by Knut Hamsun
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
EXPLANATORY NOTES
TEXTUAL NOTES
FOR THE BEST IN PAPERBACKS, LOOK FOR THE
MYSTERIES
Knut Hamsun was born in 1859 to a poor peasant family in central Norway. His early literary ambition was thwarted by having to eke out a living—as a schoolmaster, sheriff’s assistant, and road laborer in Norway; as a store clerk, farmhand, and streetcar conductor in the American Midwest, where he lived for two extended periods between 1882 and 1888. Based on his own experiences as a struggling writer, Hamsun’s first novel, Sult (1890; tr. Hunger, 1899), was an immediate critical success. While also a poet and playwright, Hamsun made his mark on European literature as a novelist. Finding the contemporary novel plot-ridden, psychologically unsophisticated and didactic, he aimed to transform it so as to accommodate contingency and the irrational, the nuances of conscious and subconscious life as well as the vagaries of human behavior. Hamsun’s innovative aesthetic is exemplified in his successive novels of the decade: Mysteries (1892), Pan (1894), and Victoria (1898). Perhaps his best-known work is The Growth of the Soil (1917), which earned him the Nobel Prize in 1920. After the Second World War, as a result of his openly expressed Nazi sympathies during the German occupation of Norway, Hamsun forfeited his considerable fortune to the state. He died in poverty in 1952.
Sverre Lyngstad, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, New Jersey, holds degrees in English from the University of Oslo, the University of Washington, Seattle, and New York University. He is the author of many books and articles in the field of Scandinavian literature, including Jonas Lie (1977) and Sigurd Hoel’s Fiction (1984), coauthor of Ivan Goncharov (1971), and cotranslator of Tolstoy’s Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth (1968). Among his more recent translations from Norwegian are Knut Fadbakken’s Adam’s Diary (1988), Sigurd Hoel’s The Troll Circle (1992) and The Road to the World’s End (1995), Knut Hamsun’s Rosa (1997) and On Overgrown Paths (1999), and Arne Garborg’s Weary Men (1999). Dr. Lyngstad is the recipient of several grants, prizes, and awards and has been honored by the King of Norway with the St. Olav Medal and with the Knight’s Cross, First Class, of the Royal Norwegian Order of Merit. He has recently completed a critical study of Knut Hamsun’s novels.
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First published in Penguin Books 2001
Translation, introduction, and notes copyright © Sverre Lyngstad, 2001 All rights reserved
Originally published in Norwegian as Mysterier
by P. G. Philipsens Forlag, Kobenhavn, 1892.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Hamsun, Knut, 1859—1952.
[Mysterier. English]
Mysteries / Knut Hamsun ; translated with an introduction and
explanatory and textual notes by Sverre Lyngstad.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN : 978-1-440-67363-4
I. Lyngstad, Sverre. II. Title
PT8950.H3M913 2001
839.8’236—dc21
00-040651
http://us.penguingroup.com
For Karin and Ken
—S. L.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank the following persons for information concerning special usages, literary allusions, and biographical items in translating Mysteries and preparing the notes: Arnold and Kjellrun Lyngstad, Michael Rijssenbeek, Guy Rosa, and Dagfinn Worren. Special thanks go to Eléonore Zimmermann for her patience and encouragement during the period I was working on the translation and for reading the manuscript.
INTRODUCTION
At the time when Knut Hamsun was working on the novel that became Mysteries, he was also deeply, and busily, engaged in a critical crusade against the state of Norwegian literature. Already in 1890, the year his first novel, Hunger, appeared, he had published an essay in the journal Samtiden (The Contemporary) entitled “Fra det ubevidste Sjæleliv” (From the Unconscious Life of the Mind), in which he championed a new literary psychology, focused on the intangible, elusive aspects of consciousness, the very stream of thought, rather than its outcome or end results. Concurrently, he emphasized the unpredictable nature of the process of thought and its roots in the subconscious mind.
In 1891 he extended his crusade by going on a lecture tour of Norwegian cities, ending up in Kristiania (now Oslo) in October of that year. In these lectures, the contents of which were only known through newspaper reports until 1960, Hamsun repeated his call for a new literature while attacking the reigning deities on the Norwegian Parnassus, Ibsen, Bjørnson, Kielland, and Lie, the so-called Four Greats. Ibsen had received a special invitation to the Kristiania lecture and sat in the front row, beside Nina and Edvard Grieg. The lectures caused a sensation, but the reviews were mixed. Many critics found the attacks to be outrageously unfair as well as churlish and cast Hamsun as a Yankee self-booster, a reference to his recent sojourns in the United States.
This largely hostile public reaction is an essential part of the background to Mysteries, which appeared in 1892. As the reader will soon discover, the debate is continued on a wider scale in the novel. During the period of the novel’s genesis, Hamsun’s life was no less unsettled than that of Johan Nilsen Nagel, the book’s central character, as he kept moving between Kristiania and Copenhagen, between Copenhagen and the Danish island of Samsø, and from one Norwegian town to another. His finances were also precarious: the sales of Hunger were poor despite excellent reviews. These circumstances were bound to have a strong impact on the book he was writing. Indeed, in creating the central figure of Mysteries, Hamsun produced an aggravated or heightened version of his own provisional life: Nagel, whose rootlessness is global, represents the extreme limit of an existential condition with which his creator was intimately familiar. In effect, he can be seen as a virtual self of the author, whose artistic vocation helped prevent its real-life actualization.1
That vocation had not come cheaply. Hamsun’s beginnings as a writer had been slow and painful. By the time he appeared on the scene with a fragment of Hunger in 1888, he had served a literary apprenticeship of more than ten years and tried his fortune on two continents. His life, never an easy one, was often marked by severe hardship. Born to an impoverished peasant family at Garmotrxdet, Lom, in central Norway in 1859, Knut Pedersen, to use
his baptismal name, had a difficult childhood. In the summer of 1862, when Knut was less than three years old, his father, a tailor, moved with his family to Hamarøy, north of the Arctic Circle, where he worked the farm Hamsund belonging to his brother-in-law, Hans Olsen. From the age of nine to fourteen Hamsun was a sort of indentured servant to his uncle, since the family was financially dependent on him. The boy’s beautiful penmanship made him particularly valuable to Hans Olsen, who suffered from palsy and needed a scribe for his multifarious business, from shopkeeper to librarian and postmaster. The uncle treated Knut with anything but kid gloves; at the slightest slip of the pen he would rap his knuckles with a long ruler. And on Sundays the boy was kept indoors, forced to read edifying literature to Hans and his pietist brethren while his friends were playing outside, waiting for Knut to join in their games. No wonder he liked to tend the cattle at the parsonage, where his uncle had his quarters. This allowed him to lie on his back in the woods, dreaming his time away and writing on the sky. Very likely, these hours of solitary musings away from the tyranny of his uncle acted as a stimulus to young Hamsun’s imagination. His schooling, starting at the age of nine, was sporadic, and his family had no literary culture. However, the local library at his uncle’s place may have provided a modicum of sustenance for his childish dreams.
During his adolescence and youth Hamsun led a virtually nomadic existence, at first in various parts of Norway, later in the United States. After being confirmed in the church of his native parish in 1873, he was a store clerk in his godfather’s business in Lom for a year, then returned north to work in the same capacity for Nikolai Walsøe, a merchant at Tranøy, not far from his parents’ place. There Hamsun seems to have fallen in love with the boss’s daughter, Laura. It is uncertain whether the young man was asked to leave because of his infatuation with Laura or because of the bankruptcy of Mr. Walsøe in 1875. In the next few years he supported himself as a peddler, shoemaker’s apprentice, schoolmaster, and sheriff’s assistant in different parts of Nordland. After the failure of his literary ventures in the late 1870s, the school of life took the form of road construction work for a year and a half (1880-81).
Hamsun’s dream of becoming a writer had been conceived at an early age, amid circumstances that left him no choice but to fend for himself. If it can be said of any writer that he was self-made or self-taught, it can certainly be said of Hamsun. Not surprisingly, the two narratives published in his teens, Den Gådefulde (1877; The Enigmatic One) and Bjørger (1878), were clumsy and insignificant. The former is an idyllic tale in the manner of magazine fiction, in a language more Danish than Norwegian. The latter, a short novel, was modeled on Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s peasant tales of the 1850s. In 1879, with the support of a prosperous Nordland businessman, E. B. K. Zahl, Hamsun wrote another novel, “Frida,” which he presented to Frederik Hegel at Gyldendal Publishers in Copenhagen. It was turned down without comment. The manuscript of this story, which was also dismissed by Bjørnson (1832-1910), has been lost. Bjørnson suggested he become an actor. And so, in early 1880, in his twenty-first year, the first period of Hamsun’s literary apprenticeship came to an end.
During the 1880s hard physical labor went hand in hand with renewed literary and intellectual efforts. While employed in road construction, he had made his debut as a public lecturer. But though his lecture on August Strindberg was enthusiastically reviewed in the Gjøvik paper, Hamsun lost money on the venture.2 His next decision was not unusual for a poor, ambitious Norwegian in the 1880s: to emigrate to America. However, Hamsun was not primarily interested in improving his fortune; instead, he foresaw a future for himself as the poetic voice of the Norwegian community in the New World. Needless to say, the dream quickly foundered, though the lecturing activity was continued. To support himself he worked as a farmhand and store clerk, except for the last six months or so of the two-and-a-half-year stay, when he was offered the job of “secretary and assistant minister with a salary of $500 a year” by the head of the Norwegian Unitarian community in Minneapolis, Kristofer Janson (1841-1917).3 This was Hamsun’s first significant encounter with an intellectual milieu. While he did not share Janson’s religious beliefs, he clearly enjoyed browsing in his well-stocked library. But his stay was cut short: in the summer of 1884 his doctor diagnosed “galloping consumption,”4 and in the fall of that year Hamsun returned to Norway, apparently resigned to die. He was twenty-five years old. His illness turned out to be a severe case of bronchitis.
Back in Norway, Hamsun’s endeavors to support himself by writing stories, articles, and reviews for the newspapers, while working on a “big book,”5 brought only a meager harvest financially, despite a considerable amount of publishing activity. Worthy of mention is his article on Mark Twain in the weekly paper Ny illustreret Tidende (New Illustrated Gazette) in March 1885, important because, by a compositor’s error, the d in his name, Hamsund, was dropped. Henceforth, the young aspiring writer would use no other spelling of his name.
After a couple of years in Norway, at times in severe want, Hamsun returned to America, but now for purely economic reasons: to finance his literary ambition. From New York he wrote to a friend in Norway that it had become “impossible” for him at home.6 However, the challenges posed by America were still formidable. Only toward the end of his two-year stay, after supporting himself as a streetcar conductor in Chicago and a farm laborer in the Dakotas, was he able to turn his attention to literature. Having returned to Minneapolis in the fall of 1887, he delivered a series of lectures there during the winter of 1887-88. These lectures, which dealt with such literary figures as Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Bjørnson, Ibsen, and Strindberg, demonstrate Hamsun’s painfully acquired familiarity with the literary culture of his time. By July 1888 we find him in Copenhagen. In a brief sketch of his early life recorded in 1894 he says that, when the ship reached Kristiania, he “hid on board a day and a half,”7 bypassing the city that had so bitterly frustrated his literary dreams. 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.
