The KierKegaard Novel: The Age of Longing

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Log In Sign Up. I A [JP3 ]. Kierkegaard has an ambivalent attitude toward the Romantics. On the other hand, in his literary reviews Kierkegaard borrows some of his key critical tools from Schlegel.

These include how to distinguish ancient from modern poetry and drama, how to communi- cate ethical and religious views, how to understand the relative importance of feeling, reason, intuition, sensation and imagination, and how to use the multifarious art of style implicit in the form of the novel to subvert the Bildungsroman Garff He shares a love of Socrates and Plato, an admiration for Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Goethe, and a fascination for the mythology of the Middle Ages.

Most references in his Journals and Notebooks are restricted to an even earlier period, from to However, these are often in the form of allusions or quotations rather than extended discussions. This appearance is misleading. This essay will lay out some of the central themes and concepts framed by the Romantics and show how Kierkegaard responded to them.

In pursuing this task it will pay particular attention to the work of the early German Romantics, especially Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich von Hardenberg Novalis. Romanticism in Denmark By the time Kierkegaard began publishing in the late s, Romanticism as a cultural movement was in decline and many of its progenitors were dead. Kierkegaard himself wrote of it as though it belonged to the past. It had been subjected to serious criticism by Hegel and Danish Hegelians such as J. While Jena Romanticism had been a heady mix of philosophy, poetry, science, literary criticism, politics, and religion, by the s Danish Romanticism was largely confined to litera- ture, painting, and music, although there were important exceptions in the philosophical 1 Very briefly, Kierkegaard criticized Romantic irony as nihilistic.

Romantic irony runs wild in subjectivity, so that it loses touch with actuality. It elevates the category of possibility at the expense of the category of necessity, although ironically because of the Romantic emphasis on fate and chance, necessity is what actually rules it, while it retains only the fantasy of freedom. Naturalistic Romanticism was characterized by individualism, passion, exoticism, and rebellion Hertel Almost from the outset Kierkegaard took these later forms of Romanticism to be symptomatic of deeper problems which origi- nate with early German Romanticism, in particular its aestheticism.

Therefore his criti- cisms are aimed primarily at the latter. Steffens had obtained his doc- torate in mineralogy at the University of Kiel in , but also studied the philosophy of J. Steffens was therefore particularly dis- posed to emphasize the philosophy of nature to be found in the Jena school Albeck One mark of literary Romanticism, both in Germany and in Denmark, was fascina- tion with folktales and myths from the Middle Ages. In the mids, while at the University of Copenhagen, Kierkegaard began an intense study of literature. During this time he became fascinated by the figure of Faust.

Each figure represented an essential idea for Kierkegaard: In his journals, Kierkegaard played Hegelian variations on the possible dialectical relations among the three characters. He tried Ahasverus as the synthesis of Faust and Don Juan. He tried Faust as the synthesis of Don Juan and Ahasverus. But even in Denmark Kierkegaard was far from alone in this interest. In Kierkegaard unhappily discovered that his project to write on Faust had been anticipated in an essay by H. These themes form part of a wider set, which Kierkegaard shared with the early German Romantics and the Danish Romantics.

Whatever his personal motivation for writing it, the review was an occasion for Kierkegaard to practice his skills as a literary critic. In the process, he intro- duced themes that are central to his authorship.

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These themes include the questions of what makes for good and bad authorship in the present age, and how authentic commu- nication is to be achieved to address the spiritual demands of the age. These themes overlap considerably with those introduced in the literary theory of the early German Romantics, particularly in the Athenaeum-Fragments. Literary criticism, as theorized and practiced by Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel in the Athenaeum-Fragments, comprised a number of different approaches.

They include, firstly, the approach of the reviewer, who guides and informs the public with respect to new works. Secondly, there is the approach which tries to discern the qualities of great works of art, especially through comparative studies of acknowledged masters with modern authors, with a view to work- ing out how great literature might emerge in modernity. Thirdly, there is the critical evaluation of particular works in order to develop new aesthetic prin- ciples that can inform future literary efforts. He takes the review as an occasion to introduce his con- cepts of life-view and life-development, as well as to make some remarks about the nature of genius.

The Romantics, too, spilled a lot of ink on the nature of genius, and on the notion of Bildung [cultivation, formation], which Kierkegaard subsequently attacked and for which his notions of life-view and life-development provide early alternatives. Finally there is the purely theoretical approach in which the Romantics sought to establish a new poetic form of criticism, which would combine the artistic sensitivities of the poet with Kierkegaard positions himself as a poetic critic in his assessment of Andersen as an author who lacks a life-view and a life-develop- ment.

Each of these characteristics, which Andersen is said to lack, is recognized by the Romantic critics as grounds for literary authority. Andersen depicts genius as something that needs cosseting rather than as something with the inner strength and courage to resist the demands of fashion. For Kierkegaard, the strength of genius, won from experience, is woven into a life-view, which has the aspect of totality, so that further experiences can be incorporated into it and explained from its point of view.

While unity of character can be sustained in lyric poetry by mood, the epic requires character development. The dramatic introduces the further element of dialectical development of character. The extension of literary criticism to existential critique of personality is already explicit in Romanticism. For Friedrich Schlegel there is a parallel between the structure of a literary work and the structure of an integrated individual: Every human being who is cultivated and who cultivates himself contains a novel within himself.

Therefore his analysis is a form of culture-criticism encapsulated in a case study. Two Ages and The Book on Adler The former reviews the novel Two Ages by Thomasine Gyllembourg, and is an occasion for Kierkegaard to reflect on the decisive differences between the present age and the pre- ceding age. The Book on Adler reviews the work of Pastor Adolf Adler, a Hegelian author of books in speculative theology who claimed to have had a personal divine revelation. His whole authorship could be said to be guided by their lights, starting with Socrates and ending with Christ. Then there is his self-examination, and the use of himself as exem- plar.

In his literary criticism, Kierkegaard seems more concerned to develop his own ideas than to account for the texts he reviews. He even remarks in his journal: Passion, according to Kierkegaard, entails inwardness and immediacy, both of which are missing in reflection. Furthermore, Kierkegaard introduces the categories of levelling, the public, and the press, all of which lead to passionless, abstract reflection, which lacks concrete existential engagement.

When Kierkegaard sent a copy of his review to the author of Two Ages, through J. This book offers a journey through the changing ideas and perceptions of the ultimate scope of human existence-where it goes, how much we can know, where to draw the line between experience and the unknowable. For this intellectual journey, the horizon provides the lodestar-a mirage, a destination.

At once insubstantial and insuperable, the horizon symbolizes the shifting frontline between knowledge and reality. It is an image of the elusive, slippery, onward character of human finitude, of our limitedness in time, space, and understanding. Like the end of existence or the outer edge of knowledge, the horizon at the far end of earth and sky does not draw an objective limit; there, earth and sky do not come lip to lip.

Drawing not the empirical boundary of the world but the soft edge where perception fades off, the "offing" is really a trick of vision. Where it glimmers, sight beholds its own vanishing. This vanishing-the trace of human vision seeing itself out-is indeed what we mean by horizon.

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Both knowledge and human life are shaped like horizons: It is an inwardly drawn limit, which moves in time with the knower. It is a historical limit-in the dual sense that it follows historical development and also marks its outer limit. All historical knowledge pushes against a horizon, and the march of history itself is both a conquest and a forced march toward the open unknown what the future holds.

What goes for historical knowledge obtains also at the individual level. No one knows save for the death-row inmate and the meticulous suicide the hour of one's death.

And to know it would certainly not cast any light on its hither side. The limit of death is drawn by a purblind artist: I know my life is to end, but the ending paradoxically brings no closure. This paradoxical experience of a limit without an end, of a finishing line that does not materialize, of being bounded by something that is not there-these are the nuances that the word finitude brings to the stone-faced lexicon of end, boundary, borderline, or terminus. Horizon highlights the subjective, makeshift nature of perceived reality.

It makes the viewer intensely conscious of his perception, his position, his own self. A horizon reveals a perceiver who knows, if he knows he is looking at a horizon and not, say, the Pillars of Hercules or Jacob's Ladder, that the offing relates to the place he stands on. To perceive oneself perceiving is, inevitably, to look inward; it is to become conscious of the reach of human experience.

The Kierkegaard Novel: The Age of Longing

Images of the horizon crystallize perennial preoccupations with the overlapping limits of knowledge and existence-and it is on this mixed zone of epistemology and eschatology that the present study finds its dubious hunting ground. Like all human constructs and apprehensions, "the shape of the world" is born, submits to the tribulations of time, and dies. Whereas the contents of reality are largely objective features, the boundaries of reality are drawn by speculation-this is true whether we are loftily contemplating the cosmos, whose ultimate perimeter is unimaginable, or more domestically gauging our own surroundings.

Whether cosmic or domestic, the limits of reality are mental projections that reflect changing mores and beliefs.

Armed with Iron Age assumptions, the Mesopotamian traveler of four thousand years ago could not have seen the same horizon that Magellan glimpsed, even if both voyagers stood on the same spot. Ways of thinking and believing create their own circumstances. We imagine worlds and then end up living in them-often becoming strangers to each other's horizon. Better than one horizon, in sum, we had better speak of horizons. Any cultural history of the horizon, even within the same theological and philosophical tradition, should expect to sail, not under the canopy of a gloriously homogenous skyline, but across a foldout map of jumbled and jagged horizons.

Such is the creative plasticity of our worldviews that we cannot, and must not, expect uniformity and continuity.

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Together with the latter two, we should expect to part with finality. The horizon is the child of curiosity-it is the inquiring, expectant, far-looking mind that beholds a horizon. To this extent, the horizon is wedded to the concept of transcendence, a concept that is not inherently high-flown or mystical but underpins everyday human knowledge. Outside religion, transcendence designates the second-guessing nature of human consciousness, the fact that, self-limiting as it is, knowledge is moved to wonder about the space beyond its perimeter.

An animal-so it seems-doesn't draw a distinction between its perception and reality: Not so with human beings. Aware of the distinction between mental representations and their objects, we are in touch with the borderline of consciousness. This going-to-the-limit is innate in human intelligence. To it we owe, among other things, the idea of truth, which endeavors to line our conceptions toe-to-toe with what they stand for.

A quixotic venture though this matchup may be, we should be sorry to give up trying. A world without that kind of transcendence would be oppressively hidebound. Transcendence is the mental experience that consists in regarding the plane of known reality as open-ended. Now, the horizon beckons toward transcendence but does not fulfill it. A gateway it isn't. It points to finality but leaves the momentum unfulfilled.

In philosophical terms, we may say that the horizon is the creation of a diligently immanent observer possessed by an unrequited longing for the unseen. It is this love that keeps him gazing upward and outward; and it is perhaps the love of his own gazing, and the humble acknowledgment of his finiteness, that keeps him from claiming to know or possess the other side-if an other side even exists. Put otherwise, the horizon arises from a religious longing that chooses not to avail itself of the available answers-those by which the satisfied longing hardens into dogma.

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The horizon is the theological mirage-object of a contradiction on two legs-the nonreligious, unknowing believer. The presence of this ambivalent beholder-protagonist of the horizons of the following chapters-helps explain why the book, though steeped in religious and theological thought, is not primarily concerned with religion; or why, when it addresses religious texts, it is interested less in their dogmatic and sociopolitical strictures than in their zones of wavering, their fragile, poetic self-construction, their self-doubt also.

The social role of religion is curative and pastoral. However, this wait is made excruciating by the news of a terrorist attack and hostage taking at the Irish embassy by Islamic militants. In this sequence, Gamboa flexes his geopolitical nous, depicting a chief issue with the modern world — the normalization of and anesthetization to acts of terror, at home and abroad. In the present global climate, one cannot turn on the news without seeing a headline about a suicide bombing, hostage taking, or other heinous attack occurring somewhere in the world.

Gamboa not only understands the current global security climate, but he also describes the geopolitics and nuances of these issues with such detail and expertise that one could easily mistake them for an analysis lifted from Foreign Policy. He showcases a population that, after the initial shock of the hostage taking, returns to its day-to-day activities, only casually keeping up-to-date via hour news punditry.

When discussing consumerism, for example, the Consul declares:. The Old Hispanic vice of confusing genius with appearance was reaching new heights. The cult of the superficial […] was now triumphant. Abercrombie underpants […] I want half a dozen! I want lots of likes on my Facebook page. In the middle of the crisis, the fortunate minority practiced a combination of every form of luxury and frivolity. Gamboa demonstrates an uncanny ability to pinpoint one of the many generational malaises plaguing the present age: In an age where the sheer volume of information as well as the unprecedented rate of its dissemination both dictate the increasingly rapid pace of modern life, Gamboa serves us with a clairvoyant reminder as to its antecedent.

Individuals living in the 21st century, Gamboa seems to say, are increasingly trapped within the virtual confines of their phones, computers, and televisions. Gamboa testifies to our collective inability to sustain our attention on causes for more than the 30 seconds they get on a news report or the split-second it takes for us to scroll down our newsfeed.

He masterfully demonstrates what Kierkegaard so judiciously wrote about nearly two centuries ago. Gamboa grasps the magnitude of the over-stimulation in the present age: Now, this is not to say that Gamboa is some sort of anti-technology crusader or luddite — he is in fact quite the opposite. He writes of a world that grows increasingly smaller and more accessible, of a generation that has a slew of previously nonexistent tools at its hands.

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