Journeys from Scandinavia: Travelogues of Africa, Asia, and South America, 1840—2000

One: Discovering His Inner Turk: Hans Christian Andersen’s Commodification of the Exotic

6 one Discovering His Inner Turk Hans Christian Andersen’s Commodification of the Exotic Andersen absorbed like a sponge. His entire oeuvre—from fairy tales to drama to travel accounts—reflects his uncanny ability to soak up the mental, material, and cultural preoccupations of his era. Even in the shortest of depictions, one has the sense that Andersen squeezes his sponge and lets out an entire epoch’s cultural and aesthetic issues—never reducing their complexity, but leaving opposite standpoints unresolved and ending his accounts on an ambivalent note. Søren Kierkegaard may well have launched his writing career by expressing his contempt for Andersen’s lack of a coherent worldview, but readers today, emphasizing his premodernist aesthetic, find Andersen’s tendency to absorb the various discourses of his age less problematic than intriguing.1 In Andersen’s life and oeuvre, traveling occupies a predominant position. “At rejse er at leve” (to travel is to live), he declared, and the romanticist author lived up to this dictum, embarking on approximately thirty journeys during his seventy-year life span, spending a total of ten years abroad.2 Beginning with domestic journeys, moving on to neighboring Scandinavian countries, heading down through Europe, and eventually moving beyond the European continent, Andersen in the end traveled as far east as Constantinople and Smyrna (present-day Istanbul and Izmir) and as far south as Tangier in North Africa. These journeys have resulted in such a wealth of travel accounts that one may conclude that for Andersen, to travel was not only to live but also to write—or maybe writing should be placed as an intermediary term: to travel is to write, which in turn is to live. The focus of this chapter is En Digters Bazar (A Poet’s Bazaar, 1842) depicting Andersen’s first journey beyond the European continent to Turkey . The travelogue’s title has previously been regarded as a well-chosen DISCOVERING HIS INNER TURK 7 indicator of the text’s content and form. In terms of content it conjures up a sense of the exotic and sensual; with regard to genre, it suggests a series of unconnected portraits and impressions. As noted in one Danish literary history, “Systematization is of no concern for this traveler.”3 Yet, what tends to be overlooked is the degree to which Andersen—through this title—signals a commercialization and commodification not only of art but also of the cultural Other. The first part of this chapter will thus regard the text from a nineteenth-century point of view—that is, within its own historical horizon—and focus on what I will call Andersen’s bazaar poetics. The second part of this chapter is inspired by Andersen’s bicentennial. In the case of “Andersen 2005” and the so-called worldwide celebration, commodification remains a relevant focus for this chapter. Now, however, it must be applied to Andersen himself. Since 2004, the Danish media have held up Andersen as a cultural icon symbolizing innocence and crosscultural openness. En Digters Bazar, in particular, has been promoted as a model and inspiration for attaining friendship and understanding between Danes and Arabs. Yet, one could just as well read the text concentrating on its Orientalist and Euroimperialist aspects. The second part of this chapter , then, situates En Digters Bazar in the ideological landscape emerging between two poles: between that of a radical postcolonial stance in which all white, European, male travelers are seen as suspect imperialists, on the one hand; and that of a national, excessively self-congratulatory project, on the other. Finally, I will consider the use of Andersen’s sketches as illustrative material in his travelogues—a practice dating back to the middle of the twentieth century. Bazaar Poetics En Digters Bazar covers nine months of travel during which Andersen— in 1840 and 1841—journeyed from Denmark, down through Germany to Italy, Greece, and Turkey, and returned up the Danube River to Budapest , Vienna, and Prague, and finally back to Denmark through Germany. The travelogue is divided into six geographical sections presenting the journey chronologically. Each section, in turn, is composed of short chapters containing a hodgepodge of genres, ranging from lyrical depictions to 8 DISCOVERING HIS INNER TURK fairy tales, poetry, prose poems, short stories, and dialogues. Andersen, in fact, makes an explicit point of his romanticist goal of breaking through previously established genre conventions. Whereas his diaries reflect pecuniary and physical...