Peel the onion of personas, from one to the next, moving further and further inside the book.
Listen to this, Harry. You remember when you first read it. The sentence comes right near the end of the first volume. You are still in Part I. It shook you hard. Remember? He was your own being, wasn’t he? Not Cordelia.
No, that’s a lie. Poor Cordelia. But that poor is the something you spit out, reject, cough up, vomit out. Not always, not always, but the seduction is complete, his of you, not as a woman but as a man. I am Johannes. The reader Johannes seduces becomes Johannes — in part. There’s the knot. Look at the knot. It is so dull, so familiar, so unjust being treated as a woman first, always as a woman. I rebel. Why womanliness first? Why this trait first? Inescapable.
Dr. F. noticed that I was wearing a skirt. He knows. It is only the second time in all these years, he said. It is noteworthy. It was a show of vulnerability. The ones in skirts are vulnerable. This is the history of women in skirts.
Women fall, drop from the skies, one after the other, falling and falling again. Open your thighs, beloved, and I will hurl you over the cliff to your death. Vagina as battleground. Vagina as ruin. But he never says, Let me in. That is the coup. Her only power is in not letting him in. I will cross my legs tightly.
Cross your thighs, Cordelia.
The Seducer writes, “Everything is a metaphor. I myself am a myth about myself, for is it not a myth that I hasten to this tryst? Who I am is irrelevant; everything finite and temporal is forgotten; only the eternal remains, the power of erotic longing, its bliss.”
The Seducer lives only on the page. He is a phantasm of A, who is a phantasm of Eremita, the editor of Either/Or, who is in turn a phantasm of Søren Kierkegaard, long dead and animated by his pages.
Isn’t A appalled by his own aesthetic invention?I
We are all myths to ourselves.
Johannes is going to fuck Cordelia.
And then he will leave her.
S.K. loved Regina, and he left her. He did not literally screw her, it seems. He left her virginity for another, but he hurt her to the quick.II
“I shall not bid her farewell,” writes Johannes, “nothing is more revolting than the feminine tears and pleas that alter everything and yet are essentially meaningless. I did love her, but from now on she can no longer occupy my soul. If I were a god, I would do for her what Neptune did for the nymph: transform her into a man.”
There they are, the last five words: the razor.
I will transform myself into a man through Rune.
Will I become Johannes?
But Johannes was not Søren. He wasn’t A. No, he was not. We know S.K. believed in women’s tears and women’s pleas and women’s prayers. And I am not Rune. And yet, and yet, and yet, I am he somewhere else, in the phantasmagoria. Let me whisper in your ear. Let me whisper that the fantasy man with the dialectical whip is Søren, too. A trickster. I will borrow a trickster self.
Look at me, a Prometheus. I am myself a myth about myself. Who I am has nothing to do with it.
I. Burden compares the role she wants Rune to play to Kierkegaard’s use of Johannes, the pseudonymous author of “A Seducer’s Diary,” the final section of Either/Or, Part I. In the diary, Johannes writes about his seduction of Cordelia, which he manages with such consummate skill that she imagines she is pursuing him. Part I is an “onion” of pseudonymity. The editor, Victor Eremita, writes the preface for Part I. A is the character who occupies the aesthetic point of view in the first volume and declares himself the editor of “A Seducer’s Diary,” but not its author. Following Eremita, Burden understands that Johannes is A’s fictional creature, the pseudonym of a pseudonym, a “metaphor” and a “myth” that represents an extreme aesthetic position of reflection. A is horrified by his own creation. In the preface Eremita writes, “It really seems as if A himself has become afraid of his fiction, which, like a troubled dream, continued to make him feel uneasy, also in the telling” (Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. III, 9).
II. Kierkegaard met Regina Olsen in 1837 when he was twenty-four and she was fourteen. They became engaged in 1840, but a year later he broke the engagement, leaving Regina by all accounts in despair. Kierkegaard writes, “So, there was nothing else for me to do but to venture to the uttermost, to support her, if possible, by means of a deception, to do everything to repel her from me in order to rekindle her pride.” Quoted in Joachim Garff, Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, trans. Bruce H. Kirmmse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 186. Although he repeatedly declares his love for her in his journals, the reason for his withdrawal from his promise has been the subject of endless scholarly speculation. Despite her fascination with Kierkegaard, Burden thought S.K.’s relations with Regina were “perverse.” In Notebook K, she writes, “Regina occupies the remote space assigned to all female love objects and muses. Poor Regina! Poor Cordelia! I turn the tables!”
Harriet Burden Notebook A
May 4, 2001
Bruno is writing a memoir. I must not show that I am too happy about it. He’s just fooling around, he says, having a little fun. He’s waltzing. That’s what he should have done all along, the stubborn S.O.B., waltzed, had a little fun instead of bleeding out those verses for the millennium. But I must not gloat or preen or he may stop just to spite me. Dear Bear, what have you done with all those years of your life? I want you to write that caustic, tender, bullish man into a book. Make him up, darling, if you have to. He’s there.
A passage he read to me about ice cream on the boardwalk at Coney Island, about his mother pulling her hand away after he had reached for hers — the cold chocolate had run into his palm. So tiny, this moment, but taken as a slap, its sound reverberating over many years. What do they say? A difficult woman. She was a difficult woman. Heads shaking over difficult women. We are all difficult women. Was Bruno’s mother more difficult? No, but she was Bruno’s mother. Just now, this word difficult looks mad to me, an insane spelling of a word I cannot recognize anymore.
Aven told me that Julie said, “I won’t be your friend anymore.” Aven’s mouth stretched into a grimace. “But then,” she said, “you wouldn’t believe it. The next day she forgot!” Aven doesn’t forget. She is one of us.
Mother plays in my body like a tune. Her voice returns, old and hoarse, as she thinks through time. “He loved me more at the end.” And when I ask her what she means, she says, “More than he did in the beginning. I loved him. I put your father on a pedestal, but he ran away from me.”
And I see my father running away with long strides over hills and dales.
He punished her with silence.
“I rarely got a word in at a dinner party, you know. I brought in the food and I cleared the table and I listened, but when I began to speak, he would cut me off. Once, after a party, I brought it up. I said that I had felt bad about it, hurt. He didn’t answer me, but the next time we had a dinner, he said nothing, not a word.”
“That was cruel,” I said to Mother.
Dr. F. has heard it all now. I remember my mother.
“Don’t forget,” my mother said in the hospital. “You’re a Jew.”
“I won’t forget, Mother.”