Volume 17: Kierkegaard's Pseudonyms

Katalin Nun, Jon Stewart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351874816
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Critique philosophique

One of the elements that many readers admire in Kierkegaard's skill as a writer is his ability to create different voices and perspectives in his works. Instead of unilaterally presenting clear-cut doctrines and theses, he confronts the reader with a range of personalities and figures who all espouse different views. One important aspect of this play of perspectives is Kierkegaard's controversial use of pseudonyms. The present volume is dedicated to exploring the different pseudonyms and authorial voices in Kierkegaard's writing. The articles featured here try to explore each pseudonymous author as a literary figure and to explain what kind of a person is at issue in each of the pseudonymous works. The hope is that by taking seriously each of these figures as individuals, we will be able to gain new insights into the texts which they are ostensibly responsible for.

Frater Taciturnus:

The Two Lives of the Silent Brother

Wojciech Kaftański and Gabriel Guedes Rossatti

Frater Taciturnus is Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous author and editor of “‘Guilty?’/ ‘Not Guilty?’”¹ as well as the author of its accompanying “Letter to the Reader,”² jointly comprising the bulk of Stages on Life’s Way, ostensibly a collection of novels and essays (if not loose papers) published on April 30, 1845 by Hilarius Bookbinder, who is yet another Kierkegaardian pseudonym.³ Apart from these works, he is also the author of a newspaper article written as a reply to the review of Stages on Life’s Way written by Peder Ludvig Møller, which was published as “A Visit in Sorø” in Gæa.⁴ Taciturnus’ article, entitled “The Activity of a Travelling Esthetician and How He Still Happened to Pay for the Dinner,” which was published in Fædrelandet on December 27, 1845,⁵ was the work that ignited the famous “Corsair affair.” This public controversy pushed Frater Taciturnus to write yet another reply, this time to an article entitled “How the Wandering Philosopher Found the Wandering Actual Editor of The Corsair,” written by Meïr Goldschmidt and published in the Corsair on January 2, 1846.⁶ Taciturnus’ response appeared as “The Dialectical Result of a Literary Police Action” in Fædrelandet on January 10, 1846,⁷ and it would signal his last appearance as an author within the context of Kierkegaard’s literary production.

Frater Taciturnus is, as hinted above, a highly complicated figure. In fact, a thorough analysis of the works of which he is both the editor and author, as well as the consequences of their publishing, disclose two different facets of the same figure. In the first period of his production we encounter Frater Taciturnus engaged in exclusively novel writing, as well as aesthetic criticism of his own production. In the second period, the one comprised by his newspaper articles, Frater Taciturnus transforms himself not only into a journalist, but more specifically into a full-fledged “intellectual,” as we shall argue in the latter part of this exposition. Notwithstanding the differences in the manifestations of both “facets” of Frater Taciturnus, their unity seems to be held together by the very identity of the name given by Kierkegaard to his pseudonym: (the) Silent Brother.

This means that along with the texts either written or “edited” by Frater Taciturnus, we receive some intimations concerning the personality of its author. Indeed, a close reading of his writings takes us into a journey during which we notice that Frater Taciturnus is, on the one hand, the Silent Brother who speaks mainly through silence in both “ ‘Guilty?’/‘Not Guilty?’ ” and the “Letter to the Reader,” while, on the other hand, he is also the Silent Brother who breaks the silence in two short newspaper articles written as replies to his reviewers. In other words, one sees a mutation, if not a revolution, from a literary style devised to communicate existential truths or ideas mainly through what could be called a rhetoric of silence. Frater Taciturnus then goes toward the other end of the spectrum of silence, thus becoming a strident author. In any event, if the majority of “direct” information about him as an author can be extracted from the “Letter to the Reader,” the work written by Frater Taciturnus as a commentary to his own novel “ ‘Guilty?’/‘Not Guilty?,’ ” the latter nevertheless provides us with a method that allows us to recreate the identity of the pseudonym. It is there that we find a useful metaphor for what our research should be modeled after since Taciturnus at one point portrays his character “Quidam” as an interrogator who says:

When an interrogator has perhaps been sitting for a long time reading documents, hearing witnesses, gathering evidence, inspecting the setting, he suddenly, sitting there in his room, sees something. It is not a human being, a new witness, it is not a corpus delicti; it is a something, and he calls it: the pattern of the case. As soon as he has seen the pattern of the case, he, that is, an interrogator, is effective.⁸

Frater Taciturnus, later in his “Letter to the Reader,” portrays himself as being “an observer and thus in a poetic and refined way a street inspector [Opsigtsbetjent].”⁹ In a similar manner, in this article we approach the personality of Frater Taciturnus from the perspective of the above-presented interrogator. In order to be “effective” we shall “examine searchingly,”¹⁰ through piles of data, “the pattern of the case.”¹¹ In sum, using the method proposed by Frater Taciturnus himself, we intend to follow his very steps, that is, the marks left by the interrogator who knew best the streets and buildings of his city, its people as well as their language.¹²

This article is divided into two main sections. The first section explores his aesthetic production, comprised of “ ‘Guilty?’/‘Not Guilty?’ ” and the “Letter to the Reader.” The second section approaches Frater Taciturnus’ journalistic production, comprised of “The Activity of a Travelling Esthetician and How He Still Happened to Pay for the Dinner” and “The Dialectical Result of a Literary Police Action.”

I. Frater Taciturnus as a Street Inspector, Experimenter, Religious Poet, Observer, and Editor

A. “ ‘Guilty?’/‘Not Guilty?’ ”

The original title of “ ‘Guilty?’/‘Not Guilty?,’ ” which was supposed to be “Unhappy Love,” is indirectly retained in the subtitle which, eventually was attached to the former, namely, “A Story of Suffering.”¹³ “ ‘Guilty?’/‘Not Guilty?’ ” is written in a style that can be categorized as “memoir-novel,” understood as “a kind of novel that pretends to be a true autobiography or memoir.”¹⁴ It consists of journal entries from January 3 to July 7, although the year is not given. It is modeled on a case report that is written from an objective point of view and suggests a cycle, as the last entry recounts “the third of January” and indicates that “the unrest begins again.”¹⁵ The memoirs are written a year after the actual events,¹⁶ and yet the actual end of the life story is the point of departure of the written text.

“Quidam” or “someone” in Latin, as the male protagonist and presumably the author of the memoirs that constitute “ ‘Guilty?’/‘Not Guilty?,’ ” writes about his unsuccessful relationship with “Quaedam,” the feminine form of “someone” in Latin. Their love, as Quidam reports, fails for a number of reasons. First, Quaedam does not feel the need for the spiritual, without which Quidam “is not.”¹⁷ He cannot sacrifice, even for love, “the deepest breathing of his spirit-existence,”¹⁸ because this is what constitutes him. He, therefore, chooses the religious instead of Quaedam.¹⁹ Second, their love occurs on different levels of existence, and as such it is not the same love they share, or, as the text suggests, they have never really loved.²⁰ Third, Quaedam has erected an illusion that is a false image of reality, including the image of Quidam, and the illusion is beyond her control.²¹ Quaedam’s perception of her beloved takes place in the realm of the imagination and ends up in a misrelation between them.²² Fourth, the problem lies in the unsuccessful and fruitless guidance of Quidam, dedicated to the development of Quaedam’s religiousness. Eventually, Quidam concludes that he cannot essentially benefit the other in the realms of the ethically-religious.²³

In the preface to the work, entitled “Notice: The Owner Sought,”²⁴ Frater Taciturnus tells a story that gives the reader a perspective on a few possible approaches to, as well as the correct mood for, reading “ ‘Guilty?’/‘Not Guilty?’ ” His narrative is presented in the mood of romantic melancholy. It is full of symbols and brings up various themes that will be discussed in the main part of the work; it tells the story of two friends who embark on a journey to the secluded Søborg Lake. Frater Taciturnus, “on behalf of friendship and curiosity,”²⁵ decides to accompany his “friend the naturalist,”²⁶ who is anxious to examine the plant life of the lake “on behalf of science.”²⁷

Frater Taciturnus, as the protagonist, discovers in the lake a chest made of palisander wood, wrapped in oilcloth, provided with many seals. Once opened, the chest discloses pieces of jewelry, a plain gold ring with a date engraved on it, a necklace with a diamond cross, a fragment of a poster of a comedy (perhaps as a symbol for the aesthetic), a torn page from the New Testament (perhaps as a symbol for the religious), as well as a dried rose (perhaps as a symbol for unhappy love).²⁸ Among the artifacts Frater Taciturnus discovers “a very carefully and neatly handwritten manuscript on very fine letter paper.”²⁹ Eventually, he decides to write a notice that would appeal to the owner of the found work via Reitzel’s bookstore by means of a sealed note with his initials.³⁰ The notice, presented as th...