Victoria: A Love Story

by Knut Hamsun

  Beyond relating a love story, Victoria is a celebration of love in all its facets, its ups and downs, its torments and raptures, its capricious twists and turns. It conjures up the charms of adolescent and youthful love, bright and adventurous or desperately unhappy, as well as the fateful attractions of a besetting passion. While Victoria feels obliged to suppress her love of Johannes and, as a result, becomes a prodigy of dissimulation, with occasional bouts of spite and ill humor, Camilla quickly finds herself in a situation where she simulates a love she does not feel. Here, as in Pan, the characters reveal themselves as a cluster of inconsistencies and contradictions. Thus, Victoria will tell Johannes, “You’re the one I love,” embracing and kissing him while at the same time attempting to palm off Camilla on him. A comic sidelight on the vagaries of Eros is provided by Victoria’s former tutor, who, having chosen bachelorhood after the failure of a youthful romance, ends up marrying a widow. The tutor is a perfect foil to the central characters’ sublime passions.

  The inserted vignettes, or sketches, and the lyrical interludes present a wider array of perspectives on the irrational, and highly ambiguous, workings of desire. The former, mostly depicting situations that involve jealousy and adultery, occasionally assume anomalous forms that, in isolation, would appear implausible or absurd; in context, however, they expand the novel’s narrative and psychological horizon. There is, for example, the husband who, having surprised his wife with her lover, asks, “What do you say to putting horns on him—on the one who just left—?” a question that draws a scream from his wife. No less grotesque is the behavior of a loving couple who, as they grow old and decrepit, vie with one another in constancy, to the point that the husband disfigures his face to match his paralyzed wife’s “deep furrows” of grief.

  By dint of its language, carefully structured by anaphoras and refrain, the main lyrical interlude qualifies as a poem in prose. In this poem, love runs the gamut from being “a yellow phosphorescence in the blood” and a “hot devil’s music that set even the hearts of old men dancing” to a “summer night with stars in the sky and fragrance on earth.” The imagery ranges from the idyllic (“wind whispering among the roses”) to the repellent (a garden of “obscene toadstools”), from nocturnal darkness to flashing suns, from heaven to hell. Ultimately, in a pastiche of Genesis, love becomes “God’s first word, the first thought that sailed through his brain. When he said, ‘Let there be light!’ there was love. . . . And love became the world’s beginning and the world’s ruler; but all its ways are full of flowers and blood, flowers and blood.” Love, or desire, has become an all-encompassing metaphysical principle.

  Victoria is unquestionably Hamsun’s most erotically charged novel; here, more than anywhere else, love is an inexorable cosmic force; it rules not only the human world but also nature, and Hamsun evokes its omnipresence by a rich array of sensuous images. The “song to joy” of Johannes is duplicated in the forest by the “wild, passionate music” of the birds, the mating call of the blackcock, and the sound of the cuckoo. In her post-engagement confession, Victoria tells Johannes that his voice at the party “was like an organ,” and in the postscript to her deathbed letter, Victoria notes that she has “even heard some music.” These recurring musical images, together with the images of color—chiefly white, yellow, and red14—form a counterpoise to the somewhat ominous connotations of “flowers and blood” in the ambiguous conclusion to the above-cited lyric interlude. They mark a borderland where the experience of Eros coexists with its sublimated forms, such as a felt kinship with all living creatures and the exaltations of artistic inspiration.

  With all his attention to Eros as a universal force, Hamsun’s emphasis is nevertheless psychological, as he evokes the complexities of individual erotic experience and the ambiguities of artistic creation. The former are most memorably portrayed through Victoria and Camilla. Although the two women form part of a replicating structure, a kind of round with changing partners, they are nicely individualized. Victoria, a near relation of Pan’s Edvarda, is torn apart by conflicting emotions; to her, love approaches a perpetual torment, occasionally interrupted by moments of transcendent rapture. Though the color red is associated with both women, it acquires—together with yellow, the color of joy—a deeper resonance in the case of Victoria: her red hat and parasol, unlikely emblems of passion, are eventually replaced by the red of a hemorrhage, the harbinger of a species of love-death. These symbolic touches are, in Victoria’s case, supported by nonverbal techniques with a be haviorist slant. In the dialogues of Johannes and Victoria, a language of gesture complements the brief verbal exchanges: Victoria’s lips, face, eyes, and hands speak when her tongue is tied. Her lips tremble, she drops her eyes, and her hands make contact, although otherwise she appears cold and unapproachable. But we also hear Victoria’s own voice, in a couple of monologues muted by no inhibiting constraints. Edvarda is given no such opportunity in Pan; she has to wait until the publication of Rosa (1908), a novel in which she appears, before she can give voice to her true feelings. By comparison with Victoria, Camilla is appropriately superficial, a bundle of bad faith but a perfect embodiment of one face of love, inconstancy, and Victoria’s diametrical opposite.

  Fascinating as these two young women are, the novel’s central focus is nevertheless Johannes as a developing writer. Already as a child he cuts “letters and signs” into stones found in the abandoned quarry, one of his favorite haunts. Both the quarry, which he envisages as a cave, and the sea, which also gives rise to romantic fantasies, are images of depths to be explored. His dream of becoming a diver is accidentally fulfilled when, at the age of eighteen, he saves Camilla from drowning. These spaces of refuge and exploration are complemented by images of isolation and power, like being a fearsome “maker of matches” or the ruler of an island guarded by a gunboat. In these images and fantasies creativity is associated with human detachment, an association that the novel will bear out.

  Johannes’ two passions, for Victoria and literary art, are interestingly interrelated in the book. They can scarcely be separated. All his poetry is written for her, and his “big book,” completed after years of emotional frustration but before the official engagement of Victoria and Otto, is a transparent reworking of his youthful experiences transposed into the future. We are given his envisioned conclusion to the book, a meeting at an inn between a no-longer-young, graying man and the lady of the castle, easily recognizable as Victoria by her yellow dress. In the emotional scene that ensues, the man sates his pride in a bitter speech, followed by a prayer for forgiveness. One may note that the scene ends with the lady confessing her love and that the very words she uses, “I love you; do not misunderstand me anymore, you are the one I love. Good-bye!” echo Victoria’s declaration of love for Johannes in chapter three. These literary reworkings look like a further development of the pattern demonstrated above, in which the past is creatively transformed. Already in Johannes’ recollections, events are modified, telescoped, and viewed at a distance: the borderline between Wahrheit and Dichtung is a fluid one. Whatever the motive, in his life as in his art, Johannes creates an imagined world: experience is always mediated.

  All this creative activity appears to have an underlying telos: to counter, if not transcend, time’s ineluctable passage and, ultimately, death. Passion-love is one way of suspending mutability, and, like Nagel in Mysteries, Johannes stakes the meaning of his entire existence on his love. Unlike Nagel, the artist man qué, however, he finds a credible substitute in his writing when love fails.

  As shown in chapter five, Victoria’s rejection of him confronts Johannes with existential absurdity. Isolated in the city after Victoria’s departure, he finds himself at point zero, prey to macabre fantasies of death and dying. Nature itself is dead: the old poplars outside are “stripped of their leaves and look like miserable freaks of nature; some gnarled branches grinding against the wall produce a creaking sound, like a wooden machine, a cracked stamping mill that runs and runs.” In t
his ambience of decrepitude and decay, Johannes is writing about a “lush, green garden near his home, the Castle garden. . . . It’s dead and covered with snow now, and yet that is what he’s writing about, and it isn’t winter with snow at all, but spring with fragrance and mild breezes.” And Victoria, when she appears, does not sport yellow or red but is dressed in white: “She appears like a white spirit in the middle of the green garden.” The reversal of the seasons has a counterpart in Johannes’s work habits: he writes at night, when most people are asleep. Paradoxically, the whistle of a train around midnight is a wake-up call: “it sounds like a lone cock crow in the silent night.”

  The outer limit of Johannes’ manipulation of time amounts to downright revolt. Overcome by “violent emotion” after being turned down by Victoria, he gives in to an impulse that can only be described by an oxymoron, “gleeful indignation”: tearing a handful of leaves off his calendar, he creates a virtual future moment, which he decides to enjoy to the full smoking his pipe. Unable to locate his pipe cleaner, he “jerks one hand off the corner clock to clean his pipe with.” These infractions of temporal order afford him great pleasure. His two-pronged assault on temporality signifies a fundamental aspiration: to create a suspended moment. Just as inspiration or creative activity plays fast and loose with real time, so the literary representation itself aims to concentrate experience in a moment, thus resisting the inroad of destructive time.

  In presenting the inner world of Johannes, Hamsun once more shows a preference for indirect methods of portrayal, though different from those used in laying bare the feelings of Victoria. Notable is his use of free indirect discourse, frequently with a strong expressionist slant. Thus, after saying good-bye to Victoria, who warns him not to pursue her, Johannes’ state of mind is rendered as follows: “The street stretched cold and gray before him, it looked like a belt of sand, an endless road to walk.” The sights he observes in the street, in particular a sickly little boy with “hollow cheeks” and a disfiguring hair disease, are equally imbued with his despondent mood, as is his surmise that the boy’s soul was “all withered.” The lightening of Johannes’ mood is signaled by some ensuing observations, as he imagines the boy watching the other children at play: “Who knows, maybe he sat there being happy about something, maybe he had a doll in his little backstairs room, a jumping jack or a whirligig. Maybe he hadn’t lost everything in life, leaving some hope in his withered soul.” The point here is not to describe the life of the streets as much as to show, by indi rection, the phases of Johannes’s consciousness as he struggles to recover from his grievous disappointment. In contrast, his excitement at being invited to Victoria’s party comes through perfectly in the following sentence: “The afternoon was calm and warm; the river throbbed like a pulse as it flowed through the steamy landscape.”

  The technique of free indirect discourse does, however, encompass another horizon beyond that represented by the fictional character, namely, that of the implied narrator. Though the narrator’s point of view is nearly identical with that of Johannes, there are passages where the narrator and the central character part company. For example, the writings of Johannes as exemplified by the scene at the inn referred to above are far less complex than the novel in which they appear; that novel also possesses a greater emotional amplitude. Johannes’ literary work is motivated by two diametrically opposed passions, amorous devotion and a lover’s revenge; the novel transcends these simplicities. In fact, whereas Johannes the writer shapes experience into ready-made patterns, the novel radically undermines such patterns.

  The most convincing example showing that the narrator constitutes an independent entity that is larger than the main character’s consciousness is Johannes’ macabre dream at the end of chapter five, immediately after he has envisioned the conclusion to his “big book.” At the same time, the dream offers some fascinating insights into Johannes’ subconscious. Now that his double in the nearly finished book has been reassured of his lady’s love, Johannes feels triumphant. So what could possibly be wrong? The dream, which ends with a mocking echo of Johannes’ childhood wish to become a diver, a motif associated with artistic aspirations, offers some clues.

  The context of the dream is one of felt artistic accomplishment on the part of the dreamer: with his book he has won “the kingdom,” but the fairy-tale princess has eluded him. From this perspective, the dream evokes the complementary negative state to Johannes’ literary triumph. His psyche is at a point of stagnancy; it has nourished his art, symbolized by music, words, and dance, with blood and precious time. No wonder the dreamer is anxious. The encounter with the captive of the mountain alludes to Johannes’ childhood threat that he will go into service with a mountain giant to escape the miseries of life and the torment of unrequited love. The dream, however, suggests that this option is a dead end; in any case, the dreamer cannot liberate the giant, who seems to symbolize the state of Johannes’ creative self. Instead, it looks as though the dreamer may be in danger of losing his humanity, or his very identity, through the shadow-collecting man of musk. We do not know what lies beyond the bridge that he guards, but the sight of this man instills a “chilling horror” in the dreamer. Though rescue is at hand through the rolling skull, a kind of psychopomp which leads him to the sea and Victoria,15 the latter, naked and smiling, is unreachable, being defended by a monster, a kind of Nordic Cerberus of the deep that prevents Johannes from enacting his desire. The dream ends in nightmare: when Johannes, the dreamer, calls to Victoria, “he hears his own scream—and wakes up.”

  The dream seems almost too complex for the context. It certainly undermines, for the reader, Johannes’ sense of triumph at the completion of his book. To an outsider, the dream clearly associates artistic endeavor with emotional deadness; it also suggests that an arduous journey of the soul is required to overcome that deadness. However, the scream of terror that concludes the journey of the dreamer betrays Johannes’ inability to meet Victoria’s challenge. If the monster is viewed as a part of his own psyche, it becomes an emblem of sexual fear. This suspicion is confirmed not only by Johannes’s calm indifference when confronted with Camilla’s fickleness, but also by his failure to seek out Victoria after Otto’s death.

  From the perspective of the dream, Johannes’ brutal words, “I’m engaged,” in response to Victoria’s passionate avowal of her love come to seem like a cover for the cooling of his desire. Now that his passion has been exploited for artistic creation and embodied in his work, it is no longer alive: Johannes has attained a condition of emotional stasis. On the one hand, the idea of a poem in which he imagines the earth “seen from above, like a beautiful, fantastic papal gown,” with couples walking about in its folds at the “hour of love,” makes him feel as though he could “embrace the whole earth”; but, on the other hand, this general love for humanity goes hand in hand with emotional coldness toward individuals. Meeting Camilla and her family in the street, he thinks, “How little it all concerned him, this carriage, these people, this chatter! A cold, empty feeling invaded him. . . .” This coldness may be a reason why Hamsun ended the novel with Victoria’s deathbed confession, warm and spontaneous and expressive of an opposing perspective. In her tragic defeat, Victoria paradoxically looks like a winner.

  Victoria could be called a Künstlerroman; it is also an example of metafiction, since it problematizes the relationship between lived experience and its artistic representation. That relationship is not a simple one. On the one hand, art is present as an element of everyday life: in our retrospections we reshape the events of our lives in a more expressive and harmonious, though not always truthful, way. Further, much of what is called art often distorts experience, creating compensatory fictional worlds the unstated purpose of which is to magnify our egos. This may lead to spiritual sterility, unless one guards against the emotional indifference—necessary for art but fatal to life—that artistic detachment might produce.

  The style of Victoria is well suited to its subject. The beg
inning of the book is written in a fairy-tale manner, describing the world of Johannes as that of a young dreamer who wants to win the princess and half the kingdom. Later, the fairy-tale quality recedes, but not the stylization that the manner of fairy-tale narrative entails. Instead of being described in detail, with circumstantial realism, scenes and situations are rendered sparely, as in legends or myths; thus, places are only vaguely indicated, as is the chronology. Consequently, the book instills a reader attitude that does not ask for the reasons why things occur. Victoria creates a fictional world in which rigorous notions of time, space, and cause and effect do not obtain. Its success or failure depends on whether it creates a feeling of empathy in the reader, a sense that, however abstract, it renders life, passion, and artistic creation in a manner that is both true and aesthetically satisfying.

  A novel like Victoria, whose central characters in their emotional intensity sometimes appear like emblematic figures, like passions and aspirations incarnate, invites critical hyperbole. Its alternation of everyday scenes with high-pitched speeches is suggestive of the recitatives and arias of an operatic performance. Though ordinary enough, in their pride and vehemence the characters are larger than life, driven by impossible desires. As previously mentioned, Eros is expressed by musical motifs, and other images—the cave, the sea, the garden, the creaking poplars—likewise turn up, much like phrases or leitmotifs in a sonata or symphony. Fittingly, the novel concludes with the organ fugue of Victoria’s deathbed farewell.

  With one exception, which Hamsun deeply resented, the novel was well received by the critics when it appeared in October 1898. Hamsun, who had married an upper-class divorcée, Bergljot Goepfert, in May of the same year, was criticized by Nils Vogt, editor of the conservative Morgenbladet, for his “unfamiliarity with” and inability to portray “really fine ladies,” and for misrepresenting upper-class Norwegians in general.16 Subsequent critics have, to my knowledge, found no fault with Hamsun’s character portrayal, while more than one have had harsh words for the novel’s conventional aspects, using disparaging terms like “innocuous idyll” and “puppet-theatre plot.”17 Edwin Muir, calling Victoria one of the “most exquisite” of Hamsun’s works, praises the characterization. As a por trayer of women Hamsun belongs, in Muir’s view, in the same class as Thomas Hardy. Though they are merely sketched, he writes, Victoria and Camilla “give that sense of a truth existing in them beyond the reach of observation or analysis which, like the creation of the highest imagination in poetry, has a touch of the occult.”18 John Updike, whose review of the Stallybrass translation of Victoria is more mixed, sounds a similar note, describing Hamsun as a “heathen visionary” of “intuitive genius” on the strength of the novel.19