Mysteries - Knut Hamsun [5]
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 manqu