LYNN R. WILKINSON

HANNAH ARENDT ON ISAK DINESEN: BETWEEN STORYTELLING AND THEORY

"ALL SORROWS CAN BE BORNE if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.” The words stand as an epigraph to the chapter on action in Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, first published in 1958. They are attributed to “Isak Dinesen,” the British and American nom de plume of the Danish writer known as Karen Blixen in Denmark, although no source is given. Evocative and puzzling, they seem to point to Hannah Arendt’s own story, which goes largely untold in her own writing, but they also jar against both the Latin quotation by Dante that follows and, to an even greater extent, the discussion of Greek philosophy and politics in the body of the chapter itself. What can a Danish writer who called herself a mere storyteller possibly have to do with a work that is now considered to be one of the classics of Western political theory? Why did Arendt choose as the first of two epigraphs that head the most important chapter in the work a quotation by Dinesen—and one, moreover, for which readers of both Arendt and Dinesen have searched in vain in the Danish writer’s published works?

Although some version of Arendt’s epigraph may eventually crop up in an electronic search of Dinesen’s work, the probable source is a telephone interview published in The New York Times Book Review on November 3, 1957 (and reprinted in 2000 in a collection of interviews and talks edited by Else Brundbjerg). The passage in question both reveals the epigraph to be a misquotation and suggests the framework for Hannah Arendt’s interest in the Danish writer and her work. Blixen/Dinesen had not yet visited the United States. Tongue-in-cheek, the interviewer, Bent Mohn, asks her:

“You have written about eighteenth and nineteenth century people—wouldn’t you like to write about people of 1957, living in semi-detached houses with radio and TV?”

She replies:

“I must give you the impression that I don’t want to write about my own contemporaries. But to me it is as if the people of 1957 shrink back from the story. You can put them into a novel, full of observations of man’s emotions and also of the subconscious, but I feel that they simply won’t go into a tale. And I am not a novelist, really not even a writer; I am a storyteller. One of my friends said about me that I think all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them, and perhaps this is not entirely untrue. To me, the explanation of life seems to be its melody, its pattern. And I feel in life such an infinite, truly inconceivable fantasy.”

“Do you then look on your own life as a ‘tale’?”

“Yes, I suppose so but in a sense only I can grasp. And, after all, the tale is not yet quite finished!”

If this newspaper interview is indeed the source of the epigraph, Arendt may have omitted it because such an explicit reference to the mass media would have jarred with the critique of mass culture that informs much of the argument in The Human Condition. Or perhaps it was a private joke. But it would be wrong to conclude that if the newspaper article is in fact the source of Arendt’s epigraph it proves that Arendt knew very little about Dinesen’s work, for Dinesen’s comments on storytelling in this interview have much in common with Arendt’s other citations of Dinesen and with the theorist’s discussions of storytelling in general: in the interview, Dinesen ties storytelling not only to mourning but also to meaning and aesthetic patterns perceived in actions when relived in memory, patterns that don’t fit into novels, since the latter are “full of observations of man’s emotions and also of the subconscious.”  Storytelling, uniquely, is able to capture the shape of an individual human life and to endow it with meaning.

Arendt mentions Dinesen elsewhere in The Human Condition as well as in other published texts, although at first glance these references offer little in the way of an explanation for her interest. In The Human Condition, a long footnote in the chapter on labor credits Dinesen as the only modern author to have recognized the close relationship between the cessation of pain and the illusion of pleasure, and the chapter on action refers to “The Dreamers,” a story from Seven Gothic Tales, Dinesen’s first collection in English. Arendt’s essay “Truth and Politics,” published in The New Yorker in 1967 (and reprinted in the collection Between Past and Future in 1968), again quotes the sentence used as the epigraph to the chapter on action, this time in the context of a discussion of the relationship of storytelling to truth in politics. And the sentence appears yet again in Arendt’s highly critical 1968 review in The New Yorker of Parmenia Migel’s 1967 biography of Isak Dinesen (Titania: The Biography of Isak Dinesen), which discusses her life and works in terms that would seem to agree with Arendt’s enigmatic epigraph —namely, that the loss of her African farm and lover made Dinesen into a wise woman and a storyteller. The one reference to Dinesen in Arendt’s published letters occurs in a letter to Gertrud Jaspers dated November 16, 1958, in which Arendt mentions that she has just read Dinesen’s Anecdotes of Destiny, which she finds to be the work of “einer großen dänischen Geschichtenerzählerin, große Dame und weise alte Frau” (a great Danish storyteller, a great lady, and a wise old woman [my translation]). There are, on the other hand, no references to Dinesen in the hundreds of letters to Heidegger, her husband Heinrich Blücher, or Mary McCarthy, although the latter does refer to Dinesen in a letter written to Arendt in 1968.