People who dream … know that the real glory of dreams lies in their atmosphere of unlimited freedom … the freedom of the artist.

—Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa

THE ART OF DREAMING

Day is a space of time without meaning, and … it is with the coming of dusk, with the lighting of the first star and the first candle, that things will become what they really are, and will come forth to meet me. … During my first months after my return to Denmark from Africa, I had great trouble in seeing anything at all as reality. My African existence had sunk below the horizon, … then faded and disappeared. … The landscapes, the beasts and the human beings could not possibly mean more to my surroundings in Denmark than did the landscapes, beasts, and human beings of my dreams at night. Their names here were just words. … There they were, all of them, nine thousand feet up, safe in the mould of Africa, slowly being turned into mould themselves. And here was I, walking in the fair woods of Denmark, listening to the waves of Öresund. … What business had I had ever to set my heart on Africa?

(Dinesen, “Echoes from the Hills,” 112-14)

Thus Karen Blixen would recall her bereavement on losing the place she called “my heart's land.”¹ Paradoxically, going “home” to “the fair woods of Denmark” in 1931, after seventeen years in Kenya, seemed to her tantamount to entering a condition of permanent exile, a forced dwelling in a space—both geographical and psychological—from which she had felt herself estranged since earliest childhood. Inscribing this event in Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass, she would repeatedly write repatriation as exmatriation: to lose Africa was to lose more than a homeland of the spirit; it was also to lose the place she claimed as the matrix of her creativity, the place where, as she wrote in “Mottoes of My Life,” she began at last to speak “freely and without restraint” (7).² For it was in Africa that she found her mature voice as a storyteller, creating the earliest versions of the haunting narratives that would become Seven Gothic Tales. To leave Africa, then, was not only to enter what she described as a living death but potentially to risk the loss of that authorial voice as well.³

Yet it was, after all, the voice alone that remained to her when she returned, bankrupt and bereft, to Denmark, and with it she would make her future as a writer, taking those “words” to which her African existence had been reduced and transforming them into fictive flesh: the body of writing that would bring her worldwide recognition as “Isak Dinesen.” Incipient in the passage above, then, is a poetics of displacement, grounded in a reading of the author's diurnal, living “reality” as a form of death or dream, an exile in which, like an unquiet spirit, she becomes a permanent wanderer. In this oneiric realm, words—which seem at first a ghastly remnant, appalling shreds, the insubstantial traces of a lost plenitude—paradoxically become the very stuff of resurrection, strands from which she would fabricate both a persona and a textual corpus. For Dinesen, writing became at once the sign of wounding, a form of mourning, and a way to regeneration: words, even while bearing witness to her permanent loss of what she called “my real life,” would also give rise to the vibrant life of her texts (“Mottoes,” 6).⁴ It is no accident that the figure of dreaming, with all it implies of discontinuity and displacement, would become one of her recurrent metaphors not only for exile but for narrative itself.

Beginning in geographical alienation, displacement operates in Dinesen's writing at many levels. Consider, for example, her extraordinary double textual system, her practice of writing virtually every text twice—once in English, as Isak Dinesen, then in Danish, as Karen Blixen—an extension of the many names and masks she bore throughout her life.⁵ By choosing English as her primary literary language, she displaced herself from her native tongue; by rewriting the texts in Danish, she displaced them from their own ostensible origin(al)s. The gap opened by this two-fold inscription goes beyond the transatlantic distance between national borders and literary canons: just as the sexual doubleness of her signature mystifies the “true” nature of the writer's body, so the textual doubleness of her literary production calls into question the “true” nature of her narrative corpus, the body of her writing. In either case, writing marks a process of dislocation; the place of the author becomes indeterminate. Moving between two linguistic worlds, locatable in neither, Karen Blixen both is, and is not, Isak Dinesen.

As her choice of a male pseudonym implies, these enactments of writing as a form of exile are inseparable from issues of sexual difference. Dinesen's Letters from Africa develops an extensive analysis of woman's irrevocable status as a foreigner within androcentric culture and discourse, an analysis that provides an important perspective on her fiction (e.g., 163, 240-41, 244-51, 258-65, 399). By writing her English texts “as a man,” in effect displacing herself from herself, Dinesen made the male signature the sign of alienation, inscribing her own difference from patriarchal traditions even as she appeared to enact her erasure within them. In the light of her many reflexive speculations on the power of woman—operating perforce on the margins of the dominant discourse—to challenge, disrupt, and ultimately transform the symbolic order that would enforce her otherness, the signature would become for Dinesen an ironic instrument of resistance, turning apparent subservience into subversiveness (e.g., Letters, 240-41, 246; Out of Africa, 179-80).⁶ It is no coincidence that the Hebrew meaning of Isak conflates exile with both woman's laughter and female generativity. As I have shown elsewhere, Dinesen uses those connotations in radical ways, destabilizing the preeminent Judaeo-Christian patriarchal formula—“Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob”—by appropriating and feminizing its central term.⁷ Thus she transforms exile into the space for engendering stories suffused with what, describing one of the many subversive female artists in her fiction, she called the “laughter of liberation” (Seven Gothic Tales, 21).

This conflation of exile, sexual difference, voice, and writing is elaborated in many of Dinesen's greatest works, most obviously, of course, in her memoirs Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass. In this essay, however, I will consider its operations not in one of her fictionalized autobiographies but in one of her most complex autobiographical fictions: an early novella entitled, significantly, “The Dreamers.”⁸ Just as she blurred the boundaries between names, nationalities, and sexual identities, so Dinesen would put into question traditional generic boundaries separating fiction from fact, story from theory. “The Dreamers,” as its linguistic link to the autobiographical meditations quoted above suggests, is an intensely self-reflexive text. In its frame story Dinesen develops a poetics of displacement that, like “Echoes from the Hills,” equates dreaming, dis-ease, exile, and loss with the production of narrative.

The character who elaborates that figural conjunction in “The Dreamers” is one of the many tale-tellers who become their author's fictive doubles. Mira Jama, “the inventions of whose mind have been loved by a hundred tribes,” is a permanent outcast from his native land, a wanderer, who, having lost the ability to dream up new fictions, now dwells in and on the fictions made up in dreams:

“In my dreams I … carry with me something infinitely dear and precious, such as I know well enough that no real things be, and there it seems to me that I must keep this thing against some dreadful danger. … And it also seems to me that I shall be struck down and annihilated if I lose it. … The air in my dreams … is always very high, and I generally see myself as a very small figure in a great landscape. …

“You know, … that if, in planting a coffee tree, you bend the taproot, that tree will start, after a little time, to put out a multitude of small delicate roots near the surface. That tree will never thrive, nor bear fruit, but it will flower more richly than the others.

“Those fine roots are the dreams of the tree. As it puts them out, it need no longer think of its bent taproot. It keeps alive by them—a little, not very long. Or you can say that it dies by them, if you like, for really, dreaming is the well-mannered people's way of committing suicide.”

(“The Dreamers,” 276-77)

Dinesen would repeat these figures many years later in “Echoes from the Hills.” In “my dreams,” she writes there,

I move in a world deeply and sweetly familiar to me, a world which belongs to me and to which I myself belong more intensely than is ever the case in my waking existence. … The second characteristic of my dreams is their vastness, their quality of infinite space. I move in mighty landscapes, among tremendous heights, depths, and expanses and with unlimited views to all sides. … At times I feel that the fourth dimension is within reach. I fly, in dream, to any altitude, I dive into bottomless, clear, bottle-green waters. It is a weightless world. Its very atmosphere is joy, its crowning happiness, unreasonably or against reason, is that of triumph. For we have in the dream forsaken our allegiance to the organizing, controlling, and rectifying forces of the world, the Universal Conscience. We have sworn fealty to the wild, incalculable, creative forces, the Imagination of the Universe.

(108-10)⁹

As its title suggests, this text, juxtaposed with “The Dreamers” and Out of Africa, sets up an echoic dialogue across the span of Dinesen's career, illuminating both the text of its author's life and the life of her texts. This exchange is extended in the companion story to “The Dreamers,” published in Last Tales in 1957, which treats the same protagonist at an earlier moment in her fictive history; its title, “Echoes,” suggests the degree to which Dinesen connected it with “The Dreamers,” Out of Africa, and “Echoes from the Hills”—that reminder and remainder of Out of Africa—as elements in a metatext, an extended interactive series of meditations on writing (in) exile. In the poetics of displacement inherent in these conjunctions, Dinesen not only associates exile and death, paradoxically, with creative “triumph,” but implicitly genders this figurative nexus. Her description of dreaming/fiction-making as a radical subversion of “the organizing, controlling and rectifying forces of the world,” a transgressive place of jouissance wherein “the wild, incalculable, creative forces” come into play, anticipates recent theoretical speculations on the “wild space” that women, as a culturally “muted” group, occupy “outside the dominant boundary” of the androcentric symbolic order (Showalter, 200).¹⁰ It is from this “elsewhere,” as Luce Irigaray has called it (76), that the possibilities of an other, feminine discourse may be imagined.

Peter Brooks has argued that “deviance is the very condition for life to be ‘narratable’: the state of normality is devoid of interest, energy, and the possibility for narration. In between a beginning prior to plot and an end beyond plot, the middle—the plotted text—has been in a state of error: wandering and misinterpretation” (139). Such a reading of narrativity raises acutely the question of woman, since phallocentric discourses have traditionally represented her as the most extreme example of deviance.¹¹ In this context, then, an equivalency emerges between narrativity and femininity, each being construed, according to phallocentric law, as the principle of deviation, swerving—literally extra-vagance. And if the story of woman is the story of stories, then the greatest storyteller of all, potentially, would be woman herself, she who can both embody and engender the “narratable” by telling her own tale. In “The Dreamers,” as in many other texts, Dinesen sets up precisely such a possibility, suggesting that within the confines of patriarchal culture, those “wild, incalculable, creative forces” find their fullest expression in woman.

Consider first the storyteller through whose monologue about his authorial impotence Dinesen constructs a reflexive speculation on her own situation. Mira Jama is not only a permanent exile but a mutilated man—“the nose and ears of his dark head cut clear off.” Like “Isak Dinesen,” Mira—as the pun on his name suggests—is a reflection of his author, a masculine mask that doubles Karen Blixen's pseudonymy—hence an implicit sign of her multiply alienated status as a woman speaking (through) a masculine discourse. As a symbolic castration, his condition suggests an oblique play on the Freudian model of woman as castrated man. But his wounds also recall Dinesen's figurative dismemberment in another sense: the breakup of the Ngong farm and the severance from Africa that precipitated her own exile. As if to underscore this connection, the frame story takes place in a dhow sailing off the African coast.

Mira's inability to tell stories becomes, paradoxically, the precipitating condition for the story of a woman, a narrative recounted by Mira's companion Lincoln Forsner: “I will tell you a tale tonight, Mira … since you have none … [of] how I was, twenty years ago, taught … to dream, and of the woman who taught me.” I shall return to the problematics of the text's several male narrators, but first let us consider the tale of the woman who knew the art of dreaming, the narrative on which “The Dreamers” pivots. Through it, Dinesen obliquely tells not only her own story but the story of her stories as well.¹²

DREAMING WOMAN

“A woman's (re)discovery of herself can only signify the possibility of not sacrificing any of her pleasures to another, of not identifying with anyone in particular, of never being simply one.”

—Luce Irigaray, This Sex That Is Not One

Briefly summarized, Forsner's narrative concerns the wanderings of Pellegrina Leoni, a renowned operatic diva—Prima Donna Assoluta—who loses her voice through injuries from a fire in the Milan opera house.¹³ This event precipitates her lifelong wanderings, a self-imposed exile from her former place and name, and her refusal to become “tied up” in a stable, permanent, unitary identity: “I will not be one person again. … I will be always many persons from now. Never again will I have my heart and my whole life bound up with one woman, to suffer so much” (“Dreamers,” 345). First fabricating her own “death” by erecting a monument inscribed with her name—literally turning self into text—Pellegrina begins a lifelong play, assuming new names, new personae, each time the old threaten to constrain her. This serial staging of perpetual difference from herself is aided by her loyal “friend” and “shadow” Marcus Cocoza, a wealthy Jew from Amsterdam, whose ambiguous relation to Pellegrina, like the male-authored narrative through which her story unfolds, becomes one of the story's principal interpretive conundrums.¹⁴

Forsner's narrative emerges as a series of flashbacks, generated from his own recollections and the tales told to him by two other male narrators, whom he had met “one winter night” twenty years before, in an inn “amongst mountains, with snow, storm, great clouds and wild moon outside” (279). Like Forsner himself, each of his companions has fallen in love with, and subsequently lost, an extraordinary, magnetic woman, who turns out, as they discover in conversation, to be the same person in different guises. They are able to read their “different” women as the same because of a mark imprinted on her body like a signature, “a long scar from a burn, which, like a little white snake, ran from her left ear to her collar bone” (285). Paradoxically, this stigma, which serves as proof of her identity, is also the hieroglyphic sign of its absence; emblematizing Pellegrina's lost voice, name and selfhood, it is the trace of the story—as yet untold—of how her wanderings began.

At the very moment their narratives are ending, a veiled woman enters the inn, as if called forth on cue from their discourse. She glances at the three companions and hastily departs but not before being recognized, belatedly, by her former lovers. Strangely desperate to elude them, she takes a coach upward toward an Alpine pass that leads through the otherwise impassable mountains, proceeding afoot after the coach becomes stuck in the snow. They follow, but their own carriage is halted by drifts. Continuing to pursue her in this space of unmarked, impassable terrain, amid “this wildness of the elements,” they enter a state like that of dreams or “fairy tale” (318), where time seems suspended and only hunter and hunted exist.

But here I would like to halt my own tracking of the story by raising a question: what do these men seek? What does this dream/woman mean? And what can we in the uncomfortable position as parallels to her fictional pursuers, read in the linguistic traces that represent her even as they mark her disappearance?

Pellegrina's peregrinations may appear picaresque, but the roles she chooses are not random: she becomes, successively, whore, revolutionary, and saint, thereby enacting three of the most overdetermined versions of “woman” available in Western patriarchal culture.¹⁵ But there is a difference, for by playing these roles to the full yet retaining the power to abandon them at will, she can remain at once inside and outside the semiotic systems that would codify woman according to androcentric logic, resisting even as she appears to fulfill traditional patriarchal categorizations of the feminine. In traversing the continuum that would polarize woman as virgin or whore, domesticated object or revolutionary agent, Pellegrina demonstrates the essential interchangeability—hence invalidity—of these oppositions. Exposing the provisionality and instability of masculine conceptions of woman, she threatens the very foundations of patriarchal culture, predicated, as feminist critics have demonstrated, on the control of women as both bodies and signs (see, for example, Beauvoir and Suleiman). Significantly, in role after role, Pellegrina flees involvement with a male lover whose desire would appropriate hers, claiming her permanently as his, writing her into his own script. She eludes these appropriations by flight, literally dropping out of (his) sight, fabricating another self, another script to be enacted elsewhere, hence stealing, in a sense that anticipates Hélène Cixous's play on the double meaning of voler (fly/steal), the very identity by which he would construct himself (89; see Herrmann).

Entering perpetual exile, Pellegrina casts herself as a moving signifier in several senses of that term, liberating herself from the domination of male speculations even as she deliberately solicits them. True to her names (pellegrina = wanderer; leoni/leone = lion), she is simultaneously rover and devourer, consuming those men who would consume her by fixing her as their object, putting her in her—their—place. Perpetually in flight, she makes exile itself into a source of creative energy. As every man's ideal Woman, she appears to be the ultimate embodiment of “le sexe” adored and feared by the masculine imagination that created it; but Dinesen, anticipating the redefinitions of Luce Irigaray (and investing with new meaning the operatic tradition of la donna mobile), subverts that masculine conception by representing Pellegrina as the “sexe qui n'en est pas un”—a multiple, mobile figure who cannot be encompassed—cannot be read—by the appropriative gaze of the other and who therefore escapes masculine hermeneutical control even as she acts as its ever-elusive object. If in this context Pellegrina seems to turn men into dreamers, the text suggests that they are victims not so much of a woman as of their own desire and of the fantasies that are its products: solipsistic mirror images that ultimately focus not on the woman, their putative object, but on themselves.¹⁶ Similarly, insofar as each of these men becomes in effect an author, seeking to inscribe and circumscribe Pellegrina within his own life text, her power as an artist is manifest precisely in the way her fictions, lionlike, swallow up—literally incorporate and thus transform—theirs.¹⁷

Yet the text never lets us forget that story cannot ultimately elude history, that it is, finally, a man's world from which Pellegrina seeks liberation, and that given the historical realities of that world for women, the condition of freedom may ultimately be death. Caught at “the pass,” Pellegrina faces an impasse of androcentric constructions. She is surrounded at last by former lovers whose echoic, relentlessly reiterated demand, “Tell me who you are” (325-26), is in fact a question of masculine identity: by being the woman I desire, tell me who I am; reflect me to myself.¹⁸

Overtaken—and potentially taken over—by those who would constrain and own her, Pellegrina answers the question of identity not with words but with a gesture that severs her from the consuming gazes that would hold her permanently as a mere reflection. Having already constituted herself as a signifier, she now puts herself literally en abîme, in a gesture that condenses and reenacts all her earlier flights/thefts: “She did not turn, or look at me. But the next moment she did what I always feared that she might do: she spread out her wings and flew away. Below the round white moon she made one great movement, throwing herself away from us all. … For one second she seemed to lift herself up with the wind, then running straight across the road, with all her might she threw herself from the earth clear into the abyss, and disappeared from our sight” (327).

Forsner and his companions rescue from this flight no more than what they would have made her from the outset: the shell of a woman, no longer resistant to their manipulations. Lying iconically “immovable” on a stretcher at the monastery to which they carry her, she is surrounded once more by the men who wait, at last, “to get an answer … of her” (328-29). Enclosed within a male space whose very name signifies oneness and incarceration (Greek monasterion = “hermit's cell,” from monos, “single”), claustrated within the monological discourse that reiterates the Law of the Same against the multiplicity that she had made the sign of both subjectivity and freedom, Pellegrina dies doubly—not only literally but by becoming the object of a final male narrative. It is the account of Marcus Cocoza, the wandering Jew who, having acted as “her shadow” throughout her exile, now proposes to tell her “true” story, to utter “her real name.” At its conclusion,

“She stirred upon the couch. … I looked at the Jew. It was obvious that he was terrified lest she should see him. … He shrank back and took shelter behind me. The next second she slowly looked up. … In spite of the Jew's move to hide himself, her gaze fell straight upon him. He stood quite still under it. … She tried to speak two or three times, without getting a sound out, and again she closed her eyes. But once more she opened them, looking again straight at him. When she spoke it was in her ordinary low voice, a little slowly, but without any effort.”

(349-50)

Her discourse engenders a fiction that returns her to the opera before the loss of voice, place, and identity: a dialogue that revives Pellegrina Leoni as creator, shaping Marcus Cocoza as a character in her script of desire, making his words the entrée into her own “song”—paradoxically a scene from Don Giovanni, the quintessential script of the phallic appropriation of woman:

“‘My little star,’ said he. … ‘It is sure to go well with you tonight. It is the second act of Don Giovanni; it is the letter air. It begins now with your recitative.’ … As she spoke [the] words of the old opera … her face broke, as the night-old ice on a pool was broken up when, as a boy, I threw a stone into it. It became like a constellation of stars, quivering in the universe. … ‘Oh,’ she cried, ‘look, look here! It is Pellegrina Leoni—it is she, it is she herself again,—she is back … on the stage again.’ … Of a sudden he took up his little walking stick and struck three short strokes on the side of the stretcher. ‘Donna Pellegrina Leoni,’ he cried in a clear voice. ‘En scène pour les deux. …’ She collected herself at his words. Within the next minute she became quiet in a gallant and deadly calm. … In one mighty movement, like that of a billow rising and sinking, she lifted the middle of her body. A strange sound, like the distant roar of a great animal, came from her breast. Slowly the flames in her face sank, and an ashen gray covered it instead. Her body fell back, stretched itself out and lay quite still, and she was dead.”

(352)

This final scene—like the complex relation of Pellegrina to the wandering Jew who “shadows” her or the letter on which the reenacted “scène” reflexively turns—invites contradictory readings. It is arguably an enactment of a deceptive and destructive deathbed delusion, born of hysteria, manipulated by the Mephistophelean character whose words—as seductive in their way as Don Giovanni's—direct the woman in her final moments, and culminating in a death precipitated by the incoherent “roar” that concludes her fantasy of return. In this context, she is indeed destroyed by the discourse that beckons her “en scène” before the engulfing masculine gaze, just as, on stage at the opera, “she would have died for”—indeed in the fire virtually did die for—her audiences (334).

But who, one wonders, controls whom? Who speaks through—and for—whom? In this discourse on the power of the name, whose name does Marcus Cocoza invoke? And what of Pellegrina's own voice? Her final “song” can be heard by the men who surround her only as incoherent noise—an uninterpretable “distant roar”—but Dinesen implies that for Pellegrina herself, it has an altogether other meaning, a liberatory potential that she herself has created by ventriloquizing her desire through Marcus's words, making him a mimetic means to her own end in both senses of that phrase. “If women are such good mimics,” remarks Irigaray, “it is because they are not simply reabsorbed in this function. They also remain elsewhere” (76).¹⁹ One might argue that in the final moments of Pellegrina's story, this subversive feminine “mimicry” is doubled, for Pellegrina “speaks” through both Marcus's discourse and her own, giving voice to an “elsewhere” that is hers alone, unfathomable to the men who hear it. That this moment marks the site of another story is reinforced by the echoes Dinesen sets up between the figure of Pellegrina as “star,” her face like “the night-old ice on a pool … broken up” or “a constellation of stars, quivering in the universe,” and Mira Jama's earlier reflections on stories/dreams as emerging from “a deep well” from which “there comes up a spring of water, which runs out in little streamlets to all possible sides, like the rays of a star” (“Dreamers,” 277). The text suggests that even as Marcus's story would impose on her his own “truth,” freezing her fluidity into some final rigid form, she ultimately shatters those alien(ating) narrative structures with her creative energy, turning him into the instrument for regaining her voice and her self—which is to say, her own fiction(s). Similarly, one might argue, Dinesen's narrative pervades and incorporates all the male-authored narratives in the text, using them at last to ventriloquize her own encompassing self-reflexive story, her own ineluctable “elsewhereness.”

But what does it mean to regain “oneself” in this context? The text suggests that being oneself is not the same as being one self. Paradoxically, Pellegrina Leoni is most herself when she is least herself: she “lives” most intensely as operatic actress, a figure quintessentially plural, a character, in the several senses of that word, who “sings” in many voices. For her (as for her author after the loss of Africa), “real life” is fiction and vice versa: the very interchangeability of those terms and the irresolvable ambiguity of their statement emblematizes the paradoxes Dinesen plays out in Pellegrina. Whether on the literal stage or in the stagings of life that she has enacted after leaving the opera, the fundamental truth about the self that Pellegrina enacts is that there may be no fundamental truth about the self: what she does, whether as diva or mask-wearing wanderer, in the theater as an imitation of life or in life as an imitation of theater, is to enact the self as a dynamic of displacement, to make literal the internal multiplicity that traditional unitary, monological conceptions of identity would repress. In this sense Pellegrina has never left the theater; hence her affirmation of “return”—“it is she, she herself again”—is inseparable from its qualifying conclusion: “on the stage again.”

Even in death, then, Pellegrina—like her author—resists reductive readings that would turn her into a sign “tied up” within another's discourse (347). Ultimately, the question of who is speaking in “The Dreamers” becomes as undecidable as Pellegrina's identity.²⁰ This elusiveness of both woman and narrative finds a metaphor in the opening scene of the text, in the floating world in which the frame story transpires—a scene that anticipates the climactic conjunction of dreaming, fluidity, multiplicity, and illumination that figure Pellegrina's life and death. From the dhow moving on the midnight ocean, the ordinary, separable positionings of up and down, above and below, are rendered problematic, “bewildering,” as sky and sea become indistinguishable, mirroring one another in an infinite series of reflections:

as if something had happened to the world; as if the soul of it had been, by some magic, turned upside down. … The brightness of the moon upon the water was so clear that it seemed as if all the light in the world were in reality radiating from the sea, to be reflected in the skies. The waves looked solid as if one might safely have walked upon them, while it was into the vertiginous sky that one might sink and fall, into the turbulent and unfathomable depths of silvery worlds, forever silver reflected within silver, moving and changing. … The heavy waters sang and murmured.

(271)

In comparable ways, Dinesen dislocates her readers, sets them afloat as wanderers in the “vertiginous” world of her texts, at once lured and unmoored by the story of woman, which, like Pellegrina or the “heavy waters” beneath the floating dhow, has depths that “sing and murmur” in many voices—voices that from an androcentric perspective may appear indecipherable, “bewildering,” even incoherent, but that persistently invite another hearing, rewriting exile as exploration outside the bounds, a form of creative ecstasy.

As a mobile, endlessly inventive figure, Pellegrina inspires an ever-widening process of interpretation. Even after death, she continues to engender narratives:

“I have thought,” said Lincoln, “what would have happened to this woman if she had not died then? She might have been with us here tonight. … Or she might have gone with us into the highlands … and have been honored … as a great witch. In the end … she might perhaps have decided to become a pretty little jackal, and have made herself a den on the plain. … I have imagined that so vividly that on a moonlight night I have believed that I heard her voice amongst the hills. …” “Ah la la,” said Mira, … “I have heard that little jackal too. … She barks, ‘I am not one little jackal, not one; I am many. …’ And pat! in a second she really is another, barking just behind you: ‘I am not one little jackal. Now I am another.’”

(353-54)

Just so, Dinesen herself refuses final placement, proves equally resistant to finalizing readings. The story of the woman as artist and exile both enacts and explicates its author's own transgressive art, quintessentially the product of displacement, which remakes as it transcends the masculine models it appears to serve—a discourse of disclosure that invites yet always eludes interpretations. The name Leoni was also Dinesen's; “Lioness” was one of her many appellations, the sheer profusion of which, like Pellegrina's many names, suggests her refusal to be fixed by any single logos.²¹ Late in life, Dinesen would repeatedly speak of Pellegrina's lost voice as a figure for her own loss of Africa. Out of Africa, Dinesen conceived of her life as a form of exile, a living death, a “dream.” Yet by a great act of courage and imagination she would turn the space of that dream—the dislocations of that life—into the site for the engendering of her narratives. And if, as she ruefully remarked, she also died, figuratively, by turning herself in the process into inert “printed matter” (Daguerreotypes, 196), it is paradoxically through the displacements of writing that she continues to live, marking the place of exile as the ever-receding horizon of new readings.

Notes

1. The phrase “my heart's land” comes from Karen Blixen's early poem “Ex Africa,” published in the Danish journal Tilskueren in 1925. For an English translation, see Gatura, n.p.

2. For her configuration of Africa as mother, see Letters from Africa, 416, and Out of Africa, 356.

3. “When in the early thirties coffee prices fell, I had to give up my farm. I went back to my own country, at sea-level, out of earshot of the echoes of the plain. … During this time my existence was without an answer from anywhere. … Under the circumstances I myself grew silent. I had, in every sense of the word, nothing to say. And yet I had to speak. For I had my books to write” (“Mottoes,” 10).

4. For an analysis of Dinesen's writing as mourning see Aiken, “Isak Dinesen and Photo/Graphic Recollection,” 29-38. See also Langbaum, 119, on Out of Africa as a pastoral elegiac version of Paradise Lost; and Thurman, 282-84, on Out of Africa as a text of loss.

5. On Dinesen's many names and pseudonyms, see Thurman, 6.

6. Her analysis of Portia's use of male disguise in The Merchant of Venice obliquely comments on her own situation as a woman writing as a man: “In the performances of The Merchant of Venice which I have seen, Portia has, according to my view, been played incorrectly. In the court scene she has been all too solemn and doctrinaire. … Just as she sparkles in the entire comedy, … quick to laughter, so she should also, I think, sparkle in the closed, severely masculine world of the court. … Her magic lies precisely in her duplicity, the pretended deep respect for the paragraphs of the law which overlies her … quite fearless heresy” (“Oration at a Bonfire, Fourteen Years Late,” in Daguerreotypes and Other Essays, 82-83).

7. Isaac (“the one who laughs”), born during his parents' exilic wanderings, occupies a uniquely “feminine” position by virtue of his name, which his mother, Sarah, bestowed on him as a sign of her own laughter. See Genesis 18:10-12, and 21:6. On the subversive implications of Dinesen's pseudonym, see Aiken, “Dinesen's ‘Sorrow Acre.’”

8. Published as the sixth of Seven Gothic Tales (pp. 271-355), the text, like most of the Gothic tales, is perhaps more accurately characterized as a novella than as a short story because of its length. For discussions of how extensively Dinesen fictionalized her “autobiography,” see Thurman, 282-85, and Juhl.

9. For an extension of the link between flying, woman's fiction-making, and the underwater world of the unconscious, see “The Diver,” in Dinesen's last collection, Anecdotes of Destiny, 16-20.

10. Showalter is elaborating on the model proposed by Ardener, 3. See Cixous and Clément, 67-69.

11. See, for example, Aristotle, Generation, I, ii; Politics, I, xii-xiii; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, Question 92; Rousseau, 109; Kierkegaard, 66-67; Freud, “Femininity.”

12. For Dinesen's explicit identification of herself with Pellegrina Leoni, see Bjørnvig, 158-63. See also Thurman, 399-400. Significantly, after Forsner finishes his tale, the storyteller, Mira, Dinesen's double, claims it as his own: “I know all your tale. … I have heard it before. Now I believe that I made it myself” (“Dreamers,” 354).

13. I am grateful to my student Lynn Gerou for reminding me of the use of the phrase Prima Donna Assoluta to characterize the greatest female singers. The phrase resonates at many levels with Dinesen's representation of woman in the text.

14. Dinesen reinforces the reading of Pellegrina as a figure of and in exile through a complex nexus of literary reference. As Langbaum notes, “In Pellegrina, the allusions are so various and shifting that we cannot identify her with any one of them. … In her aspect of penitential pilgrim, she recalls the Wandering Jew; Marcus's presence helps us to make that connection. Marcus calls her a Donna Quixotta de la Mancha: ‘“the phenomena of life were not great enough for her; they were not in proportion with her own heart.”’ This connects her with Faust, still another wanderer; and since the force that makes her so effective in her metamorphoses … is an erotic force, she is also a female Don Juan. It is surely to make this connection that Isak Dinesen has the fire break out when Pellegrina is singing Mozart's Don Giovanni” (99). As I shall argue below, there are further implications in Dinesen's use of Don Giovanni. Space does not allow a thorough exploration of the intertextualities in “The Dreamers,” but each of the cases cited by Langbaum illustrates a strategy characteristic of Dinesen throughout her career: the appropriation and consequent revisionist interpretation of male-authored, androcentric texts—here classic texts of exile literally reembodied in woman, their male desire-in-narrative dislocated and replaced.

15. As feminist scholarship has long recognized, the virgin and the whore serve as quintessential polar opposites on the symbolic spectrum representing woman in Western cultural history. See, for example, Warner, 49-67. Woman as the locus of revolution, a threat to the order of the state, is a recurrent topos in masculine discourses from antiquity on. See Pateman, 20-34.

16. Dinesen's insight here has obvious similarities to Woolf's famous observation that “women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size” (35) and to Irigaray's discussion of the “role of ‘femininity’” in Western culture: “The rejection, the exclusion of a female imaginary undoubtedly places woman in a position where she can experience herself only fragmentarily as waste or as excess in the little structured margins of a dominant ideology, this mirror entrusted by the (masculine) ‘subject’ with the task of reflecting and redoubling himself. The role of ‘femininity’ is prescribed moreover by this masculine specula(riza)tion and corresponds only slightly to woman's desire” (104).

17. Cf. Cocoza's image of Pellegrina as “a python”: “You have no poison whatever in you, and if you kill it is by the force of your embrace. This quality upsets your lovers, who … have neither the strength to resist you, nor the wisdom to value the sort of death which they might obtain with you. … The sight of you unfolding your great coils to revolve around, impress yourself upon, and finally crush a meadow mouse is enough to split one's sides with laughter” (“Dreamers,” 337).

18. The text makes a significant distinction at this point between Lincoln and the two other men who have pursued Pellegrina. Having reached her before them, Lincoln has come close to comprehending the intensity of her need for imaginative freedom. His willingness to participate with her in a new sort of play—in both senses—suggests that he may be capable of creating, with her, a new story in which the two might participate together, in genuine mutuality (322-24). The arrival of the two other lovers shatters the fragile “house” of fiction in which they take shelter (324). Driven by jealousy that has more to do with the other men than with the woman for whom they fight as for a rare trophy, Lincoln betrays Pellegrina: “She turned to me slowly, and looked at me, as if she were confident that I would be on her side. So I should have been, against all the world, ten minutes before, but it is extraordinary how quickly one is corrupted by bad company. When I heard these other people talking of their old acquaintance with her, I myself, who stood so much closer than the others, turned toward her. … ‘Tell them,’ I cried. ‘Tell them who you are!’” (326).

19. See Nancy Miller's discussion of this passage in “Emphasis Added,” 38-39.

20. On this question and its import for women and feminist criticism, see Foucault, and the debate between Kamuf (“Replacing Feminist Criticism”) and Miller (“The Text's Heroine”).

21. See Out of Africa, 70, where Dinesen conflates this appellation with the figure of herself as text: “After Ismail had gone back to Somaliland, I had a letter from him which was addressed to Lioness Blixen, and opened: Honorable Lioness.”

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