Mysteries (3 page)

 

 

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.
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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 of Miniman’s crime, possibly attempted rape, shows up the moral depravity lurking under the respectable surface. For despite his outsider’s status, Miniman’s unconscious hypocrisy metonymously involves all the other whited sepulchers of the town.

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.”
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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.”
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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. Nagel even hears someone calling him, a putative divine presence, and he answers the call. The fancy of rocking about “on a heavenly sea, fishing with a silver hook and singing to himself” seems more disinterested, an instance of pure beauty. However, in the midst of his ecstasy he experiences a
Weltschmerz
and a sense of transience so keen as to be soothed only by the thought of “putting an end to it all!” The fetal position Nagel assumes, as he curls up, “hugging his knees and shivering with well-being,” similarly associates the experience with a death wish. The fact that, a moment earlier, Nagel had met a girl with a cat in her arms, followed by the vision of a white pigeon reeling “sideways down the sky,” shot dead by a hunter, is another foreshadowing of future disenchantment.

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”
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—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 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.”
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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, ”
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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.”
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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,
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inevitably so, considering Hamsun’s intent: to probe the deepest layers of the psyche, where irrationality reigns and ordinary cause and effect appear to be suspended. This is also the realm of the uncanny, where depth psychology meets the mystery story. The bizarre relationship between everyday reality, dream, and fairy tale in the book borders on the surreal, or on magic realism. All these new elements, grounded in the irrational, forced Hamsun to come up with a novel set of criteria for aesthetic coherence. Perhaps a musical analogy will be helpful. Despite the seeming chaos of Nagel’s mind, his story falls into a definite pattern: the repetitions, variations, and recapitulations of situations and motifs that the text reveals generate an aesthetically satisfying rhythm and a sense of completion, while at the same time producing a plausible rendering of a mind at the end of its tether.