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the end, Nagel suffers a complete psychological disintegration, that, in fact, he becomes insane. Hamsun himself says in a letter that the book deals with a “strange fellow” who “ends up by going quite mad.”37 But it is questionable whether Nagel possesses a core identity to begin with. Not only is he known by more than one name, but in the course of the novel he assumes a gamut of roles, somewhat brashly enumerated by Henry Miller: Nagel plays “the clown, the buffoon, the lover, the con man, the fixer, the patron, the phony detective, the intellectual, the artist, the enchanter, ”38 to which might be added agronomist, globetrotter, collector, dogooder, friend, heir, self-slanderer, iconoclast, mystery man. The self as portrayed in Mysteries is reduced precisely to a collection of roles, played in succession or simultaneously. Nagel even acts out roles in solitude, as in an early scene in his room where he awakens from his mental absorption with a start, “so abrupt that it could have been feigned, as if he had contemplated making this start for a long time, though he was alone in the room” (chapter 1). Seen in this light, the novel illustrates the nullity of the self, turning Hamsun into a postmodernist ante rem, the creator of a “man without qualities.” Could the underlying reason for Nagel’s love of Dagny, and his dream of a pastoral existence with Martha, be his desire to escape from psychosocial serialism?

Hamsun’s literary technique in this book is equally unconventional. Much has been written about the angle(s) of narration in Mysteries. Though initially we sense the presence of an observer, a townsman perhaps, who tells the story, soon we find ourselves listening to Nagel’s thoughts, mostly by way of free indirect discourse or erlebte Rede, but also here and there in the form of stream of consciousness. Yet, the point of view is not that of an omniscient author, but rather limited omniscience. On the whole, Hamsun treats the handling of point of view rather cavalierly in Mysteries. The narrative persona seems to hover above the text like a sort of all-seeing eye, an eye that can feign partial sight at will, if the occasion calls for it. Wolfgang Kayser says that Hamsun’s narrator dissolves into “an aura” that “floats around and through the characters.”39 By comparison with Hunger and Pan, both consistently first-person stories, Mysteries is narratologically loose, whether by design or from lack of skill. It looks as though Hamsun’s project, that of portraying a strong, complex mind drifting toward crackup, demanded the technical eclecticism that distinguishes this novel from its two classic companions.

Whether one likes the book’s narrative strategies or not, Hamsun seems to have achieved considerable success in applying his new aesthetic in a substantial work of fiction. As a whole, Mysteries succeeds in creating an intensely immediate sense of the day-by-day, hour-by-hour stream of thought of the central character, who is poised on the brink of annihilation. The social occasions, with their carousing and debates—including Nagel’s outrageous sallies at everything under the sun à la Mark Twain and the Dostoyevsky-inspired scenes of scandal—recede in the reader’s experience in favor of Nagel’s interior monologues. Gradually, the excoriator of so-called great men who puts himself forward as a champion of the great terrorist turns out to be a sensitive soul, speaking from weakness rather than strength. He withdraws more and more into the torture chamber of his own subconscious psyche, haunted by phantoms and driven to his death by the mysterious forces he so tirelessly defended against the inroads of science and reason, forces now turned destructive.

In Mysteries, Hamsun shows little concern with some of the most essential elements of the traditional novel: a coherent plot, causality, fullness and consistency of characterization, verisimilitude, and a sustained narrative perspective. Yet it cannot be called a modernist novel tout court. It does, however, display several modernist traits,40 inevitably so, considering