Hannah Arendt on Isak Dinesen: Between Storytelling and Theory

Comparative Literature, Winter 2004 by Wilkinson, Lynn R

Arendt scholars have naturally focused on what her references to writers tell us about her own work. But what do they tell us about the literary works themselves? One problem is that both Arendt's review essay and her other citations of Dinesen's work offer little in the way of conventional literary interpretations. Even in the review essay, her most substantial piece of writing about Dinesen's work, Arendt cites out of context and fails to take into account the structure of individual works or any kind of chronological sequence. Here, as in some of Walter Benjamin's works, quotation is an integral part of a kind of interpretation that emphasizes the task of the critic as that of assembling the fragments of a tradition into a meaningful constellation that evokes hope for the future, rather than explaining the past in terms of a determined chronology of events.

Yet the references to Dinesen offer a privileged perspective on Arendt's practice as a theorist whose work has literary and cultural, as well as political, implications. Arendt not only cites and discusses Dinesen, but also incorporates elements of Dinesen's writings into her own work. Arendt's texts thus enter into a dialogue with those of Dinesen, one which brings into focus the importance of storytelling and literature for Arendt but also the theoretical dimensions of Dinesen's tales.

In the late 1950s, Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen published two collections of stories: Last Tales (1957) and Anecdotes of Destiny (1958), which Arendt mentions in her November 1958 letter to Gertrud Jaspers. Arendt's references in The Human Condition (1958) prove that she had read not only "The Dreamers," from Seven Gothic Tales (1934), but also at least one story from Last Tales: "Converse at Night in Copenhagen." It is almost certain that she read Anecdotes of Destiny after the publication of The Human Condition, but it is unclear when she read Out of Africa, or whether she was familiar with Blixen/Dinesen's second story collection, Winter's Tales, published in 1942. However, Arendt would also have known Dinesen by reputation, for the Danish writer was celebrated in New York literary and intellectual circles in the late 1950s.3 Visiting New York for the first and only time in 1959, Dinesen made a number of appearances, including three at the Ninety-Third Street YMCA (Thurman 421). Arendt was present at at least one of them, and Young-Bruehl reports on her reactions:

A year after the Danish short-story writer Isak Dinesen died, Hannah Arendt recounted to a friend an occasion when Dinesen had come to New York, where she was supposed to read but did not. "She came, very very old, terribly fragile, beautifully dressed; she was led to a kind of Renaissance chair, given some wine, and then, without a shred of paper, she began to tell stories [from the Out of Africa book], almost word for word as they exist in print. The audience, all very young people, was overwhelmed. . . . She was like an apparition from god knows where or when. And even more convincing than in print. Also: a great lady." (Hannah Arendt 18-19)