Hannah Arendt on Isak Dinesen: Between Storytelling and Theory

Comparative Literature, Winter 2004 by Wilkinson, Lynn R

Storytelling, at any rate, is what, in the end made her wise-and, incidentally, not a "witch," "siren," or "sibyl," as her entourage admiringly thought. Wisdom is a virtue of old age, and it seems to come only to those who, when young, were neither wise nor prudent." (109)

Although the essays on both Luxemburg and Dinesen emphasize the importance of passion for the intellectual development of each woman, the Danish writer's life, as recounted by Arendt in her reading of Migel's biography, suggests how Storytelling endows life with meaning. Dinesen is an exceptional figure, for rarely is an actor able to tell the story of his or her own life. What makes such Storytelling possible is an experience of extreme loss, such as the catastrophe of Nazism and exile or Dinesen's loss of her farm and lover in the early 1930s. Such catastrophes, which for both women also entailed a kind oi linguistic exile, make it possible to double back and consider the meaning of a life that followed the lines of a master-plot that resembles that of the judeo-Christian tradition, with expulsion from the garden followed by various attempts at survival and even redemption. Arendt does not consider Dinesen's work systematically in the essay, but she docs suggest how the best of her stories embody the experience of exile, especially in their incorporation of fragments of Western tradition, an incorporation that in the best tales emphasizes dissonance and a lack of closure, and in the worst, a narcissistic preoccupation with the airless harmonies of aestheticism or what Arendt calls the German tradition of Bildung.

For Arendt, Dinesen's early tale "The Poet" best illustrates the connection between bad Storytelling and German culture, for one of the characters in the tale had visited Weimar and Goethe during his youth and remained throughout his life under their spell. The end of the tale emphasizes the grotesqueness of his attempts to recreate in his own life the artificial aestheticism of Weimar. The man's protege, the poet of the title, shoots his benefactor and is, in turn, put to death by his own lover, whose comments Arendt quotes: '"Just because it suited him that the world should be lovely, he meant to conjure it into being so,' she said to herself, 'You!,' she cried at him, 'You poet!'" (Men in Dark Times [MDT] 107).

For Arendt, "The Poet" is one of a cluster of tales by Dinesen that illustrate the dangers of trying to make stories come true, rather than telling stories about life. The essay traces this error to Dinesen's own narcissism: Arendt names her preoccupation with literary honors, but one might also mention Dinesen's preoccupation with fashion, a preoccupation which led her to pose for photographs reproduced in glossy magazines. Arendt also cites Dinesen's marriage, not to the man she was in love with, but with his twin, as an early example of the folly of trying to make stories come true.

It is all too easy to focus on the biographical details of Arendt's discussion of bad Storytelling. Her comments on "The Poet," however, tie aestheticism and what one might call false closure to broader currents within twentieth-century culture and politics. "The Poet," Arendt argues, "could also be read as a story about the vices of Bildung" (MDT 107). Arendt's wording startles. What is at stake here is less the virtues or vices of the process of humanistic education implicit in the word Bildung than the particularly German development of the term. For Arendt, both Storytelling and culture go wrong when they fail to come to grips with life and politics, when they underwrite the practices of social groups such as the German bourgeoisie, the Bildungsburgertum, who turn to culture and tradition as refuges from politics and public life. Throughout the essay, Arendt notes Dinesen's own ambivalence concerning public life and storytelling. Early on, Arendt suggests, Dinesen had reached "the firm conviction that it was not very becoming for a woman to be an author, hence a public figure; the light that illuminates the public domain is much too harsh to be flattering" (MDT 95). But -and here (lie parallel Lo Arendt's own experience is striking-events propelled Dinesen into a public realm that she, as well as Arendt, recognized as less than friendly to women.