Isak Dinesen's “The Deluge at Norderney” (1934) is a tale about self-invention and its role in resisting the impositions of others.¹ Characters who invent themselves based upon artistic models find that the results of their inventions can far exceed their models; in a startling move away from the usual sequence of events, the most successful characters become idealized versions of their flawed originals. The similar activity of rewriting the past has a still more dramatically redemptive result: it allows Miss Malin Nat-og-Dag to go to her grave a free and happy woman. In the moment of death, memory and fantasy are indistinguishable, and the characters' masquerades become true.

It is nearly impossible to summarize the plot of “The Deluge at Norderney” in a satisfactory manner. The frame narrative, if stripped of its descriptions and explanation, is too simple even to be a story: A young man, a young woman, an aristocratic old maid, and an old Cardinal are all stranded in a barn in the flooded German countryside. If the barn does not collapse by dawn, they will be rescued. They pass the night by telling stories. Early in the night, the young woman and the young man are married to each other by the Cardinal. Just before morning, the Cardinal reveals that he is not a Cardinal at all, but the Cardinal's valet; he killed his master when the flood began and has taken his place during the day's rescue work. The story ends at dawn, the barn's collapse imminent.

The magic and delight of “The Deluge at Norderney” is in the interaction of the stories-within-stories. There are two kinds of these embedded tales: the omniscient narrator's asides, in which we learn the history of Cardinal Hamilcar von Sehstedt's life and his actions (or rather, the impostor, Kasparson's, actions) on the day of the flood, and the story of the old lady, Miss Malin Nat-og-Dag; and the tales told by the refugees in the barn. There are three of these: an autobiography, told by the young man Jonathan Mærsk; a biography, told by Miss Malin about her young friend and fellow-castaway Calypso; and a fantasy, told by the Cardinal about St. Peter and Barabbas.² Calypso tells no story; Miss Malin, whose story we already know from the narrator, almost re-tells it herself, but interrupts herself at dawn.

This progression—biography told by the omniscient narrator; autobiography; biography told by a character; fantasy; interrupted autobiography—is essential to the development of “The Deluge at Norderney.” The tale passes through five degrees of invention, in which the truths and central obsessions of the narrators' and/or main characters' lives are presented with varying layers of sympathy and differing attempts at concealment. I will argue that each embedded tale is a story not only of self-invention (which should be more or less clear from the tales themselves), but also of re-creation. The characters are telling stories which, in retrospect, become the truth. For Robert Langbaum, the purpose of the time in the barn is to give the characters the chance “to make death their ultimate triumph over conditions” (71). But in order for the characters to achieve this triumph, they must first overcome past impositions and learn to invent their own life stories, thus reclaiming and shaping their identities. Marcia Landy writes that “only through the mirroring of self through others, through art, and through language is it possible to restore the integrity of the self” (401), but it seems that in “The Deluge at Norderney,” the self can only escape from the misreadings and projections of others when it is telling its own story. When the characters in the barn tell their stories, they make their lives complete and worthwhile.³ Any lies they tell are in the search for a fundamental truth.

The tale begins with an example of misguided reinvention, the sort of thing the characters must struggle to escape. Norderney is not an obvious place for a seaside resort; it is, in fact, only made one by the romantic imagination, which “delighted in ruins, ghosts, and lunatics” (Dinesen 1). Aristocrats flock to Norderney for its wild shore and appear incongruously delicate and polished against its rougher background. “The sea had hitherto held the rôle of the devil” to the local peasantry, but the devil has been declawed: “The peasants and fishermen of Norderney themselves learned to look upon the terrible and faithless gray monster westward of them as upon some kind of maître de plaisir” (1). In an interesting (and, to the characters of the story, unconscious) superposition, the sea remains a “terrible … gray monster”; it retains its old “rôle.” The visiting aristocrats do not erase the sea's history, nor indeed eradicate the peasants' projection of a persona onto it. Instead, they re-imagine that persona making the danger both less pressing and more attractive. In doing so, they deliberately overlook a serious truth, which is that the sea is neither a monster nor a game, but a huge gray mass of water, which at the beginning of the story breaks through the dikes and drowns humans and their livestock. Whereas the sea in the first page or so of the story is described almost like a character, once the disaster strikes the sea is reduced to a thing, “driven up by the storm … [which] broke the dikes … and washed through them” (2). In the initial passive verb there is no personification: the water is acted upon, not acting, and the active verb, “washed,” is one which cannot apply to any conscious creature in this context. Nonetheless, the aristocrats remaining at Norderney continue to imagine that the sea is a person: “could their sea,” they wonder, “sing now in this voice?” (3) “Their” sea is a person, and an entertainer, but this sea, the real sea, is not “theirs” or anyone's. In the morning, there is no song, only “noise” in which “nobody could talk or even think. What the sea was doing you could not tell.” The strength and bulk of the sea defeats anthropomorphism. The aristocrats are not only unable to describe it any more, they are so deafened by it that they can no longer describe anything else either. None the less, they have not learned to fear it properly, and as the last few escape in carriages before the arrival of the main flood, “The young women pressed their faces to the window panes of their coaches, wild to catch a last glimpse of the wild scenery.” The repeated adjective has two very different meanings: whereas a “wild” woman is in a state of high excitement, the “wild scenery” feels no emotion.⁴ The women's wildness is entirely socially constructed, the product of a fashion for drama (and we shall see in a moment that the vagaries of fashion are central to the rest of the tale), whereas the wildness of the scenery is inherent, impersonal, unconscious. The wildness of these women holds none of the threat of the landscape.

The aristocrats' mistake lies not in imagining falsehoods—apparent falsehoods are encouraged throughout the tale—but in picking the wrong falsehoods to imagine. Making up stories about the sea is dangerous, because the sea cannot listen to them. If you convince yourself that the sea will never drown you, you are sure to drown, for you will expect the sea to behave in impossible ways. But other stories, told in the right quarters, are much more effective. If you make up a story about your child, you may convince the child of the story's truth and cause her to grow into the person you want her to be; better yet, you may make up a story from which the child cannot escape, so that whatever action she may attempt is somehow accounted for. Best of all, you may make up a story about yourself, and no one can ever contradict you or prove you wrong. Self-invention, if done correctly, transcends the deceptions and impositions of the other kinds of storytelling. While the stories about the ocean are false and dangerous, stories about the teller can be, for Dinesen, empowering or even life-saving. If you are the story you tell, then you tell the truth.

The first and most obvious instance of self-invention in “The Deluge at Norderney” is in Miss Malin's madness. Once a fanatical virgin, reacting to any form of male desire as to an attempted rape, she now—having reached menopause and come unexpectedly into a fortune, so that she is entirely removed, as Susan Hardy Aiken points out (100), from the sexual economy her previous morality was designed to serve—believes that she was “the grand courtesan of her time” (21). She takes great pleasure in remembering her imaginary transgressions, and shows in the process “a surprising knowledge” (22) of the details of debauchery, including venereal disease—a subject which makes an identification with Dinesen all too easy.

It is vitally important to emphasize that Miss Malin is in no way presented as a victim. Aiken shows how Miss Malin's fanatical virginity, while obviously inspired by the religious peculiarities of her governess and by the pressures of the patriarchal society around her, exceeds the demands of that society and ends up defeating the potential future husband it is meant to serve (98-9). Her madness, by the same token, is not caused simply by exterior forces: “to the people who knew her well, it sometimes seemed open to doubt whether she was not mad by her own choice” (16). Miss Malin has chosen to believe in an alternate past; she has used the evidence of her fortune and her memories of real people to create a convincing alternate biography for herself.⁵ Her slight madness saves her from worse: rather than being a frustrated old maid, she looks back on a happy life of debauchery.⁶ That happy life's fictionality does not diminish the satisfaction she takes in it. The strength of her imagination is in fact a continuity with her past: when young, “though not beautiful, she had the higher gift of seeming so” (18). Her madness is a further, stranger reinvention of self than her “seeming” beauty in youth was. Miss Malin's self-invention is partially successful: it does what she needs it to. It makes her happy, and harms no one. But it is not complete, for while she convinces herself, she does not convince anyone else. The rest of the world considers her mad, and she admits her own madness. Successful self-invention would have to be accepted by onlookers, as well.

The second case of flawed self-invention is Jonathan Mærsk. The story Mærsk tells in the hayloft is that of his own life. Raised in the coastal town of Assens as the child of the sea-captain Clement Mærsk and his wife, Mærsk moves to Copenhagen, where he finds great success in society as a singer. But after he loses his singing voice in an illness, he learns that he is in fact the son of the Baron Joachim Gersdorff, a Copenhagen man of fashion, and that his success as an artist has rested entirely on the public's knowledge of his father's status. Just as the aristocrats at Norderney ignore the reality of the sea in favor of the sea's imaginary “song,” so the aristocrats of Copenhagen ignore Mærsk's singing in favor of his status as son of a fashionable father. But unlike the sea, Mærsk is not in a position to overwhelm the people who falsely imagine him.

Father and son are both surprised by the revelation of Mærsk's paternity, but while Mærsk is horrified, the Baron reacts with intense, self-centered curiosity:

There is nothing that I have ever done unconsciously, without knowing well what I did. But this boy, this Jonathan, I have really made without thinking of it. He is bound to be … a true and genuine work of Joachim Gersdorff … Let him but show me what a Joachim Gersdorff is in reality, and no reward of mine shall be too great.

(33)

The Baron looks at Mærsk only as a reflection of his own “real” self: he is, in fact, looking to Mærsk to tell him the story of his life. From this moment, Mærsk's every action is subject to intense scrutiny and construal. Each attempt he makes to free himself from the Baron backfires. The Baron takes Mærsk's increasing misanthropy (for which he becomes fashionably known as Timon of Assens) and his desire for independence as absolute proof of Mærsk's paternity; at last, as reported by the friend who first introduced Mærsk to the Baron,

when the Baron heard … of your spitting at the door of his house, he became very grave. “That,” he said, “I did to my father's door, to the door of the Gersdorff Palace of St. Petersburg.” He at once sent for his lawyer, and drew up a document to acknowledge you as his son, and to leave you all his fortune. Likewise he has written to obtain for you the title of Knight of Malta, and the name of De Résurrection.

(37)

The Baron completely subsumes Mærsk's attempts at freedom. Each gesture toward independence is taken as further submission. At the last, Mærsk's very name is changed—he is no longer Jonathan Mærsk, an independent being, but De Résurrection, a copy of the Baron. By reading Mærsk's actions as his own life story, the Baron erases Mærsk's individuality. Mærsk himself is ambivalent about the Baron's interpretation of his actions. He seems half convinced—though no more than half. For the spitting at the door, which convinces the Baron that Mærsk is his “Résurrection,” may also come from another source, as Mærsk reports: “I spat at it, as my father—alas, as the skipper Clement Mærsk of Assens—had taught me to spit when I was a boy” (35). The two sources of Mærsk's expectoration are held in tension by that “alas:” either he is imitating his father the skipper, or he is imitating his father, the man of fashion, and it has become impossible for him to tell which. He has been overwhelmed by another man's story about him. Even his attempt at suicide is foiled: as he prepares to jump of a bridge, a woman recognizes him and asks to join him, riding piggyback on his despair. Mærsk cannot possibly allow this, as the woman is making even his death into something fashionable and superficial. He has come to Norderney, on the advice of his skipper-father Clement Mærsk, to find a cure in salt water. This he does indeed find, although not in the manner either he or his first father expects. When he drowns in the collapse of the barn, he drowns as himself, not as the creation or imitation of either. This is because he is first able to tell his own story, as himself; his autobiography, as told in the barn, is a form of self-invention, in which he distances himself from both fathers.

While Mærsk escapes from impositions, he does not escape from fiction. His marriage to Calypso is predicated upon a falsehood: that he followed her into the barn because he was in love with her. This story is invented by Miss Malin. It is not, however, the same kind of imposition as the other stories made up about Mærsk, as he is given the chance to reject it:

“Did you not see, Calypso,” Miss Malin addressed herself kindly to her, “how he followed you here, and how, the moment he heard that you were staying here with me, nothing in the world could induce him to go with the boat? Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.”

“Is that true?” asked the girl, turning her eyes upon the boy with such an intense and frantic look as if life and death for her depended upon his answer.

“Yes, that is true,” said Jonathan. It was not in the least true. He had not even, at the time, been aware of the girl's existence. But the power of imagination of the old woman was enough to sway anybody off his feet.

(51)

Miss Malin's “imagination,” not her self-interest, is at work, and her fiction grants something valuable to all of its participants—for Mærsk and Calypso both participate in it establishing its “truth” for themselves. In this moment, Mærsk imitates Miss Malin by reinventing his remembered romances. Rather than sacrificing his individuality to someone else, he gains an imagined past—lives a little more. By agreeing with Miss Malin's suggestion, Mærsk enters into a romance; more importantly, he does for the girl precisely the opposite of what has been done to him—he gives her an opportunity to create herself through a chosen fiction. “Life and death” do depend upon Mærsk's answer: the life and death of Calypso's self-invention.

Calypso's story, told by Miss Malin—the second remove of biography, in which the invention is told about the inventee rather than by her—is also a story about impositions. Whereas Mærsk's autonomy is erased by the expectations of his father, who takes all Mærsk's actions as proof of his dependence, Calypso is more thoroughly erased by her uncle, who ignores her entirely. Calypso's uncle, Count August von Platen-Hallermund, to whom Miss Malin refers as Count Seraphina, is a parody of the self-creative artist, a mockery of a seraph. He is not an artist, but merely, in Robert Langbaum's word, an esthete, who “is not distinguished by his love of art but by his desire to organize all of life like a work of art; and he is, in his desire to see the imprint of human will and consciousness on everything, as rationalistic as the engineer” (62-3).

The Count's “rationalistic” approach to re-making his world is in fact antithetical to art: real art, as the Cardinal says, has an element of the preposterous in it. The Count's world, while silly, is entirely rationally thought out—and for this reason, among others, it is sterile, unconvincing to outsiders. He successfully creates an artificial world on his estate, but it consists entirely of poses, and is fatally self-centered:

His idea of paradise was … a long row of lovely young boys, in transparent robes of white, walking two by two, singing his poems to his music … or otherwise discussing his philosophy, or absorbed in his books upon arithmetics. The estate which he owned at Angelshorn in Mechlenburg he endeavored to turn into such a heaven, a Von Platen waxwork elysium.

(43)

This “paradise” is only “waxwork;” it has no life of its own. It is based entirely on the Count's own work: his poems, music, philosophy, arithmetic. It is intellectually sterile: the Count is entirely uninterested in adding new points of view. There is no room for growth or dialogue in the von Platen waxwork elysium. The Count's “elysium” can never be real: it is two-dimensional. The perversity of the Count's taste is established by his castle:

Count Seraphina had a great predilection for the Middle Ages. His huge castle of Angelshorn dated from that time, and he had taken pains to bring it back inside, as outside, to the times of the Crusades … The daylight was let in, between fathom-thick walls, through old stained glass, like cinnamon and blood of oxen, along the sides of the rooms, where, upon faded tapestries, unicorns were killed and the Magians and their retinue carried gold and myrrh to Bethlehem. … He never read a printed book, but had his authors of the day copied by hand in ultramarine and scarlet letters.

(44)

Everything he sees must be artificially colored: the daylight is bloodied by the old stained glass, and the “authors of the day” are anachronistically obscured by their scarlet letters. His world requires “great pains” to maintain and will not stand up to exposure to unfiltered light: the colored daylight is only “let in … along the sides of the rooms.” The “fathom-thick” walls make the castle into a sunken ship or a tomb. Moreover, the Count's castle is a false reversion to the past; the tapestries are “faded,” not new as they were in the times to which they belonged, and they show only the killing of unicorns—an assault against the ideals of courtly love which otherwise might have partially redeemed the Count's obsession with the medieval. The re-copied books show his imagination to be nothing but anachronism; for all his effort, he creates nothing new. While the Count successfully modifies his environment, he does not transform it; he only makes a strange and unpleasant mockery of both the past and the present.

Within the Count's sterile, ill-invented, all-male world is the inconvenient Calypso. At first the Count hopes that by dressing her in boy's clothing and giving her a boy's education he may raise her as a boy. Or, as Miss Malin speculates, “perhaps he even dreamed of creating a being of its own kind, an object of art which was neither boy nor girl, but a pure von Platen. There may have been times, then, when his delicate artist's blood stirred a little in his veins at the idea” (43). The Count, Miss Malin suggests, attempts to do deliberately what the Baron does inadvertently: to form another person into an exact reflection of himself. The fact that this alone excites the “delicate artist's blood” in the cold, perverse, self-centered Count implies that turning another human being into an object of art—which is to say, a created rather than a creating object—is the greatest perversity of all. And, just as importantly, the delicacy of his blood implies that he is not an artist at all; whereas Anders in Dinesen's “The Poet” is passionate enough—he falls in love, contemplates suicide, commits murder—the Count's passionless nature is inimical to art. The Count is a meddler, not an artist. The true artists of the story—Miss Malin and the Cardinal—make themselves. The artist, not the creation, is “a being of its own kind.” The self-made person is unique; the made person—the victim of a false biography—is reduced to cliché or parody.

Calypso must rescue herself from the Count's annihilation. Miss Malin's account of Calypso's position is, of course, biased by Miss Malin's own obsession: to Miss Malin, what Calypso most needs is to be looked at, for, she says, “the loveliness of woman is created in the eye of man” (45). But no man arrives to rescue Calypso, and what she does instead is look at herself and thereby conjure the necessary audience.

Calypso's initial goal in her self-invention is in fact to succumb to the Count's annihilation. In an attempt to be worthy of his notice, she decides to cut off her breasts. This physical transformation will, she thinks, allow her once again to be visible in the all-male castle. But when she wanders, hatchet in hand, at midnight, into a disused room in the castle, she realizes that there is another form of transformation available. The room, which once belonged to the Count's grandmother and which still contains her old belongings, offers an alternative. Calypso strips and faces the long mirror on the wall:

At that moment she saw in the looking-glass a big figure behind her own. It seemed to move, and she turned around. There was nobody there, but on the wall was an enormous old painting which had grown dark with age, but in which the lighter parts, illuminated by her candle, sprang out. It represented a scene out of the life of the nymphs, fauns, and satyrs, with the centaurs, playing in groves and on the flowery plains.

(47)

The picture is “nobody,” but it does what no character in the story could do: by seeming to move, it draws Calypso's attention to itself and the possibilities it suggests. Like Calypso herself, it demands an audience. The painting is a “figure” of an entire world outside of the male-only domain of Angelshorn; it is “illuminated” not by the Count's anachronistic red ink or the dyed sun but by Calypso's plain candle. As Calypso's light reveals the picture, so the picture reveals something to her. It is not realistic or even “well-painted,” but that does not matter, because “in the foreground” are “three young naked nymphs.” Calypso, raised in the strange world of the castle, in which all truths are based on a fantasy, does not “doubt that it was a true representation of beings actually existing.” Her credulity lends the painting authority, and based on that authority, she is “surprised and overwhelmed” to see that the satyrs and centaurs “were obviously concentrating their attention upon following, adoring, and embracing young girls of her own age, and of her own figure and face, that the whole thing was done in their honor and inspired by their charms” (48). The painting supplies Calypso with an implied audience. She is now able to imagine someone looking at her. With this in mind, she turns again to the mirror, and looks at herself again: she becomes, at last, her own audience, and thus a free agent. She is able to invent for herself a persona based on that of the nymphs and satyrs. While Miss Malin tells us that “she knew now that she had friends in the world,” the most important realization comes from that look in the mirror: the instant of self-recognition. While Miss Malin, the virgin/courtesan, insists upon the importance of the male gaze, Calypso has learned the trick Miss Malin practices but never articulates, which is the trick of self-invention. It is this trick which allows Calypso to escape the castle—still unseen, but liberated from invisibility—to come and find Miss Malin's house nearby. Calypso, caught in Count Seraphina's earthly realization of his fraudulent paradise, is unable to exist until she has a vision of paradise herself. Her imaginary world, taken from the old painting, is no more realistic than the Count's—but it is hers, and it is in order to seek it that she finally flees the castle.

This account of Calypso's self-invention is made more problematic by the fact that we hear it from someone else. When Miss Malin's narration reaches the point at which Calypso resolves to cut off her own breasts,

the girl, who had hitherto stared straight in front of her, turned her wild eyes toward the narrator, and began to listen with a new kind of interest, as if she herself were hearing the tale for the first time. Miss Malin had an opulent power of imagination. But still the story, correct or not, was to the heroine herself a symbol, a dressed-up image of what she had in reality gone through, and she acknowledged it by her clear deep glance at the old woman.

(46)

The story, we see, is presumably not “correct:” Miss Malin's tale of Calypso's self-invention is itself an invention, or an interpretation. But it is an “image” of “reality;” Calypso recognizes her own actions and self in the story, so that Miss Malin's “opulent” inventions around her are acceptable and even useful to her. Miss Malin has Calypso's permission to tell this story, as “acknowledged” by “her clear deep glance”: if anything, Calypso is interested to see what Miss Malin will make of her. Calypso, as Miss Malin says, “had to create herself” to escape the Count's “annihilation;” her materials are not entirely self-made, however, and she depends upon the perceptions of others—Miss Malin, the anonymous painter—to help her to her autonomy.

Calypso and Mærsk, then, are both still dependent upon other people to know who they are. The reactions of the world of fashion—whether it is looking at them too long or not looking at them at all—provides a basis for their own ideas about themselves. The case of Miss Malin and the Cardinal are different. Miss Malin is quite aware that she is “mad”; nonetheless she retains her madness, her belief in her past. The opinion of society (i.e. that her past is invented) is nothing to her.

The Cardinal/Kasparson is a more complicated case. To begin with, he is two people at once: the actor, and the murdered man the actor impersonates. Kasparson, in the role of the Cardinal, has so thoroughly taken on the Cardinal's past that it cannot be separated from his own.⁷ This is one way in which Kasparson remakes his life. But he goes further: once he has become the Cardinal, he goes on to re-make the Cardinal's life—past and present—as well, turning him into the man he ought to have been. Once Kasparson has killed the Cardinal and taken on his role, they are interchangeable; the names “Kasparson” and “the Cardinal” only refer to different people before the flood.

The opinions of others matter intensely to Kasparson. He wants, he says, to be “worshipped” (76) by the peasantry, his mother's people, whom he loves. But he does not depend upon their opinions—he makes them. As an actor, he is able to manipulate himself in order to manipulate the opinions of those around him: he alone among the characters in the story knows the secret of changing the world. By becoming the Cardinal—playing the role for his very life—he is able to convince everyone else not only that he is the Cardinal, but that the Cardinal is a miracle-worker: “Once or twice, when the boat, hit by heavy floating timbers, came near to capsizing, he rose and held out his hand, and as if he had a magic power of balance, the boat steadied itself” (7). Even the boats are convinced of the Cardinal's sainthood. Or rather, not sainthood—for after all, the man in the boat is an actor and a murderer—but of his magic: Kasparson's ability is magic.⁸ Where sainthood, which is perhaps best personified by Pellegrina Leoni's character Rosalba in Dinesen's “The Dreamers,” is a selfless dedication to another being, magic is more selfish and less sanctified: it is the physical power of imagination. When Kasparson acts the Cardinal, he acts the Cardinal as he ought to be: he acts the ideal of the Cardinal. Were the “real” Cardinal in the boat, he might very well not indulge in such theatricality, and thus accomplish less. By murdering the Cardinal and re-making him into an ideal version of himself, Kasparson re-makes the world around him, as well. Knowing that he is acting, knowing that his pose is a “false” one, he brings the heretofore untamable water into submission. The sea, which resists the unthinking impositions of the aristocrats, reacts to Kasparson's self-aware impersonation. While Kasparson's deliberate adoption of the peasants' ideal resembles Mærsk and Calypso's problematic imposed identities, Kasparson's impersonation of the Cardinal is a reinvention of the Cardinal's persona, which allows the actor to reinvent the world around him in turn, thereby fulfilling the Cardinal's own destiny.

The idea that the Cardinal might re-make the world is an old one, dating back to his brilliant (and pre-Kasparson) youth:

The Pope himself … said of him: “If, after the destruction of our present world, I were to charge one human being with the construction of a new world, the only person whom I would trust with this work would be my young Hamilcar.” Whereupon, however, he quickly crossed himself two or three times.

(6)

The Pope crosses himself not only because “my young Hamilcar” is a frightening person, but at the idea of a world “constructed” by a single human being. The idea is blasphemous; terrifying because of the attitude toward God which it draws one into. The Pope here risks reducing the sanctity of God to the magic of the dreamer. This is only possible, even in jest, because the Cardinal has, to him, an unpredictable imagination: he will not set things up in an overly simplistic, clichéd, or dull way. But as we see in Calypso and Mærsk's stories, such a construct is terrifying and inherently flawed. For no one can make up the world as it should be. Kasparson-as-the-Cardinal remarks in the hayloft that

I might, had I been given omnipotence and a free hand, have made a fine world. I might have bethought me of the trees and rivers, of the different keys in music, of friendship, and innocence; but upon my word and honor, I should not have dared to arrange these matters of love and marriage as they are, and my world should have lost sadly thereby. What an overwhelming lesson to all artists! Be not afraid of absurdity; do not shrink from the fantastic. Within a dilemma, choose the most unheard-of, the most dangerous, solution.

(54-55)

Choosing “the most unheard-of, the most dangerous solution” is the essence of creative art. It avoids the cliché which traps false artists like Count Seraphina, and it opens the artist to unforeseen, and thus uncontrollable, possibilities. The choice of the “dangerous solution” allows “love:” it avoids the solipsism and sterility of Count Seraphina, and it grants other characters free will. This is what Kasparson did in killing the Cardinal, and what Miss Malin did in changing her past. Each has taken the “absurd,” “fantastic” solution to his or her problem, without attempting to manipulate an audience overtly. Miss Malin does not care whether other people believe in the past she remembers; Kasparson manipulates his own identity rather than the peasants he wants to impress. He does not try to make them love him; instead, he becomes the person they already love.

The only hint that the Cardinal is acting a role comes when he sets out with the last boatload of rescuers to the resort:

As he walked down to the boat, and the people from the bath dispersed before him, some of the ladies suddenly and wildly clapped their hands. They meant no harm. Knowing heroism only from the stage, they gave it the stage's applause. But the old man whom they applauded stopped under it for a moment. He bowed his head a little, with an exquisite irony, in the manner of a hero upon the stage.

(8-9)

At this early stage in the story, the ladies' “wild” applause is extremely inappropriate. It reveals them for what they are: trivial, naive, the falsely-wild women who looked out at the truly-wild landscape from coach windows. They do not understand what is really at stake. For them, the whole tragedy is comprehensible only as a play—in which not only will nobody drown, but nobody will even get wet. The apology, “they meant no harm,” is needed, for otherwise they may look downright malicious, as they seem to be making games of a matter of life and death. But their ignorance nonetheless reveals something about the Cardinal. For the “irony” which, at that moment, appears simply to be an understanding of their deficiencies, turns out to be a more classical irony: the Cardinal knows, as we do not, that he is an actor, and that applause is appropriate. The difference between the role he is playing and the role they are reacting to, however, is crucial: the Cardinal, unlike the women, knows that while he is playing a role, he is playing it surrounded by reality—he knows that he can drown. Although their applause is not what he wants—he is acting for the peasants, who also know the dangers he faces—he recognizes its suitability.

Kasparson, in the barn, says that the Cardinal (and here once again they are briefly two people, as the actor considers the original of the part he is playing) would have approved of how he played his role, with one reservation:

he might have held that I overdid my rôle. I stayed in this hayloft to save the lives of those sottish peasants, who preferred the salvation of their cattle to their own. It is doubtful whether the Cardinal would ever have done that, for he was a man of excellent sense. That may be so. But a little charlatanry there must needs be in all great art, and the Cardinal himself was not free from it.

(75)

The “charlatanry” in Kasparson's “art” does not lie in his impersonation, but in his divergence from exact impersonation. He is not a charlatan until he does something which the Cardinal would not. He does this not for his own sake—after all, it will clearly lead to his death—but for the sake of the legend he wants to create: he does it to make the story perfect. Kasparson, the artist-murderer, is true not to the desires or character of his victim, but to his victim's persona. This divergence of the role from the model is, Kasparson claims, unavoidable: “there never was a great artist who was not a bit of a charlatan; nor a great king, nor a god” (58-9). The artist, king, or god is at once the director of the play—a figure of power—and obedient to the script, or to his ideal of the best version of the story.

In order for his art to be appreciated, however, Kasparson must at last reveal that he is acting. He waits to do this until the young people are asleep. In effect, only he and Miss Malin are now in the hayloft. He strips off the bandages which have disguised him and says, “I had better get rid of these … now that morning is almost here” (71). Morning brings death, and death is truth, so that still to be disguised at morning would be futile as well as artistically inappropriate. He confesses his identity to the surprised but unperturbed Miss Malin, and explains: “I am an actor, madame, as you are a Nat-og-Dag; that is, we remain so whatever else we take on, and fall back upon this one thing when the others fail us” (72). The equation of “actor” with “Nat-og-Dag” is telling. “Actor” and “aristocrat” (and it is important to distinguish Miss Malin's ancient, dying branch of aristocracy from the modern, fashionable, flighty kind represented by the applauding women) become blurred categories; each is an artist, each is a charlatan. Each has an essential, “true” identity—actor, Nat-og-Dag—around which other, secondary identities may be erected without damaging or changing the core. In Miss Malin's case, these secondary identities are her self-inventions as virgin and whore, either of which she plays in an equally grand, exaggerated manner; in Kasparson's case, they are his many careers. He has been a barber, a revolutionary, and a hostler; he has been on the run from the law. But all of these facets of his identity are secondary to the important truth that he is an actor, and “the bastard of Égalité” (73), the Duke of Orléans who changed his name and “voted for the death of the King of France.” Kasparson is the product of a union between debased nobility and risen peasantry; he is a cross between the aristocratic and peasant cultures which the story holds in such contrast. Thus while he will fit in neither world, he can blend in with either, and plays the two against each other.

It may be a flaw in the story that its supreme artist, who gains his heart's desire, only manages to do so because he is also a murderer. Miss Malin seems oddly unperturbed by Kasparson's confession, but her sense of morality is notably skewed. For Dinesen, the Cardinal's murder seems justified by the fact that his murderer plays the Cardinal's role to perfection: because the impersonation is artistically perfect, its morality is irrelevant—all the more so, apparently, since all the characters are going to end up dead by the end of the day no matter what happens.

Kasparson, in a rather surprising and perhaps dubious move, justifies his murder and impersonation of the Cardinal by saying that it is necessary to him for artistic fulfillment:

I told you: I am an actor. Shall not an actor have a rôle? If all the time the manager of the theater holds back the good rôles from us, may we not insist upon understudying the stars? The proof of our undertaking is in the success or fiasco. I have played the part well. The Cardinal would have applauded me, for he was a fine connoisseur of the art.

(74)

In this formulation, murder is diminished into a sensible career move, and impersonation of a dead man is “understudying the stars.” The “manager of the theater” is an unseen force which nudges characters into certain roles. But Kasparson sees a role for free will and individual action: he is able to “insist.” After a lifetime of secondary roles—barber, revolutionary—he is at last able to play the part he yearns for: savior. The fact that he plays it under an assumed name is irrelevant. What matters is that he gets to play it at all. In exchange he gets not only his original goal, the love of the peasants, but a kind of approval from the man he impersonates. The applause of a connoisseur, even the imaginary applause of a dead connoisseur, is worth getting—unlike that of the foolish ladies by the boats. To Kasparson, the fact that his impersonation of the Cardinal convinces the peasants justifies the murder. In exchange, they have finally given him what he wants: “Only tonight have they come around. They have seen the face of God in my face. They will tell you, after tonight, that there was a white light over the boat in which I went out with them” (76). Kasparson is right: we know from the beginning of the tale that to the peasants, the Cardinal will remain the central figure of the flood for years after his double death (murdered in his house and then drowned in the barn).⁹ No one by the name Kasparson achieves any credit: that name dies in the house, an unimportant drowned valet. But Kasparson, through the Cardinal, achieves his heart's desire—and he does it by living a story; he tells a story through his own actions and convinces his audience that he is telling the truth. He reinvents himself entirely, assuming the ideal version of another man's persona. In the process, he helps save the lives of peasants stranded by a flood. He is the opposite of the Baron or Count Seraphina: instead of remaking others to serve his own ideal, he makes himself into the ideal of others in order to serve them. This transformation is fatal. If the actor-Cardinal had not stayed in the barn to drown, he would have been hanged for murder, and the entire role sabotaged. Kasparson dies for his art.

It is in recognition of his ability to make his dream come true that, as dawn is breaking and the barn is on the verge of collapse, Miss Malin says to him, “Kasparson, you great actor … Bastard of Égalité, kiss me” (78). She wishes to kiss not the Cardinal, but the Cardinal's alter ego/creator, the actor. At once embracing her aristocratic ideal by kissing the older brother of the King of France and abandoning it by kissing the disreputable son of a peasant woman, Miss Malin gets the one real kiss of her life from the one man of her own nature, her fellow-inventor. Her belief in her dissipated past allows her to act, and with that kiss, she makes her belief true—“the proud old maid did not go unkissed into her grave.” Her invitation, quoting the priest who presided at the execution of Louis XVI, is “Fils de St. Louis, montez au ciel!”—a suggestion with a triple meaning, for the kiss offered as both a heavenly and an earthly sexual reward is in fact the kiss of a “death's-head by which druggists label their poison bottles,” to be taken in the last moments of Kasparson's life.

“Not by the face shall the man be known, but by the mask,” says the Cardinal/actor (75). What reveals the truths of these characters is not the selves invented for them by society, family, or chance, but the selves they invent in spite of their surroundings, or to seduce them. While Mærsk and Calypso remain to some extent dependent upon exterior circumstances, Miss Malin and Kasparson are free to shape themselves according to their own visions. Miss Malin manages to convince herself; Kasparson goes the crucial step further, and convinces everyone else, as well.

The tale ends with dawn because that is the moment of synthesis; neither night nor day, the transitional moment; the knife-edge of Miss Malin Nat-og-Dag's name. At that moment the tension between truth and falsehood, youth and age, aristocracy and peasant, and life and death all come together, focused by the kiss, the rising water, and the rising sun. Miss Malin interrupts herself as she begins to tell her own story because this is the moment the whole night has led towards: the moment when everything that should be true, is. The characters have completed themselves, and no more audience is needed.

Notes

1. Questions of identity are never far from the surface in Dinesen's work (see Bjørnvig). But few critics have looked closely at precisely how Dinesen's characters imagine new identities for themselves in the face of identities imposed upon them.

2. I use the term autobiography deliberately. Defined by Paul de Man as the story of a name (68) and by Georges Gusdorf as the “diagram of a destiny” (40), it exactly fits the stories the characters tell about themselves.

3. Morten Kyndrup points out the “positive valorization” of Miss Malin's “unconcern for realities” (139) and the fact that Kasparson's “staging” of the Cardinal is “good” despite being “a lie,” but, having other concerns, does little to analyze the differences between characters' alternate realities (147).

4. I disagree with Susan Hardy Aiken's reading of this passage in which she takes the repeated adjective to imply that the sea is a representative of women's transgressive sexual power (88). The women in the carriages are trivial and uncritical and the sea's monstrosity is in its impersonality—it has no desires at all.

5. This is, of course, what Dinesen does in Out of Africa.

6. Helen Stoddart points out that Miss Malin “is making herself and her value up just like the honnêtes femmes. This is real story-telling. By accepting their terms and then taking things to exaggerated extremes she makes a real comedy out of what was, to her, formerly merely a bad joke” (85-6).

7. This is confirmed by Dinesen, who said to Aage Henrikson, “I suppose you have understood … that the two figures, the Cardinal and Kasparson, are really one and the same person” (Hannah 161), as well as by similarities between the two characters—for example, both men feel tremendous and apparently inappropriate pity for all human beings.

8. For an interesting discussion of the role of magic (as opposed to holiness) in Dinesen's work, see Stambaugh.

9. The fact that the peasants remember the Cardinal as the central figure of the flood is proof—if any is needed—that the barn does collapse at dawn, before the storytellers can be rescued. If Kasparson had been rescued, he would have been caught, and the legend quashed.

Works Cited

Aiken, Susan Hardy. Isak Dinesen and the Engendering of Narrative. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1990.

Bjørnvig, Thorkild. “Who Am I? The Story of Isak Dinesen's Identity.” Scandinavian Studies 57 (1985): 363-78.

Dinesen, Isak. Seven Gothic Tales. New York: Vintage, 1972.

Gusdorf, Georges. “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography.” Trans. James Olney. Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980. 28-48.

Hannah, Donald. “Isak Dinesen” and Karen Blixen: The Mask and the Reality. New York: Random House, 1971.

Kyndrup, Morten. “Dinesen Versus Postmodernism: The Criticism of Modernity and the Problem of Non-simultaneousness in Relation to Isak Dinesen's Works.” Isak Dinesen and Narrativity: Reassessments for the 1990s. Ed. Gurli A. Woods. Ottowa, Canada: Carleton UP, 1994. 133-49.

Langbaum, Robert. The Gayety of Vision: A Study of Isak Dinesen's Art. New York: Random House, 1965.

Landy, Marcia. “Anecdote as Destiny: Isak Dinesen and the Storyteller.” The Massachusetts Review 19.2 (1978): 389-406.

de Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-Facement.” The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.

Stambaugh, Sara. The Witch and the Goddess in the Stories of Isak Dinesen: A Feminist Reading. Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1988.

Stoddart, Helen. “Isak Dinesen and the Fiction of Gothic Gravity.” Modern Gothic: A Reader. Ed. Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith. New York: Manchester UP, 1996. 81-8.