happiness lay in, what else, a renunciation of this world - trying to take the ideas seriously in Lucky Per

I think or fear that the psychology of Lykke-Per is driven by philosophy, and not vice versa, meaning that Henrik Pontoppidan expects you, the reader, to work through Lucky Per’s successive stages of development at a pretty abstract, philosophical level, just like Per does.  Maybe just like Pontoppidan does.

But the more he read, the more confused he became.  Throughout his steadfast search for the touchstone of that final and incontrovertible phrase or word that for all time would banish every superstitious belief in the existence of ‘the other side,’ he staggered around as if in some mental game of blind man’s bluff played in the dark of his own confusion…  With the implicit faith in books, which every autodidact develops…  (Ch. 13)

I had better stop there.  Too painful for this autodidact to continue.  I hope that Pontoppidan means that “faith in books” stuff ironically.  This whole passage has to be ironic, right?  But this is where the most Nietzschean section of the book launches, so I am not sure.

Pontoppidan scholar Flemming Behrendt, in the Afterword of the Paul Larkin translation, writes that Pontoppidan had a crisis midway through Lykke-Per, which is why there is no publication during 1900.  He spent the time reading Friedrich Nietzsche, which cured his writer’s block, not only allowing him to continue the novel but inspiring him to begin rewriting earlier parts to include more Nietzsche.

Thus the amazing climax of Chapter 13, in which Per shoots, with a revolver, a Tyrolean statue of Jesus, a truly peak moment of Zarathustranism, is not in the early 1899 version of the chapter but was added later.  Per is hiking with his Jewish girlfriend Jakobe, who herself is awfully Zarathustran.  It is at times like reading an Ayn Rand novel, with Per’s ludicrous harbor plans in place of Roark’s awful buildings.  Are the blasphemers punished, by the way?

And on they went, slowly downwards, embracing the glorious sunshine that bathed the valley as they went, overwhelmed by the heady scents of spring.  (end of Ch. 13)

Since this is just the middle of the novel, there is a lot of development still to come, including a temporary return to Lutheranism, albeit a sunnier version that that of his childhood, and a passage through what I think is a set of ideas drawn from Kierkegaard.  Per succumbs to the Sickness Unto Death, and has what people will later call an existential crisis – “[n]ow that he fully appreciated and understood his aloofness and dread of life” (Ch. 26), that sort of thing.

What I think is going on at the end of the novel is, over the course of several chapters, a synthesis of ideas.  Christianity, the slave religion, is rejected in all forms, and Nietzsche’s excesses are rescued by Kierkegaard (or is it the other way?).  The ultimate answer turns out to be the usual one of the German Bildungsroman:

Right down through the history of mankind the same command: the denial of the self, the expunging of the I – because happiness lay in a renunciation of this world.  (Ch. 25)

“Renunciation,” that’s Goethe’s word, his answer, although in practice it does not look like Per’s.  One must “either pledge oneself to the cross or the champagne glass,” Per fears, but he still has several chapters to find another way.

Maybe some or all of this is meant ironically.  Jakobe, the heroine, takes her Nietzschean ideas down a different path, but of course she does not have to struggle out from under the weight of Danish Lutheranism.  Maybe she is a step or two ahead of Per.

Maybe Pontoppidan means every word.  Maybe I have trouble taking Novels of Ideas seriously.  Tomorrow, let’s at least glance at Pontoppidan’s art.  Aesthetics, Per tries and rejects that early in the novel.

I even took pleasure in inciting him to begin his philosophical instruction - a little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down the pants in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard

If nothing else I have learned to take Kierkegaard ironically, and once I do that I can enjoy his grim humor:

There was a man whose chatter certain circumstances made it necessary for me to listen to.  At every opportunity he was ready with a little philosophical lecture, a very tiresome harangue.  Almost in despair, I suddenly discovered that he perspired copiously when talking.  I saw the pearls of sweat gather on his brow, unite to form a stream, glide down his nose, and hang at the extreme point of his nose in a drop-shaped body.  From the moment of making this discovery, all was changed.  I even took pleasure in inciting him to begin his philosophical instruction, merely to observe the perspiration on his brow and at the end of his nose.  (56)*

Kierkegaard’s humor often comes from his inventiveness, as he pursues an idea, for example describing a true “knight of the faith” as an accountant who walks “as sturdily as a postman” and “thinks about the special hot dish which his wife has been preparing for him, a grilled lamb’s head garnished with herbs perhaps” – given the chance, “he will discuss it with a passion” (107), the grilled lamb’s head, a classic Danish dish which you should not Google if you do not want to see a photo of a grilled lamb’s head.  I am still not exactly sure what a “knight of the faith” is meant to be.

In a discussion of “demoniac despair,” Kierkegaard invents a sentient clerical error:

perhaps it was no error but in a far higher sense was an essential constituent in the whole exposition – it is then as if this clerical error would revolt against the author, out of hatred for him were to forbid to correct it, and were to say, “No, I will not be erased, I will stand as a witness against thee, that thou art a very poor writer.”  (158)

I suppose I should be pulling out some sharp aphorisms, too, but Kierkegaard is no G. C. Lichtenberg, and I find his inventions, these little characters than emerge, more amusing than his sayings, although those are not bad either.

The characters are part of the one part of Kierkegaard that I feel I misunderstand most fruitfully, the “Exordium” to Fear and Trembling in which he retells the story of Abraham and Isaac in four different ways, each with a variation not in action but in the psychological outcome.  Abraham, for example, is intentionally cruel to his Isaac in order to protect his son’s faith, to direct Isaac’s doubt or despair onto himself (so Abraham sacrifices not his son but himself).  Or in another version, the reverse:

But Abraham prepared everything for the sacrifice, gently and quietly, but when he turned aside and drew the knife, then Isaac saw that his left hand was clenched in despair and that a shudder passed through his body – but Abraham drew the knife.

Then they returned home and Sara hastened to  meet them; but Isaac had lost his faith.  No word of this has ever been mentioned in the world, and Isaac never spoke to anyone of what he had seen and Abraham never suspected that anyone had seen it.  (100)

So Abraham’s entirely human and understandable – almost necessary (that’s another one of the variations) – moment of doubt is destructive.

Kierkegaard immediately turns these scenarios to a complex argument about faith, dread, and despair that I did not understand at all.  Whatever fragments Auden used went unrecognized, except for the four stories themselves; whatever idea I was supposed to be following was replaced by an idea about narrativity, about how stories imply other stories, with especially rich stories implying many other stories.  Once each new story is recognized – told, written, imagined – it becomes a permanent part of the original story.  Maybe it was invented, maybe it was there all along.

Meanings accumulate, too, complementary or contradictory, but unresolvably so, because as stories they may well all be true.  Or many of them may be true. Or none. Who knows.

In other words, I recognized in Fear and Trembling the Kierkegaard of Borges and Derrida, or a simple outline of such a creature.  I read Kierkegaard, and all philosophy, as if it were literature, and perhaps too much as if it were about literature, but in this narrow case it really was.

*  Page numbers from The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard, so I have no idea which book this is from.

Neither more nor less than pure nonsense - I did read Kierkegaard

I read a bit of Søren Kierkegaard rather than Hegel.  Actually, understanding Kierkegaard is another reason to read Hegel, another place Hegel kept popping up, even in the strange mangled hybrid book I read, The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard (1952). 

If Hegel had written his whole Logic and in the Preface disclosed the fact that it was merely a thought experiment (in which, however, at many points he had shirked something), he would have been the greatest thinker that has ever lived.  Now this is comic.  (125)

I disagree on one point.  It would be funnier to make the disclosure in the afterward.  Even funnier, never disclose that it was merely etc.  Pretend you mean every word.  The greatest prankster that has ever lived.

Kierkegaard came to English-language attention fairly recently.  A major translation effort brought his major works into English in the 1940s.  W. H. Auden plundered these books to create his.  It was supposed to introduce Kierkegaard to a wider audience.  Did it?  I don’t know.

However useful the book is, it has two massive problems.  First, any possibility of coherent argument is destroyed.  A three page excerpt from one book is followed by a paragraph from another.  Which books?  Which bits are from published texts and which from private journals?  Auden does not say.

Then, second, the hilarious Kierkegaard pseudonym system is destroyed.  Fear and Trembling (1843) was written by Johannes de Silentio, The Concept of Dread (1844) by Vigilius Haufniensis, other books by Hilarius Bogbinder, H. H., and Anti-Climacus.  Kierkegaard had books that contradicted each other published on the same day.  Either/Or (1843) has various authors arguing with each other within the book.  What a shame to throw out all of this.  To a book blogger of a certain temperament, it is practically the best part.  Some of what we now blithely call “Kierkegaard” is a pose or a parody or fiction.

Auden’s book gives no hint of dates either.  Just glance at those above.  Kierkegaard spent a decade working privately, and then kaboom, this amazing mass of published material in the 1840s and on to his death in 1855.  Of course this is why there are so many anthologies of mangled Kierkegaard excerpts.

Even chopped up (or because), I found much of Kierkegaard’s (or Anti-Climacus’s) thought to be difficult or beyond comprehension, such as a concept of subjectivity that went well beyond ordinary English usage, or a sharp distinction between the “aesthetic” and “ethical” that appeared arbitrary in its either/or divisions.  I would be surprised if I got something out of one page of five.

An author writes a clear, consistent, connected, fully matured presentation of some thought, perhaps the fruit of many years’ labor.  Nobody reads it.  But a [book blogger] reviews the book; in the course of half an hour or so, he writes something that is neither more nor less than pure nonsense.  This is then supposed to be the purport of the author’s book; moreover everybody reads it.  The significance of an author’s existence thus becomes evident: he exists for the sake of affording some journalist an opportunity to write nonsense for everybody to read.  (31)

Now that I understood.   I am doing my part to prove Kierkegaard right.

And honestly, one page out of five is a success.  If I thought I could hit that mark with Hegel, I would read him too.  So tomorrow, thought experiments, Kierkegaardian comedy, philosophy as a form of play.  Some of the parts I think I understood.