A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women

by Siri Hustvedt

  Authorship and origin with their metaphorical associations, paternity, maternity, birth, and genesis are not only riddled in the formal travesties of the pseudonymous books—what is a beginning and what is an end?—they appear as recurring figures in the texts themselves. The bewildering structures and tropes enact duplexity from duplexity. In the not at all simple, dizzy-making, disorienting text by Vigilius Haufniensis, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin, which treats procreation and original sin, Arvesynd, I read that during conception “spirit is furthest away, and therefore the anxiety is the greatest.” Then, V.H. writes, “In this anxiety the new individual comes into being.” The natural act of procreation distances spirit: an ancient dichotomy. “In the moment of birth, anxiety culminates a second time in the woman, and in this moment the new individual comes into the world.”22 And “the spirit trembles” because it is “suspended.” Animals appear not to have it—anxiety, that is. The contradiction of self-consciousness is needed. I am well aware of the larger text and the dizziness of freedom, the nothing, the relation between the race and the single individual’s guilt and so forth, but what is interesting here is the anxiety that turns around the “sensuousness” of conception and birth. “The more sensuousness the more anxiety,” Haufniensis tells us.23 Angest describes the sinful human condition, but there is something weird about arguing that conception, which presupposes copulation and male orgasm, at the very least, and one would hope female orgasm, too, is anxiety at its peak, not joy, release, or the erotic immediacy of Don Juan, but anxiety. Creativity and guilt are bound up together, and yet hidden behind the dread is also the elation of conception, of making—which for S.K. meant one thing: writing.

  The ingenious trickster and ironist, the editor, author, prompter Søren Kierkegaard was a man filled with anxiety and guilt about his own aesthetic creativity, about when to publish what and under what name, his own or one of his foster sons. In journal entries from 1849, a wrenching inner war is fought on the page over if, when, and how to bring out The Point of View for My Work as an Author. Shall the author appear or disappear, speak or remain silent? He considers publishing Point of View as a poet pseudonym, notably Johannes de Silentio, the “silent” author of Fear and Trembling who has written a book about Abraham, a man who cannot speak and make himself understood. He will append himself as editor. Then again, maybe he should find himself a “third party” and publish it under the title “A Possible Explanation of Magister Kierkegaard’s Authorship.” In this case, S.K. is forced to acknowledge, “it is no longer the same book at all. For the point of it was my personal story.”24

  To tell or not to tell and, if to tell, how to tell it? With or without authority? These are anguished questions in S.K.’s writing, and they are heavy with guilt. All along he has been a religious author, hasn’t he? Only now can he see the story of his own authorship clearly. But what does it mean to tell or write his or any personal story in his own voice? “I could perhaps reproduce in a novel called The Mysterious Family the tragedy of my childhood,” Kierkegaard writes in his journal.25 My life: the novel. What would it mean to reveal the hidden subject coded by expressions such as “thorn in my side,” “the earthquake,” or the “terrible things” S.K. insists he would have to tell Regine were he to marry her? In Either/Or, Judge William says, “If in some way or another you have swallowed a secret that cannot be dragged out of you without costing your life—then never marry.”26 The silence of the secret constitutes a gap, a chasm in communication. The secret bars intimacy with another person. A secret is a silence locked inside a self. Antigone keeps the terrible secret of her father in the Kierkegaardian version of the tragedy. It lurks within: Indesluttedhed. Two swords bar the door to the inner self.

  In the “Guilty/Not Guilty” section of Stages, Frater Taciturnus, another pseudonym who carries silence in his name, is out on Søborg Lake with his friend the naturalist who is exploring its marine life. S.K. lavishes all his novelistic gifts on the scene’s description and gives it the haunted beauty of an imaginary remoteness, of fairy-tale pleasure and Romantic mystery. Our narrator feels “almost anxious.” Birds scream overhead, then fall silent. The lake is itself isolated and overgrown, and Taciturnus lowers the instrument into the water and, as he heaves the load from the depths, there are three sighs—“a sigh because I wrested from the lake its deposit, a sigh from the inclosed lake, a sigh from an inclosed soul from which I wrested its secret.”27 The locked box must be forced open, like Eremita’s desk, it is forced, not pried open or unlocked, and inside is a manuscript—the text of a locked-in soul. Only later are we told that all this is part of a thought experiment. Quidam’s diary is in Taciturnus’s head along with the lake. One box inside another, inside another, inside another, inside another.

  A box of secrets, an enclosure, a womb, a hermetic space violated. In her passionate book Aparté, Sylviane Agacinski turns round S.K.’s secret and the many references to paternal violence and sexual crimes in various works. She speculates that the unspeakable could be the father’s rape of the mother, either real or imagined by the son. She writes, “Suppose what the son was neither able nor willing to know were to refer to what he claimed never to have said, to what he in fact never did talk about—namely his mother. The absolute silence in which he kept her would be less enigmatic were it to enclose, in addition to her, that ‘concrete explanation’ he wanted to hide, and the horrible suspicion he preferred not to look at.”28 We cannot know. But I think Agacinski may have missed something—a silent, loving maternal presence may serve as a metaphor for God’s relation to his children, and the total dependence of the human being on the divine. The speechless mother weaning her infant in Fear and Trembling is the picture of God’s love. What we do know is that in Kierkegaard’s work one feels the gap between silent secretive inner being and reflective articulation as a terrible wound and a repository of fear. There is a felt, anguished distance between silence and speech.

  Part A. Autobiographical Fragments or Smuler, Plus a Crumb That Belongs to Pessoa

  1. My mother told me that her father, my morfar, read only Kierkegaard and church history. Not until I was grown up did I wonder if he read them as oppositional texts. He died of heart disease in 1943 during the Nazi occupation of Norway. I was never able to ask him.

  2. When I was nine, my Sunday school class studied the Abraham and Isaac story. The teacher’s moral: to love God more than anyone or anything. “Even more than your parents?” I asked her. “Even more than your parents,” she said solemnly. The story was not abstract. I had felt God in my moments of euphoria and what I called “lifting feelings,” not to speak of the repeated powerful sensations I had of a menacing felt presence at the bottom of the stairs, a devil, an angel—the auras of an undiagnosed child migraineur. I lay awake night after night terrified God would command me to kill my parents. Now I am able to read my fear through an apt Freudian reversal, that the paternal figure of the law, God, might unleash my repressed hostility toward my own mysterious father, whom I also loved terribly, but at the time, all I felt was sleepless horror, frykt og baeven, in the face of a monstrous, incomprehensible deity.

  After weeks of suffering, I told my mother what my Sunday school teacher had said about loving God more than my parents. With her one-word answer, she set me free. My mother said sharply, “Nonsense.”

  3. Behind my childhood house outside Northfield, Minnesota, ran a stream. Across Heath Creek and up a steep embankment lay another house that belonged to Edna and Howard Hong, who, for as long as I can remember, were translating Kierkegaard’s writings, volume after volume, for the English Princeton edition I now own. Every time I visited, I saw Søren Kierkegaard as a tall pile of papers on Edna’s desk. I remember conjuring a gloomy, gray, ghostly saint of a man, probably because I saw gravestones in a kirkegård (graveyard) in my mind.

  4. When I was twelve, I heard voices and thought I might be insane.

 
5. When I first read Fear and Trembling, I felt as if I had been possessed by my own demon. I was fifteen. I remember nothing of Johannes de Silentio, of masks or pseudonyms. Kierkegaard’s name was on the book’s cover, and I had found someone who spoke to me, the only someone in my admittedly brief life who treated the story of a father asked to kill his own child as the horror that it is. This I understood, but most of the book must have escaped me, its ironies in particular, and yet, I felt the emotional urgency of the writing like a hot wind that carried me forward. “The conclusions of passion are the only dependable ones—that is, the only convincing ones,” writes Johannes.29 I felt the passion.

  6. Confession: I once threw The Concept of Irony across the room in frustration after I understood S.K. was being ironic about irony.

  7. As an adult, I have indulged in Kierkegaard binges. I return to the same texts: Fear and Trembling, Either/Or, Repetition, Postscript, The Sickness unto Death, The Concept of Anxiety, and the Journals. As a novelist, I love the play, the dance, the jokes, the ironies, the images, but also the dithyrambic lilt in the writing, the rhythms of passion. I love testing my philosophical comprehension, my wits, but at some point, I inevitably find myself going slowly, dialectically mad, and I think of yet another Johannes, poor Johannes in Dreyer’s film version of Ordet. When the pastor asks if it was love that deranged the man, the brother of Johannes, Mikkel, answers, “No, no, it was Søren Kierkegaard.”

  8. Some of the characters in my novels read Kierkegaard. I am not my characters. I do not know where they come from, and I do not know why they say what they say. Sometimes I do not write. I am written.

  9. On March 8, 1914, Fernando Pessoa stood at his desk in a room in Lisbon and began to write. He wrote thirty poems in “a state of ecstasy.” He recorded the experience of possession as “the apparition of somebody in me, to whom I at once gave the name Alberto Caeiro. Forgive the absurdity of the phrase: my master had appeared in me.” Scholars are still sifting through the papers, but to date Pessoa has seventy-two known heteronyms.30

  Part B. Further Mysteries of the First Person or the Souffleur’s Souffleur

  In his biography of Kierkegaard, Joakim Garff quotes a euphoric passage from the journals written when S.K. was at work on Repetition: “This is the way literature ought to be, not a nursing home for cripples, but a playground for healthy, happy, thriving, smiling, vigorous little scamps, well-formed complete beings, satisfied with who they are, each of whom has the express image of its mother and the power of its father’s loins, not the aborted products of feeble wishes, not the afterbirth that comes of postpartum pains.”31 These rambunctious verbal offspring appear to have been conceived in joy, not anxiety, and they bear little resemblance to the tortured, Dickensian child self S.K. describes in the second part of The Point of View. This child has no immediacy and therefore never really lived. In him time is warped. He is aged while still young. “Insanely brought up, humanly speaking” by a depressed father, little Søren was, the reader is told, “a child attired, how insane, as a depressed old man. Frightful!” And then, “My only joy . . . was that no one could discover how unhappy I felt.” Paradoxical almost from birth, it seems, the little boy is not only disguised as an old man but his single joy is disguising his misery. From this description, S.K. the child is already traveling incognito and wearing a pseudonymous mask, a comic persona on the outside concealing a tragic being within. He is already double, inwardly depressed, but outwardly he shows “a seeming cheerfulness and zest for life.”32

  D. W. Winnicott developed an idea about what he called the false and true self. Under duress, the child develops a compliant, agreeable exterior for those around him to hide his true self from view. Winnicott readily admits that we all adopt false selves in our social lives. We all walk around in disguise to preserve interactive equilibrium, but this divide between false and true is accommodating, not self-destructive. In his essay “Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self,” Winnicott charts degrees of disguise. In extremis the true self is completely hidden. “Less extreme: the False Self defends the True Self; the True Self is, however, acknowledged as a potential and is allowed a secret life. Here is the clearest example of clinical illness as an organization with a positive aim, the preservation of the individual in spite of abnormal environmental conditions.”33 In Kierkegaard, the true self is hidden but present, but can it be written?

  The description of young Søren in The Point of View is at the very least a heartrending portrait of the “observer” boy standing off to one side, the tormented, handicapped genius, who, grieving under the weight of his melancholy, watches the hale, lively children skip and turn somersaults on the playground. As far back as our hero can remember he has prayed for the “zeal and patience” that will be required of him to do the future work God himself will assign him. And then the passage reaches its poetic climax: “In this way I became an author.”34 The boy was destined for divine work. We all mythologize ourselves, poetize and fictionalize our autobiographies, especially if we are writers, and none of us can truly recover our child selves, only the adult’s continually revised and edited versions of the former person. By some accounts the little boy wasn’t always hiding. He had fun, played tricks on people, and from the meager evidence that exists, was strongly attached to his mother. What is not fictive about the description is the emotion that accompanies the memory, its mood and feeling. When S.K. looks back at his boyhood self in The Point of View, he suffers acutely for that child who was not like the others.

  It is in his writing, in the productivity, in the pseudonymous Uttømmelse (outpouring, emptying out) that the well-formed, whole, and happy children of robust wishes and soaring desires find a good home with both a mother and a father, and this creativity, it seems to me, is nothing less than ecstatic, even when the author is writing about anxiety, guilt, and the demonic, even when metaphorical women are being dragged by the hair kicking and screaming to their executions, perhaps especially then. Kierkegaard, the writer, describes the feeling as he writes The Point of View: “I am reliving it again so vividly, so presently, at this moment. When it was a matter of boldness, enthusiasm, zeal, almost to the border of madness, what was this pen not able to present!”35 It is Governance that tames S.K.’s overabundant thoughts, his manic glee in writerly excess, in the pirouettes and grands jetés of his poetic and philosophical imagination. God authors the author, prompts him as a teacher, and tells him to do it “as a work assignment.” “Then I can do it, then I dare not do anything else, then I write each word, each line, almost unaware of the next word and the next line.”36 And how he wrote. He wrote and wrote and wrote, seven thousand pages in the journals alone, not to speak of the books. The pressure and the joy are palpable in the sentences.

  Heidi Hansen and Leif Bork Hansen have argued that Kierkegaard, like Dostoyevsky, may have suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy and Waxman-Geschwind or interictal (between seizures) personality syndrome.37 I quote from a 2012 edition of a clinical neuropsychiatry textbook: “Interictal personality syndrome . . . is seen in patients with chronic epilepsy and typically includes hypergraphia, along with deep and persistent affect, verbosity, a preoccupation with religious, ethical or philosophical concerns, hyposexuality, and irritability.”38

  Posthumous diagnosis is a difficult business at best, and hypergraphia, the uncontrollable urge to write, may also occur in the manic states of bipolar disorder, in schizophrenia, and more rarely after a stroke. Crowded, rushing, excited thoughts are a symptom of mania. While volunteering in the psychiatric ward, I had a number of patients in my classes who wrote compulsively, including a woman who, in the grip of mania, produced a manuscript many thousands of pages long. But there is also hypomania, a less pronounced form of mania, in which the urge to write may be manifest. Pessoa was clearly obsessed with writing and, at least as himself, not as one of his heteronyms, he became fascinated by psychic supernatural phenomena, but there is no evidence he was epileptic—dissociated maybe, but not e
pileptic. Nevertheless, the urge to write—Kierkegaard calls it a “need”—and what one writes are two different things, and no body of work can be reduced to the body of the writer, afflicted or otherwise.

  In Varieties of Religious Experience, the Pragmatist William James attacks what he calls “medical materialism” and quotes the then famous, now infamous, Italian scientist Cesare Lombroso, who argued that genius was “hereditary degeneration of the epileptoid variety.”39 For James, judgment of religious experience and the texts it has produced should be based on “Immediate luminousness, in short, philosophical reasonableness and moral helpfulness.” He goes on: “Saint Teresa might have had the nervous system of the placidest cow, and it would not save her theology, if the trial of the theology by these other tests would show it to be contemptible. And conversely if her theology can stand these other tests, it will make no difference how hysterical or nervously off balance Saint Teresa may have been when she was with us here below.”40 We may say the same of Søren Kierkegaard, without pretending that his nervous system played no role in his prodigious production.

  In his book The Indirect Communication, Roger Poole includes a chapter called “The Text of the Body,” in which he examines the journal entries and their careful avoidance of the thing that is the “thorn.” He refers to Kierkegaard’s perception of a conflict between psyche and soma—“et Misforhold mellem min Sjael og mit Legeme.”41 “All we can hope to do, in establishing the embodiment,” Poole writes, “is to learn to feel, to intuit, ‘what it was like for him.’ With that at least, I do not think there is any great difficulty.”42 No, there is not. S.K.’s body pained him. He felt crippled, aggrieved, and grotesquely anxious about it. If seizures were the cause, this is hardly strange. The hallucinatory auras that may precede them, the distinct feeling of being struck down by a great external force, the subsequent loss of bodily control, even consciousness, and the depressions that often follow are wrenching. And for many epileptics over the centuries there has been shame, secrecy, and ostracism.