Isak Dinesen and Narrativity 9780773573949

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Isak Dinesen

and Narrativity: Reassessments for the 1990s TADAC Papers III

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Isak Dinesen

and Narrativity: Reassessments for the 1990s Edited by Gurli A. Woods

Carleton University Press for The Centre for Textual Analysis, Discourse, and Culture

© Individual Authors, 1994 Printed and bound in Canada CANADIAN CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA Main entry under title: Isak Dinesen and Narrativity: reassessments for the 1990s ISBN 0-88629-244-1 (bound) ISBN 0-88629-245-x(pbk.) 1. Dinesen, Isak, 1885-1962 - Criticism and interpretation. 2. Feminist literary criticism. I. Woods, Gurli A. (Gurli Aagaard), 1942 PT8175.B545Z7 1994

839.8'1372

C94-900438-3

Carleton University Press

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Cover design and illustrations: The Gordon Creative Group Acknowledgements: Carleton University Press gratefully acknowledges the support extended to its publishing programme by the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council. The Press would also like to thank the Department of Canadian Heritage, Government of Canada, and the Government of Ontario through the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Recreation, for their assistance.

The early women of the women's movement were not only just, courageous, and unswervingly loyal—they were also sly! When they were repulsed from the ancient citadels of males, the strongholds of the church, science, and law, they adapted themselves as in their time the Achaeans did in Troy, by going within the walls in a wooden horse. That is, they made their entry in disguise, in a costume which intellectually or psychologically represented a male. . . . But today, woman has sprung out from the wooden horse and walks within the walls of the citadels. And she has certainly such a firm footing in the old strongholds that she can confidently open her visor and show the world that she is a woman and no disguised rogue. Isak Dinesen, "Oration at a Bonfire, Fourteen Years Later"

V

Acknowledgements Grateful acknowledgement is made to The University of Chicago Press for permission to reprint paragraphs from Susan Hardy Aiken's book Isak Dinesen and the Engendering of Narrative (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990). Grateful acknowledgement is made to the Rungstedlund Foundation in Denmark for permission to use, as an epigraph, a quote from "Oration at a Bonfire, Fourteen Years Later" from Daguerreotypes and Other Essays, and to use Cecil Beaton's 1959 portrait of Karen Blixen for the cover of the book. Grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and from the Office of the Dean of Graduate Studies and Research at Carleton University towards the conference on "Isak Dinesen: A Reassessment of Her Work for the 1990s" are gratefully acknowledged. Grants from the Dean of Arts of Carleton University and editorial assistance from the School of Comparative Literary Studies towards the preparation and publication of this volume are also gratefully acknowledged.

Vi

Table of Contents

Barry Rutland

ix

Preface

Gurli A. Woods

xi

Introduction

I. Gender and Feminist Perspectives Susan Hardy Aiken

3

Consuming Isak Dinesen

Kristjana Gunnars

25

Life as Fiction: Narrative Appropriation in Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa

H. Jill Scott

35

Sp(l)acing out of the (Sub)Text: Rewriting through Landscapes in Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa

Gurli A. Woods

47

Lilith and Gender Equality in Isak Dinesen's "The Supper at Elsinore" and "The Old Chevalier"

Kathryn Barnwell

62

Tapping the Roots: Hidden Sources of Power in Isak Dinesen's "The Dreamers"

II. The Symbolist Tradition Barbara Gabriel

79

Mallarme'an Poetics and Isak Dinesen's Politics in "The Blank Page"

Bo Hakon J0rgensen

102

The Poetics of the Story: On Symbolist Tendencies in Isak Dinesen's Fiction

Sara Stambaugh

115

Isak Dinesen Among the Victorians: Some Shared Symbolic Techniques

VII

viii

CONTENTS

III. Interpretive Strategies from Rhetoric to Deconstruction Morten Kyndrup

133

Isak Dinesen Versus Postmodernism: The Criticism of Modernity and the Problem of Non-simultaneousness in Relation to Isak Dinesen's Work

Albert W. Halsall

150

Methods of Narratology and Rhetoric for Analyzing Isak Dinesen's "The Blank Page"

Mark A. Kemp

165

The Silent Tale: Pragmatic Strategy in Isak Dinesen's "The Blank Page"

Casey Bjerregaard Black

180

The Phenomenon of Intertextuality and the Role of Androgyny in Isak Dinesen's "The Roads Round Pisa"

Toby Foshay

193

Isak Dinesen's "The Pearls:" Resentment and the Economy of Narrative

Cristina Gheorghe

204

Deconstructing the Fictional World of Isak Dinesen's "The Monkey"

221

Works Cited and Consulted

231

Index

238

Notes on the Contributors

Preface The present volume of essays, Isak Dinesen and Narrativity, edited by my colleague Gurli A. Woods, is the outcome of a group research project undertaken by the Centre for Textual Analysis, Discourse, and Culture (TADAC) of the School of Comparative Literary Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. TADAC, founded in 1984, is dedicated to bringing together faculty and graduate students at Carleton and elsewhere, in Canada and abroad, who are interested in the study of world literature within the broad context of general cultural theory and cultural history. Typically, Isak Dinesen and Narrativity began with an in-house seminar series, involving both faculty members and graduate students, on the Danish writer's work, to establish the parameters of investigation. Cristina Gheorghe, who contributes to this volume, was a driving force behind this project. The seminars led to an International Colloquium of invited speakers, generously funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and supported by the Dean of Arts, in 1990. Half a dozen recognized Dinesen scholars from North America and Europe joined the budding Carleton Dinesenists in two days of intensive delivery of papers and discussion. Subsequently, under the direction of Gurli Woods, through further exchanges among the participants, the results of the conference were developed into the articles that you now have before you, a substantial addition to Dinesen scholarship in terms of current scholarly interests and critical trends. In addition, the conference sparked further interest both at Carleton and elsewhere resulting in further contributions to this volume. Isak Dinesen and Narrativity is the third volume in TADA C Papers/ Cahiers TADAC, but the second to see print, following Volume I, Text and Ideology/Texte et ideologie (1988). Publication of Volume II, Gender and Narrativity/ Narrativite et les marques discursives de la sexualite, the outcome of the research undertaking that led directly to the Dinesen project, while close to completion, has been held up for technical reasons. Volume IV, The Critical Carnival, is currently being prepared for publication separately in English and in French. Barry Rutland Director, TADAC

IX

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Introduction Much has happened in Dinesen criticism in North America since Robert Langbaum launched his ground breaking study The Gayety of Vision in 1964. This book opened up the academic world in North America to an interest in the fiction of Danish writer Karen Blixen whose chosen pen name for her English speaking readers was Isak Dinesen. It is beyond the scope of this brief introduction to list the considerable amount of criticism published since then, but for the purposes of situating the present collection of Dinesen criticism in context, the following important factors should be mentioned. Despite the fact that Dinesen herself insisted that "feminism ... is a matter which I do not understand, and which I have never concerned myself with of my own volition" ("Oration at a Bonfire: Fourteen Years Later"), a number of women scholars in the 1970s and 80s turned their attention to Isak Dinesen from a feminist point of view, among them two of the North American contributors to the present collection of essays, who has each published milestones in Dinesen criticism from a feminist perspective: Sara Stambaugh published The Witch and the Goddess in the Stories of Isak Dinesen: A Feminist Reading in 1988, and in 1990 Susan Hardy Aiken's book Isak Dinesen and the Engendering of Narrative appeared. In addition, literary theorists began to discover that Dinesen's sophisticated narrative technique lends itself to a closer examination, and that it was rewarding to analyse her texts from the points of view of recent literary theory. For example, Morten Kyndrup, one of the Danish contributors, had already discussed Dinesen from the point of view of postmodernism in Det postmoderne (Copenhagen, 1986), and at the time of the Dinesen conference at Carleton University (see below), he was working on Dinesen as part of his book Framing and Fiction: Studies in the Rhetoric of Novel, Interpretation, and History, published in 1992. The Centre for Textual Analysis Discourse and Culture at Carleton University (TADAC) has been dealing with gender and narrativity and interpretive strategies based on recent developments in European and North American literary theory on an ongoing basis since its inception, and the TADAC conference on "Isak Dinesen: A Reassessment of Her Work for the 1990s" held in 1990 at Carleton University and dealing with these issues, was part of this ongoing research project. The conference featured many outstanding contributions which have now been published in this collection. Furthermore, the interest in the subject matter continued afterwards. Consequently, a number of excellent papers on Dinesen were subsequently submitted to TADAC and accepted for inclusion in this volume. Xi

xii ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY The volume now comprises fourteen essays of Dinesen criticism. We have divided the papers into three main sections, each focusing on specific issues. In the first one, "Gender and Feminist Perspectives," the articles concentrate on gender issues in connection with feminist aspects of Dinesen's writing. Other essays in this volume also deal with gender issues and feminist aspects (Gabriel, Gheorghe, and Stambaugh) and could therefore easily have been included in the first section as well. The second part focuses on "The Symbolist Tradition." Barbara Gabriel and Bo Hakon J0rgensen examine Dinesen's work in relation to the French Symbolist Movement, whereas Sara Stambaugh concentrates on similarities between the Victorian tradition and Dinesen's use of symbols. The third part, "Interpretive Strategies from Rhetoric to Deconstruction," features articles approaching Dinesen's work from a variety of critical stances: rhetoric, narratology, intertextuality, semiotics, and deconstruction. The first article in this collection is written by Susan Hardy Aiken, who needs no introduction to the Dinesen scholar following her ground breaking book referred to above. Aiken begins by discussing society's "appetite" for "consuming" its artists. She focuses on "the uneasy parallels between the recent technologization and commodification of Isak Dinesen and her texts as consumer items—in media events, commercial cuisine, the fashion industry, or academic conferences . . . and the cultural tendency, so pronounced in late capitalist societies, to commodify both the female body and the printed book as consumable objects of the (masculine) gaze, objects the "proper" end of which (like Africa in the colonial view) is to be mastered" (6). In the second part of her essay, Aiken draws parallels between "woman as a dark continent" and the colonialist enterprise in Africa. According to Aiken's analysis, gender makes a great deal of difference. Dinesen as a woman turns the African world into "the locus of liberation," "a space outside the bounds where she might elude the gender codes that would install her within what she called the 'narrow circle' of domesticity" (9). In the last part of her article, Aiken discusses Dinesen's "elaborate self-stagings" (18), "Babette's Feast," that "consummately festive narrative about consumption" (21), and "Carnival," and she demonstrates that, rather than allowing herself to be consumed by the patriarchal structures, Dinesen uses her "infinite foolery" to achieve "freedom and perpetually revitalizing possibilities" (24). Like Aiken, Kristjana Gunnars is concerned with Dinesen, the woman, in Out of Africa. When dealing with Out of Africa in the context of other writings, Aiken sees a certain empowerment behind Dinesen's conscious

INTRODUCTION

xiii

manipulation of her audiences, be it through her "self-stagings," or her characters, such as Babette, and despite her profound sense of loss at having to give up her farm. Gunnars, on the other hand, views Out of Africa as a piece of life writing which demonstrates Dinesen's feeling of "isolation from her own text, and her own life" (30). Gunnars stresses Dinesen's narrator's "own powerlessness" in relation to the jouissance of experiencing Africa with Denys Finch Hatton: "The pleasures described, like the pains, are not in her control" (33). To Gunnars, Out of Africa is a "typical 'woman's text.'" It is "a story of progressive silencing" (34). The third article in the first section also concentrates on Out of Africa. H. Jill Scott contends that in this book, Dinesen "uses landscape, place and space to show the construction of a uniquely feminine subjectivity." This relationship is reflexive in that "the female subject is both subject to and subject of her spatial surroundings" (36). The last two articles of Part I discuss Dinesen's use of the legends of The Wandering Jew, the Winged Sphinx, and Lilith. Gurli Woods' article explores how Dinesen, in "The Supper at Elsinore" and "The Old Chevalier" uses certain aspects of the old Hebrew legends of the Lilith figure to underline her quest for gender equality. Kathryn Barnwell investigates the legends of the Wandering Jew and the Sphinx, and the way in which Dinesen uses this material. Barnwell demonstrates that Dinesen makes clear "how intolerable patriarchally mapped subject positions are for both men and women" (69). She concludes that Dinesen's narrative suggests that the "subject positions open to Pellegrina as woman in the various discourses she encounters after the fire, are enclosing and limiting since in patriarchy the dominant position in any dual-gendered discourse will be open for and assumed by the man. Even then, the text suggests, while men may believe they are independent heros/actors, they are merely agents of patriarchal power and subject to its authority. The 'hero' believes in such power because he hopes eventually to partake in it, but in fact, he will not become its beneficiary any more than the woman who is denied direct access to the patriarchal order" (75-6). Part II of the present collection is entitled "The Symbolist Tradition." The first two articles in this section are concerned with Dinesen in relation to the Symbolist Movement in France towards the end of the 19th century. Barbara Gabriel links "The Blank Page" directly to the Mallarme'an Symbolist concept of "silence," "purity," and "lapage blanche" (79), while observing that Dinesen's story is "ironic, turning an historically self-reflexive poetics into a subversive politics" (80). Gabriel shows that "the discourses

xiv ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY of Symbolism provide the very conditions of possibility for central elements in Dinesen's textual play" (84) while at the same time pointing out how Dinesen radically interrogates gendered subjectivity, "subverting stable gender categories and presenting masculinity and femininity as masquerade" (86). In contrast to Gabriel's gender-oriented study of Dinesen in relation to Symbolism, Bo Hakon J0rgensen's study is mainly centered on aesthetics. J0rgensen uses "The Second Meeting" to illustrate Dinesen's "desire for unity" (108) and "The Cardinal's First Tale" as an example of Dinesen's inserting the individualized character of the novel, the character who can ask " Who am I," into the old story form where it traditionally does not belong. In other words, Dinesen's tales "illustrate the conflict between the poetics of the story and that of a private subjectivity seeking expression" (111). J0rgensen points out that the "transformation of private, sensual experiences into a world-view by means of symbolized, universal rhythms through suggestion constitutes the essential Symbolist project," and he suggests that Seven Gothic Tales would more aptly have been called "Seven Symbolist Tales" (112). Contrary to the two first articles in this section, which focus on the French Symbolist Movement, Sara Stambaugh's article deals with Dinesen's symbolic techniques as compared to those of the British Victorian poets, and she draws the conclusion that Dinesen shares the same tradition of investing a heavily symbolic content in narratives. Part III of the book is devoted to "Interpretive Strategies from Rhetoric to Deconstruction." The first article, by Morten Kyndrup, discusses what might be regarded as postmodern aspects of Dinesen's work. He examines Dinesen's narrative strategies for deceiving the reader and problematizing "truth" in an analysis of "The Deluge at Norderaey:" "Thus, the story is simultaneously taking the reader by the hand . . . and by [a] surprising pull in the pragmatic development of the story, making the substance of the statements indeterminable" (146). In other words, the story "deconstructs its level of statement through its construction of what could be called a selfdeconstructing complex form of enunciation, which, after all, gives reality to the statement, and makes it create its own self-constituted provisional truth within, conscious of, and by virtue of the frames which it itself is mounting" (149). In the second article, Albert Halsall discusses "The Blank Page" using narratological and rhetorical strategies, and after a thorough investigation of this relatively short narrative from these perspectives, he leaves the reader with the perplexing, wide open ending of the story: "Readers of the 'blank

INTRODUCTION

xv

page' [the white linen bed-covering]. . . including those who make the pilgrimage to the convent to view it, stand in silent meditation before this ambiguous icon. What direction their thoughts take, whether they praise or blame the royal parents for exposing their daughter's contract-breaking act, whether they praise or blame the act itself, or its perpetrators, or whether they praise or blame the latters' refusal to engage in semiotic sleight of hand, remain decisions about which we are not told. As existential readers, we may only turn ourselves into implied readers by solving the riddle that 'The Blank Page,' like any open work, imposes upon us" (163-64). The same tale is the focus of attention in Mark Kemp's article. Kemp employs Eco's approach to the ambiguous metafictional text to examine pragmatic strategies in "The Blank Page," thus revealing a series of paradoxes. Kemp concludes that "The Blank Page" is the "story of narrative power—who possesses it and the cost of that purchase." The metanarrative "calls attention to the problematical elements of fictional reality, of narrative power (particularly over the passive, overly-cooperative reader—in this story, princesses imprisoned in palaces), and of the ideological assumptions upon which a literary text or genre is based" (179). In the fourth article, Casey Bjerregaard Black examines gender roles in "The Roads Round Pisa" from an intertextual point of view. Following Jonathan Culler's method and terminology, Black establishes five levels of vraisemblance in Dinesen's tale, and he concludes that to read Dinesen and "be attuned to the verbal irony which emerges from the circular intertext is to read her as a modern writer—not as an anachronism—not as a copy of a nineteenth-century style—but as a writer of what Julia Kristeva, in describing Bakhtin's work on dialogical discourse, called the carnivalesque" (191). Furthermore, the "role of androgyny and intertextuality in "The Roads Round Pisa' ... is ultimately to subvert reality and to mark Dinesen as a dialogic or polyphonic writer" (192). The fifth article in this part is Toby Foshay's analysis of the economy of the narrative in "The Pearls." Foshay states that Dinesen's classical third person omniscient narration is "principally dedicated not to the unfolding of a conventional diachronic plot, but to the construction of a synchronic thematic structure" (193). "The Pearls" is also a piece of metafiction in that it "goes to the root of its own apprehension of itself as story about the cognitional primacy of storytelling" (199). In terms of gender specificity, Foshay contends that "Jensine recognizes through the negative and resentful nature of her feelings that the Christian and Romantic ideological construction of woman is the vehicle of her subjection and insignificance,

xvi ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY that she is not Christ but the serpent in this economy of identity, and that she is the conspirator in her own defeat and subjection in her very resentment at her husband's autonomy" (202). In the end, Foshay continues, Jensine "sees herself as temporal, as a narrative attached to the pearls, which become her embodiment in an economy, not of fear and of sacrifice but of interaction and play between consciousness and its physical, temporal, sexual, and narrative expressions" (202). She thus "renounces worldly subjective and subjected identity and embraces the play and ambiguity of allegorical representation of self in the pearls" (203). The last article of the collection "explores the ironic narrative strategies used by Isak Dinesen to construct and deconstruct, authenticate and disauthenticate her fictional world" (204) as illustrated by "The Monkey." According to Cristina Gheorghe, Dinesen "deconstructs what she portrays: a perfectly centered society, a patriarchal hierarchy" (204), and Gheorghe deconstructs Dinesen's narrative by analysing it from the point of view of Dolezel's four modal systems, or narrative worlds: the deontic, the analogical, the epistemic, and the alethic (209-10). A special note of thanks go to two graduate students at the time, Kristina Gheorghe and Stephen Barber, who helped organize the "Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen Workshops" held regularly at Carleton University in the winter of 1989 and fall/winter 1989-90. These workshops were very successful and sparked the interest in the international Dinesen conference referred to above. Other graduate students who assisted in the early stages of the time consuming task of preparing the manuscripts for publication, some requiring more editorial attention than others, include Penny Ironstone, Evelyn Huer, and Marcella Moc. Furthermore, a number of graduate students in the School of Comparative Literary Studies made important contributions to the production of this volume, especially my Editorial Assistant Kathy Quinn who in 1992-93 undertook the unenviable task of formatting and indexing the book, thus enabling my present Editorial Assistant, Christine Mains, to look after the final details of indexing, ensuring consistency, proofreading, and finally generating the camera ready copy. Finally I wish to thank the Director of TAD AC, Barry Rutland, for his expert advice in editorial matters, his never failing availability and assistance, and his commitment to seeing this project through. Gurli A. Woods Ottawa, December 1993

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Gender and Feminist Perspectives

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Consuming Isak Dinesen Susan Hardy Aiken University of Arizona I. Devouring Dinesen: Art(ist) as Commodity The man who finally filmed "Out of Africa," as a $30 million Christmas movie . . . , is best known for big-name Hollywood romances . . . "Out of Africa," which he also produced, is a sweeping costume drama made in Africa with intricate sets, imported lions (flown hi especially from California) and thousands of extras, some equipped with special $15-a-pair drooping latex ears.

Janet Maslin1 In the restaurants that offer the dinner, the fixed person charge averages $85 for the food, $110 with the wines. Serving Babette's feast to the American public was the idea of Alfred Rosenthal, president of By Invitation Only, Ltd., a New York event-planning firm hired by Orion Classics, the film's distributor, to coordinate a press dinner for the movie's New York opening.

Molly Bliss2 In the wake of the Academy-Award winning films of Out of Africa and Babette's Feast, "Isak Dinesen" has once again become a pop icon, the subject of fascinated speculation, fashionable imitation, and culinary fabrication. In the United States alone stories about her have turned up everywhere from the sophisticated reviews of the New York Times to the cruder pages of People magazine;3 her image inspired the so-called "Safari Look"4 and appeared on the cover of Banana Republic catalogues; and from coast to coast, those privileged few who possessed the purchase price have been able to regale themselves in posh restaurants on painstakingly reconstructed replicas of Babette's Feast. (It is indicative of the tone of

1

"The Pollak Touch," The New York Times Magazine. "Creating Babette's Feast," Diversions. 3 Jane Kramer, "The Eighth Gothic Tale," New York Times Book Review 17 July 1986; Susan Gubar, "Make Love, Not Dinner," New York Times Book Review 21 Dec. 1986; J.D. Reed, "Isak Dinesen," People 3 Feb. 1986. 4 See, for example, "Out of Africa and into the Fashion Spotlight" in the "Lifestyle" section of the Austin American-Statesman 10 Jan. 1986. 2

3

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these occasions that in the midst of a rhapsodic newspaper review of one such dinner in Los Angeles, a food editor lamented the fact that because sea turtles were protected as an endangered species, they were no longer—alas!—available for the soup.) Even Dinesen's books now appear as mere supplements to capitalist technology: paperback copies of Out of Africa, emblazoned with the insignia "Official Movie Tie-In Edition," bear the "bankable" images (Hollywood's term) of Robert Redford and Meryl Streep. For all their manifest triviality and sometimes sheer silliness, the diverse iconographies, inscriptions, and edibles now popularly associated with Isak Dinesen also raise disquieting questions, for they inevitably recall, on a massive scale, the social stir set off by Dinesen's own appearances in New York during her American visit in 1959. She became for a time the centre of media attention, the subject of public adoration, and the fetishized iconographic object of celebrated photographers like Cecil Beaton and Richard Avedon. Reading current Dinesen fads and fancies as signs of the politics and poetics of contemporary culture, one is led to wonder about the implications of Dinesen's own performative self-displays—her deployment of herself, especially in her later years, as a consumable artifact, a kind of simulacrum, the literal embodiment of her well-known dictum "by their masks ye shall know them." Should we, as some recent critics have done, simply dismiss the aging Dinesen as an aristocratic elitist who capitalized, in every sense, on her role as Baronessen and literary lioness?5 According to this reading, Dinesen herself must be seen as profoundly complicitous not only with a consumerist culture inseparable from what Gayle Rubin, following Emma Goldman, has called "the traffic in women,"6 but also with the widespread reactionary nostalgia recently evident in much contemporary popular culture of the West—especially the Anglo-American West—for an imperialist, aristocratic world, reconfigured by movies like A Passage to India, White Mischief, or Out of Africa itself; by television series like The Flame Trees of Thika or The Jewel in the Crown; by the wildly successful renewed promotion of texts like Beryl Markham's West With the Night; by fashion trends associated with the burgeoning popularity of retail clothing

5 For a particularly biting instance of such a reaction, see Kramer, "The Eighth Gothic Tale." 6 "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex," Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review, 1975): 157-210.

CONSUMING ISAK DINESEN

5

houses like the Banana Republic; by the proliferation—unprecedented since the 'twenties and early 'thirties—of safari tours, both literal and literary, to Africa;7 or by the coast-to-coast culinary hoopla generated by "Babette's Feast." The dismissive view of an elitist, commercialized Dinesen thus intersects with current dismissals of the Dinesen of Out of Africa as merely another colonialist writer—as Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Tiong'o has put it in a particularly scathing attack, "the baroness of blighted bloom turned author."8 Such a position is both tempting and easy to assume, not only because it enables the therapeutic venting of moral outrage and implicitly situates the critic in the role of ethical or intellectual superior, but also because it bears elements of undeniable historical accuracy. Dinesen did, after all, participate in and benefit from both the colonialist and the capitalist systems, to an extent that may seem appalling to a contemporary consciousness sensitized to the political implications of such complicity.9 In considering the import of her theatrical self-stagings in this context, I would frame my analysis by recalling Teresa de Lauretis' recent discussion of the recurrent figures of mask and masquerade in contemporary feminist theories. Contrasting white bourgeois feminism with the feminism of women of colour, de Lauretis notes that both mask and masquerade are "worn . . . as weapons of survival. But the former [used most often by women of colour], is there to represent a burden, imposed, constraining the expression of one's real identity," while "the latter [used most frequently by white women] is flaunted, or, if not, at least put on like a new dress which, even when required, does give some pleasure to the wearer." For those who feel denied the very ground of 7 See, for example, "Out of Africa, Then and Now," the front page article in the Travel section of the New York Times 12 Jan. 1986; Daniel Aubry, "Isak Dinesen's Kenya," in Travel and Leisure magazine Oct. 1986; "Out of Africa: Will a tourist trap rise from the ruins of Karen Blixen's coffee plantation?" Chicago Tribune 4 June 1986; and Sierra Club's glossy coffee-table picture book, Isak Dinesen's Africa (1985), its appearance timed to coincide with the release of the movie. 8 Prison Notes (Kenya: African Writers Series, 1981) 37. Cf. 34-36. 9 For an analysis of her life in Africa and relations to colonialism see Judith Thurman, Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller (New York: St. Martin's, 1982) 113-242; Abdul R. JanMohamed, Manichaean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1983), and Susan Hardy Aiken, Isak Dinesen and the Engendering of Narrative (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990) 2647, 246.

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identity, especially women of colour, "Verisimilitude, realism, positive images are the demands" made "of their own writing as critical and political practice; white women demand instead simulation, textual performances, double displacements. That . . . is difference indeed."10 Following de Lauretis' distinctions, one might argue that Dinesen's very ability to play with her various roles as forms of masquerade could be read as a sign of her privileged position. For despite her gender, her agonizing illness, and her financial struggles, she was still a member of the dominant order in terms of both race and class. To redirect Nancy Miller's apt remark about the phallus, "only those who have it can play with not having it"11—"it," in Dinesen's case, being a relatively secure identity and place in the material world of a Euro-American social order. But to use such facts as foundations for wholesale condemnation is at once simplistic and reductive. For as de Lauretis continues in a crucial qualification, while "mask and masquerade" may be "the terms of different demands," they are nevertheless not "terms inscribing different desires. . . they are signs for the same need for, and a very similar drive toward, the representation of a subjectivity that, however diverse its sociohistorical configurations and modes of expression, has come into its own as political consciousness" (Feminist 17). Whatever Dinesen's racial or class-based privileges, she still inhabited aphallocentric sociosymbolic order wherein her gender was the determinant of subordination. I want to approach these issues by pointing to the uneasy parallels between the recent technologization and commodification of Isak Dinesen and her texts as consumer items—in media events, commercial cuisine, the fashion industry, or academic conferences like the one of which this collection is the printed artifact—and the cultural tendency, so pronounced in late capitalist societies, to commodity both the female body and the printed book as consumable objects of the (masculine) gaze, objects the "proper" end of which (like Africa in the colonial view) is to be owned or mastered.12 I would argue that far from being simply a perpetuator of

10

Introduction, Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986) 17. 11 "The Text's Heroine: A Feminist Critic and Her Fictions," Diacritics 12 (1982): 53. 12 For analyses of the gaze as a form of phallocentric appropriation, the expression of the desire for mastery over woman as object/spectacle, see John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972) 45-82; Laura Mulvey, "Visual

CONSUMING ISAK DINESEN

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reactionary ideologies, Dinesen anticipated insights of contemporary critics like de Lauretis by deconstructing or radically ironizing her own selfrepresentations in both autobiographical texts and public performances. In this context I shall consider, through a series of brief and necessarily incomplete readings, the operations of that process in the three instances that have attracted the most spectacular attention in the arena of recent popular culture: the texts of Out of Africa and "Babette's Feast," and the staged American appearances in which Dinesen literally fashioned herself as a figure of feminine narrative. I would suggest that in all her selfrepresentations, whether actual performances or self-reflexive texts—she simultaneously exploited, explicated, and exploded a certain conception of "femininity" as well as the commercial construction and manipulation of both "woman" as textualized body and her writings as textual corpus. II. (Dis)Figuring Imperial Words: Politics, Gender, and Writing in Out of Africa13 She takes pleasure in being boundless, outside self, outside same, far from a "centre," from any capital of her "dark continent."

H61ene Cixous14 "I had a farm in Africa." The famous words, alluring microcosm of the book they begin, have repeatedly transported spell-bound Anglo-American readers to the lost paradise that forms the mythic subtext of Out of Africa. Given the dazzling lyricism, the achronological structure, and the Edenic allusions that figure so prominently in Dinesen's best-known book, it is not surprising that critics have traditionally stressed precisely this mythopoetic, "tuneless" effect. But such an atemporal vision elides both the text's and the Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975; rpt. in Visual and Other Pleasures [Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1989] 14-28) and "Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' Inspired by King Vidor's Duel in the Sun," in Visual and Other Pleasures: 29-38; and Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982) 67. For an analysis of Dinesen's anticipation of this theoretical problematic, see Aiken, Isak Dinesen and the Engendering of Narrative 112-32. 13 Portions of sections II and III of this paper have appeared in different forms in my book Isak Dinesen and the Engendering of Narrative. 14 "Sorties," The Newly Bom Woman, ed. Cixous and Catherine Clement, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1986).

8

ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY

author's problematic relations to history. One of the gravest difficulties facing a contemporary reader is the conflict one must negotiate between the sheer lyric beauty of this book and the disconcerting knowledge of the historical circumstances that formed its conditions of possibility. The interpretive dilemma pivots on a fundamental question: how are we to read a text in which, as Edward Said remarks of Kim, "there is more than one history . . . to be remembered?" Said's comments on Kipling's colonial novel might be transferred to Out of Africa, for there too "the imperial experience, . . . often regarded as exclusively political, . . . also . . . entered into cultural and aesthetic life."15 Yet those explicitly political analyses that group Dinesen indiscriminately with all other colonialist writers are as problematic as their ahistoricist counterparts, for in attacking Out of Africa as nothing more than an imperialist text, they ignore precisely what they accuse Dinesen of ignoring in her treatment of Africans: the possibility of distinctiveness, specificity, and difference.16 It is difficult, today, to disentangle the complexities of Dinesen's involvement in a colonial project that she simultaneously participated in, benefitted from, despised, and repeatedly sought to subvert. It is of course undeniable that in many ways she reflected the premises and prejudices of her age, class, and race, or that in representing Africa she employed tropes and conventions inherited from centuries of colonialist discourses. Yet it is equally undeniable that she remained remarkably free, given her historical circumstances, from the smug indifference to the perspectives of African peoples that characterized most colonists. As Abdul JanMohamed notes in his important study of the politics of literature in colonial Africa, Dinesen is unique in "criticizing in a substantial manner the economic, religious, and ethnocentric motives at the heart of the colonial endeavor." She constitutes "a major exception to the. . . pattern of conquest and irresponsible exploitation" typical of many colonialists and colonial authors."17 These

15

"Kim: The Pleasures of Imperialism," Raritan 1.2 (Fall 1987): 31. See, for example, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Prison Notes, and the attack in the Kenya Times on "the racist Blixen" by Daniel Arap Moi, President of Kenya, quoted by Barry Schlachter, "Bias Charges Mar Dinesen's Memory," in the International Herald Tribune 26 July 1985. 17 Manichaean Aesthetics 52, 57. Cf. the observation of Chris Lukorito Wanjala, director of the Institute of African Studies, that "her book, placed in its historical setting, gave a liberal understanding of its environment," and that by comparison with other white settlers, she "may have been radical"; or the assertion 16

CONSUMING ISAK DINESEN

9

complex issues exceed the scope of a single paper. What I want to sketch here are certain responses to a question too seldom posed by either those who historicize or those who dehistoricize Out of Africa: What difference does it make that "Isak Dinesen" is a woman? At its most obvious level, the narrative represents a radical shift of sexual positioning. If "Denmark" was for Karen Blixen the site of women's repression, a "fatherland" evadable only by flight, Africa became for her the locus of liberation and a redefinition of "woman's place," a space outside the bounds where she might elude the gender codes that would install her within what she called the "narrow circle" of domesticity.18 She would later rewrite her passage thus: "I sailed into the heart of Africa and into a Vita Nuova. . . . Africa received me, and made me her own."19 As the Dantean allusion suggests, in Africa she found her vocation as an artist, the matrix of her creativity, the place—psychological as well as geographical—where she might "speak freely and without restraint" (Daguerreotypes 7). In this context her association with Africa attains its most complex implications, for despite her affiliation with the colonialist establishment, which would predicate her "freedom" to "speak" precisely on the silencing of Africans, as a woman she was also positioned among the colonized. As Natalie Zemon Davis remarks, "long before Europeans were asserting flatly that the 'inferiority' of black Africans was innate . . . they were attributing female 'inferiority' to nature."20 The definitions of women evolved by an androcentric social order are remarkably similar to the definitions of Africans evolved by colonialism: both groups have been construed as naturally secondary, properly subordinate, and acceptable only when kept "in

of Kenyan journalist Lawrence Kibui that the characterization of Dinesen as a "racist" was "simply false" (both quoted in Barry Scnlachter, "Bias Charges Mar Dinesen's Memory," International Herald Tribune 26 July 1985). 18 Letters from Africa: 1914-1931, trans. Anne Born, ed. Frans Lasson (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981) 250. This collection will hereafter be referred to as LFA. 19 "On Mottoes of My Life," Daguerreotypes and Other Essays, trans. P.M. Mitchell and W.D. Paden (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979) 6. 20 "Women on Top," in The Reversible World, ed. Barbara Babcock (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1978) 148.

10 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY their places. "21 As Blixen suggested in her letters from Africa, striking affinities exist between those who have been imagined as the "other" of European culture and those historically construed as the Other of Man within a broader, more pervasive discourse of sexual domination. The oppositional ontology that structures the logic and ideologies of imperialism—Culture versus Nature, Known versus Unknown, "Us" versus "Them"—also structures the logic and ideologies of gender, which displace and erase woman in the Name of the Father just as colonialism sought to displace and erase the colonized in the name of Civilization—a construct commonly represented as the peculiar property of "the White Man."22 Both symbolic orders operate within an economy of difference based on a subject/object dichotomy whereby, as Karen Blixen wrote in her letters, colonized peoples are treated as inferior, insensate, or subhuman instruments of the colonizers and women as circulating ciphers who, "merely because they belong to the female sex," do "not exist" outside their relation to men (UFA 250, 263). And just as questions of gender are inseparable from other global economies of power and commerce, so, Dinesen would insist, such economies are themselves inseparable from questions of discourse, given the "world of symbols" which, as she suggests in "Daguerreotypes," human beings construct and inhabit. Her letters, like her fictions, develop extended critiques of the institutions and discourses that shut people in "cages." Instead, like contemporary critics as diverse as Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, or Gayatri Spivak, she calls for the "revolutionary" transformations in "consciousness" that would enable "radical change in [areas] previously considered to be raised above it, or immune from it" (UFA 258). In Out of Africa these concerns are reiterated in the narrator's repeated

21

See Carole Pateman, "The Disorder of Women," Ethics 91 (Oct. 1980): 2034; Elizabeth Janeway, Powers of the Weak (New York: Knopf, 1980) 7. On the figure of the African as a similar anomalous locus of disorder and potential evil, see Christopher Miller, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985), especially 189-93. The association of Africa with the figure of disease persists, given new impetus by the mass anxiety promoted by the spread of AIDS. See Sydney Bryn Austin, "AIDS and Africa: U.S. Media and Racist Fantasy," Cultural Critique 14 (Winter 1989-90): 129-152. 22 On the generic formulation of the colonialist as "the White Man" see Edward Said, Orientalism (1978; rpt. New York: Vintage, 1979) 226-27 (Cf. the title of Elspeth Huxley's memoir of Kenya, White Man's Country). Said, however, does not consider the import of the phrase for women.

CONSUMING ISAK DINESEN

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association of herself with wild animals and the "wildness and irregularity" of the land, as well as her implicit identification with "bewitching" female characters like the old Kikuyu women, in whose derisive "laughter" she found a figure for her own pseudonym, or the Somali women whose brilliant "art of mimicry" and ironic, subversive strategies for dealing with their public subordination offered her a model for her own authorship. As she remarked in her "Bonfire" oration, women may undermine a male-oriented symbolic order through a calculated verbal "duplicity"—using a "pretended . . . respect for the paragraphs of the [masculine] law" to conceal a "quite fearless heresy" (Daguerreotypes 82-83). As I have noted elsewhere, the Somali women's oral narratives provided a model for the power this sort of duplicitous discourse might hold for women authors: they would relate fairy tales in the style of the Arabian Nights . . . [in which] the heroine . . . would get the better of the male characters and come out of it triumphant. . . . Within this enclosed women's world . . . behind the walls and fortifications of it, I felt the presence of a great ideal, without which the garrison would not have carried on so gallantly; the idea of a Millenium when women were to reign supreme hi the world. The old mother at such times would take on a new shape, and sit enthroned as a massive dark symbol of that mighty female deity who had existed hi old ages, before the time of the Prophet's God. Of her they never lost sight.23 These cumulative figurations anticipate both Elaine Showalter's analysis of the "wild space" wherein women are situated by patriarchal culture, and H61ene Cixous' revisionist readings of Freud's trope of woman as the "dark continent" of the phallocentric order.24 Long before such critiques, Dinesen suggested that women's writing, figuratively inscribed in invisible ink—what Cixous would later call "white ink"—or situated in the gaps and margins of patriarchal language, makes her doubly parallel to the figures of Africa or Africans as constituted by the imperializing patriarchal imagination. Just as European maps traditionally represented the African continent as a blank space or terra incognita, source of endless speculations—in both senses—so woman was construed as "the blank page"

23

Out of Africa (New York: Random House, 1937) 180; for other parallels of women and Africans, see OA 18-19. 24 Elaine Showalter, "Feminist Criticism hi the Wilderness," Critical Inquiry & (Winter 1981): 201; Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa," trans. Keith and Paula Cohen, Signs I (Summer 1976): 281-290.

12 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY of masculinist culture, the inert object to be inscribed by the signifying phallus.25 But like recent theorists of sexual difference, Dinesen too would gesture toward the disruptive and liberatory potential of those spaces, would reclaim their seeming emptiness by evoking the subjectivity and generative power that lay behind them, invisible to the imperial phallocentric view. In her profound disagreements with the British over their treatment of colonized peoples, she eschewed direct assaults as futile: "As a woman and a foreigner . . . if I argue I shall lose my power." She chose instead "to play the hostess and friend" who seeks, despite her anger, to persuade through indirection (although, as she would add, "I feel like shooting off a broadside in their silly faces") (LFA 240-41). The same strategies animate her texts. Unlike Sydney Pollak's blockbuster movie (which, as Molly Haskell has aptly remarked, often "feels like a long and tiresome and very expensive . . . safari, the kind that is organized for neophytes, to provide a maximum of picturesqueness with a minimum of risk,")26 if Out of Africa rewrites the imperialist script, it does so not simply as repetition or romanticization, but also as subversion. Dinesen's figuration of Africa as mythic motherland, for example, reenacts the contradictions inherent in her paradoxically doubled positioning, simultaneously reinscribing and critically revising a colonialist trope by using it to reclaim an ancient topos of generative feminine power common to both European and African women: "that mighty female deity who existed in old ages, before the Prophet's God." This figure might stand as a synecdoche for Dinesen's strategy throughout Out of Africa: like her essays and fictions, the text deploys a poetics of feminine subversion, an "art of mimicry" that anticipates the "mimetisme" Luce Irigaray proposes, in Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un, as a "provisional" way for women to deal with their subordination and exploitation within phallocentric discourse "without allowing [themselves] to be simply reduced to it," a way to make "visible" by the effect of playful repetition what was supposed to remain invisible: the cover-up of a possible operation of the feminine in language. . . . If women are such good mimics it is because they are not

25

Miller's Blank Darkness, a book whose title plays on these categories and iconographies, discusses the representation of Africa as blank space. 26 "Out of Dinesen: Why Meryl Streep Isn't Karen Blixen," Ms. March 1986: 13-14.

CONSUMING ISAK DINESEN

13

simply reabsorbed in that function. They also remain elsewhere.21 I would suggest that through a reformulation of the question of difference—representing it not merely in terms of hierarchial opposition but as a continual transformational slippage that calls into question the European, phallocentric notion of the single, sovereign, territorializing self—Dinesen also unsettles the representational systems that uphold the imperialist project and destabilizes the language of property, propriety, and power on which it rests. Uncovering the operations of what she called "the interplay of heterogeneous elements" in what an imperialist phallocentric ontology would read in-differently as monolithic, static, and Same, she evokes alternative ways of seeing and being that undermine the politics and the poetics of the very systems which, paradoxically, had made Out of Africa possible.28 Such a perspective opens new ways of thinking about the destabilizations of self, space, gender, and genre that pervade the narrative. Approaching the text for the first time, readers are likely to be struck by the paradoxical sense of having experienced at once a shaped, coherent, and fulfilling whole and, simultaneously, a kind of pastiche or bricolage—fragmentary, heterogeneous, almost random. Situated between the discourses of history and myth, autobiography and fiction, prose and poetry; drawing on forms as diverse as pastoral elegy, classical tragedy, memoir, and travel tale; compounded of narrative, philosophical speculation, aphorism, parabolic reflection, and song, the text eludes all unitary generic classifications. Its decided disorder forces a radical reorientation of traditional perspectives by calling into question conventions of reading that depend on a notion of the book as a figure of solidity, unity, linearity, and integrity. In interrogating such conventions, reflexively representing her own writing as a wild disarray of scattered leaves and leavings—pages discomposed by the wind, "some here and some there" (OA 48)—Dinesen establishes a parallel between the reader's attempts to comprehend the textual discontinuities of Out of Africa and the attempts of the protagonist to hold fast to the farm she has marked out upon the African continent (OA 7). The story she narrates most insistently, after all, is that of her effort to "have a farm in Africa"—a

27

This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Carolyn Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985) 76. 28 The phrase "interplay of heterogeneous elements" occurs in the unpublished essay "On Feminism and Womanhood," in the Karen Blixen Archives, Royal Library, Copenhagen.

14 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY project doomed, as the past tense of the opening sentence insists—from the start. The wordplay inherent in its title suggests that Out of Africa is precisely about the narrator's failure to territorialize; recalling her early description of the European "yearning" to turn "the wilderness and irregularity" of the country into a series of "geometrical figures" (OA 7), one might say that the text is about the decomposition of her plots, both literal and literary. The end—of both farm and text—is predetermined, she implies, not merely because of the climatic, geographical, economic, and political conditions that brought about the farm's demise but because of the ultimately unmasterable nature of Africa and the inadequacy of Eurocentric representational and hermeneutical systems that attempt to capture it. The spare summation with which she concludes—"It was no longer mine" (OA 362)—refers not only to the farm and all it represents, but also to the identity it has grounded and to the ontological foundations of that identity: "Wherever I walked, the ground fell away under me" (OA 368). Yet this radical unmooring becomes the paradoxical condition for the transformation of subjectivity the book records. Conjoining the issues of farming, colonization, and writing within the matrix of gender, Dinesen repeatedly stresses the necessary relinquishment of the need to control, order, and contain within our own constructs an inalienable other that ultimately must elude our systematizations. By disclosing the instability of all fixed and final boundaries—those plots laid out "according to rule," so comforting to the colonizer's mind (OA 7)—and by blurring the lines that divide peoples, territories, or genres, Dinesen also disrupts the symbolic orders that underwrite hierarchial sexual codes in both culture and textuality. One could cite multiple instances of this creative disfiguration, which begins with the poetics of landscape in the opening paragraphs—the "shimmering," shifting spaces that "scintillated, waved and shone like running water," blurring topographical "lines" and "figures" and teasing the beholder's eye with "mirages" like those created by the narrative itself (OA 3-5)—but let me take as my paradigmatic example the elusiveness with which Dinesen represents the autobiographical subject of the text.29 "Here I am, where I ought to be," declares the narratorial voice in a tellingly reflexive, retrospective gesture (OA 4). But who—and where—is this "I?" Significantly, the narrator's gender remains ambiguous until well into the narrative, an uncertainty reinforced by her masculine pseudonym. As a 29

For extensive treatment of other instances of this effect, see my discussion in Isak Dinesen and the Engendering of Narrative 210-246.

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European colonist, seeking to claim the virgin wilderness, "s/he" is associated with a tradition that would write selfhood as stable, autonomous, "individual," monolithic—and male. But that peculiarly Westernized "I" here is rendered unstable, problematic, perpetually dissolving into the "Africa" with which it is set in opposition, syntactically as well as socioculturally, in the opening sentence of the book. On one level, as we have seen, the apparent polarity of "I" and "Africa" restages those epistemological oppositions by which Western cultural traditions organize the psychosocial order. But just as the farm figures as a precarious, progressively deteriorating, marginal enterprise whose plots will not bear fruit, so these Occidental plots of Sameness and Difference also disintegrate as the text progresses. Like the "faintly vibrating" line dividing woods and plains in the shape-shifting landscape, or the "air ... alive over [it], like a flame burning," or the Ngong Hills, which "changed their character many tunes a day," so Dinesen's fluid narrative unsettles the ground that maintains a certain "self" and its systems. The author becomes only one among many moving figures, gliding in and out of "history," in and out of "dream," sometimes receding, like the hills, into "distance" (OA 389), sometimes addressing us with astonishing immediacy. The semiotics of shifting subjectivity are crucial to the paradoxical positioning of "Isak Dinesen" as both woman and "master"—"husbandman" of the land she farms. If, like Adam, she labours to cultivate the maternalized earth and make it bring forth harvests, she also represents herself and her text as mobile "feminine" figures, "irregular," nurturant, and earthy—situated not at the centre, but on multiple margins of culture and discourse, like the farms whose cultivated plots increasingly run wild. A symbolic "brother" to old Knudsen, she is also "sister" to the women she encounters, or "mother" to the sick Kamante and the outlaw Emmanuelson. If, as her tropes suggest, the "I" here constitutes herself as subject by becoming an Adamic namer in this latter-day Eden, "s/he" is also represented repeatedly as object, named and "turned into a symbol" by the Africans in an ironic reversal of her own authorial project. By moving freely among diverse subject positions, "s/he" puts into question those gender codes that would write "woman" and "man"—like "native" and "colonist," "powerless" and "powerful," subordinate and dominant—as absolute, fixed, and final. This loss is reinscribed in the book's reflexive representations of its own unstable figurations: each of its sections concludes with images of tantalizing, untranslatable inscriptions, making writing the epitomizing figure

16 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY for all the other forms of displacement the text elaborates. If Out of Africa traces a rite of passage, it also traces the writing of a passage: its operative effect is, in every sense, to change the subject. And such projects are especially crucial when the subject is woman. Significantly, the closer the narrator comes to her final dispossession, the more strongly she underscores her connections with other women. The climax of these associations occurs in the last chapter, in her image of the "unwritten" book of women (OA 37072), made up of a discourse which, like the perspectives of displaced African peoples, remains literally unspeakable within the world of "the white men and their laws" (OA 377). That "book" prefigures the text that records it. As Dinesen would write in "The Blank Page," it is through the subversive words of "story-telling women" that "silence will speak."30 In Out of Africa she played out this paradox, epitomizing its dynamics through the figure of Philomela, that quintessential female artist who overcame silence, suffering, and loss by engendering an eloquent fabrication: I have heard the nightingale in the woods of Africa. Not the full song—a few notes only, . . . suddenly stopped and again begun. . . . It was, however, the same melody, the same abundance and sweetness as were soon to fill the forests of Europe, from Sicily to Elsinore (OA 283).

That discontinuous song, filled with stops and gaps, becomes an emblem of the text itself. When, in one of her many revisionist readings of patriarchal scripture, Dinesen represents her relation to Africa through Jacob's words to the angel after a night of brutal wrestling—"I will not let thee go except thou bless me" (OA 274-76)—we recall that the blessing took the form of a new word, a new name, a self remade explicitly through language. Similarly, the "blessing" that Out of Africa promises is not the dream of empire, but the bliss of writing and reading with a transformed vision, the advent of an alternative way of seeing dependent not on ownership but precisely on the willingness to "let go." Playing out the crucial paradox of language—that the very act of representation requires and marks the displacement of that which is signified—the text ultimately celebrates not possession or commodification but what Dinesen called the "transport" of largesse, relinquishment, and release. It is a process that gives new meaning to the word abandon. And the naming that signifies rebirth is here engendered not by the power struggle of agonistic masculine contestants, but

30

Last Tales (New York: Random House, 1957) 100, 104.

CONSUMING ISAK DINESEN

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by a woman whose only hold on us, or on the past, is a tenuous thread of inscriptions. III. "Babette's Feast," Tertiary Syphilis, and the Carnivalization of the Female Body This laughter is ambivalent. . . . It asserts and denies, it buries and revives. Such is the laughter of carnival.

Mikhail Bakhtin31 The complex displacements and reorientations embodied in Out of Africa would recur in Dinesen's self-presentations and the reflexive, quasiautobiographical fictions of her last years. When Karen Blixen contracted syphilis from her husband in 1914, it was to prove a fatal event in every sense: she would suffer for the rest of her life from the progressively debilitating effects of the disease. Yet like her loss in Africa, her malady also became, paradoxically, a major spur and source of her creativity, as she suggested through her wry description of her syphilis as a sign of the "pact she made with the devil in exchange for the gift of story-telling." It is hardly surprising that her tales appear so frequently inflected or infected by a poetics of illness, giving new meaning to the "decadence" often associated, rightly or wrongly, with her literary corpus. That poetics becomes especially marked in many of her late productions. Her repeated observation that she "died" into her art, becoming "a piece of printed matter" (Daguerreotypes 196), was never more poignantly enacted than in the final years of her life, as her body gradually withered to skeletal, wraith-like proportions, and her writing ultimately had to proceed by dictation while she lay supine to ease the pain that racked her. Indeed, given the striking parallelism between European figurations of Africa as a contaminated or disordered body and traditional misogynist figurations of the female body as a primary site of disorder and disease, we might find it uncannily appropriate that it was precisely as disintegrating body that "Isak Dinesen" would be most widely represented in the popular press. But it was typical of Dinesen that she gallantly made the most even of these effects. In "The Diver," she had figured "poets' tales" as "disease turned into loveliness"—an apt description of her own narratives, which

31

Rabelais and His World, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Helen Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984).

18 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY recurrently celebrate the transformative possibilities of suffering and loss.32 In related fashion, refusing the masochistic role as victim of her maleauthored illness, she fabricated her fragile, disease-ridden body into a living work of art, extending her fiction-making into a wider semiotic space through the elaborate self-stagings which, like her several literary pseudonyms and the labyrinthine complexities of her narratives, concealed or put into question the existence of a "real" Karen Blixen even as they flamboyantly proclaimed her presence. Ambivalent about photography, she nevertheless anticipated by her playful self-imagings the photographers who would find in her aging body such a compelling icon: one recalls especially the stunning late portraits made of her by Peter Beard and Cecil Beaton.33 "Every photograph," Edward Steichen has remarked, "is a fake from start to finish."34 So, Dinesen had written, is every person, seen from the observer's perspective: "Your own self, your personality and existence are reflected within the mind of each of the people whom you meet, . . . into a likeness, a caricature of yourself, which still lives on and appears to be, in some way, the truth about you. "35 Most spectacular of all were her appearances on stage in her celebrated public readings in America in 1959, her emaciated body so frail that she could hardly stand without support. There she fashioned herself as a radical icon, like a design by Beardsley: dressed all in black, the large dark eyes reinscribed through the added emphasis of kohl, the parchment-like face chalkwhite. Both literally and figuratively, she made herself up, putting into practice the paradox by which she had lived and written: "By their masks ye shall know them." Posed as "herself" or crafting herself as sibyl, witch, or clown—literally making a spectacle of herself—she transformed her dying body into a speaking text, defying mortality by becoming narrative—a self-

32

Anecdotes of Destiny (New York: Random House, 1958) 12. See Clara Svendsen, The Life and Destiny of Isak Dinesen, ed. Frans Lasson (New York: Random House, 1970) 197, 203-205, 214, 218-19. For an analysis of how Dinesen herself constructed the photographed persona, see my "Isak Dinesen and Photo/Graphic Recollection," Exposure 23 (Whiter 1985): 29-38. 34 "Ye Fakers," quoted in Kendall L. Walton, "Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism," in Critical Inquiry 11 (December 1984): 246. 35 "The Roads Round Pisa," Seven Gothic Tales (New York: Random House, 1934) 166. The passage represents the thoughts of Augustus von Schimmelman, who regards such representationalism with fear and loathing, but it nicely encapsulates Dinesen's own repeated acknowledgement of the fabricated quality of the "self." 33

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consuming artifact in every sense. As she wrote in her posthumouslypublished "Carnival", "Your own mask" can "give you . . . that release from self toward which all religions strive. . . . mystery, depth, and bliss": "only thus can great works of art be accomplished. "36 It is no accident that Dinesen's compelling female figures repeatedly enact this observation; one recalls, for example, Malin Nat-og-Dag's selftransformation from "death's head" to beatific agent of renewal and transcendence in "The Deluge at Norderney"; Pellegrina Leoni's recreation of herself as a kind of floating signifier, source of displacement and perpetual renewable fictions in "The Dreamers"; Anne-Marie, whose selfsacrifice also becomes a life-giving ritual recalling the spectacles of Dionysian vegetation ceremonies in "Sorrow-acre"; the "Heroine" H61oise, who, in a spectacular put-on, offers herself as a vital element for the salvational communion of her imperiled compatriots; or Lady Flora Gordon, whose towering figure and ebullient spirits revitalize her fellow sufferers at the sanatorium for syphilitics, and who, reflecting on the sore that signifies her disease, unfolds a deconstructive semiotics focused on the undecidability and instability of the sign—"To what does this bear a likeness? To a rose? or to a seal?" (Last Tales 98). So also their author presented herself as an enigmatic gift to be consumed by her audiences in her own festive productions, replacing the phallocentric economy, wherein men exchange women, with what Cixous calls depense, woman's lavish self-bestowal and generative power that overflows the bounds of restrictive masculine economies. Merging the body of her fiction with the fiction of her body, Dinesen made herself one of the preeminent figures of her own fictional corpus: "woman" as both "flesh" and "word." "And the word," as she observed in "On Mottoes of My Life," "taken in such earnest is a mighty thing:" "In hoc signo vinces" (Daguerreotypes 3). Through such forms of serious play, ludic spectacles in which her body appeared resurrected from apparent "death" through the medium of her own figuration, Dinesen composed herself into the very image of feminine generativity—suitable occasion for the "laughter" inherent in the etymology of her pseudonym. A feast for the eyes or for the mind, at once consumed and consuming, she acted as both sign and signifying agent; her iconic selfrepresentations, a festive celebration of the possibilities of feminine art, evoked a surplus unconfinable within a phallocentric economy. In her

36

"Carnival," Carnival: Entertainments and Posthumous Tales (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1977) 67-68.

20 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY favourite role as "the storyteller who was three thousand years old and had dined with Socrates," she resembled the "laughing" terracotta figures of old women that Bakhtin identified as the transgressive epitome of carnival: her body, like theirs, became the triumphal, uncanny image of "death that gives birth," combining "decaying and deformed flesh with the flesh of new life, conceived but as yet unformed" (Bakhtin 25). Indeed, in her various playful poses as jester, transvestite, trickster—all prime agents of disruption—her reflexive enactment of parodic "laughter" and what, describing woman's subversive discourse, she had called "fearless" feminine "heresy," Dinesen, like the "witty woman" she had extolled in "The Deluge at Norderaey" (Gothic Tales 26), explicitly cast herself as an extravagant embodiment of the "carnival" spirit, that spectacular outburst of energy that inverts, mocks, and destabilizes the dominant phallocentric social order. Textualizing woman's body through both her literary corpus and her own carnivalesque poses and selftheatricalizations, she put quite literally into practice that "play with mimesis" which, as Irigaray would later claim, allows women to subvert even as they seemingly conform to hegemonic cultural codes. Since phallocentric culture makes the female body a primary site of contestation, the originary property of which, in the Name of the Father, woman herself must be dispossessed, for a woman to (re)claim that body, to mimic "woman" as spectacular object while simultaneously asserting her position as signifying subject, is to refuse the economy of masculine possession and exchange that would appropriate her, and to express, through the very process of feminine masquerade, that "elsewhere" of another meaning, unspeakable within a phallocentric symbolic order. As Mary Russo astutely remarks, "to put on femininity with a vengeance suggests the power of taking it off. "37 Similarly, to give centre stage to that which patriarchal culture marks as eccentric, marginal, deviant, and pathological—the old woman's scandalous, diseased body as both subject and object of desire—is to play havoc with the reigning sociosymbolic order by opening it to the very forces it would most insistently cast out in the Name of the Father: autonomous femininity, illness, and mortality—all treated within traditional Western culture as contaminations that imperil both the phallic body and the phallocentric body politic. In this sense, Dinesen's diverse self-fabrications as story/teller might

37

"Female Grotesques: Studies 224.

Carnival and Theory," in Feminist Studies/Critical

CONSUMING ISAK DINESEN

21

be read not as ratifications of repressive ideologies or conformity to a consumerist economy but rather as dis-orderly enactments, in the most literal sense, of a radical Venture feminine: a writing of her body which was also a profound commentary on the body of her writing. Such a double inscription literally incorporated the linguistic interplay of theatre with theory, for as Cixous suggests, ecriture feminine operates as a contestational form of theorizing woman's place in a phallocentric culture and discourse. Dinesen's play also recalled the common etymological roots of incarnation and carni val—what, in Out of Africa, she had called "the flesh made word" (OA HO).38 Such performances were, in every sense, gestures of recuperation. These conjunctions are brilliantly interwoven in "Babette's Feast," that consummately festive narrative about consumption.39 In its evident selfreflexivity, the fiction implicitly affirms Dinesen's artistic transcendence of her own carnal infirmity through the story of the celebrated female chef who, after years of exile and anonymity, brought about precisely by her commitment to social revolution, simultaneously sacrifices and reclaims herself through the "great art" of the feast she prepares for the assembled guests. Her subversive import is apparent from the outset: "massive, dark," and "deadly pale"—a woman who, like her author, knows what it means to have lost everything—she arrives "haggard and wild-eyed like a hunted animal." Achille Papin's letter suggests her revolutionary implications for a patriarchal symbolic order through the unintentional double entendre inherent in his definition of the term "Petroleuse," a "word . . . used . . . for women who set fire to houses" (BF 33). Twelve years later, ostensibly to celebrate the name, day, and memory of the Father whose preternatural phallic power haunts his daughters' lives, Babette overawes the unsuspecting sisters with the "incalculable nature and range" of her culinary project, for which she imports strange, "undefinable" (BF 46) objects and creatures, "monstrous and terrible to behold," converting the father's sacred day and the confining paternal "house" into sites of "a witches' sabbath" (BF 46) presided over by Babette as a kind of supernatural figure, "like the bottled

38

On ecriture feminine as a contestational form of theorizing woman's place in phallocentric culture, see Helene Cixous, "Sorties." See Suleiman, The Female Body in Western Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1986) on "the contemporary attempt, by women, to rewrite and rethink the female body" 8. 39 Anecdotes 23-70. "Babette's Feast," included in this collection, will be referred to hereafter as BF.

22 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY demon of fairy tale . . . grown to such dimensions that her mistresses felt small before her" (BF 45). Out of her labours comes a meal beyond imagining, a feast that undoes established oppositions and unsettles hegemonic identities and discourses: the urbane, articulate general is "startled" into "silence," "seized by a queer kind of panic" (BF 56), while the ordinarily "taciturn" parishioners receive "the gift of tongues" (BF 61). Transported into an "exalted state of mind," lifted "off the ground, into a higher and purer sphere" (BF 57), all are moved to contemplate what "one might venture to call miracles" (BF 56). In Dinesen's figure of this dinner as "a kind of love affair" (BF 58), woman's art becomes a source ofjouissance, that blissful state of openness "in which one no longer distinguishes between bodily and spiritual appetite or satiety" (BF 58)! The meal her guests consume is at once a resurrection and a kind of secular Eucharist. Emblematized by the sarcophages that mark it as her production, it revives those long "dead," effecting a regenerating, carnivalizing outpouring of good spirits in every sense, a festive transubstantiation in which oppositions like "righteousness and bliss . . . kiss one another" (BF 59). In this enchanted comic space, "anything is possible" (BF 62): the assumed boundaries between body and soul, self and other, past and present are momentarily abolished, and "Time itself" is "merged into eternity" (BF 61). Inspired by the "intoxication" of the woman's "blessed" art and the "infinite . . . grace" of the festival, the celebrants experience a kind of psychological "millenium" that heals old wounds and reconciles deeply-entrenched differences in "a heavenly burst of laughter" (BF 61). It is a "miracle" of multiple incarnations—flesh, quite literally, made word in a stream of overflowing benedictions, a kind of linguistic excess: "'Bless you, bless you, bless you,' like an echo of the harmony of the spheres rang on all sides" (BF 63). The reflexive connection of Dinesen's own "self"-sacrificial art with Babette's is made explicit in the concluding scene. As Dinesen implies through the sarcophages that epitomize Babette's creation, it is ultimately the woman's own body that is offered up, in displaced form, through the culinary corpus she prepares. It is no accident that afterward she is found, "deadly exhausted," "on the chopping block" (BF64). Having "given away all [she] had" to create the feast, she is emptied out, left again with nothing—in effect consumed by her own artistic production. For the sisters, this "self-sacrifice," like the festival it enables, is "beyond comprehension" (BF 66). The discourse on art with which Babette answers their condolences also illuminates the simultaneous self-annihilation and self-creation Dinesen

CONSUMING ISAK DINESEN

23

associated with her own engendering of narrative: "A great artist . . . is never poor. We have something . . . of which other people know nothing. . . . Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost!" (BF 67-68). It is poignantly appropriate that she wrote "Babette's Feast," that splendid celebration of transformative consumption, at a time when she herself was beginning slowly to starve to death, her own body literally devouring itself. In this, as in many of her other fictions and public performances, the female body becomes the duplicitous corpus whereby woman projects "woman" as a form of fabrication associated with a transformative vision of narrative, a festive enactment of the redemptive possibilities of a certain "feminine" writing in the face of illness, suffering, loss, and death. In the posthumously-published "Carnival"—which was, of course, also one of her earliest texts and hence brackets her entire career—Dinesen narrates these interactions of carnality, incarnation, and carnivalization as a process of infinite play with identity, a destabilizing fluidity of sexual rules and roles that writes woman's generativity as the blissful "joke" that undoes both paternal preeminence and the order(s) it has underwritten in the Name of the Father: "Like all women, she believed in her heart in the immaculate conception, and did not give the father . . . a thought" (Carnival 98). In this mobile, laughing space of creation, woman may change "the rules of the game" by posing the "self" as a dynamic of multiplicity and perpetual transformation rather than uniformity and stability (Carnival 88), rupturing the reigning symbolic order with a burst of bawdy puns that declare her desire and voice as "musical" significations outside the strictures of phallocentric law: "you are mistaken when you think that we love cocks—we love nightingales. We want a melody . .. that repeats itself, and will go on. Alas, that you cannot play us" (Carnival 87). Here, as in Out of Africa and elsewhere in Dinesen's oeuvre, the nightingale, that Mr-figure of the wounded woman, also becomes the image of blissful creativity: "a long ecstatic festival of song" (Daguerreotypes 207). Just as Philomela, quintessential embodiment of woman's displacement, dismemberment, and enforced muteness, filled the world with the "abundance and sweetness" of her music (OA 283), so Dinesen, out of radical discontinuity, bodily decay, incalculable loss, and death, fabricated narratives which, as she wrote in "The Blank Page" of "all old story-telling women," make "silence . . . speak" (Last Tales 100), turning malady into melody "that repeats itself, and will go on." This ebullient, paradoxical spirit informs the final line of "Carnival," which proclaims the end of final lines: "Everything is infinite, and foolery

24 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY as well" (Carnival 21). That vertiginous double entendre (spoken by a woman disguised, like her author, not only as a man but as a mask—the commedia dell'arte character Arlecchino) might be read retrospectively as a carnivalizing commentary on Dinesen's own narratives, both written and lived. Dissolving the boundaries between youth and age, health and sickness, truth and fiction, body and text, the notion of "infinite foolery" recalls the "laughter" inherent in the name with which she signed her literary corpus. And if that laughter is infectious, what it signifies is not contagion or disease, but the inexhaustible play of language which resists, by its ludic subversions of stable placement, the ontological structures on which hegemonic definitions of "male" and "female," "self-hood" and "otherness," "civilization" and "barbarism" rest. As with the narratives of Scheherazade, to which she so often compared her own, Dinesen's "infinite foolery" leads not to domination and death, but to the freedom and perpetually revitalizing possibilities inherent in what she called "immortal story."

Life as Fiction: Narrative Appropriation in Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa Kristjana Gunnars University of Alberta Out of Africa has been considered generically elusive. As Susan Hardy Aiken writes in her recent book Isak Dinesen and the Engendering of Narrative, Out of Africa is [s]ituated between the discourses of history and myth, fact and fiction, prose and poetry; partaking generically of forms as diverse as pastoral elegy, classical tragedy, autobiography, memoir, and travel tale; compounded of narrative, philosophical speculation, aphorism, parabolic reflection and song. . . .'

Rather than take the lack of generic distinctiveness as a weakness, Aiken celebrates the complexities of Dinesen's prose as an example of a woman's text. Rather than consider the author's either inability or refusal to stick to one way of telling about her coffee farm in Africa, she quotes Mary Jacobus to say that writing on the boundaries of literary genres, as Dinesen has done in Out of Africa, is a form of defiance. It is a subversive act. In Reading Woman, Mary Jacobus says [t]he transgression of literary boundaries—moments when structures are shaken, when language refuses to lie down meekly, or the marginal is brought into sudden focus, or intelligibility itself refused—reveal not only the conditions of possibility with which women's writing exists, but what it would be like to revolutionize them. . . . [A] refusal of mastery, an opting for rupture and possibility. . . . can hi itself make women's writing a challenge to the literary structures it necessarily inhabits. (Aiken 228-29)

Let me pursue this idea of "a woman's text" for a moment. There is some consensus among feminist critics that the gap between the author's body and her writing is, in the case of women, smaller than what the texts of the established literary canon would indicate. In her essay "'The Blank

1

Isak Dinesen and the Engendering of Narrative (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990) 229. See also Aiken hi this volume, p. 13. 25

26 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY Page' and Issues of Female Creativity," for example, Susan Gubar uses Isak Dinesen's short story "The Blank Page" to illustrate the idea that women, in fact, write with their bodies. "The Blank Page" concerns a convent which weaves such fine sheets that they are used for royal wedding nights. In the morning the sheets are brought back to the convent with the stains on them that prove the bride was a virgin. These sheets are then framed and hung up for viewing with the appropriate name plates attached, as works of art of a kind. Gubar reflects that [t]he stained pages are therefore biographical remnants of otherwise mute existences, a result of and response to life rather than an effort at producing an independent aesthetic object. Indeed, were the female community less sensitive to the significance of these signs, such stained sheets would hardly be considered art at all. Dinesen implies that woman's use of her own body in the creation of art results hi forms of expression devalued or totally invisible to eyes trained by traditional aesthetic standards.2

Gubar goes on to talk about the deflection of women's creativity from art to their bodies and how the woman's body becomes, for all practical purposes, a text or a canvas to paint and draw on. Aiken devotes an entire chapter of Isak Dinesen and the Engendering of Narrative to the ways in which Karen Blixen herself worked on her own body for aesthetic purposes. But what is of interest in relation to Out of Africa is the further insight that makes the closure of aesthetic distance one reason why women have been attracted to autobiographical writing. Gubar makes this connection explicit and writes that [f]or the artist, this sense that she is herself the text means that there is little distance between her life and her art. The attraction of women writers to personal forms of expression like letters, autobiographies, confessional poetry, diaries, and journals points up the effect of a life experienced as an art or an art experienced as a land of life, as does women's traditional interest in cosmetics, fashion, and ulterior decorating. (Gubar 299)

Looking at the relation of life to art, the logical assumption would be that the autobiographical writer would allow her artistic structure to

2

'"The Blank Page' and the Issues of Female Creativity," The New Feminist Criticism, Essays on Women, Literature and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon-Random House, 1985) 296.

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resemble, in some way, the structure of life. At this juncture it is a short step to poststructuralism. To continue with a kind of description of a "woman's text," then, some critical observations may be useful. Carolyn G. Heilbrun, in her recent book Writing a Woman's Life, while discussing the writings of Patricia Spacks of eighteenth century women's autobiographies, notes that "the only acceptable models for women 'involve self-deception and yielding.'"3 The autobiographies in Spacks' study all "'exploit a rhetoric of uncertainty'" (Heilbrun 23). In discussing Adrienne Rich, Heilbrun also notes "her belief that it is only the willingness of women to share their 'private and often painful experience' that will enable them to achieve a true description of the world . . . " (Heilbrun 68), because "[w]e know we are without a text, and must discover one" (Heilbrun 44). She adds an interesting note on women's fiction and power. Since women have generally engaged in forms of alterity, or of putting someone else into the centre of their lives, such as a man or a child, they do not experience life as a situation in which they themselves are central. This is why they enjoy Romances. Romances focus on the courtship period, and only during this time in a woman's life does she become a central figure in a story. As Heilbrun puts it: For a short time, during courtship, the illusion is maintained that women, by withholding themselves, are central. Women are allowed this brief period in the limelight—and it is the part of their lives most constantly and vividly enacted in a myriad of representations—to encourage the acceptance of a lifetime of marginality. (Heilbrun 21)

There is a lucid essay by Craig Owens on "The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism," where he echoes Nancy Miller's assertion that "'the plots of women's literature are not about "life". . . . They are about the plots of literature itself, about the constraints . . . of rendering female life in fiction'".4 Craig Owens notes that . . . many feminist artists have, in fact, forged a new (or renewed) alliance with theory—most profitably, perhaps, with the writing of women

3 4

Writing a Woman's Life (New York: Ballantine-Random House, 1988) 22. Nancy Miller, Subject to Change (New York: Columbia UP, 1988) 43-44.

28 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis (Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, Montrelay . . . )5

This is to say that much of women's art incorporates their reflections on the process of creating the work at hand. The sometimes disconcerting feature of women's art, namely that it seems to be going in many directions at once, is explained as the juncture where women's writing and postmodernism meet. Craig Owens asserts that " . . . the kind of simultaneous activity on multiple fronts that characterizes many feminist practices is a postmodern phenomenon" (Owens 63). In relation to the writing that proceeds "on multiple fronts," he discusses the loss of continuous narrative that characterizes postmodernist writing and the loss of the grands recits of modernity. Speaking of Fredric Jameson, Owens also notes that "[fjor Jameson, the loss of narrative is equivalent to the loss of our ability to locate ourselves historically; hence his diagnosis of postmodernism as 'schizophrenic'" (Owens 65). Perhaps this condition is often exaggerated for women writers, given the observation that they have a power problem concerning the centrality of their lives. If a woman does not find herself in the centre of her life, and by extension, of her life narrative, she must be hovering at the margins in a non-specific way. This is an observation many have made of Dinesen's place in Africa. She was an immigrant, a foreigner, both to the British elite and the Native Africans. She was a woman doing a man's work, running her farm, and a writer of stories of whose audience she was unsure. It is not surprising that Aiken would make a special note of the problem for her reader, that "[wjherever one seeks to place Dinesen, she is always also elsewhere" (Aiken xxi). Aiken goes so far as to describe Dinesen's narrative as a kind of Fata Morgana when she writes that [t]he whole scene is one of continual flux and mobility, of figures that appear and accumulate density and mass only to "dissolve" and "vanish" like the "clouds . . . travelling with the wind," or that "change their character many times." (Aiken 219)

This description of Dinesen's narrative structure in Out of Africa, therefore, has some relation to what critics describe as "women's texts." There is a further relationship between the discontinuous, dislocated,

5

"The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism," The Anti-Aesthetic, Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983) 63.

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decentred, disempowered and partly metafictional narratives of women's autobiographical writings (as observed by Heilbrun, Aiken, Owens, Gubar and others), and aspects of postmodernist and poststructuralist writings in general. My general question concerns the ways in which Dinesen uses her life in the service of certain narrative techniques that will lift her life writing to the level of fiction without sacrificing the verity she wants to maintain. In the process she "victimizes" her own narrative in the same way Africa itself was colonized by Europeans. To show this, I wish to focus on the way in which Dinesen uses the concept of destiny and where destiny fits into her world view and narrative scheme. Early on in Out of Africa, Dinesen writes about the outlook of the African Natives with whom she shares so much of her life on the farm. Her observation concerns fate and destiny. When Dinesen discusses ideas like this, she is engaging in her peculiar metafiction. This is where she incorporates some of her theories about her own narrative, and where much of her stance is explained. In this passage, she notes a difference between the Africans and the Europeans and claims that [t]he Kikuyu are adjusted for the unforeseen and accustomed to the unexpected. Here they differ from the white men, of whom the majority strive to insure themselves against the unknown and the assaults of fate. The Negro is on friendly terms with destiny, having been in her hands all his time; she is to him, in a way, his home, the familiar darkness of the hut, deep mould for his roots. He faces any change in life with great calm.6

Dinesen returns to this theme again and again. What is behind the idea that nothing surprises the person who is at home, is her sense of her own dispossession and dislocation and her consequent envy of the Natives who have nothing to lose because they never left their home. She appears to desire a comfort with life she does not have at the time of writing. In mythic terms, perhaps, she is in the position of the traveller who has found the "Navel of the World" and then been forced to abandon it. Once you are in the "Navel of the World," nothing can touch you. Once removed from that centre, which is her farm, the dislocation is ironically reversed. As Aiken also notes, Africa is home for Dinesen, and Denmark is the foreign country. In her chapter "Farah" in Shadows on the Grass, Dinesen

6

Out of Africa (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987) 30. This novel will hereafter be referred to as OA.

30 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY describes clearly what such a "Centre" means for the wanderer through life. She tells of a discussion she had in England with the painter John Philpot. Philpot claims that he had a nervous breakdown during the First Wold War and went about with uncertainty, "constantly in flight, an exile everywhere. "7 In Morocco, however, he was taken to a small village where he immediately felt at home. He explains, . . . at the moment when I had come through the gate in the wall I felt that this was a place of refuge. There came upon me a strange, blissful calm, a happiness like what you feel when a high fever leaves you. "Here," I thought, "one can remain." (SOG 294)

John Philpot emerges as a prototype for Dinesen herself. Dinesen is portrayed in her own work as a similarly "shell shocked" person who found a "refuge" of "calm" in her farm in Africa. The Natives, however, are there all the time, and the Colonist's dream of the nobility of the untouched paradise of the new Colony is played out. That paradise contains all of destiny. When you are expelled from paradise, as Dinesen was for economic reasons, destiny goes on without you, as if you no longer matter. Such an outlook is perhaps a profound inscription of the author's isolation from her own text, and her own life. Aiken locates Dinesen's text in that geographic and spiritual centre where the inhabitant remains unmoved and untouched by destiny. That centre is also connected to the narrator herself. To Aiken, there is a crucial " . . . intermingling of T and 'Africa' at the pivotal site marked by the 'farm'—which is also the text—that conjoins them" (Aiken 210-11). The farm is the locus of the narrator's self description and identity. Losing her land is losing her Self. As Aiken observes, . . . seen in overview, as if "from the air," Out of Africa describes a relentless trajectory of loss and death, leading to the narrator's ultimate alienation from the land whereon she had grounded her sense of self. . . (Aiken 218)

So there is a "peculiar relation between the 'self that writes and the elusive place by which that self is constituted" (Aiken 219). Being comfortable with destiny, or feeling at home with whatever destiny befalls, as Dinesen describes the Kikuyu people as being, has

7

Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass (London: Penguin, 1987) 294. This volume will hereafter be referred to as SOG.

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31

something to do with resignation. She argues for a kind of inversion of all the Europeans stand for. What is construed by Europeans as a weakness becomes a strength in the home territory of the Kikuyu. Dinesen likens the Kikuyu to sheep and explains that [t]he sheep themselves, the patient nations, with no teeth or claws to them, no power and no earthly protector, got through their destiny, as they get through it now, on their immense gift for resignation. They did not die under the yoke, like the Masai, or storm against fate, as the Somali do when they believe themselves injured, cheated, or slighted. They were friends with God in foreign countries, and in chains. They also kept up a peculiar self-feeling in their relations to those who persecuted them. (OA 134)

This is one of Dinesen's more outrageous comments, and the passage shows how sick at the core Colonialism and Romanticism are. For here she implies that some people have a greater capacity for suffering than others, so the Kikuyu, presumably, do not feel pain the way Europeans do, or some other Africans might. By extension it would imply that it is less heinous to inflict pain on people who have a capacity for taking it, than on others. Dinesen commits the "indecency" of speaking for others here. It is worth taking a look at the question of appropriation in literature, especially since "speaking for others" is something to which a narrator suffering from a loss of personal identity, an inability to locate herself at the centre of things, is subject. This is a problem attributed to women's writing. Appropriation in narration is part of the postmodernist debate. When the postmodernist writer relinquishes all control and refuses to speak militaristically, she is turning down the modernist invitation to mastery. When one says modernism is dead, it is the master narrative that has lost its significance, and the narrative of mastery with it. Craig Owens, referring to Heidegger, and speaking of representational art as oppositionistic to postmodernist art, asks: "For what is representation if not a 'laying hold and grasping' (appropriation), a 'making-stand-over-against, an objectifying that goes forward and masters?'" (Owens 66). The phrase he uses, "the indignity of speaking for others," comes out of an interview with Michel Foucault by Gilles Deleuze. Here also the notion of "a counter-discourse" arises. Foucault states in this interview, speaking of his work with the "Groupe d'information de prisons": When the prisoners began to speak, they possessed an individual theory of prisons, the penal system, and justice. It is this form of discourse which ultimately matters, a discourse against power, the counter-discourse of

32 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY prisoners and those we call delinquents—and not a theory about delinquency.8

"Speaking for others" becomes a form of linguistic Colonialism and domination, in which Dinesen herself engages. To be resigned to destiny, and to be at home with destiny, therefore becomes a way of being dominated, or colonized, or imprisoned. Being at home with destiny is also a way of being silenced. For those with no complaints will not complain. There is no counter-discourse in resignation. There is no discourse at all. Peculiarly, therefore, Dinesen's narrator's longing for the farm, the Centre of the World, the locus of the "I," is a longing for silence. It is a narrative that desires its own end. Or more obscurely, Out of Africa presents a narrative that attempts to colonize and dominate its own desire. It is perhaps for this reason that this book shows a proliferation of deaths and demises (Aiken 217) and why it has been labelled a "tragedy" among other things. As Aiken so aptly puts it, " . . . the text is about the decomposition of her plots, both literal and literary" (Aiken 217). The end—both of the farm and text—is predetermined, she implies, not merely because of the practical considerations of climate, altitude, weather, or financial pressure that brought about the demise of Karen Coffee Company, but because of the ultimately unmasterable nature of Africa and the inadequacy of the representational systems with which Europeans seek to configure it. (Aiken 217)

What has been described as a "trajectory of loss and death," is perhaps a tragedy because it wills itself to be one. However reluctantly, it might be possible to speak of a linguistic "death wish" operating in the narrative of this book, just as its author exercised a formal self destruction on the theatre of her body.9 Unlike the Kikuyu, who are, supposedly, at home with their fate and resigned to their history, at the centre of their own world where she would like to be, those who dominate have an entirely different relation to destiny.

8

"Intellectuals and Power: Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze," Discourses: Conversations in Postmodern An and Culture, ed. Russell Ferguson et al (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1990) 11. 9 The intricacies of Dinesen's behaviour towards herself and her own life, as well as her writings, has been outlined extensively in Judith Thurman's biography, Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller.

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In speaking of her friend Denys Finch Hatton, Dinesen writes that "[h]e never did but what he wanted to do" (OA 194). This implies that he has the power to do what he wants to do. The European, unlike the Native, dominates destiny and designs his own fate. For the same reason he flies an airplane and acquires an overview the people on the ground do not have. It is in her relations with Finch Hatton that Dinesen relates the jouissance of experiencing Africa. Aiken sees the episodes of flying as a trope for the act of writing and speaks of Dinesen's "ecstatic dislocation" (Aiken 223). For this reason she reads Out of Africa as a "text of transport" (Aiken 244). But such a reading does not take into account the narrator's own powerlessness in relation to that jouissance. The pleasures described, like the pains, are not in her control. Dinesen's own relation to destiny is much closer to that of the Kikuyu than of Finch Hatton. A significant passage concerning that relationship occurs late in the book, when Dinesen describes her selling the farm and all its contents and settling with the authorities for the people living on her land. She knows intellectually that she is leaving, but emotionally the acceptance of an ending does not come. She writes that during her final months in Kenya: I formed in my own mind a programme, or system of strategy, against destiny, and against the people in my surroundings who were her confederates. I shall give in, I thought, from this time forward, in all minor matters, to save myself unnecessary trouble. I shall let my adversaries have their way from day to day in these affairs, in talk and writing. For in the end I shall still come out triumphant and shall keep my farm and the people in it. Lose them, I thought, I cannot: it cannot be imagined, how then can it happen? (OA 284)

This is the talk of Foucault's prisoner before the counter-discourse is allowed. The prisoner knows he must move carefully so as not to anger the authorities, but privately there is no limit to thought. As the story progresses, the narrator is more and more removed from her own fate until she is completely separated from destiny. Not only does she not control her life, but she no longer understands what is happening. It is no longer "imaginable." What she is not imagining, she is not resigning herself to. Her own life becomes a story, dislodged from the body and the experience of the one who is telling it. The use of the first person pronoun is charged with what Jameson has called the postmodern "schizophrenia." She is neither the dominated nor the dominating. She has been shot off, like some missile off a spaceship, to fly in her own direction without connection to anything. "It seemed to me that I must have, in some way, got out of the

34 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY normal course of human existence, into a maelstrom where I ought never to have been" (OA 313). In the end she loses her comprehension of what is happening. It is the reaction of severe grief. The speaker stares in disbelief at her own life as if it were something entirely incomprehensible. She says: "Things are happening to you, and you feel them happening, but except for this one fact, you have no connection with them, and no key to the cause or meaning of them" (OA 328). She is experiencing the condition described in Shadows on the Grass by John Philpot, who sees himself as "constantly in flight, an exile everywhere" (294). In the end, when her lack of comprehension is complete, the narrator resorts to superstition and goes out to "look for a sign." Somehow she thinks that if you "wake up" and look at things from another angle, you will see "the grand slam in the cards" (OA 314) staring you in the face. She sees an encounter between a white cock and a grey chameleon, where the rooster takes out the chameleon's tongue (OA 314). This becomes the great "sign" for Dinesen, but she does not interpret the event. For her critics, however, the scene is significant. The removal of the chameleon's tongue is central to the idea of being silenced and of longing for silence. The story of Dinesen's life in Kenya is a story of progressive silencing, and so in spite of herself, she may feel at home with destiny and resign herself to it. In her disconnectedness from her own life and the life narrative she is subsequently creating, Isak Dinesen has given us a typical "woman's text." The act of writing becomes an attempt to close the immense gap between the life lived and the life narrated and understood. The writer becomes the Colonist and the subject becomes the helpless, resigned Native who, like a prisoner, entertains private, subversive thoughts that are never spoken. The subject/Native/prisoner's voice is appropriated by the dominating writer. This Colonialist literature provides an index to the study of autobiography in general. Here we find there is a risk si appropriating one's own voice, especially when the experience portrayed is that of the Colonist, the colonized, the immigrant and the woman all rolled into one.

Sp(l)acing out of the

Text: Rewriting

(Sub) through Landscapes in Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa H. Jill Scott University of Toronto Physis and space the female.1

Alice Jardine After long ages of exile and dreams, the homesick heart throws itself into the arms of space.2

Isak Dinesen Sp(l)acing: For Derrida "spacing" is the becoming-absent, or the becoming-unconscious of the subject; it is the shifting of the metaphysical opposition of space/time off-centre, re-spacing, re-placing it. Writing is spacing, writing is woman, the inauthentic, the mime, at once present and absent, same and different (Jardine 184). My bracketed (1) signifies the meeting point of "place" and "space" as presence, but mute and therefore absence, like its polysemic associations: "elle'Vshe; "ailes" the wings of her ex-positionality; capital "L" embodying the metaphysical dialectic of the angle, which must explode into the metaphors of woman;3 and lastly as the small (1), symbol of the phallic signifier, which must replace woman as that which is bracketed. This multiplicity of extensions is analogous to the representations of woman through place and space in Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa.

1

Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985)

25. 2 Out of Africa (New York: Penguin Books, 1954) 205. Hereafter this will be referred to as OA. 3 Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1981) 242. Here I combine Derrida's metaphysical L with his denial of the metaphysical in "spacing" to create a new paradox (typical of his own contradictions.)

35

36 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY In my analysis of spatial relations in Dinesen's text, I will be drawing upon Alice Jardine's book Gynesis, in which she discusses the exploration of women in modernity as an attempt to create a new "space" or "spacing within themselves" for survival. "Gynesis" she defines as "the putting into discourse of 'woman'" as a process beyond or outside of the male masternarratives: "This other-than-themselves is almost always a "space" of some kind (over which the narrative has lost control), and this space has been coded as 'feminine,' as 'woman'" (Jardine 25). This "woman" of whom she speaks is, therefore, a discursive construct, a social gender, and not an essential or biological entity. Such a "woman" is also the fictional subject of literature, an ontically autonomous figure, not dependent upon the objectively existing states of affairs in the real world. In and through the "places" of literature, this feminine "space" comes into being. Also relevant to a discussion of place and woman is Julia Kristeva's essay entitled "Women's Time," in which she contrasts two kinds of time; linear or cursive tune as the phallic, and Nietzsche's monumental or, as I would describe it, "paradigmatic time" as the female counterpart. This second tune is also later referred to in reference to a new "signifying space," which is not a chronological, but rather a corporeal and mentally desiring space. Also fundamental to her argument toward a female "space" is her appropriation of Plato's notion of the "chora:" "A matrix of space, nourishing, unnameable, anterior to the One, to God, and consequently, defying metaphysics." It is further described as "indefinitely a place; it cannot be destroyed, but provides a ground for all that can come into being; itself being perceptible, outside of all sensation, by means of a sort of bastard reasoning; barely assuming credibility, it is precisely that which makes us dream when we perceive it, and affirm that all that exists must be somewhere, in a determined place. "4 Similarly, Dinesen works in and through the representation of feminine "space" toward a "gynesis" of "woman." In Out of Africa, she uses landscape, place and space to show the construction of a uniquely feminine subjectivity. The relationship is a reflexive one, to the effect that the female subject is both subject to and subject of her spatial surroundings. It is my contention that Dinesen constructs such a place for woman, transcending and breaking up the traditional time/space hierarchy, privileging

4

Julia Kristeva, "Women's Time," trans. Alice Jardine, Signs 7:1 (Autumn 1981): 16.

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the latter as a means to a new understanding of feminine identity.5 If we accept this equation of woman and space, then we must confront the two-fold nature of such a definition. Kristeva's "chora" presents what is "a matrix of space," "indefinitely a place," and yet "it cannot be destroyed." This contradiction presents a problem of basic logic, inherent also in Lacan's vision of woman as "Other" or "not All," that which escapes discourse, logic, and therefore language. As the symbol of the castrated man she incites fear in men, for she is not All. But almost as if compensating for this affront, Lacan states that she does, however, have access to something extra, "supplementary jouissance;" that which is missing comes back: "she has a jouissance, this "she" who does not exist and does not signify anything. She has a jouissance about which maybe she herself knows nothing, except she feels it—that, she knows."6 This "jouissance" is also defined as "the space of the Other," a "modem space," "pure space, just as one says pure spirit" (Lacan 25). Here we have, therefore, that which is present, being absent and signified in the words "La femme" with a bar through the "La." This is a useful concept when considering the title of Out of Africa, which denotes a "movement away from" or "outside of." The connotation is that of a dynamism of being, unsettled or dis-placed in space, a distance from the centre or a virtual centre. The noun "Africa" can be seen as symbolic of woman, the two united by their status as "Other," and the combination "out of" indicates a movement away from the female self. Inherent in this equation is an energetic dialogue which begs the question: if "woman" is situated not in Africa where is she? Is she in a place or a non-place, a space? And if this possible "space" is woman, then wherein lies her "jouissance" which Lacan has promised her? I shall address this question in due time.

5

Paul Ricoeur discusses different concepts of time; he juxtaposes Augustine's conception of time as regulated and contingent upon the human soul against Aristotle and Kant, who see time as inextricably linked to its counterpart: space. S.H. Clark, Paul Ricoeur (London: Routledge, 1990) 161. This latter time in fact indicates that time is space, or that our concept of time is dependent upon our movement through space. It is possible to equate the desire to control time with civilisation/culture/ phallologocentrism against the acceptance of space as the only real measure with environment/nature/woman. 6 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977) 69, as quoted in Jardine 165-66.

38 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY In considering the way in which Dinesen develops a spatial fictional world, the idea of an "isotopic text" becomes important. A spatial network can be seen to travel throughout the text making up what Tamar Yacobi calls "plots of space. "7 Within the textual fabric, sign clusters signifying spatial reference are built up like a pattern imprinted or superimposed upon and through the text itself. The linking of these clusters creates a heterocosm with its own separate reality, analogous to Dinesen's description of Denys Finch Hatton's life line: "Between the river in the mellow English landscape and the African mountain ridge, ran the path of his life; it is an optical illusion that it seemed to wind and swerve—the surroundings swerved" (OA 307-308). This optical illusion is the process by which the reader is initiated into the spatial universe of this text. In the first chapter of Out of Africa, spatial description is the dominant poetic function. As Susan Hardy Aiken rightly points out in her recent book Isak Dinesen and the Engendering of Narrative, the first sentence of the novel sets up a number of hierarchical dichotomies: "I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills" (OA 13) whereby the "I" and "Africa" stand for Europe/Colony, self/Other, mind/matter and known/unknown.8 The farm acts as a mediator between the polar opposites, providing a point of intersection for the two and the possibility of dissolving that stringent binary system. The indication that the farm is at the "foot" of the Ngong Hills functions as a foregrounding of the tenuous hold or relationship between the two.9 Within this same first sentence exists an unsettling contradiction, however, in that Dinesen is posited as the oppressor colonialist, and yet as a woman, an "Other" by definition. It remains to be seen how these two "Others" can be same but also different, cancelling out certain a priori truths and thereby questioning the very nature of truth, and by implication "logos," in her undecidability, hence sp(l)acing.

7

"Plots of Space: World and Story in Isak Dinesen," Poetics Today 12.3 (Fall 1991): 447. 8 Susan Hardy Aiken, Isak Dinesen and the Engendering of Narrative (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990) 210. I am indebted to Susan Aiken's major contribution toward Dinesen scholarship, and it is not without an awareness of her inspiration that I add footnotes, if at times divergent, to her work. 9 While Judith Lee posits Dinesen's most important relationships with "Africans, with other women, and with a man" ("The Mask of Form in Out of Africa," Prose Studies 8 (1985): 49), I maintain that the narrator/Africa rapport is privileged.

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It is the diegesis or narrative processes not the mimesis or narrative product which takes precedence in Dinesen's opening narration: The geographical position and the height of the land combined to create a landscape that had not its like in all the world. There was no fat on it and no luxuriance anywhere; it was Africa distilled up through six thousand feet, like the strong and refined essence of a continent. The colors were dry and burnt, like the colors in pottery. The trees had a light delicate foliage, the structure of which was different from that of the trees in Europe; it did not grow in bows or copulas, but in horizontal layers, and the formation gave to the tall solitary trees a likeness to the palms, or a heroic or romantic air like full-rigged ships with their sails furled, and to the edge of a wood a strange appearance as if the whole wood were faintly vibrating. (OA 13)

This long quotation can be read as a microcosmic unit, mirroring the macrocosmic structure of the novel in one condensed description. The lofty height indicates the ex-positioned nature of place, safe both for woman and for Africa. The reference to Africa "distilled" and "refined" through distance upward is precisely what Dinesen has done for herself and for her readers. Her Africa is made up of fictional signifiers where it is of little importance whether or not they bear any resemblance to their corresponding real referents, hence the notion of "dry and burnt," or for Dinesen, timefaded colours. The horizontal growth of African foliage further emphasises the paradigmatic structure of women's spaces as well as the nonchronological nature of the text this same narrator is writing, in contrast to the tall "phallic" trees, indicative of temporal linearity. The adjectives "heroic" and "romantic" connote the fictionality of Dinesen's experiences, once transposed from the distorting double of memory into yet another double, the written word. And finally, the "strange appearance" of the "faintly vibrating" wood warns the implicit reader to beware of the way things seem, unreality, and alludes to the constantly shifting dynamism at work in the portrayal of Africa and therefore woman, unstable, not static, as well as foregrounding the eventual withdrawal of Africa from the narrator. This metafictional aspect plays an important role in Dinesen's narration, opening up new avenues and multiple interpretive levels. It is the acknowledgement of subjectivity and hence the fictional status of the literary work which allows Dinesen the freedom to create a new space for woman, as she is no longer hampered by the necessity to imitate an objectively existing external "reality" or "truth." She could create fictional

40 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY truths which would prove to be applicable to the status of "woman" as a discursive construct or a "gynesis."10 It is the very impossibility of exact representation which forces the reader to examine Out of Africa not as autobiography, but as a process through words, the space of woman painted upon the ever-changing, distorted landscape: The sky was rarely more than pale blue or violet, with a profusion of mighty, weightless, ever-changing clouds towering up and sailing on it, but it has a blue vigour in it, and at a short distance, it painted the ranges of hills and the woods a fresh deep blue. In the middle of the day the air was alive over the land, like a flame burning; it scintillated, waved and shone like running water, mirrored and doubled all objects . . . you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am where I ought to be. (OA 14)

This passage evokes much about Dinesen's conception of woman and identity. If modernity is concerned with epistemologies or the question "How do I know?," then Dinesen anticipates the subsequent obsession with ontologies in her question "Who am I?" Her description echoes this concern. Contradiction is inherent in the oxymoron of the mighty, weightless clouds, or powerful yet free woman. The movement of air and water, images of femininity, indicates the dynamism of "process," and the "mirroring and doubling" indicates the inward-looking perspective upon woman's identity, as well as the fictional autonomy of the text as opposed to extra-textual reference. Mirrors present exact doubling, but distorted in that they present woman's negative image of the same (man), the metaphor used by Luce Irigaray in Speculum de I'autre femme.n Dinesen's frequent usage of second person narration universalizes her experience of womanhood, so that the T becomes less dominating, more like a 'we.' With her statement: "Here I am, where I ought to be," the narrator asks the questions "where is here?" and "who am I?" The response to this first enquiry might lead to the equation of [here= Africa], or landscape. Going back to our previous equation of [woman = Africa] (the two "Others"), it is possible to end off with the response [I = Africa], 10

In her book Narcissistic Narrative, Linda Hutcheon discusses metafiction, its devices and its origins. She points to modernist narrative, such as Dinesen's, as a positive contribution toward bringing the novel out of the dark ages of nineteenth century realism by expanding mimesis to include the process as well as the product. (Toronto: Wilfred Laurier P, 1980) 25. 11 (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1974).

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41

further strengthened by the narrator's own fantasies: "The grass was me, and the air, the distant invisible mountains were me, the tired oxen were me. I breathed with the slight night-wind in the thorn trees" (OA 233). If this is a valid syllogism then the ramifications for woman's identity are that she is as mighty, as weightless, as fictional, as full of movement, as multiple, as Dinesen's description itself. Using the analogy of the mirror it is then to be deduced that landscape is reflexive to itself and woman is reflexive to herself; they reflect one another in an infinite cycle of movement in images, mirroring Dinesen's own artistic means, her ability to create an endless chain of semantic options. This narrative and ontological intra-reflexivity leads to the undecidability which is the metaphysical shift of "sp(l)acing." This isotopic plot of spaces and perspectives creates a "text-scape" through landscape which allows for the "ex-scape" of woman from the confines of the male gaze. Through an exaggeration of perspective, distorting any preconceived notion of "reality," Dinesen uses these "sub-spaces" to create a "sub-text," un-reading and re-writing, through her appropriation of patriarchal discourse.12 What better way to illustrate woman's phenomenological intentionality through her "escape" into the "sub" of the text, than through images of distance, height, and depth. Dinesen directs her intentional gaze through an inverted perspective: Standing like this in the limpid shadow, looking up towards the golden heights and the clear sky, you would get the feeling that you were in reality walking along the bottom of the sea, with the currents running by you, and were gazing up towards the surface of the ocean. (OA 71)

Here, the "reality" of looking upward into the forest is twisted to dis-place the lens of the observer to a position outside of the realm of the familiar.

12

In this context, Roman Ingarden's phenomenological method in Das Literarische Kunstwerk is of some relevance. He borrows Husserl's concept of "intentionality", in which the mind is a pure absorber of meanings, emptied of any substance, directed by pure intentions. Although this now transcendental ego presupposes the stability of consciousness, intentionality nevertheless presents the liberating possibility that woman as writer/reader be allowed to create her fictional world according to her own female subjectivity. This notion allows for the autonomy of her world view presented in text form and the privileging of her aesthetic fiction over any accepted norm. Roman Ingarden, Das Literarische Kunstwerk (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1972), English trans. George G. Grabowicz, The Literary Work of An (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973).

42 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY The experience is almost one of dizziness as one is forced to re-position one's horizon of expectations and imaginary vision of Dinesen's African forest. Similarly the intoxicating effects of the thin air in the Ngong Hills becomes "reality" for the reader: "The early morning air of the African highlands is of such tangible coldness and freshness . .. you are not on earth but in the dark deep waters, going ahead along the bottom of the sea. It is not even certain that you are moving at all" (OA 196). Dinesen has the movement of the car turned into a "sluggish electric fish," always reversing that which is a given and disturbing the established order of things; what is static is made dynamic and what man makes move ceases to function according to plan. Another technique is her reversal of the subject/object relationship. The "doer" becomes the object of the "doing," so that her implicit white European reader is no longer master of his/her experiences. "We" become her "you" and must conform to the role she sets us. The culminating experience for the narrator in Out of Africa is her flight over and above the landscape in the chapter "Das Ding an sich:" To Denys Finch Hatton I owe what was, I think, the greatest, the most transporting pleasure of my life on the farm: I flew with him over Africa . . . flying becomes a thing of great importance in your life. It opens up a world. . . . You have tremendous views as you get up above the African highlands, surprising combinations and changes of light and coloring, the rainbow on the green sunlit land, the gigantic upright clouds and big wild storms, all swing round you in a race and a dance. (OA 204)

This poetic description of flying mimics the flighty dance itself. Susan Hardy Aiken also comments on the importance of this passage, stating that the insistence that indivisibility of possession and dispossession means that the self paradoxically becomes "itself" only when it loses itself (Aiken 224). This can be further understood through the [woman = Africa] equation, to the effect that this extreme pleasure is achieved by flying away from the self, from subjectivity. Suddenly "she" is capable of defying the laws of gravity and time, making three-dimensional existence a paradigmatic possibility, as she exclaims, "And now I understand everything" (OA 205). Her ecstasy in flight is analogous to the bracketed "1" in that "Sp(l)acing" with its wings/ailes of ex-scape. Yet another orthographic meta-mutation would be the addition of a bracketed (y) to make "sp(l)a(y)cing." This draws attention to "play" or the ludic function in Dinesen's work, also fundamental to her project of "gynesis" as a product of new visions through place and space. Dinesen's

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43

use of topography to initiate new dialogue for a discursive model of woman shows us how fair it is to make foul with play(ce). Images of loss, lack and ex-positionality recur and culminate in the retreat of Africa from the narrator. Beginning with the statement that the farm is just a bit too high up for growing coffee, one senses a process of separation, whereby Africa becomes the animate subject in motion and Dinesen the object of stasis: "Now the country disengaged itself from me, and stood back a little, in order that I should see it clearly as a whole" (OA 284). This process of separation is akin to the notion of difference within the self of woman expressed in Irigaray's essay "When Our Lips Speak Together." Here, she proposes an alternative to Lacan's theory of lack or not-All, which reduces woman to her reproductive function and "womb" imagery. Irigaray is interested in doing away with this narrow vision of woman as mother toward the autonomous intra-reflexive entity of woman with her "two lips."13 This means that woman no longer needs the Phallus or the man to hold up the mirror/speculum in order for her to exist, since she possesses the power to mirror herself. She in effect replaces the univocal Phallus with the undecidability of being in her polysemic self. Africa retreating from Dinesen reflects the two lips of woman in that the two are almost indistinguishable, yet different and separate, disallowing the metaphysical self/other opposition to function, threatening the entire symbolic order and communication itself. Where Susan Hardy Aiken uses Cixous' revisionist reading of Freud, interpreting the loss of Africa as "lack" of the (M)other (Aiken 209), I would propose Irigaray's views as more liberating, for they permit an infinite desire/semiosis independent of any "other." When the narrator says, "Wherever I walked, the ground fell away under me, and the stars fell from the sky" (OA 313), a loss of subjectivity allows her to embody Irigaray's "blindspot," ex-positioned and absent from the male specular gaze.14 Out of Africa turns artistic expression and female creativity into a topos, as a means to a portrayal of identity in a concrete spatial medium. A work

13

Luce Irigaray, "When Our Lips Speak Together," trans. Caroline Burke, Signs 6.1 (1980). 14 This is not to suggest that Irigaray's own arguments are unproblematic. While she permits the functional autonomy of "woman," she does so through a dangerously "gynocentric" position, threatening the possibility of an "hegemony" of woman equally as debilitating as that of "phallocentrism."

44 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY of art can exist as a double of woman herself, as this text dis-plays a feminine interpretation of some reality. The representation of an artist at work within that fictional work acts as a "mise en abyme," the double of the double, a metafictional device to bring the "process" of "the putting into discourse of woman" to the fore. Dinesen starts off by telling us that she began writing stories in the evenings to "take my mind off, to other countries and other tunes" (OA 47), dis-placing herself through distance of tune and place. She ironically subverts the notion of genre through the parable about the "good book," as she relates the remarks of Kumante, her servant boy: "Look, Msabu," he said, "this is a good book. It hangs together from the one end to the other. Even if you hold it up and shake it strongly, it does not come to pieces. The man who has written it is very clever. But what you write . . . is some here and some there. When the people forget to close the door it blows about, even down on the floor and you are angry. It will not be a good book." (OA 50)

This passage self-reflexively refers to the book at hand, which, in its fragmented, episodic structure avoids the positive authority of the "I" narrator. It is not one long utterance, but an anecdotal collection, nonchronological, with spaces in time scattered like the spaces of paper in this breezy African dining room. It is within this context of "writing" that "woman" and "space" can be ultimately conceptualised. For Derrida, the speech/writing hierarchy is analogous to that of male/female, and since woman is associated with space otphysis, and the male with the metaphysical, then it follows that, "'woman' must be released from her metaphysical bondage and it is writing, as 'feminine operation,' that can and does subvert the history of metaphysics" (Jardine 183). Derrida does not stop here, but goes on to show that writing is in fact "spacing," as it displaces or moves off-centre the metaphysical, by privileging the physical, de-naturalising the natural (Jardine 184). This is unequivocally linked to his notion of "difference," that is, the endless deferral of the perpetually virtual signifier in the process of creating meaning, as opposed to the Saussurean binary signifier/signified as closed system.15 This possibility of between-ness in spacing, the play of presence and absence, makes textual sense of Lacan's non-linguistic positing of

15

Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics (London: Routledge, 1985) 106.

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woman as a non-being, not All, as Derrida explains: "spacing as writing is the becoming-absent and the becoming-unconscious of the subject."16 The stories which Dinesen writes in Out of Africa are not like "the Odyssey itself" that Kumante offers as an example of a "good book." Rather, they are well "spaced:" "I used to sit and write in the dining-room, with papers spread all over the table, for I had accounts and estimates of the farm to do, in between my stories, and little notes from my farming manager to answer" (OA 48). This reminiscence must be seen within the parameters of the larger structure of Dinesen's fictional autobiography. Out of Africa is divided into five larger sections of approximately equal length, each of which is subdivided into segments of varying length. The first section contains the fewest segments, while the fourth contains the greatest number, and the fifth moves back to the continuity established at the beginning. There is a progression toward more "spacing" and fragmentation of the text, with section four as a sequence of parable-like anecdotes. This spacing also over-rides the chronology of tune, leaving spaces of time, throughprolepses and analepses in and amongst the various segments. Dinesen subverts the normal spatial requirements of the novel genre to create a new discursive spacing for woman. The spaces of the African landscape, the spaces forming the text-scape, and the spaces of the text within the text, must all be seen in the same con-text of displacement analogous to the multi-faceted identity of woman.17 The very charm of Dinesen's "ontological landscape" lies in its indeterminacies of "jouissance," making a foul play of Lacan's indeterminate bar through the definite article in "La femme." In Das Literarische Kunstwerk, Ingarden discusses the Konkretisierung of the literary work as a function of these very indeterminacies: "our observations have led us to the conclusion that the purely literary work is schematic in various respects, containing "gaps," spots of indeterminacy,

16

Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967) 69, as quoted in Jardine 184. 17 I propose a divergence from critic Wayne Schow's attempts to equate Dinesen's writing with "wholeness and coherence," stating that the megastructure gives the message that all humanness is connected and that "Things fit together." "Out of Africa, The White Album, and the Possibility of Tragic Affirmation," English Studies 67.1 (1986): 45.

46 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY schematized aspects, etc."18 These spaces of which he speaks foreground Roland Barthes' later discussion in Le plaisir du texte: Pleasure/Bliss [Jouissance]: terminologically, there is always a vacillation—I stumble, I err. In any case, there will always be a margin of indecision. . . . A site of bliss [jouissance] is then created. It is not the reader's "person" that is necessary to me, it is this site: the possibility of a dialectics of pleasure, of an unpredictability of bliss: the bets are not placed, there can still be a game.19 This process of "sp(l)acing" through writing dis-"placing" is the manner by which Isak Dinesen succeeds in creating a fissure in the existing paradigm and exploring a new feminine space of jouissance. Dinesen illustrates the "undulating landscape" of her African Utopia through "plots of space," forming a metatextual landscape in discourse capable of showing us as much through narrative technique, as through topos, that this indeterminacy, at once a place and a space, a presence within an absence, can be a function of "gynesis." The discursive model of woman, however, is always already undetermined and incomplete, for to suggest finality would be an end to dialogue and discourse itself. This process is reflected in the infinite metaphoric virtuality of poststructuralist theory and criticism. With analogy as its main source, the "argument" is never and can never achieve finality, but merely an ongoing semiosis of sp(l)a(y)cing, where the parodic complicitous "p(l)a(y)n is simultaneously installing and subverting its own means and "pla(y)ces."

18

The Literary Work of Art, 331. The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975) 4. 19

Lilith and Gender Equality in Isak Dinesen's "The Supper at Elsinore" and "The Old Chevalier" Gurli A. Woods Carleton University The Lilith figure is a very complex one that likely predates the Biblical Hebrews. Raphael Patai traces her "mythical biography" to the "Sumerian culture about the middle of the 3rd millennium B.C."' He further states that no she-demon has ever achieved as fantastic a career as Lilith who started out from the lowliest of origins, was a failure as Adam's intended wife, became the paramour of lascivious spirits, rose to be the bride of Samael the demon King, ruled as the Queen of Zemargad and Sheba, and finally ended up as the consort of God himself. . . . [B]y the Talmudic period (2nd to 5th centuries A.D.) she was a fully developed evil she-demon, and during the Kabbalistic age she rose to the high position of queenly consort at God's side. (207)

The legend of Lilith as the first wife of Adam appears in the Talmud, was expanded by the kabbalists, and has been "favored as a romantic theme by poets, novelists, and dramatists of Europe and America until our own day."2 According to Talmudic legend, there was tension between Lilith and Adam: Adam and Lilith could find no happiness together, not even understanding. When Adam wished to lie with her, Lilith demurred: "Why should I lie beneath you," she asked, "when I am your equal since both of us were created from dust?" When Lilith saw that Adam was determined to overpower her, she uttered the magic name of God, rose into the air and flew away to the Red Sea, a place of ill repute, full of lascivious demons. There, Lilith engaged in unbridled promiscuity, and bore a demonic brood of more than one hundred a day. God, however, sent after her three

1

Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess (Hoboken, NJ: KTAV Publishing, 1967)

207. 2

The chapter on "Rehabilitation of Lilith" in Sol Liptzin's book Biblical Themes in World Literature (Hoboken, NJ: KTAV Publishing, 1985) 1.

47

48 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY angels, Senoy, Sansenoy, and Semangelof by name, who soon located her in the same wild waters in which the Egyptians were to drown in the days of the Exodus. The angels gave her God's message, but she refused to return. (Patai 210)

Sol Liptzin points out that most versions vilify Lilith3 and that it was not until the dawn of our century, the century that has fought so vehemently for the liberation of woman from the dominance of man, that attempts were begun to rehabilitate Lilith as Adam's proud mate, who refused to bow to his claim of male superiority, a claim which her successor, Eve, accepted as God-ordained. (2)

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar also discuss the Lilith legend.4 They are not surprised at the vilification of Lilith: What her [Lilith's] story suggests is that in patriarchal culture, female speech and female "presumption"—that is, angry revolt against male domination—are inextricably linked and inevitably daemonic. Excluded from the human community, even from the semidivine communal chronicles of the Bible, the figure of Lilith represents the price women have been told they must pay for attempting to define themselves.5

3

Patai also sees the vilification of Lilith in the conclusion to his chapter on Lilith: ". . .the basic qualities of her personality never changed: she remained the beautiful seductress who joined lonely men in their nocturnal unrest, enjoyed their sex and bore them demonic offspring, while she also found enough time to play her lethal games with children. . . ," and he concludes that Lilith "must be a projection, or objectification, of human fears and desires which, in a deeper sense, are identical with those oft-mentioned 'plagues of mankind' said in Kabbalistic literature to be the offspring of Lilith, but recognized by us as her psychogenic progenitors" (242). 4 See also Sidney D. Braun, "Lilith: Her Literary Portrait, Symbolism, and Significance," Nineteenth-Century French Studies 11 (1982-83): 135-153, who refers to the fact that "the interpretations of the legend of Lilith have been many, complex, even esoteric, resulting in a vast body of scholarship" (136). 5 The Mad Woman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979) 35. Gilbert and Gubar also link the problem which Lilith represents with female authorship and female authority: "a life of feminine submission, of 'contemplative purity,' is a life of silence, a life that has no pen and no story, while a life of female rebellion, of 'significant action,' is a life that must be silenced, a life whose monstrous pen tells a terrible story" (36).

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Dinesen is interested in the part of the Lilith myth dealing with the question of equality between Adam and Eve. Lilith was created of the same earth as Adam, and hence as his equal,6 and Eve was created from Adam's ribs, i.e. as his dependent. Dinesen deals with this question most literally in her tale of "The Old Chevalier," as will be discussed below. Dinesen does not refer to the figure of Lilith by name very often in her work. In fact, Lilith is mentioned by name in only two of Seven Gothic Tales in the English edition, and according to Lise Henriksen's comprehensive index of names and subject matter in Dinesen's work, Lilith is referred to by name in only one tale in the Danish editions.7 And yet, certain characteristics of this mythical figure constitute a basic ingredient in all the strong women in Dinesen's work who are associated with witches, goddesses, lionesses, and pythonesses. One of the tales, in which Lilith is referred to by name, is "The Supper at Elsinore." In this tale, it will be remembered that Fanny De Coninck is engaged in a conversation with the bishop on the question whether "if offered a pair of angel's wings which could not be removed, one would accept or refuse the gift. "8 Fanny does not hesitate to admit that if she had a chance of getting these wings, "she would fly" (SAE 240). Not surprisingly, the supreme patriarch, the bishop, does not encourage the notion of a woman flying. He brings up the "bad" example of Adam's first wife Lilith who was made out of earth like Adam, and who flew away from him.9

6

Patai 210. Patai also refers to one version of legends pertaining to the birth of Lilith which recounts "that she was created by God hi the same manner in which He had shortly before fashioned Adam. That is to say, God again turned to the earth to obtain raw material, but this time, instead of using clean earth which was the substance of Adam's body, He—for reasons unknown—took filth and impure sediments from the earth, and out of these He formed a female. As was to be expected, this creature turned out to be an evil spirit" (218). 7 Karen Blixen: En handbag (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1988) 149. 8 Isak Dinesen, "The Supper at Elsinore," Seven Gothic Tales (New York: Vintage-Random, 1972) 240. This story will hereafter be referred to as SAE. 9 Dinesen was obviously familiar with some versions of the Lilith legend. She was also very well read. It is therefore possible that she could have been inspired by the way in which other authors had used the Lilith figure as well. In her study on The Witch and the Goddess in the Stories of Isak Dinesen: A Feminist Reading (Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1988), Sara Stambaugh, for example, thinks that "[t]he Bishop's phrase, 'Adam's first wife, Lilith,' is taken from D.G. Rossetti's

50 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY If we compare the Lilith legend from the Talmud (quoted above) with that which the bishop says about Lilith, we find essentially the same story: We may have our reasons to mistrust a flying lady. You have, perhaps, heard of Adam's first wife, Lilith? She was, in contradistinction to Eve, made all out of earth, like himself. What was the first thing that she did? She seduced two angels and made them betray to her the secret word which opens heaven, and so she flew away from Adam. That goes to teach us that where there is too much of the earthly element in a woman, neither husband nor angels can master her. (SAE 240)

Dinesen's Danish version of the same passage reads:

sonnet 'Lilith' or 'Body's Beauty'" (113n.4), and she suggests that Dinesen would also have known Rossetti's source: the Walpurgisnacht scene in Goethe's Faust. I would want to add another possible source: Anatole France's "La fille de Lilith", one of seven tales in Balthazar from 1889. Some of the characteristics of Lilith's daughter are very similar to some of the important characteristics of Dinesen's Lilith figures: "ethereal lightness of footsteps," "arms, to which invisible wings seemed attached," and "magnetic personality," (Balthasar, trans. Mrs. J. Lane [London: Bodley Head, 1909] 70). The first person narrator in Anatole France's tale explains: "Adam . . . had a first wife whom the Bible does not make mention of, but of whom the Talmud speaks. Her name was Lilith. Created, not out of one of his ribs, but from this same red earth out of which he himself had been kneaded, she was not flesh of his flesh. She voluntarily separated from him. He was still living in innocence when she left him to go to those regions where long years afterwards the Persians settled, but which at this time were inhabited by the pre-Adamites, more intelligent and more beautiful than the sons of men. She therefore had no part in the transgression of our first father, and was unsullied by that original sin. Because of this she also escaped from the curse pronounced against Eve and her descendants. She is exempt from sorrow and death; having no soul to be saved, she is incapable of virtue or vice. Whatever she does, she accomplishes neither good nor evil. The daughters that were born to her of some mysterious wedlock are immortal as she is, and free as she is both in their deeds and thoughts, seeing that they can neither gain nor lose in the sight of God" (76-77). Anatole France stresses the immortality and its implications in his usage of the Lilith figure, whereas Dinesen uses her Lilith figure in quite a different way. But both are basing then- tales on basically the same legend, it would appear. From the records at the Karen Blixen Museum in Rungstedlund, Denmark, which contains a list of the books in Dinesen's personal library, it is evident that she owned several works by Anatole France. Balthasar does not appear to have been part of her collection. This does not, however, preclude her having read this particular book. See also Liptzin's "The Rehabilitation of Lilith" (6).

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51

Vi bar dog vistnok Grund til at naere Mistillid til de flyvende darner. De bar maaske h0rt om Adams f0rste Hustru, Lilith. Hun var ligesom han selv, og i Modsaetning til Eva, skabt af Jorden. Hvad var da det f0rste, hun gjorde? Hun forf0rte to Engle og overtake dem til at r0be det hemmelige Ord, som aabner Himlens Porte, og saa f!0j hun bort fra Adam. Deraf kan vi uddrage den Laere, at naar der er for meget af det jordiske Element i en Kvinde, kan hverken Engle eller /Egtemaend mestre hende.10

However, Dinesen twists the legend in the bishop's mouth to make it suit his agenda, while at the same time stressing the elements in which she, the author, is particularly interested. The bishop stresses the fact that Lilith was made all out of earth, thus leading up to the assertion that "where there is too much of the earthly element in a woman, neither husband nor angels can master her" (SAE 240). Such an assertion is, of course, based on the assumption that women are "supposed" to be mastered, not an entirely surprising attitude on the part of a representative of a patriarchal institution such as the Church. In her description of the bishop, Dinesen has already signalled to the reader that he, the bishop, although a "pillar of society," is an unreliable source of information. In Fanny's mind, Dinesen has unmasked him and stripped him of any priestly authority by thinking of him as using a chamber pot." The lesson which the bishop draws from Lilith's/woman's flight implies that Lilith/woman is to be "mastered" by the "master/husband," and that there is something wrong if such mastering is not carried out. The word which "opens heaven" is "secret" in the bishop's account, and it should "obviously" remain so to Lilith/woman lest she "fly away" from Adam/her master. At the beginning of the quote, this unreliable speaker does, however, mention a fact about Lilith which is very important to Dinesen: Adam's first wife, Lilith, had been created from earth, like Adam himself, as opposed to Eve. The bishop does not exactly foreground this statement. It is almost against his will that the author imposes this fact on him. When examining the sentence again: "She [Lilith] was, in

10

"Et Familieselskab i Helsing0r" (FH) in Karen Blixen, Syv fantastiske fortcellinger (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1985) 293. 11 Marianne Juhl is right when she says that Fanny's thinking of the chamber pot reflects her desire to tell "the hidden story" (Marianne Juhl and Bo Hakon J0rgensen, Diana's Revenge: Two Lines in Isak Dinesen's Authorship, trans. Anne Born Odense, Penmark: Odense UP, 1985] 200). But there is more to it than that, I believe. Dinesen also discredits the bishop, thus rendering his statements less authoritative, by having Fanny put him in a ridiculous light hi front of the reader.

52 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY contradistinction to Eve, made all out of earth, like himself [Adam]" (SAE 240), we find that a prepositional phrase containing the difference between Eve and Lilith has been interpolated into the main clause stating that she was made from earth. The fact that Adam was likewise created out of earth is almost glossed over and added as if an afterthought, tagged on reluctantly by the bishop in the interest of accuracy. It is, however, important to the author to retain the presence of the comparisons between Adam and Eve, and between Adam and Lilith. Dinesen wants to point out that Adam and Lilith were created equal despite the fact that she has the bishop attempt to gloss over this detail, and she achieves this by providing the bishop with this particular piece of knowledge. But being who he is, he cannot draw a conclusion based on equality. Rather, his conclusion moves from an acknowledgement of equal birth to a confirmation of the prevailing attitude of society, that this "equal" woman is, of course, supposed to be dominated and mastered. In the following paragraph, the bishop further expounds his ideas of the "angel in the house", the woman on the pedestal, out of touch with reality, and out of touch with equality. He is, for example, willing to grant her [woman] the title of angel, and the white wings, and hit her up on our highest pedestal on the inevitable condition that she must not dream of, must even have been brought up in absolute ignorance of, the possibility of flight. (SAE 240) The Director of the Royal Theatre, another high ranking male within the patriarchal order, expects women to be perfectly lovely poetry (SAE 241), and the old Commodore complains of the "beastly steamships" being "witches of the sea" like "self-supporting women" (SAE 241). The mere thought of emancipated women is thoroughly undesirable to these patriarchs.12 Most of the guests at the sisters' party are male "pillars of

12

Dinesen elaborates on this question also in her letters, for example in the letter to her aunt, Mary Bess Westenholz, of May 23, 1926: "In my opinion 'manliness' is a human concept; 'womanliness' as a rule signifies those qualities in a woman or that aspect of her personality that is pleasing to men, or that they have need of. . . A man might well be attracted to and admire a woman who took a passionate interest in the stars, or who cultivated flowers with which to beautify his home; but she would be sinning against the idea of womanliness if she sought to establish a direct relationship with nature in these branches by taking up astronomy or botany—for how could such ambitions have anything to do with him and his happiness?" Isak Dinesen, Letters from Africa 1914-1931, ed. Frans Lasson, trans.

LILITH AND GENDER EQUALITY

53

society", and they clearly represent the prevailing order with its restrictive concept of the woman's role and place. Dinesen shows that Fanny is aware of this and that she probably does not agree with the statements of these patriarchs. Moreover, Dinesen shows how Fanny consciously puts on a mask when talking to the bishop, and by extension to the other "important" gentlemen as well. When discussing the question of angel's wings, Dinesen lets us witness what is behind Fanny's mask. Fanny thinks of one thing and says another. She is, for example, thinking of the bishop using a chamber pot with wings on him, but she is actually talking to him about eating "a roast white turkey" (SAE 241). The Dinesen reader suspects that Fanny herself is the white fat bird, prepared, cooked and consumed "with obvious delight" (SAE 239) by the bishop, alias the patriarchal society. Nevertheless, Fanny brings up these matters and engages in polite conversation which inevitably produces remarks by the male authoritative figures designed to put women in their place and keep them there. Only in the privacy of their own rooms have Fanny and her sister been able to let go and show how depressed they really are with their situation. Fanny cannot help pointing out that the women, whom the men do not adore in the manner described by the bishop, are those who prepare themselves to fly off on a broom stick, i.e. they are witches. To Fanny, this is a positive state of affairs, whereas to the bishop, it is decidedly negative. Dinesen's tales are full of witches13 and, on the surface at least, less populated with Lilith figures. Lilith and the witch have the flying aspect in common. Both represent the strong-willed, independently minded woman protesting against the constraints of patriarchal society. The witch is constantly evoked, along with the goddess on her tripod. Fanny, for example, is likened to a pythoness just as the question of the angel's wings is introduced: "No pythoness on her tripod, her body filled with inspiring fumes, could look more prophetic" (SAE 238).M There is clearly a link between the witch and Lilith. Fanny associates Lilith with witches; the bishop's remarks that women should have absolutely no notion of flying, immediately conjures up ideas of flying witches in Fanny's mind.

Anne Born (Chicago, U of Chicago P, 1981) 261. 13 See Sara Stambaugh's excellent discussion of the witches in Dinesen's work in The Witch and the Goddess in the Stories oflsak Dinesen. 14 Another highly topical example—thanks to the filmed version of "Babette's Feast"—is, of course, Babette on her tripod brewing her witches' brew in the cauldrons of the pious sisters' kitchen.

54 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY Are all of Dinesen's witches then also Liliths? The answer must be in the affirmative as far as the aspect of the urge to fly away from the constraints of society is concerned. But there is one aspect to Lilith which is not shared by the witch: the aspect of the inherent equality based on the creation myth. Dinesen quite clearly stresses the fact, even through the unreliable narration of the bishop, that Lilith was created as an equal to Adam, both having been created out of earth. The figure of the witch, while a powerful symbol of the strong emancipated woman, does not necessarily imply equality. The Lilith figure implies equality and, at the same tune, unwillingness to take orders from the being with whom she was created equal. To the bishop, however, the superimposition of inequality is justified, not only for reasons of feminine clothing, but also because of woman's biological shape itself: "The long tresses, the veils of pudicity, the trailing garments, even the adorable womanly forms in themselves, the swelling bosom and hip, are as little as possible in conformity with the idea of flying" (SAE 240). In fact, those things "all go to weigh her down and keep her on the ground'X^AE 240). Unfortunately, he is right. All these things have, indeed, served to "keep women in their place," firmly on the ground and far removed from equality, and the bishop wants to see this state of affairs continue. In "The Old Chevalier," Dinesen again brings in the Lilith figure, but only in the English edition, not in the Danish one. In this tale, Dinesen works out her perception of the difference between Lilith and Eve. Dinesen lets von Brackel narrate his account of his experience with two women, one after the other, on a rainy night in 1874. Von Brackel sees the two incidents as unrelated: "the attempt to poison me has nothing to do with what I was going to tell you."15 Von Brackel cannot see any connection between the two women. However, the reader is able to observe that the two incidents have been set up as parallel, each one with a different emphasis. The first one, the one with the lady who tried to poison von Brackel, explores the Lilith figure.16 The second one explores the Eve figure.

15

Seven Gothic Tales (New York: Vintage-Random, 1972) 81. "The Old Chevalier" will hereafter be referred to as TOC. 16 Marianne Juhl also compares von Brackel's statements about emancipated women in "The Old Chevalier" with Fanny's conversation with the bishop hi "The Supper at Elsinore," but Juhl and her co-author Bo Hakon J0rgensen see von Brackel's first mistress figure as an Artemis/Diana figure rather than a Lilith figure, thereby stressing the notion of revenge, i.e., the attempted poisoning, on the part of

LILITH AND GENDER EQUALITY

55

The paragraph alerting the reader to the fact that Lilith figures in this story is the one discussing competition between men and women: The jealousy of competition was, as between Adam and Lilith, a noble striving. So there you would find, not only the old witches of Macbeth, of whom one might have expected it, but even young ladies with faces smooth as flowers, wild and mad with jealousy of their lovers' mustachios. All this they got from reading—in the orthodox witches' manner—the book of Genesis backwards. (TOC 88)

And, indeed, the question of competition is all pervasive in the first part of the tale. Lilith is von Brackel's object of desire, the woman who later tries to poison him, and Adam is her husband. The competition between the two of them is stressed throughout. Von Brackel suspects her of making use of him "to make her husband jealous" (TOC 83), and he readily admits that he himself "felt it to be true that [his] feelings for the lovely young woman, whom [he] adored, were really light of weight compared to [his] feeling for the young man" (TOC 86). Not only that, but if the husband had been with her when they first met, or if he had known him before he met her, he "would never have dreamed of falling in love with the man's wife" (TOC 86). It is interesting to note that the reference to Lilith and Adam has been left out of the Danish version. Everything else is there: Men Kappestriden imellem Mand og Kvinde, med den saeregne skinsyge, den f0rer med sig, den var efter den nye Katekismus af aedel art, og blev lyst i Kuld og K0n i Heksekredse".17

It is not clear why Dinesen might have chosen to leave out the reference to Adam and Lilith in the Danish edition. Whatever the reason might be, it is, I believe, of significance that the reference occurs in the English edition. Although the reference is inserted as an apparently insignificant phrase of comparison: "as between Adam and Lilith" (TOC 88), this tiny reference nevertheless sheds very illuminating light on the entire story, on the Lilith aspects of the "poison"-lady, as well as on the comparison between the Lilith

this woman (Juhl and J0rgensen 55ff). For further details about the Artemis (Greek) and Diana (Roman) myths, see Barbara G. Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983). 17 "Den gamle vandrende Ridder," in Karen Blixen Syvfantastiskefortcellinger, 82.

56 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY figure and the Eve figure. The paragraph setting up the Adam/Eve relationship can be found in both language editions. If we examine this tale's Lilith figure in relation to her husband (Adam) more closely, we find that she has no name in the story, and neither does her husband. Both are descendants from old well-known families, i.e. they are (created) equal. Not surprisingly, Lilith is associated with emancipation. Von Brackel calls his first love (Lilith) his "emancipated young witch" (TOC 89) who was as fond of him as of her favourite doll (TOC 89). This Lilith figure is an individual who rides a big horse (usually a male prerogative), who gives a boy of twenty (young von Brackel) sad dreams, who makes him (von Brackel) happy (not the other way around), etc. In other words, she appears to be the subject of her own actions; she takes the initiative in the situations in which she is involved, be it horse back riding or playing cat and mouse with von Brackel. In the latter kind of situation he is definitely the mouse. She plays with him as if he were her favourite doll, or makes love to nun, making him happy (TOC 82-83). She is a woman with her own agenda, who is competing with her husband for the right to be perceived as an equal by, among others, von Brackel.18 Von Brackel clearly fails to live up to her expectations, as he is more interested in her husband than in her. For this reason she apparently decides to poison him, according to the narrator (von Brackel).19 An attempt at poisoning someone is, again, an

18

Marianne Juhl links the relationship between the unnamed lady and her husband to Dinesen's own relationship to Denys Finch Hatton and thus enters into a somewhat negative evaluation of the stressful aspects of male and female lives (Dinesen's and Hatton's) "running parallel" to each other (Juhl and J0rgensen 57). I read the situation in "The Old Chevalier" more positively by stressing the equality aspect of the relationship, based on Dinesen's reference to the Lilith legend. 19 Perhaps von Brackel, whom Dinesen, from the very first paragraph of the tale, presents as an unreliable narrator, is imagining things here. He displays a paranoid fear of this woman being a werewolf at the time when he conjures up the alleged attempted poisoning (TOC 84). Marianne Juhl also points out that von Brackel cannot be trusted (Juhl and J0rgensen 52f.), i.e., he is an "unreliable narrator", and she says that von Brackel's "fear causes him to exaggerate all her [the Artemis figure's] dominating qualities so that they acquire unreal dimensions and so become even more dangerous" (Juhl and J0rgensen 56), but she and Bo Hakon Jorgensen both accept the poisoning attempt at face value, building it into their argument that this woman is an Artemis/Diana figure, and hence a revenge figure. Juhl does, however, also see the equality aspect without foregrounding it: "The two women in "The Old Chevalier" may well be two sides of Karen Blixen herself:

LILITH AND GENDER EQUALITY

57

expression of action as opposed to any passive acceptance of the state of affairs. It is also quite different from, say, breaking down and committing suicide in despair. The contrast between the Lilith and the Eve figure, the young woman who spends the night with von Brackel right after the alleged attempted poisoning, and who subsequently demands twenty francs for her services, is set up in a key paragraph: I [von Brackel] have always thought it unfair to woman that she has never been alone in the world. Adam had a time . . . when he could wander about on a fresh and peaceful earth, among the beasts, in full possession of his soul, and most men are born with a memory of that period. But poor Eve found him there, with all his claims upon her, the moment she looked into the world. (TOC 87-88) This is precisely what the Eve figure, called Nathalie in the tale, illustrates. She (Eve) is von Brackel's (Adam's) doll, as opposed to von Brackel being the doll of the Lilith figure. Now von Brackel takes all the initiatives. He tells Nathalie/Eve to eat and to undress. It is he who finishes the undressing of her as if she were a doll, etc. He repeatedly refers to her as having been sent to him to console him after his other unhappy love affair.20 That is,

Artemis, who wants to be a man's 'equal,' a human being. And the sensual young woman who longs to be loved and held fast, not by men who drop to their knees before her and worship her like a doll or see her as 'an enchanting image of the woman of her time,' but as an individuality" (60-61). 20 The pioneer of Isak Dinesen studies in North America, Robert Langbaum, assumes that von Brackel is speaking for a nostalgic Dinesen in this tale, and that "Dinesen characterizes these women [i.e. the emancipated young women of the highest intelligence who compete with men] as witches—her way of talking about sexual deficiency hi women," Isak Dinesen's Art: The Gayety of Vision (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1975) 77-78. In Langbaum's interpretation, it is Nathalie who embodies the "ideal" of woman which von Brackel had "managed to revive for a moment . . . then saw it disappear" (80). Langbaum totally overlooks the fact that Dinesen sets out at the very beginning to discredit the old baron, thus turning him into an unreliable narrator. By contrast, Susan Hardy Aiken is aware of the danger of "accepting] him [von Brackel], unproblematically, as a privileged interpreter of the events he recounts, and to read him as Dinesen's double," Isak Dinesen and the Engendering of Narrative (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990) 120, and she singles out the references to Don Quixote, Odysseus, and "Tennyson's Homeric echoes in 'Ulysses'" as evidence of Dinesen's "telescopfing] into a single sentence twenty-seven centuries of masculinist literary tradition, remarking its obsolescence through the

58 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY "Eve finds Adam already there with all his claims upon her." Von Brackel does not acknowledge Nathalie as an individual, as a "real" woman. He wants mystery, such as the mystery of undressing a woman layer after layer. "Nothing is mysterious until it symbolizes something," he says (TOC 94). And he continues: The women of those days were more than a collection of individuals. They symbolized or represented Woman . . . Where we talked of woman . . . you [the younger generation] talk of women [individual women], and all the difference lies there. (TOC 94-95)

Von Brackel wants the Goethean "idea of Woman—of das ewig weibliche" (TOC 95), and von Brackel feels certain that he "must also have symbolized something to her," and that he "hardly existed for her as an individual" (TOC 92). This is, of course, what he thinks. Dinesen gives us no access to Nathalie's mind. This lack of interest in people as individuals is further illustrated in von Bracket's anecdotal reference to his very old Russian acquaintance in Paris, who used to keep "the most charming young dancers, and who, when once asked whether he had, or needed to have, any illusions as to their feelings for him, thought the question over and said: 'I do not think, if my chef succeeds in making me a good omelette, that I bother much whether he loves me or not'" (TOC 83). And von Brackel continues in the same vein by referring to the fact that a young man "might say that he did not care whether his wine merchant was of his own religion or not" (TOC 83). Love is thus equated—by von Brackel and his old acquaintance—with the consumption/delivery of food and wine, and the individual behind the "product" does not matter. These anecdotal statements are juxtaposed to von Brackel's musings that the Lilith-lady had made him happy: "Whatever would happen to me now, I had had my due, and declared myself satisfied" (TOC 83). The implication is that he, as a young man, was in love with being in love: Love, with very young people, is a heartless business. We drink at that age from thirst, or to get drunk; it is only later in life that we occupy ourselves with the individuality of our wine. A young man in love is essentially enraptured by the forces within himself. (TOC 83)

name von Brackel, the German root of which signifies waste or refuse" (119).

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In other words, von Brackel in his affair with the Lilith figure was not interested in her as an individual. His references to omelettes and wine appear in the text as an illustration of the above quote. Von Brackel even says that if he indeed had too much of youthful vanity, he was going to be "taught a lesson very soon" (TOC 83). This lesson is the attempted poisoning. But did he learn the lesson? When Nathalie/Eve comes along, he again does not see her as an individual. She is all symbol to him, and he believes that she sees him as a symbol as well. We do not know. She is never asked. It is irrelevant to von Brackel. Again, he has to learn a lesson. This tune it is poisoning of a different kind. Nathalie/Eve shocks him by demanding money for her services. Before that von Brackel and Nathalie consume "a cold bird" (TOC 99), Nathalie herself, wingless, dead and cold, a foreshadowing of her death, and yet another indication of the wingless, dead position of the Eves within the constraints of patriarchal society. When this "God-sent" woman demands twenty francs for her services, von Brackel is shocked. He does not see that he really equates her with consumed goods (omelettes and wine). In this situation he is naked, i.e. totally unprepared. He feels a sensation of suffocation, of a person who has been buried alive, that is, buried in the old concepts of symbols. This incident is juxtaposed to the Commune and the massacres in Paris by the Versailles army: "A whole world must have tumbled down within these months of disaster" (TOC 104), i.e., the old concepts crumbled. It is interesting to note that von Brackel considers the Eve figure dead. At the end of the tale, von Brackel comes across a skull which could conceivably be Nathalie's skull. If the notion of the Eve figure as dead is in the tale, the opposite is true as far as the Lilith figure is concerned. At the beginning of the narrative, von Brackel tells us that last time he was in Paris, he had seen the lady [Lilith] in the opera with her great granddaughters (TOC 82). The Lilith figure not only survives, she has also established a matrilineal succession of daughters, granddaughters, and great granddaughters.21

21

Aiken sees the appearance of the skull at the end as von Brackel's "need to force Nathalie at last to undergo the death she thus resisted, to reduce her to the dissolution and abjection to which he himself, through her, has been subjected. By skeletalizing her, recreating her as skull (as he had earlier recreated his mistress in domesticated topoi as "a very old woman" with "two charming granddaughters," he achieves in the word what he could not achieve in the flesh, restoring thereby his own fragile mastery and the reassurance that he remains, at last, a unified, transcendent self and, by implication, that the structures of phallic order which that

60 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY The two references to Lilith in the Seven Gothic Tales are not exactly foregrounded, at least not in the literal sense. They are, nevertheless, I would argue, important for the understanding of Dinesen's view of woman's position in society.22 Dinesen only hints at the Lilith myth. The hints suffice, however, to reinforce her frustration as a woman who yearns to rid herself of the constraints imposed by the male dominated society. The mythical Lilith is a deeply frustrated woman who will not tolerate Adam's dominance (expressed in the myth in sexual terms) because they were really created equal from the same earth.23 The mythical Lilith took it upon herself to disobey the commands of both Adam and God, and to fly off. She subsequently engaged in promiscuity galore and gave birth to millions of demons. The fear of Lilith's independently minded sexuality is expressed in the legends by references to her killing babies, seducing men left alone in their own homes, and inducing men to masturbate and have wet dreams. Dinesen is not interested in these latter aspects of the myth. She uses the Lilith figure as the sexually attractive woman who resists being dominated by her male counterpart with whom she is really meant to be on an equal footing. The question of equality is foremost in Dinesen's mind. In "The Supper at Elsinore," the patriarch's attempt to keep woman on the ground (keep her from flying off) despite her originally equal status, is being undermined, albeit subtly. The Lilith figure deconstructs the male dominated society in her very knowledge of having been created as an equal to men. Fanny is described as a witch because she shares this knowledge. She struggles against the confines imposed by the bishop and his fellow patriarchs. But Fanny ends up having wings only through her brother, thereby bringing about a merely ghostly reality in her life. She engages in polite conversation with the dominating patriarch, the bishop, thus confirming the consumption by the patriarchs of herself as a roast turkey. In the end, she is defeated. In "The Old Chevalier," Lilith, the beautiful, independently minded, sexually uninhibited woman appears. She is also referred to as having been

'self' embodies are still intact" (128). 22 In her abovementioned letter to her Aunt Bess (Mary Bess Westenholz) of May 23, 1926, Dinesen states that "it is my opinion that women now—in direct contrast to what was previously the case—desire and are striving to be human beings with a direct relationship with life in the same way as men have done and do this" (Letters 259). 23 See Patai, 217ff.

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created equal to her male counterpart, expressed as her having a family background equal to that of her husband's. More so than Fanny is able to do, this Lilith sets her own agenda and is constantly concerned with reinforcing her equality (expressed through the competition with her husband/Adam). As in the legend, it is a requirement that the equality be confirmed also in the sexual relationships. Dinesen uses this motif to the hilt in "The Old Chevalier." Lilith represents a silent subversive force in much of Dinesen's writing. She is that facet of a woman which is aware of an inherent equality between the sexes. It is this piece of knowledge which ruptures Dinesen's narrative, deconstructing and subverting the narration of narrators, such as von Brackel, the bishop, and other unreliable narrators24 in Dinesen's work. She may be referred to by name in only two tales. However, just as she is there in the Danish version of "The Old Chevalier" without being referred to by name, so she is there, in principle, wherever Dinesen lets her heroines take off in flight25 or fight for recognition as individuals and as equals to their male counterparts. And every woman associated with witches and goddesses in Dinesen's work have a touch of Lilith in them, whether or not explicitly stated.

24

Such as Lincoln Forsner in "The Dreamers" and Frederick Lamond in "The Heroine" from whose perspective the narrator tells the story of Heloise. 25 Pellegrina in "The Dreamers", when pursued by Lincoln Forsner, "spread out her wings and flew away" (SGT 327).

Tapping the Roots: Hidden Sources of Power in Isak Dinesen's "The Dreamers" Kathryn Barnwell Malaspina College

"The Dreamers" was probably the first story of Seven Gothic Tales to have been written after Dinesen returned to Rungstedlund, having left her African life behind her. And since she did nothing to discourage a comparison between herself and Pellegrina Leoni, the story's mysterious central figure, we might suppose that this particular tale had a special significance for its author. Like Pellegrina, Dinesen had suffered loss by fire, had attempted suicide1 and was forced to leave behind a life which had seemed perfectly resonant of her deepest self. Also like her heroine, Dinesen ever after mistrusted investing herself fully in one persona. In "The Dreamers" Lincoln Forsner employs the metaphor of the "bent taproot" to explain why some of life's wounded adopt the strategy of "dreaming" to make the most of altered circumstances: . . . if, in planting a coffee tree, you bend the taproot, that tree will start, after a little time, to put out a multitude of small delicate roots near the surface. That tree will never thrive, nor bear fruit, but it will flower more richly than the others. Those fine roots are the dreams of the tree. As it puts them out, it need no longer think of its bent taproot. It keeps alive by them—a little, not very long. Or you can say that it dies by them, if you like. For really, dreaming is the well-mannered people's way of committing suicide.2

1

In her biography, Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller (New York: St. Martin's, 1982), Judith Thurman reports that after losing the African farm, but before Denys Finch Hatton's death, Dinesen attempted suicide. "According to Thomas Dinesen, Tanne's [the name by which her family knew her] despair at this point was so great that she tried to kill herself. The attempt took place in the house of friends, and a suicide note was found among her papers, but subsequently misplaced . . . " (246). 2 Seven Gothic Tales (New York: Vintage, 1972) 277. "The Dreamers" included in this volume will hereafter be referred to as Dreamers.

62

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While there are decadent overtones in this passage which would later embarrass Dinesen,3 nevertheless it is significant that the irrationality of dreaming is the replacement for the loss of the ability to believe in a rational, knowable, unitary personality. The events, although very different, which bring about this loss of belief for Pellegrina, and then for Lincoln, are seen by each of them to have been cataclysmic. Pellegrina loses her voice and hence her role as adored diva (with its accompanying roles offemme fatale and lady bountiful); and Lincoln loses the object of his desire: Pellegrina in the guise of Olalla. Both suffer shifts in the subject positions which are possible for them to occupy. We know less of Lincoln's ways of responding to this shift and more of Pellegrina's since, by his own admission, he has learned to "dream" as a consequence of knowing her just as he hopes Said Ben Ahmed will learn, in turn, from his tale. Said, who journeys toward the place and tune of his longed-for vengeance, still believes that great deeds can be shaped and accomplished by individual will. He is still "praying to God." Mira Jama, the third occupant of the dhow which is sailing toward Zanzibar, adds: "By the time when you have finished praying to God . . . that is when you begin to dream" (Dreamers 278). Dreaming, according to Mira, involves a surrender of will, letting "the world form itself around you" and then opening "your eyes to see where you will find yourself" (Dreamers 211). It is an activity of the soul, "a favour of God's" (Dreamers 279), and to love God "you must love change, and you must love a joke" (Dreamers 355). Pellegrina, in being guided by this deeper vein of irrationality, rather than attempting any longer to exert control over her life's journey, nevertheless "opens her eyes" and "finds herself" in a series of relationships which Lincoln's tale describes. After the transformative fire, it becomes apparent that as a woman, Pellegrina is denied full participation in the patriarchal order, and that her strength will have to be found elsewhere: in sources of female power which

3 Thurman writes that Robert Langbaum, who met Dinesen in 1959 while he was preparing The Gayety of Vision, reported that she spoke of Seven Gothic Tales with embarrassment, as "too elaborate," and as having "too much of the author in it." He believed it was "the 'decadence,' if you like . . . especially its treatment of sexual perversion, that embarassed her—that and her own awareness of how deeply personal the book is" (267).

64 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY have historically been suppressed but not eradicated.4 Although Lincoln's tale and the narratives embedded within it are male texts, told by men, to men, there is a hidden text which is, whether Lincoln even fully recognizes it, subversive of the patriarchal order. Inspired by the moon, rather than the sun, it has at its centre not the divine son of God the Father, but the Goddess and her daughters in the diversity of forms with which they have been associated. Like the multi-faceted Goddess, Pellegrina leaves behind her original roles and adopts a series of others. She hopes, certainly, to have a little fun in doing so, but more significantly, by her refusal to fully invest herself in one persona, she reveals the destructive contradictions between and limitations of the gendered subject positions available for both men and women in patriarchy. Her power, alluded to in a complicated matrix of intertexts, is drawn from older, deeper sources which tap the roots of female power structures: the witch, the sphinx, the Goddess, Mother Earth herself. The moon, long associated with women, witches and more specifically with the Goddess, is the presiding astronomical influence of the story, which is set in a seascape where: . . . the brightness of the moon upon the water was so clear that it seemed as if all the light in the world were in reality radiating from the sea, to be reflected in the skies. The waves looked solid, as if one might safely have walked upon them, while it was into the vertiginous sky that one might sink and fall . . . (Dreamers 271).

The effect of the moonlight, which seems to have turned the world upside down, prepares us for a story which will likewise challenge other orthodox assumptions. Lincoln wonders why, after some twenty years have passed, he is, at this particular time, prompted to tell his story. He asks: "Does this moon remember it [i.e. that night on the mountain which climaxes his narrative] perhaps? She was there, too" (Dreamers 324). Certainly the three men whose paths cross at the Hotel Andermatt seem possessed by a collective "lunacy" as they begin to understand that each of them has had a significant encounter with a woman who is distinguished by "a deep scar... 4

In her excellent article, "Dinesen's 'Sorrow-acre': Tracing the Woman's Line," Contemporary Literature 25 (Summer 1984), Susan Hardy Aiken explores Dinesen's use of the myth of the Great Goddess. As she points out: "In Genesis . . . the Goddess has been reduced to an etymological function of the text, her presence felt but literally unnameable. Similarly in 'Sorrow-acre,' in the long 'discourse on divinity' (52) between Adam and the lord, what remains unspoken, suppressed, yet pervasively felt is the myth of the Goddess" (181).

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like a little white snake" (Dreamers 312) which runs from her ear to her collar bone. Pursuing her farther and farther up the moonlit mountain, Lincoln recalls "We might, for all I knew, be driving into heaven" (Dreamers 317). It seems less and less that they are pursuing a real woman than a transcendent meaning or truth about themselves that is part of the quest, prompted by desire, for the "other. "5 Each of the men whose stories are incorporated into Lincoln's, has, or believe he has, some special relationship with the woman whom they each know by a different name, names which are quirky echoes of one another: Olalla, Lola, Rosalba. The final word is given to Marcus Cocoza, presumably because he is able to resolve the apparent contradictions of the other three versions of her life. That he has a special relationship to Pellegrina is marked by Lincoln's earlier observation that he circles around her "like the moon around the earth" (Dreamers 287). Marcus' story is of a woman whose nature was too large to be contained in a single persona, who, having been too deeply wounded by her over-attachment to her lost life as Pellegrina Leoni, renowned diva, resolves "not to be one person again," but "always many persons" (Dreamers 345). After she makes this decision, Marcus is content to be devoted to her from a distance and to be misapprehended as a sinister and shadowy figure, knowing that his purpose is to assist her to shed one persona and adopt another whenever she is threatened by enclosure. Marcus Cocoza would seem to be an unlikely "shadow" to the luminous Pellegrina, but this is what she calls him in conversation with Lincoln: Once upon a time I sold my shadow to the devil, for a little heart-ease, a little fun. That man whom you have seen outside—with your usual penetration you will easily guess him to be no other than this shadow of mine, with which I have no longer anything to do. (Dreamers 287)

5

There are many elements of "The Dreamers" that are evocative of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. As Sara Stambaugh has noted hi The Witch and the Goddess in the Stories oflsak Dinesen: A Feminist Reading (Ann Arbour: U.M.I. Research, 1988), Conrad was one of Dinesen's favourite authors and, like him, she enjoyed "psychological probing" (100). Lincoln's pursuit of Pellegrina recalls Marlow's quest for Kurtz, the "voice" of the "Inner Station." Also, both stories are set on ships and are told as stories within stories by men who are passing time yet nevertheless believe that their tales will have a special significance for their listeners.

66 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY To Lincoln, Marcus seems to be "an evil spirit in her life" (Dreamers 287) who, he discovers, is a "fabulously rich Jew of Holland . . . of fifty or sixty years" (Dreamers 286). In addition to being a rather unconventional double, Marcus is clearly intended to resemble the legendary Wandering Jew, stories of whom have circulated around Europe, the Middle East and later in America, and who has "appeared" in numerous guises over the centuries. According to George Anderson, whose book The Legend of the Wandering Jew is a comprehensive history of its development and numerous variations, the basic legend is the tale of a man in Jerusalem who, when Christ was carrying the Cross to Calvary and paused to rest for a moment on this man's doorstep, drove the Saviour away (with or without physical contact, depending on the variants), crying aloud, "Walk faster!" And Christ replied, "I go, but you will walk until I come again! "6 Anderson suggests that the legend had two vaguely scriptural sources, which he calls the Legend of Malchus and the Legend of St. John, which eventually generated a completely independent story now generally known as the Legend of the Wandering Jew.7

6

The Legend of the Wandering Jew (Providence: Brown UP, 1965). The Legend of Malchus is drawn from John 18: 4-10 and 20-22 in which Malchus, who is a servant of the high priest, strikes Jesus with the palm of his hand. Later accretions to this aspect of the legend "emphasize the suffering and anguish brought down upon the offender [Malchus] in punishment for an insult" (Anderson 11) against Jesus. There are two possible biblical references which may have generated the Legend of St. John. The first is Matthew 16: 28, in which Jesus is addressing his disciples: "Verily I say unto you there be some standing here which shall not taste of death till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom." The other reference is to John 21: 20-23 in which, after the resurrection, Jesus is again speaking to his disciples, suggesting that John will "tarry till I come" [again]. These two sources yield very different motives for the directive that a man, designated by Jesus, will not die until Jesus comes again: the former would seem to be an example of the kind of perpetual punishment suffered by mythic figures such as Sisyphus, the Sibyl of Cumae, Prometheus, etc; the latter suggests that, for some special purpose, Jesus wishes John to remain alive until he returns. Malchus has struck Jesus, while John is his most beloved disciple. This fundamental confusion concerning the relationship of the legend's central figure to Jesus continues as the tale circulates around the Mediterranean and into Europe via Italy. In one of the earliest written accounts of the legend, by Roger of Wendover, the tendency to collapse antithetical characteristics into one another is perpetuated. In this version, the Wandering Jew 7

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There are, clearly, a number of interesting parallels between Marcus Cocoza and the legendary Wandering Jew, especially in the earlier versions of the legend. He is seen by Lincoln to be the sinister shadow who perhaps intends Pellegrina harm, and yet he is in fact, as later events and his own narrative reveal, the most dearly beloved and devoted friend. His presence is misinterpreted by Lincoln until he suddenly understands, there on the mountain top, that Pellegrina is desperately fleeing, not Marcus, but Lincoln himself. Romantically possessed by his love for Pellegrina, Lincoln is nevertheless responsible for driving her to her death and hence, without consciously intending it, becomes "the evil spirit in her life" (Dreamers 287) he imagined Marcus to have been. In keeping with the twofold sources of the original legend, Lincoln's assumptions about Pellegrina's shadow and, therefore, about the figure of the Wandering Jew, are forced to undergo substantial revision. As noted, the legend has, at best, a very tenuous scriptural basis and from an early point in its development becomes an entirely extra-scriptural phenomenon. It is, therefore, an example of a nonsacred discourse which nevertheless attracts a wide audience of "believers." "The Dreamers" makes use of this apocryphal legend in typically unorthodox ways. Were the allegorical parallels exact, Pellegrina would be a man, a Christ-like figure, rather than a cross between a childless Madonna and Mary Magdalene, and Marcus would not describe himself as being a "mother" to her.8 Gender positions have been shifted in a way which suggests a challenge to patriarchal, monotheistic orthodoxy. This text derives its authority from a matrilineal inheritance which subverts the authority of both misogynist "texts" and hermeneutics.

is named Joseph Cartaphilus (Anderson 19). Although he, as a porter in Pilate's hall, had struck Jesus, his name would suggest that he is linked both with Jesus' adoptive father and with John (Cartaphilus means dearly loved). Later, in Italy, the Wandering Jew acquires yet another name: Botadeo or "God-beater" which was sometimes, seemingly nonsensically, garbled into Votadeo or "devoted to God" (Anderson 22). And he is also known by a number of variations of Malchus: Malco, Marco and Marcus, and of John: "As early as the first quarter of the 1500's [the Wandering Jew's] name in Spain is Juan (de) Espera en Dios; . . . Once more we see the association of the name John with fabulous men of immortal potentialities —Johannes Buttadeus or Giovanni Bottadio or Jehan Boutedieu, Juan de los Tiempos or Jan van Tyden, and Don Juan—all striking testimonials to the vitality of the Legend of St. John" (Anderson 28). 8 As Sara Stambaugh has pointed out: "Cocoza is presented as a feminine presence" (103) or as a "surrogate woman" (102).

68 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY In a sense, Pellegrina seems to be "mastered" by the narrative. Although she is the central figure in the lives, not only of the Wandering Jew figure, Marcus Cocoza, but also of the other men whose stories form part of Lincoln's narrative (most notably, those of Friederich Hohenemser and Baron Guildenstera) she does not tell, even in an embedded narrative, her own story.9 Divinities, of course, virtually never write their own sacred texts. Nor do women in patriarchy find it easy to "write" themselves or to assume subject positions other than those which are already prepared and waiting for them. In spite of the fact that Pellegrina's life is filtered through a patriarchal gaze, it is possible to see (even if her chroniclers cannot) that she repeatedly resists being forced into unacceptable subject positions by the men who, having assumed gendered subject positions themselves, expect that she in turn will assume the appropriate counterpart position, and further, that she will be "captive" to that position and remain in it.10 Since losing her voice, Pellegrina's "taproot," following Mira Jama's analogy, has been bent. Like the taproot, she has put out a multitude of roots or personae. Like Marcus, the prismatic Pellegrina is seen differently depending on one's angle

9 Marianne Juhl and Bo Hakon J0rgensen have noted in Diana's Revenge: Two Lines in Isak Dinesen's Authorship (Odense: Odense UP, 1985), that the men's narratives are "about the forms of men's understanding of woman" and that Pellegrina's roles are "perceived . . . in relation to the man and understood as patterns to which woman must conform" (145-6). 10 In writing of discourse analysis as a way of understanding gender difference and subjectivity, Wendy Holloway, in "Gender Difference and the Production of Subjectivity," Changing the Subject, ed. Julian Henriques et al (London: Methuen, 1984) says, "[discourses make available positions for subjects to take up. These positions are in relation to other people. Like the subject and object of a sentence (and indeed expressed through such a grammar), women and men are placed in relation to each other through the meanings which a particular discourse makes available: [i.e.] 'the female who yields and submits' to the man" (236). She also says "that people have investments . . . in taking up certain positions in discourse, and consequently in relation to each other . . . that there will be some satisfaction or pay-off or reward . . . for that person" (238). Clearly, what Pellegrina does in each of her relationships is to refuse the "usual" or expected position in the discourse, and in so doing exposes how unsatisfactory those positions are for women. The rewards or "pay-offs" seem destined for men: they stand to win the wife, nurse/mother or mistress as then- own. But Dinesen goes one step farther in demonstrating that even these presumed "victories" for men would actually be hollow.

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of view. To the poor, to whom she gives with an open hand and whose children have the freedom of her garden, she is "a Madonna of their own, the manifestation upon earth of God in his heaven" (Dreamers 335) (but of course, it is Jesus, not the Madonna, who is God made manifest); she calls herself "a divinity worshipping sinners" (Dreamers 336): to Marcus she is a "miracle" (Dreamers 332). As a consequence of knowing her, he is saved from an inauthentic worship of a misogynist representation of feminine beauty he has created for himself in the form of a "staff of thirty young girls, none more than seventeen . . . who used to dance naked before [him]" (Dreamers 331). However, the "conversion" undergone by Marcus is not, any more than the tale of the Wandering Jew itself is, orthodox. His "gospel," that of the best beloved disciple, does not begin, as John's does, with the patriarchal Logos, but rather with the matriarchal oracular voice. Having heard Pellegrina sing, he says: "I understood the meaning of heaven and earth, of the stars, life and death, and eternity. . . . she rose and lifted you with her, higher than the moon" (Dreamers 331). If she appears to some to be a benevolent Madonna, to the other women in her opera company she is a demanding prima donna whom they have dubbed "Lucifera." To Lincoln, she is the perfect lover, the captivating mistress whom he hopes to enclose in marriage. To Pilot, she is the inspiration to heroic action and later, nurturing nurse/mother who seems to promise the fulfilment of Oedipal desires. To Guildenstern, she is the ideal object of his seductive powers: a woman nearly saintly in her dedication to the memory of her dead lover. In each instance she contrives to resist entrapment, and further, to resist assuming the subject position each expects of her, thus making clear how intolerable patriarchally mapped subject positions are for both men and women. Pellegrina is acutely aware of the price patriarchy exacts of the independent woman; on the other hand, the men she encounters seem ignorant of the price they will have to pay if they would enjoy the other "benefits" of patriarchy.''

11

Sara Stambaugh indicates that the roles adopted by Pellegrina "constitute studies of various kinds of misogyny" (103) through which she provides "lessons to [the three men] on proper views of sexuality" (100). I would argue that it is not so much that Pellegrina sees the three men she encounters as misogynists in need of reform, but rather that she recognizes that in patriarchy, neither women nor men are presented with acceptable subject positions. Attempting to re-educate three misogynists is a small gesture when compared to the truly subversive defiance of Pellegrina's refusal to be enclosed in any of the roles traditionally reserved for

70 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY All the personae she adopts serve to disguise both her "real" self and the mythic sources of her power. As Robert Langbaum has pointed out, she is Pellegrina (cognate to peregrine): both wanderer (like her double) and falcon; and Leoni: lion.12 However, as a winged lion she is also, of course, a sphinx.13 The Theban sphinx is best known as the monster, depicted nevertheless in Greek art as seductively beautiful14 whose prerogative it was to ask riddles and to devour those luckless contestants who failed to answer her famous question: "What being with but one voice has now two feet, now three and now four, and when it has the most is weakest?"15 The question asks, in essence, "Do you recognize yourself in this description?" It is Oedipus who eventually solves the riddle and wins the dubious prize: the kingship of Thebes and, unbeknownst to him, his mother as wife. The sphinx, with obscure motivation, leaps into the ravine, apparently choosing not to use her wings, and dies.16 women in patriarchy. 12 Isak Dinesen's Art: The Gayety of Vision (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1975) 106. 13 The genealogy of the Greek sphinx is worthy of note. Her grandmother was the parentless Gaia, Mother Earth, the first Goddess. Her mother was Echidna, herself half nymph, half serpent, who in turn produced a whole host of classical monsters, including the Chimera, Scylla, Cerberus, the Gorgon, and Orthrus, by whom she incestuously begat the sphinx. The sphinx's origins are decidedly matrilineal; she is the daughter and granddaughter of divinities who choose their own mates, for then- own reasons, and she shares then" terrible beauty. In this form she partakes of both the seductive and the destructive aspects of the Great Goddess. 14 See illustrations hi Jane Harrison's Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (London: Cambridge UP, 1922 [1903]). 15 Richard Cavendish, ed. Mythology: An Illustrated Encyclopaedia (New York: Rizzoli, 1980) 132. 16 But according to Jane Harrison's Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion: "The sphinx was [at first] a local Theban bogey, but she became the symbol of oracular divinity. At Delphi there was an earth-oracle guarded by a snake, and hi honour of that earth-oracle the Naxians upreared then- colossal Sphinx and set it in the precinct of Gaia. As time went on, the savage 'man-snatching' aspect of the Sphinx faded, remembered only in the local legend, while her oracular aspect grew." The sphinx in this tradition is more closely linked with the Goddess Gaia, and as a consequence, with the oracular significance of Delphi. Later, Delphi was taken over by patriarchal influences after the ascension of Zeus to the highest place in the Greek pantheon. Apollo killed the sacred python, but did not go so far as to supplant the

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Pellegrina shares many of the attributes of the mythic sphinx; she has a similar independence and, with her double, is the only possessor of the answer to her "riddle." Lincoln Forsner, Friederich Hohenemser and Baron Guildenstera each tell stories of a woman with a snake-like scar (reminiscent both of witches and of the oracle's guardian snake), who, in retrospect, was other than she appeared to have been, and who played an unforgettable role in their lives and then mysteriously disappeared. Marcus, too, has made note of her snake-like aspect: he compares her in her dealings with her numerous lovers, to a python which, if it kills, does so by the force of its embrace (Dreamers 337). Marcus recalls making Pellegrina laugh with the comparison: "the sight of you unfolding your great coils to revolve around, impress yourself upon, and finally crush a meadow mouse is enough to split one's side with laughter" (Dreamers 337). As the riddle of her identity is about to be "solved" she, like the sphinx, leaps off the mountainside: "Below the round white moon she made one great movement, throwing herself away from us all" (Dreamers 327), Lincoln recounts. In short, she keeps herself to herself, preferring, if necessary, to "throw herself away from" her male pursuers, who have hounded her with the question "Who are you?" The ironically nicknamed Pilot (whom could he guide?) has even implored her to "save" him (Dreamers 326). Her pursuers seem determined to confine her to a single identity with which they, but not she, would feel comfortable. She has chosen, like the descendants of the Goddess, to assume a variety of forms and to retain her right to determine the degree to which she will commit herself. The Goddess typically resists marriage or, if married (as she was sometimes forced to be after Zeus's ascension), rejects fidelity and so is frequently depicted as a virgin, meaning in this context the possession of no man, rather than sexually inviolate. Lincoln meets Pellegrina in her shape as Olalla, a prostitute, and Marcus, confirming her ever-renewing innocence, says that Pellegrina's numerous affairs with young men "assisted her to achieve . . . lightness" (Dreamers 337). "From the time that she had taken their lessons to heart, she reached perfection, on the stage, in the part of the young innocent girl in love" (Dreamers 338). She seems, thus, to be promiscuous or disloyal to those who are unable to understand that taking lovers on her own terms was always an attribute of the Goddess for whom patrilineal genealogy was irrelevant. That patriarchal institutions do not serve independent women well is obvious; it is less obvious that they serve most men no better. Lincoln is oracle herself, who remained female.

72 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY given an ideal example of the uses to which marriage can be put by the patriarchy when women are considered commodities to be traded and possessed. His father, declaring Lincoln to be the family scapegoat, marries his son's English fiancee himself and engenders a second little Lincoln to inherit the patrimony he has denied his elder son. Pellegrina has decided to avoid marrying Lincoln (even for the few years Marcus later reveals would have been her limit in any case) because his father would recognize her as Pellegrina and, hence, could disclose her secret. Having imagined himself the hero of the hour in a political conflict of which he is entirely ignorant, Pilot discovers that he has escaped Lucerne only on the sufferance of his uncle, De Wattville—a man whom Pilot would have killed had De Wattville led the attack against the revolutionary barricade, instead of the eventual victim: the chaplain of the Bishop of St. Gallen. Pilot is reduced once more to the childish position in the Oedipal struggle, reminded that the patriarch ultimately controls his destiny. As Rosalba, Pellegrina makes the clearest possible statement concerning the destructiveness of the subject positions into which the Don Juan/Don Giovanni discourse thrusts both seducer and seduced. Guildenstern is a Don Giovanni figure, "playing opposite" Pellegrina (disguised as Rosalba) whose last operatic role was that of Donna Anna in the Mozart opera. While Don Giovanni appears to have dedicated his life to the love of women, he is in fact, as Mozart's opera reveals, deeply misogynistic: both a would-be rapist and a rapist (not to mention, murderer). That he is no respecter of either women or the Goddess is made especially clear by his attempted rape of Donna Anna, whose name links her to the mother of Mary. He cannot resist making her the object of his seductive powers precisely because she seems so devoted to the memory of her dead lover, General Zumala Corregui. Although she predicts, using a metaphor crude enough for him to understand, that "Rosalba was such a shining bubble, and when you break her, a little bit of wet will be all that you get out of it . . ." (Dreamers 311), he nevertheless is determined to "conquer" her. Pellegrina offers him yet another alternative: she will give him a horse equal to the one he stands to win if he successfully completes his competition, the culmination of which is his "possession" of Rosalba. And finally, when he rejects even this alternative, she evokes the oracular voice of the Goddess, suppressed but not silenced by patriarchy. "Speaking in the manner of a sibyl," she warns him of "the fatal step on the stair, marble upon marble" (Dreamers 312) which echoes the revenge of the Commandant of Don Giovanni, whose marble funerary statue comes to life in order to avenge his daughter and to fling Don Giovanni into the jaws of

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hell. Of the three men, he is the one who is made fully aware of the price which will be exacted of young men who challenge patriarchal authority, and yet, like Don Giovanni, he proceeds, unrepentant, to his damnation. For the "seduced" the consequences are that "she should lose her last refuge, and be haunted and doomed forever" (Dreamers 312). When Rosalba asks "that means nothing to you?" he replies: "You yourself have no pity on me" (Dreamers 312). Clearly, were Pellegrina to take up, in all seriousness, the role of "faithful woman seduced" opposite the role of "irresistable seducer," she would experience a shift in power away from the woman's position and toward the man's. As long as he is in a desirous state, she retains greater power; once his desire is satisfied, he gains the upper hand. Pellegrina is able to reveal the futility of both positions offered in this discourse because she knows that she will not be trapped in it. She can later laugh at Guildenstern for believing that he has "possessed" her, when in reality he has no hold over her whatsoever. Although Pellegrina (in the guise of Rosalba) returns to her role as Donna Anna in Don Giovanni, here she is not innocence outraged, but a wiser woman who sees beyond the immediate consequences of what is for Don Giovanni merely another sexual exploit. The line upon which her singing career ended and to which she returns on her death bed: "Crudele? Ah no, mio bene! Troppo mi spiace alontanarti un ben che lungamente la nostr' alma desia" (Dreamers 338, 351) "[Cruel? Ah, no, beloved! I also suffer too much from these delays. I also long for that sweet hour of fulfillment.],"17 occurs at the point in the opera when her fiance has suggested that they marry soon in order to "compensate" her for the loss of her father. She postpones her marriage to Ottavio, citing as her reasons her grief and desire for vengeance, though reiterating her love for him; even after Don Giovanni has been swept to his damnation, she asks Ottavio to postpone their marriage for another year. Her instincts are just. Although she has not heard Ottavio declare it, in Act I, scene iii after Anna has recognized Don Giovanni to have been her attacker and her father's murderer, Ottavio has asked: "Come mai credo deggio di so ner delitto capace un cavaliere! Ah, di scoprire il vero ogni mezzo si cerchi; . . . disingannarla voglio or vendicarla. [Could a gentleman like him be so base and so cruel? But I will spare no effort till I find where the truth lies...I must prove her mistaken, or else avenge her!]" (Don Giovanni 68). Clearly,

17

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Don Giovanni, libretto by Lorenzo de Ponte, trans. Norman Platt and Laura Sarti (London: John Calder, 1983) 98.

74 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY he does not wish to believe her. While his duty as her fiance may be to avenge her, in this he is less effectual than Anna's dead father. Even this role has been usurped by the patriarch; and Anna chooses to defer enclosure in marriage and remain an independent maiden for another year. Through all of Pellegrina's metamorphoses, Marcus has respected her wish that he follow her, but at a distance. He says, speaking of the trust she has placed in him: "She turned to me as a child to its mother" (Dreamers 332). As her self-appointed shadow, his destiny is intimately linked with hers, or as he puts it: "The moon must follow the earth" (Dreamers 346); he is to Pellegrina what the moon represents to the worship of Mother Earth. His reverence for Pellegrina springs from his recognition of her transformative essence and is proven not only by his actions throughout, but is recorded by Lincoln who observes their final hours together. As Pellegrina lies dying "her gaze fell straight upon [Marcus]" (Dreamers 349) just as, at the moment of the fateful fire, "her eyes met [his]" (Dreamers 338). This is the mutual gaze which Dinesen frequently employs to signal completion of identity through the recognition of both difference and sameness in the other. That Marcus is Pellegrina's double (as well as her "mother"), and that she is in some sense his divine bride, is suggested in her dying moments. After her leap off the mountain, she is badly bruised: "a dark shadow covered the one side of her face" (Dreamers 329). In telling her story Marcus had grown white; when Pellegrina speaks he blushes; when she repeats the words from Don Giovanni" a wave of deep, dark colour, like that of a bride, like that in the face of the old Jew, washed over her white and bruised face" and she and Marcus, "looking at each other, glowed in a mute, increasing ecstasy" (Dreamers 351). Their "union," long postponed, is marked symbolically by the interplay of their alternative blushing and blanching throughout Pellegrina's final hours. As if to call her to her final scene he announces, "En scene pour le deux" (Dreamers 352) and as she dies, "[s]lowly the flames in her face sank, and an ashen grey covered it instead" (Dreamers 352). Even in death, there is a hint that like the selfimmolating phoenix, she will rise from the ashes as she has once before, and assume another form.18 Lincoln imagines that she will reincarnate as a jackal, and that:

18

She has, throughout, been compared to a number of different birds: owl, crane, falcon, black martin, albatross, swan, nightingale.

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on a moonlight night I have believed that I heard her voice amongst the hills. And I have seen her, then, running about, playing with her own small graceful shadow, having a little ease of heart, a little fun. [And Mira adds]: I have heard that little jackal too . . . She barks: I am not one little jackal, not one; I am many little jackals." (Dreamers 354) Her voice still lingers in the hills.19 The sphinx posed another, less well known riddle: "Who are the two sisters who give birth to one another?" Answer: "Day and Night" (both words being feminine in Greek).20 Waldemar Nat-og-Dag, one of Guildenstera's fellow competitors, has claimed that Rosalba is "meant for" him. As he says: As you know my name is Night-and-Day, and my arms two-parted in black and white . . . this Madame Rosalba has in her more life than any person I have ever met. . . . She sits like a fresh, full flower in the circle of old dry perisperms. She is a swan in the lake of life everlasting. That is the white half of my shield. And at the same time there is death about her somewhere, and that is the black half of the Nat-og-Dag arms. (Dreamers 305) Typically underestimating Pellegrina's real power and ignorant of her refusal to belong to any man, he nevertheless detects both the abundance of life and the shadow of death about her reminiscent of the splendid flowering, signalling the plant's imminent death, of the coffee plant with a bent taproot. But hers is more than the merely two-sided nature of the black and white coat of arms; she has also the capacity, like Night and Day, to give birth to herself, and, like the Mother Goddess herself, to destroy and regenerate life after life. The subject positions open to Pellegrina as woman in the various discourses she encounters after the fire, are enclosing and limiting since in patriarchy the dominant position in any dual-gendered discourse will be open for and assumed by the man. Even then, the text suggests, while men may

19

Two interesting associations with jackals should be noted. First, jackals were, according to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, "formerly supposed to hunt up a lion's prey for him" [sic]. Secondly, according to Barbara Walker's Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects (San Francisco: Harper, 1988) 380, "Because of its carrion-eating proclivities, the jackal used to be revered as a companion of the Goddess as receiver of the dead." 20 Pierre Grimal, ed.,Larousse World Mythology (London: Paul Hamlyn, 1963) 168.

76 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY believe they are independent heros/actors, they are merely agents of patriarchal power and subject to its authority. The "hero" believes in such power because he hopes eventually to partake in it, but in fact, he will not become its beneficiary any more than the woman who is denied direct access to the patriarchal order. The precinct of the Goddess may be occupied by Apollo, but the female oracular voice cannot be silenced. For a tune, Pellegrina, in her many guises, has been the voice of the oracle; and her final utterance, which "came from her breast" is "a strange sound, like the distant roar of a great animal" (Dreamers 352), perhaps a lion or a sphinx, which taps once again the ancient roots of female wisdom.

The Symbolist Tradition

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Mallarmean Poetics and Isak Dinesen's Politics in "The Blank Page" Barbara Gabriel Carleton University

I Who then . . . tells a finer tale than any of us? Silence does. And where does one read a deeper tale than upon the most perfectly printed page of the most precious book? Upon the blank page.

Isak Dinesen1 The title of Dinesen's haunting tale suggests the white-on-white of a canvas by Russian painter Kasimir Malevich, reversing the Derridean reading of Western thought to construct a metaphysics of absence. It is the same non-meaning at the centre of the still geometry of Mondrian and Rothko, echoing formally the vanishing point at the heart of the ancient Mandala paradigm. But although concepts of void, emptiness, and silence are at the centre of a number of non-Western belief systems, they have been marginalized historically in the institutionalized teachings of the Judeo-Christian tradition, constituting a way of knowing for the most part situated within hermetic traditions.2 Yet, it was precisely such traditions which were to have an important impact on the discourses of late 19th century Symbolism in France—and nowhere more prominently than in the writings of the movement's central figure, Stephane Mallarm6. The conceptual grid of Isak Dinesen's "The Blank Page" rests on a series of word-clusters which are recognizably Mallarmdan in association, drawing not only on the framework, but the very vocabulary of the Symbolist problematic. MallarmS himself invokes both "silence" and "purity" as central tenets, elaborating a poetics whose ideal is la page blanche. As Paula Gilbert Lewis observes:

1

Last Tales (1955; Middlesex: Penguin, 1986) 100. "The Blank Page' included within this collection will hereafter be referred to as UP. 2 Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (London: Routledge, 1966) 110-115.

79

80 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY Mallarme had been fascinated by the purity of silence and the white page since his early discoveries of le neant and of ideal beauty, but the pure essence of the page, as combined with the written word into typography, did not concern him until the 1880s . . . .3 "The Blank Page" both acknowledges and expands upon the paradoxes of meaning and non-meaning, presence and absence, integral to the poet's scheme. But while it transforms the terms of Mallarm6's argument into the primary categories of the narrative (silence/purity/the white page), moving on, as Mallarm6 himself did, to a consideration of the relationship between written and oral traditions, writing as black marks on a white ground, the story's central strategy is ironic, turning an historically self-reflexive poetics into a subversive politics. If Dinesen's "The Blank Page" has become something of a touchstone for recent feminist criticism, it is because its title image sums up the effacement of women's experience historically, and does so in a narrative gesture of subversion that destabilizes the very structures of exchange at the centre of patriarchy. It accomplishes this by strategies which have increasingly come to be seen as the marks of a feminist inscription, revising, re-writing, and over-turning canonical texts. It is a patricidal drama that is characteristically comic in Dinesen, its spirit informed by the very name that she would take for her own: Isak, she who laughs. Gaiety, as well as amor-fati, were the life-stances proposed to her by Nietzsche, who also taught her a thing or two about re-interpretation.4 But if Nietzsche's writings counselled the use and transformation of already existing discourses as a rhetorical ploy, Dinesen's texts adopt this strategy against even more urgent premises: namely, that women use a language which is always-already compromised, positioning them in discourses which directly inscribe power relations.5

3 The Aesthetics of Stephane Mallarme in Relation to the Public (New Jersey: Associated UP, 1976) 101. 4 Susan Hardy Aiken's important recent study of Dinesen suggests dramatic continuities between Dinesen's own practices and contemporary post-structuralist theory. The historical connection here is likely Nietzsche, iconoclastic Godfather to Derrida and Foucault alike, both of whom have been re-interpreted for a feminism which is already there in Dinesen. 5 In The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1972) Michel Foucault defines discourse as "a body of anonymous, historical rules always determined in the time and space that have defined a given period, and for

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"The Blank Page" assumes new meanings when read as a palimpsest, one text written over another. It is in the agon between these two texts that something of its deeper significance lies, that quarrel with the uses of language which is always a struggle for empowerment. Yet, Dinesen writes from a remarkably rich fabric of experience, both as woman and European colonial in Africa, problematizing even further the complex enunciative position of this text. Who owns this story, told by a "coffee-brown woman" who comes from a long line of female spinners of tales? What is the relationship between her art and Dinesen's, the oral story and the written? For the latter opposition is Mallarm6an, too, though never so boldly articulated as a poetics of transgression. In "The Blank Page," Dinesen writes both for herself and against herself, the two meaning spaces collapsing in Freud's own trope for Woman as the "dark continent." In that other pivotal tale of the Imperial imagination (similarly framed as an oral project, this time, a rambling sea-yam), Africa as topos supplies the textual knot. For, long before it became "a place of darkness" for Conrad's Marlowe, it was "the biggest, the most blank" space on the map.6 Dinesen's story, too, becomes a narrative of black on white, though far removed, as we shall see, from that typographical chiaroscuro which focuses Mallarm6's concerns. "The Blank Page" conforms to that structure of infinite regress which is characteristic of Dinesen's stories. The outer frame is inhabited by the "coffee-brown black-veiled woman who made her living telling stories" and it introduces two of the principle terms of her own poetics, "silence" and the "blank page." She has been taught by her grandmother that where the story-teller is unswervingly loyal to the story, "there in the end, silence will

a given social, economic, geographical, or linguistic area, the conditions of operation of the enunciative function" (117). Recent feminist studies have attempted to compensate for "the gaps hi Foucauldian genealogies" (see Diamond and Quinby, eds., Feminism and Foucault [Boston: Northeastern UP, 1988] xi), but there have been few attempts to analyze gendered subject positions within discourses. See Wendy Holloway, "Gender Difference and the Production of Subjectivity," Changing the Subject, ed. Julian Henriques et al. (London: Methuen, 1961) 227-63 for a model which could be applied to literary texts. 6 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New York: St. Martin's, 1989) 22. Writing about his "coming to consciousness" of a recoverable African history, Aime Cesaire recalls the growing affirmation in the 1920's and 1930's "that we were Negroes and that we were proud of it, and that we thought that Africa was not some sort of blank page in the history of humanity. . . . " Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review, 1972) 76 (italics mine).

82 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY speak" (BP 100); if the story has been betrayed, on the other hand, it will yield nothing but emptiness. The authentic voice of silence belongs only to the faithful, where (in the manner of Robbe-Grillet's Les Gommes), it constitutes itself as an ecriture of erasure. When a royal and gallant pen, in the moment of its highest inspiration, has written down its tale with the rarest ink of all—where, then, may one read a still deeper, sweeter, merrier and more cruel tale than that? Upon the blank page. (BP 100)

The keepers of these tales, more profound than any found between the pages of books, are the "old women who tell stories." Ancient repositories of wisdom and wit, they alone know the story of the blank page. The embedded story-within-the-story that follows, then, becomes both a narrative about high-born ladies and a mse-en-abyme device for an ironic dramatization of an already-announced poetics. But at this point the third in this triad of Mallarm6an terms becomes integral to the story, and once more, it is reconstituted ironically. For, if Mallarm6's ideal is "la puriteY' Dinesen's own tale turns on the currency assigned virginity in patriarchal marriage. The story is set in a Carmelite order of nuns, themselves brides of Christ whose lives are dedicated to sexual renunciation. The painterly tableau that follows taps all the Western iconographic codes for purity, its insistent whiteness broken up only by the blue traditionally associated with the Virgin Mary. But the purity of the renowned flax grown by the convent has a spiritual tap-root, too, in that the very first linseed was brought by a crusader from the Holy Land; hence, "the very first germ of a story will come from some mystical place outside the story itself" (BP 102). The convent's task is to provide the old and noble families of Portugal with the white sheets which will bear witness to the marriage consummation. In turn, the sheets are hung out ritually the next day from a balcony of the palace by a Chamberlain or High Steward who solemnly proclaims: "'Virginem earn tenemus—v/e declare her to have been a virgin'" (BP 102-3). The convent is honoured as custodian of these same royal wedding sheets, squares cut from which are mounted in frames to hang in a long picture-gallery. This museum to woman's honour, an unlikely shrine, becomes the destination of pilgrimages made in later years, both by the noble women themselves and their attendants. What they read from the faded blood-stains ranges from the signs of the Zodiac to allegories of the age, an infinity of changing shapes and meanings. It is not till the close of this witty and enormously dense fable that the double meaning of the title becomes clear, leading, in turn, to a polyphony

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or very riot of meanings. For the narrative "surprise" fulfils the story-teller's own poetics. In the midst of this procession of story-telling canvases, one square stands blank, mute testimony to its owner's transgression. Its solitary difference ruptures the system of patriarchal exchange, that "traffic in women" which was first described by Claude Le"vi-Strauss in his now classic Elementary Structures of Kinship.1 But what this story reminds us with remarkable economy is that hegemony is exercised, above all, in the control of circulation of meanings in society. In a patriarchal symbolic order, signifying practices will be governed by male desire. Woman's desire, registered only as surplus-value, will be written in invisible ink. What are the sites of resistance available to women historically? How may we track them in this tale and, in so doing, learn to read, write, and tell stories £ reboursl II To name an object is to suppress three quarters of the enjoyment of the poem which is composed in order to be divined little by little; to suggest there is the dream. It is the perfect use of this mystery which constitutes the symbol. Stephane MaHamae"8 It is not a bad thing in a tale that you understand only half of it.

Isak Dinesen9 The line that echoes throughout Dinesen's "The Dreamers" follows closely the Mallarme'an credo which became one of the informing principles of Continental Symbolism. This paper will suggest that while Mallarm6 provides the very language that is both echoed and displaced in "The Blank Page," it is both within and against that wider complex we call Symbolism

7

In The Elementary Structure of Kinship, trans. James H. Bell et al. (Boston: Beacon, 1969), Levi-Strauss sees the emergence of symbolic thought as co-terminus with the view that "women, like words, should be ... exchanged" (495-96). See also Rubin for a now classic feminist reading of this theme. Dinesen herself, in On Modern Marriage and other Observations, trans. Anne Born (New York: St. Martin's, 1986), shows a keen historical understanding of the way in which women function as objects of exchange in patriarchal marriage (67). 8 Oeuvres Completes, Poesies (Paris: Flammarion, 1983) 869. 9 "The Dreamers," Seven Gothic Tales (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1972) 279.

84 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY that many of Dinesen's preoccupations are historically situated. In Foucault's terms, the discourses of Symbolism provide the very conditions of possibility for central elements in Dinesen's textual play, and it is this larger question of the prevailing episteme that is at issue, rather than questions of source or influence.10 In the case of "The Blank Page," then, we confront a feminist re-working of already-existing discourses. But what does an ostensibly self-reflexive poetics (in its most paradigmatic form) have to say about Woman either as textual sign or as subject? At what points do these two seemingly unrelated categories intersect? And where they do not, what does Dinesen herself read in the blancsl The relationship between Dinesen's fiction and Symbolist discourses is a persistent one in the tales and it becomes transparently clear when we remember the widespread English name for the Symbolist movement as the "Decadence." This was the preferred term of Arthur Symons, whose classic The Symbolist Movement in Literature first appeared in 1899, followed by successive editions which directly influenced the two major modernist English-language poets, W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot and inspired both J. M. Synge and James Joyce to follow Symons' intellectual pilgrimage to Paris. In its reaction against the positivist epistemology of late 19th century Naturalism, continental Symbolism extended a position partly staked out earlier by Thomas Carlyle: "by Silence and by Speech acting together, comes a double significance. " u Characteristically, it pitted the evanescent, fleeting world of phenomenon against the unchanging realm of noumenon. It was the latter sphere with its properties of "la mystere" which was the ideal site of the Symbolist aesthetic, moving quickly to a concern with the interpenetration of the two spheres in a structure of correspondences. But if this is an aerial map of Symbolism, things get more complicated, the outlines less hard-edged, on the ground. Yet, even the most preliminary examination of Symbolism's obsessions turns up that preoccupation with a realm of neo-Platonic Idea12 that is inseparable from motifs of the dream and the dreamer. To the extent that this is part and parcel of the legacy of Romanticism, Robert Langbaum is right, of course, in seeing Dinesen's art as Romantic in character, though it would be more accurate to locate the

10

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1973) xxii. Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (New York: Dutton, 1958) 2. 12 Malcolm Bowie, Mallarme and the An of Being Difficult (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1978) 26-30. 11

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tension in her art between Romantic values and a constant chafing against them. The model here is in some ways Graham Hough's classic study, The Last Romantics. Dinesen might well be called the last Decadent. Many of the discourses of both movements overlap and Symbolism's own emphasis on textuality as radical experiment and process is paradoxically unthinkable without Romanticism's stress on the individual imagination. But it is precisely those central themes of Symbolism that branch out directly into the Decadence that have the most continuity with Dinesen's own concerns: the relationship of real/ideal worlds, concepts of nobility and aristocracy, the dream and the dreamer, the mask, and the Symbolist cult of the marionette.13 What's more, Dinesen's tales reflect something of the Symbolist fascination with an Orientalism which frequently displaces sexual difference by moving it onto an alien terrain.14 As her own contemporaries recognized, it is Dinesen's fascination with a fluid or epicene sexuality that most strongly marks her tales with the aura of fin de siecle texts. There is that same concern to dramatize the permeable boundaries of gender difference, either by blurring its edges or stylizing masculinity and femininity incarnivalesque interruptions of their naturalized status.15 These are strategies that extend from Balzac's Sarrasine to the texts of Wilde and Huysmans, interrupting the binary opposites of nature and culture in a kind of ontological strip-tease. But if these texts cut to the quick of the matter, it is because they are not, in terms of their enunciative position, texts from the master's house. Their radical interrogation of gendered subjectivity derives from the fact that, like Dinesen's tale, they do not spring from the dominant patriarchal culture. More characteristically,

13

See Jacques Robichez, Le Symbolisme au theatre: Lugne-Poe et les Debuts de L 'Oeuvre (Paris: Maison de 1'oeuvre, 1957) 188ff for a discussion of the relationship between the fin de siecle marionette vogue and a symbolist poetics. Dinesen herself wrote and revised a marionette comedy, The Revenge of Truth, in which the central figure of the witch proclaims, "The truth, my children, is that we are, all of us, acting in a marionette comedy" (Langbaum 11-12). 14 For a reading of Orientalism as power/knowledge discourse, see Edward Said's Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978). Said's study ignores the widespread literary connections between Orientalism and homo-eroticism in the Decadence, though the illustration to the edition cited unintentionally encodes a fairly unambiguous homo-erotic gaze. 15 Mary Russo, "Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory," Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986).

86 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY they are homoerotexts, dramatically subverting stable gender categories and presenting masculinity and femininity as masquerade.16 Robert Langbaum has noted the importance of Baudelaire, in particular, in the later stories of Winter's Tales, most directly in "The Invincible Slave-owners" where Baudelaire's lines describe Axel Leth's dream of Mizzi: "D'un air placide et triomphant,/ Tu passes ton chemin, majestueuse enfant."17 In a similar way, Langbaum argues, the story echoes "Supper at Elsinore" by connecting, through Baudelaire's lines, sailboats, old-fashioned women and the aristocratic ideal. In fact, the very name Axel has a central place in the Symbolist lexicon as the title of the pre-eminent Symbolist drama of "Villiers de I'lsle-Adam." The play is structured episodically as the central character's mystical quest for the Ideal, a search so paradigmatic for the Symbolist imagination that Edmund Wilson would echo it in the title of his Axel's Castle™, his pioneering and widely-read 1931 study of the Symbolist legacy within Modernism. But Winter's Tales also provides concrete evidence of Dinesen's reading of Mallarm6. Langbaum notes that the "blue story" that Charlie tells the sailors in "The Young Man with the Carnation" is "unique in Dinesen in that it's Symbolist in the distinctly modern manner. It does not take off from established symbols but sets up an aura of undefinable meanings by intensifying a real object, in this case a color" (Langbaum 160). It is precisely this surface of indeterminacy, what Langbaum calls Dinesen's

16

For Jacques Lacan, sexuality is itself located in the realm of masquerade. Though the term was first elaborated by Joan Riviere to describe a failed femininity, Lacan defines masquerade as the very structure of a feniininity constructed in a patriarchal symbolic order (Lacan, Feminine Sexuality, eds. J. Mitchell and J. Rose [New York: Norton, 1982] 43,53). He suggests that it "is no doubt through the mediation of masks that the masculine and the feminine meet in the most acute, most intense way." The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan, ed. Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 1981) 107. Lacan argues that the masculine ideal and the feminine ideal are projected (as onto a screen) hi masquerade. The process, he reminds us, is quite different from the display involved hi animal sexuality: "Masquerade has another meaning in the human domain, and that is precisely to play not at the imaginary, but at the symbolic level." (Lacan, Fundamental 43-53). 17 As quoted hi The Gayety of Vision: A Study oflsak Dinesen's Art (London: Chatto, 1964) 164. 18 Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 (Glasgow: Collins, 1959).

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"undefinable meanings" (Langbaum 160), that connects Dinesen's textual play with Symbolism at a number of levels. It is the same displacement and deferral of meaning which prompts Barbara Johnson to write about "Mallarme as Mother," a theme to which we shall return. Certainly, there is some mothering/fathering going on here. As Langbaum concludes of the "blue story," the tale is likely to have been suggested by MallarmS's poem L'Azur: "itfollows Mallarm£'s method" (Langbaum 160, emphasis mine). It is the story of a young English aristocrat's search round the globe for the "right blue"19 which is the symbol of her quest for the ideal.20 When she finds it, in a very old blue jar brought to her by a merchant, she declares that she can now die. Langbaum concludes that the dream or imagination is the force that resolves the story's oppositions here, as in "The Sailor-Boy's Tale" and "The Young Man with the Carnation." But there are ironies here, too, I would add, not least the Keatsian undercutting that informs the deliberately ambiguous endings of the Great Odes (and the blue jar clearly is a kind of Grecian Urn)—the realization, finally, that to inherit the dream is to die. In short, "life" and the world of idea are indissolubly opposed to each other. It is Yeats' familiar theme in the Byzantium poems and connects up with the Symbolist fascination with the hieratic image of death. In formal terms, it is the dialectic of the symbolic process itself in which absence and plentitude change places. But where else can the dream lead, implying as it does, in its Platonic origins, an absent, perfect object of desire? At one level, it could lead only to that fascination with the sepulchral which is another way of fixing irrevocably the moving object. This is one way of reading the gothic reversal of the image in Dinesen's "The Old Chevalier." Having been tricked once by the threatening excess of a real-life Nathalie (demanding twenty francs) in place of the virginal innocent he thought he

19

Isak Dinesen, Winter's Tales. "The Young Man with a Carnation" will hereafter be referred to as YMWC. "The Sailor Boy's Tale" will be referred to as SET. 20 '"Surely there must be some of it left' she cries, 'from the time when all the world was blue'" (YMWC 28). Anna Balakian's gloss is instructive: "AZUR," a word untranslatable into English, but combining the meanings of "blue" and "sky" and its mysterious impermeability will become one of the literary conventions of symbolism. She notes that when the Latin American poet Ruben Dario calls his first significant volume of verse Azul, it evokes the metaphysical meaning that Mallarme had given its French equivalent. Thereafter, the word becomes part of the Symbolist code.

88 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY went to bed with, the male protagonist, years later, traces the decadent path of locating his desire in death itself. It is a wonderfully inventive turning round of the earlier image of feminine innocence, here projected onto the blank page of the "pure" skull whom he fantasizes as his own lost Nathalie. Desire here can be traced onto lack in an infinite series, sustained by the very impossibility of its ever being satisfied. But it is also a dramatic working out of the murderous implications of Idealism itself within the Western literary tradition, typically written over the dream of Woman. In Teresa de Lauretis' words, "[w]oman is then the very ground of representations, both object and support of a desire which, intimately bound up with power and creativity, is the moving force of culture and history."21 The figure of Heloise in Dinesen's "The Heroine" reminds us of the consolidation of this structure within the discourses of courtly love. Pellegrina Leoni in "The Dreamers," by extension, becomes the dream of different men who variously constitute her as whore, angel, and mother, a Cubist canvas of simultaneity in which the "real" Pellegrina Leoni is nowhere to be found. In the end, then, Dinesen's critique of Symbolism radically extends that of poets such as Yeats by interrogating the very structure of what Frank Kermode calls "the Romantic Image." Kermode acknowledges the "dominant role in much modem poetic thought" of the image "emblematized" by a woman's body, culminating in the fin de siecle cult of the dancer.22 But the slippage in his own vocabulary is symptomatic, and it betrays a blurring of figure and ground that, taken to its logical conclusion, challenges the very myth of the autotelic image. Compare the explicitness of that arch-Symbolist Richard Wagner, defining art as "the fulfilment of a longing to know oneself in the likeness of an object of one's love or adoration."23 In the patriarchal imagination, it is Woman who becomes sign and bearer of meaning, in discourses which have profound implications for the lives of women. This was something Dinesen understood all her life and it is at the heart of her role as teller-of-tales from the Arabian Nights: trading old lamps/stories for new ones. She would find that Symbolism provided a particularly fertile ground for locating a politics

21

Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1983) 12. 22 Romantic Image (London: Routledge, 1966). 23 Wagner on Music and Drama, trans. H. Ashton (New York and London: Victor Gollancz, 1964) 89.

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of gender, rooted as it was in the very ground of patriarchal desire. Ill Some of Isak Dinesen's working notes for Albondocani survive among her unedited papers and they provide a rare glimpse of the method by which she assembled and organized the wealth of incident and detail that went into one of her tales. Using sheets of dated, legal-sized paper, she made lists of quotes, references, memories and dramatic situations, generally ironic, which might be turned into tales.

Judith Thurman24 To consider some of the ways in which Dinesen ironizes a strikingly Mallarm6an vocabulary is to return to the scene of writing itself. For if we propose that the central terms of "The Blank Page" are written over a Mallarm6an conceptual cluster of silence, the blank page, and purity, we are required to ask: what do these terms mean at their original site? From Mallarm6 onwards, the Symbolist problematic led the way to a renewed debate around the status of the sign. In theatrical terms, this manifested itself as a profound suspicion of both performance, on the one hand, and the written text, on the other, leading to the double paradox of an ideal theatre without text or an ideal text without theatre (Robichez). For Mallarm6, the model was the silence of the mime, which directly corresponded to the blank spaces of the written text. In the essay, Mimique, Mallarm£ describes the ideal as Pierrot: "[il] tient et du visage et des gestes le fantome blanc comme un page pas encore ecrite" (Mallannd, Oeuvres 238). Yet, Mallarm6's own more complex elaboration of the relationship between silence and the blank space of the written page itself went a good deal further than this. What began as a quest for the Ideal became, after the 1880s, a hankering for an absent perfect language, focusing on the very textual interface of black and white on the printed page. The terms in which this drama of desire and loss take place are set out in the characteristic text of Mystery in Literature. I quote it at length because it invokes many of the terms which will be given renewed meaning in Dinesen's own tale:

24

Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller (New York: St. Martin's, 1982)363.

90 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY Reading Is an exercise We must bend our independent minds, page by page, to the blank space which begins each one; we must forget the title, for it is too resounding. Then, in the tiniest and most scattered stopping-points upon the page, when the lines of chance have been vanquished word by word, the blanks unfailingly return; before, they were gratuitous; now they are essential; and now at last it is clear that nothing lies beyond; now silence is genuine and just. It is a virgin space, face to face with the lucidity of our matching vision, divided of itself, in solitude, into halves of whiteness; and each of these is lawful bride to the other at the wedding of the Idea.25 The crisis that Mallarm£ has come to terms with here is the one produced by the fact of chance in ordinary referential language. Having recognized that there is no necessary relationship between signifier and signified in post-Saussurean terms, Mallarm6 is face to face with the status of the unmotivated sign.26 Mallarm6's post-lapsarian universe27 is the world after Babel: "Languages are imperfect because multiple; the supreme language is missing . . . the diversity of languages on earth means that no one can utter words which would bear the miraculous stamp of Truth Herself Incarnate" (Mallarm£, Selected 38). Yet, faced with this lost linguistic paradise, Mallarm6 constructs a new vision of a poetry which will dislocate and circumvent ordinary referential language altogether. His ideal is verse which remakes from several vocables one total, new word, foreign to language and seemingly incantatory, completes this isolation of the word, denying, in one sovereign stroke, the element of chance remaining in the terms [the arbitrariness of the sign]. . ." (Genette 365)

25

Stephane Mallarme, Selected Prose Poems, Essays, and Letters, trans. Bradford Cook (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1956) 33-34. 26 Gerard Genette, "Valery and the Poetics of Language," Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josue V. Harari (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979) 364. 27 Dinesen understood keenly the relationship between philosophic idealism and myths of the Golden Age which find their counterpart hi the Christian myth of the Fall. The female protagonist of "Young Man with the Carnation" cries out, "surely there must be some of it left from the tune when all the world was blue" (YMWC 28).

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In his monumental, unfinished Le Livre, MallarmS would alternate between texts designed for recitation and written verse, exploring the tension between written and oral modes, in a dialectic which underlines the act of poetry as process. In a similar way, he continued to be fascinated with the physical fact of typography itself, the dance of black and white on the printed page summed up in the linguistic quest itself: "man pursues black upon white" (Mallarmd, Selected 370). Yet the ideal would continue to be the "pure space" (Lewis 101) of the unmarked page, just as he sought life-long for the "pure work" itself. IV

"After Mallarme . . . " As we have seen, the Symbolist discourses which Dinesen re-constitutes in "The Blank Page" are traditionally associated with a poetry and poetics of auto-referentiality. As Frank Kermode notes, the symbol in its modernist incarnation rests on "the idea of the autonomous Image, free of discursive content" (Kermode 111). "After Mallarm6 . . . " is the usual turn of phrase in the contemporary critical lexicon; it marks the French poet's pivotal role in exploring a poetry which turns inward upon itself, "liberated from discourse, with coincident form and meaning" (Kermode 111). Dinesen's tales, too, signal textual play and a decidedly post-Mallarm£an self-consciousness, both in their characteristic use of multiple frames and their persistent, if elusive, ironic stance. But, far from attempting to capture a language "liberated from discourse," they pose dramatically subversive questions about both the enunciation and address of the discourses they survey. Who is the dreamer, who the dreamed, in the "unworldly" theatre of the Symbolist Imagination? Who is the writer and who the written-over in tropes which directly inscribe relations of hierarchy? Typically, in these tales, Dinesen's interventions and over-turnings operate to mark her own place in discourse. Mallarmd's own neutral/neutered language (he would declare his poetry impotent, sign himself as a woman in his fetishistic writings on fashion) seems particularly intractable to this revisionist task. But if Mallarm6's slipperiness (he is everywhere and nowhere) seems less obviously complicit with a patriarchal enunciation than the tropes of Baudelaire, Yeats, or Poe (whose ideal subject, after all, is the death of a beautiful young woman), it

92 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY is open to other, more subtle interventions.28 For its very insistence on the non-referentiality of language refuses the relations of knowledge and power that are at the heart of Dinesen's concerns. It is for this reason that "The Blank Page" is a writing against as well as "after MaHamae" . . . " It insists on inscribing the woman-in-the-text which purports to speak of nothing-atall-in-this-world. The degree to which Dinesen has succeeded is confirmed by the emerging status of "The Blank Page" as a kind of paradigmatic feminist text. In their opening essay in Making a Difference, Gayle Greene and Copp61ia Kahn use Dinesen's story as a model to show how a feminist mode of reading is also always a reading of culture: "[t]he nuns preserve their virginity and the princesses surrender theirs, but the ideology informing both practices holds female sexuality to be dangerous and powerful, requiring men to exercise strict control over it." 29 But the authors also outline a secondary cluster of meanings in the tale. If the first corresponds to the Mallarmdan concept of "purity," the second is even closer to the French poet's notions of "silence" and "the white page." "The contrast," they argue, between the story told by the spotted bridal sheets and that which speaks in the silence of "the blank page" may be seen as a metaphor for the two major foci of feminist scholarship: deconstructing dominant male patterns of thought and social practice; and reconstructing female experience previously hidden or over-looked. (Greene and Kahn 6) Susan Gubar demonstrates the ubiquity of the metaphor of the blank page in writing by women, extending the centrality of the notion of silence in women's culture. Male writers (like Melville and MaHamae"), she suggests, invoke the blank page to speak of creative dilemmas; women exploit it to show how they have been "defined symbolically in the patriarchy

28

See, for example, Adrienne Rich's summing-up: The would-be woman writer everywhere "meets the image of Woman in books written by men. She finds a terror and a dream, she finds a beautiful pale face, she finds La Belle Dame Sans Merci, she finds Juliet or Tess or Salome, but precisely what she does not find is the absorbed, drudging, puzzled, sometimes inspired creature, herself, who sits at a desk trying to write." Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi, Adrienne Rich's Poetry (New York: Norton, 1975) 94. 29 "Feminist Scholarship and the Social Construction of Woman," Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, ed. Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn (New York: Methuen, 1985) 6.

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as a tabula rasa, a lack, a negation, an absence.n30 Gubar's reading of the tale's central imagery is intended to support her more general argument that women create art out of what they perceive and describe (often literally) as a wound. Her own emphasis in Dinesen's tale is not on the way in which patriarchy circumscribes and controls female sexuality, but on the actual "dread of heterosexuality" (Gubar 301) that many women experience. In fact, if we look more closely at the dialectical relationship between the inset story and the frame, what we discover is a more complex, and rather different reading of female sexuality. What's more, the frame will be seen to unite the two meaning-clusters in the story, issues of sexuality and textuality fusing in the storytelling art of the "coffee-brown" woman who is Dinesen's own Scheherazade-like double. Attention to her authority, in turn, multiplies the sites of difference in this tale, writing alterity over questions of race and colonialism as well as gender. Yet, even within the terms of the story-within-the-story, that privileged inset tale which has all but effaced the frame and its African teller for most readers (making them complicit in an exclusionary reading which itself exposes hegemonic control of meanings), there is plenty of evidence that heterosexual eroticism is not a negative value in this tale. Rather, it is one woman's refusal to define her sexuality within patriarchal rules of exchange that provides the central irony of the story. "The Blank Page" first sets up a binary opposition (black/white; African/European; sexuality/chastity) which provides the governing structure of the narrative. It then moves, by a reversal of tropes (the story of unlicensed sexuality becomes the story of the "pure" white page) to de-stabilize these oppositions. What emerges, instead, as we shall see, is a new series of connections between women in a patriarchal order. The value placed on eroticism in the tale reflects a constant in Dinesen's writings. Judith Thurman suggests that the 19th century tension between the moral and the erotic was staged dramatically in Dinesen's own life by the conflict between what she saw as the ethical philosophy of her mother's family and the sensuous aesthetic of her father's. Years later, when the Danish writer Ole Wivel set forth a new editorial policy for his journal Heretica, announcing a "moral" as well as "esthetic" responsibility, the subject was still capable of evoking a passionate response from the author. "I warn you," Dinesen told her old friend,

30

"'The Blank Page' and the Issue of Female Creativity," The New Feminist Criticism, ed. Elaine Showalter (London: Virago, 1986) 89.

94 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY with your choice of the Moral and your inclination toward the Ethical. Has not precisely this choice in our Protestant cultures led us straight against our own will into the abyss? Has not Christianity excluded ecstasy, with its gifts and mysteries, denied and driven out our sensuality? And has it not also barred the way to the world of the spirit, through the means, the basic circumstances of existence which are the only ones we have? (Thurman 338-9)

Dinesen's answer, Thurman adds, were the lines from the Danish Symbolist poet, Sophus Claussen: "I forgot my Greek for Latin. To Homer you stayed true. I tell you God is charity. EROS! Answer you" (Thurman 339). Dinesen was convinced that it was the Western heritage of dualism that lay at the root of the repudiation of the erotic in Western culture. Yet, she also understood how Christian dualism, like its neo-Platonic counterpart, had special implications for women, who become bodies traced with codes which undermine their very substantiality. Her own remarkable alertness to gender as sign-system is evident in a key letter to her Aunt Bess. In astonishingly contemporary terms, Dinesen remarks on the contingency of woman as sign, for though "manliness" is a "human concept" (standing in for the whole species and read as a universal), "womanliness is merely a relative term, signifying those qualities in a woman or that aspect of her personality that is pleasing to men or that they have need of."31 In language which bears directly on the lesson of "The Blank Page," she observes how often that definition takes place exclusively in sexual terms, its legacy firmly in place even in contemporary debates around the emancipation of women. It is often discussed how much influence the feminist movement exerts on women's morals, and these very discussions generally show to what a great extent we are regarded as sexual beings, to what a small extent as human beings. A woman's "morals" are understood as something purely sexual, just as a woman's "honor" always has something to do with sex. (LFA 263)

Dinesen understood that women's bodies historically have been resting places of meaning as well as sites of material ownership. But if Woman's sexuality is always/already defined for her, what happens when real-life women refuse their discursively-assigned subject positions? That is precisely

31

Letters From Africa, 1914-1931, trans. Anne Born, ed. Frans Lasson (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981)261. Hereafter this collection will be referred to as LFA.

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the subversive movement of the parabolic "The Blank Page," a story whose erotic implications are given fuller and more unruly treatment in stories such as "The Deluge at Norderaey" and "The Monkey."32 Both of these tales, like "The Blank Page," turn on questions of female sexuality within the dominant culture, concepts of purity and honour understood as discourses of regulation and control.33 But if the Prioress and Miss Malin are Luciferian, larger-than-life figures, subversive and wholly without place in their own traditions, the old "beldame" who is their closest equivalent in "The Blank Page" belongs to a culture outside Western traditions altogether, recuperating power in her status as witch, a force to be reckoned with even within the meaning-productions of her own dominant culture.34 In the end, Africa is central to defining the two conceptual clusters at the heart of the tale and written over the Mallarme'an triad. On the one hand, the concept of purity slides over into a remarkably dense and economical narrative about ownership of woman's sexuality within patriarchy; on the other hand, the idealist drama of silence and the blank page is transformed into a staged dialectic of exclusionary practices and counter-strategies. Writing over and against a Mallarme'an set of definitions, the silences of which this text speaks are those produced by a patriarchal and Imperialist cartography which has failed to map either women or the colonized. The recuperation of lives and texts outside of hegemonic culture has led

32

See Susan Hardy Aiken's imaginative reading, Isak Dinesen and the Engendering of Narrative, chapters 5 and 7. 33 Foucault, of course, theorizes the body as site of social regulation and control in Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality. A suggestive, recent study which bears directly on Dinesen's fiction is Philippa Berry's Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (London: Routledge, 1989). Berry's study provides historical confirmation of Luce Irigaray's psychoanalytic account of woman as a "speculum" or mirror of masculine narcissism. She argues that the "hypothesis that a chaste woman could serve as a bridge between the material world and an invisible spiritual dimension enabled Petrarchan poet and neoplatonic philosophers to elaborate a new concept of masculine wholeness and self-sufficiency through or across the idealized figure" (2). Key Elizabethan texts, she argues, are marked by the "profound anxieties of the masculine subject that, as a woman possessed of power, Elizabeth could not ultimately be manipulated in the manner of other female objects." This crisis at the level of the sign echoes throughout patriarchal representation. 34 See Sara Stambaugh, The Witch and the Goddess in the Stories of Isak Dinesen (Ann Arbor: U.M.I Research, 1988).

96 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY to a new understanding of what is at stake in the construction of knowledge. We have to look elsewhere for the voices which have been silenced, to stories told in letters, diaries, circulating manuscripts, slave-narratives, and songs. It is in this context that Dinesen's well-known interest in the oral tale gains in significance in "The Blank Page." It is a narrative structure in which the convention of oral performance recuperates the speaker into history, the solitary narrator, the "I" of the outer frame, dissolving into that continuous line of female authors who "have told stories for two hundred years." Dinesen's own sense of herself as a Scheherazade, fashioning tales which were deeply rooted in an oral tradition, is confirmed both by her pattern of writing and her quest for an ideal auditor/audience. Like that other histrionic writer, Charles Dickens, she constructs a scene of writing that is essentially performative and played out in the looking-glass. Dinesen acknowledged that she could not create "until I had heard my own voice, seen myself in that mirror that is the person to whom one is speaking" (LFA 288-9). In turn her lover, Denys Finch Hatton, would function as her ideal listener in a textual and sexual pas de deux, which granted her rare power and authority in an otherwise unstable relationship.35 A number of Dinesen critics have commented on the erotic nature of this storytelling ritual. Thurman suggests that Dinesen used "the erotic power of narrative . . . to test her power to enchant, to hold in thrall—and thereby to survive" (Thurman 184-5, 187). Susan Hardy Aiken reminds us that these "stories" were the germ of her mature narratives. "On one level, then, Dinesen's fictions might be seen as forms of seduction or apotropaic rituals—designed, like Scheherazade's tales, to keep at bay the little 'death' Karen Blixen underwent each time her lover departed" (Aiken 43). The twinning of story-telling and sexuality is an important motif in the opening of "The Blank Page." But if this in itself is a subversive association

35

"Denys had a trait of character which to me was very precious, he liked to hear a story told. . . . Fashions have changed, and the art of listening to a narrative has been lost in Europe. . . . Denys, who lived much by the ear, preferred hearing a tale told, to reading it; when he came to the farm he would ask: 'Have you got a story?' I had been making up many while he was away. In the evenings he made himself comfortable, spreading cushions like a couch in front of the fire, and with me sitting on the floor, cross-legged like Scheherazade herself, he would listen, clear-eyed, to a long tale, from when it began until it ended." Dinesen, Out of Africa (London: Putnam, 1946) 225-26.

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in the Western tradition, the inset stories within the story provide an equally transgressive set of meanings to be read. Dinesen undoubtedly had a real-life model in mind for her own "coffee-brown woman," the storytelling of the Somali women which subtly encoded insurrectionary lessons. In Daguerreotypes, she had already announced the importance of "duplicity" for the woman writer.36 Now she saw it used as the very principle of the Somali women, who would alternately construct fictional triumphs and re-instate female deities, in a recovery of a feminine tradition which directly anticipates the story-telling strategies of "The Blank Page." Sometimes, to entertain me, they would relate fairy tales in the style of the Arabian Nights. . . . It was a trait common to all these tales that the heroine . . . would get the better of the male characters and come out of the tale triumphant. The mother sat and listened with a smile of triumph on her face. Within this enclosed women's world, so to say, behind the walls and fortifications of it, I felt the presence of a real Ideal, without which the garrison would not have carried on so gallantly; the idea of a Millenium when women were to reign supreme in the world. The old mother at such times would take on a new shape, and sit enthroned as a massive dark symbol of that mighty female deity who had existed in old ages, before the time of the Prophet's God. Of her they never lost sight. (OA 179-80) "The Blank Page," too, as we shall see, re-constructs a tradition of female experience that straddles all of patriarchal culture. But Africa offered an alternative model for other reasons as well; in Dinesen's own mind it had been a place where the tension between the moral and the erotic did not exist: "Heavenly and earthly love were not in opposition out there, as among Christian Europeans . . . a disease caught from the tradition of dualism . . . " (Thurman 338). "The Blank Page" offers an ideal in which unashamed eroticism fuses with the model of the story-telling Somali women.37

36

Daguerreotypes, and Other Essays, trans. P.M. Mitchell and W.D. Paden (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979) 65-6. 37 It is clear that Dinesen's use of the African woman to signify erotic freedom in "The Blank Page" reflects her own desire to mythologize Africa as the blank Other of all that she most resented in the European tradition. The widespread practice of female genital mutilation in Africa (practised ritually among the Somali women, who are Muslim) is the "truth" against which Dinesen's colonial romanticizing must be read. I asked a young Somali woman working at the African Resource Centre in

98 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY Dinesen writes against the patriarchal naming of women by valorizing the owner of the tale as an "old beldame" with a toothless mouth, her own grandmother named as "old hag." Authority here accrues to both age and experience, the latter almost exclusively defined erotically in the text. Her own telling of tales is co-terminous with her sexual initiation, marked by "that time when I first let young men tell me, myself, tales of a red rose, two smooth lily buds, and four silky, supple deadly intertwining snakes" (BP 99). The imagery is at the same time iconographically conventional (the rose as female, the lily as phallic male) and transgressive. The deadly snakes suggest the contiguity of pleasure and danger rather than a meeting of Eros and Thanatos; the imagery is, at any rate, explicitly erotic, so that the story immediately reverses the Biblical reading of Genesis for a subversive politics of Paradise. Rather than constructing the terms for the exile from the privileged Garden, the dyad of snake and sexuality marks a point of initiation or entry into the world of story-telling women. It is an art zealously guarded by the female line, constituting a matrilineal tradition in striking contrast to the patrilineal canon of Western textuality. In turn, it is a space markedly Dionysian rather than Apollonian, characterized by dark (as opposed to white) imagery; the story-teller herself is "coffee-brown, black veiled," her mother "the black-eyed dancer." Her mother is both dancer, textualizing her body, and a teller of oral tales, the "often embraced" unabashedly erotic bearer of meaning. Female old age here is associated with wisdom rather than the averting of the male gaze, authority transposed directly from the site of sexuality to that of textuality. Dinesen regarded the continuum from woman as sexual being to that of witch as a valuable means of recuperating power. In a public address to the Danish Women's Citizen's Society, she offered the model of African women: "All old women had the consolation of witchcraft; their relations with witchcraft were comparable to their relations with the art of seduction. One cannot understand how we, who will have nothing to do with witchcraft, can bear to grow old" (Thurman 275).

Ottawa (which was engaged at the time of writing in a controversial attempt to halt the practice among refugee families) whether Dinesen could have lived among the Somali in Kenya and not have known of this practice. Her answer told another story of mothers and daughters: "My mother knows my views, but she told me that this is something of which we must not speak." If "The Blank Page" destabilizes the Mallarmean text, the unwritten stories of the Somali women interrupt both Dinesen's text and my own.

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Yet, if these African women at first seem outside of the circle of Western traditions, they also recuperate its most subversive meanings. The narrator cunningly restores their lesson to a locus within Judeo-Christian discourse itself, identifying the transgressive status of her implied moral to resisting strands within Western patriarchy's founding fiction. Like Charlotte Bronte, whose Vashti figure in Villette invokes a rebellious Old Testament heroine, Dinesen constructs a speaker who locates the "first germ" of the story in a request made by the daughter of Caleb in the Book of Joshua. This is the imperious heroine who lighted from her ass and cried unto her father: "Give me a blessing! For thou has now given me land; give me also the blessings of springs of water!" And he gave her the upper springs and the nether springs. And in the fields of Lecha and Maresha lived, later on, the families of them that wrought the finest linen of all. (102)

These are the same lands which provided the flax for that Portuguese crusader who brought them to the convent, so that in another gesture of infinite regress, it is this Achsah's dialectic of desire and demand, registered as supplement to the Old Testament patriarchy, which provides the flax to be woven into the sheet. Read as page blanche, it becomes in turn a new site of resistance. This is the key to the riddle of the tale whose source is "some mystical place outside the story itself" and it operates as a deliberate rupture of the Law of the Father. Alternately multiplying and resolving difference between women, the tale returns to the "first germ" to define and fix its spirit of revolt. It operates within the tale to construct a genealogy of narratives of resistance, one which provides a common bond between women cross-culturally. Its lesson is the one summed up by bird and witch figure Sunniva in Dinesen's mythopoeic "The Sailor-Boy's Tale:" "We hold together, the females of this earth" (SET 102). V

I return now to Mallarm6 as Mother. What can Barbara Johnson mean by her outlandish trope? She makes clear at the start that she does not mean Mallarm6 as feminine persona in the text, but in terms of a specific set of "interactions and transactions that structure the relationship between the

100 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY earliest parent and child,"38 a relationship summed up in terms of its ambivalence. The Mallarm6an text, she argues, recreates "the drama of the simultaneity of attachment and detachment that defines thematernal./w«cft'0n" (Johnson 141). The desire for separation and the desire for merger are thus simultaneously satisfied on two different levels: the text proclaims its autonomy and individuality, but that individuality is itself composed of structures of indifferentiation and entanglement. The reader's separation from the text is never done. (Johnson 140)

The clearest indices of this ambivalence in MaUamae" are, for Johnson, precisely those blancs in his texts which foreground absence and incompleteness. Yet whiteness also stands, she suggests, within both the traditional Western imagery and certain sites within psychoanalytic theory for the female body and breast. MallarmS himself in "Don du poeme" asks the woman to accept his poetic "child:" "Through which in sibylline whiteness woman flows/ For lips half starved by virgin azure air" (Johnson 141). The motifs Johnson invokes, centering on her own foregrounding of the concept of the blank page in MallarmS, serve as a fascinating and entirely serendipitous gloss on a text nowhere named in her essay. Yet we might playfully speculate that one key passage in Dinesen's tale could have served her as a veritable parable of indeterminacy: Within the faded markings of the canvases people of some imagination and sensibility may read all the signs of the zodiac: the Scales, the Scorpion, the Lion, the Twins. Or they may there find pictures from their own world of ideas: a rose, a heart, a sword—or even a heart pierced through with a sword. (BP 103)

Despite the tongue in cheek tone here, the tale itself contains the lesson of a strikingly contemporary hermeneutics. For not only are we required to read the aporias and silences in the text, but to recognize that they are the privileged sites of meaning. Yet the point here, pace Barbara Johnson's version of Mallarm6 or those contemporary theorists she notes for whom Mallarm6 is fundamental is that Dinesen's text is not finally indeterminate in the manner of MallarmS. It undoes a line of former readings but it does not, in the end, undo itself. Dinesen's texts characteristically layer meanings in the often disjunctive

38

A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987) 138.

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mode of postmodern irony. But as "The Blank Page" reminds us, these are also stories which gesture towards parable. The final scene of this most economical of Dinesen's tales operates like a Brechtian tableau-vivant. If its interrogative mode does not foreclose a set of meanings, that is because its very choreography is designed to give it the status of a "teaching-piece," rendered in plastic terms.39 The final passage moves through that whole portrait gallery of gilt-framed squares to a freeze-frame of that "piece of pure linen" before which the noble women of Portugal have stood silent all these years. Structurally, it operates as a clear directive to the reader to join the nuns and the Mother Abbess herself in contemplating its meaning. It is a staged lesson in reading against the grain, and in profound contrast to the Mallarmdan text, stripped of any stable referent, it returns us to another scene—that of history and the power relations written within it.

39

The Brechtian Lehrstuch or "teaching-piece" characteristically ends with a question. The German dramatist's use of the "gest," a frozen visual moment on the stage, was designed to reveal the underlying social and economic relations that governed the action or character.

The Poetics of the Story: On Symbolist Tendencies in Isak Dinesen's Fiction Bo Hakon Jergensen Odense University

Isak Dinesen's youth coincided with the period of Symbolism in Denmark. She was fifteen years old in 1903, and nineteen when her favourite collection of poems Djcevlerier [Devilries] (1904) was published, written by the Danish poet she appreciated most of all, Sophus Claussen. Later Dinesen made the statement to Aage Henriksen, one of the young men at Rungstedlund after the Second World War, that Sophus Claussen was the only one, of all the Danish poets, who was "free." Unfortunately translations are unable to express the special mixture of humour and irony which characterizes Claussen's work. If this were not the case he would surely be considered one of the leading figures of European Symbolism around 1900. Very few of Claussen's poems have been translated into English, and those that have are not the most important ones. On 15 October 1922, Isak Dinesen wrote to her mother: I so much regrat that I did not manage to ask you to send me Sophus Claussen's "Djaevlerier" ["Devilries"] via Viggo. I had a copy, which I got from Elisabeth, but unfortunately it was lost, and I find it hard to live without it. "Aphrodite's Vapors" and "Man" [two central poems in the collection] are a kind of gospel to me. So I would be very grateful if you would send it to me.1 Sophus Claussen was the leading figure in the Baudelaire-Mallarm6inspired Danish Symbolism Movement, and his most important works were written between the years of 1896 and 1904. He stayed in Paris in 1892-93, when the debate surrounding Symbolist poetics was at its height, and when both Mallarm6 and Verlaine were still alive. He even spent a spiritually drunk night with Verlaine in the streets of Paris and later described this night in his book Antonius i Paris [Antonius in Paris] published in 1896. Claussen's poem "Afrodites Dampe [Aphrodite's Vapors]" describes the

1

Letters from Africa: 1914-1931, trans. Anne Born, ed. Frans Lasson (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981) 136. 102

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goddess as a peculiarly disruptive and teasing aspect of consciousness, forming a contrast to the purposeful seriousness of the male gods. The poem "Mennesket [Man]" tells the story of a king's son who has a special communion with a godlike snake which is not poisonous and wicked when entertained with a wonderful instrument—i.e. the poem: Ja, naar den fnyste giftig og morderisk i Hammen, jeg hviskede som Praesten: "Det er Kaerlighed altsammen." [Yes, when it snorted, poisonous and murderous in its skin, I whispered like the priest: "It is love, all of it. "]2

Both poems deal with a particular understanding of artistic form. This form is, for Claussen, a sort of laboratory of the human passions, which are deprived of their violent, existential consequences when they occur in art in such a way that one gets a glimpse of their universal structure; love, for example, can manifest itself in many different forms. This is the essence of the Symbolist mode of perception: to penetrate variety in order to reach unity, and to perceive the work of art as the Symbolist form which makes such a point of view possible. The radically new idea presented by the Symbolist movement that manifested itself at the end of the nineteenth century rests on the perception of art as a special aesthetic field which relieves art of the obligation to comment on "reality." Structuralism (de Saussure) and the Symbolist movement originate from the same spiritual horizon: the belief that human life is unchanging, repeating itself eternally through the ages, and that it is inscribed in the stories and myths handed down to us. It is a well-known fact that the lyric poem is the centre of the poetics of Symbolism, and so, all things considered, one may ask how the phenomenon is connected to Isak Dinesen's stories? In this paper, I will attempt to illustrate Dinesen's relationship to Symbolism3 not simply by referring to all the passages where Dinesen, in a more or less disguised manner, makes use

2

"Mennesket," Udvalgte Digte (Copenhagen: Gyldendals Boghandel, 1952) 221. (My translation). 3 I am not the only one to do this—Bernhard Blienke has also dealt with this relationship. He writes: "1830 bis 1950—irgenwo innerhalb dieser historischen Spanne ist Blixen [Dinesen] epochal zu Hause, ist eine Heimsuchung am Platze. Ich habe mehrmals ihre theologie, Poetologie und Kunst kurzerhand an Jahrhundertende und Jahrhundertwende festgemacht..." Fatale Prdzedenz Karen Blixens Mythologie (Neumiinster: Karl Wachholtz Verlag, 1986) 288.

104 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY of Baudelaire and Sophus Claussen, but by penetrating her conception of the nature of the story as expressed in "Second Meeting," "The Cardinal's First Tale," and "The Deluge at Norderney." In the years 1886-98, the typical Symbolist discussion centred on five concepts: (1) the search for unity, (2) correspondence, (3) suggestion, (4) music as an artistic ideal and, finally, (5) the need for free verse.4 Symbolism holds the view that the work of art belongs to a special sphere of language, where the internal combination of the elements is more significant than their possible reference to the recognizable outside world. The elements combine to form a unity through internal correspondences. The significance of these elements results from their musical effect, which determines the background to the suggestion, i.e. how the text affects the reader. The poet's aim is to affect the outside world, of which the reader is a part, rather than create a mimetic reproduction of that world. The reader must resonate with the text so he/she realizes the necessity of the Symbolist perception in his/her body. In this way, the reader will experience an almost religious feeling that everything has one point of origin in the universal rhythm.5 This material point of origin (i.e. reality) also manifests itself in the phenomenon referred to as "observed originality." Very often the Symbolist work of art assumes its form in such a way that a private, individual, factual experience is viewed through an artistic lens which analytically searches for unity with the mythical portions inherent in the material of individual experience—the manner in which the individual life reflects the (universal) mythological traditions. In other words, on a secondary level the work of art emerges as an aesthetic—but existentially denied—reconstruction of the primary experience (Mallarme'). Sophus Claussen mastered this technique; by elevating his private life into art he became free and was able to see his own doings as configurations of the fundamental rhythms of existence. By

4

Also figuring in this discussion was Edgar Allen Poe's constructivist interpretation in "The Raven." Poe stated that the work of art is created intentionally, an idea that is taken up in Symbolism. (See particularly Poe, "Philosophy of Composition," The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe with a Selection of Essays [London: Dent and Sons, 1927] 163-177.) 5 If this sounds romantic, it should be kept in mind that the effect is achieved by using linguistic combinatory effects, which—originating from their physical basis—almost contradict the existence of the universal Idea. In other words, through the use of material elements a road is created to reach the non-material: the idea.

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perceiving Symbolism as an aesthetic technique rather than an idea, he disengaged himself from existential consequences. However, the distance imposed between art and reality was, for Claussen, sometimes perceived as a loss of ordinary humanity. Isak Dinesen became attracted to this aesthetic point of view where art is a perspective, a view from far above, almost like when she was flying with Denys in an airplane. This is, of course, related to the perspective of God and, consequently, also to the old form of story-telling. I claim that the fact that Isak Dinesen linked up with a three thousand year old narrative tradition, was really a mythological statement which, at that tune, was also a modern aesthetic technique. When she chose to utilize certain expressions, such as "fate," and referred to the history of this technique, she did it more or less deliberately as an old-fashioned disguise for a modem exploitation of an old genre, the Tale. The short story "Second Meeting" from Carnival: Entertainments and Posthumous Tales has the flavour of a poet's testament, in which the poet accounts for the poetics that she herself has been using. The story was written in 1961 as a part of the Albondocani-project and is, accordingly, Isak Dinesen's last story. The characters of the story are all poets in different ways. On the one hand, Lord Byron in Genoa—on his way to death in Greece—is a well-known poet in the history of literature. On the other hand, the puppet show director Pipistrello was created by Dinesen for the occasion and was, moreover, made the double of Byron. Pipistrello makes up stories and performs them on stage at his theatre. In this way the elements in "Second Meeting" have been lined up to create a "poet-story" by thematizing problems and solutions pertaining to poetics. It is clear that Pipistrello's "ancestral grandmother," alias Isak Dinesen, is speaking in allegorical voices in this story by using Pipistrello as her poetic voice and Byron as her private voice. Fourteen years earlier, before the story begins and at their first meeting on Malta, Pipistrello had saved Lord Byron from an ambush brought about by a girl, and had set up his puppet theatre from the money he got from Byron through the men involved in the ambush. Pipistrello arrives to arrange the second meeting between the two of them since, in his view, there have to be two meetings in order for a good story to be created. When Lord Byron compares the intervening fourteen years of his life to a wine cellar of varying quality wines, of which one might make an inventory, Pipistrello declares:

106 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY I have indeed come to make an inventory . . . to round off your stock and collect it into a unity [italics mine]—as you say, a cellar. I am going to turn it into a story. That is what a second meeting does. It is the story's touchstone, the last curve of the parenthesis, which joins up with the first curve and makes a unity of its contents.6

Lord Byron believes that, in future, his story will result in him becoming a widely read author. However, the outcome is that it is his life that makes up a unity, and it is precisely this unity which will be told again and again. The implication of this story is that Isak Dinesen realizes that, in comparison to her stories, her life—her biography—will become a better story than those she created. In a peculiar way this both undermines and confirms the poetics of the story which she has just established. An inset story of the life of the Virgin Mary, one which Pipistrello would like to produce at his theatre, indicates the reason for this. By having two meetings, the story creates a sort of repetition in connection with the conception of Christ through the Holy Ghost. Mary once more feels the pleasure she had felt at the tune when Jesus was conceived. Therefore, one might say that the motive behind the distant story teller was the wish to reawaken a love affair. Dinesen's use of the story has not been "pure;" instead, it has been imbued with private motives. Consequently, it will be this, her private story, that will be handed down as the real story once she is dead. The purpose behind the stories told by Dinesen is to create a unity out of disparate parts. Is this a modern use of the old story? Was it the intention of the story teller who told Ali Baba's story to create a unity? Hardly—this unity was supposedly there already. By reflecting on the poetics of the story in "Second Meeting" Dinesen. shows how unity is constructed as an aesthetic replacement of a lost or perceived unity in an old genre. The reason why this constructed aesthetic unity is employed is the fact that Dinesen uses the story to answer a question that it had never before been used to answer: "Who am I?" Are we as readers, the audience, capable of getting a possible answer to the question, "Who am I," in Ali Baba? How? We are able to grasp a narrative about a man who suddenly enters the plot, but are we able to identify with the character, something which The Lady in the Black Dress of "The Cardinal's First Tale" obviously

6 Carnival: Entertainments and Posthumous Tales (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1977) 334-335. "The Second Meeting" contained in this collection will hereafter be referred to as SM.

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wants to do? The answer is negative. It would be a contradiction in terms since the old form of the story does not involve heroes of a naturalistic or realistic nature. The poetics of unity is a Symbolist feature in Isak Dinesen's narrative style.7 The unity, enclosed within the two curves of the parenthesis, changes a coincidence into a regularity in the same way that two separate items on the page of a newspaper are able to comment on each other metonymically by the mere fact that they are placed on the same page. The narrative sequences, the phenomena, correspond to each other as they do in a Symbolist poem. The artistic technique of dialogue provides for suggestion in the same way that Pipistrello would manage the approach of the Holy Ghost by using "the machine in the wings [backstage]11 (SM 336). In light of the above, Dinesen's many "framed" stories are much more comprehensible. The unity of the story is only preserved through the parentheses (the frame). It is also much easier to understand why Pipistrello has to state the following view of creating stories: "For I shall tell you", he went on, "in accepting my life, and the sovereign, I forfeited my claim to a real human life. The harmony of it from then on, was the harmony of the story. Certainly it is a great happiness to be able to turn the things which happen to you into stories. It is perhaps the one perfect happiness that a human being will find in life. But it is, at the same time, inexplicably, to the uninitiated a loss, a curse even. What I have gained through these fourteen years is then a knowledge of the story and everything concerning it." (SM 333-334)

The fact is that in the created unity of this poetics there is nothing left of ordinary, daily, human life. The inventory of human life is transformed in that certain parts of it are used while others are neglected. Disorder is replaced by the elevated, perspectival viewpoint. This is the Symbolist loss, of which Claussen was also aware: "Jeg er d0d, men om mit spor svaever livets skaberord. [I am dead but around my tracks hovers the creative word of life.]"8 The urge towards unity is, in itself, fundamentally contrary to the sensuality which marked the modem starting point of Symbolism, a sensuality which the return of the Holy Ghost to the Virgin Mary in "Second 7

This kind of framework is like a photograph of a boring party. Everyone within the frame looks happy and interested, although they do not necessarily feel that way at all. 8 Sophus Claussen, "MennesketogDigteren,"FaWer (Copenhagen: Gyldendals Boghandel, 1917) 39-45 (My translation).

108 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY Meeting" was supposed to express. The aesthetic unity proves itself to be purely aesthetic, although it was intended to be a universal interpretation of the newly inscribed subject, namely, the beautiful ubermensch. Furthermore, it was not understood until the advent of Modernism that language is not life, just as Magritte's "pipe" is not a pipe. Dinesen's use of the marionette theme also indicates the conditions under which she attempts to create unity in the stories. From the story teller's point of view, the characters are not actual people but are puppetrepresentatives of elements that may be made to interact with each other. In a similar manner, the small circle of light which is established as a stage setting around a lamp, for instance, in "The Dreamers" and "The Deluge at Norderney," calls attention to the small horizon within which the story as a whole is able to operate. In other words, the outside world is to be bracketed off. The marionette theme which leads back to the story teller, the puppet-master, with all his threads and the stage setting created by the circle of light, are elements of the unity which is both the condition and meaning of the stories. The poetics surrounding the two parentheses in "Second Meeting" illustrates the desire for unity. The other meeting occurs, and the parenthesis closes, thereby establishing the frame of the story. The two meetings are necessary for unity to be created. Similarly, when the famous sculptor Angelo Santasilia moves his small figures of clay around in order to create the "golden section" while talking to the puppet show director Pino in "Of Hidden Thoughts and of Heaven," we are dealing with story telling for the purposes of creating a unity, the unity of the rectangle. As in "Second Meeting," discussions about the nature of story-telling form part of the story in "The Cardinal's First Tale." This story opens with the question "Who are you?"9 asked by The Lady in the Black Dress to the Cardinal. It closes with the statement: "For within our whole universe the story only has authority to answer that cry of heart of its characters, that one cry of heart of each of them: 'Who am I?'" (CFT 26) The Danish version reads Menneskehjertets, which refers generally to "the human heart" rather than specifically to the "heart of its characters" as suggested in the English version. This makes quite a difference. The English version states that the characters of the story get their explanation from the story, while the Danish version promises human beings outside the story the answer through the

9 Last Tales (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1957) 3. "The Cardinal's First Tale" contained within this collection will hereafter be referred to as CFT.

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story. The story itself oscillates between the poles of this difference. Through her conversations with the Cardinal, the lady has pieced together the disparate parts of her life into a whole; with the Cardinal's mediation, she is "narrated" anew, so to speak. By telling his own story, the Cardinal has answered the question of "who he is" as one of the characters of the story. The response of The Lady in the Black Dress is significant in terms of the whole complex of problems surrounding Dinesen's poetics of storytelling: "As I myself!" she cried out for the third time. "When I first told you the horrible conflict, of the cruel dilemma which was rending my heart, I put before you, I know, a number of details, in themselves unconnected and contradictory, and so jarring, that I had to stop the ears of my mind to them. In the course of our talks together all these fragments have been united into a whole." (CFT 4)

With her inclination towards the realist novel of identification, the lady wishes for help through the story, but instead she gets the old kind of story palmed off on her with its answer to "Who am I?" an answer which is only obtained by entering into the plot as a character with whom the story deals as it pleases. How does the story get this kind of authority? In the tale, it comes about by having the Cardinal appear as both a person and a priest. Dinesen thereby connects the act of story telling with the divine story. Dinesen does not specify which stories were used as models for the genre of divine stories, whereas the contrasting term, the novel, holds a specified position. Does the German short story from the beginning of the 19th century serve as a model for the divine story? Do Dinesen's own stories? It strikes me that a distinction is being made between the oral story and the written one with the subtle implication that the oral one is privileged: "Madame", he said, "I have been telling you a story. Stories have been told as long as speech has existed, and sans stories the human race would have perished, as it would have perished sans water. . . . But I see, Madame", he went on, "I see, today, a new art of narration, a novel literature and category of belles-lettres, drawing upon the world." (CFT 23)

If this is the case, Isak Dinesen's own stories belong to the modem form of the novel in that they are composed for the reading eye, although she readily told part of them without a written text. In fact one is able to follow her differentiation so far as to say that a good story is the story that may be repeated independently of the form in which it was initially presented. Such

110 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY a story does not dwell on the individual disposition of its characters. From this use of the oral story, the concept of the story is carried further in that it is applied to Pipistrello's puppet (theatre) stories, for instance, and that it is generally used in the sense of "tale." This development is ideological since it aims at giving a very specific form of the story—Isak Dinesen's own art of story-telling—an aesthetically high status. In their rigidity, the marionettes are elevated to representatives of the divine story which has been handed down to us. In other words, the Symbolist drive for unity provides a universal perspective reaching infinitely backwards and, consequently, also forward in time. The Cardinal's opinion of the story is a case in point: "A story", he went on as before, "has a hero to it, and you will see him clearly, luminous, and as upon a higher plane. Whatever he is in himself, the immortal story immortalizes its hero. Ali Baba, who in himself is nothing more than an honest woodcutter, is the adequate hero of a very great story. But by the time when the new literature shall reign supreme and you will have no more stories, you will have no more heroes. The world will have to do without them, sadly, until the hour when the divine powers shall see fit, once more, to make a story for a hero to appear in." (CFT 24)

Here the hero is the constituent element of a story, but in "Second Meeting," which also uses Ali Baba as an example, it is the two meetings between Ali Baba and the thieves which creates the unity of the story. In Isak Dinesen's experience as a story writer, the unity (i.e. the hero) has evidently been split into two elements or parentheses. The hero is lost, unless the hero is Isak Dinesen in the story of her life, since the unity has been achieved only in the act of composition. In the Danish version, the last line of the above citation refers to: "hvori en Kelt kan ande, [a story in which a hero is able to breathe.]"10 Here, subjectivity is attributed to the hero: how he is "able to breathe!" The divine story cannot deal with the question of how the hero breathes, or how he is, for that matter. On the contrary, what is taking place here is the subjectivization of the ideal, the divine or immortal story, which is always present in Dinesen's work. The subjectivity of the story teller is hidden behind the mask of the divine story. The dream is to create a story in which this subjectivity is able to "breathe," i.e. to find an answer to the question

10

Karen Blixen, Sidste Fortcellinger (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1957) 28.

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"Who am I?" Ali Baba never wished to know "who he was;" his was a hand-to-mouth existence. The question "Who am I?" constitutes the entry of the individual character of the novel into the old story form. This interferes with a non-individual course of action. Dinesen sets up this difference through the opposition of Mythos versus Logos in "Converse at Night in Copenhagen." It is not an exaggeration to state that Isak Dinesen's tales illustrate the conflict between the poetics of the story and that of a private subjectivity seeking expression. The relationship between the Cardinal and The Lady in Black reflects the dialectics between the demand for form and the desire of the subject for identification, as in the novel. The Symbolist doubling of aesthetics and sensualism prevails, leading thereby to the disintegration of the old genre of the story. When, at the end of the tale "The Invincible Slave-owners," Axel contemplates his efforts, he is standing at a waterfall: He kept his eyes upon the waterfall. The clear stream, like a luminous column amongst the moss and the stones, held its noble outline unaltered through all the hours of day and night. In the midst of it there was a small projecting cascade, where the tumbling water struck a rock. That, too, stood out immutable like a fresh crack in the marble of the cataract. If he returned in ten years, he would find it unchanged, hi the same form, like a harmonious and immortal work of art. Still it was, each second, new particles of water hurled over the edge, rushing into a precipice and disappearing. It was a flight, a whirl, an incessant catastrophe. Are there, in life, he thought, similar phenomena? Is there a corresponding, paradoxical mode of existing, a poised, classic, static flight and run. In music it exists, and there it is called a Fuga: D'un air placide et triomphant, Tu passes ton chemin, majesteuse enfant.11

The idea must be that a "similar phenomenon" is also to be found in the art of writing, where it is called a story. Storm and catastrophe, and, by implication, form and subjectivity, are united. The shattering of the single drop symbolizes the chance catastrophes of the individual human life. But such a pattern of form originates in the story teller's olympian perspective, also alluded to in the Baudelaire quotation. Dinesen, as the author, uses the

11

Winter's Tales (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1970) 151-152. "The Invincible Slave-owners" contained within this collection will hereafter be referred to as ISO. "Sorrow-acre" will be referred to as 5/4.

112 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY story to bring about a connection that is never to be experienced by the searching character at the moment in question, but belongs to the omniscient perspective of the author and is often introduced by a "later on" in the stories. Adam in "Sorrow-Acre," for example, experiences such an insight: "Later on he remembered what he had thought that evening" (SA 65). It is a great happiness for a human being to perceive him/herself as a story, but, at the same time, it is also a source of great misery since the knowledge that the story inscribes is useless precisely because it is realized only "later on." The overview of the story is the result of the artistic process and, as in other modernist works, it belongs only to the author. The transformation of private, sensual experiences into a world-view by means of symbolized, universal rhythms through suggestion constitutes the essential Symbolist project. The mixture of art and life is made central in such a way that art becomes life-changing rather than merely a reflection of life. This mixture, which is fundamental to Symbolism, marks a most powerful and beautiful contribution to aesthetics: the involvement of the reader through suggestion. However, it also produces a disappointing effect since the produced unity belongs solely to the work of art and is not to be found elsewhere. The constant reference to the marionette theme in Seven Gothic Tales points to a knowledge of this problem. One might, in fact, consider replacing the term "Gothic," which refers to a wide range of tales anywhere between Hoffmann and Poe, with what is today referred to as Symbolism, thereby altering the title of Dinesen's book to read "Seven Symbolist Tales."12 When reading "The Deluge at Norderney" from this point of view, we see at once that the story consists of four separate parts brought together within the frame of the deluge or, rather, the small circle of light from the lantern in the hayloft. The narrator indicates that it is the shadows produced by the light, rather than the tired people themselves, which keep the conversation going. Elsewhere, these characters are called puppets, a significant indication of the special status of these characters as elemental figures. They are meant to represent different aspects of the theme of "being seen." At the same time, the created unity deals with sensuality and disguise. Towards the end of the story, Kasparson quotes from Axel and Walborg, "I am his ghost, the larva of his spirit; the transient shell of an

12

Claussen, as a Symbolist, also used the word "Gothic" in 1908 in order to express his expectation for and anticipation of a new age.

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immortal mind. . . . "13 as an expression of his relationship to the deceased Cardinal. This is, if anything, an expression of the Symbolist theme—the sensual realm as a path to the idea. The evening in the hayloft is Kasparson's staged aesthetic achievement, that is, the linking together of the tales of each of the individual characters. The private point of origin in this work of art is also evident in the scene of the unmasking. What is achieved by drawing attention to the Symbolist tendencies in Dinesen's tales? First of all, it places the tales at the beginning of Modernism, thereby relativizing their existential content. The poetics of the story points to an artificially created unity in which expressions of "fate" or "God's will" are metaphors for the aesthetic will that combines the separate parts into a whole. If Symbolism was the first movement in art that was aware of itself as art, then it follows that biography, realism, and a calculated weighing of the representative elements would enter into the most peculiar combinations in the tales of Isak Dinesen. Fiction is no longer an unmediated medium. The latter notion disappears concurrently with the withdrawal of the motif from painting and music in and around 1910. The Symbolist vision transforms reality into signs of fundamental interconnections at the interpretive level which have rendered the old type of (transparent) fiction impossible. The Symbolist conception of aesthetic unity is only one way of looking at the "big picture" of these "great stories" of the twentieth century. This is why Isak Dinesen was able to mythologize herself as being three thousand years old although she was completely contemporary. In her works, the poetics of the story demonstrates a tendency toward abstraction in the effort to answer the question "Who am I?" The subject precipitates the meaning, untying the objective strings it had in the old fiction. The story is no longer self-validating. Rather, it points to the subject having produced it: it has become lyrical. This does not make it poor fiction, but it does make Dinesen's fiction of such a type that the tales can hardly be called stories any longer. Maybe this is the reason why Dinesen's tales demand such a tremendous disguise of her role as a story teller. The opposition of the Cardinal and Kasparson not only signifies the desire to create a story, it also signifies the unmanageable sensual conditions within which the story has to take place. The opposition of the Cardinal and the Lady in Black shows Isak Dinesen as the lady who asks of the old genre of the story that it tell her life as a unity. In this way, the story, to Dinesen, is not only a sign of

13

"The Deluge at Norderney," Seven Gothic Tales Random House, 1961) 75.

(New York: Vintage-

114 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY liberation from meaninglessness, it is also the opium that she gives to her reader.

Isak Dinesen Among the Victorians: Some Shared Symbolic Techniques Sara Stambaugh University of Alberta In 1985 I participated in the Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen International Conference hosted by Poul Houe at the University of Minnesota. As I recall, of the opening speakers (not listed on the program), three, including Robert Langbaum, emphasized that reading Dinesen had shifted their perceptions and changed their way of reading. Like Malli in Dinesen's "Tempests," I was struck, because Isak Dinesen had done the same thing to me. In this paper, therefore, I want to explain how Dinesen illustrates the reading of British Victorian literature and vice versa. In fact, my paper could perhaps be subtitled "An Apologia for a Victorian Scholar's Interest in Isak Dinesen." I shall first establish my basis for placing Isak Dinesen in a nineteenth century British context, next give examples of two shared techniques, and finally draw some generalized conclusions. One of the assumptions I make in my Dinesen study, The Witch and the Goddess, is that Dinesen was grounded in nineteenth century British literature. Certainly, she draws upon some central Victorian writers whom she names in a letter to her aunt Bess (Mary Westenholz), dating probably from 1925. Dinesen says, "Perhaps you will say that I do not know enough about the Victorians to express myself at all on them. . . . There are some of them, however, Tennyson, Rossetti, and the Brontes, for example, that I think I probably know as well as you do."1 To substantiate her claim, in "The Supper at Elsinore" she uses the opening line from D.G. Rossetti's "Lilith" or "Body's Beauty," and "The Poet" includes the closing line of Tennyson's "Come Down, O Maid," one of the songs from The Princess. In both cases the lines are not quoted as verse but incorporated into Dinesen's prose as part of her own casual, intellectual baggage. To my mind the influence of the Bronte sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and the underrated Anne, permeates her work, probably providing Dinesen with a

1 Isak Dinesen, Letters from Africa: 1914-1931, trans. Anne Born, ed. Frans Lasson. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979) 236.

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116 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY stance as well as with imagery and sentiments more than coincidentally consonant with theirs. I suspect, however, that Dinesen's most important Victorian source is one not named in her essays or published correspondence, Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, although she twice refers familiarly to another of his works, Heroes and Hero-Worship.2 My unsubstantiated claim rests partly upon her position as a partly English child with a partly English education but mostly upon what she says in her essays, specifically in "On Mottoes of My Life" and "Daguerreotypes," both of which praise the power of symbols and emphasize their power and significance to past generations, a message central to Carlyle's work. Carlyle's Sartor Resartus was published serially from November, 1833, to August, 1834. Like Seven Gothic Tales, its first enthusiastic audience was in the United States. Carlyle's book soon became so influential that I think it fair to say that it taught generations of British writers to write and readers to read. In fact, I would posit that it dictated a style of writing which held sway, in Britain at least, from the 1840s until the 1920s, when it fell from grace along with most else Victorian but remained alive and well in Isak Dinesen's fictional practice. This is one reason she can provide a window to the past for students of Victorian literature. Carlyle's central injunction in Sartor Resartus was "Close thy Byron, open thy Goethe. "3 Any student of Dinesen knows that she refused, at least, to do the first. Carlyle's most influential chapter, however, was probably the one from Book III entitled "Symbols." I quote the passage I think central to Dinesen (and, of course, to the purpose of my paper): . . . [N]ot our Logical, Mensurative faculty, but our Imaginative one is King over us; I might say, Priest and Prophet to lead us heavenward; or Magician and Wizard to lead us hellward. Nay, even for the basest Sensualist, what is Sense but the implement of Fantasy; the vessel it drinks out of? Ever in the dullest existence there is a sheen either of Inspiration or of Madness (thou partly hast it in thy choice, which of the two), that gleams-in from the circumambient Eternity, and colours with its own hues

2

Letters 63. "Letters from a Land at War," Daguerreotypes and Other Essays, trans. P.M. Mitchell and W.D. Paden (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981) 109. "On Mottoes of My Life" included in this collection will hereafter be referred to as MML. "Daguerreotypes" will be referred to as Daguerreotypes, 3 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Hen Teufelsdrockh, ed. Charles Frederick Harrold (New York: Odyssey, 1974) 192.

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our little islet of Time. The Understanding is indeed thy window, too clear thou canst not make it; but Fantasy is thy eye, with its colour-giving retina, healthy or diseased. Have not I myself known five-hundred living soldiers sabred into crows'-meat for a piece of glazed cotton, which they called their Flag; which, had you sold it at any market-cross, would not have brought above three groschen? Did not the whole Hungarian Nation rise, like some tumultuous moon-stirred Atlantic, when Kaiser Joseph pocketed their Iron Crown; an implement, as was sagaciously observed, in size and commercial value little differing from a horseshoe? It is in and through Symbols that man, consciously or unconsciously, lives, works, and has his being: those ages, moreover, are accounted the noblest which can the best recognise symbolical worth, and prize it the highest. For is not a Symbol ever, to him who has eyes for it, some dimmer or clearer revelation of the God-like? (Carlyle 222) Here, for comparison, is the third paragraph of Dinesen's essay, "On Mottoes of My Life:" Very likely it will be difficult for the younger generation to realize to what extent we lived in a world of symbols. We might, at this moment, lay before us a plain matter-of-fact object, a piece of cloth, and endeavour to agree in defining and placing it. A young man or woman would say to me: "You may give this thing a name of your own choice, but actually, in reality and for all working purposes, it is a length of bunting, of such and such measurements and such and such colors, and worth so and so much a yard." The person brought up with symbols, genuinely surprised and shocked, would protest: "What do you mean? You are all wrong. The thing before us, in reality and for all working purposes, is a thing of tremendous power. Put it to a test in real, actual life—it can at any moment call up a hundred million people and set them marching. It is the Stars and Stripes, it is Old Glory, it is the United States of America." (MML 1-2) The two passages make a similar point. More striking, however, is their use of a mutual example, the symbolic as opposed to the material value of a flag, an image Dinesen repeats midway in her essay "Daguerreotypes" (Daguerreotypes 50). It is possible, of course, that both passages draw upon a mutual German source available to both Carlyle and Dinesen. Nevertheless, the message that the symbol lies at the heart of nature resonated internationally. Its point is reflected in the style of Isak Dinesen and in that of nineteenth century British writers, both poets and novelists. Carlyle's prescription to his Victorian patients was to look through the surface of things, their clothes, as he puts it, to the underlying spiritual

118 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY essence. In other words, they were to read the hieroglyphics of nature and decipher the hidden significance of what lay around them.4 In his fine study of British Pre-Raphaelite painters, Fact into Figure, Herbert L. Sussman emphasizes Carry le's influence upon that group. Sussman's study examines typology, only one aspect of Carlyle's wide-reaching injunctions. The Scotsman's sermons also led back to seventeenth century poets like George Herbert, who wrote poems shaped and designed as emblems, or like Henry Vaughan, who read messages in nature as divine emblems (as Dinesen herself did when she lost the farm and asked for "a sign.") Not accidentally, the most famous seventeenth century emblem book, that of Francis Quarles, went through a number of new editions in the nineteenth century. Students of nineteenth century British literature are only beginning to realize how thoroughly Carlyle's precepts were followed and how central his injunctions were to the practice of writers like the Brontes, D.G. Rossetti, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, among many others, with whom I include Isak Dinesen, who stated her shared belief in the importance of the symbol. The study of symbolic technique as promulgated by Thomas Carlyle is perhaps the most exciting aspect of current nineteenth century scholarship, and it branches in many directions: to typology (which postulates moral correspondences between Old and New Testament characters as well as between living souls and both), to physiognomy (the reflection of character through appearance), to emblems (God's symbolic messages, particularly through nature), and to the language of the flowers. It also points to the less specific areas discussed below. All of these areas, however, are related to a larger one which I shall briefly mention before moving on to discuss technique. Dinesen's practice and Carlyle's injunctions, I think, are both rooted in romance, a tradition and practice publicly sneered at in Britain after the advent of that most superficially realistic of genres, the novel.5 Both Dinesen's practice and Carlyle's injunctions are firmly rooted in that past habit of European

4

Paul J. Korshin speaks extensively of the significance of hieroglyphics to the symbolic mentality in Typologies in England, 1650-1820 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982). He also notes that "the typological system functions equally well in contexts where natural religion or the religion of nature is central. . . , and ultimately, in situations where there is no particular religious context at all" (Korshin 87). 5 Juliet McMaster discusses the still flourishing state of romance within the Victorian novel in "Romance and the Novel," English Studies in Canada 4, vol. ix (December 1983): 392-401.

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thinking. I shall therefore repeat Carlyle's romantic claim: "It is in and through Symbols that man, consciously or unconsciously, lives, works, and has his being. . . . " As her work makes clear, Isak Dinesen shared that assumption as well as the symbolic techniques practised by her predecessors. Dinesen's allegiance to the kind of technique I have in mind may be elucidated by some of her statements about the nature of the story, the most important of which occurs in the closing pages of "The Cardinal's First Tale," where the artist-priest denigrates novelist literature in favour of the story, which he calls "the divine art," in contrast to the novel, which is merely "a great, earnest, and ambitious human product."6 The Cardinal goes on to emphasize plot action as superior to realistic characterization and illustrates his points by referring to The Arabian Nights and to the classical tales of Hero and Leander and of Cupid and Psyche. Taken simply as statements about narrative technique, the Cardinal's discussion points directly to the tradition of romance as the source of the divine art he advocates, even to the unimportance of individualized characterizations in the romance tradition (in which I include The Arabian Nights and the world of classical stories and fairy tales). An illustration of "the divine art" advocated by the Cardinal appears in "The Deluge at Norderney," in Miss Malin's story of the girl Calypso. Slightly beyond midway in Miss Malin's tale, Dinesen comments, . . . the girl, who had hitherto stared straight in front of her, turned her wild eyes toward the narrator, and began to listen with a new kind of interest, as if she herself were hearing the tale for the first time. Miss Malin had an opulent power of imagination. But still the story, correct or not, was to the heroine herself a symbol, a dressed-up image of what she had in reality gone through. . . .7

The sense of story as symbol, as dressed up image of reality, is central to the conception of romance and to Carlyle's injunctions. I shall cite one last, indirect statement by Dinesen on her conception of story, this one reported by Robert Langbaum. He says, [i]n explaining to me the difference between the novel and the story as she

6 Last Tales (New York: Random House, 1958) 24. "The Cardinal's First Tale" included in this collection will hereafter be referred to as CFT. "A Country Tale" will be referred to as CT. 7 Seven Gothic Tales (New York: Random House, 1958) 46. "The Deluge at Norderney" included in this volume will hereafter be referred to as DN.

120 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY conceived it, she said that in the novel all kinds of details are there simply to give a sense of reality, but in a story every detail—a letter, a handkerchief . . .must bear directly on the action and meaning.8 I read Dinesen's emphasis upon the significance of details as yet another indication of her allegiance to romance, here to the power and importance of the image dropped, apparently at random, into her narratives but always bearing symbolic weight in relation to the story. I propose that like many British Victorians, Isak Dinesen subscribed to Thomas Carlyle's belief in the power of the symbol and that, in spite of the superficial realism of many Victorian writers, she shares their techniques, especially in her use of symbolic details and of symbolic plot action. Here I might add that like Dinesen, Charles Dickens, my major Victorian point of comparison, has also been charged with thinness of characterization, particularly of the characters Oliver Twist and Little Nell (of The Old Curiosity Shop), because, I think, modern readers trained in the realistic novel are incapable of reading such characters as romance figures typifying innocence, rather than as realistically conceived characterizations in the novelistic mode. To begin my discussion of Dinesen's use of symbolic detail and its relation to that of the Victorians, it should be noted that I have in mind particularly a system of public symbols largely lost to the modern reader, although their use shades into wider practice still used and readily recognized, just as the specifically typological use of names shades into more general allusiveness. Martin C. Battestin has explained, for example, that two characters in Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews, Abraham Adams and the title character, would have been recognized by contemporary readers as types representing faith (Abraham) and chastity (Joseph), although the wonderful Mrs. Slipslop reflects broader practice.9 By the same token, George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver (of The Mill on the Floss) or Wilkie Collins' Magdalene Vanstone (of No Name) would have instantly registered as types of erring womanhood, undoubtedly Dinesen's ironic intention as well in such stories as "The Deluge at Norderaey," "Sorrow-Acre," and "The Bear and the Kiss," in which she uses the same name. Dinesen, however, broadens her practice to conceive all names symbolically, often charging them not 8

Robert Langbaum, Isak Dinesen's An: The Gayety of Vision (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1975) 210. 9 Martin C. Battestin, Introduction and Notes, Joseph Andrews and Shamela by Henry Fielding (Boston: Houghton Mifflin (Riverside), 1961) xxx.

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with biblical but with historical significance, such as the given name of Cardinal Hamilcar von Sehestedt from "The Deluge at Norderney," which is that of a notable rebel against Rome, while the story itself transforms the cardinal into the rebellious outlaw, Kasparson. The kind of public image I am interested in is perhaps most easily illustrated by one central to many of Dinesen's stories, the bird. Dinesen established her home, Rungstedlund, as a bird refuge, but her fictional practice reflects something other than simple love of wild life. Flight is a central image in her stories, used to indicate a condition of freedom, while birds themselves are closely associated with a remarkable number of trapped women. In "The Immortal Story," for example, Virginie du Pont is a peacock too big for the poultry yard of Canton, while Elishama, who choreographs her immortal night, has the same sympathy for women as for caged birds.10 Similarly, the proud sisters of "The Supper at Elsinore" are particularly associated with birds, initially with the caged birds given to them by would-be lovers—symbols, the reader soon comes to realize, of their own situation as trapped women. Rereading Charles Dickens in the light of Dinesen's practice, I was struck by the number of mysterious birds which appear and disappear in his novels and with the question of what they were doing there. Why, for example, should Esther Summerson of Dickens' Bleak House begin her narrative by pointedly mentioning the caged bird she carries with her on her way to boarding school, a bird which disappears as abruptly as it appears?11 Even more mysterious, why should the would-be rescuers of Little Nell in Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop set out in mid-winter with a caged bird, sure to drop dead within an hour of avian pneumonia from the cold and jolting of a drafty coach?12 Neither bird appears again, because both serve the same function as those in Dinesen's stories. Readers raised in the nineteenth century tradition would have recognized them instantly as public symbols of trapped women. Once alert to the iconographic function of birds, the reader comes to note their appearance, for example, as the especially trained and docile pets

10

Anecdotes of Destiny (New York: Random House, 1958) 178. "The Immortal Story" and "The Supper at Elsinore" are contained within this collection. 11 Charles Dickens, BleakHouse, ed. MortonDauwenZabel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin (Riverside), 1956) chapter 3. 12 Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop, ed. Angus Easson (London: Penguin, 1972) chapter 70.

122 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY of Wilkie Collins' villainous Count Fosco in The Woman in White, who has only to set the doors of the canaries' cages open, and to call them, and the pretty little cleverly trained creatures perch fearlessly on his hand, mount his fat outstretched fingers one by one, when he tells them to "go upstairs," and sing together as if they would burst their throats with delight when they get to the top finger.13

Clearly, the Count controls the birds as he controls the women he equally fascinates. After describing Fosco's methods of managing his wife, Marian Halcombe explains, I can find him out when I am away from him—I know he flatters my vanity, when I think of him up here in my own room—and yet, when I go downstairs, and get into his company again, he will blind me again, and I shall be flattered again, just as if I had never found him out at all! (Collins 245)

In short, Count Fosco's birds are the same as those in Dickens, in Dinesen, and in Victorian paintings, though here their function is to illustrate an aspect of Fosco's villainous character. If birds represent helpless women, it follows that cats frequently carry symbolic weight as their predators, as they almost invariably do in Dickens' novels. It has been said that Dickens disliked cats. Perhaps so, perhaps not, in private life, but in his fiction they offer a convenient Victorian shorthand to signal evil characters, because, like crows and rooks, they prey upon songbirds. I do not recall any cats in Dinesen, but hawks abound. Her flying predators, however, never kill anything,14 and Dinesen uses them to symbolize free women too strong to be caged: an indication of the flexibility of even the most widespread of public symbols. Obvious as such symbols appear, the problem for twentieth century readers is to recognize them. A wide-spread range of more or less specific meanings, for example, is attached to plants and flowers. In "The Poet" Dinesen explains the madness and death of the evil Councillor's wife by remarking simply that after she caught him philandering, the Councillor wore a pansy. Dinesen may merely be recalling Ophelia's pansy for remembrance, but Victorian writers often drew upon the popular language of the flowers, as Tennyson did and, more noticeably, Thomas Hardy. One

13 14

Day."

The Woman in White, ed. Julian Symons (London: Penguin, 1974) 242. An exception is an old man who is killed in the Danish version of "The Last

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of the most striking scenes in Far from the Madding Crowd shows Captain Troy captivating Bathsheba Everdene with an exhibition of swordplay in a dell filled with ferns.15 I need not explicate the significance of the sword, but an interesting gloss is that to Victorian readers the fern represented fascination.16 Later in the narrative, when Troy's former mistress is buried, Hardy describes in detail two divergent floral arrangements upon her grave, the first made by Bathsheba and the second by Troy, the flowers chosen by each reflecting their divergent character readings of the dead woman (Hardy, Far from Chapters 45, 46). Difficult as it is to reclaim what were public symbols in the nineteenth century, I can mention a few which Dinesen shares with her Victorian predecessors and which her stories helped me to recognize. One of them is hair, which Dinesen uses as a standard symbol of sexuality in the posthumously published "The Bear and the Kiss" and in "The Immortal Story." In a 1984 article called "The Power of Women's Hair in the Victorian Imagination," Elisabeth Gitter establishes hair as a powerful Victorian sex symbol, although, clearly, it applies to men as well as to women, a point used by Stanley Renner to explicate a knotty problem in The Turn of the Screw in an 1988 article based upon nineteenth century physiognomy. Hair colour could also be significant, particularly if the colour were red, because of traditional diabolical associations. When Babette prepares her witchly feast, her assistant has red hair. So does the Scots giantess Lady Flora of "The Cardinal's Third Tale," apparently as Victorian-style shorthand to signal that like her creator, Lady Flora is a rebel and child of Lucifer. Red hair was a clear, public symbol in the nineteenth century (at least until the Pre-Raphaelites began to revise fashion). In the six or eight Dickens novels I have reread in the last few years, all the villains have red hair. The basis of its diabolical association is almost certainly medieval and probably stems from the association of red with the humour of choler, hence with devils and evil in Dickens, and in Dinesen with rebellion against the status quo. The colour red is also expressed in the choleric quality implicit in fire, the element Victorian writers use to express diabolic and destructive passion.

15 Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, ed. Ronald Blythe (London: Penguin, 1978) chapter 28. 16 Lucy Hooper, ed., "A Floral Dictionary," The Lady's Book of Flowers and Poetry (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1864) 241.

124 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY Both Dinesen and Dickens present a number of more or less mysterious fires. Oliver Twist and The Old Curiosity Shop are highly symbolic narratives resting upon the romance tradition and Carlylean injunctions. In Oliver Twist, for example, when Bill Sikes flees his pursuers after murdering Nancy, he rests in the shadow of poplar trees, traditional symbols of death.17 Subsequently, Sikes plunges into a random fire, where, like a devil in a medieval mystery play, he moves about free and unscathed.18 His death is subsequently accomplished by hanging, not the public kind, but one he has inadvertently arranged through his own contriving: Dickens' clear symbolic declaration that murderers like Sikes put a noose around their own necks. In The Old Curiosity Shop fire is especially central to the characterization of the devil figure Quilp, whose death by drowning (associated with witches and other familiars of Lucifer) is nonetheless accompanied by a raging fire. Superficially, Wilkie Collins might seem less symbolic than his friend and associate, Charles Dickens, but he too uses fire to dispatch a villain in The Woman in White. Slimy as he is, Count Fosco is appropriately assassinated, but the other one, Sir Percival Glyde, is killed off in a fire he has inadvertently started. The narrator never determines how, but initiates can easily deduce that the fire results from the fiery temper with which Sir Percival has been characterized and that it is the inevitable product of intemperance and rage. In her stories, Isak Dinesen also includes two mysterious fires, both reflecting, I think, nineteenth century practice. One occurs in "The Cardinal's First Tale" and is set by the sun through the thoughtless contrivance of a Christian priest (characterized as a toady of the egocentric Prince Pompilio). This fire burns up one child and scars another. I shall return to this fire below. Dinesen's second fire, in "The Dreamers," is presented with no explanation. Mysteriously, it breaks out in the middle of Donna Anna's show-stopping aria in Don Giovanni and succeeds in silencing the singer's voice. Since Pellegrina Leoni has until then been the darling of millions through the power of her singing, the fire symbolically destroys her identity

17

Poplars are used similarly in Tennyson's poem "Mariana" as well as in paintings like Vincent Van Gogh's "A Starry Night" and John Everett Millais' "Autumn Leaves." 18 Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, ed. Peter Fairclough (London: Penguin, 1966) chapter 48.

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as well (the subject of Dinesen's story). The question of what has destroyed Pellegrina is central to the meaning of the story. Dinesen's text offers little evidence, except the parallels between Pellegrina's fire and rape, as in the allusions to a princess raped on her way to meet her bridegroom and to the story of Philomela, the Greek maiden raped by her brother-in-law, who cuts out her tongue to prevent word of his action. Nineteenth century fictional practice, however, gives some basis for my assumption that Prince Pompilio's feminine son and Pellegrina as darling to the multitudes are both destroyed by rage, in the second case, at least, by the masculine envy and jealousy which Dinesen considered equivalent to rape in the world in which she lived. After all, in British tradition, women are cats at worst. Unlike masculine villains, their choleric humours do not make them explode into fire (if only because of their proper, womanly conditioning). The result is that (with the exception of Charlotte Bronte's Bertha Mason), Victorian writers considered uncontrolled rage as yet another masculine prerogative. A few more examples of Dinesen's use of public symbols come to mind, the butterfly, for example, symbol of the soul, associated with Rosa of "Peter and Rosa," with Fransine of "The Poet" (whose last name, incidentally, means lark), and, ominously, with Uncle Seneca, the Jack-theRipper surrogate in the story of the same name. He collects butterflies and stuffs birds, clear signals of his misogyny, in spite of his gentlemanly deportment. Dinesen also uses wealth to indicate the worth and spiritual richness of such characters as Alkmene, Lady Flora (of "The Cardinal's Third Tale"), and the fabulously rich Marcus Cocoza of "The Dreamers," who reflects the intrinsic nature Pellegrina Leoni must hide in a misogynistic world. Dinesen's use of this symbol brings to mind that of Charles Dickens in Our Mutual Friend. As a last example, Dinesen occasionally mentions the horse, a traditional symbol of sexuality. The sexual potency of the young sailor in "The Immortal Story" is signalled well before he arrives in Virginie's bedroom, when he runs from the harbour beside a carriage and keeps pace with a pair of tall horses. From our perspective, it is hard to recognize public symbols and thus to know the extent to which they are used in Victorian fiction and in Dinesen's stories. Some, like Dinesen's habitual association of the colour blue with sympathetic women characters, are fairly easy to explain because of traditional associations, here with heaven, with the Virgin Mary, and with the sea. Others, like Dickens' half dozen or more sad young men who play

126 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY the flute, are more elusive. Still others, like the mirror, are equally difficult, in this case because of meanings that shift according to context, from self-knowledge to mutual understanding, to, more emblematically, vanity or egotism. The whole area is one I think particularly crying for investigation. Certainly, given our present state of relative ignorance, the work of Dickens or of Dinesen would not stand if it rested upon our recognition of nineteenth century public symbols. Not surprisingly, public symbols are often used in conjunction with symbolic plots. It seems to me that quite a few of Dinesen's stories (like Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop) can be understood only if plot as well as individual detail is read symbolically. The most obvious example from Dinesen is "The Monkey." How can the reader accept the transformation of monkey and prioress at the climax of that story without recognizing the monkey as a traditional symbol of lust and thus realizing that it represents the sexuality of the old prioress, the part of her usually repressed under her staid habit but, like caged African elephants, now and then rampant? Thus plot action in conjunction with traditional symbol has been used to make a symbolic statement. Again, Charles Dickens presents the clearest model of Victorian use of symbolic plot and may help to clarify Dinesen's practice. Hard Times, for example, is a parable which dramatizes the clash between Jeremy Bentham's utilitarian philosophy (which Dickens presents as "Look out for number one") and the powers of the imagination, here symbolized by a horse circus. Even fairly fixed public symbols tend to shift according to context, and in Hard Times Dickens makes clear that his horse association here is with Pegasus, the winged horse of the imagination (although he may intend as well overtones of healthy sexuality, a point that would be missed by the children among his readers). The climax of Hard Times comes with a confrontation between representatives of the two ideologies: a villainous Benthamite is foiled and kept at bay by a dog and, especially, a pony trained to do circus tricks. In short, an episode which at first might appear to be only whimsical is obviously intended as the resolution of the dominant ideological conflict of the novel, when the villain is overcome by the symbolic incarnations of the opposite system. One more example may clarify what I mean by symbolic plot. The unsavoury Krook in Dickens' Bleak House is suddenly taken off by spontaneous combustion (a popular mode of dispatch in the nineteenth

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century novel).19 The contemporary critic George Henry Lewes particularly objected, although Dickens' manner of execution makes perfect symbolic sense. Krook's death is obviously symbolic, as plot actions in Dinesen's stories often are as well. Dickens has established Krook as the tangible symbol of the court of Chancery, the amorphous central villain of Bleak House. In the opening chapter, the third-person narrator has remarked of it, "[i]f all the injustice it has committed, and all the misery it has caused, could only be locked up with it, and the whole burnt away in a great funeral pyre,—why so much the better . . . " (Dickens, Bleak 5). Because Krook is the surrogate of Chancery, Dickens burns him up in a fire generated by the evil passions of his own nature. What could be more logical?20 This aspect of Victorian practice, as illustrated in Dickens, provides the basis for much of my approach to Dinesen's stories. Early in my research, I was much struck with a comment Dinesen is quoted as having made to Aage Henriksen about "The Deluge at Norderney:" "'I suppose you have understood,' she said, 'that the two figures, the Cardinal and Kasparson, are really one and the same person.'"21 Near the end of that story the churchman discards his bloody bandage and announces that he is really the rogue Kasparson, hitherto disguised as the Cardinal, whom he has murdered and replaced. Read as an example of symbolic plot on the strength of Victorian precedent and Dinesen's own statement, the story becomes a study of a personality in conflict, the officially dominant Christian half figuratively murdered by being overcome and rejected in favour of the hitherto repressed Dionysian aspect. Following the same logic, I give a similar reading to Dinesen's story, 19

In a 1977 examination Michael Harrison lists nine literary deaths by spontaneous combustion: in Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland(1198), Washington living's Knickerbocker History of New York (1809), Frederick Marryat's Joseph Faithful (1833), Honore de Balzac's Le Cousin Pons (1847), Herman Melville's Redburn (1849), Charles Dickens' Bleak House (1853), Thomas de Quincy's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (rev. ed. of 1856), Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi (1883), and Emile Zola's Le Docteur Pascal (1893). Fire from Heaven: A Study of Spontaneous Combustion in Human Beings (rev. ed. London and Sydney: Pan Books, 1977) 259. 20 At least one critic shares my symbolic reading of Krook's death. See the chapter on Bleak House in Elliott B. Gose, Jr., Imagination Indulged: The Irrational in the Nineteenth Century Novel (Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 1972) 73-97. 21 Donald Hannah, "Isak Dinesen" and Karen Blixen: The Mask and the Reality (New York: Random House, 1971) 161.

128 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY "The Cardinal's First Tale," which I see as almost totally symbolic in its action. The main subject of the story is a war of the sexes between the Prince Pompilio and his youthful bride, the Princess Benedetta. That conflict in turn is reflected in the nature of their second child, whose double heritage is expressed in his symbolic birth as twins, one of them, as I mentioned earlier, killed in a fire, which can be associated with masculine rage. The teasing question explored through the rest of the story is, which twin was killed? In other words, read in symbolic terms, which system of values will the child adopt, the masculine or the feminine? Victorian novelists usually present their symbolic plot actions in a more realistic matrix than Dinesen does. Nevertheless, they provide a helpful basis for reading her, as she does for them. The mutual use of public symbolic plots both in Dinesen and in her Victorian predecessors signals, I think, a mode of writing almost lost in our current age (although the best of modem writers still practice it in less pervasive ways). As Dinesen indicates in a statement quoted above, "Very likely it will be difficult for the younger generation to realize to what an extent we lived in a world of symbols" (MML 1). I want to emphasize that such a habit of thought extends far beyond the two narrow areas which I have chosen to explicate my point. It pervades every aspect of Dinesen's work, as well as that of the great Victorians. Dinesen's heavily symbolic descriptions, for example, also show a close relation to Victorian practice. Some time ago I was pleased to hear Gurli Woods explicate the significance of a number of apparently casual geographical details from the introduction to "Babette's Feast," all, as she illustrated, weighted with symbolic meaning.22 Time after time the apparently casual references in Dinesen's stories flash out as charged with underlying implications, as in "A Country Tale," which begins by describing a young nobleman's illicit relationship with the woman he walks with, his neighbour's wife. Here is Dinesen's description of the woodland path they follow: "The path wound in and out, up and down, the forest slopes. It swerved toward the fence, as if it meant to unite the wood world with the open country, then shrank back again as if in fear of giving away a secret" (CT 192). Clearly, the path symbolizes their clandestine relationship, the woods its secrecy, and the open country public recognition of their adultery.

22 The paper presented by Gurli Woods, in March 1989, for the Canadian Institute for Nordic Studies, at the University of Alberta, was titled "Babette and Other Women in the Works of Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen."

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Such an example is habitual practice in Dinesen. Again, it reflects the habit of thought enjoined by Thomas Carlyle and practised by Victorian writers, even those who appear most ostensibly realistic. Thomas Hardy is not the best of examples, as heavily symbolic as readers sense him to be, but he can illustrate the pervasiveness of the mode I am discussing. I have long been convinced that his ability to hypnotize his readers (no matter how outrageous his plots) stems from his heavily symbolic content, especially from his use of public symbols, like the luxuriant hair cut from the head of the subsequently celibate Marty South in The Woodlanders, or the strawberries forced upon a reluctant Tess Durbeyfield by her seducer, Alec.23 A better example of how widespread was the Carlylean habit of symbolic thought, however, is George Eliot, a writer classed as realistic, although her books, too, are charged with symbolic resonance (one reason the attacks on Dickens' case of spontaneous combustion by George Henry Lewes, her mentor and common-law husband, seem odd). Nevertheless, George Eliot's novels resonate with symbolic techniques. Her first novel, Adam Bede, is built upon biblical typology, with a title character who at first embodies the Old Adam, in his Old Testament insistence upon justice. The plot shows his ultimate acceptance of the New Testament's injunction to mercy. Thus, the plot is structured upon a typological conception of the Adam of the Old Testament as prefiguration of the Second Adam, the merciful Christ of the New. As Brian Swann indicated in a series of articles in the 1970s, even George Eliot's ostensibly realistic Middlemarch is heavily charged with symbolic content. In one of his articles, Swann says, "While denying the transcendentalism implicit and explicit in Carlyle, [George Eliot] would yet have agreed with him that 'all visible things are emblems' and that 'matter

23

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, ed. Scott Elledge (New York: Norton, 1965) chapter 5. Herbert L. Sussman notes "The offering of berries" as "a traditional emblem of sexual temptation" and cites Millais' painting "The Woodman's Daughter" and Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" as illustrations in Fact into Figure: Typology in Carlyle, Ruskin, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1979) 105. As an art student, Dinesen had access to such symbols through pictorial as well as literary examples.

130 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY exists only spiritually.'"24 In presenting his claims, Swann also says of her, "In the wealth of gestures, even the smallest act becomes symbolic in its context, and summarizes the whole thrust of a character or situation at that particular time" (Swann 299). I have chosen George Eliot as an example because, of all Victorian writers, she would seem least likely to share technique with Isak Dinesen and to be steeped in a symbolic habit of mind. Still, if even George Eliot's works are pervaded with symbolic techniques, who can say how endemic the habit of symbolic thought was to readers and writers of our lost and blotted century, in which, late though she was, I place Isak Dinesen? The question remains, however, of why, out of all nineteenth century tradition, Isak Dinesen chose the most extreme and cryptic form of the symbolic styles available to her. Part of the reason may be her allegiance to E.T.A. Hoffmann. The more likely explanation of Dinesen's practice, I think, stems from her position as an isolated woman in a world dominated by masculine values, a world in which she was strong enough to voice her resentment but not to proclaim it openly. Hoffmann, Carlyle, Dickens pointed the way towards disguise, a stylistic mask that could be used to hide the real purport of Dinesen's tales, which, more often than not, proclaim the value of women. I speculate, of course. Still, given the current feminist interest in decoding a separate female language, I certainly propose Isak Dinesen as a candidate for study in the context of nineteenth century literary practice.

24

"Middlemarch: Realism and Symbolic Form," English Literary History vol. 39 (1972): 299.

Interpretive Strategies from Rhetoric to Deconstruction

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Dinesen Versus Postmodernism: The Criticism of Modernity and the Problem of Non-simultaneousness in Relation to Isak Dinesen's Works Morten Kyndrup Aarhus University The very notion of a genuine postmodernist view of the world would certainly be a contradictio in adjecto. In this paper I shall discuss the criticism of Modernity and the problem of non-simultaneousness in relation to Dinesen's work, and this discussion will in turn be seen in relation to the ideas of postmodernism as a certain state of sign production and reception on the borderlines, i.e., behind and consequently inside of what we call Modernity. As a start, I shall provide a rough outline of the kind of framework in which we talk about postmodernism. Secondly, I shall try to show and discuss the problems raised through a close reading of one particular story by Dinesen, "The Deluge at Norderney," which happens to be the opening story of Seven Gothic Tales. If such a thing as a condition postmoderne exists, this must imply decisive changes in the fundamental framing of meaning, i.e., changes not only at the level of signs like any other shift in mode or style expresses itself, but also changes in the very codes, the basic ones, that generate meaning in the play between signs and their virtual referents. I want to stress the fact that at this level, it is not decisive whether you speak precisely to a Lyotard, to a Baudrillard, or even to a Fredric Jameson. What is decisive is whether you see the change in the meaning-generating codes as something relating to a macro-structure called Modernity or not. The above theorists and many others have argued that this is so. However, if there is a change of that kind, and if, consequently, this involves a change in the framing of meaning, then such a condition postmoderne necessarily creates two types of changes. One type is the change at the sign level, directly resulting from the altered framings. The other one is the "optical" change which arises when already existing signs are being framed by a different code. In art, the first type of change, at the level of sign, is demonstrated directly as different products. In literature, there is a remarkable shift away from the hermetic piece of art in Modernism, a piece of art which in its

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134 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY emphatic exposition of the absence of sense and the constitutional impossibility of the subject-object relation must turn away from its own audience, must become inconceivable, strange, weird, tied up in the search for "me erhorte Klange," as Adorao1 expresses it. Against this, postmodernist art seems to re-invest in the narrative, and in its relationship to its audience. The status of art can no longer be taken for granted, and art is no longer automatically considered as holding a privileged cognitive position: like everything else it has to keep its position through its effects, and this new "non-obviousness" provides it with new challenges and new modes of existence. In the production and the reception of literature, it leads to a rejection of the so-called "depth"-model, as Fredric Jameson2 points out, a rejection of the idea of any literary expression always standing for something else. In Roman Jakobson's terms one can talk about a shift in attention from an axis between the referential and emotive strata of the expressions to the metalingual and the conative ones (as the investment in the poetic level could be called constant, even though it seems to serve different purposes). In narrative literary fiction we also see that the dimension of enunciation is stressed more than is the dimension of discourse, that the socalled vertical dimensions of the works, the "content of the form," as Hayden White expresses it, are stressed. We see this from Calvino to Kundera, from Paul Auster to Botho Strauss. In order to discuss the second type of change, I shall assume that a great change is taking place in the framings or codes according to which we understand the signs, and which in turn are an inseparable part of their meaning. It is then obvious that the same signs, which according to an earlier framing had one meaning, will now, in principle, produce another meaning. Umberto Eco3 says ironically about this phenomenon that soon everything will have become postmodern, including Homer. This

1 Philosophic der neuen Musik, 1948 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975). See discussion on his notion of perpetual innovation as an indispensable property of genuine art. 2 Jameson's "depth"-model is explained in "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review 146 (1984). A whole volume of discussions of Jameson's works has been published recently in Postmodernism: Jameson: critique, ed. Douglas Kellner (Washington: Maisonneuve, 1989). 3 Postscript to The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, 1984). See also Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984) for a general discussion.

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phenomenon is the thematic point in his latest novel, llpendolo di Foucault. This novel deals not only with the question of the way in which isotopes holding a power of explanation, going historically backwards, without any problems, can be established optionally in accordance with the framings in force at the tune in question, but also with the point that if these isotopes have once been brought into the world, they necessarily become carriers of consequence. They do so in a field where their potential "truth" is of the very least importance. A thorough and irreversible shift of the framing also causes a change of the meaning of signs and phenomena, which were originally established under other conditions. This is a general problem with regard to any kind of historical research, and it is also a common hermeneutic problem. According to the theories of postmodernism, however, we are not dealing with a steady, gradual slide of the framing taking place all the time. Instead, we can observe a supreme change of code, also as regards our whole notion of "literature"—a code which has been quite stable since mid-eighteenth century. This implies the possibility of a kind of "optic postmodernism,"4 in the perception of earlier phenomena. Of course, in its more primitive versions, this phenomenon can easily be rejected as a kind of theoretic self-abuse (as it has happened in parts of deconstructionist criticism). Yet this point of view has very interesting implications, indeed. One could imagine works that are nonsimultaneous, or incongruent with their own framings. In such a case, a renewed reading of these works would give them an extremely different meaning, although not necessarily a "true" meaning because literature, like any other allographic piece of art (Nelson Goodman's expression),5 is thrown upon the codes of the meaning of syntax, given by the respective framings. However, it would be another meaning, with other properties. Perhaps it would clear up earlier readings through its very difference. Or maybe, in its own way, it would enable us to make new readings possible. In terms of Dinesen's work, we do not need thorough analyses to find an amazing similarity between her tales and the properties one finds today in the literature called postmodern. Of course Dinesen's tales are amazing, first of all compared to their contemporary works: they were written at the same time as the doctrine of socialist realism was being developed in one

4

The problem of "developed" versus "optical" postmodernism is discussed in detail in my work Framing and Fiction: Studies in the Rhetoric of Novel, Interpretation, and History: A Composition (Denmark: Aarhus UP, 1992). 5 Problems and Projects, (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972) 95 ff.

136 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY part of the world; and in another part of the world Modernism flourished, partly with the unlimited honesty of a Joyce, a Woolf or a Musil, partly with the more or less rabid ideas of the historical avantgarde. Considering all this, Dinesen almost seems to be entartet, or at least radically different. Her tales are immediately different at any accessible level: form, taste, genre, content, range, air, etc., but most fundamentally in relation to Modernity. The two simultaneous movements mentioned above were both integral parts of Modernity, the one manifesting itself as a fulfilling of the project of the Enlightenment through literature, the other an outcry against the tragic impossibility of the desire for substance in Modernity. Unlike this, Dinesen's work is, at all levels, characterized by a radical criticism of Modernity. Her criticism towards the norms and movements of her tune did not, of course, escape the attention of her contemporaries. First of all, however, the criticism was seen as conservative or simply outdated. This notion is supported by Dinesen's preference for placing her fiction in the first half of the 19th century. Consequently, her criticism was read "backwards," was understood as a wish for reestablishing historic conditions which had already passed away. It would be absurd to try to ascribe prophetic or clairvoyant abilities to Dinesen. On the other hand, the change of framing which has taken place seems to have rendered visible some relations and intentions in Dinesen's works, which could hardly have been seen by her contemporaries. It seems evident that the "criticism of time," which is manifest and dominant in her tales, was never supposed to be a narrow comment on manifestations of the spirit of the time. It also seems evident that this criticism has not been limited to a pre-Modera regressive rejection of implications of a new age. On the contrary, Dinesen's criticism of Modernity seems to be characterized by a comprehensive view and an understanding of Modernity precisely as a construct. This understanding is absent in most of her contemporaries, even in their revolt against this construct. This criticism of Modernity should be reasonably evident at the thematic level, at the level of "statements," of content. However, what one often misses is the fact that it is equally dominant in the narrative construction of her tales, in their (enunciated) enunciation, enonciation, at their vertical level, and, consequently, in their operating as literature, as speech acts. Therefore, the tales as a whole also become critical comments on the routine reduction of literature to its referential stratum, a reduction which characterizes the whole idea of literature in Modernity. Consequently, Dinesen's tales can be seen as a criticism of the entire notion of literature as

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well. I shall attempt to illustrate some of these above observations by discussing one of Dinesen's stories: "The Deluge at Norderaey". Seven Gothic Tales was first published in English in 1934, and a Danish version Syv fantastiske fortcellinger appeared in 1935. Here we find "The Deluge at Norderaey". As a literary construction, it appears as an ingenious and complicated system of narrative levels. It is a framed story, told by an apparently traditional Dinesen-narrator: omniscient vision-par-derriere in a rather Olympic position. The external sequence of events begins in 1835, when the west coast of Holstein is hit by a flood. It happens at Norderaey, a fashionable seaside resort, where, apart from the simple population of fishermen and marsh farmers, there are also representatives of the rich upper class. The flood claims many victims. During the rescue work, which mostly consists of saving farmers and visitors from roofs and lofts, an almost sacred hero appears: Hamilcar von Sehested, a cardinal of noble birth. He has been sailing along with the rescuers all day, inspiring the tired men, giving them new courage. Finally, before night breaks through, the rescuers fetch some remaining guests from Nordemey, but on their way home they find out that they have missed a farmer's family. Now the fashionable people, headed by the cardinal, sacrifice themselves for the farmers by giving them their seats in the boat, thereby having to spend the night in the hayloft themselves, and face the risk that very likely the roof will not be able to stand up to the water. In other words, they must die. The story takes place in the hayloft during that night. Aside from the cardinal (and a dog) the persons present are Miss Malin Nat-og-Dag ("Nightand-Day"), an old lady belonging to the high nobility; Calypso, a young lady who also belongs to the nobility; and Jonathan Maersk, the young son of a commoner. Interrupted by the Olympic narrator's reflections (on the antecedents and on a series of principal discussions about truth and equality between the two older persons), we are eventually told the story of each of the four persons. Jonathan Maersk tells his own story, about how, by being made a figure a la mode against his will, he has lost any sense of authenticity, of Wesen. Malin Nat-og-Dag tells the story about Calypso, her relative, which is in some sense complementary to Jonathan's story. Because Calypso is the only (and unwanted) woman in a specifically male universe, she has been ignored, and therefore she is not able to sense her own appearance, her Schein. In the frame story, the two separate stories conclude in the cardinal's marrying of the two young people at Malin's suggestion. Finally the cardinal tells a story from the time of Jesus, called "The Wine of the 'Tetrarch,'" about a meeting between St. Peter and

138 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY Barrabas (the robber, whom the people of Jerusalem demanded should be given freedom rather than Jesus, when Pontius Pilate gave them the choice). The cardinal, who has been wearing bandages around his head all day, apparently as a consequence of some falling rafters, at last reveals that he is actually Kasparson, the cardinal's valet, a bastard, the illegitimate son of the Duke of Orl6ans, and thus the brother of Louis Philippe. Kasparson has killed the wounded cardinal in order to play the part of the cardinal, a part in which he has succeeded superbly all day. Dawn is breaking, the water is rising. Malin Nat-og-Dag, never kissed, but consciously playing the part of the great courtesan of her time, demands and gets a kiss from Kasparson. The young people have fallen asleep. The story concludes with Malin's lines from 1001 Nights: "'A ce moment de sa narration,' she said, 'Scheherazade vit paraitre le matin, et, discrete, se tut.'"6 Indirectly, however, the narrative informs us that they actually all drown. The narrator's mention of the cardinal's reputation after the flood reveals that knowledge of Kasparson's "deceit" never went beyond the company in the hayloft. All statements at any level of narration are being problematized to the reader; they modify, and even contradict each other, not only vertically through the three personal narrators, from the "mad" Malin, and the inexperienced, and somewhat unintelligent, Jonathan (who becomes "wiser"), to the clearly allegorical—and, as we know, false—cardinal, but also through the final horizontal break in the shape of the cardinal's unmasking. This break sends an immense shock wave backwards through the text, partly by revealing the cardinal's part as being just a role, partly by revealing the "authorial" narrator's apparently Olympic reliability as acunning manipulator of the reader. Exactly how cunning this narrator is will be discussed below. It seems clear that this multiple move in the enunciation (&nonciatiori) should obstruct any insistence on the level of the enunciated (enonce), on what is said, what is thematized, what is meant, behind this structure of enunciation, or beneath the narration of the narrative. It is obvious that "The Deluge at Norderney" first of all tells us something about truth—objective truth versus subjective truth. Furthermore, it tells us something about the subject's relationship to his/her surroundings, to the objects (of value) in general, including the special part of the

6

Seven Gothic Tales (New York: Vintage, 1972) 79. "The Deluge at Norderney" included in this volume will be referred to hereafter as DN.

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surroundings consisting of other subjects. And in connection with exactly this intersubjective, symbolic exchange, the question arises with respect to the forming of values, which also means the forming of meaning: is there a "substance" to meaning? Does this substance produce the expressions? Or vice versa? As can be seen, the problem of "truth" keeps reoccurring. In terms of those referred to above, the thematics might seem very general. However, they actually are that general (or fundamental) also in terms of the story itself. The item of truth is being directly stressed and with so much redundance that it cannot be missed or decomposed into "smaller" problems. For instance, in one of the discussions related to religion (DN 22-27) between the cardinal and Miss Malin, the cardinal's points of view about the true (that is, unpainted) faces are being parried very strongly by the old noble lady: "Where in all the world did you get the idea that the Lord wants the truth from us?" (DN24) she says, and (eventually with the cardinal's consent) she reaches the conclusion that it is the poem, the mask, which keeps everything going. The truth is "the end of the game," as it were. As to the cardinal's point of view and as to his movements, it is noteworthy that he is actually himself playing a part. So it turns out, anyway. Later on, in a metaphorical discussion about some sort of revolution in Heaven, it is also the cardinal who says: . . . to my mind there never was a great artist who was not a bit of a charlatan; nor a great king, nor a god. The quality of charlatanry is indispensable in a court, or a theatre, or in Paradise. (DN 58-59)

This point of view is of course further stressed by Kasparson's interpretation of his own project after the unmasking. He confesses to being "pleased" and "proud" to have "made this night here," and to "having made you" (i.e. Miss Malin) (DN 68). The point is that this is neither meant nor taken as an insult during the conversation. In the derived themes mentioned above, the philosophical problem of truth is also expressed more indirectly. It is stressed how Miss Malin chooses to be "mad," i.e., she herself establishes and inserts her own subjective truth; in other words, she rewrites the past, thus making this rewriting her reality: even though, in fact, she was once the quintessence of ultra-incarnated "virtue," she now retrospectively makes herself the most debauched person of her time. She is quite unconcerned about realities. This is her desire, just as she wants this, her first and only, kiss, from Kasparson. This last fact is, however, clearly inconsistent with her own views on the purity of noble blood, and in the story she is clearly a positively valorized person.

140 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY At various levels, the single stories of the tale discuss the same set of problems. First of all, the fact is stressed that the object or the phenomenon never carries its own value in itself. Value is always settled by the context, the coherence, the concrete situation of exchange. The Prince Ernest Theodore of Anhalt, the idol of his time, who finally falls in love with the aging, ugly and poor Miss Malin, only does so because of her price, which is said to be the only "striking" thing about her. This price has been fixed by herself. The prince's problem is the fact that he has always been able to obtain things too easily. Therefore their value is diminished. That the concrete function is decisive in the context, not the phenomenon itself, is being stressed in other levels or stories as well. For instance, in an anecdote about the blindfolded tightrope walker who turns out to be a swindler because he was born blind (DN 61), or in the cardinal's words: ". . .no one of the notes is sacred in itself. . . . It is the music, which can be made out of them, which is alone divine" (DN 14). In relation to the formation of meaning itself, the problem manifests itself most clearly in the two stories about "Timon from Assens" (Jonathan) and Calypso. The stories act, so to speak, as inversions of each other. The Timon story makes ironic remarks about the fashion-baron's desire for substance through the description of his very peculiar argumentation on his fascination with Jonathan, the illegitimate son; as he himself has never been able to do anything "real," because he has always been conscious (that is, purposively rational) in all his actions, Jonathan must be able to show him " . . . what a Joachim Gersdorff is in reality" because his actions were "made without thinking of it" (DN 33). Jonathan's problem is, then, that his surroundings make any one of his own utterances a part of Gersdorff. They are turned into "fashion," and thus they lose their authenticity and their value to himself. Jonathan cannot be himself, because everybody else wants to be like him without having his (assumingly) genuine reasons for being so. He is not even allowed to kill himself without being imitated. To Jonathan, the expression (the sign) loses its meaning by his imitators' using it; it is separated from its, i.e. his, content. As mentioned above, Calypso's story, to a certain extent, represents an inversion of Jonathan's story. It is told by Miss Malin as a lesson to Jonathan. Calypso's problem is that her whole life as a woman (in a sarcastically described ultra-German circle of male glorification) has been ignored. By not being allowed to exist as expression she is on the point of losing her existence as content', i.e. she is on the point of ceasing to exist. Only an accidental confrontation with some pictures, at the last moment,

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makes her realize the situation of her own expression and her own raison d'etre. And through her expression she is now gaining meaning (content). Jonathan realizes that he has met his match, and that his own problem of not being able to have his own expression to himself is a pseudo-problem or, at any rate, a problem of luxury in relation to the problem of not being able to express oneself at all. Only the surroundings, the context, the concrete exchange is able to make expression possible. Thus, authentic meaning is not derived from and is not an expression of being-in-itself: only by virtue of expressions, of the exchange of signs, is being created. Characteristically, the cardinal here makes the performative speech act "Then that is all" (DW 54) because the two young people solemnly declare that they "expect and hold" (DN 54) the cardinal's authority divine. Correspondingly, this "being" can lose its substantiality, if its function as part of a concrete (symbolic) exchange is blocked. This is apparent in the Barrabas story, which is told "metaphorically" by the cardinal (i.e., by Kasparson). Barrabas' problem is that all of a sudden his life has lost all its body and quality because it has been given to him as part of an exchange which had nothing to do with himself. As he cannot give anything in return, he can do nothing. He neither enjoys the wine nor the virgins any more; the purpose of his seeking out (St.) Peter is that the latter could give him some extraordinarily good wine (i.e., the Sacrament). The description of their conversation, especially of Peter's complete misunderstanding of Barrabas' account, is diabolically precise. Peter's heart melts, he blushes "like a young bride" (DN 68), and for the first time he feels a "real interest in his companion" (DN 68) because Barrabas interprets the crucifixion as the probable ending of Peter's life. This is, of course, meant contemptuously, but Peter understands it as the highest possible honour. Thus Peter is being shown almost as a blithering idiot, and this without any further comments. The point of the story is Barrabas' loss of meaning, of content. It is possible to outline, with some reservations, the universe of values of the story according to a positive-negative logic as follows:7

7 The sign-referent-code model of preliminary investigation on communication is above all indebted to Jean-Francois Lyotard, Le Differend (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1983) with inspiration from different theoreticians of language from Buhler to Roman Jakobson (whose general stratum model is involved here as well), including, at another level, Wittgenstein. See also more concrete considerations in Jonathan Culler, Framing the Sign: Criticism and its Institutions (Oxford: Oxfordshire, Blackwell, 1988).

142 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY

Fig. 1

According to this axiology, Kasparson's exit almost seems to be the moral of the story: "And what now if this—to grin back when the devil grins at you—be in reality the highest, the only true fun in all the world?" (DN1178). This sentence stresses at one and the same time the exchange ("grin back"), the concrete textuality ("when"), and the hedonistic, or subjective, non-universal character of meaning itself ("fun").

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The above outline of the axiology in the story, in terms of thematics and attitude, seems to be just barely adequate. The reason is that we face a paradox, a classical contradictio in adjecto: Kasparson's statement forms exactly such a general and "objective" level, the possibility of which the same statement claims to reject. The implicit narrator behind the ingenious narrative system, this "objective" level, manipulates even the apparently reliable, explicit narrator in order to first and foremost hide from the reader the double deceit. This is all done to prepare the reader for an ingeniously conceived effect. Does not this "objective" level represent exactly such an "initial director" in the name of a superior truth? Does it not express a ratio of precisely the kind which it wants to oppose? The change of attitude does not change the status of the attitude. Then, should not the contradiction of this statement be the unavoidable consequence of the mere existence of an "objective" level like this? It should be, and yet it is not. Had the text been a piece of philosophy, this problem of "revocation"—present in almost all philosophical thinking of this century—would have been undeniable. We are, however, dealing with literature, and therefore with a literary construct, a narration. Consequently, we find that which one thinks is evident from the story, is actually linked to the question of the way in which the story does what it is doing. In other words, what is said is included in what the story does, i.e., it is included in its narrative pragmatics in a way which makes this "statement" different from a standard meta-instance of a given expression. The story is building up its own structure of narration in a way that redoubles what is said. It meta-thematises itself by and through its enunciation, in its concrete construction of its relation with the reader. Thus one might say that the story constitutes its own thematic realization. This alters its status, among other things in relation to the above philosophical problem of the paradox. By displaying itself pragmatically, the story makes this problem distinct. These above assertions may be illustrated through a simplifying model of the complicated narrative structure:

144 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY

Fig. 2

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The distance between the narrative levels makes their respective "statements" relative. Obviously this applies to the single narrators, whose status as first-person-narrators questions—openly, not rhetorically—their own "reliability" in the axiological universe of the story. However, more surprisingly and subtly, it also applies to the Olympic, apparently reliable and omniscient narrator of the frame story itself. This cannot be called "unreliability" in a traditional point-of-view sense of the word. A close reading shows that the Olympic narrator in the key passages about the cardinal's possible death remains "innocent" in so far as nothing is said which might later on turn out to be untrue. Indeed, in a passage like the following one, the words have been weighed on gold scales: He may have felt handicapped in this feat, for he was nearly killed at the very start of events. When the fishermen from the hamlet, as the flood came on, ran to his assistance, they found his cottage already half a ruin. In the fall of it the man Kasparson had been killed. The Cardinal himself was badly wounded, and wore, all during his rescue work, a long, bloodstained bandage wound about his head. (DN 7)

Strictly speaking, the narrator does not say that it actually was the cardinal who survived. By shifting the point of view to the fishermen, thus letting them "find" the man, the narrator more or less keeps to the straight and narrow path. This formal change of point of view is even clearer in the Danish edition.8 By making the cardinal's surroundings the carriers of the points of view, wherever he is mentioned (by calling him "the cardinal," "the old man," etc.) a consequent (but to the reader, invisible) difference in level is being established within the narrator's telling of the individual persons/events. The purpose is clear: the deceit should not only pertain to the cardinal's surroundings, as is actually the fact at the told level of the fiction, but to the reader as well. This has two decisive effects. The first one is that in the actual development of the story, the deceit/the masquerade perpetrated on the reader becomes threefold. As the cardinal unmasks himself, the reader also sees a reversing of the problematization of the reliability of any story involving the cardinal up till then, notably all the philosophical estimations and discussions in the frame story. And as the reader has already once had to make a decision about these, the enforced revision also necessarily involves a self-objectification, a revised perception

8

Karen Blixen, Syv fantastiske fortcellinger (1935; Copenhagen: Gyldendals, 1985) 180.

146 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY of the attitudes which have been produced on "false" premises. Thus, the substance, in terms of content and attitude in the discussions and in the scene as a whole, collapses, and the problem actually remains indeterminable. What is what in a discussion of "true" and "false" between an elderly lady, who consciously chooses to be mad, but who is not, and a "cardinal" whose part is played by a valet, himself a bastard, who is unsure of what to give to the part (he explicitly regrets some of his expressions after the unmasking) and what to give to the one who is playing it. To top it all off, everything is told by a narrator who freely alters the levels and the points of view for manipulating purposes. The other effect consists in the reader being conscious of these manipulators, a situation for which the story has not at all set the scene, with regard to style and so on. Thanks to the enforced retrospective reflection, and perhaps to a renewed reading by a reader who is now conscious of the "true" facts of the case, the narrator's efforts become evident; they are almost pure teasing, not only in the above quotation, but in several other passages. A prize example is the cardinal's comments, as Miss Malm remarks in passing that the young gentlemen of our time wear tight trousers which oblige them to keep two valets for drawing them on, one for each leg: '"And a difficult job even at that,' said the Cardinal thoughtfully" (ZW25). This obviously refers to the cardinal's experience as a valet. But the reader does not know this until later, and the remark has no other meaning in the context discussing "truth." Thus, the story is simultaneously taking the reader by the hand (by taking the reader in), and by this surprising pull in the pragmatic development of the story, making the substance of the statements indeterminable. The result is a certain airiness which, paradoxically, makes the story both an expression of the above paradox (what can be said from where) and an incarnation (Gestaltung) of this paradox. The figure below (Fig. 3) outlines the complex system of mutual and self-denying, correcting, and commenting subject-object relations in the narrative. What is decisive here is that the levels do not only relate to each other as chains, i.e., hierarchically. Mutually, the relations also act directly. Thus they are made into fragments; they are made relative, or are actually perforated, as when the Ss level suddenly turns out not to exist as pretended.

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Fig. 3 At the fictional level of the narrative, Kasparson stages himself as a cardinal, and as a cardinal he stages the narrative cyclus and the events of the night. What happens is "a lie," so to speak. But the staging is successful, it is good. The reader is a witness to this successful staging, because the narrator stages Kasparson's staging in a way which does not allow the reader to take part in the scene until it reaches a level which, according to insight, apparently corresponds with the fictional level of the characters. However, this is only pretence since the reader is afterwards

148 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY being pulled through the unmasking of the nature of play in the story. We are dealing with lies, but well-turned and reliable lies. The cardinal turns out to be a valet, but still a bastard. Thus, the opposition of the meaning of "illegitimate-legitimate" (Fig. 1) rises from the paper. The bastard, of all people, is able to stage a play which cannot be accepted as genuine. And the "truths," both on the positive and on the negative side, remain "genuine," thereby together constituting one, joint, negative pole:

Fig. 4

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The statement of the story, its antagonism itself, consequently becomes a lie, as every truth has to become a lie. However, this lie is being played and staged. It is carried out, thereby establishing itself as a reality, as pragmatics, in the same way as, and as far as, the story is a reality. It deconstructs its level of statement through its construction of what could be called a self-deconstructing complex of form, of enunciation, which, after all, gives reality to the statement, and makes it create its own self-constituted provisional truth within, conscious of, and by virtue of the frames which it itself is mounting. It seems obvious that whatever Dinesen's criticism of Modernity is, it is certainly not an expression of fear of a historically regressive outlook, fear of things as they are or will be. In full orchestra, her narrative accomplishes a supreme playing through of Modernity, of its meaning and of its psychology. She has a sense not only of its absolute inevitability, but also of its brutality, itspitifulness, and its blindness, especially itstachesaveugles towards its own inner contradictions. Dinesen's stories are not an emphatic rebellion against the conditions of Modernity, as a great part of her contemporary Modernism might be said to be. On the contrary, in Dinesen we see a staging of the problem, a kind of working it through in correlation with the conditions to which it is itself subjected. Being neither clairvoyant nor prophetic, Dinesen, strictly speaking, is not a "postmodernist." However, postmodernism is part and parcel of the whole development of Modernity. In one sense, it will hardly be possible to decide whether, on the one hand, this new framing realizes an inherent, overlooked, or hidden meaning in Dinesen; or whether, on the other hand, this new framing projects its own position onto Dinesen. In any case, there seems to be a non-accidental coincidence, the effect of which in every possible way seems to correspond to the author's taste. Still, and perhaps more than ever on the threshold to the 90s, the prevailing attitude is Dinesen's "grinning back at the Devil."

Methods of Narratology and Rhetoric for Analyzing Isak Dinesen's "The Blank Page" A. W. Halsall Carleton University

The principal problem posed by Dinesen's story, "The Blank Page" is one of ethos. Put very simply, and as Dinesen quite accurately foresaw, in my view, the story's credibility or plausibility is the problem most likely to trouble readers whose ideological presuppositions do not commit them to reading it as a tract, feminist or otherwise. To prove my thesis, I will have recourse to two critical methods which should, I hope, function as symbiotic agents of analysis. Formal narratology, of the sort developed by French Structuralists like Barthes, Genette and the Ecole de Paris, enables one to describe the text's narrative phenomena, plot logic, actantial functions and so on, but is unable to account for the discursive devices occurring at what is called metaphorically the "surface" of the text. My second method, rhetoric, old and new, offers a pragmatic theory of discourse, one of whose forms is narrative. Rhetoric allows one to examine the functioning of the narrative arguments (syllogisms, enthymemes, sorites, etc.) which, in combination with plot-logic and enunciation techniques attempt to make a work persuasive. I will begin by applying the formal narratological method to "The Blank Page."

NARRATOLOGY As a student of narrative, what struck me immediately when I first read the story was its lack of formal or persuasive symmetry.1 After reading "The Blank Page," I looked for some explanation of the considerable disproportion between the complicated nature of the story's enunciation or narration, as compared to what appears to me to be the relative simplicity of

1

This is not a negative value judgement, since I do not accept that symmetry is necessarily a plus-value, in narrative or elsewhere; Lisbon's Alfama district seems to me at least as architecturally interesting as the court-yard at Versailles, or the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, for instance.

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its semantic content. The story, as presented in Dinesen's Last Tales, covers not quite six pages. And yet the process by which we, as existential readers, gain access to it passes through five (not quite) clear stages. Now although this is no record, chinese-box stories of similar or even greater complexity go back to the Arabian Nights after all, as Dinesen reminds us allusively in "The Blank Page" itself, and Pre"vest's Manon Lescaut has an even longer succession of separate narrators and narratees, all of whom either tell or listen to stories intra-, extra-, homo-, orhetero-diegetically, to borrow Genette's terminology for a moment.2 But such texts fill hundreds of pages. Dinesen's six pages foreground the following pragmatic contexts or narrative situations. I. The Existential Context: The Historical Author, Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen, published in 1957 Last Tales in which we, as Historical Readers, may have read the story entitled "The Blank Page." Now, as biological entities, neither Dinesen nor we ourselves owe our existence totally to a teller of tales, and yet this apparently unproblematic ontological relationship remains bedeviled by the onomastic sex-change she achieved and by the resultant violence which such an impersonation imposed on the expectations and ideological presuppositions entertained by her readers. I suspect that a reader who had first read the story attributing it to a male Historical Author would not read it a second tune in exactly the same way, once (s)he had discovered that the name on the cover was the nom de plume of a female author. II. First Intra-diegetic Situation: The Implied Author tells the story of "an old coffee-brown, black-veiled woman who made her living by telling stories. "3 The Implied Author then immediately withdraws, reporting numerically, i.e., word-for-word, in the rhetorical meaning of the term as the reproduction of direct discourse, the

2

"Discours du recit," Figures III (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972) Last Tales (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986) 99. "The Blank Page" included in this collection will hereafter be referred to as BP. 3

152 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY "coffee-brown, black-veiled" narrator's exact words.4 The Implied Author addresses herself to us who, as Existential or Historical readers, must work to achieve the status of Implied readers, those, that is, who are in sympathy with the work's implied norms, as Wayne Booth pointed out in his 1988 book, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction.5 III. Second Intra-diegetic Context: The old narrator then recounts, in the role of intra-diegetic narrator, to a couple of thematized and schematized narratees, whom she addresses as "sweet lady and gentleman," an allegorical story about herself being told stories by "young men" who regaled her, for their own, undetailed purposes, with "tales of a red rose, two smooth lily buds, and four silky, supple, deadly entwining snakes" (BP 99).6 IV. Third Intra-intra-diegetic Context:7 The old story-teller tells of her mother's mother who "took it upon herself to teach [her] the art of story-telling" (BP 99). But she adds that her own "mother's mother had taught [the said art] to her" adding that both were better story-tellers than she herself, a matter of no consequence, since "to the people they and I have become one, and I am most highly honoured because I have told stories for two hundred years" (BP 99-100). So, by means of this narratological chain, she has been able, like Scheherazade, to tell tales, "one more than a thousand" (BP 99) in all. The implied readers of her stories, whom she designates by the generalized expression of vaguely populist origin, namely, "the people," seem by her account to ignore mere temporal parameters, being quite willing to believe that she has achieved, if not immortality, then at least longevity on a biblical scale.

4

This is the Platonic meaning of the term "mimetic," which I am not using here in the Auerbachian sense of "imitation" of "reality." Plato, The Republic, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968) III, vi, 393 b-c. 5 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988) 420. 6 I am leaving to specialists in Dinesen's work, who are better qualified than I, the task of interpreting this allegory. 7 I am here concatenating two narratological situations which those using a linguistically-derived system of notation may prefer to indicate as 4.1 and 4.2.

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V. Fourth Intra-, intra-, intra-diegetic Context: By personifying the trope which the ancient rhetoricians called aposiopesis or reticentia? the old teller of tales then posits a fifth, paradoxical narrator: "Silence." The personification occurs in a long, threeparagraph disquisition upon the subject of this paper, namely the problem of ethos already referred to and to which I shall return in its second half. The narrator then tells the story of the convent in terms which preclude any possibility of a non-naive reader's establishing the relevant deictics or chronotopical co-ordinates of the action. Spatially, she sets the tale in the "blue mountains of Portugal" (BP 100). One will find no such range recorded on a map. The same is true of the Carmelite convent itself, with the bizarre name of the "Convento Velho." Convents in the real world tend to be named after saints, the Virgin or other metaphysical phenomena; their onomastics are, so to speak, motivated. One can only conclude in this instance that the appellation serves as a cognomen. As to the dating of the events recounted in this fifth-level story, that too is obscured by the narrator's sprinkling of her account with deictic ^qualifiers of the sort: "in ancient times" (BP 100), "during the centuries," "once, long, long ago" (BP 101), "for many hundreds of years," and even "in days of old" (BP 103).9 It is also true that the old narrator does claim in her story to rejoin her own historic present time, as in the already quoted expression, "by now to the people they [her great-great-grandmother and grandmother, that is] and I have become one." Indeed, she declares that the evidence for the events she recounts lies open to her present diegetic readers (BP 104-5), should they feel inclined to seek it out in the convent, that is, in the convent without an identifiable name in the non-existent "blue mountains" of Portugal. The text could not make much clearer the contradiction between the narrator's claims

8

See Richard Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms (Berkeley: U of California P, 1968) 15, 86; Sister Miriam Joseph, Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language (New York: Columbia UP, 1947) 245, 389; and B. Dupriez, A Dictionary of Literary Devices: Gradus, A-Z, trans, and adapted by A.W. Halsall (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1991). 9 This is an expression which I only ever remember having actually heard in English in the first line of an obscene limerick that parodies fake medieval language of the kind which Robert Louis Stevenson called "tushery:" In days of old, when knights were bold . . . and so on.

154 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY to "historicity" and her deictic obfuscation. I conclude here the description of the techniques of narrativization. My "description" has already become decidedly rhetorical. If I may summarize these techniques in the terms of a slightly older theory of narrativity than the largely French Structuralist one used so far, I would invoke the one produced in the 1950s and early sixties by, among others, the American New Critics and the Chicago School. Their theories of the functions of narrative techniques will form a bridge into my own examination of the rhetorical functioning of such devices. Speaking, for instance, of the use of frames or chinese-box narratives which multiply pragmatic situations, narrators, and so by implication, narratees, Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg explained such devices as characteristic of Romance: . . . [M]ultiple narrators . . . w[ere] employed extensively in Greek romance. . . . As narrators are multiplied, evidence becomes hearsay, empiricism becomes romance. The multiplication of narrators is characteristic of modern fictions which lean towards romance. . . . The tendency of modern authors to multiply narrators or to circumvent the restriction of empirical eye-witness narration are signs of the decline of "realism" as an aesthetic force in narrative.10

Clearly then, we are faced in Dinesen's story with a conflict between opposing claims and generic characteristics. It would appear that to achieve an interpretation consistent with the contradiction between the story-teller's claim to empirical verifiability and the just demonstrated absence of chronotopical co-ordinates and evidential constraints, we will need to discard the law of the excluded middle. RHETORIC I am using the term "rhetoric" as defined by Aristotle in his treatise, and as studied by students of the discipline from his to our time, that is, as "the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. " n Listing the principal means as those depending on the logos or arguments advanced, on the pathos or emotional appeals made to the audience, and finally on the ethos or authority possessed by the speaker thanks to his good character, Aristotle adds that credibility is to be achieved most "effective[ly]"

10 11

The Nature of Narrative (New York: Oxford UP, 1966) 262-3. Rhetoric and Poetics (New York: Modern Library, 1954) book I, ch. 2, 24.

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by means of the techniques of ethos (Aristotle 25). Like any fiction, or "lie," as Plato's transgeneric formulation would have it (Plato II, 376), Dinesen's "The Blank Page" must persuade readers to suspend disbelief at least until they complete a first reading. More importantly, also like any other fiction, it must possess the kind of plausibility strong enough to resist the law of the second reading, which posits that once a reader knows the ending, (s)he will look more critically at the devices forming the narrative discourse itself. The extremely sophisticated techniques creating narrative verisimilitude suggest strongly Dinesen's familiarity with Aristotle's strictures in the Poetics concerning the preference to be given, for example, to a probable impossibility over an improbable possibility (Aristotle ch. 24, 1460a 27). What is more, whether or not she had read either the Poetics or the Rhetoric, Dinesen displays considerable skill in constructing a narrative argument in "The Blank Page" consistent with her apparent desire to achieve ideological ambiguity. I suggest that the ambiguous narrative syllogism which configures the work takes the following form: Minor Premise (species): There is a convent which displays evidence of premarital virginity. Major Premise (genus): I shall not formulate this, because I do not accept responsibility for it, but the axiom would involve the desirability, in the possible world in question, of female marriage partners displaying "proof" of virginity at marriage. The Consequence, as it appears in the story's concluding two paragraphs, is ambiguous, not to say a contradiction in terms: 1. Therefore those virgins are to be applauded. 2. Therefore those non-virgins are not to be condemned. The "openness" or "inconclusiveness" of the syllogism resists the discursive attempts made during the story to move it towards "closure," or "conclusiveness," as we shall see. Another set of devices, the analogical tropes deriving from the topos of similitude, also introduce, if not confusion, then at least ambiguity by their initial implied valorization of the connotations conventionally attached in Western culture to the notion of whiteness. The implication is later overturned at the story's climax. Allow me to document these assertions about whiteness.

156 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY The narrator first introduces the topic in the explanation given, for example, of the convent's "unique and strange privilege: they grow the finest flax and manufacture the most exquisite linen of Portugal." The ploughing, which she describes as being performed by "milk-white bullocks, [with] the seed [being] skilfully sown out by labor-hardened virginal hands" (BP 101) seems to me, at least, to confuse nature and culture, farming and eroticism.12 The convent's flax is described as being bleached and washed repeatedly, so becoming snow-like, "flower-white" (BP 101) linen. Such a description seems to represent the flax unambiguously as an object of value produced by the virgin nuns. By means of a narrative paradox, Dinesen converts the unambiguous plus-value, whiteness, into a semiotic marker possessing both positive and negative values as it is appropriated at the same time by two opposed sets of etiologically inclined hermeneuts. The first group interprets its functioning as a sign of dynastic guilt. The second interpretation, less negative perhaps, suggested but not actually posited in the story's conclusion, works by rejecting the law of the excluded middle, and so implies paradoxically that both interpretations are possible, and even correct. The paradox in question is presented in syllogistic form and, of course, given its narrative environment, concerns not only clean and dirty sheets, but inevitably good and bad processes of story-telling, as the old coffee-brown narrator explains: Major Premise (genus): "Diligence, dear Master and Mistress, is a good thing, and religion is a good thing, . . . " Minor Premise (counter-example as species): "but the very first germ of a story will come from some mystical place outside the story itself." Consequence: "Thus does the linen of the Convento Velho draw its true virtue from the fact that the very first linseed was brought home from the Holy Land by a crusader" (BP 102).

12

It also seems to me that ambiguity characterises the details given concerning the Blessed Virgin's collecting of eggs, "the moment before the angel Gabriel lowered himself onto the threshold of the house . . . while high, high up a dove, neck-feathers raised and wings vibrating, stood like a small clear silver star in the sky" (BP 101). This kind of vague sexual innuendo involving supernatural beings would not be out of place in a classical Greek romance telling of the amorous pursuits of mythological gods and goddesses.

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The consequence, a form of the origins myth, stands in need of some explanation or illustration, which conventionally would take the form of exempla, parables, or quotations from texts considered authoritative by the readers, virtual, implied, or historical. Which is precisely the form that the text then adopts. The first exemplum, taken from the Bible, recounts how the lands of Lecha and Maresha acquired from the Lord's blessing the flax to spin "the finest linen of all." The second exemplum recounts how, in the words of the old narrator, "our Portuguese crusader," something of an expert in such matters apparently, brought home the seed and presented it presumably to the convent which, as a result, obtained the right to "procure bridal sheets for all the young princesses of the royal house" (BP 102). The narrator then introduces a third exemplum which, she alleges, has "historical" status: I will inform you, dear lady and gentleman, that in the country of Portugal in the very old and noble families a venerable custom has been observed. On the morning after the wedding of a daughter of the house, and before the morning gift had yet been handed over, the Chamberlain or High Steward from a balcony of the palace would hang out the sheet of the night before and would solemnly declare: Virginem earn tenemus—"we declare her to have been a virgin." (BP 102-3)

In this way, the old story-teller guarantees not so much the supposed verisimilitude, but much more strongly the "historicity" of what is to follow. Such a hyperbolic declaration is the more surprising, given the strictness with which the story so far has conformed to the laws of verisimilitude. Any unlikeliness has been ascribed to changes in customs between "now" and "many hundreds of years ago," etc. That the convent should have the right to spin flax into linen, for instance, may well seem unexceptionable to modern readers familiar with the distilling activities of many religious orders. The link between the right in question and Portuguese royalty remains implicit, and must be supplied by means of a process by which readers construct inferentially a series of "explanatory" enthymemes, of the type: if a crusader, then aristocratic, if aristocratic, then able to influence royalty, and so on. The next element in the narrative discourse, the "convent's second high privilege," presents a far greater problem if one tries to justify it in terms of verisimilitude, a fact which probably explains the hyperbolic nature of the previous claim to historicity. The convent has the right to display the "central piece of the snow-white sheet which bore witness to the honor of a royal bride" (BP 103). The stylisation already evident in the implied

158 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY contention that the mark in question always appeared in the dead centre of the bed-covering should not, I think, be attributed only to sexual unadventurousness displayed by the royal couples in question. It may just as plausibly, in my view, be attributed to the ready availability and frequently employed means of fabricating ^incriminating evidence over the "many hundred years" that, according to the text, the convent possessed this strange privilege. If semiotics is, as Eco has suggested,13 the art of lying by means of signs, then we should be slow to accept unequivocally all marks on sheets as bloodstains emanating "naturally" from a single spot in the human female anatomy as a result of her first experience of coition. Secondly, we might perhaps muse about the likelihood of displaying such trophies in the gallery of a convent. Such a custom would not presumably have as its function that of providing the novices with a target to ami for, although the bizarre nature of some medieval paintings hung in such places, like the sado-masochistic representations of various kinds of martyrdoms for instance, does give one pause in this respect. Let us consider the storyteller's next rhetorical move. Following immediately upon the declaration of historicity, she encourages us to meditate upon the multiple readings which such marks seem to offer readily enough. Thus, she invites us, if we are (and we are, of course) "people of some imagination and sensibility" (BP 103) to read into them all kinds of allegories—astrological, hierarchical, erotic—according to isotopic preference. The plausibility of the story's final incident, the function of which is to "prove" the "historical" presence in the convent of the fragments of sheet, taken to be signs, is prepared by means of two conventional rhetorical devices: 1) The proverbial or mythical expression already quoted, namely "In days of old," introduces a generalized claim that traditionally princesses would bring their trophy to hang in glory. I imagine there will be readers who remain unconvinced that such an embarrassingly public invasion of

13

"Semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign. A sign is everything which can be taken as significantly substituting for something else. This something else does not necessarily have to exist or to actually be somewhere at the moment in which a sign stands for it. Thus semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used 'to tell' at all. I think that the definition of a 'theory of the lie' should be taken as a pretty comprehensive program for a general semiotics," Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1976) 7. (The emphasis is Eco's.)

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(perhaps) just recently surrendered maidenly modesty would have occurred even in the time of the dinosaurs, let alone in an age when Princesses of the Blood could rely on the chivalric ideal, and more realistically perhaps upon a standing army, to protect their privacy, to say nothing of their honour. To convince such sceptics, Dinesen's narrator introduces her clinching argument: she updates her story to her own present tune, a time of hard, verifiable facts. The problem is, however, she does so by invoking the argument of the invented witness, and in so doing is at her most exposed, it seems to me. She characterises the witness in question as an old spinster, ex-friend and confidante of a young bride, who travels (and we with her) to the convent, stands in front of each trophy in turn until she gets to the one upon which the narrative and argumentative climax and conclusion depend. And at that very moment, her usefulness as guide and reducer of aesthetic and psychic distance at an end, the old spinster disappears. The argumentative overdetermination, when compared to the narrative underdetermination of such a character used as a verisimilitude-creating device, seems clear enough. Genette reminds us that the more functional or "motivated" such devices are, the more they add to the arbitrariness of the narrative. On the contrary, the less apparent justification for dwelling at length on a device which contributes nothing to the text's argued verisimilitude, the more plausibility such a device possesses.14 Whether one accepts such a view or not, one may agree that the old spinster's function as persuasive device is too clear for her participation to be taken as entirely unmotivated. And so we arrive in front of the white sheet which hangs unidentified in the gallery—and at this point, the old coffee-brown, black-veiled storyteller enters with her final apostrophe to express her dual (?) readings of the narrative evidence averred so far. However, before we examine the reasons behind her interpretation, I will make one final, analeptic, retour en arriere to examine her other direct addresses to her readers, both intra- and extradiegetic. Conclusion: LOYALTY and/as ETHOS The old story-teller neither narrates nor outlines her system of professional ethics freely. Only "if she is well paid and in good spirits," we

14

71-99.

"Vraisemblance el motivation," Figures II (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969)

160 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY are told, will she consent either to practise or theorize upon narrative discourse. Once remunerated, she explains that the ideal relationship between the teller and the tale is one of "loyalty"—and traces the axiom back to her grandmother who explained it thus: Where the story-teller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak. Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness. But we, the faithful, when we have spoken our last word, will hear the voice of silence. (BP 100)

To call such a declaration paradoxical is to understate. If we examine, either in order or together, the key terms in this complex utterance, the results may be tabulated as follows. "Loyal," as defined in the Oxford English Dictionary,15 and in Webster's Dictionary16 involves emotions of faithfulness, respect, and/or friendship etc. for other people or values. Such a definition identifies the axiom in question here as one in which personification blurs logic. By the injunction to narrators to be "loyal to the story," does she perhaps mean that the story's narrative and discursive elements should be faithfully, or exactly, reproduced from performance to performance? This is not easy, but might be possible in an oral culture where traditions of story-telling would make memorisation a powerful agent of persuasion. If the story has to be repeated exactly on every occasion of its telling, each new story-teller must "brainwash" herself into repeating without variation the narrative ideologemes and their syntax. No hesitation or deviation would be possible if loyalty has this absolute meaning. The result of such "brainwashing" is that the stories would then be told by "Silence:" "Who then", she continues, "tells a finer tale than any of us? Silence does. And where does one read a deeper tale than upon the most perfectly printed page of the most precious book? Upon the blank page. When a royal and gallant pen, in the moment of its highest inspiration, has written down its tale with the rarest ink of all—where, then, may one read a still deeper, sweeter, merrier and more cruel tale than that? Upon the blank page." (BP 100)

Once again the trope chosen is paradox—one of the meanings of which term is anti-doxa: that which deliberately goes against the conventional wisdom 15

Compact edition including Supplement (1971; Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987). Webster's New World Dictionary. Third College Edition (New York: Webster's New World, 1988). 16

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expressed by a community's axioms, hermeneutical or otherwise. The storyteller here celebrates aposiopesis or reticentia, tropes which function by refusing information, thus obliging listeners or readers to supply it for themselves. Not infrequently, as ancient and modem rhetoricians tell us, such tropes have the effect of inducing hyperbolic reactions in their audience whose imagination may well be stronger than the spoken or written words of a story-teller.17 The old lady herself resists the temptation to remain silent, preferring to thematize silence itself: "We . . . the old women who tell stories, we know the story of the blank page. But we are somewhat averse to telling it, for it might well, among the uninitiated, weaken our own credit. All the same, I am going to make an exception with you, my sweet and pretty lady and gentleman of the generous hearts. I shall tell it to you." (BP 100)

The mixture of flattery of the intra-diegetic readers who are not "uninitiated" (neither are we, the readers) and the concern she expresses for the nurturing of her own "credit" or ethos marks the narrator's rhetorical strategy and stance. Despite the danger to her credibility, she says, thus combining captatio benevolentiae with retorsion,18 the device of appearing to argue on the adversary's ground as a sign of good faith, she will tell the tale. This she does, and we return to our final consideration of its ending. Which tale, one may ask? A good question! Allow me to distinguish at least two possibilities or narrative strands.19

17 The story-teller, who cannot read, as she explains when commenting upon her biblical exemplum, has achieved in this instance a relationship with the printed word or page that one would find less surprising as expressed by the rarest and most sophisticated of professional poets or scribes. Her effusions on the blank page would not be out of place in a text by Mallarme whose theory of metaphor, for instance, involved the suppression not only of the tenor but of the vehicle as well—a process which was to produce the Livre des Livres. . . , and so on. The ideal blankness of such a hyperbolic object of transcendental communication is of course the Grail sought by all authors suffering from writer's block. 18 See Marc Angenot, La Parole pamphletaire, typologie des discours modemes (Paris: Payot, 1982) 219-20. 19 I am now using the reverse order from the one discussed previously under narratology.

162 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY Story No. 1 concerns the convent/princesses and sheets—one of which is white, i.e., "blank" and which has no coroneted name-plate above it. This sheet she designates "a blank page" (BP 104). Story No. 2 has some complications caused by the ontological difference separating pages written and pages read from sheets, or bed-coverings allegorized into "pages" to be "read" by fictional readers. As the story-teller says: "I beg of you, you good people who want to hear stories told: look at this page, and recognize the wisdom of my grandmother and of all old story-telling women!" (BP 104). At least since literary critics began to apply to narrative discourse Russell's paradox,20 we have become familiar with the problems and tricks of self-reference. Such deictically ambiguous statements as "look at this page" function in the passage just quoted in precisely such a way. "This" page is normally the one at which I or you are looking: in the present case, my paper or whatever text, if any, you happen to be currently perusing. But in the particular case represented by the utterance of Dinesen's narrator, the expression "this page" has at least two referents: the first referent is metaphorical, the other literal, with, as usually happens in ordinary language, the literal expression serving as the vehicle of the metaphor. The first referent that the old story-teller so indicates is the white bed-covering which she has just called "a blank page." The second is

20 See A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (New York: Dover, 1952) 71: "It is to be remarked that the process of analyzing a language is facilitated if it is possible to use for the classification of its forms an artificial system of symbols whose structure is known. The best-known example of such a symbolism is the socalled system of logistic which was employed by Russell and Whitehead in their Prindpia Mathematica. But it is not necessary that the language in which analysis is carried out should be different from the language analyzed. If it were, we should be obliged to suppose, as Russell once suggested, 'that every language has a structure concerning which, in the language, nothing can be said, but that there may be another language dealing with the structure of the first language, and having itself a new structure, and that to this hierarchy of languages there may be no limit' [Introduction to L. Wittgenstein's Tractates Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge, 1961) 23.] This was written presumably in the belief that an attempt to refer to the structure of a language in the language itself would lead to the occurrence of logical paradoxes [Concerning logical paradoxes, see Russell and Whitehead, Prindpia Mathematica (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1957) ch. ii.] But Carnap, by actually carrying out such an analysis, has subsequently shown that such a language can without self-contradiction be used in the analysis of itself."

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her story, as it is printed in the text by Dinesen in the edition in which we are reading it. What is the function of this foregrounding of the confusions made possible by the switch from literal to figurative language? Here at the climax of the story of the convent and of the story about story-telling, the story-teller asks us to "recognize the wisdom of [her] grandmother and of all old story-telling women!" Why? Because of their loyalty to the story, i.e., to the narrativized referents, or "facts." But the facts in this case are not simple. First, because at this late point, the story's antepenultimate paragraph, the story-teller identifies metaphorically the notion of loyalty with that of blood ties, with reliable information concerning blood-lines: For with what unswerving and eternal loyalty has not this canvas been inserted in the row! The story-tellers themselves before it draw their veils over their faces and are dumb. Because the royal papa and mama who once ordered this canvas to be framed and hung up, had they not had the tradition of loyalty in their blood, might have left it out. (BP 105)

She thus reveals the comparison with the breeding of pedigree animals which it was the function of such marriage customs to "guarantee." Purity of blood could be ensured as long as no foreign, undesirable, or "mongrel" seed, blood or genes were introduced through coition into the blood of broodmares or princesses. She further suggests that the progenitors of the princess of the white sheet behaved with exemplary, if perhaps quixotic, loyalty to their own blood-line. Rather than allowing their daughter to pollute or dilute their gene-pool, they chose to signal to all suitors their daughter's unavailability for breeding, or even for entry into the category which such a society considered appropriate to conduct what L6vi-Strauss called an "exchange of women." But the story does not end by foregrounding this figurative interpretation. The two final paragraphs, as supplied by the old story-teller, appear to contradict the previous enthusiastic encomium she pronounced upon the "loyal" act of the royal couple. Readers of the "blank page"—by which I mean the white linen bed-covering—including those who make the pilgrimage to the convent to view it, stand in silent meditation before this ambiguous icon. What direction their thoughts take, whether they praise or blame the royal parents for exposing their daughter's contract-breaking act, whether they praise or blame the act itself, or its perpetrators, or whether they praise or blame the latters' refusal to engage in semiotic sleight of hand, remain decisions about which we are not told. As existential readers, we

164 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY may only turn ourselves into implied readers by solving the riddle that "The Blank Page," like any open work, imposes upon us.

The Silent Tale: Pragmatic Strategy in "The Blank Page" Mark A. Kemp University of Pittsburgh

In his analysis of a short narrative text which ends ambiguously, Umberto Eco concludes that the story being told is actually the story of the reader's failure in reading the story.1 This "naive" reader's complacent acceptance of narrative conventions and ideological assumptions deliberately inscribed in the text leads to an impasse in interpretation. Instead of the expected denouement there is an impossible, or paradoxical, outcome. Only a critical reading, such as the one performed in "Lector in Fabula," can overcome the frustrated conventional reading and detect the "pragmatic strategy" in the text. By self-critical I mean both the text's criticism of itself (and of the nature of textuality) and, more importantly, an implicit criticism of the assumptions of the reader who is reconstructing this text. It is the ami of this paper to apply Eco's approach2 to the ambiguous metafictional text to Isak Dinesen's tale "The Blank Page." This short story employs subtle metanarrative devices in order to guide the critical reader in interpreting what might seem upon a first reading to be an irreconcilable construct. I will attempt to demonstrate that the very values and cultural presuppositions which Dinesen's story appears to uphold are in fact undermined and inverted by the text. I first want to address briefly the question of "metanarrative." Although even recent literary critics seem compelled to defend its self-consciousness and self-reflexivity from residual assumptions about the value of mimetic

1

Umberto Eco, "Lector in Fabula: Pragmatic Strategy in a Metanarrative Text," The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984) 200-66. 2 Within the constrained scope of this paper, my discussion of both Eco's full methodology and its application to even such a reduced narrative model as Dinesen's tale must be sketchy. Much of Eco's use of modal logic and possible-world semantics will go neglected, unfortunately, in order to focus on my primary interest, the metanarrative strategies for critical reading which can be traced in the text itself.

165

166 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY realism, metafiction has always been an element of literature. Linda Hutcheon, for example, has linked the "postmodern" obsession with metafictive forms back to such texts as Don Quijote and Tristram Shandy. She maintains that: this kind of literary formalism [in which the process of fiction-writing becomes its subject matter] has always existed; the more modern textual self-preoccupation differs mostly in its explicitness, its intensity, and its own critical self-awareness.3

Speaking of the novel specifically, Hutcheon suggests that the origins of metafiction "lie in that parodic intent basic to the genre as it began in Don Quijote" (5). Bakhtin, who would date the novel's origins much earlier (in the Socratic dialogues) also sees the novel as innately and necessarily parodic of ossified genres and styles.4 The Greek prefix "meta" is a multi-purpose morpheme which Hutcheon and others can use liberally to describe various second-order levels of meaning and of signifying. For example, frame narratives, which might foreground fictional process by setting a story within a story (within a story), force a reader to look critically at the smaller narrative genres or voices they enclose and contain. Aside from the formal innovation that metafiction strives for, its essentially novelistic parody functions to push the reader out of his or her uncritical assumptions and complacency. What I hope to draw from Eco's analysis of Alphonse Allais' "Un drame bien parisien," as well as from my own reading of Dinesen's "The Blank Page," then, is that metanarratives call into question not only an older set of coded literary conventions but also the passive reader's reliance on those conventions and the ideological assumptions which presume that reliance. The metafictional text solicits a critique not only of exhausted forms of literature but of the received ideas or beliefs that it shares with its 3

Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier UP, 1980) 18. 4 Bakhtin conceives of the novel as rising out of a folkloric impulse to ridicule and disempower canonized genres (epic, tragedy, comedy). Its crucial features are parodic self-examination and constant renewal. By "novel," Bakhtin is referring not only to a long prose form, but to an active literary force which challenges limits and established canons, "novelizing" other genres (he discusses Pushkin's Eugene Onegin as a novel, for instance). See especially "Epic and Novel," in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P, 1981).

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implied readers. Does Don Quijote parody the chivalric romance alone, or does it not also satirize the persistence and symbolic consequences of a specific social dependence upon an outdated ideology (the chivalric code)? The appearance of devices which designate a text as being metafictional should trigger in the mind of the reader who is familiar with such selfreflective indices a wariness concerning further ambiguities in meaning. The use of the multiple narrator or framing structure—such as we see in "The Blank Page"—signals the reader to be on the lookout for semantic equivocalities and paradoxes. Although the narration-within-the-narration (the indirectly-reported tale recited by the old story-teller) pretends to authenticate itself through this convention of vraisemblance (i.e., the witness' report), it also distances the narrative by removing it several levels and by establishing problematic differences between the two narrators (the firstperson story-teller and the omniscient mediator). Because he or she controls the narrative this "mediator" assumes the privilege of positioning the other narrator, the old woman, socially. This narrative duality is set up in the first sentence of the tale: "By the ancient city gate sat an old coffee-brown, black-veiled woman who made her living by telling stories. "5 A series of oppositions has been initiated between teller and listener, poor and wealthy, impure and chaste. The elaborate framing of the narrative operates as an indication or instruction to the reader; I will discuss its effect in more detail when I take up my analysis of "The Blank Page." The point I want to make here is that arguably the most constructive characteristic of metafiction is its self-inscribed critical strategy. The reader is supplied with a set of instructions for reassembling the fictional world and a theoretical model for interpreting it semantically. The social positioning of the old story-teller in the opening line of "The Blank Page" should be the first clue to the critical reading the text is calling for. Theorists of metafiction recognize this function: Hutcheon begins her study with the observation that "the point of m^tofiction is that it constitutes its own first critical commentary, and in so doing, it will be argued, sets up the theoretical frame of reference in which it must be considered" (6). Such comments, and the discussions of metafiction which they initiate, can be problematic when they serve to justify a subsequent evasion of any real theory of reading metafiction. In her concluding chapter, Hutcheon contends

5

Isak Dinesen, Last Tales (New York: Random House, 1957) 99. "The Blank Page" included in this collection will hereafter be referred to as BP.

168 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY that the literature itself generates the theoretical method: "There can be no 'theory' of metafiction, only 'implications' for theory; each self-informing work internalizes its own critical context" (155). This may be true, but how does the reader go about activating this internal critical structure? By what authority do we uncritically accept a particular metafiction's theoretical position, and do such "self-informing" works attempt to preclude criticism which they do not themselves manipulate? Such issues are ignored or glossed over by Hutcheon; her typological scheme for discussing metafiction is principally metaphoric—e.g., the Narcissus conceit. She must consequently make the disclaimer I quoted above, which places the onus for determining a theoretical methodology upon the text itself. As a result of this induced passivity in the reader, an obvious problem is a lessening of reader complicity in the production of meaning, which Hutcheon otherwise considers a crucial feature of metafiction. To valorize the critical approach outlined by the text is to accept the authority of the author-in-the-text without question, and to merely paraphrase by metaphor and analogy, undermining the theoretical function of metafiction. In contrast, Eco's approach circumscribes such critical subservience. "Lector in Fabula" combines the two levels of semiotic and semantic analysis on a third level, the pragmatic, thereby providing a means of re-producing as well as implementing the inscribed critical framework of the text. The distinction between semiotic and semantic, to follow a line from de Saussure to Ricoeur, is that the first level analyzes the word (signs in text) and the second its meaning when decoded (signs in context). Therefore the second, semantic, level of inquiry is more oriented to the response of the "Model Reader." The third, pragmatic, level investigates how the text uses this semantic level to manipulate the Model Reader and to create an alternate, critical reader. On the one hand, Eco's semiotic theory maintains the text's autonomy and therefore its control of the reader's interpretive process; on the other his positing of a "Model Reader" induces the cooperation of the addressee, who is either the frustrated "naive" reader or the critical reader foreseen by the manipulative strategy of the text. The text—Allais' story, in this case—inscribes both addressees: its "pragmatic strategy" (a term more or less synonymous with Model Reader, since the latter is a textual/discursive strategy rather than a specific imagined reader) constructs two general interpretative modes, "a first naive interpreter expected to commit various alternative mistakes and a second critical reader who can make different explanatory decisions" (Eco, Role 257). "Un drame bien parisien," and presumably other metanarratives, are

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what Eco calls "open/closed" texts because of this double addressee. The terms are not opposed but are combined. The Model Reader inscribed in texts that represent the extremes, "open" or "closed," is by contrast singular. The author of the closed text envisions "an average reader referred to a given social context" (Eco, Role 8) that is formulaic in structure and ideologically coded to reassure its audience/market. This generic codification actually makes the closed text highly interpretable, as Eco demonstrates in his essays on Superman comics and Fleming's James Bond novels. On the other hand, the "maze-like structure" of an open text, such as Finnegans Wake, while demanding a Model Reader who is equal to its interpretive complexities, in fact "outlines a 'closed' project of its Model Reader as a component of its structural strategy" (Eco, Role 9). So the closed text is far too open and the open text too closed to interpretation. What remains as the ideal text (the most enjoyable, since it permits its Model Reader the greatest freedom, as well as the greatest gratification through his or her active role) is the metanarrative text which inscribes both types of readers. For Eco, this ideal text is exemplified by "Un drame bien parisien." "Lector in Fabula," the final essay in the collection The Role of the Reader, sets out to substantiate the assertion that "the critical reader will succeed only by enjoying the defeat" (Eco, Role 10) of the naive reader. Eco documents the various pragmatic discursive and narrative devices performed by the text in its project of "building up ... the Model Reader(s) as a possible interpretive strategy" (Eco, Role 206). These devices, which I will apply to my discussion of "The Blank Page," include the discursive strategy I have already alluded to—that is, the identification of the speaker/narrator and the objectives of his or her speech acts—and rhetorical overcoding which signals particular generic conventions and therefore elicits particular responses and expectations. "A code," in Eco's semiotics, "is a system of signification, insofar as it couples present entities with absent units." Overcoding, on the other hand, involves the addition of new entities or rules to describe the existing referent, or the use of ready-made syntagms, such as /how are you/, /I beg your pardon/ or /closed on Sundays/ which work as minimal units, single "signs" endowed

170 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY with an "atomic" meaning. In this sense the whole series of stylistic and rhetorical rules operating in verbal language are cases of overcoding.6 Since codes reproduce common systems of signification (which are socially and historically constructed), the text can be ideologically overcoded as well, playing upon the biases of the reader, and possibly leading the more critical reader to identify the concealed or presupposed subcodes or to become aware of his or her own ideological assumptions. Gaps and enigmas in the narrative are filled or solved through a series of inferences based upon common frames of reference (drawn from the reader's experiential "encyclopedia") or upon intertextual frames (since "[n]o text is read independently of the reader's experience of other texts" [Eco, Role 21]). Inferences, or abductions, to use the term Eco has adopted from C. S. Peirce, result from the posing of a number of hermeneutic questions which determine the textual topics. (In "Un drame" the two opposing topics are "adultery" and "misunderstanding"). From the numerous propositions and abductions depending on and constituting narrative topics, the reader continually forecasts the logical outcome of the narrative. The identification of textual topics is assisted by "markers," such as titles, proper names, and keywords which are obsessively reiterated or strategically located in the text. No realistic interpretation can be made of "Un drame" other than that offered by the text itself: that there can be no interpretation (of a conventional kind). The confusion initially lies in the reader's acceptance of generic overcoding which provokes a programmed response. The topic "adultery" is privileged over that of "misunderstanding" because of both the ideological biases of the reader and the too-familiar conventions of the popular genre of bedroom melodrama. Therefore, the Model Reader is trapped into believing that Raoul and Marguerite go to the costume ball to catch each other "in the act" of meeting their respective lovers, and that they wear the specific costumes mentioned in the letters, even though the letters only describe the other's disguise and not the one which each addressee should wear. But even the reader who does not fall for these manipulations is stymied in the attempt to naturalize the text, because the unknown

6

Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1976) 8, 133. Eco also discusses "undercoding" (135ff) in situations where an "absence of reliable pre-established rules" leads the reader/interpreter to infer crucial units of a code from "certain macroscopic portions" of a text; e.g., the operation performed by someone learning a foreign language by immersion in its speaking community. Only overcoding is discussed in Eco's treatment of "Un drame".

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characters at the end of the story are not only disguised as Marguerite and Raoul (a Congolese Dugout and a Knight Templar) but are also surprised to find out that the other is not Marguerite or Raoul. Neither too little nor too much cooperation can be brought to this "metafiction [that is] speaking about the cooperative principle in narrativity and at the same tune challenging our yearning for cooperation by gracefully punishing our pushiness" (Eco, Role 256). Appropriation of and subjection to narrative are the two semantic poles of "The Blank Page" as well, although this text does not function in the same way as "Un drame." That is to say, it does not adamantly insist on being interpreted only as a lesson on the dynamics of narrativity, as the Allais story does. The transparent structure of the latter is conducive to a step-bystep analysis of textual devices: its typographical division into "chapters" with euphemistic headings and epigraphs allows Eco to schematize his "inferential walks" (those gaps in information which the reader must go outside of the text to fill) by constructing "ghost chapters." A similarly linear process of plotting chapters is not practicable in the Dinesen text. The relatively seamless structure of "The Blank Page" is, of course, full of gaps which must be filled by inference—the transferral of the wondrous flaxseed from the Holy Land to the old convent, for example. But whereas the impossibility of the ending of "Un drame" is blatant to even the naive reader, the ambiguity of "The Blank Page" is not so obvious on a first reading. Read in the vein of the fairytale genre which its form and its overcoded, or "ready-made expressions"—such as "once, long, long ago" and "in days of old"—suggest, the tale which the old story-teller narrates might be passed over as a parable of aristocratic virtue. Alternatively, the concluding episode which takes place in the convent's bizarre gallery of "portraits"—which are in fact fragments of the stained bridal sheets of princesses—might leave the reader merely puzzled. A re-examination of the text for its pragmatic strategies, however, reveals a series of paradoxes leading up to the concluding one. The pervasive sense of irreconcilable opposition which runs through the story of "The Blank Page" is implicated in the opening sentences. "By the ancient city gate sat an old coffee-brown, black-veiled woman who made her living by telling stories" (BP 99). The actor is immediately situated on a social stratum: she is sitting (presumably on the ground) by the city gate (most likely just outside it, where she can confront pedestrians, her prospective clients, entering the city by way of the busy thoroughfare). She is alone and poor, as is evident from the description of her "placement" and

172 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY of her appearance: "coffee-brown" would be—at the supposed time of the story—the skin-colour of peasants who spend their lives working outdoors. The old story-teller is represented by the narrator (the first diegetic level, or frame) in the third person, and in the first person only on the second, or indirect, diegetic level, thus sharply separating the written from the oral. This feeling that the writing narrator is socially superior to the speaking narrator is reinforced by the latter's address to her customers: "'You want a tale, sweet lady and gentleman?'" (BP 99). The Model Reader might first attribute this deference to business-minded politeness. However, the narrative gradually accumulates semantic disclosures which signify or "blow up" (as Eco says of the essential properties described by a fictional world) the topic "wealth." The old story-teller is positioned, in relation to her audience, by her appearance and profession, by her identification with "the people," and by the fact that she is illiterate, despite her articulateness. Thus the ambivalence of the text is already intimated by the splitting of the narration into what appears to be diametrically opposed social types: he or she who writes through appropriation of the narratives of the other, and she who cannot write but possesses experience and memory. The first hermeneutic problem is, then, the choice and the simultaneous distancing of this specific narrator. This distancing and containing appears to be a typical strategy for assuring narrative authority or ethos. But we are forced to ask whether this ethos is retained by the authorial voice or whether it is subverted and appropriated by the old woman's narrative. Eco says of "Un drame" that "the text carefully designs its naive reader as the typical consumer of adultery stories" (Eco, Role 207). It is by basing interpretive decisions on familiarity with the "recipes" of such genres (and on the desire/expectation that a particular reading experience will be repeated, as the text seems to promise) that the reader fails to apprehend intended meaning. Likewise, "The Blank Page" meticulously constructs its naive reader as a consumer of the didactic folktale with its colouring of chivalric romance. Our ignoring of the paradoxical propositions advanced by the text is thus the issue of our wish for fulfilment of the idealistic (and ideological) literary conventions suggested by the framing and formalizing style of the old story-teller's tale. With its dramatis personae of royal and noble families, princesses, nuns, and crusading knights, its feudal settings of castles, "the vast crumbling structure" of the old convent ("Convento Velho") found "high up in the blue mountains of Portugal" (BP 100), and its allusions to sinister or unrequited loves, the story of the blank page invokes not only the fairy tale but also

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another genre which has its roots in folklore and which pervades Isak Dinesen's work—the Gothic tale. While it is the castle which usually forms the central image of this type of narrative, in "The Blank Page" the convent is a surrogate that is described in very similar terms: In ancient times the convent was rich, the sisters were all noble ladies, and miracles took place there. But during the centuries highborn ladies grew less keen on fasting and prayer, the great dowries flowed scantily into the treasury of the convent, and today the few portionless and humble sisters live in but one wing of the vast crumbling structure, which looks as if it longed to become one with the gray rock itself. (BP 100-101)

The characters have been transposed from a medieval romance where the implicit equation of aristocratic values with religious piety is possible. But the narrative reiterates to the point of redundancy the passage of tune—"in ancient times," "during the centuries," "miracles took place there"—in order to foreground the passage of a dying world and its idealized (and therefore doomed) representatives. Hence the text contrasts this first moment ("once, long, long ago") with a second ("today") in which both the convent and the aristocracy that enriched it are crumbling. In the interim, "history" saturates the text by means of both the legend-format of the tale and the "ready-made" phrases separating the mythic "then" from an obscure "now." The convent's portrait gallery reinforces with its symbolic genealogy this sense of chronicling the past. It functions as one of those stock features of the Gothic setting in which, according to Bakhtin, the traces of centuries and generations are arranged . . . in visible form as various parts of its architecture, in furnishings, weapons, the ancestral portrait gallery, the family archives and in the particular human relationships involving dynastic primacy and the transfer of hereditary rights. (246)

Despite this rhetorical and generic overcoding which constructs a trap for the reader who prefers the nostalgia of the fairytale/Gothic form, an underlying or secondary topic advises the more astute reader to take such hyperbole with a grain of salt. It is primarily the dual time-frame, contrasting a magical distant past with a more quotidian present, which suggests this second, ironic interpretation of the fairytale/Gothic narrative. What narrative topic, based on the reader's intertextual frames (consciousness of literary traditions), does the specificity of an aristocratic convent suggest? It could only be the twinned pair "wealth/chastity," or its chivalric equivalent "nobility/honour," whose negation is implicit in the story-teller's preamble and which permeates the tale of the blank page

174 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY itself— "peasantry/dishonour," for lack of a more concise title. In her second sentence the old woman narrates her own original fall from grace: "Indeed I have told many tales, one more than a thousand, since that tune when I first let young men tell me, myself, tales of a red rose, two smooth lily buds, and four silky, supple, deadly entwining snakes" (BP 99). The sexual act is already co-referent with the narrative act in this passage, where the man's tale signifies seduction. This will be verified by the text which ambiguates the central motif of "blank page" as both a sheet of uninscribed paper (the narrative not yet told) and a new linen bedsheet (the sexual act not yet performed). Both images bring into sharp focus the traditional role of women as sexual objects and silent spaces, who can be written (i.e., who serve as subjects for the male artist) but who are constrained from writing themselves. The fact that the only inscription that the princesses in Dinesen's tale make—the sacred virginal bloodstain—is produced by a male "pen" constitutes the paradox of silence equalling narrative. As Susan Gubar has discussed in her essay on "The Blank Page,"7 only by refusing this particular passive sexual/artistic role can the woman herself produce a narrative. This first paradox delineated by the old story-teller (silence = narrative) is linked with the last paradox (chastity = sexual congress) through a critical reading of what Eco would call "contradictory world structures" in the text. Contradiction is first introduced as an equivocation of language (narrative) and silence (the blank page): "Who then," she continues, "tells a finer tale than any of us? Silence does. And where does one read a deeper tale than upon a most perfectly printed page of the most precious book? Upon the blank page. When a royal and gallant pen, in the moment of its highest inspiration, has written down its tale with the rarest ink of all—where, then, may one read a still deeper, sweeter, merrier and more cruel tale than that? Upon the blank page." (BP 100)

What inferences can we draw at this point? That the act of narration always compromises the ideal narrative of the imagination, and therefore the finest tale can only be potential? But the old woman has also told us that two kinds of "silence" exist, the vocal kind whose prerequisite is "eternal and unswerving loyalty to the story," and the empty kind resulting from a

7

Susan Gubar, "'The Blank Page' and the Issues of Female Creativity," Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. Elizabeth Abel (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982) 73-93.

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"betrayal" of the story. What, then, is this universal story that must be told faithfully and yet is always inferior to the tale of the blank page? And how (the second paradox) can the old story-teller then tell this tale which is silence? As is apparent throughout the text, however, narrative ambiguities and sexual ones are co-essential and interchangeable. The nuns in the "Convento Velho" in Portugal, in spite of their aristocratic birth (which is plausible), are all virgins (which is not so plausible: it is "encyclopedic" knowledge that convent inmates are often disgraced or widowed women). Perhaps the Carmelite order, with its stringent vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience is more selective of its initiates, though Dinesen's convent seems inordinately obsessed with the reverse of at least two of the vows, poverty and chastity. An ironic juxtaposition of chastity and fertility forms the fabric of the nuns' daily existence, since they "grow the finest flax" in the country. The reproductive act symbolic in agriculture is enacted by asexual beings: "The long field below the convent is plowed with gentle-eyed, milk-white bullocks, and the seed is skillfully sown out by labor-hardened virginal hands with mold under the nails" (BP 101). We might note in passing that certain colours are constantly reiterated throughout the text, and might therefore be discerned as topic-markers. White and blue (the sentence following the passage quoted above compares flax flowers to the sky and to the Virgin Mary's apron) are contrasted with brown (the story-teller's face) and black (her veil). The marble floor of the portrait gallery is black and white. And of course the blank sheet is imprinted with the black ink or the red-brown of bloodstains. This metaphorical (ideologically coded) duality only assists the interpretation of ambivalence in the semantic structure of the text. Chastity/fertility (the third paradox) permeates the convent's role in society. The linen that the nuns produce, endorsed by not only its quality but its reputed sacred origins in the Holy Land, entitles the nuns to "procure bridal sheets for all the young princesses of the royal house" (BP 102). Furthermore, the convent receives the sheets back afterwards bearing the insignia of virginity, which at the same time graphically signify the sexual act: "that central piece of snow-white sheet which bore witness to the honor of the royal bride" (BP 103). The stained linen squares are framed, labelled, and hung as portraits in the convent gallery, thereby reducing those faceless brides to their essential characteristic as unspoiled merchandise in a royal transaction. Semiotically, the belief in the princess' virtue as signified by the bloodstain is merely connoted on a secondary or symbolic level of signification. The direct referent, a specific haemorrhage resulting

176 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY from nuptial coitus, is only assumed. That these "signs" are more ambiguous than simple indicators of virginity is implied by their interpretability by "people of some imagination and sensibility," who see in them, as if they were some sort of medieval Rorschach blot, "the signs of the zodiac: the Scales, the Scorpion, the Lion, the Twins. Or they may there find pictures from their own world of ideas: a rose, a heart, a sword, or even a heart pierced through with a sword" (BP 103). The last is perhaps a more apropos euphemism than "deflowering." The fourth paradox, then, is the dual signification of the white linen as both "purity" and "dishonour" (i.e., if it is found to be still white the morning after the princess-bride's defloration). The final paradox consists in the presence in the portrait gallery of a single incongruously blank "canvas:" But in the midst of the long row there hangs a canvas which differs from the others. The frame of it is as fine and as heavy as any, and as proudly as any carries the golden plate with the royal crown. But on this one plate no name is inscribed, and the linen within the frame is snow-white from corner to corner, a blank page. (BP 104)

We have seen how the blank page carries two possible but antithetical meanings. Either is "read"—as Rorschachs for our unconscious projections, as tales of innocence or shame, as auguries or tarots, as affirmations or mysteries. But the final "reading" offered by the text—or, rather, by the individuals contained in the text—is completely unexpected. The narrative concludes: It is in front of this piece of pure white linen that the old princesses of Portugal—worldly wise, dutiful, long-suffering queens, wives and mothers—and their noble old playmates, bridesmaids and maids-of-honor have most often stood still. It is in front of the blank page that old and young nuns, with the Mother Abbess herself, sink into deepest thought. (BP 105)

The apparent respect of the queens and the reverential meditation of the nuns before the blank linen suggests that they interpret the "text" as conveying the first message only: that of "chastity" and "purity." The repeated words "pure white linen" and "blank page" overemphasize this option. Given the response of the women to the single unstained sheet in the gallery, it is possible to forget momentarily that the narrative logic of the story requires that this sheet actually signify the opposite; that is, that it indicate impurity and dishonour, since the princess who used it as a wedding sheet could not

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have been a virgin. In spite of the unengraved nameplate on the portrait, a "royal papa and mama" have "ordered this canvas to be framed and hung up" (BP 105), bespeaking a daughter who existed and whose "virtues," or lack of them, should be depicted on the canvas. In order to disambiguate a text, a continuous and progressive formulation of questions and answers is performed. As we have discussed in relation to Eco's interpretation of metanarratives, the text itself manipulates this selecting and rejecting of propositions—through discursive strategies, rhetorical and ideological overcoding, topic-markers, and so on. While the text orients its Model Reader to follow thefabula as if it were a fantasized tale of sex and honour, its immediate positioning of two narrators between whom there exists a dichotomy of experience, social background, education, and perhaps even gender, plus its subsequent equation of sexual with narrative acts, suggest a reformulation of questions based on these ambiguities. I asked earlier: why this particular story-teller? Is the ethos of the implied (authorial) narrator preserved or undermined by the narration it tries to contain? The old story-teller is given the final word, and although her denouement seems rather to tie a Gordian knot, we can postulate that in fact it is a noose meant to hang the wealthy (honourable) and educated (powerful) narrator who has pretended to control and contain her. Because the ultimate signifier is ambiguity, and the signs read in those texts—the linen "portraits"—are false, the tale of the blank page emerges as a criticism rather than a celebration of the aristocratic values which it depicts. However, while this predication of the subjectivity of the old story-teller upon the defeat of the narrator and the values he/she represents maybe satisfy one of our interpretative problems, it cannot be extended to our understanding of the story's ending. For this, we need to look again at the second set of textual topics which were first indicated by the story-teller's description of her own profession. Her power of narrative, I observed, is an oral one. It is passed down from grandmother to granddaughter, and is therefore a feminine narrativity. Men write—the story-teller metonymically calls the authoritative writer a "royal and gallant pen"—or inscribe their narratives sexually, drawing their "ink" from their virgin brides. The women who tell stories for a living are defined by their experience—by implication, sexual ("my mother's mother, the black-eyed dancer, the oftenembraced" (BP 99) —which they clearly neither wish nor need to conceal. The princesses, on the other hand, due to the constraints of their class which prescribe very specific duties for them—including to remain chaste until the allotted and politically-arranged moment—cannot tell stories, in the sexual

178 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY sense with which the text imbues the narrative act. We recall that the old story-teller's first experience with narrativity is the passive one of being "told stories" by young men whose perlocutionary discourse suggests the Song of Solomon. The silence which the princesses must keep is always potentially filled; it "tells a finer tale than any of us," because it does tell its own tale, not the one imposed upon it by a seducer or husband. The blank page which hangs among all of those inscribed pages in the convent's picture gallery narrates a story which must be "deeper, sweeter, merrier and more cruel" to the old women than any other because it tells of a woman who has defiantly appropriated the power of narration. This unnamed princess who has narrated her story through the blank page, rather than being narrated to, is the cause of other women's respect and envy. The story-teller is careful to show that those other princesses, who view the blank canvas with such respect, are now "worldly wise, dutiful, long-suffering queens, wives and mothers" (BP 105), giving them motive for their admiration of a comrade's escape from those (apparently) unenviable roles. From this process of proposition and inference, we can conclude that the story being told by "The Blank Page" is the story of narrative power—who possesses it and the cost of that purchase. Women who abide by the rules of a highly artificial society—one which valorizes abstractions like "honour" above the concrete reality of peasants, beggars and story-tellers—are silenced, while those who appropriate language and narrativity are stigmatized. Secretly, however, they are idolized—in a shrine into which men cannot venture. By both commenting ironically on the foibles of a disintegrating aristocratic system (the "vast crumbling structure" with its impoverished patrons) and by thematizing the sexual and social power of narrative, the old story-teller increases her own authority at the expense of the invisible—and now silent—narrator, who, we have inferred, represents a privileged class. In conclusion, while it is apparent that metafiction is an historically ubiquitous and recently re-emphasized element of literature, and therefore requires a more systematic and less metaphorical critical approach, most studies of the subject do not satisfy this requirement. Umberto Eco's appropriations of Peircian semiotics, theories of the reader's role insemiosis, and concepts of modal logic and rhetorical strategy provide a method for reading critically those texts which contain a double Model Reader (that is, those texts which are ambiguous) and which inscribe within themselves (mis)directions for their own interpretation.

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Dinesen's short tale, "The Blank Page," is also paradoxical in its narrative logic and also deploys metafictional devices which enable the critical reader to disambiguate the text. A sequence of questions, based on "encyclopedic" knowledge (cultural, intertextual or generic, ideological, etc.) activated by the text, are asked during the reading process, then manipulated, modified or negated by the text. This is the process of inference and abduction which distinguishes Eco's semiotic analysis. In "The Blank Page" the containment of a secondary, and socially distinct, narrator by another, unseen and authoritative narrator is one of the signposts directing the reader to question central assumptions in this text—for example, the generic and social conventions deliberately grounding the narrative which equate aristocratic and spiritual values, power and virtue. Allusions to sexuality which overlap discussions of narrativity are other signals which provoke the reader to look for ironic or ambiguous meaning. Finally, paradoxical structures—white linen = virginity / white linen = loss of virginity—subvert doxical structures—that is, structures dependent upon common knowledge, therefore coded, therefore ideological. By inscribing such presuppositions so as to mislead the Model Reader, and by plotting pragmatic strategies whereby the critical reader can "enjoy the defeat of the former," the text can create an "experience of transformation for its reader" (as Eco says of his own novel, The Name of the Rose)8. "The Blank Page" does precisely this: the metanarrative reflects itself in order to "reveal the reader to himself" (Eco, Postscript 49). It calls attention to the problematical elements of fictional reality, of narrative power (particularly over the passive, overly-cooperative reader—in this story, princesses imprisoned in palaces), and of the ideological assumptions upon which a literary text or genre is based.

8 In Postscript to "The Name of the Rose," trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, 1984) Eco describes how he constructs the Model Reader in his novel: "I wanted to create a type of reader who, once the initiation was past [i.e. the first 100 pages of the novel which "constructs a reader suitable for what comes after"—(48)], would become my prey—or, rather, the prey of the text—and would think he wanted nothing but what the text was offering him. A text is meant to be an experience of transformation for its reader. . . . And then, if you are good, you will realize how I lured you into this trap, because I was really telling you about it at every step, I was carefully warning you that I was dragging you to your damnation" (53).

The Phenomenon of Intertextuality and the Role of Androgyny in Isak Dinesen's "The Roads Round Pisa" Casey Bjerregaard Black Northern State University

Intertextuality can be construed in a narrow way as a synonym for the explicit or indirect references that go by the name of allusion. More broadly conceived, however, to speak of intertextuality is to recognize that all literary texts are interlinked and that no single text is an island of meaning unto itself. As Jonathan Culler puts it in Structuralist Poetics: A work can only be read in connection with or against other texts, which provide a grid through which it is read and structured by establishing expectations which enable one to pick out salient features and give them a structure.1

Thus a poem is understood not only through establishing the significance of specific literary allusions but also through its relation to a whole body of conventions and preconceived notions as to what a poem is and how it is to be read. This paper describes how we make sense of a Dinesen tale, in this case "The Roads Round Pisa," in the context of this broader idea of text as intertext where the text becomes that process of realizing an intersubjectivity that Julia Kristeva describes in Semeiotike. When we read a story by Isak Dinesen, we can read it in much the same way that we can read James Branch Cabell, an author much admired by Isak Dinesen. In a letter to her mother dated 12 August 1923, she writes: I was very interested just then in an American, Branch Cabell's books, which are also full of fantasy, and all this has made me wonder whether a new direction in literature is about to develop, making use of fantasy. I don't think you would much care for "Jurgen," which I recommended to Thomas, because it is rather shocking; but I have read another of his books, "The Cream of the Jest," which I think is excellent, and in which I have found—sans comparaison—many of my ideas, for instance those in "The Revenge of Truth," about life and death and art, and so on. . . .2

1 2

Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP, 1975) 139. Letters From Africa: 1914-1931 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981) 164-165. 180

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Of this American writer, whose endowed chair at the University of Virginia, in a twist of fate that Dinesen would surely have appreciated, is held by Robert Langbaum, Lin Carter has written: Cabell regarded novel-writing as a game; you, his readers, may if you so desire, approach the reading of his novels as a sort of game. Or you may read the novels for sheer entertainment, just as you wish. But for the gamesmen among you, let me point out the sort of playful prankishness Cabell indulges in, it being clearly understood that exploring Cabell and looking for the hidden meanings, the anagrams, the tricks, can be as absorbing as trying to make sense out of Finnegans Wake.3

We, too, can read Dinesen in these two modes. We can read Dinesen the way an "uninitiated" reader reads, i.e., for the exoticism of her plots, for the flights of fancy, for the queerness of expression, or for the "beauty" or "poetry" of her descriptions. We need only look at the first reviews of Seven Gothic Tales reprinted in Blixeniana 1980* to be reminded how puzzled and delighted or puzzled and put off readers were on first reading. Or we can enter into the game and revel in the deciphering of the text. The game-playing reader finds his/her pleasure in the writerly text by unravelling its seams at those junctures where there is an opening . . . where, to paraphrase Barthes' The Pleasure of the Text, language gapes like the flash of skin where clothing reveals hidden charms and leads us into a field of significance marked by appearance and disappearance.5 When we read Dinesen in a jaded mode, that is, with a view to read for significance, we try to "make sense" of a particular passage by unravelling the chain of associations that occur not only in the space of the text but in that intersecting text that is the* reader him/herself. As Richard Harland puts it, "Reading for 'significance', we ... 'run' the threads of meaning back across all the other texts from which our given text was formed. "6 In other

3 Introduction, The Cream of the Jest, by James Branch Cabell (1917; New York: Ballantine, 1971) 4-5. 4 Grethe Rostb011, "Om Syv fantastiske Fortaellinger. Tilblivelsen, udgivelsen og modtagelsen af Karen Blixens f0rste bog. En dokumentation," Blixeniana 1980, eds. Hans Andersen and Frans Lasson (Copenhagen: Karen Blixen Selskabet, 1980) 29-268. 5 The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973; New York: Hill and Wang, 1975) 9-10. 6 Superstructuralism: The Philosophy of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism. (New York: Methuen-New Accents, 1987) 168.

182 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY words, as I read "The Roads Round Pisa" I am trying to naturalize or recuperate the fissures in the fabric of the text and assimilate them into a structure of meaning that holds together. If I can make the pieces fit, I win the game. Jonathan Culler points out that this process of assimilation or interpretation goes by many names besides naturalization or recuperation, including vraisemblablisation, which is the placing of a text in a framework to make it legible and intelligible (138). He distinguishes five levels of vraisemblance: First, there is the socially given text, that which is taken as the "real world". Second, but in some cases difficult to distinguish from the first, is a general cultural text: shared knowledge which would be recognized by participants as part of culture and hence subject to correction or modification but which none the less serves as a kind of "nature". Third, there are the texts or conventions of a genre, a specifically literary and artificial vraisemblance. Fourth, comes what might be called the natural attitude to the artificial, where the text explicitly cites and exposes vraisemblance of the third kind so as to reinforce its own authority. And finally, there is the complex vraisemblance of specific intertextualities, where one work takes another as its basis or point of departure and must be assimilated in relation to it. (140)

If we apply this schema to "The Roads Round Pisa"7 we find that these different levels of "making real" or of naturalizing the text correspond to the strategies we as readers and critics generally employ in our interpretations. The first type of vraisemblance describes the epic or monologic aspects of the story: the normal, discursive, historical aspect of the language which seems to reproduce a reality that we recognize as the real world. Thus Augustus has begun a letter to his friend Karl in the first chapter, and as is to be expected in a normal world, he indeed returns to finish it. Quite simply, the language serves to represent an external reality however unusual that reality may be. Readings at this level could be said to be superficial, although I do not mean to attach a pejorative connotation to the word. We accept Dinesen's world unconsciously and revel in an apparently closed universe with an omniscient narrator.

We find the second type of vraisemblance in Dinesen's reference to a

7

Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1972). "The Roads Round Pisa" contained within this collection will hereafter be referred to as RRP.

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shared, cultural text. When the Countess Carlotta di Gampocorta says of Augustus von Schimmelmann, "He is a nobleman, and that is the only person I need" (RRP 170), we understand the significance of Augustus' nobility because we share a cultural awareness of the privileges and responsibilities of the nobleman. Similarly, references to the Duke of Berri, to the etiquette pertaining to duels, or to Venus, or Bacchus, or Swedenborg, rely on a cultural context that is operable only if and when the reader brings these texts to the intertextual playground. The third level of vraisemblance operates when intelligibility comes about through relating the text to a set of specifically literary norms. For example, when we read a Dinesen tale, our reading is informed by the expectations we have from reading other Dinesen stories: we know what a Dinesen story is supposed to be like. In much the same way, we naturalize certain attitudes towards the world, or life, that are expressed in the story by relating them to what we know of the author so that we get a kind of psychological vraisemblance. Less dependent on the biography of Dinesen is a related technique that relates the text to a narrative persona; we find coherence in the text by relating the speech of a Carlotta, a Pellegrina, or a Cardinal, or any of dozens of characters who are said to speak for Isak Dinesen. Isak Dinesen is thus understood as not merely another name for Karen Blixen but as a purely literary construct: a narrative persona. In either case, the text is made sense of by relating it to an outside set of literary conventions. The most obvious set of conventions that Jonathan Culler describes in connection with the third level of vraisemblance concerns the conventions we associate with genre. As Culler puts it: "The function of genre conventions is essentially to establish a contract between writer and reader so as to make certain relevant expectations operative and thus to permit both compliance with and deviation from accepted modes of intelligibility" (147). For example, in his Introduction a la Litterature Fantastique, Tzvetan Todorov defines the genre of fantastic literature as lying between the supernatural and the strange: the reader must hesitate before the appearance of a ghost and remain in a state of uncertainty between a scientific or a poetic explanation.8 Thus, when Dinesen gives us a Prioress who turns into a Monkey, or vice versa, she is loath to tell interviewers what it means, for that would destroy the reader's hesitation and the uncertainty at the core of the story. As she told Eugene Walter when he remarked that many people were mystified by 8

Introduction a la Litterature Fantastique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970)

184 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY "The Monkey:" "Yes, I grow weary from the questions people ask me about that particular tale. But that is a fantastic story; it should be interpreted that way. The principle is this: Let the Monkey resolve the mess when the plot has got too complicated for the human characters. . . ."9

Of course, although the plot may be too complicated for the characters, we assume, according to our assumptions about what a Dinesen story should be, that the plot will not be too complicated for the author herself, and so we have two conflicting kinds of vraisemblance at the third level. On the one hand, our expectations of what a Dinesen tale is and our practice of finding coherence in our understanding of the author lead us to assume that the story is at least transparent to the author and therefore ultimately explicable. On the other hand, our expectation that the story should function as a fantastic story a la Todorov and Horace Walpole leads us to make sense of the story in a very open-ended and subversive way.10 By meaning just what it says and no more, "The Monkey" refuses to let us recuperate it and make it real by explaining the weird either through recourse to the scientifically explainable or to the unabashedly supernatural." Consequently, our idea of what is real and how we reproduce the real in writing comes under fire from such a fantastic story. This contradiction is not a serious one, however, because we shy away from allegorizing the Prioress/Monkey transformation (and thus resolving the fantastic uncertainty in accordance with some kind of psychological vraisemblance) not only because to do so runs against traces of a generic model of the fantastic, but also because we have recourse from a different direction to the level of vraisemblance that links us to our knowledge of Dinesen. For example, we know that Dinesen expressed to Eugene Walter her impatience with attempts to allegorize her stories: "People are always asking me what is the significance of this or that in the tales—'What does this symbolize: What does that stand for?' And I always have a difficult time making them believe that I intend everything

9

"Isak Dinesen," Writers at Work, ed. George Plimpton, The Paris Review Interviews 4 (New York: Viking-Penguin, 1974) 18. 10 See Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (New York: Methuen, 1981). 11 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (1970; Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP, 1980) 47.

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as it's stated. It would be terrible if the explanation of the work were outside the work itself." (Walter 15)

Thus psychological and generic vraisemblance can reinforce each other as we interpret "The Monkey." In much the same way, our own competence as readers of literature informs our reading of "The Immortal Story:" we know what to expect from this kind of story, and we know also what to expect from this self-styled Scheherazade. In sum, these "texts"—the text that is our set of expectations of a Dinesen story, the text that is our psychological profile of the author and the narrative persona, and the text that reflects our ideas about what a short story, or a fantastic tale, should be—determine how we make sense of "The Roads Round Pisa" on a literal level. The fourth level of vraisemblance, where the text either openly or covertly claims that meaning is not to be found at the level of psychological or generic vraisemblance, plays a subtle though important role in our struggle to make "The Roads Round Pisa" intelligible. We have seen how the first two levels of vraisemblance allow us to relate the characters and action to that text which is our innate conception of what reality is and how it is represented through the written word, and how this reality matches a cultural text (i.e., what it means to be a nobleman). And we can readily see how Dinesen, in her letters, essays, and interviews as well as in her stories themselves, embraces generic patterns. What is less immediately apparent is that the multidimensional intertextuality of Dinesen's tales does not stop at the third level of vraisemblance. For they are self-conscious and reflexive stories; the storyteller is aware of her generic constraints and draws our attention to them. An example of this self-awareness that verges on self-mockery occurs at the end of the first section of "The Roads Round Pisa" after Augustus has been looking at his smelling-bottle. The painting on the bottle shows "a landscape with large trees and a bridge across a river," and underneath there is a ribbon with the inscription "Amide sincere." He subsequently speculates on whether he should "some day . . . come across the bridge under the trees and see the rock and the castle" (RRP 168). After this quite obvious piece of foreshadowing, the narrator, relating Augustus' thoughts, concludes: How mysterious and difficult it is to live, he thought, and what does it all mean? Why does my life seem to me so terribly important, more important than anything that has ever happened? Perhaps in a hundred

186 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY years people will be reading about me, and about my sadness tonight, and think it only entertaining, if even that. (RRP 168)

This indirect speech is similar to an aside, not unlike the self-deprecating asides that Sterne surprises and delights us with in Tristram Shandy. A parallel that strikes closer to home would be the kind of dramatic aside Osceola introduces into "The Revenge of Truth," where Mopsus tells Jan Bravida that he is the one who has written the play in which they are both acting: MOPSUS: . . . Sir, I'm the one that has written the play. JAN BRAVIDA: What play? MOPSUS: This play, Jan Bravida, and I don't mind telling you that I'm very satisfied indeed with it. I think I've been successful in everything except for my own character. Isn't it awful to have been successful in everything and to have presented everything clearly, except for one's own character? I can tell you, my hair stands on end when I remember that we have only seven scenes left. But you know, Jan Bravida, I'm going to sacrifice the whole plot in order to make my own character clear in those seven scenes. Ah, what did I say? The terrible fate of the artist is that I can't do that. I love you all better than I do myself, I, the one who ought to love myself. Oh, let it be entered into your account, as at some time it will into mine—he loved these puppets better than himself, for their characters he sacrificed his own soul.12

This Pirandelloesque rupture of the normal boundaries in drama has the same purpose as the lightly mocking tone that Augustus has towards the story in which he is appearing and that the narrator has when the "immortal 'Revenge of Truth'" is introduced into "The Roads Round Pisa." When the narrator pronounces, "Everybody will remember . . . " and then proceeds with a detailed exposition of the most salient features of the comedy, the reader—alert to the extreme rarity of self-contained explanations of literary allusions in Dinesen's authorship—smiles at the fun Dinesen is poking at herself. Less overt in its self-mockery, but no less reflexive, are instances where the story turns inward upon itself and puts itself in question. When Prince Pozentiani finishes telling the story of the Bravo to Giovanni, the young Prince remarks that it was not only too long, but that it had no end. Pozentiani replies, "What an excellent critic you are ... not only of your

12

Donald Hannah, "Isak Dinesen" and Karen Blixen: The Mask and the Reality (New York: Random House, 1971) 194-5.

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own Tuscan songs, but of modern prose as well. That exactly was the fault of my story: that it had no end. A charming thing, an end" (RRP 192-3). Just as the end to the story of the Bravo is found in the story that frames it, "The Roads Round Pisa," so do we look for the ending of "The Roads Round Pisa" in a higher level of intelligibility. When Augustus declines to let the old lady in on the secret of the smelling-bottle, denies her a story "which she would forever have cherished and repeated" (RRP 216) and returns to his own self-centred reflection in the mirror, we see Augustus' circular fate as a "statement about the imaginative ordering of the world that takes place in literature" (Culler 151). By failing to create a story, the materials for which lie readily at hand, Augustus condemns himself to a peripheral, parasitic, and shadow-like existence, which we see confirmed in "The Poet." His story becomes, then, not merely a story about a Hamlet-like character and his search for truth, but a story about the role of storytelling itself. Made sense of at the fourth level of vraisemblance, this reflexive nature of the story itself makes of "The Roads Round Pisa" a kind of metafiction. In other words, we make sense of the "The Roads Round Pisa" by saying that it is a story whose message is that life is a story whose ending you must fashion for yourself even though as an artist you must, like Mopsus, sacrifice your soul to the plot. To illustrate the fifth level of vraisemblance that operates in our intertextual reading of "The Roads Round Pisa," we can backtrack and follow the significance of the road in the story. On the simplest level of vraisemblance we take "road" to mean what it means in the real world: a way between more or less distant places and upon which carriages can travel and have accidents. However, in conformity with what we expect of introspective, romantic tales, "road" is quickly associated with the idea of truth: Augustus reflects, "[w]hat is the truth about a mountain in Africa that has no name and not even a footpath across it? The truth about this road is that it leads to Pisa, and the truth about Pisa can be found with books written and read by human beings" (RRP 165). A road becomes a symbol for the search for truth. In this, it is also much like a mirror, a friendship, and love and marriage: A glass tells you the truth about yourself. . . . So your own self, your personality and existence are reflected within the mind of each of the people whom you meet and live with, into a likeness, a caricature of yourself, which still lives on and pretends to be, in some way, the truth about you. Even a flattering picture is a caricature and a lie. A friendly and sympathetic mind, like Karl's, he thought, is like a true mirror to the soul, and that is what made his friendship so precious to me. Love ought

188 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY to be even more so. It ought to mean, along the roads of life, the companionship of another mind, reflecting your own fortune and misfortunes, and proving to you that all is not a dream. The idea of marriage has been to me the presence in my life of a person with whom I could talk, tomorrow, of the things that happened yesterday. (RRP 165-6)

If such ideas strike us as being clich6s, it is only because they rely on the "texts" within us to which we have recourse as we make sense of "The Roads Round Pisa." We are still not beyond the level of generic vraisemblance. Similarly, when old Carlotta (about whose identity we are still in the dark at this point in the story, except that she has been transformed from "a bald old man with a refined face and a large nose" into "a fine old lady of imposing appearance" [RRP 169]) says of Prince Pozentiani's proposal to Rosina, "I was so happy and thankful that I saw my own face smile to me in the mirror, like the face of a blessed spirit" (RRP 173), our practice in reading Dinesen stories tells us to connect the Carlotta and Pozentiani friendship with that of Augustus and Kurt, and by extension, to that suggested by the conversation about male and female relationships between Augustus and Agnese when he still thinks she is a he. Likewise, when upon repeating the story of the Bravo to Agnese and being asked to repeat certain words and figures, Augustus sees in Agnese's face "as if reflected in a mirror, the expression in the face of the old Prince when he had been so deeply insulted" (RRP 196), we know from our having read other Dinesen stories to connect the telling and the retelling of a tale with the search for truth, with friendship, and with love. In linking Dinesen's usage of the road with her ideas of truth, friendship, love, and self-knowledge, we are finding, or creating a network of thematic veins that operate on our act of interpretation precisely because they draw attention to themselves. The reader chooses to play the intertextual game; he/she mines these veins by running threads of significance through the text; he/she associates them with generic models and sets of expectations, and finds that the story begins to cohere on a level beyond the kind of higher synthesis that entails a reading of the story as a kind of metafiction. This fifth level of vraisemblance operates when the author goes beyond poking fun at her own genre and the particular conventions associated with her literary production. When Dinesen insists on the reality, the vraisemblance, of her own parody, then she enters a sphere of verbal irony that forces the text to remain open, unresolved, and in a deconstructive

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movement, ultimately plural in meaning. Jonathan Culler explains this radical form of parody where the text at hand takes another text as its point of departure and thereby opposes two modes of vraisemblance (that which naturalizes the text at hand and that which undercuts it). He compares this parodying of another text to verbal irony, and he emphasises that aspect of irony which presupposes the possibility of misunderstanding. He cites Kierkegaard, who "maintains that the true ironist does not wish to be understood" (Culler 154). Moreover, Culler adds, verbal irony is even more subtle and complex than dramatic irony, since there are no situational cues or explicit signals which announce to the reader how the conflict between apparent and assumed meanings, or the surface and hidden meanings, is to be resolved. Culler explains: The perception of verbal irony depends upon a set of expectations which enable the reader to sense the incongruity of an apparent level of vraisemblance at which the literal meaning of a sentence could be interpreted and to construct an alternative ironic reading which accords with the vraisemblance which he is in the process of constructing for the text. (154-5)

It is this kind of parody which goes beyond light-hearted self-mockery to put in question the vraisemblance of the characters and plot of the story at hand—this fifth level of vraisemblance—that makes Dinesen's texts so difficult, and so rewarding. An example of this fifth level, ironic vraisemblance, is the moment when Dinesen moves beyond a jovial, self-deprecating reference to "the immortal 'Revenge of Truth'" (RRP 198) and makes specific allusions to the message of the marionette comedy. At this point we enter an intertextual space which forces us to naturalize the juxtaposition. We must make an interpretive decision about what significance "The Revenge of Truth" has for "The Roads Round Pisa" and, more specifically, for Augustus. Since the passage is filled with verbal irony, we can make sense of it in two ways. When the narrator quotes Amiane saying that we are all acting in a marionette comedy and that the most important thing in a marionette comedy is to keep the ideas of the author clear, we can take the narrator's and Augustus' word for it that Amiane's speech seems "to hold a lot of truth" (RRP 199). To do so is to accept the text on a literal level, to remain on a low level of intertextual vraisemblance. We accept Augustus' thought that he has come into a marionette play and will not go out of it again. However, when we read the passage with a sense of parody and irony, that is, when we bring to the passage our knowledge of the story at hand,

190 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY our knowledge of what becomes of Augustus in "The Poet," and our knowledge of "The Revenge of Truth," we begin to see that Dinesen is making fun of Augustus. For we know through this fifth-order intertextual structuring that, in fact, Augustus ends up at the end of "The Roads Round Pisa" out of the play and engrossed in his own image in the pocket mirror. We know from "The Poet" that in later life he does not find the road leading from a life of pleasure into the heart of things, for as Councillor Mathiesen's "real friend" to whom he was "united by many sympathies and common tastes," Augustus has "accepted the happiness of life . . . not as he really believed it to be, but, as in a reflection within a mirror, such as others saw it."13 We also know that the moral of "The Revenge of Truth" is that lies become truths, i.e., reality is reversed, and from Mopsus' confession to Jan Bravida we know that the artist who creates life must paradoxically sacrifice his own soul to achieve his own story. Augustus, then, emerges as a parody of a romantic, Hamlet-like character with a "heavy and melancholic disposition," and reading ironically now, we interpret Augustus' thoughts to be sadly deluded. He thinks he has found the drama of his life, a drama which, we have been given to believe, has his life as "terribly important, more important than anything that has ever happened" (RRP 168) when in reality he is merely a bit player in someone else's play, "one of the dogs of God," or a lover who is forced to be content with a piece of dry bread rather than the delights of the whole cookery book (RRP 198). Augustus, we sense, is a ridiculous and tragic character who cannot author his own story. The "ending" (although the story only ends in a literal reading) of "The Roads Round Pisa" culminates in the vision of Augustus as one who comes close to the truth, but fails to see it. The passage mirrors his blindness and insight by incorporating the verbal irony that presupposes the possibility of misunderstanding. For without reading for irony, that is, without reading the passage in light of a "text" which takes its own parody seriously, the passage must be read at face value. Thus, Augustus' decision not to tell the old lady of his own smelling-bottle, which matches the one she has just given him, actually is justified by his feeling that, in the coincidence he has encountered, fate has reserved something for him alone. His parting with "expressions of sincere friendship," too, is taken literally. Even his final gazing into the glass is naturalized into an understandable, poignant, and romantic melancholia. It is, in Pozentiani's words, a "charming" ending.

13

"The Poet," Seven Gothic Tales (1934; New York: Vintage-Random House, 1972) 380.

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However, although the passage can be read for this apparent or surface meaning, our need to make the text fit with the "veins" or intertextual threads that undermine this superficial reading forces us to read the passage ironically. Augustus' refusal to share his insight with the old woman and thus make "a tale which she would forever have cherished and repeated" (RRP 216) becomes a colossally egotistical blunder. His "expressions of sincere friendship" turn to ashes on his lips. And his thoughtful looking into the small pocket mirror reminds us that he has not advanced along the "road," that he is back where he started, and that his self-centred refusal to make a story condemns him to a life of blindness, of dreams, of second-hand pleasures, and emptiness. His image in the mirror is distorted like those he saw "in the mirror-room of the Panoptikon, in Copenhagen" (RRP 166). Savouring the irony, we understand that for Augustus to refuse the telling and retelling of a tale is to abandon the road to truth, friendship, and love. To read Dinesen like James Branch Cabell or James Joyce is to read as what Barthes describes as an aristocratic reader. To find the seams within a text—seams that appear within our "circular memory" (Barthes 36) as we read intertextually—to find what he calls the "interstice[s] of bliss" occurs not in the reading for plot, but in "applied" reading. As Barthes puts it: "[N]ot to devour, to gobble, but to graze, to browse scrupulously, to rediscover—in order to read today's writers—the leisure of bygone readings: to be aristocratic readers" (13). To read Dinesen and be attuned to the verbal irony which emerges from the circular intertext is to read her as a modem writer—not as an anachronism—not as a copy of a nineteenth-century style—but as a writer of what Julia Kristeva, in describing Bakhtin's work on dialogical discourse, called the carnivalesque.14 Like Cabell, Dinesen uses elements of the fantastic, "pathological states of soul, such as madness, split personalities, daydreams, dreams and death" (Kristeva 53) to free the language of the text to allow it to include the scandalous and the eccentric. Dinesen's discourse reads like the Menippean discourse that Kristeva describes in S£m£iotike: This discourse is made up of contrasts: virtuous courtesans, generous bandits, wise men that are both free and enslaved, and so on. It uses abrupt transitions and changes; high and low, rise and fall, and misalliances of all kinds. Its language seems fascinated with the "double" (with its own activity as graphic trace, doubling an "outside") and with the logic of

14

The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia UP, 1986) 48-51.

192 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY opposition replacing that of identity in defining terms. It is an all-inclusive genre, put together as a pavement of citations. (53)

This carnivalesque dialogism which underscores the plurality of identity crops up in the allusiveness of "The Roads Round Pisa," in its pastiche-like qualities, in Augustus' "pathological state of soul," and most notably in the androgyny of its characters. Therefore, Agnese's bisexual identity, Carlotta's transformation from "a bald old man with a refined face and a large nose" into "a fine old lady of imposing appearance" (RRP 169), and the pairing of characters, for example, of Carlotta and Agnese with Pozentiani when their faces are seen as his as if in a mirror (RRP 173, 196) serve to double the text. In this way, androgyny serves to merge the characters in a metonymic rather than a metaphoric movement, and this in turn casts doubt on the reality or the firstorder vraisemblance of the text. The role of androgyny and intertextuality in "The Roads Round Pisa," then, is ultimately to subvert reality and to mark Dinesen as a dialogic or polyphonic writer. Or, as Prince Pozentiani puts it, as a writer of "modern prose" (RRP 193).

Isak Dinesen's "The Pearls:" Resentment and the Economy of Narrative Toby Foshay University of Victoria Most writers on Isak Dinesen's fiction point to its narrative traditionalism. The precisely described historical settings, the distinct characters with their clearly determined social identities, and the classical third person omniscient narration employed by Dinesen in her tales are cited in evidence. But, as Robert Langbaum observes, this surface traditionalism is principally dedicated not to the unfolding of a conventional diachronic plot, but to the construction of a synchronic thematic structure. As he describes it: The main question in an Isak Dinesen story is not what will happen next, but what is happening now or what is the meaning of what is happening now. Her method is a way of penetrating in depth. It is a way of penetrating, through . . . a structure like that of Chinese boxes arranged one inside the other, to the heart of life.1

To the outward teleological completeness, then, of the sense of an ending, Langbaum prefers the image of an intricate penetration to a thematic centre, to what he calls the "heart of life." That is, he works with the same mind/body binarism of experience as does classical fiction and criticism, pointing out that, as a modern writer, Dinesen goes inward to preoccupation with issues of consciousness; but she presents them thematically, rather than formally and stylistically, as do modernist writers. We might say that Dinesen is more like D.H. Lawrence in this respect than like James Joyce, for instance. In an interesting essay entitled "Karen Blixen's Place in Modern Literature," Aage Henriksen makes a similar observation about the surface traditionalism of Dinesen's tales and their "depth structure." He says: [Karen Blixen's fictional world] is a closed universe, and modernistic

1

Isak Dinesen's Art: The Gayety of Vision (New York: Random House, 1965)

25.

193

194 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY literature lacks precisely those characters who have identity and who are clearly demarcated and express themselves in lines of ordered . . . syntax. In these respects Karen Blixen presents a closed almost naturalistically simple surface world, as opposed to disintegrated modern thinking. But her world is dangerously open downward in a depth dimension. And there it slips into not only . . . organic conditions, but also into violent inner conflicts.2

In his use of the same image of inner depths, there is an important difference from Langbaum in Henriksen's observation. He says that her fictional world is "open downward in a depth dimension," and I would emphasize his use of the word "open," in contrast to Langbaum's image of penetration to "the heart of life." Henriksen says that this inner openness is "dangerous," that it slips into the "violent inner conflicts" that make her a modernist, as much as into the "organic conditions" that make her a traditional and Romantic storyteller. In other words, Henriksen is careful not to envision a closed thematic centre for Dinesen's narrative structure, any more than a traditional closed and determined ending, and in this caution he is more successful than Langbaum in locating the peculiar modernity of Dinesen's fiction in such a thematic Anteriority. Henriksen goes on to describe this "open depth structure" in Dinesen as preoccupation with what, lacking more adequate language, he reluctantly calls "decision-making processes." He says, Certain questions must be asked about Karen Blixen's short stories, particularly those contained hi one central collection, Winter's Tales. . . . At what moment is the action determined? Which decisions are made? When does a character decide on a course of action that becomes a determining factor in the plot? (88)

What makes this preoccupation with decision-making an open structure in Dinesen becomes more evident, says Henriksen, when we are reminded of her apparently contradictory concern with the notion of destiny, of fate, of a larger than personal dimension to the crucial determinants of any major insight or act of will. What are these crucial factors in the governing decisions of individual lives? To what extent does consciousness act freely and to what extent is it directed by elements outside its conscious control?

2 "Karen Blixen's Place in Modern European Literature," The Nordic Mind: Current Trends in Scandinavian Literary Criticism, eds. Frank E. Anderson and John Weinstock (Lanham, MD: UP of America, 1987) 99.

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Are these elements beyond our control external, natural and social forces or are they internal and psychological? Henriksen observes: [Although the expression "the ways of destiny" hovers over Karen Blixen's tales like a solemn formula for obscure and inaccessible decisions, her own investigation of these paths was full of common sense and wisdom. It led through deeper and deeper layers of consciousness down to the depth where decisions are made and which borders on an even deeper level which is no longer a decision plane but a world of power that in unknown ways is subject to or connected to actions. (98)

This "world of power . . . subject to or connected to actions," then, is what the Anteriority of Dinesen's fiction opens into for Henriksen. He describes this depth openness as "a sphere or zone of events that can be said to be on the border between consciousness and organism" (93). He says: This analysis reaches down and says something about psychic processes—those psycho-organic or psycho-somatic processes that are little known. But that analysis also reveals how they, precisely because they are unconscious or semiconscious, are controlled by what happens in the outside world. (92)

Henriksen continues by saying that Dinesen focuses on a particular kind of interplay between mind, body, and outside world, "mainly the relationship between sex and consciousness" (93). Consciousness, sexual passion, and the external world in Dinesen's work are presented by Henriksen as having a mysterious interrelation in which no factor is necessarily dominant over the other, and so capable of organizing experience in a hierarchical and/or centred design. Henriksen points to a more complex interaction of world, desire, and will for which, in fact, he claims that as yet "there exists no language with which to describe these matters" (85). Dinesen's story "The Pearls," from her collection Winter's Tales, is an intriguing example of the interaction and complicity between consciousness, body, and world. The main character in the story, Jensine, daughter of a wealthy merchant, marries a not so wealthy young officer of an old landed family. They marry for love, she from her sheltered and secure middle class background and he from considerable experience of the world. They honeymoon in Norway. It is Spring, and the drama of the Norwegian landscape is a profound new experience for Jensine: The country was at its loveliest. . . . But hi these mountains everything seemed strangely to stand up vertically, like some great animal that rises

196 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY on its hind legs—and you know not whether to play, or to crush you. She was higher than she had ever been, and the air went to her head like wine. Also, wherever she looked there was running water, rushing from the skyhigh mountains into the lakes, in silvery rivulets or in roaring falls, rainbow-adorned. It was as if Nature itself was weeping, or laughing, aloud.3

The change of landscape is an integral element in a profound unsettling of Jensine's relation to the world. Nature is living being; it is "like some great animal that rises on its hind legs." The effect is deeply ambiguous for her; she doesn't know whether this creature has risen up "to play, or to crush you," whether "ln]ature itself was weeping, or laughing, aloud." The phallic quality of her experience of the landscape is appropriate to her concurrent initiation into sexual passion, about which she is likewise unsettled: "But now she reflected that [the god of love] had perhaps granted her prayer with a vengeance, and that her books had given her but little information as to the real nature of love" (Pearls 47). These inner and outer experiences, we are told, "converged into a sensation of the deepest alarm, a panic such as she had never experienced" (Pearls 47). Jensine's body is the scene of a crisis in her apprehension of self and world. The fundamental axis of her experience has shifted from horizontal to vertical: "[H]er idea of the earth was that it must spread out horizontally, flat or undulating, before her feet. But in these mountains everything seemed to stand up vertically" (Pearls 47). This shift in axis is a shift from the secure and supportive world of her bourgeois upbringing to a world of hazard, of uncertainty and ambiguity, which is as physical as it is emotional, as moral as it is intellectual. Her father had been "an honest tradesman, afraid both to lose his own money, and to let down his customers. . . . Her mother had been a God-fearing young woman, member of a pietistic sect" (Pearls 48). By contrast, her new husband is an adventuring aristocrat who had gambled, duelled, and spent a great deal of his money before the marriage. Deeply shocked by his attitude, Jensine thinks of him: "He is really a thief, or if not that, a receiver of stolen goods, and no better than a thief" (Pearls 49). And this moral response has its physical concomitant. She finds Alexander "was a human being entirely devoid, and incapable, of fear" (Pearls 48). He is not heroic and courageous:

3

Winter's Tales (New York: Random House, 1942) 47. "The Pearls" included in this collection will hereafter be referred to as Pearls.

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He was not braving, or conquering, the dangers of this world, but he was unaware of their existence. To him mountains were a playground, and all the phenomena of life, love itself included, were his playmates within it. "In a hundred years, my darling," he said, "it will all be one." (Pearls 48)

The background of her father's economic and her mother's spiritual fear becomes galvanized in Jensine's sexual panic; she becomes vulnerable to a world of physical, moral, and spiritual hazard through her romantic love for Alexander and the experience of sexual passion to which it leads. She decides that she can never have children with a husband who is so lacking in the probity, sobriety, and responsibility which has shaped her own physical apprehension of self and world. At the height of her panic, Jensine defines her relationship with Alexander in the charged language of religious sacrifice. Out of the intellectual, moral, and physical fear induced by the marriage, she speaks to herself straight from the Gospels. She says to herself: "'If it be possible, let this cup pass from me'" (Pearls 50). These are the words of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane on the evening before his crucifixion. Jensine's god of romantic love has become the Judeo-Christian Father exacting from her a bloody, all too literal, sacrificial immolation. Jensine's visceral response is to fight her husband, to make him vulnerable and earthbound like herself—as she puts it to herself, to "teach him fear." Her attempts to frighten him with her own injury or death are unsuccessful, and it is here that the pearls of the story's title enter. Alexander gives her a pearl necklace received from his grandmother, and it is the only thing over which he displays the least anxiety. When the string is accidentally broken, Jensine takes the opportunity to challenge Alexander with cavalier unconcern as to whether the cobbler who repairs them has lost or stolen one of the pearls. But Jensine's act of carefree trust in the cobbler's good nature, though it gives her a momentary sense of triumph, begins to haunt her conscience. Each of the pearls represents a year in the marriage of Alexander's grandparents, and she wonders: "What would it be ... which she had sacrificed for her victory over her husband? A year, or two years, of their married life before their golden wedding? . . . how was she to part with one of them?" (Pearls 57). It is the eve of the Prusso-Danish War of 1864. She is herself provoked by the courage expressed in the newspapers to actually count the pearls in the necklace. There should be fifty-two on the string—as Alexander quips: "It is easy to remember; it is the number of cards in a pack" (Pearls 53)—and to her horror she now finds fifty-three. Her reaction is that the Devil has played a trick on her: "She would not have been

198 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY surprised had she heard laughter from behind the sofa. Had the powers of the universe . . . combined, here, to make fun of a poor girl?" (Pearls 58). The new pearl, she discovers, is not only larger but is more valuable than the others combined. This pearl is Jensine's answer to her question about the vertical axis of experience, as to whether the powers of the physical universe, to which sexuality had exposed her, meant to "play" with her or "crush" her, were "weeping, or laughing, aloud." That the mask of fear and evil is revealed to hide a laughing face is more profoundly disorienting to her sacrificial view of the world than the malevolence of which she suspected it, and it leads to a crisis and a recognition that resolves the plot and its themes. The cobbler, whom she approaches for an explanation, writes back that he had played the trick on her, first because of the fear she betrayed that he would steal one of the pearls, and second because he admired her beauty. That is, he has acted out of a sense of erotic play. The pearl in question had been left behind and never reclaimed when he had restrung, in a similar fashion, the necklace of an English duchess. He explains: "I have no use for [this pearl]. It is better that it should be with a young lady. . . . I wish you good luck and that something pleasant may happen to you on the very same day as you get this letter" (Pearls 61). Jensine lifts her eyes from the letter and confronts her own image in the mirror, feeling herself suddenly like her husband, "a thief, or if not, a receiver of stolen goods" (Pearls 61). She admits defeat in her battle against fearless people, but, to her surprise, she does not mind her humiliation, consoling herself with the very saying that she earlier objected to: "In a hundred years . . . it will all be one." The central moment of recognition ensues: "Was there," she thought, "nothing remarkable left under the visiting moon?" At the word of the visiting moon the eyes of the image in the looking glass opened wide; the two women stared at one another intensely. Something, she decided, was of great importance, which had come into the world now, and in a hundred years would still remain. The pearls. In a hundred years, she saw, a young man would hand them over to his wife and tell the young woman her own story, just as Alexander had given them to her, and had told her of his grandmother. (Pearls 62)

It is clearly the cobbler who transforms the pearls for Jensine, both by the addition of the largest pearl and by the significance that it has coming from his hand. Through the cobbler and the pearls, she establishes a connection and a reconciliation between herself and both the natural and social worlds which is completely independent of her husband. But clearly

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the crux of the reconciliation takes place within Jensine herself, between two elements of herself, the familiar one ruled by fear and the emergent one that recognizes her freedom from fear and acknowledges that she herself plays with the physical universe and will leave behind an embodiment of herself in the pearls, and the story about her that will now be attached to them. It is necessary to point to what seems to be the thematic integrity of Dinesen's plot in "The Pearls." As Walter Benjamin observes, storytelling depends on the story being kept as free as possible from the impulse to explanation: "Actually," he says, "it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it. "4 And this is because, he says, there is no story for which the question as to how it continued would not be legitimate. The novelist, on the other hand, cannot hope to take the smallest step beyond that limit at which he invites the reader to a divinatory realization of the meaning of life by writing "Finis." (100)

The divinatory recognition at the end of "The Pearls," however, is precisely a realization of the continuity of tune through story, that one's story is the only means of overcoming the finitude of the body and the finality of experience in physical death. As Benjamin observes: "Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death" (94). But Dinesen not only invokes the sanction of death and finitude to motivate the plot of "The Pearls." The relation of story to death, and to embodiment generally, is precisely the theme of her story. This open and reflexive character of "The Pearls" resides in the "deep thematic structure" described by Henriksen. It seems to be the thematic point of the story that explanations of the world, like Jensine's middle class ethics and economics, and her sacrificial and violent religious interpretation of experience merely confirm their own expectations. "The Pearls" invites the recognition that narrative is a more primary and trustworthy discourse than a utilitarian or a sacrificial ethics, with their totalizing ambitions and practices. With all its surface simplicity of tone and traditional narrative appeal, "The Pearls" goes to the root of its own apprehension of itself as story about the cognitional primacy of storytelling. What is perhaps the most salient and immediate feature of the thematic structure of "The Pearls" is its post-Romanticism. Jensine's ideal of

4 "The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov," Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969) 89.

200 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY romantic union with Alexander is frustrated by the latter's attitude toward time. Alexander's fearlessness, his willingness to take large risks with his person and his fortune, arises out of a recognition of life's ephemerality: "In a hundred years my darling," he says, "it will all be one." When Jensine probes him about his attitude to the coming war, he replies: "To be a hero's widow . . . would be just the part for you my dear. . . . If I fall ... it will be a consolation to me to remember that I have kissed you as often as you would let me" (Pearls 60). Alexander's ability to live for the moment is as much feckless and irresponsible as it is carefree. Jensine is unable to achieve any grounded, predictable, and therefore spatial and horizontal relation to such a creature of the heights and the airy element of time. Her struggle to ground Alexander, to tie him to the earth by teaching him fear, utterly fails. It is only by means of the recognition which occurs through the cobbler's gift of the pearl that Jensine is reconciled to time and so, at the close of the story, can take up a stance alongside her husband, as they look from a window down into the street. Just prior to the central confrontation with her own image in the mirror, Jensine lets go of her romantic focus on her husband: "Alexander himself had become a very small figure in the background of life; what he did or thought mattered not in the least" (Pearls 61). Although romantic love cannot be assimilated too blithefully to the Romantic movement, I would argue that they are similarly structured. In "The Rhetoric of Temporality," Paul de Man describes the transition from the Romantic to the modem as a shift from the symbolic and spatial axis of experience to the allegorical and temporal axis. The structure of Romantic experience as symbolic is one of spatial union and identity between subject and object, consciousness and environment. The structure of modern experience as allegorical, he claims, is one of temporal difference and discontinuity between self and other. Jensine's relation to the world is taken up in the end not through Alexander, but through the pearls. When she recognizes their importance, she is looking at herself in the mirror: "[T]he two young women," the narrator says, "stared at one another intensely" (Pearls 62). This relation to the world, represented by the pearls, is a relation, not to something outside of herself, something spatial, but precisely to herself, or rather to another aspect of herself which had not previously appeared. Alexander recedes into the background because Jensine steps outside of herself as subject, herself being subjected to the world, and apprehends herself as object. This objectification of her consciousness takes place within time and is not contained by her aspirations for permanent, centred self-identity. It is only this objective entity, the self that becomes a

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narrative attached to the objective pearls, which becomes temporalized and externalized, not as a union of self with world but as a parallel and differential instantiation of her story, her history, that is her appearance and disappearance in time. What I have called her recognition, then, is an axial shift in which Jensine lets go of her "romantic" desire for symbolic union and identity between self and world, and embraces a temporal structure of difference, in which self persists not as symbol but as allegory, as the dual objective presences "pearl" and "story," which carry on materially in time after the disappearance of self as subject. Jensine is deliberate and intentional in her interpretation of her husband's attitude to life and to their marriage. The caution and positive fearfulness of her bourgeois worldview exemplifies what Nietzsche characterized as ressentiment, the "spirit of revenge," which in its ethical form is exemplified in his well known portrayal of Christianity as a "slave morality," the envy of the weak for the strong. However, in its less familiar metaphysical form, ressentiment is located by Nietzsche in what he calls "rancour against tune," against the transitory, and the very character of time as that which is always passing away. Jensine's inherited bourgeois caution, her refusal to take risks and insistence on her identity as wife and mother rooted in romantic union with Alexander—the whole apparatus of her physical and psychological life—is shattered by sexual involvement with her husband. The initiation into sexual passion challenges the spatial and horizontal stability of a world in which all opposites balance one another and are centred and rooted in a principle of identity with the transcendent, the contemplative vision of an eternal world that escapes time, change, loss, risk, hazard, alienation, and death. Jensine's inner refusal to have children with Alexander is based on anger and resentment at his cavalier assignment to her of the role of military widow. She feels herself a Christ-like sacrificial victim, to Alexander and the social order that sees in him an aristocratic and military ideal, the young and noble hero, the child of fortune. As Eric Cans defines it, resentment is "scandal at the significance of the other that imposes on the self the burden of insignificance."5 Cans demonstrates that resentment is not only at work, as Nietzsche argues, in the Judeo-Christian and the Greek metaphysical traditions—what Heidegger terms the onto-theo-logical tradition—but also in the literary tradition of the

5 The End of Culture: Toward a Generative Anthropology (Berkeley: U of California P, 1985) 59.

202 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY West beginning with Homer. The high cultural literary and artistic tradition of the West, says Cans, is constituted as scandalized response to the power and recognition accorded political, military, and economic, i.e., so called "worldly," power. The Iliad, like all high cultural works, says Cans, demonstrates the destructiveness of resentment, despite its preferability to simple violence, but it also illustrates that the worldly perception of significance as power is empty, and that the position of victim is the more ethically and epistemologically significant. In "The Pearls," Jensine is completely undermined in her relationship with Alexander, not only by the resentment she feels at his freedom and social status as aristocrat and military officer, but also simply as husband, as male. Her resentment creates a crisis in her own complicity in the values that support Alexander's significance. Her identification with the image of Christ as sacrificial victim merely serves to enhance Alexander's autonomy and her own reactionary servitude. When she receives the cobbler's letter revealing the practical joke of the pearl, she thinks: "It is all over. Now I know that I shall never conquer these people, who know neither care nor fear. It is as in the Bible; I shall bruise their heel, but they shall bruise my head. . . . " (Pearls 61). This reference to the Book of Genesis is important in that Jensine identifies herself, not with Eve (who will have pain in childbearing and be ruled over by her husband) but with the serpent. As the passage in Genesis reads: "The Lord God said to the serpent, 'Because you have done this cursed are you . . . I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed, he shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel'" (3:14-16). Jensine recognizes through the negative and resentful nature of her feelings that the Christian and Romantic ideological construction of woman is the vehicle of her subjection and insignificance, that she is not Christ but the serpent in this economy of identity, and that she is the conspirator in her own defeat and subjection in her very resentment at her husband's autonomy. With this realization her resentment dissolves, and for her Alexander himself becomes "a very small figure in the background of life" (Pearls 61). She no longer looks for significance in herself in mere relation or reaction to him, in a transcendental identity as Christian wife and mother, but sees herself as temporal, as a narrative attached to the pearls, which become her embodiment in an economy, not of fear and of sacrifice but of interaction and play between consciousness and its physical, temporal, sexual, and narrative expressions. "The Pearls" itself, as a narrative of the liberating power of narrative from resentment, demonstrates what it portrays. In expressing the fear and

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resentment of a woman toward the position of women as controlled by fear and resentment, it demonstrates the interaction of resentment, desire, and recognition as the expression and enactment of freedom, rather than the mere conception and representation of it in its static and sacrificial structure. The primacy of narrative in Dinesen is both an epistemological and a performative economy, and it is more profoundly epistemological precisely as performative, as a narrative about resentment which portrays its overcoming, through narrative by means of narrative. Jensine renounces patriarchal violence against herself, and embraces narrative. She renounces worldly subjective and subjected identity and embraces the play and ambiguity of allegorical representation of self in the pearls. Fictional transcendence of desire as resentment is imaginary, but its imagination enables us to recognize the imaginary nature of desire itself, and to see its profoundly ambiguous and relative character.

Deconstructing the Fictional World of "The Monkey" Cristina Gheorghe Carleton University

Fiction making becomes overtly what it has been covertly: a game of possible existence.

Lubomir Dolezel1 The paper explores the ironic narrative strategies used by Isak Dinesen to construct and deconstruct, authenticate and disauthenticate her fictional world, as illustrated by the short story "The Monkey." In examining this short story and through reference to instances from other stories, I will point out Dinesen's disauthenticating technique in light of Derrida's philosophic strategy of deconstruction. My main concern here is, however, possible world semantics. The term deconstruction will be used as authorial deconstruction, applied by Dinesen in her specific narrative technique, and lectorial deconstruction—this reader's response to Dinesen's deconstructive technique which reveals in her literary discourse analogies to Derrida's decentring, self-declared "political practice." It might seem a contradiction to state that a writer famous for her nostalgic return to a long-gone aristocratic era aims, through her highly wrought writing, to deconstruct what she portrays: a perfectly centred society, a patriarchal hierarchy. But, once we go through the many-layered deceit structures of her stories, we perceive that her real nostalgia is for an Origin before and without Adam, a world of winged lionesses and free eagles, of luciferous Liliths, a mythic world, which, like any other, precedes historical time or is constantly deferred through tune. As readers, we receive and actualize Dinesen's representations as stories invariably introduced by an elaborate spatial and temporal regressive technique of distancing. Dinesen uses deconstructive strategies of disauthentication in her fictional worlds to signify the rupture of the hierarchy of patriarchal society of her tune, with the result of directly or indirectly affecting the signified world both in her tune and now. The latter statement relies on an assumption of referentialty. It implies a certain degree of referentiality

1

"Mimesis and Possible Worlds," Poetics Today 9 (1988): 493. 204

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between signifying fictional world(s) and the signified real world. This axis of referentiality should be accessible to semiotic movement in both directions: from the real world to the fictional world for, first, extensional and then textual intensional representation,2 and from the fictional world to the real world to affect the latter and thus perform a deconstructive function on the patriarchal values of society in its social discourse. In other words, a partially mimetic semantics of fictionality must be assumed to understand and validate Dinesen's decentring literary practice!3 Dinesen's fictional world is to us an intensional logical construct generated through the narrative macro-structures of modalities from data available within the shared frames of social discourse.4 However, social discourse should not be seen as the origin or the transcendental signified of the signifying literary discourse, as tempting as it might seem to consider it so. Social discourse is itself a signifier of cultural frames, ideologies or codes. The signified is "deferred." The stories are ultimately an interplay between presence and absence, the presence of the literary discourse which signifies the absence of the represented social discourse and contains its traces. Or as Derrida said: "II n'y a rien hors du texte! "5 Referentiality is linked to the concepts of probability and mimesis. Speaking of probability entails speaking about the very nature of fiction. As a literary concept, probability refers to the manner in which some readers

2

Lubomir Dolezel, "Extensional and Intensional Narrative Worlds," Poetics 8 (1979): 197. 3 There is no agreement amongst theorists of possible world semantics concerning mimesis and referentiality; while Dolezel totally opposes any mimetic semantics as a valid explanation for the construction and authentication of fiction ("Mimesis and ^Possible Worlds," 481), Eco and Pavel allow referentiality as a condition of creation, existence, and reception of fictional worlds. (Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader [Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979] 221; Thomas Pavel, Fictional Worlds [Cambridge, Mass.; London: Harvard UP, 1986] 23). 4 See Fregean semantics (Gottlob Frege, "Uber Sinn und Bedeutung." Zeitschrift fur Philosophic und philosophische Kritik 100 [1892)] 25-50; English trans. Max Black in The Philosophical Review 3, Vol. LVII [May 1948]: 185-210.) for more about the principle of extensionality seen as referentiality between the primary or secondary narrative worlds and the real world while the intensional functions are the creative, actualizing mechanisms of texts; see (Eco 222) for the notion of intertextual frames as those constructed from the endoxa of the real world. 5 Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976) 158.

206 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY perceive narrative worlds (primary and secondary, extensional and intensional) as probable or not and the degree to which they are influenced by them. Probability is a consequence of the intensional functions (i.e. authenticating strategies andexplicitness/implicitness functions) exercised by an author to give fictional worlds an Aristotelian ethos or make the narrative events believable to readers. Dinesen uses a deconstructive strategy comprised of deceit structures: at the macro-level she deftly manipulates several narrative levels, creating endless possible worlds that interrelate in a mise-en-abyme model; at the micro-level, her protean characters wear disguises, masks and produce surprising revelations followed by perpetually renewed disguises (e.g.: Pellegrina Leoni, Kasparson, the Cardinal in their respective stories). She uses deceit structures to authenticate and then disauthenticate her narrative worlds, thus achieving an ironic free play of meaning in stories that generally have no closure. In his Poetics, Aristotle defines probability as that "which is believed by the wise men and that usually happens";6 he associates probability with the universals which he perceived to happen regularly. One should remember here that Dinesen's characters are, predominantly, stylized universal types, structuralist actants. But what Dinesen does with her universal types is to perpetually compel her readers to supplement the fictional beings' identities by revealing to them a surprising hidden opposite personality: cardinals are revealed to be actors and murderers (Kasparson), old spinsters create for themselves an imaginary courtesan's past (Miss Malin), or respectable Prioresses prove to have been monkeys all along. The characters' identities are governed by undecidability and constant deferral (e.g.: Pellegrina Leoni prefers to die rather than reveal her identity; Kasparson takes off only part of the masks that hide others, ad infinitum). Aristotle detailed his definition by adding that "one should choose impossibilities that are probable in preference to possibilities that are improbable" and "the impossible must be judged in relation to its poetic effect, to what is better than reality, or to the general opinion (doxa)" (Aristotle ch. 24, 1490 a 27). Aristotle links probability to actual evidence, and hence, it is seen in its referential aspect. The concept of probability is of such complexity as to lie between various other notions: the rational (logos), the persuasive (pithanori), opinion (doxd), and likeness (eikori). From its origins, i.e. the writings of Plato and Aristotle, Western aesthetic thought has been dominated by the idea of mimesis according to 6

Aristotle, Poetics, trans, and ed. James Hunton (New York: Norton, 1982).

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which fictional worlds, beings and functions are derived from reality; they are imitations/representations of actually existing entities and their events (Dolezel, "Mimesis" 475). In spite of the various changes of paradigm registered in the history of thought,7 changes that govern our view of the world and hence, the very possibility, or desirability, of a mimetic representation, mimesis continues to be an explicit or implicit desideratum for most authors and readers. Some contemporary critics8 signal new concepts of mimesis operating within modern and post-Modera fiction: mimesis as a mirroring of the creative process rather than of the product; others9 distinguish between non-imitative or pre-Platonic and imitative or Platonic mimesis. It is probably as naive to refute a natural desire to create a fictional world equal to the real world as it is to ami at a perfect imitation of the real world. If we consider Dinesen in postmodern terms, as a writer of metafiction, then we might be able to see how her slightly artificial, deliberately distanced, Gothic fictional world remains mimetic under this new understanding of the term; her writings are auto-referential, self-reflexive, describing their own process of creation. The Aristotelian concept of mimesis is balanced by harmonia, the myth-making instinct to create coherent worlds, to pattern and to organize the chaos of experience. The basic myth-making human instinct manifests itself in and through language and, specifically, through story-telling. For Dinesen, story-telling reaffirms the human potential to construct reality, to reassemble it as a mosaic (a frequent motif). We should not forget that most of her stories are about story-tellers who masterfully defend and define the art of story-telling while practicing it (e.g. "The Dreamers" and "The Deluge at Norderaey"). "The Monkey" is a self-reflexive story, but its metafictional level becomes apparent for the reader only when s/he has identified and decoded the intertextual allusions in the text. The following plot-summary should make this clear: In one of the Lutheran countries of northern Europe the Prioress of Kloster Seven, a non-religious retreat for unmarried ladies and

7

I am using the term "paradigm" in the sense used by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1977). 8 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody; the Teachings of Twentieth Century Art Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985). 9 Mihai Spariosu, "Introduction," Mimesis in Contemporary Theory, ed. Mihai Spariosu: i-xxix, Vol. I., The Literary and Philosophical Debate (Amsterdam, Phil.: Benjamins, 1984).

208 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY widows of noble birth, has a pet monkey that comes from an exotic country, Zanzibar. At the end of every autumn, at the change of seasons, the monkey wanders off into the woods, feeling the call of a freer life. While the monkey is away, the Prioress is known to behave a little strangely. During one of these absences, Boris, who is the Prioress' nephew and godson, and a lieutenant in the Royal guards, comes to visit and asks for her help. He has apparently been involved in a homosexual scandal (although we never learn clearly the form of his sexual offence) and to avoid dishonour and exile from "that world, that is of any significance" (Monkey 111)10 he must be married immediately. Aunt Cathinka chooses Athena, a fierce, statuesque, archetypal young maiden, whose name is perfectly suited to her personality, as Boris' potential bride. Athena's father, an exiled Polish count who lives "in a sort of Olympus" (Monkey 122) (another reinforcement of the Greek analogy), has been an ardent admirer of Boris' beautiful mother and throughout their childhood the two young people have been kept apart; a possibility of their being siblings and of a potential danger of incest by marriage is implied. The Polish count has been obsessed all his life with regaining his estate in Poland (another form of cultural continuity similar to paternity); at the time of the story he has just won his lawsuit. Armed with a letter from the Prioress, Boris goes "as the ideal young hero of romance" (Monkey 119) to woo Athena and is received with open arms by the Polish count, contrary to the young man's expectations. However, the next day, at the convent, Boris receives an apologetic, guilt-ridden letter from the count, in which he is told that Athena has rejected him and any other suitor as she does not want to leave her father and marry. Enraged, the Prioress summons Athena to the convent for "a great supper of seduction" (Monkey 139) during which she gets the young girl drunk and gives Boris a potion to help him rape the virgin. A fierce struggle follows, Boris gets two of his teeth knocked out, manages to only kiss Athena and the girl faints. The next morning, the scheming Prioress misleadingly tells Athena that she might have become pregnant and to avoid dishonour she should get married. Grudgingly, Athena half-agrees to marry Boris while threatening him with murder at the first opportunity. At that moment, they see the monkey at the window, while the Prioress frantically tries to prevent it from coming in. The window is broken, the Prioress and the monkey struggle and the two astonished young people witness a metamorphosis. The monkey turns into

10

Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales (New York: Vintage, 1972) 109-163. "The Monkey" included in this collection will be referred to hereafter as Monkey.

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the real Prioress and simultaneously the scheming, wicked Prioress turns into a monkey. The feeling of shared secrecy, of experiencing an extraordinary event together, brings a new quality to the relationship between Athena and Boris and creates the hope of a real bond between them. This is a bizarre and puzzling story that is fascinating to explore in its generative and authenticating strategies and in its planned deconstructive effects, as registered in our reception as readers. I will examine "The Monkey" from the perspective of possible world narrative semantics. In order to underline the similarity between linguistic and literary studies, and the proximity between logical semantics and narrative semantics, Dolezel has defined narrative semantics as being the study of narrative structures that underlie various types of discourse such as literary, film, television, etc.11 Narrative semantics tries to discover what gives coherence to a story by examining the set of macrostructural constraints which should satisfy two prerequisites: "they should be derived from a logically homogeneous conceptual model" and "they should generate all possible coherent story structures".12 Dolezel sees these requirements satisfied by the concept of narrative modalities defined as "global restrictions imposed on the possible courses of narrated actions" (Dolezel, "Narrative Worlds" 544). He describes with the help of modal logic four modal systems.13 The four modal systems generate four narrative worlds: 1. "the deontic world in which the narrated actions are governed by the modalities of permission, prohibition and obligation"14 2. "the axiological world in which the narrated actions are dominated by the modalities of goodness, badness and indifference"15 3. "the epistemic world in which the narrated actions follow the course given by the modalities of knowledge, ignorance and belief"16 11

"Narrative Worlds," Sound, Sign and Meaning: Quinquagenary of the Prague Linguistic Circle, ed. Ladislav Matejka (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1976) 542552. 12 Lubomir Dolezel, "Narrative Semantics," PTL: A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature 1 (1976): 129-51. 13 "System" is defined by Jaakko Hintikka as "an explanatory model in terms of which certain aspects of the workings of our ordinary language can be understood." Models for Modalities (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1969) 5. 14 See von Wright 1963, 1968 as quoted in Dolezel "Narrative Worlds" 544. 15 See Nicholas Rescher, Essays in Philosophical Analysis (Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1969). 16 See Jaakko Hintikka, Knowledge and Belief: an Introduction to the Logic of the Two Notions (Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP, 1962).

210 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY and 4. "the alethic world in which the narrated actions are subject to the restrictions of the 'classical' modalities—possibility, impossibility and necessity" (Dolezel, "Narrative Worlds" 544). If we consider the world of "The Monkey" a deontic world, the narrated actions should be submitted to two kinds of norms: prohibition and obligation. If a narrative agent performs a prohibited action, the story structure of prohibition—violation—punishment will be generated. Boris disobeys the established laws of patriarchal society, violates by his sexual behaviour the network of the hierarchy and is punished by threatened dishonour and exile from high society. Athena, who is apparently obeying the required norms, is fanatically devoted to her father—an archetypal patriarch who is compared to Zeus. Nevertheless, she disobeys the established patriarchal laws and violates by her fierce chastity the rules according to which she should marry, procreate, and ensure cultural continuity. She is punished by being equally threatened with dishonour. Obligation norms are imposed leading to the generation of a story structure called test: obligation (assignment of a task) — fulfilment of the task — reward. Both Boris and Athena are obliged by society to marry and prove that they belong to the patriarchal order: neither one nor the other fulfils his/her task and is, as a consequence, not rewarded. But, if we bear in mind that appearances are usually deliberately deceptive in Dinesen's stories we might look for a second, opposite, hidden variant of this story's narrative structure. I suggest that their real assigned and fulfilled task is rebellion against the patriarchal order after which both the hero and the heroine are rewarded by a genuinely equal brother-sister relationship, which seems to be the only intersexual relationship fully accepted in Dinesen's fictional worlds.17 If we consider the fictional world of "The Monkey" an axiological world, the assignment of axiological modalities will create a world of values which are desirable, and disvalues which are repugnant. Axiological modalities may either be validated by a supra-individual system, in the case of codexal modalities (i.e. social values of the patriarchal order), or may be specific for a narrative agent, as is the case of relativized modalities (e.g.: Athena's personal brand of freedom from marriage). Narrative structures of quest are generated: lack of value — acquisition — possession. Narrative

17

e.g. Peter and Rosa in the story with the same name which is included in the collection Winter's Tales, and Calypso and Jonathan in "The Deluge at Norderaey," included in Seven Gothic Tales.

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agents interrelate in their quest in disjunction (disagreement)17 or conjunction (agreement).18 Conjunction proves to be disjunction and vice versa. A structuralist actantial diagram produces the following model:

Fig. 1 Deceiving Model

Most of the actantial positions are occupied by the collective actor—patriarchal society—or by its corresponding individualized actor—the Prioress/monkey; the object of value is submission to society's imposed rules. The actantial subject is the actor, Boris, who is in an opposite position to himself and to his relativized modalities—i.e. his hidden desires and values. Keeping in mind the ironic double narrative structure of Dinesen's stories, we should not be surprised to discover that we could draw an almost opposite structuralist actantial diagram that supplements the first one:

Fig. 2 Authenticated Model

17

e.g. apparently Boris and Athena disagree but later they will prove to agree, i.e. "the double rebelliousness in the two young people" (Monkey 148). 18 e.g. apparently the Prioress agrees with Boris but actually she is manipulating him against his real desires to the advantage of the patriarchal society.

212 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY The actantial quest for the object of value is a perpetual quest for identity carried out in spite of the actantial opponent, and it is actualized by a collective actor (the patriarchal society), and doubled by an individualized actor (the Prioress/ monkey). Dinesen's purposeful placement of women at the centre of her stories allows the subject, helper, sender, and opponent actantial positions to be occupied by the same actant, the heroine Athena. The hero, Boris, joins her side only unconsciously, indirectly, and later. They are, however, occupying the same actantial position and this would imply that the desired equality in relationship has been achieved. Dinesen writes at the end of her story: This time Athena's luciferous eyes within their deep dark sockets did not exactly take Boris into possession. . . . But she was, in this look, laying down another law, a command which was not to be broken: from now, between, on the one side, her and him, who had been present together at the happenings of the last minutes, and, on the other side, the rest of the world, which had not been there, an insurmountable line would be forever drawn. (Monkey 162)

Dinesen has explained in a letter what Lucifer means to her: It occurs to me that I ought perhaps to explain in more detail what I mean by the symbolic expression Lucifer, so that it does not appear as if it means that I am longing for something wild and demonic, or be misunderstood in some other way. I conceive of it as meaning: truth, or the search for truth, striving toward the light, a critical attitude—indeed, what one means by spirit. The opposite of settling down, believing that what one cares for is and must be the best, indeed, settling into the studied calm, satisfaction and uncritical atmosphere of the Paradise. And in addition to this . . . a sense of humor which is afraid of nothing but has the courage of its convictions to make fun of everything, and life, new light, variety.20

What, if any, is the importance of Dinesen's letter on the connotations held by Lucifer? If we adopt Eco's (221) and Pavel's (23) referential narrative model of the possible world semantics, then what the author says is important. It is a reference element from which a reader constructs the intertextual frames through which s/he takes an inferential walk to obtain one

20

Isak Dinesen, Letters From Africa: 1914-1931, ed. Frans Lasson, trans. Anne Born (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981) 249. This collection will hereafter be referred to as LFA.

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of the numerous possible worlds of a story (Eco 214). Knowing what Dinesen thought of Lucifer confirms our inferred deontic and axiological modal worlds of "The Monkey." Under the disguising story structures, where the test is to submit to the obligation norms—i.e. marriage—and the quest is for a patriarchal codexal object of value—i.e. marriage, there are masked modal structures that confirm each other across the fluctuating boundaries of modalities: the test does coincide with the quest but the test is the search for identity by rebellion against the established laws of patriarchy. If we consider the fictional world of "The Monkey" as an epistemic one, we find yet another double structure. The false belief prompted by the story relates again to identity, the identity of the Prioress as a monkey. How great is the difference between the Prioress/monkey and the monkey/Prioress? The actors who actualize this actant (helper, receiver) support the patriarchal order in seeking to integrate the two young people. Boris is sent to the Prioress to obtain immediate help in finding a bride and thus avoiding dishonour. Therefore, the inference made by this reader is that the Prioress/monkey must be an ally of high society and its laws. She skilfully manipulates both Boris and Athena into a dead-end situation to make them obey, conform and marry. At the end, when the authentic monkey/Prioress replaces the Prioress/monkey, her first words, which are the last words of the story, are a Latin quotation from Virgil's Aeneid:21 "Discite justitiam moniti, et non temnere Divos. [Behold and learn to practise right, Nor do the blessed gods despite.]"22 At first sight, this is an open plea of obedience and submission to God and His laws which does not depart from the direction of the Prioress/monkey's previous behaviour. But those readers who want to validate their first "inferential walk" (Eco 221) by researching the context of this intertextual utterance will be surprised to discover that there might be a slight difference between the Prioress/monkey and the monkey/Prioress. In The Aeneid, the speaker of these quoted words is one of a group of so-called "evil-doers," a group of Luciferian beings who have been punished for daring acts of rebellion against the established law of the gods. These words are uttered in Hades, where Aeneas himself has

21

A typical deontic and axiological modal world in which Aeneas sacrifices all his relativized values for the sake of the codexal values—the foundations of a new Roman empire. 22 The Aeneid, trans, and ed. Symones Connington (New York: Washington Square, 1965) VI, 620.

214 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY descended while on a quest for truth and identity. Perhaps the Prioress' identity is a mysterious changing entity. Perhaps she also feels, or at least used to feel, the call of rebellion and freedom that periodically made the socalled monkey leave the convent. We find in the text another interesting indication of a certain similarity that might exist between the real Prioress and Athena: Boris sees her "as the Chinese goddess Kuan-Yin, the deity of mercy and of benignant subtlety" (Monkey 114)—a goddess born from her father's mind as was Athena, the virgin warrior goddess of the Greeks. What makes the real Prioress return to preach submission? Is it a lack of courage, the temporary power of her position and the comforts of a gilded cage, a cage that Athena is passionately seeking to escape: "she had always known that in a benevolent way the old lady had wanted to put her in a cage" (Monkey 142)? Perhaps the answer to the above question is that it might simply be the law of perpetual change from one opposite to the other, the perpetual supplementation of an identity which is never fixed and centred. The latter assumption might be supported by another intertextual allusion: after the metamorphosizing struggle, the monkey finds refuge on the bust of Immanuel Kant. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason discusses our ability to gain access to "things-in-themselves." Kant makes a distinction between phenomena (appearances), to which we have access through experience, and the noumena (intelligibles) due to which phenomena are generated; noumena remain, to us, a mere possibility. Just as there is no access to the noumena lying behind phenomena so there is no access to a noumenal self to which phenomena are appearances. The only self that can be experienced is the empirical self. In "The Monkey," readers who have uncoded the latter clue are implicitly directed to the changing identity of the Prioress/monkey, who is just one more of those phenomena whose noumena elude us in a playful way. We perceive the change but never the essence that changes. The identity remains an elusive mystery. We do not know the real identity of the Prioress, how obedient or rebellious she is. This all will remain a mystery. The epistemic modal story structure (in which a false belief is replaced by knowledge) is represented in "The Monkey" by a false belief which is replaced not by knowledge, but by another belief. The fictional world of "The Monkey" is ruled by perpetual change. The story is set in late autumn, the moment of seasonal change, at a moment of psychological change in the characters who, at the end of externally imposed or self-imposed tests, gain self-awareness. This is a moment of premonition of social change to be brought about by a new race of "tragic heroes" equal

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to God in their special type of heroism, and a moment of inexplicable physiological metamorphosis of human beings into animals and animals into human beings. . . . he [Boris] fell to meditating upon the subject of change. The real difference between God and human beings, he thought, was that God cannot stand continuance. No sooner has he created a season of a year, or a time of the day, than he wishes for something quite different, and sweeps it all away. No sooner was one a young man, and happy at that, than the nature of things would rush one into marriage, martyrdom or old age. And human beings cleave to the existing state of things. All then* lives they are striving to hold the moment fast, and are up against a. force majeure. Thenart itself is nothing but the attempt to catch by all means the one particular moment, one mood, one light, the momentary beauty of one woman or one flower, and make it everlasting. It is all wrong, he thought, to imagine paradise as a never-changing state of bliss. It will probably, on the contrary, turn out to be, in the true spirit of God, an incessant up and down, a whirlpool of change. (Monkey 122)

Dinesen's fictional world has a perpetual movement between several pairs of opposites and represents consistently the same idea of change. The writer actualizes change in her macro-narrative structures—double or multiple modal structures and mise-en-abyme—sis well as in her micro-structures at the level of disguised or metamorphosizing fictional beings who control and create their own changing personae out of natural and artificial features. If we consider the fictional world of "The Monkey" an alethic world, we will have to discuss it in terms of the classical modalities of necessity, possibility and impossibility, hence alternative possible worlds. There are many definitions of the possible world and its creation. All seem to agree that they are logical constructs (Dolezel, Hintikka, Rescher, Eco). Hintikka states that "alternatives to a given world W are those possible worlds which could have been realized instead of W. "23 Eco defines the possible world as: . . . a possible state of affairs expressed by a set of relevant propositions where for every proposition either p or not p; ... as such it outlines a set of possible individuals along with their properties; . . . since some of these properties are actions, a possible world is also a possible course of events;

23

"The Semantics of Modal Notions and the Indeterminacy of Ontology," Semantics of Natural Languages, ed. D. Davidson and G. Hartman (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1972) 399.

216 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY . . . since this course of events is not actual, it must depend on prepositional attitudes of somebody; in other words, possible worlds are worlds imagined, believed, wished, and so on. (219) Eco (217) sees the possible worlds as multiple, projected by the characters by their beliefs and wishes or by the readers reacting to the textual clues with the help of reference to their real life encyclopedic knowledge (be it called "doxa," "codes," "frames," "myths"). Eco and Pavel see referentiality as a necessity while Dolezel sees it as misleading and declares that the possible worlds are formed "by a substantial transformation at the world boundary" of the "realemes"24 "converted into non-actual possibles" (Dolezel, "Mimesis" 485). The fictional world is one, while the possible ones are unlimited and maximally varied (Eco 220; Dolezel, "Mimesis" 483). Modalities operate as generating macroconstraints of fictional worlds whereby only "compossible" fictional particulars (elements that comply with the general order) are allowed into them. Out of these fictional "compossibles" a virtually unlimited set of possible worlds can be produced. In applying all this to "The Monkey," we can see how the Gothic story mixes natural (physically possible) and fantastic (physically impossible) elements in a semantically unhomogeneous world which displays natural and supernatural subdomains (all of which represent a set of alternative possible worlds). The boundaries of possible worlds are crossed by "complex immigrant fictional beings" such as Boris and Athena which are both "native" (constructs of this story), and "immigrant" (intertextually defined), a Greek goddess and a fairy story hero.25 In Fig. 3 below, each of the circles have many outlines that signify the virtually infinite number of possible readings:

24

Itamar Even-Zohar, "Constraints on Realeme Insertability in Narrative," Poetics Today I (1980): 72. 25 Terence Parsons, Nonexistent Objects (New Haven, London: Yale UP, 1980).

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Fig. 3

217

218 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY The subdomain M (a set of possible worlds), part of the fictional world F, corresponds to the convent and is the main stage of the events. It is created by the readers, the narrator and characters first as a place of "clockwork order" (Monkey 131), a shelter for outcasts and mild rebels—old maidens of high origin—led by a wise and distinguished noble lady. Later on, the convent is seen by the readers and by Athena and Boris as a dangerous cage ready to entrap both young people in a forced marriage, led by a wicked scheming old lady. Finally, the convent is seen by the readers and the two astonished young heroes as the stage where an essential metamorphosis takes place. It is in accordance with Dinesen's general literary strategy that the main subdomain is gynocentric, even if the women in this place are opposing the system only by a passive withdrawal. In spite of the appearance that Boris is the one who moves most and is at the centre of the action, the main fictional beings of this story are, as in most of Dinesen's stories, women: the real Prioress, who in appropriating Virgil's words, inscribes herself within a non-patriarchal paradigm, and Athena, who violently opposes the manipulative oppressive rules. The second main subdomain, C (a set of possible worlds), which is of androcentric sign, is the old Polish count's mansion. It is created through the reader's reference to his/her encyclopedic frames. Boris, delegated by the author, prompts these frames: "a fantastic place" . . . "a sort of Olympus" . . . "a cathedral" . . . "a chaotic world" in sheer antithesis to the convent. The pair of possible worlds K and P are constructed under the constraints of the axiological modality. The possible world K, of marked androcentric sign, is absent and therefore entirely projected from reported data. It corresponds to "the world that matters" from which Boris has been exiled due to his violation of the patriarchal rules; it is created by the narrator, the early Boris and the Prioress/monkey's euphoric projection as they both value it; it is equally created by Athena, Boris and this reader's dysphoric projection as an obstacle to freedom and identity awareness. As Dinesen sums it up, "[t]his is this tragic maiden's prayer: From being a success at court, a happy, congratulated bride, a mother of a promising family, good Lord, deliver me. As a tragic actor of a high standard himself, he applauded her" (Monkey 142). The absent axiological possible world P, of androcentric sign, constructed by readers and the count, corresponds to the surrogate world called Poland; this reader projects it out of the information provided to her by the count's retelling of his eternal lawsuit. The narrative structure of "The Monkey" is perfectly symmetric, yin and yang, androcentric and gynocentric, binary because the possible worlds are

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formed of two present sets, M and C, and two absent sets, K and P. Dinesen's narrative structure provides us with another instance of the continuous interplay between presence and absence at work in her fictional world. There are at least two other deontic possible worlds that are projected by this reader and the characters of the story: the possible world K ab, in which Boris and Athena's marriage has been performed, the world projected by the wishes of a collective anonymous actor (i.e. the patriarchal world), the monkey/Prioress, the early Boris, the Polish count, and perhaps some readers. The world K -ab, in which Boris has been officially exiled and dishonoured beyond any chance of being reaccepted, is created by the fears of the early Boris, of the Prioress/monkey and some readers. These last two worlds have a different degree of existence than the rest of the possible worlds enumerated. The difference lies in their different authentication which makes them more or less true, at once inside and outside the text, present as potential but absent as actualization. In the fictional world and its possible worlds, and toward the fictional world, belief and truth have a totally different, entirely fictive referent/ signified which is situated within the imagination of a creator, or of a reader. Those worlds have been created by the active force of semiosis and authenticated by a special illocutionary force analogous to the force of perlocutionary speech acts described by Austin (Dolezel, "Existential" 11). The distinction between truth and false belief is a fundamental problem. While for Frege or Austin and Searle the concept of truth as represented and received should not be discussed in connection with literary sentences, for others, like Kendall Walton or Thomas Pavel, the very enjoyment of literature is linked to our possibility of playing this illusionary game and believing the truth of literary sentences from a point of view situated in a complex, salient structure, formed by the two worlds, the real and the fictional. Pavel also introduces the concept of "ersatz sentences"—sentences that paraphrase the literary text and which can be considered true if they express a state of affairs that exists in the text.26 As Dolezel puts it, "[fjictional truth is strictly 'truth in/of the constructed narrative world and its criterion is agreement or disagreement with authenticated narrative facts. "27 Consequently, the possible worlds K ab and K -ab are not true as they are not in agreement with the authenticated narrative facts: Athena and

26

Thomas Pavel, Fictional Worlds (Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard UP,

1986). 27

"Truth and Authenticity in Narrative," Poetics Today 1 (1980): 15.

220 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY Boris do not marry, and Boris and Athena are not dishonoured. Since, according to the data offered to us and to the characters, one day they might marry or be dishonoured for ever, K ab and K -ab are possible worlds in disjunction, that is they exist in an either/or relation to each other. The force of authentication validates the possible worlds once they are constructed by semiosis and controlled by the macrostructural constraints of modalities. Authentication is inherent in the speech acts of the narrator(s), who, because of Dinesen's narrative strategy, are mostly unreliable in the stories. Even the traditional omniscient Er-fona narrator is not to be trusted since he (most of Dinesen's narrators are masculine voices) misleads the readers into believing that the monkey is the Prioress, barely hinting at the on-going metamorphosis. Through these hints, which will be retroactively decoded, he proves to be what Dolezel calls a "skaz narrator" who treats the authenticating act "with irony" and " . . . engages in a non-binding game of story-telling" (Dolezel, "Mimesis" 491). The graded authentication subtly changes into disauthentication as the collective experience of Boris, Athena, and the readers disauthenticate the apparent identity of the Prioress. The playful, authenticating and, at the same time, self-disauthenticating narrator of "The Monkey" creates what Dolezel calls an "impossible/ambiguous/ fantastic fictional world" and all its possible worlds "that include inner contradictions and imply contradictory states of affairs" (Dolezel, "Mimesis" 492). Dinesen's fictional world is amenable to analysis in terms of possible world semantics because she creates a multiplicity of contradictory and sometimes ambiguous worlds that interrelate in complicated patterns. Dinesen constructs and authenticates only to playfully deconstruct and disauthenticate in the next moment a fictional world peopled by fictional beings, an alternate world to the patriarchal society. She has turned what seemed to be a self-destructive process into an achievement of beauty and depth of meaning.

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1

The contributors to this volume have used various editions of Dinesen's works. Full references to these editions will be found in the individual articles.

224 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY Dolezel, Lubomir. "Mimesis and Possible Worlds." Poetics Today 9 (1988): 479493. Dolezel, Lubomir. "Narrative Semantics." PTL: A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature 1 (1976): 129-51. Dolezel, Lubomir. "Narrative Worlds." Sound, Sign and Meaning: Quinquagenary of the Prague Linguistic Circle. Ed. Ladislav Matejka. (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1976). 542-552. Dolezel, Lubomir. "Truth and Authenticity in Narrative." Poetics Today 1.3 (1980): 7-26. Dupriez, B. Dictionary of Literary Devices: Gradus, A-Z. Trans, and adapted by A.W. Halsall. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1991. Eco, Umberto. Postscript to The Name of the Rose. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt, 1984. Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979. Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984. Eco, Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1976. Even-Zohar, Itamar. "Constraints on Realeme Insertabilty in Narrative." Poetics Today 1 (1980): 65-74. Ferguson, Russell, et al, ed. Discourses: Conversation in Postmodern Art and Culture. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1990. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans A. Sheridan. New York: Pantheon, 1972. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish, Birth of the Prison. Trans A. Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1979. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1980. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. New York: Vintage, 1973. France, Anatole. Balthasar. Trans. Mrs. J. Lane. London: Bodley Head, 1909. Frege, Gottlob. "Uber Sinn und Bedeutung." Zeitschrift fur Philosophic und philosophische Kritik 100 (1892): 25-50; English trans. Max Black in The Philosophical Review 3, vol. LVII (May 1948): 185-210. Gans, Eric. The End of Culture: Toward a Generative Anthropology. Berkeley: U of California P, 1985. Gelpi, Barbara Charlesworth and Albert Gelpi. Adrienne Rich's Poetry. New York: Norton, 1975. Genette, Gerard. "Discours du recit." Figures HI. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972. Genette, Gerard. "Valery and the Poetics of Language." Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism. Ed. Josue V. Harari. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979. Genette, Gerard. "Vraisemblance et motivation." Figures II. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969.

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228 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY Miller, Nancy. Subject to Change. New York: Columbia UP, 1988. Miller, Nancy. "The Text's Heroine: A Feminist Critic and Her Fictions." Diacritics 12 (Fall 1982): 48-53. Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics. London: Routledge, 1985. Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus. Don Giovanni. Libretto by Lorenzo de Ponte. Trans. Norman Platt and Laura Sarti. London: John Calder, 1983. Mulvey, Laura. "Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' Inspired by King Vidor's Duel in the Sun." Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1989: 29-38. Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Rpt. in Visual and Other Pleasures. 1975; Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1989: 14-28. "On Feminism and Womanhood." Unpublished. Karen Blixen Archives, Royal Library, Copenhagen. Out of Africa. Dir. Sydney Pollack. With Meryl Streep, Robert Redford and Klaus Maria Brandauer. Universal, 1986. "Out of Africa and into the Fashion Spotlight." Austin American-Statesman 10 Jan. 1986: "Lifestyle" section. "Out of Africa, Then and Now." New York Times 12 Jan. 1986: page 1 of the Travel section. "Out of Africa: Will a tourist trap rise from the ruins of Karen Blixen's coffee plantation?" Chicago Tribune 4 June 1986. "Out of Dinesen: Why Meryl Streep Isn't Karen Blixen." Ms. (March 1986): 1314. Owens, Craig. "The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism." The Anti-Aesthetic, Essays on Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983. 57-83. Parsons, Terence. Nonexistent Objects. New Haven, London: Yale UP, 1980. Patai, Raphael. The Hebrew Goddess. Hoboken, NJ: KTAV Publishing, 1967. Pateman, Carole. "The Disorder of Women." Ethics 91 (October 1980): 20-34. Pavel, Thomas. Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard UP, 1986. Pavel, Thomas. "Narrative Domains." Poetics Today 1 (1980): 105-14. Pavel, Thomas. "Possible Worlds in Literary Semantics." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 34 (1975/76): 165-76. Plantinga, Alvin. "Transworld Identity of Worldbound Individuals." Naming, Necessity and Natural Kinds. Ed. Stephen P. Schwartz. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977: 245-66. Plato. The Republic. Trans. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1968. Poe, Edgar Allan. "Philosophy of Composition." The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe with a Selection of Essays. London: Dent, 1927: 163-177. Reed, J. D. "Isak Dinesen." People 3 Feb. 1986. Renner, Stanley. "Sexual Hysteria, Physiognomical Bogeymen, and the 'Ghosts' in The Turn of the Screw." Nineteeth Century Literature 2, vol. 43 (September 1988): 175-94.

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230 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY Todorov, Tzvetan. Introduction a la Litterature Fantastique. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970. Virgil. The Aeneid. Trans, and ed. Symones Conningtons. New York: Washington Square, 1965. wa Thiong'o, Ngugi. Prison Notes. Kenya: African Writers Series, 1981. Wagner, Richard. Wagner on Music and Drama. Trans. H. Ashton Ellis. London: Victor Gollancz, 1970. Walker, Barbara G. The Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988. Walter, Eugene. "Isak Dinesen." Writers at Work. Ed. George Plimpton. The Paris Review Interviews 4. New York: Viking-Penguin, 1974: 1-19. Walton, Kendall. "How Remote Are Fictional Worlds from the Real World?" The Journal of Aesthetics and An Criticism 37 (1978/79): 11-23. Walton, Kendall. "Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism." Critical Inquiry 11 (December 1984): 246-277. Wilson, Edmund. Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930. Glasgow: Collins, 1959. Wittgenstein, L. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge, 1961. Yacobi, Tamar. "Plots of Space: World and Story hi Isak Dinesen." Poetics Today 12.3 (1991): 447-493.

Index Adam 15, 47-49, 51, 52, 54, 58, 60, 61, 112, 129, 204 Adorno, Theodor W. 134 Africa 3, 5-17, 25, 28-30, 32, 33, 37-39, 42, 43, 81, 95, 97 Aiken, Susan Hardy 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 38, 42, 43 Anderson, George 66 androcentrism 9, 218 androgyny 180, 192 angel in the house 52 Arabian Nights, The 11,88, 97, 119, 151 Aristotle 206 Auster, Paul 134 Avantgarde 136 Avedon, Richard 4 Babette's Feast (film version) 3, 53 Bakhtin, Mikhail 17, 20, 191 Barrabas 138, 141 Barthes, Roland 191 The Pleasure of the Text 181 Battestin, Martin C. 120 Baudelaire 102, 104, 111 Baudrillard, Jean 133 Beard, Peter 18 Beardsley, Monroe 18 Beaton, Cecil 4, 18 Benjamin, Walter 199 blank page 11, 79, 82, 88, 89, 92, 96, 100, 160-163, 172-178 Bliss, Molly 3 Blixen, Karen 9, 10, 17, 18, 26, 151, 183, 193-195

Branch Cabell, James 180, 181, 191 Bronte, Anne 115, 118 Bronte, Charlotte 115, 118, 125 Bronte, Emily 115, 118 Calvino, Italo 134 Calypso 119, 137, 140, 144 Capitalism 4-6 capitalist 5 Cardinal 108, 109, 111, 113, 119, 121, 206 Kasparson 127, 137-139, 141, 144, 145, 146, 147 Carlyle, Thomas 116-120, 129, 130 carnival 17, 20-22 carnivalesque 20, 85, 191, 192 carnivalization 17, 23 carnivalizing 24 Carter, Lin 181 Cixous, Helene 7, 11, 19, 21, 27, 43 Claussen, Sophus 102-105, 107 Collins, Wilkie 120, 122, 124 Colonialism 5, 6, 8-10, 12, 31, 32, 34, 93 colonialist 38 colonialist discourse 8 colonized 9, 10, 29, 34, 96 Colony 30, 38 commedia dell'arte 24 consumption 4, 6, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 53, 58-60 Culler, Jonathan 180, 182, 183, 189

231

232 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY de Lauretis, Teresa 5, 6 de Man, Paul 200 de Saussure, Ferdinand 103 deceit 138, 143, 145 deconstruction 7, 60, 61, 92, 135, 149, 188, 204, 205, 206, 209, 220 deconstructive semiotics 19 Deleuze, Gilles 31, 32 Derrida, Jacques 35, 44, 45, 204, 205 Derridean 79 Destiny 29-34, 194, 195 devil see Lucifer 17, 65, 123, 124, 142, 149, 197 Dialogism 192 dialogic discourse 191 Dickens, Charles 120-127, 129, 130 difference 44 difference 8, 10, 13 sameness/difference 15 sexual difference 12, 85 Dinesen, Isak 3-26, 28-36, 38, 39, 40-46, 62, 63, 102, 103, 105-113, 115-130, 133, 135, 136, 137, 149, 180, 181, 182-186, 188, 189, 190-195, 199, 203, 204-207, 210, 211, 212, 213, 215, 218, 219, 220 "A Country Tale" 128 "Babette's Feast" 5, 7, 17, 21, 23, 123, 128 "Carnival" 19, 23, 24 "Converse at Night in Copenhagen" 111 "Daguerreotypes" 10, 116, 117

"On Mottoes of My Life" 19, 116, 117 "Peter and Rosa" 125 "Second Meeting" 104, 105, 106-108, 110 "Sorrow-acre" 19, 111, 120 "Tempests" 115 "The Bear and the Kiss" 120, 123 "The Blank Page" 16, 23, 26, 79-81, 83, 84, 89, 91-98, 101, 150, 151, 155, 164-167, 169, 171, 172, 173, 174, 178, 179 "The Cardinal's First Tale" 104, 106, 108, 119, 124, 128 "The Cardinal's Third Tale" 123, 125 "The Deluge at Norderney" 19, 20, 95, 104, 108, 112, 119, 120, 121, 127, 133, 137, 138, 207 "The Diver" 17 "The Dreamers" 19, 62, 67, 83, 88, 108, 124, 125, 207 "The Heroine" 88 "The Immortal Story" 121, 123, 125, 185 "The Invincible Slave-owners" 86, 111 "The Monkey" 95, 126, 184, 185, 204, 207, 209, 210, 213-216, 218, 220 "The Old Chevalier" 47, 49, 54, 56, 61, 87

233

INDEX "The Pearls" 195, 199, 202 "The Poet" 122, 125, 187, 190 "The Revenge of Truth" 189 "The Roads Round Pisa" 180, 182, 185-190, 192 "The Sailor-Boy's Tale" 87, 99 "The Supper at Elsinore" 47, 49, 60, 115, 121 "The Young Man with the Carnation" 86, 87 Babette's Feast (film version) 3, 53 Carnival: Entertainments and Posthumous Tales 105 Last Tales 151 Out of Africa 4, 5, 7-10, 12-14, 16, 17, 21, 23, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 42, 43, 45 Out of Africa (film version) 3, 4 Seven Gothic Tales 49, 60, 62, 112, 116, 133, 137, 181 Syv fantastiske fortcellinger 51, 55, 137 Winter's Tales 86, 194, 195 Dolezel, Lubomir 204, 209, 215, 219, 220 Eco, Umberto 134, 158, 165, 166, 168-172, 174, 177, 178, 179, 212, 215, 216

The Name of the Rose 179 ecriture feminine 21 Eden 7, 15, 98 Eliot, George 120, 129, 130 Enlightenment 136 Equality 47, 49, 52, 54, 60, 61, 137, 212 Eve 48, 49, 51, 52, 54, 57, 58 extensional representation 205, 206 false 138, 146 Fanny 49, 53, 60 Fata Morgana 28 fatherland 9 Fergusen, Russell 32 Fielding, Henry 120 Finch Hatton, Denys 33, 38, 42, 62, 95, 105 Foucault, Michel 31-33 Foucaudian 84 framing structure 81, 91, 93, 96, 107, 108, 112, 133, 137, 145, 149, 166, 168, 170, 172, 173, 212 Chinese boxes 154, 193 France, Anatole 50 Frege, Gottlob 219 Freud, Sigmund 43, 81 Gans, Eric 201, 202 gender relations 6, 9, 10, 14, 15, 64, 85, 86, 89, 94 dual-gendered discourse 75 subject position 67-68 Gilbert, Sandra 48 Gitter, Elisabeth 123 goddess 49, 53, 60-61, 64, 71-72, 75-76, 103, 214, 216

234 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY Goldman, Emma 4 Goodman, Nelson 135 Gubar, Susan 26, 29, 48 gynocentrism 43, 218 Hardy, Thomas 122, 123, 129 Harmonia 207 Haskell, Molly 12 hegemony 43, 83 Heidegger, Martin 31, 201 Heilbrun, Carolyn G. 27, 29 Henriksen, Aage 102, 127, 193, 194, 195, 199 Henriksen, Lise 49 Herbert, George 118 Hintikka, Jaakko 215 Hoffmann, E.T.A. 112, 130 Homer 134, 202 Houe, Poul 115 Imperialism 4, 8, 10-13, 81, 96 Ingarden, Roman 45 intensional representation 205, 206 intertextuality 64, 180, 182, 183, 185, 187-192, 207, 212, 213, 214, 216 Irigaray, Luce 10, 12, 27, 40, 43 Irony 102 irrationality 63 Jacobus, Mary 25 Jakobson, Roman 134 Jameson, Fredric 28, 33, 133, 134 JanMohamed, Abdul 8 Jardine, Alice 35, 36 Jonathan Maersk 137 Joyce, James 136, 191, 193 Judeo-Christian 197, 201, 202 Kant, Immanuel 214

Kasparson the Cardinal 138-139, 141, 144-145, 147 Kikuyu 11, 29-33 Kipling, Rudyard 8 Kristeva, Julia 10, 36, 37, 180, 191 Kundera, Milan 134 Lacan, Jacques 27, 37, 43, 45 Name of the Father 10, 20, 23 Langbaum, Robert 70, 115, 119, 181, 193, 194 Lawrence, D.H. 193 legitimacy 138, 140, 142, 148 Lewes, George Henry 127, 129 Lilith 47-61, 115 Liptzin, Sol 47 Lucifer 17, 95, 123-124, 212, 213 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 133 madness 116, 122, 138-139, 142, 146, 191 male gaze 6, 43, 68 mutual 74 Mallarme, Stephane 102, 104 marginalization 25, 79 marginality 27 Markham, Beryl 4 mask 4-6, 18-19, 24, 51, 53, 85, 110, 130, 139, 198, 206 masquerade 5, 6, 20, 86, 145 unmasking 113, 138, 139, 145, 146, 148 Maslin, Janet 3 Metafiction 28, 29, 39, 44, 165, 166-168, 171, 178, 179, 187, 188, 207

235

INDEX Miller, Nancy 6, 27 mimetisme 12, 165, 207 mimicry 11, 12, 20, 35, 42 mise-en-abyme 82, 206, 215 Miss Malin 119, 137-140, 144, 146 modal system 209 Modernism 28, 31, 84, 86, 91, 108, 112, 113, 133, 136, 149, 166, 193, 194, 207 moon, as symbol 64, 69, 74, 198 lunacy 64 motherland 12 Musil, Robert 136 Name of the Father see Jacques Lacan 10 narrativity 28, 29, 46, 119, 136, 204 embedded narratives 64, 68 macro-structures 205 master narrative 31 metanarrative 165, 166, 168, 169, 177, 179 narrative arguments 150, 155 narrative discourse 155, 157, 160, 162 narrative duality 167 narrative ideologemes 160 narrative persona 183, 185 narrative phenomena 150 narrative pragmatics 143 narrative processes 39 narrative semantics 209 narrative sequences 107 narrative situation 151

narrative structure 194 narrative worlds 206, 209 narrativization 154 slave-narratives 96 narratology 150, 152, 154 narrator 151-154, 156, 160162 'skaz' 220 authorial 44, 138 Er-form 220 explicit 143, 147 first-person 96, 145 implicit 143, 147 implied 177 multiple 167, 179 Olympic 137-138, 144145 omniscient 137, 144-145, 147, 167, 182, 193, 220 personal 138 self-disauthenticating 220 third-person 127, 172, 193 unreliable 54, 61, 220 Nathalie 57 Nature 118 Nietzsche, Friedrich 36, 201 Non-simultaneousness 133, 135 Noumena 214 Other 37-38, 43, 65, 74, 200, 201 Owens, Craig 27-29, 31 Papin, Achille 21 paradox 42, 80, 85, 89, 111, 143, 146, 156, 161162, 165, 167, 171172, 174-176, 179, 190 Patai, Raphael 47-48

236 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY patriarchal 11, 16, 20, 21, 41, 48, 49, 51-53, 59, 60, 63, 64, 67-69, 72-76, 80, 82, 83, 85, 88-89, 91, 92, 93, 96-99, 203, 204, 205, 210-212, 213, 218, 220 Pavel, Thomas 212, 216, 219 Pellegrina Leoni 124, 125 Phallocentric 6, 19, 20, 35, 36, 43 phallocentrism 12, 13, 43, 196 Plato 36, 206 Poe, Edgar Allen 112 Pollak, Sydney 12 Post-structuralism 27, 29 Postmodernism 27-29, 31, 33, 133, 134, 135, 149, 166, 207 'optic' 133, 135 Quarles, Francis 118 Reception 133, 134, 209 Redford, Robert 4 Renner, Stanley 123 Rescher, Nicholas 215 Rich, Adrienne 27 Rosenthal, Alfred 3 Rossetti, D. G. 115, 118 Rubin, Gayle 4 Russo, Mary 20 Said, Edward 8 Scheherazade 24, 93, 95-97, 138, 152, 185 self-reflexivity 44, 165, 185, 199, 207 semiotics 158 Showalter, Elaine 11 socialist realism 135 Socrates 20 Somali women 97, 98

Spacks, Patricia 27 speech act 84, 136, 141, 169, 219, 220 Sphinx 64, 70, 71, 75, 76 Spivak, Gayatri 10 St. Peter 137, 141 Steichen, Edward 18 Strauss, Botho 134 Streep, Meryl 4 subject position 63, 64, 68, 69, 72, 75, 94 subject/object relationship 42, 43, 84, 88, 134, 146, 174, 200, 201, 211 Subjectivity 36, 39, 42, 43, 85, 110, 111, 138, 139, 142, 148, 177 Sussman, Herbert L. 118 Swann, Brian 129, 130 symbol appearance 118 bird 121 butterfly 125 death 124 flag 117 flowers 118 hair 123 horse 125 monkey 126 name 120 public 120-123, 125, 126, 129 symbolic plot 126-128 twins 128 Symbolism 79, 83-88, 91, 94, 102, 103-105, 107, 110, 112, 113, 117, 118, 119 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 115, 118, 122 Todorov, Tzvetan 183, 184

237

INDEX Truth 38-39, 65, 90, 135, 137-139, 143, 146, 149, 187-188, 191, 212, 214, 219 Vaughan, Henry 118 Verlaine 102 Virgil 213, 218 Von Brackel 54, 57-59 Vraisemblance 182-185, 187189, 192 wa Thion'go, Ngugi 5 Walker, Barbara 55 Walpole, Horace 184

Walter, Eugene 183-184 Walton, Kendall 219 Wandering Jew 66-69 Westenholz, Mary (Bess) 52, 60, 115 White, Hay den 134 witch 18, 22, 49, 52-56, 60, 61, 64, 71, 85, 95, 123-124 Woods, Gurli A. 128 Woolf, Virginia 136 Yacobi, Tamar 38 Zemon Davis, Natalie 9

Notes on the Contributors Susan Hardy Aiken is Professor of English and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona. She has published several articles on Isak Dinesen and is the author of Isak Dinesen and the Engendering of Narrative published by the University of Chicago Press in 1990. Her most recent book is Dialogues/Dialogi: Literary and Cultural Exchanges Between (Ex)Soviet and American Women (Duke University Press, 1994). Kathryn Barawell is Chair of Women's Studies and also teaches in the Department of English at Malaspina College in Nanaimo, British Columbia. At the time of the Isak Dinesen conference, she was a Visiting Scholar in the Institute for Canadian Studies at Carleton University. She was the coorganizer of a recent conference held at Malaspina on "Female Friendship in Canadian Writing" and is currently President of the Nanaimo Women's Resources Society. Casey Bjerregaard Black is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Language, Literature, and Communication at Northern State University in Aberdeen, South Dakota, where he teaches French language and literature and World Literature in translation. He has published several articles on Isak Dinesen in Scandinavian Studies and other journals. He continues to translate the early works of Isak Dinesen and is currently engaged in research on the journals of the 19th century ethnologist, explorer, and cartographer, Joseph Nicolas Nicollet. Toby Foshay teaches critical theory and modem British literature at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. With regard to theory, he works on deconstruction and its relation to theology and psychoanalysis, with articles on Derrida, Levinas, and Lacan, and he has edited (with Harold Coward) a collection of articles, Derrida and Negative Theology (SUNY, 1992). In literature, he has published on Joyce, Yeats, and Wyndham Lewis, with Wyndham Lewis and the Avant-Gard: The Politics of the Intellect (McGill-Queen's) appearing in 1992. He is currently working on problems of representation and identification in Derrida and Lacan. Barbara Gabriel teaches in the Department of English at Carleton University, Ottawa. She has published in areas ranging from theatre and fiction to 238

NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS

239

contemporary feminist theory. These interests have recently converged in readings of gender in a performative mode. Cristina Gheorghe, born in Bucharest, Romania, teaches English at high school and is a sessional lecturer in the Department of English at Carleton University, Ottawa. She is an active member of several research groups, and was a driving force behind organizing and conceptualizing the Isak Dinesen workshops and conference held at Carleton University, while she was an M.A. student in the School of Comparative Literary Studies. Kristjana Gunnars is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Alberta, Edmonton. She is the author of six books of poetry, two poststructuralist novels, a book of creative non-fiction, and two collections of short stories. Her most recent works are The Substance of Forgetting and The Guest House. Albert W. Halsall teaches in the Department of French and the School of Comparative Literary Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa. He founded, and is the Chair of, The Carleton University Centre for Rhetorical Studies. He has published extensively in the field of rhetoric and narratology. Among his recent accomplishments is A Dictionary of Literary Devices: Gradus, A-Z (University of Toronto Press, 1991), a translation into English and adaptation of Bernard Dupriez Gradus: les precedes litteraires. He earned the Governor General's Award for this volume in 1991. Bo Hakon J0rgensen teaches at the Nordic Institute at Odense University in Denmark. He collaborated with Marianne Juhl on the book Dianas Haevn: to spor i Karen Blixens forfatterskab, published in 1981. This book was later translated by Anne Bora, and in 1985 published by Odense University Press as Diana's Revenge: Two Lines in Isak Dinesen's Authorship. Mark A. Kemp is a Ph.D. student in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. He is currently finishing his thesis on "Nationalism and North American Literatures." When he wrote the article published in this volume, he was enrolled in the M.A. Program at the School of Comparative Literary Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa. Morten Kyndrup teaches Comparative Literature and Aesthetics at Aarhus University in Denmark. He has published several books on postmodernism

240 ISAK DINESEN AND NARRATIVITY and various interpretive strategies, among them Framing and Fiction: Studies in the Rhetoric of Novel, Interpretation, and History (Aarhus University Press, 1992), which includes an article on Isak Dinesen's "The Roads Round Pisa." He is currently the Director of a five-year research project on "Modem Theories of Aesthetics: Current Functional Changes." H. Jill Scott is a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. She was an M.A. student in the School of Comparative Literary Studies at Carleton University when she wrote the article published in this volume. She has published on modem adaptations of the Antigone myth from a feminist perspective in Gestos: Teoria y practica del teatro hispanico, and presented papers at symposia organized by ECDA (Exploring Contemporary Discourse Analysis) and the Centre for Research in Culture and Society. She is currently researching "Kitsch as an Aesthetics of Postmodernity." Sara Stambaugh teaches Victorian literature in the Department of English at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. In 1988 she published The Witch and the Goddess in the Stories of Isak Dinesen: A Feminist Reading with UMI Research Press. In addition to articles on Dinesen, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James, she has published fiction and verse in Canadian literary journals and two novels, / Hear the Reaper's Song and The Sign of the Fox.. Gurli Aagaard Woods teaches in the School of Comparative Literary Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa. In 1981-82, she chaired the committee founding the Association for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies in Canada, of which she was later President (1987-91), and she has edited some of the volumes of Scandinavian-Canadian Studies. She is currently engaged in a comparative study of Scandinavian and Canadian women writers of the 1970s and 80s from a poststructuralist feminist critical point of view.

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