by Knut Hamsun
Hamsun’s literary technique in this book is equally unconventional. Much has been written about the angle(s) of narration in Mysteries. Though initially we sense the presence of an observer, a townsman perhaps, who tells the story, soon we find ourselves listening to Nagel’s thoughts, mostly by way of free indirect discourse or erlebte Rede, but also here and there in the form of stream of consciousness. Yet, the point of view is not that of an omniscient author, but rather limited omniscience. On the whole, Hamsun treats the handling of point of view rather cavalierly in Mysteries. The narrative persona seems to hover above the text like a sort of all-seeing eye, an eye that can feign partial sight at will, if the occasion calls for it. Wolfgang Kayser says that Hamsun’s narrator dissolves into “an aura” that “floats around and through the characters.”39 By comparison with Hunger and Pan, both consistently first-person stories, Mysteries is narratologically loose, whether by design or from lack of skill. It looks as though Hamsun’s project, that of portraying a strong, complex mind drifting toward crackup, demanded the technical eclecticism that distinguishes this novel from its two classic companions.
Whether one likes the book’s narrative strategies or not, Hamsun seems to have achieved considerable success in applying his new aesthetic in a substantial work of fiction. As a whole, Mysteries succeeds in creating an intensely immediate sense of the day-by-day, hour-by-hour stream of thought of the central character, who is poised on the brink of annihilation. The social occasions, with their carousing and debates—including Nagel’s outrageous sallies at everything under the sun à la Mark Twain and the Dostoyevsky-inspired scenes of scandal—recede in the reader’s experience in favor of Nagel’s interior monologues. Gradually, the excoriator of so-called great men who puts himself forward as a champion of the great terrorist turns out to be a sensitive soul, speaking from weakness rather than strength. He withdraws more and more into the torture chamber of his own subconscious psyche, haunted by phantoms and driven to his death by the mysterious forces he so tirelessly defended against the inroads of science and reason, forces now turned destructive.
In Mysteries, Hamsun shows little concern with some of the most essential elements of the traditional novel: a coherent plot, causality, fullness and consistency of characterization, verisimilitude, and a sustained narrative perspective. Yet it cannot be called a modernist novel tout court. It does, however, display several modernist traits,40 inevitably so, considering Hamsun’s intent: to probe the deepest layers of the psyche, where irrationality reigns and ordinary cause and effect appear to be suspended. This is also the realm of the uncanny, where depth psychology meets the mystery story. The bizarre relationship between everyday reality, dream, and fairy tale in the book borders on the surreal, or on magic realism. All these new elements, grounded in the irrational, forced Hamsun to come up with a novel set of criteria for aesthetic coherence. Perhaps a musical analogy will be helpful. Despite the seeming chaos of Nagel’s mind, his story falls into a definite pattern: the repetitions, variations, and recapitulations of situations and motifs that the text reveals generate an aesthetically satisfying rhythm and a sense of completion, while at the same time producing a plausible rendering of a mind at the end of its tether.
Viewed in a different perspective, Mysteries can be seen as an absurdist work. Life in society is described as a kind of puppet show, in which the puppets dutifully repeat their lines. Some of the characters have generic names: the doctor, the lawyer, the teacher, as in an expressionist play. And in the end Nagel, who considers himself to be above the social comedy, also becomes a puppet as he is drawn to his death by his own subconscious obsessions. But by its very absurdity, Nagel’s predicament becomes tragic. The book envisages the human condition as a tragedy of mind: the more highly developed your consciousness, the more acutely you will suffer. The mind of Nagel, which perceives the before and after with a lacerated sensibility, is fraught with existential angst. The loathing instilled by life’s humiliations is akin to the nausea felt by Roquentin in Sartre’s famous 1938 novel La Nausée. However, unlike Roquentin, Nagel has renounced redemption through art.
Mysteries is a very rich novel, and a brief essay cannot do justice to it. In any case, the reader will want to work out his or her own interpretation of the book, which, despite its occasional quirks and perversities, presents a bracing challenge to one’s critical imagination.
NOTES
1 In regard to rootlessness, statements in the first edition of Mysteries echo Hamsun’s letters of the time. In a passage subsequently deleted, Nagel reflects nostalgically, “One ought to ... get on, have a house, a wife, and a dog.” (See Textual Notes, ch. 4, note 5.) In a letter to Bolette and Ole Johan Larsen of March 7, 1892, Hamsun says, “... one shouldn’t write for people, one should ... settle down in a forest, acquire a house, a wife, and a dog.” (Knut Hamsuns brev, ed. Harald S. Næss, I [Oslo, 1994]: 247. Hereafter cited as Brev. The translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.) Nevertheless, Hamsun refused to be identified with Nagel, as shown in a letter to Erik Skram of November 5,1892, where he says he cannot be responsible for “all of Nagel’s opinions” (Brev, 284; Knut Hamsun, Selected Letters, ed. Harald Næss & James McFarlane, I [Norwich, England: Norvik Press, 1990]: 163-64. Hereafter referred to as Letters.)
2 Tore Hamsun, Knut Hamsun—min far (Oslo, 1992), 64.
3 Letter to Svend Tveraas of February 29, 1884, in Brev, 42; Letters, 42.
4 Harald Næss, Knut Hamsun (Boston, 1984), 12.
5 Letter to Nikolai Frøsland of January 19, 1886, in Brev, 63.
6 Letter to Erik Frydenlund of September 4, 1886, in Brev, 69; Letters, 58.
7 Letter to the Larsens in November 1894, in Brev, 431; Letters, 214.
8 “Psykologisk literatur,” in Paa Turné: Tre foredrag om litteratur, ed. Tore Hamsun (Oslo, 1960), 51.
9 Ibid., 66.
10 Ibid., 70-71.
11 “Fra det ubevidste Sjæleliv,” in Knut Hamsun, Artikler, ed. Francis Bull (Oslo, 1939), 60. In his article “ ‘Et dyb af mimoser, hvori vinden puster’: Om hvordan Knut Hamsun oppdaget Nathalie Sarrautes tropismer en natt i Lillesand,” Vinduet 46 (1992), nos. ¾, 97-101, Pal Norheim claims to find striking similarities between what Hamsun means by the mimosa metaphor in describing his aesthetic program and the meaning of tropisms in Nathalie Sarraute’s literary work.
12 “Fra det ubevidste Sjæleliv,” 61.
13 See “The Unconscious in the Aesthetic Judgment and in Artistic Production,” in Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophy of the Unconscious, trans. W. C. Coupland, with a Preface by C. K. Ogden (London & New York, 1931), I: 276ff.
14 Gregory Nybø, Knut Hamsuns ‘Mysterier’ (Oslo, 1969).
15 “Den moderne norske literatur” (1896), in Norsk skrivekunst, ed. Erling Nielsen (Oslo, 1958), 17, and “Knut Hamsun,” in Skildringer og stemninger fra den yngre litteratur (Kristiania, 1897), 28.
16 See “Sidste kapitel og det første: Hamsuns og Kincks sidste bøker,” in Norsk national kunst (Copenhagen, 1924), 147; Hamsun som modernist (Copenhagen, 1975), 197; and as quoted by Arne Falck, “Storm mot Mysterier,” in Ni artikler om Knut Hamsun, ed. Arild Hamsun (Arendal, 1976), 74, from Faldbakken’s article in Dagbladet, August 6, 1973.
17 See Henry Miller, The Books in My Life (London, 1952), 40, and Updike’s review of Gerry Bothmer’s translation of Mysteries in the New York Times Book Review, August 22, 1971, 1, 30.
18 Reinhard H. Friederich, “Kafka and Hamsun’s Mysteries,” Comparative Literature 28, no. 1 (Winter 1976): 34.
19 Nico Rost, “Aantekeningen bij het lezen van Knut Hamsun,” De nieuwe Gids 37 (1922): 40.
20 See “Heart of Darkness,” in The Portable Conrad, ed. Morton Dauwen Zabel (New York, 1952), 561.
21 Janko Lavrin, “The Return of Pan (On Knut Hamsun),” in Aspects of Modernism (Freeport, New York, 1968), 95.
22 Matthew 6:4.
23 Myshkin even hopes that his jealous rival, the fiery Rogozhin, will eventually become Nastasya Fil
ippovna’s “providence.” See Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, VIII (Leningrad, 1973): 192; The Idiot, trans. Constance Garnett (New York, 1935), 218.
24 Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, XIV (Leningrad, 1976): 214-15, 223, 239; The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York, 1991), 235-36, 245, 263.
25 Hamsun’s use of clairvoyance in Mysteries recalls The Visionary (1870) by Jonas Lie, who also grew up in Northern Norway, known for its uncanny tales of the supernatural.
26 Gregory Nybø’s study of Mysteries analyzes the work in terms of psychological detective fiction. His assertion that such a critical approach helps to bring out the organizing structures of the story (Knut Hamsuns ‘Mysterier,’ 16) is no doubt valid. However, the strategies of detective fiction do not by themselves unify the work. Nagel’s self-appointed exercise as a detective, in an apparent attempt to clear up the puzzling circumstances surrounding Karlsen’s death, shows up only sporadically and is abandoned well before the end of the novel.
27 The close kinship between the two heroes is suggested by several shared motifs: Nagel’s description of himself as a “stranger on earth” seems to echo Werther’s self-definition as a “wanderer, a pilgrim on earth”; Werther, like Nagel, fantasizes about meeting his beloved in the beyond; he is also associated with the color yellow, wearing a yellow vest (The Sufferings of Young Werther, trans. Harry Steinhauer [New York, 1970], 57, 90, 96). For further discussion, see Frank Thiess, “Das Werther-Thema in Hamsuns Mysterien,” in Heimat und Weltgeist: Jabrbuch der Knut Hamsun-Gesellschaft, ed. Hilde Fürstenberg (1960), 133-52. The classic study of the history of passion love is L’Amour et l’Occident (1939; Love in the Western World, 1957).
28 Hamsun had close contacts with the circle associated with the Copenhagen journal Ny Jord, which published the fragment of Hunger in 1888. Its first three volumes, 1888-1889, featured selections from Schopenhauer’s most popular book, Parerga and Paralipomena, as well as critical discussion of his philosophy, and from Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. Georg Brandes’ study of Nietzsche appeared in another Danish journal during the same period: “Aristokratisk Radikalisme: En Afhandling om Friedrich Nietzsche,” Tilskueren 6 (1889), 565-613; Friedrich Nietzsche: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism, trans. A. G. Chater (New York, n.d.). In an 1889 article on Strindberg, from whom, according to Harald Næss, Hamsun may have acquired what Georg Brandes called his “touching blind faith in Eduard von Hartmann’s profundity” (Brev, I: 135; 136, note 1), Hamsun describes Hartmann as a “subtle, aristocratic author whose ... refined thoughts delight in ... losing themselves in a drunken orgy of suffering” (Hamsun, Artikler, 41).
29 “On the Sufferings of the World,” in Parerga and Paralipomena, trans. T. Bailey Saunders, in K. Francke & W. G. Howard, eds., The German Classics, XV (New York, 1914): 84.
30 Op. cit., 229-30.
31 See E. C. Barksdale & Daniel Popp, “Hamsun and Pasternak: The Development of Dionysian Tragedy,” Edda 76 (1976): 343.
32 Brandes’ review of Mysteries appeared in Politiken, September 21, 1892.
33 Brev, I: 280. A story published in August 1890, “Small Town Life” (Samlede verker [Oslo, 1992], IV: 96-109), has a similar social setting to that in Mysteries. Based in all likelihood on Hamsun’s stay in Lillesand during the summer of that year, it contains a trenchant expose of small-town life. Tønnes Olai, a rather mysterious figure in the story, recalls Miniman by assuming the paternity of an illegitimate child, a proposition that the latter turned down.
34 Brev, I: 280.
35 Brev, I: 284; Letters, I: 164.
36 Matthew 4:19.
37 Letter to the Larsens of May 13, 1892, Brev, I: 250; Letters, I: 150.
38 Review of Mysteries (trans. Gerry Bothmer) in the New York Times Book Review, August 22, 1971, 1, 30.
39 Entstehung und Krise des modernen Romans, 4th ed. (Stuttgart, 1963), 35.
40 The most extensive treatment of Mysteries in relation to modernism is a section entitled “The Modernist Perspectivization of Narrative in Mysteries” in Martin Humpál’s narratological study of Hamsun’s early novels, The Roots of Modernist Narrative (Oslo, 1998), 89-104.
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Buttry, Dolores. “Music and the Musician in the Works of Knut Hamsun,” Scandinavian Studies 53, no. 2 (1981): 171-82.
Downs, Brian. Modern Norwegian Literature 1860-1918. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1966. Pp. 174- 88.
Ferguson, Robert. Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987.
Humpál, Martin. The Roots of Modernist Narrative: Knut Hamsun’s Novels ‘Hunger,’ ‘Mysteries,’ and ‘Pan.’ Oslo: Solum Forlag, 1998.
Larsen, Hanna Astrup. Knut Hamsun. New York: Knopf, 1922.
McFarlane, James W. “Knut Hamsun,” in Ibsen and the Temper of Norwegian Literature. London, New York: Oxford University Press, 1960. Pp. 114-57.
—“The Whisper of the Blood: A Study of Knut Hamsun’s Early Novels,” PMLA 71 (1956): 563-94.
Næss, Harald. Knut Hamsun. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984.
—“Knut Hamsun and America,” Scandinavian Studies 39 (1967): 305-28.
—“A Strange Meeting and Hamsun’s Mysteries,” Scandinavian Studies 36 (1964): 48-58.
—“Strindberg and Hamsun,” in Structures of Influence: A Comparative Approach to August Strindberg. University of North Carolina Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures, vol. 98, ed. Marilyn Johns Blackwell. Chapel Hill, 1981. Pp. 121-36.
—“Who Was Hamsun’s Hero?” in The Hero in Scandinavian Literature, ed. John M. Weinstock & Robert T. Rovinsky. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975. Pp. 63-86.
Popperwell, Ronald G. “Interrelatedness in Hamsun’s Mysterier,” Scandinavian Studies 38 (1966): 295-301.
Riechel, Donald C. “Knut Hamsun’s ‘Imp of the Perverse’: Calculation and Contradiction in Sult and Mysterier,” Scandinavica 28 (1989): 29-53.
Wood, James. “Knut Hamsun’s Christian Perversions,” in The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief. New York: Random House, 1999. Pp. 75-88.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
This is the first complete translation of Knut Hamsun’s second novel, Mysteries. Arthur G. Chater’s rendition of 1927 was bowdlerized, presumably because the deleted pages (an episode in chapter 10) were considered too robust fare for English and American readers of the 1920s. Gerry Bothmer’s version of 1971 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) is less a translation than a free adaptation of Hamsun’s original. The text is not only drastically reduced but also simplified, depriving Hamsun’s language of its quirky uniqueness and verve. In some ways Bothmer’s rendering represents a more egregious betrayal of Hamsun’s work than Robert Bly’s translation of Hunger.
I
IN THE MIDDLE of last summer a small Norwegian coastal town was the scene of some highly unusual events. A stranger appeared in town, a certain Nagel, a remarkable, eccentric charlatan who did a lot of curious things and then disappeared as suddenly as he had come. What’s more, the man was visited by a mysterious young lady, who came on heaven knows what business and left after only a few hours, afraid to stay any longer. But this is not the beginning....
The beginning is as follows: When the steamer docked around six o’clock in the evening, there appeared on deck two or three passengers, including a man wearing a loud yellow suit and a wide velvet cap. This was the evening of June 12, for flags were flying all over town in honor of Miss Kielland’s engagement, which had been announced that day. The porter from the Central Hotel immediately went on board, and the man in the yellow suit handed him his luggage; at the same time he surrendered his ticket to one of the ship’s officers. But then, instead of going ashore, he began pacing up and down the deck. He seemed to be greatly agitated. When the ship’s bell rang for the third time, he hadn’t even paid his bill to the steward.
As he was doing this he suddenly paused, noticing that the ship was al
ready putting out. Taken aback, he hesitated a moment, then waved to the porter on shore and said to him over the railing, “All right, take my luggage to the hotel and reserve a room for me anyway.”
Whereupon the ship carried him farther out the fjord.
This man was Johan Nilsen Nagel.
The porter took his luggage away on a cart. It consisted of only two small bags and a fur coat—yes, a fur coat, though it was the middle of summer—except for a valise and a violin case. None of it was tagged.
Around noon the following day Johan Nagel arrived at the hotel overland, traveling by coach and pair. He could just as easily, well, far more easily, have come by sea, and yet he arrived by carriage. He brought some more luggage: on the front seat was a trunk and, beside it, a traveling bag, a coat, and a carrying strap with some articles in it. The carrying strap was marked J. N. N. in beads.
While he was still sitting in the carriage, he asked the hotel keeper about his room, and when he was shown up to the second floor he began examining the walls, to see how thick they were and whether any sound could penetrate from the adjoining rooms. Then he suddenly asked the chambermaid, “What’s your name?”