Oregon Humanities Spring/Summer 2007

Cover of Oregon Humanities Spring/Summer 2007
Kathleen Holt
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Hiding Men

Kierkegaard's silent scream

By Tracy Daugherty

Kierkegaard has a secret. In an 1843 journal entry he writes, "After my death no one will find in my papers the slightest information ... about what has really filled my life; no one will find ... the rupture ... in my innermost being that interprets everything." He suggests that, without this key, his literary output cannot be properly understood. There is no way to read Kierkegaard. We can only misread him.

Yet the readers he draws seize on him with a fervent, almost personal, passion. "Kierkegaard knew very clearly how matters stood," Franz Kafka wrote in his diary in 1913. "He is on my side of the world. He bears me out like a friend."

The painter Edvard Munch felt as Kafka did. According to Mark C. Taylor, professor of humanities at Williams College, Munch's painting The Scream is a visual representation of the emotional core in Kierkegaard's work. Though the painting was finished before Munch read Kierkegaard, Munch later affirmed that he found "remarkable parallels" between himself and the philosopher. In The Scream, a tortured figure stands on a wooden bridge, emitting a noise that nearby strollers fail to hear. It is beyond their normal understanding. The figure's trouble remains obscure--not because he hasn't let it out, but because he has let it out in a way that others cannot register.

What is this silent scream in Kierkegaard that tugged at Kafka and Munch?

Scholars have long speculated, based on Kierkegaard's journals, that his hidden wound had something to do with his father. As a youth, Michael Kierkegaard blasphemed God, an act he later blamed for casting a curse on his family. All of his children, save Soren and his older brother, died quite young, as did Michael's first wife. These tragedies compounded his already gloomy temperament and led him to raise Soren in a harsh, overprotective manner with strict Christian discipline. Soren developed a depressive view of life. For a while, as a young man, he broke with his father.

Paternal battles consumed Kafka as well. A letter, found in his papers after his death, begins, "Dearest Father, You asked me recently why I mention that I am afraid of you. As usual, I was unable to think of any answer to your question, partly for the very reason that I am afraid of you. ... And if I try to give you an answer in writing, it will still be very incomplete." He never sent the letter.

In a little blue notebook, Kafka scrawled a series of aphorisms based on his reading of Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard's meditation on the ultimate father-son conflict, the one between Abraham and Isaac. Kierkegaard ponders Abraham's inability to explain his secret--his willingness to sacrifice his son for the Lord. Kafka concludes that Abraham suffers from an arrogant "spiritual poverty." He puts himself above the common run of men. Abraham's real problem, Kafka insists, is his "insufficiently profound mingling with the ... world."

In the unsent letter, Kafka says that his father is a "veiled" man, not even pretending to be engaged with his family or the world around him.

Did these remote and frightening fathers, Kierkegaard's and Kafka's, sacrifice their sons' mental health in their striving for religious and social propriety? Kierkegaard certainly believed that this was his family story. Though he reconciled with his father shortly before the older man died, his resentment lingered. In his journals he complains that his was not a proper childhood.

Taylor argues that Munch's kinship with Kierkegaard and Kafka rests in Oedipal terror. The Scream's inception lies in an earlier painting by Munch, The Dead Mother and Her Child. A boy, standing beside his mother's deathbed, opens his mouth to scream. "If we read The Scream in terms of the sketches from which it came and the paintings to which it led, we discover a fascinating chain of signs," Taylor says. "Despair ... The Scream ... Anxiety ... The Dead Mother." Anxiety, Taylor reminds us, appears in Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death as the "way in which every individual experiences the primordial guilt associated with original sin."

Our hidden men seem to have experienced "original sin" in an unusually personal manner. In Kierkegaard's home, birth and iniquity were one and the same. His mother was the family's house servant, impregnated by his father shortly after the death of Michael's wife. As a result of this "fall," Michael Kierkegaard withdrew from society. He hurled himself into strenuous religious study and sacrificed any chance Soren might have had for a normal upbringing. Not once in his writing does Kierkegaard mention his mother.

The American writer Donald Barthelme (whose best-known novel, a retelling of Oedipal myths, is called The Dead Father) once said that "by bypassing" a subject in writing, "you are able to present it in a much stronger way than if you confronted it directly. I mean there are some things that have to be done by backing into them ... indirection is a way of presenting the thing that somehow works more strongly" to sharpen the emotion.

In the father's shadow, much remains hidden. Silent screams. Absent mothers. Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, an avid reader of Kierkegaard, said that, as soon as we name our love, we have spoiled it by exposing it to the world's harshness. Or to the father's anger. In a similar spirit, the psychologist Hubert Benoit says that a child who has, rightly or wrongly, felt itself "despised" in the Oedipal crush will approach love and eros indirectly, in fear.

Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that the narratives we encounter in Kierkegaard and Kafka proceed surreptitiously, or that each new literary generation produces a certain number of hiding men. As Barthelme writes, in a love story called "Rebecca," "Do I want to be loved in spite of [my flaws]? Do you? Does anyone? But aren't we all, to some degree?" In a whisper, his narrator concludes, "[This] story ... was written for several reasons. Nine of them are secrets."

Published in the Spring/Summer 2007 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2007 Oregon Council for the Humanities