Mysteries - Knut Hamsun [4]
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.
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