in the end makes this earnestness another name for the tacit acceptance of
Kierkegaard’s fictions and dubious ploys. Therefore it is not surprising that
the work displays a marked confidence in the reader—or, if you will, it is
not surprising that the unreflective innocence Johannes the Seducer presup-
posed in Cordelia is suspiciously similar to the uncritical earnestness Kier-
kegaard presupposes in his reader. This is evident, for example, in this mildly
erotic appeal: “Some day, when my lover appears, he will easily see that
when I was regarded as ironic, the irony by no means consisted in what the
esteemed, cultivated public thought it consisted....Hewill see that the
irony consisted precisely in the fact that within this aesthetical author, be-
neath this appearance of worldliness, a religious author concealed him-
self....Mylover will see how it matches up, to the letter.”
Who is Kierkegaard’s lover? It is the reader who reads the fiction as a
piece of nonfiction and who cannot see that in this work Kierkegaard did
not reproduce his own actions but in fact produced them as textual actions
that claim to be facts.
And indeed, this is the only way that everything can be made to match
up, to the letter.
“What Hasn’t This Pen Been Capable of...?”
ButThe Point of Viewdoes not consist solely of a more or less uninten-
tional—and, in the final analysis, self-accusatory—apologia for a particular
religious interpretation of Kierkegaard’s writings. It also contains lighter,
more lyrical passages, including a rather grand ode to laboring with pen and
paper and to the mysterious powers that help produce such handiwork. In
this connection Kierkegaard wrote that there had “not been the slightest
delay in the literary productivity. Everything that was to be used has always
been ready at hand at precisely the moment it was to be used. In one sense,
the entire production has had an uninterrupted regularity, as if I had done
nothing else but copy out every day a specific portion of a printed book.”
It had been a “simple task of duty, ”and Kierkegaard himself had “lived like
a copyist in his office.”
Kierkegaard’s “office ”was a metaphor for the absence of inclination, and
it is clear that this office was part of the Department of Duty and Punctual-
ity. We are not told what book it was that Kierkegaard copied so diligently,
but it ought to be obvious that this was hardly a case of an ordinary copyist’s
work or of mere plagiarism. When Kierkegaard copied something, he was
doing something other, and something more, than mere copying. But what?
And whose writing was it of which his writing was a copy?