Mysteries - Knut Hamsun [6]
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 suggested 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