Who If Not He? A Narrative Semiotic Reading of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or

Abstract

There is nowhere a truth that would teach me who I have to be; a truth that I would not understand if I had not already become who I have to be. Vincent Descombes This essay proposes an interpretation of Kierkegaard's Either/Or I (1987) [1845] from a narrative semiotic perspective. It aims to show how the philosophy of life communicated in this book is constructed by a creative manipulation of linguistic signs and a hidden presence of narrative patterns. Some clarifications may be helpful in elucidating this potentially controversial theoretical standpoint on Kierkegaard's philosophy. My desire to understand Either/Or led me to search for ways that I could use my experience as semiotician and narratologist to shed light on what at first seemed to me like an obscure and mystifying collection of riddles. This in turn encouraged me to approach the text on its own terms, as a self-contained entity, instead of placing it in a tradition of thought and comparing it with other philosophical or religious ideologies like perhaps a more conventional interpretation would do. In this respect I engaged with the text from an outsider's perspective, and therefore as an innocent to expert opinion. The resulting reading of Either/Or is in terms of the world that it constructs through its stylistic structure and writing strategy more than in terms of its intertextual references to other philosophic texts. Following the advice of Maurice Blanchot (1988), who wrote that to truly understand a book one has to give oneself to it, I attempted to blend my voice with that of the writer and to reach an understanding of the text by following its movement. The Narrative Framework Before concentrating on Either/Or, a background description of some pertinent narratological concepts would be useful. A widely accepted method of narratological analysis, which will be followed here, distinguishes two textual levels, the story and the discourse (Chatman 1978 and 1990, Prince 1982, Marsen 1998). The level of story contains events, settings and agents-the propositional content of the narrative. The level of discourse contains the linguistic organization, spatio-temporal and deictic structures, and the semiotic code (i.e., whether a text is verbal, visual, etc.)-the presentational form of the narrative. In this scheme, the role of the narrator, the presenter of information, is paramount. Even when not playing a specific role in the story, the narrator is logically presupposed by any utterance as its emanating and organizing source, responsible for the amount, detail, hierarchical order and evaluation of the information presented. Typologies of the narrator formulated in the 1970s and 80s, the peak of narratological interest, tended to focus on action, i.e., whether or not the narrator is an agent in the story, and/or knowledge, i.e., what and how much the narrator knows in relation to the (other) agents (Genette 1972, Bal 1977, Bremond 1973, Coste 1989). In the last decade or so, focus has shifted from text analysis to ideo-cultural issues of power relations and representations of identity (Jameson, 1998, Gibson, 1996, Currie, 1998). The reading proposed in this essay attempts a synthesis of these approaches. It aims to show how the philosophy of life that is communicated in and by the text depends not only on the propositional level (what is said), but also on the relations between who speaks, who sees (whose perspective orients the story), and who knows (the ideological and epistemological sources of knowledge that legitimize the presented information). These relations can be traced in the organization of textual sequences and in discursive structures, and create an identity of the narrator. The identity or presence of the narrator that emerges through these textual relations determines, to a considerable extent, the meaning attributed to the text by the reader. In terms of this approach, the narrator not only describes different possibilities of life; he also incarnates different possibilities of life, seeks the freedom to incarnate them, or seeks ways to abandon them. …