Books of defianceKnut HamsunWith Mysteries, Knut Hamsun rewrote the novel's rules
This strange tale of a quixotic young man disturbing the equilibrium of a Norwegian town also disturbed accepted ways of depicting inner life
We’ve all heard of rebels without a cause, desperate for something to defy. Then there are rebels without a clue, who have no idea what they are defying, or why.
The Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun specialised in the latter. His 1892 novel Mysteries follows a young man, Nagel, who arrives at a Norwegian coastal town and defies polite society in a series of almost inconsequential actions. He brings only a yellow suit, a fur coat in summer, and a violin case that doesn’t contain a violin; he leaves telegrams out for people to see which indicate that he’s rich, then claims they are false; he makes up for bad first impressions, then spoils it all by admitting that his behaviour had all been deliberate.
Nagel is supposedly reacting against “the decadence, phoniness, self-adulation, and snobbery of our times” – but then again, he might be lying, perhaps even to himself.
Hamsun spent his 20s being ignored by the literary establishment, doing odd jobs at home and in the US. But in the 1890s, he suddenly won fame across Europe for what he described as his exploration of “the strange and peculiar life of the mind”.
Hamsun felt that contemporary fiction was only concerned with the plottable results of psychology, not the strange vacillations that operate at a deeper level. He identified the erratic unpredictability of Dostoevsky’s characters as true to at least his own life – the way they throbbed from the page with strange and spontaneous compulsions – and thought he’d make this the core of his fiction. In his 1890 book Hunger, a mentally ill, struggling writer wanders round what is now Oslo arguing with himself, telling lies and coming to believe them passionately.
But for Hamsun this was tyro stuff: the book a struggling writer writes. Even if the narrator doesn’t know quite why he is acting the way he is, we can make our own conclusions. Then two years later came Mysteries, explicitly about the “underlying mysteries that govern people”. Hamsun defies us to come up with a why and we are without a clue. The narrator seems as baffled as we are. “Was [Nagel] laughing at himself and the role he was playing?” “His face flushed for no apparent reason.”
At one point, Nagel lies down and “[begins] talking aloud to himself”. What seems a crude way of rendering interior monologue introduces a bravura passage that introduces new characters, fills in scenes that have happened secretly and supplely weaves in flashbacks – exceedingly rare for writing of the era. Hamsun also uses this monologue to confuse – revealing bits of Nagel’s backstory that he later contradicts, moments where he loses his own train of thought.
Hamsun was making formal jokes about stream of consciousness, parodying it, when it was still in prototype, 30 years before James Joyce or Virginia Woolf had perfected it. He was defying forms that had yet to be invented.
Mysteries is one of my favourite books and I can’t figure out how it works. I read it in Gerry Bothmer’s 1973 translation which I suspect adds additional oddness to Hamsun’s strange mix. The characters feel simultaneously strange and familiar. Hamsun isn’t the father of the modern novel, but rather its difficult, lonely uncle. His heritage, which began in Russia with Pushkin, Lermontov and Dostoevsky, was widely abandoned for high modernism, a decade or so after Hamsun’s best work. Because of this he still feels advanced and new. He isn’t in our blood the same way, though he has high-profile disciples: among them Beckett, Céline and Lawrence.
The man himself turned out to be even more problematic than his characters. Hamsun welcomed the Nazi invasion of Norway and even gifted his 1920 Nobel prize medal to Goebbels. At his postwar trial, he claimed – in an odd feat of bigoted mental acrobatics – that he thought the English were going to invade, and he would rather a German occupation than an English one.
Yet, when we talk of Hamsun’s influential work we are mainly talking about his four novels of the 1890s: Hunger, Mysteries, Pan and Victoria. There is a good deal of other work but it is little read. By the time of his nazism, the work that made him singular was nearly half a century old, and I have no need for what came after. But the young Hamsun defied the way thought was usually portrayed, and, read now, the books defy what came after.
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