Savannah Lee

Because this is how writers talk about literature.

This is an essay by Joanna Scott about Karen Blixen, aka Isak Dinesen.

It's very sad, because no one is reading Dinesen anymore and Scott wishes they would. Her essay is a labor of deep love. Yet the aspects of Dinesen's fiction which Scott highlights to try to get people to read her again are exactly the aspects which will prevent that from ever happening.

Look! says Scott. Dinesen's glass-blown, high-strung works show "a representation of life as a performance"! Like "watching a troupe of masked actors walk out of the theater and down the street"! Not, you understand, so anything can happen...just so we can see them and understand. "The masks help us to understand how individuals are defined by, and in some cases cling to, the identities assigned to them by their culture."

Meanwhile, the actual events of the stories, as described by Scott, tend to be as follows: a monkey keeps coming back to a house. A man and an androgynous girl talk about men and women. An "old lord" forces a peasant woman to work a field until she drops dead.

Let's take that last one. In a contemporary story, that would be a beginning, a setup. For Dinesen, it's the end. The woman staggers off the field and dies; the lord who murdered her stands there ineffectually; the peasants decide to ignore him. The end.

Scott realizes that a story like this is alien to our consciousness--it doesn't speak to us, in that over-used phrase. Dinesen's fiction, she never quite tells us, was of its time. But that's the point. She's hoping that we'll stretch the distance, that we'll fit ourselves into the strange shoes.

But we won't.

And why?

Because we have our own writers who do what Dinesen does--"to mask her characters in stereotypes and then set them in motion, giving them opportunities to define themselves as individuals." Maybe you've heard of some of them? One of them is a British woman. Her name is J.K. Rowling.

Whose works are also, very much, of their time. Sixty, seventy years from now? Who knows? Wouldn't it be funny if someone has to write an essay earnestly pointing out how good for us and intellectually serious Rowling is? Yes, really, it's worth slogging through Harry solving those dragon-egg puzzles to get at the important teleo-psychological underpinnings!! And we look at it and think "God, that sounds like such a chore."

I wonder what sort of stories we'll be telling ourselves then.