Soren Kierkegaard

portraits of the impossible magister with the appropriate accoutrements:
first, as a bent-over little fellow spraddled across a young woman’s shoulders;
next, wearing a pair of much-too-large boots; and on horseback, where he
sits as crooked as the Devil, wearing a top hat, looking totally out of balance;
and another, fantastic indeed, in which he appears in the form of a stork
who is giving a wide berth to a cobblestone rammer [Danish,brolæggerjomfru:
“paver’s maid”], accompanied by the caption “How the Frater Walks Past
a Prostitute.” This was Møller’s tit for tat. And if all this were not enough,
we next see Kierkegaard on his way through the doorway leading intoThe
Corsair’s offices, and then back out again, impotent and bedraggled, with
all his deformities. In addition, this same issue ofThe Corsairincluded a
letter to Frater Taciturnus from a certain Frater Observantissimus, who with
feigned respect—but also in fact with some justification—asks Frater Taci-
turnus why he did not attackThe Corsairwhen the paper praised him, but
only after he had been attacked in Møller’sGæa. And last, the back cover of
the journal carried “Advertisements from Frater Taciturnus’s Dialectically
Licensed Experimentation Office,” ten fictional classified advertisements,
including a notice from the Copenhagen city government to the effect that
Frater Taciturnus had now been granted permission to establish residence
as “ironyhere in the city.”
The following week, in the issue of January 23, there were two more
drawings. One depicted “Frater Taciturnus the Terrible,” viewed from be-
hind, marshaling his surviving comrades-in-arms in a back alley, where they
are celebrating the fact thatThe Corsairhas now been beaten and crippled.
In the other drawing Frater Taciturnus, terrified, encountersThe Corsairin
the form of Goldschmidt, who has the misfortune to say “Good day, great
man.” Frater Taciturnus emphatically refuses to accept this sort of praise, so
Goldschmidt tries out the salutation “Tiny little man,” which Frater Taci-
turnus views as a villainous insult. “Good Lord,” Goldschmidt then exclaims,
“You will neither be great nor little! Well, mediocre man, how are you?”
The impudence continued in the January 30 issue, in which Kierkegaard
and Nathanson were once again confused with each other in a rather chaotic
account in which Kierkegaard, several times, shouts—in a double enten-
dre—“I have no organ.” After this there was a pause in the humor, which
by then had worn quite thin. Still, on February 20The Corsaircould report
in its “Logbook” that the author ofEither/Orhad won a prize from the
Industry Association for an essay on clothing manufacture in Denmark. The
following week there was more news, this time occasioned by the recent
publication of Kierkegaard’sConcluding Unscientific Postscript, which was sin-
gled out for its good ideas, its fitting observations, and unexceptionable
language: “We once again bid the honored author welcome to the world