Mysteries - Knut Hamsun [7]
Nevertheless, it is as Nagel’s double that Miniman becomes truly fascinating, adding both complexity and depth to Hamsun’s novel and laying bare fateful contradictions in Nagel’s psyche. Hamsun himself was fully aware of Miniman’s status as Nagel’s “alter ego”; therefore, he says, “those mysterious clashes, therefore the dreams, therefore his visions of him when [he] wants to kill himself and so forth.”34 Dostoyevsky tends to use the double to symbolize a central character’s moral underground, like Smerdyakov in relation to Ivan Karamazov. By contrast, the difference between Nagel and Miniman is chiefly a matter of class and temperament, not morality, the former being an excessively ebullient member of the middle class, the latter a shy and rather taciturn proletarian. However, it cannot be forgotten that Miniman is physically misshapen, a possible hint at a warped nature. Yet, despite the divide separating them, Hamsun suggests they are united by deep affinities. Thus, in his meetings with Miniman, particularly when in his cups, Nagel sometimes confuses his own persona with that of his interlocutor. Hamsun formulates the situation quite aptly, if somewhat obscurely, in a letter to Erik Skram: “The question is whether he [Nagel] hangs together, hangs together with his alter ego, Miniman, and hangs loosely enough together with himself to almost fall apart.”35
The deep bonds between these two figures, whose names echo one another—one being called Johan, the other Johannes—are shown most convincingly through Nagel’s dreams (chapters 6 and 22). Both dreams are agons, the first Miniman’s, the second Nagel’s; yet, these dreams are important chiefly for what they tell us about the dreamer, Nagel. In the first dream, Nagel is split in two, between the humble, barely human creature struggling to rise out of the primeval jungle and the arrogant intellectual whose taunts prefigure Nagel’s semisadistic interrogations of his friend. In the second dream—which Hamsun, taking his cue from Dostoyevsky, no doubt, presents as though it were an actual happening—the roles are reversed, Miniman being the savior, as well as the voice of reason, Nagel the victim of his own unreason. At this point all certainties have been relativized: moral principle—the categorical imperative or the Christian maxim of doing to your neighbor as you would be done to—is stood on its head as Nagel becomes a victim, rather than a beneficiary, of Miniman’s good intentions. The little man who a short time ago turned Nagel’s projected suicide into an embarrassing fiasco, once more interferes fatefully in his life, though this time by indirection, in Nagel’s dream. Ironically, he enacts in both instances the very principle obeyed by Nagel in saving the young man who jumped overboard on his way to Hamburg. Nagel’s world is collapsing; eventually he envisages himself in the role of a clown, dancing in the marketplace in his stocking feet just like his humble friend. It is as though the transvaluation of all values which underlies his attacks on, and parodies of, received ideas and current ideologies has come home to roost.
The subconscious dialectic revealed in Nagel’s dreams of Miniman shows that, however sharply he rejects society, he cannot escape it. Nor is he able to find a satisfactory replacement for it through nature. His rapture in the woods, with its lyrical afflatus, while transporting, is undercut by its associated images. In a state of “perfect contentment,” he “perceived music in his blood, sensed a kinship with all of nature, ... felt enveloped by his own sense of self as it came back to him from trees and tussocks and blades of grass. His soul grew big and rich, like the sound of an organ inside him ...” (chapter 6). The mystical sense of oneness with creation is accompanied by a self-inflation approaching apotheosis.