Mysteries - Knut Hamsun [1]
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