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Landscape, identity andliteratureSvend Erik Larsen aa Professor of Literature , Aarhus University ,DenmarkPublished online: 06 Jul 2007.

To cite this article: Svend Erik Larsen (1997) Landscape, identity and literature,Journal of Literary Studies, 13:3-4, 284-302, DOI: 10.1080/02564719708530173

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Landscape, Identity and Literature

Svend Erik Larsen

Summary

The article discusses the landscape as initially being part and parcel of God's creation,and also territory within boundaries defined by law. This subsequently led to thedevelopment of a national identity firmly rooted in the soil. The author regards thefunctions of the national landscape as providing a common unity to people and place,promoting their common origin, and finally naturalizing both unity and origin. Specialreference is made to Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa and Winter's Tales as furnishingexamples of the meaning of the landscape, and the meaning in the landscape. Struc-tures in the landscape such as the social structure, the sexual structure and thestructure of symbolic values are scrutinized. In conclusion, the author poses thequestion as to whether a national identity is indeed possible without a nationallandscape.

Opsomming

Die artikel wys daarop dat die landskap aanvanklik deel van God se skepping was, enook 'n gebied binne grense soos deur wetgewing bepaal. Die gevolg hiervan was dat'n nasionale identiteit as't ware uit die grond ontspring het. Die nasionale landskap,volgens die skrywer, voorsien dus 'n gesamentlike eenheid vir mense en van plek,terwyl dit terselfdertyd die idee van hulle gesamentlike oorsprong bevorder en uiteindelikeenheid sowel as oorsprong naturaliseer. Daar word in die besonder verwys na IsakDinesen se Out of Africa en Winter's Tales wat voorbeelde verskaf rakende diebetekenis van die landskap, en die betekenis in die landskap. Strukture wat in dielandskap voorkom, soos byvoorbeeld die sosiale struktuur, die seksuele struktuur en diestruktuur van simboliese waardes word onder die loep geneem. Ten slotte bevraagtekendie outeur of 'n nasionale identiteit sonder 'n nasionale landskap wel moontlik is.

Belonging is a privilege, and has a price. All this is determined by an arbitraryline. What is the nature of this line?

(Spiro Kostof: The City Assembled, 1992)

The thin grey line of a road, winding across the plain and up and down hills, wasthe fixed materialization of human longing, and of the human notion that it werebetter to be in one place than another.

(Isak Dinesen: Sorrow-Acre, 1942)

JLS/TLW 13(3/4), Dec./Des. 1997 ISSN 0256-4718 2 8 4

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Introduction

Nation-building is a process of belonging. It involves both a redefinition ofterritory and of collective and individual identity that often amalgamate intoa specific national identity. This process has been going on from the lateeighteenth century and onwards in changing localities all over the world,still echoing its early stages when many European countries were engagedin a struggle to redefine the country as a nation in a new geographical,political, economical and cultural context. Of course, many of them hadexisted for hundreds of years, but under very different conditions. At thattime Europe was aflame during the Napoleonic wars, feudal empires - likeDenmark - were crumbling, economic advantages and disadvantageschanged drastically among the European regions, the outline of a newurban-industrial area began to appear on the horizon, and new secularideologies redefined collective and individual identities with new conceptionsof language, culture, religion, social power, education etc. From Europe thecomplex logic of nation-building comprising geopolitics, ideology andaesthetics spread up till today to the former colonies and other regions underEuropean influence and thus acquired a global status (Davidson 1992,Hobsbawn 1990, Ranger 1983, Smith 1991, Zizek 1993).

In this complex transitional process, the national landscape played a fun-damental role in the formation of identities, both on a collective and anindividual level (although this aspect is hardly dealt with in most discussionson national identity). In the national ideologies growing out of Europeanromanticism, especially in the German Reich, language and landscape werethe basic constituents of national identity, the first one defining and expres-sing the latter, presenting it as the natural foundation of the nation. Ofcourse, landscapes existed before they were constructed as national land-scapes and before nationalism emerged as a dominant political ideology. Atleast three other approaches to the landscape were silenced by the nationallandscape. Firstly, landscapes were there as God's natural creation, acomplex of signs constituting the Great Book of Nature, or as an artisticcreation, especially in painting. Secondly, landscapes were also defined bylaw, as territories in a feudal order governed by a common law (as stillexisting in the German Bundesland). But as national landscapes, with amajor impact on national identity, they were designed, roughly speaking,between the French Revolution and the Vienna Congress as a response tothe complex historical transition.

The third possibility, namely, to see the typicality of landscapes orspecific landscape uses - for example, a certain type of forest and forestry- as simple facts shared by nations belonging to the same climatic zones,

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were neglected when landscapes were turned into symbols of nationalspecificity with an impact on national character and thereby on nationalidentity. Painters and writers received standing ovations when they gaveartistic form to this idea in visual or verbal texts, and their imaginationmaterialized later on in concrete landscapes like natural parks, naturereserves or preserved cultural landscapes. Brochures on the natural wondersfrom the national tourist agencies of today, have perpetualized and commer-cialized these landscape views, more often than not stressing their nationalcharacter.

It is, however, important not to forget that in Europe the national land-scape was associated with a national ideology before democratic consti-tutions and institutions were created and, therefore, its contribution to thenational identity was not necessarily shaped by a consideration for democ-racy. The short history of a young state like the USA makes it an exceptionto this trend. Also the landscape most celebrated as genuinely American isthe noncultivated and nonEuropean wilderness as opposed to the Edenicgarden cherished by the early emigrants (for general accounts see Marx1967 and Smith 1978. An extreme individual case is Krakauer 1996). I shallnot dwell on all too well-known historical examples of the unhappy alliancebetween a quasi-religious national fundamentalism and the landscape in Blutund Boden ideologies or in wilderness enthusiasm, especially in the USA.After a brief summary of the basic structures of the ideological mechanismsof the national landscapes, I want to show how literature might contributeto another approach to the landscape and thereby to another sense of belong-ing to a place.

The Functions of the National Landscape

The national landscape contributes to a national identity in the followingways:

1) it gives unity to people and place2) it provides people and place with a common origin3) it naturalizes the unity and the origin

Therefore, the national landscape serves several ideological functions: ittends to present - also in the USA - the actual state of affairs, called a unity,as the outcome of a linear and almost purposive process, a historical des-tiny, and not as a complicated and partly unforeseeable process of fragmen-tation and breaking up, partly due to circumstantial human and nonhuman

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interventions; it tends to disguise the actual conflicts and contrasts in thenational setting, especially the fact that nations are mostly established afterthe breakdown of older structures and often with a reduced geographicalterritory; and, finally, in naturalizing the national identity, the landscaperemoves change and choice from the definition of national identity whichappears as an irrevocable fact. The national landscape sets the individualand collective identity, seen as a national identity, apart from the history ofwhich it is part. In the national landscape, nation and nature become oneand the same thing, both in language {nation and nature actually are thesame word) and in the perception of political reality, where change, dif-ferences etc. are considered unnatural or as detours on the way to thenaturalized nation. On the surface, the national landscape is an active andcreative force in the formation of a nonexclusive identity for all membersof a nation - the people; nevertheless, it is more correct to see it as areactive and partly repressive force, hiding actual conflicts and legitimizinghistorical boundaries, both physical and normative, on a quasi-natural basis.

Considering the standard image of Denmark as a homogeneous anddemocratic nation, this country may serve as an example to illustrate theconflictual origin of nations. Hans Christian 0rsted, one of the leadingfigures in modern science of his day owing to his investigations on electro-magnetism, was deeply involved in the national issue in the first half of thenineteenth century. In 1836 he naively defined and defended Danishness likethis:

What is Danishness? Like any national character it includes, first of all,everything that defines the human being; but what makes this character a specialDanish character is, naturally, the totality of the features that are more frequentin our people than in others .... The Danish land has a friendly nature, theenormous only reveals itself in sky and sea, and the horrifying is almost absent;only the sea unfolds now and then with terror; but numerous are the vistas wherethe Dane has either a wide or a smiling panorama over its blue surface ....Surrounded by this nature the people have lived and developed for centuries: howcan we not notice a correspondence between them? I think nobody can deny thatthe Dane is good-humoured, easy-going, modest, disinclined to violence andwiles, rarely passionate.

(0rsted 1852: 50-51; my translation)

This was written after Norway, more than three times as large as present-day Denmark, was forcibly separated from the Danish kingdom by theVienna Congress after a seven-hundred years' union, because of Denmark'salliance with Napoleon, the loser; after national bankruptcy in 1813; andafter the King's denial of some sort of constitution in 1836, the year of0rsted's paper. Thus, the national landscape was used to reduce historical

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complexity to natural simplicity which was part of the ideological andpolitical make-up that naively led Denmark on the road toward two warswith Prussia (1848-50 and 1864), reducing Danish territory even more.Thus, the national landscape confused the basic national agenda, givingpriority to an imaginary unity over the conflicts and changes that constitutedthe real political agenda of nation: health, education, urban and industrialdevelopment, new class structures, political participation etc. that grew outof the economical and political processes of the nineteenth century.

0rsted continues:

If anybody asked me: what enables me to write a genuine Danish? then I wouldprobably give him the same answer as if he had asked me: what enables me tobe a genuine Dane in the very essence of my being? I would simply tell himprudently to follow his nature: when a Dane, bom and raised among Danes andhaving lived among Danes, follows this precept, he will automatically becomegenuinely Danish; only artificiality will cause him to deviate from trueDanishness.

(0rsted 1852: 53; my translation)

The argument is simple, its consequences complicated: in the national iden-tity outer nature, the landscape, and inner nature, the genuine Danishness,are unified in a complete balance that works all by itself, and the two"natures" find a common means of expression, the national language thatconfirms their unity. Although an explicit hostility toward foreignness, orjust the lack of balance between inner life and outer landscape, is avoided,xenophobia toward domestic and foreign enemies is just a step away (apogrom-like attack on Jews, almost unheard of in Denmark, took place in1819 in Copenhagen).

The national language has both to express and promote the national iden-tity, especially in describing the national landscape as the scene of theoriginal national way of life. In this perspective, the landscape is, of course,more fundamental than language, being accessible to you by immediatesense perception alone, whereas it requires some learning to master theproduction and interpretation of landscape descriptions. For a more thought-ful consideration - to follow 0rsted's invitation as quoted above - this is,however, a dubious argument: the immediate perception does not capturea national landscape, but just some environmental elements; only a personalready informed by descriptions will "know" that what is perceived, is anational landscape. And he doesn't even need a national language to obtainthe information.

Still, the reference to nature pushes the nationalized individual andcollective identity outside history and historical reflection, and therefore

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outside the realm of human decisions, also in the institutionalized form ofdemocratic decisions, and language no longer serves as a medium for col-lective historical reflexion. The national landscape is both an uplifting anddangerous phenomenon, hiding more than it reveals, and most often theopposite of what it displays. To promote an understanding of the historicalsense of the landscape I shall take a closer look at the descriptions of twoliterary landscapes.

The Meaning of the Landscape

Due to the intimate relation between national landscape, national languageand national identity, literature plays a fundamental role in creating thevision of the national landscape and making it serve its ideological func-tions. But literature is an unfaithful ally that often dissolves its own basis,even when it describes or even celebrates the national landscape. By its verynature literature de-unifies and ambiguizes its objects and therefore alsode-naturalizes and historizes them. Firstly, literature separates the twocomponents of national identity - individual identity from collective identityand makes national identity just one variation of possible combinations ofindividual and collective identity. Secondly, literature focuses both on thefeatures of the landscape and of the signifying and memorizing strategieswith which humans attach history and identity to the landscape beyond anynationalism. Thirdly, in literature the meaning in the landscape (the tracesof natural and historical processes actually manifested in the landscape) isinseparably linked to the meaning of the landscape (the identity-creatingprojection we attribute to our surroundings, the mindscape as it were) - thelandscape never speaks by and for itself showing the will of God, the vicis-situdes of nature or the essence of the nation. It is an integral part of acontextualized subjective-objective process. The synthesis of these threeaspects is the condition for a relation between individual collective identityand our surroundings - the condition for belonging on a level more funda-damental than that of national identity.

The Danish writer Isak Dinesen, a pen-name for Karen Blixen, settled inKenya in 1914 as a coffee farmer. She left Kenya in 1931 after having lostall her money and began a successful international career as a writer. Theopening of her memoirs from Africa, Out of Africa (1937), foregroundshow landscape related strategies may shape an individual identity as ameaning of the landscape (Dinesen 1985: 3-4), whereas the opening of herstory "Sorrow-Acre" from Winter's Tales (1942) foregrounds how collectiveidentity is bound to the meaning in the landscape (1986: 172-174).

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Out of Africa opens with the impressive view of the Ngong Hills:

I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs acrossthese highlands, a hundred miles to the North, and the farm lay at an altitude ofover six thousand feet. In the day-time you felt that you had got high up, nearto the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and thenights were cold.

The geographical position, and the height of the land combined to create alandscape that had not its like in all the world. There was no fat on it and noluxuriance anywhere; it was Africa distilled up through six thousand feet, like thestrong and refined essence of a continent.

(Dinesen 1985: 3)

After a long and vibrant description of the uniqueness and the astoundingbeauty of the African setting, with many concrete details of trees, plants andanimals, light and temperature, earth and sky, and pervaded with an ecstaticfeeling of presence, she sums up:

The chief feature of the landscape, and of your life in it, was the air .... Up inthis high air you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness ofheart. In the highland you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am,where I ought to be.

(Dinesen 1985:4)

Although Dinesen explicitly wants to give an image of the totality of thelandscape, horizontally and vertically, she actually presents a highly selec-tive description, including only those details that make the landscape atotality for her, not in itself, and enables her to experience an identity inrelation to the local place. The landscape is more loaded with subjectivepurposiveness than with social and natural facticity.

In spite of Dinesen's exuberant descriptions of freedom and happiness inOut of Africa, as anticipated in the opening, we know from Dinesen's lettersand other sources that her stay in Africa was a misery on a personal andeconomical level - she suffered constantly from illness, most notably fromsyphilis she contracted from her womanizing husband whom she divorced,and she was permanently on the brink of bankruptcy which forced her tohumiliate herself to ask for money from her Danish family. The bottom linewas that she was lured by her husband to buy a plantation on a site un-suitable for coffee farming.

If we scrutinize the landscape description itself, we cannot help doubtingits reality. Is it a dream about living in the air, or do we face the place asit really is? And if it is but a dream, should we feel deceived because weexpected to read a reliable autobiography and not a fictional construct? No,

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Dinesen is not lying about social or natural reality; she is transforming thelandscape and the African experience in order to come to grips with anotherreality, that of her own identity. The landscape is turned into a symbol ofthat identity. What we encounter in the opening pages, and all the waythrough the memoirs, is this transformational process.

The first words and the last words of the two above quotations are "I hada farm" and "Here I am, where I ought to be". The transformation runsfrom a reference to the outside world, to have, to an expression of theinside world, to be. Moreover, "I had" is in the past tense, thereby referringto a lost reality. The text is a narrated memory-searching for the real beingof the "I", not of the landscape. On their way from have to be, all autobi-ographies run the risk of being sentimentally nostalgic in their attempt torevive the past, to restore the loss of bygone life. Only the discursivestrategy of the text itself can qualify the transformation from lost reality togenuine identity, by fulfilling three conditions:

1) The landscape must be seen as irrevocably lost. The possibility ofreturning to Africa to her lost farm and its surroundings is ruled out. Ifnot, the recreation of identity through art, would just be a sentimentalentertainment, not a necessity. As for Orpheus, the authenticity of thenarrated memory presupposes that he does not turn around to face thereal Eurydice-Africa. The dangers and challenges of the recreativepowers of art are a recurrent theme in Dinesen's work.

2) The landscape must be seen as unique. If the landscape is not unparal-leled but just chosen at random among numerous sceneries, the identityrelated to the landscape would be peripheral.

3) The landscape must be seen as all-embracing. It does not just define partof one's life; one's entire life, including everything it contains, belongsto the landscape. No additional experiences are needed to develop theessentials of one's identity.

Of course, we know that Africa still exists, that Dinesen could have re-turned (but she never did after 1931), that the Ngong Hills do not exemplifythe entire continent, and that the world possesses other breathtaking sights.The qualities of being lost, of being unique, and of being all-embracing areeffects of the literary and artistic transformation on the basis of selectedelements from the landscape. This landscape is not by nature an identity-creating force, but is chosen to be so by an individual who is willing to paythe price. The very fact that she might have made a different choice makes

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the identity her identity. The role of art and literature is not to qualifyidentity as superficial and artificial or to make it a metaphysical abstraction,but to underline that there is always a basic element of choice and construc-tion involved in any identity. Through art, Dinesen decides to construct arelationship with an otherwise lost landscape. The very last lines of the bookdescribe her view of the Ngong Hills seen from the ship that is carrying heraway: "The outline of the mountain was slowly smoothed and levelled outby the hand of distance" (Dinesen 1985: 401). And it is from this point thatshe can begin the book in the past tense with "I had a farm in Africa" pro-ducing her identity in the present tense "Here I am, where I ought to be".

A brief discussion follows of the three conditions with which landscapedescription should comply. (All quotations are from Dinesen 1985: 3-4.)

Lost, Unique and Ail-Embracing

Lost: All the verbs, except four, in the opening of Out of Africa are in thepast tense. Hence, not only the actions and thoughts of the memorizingperson belong to the past, but also the landscape itself is presented in thatway, in spite of the fact that it still appears the same as when she left it.The few occurrences of the present tense refer to the location of the Equatorthat "runs across these highlands" or, more importantly, to the actualemotions of the memorizing person: "you are struck" when looking back.The past tense verbs are anchored in the feelings of the memorizing person,not in the landscape. It is her past all the way through, not that of the land-scape. The final statement, when she woke up in the morning and thought:"Here I am, where I ought to be", is rendered as a quotation from herthoughts when she was in Africa. So the only past event represented in thepresent tense is her self-reflexion. This constitutes the link between past andpresent, not the pressure or causal effects of past events.

However, the description immediately preceding her self-quotation forcesus to doubt if she actually wakes up to a reality or if she still has her feetsolidly rooted in the air. In fact, she has a "feeling of having lived for atime up in the air", and the landscape itself is "in the middle of the day" a"great Fata Morgana" that "mirrored and doubled all objects", which is theentire landscape. This time indication in the last lines of the opening dis-cretely refers to the first lines mentioning "the day-time" with the sun inzenith when "you felt that you had got high up, near to the sun". Onecannot avoid seeing this as an allusion to Icarus whose flying experienceclose to the sun ended in a catastrophe. Living in the air might be a dange-rous illusion that denies the physical reality of herself and the landscape.

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The possible loss of place is not filtered through a regretful sentimen-tality. In the last part of the book, "Farewell to the Farm", she describesfrankly how the altitude of the farm, that gave her and the landscape theiridentity, made coffee-growing impossible due to recurrent drought and cold.Moreover, she admits that she knew about it very early on, and that sheherself made the conditions of the farm even worse when she insisted,against expert advice, to grow flax "without success" (Dinesen 1985: 332).But the flax was in harmony with the air and gave the place an identity thatconformed to her wide-ranging dreams and fostered visions of cloths andlinen for people beyond the horizons of the local hills: "A sky-blueflowering flax-field is a marvellously pretty sight - like Heaven on earth"(p. 332). With this union of sky and earth she is repeating the openingdescription of the lost landscape.

Whereas Dinesen is not to blame for the lack of success in coffee-grow-ing, the futility of the flax project is clearly described as an effect of herstubborn dreams. Therefore, as the landscape is seen as her past, also theloss is seen as her loss. The memory of her farm is also the memory of herloss. There is no farm and no landscape to return to, but an identity to becreated.

Unique'. Whether lost or not, whether real or fictitious, the landscape isunique: "a landscape that had not its like in all the world". Nevertheless, itis presented to us in a series of comparisons: the experience of the land-scape makes us feel like something else (being close to the sun, living in theair etc.) or the features of the landscape are like something else (pottery,palms, full-rigged ships, faintly vibrating woods, thyme and bog-myrtle,flowers of the downs). This paradox is easily explained: this is the waymemory always works. Also, the unique has to be compared with somethingwe already know to enable us to retain it and give it new meaning. In thiscase, the comparisons inscribe the landscape in a Danish context (in fact,a similar landscape description can be found in a story, "Ib and Adelaide",located in Denmark).

Not only comparisons, but also contrasts, are part of the discursivestrategy used to transform the landscape to individual identity. The contrastsunderline explicitly the non-European character of the site (the trees haveno bows or cupolas, but horizontal layers; the sky is never blue, but pale;the view is immensely wide). On top of the localizing comparisons andcontrasts we find an abundance of imagery, projecting a variety of indirectcomparisons into the landscape: it is romantic, heroic, noble; things sail,tower up, are alive. In spite of its uniqueness, the landscape acquires itsidentity in a multidimensional network of associations.

Therefore, the landscape appears as characterized by almost contradictory

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properties. The contrasting features in the opening lines, quoted above, aretrivial: we are at the foot of a mountain, yet high up, and night and day arelike ice and fire. But gradually, the contrasts become more and morecomplex and paradoxical. The horizontal and static landscape with "no fatand no luxuriance" is opposed to the air with its "plenitude" of dynamic andmoving forms that "tower up" vertically. Although the air "is the chieffeature" of the landscape where life unfolds to its highest degree of free-dom, the airy forms are difficult to grasp, whereas the clear-cut forms ofthe earth are easy to perceive but less important. When the "chief feature"is difficult to catch with your senses, it is no surprise that everything ismixed and confused with ample space for your imagination to be led astray.

When we look at the landscape at ground level the four elements areconfused: the trees are like full-rigged ships on water, with the air fillingthe sails and dispersing the scent of herbs, or the earth is dry and burnt asif by fire. The same goes for the air: at one point the air is like a solidsubstance with clouds "towering up", and later the clouds sail as if on waterand the air "scintillates" and waves like water or is like a "flame burning".This landscape is so unique that it destroys the verbal articulation of spatialexperience; therefore it is grasped as a mythological synthesis of the fourelements.

Parallel to the spatial uniqueness, the temporal particularity shows similarcomplementary features. In this respect, the semantics of a verb like "scin-tillate" is emblematic: there is a movement, but with repeatable and repeatedmoves and therefore without changes. The ample use of verbal aspect(burning, towering) also contributes to that impression of reduced temporallinearity and finitude. Most of the finite verbs, carrying the verbal tense, aresemantically void (have, be, come etc.) whereas the semantically loadedverbs referring to actions, intentions, moves etc. often are infinite formswithout temporal marks (e.g. "it was Africa distilled up"). Semantically andgrammatically the temporal uniquess of the landscape is presented as amoving standstill. This is exactly how the unique appears in memory: arepeated and repeatable movement that nevertheless remains constant, likea never realized potentiality.

All-embracing: Apart from being lost and unique, the landscape is alsoseen as all-embracing. It extends horizontally, its "views were immenselywide" and reaches vertically from the sea six thousand feet up and almostto the sun. It is not only "Africa distilled up through six thousand feet", butit stands out compared to the entire world, even its fata morganas include"all objects". The synthesis it expresses transcends any specific locality andbecomes a universal value: "Everything that you saw made for greatnessand freedom and unequalled nobility." It gives everything an identity. There

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is a unifying drive in it, almost on behalf of the entire Earth and Heaven.The landscape widens out from a geographical location to a symbolic

space. All-embracing does not simply mean large, but implies that anyonein the very act of perceiving it becomes part of it, both in relation to itsphysical particularity and its symbolic meaning. That is why the landscapestands out as a mythical synthesis where the four elements - earth, air, fireand water - are combined and organized beyond human will and intentionand also include the human beings in the landscape. We are formed by it.

But the landscape is also formed by us. It is a kind of screen exposingsubjective plans, actions and feelings of individual or collective nature andwith a mixed historical origin: the landscape is heroic, romantic, free,noble, loaded with greatness and hope. When humans are part of the land-scapes they leave their footprints, in spite of the landscape's all-embracing,autonomous character. Therefore, the landscape, almost from the first line,is never just a collection of material elements, but also a semantic construct.First and foremost, it is located in relation to the arbitrary line of theEquator, defined by humans. Other manifestations of its constructed charac-ter are hinted at in the verbs (position and height "create" the landscape),but is more succinctly referred to in its likeness with items like pottery andships. Moreover, the human point of view is present in expressions em-phasizing aesthetic qualities like "no luxuriance", "strange appearance","delicate foliage", "structure". The landscape is all-embracing, and yet it isseen as a symbolic construct supporting human identity.

The discursive strategy of Dinesen's text shows in great detail, and witha fascinating linguistic and imaginary mastery, through metaphors and withmany references to the dreamlike state she is in when she experiences thelandscape, that she does not primarily describe a landscape but forms anidentity. If it is a dream, it is a dream about her own place in the world.This identity is based on the landscape only if it is made unreal, lost andseen as an artificial totality of selected details. She is defining a meaning ofthe landscape as her memory-based identity of highly individual conditions.Thereby, she is highlighting the role of human intervention for the creationof identity in relation to the landscape, and thus reducing the importance ofits immediately perceived naturalness.

The Meaning in the Landscape

The same discursive strategy is at work in a description of a Danish land-scape. But here the landscape is not a dream-like state transformed to in-dividual identity, but a collective historical and natural reality for everyone

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living there. The introduction to her story "Sorrow-Acre" from Winter'sTales (1942: 172-74) presents the undulated Danish landscape before theaction unfolds. The story is historically situated around 1780 in the fieldsand gardens of a Danish manor house.

The low undulating Danish landscape is silent and serene, mysterious wide-awake, in the hour before sunrise, There was not a cloud in the pale sky, not ashadow along the dim, pearly fields, hills and woods. The mist was lifting fromthe valleys and hollows, the air was cool, the grass and the foliage dripping wetwith morning dew. Unwatched by the eyes of man, and undisturbed by hisactivity, the country breathed a timeless life, to which language was inadequate.

All the same a human race had lived on this land for a thousand years, hadbeen formed by its soil and weathers, and had marked it with its thoughts, so thatnow no one could tell where the existence of the one ceased and that of the otherbegan. The thin grey line of a road, winding across the plain and up and downhills, was the fixed materialization of human longing, and of the human notionthat it were better to be in one place than another. A child of the landscape wouldread this open landscape like a book.

(Dinesen 1986:172)

Already in this simple appraisal of the eternal beauty of the Danish land-scape that embraces the entire life of its inhabitants, certain underlyingcontradictions reveal that Dinesen here, too, is trying to provide us withmore than a simple description. In these opening lines of her story we areinvited rather to reflect upon the relation between national landscape andnational identity than just to observe it. Thus, in the brief quotation she bothcelebrates the being locality-bound and the longing to get away; she bothplaces the landscape inside the realm of human experience, language andinterpretation and outside it, in a timeless transcendence. On the followingpages, before the action actually takes place, she continues to articulate twolevels simultaneously: that of simple recognizability and stable, comfortingidentity, and that of unsolvable and thereby dynamic and destabilizingcontrasts and contradictions.

Dinesen presents a landscape that is overemphasized by several types ofnatural, social and symbolic features, each of which contributes to itsdynamics. Five structures are simultaneously at work in the landscape, eachbased on a major conflict through which they are either reinforcing orneutralizing each other.

The first one, concerning the development of the individual characters(the old Lord of the manorhouse, his young wife, his nephew Adam, andthe peasant woman Anne-Marie), is not directly important for the openingbefore they enter the scene. They belong to the following plot: Betweensunrise and sunset Anne-Marie has been sentenced by the old Lord to

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harvest a full field of rye. A barn has been set on fire and her son is themain suspect. If she succeeds, the son will be set free. The Lord sees it asan opportunity for Anne-Marie, while his nephew, Adam, inspired by theideas of individual rights, calls it an act of cruelty because the boy's actualguilt is not involved. But in a certain sense Anne-Marie is more fortunatethan the Lord. He has no son and heir, but she has one she can give her lifefor. He does not even have the choice to do so. But he has a young wife,and Adam is not unaware of her charms, so perhaps the Lord will get a son,after all. One thing is sure, though: Anne-Marie's son is set free; she diesand because of her singular act she procures her identity in the collectivememory, whereas the Lord will leave no evidence of his existence - no son,no deed. Like Out of Africa, this is also a story about identity and con-ditions for identity including loss and memory, but in a collective context.

We will now take a closer look at the conflicts constituting the fourremaining structures in the landscape.

The Four Structures in the Landscape

a) Social structure: The landscape is a sociological portrait of a stablesocial structure, almost eternalized and naturalized over the centuries. Wehave a vertical line with the peasants in their huts at the bottom, "a low,brown growth of the earth", practically indistinguishable from the soil. Atthe top we see the church, placed "a little higher up" and to be seen "as faras the eye reached". On a horizontal line, crossing the vertical one in the"woods" halfway between huts and church, we have the centre of the story:a "pyramidal silhouette" of a manor house, which "did not gaze upward,like the church, nor down to the ground like the huts: it had a wider earthlyhorizon than they, and was related to much noble architecture all overEurope". Here we are confronted with the tripartite structure of feudalsociety, including also a little later in the text a reference to God and to theKing.

But this stable structure is also in a state of transition. Firstly, we learnthat it has developed through certain stages through human activity and istherefore changeable. Secondly, we see an indication of a shift in powerbetween church and manor house. The church is described condescendinglyas "a plain, square embodiment of the nation's trust in justice and mercy ofheaven" (Dinesen 1986: 172-174), although a little later we see that thenoble families are the ones actually responsible for the nation, for justiceand for mercy. And the manor house with the life on "a higher plane" hastaken over the general responsibility for the quasi-religious function of

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"destiny" and it possesses the dominant visibility in the landscape: the houseand its avenue of lime-trees rise "in the air", and "The writing in the skysolemnly proclaimed continuance, a worldly immortality", a continuancewhich is labelled "sacred". The church simply disappears, and the dis-appearance is prepared by the fact that the church is first and foremostrelated to the vanishing sound of bells. We witness a transition to a modernsecular world removing one of the cornerstones, the church, from the feudalstructure.

b) Natural process: The landscape as a natural setting is depicted bothin a relation of contrast to humans and in a relation of continuity: "Un-watched by the eyes of man, and undisturbed by his activity, the countrybreathed a timeless life, to which language was inadequate". The world ofhumans is one thing, nature something entirely different, outside temporalflow of history and the linear time of human actions. But the descriptiongoes on:

All the same a human race had lived on this land for a thousand years, had beenformed by its soil and weathers, and had marked it with its thoughts, so that nowno one could tell where the existence of the one ceased and that of the otherbegan.

(Dinesen: 1986:172)

Human interaction with nature is as essential to the place as the naturalprocesses themselves.

c) Sexual structure: Sexuality is bound up with the problem of legiti-macy, "the vital principle of the world", which is identical with the con-tinuing worldly power of the manor lords. The collective control over thelandscape and its people is upheld by the legitimacy of the noble family andits offspring. But at the same time it is bound to the individual freedom ofthe ladies of the house to fool their husbands - they are the only ones toknow the final truth of the legitimacy. Sexual relations are established bothin order to serve the social structure and to gain a possibility of dangerousand passionate experiences of freedom:

For how free were they [the women] not, how powerful! Their lords might rulethe country, and allow themselves many liberties, but when it came to thatsupreme matter of legitimacy which was the vital principle of their world, thecentre of gravitation lay by them.

(Dinesen: 1986:174)

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This tension between collective control and individual freedom makessexuality a dynamic structure of the landscape.

d) Structure of symbolic values: The symbolic and mythological dimen-sions refer both to the text itself as a symbolic structure and to the role ofwords, nonverbal symbols, and myths as a motif in the text. Firstly, verbalor visual language is used redundantly as a metaphor of the landscape,which is called a book, a story, a writing, a picture, a voice, a cipher, amosaic. On the other hand we are told that no language is adequate to graspthe landscape: "a timeless life, to which language was inadequate". In thelast lines of the opening the very reality of the highly coded legitimacy isa profound and unpronounced secret in the noble ladies. We are confrontedwith a borderline between a universe of normative coding on the level oflanguage and behaviour, and an actual reality which transgresses it - thelandscape itself and the actual state of legitimacy. Only a narrative canconnect them.

With regard to the text itself, we face a syntactic structure that is pre-dominantly descriptive with a lack of connectors between the single state-ments (e.g. "There was not a cloud ...", "The lime-trees paraded round astronghold ...", "The big house stood .. ."). Now and then our attention iscalled to a few explicatory contrasts marked by words like "all the same","but", "only", "not ... like". But all explicit indications of inferences areabsent - we can never be sure about causes and consequences; we can onlysee the surface of things, occasionally combined in visible contrasts. (Onlytwice we find a "so" and a "for"). In a sentence like "They [the lime-trees]spoke of dignity, decorum and taste. Danish soil grew no finer flower thanthe mansion to which the long avenue led", the trees are like cultural arte-facts, and the mansion is like a tree: the question of what is culture andwhat is nature, what is precondition and what is consequence, is left open.Beneath the order at the surface is an imminent chaos of unrelated events,things, and processes.

The four structures in the landscape reveal a conflict that necessitateshuman action, decision, intervention to enable these structures to form thelandscape: power, cultivation, procreation and narration. Thereby they con-stitute a historical process that causes the landscape to materialize as part ofa collective identity.

National Identity Without a National Landscape?

Such descriptions reveal, first of all, how the positive function of the land-

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scape is the creation of identity as a sense of belonging to a place, based onindividual or collective memory, whether the landscape is real or fictional,and whether the identity is a highly individual project, as in Out of Africa,or a collective enterprise as in "Sorrow-Acre". In both cases the literaryarticulation of the transformation of landscape into identity brings back thelandscape from nature to the history of human beings. But the two landscapedescriptions do not naturalize this experience. They show the ambiguous,even conflictual, character of the identity emanating from the landscape,showing it as a result of human choice on an individual and collective levelintegrated in a process of change. To be born in a place is not enough.Identity does not grow from the ground like plants, as 0rsted would haveit. Dinesen focuses on the historical processes, conflicts and human signsin the landscape that create our identity. The national identity, as an indi-vidual and collective identity, only exists on such conditions and can neverfind a natural foundation in the landscape (although modern politics innature conservation unfortunately echoes such positions).

This does not imply, though, that the question of national identity has tobe dismissed altogether and sent back to a predemocratic past from whereit emerged. Such a conclusion would precisely deny the historical characterof locality-bound identity: it is not a question of which national identity wehave, but which one we choose. The relevant question is: what does it meanto belong to a place as part of one's identity under democratic conditions,and where does a landscape fit in?

The British political scientist David'Miller has addressed similar issues inhis book On Nationality. Although the role of landscapes does not enter hisdiscussion (or the discussion of most others taking issue with the questionof national identity, e.g. Hobsbawm 1990), his argument is very much inline with mine. He is trying to escape the easy solutions: because an eagerinterest in national identity has often degenerated into destructive chauvi-nism, we do not have to dismiss it as an uncontrollable quasi-naturalatavism or as a stable but unhappy fact of modern Realpolitik with whichordinary people should not interfere; furthermore, because nationalism hassome unfortunate effects in modern history, we do not need to delegitimizeall questions about locality-bound identity and set up a placeless cosmo-politanism as our ideal. It is legitimate, and in fact inevitable, to argue fora locality-bound identity; to accept, as we saw in the Dinesen quotationabove, "the human notion that it were better to be in one place thananother" (Dinesen 1986: 172).

Firstly, Miller claims that as humans we are social beings whose identity- that is, the way we understand our place in the world - partly, but notexclusively, includes that we are inextricably part of a national grouping.

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In certain contexts the essentials of this grouping have to do with language,in others with certain institutionalized practices, with family structure etc.;sometimes we accept them, sometimes we cherish especially one or someof them; and they all change with time. Nationality is a result of historicaloveremphasis, not of natural foundation whether related to landscape, torace or other natural or quasi-natural categories. Dinesen's Danish landscapeshowed precisely this overemphasized complexity. So, a landscape may bepart of this whole, not as natural foundation but as a historically developedfeature which, however, is relevant only in certain contexts.

Secondly, he insists that nations are ethical communities, implying mutualobligations between compatriots, that may include and sometimes ought alsoto embrace others. But we cannot, like Miller, avoid having mutual obliga-tions that are defined on the basis of a national community. Ethical obli-gations begin inside a close space from where we can reach out; but wecannot start by reaching out and then ending up in our circles closer tohome. In that case, there would be no ethics at all. Wars and disastersaffecting the human race bear testimony to the consequences suffered by theenvironment through globalization of politics and economics.

Thirdly, nations impose limits on who I am and what I ought to do.Miller calls this the political aspect of the nation, its claim to self-determina-tion. A nation that offers us an identity and imposes obligations on ustoward our fellow nationals, will have to be able to define and defend theself-determination with regard to at least the essential identity-creatingelements (for example language and education) and the basic obligations (forexample the level of social welfare), and it must have a certain territorywhere self-determination can be exercised, and where certain boundariesmerit respect (but not necessarily a specific landscape). Identity and obli-gations must have a place that can be shaped accordingly, although theterritory itself does not define the nation. Building a nation is to build up acombination of these three aspects.

The most essential part of the identity complex is history: a common cul-ture for interaction, for a memory of these actions and a shared belief in theorientation towards the future. To this it is important to add, a sharedmemory of the conflicts, disasters, contradictions of the history related tothe place seen as our conflicts, and not as victimizing external forces. Build-ing up a national identity will have to refer to institutions that carry a com-mon relevant history, not a common nature. Belonging to a place is a matterof a series of decisions, not a matter of natural origin. If we cannot recog-nize our decisions in this history, but merely accept the bare nature ofevents and places, how can this place be called ours? Literature is one ofthese institutions, giving history a narrative form that integrates individual

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and collective identity with their conflictual conditions.

References

Davidson, Basil1992 The Black Man's Burden. Africa and the Curse of the Nation

State. Oxford: Currey/Harare: Baobab/Nairobi: EAEP/Kampala:Fountain.

Dinesen, Isak[1937]1985 Out of Africa. New York: Vintage.[1942]1986 Sorrow-Acre. Winter's Tales. Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp.

172-200.Hobsbawm, E.J.

1990 Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myths, Reality.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kostof, Spiro1992 The City Assembled. London: Thames & Hudson.

Krakauer, Jon1996 Into the Wild. New York: Villard.

Marx, Leo[1964] 1967 The Machine in the Garden. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Miller, David

1995 On Nationality. Oxford: Clarendon.Ørsted, Hans Christian[1836] 1852 Danskhed [Danishness]. Samlede og efterladte Skrifter vol. 7.

Copenhagen: Høst, pp. 39-58.Ranger, Terence[1983] 1996 The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa. In: Hobsbawn, E.

& Ranger, T. (eds) The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, pp. 211-262.

Smith, Anthony1991 National Identity. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Smith, Henry Nash1951 Virgin Land. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Zizek, Slavoj1993 Enjoy Your Nation as Yourself. Tarrying with the Negative.

Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 200-237.

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