Kierkegaard, Schumann, and the Musical-Religious: An Approach to Literary Polyvocality

Of Kierkegaard’s most frequently discussed literary or stylistic strategies is his peculiar use of pseudonymity. Kierkegaard employs pseudonymity not merely as a mask to cover over the author’s real identity, but instead as the creation of wholly unique fictional personae to whom authorship of various writings is ascribed. And while there are a number of other authors who do this, Kierkegaard is in a minority of such authors who write works authored by multiple different pseudonymous authors (in addition to works ascribed to himself), so that his authorship is characterized by multiple different authorial voices, each inhabiting a point of view of their own.

Kierkegaard himself describes the purpose of such authorial polyvocality as related to a division in his authorship between “aesthetic” and “religious” works—or, those works engaged in “indirect communication” and those which attempt to communicate “directly”—and he asserts that the overall ultimate purpose of his writing is religious in nature. Most interpretations of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymity treat it as unique in the history of letters, in its multiplicity and the depth to which Kierkegaard crafts his authorial personae, but as some have noted, other examples of such polyvocality in authorship do exist. Perhaps most notably, in early twentieth-century literature there is the example of Fernando Pessoa’s “heteronyms.” Even in Kierkegaard’s own nineteenth century, however, comparable practices of polyvocal pseudonymous authorship can be found. In this paper, I wish to argue that two of these examples in particular—Johan Ludvig Heiberg and Robert Schumann—are especially instructive in coming to understand the nature and purpose of Kierkegaard’s polyvocality.

Like many of the literary figures of the day—including Kierkegaard himself—Heiberg was engaged frequently in writing for the Danish press. While much of Heiberg’s own pseudonymous and anonymous production was of a fairly typical sort (the use of a single Greek or Latin letter in place of his name), he did produce a series of works under the names of fictional persons. Heiberg’s polyvocality seems to have been motivated by the German Romantics, and the belief that an author ought to introduce an absolute distance between him- or herself and the works they write. Although there were various means employed to achieve the goal of authorial distance, pseudonymity was a common one. The more and more diverse pseudonymous personae employed by an author like Heiberg, the further away from him those written works become: that is, the less readers are justified in reading those works as extensions or expressions of real human authors, and the more they would be forced to read the works on their own merits, as independently existing creatures of their (real or pseudonymous) authors. This is a view with which the young Kierkegaard appears to have had at least some sympathy, as in his early critique of Hans Christian Andersen as an author.

Schumann, although primarily a composer, was one of the most literary and creative music critics in the first half of the nineteenth century. He conceived of a mode of criticism which relied upon the literary interaction of multiple different fictional personae, authors who articulated their own points of view on musical works (and, in at least one case, cooperated in the composition of a musical work themselves)—starting in an 1831 article wherein four pseudonymous personae discuss a piece by Chopin. With those first of Schumann’s pseudonymous critics—Florestan, Eusebius, Raro, and Julius—began Schumann’s “Davidsbündler,” an entirely literary music society composed of pseudonymous critics whose “conversations” about music were published in his Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. Schumann’s justification for engaging in polyvocality lies in his understanding of the nature of music, which, according to Schumann, could not be adequately captured or described in mere language. This is of course a real problem for music criticism, given that criticism is a linguistic endeavor. For Schumann, the problem appears to have been resolved in writing through multiple voices and points of view on a single musical work; so doing created an unarticulated space between the pseudonymous writing voices in which, for the reader, some response to the musical work could appear. Precisely because music cannot be finally articulated in language, when working in language to discuss music, one must decenter any sort of finalizing, totalizing point of view.

Ultimately, I wish to argue that, despite the shared cultural context and the very real influence of Heiberg on the young Kierkegaard, Kierkegaardian polyvocality is better understood as an instance of something like Schumannian rather than Heibergian pseudonymity. Although much can be said about the distance the pseudonyms create between Kierkegaard and his readers, that distance only ever achieves something like an aesthetic approximation of the ethical: an attempt to mediate various philosophical and theological concepts by way of language, just a language that is not exactly Kierkegaard’s. Such a reading sets the pseudonyms at perhaps a very great distance from Kierkegaard—but also at that same distance from each other, isolating the reader with each authorial persona, one at a time, in some kind of master sequence (first A, then B, then Johannes de Silentio, etc.). Kierkegaard is doing something other than this with his multiple authorial personae, I argue, something more than this: he is preventing any one authorial voice from having the final word on existence. This refusal to say the last word—occasioned by the saying of many other words in many different voices—privileges the reader’s immediate existential relationship with faith, anxiety, despair, and the like over any linguistically or conceptually mediated understanding thereof. And it is in this existential immediacy that I think we find (albeit perhaps in different ways) our way to an appreciation and appropriation of both music and the religious. Following Schumann in using a literary tool—pseudonymous polyvocality—in a musical way, Kierkegaard opens space in his authorship for each individual reader to come into their own immediate relationship with Christianity and the religious, precisely by way of hearing all of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous voices at work simultaneously in the authorship.