The Ring (Historical Context)

Historical Context

Diminishing Danish Influence

Militarily, economically, and artistically, Denmark was a much more influential nation in the nineteenth century that it would be in the twentieth. This fact is significant for an understanding of Isak Dinesen (1885-1962), whose life straddles both centuries. When the nineteenth century began, Denmark controlled an empire: Iceland, Greenland, the Faeroe Islands, and the Danish Virgin Islands were all territories of the Danish crown, and so was the region of Slesvig-Holstein, a corner of the European continent which would, in the war of 1864, fall under the control of Prussia. Not only did Denmark begin the nineteenth century both as a power and with an empire, but in the middle of that century it suffered a humiliating defeat. One effect of the loss was to disabuse the Danes of further geopolitical ambitions and provoke them to seek status by cultural means. For a small country, Denmark could already, by mid-century, claim a good share of Europe’s literary and artistic achievement, not least in the work of well-known and respected writers like Hans Christian Andersen, Adam Oehlenschlager, Meir Goldschmidt, Jens-Peter Jacobsen, Soren Kierkegaard, and Georg Brandes. Even the redoubtable Henrik Ibsen, though a Norwegian, wrote in Danish and could be considered part of Danish literature. As for Brandes, he was, in the last third of the nineteenth century, the most influential literary critic in Europe, a herald and explicator of the burgeoning, self-conscious movement of artistic modernity. In painting, Edvard Munch broke ground as an exponent of the expressionist school.

Dinesen came of age exactly at the turn of the century, an era of sophistication. She enrolled as a student in Det Kongelige Akademi, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, in Copenhagen, aiming at making a career as a painter. It did not work out that way, but in Copenhagen Dinesen was exposed to the leading currents of contemporary thought and art. Under the influence of Brandes, for example, she made herself familiar with the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, the radical German thinker popularized by Brandes in a widely disseminated book called Aristocratic Radicalism, whose title in many ways describes Dinesen’s own outlook. Nietzsche argued that all the inherited “values” of European civilization were exhausted of their relevancy and that a new breed of men was required to create new values to replace the dead ones. In Nietzsche’s view, life was entirely “immanent,” that is, life was what people might make of it, and if their aims were heroic, then life itself would be heroic; but if their aims were those of shopkeepers and bureaucrats, the bourgeoisie, then life would be a paltry affair of routine and habit. In the absence of God, urged Nietzsche, the locus of all genuine values was art; under Nietzsche’s dispensation, the justification of life lay in beauty, not in worship.

Just as the war with Prussia in 1864 chastened Denmark, so too did the World War of 1914 to 1918 chasten all of Europe. The traditionalists who thought that tradition itself formed a bulwark against catastrophe and the radicals who thought that the unleashing of the will would lead to a utopia of supermen — all found that humanity was a fragile thing that could collapse out of control if not supervised with the utmost vigilance. Although Denmark had kept out of the war, Dinesen herself, in Kenya at the time, was in it, for her farm lay in the skirmishing ground between British and German forces in East Africa. Dinesen returned to a Europe devastated by war, intoxicated by the “Roaring Twenties,” headed for financial collapse in a worldwide depression (1929), and plunging into an era of fascism and nationalism. In the heady atmosphere of the 1920s, the leading lights in art and literature were self-proclaimed modernists, either experimentalists like James Joyce in England or social realists like Tom Kristensen in Denmark. Although a modernist in her outlook (she remained a Nietzschean, even after the war), Dinesen belonged to a group of Scandinavian writers who were severe critics of modernism, advocates of a type of Gothic or preindustrial ethos.

Two writers are important in this regard: Knut Hamsun and Sigrid Undset, both Norwegians. Hamsun’s novels celebrate the world of the Norwegian coastal village, a world of fishermen and small farmers; Undset’s look back to the medieval period, when Christianity was newly consolidated in Scandinavia and the fishing and farming communities described in Dinesen’s tales had found their basic form. In her Gothicism, Undset is particularly close to Dinesen, and her trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter (1920-22) explores on an epic scale the same issues that are central for Dinesen. But Dinesen’s earliest significant work, the Seven Gothic Tales, appeared only in 1937, much later than Undset’s work; Anecdotes of Destiny belongs to the mid-1950s. Meanwhile, the heritage of English literature exerted some influence on Dinesen, who spoke the language well enough to write the Seven Gothic Tales in English. Shakespeare meant a great deal to her, and so did Edgar Allan Poe, an earlier critic of modern life and another expert teller of the short story.

The Europe of the height of Dinesen’s career (1937-1957) saw even more tumult than the Europe of her youth. A second world war did not spare Denmark but engulfed it; the Nazis’ professed admiration for Nietzsche and his concept of the “superman” tainted the Brandesian notion of aristocratic radicalism so dear to Dinesen. Unsullied by twentieth-century developments, however, and at last coming into his own as an important thinker was Kierkegaard, a Christian psychologist and aesthetician who became increasingly visible as a factor in Dinesen’s outlook. For Kierkegaard, human life consisted of profoundly consequential choices, each one of them an “either-or” which admitted no compromise and demanded action. Before Nietzsche, before Freud, Kierkegaard had conducted a brilliant and disturbing analysis of human motives, and Dinesen was not the only one during the Second World War and after to turn to him in qualified preference to the now-suspect Nietzsche.

Dinesen’s last decade (1952-1962) belonged to the Cold War and to the increasing possibility of nuclear destruction. The impulses of the would-be superman were now more dangerous than ever, but were the circumstances of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century landed gentry more relevant to the modern condition than they had been before or only less relevant than ever? It was still an assertion of aristocratic radicalism to pay no attention to the critics, to depend on the discernment of sensitive readers, and to forge ahead according to one’s own lights. In her last years, the facts of the contemporary world, of milieu, diminished in importance for Dinesen. She exerted her own influence rather than taking her cues from the present.