Soren Kierkegaard

posed anonymity was referred to merely as “the author ofA Story of Everyday
Life”) and in Steen Steensen Blicher, whose works are characterized by a
joyous view of life and a confidence in the world. All other things being
equal, despite difficulties, the story ends happily. In Andersen things happen
in precisely the opposite fashion, and according to Kierkegaard this was
because Andersen lacked a life view. “In a novel,” Kierkegaard declares,
“there must be an immortal spirit that survives the whole.” And this spirit
is endowed with its requisite immortality by none other than the author’s
life view, which to this extent functions as “in the novel [as] Providence.”
One ought not merely scribble away the best one can; one must permit
one’s experiences and impressions to be refracted in a poetically refined
prism. If an author lacks a life view, his novel not only becomes chaotic, it
also becomes unpleasantly private. Although during this same year Kierke-
gaard remarked in his journal that “an author always ought to give some-
thing of his personality, just as Christ feeds us with His body and blood,”
Andersen had gone too far. For he had not succeeded in maintaining the
requisite distance from his literary work, and consequently he had gradually
become enmeshed in it. Indeed, his “novels stand in so physical a relation
to his own self that their genesis can be seen less as his productions than as
amputations of his self.” Thus Kierkegaard’s point and Andersen’s problem
is that Andersen’s own “person volatilizes itself into fiction, so that some-
times one is actually tempted to believe that Andersen is a fictional character
who has run away from a group of such characters composed by an author
but not yet completed.”
These were the words on which (according to Andersen himself ) Ander-
sen had fastened, but if he had needed to take cooling powders to regain
his normal temperature when he had finished reading Kierkegaard’s work,
it was because he had sensed that he had been the target of an attempted
murder, a night of the long pens. Kierkegaard had thus attacked Andersen’s
lack of certainty as an artist—the “tremor of the hand that causes his pen
not only to spatter but to chatter.” Kierkegaard had further criticized him
for failing to choose his mottoes with a sufficiently musical ear: Lacking
both spirit and sense, Andersen merely cited “second-rate, third-rate, et
cetera-rate poets,” which was why his novels come to resemble “factory
products.” Andersen also lacked a sense for psychology; he lacked clarity.
And, in connection with a purely technical note about mathematical pow-
ers, the reader is referred to this androgynous footnote: “Andersen’s first
power is better compared to those flowers in which male and female are
situated on the same stalk”—here Andersen, whose sexual proclivities were
not always entirely unequivocal, would surely get the point.