Volume 12, Tome V: Kierkegaard's Influence on Literature, Criticism and Art: The Romance Languages, Central and Eastern Europe (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources) [1 ed.] 9781409465140, 1409465144

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Kierkegaard’s Influence on Literature, Criticism and Art Tome V: THE ROMANCE LANGUAGES, CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE

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

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

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

Kierkegaard’s Influence on Literature, Criticism and Art Tome V: The Romance Languages, Central and Eastern Europe

Edited by Jon Stewart

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

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

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Kierkegaard’s influence on literature, criticism and art. Tome V. – (Kierkegaard research ; v. 12) 1. Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813–1855 – Influence. 2. Romance literature – History and criticism. 3. East European literature – History and criticism. 4. Central European literature – History and criticism. 5. Philosophy in literature. I. Series II. Stewart, Jon (Jon Bartley) 198.9–dc23 The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Kierkegaard’s influence on literature, criticism, and art / edited by Jon Stewart. p. cm.—(Kierkegaard research ; v. 12, t. 5) Includes index. ISBN 978-1-4094-6514-0 (hardcover) 1. Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813–1855—Influence. 2. Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813–1855—Literary art. 3. Criticism. I. Stewart, Jon (Jon Bartley) B4377.K5124 2012 198’.9—dc23 2012026885 ISBN 9781409465140 (hbk) Cover design by Katalin Nun

Contents List of Contributors List of Abbreviations

vii ix

Part I  The Romance Languages Max Blecher: The Bizarre Adventure of Suffering Leo Stan

3

Jorge Luis Borges: The Fear without Trembling Eduardo Fernández Villar

21

Leonardo L. Castellani: Between Suero Kirkegord and Thomas Aquinas María J. Binetti

33

Carlos Fuentes: “Poor Mexico, so far away from God and so close to the United States” Patricia C. Dip

45

Fernando Pessoa: Poets and Philosophers Elisabete M. de Sousa and António M. Feijó

57

Ernesto Sábato: The Darker Side of Kierkegaardian Existence María J. Binetti

77

María Zambrano: Kierkegaard and the Criticism of Modern Rationalism Carmen Revilla and Laura Llevadot

87

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Part II  Central and Eastern Europe Mikhail Bakhtin: Direct and Indirect Reception of Kierkegaard in Works of the Russian Thinker Tatiana Shchyttsova

105

Péter Esterházy: Semi-Serious András Nagy

121

Witold Gombrowicz: The Struggle for the Authentic Self Wojciech Kaftański

139

Ivan Klíma: “To Save My Inner World” Nigel Hatton

157

Péter Nádas: Books and Memories András Nagy

169

Pinhas Sadeh: The Poet as “the Single Individual” Sharon Krishek

189

Index of Persons Index of Subjects

199 205

List of Contributors María J. Binetti, CONICET (“Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones científicas y técnicas”), Federico Lacroze 2100, C1426CPS, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Patricia C. Dip, Instituto de Ciencias, Universidad de General Sarmiento, Juan M. Gutierrez 1150, (1613) Los Polvorines, Buenos Aires, Argentina. António M. Feijó, Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa, Alameda da Universidade, 1600-214 Lisbon, Portugal. Eduardo Fernández Villar, Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, Facultad de Humanidades, Departamento de Filosofía, Funes 3350, C.P. 7600, Mar del Plata – Buenos Aires, Argentina. Nigel Hatton, School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts, University of California, Merced, 5200 North Lake Road, Merced, CA 95343, USA. Wojciech Kaftański, Australian Catholic University, Faculty of Theology and Philosophy, Locked Bag 4115 DC, Fitzroy Victoria 3065, Melbourne, Australia. Sharon Krishek, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, P.O.B. 653 Beer-Sheva, 84105 Israel. Laura Llevadot, Departament d’Historia de la Filosofia, Estetica i Filosofia de la Cultura, Facultat de Filosofia, Universitat de Barcelona, c/ Montalegre, 6, 08001 Barcelona, Spain. András Nagy, Theater Department, Pannon University, Egyetem utca 10, 8200 Veszprém, Hungary. Carmen Revilla, Departament d’Historia de la Filosofia, Estetica i Filosofia de la Cultura, Facultat de Filosofia, Universitat de Barcelona, c/ Montalegre, 6, 08001 Barcelona, Spain. Tatiana Shchyttsova, European Humanities University, Tauro str. 12, LT-01114 Vilnius, Lithuania. Elisabete M. de Sousa, Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Letras, Alameda da Universidade, 1600-214 Lisbon, Portugal.

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Leo Stan, Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism, University of Western Ontario, Somerville House, Rm. 2345A, London, Ontario N6A 3K7, Canada.

List of Abbreviations Danish Abbreviations B&A Breve og Aktstykker vedrørende Søren Kierkegaard, vols. 1–2, ed. by Niels Thulstrup, Copenhagen: Munksgaard 1953–54. Bl.art. S. Kierkegaard’s Bladartikler, med Bilag samlede efter Forfatterens Død, udgivne som Supplement til hans øvrige Skrifter, ed. by Rasmus Nielsen, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1857. EP

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

Pap. Søren Kierkegaards Papirer, vols. I to XI–3, ed. by Peter Andreas Heiberg, Victor Kuhr and Einer Torsting, Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1909–48; second, expanded ed., vols. I to XI–3, by Niels Thulstrup, vols. XII to XIII supplementary volumes, ed. by Niels Thulstrup, vols. XIV to XVI index by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1968–78. SKS Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, vols. 1–28, vols. K1–K28, ed. by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Jette Knudsen, Johnny Kondrup, Alastair McKinnon and Finn Hauberg Mortensen, Copenhagen: Gads Forlag 1997–2013. SV1 Samlede Værker, ed. by A.B. Drachmann, Johan Ludvig Heiberg and H.O. Lange, vols. I–XIV, Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandels Forlag 1901–06. English Abbreviations AN

Armed Neutrality, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1998.

AR

On Authority and Revelation, The Book on Adler, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1955.

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ASKB The Auctioneer’s Sales Record of the Library of Søren Kierkegaard, ed. by H.P. Rohde, Copenhagen: The Royal Library 1967. BA

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

C

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

CA The Concept of Anxiety, trans. by Reidar Thomte in collaboration with Albert B. Anderson, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1980. CD

Christian Discourses, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1997.

CI

The Concept of Irony, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1989.

CIC The Concept of Irony, trans. with an Introduction and Notes by Lee M. Capel, London: Collins 1966. COR

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

CUP1 Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 1, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1982. CUP2 Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 2, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1982. CUPH Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 2009. EO1

Either/Or, Part I, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1987.

EO2

Either/Or, Part II, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1987.

EOP Either/Or, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1992. EPW Early Polemical Writings, among others: From the Papers of One Still Living; Articles from Student Days; The Battle Between the Old and the New Soap-Cellars, trans. by Julia Watkin, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1990.

List of Abbreviations

xi

EUD

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

FSE

For Self-Examination, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1990.

FT

Fear and Trembling, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1983.

FTP Fear and Trembling, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1985. JC

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

JFY

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

JP Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vols. 1–6, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, assisted by Gregor Malantschuk (vol. 7, Index and Composite Collation), Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press 1967–78. KAC Kierkegaard’s Attack upon “Christendom,” 1854–1855, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1944. KJN Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, vols. 1–11, ed. by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, David Kangas, Bruce H. Kirmmse, George Pattison, Vanessa Rumble, and K. Brian Söderquist, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press 2007ff. LD Letters and Documents, trans. by Henrik Rosenmeier, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1978. LR A Literary Review, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 2001. M

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

P Prefaces / Writing Sampler, trans. by Todd W. Nichol, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1997. PC

Practice in Christianity, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1991.

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PF

Philosophical Fragments, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1985.

PJ

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

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

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

PVL The Point of View for My Work as an Author including On My Work as an Author, trans. by Walter Lowrie, New York and London: Oxford University Press 1939. R

Repetition, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1983.

SBL

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

SLW

Stages on Life’s Way, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1988.

SUD

The Sickness unto Death, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1980.

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

List of Abbreviations

xiii

WA

Without Authority including The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air, Two Ethical-Religious Essays, Three Discourses at the Communion on Fridays, An Upbuilding Discourse, Two Discourses at the Communion on Fridays, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1997.

WL

Works of Love, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1995.

WS

Writing Sampler, trans. by Todd W. Nichol, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1997.

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Part I The Romance Languages

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Max Blecher: The Bizarre Adventure of Suffering Leo Stan “Everything will eventually rot only to be afterwards absorbed by darkness, forever.” Max Blecher1

On September 8, 1909 the remote Romanian town of Botoşani witnessed the birth of a special child. His name was Max L. Blecher. Of Jewish origin, his family belonged to the relatively affluent local bourgeoisie. His school years were spent in the nearby city of Roman. Immediately afterwards, he took a huge geographical leap to Paris with the intention of studying medicine. However, in 1928, shortly after the arrival in France, Blecher’s existence took a dramatic turn as he was diagnosed with tuberculosis spondylitis, also known as Pott’s disease or extrapulmonary tuberculosis. From this date on, one could say without exaggeration that his existence resembled a prolonged Golgotha. He spent extended periods of time at various sanatoria in Switzerland, France, and Romania. The grim reality he encountered in these places constituted the main source of inspiration for his prose. Because all treatments proved useless, in 1935 his family placed him in a house at the outskirts of Roman, where he spent the rest of his life lying in bed, completely immobilized. He took refuge in reading,2 correspondence, and a few friendships cultivated with religious reverence.3 After almost ten years of endless physical and psychological torments, endured, nonetheless, with a saintly patience and discretion, he died on May 31, 1938. He was only 28. He left behind three novels—two of which were published before he died4—a volume This article has been made possible through a generous postdoctoral grant offered by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, to which I extend my full gratitude. I also wish to thank Karsten Sand Iversen for his critical and most helpful feedback. 1 Max Blecher, Vizuina luminată, in his Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată. Inimi cicatrizate. Vizuina luminată. Corp transparent. Corespondenţă, ed. by Constantin M. Popa and Nicolae Ţone, Craiova and Bucharest: Aius and Vinea 1999, p. 306. 2 Blecher’s intellectual interests ranged from the status of the chromosomes in biology to art, poetry, twentieth century epistemology, and even the history of religions. See Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată, pp. 361–84. 3 Radu G. Ţeposu, Suferinţele tânărului Blecher, Bucharest: Minerva 1996, p. 13. 4 Max Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată, Bucharest: Vremea 1936 (French translation: Aventures dans l’irréalité immediate, trans. by Marianne Sora, Paris: Denoël 1972); Max Blecher, Inimi cicatrizate, Bucharest: Editura librăriei Universala Alcalay & Co. 1937 (English translation: Scarred Hearts, trans. by Henry Howard, London: Old Street Publishing 2008); and Max Blecher, Vizuina luminată, ed. by Saşa Pană, Bucharest: Cartea

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of poems,5 translations, newspaper articles, and book reviews. The recipients of his epistles included Mihail Sebastian, André Breton, André Gide, and Martin Heidegger.6 As regards the literary imprint of Blecher’s novels, it belongs to an eclectic family arguably formed by André Gide, Franz Kafka, Charles Baudelaire, Conte de Lautréamont, Thomas Mann (particularly, The Magic Mountain), Marcel Proust, Benjamin Fondane, Henri Bergson, and Ernst Jünger, together with lesserknown figures like Bruno Schulz, Robert Walser, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, and Gabriele d’Annunzio.7 Given Romania’s oppressive ideological strictures between 1945 and 1989, the reception of Blecher’s oeuvre has been slow and continues to be so to this day. As in the case of a vast number of Romanian writers, the complete critical compendium of Max Blecher’s writings still awaits more auspicious times. I. The Infinite Negativity of Mystical Repetition Ever since Blecher’s works started to reenter the attention of literati, his affinities with and enthusiasm for Kierkegaard have been sufficiently documented.8 But the amplitude of Blecher’s actual knowledge of Kierkegaard remains a source of speculation. Similarly to all his conational peers, Blecher familiarized himself with Kierkegaard’s corpus through the French translations which, aside from their small number, were also difficult to find. We can be fairly sure that besides Repetition, Blecher read La pureté du coeur, the French translation of the first discourse from Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits.9 However, it may be of help to know what other works he might have consulted. Theoretically, by 1936 Românească 1971. Throughout this study all references to Blecher’s work are from Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată. All translations from the Romanian are mine. 5 Max Blecher, Corp transparent, Bucharest: n.p. 1934. 6 Max Blecher’s journalistic and epistolary activity can be found in Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată, pp. 359ff. See also Max Blecher mai puţin cunoscut. Corespondenţă şi receptare critică, ed. by Mădălina Lascu, Bucharest: Hasefer 2000. For more biographical details, intellectual or otherwise, Ţeposu, Suferinţele tânărului Blecher, pp. 14–18; Gheorghe Glodeanu, Max Blecher, Cluj-Napoca: Limes 2005, pp. 5–6; Radu G. Ţeposu, “Blecher, Max,” in Dicţionarul scriitorilor români (A–C), ed. by M. Zaciu, M. Papahagi, and A. Sasu, Bucharest: Editura Fundaţiei Culturale Române 1995, p. 297. 7 For a more detailed account of Blecher’s literary activity and other indispensable biographical aspects the interested reader may consult Karsten Sand Iversen’s afterword to the Danish translation of Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată; Karsten Sand Iversen, “Kødets fortvivlelse,” in Max Blecher, Hændelser fra den umiddelbare uvirkelighed, trans. by Erling Schøller, Copenhagen: Basilisk 2010, pp. 142–55. I am grateful to Karsten Sand Iversen for a critical reading of the present article, as well as making his afterword available to me. 8 Nicolae Balotă, De la Ion la Ioanide, Bucharest: Eminescu 1974, p. 159; Ion Negoiţescu, Engrame, Bucharest: Albatros 1975, p. 120; Iulian Băicuş, Max Blecher—Un arlechin pe marginea neantului, Bucharest: Editura Universităţii Bucureşti 2004, p. 39; p. 79; p. 112. 9 Blecher’s novel Inimi cicatrizate has the following motto: “Quel terrible souvenir à affronter.” See Sören Kierkegaard, La pureté du coeur, trans. by Paul-Henry Tisseau, Bazoges-en-Pareds: privately published 1936. Cf. SKS 8, 133 / UD, 18.

Max Blecher: The Bizarre Adventure of Suffering

5

when he published his thoughts on Kierkegaard, a fairly good share of Kierkegaard’s authorship, both pseudonymous and edifying, could have been at Blecher’s disposal. The enthralling and bizarre story from “The Diary of the Seducer” was one of the earliest Kierkegaardian texts published in interwar France.10 The simulated bacchanalia and philosophical parodies comprised in “In vino veritas” had been available since 1933.11 Amongst the remaining titles which, interestingly enough, had a definite religious texture, we count the “lilies in the field” series,12 For SelfExamination,13 but also The Sickness unto Death,14 Fear and Trembling,15 and The Concept of Anxiety.16 We would not be completely wrong to assume that Blecher’s knowledge of Kierkegaard went beyond primary texts. However, regarding the secondary sources, the Romanian landscape was not entirely desolate but likewise was not conducive to an exceptional reception. According to Florin Ţurcanu, the first written material on Kierkegaard dates back to 1927 and is attributable to the academic philosopher and sociologist Mihail Ralea (1896–1964).17 Next, on March 4, 1928 the newspaper Cuvântul hosted an article signed by a young student, Mircea Eliade, and entitled “Sören Kierkegaard: Fiancé, Pamphleteer, and Hermit.”18 Three 10 Sören Kierkegaard, Le journal du séducteur, trans. by Jean J. Gateau, Paris: Stock, Delamain & Boutelleau 1929. 11 Sören Kierkegaard, In vino veritas, trans. by André Babelon and C. Lund, Paris: Éditions du Cavalier 1933. 12 Sören Kierkegaard, Ce que nous apprennent les lis des champs et les oiseaux du ciel, trans. by Paul-Henri Tisseau, Paris: Félix Alcan 1935 and Sören Kierkegaard, Les lis des champs et les oiseaux de ciel, trans. by Paul-Henri Tisseau, Paris: Félix Alcan 1935. 13 Sören Kierkegaard, Pour un examen de conscience, à mes contemporains, trans. by Paul-Henri Tisseau, Bazoges-en-Pareds: privately published 1934. 14 Sören Kierkegaard, Traité du désespoir. (La maladie mortelle), trans. by Knud Ferlov and Jean J. Gateau, Paris: Gallimard 1932. 15 Sören Kierkegaard, Crainte et Tremblement. Lyrique-dialectique, par Johannes de Silentio, trans. by Paul-Henri Tisseau, Paris: Fernand Aubier 1935. 16 No less than two translations of The Concept of Anxiety were available at the time. See Sören Kierkegaard, Le Concept d’angoisse. Simple méditation psychologique pour servir d’introduction au problème dogmatique du péché originel, par Vigilius Haufniensis, trans. by Paul-Henri Tisseau, Paris: Félix Alcan 1935; and Sören Kierkegaard, Le concept de l’angoisse, trans. by Jean J. Gateau and Knud Ferlov, Paris: Gallimard 1935. For a complete bibliographical list, see Jon Stewart, “France: Kierkegaard as a Forerunner of Existentialism and Poststructuralism,” in Kierkegaard’s International Reception, Tome I, Northern and Western Europe, ed. by Jon Stewart, Aldershot: Ashgate 2009 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 8), pp. 460–1. 17 Ralea’s article appeared in Viaţa românească, vol. 19, nos. 6–7, 1927. See Florin Ţurcanu, “Erudiţie şi jurnalism. Publicistica lui Mircea Eliade în anii 1926–1928,” Sud-Estul şi contextul european vol. 3, 1995, pp. 87–94; p. 93, note 16. 18 Mircea Eliade,“Sören Kierkegaard—Logodnic, pamfletar şi eremit,” Cuvântul, vol. 4, no. 1035, 1928, p. 1 (reprinted in Mircea Eliade, Virilitate şi asceză. Scrieri de tinereţe 1928, Bucharest: Humanitas Publishers 2008, pp. 68–72). For a thorough analysis of Eliade’s article, see Leo Stan, “Mircea Eliade: On Religion, Cosmos, and Agony,” in Kierkegaard’s Influence on the Social Sciences, ed. by Jon Stewart, Aldershot: Ashgate 2011 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 13), pp. 55–80.

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years later, the renowned philosopher and poet, Lucian Blaga, introduced Romanian readers to Kierkegaard’s purportedly dualistic view of faith and reason, based on the Dane’s peculiar employment of the Christian dogmas.19 Then in 1934, Mircea Eliade published a tome with the evocative title, Oceanografie,20 whose Kierkegaardian (explicit or implicit) undertones are not difficult to detect. Not to be ignored either are Benjamin Fundoianu’s incidental remarks on Kierkegaard scattered throughout the inter bellum Romanian press.21 Fundoianu (that is, Benjamin Fondane) published his chief work, Conscience malheureuse, in which Kierkegaard occupies a relatively central position, in 1936.22 It so happened that, thanks to Max Blecher, in the same year a new line was added to the scanty bibliography of Kierkegaard’s entry onto Romanian soil. The title of Blecher’s article “On Kierkegaard’s Concept of Repetition”23 sounds promising from one standpoint. It appeared in the newspaper Vremea on March 29, 1936. From the first lines we can safely infer that the text was sparked by the allegedly “most recent and most interesting”24 French translation of Kierkegaard’s Repetition. The term “most recent” should be taken cum grano salis because the edition Blecher has in mind was originally published in 1933.25 In the preamble we are offered two reasons for the deficient knowledge of Kierkegaard in the Romanian literary milieu. First of all, opines Blecher, for the autochthonous public the French publications—the channel par excellence for the discovery of any foreign newcomer—are difficult to procure. Second, while briefly delving into the quick running waters of the philosophy of culture, Blecher conjectures that in Kierkegaard the Romanian audience is confronted with “an essentially different way of thinking, Lucian Blaga, “Eonul dogmatic,” Gândirea. Literară, artistică, socială, vol. 11, no. 2, 1931, pp. 70–8. See also Mădălina Diaconu, “Kierkegaard-Rezeption in Rumänien,” Revue Roumaine de Philosophie, vol. 45, nos. 1–2, 2001, pp. 149–64. Importantly enough, Diaconu observes that the scholarly approach to Kierkegaard’s oeuvre was initiated by Nicolae Balcă who wrote the Kierkegaard chapter for Istoria filozofiei moderne, vols. 1–5, ed. by Mircea Florian et al., Bucharest: Societatea Română de Filosofie 1937–41, vol. 2 (De la Kant până la evoluţionismul englez), pp. 531–62; and by Grigore Popa, Existenţă şi adevăr la Sören Kierkegaard, Sibiu: Tipografia Arhidiecezană 1940. Unfortunately, Blecher did not live long enough to have consulted these exegetical works. 20 Mircea Eliade, Oceanografie, Bucharest: Cultura Poporului 1934. For references to Kierkegaard, see Mircea Eliade, Oceanografie, 2nd ed., Bucharest: Humanitas 2003, pp. 21–2; pp. 198–9; pp. 200–1. 21 See Diaconu, “Kierkegaard-Rezeption in Rumänien.” 22 Benjamin Fondane, Conscience malheureuse, Paris: Denoël 1936. Fondane treats Kierkegaard alongside Martin Heidegger, Lev Shestov, and Dostoevsky. A separate chapter analyzes Kierkegaard’s category of the secret. However, it is highly improbable that Blecher read Fondane’s book before writing the material on Kierkegaard which I discuss below. 23 Max Blecher, “Conceptul repetiţiei la Kirkegaard [sic],” Vremea, vol. 9, no. 431, March 29, 1936. The article has been reprinted in Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată, pp. 376–8. Concerning page references I have followed this edition. 24 Blecher, “Conceptul repetiţiei la Kirkegaard [sic],” p. 376. 25 Sören Kierkegaard, La Répétition. Essai d’expérience psychologique par Constantin Constantius, trans. by Paul-Henri Tisseau, Paris: Alcan 1933. 19

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given our somewhat Latin intellectualism in contradistinction to the severe Protestant mysticism of the Danish writer.”26 “On Kierkegaard’s Concept of Repetition” puts forward a few controversial theses. However, their unprecedented quality which makes them worthy of further study must be properly appreciated. After all, Blecher writes in the French tradition of essay which is built on free associations and a rather impressionistic hermeneutic. Besides, there are two theoretical assumptions which Blecher adopts without further questioning, a proof that they may have been “floating in the air” at the time. First, Blecher remarks that Kierkegaard can be fruitfully assimilated to the emerging school of phenomenology. “Husserl’s philosophy,” he declares, “similarly to that of Jaspers and Heidegger, takes us closer to Kirkegaard’s [sic] thought.”27 In the same vein, Blecher claims that, apart from significantly influencing such phenomenologists as Karl Barth, Karl Jaspers, and Martin Heidegger, Kierkegaard “genuinely sought to appropriate in experience that pure state of consciousness…which Husserl was content merely to describe.”28 Despite the inordinate character of these statements, Blecher hereby touches upon a historical-philosophical truth that is neglected to this very day. We forget too quickly that none other than Edmund Husserl introduced Lev Shestov to Kierkegaard’s reflections on religion, and that the Danish thinker was a recurrent reference point in the history of twentieth-century phenomenology. Blecher refers to the latter’s allegiance to Kierkegaard as if formulating a cultural fact. The explanation might be that in the interwar period Kierkegaard’s thought was disseminated via the existentialist branch of phenomenology.29 In this respect, Blecher alludes to Jaspers and Heidegger, and implies that Karl Barth’s theology is inseparable from existentialist phenomenology, which it was to a certain extent.30 However, although he rightly points out that Kierkegaard is first and foremost concerned with the “endless examination of the challenges (problemelor) of eternity,”31 Blecher does not pause for a second to ask how that would be possible within the narrow limits of Husserl’s or Heidegger’s secular phenomenology. The fact that Kierkegaard naturally belongs to phenomenological existentialism perfectly coheres with a second theoretical move which allows Blecher to interpret Kierkegaard in a rigidly biographical key. Although Repetition is a pseudonymous work with an intricate authorial dynamic, the Romanian writer discusses it not only as if it had been signed with Kierkegaard’s name, but also credits it as confessional Blecher, “Conceptul repetiţiei la Kirkegaard [sic],” p. 376. Ibid. 28 Ibid., p. 378. 29 For an interpretation of Blecher in the horizon of Jaspers’ existentialism, see Negoiţescu, Engrame, pp. 119–39. 30 Of course, Blecher must have had in mind Karl Barth, Der Römerbrief, Munich: Kaiser 1st ed., 1919, 2nd ed., 1922. (English translation: The Epistle to the Romans, trans. by Edwyn C. Hoskyns, London: Oxford University Press 1933.) Somewhere else, Blecher considers Kierkegaard the spiritual forefather of the “philosophers of existence,” amongst whom he counts Jaspers, Ludwig Klages, Heidegger, Husserl, and Barth. See Max Blecher, “Exegeza câtorva teme comune,” Azi, vol. 5, no. 23, May–June, 1936 (reprinted in his Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată, pp. 379–84; see p. 383). 31 Blecher, “Conceptul repetiţiei la Kirkegaard [sic],” p. 377. 26 27

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fiction. Blecher calls this aspect “the purely anecdotic side of the book,”32 and subsequently holds that in Repetition “Kirkegaard [sic] recounts his first love, the engagement to his inamorata, and the dreadful despair of being unable to marry her.”33 The far-reaching thesis seems to be that “what was infinitely troubling and painful in Kirkegaard’s [sic] life”34 represents indubitable evidence that “the nature of thinking, in general, is pathos-filled.”35 Of course, that Blecher completely ignores the indispensible role of Constantin Constantius within the existential universe and ideational dialectic of the book will significantly compromise his hermeneutic enterprise. Turning to the theoretical core of the article, Blecher starts from the premise that Repetition “carries within it the entire Kierkegaardian problematic”36 and as such represents a pertinent “introduction to [Kierkegaard’s] oeuvre as a whole.”37 On the other side, Blecher’s discussion revolves around (1) the momentous significance of negativity in Kierkegaard’s thought38 and (2) an inwardness-centered conception of mysticism. Vis-à-vis the negative factor, Blecher observes that the essence of Kierkegaard’s approach lies in the “desire to ‘repeat’ a past state of mind,”39 and that, at the same time, every effort to fulfill this desideratum is bound to fail. For instance, when he painfully regains his freedom after having broken the engagement, the young man/Kierkegaard believes that his reborn and exalted selfhood can be subjected to a religious teleology. More exactly, the new identity seems encompassing and passionate enough to pattern itself on the biblical example of Job. However, Blecher insightfully realizes that within the confines of Repetition it is not clear whether Kierkegaard did succeed in emulating Job.40 To Blecher what is nonetheless certain is that, despite his ebullient claim to the contrary, “Kirkegaard [sic] falls prey to the same inner turmoil.”41 Ibid., p. 376. Ibid. 34 Ibid., p. 378. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., p. 376. 37 Ibid. 38 For a full treatment of this issue, see Arne Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet: Kierkegaard, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1997. See also Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: MIT Press 2006. 39 Blecher, “Conceptul repetiţiei la Kirkegaard [sic],” p. 376. 40 Repetition ends with the young man’s outburst that he won himself back. The parallel with Job, though explicitly endorsed by the young man, is rather artificial as long as the transcendent is completely absent from his discourse, and as he lacks any sense of sinfulness. That there may be a “teleological suspension of the ethical,” given the young man’s deliberate breaking of the engagement, is an untenable conjecture. Unlike Abraham, who willfully set aside the ethical considerations (that is, his fatherly duties but never his love for Isaac) in order to fulfill God’s commandment, the young man puts an end to the engagement due to an inner impossibility to assume the marital role. It may be worth remembering that in the Postscript, when he comments upon Repetition, Johannes Climacus never mentions the young man’s attempt to emulate Job, even if Climacus tackles the possible opposition between the ethical and the religious. See SKS 7, 238–45 / CUP1, 262–8. 41 Blecher, “Conceptul repetiţiei la Kirkegaard [sic],” p. 377. 32 33

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Therefore, Blecher’s argument goes on, the difference between Kierkegaard and the true mystic—who is particularized not necessarily by faith but by an “incessant inward examination”42—is negligible. Provided his “pathos-laden search for a solution,”43 Kierkegaard must have placed himself “between his real personhood and his spiritual idealization in eternity.”44 It is precisely on this existentialist ground that, in Blecher’s view, Kierkegaard gives one the impression of “a Hegelian in endless becoming (formaţie).”45 Specifically, Kierkegaard “rejects a third term not because it was not logical, but because his inner uneasiness is too deep, too passionate to be reducible to a merely objective perspective on the quandaries that torment him.”46 Mysticism, holds Blecher, can be equated with an intense subjective quest for meaningfulness and a continual dissection of one’s inward commotions. Consequently, (1) if mysticism hinges on an endless and ardent attempt to realize repetition despite the impossibility of fulfilling it; (2) if Kierkegaard stressed “the permanence of the [inner] quest;”47 and (3) if he “remained within the parameters of passion, at equal distance from the rational and the absurd,”48 then, Blecher’s reasoning goes, Kierkegaard can be considered a mystic. Even if Blecher does acknowledge the significance of the eternal and its stakes for Kierkegaard, his slant on the latter’s mysticism stresses the passionate introspection and inner antagonism to such a degree that it almost borders on solipsism. It is for no other reason that for Blecher, “what particularizes Kirkegaard’s [sic] mysticism is precisely the desire to free himself from any contingency (be it an inward one), to live his inner conflict in its sheer purity, unbound by time, space, and feelings.”49 The overall thesis advocated here is that, since existential repetition50 constitutes an unattainable ideal, the mystical (as different from religious) existence—which Kierkegaard’s personality peerlessly epitomizes—is the only way out of repetition’s impasse. The odd aspect is, of course, the absence of any reference whatsoever to divine transcendence. In Blecher’s article we look in vain for any mention of union with God or suffering for the sake of Christ, to name only two exceptionally mystical tropes. Moreover, as I hypothesized above, Kierkegaard’s substantial reflections on the uniqueness of the Judeo-Christian religiosity and faith may have been within Blecher’s reach. And yet, they are completely absent from his article. But once we come to know more of Blecher’s personal and aesthetic Weltanschauung, the picture Ibid. Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., p. 378. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., p. 377. 50 By existential repetition I mean the possibility to fully relive a past experience. The first example that comes to mind is, of course, Constantin Constantius who returns to Berlin hoping to relive the same pleasures and enchantments from a previous trip. However, the failure of this experiment makes him wonder whether repetition has a far more inward connotation than he initially expected. And that is how he brings the young man into the picture (together with his unseemly involvement in it). 42 43

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of his idiosyncratic reception of Kierkegaard will lose its bewildering penumbrae. It is this world-view and its possible pathology (delineated with Kierkegaard’s help) that I shall tackle next. II. Prior to Repetition: On Dreams, Eros, and Filth That Blecher reads Kierkegaard in such an unsophisticated manner is not accidental. It may be the case that Blecher took his Danish companion as the occasion for a covert confessio. Thus, Blecher’s intimate world-view—the literary reverberations of which are hard to miss—must have played a fundamental part in his reception of Kierkegaard. And since Blecher’s work, I hold, can be diagnosed as the product of a self in despair, below I shall hypothetically read the central themes of Blecher’s novels in light of Kierkegaard’s anatomy of Fortvivlelse. But first a few words on Blecher’s literary profile. Scholars have argued that Blecher’s allegiance lies with existentialism, surrealism, and the nineteenth-century literature of decadence. From surrealism Blecher inherited an irresistible propensity towards the dazzling world of dreams and imagination. Decadent writers gave him a taste for artificial objects and theatricality.51 I also noted above that the existentialist version of phenomenology was incrementally reaching a degree of popularity during the period that concerns us here. Blecher felt particularly close to this philosophical current because it proposed a type of thinking and a writing style which were rooted exclusively in the carnal individuality of the author.52 At the same time, incipient hard-core existentialism equipped Blecher with a recklessly lucid understanding of the tragic human condition, which, we should never forget, was confirmed by his own quotidian ordeals. Alienation vis-à-vis oneself, the others, or the world, an intense—and nihilistic, I shall suggest—sensitivity to the absurdity of life, the stress on the individual’s inevitable loneliness, the equivocal flight from alterity in any of its forms, and a bold affirmation of universal contingency are the main contours of Blecher’s existentialist mindset. All of these elements must be taken into consideration when analyzing Max Blecher’s prose. Most importantly, in spite of any contrary opinion,53 my assumption throughout this study is that, somewhat similarly to Kierkegaard, one cannot sharply separate Blecher’s harrowing life from his literary exploits. If we accept that Blecher

Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată, p. 66; pp. 68–71; p. 74; Blecher, Vizuina luminată, p. 275; pp. 299–300; Balotă, De la Ion la Ioanide, pp. 177–9; Nicolae Manolescu, Arca lui Noe, Bucharest: Gramar 1998, pp. 566–7. Negoiţescu, Engrame, p. 121. 52 We should not forget that in 1938, the year of Blecher’s death, Jean-Paul Sartre published La Nausée. Five years later Sartre sent to the printer his magnum opus, L’Être et le néant (1943) which, in concert with Albert Camus’ L’Étranger (1942) and Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942), arguably consecrates atheist existentialism as a self-standing literary genre and philosophical current. 53 See in this sense Balotă, De la Ion la Ioanide, pp. 154–5. My position coincides with that of Radu G. Ţeposu, who unearths the biographical roots of Blecher’s literary activity. See Ţeposu, Suferinţele tânărului Blecher, pp. 21ff. 51

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suffered a “daily martyrdom,”54 being “tortured and humiliated by every inch of his body”55—a reality that is impossible to dispute—then the fact that his prose describes only gravely ill people, whom he probably chanced upon in various sanatoria, cannot be dismissed as marginal. In this regard, I would dare to say that the humanity that literally crawls through Blecher’s pages is epitomized by the figure of the (hopeless) patient. The wordsmith of Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată (Events from the Close Unreality), Inimi cicatrizate (literally, Scarred Hearts), and Vizuina luminată (The Lighted Burrow, subtitled “A Sanatorium Diary”) portrays only “negative heroes”56 who resignedly live at the mercy of their sick bodies’ whims. Everyone in Blecher’s fiction sees the world and themselves through the darkening lens of their diseased condition and physical degradation. The novelistic triptych I alluded to earlier is dominated by the imagery of a grotesque, tragic-comic humanity that is integrally affected by the humiliations of a decaying corporeality and whose origin is anything but divine. Many of Blecher’s characters suffer from terminal illnesses, while the recovery period of others is long enough to result in unforgettable and ghastly revelations. Given the aims of this article, it is important to remember that there are, broadly speaking, three ways in which Blecher’s personages wish to escape the inferno of pain: a melancholy retreat into the oneiric and phantasmal dimension of interiority,57 the erotic escapades meant to compensate for physical invalidity, and the rapturous immersion into the material and the abject. In what follows, after a short overview, I project each of these against Kierkegaard’s discussion of the pathology of subjectivity. Hereby I hope to open a few vistas that deserve a more extensive analysis. To begin with, Blecher’s ailing protagonists have recurrent experiences of estrangement from the outer world but also from themselves.58 Consequently, some of them will seek liberation through evasive withdrawal into the depths of imagination and dreams. Their self-absorbed involvement with the imaginary is so profound, and their oscillation between daydreaming and facticity so vertiginous, that reality and fantasy become impossible to discern.59 Thus one can speak of a hallucinatory dimension of Blecher’s fiction. Oftentimes this oneiric universe is imbued with a nightmarish aggressiveness, wherein one can guess the ghastly omen of death or annihilation.60 However, the anti-traumatic descent into the abyss of inner Balotă, De la Ion la Ioanide, p. 153. Ibid. 56 Blecher, Inimi cicatrizate, p. 160 (Scarred Hearts, p. 84). 57 Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată, p. 65; Balotă, De la Ion la Ioanide, p. 180; Ţeposu, Suferinţele tânărului Blecher, p. 25; pp. 73–5. 58 Balotă, De la Ion la Ioanide, pp. 156–9; Ţeposu, Suferinţele tânărului Blecher, pp. 53ff. 59 Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată, p. 64; p. 73; Blecher, Vizuina luminată, p. 242; p. 260; p. 292; Manolescu, Arca lui Noe, p. 560; Ţeposu, Suferinţele tânărului Blecher, p. 39; Balotă, De la Ion la Ioanide, p. 156; pp. 163–5. 60 Balotă, De la Ion la Ioanide, p. 172; Ţeposu, “Blecher, Max” p. 300; Ţeposu, Suferinţele tânărului Blecher, pp. 76–82. Balotă observes that the spatiality encountered in Blecher’s prose appears as “a trap, a cavern, a burrow,” while the objects that fill this space are hostile towards the afflicted self. Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată, p. 44; p. 62; 54 55

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phantasms proves ultimately futile. Not unlike Kierkegaard’s “A” from Either/Or, Part One, upon leaving the land of reveries and while in the grips of despondency, Blecher’s personae return to the ever-present ontological void.61 Seen strictly within these limits, Judge William’s ethical exhortations to his friend “A” are perfectly valid for Blecher’s afflicted aesthetes. That the latter’s existential condition is one of despair is beyond doubt. However, Blecher refuses to open any door towards the ethical venue in William’s sense. His characters are so degraded by their daily Hades that the ideal of ethical self-becoming may sound like anathema to their ears. Compassion is also conspicuously absent from their souls. If they turn their attention to the suffering of others, Blecher’s characters do it either egotistically, that is to say, by feeling relieved it is not their plight, or almost objectively, as if dissecting the slow and terrifying agony of their fellows with the impartiality of a scientific observer.62 Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death is extremely useful here. The elaboration of despair as lack of finitude, as lack of necessity, and as refusal to be oneself seems perfectly applicable to Blecher’s plausible aestheticism.63 For instance, AntiClimacus’ statement that “[when] feeling becomes fantastic…, the self becomes only more and more volatilized and finally comes to be a kind of abstract sentimentality that inhumanly belongs to no human being”64 can be easily predicated of Blecher’s tormented dreamers. Moreover, as we shall soon see, the latter remain hopeless because, instead of choosing to appropriate the fideistic stance, they defiantly dwell on their ordeals and never achieve the status of a suffering self before the transcendent. Thus, as if with Blecher’s unfortunate in mind, Anti-Climacus writes: Whether or not the embattled one collapses depends solely upon whether he obtains possibility, that is, whether he will believe. And yet he understands that, humanly speaking, his collapse is altogether certain….The believer sees and understands his downfall, humanly speaking (in what has happened to him, or in what he has ventured), but he believes. For this reason he does not collapse. He leaves it entirely to God how he is to be helped, but he believes that for God everything is possible….So God helps him also—perhaps by allowing him to avoid the horror, perhaps through the horror itself— and here, unexpectedly, miraculously, divinely, help does come.65

For a short time, eroticism in lieu of faith is taken as a possible suspension of bodily wretchedness. Blecher’s fascination with carnal passion or even amoral sexuality is very salient. Blecher’s patients feel that sexuality possesses the capacity to assuage the brutal and continual assaults of pain. Their occasional carnal ecstasies are part p. 88; p. 106; p. 107; Balotă, De la Ion la Ioanide, p. 158; pp. 166–73; Manolescu, Arca lui Noe, pp. 569–70. 61 Blecher, Inimi cicatrizate, p. 229 (Scarred Hearts, p. 226); Ţeposu, Suferinţele tânărului Blecher, p. 61; Balotă, De la Ion la Ioanide, p. 176. 62 For example, Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată, p. 91; Blecher, Vizuina luminată, p. 234. Aside from his intention to study medicine, Blecher manifested a genuine and lasting interest in sciences. 63 SKS 11, 146–53 / SUD, 30–7. SKS 11, 164–75 / SUD, 49–60. 64 SKS 11, 147 / SUD, 31. 65 SKS 11, 154–5 / SUD, 39; second and third emphases added.

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of the larger telos to reactualize the primordial unity of being and to annihilate the feeling of self-alienation.66 However, in the battle between thanatos and eros the former is the sole possible victor. Since love is understood by Blecher exclusively in physiological terms—as if the soul were a mere chimera—the sickliness of the body invades and defiles even the last sanctuary of relative purity, namely, the human emotions and affection. Therefore, Blecher’s sufferers fall prey to an overwhelmingly instinctual or sickly excessive sensuality.67 When not abandoning themselves to an unbridled, Dionysian-like sexuality,68 they practice a “hygienic love without any trace of jouissance,”69 or they enjoy perverse, heavily ritualistic forms of sexuality.70 In the end, however, sex turns out to be every bit as impotent as oneiric escapism. When the erotic ecstasy vanishes, the diseased are engulfed again by the unfathomable blackness of existence, by melancholy, and forlornness.71 This disheartening landscape is not absolutely incommensurable with Kierkegaard’s Christian spirituality and insistence on agape. To be sure, the issue of sexuality most prominently arises in Kierkegaard’s mind in connection with the dynamic between anxiety and the perpetuation of sin throughout human generations. In Works of Love, when the limitations of erotic affection are explicitly taken up, sexuality plays a marginal role. Kierkegaard is more interested in the selflessness of agape as antithetical to the preferentiality of spontaneous love or friendship, to the detriment and sometimes even exclusion of the sexual determinations of human nature. In Kierkegaard’s philosophy, instinctual corporeality rarely comes to the fore, and even then as indicative of the dangers it poses to salvation. On the other side, as paradoxical as it sounds, Blecher could help us contemplate eroticism within the horizon of fallenness, whose effects on erotic behavior have been insufficiently addressed by Kierkegaard. As to the third remedy practiced by Blecher’s unfortunate characters, we should specify from the outset that it envisions the most elementary level of existence. In Blecher’s relation to eroticism we already sensed a certain attraction to a purely elemental physiology, to an organicity deprived of ineffability or any spiritual connotations. Here matter and especially its decomposing constitution are

66 Ţeposu, Suferinţele tânărului Blecher, p. 68. On the loss of identity induced by recurrent physiological crises, see Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată, p. 43; p. 44; Blecher, Inimi cicatrizate, p. 136 (Scarred Hearts, pp. 37–8). 67 Blecher, Inimi cicatrizate, p. 161; p. 216 (Scarred Hearts, p. 86; p. 200); Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată, pp. 50–1; Manolescu, Arca lui Noe, p. 564; and Blecher, Vizuina luminată, p. 271; p. 306. 68 See, for instance, Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată, p. 60; p. 67; and Blecher, Inimi cicatrizate, p. 216 (Scarred Hearts, p. 200). See also Ţeposu, Suferinţele tânărului Blecher, p. 69. 69 Blecher, Inimi cicatrizate, p. 126; see also ibid., p. 187 (Scarred Hearts, p. 16; p. 141). 70 Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată, pp. 56–61; Blecher, Inimi cicatrizate, pp. 188–9 (Scarred Hearts, pp. 144–6); Blecher, Vizuina luminată, p. 287; and Ţeposu, Suferinţele tânărului Blecher, p. 70. 71 Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată, p. 85; Blecher, Inimi cicatrizate, p. 164 (Scarred Hearts, p. 95).

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deliberately and perversely used as a source of enjoyment. It is almost as if one wallows in the very poison that slowly consumes him or her. Commentators have often observed that Blecher writes as if he might aim to construct a phenomenology of pure materiality.72 That in his last unpublished novel, Vizuina luminată, the reader comes into contact with a true “sensory delirium”73 can be seen as part of the same strategy. However, every attempt to lose themselves in the outer non-human reality, every experiment in self-reification, brings Blecher’s characters before a hostile and oppressive physicality.74 Within the limits of this exteriority “matter and material objects acquire an opaque heaviness, a black substantiality.”75 On these ill-fated sites the organic sordidness of existence triumphs over any other truth, irrespective of its sublimity.76 Moreover, in Blecher’s depiction, in realizing on his skin the impossibility of purity,77 the sick individual voluptuously yields to the degenerate lures of the abject. In a more or less veiled fashion, he displays an ambiguous attraction to dirt, to the musty and the viscous, to moist dark places, and putrid odors.78 In this horizon, the ultimate truth about humankind goes beyond the fact that we find ourselves captive to an essentially evil matter.79 Rather, the nadir of degradation comes to the surface when the cursed willfully, hedonistically, and almost liturgically “bathe” in grime.80 This quasi-demonic liturgy Balotă, De la Ion la Ioanide, p. 173. Balotă goes so far as to claim that Blecher sometimes bypasses the role of consciousness in this process. In his turn, even if he holds that the object of Blecher’s phenomenology is “an ontic crisis,” Nicolae Manolescu admits that human “consciousness is replaced by an absorbing vacuum,” which results in “a pure vision of materiality.” Manolescu, Arca lui Noe, pp. 564–5. However, from a phenomenological standpoint, both of these assumptions are unfounded since consciousness is and remains primarily intentional, while phenomena of whatever kind must always present themselves to a conscious receptive ego. On this matter, I concur with Octav Şuluţiu who astutely remarks that a subtle metaphysical psychology is at work in Blecher’s Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată; O. Şuluţiu, Scriitori şi cărţi, Bucharest: Minerva 1974, pp. 198–204. 73 Ţeposu, Suferinţele tânărului Blecher, p. 22. 74 Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată, pp. 46–7; p. 50; Blecher, Inimi cicatrizate, p. 225 (Scarred Hearts, pp. 217–18); Blecher, Vizuina luminată, p. 303; p. 313; Negoiţescu, Engrame, p. 127. 75 Balotă, De la Ion la Ioanide, pp. 173–4. 76 Ibid., p. 176. 77 Negoiţescu, Engrame, p. 127; Ţeposu, “Blecher, Max,” p. 300. 78 Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată, pp. 93–7; p. 110; Blecher, Vizuina luminată, p. 239; p. 306; p. 317; Manolescu, Arca lui Noe, p. 558; Balotă, De la Ion la Ioanide, p. 174; Negoiţescu, Engrame, p. 121. 79 Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată, p. 44; Balotă, De la Ion la Ioanide, p. 174. 80 This reminds us of Kierkegaard’s depiction of anxiety as “sympathetic antipathy.” SKS 4, 348 / CA, 42. SKS 4, 366 / CA, 61. SKS 4, 400 / CA, 97. Though we cannot be entirely sure that he has ever read The Concept of Anxiety, there are a few hints in Blecher’s prose which buttress that possibility. One finds four specific instances where the phenomenon of anxiety, understood as an attraction to what is and remains repugnant, surfaces in his texts. First, interpreters speak of an “anxiety of alienation.” Balotă, De la Ion la Ioanide, p. 157; Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată, p. 43. Second, the so-called vile spaces, in conjunction with the threatening objects, trigger horror, vertigoes, swoons, but also an “inexplicable euphoria.” 72

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can be interpreted either as a symptom of the profundity and destructiveness of evil (i.e., of sinfulness in the Christian doctrinal parlance) or as the disconsolate desire to commune with the oneness of matter and to escape ontological separation. The latter possibility has been suggested by several commentators.81 As I read it, the former is more Kierkegaardian in spirit. My conjecture is that perhaps here we come across an unexpected instantiation of demonism in Kierkegaard’s sense, whereby the malady of spirit is taken one step further. In what sense? In The Sickness unto Death Kierkegaard argues that the supreme demonic attitude presupposes an open denial of the salvific powers of Christ. More exactly, demonism declares Christianity to be untruth.82 In Blecher’s authorship, however, we can discern a tendency to counteract “the immense stupidity of physical pain”83 and the ensuing meaninglessness of existence not by an open denial of the salvific intentions of a lofty God but by a deliberate communion with the lowest, that is, with the nauseating and repulsive component of matter.84 This is not infinitely far from Kierkegaard’s soteriology since, as I hypothesized above, distinct echoes of the fallenness of the flesh, in particular, and of materiality, in general, are discernible in Blecher’s corpus. My suggestion is that in its Blecherian version, demonism manifests itself through the odious embrace of a fallen organicity with absolutely no awareness of the soul’s existence, letting alone the truthfulness of God, spirit, redemption, etc. Thus portrayed, the demonic self proclaims the primitive, ever-changing, though soulless and disintegrating, materiality as the sole verity of our lives. It may be clearer by now why Blecher interprets Kierkegaard’s Repetition in the way elaborated above. We have seen that the mystical trait he identifies in Kierkegaard is inwardness-centered but, paradoxically enough, godless. In this section I have delineated a few reasons why the humanity textually drawn by Manolescu, Arca lui Noe, p. 570. See also Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată, p. 47; p. 65; Balotă, De la Ion la Ioanide, p. 167; p. 174; and Negoiţescu, Engrame, p. 134. Anxiety is also related to the impossibility of dispensing with one’s self. Manolescu, Arca lui Noe, p. 573. (Interestingly enough, this is a quality that Kierkegaard attributes to despair.) Fourthly, anxiety surges in consciousness when one is faced with the indeterminacy, putrescence, and chaos of matter as such. Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată, p. 45; Blecher, Vizuina luminată, p. 275; Negoiţescu, Engrame, p. 129; pp. 130–3. 81 Balotă, De la Ion la Ioanide, p. 175; Manolescu, Arca lui Noe, pp. 570–1; Ţeposu, Suferinţele tânărului Blecher, p. 63. 82 SKS 11, 236–42 / SUD, 125–31. 83 Quoted by Balotă, De la Ion la Ioanide, p. 155. 84 It is important to note that Blecher views religiosity only through the dark prism of physical illness, against which every religious consolation or endeavor is utterly powerless and even ludicrous. Implicit denials of Judeo-Christian spirituality and of its creationistsoteriological gist can be found in Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată, pp. 93–4; Blecher, Inimi cicatrizate, pp. 180–1 (Scarred Hearts, pp. 128–9); Blecher, Vizuina luminată, p. 237; pp. 300–1; Max Blecher, “Berck oraşul damnaţilor,” Vremea, vol. 7, no. 358, 1934 (reprinted in Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată, pp. 352ff.; see pp. 356–7). As fundamental here is Blecher’s fascination for Lautréamont’s Les chants de Maldoror; Blecher, Inimi cicatrizate, pp. 183–4 (Scarred Hearts, pp. 134–5).

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Blecher is completely unaware of and unable to commune with the divine. As one commentator put it, the human lot is, according to Blecher, a “pointless struggle in a carceral condition wherefrom there is no exit, except a few rare and transitory moments of ecstasy when one’s identity is suspended and allows one, as in a beautiful dream, to take part in the infinite, profound, and essential existence of the Whole.”85 I have claimed above that Kierkegaard’s category of despair represents a pertinent tool in diagnosing the existential malady Blecher’s characters suffer from. In this context, my thesis is reinforced by the presence of another symptom, namely, that the individuals who people Blecher’s novels incessantly vacillate between “organic authenticity and mechanical objectification.”86 As such, this vacillation gives birth to a selfhood perceived as a burden, as something one has to free oneself from. Consequently, Blecher’s personages will do everything in their power to flee from themselves. They are eager to become someone else and dread the impossibility of annihilating their present ipseity.87 This is exactly what Kierkegaard meant by the despair of not willing to be oneself or the “despair in weakness.”88 As if dissecting Blecher’s bleak anthropology, Kierkegaard remarks that for someone fully given to “pure immediacy or immediacy containing a quantitative reflection…there is no infinite consciousness of the self.”89 And he continues: The man of immediacy is only physically qualified (insofar as there really can be immediacy without any reflection at all); his self, he himself is an accompanying something within the dimensions of temporality and secularity, in immediate connection with “the other”…, and has but an illusory appearance of having anything eternal in it. The self is bound up in immediacy with the other in desiring, craving, enjoying, etc., yet passively; in its craving, this self is a dative, like the “me” of a child. Its dialectic is: the pleasant and the unpleasant; its concepts are: good luck, bad luck, fate.90

Astonishingly enough, Kierkegaard realizes that the person fully given to immediacy understands everything in terms of fatality, and that whenever destiny deals her a crushing blow, as when, for instance, she becomes physically ill, then unhappiness sets in.91 Moreover, such an individual, states Kierkegaard, “regards himself as dead, as a shadow of himself.”92 Indeed, due to the radical destruction of illness and pain, Blecher’s characters lack concreteness; they are half-dead and incarnate a merely generic selfhood without an unmistakable personal identity.93 Moreover, since in Blecher’s thought the ever-shifting mask is much more valuable than real existence, the ostentatious falsification of life appears heuristically adequate and aesthetically advisable. Kierkegaard, too, realized that, while in despair, the first thing the self Manolescu, Arca lui Noe, p. 575. Ţeposu, Suferinţele tânărului Blecher, p. 64. 87 Balotă, De la Ion la Ioanide, p. 159; Manolescu, Arca lui Noe, pp. 572–3. 88 SKS 11, 164–5 / SUD, 49–50. 89 SKS 11, 165 / SUD, 50. 90 SKS 11, 165–6 / SUD, 51. 91 SKS 11, 166–7 / SUD, 51. 92 SKS 11, 167 / SUD, 52. 93 See Manolescu, Arca lui Noe, p. 559; p. 563. 85 86

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longs for is a different identity.94 Because “[immediacy] actually has no self,”95 the man of immediacy constantly aspires to exchange his actual selfhood for a new one every time the outer reality seems unwelcoming. The difference here would be that Kierkegaard does not insist as much as Blecher on the irrecoverable degradation of physical suffering96 and especially, on the sufferer’s aspiration to “the quietude of indifference”97 or a reification without remainder.98 The differences between our authors are, I hold, quintessential. Whereas Blecher identifies human inwardness with the milieu of escapist phantasms or reduces it to the entrails of the physical body,99 Kierkegaard relegates corporeality to immediacy, and by qualifying the latter as deficient in reflection, he does not dwell too much on its base despair. By contrast, in Blecher’s world, “where God is dead, matter plays the role of a pitiless destiny.”100 The kind of introspection Blecher advocates “does not envision one’s inner invisible emotions or reflexivity, but rather reveals a being in flesh and bones, which is situated on this side of the skin in a purely physical interiority.”101 As contemplated by Blecher, human life is definable primarily by its organic quantity and fleshiness, as “a landscape shaped by veins, muscles, nerves and a heart,”102 wherein the soul and the spirit are utterly absent, almost inconceivable.103 Here we should never forget that, for Blecher, the bodily determination of existence is, by virtue of its constitutive and mortal sickliness, a trap. This philosophical view has a certain Gnostic or Neoplatonic flavor,104 but is not necessarily incommensurable with the Christian understanding of corporeality.105 Finally, we arrived at what I consider the core point of contention. Even if we could see Blecher’s world-view as an instance of human fallenness in the Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată, p. 81; p. 92; p. 113; Balotă, De la Ion la Ioanide, p. 180. Blecher’s characters often display clear suicidal tendencies. See Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată, p. 98 and Blecher, Vizuina luminată, pp. 303–4. 95 SKS 11, 168 / SUD, 53. 96 Blecher, Inimi cicatrizate, p. 121; p. 134; p. 136; p. 139; p. 177; p. 225 (Scarred Hearts, pp. 6–7; pp. 30–1; p. 37; p. 43; pp. 121–2; pp. 217–18). 97 Balotă, De la Ion la Ioanide, p. 159. 98 Ţeposu, Suferinţele tânărului Blecher, p. 41. 99 Blecher, Vizuina luminată, p. 233; pp. 267–9; Manolescu, Arca lui Noe, p. 558. 100 Balotă, De la Ion la Ioanide, p. 175. 101 Manolescu, Arca lui Noe, p. 559. 102 Ibid., p. 559. See also Negoiţescu, Engrame, p. 129. 103 However, we should keep in mind that, in addition to the paroxysmal proliferation of corporeality, Blecher’s obsessions are equally directed towards “the imaginary of subjectivity, the phantasms of inwardness, the hallucinating unreality of psychical depths, the profundity of the unconscious, and the terrifying spectacle of groundlessness.” Ţeposu, Suferinţele tânărului Blecher, pp. 22–3; see also ibid., pp. 36–7. 104 Balotă, De la Ion la Ioanide, p. 168; Manolescu, Arca lui Noe, p. 559; p. 571; Ţeposu, Suferinţele tânărului Blecher, p. 75; p. 83. 105 Here we should remember that by taking on a human body, Christ restored the sanctity of corporeality. At the same time, physical pain, illness, and ultimately death are conceived by the Christian doctrine as a direct consequence of the Fall. It may be useful to realize that neither Kierkegaard, nor Blecher, pay any attention to the transfiguration of the body via God’s embodiment in Christ. 94

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Christian sense—and Kierkegaard would not disagree with this possibility—the radical dissimilarity lies in the unambiguous denial of religiousness professed by Blecher.106 Instead, the Romanian writer succeeds in denouncing the infirmity of being per se. He renders mortality and decay so endemic that life itself becomes an epiphenomenon of non-being. And it is for no other reason that his fictional alteregos parade before us as protean incarnations of a vaguely pulsating nothingness.107 We are therefore entitled to speak of Blecher’s “existential nihilism”108 or “aesthetics of the void”109 as opposed to Kierkegaard’s Christian-soteriological psychology. Kierkegaard does recognize the ubiquity of despair and the nihilistic potential of suffering. Nevertheless, he discusses them against the background of Christianity, neighbor love, and the imitation of the exemplar (whereby any suffering acquires a redemptive meaningfulness).110 Unlike Kierkegaard, Blecher considers the world meaningless, preposterously oppressive or theatrical, that is to say, both dramatic as well as ludicrously artificial.111 When not suffused with infernal depictions of bodily degradation, Blecher chronicles a vast “artificial paradise,”112 where the tragic farce of humanness recklessly unfolds before our eyes. I have explained above why Blecher’s characters ultimately fail to do away with the alienation from the world or with their inner discord and self-split.113 That can be Balotă speaks of Blecher’s suffering as being placed in the proximity of religiousness, but he immediately adds that the latter does not envision any deity. For Balotă, the “religious” element resides in Blecher’s deep compassion for any kind of tribulation and in his uncompromising refusal to occasion pity in others. Balotă, De la Ion la Ioanide, p. 155. My position is that one can hardly pinpoint the specifically religious dimension of this, indeed highly dignified, attitude. 107 Ţeposu, Suferinţele tânărului Blecher, p. 37; Balotă, De la Ion la Ioanide, p. 170; p. 176; Negoiţescu, Engrame, p. 121. 108 Balotă, De la Ion la Ioanide, p. 177. See also Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată, p. 71; p. 82; p. 103; p. 113; Blecher, Inimi cicatrizate, p. 129; p. 139; 177; p. 223 (Scarred Hearts, pp. 20–1; p. 43; p. 121; pp. 213–14); Blecher, Vizuina luminată, p. 233; p. 261; p. 302; p. 304; Negoiţescu, Engrame, pp. 136–7; and Silvian Iosifescu, Reverberaţii, Bucharest: Eminescu 1981, pp. 141–3. 109 Ţeposu, Suferinţele tânărului Blecher, p. 74. See also Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată, p. 63; p. 93; Blecher, Inimi cicatrizate, p. 151; p. 229 (Scarred Hearts, p. 67; p. 226). 110 For Kierkegaard, the horrors of physical suffering can and should be integrated into a faith-oriented existence. Tellingly enough, this attitude is embraced by none of Blecher’s characters. By way of contrast, Blecher admits that pain cannot be otherwise than degrading, meaningless, unacceptable, or worthy of despising. Blecher, Inimi cicatrizate, p. 140; p. 185 (Scarred Hearts, pp. 45–6; p. 137); Blecher, Vizuina luminată, p. 263; p. 270; p. 312; Ţeposu, “Blecher, Max” p. 300; Balotă, De la Ion la Ioanide, p. 154. 111 On the meaninglessness of the world, see Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată, p. 48; p. 50; p. 62; pp. 63–7; pp. 69–70; p. 88; p. 103; Blecher, Inimi cicatrizate, p. 175 (Scarred Hearts, p. 118); Blecher, Vizuina luminată, p. 302. Ţeposu plastically writes that Blecher’s “world is an immense panopticon animated not by a vital flux but rather by a grotesque, stale mechanization.” Cf. Ţeposu, Suferinţele tânărului Blecher, p. 58. 112 Balotă, De la Ion la Ioanide, p. 179. 113 Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată, p. 44. See also Ţeposu, Suferinţele tânărului Blecher, pp. 40–1; Negoiţescu, Engrame, p. 125. 106

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seen as a sign of their “sickness unto death.” From a different perspective, Blecher abundantly buttresses Kierkegaard’s view of despair as unawareness—and therefore implicit rejection—of the eternal. He does so through an exclusive emphasis on the devouring temporality. As already mentioned, Blecher is completely uninterested in attaching any expiatory sense to human tribulations, physical or otherwise, in stark contrast to Kierkegaard, for whom suffering is a source of joy because it is a constitutive part of a soteriological scenario. In sum, granted the impossibility of religious rebirth, Blecher emerges from his life and oeuvre as an Ecclesiastes without God, absorbed only by his fetid sores and inconsolable grief; an Ecclesiastes for whom even the eternally meaningless ordeal of Sisyphus remains a bliss.114 And yet, irrespective of their significant divergence, the careful reader cannot help noticing a few salient similarities, this time from a biographical viewpoint. Both Kierkegaard and Max Blecher have learned the harsh lesson of suffering, whether physical (Blecher) or psycho-spiritual (Kierkegaard). Neither of them has been spared the torments of eros. It appears that Blecher secretly fell in love with a married woman,115 although his affection never crossed the limits of a book dedication….Kierkegaard’s marital-erotic fiasco, the most debated episode of his biography, need hardly be mentioned. Next, we should not ignore that both authors have benefitted from the generosity and wealth of their fathers, although Blecher was never physically fit for the aesthetic extravagances of the young Kierkegaard. Their vital dependence on writing116 and their fondness for pseudonymity117 brings further support to the tenet that these great sufferers found a comparable means to sublimate their earthly purgatory. Last but not least, Blecher and Kierkegaard might have been kindred in death. Noteworthy in this sense is that after his fatal collapse in the street, Kierkegaard was diagnosed with tuberculosis of the spine marrow.118 Thus, for a few weeks he may have experienced, to be sure, on a different scale, what Max Blecher endured during the last ten years of his sorrowful passage through life.

114 See Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată, pp. 93–4; Blecher, Vizuina luminată, p. 303; Balotă, De la Ion la Ioanide, p. 176; p. 178. 115 See Băicuş, Max Blecher, pp. 169–73. 116 Balotă, De la Ion la Ioanide, p. 171. 117 Ţeposu, Suferinţele tânărului Blecher, p. 18. 118 See Encounters with Kierkegaard: A Life Seen by His Contemporaries, ed. by Bruce H. Kirmmse, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1996, p. 118; p. 119.

Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Blecher’s Corpus “Conceptul repetiţiei la Kirkegaard [sic],” Vremea, vol. 9, no. 431, March 29, 1936. “Exegeza câtorva teme comune,” Azi, vol. 5, no. 23, May–June, 1936. II. Sources of Blecher’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Kierkegaard, Søren, La Répétition. Essai d’expérience psychologique par Constantin Constantius, trans. by Paul-Henri Tisseau, Paris: Alcan 1933. — La pureté du coeur, trans. by Paul-Henry Tisseau, Bazoges-en-Pareds: privately published 1936. III. Secondary Literature on Blecher’s Relation to Kierkegaard Băicuş, Iulian, Max Blecher—Un arlechin pe marginea neantului, Bucharest: Editura Universităţii Bucureşti 2004, pp. 32–3; pp. 38–9; p. 79; pp. 81–2; p. 112; pp. 197–204. Iversen, Karsten Sand, “Kødets fortvivlelse,” in Max Blecher, Hændelser fra den umiddelbare uvirkelighed, trans. by Erling Schøller, Copenhagen: Basilisk 2010, pp. 142–55.

Jorge Luis Borges: The Fear without Trembling Eduardo Fernández Villar “Borges, destined, obliged to universality, obliged to exercise his spirit everywhere, even if it was just to escape the Argentinean suffocation. It is the South American nothingness that makes writers from that continent more open, more alive….”1

I. A South American Destiny The figure of Jorge Luis Borges (August 24, 1899, Buenos Aires–June 14, 1986, Geneva) was to become a milestone in the Hispanic literature, from which open new crossroads would be seen in every contemporary language. Borges, of AngloUruguayan descent (Borges Haslam on his father’s side and Acevedo Suarez on his mother’s side), was a typical member of the bourgeoisie of the Río de la Plata at its greatest splendor. In spite of this, his childhood took place in the suburbs of the Palermo neighborhood (peripheral enough to shelter him from occasional murderers and compadritos). At 15, at the beginnings of World War I, he traveled to Geneva with his family. There he would attend secondary school and learn English, French, and German (the last of which was self-taught with the aid of a dictionary and a book of poems by Heine). In 1919, his family moved to Majorca, and a year later they moved to Seville and Madrid. In the latter city, he would come into contact with literary personalities such as Ramón José Simón Valle Peña (1866–1936), Juan Ramón Jiménez Mantecón (1881–1958), José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955), Ramón Gomez de la Serna Puig (1888–1963), and Rafael Cansinos-Asséns (1882–1964). Borges established a closer relationship with Cansinos-Asséns and even considered him his master. From this relationship arose Borges’ brief affiliation to ultraism. In 1921, the family returned to Buenos Aires. This European journey, which would be later called “illusory,” awakened in Borges a deep feeling of membership. It was also a “rediscovery,” with some nostalgia or homesickness for his homeland Argentina. His first book, Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923), is the result of this experience.2 Once settled in Buenos Aires, Borges embarked on a tireless and fruitful task which would characterize his versatile figure: writer, translator, speaker, professor, and editor. He founded four literary magazines (Prisma, Proa, Revista Multicolor de los sábados, and Los Anales de Buenos Aires) and contributed regularly to many others (such as Síntesis, Sur, and El Hogar). He also participated in different national 1 Emile Cioran, “El último delicado,” in Ejercicios de admiración y otros textos. Ensayos y retratos, Barcelona: Tusquets 1995, p. 156. 2 Jorge Luis Borges, Fervor de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires: Imprenta Serantes 1923.

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newspapers, such as La Nación, and international ones, such as El País. In this type of publication, his first productions started to appear. It was not until recently that this aspect of his work has come to light: that of a professional writer. Likewise, even when Borges is mostly remembered because of his short stories and poetry, his essays were the only constant production from his beginnings as a writer, which, either with the format of a lecture or as articles, would provide Borges with a salary. His first years belonged to poetry (too oriented to local color according to his own opinion). Subsequently, at the beginning of the 1930s, he began with the fiction stories which gave him deserved international recognition. He would still have time to successfully try other forms of literature (like his well-known prologues and epilogues, which he elevated to the category of genre), coming back once and again to poetry. However, in this complete incursion into the diverse genres, his essays about philosophy, theology and, more often, literature, continued to accumulate. An enumeration of his works would be enough to corroborate the persistence of his critical work. There are three stages in Borges’ production. The works which belong to the first of these are the poems: the above-mentioned Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923), Luna de enfrente (1925),3 Cuaderno San Martin (1929),4 and the brief essays: Inquisiciones (1925),5 El tamaño de mi esperanza (1926),6 El idioma de los argentinos (1928),7 Evaristo Carriego (1930),8 and Discusión (1932).9 Four years later, his Historia Universal de la Infamia started to appear in installments (1936),10 by which his quality as a narrator of short and extraordinary stories became clear. In 1938, the real turning point in his life and his production, two things happened: his father’s death and an event which would confront him with the proximity of his own death. Because of a domestic accident, he suffered a septicemia that prevented him from speaking, and he almost died. Once recovered and deeply moved by this experience, Borges decided to enter into a new form of narrative: the short story (so far, the only stories he had written were El hombre de la esquina rosada and the ones which make up the volume Historia Universal de la Infamia). He was trying to reduce the impact of frustration in case the results were not as expected. The corollary of this experience is Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote and also the extensive production of stories that fill his well-known anthologies. Satisfied, Borges concentrated on the narrative. From then on, he wrote all the short stories that make up the volume El jardín de los senderos que

5 6 7 8 9 3 4

1935.

10

Jorge Luis Borges, Luna de enfrente, Buenos Aires: Proa 1925. Jorge Luis Borges, Cuaderno San Martin, Buenos Aires: Proa 1929. Jorge Luis Borges, Inquisiciones, Buenos Aires: Proa 1925. Jorge Luis Borges, El tamaño de mi esperanza, Buenos Aires: Proa 1926. Jorge Luis Borges, El idioma de los argentinos, Buenos Aires: M. Gleizer 1928. Jorge Luis Borges, Evaristo Carriego, Buenos Aires: M. Gleizer 1930. Jorge Luis Borges, Discusión, Buenos Aires: M. Gleizer 1932. Jorge Luis Borges, Historia Universal de la Infamia, Buenos Aires: Editorial Tor

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se bifurcan (1941),11 Ficciones (1944),12 El Aleph (1949),13 and La Muerte y la Brújula (1951).14 With all this, Borges established his future second avatar: he became a writer of fantastic stories. However, he never abandoned his work as an essayist and wrote Historia de la eternidad (1936),15 Nueva refutación del tiempo (1947),16 Aspectos de la poesía gauchesca (1950),17 Otras Inquisiciones (1952),18 and El “Martin Fierro” (1953).19 His last stage was marked by hereditary blindness, which, even if it did not prevent him from writing short stories, made him devote himself to poetry. From this period come El Hacedor (1960),20 Para las seis cuerdas (1965),21 Elogio de la sombra (1969),22 El otro, el mismo (1969),23 El oro de los tigres (1972),24 La rosa profunda (1975),25 La moneda de hierro (1976),26 Historia de la noche (1977),27 La cifra (1981),28 and Los conjurados (1985).29 From this period also come his short stories El informe de Brodie (1970) and El libro de arena (1975), and we can mention the short stories condensed in La memoria de Shakespeare (1983).30 As regards his critical works, in this period we find his lecture books, Siete noches (1980),31 Borges, oral (1979),32 and Nueve ensayos dantescos (1982),33 and also the compilation of his

11 Jorge Luis Borges, El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan, Buenos Aires: Ediciones Sur 1941. 12 Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones (1935–1944), Buenos Aires: Ediciones Sur 1944. 13 Jorge Luis Borges, El Aleph, Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada 1942. 14 Jorge Luis Borges, La muerte y la brújula, Buenos Aires: Emecé 1951. 15 Jorge Luis Borges, Historia de la eternidad, Buenos Aires: Viau y Zona editores 1936. 16 Jorge Luis Borges, Nueva refutación del tiempo, Buenos Aires: Oportet & Haerses 1947. 17 Jorge Luis Borges, Aspectos de la poesía gauchesca, Montevideo: Número 1950. 18 Jorge Luis Borges, Otras inquisiciones (1937–1952), Buenos Aires: Sur 1952. 19 Jorge Luis Borges, El “Martín Fierro,” Buenos Aires: Columba 1953. 20 Jorge Luis Borges, El hacedor, Buenos Aires: Emecé 1960. 21 Jorge Luis Borges, Para las seis cuerdas, Buenos Aires: Emecé 1965. 22 Jorge Luis Borges, Elogio de la sombra, Buenos Aires: Emecé 1969. (Two more editions were published in the same year.) 23 Jorge Luis Borges, El otro, el mismo, Buenos Aires: Emecé 1969. 24 Jorge Luis Borges, El oro de los tigres, Buenos Aires: Emecé 1972. 25 Jorge Luis Borges, La rosa profunda, Buenos Aires: Emecé 1975. 26 Jorge Luis Borges, La moneda de hierro, Buenos Aires: Emecé 1976. 27 Jorge Luis Borges, Historia de la noche, Buenos Aires: Emecé 1977. 28 Jorge Luis Borges, La cifra, Buenos Aires: Emecé 1981. 29 Jorge Luis Borges, Los conjurados, Madrid: Alianza 1985. 30 Jorge Luis Borges, La memoria de Shakespeare, Buenos Aires: Ediciones Dos Amigos 1980. 31 Jorge Luis Borges, Siete noches, México City: Fondo de Cultura Económica 1980. 32 Jorge Luis Borges, Borges, oral, Buenos Aires: Emecé/Editorial de Belgrano 1979 (transcripts of talks given by Borges at the Universidad de Belgrano in 1978). 33 Jorge Luis Borges, Nueve ensayos dantescos, Madrid: Espasa-Calpe 1982. (This work is a compilation of essays mostly from the late 1940s and early 1950s. It contains an introduction by Marcos Ricardo Barnatán.)

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writings in the magazine El Hogar under the name of Textos cautivos (1985)34 and the collection of prologues that belong to his Biblioteca Personal (1986).35 The works in collaboration with other authors are as vast as his personal works. A special place was occupied by his friend Adolfo Bioy Casares (Adolfo Vicente Perfecto Bioy Casares (1914–99)), with whom Borges co-authored Seis problemas para don Isidro Parodi (1942),36 Los mejores cuentos policiales (1943 and 1956),37 Un modelo para la muerte (1946),38 Dos fantasías memorables (1946),39 Los orilleros (1955), El paraíso de los creyentes (1955),40 Cuentos breves y extraordinarios (1955),41 Poesía gauchesca (1955),42 Libro del cielo y del infierno (1960),43 Crónicas de Bustos Domecq (1967),44 and Nuevos cuentos de Bustos Domecq (1977).45 His extensive work was completed with texts he wrote in collaboration with other writers: Índice de la poesía Americana (1926) was the anthology he wrote with Vicente García-Huidobro Fernández (1893–1949) and Alberto Hidalgo Lobato (1897–1967);46 Antología clásica de la literatura argentina (1937) with Nicolás Jorge Luis Borges, Textos cautivos, Barcelona and Buenos Aires: Tusquets Editores 1986. (This work is edited by Enrique Sacerio-Garí and Emir Rodríguez Monegal and contains a selection of the texts Borges published in El Hogar. Those omitted were later collected in Borges en El Hogar.) 35 Jorge Luis Borges, Biblioteca Personal, Madrid: Hyspamérica 1985. 36 H. Bustos Domecq, Seis problemas para don Isidro Parodi, Buenos Aires: Sur 1942. (Bustos Domecq is the first of the various pseudonyms used by Borges and Bioy Casares for their works in collaboration. This work contains a preface by one of the fictional characters, Gervasio Montenegro. It was later included in Obras completas en colaboración.) 37 Adolfo Bioy Casares and Jorge Luis Borges, Los mejores cuentos policiales, Buenos Aires: Emecé 1943; and Los mejores cuentos policiales; Segunda serie. Buenos Aires: Emecé 1956. 38 Un modelo para la muerte / B. Suarez Lynch, Buenos Aires: Oportet y Haereses 1946. (This work was written with Adolfo Bioy Casares under the pseudonym B. Suárez Lynch.) 39 Dos fantasías memorables / H. Bustos Domecq, Buenos Aires: Oportet y Haereses 1946. (This work was written with Adolfo Bioy Casares under the pseudonym H. Bustos Domecq.) 40 Los orilleros; El paraíso de los creyentes, Buenos Aires: Losada 1955. (These are filmscripts written in collaboration by Borges and Bioy Casares.) 41 Adolfo Bioy Casares and Jorge Luis Borges (eds.), Cuentos breves y extraordinarios, Buenos Aires: Raigal 1955. 42 Poesía gauchesca, vols. 1–2, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica 1955. (This work is edited with notes and introductions by Borges and Bioy Casares.) 43 Adolfo Bioy Casares and Jorge Luis Borges (eds.), Libro del cielo y el infierno, Buenos Aires: Raigal 1955. 44 Adolfo Bioy Casares and Jorge Luis Borges, Crónicas de Bustos Domecq, Buenos Aires: Losada 1967. 45 Adolfo Bioy Casares and Jorge Luis Borges, Nuevos cuentos de Bustos Domecq, Buenos Aires: Librería La Ciudad 1977. 46 Jorge Luis Borges, Alberto Hidalgo, and Vicente Huidobro (eds.), Indice de la nueva poesía americana, Buenos Aires: Sociedad de Publicaciones El Inca 1926 (This book had three prefaces, one by each of the editors. Borges’ preface is included in Textos recobrados, 1919–1929.) 34

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Federico Henríquez Ureña (1884–1946);47 Antología de la literatura fantástica (1940)48 and Antología poética argentina (1941),49 both with Bioy Casares and Silvina Inocencia Ocampo Aguirre (1903–93); El compadrito. Su destino, sus barrios y su música (1945), an anthology of Argentinean authors in collaboration with Silvina Bullrich (1915–90);50 Antiguas literaturas germánicas (1951) with Delia Ingenieros (1915–96);51 Leopoldo Lugones (1955) with Betina Edelberg (1921–2010);52 La hermana de Eloísa (1955) with Luisa Mercedes Levinson (1914–88);53 Manual de zoología fantástica (1957) with Margarita Guerrero;54 Introducción a la literatura inglesa (1965) with María Esther Zemborain de Torres Duggan (1915–2001);55 ¿Qué es el budismo? (1976) with Alicia Jurado (1922–2011);56 Diálogos (1976) with Ernesto Sábato (1911–2011);57 Breve antología anglosajona (1978) and Atlas (1984), both in conjunction with María Kodama (b. 1937).58 The quantity of awards and prizes his works have deservingly been awarded is huge. To name just a few: the Formentor Award—shared with Samuel Beckett (1906–89)—given in 1961, and the Cervantes Award in 1980. He received honoris causa doctorates from universities in Cuyo (Argentina, 1953), Los Andes (Columbia, 1963), Columbia (USA, 1971), Oxford (England, 1971), East Lansing (USA, 1972), 47 Jorge Luis Borges and Pedro Ureña Henríquez, (eds.), Antología clásica de la literatura argentina, Buenos Aires: Kapelusz 1937 (preface included in Textos recobrados 1931–1955). 48 Adolfo Bioy Casares, Jorge Luis Borges, and Silvina Ocampo (eds.), Antología de la literatura fantástica, Buenos Aires: Sudamericana 1940. (This anthology was considerably modified for its second edition in 1965.) 49 Adolfo Bioy Casares, Jorge Luis Borges, and Silvina Ocampo (eds.), Antología poética argentina, Buenos Aires: Sudamericana 1941 (This work contains a preface by Borges.) 50 Jorge Luis Borges and Silvina Bulrich, El compadrito. Su destino, sus barrios y su música, Buenos Aires: Emecé 1945. (This work includes a preface by Borges and “Hombre de la esquina rosada.”) 51 Jorge Luis Borges and Delia Ingenieros, Antiguas literaturas germánicas, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica 1951 (A later version of this book is entitled Literaturas germánicas medievales.) 52 Jorge Luis Borges and Betina Edelberg, Leopoldo Lugones, Buenos Aires: Troquel 1955. 53 Jorge Luis Borges and Luisa Levinson, La hermana de Eloísa, Buenos Aires: Ene 1955. (This work contains two stories each by Borges and by Luisa Mercedes Levinson, and a final story written in collaboration.) 54 Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero, Manual de zoología fantástica, México City: Fondo de Cultura Económica 1957. (This work was later expanded as El libro de los seres imaginarios 1967.) 55 Jorge Luis Borges and María Esther Zemborain, Introducción a la literatura inglesa, Buenos Aires: Columba 1965. 56 Jorge Luis Borges and Alicia Jurado, ¿Qué es el budismo? Buenos Aires: Columba 1976. 57 Orlando Barone, Diálogos Borges-Sábato, Buenos Aires: Emecé 1976. 58 Jorge Luis Borges, Breve antología anglosajona, Santiago, Chile: Ediciones La Ciudad 1978; Jorge Luis Borges and María Kodama, Atlas, Buenos Aires: Sudamericana 1984.

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Santiago (Chile, 1976), La Sorbonne (France, 1977), Cincinnati (USA, 1977), Tucumán (Argentina, 1977), and Rome (Italy 1984). His teaching should also be mentioned: he delivered classes in the universities of Buenos Aires, Texas, and Harvard. Almost no mention has been made of Borges’ personal life here. In fact, he seemed to have lived just for literature (which he would elevate, in tribute, to impregnable honored positions). Literally, this was his whole world. Characterized by an inquisitive and special keenness for literature, Borges could barely interpret the place he lived in. His contemporary Julio Cortázar (1914–84) definitively expressed this inability. He referred to Borges as “an integral blind man”59—alluding to Borges’ inexcusable political opinions during the 1970s. It is a fact that Borges, who could so cleverly create and scan imaginary worlds, did not seem to have lived in the real world. According to him, this cosmic symmetry represented the way in which reality manifested itself, and it would play a dirty trick on him. His insults and cheers to two Generals resulted in local repudiation, on the one hand, and international condemnation on the other. Indeed, perhaps the only political interventions (in the broader sense of the word) that could be mentioned here are his animosity towards General Juan Domingo Perón and his friendliness to General Jorge Rafael Videla. Beyond this mere biographical information, his prose, invaluable and incomprehensible, is left. His talismans, as he called them, were the mirrors, the labyrinths, the cube, the sphere, the tigers, and the panther. His exquisite and unique style, his chaotic way of understanding the cosmos, his tidy way of dealing with chaos; the irreparable unreality; the strange mixture of eclecticism which is, eventually, skeptical; the paradoxical building of a religiousness that is, deep down, atheistic (but Borges did not despair about it): all these concerns are Borges. Perhaps only encyclopedias can abridge the life and works of a man in a few lines. A fictional Enciclopedia Sudamericana—in the year 2074—will introduce him this way: the renown Borges enjoyed in his lifetime, documented with an accumulation of papers and controversies, astonished us. We are absolutely certain that he was the first to be surprised and that he was always afraid of being considered an impostor or slapdash or a singular mix of both….Did Borges ever feel the intimate discord of his luck? We suspect he did.60

II. Kierkegaard in the Labyrinth There are two ways of establishing the relationship between a thinker and a poet. The most obvious one is direct referentiality. The other, subtle but also evident, is lateral or indirect referentiality. In Borges there are two Kierkegaards: one who is present—referenced and quoted­—and the other is hidden. Throughout his entire works, Borges only mentions the Dane three times. The first mention, in 1951, was meant to make an allusion to Franz Kafka. The second time was in 1980, to question Julio Cortázar, Cartas 1964–1968, Buenos Aires: Alfaguara 2000, p. 1279. Jorge Luis Borges, “Epílogo,” in Obra completa, vols. 1–2, Buenos Aires: Emecé 1974, vol. 1, p. 1145.

59 60

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the persistence of his ecstasy. The third mention, in 1985, was Borges’ prologue to Fear and Trembling.61 The only direct reference about his contact with Kierkegaard is a text 20 lines long that—like the rest of his prologues—functions as introduction, gloss, and assessment of the Dane’s famous pseudonymous work. In addition, we should point out that on the three occasions Borges barely referred to, distorted or, totally confused Søren Kierkegaard. In “Kafka, sus precursores,”62 Borges quoted him so as to corroborate one of his celebrated topics: “each writer creates his precursors.”63 The idea that one author proliferates others is in keeping with Borges’ idea of a “whole book” in which the entire universe is included. Furthermore, the “precursor” character can only be established retrospectively and extrinsically (any author has precursors who are heterogeneous writers, and, despite this fact, he will be more similar to them than to his own previous works). We can already glimpse a point of commonality with Kierkegaard in an outline of the theory of the avant la lettre reception—a concept in Borges by which the reader rewrites the work, making the author fragment and move. The polarization of the author and the main role of the reader as well are also found anticipated in the Dane. For Borges, it was unquestionable that Kierkegaard and Kafka shared the same “mental affinity,” and he added a point of overlap in the methodological order, that is, their use of “religious parables on contemporary and middle-class themes.”64 It is important to point out two things. First, Borges used Kierkegaard quotations from Walter Lowrie (1868–1959), not from Kierkegaard’s works. Secondly, Borges had his own precursors when he linked Kierkegaard to Kafka. Theodor Adorno (1903–69), in fact, had already pointed out that same likeness almost twenty years before.65 The second appearance of Kierkegaard in Borges’ works is not particularly revealing. As regards the length of the infernal torments, Borges doubted—with his usual malice—the hypothetical evidence of the Kierkegaardian ecstasy: “I don’t know if it is easy to feel this. I don’t know if, after a few minutes in hell, Kierkegaard would have continued to feel the same way.”66 Borges referred to the judgment— later quoted in his prologue to Fear and Trembling—in which Kierkegaard affirmed that he would celebrate divine justice even if he had to burn in hell. This is not just one more example of Borges’ famous irony; rather this shows Borges’ ignorance about Kierkegaard or, at least, about his concept of “eternity.” A quotation from Cf. Jorge Luis Borges, “Prólogo a Temor y Temblor,” in Biblioteca personal, Madrid: Hyspamérica 1985, p. 9. 62 Jorge Luis Borges, Otras inquisiciones, Buenos Aires: Proa 1952, p. 126. (English translation: Other Inquisitions 1937–1952, trans. by Ruth L.C. Simms, New York: Washington Square Press 1966, p. 112.) 63 Borges, Otras inquisiciones, p. 127. Other Inquisitions 1937–1952, p. 113. 64 Borges, Otras inquisiciones, p. 128. Other Inquisitions 1937–1952, p. 112. 65 Cf. Theodor Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag 1962, p. 48. (English translation: Theodor Adorno, Kierkegaard, Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. by Robert Hullot-Kentor, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1989, p. 25.) 66 Borges, Siete noches, p. 55. (English translation: Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights, trans. by Eliot Weinberger, New York: New Directions 1984, p. 103.) 61

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The Moment would be enough to explain the meaning of the passage: “If when death comes your life has been used well—that is, used so it rightly relates itself to eternity—God be eternally praised. If not, it is eternally irreparable for ever….”67 It is important to pay special attention to the adverb eternally. Indeed, here Borges seemed to have confused one of the characteristics of Christianity pointed out by the Dane with an improbable bluff. What happens is that, whenever the Kierkegaardian categories (like eternity, moment, seriousness, aesthetic or sin) can be traced in Borges’ narrative, they appear in reverse positions: secularized or, better, laicized, out of the Christian context or with a biased interpretation (mostly in keeping with the reading of one of the pseudonyms). Thus, we reach the most circumspect and detailed reference: the prologue of Fear and Trembling.68 Despite its brevity, there are two interesting pieces of information: the association with Hamlet and the disassociation with the existentialist movement, both of which have—in Borges’ mind—a positive meaning. On the one hand, in Borges’ universe, where real persons and fictitious characters live together, it is praise to put Søren Kierkegaard on a level with Hamlet. On the other hand, Borges’ antagonism to existentialist thinking is well known—he considered it to be a philosophy of the pathetic—and so to distinguish Kierkegaard from it is a positive determination. Nevertheless, it has been said—rightfully—that Borges confused Kierkegaard with his pseudonym Johannes de silentio (from this confusion the comparison with Hamlet would come up). Such confusion should be revised. Borges thought that every person could be circumscribed, “summarized,” in a phrase or in a thought (which, in turn, is a phrase). With echoes of his admired León Bloy, Borges considered that certain people could be taken for what they “symbolized”; in other words, they could be phrases, ideas or even attitudes that those same people had coined at a given moment in their lives and by which they have been sustained. Considering this, we should agree that the ideas he chose to condense Kierkegaard are not wrong, if we take into account—just as Borges did— the person and not his works (or much better, the person underlying the works and, at the same time, the works embodied in the person). In Søren Kierkegaard’s case in particular, an interpretation of this type is more inevitable than plausible. On the other hand, among Borges’ topics, there is the interpretation of a work as an autonomous entity, which surpasses the author. In his own terms, “a book has to go beyond the intention of the author. The intention of the author is a poor human thing, fallible, but in the book there must be more….”69 As can be seen, it is a prescriptive matter: “there must be.” It does not matter if the author writes justifications or guides of interpretation for his works. There will always be a certain surplus of autonomous meaning, independent of any intent, which is residual. Therefore, it is no longer about right or wrong interpretations. The purpose of the author—in this case, Kierkegaard—is no longer a debatable question. It is curious that these same SKS 13, 352 / M, 294. Cf. Jorge Luis Borges, “Prólogo a Temor y Temblor,” in Biblioteca personal, Madrid: Hyspamérica 1985, p. 9. 69 Jorge Luis Borges, Prólogos con un prólogo de prólogos, Buenos Aires: Torres Agüero Editor 1975, p. 9. 67 68

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ideas are in keeping with Kierkegaard’s thinking, so that the subject himself ends up included in a superior stage. Borges preferred the figure of the afflicted and passionate Danish theologian of the nineteenth century rather than the pseudonymous author of works as different as Either/Or and Practice in Christianity. Thus, he could declare: Lutheran Protestant, he denied the arguments that prove God’s existence and the incarnation of Jesus, which he considered absurd from the point of view of reason, and he propounded an individual act of faith for each believer. He did not admit the authority of the Church and wrote that everyone has the right to choose….His sedentary biography is less enriching than reflection and prayers. Religion is the strongest of his passions.70

As can be seen, here there is interwoven biographical information (some accurate, some untrue) with philosophical opinions sustained by pseudonyms and explicitly denied by Kierkegaard. Borges considered that no character created by an author could be superior to him (assuming, of course, that such distinction could be established). Perhaps that is the reason why Kierkegaard was the combination of all his pseudonyms, not just the mere sum of all of them but all of them simultaneously (that is, not in a progressive way, but in an immediate way). According to this opinion, Kierkegaard would not have to be different—not even disassociated— from his pseudonyms, as he would have intended. However, it should be noted that Borges is skeptical about the possibility of an exegetical fulfillment of a work. There is hardly any confusion in somebody who had repeatedly said that he did not believe in bibliography, that the “compulsory bibliography” was an oxymoron, that the superstition of chronology in the study of philosophy or history was to be superseded. There is no confusion in such a person who, in conclusion, declared himself a “hedonic reader.” There is another relevant reference in the brevity of this prologue. It is about the quotation mentioned before, in which Kierkegaard asserts that the glory of God will sing from hell. It is possible to corroborate the profound impact this phrase had in Borges because he would use it (as a quotation or, more often, in periphrastic rephrasing) in his short stories “La escritura del Dios”71 and “La biblioteca de Babel”72 and in the poems “James Joyce”73 and “Browning resuelve ser poeta”74 (to quote the most evident references). Borges was always in search of brevity, precision, and also an idea that would include the depth and quintessence of the meaning of the universe. He may have seen in this idea the epitome of his own values: courage, melancholy, and defeat. Concerning the presence of the Dane in the works of the Argentinean, we should trace the methodological point of view. The Kierkegaardian pseudonym—or, better, the heteronym—has a large interface with Borges’ prose. Even though Borges did not use pseudonyms (except in the works with Adolfo Bioy Casares), he used a similar Borges, “Prólogo a Temor y Temblor,” in Biblioteca personal, p. 9. Cf. Borges, El Aleph, pp. 67–71. 72 Cf. Borges, El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan, pp. 45–52. 73 Borges, Elogio de la sombra, p. 13. 74 Borges, La rosa profunda, p. 7. 70 71

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resource: the fictional quotation, the absent or circular reference. In his esthetic work, Kierkegaard is epigrammatic, lacunary, aphoristic, and mainly ironic, but especially absent. We find the same in Borges’ most famous stories (for instance, Ficciones, El Aleph or El informe Brodie). On the contrary, in the edifying writings Kierkegaard takes a leading role, and, in the meantime, he locates his “dear reader.” A part of his work is crowded, suggestive, and impersonal; the other is intimate, disdainful, and personal. The voice that preaches cannot be anonymous. This relationship can be established in Borges’ works, since he was cautious in his critical and poetic works. When Borges made his famous literary criticisms (even when they allude to his very own production, as in his prologues and epilogues), he took charge and spoke from his favorite place: that of the reader. Ana María Barrenechea (b. 1938) points out with subtle skill that, as Borges said that every poet just sings a brief repertoire of frequent universal metaphors, he also established that he should “embody them,” making them concrete.75 This is precisely what we see in the critical part of his works: his personal nature and the fanatical defense of his individualism, as an author and as a reader (perhaps, particularly as a reader). In this way he could say things such as the following: he had enjoyed Cervantes in English more than in Spanish, that Lorca was a professional Andalusian or that the Goethe who wrote Faust was not the best. Likewise, in both writers we find, in parallel with this attitude—with this “existential commitment”—their greatest isolation. This isolation, this incomprehension would lead them to break with the institutions of their time (religious and political for the Dane, literary—seldom political—for the Argentinean). We could devote another article to describing another point of contact: the magisterial use of irony. Both used it to create a void, where the afflicted readers would get stuck. For Kierkegaard as well as for Borges, irony was not a simple stylistic resource, but a way of communication, and a constitutive element of literary writing. III. Borges: The Metaphysical Trembling It is known that Borges saw metaphysics as an “indefinite fear imbued with science”76 but no more than that. For him, philosophy and theology were only different subgenres of fantastic literature. Borges, however, chose repeatedly the word “fear” to refer to the matters of thinking (that certainly concerned him). Borges was by no means a systematic philosopher, even if he considered some arduous questions of thinking. Similarly, Kierkegaard was not a theologian in spite of having devoted his life to it. Borges was a philosopher as much as Kierkegaard was a poet.77 Out of this reasoning, we could derive interesting lines of analysis (from which these words Just as an example, see Borges, El tamaño de mi esperanza, pp. 146–7, p. 150; Borges, Otras inquisiciones (1937–1952), p. 16, p. 41, pp. 142–5, pp. 210–13; Francisco de Quevedo. Prosa y verso, Buenos Aires: Emecé 1948, Prologue; cf. also Ana María Barrenechea, La expresión de la irrealidad en la obra de Jorge Luis Borges y otros ensayos, Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Cifrado 2000, pp. 239–50. 76 Borges, Historia de la eternidad, p. 167. 77 It is important to remember that Kierkegaard referred to himself as a “poet of Christianity.” See SKS 21, 367–8, NB10:200. 75

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do not pretend to be more than an outline). Thus, if we can establish a relationship between them, this stemning—the fear—would be the starting point. In the case of the Argentinean, it is not the fear Kierkegaard spoke about, which preceded an ecstatic trembling, but just mere fear, the fear of those who have no faith. Borges is concerned with metaphysical anxiety, with the urgency of an answer to the uneasy conscience of fear. He fluctuated between agnosticism and a self-confessed atheism throughout his entire life. For him faith comes about in desperation since “There’s no compassion in the Fate and the night of God is infinite.”78 In addition, he lacked a complete knowledge of all the works by Kierkegaard, since he did not know much about even more interesting thinkers.79 We could venture that Borges may not have been that “beloved reader” to whom Kierkegaard spoke in his edifying writings. His hypercritical reading seems to break up the artifice propounded by the Dane. Turning over the page, Borges would have found signs of faith, of a commitment that he never felt. Perhaps he could have glimpsed in Kierkegaard’s esthetic works, by contrast, the future and close edifying purpose, through which these were created. This, by the way, is something Kierkegaard knew well: “there is just as little social unity in a coterie of ironists as there is real honesty in a band of thieves.”80 Translated by Patricia Alejandra Lhomy

Jorge Luis Borges, “El ápice” in La cifra, Buenos Aires: Emecé 1981, p. 84. Probably with the exception of Schopenhauer, Borges only had a rhapsodian knowledge of philosophers like Berkeley, Hume, or even Spinoza. For this, see Juan Nuño, La filosofía de Borges, México: Fondo de Cultura Económica 1986. 80 SKS 1, 288 / CI, 249. 78 79

Bibliography I. Works by Borges that Make Use of Kierkegaard Otras inquisiciones, Buenos Aires: Sur 1952, p. 126. (English translation: Other Inquisitions 1937–1952, trans. by Ruth L.C. Simms, New York: Washington Square Press 1966, p. 112.) Siete noches, México City: Fondo de Cultura Económica 1980, p. 55. (English translation: Seven Nights, trans. by Eliot Weinberger, New York: New Directions 1984, p. 103.) “Prólogo. Søren Kierkegaard,” in Temor y temblor, trans. by Jaime Grinberg, Madrid: Hyspamérica 1985, p. 9. (This preface was later included in Biblioteca personal, Madrid: Hyspamérica 1985, p. 9.) II. Sources of Borges’ Knowledge of Kierkegaard Chestov, Leon, Kierkegaard y la filosofía existencial, Buenos Aires: Sudamericana 1948. Lowrie, Walter, Kierkegaard, New York: Harper and Brothers 1938. III. Secondary Literature on Borges’ Relation to Kierkegaard Agheana, Ion, The Prose of Jorge Luis Borges. Existentialism and the Dynamics of Surprise, New York: Peter Lang 1984, p. 2; p. 18; p. 25; p. 43. Barrenechea, Ana María, Borges, the Labyrinth Maker, New York: New York University Press 1965, p. 76. — La expresión de la irrealidad en la obra de Jorge Luis Borges y otros ensayos, Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Cifrado 2000, p. 82. Dunham, Lowell, The Cardinal Points of Borges, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 1971, p. 43; p. 45. Nuño, Juan, La filosofía de Borges, México: Fondo de Cultura Económica 1986, p. 36.

Leonardo L. Castellani: Between Suero Kirkegord and Thomas Aquinas María J. Binetti

I. Leonardo L. Castellani: His Life and Work Leonardo Luis Castellani (Santa Fe, 1899–Buenos Aires, 1981) was an Argentinian priest, politician, writer, and philosopher. During his childhood he lived in the Province of Santa Fe, where he pursued his elementary studies at Don José Parodi School. From 1913 he went to Secondary School as a boarder at the Inmaculada Concepción Jesuit School. During 1918 he moved to Córdoba in order to join the Society of Jesus novitiate as a seminarian. He later pursued his theological studies at the Seminario Metropolitano of Villa Devoto, in Buenos Aires, where in 1928 he became a Bachelor in Theology. The following year he traveled to Italy, where in 1931 he obtained a Ph.D. in Theology and Philosophy from the Gregorian University of Rome. In 1930, while still in Rome, he was ordained as a priest in the Society of Jesus. Once his residence in Rome was over, he went to Paris where he completed his studies in anthropology and psychology at the Sorbonne University, obtaining his degree in Superior Studies in Philosophy with a specialization in Psychology. In 1934 he started a brief journey across Germany and Austria with the aim of becoming further acquainted with educational issues. After the journey, whose main objective was academic formation, he finally returned to Buenos Aires in 1935, where he started an intensive activity as teacher, journalist, and politician. In the 1940s Castellani joined the nationalist political movement that had been spreading in Argentina since the 1930s. He contributed various articles to the journals Cabildo, Nuestro Tiempo, Nueva política, Crisol, Segunda República, La mano derecha, Tribuna, Ichthys, Estudios, Criterio, La Nación, Dinámica Social, Azul y Blanco, etc., and he eventually became editor of the cultural journal Jauja. As a result of his political activism he ran as second candidate for national deputy for the Alianza Libertadora Nacionalista in the general elections in February 1946, which led him to some serious problems with the Society of Jesus as well as with the ecclesiastical hierarchy. In fact, in the following year the Jesuit Order confined him to Manresa (Cataluña), from where he escaped two years later, in 1949. As a result, the Society decided to expel him, and the clerical hierarchy suspended him in sacris, which means in the exercise of his pastoral functions. In 1966 Pope John XXIII restored him to his priestly ministry. As a political activist, Castellani belonged to fascist and Catholic nationalism, a political movement that, already established in Europe although exacerbated by

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World War II’s ideological polarization, began to penetrate Argentina as well. Castellani understood fascism as the resurgence of imperial and papal Rome, and saw the Concordat between Benito Mussolini and Pope Pius XI as the only possible hope for the world.1 The agreement between fascism and Catholicism—backed by the social doctrine of the encyclic Quadragesimo Anno—fostered the theologicophilosophical justification of the antidemocratic, theocratic, and hierarchical ideology endorsed by Castellani. In fact, his deepest political aspiration consisted in the reestablishment of the medieval Catholic Empire as a supranational and universal confederation led by the hierarchical power of the Church. Some constitutive principles of this ideal of Castellani are, for example, opposition to representative democracy and universal suffrage, a single party destined to bring order to society, advocacy of the death penalty as beneficial to the defendant’s salvation, consideration of interest as immoral financial practices, and obligatory religious education in all Argentine public schools, according to the religious educational model reinstated by Benito Mussolini.2 As a third intermediate way, Castellani’s fascist nationalism was opposed to both communism and liberalism, both considered as demonic and even as the Antichrist itself. According to his theological and political interpretation, liberalism was the cause of the destruction of Christian Europe, which began with the Protestant Reformation, continued with the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and ended in communism. In his opinion, “Rousseau’s liberalism is a heresy,” and the ideals of equality, liberty, and fraternity constitute an extremely dangerous madness, in the face of which “real freedom is merely a state of obedience.”3 While “obsession for freedom entails the maximum degree of weakness,”4 submission to a theocratic and absolutist regime represents for Castellani maximum strength. In this way all of modernity was demonized on the charges of blasphemy, atheism, heresy, and several other expressions of an inquisitorial nature. Castellani’s prolific political activity is reflected not just in his newspaper articles but also in some of his books, such as Educational Reform (1939),5 The Essence of Liberalism (1960),6 Argentina Perspectives (1962),7 Current Prophecies (1966),8 Our Discussion (1968),9 The Songs of Militis (1974),10 and A County of Jauja (1999).11 From a theoretical point of view, Castellani legitimized his political militancy through his theological and philosophical formation and, from a practical point of Cf. Leonardo Castellani, Crítica Literaria, Buenos Aires: Penca 1945, p. 420. Cf. Leonardo Castellani, La reforma de la enseñanza, Buenos Aires: Editorial Difusión 1939, pp. 93–107. 3 Leonardo Castellani, Conversación y crítica filosófica, Buenos Aires: Espasa Calpe 1941, p. 17. 4 Leonardo Castellani, Las canciones de Militis, Buenos Aires: Dictio 1974, p. 55. 5 Castellani, La reforma de la enseñanza. 6 Leonardo Castellani, Esencia del liberalismo, Buenos Aires: Librería Huemul 1961. 7 Leonardo Castellani, Perspectivas argentinas, Buenos Aires: Librería Huemul 1962. 8 Leonardo Castellani, Las Profecías actuales, Buenos Aires: Cruz y Fierro 1966. 9 Leonardo Castellani, Decíamos ayer, Buenos Aires: Sudestada 1968. 10 Leonardo Castellani, Las canciones de Militis, Buenos Aires: Dictio 1974. 11 Leonardo Castellani, Un país de Jauja, Mendoza: Ediciones Jauja 1999. 1 2

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view, through the need to turn the eternal and infallible doctrines of Catholicism into secular action. In this way, partisan activism, priestly ministry, and religious devotion were integrated into a unique mission in his own person. As a theologian, a catechist, and a preacher, he was the author of numerous works on exegesis, spirituality and the diffusion of ideas, such as his biblical analyses: The Apocalypse of Saint John (1936)12 and The Gospel of Jesus Christ (1957),13 his prophecies: Will Christ Return or not? (1951),14 his homilies: Sunday Sermons (1997–98),15 his catechisms: a common Catechism (1975),16 and Catechism for Adults (1979),17 and certain texts on spirituality such as The Book of Prayers (1978).18 To his politico-theological integration we must also add philosophy, as the ultimate foundation of Castellani’s theory and praxis. In standard manuals on the history of Argentine philosophy Castellani’s name appears as that of a representative of Catholic thought, which has had a strong presence in the country ever since the time of Spanish colonization. The promotion of this trend of thought was favored by the Cursos de Cultura Católica created in 1922 and furthermore by the institutionalization of Catholic Universities towards the end of the 1950s, where scholasticism, especially in its Thomistic form, had the upper hand. The philosophy of Castellani belongs to this trend of thought, which holds that philosophy is ancilla theologiae19 and thus should follow the dogmatic prescriptions of the clerical institution. Castellani’s metaphysics is the metaphysics of Saint Thomas Aquinas, sifted by the neo-Thomism of Joseph Maréchal (1878–1944) and Jacques Maritain (1882–1973). He took over the Argentine edition of the Suma Teológica,20 in which he also participated as a translator and commentator, dealing with issues such as whether an infinite number of angels might fit on the head of a pin. Castellani supports the enforcement of a philosophia perennis respectful of tradition and a servant to theology, thus coinciding with Thomism. Among his philosophical production we may point out Saint Augustine and Descartes (1937),21 Philosophical Conversation and Criticism (1941),22 and Elements of Metaphysics (1951).23 Leonardo Castellani, El Apokalypsis de San Juan, Buenos Aires: Ediciones Paulinas 1963. 13 Leonardo Castellani, El Evangelio de Jesucristo, Buenos Aires: Itinerarium 1957. 14 Leonardo Castellani, Cristo ¿vuelve o no vuelve?, Buenos Aires: Paucis Pango 1951. 15 Leonardo Castellani, Domingueras prédicas, Mendoza: Ediciones Jauja 1997–98. 16 Leonardo Castellani, Catecismo, Buenos Aires: Círculo de Amigos de L. Castellani 1975. 17 Leonardo Castellani, Catecismo para adultos, Buenos Aires: Grupo Patria Grande 1979. 18 Leonardo Castellani, El libro de las oraciones, Buenos Aires: Dictio 1978. 19 Cf. Leonardo Castellani, Elementos de metafísica, Buenos Aires: D.A.L.I.A. 1951, p. 73. 20 Santo Tomás de Aquino, Suma Teológica, vols. 1–20, ed. and trans. by Leonardo Castellani, Buenos Aires: Club de Lectores 1944–45, vol. 1. 21 Leonardo Castellani, San Agustin y Descartes, Buenos Aires: EUDEBA 1937. 22 Leonardo Castellani, Conversación y crítica filosófica, Buenos Aires: Espasa Calpe 1941. 23 Leonardo Castellani, Elementos de metafísica, Buenos Aires: D.A.L.I.A. 1951. 12

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But Castellani’s multifarious personality went beyond this, and he also tackled the sphere of psychology. As a result of his studies in this field, he wrote Freud in Numbers (1966)24 and Human Psychology (1997).25 As a psychologist, Castellani denounces Freudian theory as materialistic, deterministic, pessimistic, and hedonistic. According to him, the omnivorous sexuality of psychoanalysis is incompatible with “Christian doctrine or with the lofty demands of Christian decency.”26 Freud’s myths, such as the Oedipus complex, the libido, child sexuality, the sexual origin of neurosis, thanatos, etc., are not just a heresy but also plain folly. If from a theoretical perspective Freud is mistaken, from the practical perspective Castellani is convinced that “there is real danger in ascribing consciousness (Bewußtmachen) to a multitude of people,”27 and it is thus much safer to keep them ignorant. We will end the enumeration of his multiple attributes by mentioning that Castellani is also the author of short stories, fables, legends, novels, and poetry, with an ultimate political, catechistic, and paternalistic intention. In his artistic production he repeatedly used pseudonyms such as Ermitaño Urbano, Jerónimo del Rey, Militis Militorum, Cide Hamete, Pío Duca D’Elía, and Edmundo Florio. In literary fiction, Castellani recreates the telluric paradigm of the Argentinian “gaucho,” ascribing to him the most typical national characteristics. The typical gaucho soul he depicts transfers the tormented and pious Chesterton hero onto the Argentine stage. His production also includes rural fables, such as Tales from the Countryside (1931);28 detective stories, such as The 9 Deaths of Father Metri (1942);29 short stories, for instance Stories from Norte bravo (1936),30 Martita Ofelia and Other Short Ghost Stories (1939),31 The Crime of Ducadelia (1959);32 novels, including Your Majesty, Dulcinea (1956)33 and The Papers of Benjamín Benavides (1947);34 satires, such as The New Government of Sancho (1942);35 and poetry, for example The Death of Martín Fierro (1953)36 and Sad Sonatas from the Manresa Year (1964).37 He also tackled the genre of literary review in texts dedicated to Paul Claudel (1868–1955), Leonardo Castellani, Freud en cifras, Buenos Aires: Cruz y Fierro 1966, p. 66. Leonardo Castellani, Psicología humana, Mendoza: Jauja 1997. 26 Castellani, Freud en cifras, p. 66. 27 Ibid., p. 70. 28 Leonardo Castellani, Camperas, Buenos Aires: Ediciones Surgo 1931. 29 Leonardo Castellani, Las 9 muertes del padre Metri, Buenos Aires: Ediciones C.E.P.A. 1942. 30 Leonardo Castellani, Historias del Norte bravo, Buenos Aires: Dictio 1977. 31 Leonardo Castellani, Martina Ofelia y otros cuentos de fantasmas, Buenos Aires: Editorial Difusión 1939. 32 Leonardo Castellani, El crimen de Ducadelia, Buenos Aires: Doseme 1959. 33 Leonardo Castellani, Su Majestad Dulcinea, Buenos Aires: Ediciones Cintra 1956. 34 Leonardo Castellani, Los papeles de Benjamín Benavides, Buenos Aires: Ediciones Cintra 1947. 35 Leonardo Castellani, El nuevo gobierno de Sancho, Buenos Aires: El Ateneo 1942. 36 Leonardo Castellani, La muerte de Martín Fierro, Buenos Aires: Ediciones Cintra 1953. 37 Leonardo Castellani, Sonatas tristes de todo el año manresano, Buenos Aires: Ediciones Theoria 1964. 24 25

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Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874–1936), Leopoldo Lugones (1874–1938), and Hugo Wast (1883–1962), all of them intended to enhance the Catholic virtues of those writers, in accordance to Castellani’s own line of inspiration and ecclesiastical exemplariness. Apart from his notes and newspaper articles, Castellani published over 45 books and 10 translations. We might generally state that his prose—in any of the literary genres he chooses—is noteworthy for its colloquial language full of slang, popular turns of phrase and neologisms. His protean and eclectic personality mixes anecdotes, jokes or exorbitant statements with the most formal and academic enunciations. His style has recourse to persuasion, irony, and emotional impact rather than to analysis or rigorous argumentation. An eschatological, millenarian, prophetic, and inquisitorial rhetoric, abounding in heresies, antichrists, anathema, persecution, apostasy, satanic empires, demonic realities, parousia, etc., runs through Castellani’s discourse. In reality as well as in fiction, the world is divided, according to his perspective, into us and them, friends and enemies, the chosen ones and the condemned ones. The whole dualistic universe he represents is surrounded by a poetic and mystical atmosphere, which gives his work the agonic but glorious tone of Christian elegy. II. Castellani’s Suero Kirkegord While Europe had a leading role in the Kierkegaard renaissance in the middle of the twentieth century—impelled by F.J. Billeskov Jansen (1907–2002), Gregor Malantschuk (1902–78), Niels Thulstrup (1924–88), and Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, among others—Kierkegaard’s name was gradually becoming familiar among Argentine intellectuals. The absence of translations in Spanish as well as the difficulties proper to the Danish language contributed to the fact that Kierkegaard’s introduction in Argentina was not a direct one but was mediated by the reading of other works, such as those of Jean Wahl (1888–1974) and especially of Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936), among others.38 For the same reasons, Kierkegaard’s corpus was not approached in a systematic, methodical, and critical way, but rather was incorporated as a new spiritual atmosphere, as an omnipresent perspective able to inspire and motivate the total regeneration of thought without the author being expressly considered as a subject in itself. Catholic thought has been essential to Kierkegaard’s reception in Argentina, and the cause of his assimilation by it was doubtless due to the religious character of his work and his explicit advocacy of Christianity. It is therefore not surprising that such authors as Romano Guardini (1885–1965) in Germany or Cornelio Fabro (1911–95) in Italy—who both had a very deep influence on Argentine Catholic philosophers— considered Kierkegaard one of the few modern authors able to avoid the nihil obstat of the ecclesiastical institution, probably the only one. In the case of Argentina, the main representative of this pro-Catholic assimilation of Kierkegaard was Castellani, who discovered his most conservative, reactionary, and anti-modern aspect. Castellani is the only one in Argentina who, by the middle of the twentieth century, Cf. Francisco Leocata, Los caminos de la filosofía en la Argentina, Buenos Aires: Centro Saleciano de Estudios 2004, p. 251; cf. also Alberto Erro, Diálogo existencial, Buenos Aires: Sur 1937, pp. 179–202. 38

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dedicated a whole work to Kierkegaard, in spite of having become acquainted with this author only through German and Italian translations. In From Kirkegord to Thomas Aquinas (1973),39 Castellani not only reflects his own interpretation of Kirkegord but his thought as well. Ever faithful to the style of his permanent neologisms and grammatical innovations, the work refers to “Suero Kirkegord ” instead of Søren Kierkegaard, although maintaining the name of Doctor Angelicus within the limits of orthodoxy. Castellani explains that the chronological inversion that appears in the title of the text is in accordance with a strict historicalphilosophical criterion. In fact, the history of philosophy itself would return, with Kirkegord, to pre-idealistic and pre-modern realism, as we find it in Saint Thomas Aquinas. Thus Kirkegord would turn out to be the new founder of scholasticism, destined to overcome the “heresy of modernism,”40 to retrieve “Greek philosophy as well as the philosophy of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas as ancilla theologiae,”41 and to infuse new life into the philosophia perennis that coincides with Thomism as the expression of the only and real truth. We might generally say that From Kirkegord to Thomas Aquinas is a compendium of autobiographical literature, catechism, effusions of the heart, scholastic philosophy, anecdotes, political statements, Catholic dogma, poetry and historico-universal prophecies, the whole in accordance to Castellani’s interpretation of Kirkegord. The text is divided into 25 brief chapters, preceded by a preface and followed by a conclusion and two appendixes. The preface puts forward the thesis the author will try to demonstrate in its pages, that is to say, that “Kirkegord’s philosophicaltheological position coincided with Saint Thomas Aquinas,’ ”42 that Kirkegord “reaches Catholicism starting from Luther”43 and that “his mind was headed towards the Church and even towards Thomism.”44 The attempt to justify this thesis gives the work a certain unity and consistency, validated by the infallible truth of the “moral mystery of the Church”45—obviously the Catholic Church—in relation to which Kirkegord would be a saint and a mystic in the medieval style. The following 25 chapters are intended to point out Kirkegord’s Thomism and Catholicism through a series of arguments that we will consider separately. Above all, Kirkegord might be considered a Thomist on account of the starting point of his thought, that is, the “drastic return to the philosophical tradition that maintains the truth of the external world,”46 whose immediate evidence had been denied by modernity, particularly idealistic modernity, considering idealism’s denial of the external world. In this simple and straightforward way, Castellani states Kirkegord’s scholasticism, summarized in the existence of the self and the external world as an initial datum of consciousness, but of a consciousness Leonardo Castellani, De Kirkegord a Tomás de Aquino, Buenos Aires: Guadalupe 1973. 40 Ibid., p. 252. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., p. 7. 43 Ibid., p. 8. 44 Ibid., p. 9. 45 Ibid., p. 11. 46 Ibid., p. 29. 39

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finally wrapped up in mystery, because “Kirkegord’s first category is mystery”47 and his two first books—Fear and Trembling and Repetition—deal precisely with the mysterious. This initial coincidence is followed by multiple theological and dogmatic convergences. For instance, Kirkegord and Saint Thomas both agree in the affirmation of the preambula fidei, the necessity of the Church,48 sacramental life and the sacrament of holy matrimony,49 Jesus Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist,50 the baptism of children, the medieval monastic ideal, anti-Lutheranism and a fervent devotion to the Virgin Mary.51 Kirkegord’s category of sin deserves a special mention, and Castellani’s approach to it is extremely original. His analysis starts with the surprising historical claim that “Kirkegord is the first to have studied sin from a philosophical perspective. In order to do this, he has had to formulate a new method (in The Concept of Anxiety), a combination of dogmatism, psychology and ethics.”52 After stating this sort of combined methodology—of which Castellani himself has given us numerous examples—he stops at the catechistic exposition of the dogma of original sin and moves on to the sacrament of baptism, specifying that the latter operates in human beings through faith instilled by God’s grace, which is different from actual and active faith. In the same way that Kirkegord ascribes the quantitative universality of sin to the identity of the human species, Castellani justifies the universal call to redemption and the communion of the saints through the identity of nature, which includes atheists, Jews, liberals, freemasons, and Protestants.53 But the author fails to clarify the relation between Kirkegord and Saint Thomas when he states that, according to Thomistic doctrine, sin is measured by substantial and objectively evil realities that are independent of human freedom. In accordance with his scholastic predilection, Castellani ends his reflection on sin with a casuistic hierarchy of it. He concludes that, while presently the sins of incontinence and malice remain the same, the sin of bestialitá matta, on the contrary, has increased.54 His interpretation of faith, which both Kirkegord and Saint Thomas would deem an intellectual act, is also surprising. He states, “the content of faith is the same for Kirkegord as for us, in other words, dogma: and that is knowledge.”55 Castellani concludes, from a logical point of view, that Kirkegord’s subjectivity, determined by faith as a cognitive act, coincides with Aquinas’ “contemplative knowledge.”56 Furthermore, he insists on the statement that Saint Thomas’ religious contemplation amounts to Kirkegord’s repetition.57 In order to prove this he maintains that Kirkegord Ibid., p. 25. Ibid., p. 85. 49 Ibid., p. 147. 50 Ibid., p. 35. 51 Ibid., p. 45. 52 Ibid., p. 203. 53 Ibid., p. 204. 54 Ibid., p. 207. 55 Ibid., p. 40. 56 Ibid., p. 33. 57 Ibid., pp. 92–3; p. 210. 47 48

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had left Regine in order to live his virginity as contemplation and to contemplate Regine as repeated or redoubled. As for Kirkegord’s category itself, the existent singular individual, Castellani intends to show that it coincides with what Catholicism understands by saintliness. Assuming that “the single individual amounts to what Thomists call a person”58— in other words, an individual substance of a rational nature—the three constitutive stages of its essential becoming “coincide with the three lives of Aristotle and Saint Thomas,”59 so that all of them—that is to say, Aristotle, Saint Thomas, and Kirkegord, the person and the single individual—end up by being canonized. On the other hand, and following the schema of the existential stages, Castellani distinguishes three different types of Kirkegordian journals: the fictitious and aesthetic one—“The Seducer’s Diary”—the semi-fictitious and ethical one—“Guilty/Not Guilty”—and the real and religious one—his personal journals.60 Thus in a very original way the stages of life are associated with the literary genres used by Kirkegord and his own intimacy. The last of Kirkegord’s categories that Castellani mentions is anxiety, which he advises should be translated as “uneasiness” (desasosiego). Anxiety is assimilated to Saint Thomas’ feeling of indigence, as a foundation of instinctive religiousness and the primary form that the gift of the fear of God assumes among human beings.61 Castellani’s theologico-philosophical disquisition ends in the prevailing objective of his thought, the political aspect, whose ideological orientation we have already mentioned. In relation to this he states: “as you can see, Kirkegord has been a conservative, not in the style peculiar to Argentinian conservatives but rather in the nationalistic one: he was in favor of monarchy and hierarchy as well as against liberalism.”62 He interprets politically Kirkegord’s affirmation that the crowd is a lie, and identifies it with the advent of the French Revolution culminating in the Communist Revolution.63 Kirkegord’s impugnation of the masses is for Castellani an equivalent to the abolition of universal suffrage, the advocacy of a single party, and the hierarchical stratification of society,64 because truth does not harmonize with individual arbitrariness but with the laws of the general spirit, present in the theocratic, papal, and real government he advocates. In Castellani’s best style, his political analysis ends by coinciding with the apocalyptic and inquisitorial spectrum: “thought will be centered around a final battle to the death between atheism and Catholic Christianity: a battle which will employ every weapon, including political power.”65 Kirkegord himself remains trapped in this identification of Christianity, governmental power, and the call to arms.

Ibid., p. 102. Ibid., p. 104. 60 Ibid., pp. 113ff. 61 Ibid., p. 188; p. 211. 62 Ibid., p. 163. 63 Ibid., p. 194. 64 Ibid., p. 199. 65 Ibid., p. 252. 58 59

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From Kirkegord to Thomas Aquinas has two appendixes as corollaries. The first one is dedicated to Jean Paul Sartre’s (1905–80) atheistic existentialism, whose work is condemned on the whole as “perverse, cynical and blasphemous.”66 Sartre is demonic; he hates not just God but also humankind, and from his “three absurd concepts, the in-itself, for-itself and nothingness”67 anything can be deduced. The second one ends the text with Jauja, Castellani’s own poem in Kirkegord’s style. Castellani’s work is full of striking statements, such as the following: Kirkegord was “the greatest interpreter of the Bible since Saint John of Damascus”;68 “Kirkegord has done justice to Aristotle’s ethics”;69 “if we follow Kirkegord we end up in Catholicism”;70 “Kirkegord has not converted Denmark, although he did convert some individuals, or perhaps many, but to Catholicism”;71 Kirkegord “loved to repeat a pious little verse, something like: ‘Oh Mary—My Mother—oh consolation of mortal beings.’ ”72 The triumphant Church as a whole, from Saint Thomas to Saint Teresa including San Juan de Yepes and San Ignacio de Loyola, is present in these pages as Kirkegord’s authentic inspiration. In this way Castellani finally reaches the conclusion he was so intently seeking, which now possesses the certainty of that which is fully proved under the infallible auspices of the claim ex cathedra: “towards the end of his life his thought had become Catholic and almost Thomistic.”73 III. From Kierkegaard to Kirkegord Castellani’s historical follies, his scarce or wholly absent philosophical depth, his logical and methodological inconsistency, and his politico-theological dogmatism prevent us from seriously considering his interpretation of Kirkegord, even though we may stress his striking originality. The proposition put forward in From Kirkegord to Thomas Aquinas is neither a literal exegesis of Kierkegaard’s corpus nor a critical analysis of his work, let alone a historical contextualization or an inquiry into its existential specificity. Quite the contrary, the work makes clear from the beginning his attempt to assimilate Kirkegord to scholasticism and Catholicism, which presupposes a doctrinal and institutional praise of Catholicism, a blind attack on modernity in general and an ideological use of Kirkegord’s thought, aimed at legitimizing the author’s political standing. In this sense, Castellani’s thought is consistent with its own objective and has a certain organic structure, even though it is not consistent with Kierkegaard himself, or with the history of thought, or even with reality.

Ibid., p. 253. Ibid., p. 257. 68 Ibid., p. 62. 69 Ibid., p. 154. 70 Ibid., p. 87. 71 Ibid., p. 239. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid., p. 248. 66 67

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In the face of the Castellani phenomenon, the question inevitably arises: how could Søren Kierkegaard become Suero Kirkegord ? The answer to this question is also inevitable: there is in Kierkegaard a conservative, traditionalistic, and dogmatic dimension, prone to be absorbed by certain ideologies similar to Castellani’s. Kierkegaard was able to completely free himself from the bourgeois Protestantism against which he struggled or from the doctrine whose internalization he fostered. In other words, there is a Kierkegaard who contradicts Kierkegaard himself. On the one hand, he appears before us as the philosopher of absolute singularity, whose dialectical and relational self-awareness assimilates the romantic and idealistic primacy of the spirit. On the other hand, he posits himself as the advocate of the established order and assures us that he does not want any changes in the external world. But is it possible to change the internal without also changing the external? Can one state the absolute value of the singular and still pursue a monarchical regime, where the only valid liberty is that of the king? Can we assert that the divine is the “how” of subjectivity and at the same time support its exclusive and excluding historical descent? Is it feasible to deny 1800-year-old Christianity while maintaining the scriptures and doctrines it produced? We believe this is not possible, and thus we face a clear alternative: either we accept the revolutionary Kierkegaard of singular subjectivity, or the reactionary Kierkegaard in whom all his greatness as an original philosopher ends. Kierkegaard is both ambiguous and contradictory. This is the part of truth that the Castellani phenomenon makes evident. Nevertheless, and even considering the most conservative Kierkegaard, he still remains far from Castellani’s Kirkegord. Furthermore, and precisely as a conservative, Kierkegaard is a Protestant. His sense of religious intimacy, the primacy of freedom as an infinite and self-reflective possibility, and the sameness among poor existing single individuals are Lutheran principles, and Luther was modern. This has nothing to do either with Castellani’s dogmatic realism or with Catholicism’s sacramental magic or the hierarchy of the Church based on Saint Peter’s appointment as its supreme head. Castellani’s eclectic personality—as politician, theologian, writer, poet, journalist, and philosopher—is far from emulating the loftiness and depth of Kierkegaard’s equally multifarious personality. Agonic Christianity, trying to justify the call to arms and the confrontation of humankind against humankind, is very far from subjectivity torn by absolute difference. Likewise, fascism does not resemble the community of single individuals that does not add up as parts but in which each one constitutes an absolute. To sum up, Castellani’s Kirkegord is—as its own neologism suggests—a Kirkegord suitable for popular disclosure and Catholic proselytism. If his text is no good as an exegesis of Kierkegaard, let it at least serve as an example of what may happen to great philosophers when they fall prey to political and economic interests, which try to legitimize themselves through a pseudo-religious and messianic rhetoric. Unfortunately, the case of Søren Kierkegaard transformed into Suero Kirkegord is extremely common throughout history, and the first one to have undergone such a fate may well have been Christ himself. Translated by Dora Delfino

Bibliography I. Works by Castellani that Make Use of Kierkegaard De Kirkegord a Tomás de Aquino, Buenos Aires: Guadalupe 1973. II. Sources of Castellani’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Camus, Albert, Le mythe de Sisyphe, Paris: Gallimard 1942, p. 39; pp. 42–3; p. 51; pp. 56–61; p. 65; pp. 69–72. Sartre, Jean Paul, L’être et le néant. Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique, Paris: Gallimard 1943, pp. 58–84; pp. 94–111; pp. 115–49; pp. 150–74; pp. 291–300; pp. 508–16; pp. 529–60; pp. 639–42; pp. 643–63; pp. 669–70; pp. 720–2. Unamuno, Miguel de, El sentimiento trágico de la vida en los hombres y en los pueblos, Madrid: Renacimiento 1913, p. 7; p. 22, pp. 111–13; pp. 117–18; p. 124; p. 154; pp. 176–7; p. 197; p. 253; p. 280; p. 318. — La agonía del Cristianismo, Madrid: Madrid: Renacimiento 1931, pp. 38–9. Wahl, Jean, Esquisse pour une histoire de ‘l’existentialisme’, Paris: L’ Arche 1949, p. 10 ; pp. 13–23; pp. 23–6; p. 28; pp. 31–2; p. 36; p. 40; pp. 42–4; pp. 48–9; pp. 51–2; p. 59; pp. 107–53. — Études kierkegaardiennes, 2nd ed., Vrin, Paris 1949. — La pensée de l’existence, Paris: Flammarion 1951, pp. 5–58. III. Secondary Literature on Castellani’s Relation to Kierkegaard Caturelli, Alberto, La Filosofía en la Argentina actual, Buenos Aires: Sudamericana 1971, pp. 237–8. Leocata, Francisco, Los caminos de la filosofía en la Argentina, Buenos Aires: Centro Salesiano de Estudios 2004, pp. 250–3.

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Carlos Fuentes: “Poor Mexico, so far away from God and so close to the United States”1 Patricia C. Dip

I. Carlos Fuentes Carlos Fuentes, novelist, journalist, playwright, and essayist, was born in Panama City on November 11, 1928 from Mexican parents. Rafael Fuentes Boettiger, his father, was a diplomat who introduced his son to an international environment at a very early age. This cosmopolitan upbringing left a deep mark on the Mexican writer, who lived in the United States, Chile, and Argentina. Fuentes studied law in the Universidad Autónoma de México and economics at the Institut des Hautes Études internationales (Switzerland). Besides writing, he held important positions as head assistant of the press section of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Mexican Ambassador in France from 1974 to 1977. His recurrent topics as an author are the power of fantasy, the paradox of Mexican identity, and the role of revolution in the foundations of modern Mexico. He was selected as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for literature many times. He died on May 15, 2012. Fuentes’ writing career began in the late 1940s. In 1954 he founded the magazine Revista Mexicana de Literatura with Emmanuel Carballo (b. 1929) and Octavio Paz (1914–98). He was the editor of El Espectador (1959–61), Siempre (since 1960), and Política (since 1960). Fuentes’ first collection of short stories, Los días emmascarados, was published in 1954. His first novel Where the Air Is Clear,2 devoted to offering a strong view of Mexico City, has been compared to John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer (1925). He received several awards during his literary career, among which we can mention the Villaurrutia Prize (1975), the Gallegos Prize (1977), the Reyes Prize (1979), the Mexican National Award for Literature (1984), the Cervantes Prize (1987), the Darío Prize (1988), the New Order of Cultural Independence (1988), the Prince of Asturias Prize (1994), the Grinzane Cavouch International Prize (1994), and the National Order of Merit (1997). Carlos Fuentes, Gringo viejo, México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica 1985, p. 27. (English translation: The Old Gringo, trans. by Margaret Sayers Peden, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1985, p. 20.) 2 Carlos Fuentes, La región más transparente, Montevideo: Alfaguara 1958. (English translation: Where the Air Is Clear: A Novel, trans. by Sam Hilleman, London: Deutsch 1986.) 1

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II. Fuentes and Kierkegaard Leticia Valadez distinguishes three generations of Kierkegaard studies in Mexico.3 The first one runs from 1940 until 1960, when many of Kierkegaard’s works were translated into Spanish. The second one (1960–90), in which Fuentes’ case is considered, is represented by authors who either studied or wrote about the Dane. The last period, from 1990 onwards, is dedicated to the Sociedad Iberoamericana de Estudios Kierkegaardianos. Since Valadez focuses primarily on the impact of Kierkegaard’s works on Mexican culture at large, it is worth mentioning that Kierkegaard is only considered in one of Fuentes’ book: Tiempo mexicano.4 Admittedly, we cannot take the same general approach here because this article will specifically deal with the influence of the Danish philosopher on Fuentes. Therefore, before taking into account the relationship between Fuentes and Kierkegaard in Tiempo mexicano, it is necessary to give a preliminary explanation. Fuentes neither received any influence from Kierkegaard’s work nor studied it in a way that suggests that the Dane’s ideas should be of considerable relevance to his literary corpus.5 In terms of degree of influence and reception of an author’s ideas, the following distinctions should be made: (1) academic research on an author and his work; (2) use of an author’s theory implicitly or explicitly with the express purpose of developing his own work; (3) occasional reference to an author. Even though Carlos Fuentes’ use of Kierkegaard must be understood under (3), it is possible to speak of an unconscious treatment of such Kierkegaardian topics as existential choice, despair, temporality, relationship to God, and awareness of authorship. First, we are going to discuss the chapter of Tiempo mexicano in which the Dane is mentioned: 3 See Leticia Valadez, “Mexico: Three Generations of Kierkegaard Studies,” in Kierkegaard’s International Reception, Tome III, The Near East, Asia, Australia and the Americas, ed. by Jon Stewart, Aldershot: Ashgate 2009 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 8), pp. 269–84. 4 Carlos Fuentes, Tiempo mexicano, México D.F.: Cuadernos de Joaquín Mortiz 1971. 5 Fuentes’ large production is represented by La voluntad y la fortuna (2008); Cuentos naturales (2008); Cuentos sobrenaturales (2006); Todas las familias felices (2006); Los 68. París, Praga, México (2005); Contra Bush (2004); Cuerpos y ofrendas (2004); Inquieta compañía (2004); Liceo Nobél Gabriela Mistral (2004); La silla del águila (2003); En esto creo (2002); Instinto de Inez (2001); Los cinco soles de México (2000); Los años con Laura Díaz (1999); Retratos en el tiempo (1998); La frontera de cristal (1995); Nuevo tiempo mexicano (1995); Diana o la cazadora solitaria (1994); El naranjo o los círculos del tiempo (1993); Geografía de la novela (1993); El espejo enterrado (1992); Ceremonias del alba (1991); Constancia y otras novelas para vírgenes (1990); La campaña (1990); Valiente mundo nuevo (1990); Cristóbal Nonato (1987); Gringo viejo (1985); Orquídeas a la luz de la luna (1982); Agua quemada (1981); Una familia lejana (1980); La cabeza de la hidra (1978); Cervantes o la crítica de la lectura (1976); Terra nostra (1975); El tuerto es rey (1971); Los reinos originarios (1971); Tiempo mexicano (1971); Casa con dos puertas (1970); Todos los gatos son pardos (1970); Cumpleaños (1969); El mundo de José Luis Cuevas (1969); La nueva novela hispanoamericana (1969); Cambio de piel (1967); Zona sagrada (1967); Cantar de ciegos (1964); Aura (1962); La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962); Las buenas conciencias (1959); La región más transparente (1958); Los días enmascarados (1954).

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“Kierkegaard en la zona rosa,” and then the treatment of certain topics that help to create an “existential atmosphere” in Fuentes’ literature. Tiempo mexicano begins with an “Author’s Note,” where Fuentes explains that the book is the result of fifteen years of intense speculation over political, social, and economic affairs plus some unpublished pages. What Kierkegaard calls “passionate interest in existence” is translated by Fuentes as “national interest” or pasión de mexicano (Mexican passion). Both Kierkegaard and Fuentes agree on a style of writing that intends to be the expression of pathos instead of the manifestation of unwilling objectivity. “I did not mean to write a cold, objective, statistical or totalizing text about our country; I preferred to give free rein to my obsessions, preferences and Mexican passions, without being disdainful of either arbitrariness or autobiography. I was looking for personal experience and conviction rather than rigor and unwilling objectivity.”6 Given that Kierkegaard and Fuentes share the idea of highlighting the subjective aspects of writing, what interest can a twentieth-century author from a culturally diverse and politically unstable country show for a nineteenth-century Dane whose main aim is the discussion of the solitary individual before God? What strange coincidence can bring together Mexico City and Copenhagen? Literary fiction? In 1971, it was not literary fiction but a historical essay that made this extraordinary meeting between Kierkegaard and the “pink zone” possible. Carlos Fuentes has always tried to understand Mexican history using different resources, from the fiction that transforms Ambrose Bierce into the main character of the search for American identity in Pancho Villa’s Mexico in Old Gringo (1985) to the criticism of the American conservative right wing in Contra Bush (2004).7 In 1971 Fuentes devoted himself to discussing the problem of “the constitution of Mexican identity through history.” Latin American political history is not independent of its complex relationship with the United States. Fuentes works on this topic in a very particular way in Tiempo mexicano, making use of a mixture of literary, poetic, and political strategies of analysis. Twenty years later he considered the same topic again in a book entitled New Mexican Time.8 He writes, “Almost twenty years ago I published a first Tiempo mexicano that—like this one—went through moments of our country’s memories and hopes, present and past. Now as then, I would like to join together literary and civic sensibility, without any intransigent purpose that what is lasting lasts and what is temporary passes.”9 The focus of debate in his new book is described as follows: There is not an absolute politics, there are many politics related to different cultures and values. Politics of what is relative is called “democracy”: it is the sign of the New Mexican Time. But this new time cannot, and must not exclude the old times. Neither in Fuentes, Tiempo mexicano, p. 7. Carlos Fuentes, Contra Bush, Buenos Aires: Aguilar 2004. 8 Carlos Fuentes, Nuevo Tiempo Mexicano, México D.F.: Aguilar 1995, p. 9. (English translation: A New Time for Mexico, trans. by Marina Gutman Castañeda and Carlos Fuentes, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1996. Unfortunately the Preface from which this quotation has been taken is not included in the English translation.) 9 Fuentes, Nuevo Tiempo Mexicano, p. 9. 6 7

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Patricia C. Dip Mexico nor in Latin America could we ever establish democracies without past, without memory, without culture. We support democracy with memory, progress with culture, and future with past. This is my New Mexican Time paradox. It is also its hope.10

The first chapter of Tiempo mexicano, “Kierkegaard in the Pink Zone,” opens with the following words: “In a very famous and amusing essay Søren Kierkegaard explains his personal strategy for preserving the independence of movement and spirit in a city like Copenhagen, which a century ago also had its own pink zone.”11 The Dane’s strategy consisted in building a wholly fictional personality concentrated on the aesthetical interest in existence with the main purpose of getting rid of the serious matters that the different authors he had created had in mind. It could be said that it was a kind of theatrical strategy that anticipated Bertolt Brecht’s (1898–1956) conception of the function of theater, especially the aspects related to the question of the absurd and self-defense against one’s own feelings. Fuentes reflects on Kierkegaard’s strategy, and at the same time he introduces his own ideas about writing. According to him, this strategy is built on the opposition between the public and the private sphere. While anguish is related to the writer’s private life, in the public sphere he exposes himself as “bourgeois.” Kierkegaard was “forced by time to do exactly the contrary of what the spirit of the age demanded.”12 “Writing is fighting against time without time: outdoors when it is rainy, in the basement when it is a sunny day.13 Then Fuentes asks himself whether it is possible to make use of the same resource as the Dane in Mexico, and he concludes that it is not. To the European writer, time is a linear unit that moves forwards assimilating the past; to the Mexicans, on the contrary, time is related to multiplicity, since there is no unit of measure but the simultaneous existence of different times. “For us, there is not only one time: all the times are alive, every past is present.” 14 In Mexico all conceivable times must continue because they are supposed to coexist simultaneously; since none of these times has been exhausted yet, they are forced to go on and on for ever. Mexican time is particular because it presupposes the coexistence of many unfulfilled promises that cannot be thought from the linear point of view of the European progressive model but from the perspective of what Mircea Eliade (1907–86) refers to as “mythological time.”15 “Just by travelling from Mexico City to New York City by car one can see devastation in both countries. But American ruins are mechanical ones. They are the ruins of fulfilled promises…where Ibid., p. 11. Fuentes, Tiempo mexicano, p. 9. See Valadez, “Mexico: Three Generations of Kierkegaard Studies,” p. 277: “The Zona Rosa in Mexico City is a neighborhood quite similar to Østergade and the other streets in Copenhagen described in ‘The Seducer’s Diary.’ ” 12 Fuentes, Tiempo mexicano, p. 9. 13 Ibid., p. 9. 14 Ibid., p. 9. 15 In El mito del eterno retorno, Mircea Eliade introduces the idea of a contemporary philosophy of history that opposes itself to historicism, going back to the concept of “rebellion against historical time” defended by primitive societies. See Mircea Eliade, El mito del eterno retorno, trans. by Ricardo Anaya, Buenos Aires: Emecé 2006, p. 9. 10 11

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American progress has produced garbage, Mexican backwardness has brought about monuments.”16 In the context of this time, only revolution occupies a privileged place. While medieval hierarchical organization was reproduced in colonial times, nineteenthcentury modernity, without taking into account the rights of the peasantry, introduced “only Revolution—and that is why in spite of everything it deserves a capital R— and made all the pasts present in Mexico. It made it instantaneously, as if it knew that there would be no time left for the party of incarnations.”17 The brief instant that summarizes Mexican history makes not historical but aesthetical sense in Fuentes’ terms: Desire is love of something else; it is transfiguration. The surrealistic shade of the Mexican spirit requires desire to be subjugated to reality in order to find its own object, its own opposite, and the unity of the “subverted Eden” in the imagination of the recovered Eden. In this way, the nostalgia for the lost paradise and the impossibility of any future paradise in the present leave most Mexican people with no choice but the paradise in the instant.18

The present is reduced to this “paradise of the instant,” which has a sacred meaning.19 The continuity of history is interrupted with the main purpose of giving to Mexican people their absolute present in Fuentes’ optimistic aesthetical view, in which death itself “is also transfiguration.”20 However, even though the first chapter deals with aesthetical speculation, the book’s main aim is clearly defined by its interest in the discussion on the possibility of establishing “Mexican Socialism.” III. From Mexican Socialism to American Democracy From 1971, when Tiempo mexicano was published for the first time, to 2004, when Against Bush appeared, a certain ideological change took place in Fuentes’ analysis of the Mexican situation. This change probably began in New Mexican Time, published in 1995. Carlos Fuentes’ first Tiempo mexicano ends with a dilemma: “the left wing requires time and patience in order to organize itself; the right wing, on the contrary, exceeds in organization and eagerness.”21 Fuentes takes part in this Fuentes, Tiempo mexicano, p. 10. Ibid., p. 11. 18 Ibid., p. 13. Although Fuentes does not specifically refer to it, the “hope” that Kierkegaard describes in Works of Love as the result of gained awareness of the meaning of the “Christian instant” appears here as romantic exaltation to explain Mexican history. 19 Even though the concept of “instant” bears a resemblance to the sacred in Kierkegaard’s philosophy, the Dane uses it in a precise sense with the purpose of defining Christianity as the point where temporality and eternity converge. In Fuentes’ case, the meaning of the explanation is not religious but political. “The paradise of instant” is used as a metaphor in order to explain Mexican history, as opposed to the European explanation of history based on a “lineal progress,” which does not apply to Mexican events. 20 Fuentes, Tiempo mexicano, p. 13. 21 Ibid., p. 193. 16 17

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dilemma supporting, with Lenin and Gramsci, “conscious, growing and organized action” in order to build “Mexican Socialism.”22 In 1971 he quotes Gramsci: “the existence of objective conditions is not enough for a social transformation; the manifestation of the consciousness and the will to make it happen are also necessary.”23 “His lesson is not only important for the current European social movements but also for us.”24 “In Gramsci’s Italy as well as in our Mexico the Marxist idea makes sense that no social formation disappears until the productive forces that have developed in it find field for an ulterior progressive movement.”25 In Mexico this means two things. First of all, it means that the capitalist development of the country is not finished yet because the State has abandoned it to private hands, incapable of promoting it with social justice. Therefore, the only possibility consists in transferring it into the State’s hands with the purpose of stimulating this development and beginning a new cycle: “the socialist one.” Second, while this happens, the left wing must be in charge of “winning the ideological battle.”26 In this democracy-to-be neither the formally bourgeois parliamentarianism nor the equally formal bureaucracy of Stalinism will have any room; it will only be supported by the worker’s self-determination.27 Progressively, however, Fuentes abandons his socialist ideals only to agree, in 1995, with the intellectuals who, without defending the “end of ideologies,” use the “post-communist” vocabulary. This progressive but rapid ideological change in Fuentes’ viewpoint finally results in his supporting the American Democratic model. Apparently the Mexican question has now nothing to do with the “way to Socialism” but focuses on “multiculturalism,” that is, a kind of cultural progress that does not discuss absolute but relative politics, without raising the subject in radical terms. “We support Democracy with memory, progress with culture, and future with past. This is my New Mexican Time paradox and also its hope.”28 Fuentes’ new approach to understanding Mexican politics is even clearer in Contra Bush, which criticizes Bush’s administration without attacking the capitalist system. This might be the reason why the book is called Against Bush instead of Against Capitalism, since he seems to firmly believe in American democratic values. Even though he shows awareness of the damages the successive American administrations have caused all over the world, he thinks that the main problem is not capitalism itself but the American conservative governments. Fuentes seeks what he calls “politics of ideological equilibrium.”29 He considers that it is necessary to “humanize globalization”30 and that American democracy should have a central role in the achievement of this goal. His search for what can Ibid., p. 191. Ibid., p. 190. 24 Ibid., p. 190. 25 Ibid., p. 190. 26 This is the expression Gramsci uses to mean the need to fight against capitalism not only in political but also in cultural terms. 27 Fuentes, Tiempo mexicano, p. 191. 28 Fuentes, Nuevo tiempo mexicano, p. 11. 29 Fuentes, Contra Bush, p. 32. 30 Ibid., p. 68. 22 23

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be called a “more humane capitalism” prevents him from acknowledging that it is capitalism that is to blame for the vices he describes in his book, not just one of its realizations. If Bush was a cynic, capitalism allowed him to become even more cynical. It is important to bear in mind that American democracy is a modern phenomenon. Why should we Latin Americans support a model which has not proved to be the best one for us? Why should we support a model which has shown its power against us? Why should we support a model which has worked in favor of South American dictatorships by devising the well-known “Condor Plan”? Actually, we do not. If Fuentes still believes in the paradoxical model of American democracy, there is no need for us to follow him. This century may show that socialism is still an alternative if not ideologically reduced to either Mao’s or Stalin’s experiences. Even though I do not agree with Fuentes’ ideological perspective, I must admit that he has always kept up to date with the following three topics: the international political situation, the relationship between Mexico and the United States, and the fortunes of Latin American democracies. Fuentes’ activism depends not only on his work as an author but also on his role as intellectual, and he knows it very well. Kierkegaard was also aware of the meaning of being a nineteenth-century intellectual committed to his own age’s demands. The expression of this consciousness can be found not only in The Point of View of My Work as an Author, but also in the works revolving around the problem of indirect communication, and those written toward the end of his life with the purpose of confronting the Danish status quo. Both Kierkegaard and Fuentes want to give to their writing a political content in action expressing social effects. Neither of them accepts the model of the solitary intellectual, whose work can only be interpreted in aesthetical terms. Aesthetics and politics are, in any case, two sides of the same coin, a coin doomed to roll down the path of polemic. IV. Kierkegaard’s Indirect Appearances in Gringo Viejo Gringo Viejo or Old Gringo from 1985 portraits a triangle involving an American woman Harriet Winslow, a general Tomas Arroyo, and the American journalist and writer Ambrose Bierce, who disappeared during Pancho Villa’s revolution in 1913. The book was made into a film directed by Luis Puenzo in 1989, starring Jane Fonda and Gregory Peck. This is probably one of the most “existentialist” of Fuentes’ works. The action takes place in a Mexico surrounded by a decadent atmosphere which clearly puts moral values aside. In this context of decadence Old Gringo says: mi destino es mío (I am in control of my destiny).31 This saying sums up the content of the drama. Communication between characters is reduced to intimate moments which disappear, absorbed by the development of Mexican history. Sometimes it looks as if their battles happened in the middle of nowhere. Anguish and emptiness inhabit their hearts, and redemption is only possible through death. Even if the religious subject is not introduced in theological terms, the problem of Fuentes, Gringo viejo, p. 24. (The Old Gringo, p. 17.)

31

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living without God appears in many dialogues. This allows us to consider the action in terms of Christian existentialism. When there is no God, the lack of law is clear, and “the death of the father” ceases to be a psychoanalytic symbol to become a real experience. Harriet Winslow experiences these inner conflicts during her “time in Mexico” and therefore can be said to represent what Nietzsche calls “the death of God” and Kierkegaard, “living in despair.”32 However, it is not only despair which is introduced as the universal determination of the human condition, but also the choosing of oneself (at vælge sig selv) as the precondition of any understanding of the world, as it is discussed in Either/Or.33 Two of the main characters of Old Gringo are used as vehicles for showing the “aut-aut question”: Old Gringo and Harriet Winslow. The old man decides to die in Mexico, choosing his own fate and trying to figure out whether he was a journalist or a writer. “For the old Gringo, dazed by the fragility of the planet that separates reality from fiction, the problem was different: journalist or writer, he was still pursued by alternatives.”34 If Harriet Winslow is to be thought of as a character determined by the existential choice, the way responsibility is considered in her case is more related to Sartre’s existentialism than to Kierkegaard’s. In Sartre’s view, choosing implies the choosing not only of the self but of humanity as a whole. That is why responsibility means supporting the idea that every single individual should act the same way one does. In a certain way, Kantian morality plays an important role when it comes to defining what it means to choose. The universal form of the imperative is represented by the “human condition.” “I was happiest when my adored father left us and I could be the responsible one; I felt that now everything depended on me; it was I who had to sacrifice, to strive, to temporize, and not only on my own behalf, but on behalf of all those who love me and whom I love in return.”35 Harriet also embodies the problem of duty, guilt, and the relationship to God. This becomes clear when the old Gringo tells his secret to her: His hard eyes glistened as he spoke. He murmured that he had come here to be killed because he was not capable of killing himself. He had felt freed the moment he crossed the border at Juárez, as if he had walked into a different world. Now he was sure: each of us has a secret frontier within him, and that is the most difficult frontier to cross because each of us hopes to find himself alone there, but finds only that he is more than ever in the company of others.36 From this point of view, Gringo Viejo can be thought of as a literary way of describing what Anti-Climacus calls “despair” in The Sickness unto Death. 33 The problem of human choices does not appear only in Gringo Viejo but also in other books. See, for example, Instinto de Inez, where Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara, an orchestra conductor realizes at the age of 93 that while the future equals death for him, there is still the past, Inez and eternity. Like Artemio Cruz at the end of his life, Gabriel is also engrossed in the consideration of the choices he has made during his prolonged existence. See Carlos Fuentes, Instinto de Inez, Buenos Aires: Alfaguara 2001. (English translation: Inez, trans. by Margaret Sayers Peden, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2002.) 34 Fuentes, Gringo viejo, p. 60. (The Old Gringo, p. 56.) 35 Fuentes, Gringo viejo, pp. 93–4. (The Old Gringo, p. 96.) 36 Fuentes, Gringo viejo, p. 143. (The Old Gringo, pp. 160–1.) 32

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In this description, we find the model of the self that appears in The Sickness unto Death when Anti-Climacus explains that the only way of understanding the constitution of the self is by relating it to God. The relationship between body and soul is external. What is really human in anthropological terms is only shown by means of Spirit (Geist) or, in Fuentes’ terms, la frontera más difícil de cruzar (the most difficult frontier to cross). At the same time, the realization that loneliness has no meaning if it is not juxtaposed to the company of others—introduced by the Old Gringo in a dialogue with Harriet—can summarize the question of the “neighbor” that Kierkegaard has in mind in Works of Love when he tries to support the idea that only when love is seen as a duty does the other appear as the object of a debt. The way Harriet abandons herself in thoughts about guilt and duty can be explained in terms of the Christian ethics inherited from her shy Calvinist father:37 The new compassion granted her precisely by virtue of that sin, she owed to a young Mexican revolutionary who offered life and to an old American writer who sought death: they had given her enough life to live for many years, here in the United States, there in Mexico, anywhere at all: pity was the name of the emotion Harriet Winslow had felt when she looked into the face of violence and glory, and both where finally unmasked to show their true features: those of death.38

V. Conclusion Kierkegaard and Fuentes describe the constitution of the self by means of “time.” In this sense, both consider that being outside “time” is impossible. However, while the Dane concentrates on what is “universally human,” the Mexican writer focuses on the constitution of the Mexican identity. Contrary to Kierkegaard, whose works tackle a metaphysical and religious problem, Fuentes has a more historical and mythological discussion in mind. Kierkegaard defines the ontological structure of the self using the category “before God.” Both the human and the divine are explained through their relationship with “time”; while the human condition takes the form of the instant, the essence of God remains always eternal. In this way Kierkegaard becomes relevant for Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein in Sein und Zeit. Even though the German philosopher is not concerned with theological matters, the way of considering being in time is clearly inherited from Kierkegaard. Fuentes wants to show the influence of mythology on the development of Mexican history. This is a peculiar exercise inasmuch as, in most cases, history and mythology are opposite terms. While the former is supposed to reveal the nature of what is constantly changing, mythology depends on a fixed structure which explains

“Harriet Winslow always awakened with a certain feeling of guilt for what she had said or left unsaid the previous day, guilt for the errors and omissions of the day gone by.” Fuentes, Gringo viejo, p. 93. (The Old Gringo, pp. 95–6.) 38 Fuentes, Gringo viejo, p. 170. (The Old Gringo, p. 180.) 37

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all the changes by means of the same symbol. The paradox of Mexican Time consists, therefore, in subordinating myth to history. In this way, Kierkegaard becomes a referent to post-metaphysical philosophy and Fuentes a symbol of Latin American contemporary literature, whose main concern lies in the search for its own ways of understanding the modern world without copying either European or American models. Both Kierkegaard and Fuentes are interested in putting their ideas into action: the Dane discussing “the ethical” forms of religious discourse and the Latin American the political effects of “becoming Mexican.” In this sense, Kierkegaard goes further than the Heideggerian project, which is limited to presenting existence in the context of an ontological structure that has nothing to do with ethics. Fuentes, on his part, tries to think literature in connection with history or, in others terms, as committed to a historical imperative.

Bibliography I. References and Uses of Kierkegaard in Fuentes’ Corpus Tiempo mexicano, México D.F.: Cuadernos de Joaquín Mortiz 1971. II. Sources of Fuentes’ Knowledge of Kierkegaard Undetermined. III. Secondary Literature on Fuentes’ Relation to Kierkegaard Valadez, Leticia, “Mexico: Three Generations of Kierkegaard Studies,” in Kierkegaard’s International Reception, Tome III, The Near East, Asia, Australia and the Americas, ed. by Jon Stewart, Aldershot: Ashgate 2009 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 8), pp. 269–84.

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Fernando Pessoa: Poets and Philosophers Elisabete M. de Sousa and António M. Feijó

During Fernando Pessoa’s lifetime, an estimated 72 literary personae would come to life,1 some of them intended authors of works that never gained form, while others signed one or two poems or articles, or some other ephemeral contribution, and finally there were the extremely prolific ones, a group fully active for extended periods of Pessoa’s life. His early production and the creation of the heteronyms span a turbulent period in the political life of Portugal. In 1908, the Regicide dictated the end of the Monarchy, which would be overthrown by the 1910 Republican revolution; the subsequent political, economic, and social changes led to widespread unrest, and the Portuguese artists engaged in the avant-garde movements characteristic of the pre-World War I period reflected this turmoil. This explains why most studies of the period focus primarily on the role of political agents and the sociological impact of such changes, and less on their collateral effects on the cultural sphere.2 Although there has been scholarly research on perceived affinities between Pessoa and Kierkegaard, the end result is to see both figures as examples of the Romantic endeavor to build a composite figure of poet-philosopher-artist, rather than, as one might expect, consider the issue of a possible influence of Kierkegaard on Pessoa. Nonetheless, the absence of an explicit reference to Kierkegaard in Pessoa’s corpus ought not to serve as negative evidence of any knowledge of the Danish philosopher-poet by the Portuguese poet-philosopher, as any influence would likely address issues such as modes of communication and the operational effectiveness of the multiple authorship—a domain in which poets are prone to conceal their sources. The general overview that follows hopes to lead to more conclusive research on the affinities between the two authors; it focuses on the functional modes of Pessoa’s so-called heteronyms, on the relationships among them and within the art movements of Pessoa’s day, and, while it eschews any examination of the critical impact (the only critical accounts alluded to will be the ones provided by Pessoa himself, or According to Teresa Rita Lopes, in “Pessoa-Obra,” in Dicionário de Fernando Pessoa e do Modernismo Português, ed. by Fernando Cabral Martins, Lisbon: Caminho 2008, p. 646. 2 Many reliable studies on the press are available, but that is not the case with publishing houses; this leaves us with little information concerning their publishing policies and no information at all, for example, on abandoned translation projects, which could lead us to sources of knowledge on Kierkegaard in that day. 1

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assumed relevant to his production), it aims at a more accurate understanding of the issues taken up in the comparative studies discussed here. Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa (1888–1935) was born in Lisbon in a building facing the Opera House on June 13, the day devoted to St. Anthony, the patron of Lisbon. In the poem “O Church Bell of My Village” (1913),3 in the elaborate sound effects that imitate both the cadence and the distinctive duration of the ringing of church bells, one is invited, as Pessoa later claimed in a letter, to hear the Church of Martyrs in the central Chiado section of the city,4 the heart of the neighborhood where he was born and would spend most of his adult life, in his incessant to and fro among the various offices where he worked and the cafés where most intellectuals then gathered. Both his parents came from middle-class families and were well educated; before he turned six, however, his father and younger brother died only six months apart, and less than two years later, his mother remarried to settle in Durban, South Africa, where her second husband had been appointed to the post of Portuguese consul. The young boy thus entered a new family and a new cultural environment at once. The English education received during his formative years between 1896 and 1905 laid the foundations of the person he would become—a See Fernando Pessoa, Ficções do Interlúdio 1914–1935, ed. by Fernando Cabral Martins, Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim 1998, p. 11. (English translation: A Little Larger than the Universe, trans. by Richard Zenith, London: Penguin Books 2006, p. 277.) As it becomes clear in the article, Pessoa published very little in his lifetime. Moreover, the first editions (published in Lisbon by Ática in the 1960s and 1970s) included a fairly restricted selection of the poems. The most relevant modern editions are published by Assírio & Alvim (34 titles until now) and INCM (Imprensa Nacional Casa da Moeda), the latter being the ongoing critical edition of the complete works. The English translations here used are The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa, trans. by Richard Zenith, New York: Grove Press 2001; and Forever Someone Else: Selected Poems, Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim 2008. Other available English translations are Fernando Pessoa: Selected Poems, ed. and trans. by Peter Rickard, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 1971; Fernando Pessoa I–IV, vols. 1–4, trans. by Jonathan Griffin, Manchester: Carcanet Press 1971; Fernando Pessoa: Selected Poems, London: Penguin Books 1984 (Penguin Modern European Poets); and Fernando Pessoa: Message, London: The Menard Press / King’s College 1992. See also Selected Poems of Fernando Pessoa, trans. by Edwin Honig, Chicago: The Swallow Press 1971; Always Astonished: Selected Prose by Fernando Pessoa, trans. by Edwin Honig, San Francisco: City Lights Books 1988; The Keeper of Sheep by Fernando Pessoa, trans. by Susan Brown, Riverdale-on-Hudson, New York: The Sheep Meadow Press 1986; Poems of Fernando Pessoa, trans. by Susan Brown, New York: The Ecco Press 1986; and Fernando Pessoa: Message, trans. by Susan Brown, New York: The Ecco Press 1986; By Weight of Reason, trans. and ed. by J.C.R. Green, Breakish: Aguila 1968; Álvaro de Campos. The Tobacconist, trans. and ed. by J.C.R. Green, Breakish: Phaethon Press 1975; Ricardo Reis. The Ancient Rhythm, trans. and ed. by J.C.R. Green, Breakish: Aquila 1976; The Stations of the Cross, trans. and ed. by J.C.R. Green, Breakish: Aguila 1976; and The Keeper of Flocks, trans. and ed. by J.C.R. Green, Breakish: Aguila 1976. 4 See the letter, dated December 11, 1931, to João Gaspar Simões, one of his first reviewers and author of a posthumous biography of Pessoa. See Fernando Pessoa, Correspondência 1923–1935, ed. by Manuela Parreira da Silva, Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim 1999, pp. 248–58, see pp. 254–5. (The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa, p. 245.) 3

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freelance business correspondent earning a living in different commercial offices in downtown Lisbon, and a poet whose authorship is inseparable from his readings of the classics and of English authors (Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Shelley, and Dickens, among others) during his school years in Durban. After he passed his Higher Certificate with distinction in 1901, the family enjoyed an extended leave in Lisbon, and, upon his return, Pessoa enrolled in night classes at Durban Commercial School so as to be prepared for the Cape University Matriculation Exam, which he successfully passed in 1903, having been awarded the Queen Victoria Memorial Prize for the best English Essay. The following year he completed sixth-form studies at Durban High School and passed the Intermediate Examination in Arts at Cape University, but the year he had spent in Lisbon ruled out his pursuing his studies at Oxford University, as granted to recipients of the coveted Queen Victoria Memorial Prize. As a result, he would sail alone to Lisbon in August 1905 to enroll in the Diplomatic Course at the Humanities Faculty in Lisbon.5 Pessoa would attend the university for two years, a time marked by student riots and the republican agitation that led to the end of the Portuguese monarchy. He never took his examinations but read intensively instead, complementing his knowledge of Portuguese and English literature with wide readings on German and Greek philosophy, French poets and novelists, Darwinism, psychology, and religion.6 He started by writing poems in English (as well as in French), his youthful ambition set on becoming an English poet. Not surprisingly, his first poetical personae were English7 and French, with Alexander Search as the most prolific heteronym between 1903 and 1910. The very first literary characters, mainly created during his 1901–02 voyage to Portugal, take on journalistic tasks, but not any discernible poetic stance; the latter will be assumed by Pessoa himself, and from 1914 onwards the created heteronyms will predominantly be poets. Until quite late, as documented in the drafted plans for the two publishing firms he founded, he kept experimenting with 5 His family joined him for a short period at the end of 1906, but from their return to Durban onwards, he would never live within his inner family circle again, since after his widowed mother’s return to Lisbon in 1920 his two younger brothers left for London and his sister got married. He would always be very close to all his relatives—on his father’s and stepfather’s sides, and naturally on his mother’s and siblings’—and joined in most of the regular family celebrations. A bachelor, he often lived with them or in rooms in the vicinity, and in spite of generally observing a reserved attitude in public he is warmly remembered by his nephews and nieces as an amusing and affectionate uncle. His sister’s descendants kept most of Pessoa’s documents and writings until the 1980s; they are now under the care of a research team of editors (Equipa Pessoa) in the National Library in Lisbon. 6 There has been recent research on Pessoa’s marginalia and on the books listed on his reading lists, but studies on correlative philosophy and music books, available at the National Library during Pessoa’s university years, are still wanting. 7 Charles Robert Anon, his first English heteronym, wrote poetry, prose and also letters; Horace James Faber dates from the same time and signed quite a large number of complete detective stories in English. Alexander Search is the poet in the early group and his senior brother, Charles James Search, a diarist, disappeared on Pessoa’s return to Lisbon in 1907. All these early literary personae were created around 1904, and Jean Seul de Mérat dates from 1907.

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fictitious authors or agents who were members of editorial boards of equally fictitious cultural magazines and newspapers—usually two brothers assisted by two other fully individualized assistant journalists, some of whom are given a biography.8 Not surprisingly, the writings of these first personae range across most of the essayistic genres that would later gain full-fledged autonomy, and a few of these collaborators saw their role redesigned in order to fit into the inaugural 1914 cluster of heteronyms.9 Pessoa was 25 when he created them, and he would pour his creativity into this coterie for another 22 years. It comprehends five major heteronyms: Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, and Fernando Pessoa (the orthonym poet),10 as well as António Mora, the philosopher in the group; around 1915 a semi-heteronym, Bernardo Soares, the diarist of The Book of Disquiet would join them.11 They were all markedly different in diction, stance, and individual authority. The first texts on the origin of the heteronyms, signed by Fernando Pessoa and Álvaro de Campos,12 8 For the Search brothers, see the previous note. Vicente Guedes had a brother, Manuel Guedes, a character in the detective stories Pessoa wrote in Portuguese mostly in the 1920s. The three Crosse brothers were literary personalities with individuated tasks in Pessoa’s world: A.A. Crosse was a fan of crosswords and charades and actually collaborated in English newspapers; I.I. Crosse was a literary critic destined to spread the fame of Álvaro de Campos, while Thomas Crosse, a translator and essayist, was supposed to do the same for Alberto Caeiro. There were also three Wyatt brothers: Frederick Wyatt had apparently been conceived to be the English heteronym within the 1914 group, as roughly at the same time he was assigned as author of about twenty poems previously attributed to Alexander Search; the tasks of both Alfred Wyatt, living in Paris, and Rev. (or Sir) Walter Wyatt, were left unmentioned. Carlos and Miguel Otto belonged to the Ibis publishing house (discussed further down) and had already appeared in O Phosphoro, one of the periodicals he worked on in his youth. 9 Vicente Guedes is the best example. See note 10. 10 Though Pessoa stipulated a theoretical difference between the heteronyms and the ortonym Fernando Pessoa, the truth is that the ortonym is as much a literary creation as the heteronyms, and the individuation of his poetic profile is also co-opted. In Pessoa’s words, “a pseudonymic work is, except for the name with which it is signed, the work of an author writing as himself; a heteronym work is by an author writing outside his own personality: it is the work of a complete individuality made up by him, just as the utterances of some character in a drama would be” (Presença, no. 17, December 1928, p. 10; English translation: A Centenary Pessoa, ed. by Eugénio Lisbon with L.C. Taylor, prose translation by Bernard McGuirk, Manchester: Carcanet Press 1995, pp. 133–4). 11 The diary had been started in 1909 by the most versatile of the early heteronyms— Vicente Guedes, a former storyteller and, since 1909, a translator of Byron and Shelley as well as of other early English heteronyms. He had “died” in 1915 from tuberculosis and was therefore replaced in this task by Bernardo Soares in 1920, who in turn reached the peak of his activity after 1928. Richard Zenith has also translated The Book of Disquietude, by Bernardo Soares, Assistant Book-Keeper in the City of Lisbon, Manchester: Carcanet Press 1996. See also Fernando Pessoa, Livro do Desasocego (vol. 12, Tomes I and II in Edição crítica de Fernando Pessoa, Lisbon: INCM 1993ff.), ed. by Jerónimo Pizarro, Lisbon: INCM 2010. 12 See Fernando Cabral Martins, “Heteronímia-História,” Dicionário de Fernando Pessoa e do Modernismo Português, ed. by Fernando Cabral Martins, Lisbon: Caminho 2008, p. 326. For a recent study in English on the Pessoa in the light of the heteronym conception, see Darlene J. Sadlier, An Introduction to Fernando Pessoa, Modernism and the Paradoxes of Authorship, Gainsville: University Press of Florida 1998.

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date from as early as 1914. The heteronyms were conceived as fully autonomous poets each with their own biography, dovetailing with the life and times of Pessoa, and joining him in the challenges he faced in his self-appointed role as an agent of literary renewal. The singularity of this poetical program naturally foregrounds Pessoa himself, as “author of the authors” and embodiment of a fully autonomous agency of renewal within Portuguese modernism, with the heteronyms working as “reduplicated” authors, to use Kierkegaard’s terminology in “A First and Last Explanation.”13 Before creating his pantheon of poets, Pessoa had attempted to carry out his own practical criticism within “Renascença Portuguesa,” a movement around Teixeira de Pascoaes (1877–1952), the only contemporary poet in Portuguese whose authority Pessoa knew he had to face to make room for the emergence of his own poetical program. Earlier in 1912, Pessoa had written articles for the movement’s review, Águia, where Pascoaes’ disciples assiduously celebrated his genius; by 1914, however, he had already dropped any intention of becoming part of the group, and was determined to emulate on his own the acknowledged magnitude of Pascoaes. Following his inchoate proto-heteronyms, the conception of Pessoa’s heteronyms is a step forward in terms of complexity in their poetical structure and in their role in Portuguese poetry, confronting the towering presence of Pascoaes. In a previous article one of us has summed up this movement thus: “Caeiro et alii are the sect of an internal movement mimicking Pascoaes’ Águia, and sublating it into modernity.”14 Alberto Caeiro, within Pessoa’s poetics, is deliberately designed as “the reverse side of Pascoaes,”15 in language, style and content, and even in lifespan: Pascoaes would outlive most of the poets of “Renascença,” whereas Caeiro would assume in absentia a leading role for the rest of Pessoa’s group—he was the first to be declared dead, depriving all the other heteronyms’ hagiographic commentaries of any overt reservation or dissent. In the meantime, Pessoa had become a leading member of a select group of young poets and painters, a few of whom spent most of their time in Paris attentive to the then emerging heroic Modernist practices. The creation of the heteronyms obviously contributed to Pessoa’s ascendancy within this group of artists. The different labels for the art movements which they attempted to launch, be they Paulism, Intersectionism, Sensationism, or Neopaganism, are a decisive element in the individuation of Pessoa’s heteronyms, providing different answers to the ongoing theoretical and aesthetic discussions. Pessoa’s different selves and their creative modes have a distinctive tone. Caeiro is a self-taught bucolic aesthete, and the whiteness of his face, the vividness of his blue eyes, and the luxuriant blonde hair, as described by Campos,16 contrast vividly with his untimely death from tuberculosis. Reis is a physician and a classicist by training, SKS 7, 569–73 / CUP1, 625–9. See António M. Feijó, “A constituição dos heterónimos. I. Caeiro e a correcção de Wordsworth,” in Colóquio Letras, nos. 140–1, 1996, pp. 48–60. 15 See Fernando Pessoa, Obra em prosa, ed. by Cleonice Berardinelli, Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Aguilar 1990, p. 128. 16 See Fernando Pessoa, “Notas para a Recordação do Meu Mestre Caeiro, por Álvaro de Campos,” in Poemas Completos de Alberto Caeiro, ed. by Teresa Sobral Cunha, Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim 1994, pp. 155–76, see p. 157. (The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa, p. 39.) 13 14

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defined by Pessoa as “a Greek Horace who writes in Portuguese,”17 a monarchist living in exile at odds with the republican regime. As for Fernando Pessoa himself, in the opinion of Campos18 he owed his stronger poetical self to Caeiro’s influence, whereas António Mora is an anti-Kantian theoretician of a resurrected Paganism aiming at bringing back the lost plurality of the pagan gods. The futurist Álvaro de Campos is a naval engineer with a degree from Glasgow, described by Pessoa as “the most hysterically hysterical part of me,”19 often writing in the style of Whitman. During the period in which the heteronyms serially emerged, Pessoa engaged in a challenging joint venture with the poet Mário de Sá-Carneiro (1890–1916): the launching of the modernist review Orpheu (1915), in which Pessoa was both co-director and contributor under two names (Fernando Pessoa and Álvaro de Campos). Campos appeared in the only two issues of the review in two apparently disparate modes: first as the author of programmatic poems, “Ode Triunfal” and “Ode Marítima,”20 with Walt Whitman and Caeiro as precursors, and second as author of Opiário,21 a long decadent poem deliberately written in a poetic manner prior to Caeiro’s influence. Orpheu stirred the cultural milieu, but failed to meet the expectations of a significant part of the contributors, who later reassembled in Portugal Futurista (1917). Campos published here a sustained invective in prose, Ultimatum,22 and Pessoa two series of poems, with other contributions by the same group of avant-garde painters and poets. The only issue to be printed was promptly seized by the authorities due to the fierce radical language used. Almost ten years after Orpheu, Pessoa would once again be the director of a more lasting project, Athena, a monthly magazine of arts and letters initially conceived as the organ for a newly drafted Neopaganism. Five numbers were published (October 1924–June 1925) offering the most comprehensive overview of Pessoa’s and of his internal coterie’s poetics. In the first issue, Reis published a complete book of odes; 22 poems from The Keeper of Sheep by Caeiro came out in no. 4, and 16 poems from Caeiro’s Incomplete Poems in no. 3. Fernando Pessoa published translations of Edgar Allan Poe, Walter Pater and O. Henry, as well as 16 poems in no. 3. Once again, Campos acted out a strong version of the heteronyms’ autonomy: essays were printed as part of a disputatio targeting Pessoa’s first editorial for Athena, with one of the regular contributors, Mário Saa (poet and essayist, 1893–1971), joining in the polemics among the heteronyms, thereby making fictitious authors sound real. In a polemical From a letter in English, dated October 31, 1924, in Pessoa, Correspondência 1923–1935, p. 53. 18 See Pessoa, “Notas para a Recordação do Meu Mestre Caeiro, por Álvaro de Campos,” p. 162. (The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa, p. 204.) 19 The description belongs to the “Letter on the Genesis of the Heteronyms,” to A. Casais Monteiro, dated January 13, 1935, in Pessoa, Correspondência 1923–1935, pp. 337–48, see p. 341. (The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa, p. 254.) 20 See Pessoa, Poemas de Álvaro de Campos, pp. 80–107. (A Little Larger than the Universe, pp. 166–96.) 21 See Pessoa, Poemas de Álvaro de Campos, pp. 55–61. (A Little Larger than the Universe, pp. 147–52.) 22 See Pessoa, Obra em prosa, pp. 508–20. (The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa, pp. 69–88.) 17

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answer to Campos, Saa stated twice that the talent of Campos “can only be compared to the talent of Fernando Pessoa.”23 Less successful and influential than the literary periodicals, the two publishing houses founded by Pessoa provide interesting evidence of his determination to make public the actual creation of a poetical program. First, they continue his experiments with literary characters caught up in a wide range of literary tasks, from translation and reviewing to the actual creation of prose and poems; and secondly, they underscore the idea that the heteronyms should be taken collectively, not as a contingent aggregate of poets or writers to be singled out from a whole. In 1909, Pessoa invested a small inheritance in Ibis,24 drawing grand editorial plans, never to be carried out—Portuguese and Brazilian poetry, translations, crime stories, two periodicals, a novel, his own English poems, these many tasks being divided among different literary characters. After this first failed attempt, and especially after the intense, though abruptly ended, editorial episodes of Orpheu and Portugal Futurista, Pessoa tried another line of publishing activity, and in 1921 founded Olisipo. Conceived originally as a kind of cultural and commercial marketing firm for the label “Portugal,” Pessoa planned three branches: the publishing house would update the plans he had made for Ibis, the marketing area would promote Portuguese products abroad, and the commercial sector would work as a representation office for Portuguese industrial agents. He managed to publish a handful of works during the two-year existence of Olisipo: his own English Poems I–II and English Poems III which included Antinous, Inscriptions and Ephitalamium, and some essays. Consumed by literary battles, Olisipo folded in 1923, after issuing two manifestos against the ultra-conservative students’ public attack on the homosexual content of controversial works by two of Pessoa’s literary friends.25 Pessoa kept publishing scattered texts in various reviews26 and gained academic recognition in 1925, when José Régio (1901–69), the leading poet of the subsequent generation assembled in the Presença movement, described the poet in his dissertation on Portuguese Modern Poetry as “the most original, the most complete and the most powerful of all our modernists.”27 Between 1927 and 1938, several key poems by the various heteronyms would be published in the movement’s influential literary magazine (also entitled Presença), as well as letters on the genesis and role

Álvaro de Campos, “O que é a metaphysica?,” Athena, no. 2, 1924, pp. 54–62; for Saa’s reply to Campos, see Athena, no. 4, 1925, pp. 165–7. 24 For his first endeavor as publisher, Pessoa chose the name of the bird he liked to imitate vocally and graphically, using the actual name and drawing as signature. 25 António Botto (poet, 1897–1959) and Raúl Leal (poet, pamphletist, 1886–1964). 26 In 1922, Pessoa published the short story “O Banqueiro Anarquista” in the first issue of Contemporânea, a review for literature and arts where other poems and articles by Pessoa and Campos would also be published until 1926. In 1926 Pessoa founded with his brotherin-law a periodical for trade and accounting (Revista de Contabilidade e Comércio); he contributed many articles on contemporary issues and business, at a time when his reputation as a commercial correspondent and advisor was publicly acknowledged. 27 Quoted by José Blanco in “Pessoa, Fernando—História da Crítica,” in Dicionário de Fernando Pessoa e do Modernismo Português, p. 624. 23

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of the heteronyms and on the overall conception of his work.28 Together with the five numbers of Athena, Presença published the most consistent production of Pessoa’s heteronyms during his lifetime. The year of Pessoa’s death, 1935, would see the publication of Mensagem, his only book in Portuguese to be published during his lifetime. Since Pessoa wrote a large number of prefaces for various sets of works, and since collections of poems and texts were found in separate envelopes in the trunk containing his literary legacy,29 he clearly intended to publish more works after Mensagem. All that we may infer from the published poems and writings is that he envisaged himself as both the scene and the agent of literary creation latu sensu: the promoter of modernism, the recipient of tradition, the pioneer of new paths, the critical voice of a turbulent age, the master of the artistic practices thereby generated, and the selfreflected poetic instance of all this outstanding creative process. Pessoa was faithful to his heteronyms (and to the English language) until the day he died—in a note drafted in English, he expressed his leap into eternity: “I know not what tomorrow may bring.”30 As previously noted by Feijó,31 “his [gnomic] last words belong to the stoic Ricardo Reis, who filially ushered the ailing Pessoa to his death, once again adopting lines from Horace as he had done in so many memorable Horatian odes. ‘I know not what tomorrow may bring’ is an antiphrasis of a line by Horace (Ode ix, 13): Quid sit futurum cras fuge quaerere (‘Drop the question what tomorrow may bring’).” According to Pessoa’s 1935 letter to Casais Monteiro on the genesis of the heteronyms, he would write in the name of Caeiro “through sheer and unexpected inspiration, without knowing or even suspecting that I’m going to write in his name”; in the name of Reis “after an abstract meditation that suddenly takes concrete shape in an ode”; in the name of Campos when he felt “a sudden impulse to write” and did not have a topic.32 Pessoa left a large number of testimonies intended to illuminate the creation of his heteronyms, and a few of them bear resemblance to Kierkegaard’s 28 To Adolfo Casais Monteiro (1908–72) who would be the translator of The Concept of Anxiety after Pessoa’s death. His 1936 translation and his introduction reveal some knowledge of Kierkegaard’s thought. A prolific essayist, he never established any links between Kierkegaard and Pessoa. Letters to his future editor and biographer J. Gaspar Simões (1903–87) were also published in Presença. For a complete edition of Pessoa’s poems published during his lifetime, see Ficções do Interlúdio 1914–1935. 29 Over 25,000 items, including complete poems, essays and short stories, or mere scraps and drafts, were left in a trunk, some already filed by Pessoa, together with many loose papers of various kinds, or collected in sets of manuscripts that were still being classified at the time of his death. A second trunk has been recently traced with books from his personal library. 30 See Maria José de Lancastre, Fernando Pessoa. Uma Fotobiografia, Lisbon: INCM 1981, p. 307. 31 See António M. Feijó, “Fernando Pessoa’s Mothering of the Avant-Garde,” Stanford Electronic Humanities Review, vol. 7, no. 1, 1999, pp. 118–26; António M. Feijó, “ ‘Alberto Caeiro’ e as últimas palavras de Fernando Pessoa,” Colóquio/Letras, nos. 155–6, 2000, pp. 181–90. 32 See Pessoa, Correspondência 1923–1935, pp. 337–48. (The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa, pp. 251–60.)

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accounts of his pseudonyms. In the same letter, Pessoa claims that he served as a mere dutiful scrivener of the creatures whom he saw emerge in himself, that he had “mothered” as private personae. These paragraphs from a preface to his works remind us of the opening considerations in the Preface of From the Papers of One Still Living and from “A First and Last Explanation”: Each of the more enduring personalities, lived by the author within himself, was given an expressive nature and made the author of one or more books whose ideas, emotions and literary art have no relationship to the real author (or perhaps only apparent author, since we don’t know what reality is) except insofar as he served, when he wrote them, as the medium of the characters he created. Neither this work nor those to follow have anything to do with the man who writes them. He doesn’t agree or disagree with what’s in them. He writes as if he were being dictated to. And as if the person dictating were a friend (and for that reason could freely ask him to write down what he dictates), the writer finds the dictation interesting, perhaps just out of friendship. The human author of these books has no personality of his own. Whenever he feels a personality well up inside, he quickly realizes that this new being, though similar, is distinct from him—an intellectual son, perhaps, with inherited characteristics, but also with differences that make him someone else.33

Additional examples may be found in the poems, often linking the depersonalization of the poet with the idea of fingere, bringing back the idea of making and modeling as the essence of poetry. Autopsychography shows the pain of the poet in the process of being “reduplicated”: The poet is a feigner Who’s so good at his act He even feigns the pain Of pain he feels in fact. And those who read his words Will feel in his writing Neither of the pains he has But just the one they’re missing. And so around its track This thing called the heart winds, A little clockwork train To entertain our minds.34

Besides the orthonym Fernando Pessoa, the other heteronyms also describe their heightened self-consciousness, as in this late poem by Reis:

SKS 7, 569–73 / CUP1, 625–9. Pessoa, Ficções do Interlúdio 1914–1935, p. 94. (A Little Larger than the Universe, p. 314.) See also Paul Muldoon, “In the Hall of Mirrors: ‘Autopsychography’ by Fernando Pessoa,” New England Review, vol. 23, no. 4, 2002, pp. 37–52. 33 34

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Campos develops the same in his peculiar mode and disposition: I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist. I’m the gap between what I’d like to be and what others have me, Or half of this gap, since there’s also life… That’s me. Period. Turn off the light, shut the door, and quit that slipper noise in the hallway. Leave me alone in my room with the vast peace of myself. It’s a shoddy universe.36

During the last decade of Pessoa’s life, the poems by Campos become more shadowed by anguish and bitterness, whereas the poems by Fernando Pessoa, though deeply self-reflective, are more focused on literary creativity, coinciding with the times of his never-finished essay on literary immortality, “Erostratus.”37 Pessoa rejected any psychoanalytical interpretations for the heteronyms,38 despite his claim that they were a consequence of his self-diagnosed “hysterical neurasthenia,” a condition, transmuted in a family resemblance, he diagnoses elsewhere in Shakespeare. On different occasions he confessed to be doing what he was destined or even urged to do, and there is evidence that he looked for answers in his extensive readings on esoteric theories.39 These interests and his readings on the topic were carried on Pessoa, Poemas de Ricardo Reis, pp. 180–1. (Forever Someone Else, p. 117.) Pessoa, Poemas de Álvaro de Campos, p. 341. (Forever Someone Else, p. 201.) 37 Left unfinished, the fragments contain thoughts on genius and immortality, on fame and posterity, and on the nature of the different arts. See Fernando Pessoa, Escritos sobre Génio e Loucura, Tomes I–II, ed. by Jerónimo Pizarro, Lisbon: INCM 2006. (Partial English translations in The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa, pp. 202–12.) 38 Pessoa, Correspondência 1923–1935, pp. 248–58. (The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa, pp. 238–47.) 39 Pessoa translated four theosophical works for Livraria Clássica Editora in 1915–16, and left several essays on Rosecrucianism; he was also a keen astrologer and 35 36

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after the creation of the first English heteronyms, while Pessoa was still living in Durban, and have yet to shed light on the origins of his conception as a multiple poet. What we know for sure is that during his late teens he saw himself as a major English poet to be. The cluster of heteronyms, when he was 25, and his later editorial entrepreneurship were fully intended to posit him as the center of the theoretical and literary creation of modernism in Portugal, and even in his last years, when the idea of publishing all his work signed by the heteronyms seemed to be continuously postponed, he took care to leave behind a significant number of organized envelopes with sets of poems and writings, in an attempt to control the posthumous edition of his literary remains. In the last letters to J.G. Simões and A.C. Monteiro, Pessoa repeatedly referred to the heteronyms as “a drama in people” or to his poetics as a form of drama.40 In his late poetic production, further insight into his creation process is also gained, as in this ode by Reis, a statement of a stoic rule on how to master effectively the required depersonalization in order to create fully individuated “acts” of being: To be great, be whole: don’t exaggerate Or leave out any part of you. Be complete in each thing. Put all you are Into the least of your acts. So too in each lake, with its lofty life, The whole moon shines.41

As it is only to be expected in an author of such magnitude, the critical literature on the work of Pessoa is quite extensive.42 Nevertheless, there have not been many essays on Kierkegaard and Pessoa, mainly because until the last decade of the twentieth century knowledge of the Danish philosopher in Portugal was limited.43

made astrological charts for some of his heteronyms and even created one who was an astrologer, Raphael Baldaya. His links with the English magus and occultist Aleister Crawley (1875–1947) are well documented; moreover, quite a large number of papers with specimens of automatic writing make proof of his practice of occultism. This line of activity is of some interest to Pessoa’s relation to Sebastianism, a form of messianic nationalism which in the early twentieth century took the place of religion in many currents of thought during a time of deep social and political changes in Portugal. 40 Pessoa, Correspondência 1923–1935, pp. 248–58; pp. 337–48. (The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa, pp. 238–47; pp. 251–60.) 41 Dated February 14, 1933, in Pessoa, Poemas de Ricardo Reis, p. 82. (A Little Larger than the Universe, p. 134.) 42 For a recent overview of available bibliography in English, see José Blanco, “Fernando Pessoa’s Critical and Editorial Fortune in English: A Selective Chronological Overview,” Portuguese Studies, vol. 24, no. 2, 2008, pp. 13–32. For a more complete, though less updated bibliographical list, see A Centenary Pessoa, pp. 317–30. 43 For a detailed account of the state of the art in Portugal until 2006, see Elisabete M. de Sousa, “Portugal: Discontinuity and Repetition,” in Kierkegaard’s International Reception, Tome II, Southern, Central and Eastern Europe, ed. by Jon Stewart, Aldershot: Ashgate 2009 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 8), pp. 1–16.

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Except for a few stray remarks44 not aimed at a comparative analysis of the two cases, only four essays can actually be regarded as contributions to this issue, two seminal articles by Eduardo Lourenço being the most relevant to date. The poet, essayist, and visual artist Ana Hatherly (b. 1929) departs from the standard model of comparative essays45 and claims that Pessoa’s work can be seen as a “general portrait” showing great similarities to “The Unhappiest One” portrayed in Either/Or, Part I. She briefly lists Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms and describes with more detail the structure of Either/Or, basically using excerpts from that chapter as the basis for such a portrait. Relying on carefully chosen quotations, Hatherly underscores the links between being out of oneself, unhappiness, and the inability to posit oneself within time,46 and she explains the subtle ties between unhappiness in hope and unhappiness in recollection, in order to enhance the unhappiest one as he who experiences a two-way movement of recollection and hope, hoping for what lies in the past and recollecting what lies ahead.47 Hatherly comments that this description can be used for a description of the personality of the poet as artist and quotes a passage where the unhappiest one is described as an isolated self, misunderstood by the world he takes as a “you,” with whom he stands in a continual conflict depriving him of the ability to set any boundary in his capacity to experience time, love, or passion, a conflict that leaves the self powerless and his energy exhausted.48 In the second part of her essay, Hatherly collects evidence for a similar line of thought from various poems. Nonetheless, her analysis fails to establish any conclusive link between Kierkegaard and Pessoa; on the one hand, quotations from many other writers might have been used as hypothetical figures for “the unhappiest one”—besides a few of the Kierkegaard authors, Rilke, Kafka, or Rimbaud would do; on the other hand, Hatherly’s essay leaves out any considerations regarding the high degree of self-consciousness both in Kierkegaard’s or Pessoa’s (un)happiness as humans and/or poetical beings. The essayist Luís de Oliveira e Silva (b. 1945) presents a version of Kierkegaard and Pessoa as philosopher-poets and implicitly sets Kierkegaard and Pessoa in a philosophical domain that would subsequently flourish in Heidegger and existentialism.49 Oliveira e Silva takes their position as Romantic writers as a starting point and, focusing on Caeiro, explains the relationship between Pessoa’s

See, among others, Jorge de Sena, Fernando Pessoa & Cª Heterónima, Lisbon: Edições 70 1982, p. 80; p. 116; p. 123; p. 127; p. 141. 45 See Ana Hatherly, “Fernando Pessoa—retrato encontrado em Søren Kierkegaard,” in Actas do II Congresso Internacional de Estudos Pessoanos, Porto: Centro de Estudos Pessoanos 1985, pp. 263–77. 46 SKS 2, 216 / EO1, 222. 47 SKS 2, 218–19 / EO1, 225. 48 SKS 2, 219–20 / EO1, 226. 49 See Luís Oliveira e Silva, “Estética e Ética em Kierkegaard e Pessoa,” Revista da Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da UNL, Lisbon: UNL 1988, pp. 261–72. See also Luís Oliveira e Silva, O Materialismo Idealista de Fernando Pessoa, Lisbon: Clássica Editora 1985, p. 24; p. 156; pp. 192–3; p. 213. 44

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heteronyms through an appeal to Kierkegaardian concepts. Hence, Caeiro’s paganism is “paganism within Christianity,” Johannes the seducer being a forerunner of Caeiro’s immediate aestheticism (sensationism in Pessoa’s vocabulary). As for ethics, Oliveira e Silva contrasts Kierkegaard’s teleological suspension of the ethical with Caeiro’s suspension of ethical concerns, which is the basis for his nihilism and the likely root of a perceived dominance of despair over tedium in the later production of Pessoa himself, Campos and Reis after Caeiro’s “death.” Eduardo Lourenço (b. 1923), a contemporary essayist and philosopher, wrote two essays on Kierkegaard and Pessoa.50 In the first, “Kierkegaard and Pessoa or Indirect Communication,” dating from the mid-1950s, the use of pseudonyms/heteronyms is taken as a poetic-philosophical solution to the awareness that authenticity does not lie in actuality. In the first part, “On the Common Confusion between Sincerity and Authenticity,” the creation of pseudonyms/heteronyms is explained not as lack of sincerity as artists, but as proof of their authenticity as authors and poets living in an environment ruled by inauthenticity. Sincerity is taken as a minor virtue, a pabulum for good consciousness, but dangerously compelling the individual to assure his survival by committing to the multiplicity of desires and the constraints of the environment (Mozart’s Don Giovanni is used as an example). Lourenço proceeds to demonstrate the uselessness of persisting in the practice of psychological criticism which has taken sincerity, attained in the instant, for authenticity, which stands firmly in time. Authenticity can only regain its deep meaning when it is apprehended as a commitment to exist, which can only be demonstrated by existence itself. In the second part, “Authenticity and Indirect Communication,” Kierkegaard’s and Pessoa’s authorships are used to demonstrate the abyss between authenticity and sincerity—“indirect communication” is thus described as a communicative strategy to bridge an abyss bordered by an “authentic” mode of existence lasting in time and a “sincere” mode of living in the instant. With extraordinary gifts of expression, these authors felt compelled to repeat to themselves, and to others, their understanding of the fall, which takes place in the realm of direct communication, as well as the continual drive, set in motion by contradictory emotions and beliefs, to reach a form of expression nearer to the experience of that very same fall. Lourenço contrasts Kierkegaard and Pessoa by emphasizing the basic ontological nature of Pessoa’s heteronyms, in contrast with Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous gallery of authors, which is designed to meet the psychological and apologetic demands of Kierkegaard. Thus Pessoa would stand as a representative of a more radical collection of heteronyms, leaving no space for a ruling orthonym author, whereas Kierkegaard would be a case of heteronyms and pseudonyms under the control of an orthonym. In both cases, the creation of heteronyms would result from a single spiritual movement, always drawing nearer to unity but under fragmented units of expression.51 See Eduardo Lourenço, “Kierkegaard e Pessoa ou as Máscaras do Absoluto” (1981), in his Fernando Rei da Nossa Baviera, Lisbon: INCM 1986, pp. 97–109; and Eduardo Lourenço, “Kierkegaard e Pessoa ou a Comunicação Indirecta” (1954–56), in Fernando Rei da Nossa Baviera, pp. 121–44. 51 This is reinstated by Joel Serrão and quoted in A Centenary Pessoa, p. 298: “They were above all witnesses—and also the theological, philosophic and poetic incarnations—of 50

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In 1981 Lourenço wrote “Kierkegaard and Pessoa or the Masks of the Absolute,”52 an essay where he goes in some detail into Kierkegaard’s use of pseudonyms until 1846, before developing the use of pseudonyms and heteronyms in relation to the substance of Kierkegaard’s and Pessoa’s thought, and also into Kierkegaard’s dialogue with the religious, philosophical, and political sectors of his milieu, and Pessoa’s response to the dominant poets of the different literary spheres he was immersed in. Both authors are described as apparently opposite versions of the “idealist living of the self” and, once more, Lourenço places Pessoa’s heteronyms at a higher level of depersonalization, based on a mythical unity derived from the plurality of his masks, and distinct in content from Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms, who, despite their individual traits, share the condition of a self whose existence is determined by God and by the hope that paradox and the absurd will eventually be dissolved. Lourenço remarks that Don Juan, Judge William, and Abraham and Job, placed as they are in a half-way position as chief representatives of the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious stages, and as symbols of three dominant stances in western thought—Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Christianity—are actually closer to Pessoa’s heteronyms than to Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms. Lourenço suggests that pseudonyms are as dramatic as heteronyms, and that heteronyms are as tragic as pseudonyms, and that the real difference lies in their capacity to mask or unmask melancholy. Pessoa is thus described, by means of the Kierkegaardian movement of concealment and manifestation, as someone who never left the aesthetic stage, since the exuberant existence of his heteronyms masks his melancholy, whereas Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms accept their melancholy in the different stages. Judith Balso is of a contrary opinion;53 she believes that the heteronyms aim at building a multiplicity, and the pseudonyms at providing a mask, though neither Pessoa nor Kierkegaard intends to hide behind their created authors. Quite the opposite: they both claim the necessity of other individual identities, besides the author’s who creates all the others, and thus manage to void any biographical reading of the work. Balso’s most interesting point lies on the emphasis given to the role of the orthonym as a “reduplicated” heteronym or a potential heteronym, thus allowing the heteronyms to individuate the expression of their thought. In another recent study, Michelle Pulsipher Hale argues that Pessoa posited himself as the midwife of modernity,54 and that Kierkegaard’s aspirations for Socratic midwifery through irony partially failed, even though he mastered the use of irony, the crisis of values current in their time and still seething in our own. This crisis is common to all western countries, though in each it has taken a particular form according to local conditions, to the legacy of the past, to the hopes or the despair of the present.” 52 See Lourenço, “Kierkegaard e Pessoa ou as Máscaras do Absoluto.” 53 See Judith Balso, “L’hétéronymie: une ontologie poétique sans métaphysique,” in Pessoa: Unité, Diversité, Obliquité. Colloque de Cerisy 1997, ed. by Pascal Dethurens and Maria-Alzira Seixo, Paris: Éditions Christian Bourgois 2000, pp. 157–91, see especially pp. 158–67. 54 See Michelle Pulsipher Hale, Ironic Multiplicity: Fernando’s “Pessoas” Suspended in Kierkegaardian Irony, Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University, Department of Humanities, Classic and Comparative Literature 2004.

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whereas Pessoa was able to continue the work which Kierkegaard initiated, by actually living irony. Lourenço finishes the first of his articles by saying that the heteronyms emerge as a “spectacular illustration of a drama which is played at the heart of the human condition and according to which we decide our powers and our limits,”55 a claim that renders universal Pessoa’s formula of “drama in people,”56 implying a wise warning on the use of dialogical patterns in the analyses of both authors. For Lourenço, the answer to Pessoa’s heteronyms lies in the poet’s awareness of the ontological capacity of human language: “the creation of heteronyms as a sustaining consciousnesses of all possible languages, capable of taking in their architecture the existential possibilities of Pessoa, is an answer, among others, for that primordial ontological deficiency inscribed in ourselves and in the heart of language.”57 One could hardly find a more Kierkegaardian description of the heteronyms than this, and of what Kierkegaard actually achieves as a corollary of his program, defined by Lourenço as a quest to reassert “human existence under the provocative light of the Absolute” in face of the “glaring presence of Truth under the form of the Abyss and near Absurd,” which “abrogates the links of ordinary human communication.”58 There are evident dissimilarities in the content of the work of Kierkegaard and Pessoa, some of them directly linked to the national and cultural context, others otherwise explainable. But the fault line that Pessoa and Kierkegaard witness in themselves is all the more devastating because neither author can exist out of the environment he had first taken both as an observation site and as an object of observation. The ivory towers they seem to have planned for themselves are actually rooks moving on a chess board where all the other pieces stand for the different instances of power they are in incessant dialogue with, and they will all end up being either captured or castled. Thus, the multiplicity of fictitious poet-philosophers generated by both authors depends on the relation between their coterie of masks and their milieu, to such an extent that indirect communication is sustained in both cases until the very end of their existence. The mode of communication chosen by Kierkegaard for The Moment is another mode in the long series of communication patterns that he developed in his authorship. What is often seen as a sign of mystification, or insincerity, is instead a sign of authenticity—the languages the heteronyms/pseudonyms speak are a perfect match to their physical and intellectual descriptions, in the case of Pessoa, or to the confessed ethos of the Kierkegaardian authors who never relinquish any possibility to sneak into the text. Pessoa and his coterie of heteronyms are poet-philosophers whose writing is ruled by their own poetics, which they present in poems such as “Autopsychography.” There is, however, scant evidence for the influence of Kierkegaard on Pessoa’s heteronyms, for a number of reasons: Kierkegaard’s Anglophone reception at the beginning of the twentieth century was in its embryonic stage, and it is unlikely that Lourenço, “Kierkegaard e Pessoa ou a Comunicação Indirecta,” p. 143. Pessoa, Presença, no. 17, December 1928, p. 10 (republished, Lisbon: Contexto 1993, see p. 250.) 57 Lourenço, “Kierkegaard e Pessoa ou a Comunicação Indirecta,” p. 143. 58 Ibid., p. 140. 55 56

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it would have reached Durban during Pessoa’s formative years. During the time he studied at the University of Lisbon, Pessoa spent his days reading philosophy as well as French and Portuguese writers, and he might have come across two 1908 French translations of works by Harald Høffding (1843–1915),59 which mention in some detail the nature of Kierkegaard’s work, but there are no studies on the influence of Høffding, or of any other authors on the history of philosophy known to have been read by Pessoa. As for Høffding’s famous Søren Kierkegaard som Filosof (1892),60 it only reached the Portuguese National Library after 1930 in a Spanish translation.61 This forces us to rule out a working knowledge by Pessoa of Kierkegaard’s writings. The possibility of having read the 1911 Portuguese translation of The Diary of the Seducer should nevertheless be seriously considered,62 since Pessoa translated four books for the same publishing house around 1914,63 and he was a voracious reader. Yet, the introduction mentions the use of pseudonyms without further details, and the work is presented as Kierkegaard’s attempt to overcome the emotional disruption in the aftermath of his engagement with Regine Olsen, an explanation more apt to leave the reader prone to believe that Kierkegaard was an autobiographical novelist than to imagine the particular role of Johannes the Seducer in Kierkegaard’s authorship. Literary and philosophical criticism has, however, always been aware that misquotations and twisted allusions are as relevant as full citations. This is also the case with Kierkegaard who had to overcome his lack of knowledge of musical technê in order to write the chapter on the musical-erotic in Either/Or, Part I. He certainly did it—by means of wide reading, studying, and pondering on music as an art—and also on the emotional impact of music, and on music as a social phenomenon.64 His readings of musical periodicals date back to when he was a member of, or at least on good terms with, the Copenhagen group of actors and musicians who started a Davidsbund, emulating Schumann’s original experiment with musical criticism and music making, fighting the Goliath of philistinism See Harald Høffding, Philosophes contemporains, trans. by A. Tremesaygues, Paris: Félix Alcan 1908 and Harald Høffding, Histoire de la philosophie moderne, vols. 1–2, trans. by P. Bordier, Paris: Félix Alcan 1908. 60 Harald Høffding, Søren Kierkegaard som Filosof, Copenhagen: P.G. Philipsen 1892. 61 See Sören Kierkegaard, trans. by Fernando Vela, Madrid: Revista de Occidente 1930. 62 Søren Kierkegaard, O diário do seductor: a arte de amar, trans. by Mário Alemquer, Lisbon: Livraria Clássica 1911 (translated from Il diario del seduttore, trans. by Luigi Redaelli, Torino: Fratelli Bocca Editori 1910). 63 How Pessoa came to translate the books for Clássica Editora, and who suggested his name to the editors, is still unknown. 64 Kierkegaard experienced it first hand; during the crucial stages of the writing of Either/ Or, Kierkegaard’s stay in Berlin was absolutely coincident with Liszt’s wave of concerts and the outbreak of Lisztomania; intentionally or not, he arrived shortly before Liszt and left the following day, and there is textual evidence in the chapter that he followed what was going on attentively. See Elisabete M. de Sousa, “Kierkegaard’s Musical Recollections,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2008, pp. 85–108, and “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: The Love for Music and The Music of Love,” in Kierkegaard and the Renaissance and Modern Traditions, Tome III, Literature, Drama and Music, ed. by Jon Stewart, Aldershot: Ashgate 2009 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 5), pp. 137–68. 59

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through a radical new approach, by keeping the enemy under fire in all fronts at the same time.65 To know Schumann’s Davidsbund he would have to have read Schumann’s articles in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik authored by his imaginary league of artists and critics, who took themselves as heralds of a new form of art. We also know that the Copenhagen Davidsbündler were the founding members of the Musikforening—and we know that Kierkegaard helped to draft the rules of the association.66 Schumann’s articles are intended to criticize contemporary music and to set new vistas for young artists as poet-musicians, and not as poets, philosophers, or poet-philosophers. Though he often dwells on the need for new musical forms as a new type of art, on the role of the musician as creator and of the artist as genius, notions that Kierkegaard sparingly adopts in the chapter on the musical erotic, the fact remains that Kierkegaard had knowledge of Schumann’s critical practice as a deliberate authorship based on the creation of multiple personae. Curiously enough, there is a great deal of evidence that suggests the possibility of Pessoa having realized the same. By the time Pessoa was born, Schumann’s personae were commonplace in various types of musical literature,67 and music was present from his birth to his last days.68 Still in Durban, Pessoa had read and studied Walter See Anna Harwell Celenza, “Imagined Communities Made Real: The Impact of Robert Schumann’s Neue Zeitschrift für Musik on the Formation of Music Communities in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Musicological Research, vol. 24, no. 1, 2005, pp. 1–26, see especially pp. 8–14. Schumann’s ideas had become so popular in the musical milieu in Copenhagen that as early as 1834 a group of musicians and actors decided to found a Danish version of the Davidsbund, recruited among the elected who met regularly to discuss poetry, novels, philosophy, and Schumann’s ideas, as expressed in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. 66 See Jørgen Henrik Lorck’s testimony in Encounters with Kierkegaard: A Life as Seen by His Contemporaries, trans. and ed. by Bruce Kirmmse, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press 1996, p. 24. 67 See Léonce Mesnard, Étude sur Schumann, un successeur de Beethoven, Paris: Durand, Schoenewerk 1876, pp. 12–15; and F. Gustav Jansen, Die Davidsbündler aus Robert Schumann’s Sturm- und Drangperiode, Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel 1883. 68 His father, Joaquim de Seabra Pessoa (1850–93) was the music critic and reviewer for one of the most important morning newspapers, Diário de Notícias from 1876 until the year of his death, and his mother was a keen pianist; in Durban, his stepfather played the flute and joined his mother in duets to entertain family and friends. Though he did not have any musical training, his siblings did, and he followed with interest his sister’s piano learning; after her return to Lisbon, she remembers Pessoa’s frequent going to the Opera House, and how he would pace the long corridors while listening to the music rather than let himself be confined in the theater box. Cf. Isabel Murteira França, Fernando Pessoa na Intimidade, Lisbon: Dom Quixote 1987, p. 250. He had probably started going to the opera quite early, since his great uncle mentions the fact in a postcard sent to Durban in 1897, and resumed the habit after returning to Portugal. Cf. Manuela Nogueira, Fernando Pessoa—Imagens de uma Vida, Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim 2005, p. 36. One of the early poems that makes proof of the presence of music in his childhood is Slanting Rain, see Pessoa, Ficções do Interlúdio 1914–1935, pp. 13–18; pp. 17–18 (Forever Someone Else, pp. 218–21). See also See Fernando Pessoa, Poemas de Fernando Pessoa 1934–1935 (vol. 1, Tome V in Edição crítica de Fernando Pessoa), ed. by Luís Prista, Lisbon: INCN 2000, pp. 232–41. (A Little Larger than the Universe, pp. 253–60.) 65

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Pater’s The Renaissance and was naturally aware of Pater’s celebrated dictum that “all arts tend to music,”69 a forerunner of Verlaine’s “De la musique avant toute chose,” a truism in the fin-de-siècle literary movements that fused Wagnerism with Décadence. Significantly, one of the fragments, from circa 1914, contains notes concerning an incipient project for a book of poems70 entitled Music (Fictions of the Interlude is another variant), with the indication that it should be divided into sections grouped as different kinds of music, followed by the titles of poems already written by then.71 Kierkegaard’s formative years were contemporary to Schumann’s endeavor, which had become central to the activity of the Copenhagen “Davidsbund,” and by the end of the nineteenth century, the term “Davidsbund” was commonly applied to a group of admirers gathered around a composer, emulating the “David-againstGoliath” character of the original league.72 In a way, it is more problematical to rule out the possibility of accepting that Kierkegaard or Pessoa had knowledge of the aesthetics set up by the “Davidsbund” than to admit that it might have served as an inspiring pattern of action. Ignoring it would require us to believe that Kierkegaard had been around the debate about Schumann’s ideas and criticism in his juvenile years as a mere non-reflective witness. In a way, Kierkegaard and Pessoa are joined together by an effort to compensate for their lack of musical technê by enabling the voicing of the musica universalis that only poets and philosophers can hear. This is what Kierkegaard means when he dwells on the sound of “those two violin strains” played by two street musicians, and ends by asking the “unfortunate artists” if they “know that those strains hide in themselves the glories of the whole world.”73 In the same fragment, Kierkegaard asks if having “ears that perform what they hear” is a reward of the gods; and one of the late odes of Ricardo Reis “performs” what both Kierkegaard and Pessoa “heard”: Others narrate with lyres or harps; I tell with my thought. See Walter Pater, “The School of Giorgione” (1877), in his The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. by Donald L. Hill, Berkeley: University of California Press 1980 [1893], p. 109. 70 Reference 48E-37. The information concerning this fragment was kindly offered by Richard Zenith. 71 The sections were entitled “Visual Music”—Slanting Rain; “Direct Music”—Arabic Suite; “Abstract [or Ideal] Music”—Beyond God, Pauis, Absurd Hour. Presented “not as literature,” but as a “curiosity,” the abandoned project was commented upon in another fragment: “These poems, among which I count some of my victories, are, taken together, the rags of my defeat.” Information kindly granted by Richard Zenith. 72 One of the best known was the “Davidsbund” of Prague, with A.W. Ambros and Hanslick as their leading members, using the identities of “Flamin” and “Renatus.” See Bonnie Lomnäs et al., Auf der Suche nach der poetischen Zeit: der Prager Davidsbund: Ambros, Bach, Bayer, Hampel, Hanslick, Helfert, Heller, Hock, Ulm; zu einem vergessenen Abschnitt der Musikgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, Saarbrücken: Pfau 1999. John Tyrrell, “Petr Vít, Estetické myšlení o hudbě (České země 1760–1860),” Music & Letters, vol. 71, no. 3, 1990, pp. 398–9. 73 SKS 2, 39, EO1, 30. 69

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For he finds nothing, who through music Finds only what he feels. Words weigh more which, carefully measured, Say that the world exists.74

Dated December 10, 1931. See Fernando Pessoa, Poemas de Ricardo Reis, p. 66. (Forever Someone Else, p. 111.)

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Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Pessoa’s Corpus Undetermined. II. Sources of Pessoa’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Kierkegaard, Søren, O diário do seductor: a arte de amar, trans. by Mário Alemquer, Lisbon: Livraria Clássica 1911. III. Secondary Literature on Pessoa’s Relation to Kierkegaard Balso, Judith, “L’hétéronymie: une ontologie poétique sans métaphysique,” in Pessoa: Unité, Diversité, Obliquité. Colloque de Cerisy 1997, ed. by Pascal Dethurens and Maria-Alzira Seixo, Paris: Éditions Christian Bourgois 2000, pp. 157–91, see especially pp. 158–67. Hale, Michelle Pulsipher, Ironic Multiplicity: Fernando’s “pessoas” Suspended in Kierkegaardian Irony, Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University, Department of Humanities, Classic and Comparative Literature 2004. Hatherly, Ana, “Fernando Pessoa—retrato encontrado em Søren Kierkegaard,” in Actas do II Congresso Internacional de Estudos Pessoanos, Porto: Centro de Estudos Pessoanos 1985, pp. 263–77. Lourenço, Eduardo, “Kierkegaard e Pessoa ou a Comunicação Indirecta,” in his Fernando Rei da Nossa Baviera, Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional Casa da Moeda 1986, pp. 121–44. — “Kierkegaard e Pessoa ou as Máscaras do Absoluto,” in his Fernando Rei da Nossa Baviera, Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional Casa da Moeda 1986, pp. 97–109. Oliveira e Silva, Luís, “Estética e Ética em Kierkegaard e Pessoa,” in Revista da Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da UNL, Lisbon: Universidade Nova de Lisboa 1988, pp. 261–72.

Ernesto Sábato: The Darker Side of Kierkegaardian Existence María J. Binetti

I. Ernesto Sábato: The Blind Spot of Existence Ernesto Sábato was born in Rojas, in Buenos Aires Province, Argentina, on June 24, 1911. Having completed his primary education in his native town, he moved to La Plata, where he attended secondary school. He was admitted to the School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences of the local university, enrolling as a physics student. He became a member of the Communist Party, travelling to Moscow and Paris, where he lived between 1934 and 1936. Back in La Plata, he was awarded a Doctorate of Physics in 1938, winning a research scholarship to study atomic radiation at the Juliot-Curie Laboratory of Paris. At the outbreak of World War II he transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a further year. He returned to Argentina in 1940, alternating university teaching at his old school with the publication of articles on art and literary criticism in the magazines Teseo and Sur as well as in the newspaper La Nación. An inner conflict between science and literary creation led to an existential crisis that resulted in the abandonment of his promising scientific career, and in 1943 Sábato decided to devote himself to literature and painting. He combined writing with his work as advisor to various publishing houses, assistant to the Executive Board of UNESCO in Paris and Rome, and editor of the magazine Mundo Argentino. He was director of Cultural Relations at the Argentine Ministry of Foreign Affairs and presided over the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, which investigated the crimes committed by the military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983. His dark, gloomy and subterraneous writing is characterized by an accurate, dry, aphoristic, and cutting style as well as by an unswerving commitment to justice and human dignity. The subject of his essays, novels, political works, and autobiographical texts ranges from metaphysical speculation to political and social praxis. Among other accolades, he has received the National Achievement (1975), Cervantes (1984), Gabriela Mistral (1984), Jerusalem (1989), and Ismail Kadare (1995) Prizes. For the third successive year he has been nominated for the Nobel Prize by the General Society of Writers and Editors of Spain.

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Sábato’s essays include One and the Universe (1945),1 Men and Gears (1945),2 Heterodoxy (1953),3 The Writer and his Ghosts (1964),4 and Apologies and Rejections (1979).5 One and the Universe, his first book, contains the seeds of his recurring themes: a critique of modern rationalism, which turned him away from science and towards literature, and the defense of integral humanism. His essays reflect on the evolution of modern and contemporary human beings, which is seen as dominated by technological, scientific, and capitalist rationality. They deal with “the problems facing human beings in this tremendous crisis of civilization: the robotization of our species, the approaching cataclysm, the how and the why of fiction, whose foundation is provided, I believe, by the great enigmas of existence.”6 Modern capitalism and positive science, quantification and objectification, progressivism and the desacralization of the world, money and reason constitute the chief manifestations of a process that has led to loss of identity and the meaning of existence. We are witnessing the last consequences of this crisis of the Western human being, whose seriousness demands that we should “reclaim the human meaning of technology and science, draw their limits and put an end to their religion.”7 This means doing away not with reason but rather with its mythical exaltation in order to get back to the original meaning of reality. Sábato’s great trilogy, increasingly complex and deep, consists of The Tunnel (1948),8 On Heroes and Tombs (1961),9 and Abaddon, the Destroyer (1974).10 The Tunnel, his first novel, is narrated in the first person by Juan Pablo Castel, a paranoid painter who murders his mistress, María Iribarne. He experiences existence as a “pointless comedy,” a lonely and “dark labyrinth”11 that “leads to nothingness.”12 The book describes the despair of a life trapped in the existential absurd, exploring hells of doubt and rebellion and the discovery of transcendent reality, and thus outlines the themes that will run throughout his literary production. The Tunnel has been viewed as an existentialist work, a sort of Camusian classic of despair. On Heroes and Tombs, Sábato’s second novel, has three main strands: Martín and Alejandra’s fictional love story, the true story of Argentine General Juan Lavalle’s march to the north, defeat and death, and the world of the blind as a representation of metaphysical dualism. The tunnel metaphor, present in his first novel, is replaced by the subterraneous dimness of this world, which symbolizes “metaphysical obscurity,”13 Ernesto Sábato, Uno y el universo, Barcelona: Círculo de Lectores 1994. Ernesto Sábato, Hombres y engranajes, Madrid: Alianza Editorial 1998. 3 Ernesto Sábato, Heterodoxia, Madrid: Alianza Editorial 1998. 4 Ernesto Sábato, El escritor y sus fantasmas, Barcelona: Seix Barral 1997. 5 Ernesto Sábato, Apologías y rechazos, Barcelona: Seix Barral 1987. 6 Ernesto Sábato, Obra Completa. Ensayos, Barcelona: Seix Barral 1973, p. 13. 7 Ibid., p. 167. 8 Ernesto Sábato, El túnel, Barcelona: Planeta 1995. 9 Ernesto Sábato, Sobre héroes y tumbas, Barcelona: Planeta 1973. 10 Ernesto Sábato, Abaddón el exterminador, Barcelona: Seix Barral 1981. 11 Sábato, El túnel, p. 40. 12 Ibid., p. 43. 13 Ernesto Sábato, Informe sobre ciegos, Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina 1968, p. 7. 1 2

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“the bulwark of nothingness”14 and “the forces of darkness.”15 The blindness myth epitomizes Sábato’s dualist anthropology, as well as the deconstructive and debunking power of his production.16 Human beings are sightless creatures, hunting around in a nocturnal, dreamlike universe that resembles hell. His writing delves into the occult, inquires into darkness and ends up in a blind tunnel. His artistic enquiry into the human being culminates in the masterpiece Abaddon, the Destroyer, which was awarded the prize for best foreign novel published in France in 1976. In it Sábato explores a search for the absolute that is beyond human capacity,17 through a plot made up of three overlapping narratives. These feature the main characters: Bruno, a non-conformist writer; Marcelo, a Marxist revolutionary, and Sábato himself, tormented by his own demons. “My purpose,” he later confessed, “was to write a novel of a novel, a sort of novel squared. I wanted to write something fictional and, at the same time, a challenge to fiction, an enquiry into the very form of the genre, its possibilities and limitations, its secret source in the innermost depths of the human soul.”18 To him art springs from this spiritual abyss: it has nothing to do with reason, logic, science or technology, but rather with the irrational, with the terrifying profundity of the unspeakable, which unfolds in an apocalyptic interplay of images and symbols. Sábato’s political works include The Other Face of Peronism (1956)19 and Open Letter to General Aramburu (1956).20 The former softens his public condemnation of Peronism on account of its policies in favor of the working classes and the poor. The latter denounces the practice of secret torture and censorship by the military government that dislodged it from power. Never Again, the final report of the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons is known worldwide as “the Sábato Report”: it gathers together testimonies of the forced disappearance and death of 20,000 people during the 1976–80 military dictatorship. Other texts blend fiction with essay, among them his autobiography, Before the End: Memoirs (1998),21 and Spain in My Old-Age Diaries (2004),22 which recounts his experiences during his two latest trips. As a literary critic, Sábato puts forward the theory of a “total novel”23 that would integrate the psychological and the social, the subjective and the objective, ideas and facts. “It is no longer possible,” he remarks, “to keep the absolute separation between subject and object. Novelists should provide a whole description of the Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 118. 16 Cf. Luis Wainerman, Sábato y el misterio de los ciegos, Buenos Aires: Losada 1971, p. 28. 17 Cf. Sábato, Abaddón el exterminador, p. 17. 18 Sábato, Obra Completa. Ensayos, p. 633. 19 Ernesto Sábato, El otro rostro del peronismo. Carta abierta a Mario Amadeo, Buenos Aires: Imprenta López 1956. 20 Ernesto Sábato, Carta abierta al General Aramburu, Buenos Aires: Edición del autor 1956. 21 Ernesto Sábato, Antes del fin. Memorias, Buenos Aires: Seix Barral 1998. 22 Ernesto Sábato, España en los diarios de mi vejez, Buenos Aires: Seix Barral 2004. 23 Sábato, Obra Completa. Ensayos, p. 270. 14 15

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interaction between consciousness and the world that is peculiar to existence.”24 Literature would proceed through a double, centripetal and centrifugal, motion: “a return to the primordial mystery of one’s own existence, what we would call “subjectivism,” and then a second movement towards viewing the subject–object totality from consciousness.”25 Thus, art synthesizes what philosophical thought distinguishes and divides, his work combining psychological, social and objective depth with “metaphysical emphasis.”26 The total novel is rooted in the transcendent core of the real, in the absolute source from which understanding of the human as a whole springs. Accordingly, it seeks to bring together the different domains of human existence. Sábato is a whole writer in search of the blinding absolute. This conception of the total and metaphysical novel has been inspired by Romanticism, which has exerted a major influence on his thought. One commentator writes: Sábato has constructed a poetics that we might call neo-romantic. He himself has stated that he subscribes to a phenomenological neo-romanticism that curbs the purely personal, individual romantic subjectivity through phenomenological analysis of the self and the world. A poetics that also partially accepts in his world-view the presence of surrealism and expressionism as comforting factors.27

Opposing Western rationalism, he turns to Romanticism, whose philosophical and artistic continuation he sees in existentialism and surrealism. In it he perceives a force for the reconstruction of human subjectivity, a way of returning to the concrete human beings and saving them from the depersonalizing effects of science, technology, and capitalism. Nevertheless, since the Romantic self is individualistic, arbitrary and subjectivistic, he deems it necessary to draw on Edmund Husserl’s (1859–1938) phenomenology, into which he reads the objectivity of the world. Thus, he attains the objective whole neglected by Romanticism and existentialism. Sábato’s writing has been criticized as pessimistic, obscurantist, and claustrophobic. The author himself describes it as “a world of tunnels and corridors, shortcuts and forks, between murky landscapes and dark corners,” where “the human being trembles, confronted by the impossibility of every goal and the failure of every encounter.”28 Far from the classical ideals of equilibrium and the beauty of the harmonious soul, it comes close to the artistic paradigm behind Jean-Paul Sartre’s (1905–80) nausea and Albert Camus’ (1913–60) rebellion, stressing the ambiguity of the sinister. He definitely does not seek to appease anybody’s conscience but rather to tear it apart. The human being’s metaphysical calling turns into desperate pathetic consciousness that verges on madness and extermination. The primeval meaning of existence is irredeemably lost and failure appears as the only possible ending.

Ibid., p. 283. Ibid., p. 635. 26 Ibid., p. 257. 27 María Rosa Lojo, Sábato: en busca del original perdido, Buenos Aires: Corregidor 1997, p. 15. 28 Sábato, Antes del fin. Memorias, p. 160. 24 25

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This literary stance is grounded in metaphysical and anthropological dualism: both the human being and reality are made up of opposing forces that tend towards mutual destruction. This dualism is symbolically represented by the nocturnal, gloomy, sightless, demonic, and bottomless underworld depicted in Sábato’s narrative. In this context, his work is located “between” vision and blindness, heaven and hell. Far from overcoming the contradiction or playing a mediating role, this “inbetweenness” points to an irreconcilable separation: “The life of every human being fluctuates between this illusion of the ideal and the encumbrance of the factual, the dullness we call reality.”29 His world-view is based on the human longing for the impossible absolute and the continuous tension of an insurmountable split: “The tensions, disillusionment, impossibility and small, absurd hopes, nevertheless, saturate the discontinuity of life. And in this very failure lies their anthropological and aesthetic victory.”30 Needless to say, this victory corresponds to an anthropology, aesthetics and metaphysics which has blindness, the tunnel, and the absurd as its dimensions. Struggling through the blind maze of dualism, he tries to avoid suicide as a logical conclusion, preserving at least some hope: “The human being cannot live without hope. Without an ideal, without a promised land.”31 The legitimacy of that hope, however, is open to question, since this land is forever promised, but never real. Sábato believes that “salvation lies in art,”32 and “utopia is the only way.”33 No other could be the creed of a blind existence, torn between the aesthetic ideal and a fleeting reality. II. Kierkegaard and Sábato Sábato’s work has been influenced by three currents of thought that, in his view, have eroded the bourgeois, capitalist, and rationalist complacency of modern and contemporary culture: Romanticism, existentialism, and Marxism. They all set about reclaiming individual subjectivity, its affective integrity, and transforming praxis. The existential stamp of writers such as Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81), Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936), Nikolay Berdyaev (1874–1948), Camus, and Sartre on his books is undeniable. He sees existentialism as a continuation of Romanticism: “The great romantic rebellion, particularly in the case of the German romantic philosophers, rose up against this tremendous split of the human being, and this culminated in the great existential philosophies, from Kierkegaard to Heidegger.”34 Both existentialism and Marxism start from the concrete human being, are rooted in subjective praxis, conceive the individual through the other and may ultimately be traced back to Hegel.35 However, the rationalist and materialist tenets on which Sábato, España en los diarios de mi vejez, p. 20. Lojo, Sábato: en busca del original perdido, p. 297. 31 Sábato, España en los diarios de mi vejez, p. 118. 32 Ibid., p. 106. 33 Ibid., p. 19. 34 Sábato, Obra Completa. Ensayos, p. 512. 35 Cf. Ernesto Sábato, La cultura en la encrucijada nacional, Buenos Aires: Sudamericana 1983, pp. 73–4; Ernesto Sábato, Obra Completa. Ensayos, p. 362. 29 30

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Marxism is based make it vulnerable to the kind of criticism he levels at capitalism,36 which has led Sábato to abandon his early Marxist commitment. The strong impact of Kierkegaard on his writing must be considered in this context. Sábato explains in his autobiography: “Dostoevsky was very important in my education, with its transcendental underpinnings, as was Kierkegaard, who had planted his bombs at the very foundation of the Hegelian cathedral.”37 The Danish thinker was one of the first to understand the huge distance between a perfect system and existence, correcting the errors of idealist abstraction and gross materialism. From this perspective, Sábato turns to Kierkegaard as a safeguard against Western rationalism and depersonalization. His Kierkegaard is a Romantic and, therefore, truly revolutionary spirit: “what Vossler invoked was what Humboldt and Kierkegaard had invoked earlier when they defended the human being against the system. From this point of view, it is thinkers of this kind who are the true revolutionaries, if the future is not to hold a collection of computer-programmed humanoids.”38 True revolutions are those that shake the innermost existence of the self, those that stem from inner struggle and victory. Kierkegaard’s strength did not lie in party-politics but in subjective despair, in pain and anguish, in the intuition of the “tragic that had been incubating amidst the optimism of Enlightenment.”39 The effects of this silent revolution are more farreaching than the breakthroughs of enlightened science and technology. His somewhat biased interpretation of Kierkegaard focuses on certain aspects to the neglect of others. First, Sábato highlights the primacy of the concrete and individual human being as opposed to the abstract depersonalization of the system: “Marx and Kierkegaard vindicated the concrete human being.”40 But Kierkegaard’s view of personal existence is seen as arbitrarily subjectivistic, since he considers it as a whole made up of vital and affective, rational and irrational, conscious and unconscious, and light and dark dimensions. This subjectivism41 must be counterweighted by objectivity: otherwise, his “protest would be no more than a romantic and subjectivistic uprising…the world cannot do without the concrete self, but the concrete self cannot do without the world: reality is mutual presence.”42 To correct this shortcoming, Sábato turns to Husserl’s phenomenology, which enables him to complete his image of the real and conceive the total novel. In short, whereas Kierkegaard returns to the human, Husserl restores the world that has been forgotten. Sábato’s human being is at the same time individual and universal, not an unreal abstraction but a “universality that is obtained, as Kierkegaard wanted it to be, through the concrete and individual. It is not the universality of reason but of unreason.”43 The idea of a concrete universality would replace the abstract Cf. Sixto Mardoqueo Reyes, Ernesto Sábato y su compromiso con el hombre, Santa Fe: Arcien 1982, pp. 45ff. 37 Sábato, Antes del fin, p. 117. 38 Sábato, Obra Completa. Ensayos, p. 537. 39 Ibid., p. 474. 40 Sábato, Abaddón el exterminador, p. 198. 41 Ibid., p. 343; p. 356. 42 Ibid., p. 252. 43 Ibid., p. 151. 36

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universality of conceptual systems, embracing the irrational component of reality, its contradictory and paradoxical forces, far beyond the differentiated clarity of the intellectual order. Paradox, irrationality, and contradiction give rise to another Kierkegaardian category: the dialectics of existence and history, “a dialectics not so much in the Hegelian as in the Kierkegaardian sense.”44 To Sábato this concrete dialectics takes place as the interplay of opposing forces, of contradictions that impregnate and generate each other incessantly.45 This dialectical interplay corresponds to the opposition between finitude and infinity, time and eternity, rationality and irrationality, hope and despair that Sábato, following Kierkegaard’s idea of the “paradoxical scandal,”46 views as the essential constitution of existence. The dialectic and the paradoxical do not lie in the contradiction itself, but rather in the synthesis towards which these terms tend. This is the irrational element that Sábato stresses, which can be best appreciated in his undoubtedly Kierkegaardian notion of the instant: “We cannot reach eternity except by getting deeper into the instant, nor can we arrive at universality except through our own circumstances: the here and now.”47 The instant reveals the contradiction between and the synthesis of the historical and the timeless, the ephemeral and the absolute, the mortal and the desire for the eternal that coexist in every human being.48 This is the absurd, the blind irrationality present in his books. It is not clear, however, if it is the synthesis that is absurd, as Kierkegaard suggests, or the fact that it will never be achieved in spite of our deepest wishes, as Sábato seems to imply. Literary style and metaphysical emphasis characterize the work of both writers. They believe that, whereas thought systems are transparently and seamlessly constructed, art reflects the paradoxes, contradictions, and ambiguity of existence.49 Therefore, as Sábato points out, whenever philosophers aim for the absolute, they express themselves through art: “New philosophy has approached literature: the latter has always been existentialist.” 50 This fully Romantic thesis is rooted in Kierkegaard: “As literature became metaphysical with Dostoevsky, metaphysics became literary with Kierkegaard.”51 Only art can express the distressing contradiction of the individual, the irrationality of existence, the wealth and depth of a reality ignored by the formal clarity of the intellect: “The great problems of the human condition are not amenable to coherent analysis, but only accessible through myth and poetry, which are as contradictory and paradoxical as our own existence.”52 Just like Kierkegaard and the Romantics, Sábato aspires to an absolute literature capable of synthesizing art and philosophy. Ibid., p. 372. Ibid., pp. 136ff. 46 Ibid., p. 216. 47 Ernesto Sábato, La resistencia, Buenos Aires: Seix Barral 2000, p. 17; Sábato, Informe sobre ciegos, p. 6. 48 Cf. Sábato, Obra Completa. Ensayos, p. 632; see also Sábato, Informe sobre ciegos, p. 6. 49 Cf. Sábato, Obra Completa. Ensayos, p. 360. 50 Ibid., p. 253. 51 Ibid., p. 313. 52 Sábato, Antes del fin, p. 155. 44 45

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Faith, on the other hand, “as Kierkegaard rightly put it, begins precisely where reason ends.”53 Sábato’s interpretation of Kierkegaard is colored by his own views on the subject: related to the irrational, the contradictory and the paradoxical, faith would constitute a kind of blindness. It would no longer be linked to the divine or religious—Christian or otherwise—but to literature in the absolute sense: “When reality is destruction, the novel cannot be but the construction of some new faith.”54 In other words, reality leads to doubt and despair, and we can only be saved by utopia and fiction. Skepticism is also present in his thought: “I have often wondered whether I believe in God or not: I cannot answer this question univocally, but through the contradictory characters of my novels.”55 Sábato’s faith maintains dualism instead of achieving a synthesis of opposing forces: far from restoring the primeval wholeness, it preserves separation. He is comforted by Kierkegaard’s idea that “faith is the courage to uphold doubt.”56 From a purely Kierkegaardian standpoint, however, it is the unhappy aesthetic consciousness that is incapable of reconciling the real and the ideal. Faith does indeed support doubt, but at the intellectual level, whereas on the affective plane it produces an absolutely real synthesis that goes beyond intellectual considerations. To sum up, Sábato draws on certain Kierkegaardian categories, such as concrete subjectivity, the tragic sense of existence, the dialectics of the real, the paradoxical offense, the instant, the synthesis of relative opposites, and the primacy of art as an expression of subjectivity and faith in the irrational. Kierkegaard restores the original power of the individual, a fact that Sábato celebrates, while stressing the need to correct arbitrary subjectivism by acknowledging the objectivity of the outer world. Struggling against Western rationalism and materialism, he sees the Danish existentialist as a pioneer who reclaims the pathos of thinking.57 In Sábato, however, the huge forces of the individual lead to the absurd, and the pathos of thinking to a blind tunnel. Confronted by the irrationality of existence and the collapse of the world, he resorts to faith in a literary paradise, although, as Kierkegaard points out, novels cannot save us—let alone the noble hope of the world of ideas. Sábato emphasizes the darkest and most desperate aspects of Kierkegaard’s thought, failing to see that they only make sense as part of a far deeper and luminous whole. Otherwise, they would have to be viewed as the product of the irreparable split of the unhappy consciousness, an interpretation which we do not share. III. Conclusions Sábato’s books leave us with a deep feeling of anguish that is not provoked by simultaneous love and fear of the sublime, but rather by the merely repulsive. His is a world of tunnels, basements, darkness, blindness, gloom, and absurdity. There are, undoubtedly, similarities between this desperate and irrational conception of Sábato, La resistencia, p. 147. Sábato, Obra Completa. Ensayos, p. 377. 55 Ibid., p. 547. 56 Sábato, Antes del fin, p. 207. 57 Sábato, Obra Completa. Ensayos, p. 731. 53 54

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existence and the drama of existence as it plays out in Kierkegaard’s work, in which despair even leads to the rejection of the whole world as if it were a crime. Both have a depressive personality that finds relief in literature. Their writings reflect this state of mind, which is metaphysically justified by the dialectic negativity that constitutes the real. But, beyond these and other coincidences, does Sábato’s desperate existence strictly reflect Kierkegaard’s? For a number of reasons, we believe it does not. The latter sees the real as ultimately grounded in light, in the ideal, in logos. Existence arises from the Idea and is destined to make it concrete through subjective development. In this undeniably Romantic and idealist matrix, the spiritual constitutes the supreme force. To Sábato, on the other hand, the main principle is darkness, blindness, the irrational, which ends up in a fatalistic view of existence. His erroneous philosophical and historical interpretation confuses the ideal or luminous with the intellectual and abstract, and the concrete and existential with the irrational. From this dualist perspective, unity and synthesis appear impossible, and mediation is doomed to failure. Kierkegaard, by contrast, starts from the ideal and reflective absolute, whose dialectics produces a split, with repetition ipso facto restoring spiritual sameness by means of a third term. His principle is oneness, and the outcome is, therefore, positive. Anguish and despair are thus manifestations of an infinite identity that splits itself to come back, through them, to its original wholeness. According to Sábato, however, they reveal a fundamental dualism from which there is no return. Whereas to Kierkegaard anguish stems from the infinite possibility of power, to Sábato it is brought about by the infinite nothingness of the impossible. Despair leads to faith in different ways: as a second mediated and effective immediacy in the former, and as a bad—transcendent, never actual—infinity in the latter. In other words, Kierkegaard starts from faith in the absolute: despair presupposes belief, and sin is the dialectical consciousness of reconciliation. Sábato begins by disbelieving, relegating hope to the afterlife: faith is not based on conviction but on resignation: he does not believe but would rather like to believe in something in order to avoid suicide. Thus, faith cannot but seek refuge in an irrationality that has no place in this world, while in Kierkegaard it is synonymous with actual reality. Whereas the ideality of Kierkegaard’s individual illuminates the entire universe, blindness buries Sábato’s in a shadowy underworld. Here lies the profound difference between these two absolute but opposing subjectivities: one is infinite power reflected in its own dialectics, the other infinite powerlessness in search of some hope that might enable it to believe in its potency—myth, poetry, art or literature. Hope and faith are thus as fictional as Sábato’s narrative, a fleeting instant without history. But, as Kierkegaard found out, aesthetics cannot save. Far from resembling a knight of faith, Sábato’s individual almost shares Sartre’s futile passion and Camus’ Sisyphean endeavor. Translated by Mónica Descalzi

Bibliography I. Works by Sábato that Make Use of Kierkegaard Obra Completa. Ensayos, Barcelona: Seix Barral 1973, p. 313; p. 360; p. 377; p. 512; p. 537; p. 547; p. 632; p. 731. Abaddón el exterminador, Barcelona: Seix Barral 1981, p. 151; p. 198; p. 216; p. 372. Antes del fin. Memorias, Buenos Aires: Seix Barral 1998, p. 117; p. 155; p. 207. La resistencia, Buenos Aires: Seix Barral 2000, p. 17; p. 147. II. Sources of Sábato’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Camus, Albert, Le mythe de Sisyphe, Paris: Gallimard 1942, p. 39; pp. 42–3; p. 51; pp. 56–61; p. 65; pp. 69–72. Sartre, Jean-Paul, L’être et le néant. Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique, Paris: Gallimard 1943, pp. 58–84; pp. 94–111; pp. 115–49; pp. 150–74; pp. 291–300; pp. 508–16; pp. 529–60; pp. 639–42; pp. 643–63; pp. 669–70; pp. 720–2. Unamuno, Miguel de, El sentimiento trágico de la vida en los hombres y en los pueblos, Madrid: Renacimiento 1913, p. 7; p. 22, pp. 111–13; pp. 117–18; p. 124; p. 154; pp. 176–7; p. 197; p. 253; p. 280; p. 318. — La agonía del Cristianismo, Madrid: Madrid: Renacimiento 1931, pp. 38–9. III. Secondary Literature on Sábato’s Relation to Kierkegaard Dávalos, Baica, “Sobre héroes y tumbas,” in Homenaje a Ernesto Sábato, ed. by Helmy F. Giacoman, Madrid: Anaya 1967, p. 388. Oberhelman, Harley D., Ernesto Sábato, New York: Twayne Publishers 1970, p. 37.

María Zambrano: Kierkegaard and the Criticism of Modern Rationalism Carmen Revilla and Laura Llevadot

I. A General Introduction to the Life and Works of María Zambrano Despite living in exile for most of her life (from 1939 to 1984), the work of María Zambrano (Vélez Málaga 1904–Madrid 1991), the philosopher of “poetic reason,” is one of the most significant contributions to Spanish philosophy of the twentieth century. Her publications were many and varied, defying easy classification, and she is one of the most influential thinkers in the Spanish-speaking world. María Zambrano has been linked to the “Madrid School” because she both studied and began her professional life there, teaching at the University in the decade prior to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. The war led to the dispersion of the school, which included philosophers such as José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955), Manuel García Morente (1886–1942), Xavier Zubiri (1898–1983), José Gaos (1900–69), Luis Recasens Fiches (1903–77), and Zambrano herself, as well as figures from other fields, such as Ramón Menéndez Pidal (1869–1968) and Américo Castro (1885–1972). Biographies of María Zambrano have focused on her exile at the end of the Civil War, in 1939, as a decisive moment in her intellectual and personal development, one which, in her own words, determined the remainder of her life. With this in mind, we can identify three significant events that marked her long and complex life: (a) her education in the period leading up to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War; (b) her life in exile, which was a period of great intellectual and philosophical enquiry; and (c) her return to Spain. (a) The first period of her life was prior to 1939, a time which includes her years as a student and the beginning of her professional life. Her early life was spent in Segovia, where she grew up, and Madrid, where she studied at the Complutense University, and where she would go on to teach. She was an active participant in the currents of political and cultural renovation that were in motion around 1930. Her first book, The Horizons of Liberalism, was published in 1929 and the articles she contributed to publications in the coming years were marked by her growing This article has been made possible by the financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. Research Project: “María Zambrano y el pensamiento contemporáneo” (FFI2010–18483/FISO).

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political convictions. The article that was published in 1934, “Towards a Knowledge of the Soul,” indicated a departure from the positions of her mentors and a personal line of enquiry that would be a constant in her work from that point on. The influence of her teachers was now complemented by that of Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), who was the subject of her thesis, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), Max Scheler (1874–1928), René Descartes (1596–1650), Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), the school of Pythagoras, Plato, and Plotinus as well as Miguel Unamuno (1864–1936) and, particularly, Antonio Machado (1875–1939). In philosophical terms, her writings from this period are characterized by her analysis of the crisis of modernity and the announcement of her project, as yet unrealized, of elaborating a “poetic reason” which would be capable of accepting and integrating the formless and passionate impulses that underlie our consciousness. Zambrano felt that the modern humanist tradition had resulted in Western culture losing its contact with reality, and this problem lay at the root of her search for a form of reason that could restore this connection. Zambrano felt that “knowledge of the soul” was required to make possible the full realization of the person and the development of a form of rational thought that was in harmony with the heterogeneous variety of the real world. The article “Life in Crisis” was written with this in mind: “What appears to be in crisis is this mysterious link that connects our being to reality, something so deep and fundamental that it is our inmost sustenance. What this crisis teaches us above all else is that man is incomplete, unfinished.”1 It is precisely so that man, the “incomplete creation,” could be fully finished, or “born anew” as she would say at other times, that a reform of reason, a “reform of understanding” was called for that would allow us to develop a rationalism that embraces the whole of life rather than opposing it. Zambrano drew attention to the fact that “at critical moments in history, men have always talked of a ‘reform of understanding,’ of a critique which the intellect makes of itself.”2 Her article from 1937 on “The Reform of Understanding” forms part of this project. This article establishes the task of “discovering a new, more complex and sensitive use of reason,”3 and already puts forward practical suggestions for a use of reason that contains “its own permanent criticism”: Human reasoning has to be able to assimilate movement, the flow of history itself, and although it may seem far-fetched, it has to acquire a dynamic structure in place of the static framework it has adopted until now. Our understanding must be brought into closer contact with life, but human life in its fullest sense.4

Zambrano considered this task, which was related to the proposals put forward by Ortega, to be the highest priority of the time. This was to be the first step of a study which would have the soul as its object and which would be transformed into knowledge of the soul as subject. It would be a form of knowledge that modernity María Zambrano, “La vida en crisis,” in Hacia un saber sobre el alma, Buenos Aires: Losada 1950, p. 75. 2 María Zambrano, “La reforma del entendimiento,” in Los intelectuales en el drama de España y escritos de la guerra civil, Madrid: Trotta 1998, p. 138. 3 Ibid., p. 138. 4 Ibid. 1

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could not aspire to, since it identified subjectivity with consciousness, and this was the source of ideas. (b) Leaving Spain proved to be a vital step in her development and had a decisive effect on her work. The years she spent in different parts of the Americas (Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Havana, from 1939 to 1953) saw her tackling the problem of Spain, Europe and, eventually, history, in her progressive elaboration of a diagnosis of the crisis of Western civilization. This was the starting point and the nucleus of her contribution, her “poetic reason.” She had found it in Machado, but it was also influenced by Plotinus, Spinoza, and Nietzsche as well as the poets in the circle of the Cuban Journal Orígenes, and especially José Lezama Lima (1910–76). She lived in Rome between 1953 and 1964, and she engaged in intense intellectual activity there, writing many articles and texts as well as versions of what would later become Dreams and Time (1992)5 and Person and Democracy (1958).6 She moved to La Pièce, in the department of Jura, France, in 1964, and continued her work there. She wrote The Creative Dream (1965),7 published Spain, Dream and Truth (1965)8 and The Tomb of Antigone (1967),9 and wrote the texts that made up Clearings in the Forest (1977)10 and the countless manuscripts that would become Of the Dawn (1986),11 The Fortunate Ones (1990),12 and Notes on a Method (1989).13 These writings reveal not only the influence of contemporary Spanish poetry but also the mystic tradition in the works of San Juan de la Cruz (1542–91) and Miguel de Molinos (1628–96) which, along with her awareness of oriental philosophy, she had previously expressed an interest in. It is in this period that her philosophical project of “poetic reason” was established, and her investigations were centered on two areas in which she showed special interest: history and dreams. As she seemed to sense when she wrote “Antonio Machado’s War,”14 history is not limited to the events that are narrated in the course of its unfolding story, and the interpretation of their importance; it is an area of emergence and creation that requires a descent to “underworlds,” where the inner self comes into contact with reality in “order and connection.” She places this descent, therefore, in the sphere of the logos which can save that which has failed or not borne fruit, to reveal the internal workings, the cause of suffering by making a form available for what they might contain. The narration of “infernal stories,” such María Zambrano, Los sueños y el tiempo, Madrid: Siruela 1992. María Zambrano, Persona y democracia, San Juan de Puerto Rico, Departamento de Instrucción Pública 1958. 7 María Zambrano, El sueño creador, Mexico City: Universidad Veracruzana 1965. 8 María Zambrano, España, sueño y verdad, Barcelona, Edhasa 1965. 9 María Zambrano, La tumba de Antígona, Mexico City: Siglo XXI 1967. 10 María Zambrano, Claros del bosque, Barcelona: Seix Barral 1977. 11 María Zambrano, De la Aurora, Madrid: Turner 1986. 12 María Zambrano, Los bienaventurados, Madrid: Siruela 1990. 13 María Zambrano, Notas de un método, Madrid: Mondadori 1989. 14 Zambrano, Los intelectuales en el drama de España y escritos de la guerra civil, p. 171: “The history of Spain is essentially poetic, not because it has been made by poets, but because at its most profound level it is continuous poetic transformation, and it may be that all history, of Spain and any other place, is ultimately poetry, creation and complete realization.” 5 6

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as that of Antigone, and the choice between the different sides offered by the vision of history15 take María Zambrano out of the area of influence of Ortega by underlining the inadequacy of historical reason for a “living subject.” “H.R. (Historical Reason) is the way in which Ortega understood and tried to use V.R. (Vital Reason) when he had not even carried out an examination of life or even the living subject,”16 she wrote in La Pièce. Memory can therefore offer life a “new medium” in which that which has been lost can be born anew and is, for that reason, “the most radical form of renovation.”17 Zambrano’s idea of philosophy is therefore a trajectory of the reason that descends to the originary source of life in order to untangle it and raise it to the light. She therefore sought the word that would reveal the failure of the new reality of the human being, because failure carries with it the possibility of transformation. Her thought can therefore be traced to her experience of the crisis of the subject, a crisis which establishes the limits of modern rationalism. It is in this sense that dreams come to occupy a central role in her thought. Her interest in dreams—a part of the memory where experience is stored, the obscured part of life, and the area that handles the consequences of the waking life—derives from her conviction that dreams are the “initial stage of our lives,”18 and that by investigating them one can approach the spontaneous life of the psyche. Important works such as The Creative Dream (1965) and Dreams and Time (published posthumously in 1992) were concerned with this issue. (c) María Zambrano returned to Spain on November 20, 1984, already in poor health. With the help of a group of young intellectuals, she would engage in the definitive resolution of some of her theoretical projects. She was awarded the Prince of Asturies Prize for Communication and the Humanities in 1981, and the Miguel de Cervantes Prize in 1988. These were the years in which her contribution began to receive recognition and her ideas became more widely known. She died in Madrid on February 6, 1991. She finished and published several works during this period, including Of the Dawn (1986), The Fortunate Ones (1990), and Notes on a Method (1989).19 Maria Zambrano’s intellectual project consisted of the elaboration of a mediating poetic reason which has its roots in her criticism of the rationalism promoted by Western culture that ignores vital aspects of human experience. It is here that her reading of Kierkegaard, and especially the Kierkegaard that reached her through Unamuno, was pertinent in the construction of her philosophical project. It should not surprise us, then, that Maria Zambrano makes reference to Kierkegaard in Cf. J. Moreno Sanz, “De la razón armada a la razón misericordiosa,” introductory study for Los intelectuales en el drama de España y escritos de la guerra civil, p. 17. 16 María Zambrano, Cartas de La Pièce (Correspondencia con Agustín Andreu), Valencia: Pre-textos y Universidad Politécnica de Valencia 2002, p. 93 (the italics, like the abbreviations, appear in the text). 17 María Zambrano, “Del método en filosofía o de las tres formas de visión,” in Río Piedras, San Juan, Puerto Rico 1972, collected in Anthropos. Suplementos, no. 2, p. 122. 18 María Zambrano, El sueño creador (expanded and revised edition), Madrid: Turner 1986, p. 14. 19 See notes 11, 12 and 13. 15

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several crucial areas of her texts, despite her non-academic approach to writing and the difficulty of identifying many of the extracts that she includes. II. The Presence of Kierkegaard in Zambrano The intellectual biography of Maria Zambrano is complicated, and her approach to writing meant that she often alluded to Kierkegaard and many other authors without actually providing explicit references to their work. Even so, the presence of Kierkegaard in her work is worthy of examination. One significant exception to this unacademic approach to other works is found in her book Poetry and Philosophy (1939) in which Zambrano quotes lengthy fragments of The Concept of Anxiety, and in other important areas of her work where Kierkegaard is invoked as both an intermediary and guide.20 Maria Zambrano’s library includes several of Kierkegaard’s works. They are mostly in French translations and have been extensively underlined, with a great many notes written in the margins.21 There were two significant periods in Maria Zambrano’s life when she came into contact with the writings of Kierkegaard. First of all, we should look at her formative years, when she was a member of Ortega y Gasset’s circle, or even earlier, among her first readings and the friends of her family. There were two reference points in this context which must have formed the basis for her appropriation of Kierkegaard: (a) the first was the group that was known as the School of Madrid, which enjoyed its most fertile period around 1930, when Zambrano was an active contributor to the group. Their interest in Kierkegaard is highlighted by José Gaos’ translation of The Concept of Anxiety which was published in the group’s journal, Revista de Occidente in 1930.22 Zambrano was familiar with this text and incorporated it into her work;23 (b) the second was Unamuno, who would also have a huge influence on her. She had met him through her father when they lived in Segovia “when she was still practically

Maria Zambrano, “Introductory Note to the 1986 edition” in Hacia un saber sobre el alma, p. 13. 21 The personal library of Maria Zambrano can be consulted at the Maria Zambrano Foundation of Vélez-Málaga, and contains the following editions of Kierkegaard’s writings: Crainte et tremblement, trans. by Paul-Henry Tisseau, introduction by Jean Wahl, Paris: Aubier Montaigne 1946; Les miettes philosophiques, trans. by Paul Petit, Paris: Du Livre 1947; El concepto de angustia, trans. by José Gaos, Madrid: Revista de Occidente 1930; Antígona, trans. by Gil Albert, Mexico City: Séneca 1942; Diario I, ed. by Cornelio Fabro, Brescia: Morcelliana 1948; Etapes sur le chemin de la vie, trans. by François Prior and MarieHenriette Guignot, Paris: Gallimard 1948; Aut-aut, ed. by Remo Cantoni, 3rd ed., trans. by Kirsten Montanari Guldbrandsen and Remo Cantoni, Milan: M.A. Denti 1946. 22 Søren Kierkegaard, El concepto de angustia, trans. by José Gaos, Madrid: Revista Occidente 1930. 23 Jesús Moreno Sanz confirmed in his study El logos oscuro: tragedia, mística y filosofía en María Zambrano that Zambrano had read this work by 1938, according to her own notes, as she moved between Valencia and Barcelona during the Civil War, and she also noted having read Antigone in 1942. El logos oscuro: tragedia, mística y filosofía en María Zambrano, vols. 1–4, Madrid: Verbum 2008, vol. 1, p. 83. 20

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a child,”24 and between 1940 and 1942 she would write a monograph titled Unamuno and his Work.25 It is in this text that Zambrano refers to Kierkegaard as one of the “close relations”26 of Unamuno, besides sketching several important connections that demonstrate her reading of Kierkegaard, and Unamuno’s importance as a means of assimilating his influence. The second period when she was receptive to his work came during her mature phase in Rome between 1953 and 1959, which was a crucial period in the development of her thought. Jesús Moreno Sanz draws our attention to the importance that her reading of Kierkegaard, as well as Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), Max Jacob (1876–1944) and others, might have had in the hours before attending concerts in the church of the Augustines of Santa Maria del Popolo.27 One example that illustrates this consideration is the unpublished text, “The Word,” which is dated January 27, 1961, in which she refers to “the moment of departure, of qualitatively different experience that Kierkegaard identified as the truly metaphysical moment.”28 However, if we wish to comprehend the influence of Kierkegaard on Maria Zambrano’s philosophical project, namely, her attempt to rethink the relation between thought and writing, we must look beyond these moments in the development of her thought in which she was receptive to his ideas, and examine the role that she assigns him in the history of philosophy. In order to examine the reach of Kierkegaard’s influence and his effect on Maria Zambrano, we must focus on those areas and subjects in which she mentions him by name. She would surely have identified with the critique of modern rationality that Kierkegaard directs against G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831). The analysis of Kierkegaard that Zambrano undertakes in some of her writings mainly revolve around the following questions: (a) his critique of modern rationalism; (b) the role of anxiety as an element that is found in both philosophy and poetry, and in general as an originary feature of the human condition; and (c) the relation between philosophy, poetry, and religion. We shall look at each of these questions as they appear in the writings of Zambrano where she makes specific reference to the work of Kierkegaard. A. The Critique of Modern Rationalism When Zambrano mentions Kierkegaard, she usually does so in relation to other significant writers and in the context of their criticism of modern rationalism. In the María Zambrano, “La presencia de don Miguel” in Diario 16 (“Culturas” supplement, no. 90, p. II) 28th December 1986, collected in Las palabras del regreso, Salamanca: Amarú 1995, and Unamuno, ed. by Mercedes Gómez Blesa, Barcelona: Mondadori-Debate 2003, p. 201. 25 María Zambrano, Unamuno. This text was published posthumously in the edition by Mercedes Gómez Blesa. The author had only published the first chapter “Unamuno y su tiempo” in two parts in Revista de la Universidad de La Habana, vol. 15, nos. 46–8 and no. 49, 1943. 26 Zambrano, Unamuno, p. 80. 27 Jesús Moreno Sanz, “Síntesis biográfica” in María Zambrano 1904–1991. De la razón cívica a la razón poética, Madrid: Residencia de Estudiantes/Fundación María Zambrano 2004, p. 64. 28 Cf. Jesús Moreno Sanz, El logos oscuro, vol. 3, pp. 191–2. 24

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first such text in which Kierkegaard is mentioned, he is placed alongside Charles Baudelaire (1821–67). Zambrano wrote the following in Philosophy and Poetry: After Victor Hugo came Baudelaire, as Schelling was followed by Kierkegaard. It can be said that both of these successors gave us the same thing, a sense of moderation or conscience. Man descends to earth among flaming clouds, then opens his eyes to discover that he is still a man. Man, who lives in a world of creation, but as a created thing, not a creator. He is already aware of his shame, his excruciating, burning shame as though the timeless pain of original sin was compounded by another more recent disgrace. This awareness of recent sin, of the sin of romanticism, is painfully obvious in these two brilliant alert minds….What these two thinkers—nobody doubts that Baudelaire was one—these two poets—there is no need to show that Kierkegaard was one—experience, in reality, is a purification. They purge the intoxication of the past and reduce things to their true size. They are both almost scientific in their desire for precision. The first thing that they both define, as thinkers and as poets, is the distinction between poetry and metaphysics….Both Baudelaire and Kierkegaard are aware of this.29

These fragments are inserted into a reflection on what Zambrano referred to in this text as the “Metaphysics of Creation.”30 In this book, Zambrano offers us a history of the relationship between philosophy and poetry in which this “metaphysics of creation” is applied to both Cartesian thought and German Romanticism, inasmuch as they both view mankind, the subject, not as a creature, but as a creator ex nihilo. The solitude of the Cartesian subject, who doubts the world in order to better develop his powers of reason, is shared by the Romantic individual who, as Kierkegaard reveals in The Concept of Irony, is faced with a reality that he disdains and so chooses, through the strength of his thought or poetry, to create another, which is more perfect, despite its unreality. Zambrano makes this same criticism of Romanticism and indicates Kierkegaard’s contribution in this context, because it is precisely his defense of the concept of sin, his acceptance of it as part of Christian dogma and his handling of it in The Concept of Anxiety, which provides this modern creative subject with humility. It is here that Zambrano compares Kierkegaard with Baudelaire, on the basis that both do the same thing, they transmit “moderation” and “conscience,” which means humility, both in the sphere of philosophy as well as that of poetry, respectively.31 In Kierkegaard, whom Zambrano considered to be a “philosopher-poet,” she identified the same endeavor as Baudelaire, which was to make a clear distinction between metaphysics and poetry, because the blurring of this separation had led to the inflation of this creative subject that disdains reality. Kierkegaard’s vindication of the existing subject as opposed to the metaphysical or poetic subject was seen by Zambrano here as a necessary “correction”32 to the excesses of modernity. Zambrano would return to Kierkegaard several years later in order to counter the influence of modern rationalism, although on this occasion she would compare him with Nietzsche, Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91), and Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81), as María Zambrano, Filosofía y Poesía, Madrid: FCE 1987, pp. 80–2. Ibid., p. 78. 31 Ibid., p. 81. 32 Ibid., p. 80. 29 30

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well as Baudelaire. In the final pages of Confession as a Literary Genre (1943), Zambrano considered Kierkegaard as one of the “living dead” and uses an extract from his work, although without indicating the source of the quotation, to summon the figure of these “living dead” which she thought of as a kind of subterranean survivor who had evaded the false illumination of modern reasoning, albeit at the expense of great hardships: It is the discord of the living dead, their grudging presence. The living ones, poets such as Baudelaire and Rimbaud, philosophers such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, novelists such as Dostoevsky, have been subjected to infinite torment in their ghost-ridden solitude, and have freed themselves only in the space that their art and thought has won for them. They were unfortunate to have lived in such impious times, and their existence was tormented by the furies of ancient tragedy. And so they freed themselves in the same degree as they achieved the existence of their tormentors, rejecting the role of tragedy and conquering a different kind of solitude. Their solitude is a source of communication, a solitude that requires distance and the power of perception that enabled Kierkegaard who practiced his art of writing posthumous papers to see himself as he is, as one of the living dead. “Posthumous works are like ruins, and what place of resort could be more natural for the buried?33

Zambrano here makes direct use of an extract from Either/Or, although without indicating its origin. It is the chapter headed “The Tragic in Ancient Drama reflected in the Tragic in Modern Drama. A Venture in Fragmentary Endeavor (Delivered before the Symparanecromenoi (Fellowship of the Dead).”34 Kierkegaard, using the pseudonym of the aesthete A, boasts of writing posthumous works due to his condition as one of the living dead. This idea of the “living dead” proved particularly interesting to Zambrano since it designated a type of writer who, unable to fit into the prevailing system of modern rationalism, directs his or her thought and written work towards the marginal experience of the irrational. For Zambrano, this was the other side of the coin that modernity could not avoid producing, and she included both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche among these “living dead” or “subterranean beings,” and saw them as modern versions of Antigone in the sense that they defied the laws of their city. Zambrano felt that this kind of writer was unable to find the audience that their understanding of existence required, and so they found themselves forced to turn their backs on life, taking refuge in their writing in order to free themselves of the spirits who besieged them. Kierkegaard’s inability to live a normal life, and in particular his inability to marry Regine, was used by Zambrano as an example of the kind of unfulfilled existence that was an inevitable product of modern philosophy. Years later, Zambrano brought the names of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche together once more as examples of non-totalitarian thought against which she wanted to measure her attempt to reform reason. In Man and the Divine (1955) we can find an important remark which enables us to evaluate the elements of each author that Zambrano sought to pursue:

María Zambrano, La confesión, género literario, Mexico: Luminar 1943, pp. 61–3. SKS 2, 159 / EO1, 152.

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To know life for life’s sake is an obligation to explore life in its entirety, not to shrink from anything. This requires, and will always require, an innocence that he never had and another sacrifice; he must surrender, if not his own hell, his own labyrinth. The conquest of a simplicity that brings him closer to the original light, the light that does not impose its clarity and does not make a structure of its clarity as Descartes and all those that came after him did, with the exception of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and before them, Pascal, whose light was more like the flickering glow of an oil lamp than the uniform illumination of consciousness and pure reason.35

This fragment sees Zambrano using a metaphor that she would repeat in many of her writings. It is the metaphor of the “oil lamp” as a type of rationalism that is neither abusive nor totalitarian, a kind of reason that does not damage the eyes or blind one as, in her opinion, the light of modern rationalism does.36 It is her opinion that Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Blaise Pascal (1623–62) inaugurated this non-totalitarian form of rationalism precisely because of their unsystematic manner of using elaborate texts to express their thought. The fact that Kierkegaard was scrupulously averse to writing systems, or even essays in which he propounded his ideas, encouraged Zambrano to champion his philosophy and to put him forward as an example to follow in his desire to study life and not only the human being as a metaphysical entity. B. Anxiety In her work Philosophy and Poetry, Zambrano makes abundant use of extracts from Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety. In this work, Zambrano established her notion of “person” as the equivalent of Kierkegaard’s “spirit.” “What anxiety brings to the fore, then, is the person, this is the element that is anxious to make its way. This person is identical with that which Kierkegaard called spirit.”37 Zambrano establishes an opposition between person and character. The person, as opposed to the character, is the one who accepts life in its fullest sense and who tries to see the passive and subconscious elements that remain below the level of consciousness. It is here that Zambrano identifies anxiety as an originary experience which any being that aspires to the status of person, in “becoming an individual” as Kierkegaard would say, must have, or else just remain a character. However, Zambrano identifies two different ways to react when faced with this originary experience of anxiety: the philosophical reaction and the poetic reaction. Zambrano accepts the Kierkegaardian definition of anxiety as “a determination of the dreaming spirit.”38 Zambrano is especially interested in this idea of the dream, of the spirit that dreams, that has not yet awoken and in which this anxiety is already present, because this is precisely what philosophy and poetry share. Zambrano puts it as follows: 35 María Zambrano, El hombre y lo divino, Mexico City: FCE 1973 (expanded and revised edition, first edition: Mexico City: FCE 1955), p. 176. 36 On the metaphor of “oil” in the work of María Zambrano, see Sonia Prieto, “El pensar que fluye como ‘gota de aceite,’ ” in Aurora. Papeles del Seminario María Zambrano, ed. by Carmen Revilla, no. 4, University of Barcelona 2002, pp. 107–12. 37 María Zambrano, Filosofía y poesía, p. 90. 38 Ibid., p. 91.

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A Dream. Anxiety in the face of the perceived totality, before the infinity of freedom. And falling into power….I know that Kierkegaard does not use the word power in the sense of the power of domination, but in the sense of the possibilities open to a being that wakes as it falls, which is that it falls into its own existence from the innocent dream in which it lay while it was not yet itself, while it still had not left the domains of God or of nothingness. Anxiety, a feeling from nowhere, of the fall of one’s own existence, of waking into the sin of being oneself. Life is a Dream says the same thing more clearly, more pleasingly with its central image of life as a dream (everything is a dream, except “doing good, which is never overlooked”). For the poet, however, life is a dream, and for the philosopher the dream is innocence and the fall is the awakening to freedom. In both of them, freedom is the only reality.39

In this fragment, Zambrano is comparing Kierkegaard, who is here the philosopher, with the Spanish poet Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–81), who wrote Life is a Dream. Zambrano reveals to us how both men strive to show us that life is a dream, meaning that mankind is a “half-born being” that comes into existence blind and halfasleep, and that mankind’s task is to wake up in one way or another. The difference lies in the varying reactions of philosophy and poetry to the originary anxiety of the “dreaming spirit,” and “the dream of innocence. And anxiety as the possibility of freedom. Up to this point, poetry can go hand-in-hand with any other form of human existence. The parting of the ways comes in the following instant, in the moment that possibilities reappear.”40 Zambrano held that philosophy chooses the path of possibility while poetry chooses love. “The poet is shackled by enchantment and does not reach the fulfillment of possibilities.”41 Although Zambrano concedes that Kierkegaard does not talk about power as, for example, Nietzsche does, she does accuse him of not having paid sufficient attention to love. A few lines later, she says: Neither Kierkegaard nor any of the others who have talked about anxiety have described love. Only fear is present. There is no love because there is no other presence, no other face. In anxiety, the other does not exist. However, the anxiety of the poet has something that he has been forced to create, because he has fallen in love with its presence without seeing it, and in order to see and enjoy it, he has to search for it. The poet is enamored of something he does not possess, and as he does not have it, he has to attract it. Kierkegaard quotes Schelling’s idea that anxiety first and foremost describes the suffering of God before he set out to create….He is also correct when he affirms a few lines later that these ideas are anthropomorphic. This anxiety of the creator can therefore be seen as something which belongs only to Man. The strange thing, however, is that Kierkegaard is not drawn to an analysis of what the creative anxiety of poets means.42

For Zambrano, the poet’s anxiety is filled with love, and this love leads him to the creation of the poetic object, which is then received as a blessing rather than a product of his will. In contrast, the philosopher’s anxiety is filled with the “will to power.” This means that in philosophy, the anxious man emerges from the originary Ibid., p. 93. Ibid., p. 93. 41 Ibid., p. 94. 42 Ibid., p. 95. 39 40

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dream in which he has spent nearly of all his life in direct proportion to his capacity to will and convince himself that he has the ability to create. For Zambrano, this is the point at which the paths of poetry and philosophy separate, and she criticizes Kierkegaard for failing to see this form of love that poetic creation reveals as part of the experience of anxiety. This criticism would be tempered in later years when she returns to him after reading Unamuno. Her identification of Kierkegaard as a philosopher as opposed to a poet would then waver, and in its place she would endeavor to focus on the struggle of Christianity to make itself heard in his works. C. Philosophy, Poetry, and Christianity In a text from 1940 dedicated to Unamuno,43 Zambrano compared his vocation with that of Kierkegaard, with regard to their shared aim of thinking about the “tragedy of Christianity.” What distinguishes them, according to this text, is that for Unamuno the drama is that of “religion and politics,”44 while Kierkegaard’s drama is that of “philosophy, poetry and religion.” Zambrano describes Kierkegaard’s view of the conflict as follows: Kierkegaard felt within himself the gift of poetry and the ambition of philosophy, which is a drama in itself. However, he also possessed another gift, that of Christianity, which both fed on the others and denied them. His struggle was far more delicate, complex and difficult than that of Unamuno. What is more, it was both more ancient and more modern. It is a repetition, within the tenets of Christianity itself, of the drama in the Garden of Eden when the gullible Adam was tempted by the wily serpent with the desire for knowledge. “You shall be as the gods are.” But how? The philosopher says: through yourself. The poet would wait without making a decision. The Christian, who cannot even harbor such a thought, can only wait for the divine word to descend upon his mortal heart. Kierkegaard struggled with these three attitudes: the ambition of philosophy, the poet’s indecision and the seed of Christianity, which “God sows in the weakness of human nature.” Kierkegaard was aware of all of this because he was, first and foremost, his conscience. His anxiety springs from this. The anxiety of feeling the opposite of power, anxiety above all else in the empty spaces left by divine grace. With so many potential beings within him, he felt the emptiness, the meaninglessness of all of them. The only one that could confer on him the gift of being, would not show itself fully.45

Zambrano highlights the principal aspects of Kierkegaard’s work that interested her in this lengthy character study: the idea of original anxiety, his status as one of the “living dead” or a “subterranean man” whom she would define in The Confession as the type of life that contains many “potential existences” but which do not ever become real, and finally the fact that Kierkegaard personified the struggle between philosophy, poetry, and religion. Despite her evaluation of Kierkegaard as a philosopher-poet in Philosophy and Poetry, her later works, based on her reading of María Zambrano, “Sobre Unamuno,” in Nuestra España (Havana), January 1940, no. 4, pp. 21–7. In Zambrano, Unamuno, pp. 151–6. 44 Zambrano, Unamuno, p. 156. 45 Ibid., pp. 154–5. 43

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The Concept of Anxiety, reflect the idea that his attitude was that of a philosopher. In this text, Zambrano sharpens her focus and examines the complexity of the conflict that Kierkegaard represents in his life and work. On the one hand, Kierkegaard is undoubtedly a philosopher, as Zambrano sensed when she read The Concept of Anxiety. Yet Kierkegaard possesses poetic gifts that he is unable to conceal, and which feature prominently in his writings. However, Zambrano recognized his religious vocation as the deepest of his characteristics, and it was this that gave direction to his poetic talent and philosophy. She also realized that this religious urge in Kierkegaard would not allow him to enjoy the peace and serenity that his Christianity should have brought, as happened also to Unamuno. He found instead that his commitment to Christianity, the need to be a “new man” went beyond the limits of Christian morality. The defining characteristic of the Kierkegaardian attitude in the face of this commitment was that “For this Danish thinker and poet, the ‘new man’ must be born in the ancient crucible of philosophy and, worse still, in the immense territory of poetry.”46 Zambrano felt that the religious element took priority in the task that Kierkegaard set himself in his writings. The real problem that Kierkegaard set himself was that of “becoming a Christian.” His insistence that this task should be undertaken on the basis of philosophy and poetry made his attempt to tackle this issue specifically his own. III. Life and Truth As we have seen, Zambrano recognized Kierkegaard’s rejection of the excess of abstraction that is an essential aspect of modernity, and expressed her sense that she was continuing this conflict. She adopted Kierkegaard’s principle that life and truth must be made to coincide. Faced with an abstract reason that turned away from life, and the lives of individuals, or as Kierkegaard called them, “existing individuals,” Zambrano adopted Kierkegaard’s request that one must “think our existence,” which is to say that one must make truth and life coincide in some way or other. Zambrano formulated it as follows: The drama of modern culture is due to the lack of contact between truth, reason and life. Because life is, above anything else, distraction and confusion. When it stands before the pure truth it feels humiliated. Yet all rational, universal, pure truth must favor life, and it must be loved in return.47

Any call for a thought system that can embrace life in its fullness requires the presence of a rationalism that can merge gently into the other discursive areas that border it. This is what makes it possible to read Zambrano and Kierkegaard from the three perspectives that their work allows: the philosophical, poetic, and religious. Like Kierkegaard, the philosophy of Maria Zambrano has its roots in these three discursive forms, which correspond to the three attitudes towards life. The idea that the truth must transform our lives, and that the truth cannot be merely Ibid., p. 154. Zambrano, La confesión, género literario, p. 5.

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an objective fact is something that both Zambrano and Kierkegaard make clear in their works. Zambrano would surely have subscribed to the sentence in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript which says that “To objective reflection, truth becomes something objective, an object, and the point is to disregard the subject. To subjective reflection, truth becomes appropriation; inwardness, subjectivity, and the point is to immerse oneself, existing, in subjectivity.”48 The difference between them, however, arises from Zambrano’s high consideration of poetry as opposed to philosophy and religion. This is the explanation for the term “poetic reason” which she coined in her writings. As we have already seen, at first Zambrano criticized Kierkegaard for favoring philosophy in The Concept of Anxiety. While she shared with him the idea that the experience of anxiety was a required originary step in the formation of the person, or spirit, Zambrano seems to think that Kierkegaard does not take the “creative anxiety” of poets and its relation with love into account. This criticism of Kierkegaard may well have been based on a limited knowledge of Kierkegaard’s body of work. Maria Zambrano was surely unaware of Works of Love, a text in which Kierkegaard compares the poetic and the Christian concepts of love, and, instead of choosing the side of “power” and “fear” as Zambrano seems to expect, he chooses love. This is a point on which the thoughts of both authors are in agreement to a greater extent than Zambrano could have known or realized. The fact that she changed her view of Kierkegaard in her article on Unamuno, in which she examined the triple source (religion, philosophy and poetry) that feeds the philosophy of Kierkegaard, indicates that the reasoning behind both attempts to harmonize life and truth were in fact very closely related.



48

SKS 7, 176 / CUP1, 192.

Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Zambrano’s Corpus Filosofía y Poesía, Morelia (Mexico): Publicaciones de la Universidad Michoacana 1939. (Revised and expanded edition, Madrid: FCE 1987, pp. 80–97.) “Sobre Unamuno,” in Nuestra España (Havana), January 1940, no. 4, pp. 21–7. (Reprinted in Unamuno, ed. by Mercedes Gómez Blesa, Barcelona: MondadoriDebate 2003, pp. 151–6). La confesión, género literario, Mexico: Luminar 1943, pp. 61–3. El hombre y lo divino, Madrid: FCE 1955. (Revised and expanded edition, Madrid: FCE 1973, p. 176.) “Nota introductoria a la edición de 1986,” in Hacia un saber sobre el alma, Madrid: Alianza 1987, pp. 12–13. II. Sources of Zambrano’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Grimault, Marguerite, Kierkegaard par lui-même, París: du Seuil 1962. Kierkegaard, Søren, El concepto de angustia, trans. by José Gaos, Madrid: Revista de Occidente 1930. — Antígona, trans. by Gil Albert, Mexico City: Séneca 1942. — Aut-aut, ed. by Remo Cantoni, 3rd ed., trans. by Kirsten Montanari Guldbrandsen and Remo Cantoni, Milan: M.A. Denti 1946. — Crainte et tremblement, trans. by Paul-Henry Tisseau, introduction by Jean Wahl, Paris: Aubier Montaigne 1946. — Les miettes philosophiques, trans. by Paul Petit, Paris: Du Livre 1947. — Diario I, ed. by Cornelio Fabro, Brescia: Morcelliana 1948. — Etapes sur le chemin de la vie, trans. by François Prior and Marie-Henriette Guignot, Paris: Gallimard 1948. Ortega y Gasset, José, La idea de principio en Leibniz, Buenos Aires: Revista Occidente 1958, pp. 364–74. — Idea del teatro, Madrid: Revista Occidente 1958, pp. 49–52. Unamuno, Miguel de, “Ibsen y Kierkegaard” in Los lunes de El Imparcial, Madrid, 25 March 1907, pp. 3–4. — El sentimiento trágico de la vida en los hombres y en los pueblos, Madrid: Renacimiento 1913, p. 7; p. 22, pp. 111–13; pp. 117–18; p. 124; p. 154; pp. 176–7; p. 197; p. 253; p. 280; p. 318. Wahl, Jean, Études kierkegaardiens (Suivi d’extraits du Journal de Kierkegaard, 1834–1839 et 1849–1854), Paris: Aubier 1938.

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III. Secondary Literature on Zambrano’s Relation to Kierkegaard Llevadot, Laura, “Kierkegaard y Zambrano: la ética de la escritura,” in Kierkegaard and Great Philosophers. Acta Kierkegaardiana, vol. 2, Mexico City et alii: Sociedad Iberoamericana de estudios kierkegaardianos 2007, pp. 213–28 (reprinted in Aurora. Papeles del seminario María Zambrano, Barcelona: University of Barcelona 2008, pp. 26–36).

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Part II Central and Eastern Europe

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Mikhail Bakhtin: Direct and Indirect Reception of Kierkegaard in Works of the Russian Thinker Tatiana Shchyttsova

Kierkegaard and Bakhtin: for a Western reader who still knows Bakhtin (1895–1975) primarily as a theorist of the text, a literary critic, and dialogist1 this “and ” may seem unexpected or far-fetched. Actually, from what perspectives is it possible to think of—to compare—on the one hand, the existential thinker passionately concerned with inwardness as the truth and, on the other hand, the author, whose recognition in the West began after he (thanks to Julia Kristeva) had been accepted and began to be promoted in circles of structural-semiotics? I have already had occasion to write that this “promotion” was quite a remarkable case of misinterpretation,2 the reason for which was the absence of translations of Bakhtin’s early philosophical works into other languages and primarily his first philosophical treatise Toward a Philosophy of the Act. This text, which was written sometime between 1920 and 1924, remained unfinished and was only published in 1986.3 The ideas stated there allow one to look at Bakhtin’s so versatile heritage in a new light and to see in his works, which might seem absolutely unrelated, the realization of one and the same conceptual idea, the key concept of which was that of event.4 The English translation of this book appeared only in 19935 when the tradition of Western Bakhtinology had already been formed. With the publication of this book it became obvious that essential 1 See, for example, Tzvetan Тоdоrоv, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, trans. by Wlad Godzich, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1984; Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World, London and New York: Routledge 1990. 2 Tatiana Shchyttsova, “Ereignis und Differenz. Einführung in die Philosophie Bachtins” in Ereignis und Affektivität. Zur Phänomenologie des sich bildenden Sinnes, ed. by Michael Staudigl and Juergen Trinks, Vienna: Turia und Kant 2006, pp. 71–84. 3 К философии поступка [Toward a Philosophy of the Act], in Философия и социология науки и техники [Philosophy and Sociology of Science and Technique], Moscow: Nauka 1986, pp. 80–160. 4 Regarding this, see my monograph: Татьяна Валерьевна Щитцова, [Tatiana Valerievna Shchyttsova], Событие в философии Бахтина [Event in the Philosophy of Bakhtin], Minsk: Logvinov 2002. 5 Mikhail Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, trans. by V. Liapunov, University of Texas Press 1993.

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revision of the accepted (one-sided) estimations of Bakhtin’s works was required. It is no surprise that this problem still remains topical: in order to see “the other Bakhtin” it is necessary to overcome the inertia of his own achievements as well as the misunderstandings in the already proposed (even “textbook”6) interpretations and statements of the Russian thinker’s heritage. “The other Bakhtin” is a thinker, whose name, according to Paul de Man’s remark, can be considered along with the names of Husserl, Heidegger or Levinas,7 a thinker whose spiritual evolution began with such a “conjunction” (with such an “and”) as “Bakhtin and Kierkegaard.” We know from the conversations of the literary critic Viktor Duvakin (1909–82) with Bakhtin that the Russian philosopher became acquainted with Kierkegaard’s heritage quite early in Odessa, where Bakhtin lived and studied from 1912 until 1916.8 The same conversations inform us that in Odessa Bakhtin received his first book by Kierkegaard as a gift and then bought Kierkegaard’s collected works in German. Unfortunately the conversations do not contain any information about which works of the Danish thinker Bakhtin owned and in what sequence he read them. It is only possible to quote Bakhtin’s laconic remark: “I became acquainted with Kierkegaard quite early, earlier than anyone else in Russia.”9 Since the aim of this article consists in revealing the degree and nature of Kierkegaard’s influence on Bakhtin, it is necessary to recognize at once that research of this kind will inevitably be an interpretation rather than a statement. This is due to the fact that Bakhtin does not articulate his own interpretation of Kierkegaard’s works, and one can find only a very few references to the Danish thinker in which Kierkegaard’s peculiar strategy of authorship is marked. Had Bakhtin not admitted his early great interest in Kierkegaard, it probably would never have occurred to anyone to study his philosophical heritage through the prism of the question about “Kierkegaard’s reception in Russia.” This assumption is supported by the fact that none of the historical-philosophical research could bring itself to name Bakhtin “a Russian existentialist” (as happened, for example, to Lev Shestov (1866–1938)).10 And still, as will be shown below, this refusal to belong to the camp of “existential philosophers” does not cancel the profound continuity between Kierkegaard and Bakhtin. The main thesis which I will try to prove in this article can be formulated as For a “representative” edition see Bakhtinian Thought: An Introductory Reader, ed. by Simon Deutith, London and New York: Routledge 1995. 7 Paul de Man, “Dialogue and Dialogism,” Poetics Today, vol. 4, no. 1, 1985, p. 103. 8 Беседы В.Д. Дувакина с М.М. Бахтиным [Conversations of V.D. Duvakin with M.M. Bakhtin], Moscow: Progress 1996, p. 36. 9 Ibid. 10 In the context of this article it is interesting to mention the well-known event from Shestov’s life. When at the end of the 1920s he, having plunged into German philosophical milieu, discovered Kierkegaard for himself, this discovery was accompanied by the following confession: “the name of Kierkegaard is completely unknown in Russia.” See Наталья Львовна Баранова-Шестова [Natalja Lvovna Baranova-Shestova], Жизнь Льва Шестова [The Life of Lev Shestov], vols. 1–2, Paris: La Presse Libre 1983, vol. 2, p. 12. By that time Bakhtin had already written his main philosophical works marked by considerable influence of Kierkegaard. 6

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follows: it is because Bakhtin cannot be named an existentialist that his reception of Kierkegaard reveals the opportunity to make the Danish thinker’s heritage relevant in the modern world. I. Traces of Kierkegaard’s Influence in Bakhtin’s Early Philosophical Works When one speaks of Bakhtin’s early philosophical works three texts are meant: (1) his first printed work “Art and Responsibility” (published in 1919),11 written in the form of a philosophical manifesto; (2) his unfinished treatise Toward a Philosophy of the Act and (3) his solid systematic (but also unfinished) work Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity (written between 1920 and 1926 and first published in 1979).12 Based on the textual analysis it is possible to state with certainty that the writing of these works was preceded by the acquaintance with two key Kierkegaardian works: Either/Or and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. In Bakhtin’s reflections it is possible to trace at least four interrelated thematic lines which testify to his active creative mastering and development of the Danish thinker’s ideas. They are (1) an antisubstantialist interpretation of human beings; (2) a diagnosis of a cultural crisis and subsequent criticism of abstract thinking; (3) a formation of the way of thinking that overcomes the traditional division into “theoretical” and “practical”; and (4) giving quasi-ontological status to ethics and defining an “unethical” way of existence in terms of aestheticism. Let us pause briefly with the fixed issues. A. Antisubstantialist Interpretation of Human Beings It would be good to begin with Bakhtin’s terminological innovation. Unlike a great number of famous Western philosophers of the twentieth century, who under the influence of Kierkegaard made the concept of existence the central concept of their doctrines, Bakhtin does not transfer this Latin loan-word to his philosophical program but searches for the possibilities of a new conceptualization of the way of being human that are organic to the Russian language. Bakhtin clearly shares Kierkegaard’s two initial philosophical principles, finding at the same time other concepts for their articulation. The first principle is the irreducible character of the singularity of the human being. Just as Kierkegaard focuses on reflections about a single existing individual, Bakhtin’s thought concentrates on “the fact of my unique being,” “the fact of my unique actual joining to being.”13 The second principle is the 11 Михаил Михайлович Бахтин [Mikhail Mikhailovitsh Bakhtin], “Исскуство и ответственность” [Art and Responsibility], in День искусства [The Day of Art], Nevel 1919 (September 13), pp. 3–4. 12 Михаил Михайлович Бахтин [Mikhail Mikhailovitsh Bakhtin], Автор и герой в эстетической деятельности [Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity], in Эстетика словесного творчества [Aesthetics of Philological Creativity], Moscow: Iskusstvo 1979, pp. 7–180. 13 Михаил Михайлович Бахтин [Mikhail Mikhailovitsh Bakhtin], К философии поступка [Toward a Philosophy of the Act], in Работы 1920-ых годов [Works of the 1920s], Kiev: Next 1994, p. 17.

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open, unpredetermined nature of the human being. When one joins the two principles, it is possible to say that Bakhtin, following Kierkegaard, turns to the concrete facticity of the human being in its becoming. The fact that human existence (Existents) has the nature of open fulfillment is fixed by Bakhtin in the concept around which his whole work is formed: the concept of event (or event of Being). This concept is not a synonym for Kierkegaardian Existents. Being relevant to some basic characteristics of the Existents experience, it simultaneously introduces essentially new conceptual contents, according to which I can speak about “my unified and unique event of being” only in the context of “the event that connects us,” that is, in the context of the event of being which “happens through me and the others.”14 This social-ontological dimension of Bakhtin’s thought, which is crucial for his entire philosophical program, can probably serve as an excuse for his briefness toward Kierkegaard. However, the very fact of integration of Kierkegaardian ideas into this new philosophical project deserves attention and certainly additional analysis, which is not the purpose of this article. I would like only to mention the temporal interpretation of the event nature of the human being, proposed by Bakhtin in the work Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity (see specifically the chapter “Time Integrity of the Hero”). Explaining the temporal sense of “my unified and unique event of being,” Bakhtin consistently develops the thesis about a priority of the future in a person’s selfdetermination,15 which is well known from Kierkegaard’s existential philosophy. The concept of “the absolute meaningful future,”16 introduced thereupon by Bakhtin, is of interest first of all as a secularized version of that temporal structure of existing, which in Kierkegaard characterized the existence of a Christian. One more antisubstantialist concept of Bakhtin, where Kierkegaard’s influence can be traced, is the concept of giveness-as-a-task (zadannost’ —заданность) and namely—the idea of the dialectical unity of giveness and giveness-as-a-task in the structure of human existence. “My uniqueness is given,” Bakhtin writes, “but at the same time is only so far as it is carried out by me as uniqueness, it is always in the act, in the deed, i.e., is given-as-a-task.”17 These words can be considered as a philosophical reformulation of Kierkegaard’s famous reflections about the dialectics of the act of choice in Either/Or: This self that he chooses in this way is infinitely concrete, for it is he himself, and yet it is absolutely different from his former self, for he has chosen it absolutely. This self has not existed before, because it came into existence through the choice, and yet it has existed, for it was indeed “himself.” The choice here makes two dialectical movements simultaneously—that which is chosen does not exist and comes into existence through the choice—and that which is chosen exists; otherwise it was not a choice.18

Hence Kierkegaard’s theme of the choice of oneself as the ethical task which each individual faces is reformulated by Bakhtin in the framework of his general plan Ibid., p. 20. Ibid., pp. 182ff. 16 Ibid., p. 206. 17 Ibid., p. 42. 18 SKS 2, 207 / EO1, 215. 14 15

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of prima philosophia as the philosophy of event and appears here in the form of dialectics of giveness and giveness-as-a-task, which is a necessary structural principle of the event nature of human beings. B. The Diagnostics of the Cultural Crisis and the Subsequent Criticism of Abstract Thinking Bakhtin inherits an absolutely certain disposition of thought from Kierkegaard, namely, the existential thinker’s critical reference to the “spirit of the age.” The sensitive diagnosis of his epoch which we find in the Postscript and A Literary Review of Two Аges reveals the essential interrelation between the prevailing philosophical discourse (promoting the truth of the universal) and the dissolution of all en masse, supported by the rising mass media (the press). “The age and human beings become less and less actual,”19 writes Kierkegaard, connecting the peculiar immorality of the epoch with the fact that people evade the work of individuation, the existential interest in their own actuality. Kierkegaard’s critical diagnosis is rooted in the existential question about the capability to be a single individual (den Enkelte). It is this approach, based on the philosophical rehabilitation of the singular and the radical revision of the question of the relation between the general and the individual, that becomes crucial for Bakhtin. In a historical and philosophical respect it is remarkable that in their criticism of abstract thinking Kierkegaard and Bakhtin take aim at different opponents: for the former it is Hegel’s speculative philosophy, for the latter—it is German (primarily, Marburg) neo-Kantianism. Bakhtin’s first two philosophical works are written in the spirit of a fundamental objection to “theoretism”20 of the modern time, the contemporary representative of which for Bakhtin was neo-Kantianism. In complete harmony with Kierkegaard, the Russian scholar persistently carries out the thought that the fatal mistake of theoretical philosophy is the “derivation from oneself, a unique one”21 and operating with the concept of being in respect of which Bakhtin notes: “if it were the only concept of being, I would not exist.”22 These reflections, in which the necessity of the renewal of the question of being is outlined in connection with the discovery (rehabilitation) of the singular nature of the human being, are a loose paraphrase of Kierkegaard’s existential-ontological reasoning: “But to be an individual human being is not a pure idea-existence either. Only humanity in general exists in this way, that is, does not exist. Existence is always the particular; the abstract does not exist.”23 Bakhtin defines the modern crisis as the “crisis of act,”24 keeping in mind that as a result of a digression from oneself as from an actual participant in the SKS 7, 291 / CUP1, 319. Бахтин [Bakhtin], К философии поступка [Toward a Philosophy of the Act], in Работы 1920-ых годов [Works of the 1920s], p. 27; p. 31. 21 Ibid., p. 31. 22 Ibid., p. 17. 23 SKS 7, 301 / CUP1, 220. 24 Бахтин [Bakhtin], К философии поступка [Toward a Philosophy of the Act], in Работы 1920-ых годов [Works of the 1920s], p. 52. 19 20

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historical reality there formed a split, fatal for culture, between the sense (contents) of activity (established in abstract contemplation) and the historical actuality of the corresponding act.25 Constant terminological variations in Bakhtin with the use of such notions, which are close in meaning, such as act, deed, or activity, are, in my opinion, the reflection of the interesting process of mastering and transmitting the semantics of Kierkegaard’s concept of Handling (in German, Handlung) into the other language. At the same time the priority which the word postupok [поступок] (usually translated as act) receives in Bakhtin is to be predicted, for in Russian only it accents the specific ethical nature of an action carried-out (be it a thought, an experience, a gesture, or an action directed outwardly). The possibility of overcoming the situation of crisis, both for Kierkegaard and for Bakhtin, lies, thus, in implanting “objective contents” in the individual’s own (existential) actuality. In his short programmatic work “Art and Responsibility,” Bakhtin formulates this task demanded by the time in the following way: “Three spheres of human culture— science, art and life—should find unity in the unity of my responsibility.”26 C. A New Way of Thinking to Overcome the Traditional Division of the “Theoretical” and the “Practical” The disposition of thought mentioned above was revolutionary for philosophy because it opened a new dimension of philosophical reflection which exceeded the limits of the traditional division into the theoretical and the practical. The Kierkegaardian definition of existential thinking in terms of passion and interest (interest in one’s own unique actuality) presupposed such a unity of the performative and the narrative (or act and product, as Bakhtin used to say) that it gave to thinking an unreduced practical sense. Bakhtin picks up and radicalizes with enthusiasm the practical turn in philosophy that was started by Kierkegaard. Again we will not find direct borrowings of Kierkegaard’s notions in the Russian philosopher, but only a quite distinct correlation with them. Thus following Kierkegaard’s passionate thinking, Bakhtin speaks about “emotionally-willed understanding of being as an event in concrete uniqueness.”27 We will emphasize again that the direct transference of Kierkegaard’s terms into his texts was impossible for Bakhtin because he developed his own philosophical conception, which was different in its purposes from Kierkegaard’s intellectual efforts. Bakhtin’s conception of prima philosophia as the moral philosophy presupposed considering the fundamental responsibility to the Other in the “unique event connecting us.”28 The impossibility of indifferent thinking was proved by the fact that the person in his singularity/singleness—or as Bakhtin says, proceeding from his “unique place in being”29—participates in the historically occuring event of his relation with the Other. In this context Bakhtin, acquiring and re-thinking Kierkegaard’s “passion” and “interest,” proposes his Ibid., p. 24. Ibid., pp. 7–8. 27 Ibid., p. 45. 28 Ibid., p. 23 29 Ibid., p. 22; p. 42. 25 26

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definition for a philosophy, which does not want to lose its fundamental practical relevance: participative thinking [участное мышление]. Bakhtin also calls it acting thinking. To think in a participative way means “not to separate the act from its product, but to relate them and to try to define them as indivisible in a unified and unique context of life.”30 Thus, it is a question of the thinking, the contents of which are defined by personal (responsible) participation of a thinking person in a certain historical reality. The theoretical consciousness built on digression from the individual participation (from the place in being) is interpreted by Bakhtin as unincarnated. (I mention this concept because it contains express evidence of that direction in which the reconsideration of Christian dogma, so significant for Kierkegaard, takes shape in Bakhtin.)31 D. Ethical and Aesthetic Ways of Existence “The only actuality there is for an existing person is his own ethical actuality.” Kierkegaard32

The thesis from the Postscript quoted in the epigraph here is the starting point both for Kierkegaard and Bakhtin. In the treatise Toward a Philosophy of the Act we find repeated variations of notions and phrases, including such terms as “actuality/ actual” and “uniqueness/unique,” which testify quite eloquently to an intensive reading of Kierkegaard’s Postscript. In the reception of the Danish thinker’s ideas Bakhtin becomes a consistent and rather productive conductor of the fundamental ethisation of human being and thinking, which is for him the sense of the practical turn. The conceptual shift that occurs in Bakhtin’s philosophy has already been mentioned above: his thought is concentrated not on subjectivity and inward truth but on participation in the historical fulfillment of that world where the person lives. In this respect the concept of responsibility appears in Kierkegaard and Bakhtin in different aspects: in the first case, it is the responsibility adhered to in the act of choice due to which responsibility in the strict sense becomes possible; in the second case, responsibility is initially referred to the Other (or the others) with whom a person shares his or her world as the world of the act. Since the relation I–the other defines the structure (or as Bakhtin says, architectonics) of the world of the act, Bakhtin reveals the register of responsibility, which is valid (before any reflections and statements) owing to the reference to the Other as to the irreducible givenness of actual life. Bakhtin fixes the fundamental ethical sense of this reference in the concept of my non-alibi in being.33 I will risk assuming that this concept of Bakhtin is the result of a reconsideration of Kierkegaard’s concept of total guilt considered in the Postscript. In Kierkegaard, the absolute transcendence, in relation to which the consciousness of total guilt is formed, is eternal pleasure: “The totality of guilt comes Ibid., pp. 24–5. Ibid., p. 23. 32 SKS 7, 288 / CUP1, 316. 33 Бахтин [Bakhtin], К философии поступка [Toward a Philosophy of the Act], in Работы 1920-ых годов [Works of the 1920s], p. 41. 30 31

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into existence for the individual by joining his guilt, be it just one, be it utterly trivial, together with the relation to an eternal happiness….The person who does not relate himself to this never comes to comprehend himself as totally or essentially guilty.”34 The total guilt is thus the “qualitative category,” or, in other words, a factual a priori of existence with which the “immersion (Fordybelse) in existence”35 is connected and which carries out the function of total individuation. In Bakhtin, according to the above fixed conceptual shift, the concept of my non-alibi in being is formed on the ground of reference to the Other and to the “connecting us event.”36 As the factual a priori of my existence, non-alibi in being carries out the same functions as total guilt in Kierkegaard: it introduces the dimension of bottomlessness into existence (after all, this non-alibi has no empirical beginning) and carries out individuation of human being (self) as a whole. It is possible to say that Bakhtin complicates Kierkegaard’s theme of ethical choice by introducing a passive (prereflexive) dimension of responsibility fixed in the concept of my non-alibi in being. The moment of active self-affirmation or selfdetermination (the choice of oneself, according to Kierkegaard) is interpreted by Bakhtin accordingly as a recognition (or statement) of one’s own non-alibi in being. The basic moral principle of the Bakhtinian doctrine consists, thus, in acting on the basis of such an act as recognition of one’s own non-alibi in being. Inheriting and rethinking the Kierkegaardian theme of ethical choice, Bakhtin picks up and develops the basic critical motif of the ethical existential reflections of the Danish thinker, namely, the dissatisfaction with the formal foundation of ethics in Kant.37 Michael Holquist characterizes the treatise Toward a Philosophy of the Act as an attempt at a detranscendentalization of Kant.38 There is no doubt that the origins of this attempt go back to Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. One of the most obvious traces of Kierkegaard’s influence on the works of the Russian philosopher is the Bakhtinian interpretation of a “non-ethical” way of being in terms of aestheticism. In full conformity with the formula “either/or” Bakhtin distinguishes two ways of being: one is based on the recognition of one’s own nonalibi in being; the second, on a silent assumption of one’s own alibi, or evasion of the recognition of responsible participation in actual historical life. The possibility of existing separately from the “ontological roots of personal participativeness” Bakhtin names the “temptation of aestheticism,”39 adhering in the description of this way of life to the known characterization given (in Either/Or) by Judge William to his respondent, the aesthete: “you are a nonentity and are something only in relation to others, and what you are you are only through this relation.”40 The lack SKS 7, 480–1 / CUP1, 529. SKS 7, 481 / CUP1, 529–30. 36 Бахтин [Bakhtin], К философии поступка [Toward a Philosophy of the Act], in Работы 1920-ых годов [Works of the 1920s], p. 23. 37 Ibid., p. 14; p. 25; pp. 28–31; p. 34. 38 See his Foreword to Bakhtin’s К философии поступка [Toward a Philosophy of the Act], p. IX. 39 Бахтин [Bakhtin], К философии поступка [Toward a Philosophy of the Act], in Работы 1920-ых годов [Works of the 1920s], p. 24. 40 SKS 3, 157 / EO2, 159. 34 35

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of actuality of aesthetic life (you are a nonentity) finds in Bakhtin the expression in such definitions as a mask41 (lichina) (contrary to the person—lichnost) [личина— личность], impostor, the double, the being of a lie, or the lie of being. The absence of ethical independence (what you are you are only through a relation to others) is interpreted by him in terms of representation and naked rituality: “Trying to understand our whole life as a concealed representation and our every act as ritual, we become impostors.”42 After Kierkegaard, Bakhtin concentrates his attention on the conscious preference of the aesthetic form of life which, just as in the Danish philosopher,43 is understood by him as a moral sin, as “the Fall immanent to being.”44 II. The Idea of “Responsive Subjectivity” in Kierkegaard’s and Bakhtin’s Works “Objectivity is believed to be superior to subjectivity, but it is just the opposite; that is to say, an objectivity which is within a corresponding subjectivity is the finale. The system was an inhuman something to which no human being could correspond as author and executer.” Kierkegaard45 “…the unified truth demands plurality of consciousnesses…it is essentially not embeddable in the limits of one consciousness…it is…inventive by nature and is born at the point of contact of different consciousnesses.” Bakhtin46

In the introduction to this article it has been noted that the Bakhtinian reception of Kierkegaard entails the possibility of making the Danish thinker’s heritage relevant in the modern world. This assumption presupposes that there is a certain basic cohesion between these thinkers, which cannot be reduced to the examples of Kierkegaard’s direct influence on Bakhtin fixed in the first section. In other words, the question about reception has a more complicated character than has been presented before. This complication is quite predictable if one takes into consideration that Kierkegaard devoted his entire life to exercises in the art of indirect communication. The crucial moment connecting these thinkers is, in my opinion, the idea of “responsive subjectivity.” Reflexive elaboration and the implementation of this idea make Kierkegaard and Bakhtin accomplices of a communicative turn, which is based Cf. “Din Maske er den gaadefuldeste af alle.” Ibid. Бахтин [Bakhtin], Работы 1920-ых годов [Works of the 1920s], p. 50. 43 Compare SKS 3, 165 / EO2, 168: “…for the person who lives esthetically does not choose, and the person who chooses the esthetic after the ethical has become manifest to him is not living esthetically, for he is sinning and is subject to ethical qualifications, even if his life must be termed unethical.” 44 Бахтин [Bakhtin], Автор и герой в эстетической деятельности [Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity], in Работы 1920-ых годов [Works of the 1920s], p. 187. 45 SKS 21, 293, NB10:68 / JP 6, 6360. 46 Михаил Михайлович Бахтин [Mikhail Mikhailovitsch Bakhtin], Проблемы творчества/поэтики Достоевского [Problems of Dostoevsky’s Work/Poetics], Kiev: Next 1994, p. 287. 41 42

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on a critical reconsideration of the idea of transcendental subjectivity and defines all key philosophical discussions of the present. The intriguing thing about the situation is that while sharing this idea, Kierkegaard and Bakhtin put it into practice in different ways, pursuing different strategic aims. In this connection it will be shown below that Kierkegaard’s activity as a “subjective thinker,” his maieutic approach itself, is a practical implication of Bakhtin’s philosophical concept; and vice versa, Bakhtin’s prima philosophia is a theoretical (more precisely, quasi-theoretical) implication of Kierkegaard’s works. Thus, we will consider the philosophical work of these authors not diachronically (historically-philosophically) but synchronically. In such synchronization I see a new possibility to make Kierkegaard and Bakhtin relevant again today.47 I will underline that the planned line of the analysis is supported by the corresponding references to Kierkegaard in Bakhtin’s work. The nature of these references is such that Bakhtin’s elaboration of the idea of “responsive subjectivity” can be understood as an example of “indirect reception/communication.” The reference (or “indirect indication”) is contained in the work Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity. What is meant is the general understanding of Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky as authors from the point of view of their relation to the “hero.”48 I will remind the reader that in this work Bakhtin considers a certain model of aesthetic activity, namely, the objectivizing one. This model receives its definition in connection with how the position of exteriority is realized in it: the author objectivizes his hero and as a result the latter appears as a complete aesthetic object. According to Bakhtin, Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky drop out of this model: their relation to the hero is classified as the following: “the hero seizes the author.”49 In other words, it means that the nature of their attitude to the hero is not compatible with the transformation of the latter into a complete aesthetic object; in other words, the authors Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky act in such a way that the question about who their hero is always remains open. The cited “prompt” has a continuation: when Bakhtin starts to describe the other model of aesthetic activity—a model in which the position of exteriority is realized not in the experience of objectivization but in the experience of dialogical addressing—it is Dostoevsky who serves as the example (this is how the theory of the polyphonic novel appeared, which brought world fame to Bakhtin).50 Bakhtin finds in Dostoevsky’s works, so to speak, an artistic execution of his own philosophical conception, which he defines as “the teaching about the unified and The extended attempt of such reactualization was made by me in the book: Memento nasci: Сообщество и генеративный опыт. Штудии по экзистенциальной антропологии [Memento nasci: Community and Generativity. Studies in Existential Anthropology], Vilnius: European Humanities University 2006. 48 Бахтин [Bakhtin], Автор и герой в эстетической деятельности [Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity], in Работы 1920-ых годов [Works of the 1920s], p. 102. 49 Ibid., p. 100. 50 The book about Dostoevsky first appeared in Leningrad 1929 under the title of Проблемы творчества Достоевского [Problems of Dostoevsky’s Work], Leningrad: Priboj. In 1963 in Moscow the second and enlarged edition of this book was published under the title Проблемы поэтики Достоевского [Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics], Moscow: Sovetsky Pisatel. 47

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unique being-event.”51 Thus it is a question of the isomorphism of the philosophical vision of Bakhtin and the vision of the art of Dostoevsky: both (by different means) show actual life as an event or dialogical (polyphonic) fulfillment. In the same book Bakhtin, trying to trace the historical background of the polyphonic novel, mentions such genres as the Socratic dialogues. “Behind this genre,” Bakhtin remarks, “there is the idea about the dialogical nature of the truth….The dialogical method of truth searching is opposed to the official monologism….The truth…is born between people…in the process of their dialogical communication.”52 Thanks to this address to Socrates’ personality and his maieutic activity, Bahktin clarifies the essence of the “amazing proximity of Kierkegaard to Dostoevsky,” which Bakhtin emphasized in his interviews with Duvakin.53 Now is there any reason to assume that the book about Dostoevsky “basically” could be the book about Kierkegaard? The answer to this question is ambiguous. On the one hand, analyzing Dostoevsky’s polyphonic novel, Bakhtin reveals features of his artistic method that fully characterize the pseudonymous works by Kierkegaard (consciousness of the hero, a dialogical position of the author in relation to the hero, the ability to think in voices,54 etc.). On the other hand, Kierkegaard’s heritage is not limited by the artistic plan itself. In contrast to Dostoevsky,55 the aim of the Danish thinker was not to portray the “depths of human soul”56 as such but to evoke the existential transformation of the reader and through him or her to transform the epoch to which he or she belongs to. In other words, initially he did not have the aesthetic (pictorial) aim but the ethical one, for the achievement of which a manyvoiced artistic world was created. It follows from this, for example, that it would not be possible to ascribe to Kierkegaard, unlike to Dostoevsky, such a feature as the absence “of any essential excess of sense” in the author in relation to the hero.57 In this article we proceed from the assumption that Kierkegaard’s essential excess of sense in respect to all his authors and heroes was the philosophical idea of a corresponding subjectivity (en tilsvarende Subjektivitet),58 defining his own author’s strategy. In connection with what has been said, I cannot agree with the basic thesis developed by Irina Popova in the article “On the Limits of Literary Theory and Бахтин [Bakhtin], К философии поступка [Toward a Philosophy of the Act], in Работы 1920-ых годов [Works of the 1920s], p. 25. 52 Бахтин [Bakhtin], Проблемы творчества/поэтики Достоевского [Problems of Dostoevsky’s Work/Poetics], p. 318. 53 Беседы В.Д. Дувакина с М.М. Бахтиным [Conversations of V.D. Duvakin with M.M. Bakhtin], p. 37. 54 Cf. Бахтин [Bakhtin], Проблемы творчества/поэтики Достоевского [Problems of Dostoevsky’s Work/Poetics], pp. 14–15; p. 31; pp. 41–2; pp. 176ff. 55 Cf. Dostoevsky about himself: “…I am just a realist in the highest sense, that is, I portray the depths of a human soul.” Бахтин [Bakhtin], Проблемы творчества/поэтики Достоевского [Problems of Dostoevsky’s Work/Poetics], p. 267. 56 See the previous footnote. 57 Бахтин [Bakhtin], Проблемы творчества/поэтики Достоевского [Problems of Dostoevsky’s Work/Poetics], p. 283. 58 SKS 21, 293, NB10:68 / JP 6, 6360. 51

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Philosophy in M.M. Bakhtin’s Works.”59 Comparing Bakhtin and Kierkegaard, Popova considers the literary form of expression in the creativity of the latter as the only way for philosophy to thematize the problematic of author and hero. She insists on the congeniality of Kierkegaard and Bakhtin just in this aspect. The latter, as Popova remarks, also addresses the analysis of literary texts (in particular, Dostoevsky’s works) to reveal in them a new dialogical paradigm. My reservation consists in the fact that this “also” can by no means be developed in one and the same dimension because Kierkegaard operates by means of the literary form, and Bakhtin writes about it. Popova’s thesis that Kierkegaard had to resort to the literary form to formulate the fundamentals of his philosophy is not quite correct. New forms of expression were necessary for Kierkegaard not in an effort to thematize a certain problematic but to achieve a certain practical effect. Thus, we come back to the purpose of this section: to clarify different ways of explication of the idea of “responsive subjectivity” in Kierkegaard and Bakhtin in their essential interrelation. In Bakhtin’s terminology the idea of “responsive subjectivity” means that I personally, that is, responsively, am involved in that being-event which historically happens “between me and the others”60 and finds expression in various cultural forms. For the philosopher, it means that he or she should integrate the contents of his or her theory into the historical actuality as to a happening event; in this way his or her thinking becomes “participative,” that is, it becomes an (ethical) act (postupok). In other words, philosophy can participate in history—in the practical transformation of the world—only having testified to its own historicity, that is, having developed its own “theory” as the answer to a certain situation. This hermeneutic circle puts an end to the self-identity of the subject, the totality in understanding of the truth and its neutrality. The key principle which breaks off with these images of the classical gnosiological paradigm is the principle of the answer. “To be” means to answer for Bakhtin (to answer from the unified and unique place in being, that is, by this answer to certify/confirm this “place”). It is caused by the polyphonic structure of eventbeing and by the factual a priori of the non-alibi. We have seen above that the responsive/participative nature of both Kierkegaard’s and Bakhtin’s creativity was proved by a critical diagnosis of the time on which all the other philosophical concepts of these thinkers were based. The unique authorial strategy of Kierkegaard can be considered a courageous radicalization of the practical turn in philosophy discussed in section I and simultaneously a “strong” practical implication of Bakhtin’s philosophy of event. The practical sense of his work can be defined as an existential rehabilitation of the present, that is, epoch 59 Ирина Попова [Irina Popova], “О границах литературоведения и философии в работах Бахтина” [On the Limits of Literary Theory and Philosophy in Bakhtin’ Works], in Русская теория. Материалы 10-х Лотмановских чтений [The Russian Theory: Proceedings of the 10th Lotman Readings], ed. by Сергей Зенкин [Sergej Zenkin], Моscow: RGGU 2004, pp. 103–14. 60 Бахтин [Bakhtin], Автор и герой в эстетической деятельности [Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity], in Работы 1920-ых годов [Works of the 1920s], p. 91. See also Bakhtin’s materials to the second edition of his book on Dostoevsky where he uses the notion “responsive activity”: Бахтин [Bakhtin], Проблемы творчества/поэтики Достоевского [Problems of Dostoevsky’s Work/Poetics], p. 185.

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transformation through existential transformation of separate individuals. The essence of this transformation consists in the restoration of the capability (of the reader) to become a self or to gain self-determination in a certain historical situation. It is a question of some kind of therapy. I will cite the passage already quoted above, “The age and human beings become less and less actual”;61 proceeding from this diagnosis Kierkegaard initiates a private therapeutic practice—the practice of existential (ethical) communication. Philosophy acts here as a communicative (imp) act, that is, not as the announcement of knowledge but as the leading to a certain sort of capability—the capability to be a self, that is, the capability not to identify oneself uncritically with customs and traditions (with Zeitgeist), the capability of responsible self-determination in the present. The idea of responsive subjectivity lies thus at the base of the authorial method of Kierkegaard (the maieutic method or the method of indirect communication), which he practiced in order to rehabilitate the addressee. If Bakhtin thematized this idea, that is, if he made it a subject of philosophical conceptualization, then Kierkegaard showed that it can define the mode of the thinker’s work itself: after all, maieutics is the ability to respond properly to a certain practical problem that appears in the given context of event-being. By way of summary, it is possible to say that Bakhtin’s philosophy of event is implied by Kierkegaard’s practice of responsive subjectivity to the same degree to which it is implied by the idea of the polyphonic novel. We saw that Bakhtin distinguished and fixed (though indirectly) the conceptual affinity of his philosophical program and the nature of the author’s strategy of Kierkegaard. The principle of the complementarity of these thinkers as adherents of the idea of “responsive subjectivity” seems topical. Here opens an interesting field for discussion of the question of what kind of philosophy is not only possible today but also necessary.62

SKS 7, 291 / CUP1, 319. It is not difficult to notice that the noted principle of complementarity of Kierkegaard’s and Bakhtin’s approaches rejects as too schematic the suggestion by Rorty of a division of philosophy into systematic and edifying. 61 62

Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Bakhtin’s Corpus “Исскуство и ответственность” [Art and Responsibility], “Исскуство и ответственность” [Art and Responsibility], in День искусства [The Day of Art], September 13, 1919, pp. 3–4 (published also in Бахтин, Михаил Михайлович [Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovitsch], Работы 1920-ых годов [Works of the 1920s], Kiev: “Next” 1994, pp. 7–8. К философии поступка [Toward a Philosophy of the Act] [1986], in Бахтин, Михаил Михайлович [Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovitsch] Работы 1920-ых годов [Works of the 1920s], Kiev: “Next” 1994, pp. 9–68. Автор и герой в эстетической деятельности [Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity] [1979], in Бахтин, Михаил Михайлович [Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovitsch] Работы 1920-ых годов [Works of the 1920s], Kiev: “Next” 1994, pp. 69–255. Беседы В.Д. Дувакина с М.М. Бахтиным [Conversations of V.D. Duvakin with M.M. Bakhtin], Moscow: Progress 1996, pp. 36–8. II. Sources of Bakhtin’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Гайденко, Пиама Павловна [Gaidenko, Piama Pavlovna], Трагедия эстетизма. О мироcозерцании Серена Киркегора [The Tragedy of Aesthetiсism: On the Weltanschauung of Søren Kierkegaard], Moscow: Iskystvo 1970. III. Secondary Literature on Bakhtin’s Relation to Kierkegaard Попова, Ирина [Popova, Irina], “О границах литературоведения и философии в работах Бахтина” [On the Limits of Literary Theory and Philosophy in Works of Bakhtin], in Русская теория. Материалы 10-х Лотмановских чтений [The Russian Theory: Proceedings of the 10th Lotman Readings], ed. by Сергей Зенкин [Sergej Zenkin], Moscow 2004, pp. 103–14. Фришман, Алексей [Fryszman, Alexej] “Теория коммуникации С. Кьеркегора и диалогическое мышление М. Бахтина.” [S. Kierkegaard’s Theory of Communication and the Dialogical Thinking of M. Bakhtin], in М.М. Бахтин и перспективы гуманитарных наук [M.M. Bakhtin and the Perspectives of the Humanities], Vitebsk 1994, pp. 31–8.

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Щитцова, Татьяна Валерьевна [Shchyttsova, Tatiana Valerievna] К истокам экзистенциальной онтологии: Паскаль, Киркегор, Бахтин [On the Sources of the Existential Ontology: Pascal, Kierkegaard, Bakhtin], Minsk: Propilei 1999. Shchyttsova, Tatiana, “Die Idee der ‘antwortenden Subjektivität’ im Werk von Søren Kierkegaard und Michail Bachtin,” in Diskurse der Personalität. Die Begriffsgeschichte der “Person” aus deutscher und russischer Perspektive, ed. by Alexander Haardt, Nikolaj Plotnikov, Munich: Wilhelm Fink 2008, pp. 241–50.

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Péter Esterházy: Semi-Serious András Nagy

The Hungarian word kergekór can be translated into English as a dangerous disease that makes sheep disoriented and ends in death. Since this disease can infect humans, the verb megkergül recalls this meaning when it is used to describe someone who is behaving strangely or oddly, as if out of his or her mind. Even if this may not sound too subtle or sophisticated, this was one of the earliest and probably most concrete references of the Hungarian writer Péter Esterházy (b. 1950) to Kierkegaard. Playing on the phonetic similarity of the philosopher’s name and the Hungarian word, Esterházy refers subtly to the Danish thinker—a kind of reference characteristic of the writing strategy, literary style and Weltanschauung of Esterházy. It is hard to overestimate the role and significance Péter Esterházy has had in Hungarian literature. He has penned dozens of books, which include some true masterpieces. Breaking with conventions and renewing the traditions of Hungarian prose, he created a new sense of text, a new method for composing a novel, and a new meaning for narration. Starting his writing career with short stories (Fancsikó and Pinta),1 Esterházy soon became both a highly appreciated and a sharply criticized author, particularly when his debut fiction Production Novel was published.2 The composition of the novel after modernity was of the same importance for him as the coming to terms with the Hungarian identity, traditions, language, literature, and nation, and this at a time that seemed to be lost by history, in the endless decades of socialism. Later, and with no less passion and spirit, Esterházy’s works responded to the political and historical changes in Mitteleuropa,3 helping to express the unprecedented changes this geographical area experienced. In his early masterpiece, Introduction to the Belles-lettres, the personal, historical, and literary elements were composed into one body (corpus) of text, which included and reshaped his earlier

Péter Esterházy, Fancsikó és Pinta [Fancsikó and Pinta], Budapest: Magvető 1976. Péter Esterházy, Termelési-regény (kisssregény) [Production Novel. (sssssshortnovel)], Budapest: Magvető 1979. 3 The English expression “Central Europe” does not have the same richness of meaning as the German version does, particularly when concerning Esterházy. 1 2

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novels into one book.4 That was in 1986,5 and the book paved the way for a new sense and meaning of literature, of reading, and of understanding—not to mention of history as well. Art seemed to be only followed or rather aped by the events of 1989. Writing exclusively prose, which includes essays, articles, and a variety of forms such as notes, aphorisms, fragments, and theater pieces, Esterházy experimented with pseudonyms, incognitos, and the changing of angles—features that are familiar to Kierkegaard readers. His overwhelming irony, unprecedented in Hungarian literature, is also basic for his world-view. Esterházy is very attracted to paradoxes; in addition to applying them in his texts, he builds up his entire oeuvre somewhat paradoxically to the enchantment and bewilderment of his readers and critics. The ironic and paradoxical elements are clearly expressed when in The Book of Hrabal he tells the story of two of God’s angels who are sent to Budapest to make sure that a couple, a writer and his wife, who are both having an imaginary affair with a great Czech author, would be happy with the pregnancy of the woman and keep the unwanted baby.6 These Kierkegaardian features shape his vision when Esterházy is writing about his real and imaginary journey on the Danube in a personally and historically turbulent space and time—a vision which is revealed through recollections and often ironic episodes (in The Glance of Countess HahnHahn).7 The same strategy determines Esterházy’s writing about the personally appreciated and nationally esteemed sport of football (in Traveling to the Depth of the Soccer Field )8 that is composed into the family’s saga, with his late mother at the center (Nothing of Art).9 The Esterházys for many centuries were one of the wealthiest and most influential aristocratic families in Hungary, first in the Austrian Empire and then in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, intermarrying with a large part of the national and international aristocracy and providing several statesmen to the imperial and then to the royal court. However, when Péter Esterházy was born in 1950, these advantages (also in the form of privileges) were over forever and even dramatically reversed as political persecution drove the aristocracy out of power and confiscated their estates, wealth, and feudal tenures. Many of the holders of “historical names”10 Péter Esterházy, Bevezetés a szépirodalomba [Introduction to the Belles-lettres], Budapest: Magvető 1986. 5 In that year two novels were published that had profound importance in the history of literature; in addition to Esterházy’s work, Péter Nádas’ Book of Memories also appeared in 1986. 6 Péter Esterházy, Hrabal könyve [The Book of Hrabal], Budapest: Magvető 1990. In English: The Book of Hrabal, trans. by Judith Sollosy, London: Quartet Books 1993. 7 Péter Esterházy, Hahn-Hahn grófnő pillantása, Budapest: Magvető 1991. In English: The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn, trans. by Richard Atzel, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1994. 8 Péter Esterházy, Utazás a tizenhatos mélyére [Traveling to the Depth of the Soccer Field], Budapest: Magvető 2006. 9 Péter Esterházy, Semmi művészet [Nothing of Art], Budapest: Magvető 2008. 10 This is a Hungarian expression for the aristocracy, but it also refers to the quite numerous nobility in general, including those who, although not having the same wealth or political influence, nevertheless were also victimized in the 1950s. 4

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thus were concentrated in camps and small villages in rural Hungary, being forced to do physical labor in agriculture. Thus the young author in his early years had already received some lessons of history that were impossible to forget and made him remember the whole narrative behind the concrete and painful episodes. When the restrictive measures were lifted somewhat and the institutionalized revenge was finally over around the mid-1950s, the family returned to a place close to the capital, and Esterházy, well before his literary talent was revealed, focused on personal achievements and on measurable production suitable for the civil life in a not too civilized system, namely, on mathematics and football. Both are not only represented in his writings but also serve as a model of thinking, acting, and framing the author’s personality in different social interactions. In recent years, paradoxically enough, Esterházy identifies himself more and more with the tradition of his family, with no less irony than before. His major literary success, Harmonia Caelestis,11 was inspired by the charismatic figure of his late father, by the authenticity and autonomy of Esterházy senior, who represents a chain of fathers, leading back in time and revealing the history of the family. In this work radical and often surprising fantasies were composed into hard documentary facts and narrated in a masterful prose. The title comes from a musical piece composed by an early Esterházy.12 However, soon horrendous revelations reshaped the novel and thus the family history, when Péter Esterházy received a research permit to examine the ex-state security archives, and discovered that his admired and beloved father used to be a secret agent of the communist political police. Two years later a Corrected Edition followed the highly acclaimed earlier novel.13 This new edition beautifully expressed the shock of the son when facing his father’s moral—and immoral—decisions and activity. It included the annotated handwritten secret reports, which Esterházy incorporated into the text. The book received a variety of responses from critics, publicists, political scientists, and readers, often extreme ones, as often happens when people come to terms with a hidden and shameful past. It was also a familiar situation from a Kierkegaardian angle: the father’s sin inherited by the suffering son. I. Kierkegaard’s name has appeared in the oeuvre of Esterházy at least half a dozen times so far; it is also referred to when the author compares the logic of mathematics and that of religious experience, and when he discusses the role irony plays in forming one’s Weltanschauung. Esterházy regularly plays with borrowed texts in his prose, using open or hidden quotations (sometimes slightly modified or even distorted) that may reveal important features—as is familiar in post-modern literature in general. The borrowed lines and motifs sometimes contradict the logic of the Péter Esterházy, Harmonia Caelestis, Budapest: Magvető 2000. In English: Celestial Harmonies, trans. by Judith Sollosy, New York: ECCO 2005. 12 His nickname was also “Fényes Miklós,” something like Michael the Bright. 13 Péter Esterházy, Javított kiadás [Corrected Edition], Budapest: Magvető 2002. The title of the new book included “corrections,” yet the original text was not modified as the expression suggests. 11

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host text, thus opening new horizons for interpretation. All these differ from a more sophisticated inspiration known in the history of literature as influence. As Esterházy highlighted in an explanation for the author of this study, in his works sentences are used and not thoughts, since for him the interesting part is what happens when one takes certain phrases from one context and inserts them into another. How do the sentences and motifs behave after all? In this way a formal use of the Danish author is characteristic of Esterházy’s writing technique, which is fundamentally different from an organic application and from a so-called substantial influence. Esterházy often builds upon the inclusion of unexpected snippets, surprising terminology, or even recycled platitudes, which he works into a magnificent collage of sentences that create a prose that may seem like the “rhizome-labyrinth” Umberto Eco referred to.14 Even when an author is concretely mentioned or identified in the text by a quotation or a characteristic motif, the borrowed snippet is recycled in a totally autonomous manner, with a very personal logic and meaning, which changes the borrowed motif, text or sentence into Esterházy’s own work. Esterházy’s unusual manner of referring to Kierkegaard may originate in the fact that Kierkegaard’s writings were not easily accessible in Esterházy’s most important formative years. As described in another essay,15 only few works were available in translation, yet these became extremely popular. Based on the recollections of Esterházy, the talented young critic Péter Balassa (1947–2003), himself an expert on both Kierkegaard and contemporary Hungarian literature, suggested that the author read the Danish thinker not only in the few existing Hungarian translations of the time,16 but in German translations as well, since Esterházy is fluent in that language. Indirectly, however, Kierkegaard was already present for Esterházy at the time of the latter’s early spiritual orientation since Esterházy was a devoted reader of Béla Hamvas (1897–1968), a Hungarian writer-philosopher strongly influenced by Kierkegaard and by contemporary existentialism.17 Besides Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche was a determining force in Esterházy’s break with the existing literary conventions.18 Likewise, Martin Heidegger provided one of the most important ways of questioning for Esterházy: “Wozu…” —Why?—a question that regularly returns in important novels. Later, at a key point in Esterházy’s novel on the Danube, the German philosopher is made to engage in a personal, though asymmetrical dialogue with God.19

See Ernő Kulcsár Szabó, Esterházy Péter, Bratislava: Kalligram 1996, p. 103. András Nagy, “Hungary: The Hungarian Patient,” in Kierkegaard’s International Reception, Tome II, Southern, Central and Eastern Europe, ed. by Jon Stewart, Aldershot: Ashgate 2009 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 8), pp. 155–88. 16 Besides selections of Kierkegaard’s texts, only Either/Or and Fear and Trembling were translated prior to 1989. 17 See Béla Hamvas, “Kierkegaard Szicíliában” [Kierkegaard in Sicily], in Esszépanoráma [Panorama of Essays], vols. 1–3, ed. by Zoltán Kenyeres, Budapest: Szépriodalmi Kiadó 1978, vol. 3, pp. 92–104. 18 See Kulcsár Szabó, Esterházy Péter, p. 57, p. 115. 19 See Esterházy, Hahn-Hahn grófnő pillantása, p. 57; The Glance of Countess HahnHahn, p. 70. 14 15

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Literature was the main source for learning about contemporary philosophy and theology during the decades of communism. Kafka, Beckett, and French existentialism opened the way to contemporary thinkers who were banned in the Soviet bloc. Many well-read and talented intellectuals, poets, and writers were able to read these texts in the original languages and even exchange letters with and meet their Western colleagues. János Pilinszky (1921–81) composed masterful poetry based on contemporary philosophy and theology, which he filtered through his sensitivity and intellect. Miklós Mészöly (1921–2001) was also an important source of contemporary thinking, literature, and art for many. His wonderful prose and personality were a point of reference for a whole generation that was very much influenced by his ideas, writing method, and generous personal assistance. In this way, for example, the nouveau roman and French existentialism became not only familiar but extremely inspiring for young authors, with plenty of recycled Kierkegaardian ideas, thoughts and revelations, even though they were still mainly unidentified, or even distorted. Albert Camus often appears in Esterházy’s texts, although paraphrased or interpreted in an odd way. Esterházy studied mathematics at the university. Instead of applying to the Faculty of Humanities,20 he applied to study in the very prestigious Department of Mathematics at Budapest University (ELTE). The mind-frame obtained by this education later served him well, when he developed his writing skills and methods. Just as rational and irrational horizons, mathematical examples and proofs, prime numbers and questions of infinity appear in his prose, so also do great mathematicians, famous for certain paradoxes or solutions, like Gauss, Frege, Gödel, and Cantor. Beyond providing a diploma and a profession to the young mathematician (before his literary breakthrough), this science opened the way for Esterházy in two further directions: the empirical and logical approach oriented him toward the theory of language, while, paradoxically enough, mathematics helped to shape the expression of his very deep and determinant religious experience. Sharing the legacy of post-Monarchic literature21—including writers such as Musil, Broch, and Bruno Schulz—Esterházy was receptive to the influence of the Vienna Circle, especially the philosophy of language, as represented in the thinking of Carnap and Wittgenstein.22 The logical-empirical analysis of language often included mathematical formulas in demonstrating its conclusions; it provided a language about language that seemed to be exact and final. This view of language was also influential for Esterházy’s literary methodology. The “mathematical experience,” as commented upon by Esterházy himself, offers a model for the relationship to God: “understanding” is irrelevant and fruitless, as opposed to “intuition” (belátás).23 Kierkegaard’s approach to faith also shows certain During communist rule in Hungary, the humanities disciplines were strictly controlled by the ideological authorities, and with Esterházy’s background it was impossible for him to be accepted as a student there. (He had attended a religious high school before going to the university.) 21 See Kulcsár Szabó, Esterházy Péter, p. 102. 22 Ibid., p. 103. 23 Péter Esterházy, Egy kék haris [A Blue Stocking], Budapest: Magvető 1996, p. 168. The title is an untranslatable pun referring to female snobbery. The Hungarian expression belátás can be also translated as “revelation.” 20

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analogies to that of Esterházy, whose faith is unquestionable and inexpressible as well. Although the Hungarian author belongs to the ecclesial tradition of Catholicism, nonetheless he shares with Kierkegaard the legacy of Tertullian and Pascal.24 Esterházy is also inspired by thinkers influenced by Kierkegaard, such as Teilhard de Chardin and Simone Weil. Rilke is also important for Esterházy as well as the Hungarian poet who translated his poetry: Dezső Kosztolányi. The latter is a constant point of reference for Esterházy, from his debut until his most recently published novel.25 Unlike many other Hungarian writers, such as Péter Nádas (b. 1942) for example, for whom God “simply did not exist”26 and for many intellectuals of the same generation who had an atheist upbringing in ex-communist Hungary, Esterházy is not only a representative of his family’s religious tradition, but, more importantly, he is “musical” for religion, as he paraphrased Max Weber’s famous metaphor in an interview given to the great Hungarian poet György Petri (1943–2000).27 The character and depth of Esterházy’s faith was revealed already in his early writings, which were strongly influenced by Kierkegaardian ideas. This feature was highlighted by Sándor Radnóti, a literary critic and philosopher instrumental in the Hungarian Kierkegaard reception and an outstanding interpreter of Esterházy: “It had to be doubtlessly revealed that Péter Esterházy is a religious writer. In modern European culture religion more or less became a private matter, since the place of its universality in the world is neither the institution…nor the ritual recreating the union, nor the fragmented community of believers, but the one individual, the persona.”28 This last phrase can be also translated as “the single individual.” Even if we do not have clearly documented evidence for it, Esterházy’s deep familiarity with the Kierkegaardian experience seems to be obvious. His personal religious experience inspires his work, as Esterházy confesses in one of the rare interviews where he talks about the more intimate aspects of writing: “The holy, the sacred is also in the basic vocabulary of art. And about this, to put it roughly, Christianity knows quite a lot.”29 Sacred and artistic are strongly interconnected for Esterházy, who usually avoids any kind of direct communication about anything that can be expressed by his prose—and this includes anything For the references to Pascal in the Introduction to the Belles-lettres, see Kulcsár Szabó, Esterházy Péter, pp. 175–7. 25 Péter Esterházy, Esti, Budapest: Magvető 2010. The title both refers to a diminutive form of the author’s name and also a “borrowed personality” for Kosztolányi, in his famous stories on Kornél Esti. 26 Péter Nádas, “Burok” [Shell], in his Játéktér [Playspace], Budapest: Szépirodalmi 1988, p. 5. 27 Esterházy, Egy kék haris, p. 167. 28 Sándor Radnóti, “Az ambivalens műbírálat” [The Ambiguous Criticism], in Dyptichon. Elemzések Esterházy Péter és Nádas Péter műveiről 1986–88 [Dyptichon: Analyses of the Works of Péter Esterházy and of Péter Nádas], ed. by Péter Balassa, Budapest: Magvető/JAK 1988, p. 83. 29 Péter Esterházy, “Azt csinálom, amit eddig, nézdegélek” [“I do what I did so far, looking around”], in A halacska csodálatos élete [The Wonderful Life of the Little Fish], Budapest: Magvető 2004, p. 41. 24

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having to do with theology or philosophy. However, of all the Hungarian writers, he is one of the most systematic readers; his readings include contemporary fiction and philosophy, yet philosophical theory, he says, “is read by me only as a novel, thus not with the need that it helps or disturbs or influences me.”30 Both in reading and in writing this approach is of fundamental importance. When touching upon any kind of theoretical or philosophical issue, Esterházy avoids being abstract, partly due to his artistic intentions and partly due to the language he was born into. He states, “the Hungarian terminological arsenal being as it is, just like the tradition of writing philosophy in Hungarian, the outcome of this tradition becomes very clever or far too clever, while the same topic becomes sensual in Musil, thought over, yet sensual.”31 Being “clever” in this sense does not help one to understand or be communicative since for a fiction writer wisdom should be expressed differently. This refers to Esterházy’s concept of writing and composing a text. Péter Balassa writes: “Esterházy’s vision of art is not brand new. In its core it is closer to philosophy than to aesthetics.”32 Paradoxically enough, for Esterházy, it is not necessarily a compliment to say that philosophy has become clever. This is also a familiar motif from Kierkegaard. II. In Esterházy’s oeuvre there is a significant modification of the philosophical inspiration, starting with the more formal and ironical use of thoughts in the early works, moving in the direction of the more elaborated conclusions that are connected to concrete experiences and often to painful ones, as is revealed in the books published subsequently. This seems to be applicable also to his relationship to Kierkegaard. In Esterházy’s breakthrough novel (Production Novel ) the Danish thinker was probably one of the many sources of inspiration that allowed the author to create a complex and multi-dimensional textual space. Notes, even drawings, aphorisms, descriptions, and quotations were integrated into one body of text. This work paved the way for the future masterpiece, Introduction to the Belles-lettres, in which the author could break “with the Cartesian concept of reality,”33 as his most thorough critic described. In that work Esterházy focuses on the Kantian concept of freedom,34 in a context in which both political and intellectual freedom were missing. Kierkegaard’s Either/Or could serve as a model for Esterházy’s variety of forms and genres. It is often difficult to trace the concrete sources of the Production Novel since hidden and obvious references appear simultaneously, and some kind of distorted irony is also present. The Kierkegaardian inspiration becomes obvious with Esterházy, Egy kék haris, p. 164. Marianna D. Birnbaum, Esterházy-kalauz [Esterházy-Guide], Budapest: Magvető 1991, p. 104. 32 Péter Balassa, Segédigék. Esterházy Péter prózájáról [Auxiliaries: About Péter Esterházy’s Prose], Budapest: Balassi Kiadó 2005, p. 95. 33 Kulcsár Szabó, Esterházy Péter, p. 46. 34 Ibid., p. 57. 30 31

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the mention of “Anti-Climax.”35 In the text, however, the concrete source and the contextual meaning of the reference become immediately confused. Anti-Climacus is, of course, the pseudonymous author of Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death and Practice in Christianity (neither of which had been translated into Hungarian at that time), but his name is abbreviated in the novel as “Anti-Climax.” In Hungarian “climax” refers to menopause, with no real opposition (or anti-). In the text this is the name of a person, called “George Fielding Anti-Climax,” who has the title of a major, but who also has a pseudonym: “Buddy Glass.” The set of references opens several possibilities of associations, in literature and beyond. The name appears in the motto; its authors are given as “Salinger: Seymour: introduction,”36 while all these are included at the beginning of the second part of the book, under the subtitle “E.*’s Notes.” In the footnote the name is given as “Eckermann, Johann Peter,” the bold characters refer to the author himself. The mosaic-like—or rather rhizomatic— complex of information also appears later in the book, where the exact repetition of the motto is expanded to read “thus spoke to me peter esterházy”37 (sic), which thus connects Kierkegaard to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. All these are included in a Goethelike conversational form, which presents the author himself both in the place of the aging German poet, and in the role of the loyal Eckermann who kept the record of the aphorisms and dialogues of the aging poet. In Esterházy’s oeuvre the role of irony is also determinative, expressing both a distance from the issues discussed and also the unlimited liberty of the one doing the discussing. However, in Esterházy’s upbringing and education there was room enough both for the classic form of irony—the high school he attended was famous for the appreciation of the classical thinkers, Socrates included—and for the German Romantic irony that Esterházy’s readings in German literature made him familiar with. The other Kierkegaardian reference, however hidden or indirect, could be the eroticization of the text (developed sometimes into openly sexual or willingly obscene segments), which at an abstract level connects the carnal and the down-toearth drives and instincts to the highly artistic, aesthetic, and philosophical ones. What are the concrete consequences of the most subtle seduction after all? Avoiding any intoxicating effect of the success of the novel, Esterházy, soon after its publication, headed in different directions, renewing his writing method and his use of language, together with the revision of his sense of fiction and his impression of reality. He started composing a series of shorter texts (coherent and readable on their own) that were later integrated into the novel, Introduction to the Belles-lettres. The first of the series was Indirect, which plays on the sense of the word függő in Hungarian (in addition to hanging and [de]pending, it also means indirect speech in grammar). The story is told in an indirect way, in which narration and reflection overlap. Kierkegaardian parallels could well have been traced in the composition of this work, particularly concerning the pseudonymous author, but there were more substantial links between the Hungarian writer and the Danish thinker. For Péter Esterházy, Termelési regény [Production Novel], Budapest: Magvető 1979, p. 133. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., p. 261. 35

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Esterházy, intuition was more important than understanding. This distinction will be important throughout Esterházy’s entire oeuvre. Though Pascal is referred to first in the context of the novel,38 later Camus and Dostoevsky are also recalled. When Esterházy writes about freedom, Kierkegaard’s presence seems to be obvious even if indirect: “there is freedom, thus there is risk, and there is sacrifice,”39 concludes Esterházy in the novel. It is also important to notice that this concept of freedom was expressed at a time when there was no political freedom, and so a philosophical interpretation with an emphasis on its politically relevant features had a far-reaching significance. This motif reappears in the next short book published in the following year: Who Guarantees the Safety of the Lady? The playful and seriously considered story of love, life, and private and collective decadence is an exact diagnosis of the Hungarian 1980s, against a metaphysically shaped background. Kierkegaard was needed for this philosophical context. Answering the question that is difficult to pose (and to translate), “What is life for?,” the young female figure Jitka responds in familiar terms: “To live is nothing more than to hesitate between certain possibilities, to live is nothing more than feeling ourselves fatally strong to exercise freedom….Even if we would desperately let things happen anyhow, we would then also choose, namely, the non-choosing.”40 The protagonist, a marginal yet promising intellectual, continues her logic further: “Living is nothing more than feeling ourselves totally lost, and the one who is able to accept it has already started to find himself….The one who does not feel himself totally lost, becomes hopelessly lost, rather will never meet with his own self, will never find his own reality.”41 These lines certainly recall Kierkegaardian paradoxes or rather those of the pseudonymous authors, and they provide a new interpretation of faith as well. In these frames Christ appears at the end of the novel conclusively as “suffering” and “lonely.”42 Thus redemption is no longer a source of hope. The real success was still to come with the next short masterpiece Transporters, which contains archaically modified wording in the Hungarian title. This work presents a poetic mixture of female figures, passions, and family relations, opposing the world of men and history in which brutality and sheer force play the lead role. The author of the brief and highly poetic text, published in 1983, reveals in the very last paragraph that in the novel “literally or in distorted forms there are quotations of Teilhard du Chardin, Sören Kierkegaard, Blaise Pascal, János Pilinszky, Rainer Maria Rilke and Géza Szőcs.”43 The intellectual and spiritual context given by the quoted authors is of the same importance as the distortion, and this results in a very creative and strikingly autonomous reformulation and use of the literary and philosophical texts borrowed from the above-mentioned authors. This is probably the most obvious Péter Esterházy, Függő [Indirect], Budapest: Magvető 1981, p. 137. Ibid., p. 75. 40 Péter Esterházy, Ki szavatol a lady biztonságáért? [Who Guarantees the Safety of the Lady?], Budapest: Magvető 1982, p. 143. 41 Ibid., p. 144. My translation. 42 Ibid., p. 152. 43 Péter Esterházy, Fuharosok, Budapest: Magvető 1983. p. 52. In English: The Transporters, trans. by Ferenc Takács, Budapest: Hungarian Radio 1995, p. 62. 38 39

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and most significant appearance of Kierkegaard in Esterházy’s entire oeuvre, and even if there is no concrete mention of Kierkegaard’s name (that will appear in a later text), nonetheless in this text his presence is determinative and substantial.44 The motif of the knight in the text refers to its Kierkegaardian origins, thus to Fear and Trembling—which was soon to be published in Hungarian. “At a very early age I was initiated into the thought that victory in the sense of infinity is victory, in the sense of finitude is suffering”45—meditates the Knight, who soon mentions “Kergekór,”46 both as an obvious identification of the source and also as playing with the sense and non-sense of these ideas, using the pun in Hungarian. Then Wittgenstein is recalled: “It is not the solutions to the problems that are difficult but the way of presenting them.”47 The Austrian philosopher will be quoted as defining “silence”: what we are unable to talk about we must be silent about. The same silence is emphasized in the name of the author of Kierkegaard’s book, Johannes de silentio, who is definitely known by Esterházy and recycled in his own way. The tone of the text as “endless resignation”48 was soon identified by the critics as inspired by Kierkegaard, yet for Esterházy silence is also “the language of mathematics.”49 Soon the short novel was composed into a new entity, which changed the atmosphere, the context and thus the whole meaning, but yet resignation remained in a determinative position. Esterházy worked music and drama into a text entitled Daisy which resulted in a libretto for an opera “semiseria.”50 Emerging from the questioning of the earlier novels, “What is life for?,” the main motif of the music regularly returns on the stage of a transvestite bar staged in West Berlin but modeled on the historical Venice, with certain references to Hungary in the Baroque period. The playing with genders was just as important as the role music played in the sensual and erotic confusion that is familiar from Kierkegaard’s oeuvre, especially Either/Or. Yet the conclusion, “I don’t want to be free,”51 seems to be an overall diagnosis of the social and political contradictions of the Hungarian 1980s, presented in a paradoxical philosophical context that provides new meaning to the surprising statement. The book Introduction… was published in 1986 in which two more texts were included besides the ones mentioned: The Little Hungarian Pornography,52 which See the “dramolette” of Péter Esterházy, “Affolter, Meyer, Beer,” in his Rubens és a nemeuklideszi asszonyok [Rubens and the Non-Euclidean Women], Budapest: Magvető 2006, p. 32. 45 Esterházy, Fuharosok, p. 42. My translation. 46 Ibid. 47 Esterházy, “Affolter, Meyer, Beer,” p. 32. 48 Sándor Radnóti, “A furmányos szépíró. Esterházy Péterről” [“The Sophisticated Author: About Péter Esterházy”] in Mi az, hogy beszélgetés? [What is Conversation?], Budapest: Magvető/JAK 1988, p. 270. 49 Péter Esterházy, Bevezetés a szépirodalomba [Introduction to the Belles-lettres], Budapest: Magvető 1986, p. 12. The sentence appears in the text in brackets. 50 Péter Esterházy, Daisy, Budapest: Magvető/JAK 1984, p. 5. 51 Ibid., p. 42. My translation. 52 Péter Esterházy, Kis Magyar pornográfia, Budapest: Magvető 1984. In English: A Little Hungarian Pornography, trans. by Judith Sollosy, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press 1995. 44

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was inspired by Witold Gombrowicz’s writings but adapted to the conditions of Hungary in a highly amusing manner, and The Auxiliaries of the Heart,53 which tells the tragic story of a mother who passes away and her family facing the eternal farewell. In the complexity of genres, in the changes of perspectives and of narration, in the playfulness of the author and of the composition of the book itself, the textual logic of Either/Or can be observed. Important elements were included from Kierkegaard’s other works as well: resignation, choice, knight, discretion, and many other motifs and revelations. However, there is no concrete mention of the Danish thinker. Unambiguous textual traces are hard to find due to Esterházy’s use of borrowed texts, yet the similarities between the Danish writer’s complex and somewhat multi-dimensional textual and spiritual space, and the Hungarian author’s prose seem to be fairly clear. In the book Introduction… the earlier published texts have lost their autonomy since a new meaning was provided for all of them by the creation of a larger referential horizon, just as, for example, “The Seducer’s Diary” has a different meaning when published separately or when it is included as a part of a larger book. Esterházy himself, however, also helped his readers to find connections and cross-references with his earlier texts. These are highlighted by marginal notes, drawings, and comments included in the body of the novel or in between the text or on the side, while the unusual composition of the book was creatively served by the typography of the volume. In this way Kierkegaard was often recalled, reinterpreted, and commented upon in a larger and more sophisticated structured context, in which theology was also presented by Pascal, Tertullian,54 and Joseph Ratzinger. The Danish thinker reappeared in reference to atheism: “for the faithless, faith is temptation that threatens his eternally closed world.”55 This conclusion will be elaborated in the future works of Péter Esterházy. III. It was certainly difficult for Esterházy to continue writing after the overwhelming success of the Introduction...—his chef d’oeuvre of that time. For his next book the author experimented with a special approach, unusual in the Hungarian literary traditions but well known in Kierkegaard’s Denmark: to publish under a pseudonym. “Lili Csokonai” was the author of the Seventeen Swans, a short novel, presenting an extremely painful life and love story of a young woman in Hungary in the 1980s. The story is told with striking sensitivity. The rustically poetic language of the sixteenth-seventeenth century Hungarian that the book was written in describes the late twentieth century’s Magyar life. The antiquated language recalls the style and manner of Péter Pázmány (1570–1637), a brilliant stylist and militant Catholic of the Counter-Reformation, founder of universities, bishop, and master of the Péter Esterházy, A szív segédigéi, Budapest: Magvető 1985. In English: Helping Verbs of the Heart, trans. by Michael Henry Heim, London: Quartet Books 1992. I prefer to use my version, since “helping verbs” do not have the same tension of meaning. 54 Esterházy, Bevezetés a szépirodalomba, p. 204. 55 Ibid., p. 215. 53

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Hungarian language. Lili Csokonai herself was an ardent believer, who “remained in the true Roman faith and faithlessness,”56 as she put it. Her discourse is heavily laden with references to religion, God, blessings in life and curses as well; there was a transcendental horizon above her world. Esterházy’s masterful identification with the female protagonist57 recalls Kierkegaard’s empathy and approach in the “Silhouettes” or in Cordelia’s letters and monologues which are integrated into “The Seducer’s Diary” of Either/Or. Another reference to the Danish thinker could have been the ambiguous appreciation of philosophy as paradigmatically symbolized by Hegel. Strangely the German thinker appears in a playful and symbolic context as “Wolfgang Amadeus Hegel,”58 being the representative of the understanding in opposition to intuition, an issue already elaborated by Esterházy. The conflict between the rigidity of religious dogmas versus the vitality of young lives shaped the short novel published some years later, The Book of Hrabal.59 In the motto the author quotes a prayer written by Milán Füst (1888–1967) in the tone and style as if it were created in the Middle Ages; the prayer voices the call to God as the creator of man, but also calling to man as the one who is responsible for himself.60 The existentialist vision is connected with God’s creative power, while responsibility is shared between the human and the divine. This responsibility is even greater when new beings—children—are to be created. In the story two angels were sent by the Lord to avoid “angel-making”—a synonym for abortion in Hungarian. They appear in the form of two policemen in civilian clothes, sitting in a Soviet-made Lada car, communicating shortwave with their “Boss” in heaven. In the text Augustine and Thomas Aquinas are referred to; in addition, there are quotations from Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, while non-Euclidean mathematical thinking also plays a role with the presentation of Heisenberg, Gödel, and Cantor. The events of the book are influenced by the historical changes that took place in Hungary in the late 1980s, yet the political events and passions are interpreted in a deeply ironic and thus alienated way. The author does not want to speak about either God or freedom,61 but yet when he connects the two categories in this context, Kierkegaard’s presence seems to be obvious. While sudden and unexpected appearances of the Danish thinker are characteristic in Esterházy’s oeuvre throughout, significant modifications should be also noted. Indirect references play a major role in general, such as those in the collection of

Lili Csokonai [Péter Esterházy], Tizenhét hattyúk [Seventeen Swans], Budapest: Magvető 1987, p. 5. 57 In Hungarian literary life for quite a while the young woman was greatly appreciated, until Esterházy’s authorship was revealed. 58 Péter Esterházy, A szabadság nehéz mámora [The Heavy Intoxication of Freedom], Budapest: Magvető 2003, p. 51. 59 Péter Esterházy, Hrabal könyve, Budapest: Magvető 1990. In English: The Book of Hrabal, trans. by Judith Sollosy, London: Quartet Books 1993. 60 Esterházy, Hrabal könyve, p. 5; The Book of Hrabal, p. 7: “We call upon Thee, who created man to be such as he is, and likewise call upon man, who is after all responsible for himself.” 61 Esterházy, Hrabal könyve, p. 36; The Book of Hrabal, p. 41. 56

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short stories entitled A Woman,62 which contain the ultimate paradoxes of love, male– female relationships, paradoxical relations of attraction and alienation, human gain and loss. In the context of anecdotes, aphoristic remarks, and detailed sensual-sexual chronicles, a hidden reference to the history of Tobit and Sara emerges,63 as the paradox of love and sacrifice, once wonderfully described in Fear and Trembling. However, Kierkegaard seems to remain more in the background since Esterházy’s interest and inspiration turns toward Heidegger, sometimes filtered through a Wittgensteinian questioning, as in the reflective parts of the Danube-novel.64 When the author discusses the core of the problem he does not focus on its existence or non-existence but on the possibility of revealing it. The missing questions are the basis of the dilemma for Esterházy, and this motif is further elaborated in his recent works as well. The famous Heideggerian question “Wozu” is repeated regularly in the novels both ironically and as a desperately final formula, presented in dramatic texts or rather in “dramolettes,” inspired by the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard.65 In a short play the Danish thinker is referred to as the most famous interpreter of the Don Juan myth, as one who describes music “as the language of the seducer”; this is followed in the text by a mention of Kierkegaard and an ironic mimic.66 The Danish thinker later became more influential in the dynamically growing oeuvre, particularly in the “twin-volumes” published in a two-year timespan: Harmonia Caelestis and Corrected Edition. The composition of the first book is somewhat Kierkegaardian and ironic, playing with personalities and time frames, and focusing on the unchanged figure of the father in different personalities. After the publication of the novel about his father, Esterházy discovered, by visiting the State Security Archive, that his beloved father was an agent, who had been secretly reporting to the communist authorities for decades. The confrontation with the sin of his father traumatically shook the whole world of the son, not only his human and moral side but his very identity, right down to his devotion, vocation, profession: “I would have never been able to write my books,”67 he added, with the present knowledge.

62 Péter Esterházy, Egy nő. Budapest: Magvető 1995. In English: She Loves Me, trans. by Judith Sollosy, London: Quartet Books 1997. 63 The identification of the apocryphal story was revealed by Zsuzsa Selyem: “Egy javított nő. (Esterházy Péter Egy nőjéről a Javított kiadás megjelenése után)” [“A Corrected Woman. About Péter Esterházy’s A Woman after the Publication of the Corrected Edition”] in Egytucat. Kortárs magyar írók női szemmel. [A Dozen Contemporary Hungarian Writers Through Women’s Eyes], ed. by Tibor Keresztury and Zoltán Kőrösi, Budapest: JAK/Kijárat Kiadó 2003, pp. 155–75. The identification with Tobit includes the reference to Fear and Trembling, p. 169. 64 Esterházy, Hahn-Hahn grófnő pillantása. In English: The Glance of Countess HahnHahn. 65 See Péter Esterházy, Legyünk együtt gazdagok [Let’s Be Rich Together], in Rubens és a nemeuklideszi asszonyok. 66 Esterházy, Affolter, Meyer, Beil, p. 32. 67 Esterházy, Javított kiadás, p. 15.

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The form of the novel68 also presents this disorientation on one side and helps the author to face this tragedy on the other. The timing of the shameful revelation overlapped with the success of Esterházy’s earlier book. Thus the diabolic trip down to the moral and political circles of Hell in communist Hungary and his father’s role in it happened simultaneously with book signings, press conferences, and reading tours, which celebrated the Esterházys as protagonists of the Harmonia Caelestis. The sense of hereditary sin is definitely familiar from Kierkegaard, creating an atmosphere of innocent responsibility, through the unconditional love of his father. “What never happened, I fear. Life-fear.”69 In this way Esterházy describes the sentiments familiar from Fear and Trembling, in which the father’s crime greatly and fatally concerns the child. The writer turns to God quite a number of times in the book: “To God I will come back (screaming and demanding).”70 The references to Judas71 demonstrate also the “theological” reading of the events that present the father as the “outcast”—references which refer to existential choices in extreme situations. “I was alone again facing God, whether he exists or not,”72 as the author recalls a Kierkegaardian paradox. Then he consoles himself with the dogmatic conclusion: “Deus semper maior,” a formula that he repeats again and again.73 Thus a non-existent God is greater than the empty sky of atheism, while the liberty of choosing is unconditional. Freedom exists even if God does not. When concluding the reading of the secret police documents, the author assumes: “My father’s life is a direct (and disgusting) proof of the human freedom.”74 Interpreters and critics of the book highlighted the passion-like story of the father and the history of the son’s suffering with the conclusion that thinking about ethical issues was born in despair.75 Other readers focus on the composition of the text both as a journal and as a “re-staged reading”76 of the former events, creating an extremely complex space for the text with reports, comments, and daily chronicles composed into the text of recollections. There is also a strongly emphatic reading of the two novels together, which reveals the nearly prophetic sense of Esterházy’s vision before the knowledge obtained in the archives. Sándor Radnóti recalls the episode of Harmonia Caelestis in which the son is taken to the secret police by a family member who collaborates with the communist authorities, and the young man signs a compromising document to free his father. However, when his beloved father 68 After the publication of the novel, for some critics with deep knowledge of Esterházy’s oeuvre and writing strategies it could not be ruled out that this story was also made up and part of a very important “educational program” executed by the author, namely, to explain how to confront the past, even if it is utterly and personally painful. 69 Esterházy, Javított kiadás, p. 14. 70 Ibid., p. 15. 71 Ibid., p. 24. 72 Ibid., p. 161. 73 Ibid., p. 161. 74 Ibid., p. 281. 75 Gábor Kránitz, “ÉDESAPAssió. Esterházy Péter: Javított kiadás” [“Father-Passio. Péter Esterházy: Corrected Edition], Újnautilus, January 20, 2007, www.ujnautilus.hu. 76 Gábor Palkó, “Az Esterházy-életmű ’szoft’ olvasata” [“The ‘Soft’ Reading of the Esterházy oeuvre”], Tiszatáj, vol. 56. no. 7, 2003, pp. 97–106.

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meets him leaving custody, he spits on his son, and in this way “the son knowingly or unknowingly has identified himself with the sin of the father and also with his judgment.”77 The oeuvre of Esterházy is invitingly open, and new revelations can be well expected from him. However, the story and the logic of his use of and inspiration from Kierkegaard seem to suggest that once serious and unprecedented revelations and experiences arise, there is the final logic of faith, responsibility, freedom— beyond understanding. This was wonderfully expressed by Kierkegaard, and it was certainly something that inspired Esterházy. With our pure intellect we may be able neither to orientate ourselves in life nor to properly choose. Silence also can be learnt from the author Johannes de silentio recalling the lack of words of Abraham approaching Mount Moriah.

Sándor Radnóti, “Ká-európai diszharmónia” [“C[entral]-European Disharmony”], in his Műhelymunka, [Workshop Work], Debrecen: Csokonai 2004, p. 119. 77

Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Esterházy’s Corpus Termelési-regény (kisssregény) [Production Novel], Budapest: Magvető 1979, p. 133; p. 261. Függő [Indirect], Budapest: Magvető 1981, p. 75; p. 137. Ki szavatol a lady biztonságáért? [Who Guarantees for the Safety of the Lady?], Budapest: Magvető 1982, pp. 143–52. Fuharosok, Budapest: Magvető 1983, p. 52. (English translation: The Transporters, trans. by Ferenc Takács Budapest: Hungarian Radio 1995, p. 62.) Daisy, Budapest: Magvető/JAK 1984, p. 42. Bevezetés a szépirodalomba [Introduction to the Belles-lettres], Budapest: Magvető 1986, p. 204; p. 215. [Lili Csokonai], Tizenhét hattyúk [Seventeen Swans], Budapest: Magvető 1987, p. 5; p. 103. Hrabal könyve, Budapest: Magvető 1990, p. 5; p. 36. (English translation: The Book of Hrabal, trans. by Judith Sollosy, London: Quartet Books 1993, p. 7; p. 41.) Hahn-Hahn grófnő pillantása, Budapest: Magvető 1991, p. 57. (English translation: The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn, trans. by Richard Atzel, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1994, p. 70.) Egy nő, Budapest: Magvető 1995, pp. 6–8. (English translation: She Loves Me, trans. by Judith Sollosy, London: Quartet Books 1997, pp. 2–4.) Egy kék haris [One Blue Stocking], Budapest: Magvető 1996, pp. 164–8. Harmonia Caelestis, Budapest: Magvető 2000, p. 51. Javított kiadás [Corrected Edition], Budapest: Magvető 2002, p. 14; p. 15; p. 24; p. 118; p. 161; p. 281. A szabadság nehéz mámora [Liberty’s Difficult Intoxication], Budapest: Magvető 2003, p. 51. A halacska csodálatos élete [The Miraculous Life of the Small Fish], Budapest: Magvető 2004, p. 41. Rubens és a nemeuklideszi asszonyok [Rubens and the Non-Euclidean Women], Budapest: Magvető 2006, p. 32; p. 42. II. Sources of Esterházy’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Babits, Mihály, Az európai irodalom története [The History of European Literature], Budapest: Szépirodalmi 1979, p. 423.

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Hamvas, Béla, “Kierkegaard Szicíliában” [Kierkegaard in Sicily], in Esszépanoráma [Panorama of Essays] vols. 1–3, ed. by Zoltán Kenyeres, Budapest: Szépriodalmi Kiadó 1978, vol. 3, pp. 92–104. Kierkegaard, Søren, Sören Kierkegaard írásaiból [From the Writings of Sören Kierkegaard], trans. by Tivadar Dani et al., ed. by Béla Suki, Budapest: Gondolat 1969. — Mozart Don Juanja [Mozart’s Don Juan], trans. by László Lontay, Budapest: Európa 1972. — Vagy–vagy [Either/Or], trans. by Tivadar Dani, Budapest: Gondolat 1978. — Félelem és reszketés [Fear and Trembling], trans. by Péter Rácz, Budapest: Európa 1986. — A halálos betegség [The Sickness unto Death], trans. by Péter Rácz, Budapest: Göncöl 1993. — A szorongás fogalma [The Concept of Anxiety], trans. by Péter Rácz, Budapest: Göncöl 1993. — Az ismétlés [Repetition], trans. by Zoltán Gyenge, no place given: Ictus 1993. — A keresztény hit iskolája [Training in Christianity], trans. by Zoltán Hidas, Budapest: Atlantisz 1998. Köpeczi, Béla (ed.), Az egzisztencializmus [Existentialism], Budapest: Gondolat 1965, pp. 59–116. Lukács, György, Az ész trónfosztása [The Destruction of Reason], Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó 1954, pp. 199–245. Márkus, György, and Zádor Tordai, Irányzatok a mai polgári filozófiában [Trends in Contemporary Bourgeois Philosophy], Budapest: Gondolat 1964, pp. 34–45. Rilke, Rainer Maria, Rilke prózai művei [Rilke’s Works in Prose], trans. by Gábor Görgey, Budapest: Európa 1990, pp. 5–194. III. Secondary Literature on Esterházy’s Relation to Kierkegaard Balassa, Péter, Segédigék. Esterházy Péter prózájáról [Auxiliaries: About Péter Esterházy’s Prose], Budapest: Balassi Kiadó 2005, p. 95. Birnbaum, Marianna D., Esterházy-kalauz [Esterházy Guide], Budapest: Magvető 1991, p. 104. Kulcsár Szabó, Ernő, Esterházy Péter, Bratislava: Kalligram 1996, p. 46; p. 57; pp. 102–3; pp. 115–17; pp. 175–7. Palkó, Gábor, “Az Esterházy-életmű “szoft” olvasata” [The “Soft” Reading of the Esterházy Oeuvre], Tiszatáj, vol. 56. no. 7, 2003, pp. 97–106. — Esterházy-kontextusok [Esterházy-Contexts], Budapest: Ráció 2008, pp. 5–276. Radnóti, Sándor, “Az ambivalens műbírálat” [The Ambiguous Criticism], in Dyptichon. Elemzések Esterházy Péter és Nádas Péter műveiről 1986–88 [Dyptichon: Analyses of the Works of Péter Esterházy and Péter Nádas], ed. by Péter Balassa, Budapest: Magvető/JAK 1988, p. 83. — Mi az, hogy beszélgetés? [What is a Dialogue?], Budapest: Magvető/JAK 1988, p. 270.

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Selyem, Zsuzsa, “Egy javított nő. (Esterházy Péter Egy nőjéről a Javított kiadás megjelenése után)” [A Corrected Woman. About Péter Esterházy’s A Woman after the Publication of the Corrected Edition], in Egytucat. Kortárs magyar írók női szemmel [A Dozen: Contemporary Hungarian Writers Seen Through Women’s Eyes], Budapest: JAK / Kijárat Kiadó 2003, pp. 155–75. Szegedy-Maszák, Mihály, “Bevezetés a szépirodalomba” [Introduction to the BellesLettres], in Minta a szőnyegen [Ornament on the Carpet], Budapest: Balassi Kiadó 1995, pp. 253–65. Szirák, Péter, “A késő-modern és a posztmodern tapasztalat interpretációja” [Interpretation of the Late Modern and the Postmodern Experience], in his Folytonosság és változás [Continuity and Change], Debrecen: Csokonai 1998, pp. 51–68.

Witold Gombrowicz: The Struggle for the Authentic Self Wojciech Kaftański And today I, a living individual, am the servant of that official Gombrowicz whom I built with my own hands. I can only add to him. My former impulses, my gaffes, my dissonances, all this trying immaturity…where has all that gone?1

I. Witold Marian Gombrowicz (1906–69) was born into a landowning noble family in Małoszyce, south of Warsaw. His parents were religious, and he was raised in the Catholic faith with strong national traditions. His father was a practicing Catholic, but, in Gombrowicz’s eyes, he was not a “bigot.”2 His mother was a devoted believer. It was her religiousness and way of life that influenced Gombrowicz’s initial development. He observed her carefully, and her existence convinced him early on that lack of integrity is the foundation for human nature. The leading thought that will burst out of this experience will be: “each of us plays at being cleverer and more mature than he is.”3 He became an atheist as a teenager, when he read “Spencer, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Shakespeare, Goethe, Montaigne, Pascal, [and] Rabelais….”4 Gombrowicz attended a Catholic lyceum, studied law at the University of Warsaw, and philosophy and economics at the Institut des Hautes Études Internationales in Paris. Childhood experiences influenced the work of both Kierkegaard and Gombrowicz. For Kierkegaard it was his father and religious upbringing that had an impact: the melancholy of his father5 changed into Kierkegaard’s melancholy as a way of life.6 Gombrowicz’s early development was a result of larger historical forces and social drives. He grew up in a particular period in European history that was fundamental for the formation of the socio-political space he inhabited. In the afterward to the last volume of Gombrowicz’s Diary, Wojciech Karpiński described this phenomenon: I would like to acknowledge my appreciation for Thomas Gilbert’s linguistic corrections. 1 Witold Gombrowicz, Testament: Entretiens avec Dominique de Roux, trans. by Koukou Chanska and François Marié, Paris: Belfond 1977, p. 179; English translation: A Kind of Testament, trans. by Alastair Hamilton, Champaign-London: Dalkey Archive 2007, p. 172. 2 Gombrowicz, Testament, p. 31; A Kind of Testament, p. 29. 3 Gombrowicz, Testament, p. 133; A Kind of Testament, p. 129. 4 Gombrowicz, Testament, p. 39; A Kind of Testament, p. 37. 5 SKS 18, 212–13, JJ:226 / KJN 2, 195–6. SKS 20, 67, NB5:65 / KJN 4, 401. 6 SKS 18, 134, HH:17 / KJN 2, 125–6. SKS 16, 55-6 / PV, 76. See also Harvie Ferguson, Melancholy and the Critique of Modernity, London: Routledge 1995, p. 4.

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Drawing on this perspective, Gombrowicz identified in his life narrative motives that fundamentally influenced his authorship. One of them is what will be more broadly discussed in the following part of this article, and what Gombrowicz calls: “between” (entre). This is how he refers to the formative years of his life: So, in that Proustian epoch at the beginning of the century, we were a displaced family, whose social status was far from clear, living between Lithuania and the former Congress Kingdom of Poland, between land and industry, between what is known as “good society” and another, more middle-class society. These were the first “betweens” [entre], which subsequently multiplied until they almost constituted my country of residence, my true home.8

His writing period can be divided into three parts. In the first period he wrote short novels, feuilletons, and dramas. In this period Gombrowicz also wrote Ferdydurke, the novel that made him famous among Polish writers. This work, which is the most existential of Gombrowicz’s early writings and, for some scholars, a precursor of the existential novel,9 appeared in 1937, a year before Sartre’s Nausea. In August 1939, just a month before the outbreak of World War II, Gombrowicz cruised to Argentina where he started the second period of his writing. This was probably the most difficult time for Gombrowicz for various reasons. Although Poland lost its independence after first the German and then the Soviet invasion, the war was not over. One’s patriotic duty was to fight the Axis either as a guerilla in Poland or as a soldier joining the Alliance forces on various fronts around the world. In spite of this, Gombrowicz remained in Argentina. His attitude was controversial, and consequently widely condemned. On his “exile” he suffered poverty and solitude. Argentina became his second homeland for more than two decades. As an émigré,10 Gombrowicz produced works that concentrate on a criticism of Polish emigration and sources of power in society that affect the human condition: TransAtlantyk and The Marriage. He also started other important works that pondered Wojciech Karpiński, “Głos Gombrowicza,” in Witold Gombrowicz, Dziennik, Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie 1997, p. 291. (My translation.) 8 Gombrowicz, Testament, p. 30; A Kind of Testament, p. 28. 9 Milan Kundera, Les Testaments trahis, Paris: Gallimard 1993, pp. 293f.; English translation: Testaments Betrayed, trans. by Linda Asher, New York: Harper Perennial 1996, p. 251: “Ferdydurke was published in 1937, a year before Nausea, but as Gombrowicz was unknown and Sartre famous, Nausea, so to speak, usurped Gombrowicz’s rightful place in the history of the novel.” See also Jerzy Franczak, Rzecz o nierzeczywistości, Cracow: Universitas 2002, p. 7. 10 On Gombrowicz as émigré, see Jerzy Jarzębski, “Gombrowicz, the Émigré,” in The Exile and Return of Writers from East-Central Europe: A Compendium, ed. by John Neubauer, Borbála Zsuzsanna Török, Berlin: De Gruyter 2009, pp. 325–42. 7

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the subjects of national identity, the relation between the singular I and society, and sexuality: Pornography, Cosmos, and Operetta. He also completed a major part of his Diaries.11 In 1950 Gombrowicz established contact with a Polish intellectual circle in Paris: Kultura.12 Later on he started with publishing excerpts from his novel Trans-Atlantyk, which garnered negative reactions, mostly among Polish émigrés. In 1963 Gombrowicz received a Ford Foundation Scholarship, beginning the third period of his writing life. He traveled to West Berlin, then to Vence in France, where he stayed until the end of his life; he died in 1969. During the last period, Gombrowicz finally became famous. His works were translated into several languages, acquired an international commentary, and his dramas were performed in theaters across Europe. II. There is little academic research on Gombrowicz’s relation to Kierkegaard.13 This is, in a way, justified. Gombrowicz is not well known outside Poland, and even in his homeland he was poorly received for a long time.14 There was a time when Gombrowicz’s works were banned in communist Poland, ostracized and ignored by the Polish émigré elite, and therefore absent from the literary world. He was accused of being an anti-patriot, revolutionary, and controversial figure. Later on, during the thaw in Poland, the process of so-called softening of communism, appreciation of Gombrowicz increased and all of his works, except his Diaries, were translated. Kierkegaard’s reception in Poland was, and still is, even less extensive than Gombrowicz’s. For a long time Kierkegaard was not widely known in Poland since The Polish titles are respectively: Trans-Atlantyk, Paris: Instytut Literacki 1953, Ślub, Paris: Instytut Literacki 1953, Pornografia, Paris: Instytut Literacki 1960, Kosmos, Paris: Instytut Literacki 1965, and Operetka, Paris: Instytut Literacki 1966. 12 Matthew J. Gibney and Randall Hansen, Immigration and Asylum: From 1900 to the Present, vols. 1–3, Santa Barbara: ABC CLIO 2005, vol. 1, p. 480. “A very important Polish postwar diaspora was formed in Paris, continuing the tradition of the nineteenth-century Great Emigration. Its main institution was the Kultura, a social-cultural monthly, and a publishing house, which published books and articles of very high quality, addressed mainly to educated Polish diaspora public, specializing in history, politics, and literature. The Paris Kultura was an institution of tremendous importance for the preservation of the Polish Diaspora culture and indeed the main forum of Polish independent thought during the Communist period.” See also “Kultura,” in The Exile and Return of Writers from East-Central Europe: A Compendium, ed. by John Neubauer, pp. 144–88. 13 Bronisław Świderski, “Kierkegaard i Gombrowicz. Czy można kochać dwóch mężczyzn naraz” [Kierkegaard and Gombrowicz. Is It Possible To Love Both Men at the Same Time?], in Aktualność Kierkegaarda, ed. by Antoni Szwed, Kęty: Antyk 2005, pp. 101–8. In one of the very few articles on Kierkegaard and Gombrowicz, Świderski juxtaposes the thinkers, pointing out differences between them; Świderski concludes that Gombrowicz, although he knew Kierkegaard, was more interested in the works of Nietzsche and Sartre. 14 Ewa Płonowska-Ziarek, The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction of Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism, Albany: State University of New York Press 1996, p. 19. 11

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there were only a few of his works available in translation, mostly of his aesthetic writings.15 The task of presenting Kierkegaard’s influence on Gombrowicz has never been systematically undertaken. Apart from the above-mentioned limited knowledge of Kierkegaard in Polish academia, the difficulty lies in the fact of the little textual manifestation of Kierkegaard in Gombrowicz’s writings. Gombrowicz mentioned the Dane a few times in the most philosophical of his works—his Diaries—a series of philosophical lectures—A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes— and in one of his letters to his colleague: Artur Sandauer.16 The comparatively few textual references to Kierkegaard in Gombrowicz’s writings—as opposed to numerous references to Kant, Hegel, and French existentialists like Sartre, Camus, and Simone Weil—and Gombrowicz’s atheistic world-view make the possible recreation of Gombrowicz’s approach to Kierkegaard difficult, and raise the question of Gombrowicz’s knowledge and appropriation of Kierkegaard.17 In one of the few such entries in Gombrowicz’s Diary, Gombrowicz described himself as the “grandchild of Kierkegaard.” Gombrowicz, while referring to his relation to Simone Weil and her understanding of God, somehow unexpectedly At the beginning of the 1990s there were few Polish translations of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works and not a single complete translation of any of Kierkegaard’s signed works. This situation started to change after Antoni Szwed’s translations of The Concept of Anxiety, Works of Love, and Philosophical Fragments, and continued to change with the translation of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript by Karol Toeplitz at the end of 2011. See also Antoni Szwed, “Poland: A Short History of the Reception of Kierkegaard’s Thought,” in Kierkegaard’s International Reception, Tome II, Southern, Central and Eastern Europe, ed. by Jon Stewart, Aldershot: Ashgate 2009 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 8), pp. 213–42. 16 Witold Gombrowicz, Dziennik: 1953–1956, Paris: Instytut Literacki 1957, p. 254; p. 259; p. 266; p. 272; English translation: Diary: 1953–1956, trans. by Lillian Vallee, Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1998, p. 173; p. 177; p. 181; p. 185. Dziennik: 1957–1961, Paris: Instytut Literacki 1962, p. 141; p. 192; English translation: Diary: 1957–1961, trans. by Lillian Vallee, Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1989, p. 122; p. 167. “Course de Philosophie en Six Heures un Quart,” in Gombrowicz Cahier, ed. by Constantin Jelenski, Dominique de Roux, Paris: Cahier de l’Herne 1971, pp. 401–3; p. 408; p. 411; p. 415; English translation: A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes, trans. by Benjamin Ivry, New Haven and London: Yale University Press 2004, pp. 46–9; p. 61; p. 70; p. 78. A Gombrowicz’s letter to Artur Sandauer, published in Gombrowicz Cahier, ed. by Constantin Jelenski, Dominique de Roux, Paris: Cahier de l’Herne 1971, p. 127; Gombrowicz: Walka o sławę, ed. by Jerzy Jarzębski, Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie 1996, p. 212. 17 However difficult and arguable the problem of Gombrowicz’s relation to the Dane is, three main readings of the relation can be distinguished. Firstly, one can say that Gombrowicz did not really know Kierkegaard, and merely quoted or referred to him, indicating to the reader that he knew the Dane but was not interested in his philosophy. The second reading of Gombrowicz’s relation to Kierkegaard is that Gombrowicz knew Kierkegaard, but he was not interested in him or merely disagreed with the Dane. This article is based on a third reading of Gombrowicz’s relation to Kierkegaard: that Gombrowicz knew Kierkegaard to certain extent, and his reading of Kierkegaard was much more complex than merely reading, agreeing or disagreeing with, or appropriating the Dane into his philosophy. 15

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juxtaposes Kierkegaard’s understanding of God with the understanding of a “reasoned God”: “Through her [Simone Weil] presence here before me grows the presence of her God. I say ‘through her presence’ because an abstract God is Greek to me. We, the grandchildren of Kierkegaard, can no longer digest the reasoned God of Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, or Kant.”18 This quotation appears out of the blue in the first volume of his Diary and testifies to two paradoxical aspects of Gombrowicz’s enterprise: the atheist’s constant interest in God and the positive presence of the founder of existentialism in the thought of one whose approach to existentialism was qualified.19 In a certain way Gombrowicz felt indebted to Kierkegaard, and his philosophy was somewhere in the back of his head. Gombrowicz described himself as belonging to a philosophical movement that was begun by Kierkegaard, but except for Simone Weil, who is explicitly mentioned there, it is hard to know whom Gombrowicz was referring to: We, the grandchildren of Kierkegaard. Most likely Gombrowicz believed that his current philosophy— existentialism and structuralism—was rooted in Kierkegaard’s thought all the way down. The fact of Kierkegaard’s minor presence in Gombrowicz’s thought in relation to Gombrowicz’s reading of the Dane might “explain” a quotation from Jacques Caubaud’s biography of Simone Weil treating her relation to Kierkegaard: “Simone Weil could not read Kierkegaard without feeling moved. Although her rationalist upbringing still shut her off from Kierkegaard’s teaching, she was close to him in spirit—so close, in fact, that she did not need to refer to him in her writings.”20 Similarly, while Gombrowicz rarely referred to Kierkegaard in his writings, in a certain sense he is “close to him in spirit.” However, while Kierkegaard’s influence ought not be overemphasized, it should not be limited to mere elaboration of textual references. Consequently, a short overview of Gombrowicz’s philosophy and a presentation of his quest to acquire an authentic self follow. In its methodology the article aims to present points of Kierkegaard’s influence on Gombrowicz, and consequently certain similarities and differences in the thinkers’ pursuit for the authentic self. III. Most likely for the purpose of a series of his lectures on philosophy frequently delivered in Buenos Aires, ultimately put together and published later in France as A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes, Gombrowicz, trying to reconstruct a “genealogy of existentialism,” came up with a drawing of a family

Gombrowicz, Dziennik: 1953–1956, p. 254; Diary: 1953–1956, p. 173. Witold Gombrowicz, “Course de Philosophie en Six Heures un Quart,” p. 403; A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes, p. 48: “Existentialism was born directly from Kierkegaard’s attack on Hegel.” 20 Jacques Cabaud, Simone Weil: A Fellowship in Love, New York: Channel Press 1964, p. 117. See also Martin Andic, “Simone Weil and Kierkegaard,” Modern Theology, vol. 2, 1985, pp. 20–41. 18 19

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tree.21 The family tree of philosophy blossoms with wealth of philosophical names inscribed on it; however, the trunk of the tree has two names: Kierkegaard and Pascal.22 In the collection of lectures, one reads the main points of Kierkegaard’s influence on Gombrowicz implicitly and explicitly present in the Pole’s enterprise. The main inspiration comes from Kierkegaard’s criticism of Hegel. Gombrowicz is beholden to Kierkegaard, especially for breaking with Hegel’s abstract dialectics. The opposition of Hegelian thesis and antithesis is resolved in synthesis, but this is something that can be accepted neither by Kierkegaard nor by Gombrowicz. One can also find similarities between Kierkegaard’s tension of the famous oppositions from The Sickness unto Death—the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal, possibility and necessity in the perpetual process of becoming— and Gombrowicz’s “in-betweenness.”23 Such a feeling was natural to Gombrowicz from the time of his youth. It was more than just a psychological feeling or a state of mind; it was how he identified himself, especially from the perspective of the past. This suspension between oppositions that resulted in Kierkegaard’s paradox can be found in Gombrowicz’s concept of the absurd. He says: “The cult of the absurd, the relationship between reality and unreality, superiority and inferiority, master and slave, already obsessed me. And there was something obscure which nothing could bring to the light of day. Besides, I was quite incapable of loving. Love was refused me, once and for all….”24 This resonates with the Judge’s general description of the self in Either/Or, Part Two, as undefined, divided between actual and ideal, inside and outside, knowing and getting to know oneself in the process of becoming: “The self the individual knows is simultaneously the actual self and the ideal self, which the individual has outside himself as the image in whose likeness he is to form himself, and which on the other hand he has within himself, since it is he himself.”25 In spite of the fact that Gombrowicz described himself as adoring the joyful life and was a critic of asceticism,26 in fact deep down he felt inadequacy and suffering.27 The lack of integrity and authenticity made Gombrowicz realize that one compensates for a feeling of inferiority by creating a certain image of oneself that is to be perceived by others: [I]n our relations with other people we want to be cultivated, superior, mature, so we use the language of maturity, and we talk about, for instance, Beauty, Goodness, Truth…. But, within our own confidential intimate reality, we feel nothing but inadequacy, immaturity; and then our private ideals collapse, and we create a private mythology for

“Tree of philosophy” (sketch on the verso of bank form), holograph. GEN MSS 515, Folder 688, BRN 2007792, Image ID Number: 1041460 [in] General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 22 Aleksandra Gruzińska, “Witold Gombrowicz. A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes,” Rocky Mountain Review, vol. 60, 2006, p. 132. 23 See also Kierkegaard’s concepts of “inter-esse,” SKS 7, 238 / CUP1, 314–15. 24 Gombrowicz, Testament, p. 36; A Kind of Testament, p. 34. 25 SKS 3, 247 / EO2, 259. 26 Gombrowicz, Testament, p. 161; A Kind of Testament, p. 155. 27 Gombrowicz, Testament, pp. 154–5; A Kind of Testament, pp. 148–9. 21

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ourselves, which is also basically a culture, but a shabby inferior culture, degraded to the level of our own inadequacy.28

This resonates with the confession of the Aesthete in “Diapsalamata,” in Either/Or, Part One, who is perceived as joyful and open, however, inside he feels isolation and sadness: I have never been joyful, and yet it has always seemed as if joy were my constant companion, as if the buoyant jinn of joy danced around me, invisible to others but not to me, whose eyes shone with delight. Then when I walk past people, happy-go-lucky as a god, and they envy me because of my good fortune, I laugh, for I despise people, and I take my revenge. Then when I hear others praised for their faithfulness, their integrity, I laugh, for I despise people, and I take my revenge. My heart has never been hardened toward anyone, but I have always made it appear, especially when I was touched most deeply, as if my heart were closed and alien to every feeling.29

IV. “I was ‘between’ [entre]. And I was an actor.”30 From this feeling of “in-betweenness” arises Gombrowicz’s life-long struggle between living and acting, self-formation and self-production. One can see here a similarity between Kierkegaard and Gombrowicz, especially in how they perceived their relation to their work. On the one hand, Kierkegaard implements autobiographical aspects of his life in his production, and on the other hand his enterprise is understood as the process of becoming his own self; one can also see how Kierkegaard interprets the purpose and the meaning of his life through conceptual apprehension of his past. Kierkegaard sees his life and his work as integral parts of his self-formation interrupted by the intervention of providence. Kierkegaard was given a task by God. The task was to redefine what it means to be Christian. Gombrowicz is more skeptical about looking and interpreting to past. He believes that one is unable to see the past “clearly, dispassionately”31 and often reconstructs the past for the purpose of one’s own perception of oneself in the present. We devour the past to feed what we are today.32 Gombrowicz, however, affected by Kierkegaard’s idea of self-formation, reads it as production of oneself. He sees himself as being suspended between his internal calling to be himself and the external, worldly pressures that shape him. It seems three realms can be distinguished. First is the individual’s inner formation. Although Gombrowicz does not elaborate extensively on what that inner sphere of the individual is, from various parts of his works one can reconstruct it as some sort of spiritual life.33 In this sense an individual creates oneself within oneself in Gombrowicz, Testament, pp. 71–2; A Kind of Testament, p. 70. SKS 2, 49 / EO1, 40. 30 Gombrowicz, Testament, p. 41; A Kind of Testament, p. 39. 31 Gombrowicz, Testament, p. 36; A Kind of Testament, p. 34. 32 Ibid. 33 Gombrowicz, Dziennik: 1953–1956, p. 45; Diary; 1953–1956, p. 27: “I insist only that whatever happens in our spiritual life happen in the profoundest and most honest way. The time has come in which atheists should seek a new understanding with the Church.” 28 29

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substantial and imaginative ways, by producing an image of oneself as one is, and what one would like to attain to. In the second sense one is created through the external structures of Form, because the individual’s personality can be formed only in relation to the outer world.34 The third realm is connected with the individual’s creation within the perspective of his recipients. Gombrowicz as a writer creates himself in and through expression of himself, but also according to the images in which he is perceived. According to Gombrowicz, to be human is to be as one is in the eyes of others. The individual’s task is to impact the image of oneself in the Other’s representations of oneself, to not be recreated in the Other’s representations of the individual in any possible way. “The thing is that [a human being] ought not be subject to others’ representations of ourselves, but also ought to try to mould those representations according to one’s will….To create oneself through the overpowering of others’ representation of ourselves—this is the plan….”35 In these words he reveals his relation between himself, his works, and readers. On the one hand, he openly admits that his real life is different from what he elaborates in his works; on the other hand he says that there is no difference between his works and himself. “ ‘This is how I would like to be for you,’ and not ‘This is how I am.’ ” says Gombrowicz.36 His sincerity is in fact his sober awareness of the impossibility of sincerity.37 Commenting on the writing of his Diary, Gombrowicz writes: “I write this diary reluctantly. Its dishonest honesty wearies me. For whom am I writing? If I am writing for myself, then why is it being published? If for the reader, why do I pretend that I am talking to myself?”38 For a writer, he believes, what matters, and is hidden by most of them, is the writer’s struggle for position, success, and admiration.39 It is through writing that one becomes, and exists; writing is not pure expression of an artist, it is the writing that writes the writer.40 Another aspect of Gombrowicz’s particular interest in Kierkegaard concentrates on the Dane’s concept of the single individual. Gombrowicz speaks of Kierkegaard in two chapters of A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes, portraying Kierkegaard as the starting point for existentialism. In a serious and short elaboration, Gombrowicz ascribed to Kierkegaard the renewed concentration on the concrete individual, instead of the abstract.41 One can trace Gombrowicz’s interest in the concept of the single individual in most of his writings. While preparing for the collected publication of the excerpts of his Diary, which were previously issued 34 Wojciech Wyskiel, Witold Gombrowicz. Twórczość Literacka, Warsaw and Cracow: PWN 1975, p. 11. 35 Ibid., p. 4 (My translation). 36 Gombrowicz, Testament, p. 130; A Kind of Testament, p. 126. 37 Gombrowicz, Testament, pp. 86–7; A Kind of Testament, pp. 84–5. 38 Gombrowicz, Dziennik: 1953–1956. p. 54; Diary: 1953–1956, p. 34. 39 Gombrowicz, Dziennik: 1953–1956. pp. 54–5; Diary: 1953–1956, p. 34. 40 Gombrowicz, Testament, p. 86; A Kind of Testament, p. 84: “I create myself through my work. To start with I shall fight, and then I shall see what I am.” 41 Gombrowicz, “Course de Philosophie en Six Heures un Quart,” p. 40; A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes, p. 47.

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in Kultura in Paris, Gombrowicz struggled to write a suitable preface to the onevolume work. Readers had already objected to fragments of his Diary for being politically and philosophically controversial, but Gombrowicz decided to be even more provocative. He wrote: Monday: myself Tuesday: myself Wednesday: myself Thursday: myself.42

To understand the gravity of these words, one should refer to Gombrowicz’s commentary on the fragment; he says: And I found myself in sharp conflict with all the post-war tendencies, which condemned the word “myself.” This “myself” was excommunicated by the church as being immoral, it was frowned upon by Science as being in contradiction with objectivism, it was banned by Marxism and by every current of the time which wanted man to despise his selfish, egocentric, old fashioned, antisocial, “self.” When I wrote “myself” for the fourth time, I felt like Antaeus when he touched the earth! I felt the ground under my feet once more! To assert myself in this “myself,” in spite of everything, with the maximum insolence, with a certain stubborn nonchalance, in an unexaggerated, quite natural manner—this, I realized, was the purpose of my diary.43

Both concentrated their philosophies on the quest for rediscovering the single individual.44 The work of Gombrowicz concentrates on the singularity of the I, but he is not naïve in his thinking, believing that I is currently an “endangered species.”45 What posits the I in the danger of the current age is, on the one hand, a purely theoretical and abstract understanding of it, mixed with science and technology that needs no I; on the other hand, it is philosophies, world-views, and religions that deform the I.46 V. Deformation of I is linked with the fundamental concept of Gombrowicz’s authorship—the concept of Form.47 Form is, in fact, what Gombrowicz is most Gombrowicz, Dziennik: 1953–1956, p. 11; Diary: 1953–1956, p. 3. Gombrowicz, Testament, p. 127; A Kind of Testament, pp. 123–4. 44 SKS 4, 54–7 / FT, 54–7, SKS 16, 93–104 / PV, 113–24; SKS, 8, 85–7 / TA, 84–6; Gombrowicz, Dziennik: 1953–1956, pp. 134–5; Diary: 1953–1956, p. 90. 45 Gombrowicz’s concept of the human is complex; it links two ideas: the individual and the interhuman [idea międzyludzkiego]. For the purpose of the article, I focus on the individuality rather than interhumanity of the self. For more on the interhuman, see Wyskiel, Witold Gombrowicz, pp. 17–21; Leszek Nowak, Gombrowicz. Człowiek wobec ludzi, Warsaw: Prószyński i S-ka 2000, pp. 39–90. 46 Gombrowicz, Testament, pp. 165–80; A Kind of Testament, pp. 159–73. Dziennik: 1953–1956, pp. 128–9. Diary: 1953–1956, pp. 85–6. 47 Gombrowicz is not consistent with using either uppercase or lowercase for “Form.” However, in distinctive presentation of Form as a concept in Testament Gombrowicz uses 42 43

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famous for. What is Form? Actually, Gombrowicz sees himself as witness of Form, someone who discovered the “logos” of Form: “Ha! The adventures of Form are numberless.”48 On the one hand, Form relates itself to the relation between individuals and culture, and between individuals in general; on the other hand, Form is the relation between individuals and culture, and individuals themselves.49 What we call Human is ultimately related to Form. Form imposes, deforms and cheats.50 In Ferdydurke, ironically referring to the pathetical style of Scriptures, Gombrowicz says: The son of earth will henceforth understand that he is not expressing himself in harmony with his deepest being but always in accordance with some artificial form painfully thrust upon him from without, either by people or by circumstances. He will then dread that form of his and feel ashamed of it, much as he had thus far idolized and flaunted it. We will soon fear our persons and our personalities, because it will become apparent that they are by no means truly our own. And instead of roaring: “I believe this—I feel it— that is how I am—I am ready to defend it.” We will say in all humility: “Maybe I believe in it—maybe I feel it—I happened to say it, to do it, or to think it.” The high priest will stand in terror of the altar, and the mother will instill in her son not only principles but also ways of escaping them so that they do not smother him.51

To be human is having in oneself a conflict; it is a battle between oneself and one’s own Form, which Gombrowicz calls “a drama of human Form.”52 It is the “battle against his way of being, feeling, thinking, talking, acting, against his culture, his ideas and his ideologies, his convictions, his creeds…against everything by which he appears to the outer world.”53 Form deforms the individual, therefore the individual is the subject of Form, and the individual’s moral obligation is to defend oneself from deformity. Gombrowicz says: mainly uppercase. I use uppercase for “Form” in correspondence with the fact; it is also consistent with Hamilton’s translation of Testament into English: A Kind of Testament. 48 Gombrowicz, Testament, p. 78; A Kind of Testament, p. 76. 49 Gombrowicz, Dziennik: 1957–1961, pp. 11–13; Diary: 1957–1961, pp. 4–6. 50 Wyskiel, Witold Gombrowicz, p. 12: “A man must submit to the form, not just ‘be,’ must ‘be someone’—must have a certain body, and must appear to the other in a certain form, must adopt a certain style of life and world-view, and to think according to some rules that have not been established by themselves. On the other hand, [a man] constantly rebels against this situation, because the form always betrays him, never corresponds to his most personal feelings, convictions, experiences. A man is never himself—says Gombrowicz—because one is never identical with one’s form. And he is never sincere—each of his expressions is subordinated to the form (means of personal communication belong to the world of things, as it is with the general rules of thinking). In later definitions of the form, Gombrowicz described the form as ‘all the ways to manifest oneself such as speech, thought, gestures, decisions, acts, etc.’ The Concept [of the form] can be interpreted sociopsychologically, ontologically and epistemologically.” (My translation.) 51 Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke, Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy 1956, p. 92; Ferdydurke, trans. by Danuta Borchard, New Haven and London: Yale University Press 2000, p. 85. 52 Gombrowicz, Testament, p. 55; A Kind of Testament, p. 53. 53 Ibid.

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[I]f Form deforms us, then the moral postulate requires us to face the consequences. To be myself, to defend myself from deformity, to keep my distance from my feelings, my most private thoughts, whenever they do not really express me. This is my first moral obligation.54 It’s simple, isn’t it? But here is the rub; if I am always defined by others and by culture as well as by my own formal necessities, where should I look for my “self”? Who am I really and to what extent am I? I have only found one answer: I do not know who I really am, but I suffer when I am deformed. So at least I know what I am not. My “self” is nothing but my will to be myself.55

Although to fight Form is a moral obligation, our struggle with Form ultimately turns into some kind of Form itself. It is because the human, on the one hand, fights Form and, on the other hand, craves Form.56 Gombrowicz says: “By questioning Form, my works, themselves the products of Form, defined me more and more. But contradiction, which is the philosopher’s death, is the artist’s life.”57 Ultimately Gombrowicz attains a very pessimistic image of the individual, according to which the human lives in Form, yet is formed (deformed) by Form and imposes Form on others. Nothing in man is authentic; “to be a man is to be artificial,”58 he says. What alleviates that is the existential experience of “the leap.” This exclusively Kierkegaardian category is discussed by Gombrowicz in his criticism of “Polishness” (polonitude).59 This local problem in Gombrowicz’s writings,60 which might be difficult to understand for non-Poles,61 nonetheless is very important for a full understanding of his thought. Gombrowicz elaborates on what he calls Polish Form—Sarmatian style—which is based on the “feeling of formlessness that tortured Poles”62 and conservation of “trauma of our loss of independence.”63 This is the Form that disables Poles as a people. Gombrowicz writes: “The Pole, formed by Poland, by the Polish environment and tradition….”64 He argues that however painful and difficult is the truth of the condition of Polish art, culture and literature, Poles must admit that fact and decide to change that state of passiveness and resentment.65 “Beware of Form. In this case of national form.”66

See also SKS 11, 25 / SUD, 29–30. Gombrowicz, Testament, pp. 85–6; A Kind of Testament, p. 83. 56 Gombrowicz, Dziennik: 1953–1956, p. 139; Diary: 1953–1956, p. 93. 57 Gombrowicz, Testament, p. 86; A Kind of Testament, p. 84. 58 Gombrowicz, Testament, p. 63; A Kind of Testament, p. 62. 59 Gombrowicz, Testament, p. 58, p. 59; A Kind of Testament, p. 56, p. 57. 60 Note that Kierkegaard was critical of the Danes just as Gombrowicz was of the Poles. See SKS 25, 390, NB30:13 / JP 2, 1621. 61 Gombrowicz, Testament, p. 116; A Kind of Testament, p. 112. This relation goes both ways, as Gombrowicz says: “And how many times, subsequently, did I not read, in articles about me in European or American papers, these same clichés from which, being a Pole, I could never escape? It was as though it were impossible to talk about us normally.” 62 Gombrowicz, Testament, p. 59; A Kind of Testament, p. 57. 63 Ibid. 64 Gombrowicz, Testament, p. 62; A Kind of Testament, p. 60. 65 Gombrowicz, Testament, pp. 58–61; A Kind of Testament, pp. 56–8. 66 Gombrowicz, Testament, p. 117; A Kind of Testament, p. 113. 54 55

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The existential leap—which allows the individual (in this example the Poles) to break with Form (Polishness)—is an absolute way of choosing oneself in refusing to accept oneself as one is culturally/socially/nationally defined. Gombrowicz says: “We will discover that other Pole when we turn against ourselves.”67 On the contrary, for Kierkegaard to choose oneself absolutely is to reject oneself as oneself. We can contrast this with Gombrowicz, who writes: “Give me the knife, then! I must perform a still more radical operation! I must amputate myself from myself” I proceeded to amputate. The following thought was the scalpel: accept, understand that you are not yourself, that no one is ever himself with anyone, in any situation, that to be a man is to be artificial. Is that simple enough? Yes, there was only one difficulty. It was not sufficient to accept it and to understand it; I had to experience it.68

Consequently, Gombrowicz, in a self-creative act “leaped as energetically as [he] could towards a new understanding of man—a [modern man], bereft of God, liberated and solitary…characterized by a new attitude towards Form.”69 This new attitude towards Form that characterizes modern man is precisely manifested in Gombrowicz’s awareness of the existence of Form and his possible influence on Form. The individual must gain its ability to manipulate and transform Form. For Gombrowicz, the true life oscillates between “closeness”70 and “openness,”71 between “being lost in the multitude of fractions and being imprisoned in some narrow perspective.”72 In Trans-Atlantyk the first attitude represents Tomasz Kobrzycki, whose world is in order but poor, and Gonzalo, whose life is overwhelmed with pluralism and randomness; it is all about avoiding both extremes.73 This is the literature that should awaken the individual, not reduplicate and reassure what was already within the individual.74 This process Gombrowicz calls “rehumanization of inhumanity” (réhumanisation de l’inhumanité )75—bringing back the individual to himself, and to others. He must distance himself from Form, but not negate the fact that he himself dwells in it. It is to counteract too far-reaching deformations of personality and to recreate the possibility of deliberate manipulation of Form.76 This idea fits with Gombrowicz’s understanding of selfhood: “The human is an actor—says Gombrowicz—but the natural actor; he cannot stop acting, can change his masks, but cannot reveal his face.”77 Distance to Form brings its psychological and sociological consequences for the individual. Individuals, while trying to act in accordance with various values (social, Gombrowicz, Dziennik: 1953–1956, p. 165; Diary: 1953–1956, p. 110. Gombrowicz, Testament, pp. 63–4; A Kind of Testament, pp. 61–2. 69 Gombrowicz, Testament, p. 64; A Kind of Testament, pp. 62–3. 70 Wyskiel, Witold Gombrowicz, p. 16. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid. 73 Wyskiel, Witold Gombrowicz, pp. 16–17. 74 Gombrowicz, Dziennik: 1953–1956, p. 165; Diary: 1953–1956, p. 109. 75 Gombrowicz, Testament, p. 157; A Kind of Testament, p. 151. 76 Wyskiel, Witold Gombrowicz, p. 13. 77 Ibid. 67 68

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moral, spiritual, economic, political), try to become like social models (businessman, professor, luminary, man of faith) and imitate them; one tries to become oneself by identifying with the image of the ideal selves, instead of naturally becoming oneself. A close look at Gombrowicz’s works reveals modified representations of Kierkegaard’s three stages: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious.78 The above-mentioned “existential leap” distinguishes between two types of selves in Gombrowicz’s anthropology. Such distinction represents the movement of the self towards an authenticity that is based on the individual’s distance towards Form. The first, let us say, natural individual dwells in and is subject to Form. In this state of unawareness the natural man is content due to his being created by Form and by attaining certain stabilization through Form. The other individual that Gombrowicz calls “modern man” is aware of Form and tries to keep distance towards Form; unsatisfied but liberated from being passively produced, he is immature and recreates himself according to the perception of others. Such distinction of the two types of selves resonates with two of Kierkegaard’s stages on life’s way, the aesthete and the ethical. The ethical represents accelerated intensification of the spirit, deeper inwardness and freedom. The aesthete and the natural man share the intensity of unawareness of what they are and how they are. For Kierkegaard it is despair and anxiety that, on the one hand, make the individual unaware and, on the other hand, make the individual aware of its existence and its being in the process of becoming. The aesthete has no social stabilization, but natural man in his stabilization hides his non-becoming in an existential way. For the ethical, stabilization expresses more advanced becoming, and the stabilization of modern man is the proof of the form’s “victory” over the individual. Rules, morals, laws, principles and values are structured by inter-human relations, and not defined by any spiritual authority, and therefore represent the power of Form, which makes the individual inauthentic rather than increasing his authenticity. Judge William—the ethical—who is mature, serious, and married, for Gombrowicz represents the individual dominated by Form. The modern man is immature and skeptical, liberated from social structures, conventionality and etiquette.79 Gombrowicz’s modern man, although located in opposition to Kierkegaard’s ethicist, does not resemble Kierkegaard’s aesthete fully. The modern man is not folly and does not seek aesthetic impulses; he is neither Don Juan nor Herod. However paradoxical it may appear, Gombrowicz’s modern man, to a certain extent, recalls Kierkegaard’s concept of the religious. Although Gombrowicz is an atheist, his attitude towards religion is similar to the religious person, especially in their criticism of Christianity as form of tradition, habit, world-view, theory, or cult, or as a crutch for weak-minded people or mere social phenomena that organize one’s life into a consistent unity. Gombrowicz’s modern man especially in his concern for self-formation (auto-creation in Gombrowicz’s language) partially resonates with what Kierkegaard calls religiousness A or Socratic religiousness, a type of religiousness that is purely immanent. However, Gombrowicz does not see Religiousness B as a possible and necessary continuation Gombrowicz, Dziennik: 1953–1956, p. 266; Diary: 1953–1956, p. 181. Gombrowicz, Dziennik: 1953–1956, pp. 33–6; Diary: 1953–1956, pp. 20–1. Gombrowicz, Testament, p. 64; A Kind of Testament, p. 62. 78

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of its development.80 In one of his dramas written before World War II, entitled Yvonne, Princess of Burgundy, Gombrowicz indirectly expresses his criticism of religion: PRINCE: Do you believe in God? Do you pray? Do you kneel? Do you believe that Christ died for your sins on the cross? YVONNE: (with contempt) I do. PRINCE: A miracle. Finally. Blessed you are, oh God on the highest! But why is she speaking…that tone…that tone… with contempt? With contempt about God? That she believes in God with contempt? CYRIL: It is beyond my understanding. PRINCE: Cyril, let me tell you something. She believes in God because of her defects, and she knows that. If she hadn’t the defects, she wouldn’t believe. She believes in God, but simultaneously knows that God is just a plaster on her psychophysical defects. (Turning towards Yvonne) Am I right? YVONNE: (silent).81

Gombrowicz, like Kierkegaard, disapproved of the individual’s pursuit of religion for practical reasons; both witnessed and understood the danger of using religion to conceal one’s deficiencies and defects.82 However, according to Kierkegaard, it is Christianity that destabilizes one’s superficial state of equilibrium and cohesion, which Gombrowicz does not accept. For Kierkegaard, the truth of Christianity is based on a subjective relationship between the individual and God, as both are subjects. It is the deepening of awareness of one’s existence and inwardness that leads the individual to authenticity of the self, and ultimately leads the individual before God. Only before God, the individual is as it is. Gombrowicz could refer to that saying: “For Kierkegaard…the more profound the awareness, the more authentic the existence. [He] measures honesty and the essence of experience by the degree of awareness. But is our humanity really built on awareness?”83 Awareness is the structure that is built between individuals, and imposed on one another; awareness does not really represent any of the merits of human existence.84 For Gombrowicz, the individual’s cry for authenticity must be directed towards the void, because no M. Jamie Ferreira, Kierkegaard, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell 2009, p. 101, pp. 111–16; Seung-Goo Lee, Kierkegaard on Becoming and Being a Christian, Zoetermer: Meinema 2006, pp. 207–8; Sylvia Walsh, Kierkegaard: Thinking Christianly in an Existential Mode, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009, pp. 41–4. 81 Witold Gombrowicz, “Iwona, księżniczka Burgunda,” Skamander. Miesięcznik Literacki, vol. 12, 1938, p. 83 (my translation). 82 SKS 25, 85, NB26:83 / JP 4, 4901, p. 515: ”But how does one live in Christendom these days? One lives in such a way that he imagines that he is relating in faith to the being-inand-for-itself, but stays as far away from it as possible (probably so that he does not discover his delusion) and on the whole is mainly occupied with making his earthly life as comfortable as possible, getting through life satisfactorily—yes, he even thinks that the relationship to the being-in-and-for-itself is supposed to help him—what nonsense!—to get through this world satisfactorily, to have a good life of it.” 83 Gombrowicz, Dziennik: 1953–1956, p. 266; Diary: 1953–1956, p. 232. 84 Ibid. 80

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one is listening, and there is no one to help: “I, with my proud humanity, which was indeed ‘alone with itself,’ supported by nothing, a king of the categorical imperative crying in a void: be yourself!”85 For Kierkegaard, the self is “[the] relation that relates itself to itself”86 and “[the] self must either have established itself or have been established by another.”87 Another can be understood as oneself perceived as another, therefore immanent, or as transcendent, another that is ultimately different than the self. Another establishes the self: “If the relation that relates itself to itself has been established by another, then the relation is indeed the third, but this relation, the third, is yet again a relation and relates itself to that which established the entire relation.”88 Due to the fact of such constitution of the self two forms of despair apply: firstly “[i]f a human self had itself established itself, then there could be only one form: not to will to be oneself, to will to do away with oneself….”89 The second form can be seen in “despair to will to be oneself. This second formulation is specifically the expression for the complete dependence of the relation (of the self)…in relating itself to itself, by relating itself to that which has established the entire relation.”90 Gombrowicz sees Kierkegaard’s forms of the self-relating to itself as produced and recreated in society among people. Consequently, agreeing with Kierkegaard’s formulation that the self must either have established itself or have been established by another, he chooses the immanent path of personally establishing one’s self.91 Kierkegaard’s question for what is of absolute importance for the individual, should be changed into what kind of person one would like to become and how that happens, limiting the question to the spectrum of immanence: “The question I put to Catholics is not what kind of God do they believe in, but what kind of people they want to become.”92 VI. Kierkegaard’s influence on Gombrowicz can be predominantly seen in the Pole’s constant struggle for the authentic self. Deeply indebted to Kierkegaard, Gombrowicz explicitly and implicitly used, and often reworked, the Dane’s essential concepts: the single individual, self-formation, the existential leap, existence, and paradox. Kierkegaard’s pursuit for personal integrity—by emphasizing awareness of selfdeception, intimacy, subjectivity, and various existential categories—became an Gombrowicz, Dziennik: 1961–1966, pp. 16–17; Diary: 1961–1966, p. 10. SKS 11, 7 / SUD, 13. 87 SKS 11, 8 / SUD, 13. 88 Ibid. 89 SKS 11, 8 / SUD, 14. 90 Ibid. 91 SKS 11, 8 / SUD, 13: “the self must either have established itself or have been established by another.” In this respect, Gombrowicz, contrary to Kierkegaard’s transcendental understanding of the foundation of the self—the another—sees merely the self as its own fundament. 92 Gombrowicz, Dziennik: 1953–1956, pp. 47–8; Diary: 1953–1956, p. 30. 85 86

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important point of departure for Gombrowicz’s writings. However, the authorships of both Kierkegaard and Gombrowicz do not intend to describe authentic selfhood but rather to provoke the reader for her own journey to authentic selfhood. They are without authority. It is their life and work that is supposed to convince the reader of their honesty: the existential climax of Kierkegaard’s being before God, Gombrowicz’s sincere insincerity. Both were true to their life to the end— Kierkegaard the martyr and Gombrowicz, always in-between, fighting Form—and were witnesses to their ideas despite facing lifelong critique, or worse, omission and silence. Both received their true appreciation mostly after death. Kierkegaard’s difficult language, however, cannot measure up with the difficulty of Gombrowicz: demanding, full of neologisms, overwhelming with the abundance of made up words, difficult to understand even for his compatriots, comparable to the abstruseness of Joyce’s language. This all makes Gombrowicz unsuitable for many, but his thought is relevant in pluralistic societies such as our own age. In one’s pursuit of authentic selfhood, in an age of overconfidence, supremacy of knowledge and information, and obsession with control, Gombrowicz’s provoking thought allows one to keep distance from oneself. In his opening to his Testament he says: “Should I talk about my life in connection with my work? I know neither my life nor my work.”93

Gombrowicz, Testament, p. 29; A Kind of Testament, p. 27.

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Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Gombrowicz’s Corpus Dziennik: 1953–1956, Paris: Instytut Literacki 1957, p. 254; p. 259; p. 266; p. 272. (English translation: Diary: 1953–1956, trans. by Lillian Vallee, Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1998, p. 173; p. 177; p. 181; p. 185.) Dziennik: 1957–1961, Paris: Instytut Literacki 1962, p. 141; p. 192. (English translation: Diary: 1957–1961, trans. by Lillian Vallee, Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1989, p. 122; p. 167.) Gombrowicz’s letter to Artur Saundauer from November 23, 1958, published in Gombrowicz Cahier, ed. by Constantin Jelenski and Dominique de Roux, Paris: Cahier de l’Herne 1971, p. 127. “Course de Philosophie en Six Heures un Quart,” in Gombrowicz Cahier ed. by Constantin Jelenski, Dominique de Roux, Paris: Cahier de l’Herne 1971, pp. 401–3; p. 408; p. 411, p. 415. (English translation: A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes, trans. by Benjamin Ivry, New Haven and London: Yale University Press 2004, pp. 46–49; p. 61; p. 70; p. 78.) II. Sources of Gombrowicz’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Camus, Albert, Le Mythe de Sisyphe, Paris: Gallimard 1942, p. 39; pp. 42–3; p. 51; pp. 56–61; p. 65; pp. 69–72. Heidegger, Martin, Sein und Zeit, Halle: Niemeyer 1927, pp. 175–96, see also p. 190, note 1; p. 235, note 1; and p. 338, note 1. Sartre, Jean-Paul, L’être et le néant. Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique, Paris: Gallimard 1943 (Bibliothèque des Idées), pp. 58–84; pp. 94–111; pp. 115–49; pp. 150–74; pp. 291–300; pp. 508–16; pp. 529–60; pp. 639–42; 643–63; pp. 669–70; pp. 720ff. — Critique de la raison dialectique, vol. 1, Théorie des ensembles pratiques, Paris: Gallimard 1960, pp. 15–32, p. 117, note 1. III. Secondary Literature on Gombrowicz’s Relation to Kierkegaard Filutowska, Katarzyna, “Gombrowicz bojący i drżący. Gombrowicz a Kierkegaard. Ironia w ‘Dziennikach’ Gombrowicza” [Fearing and Trembling Gombrowicz. Gombrowicz and Kierkegaard. The Irony in Gombrowicz’s “Journals” ], in Gdzie wschodzi Gombrowicz i kędy zapada [Where Gombrowicz Rises and Where He

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Sets], ed. by Jakub Macha i Aleksander Zbrzezny, Warsaw: Wydział Filozofii i Socjologii Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego 2004, pp. 71–87. Świderski, Bronisław, “Kierkegaard i Gombrowicz. Czy można kochać dwóch mężczyzn naraz” [Kierkegaard and Gombrowicz. Is It Possible To Love Both Men at the Same Time?], in Aktualność Kierkegaarda, ed. by Antoni Szwed, Kęty: Antyk 2005, pp. 101–8. Szwed, Antoni, “Poland: A Short History of the Reception of Kierkegaard’s Thought,” in Kierkegaard’s International Reception, Tome II, Southern, Central and Eastern Europe, ed. by Jon Stewart, Aldershot: Ashgate 2009 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 8), pp. 213–43. Tomaszewski, Marek, “La Pologne et l’Argentine: deux ‘tigres mythiques’ dans la vie et l’œuvre de Witold Gombrowicz, dans Witold Gombrowicz,” in Witold Gombrowicz entre l’Europe et l’Amérique, ed. by Marek Tomaszewski, Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion 2007, pp. 181–94.

Ivan Klíma: “To Save My Inner World” Nigel Hatton

The Jewish Czech1 writer Ivan Klíma, born in Prague in 1931, spent part of his youth in a concentration camp. From 1941 to 1945, he lived against his will at Theresienstadt—Terezín in the Czech language. Approximately 73,608 people were transported on 122 trains from Bohemia and Moravia to Terezín between November 1941 and March 1945.2 The experience informs all of Klíma’s writing: novels, essays, plays, and short stories dominated by themes of love, freedom, and justice. These works—with deceptive, guised, and often ironic titles like My Merry Mornings, My First Loves, The Ultimate Intimacy, Love and Garbage, Judge on Trial, My Golden Trades, and Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light, also feature an inescapable despair and anxiety that, in part, can be traced to the writing of Søren Kierkegaard, a thinker Klíma has alluded to in both his prose and autobiographical writing. Klíma fictionalizes the drama of human precariousness through moralized narratives about failed relationships and alienated human beings pressed to act on behalf of their own freedom—instances of the self trying to preserve the self as an act of freedom. In an essay titled “The Unexpected Merits of Oppression” Klíma meditates on the leitmotif that correlates the scenes and expositions within his own prose: I was lucky enough to spend my war youth mostly in a concentration camp. The word luck is not a slip of the tongue. From my juvenile experience I gained important knowledge. First of all, if man wants to survive in the situation of immediate threat he must adapt himself, he must accept even the worst circumstances life gives and strive even within this context to continue his human existence. In the camp this meant to maintain my human dignity and mental balance: to save my inner world, my hope, my inner freedom, never to succumb to panic or despair. Those who did not manage this were lost! Secondly, and less importantly, I learned that man accepts these circumstances as

1 Klíma’s parents did not practice the Jewish religion. He describes them as atheists. Klíma attended church as part of the Protestant youth movement, but says he was “not a real believer at any time in my life.” See Rob Trucks, “A Conversation with Ivan Klíma,” New England Review, vol. 20, no. 2, 1999, pp. 77–87; p. 80. 2 The Jews of Czechoslovakia: Historical Studies and Surveys, vols. 1–3, ed. by Avigdor Dagan, Gertrude Hirschler, and Lewis Weiner, Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America 1968–83.

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Klíma’s experience in the concentration camp has led to his “obsession with the problem of justice, with the feelings of people who have been condemned and cast out, the lonely and the helpless.”4 He has carried out this obsession in his prose. Primarily a novelist whose fiction—characters, settings, timelines, events, occupations—closely resembles the facts of his own life, Klíma nevertheless insists upon an impermeable wall between his imaginative work and his own experiences. Yet, even with such a qualification, Klíma encourages parallels between the meditation that helped him survive the concentration camp and the meditative, almost essayistic, reflection of his characters. Women and men in his novels find themselves facing crises and predicaments that force them into self-examination and ethical deliberation—similar, though never as drastic and life-threatening, as the situation Klíma faced as a child and as a citizen living under a totalitarian regime. Though not considered a religious writer in the rigorous or ecclesiastic sense of the word, Klíma’s prose can still be seen as religious in terms of the rigidity of how characters appeal to the self in relation to some inexplicable force to keep themselves afloat and hopeful. Klíma’s authorship also must be considered in the context of censorship, totalitarianism, and constant political change. The German Reich occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939 (it had been a democratic republic from 1918 to 1938), and then Russian and American troops liberated the country in 1945, and after what Klíma calls “less than three years of relative freedom,” a 1948 coup d’état ushered in communist rule.5 The Prague Spring of 1968, in which Klíma played a prominent role, momentarily allowed greater freedoms of expression, but the Soviet invasion and occupation led to renewed restrictions that had varying effects until the Velvet Revolution and the collapse of communism in 1989. Klíma’s work was banned in his native land for twenty years, and between 1970 and 1989 he published mainly abroad or in underground or samizdat6 publications within the Ivan Klíma, “The Unexpected Merits of Oppression,” Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature, vol. 2, no. 1, 1990, pp. 37–42; p. 38. 4 Klíma makes his remarks in an interview with Philip Roth. Available in Philip Roth, A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work, New York: Houghton Mifflin 2001, p. 68. 5 See Ivan Klíma, Michael Heim, Czeslaw Milosz, and Martina Moravcova, Fictions and Histories, Berkeley: Townsend Center for the Humanities 1998 (Occasional Papers of the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, no. 11), p. 6. 6 Jiří Holý divides Czech literature in the second half of the twentieth century into “three communicative spheres of artistic and literary activity. The first is represented by works written at home and published under censorship, i.e., official literature; the second is represented by underground works written at home, i.e., works in manuscript or samizdat; the third includes writing abroad in Czech, i.e., works written and distributed in exile. All three created their own aesthetic and ethical parameters, their own genres and their own readership.” Jiří Holý, Writers Under Siege: Czech Literature since 1945, Brighton: Sussex Academic Press 2008, p. 1. Klíma fell into the second category for two decades. Volunteer copyists and typists would gather in underground meetings and make copies of the work of banned Czech writers. Copies were either circulated in the country or smuggled out to be printed at foreign or émigré presses. Unlike other countries where samizdat served to produce 3

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country’s borders.7 Czech politician and literary scholar Josef Jařab explains that “because open, direct, and explicit protest was hardly possible and rarely effective in modern Czech history, and because Czechs are used to reading and learning and even ‘teaching between the lines,’ ” Czechs “have been traditionally more open to identifying with cultural rebels, to identifying in human rather than political or ideological terms.”8 The rebellious spirit can be seen in twentieth-century Czech artistic expression from the theater to the novel in the writings of Klíma, Vaclav Havel, Pavel Kohout, Josef Škvorecký, Ludvík Vaculík, and Milan Kundera. It is this generation of writers, marked by the war and repression, that Klíma most identifies with and deems a particular group or collective (distinctive of writers who emerged after the war) that may or may not have been shaped by the political events surrounding their lives and careers. Thus, for Klíma, Søren Kierkegaard would represent a writer and thinker he could identify with and appreciate even if he could not ultimately accept Kierkegaard’s leap of faith and positioning of God in his world-view. Klíma, who recalls reading at least The Sickness unto Death and The Moment in the corpus of Kierkegaard, routinely addresses ways in which human beings can free themselves from oppression, movements that require faith and allegiance to the self and others. Klíma’s acclaimed novel Love and Garbage (Láska a smetí, 1986)9 contains direct allusions to Kierkegaard and has attracted more attention from Anglophone scholars than any of his other works. The ideas of Kierkegaard, I suggest, provide insight into the metaphysics of Klíma’s moral universe, one in which the individual is not only faced with preservation of the self in an environment where freedom has been compromised by state apparatuses, but also a world complicated by even the most moral human beings’ subjection to his or her own desire and hubris. Whether through the lens of the priest-protagonist, as in Klíma’s novel, The Ultimate Intimacy, or the work of solely books banned by censors for political or ideological content, samizdat in Czechoslovakia encompassed all types of literature, polemical or romanticist, by writers who refused to even consider seeking the censor’s approval or were banned altogether. It was the main source for authentic Czech literature, and more than 1,000 titles were produced, accounting for a substantial chapter in the Czech literary tradition. Whereas writers who fell into the first sphere indicated by Holý received prizes and honors (and publication) for their contributions, Klíma and his colleagues captured readers. Klíma’s awards would come eventually. Within a three-day period in 2002, he received his first ever awards from his native country: the Medal for Outstanding Service to the Czech Republic and the Franz Kafka Prize, won the year before by Philip Roth. 7 In the November 30, 1980 edition of the New York Times, Milan Kundera said in an interview with Philip Roth, “For twelve years now practically no contemporary Czech literature of any merit has been published in Prague. Two hundred Czech writers have been blacklisted, including the deceased Franz Kafka, 145 Czech historians have been prevented from working in their profession, history has been rewritten, monuments destroyed. A nation deprived of its past begins to lose its identity.” 8 Josef Jařab, “Black Stars, the Red Star, and the Blues,” The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African American Literature and Culture, ed. by Werner Sollors and Maria Diedrich, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 1994, pp. 167–73. 9 Ivan Klíma, Láska a Smetí, Purley, Surrey: Rozmluvy 1988 (first published as samizdat in 1986).

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through the perspective of a philosophical street sweeper, as in Love and Garbage, Klíma is concerned with matters of solidarity and human obligation, as well as questions of ethics. In the assessment of publisher Alexandr Tomsky, Klíma “seems a Protestant writer to the Czechs, appearing to be preaching—though he isn’t. They feel he’s not modern or post-modern but a straightforward storyteller bemoaning a lost order.”10 The traces of despair that filter throughout Klíma’s writing bear striking resemblances to the complex discussions of despair in Kierkegaard’s writing, even if the two thinkers depart on the relationship of despair to faith and the eternal. Despair aides Klíma in his denouncement of totalitarianism, his psychological escape from the concentration camp of his youth, and his polemic against state censorship and its ill effect on society. Kierkegaard wrote, “the self has the task of becoming itself in freedom” and “a self that has no possibility is in despair, and likewise a self that has no necessity.”11 For Klíma and Kierkegaard, despair is a sin, yet the journey through it is necessary in order to attain inner freedom for one, and true religious consciousness for the other. I. “For me it is much better to stay at home than to be exiled” In the 1950s, Klíma studied Czech literature and language at Charles University in Prague. He completed a thesis on Karel Čapek (1890–1938), an important Czech writer remembered for his prose as well as his friendship with the first president of Czechoslovakia Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850–1937). From 1956 until 1969, Klíma worked as an editor and writer for several publications, including the weeklies Květy (Flowers) and Literární noviny (Literary News), and the Československý spisovatel (Czechoslovak Writers) publishing house. In 1968, shortly after the Russian invasion, Klíma received an invitation to visit the University of Michigan. The university had produced one of his plays, The Castle, and Klíma agreed to attend the opening night in Ann Arbor. Klíma left Czechoslovakia on August 31; the next day, the Czechoslovakian border was closed by the government. The Slavic department at Michigan offered Klíma a faculty position, and he stayed in the United States until March 1970 (his government would not extend his permit for a longer period of time), teaching Czech literature and language courses. By the time he returned home he was blacklisted and unable to publish in his country.12 The government banned the work of hundreds of Czech writers, whether living, or deceased since the Middle Ages. Klíma and many of his colleagues managed to 10 Tomsky is quoted in Maya Jaggi, “Building Bridges,” Guardian, May 1, 2004, section “Features & Reviews,” p. 20. 11 SKS 9, 151 / SUD, 35. 12 Ivan Klíma, “The Unexpected Merits of Oppression,” Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature, vol. 2, no. 1, 1990, pp. 37–8: “Because I was published abroad often enough I could have lived as a writer. I did not have to, like many of my colleagues, seek alternative employment to win my bread. I would like to stress that the prohibited authors could have only the most menial jobs, they worked as porters, watchmen, window-washers, as constructionworkers and, if lucky, as warehouse clerks. Obviously, for many authors, especially for the older ones, this was a serious interference with their creative work.”

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publish their work outside of Czechoslovakia, often in Germany or at publishing houses run by exiled Czechs, for example, in England (Alexandr Tomsky) and Canada (Josef Škvorecký). The publication history of Love and Garbage (Láska a smetí) is typical of the manner in which Klíma’s books were made available to readers inside and outside of Czechoslovakia. A samizdat edition began to circulate in 1986 followed by a 1988 Rozmluvy (Tomsky’s emigre press) edition published in Purley, England. The novel was printed in Prague in 1990, and English translations appeared in England in 1990 and New York in 1991. Klíma’s work has been translated into at least 29 languages, and his titles in English (with their London publishing date) include My Merry Mornings (1985),13 My First Loves (1986),14 My Golden Trades (1992),15 Judge on Trial (1990),16 A Summer Affair (1987),17 Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light (1994),18 The Ultimate Intimacy (1997),19 and No Saints or Angels (2001).20 The Spirit of Prague and Other Essays (1994),21 Between Security and Insecurity (2000),22 and Karel Čapek: Life and Work (2002),23 are among the titles of his nonfiction. Aside from Milan Kundera—who long ago exiled himself to France—Klíma is the most recognized contemporary Czech writer. Harkins places Klíma in a category of Czech writers whose writing is essentially ethical and political, and emphasizes the betrayal which Stalinism represented. Common to these writers is a basic concern for ethical values, whether relating to the individual or the entire society, and a sense that the betrayal of ethical values by the society is one source of modern man’s estrangement and unhappiness. It does not matter essentially whether these writers are leftists or further to the right in ideology: they are joined by a common concern for ideals and a disapproval at the betrayal of ideals by either extreme left or right.24

Ivan Klíma, My Merry Mornings, Stories from Prague, trans. by George Theiner, London: Readers International 1985. 14 Ivan Klíma, My First Loves, trans. by Ewald Osers, London: Chatto & Windus 1986. 15 Ivan Klíma, My Golden Trades, trans. by Paul Wilson, London: Granta 1992. 16 Ivan Klíma, Judge on Trial, trans. by A.G. Brain, London: Chatto & Windus 1991. 17 Ivan Klíma, A Summer Affair, trans. by Ewald Osers, London: Chatto & Windus 1987. 18 Ivan Klíma, Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light, trans. by Paul Wilson, London: Granta 1994. 19 Ivan Klíma, The Ultimate Intimacy, trans. by A.G. Brain, London: Granta 1997. 20 Ivan Klíma, No Saints or Angels, trans. by Gerald Turner, London: Granta 2001. 21 Ivan Klíma, The Spirit of Prague and other Essays, trans. by Paul Wilson, London: Granta 1994. 22 Ivan Klíma, Between Security and Insecurity, trans. by Gerald Turner, London: Thames & Hudson 2000. 23 Ivan Klíma, Karel Čapek: Life and Work, trans. by Norma Comrada, North Haven, Connecticut: Catbird Press 2002. 24 William E. Harkins, “The Czech Novel Since 1956: At Home and Abroad,” Czech Literature since 1956: A Symposium, ed. by William Edward Harkins and Paul I. Trensky, New York: Bohemica 1980, p. 14. Harkins contrasts Klíma to Czech writers like Kundera who avoid ideology and are more humoristic and pessimistic in their inclination. 13

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My Merry Mornings and The Ultimate Intimacy are both notable for their meditations on Klíma’s notion of despair. The protagonist of “Tuesday Morning: A Sentimental Story,” collected in My Merry Mornings, reasons that It so happens that life often presents you only with a choice between two kinds of suffering, two forms of nothingness, two varieties of despair. All you can do is choose which you think will be the less unbearable, or even the more attractive, which will allow you to retain at least a modicum of pride or self-respect.25

The speaker in the text is a fictional Ivan Klíma who has left Prague for the United States, but returned to his native country for reasons he cannot explain. A former lover with whom he has had an adulterous affair asks him to explain his reason for staying in Czechoslovakia and not fleeing, as she has done with a wealthy American. The question prompts the fictional protagonist Klíma to reflect on why he has chosen to remain. Klíma calls the story “entirely invented,”26 but acknowledges the close parallels with his own life and travels abroad under communism. While Klíma has not subjected his character—who can be seen as another self, Ivan Klíma writing about a fictional Ivan Klíma—to a religious order of despair similar to that in Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death, nonetheless a rigid order of despair—two kinds, both attractive and unbearable—is still identifiable. The sickness, for Klíma, is both the conditions created by totalitarian rule as well as the moral failings of human beings in their personal relationships. Yet, even in the secularized despair of his prose Klíma draws from the category of the religious. In The Ultimate Intimacy, an adulterous Protestant priest in Prague writes to his wife, “A person in despair makes fatal mistakes and acts foolishly and self-destructively. Do not ascribe evil intentions when someone is shaking with despair. Despair has no logic or rational cause, in this it is akin to love or hate or any other emotion.”27 Klíma evokes the priest-character (Daniel) for his symbolic morality and representation of the good, and then interrogates that good through a modernist application of a romanticist scandal. On the one hand, My Merry Mornings and The Ultimate Intimacy show the condition of Prague under totalitarian rule. On the other hand, the closely autobiographical protagonists allow Klíma to delve even deeper into the human psyche, examining the effects of the anxiety and despair inflicted upon the self and others through immorality. II. “The majority of Czech authors retained their inner freedom” In his writing on totalitarian rule Klíma consistently links censorship, despair, and the loss of inner freedom. In the 1980s he frequently commented on the topic of censorship in articles published in the London-based Index on Censorship,

Klíma, My Merry Mornings: Stories from Prague, p. 40. Rob Trucks, “A Conversation with Ivan Klíma,” New England Review, p. 78. 27 Klíma, The Ultimate Intimacy, p. 297. 25 26

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a magazine founded initially to give voice to silenced writers in Russia and the Warsaw Pact countries. In 1981, Klíma argued that with the loss of one’s freedom of expression a man can easily lapse into despair, accept this unfreedom as his inevitable fate, fall silent and give up his soul to darkness—on the other hand, he can see this as a challenge. He may then discover that his earlier, more public, existence had been a form of escape from his own self, that while he was always ready to hold up a mirror to the world at large, he himself avoided looking in it or looked into a less harsh and critical one.28

It is here that Klíma continues to develop a chilling sense of irony (unfreedom as a challenge) about the merits of totalitarian rule. On the one hand, he denounces its betrayal of human beings. On the other hand, he acknowledges the strength, perseverance and self-examination totalitarianism forces human beings to develop. Brian Söderquist’s reading of Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony can bring Klíma’s idea of the “earlier, more public, existence” as “a form of escape from his own self”29 into greater relief. For Söderquist, The Concept of Irony is central to the authorship of Kierkegaard as a whole and shows how irony and the isolation it engenders “entails choosing the emptiness of total spiritual collapse in order to then receive the self again.”30 Klíma’s irony—he invented the word “jerkish” to refer to the official language of communism—precedes the arrival of despair and the choice that the characters in his fiction or the human beings generalized in his essays must ultimately make in regard to despairing conditions. Writing in 1988, Klíma reasoned that [o]ne of the crimes of which censorship is guilty is the destruction of people’s creative urge. Those who should be seeking a path to the light are thrust into darkness. To justify themselves, they encourage others to share their darkness. Those who should be messengers of hope are driven to self-contempt, and end up espousing a message of despair.31

Klíma’s writings represent an escape from the darkness or the self that his captors and censors hoped they could control or remove through the concentration camp and censorship. Klíma has escaped both fates and responded with fictional accounts of his experiences. III. “Where in all this darkness have we lost our God?” Direct references to Kierkegaard appear in Klíma’s Love and Garbage, a novel molded in the Bakhtinian sense, one that incorporates several competing discourses 28 Ivan Klíma, “Variation on an Eternal Theme,” Index on Censorship, vol. 10, no. 6, 1981, p. 13. 29 K. Brian Söderquist, The Isolated Self: Truth and Untruth in Søren Kierkegaard’s On the Concept of Irony, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 2007 (Danish Golden Age Studies, vol. 1). 30 Ibid., p. 1. 31 Ivan Klíma, “Crime and Paradox,” Index on Censorship, vol. 17, no. 5, 1988, p. 46.

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and centrifuges meditations, monologues and dialogues on science and technology, humanity and refuse, love and infidelity, genocide and extermination, religiousness and freedom, classical music and fine arts, racism and inequality, and literature and philosophy. Kierkegaard is a symbol of freedom, though the novel debates the attainability of Kierkegaardian freedom, complicating its religious demands next to the struggles of a figure like Kafka, the narrator himself, and his colleagues living under the “jerkish” ideology of communism. Love and Garbage raises questions about paradise, the relationship between the temporal and eternal world, God’s position in that universe, and whether “God’s love had not abandoned mankind.”32 The novel is Kafkaesque in that the narrator, an intellectual employed as a street sweeper, clears trash from the streets of Prague, and pauses occasionally to wonder about an essay he is writing on Kafka, his literary ancestor and countryman who is often absent from analyses of Czech literature but canonized in German arts and letters. He also reflects on the absurdity of his situation in relation to the state: I had been living in a strange kind of exile for the previous ten years, hemmed in by prohibitions and guarded sometimes by visible, sometimes by invisible, and sometimes only by imagined watchers. I was not allowed to enter into life except as a guest, as a visitor, or as a day-wage laborer in selected jobs. Over those years there grew within me a longing for something to happen, something that would change my life.33

The narrator, his colleagues on the cleaning detail, and their daily removal of refuse and waste, are as mundane as the everyday routines of the villagers in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” a painting referenced in the novel and famously reprised by Auden in a poem that begins, About suffering they were never wrong The Old Masters; how well, they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.34

Tragedy—like the fall of Icarus in the painting—takes place at every turn in Love and Garbage, yet it is unclear if anyone is moved by the suffering. A young man who has read the narrator’s writing and sees him as a mentor is filled with a “painful anxiety as if he’d taken on more of life’s burdens and responsibilities than he could bear. He was interested in Kierkegaard, Kafka and Joyce, as well as in the cinema and in art.”35 The young man is attempting to free himself from his job working in the mines so that he can study “aesthetics, art history or literature by correspondence.”36 He is familiar with the work of Krsto Hegedušić, the Croatian 32 Ivan Klíma, Love and Garbage, trans. by Oliver Elton, New York: Vintage Books 1993, p. 199. 33 Klíma, Love and Garbage, p. 15. 34 W.H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts,” in his Another Time, New York: Random House 1940, p. 34. 35 Klíma, Love and Garbage, p. 115. 36 Ibid.

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painter who studied Bruegel the Elder and the “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” in Paris in the 1920s and depicted Croatian peasant life in his work. The meeting of the young man and the narrator, who is surprised by the young man’s knowledge of Hegedušić, universalizes their struggle for freedom and its aesthetic dimensions. Their worlds are far apart—an intellectual from Prague and a young miner from the provinces—but Kierkegaard, Kafka, and Joyce unify them and both find writing, art, painting, and literature as ways and means to freedom. The young man wants to leave the mines because the “work he was doing, he explained to me, made no sense. The people among whom he moved disgusted him.”37 He refers to the people whose indifference or innocence resembles the figures of Bruegel the Elder’s painting and his Icarus-like demand is to know “what people he’d have to move among if he succeeded in getting where he wanted to go!” The narrator responds by sharing with his friend some recent article by a leading jerkish official who’d been appointed to a university chair to ensure the oblivion of all literature. From that article I read him just a few introductory sentences on communism, which had become the highest form of freedom of the individual and the human race, and in consequence provided the writer with an unprecedented scope, whereas in the USA, that bastion of unfreedom, the greatest artists, such as Charlie Chaplin, had to escape.38

Love and Garbage untangles the relationships of the individual to the self (the narrator as writer), the individual to the state (the narrator trying to resist the repression of communism) and the individual to loved ones (the narrator dealing with his betrayal of his wife). With few exceptions, the infidelity narrative appears in all of Klíma’s fiction, differing only in context, a street sweeper in Love and Garbage, a priest in The Ultimate Intimacy. For Klíma, Questions of love and infidelity have a greater connection to life itself than to a life that is free or oppressed. If you are happy in your personal life you are happy in other facets as well. If you are unhappy, you can be completely free and still be miserable. You can be persecuted and be in love and still be happy. The subject is often mentioned in literature, because it’s an attractive one for writer and reader.39

The novel contrasts metaphysical suffering with physical pleasure and posits questions about betrayal proffered by human beings living under harsh and repressive conditions. In the opening pages, the protagonist finds himself in a discussion about sin with his wife Lída, and his future mistress, a woman christened Daria: “Daria maintained that the doctrine of sin was our curse, because it deprived us of freedom and interposed itself between one person and another, and between people and God. My wife made some objection. She believed that freedom should be limited by some kind of inner law.”40 Ibid. Ibid., pp. 115–16. 39 See Elizabeth A. Parr, “Ivan Klíma—Documenting History through Literature,” The New Presence, no. 4, 2003, pp. 37–40, see p. 39. 40 Klíma, Love and Garbage, p. 11. 37 38

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The two women represent opposite poles of a metaphysical struggle in the narrator, one in which he is trying to understand the relationship between body and soul, art and life, guilt and innocence. Daria is a “woman artist whose world was bounded by dreams, phantoms, passion and tenderness,”41 and Lída wanted to “understand what the human soul was, penetrate its secret in the hope of finding a way of alleviating its suffering.”42 The narrator admits his affair to his wife, but still he does not know how to proceed in the aftermath. He wants “to call on myself: Stay with her, after all she’s your wife. And on my soul: Come to rest! And to ask the other woman: Let me go without anger and without a sense of wrong.”43 His morality and ethical composing of the universe always take place amid the backdrop of betrayal, secret trips with his lover, and dishonesty with his wife. Thus, Klíma strikes down his own moral life-world. The affair always serves to cut through the idealism and force readers to rethink the contours of its viability in a human context. The narrator reads Borges to his mistress, daringly, a story “about a young man who is crucified for an illicit love affair.”44 He also debates Kierkegaard with her one day when they are away at the sea, a place where time comes to a crawl: Time here was slowed down. Sometimes during its retarded flow I read Kierkegaard or the story of Adrian Leverkühn as the ageing Thomas Mann had invented it and was telling it at the same slow and leisurely pace. Sometimes I read to her aloud and she listened with the concentration of a person who did everything she did in life with total completeness. But when, in that sun-scorched wasteland, where countless naked bodies were indulging in total inactivity, I read to her that action and decision in our—that is Kierkegaard’s—age were just as rare as the intoxication with danger felt by someone swimming in shallow water, so the rule that a man stands or falls with his action no longer applies, I observed in her concentration an almost excessively attentive and enthusiastic agreement, and I realised that these sentences I was reading told against me, that I was merely continuing her silent, ceaseless and scarcely disguised evidence for the prosecution. We argued about the philosopher’s theses, pretending that we were not talking about ourselves or about our conflict. We argued until the moment when I shook the sand grains out of my book and put it back in my bag. Then we just lay, our naked bodies touching each other, and gazed on the white crests of the waves which managed to touch each other without causing each other pleasure and pain. Not until evening did we get up, climb the sand dune along the line of dustbins towering there, metallic, among the flowering wild roses, and return to the road.45

The narrator is seized by the guilt of his own inaction. He remains unwilling to make a decision about his relationship with Daria and Lída, and he has surrounded himself with aesthetic justifications for the void in his ethical life. He is in despair. In Either/ Or, the aesthete laments that you would think that the generation in which I have the honor of living must be a kingdom of gods. But this is by no means so; the vigor, the courage, that wants to be the creator Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., p. 15. 43 Ibid., p. 101. 44 Ibid., p. 186. 45 Ibid., p. 103. 41 42

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of its own good fortune in this way, indeed, its own creator, is an illusion, and when the age loses the tragic, it gains despair. In the tragic there is implicit a sadness and a healing that one indeed must not disdain, and when someone wishes to gain himself in the superhuman way our age tries to do it, he loses himself and becomes comic. Every individual, however original he is, is still a child of God, of his age, of his nation, of his family, of his friends, and only in them does he have his truth.46

IV. Conclusion Ivan Klíma’s narrators often resemble the author in age, geographic background, childhood experience, and profession, yet he usually provides a disclaimer in his work that is similar to the one at the beginning of Love and Garbage: “None of the characters in this book—and that includes the narrator—is identical with any living person.”47 His stories and novels often read like nonfiction essays, a characteristic not unfamiliar in Czech fiction, as the tides of history often blurred the line between actuality and representation. I have tried to show in this article the extent and limit to which Klíma employed Kierkegaard’s ideas, both in his protest against censorship and his prose examinations of the human condition. Kierkegaard is one of many thinkers and discourses Klíma relies on to articulate the “obsession with justice” that stems from his experience as a child in the concentration camp. Even if he finds Kierkegaard’s “connection to faith” too extreme, Klíma, nevertheless, finds a way to incorporate Kierkegaard in his meditation on freedom and human agency. Klíma, like the protagonist of Love and Garbage, realizes “the amazing power of literature and of the human imagination generally: to make the dead live and to stop the living from dying. I was seized by wonder at this miracle, at the strange power of the author, and there began to spring up within me a longing to achieve something similar.”48

Ibid., pp. 144–5. See SKS 2, 144 / EO1, 145. Ibid. 48 Ibid., p. 36. 46 47

Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Klíma’s Corpus Láska a smetí, Purley, Surrey: Rozmluvy 1988, pp. 120–1. (English translation: Love and Garbage, trans. by Ewald Osers, New York: Knopf 1991, p. 144.) Moje šílené století II [My Mad Century, Part II]. Prague: Academia 2010, p. 142; p. 188; p. 194; p. 277. II. Sources of Klíma’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Undetermined. III. Secondary Literature on Klíma’s Relation to Kierkegaard Undetermined.

Péter Nádas: Books and Memories András Nagy

There must be arguments, even serious philosophical ones, for getting out of bed in the morning and continuing to do so every day. One usually does not question this act, which is followed by our daily duties, while we feel important and useful; however, the reasons for the whole process are not always so evident. For Péter Nádas (b. 1942), the literary hero of Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov’s novel Oblomov seemed to be a born philosopher, since lying in his bed was a theoretical conclusion for him. This reference to philosophy as expressed in literature rightly conjures up images of Kierkegaard, and with these thoughts Nádas opened a seminar dedicated to the Danish thinker in Budapest in January 2009.1 For the Hungarian writer, Kierkegaard was one of the very few in the history of philosophy who radically questioned the existing conventions and axioms, and did so in a simple yet profound way. The outstanding importance of Kierkegaard also originated in his approach to the question of love, which he observes on its surface and in its depth at the same time. For Nádas, however, Kierkegaard could peep into the depth of human nature, where passion and carnal sentiments were confronted and expressed in language, in the only way a writer can communicate. The Danish thinker in his own way was building upon Socrates’ and Plato’s strong emphasis on love, a topic which, for many thinkers, apparently does not belong to philosophy and is rarely examined as such. It is somewhat unusual for a writer to deal with the philosophy of love as Nádas does. This is expressed and demonstrated throughout his oeuvre, and at one point love became the subject of an entire book.2 The experiences of love and its interpretation in Nádas’ works include mainly anthropological characteristics, far beyond philosophy and psychology, and become determinant for his entire oeuvre. Love and all its consequences are expressed without taboos in his prose, which observes no conventions or traditions and is thus unprecedented in Hungarian literature. Besides the tour de force in his general theoretical account of love, Nádas also published a 1 The Seminar “Kierkegaard and Art,” which was organized jointly by the Hungarian Theater Museum and Institute and the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre (Copenhagen), took place in Budapest, January 14–15, 2009. 2 Originating in a lecture given to the “Fidesz Academy” in 1990 and later rewritten as a book Péter Nádas, Az égi és a földi szerelemről [About Celestial and Earthly Love], Budapest: Szépirodalmi Kiadó 1991.

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book dedicated entirely to love, where concrete and empirical manifestations of love are masterfully described. His emphasis on the overall power of eros also recalls Kierkegaard, but yet Nádas in a sense goes further than the Danish thinker when breaking with the heterosexual concept of love, since attraction and devotion, for him, cannot be limited by the difference of gender. Nádas recalls the ancient Greek idea of love, for example, Socrates’ seductive flow of thoughts, when focusing on the seduction of a young male. Though greatly interested in philosophy and inspired by it, Nádas has never been a trained philosopher or even an intellectual in the formal sense. On the contrary, as soon as he could, he left all possible formal educational institutions to find his own way, both in learning and in expressing his ideas and experiences. One of the most significant characteristics of his writing and thinking is the rejection of any kind of ready-made schemes, easy answers, and conventional arguments in a radical yet subtle way. Nádas’ writing strategy gives priority to images versus arguments and reflections. It has to be emphasized that Nádas’ professional activity started with photography after he left school. The attraction to images later became crucial for him. In one of his books, for example, Nádas recomposed his text to be able to “host” his photos,3 to present philosophical and metaphysical dilemmas visually and verbally at the same time. The book Own Death gives a breathtakingly detailed account of a heart attack, which describes how the heart attack victim leaves this world and approaches another one. However, due to the efforts of the emergency medical care people, he was revived. Ironically, while the mortally endangered narrator was having the heart attack, he was concerned about petty duties and then confronted both with the indifference of the ordinary people and the vulgarity of the hospital staff responsible for saving his life. All these were imprinted into the mind of the one bidding his final farewell from this world and feeling the closeness of Rilkean angels. The near-death experience appears in the book with photos of a majestic pear tree in Nádas’ garden.4 The tree is shown in all seasons, photographed at different times of the day, surrounded with different lighting in the changing atmosphere. The short, strikingly powerful and very profound text made one reviewer compare it to Kierkegaard’s Repetition and Fear and Trembling.5 The parallel does not include any concrete reference to the Danish thinker or to any of his works, but yet seems to be evident by the similarity of the method of writing. Nádas raises seemingly simple issues that prove to be crucial, and he thus arrives at the ultimate questions without burdening the text with philosophical terminology or heavy logical formulations. Nádas was born in Budapest on October 14, 1942 into an emancipated and assimilated family of Jewish origin that was integrated as much as possible into Péter Nádas, Saját halál, Pécs: Jelenkor, 2004. The book was published first in Germany as Der eigene Tod, Göttingen: Steidl Verlag 2002. In English: Péter Nádas, Own Death, trans. by Janos Solomon, Göttingen: Steidl Publishing 2009. 4 The author has for decades lived in a small village close to the Western Hungarian border, called Gombosszeg. 5 See the review of the book by Thomas Steinfeld in Süddeutsche Zeitung, December 7, 2002. 3

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the pre-World War II bourgeois society, while some of the family’s members were involved in the radical rejection of that system on the basis of communist ideology. The polar opposition of convictions in the family was soon pushed into the background by the cataclysm of World War II and the Holocaust, which only a part of the family survived. The political changes after the war concluded in the creation of a new reality, one that went to the other extreme. Both of Nádas’ parents were involved in the workings of the Stalinist system, yet by his early adolescence he had lost both of them. First his mother’s sickness ended in her death, and then his father’s incapacity to come to terms with the responsibility of what happened to his life and to his country resulted in his tragedy. Writing a farewell letter and hesitating about killing his two sons,6 the father shot himself. This very moment is described in the oeuvre of the elder son as the fatal conclusion of the father’s sin, namely, being involved in the Stalinization of his country, which was completed by the time of the 1956 revolution. This mortal melancholy of Nádas senior proved to be a sickness unto death not only metaphorically. The young Péter was then adopted by family members who provided the needed conditions for his upbringing with the middle-class bourgeois traditions on one side and the idealistic romanticism of communism (thus confronting the existing political system) on the other. I. Both the alienation from formal educational institutions and the presence of philosophical dilemmas everywhere made Nádas receptive to Kierkegaard’s experiences and ideas. His distance from the Hungarian philosophical schools, institutions, and traditions also paved the way for his original interpretation of philosophical issues, as expressed in his writings. In the history of Hungarian literature there is a strong tradition for raising theoretical issues, metaphysical dilemmas, and abstract questions in fiction and poetry. However, Nádas soon found his own way, which was inspired by the German philosophical tradition and the way in which this tradition had influenced writers such as Thomas Mann. For Nádas, Mann’s works were a great source of inspiration and identification, and the German author became a character in The Book of Memories described in the cultural and historical context of his time. The most important contemporary Hungarian writer for Nádas was Miklós Mészöly (1921–2001), a significant author and charismatic personality for a whole generation (even a father figure for some). Mészöly worked out a new meaning for writing, a new composition of prose, and a new philosophical horizon, which was opposed to the obligatory Weltanschauung of Marxism-Leninism. For Nádas, Mészöly’s significance was crucial; the two writers later also shared a house on the Danube in a small village called Kisoroszi. Péter Nádas and his younger brother, Pál. See Péter Nádas, “Életrajzi vázlat” [Biographical Sketch], in Bibliográfia 1961–1994 [Bibliography 1961–1994], ed. by György Baranyai and Gabriella Pécsi, Pécs: Jelenkor and Zalaegerszeg: Deák Ferenc Megyei Könyvtár 1994, p. 22. 6

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At the same time Nádas had some connections with the most important philosophical trend of the 1960s and 1970s, the so-called “Lukács School” as the students around the aging philosopher were called.7 Several of these figures had a similar social and family background as Nádas, including a serious ambiguity with respect to the present political system, accepting Marxism but rejecting the existing socialism. Nádas also disliked the dynamics of the small but influential group, but yet in 1965–67 he enrolled in the Marxist-Leninist Evening University to study philosophy.8 This was the only institution for which no entrance exam was needed. The university was used for a special educational program to train the future “nomenklatura” of the communist regime, providing them with a degree that was a formal requirement for certain positions. Nádas was probably attracted by the topics offered in the curriculum, but the level of training and the composition of the classes disappointed him profoundly. So he left the evening school in 1967 without ever taking any exams. Nádas continued his studies, when in 1973–74, staying in the East German capital, the writer attended classes at the Humboldt University. He studied German cultural history that served as preparation for his novel,9 A Book of Memories, which he had already started to work on. The period he studied was one that was significant with respect to Kierkegaard since this was the period when the Danish thinker was being discussed by thinkers like Adorno, Weber, Buber, and Rosenzweig, as Péter Balassa emphasizes.10 German intellectual and literary life was easy to understand for Nádas because of his fluency in German and because Nádas’ historical and cultural experiences concerning both fascism and communism could be described as consequences of the turn-of-the-century German intellectual traditions. The paradoxical unity of opposing extremes and the parallel feelings of continuity and discontinuity were later masterfully described in Nádas’ novel Parallel Histories.11 In this book, the last novel by Nádas so far, Kierkegaard is determinant and present indirectly, when the author refers to faith in opposition to the lack of God or when he experiments with the expression of belief under an empty sky. In many parts of the novel the lack of faith is demonstrated masterfully and expressed by the confusion of actions, reactions, and reflections. Nádas was born in a family where “God simply did not exist,”12 as he recalled, and the once lively Jewish traditions were George Lukács (1885–1971) was the most significant Hungarian philosopher of the twentieth century. In his long and turbulent life he worked with several students including Ágnes Heller, Ference Fehér, György Márkus, and Mihály Vajda. The next generation of thinkers included Sándor Radnóti, János Kis, and Géza Fodor. This latter group was around the same age as Nádas and was sometimes referred to as the “Lukács Kindergarten.” 8 Péter Balassa, Nádas Péter, Bratislava: Kalligram 1997, p. 520. 9 Ibid., p. 521. 10 Ibid., p. 149. 11 Péter Nádas, Párhuzamos történetek, vols. 1–3, Pécs: Jelenkor 2005. English translation: Parallel Stories, trans. by Imre Goldstein, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2005. 12 Péter Nádas, “Burok” [Shell], in his Játéktér [Play Space], Budapest: Szépirodalmi 1988, p. 5. 7

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dissolved by the process of assimilation and then by the trauma of the Holocaust, which concluded in the atheist convictions of the younger generation. However, Nádas was baptized a Lutheran, which was not uncommon for the assimilated pre-Holocaust Hungarian Jews; but yet this religion also became a mere formality for him. The fact of being a Lutheran became “very important for me when I was 29 years old,” as Nádas later recalled, and “so I was confirmed in that year and I took communion for the first time then.”13 This all happened in 1971 between the study periods in Budapest and Berlin. The religious affinity confronted with the empty transcendental horizon was expressed in Nádas’ writings from the very beginning. The title of his first published story was The Bible, which Nádas wrote when he was only 20 years old.14 Yet the holy book in the text was more just a simple physical object than a subject for reading. The heavily used little book belonged to the maidservant of the house. The fragmented story of the maid that revealed her tormented personality is emphatically described from the perspective of a young boy. It was his family that hired the girl who came from rural Hungary and later returned there, keeping her secrets forever. Later Nádas referred to the events inspiring the story by saying that much later he was more touched by the Bible emotionally and substantially than he physically touched the book called the Bible.15 The same ambiguity of attraction and distraction of the transcendental horizon is expressed in another story of the same volume, entitled Wall, describing a hermit or rather a prophet as a lonely and odd elderly man, living in the neighborhood of the protagonist, a young boy, and his family. In the story, published a year after The Bible, the unnamed man becomes an object of interest and disgust among wild adolescents. The dilemmas of the man are fragmentarily described in the text and seem to originate in the early Christian philosophy of religion that the old man expressed somewhat charismatically. When he talks about John the Apostle, the carnal existence of the body is highlighted, and the soul is revealed as a divine gift, while the material body is condemned; this recalls early Gnosticism’s dichotomy of spirit versus flesh. The masterful description of the atmosphere of the early 1950s provides a striking contrast with the confused, somewhat “Brandian”16 radicalism of the old man; however, the “Prophet’s” logic and argumentation later conclude in the ultimate obscenity as the basis of his odd Weltanschauung, when he points to his sexual organ as a final argument. John the Apostle will reappear some years later, together with the sacral appreciation of the body, providing the motto of Nádas’ future masterpiece, A Book of Memories.17 Péter Nádas, “Életrajzi vázlat,” in Bibliográfia 1961–1994, p. 16. Péter Nádas, A Biblia, Budapest: Szépirodalmi Kiadó 1967. English translation: “The Bible,” in Péter Nádas, Fire and Knowledge, trans. by Ivan Goldstein, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2007, pp. 13–64. 15 Péter Nádas, “Mondhatnám-e?” [Could I Ever Say?], in Talált cetli [A Piece of Paper Found], Pécs: Jelenkor 1992, p. 166. 16 See the hero of Ibsen’s drama. 17 Péter Nádas, Emlékiratok könyve, Budapest: Szépirodalmi Kiadó 1986, p. 5. English translation: A Book of Memories, trans. by Ivan Sanders and Imre Goldstein, London: Jonathan Cape 1997, p. V: “But he spoke of the temple of his body.” John 2:21. 13 14

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Even if Nádas was baptized and had a religious education from an early age, the spiritual and emotional context of his family was dominated by communist convictions. This created a significant ambiguity in him: growing up with no formal belief and no experience of the religious rituals whatsoever, yet having inherited a religious tradition as well. This parallel identity became dramatic in an unforgettable moment when, arriving home from school, the young boy told his mother how much he hated the Jews. The mother, as later described in an autobiographical sketch, holds her son warmly and firmly by his shoulder and then forcefully turns him to the mirror, asking why he thinks so. The boy answers as he was taught in the religious class, because they killed our Lord Jesus Christ. The woman points to the image in the mirror facing him: “There is a Jew you can hate.”18 The traumatic episode revealed to Nádas the hidden secret about his background; it was typical for Holocaust survivors not to share the knowledge of their race with their children. In their silence about their Jewish origin, the survivors hoped that their children might thus be spared future atrocities. After the publication of the book The Bible, Nádas’ early attraction to the personality of Jesus was expressed in a text titled “Minotaur.”19 In this story the author described the deeds of Christ from the angle of his parents, Mary and Joseph. The fragmentarily composed story is told in a highly personal way, which restages the events in a contemporary context. Surprising and poetic at the same time, the story describes the fate of the beloved Son who became one of the condemned. The Kierkegaardian idea of Jesus living in the present is further developed in a novel that describes the episode Kierkegaard was also inspired by, namely, Simon’s bringing of the cross up the hill on the order of the Roman soldiers. The personal and historical responsibility for everything that happened in Jerusalem becomes crucial in Nádas’ The End of a Family Novel, which was published in 1977 with great success.20 The family’s story is narrated by a young boy, Péter Simon, the last living member of the family. The motif of the Wandering Jew played an important role here—a motif familiar to Kierkegaard as well. The protagonist of the novel lives with his grandparents in the outskirts of Buda. The mother is missing (and hardly ever recalled in the text, a fact which suggests Kierkegaardian similarities), while the father is usually away on secret political trips. His appearances are unpredictable, and it is as if he were involved in some complex and dangerous conspiracy. The atmosphere of the communist 1950s is described from the perspective of the boy and is composed into the narrated experiences of the adults, who lived through the twentieth century, including both World Wars. The grandfather starts the story with the origin of the family back in ancient times, when “Abraham had set out on the road.”21 This may sound familiar from Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. This Nádas, “Életrajzi vázlat,” in Bibliográfia 1961–1994, p. 17. Péter Nádas, “Minotaurus,” The story written in 1970 was published in his Leírás, Budapest: Szépirodalmi Kiadó 1979, pp. 75–91. In English: “Minotaur,” in Fire and Knowledge, pp. 319–35. 20 Péter Nádas, Egy családregény vége, Budapest: Szépirodalmi Kiadó 1977. In English: The End of a Family Story, trans. by Imre Goldstein, Vintage: London 2000. 21 Nádas, Egy családregény vége, p. 84; The End of a Family Story, p. 87. 18 19

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is, for the young boy, a kind of initiation that concludes in explaining the family’s name: Simon. He is the one carrying the cross: “The bearer of the name will hear the voice of Lord; its other meaning is the Lord will hear the voice of the one entitled to this name.”22 There is, however, no sign of this transcendental communication when Nádas describes Christ dragging the cross uphill. When he falls, a Roman soldier orders Simon of Cyrene to carry it for a while.23 The moment in which Simon is introduced expresses both the empathy for the humiliated man, and the distance from him expressed also by Simon’s carrying the cross without any kind of identification with Christ—Kierkegaard also referred to this mentality in his later writings. In the moment recalled there is the closeness to the incarnation of God at the same time as an eternal distance from Him. The family novel that once started in Jerusalem comes to an end with the young boy, as the title of the book suggests. Péter Simon loses both of his grandparents in the flow of events, while his father becomes a victim of a show trial, which the family can follow on a live radio broadcast. The house of the family is inhabited only with the memories and fears of the last of the Simons, waiting for what is going to happen to him. The authorities then arrive to take the boy to an orphanage, where he will live with other children of the “enemies of the people.” In this way not only the novel but also the history of the family ends since there is no longer any family. II. The real breakthrough for Nádas was A Book of Memories, written over a 14-year period and published in 1986, the same year that Péter Esterházy’s Introduction to the Belles-lettres appeared. These two works opened a new chapter in the history of Hungarian literature. Nádas’ novel was composed of 19 chapters playing with time, voices, personalities, and incognitos. The Kierkegaardian inspiration is obvious, and yet it is hard to put a finger on concrete traces of the Danish thinker’s works due to Nádas’ autonomy, intellectual strength and enormous capacity of reading, recollecting, understanding, and interpreting. However, many minor or major textual parallels, open and hidden quotations refer to Kierkegaard, even if in the background or behind different masks. One of the most obvious references is the status of the text as a found manuscript just like Either/Or. Like Kierkegaard’s work, it is a book ostensibly edited and published by someone other than the real author. The editor of the papers is a childhood friend of the late narrator. The fictionalization of the origin of the book has a well-known historical tradition, yet the original and dramatic renewal of this literary convention was Nádas’ invention. He can thus create a distance from the text and compose the story with a dramatic turn. After the protagonist’s death, his notes and papers are obtained by the friend, who collects them into one text. The structural idea brilliantly serves the narrative logic of the book, providing several Nádas, Egy családregény vége, pp. 101–2; The End of a Family Story, pp. 119–20. Nádas, Egy családregény vége, pp. 113–14; The End of a Family Story, pp. 128–9.

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possibilities for the writer to play with voices, tones, perspectives, and narrative strategies. In Hungarian literary history the famous writer Géza Ottlik (1912–90) applied this literary method in his chef d’oeuvre, School at the Border (1959). The narrator’s text in the novel is interrupted by his friend and editor; in this way the author can compose the novel from different perspectives to create a distance when describing certain events and still use a personal optic when referring to the same reality.24 This structure allows the inclusion of fragmentary texts as well as fictional documents, which makes possible different ways of understanding. The process of reconstruction, with its mosaic-like totality offers a certain dynamism, together with a complex view of the events and the minds of the characters that a simply flowing linear narration could not achieve. The editor of the text refers to the work as an “eight-hundred-page manuscript… It was left to me, though I am not his legal heir.”25 Even if the voice of the friend does not differ too much from the wonderfully articulated monologue of the protagonistnarrator throughout the novel, nonetheless Nádas carefully focuses on the use of different tones and perspectives when separating the parallel histories in the book. There are three—plus one—layers in the stories that reflect each other transparently and indirectly. In the first stage, childhood events are narrated in Stalinist Hungary; this part of the story is set in a somewhat privileged neighborhood; however, the characters also had their share in the common suffering that concluded in the events of the 1956 revolution. In the second stage, the narrator, already grown up, lives in East Berlin and there falls passionately in love with a charismatic and attractive young man. This unfolds in a beautiful love story which is broken by the latter’s adventurous escape to the West. The third stage is an imaginary journal of a young writer at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century, called Thomas Thoenissen, who resembles in many ways the young Thomas Mann. All these separately composed and titled stories are edited into one book by the editor of the manuscript. In the fourth stage the editor finds the author himself at the arrival hall of Budapest airport, just when the author’s friend had returned from Berlin after his lover had left him, leaving him in ultimate despair. The future editor helps the desperate author to find temporary shelter at the home of his aunt in a small village on the Danube and thus offers him a chance to reflect, recall, and write. In the book there are further clear references to, or rather parallels with, Kierkegaard as well. One of the most important is the use of pseudonymous characters that reveals the complexity of reality, which is seen from different angles. In an essay on his novel published somewhat later,26 Nádas emphasized the use of See János Szávai, “Opus magnum,” in Diptychon. Elemzések Esterházy Péter és Nádas Péter műveiről [Diptych: Analyses of the Works of Péter Esterházy and of Péter Nádas], Budapest: Magvető/JAK 1988, p. 238. 25 Nádas, Emlékiratok könyve, p. 450; A Book of Memories, p. 593: “it is close to eight hundred pages.” In Hungarian the subject can be both the author and the manuscript: “I am not his [the author’s] legal heir” or “its [the manuscript’s] legal heir.” 26 Péter Nádas, “Hazatérés,” in Játéktér, Budapest: Szépirodalmi Kiadó 1988. In English: “Homecoming,” in Fire and Knowledge, pp. 65–82. 24

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different voices for the articulation of the personalities: “And several of these people could all be me, without being me.”27 In spite of the tragedies told in the stories and in spite of the melancholy, there is some playfulness throughout the book, even a lively irony. For “playing all these roles,” as Nádas explained somewhat later, “irony was needed.” The author went even further, adding, “this kind of undertaking needs someone with a sense of humor.”28 A Book of Memories is composed around recollection, remembering and, as the title suggests, memory. Nádas describes the mechanism of recollecting and how the mind works when it loses and then regains consciousness.29 Heraclitus is regularly referred to in the text: the “ancient philosopher had called life a rushing river.”30 The author challenges Heraclitus’ statement based on the body’s special way of “remembering.” The author’s experience refers to the body’s recollection as opposed to Heraclitus’ idea of a rushing river. Various events that take place inside or with the body are deeply buried in the personality, and the senses and feelings unconsciously contain this hidden knowledge. As the narrator explains, “in every new physical experience a story already known to our body” can be felt.31 The memory of the body unconsciously keeps the former imprints of pain and joy, but also the sensations of touches and penetration, deeply buried in the human organism, without any chance to surface otherwise. This unconscious recollection is probably the most important revelation of the book; it is described with immense empathy, with unconditional frankness and with poetic clarity. The biblical motto provides a sacral character to this human space: “But he spoke about the temple of his body.”32 Yet in John’s Gospel these words of Christ reinforce the identification of the Church with the body of the Son of God, an identification that is symbolic and unearthly at the same time. Nádas, however, transcends the body itself and demonstrates it as sacred or even divine; thus total carnal devotion can adequately find its subject of worship in the human corpus. Sensual and transcendental become interchangeable in the book as stories; reflections and images express this general synonymy beautifully and powerfully. Nádas shares the ancient Greek conclusion that eros is the ultimate mover behind everything. The possible Kierkegaardian inspiration from Either/Or becomes probable when the protagonist of A Book of Memories is attending an opera performance in East Berlin. In the East German capital—once the stage for Repetition—Beethoven’s Fidelio is performed, but yet the similarity with Kierkegaard’s analysis of Don Giovanni is striking. The sensual effects are created by the power of music, by the passion voiced and conclusively by love changing its form and appearance. On top of all these, the closeness of the future lovers in the Nádas, “Hazatérés,” p. 30; “Homecoming,” p. 78. Interview with Péter Nádas by Gábor Németh at the Corvinus University Budapest on November 17, 2005, published later as “Le kell vetnőzni, fel kell öltözni” [Take off your Clothes, You Need to get Dressed!], Jelenkor, 2006, vol. 49, no. 2, pp. 162–72. 29 See the chapter “Az eszmélet elvesztése és visszanyerése” [“Losing Consciousness and Regaining It”] in Nádas, Emlékiratok könyve, pp. 75–86; A Book of Memories, pp. 94–108. 30 Nádas, Emlékiratok könyve, p. 433; A Book of Memories, p. 571. 31 Nádas, Emlékiratok könyve, p. 434; A Book of Memories, p. 572. 32 Nádas, Emlékiratok könyve, p. 5; A Book of Memories, p. V. 27 28

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seats creates a sensual atmosphere, while on the stage the change of genders reveals a new sense of attraction and desire, as yet unknown to the narrator. The effect of music with the gender confusion recalls Kierkegaard’s analysis of Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro and also paves the way for the protagonist’s first homosexual experience. The process of seduction is also based on the power of the performance and the music, as it is described in Nádas’ novel; this recalls Kierkegaard’s theoretical approach to sensual experiences, as described in Either/Or. Nádas’ revelation or rather alteration that concludes in the modification of the original concept is, however, that gender difference is not needed anymore when love is confronted with pure and naked passion. As the homoerotic affair slowly unfolds in the novel, it also recalls the ancient approach to love; there are references to ancient Greece in one chapter of the book which refer to the Socrates’ attraction to smart young males,33 something that Kierkegaard was well aware of. In addition to parallels and hidden or open references, there are more obvious traces of the Danish thinker in Nádas’ novel. One of the most important motifs is the imaginary reconstruction of Thomas Mann’s youth under the name Thomas Thoenissen.34 Mann was profoundly influenced by the Danish thinker, as is shown by many motifs in his oeuvre—the most important being the devil’s appearance when Adrian Leverkühn is reading Kierkegaard’s account of Mozart’s Don Juan when traveling to Rome.35 Nádas reconstructs the early journals of the German author that were later burnt to eliminate forever the shameful secret, his hidden homosexuality. The imagined memories of Thoenissen are vivid and powerful fragments of passionate moments in the form of images, both written and composed to photographs expressing sensations and fantasies. The secret of Mann’s sexuality inspired masterpieces. Death in Venice contains the embarrassing attraction of the aging writer to a handsome Polish adolescent, but the motif surfaces in the Magic Mountain as well. When writing many years later about Mann’s published diaries36— which were carefully selected by the author but unfortunately subject to heavyhanded editorial work in the Hungarian version—Nádas refers to the importance of the attraction to his own sex and of the suppression of this drive. In Nádas’ analysis the tension was too hard to deal with between Mann’s instincts and drives and the role he had to play in society. This tension helped to create a life-long incognito for the German writer. The frankness of some of Mann’s journal entries challenges the masterfully shaped role a serious writer should play. The mask soon substituted the real features and served the public figure, the model writer, the European idol and the devoted father. Kierkegaard’s own life also contained many secrets, and his real self was hidden behind the masks and incognitos of the writer who played the role of Nádas, “Egy antik faliképre,” in Emlékiratok könyve, pp. 176–94. In English: “On an Antique Mural,” in A Book of Memories, pp. 227–51. 34 See Nádas, “Hazatérés,” in Játéktér, pp. 7–36; “Homecoming,” in Fire and Knowledge, pp. 65–82. 35 The protagonist of Mann’s novel, Doctor Faustus. 36 Péter Nádas, “Thomas Mann naplóiról,” in Esszék [Essays], Pécs: Jekenkor 1995, pp. 31–50. In English: “On Thomas Mann’s Diaries,” in Fire and Knowledge, pp. 93–106. 33

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the seducer for Regine Olsen, and who hid his real passions behind the mask of the scoundrel. The story of the broken engagement, with the passion of love that proved helpless, was definitely inspiring for Nádas.37 Conclusively, for the expression of love the rejection of the loved one was needed, in order to save her from him this way. The real self has to remain in hiding forever, and any “plot against the secrets of my life” can have fatal consequences, as Nádas emphasized when quoting and writing about Thomas Mann.38 Thomas Thoenissen’s life secrets originated in a game with four people that was overwhelmingly erotic yet composed only as the expression of the communication between personalities. The body served as language by which feelings, touches, and sensations were exchanged, and then the scenes of the passions were frozen into images. The photographic visualization of the participants’ gestures and positions helped the desire of those involved to grow and expressed the complex and complicated relationships between them. However, the same pictures served as evidence in a murder case in which the young lovers’ confusion of passions concluded. In this erotic whirlwind described by the author, himself a one-time photographer, concrete reminiscences of Kierkegaard appear. The male lover is called Gyllenborg; he is Swedish and handsome, speaking French as if to correct the misspelling of his name.39 The female playmate in the game is Ms. Stollberg, with masculine features and somewhat animal-like bodily characteristics, recalling something dangerous, forbidden, and even demonic. The male servant participating in the game is called Hans Baader, referring to the German mystical tradition once so inspiring for Kierkegaard. In the novel he is accused of killing Gyllenborg.40 Throughout the book there are several further references to philosophers and their views. These focus on two important issues, both Kierkegaardian. One is the nature and character of recollection when one is confronted with the irreversible flow of time, as emphasized in the title of the book. It is dramatically raised at one point: “…as if our foot did not step into a rushing river but trod desperately on some sinking, soft marsh, trying to stay on the surface of deadly boring repetitions.”41 This complaint of the narrator recalls Heraclitus’ famous metaphor, but yet this metaphor is overwritten with feelings of fear, boredom, and with the need of struggle—all of which are important for Kierkegaard as well. The basic question at another point is raised in an indirect way: “How can you get deep enough into your memories so that you won’t need to remember anything any more?”42 This was what Nádas learned from the Danish thinker as the author

The writer referred to this in a message written to the author of the present study. Nádas, “Thomas Mann naplóiról,” in Esszék, p. 34. “On Thomas Mann’s Diaries,” in Fire and Knowledge, p. 95. 39 The name of Kierkegaard’s famous female contemporary, the subject of his book review and the intellectual center of Golden Age Copenhagen was spelled Gyllembourg. 40 Nádas, Emlékiratok könyve, p. 435; A Book of Memories, p. 573. It is also important to mention that the other Baader was Andreas, a terrorist of the 1970s. 41 Nádas, Emlékiratok könyve, p. 434; A Book of Memories, p. 572. 42 Nádas, Emlékiratok könyve, p. 520; A Book of Memories, p. 685. 37 38

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himself recalled, namely, the structure of negative decisions.43 Ultimate questions can be better posed from the inverse. III. Raising philosophical issues as personal dilemmas is a basic feature of Nádas’ prose. Concluding in radical reflections and profound meditations is characteristic both of his fictions and of his essays, although it is often hard to draw the borderline between the two. This approach was one of Nádas’ poetical inventions for the renewal of Hungarian philosophical prose in an attempt to leave behind the heavy-handed speculations and so-called “clever” literature. Nádas gives priority to experiences, feelings, and emotions, expressing them mainly in images and not abstract ideas. The highest level offers the broadest view to the world, but it is only achieved once all the climbing was done. When Péter Balassa, the most devoted analyst of Nádas’ oeuvre, was writing about the early works of Nádas, he used Kierkegaardian terminology to distinguish between Nádas’ essays and fiction. “The Nádas essay is identical with the tragic hero of Kierkegaard: ‘The tragic hero is the favorite of the ethics…everything he does is visible.’ The Nádas fiction, however, could be expressed by the words of the Danish thinker: ‘But if I go on, I am always confronted with the paradox as the divine or as the demonic, yet both are silence.’ ”44 This silence also plays a very important role in A Book of Memories with its structure of parallel histories, its omission of important details, and its composition of three layers without causality or rational logic. The meaning of silence and its capacity for communicating is present in Nádas’ works, both as a principle of the composition and as a basic ingredient of his writings. This is further explained in his essay “Shell,” in which Nádas recalls his atheist upbringing. When writing is concerned, he claims, then everything “that happens is the shell, and God is sitting in it.”45 The Hungarian word burok used for the title can also be translated as “shape” or “cover,” referring to the outside or the surface that covers the important things that are inside and silent. God’s presence becomes more indirect and somewhat paradoxical: “the obvious way of confession would deprive me of certainty of His absence.”46 This logic is similar to Kierkegaard’s in its rejection of ready-made answers, rituals, and conventions. The focus is on doubt and uncertainty as the necessary conditions of faith. The idea of the demonic often reappears in Nádas’ writings, with probable Kierkegaardian inspiration. When the author recalls the origin of his novel and reconstructs the process of writing, he emphasizes, “The demons carefully conceal my open self and remove their hands a little bit only if, in my fear of death, I entrust myself to my imagination.”47 Demons also return when he talks about love in his Yearbook, which is a mixture Nádas revealed this in response to a question from the author of the present article. Balassa, Nádas Péter, pp. 441–2. 45 Nádas, “Burok,” in Játéktér, p. 5. 46 Ibid. 47 Nádas, “Hazatérés” in Játéktér, pp. 29–30; “Homecoming,” p. 78. 43 44

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of fiction and essay, including the story of a fatal love triangle.48 Love and final farewell, expressed with profound melancholy, regularly return in Nádas’ thinking and writing. This can well be the inheritance of his upbringing, which shaped his character, mood, and Weltanschauung, as a continuation of family traditions. This motif has Kierkegaardian overtones; melancholy is beyond hope and hopelessness. “Either there is hope or there is no hope,”49 as Nádas summarizes the conclusion of the time he spent writing his magnificent book. To describe the state of his spirit he refers to a painting by Caspar David Friedrich as the best image of melancholy; the painting also serves as the cover for the book and as the subject of his essay.50 With the statement, “Melancholy is remembrance,”51 Nádas refers to the twin motifs of his inspiration for writing the book. This metaphysical sorrow is also explained in Kierkegaardian terms: “Melancholy is referred to as a mental condition, but yet I say it is not a condition but an activity: the spirit’s work in the soul or the soul’s work in the spirit.”52 Melancholy and anxiety are somewhat interconnected, and both play important roles in Nádas’ oeuvre, both in his fiction and in his essays. The confrontation with the sense of finitude is at the center of Nádas’ book Own Death, a masterful observation and description of his heart attack with the approaching of death. “I was convinced, as people are in general, that anxiety is not the warning of the body, but originated in the soul, so the soul can be under control,”53 as Nádas states. He concludes by recalling the insignificant details and petty worries when he seemed to be dying. Yet in the moment that seemed to be that of the final departure Nádas recalled “the experience of wholeness to such a degree that…can be compared in this miserable world only with euphoria or that of love.”54 The book on his near-death experience was with good reason compared to Kierkegaard’s chef d’oeuvres by a German reviewer, who defines the genre as “philosophical narrative,” similar to the “experimental psychology” of the Danish author of Fear and Trembling and Repetition.55 These works are also based on observation but in a very profound way. Nádas’ capacity for observation and imagemaking may be based on his training and practice as a photographer; however, in the book on his near-death experience the pictures and the text are composed so as to reflect on each other. This writing method was already present in his early works, as Balassa assumed: “[He] is talking about pictures while looking into the mirror.”56 Péter Nádas, “Augusztus” [August], in Évkönyv [Yearbook], Budapest: Szépirodalmi Kiadó 1989, pp. 153–184. 49 Nádas, “Mélabú” [Melancholy], in Játéktér, p. 88. 50 Nádas, “Mélabú,” in Játéktér, pp. 47–88. See the cover of the first edition of the volume. In English: “Melancholy,” in Fire and Knowledge, pp. 238–61. 51 Nádas, “Mélabú,” in Játéktér, p. 53. “Melancholy,” p. 242. 52 Nádas, “Mélabú,” in Játéktér, p. 70. “Melancholy,” p. 251. 53 Nádas, Saját halál, p. 39. I prefer to use my own translation to make clear the Kierkegaardian emphasis. 54 Ibid., p. 201. 55 See the review of the book by Thomas Steinfeld in Süddeutsche Zeitung, December 7, 2002. 56 Balassa, Nádas Péter, p. 482. 48

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Nádas formulates this by saying that man “can be seen by himself as an image” when love is concerned.57 The origin of this latter remark can be identified in Teilhard de Chardin’s thinking, since for him the transcendental horizon appeared through his own image—the same may be true for Nádas, when focusing on the whole oeuvre. IV. It is an interesting coincidence that Scandinavian literature was referred to at the debut of Nádas’ oeuvre as a photographer. In 1961 he took a picture of a woman from a small village (Terepes) for a magazine with the title “The Solvejg of the Matra Mountain.”58 Ibsen is not that far from Kierkegaard nor is Solvejg from Regine Olsen. Other coincidences also refer to his receptivity for Kierkegaard, like his close friendship with the Swedish journalist Richard Swartz59 or his deep interest in Karen Blixen.60 In 1991 at the Playwrights’ Forum (in Egervár),61 Nádas analyzed a play based on “The Seducer’s Diary.”62 The analysis was presented as an idea for staging the play. Some years later he accepted the invitation to be the official founder of a small resource center in Budapest called the Kierkegaard Cabinet,63 on which occasion he donated his own series of photos to the small institution (these were later published in his book Own Death). For the Hungarian reception of Kierkegaard his role was thus artistic, theoretical, and practical as well. With respect to the latter, he also found a suitable publisher for the Hungarian translation of Kierkegaard’s writings.64 Nádas has probably read all the works of the Danish thinker published so far in Hungarian, but yet concrete references to any of the works are hard to find. In a conversation from 1989 he mentioned Fear and Trembling and Either/Or when talking to his Scandinavian friend emphasizing, adding, “I haven’t read anything else from him.”65 In the oeuvre, however, there are traces of other writings of Kierkegaard as well, for example, Repetition and The Sickness unto Death. Very probably Nádas is also familiar with The Concept of Anxiety as well as some of the journals and edifying discourses. Different types of interpretations of Kierkegaard Nádas, Az égi és a földi szerelemről, p. 7. See Bibliográfia 1961–1994, p. 31. 59 The conversations with his friend at a significant historical moment were published in a book: Péter Nádas and Richard Swartz, Párbeszéd [Conversation], Pécs: Jelenkor 1992. 60 Besides his familiarity with the oeuvre and affinity for the author, the exhibition dedicated to the Danish genius was followed with a conversation with Nádas in the Petőfi Literary Museum (Budapest) in 2009. 61 Organized from 1986 yearly for emerging young playwrights. 62 Nyílt Fórum, 1991. (The Seducer’s Diary: Kierkegaard by András Nagy was later staged in the Budapest Chamber Theater but not under Nádas’ direction.) 63 The small resource center was located at the ELTE University (Budapest) affiliated with the Aesthetics Department and supported by the Danish Cultural Institute. 64 The publishing house Jelenkor is located in Pécs and publishes Nádas’ oeuvre. It now publishes the Hungarian Kierkegaard edition. The first contact was made following Nádas’ advice. 65 Nádas and Swartz, Párbeszéd, p. 91. 57 58

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are also inspiring for him. Kierkegaardian ideas were present in Rilke, Kafka, Buber, Rosenzweig, and in the work of many other authors, appreciated and referred to by him. Concerning Nádas’ focus, it is interesting that the anecdote he refers to in his conversation with Richard Swartz as influential for him is very un-Kierkegaardian. He quotes the story of the old Rabbi who was carefully and devotedly studying a text in which a still unknown sign appeared. Buried in the work, he turned down the request of his wife to come to dinner since he was unable to concentrate on anything else but the problem until it was solved. The woman goes to her husband and by caressing his forehead she sweeps away the “sign” that was only a dropping of a fly. Nádas’ conclusion is that women solve difficulties easier than men.66 Here he may be inspired by the views of Judge William from Either/Or, and by his own life, lived at the side of his devoted wife. However, the final conclusion is far more complex than this idyllic moment suggests both in Kierkegaard and in Nádas. Nádas’ most recent novel, Parallel Stories, was published in 2005 in three volumes (exceeding 1,500 pages), the result of more than 18 years of work. The very first segment of the book was already written in 1985 and appeared in an anthology a year later;67 thus the period of composition could be stretched out to 26 years if not more. The title of the section was “An Apricot Tree Bearing Many Fruits,” which was inspired by the above-mentioned pear tree of his garden in Gombosszeg. The opening sentence of the text was crucial in 1986 not only politically but philosophically as well: “Finally, I am free.”68 The sentence was uttered by the protagonist of the book, a prison guard retiring to his garden in which an apricot tree blossoms. The idyllic setting with the consoling duties of a gardener are intended to help the guard to forget all the difficulties of his past. However, all these will soon be the stage for a murder. Fruits disappear regularly from the tree, stolen by a mentally handicapped young man, sitting up in the branches. Once he realizes that the thief is up in the branches of the tree, the guard kills him in a rage. The novel, in which the story appears as a chapter, presents “parallel” situations, relationships, and events, focusing on freedom and other similarly important issues like love, fate, the body, passion, and history. Many of these could have originated in philosophical problems, very likely in Kierkegaardian ones as well; however, the source of inspiration is hard to identify concretely, since theoretical inspiration and philosophical dilemmas are deeply buried under the chain of the often shocking events. The novel is staged before, during and after World War II, in the Hungarian 1950s, and in contemporary Germany. The masterfully created images of places, scenes, moments, and events reveal the inner universe of the protagonists, often provoking the empty transcendence with their acts. In the years that had passed between A Book of Memories and Parallel Histories, the world has changed fatally and finally, greatly influencing Nádas’ Weltanschauung. After regaining political freedom, the crucial dilemmas in his Ibid., p. 92. Péter Nádas, “Egy bőven termő barackfa” [An Apricot Tree Bearing Many Fruits] in Újhold, Budapest: Magvető, no. 2, 1986, pp. 19–69. 68 Ibid., p. 19. 66 67

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focus became more tormenting than before, and any kind of answer to them seemed much less probable than our once “captive mind”69 had imagined. The Romantic and somewhat optimistic tone of A Book of Memories, published before political freedom and social metamorphoses were on the horizon, changed in Parallel Stories to the melancholic and often desperate view facing the metaphysical dead end. The references to faith, God, and transcendence did not promise any consolation; on the contrary, they only helped to deepen the sorrow. This process seems to be parallel to the ambiguity of the later Kierkegaard. In A Book of Memories the motto of the novel was from the Bible; in the new novel the motto refers to Parmenides’ idea about the place of departure being the same as that of the arrival. The stories are thus closed in the ontological vision of the Eleatic thinker, as Béla Bacsó highlights.70 The horizon is darkened with the theoretical hopelessness of any kind of movement. However, the abyss that opened between the end of Fear and Trembling and the beginning of Repetition in Nádas’ view is not only deep but bottomless. The parallel lives lived do not intersect anymore but only demonstrate the missed possibilities of real life—yet, as Bacsó explains, this “determines how man exists.”71 Melancholy and solitude express the desperate, hopeless and bitter aspect of existence, and the complex human universe is confronted with it. What is really bright, colorful, inviting, and worth living for is basically unattainable, as if all the hopes in the world existed exclusively for us to be denied ever attaining it.

See the title of Cteslaw Milosz’ essays, first published by Knopf, in 1953. Béla Bacsó, “Olvasási kísérlet,” Litera, 2006, no. 1, www.litera.hu. 71 Ibid. 69 70

Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Nádas’ Corpus A Biblia, Budapest: Szépirodalmi Kiadó 1967, pp. 5–109. (English translation: “The Bible” in Péter Nádas, Fire and Knowledge, trans. by Ivan Goldstein, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2007, pp. 13–64.) Egy családregény vége, Budapest: Szépirodalmi Kiadó 1977, p. 84; pp. 101–2; pp. 113–14. (English translation: The End of a Family Story, trans. by Imre Goldstein, Vintage: London 2000. p. 87; pp. 119–20; pp. 128–9.) Leírás, Budapest: Szépirodalmi Kiadó 1979, pp. 83–103. (English translation: “Description,” in Péter Nádas, Fire and Knowledge, trans. by Ivan Goldstein, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2007, pp. 319–35.) Emlékiratok könyve, Budapest: Szépirodalmi Kiadó 1986, p. 5. (English translation: A Book of Memories, trans. by Ivan Sanders and Imre Goldstein, London: Jonathan Cape 1997. p. V.) Játéktér [Play Space], Budapest: Szépirodalmi Kiadó 1988, p. 5. Évkönyv [Yearbook], Budapest: Szépirodalmi Kiadó 1989, pp. 153–84. Az égi és a földi szerelemről [About Earthly and Celestial Love], Budapest: Szépirodalmi Kiadó 1991, p. 7. Talált cetli [A Piece of Paper Found], Pécs: Jelenkor 1992, p. 166. Together with Richard Swartz, Párbeszéd [Conversation], Pécs: Jelenkor 1992, p. 91. “Életrajzi vázlat” [Biographical Sketch], in Bibliográfia 1961–1994 [Bibliography 1961–1994], ed. by György Baranyai and Gabriella Pécsi, Pécs: Jelenkor and Zalaegerszeg: Deák Ferenc Megyei Könyvtár 1994, p. 16; p. 22. “Thomas Mann naplóiról,” in Esszék [Essays], Pécs: Jekenkor 1995, pp. 31–50. (English translation: “On Thomas Mann’s Diaries,” in Fire and Knowledge, trans. by Ivan Goldstein, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2007, pp. 93–106.) Saját halál, Pécs: Jelenkor 2004. (English translation: Own Death, trans. by Janos Solomon, Göttingen: Steidl Publishing 2009.) Párhuzamos történetek [Parallel Stories], vols. 1–3, Pécs: Jelenkor 2005, vol. 3, p. 450. II. Sources of Nádas’ Knowledge of Kierkegaard Babits, Mihály, Az európai irodalom története [The History of European Literature], Budapest: Szépirodalmi 1979, p. 423.

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Hamvas, Béla, “Kierkegaard Szicíliában” [Kierkegaard in Sicily], in Esszépanoráma [Panorama of Essays] vols. 1–3, ed. by Zoltán Kenyeres, Budapest: Szépriodalmi Kiadó 1978, vol. 3, pp. 92–104. Kierkegaard, Søren, Sören Kierkegaard írásaiból [From the Writings of Sören Kierkegaard], trans. by Tivadar Dani et al., ed. by Béla Suki, Budapest: Gondolat 1969. — Mozart Don Juanja [Mozart’s Don Juan], trans. by László Lontay, Budapest: Európa 1972. — Vagy–vagy [Either/Or], trans. by Tivadar Dani, Budapest: Gondolat 1978. — Félelem és reszketés [Fear and Trembling], trans. by Péter Rácz, Budapest: Európa 1986. — A szorongás fogalma [The Concept of Anxiety], trans. by Péter Rácz, Budapest: Göncöl 1993. — A halálos betegség [The Sickness unto Death], trans. by Péter Rácz, Budapest: Göncöl 1993. — Az ismétlés [Repetition], trans. by Zoltán Gyenge, no place given: Ictus 1993. — A keresztény hit iskolája [Training in Christianity], trans. by Zoltán Hidas, Budapest: Atlantisz 1998. Király, István (ed.), Virágirodalmi Lexikon [Encyclopedia of World Literature], vols. 1–12, Budapest: Akadémiai 1979, vol. 6, pp. 253–7. Köpeczi, Béla (ed.), Az egzisztencializmus [Existentialism], Budapest: Gondolat 1965, pp. 59–116. Lukács, György, Az ész trónfosztása [The Destruction of Reason], Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó 1954, pp. 199–245. Márkus, György, and Zádor Tordai, Irányzatok a mai polgári filozófiában [Trends in Contemporary Bourgeois Philosophy], Budapest: Gondolat 1964, pp. 34–45. Rilke, Rainer, Maria, Rilke prózai művei [Rilke’s Works in Prose], trans. by Gábor Görgey, Budapest: Európa 1990, pp. 5–194. III. Secondary Literature on Nádas’ Relation to Kierkegaard Bacsó, Béla, “A saját élet” [One’s Own Life], Jelenkor, vol. 48, nos. 7–8, 2005, pp. 746–9. — “Olvasási kísérlet” [An Experiment in Reading], Litera, 2006, no. 1, www.litera. hu. Balassa, Péter, Nádas Péter, Bratislava: Kalligram 1997, p. 149, pp. 520–1. — “Sors- és bűnértelmezés az Emlékiratok könyvében” [The Interpretation of Destiny and of Crime in The Book of Memories], Alföld, vol. 51, no. 5, 2000, pp. 35–42. Németh, Gábor, “Le kell vetkőzni, fel kell öltözni” [Take off your Clothes, You Need to get Dressed], Jelenkor, vol. 49, no. 2, 2006, pp. 162–72. Sándor Radnóti, “Az egy és a sok” [The One and the Many], Holmi, vol. 18, no. 6, 2006, pp. 774–91.

Péter Nádas: Books and Memories

187

Szávai, János, “Opus magnum,” in Diptychon. Elemzések Esterházy Péter és Nádas Péter műveiről [Dyptich: Analyses of the Works of Péter Esterházy and Péter Nádas], Budapest: Magvető/JAK 1988, p. 238. Szirák, Péter, “Az ész reménye a sors ellenében” [The Hope of Reason Against Destiny], Jelenkor, vol. 38, no. 2, 1995, pp. 125–37.

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Pinhas Sadeh: The Poet as “the Single Individual” Sharon Krishek

I. Pinhas Sadeh: A General Introduction Pinhas Sadeh (1929–94) is a well-known Israeli poet, novelist, and essayist, whose work is characterized by a deep existential religiosity. Born in Lwów, Poland in 1929, he arrived in pre-state Israel with his parents at the age of five. Severe poverty in their new home in Tel Aviv and discord between his parents led them to place him in a boarding school when he was ten. At fourteen, on his own initiative, he moved to Kibbutz Sarid in the Jezreel Valley, but left three years later. He spent a short time in Tel Aviv working at occasional jobs, but soon left for Jerusalem where he began his active life as a poet. He rented a small room in an attic and dedicated his days and nights to writing. In 1948 he enlisted in the army and fought in the War of Independence. Upon discharge two years later he again fell back on occasional jobs, now to earn money for a trip to London in 1951. There he remained for almost a year. He loved London deeply but felt that the peace—the warm friendliness and also, significantly, artistic acknowledgment—that this city granted him did not allow him to fulfill his vocation as a poet. This decision quite vividly reflects Sadeh’s understanding of what it means to be a poet, and helps illustrate the type of person he was. Here is his account of why he left London, voicing an expression of the basic incompatibility he perceived between the comforts of social life and the suffering of the dedicated individual; an incompatibility he was struggling with his entire life and which strongly connected him to Kierkegaard’s thought, as we shall see below: so how could I then, how could I seek for myself a share of this social life? How could I seek a share, and thus lose the perfection, the totality of the world that had been revealed to me, how could I seek happiness, or status, or fame, or success, or satisfaction, how could I ask for thirty pieces of silver? God be my witness, I needed those thirty pieces of silver. They were a temptation to me. But I felt that what I had to do was to go down into the deepest, the most desperate abyss, to the people the most needful (though they know it not) of salvation. I felt that I had to sacrifice myself to the throes of redemption in the hardest but most necessary place of all—that is to say, I felt I had to return to where I came from.1 1 Pinhas Sadeh, ‫החיים כמשל‬, Tel Aviv: Sheshet 1958, pp. 308–9 (republished, Tel Aviv: Schocken 1968; English translation: Life as a Parable, trans. by Richard Flantz, Jerusalem: Carta 1989, pp. 304–5).

190

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He returned to Israel, then, where he spent the rest of his life. Sadeh was a controversial figure. On the one hand he attracted admirers who saw in him a prophet of the passionate and authentic existence, someone who rises above the mediocre and succeeds in touching the mystery and glory of life. On the other hand, he repulsed many others who denounced his use of religious language, and saw in him a charlatan with dubious opinions and a megalomaniac personality. He was particularly notorious as a dark seducer who initiated relationships with young, sometimes troubled, women. Sadeh’s opponents condemned these ties as an abuse of the power he had as an admired poet, while his supporters—and he himself—justified them on the basis of friendship and mutual appreciation. Be it as it may, clearly Sadeh’s writing reflects a complex poetic personality with diverse, not always consistent, existential viewpoints. Thus his fascination with death may sometimes overshadow his admiration for life, and his harsh, cold judgment of the weaknesses of people surrounding him may make one forget the great compassion he so frequently expresses. Sadeh published several poetry books, many newspaper essays and a few books in prose. He also edited several collections of Hassidic folktales and translated into Hebrew a variety of classics (including poems by Hölderlin and the play Salome by Oscar Wilde). However, the crux of his authorship—his major and most influential work—was the book Life as a Parable (1958). This work is not simple to categorize: it is often described as an autobiographical work of fiction, but Sadeh himself disapproved of this categorization and considered it rather as “a five-hundred page poem.”2 Perhaps it is best thought of as a poetic meditation that uses the author’s life as a basis for a philosophical-theological exploration of the essence and meaning of existence. It portrays an odyssey into the author’s soul out of the conviction that by so doing he touches some essential truth of existence relevant for all. It is a spiritual autobiography striving for something far beyond the concrete biography of its author, written in prose but including poems, reflections and narratives of events and dreams. Sadeh was 29 when he published Life as a Parable, after it was rejected by almost every possible publisher. (Only years later, when the value of the work was fully recognized, was it republished by a prestigious Israeli publishing house.) This work was completely alien to the spirit of Israeli literature of the 1950s and 1960s. Rather than telling the story of the collective and exploring issues concerning the well-being of a young (and mostly secular) Israeli society, Sadeh focused on an individual concerned with his own particular (and spiritual) existence. Moreover, the critics and the academy had no idea what to do with the Christian tone of the book and its unreserved admiration for Christ, who is frequently mentioned as a source of inspiration. At the same time, even those who disapproved could not overlook the book’s undeniable poetic quality. Thus it aroused extensive interest and was much admired by some—and held in deep contempt by others. Over the years it earned the status of a cult book and became an inspiration for many Israeli poets and writers.

As he explains in an interview with Yotam Reuveny, which was published in ‫פנחס שדה‬:1/‫[ דיוקן‬Diokan/1: Pinhas Sadeh], Tel Aviv: Nimrod 2002, p. 15.

2

Pinhas Sadeh: The Poet as “the Single Individual”

191

In spite of Sadeh’s anti-institutionalism and the disdain he often expressed towards the academy and literary circles, he was acknowledged as an important poet and was awarded the Bialik Prize—a prestigious literary prize—in 1990, a few years before his death. II. Sadeh and Kierkegaard In 1954 a book of selected writings by Kierkegaard, called The Aesthetic, the Ethical and the Religious was published in Israel, the first translation of Kierkegaard into Hebrew.3 Evidently Sadeh was familiar with it: in Life as a Parable he quotes a sentence and attributes it to “a philosopher” without naming the philosopher or the source.4 The sentence is from Fear and Trembling (though the editors of the collection placed it in the ethical section), and its equivalent in the Hongs’ translation reads: “[the situation in which] an individual, by being hidden and by remaining silent, wants to save the universal.”5 The significance for Sadeh of this idea—concerning the relations between the individual and the universal (or the ethical)—will be explored in the next section. Sadeh also mentions Kierkegaard in this book: “Some time ago I happened to read Kierkegaard’s sermon about Abraham’s sacrifice. Then I opened the Book of Genesis and read Chapter 22 again.”6 Sadeh’s understanding of Kierkegaard’s interpretation of the binding of Isaac is crucial to his portrait of the poet’s vocation, as we shall see below. Additionally, it is reasonable to assume that Sadeh read Fear and Trembling in the English translation. In Life as a Parable he mentions that work as one of several influential books he purchased one day in a second-hand book stall.7 Since before 1986 there was no complete Hebrew translation of Fear and Trembling (only parts were included in the translation mentioned above), Sadeh appears to refer to the English version of the book. How well, then, did Sadeh know Kierkegaard’s philosophy? Sadeh was an autodidact who never formally or systematically studied either literature, theology or philosophy. His extensive acquaintance with these fields—as well as his firm spiritual ideology—was independently acquired, impelled by his intellectual and emotional eagerness. This approach of his also holds true with regard to Kierkegaard. Sadeh was not a scholar, and his familiarity with Kierkegaard’s ideas was not so much extensive as deep—in the sense of feeling a strong emotional identification with them. Sadeh saw in Kierkegaard (as in other great minds) a spiritual teacher. For him, Kierkegaard was someone who was willing to pay the Søren Kierkegaard, ‫ מבחר כתבים‬:‫האתי והדתי‬, ‫[ האסתטי‬The Aesthetic, The Ethical and the Religious: Selected Writings], ed. by Joseph Shechter and Illan Croch, Tel Aviv: Dvir 1954. 4 Sadeh, ‫החיים כמשל‬, p. 16. (Life as a Parable, p. 12.) 5 SKS 4, 196 / FT, 107. The English translation of this sentence as it appears in Life as a Parable is less accurate and even confusing (for example, it uses “world” instead of “universal,” though in the source the Hebrew word for “universal” is used). Hence I chose to quote the relevant sentence from the Hongs’ translation. 6 Sadeh, ‫החיים כמשל‬, p. 192. (Life as a Parable, p. 192.) 7 Sadeh, ‫החיים כמשל‬, p. 207. (Life as a Parable, p. 207.) 3

192

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painful price needed to fulfill a spiritual life focusing on the holiness embedded in human existence; someone who exemplified the passionate mode of existence which Sadeh tried to capture in his own life and writings. In a way Sadeh “internalized” Kierkegaard—in particular his idea of “the single individual”—and made him part of his idiosyncratic artistic imprint. In this sense, Kierkegaard’s spirit is implicitly present in every single work by Sadeh, even if Kierkegaard’s name is not explicitly mentioned. At the same time, Kierkegaard’s name does appear specifically in Sadeh’s oeuvre, and interestingly enough in his most typical and most influential work: Life as a Parable (see section I). Not only there, however, is Kierkegaard’s presence explicit. Almost thirty years after the publication of Life as a Parable, Sadeh published a small book that can be viewed as its sequel, The Book of the Yellow Pears.8 It is, like its predecessor, characterized by poetic deliberations on the nature of existence and of one’s relationship with divinity. The second chapter is called “Kierkegaard’s Angel” and muses on the possibility that an angel, just as in the story of the binding, would have intervened and stopped Kierkegaard from breaking his engagement with Regine Olsen. Kierkegaard’s understanding of the binding (as Sadeh interpreted it) captured Sadeh’s imagination, and the next section will show how it connects with his selfunderstanding as a spiritual poet. Thus, given the centrality of Life as a Parable to Sadeh’s literary output, as well as its explicit reference to Kierkegaard, the next section of the present study will focus on that work and its sequel, The Book of the Yellow Pears. Bearing in mind that Life as a Parable not only influenced many Israeli writers but also affected a vast audience of ordinary readers, it is suggested that for many in Israel Pinhas Sadeh’s writing served as an introduction to the thought of Søren Kierkegaard. The question then arises: what kind of Kierkegaard did Sadeh present to the Israeli audience? What was his understanding of Kierkegaard’s thought? III. Life, Poetry, and the Single Individual: Sadeh’s Understanding of Kierkegaard The mass is the void, the chaos before the creation of the world, the individual is the world created out of chaos. The meaning of the biblical story is that in each single individual the act of the creation of the world is repeated.9

Sadeh was an ardent admirer of the single individual: the person who is courageous enough to rebel against the mass, release himself from its dull, numbing pleasures and give up all the goods and comforts that society can bestow. Only as an individual (rather than as a part of society), Sadeh contended, can one approach divinity. Only by uncompromisingly examining oneself and distinguishing oneself from the distracting chaos of the mass, he insisted, can one follow the call directed at each single individual. What is the nature of this call? For Sadeh, the single individual is a kind of prophet who understands that life is a parable and that his or her vocation is Pinhas Sadeh, ‫[ ספר האגסים הצהובים‬The Book of the Yellow Pears], Tel Aviv: Schocken 1985. 9 Sadeh, ‫החיים כמשל‬, p. 338. (Life as a Parable, pp. 343–4.) 8

Pinhas Sadeh: The Poet as “the Single Individual”

193

to interpret it and fathom the ways in which life is but a manifestation of something much deeper: The life of a prophet is a parable to him, in which every detail appears as a symbol….He can turn neither left nor right, away from the open eye of God and the might of His arm. This does not mean that he cannot live; on the contrary, he lives his life in the deepest possible way, but he does not live it for its own sake—he lives it as a parable, he lives it for the sake of God. To be a writer is art, to be a prophet is a purpose, a vocation. At times the prophet may want to be only a writer, but in the depths of his heart he knows this is impossible, and he also knows that in this difficult destiny and purpose a deep and ecstatic joy is concealed, and so the word of the Lord becomes a blessing and a rejoicing to him.10

Sadeh was not a philosopher but he persistently expressed a philosophical theory regarding the nature of existence. Life, he claimed, is a parable illustrating the one and only being that truly exists: God. Everything else has the reality and stability of a dream: it is transient, vague, and stands for something else. The vocation of the prophet is to live in accordance with this realization and to exist in a way that is closely attentive to divinity. Such existence must focus on the spiritual affairs of the soul and reject the material and worldly affairs that society offers. Unfortunately, Sadeh claims, our age is as far as possible from nurturing individuality and is blind to the need of a devoted relationship with God: This book was written during the Age of Darkness. Its author lived among people to whom everything that in his eyes was the heart of life was strange. To them worldly wisdom and social morality were supreme, and so they were incapable of attaining anything but the mediocre, and could by no means attain the absolute, the great, the ecstatic. The main thing to them was to maintain a material existence, the main thing to them was to be a limb of the racial, political body, and so they were incapable of really understanding the meaning of love, loneliness, poetry, genius, purity and sin, the meaning of existence before God, the meaning of God; they dwelt in God-forsaken darkness, and they did not care.11

Accordingly, to truly worship God, Sadeh thinks, is to separate from society. One needs to reject the misleading goals of social life and focus only on listening to God’s words spoken through the experiences of one’s life. The existential-religious mission is to interpret these experiences, to perceive them as a parable by which God’s message is expressed. Genuine existence, then, cannot be achieved in the context of social life: it requires the singling out of the individual in his or her uniqueness. Sadeh believed, then, that religious life can be fulfilled only by individuals, while in social life he saw both a contemptible enemy (for its focus on the lower levels of existence) and a temptation because of the goods and comforts it offers. His ambivalence was already apparent in the above-mentioned account of the decision

Sadeh, ‫החיים כמשל‬, pp. 152–3. (Life as a Parable, p. 153.) Sadeh, ‫החיים כמשל‬, pp. 337–8. (Life as a Parable, p. 343.)

10 11

194

Sharon Krishek

to leave London, but it is even more clearly manifested by his doubts regarding the possibility of marrying the girl he loves: My hesitations as to what I should do—whether to marry her or leave her—would toss me about like the wind tossing a frail fence. On the one hand I loved her so much and felt that I did not have the strength to break with her, and on the other hand I asked myself how I would be able to create and to express all that was still contained within me if instead of loneliness and tension I was swathed in warmth and tranquility.12

We may formulate Sadeh’s dilemma thus: does devotion to one’s vocation—the religious vocation that for Sadeh was equivalent to his devotion to poetry—mean divorcing oneself from society and from earthly happiness in general? Does the single individual’s dialogue with God necessitate social solitude? Or, to put it differently, must this individual be not only single but also lonely? Sadeh struggled with this question his entire life; hence in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling he found an inspiring answer. As is well known, in Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard distinguishes between the ethical and the religious, placing the second above the first, and claiming that a tension exists between them. The tension is most strongly exemplified in the biblical story of the binding of Isaac: from a religious point of view Abraham’s willingness to kill his son is part of his faith, but from an ethical point of view this act must be judged as sheer murder. Sadeh is fascinated by Abraham’s story, but he is not disturbed, or puzzled, by this aspect of the binding. He is not bothered by the moral question of God’s commanding what is morally forbidden (which contradicts even God’s own love commandment), and does not seek to reconcile the religious with the ethical. On the contrary, Sadeh is fascinated by Abraham’s story—and by what he understood as Kierkegaard’s interpretation of it—because for him it represents the unbridgeable dichotomy between earthly happiness and a religiously devoted life. For Sadeh, the ethical stands for social life, worldly affairs and earthly, finite, goods. He therefore interprets Fear and Trembling as a work discussing the price required of the religious person, the price that the individual has to pay if he is to fulfill his vocation. This price, Sadeh thought, amounts to sacrificing the ethical. We may say that Sadeh perceived himself, qua poet fulfilling his vocation, in the portrait of Fear and Trembling’s single individual. This is the one, as Sadeh understood it, who follows God’s call at the price of sacrificing his happiness, at the price of being misunderstood and rejected, at the price of leaving the ethical behind; away from home, away from worldly happiness, away from “earthly Jerusalem”: The gods denied you happiness, That you might not live your own life. That you might understand the suffering of others, that You might be able to describe their woe. The gods chose you in your mother’s womb and will always call you to them. From the mists of distances the gods beckon to the poet, yet a youth, With beckonings most painfully sweet. Sadeh, ‫החיים כמשל‬, p. 356. (Life as a Parable, p. 362.)

12

Pinhas Sadeh: The Poet as “the Single Individual”

195

And so you went out of the earthly Jerusalem, to seek The new Jerusalem. You went out of the land of Egypt to wander in the wilderness of the world, To celebrate the soul’s Passover.13

However, nearly thirty years later, at the very beginning of The Book of the Yellow Pears, Sadeh compares Abraham and Kierkegaard and judges “the binding of Regine” to be a mistake.14 Sadeh, who must have taken Fear and Trembling as a poetic representation of Kierkegaard’s spiritual inquiry into his life (just as Life as a Parable is a poetic representation of the spiritual inquiry into Sadeh’s own life), conflates Kierkegaard’s personal life with his philosophical understanding of life. He concludes that Kierkegaard, like his Abraham, chose to sacrifice his worldly happiness for the sake of being that single individual who devotes his life to God (by means of his poetical work). And while at the time of writing Life as a Parable Sadeh believed that this should indeed be the destiny of the single individual, in The Book of the Yellow Pears he seems to question this belief. Accordingly, he deems Kierkegaard “a miserable and lonely man” whose future fame could not compensate for the chill of his solitude.15 But is Sadeh correct in his judgment of Kierkegaard’s life and philosophy? Sadeh, I claim, is twice mistaken. First, he does not consider the possibility that a failure committed in the philosopher’s personal life does not necessarily reflect a failure of the philosopher’s idea or understanding of life. That Kierkegaard broke his engagement with Regine, possibly to his regret, does not indicate a flaw in his philosophy. Maybe Kierkegaard could not live up to his own ideals? And this leads to the second and more crucial of Sadeh’s misunderstandings, namely, his (mis-) interpretation of Kierkegaard’s religiosity. Indeed, I think that Sadeh did grasp correctly the passionate spirit of Kierkegaard’s philosophy, and the real challenge this philosophy faces in its attempt to reconcile the demands of the religiously devoted existence of the single individual with earthly happiness as represented by the ethical. There is much value to this understanding of Kierkegaard’s philosophy, and to the portrait of the philosopher implicit in and between the lines of Sadeh’s work. However, Sadeh misses the paradox at the heart of Kierkegaard’s religiosity. Rather than condemning the religious and the ethical to mutual exclusion (as Sadeh understands it), Kierkegaard introduces a paradoxical model that allows an interesting intertwining of these two.16 Thus, while Sadeh finds inspiration in Kierkegaard’s perceptive indication of the tension between the life of the single individual and life in the ethical mode, he fails to see that Kierkegaard also Sadeh, ‫החיים כמשל‬, p. 255. (Life as a Parable, p. 250.) Regretfully, the strength and uniqueness of Sadeh’s poetic language is somewhat lost in translation. However, The New Jerusalem (of which a part is quoted above) is one of the more celebrated of Sadeh’s poems. 14 Sadeh, ‫[ ספר האגסים הצהובים‬The Book of the Yellow Pears], pp. 5–8. 15 Ibid., p. 8. 16 This is not the place to elaborate on this (possibly controversial) claim. For an extensive discussion of Kierkegaard’s paradoxical model of faith and its affirmation of earthly well-being, see Sharon Krishek, Kierkegaard on Faith and Love, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2009, Chapter 3. 13

196

Sharon Krishek

teaches that there is a way to be a single individual within the realm of the ethical; namely, without divorcing society, earthly goods, and mundane existence. In other words, for a genuine fulfillment of spiritual life—for living the religious life of the single individual—one need not be a secluded poet or a tormented prophet. One can be as plain and “invisible” as a tax collector, whose dull demeanor stands in a sharp contrast to his passionate inwardness.17 The single individual, according to Kierkegaard, is not only an Abraham sacrificing his son, and not only a prophet-like poet devoting his days and nights to fulfilling his vocation at the price of worldly happiness. The single individual can also be one who lives a quiet life, enjoys finite goods, and appreciates his worldly day-to-day existence. His spirituality is not defeated or threatened by the ethical. On the contrary, if this person is a single individual then the ethical—including mundane, worldly, and social life—becomes a spiritual journey. It becomes the occasion for that individual to fulfill his or her religious vocation.

Kierkegaard famously presents such a religious person in Fear and Trembling (SKS 4, 134 / FT, 38–9): “The instant I first lay eyes on him, I set him apart at once; I jump back, clap my hands, and say half aloud, ‘Good Lord, is this the man, is this really the one—he looks just like a tax collector!’ But this is indeed the one.”

17

Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Sadeh’s Corpus ‫החיים כמשל‬, Tel Aviv: Sheshet 1958, p. 12; p. 192; p. 207 (republished, Tel Aviv: Schocken 1968; English translation: Life as a Parable, trans. by Richard Flantz, Jerusalem: Carta 1989 [1966], p. 16; p. 192; p. 207). ‫[ ספר האגסים הצהובים‬The Book of the Yellow Pears], Tel Aviv: Schocken 1985, pp. 5–8; pp. 45–6. ‫אהבה אנתולוגיה משירת העולם‬: [Love: An Anthology of World Poetry], ed. by Pinhas Sadeh, Tel Aviv: Schocken 1989, pp. 177–8. II. Sources of Sadeh’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Søren Kierkegaard, ‫ מבחר כתבים‬:‫האתי והדתי‬, ‫[ האסתטי‬The Aesthetic, The Ethical and the Religious: Selected Writings], ed. by Joseph Shechter and Illan Croch, Tel Aviv: Dvir 1954. III. Secondary Literature on Sadeh’s Relation to Kierkegaard Ganan, Moses, ‫ פנחס שדה והשירה הדתית‬:‫[ אני נושא את שירי אל הרעב לרוח‬I Offer My Poem to the Hungry in Spirit: Pinhas Sadeh and Religious Poetry], Jerusalem: Goshen 2004, p. 11; p. 15; p. 21; p. 35; pp. 52–3; pp. 63–4; p. 129.

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Index of Persons

Abraham, 70, 135, 174, 191, 194, 195, 196. Adorno, Theodor W. (1903–69), German philosopher, 27, 172. Antigone, 90, 94. Aquinas, Thomas (ca. 1225–74), Scholastic philosopher and theologian, 35, 38–40, 132, 143. Arango Arámbula, José Doroteo (1878–1923), Mexican revolutionary, 51. Aristotle, 40, 41, 143. Auden, W.H. (1907–73), English-born American poet, 164. Augustine of Hippo (354–430), church father, 132. Bacsó, Béla, 184. Bakhtin, Mikhail (1895–1975), Russian philosopher and literary critic, 105–19, 163. Balassa, Péter (1947–2003), Hungarian literary critic, 124, 127, 172, 180, 181. Balso, Judith, 70. Barrenechea, Ana María, 30. Barth, Karl (1886–1968), Swiss Protestant theologian, 7. Baudelaire, Charles (1821–67), French poet, 4, 93, 94. Beckett, Samuel (1906–89), Irish playwright, 25, 125. Beethoven, Ludwig van (1770–1827), Austrian composer, 177. Berdyaev, Nicholas (1874–1948), Russian philosopher, 81. Bergson, Henri (1859–1941), French philosopher, 4.

Bernhard, Thomas (1931–89), Austrian author, 133. Billeskov Jansen, Frederik Julius (1907–2002), Danish literary scholar and author, 37. Bioy Casares, Adolfo Vicente Perfecto (1914–99), Argentinian writer, 24. Blaga, Lucian (1895–1961), Romanian philosopher, 6. Blecher, Max (1909–38), Romanian author, 3–20. Blixen, Karen (1885–1962), Danish author, 182. Borges, Jorge Luis (1899–1986), Argentinian author, 21–31, 166. Brecht, Bertold (1898–1956), German dramatist, 48. Breton, André (1896–1966), French author, 4. Broch, Hermann (1886–1951), Austrian author, 125. Bruegel, Pieter, the Elder (1525–69), Flemish painter, 164, 165. Buber, Martin (1878–1965), German philosopher, 172, 183. Bullrich, Silvina (1915–90), Argentinian author, 25. Calderón de la Barca, Pedro (1600–81), Spanish dramatist, 96. Camus, Albert (1903–60), French author, 80, 85, 125, 129. Cansinos-Asséns, Rafael (1882–1964), Spanish writer, 21. Cantor, Georg (1845–1918), German mathematician, 125, 132. Čapek, Karel (1890–1938), Czech author, 160.

200

Kierkegaard’s Influence on Literature, Criticism and Art

Carballo, Emmanuel (b. 1929), Mexican writer, 45. Carnap, Rudolf (1891–1970), German-born American philosopher, 125. Casais Monteiro, Adolfi Vítor (1908–72), Portuguese writer, 64. Castellani, Leonardo Luis (1899–1981), Argentinian priest, writer, and philosopher, 33–43. Castro, Américo (1885–1972), Spanish cultural historian, 87. Caubaud, Jacques, 143. Cervantes, Miguel de (1547–1616), Spanish author, 30. Chesterton, Gilbert Keith (1874–1936), English writer, 37. Christ, 129, 174, 175, 177, 190. Claudel, Paul (1868–1955), French author and diplomat, 36. Cortázar, Julio (1914–84), Argentinian writer, 26. d’Annunzio, Gabriele (1864–1938), Italian writer, 4. De Man, Paul (1919–83), Belgian-born American literary theorist, 106. Descartes, René (1596–1650), French philosopher, 88, 95, 143. Dickens, Charles (1812–70), English author, 59. Don Juan, 70, 133, 151. Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich (1821–81), Russian author, 81–3, 93, 94, 114–16, 129. Duvakin, Viktor (1909–82), Russian literary critic, 106. Eckermann, Johann Peter (1792–1854), German poet, 128. Eco, Umberto (b. 1932), Italian author, 124. Edelberg, Betina (1921–2010), Argentinian writer, 25. Eliade, Mircea (1907–86), Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, 5, 6, 48.

Esterházy, Péter (b. 1950), Hungarian author, 121–38, 175. Fabro, Cornelio (1911–95), Italian Catholic priest, 37. Fondane, Benjamin (1898–1944), Romanian-French poet, 4, 6. Frege, Gottlob (1848–1925), German mathematician, 125. Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939), Austrian psychologist, 36. Friedrich, Caspar David (1774–1840), German painter, 181. Fuentes, Carlos (1928–2012), Mexican writer, 45–55. Füst, Milán (1888–1967), Hungarian author, 132. Gaos, José (1900–69), Spanish-born Mexican philosopher, 87, 91. García-Huidobro Fernández, Vicente (1893–1949), Chilean poet, 24. García Lorca, Federico (1898–1936), Spanish poet, 30. García Morente, Manuel (1886–1942), Spanish philosopher, 87. Gauss, Carl Friedrich (1777–1855), German mathematician, 125. Gide, André (1869–1951), French author, 4. Gödel, Kurt (1906–78), Austrian-born American logician, 132. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749–1832), German poet, author, scientist and diplomat, 30, 128, 139. Gombrowicz, Witold (1904–69), Polish author, 131, 139–56. Goncharov, Ivan Alexandrovich (1812–91), Russian novelist, 169. Gramsci, Antonio (1891–1937), Italian writer and philosopher, 50. Guardini, Romano (1885–1968), Catholic theologian, 37. Guerrero, Margarita, Argentinian writer, 25. Hale, Michelle Pulsipher, 70.

Index of Persons Hamlet, 28. Hamvas, Béla (1897–1968), Hungarian writer and thinker, 124. Hatherly, Ana (b. 1929), Portuguese writer, 68. Havel, Vaclav (1936–2011), Czech author and politician, 159. Hegedušić, Krsto (1901–75), Croatian painter, 164, 165. Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm (1770–1831), German philosopher, 9, 81–3, 92, 109, 132, 142, 144. Heidegger, Martin (1889–1976), German philosopher, 4, 53, 54, 68, 81, 106, 133. Heine, Heinrich (1797–1856), German poet, 21. Heisenberg, Werner (1901–76), German physicist, 132. Henríquez Ureña, Nicolás Federico (1884–1946), Santo Dominican writer, 24. Heraclitus, 177, 179. Herod, 151. Hidalgo Lobato, Alberto (1897–1967), Argentinian poet, 24. Høffding, Harald (1843–1931), Danish philosopher, 72. Hölderlin, Friedrich (1770–1843), German poet, 190. Holquist, Michael, 112. Hugo, Victor (1802–85), French author, 93. Husserl, Edmund (1859–1938), German philosopher, 7, 80, 82, 88, 106. Ibsen, Henrik (1828–1906), Norwegian playwright, 182. Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), Spanish priest, 41. Ingenieros, Delia (1915–96), Argentinian writer, 25. Jacob, Max (1876–1944), French poet, 92. Jaspers, Karl (1883–1969), German philosopher, 7.

201

Jiménez Mantecón, Juan Ramón (1881–1958), Spanish poet, 21. Job, 70. John, 173, 177. John of the Cross (1542–91), Spanish mystic and poet, 41, 89. John of Damascus (ca. 645 or 676–749), Syrian monk, 41. John XXIII (pope from 1958–63), 33. José Régio, see “Reis Pereira, José Maria, dos.” Joyce, James (1882–1941), Irish author, 154, 164, 165. Judas, 134. Jünger, Ernst (1895–1998), German author, 4. Jurado, Alicia (1922–2011), Argentinian writer, 25. Kafka, Franz (1883–1924), Czech-Austrian novelist, 4, 26, 27, 68, 125, 164, 165, 183. Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804), German philosopher, 52, 88, 112, 127, 139, 142, 143. Karpiński, Wojciech, 139. Keats, John (1795–1821), English poet, 59. Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye (1813–55) From the Papers of One Still Living (1838), 65. The Concept of Irony (1841), 93. Either/Or (1843), 5, 12, 29, 40, 52, 68, 72, 94, 107, 108, 112, 127, 130–2, 144, 145, 166, 175, 177, 178, 182, 183. Fear and Trembling (1843), 5, 27, 28, 39, 130, 133, 134, 170, 172, 181, 182, 184, 191, 194, 195. Repetition (1843), 4, 6–8, 15, 39, 170, 177, 181, 182, 184. The Concept of Anxiety (1844), 5, 39, 91, 93, 95, 97, 99, 182. Stages on Life’s Way (1845), 5, 40. Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), 65, 99, 107, 108, 111, 117.

202

Kierkegaard’s Influence on Literature, Criticism and Art

A Literary Review of Two Ages (1846), 109. Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (1847), 4. Works of Love (1847), 13, 53, 99. The Point of View for My Work as an Author (ca. 1848), 51. The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air: Three Devotional Discourses (1849), 5. The Sickness unto Death (1849), 5, 12, 15, 53, 128, 144, 159, 162, 182. Practice in Christianity (1850), 29, 128. The Moment (1855), 28, 71. Journals, Notebooks, Nachlaß, 94, 159, 182. Klíma, Ivan (b. 1931), Czech writer, 157–68. Kodama, María (b. 1937), Argentinian writer, 25. Kohout, Pavel (b. 1928), Czech author, 159. Kosztolányi, Dezső (1885–1936), Hungarian author, 126. Kristeva, Julia (b. 1941), Bulgarian-French philosopher, psychoanalyst, and sociologist, 105. Kundera, Milan (b. 1929), Czech-born French author, 159, 161. Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi de (1896–1957), Italian author, 4. Lautréamont, Conte de (i.e., Isidore Ducasses) (1846–70), Uruguay-born French author, 4. Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich (1870–1924), Russian statesman, 50. Lequier, Jules (1814–62), French philosopher, 3. Lévinas, Emmanuel (1906–95), LithuanianFrench philosopher, 106. Levinson, Luisa Mercedes (1914–88), Argentinian writer, 25. Lezama Lima, José (1910–76), Cuban writer, 89.

Lourenço, Eduardo (b. 1923), Portuguese essayist, 68–71. Lowrie, Walter (1868–1959), American translator, 27. Lugones, Leopoldo (1874–1938), Argentinian writer, 37. Lukács, Georg (1885–1971), Hungarian philosopher, novelist and literary critic, 172. Luther, Martin (1483–1546), German Protestant theologian, 38, 42. Machado, Antonio (1875–1939), Spanish poet, 88, 89. Malantschuk, Gregor (1902–78), UkrainianDanish Kierkegaard scholar, 37. Mann, Thomas (1875–1955), German author, 4, 166, 171, 176, 178, 179. Mao Zedong (1893–1976), Chinese communist revolutionary, 51. Maritain, Jacques (1882–1973), French Catholic philosopher, 35. Marx, Karl (1818–83), German philosopher and economist, 82. Masaryk, Tomáš Garrigue (1850–1937), Czech statesman, 160. Menéndez Pidal, Ramón (1869–1968), Spanish philologist and historian, 87. Meréchal, Joseph (1878–1944), Italian Catholic theologian, 35. Mészöly, Miklós (1921–2001), Hungarian author, 125, 171, Milton, John (1608–74), English poet, 59. Molinos, Miguel de (1628–96), Spanish poet, 89. Montaigne, Michel de (1533–92), French essayist and philosopher, 139. Moreno Sanz, Jesús, 92. Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (1756–91), Austrian composer, 69, 178. Musil, Robert (1880–1942), Austrian author, 125, 127. Mussolini, Benito (1883–1945), Italian political leader, 34.

Index of Persons Nádas Péter (b. 1942), Hungarian author, 126, 169–87. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844–1900), German philosopher, 52, 88, 89, 93–6, 124, 128, 132, 139. Ocampo Aguirre, Silvina Inocencia (1903–93), Argentinian writer, 25. O. Henry, see “Porter, William Sydney.” Oliveira e Silva, Luís de (b. 1945), Portuguese essayist, 68, 69. Olsen, Regine (1822–1904), 40, 72, 94, 179, 182, 192, 195. Ortega y Gasset, José (1883–1955), Spanish philosopher, 21, 87, 88, 90, 91. Ottlik Géza (1912–90), Hungarian author, 176. Pancho Villa, see “Arango Arámbula, José Doroteo.” Parmenides, 184. Pascal, Blaise (1623–1662), French mathematician, physicist and philosopher, 95, 126, 129, 131, 139, 144. Passos, John Dos (1896–1970), American author, 45. Pater, Walter (1839–94), English writer, 62, 74. Paz, Octavio (1914–98), Mexican author and diplomat, 45. Pázmány, Péter (1570–1637), Hungarian Catholic theologian and cardinal, 131. Perón, Juan Domingo (1895–1974), Argentinian general, 26. Pessoa, Fernando (1888–1935), Portuguese author, 57–76. Petri, György (b. 1943), Hungarian poet, 126. Pilinszky, János (1921–81), Hungarian poet, 125, 129. Pius XI (Pope from 1922–39), 34. Plato, 88, 169. Plotinus, 88, 89.

203

Popova, Irina, 115, 116. Porter, William Sydney (1862–1910), American writer, 62. Proust, Marcel (1871–1922), French author, 4, 140. Pythagoras, 88. Rabelais, François (1494–1553), French author, 139. Radnóti, Sándor (b. 1946), Hungarian literary critic, 134. Ralea, Mihail (1896–1964), Romanian philosopher, 5. Ratzinger, Joseph (b. 1927), pope Emeritus of the Catholic Church, 131. Recasens Fiches, Luis (1903–77), Spanish philosopher, 87. Reis Pereira, José Maria, dos (1901–69), 63. Rilke, Rainer Maria (1875–1926), German poet, 68, 92, 126, 129, 170, 183. Rimbaud, Arthur (1854–91), French poet, 68, 93, 94. Rosenzweig, Franz (1886–1929), German Jewish philosopher and theologian, 172, 183. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712–78), French philosopher, 34. Saa, Mário (1893–1971), Portuguese poet, 62, 63. Sábato, Ernesto (1911–2011), Argentinian author, 25, 77–86. Sá-Carneiro, Mário (1890–1916), Portuguese poet, 62. Sadeh, Pinhas (1929–94), Polish-born Israeli novelist, 189–97. Sandauer, Artur (1913–89), Polish literary critic, 142. San Juan de la Cruz, see “John of the Cross.” Sara, 133. Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905–80), French philosopher, 41, 52, 80, 81, 85, 140, 142.

204

Kierkegaard’s Influence on Literature, Criticism and Art

Scheler, Max (1874–1928), German philosopher, 88. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von (1775–1854), German philosopher, 93, 96. Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788–1860), German philosopher, 139. Schulz, Bruno (1892–1942), Polish author, 4, 125. Schumann, Robert (1810–56), German composer, 72–4. Sebastian, Mihail (1907–45), Romanian writer, 4. Serna Puig, Ramón Gomez de la (1888–1963), Spanish writer, 21. Shakespeare, William (1564–1616), English dramatist, 59, 66, 139. Shelly, Percy Bysshe (1792–1822), English poet, 59. Shestov, Lev (1866–1938), Ukrainian– French philosopher, 7, 106. Simões, João Gaspar (1903–87), Portuguese writer, 67. Škvorecký, Josef (1924–2012), Czech writer and publisher, 159. Socrates, 115, 128, 169, 170, 178. Söderquist, Brian, 163. Spencer, Herbert (1820–1903), English philosopher, 139. Spinoza, Baruch (1632–77), Dutch philosopher, 88, 89. Stalin, Joseph Vissarionovich (1878–1953), 51. Szőcs, Géza (b. 1953), Hungarian poet, 129. Swartz, Richard, 182. Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre (1881–1955), French philosopher, 126, 129, 182. Teixeira de Pescoaes, see “Teixeira de Vasconcelos, Joaquim Pereira.” Teixeira de Vasconcelos, Joaquim Pereira (1877–1952), Portuguese poet, 61. Teresa of Ávila (1515–82), Spanish mystic, 41.

Tertullian (ca. 160–235), church father, 126, 131. Thulstrup, Marie Mikulová, 37. Thulstrup, Niels (1924–88), Danish theologian, 37. Tomsky, Alexander, 160. Unamuno, Miguel de (1864–1936), Spanish philosopher, novelist and essayist, 37, 81, 88, 90, 91, 92, 97, 98. Vaculík, Ludvík (b. 1926), Czech writer, 159. Valadez, Leticia, 46. Valle Peña, Ramón José Simón (1866–1936), Spanish author, 21. Verlaine, Paul (1844–96), French poet, 74. Videla, Jorge Rafael (b. 1925), Argentinian general, 26. Wahl, Jean (1888–1974), French philosopher, 37. Walser, Robert (1878–1956), Germanspeaking Swiss author, 4. Wast, Hugo (i.e., Gustavo Adolfo Martínez Zuviría) (1883–1962), Argentinian novelist, 37. Weber, Max (1864–1920), German sociologist, 126, 172. Weil Simone (1909–43), French philosopher, 126, 142, 143. Whitman, Walt (1819–92), American poet, 62. Wilde, Oscar (1854–1900), Irish author, author, 190. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1889–1951), Austrian philosopher, 125, 130, 132, 133. Zambrano, María (1904–91), Spanish philosopher, 87–101. Zemborain de Torres Duggan, María Esther (1915–2001), Argentinian writer, 25. Zubiri, Xavier (1898–1983), Spanish philosopher, 87.

Index of Subjects

absurd, absurdity, 9, 10, 29, 70, 71, 78, 81, 84, 144. actuality, 69, 109–11, 113, 116, 167. aesthetic, 28, 113. alienation, 10, 18. ambiguity, 83. anguish, see “anxiety.” anxiety, 13, 31, 40, 85, 92, 95–7, 99, 151, 162, 164, 181. appropriation, 99. arguments for God’s existence, 29. atheism, 131, 134, 143. authentic self, 143, 153, 154. authenticity, 16, 69, 71, 144, 151, 152. authority, 154.

criticism, 87–101. crowd, 40.

baptism, 39. becoming, 144, 151. Bible, 41, 173, 184. Ecclesiastes, 19. Genesis, 191. Job, 8. Tobit, 133. boredom, 179.

Enlightenment, 34, 82. Epicureanism, 70. eternal, the, eternity, 9, 19, 27, 28. eternal happiness, 112. ethics, the ethical, 39, 41, 107, 134, 160, 180. Eucharist, 39. existence, 83, 85, 107–9, 112, 151, 153. existentialism, 7, 10, 28, 41, 52, 68, 80, 81, 106, 125, 140, 143, 146.

capitalism, 78, 80, 82. categorical imperative, 153. Catholicism, 33–43, 126, 139, 153. choice, 46, 131. choosing oneself, 52. Christianity, 15, 18, 28, 33–43, 69, 70, 97, 98, 126, 151, 152. communication, 57, 71, 94, 117. indirect, 51, 69, 71, 113, 114, 117. communism, 34, 40. conscience, 31, 80, 93, 97. contradiction, 83, 84.

death, 11. death of God, 17, 52. demonic, the, 41, 81, 180. demonism, 15. despair, 8, 10, 12, 16–19, 46, 52, 69, 78, 82–5, 134, 151, 153, 160, 162, 163, 166, 167. dialectics, 83, 84, 144. Don Giovanni, 69, 177, 178. doubt, 78, 84, 93, 180. drama, 130. dream, 90, 95, 96, 97.

faith, 9, 31, 39, 84, 85, 129, 135, 160, 172, 180, 184, 194. Fall, the, 96, 113. fascism, 34, 42. fear, 30, 31, 96. finitude, 83. and infinity, 144. freedom, 8, 39, 42, 96, 127, 129, 132, 134, 135, 151, 157–60, 164, 165, 167, 183.

206

Kierkegaard’s Influence on Literature, Criticism and Art

French Revolution, 34, 40. Gnosticism, 173. grace, 39, 97. guilt, 111, 112. hero, 114–16, 180. history, 29, 42, 47, 49, 51, 53, 54, 83, 88–90, 116, 121–3, 129, 159, 164, 167, 183. Holocaust, 171, 173, 174. hope, 68, 83, 85. humanism, 78. idealism, 38, 166. imitation, 18. immanence, see “transcendence.” immediacy, 16, 17. inauthenticity, 69. incarnation, 29. infinity, 83, 130. innocence, 96. instant, the, 53, 83, 84. interest, 110. inwardness, 99, 151, 196. irony, 27, 30, 70, 71, 122, 123, 127, 163, 177. Romantic, 128. irrationalism, irrationality, 83–5. isolation, 30. knight, 130, 131. language, 71, 125, 169. leap, 149, 150, 151, 153, 159. liberalism, 34, 40. loneliness, 10, 53. love, 8, 13, 53, 96, 97, 99, 133, 144, 157, 169, 170, 177–81, 183, 193. agape, 13. eros, 13, 19, 177. of neighbor, 18. Lukács School, 172. Madrid School, 87, 91.

maieutics, 115, 117. martyrdom, 11. Marxism, 81, 82, 147, 172. meaning of existence, 78, 80. meaninglessness, 97. melancholy, 13, 29, 70, 139, 177, 181, 184. memory, 90, 177. midwifery, 70. modernity, 34, 38, 41, 49, 61–4, 67, 70, 88, 93, 94, 98, 121, 162. moment, the, 28. music, 72–4, 130, 133, 177, 178. mysticism, mystics, 8, 9. myth, mythology, 53, 54. nausea, 80. negativity, negation, 8, 85. neo-Kantianism, 109. nihilism, 18, 69. nothingness, nothing, 18, 78, 79, 96. novel, 77–86. offense, 84. paradox, 70, 83, 84, 129, 144, 153, 180. passion, 47, 110, 169, 177, 179, 183. phenomenology, 7, 10, 14, 80, 82. poetry, 22, 23, 57–76. possibility and necessity, 144. press, the, 109. Protestantism, 34. pseudonymity, pseudonyms, 19, 57–76, 122, 131, 176. psychoanalysis, 36, 66. psychology, 18, 36, 39. rationalism, rationality, reason, 78, 82, 84, 90–5, 98. rebellion, 78, 80. recollection, 68. reconciliation, 85. redemption, 39, 129. reflection, 17. religiousness A and B, 151. repetition, 6, 7, 9, 85, 179.

Index of Subjects responsibility, 111, 112, 135. revolt, see “rebellion.” Romanticism, 80, 81, 93. German, 93. sacrifice, 133. scandal, see “offense.” scholasticism, 38, 41. seduction, 178. self-deception, 153. seriousness, 28. sickness, 162. sickness unto death, 19. silence, 130, 135, 180. sin, 13, 15, 28, 39, 85, 93, 96, 113, 134, 135, 160, 165, 171, 193. single individual, the, 40, 109, 126, 146, 153, 191–6. skepticism, 84. solipsism, 9. solitude, 93, 94, 184, 195. soteriology, 19. speculative philosophy, 109. spirit, 53, 95, 99. stages, 40, 70, 151. aesthetic, 70, 151. ethical, 70, 151. religious, 70, 151. Stalinism, 50, 161, 171.

207

Stoicism, 70. structuralism, 143. subjectivism, 82. subjectivity, 11, 42, 80, 81, 84, 99, 113–17, 153. suffering, 12, 18, 19, 129, 130, 144, 164–6. suicide, 85. surrealism, 10, 80. suspension, see “teleological suspension.” tax collector, 196. technology, 80, 82. teleological suspension, 69. temporal and eternal, 144. temporality (see also “time”), 19. time, 53, 108. and eternity, 83. totalitarianism, 94, 95, 158, 160, 162, 163. tragedy, 94. transcendence, 111, 184. and immanence, 153. ultraism, 21. unhappy consciousness, 84. Wandering Jew, 174. World War I, 140. World War II, 140, 171.