Cordelia, My Love:

Image, Structure, and Gender

in Kierkegaard's

"The Seducer's Diary"

*

Bo Kampmann Walther

On the publication day of Kierkegaard's pseudonymeously written Enten — Eller [Either/Or], february 20, 1843, Henriette Wulff, in a letter to her friend Hans Christian Andersen, repeats the affective timbre of Golden Age Gossip as it was exposed in the small, but fastly growing, town of Copenhagen:

Yes, Andersen knew Kierkegaard. The melancholic storyteller's Kun en Spillemand [Only a Fiddler] had been the somehow defenseless target of Kierkegaard's Af en endnu Levendes Papirer [From the Papers of One Still Living, 1838] in which Andersen's novel is criticized for its lack of a genuine "life view" [Livs-Anskuelse]. Kierkegaard's blunt critique explicitly mimics the Hegelian theoremes and axiologies of the oeuvre, hereby totally separating it from Andersen's adventurous, yet down-to-earth style. The impressive work Either/Or is to a certain degree the summa of Kierkegaard's interrogation vis-a-vis the period known in Danish literary history as romantisme [Romanticm]; Andersen being one of its esteemed but philosophically misconceived figures, taking the obliqueness of German and English Romanticism—including their more folk oriented offsprings—to new sites of phychological introspection within the maternal dominated privat sphere. Either/Or further imitates Friedrich Schlegel's at that time widely spread concept of das Interessante, later to be called "psychological microscopy", and parallel to this parodic ars similitudo the more universal notions of irony, dream, and phantasm, which Kierkegaard had dealt with in his dissertation, Om Begrebet Ironi [The Concept of Irony, 1841], are shown to lead ad absurdum, revealing themselves as vague Himmelstürmerei.

Kierkegaard—being in his late twenties—worked on his experimental prose monument during an educational stay, Bildungsreise, in Berlin 1842, where he, among other things, attended Friedrich Schelling's lectures. He was not impressed by the old man, though. But the proud outcome of Kierkegaard's Berlinertage resulted in what Signe Læssøe, in an epistle again to H.C. Andersen, called "[a] new literary comet. . .in the heavens here", meaning the heavens above Copenhagen. Læssøe feels that Either/Or is "a harbringer and a bringer of bad fortune. It is so demonic that one reads and reads it. . .because one can neither let it go nor hold onto it". So, either-or becomes neither-nor, and the book deserves, as it were, a place within the grand, literary scheme of things: "I think that no book has caused such a stir with the reading public since Rosseau placed his Confessions on the altar". Læssøe could hardly avoid having heard about Kierkegaard's peculiar liason with Regine Olsen, and next she would combine von hören sagen with the reading experience itself. After all, the tragedy—or experiment, depending upon one’s point of view–is potensed and oddly enchanted in "The Seducer's Diary". "We women have to be especially angry with him", she laments.

Whether Læssøe has actually grasped the philosophical dephts of Either/Or or not, she nevertheless touches upon a profoundly important theme in especially "A's papers", namely the poetological or fictional transformation of taboo. Opposing Ingemann, who became more and more the poet of family life in rural Denmark despite his close affinity to the Gothic Unheimlichkeit of Hoffmann, but in concordance with Aarestrup who mastered the art of penetrating the frontiers of Woman, Kierkegaard alias "A" alias "Johannes the Seducer" turns the Biedermeier idyll upside down, showing it, in a sinister fashion, to be at odds with itself. Not only is Kierkegaard a harbringer of bad faith, he is the renewer of Jena Romanticism. But, inevitably, it all happens some thirty or forty years after the real garde. "Diapsalmata"'s selfconscious recordings of Weltschmertz—the epigraphic brass tacks of a speculative and utterly bored Apache—do not merely rebuke the clichées of the Hegelian community, they even so prophetize the radical apparitions of demonic Nachtleben disturbingly vacuolized in "The Seducer's Diary", the grand finale of Either/Or's first half, the most famous, and perhaps the most difficult of all Kierkegaards fiction. The "womanly" despice of Signe Læssøe and Henriette Wulff was, from Kierkegaard's point of view, deliberate. But the male frustration plays an important role in the drama, too, since the intelligent, selfreflecting seduction ends in despair and nothingness.

Either/Or disperses Bildung, integration, and development—the features of Aufklärung. This can be demonstrated by analyzing the complex modes of agency in Either/Or, and—which is the primary focus of the present essay—by showing the polarity (or polarities) between different and seemingly unmediatory rhetorical modes. Thus, I shall suggest that "The Seducer's Diary" epithomizes or effaces a certain fracture which can be traced both thematically and rhetorically. "The Diary" has reminiscenses of a sentimental rhetoricity, of Erlebnis, yet deprived of its true companion, the virtue; it is the quintessence of Romantic monism, yet in Kierkegaard's treatment nearly reduced to a series of set pieces and verbal bravura acts; and, finally, added to it is a religious dimension, yet only to be spotted in negative. And, don’t forget, Kierkegaard’s quasi-ficticious diary has much to say about that dangerous mother.

* * *

In la dolce still nuovo and the style of courtly love, Woman is a divine creature. Take Dante's Beatrice, for instance, or Petrarch's Laura. Cordelia, the female main character of "The Seducer's Diary", possesses some of this "sweet new" aura, and beatitudo. But despite her celestial essence, her being constantly described as the—ephemeral and withdrawing—Source of poetic production, she also reminds us of Goethe's women, Wilhemine and Gretschen: like them, she is a noble, but naive, middle class young girl, only awaiting the male to trigger her passionate, inward flame. The emblem of an unreachable Eurydice in Hades, or Diana violated by the veiling of her godly nakedness, is her poetic birthmark; leaving her stamp on the diarist’s private pages, she is continuosly transferred into the loci of the genius' imagination—Johannes enacting the drama of Orpheus' singing and Acteon's desire. Her divinity elevates her to the sky; she transgresses the mundane world of dull phenomena in a gracious movement, thus drawing a line from the Orphic "shades of the underworld" to the seraphic symbols on the firmament. In the speaker's vivid fancy, Cordelia both embodies and expresses the metaphors used by the former to construct his self-conscious belles lettre—lake, mirror, face, sun, sky. And one must not fail to notice her eye and smile which liken those of Beatrice and numerous other courtly heroines, and her power to lift the viewer upward toward the origin of transcendence reflected in the shining fathoms of the woman's gaze. In Beatrice's sight, the pilgrim glimpses the contours of Christ as the Griffon, in the eyes of Cordelia and their "infinite depth" (333) Johannes claims to see a Romantic landscape obeying the rules of a neo-classic locus amoenus:

Cordelia, being the symbol of what the German Romanticists labeled die schöne Seele, simultaneously disclosing the origin of imagination and shattering this imagination, could be called a perfect synecdoche. She is the unification and reification of parts and whole, pars pro toto. In the grammar of The Seducer: "She herself was hidden in herself; she herself rose up out of herself" (330), and, with a slight shift of tone and metaphors, "[s]he was an enigma that enigmatically possessed its own solution" (ib.). This grammar is, as it were, that of Novalis, Fichte, Eichendorff, even Hölderlin, and it lyrically mounts the philosophical notion of "falling to ground"—zu Grunde gehn, which I shall pursue in a moment. It portrays the ideal Woman as paradoxically confirming the exordial as well as peroratory turning back upon the male subject, so that Woman ultimately veils her femininity or Source, instead of revealing it. What remains for the male to paint with his words is, concequently, the veil itself, or the woman (and women) wearing it.

But there is another proximity at stake, one between modes of interpretation and depictings of the self. It is not by mere chance that a close reading of Johannes' images of women (and their various body parts) and nature (and nature's rich exteriour) cnits into, or resembles the content of, a typological framework. As scholars like Erich Auerbach, E.R. Curtius, Northrop Frye, M.H. Abrams, and, most recently, Arne Melberg, have made clear, the concept of figura, from its ancient Greek sources to its Christian interpretation, is deeply encoded within the somewhat inescapable ideas of temporality and repetition. Dealing with typology as an organizing principle underlying the complicated yet highly formalized geography of Biblical mythmaking, Northrop Frye states that typology is a figure of speech (or style) that is both moved by, and moves within, time. Typology is therefore closely connected to the allegorical interpretation, the so-called interpretatio allegorica, or allegoresis, which renders above all Holy Scripture as a narratological linearity emerging from figura to fullfillment—departure from the Source, and, according to the logic of figural historicity, arrival at the Source. Figures or personae such as, among others, Adam, Moses or David, are, despite their bold historical or literary qualities, anticipations of Jesus Christ. There can be only one Word.

In Paul de Man's view, most notably in his Blindness and Insight, the synecdoche—which is really a "modern" or secularized variant of Christian typology—seems to be one of the many tropes one finds in literary texts. But the synecdochical trope, and the often very complex figurative stratagems it seems to enargurate, establishes a kind of principium mobile in the texture of poetic images. This very mobility makes the synecdoche Romantic by essence, in so far as it points to the ideal basis of comparatio unifying the abtract self and its consciousness with the concrete signs (semeia) of outward nature. Following in the footsteps of the congenial criticism of Roman Jacobson and Michael Bahktin, it has become a commonplace to think of the synecdoche as a realistic trope, that is, as a syntagmatic alienation or transition from any relation of equality or presence—indeed, this is what the etymological face value of tropein hints at: turning away, apostrophy, otherness, absence. Taken, however, as a token of the Romanticists' sentimental quest for the exact representation of the gulf between mind and matter—not the bridge, but, yes, the gulf—, the synecdoche becomes the pivotal emblem of the much adorned unity of "I" and "non-I". In short, it becomes idealistic. Polemically, and using de Man for my own purposes, synecdoche turns out to be the Other of allegory. Partly, because it denunciates the durability that marks the irrevocable hoax of allegorical pictorization, and partly so since its task is to regain a certain opacity between grounding and actually arriving at proper signification. Synecdochality, hence, is a phantasmatic device.

Let's take, then, as our focal point, a quote from Johanne's "Diary", one that, at least at a superficial, stylistic level, reveals his mastery of repetition and closure:

Is not the "fan" a metaphorization of the metaphor? Obviously, it designates Johannes’ ideal portrayal of his much celebrated possibilities of seeing. The trope depicts the power envisioned by the speaker, that of his possessing the tools for transforming every tiny token of the world into "radiating emanations of womanly beauty" (ib.), finally leading to "[t]his one girl, the one and only in all the world" (ib.). As in the Neoplatonic dogma of the soul's uplifting to The One, through emanations and hypostasizes, so the Seducer's "eyes. . .never grow weary of quickly passing over this peripheral multiplicity", for "[e]very particular point has its little share and yet is complete in itself, happy, joyous, beautiful" (ib.).

The (Romantic) synecdoche and the (Christian) typology share the feature of visualizing, or, more frankly, expressing, repetitious particulars deriving from, or desiring, trangression, the overstepping of a certain boundary or threshold, limen. Frye suggests that the typological narration points toward events in the future that are often viewed as transcendent in a temporal fashion, so that these events (and the prophetic pictorization of them) include a vertical culmination as well as a horisontal transition. Hence we see a movement forward in time (chronology), and, closely intertwined herewith, a movement upward toward salvation, a kairology, since kairos refers to the singular moment or conversio in which the type is reconciled in its antitype. The crucial, albeit unfathomable, bridgebuilding between vertical and horisontal time-space is the advent of Messianism or anagogical vision. Finally, it is the story of Revelation. And Revelation plays, as Finn Hauberg Mortensen has keenly demonstrated, an important role in the enigmatic images of "The Seducer's Diary". I shall extend this similitude in the final section of my paper.

So far, one perhaps thinks of "The Seducer's Diary" as a prototypical, Christian work of art. This is both true and untrue. It is composed by a Christian author, Kierkegaard, who, quite naturally, knows his Biblical allusions and various exegesis by heart. But it is furthermore an example of what M.H. Abrams, in his book on Natural Supernaturalism, terms the "apocalyptic imagination". With a typical Kierkegaardian intermingling of genus humile and genus grande, Johannes sets out to confront the Hegelian (and quite untranslatory) notion of zu Grunde gehn, Fichte's idea of the self as Selbstbewußtsein, both knowing and not knowing its own limit as the origin of that which escapes the presence of understanding, with a scattered, zerstört, model of Christian conversion. As in The Song of Songs, "The Seducer's Diary" bears witness to a love of language and a language of love. Many of the images in "The Diary" has a double, or perverted, significance; they are the fictionalization of philosophical discourse (in Focault's sense), Fichte reshaped into the imago of Novalis, for instance; and they lay out the pattern for a secularized interpretation of a seemingly unfashionable, though not quite forgotten, Christian emblematic.

Of course, synecdochality does not entirely equates typology (although it could be argued that typology may easily swallow or integrate synecdoche). The small, but significant, difference lies in the teleology of the two "tropes". The synecdoche presupposes ein Ganzes which, in the "Seducer's Diary", is nothing but the "I" itself and the "I"'s awareness of this "I", the ongoing proces of folding and unfolding "the fan". Typology, on the other hand, is unattainable without its strings to faith, hope, and vision. The diachronity of typological imagination therefore presupposes something that is not ein Setzen in-and-of the self, but is rather grounded in the bias of transcendence, the Logos or Verbo Dei. So, while synecdochality can be read as transitions within an immanent time-space system, typology proves, by contrary, to be the figure of movement toward transcendence.

The goal, then, differs. In the novel Gjentagelsen [Repetition, 1843], written under the guise of Constantin Constantius, Kierkegaard formulates the core of Christian typology, defining (and again visualizing) it as antithetical to Platonic anamnesis (recollection). The "Repetition" of Kierkegaard's radical Christianity—which, according to Constantin, ought to be a conditio sine qua non in modern philosophy—stems from the Biblical imperative, the renewal of all things in-and-through the Incarnation (Rev. 21:5). What is "new" is the coming of Christ, or, as Kierkegaard states elsewhere, the moment (Øieblikket) in which eternity breaches and simultaneously comes to inhabit finitude.

Iconography in the diary of Johannes the Seducer is inverted from Christian typology. This is all the more obvious when one notices the impact of Johannes’ much desired "moment". Is it not the language of Solomon praising his beloved Sulamith?:

Alluding to St Paul's Epistle to the Galateans, Kierkegaard usually ascribes "the moment" to "the fullness of time" (Gal. 4:4). Here, in the erotic vocabular of Johannes, the Jetztzeit of love is transformed into aesthesis, into bodily vigor and desire for the very details that, in sum, make up the heavenly encounter between man and woman. The venacular rewriting of the metaphoricity and topography in The Song of Songs enabled Bernhard of Clairvaux, among others, to praise a spiritual similarity between the groom and Christ, and the bride (Sulamith) and the human soul. In The Book of Revelation, the bride is a picture of the Christian heart, The Church, and the celestial Jerusalem that shall be united with Christ. For Johannes, "the moment" and its matrimonal connotations function as a reconciled but also dispersed or fractured repetition. Otherwise, note the religious metaphors: lifting, promise, heaven, awaiting, prayer, murtle, bosom. The passage, quoted above, mirrors the larger framework of "The Diary"; both are filled with digressions and iterations, excursions pointing away from the main event. To speak with Freud, it is the repetitional force that haunts the text, and ultimately the text is about the attraction toward or repulsion from death, Thanatos. In the end, so it seems, reconciliation is only reachable prior to digressions.

* * *

Here is one of them. Georg Brandes was the first to register the playful music, the tone and rhytm of Kierkegaard's language. Thus Brandes suggests that the prose of Johannes the Seducer can be rewritten into poetry, or into small "fans" or "cycles" of poems. The following versification—or even hypostasizing—of the Kierkegaardian puncta mounts the iterative and delicate scorn of Johannes' eloquence and therefore deserves to be outlined in extenso:

Unfortunately quite a few of the Danish idioms, most notably the frequent hybertata, get lost in the English translation, failing to highlight the proverbial character of Johannes' panegyric. Take, for example, [3] "—Hver har Sit, og den Ene ikke det, den Anden har", which, literally, would read thus: "Each one has her own [so far, so good], and the One not that, the Other has". Suddenly the chiastic modality as well as the caesura inscribed in the sententia-like phrase becomes more evident. Which is crucial. Strophe [3] is almost an anacoluthon, yet perfectly comprehensible. Kierkegaard's lyrical transformations draw from both the "natural" rhetoric of oral language—for instance [1] and [3], the parataxis, the repetitions—and the more sophisticated Baroque couplets and dyads, as in [2] and [4]. Of great importance are the isocola or clausulae running through the entire passage. Perhaps even more noteworthy are the anaphora, and the gradatia (or climaxes), the sense of iteration toward fullfillment, climbing the ladder of admiration upward through parts and wholes, through changing word-structures, puns, both stylistic and thematic ones, emphatic signals of possessiveness ("she must belong to me; she must be mine"), culminating in [5] the perverted peroratio of "Let God keep his heaven if I may keep her".

I say advicedly perverted, for the statement bluntly rebukes the ample "Each one has her own", hailing at its ironic blow; now "God" is reduced to one among many other actors or attributes in Johannes' enumeration of sanctuated pulp fictions. Once again, the Danish original lets out an even more elaborate sigh: "Lad saa Gud beholde Himlen, naar jeg maa beholde hende". Two words are indeed absent in, though not dismissively at odds with, the English abbreviation: saa, and naar; "Let then God keep the heaven, when [certainly not "if"] I may keep her"—laß bloß. . . The trick is naar; in the passage it functions as a distinctio, transported—or translated—from "Naar jeg da har seet" ["When I [then] have seen"], via "naar jeg har smilet" ["when I have smiled"], to the perplexing duplicity in the conditional yet also affirmative prodosis of, "naar jeg maa beholde hende" ["when I may keep her"].

* * *

"The Seducer's Diary" is all about seeing, or, as the Germans would say, notably Kierkegaard's contemporaries, Anschauung. It is when the sun—that all-encompassing token which explains the moral and epistemological valence of so many Classicist paintings—closes its eye, that seeing occur. But the sight also reflects the mirror, in itself a metaphor of reflection and of self-delusion, and a mirror in turn likens the surface of calm water. Thus Cordelia's "nature" is early on, in Johannes' pensée recit, compressed into a stylish landscape whose vertical vortex is a "sun [that] had lost its vigor" (331). Later, when Johannes has become the loved, but also feared, guest of the family Wahl, tranquilizingly engaged in meaningless converzations with Cordelia's aunt, secretly mocking the adolescent love maneuvres of Edward—Cordelia's would-be-fiancée—and finally arousing the affective cocoon of the girl's inner stir, he sits down to compose a cycle of letters to Cordelia, filled with mythic allusions. The third letter reads:

This kind of prosopopeia, the vocation of a "you" literally wrapped in metaphors, was dismissively termed imagines insanes by Quintilian. The Italian poets and painters of the Baroque period coined the figure il Meraviglios or concetto. Enclosed in the metaphor-like figure is a high degree of pictoresque freshness, an ingenium which combines elements taken from different spheres of images and phenomenas, thus seeking to arrive at an abstruce or unexpected significance. The concetto zeroes in on and departures from a single motif or spiritualized punctum (as in "carpe diem" or "sapere aude") then to be reversed, transferred, disseminated, or deffered, in short: amplified (according to the figure of expolitio which the concetto resembles). The Manierism of Baroque lyric share with Romantic literature the feature of regarding tropology as ornament, yet at the same time viewing metaphoricity as a genuin apex of lingvistic innovation; hence the poetologists of Baroque and Romanticism both take pleasure in emphasizing the idea of the poet's divine imagination, argutezza.

The heliotrophic source of Johannes' apostrophy lies, to be sure, in the watershed of commonplace and innovation. We have a sun, an eye, history, the night, and a cloak, and they are all set to motion through the deployment of a sensory hoax. It's a matter of structural function; as the "sun shuts its vigiliant eye", so "history is over and the myths begin"—thus ironically making Apollo, god of solar power, and of discourse, at odds with himself. And while the sun is deprived of its faculties, the speaker reinstantiate these faculties as his own property; he throws the night around him "like a cloak", passionately seeking to render—that is, to hear—the heartbeat of his beloved. A heartbeart that further signals the temporal, deliberate shift in tone: moving from the syncopated "Soon, soon. . ." to the steady beat of isocola, as if the heart, that of Cordelia, had regained its neutral calmness. But the concetti poetico are not, as in Baroque or even Surrealism, dissonantic clauses and statements; nevertheless the repeated correctia ("I will not. . .listen not. . .") and antitheta cause a certain uneasiness within the illustrations. Finally, then, these illustrations may substitute for ekphrases, for primarily they stand sentinel to the shaping powers of artifice—art on art—and only secondary do they depict the actions or cognitive impacts that—in a realistic agenda—ought to have been the content and breakthrough of the rendered object. A sun, for instance, or an eye.

* * *

About falling to the ground, seeking for answers, grounds—ein Grund—but, as it were, touching the Un-Grund, the groundless, or, even, lesser ground. Julius, in Friedrich Schlegel's aphoristic novel Lucinde, says of Lisette that she "soll zu Grunde gehen, zu Grunde jetzt gleich: so will es das Schicksal, das eiserne". Or remember the cry of Faust, adressing the hollow, although desired, moment: "Werd ich zum Augenblicke sagen: / Verweile doch! du bist so schön! / Dann magst du mich in Fesseln schlagen, / Dann will ich gern zu grunde gehn!". In "The Seducer's Diary", Schlegel's pun—itself a metaphor of his celebrated parekbasis, the self-awareness of irony—is transformed from the sense of hubris or destiny (Schicksal) into an outright prayer for shipwreckness. The Faustian naive apotheosis of fleeting beauty, or the proleptic nerve of "in Fesseln schlagen", affirmed when the appraised "Augenblick" is finally captured as death and blindness, in Faust Two—those are cruel events certainly left behind by Johannes who on several occasions waxes melodramatic the kinship of Father-Mephistopheles. Thus he declares, in the aftermath of a noticed intimacy between Cordelia and silly Edward, that "when she falls for me, she will rescue the interesting out of the shipwreck. In relation to me, she must, as the philsophers say with a play on words: zu Grunde gehn" (352).

Rescued, indeed, from the shipwreck of Goethe, Schlegel, and Hegel, is the sense of a specular moment (Goethe), the idea of falling to ground as, paradoxically, grounding a structural, though anti-totalitarian, concept of universal poetry (Schlegel), and, finally, the exhaustive enquiry into the entaglement of Appearance and Existence (Hegel). The American editors and translators of Either/Or are very well aware of Hegel's importance in the context of "The Diary" with which we are dealing here. Thus they quote a passage from Hegel's Science of Logic:

The not-so-steady ground of Appearance is the continuos transition of that which withdraws itself from positing (Setzen) by becoming (a new) ground. It is the extremely difficult axiom of Grund im Bewußtsein—to borrow a phrase from Dieter Henrich—which Hegel, in trying to surmount the illecit "fault" of Kantian idealism-as-Wissenschaft, remonstrates, and which ultimately returns to haunt the mind of, say, Johannes. The truth of eidolos is deliberatedly pushed to the solipsistic limit in order for this truth to be grounded in absolute self-knowledge. But the Grund—or the Un-Grund which in turn is nourished by an Ur-Teilung (Hölderlin), that is, by an act of judgement and a split—furthermore stands out, in "The Diary", as the metaphysical paradigm upon which the novelist shape his images of genealogy and disclosure. Revealing to himself the sweet scents and secrets of Woman, Johannes heralds:

Suffice it to say for the moment, that the speakers invocation of deepness and of night already falls under the sway of his own imagination; the anxiety is a pseudo-anxiety, for it takes on the shape of a night that, as we know, can be wrapped around him like a cloak. The (real) danger is not inter esse, rather, the "interesting" is a (deluded) phantom of danger lurking somewhere in the deep.

The polysemic content of going to the ground is given a detailed account in the violent rhetoric of Johannes' diary, may 5th. I quote again at length:

The fifth

This is not Schlegel's Schicksal—the false umbiliac cord that, once cut, leads Lisette in despair—but rather the dangerous mother-womb pictured as a katabasis into a timeless tomb or sea of eternity, the kind that both Faust and Mephistopheles admolished in their shared quest for Helen of Troy (Die Mütter sind es!. . .). Note that in the final draft of the passage, "freedom" is not born anew, instead it is "tricked" into the vomb of maternal "necessity" where it lies forever chained. Hence arises for the "I" the urge to trick the vomb into letting freedom go—a phantasmatic counter-penetration, if you like. Unlike Orpheus, Johannes sings out of tune. He needs his willed coincidence, that "curced chance" who violently and allegorically oposses the power of Mnemosyne, mother of the muses, and daugther of Uranus and Gaia. But the paradox renounces the fact; since for the sudden epihany of pure chance to happen—that is, to be born anew—there must somehow have been disremembrance prior to the vocation of the desired distortion of recollection. Down to the singularity of it: can non-recollection be recollected? The mother (of the muses?) is depicted as someone who is unfertile ("barren mother of everything") or whose fertility, at least, bewilders the eye of the beholder. Hence, as long as the genealogy—grounding—of poetic creation is substantiated by a feminin, not a motherly, source who, in turn, is given birth by the male subject—then it's safe. As in the nymphaea alba-image, whose figural essence metaleptically turns out to be the aposthrophying self's sinister proclamation to all renegate mothers: "no, I shall be your poet!". Out of the fancyful forehead of Johannes leaps Aphrodite-Cordelia, fresh and newborn, like a white water lily both visible and invisible. And this is a matter of great delight, of self-consumation—"I shall eat my own poem!"; the cycle of giving birth to and breathing the object of desire, or the story of Chronos, father of time, eating all of his children except Zeus who was sheltered by Rhea. But when the sudden Zufall, the occurence, or the Ereignis, lends itself to a maternal origin which is, moreover, disturbingly untracable and self-opposing—then the whole enterprise arouses anxiety. There are two kinds of myth, one about the young girl, or fiction, another about the mother, or actuality:

* * *

The Seducer is an acute reader of Ovid's Metamorphoses, especially the story of Pygmalion and Galatea. But he does not use clay, marble, or engravings, rather words, pantomime, and gestures of tacit knowledge:

"[E]ngagement" in Johannes' hermeneutic demands revelation (Aabenbarelse—not "disclosure"), in other words, prefers to speak, whereas Elskov, "erotic love", heralds secresy or the unspoken silence of "darkness". Deliberately confusing these two levels of love's semantic—analogous to the synesthesia of sound and vision—is the gift of betrayal. Cordelia "listens to another person's voice as it resonates within her; she understands this resonance as if it were her own voice that discloses to her and to another" (ib.). Johannes is proud to tell that "she does not know that I possess this image and therein lies my falsification" [...]. Once enclosed within the fabric of memory (Hukommelse), and once imprented on "the whole soul" (389), techne or the art of staging images becomes immensely important:

"Sorroundings [Omgivelsen] and setting [Rammen] do have a great influence upon a person", the diarist announces. A literal translation of Ramme is "frame"; and this is crucial, since all the fascinating scenarios seem precisely to be the result of a subtle framing—the frame is the glue that mixes style with thematic; it is the arabesque setting of "a delicately cut veil of paper" or "a lamp shaped in the form of a flower". Finally, the frame helps focusing on the image, for every "erotic relationship must always be lived through in such a way that it is easy for one to produce an image [Billede] that conveys all the beauty of it. To be able to do this succesfully, one must be attentive to the surroundings [Omgivelsen]" (390). And later: "Cordelia's surroundings must have no foreground but rather the infinite boldness of the horizon [Horizontens uendelige Dristighed]. She must not be earthbound but must float [svæve], not walk but fly, not back and forth but eternally forward" (ib.). Thus "the surroundings"—plus the thrill of crafting new ones—become a measure for that specific logic of image production, which in turn marks the "stable unstableness" of connotations—a "lamp" is a "flower" is "the motif [ledende Idee] in my landscape" (ib.). Metonymic sequences are firmly secured from running astray, that is to say, they are linked as synecdoches to the "I".

The juxtaposition of frames within frames—there are actually three rooms en suite—likens what could be called a transitional space within the make-up of, for instance, a lamp, a flower, or a sun. As the reader has been tempted to peek into Cordelia's private boudoir (the door is after all open), so Cordelia is invited to disdain the restraints of "the small drawing room"—"we look directly into the sweeping horizon of the sky". But ultimately the lucid fancy is closely connected to death: "When I am sitting at her side, I let such things appear like an image hastens as elusively over actuality as death crosses a person's grave [der iler ligesaa flygtigt over Virkeligheden, som Døden gaaer over Ens Grav]" (389).

Death, as we were told in the passage on "curced chance", is the horror of forever being absent from giving (re)birth to freedom. Pictorization of feminin grace thus emerges as counterpart to the descent into the realm of desire (of the mother); "a young girl has the infinte around her, and the transition is a leap [Spring er en Svæven]" (...). This anabasis is infinitely more succesful than the "clumsy" "running start", shying away and turning back of men. If men should leap, "they leap and fall in", whereas the young, "newborn" girl, "like a flower that has shot up from the root of the mountain", swings "out over the abyss so that everything almost goes black before our eyes" (...). Note the intense blurr of phallic and vaginal characteristics that also, on a structural level, aspire to the opacity of the flux itself; the image entails a displaced binary opposition between hupsos ("shot up from. . .") and bathos ("abyss"). And, what is more, a careful comparison with the image of "the lamp" on the "round tea table" in the drawingroom of the Wahl's shows a striking resemblance in terms of metaphorical movement: As the lamp "rises up vigorously and copiosly", so the girl-flower "shot[s] up from the root of the mountain"; similarly "a delicately cut veil of paper" hanging from the "crown" of the flower resonates in the notion of an "abyss"—ultimately indicating that the source or energy of elevation stems from, respectively, a "tea table" and a "mountain" [!]. However, were it not for the "flower", the image would have been that of ejaculation, petit mort—the blackness before our eyes. Stolen from the vomb-tomb of barren motherhood is, then, "freedom's own game" (361), gravitating from mind to mind, leaping over the abyss, but, essentially, prevailing in empty transcendence or, as it were, in a peculiar traffic of gender.

Cordelia is Johannes' redeemer. Unchained from the tomb of death and the vomb of a mother's possessiveness, castigated as flower of freedom, she undergoes a metamorphosis, reborn into the personification of transcended history.

* * *

Now it is time to return to our initial discussion of the linkage between synecdoche and typology. As I have, perpaps too hastingly, suggested, comparisons can be made between meta-poetological transformations of motherhood and philosophical discourses on grounding and appearance. What is more important in our present context, however, is the fact that synecdochality, in the "Diary", codifies itself in three distinct modalities; namely as 1) a pure stylistic device employed in the service of repeatingly adjusting the variety of things so as to fixate them within an overall system of equality ("the fan"), as 2) convergence of self and nature, that is to say, the temporalization and spatialization of the self in order for it to arrive at a symbolic disambiguization of alienation and otherness, and 3) as a principle of disposition. Whereas the two former notions of synecdochality tell us something about the content of Johannes' language of love, the third one rather embarks from the concept of form. It is precisely the synecdoche-as-form that lends itself to the syntax of typology—obviously any kind of fiction may strenghten its own fictionality by borrowing the rhetoric of redemption and revelation, whereas only some fiction overtake not only Biblical words and names but, moreover, the very structure, or the very repetitous composition, of typology. "The Seducer's Diary" belongs to that latter group of fiction. It could be counterargued that the "religiosity" of Kierkegaard's text is really nothing but a small collection of handy Leitmotifs, and that, concequently, the book does not deserve the splendor of evangelic reading. Oddly enough, answering to such a counterargument would result in a departure from both the kind of Kierkegaard-exegesis that totally dismisses the religious impact of "The Seducer's Diary", hence claiming its presence elsewhere (in Talerne [Edifying Discourses] notably), and those who stress the imago of Romanticism-as-existence which, presumably, led Kierkegaard to overdetermine the consequences of his Jena enterprise. In the end, the two are one and a like, for they both assert religiosity as Other to Kierkegaard's secular acumen. The truth, I would suggest, lies rather in between. By coining apocalyptic imagination with figural interpretation, Kierkegaard was able to expose the wrongdoings of his protagonist by condemning him to the terror of idolatry, while at the same time superimposing the narrative pattern of typology on this very idolatry. Ultimately—and in search for a proper method—it becomes a matter of perspective, of standing in for Johannes or looking out into the horizon of Christian methodology. Both, really.

"The Seducer's Diary" clings to movement. The transition from urban voyerism and flamboyant street-life, to the intimacy and thrill of deceptive drawingrooms, and finally to a mythic region, carefully organized so as to render the perfect mimicry of the cozyness just departed from; this horizontal movement within the novel parallels the vertical transition from the vague shades of the underworld to the clear signs of fullfillment on the sky.

"The aunt was rather astonished" at the news of the broken engagement between Cordelia and Johannes (438). But in Johannes' mind it rather nourishes the cry of an effervescent promise: "Fly, then, bird, fly, rise proudly on your wings, glide through the delicate aerial kingdom; soon I shall be with you, soon I shall hide myself with you in deep solitude" (ib.). Soon movement will come to rest in the best of all repetitions, the one that saturates Johannes' desire the most—that of identical interieurs. In the chambers and pastoral surroundings of a country mansion, he has carefully seen to that they do "not narcotically entrap her soul but continually allow it to soar aloft as she views it all as a game that means nothing compared with what is to come" (440). Down to the very smallest detail, this mansion is described as antitype to the drawingroom of the family Wahl; it designates the telos of the novel's temporal or horizontal striving while simultaneously functioning as the splendid stage for the final transgression of temporality. The harmonious convergence of Johannes' "frame" and Cordelia's "soul" stems from the self's image of Cordelia as the incarnated goddess of timelessness. Everything seem to salute her elevated stature; "the illusion is", so say Johannes, "perfect"

First there is anticipation:

Then there is description, shaping or framing of the effigy:

Finally there is fullfillment:

There you have it. The flat contraption of livingrooms and private chambers has been expanded into a chiaroscuro of "ocean" and "atmosphere". Next "the limitless horizon" prefigures the ascent to "a forest"—an Eden—which is likened to a "garland", hereby underscoring the double significance of the image: Krands[e] ("garlands" or "wreaths") are meant for circles and brides. Perhaps there is a point in emphasizing that the landscape—otherwise simulating the classic Lustort with its background, midst, and veiled foreground—is viewed from the inside. The image of an ocean-like atmosphere with its looming forest thus may be said deliberately to renounce the Vergilian silvas, tenebras, et lustra ("forest, dark places, and wasteland"), so that the truly sublime or dangerous—in quibus feritas et libido dominantur ("these places where the wild, animated nature, and passions reign")—is kept at bay. It is hard to tell whether the "bounding and inclosing" topography stems from the attributes of the heavenly forest itself, or whether it is merely the—more profane—consequence of gazing through "row of windows". In short: the picture is framed; framed by John, Vergil, Dante, Ovid, Lucretius, and framed by keen observation.

Initiating the "higher union" of love (444), Johannes composes three letters to Cordelia. The third one we have already dealt with—remember, "When the sun shuts its vigiliant eye. . . . ."—but the first two need also commenting, since they lay out the figural pattern of bounding and inclosing:

Indeed, a great many of Johannes' images call upon the structural-metaphorical logic of enclosing and unification. The "horizon" which the speaker compared to "a garland" now resonates in the notion of an "embrace"—"a ring"—"that is more than a symbol [Betegnelse]". Again, the image of the ring pre-figures the paradoxical combination of infinitude and inseparability, that is, closure. In the second letter, however, the speaker's desire to expand the "symbol"—to push it beyond the limit of mere arbitrariness (this is what is implied in the Danish term Betegnelse)—is set within an allegorical idyllum complete with metamorphosis and pastoral love life. Somehow we are no longer upset about The Seducer's "geometrical mastery"; that is to say, we are not surprised to find the allegorical motif of reconciliation acted out "under the sea", as in the second letter, and then to find this motif subverted once more—but also completed—within the "master-text" itself. Hence in the Book of Revelation, chapter 21's first verses we read:

A new heaven and a new earth replace the old. And what's more: the sea—at least as we know and experience it—is no more. In "The Diary", this sea—of eternity, and of maternity—has been replaced by or forced into an image of a "horizon" that clearly functions as a metaphor for the salvation of Johannes. In Revelation, this sense of newness is linked to the prophecy of the Sheme tribe; it is the pictorization of Verlösung through an anagogical overbiding of time and space—and of beginning and end: Alfa and Omega. Looking out into the sky—and, by the way, over-looking "row of windows"—Johannes sees the image of Cordelia, envisioned as a glooming forest, dressed as a bride that no longer signifies the wedding between Church and Christ, Heaven and Zion, but is condensed—or, to speak with Freud, displaced—into a rebirth of Woman as male rendered redeemer deprived of maternal origin. The sea is no more. Here, in the dense peroratory gesture of "The Seducer's Diary", the sea, in its very anagogical non-being, is preserved within the intercutting of depth—the locus of Alpheus and Arethusa, phantom site of the maternal abyss—and hight, bathos and hupsos.

If we juxtapose Johannes' imaginary invocation of a "private" redemption with the sacred symbolism of John's prophecy, a certain synecdochical process of repetition, as I described it earlier, might also reveal itself: as an exhange of gradually subordinating metaphors within an overarching system or tropological economy that addresses the logic of typology's temporal sequentiality and its vertical (celestial) transgression. However, this logic of "disturbing" the images of the sacred realm, turning them into signs of the novelist's (desired) etre-propre (Selbstsein, Grund), does not only help pose the questions of how and why motherhood is transformed into male rendered femininity, or how and why a religious narrative—a specific type of narrative, to be sure—resonates allegorically, that is, inversely, within a secularized re-writing hereof; it also involves the subtle—and strangely overlooked—energy, tonal calculus, or better still: rhytm, that governs the tropological and, as we shall see, graphical, network of "The Diary":

Truly to match or do justice to the sheer rhetorical thrust of this fabulous quote would require an essay of its own. Nothing in this passage is insignificant, every semeion, every eidos, Bild, Nacheinander or Zeichenkette occupy a metaphorical, semantic, and structural place within the landscape of "The Diary". Re-phrasing and re-structuring the locus ille locurum, this perfect and harmonious—yet also highly ambivalent—site in its density and complexity illuminates what "enclosure" or, as it is also called, "[b]oundar[y]", is all about. Mirroring what can be spotted beneath the heaven—the gentle transition from "the surface of the lake" to "the deep darkness of the forest"; "to the other side" "the sea" who's image once sublated in the "eyes" of the beholder blocks the seer's ability to depict the sujet of his "thoughts"—with the attributes of "a garden facing east"—the "circle" quality of the locus amoenus, the "garlanded" topography of infinitude—becomes, finally, the mirroring of that which the passage, or the text in general, is about and the tools it generates in order to cope with its own "aboutness". (And hence we would also address the problem of how ex-istence "advents" in in-sistence). The passage speaks about the polarity of enclosure and infinity, lurid terms that live their own figural (after-)life in metaphors such as ring, garland, surroundings, place, forest, horizon and nothingness. But it does what it desires to give voice to. Note how it begins and ends; rather than repeating the stance or the obtuse necessity of alfa, omega provides a little twist—"love" becomes "fear"; the cola resonate in each other's tonal reinitiation of the piasmus (since it is not a perfect chiasmus); and the resumptio thus ironically sets out to do what it cannot do—enclose infinity. But at least, then, the tension between enclosure and infinity has been shaped—or better: framed—into a lingvistic mastery of the antinomy itself. After all, "erotic love love" exactly what the I tells it to (love): to love infinitude displaced as enclosure, aided by a figure of adiectio.

Fort! Da!

Epilogue, or maternity as masked Ereignis

Denn fast wie der heiligen,

Die Mutter ist von allem, und der Abgrund trägt

Die Verborgene sonst genannt von Menschen

. . . . .

O nenne Tochter der heiligen Erd’

Einmal die Mutter

—Hölderlin

"Culturation through the maternal voice produces the Romantic subject", David E. Wellbery writes in The Specular Moment. The mother has to be decorporealized or re-captivated as a safe being-in-order-to-be-created-femininity that in turn offers "the [male] subject a stabilized phallic self-image". Hence the nympheae alba, the crown-flower's ejaculating triumph over the maternal "abyss", both of which add up to our diarist's attempt to fold transcendence (or "freedom")—that which, according to Heidegger, founds its own foundation in an act of a withdrawing advent or Austrag—back into the spine of man's necessity, that is, into poiesis as the ground of (the anomality of) femininity. Woman must be born by the male. But prior to the male subject's imaginary subversion of what Luce Irigaray in her essay on "Volume-Fluidity" calls the "in-finite"—the stabilization of Woman's otherness within the economy of (men's) sameness—he must undergo a new metamorphosis, a violent one, equating, in the "Seducer's Diary", "chance", the mother, and the mother's vomb, by imitating her "vigiliant" forces and powers of "dissmilar similarities". The male thus becomes the phantasmatic father of the mother's now deprived velocity of form and matter—he literally eats her”—and so the male rises up to alter "[t]his incompleteness" in Woman's morphology. New transformations, then, are legio.

La mère n'est jamais Ça—she is, rather, "there" or "here" (and, of course, everywhere), or, as Freud says in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, turning his grandchildren's innocent play into a meta-psychological axiom, Fort! or Da!. The Ausspinnen of the child's bobbin or Spielzeug allegorizes the play of presence, absence, and the capacity to "cut" oneself off from the mother (and her embrace). As Jacques Lezra formulates it in a brilliant essay on "Freud's Sickle": "I "cut" myself from my mother in order to take from the mother the capacity to "cut" herself from me, the capacity to desire to be other than in the presence of the child". Seeking to adjust paternity so as to regain that within femininity which enables the male subject to transgress its own limit—in a general outlining, these vectors of fecundity explore the relationship between sameness and otherness, male and female. But read as indicators of the peculiar repression of maternity not only in "The Seducer's Diary", but in Kierkegaard's work as a whole, they seem to account for an obsession with repetition and a quest for origin. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas says: "But the encounter with the Other as feminine is required in order that the future of the child come to pass from beyond the possible, beyond projects. This relationship resembles that which was described for the idea of infinity: I cannot account for it by myself, as I do account for the luminous world by myself". To me, Levinas' usage seems to evoke the notion of die schöne Seele. The temporality which the desired (reworking of) maternity represents is that of Chronos: it is cyclical, self-constitutive, and, in a sense, anti-futuristic, whereas time opened up between father and son is the sudden moment—kairos—that breaches the originary, necessary logic of motherly time while simultaneously desiring to "trick" the chronology of maternity into its own bosom. The combination of the two senses of time is, then, what is established through the metonymies of sacred narration; the infinite time of the absolutely other (God, Woman, Ground) enfolds—or im-plies—itself upon the transubstantiation of paternity (the "I") within time.

"Woman is the eternal irony of the community". Hegel's enigmatic dictum is not merely copying the Romantic non-concept of eternity as irony in the shape of parekbasis. In fact, it is more dangerous. Rather, "eternal" means here the mode of codifiing the infinite within the law of paternal desire in order to control—that is, to anull or displace—the infinite source or origin of maternity-as-Other. But "eternal" also means: woman is there all the time—Fort!, Da!; "irony": woman subverts the image that man likes to see, for the Ereignis of femininity is family life's "internal enemy—womankind in general". Er-eignis, internal—the relentless counter-weapon of Romanticism is Er-innerung.

So, Hegel was right, Johannes is wrong. Now that's "eternal irony".