on two points. First, neither Bjørnson nor Kierkegaard adheres strictly to the text. In their critiques, they rather seem to be adding to Scribe’s compositions, and as a result, the plays end up containing far more psychological dimensions than actually intended. Secondly, they both end up distancing themselves from Scribe, precisely because they criticize the lack of psychology in the plays.35 Hence, on December 9, 1855, Bjørnson praises the new French playwrights for striving to depict nuanced and profound characters. This, according to Bjørnson, is laudable since this is exactly where Scribe has his shortcomings. However, the new authors do not succeed in living up to Scribe’s simple and compact structure, which brings Bjørnson to the following conclusion: “And here we have in front of us the great objective, which authors, who continue where Scribe left off, should pursue: allowing his machinery and their own more versatile characterization to benefit mutually from each other.”36 As an argument against the interpretation that Bjørnson was inspired by Kierkegaard’s “The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress” when writing his articles on Ms. Svendsen, one should mention that this text by Kierkegaard, at the time when Bjørnson ostensibly was influenced by it, had only been published as a series of articles in the Danish newspaper Fædrelandet in 1848. It therefore seems improbable that Bjørnson could have laid his eyes on this article.37 If Bjørnson indeed had touched upon it, it could have been through Kierkegaard’s short work On My Activity as an Author from 1851. Kierkegaard mentions the article here and divulges that it was published under the pseudonym “Inter et Inter.” This could have been the way by which Bjørnson gained access to the article.38 However, in On My Activity as an Author, Kierkegaard does not divulge the content of the article; he merely mentions that it is a “small aesthetic article.” In other words, Bjørnson could not have known that he might find help for his own theater critiques in this article and, as such, would have had no reason to procure access to it.39 The similarities between Kierkegaard’s and Bjørnson’s articles on Johanne Luise Heiberg and Laura Svendsen respectively probably stem instead from the influence which G.W.F. Hegel’s (1770–1831) dialectics exercised on both the theater critics, as well as from the influence of other philosophers, who had been inspired by Hegel in this matter, for example Frederik Christian Sibbern (1785–1872), Johan Ludvig Heiberg (1791–1860), and Johan Welhaven (1807–73). The concept of the three levels of development: the initial spontaneity, the reflective middle stage, and the unity of these two in a more profound spontaneity, may be viewed as the fruit of Romanticism’s insistence on the importance of feeling and fantasy in opposition to an excessively intellectualized and sensible Age of Enlightenment. This is an idea

Beyer, Søren Kierkegaard og Norge, p. 199. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, “Christiania Theater—Scribe og de nyere franske Teaterforfattere—‘Hjerte og Medgift,’ ” Morgenbladet, December 9, 1855, p. 2 (in Artikler og Taler, vol. 1, p. 94). 37 Collin, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson—hans Barndom og Ungdom, vol. 1, p. 150. 38 Erichsen, “Bjørnson og jomfru Svendsen,” p. 264. 39 Collin, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson—hans Barndom og Ungdom, vol. 1, p. 150. 35 36

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which has generally influenced Danish and Norwegian authors in Kierkegaard’s and Bjørnson’s time.40 In this connection, it is probable that Kierkegaard and Bjørnson, like many other Danish and Norwegian authors, were influenced by Hegel and Romanticism’s clash with the Age of Enlightenment, but this alone does not explain the at times verbatim similarities between “The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress” and Bjørnson’s analyses of Laura Svendsen. The similarities are, in fact, so striking that they are difficult to discard altogether. Given the circumstances, it seems difficult to see how Bjørnson would have obtained a copy of Kierkegaard’s article on Mrs. Heiberg; it is possible that two different authors might formulate two almost identical analyses of two different actresses, merely because they both belong to the same historical Zeitgeist of the period. Bjørnson may not have been familiar with the exact content of the “small aesthetic article,” but he must have been aware that Kierkegaard was behind the pseudonym “Inter et Inter.” We already know that Bjørnson was very preoccupied with Kierkegaard during this period. It is therefore probable that he read On My Activity as an Author from 1851. He would also have known what to expect from this “small aesthetic article,” the probability of which is highlighted by the fact that he undoubtedly found inspiration for his Scribe critiques in another aesthetic work by Kierkegaard, namely Either/Or. III. The Style As we saw earlier, Bjørnson admits to having read Kierkegaard in the context of “things interesting”; he, however, also stipulates that he read Kierkegaard exclusively for the “psychological piquancy.” Exactly what Bjørnson means by the expression “things interesting” is not clear, but in this section “things interesting” will be related to the aesthetic side of Kierkegaard’s authorship, that is, Kierkegaard’s own means of expression and not his deliberations on any particular aesthetic outlook on life. In this section, I will postulate that Kierkegaard’s stylistic influence is present in both Bjørnson’s poetic creations and his articles. Bjørnson seems to imply a connection between “things interesting” (that is, Kierkegaard’s style) and the “psychological piquancy.” It is precisely in the experimental, psychological style that one, in this connection, can sense Kierkegaard’s influence on Bjørnson’s poetic works. The important Danish man of letters and culture critic Georg Brandes touched upon this in two passages. The first is: “Maria Stuart dates from a period in Bjørnson’s development when (perhaps under the influence of Kierkegaard) he was inclined to give psychological descriptions of his characters instead of allowing them to display their own natures without commentary.”41 In the second passage Brandes writes: Ibid., vol. 1, p. 153. Georg Brandes, “Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson,” in Samlede Skrifter, vol. 1–18, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1900, vol. 3, p. 374. (Authorized English translation by Mary Morison in Henrik Ibsen. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. Critical Studies, ed. by William Archer, London: William Heinemann 1899, p. 146.)

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Esben Lindemann In this device I see a sign of the times in which the play was written. The air was full of Kierkegaard’s theories. The application of scientific observation and experiment in the domain of human intercourse, that experimental psychology which plays such an important part in Kierkegaard’s philosophy, and was conspicuous in Maria Stuart, presents itself to us in De Nygifte in the person of Mathilde, the friend of the family.42

According to Brandes, Bjørnson conducts psychological experiments with his characters in his two drama plays Maria Stuart i Skotland (1864) and De Nygifte (1865) in a way that hints at him being under the influence of Kierkegaard. What Bjørnson and Kierkegaard have in common is a tendency to describe the characters in terms of psychological profiles instead of allowing them to unfold without interpretation. One may also observe these psychological experiments in Bjørnson’s first peasant stories, for example, in Synnøve Solbakken (1857) and Arne (1858). Both in the peasant stories and the dramas, the experiments predominantly manifest themselves in that the author comments on the characters’ development.43 In addition, Kierkegaard’s ideas generally permeated the air at the time, exercising their influence on the Nordic authors, which makes it probable that Bjørnson was also influenced.44 Bjørnson, in letters and articles from this period, mentions that his contemporaries, during his earliest years as an author, were influenced by the Kierkegaardian style. Also in this context it appears as if Bjørnson, on the one hand, writes critically about Kierkegaard but, on the other hand, cannot escape his own criticism. Note the following critical assessment of the connection between Bjørnson’s contemporaries and Kierkegaard’s language: “The language, as we speak it today, whipped by the Kierkegaardian philosophy,”45 or “our light, Kierkegaardian whipped athletic language, which displays itself in so many different manifestations—from philosophy to the parlance of the street.”46 Bjørnson indicates that there is a compulsory relationship between the language of the age and the Kierkegaardian philosophy. The language is “whipped”—perhaps because his contemporaries make use of the language as a compulsory fashion, instead of freely developing their own. Furthermore, Bjørnson seems to indicate that it is characteristic of this language that it switches between many different types of terminology—“From philosophy to the parlance of the street.”47 Bjørnson, in his 1872 article, “A Few Words for the Youth,” in his own periodical For Idé og Virkelighed, writes the following, referring to this characteristic of the Kierkegaardian language48: “I by now have nothing but disdain for this glitter and tinsel style, spike style, thunder style, and the teaser style 42 Brandes, “Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson,” in Samlede Skrifter, vol. 3, p. 376. (Henrik Ibsen. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. Critical Studies, p. 147.) 43 Beyer, Søren Kierkegaard og Norge, p. 200. 44 Amdam, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson—kunstneren og samfunnsmennesket 1832–1880, p. 318. 45 Letter from Bjørnson to Ditmar Meidell, summer 1861, in Brev—Grotid, vol. 1, p. 257. 46 Letter from Bjørnson to Chr. Hviid, June 8, 1861, in Brev—Grotid, vol. 1, p. 267. 47 Ibid. 48 Beyer, Søren Kierkegaard og Norge, p. 201, note 2.

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of a serial, which all prey on the prejudices and habits of the audience, which one is addressing.”49 Bjørnson is referring here to Kierkegaard’s at times satirical style, which in its polemic against certain detractors, and in order to distract the enemy, will jump from a well-founded argument to self-invented expressions or word games that evoke street parlance, children’s language or sheer nonsense. However, this characteristic is also present in Bjørnson’s own works.50 Like Kierkegaard, Bjørnson has a proclivity for satire and polemic. Precisely in the quotations where Bjørnson polemicizes against Kierkegaard, he uses expressions that might as well have been crafted by Kierkegaard himself. Self-invented expressions such as “whipped athletic language,” “glitter and tinsel style,” “spike style,” “thunder style,” and “the teaser style of a serial,” appear to have exactly the same effect as when Kierkegaard employs such a technique. They become a kind of gibberish that in a surprising manner comes across like a sudden attack. It is also worth noting that Bjørnson writes, “The language as we speak it today,” and “our light, Kierkegaardian, whipped athletic language.” In other words, he includes himself in the diagnosis of his contemporaries. It is therefore reasonable to assume that Bjørnson admits to the linguistic influence which Kierkegaard has on him, and that the negative hue in these quotations should be interpreted as a regret that he himself cannot withstand the coercion of what is fashionable. It is therefore also reasonable to assume that Bjørnson’s attack is directed against Kierkegaard’s influence on the former’s contemporaries and not against Kierkegaard himself. Bjørnson also seems to have understood Kierkegaard’s irony. He, like Kierkegaard, enjoys ironizing about the aesthetician’s self-enjoyment.51 In 1857 he writes the following about the Danish aesthetician and actor Frederik Høedt (1820–85): “He is…Copenhagen’s first dandy (in some aspect, though, second to Goldschmidt); he is a composer, politician, actor, poet, painter, a wealthy man, and unmarried. He looks suitably worn, is sarcastic and religious-Kierkegaardian— God, he is pretty!”52 It is ironic in itself that the irony in this passage—inspired by Kierkegaard—is directed toward Kierkegaard himself. The reason for this is that Bjørnson here is writing about a time when The Moment, as mentioned earlier, rushed by, and Kierkegaard ruled over people’s imagination. It had become fashionable to be “religious-Kierkegaardian.” Kierkegaard had become aesthetic, or he had become included in the aesthetic lifestyle, about which Bjørnson ironizes. Again, Bjørnson is not attacking the person Kierkegaard, but rather something in the Zeitgeist, which stands in an artificial relation to life and—again according to Bjørnson—in an artificial relation to the Kierkegaardian religiousness.

Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, “Nogle Ord til Ungdommen,” in For Idé og Virkelighed, vol. 1, 1872, p. 217. 50 Beyer, Søren Kierkegaard og Norge, p. 201. 51 Amdam, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson—kunstneren og samfunnsmennesket 1832–1880, p. 121. 52 Letter from Bjørnson to Paul Botten-Hansen, March 13, 1857, in Brev—Grotid, vol. 1, pp. 4–5. 49

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The irony, however, Bjørnson has inherited from Kierkegaard, and it is likely that the inspiration stems from The Moment. Later we will see how Bjørnson was able to find help in Kierkegaard’s The Moment for his own battle against the Norwegian State Church and the sanctimonious Christianity of the late 1870s. In this polemic, it is possible to identify clear traces of Kierkegaard’s language. Bjørnson, in fact, takes direct ownership of a number of expressions about the priests from Kierkegaard’s The Moment,53 for example: “those who like to go about in long robes,”54 “knaves,”55 “liars,”56 “deceivers,”57 “preacher-cheating,”58 and “Sunday Christians.”59 This more detailed scrutiny of how Bjørnson uses Kierkegaard in his religious battle of liberation we will get into later; here we have merely pinpointed how one may trace Kierkegaard’s stylistic influence on Bjørnson’s authorship. IV. From Grundtvig to Brandes We have until now seen that Bjørnson, in spite of his negative statements against Kierkegaard prior to the religious crisis, was influenced positively by Kierkegaard with regard to his theater criticism and with regard to stylistic characteristics in his authorship. It might be these two aspects of Kierkegaard’s authorship that Bjørnson refers to when he writes that Kierkegaard influenced him with regard to “things interesting.” But we should not forget that Bjørnson in the same breath underscores that Kierkegaard did not influence him considerably in any other areas. This way in which Bjørnson understands his relation to Kierkegaard has, within Bjørnson research, been held up as “the true” approach to the relationship between the two authors, and one scholar has pointed to Bjørnson having an “inborn” aversion to Kierkegaard.60 Another way to express this is to say that Bjørnson felt challenged by Kierkegaard, and that this challenge reflected positively on Bjørnson’s consciousness. This holds true not just for “things interesting” with Kierkegaard but also for deeper and more serious aspects of Kierkegaard’s existential philosophy.61 We will examine this in more detail in this section. In Verdens Gang on February 12, 1902, Bjørnson stresses that Kierkegaard is one of the most important contemporary authors.62 He writes this at a time when Georg

Beyer, Søren Kierkegaard og Norge, pp. 205–10; Aldo Keel, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson— En biografi 1880–1910, p. 158; p. 402. 54 SKS 13, 248 / M, 197. 55 SKS 13, 404 / M, 341. 56 SKS 13, 398 / M, 334. 57 Ibid. 58 SKS 13, 269 / M, 216. 59 SKS 13, 270 / M, 216. 60 Beyer, Søren Kierkegaard og Norge, p. 191; Collin, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson—hans Barndom og Ungdom, p. 342. 61 Amdam, Bjørnson og kristendommen 1832–1875. Selvhevdelse og selverkjennelse, p. 67. 62 Ibid., p. 29. 53

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Brandes’ success had reached its pinnacle, and Bjørnson considers it timely to play down Brandes’ importance for Nordic intellectual life. He writes, There is one poet, who has had the greatest influence on my development: old Grundtvig. Of late, people seem to proclaim that only one person has caused change here in this world. But sweet mother of God, who is Georg Brandes compared to Grundtvig, Kierkegaard or Henrik Wergeland? What influence has he exercised that may be compared to what they have done for us?63

One could say that the purpose of highlighting Kierkegaard in this connection is to weaken Brandes’ status and not primarily to emphasize Kierkegaard’s importance.64 Nevertheless, Kierkegaard is mentioned here, almost on a par with Grundtvig, who, according to Bjørnson himself, is the poet who has exercised the greatest influence on him, and he emphasizes what Grundtvig, Kierkegaard, and Henrik Wergeland have done for “us.” To Bjørnson, this “us” of course refers to the Norwegian people, but it also includes himself, whereby he hints at Kierkegaard’s influence on himself. When Bjørnson mentions Grundtvig as the poet who has exercised the greatest influence on him, it should be seen in the context that he subsequently also underlines the importance of Kierkegaard’s and Wergeland’s influence. They have influenced him greatly; however, Grundtvig has exercised the greatest influence of the three of them. It is beyond all doubt that Bjørnson appreciates the influence that Grundtvig has had on his development. It is also common knowledge that Bjørnson was influenced by Grundtvig and actually stated that he went through a Grundtvigian period. In 1878, in Dansk Folketidende, Bjørnson accounts for this period, and explains what initially attracted him to Grundtvig: What initially drew me to Grundtvig was by no means his “discovery,” which, as is known, has its drawbacks; drawbacks that are increased rather than diminished. What drew me was his insight into human nature, his wonderful poetic eye for the life conditions of mankind. What drew me, were his broad, authoritative understanding, his visions, and his songs from the heights of life.65

Bjørnson wrote this at a point in his life when he no longer belonged to the Grundtvigian movement. However, he continued to be fascinated by Grundtvig’s understanding of human nature and his life philosophy. Some 11 years earlier, when his Grundtvig period was in its primary phase, he wrote the following in a letter to the Danish-Norwegian author Magdalene Thoresen (1829–1903): There is certainly more poetry in Oehlenschlæger, more thinking in Kierkegaard, more form in many authors, but perhaps imaginative powers only in one. But sum all this up, and apply it to health, depth, faith and vision, and it is he [sc. Grundtvig], who is on a Erichsen, “Søren Kierkegaards betydning for norsk åndsliv,” p. 358, note. Beyer, Søren Kierkegaard og Norge, p. 194. 65 Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, “Den danske Inkvisition,” Dansk Folketidende, December, 1878, p. 2 (in Artikler og Taler, vol. 1, p. 464). 63 64

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In other words, what appeals to Bjørnson is the humanitarian aspect of Grundtvig’s Christianity and in a direct comparison with Kierkegaard, the robustness and depth of Grundtvig is emphasized.67 One could say that Kierkegaard and Grundtvig are Bjørnson’s “two poles.” Through his entire adult life, and until quite some time after his religious crisis, Bjørnson was caught between Grundtvig’s healthy and humanitarian life philosophy, on the one hand, and the Kierkegaardian “Gospel of Suffering,” on the other.68 Looking back, Bjørnson describes this state of mind in a letter to the Danish minister of the church and author Jens Christian Hostrup (1818–92): “Then came the Kierkegaard catastrophe. It swiftly propelled me towards Grundtvig; to his speeches bursting with freedom and humanity; speeches, to create a society of all those who listened.”69 When Bjørnson uses the designation “the Kierkegaard Catastrophe,” he is referring to Kierkegaard’s strict and uncompromising interpretation of Christian self-knowledge, where the emphasis is on self-sacrifice, and where anxiety is a prerequisite for the transcendence into “true” Christianity.70 According to Bjørnson, all this startled him into seeking refuge with Grundtvig. In this way Bjørnson thus acknowledges that Kierkegaard was a factor in his life, and one may say that Kierkegaard stimulated Bjørnson to activate himself—forced him into making a choice.71 In Bjørnson’s view, Kierkegaard and Pietism are basically one. In other words, according to Bjørnson, Kierkegaard’s thoughts were usurped by the Pietistic awakening movement in Norway, and Kierkegaard therefore acted in the service of this movement.72 On May 24, 1876, Bjørnson wrote in Oplandenes Avis about the Pietistic awakening movement, which was started by the Norwegian theologians Carl Poul Caspari (1814–92) and Gisle Johnson (1822–94):73 The present awakening in the shape of the Caspari-Johnson preaching (scientifically based on Hengstenberg and his successors, and in its awakening enthusiasm incited further by Søren Kierkegaard) has not lost its birth characteristics, one-sidedness and a feeling of pent-up anger. Unfortunately, both the scientific and pietistic influences had

Letter from Bjørnson to Magdalene Thoresen, August 24, 1867, in Bjørnstjerne Bjørnsons brevveksling med danske 1854–1874, vol. 2, p. 153. 67 Beyer, Søren Kierkegaard og Norge, p. 202. 68 Amdam, Bjørnson og kristenarven 1875–1910. Selvhevdelse og selverkjennelse, p. 29. 69 Letter from Bjørnson to C. Hostrup, May 20, 1888, in Bjørnstjerne Bjørnsons brevveksling med danske 1875–1910, vol. 2, p. 326. 70 Amdam, Bjørnson og kristendommen 1832–1875. Selvhevdelse og selverkjennelse, p. 67; Erichsen, “Søren Kierkegaards betydning for norsk åndsliv,” p. 397. 71 Collin, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson—hans Barndom og Ungdom, vol. 2, p. 342. 72 Erichsen, “Søren Kierkegaards betydning for norsk åndsliv,” p. 397. 73 Beyer, Søren Kierkegaard og Norge, p. 203. 66

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the same shortcomings: he, “the only one,” suffered to a heightened level of illness; a level which leads to despair.74

The reason that Bjørnson drifts towards Grundtvig is that he sees in Grundtvig a medicine against the sickly Pietism and the Kierkegaardian philosophy. Grundtvig’s humane, harmonious and life-affirming thoughts are to act as a counter-balance to the, according to Bjørnson, strict and pessimistic elements of Pietism and Kierkegaard’s philosophy. This juxtaposition of Kierkegaard and Grundtvig can also be seen in Bjørnson’s poetic works of the time, for example, in Fiskerjenten from 1868.75 However, there might be more to this juxtaposition of Grundtvig and Kierkegaard than merely the influence which Kierkegaard exerted on Bjørnson qua his revulsion.76 Perhaps Bjørnson was able to use elements from Kierkegaard’s existential philosophy positively in his personal life.77 If we keep in mind Bjørnson’s own statement about Kierkegaard’s importance for his authorship, and if we consider that Bjørnson himself hailed from a family of ministers, this appears probable. Bjørnson, because of his family background and by reading extensively, became familiar with Kierkegaard’s thoughts. Bjørnson was even incited to commence studying theology. However, he probably discontinued his theology studies, in line with several other Norwegian theology students at the time, strongly influenced by Kierkegaard’s newly published The Moment. Without a doubt, Kierkegaard’s attack on the state church affected Bjørnson, whose father had just been reprimanded by the church authorities. He was therefore probably sympathetic toward what he read in The Moment.78 Subsequently, Bjørnson, as we know, chose the field of poetry. It is therefore not entirely off the mark to include Kierkegaard as one of the reasons why Bjørnson made the great leap from theology, a field which was laid out for him, to the more uncertain and unknown territory of poetry. This would have been a great and anxietyprovoking choice, for which he probably was able to avail himself of Kierkegaard’s existential thoughts on anxiety as a prerequisite for the qualitative leap.79 In this connection, Kierkegaard’s thoughts seem—to a larger extent than Grundtvig’s—to zero in on personal aspects of Bjørnson’s life. Hence, he probably had a greater impact on Bjørnson’s personal development in spite of the fact that Bjørnson himself considered Grundtvig to have been the greater influence of the two.80 Furthermore, as we shall see, Bjørnson—like Kierkegaard—attacked aesthetic and materialistic lifestyles, emphasized the responsibility of the individual, and argued in favor of more holistic standpoints.81 Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, “Lidt om vor nuværende Religionsforkyndelse og dens Forhold til Folkearbeidet,” Oplandenes Avis, May 24, 1876, no. 42, p. 1 (in Artikler og Taler, vol. 1, p. 419). 75 Erichsen, “Søren Kierkegaards betydning for norsk åndsliv,” pp. 397–8. 76 Collin, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson—hans Barndom og Ungdom, vol. 2, p. 342. 77 Erichsen, “Søren Kierkegaards betydning for norsk åndsliv,” p. 271. 78 Amdam, Bjørnson og kristendommen 1832–1875. Selvhevdelse og selverkjennelse, p. 67. 79 Ibid., p. 68. 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid., p. 67. 74

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It should be noted in this context that Bjørnson did not consider Grundtvigianism to be sufficient in itself. After a short time span, he developed an interest in the Danish philosopher Rasmus Nielsen (1809–84), who precisely wished to unite Kierkegaard and Grundtvig in a more holistic philosophical position.82 Bjørnson describes this in Dagbladet on January 16, 1880: This process soon led me to Grundtvig, his analysis of antiquity, and his fight to establish a school in his homeland. At this time, faith in his words also became stronger and stronger for me. His preaching took into consideration the human aspect, which our own did not. As this element was the strongest in me, I soon began to fight it and narrowmindedness here at home. But that I did not feel entirely at ease was witnessed by the fact that, as soon as I could, I drifted toward Rasmus Nielsen, who does operate on the solid ground of faith, but does so with greater freedom of thought.83

Here we see the three positions: Grundtvig, “narrow-mindedness” (that is, Pietism), and Rasmus Nielsen. Bjørnson did not feel entirely comfortable about the Grundtvigian fight against Pietism. He needed Nielsen, who allowed for greater freedom of thought. What Bjørnson expresses here is his conviction that Nielsen is more philosophical than Grundtvig. There is good reason to believe that when Bjørnson stresses the philosophical side, he is identifying it with the Kierkegaardian aspect of Nielsen’s program. Bjørnson hereby realizes that the union of the two standpoints constituted a more effective argument against Pietism than just Grundtvig’s ideas alone. Nielsen’s declared objective was to combat Pietism, and he viewed Kierkegaard as a central figure in this context. This is illustrated in the following 1872 statement by Nielsen in the periodical For Idé og Virkelighed, of which, incidentally, Nielsen and Bjørnson, together with Rudolf Schmidt, were publishers: “With regard to the extensive, perhaps even terrible intellectual crises that the future has to offer, it is a veritable boon for our homeland that it has an author, who from a pietistic standpoint has dissolved Pietism itself in such an extensive and all-encompassing manner; he is S. Kierkegaard.”84 It is from the Pietistic standpoint that Kierkegaard dissolves Pietism. When Bjørnson concurs with Nielsen’s point of view, and attributes “greater freedom of thought” to him, it should be viewed as an expression of Bjørnson recognizing that in order to combat the life-loathing aspects of Pietism, he will have to make some concessions to precisely Kierkegaard and Pietism itself. He needs to have sufficient freedom of thought to accept the Kierkegaardian Pietistic train of thought and, within this, have enough freedom of thought to realize, like Nielsen, that Kierkegaard actually contributed positively to combating the Pietistic standpoint. It has often been said that Bjørnson did not have a philosophical disposition. Bjørnson concurred with this, yet what drew him to Nielsen was precisely the Beyer, Søren Kierkegaard og Norge, p. 202; Amdam, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson— kunstneren og samfunnsmennesket 1832–1880, p. 379. 83 Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, “At være tro,” Dagbladet, January 16, 1880, no. 13 (in Artikler og Taler, vol. 1, p. 492). 84 Rasmus Nielsen, “Karakter og Villie,” For Idé og Virkelighed, vol. 1, 1872, p. 505. 82

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philosophical, which he apparently found missing in Grundtvig. A combination of Grundtvig and Kierkegaard seemed to be the new remedy against the sickly Pietism. In a letter to his Danish poet friend and future co-editor Rudolf Schmidt, Bjørnson, in 1866, writes about Nielsen’s most recent publication: I am probably not assessing Rasmus Nielsen properly, since I am not a philosopher. Everything I have read by him has been formulated exquisitely, highlighting the spiritual aspect. But it has never struck me as something new; this time is no exception; what strikes me, is that his words ring true and healthy. So it must be, as he says, or else religion will die with theology.85

Here it is Rasmus Nielsen’s philosophical unification of Grundtvig and Kierkegaard that is highlighted as “the true and healthy.” Additionally, it should be noted that Bjørnson’s close friendship with the two Kierkegaardians, Nielsen and Schmidt, during this period most probably had the effect that Bjørnson maintained a more positive view of the Kierkegaardian thought system.86 Bjørnson was perhaps even more strongly influenced by another of his close Kierkegaardian friends, Clemens Petersen. The times bear witness to the fact that Petersen actually warned Bjørnson against Grundtvig, and that Petersen and Bjørnson discussed Kierkegaard-inspired themes, such as the importance of ethical will on artistic development, and the necessity of anxiety to create engaged poetry.87 As an indication of Bjørnson’s affinity toward Kierkegaard during this period, it should also be mentioned that Bjørnson, during his transition to Nielsen, actually mentioned Kierkegaard in a positive manner. This fact is often overlooked by Bjørnson and Kierkegaard researchers. Bjørnson states in Fædrelandet on October 2, 1867 that the “storm” which Kierkegaard “incited intellectually is proof that he reached his goal.”88 The opposite forces that Grundtvig and Kierkegaard represent in Bjørnson’s mind are in fact the seed of his religious crisis. To Bjørnson, it is all-important to uphold a humane Christianity. A Christianity which discards human life is, according to Bjørnson, untrue. This latter concept he sees as being present in Pietism and to a certain extent in Kierkegaard.89 To Bjørnson, Nielsen is a philosopher, who through the help of Kierkegaard is able to argue against the humanity-loathing aspects of Pietism and concurrently uphold the humane aspects of Grundtvigian Christianity. However, Bjørnson’s belief in this possibility slowly started to crack. Gradually, he became convinced that all Christianity, and not just Pietism, burdens man excessively, and transgresses the borders of life.90 To him, becoming a Christian

Letter from Bjørnson to Rudolf Schmidt, February 20, 1866, in Brev—Grotid, vol. 2, p. 184. 86 Beyer, Søren Kierkegaard og Norge, p. 202. 87 Amdam, Bjørnson og kristendommen 1832–1875. Selvhevdelse og selverkjennelse, p. 197. 88 Ibid., p. 198. 89 Erichsen, “Søren Kierkegaards betydning for norsk åndsliv,” p. 399. 90 Ibid., p. 399. 85

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represents an “either/or” in the Kierkegaardian sense of the concept: either a lifeloathing Christianity or human life. Bjørnson chose the latter. An important source of this religious crisis in Bjørnson’s life was Georg Brandes.91 Bjørnson attained his most important impression of Brandes in the latter’s 1877 book on precisely Kierkegaard. This was a book which Bjørnson read with great interest. That same year, in a letter to the renowned Norwegian historian J.E. Sars (1835–1917), Bjørnson elaborates on the impression which Brandes’ book made on him: Brandes’ Søren Kierkegaard is the best thing he has written. It is a book with application, and often virtuosity, and it appears that Pietism has been eradicated in Kierkegaard; he has effected this himself by, in a brutally honest manner, pushing all its raisons d’être to extremes, and Brandes, by pointing this out, accomplishes a deed, which almost equals Kierkegaard’s own in terms of significance for his contemporaries.92

In Brandes, Bjørnson finds an affirmation of his own standpoint, that is, that Kierkegaard and Pietism are interconnected, and that the life-loathing Pietism has been dissolved through Kierkegaard, inasmuch as Kierkegaard has driven Pietism ad absurdum and thereby proven its impossibility. To begin with, however, Bjørnson insists that Kierkegaard only proved the impossibility of Pietism, and not, as Brandes writes, Christianity in its entirety. Bjørnson writes a letter on this subject on August 10, 1877 to his Norwegian friend Dikka Møller (1838–1912): You must read Søren Kierkegaard by Brandes. It is a book of eternal merit. It has shown that S.K.’s life and writings do not diverge, and accurately illustrates that Pietism is an impossibility, inasmuch as it causes insanity….Brandes believes that this is now proven for all of Christianity, but do overlook this error on his part. If you can do so, it is a useful book for all with pietistic proclivities—which you indeed have!93

Bjørnson’s reservations vis-à-vis Brandes’ book diminished slowly during the following couple of years. On March 7, 1878, he thus wrote to the Danish politician and editor Sofus Høgsbro (1822–1902): “his Kierkegaard (again not quite) is something we have never quite seen before.”94 Just one month later, he wrote directly to Brandes: “What is the subject of your new book? The one on Kierkegaard was excellent.”95 And finally, without any reservations, Bjørnson wrote to his Danish publisher Frederik Hegel (1817–87) on January 11, 1879: “I consider his [sc. Brandes’] Søren Kierkegaard to be his best book.”96 Also here, Bjørnson appears to be convinced by Brandes’ exposition of Kierkegaard’s honesty and congruity: that Beyer, Søren Kierkegaard og Norge, p. 204. Letter from Bjørnson to J.E. Sars, June 16, 1877, in Brev—Brytningsår, vol. 2, p. 180. 93 Letter to Dikka Møller, August 10, 1877, in Brev—Brytningsår, vol. 2, p. 185. 94 Letter from Bjørnson to Sofus Høgsbro, March 7, 1878, in Brev—Brytningsår, vol. 2, p. 238. 95 Letter from Bjørnson to Georg Brandes, April 4, 1878, in Brev—Brytningsår, vol. 2, p. 245. 96 Letter from Bjørnson to Frederik V. Hegel, January 11, 1879, in Frederik V. Hegel— breve til og fra ham, ed. by L.C. Nielsen, Fr. Bagges Kgl. Hof-Bogtrykkeri 1909, p. 101. 91 92

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a logical consequence of Kierkegaard’s paradoxical religious views on Christianity will have to result in self-contradiction. This also ends up being Bjørnson’s reading, and he realizes that even his Grundtvigian friends succumb to the life-loathing thoughts of Christianity. Nielsen, therefore, is included in this “black choir” with the other Grundtvigians.97 In 1883, Bjørnson writes the play Over Ævne, which aims at illustrating the point made by Brandes in his book Søren Kierkegaard: namely, that Christianity leads to a sphere without borders, and that its stipulations are above and beyond what human beings can fathom. In this connection one could say that Bjørnson—through Brandes—has moved closer to Kierkegaard. As a minimum, he acknowledges Brandes’ interpretation of Kierkegaard’s life as proof of the inhumanity and impossibility inherent in Christianity. It can of course be debated whether Brandes’ interpretation of Kierkegaard is correct, and whether Bjørnson was therefore inherently influenced by Kierkegaard or not.98 The development in Bjørnson’s outlook on Christianity, and in this connection the relationship to Kierkegaard, can be summarized by taking a look at a similar development which takes places during his assessment of Henrik Ibsen’s Brand. In an 1866 letter to Clemens Petersen, he bemoans Brand, attacking it as being too Kierkegaardian. “The truths come a-jumping, shrieking, making noises, just like Søren,”99 he writes, and as a result, “we must defend ourselves the best we know how against the confusion, the abstraction, which discards human life; I loathe this book!”100 Bjørnson condemns all the thought experiments in Brand that, according to him, cause confusion and split humanity in lieu of aiming at a reconciliation with life.101 A few years later, he even identifies the loathed Brand with Kierkegaard: “Brand is Kierkegaard, etc.”102 But in 1878, having read Brandes’ book on Kierkegaard, he writes to the former: “I now have a better understanding of ‘Brand.’ I did not appreciate it earlier, and you shall see that that book once again will show its importance.”103 Bjørnson now understood the consistency of this particular outlook on Christianity propagated by Kierkegaard and Ibsen, and to a certain extent he is in accord with them.104 He understands the “either/or” which they put forward, but he is compelled to reject Christianity and unconditionally choose humanity. From that point forward, Bjørnson’s authorship became an unequivocal defense of the

Erichsen, “Søren Kierkegaards betydning for norsk åndsliv,” p. 400; Amdam, Bjørnson og kristenarven 1875–1910. Selvhevdelse og selverkjennelse, p. 30; Beyer, Søren Kierkegaard og Norge, p. 205. 98 Collin, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson—hans Barndom og Ungdom, vol. 2, p. 340. 99 Letter from Bjørnson to Clemens Petersen, March 30, 1866, in Brev—Grotid, vol. 2, p. 189. 100 Ibid., p. 190. 101 Beyer, Søren Kierkegaard og Norge, p. 190. 102 Letter from Bjørnson to Gotfred and Margrete Rode, May 17, 1871, in Brev— Brytningsår, vol. 1, p. 16. 103 Letter from Bjørnson to Georg Brandes, April 29, 1878, in Brev—Brytningsår, vol. 2, p. 259. 104 Erichsen, “Søren Kierkegaards betydning for norsk åndsliv,” p. 401. 97

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individual rights of human life, independent of religion, and he instead journeyed toward a Darwinist point of departure.105 V. On Being in Truth During his thorough reading of Kierkegaard in 1854, Bjørnson found inspiration for his critiques and incitement for his psychological interest. In this connection, it is probable that Bjørnson was also stimulated by Kierkegaard in the realm of ethics. Bjørnson was able to transfer the structural skeleton of the aesthetic thoughts that he learned by reading Kierkegaard to the ethical development. In this context it is important to understand that the distinction between spontaneity and consciousness can be deployed not only in an understanding of the artistic development but also in regard to the personal development of the individual. Furthermore, it is not only a question of an artistic “calling,” but that each individual has a “calling,” which he or she has a personal responsibility to realize. These thoughts led Bjørnson to remain critical vis-à-vis an aesthetic and superficial lifestyle, seen in the perspective of underscoring a more serious and strong-willed ethical attitude toward life. To Bjørnson, “being in truth” becomes important. In this section, we will examine this ethical inspiration more closely, and we will adhere to the thesis that this inspiration has been prevalent throughout both Bjørnson’s youth and adult years. We see the first sign of ethical inspiration from Kierkegaard in a series of articles which Bjørnson wrote in Morgenbladet entitled “Christiania and the Students.” The first of these articles was published on December 11, 1855, and the subject is the reputation which Kristiania had gained for being a dull town. Bjørnson laments this but continues to appeal to each and every individual to take responsibility. He reproaches his fellow citizens for viewing boredom as an accepted maxim, rendering all change impossible. He writes: When you must act together with others, you often commit the abstruse error of seeing yourself and everyone else as a whole, instead of splitting “everyone else” into individual factors. Thus, in events, you do not view the sum of the miniscule efforts of the multitude as your own, but as yours and “all the others,” i.e., two factors, one very miniscule, and one very large.106

Bjørnson, who otherwise is known to be in favor of society like few others, here attacks the masses. He points to the danger of using collective expressions such as “everyone else.” By doing so, the individual disclaims his or her own responsibility. “Everyone else” becomes an independently acting individual, and one forgets that this collective term actually covers the actions of a number of individuals, who each bear responsibility for the actions carried out in the name of “everyone else.” According to Bjørnson, the concept “everyone else” must be dissolved into its individual factors, and each individual must assume responsibility. Beyer, Søren Kierkegaard og Norge, p. 205. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, “Kristiania og Studenterne,” Morgenbladet, December 11, 1855, p. 1 (in Artikler og Taler, vol. 1, p. 97). 105 106

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Let us not forget that collective terms such as “society” and “the masses” generally do not carry a negative connotation with Bjørnson; yet we here see, as with Kierkegaard, a tendency to stress the importance of individual responsibility. Similarly, we see Bjørnson, like Kierkegaard, warn against the often illusory use of collective concepts.107 Bjørnson commences his series of articles at the end of 1855, shortly after the death of Kierkegaard. As we know, during the last year of his life, Kierkegaard initiated an unforgiving fight against the State Church in The Moment, and it is precisely in this fight that he castigates humanity for having accepted superficial values such as the masses, the state, and the church in place of the only existing truth, the individual. Throughout the year, newspapers and conversations reverberated with Kierkegaard’s condemnations. We know that Bjørnson was aware of Kierkegaard’s condemnatory statements. It is therefore safe to assume that Bjørnson’s statement on the responsibility of the individual, and on the stultifying and demoralizing aspect of the masses, is an echo of Kierkegaard’s The Moment. At an early stage in Bjørnson’s writings, we see that he juxtaposes an aesthetic and ethical lifestyle in a manner that resembles the way Kierkegaard had done earlier. During a stay in Rome, he writes the following to his friend Christian Hviid: “I miss many things in Rome; primarily, serious discourse. I do perceive that the others have tired of me; but I have also tired of them. There is an overflow of aesthetics and a paucity of ethics, to sum it up.”108 The aesthetic is associated with the superficial and “the others,” the masses, while the ethical is associated with the serious, deep standpoint of the individual. Back home, he writes in 1863 to Clemens Petersen about his Norwegian countrymen: People are veiled by an ineffable drowsiness. No individual person seems to be able to carry himself—it requires a storm, a vast, collective danger. I might fear it, but I do ask for it. In this way, there is a great desire for that which is not merely edible; there then also underlies a moral consideration, where there before was mere calculation; an element of responsibility may establish itself.109

The drowsiness of the people has become so vast that not even an individual, as in the case of Kierkegaard, can shake them out of their condition. Rather, in true Kierkegaardian spirit, a storm is required. A common danger must arouse the dosing, entertainment-driven masses; only an element of responsibility can awaken them. Finally, Bjørnson, in a letter written the following year to Clemens Petersen, writes of an internal split between, on the one hand, living an introverted, self-obsessed aesthetic life as a poet, and, on the other hand, having an extroverted need to be an acting individual in the world, concretely speaking: “As a poet, I cannot live, I cannot bear it. I must exercise my vocation, or else I will come to a standstill.”110

Erichsen, “Søren Kierkegaards betydning for norsk åndsliv,” p. 274. Letter from Bjørnson to Chr. Hviid, January 3, 1862, in Brev—Grotid, vol. 2, p. 6. 109 Letter from Bjørnson to Clemens Petersen, August 1, 1863, in Brev—Grotid, vol. 2, p. 98. 110 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 110. 107 108

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In other words, Bjørnson is a serious poet, who has qualms about the aesthetic.111 In the aforementioned attack on the aesthetic, self-obsessed Copenhageners, his ethical outlook is duly displayed. It is interesting to observe that Bjørnson, in this connection, criticizes Kierkegaard as being one of the instigators of this frivolous behavior in Copenhagen, although he at the same time has many characteristics in common with Kierkegaard, who precisely is vociferous in his criticism of excessive superficiality and aestheticism among his contemporaries. In For Idé og Virkelighed, Bjørnson accuses the editor of the Danish magazine Fædrelandet, Carl Ploug (1813–94), of not having a standpoint and sufficient conviction. Ploug became one with the Copenhageners criticized by both Bjørnson and Kierkegaard, that is, one with that Copenhagen…which has neither faith nor habit, and which, although it goes to church on special occasions, or out of curiosity or habit, lives only for pleasure; which, even when it works only anticipates more pleasure; the Copenhagen, which laughs heartily at “the Nordic” (that is, when it is not exactly fashionable), at the “Grundtvigian,” of matters serious or inconvenient, “and which no one can figure out”; the Copenhagen, which places any attempt at strong will or sacrifice under the comical, any idea not commonly thought under insanity; the Copenhagen, which is, in fact, capable of being moved by a great thought or emotion, but then—without exception—in the shape of fanaticism; under such thought or emotion, men then fall, like soldiers in a battle, but the next day, no one gives a damn, “as long as we have peace”; the Copenhagen, which “merely wants to be Danish or nothing,” but which is nourished by Paris and Hamburg, and ends up being “nothing”; the Copenhagen, that leads a life of coincidence, based on the latest news, the latest fashion, the latest play; it lives a good-natured life, until it suddenly turns gruesome and improvident, right up until old age and the grave.112

To add to this, Bjørnson accuses Ploug of having ridiculed all serious intellectuals in Copenhagen, including Kierkegaard: When Kierkegaard appeared, he [Ploug] lent him his magazine, and more; but let him go his way. When Rasmus Nielsen came, he lent them both his magazine; and he left it at that. Contemporary society, with its honor intact, would call this lack of ability to assume complete standpoints: “A need to be true.”113

So, according to Bjørnson, Ploug lacks seriousness and character, inasmuch as he has not been able to assume “complete standpoints.” But in the same article, Bjørnson paradoxically attacks such “complete standpoints”: The so-called “complete standpoints” are often theoretical and do not live up to reality; it does indeed look golden to assume these wondrous positions; it is flattering for both the imagination and consciousness, but only for a while, which is why I have named it: “aesthetic flattery”: There are heaps of this in the old intelligentsia’s religious preaching,

Amdam, Bjørnson og kristendommen 1832–1875. Selvhevdelse og selverkjennelse, p. 142; Amdam, Bjørnson og kristenarven 1875–1910. Selvhevdelse og selverkjennelse, p. 60. 112 Bjørnson, “Nogle Ord til Ungdommen,” pp. 224–5. 113 Ibid., p. 222. 111

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politics and civics, but one day, in unification with our people, we will, shamefully, strip off this masquerading disguise.114

However, some of Bjørnson’s readers did not understand the ambiguity in his relation to “the complete standpoints,” for which reason he in an article, later that same year, explains what he means: “With ‘complete standpoints,’ I do not mean our internal decision; this should, truth be told, be complete….by ‘complete standpoints’ I mean the position one assumes, when the decision must manifest itself as deed. At that point, one must accommodate oneself such that the numbers tally.”115 In other words, it is important to Bjørnson that the complete standpoints do not remain theoretical abstractions, but that they are carried out in reality. It is this drive which is absent in overly-aesthetic and self-indulgent Copenhagen. Characteristic of Bjørnson’s understanding of drive is that it includes reflection. As opposed to the disdained Copenhagen, which only acts upon habit or pleasure, a strong-willed personality will, according to Bjørnson, act precisely based on reflection, but in such a way that there is agreement between the complete internal conviction and the external act. There must be agreement between what one says and what one does. If not, everything ends in flattery. However, a year prior to this, Bjørnson does associate Kierkegaard with this flattery. He writes to Margrethe Rode: “Now listen to me seriously. In Denmark, you are definitely more infested with this, than are we. It is there, in matters religious, as well as political; Kierkegaard submits to it when he assumes his positions, his attitudes in the name of religion.”116 And in a letter to Rudolf Schmidt that same year, he writes: “Now, we all bear marks of where we are born; I see it with Kierkegaard, when he assumes Christian attitudes, and with R. Nielsen in the jovial playfulness through which his truths are offered, and it revolts me.”117 Also in Bjørnson’s critique of the over-aesthetic and self-indulgent Copenhagen (in the attack on Carl Ploug above), there are certain elements that could be interpreted as being aimed at Kierkegaard, for example, when Bjørnson condemns “the Copenhagen that laughs heartily…at the ‘Grundtvigian’” and “is capable of being moved by a great thought or emotion, but then—without exception—in the shape of fanaticism.”118 In this connection, however, the critique should rather be interpreted as a critique of the intellectuals who followed Kierkegaard in Copenhagen, who take on his standpoints, yet in an insincere manner. Kierkegaard’s drive is praised in the same context. Bjørnson undoubtedly has Kierkegaard in mind when he in the same breath condemns: “the Copenhagen, which places any attempt at strong will

Ibid., p. 230. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, “Ved Hr. Pastor Birkedals Redegørelse,” For Idé og Virkelighed, vol. 1, 1872, p. 465. 116 Letter from Bjørnson to Gotfred og Margrete Rode, December 17, 1871,” in Bjørnstjerne Bjørnsons brevveksling med danske 1854–1874, vol. 3, p. 165. 117 Letter from Bjørnson to Rudolf Schmidt, December 18, 1871, in Bjørnstjerne Bjørnsons brevveksling med danske 1854–1874, vol. 3, p. 168. 118 Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, “Nogle Ord til Ungdommen,” For Idé og Virkelighed, vol. 1, 1872, pp. 224–5. 114 115

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or sacrifice under the comical, any idea not commonly thought under insanity.”119 One of the things to which Bjørnson probably is referring here is Kierkegaard’s well-known battle with the satirical Danish magazine The Corsair. Through his life and personality, Kierkegaard showed a will and resolution, which, according to Bjørnson, was merely derided by the Copenhageners and categorized as insanity. To Bjørnson, Kierkegaard appears in this context as a personality who, as opposed to the Copenhageners, managed to turn his “complete standpoint” into deeds.120 To Bjørnson, as is the case for Kierkegaard, personality formation is based on an “either/or.” This implies a complete decision, which requires severing the ties to spontaneity and chance. Earlier we saw that Bjørnson was influenced by Kierkegaard’s thoughts on artistic metamorphosis. Bjørnson now seems to realize that a metamorphosis is also necessary at the personal level. In order to establish a true personality, one must work one’s way away from what is spontaneous and natural. Whereas artistic metamorphosis is contingent upon just reflection, the metamorphosis of the personality is also contingent upon will and resolution. Personality must be turned into personal property through decision.121 Bjørnson’s interest in ethics was coupled to his interest in psychology. Both interests were stimulated by Kierkegaard. The point at which we sense the clearest connection between the ethical and the psychological with Bjørnson is indeed also where the connection to Kierkegaard is at its clearest. Like Kierkegaard, Bjørnson seems to be of the view that it is the duty of every human being to have a “calling.” They both appear to be of the notion that it is the task of every human being to become conscious about this individual calling, and to realize it through deeds, in spite of the suffering this might entail. The immediate pursuit of pleasure, as practiced by the Copenhageners, must be sacrificed for a non-egocentric and considerate realization of the individual calling.122 The connection between the calling and a personal metamorphosis is the theme of several of Bjørnson’s early works, for example, Sigurd Slembe and Fiskerjenten.123 It should be pointed out that Bjørnson’s “either/or” and thoughts on the personal calling are not quite as individualistic as Kierkegaard’s. With Kierkegaard, there is a tendency to assume that the fundamental, religious calling, in its absolute sense, must be realized in spite of solidarity; the social element in fact acts like an obstacle for the development of the religious personality. Bjørnson cannot acknowledge any decision merely because it is complete.124 However, a basic tenet of Bjørnson’s personality requirements is individualism—each and every individual has a personal calling. In this area, Bjørnson is undoubtedly influenced by Kierkegaard, an influence which partly stems from Kierkegaard’s psychological views on artistic development, and partly from The Moment. However, it is also probable that Bjørnson has been Ibid. Keel, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson—En biografi 1880–1910, p. 90; Amdam, Bjørnson og kristenarven 1875–1910. Selvhevdelse og selverkjennelse, p. 96. 121 Erichsen, “Søren Kierkegaards betydning for norsk åndsliv,” p. 358. 122 Ibid., p. 360. 123 Ibid., pp. 358–60. 124 Ibid., p. 361. 119

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influenced by Judge William’s insistence on the importance of will and choice in the ethical metamorphosis. We also see the resemblance to Kierkegaard’s view on the necessity that each individual’s standpoint is binding. This is clear from a speech given by Bjørnson to the Norwegian students at the Students’ Association on October 31, 1877. Here he stresses the importance of “being in truth”: If I were a minister in our day and age, I would commence and end by saying: Faith is the most important, and in it is contained the greatest wisdom. But for each individual, the most important is to be in truth. If I were so certain that each of us were in truth, dared to cogitate, dared to speak his mind, then I would be certain that our society was healthy, and that we, with the passing of time, would also be led to faith. But precisely because something is concealed, we are deceived in the highest, deceived in our will, in openness and truth, and are already while young, corrupted where we are the purest.125

The expression “being in truth” also appears in Kierkegaard’s writings,126 and, like Kierkegaard, Bjørnson stipulates moral requirements for those who call themselves Christian. It has been conjectured that the reason for this is that Bjørnson at this point in time was in the middle of his religious emancipation battle, and hence critically disposed towards Christianity. 127 However, there is reason to believe that these Kierkegaardian ideas are not novel to Bjørnson, that they precede his particular critique, and that they are not revisited by him on this occasion out of mere convenience. Like Kierkegaard, Bjørnson stresses that the most important thing for each individual is “to be in truth.” The faith of the individual is—precisely in the spirit of Kierkegaard—the core of Christianity, and this faith cannot be institutionalized. Here we hear an echo from Bjørnson’s article “Christiania and the Students” from 1855. In other words, Bjørnson’s critique, which is contained in his speech to the student society, is not new. Just as in the 1855 article, the individual is placed above society in the speech to the student society. And it is stressed that the faith of the individual is in danger of being dissolved by society as an institution. The church, as a societal institution, does not represent the individual, but rather carries itself as if it were itself an individual. Bjørnson’s requirement of “being in truth” can therefore not be seen exclusively as a function of him being in the middle of a battle of religious emancipation, but must be seen as an expression of a basic moral attitude, which takes the individual as point of departure, and which can be traced back to 1855, when he was first influenced by Kierkegaard’s The Moment. This idea is supported by a letter, which Bjørnson writes to his good friend Clemens Petersen in 1857: “For friendship is the portal to truth….This concept is now the great bell, which hangs in my belfry and tolls both morning, midday, and evening. I trace everything back to 125 Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, “Om at være i Sandhed—Tale i Studentersamfundet, 31. Oktober, 1877,” Aftenposten, November 1, 1877, p. 2 and Dagbladet, November 1, 1877, p. 2 (in Artikler og Taler, vol. 1, p. 441). 126 SKS 7, 182 / CUP1, 199. 127 Beyer, Søren Kierkegaard og Norge, p. 206; Amdam, Bjørnson og kristenarven 1875–1910. Selvhevdelse og selverkjennelse, p. 29.

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that.”128 The being to which friendship is the portal is true being, and in this sense, Bjørnson, even at this early stage in his life, traces everything back to “being in truth.”129 Bjørnson’s criticism of the sanctimonious State Church does indeed appear prior to the battle for religious emancipation. During his Nielsen-inspired Grundtvigian period in 1872, he writes to Dikka Møller, “Entertaining lies as a state institution can never be Christian, never, never, never! And to a people, it is undignified, even if it were not Christian.”130 The previous year, he writes to Gotfred and Margrethe Rode on the theologians’ relationship with God: “that despicable relationship with an invisible being, which they must associate with by means of an institutionalized stepladder, as if he were on the second floor.”131 These very Kierkegaardian attacks on the State Church and the theologians, as we have already seen, stem from the fact that Bjørnson, during this period, was influenced by Rasmus Nielsen and other Kierkegaardian friends; yet Bjørnson’s own emancipation battle had still not begun. This gives us reason to believe that Bjørnson’s proclivity for Kierkegaardian ideas was present prior to the religious crisis, and originated in a sincere and heartfelt demand for “being in truth” and a disdain for anything mendacious. But once Bjørnson’s battle for religious emancipation finally picked up, and he seriously began attacking the church, it was an obvious matter for him to revisit The Moment and use Kierkegaard as a weapon in the battle. We find many similarities between Bjørnson and Kierkegaard during these years. Here we shall merely call attention to a few examples from the articles that veritably launch Bjørnson’s attack. First, Bjørnson, like Kierkegaard, agitates for a separation of church and state: “This is the curse of history with which we still are encumbered; that the church, for personal gain, has sold its calling of truth to the powers that be, or through narrowmindedness has betrayed it and driven the people to despair to such a degree that those who decry Christianity now have usurped the calling of the truth!”132 As a result of the union of church and state, the decriers of Christianity have taken over the church, which, in agreement with Kierkegaard, compels Bjørnson to write that Christianity has metamorphosed into a Christianity of habit: I know that many feel weak in the face of what happens at present in Norway, and find solace in the fact that the ties to Christianity have not been severed as completely, as has been the case in other countries. All of this means, however, that Christianity of habit is more widespread here than in other countries. But this, one opines, is better than outright infidelity. It can be better; it can also be worse. If Christianity of habit is the fruit Letter from Bjørnson to Clemens Petersen, July 25, 1857, in Brev—Grotid, vol. 1, p. 14. 129 Amdam, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson—kunstneren og samfunnsmennesket 1832–1880, pp. 447–9. 130 Letter from Bjørnson to Dikka Møller, August 8, 1872, in Brev—Brytningsår, vol. 1, p. LXI. 131 Letter from Bjørnson to Gotfred and Margrete Rode, May 17, 1871, in Brytningsår, vol. 1, p. 22. 132 Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, “Præsten og Pollitiken,” Oplandenes Avis, June 25, 1876, no. 52, p. 1 (in Artikler og Taler, vol. 1, pp. 431–2). 128

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of intellectual lethargy, but a decrier of spiritual awakening, the latter is undisputedly desirable.133

Kierkegaard similarly juxtaposes Christianity of habit with infidelity, and writes in a polemical manner that this may be desirable. Like Kierkegaard, Bjørnson becomes a spokesperson for the notion that true Christian preaching should involve struggle and suffering, not security and material pursuit: Should his [God’s] preachers not be more likely to meet him there, where martyrs exist, slandered, persecuted, unappreciated, that is, in the vanguard, than in yonder place, where men of fear, men of materialism, along with many honest and competent men have succumbed to the safe shelters of that which has already been obtained? Is it not, where most danger exists, that there is the greatest gain to be had when preaching? For what is gained, is gained for all.134

Since the conditions in the State Church are as described, Bjørnson, in agreement with Kierkegaard, must conclude: “we suffer from self-deception, we suffer from copious lies, which we do not see, and from copious lies, which we see, but do not know how to negotiate.”135 So goes Bjørnson’s official Kierkegaard-inspired attack on official Christianity. In a letter to Dikka Møller, dating from the same period, Bjørnson sums up his critique as follows: How far has Christianity come, when it has not done the deed it had set out to do? What is the society in which we stand? Lies to ourselves, lies to our nearest and dearest, lies to the domestics, who we exploit without just remuneration, lies to friends and foes alike; in all instances, the silent lies abound.—No, this calls for an upheaval; it begins, tangibly, nay not only in you, but in those who share the responsibility! Christianity is either Søren Kierkegaard’s, i.e., an impossibility, insanity, or it is the regenerator of the world, the eternal youthful regenerator, which means then that one cannot halt at repentance—nay, go forth in the name of the Lord, forth against the sins of society, which contaminate our air, and then the battle shall be brought to all.136

This is almost as if taken straight from The Moment, but it is noteworthy that Bjørnson in his intensely Kierkegaardian attack on Christianity implicates Kierkegaard as the negative possibility on the one side of a rhetorically constructed “either/or” line of reasoning. On the other side is the positive possibility, but it is exactly as Kierkegaardian in its wording as the remainder of Bjørnson’s criticism of Christianity. This is testimony to the strong influence that Kierkegaard exerted on Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, “Lidt om vor nuværende Religionsforkyndelse og dens Forhold til Folkearbeidet,” Oplandenes Avis, June 7, 1876, no. 46, p. 1 (in Artikler og Taler, vol. 1, p. 429). 134 Bjørnson, “Lidt om vor nuværende Religionsforkyndelse og dens Forhold til Folkearbeidet,” p. 1 (in Artikler og Taler, vol. 1, p. 427). 135 Bjørnson, “Om at være i Sandhed,” Aftenposten, November 1, 1877, p. 2 and Dagbladet, November 1, 1877, p. 1 (in Artikler og Taler, vol. 1, p. 439). 136 Letter from Bjørnson to Dikka Møller, June 15, 1877, in Brev—Brytningsår, vol. 2, p. 179. 133

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Bjørnson in this connection. Bjørnson might have been repelled by certain aspects of Kierkegaard’s understanding of Christianity, but even when rejecting Kierkegaard, he employs Kierkegaardian rhetoric and thought structures. The following year, Bjørnson draws the consequences of his reasoning, which has metamorphosed into a “neither/nor.” Christianity is neither Kierkegaard’s nor “the eternal youthful regenerator.”137 Bjørnson has finished with Christianity and, for that matter, with everything that goes under the name of revealed religion. He writes the following to Dikka Møller on June 18, 1878: “But do not talk to me anymore about ‘the revealed religion.’ I have finished with all that, and am happy, my soul is again healthy. Science has made it crystal-clear that all knowledge ‘revealed’ to the Jews had been on earth for more than one thousand years before they, the Jews, appropriated this knowledge….”138 The purpose of this section has been to show that Bjørnson has a conscientious and morally driven disposition, for which reason he was particularly susceptible to the ethical aspect in Kierkegaard’s existential philosophy. He was under this influence from 1854 and onward, at which time he conscientiously studied Kierkegaard’s works; this influence was consolidated after reading The Moment in 1855. Hence, we continue to see traces of Kierkegaard’s distinction between an aesthetic and ethical life perspective. There is one element which Bjørnson repeatedly uses to underscore his own standpoint, the ethical. We see traces of Kierkegaard in Bjørnson’s sustained criticism of a superficial and materialistic aesthetic lifestyle. Similarly, Kierkegaard made a deep impression on Bjørnson’s understanding of the fact that ethical development is based on will and determination, and that each and every individual has a personal calling, the realization of which is the individual’s sole responsibility. In this process of development, the individual must jettison aesthetic spontaneity and chance. In his genuine ethical disposition, Bjørnson was also susceptible to Kierkegaard’s demand of “being in truth.” In addition, there is a deep-felt disdain for all hypocrisy and superficiality, which makes him argue in favor of “complete standpoints” along the lines of Kierkegaard. Our convictions must be converted to deeds. In Bjørnson’s battle with official Christianity, the clincher is once again this demand for “being in truth.” What Bjørnson attacks, is the—in principle—dishonest and superficial way of practicing Christianity, rather than the way by which the church actually deals with theological questions. Bjørnson is a man of ethics; he is not religious, and in that respect, one may say that Bjørnson and Kierkegaard stand miles apart. The most correct thing to say is probably that Bjørnson, in this connection, availed himself of Kierkegaard in his own unique way and to his own unique end. VI. Conclusion The thesis in this article has been that Kierkegaard’s influence on Bjørnson is manifest throughout both Bjørnson’s youth and adult years. The thesis attempts to Ibid. Letter from Bjørnson to Dikka Møller, June 18, 1878, in Brev—Brytningsår, vol. 2, p. 279.

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counter a tendency within Bjørnson research to deny that Kierkegaard in any way influenced Bjørnson positively during the latter’s years of youth. This tendency is based on the fact that Bjørnson mentioned Kierkegaard almost exclusively in a negative context during the years up until 1875. However, the significance of these negative statements vis-à-vis Kierkegaard is open to interpretation. For instance, we see that the statements are often not aimed directly at Kierkegaard, but rather toward the way posterity has co-opted the Kierkegaardian philosophy. In this connection, Bjørnson often points out that posterity does not assimilate the binding element of Kierkegaard’s thoughts in an honest manner. Furthermore, we see that Bjørnson may have had his reasons to publicly distance himself from Kierkegaard. In this respect, his affiliation with the Grundtvigian circles probably played a role; and the self-conscious Bjørnson might generally have wished to eradicate the most obvious traces of influence from other great intellectuals. Finally, we should not overlook the fact that Bjørnson—even during his years of youth—actually mentions Kierkegaard favorably. If we delve deeper into passages by Bjørnson, where he more indirectly affiliates himself with thoughts prevalent in Kierkegaard’s authorship, we find evidence to support the thesis that Bjørnson, even during his years of youth, was under the influence of Kierkegaard. In Bjørnson’s earliest drama critiques from 1855, for instance, we encounter an almost verbatim similarity between Kierkegaard’s analyses of a young actress’ artistic development in “The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress” and Bjørnson’s analyses of the development of the young Norwegian actress Laura Svendsen. Also in relation to Bjørnson’s critique of Scribe we find similarities with Kierkegaard, which more than merely suggest that Bjørnson also here found inspiration in Kierkegaard for his writing of dramatic criticism. Furthermore, this may explain the puzzling fact that Bjørnson, at an age of just 22, was capable of carrying out such mature and deep analyses, as is the case in these articles. Another indicator that Bjørnson was influenced by Kierkegaard both during his youth and adult years is to be found in Bjørnson’s style of writing. Based on his style, one may assert that Bjørnson adopts Kierkegaard’s experimental style, just as one finds Kierkegaardian linguistic expressions and turns-of-phrase used for polemic intent, including the ironic observations of the superficial, aesthetic modern society. Even within religion, where Kierkegaard’s influence on the young Bjørnson is traditionally denied the most categorically, one can find a connection. It is likely that Kierkegaard’s thoughts were assimilated by Bjørnson during his youthful years, but in times of crisis, yet in such a way that Bjørnson perceived Kierkegaard’s existential philosophy to be more relevant than any other school of thought during Bjørnson’s time. Therefore, one may postulate that Kierkegaard may have played a greater role in Bjørnson’s personal life than, for example, Grundtvig. Furthermore, Bjørnson had Kierkegaardian friends, who clearly influenced him in a Kierkegaardian direction during his youthful years, concurrently with his declared Grundtvig period; the most important of these were Clemens Petersen and Rasmus Nielsen. However, Bjørnson finds the strictness implicit in Kierkegaard’s Christian preaching difficult, which, according to Bjørnson, discards humanity. In his communication with Brandes, however, he grants the consistency of Kierkegaard’s thoughts, and under the influence of Brandes, Bjørnson approximates the standpoint

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that Kierkegaard through his life and authorship proved, namely, that Christianity is an impossibility. Subsequently, Bjørnson dismisses Christianity, and chooses to believe in the value of human life for its own sake, and this view ends up characterizing the remainder of his adult years. Perhaps this break with religion was lying like a seed, germinating throughout Bjørnson’s life; it may be that he was never drawn to things religious. However, he was undoubtedly drawn to things ethical, and in this connection he seems to be responsive to the moral appeal which is embedded in Kierkegaard’s universe of thought. It may be debated whether Bjørnson deploys this ethical knowledge in accordance with Kierkegaard’s intentions, but in insisting on “remaining in truth,” Bjørnson seems to be receptive to the indisputable demand for authenticity which pervades Kierkegaard’s texts. It is highly probable that it is this demand that was present in both the younger Bjørnson’s attack on the overly aesthetic-minded attitude of the Copenhageners of the times, as well as in the mature Bjørnson’s attack on sanctimonious, official Christianity. It is also highly likely that it is this demand which propels Bjørnson—in the spirit of Kierkegaard—to consistently point out that a “call” is the personal responsibility of each and every individual.

Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Bjørnson’s Corpus “De norske Skuespillerinder,” Morgenbladet, March 25, 1854, p. 1 (in Artikler og Taler, vols. 1–2, ed. by Christen Christian Dreyer Collin and Hans Thure Smith Eitrem, vols. 1–2, Kristiania: Gyldendal 1912, vol. 1, p. 63–8, see p. 63; p. 65; p. 67). “Kristiania Theater,” Aftenbladet, February 1, 1855, pp. 1–2 (in Artikler og Taler, vols. 1–2, ed. by Christen Christian Dreyer Collin and Hans Thure Smith Eitrem, vols. 1–2, Kristiania: Gyldendal 1912, vol. 1, pp. 89–90, see p. 90). “Christiania Theater—Romeo og Julie,” Morgenbladet, December 2, 1855, p. 1 (in Artikler og Taler, vols. 1–2, ed. by Christen Christian Dreyer Collin and Hans Thure Smith Eitrem, vols. 1–2, Kristiania: Gyldendal 1912, vol. 1, pp. 86–8, see p. 87). “Christiania Theater—Scribe og de nyere franske Teaterforfattere—‘Hjerte og Medgift,’ ” Morgenbladet, December 9, 1855, pp. 1–2 (in Artikler og Taler, vols. 1–2, ed. by Christen Christian Dreyer Collin and Hans Thure Smith Eitrem, vols. 1–2, Kristiania: Gyldendal 1912 vol. 1, pp. 91–5, see p. 94). “Kristiania og Studenterne,” Morgenbladet, December 11, 1855, p. 1 (in Artikler og Taler, vols. 1–2, ed. by Christen Christian Dreyer Collin and Hans Thure Smith Eitrem, vols. 1–2, Kristiania: Gyldendal 1912, vol. 1, pp. 96–102, see p. 99). “Nogle Ord til Ungdommen,” For Idé og Virkelighed, vol. 1, 1872, pp. 217–43, see p. 217; p. 222; pp. 224–5; p. 230; p. 233. “Ved Hr. Pastor Birkedals Redegørelse,” For Idé og Virkelighed, vol. 1, 1872, pp. 465–7, see p. 465. “Lidt om vor nuværende Religionsforkyndelse og dens Forhold til Folkearbeidet,” Oplandenes Avis, May 24, 1876, no. 42, p. 1 (in Artikler og Taler, vols. 1–2, ed. by Christen Christian Dreyer Collin and Hans Thure Smith Eitrem, vols. 1–2, Kristiania: Gyldendal 1912, vol. 1, pp. 418–31, see p. 419; p. 427; p. 428, note; p. 429). “Præsten og Politiken,” Oplandenes Avis, June 25, 1876, no. 52, p. 1 (in Artikler og Taler, vols. 1–2, ed. by Christen Christian Dreyer Collin and Hans Thure Smith Eitrem, vols. 1–2, Kristiania: Gyldendal 1912, vol. 1, pp. 431–2). “Om at være i Sandhed—Tale i Studentersamfundet, 31. Oktober, 1877” in Aftenposten, November 1, 1877, pp. 1–2 and Dagbladet, November 1, 1877, pp. 1–2 (in Artikler og Taler, vols. 1–2, ed. by Christen Christian Dreyer Collin and Hans Thure Smith Eitrem, vols. 1–2, Kristiania: Gyldendal 1912, vol. 1, pp. 438–51, see p. 439; p. 441).

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“Den danske Inkvisition,” Dansk Folketidende, December 6, 1878, pp. 2–3 (in Artikler og Taler, vols. 1–2, ed. by Christen Christian Dreyer Collin and Hans Thure Smith Eitrem, vols. 1–2, Kristiania: Gyldendal 1912, vol. 1, pp. 463–5, see p. 464). “At være tro,” Dagbladet, no. 13, January 16, 1880 (in Artikler og Taler, vols. 1–2, ed. by Christen Christian Dreyer Collin and Hans Thure Smith Eitrem, vols. 1–2, Kristiania: Gyldendal 1912, vol. 1, pp. 492–3). “En Tale, som burde være holdt den 20. Marts,” Verdens Gang, May 28, 1898, p. 1 (in Artikler og Taler, vols. 1–2, ed. by Christen Christian Dreyer Collin and Hans Thure Smith Eitrem, vols. 1–2, Kristiania: Gyldendal 1912, vol. 2, p. 387). “Slettensagen,” Verdens Gang, August 12, 1900 (in Artikler og Taler, vols. 1–2, ed. by Christen Christian Dreyer Collin and Hans Thure Smith Eitrem, vols. 1–2, Kristiania: Gyldendal 1912, vol. 2, p. 430.) “Letter from Bjørnson to Frederik V. Hegel, January 11, 1879,” in Frederik V. Hegel—Breve til ham og fra ham, ed. by L.C. Nielsen, Copenhagen: Fr. Bagges Kgl. Hof-Bogtrykkeri 1909, p. 101. Brev—Grotid, vols. 1–2, ed. by Halvdan Koht, Kristiania: Gyldendal 1912, vol. 1, pp. 4–5 (letter to Paul Botten-Hansen, March 13, 1857); vol. 1, p. 14 (letter to Clemens Petersen, July 25, 1857); vol. 1, p. 257 (letter to Ditmar Meidell, Summer 1861); vol. 1, p. 267 (letter to Chr. Hviid, June 8, 1861); vol. 1, p. 306 (letter to Clemens Petersen, September 15, 1861); vol. 2, p. 6 (letter to Chr. Hviid, January 3, 1862); vol. 2, p. 98 (letter to Clemens Petersen, August 1, 1863); vol. 2, p. 110 (letter to Clemens Petersen, January 16, 1864); vol. 2, p. 184 (letter to Rudolf Schmidt, February 20, 1866); vol. 2, pp. 189–93, see pp. 189–90 (letter to Clemens Petersen, March 30, 1866); vol. 2, p. 193 (letter to Henrik Ibsen, May 12, 1866); vol. 2, p. 198 (letter to Henrik Ibsen, July 11, 1866); vol. 2, p. 242 (letter to Hilmar Finsen, November 11, 1867); vol. 2, p. 367 (letter to Rudolf Schmidt, October 28, 1870). Samlede digter-verker, vols. 1–9, ed. by Francis Bull, Copenhagen 1919, vol. 1, pp. 153–241 (Synnøve Solbakken); vol. 1, pp. 333–433 (Arne); vol. 2, pp. 71–222 (Sigurd Slembe); vol. 2, pp. 223–317 (Maria Stuart i Skotland); vol. 2, pp. 317–350 (De Nygifte); vol. 2, pp. 375–501 (Fiskerjenten); vol. 5, pp. 107–52 (Over ævne, første stykke). Brev—Brytningsår, vols. 1–2, ed. by Halvdan Koht, Kristiania: Gyldendal 1921, vol. 1, p. LXI (letter to Dikka Møller, August 8, 1872); vol. 1, pp. 16–25, p. 16, p. 22 (letter to Gotfred and Margrete Rode, May 17, 1871); vol. 1, p. 43 (letter to Margrete Rode, October 26, 1871); vol. 2, p. 179 (letter to Dikka Møller, June 15, 1877); vol. 2, p. 180 (letter to J.E. Sars, 16. June, 1877); vol. 2, p. 185 (letter to Dikka Møller, August 10, 1877); vol. 2, p. 238 (letter to Sofus Høgsbro, March 7, 1878); vol. 2, p. 245 (letter to Georg Brandes, April 4, 1878); vol. 2, p. 259 (letter to Georg Brandes, April 29, 1878); vol. 2, p. 279 (letter to Dikka Møller, June 18, 1878). Bjørnstjerne Bjørnsons brevveksling med danske 1875–1910, vol. 1–3, ed. by Øyvind Anker, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1953, vol. 2, p. 326 (letter to C. Hostrup, May 20, 1888).

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Bjørnstjerne Bjørnsons brevveksling med danske 1854–1874, vols. 1–3, ed. by Øyvind Anker, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1970–74, vol. 2, p. 153 (letter to Magdalene Thoresen, August 24, 1867); vol. 3, p. 6 (letter to Erik Bøgh, May 7, 1870); vol. 3, p. 165 (letter to Gotfred og Margrete Rode, December 17, 1871); vol. 3, p. 168 (letter to Rudolf Schmidt, December 18, 1871); vol. 3, p. 236 (letter to Rudolf Schmidt, June 13, 1872); vol. 3, p. 282 (letter to Fr. Jungersen, January 13, 1874). II. Sources of Bjørnson’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Bøgh, Erik, Søren Kierkegaard og St. Sørens-Dyrkelsen, Feuilletoner, Copenhagen: Th. Gandrup 1870. Brandes, Georg, Søren Kierkegaard. En kritisk Fremstilling i Grundrids, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1877. Bruun, Christopher, Folkelige Grundtanker, 2nd revised ed., Hamar: O. Arvesens Bogtrykkeri 1878, see pp. 118–40; pp. 219–47. Heuch, J.C., Dr. Georg Brandes’ Polemik mod Kristendommen, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1877. Jungersen, Frederik, Dansk Protestantisme ved S. Kierkegaard, N.F.S. Grundtvig og R. Nielsen. Ti Foredrag, Copenhagen: Karl Schønbergs Forlag 1873 Monod, Adolph, Apostlen Paulus. Fem Taler, Bergen: C. Floors Forlag 1855. Monrad, Marcus Jacob, “Mindetale over Kierkegaard,” Illustreret Nyhedsblad, no. 4. 1856, p. 1. — “Brock og Kierkegaard,” Illustreret Nyhedsblad, no. 50, 1856, pp. 2–4. Nielsen, Rasmus, Magister S. Kierkegaards Johannes Climacus, og Dr. H. Martensens Christelige Dogmatik. En undersøgende Anmeldelse, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1849. — “Om S. Kierkegaards mentale Tilstand,” Nordisk Universitets-Tidsskrift, vol. 4, no. 1, 1858, pp. 1–29. — Paa Kierkegaardske Stadier, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1860. — “Karakter og Villie,” in For Idé og Virkelighed, vol. 1, 1872, pp. 489–517, p. 505. Thue, Henning Junghans, Læsebog i Modersmålet for Norske og Danske, Kristiania: N. Wulfsberg 1846, see pp. 486–90. III. Secondary Literature on Bjørnson’s Relation to Kierkegaard Amdam, Per, Bjørnson og kristendommen 1832–1875. Selvhevdelse og selverkjennelse, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget 1969, p. 46; pp. 67–8; p. 84; pp. 98–101; p. 128; pp. 134–6; p. 140; p. 142; p. 144; p. 152; p. 184; pp. 197–9; p. 205; pp. 216–17; p. 226; p. 230; p. 243; pp. 248–9; p. 300; pp. 305–6. — Bjørnson og kristenarven 1875–1910. Selvhevdelse og selverkjennelse, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget 1977, pp. 29–30; p. 31; pp. 34–5; p. 60; p. 96; p. 166; p. 198; pp. 202–4; p. 210; p. 212; p. 232.

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— Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson—kunstneren og samfunnsmennesket 1832–1880, Oslo: Gyldendal 1993, p. 65; p. 120; p. 129; p. 133; p. 241; p. 244; p. 251; p. 276; pp. 279–80; p. 314; p. 318; p. 333; p. 379; p. 404; pp. 447–9. Beyer, Harald, Søren Kierkegaard og Norge, Kristiania: Aschehoug 1924, pp. 190–210. Brandes, Georg, Samlede Skrifter, vols. 1–18, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1900, vol. 3, pp. 374–6. Collin, Christen, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson—hans Barndom og Ungdom, vols. 1–2, Kristiania: Aschehoug 1923, vol. 1: p. 112; p. 115; pp. 150–4; vol. 2: pp. 338–44. Erichsen, Valborg, “Bjørnson og jomfru Svendsen,” in Til Gerhard Gran fra 9. Dec.1916 fra venner og elever, Kristiania: Aschehoug 1916, pp. 257–67. — “Søren Kierkegaards betydning for norsk åndsliv,” in Edda. Nordisk tidsskrift for litteraturforskning, vol. 19, 1923, pp. 209–429, see pp. 270–5; pp. 356–63; pp. 395–402. Hjorth, Hjalmar Boyesen, Essays on Scandinavian Literature, Boston: IndyPublish. com 2007, pp. 1–52; p. 22 Johansen, Dot Strand and Møller, Peter Ulf, “Tolstoj, Bjørnson, Hansen. Træk af det russisk-skandinaviske litterære samkvem,” Fund og Forskning i Det kongelige Biblioteks Samlinger, vol. 23, 1977–78, pp. 151–68. Keel, Aldo, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson—En biografi 1880–1910, Oslo: Gyldendal 1999, p. 90; p. 129; p. 158; p. 403; p. 574. Lønning, Per, “Søren Kierkegaard på Bjørnson-festival,” Kirke og Kultur, vol. 101, 1996, pp. 299–312.

Henrik Ibsen: The Conflict between the Aesthetic and the Ethical Eivind Tjønneland

Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) made the claim that he was very little influenced by Kierkegaard; for example, he says in a letter to his publisher that he “has only read little and understood even less” of Kierkegaard.1 Ibsen also made statements about his relationship to Kierkegaard in a few other connections. Ibsen scholars generally agree that Ibsen’s own descriptions of his debt to Kierkegaard are unreliable. Ibsen seldom admitted to any influences, and he was clearly annoyed when the critics noted in his works similarities to Kierkegaard or other renowned authors. The influence of Kierkegaard on Ibsen’s dramatic authorship can be documented throughout the 50 years of Ibsen’s career as a writer and even further back to the early poems of the Grimstad period. Above all, Ibsen was influenced by the aesthetic mode of life depicted by Kierkegaard. Ibsen’s early poetics of recollection has a close affinity to Kierkegaard’s aesthetic stage of life. The melancholy state of mind experienced when recollecting represents a basis for poetry for Ibsen as well as for Kierkegaard. Ibsen scholarship is in agreement about the fact that the influence is best seen in the dramas from the 1860s, Love’s Comedy, Brand and Peer Gynt. Thereafter, it is more difficult to find convincing traces of Ibsen’s reading of Kierkegaard. The later plays from A Doll’s House to When We Dead Awaken will therefore be treated in a more cursory fashion. From Ibsen’s private letters his struggle with the aesthetic mode of life in Kierkegaard’s sense becomes manifest. In a letter from 1865 to the famous Norwegian author Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (1832–1910) he wrote: “I have expelled the aesthetic from myself as it earlier had power over me, isolated and with a demand to be valid in its own right. Aesthetics in this sense is now in my view as large a curse for poetry, as theology is for religion.”2 Ibsen seems to have a similar analysis of the aesthetic as Judge William in Either/Or, Part Two, when he says that it had power over him and that it had to be expelled. He agrees with William in pointing out the lack of freedom in the aesthetic realm. Ibsen also gives a concrete example of what he has expelled: “Once, Henrik Ibsen, letter to Frederik Hegel, March 8, 1867, in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vols. 1–23, ed. by Francis Bull, Halvdan Koht, and Didrik Arup Seip, Oslo: Gyldendal 1928–57, vol. 16, p. 179. 2 Ibid., vol. 16, p. 111 (my translation). 1

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when I was in Copenhagen, a local aesthete said: ‘Christ is really the most interesting phenomenon in world history,’—the aesthete enjoyed him as the sybarite enjoys the sight of oysters. I have always been too strong to become such an animal made of cartilage.”3 This opposition between Christ and world history reminds one strongly of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. But Kierkegaard’s point is of course that Christ should not be conceived aesthetically or judged as more or less “interesting.” When Ibsen makes the comparison of the aesthetic and an animal made of cartilage, it reminds one of William’s comparison of the aesthetic with a jellyfish: There is a creature about which I fall into reverie rather often—it is the jellyfish. Have you noticed how this gelatinous mass can flatten itself into a plate and then slowly sink, then rise, so still and firm that one would think one could step on it. Now it notices its prey approaching; then it funnels into itself, becomes a pouch, and sinks with prodigious speed, deeper and deeper, with this speed snatching in its prey—not into its pouch, for it does not have a pouch, but into itself, for it is itself a pouch and nothing else. It is so able to contract itself that one cannot imagine how it could possibly extend itself. It is just about the same with you, and you must forgive me that I have not had a more beautiful creature with which to compare you….4

The jellyfish is not an animal made of cartilage, but the associations lead in the same direction as the picture used in Ibsen’s letter. Ibsen’s analogy of the enjoyment of oysters also strengthens the connection to Kierkegaard’s metaphor. We will contend that such similarities of detail are more interesting than the general and often imprecise likenesses that scholars claim to find between Ibsen and Kierkegaard. I. The Alleged and Concrete Kierkegaard Influence in Ibsen’s First Play Catiline (1850) Many scholars have observed a possible influence from Kierkegaard on Ibsen’s first play. But these alleged influences are not always precisely documented. We will use this play to demonstrate the critical method which will be followed throughout this article. Many earlier hypotheses by Ibsen or Kierkegaard scholars about alleged similarities between the two are too loose or superficial to convince us of any actual influence. Why postulate influence from Kierkegaard when the same ideas, metaphors, themes, or words are used by a dozen other authors? Here one should remind oneself that similarity is not a proof of influence. It is important to ask the critical question: could Ibsen have made it up himself, or could there be another source or a combination of sources that are more plausible? Many similarities between Ibsen and Kierkegaard can also be explained by a common influence from a third source, for example, Hegel or Goethe. This is not the place for a systematic and comprehensive review of the research literature or an investigation into all possible points of contact between the two authors. To simplify, one could differentiate between a broad thematic and a more limited textual influence. In many instances both can occur at the same time, as when the

3 4

Ibid. (my translation). SKS 3, 45 / EO2, 38.

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main theme can be substantiated by many specific examples. When a clear connection between the two authors can be documented by particular instances, it is easier to build a  case for an actual influence by Kierkegaard on Ibsen. The hermeneutic problem becomes more difficult to handle when abstract thematic similarities between the authors are postulated on the basis of weak or unconvincing references to actual texts. Unfortunately, this is the case with many of the previous studies of the relationship between Ibsen and Kierkegaard. Studies within the history of ideas and philosophy, dealing with abstract themes like “individualism” and “Romanticism” or even “Don Juanism,” are particularly prone to construct connections and trace influences without any hard evidence. Let us take a closer look at some examples from Ibsen’s first play Catiline.5 The Norwegian Ibsen scholar Francis Bull saw a similarity between Kierkegaard’s depiction of Don Juan and Ibsen’s representation of Catiline.6 But this contention is too general; Catiline could, of course, be a seducer and a womanizer without Ibsen ever having read about Don Juan in Either/Or, Part One. Bull got this idea from Kihlmann, who observed that “Ibsen’s Catiline is not only a Räuber hero à la Schiller, but also a Don Juan.”7 Besides, he did not document the supposed influence from Kierkegaard, but had observed that Ibsen, in the second edition of Catiline, from 1875, made the Don Juan motif stronger, with a new addition to the original text: Furia fantasizes about the thousand dead which shall rise from their grave to punish Catiline, and Ibsen added that, “seduced women will join them.”8 Larson’s attempt to defend the Don Juan hypothesis is also not convincing.9 As a seducer, Catiline resembles Faust more than Don Juan. In the chapter about Margrete in “Silhouettes” in Either/Or, Part One, Kierkegaard compares Faust and Don Juan. He says about Faust: “His doubting soul finds nothing in which it can rest, and now he grasps at erotic love [Elskov], not because he believes in it but because it has an element of presentness in which there is a momentary rest and a striving that diverts and that draws attention away from the nothingness of doubt.”10 Larson claims that there is a connection between the women in Catiline and the three forsaken women depicted in “Silhouettes” in Either/Or, Part One. But the women’s reflective melancholy after being seduced and abandoned, which is the main theme in Kierkegaard’s text, is not to be found in Ibsen’s female characters Aurelia, Furia, and Tullia. It is therefore difficult to decide whether Kierkegaard’s psychological analysis of Gretchen, Donna Elvira, and Marie Beaumarchais could have influenced Ibsen. Henrik Ibsen, Catilina: Drama i tre Akter, Christiania: I Kommission hos P.F. Steensballe. F. Steens Bogtrykkeri 1850 (in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 1, pp. 39–115; English translation: Catiline in The Oxford Ibsen, vols. 1–8, ed. and trans. by James Walter McFarlane and Graham Orton, London et al.: Oxford University Press 1970–77, vol. 1, pp. 35–108). 6 See Bull’s foreword to Ibsen, Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 1, p. 34. 7 Erik Kihlmann, “Ibsen och Kierkegaard,” in his Ur Ibsen-dramatikens idéhistoria. En studie i dansk-norsk litteratur, Ph.D. Thesis, Helsinki: Söderström 1921, p. 206. 8 Ibsen, Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 1, p. 199. 9 Philip E. Larson, Ibsen in Skien and Grimstad—His Education, Reading, and Early Works, Grimstad: Ibsen House and Grimstad Town Museum 1999, see pp. 98–9. 10 SKS 2, 221 / EO1, 206. 5

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Catiline has, in a certain sense, life behind him, and like Goethe’s Faust, he is torn between “Something far nobler than this present life” (noget Høiere end dette Liv) and “A series of unbridled dissipations” (en Række kun af tøilesløse Glæder), such as when his internal conflict is stated on the first page of Catiline.11 This reminds us of the famous lines in Goethe’s Faust I just prior to the hero’s encounter with Mephistopheles: Two souls, alas! reside within my breast, and each is eager for a separation: in throes of coarse desire, one grips the earth with all its senses; the other struggles from the dust to rise to high ancestral spheres.12

Kihlmann refers to the likeness between the mood of darkness and the night in Catiline and the company of the dead (symparanekromenoi) in Either/Or, Part One.13 There is good reason to believe that there are other reasons for the many night scenes in Catiline than the fact that Ibsen wrote the play at night, which he claimed, in the foreword to the second edition, to be the unconscious reason for all the darkness in the book. If not convincing, Kihlmann’s observation is at least more probable than Valborg Erichsen’s attempt to demonstrate a connection between “Silhouettes” and Ibsen’s poems “To Norway’s Bards” (“Til Norges Skjalde”) and the “Prologue” at the Student Union matinee for the Norwegian Theater in Bergen, where the documented verbal similarities are very minor indeed.14 Without commenting upon details in Catiline, Möhring sees the connection between Ibsen’s poem “In the Night” (“I natten”) and the beginning of “Silhouettes”: “I greet you, dark night, I toast you as the victor, and this is my comfort, for in eternal oblivion you shorten everything, day and time and life and the irksomeness of recollection!”15 He observes the likeness to Kierkegaard,16 but, because the night as a metaphor for the darkness of the soul is abundant in Western literature, it is very difficult Ibsen, Catilina: Drama i tre Akter, p. 7 (in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 1, p. 43). 12 See Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust I & II, ed. and trans. by Stuart Atkins, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press 1994 (Goethe’s Collected Works, vol. 2), verses 1112–17. 13 Kihlmann, “Ibsen och Kierkegaard,” p. 202. 14 See Valborg Erichsen, “Søren Kierkegaards betydning for norsk aandsliv,” Edda. Nordisk tidsskrift for litteraturforskning, vol. 19, 1923, p. 260. She succeeds far better with the comparison of Ibsen’s “Balminder” (in Ibsen, Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 14, pp. 71–8. She argues that already Ibsen’s subtitle to the poem, “A Fragment of Life in Poetry and Prose,” sounds unmistakeably like the subtitle of Either/Or. Erichsen, “Søren Kierkegaards betydning for norsk aandsliv,” pp. 261–2. 15 SKS 2, 166 / EO1, 168. 16 Werner Möhring, “Ibsens Abkehr von Kierkegaard?,” Edda. Nordisk tidsskrift for litteraturforskning, vol. 28, no. 15, 1928, p. 62: “Bezeichnend genug spielen auch alle drei Aufzüge von Ibsens erstem dramatischen Versuch in der Nacht, und die Nachtstimmung passt gut zu den mannigfachen Klagen des Helden über die Erbärmlichkeit und Niedrigkeit der Menschen dieser Welt und ihre Unzulänglichkeit für eine ideale Tat.” 11

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to demonstrate that this poetical image in Catiline is due to any influence from Kierkegaard. In his poem “In the Night” Ibsen also makes the connection between poetical recollection and the calmness of night: So gently, my soul, go gliding Onward for Memory’s shore,— There, in night’s calm abiding, Free to wreath blooms of yore!— What bliss in the dream to extend Each memory a welcome as friend; —Yes bliss, led by yearning’s devotion To venture Remembrance’s ocean!17

The verbal likenesses between the darkness in Catiline, the night in Ibsen’s early poems and Kierkegaard’s “Silhouettes,” are in my opinion too scarce to allow for a conclusion of direct influence. To make the case stronger, one could try to find more parallels. In an aphorism in “Diapsalmata” we read: “My life is like an eternal night; when I die, I shall be able to say with Achilles: Du bist vollbracht, Nachtwache meines Daseyns.”18 A similar self-reflective identification with the night occurs when Catiline says that the night is as black as his soul: “that lamp though is distracting to my dreams… / I must have darkness, dark as is my soul!”19 Furia is the queen of the night. She is a (picture) image of Catiline’s dark soul, and his fate as well: “FURIA. …our realm is of the dark; / and there we rule. Now come, your hand upon / our dark and everlasting bond….”20 Furia is an echo of Catiline’s own desire: “those words of yours were like a ringing echo / of what my heart has whispered for so long.”21 In an aphorism in Either/Or, Part One we find a similar combination of the night and the echo, but we could hardly call the parallel conclusive: “I have only one friend, and that is echo. Why is it my friend? Because I love my sorrow and echo does not take it away from me. I have only one confidant and that is the silence night. Why is it my confidant? Because it remains silent.”22 Kihlmann’s reference to “Silhouettes” has been expanded upon by Philip Larson.23 Larson mentions several possible parallels between Catiline and Either/Or, Part One. The modern tragic hero can be more evil than in antiquity. This fits well with Sallust’s description of Catiline and the essay on modern tragedy in Either/Or, Part One. In contrast to Oedipus in Sophocles’ tragedy, Catiline, Ibsen, Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 14, p. 86. (The Collected Poems of Henrik Ibsen, trans. by John Northam, p. 36.) 18 SKS 2, 45 / EO1, 35. 19 Ibsen, Catilina, p. 48 (in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 1, p. 69; The Oxford Ibsen, vol. 1, p. 63). 20 Ibsen, Catilina, pp. 56–7 (in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 1, p. 74; The Oxford Ibsen, vol. 1, p. 68). 21 Ibsen, Catilina, p. 55 (in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 1, p. 73; The Oxford Ibsen, vol. 1, p. 68). 22 SKS 2, 42–3 / EO1, 33. 23 Larson, Ibsen in Skien and Grimstad, pp. 93–105. 17

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already at the beginning of the play, has knowledge of his own guilt, Larson points out. The play focuses on how Catiline deals with his own feeling of guilt, not that his crime is hidden from him. Already in the first act he recognizes himself as the perpetrator. This alone would not prove that there is an influence from Kierkegaard. But in addition, Larson sees a parallel between Kierkegaard’s Antigone and the mysterious prediction that Catiline will fall by his own hand, and yet, he shall be killed by another person. Kierkegaard says that Antigone is killed both by a dead and a living hand. At the end of his essay on tragedy, Kierkegaard points out: At whose hand does she fall, then? At the hand of the living or the dead? In a certain sense, at the hand of the dead, and what was predicted to Hercules, that he would be murdered not by a living person but by a dead one, applies to her, inasmuch as the cause of her death is the recollection of her father; in another sense, at the hand of the living, inasmuch as her unhappy love is the occasion for the recollection to slay her.24

Catiline receives a similar prophecy of his own death in the third act: But hear a spirit from the grave Now quoting from your book of fate: “Though thou shalt fall by thine own hand, Yet shall another strike thee down.”25

The similarity with the essay on tragedy is that Catiline falls by his own hand (living) and at the same time by the hand of Furia (dead). I think one could conclude that Larson’s proof of influence from Kierkegaard is rather convincing in this case. II. St. John’s Night Harald Beyer strongly rejects the idea of any Kierkegaard influence whatsoever in this drama: “The sentimental, melancholic and forlorn Julian Paulsen has nothing in common with the aesthetics in Either/Or and the Stages on Life’s Way. He is the Hjalmar Ekdal of national Romanticism who adorns his false existence with fragments of Heiberg’s aesthetics as make-up.”26 Chesnais claims that Ibsen’s trip to Copenhagen in 1852 renewed his interest in Kierkegaard, but he does not comment upon St. John’s Night.27 Kihlmann sees in this play above all an influence from Johan Ludvig Heiberg. Apart from the thematic influence from Heiberg’s Alferne and Syvsoverdag, the decisive aspect is the ironic distance from Oehlenschläger.28 The SKS 2, 162 / EO1, 164. Ibsen, Catilina, p. 94 (in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 1, p. 96; The Oxford Ibsen, vol. 1, p. 89). 26 See Harald Beyer, “Søren Kierkegaards Betydning for norsk Aandsliv,” Edda. Nordisk tidsskrift for litteraturforskning, vol. 19, no. 1, 1923, pp. 56–7 and Harald Beyer, Søren Kierkegaard og Norge, Kristiania: Aschehoug 1924, p. 125. 27 Pierre G. la Chesnais, “Ibsen disciple de Kierkegaard?,” Edda, vol. 34, no. 3, 1934, pp. 404–5. 28 Kihlmann, “Ibsen och Kierkegaard,” p. 169. 24 25

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impact of Kierkegaard Kihlmann finds in the essay on Scribe’s The First Love in Either/Or, Part One. However, when Paulsen complains about the pain of losing his first love one time after another, Kihlmann admits this could be a point taken directly from Scribe without Kierkegaard as a mediator.29 I would like to add that the formula “Love is desire for love” (Kjærlighed er Higen efter Kjærlighed) could be inspired by Kierkegaard’s comments on Plato’s Symposium in The Concept of Irony: But then if love also desires that which is its object, it does not, of course, possess it but is in want of it, also if this want is considered identical with the wish for continued future possession, since one does indeed desire what one does not have when one also desires to keep in the future what one has. Consequently, love is the want of and desire for what one does not have, and so if love is love of the beautiful, then Eros is in want of beauty and does not possess it.30

This perspective is neither present in Scribe’s play nor in Kierkegaard’s description of Scribe’s play. A central passage in Ibsen’s draft manuscript to St. John’s Night is the following: PAULSEN. Yes, it is said with few words! Love is to desire love! This is my own thought, without doubt my own property.—Love is a desire to get love in return, because only when we are in love, we desire to be loved. But when our goal is fulfilled, then our desire must cease to exist. Ergo love must cease to exist at the moment we get love in return.—In order to make my love eternal, to be sure not to be loved back, I would consequently have to love hopelessly— JULIANE. Yes, that makes sense. PAULSEN. Consequently I could love no human being— (whispering): Can you guess whom I loved? JULIANE. If it was not a human being, then it would have to be some animal—a dog for example, or— PAULSEN. No no—no dog—I tell you!—It was—the siren [hulder]!31

The connection to Kierkegaard is important in order to understand the relationship between the Romantic desire as a reflective longing on the one hand, and the mythical aspect of love on the other. This would correspond to Kierkegaard’s conceptual opposition between the dialectical and the mythical in Plato’s dialogues in The Concept of Irony: “The dialectical clears the terrain of everything irrelevant and then attempts to clamber up to the idea, but since this fails, the imagination reacts. Weary of the dialectical work, the imagination begins to dream, and from Ibid., p. 205. SKS 1, 106 / CI, 45. 31 Henrik Ibsen, Sancthansnatten, in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 2, p. 103 (my translation). The play was written in 1852 and first performed in Bergen January 2, 1853. It was published posthumously in 1909. 29 30

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this comes the mythical.”32 The transition from Socrates’ definition of love as longing or desire, to the following Diotima speech in the Symposium, demonstrates the change from the dialectical to the mythical. This reference makes it possible to understand Paulsen’s two fundamentally different conceptions of love, on the one hand, the desire for love and, on the other, his decision to love a mythical creature—the siren (hulder). III. Lady Inger Several scholars have found themes from Kierkegaard in this play. Kihlmann mentions the psychology of the brooding character full of doubt which reflects about possibilities in the past, but does not go into detail. Valborg Erichsen has discussed the relationship between Kierkegaard and Lady Inger in most detail. She claims, however, that there is no reason to believe that the character Lady Inger was the result of Ibsen being influenced by one of Kierkegaard’s psychological experiments.33 She focuses on the general conflict between calling and happiness in Lady Inger, but this is also demonstrated with parallel examples: Woe, woe is he who has been given a great calling in life and does not possess the strength to fulfill it. It is said that a woman shall leave father and mother to follow her husband; but she who is destined to be an instrument of heaven, dares not possess any thing that is dear to her, neither spouse nor children, neither relatives nor home, and you see—herein lies the curse in being called to an extraordinary feat.34

This should, according to Erichsen,35 be viewed as close to the following quotation from “Guilty/Not Guilty” in Stages on Life’s Way: Should a soldier stationed at the frontier be married? Does a soldier stationed at the frontier, spiritually understood, dare to marry—an outpost who battles night and day, not exactly with Tartars and Scythians but with the robber bands of a primordial depression, an outpost who, even though he does not fight day and night, even though he has peace for some time, still can never know at what moment the battle will begin again….36

Erichsen points to a parallel between Nils Lykke’s seduction of Eline and “The Seducer’s Diary.” With his capacity to enjoy recollection and to plan the bliss of the moment Nils Lykke is a fully fledged seducer.37 Like Kierkegaard’s seducer in SKS 1, 154 / CI, 101. Erichsen, “Søren Kierkegaards betydning for norsk aandsliv,” p. 264. 34 Henrik Ibsen, Fru Inger til Østraad, Illustreret Nyhedsblad, vol. 6, no. 30, 1857, p. 150 (in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 2, p. 198; my translation). Ibsen’s Fru Inger til Østraad. Historisk Drama i fem Akter was originally published in the weekly periodical Illustreret Nyhedsblad from May 31 to August 23, 1857. A book edition was printed later the same year. We will refer to the first edition in the periodical. 35 Erichsen, “Søren Kierkegaards Betydning for norsk aandsliv,” p. 264. 36 SKS 6, 183 / SLW, 195. 37 Erichsen, “Søren Kierkegaards Betydning for norsk aandsliv,” pp. 262–4. 32 33

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Either/Or, Nils enjoys the kindling of his heart and plans to profit the most from his experience. Like Kierkegaard’s seducer, Nils Lykke sees a challenge in having to conquer a proud woman who tries to resist him. One could also mention that the seducer created by Kierkegaard uses mythology and fairy tales to seduce Cordelia, like Lykke’s appeals to Eline’s dreams about a knight.38 As in Either/Or, Part One, Lykke claims that the “best part about love is recollecting it.”39 Johannes has great confidence in the seductive power of his glance—he “can let his eyes rest on a girl with a desultory tenderness that has the same effect as if he casually touched her,”40 and likewise, Nils Lykke seduces Eline by staring in her eye “with all the enigmatic power that captures the soul of woman as if in a magic net.”41 IV. “On the Heights” In the long poem “On the Heights” (1859)42 the influence of Kierkegaard is manifest. Ibsen is wrestling with the conflict between the aesthetic and the ethical mode of thought. The lyrical subject learns from the strange hunter to enjoy watching his mother’s house burn down in the valley. It burned, it blazed, then a mighty fall; I screamed in the night for sorrow; the hunter soothed me: “Why fuss?—no call— It’s only the old house burning, that’s all, The cat and the punch for tomorrow!” He sounded so wise in my despair that I was seized with trembling; He showed how effectively the glare Blended with fitful moonbeams there, A sunset sky resembling.43

This seems to be an echo of the critique of the aesthetic stage and the consequences of the abandonment of an ethical perspective as depicted in Either/Or, Part Two. Here Ibsen describes the aesthetic pleasure which has abandoned the ethical realm altogether; the aesthetic position is extreme. The protagonist of the poem experiences Ibsen, Fru Inger til Østraad, Illustreret Nyhedsblad, vol. 6, no. 30, 1857, pp. 133–4 (in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 2, p. 172). 39 Ibsen, Fru Inger til Østraad, Illustreret Nyhedsblad, vol. 6, no. 30, 1857, p. 118 (in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 2, pp. 155–6). 40 SKS 2, 366 / EO1, 378. 41 Ibsen, Fru Inger til Østraad, Illustreret Nyhedsblad, vol. 6, no. 34, 1857, p. 170 (in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 2, pp. 212–13; my translation). 42 Henrik Ibsen, “Paa Vidderne,” in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 14, pp. 387–400. (English translation: “On the Heights,” in The Collected Poems of Henrik Ibsen, pp. 150–9.) 43 Ibsen, “Paa Vidderne,” in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 14, p. 397. (“On the Heights,” p. 157.) 38

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the fire down in the valley as an aesthetic pleasure, like Nero, who in Either/Or, Part Two is mentioned as an example of this position: “With your usual rashness, you once said that Nero could hardly be blamed for burning Rome in order to get an idea of the conflagration of Troy, but one might question whether he actually had enough artistry to understand how to enjoy it.”44 Also, Kierkegaard’s contention that Nero’s essence was sorrow has a parallel in Ibsen’s poem: The hunter was gone, the moon concealed; My blood—fire and frost contending,— With my burden of grief I ranged far afield— But it must be confessed the effect appealed Of that mingled sunset blending!45

V. Love’s Comedy In this play Falk seems to be a full-fledged Kierkegaardian aesthete. Erichsen sees in him the aristocratic loneliness of a negative idealism.46 But this is complicated. Falk and Svanhild agree that the only way to salvage their ideal love is to part from each other. At the end Falk uses the Kierkegaardian distinction between remembrance (Erindring) and recollection (Hukommelse) to make this point: “I’ll recall nothing… yet remember all.”47 (Jeg Intet huske vil; Sagte. Men Alt erindre.)48 Erichsen sees an uncompromising either/or: either love or marriage, either the idea or the world. According to Erichsen, “Ibsen has never been more obviously dependent upon Kierkegaard than in this conclusion.”49 This principle is clearly stated in “Rotation of Crops”: “When two people fall in love with each other and sense that they are destined for each other, it is a question of having the courage to break it off, for by continuing there is only everything to lose, nothing to gain.”50 This philosophy is also expressed by Victor Eremita in Stages on Life’s Way: a man cannot become a poet by means of the woman he conquers, only by the woman he does not get. But Erichsen points out that Ibsen also transcends the aesthetic stage when he wants his poetic existence to express itself as action, not only as remembrance and contemplation: SVANHILD. And you’ll go upward to your goal in poetry! FALK. In poetry, yes; for every man’s a poet whether in government, or school, or church, SKS 3, 179 / EO1, 184. Ibsen, “Paa Vidderne,” in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 14, p. 398. (“On the Heights,” p. 157.) 46 Erichsen, “Søren Kierkegaards Betydning for norsk aandsliv,” p. 329. 47 Love’s Comedy, in The Oxford Ibsen, vol. 2, p. 201. 48 Henrik Ibsen, Kjærlighedens Komedie. Komedie i tre Akter, Christiania: Trykt hos H.J. Jensen 1862, p. 138 (in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 4, p. 247). 49 Erichsen, “Søren Kierkegaards betydning for norsk aandsliv,” p. 330. 50 SKS 2, 286 / EO1, 298. 44 45

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whether his calling’s glorious or lowly, who in his work expresses the ideal.51

This is hardly the notion of poetry that is expressed by Kierkegaard’s aesthetics. And Erichsen’s observation could be taken even further. Falk’s idealism also has a Christian aspect to it; on several occasions he combines aesthetic and religious idealism, such as when he says: “Though every light on earth should be extinguished, / the thought of light will live; for it is God.”52 Svanhild also combines the aesthetic negativity with a Christian understanding of love: Can circumstances alter anything? I’ve said to you already, if you mean to fight for truth, I’ll stand or fall beside you. Oh, nothing is so easy as to follow the Bible’s bidding, forsake hearth and home, and seek the love that leads forward to God.53

In some ways, the relationship between Svanhild and Falk resembles that of Agnes and Brand. As we shall see, Brand’s Christian belief has an aesthetic touch, just as Falk’s aestheticism has a religious side. This mingling of the aesthetic and the religious could be interpreted as a critique of Kierkegaard, but it is also possible to claim, as Ibsen indeed did himself, that his main intention was to examine idealism, regardless of the content of the ideal. VI. Brand Ibsen scholarship generally agrees that Ibsen’s Brand is the play most influenced by Kierkegaard. This influence, however, should not be exaggerated. In a letter to Karl Larsen, the publisher of the early epic version of Brand, Christopher Bruun, who was the main living model for Brand, wrote: “I was much more familiar with Kierkegaard than Ibsen, and that did not take much. But Brand was fully grown and had even become a priest before Ibsen made my acquaintance.”54 Many of the contemporary review articles on Brand saw the connection to Kierkegaard, and Ibsen stated repeatedly that he was unhappy about this. Georg Brandes went far in this direction in his first Ibsen essay from 1867, which is included in his Aesthetic Studies from 1868.55 Brandes wrote about Brand: “Nearly every important 51 Ibsen, Kjærlighedens Komedie, p. 132 (in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 4, p. 243; Love’s Comedy, in The Oxford Ibsen, vol. 2, p. 196). 52 Ibsen, Kjærlighedens Komedie, p. 133 (in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 4, p. 244; Love’s Comedy, in The Oxford Ibsen, vol. 2, p. 196). 53 Ibsen, Kjærlighedens Komedie, p. 117 (in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 4, p. 231; Love’s Comedy, in Oxford Ibsen, vol. 2, p. 184). 54 Karl Larsen, Henrik Ibsens episke Brand, Copenhagen and Kristiania: Gyldendalske Boghandel Nordisk Forlag 1907, p. 247. 55 Georg Brandes, “Henrik Ibsen,” in his Æsthetiske Studier, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1868, pp. 234–86 (my translation).

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thought in this poem has been expressed by Kierkegaard, and the life of the hero has him as its model. It seems that Ibsen had aspired to the honor to be called Kierkegaard’s ‘poet.’ ”56 Brandes does not elaborate further on this point. The very same year as Brand was published, the Danish priest and author Frederik Helveg (1816–1901) published a pamphlet about Bjørnson’s and Ibsen’s “two latest works,” namely, The Newlyweds and Brand.57 Helveg was one of Grundtvig’s most original students, but in opposition to most followers of Grundtvig he felt sympathy for Kierkegaard’s project. He wrote extensively on Brand, over 40 pages. He claimed that Brand, so to speak, had Kierkegaard as its content.58 Helveg did not claim that Brand and Kierkegaard are identical in every way, but that they coincide at the end of the play, where Brand is like Kierkegaard from the period of The Moment. In a letter to his publisher Frederik Hegel on June 9, 1866, Ibsen wrote that he had read Helveg’s book with interest because it corrected “many of the mistakes of earlier criticism.” But in a postscript he stated that he disagreed strongly with Helveg’s understanding of the relationship between Brand and Kierkegaard: About Helveg’s book I must in the name of truth say that what is presupposed there, that it should be just S. Kierkegaard who had been standing before me as content or anything like it, is not really the case. The truth of the matter is that the representation of a life which has the relationship to the idea and its realization as its point of view will always in certain aspects coincide with S. Kierkegaard’s.59

Helveg argues that Brand, “exactly like Kierkegaard,” is unwilling to call himself a Christian. “I hardly know if I am a Christian” (“Knapt veed jeg det”), says Brand to Ejnar in the first act:60 I do not speak as a priest of the church; Indeed, I hardly know if I am a Christian; But I do know this: I am a man, and I do know There is a canker devouring the marrow of this land.61

Both Brand and Kierkegaard criticize the indifferent and conventional Christianity with the ideal as their weapon. But Helveg also sees an important difference, which can constitute the background for Ibsen’s claim in a letter to Georg Brandes from 1869 that he could have drawn the same conclusion or made “the same syllogism just as well by using a sculptor or a politician, as a priest.”62 Helveg had already in 1866 made the point that Brand was more of a fighter for the ideal than for Christianity. Ibid., p. 263. Frederik Helveg, Bjørnson og Ibsen i deres to seneste Værker, Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel (F. Hegel) 1866. 58 Ibid., p. 26. 59 Ibsen, Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 16, p. 158 (my translation). 60 Helveg, Bjørnson og Ibsen i deres to seneste Værker, 1866, p. 35. 61 Henrik Ibsen, Brand. Et dramatisk Digt, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1866, p. 24 (in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 5, p. 191; English translation: Brand: A Dramatic Poem, in The Oxford Ibsen, vol. 3, p. 89). 62 Ibsen, Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 16, p. 249 (my translation). 56 57

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Even this point of view Ibsen could have made his own when saying that “the representation of a life which has the relationship to the idea and its realization as its main focus will always in certain aspects coincide with S. Kierkegaard’s.”63 In a letter to Peter Hansen, on October 28, 1870, Ibsen again makes a statement about the relationship between Kierkegaard and Brand: It is a complete misunderstanding when one believes that I have depicted Søren Kierkegaard’s life. I have read very little of S. K. and understood even less. That Brand is a priest is really unessential. The demand “all or nothing” is valid in all parts of life, in love, in art, etc. Brand is myself in my best moments, just as certain as I by means of self-anatomy have brought to light many traits both of Peer Gynt and Stensgård.64

The contemporary reception of the poem observed the connection to Kierkegaard, but Ibsen denied any such influence. Is Brand a portrait of Kierkegaard, is it a criticism of Kierkegaard, or is it a critique of Norway? What exactly is Ibsen’s relationship to Kierkegaard in this play? The interpretations are manifold, but the research literature has not offered a conclusive answer. In 1923, Harald Beyer and Valborg Lynner Erichsen each published a treatise on the significance of Kierkegaard with regard to intellectual life in Norway.65 Beyer took his point of departure in the founding father of Scandinavian literature studies in Norway, Gerhard Gran, who claimed that Ibsen in Brand made a movement from the aesthetic to the ethical. According to Gran, Ibsen “never reached” the third Kierkegaardian stage.66 Beyer agreed with Gran, and added that Brand is an ethicist, but not an ethicist who represents the ethical stage in Kierkegaard. The ethical is the unity of belief and life. Brand is an ethicist, but his ethics is a union of ethics and religion, especially in acts 2, 3, and 4. Brand demands the unity of the will and the serenity of the mind. Brand wants to repent backwards in time, and also to bear not only his own sins, but his mother’s as well. He wants to choose his own self in a sense that is absolute. In the first act we meet the aesthetic Brand. Just like Falk in Love’s Comedy he goes to the mountains to learn to fight and forsake. Beyer claimed that Brand’s priestly coat covers the soul of a poet. Brand reveals an aesthetic view of life when he says: Wholly and completely, not A little bit here and a little bit there. You know where you are with a Bacchante, but A drunk is neither one thing nor the other.67

Ibid., p. 249 (my translation). Ibid., vol. 16, p. 318 (my translation). 65 See Beyer, “Søren Kierkegaards Betydning for norsk Aandsliv,” pp. 1–143 and Erichsen, “Søren Kierkegaards betydning for norsk aandsliv.” pp. 209–429. 66 Beyer, “Søren Kierkegaards betydning for norsk aandsliv,” p. 74. 67 Ibsen, Brand, pp. 24–5 (in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 5, p. 192; Brand: A Dramatic Poem, in The Oxford Ibsen, vol. 3, pp. 89–90). 63 64

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The important thing is to do something wholly and fully. That drinking alcohol is not the right ethical thing to do is unimportant. Hans Ording agreed with this interpretation of Brand’s idealism: “Brand is filled with aesthetic pathos. His all or nothing! can be achieved without morals.”68 Beyer also mentioned the alreadyquoted passage where Brand says I “scarcely know if I’m a Christian really, / yet know full well I am a man.”69 Kierkegaard would not call himself a Christian. But when Brand casts himself as a martyr, he also moves beyond Kierkegaard, according to Beyer: “If the Lord has need of my death…I gladly / Give myself unto flood and waterfall and chasm!”70 When Brand at the end of the play turns away from the others, he fulfills the ideal of becoming Hiin Enkelte, according to Beyer.71 Different parts of Kierkegaard’s theory of the stages are applied to the drama. Valborg Erichsen is also inspired by Kierkegaard’s theory of the stages, and she finds many similarities between the aesthetic way of life and Brand.72 When will and the energetic choice are all important, this makes the outcome of the chosen action indifferent. This points towards the aesthetic, Erichsen claims.73 William writes about the intensity of the choice in Either/Or, Part Two, but Brand can in addition favor a choice the content of which could be unethical: What matter if you are a slave to joy… Just as long as you stay that way? But Don’t be one thing today, one thing yesterday, And something quite different a year from now.74

Erichsen stresses the aesthetic influence more than either Beyer or Gran. She points out that it is the accusation of the aesthetic in “Diapsalmata” that one encounters in Brand: “Let others complain that the times are evil. I complain that they are wretched, for they are without passion. People’s thoughts are thin and fragile as lace, and they themselves as pitiable as lace-making girls.”75 Erichsen sees a connection between Ibsen’s and Kierkegaard’s form of religiousness in the tendency to sacrifice life on the altar of the ideal. Brand sacrifices his wife and his child, and his life becomes a martyrdom which in a human perspective is madness.76 But this is not a proof of Ibsen having reached Kierkegaard’s religious stage, according to her view. She quotes Ibsen’s statement that he could have made “the same syllogism” with Hans Ording, “Ibsen og Kierkegaard. Nogen bemærkninger i anledning av Kristen Andersens foredrag,” For Kirke og Kultur, vol. 35, no. 6, 1928, p. 353. 69 Ibsen, Brand, p. 24 (in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 5, p. 191; English translation: Brand: A Dramatic Poem, in The Oxford Ibsen, vol. 3, p. 89). 70 Ibsen, Brand, p. 8 (in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 5, p. 180; Brand: A Dramatic Poem, in The Oxford Ibsen, vol. 3, p. 79). 71 Beyer, “Søren Kierkegaards betydning for norsk aandsliv,” p. 74. 72 Erichsen, “Søren Kierkegaards betydning for norsk aandsliv,” pp. 336–9. 73 Ibid., 337. 74 Ibsen, Brand, p. 24 (in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 5, pp. 191–2; Brand: A Dramatic Poem, in The Oxford Ibsen, vol. 3, p. 89). 75 SKS 2, 36 / EO1, 27. 76 Erichsen, “Søren Kierkegaards betydning for norsk aandsliv,” p. 339. 68

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any idealist, independent of Brand being a priest. The main point is not to classify Falk in Love’s Comedy as an aesthete and Brand as a religious person, but that both men worship an absolute ideal. The paradoxical demands of sacrifice pertain to both priest and poet: It is striking that Brand’s idealism is marked by the aesthetic which claims that personal truth is only to be found in the reckless realization of a principle, and therefore values wholeness in all its forms higher than a vulnerable and imperfect striving. It is also obvious that the ethical lies behind the idealization of the will and the choice—and last, the religious stage has doubtlessly been decisive for Brand’s craving for sacrifice and martyrdom.77

As a result Brand, so to speak, is divided into three parts, corresponding to Kierkegaard’s three stages. This is confusing. Werner Möhring tried to solve the problem by finding a “parallel between the three levels in Ibsen’s thought and writing and the theory of the three stages in Søren Kierkegaard.”78 He presupposed the results of Beyer and Erichsen, and stressed that “the spirit of Kierkegaard” has “hardly anywhere found a stronger expression than in Ibsen’s Brand.”79 Möhring was interested in how Ibsen worked himself free of the Kierkegaardian paradigm when he was confronted with Georg Brandes and the Modern Breakthrough in Scandinavian literature. Ibsen’s main problem is the conflict between the aesthetic and the ethical. But in Brand, there is an aesthetic vein in Brand’s form of religious practice. Inspired by Kierkegaard’s criticism from The Moment, Brand attacks the church in much the same way as Kierkegaard did the last year before his death. The ideal is contrasted with Sunday Christianity, which Kierkegaard despised in The Moment. The ethical is threatened from two sides, partly from the aesthetic stage and partly from the religious stage. The influence from Kierkegaard in this drama is complicated. Earlier scholarship concentrated on the theory of the three stages, and found all stages represented in Brand. Brand is without comparison the play by Ibsen which has received the most attention regarding the question of Kierkegaard’s influence. At the end of act two, Brand says: “This is our common aim—to make our bodies and our souls / Like open books, upon whose virgin pages God can write his name.”80 This contradicts his otherwise strong concentration on the power of the human will. Brand gives priority to the will over belief: No. It is the will that must be brought to life again. The will alone can liberate or bring man low… The will, the one whole thing in a fragmented world, The will that bears on all tasks, great or small!81 Ibid., p. 342 (my translation). See Möhring, “Ibsens Abkehr von Kierkegaard?,” p. 43 and Werner Möhring, Ibsen und Kierkegaard, Leipzig: Mayer und Müller 1928, pp. 59ff. 79 Möhring, “Ibsens Abkehr von Kierkegaard?,” p. 44. 80 Ibsen, Brand, p. 78 (in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 5, p. 229; Brand: A Dramatic Poem, p. 124). 81 Ibsen, Brand, p. 78 (in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 5, pp. 228–9; Brand: A Dramatic Poem, in The Oxford Ibsen, vol. 3, p. 124). 77 78

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The duty of the will for Brand transcends the capabilities of ordinary human beings. Kierkegaard does not have the same place for the human will within his understanding of the true Christian religion. In Kierkegaardian terminology, there is something ethical, not only religious, in Brand’s fixation on the heroic will. It is often unclear if Brand speaks of the human will or the will of God. When he speaks of awakening “the lion of the will,” this could hardly be referring to God’s will, but it fits well with Brand being a “warrior” (Kriger) and a knight (Ridder).82 Kierkegaard speaks of the opposition between human will and God’s, for example, in “The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air”: “Would that in silence you might forget your will, your self-will, in order in silence to pray to God: Your will be done!”83 The obedience of the lily and the bird is unconditional: The lily and the bird are unconditionally obedient to God; in obedience they are so simple or so sublime that they believe that everything that happens is unconditionally God’s will, and that they have nothing whatever to do in the world other than either to do God’s will in unconditional obedience or to submit to God’s will in unconditional obedience.”84

The human being can learn from the lily and the bird. The self mediates between God’s will and the human will: “The more consciousness, the more self; the more consciousness, the more will; the more will, the more self.”85 Brand could perhaps be understood as a person suffering from the kind of despair which has a will too strong to be itself, which would be defiance or Trods.86 Brand’s form of Christianity has a strong aesthetic touch. His focus on the will is more reminiscent of Judge William in Either/Or than any of the religious works by Kierkegaard. An important similarity between Brand and Kierkegaard is the conversion from love to hatred. Brand’s religious idealism paradoxically undermines Christian love: But here, in our slack and gutless times, A man’s best love can only be [shouts in terror]—Hate! Hate! But the will to shout that one, simple little word Must bring our generation into total war!87

Scholars like Beyer and Erichsen overlooked the obvious connection to Kierkegaard with regard to this dialectical relationship between love and hate.88 Chesnais must be credited with the discovery of the similarity between Brand and Kierkegaard in this Ibsen, Brand, p. 113; p. 61 (in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 5, p. 252; p. 216; Brand: A Dramatic Poem, in The Oxford Ibsen, vol. 3, p. 145; p. 113). 83 SKS 11, 24 / WA, 19. 84 SKS 11, 31 / WA, 26–7. 85 SKS 11, 145 / SUD, 29. 86 See SKS 11, 181ff. / SUD, 67ff. 87 Ibsen, Brand, p. 93 (in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 5, p. 239; Brand: A Dramatic Poem, in The Oxford Ibsen, vol. 3, pp. 133–4). 88 See Beyer, “Søren Kierkegaards Betydning for norsk Aandsliv,” Edda. Nordisk tidsskrift for litteraturforskning, vol. 19, no. 1, 1923, pp. 1–143 and Erichsen, “Søren Kierkegaards betydning for norsk aandsliv.” 82

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respect.89 The false Christian represses the insight that to be a Christian one must hate oneself—and others! Kierkegaard makes this point in several places: “…Christianity requires for saving one’s life eternally (and this, after all, is what we believe to attain as Christians): hating one’s own life in this world….”90 The idea that “a man’s best love must be to hate” is close to Kierkegaard’s understanding of the opposition between official Christianity and the New Testament: “Moreover, everyone must be able to see that official Christianity is not the Christianity of the New Testament, resembles it no more than the square resembles the circle, no more than enjoying resembles suffering, than loving oneself resembles hating oneself, than craving the world resembles hating the world….”91 Or even stronger: “Christianity in the New Testament is to love God in hatred of humankind, in hatred of oneself and thereby of all other people, hating father, mother, one’s own child, wife, etc., the most powerful expression for the most agonizing isolation.”92 The end of Brand has been interpreted differently. Brand asks: Answer me, God, in the jaws of death: Is there no salvation for the Will of Man? No small measure of salvation…? [quantum satis] [The avalanche buries him and fills the entire valley.] A VOICE [sounding above the thunder]. God is love! [deus caritatis!]93

“Deus caritatis” can be understood as a contrast and a correction of Brand’s harsh religiosity. His “love,” which expresses itself as hate, has more of “the fear and trembling”94 from The Old Testament than the “caritas” or agape of The New Testament. As the Doctor says to Brand: Your account shows more than enough credit to your will. [quantum satis] But in your current statement of account The page that shows the credit to your heart, to love, [caritatis] Is a total blank.95

The doctor sees the main problem in Brand’s understanding of religion: he tries to salvage himself through the will, and the will stands in direct opposition to Christian love. Kierkegaard has no room for this kind of will within the religious, but his tendency to see the hatred of oneself and others as a sign of true Christianity, and his predilection Chesnais, “Ibsen disciple de Kierkegaard?,” p. 371. SKS 14, 179 / M, 47. 91 SKS 14, 189 / M, 52. 92 SKS 13, 234 / M, 184. 93 Ibsen, Brand, p. 271 (in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 5, p. 362; Brand: A Dramatic Poem, p. 250). 94 Theoharis C. Theoharis has made this point concerning the sacrifice of Brand’s son. Theoharis C. Theoharis, “ ‘After the First Death, there Is No Other.’ Ibsen’s ‘Brand’ and Kierkegaard’s ‘Fear and Trembling,’ ” Ibsen Studies, no. 1, 2000, pp. 9–29. 95 Ibsen, Brand, p. 92 (in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 5, p. 238; Brand: A Dramatic Poem, p. 132). 89 90

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for the severe God in the stories of Job and Abraham and Isaac in Fear and Trembling and Repetition, makes Ibsen’s critique of Brand relevant for Kierkegaard as well. VII. Peer Gynt Perhaps the most violent outburst in all of Ibsen’s letters is his reaction to the Danish critic Clemens Petersen’s review of Peer Gynt in Fædrelandet.96 In the letter to Bjørnson of December 9, 1867 he exclaims: “He says that The Strange Passenger is The Concept of Anxiety!”97 Ibsen here refers to The Concept of Anxiety, which Kierkegaard published in 1844. We have seen that Ibsen was irritated because the critics pointed out the Kierkegaardian influence in Brand. This had obviously made him oversensitive to accusations which implied that he was a “Kierkegaard-poet.” Perhaps this is the reason why he misread what Clemens Petersen actually wrote. It is not certain that Petersen in his review article in Fædrelandet of November 30, 1867 referred to Kierkegaard at all, even though Ibsen interpreted it that way. Clemens Petersen wrote: Peer Gynt is about to drown. For the first time he is touched by reality in a way that no fantasy, no dream can help him escape from it; now it is serious, now life itself is at stake, and then for the first time reality’s bitter, but saving anxiety infuses him. This Ibsen dissolves in an allegory: The Strange Passenger who swims at Peer Gynt’s side is namely anxiety, and the dialogue between them makes clear his relationship to this new factor, to anxiety, and does it well. But the task was to give the whole a plastic expression without this dissolution, to show the person wholly transparent, for only this can represent the life of reality; the other is to demonstrate its laws.98

Clemens Petersen does not refer to Kierkegaard; in fact he does not say that The Strange Passenger is The Concept of Anxiety. The problem is that Ibsen made a dramatic person into a concept; he constructed an allegory, but did not represent reality in its “plasticity.”99 Kari Hamre has shown that this critique was not new, and that Petersen’s aesthetics is more or less repeated as a critical paradigm in all of his articles on Ibsen’s dramas.100 In a letter to Petersen from March 9, 1867, Ibsen wrote that he hoped that “You in my new work will understand that I have moved a decisive step forward.”101 In the meantime, Petersen published a book on the Danish poet Oehlenschläger.102 He sent this book to Bjørnson in August of 1867. Ibsen Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1867 (in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 6, pp. 55–241; English translation: Peer Gynt: A Dramatic Poem, in The Oxford Ibsen, vol. 3, pp. 251–421). 97 Ibsen, Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 16, p. 198 (my translation). 98 See Omkring Peer Gynt, ed. by Otto Hageberg, Oslo: Gyldendal 1967, p. 46. 99 Ibid. 100 Kari Hamre, Clemens Petersen og hans forhold til norsk litteratur i årene 1856–69, Oslo: Aschehoug 1945. 101 Ibsen, Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 16, p. 181. 102 Clemens Petersen, Om Forholdet mellem det Gamle og det Nye ved Øhlenschlægers Fremtræden i den danske Litteratur. En kritisk Undersøgelse, Copenhagen: Samfundet til den danske Litteraturs Fremme 1867. 96

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himself claimed that he added the scene with The Strange Passenger as a “Caprice” as he was finishing Peer Gynt, long after he could have read Petersen’s book. In the last chapter, “On the Relationship between the Old and the New in Oehlenschläger’s Appearance in Danish Literature,” Petersen commented upon the relationship between anxiety and poetry. About the conditions for Oehlenschläger to appear as a poet, Petersen wrote: What the particular inspired moment means for the life of the individual is explained by the genesis of the particular inspired moment. In the same way one also explains the particular inspired individual’s birth. What was then needed for the Danish people, as it was at the end of the eighteenth century, to give birth to a poet with really true enthusiasm? First and foremost anxiety was needed.103

Petersen also claimed: “it is anxiety, not fear, which is the mother of poetry and poetry is the redeemer of anxiety.”104 This anxiety should not, however, produce abstract allegories. Petersen refers to Bjørnson’s peasant stories to make his point. If Ibsen had tried too hard to incorporate anxiety in his dramatic poem, then it would have hurt him deeply that he was accused by the very man he tried to imitate that he had represented anxiety in a non-poetical manner! But there certainly are many influences from Kierkegaard in Peer Gynt. The concepts to “be oneself” and the “self” are very central to the play, and one could therefore say that Ibsen was influenced by The Sickness unto Death,105 and that Peer Gynt could be interpreted as a morality play that judges the aesthetic mode of life. Various elements of Kierkegaardian influence can be found in different parts of the play. There is the Peer, the aesthetic phantast, the Peer brooding over the problem of the self and, last but not least, Peer’s salvation at the end of the play. There is also considerable influence from Hegel in the fourth act. However, there is no agreement about how the different Kierkegaardian elements work in the play as a whole. Peer Gynt is the play in which Ibsen used most allusions. He refers to about 30 Norwegian and Danish authors, but Goethe and Shakespeare also influenced him. Goethe’s Faust was probably more important for the structure of Peer Gynt than anything he may have borrowed from Kierkegaard. In act one Ibsen depicts the workings of the imagination in a way that reminds one of Kierkegaard: PEER [softly]. Was it me they were talking about? [With a forced shrug.] Well, let them! I don’t suppose slander’s likely to kill me. [He throws himself down on the heather, and lies for some time on his back, with hands behind his neck, staring at the sky.] What an odd-shaped cloud! It looks like a horse. With a man on its back—and a saddle and bridle. And just behind, and old hag on a broomstick. [He laughs quietly to himself.] Ibid., p. 146 (my translation). Ibid., p. 147 (my translation). 105 See Øivind Nygård, Peer som fortvilet: Ibsens Peer Gynt i lys av Kierkegaards Sygdommen til Døden, M.A. Thesis, University of Bergen 2009. 103 104

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Eivind Tjønneland It’s mother! She’s cussing and carrying-on: “You beast, you beast! Do you hear what I say, Peer?” [His eyes gradually close.] Yes, she’ll be in a fine state now! Peer Gynt at the head of a great procession, His horse in a silver cap and gold shoes.106

As in this example from Peer Gynt, we likewise find the connection between the cloud-motif and the imagination in several places in Kierkegaard. As in Peer Gynt the fantasies can often be erotic, as in the following hypothetical example which describes the aesthetic in Either/Or, Part Two: No, I will flee far, far away with her while there is still time, and I will bid the night to hide us and the silent clouds to tell us fairy tales in bold pictures, which is appropriate for a bridal night, and under the enormous arch of heaven I will become intoxicated with her charms, alone with her, alone in the whole world, and I will plunge down into the abyss of her love; and my lips are silent, for the clouds are my thoughts and my thoughts are clouds; and I will call and invoke all the powers of heaven and earth so that nothing may disturb my happiness, and I will put them on oath and have them swear this to me.107

In The Concept of Irony Kierkegaard also depicted the relationship between the clouds and the subject’s imagination in a way that resembles Peer Gynt. Kierkegaard writes about the relationship between the cloud-chorus and Socrates in Aristophanes’ comedy The Clouds. The chorus, in this comedy, is clouds, but clouds that can at the same time transform themselves. Kierkegaard observes a certain correspondence between the clouds and Socrates, much in the same way as Peer sees his own wishful dreams and fantasies of grandeur in the cloud: Clouds superbly characterize the utterly flabby thought process, continually fluctuating, devoid of footing and devoid of immanent laws of motion, that takes all kinds of shapes with the same aberrant variability of the clouds; at times resembling mortal women, at times a centaur, a panther, a wolf, a bull, etc. —resembling them but, please note, not actually being them, since the clouds are nothing but fog or the dim, self-affecting, infinite possibility of becoming anything that is supposed to be, yet unable to make anything remain established, the possibility that has infinite dimensions and seems to encompass the whole world but still has no content, can accept anything but retain nothing.108

VIII. To Be Oneself The Dovre troll explains the difference between troll and man in the second act:

Ibsen, Peer Gynt. Et dramatisk Digt, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1867, p. 24 (in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 6, p. 74; Peer Gynt: A Dramatic Poem, pp. 268–9). 107 SKS 3, 59 / EO2, 53. 108 SKS 1, 184–5 / CI, 133–4. 106

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Out there, under the radiant sky, They say “To thine own self be true.” But here, in the world of trolls, we say “To thine own self be—all-sufficient!”109

In The Sickness unto Death Kierkegaard differentiates between three types of despair, all of them defined as different relationships to the self. Desperately wanting to be oneself comes close to the egoism of the trolls. The expression at være sig selv nok is used by Kierkegaard in his description of the aesthetic, but does not play any significant role in Kierkegaard’s work. Here is an example from Either/Or, Part Two: Seafarers tell that out of the great oceans of the world there is seen a kind of vessel called the Flying Dutchman. It can spread a little sail and with infinite speed sweep over the surface of the ocean. This is just about the way you navigate on the ocean of life. Alone in his kayak, a person is sufficient unto himself, has nothing to do with any person except when he himself so wishes. Alone in his kayak, a person is sufficient unto himself….110

To be oneself enough also reminds one of the description of the demonic in The Concept of Anxiety, but the expression “To be oneself enough” is not used. The possessed man answers Jesus with the formula “what have I to do with you.”111 And the troll is of course a kind of demon: The utmost extreme in this sphere is what is commonly called bestial perdition. In this state, the demonic manifests itself in saying, as did the demoniac in the New Testament with regard to salvation: τι εμοι και σοι [What have I to do with you]? Therefore it shuns every contact [with the good], whether this actually threatens it by wanting to help it to freedom or only touches it casually.112

This comes very close to the expression “to be oneself enough,” which we do not find in The Sickness unto Death, but it is described as being in despair “to will to be oneself.”113 Like Judge William, who accuses the aesthete of never doing anything that could not be reversed, Peer is scared to do anything that cannot be undone; he will not let the Dovre troll scratch him in the eye to transform him from a human into a troll, and he will not agree to never retracing his steps: This thing of having no line of retreat, As the text-book says, which you so insist on, That’s a condition I’ll never give in to.114 Ibsen, Peer Gynt, p. 68 (in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 6, p. 100; Peer Gynt: A Dramatic Poem, p. 295). 110 SKS 3, 87 / EO2, 84. 111 SKS 4, 437 / CA, 137. 112 Ibid. 113 SKS 11, 181 / SUD, 67. 114 Ibsen, Peer Gynt, pp. 75–6 (in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 6, p. 105; Peer Gynt: A Dramatic Poem, p. 300). 109

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This comes close to William’s diagnosis of the aesthetic in Either/Or, Part Two: “You continually hover over yourself, and no matter how crucial each step, you always keep for yourself a possibility of interpretation that with one word can change everything.”115 At the end of the play, the Button Moulder tells Peer: “To be one’s self is to kill one’s self.116 Kierkegaard has a similar insight in The Sickness unto Death: “The despair that is the thoroughfare to faith comes also through the aid of the eternal; through the aid of the eternal the self has the courage to lose itself in order to win self.”117 But, of course, both authors were inspired by the New Testament. IX. The Later Plays It is my opinion that scholarship on the connection between Ibsen and Kierkegaard from before World War II still remains the best. The main focus has been on Ibsen’s early poetry, Love’s Comedy, Brand, and Peer Gynt, but the influence from Kierkegaard was seen to be less obvious in his later plays. In the play Ibsen wrote after Peer Gynt, The League of Youth, we hardly find any influence from Kierkegaard. Rather, Ibsen attacked Bjørnson and the Norwegian liberals by means of the technique of a character comedy such as those by Ludvig Holberg. From 1870 onward Ibsen started to revise and republish the dramas of his youth. He also wrote a new drama during this period, Emperor and Galilean (1873),118 where he discussed the conflict between the pagan and the Christian world-view and suggested some sort of synthesis of the two main impulses in European history of ideas. Ibsen called this the “third empire.” His paradigm has a greater affinity with Hegel than with Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard also wrote about the three modes of existence that correspond to pagan life after the rise of Christianity. They are similar to the three modes of despair depicted in The Sickness unto Death, namely, the so-called “three great ideas”: Don Juan, Faust, and the wandering Jew. But Ibsen’s synthesis of the pagan and the Christian in Emperor and Galilean has no counterpart in Kierkegaard’s thought. And the “third empire” is just a dream for the future, not a true synthesis that is realized. The theme of the third empire is central to Ibsen’s thought in the later plays: the Viking-like nature of Hilde Wangel in The Master Builder,119 as a contrast to Aline’s bloodless ethics of duty, is one of many examples. In this play we can also see a parallel to Kierkegaard’s three stages. It is a somewhat different line of development from what Kierkegaard suggested with his aesthetic, ethical, and religious stages. In The Master Builder Ibsen differentiates between the buildings from his youth (the Romantic dramas), and the houses where human beings could live (the social SKS 3, 21 / EO2, 11. Ibsen, Peer Gynt, p. 242 (in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vol. 6, p. 229; Peer Gynt: A Dramatic Poem, p. 411). 117 SKS 11, 181 / SUD, 67. 118 Henrik Ibsen, Kejser og Galilæer. Et verdenshistorisk Skuespil, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1873. (English translation: Emperor and Galilean, in The Oxford Ibsen, vol. 4, pp. 195–459.) 119 Henrik Ibsen, Bygmester Solness, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1892. (English translation: The Master Builder, in The Oxford Ibsen, vol. 7, pp. 353–445.) 115 116

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dramas). He suggests that the symbolic dramas constitute a synthesis of the Romantic and the realistic, a somehow impossible synthesis conceived as “castles in the air with a firm foundation.” Some scholars have suggested that Kierkegaard thought of the religious as a dialectical reversal of the aesthetic.120 The ironic person makes up his own world like a small god; the Christian allows himself to be the “writing-tablet for God’s writ,” as Brand puts it. In this perspective, the ethical stage becomes somehow less interesting for Kierkegaard than the transformation of the aesthetic to the religious. The ethical or Hegelian stability that Judge William finds in his mediation between individual and society is without the transgression and transcendence that Kierkegaard depicted in the aesthetic and the religious stages of life. Ibsen is also fascinated by a similar transgression in the later plays. Many of his dramatic persons feel that human happiness cannot be found in the material and social sphere. It is especially his female characters in the later plays that long for something more, but this longing is Romantic, and not specifically Christian. Only to Hegel these things were the same, when he spoke of Christian art as Romantic. But Ibsen’s construction of a dramatic conflict between the individual and society resembles in many cases the contempt that Kierkegaard’s aesthetics directed at the bourgeois, the Spidsborgere. Both in The Master Builder and in Kierkegaard there are three stages, but they do not overlap. The transcendence and the realization of the absurd have something in common. In this play, the realistic and the Romantic cannot, according to Ibsen, be synthesized. When Solness falls from the tower or when Rebecca and Rosmer (in Rosmersholm) throw themselves into the mill pound, this could be interpreted as the result of lack of faith, not the “leap of faith.” Religion is not the main point for the mature Ibsen, as it was for Kierkegaard. Ibsen tried to demonstrate the conflict between ordinary life and the longing for something more, and the aesthetic longing can also be depicted in religious or romantic expressions such as “the impossible,” “the wonderful,” and “a beautiful death,” as is the case with Nora, Hedda, and others. But one could hardly claim that the ideals of Nora or Hedda are religious in a Kierkegaardian sense. They long for a transcendence of the limitations of ordinary life. Ibsen is trying to mediate between the conventional and the aesthetic. The aesthetic can contain pagan elements, as when Hedda Gabler dreams of “wine leaves in the hair” and Hilde Wangel speaks about the Vikings in The Master Builder. There is definitely a kind of pagan or aesthetic transcendence in Ibsen. On the other hand, Christianity is often depicted as sapping the strength of life from the individual. This is the case with Aline, master builder Solness’ wife, and Rosmer in Rosmersholm. The religious is not vigorous enough; it weakens life. On the other hand, Viking morality is unethical, and Ibsen does not manage to mediate between the two, the brutality of paganism and the bloodless piety of Christianity. The so-called dramas of society were inspired by the Danish critic Georg Brandes and the Modern Breakthrough in Scandinavian literature. Brandes wanted literature

120 Edo Pivčevič, Ironie als Daseinsform bei Sören Kierkegaard, Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn 1960.

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to discuss current social and political problems in society. In The Pillars of Society121 Ibsen criticized bourgeois capitalism and its double moral standard. In order to reach his prominent position Bernick, the pillar of society, has sacrificed love and engaged in criminal behavior. Sexual unfaithfulness and economic crime are the dark sides of society. Ibsen exposes betrayal hidden in the past as a means to criticize bourgeois morality. The betrayal of love and economic crime are interdependent in many of Ibsen’s plays. Capitalism was combined with an aesthetic view of women as beautiful objects. Georg Brandes attacked this aesthetic attitude towards women and blamed Kierkegaard in his foreword to his Danish translation of John Stuart Mill’s On the Subjection of Women from 1869.122 This feminist critique inspired Ibsen to write A Doll’s House.123 Ibsen offered a new critique of the aesthetic. The aesthetic represented some sort of otherness to the Protestant capitalism of his time. Victorian society produced its own urge for transgression. In A Doll’s House, Helmer has an aesthetic view of women. Nora is seen as a beautiful object, a doll in a doll’s house. This aesthetic ideology is exposed by Ibsen as an internal part of the bourgeois society, a means of subduing women. The aesthetic ideal of women is produced by a sick, competitive culture as a kind of refuge from the logic of capitalism. Sex and crime are not simply means of transgressing the boundaries of the bourgeois society, but they reveal the motivation behind the hard work of the industrialists and bankers in Ibsen’s dramas. Society upholds itself and reveals itself through aesthetic transcendence. But the religious dimension in Ibsen’s realistic dramas is absent. Ibsen reveals the perverted aesthetic ideals of frustrated upper-class people as phantasms. In the scandalous drama Ghosts,124 Ibsen was inspired by new Darwinian theories of heredity. The Kierkegaard-like repression of the past through remembrance (Erindring) which Helene Alving uses as a technique to create an ideal of her late husband, building a false memory of Captain Alving, is deconstructed by her son’s hereditary syphilis. The “poetic” recollection is undermined by naturalistic heredity. In this drama religion is absent, but the drama draws on Kierkegaard’s aesthetic stage to dramatize the protagonist’s self-delusion. The contrast to the Puritanism of Western Norway is the “joy of life,” the ideal of the dying Oswald. Society produces repressive ideology or “ghosts” and the alternative to this repression is Captain Alving’s perversion of “the joy of life” through drinking and whoring. The sickness of bourgeois society seems to be total. But it is not common to mention influence from Kierkegaard in this connection. Heredity and a new form of naturalistic necessity constitute Ibsen’s main inspiration. Ibsen mixes vocabulary from the Old Testament, Greek drama, and Darwinism to represent this necessity. Perhaps we Henrik Ibsen, Samfundets Støtter. Skuespil i fire Akter, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1877. (English translation: The Pillars of Society, in The Oxford Ibsen, vol. 5, pp. 19–126.) 122 John Stuart Mill, Kvindernes Underkuelse, trans. by Georg Brandes, 2nd ed., Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1885, pp. VIIff. 123 Henrik Ibsen, Et Dukkehjem. Skuespil i tre Akter, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1879. (English translation: A Doll’s House, in The Oxford Ibsen, vol. 5, pp. 197–286.) 124 Henrik Ibsen, Gengangere. Et Familjedrama i tre Akter, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1881. (English translation: Ghosts, in The Oxford Ibsen, vol. 5, pp. 345–422.) 121

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could see a connection to Kierkegaard’s theory of tragedy in Either/Or, Part One in Ghosts. Kierkegaard stresses the importance of a new subjectivity in modern tragedy, and Helene Alving and Nora are tormented by the secrets they try to hide. The secret is not hidden from themselves as is the case in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Modern tragedy is based on a reflective, guilt-ridden subject asking himself or herself if the secret should be revealed or not. Bernick, Nora, and Helene Alving all fit into Kierkegaard’s description of modern tragedy. They know that they are hiding the truth, and they are all forced to reveal the truth. To hide the truth has been their main project, but Ibsen refuses to let any such project succeed. X. Individualism In The Enemy of the People125 the individual hero Dr. Stockmann is fighting the conventional cowardice of the masses. This individualism could be interpreted as a secular form of Kierkegaard’s Hiin Enkelte, but it is difficult to document any real influence. Ibsen seems to be more influenced by Georg Brandes’s individualism and hero worship, which was extensive even before Brandes introduced Nietzsche to the Scandinavian public in his essay “Aristocratic Radicalism” from August 1889. The truth seeker who follows his own path would always be close to a dominant idea in Kierkegaard’s philosophy. As we have seen, Ibsen made this observation concerning the character Brand. Every tendency to underline the ideal in a drama would remind one of Kierkegaard, he claimed. In The Wild Duck (1884)126 Ibsen made a move towards a new dramatic form: the symbolic play. The Wild Duck uses some Christian symbols, and the ideal is represented by Gregers Werle. But Ibsen is interested in the hidden motives behind his idealism. The drama reveals the blindness behind Gregers Werle’s insights. Ibsen never gives up investigating hidden motives. And he has also become more skeptical in relation to the value of truth for life. Do we not need the lies to live our lives? Nietzsche made a similar point about the relationship between history and life: too much historical truth is not good for life. Revealing too much truth is unhealthy. Hedvig sacrifices herself as a result of Gregers Werle’s exaggerated quest for truth. But this sacrifice is not specifically Christian, and Relling states at the end of the drama that it will not have any effect on Hjalmar Ekdal, and that he will transform Hedvig’s death into theatrical declamation in a few months. The sacrifice of the child is connected to Christian ideas, but they are not very specific. Hedvig’s mother Gina speaks with a slip of the tongue about making “crucifixes” for the wild duck,127 and instead of shooting the duck, Hedvig sacrifices herself as a token of her love for her father. Ibsen’s conclusion in this play seems to be rather pessimistic; Hedvig seems to die in vain. But this is of course dependent upon interpretation. Henrik Ibsen, En Folkefiende, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1882. (English translation: An Enemy of the People, in The Oxford Ibsen, vol. 6, pp. 19–126.) 126 Henrik Ibsen, Vildanden, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1884. (English translation: The Wild Duck, in The Oxford Ibsen, vol. 6, pp. 126–242.) 127 Ibsen, Vildanden, p. 120. 125

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In Rosmersholm (1886), Rosmer is a priest. He is an impassionate character who seems to have been in love with Rebecca West without realizing it. Here we meet the same constellation as in The Master Builder (1892); Rebecca is the pagan, wild unethical force reminding one of Hilde Wangel. But her strong will is destroyed by the stiff passivity of Rosmer, and so she is unable to enjoy what she attained by getting rid of Rosmer’s wife Beate, who committed suicide by jumping into the mill pond. At the end of the play Rosmer and Rebecca commit suicide in the very same way as Beate, and this seems to express a compulsion to repeat. They must fulfill the same destiny as Beate, the woman whom they drove to suicide. Their sacrifice resembles some kind of Christian martyr death, but it is not clear at all what the forces are that drive them into the mill pond. They use the words of the Lutheran ritual of marriage as they throw themselves into the water, but it is unclear how this could be understood with reference to Kierkegaard. In The Lady from the Sea,128 there is the conflict between the aesthetic transgression, the longing for the infinite sea, and the ethical confinement in marriage. Ibsen was certainly influenced by Kierkegaard’s “Agnes and the Merman,” but also by Hans Christian Andersen’s mermaid and Oehlenschläger’s poem about “Rosmer Havmand.” Ellida is married to Dr. Wangel, but cannot forget the strange and demonic man from the sea. There are not many Christian references in this play; the basic conflict is between the aesthetic and the ethical, the longing for transcendence versus the freedom that has become constrained by responsibility. A radical like the Norwegian author Arne Garborg did not like the end of the play because it reminded him too much of Hans Lassen Martensen’s Christian Ethics. But Ibsen was more inspired by Darwinism in depicting this longing for the sea than by Kierkegaard. Ibsen speculated about the possibility for the longing for the sea being a result of natural history, because all life started in the sea. Perhaps we have a desire to experience our origin, Ibsen may have thought. Hedda Gabler experiences an aesthetic longing for something ideal, something beautiful, but life as it is, is just boring and ludicrous. Hedda is an egoist, as the Danish author Herman Bang called her in an essay from 1892. She dreams of wine leaves in the hair and greatness, but being such a coward her love becomes destructive. Unable to accept her pregnancy and future motherhood, she burns Løvborg’s manuscript in an almost psychotic state of mind, because she is jealous of this “child” of Thea Elvsted and Løvborg. The combination of jealousy, cowardliness, boredom, and barren aesthetic ideals could remind one of an aesthete in Kierkegaard, but the connection is not convincing. The Master Builder depicts a demonic mode of seclusion and involuntary revelation. Solness experiences a magical communication with Hilde Wangel. The play has an affinity to some of Kierkegaard’s themes, the focus on subjectivity and suffering, the demonic isolation, guilt, and regret, but the evidence of influence is not conclusive.

128 Henrik Ibsen, Fruen fra havet, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1888. (English translation: The Lady from the Sea, in The Oxford Ibsen, vol. 7, pp. 25–165.)

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In Little Eyolf,129 Allmers writes a treatise on human responsibility. In the play we meet the old conflict between responsibility and carnal lust. The child Eyolf has fallen down from a table and become a cripple due to his parent’s spontaneous lovemaking. Ibsen gendered this conflict somewhat stereotypically into a conflict between man and woman. Many of his men lack sensuality, but in contrast the women, like Allmers’ wife Rita, are very warmhearted. This is a classical gendering of the conflict between the reason of man and the irrational sensuality of woman. Kierkegaard also says that women are more sensuous than men. In John Gabriel Borkman130 the protagonist reflects compulsively on his crime from 16 years previous; he is jury, judge, and the accused in one and the same person. He is totally isolated and never gives up his Napoleon-like thoughts of himself. He could be conceived as an aesthetic egoist. Borkman tries to stop time and isolate the self demonically, but there are no formulations by Ibsen which point to a direct influence from Kierkegaard. In the last play, When We Dead Awaken,131 there is a very clear Christian theme of resurrection. The end of the play quotes Brand, and here also God and the avalanche are united, but it is very unclear how this should be interpreted. Irene and Rubek are climbing upwards in the mountains; Maja and her friend Ulfheim are climbing downwards. This symbolizes the classical split between spirituality and sensuality, which Ibsen never succeeded in uniting. We find a possible connection to the aesthetic stage when humans are portrayed as animals, but only Rubek can see the hidden animal in the human face. This reminds one of “Rotation of Crops” in Either/ Or, Part One, where the aesthetic, referring both to Plotinus and the artist Tischbein, plays with the idea of seeing all human beings transformed into animals.132 After Irene was sacrificed on the altar of art, she became crazy. But there seems to be no salvation or clear-cut leap towards faith. The theme of the living dead is often used by Kierkegaard, but Ibsen’s depiction of living death in John Gabriel Borkman and When We Dead Awaken could also be understood without reference to Kierkegaard. The role of Christianity and salvation in this play is very unclear. Ibsen uses religious symbols, but he could hardly be called a Christian. Is there a salvation from human frailty and egoism? We really do not know. In the end human effort and human finality and contingency will be conquered by time, nature and, perhaps, God. In the long run we are not able to solve our own problems and cope with our own accumulated guilt. Ibsen’s pessimism grows in these later plays. It is hard to transcend pessimism when one suffers from old age and increased weakness. Ibsen’s solution is not Christian love and hope, but he shows that the Christian vocabulary— among others—is one of the straws man can cling to.

129 Henrik Ibsen, Lille Eyolf, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1894. (English translation: Little Eyolf, in The Oxford Ibsen, vol. 8, pp. 35–106.) 130 Henrik Ibsen, John Gabriel Borkman, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1896. (English translation: John Gabriel Borkman, in The Oxford Ibsen, vol. 8, pp. 151–233.) 131 Henrik Ibsen, Når vi døde vågner, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1899. (English translation: When We Dead Awaken, in The Oxford Ibsen, vol. 8, pp. 235–97.) 132 SKS 2, 289 / EO1, 300.

Bibliography I. References to Kierkegaard in Ibsen’s Corpus Letter to Frederik Hegel, June 9, 1866, in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vols. 1–23, ed. by Francis Bull, Halvdan Koht, and Didrik Arup Seip, Oslo: Gyldendal 1928–57, vol. 16, p. 158. Letter to Frederik Hegel, March 8, 1867, in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vols. 1–23, ed. by Francis Bull, Halvdan Koht, and Didrik Arup Seip, Oslo: Gyldendal 1928–57, vol. 16, p. 179. Letter to Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, December 9, 1867, in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vols. 1–23, ed. by Francis Bull, Halvdan Koht, and Didrik Arup Seip, Oslo: Gyldendal 1928–57, vol. 16, p. 198. Letter to Georg Brandes, June 26, 1869, in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vols. 1–23, ed. by Francis Bull, Halvdan Koht, and Didrik Arup Seip, Oslo: Gyldendal 1928–57, vol. 16, p. 249. Letter to Peter Hansen, October 28, 1870, in Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vols. 1–23, ed. by Francis Bull, Halvdan Koht, and Didrik Arup Seip, Oslo: Gyldendal 1928–57, vol. 16, p. 318. II. Sources of Ibsen’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Due, Christopher, Erindringer fra Henrik Ibsens ungdomsaar, Copenhagen: Græbes Bogtrykkeri 1909, p. 38. Eitrem, Hans, Ibsen og Grimstad, Oslo: Aschehoug 1940, p. 40. Freihow, Halvdan Wexelsen, Henrik Ibsens ”Brand”: Litterær-psykologisk studie, Oslo: I kommisjon hos Jacob Dybwad 1936, p. 31. Larsen, Karl, Henrik Ibsens episke Brand, Copenhagen and Kristiania, Gyldendalske Boghandel Nordisk Forlag 1907, p. 247. III. Secondary Literature on Ibsen’s Relation to Kierkegaard Andersen, Kristen, “Den religiøse motsetning mellem Søren Kierkegaard og Henrik Ibsen. Foredrag på Universitetet i Oslo, April 16, 1928,” For Kirke og Kultur, vol. 35, no. 4, 1928, pp. 213–33. — “Et svar til hr. dr. theol. Hans Ording,” For Kirke og Kultur, 35, no. 10, 1928, pp. 500–4. — “Svar,” For Kirke og Kultur, 35, no. 5, 1928, pp. 314–16.

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Anderson, E.W., The Influence of Søren Kierkegaard’s Philosophy on Works of Henrik Ibsen, M.A. Thesis, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis 1926. Анонимно [Anonymous], “Предшественник Ибсена” [Ibsen’s Forerunner], Русский вестник, no. 8, 1901, pp. 567–73. Anz, Heinrich, “ ‘Hiobs Gemeinde.’ Überlegungen zur Poetologie des Dichters bei S. Kierkegaard, H. Ibsen, A. Strindberg und K. Blixen,” Text & Kontext, vol. 21, no. 1, 1998, pp. 7–25. Bandak, Henrik, Syndefaldet—tænkning og eksistens. Ødipus—Kierkegaard—Ibsen, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1987. Banks, William, “Kierkegaard and Ibsen Revisited. The Dialectics of Despair in ‘Brand,’ ” Ibsen Studies, vol. 4, 2004, pp. 176–90. Benzow, Kristofer, “Vid skiljevägen,” Vår lösen, vol. 20, no. 5, 1929, pp. 110–11. Beyer, Harald, “Søren Kierkegaards Betydning for norsk Aandsliv,” Edda. Nordisk tidsskrift for litteraturforskning, vol. 19, no. 1, 1923, pp. 1–143. — Søren Kierkegaard og Norge, Kristiania: Aschehoug 1924, pp. 114–90. Brandes, Georg, Æsthetiske Studier, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1868, pp. 234–68. — Henrik Ibsen, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1898, p. 29; p. 50; p. 69; p. 82; p. 88; p. 92; pp. 98–9; p. 102; p. 145. Brynhildsvold, Knut, “Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Marriage in Ibsen’s Dramas— with Constant Regard to Martin Luther, Søren Kierkegaard and ‘Love’s Comedy,’ ” in Ibsen on the Cusp of the 21st Century. Critical Perspectives, ed. by Pål Bjørby, Alvhild Dvergsdal, and Idar Stegane, Laksevåg : Alvheim & Eide 2005, pp. 33–50. Bukdahl, Jørgen, “Ariccia og Rom. Kierkegaard, og Ibsens gennembrud med ‘Brand,’ ” in his Tordenvejret og gentagelsen, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1974, pp. 134–54 (originally in Dansk Udsyn, vol. 49, 1969, pp. 244–60 and Samtiden, no. 79, 1970, pp. 245–62). Bull, Francis, “Innledning” [to Catiline], in Henrik Ibsen, Samlede Verker. Hundreårsutgave, vols. 1–23, ed. by Francis Bull, Halvdan Koht, and Didrik Arup Seip, Oslo: Gyldendal 1928–57, vol. 1, pp. 27–38. Cain, Geoffrey, “The Truth-Seekers: Ibsen, Strindberg, and Kierkegaard as Seen by Georg Brandes,” in Litteratur og magt. Nordisk-baltisk litterært symposium, ed. by Leon Nikulin, Viby: Diapason 2000, pp. 41–55. Caspari, Anna, “Ibsen og kristendommen,” Kirke og Kultur, vol. 26, 1919, pp. 244–53. Chesnais, Pierre G. la, “Ibsen disciple de Kierkegaard?,” Edda, vol. 34, 1934, pp. 355–410. Düwel, Hans, Der Entwicklungsgedanke in Søren Kierkegaards “Entweder-Oder” und in Henrik Ibsens “Komödie der Liebe,” Rostock: Winterberg 1920. Dyrerud, Thor Arvid, “Den kierkegaardske ‘Reflex’ i Ibsens dramatikk,” Bøygen. Tidsskrift for nordisk språk og litteratur, no. 4, 1997, pp. 17–22. — “ ‘Nordic Angst’: Søren Kierkegaard and The Concept of Anxiety in Norway,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2001, pp. 364–77. Erichsen, Valborg, “Søren Kierkegaards betydning for norsk aandsliv,” Edda. Nordisk tidsskrift for litteraturforskning, vol. 19, 1923, pp. 209–429. — “Ibsen og Kierkegaard,” For Kirke og Kultur, vol. 35, 1928, pp. 311–14.

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Sørensen, Ivan Ž., “ ‘Det vidunderlige’ hos Ibsen og Kierkegaard—og i italiensk oversættelse,” Studi Nordici, no. 3, 1996, pp. 37–67. Stobart, Mabel A., “New Light on Ibsen’s ‘Brand,’ ” The Fortnightly Review, vol. 66, 1899, pp. 227–39. Tammany, Jane Ellert, Henrik Ibsen’s Theatre Aesthetics and Dramatic Art. A Reflection of Kierkegaardian Consciousness—its Significance for Modern Dramatic Interpretation and the American Theatre, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin 1979. Theoharis, Theoharis C., “ ‘After the First Death, there Is No Other.’ Ibsen’s ‘Brand’ and Kierkegaard’s ‘Fear and Trembling,’ ” Ibsen Studies, no. 1, 2000, pp. 9–29. Tjønneland, Eivind, ”Den fremmede passasjer—et estetisk problem?,” Agora. Journal for Metafysisk Spekulasjon, nos. 2–3, 1989, pp. 258–319. Tysdahl, Bjørn, “James Joyce, Ibsen og Kierkegaard,” Bokvennen, vol. 11, no. 1, 1999, pp. 40–5. Ueda, Bin,「イブセン」[Ibsen],『早稲田文学』[Waseda Bungaku], vol. 3, no. 7, 1906, pp. 83–94. Unamuno y Jugo, Miguel de, “Ibsen y Kierkegaard,” Los Lunes de El Imparcial, March 25, 1907 (reprinted in Obras completas, vols. 1–9, ed. by Manuel García Blanco, Madrid: Escelicer 1966–71, vol. 3, pp. 289–93). Vinge, Louise, “Kierkegaards kvinnosyn och ‘Ett dockhem,’ ” Res publica, no. 18, 1991, pp. 161–4. Wall, John, “Ibsen and Kierkegaard,” Theatre Research/Recherches Theatrales, vol. 13, 1973–74, pp. 173–9. Wood, Forrest, Jr., “Kierkegaardian Light on Ibsen’s ‘Brand,’ ” The Personalist, vol. 51, 1970, pp. 393–400. Wyller, Egil A., “Ibsen og Kierkegaard. Tre tekst-henvisninger,” Agora. Journal for Metafysisk Spekulasjon, nos. 2–3, 1993, pp. 302–10.

Edvard Munch: The Painter of The Scream and his Relation to Kierkegaard Hans Herlof Grelland

I. Introduction The Norwegian painter and pictorial artist Edvard Munch (1863–1944) repeatedly expressed an interest in and even a close relationship to Søren Kierkegaard. It is, however, difficult to determine the exact nature of this relation. The primary source of information is some scattered statements in Munch’s notes,1 which he produced throughout his life. Many of the notes are autobiographical fragments, describing various incidents from Munch’s life, often with pseudonymous characters which, however, usually are easy to identify. Munch has a peculiar literary style, apparently spontaneous, fragmented, unconcerned about grammatical rules, and often with his own spellings which stick closely to how the words were pronounced orally. This style is of course untranslatable, and the English translation of the text fragments is (and must necessarily be) a normalized version. A second source of information is Munch’s library, which contains indications of what he read of Kierkegaard. The last source is indirect evidence, based on the content of Munch’s art and Kierkegaard’s general influence among contemporary artists and intellectuals. Edvard Munch’s professional career lasted from 1882, when he rented a studio together with some of the most outstanding young Norwegian painters at the time, working under the supervision of Christian Krohg (1852–1925), until his death in 1944, one year before the end of the German occupation of Norway. He lived for several periods in Paris and Berlin, and obtained international fame. During this period of time Søren Kierkegaard exerted a general influence on European intellectuals and artists, particularly in Scandinavia. Kierkegaard’s ideas were much discussed, not least among the so-called Kristiania Bohemians,2 which Munch more or less belonged to in the formative years of his early career. I am thankful for invaluable and generous help from research librarian Lasse Jacobsen at the Munch Museum in Oslo. 1 Edvard Munch’s Notes, Munch Museum Archives, Oslo. See the selection of the notes in Munch in His Own Words, ed. by Poul Erik Tøjner, Munich: Prestel 2001. 2 The name of the Norwegian capital was originally Oslo, but it was renamed Christiania in 1624 by the Danish-Norwegian king Christian IV, who rebuilt the city. The name was changed to Kristiania in 1877 and back to Oslo in 1925.

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In addition to Munch’s own notes, an important source for research into Munch’s reading of Kierkegaard is his private library, which still exists and is at present located at the Munch Museum in Oslo. The library belonged to Munch’s small estate Ekely, outside Oslo, where he lived from 1916 until his death. In this library we can observe Munch’s reading in the last period in his life. Munch’s friend Rolf Stenersen (1899–1978) relates the following: “During the last years of his life, Munch read particularly often in Søren Kierkegaard’s books, but they never inspired him to make drawings.”3 Munch himself wrote in a letter to a friend: My interest has been aroused by your tracing of the spiritual aspect of my art to the Nordic spirituality. I have been annoyed by being associated with the German school (independent of my high esteem of what great Germans have accomplished in art and philosophy). We have here Strindberg—Ibsen and others—(also Hans Jæger). Strangely enough I have managed reading Søren Kierkegaard in the recent years—.4

The only evidence we have of Munch actually reading Kierkegaard’s works in the original is limited to the last part of his life (with one possible exception, as we will see later). So we start our investigation at that point in time, with his library as a source of information. After having investigated what Munch read in the last part of his career, we will go back in time and try to clarify what kind of influence there might have been in earlier stages of his life. This has to be based on indirect evidence from his notes and from his paintings, and from what we know about the environment in which he worked and lived. We will see that, whatever the direct influence there may be, it is easy to see the similarity, and—from Munch’s point of view—the kinship between the two. II. What Munch’s Library Reveals Munch’s library included the following books related to Kierkegaard: The second edition of Kierkegaard’s Collected Works,5 one copy of the first edition of The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air,6 and volume 32 of the Danish series Main Works of the World Literature (1928–30).7 This volume was dedicated to Kierkegaard,

Rolf E. Stenersen, Edvard Munch: Close-up of a Genius, trans. and ed. by Reidar Dittmann, Oslo: Sem & Stenersen 1964 [1945], p. 100 (translation altered by the present author in accordance with the Norwegian original). 4 Letter to Ragnar Hoppe in 1929. In Ragnar Hoppe, “Hos Edvard Munch på Ekely,” Nutida Konst, Stockholm: Föreningen för Nutida Konst 1939. 5 Søren Kierkegaard, Samlede Værker, vols. 1–15, 2nd ed., ed. by A.B. Drachmann, J.L. Heiberg, and H.O. Lange, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1920–36. 6 Søren Kierkegaard, Lilien paa Marken og Fuglen under Himlen. Tre Gudelige Taler, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1849. 7 Gyldendals Bibliotek. Hovedværker af Verdenslitteraturen, vols. 1–52, ed. by Vilhelm Andersen et al., Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1928–30, vol. 34, Søren Kierkegaard, ed. by Eduard Geismar. 3

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and contained short extracts from Kierkegaard’s works and a short biographical introduction. The oldest of these is the copy of The Lily, which is of the first edition, printed in 1849. The copy is worn after extensive reading. It is marked by the name “E.S. Munch,” which must be Munch’s uncle, the priest Edvard Storm Munch (1814–96). We may assume that Edvard Munch himself either must have received the book as a gift, or, more probably, inherited it after his uncle’s death. This means that Munch may have acquired it as early as in April 1896, when he was 32 years old. Thus, this original text of Kierkegaard’s may have been read that early. Munch spent the year 1896 in Paris, having attained international fame. This was during the wave of La Norderie, where Ibsen, Strindberg, and also Munch became fashionable in Paris, and the newspaper Le Figaro wrote: “The Swedes and the Norwegians tyrannize over us.”8 We cannot attribute any decisive significance to the fact that Munch never mentions The Lily. It is well known that Munch usually did not care to tell other people what he read. There is physical evidence that suggests Munch actually read this book, or at least the first part of it. This consists of some markings in the form of hooks written in the margin of the book to emphasize certain passages, and these hooks resemble the parentheses of Munch’s handwritten texts, so they are probably marks made by him. The parable of the lily and the bird is taken from the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6:24–34. To Kierkegaard, the lily and the bird play the role of spiritual teachers to the human beings. The subject of the first part of The Lily is being in the moment, that is, attaining a kind of basic awareness of the present moment, so that the moment “can be used” and not only pass unnoticed. Kierkegaard imagines, and describes poetically, how the lily and the bird have this ability to be in the moment, and that we therefore can make these dumb creatures our teachers. The relevance of this subject to Munch’s art is obvious. The Lily also describes the ways to obtain the moment-awareness, first of all by silence, but then also through obedience and joy. Each of these ways is accounted for by a chapter in the book. Munch’s markings are all in the chapter on silence, appropriate for a melancholic artist with a strong sense of independence. Silence is, according to Kierkegaard, a necessary condition for entering into the awareness of, existing in, and making use of the present moment, a problem of prime importance to an artist who all his life concentrated on transforming into pictures particular striking “passionate moments.” What Munch wanted in his art was to picture such a moment, one single visual and emotional impression, as he himself had experienced it.9 Thus, he did not truly paint the motifs he had before him while painting, but, rather he painted an inner picture fixed in his memory of one particularly significant, emotionally intensified, moment. When he used living models, he used them only as an aid to his memory, and he usually did not care if they changed position during the sitting. Munch had an extraordinary visual memory and could work on such a single visual impression for 8 See Paul Ginsty in Le Figaro, February 11, 1895; quoted from Sue Prideaux, Edvard Munch: Behind The Scream, New Haven and London: Yale University Press 2005, p. 170. 9 Stenersen, Edvard Munch: Close-up of a Genius, pp. 38–41.

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years, producing picture after picture, often using different techniques to recapture the same vision. Munch himself explains his method in the following manner: I painted canvas after canvas according to the momentary impressions that had attracted my eye. I painted the lines and colors that had attached themselves to my inner eye—to my retina. I painted only what I recalled, without adding anything—without details that I no longer saw. That explains the simplicity of the paintings—the seeming emptiness. I painted impressions from my childhood—the blurred colors from those times. By painting the colors, lines, and shapes that I had seen in an emotional mood—I wanted, just like in a phonograph, to stir up the same emotional mood.10

The Lily also deals with the character of “the poet,” who, in Kierkegaard’s conception, is a person in despair, incapable of being in the present and instead immersing himself in longing and wishing. Some of Munch’s markings relate to this thought. The “poet” character later turns up in Munch’s notes, for instance this passage from his draft of a literary work entitled The Mad Poet’s Diary (with obvious reference to Kierkegaard’s “The Seducer’s Diary”): When I write down these notes with drawings—it is not to communicate my own life— It is of importance to me to study certain hereditary phenomena which determine the life and destiny of a human being—Such as the madness phenomena in general. I have made a study of the soul—since I then can study myself—used myself as an anatomic soul preparation—But since the main task is to make a piece of art and a study of the soul, I have modified and exaggerated—and used others for my studies— Thus, it is erroneous to look upon these notes as confessions. Therefore—like Søren Kierkegaard—I split the work into two parts—the painter and his nervous friend, the Poet.11

Some of the markings in The Lily are put next to passages concerning God or nature. According to Kierkegaard, the highest prayer is silence; silence, facing God. Munch marks a passage where Kierkegaard tells us that even the ocean is silent, even when it makes a raging noise, a picture which must have appealed to Munch, who painted so many coastal landscapes. The next book from the library to consider is a volume in the series, Main Works of the World Literature printed in 1928–30.12 Munch owned the entire series, and so he was probably a subscriber. The volume on Kierkegaard is no. 34 out of a total of 52 volumes.13 This particular volume was sent from the publisher Gyldendal on November 28, 1928.14 The date should be compared to the date of Munch’s following entry from February 15, 1929: “During the last year and a half, I have Munch in His Own Words, ed. by Poul Erik Tøjner, Munich: Prestel 2001, p. 64. The translation is altered to bring it closer to the Norwegian original by the present author. MM (Munch Museum) N74. Edvard Munch’s Notes, Munch Museum Archives, Oslo. 11 Arne Eggum, Edvard Munch. Livsfrisen fra maleri til grafikk, Oslo: J.M. Stenersen 1990, p. 21. 12 Gyldendals Bibliotek. Hovedværker af Verdenslitteraturen. 13 Ibid., vol. 34, Kierkegaard. 14 Information given by the publisher Gyldendal, Copenhagen, to the present author. 10

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taken to reading Kierkegaard occasionally. In a strange way it is as if everything is previously experienced—in another life—and so I should like to draw a parallel between his life and mine. I now gather these notes together—I must take care not to be too influenced by Kierkegaard.”15 It is reasonable to see this note as inspired by the reading of volume 34 of Main Works. The volume was edited by Eduard Geismar (1871–1939), who was a professor of theology at the University of Copenhagen and one of the most important Kierkegaard scholars at the time. He had just finished his great work Søren Kierkegaard: Life, Development, and Authorship.16 As opposed to the influential literary critic Georg Brandes (1842–1927), who introduced Kierkegaard to the Scandinavian intellectuals at the end of the nineteenth century, Geismar was deeply sympathetic to Kierkegaard’s religious writings, although simultaneously aware of what he considered as a morbidly depressive side of Kierkegaard’s personality. In the volume considered, Geismar contributed a short biographical introduction before making a selection from Kierkegaard’s works. The copy in Munch’s library appears to be much read at the beginning, including the introduction, while the last section, which focuses more on religion, shows no signs of use. The introduction is interesting because the portrait drawn of Kierkegaard’s father shows his similarity to Munch’s own father Christian Munch. It is also easy to recognize traits of Munch himself in the description of the adolescent Kierkegaard. To the extent that Munch learned about Kierkegaard’s life from Geismar’s introduction, he must have observed these parallels. We will therefore take a closer look at the two fathers and their influences on their sons. III. Two Fathers Kierkegaard’s father Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard (1756–1838) was born into poverty, but had grown into tremendous wealth. His dedication to his business and his ability as a trader is beyond doubt, but his deepest interests were of another kind. This was demonstrated when he retired at the age of 41 to concentrate on the study of spiritual matters. Obviously a man of brilliant intelligence and equipped with an artistic imagination, he was also burdened by a deeply depressed and depressing world outlook, dominated by feelings of sin and guilt. The shadows of his life were made even darker through the sickness and subsequent death of two sons and all three of his daughters over a time span of 15 years. Søren’s older brother Søren Michael died in an accident in 1819 at the age of 12. Michael Kierkegaard’s first-born daughter, Maren Kirstine died in 1822 at the age of 23 after 14 years of sickness, the nature of which is not documented. Thus, Søren’s sister was suffering from this sickness during all of Søren’s childhood until she died when he was nine. The third son, Niels Andreas, had a tragic life; forced by his father to be trained for trade against his will, he fled to America, where he died in 1833. On his deathbed he Munch in His Own Words, ed. by Poul Erik Tøjner, Munich: Prestel 2001, p. 182. MM T2787. Edvard Munch’s Notes, Munch Museum Archives, Oslo. 16 Eduard Geismar, Søren Kierkegaard. Hans Livsudvikling og Forfattervirksomhed, vols. 1–2, Copenhagen: Gads forlag 1927. 15

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sent the warmest thanks to his mother, but scandalously did not mention his father with a single word. In Kierkegaard’s home, the atmosphere was thus dominated by the sickness and death of Søren’s brothers and sisters as well as the guilt-feelings and depressive religious piety of his dominating father. This state was alleviated only by his mother, Ane Kierkegaard (1768–1834), who seems to have been a loving and self-effacing mother, acting as a mediator who calmed the heated discussions between the father and his two intellectually resourceful surviving sons. While we do not have much direct information about her, the testimony of Niels Andreas, and later also of Søren himself at his mother’s death, speaks strongly of a mother who meant a great deal to her children. Geismar writes: From his father he inherited a pathological melancholy, which made him reticent and introverted, [he inherited] a penetrating thought which would cast light on the innermost secret of the soul, and a wonderful imagination….His father [tried to] bring forth a religiosity, in which the unconditioned obedience towards God and a deeply humiliated consciousness of sin was particularly dominant. The cross of Christ was the central point, not as the place from which the grace of God was welling forth, but mainly as the place, where one received an indelible impression of the wickedness of humans.17

This portrait of Kierkegaard’s father would without doubt be recognized by Munch as being indeed similar to his own. Munch’s father Christian Munch (1817–89) was a medical doctor who had his consulting room in the family apartment. Thus, sickness and death were an ever-present reality to the family. After the death of his wife (Munch’s mother) in 1868 when Edvard was five years old, Dr. Munch “whose lighthearted stories had amused and entertained the children, now turned to the Bible for comfort and became a withdrawn religious brooder.”18 Edvard himself had vivid memories from his mother’s death and the days before. Then, in 1877, when Edvard was 14 years old, a new blow hit the family with the death of Edvard’s older sister Sophie, born in 1862. Sophie’s death has been made memorable for all time through Edvard’s painting of her as The Sick Child. It is generally supposed that Christian Munch, as a doctor and as a pious Christian, developed a feeling of guilt confronted by his own inability to help, be it through medicine or prayer. But Dr. Munch had more than his depressed state of mind and melancholic brand of religious piety in common with Kierkegaard’s father. He is also reported to be a dreamy sort of person with a strong imagination, who loved reading and telling legends and fairytales to his children in the evenings, stories that were often unsuitable for the small children who would listen to them wide-eyed. However, Stenersen reports that the death of Christian Munch’s wife put an end to this as well, and legends and fairytales were replaced by reading of the Bible (which may be supposed to be no less stimulating and frightening to a child’s imagination).19 Thus, we see, as Edvard must certainly have done, the similarities between the family stories of Søren Kierkegaard and of himself. Even Søren’s mother had a counterpart in Edvard’s faithful and ever supportive aunt Karen Bjølstad Hovedværker af Verdenslitteraturen, vol. 34, Kierkegaard, p. 7. See Stenersen, Edvard Munch: Close-up of a Genius, p. 8. 19 Ibid., p. 14. 17 18

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(1839–1931), who moved into Christian Munch’s household and took care of the children at her sister’s death. It is easy to understand how Edvard Munch could write of Kierkegaard’s life as one “where in a curious way everything is as if experienced earlier”—by Munch himself. IV. Kierkegaard’s Collected Works The library also includes a complete copy of the second edition of Kierkegaard’s Collected Works, that is, the Samlede Værker, which was published from 1920 to 1936. At that time, the book’s pages had to be cut by hand in order to be read. Thus, by observing what has been cut, we have an indication of what the owner of a book may have read. This applies to Munch’s copy of the Collected Works, which for the most part is uncut and hence unread. We will take a closer look at what has been cut and thus probably has been read by Munch. In Either/Or, only part two of “The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage” is cut, but this is done only from p. 121 onwards. Repetition and Fear and Trembling are both cut, the last one with the exception of the “Problemata.” In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, only the “Preface,” “Introduction,” and Part One are cut. In Stages on Life’s Way the first 31 pages, and in A Literary Review the first 61 pages are cut. In Works of Love we find what seems to be random, sporadic cutting, independent of chapters. Munch’s motivation for this reading is expressed in the following comment: “To read Kierkegaard is to experience oneself.”20 V. Anxiety Munch’s copy of The Concept of Anxiety is cut, and the copy also appears to be much read, more than the other volumes of Collected Works. The parts which are not cut are the following: Caput III, up to § 1; Caput IV, the three first pages; three pages from Caput IV, § 1; the two final pages in Caput V. This implies that the famous chapter on “the demonic” (“Anxiety about the Good”) is unread, and so is the final part of the last chapter on “Anxiety as Saving through Faith.” Altogether, the uncut parts make only a minor part of the book. It becomes clear from a close examination of the copy that The Concept of Anxiety is the most extensively read among Kierkegaard’s books in Munch’s library. It is, of course, not surprising that this book has attracted the most interest from Munch, since anxiety (dread, angst) is known to be a main theme in Munch’s art. But there may be more to it than just treating a common subject: we can observe a close correspondence between how Kierkegaard and Munch saw the phenomenon of anxiety. Kierkegaard’s theory of anxiety begins with an attempt to understand and interpret the concept of Original Sin (in Danish, Arvesynd, literally, “inherited or hereditary sin”), which, according to Kierkegaard, concerns the fall that every individual goes through, and for which the narrative of Adam and Eve’s fall is a prototype. The fall MM T2744. Edvard Munch’s Notes. Munch Museum Archives, Oslo.

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is associated with choice, and hence with freedom, with being confronted with the possible, and in particular with possibilities which are experienced simultaneously as being frightening and attractive. Anxiety leads to a weakness or powerlessness, a weakness which opens up the possibility of being seduced, be it by the serpent, as in the narrative of Adam and Eve, or by the pseudonymous author of the “Diary of the Seducer.” However, anxiety is not associated with a clear and distinct consciousness of being free; it is rather felt in an initial “dreaming state,” a vague awareness of the innocent person before he wakes up to a reflected consciousness of freedom, choice, responsibility, and guilt. “This is the profound secret of innocence; that it is at the same time anxiety.”21 Kierkegaard defines anxiety in three ways. The first definition is found already in a journal entry, where he makes notes for The Concept of Anxiety and formulates the basic idea of the book. In Journal JJ he writes: “Anxiety is a desire for what one fears, a sympathetic antipathy. Anxiety is an alien power that seizes the individual, and yet one cannot tear oneself away from it, and one does not want to do so. For one fears, but what one fears, one desires.”22 In The Concept of Anxiety this definition is formulated thus: “When we consider the dialectic determinations of anxiety, it appears that exactly these have psychological ambiguity. Anxiety is a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy.”23 The second definition relates anxiety to freedom: Anxiety may be compared to dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when…freedom looks down on its own possibility.24

This point of view on anxiety is exemplified by Adam, who is confronted with God’s prohibition against eating the fruits from two of the trees in the garden: “The prohibition induces in him anxiety, for the prohibition awakens in him freedom’s possibility. What passed by innocence as the nothing of anxiety has now entered into Adam and here again it is nothing—the anxious possibility of being able.”25 The third definition of anxiety given by Kierkegaard establishes a connection to the subject we have already reflected on, that of being in the moment: “In the individual life, anxiety is the moment—to use a new expression that says the same as was said in the previous discussion.”26 Thus, it is made clear that Kierkegaard does not consider these as three different definitions, but as three ways of saying the same thing. Freedom exists only in the moment, and it is in the experience of the present moment that freedom can be experienced by the individual. Furthermore, the anxiety created by the beginning 23 24 25 26 21 22

SKS 4, 347 / CA, 41. SKS 18, 311, JJ:511 / KJN 2, 286. SKS 4, 348 / CA, 42. SKS 4, 365 / CA, 61. SKS 4, 350 / CA, 44. SKS 4, 384 / CA, 81.

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awareness of freedom is related to the fact that we are frightened and attracted at the same time by the possibilities opened up to us by our freedom. Although this theory of anxiety has a general form, in the nineteenth century it became inevitably associated with sexuality, in particular for people like Kierkegaard and Munch, whose fathers combined a deep religious piety with a persistent feeling of guilt and sinfulness which they imposed on their children. In such a setting, sexuality represented a particularly intensified case of “antipathetic sympathy,” of a forbidden and frightening desire. We find evidence of this in several passages of The Concept of Anxiety. To Kierkegaard it was clear that there is a close connection between sin and sexuality. Sexuality was constituted by the fall of Adam and Eve: “The consequence [of the fall] is a double one; that sin came into the world and that sexuality was posited; the one is to be inseparable from the other.”27 He writes further, “By Adam’s sin, sinfulness entered into the world, and for Adam, sexuality came to signify sinfulness. The sexual was posited.”28 Kierkegaard assumes a difference between the attitude of the male and the female towards the sexual desire: What is assumed to be recognized in all experience, I shall merely point out by an imaginatively constructed observation. Picture an innocent young girl; let a man fasten his desirous glance upon her, and she becomes anxious. In addition, she might become indignant, etc., but first she will be in anxiety. On the other hand, if I picture a young woman fastening her desirous look upon an innocent young man, his mood will not be anxiety but disgust mingled with modesty, precisely because he is more qualified as a spirit.29

“More qualified as a spirit” in Kierkegaard’s sense means more reflected, less dominated by emotional spontaneity, which Kierkegaard assumes is characteristic of the woman. In spite of this, Kierkegaard points out that “sexuality is not sinfulness,”30 although adding that “A perfect spirit cannot be conceived as sexually qualified.”31 It is obvious in The Concept of Anxiety that Kierkegaard really struggles with saving sexuality from being sinful as such. It seems clear that Kierkegaard’s way of thinking about anxiety, in particular in relation to sexuality, must have been recognized by Munch as similar to his own way of thinking. In Munch’s autobiographical fragments, we meet the author in a state of anxiety in his confrontation with sexuality. In Kierkegaard’s scheme, Munch reacts both like a female in anxiety and like a male in disgust. His early experiences become particularly important to Munch. His extreme sensibility and his extraordinary capacity for recollecting the “passionate moments” of his life are clearly demonstrated in his paintings, where he is able to work on expressing the emotions of singular events (like the death of his sister Sophie in the versions of The Sick Child) many years after the event took place. Thus many of the events vividly described in his notes are keys to the understanding of Munch as an artist. SKS 4, 353 / CA, 48. SKS 4, 371 / CA, 67. 29 SKS 4, 371 / CA, 66. 30 SKS 4, 382 / CA, 79. 31 Ibid. 27 28

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In his writing, Munch was influenced by his friend Hans Jæger (1854–1910). Jæger was an author, notoriously famous for his views on morality and in particular for his book From the Kristiania Bohemian,32 which was confiscated by the police on its day of publication on account of its direct description of sexual acts. In addition, Jæger, who, of all things, was a stenographer at the Norwegian parliament, was an avowed anarchist, the author of The Bible of Anarchy.33 He was a leading figure in the circle called The Kristiania Bohemians, which consisted of rebellious young people, for the most part artists, who opposed the bourgeois way of life and recommended a break with one’s family and upbringing. Hans Jæger was also known to be deeply influenced by Kierkegaard, and supported a principle of living passionately and in unrestricted openness. One should “write one’s life” with unscrupulous honesty. This was seen as living in accordance with the slogan “subjectivity is the truth” and with fully “being oneself.” This kind of attitude gave support to Munch’s own program of painting his own “subjective truth.” On the other hand, Munch never became an explicit spokesman of unlimited sexual freedom, and above all, he never broke with his family, which he always was closely tied to and dependent on—including his father, who was unable to understand him, and who suffered from the general criticism that Edvard’s art was subject to and from his contact with the Bohemians, especially the notorious Jæger. Munch’s earliest and, according to what we can read from his notes, probably most important erotic and sexual experience, which had a lasting impact to his emotional life, was his affair with Mrs. Emilie (“Millie”) Thaulow. Although it grew into a sexual relationship, it was anything but the frivolous adventure of a libertine. The relation was burdened the entire time with guilt feelings. Millie Thaulow was married to Carl Thaulow, a medical doctor, and hence a colleague of Edvard’s father, and he was the brother of the prominent Norwegian painter Fritz Thaulow (1847–1906), a colleague of Edvard himself. Millie was 25 years old when she was introduced to Edvard Munch, but was already a celebrated femme fatale, with red hair and green eyes, so beautiful that every man turned to look at her, and with her own somewhat unorthodox ideas about morals. Munch met her for the first time on a recreational visit to a peaceful place by the Oslo Fjord. In his notes he gives himself the name of “Brandt”: They had spent the afternoon together. She had shown him the most beautiful parts of the landscape—But most of the time they spent in the forest—She wanted to visit a 0 (female) friend, and they walked together on the way through the forest. They spent much time there—she wanted to show him a beautiful flower, and then a beautiful part of the forest which was so delightfully fascinating charming. And then they should pick mushrooms. There were so many strange mushrooms she wanted to show him. Then it happened that they simultaneously became aware of a mushroom—then they ran to pick it first, and their hands touched as they were about to pick it. She got read roses on her cheeks and looked young and radiant. He had almost forgotten that she was married; to him she was like a schoolgirl.34 Hans Jæger, Fra Kristiania-bohemen, Oslo: Novus 1976 (1885). Hans Jæger, Anarkiets bibel, Oslo: Cappelen 1979 (1906). 34 MM N98. Edvard Munch’s Notes, Munch Museum Archives, Oslo. 32 33

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Then she had to go home—She was going back to the empty deserted house—the maid had gone to sleep—and she put herself to bed alone in the wide double bed—I wonder if she thinks I am stupid who does not ask for a kiss, Brandt thought. He did not sleep well at night—he was thinking that he never had kissed anyone—imagine holding her around her waist and putting the mouth against her.35 I don’t like the light [she says]—I prefer the moon when it is behind the cloud like that—it is so delightfully secretive and the light is so indiscrete. I like the sun and the light mostly in the pale summer nights. I feel like this, she said after a while—on nights like tonight I could do anything—something terribly wrong. Brandt looked into a pair of large, dark eyes.36

Munch visited Millie many times that summer. It is not clear how far they went in intimacy at this stage, but Munch writes in his notes that he seduced her. In the autumn they resumed contact in Kristiania. Munch describes one of their meetings: Then he looked at the fur bedcover—come—Then he felt at once that it was disgusting that they should go over there like that—that she knew what he meant. They sat down— he did not feel any wish—he discovered the wrinkle at the corner of the mouth. He rather wanted her to look away. So he did not want to look at her—he wanted to have what he had dreamt about—He laid down on her—He wanted—They said nothing—he felt humiliated—and an infinite listlessness and sadness—she stroked his wet hair—Poor you—He went to the fireplace and sat down on the bedcover and supported his head by his hands—Thou shalt not commit adultery—He remembered at once the feeling he had when he was small and his father read the Commandments—He had committed adultery—it suddenly turned so ugly—He repeated the word several times—Adultery, Adultery—but it always became so ugly—Was this what he had dreamt of, fought for so long—this anxious pleasure with an immense listlessness afterwards—37

This highly condensed description contains many elements parallel to Kierkegaard’s theory of anxiety: the fear and repulsion involved in the “anxious pleasure” or antipathetic sympathy, the disgust of the man (due to his “higher spirit”), the weakness (listlessness) associated with anxiety, and, not an explicit part of Kierkegaard’s theory, but readable between the lines in The Concept of Anxiety, the reference to the father and his teaching of traditional moral principles, leading to the experience of “adultery” as ugly. Thus it is easy to see why Munch found The Concept of Anxiety deeply interesting when he read it many years after the incident described here. Munch had affairs with several women after Millie, but later in his life he wrote, referring to himself in the third person, that many years later “The memory of his first love penetrates him like a dark shadow.”38

MM N104. Edvard Munch’s Notes, Munch Museum Archives, Oslo. MM N97. Edvard Munch’s Notes, Munch Museum Archives, Oslo. 37 MM N465. Edvard Munch’s Notes, Munch Museum Archives, Oslo. 38 Munch in His Own Words, ed. by Poul Erik Tøjner, p. 183. MM T2734. Edvard Munch’s Notes, Munch Museum Archives, Oslo. 35 36

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VI. Artistic Expression: The Frieze of Life In 1929 Munch wrote about Kierkegaard, in comparison with his own art: “there are some strange parallels….I now understand why people so often have compared my pictures to him.”39 This short fragment contains significant information. First of all, it shows that Munch himself was unaware of any influence from Kierkegaard while he was working on his pictures. Second, we are told that his contemporaries have pointed out for him the similarities between his pictures and Kierkegaard’s philosophy. Thus, Kierkegaard’s writing on anxiety must have been discussed in relation to Munch’s pictures. The third point is that Munch, when reading Kierkegaard, confirms that he himself is struck by the similarity between Kierkegaard and himself. It is beyond the scope of this article to present a comprehensive analysis of Munch’s art, but it will be illuminating to consider briefly some examples. Munch collected some of his most important paintings into a series which he called The Frieze of Life.40 The paintings of the Frieze are also those with the most characteristic Kierkegaardian feeling. The Frieze is divided into four series: Germ of Love, Blooming and Perish of Love, Anxiety, and Death. Munch wanted to portray the whole cycle of human life, from birth to death. Love and anxiety are continuous themes in all these pictures. Much of the early tension associated with Munch’s first meetings with Millie is reflected in The Voice (also titled Summer Night), which presents a woman between trees close to the shore in the moonlight, and with the water in the background. The moon reflects in the water, making a dimly lighted shape of a phallus intensified by the straight upright trees surrounding the woman. Significantly, she is dressed in an innocent white dress, which, however, is blurred by the blue shadiness of the moonlit night. In the girl’s face we recognize the “big dark eyes” of Munch’s description of his first encounter with Millie. We feel in the picture the tension between the innocence of the young girl and the erotic attraction filling the picture. So this is the incipient “antipathetic sympathy.” A similar feeling is found in Attraction, where the male figure is included in the picture. The man is deadly pale, and his face is in fact similar to the face in The Scream. The introduction of the man in the scene implies the introduction of anxiety. In the three paintings Kiss, Vampire, and Madonna, we have left the initial stage of erotic tension and moved into the physical encounters and the fulfilled sexual act. Madonna has the beauty of an icon, demonstrating Munch’s intention of elevating the moment of sexual fulfillment into something beautiful and holy, which should move the onlooker to “take off his hat, as if he had been in a church.”41 This painting apparently pictures the sexual beyond the anxiety. However, in the lithographic 39 Thor Arvid Dyrerud, “Innledende essay,” in Søren Kierkegaard, Begrepet Angst, Oslo: Oktober 2001, p. xxxv. 40 See, for example, Arne Eggum, Reinhold Heller, Carla Lathe, and Gerd Woll, Munch: The Frieze of Life, ed. by Mara-Helen Wood, Oslo: National Gallery Publications 1993. 41 Munch in His Own Words, ed. by Poul Erik Tøjner, p. 60. MM N63. Edvard Munch’s Notes, Munch Museum Archives, Oslo.

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versions of the picture, a frame is added, containing swimming sperms and the face of a fetus, which again carries an expression similar to the character in Scream. Anxiety reveals itself again. In the paintings Evening at Karl Johan [Street], Anxiety, and The Scream, anxiety is the dominant theme. It is written into the ghostly pale faces and their widely open eyes with frightened expressions. The first two of these paintings have much in common. The people portrayed are obviously from the bourgeoisie, tightly and correctly dressed in black and wearing hats. The contrast between the style of clothing and the facial expressions is striking. The correct and successful bourgeois of the nineteenth century, the pillar of society and the guarantor of proper behavior is, as painted by Munch, ridden by anxiety. And they are all together in this. The Scream differs from these two since the main figure in the painting is disconnected from any social context. Here the feeling of anxiety is intensified, filling the whole space, that is, the whole mind of the anxious person. VII. Kierkegaard’s General Influence on Munch’s Early Career When we try to investigate the possible influence of Kierkegaard on Munch in the first part of his career, before reading Kierkegaard’s works, we are left with indirect evidence. We know that in the circles in which he moved there was great interest in Kierkegaard’s thought, and so he could not avoid being exposed to Kierkegaard’s ideas. Some prior interest in or knowledge of Kierkegaard must also be assumed in order to explain why he took the step to subscribe to the Complete Works. One of the dominant figures in the intellectual life in Scandinavia in the nineteenth century was Georg Brandes. He was an extremely influential critic and essayist, who passed judgment on most of the contemporary writers in the Nordic countries in sharply critical and elegantly formulated essays which still are highly readable. In 1877 he wrote a 125-page essay, Søren Kierkegaard: A Critical Presentation in an Outline,42 which became very influential. This was an early attempt at giving a unified presentation of Kierkegaard’s life and works. Brandes was critical of Kierkegaard in many respects. Among other things, Brandes himself had no interest in religion, being a spokesman for modern, secular humanism. Brandes thought, however, that many of Kierkegaard’s insights could be interpreted in a secular context, and he opened the door for Kierkegaard to exert an influence on circles that were critical or indifferent to Christianity—like Hans Jæger and the Kristiania Bohemians. For many of Munch’s contemporaries, the central message to be learnt from Kierkegaard was the emphasis on the individual, the role of passion and the principle of taking responsibility for one’s own life, making one’s own individual and independent choices in unrestricted honesty, acceptance of paradoxical thinking as opposed to traditional rationalism, and an “all or nothing” attitude (either/or) as opposed to making compromises and adjusting to traditional habits, and a desire for the infinite and ideal instead of a life of compromise. Georg Brandes, Søren Kierkegaard. En kritisk Fremstilling i Grundrids, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1877. 42

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This way of thinking appealed to the young Norwegians at the fin-de-siècle. The Norwegian author and critic Kristian Mandrup Elster (1841–81) wrote in 1873 that Kierkegaard’s outlook was closer to the Norwegian mentality than to the Danish,43 a view later supported by Professor Harald Beyer (1891–1960) in his comprehensive study of the influence of Kierkegaard on Norwegian authors.44 We can safely say that Kierkegaard was known and discussed by all intellectuals and artists of any importance in Norway at the end of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth. He was criticized by some or admired by others, and sometimes both by the same person, but everybody had opinions and took a stand on him. As early as 1867 Brandes stated that Kierkegaard, in Scandinavia, was “the thinker who carried the greatest weight in the intellectual upbringing of the younger generation.”45 This view is supported by Arne Eggum, who writes: One should be aware of the fact that the poet-philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s thoughts during the maturing years of Munch was a yeast dough in the intellectual circles in Kristiania, as in the Nordic countries in general. In his profound analysis of the essence of anxiety, and in particular the existential anxiety of the genius in The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard touches on the role of the painter in several passages. In one passage, he speaks about the future artists who, in spite of “outward gifts, do not choose the broad way but rather the pain, the distress, and the anxiety….Such a struggle is indubitably very exhausting, because there will come moments when they almost regret having begun it and recall with melancholy, at times possibly unto despair, the smiling life that would have opened before them had they pursued the immediate inclination of their talent.”46

Sue Prideaux has pointed out another possible influence by identifying a connection between the representation of time in Munch and his contemporaries and Kierkegaard’s concept of repetition,47 in particular in connection with a collection of paintings called the Death Series:48 The Death Series is an extraordinary complex group of pictures as well as an extraordinary complex group of imaginings. However, Munch was by no means the only one of his contemporaries interested in series paintings. Monet, Courbet, Cézanne, Degas, and Hiroshige’s interest in the concept of the series occurred simultaneously with the interest in Kierkegaard’s concept of repetition as the crucial category of time in the modern era.49

We can draw the conclusion that Munch could hardly avoid the influence of Kierkegaard in the contemporary intellectual and artistic circles where he moved, although a more conscious and reflective relation to Kierkegaard was not established Harald Beyer, Søren Kierkegaard og Norge, Oslo: Aschehoug 1924, p. 222. Ibid. p. 222. 45 Georg Brandes, Henrik Ibsen, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1898, p. 29. 46 Eggum, Edvard Munch. Livsfrisen fra maleri til grafikk, p. 226. The reference corresponds to SKS 4, 408 / CA, 107. 47 Prideaux, Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream, pp. 154–6. 48 Including The Deathbed, Death in the Sickroom, and By the Deathbed (Fever). 49 Prideaux, Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream, p. 155. 43 44

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until he started reading his works about 1926, that is, during the last twenty years of his life. A possible exception may be his reading of The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air, which probably took place earlier, a text deeply in accordance with the basic thinking of the painter of the passionate moment.

Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Munch’s Corpus Edvard Munch’s Notes. Munch Museum Archive, Oslo. N253; N2273; N2507; T 2734; T 2744 (p. 9; p. 15; p. 16; pp. 33–4), T 2787. (N = Notes, letters, drafts for letters on sheets of paper, and notes in printed books and catalogues. T = Notes in bound sketchbooks and diaries, and on drawings.) Munch in His Own Words, ed. by Poul Erik Tøjner, Munich: Prestel 2001, p. 174; pp. 182–3. II. Sources of Munch’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Gyldendals Bibliotek. Hovedværker af Verdenslitteraturen, vols. 1–52, ed. by Vilhelm Andersen et al., Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1928–30, vol. 34, Søren Kierkegaard, ed. by Eduard Geismar. Kierkegaard, Søren, Lilien paa Marken og Fuglen under Himlen. Tre Gudelige Taler, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1849. — Samlede Værker, vols. 1–15, 2nd ed., ed. by A.B. Drachmann, J.L. Heiberg, and H.O. Lange, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1920–36. III. Secondary Literature on Munch’s Relation to Kierkegaard Dyrerud, Thor Arvid, “Innledende essay” in Søren Kierkegaard, Begrepet Angst, Oslo: Oktober 2001, pp. xxxiii–xxxv. — “ ‘Nordic Angst’: Søren Kierkegaard and The Concept of Anxiety in Norway,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2001, pp. 364–77. — “Norway: You Have No Truth Onboard! Søren Kierkegaard’s Influences on Norway,” in Kierkegaard’s International Reception, Tome I, Northern and Western Europe, ed. by Jon Stewart, Aldershot: Ashgate 2009 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 8), p. 122; p. 146; pp. 152–4. Eggum, Arne, Edvard Munch. Livsfrisen fra maleri til grafikk, Oslo: J.M. Stenersen 1990, p. 18; pp. 20–1; pp. 206–7; pp. 225–6; p. 246; p. 259; p. 273. — Edvard Munch. Malerier og studier, Oslo: J.M. Stenersen 2003, p. 46; p. 72; p. 108; p. 281. Grelland, Hans Herlof, Tausheten og øyeblikket. Kierkegaard-Ibsen-Munch, Kristiansand: Høyskoleforlaget 2007, pp. 185–226. Hoppe, Ragnar, “Hos Edvard Munch på Ekely,” in Nutida Konst, Stockholm: Föreningen för nutida konst 1939, pp. 8–19.

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Howe, Jeffery: “The Scandinavian Conscience: Kierkegaard, Ibsen and Munch” in Edvard Munch: Psyche, Symbol and Expression, Boston: McMullen Museum of Art and Boston College 2001, pp. 20–30. Prideaux, Sue, Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream, New Haven, Connecticut and London: Yale University Press 2005, p. 83; 155; p. 186. Stenersen, Rolf E., Nærbilde af et geni, Oslo: Gyldendal norsk forlag 1945, p. 54; p. 188. (English translation: Edvard Munch: Close-up of a Genius, trans. by Reidar Dittmann, Oslo: Sem & Stenersen 1994, p. 29; p. 100.)

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Index of Persons

Abraham, 20, 38, 39, 43, 162. Achilles, 149. Adam, 39, 184. and Eve, 183–5. Agnes and the Merman, 170. Ahasverus, see “Wandering Jew.” Ahlin, Lars (1915–97), Swedish author, 3–13, 37, 38. Andersen, Hans Christian (1805–75), Danish poet, novelist and writer of fairy tales, 7, 10, 170. Antigone, 150. Aristophanes, 164. Augustine of Hippo (354–430), church father, 4, 40. Bang, Herman (1857–1912), Danish author and critic, 170. Barth, Karl (1886–1968), Swiss Protestant theologian, 3, 5, 7, 11. Benedictsson (originally Bruzelius), Victoria (1850–88), Swedish author, 15–25. Benjamin, Walter (1892–1940), German philosopher, 90. Benktson, Benkt-Erik, 42. Bergenmar, Jenny, 60. Bernheim, Hippolyte (1840–1919), French physicist, 82. Beyer, Harald (1891–1960), Norwegian literary historian, 150, 157–60, 190. Bjarnason, Loftur L., 79. Bjølstad, Karen (1839–1931), Edvard Munch’s aunt, 182. Bjørnson, Bjørnstjerne (1832–1910), Norwegian author, 67, 78, 109–44, 145, 156, 162, 163, 166.

Bloom, Harold (b. 1930), American literary critic, 32. Bøgh, Erik (1822–99), Danish author, 112. Bohlin, Torsten (1889–1950), Swedish theologian, 31, 32. Bohr, Niels (1885–1962), Danish physicist, 32, 33. Bosch, Hieronymus (ca. 1450–1516), Dutch painter, 28. Boström, Christopher, Jacob (1797–1866), Swedish philosopher, 74. Brandes, Edvard (1847–1931), Danish politician and author, 66. Brandes, Georg (1842–1927), Danish author and literary critic, 15, 17, 18, 20, 21, 34, 45, 54–9, 66, 75, 79, 80, 109, 119, 120, 122–30, 139, 155, 156, 159, 167–9, 181, 189. Brandt, Frithiof (1892–1968), Danish philosopher, 37. Bremer, Fredrika (1801–65), Swedish author, 20. Bruun, Christopher (1839–1920), Norwegian pastor and educator, 155. Buber, Martin (1878–1965), German philosopher, 30, 31. Buckle, Henry Thomas (1821–62), English historian, 79. Bull, Francis, 147. Byron, George Gordon Noel (1788–1824), English poet, 19. Camus, Albert (1903–60), French author, 3, 45. Caspari, Carl Poul (1814–92), Norwegian theologian, 124.

196

Kierkegaard’s Influence on Literature, Criticism and Art

Cézanne, Paul (1839–1906), French painter, 190. Chesnais, Pierre Georget la (1865–1948), French literary critic, 150, 160. Christ, 146, 165, 179. Courbet, Gustave (1819–77), French painter, 190. Dante, Alighieri (1265–1321), Italian poet, 104. Degas, Edgar (1834–1917), French painter, 190. De Man, Paul (1919–83), Belgian-born American literary theorist, 91. Diogenes Laertius, 44. Diotima, 152. Don Juan, 42, 45, 60, 147, 166. Donna Elvira, 46, 147. Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich (1821–81), Russian author, 3. Eckhart or Meister Eckhart (ca. 1260–ca. 1328), German mystic, 31. Edström, Vivi Blom (b. 1923), Swedish literary scholar, 59. Eggum, Arne, 190. Ek, Bengt, 61. Ekman, Hans-Göran, 6. Elkan, Sophie (1853–1921), Swedish novelist, 57. Elster, Kristian Mandrup (1841–81), Norwegian author and critic, 190. Erichsen, Valborg Lynner, 148, 152, 154, 155, 157–60. Espmark, Kjell, 41. Essen, Siri von (1850–1912), Swedishspeaking Finnish actress, 68. Falbe Hansen, Ida (1849–1922), Danish translator, 61. Faust, 147, 148, 166. Furuland, Lars, 6. Garborg, Arne, 170.

Geijerstam, Gustaf af (1858–1909), Swedish novelist, 82. Geismar, Eduard (1871–1939), Danish theologian, 181, 182. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749–1832), German poet, author, scientist and diplomat, 146, 148, 163. Gran, Gerhard, 157, 158. Gretchen, 147. Grundtvig, Nikolai Frederik Severin (1783–1872), Danish theologian, historian, poet and author, 122–30, 139, 156. Gustav I of Sweden (1496–1560), 78. Gyllensten, Lars (1921–2006), Swedish author, 9, 27–51. Hamacher, Werner (b. 1948), German literary critic, 91. Hamre, Kari, 162. Hansen, Peter, 157. Hansson, Gunnar D., 5, 7–9. Hedberg, Frans (1828–1908), Swedish dramatist, 70. Hegel, Frederik (1817–87), Danish publisher, 128, 156. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770–1831), German philosopher, 36, 76, 118, 119, 146, 163, 166, 167. Heiberg, Johan Ludvig (1791–1860), Danish poet, playwright and philosopher, 118, 150. Heiberg Johanne Luise (1812–90), Danish actress and author, 115, 116, 118, 119. Heiberg, Peter Andreas (1864–1926), Danish archivist, 54. Helveg, Frederik (1816–1901), Danish pastor and author, 156. Helweg, Hjalmar (1886–1960), Danish psychologist, 31. Hengstenberg, Ernst Wilhelm (1802–69), German Lutheran theologian, 124. Hercules, 150.

Index of Persons Hiroshige, Ando (1797–1858), Japanese painter, 190. Høedt, Frederik (1820–85), Danish instructor and actor, 121. Høffding, Harald (1843–1931), Danish philosopher, 54, 60. Hofmannsthal, Hugo von (1874–1929), German author, 94. Høgsbro, Sofus (1822–1902), Danish politician and editor, 128. Hohlenberg, Johannes (1881–1960), Danish painter and writer, 30. Holberg, Ludvig (1684–1754), DanishNorwegian dramatist and historian, 166. Hostrup, Jens Christian (1818–92), Danish minister of the church and author, 124. Hviid, Christian, 131. Ibsen, Henrik (1828–1906), Norwegian playwright, 17, 59, 61, 67, 77, 79, 80, 145–76, 178, 179. Isaksson, Hans, 32, 35, 78. Jacobsen, Jens Peter (1847–85), Danish author, 67. Jæger, Hans (1854–1910), Norwegian author, 178, 186, 189. Job, 162. Johnson, Gisle (1822–94), Norwegian theologian, 124. Jor, Finn (b. 1929), Norwegian journalist and writer, 37. Joyce, James (1882–1941), Irish author, 44. Jungersen, Frederik (1836–1912), Danish theologian, 113. Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804), German philosopher, 10, 30, 36. Keijser, Gustaf Jakob (1844–1916), Swedish philosopher, 53. Kielland, Alexander (1849–1906), Norwegian writer, 18, 67.

197

Kierkegaard, Ane (1768–1834), Søren Kierkegaard’s mother, 182. Kierkegaard, Michael Pedersen (1756–1838), Søren Kierkegaard’s father, 181. Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye (1813–55) From the Papers of One Still Living (1838), 7, 10. The Concept of Irony (1841), 44, 91, 151, 164. Either/Or (1843), 7, 17, 19, 21, 23, 28, 31, 35, 37, 39, 41, 43, 45–7, 54, 58–60, 66, 70–2, 75, 82, 118, 119, 145, 147, 149–54, 158, 160, 164–6, 169, 171, 180, 183, 184. Fear and Trembling (1843), 8, 20, 38–40, 43, 162, 183. Repetition (1843), 42, 44, 82, 95, 96, 162, 183. The Concept of Anxiety (1844), 39, 40, 82, 162, 165, 183–5, 187, 190. Stages on Life’s Way (1845), 17, 19, 21, 22, 47, 60, 150, 152, 154, 183. Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), 42, 45, 146, 183. A Literary Review of Two Ages (1846), 183. Works of Love (1847), 58, 183. “The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress” (1848), 114–19, 139. On My Activity as a Writer (1848), 118, 119. The Point of View for My Work as an Author (ca. 1848), 34, 81. The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air: Three Devotional Discourses (1849), 54, 160, 178, 179, 180, 191. The Sickness unto Death (1849), 8, 10, 46, 163, 165, 166. Practice in Christianity (1850), 5, 54, 60, 75. The Moment (1855), 110, 121, 122, 125, 131, 134, 135, 136, 156, 159.

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Kierkegaard’s Influence on Literature, Criticism and Art

Journals, Notebooks, Nachlaß, 4, 110, 112, 114, 137, 138, 184. Kihlmann, Erik, 147–52. King Gustav Vasa, see “Gustav I of Sweden.” Koch, Carl (1860–1925), Danish theologian, 54, 60. Krohg, Christian (1852–1925), Norwegian painter and author, 177. Lagerlöf, Selma (1858–1940), Swedish author, 53–64. Larsen, Karl, 155. Larson, Philip E., 147, 149, 150. Leibniz, Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von (1646–1716), German philosopher and mathematician, 36. Lequier, Jules (1814–62), French philosopher, 3. Lie, Jonas (1833–1908), Norwegian author, 67. Liedman, Sven-Eric, 43, 44. Linck, Josef (1846–1901), 66. Linder, Sten, 16, 17, 21. Lundegård, Axel (1861–1930), Swedish author, 15. Lundell, Torborg, 4, 6, 7. Lundgren, Lars O., 45. Luther, Martin (1483–1546), German Protestant theologian, 4, 5, 8–11. Malmros, Elise (1849–1937), Swedish author, 53, 56–8, 62. Margarethe, 46, 147. Marie Beaumarchais, 147. Martensen, Hans Lassen (1808–84), Danish theologian, 28, 170. Melberg, Arne, 5. Mephistopholes, 148. Mill, John Stuart (1806–73), English philosopher, 17, 168. Möhring, Werner, 148, 159. Møller, Dikka (i.e., Diderikke Anette) (1838–1912), Norwegian author and pacifist, 128, 136–8.

Monet Claude (1840–1926), French painter, 190. Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (1756–91), Austrian composer, 45. Munch, Christian (1817–89), Edvard Munch’s father, 182. Munch, Edvard (1863–1944), Norwegian painter, 177–93. Nero, 154. Nielsen, Erik A., 8. Nielsen, Rasmus (1809–84), Danish philosopher, 113, 129, 132, 133, 136, 139. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844–1900), German philosopher, 10, 30, 36, 90, 169. Nobel von Sperling, Nicoline Marthe (1844–1917), 60–1. Norrman, Margit, 16, 18. Nyblom, Carl Rupert (1832–1907), Swedish literary scholar and poet, 75. Nygren, Anders (1890–1978), Swedish theologian, 3, 5. Ockham, William of (ca. 1288–1347), Scholastic philosopher, 10. Oedipus, 149. Oehlenschläger, Adam (1779–1850), Danish poet, 74, 75, 76, 123, 150, 162, 170. Olander, Valborg (1861–1943), Swedish teacher and politician, 55. Olsen, Regine (1822–1904), 39. Olsson, Anders, 35. Ording, Hans, 158. Origen (ca. 185–ca. 254), church father, 40. Orpheus, 39, 40. Oscarson, Saga, 38, 39. Palmqvist, Bertil, 43. Parker, Theodore (1810–60), American Unitarian minister, 74. Pascal, Blaise (1623–62), French mathematician, physicist and philosopher, 47. Paul, 4, 8, 41.

Index of Persons Peirce, Charles Sanders (1839–1914), American philosopher, 32, 33. Persson, Olof (1493–1552), Swedish Lutheran reformer, 78. Peter, 47. Petersen, Clemens (1834–1918), Danish literary critic, 111, 127, 129, 131, 135, 139, 162, 163. Petri, Olaus, see “Persson, Olof.” Plato, 5, 9, 44, 46, 151. Plotinus, 171. Ploug, Carl (1813–94), Danish poet and journalist, 132, 133. Prideaux, Sue, 190. Ravn, Jørgen, 59. Renan, Ernest (1823–92), French philosopher, 74. Ribot, Théodule-Armand (1839–1916), French psychologist, 82. Rode, Gotfred (1830–78), Danish literary historian, 136. Rode, Margrete (1846–1918), Danish teacher and journalist, 111, 133, 136. Rosenius, Carl Olof (1816–68), Swedish preacher and author, 73. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712–78), French philosopher, 19, 33, 36, 67. Rudin, Waldemar (1833–1921), Swedish theologian, 54. Rushdie, Salman (b. 1947), British Indian novelist, 27. Russell, Bertrand (1872–1970), British philosopher, 36. Rydberg, Abraham Viktor (1828–95), Swedish writer, 74. Sallust, 149. Sars, Johan Ernst (1835–1917), Norwegian historian, 128. Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905–80), French philosopher, 3, 31, 32. Schéele, Frans von (1853–1931), Swedish scholar, 18.

199

Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von (1759–1805), German poet, 147. Schlegel, Friedrich von (1772–1829), German Romantic writer, 90, 92, 98, 100. Schmidt, Rudolf (1836–99), Danish author, 112, 126, 127, 133. Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788–1860), German philosopher, 30. Scribe, Augustin Eugène (1791–1861), French dramatist, 117–19, 139, 151. Shakespeare, William (1564–1616), English dramatist, 55, 75, 114, 163. Sibbern, Frederik Christian (1785–1872), Danish philosopher, 118. Sjöblad, Christina, 15, 18. Sjösted, Nils Åke (b. 1916), Swedish literary scholar, 16, 18–20, 53, 54, 59, 60, 61. Socrates, 6, 9, 44, 45, 62, 152, 164. Sophocles, 149, 169, Stenersen, Rolf (1899–1978), Norwegian author, 178, 182. Stenström, Thure, 31, 40. Strauss, David Friedrich (1808–74), German theologian, 74. Strindberg, August (1849–1912), Swedish author, 15, 65–87, 178, 179. Svendsen, Laura (1832–98), Norwegian actress, 114–19, 139. Swedenborg, Emanuel (1688–1772), Swedish scientist, 82. Tertullian (ca. 160–235), church father, 29, 40. Thaulow, Emilie, 186. Thaulow, Fritz (1847–1906), Norwegian painter, 186. Thoresen, Magdalena (1829–1903), DanishNorwegian author, 123. Thorvaldsen, Bertel (1770–1844), Danish sculptor, 70. Tischbein, Johann Heinrich Wilhelm (1751–1828), German painter, 171.

200

Kierkegaard’s Influence on Literature, Criticism and Art

Vallès, Jules (1832–85), French author, 69. Wägner, Elin (1882–1949), Swedish writer, 55, 59, 60. Wandering Jew, 34, 166. Welhaven, Johan (1807–73), Norwegian poet, 118.

Wergeland, Henrik (1808–45), Norwegian author, 123. Wijkmark, Carl-Henning (b. 1934), Swedish author, 89–106. Xenophon, 44. Zola, Émile (1840–1902), French author, 66.

Index of Subjects

absurd, absurdity, 29, 40, 43. aesthetics, 3, 4, 46, 61, 155. alienation, 46. anguish, see “anxiety.” anxiety, 39, 60, 98, 125, 127, 162, 163, 183–9 passim. attack on the church, 125, 131. authenticity, 140. Bible, 41, 161, 182. Matthew, 179. boredom, 130, 170. bourgeois, 167, 168. capitalism, 168. choice, 10, 31, 72, 78, 83, 135, 184. Christianity, 3, 4, 9, 19, 57–9, 70, 72, 73, 77, 80, 112, 113, 122, 124, 127–9, 135–8, 140, 156, 159–61, 167, 171, 189. New Testament, 76, 161. communication, direct, 5. indirect, 6, 9. community, 112. Corsair, The, 134. creo quia absurdum, 29. Darwinism, 109, 130, 168, 170. death, 46, 90, 92, 94, 99, 182, 188. decision, see “choice.” defiance, 160. demonic isolation, 170. demonic, the, 35, 165, 183. desire, 90. despair, 8, 10, 46, 47, 75, 80, 125, 160, 165, 166, 180, 190. dialectics, 5, 29. dizziness, see “vertigo.”

doubt, 147, 152. duty, 39, 71, 72, 160, 166. echo, 149. either/or, 113, 128, 129, 134, 137, 154, 189. Enlightenment, 118, 119. eternal, the, 166. ethics, the ethical, 17, 23, 58, 130, 134. Christian, 72. existential, 62. existentialism, 3, 5, 28, 29, 35, 36. faith, 8, 33–5, 37, 55, 135, 166, 167. Fall, the, 39, 183, 185. finite and infinite, 90. freedom, 10, 39, 184, 185. grace, 4. Grundtvigianism, 113, 126, 129. guilt, 150, 170, 181, 182, 185. hiin enkelte, see “single individual, the.” history, 89, 146, 169. hope, 171. humor, 3, 5, 6, 9. idealism, 154, 155, 158, 159. irony, 6, 9, 28, 33, 90, 91, 93, 100, 121. Kristiania Bohemians, 177, 186, 189. language, 30, 32, 120, 121. leap, 46, 80, 125, 167. love, 4, 9, 17, 21, 22, 58–60, 62, 95–9, 151–4, 160, 161, 171, 188. eros, 3. erotic, 147.

202

Kierkegaard’s Influence on Literature, Criticism and Art

maieutics, 4, 9. marriage, 16, 17, 21, 22, 154, 170. martyr, martyrdom, 77, 81, 112, 158, 159, 170. melancholy, 74, 80, 81, 89, 90, 94, 111, 190. memory, 19, 42, 149. Modern Breakthrough, 4, 15, 16, 55, 57, 66, 109, 159, 167. modernism, modernity, 3, 38. moment, the, 10, 22, 43, 179. mysticism, mystics, 4, 31. naturalism, 17, 22, 55. necessity and possibility, 40. negative theology, 35. nihilism, 35. offense, 4, 5. paradox, 43, 80, 90. passion, 89, 158. philistine, the, 10. Pietism, 57, 72, 73, 78, 124–8 passim. Protestantism, 57. pseudonymity, pseudonyms, 6, 7, 28, 33, 36. psychology, 81, 82, 111, 120, 134. realism, 3, 6, 7, 66, 75. recollection, 19, 20, 42, 43, 95, 98, 150, 154. reduplication, 5. reflection, 115, 117. remembrance, 154, 168. repetition, 41–4, 82, 83, 91, 94–9 passim, 105, 190. resurrection, 171. revelation, 8.

Romanticism, 21, 29, 35, 118, 119, 147, 150. sacrifice, 39, 60, 159. salvation, 34, 171. scandal, see “offense.” seduction, 46. self-deception, 137. sickness, 46, sickness unto death, 47. silence, 101–3, 105, 179. sin, 4, 34, 181, 185. original, 183. single individual, the, 34, 45, 56, 58, 131, 158, 169. Spidsborger, see “bourgeois.” stages, 5, 6, 21, 29, 32, 33, 34, 36, 40–2, 44, 46, 83, 158, 159, 166, 167. aesthetical, 21, 145, 153, 157, 159, 166, 167. ethical, 21, 153, 157, 159, 166, 167. religious, 166, 167. subjectivity, 17, 30, 31, 36, 38, 170. isolated, 9. suffering, 46, 60, 80, 112, 113, 137, 161, 170. symbolism, 55. system, systematic philosophy, 35. theater, 109–44, 145–76. thorn in the flesh, 8, 80. time, 42, 44. vertigo, 39. Vienna school, 36. women’s emancipation, 17, 67.