What are August’s thoughts about the mountain? “What use did he have for such a world?” he thinks. “He was a man of action, a trader.” August is in constant motion throughout the novel, but here he is sitting still. And what does he see then? What is it that becomes plain to him as all his hustle and bustle, all his forward momentum, comes to a halt? The answer is this: “Nothingness meets nothingness, and the result is zero.” Heidegger stops there, but August himself ponders further:
He did not give the matter much thought; the notion had merely occurred to him, but, as he was somewhat fanciful by nature, it was probable that for a moment his imagination had got the better of him. Such might well have been the case. And if this silence had any meaning at all, it was probably this: I am emptiness! Of all things in the world I am emptiness! Known only as that which is contained in something, a power, an impossibility which no one possesses and no one has sent, but a delirium. I am emptiness!
I am emptiness, the word and life – that would be one way of expressing the thrust of Hamsun’s Wayfarers. Shortly after this scene takes place on the mountainside, August dies. His death is a famous one in Norwegian literature and justifiably so: he is swept under by a flock of sheep. Of course, this is fiercely ironic, sheep are followers, sheep are the mass, the embodied instinct of the unoriginal and dependence on others. All characters in Wayfarers are sheep in this sense, blindly following the zeitgeist’s every directive, yet at the same time all are portrayed as distinctive individuals; all members of this mass, who follow its every movement, are unique, and in this idiosyncracy lies their value, their human value. This duality is typical of Hamsun: he despises the mass, but not the people who belong to it. The mass is an abstraction, and in his novels Hamsun avoids abstractions like the plague. In his articles, however, which are formulations of his opinions, he operates entirely within the abstract, and this is the reason he can call for a woman who killed her child to be hanged – “Hang them!” he thundered so notoriously – yet in a novel portray a woman guilty of that very crime with insight, compassion, and understanding.
There is a clear tendency in Wayfarers, a consistent reactionary standpoint that runs throughout, an unveiled message that urges us to remain where we are, to satisfy ourselves with what we have, exemplified by Edevart’s brother Joakim’s little story about the five aspen trees. Four of them were leafy and vigorous, the fifth stunted and sorry, so Joakim took it upon himself to look after it and nourish it with manure, only for the tree to lose its foliage the following year, diseased and in a much sorrier state than before.
“You see, it found itself in an alien situation and it didn’t thrive.”
“But it wasn’t thriving before, either.”
“Yes, it was! It was thriving in its own particular way. It was simply smaller in its growth. Not all things can be equally big.”
Wayfarers is indeed starkly critical of materialism, hostile to progress, favoring instead the simple, local life, scornful of modernity and all its gadding about, though such a lifestyle is not without ambivalence either, for August, the very embodiment of rootless modern life, is a fantastic figure in Hamsun’s portrayal, a compellingly dynamic character equipped with such insight that it seems clear he is modeled on Hamsun himself. August’s conflict is Nagel’s conflict is Hamsun’s conflict throughout life, encapsulated in the words of Shakespeare, for whom nothing human was alien:
I shall be gone and live
or stay and die
On June 12, 1890, at around six o’clock in the evening, Knut Hamsun, author of Hunger, stepped ashore in Lillesand, and while this might have been an impulse, the ticket he had bought being valid as far as Bergen, he remained in the little coastal town in the Sørlandet for some six months. Perhaps he had been planning to write his second novel there, a project he had already mentioned in letters to friends, but if that was his plan he failed to see it through, producing instead a series of lectures on the modern novel and a manifesto. The latter, entitled “From the Unconscious Life of the Mind,” ranks among the most influential essays on literature ever written in Norwegian. Much of its imagery remains active to this today (the whispering of the blood…), but whereas formerly it was associated with the vision of a single writer, it has since come to be seen as the very articulation of the neo-romantic trend in Norway that it is generally taken to herald, perhaps even the expression of the romantic impulse itself. That aside, it is among the best of Hamsun’s writing – balanced, witty, self-ironic, insightful, beguiling, and while perhaps not unequivocally visionary, it most certainly stares directly into the spirit of an age that was as yet unformed. It begins in the simplest way possible, with the writer himself and the place he is in: “Just one of my many impressions, the last of them, something which happened to me here in Lillesand.” He writes that a few weeks previously he visited the cemetery at Moland’s Church, where he read a peculiar inscription on a headstone before walking home through the town. The people he met scowled at him. At one point he hears music coming from a house, and stops outside to listen. He carries on to his lodgings, paces the large balcony in the dark and observes the lighthouse blinking toward the town. The clock strikes twelve, he goes inside to his room. Retiring to bed, he reads an article entitled “Canalworks of Our Time” in the National Economic Periodical, pondering over the name of Alosta, the Jesuit, on which his eye happens to fall, before turning out the light and going to sleep. When he wakes, he finds the two sheets of paper he had taken into the room filled with writing – two short pieces, hunting yarns. He has no recollection of writing them, he claims, and realizes he must have done so in his sleep. Astonished at the obvious haste with which they have been written, without erasures or corrections, he begins to investigate them. After much ado it transpires that one of the pieces derives from an old newspaper, albeit not copied verbatim, for as he writes of his own version, “if it were not immodest, I would even say that it was greatly improved.” Of the second piece he finds no trace anywhere. The handwriting, however, is unquestionably his own; clearly, he penned the two pieces unwittingly. But how can such a thing occur, and what kind of authority can live and write outside the self? Gradually, it becomes apparent where Hamsun is leading us, which is to the insight that each and every one of us carries with us a wholly uncharted world that reveals itself to us only on occasion, in unfathomable states of perception, and may not such rich mental states, this secret reality, the life that exists in the remotest depths of the soul, be represented in literature too? Or, in his own words:
Now what if literature on the whole began to deal a little more with mental states than with engagements and balls and hikes and accidents as such? Then one would, to be sure, have to relinquish creating “types” – as all have been created before – “characters” whom one meets every day at the fishmarket. And to that extent one would perhaps lose a part of the public which reads in order to see if the hero and heroine get each other. But in return, there would be more individual cases in the books, and these in a way more appropriate to the intellectual life which mature people now live.
Peeling the romanticism from the argument, the “mimosa-like movements in the soul,” what we have is a discrepancy between life and literature. Literature is simple, schematic, structural, cohesive, harmonious, explained; life is complex, unsystematic, incohesive, unharmonious, unexplained. How can writing depart from its system and depict our human life as it is lived? This is Hamsun’s question, posed in the autumn of 1890, in Lillesand. How essential he felt this to be is easy enough for us to see, for we know how faithful he would remain to it in all his writing. Hamsun himself must have experienced it differently. He had written a novel, Hunger, and was about to write another, as yet at the planning stage, and in between those two novels he penned a series of manifestos, which basically were rationalizations after the fact, in the sense that he had already done what he was saying literature must do, which was to c
lear a space for itself where all that was predictable and bound by the system could be abandoned, thereby making literary freedom a genuine possibility, not for its own sake, but because it was the only way literature would be able to reach into the world, which is to say create a form that would permit ways of writing sensitive enough to delve into the world as it is prior to the construction of meaning, prior to the interpretation of the signs, which is to say the forever-as-yet-unexplained, and this he achieved by completely rejecting what were accepted as standard elements of the novel: Hunger has no plot other than the most basic, that which is necessary to hold everything in place, in this case a man wasting away from hunger, compelled to do certain things that to a greater or lesser extent are humiliating in order to satisfy that hunger, nor is there any kind of narrative development apart from the rises and falls that occur at that same level.
Another liberating premise on which Hunger was written, facilitated by the notion of hunger that so firmly roots the story in the material world, was the idea that the novel could deal with absolutely anything in the way of thoughts, feelings, and sensations in the mind of its main character. In the space so created, where constraints and possibilities, the very form of the work, were quite differently put together than they were in other novels of the age, Hamsun was able to go almost anywhere he wanted, and that Hunger to this day still comes across as “modern” is down to the fact that no one since has ever gone as far down that path as Hamsun did in this novel. Some have followed in his footsteps, certainly, but the whole point of Hunger is that no one had been there before. Any repetition would be mannerism, understood and digested even before the words were consumed. To make writing reach beyond thought is the art all writers strive to achieve, and the activity of writing is to immerse oneself in the particular state of being that under the right conditions can make this possible. After Hunger, Hamsun’s question, which his essay and lectures in effect simply threw back at him, was this: Where does a writer go after writing such a novel?
Mysteries, which appeared in 1892, takes place in a small and nameless coastal town in the Norwegian southland, seemingly based on Lillesand; its main character, Johan Nilsen Nagel, bears many of Hamsun’s own characteristics, and utters many of his opinions, and the novel’s narrator upholds a view of life and literature identical to that laid out in the poetics Hamsun developed in his essay and lecture series two years previously. As if to underscore this identity, Johan Nilsen Nagel arrives in the town on June 12, 1891, at around six o’clock in the evening – the same time and date Hamsun himself had gone ashore in Lillesand a year before. Much of the tension in Mysteries lies in the relationship between the realistic world in which it is so firmly anchored and what lies beyond that world yet quite as fully in its midst: phenomena unseen and unacknowledged, all that lies beyond established ways of seeing, established ways of thinking, the power of habit. In this, Nagel has a double role to play: he is the author’s spokesman in the world – we see the world through his eyes, which never rest on what is apparent, but constantly look for more, and we follow his actions in that world as they break apart the patterns by which the other characters live – and he is the author’s own object of inquiry. His intentions are made plain from the outset, Nagel is equipped with a number of props – a valise, a fur coat, a violin case, a picture, a vial of poison, a lifesaver’s medal, three telegrams – and he performs a series of unmotivated actions, having his baggage sent to the hotel and carrying on to the next town by boat, arriving back the next day overland by horse and carriage, though it would have been easier to have come by sea, examining the walls when he enters his hotel room, demanding a picture be removed from a wall, leaving the telegrams open on the table in his room for everyone to read, disappearing in the evening and not returning until well into the night, stopping and staring impudently at a young woman on the street, blushing in conversation for no apparent reason.
The narrator makes little effort to hide what all of this might mean: the novel’s first three sentences alone contain the words “unusual,” “remarkable,” “eccentric,” “curious,” and “mysterious.” The character of Johan Nilsen Nagel is introduced by an accumulation of mystifications, and this is one of the book’s most typical traits, that almost none of the information the reader is given about its main character means anything in itself, but is nearly always a sign pointing to something else. This issue is not unrelated to the criticism Hamsun leveled at the literature of the day in his lectures two years previously, his charge that authors were describing only types rather than individuals: “A man who deals in horses, for example, a man who deals in horses is nothing else but a horse dealer. He is a horse dealer in every word. He cannot read a folktale or speak of flowers or take an interest in cleanliness; no, he must always brag, always pat his wallet, curse like a barbarian, and smell of the stables.” A man smelling of the stables and patting his wallet – such a man is a horse dealer. A man in a loud yellow suit examining the walls of the hotel room in which he has just installed himself – such a man is nervous and strange. A man cursing like a barbarian – such a man is a horse dealer. A man asking if there was a pharmacy in this building at one time – such a man is oversensitive and strange. But the authorial intent made plain by the use of such “telltale” signs here is never predominant, never significant enough to infringe on the novel’s primary concern. Nagel himself is the primary concern of Mysteries, and therefore the author’s intent, so proudly present from the very outset, his “telltale” signs if anything even more exaggerated than those in the horse-dealer example, avoids being absorbed into the chaos the action generates, but instead remains firm, casting its glaring light on the entire novel. Put differently, the author’s aim becomes so perceptible, and is so manically assertive, as to undermine the novel’s ostensible claim to real life.
There is another issue attaching to all these mystifications. Most are mysterious merely by virtue of the author holding back on facts, for instance that the three telegrams Nagel receives were sent by Nagel himself, a matter of which the narrator is fully aware; the only thing that serves to create mystery around their introduction is that the reader is not made aware of the true nature of the circumstances until somewhere near the end of the novel and in the interim can only guess. In a first-person narrative there can be no objections to such a device, for in such cases the narrator is himself a part of the narrative and an omission of this kind will be significant for what it says about the character of the narrator. But in a third-person narrative there is no such significance. Omitted information says nothing about Nagel, nothing about what is going on in terms of plot, but is entirely a matter between narrator and reader, and since the narrator in actual fact knows what has been going on, and all tension is built around him omitting to tell us, the device is an empty one.
Looking at tradition, attacked by Hamsun immediately prior to Mysteries, the relationship between what is known and what is not has always been a viable narrative motor, for example in Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, where the discrepancy between the ignorance of the king and the knowledge of the audience is what opens the tragic space within which the play unfolds, not only establishing the gulf that has to be crossed, but also imbuing it with fate, the insight into his origins, to which he moves ever closer, being distributed in such a way that whereas he sees himself proceeding toward freedom, the audience sees him heading to his downfall. In Ibsen, whose entire craft grew out of the Greek dramas, this relationship between knowledge and ignorance is quite as central, albeit often distributed in another way: in a typical Ibsen play one character will invariably know more than the others, and when this knowledge, usually about some crucial past occurrence or state of affairs – as new to the audience as to the characters themselves – comes to light, exisiting balances in the relationships shift, setting off the dizzying spiral of turns that so often leads to disaster. The work of both these writers generally hinges on some development in which the relationship between kno
wing and unknowing characters is in some way pivotal, or put differently: secrets, knowledge, mysteries, insight are all integrated into the plot, whose direction at any given time depends on what is uncovered. Of course, this is not entirely a matter of dramaturgy, a question of techniques to propel the text forward, but also, and ultimately, an issue of human nature.
In the Land of the Cyclops Page 11