I've been rereading Kierkegaard alongside Geoffrey A. Hale’s excellent book Kierkegaard and the Ends of Language.
Commenting on Kierkegaard’s later texts, Kafka writes to Brod:
They are not unequivocal, and even when he late develops a kind of unequivocality, even this is only part of his chaos of spirit, melancholy and faith…. Besides, his compromising books are pseudonymous and pseudonymous nearly to the core. They can, in their totality and in spite of their contents, just as well be understood as the misleading letters of the seducer, written behind clouds.
Written behind clouds. How to take the heteronyms seriously? One might dissolve their identity into Kierkegaard’s, following Kierkegaard’s own remarks in Postscript. For doesn’t he provide the key to his works when he writes:
The contents of this little book affirm, then, what I truly am as an author, that I am and was a religious author, that the whole of my work as an author is related to Christianity, to the problem of ‘becoming a Christian’, with a direct or indirect polemic against the monstrous illusion we call Christendom, or against the illusion that in such a land as ours all are Christians of a sort.
But one should also remember what A. writes in Either/Or: that it is ‘characteristic of all human endeavour in its truth that it is fragmentary, that it is precisely this which distinguishes it from nature’s infinite coherence, that an individual’s wealth consists specifically in his capacity for fragmentary extravagance …’. A. versus Kierkegaard? A. is a heteronym; we know who should win. But this is to resolve the problem in advance. The problem: it is not merely A.’s texts which are fragmentary, but all texts. No text can guarantee its meaning once and for all.
Whence the temptation to resort to the psychobiographical, whereby it is the unity of a life behind the writer that matters most (there are dozens of commentaries of this kind). Kierkegaard would be the exemplar, whose work and life are bound under the heading of an existence - whose existence is his testimony and which the reader must learn to imitate in turn. Thus is his existence bound into a living coherency. A. anticipates this: ‘because of the disjointed and desultory character of unfinished papers, one feels a need to poeticise the personality along with them’.
The poeticisation of the author will not resolve the problems of authority. Rereading the passage from Point of View of My Work as an Author, it is clear that here it is not a question of a poeticisation, but a testament, and a fragmentary one. As Hale argues, it is not a question of thereby grasping the truth of Kierkegaard’s work, ‘it offers no revelation of a hitherto unacknowledged secret; it does not attempt in this way to correct an otherwise misled readership. In it the author never explains or supplies the meaning for texts previously written’.
This gives us a way of reading Kierkegaard’s remark: ‘What I write here is for orientation. It is a public attestation; not a defence or apology. In this respect, truly, if in no other, I believe that I have something in common with Socrates’. To attest, here, is not give the keys to the work to the reader. There is an orientation, true, but the texts remain. This is why Kierkegaard writes in ‘My Activity as a Writer’:
Without authority to call attestation to religion, to Christianity, is the category for my whole activity as an author, integrally regarded. That I was “without authority” I have from the first moment asserted clearly and repeated as a stereotyped phrase. I regard myself preferably as a reader of the books, not as the author.
A reader, then, who can only provide an orientation. Should one, then, take indirect communication as the key to his work? This is to lead to another temptation: Kierkegaard is praised by some commentators as a great poet before he is a great philosopher or a great theologian. But this is to confine him to prevent the possibility of a thinking-writing, of a writing which thinks in the author even as it renders authority ever incomplete. True, the poet is one for whom language does not have to be universal, conceptual. Nevertheless, the poet is condemned to language, and hence to meaning.
How, then, to think this indirection? What Kierkegaard stages is a relationship between text and reader such that meaning depends upon their relationship. This is not to make meaning entirely dependent upon the reader, relativising it to a particular perspective. Language is more than that perspective, even if, as this more, it can only be figured as difference or alterity even if it becomes necessary to invoke an outside which resists inclusion in any particular reading even as, in its exteriority, it only exists for itself as refusal to offer itself once and for all. Infinite interpretability: it is to this the finitude of language condemns us. It is the fact that the work happens in a contract between book and reader and that the work breaks that contract.
Then who is the author?
An author is often merely an x, even when his named is signed, something quite impersonal, which addresses itself abstractly, by the aid of printing, to thousands and thousands, while remaining itself unseen and unknown, living a life as hidden, as anonymous, as it is possible for a life to be, in order, presumably, not to reveal the too obvious and striking contradiction between the prodigious means of communication employed and the fact that the author is only a single individual….
A mere x – a pseudonym. Read the journals and you'll find Kierkegaard knows this:
The difficulty with publishing anything about the authorship is and remains that, without my knowing or knowing it positively, I really have been used, and now for the first time I understand and comprehend the whole – but then I cannot, after all, say I…. But this is my limitation – I am a pseudonym.
As Hale comments, splendidly:
Language and subjectivity remain irreconcilable, and this irreconcilability itself exceeds the delimitations of cognition. It cannot itself be known within language, because it is already the effect of language. Language produces the subject as its own excluded outside. (28)
Then irony cannot cover this notion as long as it refers to an underlying subject who would know, all along, what he or she was doing. Irony is dependent on the finitude of language, upon language as excess or outside and upon the communication in which the reader is exposed to the work as it gives and withholds itself.
The author is merely an x – but then, in encountering the text, isn’t the reader likewise an x? Doesn’t the communication which reaches between writer and reader do so as between one x and another? Behind the clouds - there where the texts meets and breaks from the reader, where the contract is shattered. Where writer becomes reader and the reader becomes x.