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  • The Literary Kierkegaard by Eric Ziolkowski
  • Alastair Hannay
Eric Ziolkowski. The Literary Kierkegaard. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011. Pp. xx + 423. Cloth, $49.95.

Can Wolfram’s Parzifal shed light on Kierkegaard’s three (and more) stages? Can the fact that Cervantes or Jean Paul is a common reference for both Thomas Carlyle and Kierkegaard shed light on either of the latter? Some might claim that by widening the lens of comparative literature we tend to lose sight of what is singular in great writers. Professor Ziolkowski’s readers can come to their own conclusions in the present case, but before doing so, or even if they refrain, they will have been given an uncommonly rich fare of resemblances, comparisons, possible influences, and analogies in which a less well researched side of Kierkegaard comes refreshingly to view.

The Literary Kierkegaard’s theme is defined in the long introduction as follows: “Despite . . . the prevailing tendency to regard Kierkegaard primarily as a philosopher, a theologian, a quasi-prophetic agent of the ‘vertical dimension,’ and as a twentieth-century thinker born far ahead of his time . . . [he] never needed to ‘become part of the horizontal’ and to be ‘taken into culture.’ On the contrary, he was firmly rooted there all along as a literary artist, albeit one whose art served not only aesthetic but also philosophical, ethical, theological and, ultimately religious purposes” (20).

It is not quite clear where this thesis is intended to take us. Ziolkowski certainly provides a local landscape wide enough to remove any suggestion that Kierkegaard wrote with total originality from an insulated bunker. But he looks further than that. The five chapters (with conclusion and two appendices) present parallels with three authors frequently quoted by Kierkegaard (Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Goethe) but also two whom Kierkegaard did not read but with whom enough parallel is claimed to constitute an “analogical” as opposed to “genealogical” connection (Wolfram von Eschenbach and Thomas Carlyle). The connecting link is dialogue, the interplay between the pseudonyms in Kierkegaard’s case, but also, capturing more analogies, a dialogue between life and writing.

Few readers of Kierkegaard need reminding of his many and apt references to literature. However, The Literary Kierkegaard will certainly fortify any too weak an impression of the extent to which Kierkegaard’s vast reading formed a resource. But quotation by itself, even from “literature,” does not make an author literary, any more than the huge number of hidden Bible quotations in the pseudonymous writings could make us talk seriously of the “biblical” Kierkegaard. A “poetics of quotation” (40) helps, along with connected matters of style and talent. Kierkegaard certainly could and did write in a style that is more literary than scholarly, even when undoing the work of the scholars in their own terms. But whether intentionally or not, The Literary Kierkegaard obscures the ancillary roles that Kierkegaard himself gave to his style or styles of writing. That Kierkegaard had an almost irrepressible literary urge is obvious, but he did try to repress it. The remark that he was “insufficiently spiritual” to do this effectively (see Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: a Selection [PJS] [London, 1996], 498) speaks volumes when it comes to asking what it, or he, is all about. As for form and style, Kierkegaard himself claims not to have considered these until late, the reason being that “anyone with genuine thoughts has form from the start” (PJS 589)—well, not quite from the start in his case. Before Either/Or, Kierkegaard’s style was so infected by his classical reading that it needed translation into Danish. Alexander Dru, an early translator, found Kierkegaard’s style (albeit in the journals) abominable. From Kierkegaard’s point of view, however, approaching even the mature works as literature is to come to them with what the first chapter of The Concept of Anxiety calls the wrong “mood.” Ziolkowski’s readers might usefully consider how the voracious reading that “fueled” (36) Kierkegaard’s writing was increasingly edited in the service of what he calls the “idea.” Of course, his thought, too, must be given its horizontal due (Socrates, Augustine, Hamann, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Rosenkranz). But, beyond being personal, it is...

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