Isak Dinesen’s The Deluge at Norderney and Eccentric Indifference
1 In Edith Sitwell’s English Eccentrics (1933), the narrator describes various personages whose behaviour and actions deviate from societal conventions and norms. For example, the reader makes the acquaintance of Charles Waterton, who “had no idea that he was doing anything out of the general course of things if he asked a visitor to accompany him to the top of a lofty tree to look at a hawk’s nest” (226). In contrast to Waterton himself, the people around him do not generally regard his actions as ordinary but as eccentric. In the context of English Eccentrics, eccentricity is considered to be a character trait inexorably linked to a person. While Waterton is certainly a character who could have come straight out of a story by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), this essay does not only focus on eccentricity as a form of behaviour but aims to show that there are also texts that display evidence of eccentricity, i.e. “the condition of not being centrally situated” (OED), on a textual level.
2 This essay intends to provide an investigation of eccentric texts by linking them to and distancing them from queer approaches to literary works. To exemplify this method, I refer to Isak Dinesen’s short story “The Deluge at Norderney,” from her collection Seven Gothic Tales (1934). I focus on the way the narrator and the literary characters deal with identity and demonstrate that identity is presented as not only inconsistent and malleable (which could be expected) but that in fact it may be entirely invented. The analysis shows that this mainly stems from the fact that each literary character is given the opportunity of telling the story of his or her life without an authority to restrain him or her. The circumstances they find themselves in allow them to modify their lives and fill them with the sets of people and events of their choice. Furthermore, I want to explore the way in which the stories told within the story oscillate between reinforcing and destabilising the text and also show how the narrative path itself is structured so as to elude the reader.
3 I begin by highlighting the connection between Ina Schabert’s notion of the “foot-off-the-ground” novel and eccentric texts, since Schabert’s definition of “foot-off-the-ground” novels forms a helpful starting point to commence defining eccentric texts, and follow on by presenting an analysis of passages from “The Deluge” that suggest a queer reading. Subsequently, I show that an analysis of the story from a queer perspective is by itself not sufficient to comprehend the special politics of this text because queer approaches aim at disclosing and combating
Foot-off-the-ground Beginnings
4 In her gendered history of English literature of the twentieth century, Ina Schabert ties together a number of texts by women writers mostly from the first half of the century whose works had hitherto not been seen as forming a group of texts united by shared techniques and concerns. In works, for example, by Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Stevie Smith, or Elizabeth von Arnim, Schabert demonstrates how these novels pursue what might by called an aesthetics of “indifference.” They try to remain comprehensible within frameworks of generic and cultural expectations while simultaneously trying to reach positions “away” from them, an elsewhere that cannot be understood as a site of opposition but rather as a trajectory of thought which tries to escape from the centre of cultural norms without reaching a counter-position, remaining in transit, floating, wilfully ignorant of or indifferent to what is left behind. Borrowing her term from Stevie Smith, one of this group’s most prominent practitioners, Schabert calls these novels “foot-off-the-ground novels”:
Der Boden, von dem die foot-off-the-ground novels abheben, ist die allgemeine Kultur, die akzeptierte gesellschaftliche, politische, moralische und literarische Sinnstiftungspraxis. Die Autorinnen halten Abstand zu dem, was das Ihre nicht ist. Sie erzählen mit anderen als den gewohnten Prioritäten, Ordnungs- und Wertvorstellungen. […] Ganz ohne diesen Boden [der Norm] geht es nicht; strenggenommen kann deshalb auch nur ein Fuß vom Boden gehoben werden und ‚woanders’ sein. […] Das Woanders kann nicht der einfache – und damit in Sprache und Literatur einfach formulierbare – Gegensatz zum kulturell Vorgegebenen sein, nicht das Andere des Gleichen, das dieses letztlich vom Negativen her noch einmal bekräftigen würde. Es weicht auf unlogische Weisen ab. […] Die Texte mögen eigensinning, bizarr, manchmal auch frech wirken, nie aber sind sie eindeutig aggressiv oder versuchen, die Leserin auf eine alternative Norm einzuschwören. (153)
5 The authors, we are told, “keep their distance” (halten Abstand) from what they do not wish to identify with, they organize their priorities differently and try to reach a place, a position “elsewhere” (woanders). This “elsewhere” is not meant to be a simple reversal of the norms that irk them (nicht das Andere des Gleichen) and neither is it meant to be a new centre of inscription, an alternative norm which may be set up as the improved version of the given. The movement these texts seek to execute can therefore be described as being profoundly eccentric: away from a centre which is neither affirmed nor negated, towards an “elsewhere” which must not under any circumstances become a new centre. The characters depicted in these novels read like blueprints for what common usage understands as eccentric personalities: “Die Heldinnen der Romane gehen mit stiller Selbstverständlichkeit eigenen Vorlieben nach. Zumeist scheint es, dass sie einfach nicht so richtig begriffen haben, was Frausein in der Gesellschaft bedeutet“ (154). These are characters who do not appear fully socialized but indifferent to or (wilfully) ignorant of what is expected of them.