A thinker who “never learned how to think,” a musician who fills his violin case with dirty laundry, in short, an artist manqué, Nagel in his yellow aesthete’s suit seems bent on investing his artistic talent and energies in the business of living. His love is a desperate attempt to give meaning to his life; a metaphysical eros, it is the means whereby he hopes to justify his very existence. That is why its failure brings such drastic consequences. By the time he starts wooing Martha, he is simply concerned to survive, however meagerly. The pastoral dream of life with Martha that he evokes in chapter 16 is symptomatic of the psychological regression that Nagel undergoes toward the end of the novel.

Despite the special circumstances of Nagel’s attachment to Dagny, his love conforms to a romantic archetype, best exemplified by Goethe’s Sturm und Drang novel The Sufferings of Young Werther (1774). Both Werther and Nagel go into ecstasies in their communion with nature and take a jaundiced view of the societies in which they find themselves; both fall in love with rather ordinary women who have been promised to someone else, and they end by taking their own lives. Though the would-be lovers respect the “injured third parties” whom they seek to supplant, they are powerless to desist from their impassioned wooing. On the contrary, the obstacles in the way of their love, the very impossibility of its fulfillment, seem to act as a stimulus to continued pursuit.27

In the working out of the archetype, especially the elements of irrationality and tragic suffering, Hamsun may have drawn upon three German philosophers who were in the forefront of public discussion at the time, Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), Eduard von Hartmann, and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900).28 To Schopenhauer, love is “the source of little pleasure and much suffering.”29 Hartmann calls it a “demon who ever and again demands his victim” and an “eternally veiled mystery” that wills an infinitude of “longing, joy and sorrow”; it is “eternally incomprehensible, unutterable, ineffable, because never to be grasped by consciousness.”30 As for Nietzsche, his relevance in this context pertains as much to the temper of his thought as to its substance. Nagel possesses a heightened sense of life, a spirit of exuberance, that is very reminiscent of Nietzsche, as is his extolling of “His Eminence Excess” (chapter 18). Indeed, it has been suggested that Mysteries is an example of Dionysian tragedy, an essay on “agony and ecstasy—with Dionysian strains.”31

 

 

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of Mysteries is that the love plot is doubled by a kind of male romance, the bonding between Nagel and Miniman. This relationship operates on two levels, one realistic, the other symbolic. In protest against the claim of Edvard Brandes in his review of Mysteries that Miniman was “an entirely Russian figure,”32 Hamsun retorted, in a letter to Philipsen, his publisher, that he was a real person, corresponding in every detail to the character in the novel.33 However, the manner in which the relationship is developed betrays obvious Dostoyevskian traits. While at the outset Nagel appears as a rescuer, offering protection to one of the “insulted and injured,” the subsequent meetings between Nagel and Miniman increasingly assume the character of interrogations, much like the virtual duels between Raskolnikov and the police investigator Porfiry Petrovich in Crime and Punishment. Eventually Nagel admits his long-time suspicion that Miniman had murdered Karlsen. But even after admitting his mistake on that score, Nagel accuses Miniman, with his “mendacious blue eyes,” of being “an unclean, unctuous soul,” “a cowardly ... angel of the Lord” who might still infect Martha with his “sanctimonious depravity” (chapter 20). Here Hamsun’s literary repertoire has borrowed a trick from Nietzsche, ever suspicious of appearances, especially the mask of humility worn by followers of the so-called slave morality.

The confirmation of Nagel’s suspicion on the book’s last page reflects not only on Miniman but on the society of which he is a part. While the townspeople go on with their lives as if nothing had happened, the revelation of Miniman’s crime, possibly attempted rape, shows up the moral depravity lurking under the respectable surface. For despite his outsider’s status, Miniman’s unconscious hypocrisy metonymously involves all the other whited sepulchers of the town.

Nevertheless, it is as Nagel’s double that Miniman becomes truly fascinating, adding both complexity and depth to Hamsun’s novel and laying bare fateful contradictions in Nagel’s psyche. Hamsun himself was fully aware of Miniman’s status as Nagel’s “alter ego”; therefore, he says, “those mysterious clashes, therefore the dreams, therefore his visions of him when [he] wants to kill himself and so forth.”34 Dostoyevsky tends to use the double to symbolize a central character’s moral underground, like Smerdyakov in relation to Ivan Karamazov. By contrast, the difference between Nagel and Miniman is chiefly a matter of class and temperament, not morality, the former being an excessively ebullient member of the middle class, the latter a shy and rather taciturn proletarian. However, it cannot be forgotten that Miniman is physically misshapen, a possible hint at a warped nature. Yet, despite the divide separating them, Hamsun suggests they are united by deep affinities. Thus, in his meetings with Miniman, particularly when in his cups, Nagel sometimes confuses his own persona with that of his interlocutor. Hamsun formulates the situation quite aptly, if somewhat obscurely, in a letter to Erik Skram: “The question is whether he [Nagel] hangs together, hangs together with his alter ego, Miniman, and hangs loosely enough together with himself to almost fall apart.”35

The deep bonds between these two figures, whose names echo one another—one being called Johan, the other Johannes—are shown most convincingly through Nagel’s dreams (chapters 6 and 22). Both dreams are agons, the first Miniman’s, the second Nagel’s; yet, these dreams are important chiefly for what they tell us about the dreamer, Nagel. In the first dream, Nagel is split in two, between the humble, barely human creature struggling to rise out of the primeval jungle and the arrogant intellectual whose taunts prefigure Nagel’s semisadistic interrogations of his friend. In the second dream—which Hamsun, taking his cue from Dostoyevsky, no doubt, presents as though it were an actual happening—the roles are reversed, Miniman being the savior, as well as the voice of reason, Nagel the victim of his own unreason. At this point all certainties have been relativized: moral principle—the categorical imperative or the Christian maxim of doing to your neighbor as you would be done to—is stood on its head as Nagel becomes a victim, rather than a beneficiary, of Miniman’s good intentions. The little man who a short time ago turned Nagel’s projected suicide into an embarrassing fiasco, once more interferes fatefully in his life, though this time by indirection, in Nagel’s dream. Ironically, he enacts in both instances the very principle obeyed by Nagel in saving the young man who jumped overboard on his way to Hamburg.