Dinesen and Shakespeare
Compiled by Steven H. Cullinane
on September 7, 2006
Excerpt from
ISAK DINESEN IN AMERICA
by
SARA STAMBAUGH
In Africa she threw herself into the role of Baroness and her conception of a long-vanished aristocracy. As an example, on one trip to Denmark she took along a small African servant. She bought him fashionable European suits to set off his turban and traveled with him in the manner of an eighteenth-century lady, rather like the Marchallin in Richard Strauss's Der Rosencavalier (Migel, p.72).
By 1931, of course, her African life had dissolved. Her marriage had broken up, the man she loved had been killed in a plane crash, and, worst of all, she'd lost the farm. Her identity as the Baroness vanished, even to the title she'd used for fifteen years, because Bror Blixen remarried in 1929, replacing her with a new Baroness Blixen.
Critics are justified, I think, in seeing Pellegrina Leoni, the central character of "The Dreamers," as a reflection of Karen Blixen's view of her situation. In the story the great prima donna Pellegrina loses her voice in a fire that breaks out in mid-performance and with it her name and identity. In a striking passage, Pellegrina tells her friend Marcus Cocoza,
"The time has come for me to be that: a woman called one name or another. And if she is unhappy we shall not think a great deal about it . . .
"And if," she said, "I come to think very much of what happens to that one woman, why I shall go away, at once, and be someone else: a woman who makes lace in the town, or who teaches children to read, or a lady traveling to Jerusalem to pray at the Holy Sepulcher. There are many that I can be. If they are happy or unhappy, or if they are fools or wise people, those women, I shall not think a great deal about that. I will not be one person again, Marcus, I will be always many persons from now. Never again, will I have my heart and my whole life bound up with one woman to suffer so much." (SGT, p. 345)
Pellegrina Leoni reinvents herself first as whore, then as revolutionary, and finally
as saint, each time with a separate name and identity. Karen Blixen reinvented herself as
the writer Isak Dinesen.
Note particularly:
"... why I shall go away, at once, and be someone else: a woman who makes lace in
the town, or who teaches children to read, or a lady traveling to Jerusalem to pray at the
Holy Sepulcher. There are many that I can be. If they are happy or unhappy, or if they are
fools or wise people, those women, I shall not think a great deal about that. I will not
be one person again, Marcus, I will be always many persons from now."
Compare to Borges on Shakespeare:
There was no one in him;
behind his face (which even through the bad paintings of those times
resembles no other) and his words, which were copious, fantastic and
stormy, there was only a bit of coldness, a dream dreamt by no one. At
first he thought that all people were like him, but the astonishment of
a friend to whom he had begun to speak of this emptiness showed him his
error and made him feel always that an individual should not differ in
outward appearance. Once he thought that in books he would find a cure
for his ill and thus he learned the small Latin and less Greek a
contemporary would speak of; later he considered that what he thought
might well be found in an elemental rite of humanity, and he let
himself be initiated by Anne Hathaway one long June afternoon. At the
age of twenty-odd years he went to London. Instinctively he had already
become proficient in the habit of simulating that he was someone, so
that others would not discover his condition as no one; in London he
found the profession for which he was predestined, that of the actor
who on a stage plays at being another before a gathering of people who
play at taking him for that other person. His histrionic tasks brought
him a singular satisfaction, perhaps the first he had ever known; but
once the last verse had been acclaimed and the last dead man withdrawn
from the stage, the hated flavor of unreality returned to him. He
ceased to be Ferrex or Tamerlane and became no one again. Thus hounded,
he took to imagining other heroes and other tragic fables. And so,
while his flesh fulfilled its destiny as flesh in the taverns and
brothels of London, the soul that inhabited him was Caesar, who
disregards the augur's admonition, and Juliet, who abhors the lark, and
Macbeth who converses on the plain with the witches who are also Fates.
No one has ever been so many men as this man, who like the Egyptian
Proteus could exhaust all the guises of reality. At times he would
leave a confession hidden away in some corner of his work, certain that
it would not be deciphered; Richard affirms that in his person he plays
the part of many and Iago claims with curious words "I am not what I
am." The fundamental identity of existing, dreaming and acting inspired
famous passages of his.
For twenty years he
persisted in that controlled hallucination, but one morning he was
suddenly gripped by the tedium and the terror of being so many kings
who die by the sword and so many suffering lovers who converge, diverge
and melodiously expire. That very day he arranged to sell his theater.
Within a week he had returned to his native village, where he recovered
the trees and rivers of his childhood and did not relate them to the
others his muse had celebrated, illustrious with mythological allusions
and Latin terms. He had to be someone; he was a retired impresario who
had made his fortune and concerned himself with loans, lawsuits and
petty usury. It was in this character that he dictated the arid will
and testament known to us, from which he deliberately excluded all
traces of pathos or literature. His friends from London would visit his
retreat and for them he would take up again his role as poet.
History adds that before or
after dying he found himself in the presence of God and told Him: "I
who have been so many men in vain want to be one and myself." The voice
of the Lord answered him from a whirlwind: "Neither am I anyone; I have
dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the
forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one."
By Jorge Luis Borges
Translated by James E. Irby