Mysteries - Knut Hamsun [3]
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