Kierkegaard as Feuilleton Writer

1 . Quoted in KI R M M S E (1996), p. 298. Enrahonar 29, 1998 1 2 51 3 0 Kierkegaard as Feuilleton Writer George Pattison King's College, Cambridge The writer and dramatist Henrik He rtz, who was both a contemporary of K i e rk e g a a rd's and knew him socially, once noted in his journal that «S.K i e rk eg a a rd often seems to me —although only in his humorous writings— to be nothing other than a ve ry talented and we l l - read feuilleton writer... His style is altogether that of a feuilleton writer, not exactly of the French style but a m i x t u re of Jules Janins and a young, philosophically educated Ge r m a n . »1 The re m a rk is in itself somewhat slight and does not belong to any sustained discussion of Kierk e g a a rd's literary significance —nor is it even clear what He rtz means by Kierk e g a a rd's humorous writings: the pseudonyms, or only some of them, and, if so, which? But although it would be extre m e l y rash, foolish even, to make this passing comment the basis for a new re a d i n g of Kierk e g a a rd's entire authorship, it does illuminate that authorship fro m an unusual angle. Nor is this illumination merely literary. If He rtz's own int e rest in Kierk e g a a rd probably did not extend to the philosophical content of his works, his comment is not without implications for a contemporary philosophical re a d e r. Let us see how this might be so. But first we have to identify what exactly He rtz meant by a «feuilleton w r i t e r » . Feuilleton literature was (and, one might say, still is) a genre of journalistic writing, aspiring to reflect and, in reflecting, to mould the point of view of a public that aspires to be both fashionable and cultured. Undoubtedly it would have been re g a rded by someone like He rtz as operating on a lower leve l than the kind of criticism emanating from the circle of writers, artists and intellectuals gathered around the dramatist, critic and amateur philosopher J . L . Heiberg, a circle with which both He rtz and Kierk e g a a rd had some ass o c i a t i o n . At one level it immediately becomes obvious that Kierk e g a a rd was a writer of a quite different stamp from that of the typical feuilleton writer. But although his critical sophistication and religious and philosophical passions put 1 2 6 Enrahonar 29, 1998 George Pattison 2 . It is plausible that the experimental pseudonym Lt. Rosenpind (or, Rosenblad) associated with an extensive group of notes for an uncompleted work called «Writing Sa m p l e r»s imultaneously satirizes Carstensen and Rosenhoff (Carstensen was regularly re f e r red to by his military rank) —one of the notes simply has «Fe u i l l e t o n»as a heading. An article sometimes believed to be by Kierk e g a a r d and entitled «Literary Qu i c k s i l ver or an At t e m p t at the Highest Madness together with Lucida In t e rva l l a did appear» in Carstensen's Ny Po rt e f e u i l l e, although it was ve ry possibly by Kierk e g a a rd's then secre t a ry P. W. Christensen. ( See Pa p. IV A, 141.) 3 . HE I B E RG, J. L. (1843), p. 290. him in another class from Carstensen and Ro s e n h o f f, he did share many of their cultural horizo n s2.If Kierk e g a a rd is now categorized as belonging to the world of «high» culture and if, even in his own day, he could be identified as a part of the cultural élite, the «public» addressed by the feuilleton writers often attended the same plays, read the same books, listened to the same music and looked at the same paintings as those who prided themselves on a more critical and less dilettante approach. The difference was not so much in what was seen (heard, etc.), but in h owit was seen. An example of the interweaving of these two worlds in the body of K i e rk e g a a rd's authorship is provided by the extended re v i ew essay Kierk e g a a r d w rote about Augustin Eugène Scribe's comedy The First Love, included in the writings of the aesthete A that make up Pa rt I of Ei t h e r / Or. Scribe is, it has to be said, almost universally forgotten today, but in his own time he was Eu rope's most successful dramatist. Carstensen's Fi g a ronoted that in one ye a r Scribe had earned more money than all other French dramatists put togethe r. His plays we re also an important ingredient in Heiberg's campaign to int roduce a more Francophile tone into De n m a rk's theatrical life: between 1823 and 1895, one hundred and one plays by Scribe we re performed 2976 times at the T h e a t re Royal in Copenhagen. Indeed, Heiberg himself translated a number of these, including The First Love. Although Kierk e g a a rd makes it clear that The First Loveis little more than a light comedy, playing upon the triviality of its characters' emotional invo l vements, he insists that, within the limits of its genre it is a masterw o rk of irony and reflection, making much ado about what is in itself nothing, a comedy of pure erro r. This appraisal of The First Lovewas, in turn, one of the features of Ei t h e r / Or that irritated Heiberg when he came to re v i ew it in his journal In t e l l i g e n s b l a d e. Heiberg wrote that the author of Ei t h e r / Orhad ‘made a masterpiece out of a p retty little bagatelle and ascribes to it a tendency which is virtually the opposite of what Scribe admits to3.For his part, Kierk e g a a rd was furious about Heiberg's re v i ew and filled pages of his journal with sarcastic re m a rks about the man who was re g a rded as the greatest authority in Danish letters, and fro m whom Kierk e g a a rd had expected a more insightful judgement. Cu r i o u s l y, In t e l l i g e n s b l a d ealso included a small piece by He rtz relating to The Peep Sh ow, that Kierk e g a a rd re g a rded it as an important parable about the nature of the modern public (S V 314, 85) and was only sorry that He rt z , Kierkegaard as Feuilleton Writer Enrahonar 29, 1998 1 2 7 4 . In KI R M M S E, (1996). 5 . See CR A RY, J. (1990); also ZE R LA N G, M. (1995). in defending it against his detractors, had called it a «mere bagatelle». (Pa p VII B 125, 87) This is striking in view of Heiberg's use of the self-same exp ression in re v i ewing Ei t h e r / Or, and it is doubly interesting in that He rtz did n o thimself use it. He did refer to it as «a small, light piece» —but it was once again Heiberg who called it a «bagatelle»! Kierk e g a a rd's slip (several years after Heiberg's re v i ew of Ei t h e r / Or) is indicative of how deeply Heiberg's word s had wounded him. We may seem to be descending into the absolute trivia of Kierk e g a a rd i a n a , but the example is not uninteresting in the light of He rtz's own comments about the typical style of the feuilleton writer, in words qualifying his pre v iously quoted re m a rk about Kierk e g a a rd: «he takes his time, letting his pen run fast and loose, makes flies into elephants and vice versa and lets his main emphasis fall on the piquant presentation of the subject and often, even, on the ve ry bizarreness of the idea4.» The debate about The First Love and T h e Peep Sh owillustrates the critical consequences of this, since the key issue was p recisely that of pro p o rtion, with the accusation flying backwards and forw a rds that one or other critic has lost all sense of pro p o rtion, making a masterpiece out of a bagatelle, an elephant out of a fly and, to cut a long story s h o rt, much ado about nothing. But this in turn highlights a further feature of critical writing in the zone of cultural life traversed both by the feuilleton writers and by critics of a more re f l e c t i ve kind —a feature perhaps not accidentally linked to the title of He rtz's little piece (Pe r p e k t i v k a s s e n)— that eve rything depends on perspective or point of view. The aim of the feuilleton writer is, above all, to direct the reader's gaze in the midst of the ever-changing caleidoscope of cultural life. In his study Techniques of the Ob s e rve rJonathan Cr a ry has argued that the period in which Kierk e g a a rd developed tow a rds his mature authorship was one that marked the emergence of «a new kind of observer». New optical techn o l o g y, simultaneously exploited in the worlds of science and industry, medicine and popular entertainment, gave a hitherto unprecedented import a n c e to the perceiving subject in determining how the world looked, a deve l o pment reflected in the culture of spectatorship that grew up in the nineteenth c e n t u ry, as evidenced by the rise of museums, arcades, zoos and pleasure park s , together with photography, stero s c o p y, dioramas and, at the end of the cent u ry, the cinema5. It is no coincidence in this context that Carstensen, one of the mov i n g spirits of feuilleton literature in De n m a rk in the early 1840s, should also be the founder of De n m a rk's best-known pleasure park, the mould-bre a k i n g Ti voli Ga rdens. He re the public could experience for themselves the kind of l e i s u rely spectatorship that had previously been the pre s e rve of English Mi l o rd s on the Grand To u r. Behind the scenes, howe ve r, was the critic, the one who not only directed the gaze of the public but who could abruptly invoke a shift 1 2 8 Enrahonar 29, 1998 George Pattison 6 . For further details, see PATT I S O N, G.(1998). of view-point, turning masterpieces back into bagatelles and elephants back into flies. In such a situation the world of culture is no longer the world shaped by classical aesthetic values in which beauty is truth and truth beauty in everlasting self-sameness and self-sufficiency. Everything has now become ephemeral, volatile, infinitely adaptable and manipulable. It is the world of the fugitive and the transient, the popular and the relative, a world in which triviality and bathos have as much claim upon aesthetic validity as the good, the true and the beautiful. It is in short, the world of popular fashionable culture. What it is like to live in such a world is succinctly captured by Kierk e g a a rd in a jotting from his early journals: «I should like to write a novel, in which the main character should be a person who had acquired a pair of glasses, of which the one glass made eve rything as small as an ox y - g a s - m i c roscope, the other made eve rything larger in the same degree, [so that] he experienced eve rything ve ry re l a t i v i s t i c a l l y.» (Pap. II A, 203) —An experience with which we , one hundred and fifty years later, have learned to make into a way of life. He rtz's description thus highlights an important aspect of Kierk e g a a rd ' s w o rk that has been almost entirely neglected in the secondary literature and o b s c u red by the image of Kierk e g a a rd as a gloomy and solitary figure. Fo r K i e rk e g a a rd did not write in some ivo ry towe r, untouched by the currents of c o n t e m p o r a ry popular culture but he was, on the contrary, engaged with that c u l t u re in a multitude of ways, ways it has only been possible to touch on h e re6. This also has, as I suggested at the beginning, implications for the philosophical reading of Kierk e g a a rd. How so? It is customary to see Kierk e g a a rd's place in the history of ideas in terms of his affiliation to what might, following Leavis, be called, the Gre a t Tradition, or, perhaps, the «Canon» of Philosophical Classics: Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, De s c a rtes, Kant, Hegel, etc. —or in terms of his influence upon the further development of that Tradition in Nietzsche, Heidegger and twe ntieth century existentialist philosophy. Even if the attempt to contextualize his work by such comparisons culminates in the judgement that he is, at best, a marginal contributor to the Great Tradition (or even the joker in the pack), the comparison itself serves to give the interpretation of his work a cert a i n philosophical dignity. This approach is not without merit. Clearly Kierk e g a a rd d i d engage with the Great Tradition at a variety of levels, bringing his own insights and formulations to the ongoing debate about a number of fundamental questions in philosophy. But, import a n t l y, the material of his own philosophizing was not restricted to the topoi of classical philosophical texts but was drawn no less frequently from the ephemeral world of popular culture, the world reflected in the pages of the feuilleton literature. In this respect Kierk e g a a rd was a man of the modern urban world in a way that more academic thinkers such Kierkegaard as Feuilleton Writer Enrahonar 29, 1998 1 2 9 as Hegel (or, for that matter, Feuerbach or Strauss, whose ideal was that of the academy even when they no longer belonged to it) could ever be. This, of course, raises an immediate problem for our interpretation of K i e rk e g a a rd. Many of the manifold connections between his authorship and the world of the feuilleton writers have, in the nature of the case, va n i s h e d into obscurity. A critical discussion of Hegel's category of transition, conducted with the help of Aristotle and Trendelenburg, will necessarily have a re l a t i ve l y timeless quality that a debate about whether a one-act comedy sketch (not e ven included in standard editions of its author's selected works) is or is not «a bagatelle» can never hope to attain. We (or the philosophers amongst us) still have a context in which to understand the former, whereas the latter will be accesible only to a cultural archeologist of extremely narrow interests. W h a t is ephemeral vanishes with the passing of its day, and the day of the popular c u l t u re of the 1840s has well and truly passed. This introduces a far-reaching distortion into our reading of Kierk e g a a rd . Only a small minority of Kierk e g a a rd readers (even of Da n i s h - re a d i n g K i e rk e g a a rd readers) will be committed to the labour of re c o n s t ructing the interactions between his writing and the world of the then popular culture . But it is important, ve ry important, for all philosophically interested re a d e r s of Kierk e g a a rd to re c o g n i ze that those connections are there. For Kierk e g a a rd ' s critique of the Great Tradition is not merely internal. It is a critique of the whole academic style. As Kierk e g a a rd's most esteemed role model, So c r a t e s , sought to philosophize in the market-place, so he himself sought to practice both philosophy and Christian testimony in the midst of the contemporary e q u i valent of the forum —the «public» domain addressed by popular journalism. Nor is this simply the manifestation of a personal pre f e rence for the populist over the scholarly approach to philosophy. Rather, it is rooted in a sense that the tradition itself has entered into a critical and potentially terminal phase in the situation of modernity, a situation of which the rise of popular culture, an essential and paradigmatic phenomenon of modern urbani t y, is a powe rfully expre s s i ve symptom. If we wish to promote philosophy à la Kierk e g a rd, then, we should be wary of attempting to justify his work by elevating him into the ranks of the «Classics». Kierk e g a a rd is not just a debating partner for Hegel and Co. He is also one of the first to have alerted us to the fact that it is the re p re s e n t ations of value in popular culture that have the most immediate impact on our perception of what makes for a worthwhile life, and that such perc e ptions shape even the prejudices of philosophers, for philosophers too part i cipate in this culture which is the all-pervading medium of modern life. T h e re is there f o re an important critical task to be performed in learning to distinguish between what is ‘a mere bagatelle’ and what offers genuine insight and, within the ever-shifting horizons of the ephemeral, daring to experiment with p e r s p e c t i ve and point of view in order to sustain, or perhaps to regain, the sense of self that the ve ry pre valence of the popular puts at risk. 1 3 0 Enrahonar 29, 1998 George Pattison Bi b l i o g r a p h y CR A RY, J. (1990), Techniques of the Ob s e rve r. On Vision and Mo d e rnity in thge Nineteenth Ce n t u ry, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Pre s s . 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