Arendt and Dinesen

University of Oregon
Hannah Arendt on Isak Dinesen: Between Storytelling and Theory Author(s): Lynn R. Wilkinson Source: Comparative Literature, Vol. 56, No. 1 (Winter, 2004), pp. 77-98 Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of Oregon Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4122287 Accessed: 10/12/2010 19:52
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LYNN R. WILKINSON
Hannah Isak
Arendt
on
Dinesen:
Between
and Storytelling
Theory
about them." The words stand as an epigraph to the chapter on action in Hannah Arendt's TheHuman Condition,first published in 1958. They are attributed to "IsakDinesen," the British and American nom de plume of the Danish writer known as Karen Blixen in Denmark, although no source is given. Evocative and puzzling, they seem to point to Hannah Arendt's own story,which goes largely untold in her own writing, but they also jar against both the Latin quotation by Dante that follows and, to an even greater extent, the discussion of Greek philosophy and politics in the body of the chapter itself. What can a Danish writer who called herself a mere storyteller possibly have to do with a work that is now considered to be one of the classics of Western political theory? Why did Arendt choose as the first of two epigraphs that head the most important chapter in the work a quotation by Dinesen-and one, moreover, for which readers of both Arendt and Dinesen have searched in vain in the Danish writer's published works? Although some version of Arendt's epigraph may eventually crop up in an electronic search of Dinesen's work, the probable source is a telephone interview TimesBookReviewon November 3, 1957 (and reprinted published in TheNew York in 2000 in a collection of interviews and talks edited by Else Brundbjerg). The passage in question both reveals the epigraph to be a misquotation and suggests the framework for Hannah Arendt's interest in the Danish writer and her work. Blixen/Dinesen had not yet visited the United States. Tongue-in-cheek, the interviewer, Bent Mohn, asks her:
"Youhave written about eighteenth and nineteenth century people-wouldn't you like to write aboutpeople of 1957,livingin semi-detached houseswithradioand TV?"
"ALL SORROWS CAN BE BORNE if you put them into a story or tell a story
She replies:
Butto me it "Imustgiveyou the impressionthatI don'twantto writeaboutmyown contemporaries. is as if the people of 1957 shrinkbackfrom the story.Youcan put them into a novel,full of observations of man'semotions and also of the subconscious, but I feel that theysimplywon'tgo into a tale. And I am not a novelist,reallynot even a writer; I am a storyteller. Oneofmy saidabout methatI friends
think all sorrowscan be borneif you put theminto a story or tell a story about them, and perhapsthis is not entirelyuntrue. To me, the explanation of life seems to be its melody, its pattern. And I feel in life such an infinite, truly inconceivable fantasy." "Do you then look on your own life as a 'tale'?"
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/78
I suppose so but in a sense only I can grasp.And, after all, the tale is not yet quite finished!" "Yes, 254-55;myemphasis) (Brundbjerg
If this newspaper interview is indeed the source of the epigraph, Arendt may have omitted it because such an explicit reference to the mass media would have jarred with the critique of mass culture that informs much of the argument in TheHuman Condition.Or perhaps it was a private joke. But it would be wrong to conclude that if the newspaper article is in fact the source of Arendt's epigraph it proves that Arendt knew very little about Dinesen's work, for Dinesen's comments on storytelling in this interview have much in common with Arendt's other citations of Dinesen and with the theorist's discussions of storytelling in general: in the interview, Dinesen ties storytelling not only to mourning but also to meaning and aesthetic patterns perceived in actions when relived in memory, patterns that don't fit into novels, since the latter are "full of observations of man's emotions and also of the subconscious" (Brundbjerg 255). Storytelling, uniquely, is able to capture the shape of an individual human life and to endow it with meaning. Arendt mentions Dinesen elsewhere in TheHuman Conditionas well as in other published texts, although at first glance these references offer little in the way of an explanation for her interest. In TheHuman Condition,a long footnote in the chapter on labor credits Dinesen as the only modern author to have recognized the close relationship between the cessation of pain and the illusion of pleasure, and the chapter on action refers to "The Dreamers," a story from Seven Gothic Tales,Dinesen's first collection in English. Arendt's essay "Truth and Politics," in 1967 (and reprinted in the collection Between published in The New Yorker Past and Future in 1968), again quotes the sentence used as the epigraph to the chapter on action, this time in the context of a discussion of the relationship of storytelling to truth in politics. And the sentence appears yet again in Arendt's of Parmenia Migel's 1967 biography highly critical 1968 review in TheNew Yorker of Isak Dinesen (Titania: The Biographyof Isak Dinesen), which discusses her life and works in terms that would seem to agree with Arendt's enigmatic epigraph -namely, that the loss of her African farm and lover made Dinesen into a wise woman and a storyteller. The one reference to Dinesen in Arendt's published letters occurs in a letter to Gertrud Jaspers dated November 16, 1958, in which Arendt mentions that she has just read Dinesen's Anecdotes of Destiny,which she finds to be the work of "einer groBen danischen Geschichtenerzahlerin, gro3e Dame und weise alte Frau" (Hannah Arendt,KarlJaspers,Briefwechsel 395; a great Danish storyteller, a great lady, and a wise old woman [my translation]). There are, on the other hand, no references to Dinesen in the hundreds of letters to Heidegger, her husband Heinrich Blficher, or Mary McCarthy,although the latter does refer to Dinesen in a letter written to Arendt in 1968. Still, the characterization of Dinesen as a wise woman and an exemplary storyteller in the letter to Gertrud Jaspers is tantalizing, for in TheHuman Condition and elsewhere Arendt argues that storytelling plays a key role in the life of the polis: while storytelling brings into focus the meaning of an individual life, it also creates a public world of shared narratives that survives the death of individual members. Dinesen's works, it seems, might serve as an example of how we might go about translating Arendt's remarks on Greek storytelling into modern terms-or at least shed light on Arendt as a writer whose own work, like that of
HANNAHARENDTON ISAKDINESEN/79
Dinesen, Benjamin, or even the great essayist Montaigne, is studded with quotations-and misquotations-of texts by other authors. The past twenty years have seen a renaissance of interest in the work of both Hannah Arendt and Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen. The publication in 1982 of magisterial biographies of both women--Judith Thurman's Isak Dinesen: The Life oJ KarenBlixen and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's Hannah Arendt: ForLove of the Worldbrought to light aspects of both writers' lives that had been passed over or obscured in their published works: for Dinesen, the painful background to her African adventure, so serenely portrayed in Out of Africa; for Arendt, her early affair with Martin Heidegger. The biographies reveal a parallel between the lives of the two women that many commentators have noted and of which, indeed, Arendt herself seems to have been aware. Her review essay on Migel's biography also opens with an epigraph, this time attributed, again with no reference, to Balzac: "Les grandes passions sont rares comme les chefs-d'oeuvre" ("Great passions are as rare as masterpieces"). For several commentators, including YoungBruehl, Carol Brightman, and most recently Julia Kristeva, this essay allows Arendt-albeit obliquely-to discuss her own "grand passion" for Heidegger, which, like Titania's infatuation with an ass in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream,was grotesque as well as spellbinding. For Kristeva, however, the parallels between the two women's lives have limited importance for the interpretation of Arendt's work as a whole. Rather, the most important model in Arendt's writing is the Orpheus-Eurydice myth, which Kristeva argues suggests a double-movement in her work: Arendt insists on the distinction between conceptual thought and the experience of the senses, while preserving-in her discussions of natality and origins-the traces of the female body, a double focus that Kristeva sees as typical of "feminine genius."' The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is only one of many narrative models in Arendt's work, and thus it would seem incontestable that Arendt herself viewed narrative as an integral part of her thinking even at the end of her life, although Arendt's interpreters continue to quarrel over the status of narrative within her writings: Does her work count as political theory or mere literature? Is it serious or postmodern? Or does it exhibit what Seyla Benhabib has called a "reluctant modernism"? But beyond the struggle for possession of Arendt's work, some interpreters have managed to shed light on the rhetorical aspects of her work, espe1In Hannah Arendt: Legeniefeminin, Kristeva writes: Ainsi donc, Eurydice,le sensible et le feminine ne se volatilisentpas sous la plume de notre narratricepolitique. Maisils reviennent,moins sous l'aspect de "concepts" que sous celui de ces metaphorsfr6quentesqui organisentsa pensee et en sont les points forts, les charnieres la condition, la naissance l'origine, d'Arendt,la trace d'une tenportent, dans les &crits d6cisives: sion entre "viecontemplative" et "vieactive," mais aussi de cette sensorialisation-desensorialisationqui fait d'unefemme un penseurde genie. (166) our politicallyminded narrator.Instead, they make a comeback, less as "concepts" than as recurringmetaphorsthat organizeher thinkingand that expressits presuppositions and turnIn Arendt's ing points:the origin, the condition,and natality. writings,those metaphorsreflect processthatmakesa womaninto a thinkerof genius. (Guberman's translation, 98)
the tension between the vita activa and the vita contemplativaas well as the sensing-desensing In that sense, Eurydice, the sensory realm, and femininity do not evaporate under the pen of
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /80
cially those works that tell stories. Young-Bruehl touched on the subject in an article that appeared in 1977. In articles published in 1990, Seyla Benhabib and Dagmar Barnouw emphasize Arendt's debts to literary and theoretical models in two of her works. Benhabib argues that Arendt drew above all on the work of her friend Walter Benjamin for the structure of her argument in The Originsof Totalitarianism, which attempts to delineate a "constellation"of the elements of totalitarianism rather than trace a chronological development: Arendt's use of the word "origin"in her title echoes Benjamin's in The Origin of GermanTragicDrama. Barnouw claims that Arendt drew on the literary technique of oratioobliquain her account of the Eichmann trial in order to represent his testimony in her own words. LisaJane Disch's Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophyargues, in turn, that storytelling is central to Arendt's work in the late 1950s and 1960s. For Arendt, storytelling, as opposed to conceptual thought, "trains the imagination to go visiting,"fostering friendship (as opposed to intimacy) and what Kant called an "enlarged mentality"among readers and listeners, which allows writers and readers alike to think beyond the 'Archimedean ideal" (Disch, esp. 102-105). Besides noting the Heideggerian resonances of Arendt's discussion of Dinesen, Kristeva'spsychoanalytic study also argues that narrative plays a key role in Arendt's attempts to distinguish her own thinking from that of Heidegger: instead of her mentor's notion of truth as revelation, Arendt emphasized that narrative reveals the meaning of human action, a distinction Kristeva sees echoed in Arendt's concern with logos,a language of men, as opposed to the nous, wisdom that comes from above (Le ginie fdminin 163-65). And while paying tribute to the breadth of Arendt's literary knowledge, which included Celine, Kristeva also laments what she sees as Arendt's lack of du langagepodtique.2 interest in the kind of linguistic revolt described in La revolution
Life is a Narrative,Kristevawrites: One could reproach Arendt for not having understood that the poetic language of a narrator -see Proust-is able to conjugate the "thinking ego" and the "ego that appears and moves through the world" in order to translate a perceptible nunc stans and breathe it into recovered time much better than can any philosophical concept or mystical vision. We can only be consternated by her Lukacs-type sociologism that declares with facility, with regard to Kafka, that "anystyle, by its own magic, is a kind of flight from truth";or that decrees that the complicated fate of the classical novel simply "corresponds to the slow decline of the citizen" in the sense of the French Revolution and of Kant; and that, in the face of a world controlled by secret powers, Kafka wanted nothing more than "to be a fellow citizen," a "member of the community." Dear Kafka, who is supposed to "make us afraid" to the point of arousing Kabbalistic interpretations of his works, if not a satanic theology, when all he wanted was to become a "fellow citizen." We can lament the fact that Arendt does not appreciate the intrapsychic but also historical need for revoltthat led the avant-gardes of this century to re-evaluate without precedent the structures of narrative, of the word, and of the Self-to the domain not only of melancholy and "desolation," as she says, but also of psychosis; and that these limit-conditions, shown by individuals as well as by the "populace" (mob), found in Celine, for example, the most symptomatic, if not the most prudent or lucid, expression. Art, and in particular the art of narrative as genre, has a history that repeats neither past stakes nor former solutions, and that today contends more with a clinical protocol than it does with moral judgment. It is up to us to discern the causes and fate of that history, but not to stigmatize it. But this is not Arendt's preoccupation. She seeks an optimal solution to the "fragility of human affairs" and, according to this perspective, narrative art is subordinate to just action, although it is narrative art that makes it possible, or not, to highlight just action. In fact, narrative art is devoured by just action; no aesthetic privilege, no excellence of the Oeuvre can obliterate the Aristotelian ideal of hou heneka:a design for a beautiful and good life. (40-41)
2 In Hannah Arendt:
More recently, Annabel Herzog has traced the multifarious implications of Benjamin's work for what she calls "Arendt's political storytelling." While some of these commentators take care to limit their arguments to only some of Arendt's work, their interpretations nonetheless convincingly demonstrate that Arendt was a highly sophisticated reader and writer who self-consciously drew on literary models when it suited her. One might add to these analyses Hanna Pitkin's The Return of the Blob,which approaches Arendt's theoretical work by retracing the story of her attempts to come to terms with various kinds of "society,"attempts that in TheHuman Conditiontook the form of "the social," the demonized other of politics. As Pitkin's title suggests, the social eludes precise definitions, but the word casts a broad and amorphous shadow over the conformist elements in twentieth-century culture, as well as the inclusion of economic issues in politics. While acknowledging Arendt's importance as a political theorist, these recent studies suggest that the literary and aesthetic dimension of her work became more pronounced and self-conscious in the last decade of her life. Arendt was above all concerned to distinguish her work from what she saw as the dangerously isolated practices of philosophy, especially those of Heidegger. On the other hand, writing before Derrida and other postmodern theorists and writers, Arendt seems to have taken for granted a fundamental difference between her writing and that of poets and novelists-all the while publishing reviews of literary works and referring to them in her writing about politics. Like both her friend Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, whom she seems to have detested, Arendt found it impossible to divorce theory from aesthetics. She, too, is a theorist whose work sheds light on politics and culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. And given the number of literary studies that have drawn on the work of Benjamin and the Frankfurt School, it is certainly odd that almost no one has approached Arendt's work from the point of view of its implications for literary or cultural theory and interpretation. 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 sto-
ries: Last Tales(1957) and Anecdotes of Destiny (1958), which Arendt mentions in her November 1958 letter to GertrudJaspers. Arendt's references in TheHuman Condition(1958) prove that she had read not only "The Dreamers," from Seven GothicTales(1934), but also at least one story from Last Tales:"Converseat Night in Copenhagen." It is almost certain that she read Anecdotes ofDestinyafter the publication of TheHuman 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 NinetyThird Street YMCA (Thurman 421). Arendt was present at at least one of them, and Young-Bruehl reports on her reactions:
A yearafterthe Danishshort-story writerIsakDinesen died, HannahArendtrecounted to a friend an occasionwhen Dinesenhad come to NewYork, whereshe wassupposedto readbut did not. "She came, veryveryold, terriblyfragile,beautifully dressed;she wasled to a kind of Renaissancechair, given some wine, and then, withouta shredof paper,she began to tell stories [fromthe OutofAfrica book], almostwordfor word as they exist in print.The audience, all veryyoung people, was overwhelmed.... She waslike an apparitionfrom god knowswhere or when. And even more convincArendt (Hannah 18-19) ing thanin print.Also:a greatlady."
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 Friends391). Young-Bruehl's in in her own public apthat Arendt fact emulated Dinesen biography suggests "She had to learned, slowly, control-though never to con[Arendt] pearances: quer-her great stage fright by yielding to her story, to what she had to say" (Hannah Arendt18). 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 but she also gave readings of for relatively large audiences at the New York "Y," latter stories and talks over the radio, the 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
3Carol Brightman
comments
on the New York scene in the late 1950s:
The city was still swarming with Europeans, who were entertained in typical fashion at private parties of thirty to fifty guests, each having a little "name,' as Mary [McCarthy] would say, all shouting at once. Only the names had changed with the times, which now favored English intellectuals over French, and men and women of fashion-Cecil Beaton, Laurence Olivier, Stephen Spender, Sonia Orwell (whose marriage to Michael Pitt-Rivers ended a few months after it began), Kenneth Tynan and his wife, Elaine Dundy, Isak Dinesen, Kingsley Amis, Christopher Isherwood-over ideologues of any persuasion. (426)
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!).' 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 "agreat 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 Benveniste, 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 what 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. The essays on both women take as their points of departure biographies, although Parmenia Migel's Titania is far inferior toJ.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:
4 Dinesen did in fact publish one work she called a novel, GengeldelsensVeje(1944; The Angelic Avengers,New York: Random House, 1947), but it is an odd and unsatisfactory work, which she admitted she wrote for money. She usually denied that she was a novelist. 5Judith Thurman notes the limitations of Migel's work: In the course of the next five years Karen Blixen met several times with Ms. Migel, who took notes, although she seems not to have used a tape recorder. After Karen Blixen's death Ms. Migel interviewed a number of friends and family members, visited Katholm and Frijsenborg, and stayed with Count and Countess Wedell. Although she had access to all of Karen Blixen's personal papers and her African letters, she did not care to have them translated. She also did not, at Karen Blixen's wish, travel to Africa, explaining that it had changed too much and that Tania wanted her to imagine it for herself. She did choose to give the greatest emphasis to that part of her subject's life she knew best: the last years, the 1950s and early 1960s; to Isak Dinesen's honors and awards; and to Isak Dinesen's socializing with famous, talented, and titled people. She defended the image of the great aristocrat and Sibyl, often with what Hannah Arendt, in her review of Titania, called a "naive impudence." Unfortunately this also led Ms. Migel to exaggerate, unwittingly, the vanity and snobbism that were certainly elements of Dinesen's character, but also certainly not such prominent or un-self-conscious ones. (396)
COMPARATIVELITERATURE/84
not a "witch," "siren," Storytelling,at anyrate, is whatin the end made her wise-and, incidentally, as her entourageadmiringly or "sibyl," thought.Wisdomis a virtueof old age, and it seems to come (109) only to thosewho,whenyoung,wereneitherwisenor prudent."
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 of 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 does 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 because it suited him death by his own lover,whose comments Arendt quotes: "'Just into it that the world should be lovely, he meant to conjure being so,' she said to Dark Times in herself. 'You!,' she cried at him, 'You poet!'" (Men [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 who turn to culture and tradithe German bourgeoisie, the Bildungsbiirgertum,
HANNAH ARENDT ON ISAK DINESEN/85
tion 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 the parallel to 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. "The Poet" is not one of Dinesen's best stories, but it is the one that most obviously ties questions of aesthetics and aesthetic judgment to politics and to the condemnation of elements in German culture. Several of the tales published in Winter's Talestake up these issues with greater success, but there is no evidence that Arendt read this collection, and indeed several of these tales imbed the clash between the artificiality of the German tradition and the demands of life in a variety of Scandinavian contexts that would have been unfamiliar to Arendt. It is true, as so many recent commentators have pointed out, that Arendt's essay alludes to the role of a catastrophic love affair, but it focuses on the importance of such a passion to the development of a woman writer's vocation, and, like the essay on Rosa Luxemburg, Arendt's discussion of Dinesen suggests the larger context of the experiences of both passion and loss. She portrays Dinesen's grand passion, Denys Finch-Hatton, as one of those rebels against twentiethcentury culture, whose revolt against the bourgeoisie bore a certain resemblance to the doctrines of conservative revolutionaries in Germany (MDT 101). Thus Finch-Hatton's vagabond ways, which led to his own death and Karen Blixen's grief, was part of a much greater historical and political tragedy. One of the implications here is that Dinesen's best stories exhibit a lack of closure: they offer an experience that is fragmentary and dissonant, rather than a harmonious resolution at odds with the world of the storyteller and her audiences. Arendt couches this issue in terms of silence, and here again the issue of gender and a woman's life peeks out from behind a quotation that, like the Balzacian maxim that serves as an epigraph to this essay, lacks an attribution. The words, however, are easily traced to a story that feminist interpreters have made into one of Dinesen's most famous. At the heart of "The Blank Page" is an anecdote that concerns a portrait gallery of the stains made on royal wedding sheets, which suggests, among other things, an ironic commentary on female identity and its relationship to language in European tradition. One of the frames in the gallery, however, contains a square of linen without a stain, and it, of course, exerts a greater fascination than any of the others. The silence of the blank page is echoed in that of spectators, who, like the Mother Abbess described at the very end of the tale, "sinkinto deepest thought" (Last Tales131). Arendt quotes the narrator of this particular tale as recalling her grandmother's advice to "be loyal to the story."In so doing, Arendt argues, "silence will speak" (MDT 97). The quotation occurs in a passage that distills the essence of Arendt's theory of storytelling and also ties it to the work of Dinesen:
All she needed to begin with was life and the world, almost any kind of world or milieu; for the
world is full of stories, of events and occurrences and strange happenings, which wait only to be
COMPARATIVELITERATURE/86
told, and the reasonwhythey usuallyremainuntold is, accordingto IsakDinesen, lack of imagination-for only if you can imaginewhathas happened anyhow,repeatit in imagination,will you see you be able to tell them well.... Withoutrepeatinglife in imaginationyou can neverbe fullyalive,
"lack of imagination" prevents people from "existing." "Beloyal to the story," as one of her storytellers means no less than, Be loyal to life, admonishestheyoung, "beeternallyand unswervinglyloyal to the story," don't create fiction but accept what life is giving you, show yourself worthy of whatever it may be by the stories, and only if you have the patience to tell and retell them ('Jemelesraconteet reraconte") will
recollectingand ponderingover it, thus repeatingit in imagination;this is the wayto remainalive. And to live in the sense of being fullyalivehad earlybeen and remainedto the end her only aim and desire. "My life, I will not let you go except you bless me, but then I will let you go" The rewardof
storytelling is to be able to let go: "When the storyteller is loyal . .. to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak.Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness. But we, the faithful,
whenwe havespokenour lastword,willhear the voice of silence." 97;myemphasis) (MDT
Thus "the voice of silence" in Arendt's text alludes to the experience of the female body, which also speaks in a story that is-to invoke a pun that haunts both texts--"faithful to the tail." Moreover, the remarks on memory and repetition recall similar comments in chapter 5 of TheHuman Condition,in which the commemoration of heroes' deeds underpins the vital political world of the Greeks. But it is important to note Arendt's reference here to the imagination. One cannot repeat or recreate a past that is dead or, as Arendt and many of her contemporaries believed of Western culture, a tradition that has been shattered. More is demanded of actors, writers, listeners, and readers. Arendt's citations of Dinesen in her review essay point in several directions. On the one hand, they resemble Walter Benjamin's extensive use of quotations in his critical works, especially The Originof GermanTragic Drama,which arranges quotations in such a way that they reveal a constellation, a pattern of meaning, within early modern German culture. As Benhabib and Herzog have noted, Arendt drew on Benjamin's work in many of her own texts; here, especially, one sees a parallel to Arendt's use of quotations in her book on Rahel Varnhagen, in which Arendt attempted to reveal Rahel in her own words (see Herzog, esp. 9). Like Benjamin, it seems Arendt used quotations in order both "to destroy the 'flow' of historiography, and preserve 'something' of the presented events" (Herzog 14). Arendt thus arranges quotations from a variety of texts in order to reveal the meaningful plot inherent in the Danish writer's life, even as portrayed in an inferior biography. But Arendt's use of citations also echoes Dinesen's own practice, for the Danish writer quoted and misquoted from a wide variety of texts in many languages. Although scholars have traced the sources for most of her quotations and misquotations, Dinesen's texts tease the reader with the limits of his or her cultural literacy, inviting the reader to look beyond her own text (see, for example, Henriksen). Indeed, as Toril Moi has shown in an interpretation of "Tempests," realizing that Dinesen has misquoted a text transforms the reader's understanding of the Danish writer's text."Arendt's citations of Dinesen, then, not only draw on the work of Walter Benjamin; they also mimic the self-conscious play with sources that permeates the Danish writer'swork.
6 This was one of the few texts Blixen/Dinesen
wrote first in Danish, and the English and Danish
versions differ substantially. Moi points out that the Danish text quotes selectively from the Apocry-
the referencesto Ariel. pha and in sucha waythatMallieasilymisconstrues
In a letter to Hannah Arendt dated December 16, 1968, Mary McCarthy compared the essays in Men in Dark Timesto "a series of fairy tales of the Northern Friends225). The lives had a forests (sometimes a forest of language)" (Between of the with woodcut," and recalled Grimms fairy "gnomic quality," "something tales (225). McCarthy's comments conjure up a vision of Dinesen herself as an archaic crone, a grandmotherly conveyer of fairy tales and other folklore, a vision actually at odds with Arendt's presentation in Men in Dark Times.In fact, what is striking about Arendt's citations of Dinesen is how little they have to do with the Scandinavian contexts of the tales. As McCarthy herself points out, the most folkloric essay in Men in Dark Timesis the portrait of Walter Benjamin, which draws on German-Jewish folklore-he is dogged by "Mr.Bungle," as well as a hunchback -to explain Benjamin's perpetual bad luck. McCarthy'sremarks are thus in a larger sense correct. In the essay on Benjamin, Arendt mimics Dinesen's She draws on folkstorytelling performances, both in her books and at the "Y." loric motifs in order to bring into focus the pattern of Benjamin's life. But the forests McCarthy refers to are Central European rather than Northern. The Art of Citation: Isak Dinesen in TheHuman Condition One might hope to find in TheHuman Conditiona less playful or literary use of Dinesen's work, but the references to her work dash such hopes. The resonant epigraph evokes curiosity as well as wonder. And if Arendt provides sources for her quotations of "Converse at Night in Copenhagen" and "The Dreamers,"the quotations are equally puzzling. The first occurs in a long footnote in chapter 3, "Labour," which opens with a remark on drug addiction, mentions Dinesen's "Converse at Night in Copenhagen" as a modern work that discusses the effects of release from pain, and then turns to a discussion of this subject in Greek and Roman philosophy-surely a strange brew:
It seems to me that certain types of mild and rather frequent drug addictions, which usually are blamed upon the habit-forming properties of drugs, might perhaps be due to the desire to repeat the once experienced pleasure of relief from pain with its intense feeling of euphoria. The phenomenon itself was well known in antiquity, whereas in modern literature Ifound the only support for
my assumption in Isak Dinesen's "Converseat Night in Copenhagen" (Last Tales [195 7], pp. 338ff ), where she counts "cessationfrom pain" among the "threekinds of perfect happiness." Plato already argues against those
who "when drawn away from pain firmly believe that they have reached the goal of... pleasure" (Republic585A), but concedes that these "mixed pleasures" which follow pain or privation are more intense than the pure pleasures, such as smelling an exquisite aroma or contemplating geometrical figures. Curiously enough, it was the hedonists who confused the issue and did not want to admit that the pleasure of release from pain is greater in intensity than "pure pleasure," let alone mere absence of pain. Thus Cicero accused Epicurus of having confused mere absence of pain with the pleasure of release from it (see V. Brochard, Etudes de philosophieancienne et de philosophiemoderne [1912], pp. 252 ff.). And Lucretius exclaimed: "Do you not see that nature is clamouring for two things only, a body free from pain, a mind released from worry .... ?" (The Nature of the Universe [Penguin ed.], p. 60). (Human Condition113 n. 61; my emphasis)
But if the reference to Dinesen jars, a closer look at the contexts-both of the note in Arendt's argument and the quotation in Dinesen's tale-suggests that, despite the academic reference to a 1912 collection of philosophical studies,
Arendt cites Dinesen in order to provoke the reader to look beyond her text, for her discussion of pain responds to Dinesen's tale as a whole. "Converse at Night in Copenhagen" tells of an encounter between the Danish king, Christian VII (1749-1808; reigned 1766-1808), who calls himself Orosmane in the tale, and the Danish poetJohannes Ewald (1743-1781), here Yorrick, late one night in the room of a prostitute. In the mid-1770s, Ewald had lived at Rungstedlund, which at that time was a hotel, and Karen Blixen at times referred to him as if he were her ancestor or literary double. In the tale, a drunken but lucid Ewald names three types of happiness, all of which Christian, who was mentally ill for most of his life, imagines he possesses. But the passages in the tale that have the greatest bearing on Arendt's discussion in TheHuman Conditionhave to do with the poet's relationship to language and his love of the world. Conscious of his own imminent death, Ewald distinguishes his own love of language from God's divine word, as Arendt herself took care to emphasize the this-worldly aspects of mythosand logos,as opposed to nous:7
"This earth of ours has been most dear and precious to me. Even up above there, I certainly could not help peering out from time to time to find out whether it were able to go on without me. Ay, I should, even up there, cry to it to preserve me! I should long to see my state of heavenly bliss reflected, far awaydown on earth, as in a mirror. Do you know, Sire, what such a reflection is called?" "No, I do not," said Orosmane. Yorick cried out, transported. "My mythos-it is the earthly reflection of my "It is called mythos!" heavenly existence. Mythos, in Greek, means speech-or, since I was never good at Greek,"he added as in parenthesis, "and since great scholars may consider me mistaken-you and I, at any rate for tonight, will agree to take it in such a sense. Highly pleasant and delightful is speech, Orosmane; we have tonight experienced it to be so. Yet, previous to speech, and higher than speech, we acknowland by the Word all things were created." edge another idea: logos.Logos, in the Greek, means Word, (394-95)
But Ewald is more interested in earthly immortality, the survival of his own reputation, than he is in the Christian afterlife. Significantly, the poet imagines his reputation as a pattern that he will be able to perceive after his own death:
"From His divine Logos-the creative force, the beginning-I shall work out my human mythosthe abiding substance, remembrance. And in time to come, when by His infinite grace I shall once more have become one with Him, then will we look down together from heaven-I myself with tears, but my God with a smile-demanding and expecting that this mythos of mine shall remain after me on earth." (396)
In the text that follows the note on "Converse at Night in Copenhagen," Arendt responds to the poet's words on how his love of the world and language are intertwined:
The mental effort required by philosophies which for various reasons wish to "liberate"man from the world is always an act of imagination in which the mere absence of pain is experienced and actualized into a feeling of being released from it. (113) Kristeva (163-64) notes the importance of these distinctions in Arendt's thought, which she ties to 7 what she sees as Arendt's unresolved relationship to religion, as well as to Heidegger and his work. Elsewhere, Kristeva discusses Arendt's notion of plot in relation to her readings of Aristotle, as well as Nietzsche and Heidegger: "...Arendt is not undertaking a naive return to Aristotle, in order to re-establish his hypothetical purity. As a reader of Nietzsche and Heidegger, and being attentive to their successive dismantlings of metaphysics, she comes back to phronesis[wisdom] and to narrated action only to echo and develop the questions already asked by Nietzsche and Heidegger with respect to action, freedom of action, and its pragmatic impasses-in order to try to establish, after her predecessors and herself, little islands of a shareable world" (21).
Arendt's footnote thus opens out into an imagined encounter between a drunken poet and a mad king, in which the poet's language holds sway over ruler and mortality. Despite the eighteenth-century setting, with its emphasis on the close connection between artistic creation and drunkenness and the autonomy and impersonality even of a work of art that describes an individual human life, the fantasy bears a distinctly modernist stamp. The second explicit reference to Dinesen is to "The Dreamers,"which is actually a cluster of stories told by an old storyteller while he and some companions are adrift on the Indian Ocean:
It is an indispensableelement of human pride to believe thatwho somebodyis transcendsin greatness and importanceanythinghe can do and produce. "Letphysiciansand confectionersand the servantsof the greathouses bejudged bywhattheyhavedone, and even bywhattheyhavemeant to Dinesen's do; the greatpeople themselvesarejudgedbywhattheyare."[I use here Isak wonderful story Condition "The in Seven Gothic Tales (ModernLibrary ed.), especiallypp. 340 ff.] (Human Dreamers," 211, myemphasis)
The sentence comes from the final section of the tale, in which the old Jew, Marcus Cocoza, comforts Pellegrina Leoni after she has lost her voice:
But the consolationsof the vulgarare bitter in the royalear.Let physiciansand confectionersand servantsin the greathouses bejudged bywhattheyhavedone, and even bywhattheyhavemeant to do; the great people themselvesarejudged by what they are. I have been told that lions, trapped and shutup in cages,grievefrom shamemore thanfromhunger. (295-96)
Pellegrina Leoni is a recurring character in Dinesen's work. Despite her apparent death towards the end of the tale, she crops up again in "Echoes,"' one of the texts Arendt cites in her 1968 review as illustrating the dangers of trying to make life conform to aesthetic models. At first glance, the reference to the later tale in
Men in Dark Times seems at odds with Arendt's argument in The Human Condition.
The immediate context is a discussion of the emptiness of the modern-day cult of celebrities (which Arendt suggests has much to do with the veneration of the artist as genius), especially in contrast to the kinds of heroism celebrated in Greek culture. Arendt comments acerbically that "the idolization of genius harbors the same degradation of the human person as the other tenets prevalent in commercial society" (211). The Dinesen quotation follows this remark. Dinesen's "The Dreamers" is a frame narrative that alludes ironically to a variety of other stories, but also includes three extended accounts of the encounters of four men with a woman they know under different names, but who turns out to be a famous opera singer who lost her voice in a catastrophic fire years before. Since that time, she has wandered the face of the earth, a kind of pilgrim lioness, as her name suggests, refusing any single identity or any commitment to another person. When several of the men catch up to her toward the end of the story, she throws herself off a cliff, but only after remarking that now, at the moment of her death, she sees herself-and all of her subsequent metamorphoses-once more as Pellegrina Leoni. It is possible to read Dinesen's tale as an account of the perils of celebrity and one woman's heroic attempts to escape it. But the tale is also about the narcissistic desire to repeat the experience of celebrity, with its distant flirtation with an audience that is never allowed to approach, and it is not difficult to see in Pellegrina Leoni traces of Dinesen's cultivation of her own celebrity: one of her nicknames in Africa had been "the lioness," and as a storyteller
she assumed many roles while adopting none of them. Moreover, Arendt's choice of quotation, which pits "physiciansand confectioners" against "the great people," belies the snobbish underpinnings of both The Human Conditionand Dinesen's tales. In the work of both writers, such distinctions underwrite not only the celebrity status of the writer, but also a system of classifications that serves to keep in place social barriers that serve the powerful. The work of Pierre Bourdieu has taught many of us to be suspicious of aesthetic distinctions, however transcendental or emancipatory their function may seem. Arendt's reference to the story of Pellegrina Leoni resembles her discussion of Dinesen some ten years later, for it suggests that she saw Dinesen as an artist who heroically tried to revive the traditions of storytelling, while at times giving way to narcissism and aestheticism. But her quotation also suggests a certain unease. How does one dissociate efforts to distinguish oneself from petty snobbery, writerly greatness from celebrity? Arendt's citation of Dinesen suggests her awareness of the problem, which is relegated to the margins of her own texts and only comes into full view when the relationship of her text to another-its inter-esse-is taken into consideration.8 Beyond the self-conscious playfulness that characterizes Arendt's quotations, what is also surprising is what she does not say about the Danish writer, especially in chapter 5, which emphasizes the importance of storytelling in Greek political culture. Action, she tells us, "'produces' stories" (184). These stories, told by spectators rather than the actor, keep alive the public world of the polis. They reveal, moreover, the "who"rather than the "what"of human identity, as Arendt puts it, using language that both harks back to Heidegger and sets her notion of storytelling as meaning apart from his view of truth as revelation.' Also crucial here is Arendt's insistence that-in the Greek world, at least-the actor can never be his own storyteller. Such a distinction does not hold true for either Arendt or
8 One of the dangers of genius or celebrity status is that it stands in the way of the representation of action: "Whatis important in our context [laboring society] is that the work of genius, as distinguished from the product of the craftsman, appears to have absorbed those elements of distinctness and uniqueness which find their immediate expression only in action and speech" (Human Condition 210).
9The passagein its entiretyreads: Together they start a new process which eventuallyemerges as the unique life story of the newcomer,affectinguniquelythe life storiesof all those withwhomhe comes into contact.It is with its innumerable,conflicting because of this alreadyexistingweb of human relationships, willsand intentions,that action almostnever achievesits purpose;but it is also because of this storieswith or withoutintention as medium, in which action alone is real, that it "produces" as fabricationproducestangiblethings.These storiesmaythen be recordedin docunaturally ments and monuments,they maybe visible in use objectsor art works,they maybe told and retold and workedinto all kinds of material.They themselves,in their living reality,are of an
altogether different nature than these reifications. They tell us more about their subjects, the "hero" in the center of each story, than any product of human hands ever tells us about the master who produced it, and yet they are not products, properly speaking. Although everybody started his life by inserting himself into the human world through action and speech, nobody is the author or producer of his own life story. In other words, the stories, the results of action and speech, reveal an agent, but this agent is not an author or producer. Somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold sense of the word, namely, its actor and sufferer, but nobody is its author. (184) The disclosure of the "who"through speech, and the setting of a new beginning through action, always fall into an already existing web where their immediate consequences can be felt.
the nineteenth- and twentieth-century individuals she commemorated. The experience of exile, loss, or anti-Semitism allowed them to see meaningful patterns in their own lives, but these patterns could only be evoked indirectly--in the forms of fragments and quotations.
BetweenPast and Futureand Anecdotesof Destiny Anecdotesof Destiny contains many of Dinesen's best tales, including "Babette's and "The Feast," "Tempests,"her eerie reworking of Shakespeare's The Tempest, Immortal Story."'o These tales are also among the longest she wrote (hardly anecdotes in the usual sense of the term), and a remark in the essay on Dinesen suggests that Arendt viewed the collection and its title as exemplary of both Dinesen and storytelling at their best:
All her stories are actually "Anecdotes of Destiny,"they tell again and again how at the end we shall
how to pursueone of the "twocoursesof thought at be privilegedto judge; or, to put it differently, all seemly to a person of any intelligence ... : Whatdid God mean by creatingthe world,the sea, and the desert,the horse, the winds,woman,amber,fishes,wine?"(MDT105)
Despite Arendt's admiration for Anecdotesof Destiny, however, her published texts refer to only one tale included in this volume. "IsakDinesen, 1885-1962" mentions "The Immortal Story" as one of those stories about the dangers of trying to make life conform to art (Men in Dark Times106-108), but a constellation of oblique references to the collection in two other essays published at about this time suggest that the volume was very much on Arendt's mind in the late 1960s, and that here, as well, some of the implications of Arendt's own writing emerge only when her texts are brought into dialogue with those of Dinesen. The essay "Truth and Politics" invokes Dinesen in the context of a discussion of the relationship between truth and storytelling. Here, once more, we encounter the epigraph to chapter 5 of TheHuman Condition,as well as the juxtaposition of references to Dinesen and a host of classics of Western philosophy.
facts lose their contingencyand acquiresome humanlycomprehensiblemeaning.It isperfectly true
that "allsorrows can beborneifyou put theminto a storyor tell a storyabout them," in thewordsoflsak Dinesen, who not only was one of thegreatstorytellers of our timebut also-and she was almostunique in this respectknewwhatshe was doing. She couldhave addedthatjoy and bliss, too, become bearable and meaningfulformen Reality is different from, and more than, the totality of facts and events, which, anyhow, is unascertainable. Who says what is--le'yet za Eo'v'ra-always tells a story, and in this story the particular
also a storyteller, he bringsabout that "reconciliation with reality" which Hegel, the philosopherof understoodas the ultimategoal of all philosophicalthought, and which, inhistorypar excellence, formationof the given rawmaterialof sheer happeningswhich the historian,like the fictionwriter (a good novelis byno meansa simpleconcoction or a figmentof purefantasy),musteffect is closely akin to the poet's transfiguration of moods or movementsof the heart-the transfiguration of grief into lamentationsor of jubilation into praise. We may see, with Aristotle,in the poet's political function the operationof a catharsis, a cleansingor purgingof all emotions thatcould preventmen
from acting. Thepoliticalfunction of thestoryteller~-historian or novelist-is to teachacceptance of things as
10 These three tales are framed by two shorter narratives. Although the arrangement of tales differs in British and American editions of some of Dinesen's collections, here it is the same: "The
only when they can talk about them and tell them as a story. To the extent that the teller of factual truth is
deed, has been the secret motor of all historiography that transcends mere learnedness. The trans-
"TheImmortal and "TheRing" Diver," Feast," "Babette's "Tempests," Story,"
they are. Out of this acceptance,which can also be called truthfulness,arises thefaculty of judgment-that, again in Isak Dinesen'swords, "at the end we shall beprivilegedto view, and review,it-and that is what is
named thedayofjudgment." PastandFuture 261-62;myemphasis) (Between
For Arendt, such judgment is impartial. In the Western tradition it emerged, she argues, in the Homeric epics, which praised Trojans as well as Achaeans. "This is the root of all so-called objectivity-this curious passion, unknown outside Western civilization, for intellectual integrity at any price. Without it no science would ever have come into being" (262). The context here is the discussion of the relationship of politics to different kinds of truth, and Arendt cites Dinesen to support her distinction between the higher truth of storytelling, which celebrates heroic deeds and brings about reconciliation and acceptance, and mere factual
truth, which is a precondition for political life. In a footnote, Arendt explains
that she wrote the essay in response to the many lies that circulated in the wake of her account of the Eichmann trial (Between Past andFuture 227). We find in this citation a summary of the remarks on storytelling in TheHuman Condition,as well as a repetition of the epigraph. But the title of the collection suggests a deeper affinity with Dinesen's work, especially her anecdotes of destiny, and further suggests that Arendt drew on both Dinesen and Benjamin as models for her own essay writing at this time. The title BetweenPast and Future echoes the final paragraph of "The Diver,"a work which also informs Arendt's discussion of Benjamin in Men in Dark Times,as well as her introduction to Between Past and Future. The first tale in Anecdotes ofDestiny, "The Diver" is one of the shortest and
strangest in the collection. MiraJama, who also appeared in the frame narrative
of "The Dreamers;" tells two tales. The first is a curious story about Saufa, a theology student from Shiraz. A fervent believer in angels, he fell in love with a dancer who danced like one. When he discovered that she was not, in fact, an angel, he left her and the country and "was no more seen in Shiraz" (17). In the second,
Mira Jama tells of a strange encounter he had in the land of the pearl divers. There he met the luckiest of them, a man whose expeditions were alwayssuccessful. The lucky man asks for a story, and MiraJama tells him the one about Saufa. As he is finishing, his listener makes a gesture, and MiraJama realizes that the lucky man is Saufa himself. MiraJama then asks to hear the rest of Saufa's story, but Saufa replies that what happened to him after he left Shiraz "makes no story at all."He had met a fish who had told him about life underwater, a strange but secure world in which nothing happens: lacking hands, fish can make nothing; supported on all sides, they cannot fall; they neither need nor are able to hope. The story concludes with the final words of the fish:
We run no risks.For our changing of place in existence never creates,or leavesafter it, what man calls a way,upon which phenomenon-in realityno phenomenon but an illusion-he will waste
inexplicable passionate deliberation. Man, in the end, is alarmed by the idea of time, and unbalanced by incessant wanderings between past and future. The inhabitants of a liquid world have brought past and future together in the maxim: Apresnous le deluge.(24, my emphasis)
The passage brings into focus the crucial context of the title of Arendt's essay collection, for it argues that the ability to negotiate the space between past and future is a distinctively human trait, although one easily lost. That space makes
possible thought, hope, and action. The odd plot of the tale retraces the familiar double pattern of a life governed by naivete, passion, and longing that is interrupted by a catastrophe that sends the lover into exile, where he-or very probably she-attempts to make a new life while salvaging what was worthwhile from the old. The depiction of the young man's idealism and infatuation in terms of his belief in angels may well have reminded Arendt of Benjamin's famous angel of history. But what is most remarkable here is the evocation of the philistinism of the brave new world in which the exiled protagonist finds himself, a suffocating world in which freedom has been traded for security, a world in which, as in some 1950s film about alien human beings have been turned into fish." invaders or Ionesco's Rhinoceros, In this fishy world, the pearl diver emerges as a strange kind of hero. The description of his activities suggest a mise-en-abyme that describes the activity of the storyteller:
For manythingshappen to those who dive to the bottom of the sea. Pearlsin themselvesare things of mysteryand adventure-if you follow the career of a single pearl it will give you materialfor a hundred tales. And pearls are like poets' tales: disease turned into loveliness, at the same time transparentand opaque, secrets of the depths brought to light to please young women, who will recognizein them the deeper secretsof theirownbosoms. (17)
One finds in this paragraph a distillation of many of Dinesen's favorite themes: the catastrophe that takes the form of a flood, as in "The Deluge at Norderney" and "Tempests," which harks back to, quotes, and misquotes Shakespeare's play; the fascination of pearls taken up in "The Pearls" and many other stories; and the heroic figure who goes into exile or works underground, because action at home is impossible. I would suggest, then, that "The Diver"functions as a kind of metatext, inviting us to read Dinesen's tales as examples of such pearl diving, which removes the sedimented treasures of a decadent tradition in order to renew -through desire and delight-human life in the present. Arendt recognized the significance of "The Diver,"as well as its position in Dinesen's work, particularly its relation to "Tempests"and the other Anecdotes of Past and Future, Destiny;she not only drew on its conclusion for the title of Between but also refers obliquely to it (and "Tempests")in both the preface to the essay collection and the concluding section of her essay on Benjamin. The preface defines the genre of the collection as the essay, but ties it to the parable and to storytelling in general. Opening with a reference to Rene Char's evocation of the Resistance as a "lost treasure,"Arendt's text identifies his loss with a valuable strand in Western tradition that is best portrayed in narrative form: "This history of revolutions-from the summer of 1776 in Philadelphia and the summer of 1789 in Paris to the autumn of 1956 in Budapest-which politically spells out the innermost story of the modern age, could be told in parable form as the tale of an age-old treasure which, under the most varied circumstances, appears abruptly, unexpectedly, and disappears again, under different mysterious conditions, as though it were a fata morgana" (5). At the time she was writing, Arendt asserts,
" For HannaPitkin,the alien invasionmoviesso popularin the 1950sdepict "daily life in waysso As such profoundlybanal, conventional,and boring that one welcomesthe horrorwhen it comes." and reminiscentof Arendt'spresentationof the social"(5). theyare "suggestive
the lost treasure had come to seem less real than even "unicorns and fairy queens." In the preface, Arendt draws on a parable by Kafka to illustrate the "gap between past and future,"but the phrase itself, as we have seen, comes from Dinesen. The essay on Benjamin falls into three parts: "The Hunchback"; "The Dark Times";and "The Pearl Diver." It, too, juxtaposes allusions to Dinesen's work with Central European models. As Mary McCarthy notes, "The Hunchback" draws on the folklore of Benjamin's childhood to illustrate the pattern of ill fortune in his life. Allusions to Dinesen permeate "The Pearl Diver"section, which opens with the quote from Shakespeare's The Tempest that also appears, with a slight alterin Dinesen's and ation, "Tempests" reappears several times in Arendt's subsequent writings:
Fullfathomfive thyfatherlies, Of his bones are coralmade,
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Nothing of him thatdoth fade Butdoth suffera sea-change Into somethingrich and strange.
In quoting Ariel's song from Act 1, scene 2, Arendt evokes a narrative of loss, exile, and redemption that would be familiar to Anglo-American audiences, but the citation also suggests the complex interplay between mourning and hope that informs her later writing. It may well be that the reference to the father harks back to Arendt's early loss of her father and that Dinesen's "Tempests,"in which the young heroine-like Dinesen herself-also loses her father at an early age, brought the song to Arendt's attention.'2 The final section in the essay on Benjamin opens with Arendt's familiar discussion of the loss of tradition and authority in modern society. Quotations, she argues, were Benjamin's way of dealing with this loss. Fragments of tradition explode into the present, destroying a sense of wholeness and empathy:
Still, the discoverers and lovers of this destructive power originally were inspired by an entirely different intention, the intention to preserve; and only because they did not let themselves be fooled by the professional "preservers"all around them did they finally discover that the destructive power of quotations was "the only one which still contains the hope that something from this period will survive-for no other reason than that it was torn out of it."(193)
Arendt associates Benjamin's love of quotations with his appreciation for collecting. Quoting, collecting, and pearl diving are allied to the activities of the storyPast and Future,Arendt names teller, although here, as in the preface to Between Kafka to illustrate her point:
12 Significantly, in Dinesen'sversion,it is the protagonistof the tale, Malli,who sees herself in a waterygrave: Fullfathomfive nowMallilies, Of mybones are coralmade, Those are pearlsthatweremyeyes. Nothing of me thatdoth fade But doth suffera sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourlyring myknell. Hark!NowI hear them-ding dong bell. (133)
HANNAH ARENDT ON ISAK DINESEN/95
Kafka's real genius was that he tried something entirely new: he sacrificed truth for the sake of clinging to its transmissibility (BriefeII, 763). He did so by making decisive changes in traditional parables or inventing new ones in traditional style; however, these "do not modestly lie at the feet of the doctrine," as do the haggadic tales in the Talmud, but "unexpectedly raise a heavy claw" against it. Even Kafka'sreaching down to the sea bottom of the past had this peculiar duality of wanting to preserve and wanting to destroy. He wanted to preserve it even though it was not truth, if only for the sake of this "new beauty in what is vanishing" (see Benjamin's essay on Leskov); and he knew, on the other hand, that there is no more effective way to break the spell of tradition than to cut out the "rich and strange,"coral and pearls, from what had been handed down in one solid piece. (196)
Not surprisingly, Arendt names Heidegger as another pearl digger, one who was aware of "the irreparability of the break in tradition" (201). Both he and Benjamin cut through the determinism of historical materialism: "Without realizing it, Benjamin actually had more in common with Heidegger's remarkable sense for living eyes and living bones that had sea-changed into pearls and coral, and as such could be saved and lifted into the present only by doing violence to their context in interpreting them with 'the deadly impact' of new thoughts, than he did with the dialectical subtleties of his Marxist friends" (201). Arendt's assessment bears on the role of quotations in her own work as well. Quotations destroy and redeem at the same time. They illustrate the necessity of "thinking poetically" in dark times:
... this thinking, fed by the present, works with the "thought fragments" it can wrest from the past and gather about itself. Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths and to carry them to the surface, this thinking delves into the depths of the past-but not in order to resuscitate it the way it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages. What guides this thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of the time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things "suffer a sea-change" and survive in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living-as "thought fragments:' as something "rich and strange,"and perhaps even as everlasting Urphdnomene. (205-206)
Arendt's references to the work of Dinesen suggest that, like Benjamin and Dinesen herself, Arendt displayed many of the pearls of her deep-sea diving in the quotations and misquotations she scattered throughout her writing. These were, as she noted throughout the final section of her essay on Benjamin, necessarily fragmentary, torn out of context in the hopes that they would find a second life in a brave new world. As such, pearl diving represents hope within the experience of exile and loss that marked Arendt's own life, as well as those she described and commemorated in Men in Dark Times,for catastrophe not only helps create such pearls, but also makes it possible for survivors to see and appreciate them. For Arendt, exile and loss make it possible to understand the meaning of one's own life, an understanding that eludes Arendt's Greeks, whose stories can only be told by those who survive them. For Dinesen, as well, it is possible to look back and understand the patterns of one's own experience, and not only from the other-worldly perspective imagined by Ewald/Yorrick in "Converse at Night in Copenhagen." In an anecdote recounted in the section of Out ofAfrica entitled "An Immigrant's Notebook," she suggests how such memory, imagination, and
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aesthetic form work together to foster such understanding. In the anecdote a man gets up in the middle of the night to investigate the sound of rushing water outside his house. He runs back and forth across his property, falling several times, before returning exhausted to bed. Looking out of the window the next morning, he sees that his apparently senseless movements have traced the figure of a stork in the newly fallen snow, a figure that also evokes the fall of Troy, as well as the death and resurrection of Christ:
dolorem. Troy in flames, seven years of exile, thirteen good ships lost. Infandum, Regina,jubes renovare
Whatis to come out of it? "Unsurpassed elegance, majesticstateliness,and sweettenderness.' Church:That He was Youare bewilderedwhen you read the second articleof faith of the Christian crucified,dead and buried, that He went down into Hell, and also did rise again the thirdday,that He ascendedinto Heaven,and fromthence shallcome again. Whatups and downs,as terribleas those of the man in the story.Whatis to come out of all this?The second articleof the Creedof half the world. (242-43)
Like Arendt's writing, Dinesen's anecdote of the stork plays with the reader's expectations concerning storytelling: the piece both reproduces the children's story, intended to be accompanied by the visual reproduction of the stork, and ties it to two masterplots of Western tradition. It juxtaposes, in other words, quotations from three different sources. Thus the anecdote reveals meaning, grandeur, and irony, for there is an irreducible gap between the world of the man in the little round house and the myths of Troy and Christ's death and resurrection, as well as between the styles required to convey them. The narrator of the anecdote comments: "Iam glad that I have been told this story and I will remember it in the hour of need" (242). But the juxtaposition of the tale with the two grand myths suggests that the comfort they offer has less to do with any one story than with the ability of readers and writers to negotiate the differences among them. Hannah Arendt's own narratives are indebted to the kind of storytelling she ascribed in The Human Conditionto the Greeks, as well as to Dinesen. In Rahel Varnhagenshe also commemorates the dead, but she does so in a way that emphasizes the fragmentary and dissonant aspects of their experience. Arendt's lives celebrate writers and intellectuals rather than warriors, and they do so in a manner that necessarily employs techniques of literary modernism. But if she acknowledged Dinesen's ability to perceive the meaning in her own life and to write stories that reflect it, Arendt herself was only able to tell her own story through those of others, evoking, as several of her commentators have noted, her own experiences of loss and exile through her accounts of theirs. In her essay on Benjamin she refers to the "rare gift of thinking poetically." Rare, but necessary, one surmises as one reads Arendt's own writing. The conclusion of Arendt's posthumous Thinking harks back to the imaginary worlds of ofDestiny pearl divers and watery catastrophes evoked both in Dinesen's Anecdotes Past and Future,for this work also and in Arendt's essay on Benjamin and Between in order, once more, to emquotes Ariel's song from Shakespeare's The Tempest of memory, imagination, storytelling, and thought. phasize the inextricability she "has that Arendt writes Here clearly joined the ranks of those who for some time now have been attempting to dismantle metaphysics,"but emphasizes that such work can only be undertaken if one assumes that "the thread of tradition is
broken" (212). Because such a past is fragmented, its nature and potential are best expressed in the lines from TheTempest that begin "Fullfathom five":
It is with such fragments from the past, after their sea-change, that I have dealt here. That they could be used at all we owe to the timeless track that thinking beats into the world of space and time. If some of my listeners or readers should be tempted to try their luck at the technique of dismantling, let them be careful not to destroy the "rich and strange," the "coral"and the "pearls," which can probably be saved only as fragments. (212)
Hannah Arendt's references to IsakDinesen are highly playfuland self-conscious. They suggest, however, that Arendt viewed storytelling as inextricable from theorizing, but that her notion of storytelling was as self-conscious, as informed by literary modernism, as the work of both Isak Dinesen and WalterBenjamin. Arendt wrote in "Truth and Politics" that Dinesen "not only was one of the great storytellers of our time but also-and she was almost unique in this respect-knew what she was doing" (262). Arendt, one might argue, was not only one of the great political theorists of our time but also one of the few who knew what she was doing when she told a story or wrote about storytelling.'3
University of Texas at Austin
Works Cited
in Political Thought.1961, 1968. HarmondsArendt, Hannah. BetweenPast and Future:Eight Exercises worth: Penguin, 1993. . TheHuman Condition.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. . "IsakDinesen: 1885-1963." TheNew Yorker. 9 Nov. 1968. 223-36. . Men in Dark Times.San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt BraceJovanovich, 1968. 2nd ed. New York:Meridian Books, 1958. . TheOriginsof Totalitarianism. . Rahel Varnhagen: TheLife ofaJewess. 1958. 2nd ed. Ed. Liliane Weissberg. Trans. Clara Winston and Richard Winston. Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. . Thinking. Vol. 1 of The Life of the Mind. 2 vols. Ed. Mary McCarthy. New York: Harcourt, Brace,Jovanovich, 1977-1978. Arendt, Hannah, and Heinrich Blficher. Briefe,1936-1968. Munich and Zurich: Piper, 1996. Arendt, Hannah, and Martin Heidegger. Briefe1925 bis 1975 und andereZeugnisse.Ed. Ursula Ludz. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1998. Arendt, Hannah, and KarlJaspers. Hannah Arendt,KarlJaspers.Briefwechsel, 1926-1969. Munich and Zurich: Piper, 1985. Arendt, Hannah, and Mary McCarthy. Between ofHannah Arendtand Mary Friends:The Correspondence 1949-1975. Ed. and intro. Carol Brightman. New York,San Diego, and London: Harcourt McCarthy, Brace & Co., 1995. Barnouw, Dagmar. "Speaking about Modernity: Arendt's Construction of the Political." New German Critique50 (Spring/Summer 1990): 21-39. SVisible Hannah Arendtand theGerman-JewishExperience. Spaces: Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. completed this essay while a fellow at the Danish Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities in Copenhagen in 2002-2003. I am grateful to the Institute for its support and for providing an ideal environment for research and discussion. "I
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57.1 (1990): SocialResearch Benhabib, Seyla. "Hannah Arendt and the Redemptive Power of Narrative." 167-96. . TheReluctantModernism ofHannah Arendt.Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1996. Walter. lluminations: Benjamin, Essays and Reflections.Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt. New York:Schocken, 1969. .. The Originof GermanTragicDrama.Trans.John Osborne. London: NLB, 1977. "The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov."Illuminations:Essaysand Reflections.Trans. Harry Zohn. Edit. and intro. Hannah Arendt. New York:Schocken, 1969. 83-109.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critiqueof theJudgment of Taste.Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 1984. and Her World. New York:Clarkson Potter, 1992. MaryMcCarthy Brightman, Carol. WritingDangerously: Brundbjerg, Else, ed. SamtalermedKarenBlixen. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2000. Dinesen, Isak. Anecdotes ofDestiny.London: MichaelJoseph, 1958. TheAngelicAvengers.By PierreAndrizel.New York:Random House, 1947. -Paa danskved ClaraSvendsen.Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1944. GengeldelsensVeje. Last Tales. London: Putnam, 1957. . Out of Africa and Shadowson the Grass.1934 and 1961. New York:Vintage International, 1989.
SevenGothicTales.1934. London: Penguin Classics, 2002. Lisa Disch, Jane. Hannah Arendtand the Limits of Philosophy.Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994. Kobenhavn: Gyldendal, 1989. Henriksen, Liselotte. KarenBlixen.En hdndbog. Herzog, Annabel. "Illuminating Inheritance: Benjamin's Influence on Arendt's Political Storytelling." and Social Criticism 26.5 (2000): 1-27. Philosophy Keenleyside, Heather. "The Self and Stories of Isak Dinesen: A Dialogue on Narrative Identity." 43.3 (2001): 109-46. CriticalQuarterly Kristeva,Julia. Hannah Arendt.Vol. 1 of Legeniefeminin (FeminineGenius). Paris: Fayard, 1999. Hannah Arendt.Trans. Ross Guberman. New York:Columbia University Press, 2001. Hannah Arendt: Life is a Narrative. Trans. Frank Collins. The Alexander Lectures, 1999. --. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2001. oflsak Dinesen.New York:Random House, 1967. Migel, Parmenia. Titania: TheBiography TimesBookReview.3 November 1957. Reprinted Mohr, Bent. "Talkwith Isak Dinesen." TheNew York in SamtalermedKarenBlixen.Ed. Else Brundbjerg. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2000. 253-56. Moi, Toril. "'Hele verden en scene': En analyse av Karen Blixens 'Storme.'"Edda 2 (1986): 149-61. Pitkin, Hanna. The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt's Conceptof the Social. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Odense: Odense Universitetsforlag, En studiei KarenBlixensforfatterskab. Selboe, Tone. Kunstog erfaring. 1996. Thurman,Judith. IsakDinesen: TheLife of KarenBlixen. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982. New Haven and London: Yale University ForLoveof theWorld. Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. Hannah Arendt: Press, 1982. 44.1 (1977): 181-90. . "Hannah Arendt's Storytelling." SocialResearch

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on the New York scene in the late 1950s:

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whenwe havespokenour lastword,willhear the voice of silence." 97;myemphasis) (MDT

wrote first in Danish, and the English and Danish

the referencesto Ariel. pha and in sucha waythatMallieasilymisconstrues

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"TheImmortal and "TheRing" Diver," Feast," "Babette's "Tempests," Story,"

named thedayofjudgment." PastandFuture 261-62;myemphasis) (Between

Into something rich and strange.

Sea-nymphs hourlyring myknell. Hark!NowI hear them-ding dong bell. (133)

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