Soren Kierkegaard

which in the first three instances is directed toward the gaze, toward vision,
the eye. Agnetesaysnothing at all, she onlysees, just like Isaac. But with
this gaze (which makes the world “as still as glass”) she gives herself so
entirel yto the Merman that he collapses in impotence and cannot seduce
her. He must therefore pretend that he had onl ywanted to show her the
sea—“and Agnete believes him.”
In his journals Kierkegaard almost without exception has Regine enter
into histor yentirel ywithout words, silent. She is recalled as having been in
a situation or is recollected in an interior scene, in which she is observed and
commented upon. But in these scenes and situations she herself is capable of
suddenl yturning toward Kierkegaard and, the next instant, ofseeing through
him, almost directl yinto the reader. During his first sta yin Berlin, Kierke-
gaard wrote in his journal: “And when she stood there, clad in her finery—
then I had to leave. When her delighted, livel ygaze met mine—then I had
to leave.—Then I went out and wept bitterly.” The choice of words is
quite extreme, because it was Peter who “wept bitterly” after having denied
Christ three times. Like some sort of Merman, Kierkegaard made the fol-
lowing note during a subsequent sta yin Berlin: “Sometimes it occurs to
me that when I return, she will perhaps have decided with certaint ythat I
was a deceiver. Suppose she had the power to crush me with her gaze (and
that is something outraged innocence can do)—I shudder to think of it, it
is dreadful to me—not the suffering, I would be quite willing to suffer if I
knew it was for her benefit, but the frightful toying with life implied in this,
in being able to do whatever one wishes with a person.” Regine’s devoted
gaze caused pain because it reminded Kierkegaard of the natural immediacy
he himself had lost. In her gaze he saw himself as he once had been when
he had been someone else, a person from whom he was now eternally
separated. And with this he was painfull yreminded of his father, because it
was he who had cut him off from natural immediacy.
InFear and Trembling, the symbol of such cutting is the knife that Johannes
de silentio has Abraham emplo ywith such sinister choreographic precision.
Apart from thefirst version, which sketches a successful deception, the knife
figures in the three subsequent versions as something more than a mere
stage prop. The choreographic employment of the knife is even reflected
at the level of typography, where dashes and paragraph changes help to
produce pauses and voids that raise doubts about what Abraham has been
doing with his knifebeforehe catches sight of the ram. The uncertainty
about this matter begins to make itself felt in thesecondversion, where a
semicolon immediatel yafter “the knife” indicates a breath being held. But
the ambiguit ybreaks forth in earnest in thethirdversion, where the words
“He climbed Mount Moriah, he drew the knife” are followed b ythe inden-