Existential Meditation on Morality: Janne Teller’s Nothing

The epigraph for this discussion on Janne Teller’s (2010) Nothing, an artful and iconoclastic work of young adult fiction from Denmark, comes from the notebooks of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Intended as a critique of academia (British Broadcasting, 2013), the sentiment expressed is offensive and amusing. If we understand “the system” as code for academia (reflective of Kierkegaard’s contempt for the professoriate) (British Broadcasting, 2013; Kaufman, 1975), then Kierkegaard here implies that a bird on a branch is more seriously reflective than a professor at a university, or that a philosopher in a tree comes closer than an academic to the legitimate province of philosophy. To arrive at Kierkegaard’s sense of the mission or responsibility of philosophy, we must draw, again, from the author’s notebooks in which he writes: “What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as a certain understanding must precede every action” (1835/2001, p. 15). This remark suggests that, for Kierkegaard, the protocol for moral action is personal, reflective, and perhaps necessarily undertaken at a remove, like the philosopher/bird on a twig. At the same time, as Kaufman has observed (Partially Examined Life, 2011), the statement represents Kierkegaard’s critique on the limits of reason or his objection to the academic premium placed on logic as the ultimate path to understanding. Therefore, the bird on a twig might be viewed as metaphoric of the retreat of the thinker to a place apart from institutionally sanctioned practices and beliefs. This situation is mirrored in another story of a thinker who took to the trees, Janne Teller’s (2010) Batchelder Award-winning novel, Nothing. In Teller’s stylistically austere, existential allegory, a middle school student named Pierre Anthon, who lives in the town of Tæring [“a verb meaning to gradually consume, corrode, or eat through” (p. 229)], announces that “nothing matters . . . [s]o nothing is worth doing” (p. 1). Thereafter, he quits school and takes up residence in a plum tree. From his position above the doings of Tæring society, Pierre Anthon pelts his peers from the seventh-grade class with over-ripe fruit and “truth bombs,” or deconstructive statements that threaten the social and ontological sense of order and coherence that the kids have always accepted without question. From there, the seventh graders work to assemble an object lesson that will disabuse Anthon of his skepticism, but their plan degenerates into chaos. In the end—true to its existential roots—Teller’s Nothing proposes no answers to the questions it raises, nor does it offer an alternative belief system to replace the one the philosopher in the tree debunks. The reader is left only with a menacing admonition from the narrator of the story, Agnes, and must make personal sense of the moral message conveyed by the text.