Mysteries

by Knut Hamsun

  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. 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 sugge
sted 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. 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. Th
ough 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. Hamsun himself says in a letter that the book deals with a “strange fellow” who “ends up by going quite mad.”37 But it is questionable whether Nagel possesses a core identity to begin with. Not only is he known by more than one name, but in the course of the novel he assumes a gamut of roles, somewhat brashly enumerated by Henry Miller: Nagel plays “the clown, the buffoon, the lover, the con man, the fixer, the patron, the phony detective, the intellectual, the artist, the enchanter, ”38 to which might be added agronomist, globetrotter, collector, dogooder, friend, heir, self-slanderer, iconoclast, mystery man. The self as portrayed in Mysteries is reduced precisely to a collection of roles, played in succession or simultaneously. Nagel even acts out roles in solitude, as in an early scene in his room where he awakens from his mental absorption with a start, “so abrupt that it could have been feigned, as if he had contemplated making this start for a long time, though he was alone in the room” (chapter 1). Seen in this light, the novel illustrates the nullity of the self, turning Hamsun into a postmodernist ante rem, the creator of a “man without qualities.” Could the underlying reason for Nagel’s love of Dagny, and his dream of a pastoral existence with Martha, be his desire to escape from psychosocial serialism?