It may seem … [that Isak Dinesen is] merely moralizing and that she conceives of art merely as the expression of some traditional religious doctrine…. It would be closer to the truth to say that she is offering art as a substitute, rather than as an apology, for religion. No one has been able to assign her beliefs to any single known religion. All that can safely be said is that she believed in a creative force which, for the sake of convenience, she called God. (p. 8)

[There is] an unmistakable religious feeling behind her stories, a feeling which carries over into her critical thinking. It is a pervasive, albeit vague, religiosity…. (pp. 8-9)

What interests her is an attitude which she finds compatible with what life and art have taught her…. [She] does not make art justify religion but religion justify art. This idea is central to Isak Dinesen's thinking;… it explains those heretical inversions of doctrine that shock the reader of her tales into sudden awareness. (pp. 9-10)

Isak Dinesen sees the artist as one who, in surrendering himself to God's will, becomes an implement (bow) in God's hand whereby the divine origin of art (Logos) is manifested in the work of art (Mythos) which will leave in the mind of the audience an impression (blank page) that will reflect the divine origin of the art. (p. 11)

Isak Dinesen is constantly relegating the artist to an inferior position by referring to him in such terms as servant and implement…. In the sense that the artist is a "go-between," it can be said that, as Isak Dinesen conceives of him, he goes between God and man—or, more accurately, between Logos, the divine source of his creativity, and the blank page, the residual effect that the audience infers. (pp. 11-12)

In the sense that [the artist] absorbs from God the creative impulse, he is master; but he is also God's medium. God and the artist share the role of creator, but the artist alone is the medium of creation; and the stringed instrument on which he both plays and is played is the means whereby Logos becomes Mythos.

The artist is mute until "played," but then, too, so is the stringed instrument. Not until the latter is played upon does it send forth all the music that it contains. And even this music is inferior to the idea that produced it…. What emanates from Logos, then, is not the same as Logos but an approximation of it—an imitation of it—what Isak Dinesen means, apparently, by the term Mythos. (pp. 12-13)

Mythos, as the earthly reflection of heavenly existence, is synonymous with art and can be applied to any visible or audible manifestation of the Logos by which, as the poet says, all things were created. (p. 13)

[Within] the tales themselves Isak Dinesen is intensely concerned with the artist, even though the ultimate obligation of the artist is to disappear from the scene, to return to the state of the "mute implement" and let silence speak.

This [deliberate] contradiction between a preoccupation with the artist within many of the tales and an emphasis on effect as the purpose of the tale can be resolved, I think, if we make a distinction between the artist as subject matter and the artist as intruder…. The effect of the eloquent blank page will not be achieved if the artist intrudes himself into the work, draws attention to himself, or in any way interferes with his function as the "bow of the Lord." When the bow is drawn across the strings, it is not the bow that is to be noticed, nor even the strings; it is the music—and beyond that, the effect of the music which is something other than the music itself. Isak Dinesen, therefore, is concerned that the artist remember his modesty and allow nothing to hinder the communication between the Logos and the blank page.

To retain such modesty he must remain loyal to the Logos, or story, as I think Isak Dinesen defines it. "Be loyal to the story," says the old hag in "The Blank Page" to her storyteller daughter. "… Where the storyteller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly 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, when we have spoken our last word, will hear the voice of silence." (pp. 15-16)

In a little play, Sandhedens Haevn (The Revenge of Truth), written long before she was to achieve fame with her first collection of tales, Isak Dinesen expresses an idea that most critics have interpreted as the governing principle behind her attitude toward life and art. Early in the play, the witch Amiane comes forth to state this idea in a speech which is also included in "The Roads Round Pisa" [Seven Gothic Tales] as the central motif of that story.

The truth, my children, is that we are, all of us, acting in a marionette comedy. What is important more than anything else in a marionette comedy, is keeping the ideas of the author clear. This is the real happiness of life….

                                                      (p. 19)

The author to whom the witch refers is specifically the human author of the marionette comedy, but it is obvious … that she is also referring to God as the author of life. The fusion of the two meanings in the single word is the beginning of Isak Dinesen's critical thinking, for stemming from this comparison between God and the artist are all the principles by which she judges art…. The artist is, himself, a character in God's greater story, and as such he is as much obliged as anyone else to "keep the ideas of the author clear." (p. 20)

["The Cardinal's First Tale," in Last Tales, expresses] not only the Apollonian-Dionysian tension in both artist and priest but also [reveals] how both share, along with the aristocrat, a separation from ordinary society as well as an obligation to a destiny that differs significantly from that of the rest of mankind. In fulfilling their own destinies, these are the only persons who consciously lead others to fulfill theirs. In a world where all destinies were obvious, the artist, the priest, and the aristocrat would have no reason to exist.

Because his back is to God and he serves as God's mouth-piece, the artist, as well as the priest and the aristocrat, must share something of God's loneliness and risk; and he is denied certain advantages that other men are free to enjoy, among these the possibility of remorse and the possession of honor. (p. 21)

The person best equipped, it seems, to perceive the masks that pervade reality is the artist; and it is his function, as the arbiter on reality, to make these masks apparent as masks, in a way that leads not to any explicable truth behind the masks, but rather to an acceptance of the presence behind the masks of a truth which we are not privileged to understand. Thus, mask stands between truth and reality, and the art that makes these masks apparent is a higher reality because it is closer to truth. (pp. 22-3)

In Isak Dinesen's concept of the artist there is a trace of the diabolical, and Louis E. Grandjean points out in Blixens Animus that she shared with Nietzsche the belief that the satanic are preferable to the good who do not create, since the diabolical create more than they destroy. (p. 29)

The artist's job, as she sees it, is not to show man how to live but to heighten his consciousness of the life he is already living. (p. 31)

In "Ehrengard" and "The Immortal Story" only the perpetrators [of the evil of exceeding the limits of art] suffer, but in "The Poet" the suffering extends to others. In the confusion of mask and reality, the innocent lovers become murderers. The true artist knows that masquerade and reality are antithetical, and he strives to keep them separate by infusing his masquerade with a higher reality that is in direct contrast to the reality of the senses. (p. 33)

Isak Dinesen is fond of dealing in antithetical terms …; she looks upon opposites as locked caskets, each of which contains the key to the other. The dialectic of pride and humility is one of her most profound concepts, for the artist's relationship to these poles determines what he shall do with the part of God's nature which he shares. Pride, as Isak Dinesen sees it, is understanding the work of God as being the "right arrangement"; humility is understanding that within this arrangement God has no favorites. She excludes no man from the possibility of sharing in God's nature; she says simply that the man who is most sensitive to the rightness of things, who is equally proud and humble before such rightness, is the man we call an artist. (pp. 34-5)

[She is concerned with] the temptation to believe that the creative talent carries with it its own assurances of success and its own protection from despair. As she sees it, such an attitude can only lead to despair and failure, for it misleads the artist into expecting certain benefits without suffering—or into interpreting his suffering as a promise of forthcoming benefits. In renouncing faith and hope at such moments of temptation, the artist is putting himself in a position to be "inspired." (p. 36)

The artist who considers himself favored is, in effect, presuming that he knows God's plan in advance. It is one thing to believe that there is a plan and that it is right, but quite another to believe one can anticipate that plan; or, sensing at any given moment one's part in that plan, to assume that that part will not change. Such foreknowledge would violate the mystery of existence, and certainly, as Isak Dinesen conceives of it, the function of the artist is not to violate but to vindicate the mystery. (pp. 36-7)

Isak Dinesen believes firmly in inspiration as the transmission of the will of God to the artist by means of the Holy Ghost. In "The Deluge at Norderney" she implies that art is the book of the Holy Ghost, and in "The Cardinal's First Tale" … she describes the Holy Ghost as the sire of the artist. "I am not blaspheming, Madame," Cardinal Salviati tells the lady in black, "when I express the idea that any young mother of a saint or great artist may feel herself to be the spouse of the Holy Ghost." (p. 41)

In the tales of Isak Dinesen, the artist is the consort of loneliness and longing and is excluded from the society of common humanity in that he cannot enjoy the benefits either of honor or of remorse. Denied most of the prerogatives of either God or the devil, he is forced, nevertheless, as a man, to wear their immortal masks in a theatrical that lacks even the dignity of tragedy…. Isak Dinesen holds that those who function on this earth in lieu of God (artist, priest, aristocrat) can never be truly tragic figures. Tragedy is the privilege of ordinary mortals alone, and the gods and their agents must never condescend to be pitied; for to pity them is to annihilate them…. (pp. 49-50)

Denied the pleasures of ordinary human intercourse, the artist can find compensation in the creation of works of art; but there is a longing of the sort that leads beyond human existence and which can only be described in terms of a longing for a union with God, a oneness with the essence of creation. (p. 51)

Honor [being based on remorse] and remorse are irrelevant qualities to the artist; he has no need of them. But adversity and distress, poverty and sickness, even the harshness of his enemies, are the realities of which he is arbiter. Here, if anywhere, can be seen the peculiar power of Isak Dinesen's theory of submission. It is gay and glorious and not the least craven. We get from life, she says in one of her tales, both what we ask for and what we reject. Both are gifts, and the artist, in not separating them, acquires dominion over them. (p. 55)

Aside from personal preference, she revered the tale as a pure and original genre. She saw in it, I believe, an unbroken link with man's prehistoric beginnings. By reminding us, as she does so often, that in the beginning was the story and that stories have always been told, she is, in effect, placing the tale first in the ranks of literature and on a level with those art forms which anthropologists have traced to prehistory and which they have designated as spontaneous, archetypal expression—dance, music, drawing.

Isak Dinesen tried her hand at just about every literary genre—drama, poetry, novel, essay; but it would be foolish to say that she returned to the tale because she thought it superior. She returned to it, without a doubt, because she excelled at it. (p. 63)

To Isak Dinesen, God is not a painter or a poet or a musician. He is above all a teller of tales. The divine art is the story, the primary pattern of all art. Creation is a story, and we are told this story step by step, as the story progresses. There is a beginning and a middle and an end (the seventh day), and the characters appear in the story on a given day.

It is the unfolding that is important to Isak Dinesen. What matters is not what happens to man so much as the way in which it happens. It is only in the working out of the story that all men participate. There can be no story without man, yet man is subordinate to the story…. As the means whereby creation is unfolded, the story, it seems, is the artistic counterpart of creation, and the other art forms are but parts of this greater art.

The elevation of the tale to the highest art form is a departure from the romantic tendency to exalt music above all other art, but Isak Dinesen still [has] … the romantic fondness for using musicians as serious subjects for literary treatment…. It is interesting to note … that the one character in her tales who bears the most obvious resemblance to herself is Pellegrina Leoni, a renowned opera singer. In [Winter's Tales], the first story in which Pellegrina Leoni appears, her identity is deliberately confused as she moves in and out of the story in a succession of widely varying disguises. One purpose of the story seems to be an attempt to show that the personality takes on meaning only in the context of the role it is playing—when, in other words, character is subordinate to plot. (pp. 65-6)

Her settings and characters are idealized; they are seen not through the distortion of a mirror but through the perception of a mind which orders things to conform with the dictates of a higher reality—a higher imagination. They are, in a word, dreamlike in that they seem to have had an existence even though they could never really have existed.

The relationship between art and dream figures importantly in Isak Dinesen's attitude toward reality. In Shadows on the Grass she writes: "For we have in the dream forsaken our allegiance to the organizing, controlling and rectifying forces of the world, the Universal Conscience. We have sworn fealty to the wild, incalculable, creative forces, the Imagination of the Universe." I think it can be shown that this statement is far from a cry for artistic anarchy. Anarchy lies in the opposite direction from such concepts as identity and metamorphosis, submission and destiny, that [are] as central to Isak Dinesen's thinking. The organizing, controlling, and rectifying forces mentioned in this passage are simply the bourgeois virtues that [Erik] Johannesson lists as sincerity, security, and being true to one's own self. These are the ingredients of the universal conscience and have nothing to do with art, which puts the mask above sincerity, uncertainty above security, and loyalty to the story above loyalty to one's self. The wild, incalculable, creative forces are the daring, passion, and imagination of the Word that Adam praises in "Sorrow-Acre" [Winter's Tales]. They are the principle of art, not the law; and when one swears fealty to them, he is yielding to authority, not anarchy—he is being loyal to the story and keeping the ideas of the author clear.

The imagination of the universe is the source of art, not the structure. When, farther on, Isak Dinesen speaks about shifting over "from the world of day, from the domain of organizing and regulating universal powers, into the world of Imagination," she is talking, I think, about a movement away from bourgeois values toward divine ones. The domain of organizing and regulating universal powers, since it is contrasted with the world of imagination, obviously refers to the sort of worldly reality by which we may mistakenly judge art. The dream can neither be argued not explained. It must be accepted on its own terms. And if this dream, which derives from the imagination of the universe, is reflected in art, then art must also be accepted on its own terms. This is a plea, I think, not for disorder in art, but for order of a kind different from that of reality.

The order of reality excludes compression and expansion. Every moment is of the same duration as every other, and one moment inexorably follows another. The order of art, like dream, lengthens some moments and shortens others. The relationship of one event to another is dictated by the inner logic of the work and is not bound by chronology. (pp. 71-2)

Isak Dinesen allows that dreams may have nightmarish qualities, but she does not believe that there is a place for nightmare as ultimate vision in art…. For her, apparently,… nightmare can only be a partial vision….

By assigning the dream an exalted position, Isak Dinesen is moving away from the interpretation of dreams as a means to a better understanding of the human personality and in the direction of dream as myth, as collective unconscious, and, therefore, as a basis for art and for the understanding of art. (p. 75)

God's art, and the art of those who are loyal to God's art, is, in contrast to human art, the art of continuance. In change only will it find its value; and its truth, reality, and order will be concealed within the mask, dream, and disorder that argue change. This means, apparently, that there can be no absolute truth, reality, or order in art except the absolute truth, reality, and order of change. Art that implies anything else, it seems, is false—or human—art.

This concept of the absolute value of change is an important affirmation of the value of an organic theory of art. If each separate work of art contains its own truth, reality, and order, then there is no external standard that can be brought to bear upon it other than the condition that the work of art conform to its own standards and not suggest that those particular standards are applicable to any other work of art. This is an assertion of the uniqueness of individual works of art, for duplication would be not only unnecessary but contradictory. This is why Isak Dinesen cannot talk about the specific nature of the mask, dream, or disorder that might appear in a work of art. All she can do is to insist that these elements be taken on their own terms, and that whenever they appear, they affirm the value of change. (pp. 76-7)

Isak Dinesen makes a distinction between tragedy and comedy which is similar to the one she makes between the novel and the story. Tragedy, like the novel, is a human art; comedy, like the story, is a divine one….

According to this distinction, tragedy cannot be an earthly reflection of the divine creative force unless it is considered as a part of comedy—much as Isak Dinesen considers nightmare as an incomplete dream. Northrop Frye has said that we reconcile ourselves to tragedy because it leads by implication to comedy. This implication Isak Dinesen would call the comic vision, I think; and I think she would insist that it be present before a work with tragic elements could truly be labeled the highest form of art. (p. 91)

Tragedy, then, can be defined, according to what Isak Dinesen has said, as a human phenomenon in which man, out of a sense of honor, rebels against the conditions brought about by the Fall by contrasting them with the Edenic ideal in an attempt to regain his innocence. Or she might prefer to say, simply, that tragedy is the imitation of lost destiny. Man cannot regain this lost destiny, as Isak Dinesen sees it, through tragedy alone, however. The ultimate purpose of all art is to reflect cosmic intent, and the ultimate effect is to regain naiveté through submission to destiny. Neither this purpose nor this effect can be achieved except through the comic vision. (pp. 93-4)

Isak Dinesen's one truly tragic figure is Councilor Mathiesen in "The Poet" [Seven Gothic Tales] and it is to him that we can look for some illumination on the question of tragic flaw. His idyllic life is interrupted by the knowledge that he can never be the poet he has always dreamed of being. The necessity of being something else he finds tiresome, and as a countermeasure against this dull condition, he undertakes to arrange the lives of others in accordance with a plan which will afford him a vicarious success as a poet. This decision to meddle in his own destiny—and the destiny of others—to appoint himself as the best judge of what should be, is … his fatal mistake…. [On] the basis of Isak Dinesen's insistent comment on the subject, I would suggest that a tragic hero commits his tragic error at the moment when he takes destiny into his own hands. (p. 94)

It is in keeping with Isak Dinesen's general philosophy … to say that those who willingly submit to their destinies are comic figures and those who do not are tragic figures. Such a definition does not afford tragic figures the exalted station that Aristotle assigns them. Isak Dinesen's tragic hero is more pitiful than pitiable. For one thing, she excludes the nobility from the role of tragic hero; and for another, she specifies no moral qualifications. "Here on earth," says the old lord in "Sorrow-Acre," "we, who stand in lieu of the gods and have emancipated ourselves from the tyranny of necessity, should leave to our vassals their monopoly of tragedy, and for ourselves accept the comic with grace." Pity, for Isak Dinesen, is a degrading emotion, not to be directed, it would seem, towards God or His mouthpieces. "In pitying, or condoling with your god," says the old lord, "you deny and annihilate him, and such is the most horrible of atheisms." Moreover, the effect of an action differs between those who stand in lieu of the gods and their vassals. "Indeed," says the old lord, "the very same fatality, which, in striking the burgher or peasant, will become tragedy, with the aristocrat is exalted to the comic." (p. 95)

The part which Isak Dinesen assigns to the audience in the realization of a work of art is as demanding as that which she assigns the artist. It is not surprising, then, that the listeners in Isak Dinesen's tales are usually storytellers themselves, for to participate fully in a story, a listener must be able to involve himself in it as deeply as the teller, to assist the teller, as it were, in the creation of the story—just as man assists God in the creation of the world. The point at which the interdependent roles of author and audience merge is that point beyond the work of art which Isak Dinesen calls the blank page. It is at this point that the story which has been properly told will unfold its deeper meaning in the mind of the audience—will, in the silence that speaks, bring about the reconciliation of opposites which is the highest effect of art. (p. 101)

The concept of interdependence is one of Isak Dinesen's most fundamental and far-reaching attitudes towards both life and art. We [note] its importance in the relationship between God and artist, pride and humility, reality and dream, truth and mask, Logos and Mythos; and we have seen it offered as a clue to the understanding of the paradoxes of life and death, man and woman, rich and poor, artist and public. [Further,] interdependence culminates in reconciliation—that grand effect to which Isak Dinesen insists all art should, and great art does, aspire. (p. 115)

If the work of art is successful, it will convey intact the sense of the unity and necessity of all things in such a way that the audience will recognize and accept the truth of this unity and necessity without asking why it is so or why it must be so. In fact, if harmony has been achieved and transmitted through the work of art, the audience will feel that such harmony is right and proper and is itself the answer to the seeming diversity and whim of isolated experiences. It will understand that "everything, even the pain and the evil, is esthetically necessary." (p. 119)

However it is given to us, balance must be present in a work of art, it seems, before we can respond to it. We know that balance has been achieved once we see that opposites are interdependent. Out of this interdependence arises a concord that makes alternatives unimaginable. Once we have reached this point, we have arrived at the moment of reconciliation—the blank page. This is the moment in which the half that we have been given unites with the half which we can project, and question and answer become one. (pp. 120-21)

It is the rebellious tendency of romanticism to posit art at the extreme opposite of existing concepts of sensually perceptible reality. Isak Dinesen is merely reaffirming this tendency by constantly dealing in terms of paradox and resolution, in terms of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Nowhere are such terms more applicable or more appropriate, it seems, than in this ultimate achievement of art—to join with reality in a reconciliation that transcends both. In her own life and art Isak Dinesen repeatedly insisted on an equal acquaintance with art and reality for this very reason, and not on an understanding of one by means of the other. (p. 122)

Thomas R. Whissen, in his Isak Dinesen's Aesthetics (copyright © 1973 by Thomas R. Whissen; reprinted by permission of Kennikat Press Corp.), Kennikat, 1973.