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KAREN
BLIXEN ¥
ISAK DINESEN
by
Christian Egesholm
Until her
death in 1962,
Karen Blixen was a dominant figure in the cultural life of post-war
Denmark
- principally by virtue of her status as an internationally-renowned
author,
but also thanks to her charismatic personality and her frequently
controversial
contributions to the Danish discussion of cultural issues.
She first
published under
the pseudonym Isak Dinesen in 1934 with Seven Gothic Tales,
which
she wrote in English, but published in Danish the following year in her
own rewriting as Syv fantastiske Fortællinger. The
pseudonym
was part of a literary strategy the aim of which was to conceal
herself.
She also wanted release from the contemporary demand for realism, and
this
she achieved by using a classical-romantic narrative form and thus
being
able to deliver her critique in symbolic form whilst maintaining her
distance.
In Seven Gothic Tales Blixen introduced her outlook on life
with
its strong reliance on fate. To give oneself up to fate is, to
Blixen,
to model fate oneself via insight into and recognition of one's
individual
potential and possibilities. The characters in Seven Gothic
Tales
seem to move like puppets guided by an invisible hand of fate. They
encounter
one another in various different role-plays, with special focus on how
women are forced into and held in tragic roles.
In Vinter-Eventyr
(Winter's Tales 1942) and Sidste Fortællinger (Last
Tales 1957) the fate- and puppet-theme continues and through it she
not only settles her account with the favoured genre of the period,
realism,
but also with the whole bourgeois narrative tradition. This
tradition
placed the individual at the centre, to the detriment of the story, and
the characters shape the sequence of events. The governing
mechanisms
of life are, according to Blixen, compelled by fate, and the sequence
of
events is the story. For Blixen, the story is therefore a
divine art form. If there are answers to our questions, then they
will be found in the story.
It is
characteristic
of Blixen's stories that they take place in the past, but within an
historical
framework she deals with contemporary themes. The framework is
allegoric-symbolic
and her narrative technique uses the Chinese-box principle, putting
minor
stories inside the major story. The result is a fabulous universe
which, by playing with masks, presents a critique of both the
aristocracy's
repression of sensuality and the bourgeois tradition's preoccupation
with
morality, guilt and ethics. |
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