Off Centre.

Telling stories and inventing identities

11 The following passage illustrates how the different stories told in “The Deluge” render the text itself eccentric. On one level, the story’s many stories-within-the-story draw attention to the absence of a fixed centre and highlight the way in which the focus of the story is constantly changing, trying to avoid focus altogether as it were, preventing the story from building up an ethical, philosophical, or even just narrative centre. At the same time, it becomes apparent that the stories the characters choose to tell serve to expose not only the constructed but in fact the invented nature of reality and identity, especially in that seemingly most urgent identity category: gender. It is this in-differentiation of gender which suggests a specifically queer reading.

12 In order to learn more about those companions who have taken temporary shelter with him from the ever-encroaching flood and to “remember what life be really like,” the Cardinal alias Kasparson invites Miss Malin, Calypso and Maersk, the fourth companion, to relate the stories of their lives (Dinesen 139). It is not until later on in the night that he reveals his true intentions to Miss Malin: he did not ask them to narrate their stories to learn more about their personality and life in general, but to “create” the night. Susan Hardy Aiken points out that “[when] the ersatz Cardinal invites his companions to reveal their identities, then, it is in terms that make ‘self’ inseparable from fabrications […]” (90). Kasparson is not interested in learning the “truth” about the other characters but in putting together his own personal piece of art. He believes that “few people can say of themselves that they are free of the belief that this world which they see around them is in reality the work of their own imagination” (Dinesen 180). In this respect Kasparson, an actor by trade, sees himself as a puppeteer who manipulates his fellow beings to create reality – his reality. At first, this may seem an outrageous act of hubris; however, he concedes that every human being has the privilege of creating his or her own reality independent of others. Therefore, while he may tell Miss Malin “I am genuinely proud of having made you, I assure you,” we know that from her perspective, she may very well have made him (181).

13 This scene shows that there is not one “true” reality but that numerous “realities” exist more or less independently of one another. It stresses that reality is always determined by individual perception, is even an effect of a more or less conscious creative act. Throughout “The Deluge,” the reader is confronted with a barrage of shifting truths and realities, a refusal on the part of the text to establish any one truth as its centre. It is this that we may posit as a key element in the establishment of an eccentric text: the way in which given truths, realities and focal points shift unpredictably throughout the narration. This can be clearly seen within “The Deluge” where the thread of the story does not follow a teleological objective but changes from one story to the next.

14 “The Deluge At Norderney” features different stories of creation – creations that fail and creations that appear to be successful. In all of them, it seems that the characters inhabit their own and each other’s fantasies, even down to the fact that their gendered identities appear phantasmic. Miss Malin begins the story of Calypso’s previous life, a story that involves different stages of creation, with the theatrical words, “I will lighten the darkness of this night to you, by impressing upon it the deeper darkness of Calypso’s story” (152). These words of introduction hold promise of a dramatic story and resemble the beginning of a tale of fiction rather than the account of a young person’s life. They hint at the fact that Miss Malin is not interested in relating simple facts but in entertaining her companions with her narration and that basic biographical facts do not seem enough to her to portray her goddaughter adequately. Miss Malin describes Calypso as a product of various creators, amongst them Calypso herself. The first person to influence and shape her was her misogynistic uncle Count August Platen-Hallermund, “Count Seraphina” as Miss Malin calls him. Count Seraphina is obsessed with the idea of turning his castle Angelshorn into a place devoid of any form of female existence. Yet, as Miss Malin recounts, “in the very centre of it he had, most awkwardly for himself and for her, this little girl about whom he had doubts as to whether or not she might pass as an angel” (152). Count August accepts his niece as long as she is a child and “[takes] pleasure in her company, for he had an eye for beauty and grace.” At this early stage of her life, Calypso does not appear explicitly female to her uncle. He takes great effort to dress her in boy’s clothes and suppress anything that could reveal that she is not that most “angelic” of creatures, a boy. Miss Malin believes that Seraphina

was much occupied by the thought of showing himself to the world as a conjuror, a high white Magician, capable of transforming that drop of blood of the devil himself, a girl, into that sweet object nearest to angels, which was a boy. (152, my emphasis)

15 It seems, then, that Count Seraphina has very clear gender notions – there are boys and girls and he prefers the former – but at the same time that he thinks that these gendered creatures can be turned into one or the other as desired. Miss Malin’s first interpretation of Count August’s efforts suggests that he wishes to turn Calypso into a boy to demonstrate the “conjuring” power of his will to the world. Furthermore, it suggests that Miss Malin is only able to think in pairs of oppositions, in this case of boys and girls and of heaven (“angel”) and hell (“devil”). Yet she has second thoughts and adds, “[or] 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” (152). This would mean that Seraphina wishes to turn Calypso into an unimaginably genderd objet d’art while denying her any human qualities, making her a “pure Von Platen.” It also, contrary to Malin’s first interpretation, annihilates any form of opposition and replaces it with non-existence (“neither boy nor girl”). Arguably, the quality of being “neither girl nor boy” could refer to androgyny. Androgyny, however, would consist of a fusion of male and female, a “both … and” of gendered attributes, while the use of “neither” annihilates both options without establishing a new one that could be seen as endowed with human qualities. Miss Malin’s interpretations of the Count’s actions, whether of her own invention or not, demonstrate that her way of thinking turns on a point of radical de-categorization in terms of human gender: neither the one nor the other nor a third consisting of a fusion of the two.