Isak Dinesen: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 3)
Isak Dinesen
Isak Dinesen is now most famous for Out of Africa, which is somewhat sad because she was fiercely devoted to the "tale," whether they be myths, sagas, folklore, contes, or Shakespeare.
Isak: It came naturally to me. My literary friends at home tell me that the heart of my work is not in the idea but in the line of the tale. Something you can tell, like one can tell Ali Bab and the Forty Thieves but one could not tell Anna Karenina.
Interviewer: But there are some who find your tales "artificial"....
Dinesen: Artificial? Or course they are artificial. They were meant to be, for such is the essence of the tale-telling art. And I felt I acknowledged that . . . or rather, pointed it out . . . by calling my first tales "Gothic." When I used the word Gothic, I didn't mean the real Gothic, but the imitation of the Gothic, the Romantic age of Byron, the age of Horace Walpole, who built Strawberry Hill, the age of the Gothic Revival . . . you know Walpole's Castle of Otranto, of course?
Interviewer: Yes, indeed. In a tale, the plot is all-important, isn't it?
Dinesen: Yes, it is. I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take, over, they make the story. But all this ends by being a plot. For other writers, that seems an unnatural thing. But a proper tales has a shape and an outline. In a painting the frame is important. Where does the picture end? What details should one include? Or omit! Where does the line go that cuts off the picture? People always ask me, they say, In "The Deluge at Norderney," were those characters drowned or saved at the end? (You remember they are trapped in a loft during a flood and spend the night recounting their stories while awaiting rescue.) Well, what can I reply? How can I tell them? That's outside the story. I really don't know!
Most of these tales are rooted in the 19th century, and the interviewer notes that very little of her work is set in modern times. In this, she is different from both Ellison and Simenon who've been featured here this week. Instead of beginning with the exploration of the moral code of our times or with Simenon's "third story" in which we live, Dinesen starts with the flavor of the tale -- and that means the era of her grandparents. Looking backward is something she relishes:
Now, in modern life and in modern fiction there is a kind of atmosphere and above all an interior movement -- inside the characters -- which is something else again. I feel that in life and in art people have drawn a little apart in this century. Solitude is now the people have drawn a little apart in this century. Solitude is now the universal theme. But I write about characters within a design, how they act upon one another. Relation with others is important to me, you see, friendship is precious to me, and i have been blessed with heroic friendships. But time in my tales is flexible.... The present is always unsettled, no one has had time to contemplate it in tranquility. I was a painter before I was a writer . . . and a painter never wants the subject right under his nose; he wants to stand back and study the landscape with half-closed eyes.
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