On The Dinesenian Tales of Self-Reinvention

God knows how I ended up spending a weekend devouring Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen, or Baroness Karen Blixen, who, according to Hemingway, deserved the Nobel Prize in Literature more than he did. I regrettably knew nothing about the author until last week, when I read a quip in response to Henrik Karlsson’s essay “Swimming in July” (you should read his writings, by the way):

The cure for anything is salt water — sweat, tears, or the sea.

Captivated by the acuteness of the aphorism, I discovered it was a paraphrase from SGT, thus the unplanned binge-reading. (Plus watching Out of Africa, a film based on the baroness’ 1937 autobiographical book of the same title — that’s a topic for another day, though.)

Dinesen’s rich and intricate writing is challenging for me to parse as a non-native speaker with rudimentary knowledge of the cultural allusions therein. Few names lack meaning; every other line taps into another mythology. Like a desperate college student scrambling to finish his homework essay, I flipped through academic articles trying to find clues on her wordplay and archetypes, and grilled ChatGPT for the meaning and intention of all the French and German insertions. What is das ewig Weibliche? What compels a character to utter fils de St. Louis, montez au ciel on the brink of death? A commentator humorously said you need an internet connection to read this author — and I’d add, a PhD in obscure references wouldn’t hurt either.

Despite my sketchy understanding, I became a fan of the Dinesenian style for her lyrical, evocative, and enigmatic command of words. Just look at how she wrote about the environment:

The very air had here in its embrace a scornful vigor which incited and renewed the heart.

And:

The free monsoon came from far places, and the sea wandered on under its sway, on her long journey, in the face of the dim luminous moon.

And:

When she came out it was raining. The night itself wanted to touch her.

Her mastery extends beyond mere description. In Dinesen’s words, dreaming “is the well-mannered people’s way of committing suicide”; a crush can be “self-luminous and shine in the dark” and “phosphorescent, like touchwood”; and a loss of life is staged as a “great white full-moon death.” Her expressions are unexpected yet eloquent, often leaving me in awe, marveling at their beauty and precision.

But what’s more fascinating about Dinesen’s storytelling is the labyrinthine structure and fractal logic. Typically, you start with a narrator who encounters others telling stories-within-stories; the narration keeps branching out until a ray of revelation cuts through, shockingly and cruelly exposing the underlying interconnections. Concurrently, through the constant creation and piercing of personae, and the alternating misreading and projection by others, issues of identity and subjectivity surface. These can be best demonstrated with the two longest — and my favorite — stories in SGT, “The Deluge at Nordeney” and “The Dreamers.”

In “The Deluge at Nordeney,” four individuals, stranded in a countryside barn and waiting for rescue from a flood, pass the night by telling stories of overcoming past impositions and reclaiming their own life stories. An unmarried noblewoman finds freedom and happiness by constructing a fictional, hedonistic past for herself that fulfills her desires. A young singer flees from the constricting expectations imposed on him by his newfound father, a baron who fathered him illegitimately. A young woman, marginalized and overlooked by her uncle, finds liberation through a painting of mythical nymphs and satyrs, a visual representation of a world where she is seen and valued. And in the most audacious act of self-invention, a servant kills a cardinal and assumes his identity, literally embodying his desired persona through performance. As dawn approaches and the barn threatens to collapse, each of them has finished the transition to a new self, while the characters’ narrations and the story itself are cut short abruptly.

On the other hand, the linchpin of “The Dreamers” is Pellegrina Leoni, a soprano who, prompted by the loss of her voice in an accident, disowns the old self she felt bound up with and vows never to “be one person again.” Driven by this desire for reinvention, she embarks on a series of transformations, inhabiting multiple roles before discarding each one out of fear of entrapment. First, she embraces the uninhibited sensuality of a Roman courtesan, indulging in earthly pleasures before ultimately abandoning her lover. Next, she channels the fervor of a revolutionary, orchestrating rebellious actions and disappearing amidst the chaos she helped create. Finally, she embodies a saint, cultivating an aura of piety and self-denial, only to slip away once more. Again, these experiences are revealed not by herself but through a series of embedded tales told by the lovers she captivated. The story culminates with these three lovers confronting her on a snowy hillside, upon which she undermines their attempt to unmask her by leaping from a cliff.

Despite the characters’ apparent triumphs in self-creation, the stories leave readers pondering the viability of these newly forged selves. Dinesen seems to recognize that fabricated identities are inevitably fragile and contingent on factors beyond the subject’s control. In “The Deluge at Nordeney,” the barn’s imminent collapse threatens to erase the characters along with their identities. Even if they survived, the imaginations and fabrications within their narratives would be vulnerable to the scrutiny of the outside world. Similarly, while Leoni in “The Dreamers” appears to enter and quit roles as she wishes, legitimate questions can be raised about whether these constructed selves can exist independently outside the surrounding narratives, which in her case are always told by male gazers. She ultimately dies a performer before her spectators.

Yet, it would be unnecessary to read the stories as pessimistic commentaries on the futility of self-invention. Identities are inherently ephemeral and performative, a feature that people carry as social creatures, constantly reshaping themselves in response to the world around them. Even in solitude, they continue to engage in internal narrations around and among iterations of the self. The dynamic is not inauthentic but rather necessary to navigate complex social landscapes, even more so in modern settings; the self is an ongoing project that takes work to maintain. Indeed, Dinesen encouraged readers to embrace theatricality and find joy in performance, even with the knowledge that the curtain must fall. As one of her characters suggests:

Be not afraid of absurdity; do not shrink from the fantastic. Within a dilemma, choose the most unheard-of, the most dangerous, solution. Be brave, be brave! Ah, Madame, we have got much to learn.

A lifetime exclama-phobe, I find myself strangely drawn to this exhortation. Surely we have got much to learn.

A note on availability and translation

Quirkiness in global copyright laws puts SGT in a liminal domain: as of now, the book is public domain only in certain jurisdictions, such as Canada, where the copyright law had a “life plus 50 years” coverage until 2022, and India, where a “life plus 60 years” rule applies. For Dinesen’s works, these rules resolve to 2012 and 2022, respectively. Thus, you can only find the full text of SGT contributed by Indian (e.g., the scanned version from the Digital Library of India on the Internet Archive) or Canadian (e.g., the ebook version hosted on Faded Page) sources.

Fellow Mandarin speakers may be interested in the volunteer Chinese translation by participants of the Yeeyan Gutenberg Project, available in the ebook version on multiple Chinese online bookstores. The quality is respectable but can get entangled or go off in some spots.