Soren Kierkegaard

tion .This is also the explanation of the perfection with which the seduction
proceeds; everything takes place absolutely flawlessly, as only happens in
myth or in a “dramaturgy without a subject” .The modesty that Johannes
repeatedly reveals when he calls Cordelia his teacher, his dance partner, and
his mirror is thus shown to be something more than just coy rhetoric .Johan-
nes is not in fact the master of his own work—his diary is haunted by an alien
power and therefore ought to have been titled “The Seduction’s Diary.”
Johannes himself perhaps had some sense of this .For indeed, the diary
presents some quite clear instances of the reversibility of the traditional
codes of activity for the sexes .For example, anticipating the point when,
in accordance with his psychological calculations, Cordelia will break off
the engagement, Johannes writes: “She herself became the temptress who
seduces me into transgressing the boundaries of the universal.” Here his
mere choice of words inevitably invites us to consider whether the revers-
ibility of roles may in fact have started long before Johannes imagines .Nor
is it without significance that the editor of the diary remarks in his preface
that Johannes’s “history with Cordelia was so involved that it was possible
for him to appear as the one seduced.”
Now, as we well know, the story was also “involved” with another story,
Kierkegaard’s own .And though it would be absurd to try to determine
how much Kierkegaard there is in Johannes, the amount of Regine in Cor-
delia, or, for that matter, the extent of Fritz in Edvard, aparallel biographical
readingis psychologically inevitable, and it becomes simply imperative
when, with Regine in mind, Kierkegaard writes that “ ‘The Seducer’s
Diary’ was written for her sake, in order to repulse her.”
Thus Kierkegaard himself was the first to attribute a biographical charac-
ter to the diary .Or perhaps there was one person who preceded him .Per-
haps, in fact, J .L .Heiberg was on a similar biographical tack when he
reviewedEither/Orand took particular aim at “The Seducer’s Diary.” In
this connection he was of course not satisfied to be merely disgusted, nause-
ated, and revolted .He also reflected on the intention that the author must
have had in writing such a diary .Heiberg thus harbored no doubts that a
person could be “like this seducer,” but he was very astonished “that an
author could be the sort of individual capable of taking pleasure in imagin-
ing himself to be such a character.” Here Heiberg was passing a moral judg-
ment, no doubt about that, but his singling out the author behind the se-
ducer was striking, and it involved a good deal more than just indignant
moralizing .Doesn’t Heiberg’s moral judgment also contain a bit of uneasy
speculation to the effect that Kierkegaard had had quite private motives in
writing a work such as “The Seducer’s Diary?”—that is, that Kierkegaard
had sought refuge in a character such as Johannes in order to be able,in the