To go by another name - it is tempting, sometimes, to write under another name, relieving oneself of the burdens of an identity that has become onerous. Here, I think of Kierkegaard’s practice of indirect communication. It was necessary, he thought, as an author troubled by what he saw as an excess of reflection and irony in the age in which he lived, to publish many of his books under pseudonyms (the word heteronym is, I think, better, for there are many names, each of who indicates an attitude, a style of existing, a way of living and writing.)
These heteronyms would leave in the works they were supposed to have composed a 'stinger' that was supposed to stir the reader into a sense of the fragility and precariousness of their own existence. No doubt it was, for Kierkegaard, a question of communicating a Christian message, of leading his reflective and ironical readers to God, and his work, if we read his later overviews of his own creative endeavour, was intended to systematically expose the weaknesses of various 'spheres of existence'.
But these books are readable by a non-Christian audience, which is to say, they communicate in a manner that is so indirect that the message never actually gets through. The ‘medium’ interposes itself; the fictional character Johannes the Seducer of the first half of Either/Or troubles the fictional young aesthete, A., who is supposed to have created him. He troubles us, too. But despite this, ‘The Seducer’s Diary’, the fictional story A. relates, is, with A.s’ essay ‘Crop Rotation’, the most attractive section this volume. B., Judge Vilhelm, whose fictional letters are gathered in the second half of Either/Or, is simply a windbag. And the Jutland Pastor, who has the ‘Last Word’, the ‘Ultimatum’, which is appended to the end of the second half of Kierkegaard's book, seems to speak from another era.
What does it matter? The same point was made about Milton, who was able to describe the fires of hell in a much more exciting way than the splendours of heaven. There are always ‘minor’ ways of reading ‘major’ authors – or more precisely, we shouldn’t let the notions of ‘literature’, of the ‘canon’ or ‘culture’ distract us from the works themselves.
No doubt. But there is, perhaps, a deeper way of understanding the meaning of ‘medium’. Before or beyond Kierkegaard's heteronyms and to the lives to which their names are linked, there is an indirect communication with respect to which it can no longer be a question of taking another name. This is a true heteronym - I am 'other named' as my writing reveals in its sonorities and rhythms, in its nuances and musicality, not another meaning, but the 'other' of meaning.
A book, and especially a literary book, is always more than a medium through which something might be communicated. It is also the body of words themselves in their resistance to mobilisation, that is, to the sense their author and their readers would discover in them. This is a writing that passes outside every attempt to enclose it, a writing that describes a line along the outside, un-naming me as I write.