SOURCE: Koelb, Clayton. “Wrestling with Proteus: Irony in Kierkegaard's Either/Or.” In Narrative Ironies, edited by A. Prier and Gerald Gillespie, pp. 21-31. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997.

[In the following essay, Koelb explores Kierkegaard's use of irony in Either/Or, particularly in his discussion of Eugène Scribe's The First Love.]

The love of recollection is the only happy love, says an author who, so far as I am acquainted with him, is sometimes rather deceitful.

Søren Kierkegaard

Irony prefers oblique refraction. It says not so much the opposite to what is meant as something other than. …

Lilian R. Furst

The first quotation is an example of the oblique, refractive irony Lilian Furst refers to in the second.¹ The irony resides in the fact that the “rather deceitful” author being quoted in these opening lines from “Repetition” is none other than Søren Kierkegaard himself, so that the judgment offered turns out to be far more accurate than we might have expected. It is a complicated bit of involution that must have amused the writer, the author of a learned treatise on irony. But there is something surprisingly revealing in Kierkegaard's deliberately coy game of self-concealment, for it suggests a sincere delight in confusion, specifically the confusion that must result in the mind of any reader attempting to unravel this teasing version of the liar's paradox (“Everything I say is false.”).

Though it is hard to imagine a more serious person than Kierkegaard, this serious writer's work is full of a kind of mischief that can only be construed as attempts to mystify the reader. “Mystify,” in fact, is one of his favorite words, along with “deceit” and similar terms.² This earnest philosopher appears to delight in deception and mystification, perhaps nowhere more notoriously than in his “novel” Either/Or, a book so thoroughly mystifying we cannot even decide definitively whether or not it really is a novel. The difficulties do not by any means disappear simply by observing that the work is a fiction in which not the author but constructed personae, an aesthete and a judge, speak to the reader. The book does not possess many of the characteristics of the novels we are familiar with: there is no plot to speak of, and there is no conventional narrator. We recognize the well-worn device of the fictional “editor,” Victor Eremita, as a means to set the text in motion, not as a guide to mediate between the contesting voices. How are we to navigate, then, in these deliberately uncharted waters? Could Either/Or be a kind of postmodern novel avant la lettre, where navigation from the outset is denied and the narrator and characters are completely unreliable? The Kierkegaard we know, bursting with moral intensity, is not a likely candidate for authorship of such a book. But if there is a moral intention, how are we supposed to find it in the midst of all the deception and mystification?

Help comes from an unexpected quarter. Important information about the two main characters in Either/Or—information that allows us to understand better the moral intention behind the conflicting and often confusing arguments—arrives in the unpromising guise of a critique of Scribe's insignificant sex comedy, Les Premières amours (The First Love). Kierkegaard turns literary criticism into an important novelistic technique, offering a vital clue as to the nature of the ironic structure of his text.

One of the first ironies is that Les Premières amours is not an appealing object for extensive critical scrunity. Scholars of French literature, in fact, scarcely mention it. Kierkegaard's contemporaries listed it as one of Scribe's “successes,” but with no elaboration. Modern critics either ignore it or use it as a foil to set off a better work, such as his Le Verre d'eau (The Glass of Water). Kierkegaard and his readers had occasion to see J. L. Heiberg's popular Danish translation, but most theater-goers evidently took it as nothing more than an evening's pastime. A careful reading of the text offers little reason to take it in any other way. It is, in fact, wholly unremarkable, one of scores of similar pieces that Scribe produced in his prolific career.

The play appears unusual in no respect but one: its heroine undergoes a totally unmotivated, sudden change of character in the final scene, a change obviously improvised during the necessarily hasty composition process by the need to contrive a happy ending. Emmeline, the heroine who has clung so steadfastly to her devotion her first love, Charles, consents to marry another, Rinville, in the last line of the play. After many confusions and near misses, it turns out that Emmeline has mistaken Rinville for Charles. When she is told of her error, she is astounded: “Je ne reviens encore de ma surprise. (A Charles) Comment, mon pauvre Charles, c'était toi que je détestais ainsi? Et vous, monsieur, que je n'avais jamais vu …” (“I'm so surprised, I can't get over it. [To Charles] Oh dear, poor Charles! Was it you I hated so much. And you, sir, a man I've never seen before …”).³ Rinville, always the witty cavalier, replies, “Vous croyiez m'avoir aimé autrefois” (“Once upon a time you thought you loved me”). The Emmeline the audience has come to know throughout the play, totally committed to the notion that the first love is the only genuine love, ought to be immobilized by this turn of events. If she is true to herself she must deny Rinville, whom she supposed she loved, and cling to Charles, whom she supposed she hated. If the matter of “first love” is as important to Emmeline as we have been led to believe, she might even consider suicide. Instead, she upsets all expectations, throws all logic out the window, and accepts Rinville. She does not hesitate for a second. She simply turns to Rinville and proclaims: “Je me suis trompée; j'ai pris le passé pour l'avenir” (“I was mistaken; I confused the past with the future”), meaning, of course, that though she was mistaken in thinking that she loved him in the past, she was correct in thinking she would love him … in the future. Rinville can be considered her “first” love only by reversing the actual order of events, a prospect that seems to trouble Emmeline not a whit.

There is nothing profound or even especially interesting about Scribe's play, and it is astonishing that Kierkegaard's characters take it so seriously. The young man ‘A’ writes an elaborate appreciation of it, treating as if it were a masterpiece. The judge ‘B’ solemnly condemns it on moral grounds, objecting principally to that fact that Scribe's characters are poor models of conduct. As literary critics, both men leave much to be desired, since both weigh down the play with far more philosophical baggage than its slender structure can safely carry. One may disagree with the interpretations given to Mozart's Don Giovanni or Sophocles's Antigone in the first volume of the novel, but we agree that these works are capable of supporting a heavy burden of critical commentary. Yet Scribe's vaudeville is the only literary work that is discussed in both volumes of Either/Or.

Why? Did Kierkegaard really share the view of ‘A’ that this trifle is a profound and successful drama? Ronald Grimsley apparently thinks so: “Kierkegaard certainly pays homage to the literary merits of the play.”⁴ Grimsley consistently equates the point of view of ‘A’ with that of Kierkegaard: “Kierkegaard [not ‘A’] is fascinated by this ironical treatment of ‘romantic love’” (117). “Scribe, therefore, is treated by Kierkegaard as a very ‘modern’ author who has cleverly exposed the illusions of modern feeling” (119, italics mine). But if it is Kierkegaad in propria persona who speaks in Either/Or, why are certain statements about The First Love made in the first volume explicitly contradicted in the second? Is it mere inconsistency or sloppiness? Grimsley agrees that this is not a promising explanation and says of Judge William's criticisms: “It ought not to be assumed that Kierkegaard himself accepts all the strictures which he places in his character's mouth” (119). This is certainly true, but if it holds for ‘B’ (William), why should it not also hold for ‘A’? Evidently neither ‘A’ nor William stands for Kierkegaard himself, neither is his direct, unmediated “mouthpiece.” The Danish critic Frithiof Brandt correctly points out the narrative complexity: “It is always necessary when reading Kierkegaard to have in mind who is speaking and to recall the standpoint the speaker is proclaiming.”⁵

If this is so, we must understand Kierkegaard's treatment of The First Love as an example of irony, of “deception.” Well and good, but what then? To say that irony is present in Either/Or is not altogether helpful, since the real issue is not its presence but its operation. Assuming there is irony here, what we want to know is how it works and how it might help us to understand the structure of the work and its (apparently moral) aims. If what is said in the novel is somehow “other than” what it means, what procedures are available to decide just what sort of “other” we should look for?

We might take a cue from Kierkegaard's own discourse on the subject of irony, because it helps to clarify the connection between irony and deception—indeed the very sort of deception that is characteristic of this “rather deceitful” author. Kierkegaard claims that there is one powerful notion that animates all ideas about irony: the distinction between “phenomenon” and “essence.”⁶ This simple idea has a number of profound implications, some of which are more clearly shown in the practice of Kierkegaard the novelist than in the treatise of Kierkegaard the scholar. We should consider, for example, that irony does not reside in the mere fact or assertion that essence and phenomenon do not coincide; it arises rather as the result of two different processes, involving either the production or perception of such a divergence. There is the additional complication that essence can be interpreted either as “reality” or as “the potential,” and that phenomenon can be either “appearance” of “the actual.” The uncomfortable fact that either side of the opposition between phenomenon and essence can be understood as representing “reality” is ironically, an essential feature of the concept. A Kierkegaardian ironist, then, may either produce or perceive a divergence between either (a) appearance and reality or (b) the actual and the potential.

Clearly there are a fair number of alternative ironies that can be generated by this scheme. A Christian, for example, might practice two different sorts of irony: she might look upon mankind as an attractive container (appearance) of ugly sin (reality); or she might see him as the temporary mortal state (actual) of an eventually immortal angel (potential). Both points of view are equally ironical (in Kierkegaard's analysis), though the first is more specifically identified with cynicism and the second with idealism. Indeed, part of the appeal of Kierkegaard's highly generalized scheme is that it explains why the term “ironist” is used now for an idealist, now for a cynic, and then for an ordinary liar. The idealist is an ironist who perceives a divergence between the actual and the potential and strives for the potential. The cynic perceives a divergence between appearance and reality, gathering a sense of world-weariness from the realization that things are not what they seem. The liar, a very earnest practical ironist, produces an undetected divergence between appearance and reality in order to further personal ends. Kierkegaard was especially interested in the close connection between irony and dissimulation (i.e, the production of appearance/reality divergences), and it is for this reason that the figure of Socrates looms so large in his meditation on irony. Socrates practiced a kind of grand, though transparent, deception; his pretense went far beyond verbal manipulation, involving the whole personality. This irony was no mere trope or rhetorical mode, is was a way of living, and it offered to Kierkegaard the possibility of integrating philosophy and existence in a way he found deeply appealing.

The dissimulating ironist could, like Socrates, be a philosopher without a system. But such a philosopher would have to defend himself against charges of engaging in deception:

One must not be deceived by the word “deception.” One can deceive a person for the truth's sake, and (to recall old Socrates) one can deceive a person into the truth. Indeed, it is only by this means, i.e. by deceiving him, that it is possible to bring into the truth one who is in illusion. … What then does it mean, “to deceive”? It means that one does not begin directly with the matter one wants to communicate, but begins by accepting the other man's illusion as good money.⁷

Deception and mystification are Kierkegaard's most powerful pedagogical tools, since telling the truth directly to someone who believes a falsehood will succeed only in inciting incredulity. “Direct communication presupposes that the receiver's ability to receive is undisturbed. But here such is not the case; an illusion stands in the way.”⁸ If the ironist can deceive someone properly—that is, interestingly—he opens up the possibility of a movement from deception to truth. Evidently Kierkegaard's fictions (the books he referred to as “aesthetic works”) were designed to enlighten readers by taking just such an indirect path.

Such irony has a double value, for it functions on both the aesthetic and the moral planes. Its aesthetic value is a direct result of its duplicity, for its double structure presents a complexity that is inherently interesting. Its moral value lies in the possibility that the double structure will facilitate a movement from illusion to truth. The irony that Kierkegaard envisions therefore allows the writer to fulfill the poet's task, set by the Horation tradition, to make a poetic work both dulce and utile—in Kierkegaard's terminology, aesthetic and ethical—at the same time.

But the irony of Socratic deception works only because the deception is transparent. If everyone had actually believed Socrates to be as ignorant as he pretended, he would have had no followers and no impact. Kierkegaard's own mystification nearly led to this unintended result. Enough of his contemporaries were totally convinced by his pretense—and by a series of attacks in the Corsair, a notorious periodical—that he was a clown and a fool that his irony was completely lost on them. That Kierkegaard himself seemed to take their “illusion as good money” merely reinforced their illusions. In his fiction Either/Or, however, he took pains to undercut the ironic deceptions of the characters ‘A’ and ‘B’ by offering clues that their opinions are not always to be trusted.

The discussion of Scribe's The First Love provides one of the most important of such clues. It is a paradigmatic case of Kierkegaardian irony in that it offers both a deception and the means for rendering that deception transparent. The only remarkable thing about Scribe's play, we recall, is the heroine's complete about-face at the end. The suddenness of the reversal forces the audience to wonder why Emmeline would give up her dearest principle and accept as a lover the man she by all rights ought to detest. As a practical matter, we can easily understand why the writer of farce would contrive matters thus, for he must at all costs provide a happy ending. The reversal is in this practical sense entirely acceptable, since it is not beyond the bounds of time-tested comedic conventions. ‘A’, however, has proposed that we approach the play not as a conventional farce but as a thought-provoking drama. We are forced to notice that Emmeline is in a terrible bind. If she refuses Rinville, she loses her reason to exist, since her cherished notions about the timeless validity of “first love” have become meaningless. By accepting Rinville, she ostensibly offers to construct a new center for her existence.

Unlike ‘A’, a real audience in a real theater has little choice but to accept this offer in good faith, perhaps providing their own, dramatically irrelevent motivations for Emmeline's turnabout. One would have to reason approximately as follows: the play is supposed to be funny, and the ending is supposed to be happy; therefore Emmeline (who is in any case shown to be absolutely uninterested in logical thought) is perfectly justified in securing her happiness by any available means. Why try to second-guess her or the playwright, who surely had no other goal in mind than to keep us amused? The analysis offered by ‘A’ will not sit still for this line of reasoning, for it assumes that the play's goal is not mere amusement but deep philosophical provocation. Scribe may appear to have produced a slick and superficial ironic reversal, ‘A’ suggests, but in reality he has set up a profound ironic cataclysm, a confrontation between two mighty forces that can only result in an explosion of annihilating laughter.

The ironist ‘A’ finds in The First Love a splendid conflict between phenomenon and essence. Emmeline's willful and dogged insistence on the validity of her concept of the first love is an absolute phenomenon of illusion. Her experiences are a portrait of an absolute reality that is intolerant of such illusions. When the two come together we witness a confrontation of forces that can only cancel each other out. It is the perfect subject for ‘A’ critical narrative, since Scribe's plot supplies no middle ground, no room for doubt about the absolute character of the conflict. At the end, we have only the irresistible force and the immovable object colliding in a total denial of meaning. He argues that “the play is not moralizing in the finite sense, but witty in an infinite sense [Forstand].”⁹ The aesthete evidently thinks the unresolvable tension at the play's end a deliberate and masterful stroke on the part of Scribe. He supposes that the play does not rest on the moral order of a “happy-end” comedy but on an absolute disorder that can be understood as an enormous metaphysical joke. Scribe's vaudeville suddenly looks like Samuel Beckett's.

But behind ‘A’s purely aesthetic irony is Kierkegaard's larger deception, rendered transparent here by a text to which we have independent access, The First Love. ‘A’s criticism, imaginative and thought-provoking though it may be, is entirely misplaced. We may for a moment take it as “good money,” but a moment's reflection on the play Scribe actually wrote unmasks the deception. The absolute disorder that ‘A’ sees as infinitely witty is a profoundly nihilistic vision quite out of keeping with anything we could in good conscience ascribe to the author of Les Premières amours. The logic of the aesthete's argument is very convincing, but only up to a point. He has set out to prove that Emmeline's acceptance of Rinville has no motivation in her character, and he has proved it. Without such motivation, he suggests, the climax cannot be understood as part of any moral order. Lacking such a moral basis, the play has to be seen as belonging to a realm utterly beyond ethical concern, as purely aesthetic, as “infinitely witty,” as a huge joke that reveals the world to be devoid of moral meaning.

The trouble with this analysis is that it assumes an an utterly improbable cause for the unmotivated reversal. ‘A’ assumes that Scribe provided no motivation in order to be philosophically profound, whereas everything we know about Scribe and the usual practices of Scribe's theater suggests that he left it out simply because he did not find it necessary. The moral basis that ‘A’ cannot find in the text indeed cannot be found in the text; but it can be found in the convention of farce which, in the powerful norm of the happy ending, assumes that all's well that ends well. Proof of this, if proof is needed, is abundantly available in the stage history of The First Love, which audiences all over Europe enjoyed, not as “infinitely witty” and unsettingly profound, but as reassuringly conventional.

The play ‘A’ writes about is therefore not at all the same as the one Kierkegaard and his fellow audience-members saw. The larger ironic structure of Either/Or depends upon this divergence. The aesthete writes about a text that has been carefully divested of its theatrical context, as if no extratextual elements were relevant to its proper understanding. ‘A’ writes, in other words, from the standpoint of a radical formalism that would not have been shared by Kierkegaard's readers, or indeed by Kierkegaard himself. The necessity for recontextualizing Scribe's play is also the necessity for skepticism about ‘A’s position, and we begin to suspect that this slick piece of literary criticism is really part of an elaborate deception.

Further consideration only confirms our suspicion. The metaphysical joke that ‘A’ finds in Scribe's play is really very depressing, based as it is on the discovery of universal meaninglessness. If we accept the aesthete's analysis, we have to accept along with it its context of despair. ‘A’ suggests that we must accept both, offering a bitter pill to swallow along with the heady drink of his brilliant reading. By making the aesthete such an effective advocate of his position, Kierkegaard in effect makes him his own prosecutor. Therein lies the ironic paradox in all its subtlety and humor, and therein lies the sort of deception that most pleased the author of Either/Or.

But if the seductive ‘A’ is part of an elaborate structure of ironic mystification, so too is the morally upright judge ‘B’. Just as we are forced to suspect that something is missing from the aesthete's interpretation of The First Love, so too must we be skeptical about ‘B’s rather stodgy criticism. He views the play—and much else besides—with a kind of eloquent middle-class morality. He has the aesthetic sensitivity of a village censor, judging the merits of the play by the supposed moral stature of its characters. He finds it “unjust on the part of the poet to let Charles sink so low in the course of eight years. He is ready to admit that such things happen in real life, but he does not think that this is what one should learn from a poet.”¹⁰ This sort of naive neo-Platonism was quite fashionable among Kierkegaard's contemporaries, as for example in this passage from a letter from Engelstoft to Oehlenschläger in 1829: “Only those ideas that are worthy of the nobler side of humanity [den aedlere Menneskehed] are worthy of being supported by the poet through the power and grace of poetry.”¹¹ Kierkegaard probably intended that his audience recognize in the judge's pronouncements the repetition of this critical cliché.

William goes on to protest against the “contradiction” in Scribe's dramaturgy of representing “Emmeline as at once a high-flown fool and a really lovable girl—as Rinville at the first glance is at once convinced she is, in spite of his prejudice against her.”¹² The criticism is once again narrowly moral: there is no law of nature that prevents fools from being lovable. William, assuming that foolishness ought not to be rewarded with love in the ideal world of poetic justice, continues to take the moral defects of characters for aesthetic defects of the playwright. We begin to suspect that the judge has taken Scribe's farce just as much out of context as ‘A’ had done earlier. He also steadfastly refuses to take into account the conventions upon which the play actually rests and substitutes instead a set of conventions derived from a theory of literature quite at odds with Scribe's theatrical milieu. If ‘A’ is a radical formalist, ‘B’ is a radical idealist. Both formalism and idealism are defensible positions, but neither seems quite appropriate to the material under discussion, especially in the uncompromising forms offered by the two narrators.

‘B’ is in his own way just a much an ironist as ‘A’, since he sees in The First Love a divergence between phenomenon and essence—in this case a divergence between the “is” and the “ought to be.” Where ‘A’s irony was purely aesthetic, focusing on the clash between illusion and reality in Emmeline's notion of love, ‘B’s is purely moral, focusing on the difference between the characters as Scribe depicted them and the paradigms of upright behavior William would like to see depicted. The judge is angry at the playwright for portraying love as a “prank it takes a man eight years to live into and half an hour to get out of,”¹³ ignoring thereby the entire basis upon which farce rests. The “comédie-vaudeville” follows the ancient comedic practice of presenting characters and situations that are not “better than ourselves,” as Aristotle put it, but worse. They are objects of ridicule. It is completely inappropriate to criticize a farce for presenting absurd situations, since that is precisely the business of farce.

The inappropriateness of both ‘A’s and ‘B’s approaches to The First Love serves as the thread by which the deception of Either/Or unravels. By using an object from outside the world of his prose fiction, Kierkegaard provides both a subject on which to write a set of “deceptions” and the means by which the deception is undone. Sribe's play becomes a kind of measuring stick against which to test the theories of the judge and the aesthete. I do not mean to argue that Kierkegaard needed his readers to make such critical comparisons consciously and systematically. He only needed to suggest that something about these elaborate discussions of Scribe's play was wrong, incomplete, or unsatisfying. Kierkegaard the novelist did not want conscious and systematic reasoning but rather a kind of learning by experience. That is the very point of writing a fiction, a set of deceptions, rather than a didactic treatise.

The “rather deceitful” author mentioned in the epigraph at the head of this essay deceives in a very special way: not merely “in such a way that he might say one thing and mean another, but in such a way that he carries the thought to extremes, so that, if it is not grasped with the same energy, it appears the next moment to be something different.”¹⁴ It becomes something different, in fact, no matter how vigorously we grasp it. Kierkegaard's ironic fictions do not simply “say one thing and mean another,” for both the “one thing” and the “other” are constantly changing. We are not offered a definite X that stands for an equally definite Y. Instead we participate in a process that has no predefined conclusion. Kierkegaard's ironic deception produces an experience in which the reader must grapple energetically with a protean text that refuses to remain static. If we find the difficulties of reading Either/Or at least as great as those of wrestling with Proteus, we are not failing. We are reading well.¹⁵

Notes

1. The first epigraph is from Repetition, trans. Walter Lowrie (1941; rpt, New York: Harper Torchbooks, n.d.), 35. The original Danish can be found in Søren Kierkegaards Samlede Vaerker, 15 vols., ed. A. B. Drachman, J. L. Hieberg, H. O. Lange (Kjøbenhavn, Kristiania: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1901-1906), III, 175. This edition will be cited hereafter as SV. A more recent third edition (Gyldendal, 1962-64) has proved unreliable (see note 14). The second epigraph is from Fictions of Romantic Irony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1984), 12.

2. See for example the entries under Mystification, mystificere, Bedrag and Svig in the Søren Kierkegaard-Register (Kjøbenhavn, 1936).

3. All quotations from Scribe are from the Théâtre complet de M. Eugène Scribe, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1838), V, 260-281. English translations are mine.

4. Søren Kierkegaard and French Literature: Eight Comparative Studies (Cardiff: U of Wales P, 1966), 116. Cited below in the text.

5. Søren Kierkegaard: His Life—His Works, trans. Ann R. Born (Copenhagen: Den Danske Selskab, 1963), 37.

6. See Om Begrebet Ironi in SV, XIII, 322: “Her have vi allerede en Bestemmelse, de gaar gjennem al Ironi, den nemlig, at Phaenomenet ikke er Vaesenet, men det Modsatte af Vaesenet.”

7. SV, XIII, 541, trans. Walter Lowrie, The Point of View for My Work as An Author (1930; rpt. New York, Harper Torchbooks, 1962), 39-40.

8. SV, XIII, 541. Lowrie, Point of View, 40.

9. SV, I, 230-231. Either/Or, trans. Swenson and Swenson (1943; rpt. with revisions by H. A. Johnson, Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1959).

10. SV, II, 269. Either/Or, II, 305.

11. Quoted by Sven Møller Kristensen in Vurderinger, 3rd ed. (København: Gyldendal, 1968), 61-62. Trans. mine.

12. SV, II, 269. Either/Or, II, 305.

13. SV, II, 269. Either/Or, II, 305.

14. SV, III, 175. Repetition, 35. The third edition of SV (1962-64) omits an essential part of the passage.

15. Earlier versions of this essay benefited from helpful suggestion by Barry Jacobs, Kjetil Flatin, and Ray Prier.