Soren Kierkegaard

has “included himself in it,” because this makes the characters in the work
so amorphous that the ybegin to dissolve into utter formlessness. And things
get no better in the postscript, when Constantin Constantius turns to the
reader in an altogether too helpful fashion, obligingl yoffering himself to us
in yet another form, for there is nothing in the work itself that necessitates
this sort of mutability.
Nonetheless the mutabilit yis necessar y. The perspectival relativism of
the postscript is less the product of a desire to exercise aesthetic cunning
than of a need to conceal the work’s compositional collapse—which appears
to reflect the psychological collapse of the work’sactualauthor. And this
person, m ydear reader, is of course not Constantin Constantius at all, but
a man who calls himself Kierkegaard.
The peculiarit yof the work is clarified somewhat when one inspects the
manuscript ofRepetition, which consists of two rather ordinar ynotebooks
of different size and with different colored paper, one of a bluish shade, one
yellowish. These notebooks, totaling 160 pages, servedbothas the draftand
as the printer’s manuscript, so the work proceeded rather expeditiously—
though this celerit ydoes not argue that it was a simple, straightforward
matter. A mere glance at the variants of the title page reveals a remarkable
indecisiveness.Repetitionhad been the work’s title all along, but there had
been trouble with the subtitle: “A Fruitless Venture” was deleted to make
wa yfor “A Venture in Discover y”; this was soon crossed out, after which
Kierkegaard yet again tried “A Fruitless Venture.” This was once more
deleted in favor of “A Venture in Experimental Philosophy,” which in turn
was crossed out and replaced b y“A Venture in Experimenting Philosoph y,”
with the last word crossed out and replaced by “Psychology.” The author
was listed as “Constantinus de bona speranza”—a name that alternated with
“Victorinus”—after which Kierkegaard finall y(though not before tr ying
out “Walter”) decided on “Constantin Constantius” as the work’s pseudon-
ymous source.
“I have finished a work,” Kierkegaard wrote Boesen proudl yfrom Berlin
on Ma y25, 1843. Kierkegaard hadRepetitionin mind, but it is unclear how
similar the work in his luggage was to what would end up as the finished
book. The surviving textual materials do not permit an yreal reconstruction
of the work’s genesis, but it is clear that Kierkegaard had felt himself com-
pelled to revise and extend his tale, making drastic changes in the plot. For
the Young Man was originall ysupposed to have committed suicide, and it
was presumabl yin this lifeless state that he arrived in Copenhagen. But in
the course of June or July, the Young Man was revived in a series of maneu-
vers that can be seen at various points in the manuscript—for example,
where Kierkegaard deleted the parenthetical material in the following state-