Soren Kierkegaard

“In vino veritas” Kierkegaard had Victor Eremita say “Good night, Wee
Willie Winkie” to all ideality, and in so doing Kierkegaard revealed that he
was familiar with Andersen’s tale “Wee Willie Winkie.” Both of these allu-
sions disappeared from the final versions of the works in question, however,
which was a symbolic augury of Kierkegaard’s subsequent attitude toward
his own debut book. Thus, inThe Point of View for My Work as an Author,
when Kierkegaard would take stock of his entire output, the work simply
disappeared from the balance sheet.
It can be debated which of the two—the “raging fire” or the “little can-
dle”—understood the other less, but in any case Kierkegaard did not have
the sense for the double entendre, the concealed irony, the sarcasm, the
satire of his times, nor the ingeniously crafted naı ̈vete ́one finds in Ander-
sen’s fairy tales, those world-class artistic miniatures. In 1837, when Kier-
kegaard was completing an essay on telling children fairy tales, he turned
up his nose at “these gangling, childish marionettes who jump about on the
floor and ride on hobbyhorses with the sweet little ones,” telling fairy tales
“for children and childlike souls.” It seems more than obvious that Andersen
and hisFairy Tales Told for Childrenwere the models behind this caricature.
One evening in Frederiksberg Gardens, Kierkegaard supposedly remarked
to Israel Levin that “Andersen has no idea what fairy tales are. It is enough
that he be good-hearted, why should he also attempt poetry?” And then
Kierkegaard himself, calling upon his demonic powers of imagery, conjured
up “six or seven fairy tales” so that Levin almost “felt uncomfortable.” That
evening, Levin recalls, Kierkegaard also remarked that “literature is not for
nursing babes or for half-grown girls, but for mature human beings.”
These two men would later make Danish literature world famous, and
we are happy to mention both of them in the same breath, but while they
were alive they avoided each other’s company, presumably because they
reflected each other’s weaknesses. At some point in 1847 Kierkegaard (dis-
playing metaphorical sophistication but psychological naı ̈vete ́) wrote:
“Now, Andersen can tell the fairy tale about the ‘Galoshes of Good For-
tune,’ but I can tell the fairy tale about the shoe that pinches.” Kierkegaard
was trying to write his way toward the immediacy out of which Andersen
was trying to write himself, but both were primitives in the best and most
basic sense of the word. Each was himself, for better or worse.