Princess and Pea v. Knight of Faith

Most people like to know whether famous people living in the same place and roughly at the same time knew and liked each other. I certainly wanted to know that about Soren Kierkegaard and Hans Christian Andersen when I set off for Denmark in June. Andersen was older than Kierkegaard, having been born in Odense in 1805. He died in 1875 in Copenhagen, where he had spent the vast majority of his life. Andersen was incredibly prolific; in addition to 175 fairy tales, he wrote 14 novels and short stories, 50 dramatic works and about 800 poems. His creative endeavors were not limited to words; he had quite talent for drawing and paper-cuts. One of his first jobs was as a puppeteer, but I digress.

Kierkegaard and Andersen, Round One

In 1838, an article appeared by S. Kjerkegaard titled, "From the Papers of One Still Living Published Against His Will." This was a review of Hans Christian Andersen’s "Only a Fiddler." While Kierkegaard did not regard this as part of his main body of work, it contains themes that recur throughout much of that work. In the piece, Kierkegaard levels the criticism that Andersen lacks a life-view, which is "the transubstantiation of experience; it is an unshakable certainty in oneself won from all experience, whether this has oriented itself only in all worldly relationships (a purely human standpoint, Stoicism, for example) by which means it keeps itself from contacts with a deeper experience—or whether in its heavenward direction (the religious) it has found therein the center as much for its heavenly as its earthly existence…"⁽¹⁾ Individuals must not passively experience life, but rather they must transform it. Kierkegaard’s complaint is that a novelist must have a life-view; it is the sine qua non of authentic writing. The life-view is what gives a novel its center of gravity. Kierkegaard admits that he encounters situations and experiences in Andersen’s writing that are poetic and beautiful, but the absence of a life-view means that these situations are left undigested, unused and unfiltered (18).

Kierkegaard is quite clear in his essay that he is not arguing for the content of a life-view, or that one view is valid and another not. Rather, he is arguing that everyone, especially a novelist, must have one. Furthermore, he wants to dispute the validity of claiming that not having a life-view is having a life-view of sorts. Perhaps more than anything, Kierkegaard wants to combat a certain kind of passivity towards experience that is both cause and consequence of a lack of a life-view. What Kierkegaard seems to find most upsetting is that Andersen regards passivity as belonging to genius. Kierkegaard quotes from Andersen "Genius is an egg that needs warmth for fertilization of good fortune; otherwise it becomes a wind-egg" and "He had intimations of the pearl in his soul, the glorious pearl of art; he did not know that like the pearl in the sea it must await the diver who brings it up to the light or cling fast to the mussels and oysters, the high fellowship of patrons, in order to come to view in this way (16). But if anyone should be active with respect to experience and (as Kierkegaard says) its transubstantiation, it is those who possess genius. Genius isn’t so much an innate property of the individual as an involvement with the world of experience through critical reflection and self-awareness.

Kierkegaard and Andersen, Round Two

Andersen, in his autobiography, The Fairy Tale of My Life, wrote that he and Kierkegaard were probably the only two people who had read "From the Papers of One Still Living." In his fairy tale, "Galoshes of Fortune," Andersen caricatures Kierkegaard as a parrot. In this story there are two fairies sitting in a cloakroom in a wealthy home. The younger one is not Fortune herself but "lady’s-maid to one of her ladies of the Bedchamber who carry round her smaller gifts." The elderly one is Sorrow, "who does all the errands herself, in her own person, to make sure they are carried out properly." The younger fairy had in her possession a pair of golden galoshes that transport the person wearing them to the place or time where he would most like to be. Every wish as to time and place will be immediately granted. Sorrow claimed that the wearer of the galoshes would be most miserable, while Fortune’s lady-maid claimed the person would be most happy. To settle the dispute, they decided to leave the galoshes by the door and observe what happens. Various people put on the galoshes, and find themselves exactly where they said they always wanted to be, but were miserable.

The parrot (that is, Kierkegaard) appears in section five, "The Transformation of the Copying Clerk." Here, an industrious copy clerk puts on the galoshes, thinking that they are his. As he is taking a stroll, he encounters a poet who is off again on another trip. Wishing that he himself could be poet, full of wonderful and beautiful thoughts and possessing a high degree of freedom, he becomes more poetic, and begins to notice things in ways that are new to him. Checking in his pockets, he finds not the documents that he was to copy, but rather his own creative work. Just for verisimilitude, he finds a rejection letter from the director of a theater. As he walks along, the clerk sees birds. Mournful of his rejection, he wishes that he were a bird instead. He becomes a bird who is captured and sold to a boy living in Copenhagen. The clerk, now a common lark, is put into a room with a canary and parrot. The parrot is capable of only one sentence in human speech, which was "Come, do let’s be men!" The parrot, canary, and the former clerk/now lark can understand each other, and while the canary mourns her lost freedom, the parrot claims to be better off, living in a cage and being well fed. The parrot knows that he is well informed and witty, while the canary, he says has genius but is very unsteady. The clerk/lark listens to this, and when the canary tells him that his cage is open and he should fly away, he escapes back to his own lodging. There, unthinkingly, he says to himself, "Come, do let’s be men," and he is transformed back to his former self.

A caricatured Kierkegaard also makes an appearance as a hairdresser in 1840 in A Comedy in the Open Air: Vaudeville in One Act Based on the Old Comedy An Actor Against His Will. The subtitle bears striking resemblance to Kierkegaard’s own subtitle of "From the Papers of One Still Living Against His Will."

In 1848 and 1849, Kierkegaard and Andersen went on to exchange gifts of some of their published works along with friendly greetings. This was, as far as I know, the extent of their contact.

 (1)The Essential Kierkegaard, edited by Howard and Edna Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000, p 13