Soren Kierkegaard

ing down on him—down, in fact, at his trousers to see if they really were
as uneven asThe Corsairhad depicted. And so everyone could see for himself
or herself that the man was indeed as odd as they had always suspected.
Things even got to the point that Kierkegaard’s tailor, C. M. Ku ̈nitzer of
Vimmelskaftet, informed Kierkegaard in desperation that all the talk about
the trousers, which had been his handiwork, could damage the reputation
of his business, so if Kierkegaard found himself another tailor, Ku ̈nitzer
would be the last person to complain.
Despite their amateurish qualities, the caricature drawings of Kierkegaard
in his uneven trousers can thus be said to have been a veritable stroke of
genius, and even though the idea behind them was clearly a blow below
the belt (indeed, as far below as could be imagined) the caricatures had a
remarkable durability. This was especially so because they had an elemental
polemical power that was doubly disarming. For one thing, they empha-
sized and exaggerated a chance detail it would have been ludicrous for Kier-
kegaard to defend himself against—one does not, after all, run announce-
ments in the newspaper, denying allegations about one’s trousers. And for
another, in a more general sense the caricatures directed attention to Kier-
kegaard’s physical appearance, his body, which was not his strong point.
When Kierkegaard launched his attack on Møller he felt sure of victory,
writing “I will catch Mr. P.L.M. in his own trap,” but we are tempted to
ask whether the result was not exactly the opposite—that is, whether Møller
had not caught Kierkegaard in a leghold trap. Significantly, it was notThe
Corsair’s text, but Klæstrup’s caricature drawings on which Kierkegaard
commented in his journals, where he again and again attempted to escape
from his humiliation by making light of the matter. “I am accustomed to
terrors other than the childish one of being drawn with... the alarmingly
thin legs of a less-than-obscure philosopher,” he wrote repeatedly, dis-
playing his uniquely vulnerable heroism. And that was certainly true, the
part about the other terrors, but it only made a bad situation worse. “I
commit myself to writing a much different sort of witty articles about myself
and my legs than Goldschmidt is capable of,” Kierkegaard announced later,
but in the same stroke of the pen he himself realized precisely that if the
articles featured adifferent sortof wit, “the mob would not be able to under-
stand them.” Thus it was of no help that in the company of an intellectual
like Carl Weis he “could laugh heartily” at the entire crazy situation: “In-
deed, when he and I laugh at my thin legs, I presume that we have a com-
mon basis in essential intellectual cultivation. If I were to laugh at them
together with the mob, it would imply that I acknowledge having a com-
mon basis with it.” And that was simply not the case.