Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter — Issue 41: February 2001

An Evocation of Kierkegaard. By David Cain. København, Denmark: C.A. Reitzels Forlag, 1997. 131 p.

ISBN 8778760100

Peter Tudvad

Copenhagen, Denmark

An Evocation of Kierkegaard is not an introduction to Kierkegaard but – just as the title announces – an evocation of Kierkegaard, or rather, an evocation by Kierkegaard. David Cain has taken Kierkegaard at this word: “My facsimile, my picture, etc., like the question whether I wear a hat or a cap, could become an object of my attention only for those to whom the indifferent has become important – perhaps in compensation because the important has become a matter of indifference to them.” Of course Cain is also interested in the person Kierkegaard, but instead of staring blindly at the melancholy Dane, he has turned his lens around – he does not look in at the intricate machinery of melancholy, but out at the world; not in at the cyclical universe of the authorship, but out at the concrete reality which surrounded Kierkegaard. This does not mean that Kierkegaard drops out of Cain’s sight, to the contrary, we meet a Kierkegaard in living color, bathed in the light of the merchant town he once considered his beloved residence and capital city. We meet him at Sunday services in The Church of Our Lady, on a walk through Rosenborg gardens, among shoppers at Gammel Torv, in Østerbro where Regine gives him a glance, with the bourgeois citizenry on their way out to Dyrehaven, by Esrum lake while a storm approaches over Grib Forest, on a journey back into memories in Sædding in West Jutland, on an undercover mission along Lovers Lane, and many, many other places.

Let me admit from the outset that I am strongly captivated by Cain’s book; his photos provide one with a nice sense of the world which served as the backdrop for Kierkegaard’s authorship, and the pictures are ordered biographically/chronologically. Cain creates a contemporary impression of Copenhagen and Denmark and does not desperately attempt to reconstruct an idyllic Golden Age which has now vanished. It is honest and does not deceive the potential Kierkegaard pilgrim into believing that the little country flows with milk and honey or offers a cornucopia of spectacular experiences. Yes, the sun does shine on the blue water of the Øresund but thunder clouds also threaten over Amager. And even if the Neo-classical nave of the Church of Our Lady invites devotional silence, other landmarks in Kierkegaard’s world are disappointingly small. Nonetheless, they are big enough to be captured on film and in this way Cain lets Kierkegaard serve as a guide to Denmark and Copenhagen.

Cain is in no hurry as he follows along in Kierkegaard’s footsteps. Viewed from Copenhagen, the author’s leisurely pace is itself cause for wonder. For according to the Danish understanding of the world, the modern American rushes through Europe, commenting upon the experiences with only a standard phrase directed at his travel partner (his wife age 65); “Have you taken your picture?” Cain has lingered around the buildings and landscapes which surrounded Kierkegaard and he has taken a deep breath of the air which Kierkegaard once breathed. Remembering Kierkegaard’s deep disgust for Hans Christian Andersen’s whirlwind tour through Europe by carriage, one can lean back in an easy-chair with peace of mind, light a cigar nd lazily vegetate on Cain’s book. One is likewise tempted to put Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony in the CD player and take a breath of fresh air with Kierkegaard on his way out of the packed capital city, and to wake heiterer Gefühle bei der Ankunft auf dem Lande in Northern Zealand: Here one does not stand with one’s back to the world like Caspar David Fredrich’s wanderer, but stands in the middle of it; for Kierkegaard continually has the confusion of the world on his back and his coachman at his side.

There is a certain lightness and enjoyment – certainly a surprise for many people – in following Kierkegaard around Copenhagen and, even more so, in following him out to the countryside. It is a real achievement to call forth another side of Kierkegaard than the melancholy Copenhagen resident – and to call forth another side of Copenhagen and Denmark than the respective business center and farmland which Kierkegaard portays in his authorship. By doing so, Cain provides the reader with a sure possibility for identifying with this world. Moreover, this means that the book’s essential contribution to Kierkegaard literature is corrective; it is directed, of course, at the person who has already read a great deal of Kierkegaard, and especially at the person who has buried himself too deeply into the terminology of the authorship and now throws around existence categories that she has only experienced through – Kierkegaard.

But from a Heiterkeit am Bach, Cain changes direction and crosses over the Kattegat to Jutland. The year is 1840, and Kierkegaard wants to see the ground upon which his family’s melancholy was fostered. At the arrival at the Mols Mountains – or “hills” as Cain very reasonably categorizes them – a sadness already hovers above. For even when the days are longest and the sun is at its zenith the summer is already a memory of itself. Maybe there is a truth to the notion that the Danish landscape and Kierkegaard’s melancholy are connected. Think of his father, who hiked up the diminutive hill – even less than a hill – on the Jutland heath in a failed attempt to reach the ear of Our Lord: “I learned from him what fatherly love is,” Kierkegaard recalls during his stay in Sædding in 1840, “and through this I gained a conception of divine fatherly love, the one single unshakable thing in life, the true Archemedian point.” What divine irony!

Without question, the real asset of Cain’s book is the collection of photographs which, without academic over-interpretation, offers the reader a meditation on Kierkegaard’s life and work. The reader never gets the unpleasant feeling that Cain wants to manipulate with his photographs; the reader can continually find in the pictures a medium for “the activity of personal appropriation.” Conversely, the text is slightly uneven at times, and blemished by jumps in style and focus: In long passages Kierkegaard himself is allowed to narrate while Cain limits himself to stringing quotations together with appropriate biographical information. In other passages, the reader is suddenly burdened with arbitrary interpretations – an example is the interruption of citations with unnecessary explanations. An interruption of this sort is almost fatally disturbing to the Kierkegaard quotation cited in the Introduction. “If there is to be no disturbing, apparently great but deceptive, middle term which falsifies a man’s relation to the divine [Johannes de Silentio’s treatment of Abraham and the question of a teleological suspension of the ethicals’ are implied here] then, according to what I have learned from my elders [above all, of course, Kierkegaard’s father; but respect for tradition is also present] and sought to understand my own, then the only reasonable thing to do is earnestly and inwardly to pledge oneself in unconditioned obedience and care-freely, if possible, hilariously, to let the outcome be God’s affair and no concern of one’s own” (p. 9). Or what about this quotation, which Cain promptly reduces to a cliché: “But since without qualification the first prerequisite for the communication of truth is personality [not any truth but ‘existential truth,’ truth which pertains essentially to existing], since ‘truth’ cannot possibly be served by ventriloquism, personality has to come to the fore again” (p. 106)? Why does ‘personality’ have to be explained, and why does it not simply mean ‘personality’ or ‘character’? Things go completely wrong when Cain will not leave Gilleleje without trivializing the “Gilleleje journal entry.” (p. 35-37): Cain the exegete preaches subjectivity and personal appropriation, but does he really need to when, precisely here, Kierkegaard’s pen is liberating light and free of burdening hops and jumps.

I would also prefer to omit Cain’s interpretation of the Corsar battle, since he does not grant it full validity as an expression of Kierkegaard’s character, but with a surgical incision cuts it away and feeds it to the cat: “Corsaren steals Kierkegaard away from himself. He loses control, and Kierkegaard is nothing if not control: contrivance and control are much a part of his personality – and of his strength (and of his weakness)” (p. 88). And jumping to another conclusion, he writes, “he is a victim of the attack which variously impresses the rest of his life, including his ‘attack on Christendom’ (p. 89). Nonetheless Cain does not hesitate to calm the congregation a few pages later: “The assault on the church is not a departure from it but a devotion to it.” Nonsense: it is a devotion to Christianity. Can supports his claim by noting that Kierkegaard, in Two Discourses at Communion on Fridays (1851) says that his authorship of “religiousness in reflection” seeks “its definite point of rest at the foot of the altar.” This may well be so, but Cain’s conclusion would seem to be undermined by the fact that Kierkegaard stops taking communion a year later. (cf.

Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, “Die ursprüngliche Unterbrechung. Søren Kierkegaard beim Abendmal im Freitagsgottesdienst der Kopenhagener Frauenkirche,” in Kierkegaard Studies, Yearbook 1996.)

Cain is guilty of another peccadillo. He assumes too much familiarity on the part of the reader with Danish geography and landmarks. For example, Cain writes , “Gurre Slotsruin, from the 12^th century, is a kilometer west of Gurre, about seventeen kilometers southeast of Frederiksborg Slot at Hillerød on the way to Ny Hammersholt” (p. 31). Very precise, but why does Cain not include a map? Once again the author observes “In this view south from Rundetåm…” (p. 19). Unfortunately however, few readers will have any knowledge of Copenhagen’s Roundtower apart from its mention in the fairytales of Hans Christian Andersen.

The book has here and there rubbed me the wrong way, I warmly recommend it. Indeed, reading it I felt like Kierekgaard’s alter ego Johannes Climacus when his father took him on a walk out into the swarm of people in Copenhagen and up to the shores of the Sound, without ever leaving the living room: “They walked through the city gate to the country palace nearby or to the seashore or about the streets – according to Johannes’s wish for his father was capable of everything. While they walked up and down the floor, his fathers voice; the pastry woman’s fruits were more tempting than ever. Whatever was familiar to Johannes his father delineated so exactly, so vividly, so directly and on the spot, down to the most trifling detail, and so minutely and graphically whatever was unfamiliar to him, that after a half-hour’s walk with his father he was overwhelmed a weary as if he had been out the whole day” (JC, 120).