Winter stories
Winter Stories is a collection of eleven stories by the author Tania Blixen (better known as Karen Blixen ), which was published in 1942 simultaneously in the USA, England ("Winter's Tales") and Denmark (Danish: "Vinter-Eventyr"). The editions differ both in the arrangement of the stories and in the wording of the title; the German edition from 1985 discussed here follows the American first edition.
Summary
What these stories have in common is the question of the meaning of life and the possibilities of the individual to influence it. The stories are about the role of the artist, about fate and self-determination, about caution and cockiness, about rebellion and the arrangement with the circumstances.
As an author's comment, a stoic attitude towards life repeatedly illuminates the character's story: self-determination and human rebellion are ultimately helpless in the face of the plan of fate. Blixen alludes several times to Job in the Bible, who, although God had taken prosperity and health from him out of sheer arbitrariness, stubbornly sticks to his belief in God: The meaning of life lies in endurance, which for Blixen is not despair, but more a stoic attitude is.
All narratives are structured chronologically, final and consistently. In contrast to the naturalistic and realistic poems of her time, Blixen varies the contrast between fate and self-determination for her main characters in a romantic or fantastic or symbolic way. The ornamentation of the stories includes a multitude of references to tradition and literary history, which expand the scope of interpretation in European cultural history: the collective name Winter's Tales alludes at least to Shakespeare's entangled fate in " The Winter's Tale ". Through this variety of references to the Bible, Greco-Roman mythology , other European literatures and Nordic sagas , Blixen works with a very complex intertextuality and composition.
Linguistically, on the other hand, the stories are classics, in which the narrative discoveries of the early 20th century ( Joyce , Woolf , Faulkner ...) have not yet left any traces: Experienced speech or internal monologues are hardly used, the language does not distinguish between the individual styles of the characters, is almost devoid of leitmotifs, puns and metaphors. The narrative style is also tied to the 19th century through an omniscient narrator who mostly guides the reader's sympathy and who seldom constructs the mood swings and twists of the main characters, reduced to a few features, "from within", but rather asserts them "from the outside". Sometimes the main characters' feelings change a little too suddenly and too violently.
A strategy that captivates interest is the construction of the stories on more than one punch line: In several narratives ( The Young Man with the Carnation , The Invincible Slaveholders , ...) Blixen drives the plot beyond a first resolution to a second punch line and exceeds it thus the limits of naturalistic storytelling.
A second strategy is the use of several leitmotifs that are taken from at least one biblical or Greco-Roman myth and linked together in a new way. These motif mosaics sometimes reduce the figures to flat characters who are determined less by their personal characteristics than by the charged mythological and educational program.
A third recurring strategy is the use of stories within the narratives that connect the actions with previous experiences or motives. In this way, the stories gain a general human depth and meaning that opens up important questions. The texts thus have the classic claim of telling something essential about life and delivering on it in a way that is still interesting today.
All of the stories summarized here take place before the beginning of the 20th century; a typical beginning is: “ More than a century ago, spring came late to Denmark one year ago. “War is mentioned several times in the stories (Prussia-Denmark 1864; Germany-France 1870/71), but the occupation of Denmark by German troops from April 1940, two years before the first publication, is not mentioned at all. This distance to the contemporary problems of Danish society led to Blixen's literary isolation: Her "symbolizing and mythicizing narrative style was perceived as a foreign body in the politicized, socially realistic literary climate of Denmark and accordingly received with caution." Multiple, e.g. B. in the first and last story, Blixen also reflects in the present collection the alienation between herself and her audience.
Individual analyzes
The young man with the carnation
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The young writer Charles Despard, who was successful at an early age, is on his way to Italy with his wife to finish his second book. He is in a deep creative crisis and fears that he will have nothing more to write about his previous topic, the fate of the poor. He fears that the public and critics will soon regard him as “ superficial ”, he feels abandoned by God, his marriage seems like a trap, the hotel in Antwerp like his grave.
In the hotel he gets lost in a strange room and lies down in bed next to a woman sleeping there. When he wants to indulge further in his depression, someone requests entry into this room and Despard opens the door to an elegant young man with a pink carnation in his buttonhole. Both are surprised, but Despard registers an expression of expectation, happiness and laughing delight in the other for a moment before the stranger withdraws. Despard is electrified and decides to renew his own search for lost happiness: he leaves the hotel and rushes to the port to embark.
Instead, he sits down with three sailors in a pub, where the four of them drink rum and coffee. Time flies by telling each other stories - the seafarers half a dozen “ seaman's yarns ”, Despard the story of an unhappy love. The four of them split up in the morning, Despard goes back to his hotel and meets his wife, who had traveled ahead of him - and only now does he realize that he was lying next to a strange woman at the beginning of the night and thereby disrupted a rendezvous.
While he was going through the events one more time, a dispute with God ensues that is reminiscent of the Book of Job in the Bible. God invented this night like a fate writer for Despard in order to lead him back to his calling, and he makes a " covenant " with Despard, who write stories not for the audience or the critics, but only for God and no longer torment the Lord for it should get assigned “ when you need to write your books. "
Narrative
The narrator speaks from a position close to his main character, whose experiences and thoughts he reports chronologically linear in a "middle style" and balanced rhythm. The plot is explicitly relocated to Antwerp in the 1860s and the narrative structure is largely transparent and "real". The only exception is the effect of the mysterious young man with the carnation on the main character and her quarrel with the creator over inventing and writing stories on the last three pages.
This fantasy is the means of discussing the concept of storytelling with the Lord as the overauthor in the story. With this leap in reality, the narrator lifts the despair of the young writer ("Despard" = English "dispair", French "désespoir" = desperation), which can already be heard in the name, from the individual context of the main character and turns the story into a parable about the motivation of literary writing itself.
interpretation
The writer despairs at first because he is convinced that he can only avoid superficial writing if he knows his characters firsthand. But in the narrator contest with the three sailors in the pub, the stories served are apparently largely made up and yet full of disturbing catastrophes. The full experience of an author is therefore not a condition for a deeper effect.
The most important “ story ” for the main character is his eponymous encounter with the young man with the carnation, whose expression of happiness sets Despard's search for the meaning of life in motion. This facial expression, which Despard only understands in retrospect as anticipation of the rendezvous he has disturbed, this hint of happiness on the “surface” of this person is enough to lead him into the insights of that night. Not only the unexperienced, but also the improbable and fantastic are forms of narration.
Despard recognizes with his “ trained eye ” in these events arranged by God a “missing link” for new confidence in his literary abilities: “ Almighty God,” it wrung from the bottom of his heart, “as much as the sky is higher than that Earth, your stories are higher than our stories. "" In this story Blixen reflects on basic poetological questions (the relationship between an author and his audience that frames the writing process, the author's closeness to the events reported, the fictional substance required to motivate the characters) which she answers here in the mode of application: This story contains a literary creed of the author. In the last history of the collection, Charles Despard appears again and underlines the programmatic importance of the figure of the biblical Job.
Leidacker
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The Leidacker is a rye field somewhere in Denmark, where at the end of the 18th century the protagonists of this story meet as if on a stage: the old baron, whose last child died before his marriage and who then became the seventeen-year-old bride to ensure the inheritance marries his son, his young nephew, who was previously at the Danish embassy at the court of King George III. lived in England and Anne-Marie Piil, a widow from the Baron's village.
The villager's only son is suspected of arson and the baron, as his court lord, wants to settle the charges with a kind of divine judgment: He is free if his mother can harvest the rye field in one day and without help, which is otherwise the daily work of three men and is " a matter of life and death " to an old woman . The baron and also his nephew for a while take their position in the shade at the edge of the field and while they philosophize about the retributive divine justice and watch the work of the villager from her privileged position, work, morally supported by the community following her in the field, the mother literally to death for her accused son.
When the nephew's last appeal to his uncle to end the drama is rejected, the nephew decides to travel to America to a new world the following day and to renounce his uncle, who was previously respected as a father and now seen as a tyrant . But after a kind of suddenly dawning insight into the predestination by fate, into the suffering inflicted on everyone everywhere, he decides to stay in his homeland: fate would also lead him “ to the predetermined goal. “Out of respect for the work done by the villager who died in the field, the baron later has a stone with a chiseled sickle set up in the field.
Narrative
The story, poor in external plot, is told by the narrator from the perspective of the young nephew and the young wife of the old baron. Both the baron and the dramatic development in the field are mirrored in the feelings and attitudes of these two young people. The nephew, for example, came into contact with the ideas of the French Revolution in England and was filled with the idea of justice, and shortly after the marriage the young mistress of the house felt the as yet indefinite inadequacy of her role as the wife of the Barons. In a gradual increase in the hints and motifs, the drama of God's judgment on the Leidacker is preparing: The nephew feels “an ominous fear for the old man ”, the “ foreboding of disaster ” grows in him, the uncle declares tragedy a privilege of man, the conversation between uncle and nephew in the field escalates - until the nephew ends his protest in another impulsive turn of a sudden resignation to fate and returns to the young wife of the baron in the manor house. The up to then linear and final narrative with the hint of impending disaster ends - foreseeable - with the death of the mother struggling for her son and - surprisingly - with the ethical turn of the nephew, introduced as " revelation " and " knowledge of the unity of the universe ".
interpretation
In this story, life appears between all the characters and their dreams: the baron's children are taken away, his young wife's prospect of love, the nephew's hope of creating a new world, the poor villager's life. "Per aspera ad astra", about the rough paths to the light - this conciliatory motto only appears in the story for the main characters as its reversal: for them life is an increasingly multifaceted disappointment. Resigned consolation results only from the variety of catastrophes and from a stoic attitude towards predestination: “ He too, ” believes the nephew, “ would have to get to know suffering, tears and remorse and, precisely through them, the fullness of life. "
The heroine
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Because of the impending war between Prussia and France, a young English religious philosopher of twenty, Frederick Lamond, left Berlin in 1870 to await the turbulence that was to be expected in France. In a small town near the border, he meets a group of French people in a hotel, in which a young French lady, accompanied by a maid, is stranded shortly afterwards. She is a figure of extraordinary grace and majestic demeanor, a heroic " embodiment of ancient France " named Héloïse.
When the German troops advance against France, the French group is suspected of espionage, arrested and, despite the untenable allegations, handed over to German officers. For her release and permits, one of the officers demands that Héloïse, the young French woman , must show herself to him naked, “ in the robe of the goddess Venus ”. After a scene of almost silent contempt from Héloïse and protests from their compatriots, the group can finally travel on to Luxembourg. Before that, the beautiful French woman receives a bouquet of red roses from the highest ranking officer: “ For the heroine. "
Six years later, the now respected religious scholar meets the apparently aristocratic heroine again as the main attraction of a variety show, in which she appears completely naked.
Narrative
The story is told on several punch lines. In the end, the reader has learned that the heroic beauty comes from a small background and took her name from somewhere (she almost borrowed her family name from the philosopher Spinoza), that the offensive demand of the German officer amounts to Héloïse in her work clothes to see and that at that time at the border the most important triumph for them was not the victory over the German officer, but the partisanship of their compatriots for them caused by their self-confident demeanor. But Héloïse makes one caveat: if there had been normal, "respectable" women among the fellow travelers, they would probably have stripped them immediately without hesitation. But she also shows understanding towards them: “It is we who feel it [the passage of time], the women. Time takes so much from us. And in the end: everything. "And she understands even the young German officer:" He could desire something with all his heart. Not many men have that in them. ”In this relativization, what is immoral in various ways becomes an imposed fate and honesty just an unusual ornament of the time shortly before the ubiquitous Fall of Man.
interpretation
On the last five pages, a series of opposites determine the text: appearance and being, responsibility and forgiveness, voluntariness and coercion, solidarity of women and their competition ... Through this interlacing of motifs, a subsequent mystery is constructed in which some are related to some.
In addition, the punch lines and echoes of importance are narrated into the context of the historical story of Peter Abelard (1079–1142) and Heloisa (1100–1163): The young Englishman is also a religious philosopher and the German officer tries to do violence to this modern Héloïse too. But the old story of learning, seduction and violence in this new form becomes a life drama in the colors of female self-determination - possibly.
The story of the cabin boy
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The 15-year-old cabin boy Simon frees a peregrine falcon that had rested on the sailing ship during a storm lasting several days and got caught in old cordage.
Two years later, in a Norwegian port, he flirts with Nora, a young girl of no more than fourteen, from whom he negotiates a kiss with an orange - to be picked up the next evening. On the way to this kiss he is stopped by Ivan, a huge drunk Russian mate, who suddenly feels a "bear tenderness" for Simon, holds him tight and kisses him. Simon defends himself against "the disgusting feeling of male body heat", draws his knife, stabs and fatally injures the Russian mate. He gets his kiss from Nora and flees from the Russian sailors chasing him. Then he is dragged out of a pub by an old Lappin and hidden in her house. After the Russians searched the house in vain and then disappeared again, Frau Simon revealed that she was the peregrine falcon that he had rescued during the storm two years ago. But before the old woman lets him off to a long life, she vigorously repays him for the blow he had given the hawk that chopped him in the thumb.
interpretation
The basis of this fantastic story is the principle of compensatory justice, which already plays a role in the story of the “Leidacker” (see above). The guiltless entanglement of the peregrine falcon in the rope and of Simon in the arms of the Russian seaman and the good, saving deed at the beginning and at the end of the story illustrate a not only comforting, but also threatening fate principle of repetition: "We do not forget!" said the old Lappin. And that also applies to the impetuous Russian mate and his lost life.
The pearls
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Jensine, a 20-year-old bride and daughter of a wool merchant who had risen from poor circumstances, married Alexander in Copenhagen in 1864, a young guard officer from the old country nobility. On her wedding day he gives her a pearl necklace that his grandmother left him. The honeymoon takes the young couple into the Norwegian wilderness, where the bride becomes more and more aware of the carelessness and arrogance / trustworthiness of her groom towards various dangers. She is so appalled by this inwardly contradicting attitude that she decides to take a lover at home.
On the day before their return journey, a mishap happens: the pearl necklace breaks - but the village shoemaker threads the important pearls again before they leave. After Jensine discovered a new and very valuable pearl in the necklace at home, she wrote the shoemaker from Copenhagen a letter to Norway. The shoemaker replies that the pearl belonged to an unknown English lady, whose chain had also broken; He only found this one pearl after she had left.
Narrative
Two motifs determine this narrative: The first motif, backed up by an embedded story, is the variation of the motto “Shoemaker, stay with your last!”, Which sometimes refers to Jensine's origins, then to the abandonment of a craft or civil profession the poetry relates. For Jensine, a value judgment about this motto does not seem possible in one direction or the other: although on the one hand she crosses social boundaries and acts against the motto, she is respected; and although on the other hand the talented village shoemaker could not study and become a poet, he seems satisfied with the hardships of his life (and only here does Jensine feel "at home"), becomes an expert on folk tales that Henrik Ibsen visits and gives Jensine an extremely valuable pearl . Blixen even lets Ibsen appear in person and speak to Jensine: “In a hundred years a book will say: A little lady from Denmark advised him [Ibsen] to stick to his last. Unfortunately, he did not obey it. ”This literary reference is a joke with a deeper meaning, since it is one of the existential questions that the author must have asked herself long before its first publication.
The second motive is the different attitudes towards the dangers of life: While Jensine grew up in an atmosphere of caution and deliberation, her groom was mostly careless and thoughtless (one caveat: it is he who predicts the breakage of the chain). Alexander does not want to see the dangers of the Norwegian wilderness, just as he used to ignore his gambling debts or throw himself into a duel. “She couldn't imagine how he had managed to stay alive until this day.” Jensine is by no means a personification of wisdom: in the rapid extinction of her love, in tearing the pearl necklace and in ridicule of Ibsen's petty opinion Jensine's limits also show up. Alexander increases her fear for him by expressing his enthusiasm about going into the war with Prussia that is approaching Denmark: “'To be the widow of a hero,' he said, 'that would be exactly the right role for you, mine Sweetheart. '”It is this contrast of attitudes towards life that separates Jensine from Alexander as soon as they return from their honeymoon:“ Alexander had become a very small figure in the background of life; what he did or thought did not have the slightest significance. ”In a new way, this also confirms the motto that is already on the first page of the story:“ Shoemaker, stick to your last! ”
interpretation
The double motif structure of the preservation of tradition and the prudence of existence is predominantly linked to the figure of Jensine in this narrative and is connected with the eponymous pearl necklace to the double helix of a third motif, the primarily female search for a fulfilled life. Even if the questions are clearer than the poetic answers, the author finds fascinating images for the latter too. The story dares to use a few principles to cut aisles in the thicket of philosophical orientations. Individual, concrete, correct answers do not appear to be important, but only the process of questioning and weighing, which goes beyond Jensine's only twenty years of life experience.
The pearl necklace, that "rain of tears" suddenly falling at Jensine's feet as it tears, becomes a symbol of this supra-individual process of searching for a place to live in a dangerous world. This necklace has linked its wearers for centuries: Jensine with Alexander's grandmother, with the English lady, whose remaining pearl she is now wearing and, above all, with today's readers. Jensine once asks himself: "Were these pearls [...] a sign of victory or submission?" This constant question about female self-determination is also (or just or still) topical in today's confusing modernity, often no longer in literature dares to express himself about life.
The indomitable slaveholders
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The young and wealthy Dane Axel Leth stayed in a hotel in Baden-Baden in 1875 for a cure . There he meets a young lady of the best company, Mizzi by first name, who is accompanied by her governess, Frau Rabe. He falls in love with Mizzi, who remains equally reserved towards his attentions and those of all other young men. He is particularly fascinated by her frequent blushes during normal conversations, which he attributes to her “relentless respect for the truth”.
After a few days he found out that Mizzi was about to leave and visited a romantic pavilion in the forest, where he involuntarily overheard a conversation between Mizzi and her governess, who was actually her older sister. He learns that Mizzi has also fallen in love with him, but that the two sisters have only performed one farce in the hotel: the family is almost penniless and the daughters do not even have money because of their father's enormous gambling losses for others than their schoolgirl and governess disguise. Mizzi cannot imagine that Axel would love her if he knew "that I have nothing, not a single piece!"
These revelations cure Axel's rapturous love: "He walked away slowly, more mature than he came." But he decided to give the farce an additional twist: He drove ahead of the sisters to Stuttgart and had one there within a day Making livery and putting on make-up and costuming as servants in the Stuttgart theater the next morning, making use of old relationships. In this mask he travels back to Baden-Baden and faces the surprised sisters in the hotel as their servant Franz even with a cockade in the colors of their family. Mizzi continues to play her role, initially “pale as death” and beside herself with anger, caught in the reflection of her social farce by the man she loves. But apart from an envelope with a rose, Mizzi, this “martyr” of her social conceit, gives him no signs of curiosity, recognition or even consent. Therefore, they part ways in Stuttgart.
Narrative
The narrator accompanies the young Dane personally and describes his observations and feelings in a linear and final way. The only brief hint from a guest that Mizzi's father was a famous player is seamlessly combined with the later justification of the older sister: “Dad had a reputation to lose.” The poetic concept is conventional in this regard.
But firstly, the impression of the inappropriateness of the two sisters, which is already evident in Mizzi's schoolgirl skirt, is underlined by the use of metaphors which, unusual for Blixen, have an ironic meaning: the sisters, of whom the older is playing the governess, appear as a “newly blooming, fragrant rose and the thin black rod to which it was tied” and later the two are characterized as “two virgin Laocoons”.
Secondly, a modern short story would probably end with the sentence: "He walked away slowly, more mature than he came": All motifs have been extended to this point and the first punch line, the overheard conversation, heals the enthusiastically in love. It is part of Tania Blixen's narrative art to add the second farce to the punch line of the sister farce, which both protects the two acting sisters in their roles and also ironically exaggerates and punishes them. In this deepening of the misfortune of the female protagonists through the servant farce lies an increase in fate reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe , in which the author makes her heroines the victims of a male god of vengeance (see: Erinyen ).
interpretation
The theme is the escape of the two sisters “from raw reality” into the social roles of master and servant, lady and waitress: “Their helplessness was like that of a person without hands. Their entire existence was based on the constant, vigilant, tireless work of slaves. ”The theme is the self-bondage of the two young“ Laocoons ”, their“ paradoxical form of existence ”, which Blixen describes in an oxymoron as“ static rushing and fleeing ”. This narrative thus has a primarily female-emancipatory vanishing point.
The dreaming child
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Little Jens, the son of a poor and early deceased woman in Copenhagen, is cared for by an old laundress whose frequent visitor, who used to be a seamstress also in elegant houses, ignites the daydream of wealth and happiness with her reports in Jens: He is convinced that the only reason he feels so strange in that slum area is because he has somehow lost his lordly family.
Fate now wants Jens to meet the young businessman Jakob, who has been married to Emilie for five years without children. Both come from wealthy trading families and have been destined for each other since childhood. But Jakob was not Emilie's great love and Emilie was “too perfect” for Jakob, so that he started his first love adventure on the side.
Emilie and Jakob decide to have little Jens on trial for half a year and then maybe adopt them. With his “magic of dreams” Jens, the little “Cupid”, enchants all adults right from the start: Since he believes he has been “found again”, he approaches the members of the family and the household with the greatest of ease and with a strange “prior knowledge” “About her life opposite. With these expectations he prompts the others to “live according to his ideal”: “He had assigned all of them their place in his world and in this they now had to submit.”
But Jens, who has lived in the patrician house since October, falls ill in January incurably and dies at the end of March. The house falls “from its place in the clouds” and Emilie is speechless for months after Jens' death. Finally she informs Jakob and reveals to him that Jens is her biological child with her first big - in reality chaste-platonic - love. In order not to doubt his wife's understanding, Jacob decides to believe her.
Narrative
The story of the short guest role of little Jens in the life of Emilie and Jakob is told from the perspective of supra-individual traditions and regulations. Right at the beginning, the Plejelts, Jens' clan, are characterized, Emilie is presented as the “daughter of a long line of capable and honest merchants” and Jakob as “inconsistent”, as “often found in children of old, rich families”. Both Jens as the end of a branch of his clan and Emilie and Jakob as children of their patrician families live under the burden of their traditions and fates, embedded in a before and after that spans generations.
From the beginning, the characters are guided by predestination: “Prophecy” and “Fate” intervene in the paths of life and Jens' death seems to be due to the work of Parze Atropos , an ancient goddess of fate, or to the laws of nature: “There are young trees that, if you transplant them, drive sick and crooked roots, but never grow together with the ground. [...] they have to die soon. ”Jens' burial in the family grave of his host parents underscores on the one hand the continuing contact between the two lines of fate, that of the" family of cottagers and fishermen "and the patrician line, but on the other hand also the end of this short experiment by Providence.
This touch of the lines of fate is the dramatic core of the story. This creates new identities and opportunities for action for those involved: Emilie and Jakob's household is illuminated in a special way, their house becomes "Olympus, the abode of the gods". Jens, on the other hand, becomes gloomy after the first few weeks: How he represents “the other” with his dreams in his poor district, he soon shifts “the focus of his being” (186) away from his new surroundings to his “other house, the creepy dark and is dirty. ”Because Jens is not determined by reality, but by a“ longing ”that always pushes beyond it. With this inner return he personifies for a second time the imposition of a transcendence of the lines of fate, a challenge for everyone and ultimately a fatal uprooting for himself: what he ignites in others will burn him up.
interpretation
In the figure of little Jens, Blixen creates an allegory of the artist: Jens has “magical power”, he is “a poet” and “within the guild of poets, a humourist, a comic storyteller”, it was “the burlesque moment that attracted and inspired him . ”This figure thus also has features of the author's self-image: One of her pseudonyms was“ Isak Dinesen ”- the Hebrew“ Isak ”means laughter or: the one who laughs.
The artist is a “magician of dreams” who, like the biblical Joseph in the books of Moses, explicitly alludes to the blixes, influences the destinies as a dream interpreter and seer. Joseph's birth mother Rachel , according to the Bible, was Jacob's favorite wife and for a long time sterile; Before her first pregnancy, Rachel symbolically took over the other children of Jacob by taking the concubines giving birth on her lap - as Emilie also recently referred to Jens as her child. During his illness, Jens holds court in his room like Joseph, who had become powerful in Egypt: "The dreamer's bedside became a throne."
The dreams of art may enrich and influence life; the artist's early death, however, makes it clear that his work will only remain a fleeting ornament in the meandering stream of fate. Jens, who was “neither an Epicurean nor a fighter”, personifies the necessity of art that transcends reality and its stoic failure. Since this topic is dealt with in several of the stories collected here and Jens' greatest poetic effect falls in the "winter months" not mentioned in any other story, this middle story could play a key role in the title of the entire collection.
Alcmene
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A little girl, called Alkmene or Mene, fell victim to an intrigue in the first half of the 19th century and had to leave her parents' home in the upper class of Copenhagen. She is taken in by a couple of pastors who have been childless until then, on a lonely estate in Jutland. The pastor had been a promising young theologian in the capital, who, in order to escape an incipient arrogance and megalomania, sought the lonely country life and then became the teacher of the son of his landlord. Vilhelm and Alkmene become friends and, despite the age difference of about eight years, are "like brother and sister". The child of “rare, noble, overwhelming beauty” becomes the happiness of his foster parents, but the little Alcmene, fearless out of utter forlornness, runs away twice and, a few years later, offers a third time to the heir, who was expelled from the village because of a relationship with a girl to go with him on the country roads.
At the age of fourteen, Alkmene inherited a large fortune of three hundred thousand Reichstalers in gold and soon afterwards took advantage of her mother's absence (the old pastor had since died) to travel to Copenhagen with Vilhelm: she wanted to take part in the public decapitation of a notorious murderer. The reason for their deep emotional shock remains a mystery and both return to Jutland immediately after the execution.
After a leap in time of sixteen years, Vilhelm doesn’t meet Alkmene, but the old pastor’s wife again, who breeds sheep on a farm on the Danish west coast with her foster daughter. Vilhelm hears people in the area talking about Alkmenes' extreme thrift and fear of being wasted; he is “a horror” when he notices that the old woman is fetching their coffee for both of them from a can hidden from Alcmene. The pastor's wife justifies herself with a little sermon: What can we find better in the world “than the hard, honest work that the Lord has given us down here?” But it is correct: Alkmene is too hard on himself and still carries it today like when she came to the rectory as a child, "not even a shirt!"
Narrative
Only in this one story does Blixen use a first-person narrator, because from his perspective, Alkmene's origin, her behavior and her motives can no longer be explained and become a riddle for the experiencing self. But Blixen gives some pointers to understand the character of Alkmenes:
First, the name refers to the Alcmene of Greek mythology, who refused to accept her husband Amphitryon until he avenged the murder of her brothers: the trip to Copenhagen for the public execution of the murderer and her somewhat astonishing subsequent allegations against Vilhelm, her not having helped transpose this motif. The pastor, the little girl's foster father, also tried his hand at an Alcmene epic as a young man.
Second, Blixen explicitly alludes to the character of "Perdita", the abandoned or lost daughter from Shakespeare's Winter Tale . Having barely escaped death, Perdita grows up into a beautiful girl in a foreign country, but as a foster child of shepherds, she is not an appropriate match for the royal heir - as far as the parallels to Alkmene and Vilhelm. It is typical of Blixen's narrative style that, with the interlacing of motifs from "Alkmene" and "Perdita", she not only gives indications of the reality of the myths, but also of their very subjective use of them.
A third motif is the Protestant ethics of Alkmenes' foster parents, which is adopted by the girl and which has grown into a comprehensive hostility towards pleasure and corporeality by the middle of her life.
interpretation
The reference to the "Alkmene" of Greek mythology makes the untimely expectation of vengeance against Vilhelm clear, whose courtship is rejected by Alkmene with the reference to failure to provide assistance - in a sense, "Alkmene" gets in the way of "Perdita": In real life that is happy ending is probably not possible.
The exaggerated thrift of the peasant alcmene also shows the dangers of a puritanical provision of general interest, which turns into pure greed. Looking back in anger and looking ahead with gratuitous worry lead to an out-of-the-way and “crazy” life: beauty and wealth are enjoyed in accurate poverty. Alkmenes' “double mistake” is her life in the past and future, but not in the now. This “carpe diem” is the alternative suggested by Blixen in the figure of Vilhelm.
The fish
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The Danish King Erik V. Klipping (1249–1286) rides in 1276 to one of his servants, "Granze" by name, to see the future for himself. He is accompanied by a young scholar, Sune, who is a childhood friend but also a member of a clan of unruly vassals. The two meet Granze at his hut on the beach, in front of which he is pulling a large fish out of the water with his net. While gutting the fish, Granze discovers a valuable ring in his stomach, which he gives to the king. Sune recognizes the ring: a week ago the beautiful wife of the royal marshal was wearing it. The last paragraph tells that the king gives this ring back to the wife of his marshal, seduces her and is later murdered by his vassal for it.
Narrative
The king is portrayed as a violent and at the same time thoughtful ruler who, in the loneliness caused by his position, has to ally himself with the forces that are not yet visible below the horizon. The seer Granze (the Danish word "graense" means the border or dividing line) becomes his mediator between the present and the future, who not only pulls the fish onto the beach, the border between sea and land, but also leads the king to his fate . Sune, who recognizes the ring again, shows the king the direction of his self-inflicted doom.
interpretation
The intention of the king, declared in dialogue with his God, to turn away from the world and its vanities for the sake of his soul, does not last long. On the way to the beach, he asked his friend Sune whether it was the will of the Lord “that mankind can never be happy, but must forever long for things that they do not have and that may not be found anywhere are. ”But in the afternoon the king began to participate in his downfall. A different ending to the story might be possible with a magnitude both Christian and Stoic.
Peter and Rosa
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Fifteen-year-old Peter was born out of wedlock and grew up with his uncle, who is a pastor in a village on the Great Belt. Peter, who is also to become a pastor, decides to run away and become a seaman. Peter talks about his plans with Rosa, the pastor's daughter, who is the same age. Both oppose in a rather quiet or decent way and the dream world of one appears "like an echo" of the other. Rosa promises to help him with Peter's chaste nightly visit to her room, but she reveals Peter's plans the next morning to her father, who puts the money into his hand with which to buy a cow. Nevertheless, Peter is allowed to accompany her to her godmother in Elsinore.
In the kitchen of the rectory, a fishwife tells that the ice cover in the sound is breaking open due to the warmth and Peter, restless and looking forward to his escape, persuades Rosa to look at the melting ice with him. At the sound they walk far out onto the crackling ice, step onto a large ice floe that separates from the fixed ice , then breaks and buries both of them under itself: “The current was strong; in a few moments they were torn down, one in the other's arms. "
Narrative
The narrative gesture is that of a rapprochement between the two main characters, who develop at different speeds as children, but develop in a common direction with puberty. The impression of increased drama is underlined by the shortening of the narrated time: two thirds of the text deal with the ten years of life before these events, the last third relates to the hour before the death of the children.
interpretation
In a typical Blixen construction, several motifs are linked to one another in this story: First of all, on the plot level, there is an abundance of mystical hints of the fate leading to an early death, which will prevail against the children's life plans. As in other stories, predestination weaves an inescapable web of futility for the individual.
A second aspect is the connection between Rosa's betrayal of Peter and the handing over of the 30 coins intended for the purchase of the cow, her “ Judas wage ”; The Christian myth of betrayal and the triumph of love thus reveals itself to Rosa and Peter, thus proving its timeless validity.
A third meaning lies beyond the character action on a symbolic level: Peter and Rosa develop similar and common longings in a phase of life of sexual awakening and the separation from the parental home. Their perspective is changing more and more from being next to each other as children to gradually developing mutual attention to a joint physical hug at the last moment of their lives: the hike on the uncertain ice and the common death become symbols of the departure into a new, one of their own, a common world.
A comforting story
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Charles Despard, the main character in the first story of this collection, now lives in Paris and is a successful, but at the moment, depressed writer: his wife has left him and has not yet found the inspiration for a new book. In a café he meets his old friend Aeneas Snell, who, like Aeneas in Greco-Roman mythology, has had some experience with “dramas and catastrophes”. Despard complains to Aeneas about the cruelty of the audience, although without art no audience and without an audience no art is possible. Despard compares himself with God, who lets the wealthy and pious Job plunge into misfortune to test his faith: "And Job wants to be as little as the audience of the Lord as my audience wants to be mine." But while in the Bible Job is rewarded for his steadfastness in the end, Despard is not sure about the effect of his literary demands: Why shouldn't he “just give up writing and leave the audience in peace? […] What use is, in the end, art to people? ".
Despard's friend Aeneas does not intervene in the question of meaning by arguing, but rather with a parable of three quarters of the text: The heir to the throne of the Persian court explores - like Harun-al-Raschid in the stories from 1000 and one nights - often as Beggar disguises the opinions of his people. For his and her own protection, the viziers instruct the interlocutors of their future master as best they can. A real beggar who looks like the prince in appearance and form is soon regarded by the people as the prince in disguise and treated with the greatest respect; but the beggar, of course, cannot accept the benevolent gifts of other poor people without risking their respect and his reputation for frugality. The prince seeks out the beggar and they recognize in conversation that each one increases the fame of the other in what he does. “My lord”, the beggar says to the prince, “you and I, the rich and the poor of this world, are two locked shrines, each of which contains the key to the other.” - a formula used three times for the necessary coexistence of opposites.
Narrative
Self-reference and a mythological double context condense into a program story that takes up the theme of the beginning of the collection: For whom and how should an author write, whom should he be allowed to “punish”? As the story progresses, this initial reference becomes a dialectical investigation of reflective relationships outside of literary production.
interpretation
In this last story of the collection, Job of the Bible again becomes the image for Blixen's poetic work: while in the first story, The Young Man with the Carnation , the poet corresponds to the figure of Job, the audience now takes the position of the helpless victim more authorially / divine arbitrariness. Possibly this change of role points to a growing self-confidence of the artist, but perhaps the figure of the biblical Job is also just a parable and personification of the painful experience of the author herself. Perhaps the story is comforting in the sense that an unloved author also makes his contribution To make an audience what it is.
literature
- Tania Blixen: Winter Stories. Translated from English by Jürgen Schweier. DVA, Stuttgart 1985, ISBN 3-421-06242-0 .
Individual evidence
- ^ Jürgen Glauser: Scandinavian literary history. Metzler, 2006, p. 281