Soren Kierkegaard

highly than common literary decency. Kierkegaard continues: “The confi-
dant went away. And then the little man put on a quilted silk damask robe,
put a genuine diamond brooch on the robe, and underneath wore a silk
vest bearing the Great Cross of the Order of the Lion. Then he sat on a
throne in front of a mirror and said ‘Actually, you look like Caesar, apart
from the fact that you are squint-eyed—and apart from the hump.’ And
then he wept again until his old housekeeper came and bore him off to
bed.” Burdened down by all these crazy emblems that merely symbolize
imagined power, the little fellow is borne out of the tale, which was now
just about over. But only just about. For almost as an afterthought it contin-
ues, “He once saw an old pantomime in which Pierrot played a hunchback,
and he thought that the piece had been written in order to tease him and
that Pierrot was imitating him—so Pierrot was abused in the paper for an
entire year.”
With these lines, Kierkegaard returns to the ambiguity present at the
beginning of the tale where it was uncertain whether it was himself or
Goldschmidt who was being caricatured. Of the two figures, the hunchback
can only be Goldschmidt, while Pierrot, who is not hunchbacked at all but
only plays a hunchback, must be Kierkegaard whose presumptuousness is
punished by abuse in “the paper.” But if anyone wasactuallya hunchback,
it was not Goldschmidt, it was Kierkegaard! The ill-starred hump thus
changes places and, so to speak, possesses the wrong man; thus Kierkegaard
transferred his own infirmity to Goldschmidt. The point in this lonely docu-
ment is the phenomenon oftransferenceitself, and the hump is not some sort
of actual, physical growth, but is another name for the infirmities and failings
one attributes to others because one refuses to acknowledge them in oneself.
It is in a way both tragic and instructive that these three people, each of
whom tried to assume a central position in Copenhagen intellectual circles,
were all rebuffed. All three received, to use Goldschmidt’s expression, “a
false number one.” Møller’s expulsion was probably the least symbolic. As
early as 1845 he had been awarded a state-supported traveling fellowship,
which long infuriated Kierkegaard, because “to allow such a person to re-
ceive a state subsidy is to compromise the nation.” The fact that Møller did
not leave Denmark until the beginning of 1848 did not makes things any
better. He went first to Germany, where he supported himself as a man of
letters, a translator, and a journalist. Three years later he continued on to
France, and after a number of restless years marked by ever greater poverty,
he died of syphilitic encephalitis in 1865.
Fate was a little kinder to Goldschmidt. After he got rid ofThe Corsair,
he traveled south “in order to be done with witticisms and to learn some-