Hannah Arendt on Isak Dinesen: Between Storytelling and Theory

Comparative Literature, Winter 2004 by Wilkinson, Lynn R

Young-Bruehl notes the parallel to Mary McCarthy's comments on her friend in "Saying Good-bye to Hannah," in which she emphasized Arendt's greatness as a performer-she was, McCarthy asserted, a "magnificent stage diva" who recalled Sarah Bernhard or Proust's Berma (cited in Between Friends 391). Young-Bruehl's biography suggests that Arendt in fact emulated Dinesen in her own public appearances: "She [Arendt] had learned, slowly, to control-though never to conquer-her great stage fright by yielding to her story, to what she had to say" (Hannah Arendt (18).

While McCarthy and Young-Bruehl both suggest, then, that Dinesen's appearances offered to Arendt a model for her own oral performances, it would be misleading to identify Dinesen's performances with the narrative traditions of preliterate communities, as discussed by ethnographers or by Walter Benjamin in his essay "The Storyteller." Dinesen had little in common with Benjamin's storyteller, whose narrating recalls familiar faces and lives to a relatively small audience and fosters their sense of community: not only did the Danish writer perform for relatively large audiences at the New York "%" but she also gave readings of stories and talks over the radio, the latter subsequently published as "essays." Furthermore, even Dinesen's earliest critics have noted the complexity of her stories and their debts to European modernism. As Tone Selboe has argued, Dinesen's tales draw on various traditions of oral storytelling and in fact mimic the situation of the storyteller as discussed by Benjamin, but their complexitytheir textuality-belongs to print culture. (Dinesen seems, like Arendt, to have been best able to define what she was doing negatively: she was most emphatically not a novelist!).4 Arendt's remarks on Dinesen at the "Y" suggest that she was also aware of the extent to which the Danish writer mimicked the role of the traditional storyteller-and in such a way that she appeared as "a great lady." But what of Arendt's interpretation of Dinesen's texts? In a pioneering article, Heather Keenleyside characterizes Arendt's notion of storytelling as revelatory of the "who" rather than the "what" of identity in the context of an argument that draws on Benvenisle, Ricoeur, and Bakhtin, thus inviting further discussion of the links between Arendt's work and that of Dinesen and these theorists:

The moment we want to say who somebody is, our very vocabulary leads us astray into saying whal he is; we get entangled in a description of qualities he necessarily shares with others like him; we begin to describe a type or a "character" in the old meaning of the word, with the result that his specific uniqueness escapes us. The specificity of the "who" is not easily approached by language that serves the universal, is not amenable to adjectives or description but, says Arendt, emerges in speech and action and events, in story. (112)

Arendt Reads Dinesen

Arendt's 1968 review essay on Dinesen was republished the same year in Men in Dark Times, a commemorative volume of Arendt's essays on European and American intellectuals and writers that includes-perversely enough-two women: Dinesen and Rosa Luxemburg.5 The essays on both women take as their points of departure biographies, although Parmenia Migel's Titania is far inferior to J.P. Nettl's work on Luxemburg.5 In both cases, moreover, Arendt uses the biography, as well as the conventions of the review essay, to approach the work of a writer through her life. Luxemburg emerges at the end of the essay as a writer whose "ideas belong wherever the history of political ideas is seriously taught" (56; Arendt cites Nettl). The end of the piece on Dinesen emphasizes the connection between storytelling and wisdom: