Mysteries - Knut Hamsun [8]
The ominous undertones of the experience in the woods are confirmed through subsequent events. The forest, the scene of “perfect contentment,” later becomes the scene of the abortive suicide, one of the most powerful passages in the book (chapter 19). The cat motif, introduced so innocently early on, turns into the gruesome story of a cat “writhing in the most terrible agony,” with a fish hook stuck in its throat (chapter 20). Two chapters later, in Nagel’s delirious monologue, it is Karlsen, with whom Nagel seems to identify, who is choking on a fish hook, and finally Nagel thinks he is himself “lying there with a fish hook in his throat....” The romantic image of fishing with a silver hook in a celestial ocean—with a possible allusion to the biblical notion of being “fishers of men”36—transforms into the motif of the hunter/hunted. In the end, after Nagel realizes he is no longer wearing the iron ring, the call in the woods recurs as a succession of demonic summonses from the sea. Similarly, though discarded by an act of free will, the ring—a pledge of loyalty to the earth—becomes the agency of inexorable fatality.
The “mysterious” aspects of Hamsun’s novel are epitomized in some of the inserted stories, in particular the story of the blind girl and that of the woman with the cross. The first, related on the spur of the moment, is called an eventyr, a word that means “adventure” as well as “fairy tale,” causing the story to hover on the borderline between dream and reality. It is a kind of fable of eros, charged with beauty, tenderness—and horror. An amateur Freudian reading is irresistible: there is the forbidding father, who yet lures Nagel on; there is the implicit promise of a night of passion, withdrawn when the girl abandons him. Instead, his night is filled with lovely sights and beautiful music: desire has been sublimated into art. However, the grisly dénouement the following day, with the blind girl’s body shattered on the ground, makes sublimation look like a crucifixion. Though the tale excites Dagny sexually, it presents erotic passion as a blind and ruthless force that wreaks havoc with people’s lives. It acts as a foreshadowing of things to come.
The anecdote about the woman with the cross is perceived as an omen of disaster already in the telling, when Nagel visits the Stenersens toward the end of the novel (chapter 21). The woman’s second apparition fills him with a kind of ontological anxiety. As in the “adventure” with the blind girl, the story’s horror is largely conveyed by an image of falling: the blind girl falls to her death from the top of the tower; the woman with the cross throws herself into the sea. More important, Nagel himself experiences a free fall as the opium trance wears off. While the experience itself, with its musical imagery, recalls his one-time rapture in the woods, his fall into the ocean, which confronts him with the spread-eagled body of the woman with the cross, is an obvious allusion to the crushed body of the young girl. Both stories are uncanny, hinting at the presence of hidden demonic forces. How else to explain the behavior of Nagel’s puppy, Jakobsen, who raises her hackles and barks furiously during the second apparition of the woman with the cross?
It has often been said that, toward