Nagel’s world is collapsing; eventually he envisages himself in the role of a clown, dancing in the marketplace in his stocking feet just like his humble friend. It is as though the transvaluation of all values which underlies his attacks on, and parodies of, received ideas and current ideologies has come home to roost.

The subconscious dialectic revealed in Nagel’s dreams of Miniman shows that, however sharply he rejects society, he cannot escape it. Nor is he able to find a satisfactory replacement for it through nature. His rapture in the woods, with its lyrical afflatus, while transporting, is undercut by its associated images. In a state of “perfect contentment,” he “perceived music in his blood, sensed a kinship with all of nature, ... felt enveloped by his own sense of self as it came back to him from trees and tussocks and blades of grass. His soul grew big and rich, like the sound of an organ inside him ...” (chapter 6). The mystical sense of oneness with creation is accompanied by a self-inflation approaching apotheosis. Nagel even hears someone calling him, a putative divine presence, and he answers the call. The fancy of rocking about “on a heavenly sea, fishing with a silver hook and singing to himself” seems more disinterested, an instance of pure beauty. However, in the midst of his ecstasy he experiences a Weltschmerz and a sense of transience so keen as to be soothed only by the thought of “putting an end to it all!” The fetal position Nagel assumes, as he curls up, “hugging his knees and shivering with well-being,” similarly associates the experience with a death wish. The fact that, a moment earlier, Nagel had met a girl with a cat in her arms, followed by the vision of a white pigeon reeling “sideways down the sky,” shot dead by a hunter, is another foreshadowing of future disenchantment.

The ominous undertones of the experience in the woods are confirmed through subsequent events. The forest, the scene of “perfect contentment,” later becomes the scene of the abortive suicide, one of the most powerful passages in the book (chapter 19). The cat motif, introduced so innocently early on, turns into the gruesome story of a cat “writhing in the most terrible agony,” with a fish hook stuck in its throat (chapter 20). Two chapters later, in Nagel’s delirious monologue, it is Karlsen, with whom Nagel seems to identify, who is choking on a fish hook, and finally Nagel thinks he is himself “lying there with a fish hook in his throat....” The romantic image of fishing with a silver hook in a celestial ocean—with a possible allusion to the biblical notion of being “fishers of men”36—transforms into the motif of the hunter/hunted. In the end, after Nagel realizes he is no longer wearing the iron ring, the call in the woods recurs as a succession of demonic summonses from the sea. Similarly, though discarded by an act of free will, the ring—a pledge of loyalty to the earth—becomes the agency of inexorable fatality.

The “mysterious” aspects of Hamsun’s novel are epitomized in some of the inserted stories, in particular the story of the blind girl and that of the woman with the cross. The first, related on the spur of the moment, is called an eventyr, a word that means “adventure” as well as “fairy tale,” causing the story to hover on the borderline between dream and reality. It is a kind of fable of eros, charged with beauty, tenderness—and horror. An amateur Freudian reading is irresistible: there is the forbidding father, who yet lures Nagel on; there is the implicit promise of a night of passion, withdrawn when the girl abandons him. Instead, his night is filled with lovely sights and beautiful music: desire has been sublimated into art. However, the grisly dénouement the following day, with the blind girl’s body shattered on the ground, makes sublimation look like a crucifixion. Though the tale excites Dagny sexually, it presents erotic passion as a blind and ruthless force that wreaks havoc with people’s lives. It acts as a foreshadowing of things to come.

The anecdote about the woman with the cross is perceived as an omen of disaster already in the telling, when Nagel visits the Stenersens toward the end of the novel (chapter 21). The woman’s second apparition fills him with a kind of ontological anxiety. As in the “adventure” with the blind girl, the story’s horror is largely conveyed by an image of falling: the blind girl falls to her death from the top of the tower; the woman with the cross throws herself into the sea. More important, Nagel himself experiences a free fall as the opium trance wears off. While the experience itself, with its musical imagery, recalls his one-time rapture in the woods, his fall into the ocean, which confronts him with the spread-eagled body of the woman with the cross, is an obvious allusion to the crushed body of the young girl. Both stories are uncanny, hinting at the presence of hidden demonic forces. How else to explain the behavior of Nagel’s puppy, Jakobsen, who raises her hackles and barks furiously during the second apparition of the woman with the cross?

 

 

It has often been said that, toward the end, Nagel suffers a complete psychological disintegration, that, in fact, he becomes insane.