Soren Kierkegaard
There is a caricature not yet extinct in popular culture of an effete romantic, one who will still write poetry about moonbeams, fall hopelessly in love with girls who laugh at him, brood at night on how to interpret a sidelong glance, deplore the crude manners of tradesmen. It is interesting that this caricature exists at all: generally a caricature is an exaggerated representation of a familiar real-life original. But in modern fiction I can’t think of any such vorbild: one has to go back at least 60 years. It might be that the original is familiar to people from reality.
Kierkegaard’s seducer is a refined aesthete, taken to the nth power and folded back on itself, but there is no suggestion of a hard fall to reality ever impending. Such a fall is not even conceivable. When we enter the seducer’s world, through the means of this diary, we enter a scheme of aesthetics & ethics that is the world, and only the ignorant turf-cutters and servants cannot be expected to participate.
Read on …
The seducer is a young gentleman in Copenhagen around the year 1840. The worldview and sensitivities of the seducer may broadly be taken to be that of young Soren’s at the time. He begins by describing his observations of girls: girls stepping down from a coach, putting an umbrella up in the rain, squealing with delight at fancy articles, taking off a glove, curtseying, waiting anxiously, hurrying through an art gallery, standing calmly in a doorway, walking slowly preoccupied with her thoughts.
Her head is perfectly oval; she tilts it a little, thereby accentuating her forehead, which rises pure and proud without any delineation of the powers of understanding. Her dark hair rings her forehead softly and gently. Her countenance is like a fruit, every angle fully rounded, her skin is transparent, like velvet to the touch – that I can feel with my eyes.
There is no consciousness of self-indulgence here. Not even when he gets his man-servant to wait six hours in the street to inform him when a particular young lady is passing, just so he can casually greet her and see her curtsey. This curtsey sets him in a very particular mood, and he has come to reply on seeing it. There is nothing more he wants from this girl. Yet there is not trace of absurdity in the prose.
He continues to roam, hunting down smiles from strangers.
I would give a hundred rix-dollars for a smile from a young girl in a street situation, and not ten for a hand squeeze at a party.
So at last he comes to Cordelia, the girl he wishes to seduce – that is, to seduce into falling in love with him. The moment of love-rapture is of value in itself, and to show its absolute nature, it is necessary that such a moment is not traded off against a signed and stamped validation by the world at large. It should be possible to discuss the aesthetics of love, its variations and development. Reasoning is an exercise in re-arranging content and deducing new content. But love-rapture is content itself. A women can dispense with reason in attaining new content. Similarly true lovers don’t need to fill silences with small talk; the silences themselves are full. There is a lot of such thinking, and the reader will sink into mires of thought. Because this diary was published as part of an extended work that has come to be regarded as philosophy, this Seducer’s Diary is interpreted through these concepts. The cover cries out for an image of a cute girl exposing a leg as she descend from a carriage; instead it has some abstract painting. The world at large in fact is ignoring what (K.?)/the narrator regards as “the interesting itself” and takes notice rather of the dialectic of ideas.
The work may be an attempt by K. to subjugate sexuality to intellect where in real life he had been so out of control it is excruciating to read of it.
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