Classic Tales for Modern Times

By : Bo Hakon Jørgensen

Quotations taken from the works of Isak Dinesen

On being presented with the Nobel Prize for Literature, Ernest Hemingway commented that it should, in fact, have gone not to him, but to Karen Blixen. He must have had his reasons for saying this, apart from his and Blixen´s mutual love of Africa. She, too, was a teller of tales in a modern age where stories seemed to be in short supply. Seemingly classic tales which on closer inspection proved to be modern experiments with classical models to which they did not always stay true. Like other citizens of the 20th century she drove a car, used a typewriter, travelled by train and aeroplane - and yet in her writing she turned the clock back 100 years in an effort to gain some perspective on her own modernity.

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She never did say what actually prompted her to write down the stories that she made up during her spare time on the farm, but what is known is that around 1925-26 she suffered some sort of existential crisis - what perhaps nowadays would be termed a "mid-life crisis", at the root of which lay the question: what was she going to do with her life? It was then that she unearthed a piece she had written as a girl, a marionette comedy entitled "Revenge of the Truth", and had it published in the celebrated Danish journal in which she had made her debut twenty years earlier. According to her letters she had plans to produce more in the same style. But these plans did not come to much. Instead, the ideas for the marionette comedies evolved into stories, written in English. A look at Blixen´s papers in the Royal Library in Copenhagen reveals that at a very early date she had composed lists of contents for the collection of stories she had set about writing. One title, "Carnival", went on, unaltered, to become the title of one of her stories, other marionette comedies wound up as subplots in some of the Seven Gothic Tales, the book with which she made her entry onto the literary scene in 1934. These lists of contents, taken together with Denys´ question, in the above quote, regarding a new story, make it clear that she must have had the plots of something like ten stories worked out in her head before she started putting them down on paper. Two of these were finished by the time she left Africa, with the farm sold and Denys killed in a plane crash.
At this point writing seemed to be her only option. She had no education other than the private tutoring she had received as the daughter of an upper-class family. Besides which she had squandered a considerable share of the family fortune on her lost cause of a farm, which lay too high up for coffee growing, and hence she could not count on having any money to plough into some new venture. And so back to Denmark she went, to live under her mother´s roof and devote herself to finishing her short stories. From having queened it over a farm in Africa; from having been the one and only, she now had to divide herself between all of the different characters in her tales. One tale, "The Dreamers" provides a vivid illustration of this drastic change in circumstances, in Blixen´s description of the great opera diva Pellegrina Leoni who has lost her singing voice due to a fire at the opera house.

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This tendency to be many different characters also manifested itself in her storytelling technique, with the one narrator being supplanted by another; each with their own stories, set into a narrative framework that carries the reader off to exotic places - both geographically and spiritually. As she herself once said, what she was striving towards was a fantasy world lying somewhere between Hoffman and Poe. But at the same time her stories involve modern themes which have been transported back into the past (somewhere between 1830 and 1870), combined with radically transformed personal experiences. One narrator, the somewhat fanciful old maid, Malin Night and Day, in her recounting of the story of the young girl Calypso (herself present when the tale is told in the hayloft during "The Deluge at Norderney) offers us some insight into this distinctive method of transposition, which is one of the most fascinating features of Karen Blixen´s stories:

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Karen Blixen was well aware of this state of affairs and in "The Blank Page" she got to grips with all the things left unsaid in a story, everything that does not quite fit. It is rooted in the classic heroic legends all of which feature some irregularity that epitomises this silence. In a row of spotted royal marriage-bed sheets there is one that is spotless and it is before this one that people gather to gaze in wonder. The old storyteller, who is teaching a young woman the art of storytelling (that of staying true to the tale) says:

"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 heavy as any, (...). 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.
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 the old-story-telling women!
For with what eternal and unswerving loyalty has not this canvas been inserted in the row. The storytellers 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." (Last Tales (1957))

What happened on the wedding night of the spotless sheet is silence. But this silence is heard between all the spotted sheets. It tells us that stories are not the only truth about the world, but the one means by which all the irregularities, the chaos, the faults, can find expression.

"Who then, she continues, tells a finer tale than any of us? Silence does. And where does one read a deeper silence than upon the most perfectly printed page of the most precious book? Upon the blank page." (Last Tales)

With this acknowledgement of the story as man-made order everything not of the story is accorded its place, and Karen Blixen´s search for meaning and a pattern in the story remains as modern as ever in its alternation between the pattern and the absence of same. We may not live as the classical heroes, but we long to do so.

Translated by Barbara Haveland