SOURCE: Mussari, Mark. “L'Heure bleue: Isak Dinesen and the Ascendant Imagination.” Scandinavian Studies 73, no. 1 (spring 2001): 43-62.

Ein blauer Augenblick ist nur mehr Seele. [A blue moment is purely and simply soul]

—“Sebastian im Traum: Kindheit” Georg Trakl

In several of the stories in Winter's Tales, Isak Dinesen makes painterly use of the imaginative breadth of blue.¹ The color functions on two levels: a number of her characters are ultimately enveloped in the blue other-world she constructs early in the collection; and at the same time, her colorific language, calling to mind Kandinsky's assertion that the eye is “absorbed” into a circle of blue, draws the reader into her imagined landscape. Recognizing blue's power to express longing, the emotional state that pervades the collection, Dinesen deftly merges the sensual and the spiritual in her chromatic and often oneiric imagery.

Though she became a writer, Dinesen writes like a painter relying heavily on the image, whether iconic or symbolic, to express sensations or emotions.² Describing the influence of painting on her writing, she has noted:

Kunsten har i alle sine Skikkelser betydet uendelig meget for mig. Og jeg tror, at Malerkunsten paa mit eget Sind har virket mest direkte inspirerende … den har bestandig for mig aabenbaret den virkelige Verdens sande Vesen.”

(Lasson 26)

[Art has in all its forms meant so much for me. I also believe that painting has most directly influenced my own mind … it has constantly revealed to me the true essence of the real world].

Thus, the image frequently supercedes the event in her writing. Her characters are not described making passionate love, for instance, but are placed in a blue scene that conveys ecstasy in its chromatic language. In an interview with Jørgen Sandvad while she was writing Winter's Tales, Dinesen commented on her own colorist sensitivity: “Da jeg i Paris saa Degas' Billeder, syntes jeg, at de viste mig, hvor dejligt, hvor rigt og levende sort er—det er jo ogsaa en Forkyndelse, en Aabenbaring af én Side af Livet” (22) [When I saw Degas's paintings in Paris, I thought that they showed me how wonderful, how rich and lively black is—it is certainly also a proclamation, a revelation of one side of life].

In his provocative study, On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry, William Gass discusses the pictorial and linguistic uses of the color and comments that “blue, the word and the condition, the color and the act, contrive to contain one another, as if the bottle of the genii were its belly, the lamp's breath the smoke of the wraith” (11). In blue, color and emotion easily exchange places as subject and object. Because blue, along with green, possesses “the greatest emotional range,” Gass contends that it is “therefore most suitable as the color of interior life” (75-6). His words call to mind the observation of the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard who, in L' Air et les Songes: Essai sur l'imagination du mouvement (1943), wrote: “Le mot bleu désigne, mais il ne montre pas” (187) [“The word blue designates, but it does not render” (162)].

Dinesen's reliance on the seductive force of blue in her pictorial imagery reflects both a cultural and a personal predeliction. As a young woman, she admired Georg Brandes's writings and even at the age of nineteen sent the literary giant flowers when he was in the hospital. She was surely familiar with Brandes's apostrophe in Hovedstrømninger to “Længselen, den blaa Blomst” [Longing, that blue flower], which is based on Novalis's image of die blaue Blume in Heinrich von Ofterdingen.³ Hans Holmberg claims that “Den blå fdargen, vintersagornas fdarg har symboliska övertoner hos Karen Blixen. Dess symboliska karaktär ar av allt att döma bestämd av Georg Brandes' analys av ‘Den blaa Blomst’” (82) [The blue color, Winter's Tales's color, has symbolic overtones for Karen Blixen. This symbolic character is apparently determined by Georg Brandes's analysis of “The Blue Flower”]. Although this comparison provides a minimal understanding of Dinesen's blue imagery, it reduces her chromaticism to the purely symbolic level and envisions only one source in deriving all of Dinesen's use of blue in Winter's Tales from her reading of Brandes.

That Dinesen should make such painterly use of blue is not surprising in a broader cultural context. The color has, for centuries, held a preeminent place in Danish art. From Eckersberg's marinescapes through to the luminous hues of J. T. Lundbye's pastoral skies to Egill Jacobsen's playful blue-green masks, Danish painters have taken their colorist inspiration especially from the wide spectrum of blues in the ever-present sea.⁴ In Skagen, in particular, the unique atmospheric condition known as l'heure bleue prompted an entire school of impressionists, most notably P. S. Krøyer, many of whose plein-air paintings fairly shimmer with the blue haze that falls on Nordjylland in the late summer evenings.⁵ The Danish art critic Hans Edvard Nørregård-Nielsen has commented on the Skagen paintings' “stemningsladet rapsodi i blåt med de lyse nætters vemodige poesi i centrum” (1:285) [mood laden rhapsody in blue with the bright nights' wistful poetry at their center]. In Sommeraften ved Skagen Sønderstrand [Summer Evening on the South Beach at Skagen] (1893), one of Krøyer's most frequently reproduced works, the unearthly light emanating from the conjoined sea and sky, a solid blue mist, envelopes two moon-white figures strolling arm-in-arm, away from the viewer along the beach. As Gass has observed, “at dusk, it is the way the color sinks among us” (59). This quality in the Skagen painters' canvases depends also on the particular shade of blue they depict. Despite many inaccurate reproductions on cards and posters, seeing the paintings in person reveals that it is a slightly mauve-blue leaning more toward periwinkle.

Isak Dinesen was familiar with l'heure bleue. In September of 1936, she drove to Skagen to finish writing Out of Africa and remained there until February of 1937. She lived part of that time at Brøndum's Hotel, which was for a long time the main repository of the local painters' works. Her transcendent use of blue in Winter's Tales captures, through language, an atmosphere similar to that attained by Krøyer and the other painters of l'heure bleue. The dissolved horizon, lost in a wash of blue, serves as an important motif. The melancholy that characterizes many of the Skagen paintings is reflected in most of her tales. As her biographer Judith Thurman has pointed out: “One image in particular keeps recurring: an enveloping blueness, in which the horizon dissolves and the sea and sky seem to be the same element” (295). Dinesen's hazy blue horizons have a more prominent function than that typical of the Impressionists, though: her aim is not simply to capture effects of light at a given time. Instead, the color's emotive, expressive quality drives her blue prose.

The origin of Dinesen's attraction to this image and the sad tones of blue can also be traced to her romantic rewriting of her life in Africa. In the opening section of Out of Africa (1937), she remarks that her farm “lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet” (3) and observes that “you are struck by the feeling of having lived for a time up in the air. … Up in this high air you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of heart” (4). Unknown to the first-time reader, Dinesen is foreshadowing her flights with Finch-Hatton and painting an imaginary landscape better than any to be found elsewhere in the world.

In her use of the blue sky, Dinesen paints color spaces ripe with emotional nuance. In the manner of a fauve, she lets the blue of the sky express her feelings. With her strong visual sense, Blixen's aerial imagery depicts ecstatic states in massive, sweeping layers of color, especially blue tones. Discussing Dinesen's painterly descriptions of flying with Finch-Hatton Out of Africa, Susan R. Horton calls the scenery a “psychic” landscape:

Dinesen's prose … renders superbly what fauve painters referred to as the “color space”. … Dinesen loved flying with Denys Finch Hatton, and in her description she couples the fauve attention to color and perspective with their characteristic experimentation with new modes of rendering the visual.

(175)

Horton seems closer to understanding the inventive nature of Dinesen's chromaticism than purely symbolic interpretations.

In the chapter entitled “Wings” in Out of Africa describing how she and Finch-Hatton shot a male and female lion, Dinesen sees some vultures circling “high in the light-blue sky.” She is drawn to their flight: “My heart was as light as if I had been flying it, up there, on a string, as you fly a kite” (223). The longing in Dinesen's words is reinforced by the merging of death and flight images. Later she comments, “To Denys Finch-Hatton I owe what was, I think the greatest, the most transporting pleasure of my life on the farm: I flew with him over Africa” (229). Flying changed Dinesen's perspective on herself, on her life, and on her art. Her Breve reveal that she continued throughout her life to use the experience as a point of reference. In a letter (2 June 1934) to Gustav Mohr in which she draws an analogy to describe her elation at the American reception of Seven Gothic Tales, Dinesen writes:

—det er omtrent den samme Følelse, som naar jeg gik op i Denys' Aeroplan og slap Jorden og følte, at det virkelig kunde lade sig gøre, den bar!—Man faar en ny Dristighed eller Tillid,—en slags Tillid til at være sig selv.

(147)

(It is almost the same feeling as when I went up in Denys's airplane and left the ground and felt that it really could be done, it held us up! You get a new courage or faith—a kind of faith in being yourself.)

“Dristighed” [courage] and “Tillid til at være sig selv” [faith in being yourself] serve as two of the cornerstones of Dinesen's fictive world; they are the essential traits of her most aerial characters, visitors from the blue world.

It is ironic that “The Young Man with the Carnation” appears first in the American edition of Winter's Tales, for in many ways this tale serves as the blueprint for the others. In the story within the story told to a group of seamen by the blue-eyed Charlie Despard—a young writer who unsuccessfully attempts to shirk the solipsistic demands of writing—Lady Helena spends a lifetime searching for a particular shade of blue. Langbaum suggests that Dinesen, in writing Charlie Despard's blue story, was inspired by Mallarmé's poem “L'Azur”: “it follows Mallarmé's method” (160).⁶ This often repeated comparison to Mallarmé limits our view of Dinesen's chromatic tendencies. It places the color in a specific paradigm while ignoring blue's expressive function in much of her writing. A sense of distance between the reader and the image attends the merely symbolic interpretations of Dinesen's chromatic imagery—as if color's sole purpose were explained once its symbolic function in a given work is determined.

In Despard's tale, Lady Helena's search begins with a forced separation from the sailor who spent nine days with her in a small boat fleeing the fiery demise of the ship on which they had been sailing. She had been accompanying her father, who, in the service of the queen, has spent a lifetime amassing ancient blue porcelain from Persia, Japan, and China. When her father discovers that a young sailor has shared a questionable amount of time alone with his daughter, he banishes the youth thus removing the object of Helena's desire. And so begins her seemingly impossible quest. Dinesen writes:

The only thing which she now wanted to do was to go, like her father before her, to collect rare blue china. … In her search, she told the people, with whom she dealt, that she was looking for a particular blue colour and would pay any price for it.

(18)

A lifetime of searching, however, only provides disappointment. Employing antipodal imagery, Helena explains to her old aunts that the world is not solid but composed entirely of water: “our planet really floats in the ether, like a soap-bubble” (19). Dinesen's ethereal blue circle conforms to certain central notions of color and design. In The Art of Color, Johannes Itten notes that “the incessantly moving circle corresponds among colors to transparent blue … the circle is spirit in eternal motion” (120). Wherever Helena travels, she says, on the opposite side of the earth another ship sails: “We two are like the reflection of one another, in the deep sea, and the ship of which I speak is always exactly beneath my own ship, upon the opposite side of the globe” (19). Helena adds that, one day, both her ship and its shadow-ship will sink; she explains, though, that “there is no up and down in the sea” (19) (in the Danish edition, Blixen adds “ingen Forskel paa højt og lavt” (46) [no difference between high and low]).

Dinesen crafts a specifically geometric image—two points separated from one another by the diameter of a sphere—and then destroys the mathematical prerequisites of that image by eradicating the diameter in a manner representing the negation of time and space. In the discussion of Bachelard's concept of spatiality in “Time and Space as the Lenses of Reading,” David J. Langston contends that “the image as ‘compressed time’ controls and resolves the outcome of … temporal flow” and that “space remains the dominant axis of perception” (403). In Helena's blue landscape, Dinesen has collapsed space to collapse time.

Denied sexual expression like many of the characters in Winter's Tales, Helena longs to unite with her male “reflection”; she can only do so by entering the timeless, spaceless blue (i.e. drowning in the sea). Her dream of descending into the blue at the same moment as her male counterpart recalls Aristophanes's myth in Plato's Symposium of the once-united sexes, now split and searching tirelessly to reunite with their lost half. This melding of romantic and aerial imagery leads the reader, again, to Dinesen's flights with Finch-Hatton, her memories of which have been transferred into wistful images of descent. In Edvard Munch's 1889 “Opptegnelser i St. Cloud,” he also expressed his reverence for passion in a blue scene:

En stærkt nøken arm—en brun kraftig nakke—op til det hvælvede bryst lægger en ung kvinde sit hove.—

Hun lukker øynene og lytter med aapen bævende mund til de ord han hvisker ind i hendes lange utslåtte haar.

Jeg skulde forme det slik jeg nu saa det i den blaa dis.—

Disse to i det øieblik de ikke er sig selv men kun et led av de tusener slægtsled der knytter slægter til slægter.—⁷

(Gierløff, 72-3)

(A strong naked arm, a tanned powerful neck—a young woman rests her head on the arching chest. She closes her eyes and listens with open, quivering lips to the words he whispers into her long flowing hair. I would give form to this as I know see it, in a blue haze. These two in that moment when they are no longer themselves but only one link in a thousand links tying one generation to another generation.)

At the end of a long life, Helena receives a Chinese jar in a rare shade of blue, “the true blue,” from a merchant. In Karen Blixens livsfilosofi, Mogens Pahuus sees the jar, the color of which Helena describes as “fresh as a breeze, as deep as a deep secret, as full as I say not what” (Winter's Tales 19-20), as symbolic of “det kvindelige køn og den fysiske kærlighed” (96) [the female sex and physical love]. Helena asks that, at the moment of her death, her heart be taken and placed inside the vase: “For then everything will be as it was then. All shall be blue round me, and in the midst of the blue world my heart will be innocent and free” (20). The second “then” in her statement must surely refer to her nine days on the sea with her sailor, her banished counterpart, the object of her desire, with whom she once shared the blue world.

That Dinesen attempted to recapture those heights through her writing becomes clear in Charlie Despard's own dilemma in “The Young Man with the Carnation.” Once Charlie abandons his reverie of shirking his artistic burden and running away, he thinks: “Almighty God … as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are thy short stories higher than our short stories” (23). In his “dialogue” with the Lord, Charlie is chastened for trying to abandon his aerial responsibility. The Lord tells him:

I made the ships on their keels, and all floating things. The moon that sails in the sky, the orbs that swing in the universe, the tides, the generations, the fashions. You make me laugh, for I have given you all the world to sail and float in, and you have run aground here, in a room of the Queen's Hotel to seek a quarrel.

(25)

Finally accepting his artistic covenant with the Lord, Charlie returns to his blue hotel room and stands, high up, looking down at the people below him: “Charlie gazed down into the street, a long way under him” (26). This aerial position, that of the true artist, is reinforced in “The Heroine” when Heloïse says to Frederick: “You are a man, a writer, are you not? You are on the upward path” (88).

Charlie's own tale merges at this point with that of his creation, Lady Helena's. Just as she will not descend until the moment of her death, so must the artist remain perched on his or her aerie of responsibility. Mirroring her own life, Dinesen's fictive aerial demands come at a great price. As the Lord warns Charlie, the artist may write about women but will get only “a shilling's worth” from them in life. The artist must be “content with that” (25). Thwarted in romance, Dinesen transformed her fleeting sensual experiences with Finch-Hatton into her art. Unable to regain her personal heights, she replaced them with her writing.

Throughout Winter's Tales, the aerial state is reserved for the chosen few. Just as Charlie looks down from his hotel room window after he finally accepts his responsibility as a writer, so Simon (“The Sailor-Boy's Tale”) is also high on the mast when he saves the falcon/Sunniva and again at her house from whence he looks down to the sea. Rosa (in “Peter and Rosa”) stands high up in a window when she inspires Peter to follow his destiny to go to the sea, and Jensine (“The Pearls”) looks down from a mountain top in Norway. Conversely, the many images of descent in Winter's Tales have a similar function. Bachelard has noted that falling imagery is “une sorte de maladie de l'imagination de la montée … la nostalgie inexpiable de la hauteur” (111) [”a kind of sickness of the imagination of rising … an inexpiable nostalgia for heights” (94)].

In the Danish edition of Vinter Eventyr, the expressive use of blue first surfaces in that collection's opening story, “Skibsdrengens fortælling,” when Simon stumbles upon Nora:

Han gik videre og var kommet til Udkanten af Landsbyen, da han fik Øje paa en lille Pige i en falmet lyseblaa Kjole, som stod paa den anden Side af et Gærde og saa paa ham.

(10)

As he walked on, and got to the outskirts of the place, he saw a little girl in a blue frock, standing at the other side of a fence and looking at him.

(93)

Simon and Nora (who is thirteen) teater on the brink of adulthood; Blixen fashions an immediate association between burgeoning sexuality and the color blue, an association that occurs in a number of the other tales. Later in the story, Simon “gik … op til den Bod, han kendte, og købte der et lille, blaat Silketørklæde, der havde samme Farve som hendes Øjne” (13) [“walked up to a booth that he knew of, and bought a small blue silk handkerchief, the same colour as her eyes” (96)]. The memory of those blue eyes eventually induces Simon to murder a Russian sailor who tries to seduce the boy and keep him from finding Nora. At the end of the story, with some help from the Lapp shapeshifter Sunniva, Simon escapes punishment for the murder, but he never returns to Nora. This unresolved desire serves as another plot device Blixen constructs to enhance associations of longing and sadness with the color blue.

Images of ascent also play a thematic function in this tale. In the story's opening scene, Simon climbs the ship's mast to free the peregrine falcon (Sunniva) stuck in the nets: “He was scared as he looked down, but at the same time he felt that he had been ordered up by nobody, but that this was his own venture, and this gave him a proud, steadying sensation, as if the sea and the sky, the ship, the bird and himself were all one” (92). In this description the blending of sky and sea, an essential motif in Winter's Tales, is associated with the state of elevation. Toward the end of the tale when Sunniva has returned the favor and saved his life, Simon “got up from his stool, stood straight up before her and stared into her face. He felt as if he were swaying high up in the air, with but a small hold” (101-2). Even Sunniva's house sits “so high up that the boy could see the sea from it” (103). Dinesen uses these images of height and airiness to define those characters or experiences that defy conventionality and complacency. The child of Destiny, Simon surrenders to the paths before him, but his true place is high atop the mast. When Dinesen comments at the end that he will “live to tell the story,” she unites Simon's aerial images with the artist's lot in life. Simon, too, is on the upward path.

The overcoming of conventionality serves as the driving force in the aerial imagery of “The Pearls,” particularly in the descriptions of Norway; this mountainous landscape, with a nod to Africa, is the scene of the prudish Jensine's first experience with “passion.” During her honeymoon with her feckless husband,

she stood upon the summits, her clothes blown about her … she had lived in Denmark … and her idea of the earth was that it must spread out horizontally, flat or undulating, before her feet. But in these mountains everything seemed strangely to stand up vertically, like some great animal that rises on its hind leg. … She was higher than she had ever been, and the air went to her head like wine … she felt her old ideas of the world blown about in all directions.

(109)

These sensations are, however, followed by panic and the realization that she has been brought up in a moralistic “atmosphere of prudence and foresight” (109). By the end of her honeymoon, Jensine's relationship to the landscape (and to herself) has changed: “Only now did Jensine fully realize the beauty of the landscape around her, for, after all, in the end she had made it her ally. Up here, she reflected, the dangers of the world were obvious, ever in sight” (114). Sensuality reflected in the mountainous landscape around her has brought Jensine to new heights—into the blue—but her visceral reaction is still trepidation. Despite the experience of physical passion, she fails Bachelard's (and Dinesen's) verticality test. Using height solely to establish a safe perspective (thus, the landscape becomes her “ally”), Jensine lacks the necessary courage to live vertically.

Her ecstasy with the vertical as opposed to the horizontal—represented by Denmark's low-lying landscape—also reflects what Bachelard calls “différentielle verticale”:

Nous formulerons donc ce principe premier de l'imagination ascensionnelle: de toutes les métaphores, les métaphores de la hauteur, de l'élévation, de la profondeur, de l'abaissement, de la chute sont par excellence des métaphores axiomatiques. … Le dynamisme positif de la verticalité est si net qu'on peut énoncer cet aphorisme: qui ne monte pas tombe.

(18-9)

(This, then, will be my formulation of the first principle of ascensional imagination: of all metaphors, metaphors of height, elevation, depth, sinking, and the fall are the axiomatic metaphors par excellence. … The positive dynamism of verticality is so clear that we can formulate this aphorism: what does not rise, falls.

[10-1])

Gazing into the mirror at her own reflection in the moment of her final epiphany, Jensine “felt a strange giddiness, as if the room was sinking away around her, but not unpleasantly” (123). She has returned to a vertical position: the magic of the extra pearl enables Jensine to overcome her fear of death and to see that immortality is achieved in the story that will be passed on with the necklace. The idea that the story staves off death is another of Dinesen's favorite romantic concepts. Jensine finally embraces the blue heights because she no longer fears the abyss.

In “The Dreaming Child,” Jens, “the dreamer whose dreams come true,” is moving toward the blue land of his dreams. The child thrives only on paradox. After he is plucked, like an orchid growing out of a dunghill from his destitute surroundings in Copenhagen's slums and adopted by a wealthy couple on Bredgade, Jens withers in his new moneyed environment. Imbued with the wisdom of Mamzell Ane, a mad sewing woman who also functions as the boy's muse, Jens and his highly charged imagination need opposites to exist.⁸ Because paradox can find no permanent home in his foster parents' “rational, solid Copenhagen mansion” (173), his character becomes the embodiment of Blake's maxim that without contraries is no progression. With his imaginative abilities paralyzed in a well-heeled world of sated social aspirations, Jens dies. Dinesen writes: “In the end, like a small brook which falls into the ocean, Jens gave himself up to, and was absorbed in, the boundless, final unity of dream” (180). Once life fails to provide the child with the contraries necessary for his existence, Jens enters the blue world, the cosmos of his dreams, what Bachelard called “the first blue.”⁹

After Jens's death, Emilie and Jakob walk through the beech woods at Charlottenlund. As they stroll through a springtime “green world,” Emilie stops “to pick up from the road the shell of a small, pale-blue, bird's egg, broken in two; she tried to set it together, and kept it on the palm of her hand” (183). In a heavy-handed symbolic turn, Dinesen's broken egg alludes to Emilie's newfound role as Jens's “mother” (as she later tells Jakob, Jens was actually her “son” with Charlie). While she walks with Jakob, the sky above them is a “faint blue” (183). Echoing her own words upon learning of Denys Finch-Hatton's death in Out of Africa, Dinesen writes: “‘And now, after he has died,’ [Emilie] said, ‘I understand everything’” (186).¹⁰ The blue sky and broken egg express not only Emilie's sorrow but Dinesen's as well.

In Granze, the wizened clairovyant Wend in “The Fish,” Dinesen creates another character who functions as a visitor from the blue world. Whereas Helena longs to sink into the waves, the King, the central character in “The Fish,” stares up at one solitary star, “shining, in the pale sky of the summer night” (227). Suffering from the Dinesenian malaise of unfulfilled passion and a spiritual desire for completion, “the yearning of an adolescent” that has grown into “a bitter ache,” the King knows that only death can satiate his longing. The “profound, fresh, silent embrace of the night” (229) reaches for him. Early in the tale, the “whisper of waves,” in a Worsdworthian synesthetic turn, evokes memories of the old Wendish thrall in the King's waking hours and indicates the path the regent needs to pursue.

Granze's immediate association with the sea and the monarch's half-dream state once again unite the blue world with the atemporal subconscious. We learn quickly that the Wend is “as old as the salt sea” and that his existence is nonlinear; for Wends, “years did not count as with Christian people; they lived forever” (231). Granze's relation to the subconscious is reinforced by the King's childhood recollections of him, “when [the King] had hardly been conscious of himself or of the world. They stirred dully in the dark, and smelled of seaweed and mussels” (233). The strong sexual undercurrent emphasizes not only Granze's association with the sensual, but also the ultimate importance of physical love (the fatal affair with Lady Ingeborg) fulfilling the King's longing.¹¹ As Holmberg has pointed out, “Kongens vej til sandhed og liv og endelig død går gennem den jordiske kærlighted” (37) [the King's path to truth and life and ultimately death goes through earthly love].

When the King finally reaches the sea, Dinesen states, paralleling her description of the night sky's seduction of him, that “the full, salt, moist breath of the sea met his face and embraced him” (238). Accompanied by his other boyhood friend, the “quick, keen” priest Sune, a representative from the Christian linear world, the King travels through the green wood to find the preternatural Wend of his childhood. Kandinsky wrote,

Nicht wie Grün—welches, wie wir später sehen werden, irdische, selbstzufriedene Ruhe ist—sondern feierliche, überirdische Vertiefung. Dies ist buchstäblich zu verstehen: auf dem Wege zu diesem “über” liegt das “irdische”, welches nicht zu vermeiden ist.

(93)

(“The way to the supernatural, lies through the natural. And we mortals passing from the earthly yellow to the heavenly blue must pass through the green”).

[38]¹²

As in the Lady Helena's ethereal story in “The Young Man with the Carnation,” Dinesen uses the natural scenery to indicate that the reader, along with the King, is entering a dreamscape: “But to the north the sea and the sky joined without the faintest line of division, and became but the universe, unfathomable space” (238). The language captures the effect achieved by Krøyer's luminescent, horizonless blue seascapes. “Because blue contracts, retreats,” explains Gass, “it is the color of transcendence, leading us away in pursuit of the infinite” (76), which is the King's ultimate destination. “There was more than a war-song in the whispering of the waves: an endless course, infinity itself. Paradise … perhaps began where the sea and the sky met in front of him” (243). Bachelard has explained that “l'œil et l'esprit, ensemble, imaginent un ciel bleu sans résistance; ils rêvent ensemble à une matière infinie” (190-1) [”eye and mind together imagine blue sky without resistance. Together they dream of an infinite matter” (165)].

The King has entered a landscape of the soul; he stands on the shore of the same celestial blue world that Lady Helena has described. In “The Fish,” though, the emphasis switches from air (ether) to water (sea). In Karen Blixens teologi, Sven Bjerg points out the importance of the sea in this scene: “Man kunne sige, at kongen endelig finder sig selv, da det lykkes ham at forbinde indre med ydre. Han byder over havet, og havet svarer ham. Fra havet modtager han sin skæbne, som var anlagt i ham” (32) [One could say that the King finally finds himself when he succeeds in uniting inner with outer. He offers himself to the sea, and the sea answers him. From the sea he receives his destiny, that lies deep within him]. The oppositions of the King's life—self/community, solipsism/passion, Christianity/paganism, Sune/Granze—can only dissolve in the distant, “unfathomable” blue.

It is not surprising, therefore, that Granze literally rises out of the sea when the King meets him, “dragging a weight, a heavy catch of fish, after him” (239). One of the fish will, of course, contain the answer to the King's unquenchable longing: a ring, lost by the Lady Ingeborg, a ring with a blue stone that matches the color of her eyes. Sune, who has recently seen Ingeborg, immediately recognizes the ring. He had been out sailing with her when, trailing her hand in a sensuous motion in the water, she lost it. Or, Dinesen's tale posits, was it taken by the waves to serve its ultimate purpose? Sune's story inspires a blue portrait in the King's consciousness: “Before the eyes of the King's mind rose the picture of the boat in blue water and a gay breeze, with the young black priest in it, and the fair lady, in silk and gold, her white fingers playing in the ripples, and underneath them the big fish swimming in the dark-blue shadow of the keel” (246). As Aage Henriksen observes in De ubændige:

Op af havets store ubevidsthed stiger en ring og et navn på en eneste, hidtil kun kendt af kongen som en ubestemt længsel og bundet i dybet, men nu frigjort, som han selv er frigjort. … Vejen ligger nu åben frem til den seksuelle besiddelse af fru Ingeborg og videre til døden i Finderup Lade.

(91-2)

(Up from the sea's great unconsciousness rises a ring and the name of one, until now only known to the King as a vague longing and bound in the deep, but now released, as he has been released. … The path has now opened to the seduction of Lady Ingeborg and further to death in the barn at Finderup.)

Through the ring, the King, whose affair with Lady Ingeborg will bring about his murder, has found the solution to his “vague longing,” his entry into the blue reverie, the completion of the circle of his life.

Dinesen's associations of the color blue with both childhood imagination and blossoming sexuality are prominent in “Peter and Rosa,” the most absorbing tale in the collection. Trapped in a colorless house with a moralistic patriarch and no promise of personal fulfillment, Peter and Rosa are thwarted in their pursuit of that most Dinesenian of all goals: “the vain and dangerous task of living” (254). Borrowing from her own wintry experiences, Dinesen begins with an image of the frozen Øresund; the soft-blue sky and sea of “The Fish” are, in this tale, replaced with a “hard, inexorable sky” over a “dead landscape” (251). Her setting reflects the limiting aspect of the young characters' surroundings and upbringing, the “curb”—to borrow a term from Blake—on their sensual natures.

The thaw, hinting at the resolution of both characters' longing, has begun in the frozen nordsjællandske landscape; the falling rain and the sound of slowly breaking ice indicate the arrival of life—of sexuality—for both Peter and Rosa. Paradoxically, theirs is “a longing for the lost world of childhood” (260). Playing on this paradox, Dinesen constructs an inventive dichotomy between two “deaths” in “Peter and Rosa.” The parson's home represents that most heinous of crimes against one's nature, the sacrifice of self to conventional values and standards. Bound by the parson's stifling morality, Peter sees a flock of wild geese “trekking … north … a migration of hope and joy … his soul ascended to the sky to meet the soul of the wild birds” (251-2). Peter feels a “tremendous stream of longing” (with all concurrent sexual puns assuredly intended). He prefers another death, though,

the sailor's end … his last couch, at the bottom of the sea. … The deep-water currents would pass through his eyes, like a row of clear, green dreams; big fish, whales even, would float above him like clouds, and a shoal of small fishes might suddenly rush along, an endless streak, like the birds tonight.

(252-3)

The reader cannot help but to return Lady Helena's antipodal blue tale.

Rosa also suffers from the Dinesenian malaise of longing, and she too feels that the house is “dragging them the other way, into the earth” (254), that is, down. Staring out the window while sitting at her loom,¹³ Rosa's mind is “balancing upon a thin ridge, from which at any moment it might tumble either into ecstasy … or, on the other side, into bitter wrath against all the world” (253). Falling can be ecstatic or abysmal.

Images of descent in Winter's Tales point in many ways in the same direction as the aerial images (again, Bachelard's “nostalgie inexpiable” for heights). Thus, Peter's reverie of dying at the bottom of the sea may also be interpreted as a variant of his soul's earlier desire to fly with the wild geese. When Rosa (who feels a kinship with a trapped butterfly) stands like a ship's figure-head in the window, she wishes that she could remain “up there” (260). Ironically, she can only fulfill her wish, just as Peter can only fulfill his dream of flying with the wild geese, in a moment of descent, of drowning. Up and down are achieved simultaneously in the blue world, as are sexual fulfillment and lost childhood.

Throughout the story, Peter and Rosa are moving toward both a spiritual and a sexual unification that cannot be achieved in their morally and socially restrictive surroundings. Their tentative physical proximity to each other in the parson's house reflects this movement. Even when Peter climbs the ladder up to Rosa's room to lie in bed and to talk with her, he barely touches her while stroking her hair. Only when they enter the blue world will they be able to unite finally and completely.

Though Peter has been dreaming of abandoning the parson's books and going to sea, the full awareness of his destiny comes to him in the portrait of Rosa, up in a window, where, standing in a blue dress, she attempts to free a trapped butterfly. The image causes him to stop “dead still”:

Now Rosa, in her stockinged feet, with the skirt of her blue frock caught back by the cross-bar of the window, was so like a figure-head of a big, fine ship that for an instant he did, so to say, see his own soul face to face. Life and death, the adventures of the seafarer, destiny herself, here stood straight up in a girl's form.

(259)

In a tour de force of merging the central motifs of Winter's Tales, Dinesen connects the blue world, the sea, the female form, death, and, most importantly, destiny, in this striking description. This portrait of Peter's anima (“his own soul”) also illustrates Dinesen's use of works of art, here a statue, in her writing.

When they finally approach the sea, Rosa is filled with “supreme wonder and delight,” because everything is wet: “Things had lately been dry and hard, unyielding to the touch, irresponsive to the cry of her heart. But here all flowed and fluctuated, the whole world was fluid” (278-9). Rationally, Peter at first sees his choice to go to sea and his desire to be with Rosa, whom he believes will remain at the parsonage, as irreconcilable:

Under ordinary circumstances the two ecstasies [the sea and Rosa] would have seemed to be incompatible. But tonight all elements and forces of his being were swept together into an unsurpassed harmony. The sea had become a female deity, and Rosa herself as powerful, foamy, salt and universal as the sea.

(266-7)

In a state of ecstasy, opposites merge in his mind. The static, frozen image of Rosa moves Peter—and ultimately Rosa, too—toward their final goal, the fluid blue sea, “a female deity.” Shortly before they slip through the breaking ice floes, Rosa crosses her arms over her chest, like a ship's figure-head and a medieval statue.

The image also inspires Peter's own blue tale, a negative variant of Lady Helena's in “The Young Man with the Carnation.” In Peter's story, betrayal serves as the theme and also reflects Rosa's betrayal of his plans to her father prompted by her envy of his opportunity to drown “in the water of all the oceans.” After a skipper has a figure-head carved to resemble his beautiful wife, she becomes jealous of it. In Trankebar, an old king gives the seafarer two precious blue stones, which, because they match his wife's eyes, he sets into the eyes of the figure-head. His wife wants the stones for earrings, though, and so she has a glazier take the precious gems out and replace them with glass. After her husband sets sail for Portugal, his wife begins to go blind; “she could not see to thread a needle” (274), Dinesen writes, a sign of foiled destiny for the jealous wife. After the skipper's ship is wrecked, she receives a letter from the Consul of Portugal telling her that it has “gone to the bottom with all hands” (275). It ran blindly into a tall rock jutting up out of the sea. In her duplicity, however, the wife has played her role in the skipper's destiny, who now has descended into the blue world.¹⁴

The tale resonates deep in Rosa's heart. The figure-head in Peter's life, she has sealed two destinies—his and her own—by disclosing his plans to her father: “But she accepted it in full as her personal lot and portion. It was her fate and her doom; it was the end of her” (275). Dinesen reinforces the association of their moment toward the blue with their pubescence: “It was, once more, the mystic melancholy of adolescence, which will take in, at the very height of its vitality and with a grave wisdom that soon again vanishes, both past and future: time itself, in the abstract” (277-8). Like the King in “The Fish,” Peter and Rosa must pass through the green beech woods to reach the sea. Bounding over the breaking ice floes, the two are “alone with the sea and the sky” (282). In this scene, Dinesen takes her blue images one step further than in “The Fish” and replaces sea and sky with their subjective correlative:

At the same time, just as dream and reality seemed, on the floe, to have become one, so did the distinction between life and death seem to have been done away with. Dimly [Peter] guessed that this state of things would be what was meant by the word: immortality.

(283)

The romantic—in both senses of the word—character of the scene is unavoidable: The rush of blue, death, and the concurrent sexual aspect of what is happening lead Peter and Rosa “from one ecstasy to another” (283). Clinging tightly to each other (“Rosa squeezed her face into his collar-bone, and shut her eyes” [285]), like one of Aristophanes's reunited pairs, they are swept down into the blue.

Though “Sorrow-Acre” is often considered the apotheosis of Winter's Tales, its pictorial sense (like its setting) is more Old World than the other stories.¹⁵ The only use of blue in the tale (other than the opening description of the sky's “blue haze”) is a significant one, though: the mention of Anne-Marie's “blue head-cloth” as she cuts the rye field.¹⁶ The inverted Pieta that closes the story as her grieving son Goske Piil holds Anne-Marie's body in his lap reinforces the association of blue with the Madonna. It also points to Dinesen's inventive feminine twist on the main figure of sacrifice. Like the “female deity” of the sea in “Peter and Rosa,” Dinesen employs the spiritual aspect of blue to unite Anne-Marie with the Catholic female deity, Mary. She would reinforce this connection in “The Blank Page” from Last Tales, in which the Portuguese convent sits high atop the “blue mountains” and the nuns' “virgin hands” cultivate the sky-blue flax flower. Dinesen compares the flowers' airy blue color to the apron worn by “the holy virgin” to collect eggs.¹⁷

The blue light that shines on Winter's Tales reflects a romantic longing for “the lost world of childhood,” a time of fulfillment, when the imagination has complete reign over the senses. That longing, reinforced by the author's chromatic language, is then delivered to the reader. Describing the aerial quality to her dreams, Dinesen writes in Shadows on the Grass:

I move in mighty landscapes, among tremendous heights, depths and expanses and with unlimited views to all sides. The loftiness and airiness of the dream come out again in its colour scheme of rare, luminous blues and violets, and mystically transparent browns. … I fly, in dream, to any altitude, I dive into bottomless, clear, bottle-green waters. It is a weightless world.

(438-9)

Notes

1. With its emphasis on color and light—and not line—Dinesen's pictorial language falls under the aegis of the “painterly,” as defined by the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945).

2. Dinesen's imagery laden language has roots in her childhood interest and training in art, including two years at Copenhagen's Kunstskole for Kvinder (1903-5). Frans Lasson claims that Dinesen's early pictorial works “syner kun som brudstykker af et mønster, der aldrig trådte klart frem” (11) [seem like only fragments of a pattern that never clearly surfaced].

3. In his dream within a dream, Heinrich sees a huge blue flower, a vision that fills him with a longing he cannot understand. Novalis knew Goethe, wrote about him, and must have been aware of Goethe's engagement with color theory.

4. Commenting on Italian quattrocento painting, the literary critic J. Hillis Miller once observed that it “makes the Tuscan air visible in its invisibility” (231). This paradoxical quality surfaces, also, in Danish painting, for example in Christen Købke's mid-nineteenth-century atmospheric skyscapes of Frederiksborg Castle in Hillerød.

5. Krøyer's nostalgic paintings take on an ironic hue when one considers that, as in the lustrous Sommeraften ved Skagen Sønderstrand, they depict a once blissful time lost to the artist's broken marriage and attacks of mental illness brought on by syphilis.

6. Bachelard seems closer to the mark when he points out that Mallarmé's blue sky in “L'Azur” is “plus fort. … Le lecteur rêvera peut-être d'un azur moins offensif, plus tendre, moins vibrant” (189) [“too hard. … The reader will perhaps dream of a less offensive blue, one that is gentler, less vibrant” (163)]. In Mallarmé's poem, the color is oppressive rendering the poet impotent in his attempts to recreate blue's purity. The blue light of Skagen is a softer more absorbing shade closer to the one Blixen “paints” in her tales.

7. Like the Skagen painters, Munch. too was influenced by James McNeill Whistler's hazy blue Nocturnes. During his depressed St. Cloud period, he produced such blue masterpieces as Natt (Natt i St. Cloud) [1890] with its solitary figure sitting by a window, a haunting example of blue's power to convey isolation and loneliness. As Itten has observed: “himmel dagegen stimmt passiv und erweckt allerlei unfaßbaren Sehnsucht” (130-1) [A blue sun-filled sky has an active and enlivening effect, whereas the mood of the blue moonlit sky is passive and evokes subtle nostalgias (130)].

8. Her scissors, bequeathed to Jens, suggest her function as one of the Fates, a kind of lower-class Atropos in a bad wig.

9. As Dinesen observed later in Shadows on the Grass, “The unruly river, which has bounced along wildly, sung out loudly and raged against her banks, will widen and calm down, will in the end fall silently into the ocean of dreams, and silently experience the supreme triumph of Unconditional Surrender” (340).

10. After Finch-Hatton dies, Dinesen comments: “at the sound of Denys's name even, truth was revealed, and I knew and understood everything” (336).

11. The French novelist Colette (1873-1954) used the term l'heure bleue to describe that hour of dusk when Parisian men forgathered to meet their mistresses.

12. The German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) saw a stable route through green (as opposed to red) in the passage from yellow to blue (see Gage, 207).

13. Another image of classical fate (cf. Mamzell Anne's scissors in “The Dreaming Child,” above, or the description in “Sorrow-Acre” of Anne-Marie's face as that of “an old woman at her spinning wheel or her knitting”).

14. Dinesen expanded Peter's tale into “The Blue Eyes,” published in Ladies Home Journal (January, 1960, 38-9). In that version, she describes the gems as “highly precious sapphires, of a blue as clear and deep as that of the sea” (38). Dinesen also resurrects Sunniva, from “The Sailor Boy's Tale,” and even gives her a Gan-Finn father who “sold wind in bags to sailors.” Sunniva tells the sailor's wife, who goes to the ancient Lapp-witch for help with her worsening eyesight, that there are “forces that are against us” and that the young woman “must go blind.” Dinesen sets the tale in Elsinore, the destination which Peter and Rosa never actually reach.

15. For a fine discussion of this pictorial approach, see Charlotte Engberg's “Evigt ejes kun fortællingen” in Læsninger i Dansk Litteratur 3: 1900-1940 (1997).

16. As dusk nears the lengthening shadows turn “azure blue” and “lonely trees in the corn marked their site by narrow blue pools” (63).

17. I am indebted to Marianne Stecher-Hansen for suggesting this connection to “The Blank Page,” and for many enlightening discussions on Isak Dinesen over the years.

Works Cited

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