In Sophocles and Ibsen, all attention is directed toward human interchange, the situations that arise between people, the way their different actions and thoughts influence what happens, and in this respect regulatory mechanisms such as holding back information, concealing facts, and suppressing truth all play significant roles.
In Hamsun’s Mysteries, all attention is directed toward a single individual, its mysteries reside in Nagel alone, and the question is whether Hamsun failed in his endeavor, given that the only form of dramaturgy it has to offer is the one regulating the reader’s access to Nagel’s secrets, this being done in such a propagandist fashion that Nagel, contrary to the writer’s intentions, becomes a “type,” the novel’s premise itself, the unrivaled human, furthermore being an idea, as such belonging to the conceptual world rather than the real world Hamsun so eagerly sought to discover in his writing.
The first of these objections was mooted by Edvard Brandes in his review in Politiken in 1892, in which he wrote that “tension arises from the fact that the author does not give correct information about the characters, not the reasonable information one has, after all, the right to expect from an author.” Hamsun’s biographer Robert Ferguson, in his book Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun, from which the quote here is taken, takes a dig at Brandes for attacking Hamsun “at one of the points where his influence on the narrative techniques of twentieth-century writers has been most decisive and for the author’s preferring subjective to objective truth in fashioning his narration.” But this is a poor reading of Brandes’s criticism. What Brandes questioned was not the subjective truth in itself, but its assignment to the narrator, to the authority above the subject, who otherwise, and in principle, is omniscient. The subjective “truth” was in other words false, a trick.
But is this an error? Is Mysteries not a Hamsun novel? And is it thereby not among the most splendid examples of Norwegian, or even world, literature?
Hamsun was plainly a self-assured man. He could be ruthless and unsubtle in his opinions, intoxicated by their power, insensitive to all else. In his writing, these aspects of his character became offset by a method, or an outlook on literature and its nature, that was advanced by an unusually delicate feel for language and an unfailing insistence on close examination that allowed no sequence of human actions or arguments to stand alone, but always sought out the shades and nuances in them, or in the world around them, always looking for what was alive. This is certainly true of Mysteries, though in an oddly back-to-front way, for in Mysteries such ruthless opinions, as uttered by its main character in his diatribes against all that smacks of reason and usefulness, day-to-day humdrum, and meaningless existence, dismantle the glee the narrator displays over the character’s hypersensitive, unrivaled mind, introducing into the novel a burlesque undercurrent of scorn and satire. Railing against peasants, the press, and liberals, for instance, Nagel spouts the following:
There he was! There was the Setesdaler, the typical Norwegian, heh-heh, oh yes, there was the native, with the crust of bread under his arm and the cow in tow! Oh, what a sight! Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh. God help you, my noble Norse Viking! How about loosening your scarf a bit and letting the lice out? But you wouldn’t survive it, you would catch some fresh air from it and die. And the press would lament your untimely demise and make a big number out of it. But to guard against repetitions, Vetle Vetlesen, that liberal Storting representative, would introduce a bill for the strict protection of our national vermin.
Against the bourgeoisie: “And the people were medium-sized burghers in three-story shanties; they ate and drank as was needful, regaled themselves with toddy and electoral politics, and traded in green soap and brass combs and fish day in, day out.” Against writers: “What were they, these writers, these stuck-up creatures who had known how to acquire such power in modern life, what were they? Well, they were a rash, a scab on the body politic, swollen and irritable pimples.” Against Dagny Kielland: “I loathe your whole taxpayer’s existence, dolled up, groomed, and inane as it is. I loathe it, God knows I do, and I feel indignation rising within me like a rushing mighty wind of the Holy Spirit when I think of you.”
Nagel’s disdain is toward almost all aspects of contemporary life – politics, the bourgeoisie, rural life, art, the newspapers, none of these has any worth, everything is pretense, humbug, a comedy. He sets against them partly the unpredictable and the unprecedented – “Give us, for example, an advanced crime, a first-rate sin! But none of your ludicrous petty-bourgeois ABC-misdemeanor – no, a rare, hair-raising debauchery, refined depravity, a royal sin, full of raw infernal splendor” – partly enchantment with the world itself and the splendid possibilities it holds, for as he says, “What would it profit us, after all, even from a purely practical viewpoint, if we stripped life of all poetry, all dreams, all beautiful mysteries, all lies?” The loss of meaning he feels is huge, and although occasionally he derives a form of pleasure from observing the worthlessness of contemporary life – to him made all the more grotesque by its sufferers being so unaware of their misery, lulled into thinking their lives to be meaningful, adrift in swaths of collective delusion – he seeks to resist such feelings too, many of his actions being patent attempts to transcend the nihilism into which his mind sooner or later seems to lead him. For Nagel, being the way he is, there are only four ways out: romantic love, which makes the world enchanting; nature, which moors him in the world and lends its own meaning to his existence; poetry and the dreams of art, which open up the world and reveal the world beyond; and suicide, which puts an end to all its demands. During the course of the novel, Nagel follows all four paths. Only the latter proves viable.
Whereas hunger gives the narrative its forward drive and steers its rhythm in Hunger, in Mysteries this function is given to romantic love. With his unorthodox yet poetic notions, Nagel awakens the young Dagny Kielland’s curiosities, he begins courting her in the approved fashion, making himself interesting in all sorts of ways, strolling with her in moonlit woods, and generally acting as ardently as one can expect of a besotted young man in a Hamsun novel. But who exactly expects such behavior from him? Who is it for? The issue of authenticity does not appear in any concrete way until toward the end of the novel, when Nagel can have thoughts such as this: “East and west, at home and abroad, he had found people to be the same; everything was vulgar and sham and disgracefully perfidious, from the bum who wore his healthy arm in a sling to the blue sky overflowing with ozone. And he himself, was he any better? No, no, he was no better himself! But now he was really at the end,” or this: “My whole nature is humbug,” yet it is present throughout, to begin with in the form of small, inconspicuous events and reflections such as this on the third page: “He awoke from his thoughts with an abrupt start, so abrupt that it could have been feigned, as if he had contemplated making this start for a long time, though he was alone in the room” (my italics), and while at first sight it might appear odd that a man who at any given time would prefer a beautiful lie to a dull truth and who is himself so full of pretense, posturing, and playacting should fear what is bogus, inauthentic, and sham, it is in fact quite logical, since what is most important to him is the idea that he is unique, original, unrivaled, and when he is a man in love or an artist – when according to his own convictions he ought to be closest to his innermost self, his truest emotions – he merely plays a role played by so many others before him, all the time sensing their presence inside him regardless of what he does, the question of who exactly he is, if he is anyone at all, becomes acute, not least because he so fiercely despises conformity, sameness, uniformity, the mass, and therefore also, eventually, must hate himself. This is what is at play in his relationship with Dagny Kielland. She is engaged to a lieutenant, Nagel is unrooted in the town, a person no one there knows anything about, whose behavior is dubious, sometimes heroic, sometimes despicable (such as when he writes a lewd verse on a young woman’s gravestone), and he is constantly aware, so we m
ust assume, that she will never be his. But then again it might not be important. Ambiguity is everywhere. What, for instance, are we to make of the following scene between Nagel and Dagny?
Nagel applauded the music enthusiastically and said to Dagny, “Listening to that kind of music, wouldn’t you like to be at some distance from it, in an adjoining room, say, holding hands with your beloved without speaking? I don’t know, but I’ve always imagined it would be so lovely.”
She gave him a scrutinizing look. Did he mean this nonsense? His face betrayed no irony, and so she fell in with his banal tone.
The conversation is in many respects reminiscent of that between Léon and Emma on their first meeting in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, when after having conversed about music and expressed their understanding of the famous musician who, to excite his imagination, would play the piano by some imposing scene, they turn to the subject of literature:
“That’s like me,” remarked Léon; “what could be better, really, than an evening by the fire with a book, with the wind beating on the panes, the lamp burning?”
“I do so agree,” she said, fixing on him her great black eyes open wide.
Emma Bovary, the very symbol of inauthentic emotions, whose every thought was accompanied by romantic conceptions drawn from books, fails to see the cliché in Léon’s remark, unlike Dagny, who instead of looking at Nagel with wide-open eyes scrutinizes him, for what he says is so banal she cannot believe he might mean it. And if a small-town girl like Dagny can recognize romantic cliché, there is every reason to believe that the considerably more sophisticated Nagel would know it too. Yet his face betrayed no irony? The inventions of his imagination, by which he woos her on their nocturnal strolls, are weightier by far, and Dagny duly lets herself be carried away, such is the impression he makes, but no sooner have they fulfilled their purpose than he turns abruptly and starts to dismantle his own actions – “In short, I force you to stare hard at me, I excite your curiosity to occupy itself with me, I make you bridle” – a ruthless candor that can lead only to infinite regress; he said what he said so as to appear interesting, he admits it, thereby making himself appear more interesting, the admission of the admission making him more interesting still, and so on, until Dagny Kielland asks him a decisive question: “Tell me, how much of what you say do you really mean? What is your deepest conviction?”
The notion of a pure and romantic love is part of the seam through which the narrator’s ideas as to the sensitive human run, gradually undermined by the issue of authenticity and ending in the ambivalence that arises when Nagel, in love with Dagny, is visited by a mysterious woman who was previously the object of a similar storm of emotion on his part, and when later, rejected by Dagny, he begins to court Martha Gude in the same manner. The mechanisms of infatuation are here brought to the forefront, how it seems to exist independently of its object, who thereby becomes exchangeable. And exchangeability is counter to any notion of authenticity. However, the novel is by no means unambiguous in this respect, Nagel may have any number of reasons for pursuing Martha Gude, the most obvious being to trigger a reaction from Dagny, but even if this were the case, the way he goes about it for a third time seems merely to demonstrate the mechanics of the maneuver, and his endeavors become parody. That she is gray haired and poor, unassuming and easily impressed, makes the relationship and the effort he puts into it come across as grotesque, and while this boomerangs on Nagel, the character of Martha herself is quite unaffected by it, being portrayed throughout as sublime in her sincerity.
Yet the novel undermines the notion of romantic love still further, in a way unconnected to the narrator’s blood-whispering gospel, belonging instead to another seam, through which Nagel’s contempt and hatred run, perhaps a consequence of the novel’s premise of investigating the human being at its most authentic, in the outlands of the soul, the technique Hamsun introduced in Hunger, entering into the moment and following the main character’s streams of thought, being expanded in Mysteries, this presumably being what Ferguson was alluding to when he wrote of Hamsun’s influence on the narrative techniques of twentieth-century writers, what Joyce thirty years later would refer to as “stream of consciousness” and forever after be associated with. In these passages, the narrator lets go of the main character completely, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say he merges with him, the two become one, all distance between them dissolved. In the voice that ensues, there is no falseness, and in its fabulous elasticity, following each and every cast of thought, Hamsun succeeds in slipping underneath the fences that stand between the movements of a human mind and their conveyance to a reading audience, closing the gap between written word and thought by eliminating everything but the likeness between them, which is even more striking the further we delve inside. In order for this to work, in order to get inside, every semblance of self-censorship must be abandoned. The price is high, the risk great, but the result, almost absolute presence in the thoughts of a human being, is scintillating. Most importantly, however, what this technique allows him to do, as it allowed Joyce to do, corresponds not in the least to the high-flown images of the soul Hamsun concerned himself with in his manifesto and for which he later became known, but is instead, by the standard of the day, remarkably raw and vulgar. An example:
“But what will become of Ola Upnorth if nobody—?”
“Let Ola Upnorth go to hell!” I cut in. “Ola Upnorth has nothing else to do in this world but to walk around waiting to die for all he’s worth, that is, to get out of the way, the sooner the better. Ola Upnorth exists to fertilize the soil, he’s the soldier that Napoleon rides down roughshod, that’s Ola Upnorth – now you know! Ola Upnorth, damn it, isn’t even a beginning, let alone a result of anything; he isn’t even a comma in the Great Book, but a mere blot on the paper. That’s Ola Upnorth—”
“Sh-sh! For God’s sake!” says the lady, terror-stricken, looking at the chairman to see if he’s going to show me the door.
“All right,” I reply, “heh-heh-heh, all right, I won’t say any more.” But at that very moment I notice her lovely mouth and I say, “I’m sorry, madam, for having taken up so much of your time with stuff and nonsense. But thank you so much for your kindness. Your lips are divinely beautiful when you smile. Goodbye.”
But now her face turns crimson and she invites me home. Simply home to her house, to where she lives. Heh-heh-heh. She lives on such and such a street, number so and so. She would like to talk to me a little more about this matter, she doesn’t agree with me and might have a great many objections. If I came tomorrow night, she would be all alone. So could I come tomorrow night? “Thanks. See you then.”
And yet, as it turned out, the only reason she wanted to see me was to show me a new soft rug, a national design, Hallingdal weave.
Sing heigh-ho, the sun’s on the meadow!
All of this is Nagel’s fantasy, the context with the chairman and everything else imaginary, the lady’s eyes he sees are a figment, her beautiful lips likewise, and fictional too her dismay that veers into what would seem to be a sexual proposal, which in Hamsun’s metonymical way ends with a soft rug, perhaps belonging to the lady’s bed, perhaps not. All of this is so very far removed from the traditional realistic novel with its drawn-out narrative lines and detached, controlled accounts of its characters’ actions. Yet it is not without precedent: Nagel’s problems with authenticity, his many different modes, his inclination toward pretense and falsification, his wish to be important, his contempt for the ordinary, and the sudden peeling away of all layers in search of an eventual motive, the innermost core, inevitably lead one to think of the writer who for Hamsun symbolized all that he disliked about the literature of his day, Ibsen, and his Peer Gynt, which also displayed the wild fantasies, utterly removed from reality, that Hamsun develops in Mysteries. In the case of Ibsen, however, the time lapse is long, even that emperor of avoidance Peer Gynt mature
s at last and returns home, whereas in Hamsun it is short, meaning that the only development that can occur is in action rather than insight or maturation of mind. In Mysteries, the different layers within the character exist simultaneously and the discrepancies between them are too great for either Nagel or the novel to deal with effectively. But it is no less interesting on that account. For what happens to romantic love when it is infused with rawness and vulgarity? What happens to it when Nagel – who has spoken warmly to Dagny of sitting in an adjoining room holding his beloved’s hands as they listen to music – tells Miniman of something that happened to him three years previously in London? An enchanting young lady was showing him the sights when he felt nature’s call. What was he to do? Unable to slip away, he let himself go on the spot where he stood and naturally found himself sopping wet. Fortunately, he was wearing a long cloak and could hide his embarrassing state, but when presently they passed a pastry shop on a brightly lit street, the young lady suggested they go inside for something to eat. Forced to find an excuse, he told her he had no money, but then looking up at some houses she remembered a friend of hers who lived there and went off to borrow some. Anguished, he waited for her to come back, but luckily her friend turned out not to be home and they were able to continue their stroll together in the dark. Only recently had he understood what had actually taken place, he tells Miniman, she too had felt nature call and sneaked into a courtyard to relieve herself – there had been no friend. And then he says this:
In the Land of the Cyclops Page 12