First performed as a one-act play in 1955, Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge was later rewritten and restaged as a full-length, two-act play. Miller's Introduction to the second version comments on both the expansion of the play and its source. Of the latter, Miller remarks: “I had known the story of A View from the Bridge for a long time. A water-front worker who had known Eddie's prototype told it to me. I had never thought to make a play of it because it was too complete, there was nothing I could add.” In Timebends, his autobiography, Miller speaks at length of his interest in the Brooklyn waterfront and of his relationship with Vincent James “Vinny” Longhi, whom he describes as “a new member of the bar with political ambitions.” Longhi and Longhi's friend, Mitch Berenson, sought out Miller to help them make known and keep alive the work of Pete Panto, a young longshoreman who had earned a gangland execution for attempting to foment a revolt against the union leadership of Joseph Ryan, the corrupt and probably Mafia-affiliated then head of the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA).

The story of German idealism is the story of Kant and the aftermath. By aftermath I mean the Aufhebung of critical philosophy in the speculative idealisms of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. The latter, of course, took himself to be the Aufhebung of Fichte and Schelling as well as Kant, to say nothing of Plato and Aristotle, Anselm and Aquinas, Descartes and Spinoza, and so forth.

The gods are jealous and do not tolerate such hubris. So German idealism involves a second aftermath, this time with Hegel rather than Kant as the subject of simultaneous critique (cancellation) and appropriation (preservation). Speculation, mediation, reconciliation, and the Idea are names by which Hegel designates a single strategy for trumping the tradition and becoming its fulfillment. The most unkindest cut of all for Hegel was to be himself out-trumped by Feuerbach, Marx, and Kierkegaard. The various ways in which his massive Aufhebung was aufgehoben in the 1840s make up one of the most fascinating stories in the history of philosophy.

Kierkegaard is a major figure in this story; he is one of the great anti-Hegelians. There are other illuminating ways to read his writings. He is a religious thinker in the Augustinian tradition. As such he is also an existentialist, a postmodernist, and a critical social theorist. But each of these stories will have to include an account of his complex relation to Hegel. The relation is complex precisely because it is an Aufhebung. There is appropriation as well as negation, and Kierkegaard is never simply anti-Hegelian.

Has it ever occurred to you, dear reader, to entertain just a little doubt concerning the well-known principle that the outer is the inner and the inner is the outer? Well, frankly, this doubt has not plagued the present author so very much. Or at least a historian cannot be nearly as much a doubter on this score as Victor Eremita, opening his editorial remarks in Either/Or, would seem to want him to be.

Let us consider the following examples. On 19 October 1855, when he lay dying in Frederik's Hospital, Søren Kierkegaard had a caller. It was his brother, the theologian and pastor Peter Christian Kierkegaard, later a bishop and briefly a cabinet minister. Peter had traveled from his parish at Pedersborg-by-Søro in west-central Zealand, in those days a considerable journey. Søren refused to receive his brother, who went home the next day. That same day Søren admitted his friend Emil Boesen for a visit. Boesen asked him if he wished to receive the Eucharist. “Yes,” answered Kierkegaard, “but from a layman, not a pastor.” Boesen protested that this would be difficult to arrange. “Then I will die without it.” Gerkegaard explained his position by stating that “pastors are civil servants of the Crown - they have nothing to do with Christianity.”

Irony ranks high among Kierkegaard's enduring philosophical preoccupations. His writing career may be said to begin with his most sustained explicit treatment of the subject, his university thesis On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates. This was, as it turned out, far from his last word on the subject. Although he never again essayed a comprehensive theoretical account of irony, the subject recurs as a topic of discussion throughout his authorship, often accompanied by supporting references (or at least allusions) to the thesis. Even more pervasive than his remarks on irony is his employment of it, and of other varieties of verbal indirectness. Precisely how many, and which, of the utterances in Kierkegaard's texts should be taken as ironical (or in some way indirect) is a matter of considerable controversy - a controversy that has naturally intensified with the entry of poststructuralist critics onto the field of Kierkegaard interpretation. But one need not share the views of self-described postmodernists or poststructuralists to regard it as a truism that any adequate reading of Kierkegaard must confront both his announced views on irony and other modes of indirect discourse, and his highly deliberate and self-conscious employment of such modes.

Writing on war did not begin with the twentieth century. Far from it: the whole tradition of epic can be defined as, precisely, literature of war. Nevertheless it is only in our own century that it has expanded to become a major genre. There are of course nineteenth-century antecedents in French: best known, La Chartreuse de Parme, where Stendhal takes Fabrice del Dongo on a gratuitous excursion to Waterloo. But these pages, famous though they are, amount to less than a tenth of a very long novel. Zola's La Débâcle (1892) is the most important individual nineteenth-century novel devoted to the theme of war, taking in its sweep both the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune which followed. La Débâcle has acted as a seminal work, since many of the typical incidents of First- and Second-World-War narratives appear, if only in embryo, in its pages, together with the dominant theme of war as confusion, a humiliating shambles. And at the same time as presenting the war as experienced by individual characters, Zola succeeds in incorporating into his fiction a bird's eye survey of the conflict, almost from a historian's viewpoint, in a way no writer was to emulate until Jules Romains in the late 1930s. His description of the shattering defeat of the French armies at the hands of the Prussians prefigures, precisely, the even greater debacle of May-June 1940.

Some questions are perennial, forever reemerging in textbooks when the debate is highly abstract but occasionally changing history when someone acts dramatically on conviction. Think of Socrates asking “What can we know?” and being willing to drink the hemlock, or of Jesus asking “Who should we love?” and being willing to stretch his body on a cross. A third enduring question - “Are we meaningfully free?” - is the chief focus of this essay. I do not expect to settle the ancient debate about freedom of the will, but I do hope to situate it theologically by critically examining Søren Kierkegaard's views in light of some significant precursors. Kierkegaard worries about how to balance the contingency and fallibility of human deliberation and choice with the indispensability and reliability of divine providence, but he does not treat these matters abstractly or in isolation. He is too Socratic for mere abstraction about human freedom; indeed, his fully Christian understanding is highly dramatic (even paradoxical) at times, in an effort to be true to lived complexity.

'Popular' literature is valued because it gives direct access to the collective heartbeat. Cultural historians, formalists (who seek out its structures) and psycho-sociologists look to it to reveal the permanence of the communal experience. But literature which is popular has properties which, though definable, are too elusive to take any single shape. Cinderella, Robin Hood and Robinson Crusoe are all popular in different ways. The first is a folk myth sired by a Darwinian process of survival. The second is a folk hero shaped by anonymous hands out of a real life. The third is a character in a book written by an individual. Nineteenth-century France was familiar with all three types. 'Bonhomme Misère' - Poverty - survived in the cheap tracts hawked by pedlars known as littérature de colportage; Napoleon was turned into a new Charlemagne; and d'Artagnan was a legend in his creator's lifetime. But after 1800, popular literature began to acquire a new common denominator: it was transmitted by the printed page. No longer expressed by word of myth, it resumed its career in created fictions.

When are we in despair? Is it when we find ourselves powerless to grasp or retain some salient good? Or when it seems nothing can be done to prevent our world collapsing? Or when the running out of possibilities has left us now paralyzed? What exactly is despair? Is it the experience itself, the sheer sense of hopelessness? Or is despair what our lives are thenceforth “in” once what we so “desperately” want proves beyond reach? Habits or rules of language give us no clear answers here, but psychology may help. It seems clear that any lingering sense of frustration and hopelessness assumes some continued but problematic interest in the salient good once hoped for, or now lost.

As several contributors to this volume have indicated, the modern French novel has shown a particularly strong capacity for questioning and redefining itself. This dynamic of constant self-renewal expresses the broader vitality of modernism at large, understood as a general ethos informing a variety of artistic movements since the 1880s, all bent on expanding, and in some cases exploding, a space of representation deemed to be unduly monopolised by codes inherited from the past. In the modern novel, as in the visual arts, the main codes under attack are those sustained by the orthodoxy of classical nineteenth-century realism, with the attack itself often being justified in the name of a 'higher' form of the same basic mimetic urge, such as 'psychological' realism, which prioritises the inner world of human subjectivity, or 'phenomenological' realism, which tracks the outer world as physically experienced by a human subject. Modernism, then, is characterised by a strongly felt need to effect a break with the past, which in turn generates a search, often conducted in an experimental spirit, for new forms and modes of artistic expression. In the twentieth century, this modernist logic of rupture and renewal, central to the very concept of an 'avant-garde', provides the framework within which most theorising about the novel has taken place.

In 1801, in the preface to Atala, the first runaway bestseller of the new century, Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand offered an account of his text's evolution in the traumatic decade of the French Revolution. Atala was not a novel at all, he claimed, but a segment of an epic on Native Americans planned before the Revolution. He called this fragment of his writings from a trip to the United States in 1791 a 'sort of poem' (Œuvres romanesques et voyages, ed. Maurice Regard (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), vol. 1, p. 17) modelled on works of classical antiquity. Transformed in form and purpose by the events of the Revolution and Terror, this little book no longer figured as part of an epic, but was now offered up as a pre-publication teaser for its author's monumental historical and philosophical treatise, Le Génie du christianisme (1802) to which he claimed it now belonged.

For more than a century, Atala and its pair, René (1802), have served as the inaugural texts in a critical history of the modern French novel. By means of these fictions, and especially of Rene, Chateaubriand has been credited with inventing the 'Romantic novel', the 'autobiographical novel', even Romanticism itself. Immensely popular and critically appreciated for decades, these two works did indeed sound a clarion call at the dawn of the new century. They were marked by an indelible sense that the overturned 'natural order' could not be reinstated (see Œuvres romanesques, vol. 1, p. 17). For a young aristocrat like Chateaubriand, aged 31 in 1789, the Revolution had changed not just his financial or social expectations, but the entire vista of the future.

From a historical standpoint, the metaphor of 'decadence' implies that art and society must age, decline, and die like a human body. Prestigious dramatisations by Baudelaire (for example in 'La Géante' of Les Fleurs du mal, 1857) and Laforgue, as later by Eliot, Toynbee and Spengler, perpetuated this notion. One cannot limit considerations of decadence to the novel or to France: decadence was an international intellectual current that left its mark on historiography, philosophy, poetry, drama, prose fiction and the visual arts throughout Western Europe and England.

In history, the degeneracy of French society seemed to have been foreshadowed by the decline and fall of the ancient Roman and Byzantine Empires. In these empires, moral decay had led to military defeats that recalled the humiliating rout of the French armies in the recent Franco- Prussian War (1870), and the three-month takeover of Paris by the revolutionary Commune in 1871. The self-selected title of 'Second Empire' (1851-70) for the government of Louis Napoléon, himself a pale reflection of Napoleon I, invited comparisons with Imperial Rome. Afterwards, France tried to live down its shame. The spectacular Basilica of the Sacré-Coeur (constructed between 1875 and 1914) stands today on Montmartre as a monument of national expiation and as an expression of the will to moral renewal after 1870.

PRELIMINARIES

The Concept of Anxiety is a maddeningly difficult book. In one of the most lucid commentaries on this short tract, Arne Gron has suggested that the book is too difficult; in other words, it could have profited from another rewrite. In one of the central images of The Concept of Anxiety, anxiety is likened to dizziness. One reader of Kierkegaard has commented that the book attempts to evoke the very dizziness that it describes. Another prominent Kierkegaard scholar insists that the book is simply a spoof, devoid of any serious psychological insight. While I disagree with this scholar's assessment, I sympathize with his judgment that The Concept of Anxiety has elements of farce.

If someone were to articulate a Kierkegaardian ethic, one of the dictums would certainly be -be honest about what you know and do not know. In all honesty, I must confess that there are many passages in The Concept of Anxiety the meaning of which completely escapes me. Worse yet, Kierkegaard scholars are silent on most of these passages. Nevertheless, exasperating as it is, The Concept of Anxiety is a wise book. It is also a book that has exercised an enormous influence on philosophers such as Heidegger and Sartre and theologians such as Tillich, Barth, and Niebuhr. Moreover, if a single text needed to be chosen as the source book of existential psychology and psychoanalysis, it would most certainly be The Concept of Anxiety.

INTRODUCTION

In The Point of View for My Work as an Author Kierkegaard uses the concept of “the aesthetic” to establish one of the fundamental divisions of his authorship. Even more significantly, he seems to give to the question of whether the authorship is “aesthetic” or “religious” a pivotal place in defining the correct “point of view” from which to understand that authorship as a whole. We might therefore conclude that a concern with “the aesthetic” lies at the very heart of Kierkegaard's intellectual project.

But what is meant by “the aesthetic” here? When the aesthetic is defined as an “existence-sphere” in opposition to the religious, are we to assume that Kierkegaard has a particular grudge against the life-styles of artists and art lovers? Does writing a novel or going to the theatre exclude those who do such things from living ethically or religiously? Kierkegaard himself seems to have denied this quite conclusively in references to the feuilleton article The Crisis [and a Crisis] in the Life of an Actress he wrote in 1847, which paid tribute to Madame Heiberg's triumphant performance as Juliet, nineteen years after she had established her reputation as one of the stars of the Danish stage in that very role. The significance of this article, he claims, is that it refutes the view that “religion and Christianity are something one first has recourse to when one grows older” (PV 31). It showed that the religious aspect of his authorship did not simply replace the aesthetic. “That little article” (as he referred to it on several occasions) showed that an appropriate engagement with art could coexist alongside the religious.

It is almost trivially easy to distinguish between serious and popular fiction. We can do it on external criteria and rest safe in the assumption that anything published under, say, the Harlequin imprint, is unlikely to bring us new insights into the human condition. Previous generations have similarly turned to recognisable brand names. Around the time of the First World War, the titles in the 'Bibliotheque de ma Fille' announced themselves on the inside front cover as novels for young ladies. 'Les Romans Bleus' a generation later made the same claim more explicitly, asserting that they were for the (chastely) passionate young Frenchwoman of the day, modern, moral and respectable. Nor should it be assumed from the avowedly moralising character of these novels - irreproachable, upright and salutary as they proclaim themselves - that they are necessarily dull. Those who read (and still do read) them, read them avidly for enjoyment.

The ethics whose teleological suspension is at issue in Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling is the secular ethics of his own time. This secular ethics is the ethical that is contrasted with the aesthetic in his Either/Or. Scholars disagree about the relative importance of the Kantian and Hegelian strands in ethics thus conceived.I This is also the first ethics spoken of in the introduction to The Concept of Anxiety. Vigilius Haufniensis, the pseudonymous author of that work, tells us that “the first ethics was shipwrecked on the sinfulness of the single individual” (CA 20). It is only the second ethics, he goes on to say, that can deal with the manifestation of sin (CA 21). For Kierkegaard, the second ethics is a distinctively Christian ethics. His most thorough treatment of this ethics occurs in Works of Love. According to Bruce Kirmmse, this book is Kierkegaard's “major ethical work and one of the most important works in his entire authorship,” and it contains “his clearest and starkest formulation of a Christian ethics.” Hence most of this essay will be devoted to a discussion of Works of Love. Kierkegaard, however, writing under the pseudonym of Anti-Climacus, also treats Christian ethics from a somewhat different perspective in Practice in Christianity, and this essay will have something to say about that book as well.