Writing the Incommensurable

Writing the Incommensurable studies how the threat posed by the absence of an immanent God is explored in the works of Soren Kierkegaard, Christina Rossetti, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Mary Finn erects a theoretical framework in each chapter based on a pseudonymous work of Kierkegaard. In these works, Kierkegaard uses the discourses of philosophy, theology, and literature to plot the complicated path of a religious writer whose own impulse to write complicates - if it does not compromise - the religious vision she or he wants to communicate. The book is organized according to four Kierkegaardian categories: anxiety, lyric voice, repetition and radical choice. All four are responses to what Kierkegaard calls, the "incommensurable," the unnegotiable gap between subjectivity (and God) on the one hand and "actuality" on the other. This gap plagues the writer-believer while also enabling writing. In what dilemma, then, does a religious poet find herself or himself when out of the depths of personal doubt, lack of understanding, and religious inadequacy comes a literary success? Or this dilemma avoided by paradoxically refiguring failure as a measure of success, and, if so, can such a refiguring ever be fully trusted? As the notion of the subjective "self" acquires preeminence in the nineteenth century the particularized "writing self" is the entity Kierkegaard, Hopkins, and Rossetti fight to get beyond as religious believers. The futility of such an attempt results in a peculiar success: there is the writing itself, material evidence that the fight occurred, imbued with the pathos and beauty of all monuments erected to lost causes.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Philosophy, Nonfiction, Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.