Itching with the sense of the fantastic, Joanna Scott's article in The Nation about the Danish writer Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) is a rare and attentive take on the namesake of this website. From Dinesen's conjurings both in life and on the pages, Scott impressively reveals the beating heart within the fabulism.
It occurs to me that despite my naming this website after Dinesen, I spend very little time discussing her or her work. So pardon me while I take a deep breath and quote extensively from Scott's sparklingly eloquent article.
Known in this country by her pseudonym, Isak Dinesen, the Danish writer Karen Blixen published her first collection of stories in 1934, at the age of 49. Though she'd returned to her family home in Denmark after spending seventeen years in British East Africa, Dinesen wrote her stories in English and secured her first contract with an American publisher. The book, Seven Gothic Tales, established Dinesen as a literary giant, a reputation that would be sustained throughout her life. Eudora Welty said Dinesen's fiction embodies "the last outreach of magic." Carson McCullers reported that she would reread Dinesen's memoir Out of Africa for comfort. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1954, Ernest Hemingway said with uncharacteristic humility that it might have gone to "that beautiful writer Karen Blixen."
But Dinesen's claim on American readers has been waning. The majority of critical books and articles on her work were published before 1990. In 1985, three years after the publication of Judith Thurman's biography Isak Dinesen, Hollywood jumped on board, recasting the time Dinesen spent in British East Africa managing a coffee plantation with her husband as a love story starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. The film, Out of Africa, might have generated a resurgence of interest in Dinesen's work, but instead it appears to have inaugurated a new period of critical indifference.
Dinesen, who died in 1962, was always an elusive target for readers, even at the height of her renown. As her fame spread, she responded by cloaking herself in an eccentric and mysterious persona. ... But if her public identity was a calculated performance, it matched the design of her tales. When (The Paris Review) asked her in the interview if she objected to readers who found her tales artificial, she responded, "Of course they are artificial. They were meant to be, for such is the essence of the tale-telling art."
And this is the heart of it, of Dinesen's fiction and nonfiction. Her celebration of the artifice of tales and her comfort with the strong storyteller has come to be quite unusual. As Scott goes on to note, it is much more fashionable these days for fiction to be buoyed by the reader's knowledge or belief that a work is confessional. Authority is bought in contemporary storytelling by implying that it is "based on a true story"--which, as I'm fond of ranting about, feeds the idea that the only stories that contain documented facts are "true" ones (i.e. nonfiction, or thinly-veiled fiction).
Dinesen, on the other hand, not only sees the blurring of truth and fiction; she has reverence for it. Her tales are unabashedly artificial, featuring characters that, say, stop sleeping (only to move and speak more and more slowly), or a monkey and Virgin Prioress that take each others' forms. And the tales are told from a storyteller's stance--omniscient and distant. Beyond the charm of her fables, the tales are unafraid of burrowing into the dark and strange--as evident even in her titles, Seven Gothic Tales, Winter's Tales, Last Tales, and Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard. In these warm-blooded, very weird stories authored by Dinesen, a truth emerges--one that couldn't be revealed in any other way.
Even in Dinesen's "based on a true story" stories--Out of Africa and Shadows of the Grass, both told in the first person and deeply personal to her--she embraces artifice as a way to reveal truth, rather than as its deflecting cover-up. She refers to the landscape, the animals, the people in her community with a storyteller's reverence, using capital letters ("the Equator;" "the Lions;" "swaggering young Native Policeman"). She tells the stories of her life in East Africa not with any clear chronology, but as a series of ... well, tales, encapsulated in her titled chapters: "The Shooting Accident," for example, and "The Wild Came to the Aid of the Wild."
And so, unhinged in any timeline that is usually so fundamental to "true stories," Dinesen's nonfiction summons a sense of simultaneity and, therefore, of myth. In her writing drawn from her own life, she finds truth in the artifice of archetypes and imagination, and brings it forth on the page with a magic that--while it may be unfashionable these days--still opens my heart.
More from Scott's article:
Throughout her writing life, Dinesen adamantly defined herself as a "storyteller." Thurman argues that this identity was based on a moral decision to align herself with the "fabulists of an older age" rather than with her contemporaries. Yet morality remains an unpredictable force as a Dinesen story unfolds. The conclusions of the tales are murky, and the motives of the heroes and heroines are questionable. Like the characters, we can't be sure whether their predicaments are defined by destiny or free will. ....
... The moral thrust of Dinesen's tales leads here, to a representation of life as performance--a necessary fiction. In her pliable and accommodating theater, the truth is found in the design of the stories we tell in order to understand whom we might become. Throughout her career, with both the fiction and nonfiction, Dinesen is urging us to recognize the reality of the artificial. And when we really start searching for the truth in stories, we can find it everywhere, not just in sincere confessions but in the deliberate lies and imagined possibilities, the magic and fantasy and all the other unreal elements that go into the concoction of identity.
I do urge you to read the whole article, which delves into some of Dinesen's specific stories and explores the complicated relationship that artifice has with stereotype (which of course carries great weight, as Dinesen is a white European woman living in Kenya and writing about it.)
Thanks to Justin B. for the link to this article.
Image Credit: The Nation
Related:
- "In Search of Karen Blixen's Kenya" (The New York Times)
- "Kenya Makes Museum Out of Dinesen's Home" (The New York Times)
- "Hollywood Comes to Africa" (East African Standard)
- "When Isak Dinesen Met Marilyn Monroe" (The Independent)
- "Hannah Arendt on Isak Dinesen: Between Storytelling and Theory" (Comparative Literature)
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