Disclaimer: I’m giving myself a time and word limits for these posts (45 minutes, 1000 words), even though I know this could be way way longer.
The Sacrifice of Isaac, Caravaggio
As an undergraduate at Boston College, I discovered nineteenth century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, and promptly fell in love. Pretty much my entire life, I’ve had twin interests in fiction and philosophy, and with Kierkegaard, I found a philosopher who used fiction in fascinating ways. Two of Kierkegaard’s mentors were philosophers who wrote also fiction, so I guess he felt like he didn’t have to choose.
Kierkegaard deploys a number of rhetorical strategies, like using pseudonyms, parody, satire, and in general, trying to shake the reader out of her immersion in “the crowd”, that set of predictable stereotypical ideas inculcated in the emerging Danish middle class of the time. He’d release two contradictory works under different pseudonyms on the same day, break up the text by prefaces, forewords, strange pauses, postscripts, appendices. He’d use different pseudonyms in the same text, mark himself out as publisher of one text, editor of another, author of a third. He’d write in a deliberately opaque way, using paradoxes to keep the reader from full immersion. The text forces the reader back on herself. She has to stay alert, take responsibility, choose, be herself with regard to the text.
One of the best examples of Kierkegaard’s method is in Fear and Trembling, where he, writing as Johannes de Silentio (John the Silent) , ponders the story of Abraham and Isaac from Genesis. Kierkegaard thinks it is an incredible story and that Abraham is a remarkable man (a “knight of faith”). But Christians hear about it in church and kind of nod their heads and think about what’s next (lunch at noon?). From Kierkegaard’s point of view, “No one, in truth, was great as was Abraham, and who can understand him?” So he re-tells the story in four different ways, demonstrating many fascinating things about the both philosophy and literature: the paradox of faith, the suspension of the ethical, the unavoidability of the absurd, the importance of narrative, the power of indirect communication, and on and on.
I’ve always loved Fear and Trembling, but when I started studying feminist theory, I saw the text in a very different way. None of the re-written versions is from Sarah’s point of view (not to mention Isaac’s), or even considers her.
Here’s how Sarah appears in Kierkegaar’s revised narratives:
1. “He departed from his tent, and Isaac with him; but Sarah looked out of the window after them until they were out of sight.”
2. “It was in the early morning. Abraham arose betimes and embraced Sarah, the bride of his old age. And Sarah kissed Isaac who had taken the shame from her—Isaac, her pride, her hope for all coming generations.”
3. “It was in the early morning. Abraham arose betimes he kissed Sarah, the young mother, and Sarah kissed Isaac, her joy, her delight for all times. And Abraham rode on his way, lost in thought—he was thinking of Hagar and her son whom he had driven out into the wilderness.”
4. “He bade farewell to Sarah … Then they returned home again, and Sarah hastened to meet them.”
Kierkegaard draws our attention to so many things, but there’s a lot of important stuff that gets overlooked if we stay within his own problematic. Specifically, where is Sarah in all this? What is the assumed role of the mother in contrast to that of the father? When they couldn’t conceive, why was it Sarah who became the “laughingstock to all the people?” Why is it so much greater to sacrifice a child rather than protect him? Why didn’t Abraham sacrifice himself? What social norms themselves influence Kierkegaard’s notion of the knight of faith?
Kierkegaard says that Abraham suspended the ethical, in order to live the paradox of faith. When I was younger, I thrilled to the idea that there was a realm beyond social norms, beyond reason, a radically subjective place from which we can take ultimate responsibility for our decisions, a existential kind of heroism that I could — like Kierkegaard himself– admire but not emulate.
After getting a little older, reading feminist theory, and, not unimportantly, becoming a mother myself, I could never go back to my college -age awe. In the provocative title of this post I say feminism “curdled” Fear and Trembling, but I don’t really believe that’s true. I’ve lost something, yes, but I think I’ve gained a more critical, and more substantial perspective, one that will hopefully continue to become more subtle and complex, as long as I stay open to new interpretations (not easy), every time I read.
ps. For a more sustained feminist reflection, have a look at this very nice lecture by Carol Delaney, Associate Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology, Stanford University.
