A few months later, in November 1888, the Danish journal Ny Jord (New Earth) published a fragment of his breakthrough novel, Hunger, which marks the real starting point of Hamsun’s career as a creative writer.

 

 

Although the genesis of Mysteries, like Hunger, can be traced to a decidedly personal predicament, more than any other of Hamsun’s novels it was written with a particular aesthetic in mind. The book was intended to vindicate his new theory of literature, spelled out, however vaguely, in his lectures, as well as in his article “From the Unconscious Life of the Mind.” Thus, his lectures contained a broadside attack on the traditional novel, accusing it of applying a superficial psychology and showing a utilitarian concern with social problems. Furthermore, they derided what he called literary creation by dint of “science and numbers,” stressing that an author is a “subjectivity” whose depiction of life and people flows from his own feelings.8 In particular, Hamsun criticized the work of his elders for its allegedly stereotypic character portrayal, expressing a preference for the changeable and divided mind, for individuals “in whom inconsistency is literally their fundamental trait.”9 He wants to see the “soul illuminated and scrutinized every way, from all viewpoints, in every secret recess”; “I will,” he says, “transfix its vaguest stirring with my pin and hold it up to my magnifying glass,” prepared to examine “the most delicate vibrations.” Significantly, the emphasis on emotional nuances also includes a preference for depicting mental phenomena in a state of becoming: he wants to direct attention to the “first germ” of thought and feeling rather than the “final bud” or flower. This accounts for his relative neglect of external action, since elements of plot—balls, outings, and so forth—show nothing but the result of a psychic process rather than that process “in its first germ and in its unfolding.” “Thoughts,” he says, “rise and change at the slightest impressions, and decisions and actions ripen by means of thoughts.”10

Of particular importance for Mysteries is a statement in his 1890 article about the function of the unconscious in literature. If we want literature to give a more faithful representation of the mental life of contemporary people, he writes, it is necessary to know something about the “mimosa-like” sensitivities of the psyche,11 the “secret stirrings” that take place “in the remote parts of the mind, the incalculable welter of emotions, ... the random wanderings of thought and feeling, the uncharted, trackless journeys of heart and brain, the mysterious activities of the nerves, the whisper of the blood, the entreaty of the bones, all the unconscious life of the mind.”12 In the same article, Hamsun stresses the unconscious element in literary creation, following in this the German philosopher Eduard von Hartmann (1842-1906), whom he greatly admired.13

While these premises seem intellectually exciting, they may have presented Hamsun with a dilemma of selection. A writer bent on representing the process of thought, along with the subconscious stirrings behind it, finds himself between the devil and the deep blue sea. On the one hand, the necessity of an aesthetic design calls for formal discipline; on the other, the ambition to reproduce the “unconscious life of the mind” militates against that discipline. The logic of the undertaking would call for an uninhibited outpouring of psychic contents, however trifling or absurd, and readers may have felt in 1892—as some do today—that Hamsun sacrificed decorum and a satisfying form in favor of a misapplied notion of psychological mimesis. The extraordinary number and length of the cuts he made in subsequent editions of the book are a tacit admission of his dissatisfaction with the final product. Apart from the setting, which remains the same throughout, the novel’s sole unifying element seems to be the consistent presence—in every chapter except the last—of the central character, whose life and death struggle, interspersed with farce, allows the reader to forget about the book’s aesthetic lapses.

In the rest of this brief essay I shall suggest a way of reading Mysteries, a novel which has elicited a great deal of commentary, including a book-length study.14 Critical evaluations varied widely from the start, Bjørnson calling it one of the “great books of literature,” whereas the distinguished critic Carl Nærup found it “crude.”15 In the nineteen hundreds, the Danish critic Jørgen Bukdahl claimed that Mysteries was Hamsun’s “best and most honest novel,” in contrast to the judgment of his countryman Peter Kirkegaard that it is a “rather unsuccessful book,” and that of the contemporary Norwegian novelist Knut Faldbakken, in whose opinion it is an “abortive masterpiece.”16 American opinions of the novel range from the rhapsodic praise of Henry Miller to the largely negative reaction of John Updike.17 Whatever one thinks of the work, it is hard to disagree with the statement by another critic that Mysteries is “one of the most provocative works of late nineteenth-century fiction.”18 If nothing else, these disparate appraisals are an indication of the complexity of Hamsun’s novel, as well as of Johan Nilsen Nagel, the book’s central character. They both transcend the Norwegian or Scandinavian context; as a Dutch critic has said, Nagel “belongs to European literature.”19 One feels tempted to quote a statement by Charles Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz,”20 with the addition that, in Nagel’s case, one would have to add America as well.

Nagel’s story, that of a “mysterious stranger” who suddenly turns up in a small town and as suddenly disappears, conforms to the outsider plot. However, Nagel is an outsider not only socially, like Turgenev’s “superfluous men” to whom Hamsun’s early heroes, or antiheroes, have been compared,21 but also meta-physically—“ an alien, a stranger on earth,” as he calls himself (chapter 18). At its deepest level, his story is archetypal: the sub-text traces the destiny of a modern Christ, presented in a spirit of near parody. Thus, Nagel voices a blanket condemnation of contemporary life and thought, befriends the poor and the despised, whom he helps “in secret” following the Scriptures,22 and gains the love of two women suggestive of Mary and Martha, sisters of Lazarus. He is also in the habit of using stories to convey his thoughts. Though Nagel is a failed Christ, returning to the sea by which he came, he is resurrected on the novel’s last page as the two women commemorate his quasi-miraculous powers.

The near-parodic aspect of the Christ analogy is shown throughout, most explicitly perhaps in chapter 18, where Nagel reflects on his “beautiful dream of a mission” while at the same time envisaging his suicide “in the fullness of time.” Like Myshkin in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, Nagel feels a need to play providence to people.23 But he also, like Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov, comes close to being a philosophical naysayer, articulating a kind of counter-theodicy. Ivan tells his brother Alyosha that, while he accepts God, he cannot accept “God’s world” or any “eternal harmony” that history might bring about. He will “respectfully return him [God] the ticket” of admission and, on reaching thirty, “smash the cup [of life] to the ground”—clearly hinting at suicide as one way out.24 Nagel combines these contrary positions: on the spur of the moment, the providential role he wishes to play is brusquely negated, as he reflects, in a moment of nervous exhaustion: “What concern was it of his that the good Lord arranged a collision with loss of life on the Erie Railroad far inside America. None, to be sure! Well, he had just as little to do with Martha Gude, a respectable lady of this town” (chapter 9). In his moral elusiveness, Nagel seems most akin to another Dostoyevskian character, Nikolai Stavrogin, the mysterious figure in Demons whose ambiguous nature, divided between noble and vicious impulses, leads him to death by his own hand.

Within this overall pattern of Mysteries, namely, a parodic version of the Christ story with its associated motif of righting the wrongs of this world, Hamsun accommodates a novelistic structure consisting of two basic elements: romance and intellectual debate. The model may derive from Ivan Turgenev (1818-83), whose novel Rudin (1855) is referred to in the text. Like most Turgenev novels, Rudin combines a failed romance with veritable orgies of discussion, and as in Mysteries the discussion often takes the form of quasi-monologues. Since the debates, dealing with issues of the day, will seem less and less relevant as time goes on, the double structure tends to privilege the romance element. In the working out of that element, Hamsun is closer to Dostoyevsky than to Turgenev: like Myshkin, Nagel shuttles between two women, both of whom play a fateful role in his life.

The novel’s narrative progression is largely determined by the vicissitudes of the love stories. Since Nagel is consistently at the focus of the action, its dynamic depends chiefly on him; that dynamic proceeds from two contrary forces, contingency and fatality. Nagel’s mental reservation of suicide as a last resort places him in a world of contingency, one in which anything can happen. The problems caused by the total freedom this condition entails become evident at the very outset, by his difficulty in deciding whether to disembark from the steamer or not: for him, this is a Hamletic moment of to be or not to be. The acceptance of suicide removes all rational motives of action in favor of sheer caprice, turning the novel into a succession of gratuitous acts. On the other hand, once his passion for Dagny develops, the reader may begin to wonder: Will he follow in the wake of Karlsen, or will he succeed where Karlsen failed? Eventually, one perceives a growing sense of fatality as Nagel’s attempts to control his life fail, with the result that his clairvoyance turns into a fearful prefiguration of destruction.25 Together, contingency and fatality produce a haunting feeling of suspense that goes far toward unifying the highly disparate materials of the work.26

The love of Nagel for Dagny Kielland, however it manifests itself, shows every sign of being an all-absorbing passion.