Soren Kierkegaard

Here Kierkegaard, of all people, is himself doing what is so often and so
properly feared with respect to biographical presentations of Kierkegaard:
He is being a little free with the facts, and furthermore, in so doing he
tempts his readers to poetize even further. Indeed, the points of contact
between Quidam’s and Kierkegaard’s erotic conflicts are quite clear, and at
times the parallels strike us with painful directness—as when Quidam cites
word for wordthe parting letter Kierkegaard wrote to Regine when he re-
turned his ring on August 11, 1841, thereby formally terminating their rela-
tionship. Or when Quidam poetizes the events of the Easter Sunday when
Regine nodded to Kierkegaard at an evening service at the Church of Our
Lady, here moved to Trinity Church and imbued with a heavy-handed
theatricality that dispels the emphatic electricity that marks the account in
the journals.
Here, as elsewhere, Regine was subjected to radical poetic recycling, so
it is psychologically quite understandable that Kierkegaard could think that
at some point she might perhaps make use of him in the same manner. At
one point in the draft ofStages on Life’s WayKierkegaard made a marginal
notation: “the anonymous novella about which I was mistaken.” This com-
ment most probably alludes to the novellaExcerpts from a Young Girl’s Diary
and Correspondence, which was advertised in the December 20, 1842, issue
ofBerlingske Tidendeas having been “published today.” The context in
which the comment was made makes it clear that Kierkegaard had thought
that Regine was the author, which to his relief (alas!) she was not.
The autobiographical thread that runs through “‘Guilty?’/‘Not
Guilty?’ ” bypasses Regine, however, and continues further and deeper into
six independent sections that are inserted among Quidam’s diary entries,
each one dated the fifth of the month, starting in January, ending in June.
Even though the pieces vary in theme, on closer inspection they can be
seen to be intimately connected in more than one sense because all six
dramatize episodes in a tale about a person who had once abandoned himself
to his sensual desires and who is now marked by the consequences of his
fall, morally as well as physically. If we rearrange the sequence in which the
various pieces appear, gradually we see the emergence, in strangely coded
fashion, of a harrowing confession concerning incidents in an increasingly
distant but always inescapable past.
In all six pieces the spying eye or the inquisitorial gaze plays a noteworthy
role: A person looks at someone without himself being seen, or at least
without knowing whether he has been seen. Or a person looks at himself
by looking at the other. Thus the first and probably the best-known of the
inserted pieces, “Quiet Despair,” deals with reciprocal mirroring. As the
first draft of this section has it: “There were a father and a son. Both were