The Literary Kierkegaard

Chapter Five: “Sorrow’s Changeling”: Irony, Humor, and Laughter in Kierkegaard and Carlyle

Chapter Five  “Sorrow’s Changeling”: Irony, Humor, and Laughter in Kierkegaard and Carlyle Odd Couple? The historian, essayist, and “man of letters” Thomas Carlyle (1795– 1881) may seem an unlikely figure with whom to compare Kierkegaard, who is usually pigeonholed as a philosopher or theologian. Although they shared deep connections with the German literary and philosophical traditions, these two contemporaries were unaware of each other, and neither man knew the language in which the other spoke and wrote. Like Kierkegaard, Carlyle is thought to be resistant to comparisons,1 and yet has been subjected to any number of them. Carlyle is routinely discussed in conjunction with Goethe, the German Romantics, and Jean Paul, all of whom influenced him, and also with the English Victorian authors whom he influenced. Rarely, however, is he considered together with Kierkegaard. Possibly the first published comparison of Kierkegaard and Carlyle occurs in one R. Garnett’s review of recent German literature for London ’s Saturday Review in 1879. Commenting upon the new and first German translation of Brandes’s literary portrait of Kierkegaard, Garnett characterized him as “a writer exceedingly difficult to class”; like Pascal and Hazlitt, Kierkegaard in Garnett’s view “perhaps . . . occupied much the same position towards the recognized ethical creeds that Mr. Carlyle has assumed in England.”2 In 1914, J. G. Robertson called Either/Or and Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus the “only two European books, which, amidst an almost universal abnegation of individualism [in the 1830s and 1840s], stood firm by the old Romantic faith in the supreme value of personality.”3 Of the more recent comparisons of Kierkegaard and Carlyle, most emphasize the graver aspects of their thinking. John R. Wilson finds 213 Kierkegaard’s literary review Two Ages and Carlyle’s essay “Signs of the Times” (1829) to reflect an “intellectual kinship” between two “philosophers of crisis”: both men defend individuality and dynamism against empiricism, rationalism, and “leveling” (Kierkegaard) or the “mechanical ” (Carlyle); both define human existence in the categories of freedom, choice, and the primacy of the “I”; and both, unlike others such as the utilitarians, “take evil seriously.”4 The notions of heroism in Carlyle, Kierkegaard, and other nineteenth-century authors have been compared.5 And the two men have been likened in their angst,6 despair,7 loneliness,8 and scorn for the “faint of heart”;9 in their notion that “from the belief in God no moral or metaphysical propositions can be deduced”;10 and in their antipathy toward the pretentiousness of the clergy, and toward certain customs of the established church.11 None of these grave analogies is illegitimate. Moreover, for reasons rooted more in their personalities and lives than in the fact that suicide had furnished a romantic subject for Goethe, Schiller, and their followers ,12 both men may have contemplated killing themselves while in their twenties—Carlyle in 1823,13 Kierkegaard around 1836 (see Pap. I A 161, n.d. 1836/JP 5:5141).14 Both appear to have later undergone some sort of religious or spiritual conversion—Carlyle, while living on his Hoddam Hill farm in Annandale from May 1825 through the same month the following year,15 and Kierkegaard, presumably at his desk in his Copenhagen apartment at 10:30 a.m. on May 19, 1838, as he dated his account of the experience in his journal.16 Nonetheless, suicide recurred as a subject of Kierkegaard’s reflections for years afterward,17 and both men cultivated pronounced senses of themselves as religious and philosophical misfits in their societies, yet found solace in the world of nature. This last point warrants elaboration before we turn to our main task in this chapter, comparing Kierkegaard and Carlyle as authors of the late Romantic period who hold in common their unusual balancing of the categories and dispositions of humor, irony, laughter, and the comic with the theme of suffering. In this respect they stand in contrast to such early Romantics as the brothers Schlegel (particularly Friedrich) and Tieck, who entered our discussion in chapter 1 and have come up intermittently in our other chapters. The World of Nature as God’s Garment and God’s Work Harboring a disdain no less vehement toward logical, empiricist, and mechanistic philosophies than the contempt Kierkegaard and his 214 Chapter Five pseudonyms harbor toward speculative systems, Carlyle lived haunted by a “strange feeling of supernaturalism, of ‘the fearfulness and wonderfulness ’ of life.”18 This feeling...