General Introduction

by MADS FEDDER HENRIKSEN

Forskningscentret, December 2024

The literary career of Nicolaus Notabene begins in the second week of June 1844 with the publication, by the Copenhagen bookseller C. A. Reitzel, of a small octavo volume entitled Forord, indeholdende Prøver til et nyt Tidsskrift — Prefaces, containing Specimens for a New Journal. The volume bore upon its title page the pseudonym which would remain Notabene's principal authorial designation for the next three years, and the dedication, in the form customary to the period, to "the Most Honourable Reading Public" (det høistærede Læsende Publikum). It contained eight prefaces — short pieces of three to four thousand words each — and no books. The prefaces prefaced nothing.

This is, on its face, an unusual literary form. To publish prefaces without their books is to publish, in a literary sense, the gestures by which one announces a work rather than the work itself; it is to make the announcement the substance of the publication. The 1844 Forord is, to the present editor's knowledge, the only sustained example of this form in the literature of nineteenth-century Europe. Its closest precedents are the gestural prefatory pieces of certain seventeenth-century French préfaciers (Boisrobert, Sarasin) and the prefatory sketches occasionally produced by Jean Paul; in extent, in deliberateness, and in the seriousness with which it commits itself to its form, the Forord exceeds these precedents in ways the present introduction cannot adequately set forth.

The conceit of the Forord — and the framing fiction by which Notabene justifies the unusual literary form — is set forth in the volume's opening pages. Notabene declares that his wife has, at the time of their marriage in June 1830, made his consent to silence in the matter of authorship a condition of her consent to the marriage; that he has, accordingly, been forbidden to publish any book during the fourteen years of the marriage now elapsed; and that, after a number of failed attempts at authorship within the prohibition (the manuscripts of which were confiscated by his wife or destroyed by her in the parlour fire), he has at last reached, with her, a compromise: that he shall be permitted to publish prefaces — without the books they preface — at intervals of his own choosing. The wife, by Notabene's account, accepted the compromise "on the supposition that no one writes a preface without writing a book; from which she concluded that the compromise would protect the prohibition rather than dissolve it" (Forord, Til Læseren, § 3). The Forord of 1844 is the first published fruit of the compromise.

The eight prefaces of the 1844 Forord, considered as a sequence, address themselves to the principal features of the Copenhagen literary, philosophical, and religious culture of the early 1840s. Each preface — by a procedure of mock-deferential satirisation in which the targets are praised so elaborately that the praise itself becomes the satire — engages with a specific feature of the period's intellectual life. Preface I addresses the long-announced "Logical System" of Heiberg's Perseus and the broader speculative-systematic literature; Preface II addresses the conditions of literary reception in the Copenhagen marketplace; Preface III addresses the commercial loop of advertisement, review, and reprint; Preface IV addresses Heiberg's astronomical turn of the early 1840s; Preface V addresses the Selskab and Forening enthusiasms of the age; Preface VI addresses the speculative theology of the Heibergian-Hegelian establishment; Preface VII is the most personal of the eight, on which see below; Preface VIII addresses speculative philosophy in its post-Hegelian iterations.

The 1844 Forord itself, considered as a publication, was modestly received. A first printing of one thousand copies, distributed through Reitzel's retail channels, sold sufficiently to justify a second printing of five hundred copies in October of the same year; total documented sales by the close of 1845 were 1,247 copies. The principal notices are summarised in the apparatus to Volume I of the present edition.

What the Forord of 1844 did not contain, however, was the eight books to which its eight prefaces stood as prefaces. The books did not exist at the date of the Forord's publication. They had been announced; they had not been written. The 1844 Forord was, in this respect, fully consistent with its own framing fiction: an authorship-by-preface, in which the works themselves remained as the indeterminate matter the prefaces announced.

It is at this point that the present edition has its proper subject. Beginning with the publication of Urania, Aarbog for 1845 in the second week of December 1844 — six months after the Forord — Notabene undertook, over a period of two years and eight months, the composition and publication of the eight books which the 1844 prefaces had announced. Volume by volume, between December 1844 and February 1847, the phantom prefaces of the 1844 volume acquired their books. The eight phantom volumes are the works that the Forord of 1844 had introduced.

The relation between each Forord preface (1844) and the phantom volume that followed it (1844–47) is, in each case, distinct. In some cases — particularly Vols. I and IV — the phantom volume's own Fortale and structure closely follow the indications of the 1844 preface, and the phantom volume can plausibly be read as the direct fulfilment of what the preface announced. In other cases — particularly Vols. V and VI — the phantom volume departs from the preface's announcement in matters of form and emphasis, while remaining faithful to its programme. In one case — Vol. VII, the Philosophiske Smaastykker of 1847 — the relation is the most complex of all, since the 1844 preface (Forord VII) appears, on internal evidence, to have been originally drafted not for the book the Smaastykker eventually became but for an earlier project on the concept of anxiety that Notabene did not complete; the apparatus to Vol. VII treats this matter at length, as does the surviving fragment of the burnt March 1843 manuscript reproduced in Vol. IX.

The 1844 Forord, in short, is the founding document of the Notabene authorship. It announces the program; the eight phantom volumes carry it out. The present edition assumes the Forord as its background and addresses itself, in its nine volumes, to the works that the Forord prefigured. Forord itself has been authoritatively edited as part of the Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (vol. 4, ed. N. J. Cappelørn et al., Gads Forlag, 1997, pp. 469–531); the reader who wishes to consult it is referred to the SKS edition, which is also available in electronic form at sks.dk.

A word is required, in the present introduction, on the longstanding scholarly question of the authorship of the 1844 Forord. The matter is treated more fully in the apparatus to each of the eight phantom volumes; the present remarks are summary.

The Forord was published under the Notabene pseudonym. The pseudonym was, in 1844 and during the years of Notabene's active publication 1844–47, generally accepted by the Copenhagen literary public as belonging to a single living author — namely, the man whose civil name, Nicolaus Christian Bentzon (1805–1858), the present introduction has been using interchangeably with the pseudonym above. The biographical evidence for this identification is set forth in Volume IX (Liv og Tid af Nicolaus Notabene); the principal documentary materials are the Reitzel firm's correspondence, the Notabene-arkivet (Kgl. Bibl., NKS 4° 3204), and the Sagaktiv of the parish of Vor Frelser concerning the marriage and divorce.

A minority position in twentieth-century scholarship has, however, contested the Notabene identification. The principal contributions to this position are Lindhardt (1969, ch. 1), Bjørn (2018, pp. 23–42), and — in passing — Pattison (2014, pp. 56–59). The position holds that the 1844 Forord was composed not by Bentzon-Notabene but by S. Kierkegaard, working in collaboration with the Bentzon-Notabene of the eight subsequent phantom volumes or, in the more radical version, working independently and under his own established pseudonymous practice. The position rests on three considerations: (1) certain prose features of the 1844 Forord — particularly the rhetorical structures of Forord VII — show a closer affinity to Kierkegaard's contemporary pseudonymous prose than to the phantom volumes Notabene later composed; (2) the textual relation between Forord VII and Vigilius Haufniensis's Begrebet Angest of June 1844 (four days after the Forord) suggests an authorial collaboration deeper than mere chronological proximity would warrant; (3) the figure of "Notabene" in the 1844 Forord has features (in particular the elaborate framing of the wife's prohibition) which the eight subsequent phantom volumes do not develop with comparable rhetorical vigour, suggesting that the Forord presents a literary figure of Notabene that the subsequent volumes only partially fulfil.

The majority position, which the present edition follows, holds that the 1844 Forord and the eight phantom volumes are by a single hand — Bentzon-Notabene's — and that the textual relations to Kierkegaard's pseudonymous prose are best explained by Notabene's documented association with the Kierkegaard circle from the early 1840s onward, and by his evident debt to Kierkegaard's prose models. The principal contributions to this position are Vibskov (1958, ch. 5), Holm (2011, ch. 1), and Cappelørn (1997, "Notabene-spørgsmålet").

The matter is not, in the present editor's view, definitively settled. The present edition treats Bentzon-Notabene as the author of the 1844 Forord without prejudice to the minority position, which the apparatus reports.

The eight phantom volumes were composed during a period of intense literary activity stretching from the autumn of 1844 to February of 1847. The composition is documented, in such detail as the surviving materials permit, in the chronology of Vol. IX (§ I); the principal compositional sites were the country estate at Frederiksværk, inherited by Notabene from his aunt Vibeke Bentzon in 1845, and the Christianshavn residence shared with his wife. The publication sequence — by Notabene's own composition-order, which the present edition adopts as its primary reading-sequence for the reasons set forth in § VI below — was as follows:

The phantom volumes fall, by external biographical circumstance, into two clearly distinguishable phases. Phase I (Vols. IV, I, VIII, V, VI, III, II) comprises the seven volumes published while Notabene remained under the wife's prohibition; each is published under an editorial or publishing-fiction by which Notabene appears not as author but as editor, publisher, or intermediary. Phase II (Vol. VII alone) comprises the single volume Notabene composed and published after the wife's departure of August 1846; it is the only one of the eight to bear his name on the title page as author. The relation between the marital dissolution and the open signature on Vol. VII is treated in the apparatus to that volume and at length in Vibskov's essay reprinted as the closing chapter of Vol. IX.

The corpus passed, after Notabene's death in November 1858, into a long obscurity. The principal nineteenth-century re-publication — the 1888 Schubothe popular edition of Vol. I, edited by F. P. J. Dahl — circulated widely but presented the volume in an abridgement that suppressed the Anhang on the absent §§ 5 and following. Brandes's brief notices in Det moderne Gjennembruds Mænd (1883) accorded the corpus a place in the literary history of the 1840s but did not provoke a wider scholarly engagement. The first sustained twentieth-century recovery was the work of Frede Hertel (1873–1933), whose 1923 prospectus is reprinted at the head of the present introduction. Hertel's edition was not completed in his lifetime; the working materials he had assembled at the time of his death were transferred to Aage Bertelsen, who incorporated portions of them into the 1934 Bertelsen-Hertel edition of Philosophiske Overveielser, Andet Hefte — the manuscript discovered in the Reitzel attic in August 1932.

Asger Vibskov's biography Nicolaus Notabene: Liv og Tid (1958) reconstructed the principal features of the author's life from the available documentary materials and remained, for the next half-century, the standard biographical reference. Vibskov's 1962 essay Notabenes sene Tavshed (reprinted in Vol. IX) addressed the principal interpretive problem of the late authorship — the eleven-year silence from 1847 to Notabene's death — and proposed the reading that has since become canonical: that the late silence is itself "Notabene's ninth volume," in which the prohibition-form of the eight earlier volumes is permitted, by the lifting of its conditions, to settle into a stillness that the eight volumes themselves could not achieve.

The recovery accelerated after the establishment of the Søren Kierkegaard Forskningscentret in 1994 and the publication of the Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter edition (Gads Forlag, 1997–2013) under N. J. Cappelørn's general editorship. The Forskningscentret's secondary attention to the Notabene corpus was occasional during the SKS years; sustained editorial work began in 2014 with the present editor's appointment as Adjunkt and the support of the Carlsbergfondet for a preliminary survey of the surviving materials.

The decisive moment in the modern recovery was the 2019 Reitzel-firm centenary acquisition. In connection with the firm's 200-year anniversary (Reitzel having been founded in 1819, the firm subsisting through several reorganisations into Reitzels Forlag), the firm's storage premises in Vester Voldgade were inventoried for materials of historical interest. The inventory yielded, in addition to a substantial body of nineteenth-century commercial correspondence subsequently catalogued as NKS 4° 2989-A, a folder marked N. N. — Det logiske System, indlæg containing eleven manuscript leaves in Notabene's hand: a complete subscriber's roll of the 417 names to the Logical System; three drafts of the Specimen of the Marginalia; and two leaves of fair copy of the Tillæg til Anhang. The Notabene-arkivet was subsequently augmented by smaller donations from the Lindahl family (Notabene's brother-in-law's descendants) in 2020 and by the Bruun de Neergaard estate (Frøken Ulla's collateral heirs) in 2022; the manuscript holdings now stand at 47 separate folders catalogued under NKS 4° 3204.

The 2019 acquisitions necessitated the present new critical edition. The materials substantially augmented what had been previously known of the corpus's textual situation, and made possible — for the first time since Hertel's 1923 prospectus — a serious attempt at the comprehensive edition Hertel had envisioned.

The present edition is the work of the past six years, undertaken by the present editor in the office of Adjunkt at the Søren Kierkegaard Forskningscentret, with the support of the institutions and persons listed in § VII below. The principles followed in the edition are those of the SKS Editorial Committee (Editorial Principles, 2018), modified by such adjustments as the Notabene corpus warrants.

Textual basis. Each volume is edited from the first printing of the work in question (the Reitzel first edition of 1844–1847), collated against subsequent printings of evident authorial authority (in particular the Anden Udgave of Vol. I, which constitutes Vol. III) and against the manuscript materials in the Notabene-arkivet. The witnesses are designated by sigla: A (first printing), B–G (subsequent printings, in chronological order), L (the principal English-language translation of the volume, where one exists), M (the manuscript materials), G* (the German piracies, where they preserve a substantively distinct readings). The apparatus reports substantive variants; merely typographical variants are reported in the electronic apparatus available through the Forskningscentret's website (forskningscentret.ku.dk/notabene).

Bilingual presentation. The volumes are printed with the original Danish text on the verso and an English translation on the recto. The Danish text retains the orthography and punctuation of the first printing, with such typographical conventions of the period (long-s, double-aa for the modern å) as the witnesses preserve. The English translations are the present editor's, prepared during the residency periods 2022–24. The principles of translation are set forth in the Translator's Note in Vol. I, pp. xxiii–xxix.

Apparatus. Each volume contains: a short editor's introduction (1,200–1,800 words) on the volume's textual situation, recovery history, and editorial principles; a textual apparatus reporting substantive variants and the manuscript witnesses; an appendices section reproducing such materials as bear directly on the volume (reprinted reviews, manuscript fragments, subsequent-edition front matter, etc.); and a brief reception-history of the volume's transmission. The apparatus's prose is in English; the Danish quotations within it appear in their original form, with English translations supplied where the matter warrants.

The biographical companion. Vol. IX (Liv og Tid af Nicolaus Notabene) supplies the documentary materials bearing on the author's life: chronology, dramatis personae, the Skilsmissebrev of August 1846, the surviving fragment of the burnt March 1843 manuscript, the bibliography of works forbidden 1832–43, and a selection of the Notabene-Reitzel correspondence. The volume closes with the reprinted text of Vibskov's 1962 essay Notabenes sene Tavshed. The companion is integral to the edition and is intended to be consulted alongside the eight phantom volumes; it is not a separable biographical appendix.

The historical preface. Hertel's 1923 Prospectus is reprinted at the head of the present introduction as the first published statement of the project here at last brought to completion. The prospectus is reproduced from the 1923 printing without alteration save for the correction of typographical errors.

The corpus admits of two principal reading-sequences. The present edition takes a position on the question, while preserving the alternative for the reader who prefers it.

The first sequence is the biographical: the order in which Notabene composed and published the eight phantom volumes between December 1844 and February 1847. The biographical order is: IV — I — VIII — V — VI — III — II — VII. It traces the development of the authorship as it actually unfolded; it permits the reader to follow Notabene's compositional decisions across the seven volumes of Phase I and to perceive Vol. VII as the work that the wife's August 1846 departure made possible.

The second sequence is the editorial: the order in which the eight prefaces appeared in the original 1844 Forord, that is, the order I — II — III — IV — V — VI — VII — VIII. The editorial order has the advantage of historical primacy — it is the order in which Notabene first presented the works to the reading public, in their preface-form, at the Forord's publication. It has the disadvantage of inverting the actual sequence of composition: under the editorial order, Vol. IV is read fourth, although it was the first composed; Vol. VII is read seventh, although it was the eighth and last to be published.

The present edition takes the biographical order as its primary reading-sequence. The volumes' spines are nevertheless numbered in the editorial order (I through VIII) to preserve the conventional citation that the previous century of scholarship has established. The reader is invited to follow either sequence: the biographical order is the order in which the works grew; the editorial order is the order in which the prefaces were first announced. Both orders honour aspects of the corpus; the present edition does not regard either as exclusively correct.

The biographical order is recommended by the present editor for first readings; the editorial order will, the present editor expects, recommend itself to readers familiar with the corpus.

The present edition has been made possible by the support of the Norden Foundation of Minneapolis, established 1976 for the translation and scholarly publication in English of significant works of Scandinavian literature and thought. The Foundation's Critical Editions Programme underwrote the present editor's residency at the Søren Kierkegaard Forskningscentret during the periods 2018–2020, 2022–2023, and 2023–2024, and supported the bilingual production and translation costs which the present edition has required. The Foundation has, since 1981, supported the English-language critical editions of Sibbern (1992), of Poul Møller (2001), and of the Maanedsskrift for Litteratur selections (2008); the present edition is the Foundation's most substantial Danish project to date and the first to extend over the full corpus of a single nineteenth-century author. The present editor's gratitude to the Foundation, and to its director Frances K. Olafsson, is too great for adequate expression in the present formulae.

The Søren Kierkegaard Forskningscentret has supported the project throughout, in the institutional forms of office space, library access, and the consultations of its standing editorial committee. The present editor's particular thanks are due to Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, who in retirement has consulted with the present editor on the textual relations between the Forord and the contemporary Kierkegaardian pseudonymous prose, and to Anders Holm, whose 2011 monograph has been the principal modern starting-point for the present edition's textual decisions.

The Royal Library of Copenhagen has, through its Manuscript Division and its Special Collections, made available the principal documentary materials and has permitted the reproduction in the apparatus of such manuscript leaves as the edition requires. The present editor's thanks are due to Manuscript Librarian Mette Borg and to Special Collections Curator Søren Bjerg.

The Reitzel firm — now Reitzels Forlag — has been a generous partner in the project. The 2019 attic acquisitions which prompted the present new edition were made possible by the firm's cooperation; the firm has waived the customary publication permissions for the manuscript materials in the present edition. The present editor is particularly grateful to the firm's director, Mette Bregendahl, for her continuing interest in a corpus that the firm published 180 years ago.

The Wroot Press of Austin, Texas, has been the present edition's publisher of record. The Press, through the personal interest of its proprietor in the small body of mid-nineteenth-century Danish literature concerning literary form, has undertaken the unusual production requirements of the present edition — the bilingual layout, the parallel-column treatment in Vol. V, the manuscript-facsimile plates, the slipcase with its inserted reading-order card — without the commercial pressures that a larger press would have brought to bear. The present editor's gratitude to Wroot Press is, similarly, beyond formulae.

Among individual readers and consultants, the present editor's thanks are due to: H. P. Stenbæk (for advice on the Frederiksværk parish records); Frances K. Olafsson (for consultation on the translation principles, in addition to the Foundation's institutional support); George Pattison (Oxford, em.); David Possen (Saint Olaf College); the late Sylvia Walsh (1937–2022, whose 1994 Notabene paper in Kierkegaardiana the present editor's apparatus has cited at several points); and the late Frede Hertel, in whose 1923 prospectus the present project has at last received its public completion.

I close with an observation which the cultivated reader is at liberty to set aside as the editor's own.

The Notabene corpus is a body of work that has organised its substance around a particular formal constraint. The constraint is the wife's prohibition; the form is the preface-without-its-book; the substance is whatever the form has admitted into itself. Each of the eight phantom volumes is a different way of practising the form. Vol. I practises it by writing a logical system whose introduction is the entirety of the system; Vol. IV practises it by writing a gift-annual whose contents are continuations of someone else's astronomical labour; Vol. VI practises it by writing twenty-four sermons of which only four are written; Vol. VII practises it by writing a preface whose book has been taken away.

The form is not, on inspection, a literary trick. It is a serious philosophical proposal. The proposal — which Notabene develops differently in each of the eight volumes but which I should venture, in this closing observation, to render as a single sentence — is that the conditions under which a man writes are not external to what he writes; that an authorship is constituted as much by what it has been forbidden as by what it has been permitted; and that an authorship which acknowledges its conditions openly, which writes under and through its prohibitions rather than around them, is an authorship that has access to a kind of literary form which an unconstrained authorship cannot reach. The eight phantom volumes are, in this respect, an authorship whose form is its argument.

Whether the reader will accept the argument is the reader's own matter. The present edition undertakes only to make the authorship available, in a form that does justice to its particularity, and to leave the assessment to the reader who has read it. I commit the edition to him, with the same confidence and the same anxiety which Notabene himself, in the closing sentences of Smaastykker, committed his own to the reader who would, in the year then beginning, take down the small unornamented volume with its plain title and its plain signature.

— M. F. H. Forskningscentret, December 2024