Whether they take place in Polish abbeys in the eighteenth century, in nineteenth-century Tuscan inns, on a hayloft in Norderney about to be submerged by a deluge or in a burning night on the African coast between Lamu and Zanzibar, among cardinals with sybaritic tastes, opera singers who have lost their voice or storytellers like Mira Jama in ‘The Dreamers’, who had had his nose and ears cut off, Isak Dinesen’s stories are always deceptive, full of secret and elusive elements. Of course it is difficult to know where they begin, and what the real story is — among all the entwined stories that the enthralled reader meanders through — that the author wishes to tell. This main story gradually emerges, obliquely, as if by chance, against the backcloth of a profusion of adventures that sometimes remain disparate or on other occasions, as in the disconcerting ending of ‘The Dreamers’, become fused into a single, coherent narration.
Artificial, brilliant, unexpected, bewitching, almost always beginning better than they end, the stories of Isak Dinesen are, above all else, extravagant. Nonsense, absurdity, grotesque or improbable details always break into the narrative, on occasion destroying the dramatic intensity or the delicacy of a scene. This tendency was much stronger than she was, an untameable habit, in much the same way that others might be drawn to laughter or to melodrama. One must always expect the unexpected in the tales of Isak Dinesen. She saw the essence of fiction as being its lack of verisimilitude. In ‘The Deluge at Nordeney’, the perverse and delicious Miss Malin Nat-og-Dag says as much to the Cardinal as they are speaking surrounded by the waters that will doubtless swallow them up, when she expounds her theory that God prefers masks to the truth since he knows that ‘truth is for tailors and shoemakers’.23 For Isak Dinesen, the truth of fiction was the lie, an explicit lie, so well constructed, so exotic and precious, so excessive and attractive, that it was preferable to truth. What the prince of the Church argues in this story — ‘be not afraid of absurdity; do not shrink from the fantastic’24 — could well be the definition of the art of Isak Dinesen. In this definition, however, we would need to specify our notion of the fantastic, a concept that, because of its excess and extravagance, cannot neatly be included in our conception of reality. We would need to exclude the supernatural variant of the fantastic because, in these stories, although a dead person — the privateer Morten de Coninck in ‘The Supper at Elsinore’ — comes from hell in order to dine with his two sisters, the fantastic, despite its excesses, always has its roots in the real world, as in the theatre or in the circus.
The past attracted Isak Dinesen because of the memory of her childhood, the education she received and her aristocratic sensibility, but also because the past is unverifiable; by situating her stories one or two centuries in the past, she could give free rein to the anti-realist passion that drove her, to her love of the grotesque and of arbitrariness, without feeling coerced by the present. What is curious is that the work of this author, who had such a free and eccentric imagination, who just before her death boasted to Daniel Gilles that she had not the ‘slightest interest in social questions or in Freudian psychology’ and whose only ambition was to ‘invent beautiful stories’, should appear in the thirties, when narrative in the West revolved maniacally around realist descriptions: political problems, social issues, psychological studies, local sketches. For that reason André Breton considered that the novel suffered from a kind of realist curse and expelled it from literature. There were exceptions to this narrative realism, writers who barred themselves from this dominant tendency. One of these writers was Valle Inclán; another, Isak Dinesen. In both, the tale becomes a dream, madness, delirium, mystery, a game, poetry.
The seven Gothic tales of the book are all admirable; but ‘The Monkey’ is the one that best expresses her playful, refined, exquisitely wrought world, with its twisted sensuousness and unbridled fantasy. It is difficult to sum up this delightful jewel of a story in a few words. In a few pages, very different stories are told that are subtly interrelated. One of these is the intense struggle between two formidable women, the elegant Prioress of Closter Seven and the young, wild Athena, whom the Prioress wants her nephew to marry, employing to this end both licit and illicit methods, such as love philtres, deceit and rape. But the indomitable Prioress meets a will as inflexible as her own in the young giant Athena, who has been brought up wild in the woods of Hopballehus, who does not have the slightest qualm in knocking out two of the gallant Boris’s teeth with a punch and wrestling with him, almost to the death, when the young man, encouraged by his aunt, tries to seduce her.
We will never know which of the two women wins in this contest because this story is abruptly interrupted just at the point where the reader is about to find out, by another story that, until then, had been stealthily sliding along, like a snake, underneath the earlier tale: the relationship between the Prioress of Closter Seven and a monkey, which had been given to her by her cousin, Admiral von Schreckenstein, on his return from Zanzibar, to which she was very attached. The violent appearance of the monkey — it comes into the Prioress’s room by breaking her window, gripped by a fever that can only be sexual — when the Superior of the convent is about to spring her trap by forcing Athena to accept Boris as her husband, is one of the greatest moments of storytelling in the whole of literature. It is a hiatus, a sleight of hand, as brilliant as the carriage journey through the streets of Rouen that Emma and Léon take in Madame Bovary. We guess at what happens inside that carriage, but the narrator never tells us: he insinuates it, lets us guess, fuelling the imagination of the reader with his loquacious silence. A similar hidden fact structures this intense moment in ‘The Monkey’. The clever description of the episode is full of superfluous detail and is silent about the essential point — the guilty relationship between the monkey and the Prioress — and, for that reason, this unspeakable relationship resonates and takes shape in the silence with as much or more force as the incredible scene witnessed by the terrified gaze of Athena and Boris. At the end of the tale, the sated monkey jumps onto a pedestal supporting the marble bust of the philosopher Immanuel Kant: this is quintessential Isak Dinesen, an example of her delirious craft.
Entertainment, amusement, diversion: many modern writers would be annoyed if they were reminded that these are also the responsibility of literature. When the Seven Gothic Tales appeared, fashion demanded that a writer should be the critical conscience of society or explore the possibilities of language. Commitment and experimentation are very respectable, of course, but when a fiction is boring, nothing can save it. Isak Dinesen’s stories are sometimes flawed, sometimes too precious, but never boring. In this she was also an anachronism: for her, telling a tale was a form of enchantment, and boredom had to be avoided by any means — suspense, terrifying revelations, extraordinary events, sensationalist details, unlikely apparitions. Fantasy can suddenly submerge a story in a sea of other stories or else causes it to take a more unlikely direction. The reason for all these juggling acts is to surprise the reader, and this she never fails to do. Her tales take place in an imprecise realm, which is not the objective world, but nor is it the world of the fantastic. As happens also in Julio Cortázar’s best stories, her reality draws from both these worlds and is different to each of them.