In the Land of the Cyclops

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  You don’t harbor a suspicion, do you, that I contrived the whole thing in advance, dragged out the walk as long as possible to press the lady to the utmost? In particular, that I couldn’t tear myself away from a petrified cave hyena in a museum, but went back to it three times, all the while keeping an eye on the young lady so that she couldn’t possibly slip out into some backyard? Of course, you don’t have any such suspicion, do you? I won’t deny that a man might be so perverse that he would prefer to suffer, even wet himself from the waist down, rather than forgo the mysterious satisfaction of seeing a lovely young lady writhe in agony.

  Or when in the same conversation with Miniman he tells him what he would really like to do with Miss Kielland, “ostensibly just to express my disdain and do her harm”:

  I could walk into the church one Sunday while her father, Pastor Kielland, was preaching the word of God, stroll up the aisle, stop in front of Miss Kielland and say out loud, Will you permit me to feel your puff? Well, what do you think? By “puff” I wouldn’t have anything particular in mind, it would just be a word to make her blush. Please, let me feel your puff, I would say. And afterward I might throw myself at her feet and implore her to make me blissfully happy by spitting on me.

  Like the narrator, Nagel is driven by a wish to discover the true and authentic nature of the world and the emotional lives of the people in it, ungoverned by social and moral imperatives. The consequence is that romantic love becomes farcical. Will you permit me to feel your puff? Can I see what you look like when you need to piss? Will you spit on me? And in a way, all these layers come together in the scene where Nagel proposes to Martha Gude, dreaming up a shared future for them together, a string of pseudoromantic platitudes with no basis in any real life, as both of them well know.

  Then they would buy a little cottage and a plot of ground in the forest, a lovely forest someplace or other; it would be their very own and they would call it Eden, and he would cultivate it – oh, he would cultivate it! […] Oh, but no harsh word would ever be uttered in their cottage! […] They had to have some cattle, a couple of large, sleek animals which they would train to eat out of their hands, and while he dug and chopped and tilled the land, she would tend the animals.

  A cottage in the forest, a plot of ground to cultivate, with large, sleek animals…This is Growth of the Soil, the novel Hamsun would write twenty-five years later, which won him the Nobel Prize in Literature. Its genesis in the oeuvre is thus parody. At the same time, there is a sense that Nagel is closest to his own nature here, his innermost, truest self, and that the childish and rather silly aspect of his character, which also came out in the Madame Bovary—like scene with Dagny, represents what for him is most genuine, and therefore it is in these passages that the novel’s ambiguity is at its height, or perhaps rather the novel’s irony, for after all we are talking about the exceptional human being here, who shines above all others, and the sudden blasts of banality that issue from his inner being seem to preclude any kind of identification with the character on the reader’s part. This is what Mysteries is like, everything its author would later treat so solemnly – love, nature, cultivation of the land – is sooner or later made to dissolve, its value sooner or later lost. The only thing that really matters is the laughter.

  Nature, so often highlighted alongside themes of love and madness in discussions of Mysteries, is nevertheless always limited in significance, having bearing only on the few scenes where Nagel leaves the town and wanders into the woods. Nature means nothing to him unless he is in its midst, otherwise he barely gives it a thought, relating only episodically to it, and even then he is as much enthused by his own self and the pictures in his mind as by the trees and bushes. Mainly, he uses his experiences of nature to make an impression on Dagny Kielland, in fact they are his most successful ploy, and if nature exerts any fleeting influence on him, it is less important to him than the way it can be employed in his posturing. While he appears to have little realization of this, he is quite differently aware when it comes to art, the third of the novel’s four escape routes.

  The violin case, a compelling, albeit minor, mystery throughout, an emblem of his artistic nature at the start, later exploded when he reveals that he uses it to keep his dirty washing in, is at last opened toward the end of the novel, in a key scene where Nagel at the closing of a bazaar takes the instrument from its case and begins to play for the townspeople like the devil himself. The audience is stunned and impressed, but Nagel makes light of it: “If you only knew how false, how little authentic it was! But I made it look very authentic, didn’t I?” To the audience it was art itself, to Nagel merely a trick he performed, an illusion, a sham: “I’m nauseated by the unspeakably crude triumph of hearing the carnivores applauding.” That no one saw through it is perhaps what matters most to Nagel, it nauseates him, but not the reader. What matters to the reader is that Nagel himself sees through it. And perhaps that his trick, the emptiness of brilliance which the narrator can never quite bridle, is suddenly revealed to us, a shiny shell of nothingness. Perhaps this is the question Mysteries poses: What constitutes an inauthentic human being, and what constitutes an authentic one?

  What then is the author’s position on this? That his own life constantly intertwines with the novel seems clear. When Nagel, from the outset an exceptional, unrivaled human being living within a system where the exceptional carries value almost intrinsically, is gradually turned toward himself, he is turned toward the author too, not least when what is held highest at the beginning of the novel, and in Hamsun’s articles, the person behind the person, the world behind the world, is suddenly given the following comment by the main character: “Oh, to hell with the world in back of it! Why should there always be a world behind everything? Why should I care a damn?”

  Eventually all that remains is death. The novel treats death in much the same way as it treats art. It too appears first as a prop, the vial of poison Nagel carries about his person, it too is a romantic emblem, for no reader in 1892 could fail to be reminded of Goethe’s Werther, and Nagel is quite as ambivalent about its presence, which he takes as a sign of his own lack of authenticity, at one point stating, “It’s medicine, prussic acid, that I’m keeping as a curiosity, not having the courage to use it. Why, then, do I carry it around with me, and why did I provide myself with it? Humbug again, nothing but humbug, the modern humbug of decadence, quest for publicity, and snobbery” – it too, and all it represents, eventually well and truly travestied when Nagel, oblivious to Miniman having swapped the poison for water, goes into the woods, drinks it, and lies down to die. “These trees, this sky, this earth – all of this he would now never see again. How strange! The poison was already sneaking about inside him, seeping through the fine tissues, making its blue way into his veins; in a moment he would go into convulsions, and a little later he would be dead and stiff.” But then he regrets, there are a thousand things still to be done, so much to live for, and he panics, tears up the heather with both his hands, turns himself onto his stomach and tries to expel the poison, fingers down his throat, but to no avail:

  Frantic with terror he jumps to his feet and begins to stagger about the woods looking for water. He calls “Water! Water!” so that it echoes far away. He raves on for several minutes, running around in all directions, bumping into trees, doing high jumps over juniper patches and groaning loudly. He doesn’t find any water. Finally he stumbles and falls on his face, his hands scrabble the heather-covered ground as he falls, and he feels a slight pain in one cheek. He tries to move, to rise, but the fall has dazed him and he sinks back again; he feels more and more faint and doesn’t rise.

  He wakes up three hours later with the sun shining down on him. The next night, however, he succeeds in his endeavor, jumping into the sea as if chased by a mad dream, as sorely unheroic as before, one of his most compelling motives being that he remembers having posted a farewell letter to his sister and that
he is supposed to be dead by the time it arrives. The stretch of time from his waking in the woods to lying at the bottom of the sea, the point to which everything in the novel is directed, is accorded no more than a dozen or so lines. I have often thought when reading the ending that it expresses a kind of weariness or fatigue, as if everything in the novel has already been emptied out and the suicide is merely a formality, a final piece of paperwork. It may be true. For where does one go in a novel when everything in it has been stripped of its meaning?

  Mysteries is most often read as a novel about a human being on the brink of collapse. The many different, often diametrically opposed character traits Nagel displays are present to serve the author’s purpose of plumbing the depths of the human psyche, which in the case of Nagel, this nobleman of the soul, are assumed to be more unfathomable than the norm. As I have tried to show, however, this seems to be borne out only at one level, in the claims of the narrator, and is continually contradicted by the insights to be gained at plot level, where everything moves unstoppably toward comedy, including the final, grand comedy itself, which is death, and what kind of a novel are we then dealing with, one might wonder, its hero constantly becoming entangled in and having to extract himself from farce, eventually to die a most farcical death?

  In those passages in which the novel turns inward toward its main character, it is not his depth that is made visible to us, in the sense of the experiences, insights, delusions, repressions, and recollections that lie deposited in his inner being, for nothing in Mysteries is vertical, its only lines are horizontal: once inside Nagel’s mind what do we find going on but his perceptions of all that surrounds him? He laughs at the world, rails against it, is filled with contempt and loathing, occasionally with glee, but in every instance what sets him off is what is out there, and the only mysterious thing about him lies in the different ways he angles his behavior accordingly. The system he employs in this is the same as that earlier advocated by the author, which in the form of the novel, in this particular way, becomes no more than the sound of empty vessels, recurring in the novel’s appraisal of the world it describes: the sound of empty vessels is all there is, nothing true, genuine, or authentic exists. Or if it does, then there is something in Nagel’s nature that prevents him from finding it. Strangely, the narrator seems blind to the possibility that this insight, so blazingly clear throughout the novel, might also apply to him.

  Or is the game more sophisticated than that? Are Nagel’s complex emotions and his ambivalence toward his own pretentious attempts to impress the townspeople connected too with the impressive but misleading flag the narrator hoists at the beginning of the novel? It is worth noting here that “From the Unconscious Life of the Mind” was by no means the only nonfiction Hamsun penned in the period leading up to Mysteries. He wrote The Cultural Life of Modern America, too. The similarity between the two titles, more striking in the original Norwegian, may have been unintentional on the author’s part, but it is hardly coincidental. Their lines thread into Mysteries. In the first essay Hamsun held up the uniqueness of the individual, which he found to be overlooked in realism’s tendency to portray types, and in Mysteries he carries this further in two ways: firstly by depicting just such a unique individual, and secondly by making him a mouthpiece for that same understanding. Nagel detests everything that smacks of sameness, conformity, and reason, and cultivates all that is opposed to it: the matchless, the unique, the original, the individual. In this respect it might be concluded that Nagel is a romantic hero, Mysteries a romantic novel, and indeed this is a view that is often churned out, but whereas romanticism arose as a reaction against the rationality and reason of the 1700s, the enlightenment of that age, in which all that was mysterious and inexplicable was dimmed, it was something else entirely that drew Nagel, and with him Hamsun, inward to the longing of human beings for that which is unrivaled and unique, and that something was their contempt for the mass and the mass human.

  If Hamsun’s question circa 1890 was how to transcend the formulas of contemporary literature and thereby penetrate into life the way it actually felt, the answer he came up with, that writing must delve as far into the innermost mind of the human as possible, was by no means obvious, for one could just as easily imagine a new sensitivity toward the great upheavals that were taking place in the society around him, toward the relationships that existed between humans rather than the uniqueness of the individual human, a quite different commitment to society to what came out in schematic descriptions of the lives of certain characters in certain social classes, but for Hamsun it was imperative that literature strove toward illuminating not only the forms of human lives, but life itself, and just as realism in the novel and the play was reductive of the human being in literature, the mass was to his mind reductive of the human being in real life, nurturing the stereotype, making everyone the same and predictable. His contempt for the mass, or for the individual who allowed himself to be swallowed up by it, was rooted in this: to his way of thinking, such a life was inhuman. If literature were to provide any counter to this, it had to turn itself toward the life of the individual. Indeed, Hamsun was to remain committed to this in all his writing, singling out and holding up to us one individual after another, good or bad in nature, talented or simple, heroic or pitiable, never with the intention of demonstrating their representative qualities, but always to show what was particular and individual about them and, little by little, the way time, streaming through them, so easily could get them in its clutches. Oh, how people sway in Hamsun’s novels, and oh, how he admired what would not sway, what stood unwaveringly firm. But the unwavering human is an idea, as far removed from living life as the mass human, and in the language he developed, the form he developed, it too dissolves. Mysteries tests the very idea of the unique. And if the nihilism it expresses is down to the perceptions of an individual, rather than necessarily obtaining in itself, it nonetheless arises as a consequence of the age in which this individual exists and is a part. Mysteries must not simply be read as an encounter between the eccentric individual and small-town conformity, but also as a clash between the contrasting mentalities of the two ages they straddle. What needs to be understood when reading Hamsun’s first novels is that the 1890s were closer in time to the eighteenth century than to our own day. Voltaire, Rousseau, the French Revolution, these were people and events that in terms of time and relevance were like Freud, Picasso, and modernism seen from our own perspective. Goethe’s death was as near to them as the 1950s is to us.

  Life in Lillesand at the time of Hamsun’s sojourn there, described with such richness of detail in Mysteries, was anchored in tradition, stable, uncomplicated, foreseeable. But although he knew this life well, he was in no way representative of it; Hamsun was born into poverty, he received no education, practical or academic, he belonged to no particular milieu, he had countless jobs and lived in countless places, seldom longer than a few months at a time, and the fact that he was a person who never looked back is important to bear in mind if one is to understand why he wrote the way he did, since all his books without exception in some way or another explore the relationship between that which belongs and that which does not, between that which remains firm and that which drifts. There was enough ambivalence between these poles to propel sixty years of monumental writing.

  Mysteries attaches no importance to Nagel’s past, we are told nothing about where he is from geographically, nothing about what social class he belongs to or the kind of conditions he grew up in, nothing about his family, friends, or acquaintances, nothing about his childhood or youth. He is simply there all of a sudden, in Lillesand, the way the narrator of Hunger is simply there in Kristiania. This is true of nearly all of Hamsun’s main characters. Even Isak, the “margrave” in Hamsun’s song to the earth, Growth of the Soil, is simply there. He too is without a past, without a family, without ties to anything that has gone before, and this detachment from all history and context, the fact of so emphatica
lly belonging to the now, consistently starting from scratch, is one of the most important traits of Hamsun’s characters, and patently American. Isak’s story echoes not the biblical creation narrative, the first people on earth cultivating the land, but the pioneers of America, who left behind everything they knew in their homelands to start again in the unknown. But Isak at least has a mission, a deeper meaning in all that he does; Nagel has no such motivation and indeed often wonders what he is actually doing there, not unlike a tourist grinding to a halt in some corner of the globe. The town is the old world, the people who live there have no difficulty belonging and perceive no lack of meaning; these are Nagel’s problems, seemingly irresolvable, for in his attempt to break away from the monotypic mass human that emerged in the first modernity, he also breaks away from everything that might go toward a sense of belonging, and the freedom he gains is applied to no end, useless in any other respect than to search for meaning. And when meaning is not found, meaning and belonging being two sides of the same coin, to laugh at it all or put an end to it. There is little reason to doubt that this conflict was Hamsun’s own, certainly not if we consider all the many forms and variations in which it occurs throughout his writing.