SOURCE: Kyndrup, Morten. “The Vertigo of Staging: Authority and Narration in Isak Dinesen's ‘The Roads Round Pisa’.” In Isak Dinesen: Critical Views, edited by Olga Anastasia Pelensky, pp. 333-45. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1993.

INTRODUCTION

Isak Dinesen's writings constitute a very special world of their own within twentieth-century fiction. And it is far from coincidental that to readers as well as to critics they appear as an illuminated island. One reason of course is the indisputable mastery of her narrative constructions; those in themselves will guarantee her a front-rank position. But moreover it is perhaps the peculiar state of non-contemporarity in Dinesen's work which is the main reason for their ability still to appear as open, inviting, attractive—and still mystically indefinite. This “non-contemporarity” is not only what characterizes the immediate relationship between the very form of Dinesen's works and their time (her contemporary world literature is signed with names such as Joyce, Proust, Virginia Woolf—and appears somewhat different). No, the non-contemporarity, the clash between times (or the clash between discourses, to be semiotically more precise) is also inherent in the works. What we have in mind here is not the thematic transmission of the action into landscapes of the past, although this transmission indeed is an important feature of the constructions. No, the clash takes place above all between on the one hand the narrative construction which (seemingly) is in charge, and which even at the time of publication was emphatically outdated, and on the other hand a theme which on a closer look is tremendously modern. Any reader of Dinesen's narratives, professional or amateur (or the rare combination of both), is thus simultaneously thrown in several different directions. Within one register she is thrown back into an almost premodern discourse not only because of the concrete rooms of action and the obviously old-fashioned olympic, narrative construction, but also qua the critique of the individuals' projectuality of controlling reality which, apparently rooted in a feudal-absolutist state of thinking, is emphatically and repeatedly exercised in the points of the intrigues as to attitudes. At the same time, however, behind the apparent “naturalness” of these narrative constructions, this critique is indeed surprisingly modern. And, finally, is perhaps already (modally) “postmodern” qua its relaxed and virtually self-ironical accepting embodiment of the emphatically importunate undecidability of the problem of enunciation; this is remarkably different from the way contemporary modernism felt itself more or less involuntarily prisoned by a tragic feeling of loss of substance, evoked by the very same experience.

These clashes of discourse include and point out the problem of discoursive change in the works, and this is no doubt one reason why Dinesen's works are still able to fascinate.

THE TALE

“The Roads Round Pisa” has an important position in Isak Dinesen's first real work, Seven Gothic Tales of 1934: as the fourth of the seven tales it forms the center of the book. In the Danish version of the following year, Syv Fantastiske Fortœllinger, the tale was placed in the front, as the opening; this further emphasizes the importance of the fact that the protagonist in “The Roads Round Pisa” also acts as subordinate figure in the last tale of the collection, “The Poet.” We shall return to this later.¹

The central position seems to be substantially well-founded in every way, for “The Roads Round Pisa” appears in thematical concentration as well as in narrative structure as virtually archetypal for the tales of the book.

“The Roads Round Pisa” is built as an ingenious hybrid between on the one hand a narration of a central perspective and on the other hand a cycle of narrations, thus marking many different narrators' perspectives. As the focus of the one-point perspective we find the young Danish nobleman Augustus von Schimmelmann travelling in Italy in 1823. He is trying to run away from problems at home (problems concerning an extremely jealous wife), and he is above all searching for truth. Even from the start of the tale he seems to have a critical attitude towards truth as objective and absolute:

How difficult it is to know the truth. I wonder if it is really possible to be absolutely truthful when you are alone. Truth, like time, is an idea arising from, and depending upon, human intercourse. What is the truth about a mountain in Africa that has no name and not even a footpath across it? The truth about this road is that it leads to Pisa, and the truth about Pisa can be found within books written and read by human beings. What is the truth about a man on a desert island? And I, I am like a man on a desert island. When I was a student my friend used to laugh at me because I was in the habit of looking at myself in the looking-glasses, and had my own rooms decorated with mirrors. They attributed this to personal vanity. But it was not really so. I looked into the glasses to see what I was like. A glass tells you the truth about yourself.

(p. 165)

Augustus is in a state of contemplative searching, though rather passive. He becomes the witness of a series of violent incidents, which finally turn out to be different sequences of one and the same story, indeed even connected to his own life story.

At first Augustus witnesses a carriage accident; the passenger—Augustus thinks it is a man, but it turns out to be a (noble)woman—is severely injured. She confides to him the dramatic story of her relationship with her granddaughter and asks him to bring a message to this granddaughter in Pisa. The next day on his way to Pisa Augustus meets a young nobleman—who turns out to be a woman—with whom he converses and who hints at, but does not really reveal, a very mysterious story. After that Augustus witnesses how a travelling company, among others consisting of the Prince Potenziani who plays a leading role in the story of the old lady, develops into a challenge, on account of a certain tale. Augustus feels obliged to act as a second in the duel. (In the meantime he watches a puppet show.) The duel next morning is stopped by Agnese, the young girl, who goes in between, telling her part/version of the story which makes all the previous, isolated, and up till then mysteriously disconnected parts join beautifully into a whole: the young Prince Nino actually did not let down the old Prince Potenziani, he just, without knowing it, deflowered a stand-in (Agnese) for Rosina, whom he was to have raped on behalf of the impotent Potenziani, thus making it possible for him to prove consummation of his marriage. The duel is off, and Nino's life is saved. But Potenziani dies; the two young people could have had each other, but having been liberated from her secret the woman is no longer paralyzed by the rape and must now (perhaps) be won; Rosina does not die in childbirth as predicted, and everything ends up with happiness and harmony. In gratitude Augustus gets a “smelling bottle” from the old noblelady which is the counterpart to the one he already has: thus (without knowing it herself) the old noblelady is identical with his grandmother's friend fifty years earlier. Augustus, however, keeps this knowledge to himself, feeling that

… in this decision of fate, [was] something which was meant for him only.

(p. 216)

All rings are closed; the pattern filled in.

THE STRUCTURE

On the face of it the structure thus seems complicated, yet not incalculable. Gerard Genette's distinction between narrator and focalizer² may be useful here: Augustus is the focalizer of the tale. The told universe is reflected through him. On both sides of this internal, personified instance of focalization (temporally acting in vision-avec) we find, however, a number of explicit instances (all working in vision-par-derrière): “under” Augustus we find the “personal” narrators, giving Augustus and each other their versions, respectively, of the pattern, which only in the end appears to the perspective of Augustus³ (the old lady, the young lady, Potenziani, Nino, etc.). “Above” Augustus we find on the other hand an “authorial” narrator telling Augustus, and being explicit among other things qua the objectifying characterization of him: his melancholy, his corpulence, etc. This instance is very close to, but must necessarily, as a principle, be separated from, the supreme implicit narrator who takes care of distribution and linking of all these instances.

THE ENUNCIATED

The enunciated is also complicated, being formulated at a number of different levels of narration. Still the message of the stories generally seems to focus on a certain limited problem: the question about which intersubjective modes of exchange, especially concerning exercise of power and control, are possible—and desirable. You can condense a formalization of this problem by setting up an axis having as one pole a mode of exchange in which the single individual as a project thrusts his will on his surroundings, directly or indirectly, but in any case through some kind of intentionally anticipated exercise of power. Belonging to this pole we find the notion of this competent single individual as being justified in the exercise of power by this competence. This point of view has certain decisive implications: it emphasizes the fact that the regulation of being is human in all circumstances; in all cases the world, then, is recognizable as objects of value in front of a subject. Furthermore—as a consequence of the mutual clashes which these kinds of subjects will then necessarily experience—hierarchical differentiation of this field of human subjects is necessary. In the second pole of the axis we find another type of exchange which considers control to be mutual relations of obligation in which the subjects are able to change their positions in relation to each other, thus performing exactly a mutual exchange. This means that no single subject is able to act as a privileged regulator of character, direction, and content of the exercise of power; instead of this, qua the insight by the single subjects into the necessity of acting also as objects to other subjects' legal exercise of power, an alternation, regulated by the concrete interactions, between the position of being subject and the position of being object, between pride and humility, an alternation which may finally be recognized as an acceptance of some outer non-human supreme instance, an alternation of that kind takes place. God, fate, chance. Or, nontranscendentally staged pragmatically: just the acceptance of what actually happens.⁴

More than anything all the single stories converge in this thematic axis. According to her privileged conception of the world, Carlotta, the old lady, wants to force the young Rosina to marry against her will; Prince Potenziani sets up an intrigue (the rape) in order to make sure that the marriage will go ahead, thus getting the opportunity of “playing with” Rosina by depriving her of the possibility of a divorce on the plea of nonconsummation of the marriage. These Great Subjects both lose: Carlotta by actually recognizing the limitation of her right of the subjective exercise of power, but Potenziani without such a recognition. On the contrary he is vexed because he has not been cunning enough to set up an even better intrigue, which would have enabled him to win. Potenziani then only sees the concrete, not the fundamental limitation of projectuality. Furthermore, Potenziani finds it quite natural to take advantage of the law of mutual obligation in the case of Nino, even when the purpose is to break this law in the case of somebody else (the intrigue). On the other hand the young ones respect this mutuality: Nino does what he has been ordered to do; contrary to all reason (not just because of the odds of it, but also because he has actually kept the promise he is being accused of having broken) he enters the duel; similarly the young girl plays her part as a stand-in and for a long time remains silent in spite of her unbearable dishonour. Still she is the one who in the very end through a higher bid saves Nino's life by telling the truth; in doing so, it turns out that she is also setting herself free. This is the type of exchange which is actually the “winner” in the tale: not because it beats the intriguers within their own register by thinking out even cannier plans (the way the—very symbolically—impotent Potenziani imagines), but by accepting chance, and thus worshipping mutual obligation and with that one's own integrity more than potential outer profit.

As should be evident from the course of events and from the very mounting of this axis in the tale, a positive evaluation of the pole of mutual exchange is made at the expense of the megalomaniac individual projectuality of the other side (as is thematically reiterated almost everywhere in Dinesen). This evaluation, however, takes place in a certain narrative structure. What is decisive is that the events are removed from or “outside” the Augustus experiencing them and through whom we are experiencing them. Everything, so to speak, is happening in front of him as though in a (puppet) theatre performance, in which he himself may be playing a very modest part, but which fundamentally has nothing concrete to do with his own problems. To him (and in the perspective of the reader through his focalization) it is this very distance that makes these events turn into a chain of allegories, carrying meaning and being attractive, and whose message is also made visible precisely because of their distance, their nature of otherness. What Augustus is going through is a kind of formation process in a double-pole structure, in which he experiences, on the one hand, his own usual emptiness (and action-paralyzed melancholy) as opposed to the abundance of substance and doing, which is characteristic of the entire chain of events that he witnesses. But on the other hand he also seems to pick the attitude of the point of the sequence of events: there is a line from his initial rejection of truth as being privileged logos, over the puppet comedy's playing with the (pragmatical) truth of lies in “Revenge of Truth,” and to his final renunciation of proclaiming the coincidence of the smelling bottles. Augustus' experience of events enables him to recognize his own indolence hitherto, and his (as is said to be generally characteristic of Northern people) constitutional distance from any kind of strong outburst of feeling. He sees his own decompressed space of melancholic depressiveness being confronted with a space which is full of exchange, death, passion, risk: an authentic space. This confrontation throws his own situation in relief. And, as one might think, something similar happens to the implicit reader following this focalization. The story seems, however, to offer a solution to this also vertical north/south conflict qua Augustus' process of recognition. Concretely Augustus is assimilated by the authentic life of the south (he even has an affair with an admittedly Swedish lady). The distance, then, is broken down.

To sum up it may, however, be said that precisely qua the originally distance-making mounting of the opposition of values in construction, the text optimalizes its supreme critique of the calculating exercise of power by projectual reason—and thus, if you like, of the modernity that has this reason as its primary property. But it should also be noted that at the same time the text mounts itself as a kind of contradiction of its own message: the nicely calculated and successful staging of the impossibility of staging made by the text itself seems to imply some sort of intrinsic denial. Or, in any case a problem of revocation for the sovereign, implicit narrator.

THE TEXT

With this reading the text is placed as more or less in accordance with itself—or at least in accordance with its own discordance. It mounts a certain axiological taxonomy in a convenient, accessible position—and it indicates an access to the ostensive and intended process of formation (through Augustus' function of focalization). Because the scenario is removed in terms of time and space, a certain distance is marked, but probably this only makes the effect of exemplary objectification, which also allegorically points back to the time of the reader, even greater. Though Dinesen's text remains absolutely different from the texts written by her modernist contemporaries it can easily be conceptualized within the same historical context, perhaps as a parallel track in the process of historical transformation: the key words here might be the critique of modernity, the individual thrown back onto itself, the problem of alienation (emphasized in Augustus' position, but also symbolically represented by the overall being verrückt of the story in space and time). Furthermore we have the rather high congruence between the text's statement and its structure of enunciation. Even according to the reading we have offered.

The question is, however, whether this reading is satisfactory and sufficient. Above all the reading seems overtly to simplify the construction of enunciation by fixing its instances, placing them in firm positions, while they are actually labile, shaking, relative. In particular this applies to the position of Augustus, the focalizer. On the one hand it is technically correct that this position works as the reader's entrance to the story, and that qua the process it is also the carrier of the perspective. On the other hand there are so many demonstrative distances inside the enunciation of the text that the competence of the focalization is seriously affected. Augustus, in other words, is unreliable or in any case not directly reliable as a narrator/focalizer. He gets his observations wrong, for instance he twice mistakes women for men (and that is one mistake too many to be coincidental in the universe of the story). His part in the tale, also from an outside point of view, is that of the observer, and his mode of existence is that of reflection, of pensiveness. On a closer look at the reflections, which he actually makes, they turn out in practice to be rather trivial, or frankly banal, in spite of their solemn character. For instance in his conversation with the young woman concerning the relationship between men and women:

“… it has happened to me many times that a lady has told me that I was making her unhappy, and that she wished that she and I were dead, at a time when I have tried hardest to make her happy. It is so many years now since Adam and Eve”—he looked across the room to a picture of them—“were first together in the garden, that it seems a great pity that we have not learned better how to please one another.”

(p. 184)

Indeed a profundity! But apart from the fact that this is the level of thinking which he stammers out, often with a lot of trouble and great solemnity, his acknowledgment of his own process is similarly miserable, apparently. In the case of the puppet comedy he manages to convince himself that if he himself has now entered a puppet comedy (i.e., the throbbing life of the south) then he wants to make sure that he does not get out of it again. But this point of view carries with it that very inside/outside dualism which the “theatrical” symbolization intended to settle with. Augustus' immovability can, however, be seen even more clearly at the end of the story itself:

Augustus took a small mirror from his pocket. Holding it in the flat of his hand, he looked thoughtfully into it.

(p. 216)

Augustus' mania of looking at himself in a mirror has already earlier in the text been explained as something which he did as a young man in order to find truth. It is decisively significant, thus, that he narcissistically regards himself in the final sequence in order to find the very truth which it has been the issue of the whole tale to show does not exist other than pragmatically, which means in concrete events, in concrete exchange. Or to put it briefly: Augustus has in fact learned nothing from what has happened.

The reason for this is primarily that he is too slow, too heavy. Actually he is an almost ridiculous figure: he is pleasant and well-intentioned, but above all he is unable to realize his own limitations. This is perceptibly confirmed by the part he plays in the last tale of the collection, “The Poet.”⁵

This distance from Augustus cannot however be called unambiguous (though seemingly growing, whenever realized in the first place). This distance is above all a tendency, a shake, an irony, which establishes an ambiguity in the reader's relation to the figure. This ambiguity, however, has rather extensive consequences first for the structure of enunciation of the story, and later on also for its thematic statement.

The dissociation from Augustus is, precisely, an evaluation, an attitude. As it is not caused by the explicit narrator, apparently (who hides no sympathies), it singles out the implicit narrator as its sender. This links the explicit narrator and Augustus, the focalizer, at one level, while a connection between the implicit narrator and the first-person narrators “down” in the text is similarly established behind this level. The latter who is supposed to possess more insight than the former, or at least to be closer to the level of insight of “the tale,” is, however, in its level of knowledge constitutionally handicapped by the fact that the first-person narrators and their stories are experienced by Augustus who is to some extent unreliable, or at least not specifically emphasized as a carrier of insight. Something potentially very full of insight is thus intermediated via a perspective constitutionally primitive—and which does not even know its own restrictions. The result of this is a high degree of uncertainty—which might be illustrated by an hourglass-shaped model of the topography of enunciation—both below (what is actually going on in the story) and above (what the narrator is actually trying to tell with this story).

This means above all that what seems at first glance to be an unambiguous linking of the story (and a linking of this to the story of Augustus) through the “disclosure” by the girl Agnese of the true inwardness of the case, in effect turns out to be anything but unambiguous. The messages of the single stories become ambiguous. It becomes uncertain what is actually happening: the exits (for instance for the young couple) are being covered up. But also the superior intention and meaning of the tale is now a matter of discussion, for what is the “meaning” of this lability in the narrative distribution? Why is the impotent Prince called “Potenziani”—is it just to jeer? Why is it exactly through “smelling bottles” (i.e. instruments of anaesthetics) that the supreme symbolic connection is established in Augustus' mind?

What is interesting in all these questions is not the answers there might be to them, but the fact that they can even be asked. Furthermore, at the level of the statement this entire “labilization” of the instances in the structure of enunciation has as its consequence the fact that Augustus' problem is changing. On an immediate reading the polarizations of north/south, emptiness/fullness, appearance/authenticity seem to be an absolute and an existential problem (to A., but with a general significance qua the reader's way of entrance). The dissociation of Augustus makes it appear rather as a structural problem of position, a relative problem more in the nature of a subjective projection than of an objective schism: Augustus' problem is an inherent part of his constitutional relationship to the world and thus it is bound to follow him in any circumstances whatsoever. What is at issue is otherness as an intrinsic counterpicture. Augustus is being exposed and made ridiculous as tied up to his own miserable self-projections. But a part of this stultification hits the implicit reader—because Augustus is still the entrance, and the attitude towards the competence of his perspective is uncertain. The reader is left, without appeal, to make use of a perspective which may be unfit for use because it is incompetent; above that incompetence, then, we find the implicit narrator as a possible director. Relegated to a continuous penduling between on the one hand Augustus' flat, but serious perspective and on the other hand the supreme narrator's sovereign, but immensely inaccurate, labile, and relaxedly ironical perspective, the implicit reader then is above all confronted with his own lack of competence in the tale, or rather: his lack of decidability of competence.

The tale is altogether open. Half-finished, it might be argued. This very nature of being existentially, constitutionally half-finished is precisely what Carlotta, the old lady, mentions as her experience of life after having dissociated herself from her ideology of projectuality and perfection hitherto:

“When I was a little girl,” she said, “I was told never to show a fool a thing half finished. But what else does the Lord himself do to us during all our lives?

(p. 215)

This may be the text's metacomment on itself. To believe in the apparent sovereignty of a construction is a mistake: constructions are always only half finished; they move.

And most important is precisely the moving, the lability, the very existence of this simultaneous, incommensurable and undecidable ambiguity—which is not an either/or. Our original reading is not contradicted by the next one: the structure and statements of its values, Augustus' cautious process of formation, the outside/in-fascination—all these elements still exist as features of the text, as traces of a reading which are an inescapable part of its meaning. They are just framed by the possible presence of the others, like a picture being shaken. A picture which is supposed to show the immutability of firmness. Which it still does. But it is being shaken.

The outcome is not one of mediation or denial. “The outcome” is the very moving, saturated by contrasts whose elements are located in different registers of discourse and thus unable to dissolve or to confirm each other. But for instance the problem of revocation in the text, which we pointed out in the first reading, is reversed by the frame of the subsequent reading: the problems involved in sovereignly staging a demonstration of the limitations of staging thus seem to have been staged. But not in a register in which it is possible to characterize the staging as “sovereign.” Or is it?

CONCLUSION

If “sovereignty” is the existence of a hierarchical system, within which a supreme arch-instance is able to act as a deciding resultant in a calculated system of levels of insight, then sovereignty is not the issue here. There is no such place here from which it is possible to survey the complexity of the text or to identify the position of the instances. But technically all this disorder of the enunciation is of course installed by a supreme implicit narrator. The text just does not contain any markers which make it possible to decide the plan or the direction of the construction—or rather, the text has many markers but they are pointing in different directions. It is this sort of (lack of) order which made us choose to read the text in two stages. Even though it would have been possible from the start to release all the undecidabilities in one and the same reading, this might have blurred the very special way in which complexity quite simply frames the quite simple.

To sum up: Technically the crucial reason for the complexity of the text is the lability of the authority of focalization (and with that of course to some extent the lability of the authority of the explicit, “olympic” narrator). This makes it impossible to decide what is up and down in the hierarchy of insight among the whole system of narrators in the text. If in fact the focalizer is unable to understand the first-person narrators, then their levels of fictionality change and the hierarchy of insight is altered. And it is not even a stable dilemma, but constant, virtual changes where the focalizer may at a given moment be precise and clearly recognizing, and the next helplessly misinterpreting, whether this is caused by concrete tâches aveugles or just by a common lack of acuteness.

What is decisive is of course that the implicit reader is partially pulled into this lability and into the ensuing uncertainty as to what is actually happening. This makes the reader one who both “understands” and “does not understand.” Augustus' stupid perspective becomes an imperceptible part of his insight and consequently that of the reader's: With Augustus the implicit reader is simultaneously mounted in this conveniently objectivating “outside” and embarassingly close to the centers of events, as their actual object. And consequently also both naively innocent, virginal—and accomplice of the ineluctability of the complications. Whether the “easy” mounting of the play is done deliberately or not.

The mode of function of the text is thus extremely complex. It is interesting to see how this complexity is clearly produced by the structure of the text itself. The mounting of the subject/object-relations in the various dimensions of the text has been done so as to make it impossible to fit them into one formula or just to make them correspond to each other at the same level. One will have to “content oneself” with describing their proper developments phenomenologically and the system as a whole as “complex.”⁶ Compared to each other the single relations may most precisely be described as out of phase. They neither confirm, contradict, nor modify each other. They simply are there at the same time, in the same text, unable to communicate and still together making out the space of the text.

This space, consequently, is very simple and surveyable—and at the same time a labyrinth with no way out. Perhaps Dinesen's tale is not at all a sidetrack in history (the way we suggested in the beginning). Perhaps it is rather a loop, necessarily outside at any time.

Notes

1. The English edition referred to here is the Vintage Books, New York 1972; it is a photographic reprint of the 1934 original edition. The Danish text used is Gyldendals Tranebøger 1985, photographic reprint of the 1950 edition.

2. See for instance Gerard Genette: Figures III, Paris 1972; see also the clarifying explicitations in Shlomith Rimmon-Kennan: Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London 1990, esp. pp. 71ff.

3. —and with that, fundamentally, to the perspective of the reader.

4. Congruent to this installation of values, the thematics of truth can also be mounted: truth as something transcendentally behind the exchanges versus truth pragmatically linked with them (in the first case the large subjects can then claim to represent truth through the projects; the other truth is not representable or monopolizable).

5. It is of course a matter of discussion whether it is reasonable to infer from the characteristics of a person from another tale, though belonging to the same collection. In “The Poet,” however, Augustus is a character of no importance at all. And this makes the merging of names not just a coincidence (because we also have references to personal disposition, the wife's jealousy, etc.). Here we meet Augustus as considerably older. Decisive in relation to the Pisa story is the establishing of the fact that as to Augustus there have been no changes whatsoever in the nature of acquiring more insight or Gelassenheit: Augustus is still bound to his Sisyphean labour of looking for authenticity, in this case pinned down to the point that he is only able to appreciate objects which other people are envious of. In other words he is still the rather ridiculous, contemplative person whom the smelling bottles in the Pisa story do not seem to have moved anywhere. In the introductory characteristic it is said about him: “He wanted to be very happy but he had no talent for happiness.” And the slightly ironic continuation—ironic if you have the Pisa story in mind—goes: “He had suffered during his youth.”

6. “Complex system” here understood in the meaning it is being given by modern natural sciences, see for instance Robert Rosen, “Organisms as Causal Systems Which Are Not Mechanisms: An Essay into the Nature of Complexity,” in Theoretical Biology and Complexity. Three Essays on the Natural Philosophy of Complex Systems. Ed., Rosen. Orlando: 1985. In his still unpublished Ph.D thesis, Realismens metode (Aarhus Universitet, 1991), Frits Andersen applies this concept to realist literature regarding this as “complex” above all through its double and mutually incongruent determinateness by mimesis and “mathesis,” i.e., narrative and descriptive elements of constitution.