10.3726/85607_157

The Effects of Voice in Isak Dinesen’s “The Dreamers”

Barbara Straumann

Baroness , who wrote under her masculine pen-name Isak Dinesen1, adopts a remarkable pose: in a photograph taken in 1954, the writer can be seen to wear a pierrot costume she already possessed in her youth (Ill. 1).2 She fixes the viewer with her alert look and smiles enigmatically. Her heavy make-up and the spectacular way in which she is lit underline the theatricality and flamboyance of Dinesen’s self-dramatization, while at the same time her thin figure almost disappears under the ample folds of her white costume and the semi-transparent fabric framing her face. Her portrait and pseudonym both suggest a complex dialectic of self-presentation and self-masking, and they also refer us to the multiple self-transformations that characterized her biography. It was after she had lost her African farm and had to return to her native that Blixen began to write professionally in her late forties. In 1934 she published her first book , through which she established herself as the internationally renowned storyteller Isak Dinesen. As well as writing literary tales, Dinesen turned herself into narrative. She fashioned herself as a fictionalized persona by claiming, for instance, that she was three thousand years old and had already dined with Socrates.3 As suggested by the various forms of her self-fashioning, masks and masquerades were crucial to Dinesen’s artistic self-expression. Although more could be said about the self-performance of Dinesen in her photographic portrait, this kind of self-fashioning can also be traced in her writing. Rather than with the biography of

1 Blixen’s nom de plume is, strictly speaking, a half-pseudonym. Dinesen was her maiden name, while the assumed Hebrew name Isak means “the one who laughs”. Blixen had several nicknames such as Tanne and Tania and she acquired a number of other pseudonyms, including Osceola and Lord Byron. See Judith THURMAN, Isak Dinesen. The Life of a Storyteller, New York: Picador, 1995, 5. 2 Further images can be found in the richly illustrated biography by Frans LASSON and Clara SVENDSEN, The Life and Destiny of Isak Dinesen, Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1970. 3 Thurman, Isak Dinesen. The Life of a Storyteller, 331. Also see Susan BRANTLY, “Isak Dinesen. The Danish Scheherazade”, Scandinavian Review 90.2 (2002), 58–66, 66.

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Blixen4, I am concerned with the poetics of Dinesen, who asserted that she had promised her soul to the devil so that she could turn her life into tales.5 What is the cultural position of Dinesen’s voice as an author, writer and storyteller? How is her notion of self- expression reflected by her treatment of textual voices in “The Dreamers”? What can theories of the voice contribute to a reading of literary texts? And in what ways does the voice allow us to reflect on the aesthetic specificity of narrative fiction? The model Dinesen chose for herself as an artist was the Oriental storyteller Scheherazade. As is well known, Scheherazade, in One Thousand and One Nights, manages to stave off death by entertaining the king with her stories. She forces him to postpone her execution by always interrupting her narration at dawn and resuming her tales the following night. Scheherazade’s storytelling, in other words, defies closure because ending the dialogue with the other, the king, would be fatal. Instead her constant caesuras allow her to survive by perpetually modulating her narrative role.6 Today we remember Dinesen not so much as an oral storyteller7, but as a writer of literary tales characterized by a highly complex textuality. Nevertheless her writing is clearly inspired by Scheherazade’s narrative dialogue. For the strategic survival of the archetypal storyteller in One Thousand and One Nights, dialogue is literally vital, and it also plays a pivotal role for Dinesen’s voice as an artist. As a storyteller, she conceives of her art as fundamentally dialogical, that is, as a performance which addresses and thus creates the very audience by which it is also itself constituted. This fundamental dialogism becomes particularly palpable in “The

4 For a detailed account of Blixen’s life, see Thurman’s standard biography Isak Dinesen. The Life of a Storyteller. 5 See Thurman, Isak Dinesen. The Life of a Storyteller, 140, 258, 337, as well as Brantly, “Isak Dinesen. The Danish Scheherazade”, 66. Blixen felt that she had been cut off from life after realizing that she had contracted a severe form of from her husband and after she lost both her life and her lover in Africa. It was against this backdrop that she turned to a second life in her writing and, as part of her artistic practice, fashioned herself as a living artefact. 6 References to Dinesen’s artistic identification with the figure of Scheherazade are abundant in Dinesen criticism. On Scheherazade and the dialogism of her storytelling, see Elisabeth BRONFEN, “‘Sheherazade Saw the Dawn and Fell Silent Discreetly’. The Relationship Between Narration and Death in Isak Dinesen’s Tales”, Nordica 3 (1986), 151–175. 7 Rather than reading her stories out in their written version, Dinesen liked to recite them from memory. Her image as a modern-day Scheherazade was further confirmed by the frequent appearances she made on the radio. ’s biopic (1985) emphasizes Blixen’s live storytelling by suggesting that it was Blixen’s narrative entertainment of and dialogue with her friend and lover Denys Finch Hatton that brought out her imagination and talent as a storyteller. As mentioned by Thurman, the motto of his family was, fittingly enough, “I shall answer”. Thurman, Isak Dinesen. The Life of a Storyteller, 207. The Effects of Voice in Isak Dinesen’s “The Dreamers” 159

Dreamers”, one of the stories in Seven Gothic Tales.8 Set in mid- nineteenth-century Europe, the narrative revolves around a spectacular soprano who loses her professional voice and role as a singer but who gains another form of self-expression. Her singing voice falls silent, but voice and dialogue reemerge as resonant effects in the story as well as in the writing of the text as such. As has been often noted, the voice is a curiously elusive phenomenon, which cannot be pinned down to a single category. The voice oscillates between spirit and body, materiality and idea, presence and evanescence.9 Vocal sounds, produced in and through material bodies, can have a powerful impact on the listener, but they also start to fade away as soon as they are vocalized. Over and above the concrete sound of voices, which can actually be heard, the voice also carries a wide range of metaphoric associations, including one’s “inner voice” or the political question of what it means to “have a voice of one’s own”. Traditionally the voice has often been understood as a privileged marker of indi- vidual selfhood. After all the timbre of each voice is distinctive and unique. At the same time, the voice also mediates between the individual and the collective, between the self and the other. As suggested by Scheherazade’s storytelling, dialogue is crucial for the constitution of an individual voice: it is only by addressing the other and by actually being heard that an individual voice comes into existence. Moreover, the voice is what hooks individuals into cultural communities. Individual voices never just resonate with themselves alone, but they always also echo with other cultural voices, signs and texts. Indeed, subjects are defined by the very fact that they are spoken and/or sung by language, culture and history.

8 Isak DINESEN, “The Dreamers” (1934), Seven Gothic Tales, London: Putnam, 1969, 327–430. 9 For a description of the voice as a threshold phenomenon, see Doris KOLESCH and Sybille KRÄMER in their introduction to the interdisciplinary collection of essays Stimme. Annäherung an ein Phänomen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006, 7–15, 12. The relatively recent turn to issues of voice in the areas of philosophy, media, performance and cultural studies is reflected by a great number of publications, including Karl-Heinz GÖTTERT, Geschichte der Stimme, München: Fink, 1998; Steven CONNOR, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventri- loquism, Oxford: University Press, 2000; Jonathan RÉE, I See a Voice: A Philosophical History, London: Flamingo, 2000; Friedrich KITTLER, Thomas MACHO and Sigrid WEIGEL (eds.), Zwischen Rauschen und Offenbarung: Zur Kultur- und Mediengeschichte der Stimme, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2002; Cornelia EPPING-JÄGER and Erika LINZ (eds.), Medien/Stimmen, Köln: DuMont, 2003; Brigitte FELDERER (ed.), Phonorama. Eine Kulturgeschichte der Stimme als Medium, Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2004; Doris KOLESCH and Jenny SCHRÖDL, eds., Kunst- Stimmen, Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2004; Thomas TRUMMER (ed.), Voice and Void, Ridgefield: The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 2007; Doris KOLESCH, Vito PINTO and Jenny SCHRÖDL (eds.), Stimm-Welten: Philosophische, medientheoretische und ästhetische Perspektiven, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009. 160 Barbara Straumann

In A Voice and Nothing More, Mladen Dolar further suggests that the voice forms a surplus or excess.10 There is a dimension of voice which exceeds verbal language. Voices do not only and not always transport semantic meaning, but they also harbour a disturbing surplus. Dolar’s point of departure is Jacques Derrida’s well-known critique of Western phonocentrism.11 Ever since Plato, Derrida argues, the metaphysics of presence has founded itself on the voice. In other words, the individual who hears him- or herself speak serves as a trope for transparent meaning and self-presence, while writing is relegated to a mere supplement, secondary to the fullness of speech. However, as Dolar points out, there is an aspect of voice which disrupts, rather than supports, self-presence. Although the voice can inspire a reassuring sense of self-identity, there is a vocal dimension which moves us beyond symbolic and imaginary codes. The voice is uniquely familiar but also uniquely strange. What is, therefore, at stake is a fundamental ambivalence: the constitution and disruption of the self in and through the voice. But how can the voice be conceptualized for a discussion of literary texts? Clearly a theory of the voice such as Dolar’s is not a text theory. Nor are there any concrete voices in narrative fiction that could actually be heard. The voice, in other words, is alien to the type of literary language under discussion. Nevertheless lite- rary texts can be seen to evoke virtually what escapes them medially. How does writing create voice as an aesthetic effect? Similar to concrete voices, which are shot through with various colours, affects, moods and intonations, textual voices also mark a surplus – namely in the form of a multi-layered complexity they introduce into a text. Important concepts here are Mikhail Bakhtin’s notions of dialogue, polyphony and heteroglossia, which he uses to describe the discourse of the novel as a battleground of different, and potentially differing, voices.12 According to Bakhtin, narrative fiction occupies a special status as a literary genre and aesthetic medium which juxtaposes various textual voices and hence confronts different social accents, positions and perspectives. It is through the ideological discord of various character voices and

10 Mladen DOLAR, A Voice and Nothing More, Cambridge MA, London: MIT Press, 2006. 11 Jacques DERRIDA, Of Grammatology (1967), Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. 12 Mikhail BAKHTIN, “Discourse in the Novel”, in: Michael Holquist (ed.), The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981, 259–422. Also note Michael HOLQUIST’s discussion of dialogue in his introduction to Bakhtin, Dialogism. Bakhtin and His World, London, New York: Routledge, 1990. The Effects of Voice in Isak Dinesen’s “The Dreamers” 161 those of the narrator and the implied author that narrative fiction puts the multiplicity of textual voices centre stage. Moreover, I suggest that we can speak of a “voice effect” in analogy to what Shoshana Felman calls a “reading effect”.13 As Felman points out, the effect of a text lies not simply in its thematic aspects but also in the ways in which it speaks to its readers.14 Its effect resides in our relation to the text as well as in the impact the text has on us. As readers and critics, we not only interpret but also actively reproduce the text.15 This is an idea that can be fruitfully transferred to the phenomenon of the voice not just because any voice in narrative fiction is entirely spectral and acousmatic since it has to be evoked by the reader in the solitary act of reading. The “voice effect”, as I define it, also allows us to bring into play the tone or “voice” of a literary text as we pay attention to, and indeed foreground, the dialogue and/or dissonance between various textual voices. My close reading of “The Dreamers” will illustrate what we gain by focusing on the effects of voice. There are four different levels of voice that I want to isolate in Dinesen’s text: 1) the voice as a narrative theme, 2) the voice as a trope of self-expression, 3) the voices in the text, and 4) the “voice” of the text. Unsurprisingly, the most obvious dimension in Dinesen’s story about a singer is the voice as a narrative theme. Who is the singer Pellegrina Leoni? How is her voice de- scribed? And how does she construct herself through her role as a singer? As pointed out by her impresario, the old Jew Marcus Cocoza, the star performer Pellegrina Leoni is characterized by two great passions.

‘The first [of Pellegrina Leoni’s two great passions] was her passion for the great soprano, Pellegrina Leoni. […] In her relation to this idol she had no forbearance and no rest. […] She worked in the service of Pellegrina Leoni like a slave under the whip, weeping, dying at times, when it was demanded of her. ‘She was a devil to the other women of the opera, for she needs must have all the parts for Pellegrina. She was indignant because it was impossible for her to perform two rôles within the same opera. […]

13 Shoshana FELMAN, “Writing and Madness – From ‘Henry James: Madness and the Risks of Practice (Turning the Screw of Interpretation)’”, The Claims of Literature. A Shoshana Felman Reader, ed. Emily Sun, Eyal Peretz and Ulrich Baer, New York: Fordham University Press, 2007, 15–50, 15–22. 14 Felman, “Writing and Madness”, 18. 15 Felman, “Writing and Madness”, 21. 162 Barbara Straumann

‘And the other great passion […] of this great heart was her love for the audience. And that was not for the great people […] but for her galleries. Those poor people of the back streets and market places. […] she loved them beyond everything in the world. […] And she was adored by the people.’ (402–405)

Remarkable in this characterization of Pellegrina Leoni is the manner in which the individual and the collective dimensions of the singer’s voice are mutually implicated. It is in dialogic ex- change with her rapt audience and the operatic system as a whole that the protagonist constitutes herself as a star performer. She sings for the “poor people”, who in turn confirm her in her social role as a universally adored public voice. But not only this. Driven by her boundless love for her audience and her unconditional commitment to her star persona, Pellegrina sacrifices herself in order to turn her own figure into an object of quasi-religious devotion, which is worshipped both by herself and her audience: “In her relation to this idol she had no forbearance and no rest. […] She worked in the service of Pellegrina Leoni like a slave under the whip […].” On the one hand, the voice of Pellegrina Leoni is composite, multiple and plural because she performs various operatic roles. When necessary, that is, “when it was demanded of her”, Pellegrina will weep and die. She undergoes the numerous deaths demanded by the operatic scripts and scores only to constantly resurrect herself on stage. On the other hand, the passage implies that her voice becomes monologic in so far as she privileges one single role. As mentioned by Marcus, “she needs must have all the parts for Pellegrina”. Rather than actually transforming herself into the various operatic figures she enacts, she claims all parts so as to use them as her own vehicle and subsume them under her one superlative role, “the great soprano, Pellegrina Leoni”. When a fire breaks out during a performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the opera house in Milan, the singer is hit by a falling beam. She makes a narrow escape from death, but loses her singing voice as a result of the shock. How is this near-fatal accident to be read? Dinesen’s tale can be seen to rewrite nineteenth-century narratives in which female performer figures, such as the impro- viser and genius Corinne in Germaine de Staël’s novel Corinne ou l’Italie (1807), tend to eventually lose their voice.16 Seemingly in this

16 Further examples include the demonized diva Alcharisi in George ELIOT’s Daniel Deronda (1876), or the political speaker Verena Tarrant in Henry JAMES’s The Bostonians (1886). The Effects of Voice in Isak Dinesen’s “The Dreamers” 163 tradition, “The Dreamers” reverberates with a tragic sense of loss. The singer leaves the stage never to be heard again. However, by using what would be a classic ending in a nineteenth-century text as her point of departure, Dinesen reshifts the narrative argument. In fact, the accident can be seen to point to a deadlock in Pellegrina’s persona as a singer. Investing everything in one single role, the incident suggests, is fatal. Dinesen’s protagonist loses her professional voice and her social role as a singer, but she gains a different form of self- expression. After the star soprano Pellegrina Leoni has been buried at a public fake funeral, she explains to her former impresario: “‘There are many that I can be. […] I will not be one person again, Marcus, I will be always many persons from now. Never again will I have my heart and my whole life bound up with one woman, to suffer so much’” (417–418). What Pellegrina opts for is a protean performance of the self. Having realized the lethal effects of a single self-construction, she fragments her former persona into a myriad of masks and masquerades: “‘I will not be one person again’”, and “‘there are many that I can be’”. Following her wish never again to be trapped and caught up in one single role, Pellegrina not only turns into a traveller but also adopts a new mask for each lover she encounters on her journey. To the Englishman Lincoln Forsner in Rome, she presents herself as the courtesan Olalla, to Friedrich Hohenemser in Lucerne as the milliner and revolutionary Madame Lola, and to Baron Guildenstern in Saumur as the saint Rosalba. This radicalized roleplay suggests at once a critical distance from and a vibrant expression of the self. It is by speaking through her multiple masks and personas that the archperformer realizes who she is. The actual theatre may have burnt down, but for Pellegrina, the wanderer, all the world becomes a stage. The multiple self- dramatizations on which she embarks after the symbolic burial of her singer persona follow a typically modernist trajectory. By transposing her theatrical scenarios into everyday life, she recreates herself as her own work of art. She keeps transforming herself not unlike the protagonist in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), who turns into a purely aesthetic sign of writing and, in so doing, blurs any boundaries between text and self. Although, or rather because Pellegrina has lost her voice as a singer, she has a “voice” of her own, and this time her self-expression is indeed multiple and dialogic. In keeping with the theatricalization of her masks and 164 Barbara Straumann disguises, her self-performances do not give expression to any psychological interiority. Instead the performer can be described as the sum of the effects which her vibrant vitality and star-like luminosity have on her various lovers. Pellegrina may not be a storyteller in the literal sense of the word, but like Scheherazade she is in constant dialogue. Even though she no longer performs in the public arena of the profes- sional theatre, her self-performance depends on the other. It is in dialogue with preexisting cultural scripts that she adopts and modulates her multiple masks, roles and disguises.17 Likewise she creates and transforms herself by always addressing an audience. Her masks and masquerades require an addressee, which is the reason why she presents each of her disguises to another lover. Yet her dialogic self-stagings also resemble Scheherazade’s storytelling in hinging on a similar principle of interruption. Whenever Pellegrina starts to feel tied down to a particular role, Marcus helps her disappear without trace and put on a new mask. Scheherazade survives the next morning because of the cliffhangers she builds into her storytelling. In a similar vein, Pellegrina’s self-authorship is sustained by a continual reinvention and renewal. As a result, her self-performance is one of fleeting evanescence, of continual disappearance and reemergence. Pellegrina serves as a figure who reflects Dinesen’s aesthetics. She refers us to a voice which disappears and then resounds as pure text. Her voice can no longer be attached to a person but instead dissolves into writing. At the same time, it is important to note that her voice is refracted and mediated by the narration of other character voices. Her stellar career, the loss of her voice and her adoption of multiple roles are the chronological events of the story we can reconstruct once we reach the end of “The Dreamers”. The actual structure of the text, however, consists of several narratives that frame Pellegrina, who is almost the only figure not to tell a story: a first-level narrative of the authorial narrator frames a second-level narrative, that is, the story that Lincoln Forsner tells to the famous but weary storyteller Mira Jama on a full-moon

17 “The Dreamers” can be seen to prefigure Judith Butler’s notion of identity as performance, that is the idea that identity is always constituted by a series of performative acts in which cultural codes and norms are both cited and resignified. See Judith BUTLER, Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York, London: Routledge, 1990. The appropriation of stereotypical images of femininity also resonates with Joan RIVIÈRE’s contemporaneous text entitled “Womanliness as a Masquerade” (1929) in: Formations of Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan, London, New York: Routledge, 1986, 35–44. The Effects of Voice in Isak Dinesen’s “The Dreamers” 165 night, whilst their ship is sailing off the African coast on the Indian Ocean. According to Lincoln, he was searching for the prostitute Olalla, who had made him a dreamer, when he met his two friends, Hohenemser and Guildenstern, who, in turn, told him their stories about Madame Lola and Rosalba. This complex narrative structure refers us to the voices in the text or, as Bakhtin would say, its narrative polyphony. According to Bakhtin, narrative fiction is inherently dialogic. It stages the dissonance between various narrator and character voices as well as their different social positions, interests and accents. “The Dreamers” enacts a heightened form of polyphony, where the tension is not just between the various character-narrators, namely Lincoln, Hohenemser and Guildenstern, all of whom derive a narcissistic sense of identity from their beloved object. The fiercest conflict can be observed between their narrative desire and Pellegrina’s protean performances. While Pellegrina keeps rein- venting herself so as to avoid being read and appropriated, each of the three men seeks to reduce her to the particular role which she plays in his story. This conflict comes to a climax on a stormy winter night. The three men have just finished telling each other their stories about Olalla, Madame Lola and Rosalba in a hotel in the Swiss Alps when, all of a sudden, they catch sight of a veiled woman. They all believe to recognize their respective object of desire and chase the woman as she is running towards the liminal topography of a mountain pass. Because Pellegrina escapes any one defining role or mask, the question Lincoln asks her, when he finally catches up with her, is inevitable. Yet it also turns out to be fatal.

‘[…] Who are you?’ She did not turn, or look at me. But the next moment she did what I had always feared that she might do: she spread out her wings and flew away. […] she threw herself from the earth clear into the abyss, and disappeared from our sight. […] I thought then of how it had been my question to her which had driven her into this great white full-moon death, in the end. (395–397)

Pellegrina refuses to answer and attempts to escape from this scene of interpellation altogether. What then is the voice of the text? By asking this question, I am not suggesting that the various textual voices are unified by a single voice. Rather, the question is one of tone, namely the tone 166 Barbara Straumann that emerges as a result of the ways in which the implied author orchestrates the various voices in the text. The narrative mode of “The Dreamers” appears as ‘feminine’, or even feminist, in the way in which it shows, and actually performs, the violence implicit in the narrative framing of the male figures. Significantly, it is only as the woman lies dying that Marcus tells the name and story of the great soprano. In a deft gesture, Dinesen has his belated commen- tary on the stable persona of the singer coincide with the actual death of the woman. Or put differently, the text implies that death is brought about by a narrative desire that seeks to reduce her to one single role. Yet the feminine mode of Dinesen’s narration goes further than that: shortly before Pellegrina’s death, her narrative contain- ment is disrupted by a strange voice effect.

Her whole body vibrated under her passion like the string of an instrument. ‘Oh,’ she cried, ‘look, look here! It is Pellegrina Leoni – it is she, it is she herself again – she is back. Pellegrina, the greatest singer, poor Pellegrina, she is on the stage again. To the honour of God, as before. Oh, she is here, it is she – Pellegrina, Pellegrina herself!’ It was unbelievable that, half dead as she was, she could house this storm of woe and triumph. It was, of course, her swan song. […] The old Jew was in a terrible state of pain and strain. […] Of a sudden he took up his little walking stick and struck three short strokes on the side of the stretcher. ‘Donna Pellegrina Leoni,’ he cried in a clear voice. ‘En scène pour le deux.’ Like a soldier to the call, or a war horse to the blast of the trumpet, she collected herself at his words. Within the next minute she became quiet in a gallant and deadly calm. She gave him a glance from her enormous dark eyes. In one mighty movement, like that of a billow rising and sinking, she lifted the middle of her body. A strange sound, like the distant roar of a great animal, came from her breast. Slowly the flames in her face sank, and an ashen grey covered it instead. Her body fell back, stretched itself out and lay quite still, and she was dead. (426–427)

Initially, Pellegrina’s famous singer persona seems to be reconstituted by the cue given by her impresario. She slips into her former symbolic role, ready to resume her part of Donna Anna in Mozart’s Don Giovanni at precisely the point at which she was interrupted by the near-fatal accident. The accumulation of the words “she”, “herself”, “Pellegrina Leoni” in her speech suggests unreserved identification with the role of the singer: “It is The Effects of Voice in Isak Dinesen’s “The Dreamers” 167

Pellegrina Leoni – it is she, it is she herself again […]. Oh, she is here, it is she – Pellegrina, Pellegrina herself!” Yet ironically the singer Leoni, a figure to whom she refers in the third person, is just as much a mask as all of her other roles. Rather than coming back on stage, she has actually never left the theatrical boards. And, indeed, while the other character voices seek to demask her, this last performance shows not just the fatality but also the inherent impossibility of their attempt to lay bare and thus expose her identity. What is even more disruptive, however, is the culmination of Pellegrina’s swan song in a monstrous utterance towards the end of the passage – “a strange sound, like the distant roar of a great animal”. Even though a written text cannot move beyond verbal language, the passage aesthetically evokes the effect of a voice beyond semantic meaning by comparing her articulation to a non- human utterance. The sheer sound of her non-verbal voice subverts not just the narrative desire of the three men. It also undercuts all symbolic and imaginary codes – and hence all social roles. The sublime song Pellegrina used to produce as a singer allowed her and her audience to mirror themselves in each other. Her swan song articulates the very reverse: a voice of radical alterity. It is at this point that we can invoke Mladen Dolar’s notion of the voice as a surplus or excess. The passage marks a moment where the voice expresses a radical subjectivity beyond cultural interpellation, thus allowing a part of the subject to be heard that is utterly singular and intimate. In my reading I have been exploring the various voices that are at stake in “The Dreamers”. It is by tracing their relation that we can fill a text with our critical tone. The voice as an aesthetic category in the sense of Bakhtin’s polyphony is closely connected to a political dimension. Or put differently, the voice effect of narrative fiction involves us as readers and critics, and refers us to an ethical dimension of literature. It is by discerning various voices that we lend our ears to the moral imagination of literature. Pellegrina may die and thus fall silent. Nevertheless it is her “voice” which is ultimately granted the greatest resonance by Dinesen’s vocal aesthetics. The complex orchestration of the various voices in “The Dreamers” can be read as a critique of the way in which the female figure is reified. When reviewed a biography of Isak Dinesen for The New Yorker, she noted that, for Dinesen, “the 168 Barbara Straumann chief trap in life is one’s own identity”.18 As a quasi-manifesto of Dinesen’s art, “The Dreamers” demonstrates, and indeed performs, a radical dispersal of a self-identical role into a multiplicity of masks. On the one hand, the text accentuates the both subversive and empowering elusiveness of the protagonist and her voice. If, on the other hand, the fate of Pellegrina carries a tragic note, this is not only because she dies in her failed attempt to escape from the violence of the three male figures and their symbolic interpellation. Yet there is also a certain sadness in the fact that she is able to fashion herself as a star performer but has to exit the public arena. In contrast to Woolf’s Orlando, who gains a voice in literature by eventually publishing the poem which he or she has been writing for centuries, Dinesen’s Pellegrina has to fall silent in order to express herself. Nevertheless the disappearance of her voice from the opera stage effects a resonant self-creation, at least as long as she can continually renew herself in and through her dialogic performances. It is because she abandons her monolithic star persona that she can articulate herself through her myriad masks. Dinesen had long turned herself into an iconic figure and cultivated her legendary status when she visited the United States towards the end of her life. During her trip her many activities included a lunch given in her honour. One of the pictures taken on this occasion shows her together with two American authors, namely Carson McCullers and , on the one hand, and the tragic star , on the other (Ill. 2). Like Monroe, who is looking at her, Dinesen is immediately recognizable. Marked by age and illness, she looks frail and fragile. However, if Monroe stands for the lethal logic of the single star image she came to enact over her body, Dinesen refers us to a resilient modulation and expression of the self. Seen in profile, her made-up face looks like an elegant mask, which puts the existence of a real Karen Blixen into question and simultaneously proclaims the presence of a fictionalized Isak Dinesen. As Susan Hardy Aiken points out, Dinesen’s fusion with her writing “was never more poignantly enacted” than in the last years of her life, when she seemed to literally die into her art as her already emaciated body withered to merely skeletal dimensions.19 However, as I have shown in my reading, it is already in “The Dreamers”, the first tale written at the

18 Hannah ARENDT, “Foreword. Isak Dinesen, 1885–1962”, in: Isak Dinesen, Daguerreotypes and Other Essays, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984, vii–xxv, viii. 19 Susan Hardy AIKEN, Isak Dinesen and the Engendering of Narrative, Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 1990, 255. The Effects of Voice in Isak Dinesen’s “The Dreamers” 169 very beginning of her literary career, that she develops a poetics in which self-annihilation and self-creation go hand in hand. Similar to her literary alter ego Pellegrina Leoni, whose voice disappears and resounds as pure writing, Dinesen modulates her voice as a writer and storyteller by always speaking through her consciously staged masks and personas.

Barbara Straumann, Senior Assistant at the English Seminar of the University of Zurich, is the author of Figurations of Exile in Hitchcock and Nabokov (Edinburgh University Press, 2008) and the co-author of Die Diva: Eine Geschichte der Bewunderung (Schirmer/Mosel, 2002). She is currently working on her Habilitation project on voice and female performer figures in nineteenth- and twentieth-century narrative fiction and another research project on the cultural afterlife of Queen Elizabeth I.

Abstract Isak Dinesen’s “The Dreamers” highlights issues of voice on several levels. The story thematically revolves around the singer Pellegrina Leoni who loses her voice in an accident. As well as tracing how her voice dissolves and resonates in Dinesen’s writing, this article shows how voice can be conceptualized for a discussion of narrative texts. Although there are no concrete voices in this literary genre that can actually be heard, it is in the voice effects of narrative fiction that the aesthetic and the political enter into close dialogue.

170 Barbara Straumann

Karen Blixen posing in a pierrot costume, photograph by Rie Niessen, 1954. © 2009 ProLitteris, Zurich.

The Effects of Voice in Isak Dinesen’s “The Dreamers” 171

Karen Blixen, Arthur Miller, Marilyn Monroe and Carson McCullers in Carson McCuller’s home in Nyack, NY, 1959. Reproduced by permission of The Karen Blixen Collection, The Royal Library, .