Irresoluteness

A blog for Saturday night? But I’m too tired. I was going to write about Kierkegaard’s Stages on Life Way (I sense he is going to become as important here as Tarkovsky …) The most pleasant sight: Stages on Life’s Way on my office desk. There it is, a handsome paperback, deep blue with a line profile of Kierkegaard’s face on the front. London, 1993: that’s what I wrote on the title page. I want to write about the novella ‘Guilty/ Not Guilty’ that is part of this volume …

There are various kinds of melancholy in Kierkegaard. Melancholi is the word that, perhaps, characterises Repetition – it is not yet the religiously impelled Tungsind of Stages on Life’s Way. Do not translate Tungsind as depression. Well, like Repetition, ‘Guilty/ Not Guilty’, which is also known colloquially as Quidam’s Diary, after its ostensibly narrator, is framed as a psychological experiment – in this case, by Frater Taciturnus. There are various distancing effects – the diary itself is said to date from 1751, and to have been disovered in a trunk at the bottom of a lake. Furthermore, it comprises ‘morning’ entries – written one year after the events it reports, and ‘midnight’ entries, far more gloomy.

Just as with Repetition, this is a book about love, about the failure of love. But the failure, according to Quidam, arises out his religiosity. For Quidam, even if he is not religious yet, is struggling to be so – struggling, that is, with the Tungsind that, as Frater Taciturnus points out is ‘the condensed possibility that must be experienced through a crisis in order that he can become clear to himself in the religious’. Quidam, the Diarist, wonders whether or not he is guilty of torturing himself for the sake of a religious vocation from which marriage would have debarred him. But does he ever become religious? He wavers; he indulges himself; he does not struggle to reach the actuality of the religious life.

A crucial expression: Indesluttedhed, inclosing reserve. The full sentence from which I quoted above reads: ‘His inclosing reserve is eesentially a form of Tungsind, and his Tungsind in turn is the condensed possibility that must be experienced through a crisis in order that he can becomc clear to himself in the religious’ (427). This is what characterises the Diary itself – it leads nowhere; Quidam despairs, but despair does not carry him forward. It is as though he remains in the thunderstorm of Repetition – a thunderstorm which never ends even as it appears to bestow the future. Some would argue that the Diary is boring; I do not find it so. There is little drama here – or at least the drama is unresolved. But I like reading these pages in the same way as I enjoy the pages of the unexpurgated diaries of Anais Nin – a strange taste, I know, but like many of the books and films I like its turmoil, its movement in itself is such that it does not permit resolution.

Often I will lay a book like Blanchot’s The Last Man open in a room as though the room itself could read it – lay it there and come to it, read a few pages and then return later that day or the next. The same with the book translated as Waiting for Oblivion, although the small typeface makes it much less pleasurable to read. (On that subject – didn’t Kafka ask that his book be printed in a very large typeface? Think of some of the Calder editions of later Beckett – remember how marvellous those pages look, with a typeface so enormous that a piece of 1000 words is stretched over 20 pages.)

To remain in possibility: what Quidam evades is his guilt, which he cannot, according to Taciturnus, grasp through comprehension. His inclosing reserve has led him too far, but it has not yet led him far enough. He is suspended – he has not decided. Here I remember what Heidegger calls the Nothing which is encountered, if that is the right word, only in a kind of hovering or indecisiveness. You are unable to decide; you hover, exposed. Who are you? No one at all, or no one yet.

I love the books where one finds this shifting locus, this opening which has not coalesced into a self. I love the books in which an event does not happening – does not round itself off into an ending. For a long time, I kept a record of the books I read (I used to read a great deal). But then, in 1993, I found myself merely rereading; rather than read new books, I read and reread books like Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet – the same with Stig Dagerman’s A Burnt Child. In those years, when I was unemployed, or able to find only casual labour, I was able, for the first time, to appreciate Beckett’s Trilogy, and in particular The Unnameable. I am not writing this to retrace my autobiography (how boring!), but only to note, for myself, when a new kind of reading became necessary. I remember going to Denmark that year, and taking several volumes of Kierkegaard with me. Was it to prepare to apply for postgraduate study? It must have been then that I encountered Bataille and Blanchot for the first time, authors I have been rereading ever since.

Where was I? Quidam, Frater Taciturnus writes, is a fiction – a venture in experimental psychology. With the creation of Quidam, one can study ‘the normal in the aberration’ (398). The young man of Repetition was also said to be a fiction (C. C.’s) (contrary to what I wrote yesterday, he should not be assumed to be young man of ‘In Vino Veritas’, which is to say, real). Then Quidam, like the young man, is the fiction of a fiction – an experiment conducted by a heteronym. Why did this become necessary to Kierkegaard? Behind all this, there is the story of his own broken engagement which should be explored in detail (it remains mysterious, however). I will not try to solve anything today … it is already late, and there will be time, later, to bring myself once again into the strangeness of an oeuvre which struggles against itself, swarming, as if it was the author of Repetition and Stages on Life’s Way who was unable to decide to decide, or to bring himself into a decision and not just his heteronyms and his heteronym’s fictions. Kierkegaard’s irresoluteness – that’s what fascinates me.

Last night, I ended by writing of a repetition through which nothing is given back. Now I know that this repetition is there in Kierkegaard’s great oeuvre – it is as though the text is more irresolute than Kierkegaard will allow. A reading of Kierkegaard has begun to open itself to me. Doubtless, though, it will remain sheer possibility, and I, like Quidam, will accomplish nothing. Still, isn’t this the peculiar joy of blogging – of writing without responsibility? Of writing without having to condense what I write into a paper or a book? Blogging is writing’s drift, an irresoluteness without momentum. Remain in the thunderstorm, then. Tungsind is without issue; but writing’s melancholy is also writing’s joy.