Ambivalent about photography, she nevertheless anticipated by her playful self-imagings the photographers who would find in her aging body such a compelling icon: one recalls especially the stunning late portraits made of her by Peter Beard and Cecil Beaton. In related fashion, refusing the masochistic role as victim of her male-authored illness, she fabricated her fragile, disease-ridden body into a living work of art, extending her fiction-making into a wider semiotic space through the elaborate self-stagings which, like her several literary pseudonyms and the labyrinthine complexities of her narratives, concealed or put into question the existence of a ‘real’ Karen Blixen even as they flamboyantly proclaimed her presence. In ‘The Diver,’ she had figured ‘poets’ tales’ as ‘disease turned into loveliness’-an apt description of her own narratives, which recurrently celebrate the transformative possibilities of suffering and loss. Indeed, given the striking parallelism between European figurations of Africa as a contaminated or disordered body and traditional misogynist figurations of the female body as a primary site of disorder and disease, we might find it uncannily appropriate that it was precisely as disintegrating body that ‘Isak Dinesen’ would be most widely represented in the popular press.īut it was typical of Dinesen that she gallantly made the most even of these effects.
Her repeated observation that she ‘died’ into her art, becoming ‘a piece of printed matter’ ( Daguerreotypes), was never more poignantly enacted than in the final years of her life, as her body gradually withered to skeletal, wraith-like proportions, and her writing ultimately had to proceed by dictation while she lay supine to ease the pain that racked her. That poetics becomes especially marked in many of her late productions. Yet like her loss in Africa, her malady also became, paradoxically, a major spur and source of her creativity, as she suggested through her wry description of her syphilis as a sign of the ‘pact she made with the devil in exchange for the gift of story-telling.’ It is hardly surprising that her tales appear so frequently inflected or infected by a poetics of illness, giving new meaning to the ‘decadence’ often associated, rightly or wrongly, with her literary corpus.
When Karen Blixen contracted syphilis from her husband in 1914, it was to prove a fatal event in every sense: she would suffer for the rest of her life from the progressively debilitating effects of the disease.
0 kommentar(er)
