[In the following essay, Katz discusses Kierkegaard's sense of his own marginality in relation to German Romanticism.]

What seems less the picture of a living person than a silhouette? And yet, how much it tells us!

[Was kann weniger Bild eines ganz lebendigen Menschen seyn, als ein Schattenriß? Und wie viel sagt er!]

—Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente

Although Søren Kierkegaard began Either/Or in Copenhagen, he wrote the bulk of it in an apartment on Gendarme Square in Berlin, where he spent the better part of 1841 escaping the public fallout from his breakup with Regine. As a Bildungsreise [journey of education] the trip was unusual, in that he fed off and collected only negative impressions. The newly expanded avenues of pre-revolutionary Berlin seemed to him inhumanly wide. Faust's Wintergarten, an elaborate glass exhibition hall to which he was lured by advertisements in the local newspapers, offered “little to see.” He heard F. W. J. Schelling speak at the university on the philosophy of revelation, but found his vaunted breakthrough to speculative authenticity unconvincing.¹ The lectures of the Hegelian K. F. Werder displayed the virtuosity of a carnival strong man lifting “paper-maché” weights; while those of Henrik Steffens, one of the last living intimates of the Jena circle and a one-time popularizer of its program in Scandinavia and Northern Europe, sounded vague to the point of senility.² Indeed, the city as a whole appeared to him to be living off its dwindling idealist capital: “not only in the realm of commerce,” he would later write, “but in the realm of ideas, our age is organizing ein wirklicher Ausverkauf” [closing-out sale].³ Kierkegaard's own sense of belatedness vis-à-vis the German Romantics (above all, Friedrich Schlegel, Ludwig Tieck and E. T. A. Hoffmann) was nothing less than acute, since in his case epigonism was a function not simply of time but place. For years he had chided himself as a provincial and polemicized against Copenhagen as a cultural backwater colonized by German thought. His Berlin flânerie only drove the fact of his marginality home, so that while abroad he felt himself to be an illegible, virtually occult figure: “I walk down the ‘Unter den Linden’ … like a silent letter which no one can pronounce.”⁴

And yet Kierkegaard did not stroll through Berlin simply to gather material for a pastiche. His literary epigonism—cultivated, exacerbated, and worked up into a virtual technique—was deliberate and seditious, a continuation of his difficult, early efforts to orient himself aesthetically. Much as he had done a few months before in The Concept of Irony (1841), Kierkegaard attempts in Either/Or to purge himself of the hermeticism of German theory, only this time on German soil, and within fiction itself. His border-crossing offers a literal enactment of Mikhail Bakhtin's cultural dialogic, in which a writer inhabits the conventions of a foreign literature without sacrificing a distancing point of view:

Creative understanding does not renounce itself, its own place in time, its own culture; and it forgets nothing. In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding. … For one cannot even really see one's own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be seen only by other people, because they are located outside us in space, and because they are others.⁵

If a writer simply empathizes with a foreign cultural tradition, the result is merely some form of imitation or hybridization. Retaining the perspective of an outsider, according to Bakhtin, is essential for real cultural dialogue, in that it allows a foreign author to recognize and play with the latent possibilites of a host culture through a “surplus” of vision. As we will see in the course of this essay, Kierkegaard, as an outsider, was able to follow through on the critical premises of two generations of German romantic fiction with a detachment and abandon beyond the reach of the most estranged of contemporary native writers (one of the reasons why he, even more than Heinrich Heine, has proven so consequential in the development of twentieth-century German literature). Either/Or is not, as Theodor Adorno maintains,⁶ merely a counterfeit of German prose with a thin overlay of polemic, but rather, a simulacrumous whole, executed from a critical distance. Like those nineteenth-century physiognomists who delineated their subjects through the casting and tracing of silhouettes, Kierkegaard physiognomizes German romantic prose by creating a literary shadow art, one that is drawn at second hand, stylized to the point of transparency, and drained of all but a negative trace of substance. Critics have generally tended to attenuate Kierkegaard's radicalized way of seeing, maintaining that if he turns with such heat on romantic impulses in the first part of the book, it is only in order to give them domesticated form in the second. It is the argument of this essay, however, that Either/Or's embrace of the mid-century bourgeois literary idiom is actually a deception from start to finish, and that the book adopts the alternate guises of aestheticism and Biedermeier—what Georg Lukács once described as the twin tactics of late German Romanticism—in order to see through and supersede both. The cultural border Kierkegaard works at is, at the same time, an historical cross-roads. Although Adorno maintains that Kierkegaard, in attemping to come free of German influence, ends up retreating even deeper into the nineteenth-century bourgeois “intérieur,”⁷ it is fairer to say that Kierkegaard actually goes a step further: in Either/Or he dissolves the German romantic interior in abstraction, and in the process, leaves behind one of the earliest blueprints of the modernist aesthetic.

Victor Emerita, the pseudonymous editor of Kierkegaard's Either/Or, claims to have discovered the vagrant manuscripts that make up the book in the trip-drawer of a second-hand writing desk. Since they were either left anonymous or signed by untraceable pseudonyms, he has divided them into two thematically distinct parts. Each of the contributions for part one illustrates an example of what he generically terms “aesthetic existence” (I: 13). Either/Or's purported editor, Victor Emerita, suggests that the manuscripts, whether anonymous or signed, have likely been written by the single unknown author A., a nameless pseudonym behind the pseudonyms whose collection of aphorisms introduce the book. A. serves in Either/Or as paradigmatically totalized aesthete. Quick-witted, dialectically skilled, prone to extravagant mood swings, and above all self-dramatizing, he has the tendency to melodramatic excess one associates with Christian Grabbe, Nikolaus Lenau, or Lord Byron, only Either/Or offers internalized melodrama, with A.'s histrionics played out as thought experiments. A. forgoes the autobiographical techniques of amassing detail and linear narrative, and instead lends his self-portrait coherence chiefly through literary analogy. As a self-styled Faustian doubter, “master thief,” and reflexive Don Juan void of a center and inherent stability, he embodies that heightened sense of masquerade which Nina Auerbach observes as signaling the epoch of mid-nineteenth-century “hero manufacture.”⁸ Portraying himself in the form of an unfinished consciousness, A. invariably lets us “catch” him in the act of Gothic self-fabrication: “My care is my baronial castle, which lies like an eagle's nest high on the mountain peak among the clouds. No one can take it by storm. From it I swoop into actuality and seize my prey, but I do not remain there. I bear my booty home, and this booty is a picture I weave into the tapestries at my palace. I then live as one already dead” (I: 42).

The literary program of Either/Or is thus worked out as a late variant on that of Friedrich Schlegel's reflexively “hovering” poet from the Fragmente, without the belief that through the constant projection and negation of the authorial ego a poetry of poetry can lead to the threshold of the absolute. It is Transzendentalpoesie stripped of its moral telos and reduced to a technique which, if not quite mechanical, has been sparked and sustained by instrumentalized reason (one of the essays develops a method for staving off boredom comparable to advanced techniques of crop rotation). Where forty years before the programmatic voluptuaries in Lucinde had oscillated between pleasure and rumination on pleasure, A. luxuriates exclusively in the latter, his self-awareness potentiated to the degree that the external world goes into eclipse. Method bears both the discursive and the imaginative weight of Either/Or, since the book is less a passive reflection of the bourgeois intèrieur than it is a deliberate account of the process of interiorization. The “still life” Adorno and others see in it (Susan Buck-Morss refers to its “eternally fixed” tableaux)⁹ is ultimately nothing but an optical illusion. Kierkegaard's art, closely observed, shows itself to be one of separating gesture from body, and act from entity. To deny this is to deny the book its most fundamental form-giving principle: kinesis as consciousness. “What,” A. himself asks, “is the most seductive moment? When the glance falters, when the foot hesitates, when the heart trembles, when the eyes drop … when the creation sighs, when the voice fails” (I: 436). The transposition of substance into movement is made articulate in Either/Or through constant reference to music—snatches of melody, observations on operatic performances, speculations on the nature of the musical erotic, and private piano recitals. The manner in which music nullifies space, Hegel observes, is unique: “Specific sensuous material … turns to movement, yet so vibrates in itself that every part of the cohering body not only changes place, but also struggles to replace itself in its former position.”¹⁰ Likewise, dogs, hunters, trees, and carriages are contained in abstracto within the welter of sounds penetrating A.'s rooms from behind the physically palpable barrier of closed shutters and heavy drapery. Once heard, the visible returns, only this time as a coporealized principle of perception:

[In the middle ages], stronger than ever before the sensuous awoke in all its profusion, in all its rapture and exultation, and—just as that hermit in nature, taciturn echo, who never speaks to anyone first or speaks without being asked, derived such great pleasure from the knight's hunting horn and from his melodies of erotic love, from the baying of hounds, from the snorting of horses, that it never wearied of repeating it again and again and finally, as it were, repeated it very softly to itself in order not to forget it—so it was that the whole world on all sides became a reverberating abode for the worldly spirit of sensuousness.

(I: 84)

Even in what is generally regarded as the most plastic of A.'s prose pieces, “The Diary of a Seducer,” the conventions of a nineteenth-century German novella serve as a background for aesthetic procedure. As a seducer, Johannes is distinguished by his ability to filter experience through the most filigreed capacity for self-representation. As Johannes himself observes, he is an emphatically “Faustian” version of Don Juan. Kierkegaard was not the first to try and link the two legends in attempting to come to terms with the legacy of aesthetic Prometheanism. In “Don Juan und Faust” (1826), Grabbe had alternated scene by scene between what he termed “the absolute transcendental” and “the absolute sensual.” Kierkegaard, who knew the melodrama intimately, follows Grabbe's lead and melds the two narratives in the figure of Johannes, his cerebralized seducer. Indeed, in the very act of analogizing himself, Johannes displays his superior style of irradiating the life of the senses with reflection, potentiating them into an abstract, hence “demonic,” force in an exaggerated version of the kind of mediated or triangulated desire René Girard has shown to be an essential element of nineteenth-century bourgeois privatization.¹¹ Johannes's exercise of sexual power is decentered and diffuse. He insinuates himself into the life of the young middle-class Cordelia, first by indifferently crossing her path on her way to church, and later, by befriending her relatives and shadowing her movements through his system of surveillance. Since he wants not only to pique her imagination, but also hold it captive in a state of anticipation, he affects the suggestiveness of a wraith. He begins his account as the epitome of the voyeuristically detached mid-century narrator, fixing his eye on the intricacies of Cordelia's domestic life but for weeks remaining unseen himself. Although his domination of her is not sadistic in any formal sense, it displays and even foregrounds the ascetic discipline which informs all sadistic performance. Johannes does not submit to desire, but mythologizes desire and indeed, mythologizes himself as desire (the real object of the voyeur, Jacques Lacan notes, lies in the voyeuristic gaze itself, and cannot be seen: “the object he sees is nothing but a shadow, a shadow cast on a screen”).¹² For her part, Cordelia is ravished not by a corporeal being but by a process of seduction, with Johannes's subjugation of her turning on how successful he is at remaining a liminal presence. The little that actually occurs between them is transformed in his letters to her, where he gives himself over to violent outbursts and passionate verbal displays—all of which are meant to conceal his inviolate capacity for self-control. Hidden behind the rhetoric, this repressive element in Johannes's performance serves as a means of expanding the scope of his private sphere and, through psychic friction, heightening his erotic response.¹³

The unexampled purity of Kierkegaard's virtuoso ideal is most clearly gauged late in the diaries, when Johannes visits Jutland to locate and decorate a oceanside cottage for one of Cordelia's retreats. Although Johannes does not plan on being there to meet her, he leaves precise instructions with his servant on how she should first be shown the premises. Nothing is left to chance; her impressions are choreographed in advance, down to the play of light off the borrowed piano. Cordelia, we are informed, will first enter through the sun room, which is described as having windows three-quarters of the way around. To one side there is a view of a still lagoon and woods, situated so that looking out from the cottage all contours vanish:

One moves closer to the window—a calm lake hides humbly within the higher surroundings. At the edge there is a boat. It works loose from its moorings, glides over the surface of the lake, rocked on the surface of the lake which is dreaming about the deep dark solitude of the trees, one vanishes in the mysteriousness of the forest.

(I: 442)

Across the room, the windows open up to the sea, offering sheer light and a limitlessness horizon. Decorative effects extend to nature: the shimmer is seen from behind the window, framed as a self-consciously romantic vista, a Turner-like view of the abstract sublime. Around the corner and to the back there is a small parlor, furnished by Johannes to resemble Cordelia's mother's, only with everything more atmospheric and exotic: “Matting woven of a special kind of willow covers the floor: in front of the sofa stands a small tea table with a lamp upon it, the mate to the one there at home. … On the music holder, the little Swedish melody lies open. The door to the hall is slightly ajar” (I: 442). In expected mid-century fashion, objects are drawn into an interior space and subjectivized into ornament. Yet, there are no static or “eternally fixed” interiors within Kierkegaard's purview. Under his gaze, rooms become mere portals, there to be passed through, and to be seen being passed through. A. leads the reader to see how Cordelia will enter, step back, circle around and visually absorb her surroundings. The cottage is thus not simply a station in Johannes's gradual seduction of Cordelia, but this seduction's own three-dimensional analogue. Walking from one room to the other in line with his cues, she will follow the path of her own aesthetic debauch, from enchantment and the piquancy of the poetic, to a domestic order in which she is no longer fully at ease. Poesis makes a near airtight conquest—and to drive the point home, Kierkegaard lets the episode dissolve into the purely figural: what Cordelia does once she gets to the cottage, or whether she even arrives in the first place is never revealed. Johannes literally sets a scene, then retreats to his rooms in the city to imagine the playing out of his private theatrical. In Werther, Roland Barthes writes, amorous adventures are so thoroughly worked over in the narration that even when described in the present tense they contain a “tone of remembrance.”¹⁴ For Johannes, trysts occur neither in the here-and-now, nor the past, but in a hypothetical present: “The illusion is perfect,” he writes from his apartment. “She enters the private room, she looks around, she is pleased, of that I am sure” (I: 443). As both the seduced and the seduction are bracketed out, sensuality is sacrificed on the altar of erotic potential (a gesture later refined in Rainer Maria Rilke's notion of objectless, intransitive love), and the ascetic self-denial traditionally used either to impress the beloved or, according to Michel Foucault, heighten one's interiority, enters the realm of pure thought. Even when Johannes finally has Cordelia in the flesh, in mente he is absent: “How Cordelia preoccupies me! And yet at the time will soon be over. I already hear, as it were, the rooster crowing in the distance. Perhaps she hears it too. But she believes it is heralding the morning” (I: 435).

Yet, at the same time Either/Or absolutizes the idea of German romantic potency, it also draws it to a dialectical turning point. Like the seducer, the “authentic” poet assumes prolonged interests to be an inherent challenge to his status as a creator ex nihilo. In order to keep his creative dynamism as self-supporting as possible, A. gathers momentum from a restless succession of tropes, a poetic calculus in which the imagination is determined exclusively by function. For the Frühromantiker self-destruction and self-creation had been a necessary concomitant of a poet's autonomy, and therefore axiomatic for their literary programs. A., too, considers poetic disillusionment an essential mark of artistic prowess, only it manifests itself in his work less as a promise of autonomy and what Friedrich Schlegel had called “unendliche Kraft” [immeasurable Power] than an increasingly frustrating and ultimately insuperable obstacle. In each of the book's manuscripts, talk of literary genre, method, and vocation is inevitably eclipsed by his expressions of disconsolateness, so that what, thematically speaking, looks at first like center stage becomes an antechamber leading elsewhere: a youthful enthusiasm for art hints at going sour (“The First Love”); a vain attempt is made to keep creative inertia at bay (“The Rotation Method”); modern ennui is discussed obliquely, by way of historical comparison (“The Ancient Tragical Motif”). Poetic disillusionment is played with in different settings and experienced at different levels of intensity according to the self-awareness of the pseudonym (a sequential ordering is abjured in order to present despair as an ongoing struggle). It is the nature of such reflexive despair that it interiorizes and, knowing no closure, feeds on itself in perpetual motion.

Kierkegaard's fictional pseudonyms hover, then, at the vanishing point where late romantic self-consciousness, having swallowed contingency but unable to find repose, becomes visibly transparent to itself. This clearly aligns Either/Or with the allegorized romantic retrospective at the close of Hegel's Phänomenologie des Geistes. If Johannes could be said to correspond to the self-defeating master in the master-slave dialectic, then A. bears the features of the Unhappy Consciousness. Indeed, A. is enough of an intertextual concoction to use Hegel's aesthetic critique as a form of self-reproach. “The Unhappy Consciousness,” he writes, “is an idea that can almost make the blood run cold, the nerves shiver, it can make a person tremble like a sinner” (I: 222). The difference between A. and the Unhappy Consciousness is, as Stephen Dunning observes, no more than a fissure, but it is a fissure of immeasurable depth.¹⁵ Even pared down to where he is little more than a voice, A. is neither a fixed category nor archetype, but a particular personality moving within a specific context; and rather than indulging the hope of short-circuiting reflective despair through the dialectic of universal history, A. attempts to gain in self-awareness by enduring the discomfort of non-identity. He is an existential incarnation of the Unhappy Consciousness, and as such a walking rebuke to the kind of Hegeliansim Kierkegaard was hearing in Berlin in the lectures of K. F. Werder and Philipp Konrad Marheineke.¹⁶

Kierkegaard's journals from the period cultivate the same radically epigonistic perspective. Taken as a whole they form a virtual compendium of allusions and quotations drawn either from Hoffmann, Grabbe, and Lenau, or from those passages in the high Romantics which, in their volatility, have a decidedly “late” or posthumous cast. Kierkegaard projects himself through the repertoire of stock Gothic-revival figures: the Wandering Jew, the master thief, the villified eccentric. The mid-century cult of Weltschmerz was at its core a theatrical phenomenon (a “Faschingsmummerei,” [carnival masquerade], according to Karl Immermann) in which the claim of authenticity was an essential part of the act. In its struggle against reification, “inwardness” had put itself at reification's disposal, first by making itself a subject of virtuoso technique, then by spectacularizing itself as Zerrissenheit [inner division]—a phenomenon which placed its nineteenth-century practitioners squarely in line with a developing publicity culture (it is no coincidence that Either/Or, this most “personal” of confessions, became a Danish bestseller, its notoriety increased by the pseudonymous fan dance with his identity Kierkegaard executed in the pages of the local press). Kierkegaard experienced the mid-century crisis of non-identity at second hand, through a lens of German writing. When he “laments” like Nikolaus Lenau or “broods” like Hoffmann or Bonaventura, he evolves a purely adverbial Romanticism. Indeed, what is remarkable about the early journals is the degree to which he is able to heighten the performative aspect of post-romantic melodrama. The focus is neither on the German literary reference or prototype, nor on his own biography, but on the isolated act of literary simulation.

Of the actual trip to Berlin, the journals provide only glimpses: mention is made of walks through the more desolate parts of the Tiergarten, immersion in the “human baths” of the marketplace, a visit to the theater, a view of the colossal opera house where Don Giovanni had recently been performed, and the decor of his apartment. Nothing of the texture of Kierkegaard's stay in Germany is registered, however, until the story “Repetition” is completed two years later. In this fictionalized account of his brief return visit to Berlin (which he made in the spring of 1843), Kierkegaard excavates, or tries to excavate, the experience of his first visit months earlier during the composition of Either/Or. Again, he takes the same apartment on the Jägerstrasse. He writes: “The recollection of these things was an important factor in my taking this journey. One climbs to the stairs to the first floor in a gas-illuminated building, opens a little door and stands in the entry. To the left is a glass door leading to a room. Straight ahead is an anteroom. Beyond are two entirely identical rooms, identically furnished, so that one sees the room double in the mirror.”¹⁷ Despite the precision of his recall, he finds that repetition is impossible without difference, however partial or invisible. Like Charles Baudelaire in “Le Cygne,” Kierkegaard's souvenir turns out to be a sense of the irrecoverable. Speed, the intoxication of sheer number, the deferred promise of chance encounters, surface glitter, all testify to the discontinuity of metropolitan life. Kierkegaard experiences Berlin as a gaslit theatrical space, the locus for an urban Gothic in which the capacity for experience is fugitive: “Sitting in a chair by the window,” he says, “one looks out on the great square, sees the shadows of passersby hurrying along the walls … one feels a strong desire to toss on a cape and steal softly along the wall with a searching gaze, aware of every sound. One does not do this but merely sees a rejuvenated self- doing it. Having smoked a cigar one goes back to the inner room and begins to work.”¹⁸ Indeed, the fact that Kierkegaard is an armchair flaneur is decisive, since it allows him the perspective from which to physiognomize his own imagined movements. In this way, Kierkegaard's gaze comprehends what Walter Benjamin calls the flaneur's “illustrative seeing” by rendering the ephemera of urban spectacle as shadow play. From above the Jägerstrasse, Kierkegaard writes, “a single shadow appears even blacker, a single footstep takes longer to disappear. … Once again one goes out into the hallway, into, the entry, into that little room, and—if one is among the fortunate who is able to sleep—goes to sleep.”¹⁹ Urban reveries are thus simulated to the point where they are fed by echoes (audible shadows), or shadows (visible echoes).

In short, it is Kierkegaard's approach in these early works to mock the increasingly melodramatic and vacant German idiom of disillusionment not through parody or distortion but by stylistic and psychological amplification. The tradition of romantic arabesque is given an additional, metacritical twist: the kind of self-reflexive prose originally plied by Friedrich Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck itself becomes an object of imaginative play. Kierkegaard displays a measure of what Seamus Deane has described as the “vicious virtuosity” of the colonial working the conventions of a dominant, metropolitan culture.²⁰ In the first part of Either/Or, Kierkegaard, like Heine, follows through on the consequences of Schlegel's original dicta of aesthetic self-parody, expanding the scope and heightening the vertigo. Kierkegaard's formal term for this maneuver is “reduplication” or “redoubling;” a pure expression of the desire to potentialize which in The Concept of Anxiety (1844) he equates with anxiety's very essence: anxiety is objectless because at bottom it is always anxiety about possibility per se (the sense of absolute potential cultivated by the Frühromantiker is, accordingly, not a compounded but a compounding anxiety). Reduplication is similar to other rhetorical tactics used by the Romantics in their agonistic attempts to emerge from one another's influence. It aims at completion like tessera, it purifies like askesis, and it has the same repetitive drive as kenosis.²¹ Yet, Kierkegaard—his already highly developed sense of retrospective distance magnified by his extraterritorial remove—takes a broader compass by collapsing universal history in on itself. “Reduplication” aims not to undercut one or more particular precursors, but to break with the German project of revisionism in toto. In discussing the privileged view of the cultural outsider, Bakhtin suggests the analogy of the physiognomist:

A special and extremely important feature in the outer plastic-pictorial seeing of another human being is the experience of the outward boundaries that encompass him. … The other is given to me entirely enclosed within a world that is external to me; he is given to me as a constituent in what is totally delineated on all sides in space. Moreover, at each given moment, I experience distinctly all of his boundaries, encompass him visually. … I see the line that delineates his head against the background of the outside world and see the lines that delimit his body in the outside world.²²

It is along similar lines that Either/Or “silhouettes” the corpus of the German Nachromantik by stepping back and delineating its fringe experience. The fact that it was Heine who was the first to deliberately and consistently turn the tradition of German literary irony against itself is something Kierkegaard himself acknowledges: “Heine,” he writes in his journals, “moves in contrast to irony, and by his teaching, elicits humorous sparks from it.”²³ But where the Heine of the Buch der Lieder is partial and tentative in this regard, Kierkegaard is methodical, to the point of establishing late romantic non-identity as the sole form-giving principle of A.'s shadowgraphic prose.

In the second part of Either/Or, Kierkegaard takes an additional step in orienting himself with regard to German aesthetics, this one in the direction of Biedermeier domesticity. The two letters addressed to A. which compose the book (“The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage,” and “Equilibrium between the Aesthetic and Ethical”) are written by a paterfamilias, provincial magistrate and self-styled defender of “altars and hearths” who signs himself “Judge Wilhelm.” As opposed to A.'s metropolitan writings, these letters issue from the still preindustrial Danish countryside (or at least from the countryside as imagined, in a highly denatured form, from Kierkegaard's apartment labyrinth in Berlin). Unfortunately, in treating the Judge either as a mouthpiece for neo-humanism or as an archetypal burgher “writing expansively from his ease,”²⁴ critics have tended to obscure his specifically Biedermeier features, namely, a phobia of aesthetic excess, and fear that behind the epoch's museal interiors and garden views there is a steady threat of fracture and decay (although Kierkegaard was unacquainted with much of German-language Biedermeier, he knew Annette Droste-Hülshoff, Justinus Kerner, Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, and Johann Nestroy. Indeed, a production of Nestroy's Posse “Der Talisman” was a highlight of his stay in Berlin). As Friedrich Sengle observes, the Biedermeier has to be understood as a further phase in the anxious “Gesamtbewegung” [dynamic] of European Romanticism.²⁵ Like one of the tutelary figures who surface in Maler Nolten or Uli der Pächter, the Judge's aim is not to extirpate but domesticate romantic impulses in order to rob them of their subversive powers. His correspondence constitutes a dialogue in and of itself: A. is invisibly present in it, in its prolixity and nervous energy. While writing, the Judge finds his assured, patriarchal identity unsettled by thoughts of A., whom he analogizes with the mesmeric, the foreign, the protean, and the effete. A.'s theatricalism provokes the Judge into an anxiety of indeterminacy (A.'s appearance in the Judge's letters is un-heimlich [uncanny or un-homely] in the Freudian sense: a fear of what is most familiar masquerading as fear of the alien). There is more than a touch of sexual panic at work here. The Judge resists being cast in the role of the seduced, maintaining that he has no reason to fear A., and arguing that stability and constancy are an even match for A.'s agility and attractive melancholy. He refuses, he says, to be “carried away” by A.'s talents (unlike the young men and women whom A. draws into his circle via “telegraphic communications,” II: 78). Nevertheless, the Judge feels himself compelled to voice his fascination with A.'s seductive powers—powers which he clearly savors while resisting: “[Your] despair is like a fire in the distance … it gives a flourish to the hat and to the whole body. The lips smile haughtilly” (II: 195). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has observed that the sexual paranoia haunting Gothic post-romantic fiction often played itself out through the rivalry of two highly individuated male protagonists, each reading the mind of the “feared and desired other.”²⁶ The second part of Either/Or enacts a struggle to turn this kind of Gothic pairing into the hierarchical, stable relation of mentor and protégé found in a conventional Bildungsroman. The Judge anticipates A.'s objections to his entreaties, and these imagined objections shape the flow of the Judge's discourse into a series of ellipses within ellipses which follow the same kinetic, circular patterning A. traced out in his portraits of romantic type-characters. As the Judge sits down to write to A., his fear of psychological contagion crystallizes into a perfect image of Biedermeier compulsion—a burgher manically securing his threshold: “I have spent my evenings on this letter. I have not imagined you here in my house, in my room, but outside my door, from which I have almost tried to drive you with my sweeping” (II: 154). Out of the era's Tugendwortschatz, [vocabulary of virtue] Kierkegaard erects a rhetorical enclosure:

I listen to the little one cry, and to my ear it is not discordant: I watch his elder brother grow and make progress; I gaze happily into his future, not impatiently, for I have time enough to wait, and to me this waiting is in itself a joy. My work has meaning for me, and I believe that to a certain degree it also has meaning for others. … I love my native country, and I cannot well imagine that I could thrive in any other. I love my mother tongue, which liberates my thoughts: I find that in it I can express extremely well what I may have to say in this world. … Amidst all this, I live a higher life, and when it happens at times that I inhale this higher life in the breathing of my earthly and domestic life, I count myself blessed, then art and grace fuse for me.

(II: 324)

This domestic arrangement, however, is more ephemeral than it first appears. The Judge begins his disquisition in expected nineteenth-century humanist fashion by stating that ethical actions follow ethical intent; and although this smacks of Kantianism—ethical volition (Willkür) as the sole reliable tie to transcendence—the Judge implicitly discourages such comparisons by rejecting any sense of duty that derives action from universal principles as being too form-driven and external an imperative. In his participatory ethics the sheer event of choice, and not a ruling concept, is crucial. The Judge's notion of ethical-aesthetic “equilibrium” is worked out in emphatically functional terms. He sketches a number of hypothetical domestic tableaux for A.—like the married pair who, wanting nothing so much as to stave off routine, encourage the accidental in life and studiously avoid the moment when repetitiveness begins (II: 114); or the household in which the husband and wife live on separate floors so that he can enjoy viewing her from his window as if she were still a complete stranger to him. Yet, each of these domestic blueprints is merely cautionary, a presentation of aesthetic equilibrium solely through negative circumscription (indeed, at one point the Judge blames A. for having forced him into distracting scene painting). Like the Judge's notion of conjugal eros, the properly oriented romantic libido “constructs” itself in strictly oppositional terms, situated as it is in the struggle against the kind of sensual phantasmagoria he, like A., has experienced most consciously through exposure to German fiction. Indeed, references to A.'s German readings are turned to polemical account, sometimes explicitly (the Judge cites “Rolands Knappen” in inveighing against phantom pleasures, and later, accuses A. of behaving like a Peter Schlemihl), at other times subterraneously: long stretches of the Judge's tirade against A.'s poet's existence are lifted almost verbatim from Kierkegaard's critical analysis of Friedrich Schlegel and K. W. F. Solger in The Concept of Irony. Polemically charged, the letters to A. take on imagistic coloration. Yet, when discussing the way in which artistic form may, as he puts it, “coalesce with the world,” he draws us a blank. Since “the aesthetic” is spoken of only with regard to A.'s instability, the Judge in effect relinquishes the very word to him:

In despair nothing perishes, all of the aesthetic remains in a person, only it is reduced to an auxiliary and precisely thereby is preserved. Yes, it is certainly true that one does not live in it as before. But from this it does not follow that it is gone. The ethicist only carries through the despair that the advanced aestheticist has already begun.

(II: 229)

Kierkegaard's notion of equilibrium turns on a slight of hand: “All of the aesthetic remains in a person, only it is reduced to an auxiliary and is thereby precisely preserved.” Yet, far from being solidified or substantialized,²⁷ the literary process remains as destabilizing for Judge Wilhelm as it does for A. or for A.'s German romantic prototypes. Judge Wilhelm has experienced speculative doubt too intensely to trust in Biedermeier gardens and idylls as a cognitive bulwark. For Kierkegaard, the kind of brittle, precarious poetic compromise with the senses that constitutes the work of a contemporary like Eduard Mörike or Adalbert Stifter is literally unimaginable. What distinguishes the Judge from A. is a subtle shift of perspective: the Judge actively wills his own imaginative defeat. Such is the “ministering role” of aesthetic experience. The visual imagination is transfigured ethically to the extent that it is resisted (like one of Ludwig Wittgenstein's proverbial ladders, it is climbed and kicked aside). Narrative progress in the book is deceptive; and the closure one expects in the Biedermeier is forestalled. Characters make headway only by realizing the extent of their romantic stasis. Like a multitiered chess game, the pseudonyms and the different degrees of self-consciousness they incorporate are present synchronically. To get one's bearings in his world, therefore, depends on seeing all occurences as simultaneous, and on seeing their interrelationship in what Bakhtin calls “the cross-section of the moment.” Either/Or's voices thus move in counterpoint. A's lamentations already contain the possibility—the need—of Judge Wilhelm; while aesthetic experience does not exist for the Judge beyond the category of “the aesthete.” The Judge claims he wants to tie the imagination more firmly to the mundane, but this is mere subterfuge meant to draw A. along:

Therefore only when I regard my life ethically do I see it with a view to its beauty, and only when I regard my own life ethically do I see it with a view to its beauty. And if you were to say that this beauty is invisible, I would answer: in a certain sense it is, in another sense it is not, that is to say, it is visible in the trace it leaves in history, visible in the sense in which it was said Loquere, ut videam te. It is indeed true that I do not see the consummation, but the struggle, but after all, I see the consummation every instant I will, if I have the courage for it, and without courage I see absolutely nothing eternal, and accordingly, nothing beautiful.

(II: 275)

If Kierkegaard's Biedermeier portrait is so spectral, it is because the “how” of reorientation fully eclipses the “what” of the contingent world. The book renders diaphanous what Nina Auerbach terms the moral “pantomime” of mid-century fiction.²⁸ The domestic plot is undermined not by being up-ended but by being seen through. The Judge's artlessness and hardiness appear as attitudinizing. Children, locale, domicile—all the basic elements of homebound existence to which he clings have no more sensuous solidity than do stage cues or compass points. Throughout the letters the Judge claims to read in his wife's presence the very source, the original text, of his rootedness and domestic bliss (she incarnates the “female” virtues which uphold both his household and his writing). And yet, the only time we glimpse her, when she accidentally crosses his field of vision as he works on the letters, she appears as a barely visible sign of his rectitude, a redemptive trace: “This feeling of having a home can come over me when I am sitting alone in my study … and there is a soft knock at the door and a head peeks through the door in such a way that one could believe it did not belong to anybody, and then in a flash she is standing by my side and vanishes again” (II: 83). The affirmative art of the Biedermeier, Adorno observes, is a “cipher” of romantic despair, its purported hardiness a “mask or ritual to keep life at a distance.” The significance of a writer like Stifter, he goes on to say, lies in the fact that he began to push the art of the period to articulate self-consciousness: the late work abjures “blissful colors” and looks instead like a pallid “pencil sketch.”²⁹ What distinguishes a Judge Wilhelm from German contemporaries like Stifter's Risach (or Mörike's Maler Nolten) is that his “equilibrium” is not a gesture or ethical posture which by virtue of time and struggle he hopes to talk himself into believing, but ethical posturing laid bare as such. Having both fulfilled and exhausted A.'s inner potential, Kierkegaard does the same to the Judge: he transforms him into an acute hypertrophy of the Biedermeier demand for balance and stasis and, as such, a manifest expression of its latent dissonance. The Judge later turns up in The Sickness unto Death (1849) in a discussion of hidden disillusionment. Although he goes unnamed, his features are familiar: “Our man in despair is sufficiently self-enclosed to keep this matter of having a self away from anyone—while outwardly he looks every bit a real man. He is a university graduate. A husband. A father. Even an uncommonly competent office holder.”³⁰ The Judge's detachment from his surroundings is so all-encompassing that no visible sign is allowed to betray it (in being able to submerge his theatricalism, he is simply a better actor than A.). To the outside world, his bourgeois mask fits with virtual seamlessness. Inwardly he is as much a figure of “romantic despair” as A.

In short, by stylizing the literary maneuvers of both the mid-century aesthete and the Biedermeier burgher, Either/Or draws the imagination of the Nachromantik beyond itself. “You know very well, A. writes, that the most intense enjoyment is in the clutching of the enjoyment in the consciousness that it may vanish the next moment. Pursued by the police, by the whole world, by the living and the dead, alone in a remote room, Don Giovanni once again gathers together all the powers of his soul and once again raises the goblet” (II: 25). From its overall architecture, down to individual tropes, the book is played out at the point of tension where distant reflections of German aesthetic experience yield to the purely invisible. It is this inner movement which more than anything else explains the book's deep affinity with music: “In music,” Hegel writes, “the negativity into which the vibrating material enters is on one side the negation of the spatial situation, a cancellation negated again by the reaction of the body, and the expression of this double negation, that is, sound, is an externality which in its coming-to-be is annihilated again by its very existence, and vanishes of itself.”³¹ Unlike contemporary, self-flagellating aesthetes such as Baudelaire or Edgar Allan Poe, Kierkegaard rarely spurs his suspicion of the visible by courting sin in luxuriant, charnel-tainted images. He is at once more susceptible and more insensate, since he can goad himself on and heighten his responses simply with the possibility of art. The book legitimates itself only in so far as it calls attention to its own highly elaborated semblance, a realization one acquires retrospectively, at the book's end. In so far as the reader shifts his or her perspective in this manner, the book offers itself as a participatory event. All points of Either/Or extend from this moment of recognition. Unlike Stifter's Der Nachsommer, the book's illusory character is neither mute, nor passive: and to trap Kierkegaard within his own romantic construct, as Adorno attempts to do, is redundant, since Kierkegaard does so himself: he dissolves the book's artifice through a sense of pure procedure in order to vindicate—if only negatively—the claim of the moment in historical time.

Writing Either/Or in the Berlin of the 1840s at the center of what was left of the idealist legacy, Kierkegaard developed an art of disillusionment purer and arguably more consequential than any of his German contemporaries. If German Romanticism was constituted by a series of border-crossings (whether between literary genres, languages, speculation and poetry, or the spheres of “art” and “non-art”), Kierkegaard, the alien epigone, turned this highly cultivated sense of transgression and “becoming” against itself and in the process superseded it. He was enamored of the legend of an elf who breaks the spell of a witch's song only when he learns to play it backwards on his flute. Either/Or employs a similar tactic. Each of the book's purported authors tries writing his way out of his epigonism, first by personifying, then second-guessing, or upstaging, his creative powers. A. tires of his pseudonyms. Judge Wilhelm damns A., and Kierkegaard implicitly mocks the effort as a whole. “Even if the book were totally devoid of meaning,” Kierkegaard later observes in his diaries, “the simple fact of having written it would be the pithiest epigram I could put over the meandering philosophy of this generation.”³² In short, Either/Or marks the site where the posturing of the German Nachromantik translates into hypermodern gesture. Like the vanishing trick of the Cheshire cat, what lingers in the end is not so much an ironic grin, as the sheer, disembodied act of grinning.

Notes

1. Friedrich Wilhelm IV called Schelling to Berlin (along with Felix Mendelssohn, the Grimms, Tieck, and Cornelius) in hopes of rejuvenating the Romantic Movement under semiofficial Prussian auspices. See Mario Krammer, Berlin im Wandel der Jahrhunderte (Berlin: Rembrandt Verlag, 1956), p. 154. Kierkegaard's disappointment with Schelling's lectures can be traced through scattered remarks in his letters from Berlin. See Søren Kierkegaard, Letters and Documents, translated by Henrik Rosenmeier (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978) pp. 89-143

2. Kierkegaard, Letters and Documents [Breve og Aktstykker], p. 107.

3. Kierkegaard, Letters and Documents, p. 107.

4. Kierkegaard, Letters and Documents, p. 151.

5. Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, translated by Vern McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), p. 55.

6. Theodor Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), p. 15-17.

7. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, pp. 34-53.

8. Nina Auerbach, Private Theatricals (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 6.

9. See Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, pp. 61-63; and Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Free Press, 1977), pp. 176-77.

10. G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, vol. 15.iii (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), p. 134: “Die Aufhebung des Räumlichen besteht deshalb hier nur darin, daß ein bestimmtes sinnliches Material sein ruhiges Aussereinander aufgibt, in Bewegung gerät, doch so in sich erzittert, daß jeder Teil des Körpers seinen Ort nicht nur verändert, sondern auch sich in den vorigen Zustand zurückzuversetzen strebt.”

11. René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel, translated by Yvonne Freccero (New York: Harper, 1965), pp. 3-8.

12. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1973), p. 182.

13. Following Foucault, John Kucich makes the point that veiled tactics of repression were common in Gothic melodrama: histrionism, he writes, was often a means of “estrangement and distance, of self-elaboration in isolation.” See John Kuchich, Repression in Victorian Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press: 1987), p. 41.

14. Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980), p. 216.

15. Stephen Dunning, Kierkegaard's Dialectic of Inwardness (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 78.

16. Kierkegaard, Letters and Documents, pp. 105-9.

17. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling [Frygt og Bœven] and Repetition [Gjentagelsen], translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 151.

18. Kierkegaard, Repetition, p. 151.

19. Kierkegaard, Repetition, p. 152.

20. Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward W. Said, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). See introduction by Seamus Deane.

21. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

22. Mikhail Bakhtin, Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, edited by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, translated by Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), p. 36.

23. Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, [Søren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers, 7 vols. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, assisted by Gregor Malantschuk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967-1978)] vol. 3, p. 229.

24. Louis Mackey, Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), p. 39.

25. Friedrich Sengle, Biedermeierzeit, vol. 3, (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1971), p. 1028.

26. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 187.

27. See Dunning, Kierkegaard's Dialectic of Inwardness, p. 101; and Mark C. Taylor, Kierkegaard's Pseudonymous Authorship (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 185-90.

28. Auerbach, Private Theatricals, pp. 14-15.

29. “Objektivität erstarrt zur Maske, beschworenes Leben wird zum abweisenden Ritual. … Blaß und fahl ist das Licht über seiner reifen Prosa, als wäre sie allergisch gegen das Glück der Farbe; sie wird gleichsam zur Graphik reduziert.” Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7, pp. 346-47.

30. Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death [Sygdommen til Døden], translated by Walter Lowrie (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1941), p. 197.

31. Hegel, Werke, vol. 15:iii, p. 134: “Da nun ferner die Negativität, in die das Schwingende Material hier eingeht, einerseits ein Aufheben des räumlichen Zustandes ist, das selbst wieder durch die Reaktion des Körpers aufgehoben wird, so ist die Äusserung dieser zwiefachen Negation … eine Äusserlichkeit, welche sich in ihrem Entstehen durch ihr Dasein selbst wieder vernichtet, und an sich selbst verschwindet.”

32. Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, vol. 5: 217.

Page numbers in parentheses refer to Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or [Enten-Eller], translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987).