“The Age of Reason has received its name, not because it was particularly
reasonable, but because the thinkers of the eighteenth century believed to
have found in Reason, capitalized, the substitute for divine order.”
Eric Voegelin, “Necessary Moral Bases for
Communication in a Democratic Society”1
THOMAS BERTONNEAU is a visiting assistant
professor of English at SUNY-Oswego and
writes often for and the Intercollegiate
Review.
I.
By the phrase “the Apocalypse of Man” the
political philosopher Eric Voegelin meant
to indicate the spiritual decadence—of
egophany, gnostic superbia, and libido dominandi—
that characterizes modernity in its
secular and materialist moods, and which
has contributed directly to the pathos,
bloody and nightmarish, of the twentieth
century. In Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man,
Voegelin notes how, in the “positive” philosophies
that eventuate in the convulsion
of the French Revolution, one encounters
a “perversion of the idea of order” that
stems, in its turn, from “the instrumentalization
of man.”2 In this negative apocalypse,
the germs of which first appear in a distinctively
modern form in the anthropological
reductions of Locke and Descartes,
as Voegelin says, “The ground of existence
in the Pascalian sense is denied to man.”3
The idea of a chain of being, with man in
his proper niche and God both presiding
over and communicating with the whole,
is lost; and so too is the understanding of
man as a creature of limitation and fallibility.
In Voegelin’s vocabulary, the subject
who submits to an ideology, invariably
“anti-Christian,” of man-and-nothing-butman
closes himself off from participation
in the “transcendental realissimum“4 of
God and in so doing reduces himself to
the servant of a purely and savagely immanent
agenda. Thus, “the growth of the
soul through an internal process, which is
nourished through communication with
transcendental reality, is replaced by a formation
of conduct through external management”
and “disorder of the soul is established
as the nature of man.”5 Voegelin
has traced this perverse impulse in modernity
to the gnostic heresies of the late medieval
period—for example, to the work
of Joachim di Fiore (1145–1202)—and
therefore to the dissolution of faith that accompanied
the fragmentation of Christen
dom and the rise of material science and of
the national states.6
In his discussion of Bolshevism and
National Socialism as classic rebellions
against reality, Voegelin often draws on
literary sources to supplement his own
analysis. In Hitler and the Germans (1961),
for example, he makes masterly use of
Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote,
Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities,
and Heimito von Doderer’s Demons for
illustrative purposes; elsewhere he draws
on Dostoyevsky. In Voegelin’s massive
work there nowhere appears a reference to
Karen Blixen (1885—1962)—the Danish
author better known under her pen-name
of Isak Dinesen—but Blixen, like Musil or
Doderer, also saw into modernity’s heart
of darkness with searchlight penetration.
In many ways herself a specimen of the
modern consciousness—a Nietzschean and
an acolyte of that Good European, Georg
Brandes—she nevertheless reacted strongly
against the prevailing secular dispensation
and argued for the validity of a medieval
code; a non-believer among too-unctuous
believers, she became an apologist for the
old ways in confrontation with the deniers
of God.
Blixen’s references and allusions are
her own, of course, but they correspond
uncannily with Voegelin’s: so much so
as to suggest a strong parallelism in their
thinking. Blixen alludes to Plato and
the Stoics, Gothic Catholicism, Goethe,
Dostoyevsky, all positively; and by way of
chastening criticism, to the gnostics, even
to Joachim di Fiore by name, to the positivists
and materialists who set the scene
for and who then followed in the wake
of 1789, and finally to the Russian revolutionaries
for their nihilism and to the
Wagner of Tristan und Isolde, with its cult
of love-in-death. The link between Plato
as positively evaluated and Wagner as
negatively evaluated lies in the concept of
eros. In the two items from Blixen’s oeuvre
that I propose to bring under consideration
in what follows, one can also observe the
aristocratic radical (a Brandesian term) in the
Baroness of Rungstedlund, who often set
aside her antinomian persona in order to
emphasize the valuable order implicit in
normative concepts such as la grace de Dieu
and l’ancien régime. Blixen understood from
direct and painful experience the need for
a spiritual regimen, and a truly anti-traditional
program could properly horrify her
when it raised its repellent head.
II.
One thing in particular could abruptly
short-circuit the Nietzschean in Blixen:
modern secular arrogance in its wicked
spate. In 1939, Blixen received a traveling
fellowship to report from Germany for the
Copenhagen newspaper Politiken. Her visit
began on 1 March and ended on 2 April
1940. She then set her notes aside for the
duration of the conflict. The long essay
Letters from a Land at War, appearing belatedly
in Heretica in 1948, records Blixen’s
experiences and sets forth her analysis of
the totalitarian state. She sees National
Socialism, quite without any fanciness of
political or philosophical vocabulary, as a
manifestation of pernicious ideas not accidentally
associated with but intrinsic
to the Enlightenment. She sees the Nazi
state, that is, as the ferocious abolition of
an immemorially improvised and fundamentally
decent civic order unthinkable
except in the framework of Christendom.
The essence of the Enlightenment manifests
itself, in Blixen’s harsh judgment, as
the elevation of reason, so-called, above
tradition, identified with a putatively intolerant
and therefore intolerable old order
that must be swept away. A refrain of the
essay is the depressing formula, to paraphrase it, a young Ph.D. told me. The Nazis
indeed found early and widespread support
among the professors and their students,
precisely those who thought of themselves
as the most enlightened.
From the moment Blixen arrived in Das
Reich, various “well-informed”7 academic
experts in the state’s employ oversaw
her itinerary and made sure to interpret
correctly for her the sights and people that
she encountered. These guides could call
on a mass of “facts and figures”8 for the
visitor’s education. They had ready rejoinders
to all critical questions. “One could
almost believe,” she confides, “that in this
people there is a peculiar sense of life as
a mathematical problem which is known
to have a solution.”9 The totalitarian state
thus represented itself to Blixen through
its collegial functionaries—“doctores,” she
calls them, using the Latin—of the arts
and sciences. So: “The Ministry [of Propaganda]
attached to me a young Ph.D.”10
Again: “There was a young Ph.D. from
the Arbeitsfront.”11 And again: “I… met
a Ph.D. who had a position in the organization
‘Kraft durch Freude,’ which was
under the Arbeitsfront.”12 Nazidom wanted
also to appear as a high cultural renaissance
struggling to redeem the decadence
of a fallen civilization and therefore as the
vanguard of a happy future: “One hears
much talk about popular art. Not a small
cultural elite, but the great German people
itself will, they say, now create the art of
the Third Reich.”13 The “they,” of course,
designates the cadre, the enthusiastic illuminati
endowed with what they regard, in
every sense, as a higher education. But the
doctrine, since it runs counter-intuitively
and cuts itself off from reality, requires
aggressive interpreters, who require in
their turn a police force licensed to coerce
in the name of doctrine.
The very fluency of the discourse, its
blithe postponement of tough questions
by means of slogans and doxologies, all
by itself aroused Blixen’s suspicion and
inclined her against the suave attempt at
persuasion. Never mentioned but always
present in the record of doings is the fact
that the Wehrmacht has just now swallowed
up half of Poland, a nation that Blixen
admired, while throwing the other half to
Stalin’s Soviet Empire.
Blixen immediately thwarted her overseers
by making an unauthorized excursion
to Bremen to renew her acquaintance with
a man last present in her sight “in Mombasa
in December 1913” and who “belonged to
the good old times.”14 Blixen’s account of
her 1940 reunion with General Paul von
Lettow-Vorbeck, who had commanded
the German Imperial force in East Africa
that fought against the combined British
and South African forces latterly under Jan
Smuts, is the positive reference for everything
else in the essay.15 Her memories are
important. Blixen, who involved herself
peripherally in the fighting and knew the
officers on the Allied side, “heard [Lettow]
mentioned every day by the English [who]
spoke of him with great respect, not only
as a skillful commander and a brave soldier,
but as a chivalrous enemy.”16 His foes,
Blixen says: “developed a sort of love for
him” until in this manner “Lettow became
a myth.”17 Finally, with the Armistice, “his
enemies mourned his disappearance from
their lives; there was ‘nothing left remarkable
beneath the visiting moon.'”18 Yet
nothing about Lettow ever suggested the
self-advertising hero; Lettow was not an
incipient Duce or Führer. Blixen remarks
that he was “a very unobtrusive man.”19
She compares him, of all people, with the
soft-spoken Albert Schweitzer: “they have
in common in their deportment an unusual
modesty and thoughtfulness towards their
fellow human beings.”20
When, over dinner, Blixen asked the
general what it had been like to fight with
no hope of prevailing, as he had done in
East Africa, he answered, “Perhaps one
should say that in such a certainty there
may lie as great an inspiration as in any
faith in victory.”21 After his defeat, Lettow
traveled to England, where his former
adversaries fêted him, “They sang For
He’s a Jolly Good Fellow… and that is
the equivalent of a Victoria Cross.”22 The
old warrior is appropriately ensconced in
Bremen, where “the seafaring people .
. . have brought home to their city very
beautiful things from the other side of
the globe… These commercially adept
people had their hearts in ships.”23 Blixen
ended her Bremen excursion by going on
Sunday to the Liebe-Frau Kirche, where an
usher showed her “a collection of weapons
from the time of the Crusades… which
got all of Christianity to take arms… and
brought a new culture to the lands of the
West.”24
Blixen spent the remainder of her
sojourn in and around Berlin, escorted
by the “political clergy.”25 Blixen means
the Bremen section of Letters to stand in
contrast with the rest. She means Lettow
himself to stand in contrast with those
inevitable “doctores.” British officers follow
the old custom of singing “For He’s A
Jolly Good Fellow.” The enthusiasts of
the Hitler regime, “untiring, zealous unto
death, without any doubt or hesitation
in their souls,”26 are full of talk, invariably
prescriptive, about what will now
supersede long-established—hence, timevetted—
custom. Blixen meets the leader
of the Reichsfrauenbund and hears how she
systematically orders the lives of German
women “by Gau, Kreis, Ort, Zelle, and
Block, down to the very basis of the population,
the individual family.”27 One of the
ubiquitous degree holders is a high official
of the labor organization Kraft durch Freude.
Blixen tells him that he must have gotten
it backwards, as “joy” seems to her rightfully
the goal and “power” merely the
means. Putting the latter before the former
would be an ethical absurdity and an operational
impossibility. The doctor responds
with a discourse about the Will in its
struggle against a recalcitrant reality: “We
of the Third Reich… don’t like to say
that something cannot be done.”28 When
Blixen responds, “some things… resist
any design,” especially art, her interlocutor
insists that nothing comes about that is “not
created… by the force of human will.”29
When she argues again “some things are
created by the grace of God,” he condescends
a smile and asks her, “do you really
belong to l’Ancien Régime to such a degree .
. . that you believe in la grace de Dieu?“30
The old regime was once a “new
culture,” the one that had its birth in the
Crusades and took the name of Christendom;
it was a culture of commerce,
exploration, and art. It might boast of
grace at the same time that it believed in
God. But the past exerts no grip on the
zealots. Nazidom is the new “new culture”
that conjures itself into existence through
prescription, as a feat of the will, nigh
unto a thousand years. Beethoven’s Fifth
Symphony becomes, in a betrayal of its
real meaning, the heralding anthem of the
novus ordo seclorum, as does Shakespeare’s
Lear, also grossly misunderstood. So
too does the model of the future Berlin,
“showing what the city will become once
the work of demolition and construction
. . . has been completed.”31 Demolition
goes before the always-postponed reconstruction;
the cynical promise of material
improvement becomes the excuse for
wanton havoc. “The German will—that
is God’s grace towards Germany,” says the
doctor.32 Despite all this Teutonic voluntas
programmatically at work on human and
plastic material, “the vista of Nazism…
has a limited perspective.”33
Her colloquies and experiences eventually
bring to Blixen’s mind the bloody
year 1789 and the French revolutionaries,
“About Robespierre one may believe he
was a god or a superman; he was certainly
not a human being, for everything human
was alien to him.”34 Marat “has no presence
except an incredible loud mouth”
and like Robespierre “he did not indulge
himself in humaneness.”35 Danton she
associates with nihilism and with “political
ideas… proclaimed like religion.”36
Inimical to this ersatz religion is anything
human—anything modest enough to
grasp that the present might suffer in a
just comparison with the past or that the
apotheosis of Reason and the Will can
only occur through the sacrifice of spontaneity
and grace.
III.
The first paragraph of “The Deluge at
Norderney” assimilates the post-Enlightenment
social phenomenon of embourgeoisiement,
in the year 1835, with the image
of a reversion from order to disorder in the
formless medium of the sea. It is perhaps
a coincidence that the motto of the Social
Democrats and their Radical allies in the
Danish national electoral campaigns of
1934–35 was “Stauning or Chaos,” Carl
Stauning being the SD candidate for Prime
Minister. The economy was in trouble and
new social and political developments were
in the offing, as they had been a century
earlier when Denmark experienced a near
civil war. Denmark’s next-door neighbor,
Germany, had grown bellicose, another
parallel with the situation a century
earlier. Blixen’s fluvial metaphor conveys
what one might call, using a Voegelinian
term, the dissolution of the ground. The
flooded coast becomes “an immense gray
plane, alarmingly alive” in which “nothing
seemed to be firm.”37 The same beginning,
along with the title, also invokes the
tale of Noah from the Old Testament and
registers the idea that God might, should
He so deign, arrange the proper chastisement
of a megalomaniacal mankind. At the
same time, everywhere in the tale, Blixen
makes reference to the French Revolution,
as if the turbulence of 1789—of the Directorate
and the Terror—had never really
ceased but instead had metastasized en camoufl
age to the corners of Europe.
Norderney, a hitherto little-frequented
island of dunes and heaths on the Atlantic
shore of Northern Saxony, has become
a fashionable resort where the gentry
consent to mix with the nouveaux riches of
the middle classes. They follow the allure,
as Blixen says, of “the romantic spirit of
the age, which delighted in ruins, ghosts,
and lunatics, and counted a stormy night
on the heath and a deep conflict of the
passions a finer treat for the connoisseur
than the ease of the salon and the harmony
of a philosophic system.”38 Before the
advent of fashion, the peasant folk of the
area regarded the seaside, so vulnerable to
inundation, as the preserve of “the devil,
the cold and voracious hereditary foe of
humanity.”39
To the romantic charm of the salty atmosphere
Blixen attaches “the new political
stir”40 that has given a dose of frisson to the
local Junkers. Some habitués of the hotel
and its casino find in the “rank briny smell”
of the tidelands the same excitation that
they derive from “the smell of gunpowder
over the battlefield.”41 The ideas of decay
and violence thus mix with one another
intoxicatingly. Midway through the tale,
one of the four main characters speculates
of another that he espouses “the revolutionary
ideas of [the young] generation.”42
Other themes connected with civic
malady touch Blixen’s main theme. A
passion for divertissement—betokened by
the popularity of the Norderney resort and
by the imperiousness of fashion—always
signifies the deracination of a people from
its ethical soil. A stroll among the dunes
is not differentiated, under the idea of
divertissement, from the excitement of “the
new political stir.” In her reference to the
“romantic spirit” that attracted the leisured
classes to the North Atlantic littoral, Blixen
reminds us that Romanticism, whatever
else it may be in a positive way, also incorporates
a morbid pleasure in ruins. When
she describes the effect on onlookers of
the collapse of a granary in the floodwaters,
Blixen makes clear that such pleasure
can only be indulged by the subject’s
bracketing of both the cause of ruin and
its human consequences. One of the
witnesses, himself lately rescued from the
disaster, rises involuntarily from his place
in the lifeboat only to seat himself again,
“very pale.”43 The origin of ruin might lie
in abandonment for better quarters or in
benign neglect, but it is more likely to lie
in deliberate destruction by an agent. Here
the flood serves as agent, but the flood, as
we have seen, is a metaphor for libidinous
action sans restraint. Suddenly, for the
onlooker, a ruin is no longer an aesthetic
phenomenon; it speaks of displaced people
and of the wreckage of lives.
Displacement and destruction along
with the propaganda of Blut, Boden, und
Germanentum had accompanied Prussia’s
martial annexation of Danish Slesvik and
Holsten as German Schleswig and Holstein
in 1864. Considering Blixen’s assessment
of Nazism in Letters from a Land at War,
biological topics such as blood-purity
and race-pride, which she ascribes to the
interest of two of the four major characters,
acquire the status of a prognosis; indeed,
Blixen characterizes the pair in question
as “devils in racial pride.”44 The reduction
of the full humanity to the merely biological
category implied by the term relates,
in this sense, to the flood itself and to its
destructive progress, which has reduced
the differentiations of the countryside to
gray homogeneity. The ground of human
being is not blood, but spirit. He who
discounts spirit inclines to treat man as so
much matter. Elsewhere Blixen endows her
dramatic personages with wildness, fanaticism,
and megalomania.45 Finally—like the
National Socialists and Marxists and other
modern ideologues—these same personae
espouse “doctrines,” at least one of which,
the theory of the Third and Last Age of
Mankind, of the Realm that shall last a
thousand years, derives from “ancient and
medieval sources,”46 especially “Joachim
de Flora.”47
Students of Voegelin will recognize in
Joachim the aboriginal precursor of Hegel
and Marx and the source, through his Tractatus
super quatuor evangelica, of the specifi-
cally modern strain of world-immanent
(“God is dead”) ideology. When Blixen
mentions doctrines, one should think ahead
to those official state-employed doctores
who blithely apologize for the Third
Reich in Letters from a Land at War. Blixen
could understand Nazism as a derailment
of religion when she visited Germany in
1940 because she had imagined totalitarian
politics under the same category six years
earlier while writing “The Deluge.”
Although as is typical for Blixen the
frame contains many intricately nestled
stories, the plot of “The Deluge” is simple:
the rising waters, an anomalous tide whose
cause remains unexplained, overwhelm the
resort and its environs including extensive
hectares of adjacent farmland. Boats from
the parts that have escaped drowning set
out to rescue, first, the guests of the resort
and then the peasant-families abruptly
stranded on their rooftops and in their
barn lofts by the incursion of the waters.
Late in the evening, an already overloaded
boat finds a peasant family of four stranded
in the hayloft of their barn and in order
that they be brought aboard four occupants
of the boat agree to exchange places with
them. The verbal supposition is that the
rescuers will return at first light, although
tacitly the complete submergence of the
barn before morning is understood. A dog
leaps from the boat at the last second to join
the sojourners. To pass the night, awaiting
their fate, the four engage in a round of
soliloquies and colloquies, while sipping
from a jug of distilled spirits and munching
on a loaf of grainy peasant bread.48 The
situation resembles that set forth in the
frame of Boccaccio’s Decameron, but, as the
monologues and exchanges have to do with
love, identity, and transcendence, features
of Plato’s Symposium also hauntingly imbue
the scene. Blixen’s flood is like Boccaccio’s
plague—a symbol of spiritual turmoil.
None of her characters is a Socrates; each
gives evidence of a deformed eros, rather
like the other speakers in Plato’s dialogue.
Blixen’s attribution of the flood to no
known cause is thus a deliberate element
in the construction: as the waters represent
spiritual havoc, so the real origin lies
in the specimen characters that the author
has put on display against the scene of
watery chaos. They are, as one might say,
in order of perversity: Cardinal Hamilcar
von Sehestedt, or rather a man named
Kasparson claiming to be the Cardinal;
Mademoiselle Malin Nat-og-Dag, an aged
spinster, quite mad, who stems from an
old family of the Danish Junkers; the same
lady’s ward, a young woman who takes
the name of Calypso; and finally Johann
Maersk, an unhappy young man from
Copenhagen.
Sehestedt-Kasparson is the most
demonic and perverse of the tetrad.
Readers will best see him as a single character,
despite the fact that Kasparson admits
that he has first murdered the Cardinal
and then impersonated him during the
deluge. Early in the tale, Blixen divulges a
few details of the Cardinal’s ilk and type.
Out of a kind of inertia the Sehestedts
remained steadfastly Catholic during the
religious wars, which in Denmark were
especially horrific; yet they never showed
any noticeable spirituality until a son of
the family late in the eighteenth century
revealed to his tutor extraordinary intellectual
talents. Hamilcar became a priest
whose “light of genius… was impossible
to ignore.”49 Indeed, “there existed a tale
of how the Pope himself, after the young
priest had been presented to him, had seen
in a dream how this youth had been set
apart by providence to bring back the great
Protestant countries under the Holy See.”50
The Pope says of Sehestedt on the occasion
of dispatching him to the North: “If,
after the destruction of our present world,
I were to charge one human being with
the construction of a new world, the only
person whom I would trust with this work
would be my young Hamilcar” (6). After
assigning the commission the Holy Father,
as Blixen tells, “quickly crossed himself
two or three times” (6).
It is as if he were warding off the intuition
of evil. Suspicion exists, then, over Sehestedt’s
“ideas and powers” and “his visionary
gift.”51 Blixen’s little details suggest that
the Cardinal suffers from the flaw of
superbia, as “to him everything seemed
possible.”52 He tells the Lady Nat-og-Dag,
that, “every human being has, I believe, at
times given room to the idea of creating a
world himself.”53 He adds that he has been
granted “omnipotence” and that he does
not “shrink from the fantastic.”54 In 1940,
six years after writing “The Deluge,” one
of Blixen’s Nazi guides would remark that
Germans under Hitler “do not like to hear
that a thing cannot be done.” Everything
must be possible, whether it really is or
not. In the mind of the superbus, known in
the twentieth century as the übermensch or
Superman, the claim of a thing’s possibility
magically precedes and assures the same
thing’s ultimate actuality. Another mark
of the superbus is his absolute certainty of
knowledge; this is a quality that the man
assumes belongs to himself uniquely.
Readers learn that in Norderney, as
elsewhere, people “believed of [Sehestedt]
that he could work miracles” and that
“people took to thinking strange things of
him,” but no word in the passage says that
the Cardinal discouraged these rumors.
Sehestedt’s reason for being at the resort
fits into Blixen’s subtle assemblage.
[He] had, during the summer, been
living in a small fisherman’s house
at some distance from the bath, to
collect his writings of many years in
a book upon the Holy Ghost. With
Joachim of Flora, who was born in
1202, the Cardinal held that while
the book of the Father is given in
the Old Testament, and that of the
Son, in the New, the Testament of
the Third Person of the Trinity still
remained to be written. This he had
made the task of his life.55
Not only has the Cardinal flirted his
lifelong with heresy, but in undertaking
the Pope’s ambition to undo the Reformation
and in allowing the aura of a miracle
worker to hover about him he has slowly
mantled himself in the role of manredeemer,
the Dux e Babylone, worked
out by Joachim himself in the Tractatus.
That his valet, Kasparson, has murdered
Sehestedt and taken on his identity only
shows the danger in the Cardinal’s arrogant
self-election, for superbia is contagious,
inspiring envy and imitation, and corrupts
any established order. Voegelin’s category
is egophany, the revelation of the self as
that, which subsumes all else, including
God. Kasparson already thinks of himself,
by way of his bastard derivation, as the
true Dux, being a son, if illegitimately,
of that aristocrat, the Duc d’Orleans, who
turned Jacobin and endorsed the regicide.
Two leader-redeemers are non-compossible;
so Kasparson repeats the crime of
Cain against his brother Abel to acquire,
for himself, Sehestedt’s carefully cultivated
and unique charisma. “If only [the Cardinal’s
followers] would have made me their
master,” Kasparson says, “I would have
served them all my life.”56 Only this night,
however, have the members of the laity
“seen the face of God in my face.”57
Malin Nat-og-Dag is another case
of egomania and spiritual degeneration.
Her peculiar surname means “Nightand-
Day” in Danish. Blixen so denominates
her because between the bouts of
her deeply sunk madness, she has flashes
of candor and lucidity. Of both the lady
and her ward, Calypso von Platen-Hallermund,
Blixen writes that, “although they
behaved in the midst of danger with great
self-control,” they nevertheless gave an
“impression of wildness which, within a
peaceful age and society, only the vanishing
and decaying aristocracy can afford to
maintain.”58 Blixen also refers to Natog-
Dag’s “derangement of… mind.”59
Nat-og-Dag, like Sehestedt-Kasparson,
has heretical leanings. Her background is
the Herrnhuten, a Moravian sect common
to Northern Germany and Denmark.60 As
Blixen puts it, “Miss Malin… ran amuck
a little in her relation to doctrine.”61 If the
Cardinal’s deformation of spirit were that
of megalomania in the direction of libido
dominandi, the lady’s is one of a savagely
blighted eros. Nat-og-Dag has rejected men
to remain a virgin. In her dotage, however,
she has reconceived herself fantastically as
a whoring sinner who has fornicated with
lovers the world over and whom God has
therefore certainly damned. “She believed
herself to have been the grand courtesan
of her time, if not the true great whore
of Revelation.”62 The Whore of Revelation
is, symbolically, the perfect mate
for the Joachitic Dux e Babylone. Blixen
compares Miss Malin’s character to that
of the legendary Queen Sigrid of Norway
who invited her suitors to the hof, locked
them in, and burned them alive, to show
her spite. Blixen calls Nat-og-Dag’s mad
laughter “the laughter of liberation,”63 thus
linking her deformed eros to the Cardinal’s
soteriological fantasy.
Both Calypso and Johann Maersk are
likewise erotically deformed, but not
through willed perversion, rather through
the demiurgic machinations of others.
Calypso, once orphaned, found herself in
girlhood under the guardianship of Count
August von Platen-Hallermund, a pederast
who, in his manor at Angelshorn, maintained
a harem of boys under the guise of
initiating them into philosophy and mysticism.
Calypso only discovers her femininity
by accident, after having been sealed
away in the chambers and treated like a
sexless being for fourteen years. During
her captivity—for that is what it amounts
to—Calypso thought of the Count as a
“minister of truth.”64 Miss Malin, in one
of her lucid flashes, refers to Count August
and his boys as “those falsifiers of truth.”65
The truth that they falsify is the truth of
the sexual division, so that their heresy
is a classic rebellion against the structure
of creation. The case of Johann Maersk
furnishes a second example of the same
rebellion. Another aristocrat-homosexual
tried once upon a time to make him over
into his own image. The decadent Count
Joachim Gersdorff (whose pregnant given
name one should remark) manipulated and
humiliated Maersk, who says in recollection
of his melancholy that, “I was made
a true Joachim Gersdorff.”66 Maersk has
been seeking to reestablish his own identity
ever since.
IV.
But the girl and the lad remain minor
characters. Blixen puts the greater substance
of her narrative into the dialogue
of Sehestedt-Kasparson with Nat-og-Dag.
When the latter asks the former whether
he believes in the Fall of Man, he answers:
“There has been a fall, but I do not hold
that it is man who has fallen.”67 He believes,
true to the gnostic pattern, “that there has
been a fall in divinity,” or, in heaven, “a tremendous
overturning, equal to the French
Revolution on earth, and its after-effects,”
and that “we are serving an inferior dynasty
of heaven.”68 When Miss Malin inquires
why Kasparson (he has now admitted his
identity and his crime) killed Sehestedt,
he says: “That moment, when I killed the
Cardinal, that was the mating of my soul
with destiny, with eternity, with the soul
of God.”69 Sehestedt-Kasparson’s contribution
to the round of tales that each of the
four tells during their common terminal
confinement must be understood in light
(so to speak) of his auto-apotheotic claim.
Characteristically, it is a piece of apocrypha,
a story of Simon Peter and the thief
named Barabbas, to which the teller gives
the name “The Wine of the Tetrarch.”70
Before he narrates his tale, in the longish
build-up to it, Kasparson says to the Lady
in passing, as though it were not signifi-
cant, “I think I hear the cock’s crow.”71
It is a tale told by a betrayer: Kaspar24
son’s rhetorical aim is to throw the veracity
of the Gospels in doubt by presenting a
mockery of the Passion as more noble than
the Passion itself. On the Wednesday after
the Resurrection, Peter meets a Mephistophelean
criminal in a tavern. He has
been a man of appetites, the stranger says
to Peter, whom a terrible affliction now
visits. Wine, which he has always loved, has
lost its taste for him and he thinks that this
“may be due to the earthquake which we
had on Friday; it has turned it all bad.”72 He
recently and brutally waylaid a shipment
of rare wine destined for the tetrarch but
is reluctant to retrieve it lest it too should
have gone sour to his tongue. The stranger
expatiates on his dejection. Peter explains
that Christ means for every man to take
up the Cross—that the way of humility
is the way of salvation. The glowering
criminal now shows his many scars and
proudly disdains the counsel. “He looked
a magnificent figure,” Kasparson says.73 “I
have been a great chief,” Kasparson has
Barabbas say, “my name shall be remembered.”
74 The term chief corresponds to the
concept of the duc, in light of which, as we
have seen, Kasparson conceives himself. In
Barabbas, whose cognomen means “Son of
the Father,” Blixen’s gnostic-nihilist finds
the prototype of the superman according
to whose homicidal model he himself acts.
Barabbas’ superbia is Kasparson’s.
By this time in Blixen’s extended parody
of the Decameron and the Symposium, the
dawn has appeared, and with it the final,
fatal rising of the tide. Calypso and Johann
lie asleep. The worst—Kasparson and Natog-
Dag—are full of passionate intensity,
while the best slumber through catastrophe
unaware that the climax approaches. In
a recasting of the Liebestod from Tristan
und Isolde, Nat-og-Dag and Sehestedt-
Kasparson clasp one another in a morbid
kiss as their demise becomes patent. But
the nothingness of the bare gray expanse of
flood as it now covers the world is not the
defeat; it is rather the perverse triumph of
the two pneumo-pathological rebels. It is
in nihilism and destruction that all rebellions
against creation must end.
Voegelin wrote on occasion of people
whom he called “noetically sensitive types.”
Plato is the greatest exemplar of the species
in Voegelin’s analyses of history, but Shakespeare,
Goethe, Dostoyevsky, even Robert
Musil, also illustrate the phenomenon. In
his noetic sensitivity, the subject witnesses
the deformations of the day; he plays a
prophetic role, often paying the prophet’s
hefty tariff in the prophet’s sorrowful coin
He finds himself rejected and scorned by
those to whom he speaks. W. B. Yeats was
such a type, and his lines on “The Second
Coming” have entered folklore as foreseeing
the blood and horror of the modern
period in the twentieth century; T. S. Eliot
is another, whose poems are a kind of Old
Testament for the age of mass communications,
atomic weaponry, and the catastrophic
trans-valuation of all values. Karen
Blixen should be added to the roster. “The
Deluge at Norderney” shows her to have
understood the totalitarian disaster with
prescient clarity at a time when appeasement
was the standing rule. Readings of
other portions of the Blixen oeuvre would
show how comprehensive her vision was in
this regard. In another of the Seven Gothic
Tales, The Poet, one encounters a repetition
of the critique of progressive ideology and
of reason, culminating in a murder whose
victim, Councilor Mathiesen, comes close
to passing beyond the reader’s sympathy
on account of his manipulative and arrogant
treatment of others. In The Young Man
with a Carnation, the first item in the cycle
called Winter’s Tales (1942), one encounters
by contrast a fully erotically integrated
poet-artist who finds non-denominational
but genuine reconciliation with God.
NOTES
- Eric Voegelin, Published Essays 1953–1965, edited
and with an introduction by Ellis Sandoz, (Columbia,
MO: University of Missouri Press, 2000), p. 56. -
Eric Voegelin, Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man (History
of Political Ideas, Volume VIII), edited with an introduction
by David Walsh, (Columbia, MO: University
of Missouri Press, 1999), p. 83. - Ibid., p. 83.
- Ibid.,
p. 83. - Ibid., p. 83 (but I have quoted the lines in
the reverse of their original order). - In Ersatz Religion
(1960), Voegelin remarks as follows: “On the historical
continuity of gnosticism from antiquity to modern
times, let it be said… that the connections in the
development of gnostic sects from those of the eastern
Mediterranean in antiquity through movements
of the high Middle Ages up to those of the Renaissance
have been sufficiently clarified to permit us to
speak of a continuity.” (See Science, Politics, and Gnosticism
and Ersatz Religion, [Washington D. C.: Gateway
Editions, 1997], p. 59) The gnostic, writes Voegelin, is
“dissatisfied with his situation” (59) and attributes his
dissatisfaction to the world’s being “intrinsically poorly
organized” (60), or in other words to a failure of the
original Creator. The gnostic responds to his perception
with the conceit that “the order of being will have
to be changed in an historical process” (60) and that
this entails “man’s own effort” (60). Gnosticism typically
entails, then. “the construction of a formula for
self and world salvation” (60). - Isak Dinesen, Daguerreotypes
and Other Essays, with a foreword by Hannah
Arendt. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1979), p. 90 - Ibid., p. 90.
- Ibid., p. 106.
- Ibid., p.
102. - Ibid., p. 106.
- Ibid., p. 117.
- Ibid., p. 124.
- Ibid. p. 92.
- At the time, Lettow had only risen to
the rank of colonel. - Daguerrotypes, p. 93.
- Ibid. p.
93. - Ibid., p. 93.
- Ibid., p. 95.
- Ibid., p. 95–6.
- Ibid., p. 97.
- Ibid., p. 96.
- Ibid., p. 101.
- Ibid., p.
102. - Ibid., p. 103.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., p. 104.
- Ibid.,
p. 118. - Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., p. 105.
- Ibid., p. 119.
- Ibid., p. 111.
- Ibid., p. 132.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., p.
131. - Seven Gothic Tales (New York: Vintage Books,
1972), p. 9. - Ibid., p. 1.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., p. 2.
- Ibid., p. 27.
- Ibid., p. 11.
- Ibid., p. 16.
- Ibid.,
pp. 16, 18, 17. - Ibid., p. 45.
- Ibid., p. 5.
- Clearly
the symbolism of the Eucharist, perverted as is all else
in “The Deluge,” is in play here. - Seven Gothic Tales,
p. 6. - Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., p. 52.
- Ibid.,
p. 55. - Ibid., p. 5.
- Ibid., p. 76.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., p.
9. - Ibid.
- Blixen writes of a similar sect in one of
her best-known tales, “Babette’s Feast,” where the sin
of the pietists is that they have cut themselves off from
life under the heretical notion that all pleasure is evil. - Seven Gothic Tales, p. 17.
- Ibid., p. 21.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., p. 49.
- Ibid., p. 46.
- Ibid., p. 34. Blixen
makes Gersdorff a “High Steward of Denmark” who
“came of a Russian family” (39). Here one finds what
is perhaps one more reference to revolutionary politics,
this time of the Bolshevik variety; Gersdorff is a “man
of fashion” (39) who corrupts Copenhagen high-society
by encouraging cynicism, hypocrisy, and a general
distancing of the aristocracy from reality into the fugue
of detachment and pessimism. - Seven Gothic Tales, pp.
55–6. - Ibid., p. 56.
- Ibid., p. 74.
- Ibid., p. 61.
- Ibid., p. 57.
- Ibid., p. 63.
- Ibid., p. 69.
- Ibid.
