Volume 5, Tome III: Kierkegaard and the Renaissance and Modern Traditions - Literature, Drama and Music

Jon Stewart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138266018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351874519
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The long period from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century supplied numerous sources for Kierkegaard's thought in any number of different fields. The present, rather heterogeneous volume covers the long period from the birth of Savonarola in 1452 through the beginning of the nineteenth century and into Kierkegaard's own time. The Danish thinker read authors representing vastly different traditions and time periods. Moreover, he also read a diverse range of genres. His interests concerned not just philosophy, theology and literature but also drama and music. The present volume consists of three tomes that are intended to cover Kierkegaard's sources in these different fields of thought. Tome III covers the sources that are relevant for literature, drama and music. Kierkegaard was well read in the European literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. He was captivated by the figure of Cervantes' Don Quixote, who is used as a model for humor and irony. He also enjoyed French literature, represented here by articles on Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and Mérimée. French dramatists were popular on the Danish stage, and Kierkegaard demonstrated an interest in, among others, Moliére and Scribe. Although he never possessed strong English skills, this did not prevent him from familiarizing himself with English literature, primarily with the help of German translations. While there is an established body of secondary material on Kierkegaard's relation to Shakespeare, little has been said about his use of the Irish dramatist Sheridan. It is obvious from, among other things, The Concept of Irony that Kierkegaard knew in detail the works of some of the main writers of the German Romantic movement. However, his use of the leading figures of the British Romantic movement, Byron and Shelley, remains largely unexplored terrain. The classic Danish authors of the eighteenth century, Holberg, Wessel and Ewald, were influential figures who prepared the way for the Golden Age of Danish poetry. Kierkegaard constantly refers to their dramatic characters, whom he often employs to illustrate a philosophical idea with a pregnant example or turn of phrase. Finally, while Kierkegaard is not an obvious name in musicology, his analysis of Mozart's Don Giovanni shows that he had a keen interest in music on many different levels.

François-René de Chateaubriand:

The Eloquent Society of Συμπαϱανεκϱωμενοι

Ingrid Basso

The mind is captivated by perceiving the links which connect so many men who remain unknown to one another.¹

Anyone who would like to draw a comparison between the Danish thinker and the French poet will soon realize that two lines of inquiry are equally open in this direction: that of the explicit traces of Kierkegaard’s reading of Chateaubriand, and that of the unconscious consonances. The former is the most complicated, even if it could appear to be the easier one, since even if it is based on something “visible”—that is, Kierkegaard’s explicit references to Chateaubriand’s words in his writings—there is no real certain criterion to establish whether Kierkegaard actually read the works he quotes, or simply had a second-hand knowledge of them, as sometimes seems to be the case. Further, we cannot know whether some references to the poet merely have the value of a simple literary allusion, or whether, on the contrary, they hide much more than what they immediately reveal, like the tip of an iceberg. This latter hypothesis, for example, has previously received detailed attention by H. P. Rohde, in his work Gaadefulde stadier paa Kierkegaards vej,² which we will consider in more detail below.

Moreover, it is also true that Kierkegaard did not quote Chateaubriand very frequently. He merely quotes, as is well known, a passage from the poet’s most famous work Atala, as a “motto” at the beginning of the second part of Either/Or, and this in fact constitutes the only instance in which the philosopher mentions a work by the French poet in his own published works. He subsequently does so again some years later in two passages from his papers, once very briefly when he talks about Chateaubriand’s Mémoires (in 1848),³ and then again when he mentions Génie du christianisme, ou les Beautés de la religion chrétienne, apologie de la religion (in 1850).⁴ Finally, we find the name of the poet mentioned in a letter to Kierkegaard written by one of his friends, the professor of jurisprudence at the Copenhagen University, Janus Lauritz Andreas Kolderup-Rosenvinge (1792–1850),⁵ with whom the philosopher at times used to promenade around the city, discussing politics. The last explicit trace of Chateaubriand in Kierkegaard’s documents appears in the list of the books of his library, where we find a German translation of the work Les Martyrs ou le Triomphe de la religion Chrétienne.⁶

We will examine all these passages below, but for now let us also take into account the second line of inquiry in the comparison between these two writers. This is a very interesting possibility, because even if in some cases one could state with great certainty that Kierkegaard could not have read certain specific works by Chateaubriand, the consonances between the two authors are nevertheless at times truly amazing, even in terms of precise verbal expressions, and not only in the sense of a vague shared romantic, melancholic mood, since Chateaubriand—as Théophile Gautier wrote—“inventa la mélancolie et la passion moderne.”⁷ Accordingly, we would like to begin by analyzing this second perspective, only subsequently turning to the critical examination of the explicit traces of the French writer in Kierkegaard’s works.

I. The Hidden Links: Unconscious Similarities between Kierkegaard and Chateaubriand

Certainly François-René de Chateaubriand could not imagine that—even if at the time⁸ he was already the celebrated writer and popular defender of the Christian religion (read, Catholic⁹), who both the intellectuals and the common people knew¹⁰—he himself would so soon become the object of that “mind-capturing” passion which perceives the hidden links connecting so many contemporary men unknown to one another. He could not know during the writing of his Mémoires, with which he intended simply “to talk from the bottom of the grave”¹¹ because “life suits me ill; perhaps death will become me better,”¹² that in the same years¹³ a young unknown Danish thinker had addressed his words to an eloquent society of Συμπαϱανεκϱωμενοι,¹⁴ or “Fellowship of the Dead”—as the Hongs’ translation has it¹⁵—an odd society that the author approaches in these terms: “dear Συμπαρανεκρωμενοι, we, like the Roman soldiers, do not fear death; we know a worse calamity, and first and last, above all—it is to live.”¹⁶ These words appear in the very brief essay in the first part of Either/Or entitled “The Unhappiest One,” an expression—“le plus malheureux des hommes”¹⁷—that Chateaubriand also used in his Mémoires, in a chapter originally written in 1836, and revised ten years later. Further, also in the Mémoires, we find the story of the author who describes how, during his exile in England, he used to meditate upon his unhappiness, walking inside Westminster Cathedral and, looking at that “labyrinth of tombs,” thought of his own grave, “ready to open.”¹⁸ One day it happened that he did not realize that the “usher”—as he wrote, using the English term—had already closed the gate, so that he had to spend a long part of the night inside the cathedral.

The image of an open grave could easily remind us of Kierkegaard’s description of the English grave, which he presents at the beginning of “The Unhappiest One”:

As is well known, there is said to be a grave somewhere in England that is distinguished not by a magnificent monument or a mournful setting but a short inscription—“The Unhappiest One.” It is said that the grave was opened, but no trace of a corpse was found. Which is the more amazing—that no corpse was found or that the grave was opened? It is indeed strange that someone took the time to see whether anyone was in it. When one reads a name in an epitaph, one is easily tempted to wonder how he passed his life on earth; one might wish to climb down into the grave for a conversation with him. But this inscription—it is so freighted with meaning!¹⁹

Later Kierkegaard will tell us that this grave is empty simply because “the unhappiest one” is actually still alive, since real unhappiness consists in living, so that the existence of a hypothetical “unhappy” dead person would be a contradiction. This seems to be a kind of answer to Chateaubriand’s story: the poet is looking at his own open grave inside the cathedral; he cannot descend, and this is, paradoxically, exactly the reason why the unhappiest one’s grave belongs to him. The similarity between the two texts is striking in this regard.

The question of whether Kierkegaard really did not read anything from these Mémoires is difficult: the very first edition of the definitive version of this text began to appear between 1848 and 1850 (first as feuilleton in the review La Presse, then as a book in 12 volumes), and so Kierkegaard obviously could not have read the passages we quoted prior to 1843, that is, the year in which Either/Or appeared. However, it is nevertheless true that Chateaubriand started to write his work in 1811 and already from 1817 began giving frequent public readings of it, first in England during his exile, then in France, where the most important social gatherings of the best-known intellectuals of that time for the purpose of listening to Chateaubriand’s Mémoires dates from 1834.²⁰ At the same time, numerous extracts of these readings were distributed to the reviews or journals like Revue des Deux Mondes, Revue de Paris, Écho de la Jeune France, for the sake of publicity,²¹ and the most significant of them, along with the extracts of the readings, were already published collectively in 1834, in a volume entitled Lectures des “Mémoires” de M. de Chateaubriand, ou recueil d’articles publié sur ces “Mémoires,” avec des fragments originaux.²²

It is more than plausible to assume that anyone who was in some way interested or involved in literary criticism and discussion at that time, and not only in France, could not help but be aware of the importance of Chateaubriand. This is made clear merely from considering the example of Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804–69), who already in 1834 had defined him as the founder of imaginative poetry, or “l’Homère du jeune siècle”²³ and emphasized that all modern literary schools descended more or less directly from him. At the time, the Revue des Deux Mondes, a literary and widely cultural review founded in Paris in 1829 by François Buloz (1803–77), held a particularly important position both in France and the rest of Europe, and it is not unlikely that Kierkegaard read it during these years, even if it cannot be demonstrated.

We should merely consider, for example—as the Danish commentator of Kierkegaard’s Journal NB7 quotes²⁴—that when Kierkegaard in 1848 wrote down in this journal, “Chateaubriand’s Memoirs has a superb motto taken from Job: sicut nubes…quasi naves—velut umbra,”²⁵ he did it after having read Louis de Loménie’s article “Chateaubriands Memoirer,” in Fædrelandet in 1848,²⁶ which was a Danish translation of the French article “Chateaubriand et ses Mémoires,” published between July 1 and September 1 in, precisely, the Revue des Deux Mondes.²⁷ This does not mean that Kierkegaard could not also have read this same review in the original language even before 1848—that is, from the first time that Chateaubriand began to read his Mémoires in public (and about this we can point out, in fact, that the first time that the incipit of the Mémoires, that is, the already mentioned Préface Testamentaire²⁸—where Job’s words appear—was published, it was precisely also in the Revue des Deux Mondes, in March 1834). It is well known, among other things, that Kierkegaard often drew upon the University of Copenhagen Library, and especially the Students Association’s book collection, whose catalogue is still preserved at the Royal Library of Copenhagen, and which, of course, included the above-mentioned review.²⁹

However, we could also add that even if Kierkegaard himself did not read the review, he could have known something about the passages from Chateaubriand’s Mémoires through conversations with his friends, such as, for example, the writer and literary critic Peder Ludvig Møller (1814–65), who, among other things, in 1840 won the literary prize offered by the University of Copenhagen on the theme of the modernity of the French taste for poetry, with a text in which Chateaubriand is naturally also quoted.³⁰

These are, nevertheless, merely interesting hypotheses, but, as was said before, nothing in fact tells us more about their verisimilitude. It is, however, stimulating to continue to trace further interesting similarities between the two writers, both in the Mémoires, as well as the most famous works of the French poet, Atala and René, which are worthy of special consideration. In this direction we can accordingly follow the method used by Ronald Grimsley in his comparative study Søren Kierkegaard and French Literature³¹—in which we also find a chapter on the “Romantic Melancholy in Kierkegaard and Chateaubriand”—where the author at the beginning expressly states:

Although the starting-point of these comparative studies will be…Kierkegaard’s specific reactions to French authors, it should perhaps be made clear at once that they are not concerned primarily with investigating problems of “influence”; their aim, for the most part, is to determine Kierkegaard’s fundamental attitude towards the questions raised rather then to examine the problem of any permanent influence they may have had upon his intellectual and religious development. By comparing two different views of a single cultural problem, I...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• Lord George Gordon Byron: Seduction, Defiance, and Despair in the Works of Kierkegaard
• Miguel de Cervantes: The Valuable Contribution of a Minor Influence
• François-René de Chateaubriand: The Eloquent Society of Συμπαϱανεκϱωμενοι
• Johannes Ewald: Poetic Fire
• Ludvig Holberg: Kierkegaard’s Unacknowledged Mentor
• Alphonse de Lamartine: The Movement “en masse” versus the Individual Choice
• Prosper Mérimée: A New Don Juan
• Molière: An Existential Vision of Authenticity in Man Across Time
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: The Love for Music and the Music of Love
• Eugène Scribe: The Unfortunate Authorship of a Successful Author
• William Shakespeare: Kierkegaard’s Post-Romantic Reception of “the Poet’s Poet”
• Percy Bysshe Shelley: Anxious Journeys, the Demonic, and “Breaking the Silence”
• Richard Brinsley Sheridan: A Story of One Review—Kierkegaard on The School for Scandal
• Johan Herman Wessel: Kierkegaard’s Use of Wessel, or The Crazier the Better
• Edward Young: Kierkegaard’s Encounter with a Proto-Romantic Religious Poet
• Index of Persons
• Index of Subjects