Guder og andre mennesker: Fortællinger fra den græske mytologi (Danish Edition)

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Erase our past, our mythologies, our theories and laws of nature. The white surface offers a limitless potential. The pieces — installation and video — are relating to the body and the concepts which are our, but they twist our world out of shape. Just as white noise the works by Hjerl are signals, that allows all frequencies both inside and outside the human perception spectrum, to be represented with equal power.

The so-called naturalistic imagery is only part of her expression. She pulls the matter, which our familiar world is done by, out of joint, in order to raise the awareness of and challenge the traditional idea goods we carry around. Her works can be seen as a showdown with a Stalled tradition and thereby as openings to a new realization.

In Consistency Hjerl paves way for a rethinking of the various spheres, private, national and global, that all of us at any time move in.

The first work, the visitor enters is 1 — to 7,,, The title is a reference to our planet, a planet with approximately sovereign nations and about 7 billion inhabitants. But the figure 1 also contains an implicit reference to the individual, the viewer of the work, which is present in both the work and the world,. The room is filled with flagpoles, all of little more than average body height, which either lean against the walls or lie on the floor.

Any national characteristics or features are deleted. The white flags are like unwritten pages — a manifest historylessness that surrounds the viewer on all sides. Located in space as a physical body, among other physical bodies, the visitor is encouraged to look at the world she knows with new eyes. What happens if we suddenly remove elements from the flag-order, we know?

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Does our world fall apart? And what does it do for our self-image and identity? Would I be able to speak frankly and let me wrap myself in a total contextlessness? Standing between two video projections, which turn on and off alternately, the viewer observes a virtual road, from two different perspectives. Waiting , sound is included here too as an essential element and supports the almost physical effect that the projections have on the viewer.

The city landscape is unknown and in constant process, with rectangular monoliths that stand as doors towards nothingness, which are then turned into building foundations and treetops that tilt and shoot into space like meteorites. The city landscape just viewed, is now completely distorted. It is seen from impossible angles and opens up new, dizzying perspectives. The overbearing drone sound that navigates within a sound field that conventional speakers cannot be adjusted to enhances the unsettling feeling of bodily imbalance and transcendence.

Like the installation 1 — to 7,,,, this double projection is also created on a ground of white surfaces and numeric codes, specifically those that configure the virtual, computer-generated space that has become a part of our daily lives; spaces that are not real, but instead are intangible environments based on abstract entities. To rearrange the numeric codes that create the digital world and thus distort the image almost beyond recognition as experienced in Perspective 2, appears thus as a natural reflection on the dissolution of conventional symbolism,.

With the video work Focus, Hjerl deals with some more mythological, archetypal and unconscious layers. Where we previously have directed our gaze upwards to read the flags and inwards to decode the computer-generated reality, we now look downwards- down into a room that comes close to human nature and some of the larger questions of existence.

Karen Blixen i Danmark 2. Oscar Wilde to Andy Magnussen, R.

State University of New York Press. Nordica, Volume 22, Cambridge: Yale University Kierkegaard, S.: Princeton, New Studies, Volume 83, Number 2, Hong Karen Blixens heltinder og Tizians gudinder. The Life of a Storyteller, Princeton, New Lindhardt og Ringhof. So even though the text is flirting with the homosexual revolution of the s, it is only on the surface of the narratives as well as on the surface of characters: As I also argue in the article, the androgynous and non-sexual is connected specifically to the artist.

It is not seen as a general condition for human kind. That means that gender is an open concept that has just been constructed socially which is what Heede claims. On the contrary, Blixen sees the two genders as powerful agents that both create mutual inspiration but, gender, admittedly also at times as something that define and confine the female protagonists in a restricting and painful way , which in the end, is what changes and develops the world see the chapter: This transgresses the way we think about gender, but not gender as such.

Additional observations As I also point out in the article that it seems no coincidence that Blixen upon her stay in Denmark in and after her conversations with Georg Brandes, started working on her writing with much more focus and determination. Holstein even wrote her a letter dated November 19th where he encouraged her to also write something about Africa: You all know that we would blow in the air, sun, moon, and all the starry legions to give our sweethearts a diverting show, but you also know that we cannot.

We must blow what we can, and give them such a show as is possible to us with the instruments we have got. Exiled from the dark, according to Rosie, and shut out from the pit, I will honestly try to take as high a note as the scale will allow me. We want a melody, something that has got some sense in it, and repeats itself, and will go on. Alas, that you cannot play us.

Det er mit Symbol. As we see from the juxtapositions of the quotes, Mimi disagrees with Julius and Constantin. Here Mimi repeats another exalted conclusion about life and repetition put forward by Constantin in the opening pages of Gjentagelsen before his disillusioned travel to Berlin: He is an effeminate young man and she is a very masculine young woman dressed as a male dandy of the s. She does not suffer from bad conscience and has no moral pangs with regard to her new life style. She is an idealist in the sense that she is fully dedicated to the idea of living materialistically-poetically no matter the costs: Annelise is only interested in the erotic as long as it is placed in the realm of the materialistic-aesthetic and has poetic value, even if that means a brothel in Singapore or meeting and departing with her lover Tido in a masochistic, one-night stand that she herself has suggested to him.

Very loose and casual in most of her modes of living she was, with other young women of her own age, as disciplined as a Prussian solider in regard to her imagination. Blixen experienced the frivolous s that marked a sexual revolution on a scale including openly bi- and homosexual relationships—there were Lesbian bars in Berlin, see Bunch , 91 that must have been impossible to imagine from a s point of view, even from the point of view of the turn of the century just twenty years before. Rosendaal also describes this characteristic of female sexuality in a passage that glitters with irony: He describes the dynamic using the image of the shadow: Det er naturligviis I en meget ung Alder, at en saadan Lyst yttrer sig.

You might change, at least, your name, and the color of your hair, twelve times, or more, within this year, and perhaps you would like it. De vilde faa lidt Fred i Hjertet, lidt Kommers. This passage seems informed by the idea that Assessor Wilhelm introduced in Enten. He wants to run parallel with her, like they are good friends, two individuals who make no demands or claims on each other regardless of gender , which makes Mimi sad and depressed, even though she, from an ideological point of view, knows that he is in the right.

Anden Deel Bunch , Thi idet hun sagde det, slog det mig: Hun havde virkelig ingen Skygge. The painter thought this question over for a little while. Sin, yes, deadly sin. A fine lovely black. It has gone, you have never seen it, the working secret has been lost. But fine it was. This is of course also an ironic remark to H. Not to forget the biographical Kierkegaard himself. Anden Deel in particular. Here I am only able to point out what I see as her most important interpretation of the shadow in connection to Kierkegaard, Christianity and the ethical, without elaborating further on the other leads.

This publication strategy seems to be a repetition of J. The article was re-submitted in April following a few suggestions for revisions. Editorial changes have, however, delayed the publication. The version printed here is similar to the one that the editor of Scandinavian Studies has submitted to the copy-editor at the University of Illinois Press where the journal is now published, so minor revisions and reformatting can be expected before the article goes into print. Since the publication of this work, at least twenty articles or separate book chapters discussing the novella in various ways have been published, for the most part focusing on the notion of gender, art and seduction1.

In this paper I will focus on the following in order to renew and enrich our understanding of this significant work by Blixen: The most elaborate passage we find in a letter from August 3, to her brother Thomas Dinesen: I do not think that anyone can read him closely without being gripped by him. The tale is about a supper party in a house north of Copenhagen in after a great masked ball has taken place. In April and May , while working on the first draft, Blixen and her secretary Clara Selborn had problems collaborating.

Selborn did not like the novella and was not able to hide it, when she took dictation Selborn , Selborn, who was a Catholic, had problems with the humorous sexual content in the novella and felt that Blixen went too far. This made Blixen furious Selborn , The journal, however, thought that the novella was too long for a magazine story and asked for the number of pages to be significantly reduced.

This was very hard for Karen Blixen to accept after having worked on it for more than ten years. The narrative complexity, the subtle intrigue, and the profound insights into the anatomy of art and seduction are products of this long and complex process through which it came into being. The end result is a novella of great depth and complexity. As the name suggests, the character of Johann 4 Translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. The character in the tale is well aware of the name similarity: The depiction of the psychological make-up of Johann W. They have very similar names Johann and Johannes and Johann W.

He is a seducer, but not in an ordinary sense as A correctly notices in the foreword: Through the voice of Johann W. You call an artist a seducer and are not aware that you are paying him the highest of compliments. The whole attitude of the artist towards the Universe is that of a seducer. For what does seduction mean but the ability to make, with infinite trouble, patience and perseverance, the object upon which you concentrate your mind give forth, voluntarily and enraptured, its very core and essence.

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Dinesen , , italics original The juxtaposition between seduction and art, seducer and artist, Johannes and Johann, is a dominant structure that runs all through the novella. Both Johann and Johannes see the whole process of seducing a young girl first and foremost as a process of personal inspiration and artistic stimulation. As the narrator describes Johann W.

Aside from the personal stimulation and inspiration the seduction process bring them, Johann and Johannes are also addicted to the intoxicating feeling of omnipotence that emerges from being a sovereign creator; that being of a seduction story with a young girl or the creator of a work of art: Dog er denne Jagt efter det flygtende Vildt aldrig la vraie chose [but the seduction of a young girl is, my comment]. Blixen , 58 The hunter must take wind and terrain into account and sneak close to them slowly and silently without their realizing the danger.

Life versus Art Even though Johannes and Johann are similar in many ways, we do find a couple of fundamental differences. Johannes wants to live poetically, in the moment, in full presence and enjoyment: Conversely, Johann wants to create art that is infinite and immortal. Johannes shapes, stages and creates poetic situations in life with his intellectual power and ability to manipulate and seduce. This makes Johannes a poet of life, but not a poet or an artist, since the diary is strictly reserved for his private observations.

As the narrator A correctly observes in the preface with regard to the diary: Johann on the contrary, artist that he is, is obsessed with the idea of eternity. His main aim is to immortalize his relationship with Ehrengard in a work of art: In what possible way could he more fully and thoroughly make the girl his own than by capturing, fastening and fixing upon his canvas every line and hue of her young body […] and immortalizing it, so that nobody in the world could ever again separate the two of them.

It would be, unmistakably and for all eternity, Ehrengard, the maid from the mountains, and it would be, unmistakably and for all eternity, a Cazotte. In the picture the face of the bather would be turned away. By no means would he betray or give away his maid-of-honor. He might show his masterpiece to Princes and Princesses, art critics and enraptured lookers-on, and the girl herself at the same moment, and no one but he and she would know the truth. And the character Johannes seems to have no intention of having his diary published as a work of art.

It concerns the nature of the seduction. Contrary to Johannes, Johann W. Cazotte intends to carry out his final seduction of Ehrengard exclusively as a spiritual seduction, and not an actual physical one involving sexual intercourse. He explains why, in this passage: I might, upon your friendly advice, undertake to seduce the girl in the orthodox and old-fashioned manner, and the task might not be as difficult as it looks [ And, Madame, it would mean nothing. For her ruin in such a case, would be fact and reality. Dinesen , , my italics Johann W.

Cazotte continues and imagines the implications of this type of spiritual seduction of Ehrengard: Alas, Madame, she will not catch me up, for I shall be away painting other fair ladies, having handed her over, intact but annihilated, to the fond cares of a young husband who will never have the faintest notion that he is drinking up my remains.

And will not then, you ask me, her ruin be a fact and a reality? Verily, my friend, it will be so, inasmuch as the reality of art be superior to that of the material world. Inasmuch as the artist be, everywhere and at all times, the arbiter of reality. After their pre- marital sexual intercourse Johannes abandons Cordelia for good. Cazotte wants to avoid in his dealings with Ehrengard. Cazotte will seduce Ehrengard only insofar as he is not compromising her virginal honor and social position: The only passages representing her point of view are the two short letters to Johannes we find in the foreword.

She basically grants Johann W. Cazotte what Victor Eremita in the foreword to Enten- Eller. See det er en Pige for mig. Jeg skal vride mig som Molboernes Aal. Give me half a year, and I will produce a story that will be ever so much more interesting than everything I have so far experienced. I picture to myself a young, energetic girl of genius having the extraordinary idea of wanting to avenge her sex on me. She thinks she will be able to coerce me, to make me taste the pains of unhappy love.

That, you see, is a girl for me.

If she herself does not think of it profoundly enough, I shall come to her assistance. And when I have brought her to the point where I want her, then she is mine. When unraveling the plot, it becomes clear that Johann, meticulously as a chess player and with the strategic skills of a Napoleon, has been the master puppeteer of the whole affair: Up until his first meeting with Ehrengard at the Leda Fountain, Johann has cleverly managed to put himself in a position where he has been able to direct and manipulate the course of events.

The key passage revealing that Johann W. Cazotte has had his eyes on Ehrengard, and a desire to seduce her long before he brings Lothar to the court of Leuchtenstein to fall in love with Ludmilla, is first disclosed well into the story: I saw, at a court ball, a girl in a white frock, the daughter of warriors, in whose universe art, or the artist, have never existed.

And I cried with Michelangelo: Other crucial passages in the novella support this interpretation of Johann W. Cazotte as being responsible for the whole chain of events: Cazotte is equally capable of manipulating the Grand Duchess in order to get what he wants: We see from Johann W. Nothing has been forgotten that could have any significance for her; on the other hand, nothing has been forgotten that could directly remind her of me, although I am nevertheless invisibly present everywhere […] The location is just as she would like it […] The illusion is perfect.

Kierkegaard , Johann W.

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Dinesen , Until Johann W. Cazotte discovers that Ehrengard swims naked in a nearby lake every morning, it has been unclear to himself — as well as the reader — how he would actually execute the final seduction. So far he has only contrived the desired outcome of the seduction: After seeing her naked at the lake, a diabolic plan finally emerges. From a hiding place on the bank he will paint Ehrengard, when she is taking her morning bath, and when the work is finished, he will show the painting to her in order to trigger the desired reaction: Three facts she would at the end of them have made her own.

That she was beautiful. That she was naked — and already in the third chapter of Genesis such a recognition is reported to be fatal. And, lastly, that in being thus beautiful and naked she had given herself over to the Venusberg. And to him […] her blood is to rise, in pride and amour-propre, in unconditional surrender to those perils, in the enraptured flinging over of her entire being to the powers which, till this hour, with her entire being she has rejected and denied, in full, triumphant consent to her own perdition.

In this blush her past, present, and future will be thrown before my feet. Dinesen , and When seeing the painting Ehrengard will understand that Johann W. Cazotte has enjoyed her many mornings and she will never be able to tell anybody. Since Ehrengard cannot be recognized she will keep her social honor, but through self-reflection she will discover sexuality her naked body as a desirable sexual object , love in the deep and secret connection with Johann W. Cazotte and eternity the immortal artwork by the famous Johann W. Hos en ung Pige er den ubetalelig. There are various kinds of womanly blushes.

There is the dense brick-red blush. In a young girl it is priceless. Cazotte has another type of blush in mind for Ehrengard, which also counts in the aftermath of the spiritual fall, and here we arrive at another crucial difference. The type of blush Johann W. Cazotte wants to provoke in Ehrengard is not a delicate sunrise-red blush, but instead an intense and fatal sunset-red — a last desperate glow of daylight, whereupon black night will follow upon the recognition that she will forever be Johann W.

After that they disappear, nothing more dramatic can be imagined: Black night follows […] what void afterwards. The Leda Fountain Johann W. Cazotte never gets the final and fatal blush from Ehrengard that he had hoped for, but it is important to remember that Ehrengard actually does blush at their first meeting at the Leda fountain.

The significance of this slight blush is, however, downplayed and obfuscated by the narrator, which makes it tempting for the reader, in accordance with Johann W. Cazotte, to misunderstand the situation: On a very lovely evening he had been reading to her in the garden and was slowly accompanying her back to the house, when he stopped and made her stop with him by a fountain representing Leda and the swan and repeated a stanza from the poem they had last read together.

He was silent for a while, the girl was silent with him, and as he turned toward her he found her young face very still. Blixen , , my italics The stanza that Johann W. The loveliest of all! Of highest race, for sure, a heavenly name. That thrashing, splashing, in the mirror? The lovely girls, intimidated, flee: Firstly, Faust is written by Johan W. Goethe, who is playing such a big part in the novella as a background figure.

To enhance the effect of his words, he does it in front of a fountain that is displaying the exact same scene. With this setup Johann W. Cazotte is seeing their relationship — not because she discovers her own sexuality, since: On the contrary, she blushes in discontent and anger, since she realizes that her friend and confidante, whom she up until now has perceived as a loyal father figure, is thinking about their relationship in a completely different way and has so far been doing everything he could to manipulate her.

In fact she is turning against him from now on in an attempt to change the power dynamics and reverse the roles. When analyzing the events following this first meeting at the Leda fountain, it is striking that Johan W. Cazotte only a few days after reciting the stanza to Ehrengard finds her nude bathing at the lake in the forest, which is a repetition of the passage he just read to her. Cazotte, even though he is completely unaware of it.

This interpretation is supported by the following chain of events: He avoids her gaze, completely unaware of the subtle subtext and continues to view Ehrengard as a work of art and not as young woman of flesh and blood: The painter, still reluctant to look her in the face, let his eyes rest on the baby. Cazotte underestimates her completely: As she lifted her head, turned and faced Herr Cazotte, she was a little pale, but she spoke in a clear voice.

Out by the east of the house. Dinesen , , my italics to underline the phallic symboism of the sculpture In this scene Ehrengard cleverly destroys Johann W. When she has the nerve and audacity to voluntarily invite him to come and paint her naked at the lake, he of course cannot expect her to blush, when showing her the painting. Cazotte, understandably, spends a sleepless and troubled night upon this disturbing second meeting that has forever ruined his plan.

The day after, the small Prince is kidnapped from Schloss Rosenbad, and when the situation at the loft of Black Boar Inn develops, Ehrengard cleverly seizes the moment and teaches Cazotte the final lesson. Just as he has led others astray, so he, I think, will end by going astray himself.

He has led others astray not in the external sense but the interior sense with respect to themselves […] I think he himself will have the same experience on an even more terrible scale. Kierkegaard , This is a very precise description of the scenario Blixen has prepared for Johann W. Towards the end of the story, the baby child of Prince Lothar and Ludmilla is kidnapped by Matthias. Cazotte soon joins her. When uttering these crucial words she is looking Johann W. Cazotte straight in the eyes and, seconds after, his head turns crimson-red in a heavy blush.

He is now himself becoming the victim of the emotional reaction he had planned for Ehrengard: His brow and cheeks, all on their own, radiated a divine fire, a celestial, deep rose flame, as if they were giving away a long kept secret. And it was a strange thing that he should blush. Dinesen , The big question is of course: Why does the powerful and always composed Johann W.

Why does he not grow pale? Through the idea that he should be the father of an actual child, Johann W. Cazotte has not been a sexually active human being, but has instead been sublimating all his sexual energy into the creation of divine and spiritual art with the nude painting of Ehrengard as the diamond he was to set in his crown.

Cazotte blushes because he now knows that Ehrengard knows that he is a virgin, and that is — for a man of forty-five — a rather embarrassing revelation. The closing lines of the novella that describe Johann W. A week later the betrothed couple were present at the baptism of the new-born Prince in Dom of Babenhausen […] Herr Cazotte to the surprise of the court was not present at the ceremony.

He had been called back to Rome to paint a portrait of the Pope. It was here, now, that he had that famous liaison with a cantatrice of the Opera which caused much talk and made his acquaintances smilingly alter his name to that of Casanova. Dinesen , Johann W. Cazotte undergoes a crucial transformation succeeding his fatal blush at the loft at the Blue Boar Inn: Goethe is crucial for the validation of this interpretation.

Goethe did most likely not have a physical love relationship with a woman until his second journey to Italy when he was thirty-nine years old. Goethe scholars have commonly acknowledged this since the publication of K. It seems — as I observed previously — that Goethe had sexual intercourse for the first time in his life during his second sojourn in Rome, after his return from Sicily. That he had intercourse in Rome can be proved; that it was for the first time is, of course beyond proof, but nevertheless an assumption of such high probability that I tend to consider it a certainty.

Eissler , Eissler assesses the event to have taken place close to the date of a decisive letter Goethe sends to Duke Karl August on February 16, , describing his new experiences in the erotic Eissler , and Eissler concludes: In the passage below Aage Henriksen explains why Goethe denied himself a sexual relationship until he was almost forty years old. Henriksen , We are dealing with an erotic career, which had most likely been impossible if he had not as most artists had a psychological makeup that allowed the easily awoken, yet unresolved sexuality, to rise through him and release visions and artistic recognitions.

This type of renunciation, increasingly unbearable, prevailed until the mid s when he escaped to the land of his longings, Italy […] in his day-to-day life he carried out a change, which under the circumstances must be called radical since he finally released his latent sexuality. In Capsule in the Karen Blixen Archive, we find seven different versions of the Ehrengard-novella: The first draft is most likely from the late summer or fall of In all of the versions up until the re-writings in , the tale ends with this passage: Cazottes Forhold til de andre — han er baade indenfor og udenfor paa en Gang.

Han har rigtig godt af, at han ikke kan faa Brug for de Miniaturemalerier senere hen — for han kan jo ikke sidde i Rom og male Prins Echo. That is the best thing about Prince Lothar — that he could come up with such a name! The earliest manuscript at The Royal Library must consequently be a rewriting of the first draft Blixen got back with comments from Clemmesen and Dahl in July And at his return to Babenhausen he declared that the Eternal City had had exactly the same effect on his own genius as upon that of the poet.

When the Grand Duchess heard of it she was upset. Blixen b, 94 Also for me it has dim points. In his novel, Thomas Mann creates a second meeting between them forty years after, when Charlotte comes to Weimar to try to settle things with Goethe regarding the unhappy love triangle that unfolded when they were both young. The comical lies in the inversion of common sexual practice for a middle-aged man and the great artist and seducer, who has not yet experienced physical love at the age of forty-five and blushes like a young schoolboy when Ehrengard points him out as the father of her child.

Cazotte also contribute to the comic since the supposedly weak character Ehrengard , which we up until the final scene have thought to be in the hands of the great artist, suddenly outwits him, thus transforming the supposedly strong character of the story into the underdog. Another comical element in this final scene lies in the involuntariness of the blush.

As for the involuntary, the contradiction is initially present: The more the given occasion emphasizes the free rational being, the more comic the involuntarily becomes. Together with the sudden inversion of the power roles it arguably places him in the category of the comical.

Ehrengard and the Tragic Johann W. Cazotte is obviously playing the comical role in the novella but another fall that carries a tragic dimension also takes place in the final scene, even though it has so far been overlooked by scholars: She too felt, in a new way, the depth of life. There was a sweetness in it which she till now had never known of, there was a terrible sadness as well. She would never have believed, had anybody told her, that to meet and part with Kurt von Blittersdorff could mean so much. The recognition at this moment was, she felt, the outcome of her stay at Rosenbad.

Dinesen , , my italics What Ehrengard in this moment discovers is the implications of Johann W. Cazotte, now possesses a deeper knowledge of the world about how to manipulate and seduce that she will never be able to communicate to Kurt. This also means that Johann W. Cazotte eventually gets from Ehrengard what he wants her spiritual fall , but the physical manifestation turns out to be the opposite of what he had hoped for the blush ; when all the blood leaves her face and she turns deadly pale: Ehrengard had grown pale […] So colorless did her face become that the light in her eyes seemed dark in it, like two cavities.

Then she turned and looked straight at Herr Cazotte. Under her glance the gentleman rose from the bed. Ehrengard turns pale, when she invites Johann W. Cazotte to come and paint her naked at the lake: In the beginning of the novella, Ludmilla encourages Ehrengard to have a secret. She eventually gets it, but unfortunately with the wrong man: Something that, in the whole world, only you and he know of. You will be feeling, then, that he is you and you are he. Dinesen , Through the secrets that Ehrengard and Johann W. Cazotte share, that he has painted her naked at the lake every morning for a full week, that she invited him to do it and that he — the great seducer — is a virgin, he and she will forever be united because they will never be able to share these secrets with anyone else within the frame of this nineteenth-century environment.

In the final scene Blixen seems to think the opposite of Constantin, when she lets Johann W. Comedy, not tragedy, is the privilege of man, in this case Johann W. Cazotte, and tragedy the privilege of woman, in this case Ehrengard. This brings us back to a crucial sentence in the beginning of the novella where a double movement of the story is indicated, but never taken up again: Comedy is the nemesis of the privileged which includes men and tragedy is the nemesis of the common people which includes women. Give me leave to do my utmost! A homophone is defined as one of two or more words, such as night and knight that are pronounced the same but differ in meaning, origin, and sometimes spelling.

I am not going to give you the real name of this country, nor of the ladies and gentlemen within my tale […] I shall inform you that the stage of our little comedy or tragedy was the lovely country and fine city of Babenhausen, and that you will be devoting your attention to a chronicle of the Grand Ducal house of Fugger-Babenhausen. And as in the course of my narrative new gentlemen and ladies make their appearance in it, I shall endeavor to find a new noble name for each of them. We also find Ludmilla to be from the princely house of Leuchtenstein.

Leucht means bright in German, but when pronounced in Danish the word sounds like lugt, meaning smell, and as we see in this passage, it is obviously on the level of the author meant to have a clear sexual connotation: Knip sounds like knep in Danish, which is the short form of the infinitive kneppe slang for sexual intercourse and the young couple must indeed have been very active since they had five sons.

The joke here is of course that this area of terror is bodily female sexuality embodied by the young maiden of Ehrengard , which is the only area that the great Johann W. Cazotte has so far not dared entering. The ironical and astute twist in the tale with regard to these names is that they are in fact historically correct e.

Kierkegaard and the Secret Note The fact that Blixen chose a female name ending in gard, when dealing with a work by Kierkegaard is also not a coincidence. I could throw myself in the arms of Shakespeare and kiss Heine, — but I would, in that sense, — at the very utmost be an offence to S. In the letter Blixen uses an indirect message to describe her relation to Kierkegaard, which is also delivered in the shape of a pun: Blixen uses the pun on one level to describe her lack of erotic attraction to Kierkegaard as a contrast to the erotic loaded descriptions of her relationship to Shakespeare and Heine: But in this humorous novella dealing with two male giants of world literature — Goethe and Kierkegaard — Blixen for certain seems to indicate that the secret note behind their success as artists and philosophers was sexual sublimation.

She is also unable to hide that she finds this contrast between spiritual omnipotence and physical impotence in a man to be highly comic — even emasculating. And there is no doubt that Blixen is on his side when he establishes: Finally, to Ivan Z. The Oxford Guide to Word Games. Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab. Mit venskab med Karen Blixen. Breve fra Afrika Published by Frans Lasson.

Karen Blixen i Danmark: Published by Frans Lasson and Tom Engelbrecht. University of South Carolina Press. Shadows on the Grass. In Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard. Letters from Africa Translated by Anne Born. University of Chicago Press. Entertainments and Posthumous Tales. The University of Chicago Press. A psychoanalytic study Wayne State University Press. Center for litteratur, kultur og medier , Syddansk Universitet. Den eneste ene — og andre essays. Edited and translated by Howard V. The Gayety of Vision: Karen Blixens livsfilosofi - en fortolkning af forfatterskabet.

I udvalg ved Peter P. En studie i Karen Blixens forfatterskab. Notater om Karen Blixen. The Rhetoric of Fictionality. Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction. Ohio State University Press. Goethe — Et essay. This rhetorical strategy is a strategy that Kierkegaard also used as Behrendt correctly observes: It is added here in order to explain the narrative and rhetorical strategy that Blixen put in use in order to successfully cover up the secret note and obscure the readers understanding of the novella.

In the chapter I use some of the latest narrative theory: Goethe , who are able to understand the secret polemics in her tales. This elusive way of communicating with an inner circle of readers is common of the two. This extremely complex narration situation is the main reason why no readers have so far been able to understand the novella. In the following analysis I will explain why using the terminology and categories following what James Phelan outlines in Living to Tell about it — A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration with one exception: The author Karen Blixen 2.

An observer narrator the Old Lady 4. A character narrator Johann W. This noncharacter narrator also appears in the middle of the novella: It is only in these three passages we detect this noncharacter narrator, who does not seem to play any other role in the narrative than removing the observer narrator, the Old Lady, from the level of the author. Throughout the story we find a total of six very short 1st person digressions Dinesen a, , , , , , , but otherwise the Old Lady narrates the story about Ehrengard and Johann W. Cazotte as a 3rd person past tense narrative similar to noncharacter narration , which accounts for more than 95 percent of the narrative: Phelan then goes on to elaborate on different versions of observer narrators: It is even possible for the observer to be someone who neither affects nor is affected by the main action beyond being moved to pass on the tale some character narrators who give way to other narrators such as John Ray Jr.

Phelan does recognize that this technique can have some problematic implications: But it is fair to say that the technique involves high risks as well as high rewards, because it violates other conventions of narration, particularly the dictum that once an author chooses to 69 In that sense we are here dealing with a 3rd person past tense narrative disguised as a 1st person narrative.

Underneath these three diegetic layers author, noncharacter narrator and observer narrator , we eventually find a fourth: Cazotte, who in the letters to Countess von Gassner is narrating from a 1st person point of view: Cazotte must here be acknowledged as a character narrator, since he—when writing his letters—is a part of the action, he writes about, even though the Old Lady later got access to the letters through her great grandmother.

In the other passages than the letters written in 1st person by J. Here we not only find four, but five diegetic levels. Eventually it makes it very difficult to identify the levels of unreliability and authorial irony. Past tense Past tense Past tense Present tense Syntax: This is the mode of ambiguity and unreliability on the level of discourse in the stories of Isak Dinesen to be discerned from the dual-voice phenomenon on the narrative level of FID.

However, AD might just as well make the reader convinced of events to come, which in fact will not occur. While the two are embracing each other, we are told about the director and his pupil, in the equivocal manner of AD: Nevertheless, after sunset, on the very day of his arrival to the manor, the nephew will be having a one-night stand with his newly married aunt—thereby begetting an heir to the estate.

To a first-time reader this simply never happens; first of all, because it is never explicitly told; secondly—as shown in the above quotation—because the reader is told the exact opposite. Cazotte is a virgin because 1 it is never explicitly told since the observer narrator—the Old Lady—does not know about it and 2 the reader is in fact told the exact opposite: The Grand Duchess so far had not favored the friendship, for if Herr Cazotte was famous as a portraitist of fair ladies, he was no less celebrated and talked about as their conqueror and seducer, the irresistible Don Juan of his age.

Dinesen a, In the first part of the passage the Old Lady is referring to a conviction of the Grand Duchess, and in the second part she is referring to the public opinion about Johan W. Cazotte and his skills as a physical seducer. The passage is an example of AD since the reader is invited to believe that what is only the Grand Duchess and the public opinions view on Cazotte FID is in fact a story world fact authorized by the 3rd person observer narrator the Old Lady corresponding to CID in the model.

It is; admittedly, easy to understand why most readers buy into this claim that Cazotte is a real Don Juan, since he supports and promotes this notion in a letter to Countess von Gassner. Here he deliberately obfuscates his embarrassing secret with a bold statement about his own seduction skills, thus becoming guilty of a severe case of mis- and underreporting with regard to his own missing erotic skills: Based on Johann W.

Another crucial piece of misinformation, which has to do with our female protagonist Ehrengard, also has severe implications for the final interpretation of the novella. By the mediation of Prince Lothar and Princess Ludmilla a full understanding was obtained.

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A week later the betrothed couple Kurt and Ehrengard was present at the baptism of the newborn Prince in the Dom of Babenhausen. The main question here is: The answer is of course no, since her fall is irreversible. This means that the Old Lady both misreads and misevaluates the events and the characters with the unavoidable implication that her narrative becomes a severe case of misreporting, which makes her an unreliable observer narrator. This date is even mentioned twice in the novella: Throughout her production Blixen juxtaposes the personal fall of her characters in this case Ehrengard and Johann W.

Cazotte, who both experience a fall on that particular day with the French Revolution as the historical parallel, since the individual, the self-made man from the Bourgeoisie, is here introduced as the new ideal through a showdown with the nobility. Being expelled also entails—and these are the most important implications—that they are now subjected to tragedy, pain and death Genesis 3: Cazotte as the great seducer of the day presented in the authoritative voice of The Old Lady, my comment]. Cazotte is spending the first night of July alone in the serene surroundings of Schloss Rosenbad.

The passage can only be understood on the level of the author as authorial irony after the reader has discovered the secret note about Johan W. In the end Ehrengard turns out to be the only character in the story that is able to see through Johan W. The reader has to acquire the same level of consciousness as Ehrengard in order to fully understand the novella and that requires a particular knowledge about the biographical Goethe and the biographical Kierkegaard. This level of consciousness coincides with the level of the author. In this chapter I will present a couple of additional observations in order to back up this claim.

Det har han betvivlet; jeg har spurgt ham, om han meente, at Aand var istand ved Villien at omskabe ell. In his book about Kierkegaard, Brandes also elaborates on the nature of this enigmatic condition. Brandes then, however, goes on to make another, much more audacious conclusion, which is probably why he put it near the end of a footnote! I og Brandes , 2 Impotence, or another type of sexual dysfunction, was the secret condition that prevented Kierkegaard from having a sexual relationship, thus from marrying Regine. This also explains why Kierkegaard knows he is in the right, even though nobody from the outside understands the break-up and scorns him for it.

Kierkegaard is in the right, but for good reasons he is completely unable to communicate it to anyone. In that regard his situation is similar to that of Abraham, who knows that he is in the right, but looks like a madman from the outside. The essay was written in but published posthumously just a few years after the above diary entry from Here Kierkegaard claims that his whole authorship from the very beginning was religious. With her usual sense for down-to-earth explanations, her affinity for irony and her self- proclaimed right to poke fun at everything, Blixen understood what was going on, even though she never mentioned it directly in her letters76 or in her tales and had to cover it up behind the secret note about Goethe.

Mere fortrolige tilkendegivelser blev forbeholdt samtaler. It has not yet been peer reviewed. As I mentioned in the foreword, this is also why I have chosen to work with the Danish versions in the background section. It is, however, important to pay attention to the fact that Blixen in her literary responses never directly mentions the literary predecessor or the literary background text. Cazotte to be modeled over J. Det gider jeg imidlertid ikke. That, however, I do not want. Even the title of the main character, the Councilor, and his behavior in Hirschholm seems to allude to a passage in Gjentagelsen: Den, der vil Gjentagelsen, han er modnet i Alvor.

The person who wills repetition is mature in earnestness. I will elaborate more on this quote later. In Gjentagelsen Kierkegaard also mentions the name Mathiesen, even though it otherwise has no importance for the narrative: Constantin never acts upon this audacious idea in Gjentagelsen and the girl eventually marries another man after the young man has fled to Sweden.

During a morning walk in the woods, the Councilor at first coins the idea of marrying Anders off to the newly arrived young widow Fransine, but when he recalls her lightness and grace, he fears that the idea is no good — that Anders might instead give up poetry and decide to take on the world with Fransine and move from Hirschholm. Suddenly, in a moment of epiphany, he discovers that he in fact has to do the opposite and a Devilish plan emerges: His thoughts went a little further while the sun rose up higher. An unhappy love is an inspiring feeling.

It has created the greatest works of history. De to Unge vilde bevare deres Troskab imod ham, hvor gruligt de end blev pint BLIXEN , , my italics 10 10 My italics show elements in the passage Blixen emphasized in her Danish translation in order to give extra detail to certain points. Here Eremita states that a man only becomes a poet because of the girl he did not get: Many a man became a genius because of a girl, many a man became a hero because of a girl, many a man became a poet because of a girl, many a man became a saint because of a girl — but he did not become a genius because of the girl he got, for with her he became only a cabinet official; he did not become a hero because of the girl he got, for because of her he became only a general; he did not become a poet because of the girl he got, for because of her he became only a father; he did not become a saint because of the girl he got, for he got none at all and wanted only to have the one and only whom he did not get, just as each of the others became a genius, a hero, a poet with the aid of the girl he did not get.

Now he wants to make a poet out of Anders instead, so that he can write poetry by proxy and at the same time achieve immortality as his Maecenas. The Melancholy Young Man: BLIXEN , , my italics 12 Count Augustus praised the beauty of the poem and thought the beauty of the little fairy queen charmingly put into words. The boy, he thought, had in him a very strong streak of primitive sensuality which would have to be watched if the tastefulness of his production were not to suffer.

Here Blixen delivers a blow to religion as an illusion and thus to Kierkegaard , but the implications of this quote and the discussion that arise from it lie outside the frame of this article. It had come to him at a seasonable moment, for he had lately been uneasy about his poet. This young slave of his had been singularly absent-minded, and even absent bodily from one or two of their Saturday suppers. Contrary to the young man, who confides his love to Constantin, Anders keeps his love for Fransine a secret all through the tale, even though the Councilor figures it out and starts to exploit it.

At han var melancholsk vidste jeg nok, men at Forelskelse kunde virke saaledes paa ham! That he was melancholy, I knew very well — but that falling in love could affect him in this way! In both cases their melancholy stems from the unhappy love affair, but the reasons are very different: Anders on the contrary is melancholy because he is in love with a girl he in no possible way is able to get. At the same time the unrealized love affair makes both of the young men extremely creative poetically. Constantin notes about the young man: The big difference between the young man in Gjentagelsen and Anders is that the young man could very well have married the girl he was in love with.

Anders finds himself in the complete opposite situation: Contrary to the young man who hopes to receive his former life back free from guilt towards the young girl, Anders has instead made up his mind to take it on the very same day that Fransine is to marry the Councilor. At the same time Constantin does everything he can to manipulate the young man and stir up his melancholy for the sake of his own pleasure and enjoyment: Farinelli stayed with the King for of Spain and later his son Ferdinand VI for more than twenty years. Again we find this scene to be a staging of a phantasy Constantin Constantius has in Gjentagelsen, when he thinks about how the young man killing him would prove the sincerity of his love for the girl: Dog maaskee forstaar jeg ham ikke ganske, maaske skjuler han Noget, maaskee elsker han dog i Sandhed.

Saa bliver vel Enden paa Historien, at han engang slaaer mig ihjel for at betroe mig det Allerhelligste. But perhaps I do not fully understand him, perhaps he is hiding something. Maybe he does in truth love after all. Then it will probably all end with his murdering me in order to confide to me the holiest of the holy. This is also how we are told by the narrator that Fransine perceives it, when she figures out that Anders has shot the Councilor: Her lover had shot this old man … After she had gone from him, Anders had proved that he loved her.

In this one action Anders does two things the young man in Gjentagelsen is not able to do in his relation to Constantin and the young girl: He tells the Councilor no and so proves his love for Fransine Fransine requites it by finishing off the Councilor, which means that she will be swinging in the gallows with Anders and, thus, finally united with him in death: Eunuchs Living by Proxy As we saw in the quote in the previous paragraph Constantin compares himself to one of the most famous eunuchs in world history, the castrate singer Farinelli, when he describes his relation to the young man: She usually lacks the consistency required for admiring or scorning a person.

Is it not, in fact, a kind of mental disorder to have subjugated to such a degree every passion, every emotion, every mood under the cold regimentation of reflection! Therefore there are important things in life that neither of them is able to do to love a woman or write poetry and that is why they are so fond of their young men and need them in their lives. The explanation for this paradox is that the Councilor belongs to a very special type of poets, who do not produce, but instead practices poetry.

Instead of writing poetry he turns life into poetry through diabolic manipulation, since his biggest enjoyment in life is the exhilaration and pleasure he feels when he can be the spectator of an unhappy love story. This passage sums up this special type of behavior and how it relates to the overall flower metaphor: The Councilor walked on, pleased. There were not a few flowers, violets, pansies, in his life. Would this night put a rose into the garland?

He terrorizes his mentally unstable wife using a pansy so that she falls back into insanity, eventually dies; and the rose he hopes to put in his garland tonight is Fransine showing herself naked to the devastated Anders Kube in the small temple. In Gjentagelsen we seem to encounter a similar paradox with regard to who is in fact the poet in the narrative. Towards the end of the narrative Constantin writes that the young man he has created is a poet, but that he himself is not: Det unge Menneske, som jeg har ladet blive til, han er Digter.

The young man I have brought into being is a poet. I can do no more, for the most I can do is to imagine a poet and to produce him by my thought. I myself cannot become a poet, and in any case my interest lies elsewhere. Constantin backs this claim by summing up certain differences in their personalities; the young man is emotional, bordering the religious, whereas Constantin is pure intellect and unable to make a religious movement, which in his own eyes disqualifies him as a poet.

In order to be a poet one needs the intellectual and manipulative skills and the ability to dedicate oneself completely to an idea no matter the costs and live by the motto: The reversal of this set- up in Gjentagelsen is carried out in this way: Constantin is a poet who has written a narrative, which he denies being a poet and instead claims his imaginative character to be one, whereas the Councilor, who is not a poet, tries to create a poet in real life Anders but in the end is himself labeled a poet!

In the closing lines in Gjentagelsen Constantin furthermore claims: Blixen seems to see it differently. Blixen creates a story, in which everything a poet does only in spirit and in fiction planning the plot, manipulate the characters and the events, living by proxy21 through the characters and getting pleasure out of the omnipotent position is carried out by the Councilor in the flesh, in actuality.

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Conversely, Constantin arranges the narrative so we believe the events have happened in real life, but in the end tells us that it has only been a sort of spiritual exercise; that his narrative is only fiction. To experience horror, triumph, sex and tragedy by proxy through the characters in a fictional story-world. Henriksen was in the process of writing a doctoral thesis about Kierkegaard during these years. Neither Kierkegaard, nor Blixen, fears the demonic esthete; they see right through him.

Cazotte26 who in various ways tries to assert omnipotence in life by manipulating the people who are close to him and whose pain and annihilation he secretly and sadistically enjoys. Karen Blixen submits these eunuch-like demonic esthetes to the comic through nemesis; a nemesis that hits them when their omnipotence is out-powered by a source or a person they thought they could control.

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