[In the following essay, Riechel studies two of Hamsun's early novels, noting that the narrative effects in both Hunger and Mysteries are achieved from a combination of ambiguity, irony, and self-contradiction.]

Nietzsche once wrote that becoming accustomed to irony and sarcasm spoils one's character: in the end one resembles a snapping dog that besides knowing how to bite has learned how to laugh¹. Perhaps such habituation spoiled Knut Hamsun, who in his life and in his art always seems to have manoeuvred for the last laugh, to the fascinated discomfort of his readers. Hamsun's ‘insistence on ambiguity’, to use Robert Ferguson's words, ‘his rejection of certainty, his juggling with lies that turn out to be true, and truths that turn out to be lies, his recognition and reproduction of the calculating nature of the mind's voice’² identify him as a Modernist in Nietzsche's wake. Neither Hamsun's ironic habits nor Nietzsche's profoundly ironic mind are measured in the least by the philosopher's early admonition, and definition, in Menschliches Allzumenschliches, that irony is appropriate only as a pedagogical method.

Hamsun was admired by Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, and Robert Musil, yet no one has suggested calling him ‘the Ironic Norwegian’. Ferguson, author of the first full-length biography of Hamsun in English, calls him ‘a multiple paradox; a living riddle; a human question-mark’ (p. 3), whose unrepentant support of the Quisling government and of Hitler's Germany at the end of his life compromises even his earliest works, Sult (Hunger, 1890), Mysterier (Mysteries, 1892), Pan (1894), the novels that established his international reputation. The critical attempt to uncover a proto-fascist ideology in them can be just as disagreeably inadequate as an apologia; in each case interpretation loses sight of Hamsun's horizon of irony. A Norwegian commentator, in an analysis of the first of the Segelfoss novels, Børn av Tiden (Children of the Age, 1913), regards irony as the essential element of Hamsun's art, perhaps the very element that lures the reader into adopting the authorial bias against social change. According to this Marxist argument irony veils ideology, seduces rather than liberates³.

Irony is always in some way a ‘fencing’ strategy, either as parry or thrust, evasion or penetration; it is invariably thought of as a sophisticated intellectual attitude and manner, requiring mental agility, wit, to hover between incompatibilities, irreconcilable opposites⁴. Ironies are not usually shouted. Hamsun's style, in apparent contrast, especially in Sult and Mysterier, (the novels to be considered in the following), has a vehemence and haste about it, a paratactical, often hyperbolic abruptness, and an insistent hypnotic rhythm that suggest the opposite of ironic utterance. In literary irony the reader is also usually initiated into the ironic game of meaning and shares the narrator's superior perspectives. But in Sult and Mysterier particularly the narrator is completely unreliable, and authenticates nothing, for Hamsun writes in the Nietzschean conviction that objectivity is nothing more than a bias, and that no individual has a privileged access to his or her innermost self.⁵ If ‘irony is the art of saying something without really saying it’ (Muecke, p. 5), what is it that Hamsun is not saying, about himself, and in his fiction?

The narrative effects in Sult and Mysterier derive from countless ambiguities, but the polarities of ironic structure seem peculiarly energized not by intellect but by elemental aggression. These stories are driven by an irresolvable compulsion both to assert and to contradict the self, by self-betrayal and self-destruction, or by what Edgar Allan Poe, nearly a half-century before Sult, called ‘the imp of the perverse’. There is no evidence that Hamsun discovered Poe during his American years, when he read Twain, Emerson and Whitman. Poe is nevertheless an uncanny presence in Hamsun's early fiction, as Nietzsche, the Poe- and Baudelaire-reader, would very likely have recognized, had Sult and Mysterier been published and translated into German or French before Nietzsche's correspondence with Georg Brandes began in 1887. Nietzsche read Strindberg, as he did Dostoevsky, in French⁶. Brandes, through his lectures on Nietzsche in Copenhagen in the spring of 1888, introduced the philosopher's thought not only to Strindberg and Hamsun, but to all Scandinavia, and with that, to Europe⁷. In the view of most Hamsun critics, the title of Brandes's essay on Nietzsche, ‘Aristocratic Radicalism’, published 1889, defines the philosophical limits of the connection between Hamsun and Nietzsche: anti-democratic elitism. But Hamsun was a ‘disciple’ of the philosopher not so much in the narrow terms of direct intellectual encounter as in the wide sense of the genealogy of Modernism. The connections Poe—Baudelaire—Dostoevsky—Strindberg—Nietzsche represent the formula for Hamsun's Modernist breakthrough as well as for his self-understanding as a writer even in his last years. (One cannot say, as does Frederick R. Karl, that ‘Modernism bypassed Hamsun’ or that he is ‘a now forgotten author’⁸).

Hamsun seems to have depended on literary models, as did Nietzsche, for his view of self and world, as though leading ‘life as literature’, to borrow the title of Alexander Nehamas's study of Nietzsche. Harald Næss has noted that even the written statements Hamsun made to the psychiatrist who was to determine Hamsun's fitness to stand trial for treason after 1945 were in essence reflections on his earliest literary identity⁹. The psychiatrist included Hamsun's fiction as a matter of course in the analysis of the writer's personality, and the artist-patient-prisoner explained himself as a matter of course in terms of his books, in which there are ‘several hundred different characters, every one of them spun from myself, with faults and virtues such as all created characters have’ (Ferguson, p. 398). The depiction of character was a matter at the heart of Hamsun's rebellion against literary tradition in 1890. The octogenarian skips over a half-century of life and work and returns to his lectures repudiating Kielland, Lie, Zola, the Naturalists who ‘wrote about people with dominant characteristics. They had no use for the more subtle psychology, people all had this “dominant characteristic” which ordained their actions' (Ferguson, p. 398). Hamsun then names Dostoevsky as a writer from whom he had learned, and continues: ‘From the time I began I do not think that in my entire output you will find a character with a single dominant characteristic. They are all without so-called “character”. They are split and fragmented, not good and not bad, but both at once, and changeable in their attitudes and in their deeds. No doubt I am also like this myself.’ (ibid.)

Hamsun is in effect one of his own characters, or several of his characters; his multiple self-inventions entangle us in the contradictions that to him denoted the truth about life and literature and that continued the polemics of his aesthetic breakthrough, when he began as a Strindberg-disciple by vehemently attacking the literary establishment, only to represent himself in later years as the spokesman and preceptor of his nation, in the manner of Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. Hamsun has been described both as a ‘Scandinavian Rousseau’¹⁰, an anti-intellectual vitalist who celebrated the fertile earth, and as an intellectual who read widely¹¹. He bought a farm in Norway in 1911, but we learn that he was only a ‘gentleman farmer’ and that he ‘continued to stay for longer or shorter periods away from home’ (Næss, p. 19). In his last days, this farmer who was no farmer sat ‘most of the time in an old wicker chair in his room’ with ‘no other company than two portraits of Goethe and Dostoevsky looking down at him from the walls’ (Næss, p. 26). Goethe and Dostoevsky is the same order of contradiction as Rousseau and Nietzsche or Strindberg and Bjørnson; nothing about Hamsun allows of an either-or, in his life or in his fiction. Contradiction is the basic structure of Hamsun's narrative art, which from the beginning was curiously preoccupied with time. It is a pre-occupation which by itself identifies Hamsun as a pioneer of the modern novel, which is a riot of discordant clocks, to borrow from Theodor Ziolkowski,¹² of clocks indicating the conflict between the individual experience of duration, the longing for redemption from the natural progression of time toward death through the timelessness of myth, and the perception of the cold rigidity of public measurements, of an oppressive society. The epiphanies of a Joyce or Proust or Musil pierce ‘through all deceptive appearances to the timeless core of things’ (Ziolkowski, p. 84), and redeem the self from the pain of contemplating the clock as Baudelaire expressed it in ‘L'Horloge’ (‘The Clock’) in Les Fleurs du Mal: ‘Trois mille six cents fois par heure, la Seconde / —Chuchote: Souviens-toi!: —Rapide, avec sa voix / D'insecte, Maintenant dit: Je suis Autrefois, / Et j'ai pompé ta vie avec ma trompe immonde!’ (‘Thirty-six hundred times in every hour / the Second whispers: Remember! and Now replies / in its maddening mosquito hum: I am Past, / who passing lit and sucked your life and left!’)¹³.

Ferguson remarks that Hamsun all his life was ‘very particular about knowing what time of day it was. During the last two years his sight failed, so that he could no longer see his watch. [His wife] bought him a large, round red wall-clock, and he would sit in his armchair with this in his lap. It had no glass in the face, so that he could feel the fingers with his hands’ [sic] (Ferguson, p. 420). It is a scene Hamsun might have written himself. His kindred creatures, the vagabond souls of Landstrykere (Wayfarers, 1927), buy, sell, trade, lend, lose and find watches—watch and chain are badges of importance and success—and periodically encounter the itinerant old Jewish watch dealer, Papst, who has many mysterious pockets, like E. T. A. Hoffmann's Coppelius, with his eyeglasses, in The Sandman, but nothing of the romantic-demonic about him. He is the paradigmatic time-keeping wayfarer, neither good nor bad, whose life and death demonstrate both the relevance and the irrelevance of time. ‘All life goes on’¹⁴.

It has been noted that Sult, is full of clocks, and that the first event in the novel is: ‘a clock struck six somewhere below’¹⁵. Such a sentence seldom detains the reader; whether it is six o'clock in the novel or ten has no bearing on the experience of reading and holds no interest as a realistic-naturalistic detail. But in Sult, ‘a pure narrative present, a sense of time continuously billowing and literally getting nowhere, for the first time fully occupies fiction’¹⁶. Time-keeping here is not a realistic device, and the public time of clocks and calendars, of churches and city halls is a provocation the starving narrator in Sult, challenges with a wilful timekeeping of his own. Roaming the streets of Christiania (Oslo, after 1924), he once sidles up to a policeman and says that it is ten o'clock. ‘Nei den er to, svarte han forundret. Nei den er ti, sa jeg, Klokken er ti. Og stønnende av Sinne traadte jeg endnu et Par Skridt frem, knyttet min Haand og sa: Hør, vet De hvad—Klokken er ti’ (Sult, p. 45). (‘No, it's two,’ he answered surprised. ‘No, it's ten,’ I said. ‘It's ten o'clock’. Growling with anger, I went two steps nearer, clenched my fist, and said, ‘Listen, take my word for it, it's ten o'clock.’ Hunger, pp. 72f.). This bizarre insistence on the correctness of an intensely private, subjectively experienced time, or a fiction, a lie, anticipates the narrator's desperate re-definition of reality near the end of the novel, where a grocer's cart comes by ‘… og jeg ser at det er Poteter i den Kjærre, men av Raseri, av Halsstarrighet finder jeg paa at si at det slet ikke er Poteter, det var Kaalhoder, og jeg bandte grusomt paa at det var Kaalhoder. Jeg hørte godt hvad jeg selv sa og jeg svor bevisst Gang efter Gang paa denne Løgn bare for at ha den morsomme Tilfredsstillelse at jeg begik en stiv Mened’ (p. 140). (‘and I saw it was filled with potatoes, but out of fury, from sheer obstinacy, I decided that they were not potatoes at all, they were cabbages, and I swore violent oaths that they were cabbages. I heard my own words very well, and I took the oath again and again on this lie and swore deliberately just to have the delightful satisfaction of committing such clear perjury’). (p. 181).

In his hunger-induced hallucinations trivial objects, coat buttons, seem to return the wild stares of an imagination that belongs to a writer¹⁷. If the narrator is an artist-figure, then his ‘perjuries’, his whirling spontaneous fictions take on the aesthetic dimension that Nietzsche first articulated: ‘Nur Narr! Nur Dichter!’ (‘Merely fool! Merely poet!’). ‘Und die Dichter lügen zuviel!’ (‘And the poets lie too much!’; from Zarathustra, Werke, II, 534; II, 345). Hamsun's distrust of artists becomes a principal theme in Mysterier, but it is also an aspect of his self-understanding, and one pole of another contradiction: the artist, the writer, as clown—and as great man. In a lecture to students at Christiania University, Hamsun warned against overestimating writers and writing, saying that writers ‘had the souls of wandering tramps’ and were akin to ‘travelling organ-grinders’ (Ferguson, p. 166-167). The protagonist of Sult is an unfathomable liar. He invents and re-invents himself, as a journalist, as a member of a distinguished aristocratic family, as a proper middle-class citizen, while being unable to escape his beggar's appearance. The creative imagination asserts its fictions as the only reality, and this is part of Hamsun's aesthetic program in the 1890s. What is reality? he asked in a lecture: ‘er da en faktisk foregaaet Fantasi mindre virkelig end en faktisk eksisterende Ytterfrakke eller en Ildtang?’ (‘Is an actually experienced fantasy less real than an actually existing overcoat or a pair of firetongs?’)¹⁸

Nothing less than salvation is at stake, redemption from the confinement by the maps and clocks of the world. Time is told again and again in Sult by the clock of the Church of Our Saviour. The building is a Christiania landmark the narrator passes and circles repeatedly, and like the city hall it represents public authority whose grace is extended only on condition of conformity, or of self-effacement, and in their function they anticipate the public edifices in Kafka's works. At one point in Sult the narrator decides to seek the help of a pastor, but first must convince himself that he has not lost his faith. Somehow he arrives too late, after the minister's office hours: ‘Naadens Tid var omme!’(p. 63; ‘grace hour is over!’ p. 92). His own counting of hours has gone awry; the ‘imp of the perverse’ arranges a missed opportunity. Redemption comes not from religion, however, but from a ship in the harbour. The narrator alternately prays to and rails against God, but his only piety is toward his hunger. God is dead, and there is no discoverable metaphysical shelter. At the same time, the narrator's hunger has been real, and not a metaphor. Why then did he starve, when there are always ships to work on? (Sult, p. 103).

Perversely too, despite his hunger, Hamsun's protagonist insists on writing the unreadable, instead of the popular material the newspaper editor requires (Sult, p. 105). He is a Modernist insisting on difficulty and protest, on a revaluation of values, and prefers to offer essays on ‘Crimes of the Future’, ‘Freedom of the Will’ (p. 25) or ‘Philosophical Consciousness’ (p. 27), or a sketch on Correggio (p. 104). Later he turns against himself as a potential producer of books with a plan of an allegory about a fire in a bookstore (p. 156), but soon it is brains, not books, that are in flames (p. 162)¹⁹. Aggression inward is followed by aggression outward, with an attempt at a one-act play called ‘The Sign of the Cross’, in which a ‘fiery prostitute’ sins at the foot of the altar, ‘bare av deilig Foragt for Himlen’, p. 126, (‘simply out of a delicious contempt for eternity’ (p. 164), which is a phrase comparable to ‘the delightful satisfaction of committing such clear perjury’ (p. 181) in swearing potatoes are cabbages.

Aggression toward the self, in imagination and in actual hunger, and aggression toward the world are again the whirling poles of contradiction, the fundamental structure of Sult. Sult by that token has been interpreted as the single model for all Hamsun's writings²⁰. The narrator is the prototypical Hamsun-character, caught between affirming the inner world of imagination and negating the external world, while still seeking acceptance in that public world. He must affirm society's values, out of hunger, but by attempting to force acceptance of his own values at the same time, he provokes the world's rejection (Masát, pp. 322-325). The Kafkaesque conflict is insoluble, and in essence suicidal²¹. The protagonist of Mysterier, Johan Nilsen Nagel, and the protagonist of Pan, Lieutenant Glahn, will actually kill themselves. Sult ends when the narrator steps out of the conflict by joining a ship's crew, a non-solution that compels the ship to return, as it were, in Mysterier, with Nagel on board.

As Ferguson comments, the reader of Sult soon comes to suspect that the narrator's sufferings result not from an inability but from a refusal to act. ‘He … is in some perverse way enjoying his predicament’, he wills it, as though to see ‘how low he can sink, how much he can endure’ (Ferguson, p. 111), as though hunger were a stimulus to life—which is an idea to be found in Nietzsche's unpublished notes from the 1880s (Werke, III, 682). The most basic activity in living things, Nietzsche argues, is not a will to self-preservation, but the desire to experience an expansion, intensification of the organism, to experience power. Man does not seek pleasure and avoid pain; that is merely consequence, interpretation. Hamsun's hunger is perverse only by the measure of the church clock, only in terms of the antithetical thinking that divides experience and behaviour into discrete opposites, good and evil, cause and effect, subject-object, love-hate (see particularly Beyond Good and Evil, Part I). Sult, Hamsun's first successful novel, is by that token a wildly Nietzschean experiment, as plotless as its narrator is literally hungry. The counting of the hours and days marks the boldness of a radical emptiness, of an ‘ironic leisure’ (Vernon, p. 167) in which dire need masquerades as grandeur. The narrator is a caricature of the flaneur and dandy, alway concerned with interpretations of his appearance. He needs audiences, and wanting to be seen and heard, he risks self-prostitution²².

In structure and theme Sult is the equivalent of Nietzsche's notion of ‘the perfect book’: in an unpublished note the philosopher once imagined that such a work should be ‘an ideal monologue’, ‘a kind of memoir’ (‘eine Art mémoires’), relating ‘die abstraktesten Dinge am leibhaftesten und blutigsten; die ganze Geschichte wie persönlich erlebt und erlitten … nicht “Beschreibung”; alle Probleme ins Gefühl übersetzt, bis zur Passion’ (‘the most abstract things at their most corporeal, at their bloodiest; the whole story as personally experienced and endured … not “description”; all problems translated into feeling, even unto passion’).²³Sult is a personal reminiscence, told after the experiment was abandoned.

By way of the genealogy of Modernism, Hamsun's first-person narrator in Sult also has an antecedent in Poe's narrative voices, as in three stories that are particularly relevant to a reading of Sult and Mysterier: The Man of the Crowd (1840), A Descent into the Maelström (1841) and The Imp of the Perverse (1845). The latter opens reflectively, philosophically, as an essay, only to end in the panic of the murderer-narrator who unaccountably betrayed himself. The spirit of the perverse impels us to a deed precisely because we should not do it; it is as self-destructive as Hamsun's voluntary hunger and deliberate delaying and evasion of solutions. This perverseness is ‘a mobile without motive, a motive not motiviert’²⁴. It is striking that Poe anticipates Nietzsche here in rejecting the conventional interpretations of human behaviour in terms of cause and effect or God's will, locating the promptings of our actions in our physiology: ‘I am not more certain that I breathe, than that the assurance of the wrong or error of any action is often the one unconquerable force which impels us, and alone impels us to its prosecution. Nor will this overwhelming tendency to do wrong for wrong's sake admit of analysis, or resolution into ulterior elements. It is a radical, a primitive impulse—elementary’ (Poe, The Imp of the Perverse, p. 281).

Poe, and his European discoverer Baudelaire, share with Nietzsche and the first Modernist generation the nineteenth-century anti-metaphysical interest in explaining emotional, psychological, sociological, moral phenomena in terms of natural science²⁵. Long before Nietzsche described art as the expression of the processes of life, Stendhal, who was among the writers Nietzsche most admired, published the essay De l'Amour (1822), which he intended as a ‘physiology of love’²⁶. There were physiologies of the flaneur, the grisette, the proper lady, the English tourist (Pfotenhauer, p. 1). Among the notable titles are Brillat-Savarin's Physiologie du goût (1825), Balzac's Physiologie du mariage (1829), and Paul Bourget's Physiologie de l'amour moderne (1891). Baudelaire first had planned to publish his De l'essence du Rire as a Physiologie du Rire (Pfotenhauer, p. 204). For Nietzsche physiological urges and needs are the motives that our moralities, logical systems, our language, our ‘objectivity’ mask (e.g. in Werke, I, 1261; II, 11; II, 569; III, 710). Art as physiology means Dionysian affirmation of the tragic experience of our physical vulnerability and mortality (Pfotenhauer, p. 170).

Hamsun's ‘hunger artist’ does not deny life, as Kafka's does, but is himself a predator loose in the city streets, affirming the primacy of an uninhibited imagination. The self-destructive, suicidal aspect of the experiment will become explicit in the second novel, Mysterier, but both Sult and Mysterier are demonstrations of an aesthetic program that is also a physiology of art. The new psychology Hamsun advocated in his essays and lectures of 1890-1891 is in essence a Nietzschean probing into the mind as body, into blood and bone as thought and feeling. He was preceded in this by Strindberg, who in his preface to the play Fröken Julie, 1888, disputed the ‘bourgeois conception of the immutability of the soul’. His characters will lack character, and their behaviour will not be reducible to single motives; they are self-contradictory beings²⁷. For Strindberg and Hamsun self-contradiction is the dramatic form of the soul's incalculability. Both concluded, with Nietzsche, that intention and action are not separable, that the content of a thought or desire cannot be isolated from the content of other thoughts and desires, that the doer cannot be separated from the deed. The self ‘is constituted not simply by the fact that it thinks, wants and acts but also by precisely what it thinks, wants and does … What we think, want and do is seldom if ever a coherent collection. Our thoughts contradict one another and contrast with our desires, which are themselves inconsistent and are in turn belied by our actions’ (Nehamas, p. 180).

In the essay “Fra det ubevidste Sjæleliv”(“From the Unconscious Life of the Mind”), published in 1890 in the new journal Samtiden, Hamsun repudiates types in literature as he would deny decades later that he was a type, a definable—hence punishable?—character. If literature were to explore psychological states,

Vi fik erfare lidt om de hemmelige Bevægelser, som bedrives upaaagtet paa de afsides Steder i Sjælen, den Fornemmelsernes uberegnelige Uorden, det delikate Fantasiliv holdt under Luppen, disse Tankens og Følelsens Vandringer i det blaa, skridtløse, sporløse Rejser med Hjærnen og Hjærtet, sælsomme Nervevirksomheder, Blodets Hvisken, Benpibernes Bøn, hele det ubevidste Sjæleliv.

(We would get to know a little about the secret stirrings that go on unnoticed in the remote parts of the mind, the incalculable chaos of impressions, the delicate life of the imagination seen under the magnifying glass; the random wanderings of those thoughts and feelings; untrodden trackless journeyings by brain and heart, strange workings of the nerves, the whisper of the blood, the entreaty of the bone, all the unconscious life of the mind.²⁸.

The structure of this essay is itself an argument for the subjectivity, the incalculability of all structures, whether narrative or psychological, and is by that token an anticipation of the structural hoax that is the novelMysterier. “Fra det ubevidste Sjæleliv” offers no science, but the abstract as the personal, a monologue with reminiscences and witty, seemingly improvised variations of its theme²⁹.

At the same time as Hamsun's physiology of literature is Nietzschean, it has, like Nietzsche's own uses of physiology, general nineteenth-century, and in this case, also quite native, roots. The Christiania of Sult is, for example, the same city whose bohemian circle inspired the artist Edvard Munch to his own Modernist breakthrough, and to a manifesto that is a remarkably close counterpart to Hamsun's program in From the Unconscious Life of the Mind³⁰. While living in St. Cloud (a suburb of Paris) in 1889, Munch jotted down for himself the conviction that painting needed the authenticity of personal emotion, needed to abandon traditional genres for the direct expression of thoughts and feelings (Reinhold Heller, p. 64). In the following year he wrote of his critics: ‘De kan inte fa in i huvudet att dessa bilder är gjorda pda allvar—med lidelse—att de är en produkt av vakna nätter—ak de har kostat ens blod—ens nerver’(‘They will not get it into their heads that these paintings were created in all seriousness and in suffering, that they are products of sleepless nights, that they have cost me blood and weakened my nerves’; Heller, p. 65 and p. 230 no. 39). To paint ‘with blood’ (Heller, p. 50) is to practise Nietzsche's physiology of art; Munch transforms nature according to his own subjective disposition (ibid., p. 66), as he does in The Scream (1893), a hallucinatory vision that captures an intense experience of loneliness and despair, which can be understood here as forms of hunger. Munch's ideas, as he acknowledged years later, ripened in the Christiania Bohème (ibid., p. 21) in the late 1880s. Christiania, ‘denne forunderlige By som ingen forlater før han har faat Mærker av den’ (‘that strange city no one escapes from until it has left its mark on him’; Sult, p. 21), small as it was, felt the same winds of cultural change that were stirring through Copenhagen, Berlin, Vienna, and Paris. Its artists, led by the writer Hans Jæger, were participants in the earliest phase of Modernism, while Hamsun was in America (1886-1888), and nevertheless well informed, as Næss (pp. 10-16) and Ferguson (pp. 87-95) have shown. Nietzsche, ‘the single most significant figure’ in the Modernist revolution, who dramatized his philosophy through different voices (Karl, pp. 81 ff.), was discussed everywhere after 1888, and Hamsun regarded him as a mentor, for Nietzsche both confirmed him in ideas he had already formed and served him in his strategy for success. With his essays and lectures, and particularly with the publication of Sult and Mysterier, Hamsun positioned himself skilfully and conspicuously in the literary avant garde and with that in the literary market place (Kirkegaard, p. 150). His insistence upon the incalculability of motivation was itself well calculated. It seems permissible to surmise that a similar opportunism prompted Hamsun to alter the subject matter and style of his fiction after 1900. It does not therefore matter, in a discussion of Hamsun as Modernist, that Hamsun very likely read more about Nietzsche before 1900 than he did Nietzsche's writings, or that Christiania was not a major city in the 1880s. The Modernist experience of the city is a theme already in Poe's The Man of the Crowd (1840), in which the narrator follows someone through the dark streets of London to discover the secret of his behaviour, but the man of the crowd, like the narrator of Sult, is a book ‘that does not permit itself to be read’ (Poe, p. 75).

Sult, which Hamsun began writing in a cheap hotel room in a working-class district of Copenhagen (Ferguson, p. 97), was conceived as the expression of modern, urban, existential urgency, and can well be called ‘a textbook on the stigmata of modernism’ (Kirkegaard, p. 42), ‘the first modern text’ (Vernon, p. 144), ‘one of the great novels of urban alienation’ (Ferguson, p. 110). In the next novel, Mysterier, Hamsun, the denier of calculability and master calculator, turns calculation and incalculability into a diabolical mockery of both writing and reading, of text and interpretation.

Mysterier was not well received when it appeared in 1892, and it has confounded critics ever since. At the same time it seems to attract more critical attention than any other novel by Hamsun³¹, and just as Sult has been described as the single model for all Hamsun's writings (Masát, above), Mysterier has been considered the one theme of which the entire subsequent work is the endless series of variations³². It has also been called Hamsun's ‘first and only complete masterpiece’ (De Mendelssohn), ‘formless’, ‘disjointed’³³; ‘a rather unsuccessful novel’ (Kirkegaard, p. 197), and as ‘an act of literary improvisation’ (Ferguson, pp. 129 and 132). Few commentators have shared Næss's observation that ‘As a prose writer Hamsun was the most meticulous craftsman in Norwegian literature’ (p. 72). He was a meticulous craftsman at least with Mysterier, as I intend to show. The novel has also been read as a detective story³⁴, but there is no agreement about whether there was a murder, or some other crime, or about who did it. The protagonist, Johan Nilsen Nagel, behaves like a private detective who suspects the character known as the Midget of the murder of a theology student named Karlsen—or perhaps of yet another crime. Perhaps the ‘detective’ himself, Nagel, is the murderer³⁵. Ferguson finds it reasonable to suspect that the Midget raped the spinster Martha Gude (p. 127), but Walter Baumgartner considers that unlikely, since the Midget, Johannes Grøgaard, and Martha Gude were overheard using their first names on saying goodbye³⁶. Næss concludes that ‘as a detective story Mysterier is unsatisfactory, not only because symbolism and depth psychology take the place of simple induction, but more particularly because the reader is provided with no solutions’ (p. 41).

Yet the title itself suggests the genre ‘detective story’ and the thought of the genre naturally leads the reader to the pursuit of relevant structural clues, despite any concession that the mysteries here may well be the kind that transcend rational explanation. But such a concession still operates in the hope of a satisfying structure. At first the novel seems to present the familiar pattern of detective fiction in which the crime has already been committed before the story begins, and in which the detective, in solving the crime, restores order to the world. The expectation that the detective will redeem a violated reality is all the greater because of the peculiar intensity of the reader's engagement with the text. Ferguson recalls in the Introduction to his biography of Hamsun that his interest in the writer began with his reading of Pan and the experience of a ‘hypnotic intensity about the prose style, even in translation’ (pp. 2-3). The composer Edvard Grieg once wrote of the hypnotic effect of Hamsun's style, in a letter to Bjørnson, 7 December 1904 (Popperwell, p. 11), and Walter Benjamin noted to himself after reading Landstrykere that Hamsun's storytelling was like incantation, that he narrated ‘als ob er der Wirklichkeit kein Wort glaubt’ (‘as though he doesn't believe a word in reality’)³⁷.

If anywhere, it is in Mysterier where Hamsun is an ‘author-hypnotist’—Strindberg used the term in his Preface to Miss Julie, 1888, and it suggests a narrative art that works with the most elemental, primitive effects. John Vernon's speculation (in Money and Fiction) that storytelling may have its origins in telling secrets about a third person is useful here (p. 85-86). ‘Through secrets, characters gain control over each other and begin the process of plotting. … If novels reveal secrets, what else is a reader but a kind of eavesdropper? Eavesdropping, exchanged confidences, intercepted mail, confessions, and even their opposites, concealed information or disguises, are all transformations of secrets and secret telling’ (p. 87). The narrator in Mysterier is himself an eavesdropper and quickly implicates the reader in eavesdropping, and in voyeurism, so that reading simultaneously enchants and disenchants; a vague guilt shadows the act. Nagel stands in his room, lost in thought, and awakes ‘med et stærkt rykk, sa stærkt at det kunde være patat, ret som om han længe hadde stat og studeret paa gjøre dette rykk skjønt han var alene i værelset (‘with a violent start, so exaggerated that it didn't seem genuine; it was as if the gesture had been made for effect, even though he was alone in the room’, p. 7)³⁸. The reader must now feel observed, and become peculiarly self-conscious, all the more because the narrator is not to be trusted. He is not in full possession of the facts, may be biased, and is given to speculation. ‘Vilde han ved denne bemærkning gjøre en liten jeip til sig selv og sin rolle?’ (p. 60; ‘Was [Nagel] laughing at himself and the role he was playing?’ p. 65), the narrator wonders. And on another occasion: ‘Var det spil eller oprigtighet?’ (p. 66; ‘Was he acting or was it real?’ p. 72). The narrator, in Baumgartner's view, practises disloyalty toward the reader and employs the same strategies of bluff and dissembling as does Nagel (p. 266). The novel is full of examples of disturbed, perverted communication (p. 261), not only among the various characters, but between the author and his readership. Baumgartner's eminently useful analysis of Mysterier, based on communication theory, ends in a condemnation of Hamsun himself. The basic principle of the novelist's relation to the reader is mystification (p. 266); Hamsun has a need to make fools of his readers as well as of his characters, and therefore practises a nihilistic narrative strategy (p. 269). The novels betray ‘eine immoralistische und irrationalistische Geisteshaltung und eine destruktive soziale Praxis …’ (‘an immoral and irrational mentality and a destructive social practice’ ibid.).

Baumgartner's indictment of Hamsun is tantamount to a repudiation of irony wherever it does not serve the critic's cause, whether it is instruction, reform or revolution (see Muecke, p. 232ff.) Irony is irresponsibility, or worse, where there is no reliable communication between the ironist and his audience. The irritated sensibility expressed in Baumgartner's argument may also have to do with the particular history of Hamsun's reception in Germany³⁹. In any case, Mysterier is a disquieting text. One may be tempted in the end to attribute a certain malevolence to its design.

The first mystery in Mysterier is Johan Nilsen Nagel, who acts as though he knew he was being watched even when alone in his hotel room, and whose private behaviour is as calculated for effect as his public displays. He sends himself telegrams, wears a conspicuous yellow suit, and a ring of iron, and carries a vial of prussic acid in his pocket. ‘Hvorfor bærer jeg den da og hvorfor har jeg anskaffet den? Humbug det ogsa, bare humbug, moderne dekadence-humbug, reklame og snobberi’ (p. 31) (But why do I carry it around, and why did I get it in the first place? Hypocrisy again, nothing but a sham; the decadence, phoneyness, self-adulation, and snobbery of our times!, p. 34). Nagel's monologues are gestures of self-deception; here he avoids saying what soon becomes clear: the vial of poison is a token of his long preoccupation with suicide⁴⁰. It is also clear that Nagel already read about Karlsen's death before his arrival; like Sherlock Holmes he scours the newspapers for information and wanders the town's streets at all hours, collects gossip, notes details. The reader thus becomes a detective following a narrator-detective who observes the detective Nagel in pursuit of the suspect, the misshapen dwarf Grøgaard, whom Hamsun once referred to as Nagel's alter ego (Ferguson, p. 133), and each seems aware of the other, as a parody is always aware of its model. But the ratiocination of Poe's or Conan Doyle's detectives is repudiated in Mysterier, not only, and not merely, by the suicide of the detective, but by a plot against us that is hidden in trivialities, in numbers, time-telling, quantifications, measurements, in the daily domestic science of counting to establish order. No one has yet shown that the structure of Mysterier, the outer organization of its narrative material as well as its inner weave of motifs, is a compulsive and scrupulous numerological arrangement, the precise counterpart to the protagonist's manifestly ‘schizoid organization of mind’⁴¹. The programmatic irrationality of the outsider Nagel has a direct equivalent in an obsessive, asymmetrical design that invites and then baffles calculation, the detection of meaning.

I have suggested that the Nagel who arrives by ship in Mysterier, at six in the evening on 12 June (p. 5), is the narrator of Sult, a figure both artist and clown, a ‘poseur, a pathological phenomenon who is part madman and part genius’, as Hamsun once characterized Nagel (Ferguson, p. 126)—and perhaps himself. The enigma that was Knut Hamsun may be that he was literally the masks he invented; behind one mask was another mask. The artist is the confidence man. Hamsun would have recognized his own fantasies, like the charlatan Nagel, in a peculiar case of literature as life that the historian Bernard Wasserstein describes in The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln (1988)⁴², the story of a Hungarian Jew (born 1879) whose career of endless masks went through innumerable aliases, passports, and professions including most naturally that of a spy for both sides in the First World War.

Nagel's claim that he is an agronomist may be as false, as devious, as K.'s claim, in Kafka's Das Schloss, that he is a land surveyor (in German ‘Vermesser’, ‘surveyor’, ‘measurer’, is related to ‘vermessen’: ‘daring, presumptuous, insolent’)⁴³. Kamma, the Danish woman who visits Nagel on his birthday, suggests as much. Her arrival in the twelfth chapter has been traced to the inspiration of an actual occasion in Hamsun's wanderings while he was writing Mysterier, but that does not explain her role⁴⁴. With the twelfth chapter the reader joins the narrator as it were at the keyhole, as a pure eavesdropper, overhearing emotional intimacies from a woman whose own ‘sensibilité nerveuse’ (to quote Bourget on Baudelaire; Pfotenhauer, p. 104) makes her a particularly keen observer of Nagel's behaviour. Kamma's visit is a scene and a chapter that dramatizes the unbridgeable gap between inside and outside worlds, between the reader and the creator of this fiction, and between the narrator and the characters in it. Nothing is verifiable. ‘Deres passiar blev avbrutt og dunkel, med halve ord som bare de selv forstod meningen av og med mange hentydninger til fortiden. De hadde truffet hverandre før og kjendte hverandre’ (p. 121f.; ‘Their conversation was disconnected; they made many elliptical allusions to the past and used words and phrases that had meaning only for them. They obviously knew each other well’, p. 132). At one point Kamma says: ‘Og hvorfor kan jeg aldri slippe dig? Jeg vet at du er gal, at dine øine er aldeles forrykte … Dr. Nissen har sagt at du er gal, og Gud skal vite du ma være meget gal nar du har kunnet sla dig ned pa et slikt sted som dette og kalde dig agronom’ (p. 124; ‘Why can't I let you go? I know you're crazy; your eyes are the eyes of a madman … Dr. Nissen said that you're mad, and God knows it must be true, if you can bury yourself in a hole like this and call yourself an agronomist … p. 134). He has played his game before, with the same iron ring and yellow suit.

Nagel's name may also be false. Kamma calls him Simonsen (p. 35), but that may be only a pet name (p. 132). Readers have found other mischief in the syllables Na-gel. Ferguson sees in them ‘an anagram in Norwegian of “en gal” (a madman) and in English of “angel”’ (p. 133), but the name is also nearly an anagram of Glahn, whose story is told in Pan.⁴⁵. Næss has pointed out that Nagel was the middle name of Kristofer Janson, Unitarian minister in Minnesota and poet who aided and encouraged Hamsun and whose ‘Christian kindliness’ is mocked and reversed in the Nietzschean elitism of the protagonist of Mysterier (Næss, pp. 44-46). The self-styled agronomist Nagel has nothing but contempt for the humble Norwegian farmer. At the same time, as we will see, there is mischief by association in Nagel's first name as well.

Like Odin in the Icelandic sagas, Hamsun's hero is a shape-changer. Næss refers to a comment Hamsun once made, in a letter from 1890, that it had always been his ambition to appear somewhere suddenly, stay for a time incognito, and then disappear just as suddenly as he came, which, as Næss concludes, reflects an ambition ‘to become a myth’ (p. 41-42), to be a god, beyond the time that is so relentlessly counted in Sult and Mysterier. It is curious too that Nagel has androgynous features: broad shoulders, but small stature, ‘and a soft, rather feminine mouth’ (Mysterier, p. 7)⁴⁶. Nagel is a bringer of myths and fairy tales, who relates, or invents, elaborate dreams and visions, offering them as a more valuable alternative to the science and rational liberalism espoused by the town physician. ‘Hvad vinding er det i grunden endog rent praktisk talt at man ribber livet for al poesi, al drøm, al skjøn mystik, al løgn? Hvad er sandhet, vet De det? Vi bevæger os jo frem bare gjennem symboler, og disse symboler skifter vi efterhvert som vi skrider frem’ (p. 136;‘… what are we gaining by a pragmatism that robs our life of poetry, dreams, mysticism—are these all lies? What is truth? Can you tell me that? We can only struggle along by using symbols, and we change them as we alter our views’, p. 148).

Nagel's mythopoesis aggressively affirms the logic in his blood (p. 38) in defying conventional assumptions about greatness and virtue in life and in art, and it is striking how often the mythmaker uses literature as a foil. In preferring the fairy tales of the Orient to ‘Disse æventyr fra Gudbrandsdalen, dens sare bondefulde poesi … Vor helt var ikke en pragtfuld prins, men en snedig klokker’ (p. 83; ‘the rustic, earthbound poetry of the tales from Gudbrandsdal’, in which the hero is not ‘a handsome prince but a village bumpkin’, p. 91), Nagel expresses his anti-democratic, anti-Christian elitism while also attacking Ibsen: Peer Gynt is a bumpkin from Gudbrandsdal. But with the mention of the valley in the heart of Norway, the possibility arises that Hamsun is engaging in self-irony, for his own roots are in the Gudbrandsdal (Næss, p. 1). The literary allusiveness of Mysterier and Nagel's symbolic and mythic inventions may in the end be elements of a strategy that intends Mysterier as a parody of Sult, and by that token as a demonstration of the artist's suspicion of all art: ‘Nur Narr! Nur Dichter!’

The characters in Mysterier read and lend each other books. Alfred de Musset and Victor Hugo are mentioned (p. 36), as well as Turgenev (p. 25), Garborg (p. 25), Tolstoi (p. 91), Bjørnson (p. 151), Maupassant (‘that crude hack’; p. 150), Ibsen (p. 150), and Skram (p. 155). Shakespeare and Nietzsche are mentioned in the same paragraph, dismissively, for Nagel is arguing that it is far better to be handsome, and illiterate, than to be intelligent (p. 70), as though suggesting Thomas Mann's biological-mythic alternatives. The three principal characters Nagel encounters also bear the names of actual prominent Norwegians: Grøgaard, and the two women Nagel attempts to seduce, the attractive young Dagny Kielland and the spinster Martha Gude⁴⁷. Kielland was a novelist whom Hamsun had once faulted in a lecture for his simple, one-dimensional characters (Beyer, I, 248). Meanwhile Jacobsen, the name Nagel gives to a puppy (p. 8), was a major Danish writer. Mysterier plays incessantly with public and literary indiscretions and outrageous opinions, as though the entire novel were clothed in the yellow of Nagel's suit. It merits noting here that yellow, in the Scandinavian tradition, is the colour of deceit, falsehood. Næss prefers to read it as representing ‘a poet's dream of freedom and beauty’ (p. 47)⁴⁸. But dreaming and lying are Nietzschean equivalents. A question-mark pursues the mythmaker Nagel, who in a sense sacrifices himself to his own creative imagination. During an evening party at the physician's home, he attributes magic powers to his ordinary iron ring. ‘Her skulde man for eksempel se at han bar en ring, en unanselig ring av jærn, men med den underbareste ævne. Skulde man tro det nar man sa den? Men mistet han den ring en kvæld klokken ti, matte han lete den op igjen inden tolv, ellers gik det ham galt’ (p. 68; ‘No one would believe it by looking at it! But if he should lose the ring—at ten o'clock, say—he would have to find it by midnight, or something dreadful would happen’, p. 74). Later he deliberately throws the ring into the sea, and drowns trying to find it before the stroke of twelve (p. 251). In order to commit suicide, however, he must overcome his other self, Grøgaard, the dwarf, who seeks to thwart him.

Næss describes Nagel's relationship to the Midget as ‘the most interesting and most intriguing aspect of Mysterier’ (p. 44). To Edvard Beyer the close relationship between them is the key to the novel (Beyer, p. 255). Nagel becomes obsessed with ‘den lille graharete nar’ (p. 17; ‘the little grey jester’, p. 19) from the time he first sees him, no doubt in part because the Midget represents repressed aspects of his own soul, but also because the Midget has a mythic identity that Nagel detects and that links the shabby, grey, limping figure with his own dandified appearance in yellow. Nagel senses ‘mystically’, intuits Grøgaard's first name, Johannes, which is his own (pp. 122, 169, 234). Crippled and shy, the Midget is the embodiment of the dwarf of European myth, the personification of archaic fears and guilt⁴⁹. The dwarf is usually described as being poorly dressed, or in rags; the colour grey predominates; he walks with a limp or a shuffle; tends to be shy, because of his ugliness but also because he can be invisible, or because as a night spirit he shuns the light. Nagel tells him once: ‘De stod pludselig midt ute i gaten, uten at jeg hadde set hvor De kom fra’ (p. 217;‘You suddenly appeared in the middle of the street and I had no idea where you came from’, p. 234). Dwarfs were believed to be abductors of children and women. Nagel relates two dreams he had (or composed) about a dwarfed madman, a poeticized Johannes Grøgaard in each case, first on Midsummer Eve, 23 June (pp. 56-57) and then on the following night, and in the only chapter with a title, ‘White Nights’ (pp. 85-90; in the Norwegian edition, ‘lyse nætter’, and without chapter number, p. 72). On Midsummer or St. John's Eve, ‘Johannisnacht’, bonfires are lit on the hillsides, and the ashes and coals from such fires were thought to have magical power to protect the home—a power relativized here by the presence of the dwarf: the Midget, who is mocked and bullied in the town, earns his living by carrying coal. Reinhard H. Friederich has speculated, in his article ‘Kafka and Hamsun's Mysterier’, that there may be significance in the coincidence of Nagel's arrival and Dagny Kielland's engagement on 12 June, following the feastday of St. Barnabas, 11 June⁵⁰. Like John, Barnabas became associated with Midsummer rites; his day in the Julian calendar had been 22 June. Nagel notices bonfires on the hills surrounding the town and learns to his delight that it is Midsummer Eve (p. 52), but does not know of Barnabas, whose protection he will need: Barnabas is mentioned in a ninth-century magic formula against being possessed (Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, IX, 927). The Barnabas figure in Mysterier, however, the messenger and companion, seems to be the Midget Johannes, the constant observer of Nagel's efforts to bring the message of myth to the unbelievers. It is interesting too that the dwarf suffers his own kind of ‘Johanniskrankheit’, ‘Johannistanz’, an epileptic or St. Vitus dance, for he is forced to dance barefoot in the streets⁵¹. With his suspicions, fantasies and dread, Nagel links the action of the novel with the unconscious. The realm of myth and dream, the realm of primal experience, threatens the integrity of the conscious mind, which is structured as a defence against the shocks of sudden, involuntary self-knowledge, traumatic memories of recurring elemental impressions⁵². The Midget haunts Nagel in the way the figure of the hunchbacked dwarf, Benjamin's ‘das bucklige Männlein’, haunts Kafka's work⁵³. The greatest danger for Nagel emerges precisely from the myths he opposes to the rational world. He must therefore constantly be on his guard against himself, must constantly calculate (see Benjamin on Baudelaire, pp. 111ff.) and contradict himself, which Dagny Kielland, in the chapter ‘White Nights’, cannot understand. ‘Nar De nu beregner at slik og slik vil det ga og De lægger det hele tilrette og De opnar hvad De ønsker, hvorfor gar De sa nu bakefter og spolerer alting ig jen ved a bekjende—som De kalder det—Deres bedrageri?’ (p. 75; ‘When you make such careful calculations and fabricate your story to suit your ends, and then undo everything by confessing your deviousness—or deceit, as you call it—what am I to think?’, p. 82).

Nagel is a Baudelairean character, an artist figure, with no occupation, part dandy, part flaneur, part detective, whose strategy is to shock, and change course suddenly (Kirkegaard, Hamsun som modernist, p. 199). He is a creature of hotel rooms, cafés, streets, skilled in lightning reactions and feigned nonchalance (Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, p. 38ff.). Like Kafka's K. a tireless and incessant calculator, Nagel calls attention to the ‘utmost importance’ of trifles (p. 115) and is himself amazed at his power to record ‘the most insignificant detail’ (p. 114). Nagel's behaviour closely resembles that of Axel Borg, the elegantly dressed scientific Inspector of Fisheries in Strindberg's I havsbandet, (By the Open Sea, 1890; Penguin edition translated by Mary Sandbach, 1987), a novel that has a striking structural kinship with Mysterier (Baumgartner, p. 270 n. 1). He can calculate and foretell the migration of fishes from his sofa (p. 94), and on the basis of psychological observation of people assign them their equations (p. 47). But he also wears a magic gold bracelet, in the form of a serpent biting its tail, and in the derangement of his last days—Borg drowns himself—he wants to hear fairy tales (p. 180). The calculator abandons calculation, while Nagel drowns in a frenzy of it. Above all, like his predecessor in Sult, Nagel records the time, sometimes to kill time, as in the fourth chapter, when he stays in bed until ten in the morning (p. 31) and delivers an interior monologue for two hours until noon, the hour of Karlsen's funeral. Ten and twelve, as we have seen, measure the time his myth allots him to find his ring and live.

The principal keeper of time is not Nagel, however, but the narrator, who follows his subject with watch in hand. He times the length of sleep and of conversation (a three-hour talk with the Midget, p. 13), times arrivals and departures, notes ages (the Midget is forty-three, Dagny is twenty-three, and Nagel between twenty-eight and thirty), and marks the calendar so consistently that the reader is able to calculate the duration of the action: some six weeks elapse between Nagel's arrival on 12 June and his drowning on 18 July at midnight, in the year 1891. Karlsen was killed, or killed himself, on 6 June. It would have been a remarkable suicide, since both wrists were cut, with Dagny Kielland's dull knife: a piece of paper was found with the words ‘Would that thy knife were as sharp as thy final no’ (p. 11). That is not mystery but hilarity over the impending defeat of all our reader-expectations.

The narrator's clock and calendar suggest that reality is orderly and legible, but we have before us a text that aims at being unreadable, contradictory. Among Nietzsche's unpublished notes from the 1880s there is a passage that could have served as Hamsun's credo: ‘Um die Welt zu begreifen, müssen wir sie berechnen können … Die Berechenbarkeit der Welt, die Ausdrückbarkeit alles Geschehens in Formeln—ist das wirklich ein “Begreifen”?’ (In order to understand the world, we have to be able to calculate it … The calculability of the world, the expressibility of all events in formulas—is that really an “understanding”?’ III, 896). In 1888 Hamsun delivered a comparable opinion, in a critique of the literary tradition and its miserable traffic in ‘types’, in characters whose intellectual or emotional life was expressible in whole numbers⁵⁴. In a diatribe against an admired ‘great man’, the British prime minister Gladstone, Nagel voices his contempt for conventionally accepted virtue and the righteous arithmetic of optimistic reason and problem-solving:

Jeg har hørt ham i en budgetdebat pa vise at sytten ganger tre og tyve er tre hundrede og en og niti, og han seiret knusende, seiret enormt, han hadde atter ret … Men nu stanset jeg virkelig op og sa pa manden … Jeg star der og tænker over hans tre hundrede og en og niti og jeg finder at det er ret, men jeg smaker desuagtet litt pa det og sier sa til mig selv: Nei stop! sytten ganger tre og tyve er tre hundrede og syv og niti! Jed vet vel at det er én og niti, men jeg sier allikevel mot bedre vidende syv og niti, for a være pa en anden side end dette menneske, denne rettens professionist.

(p. 61)

(… I have heard him [Gladstone] claim, in a budget debate, that seventeen times twenty-three is three hundred ninety-one, and he came off with a smashing … victory. Again, right was on his side … But at that point I had to stop, look, query … I stood there checking his arithmetic—three hundred ninety-one—and it was correct, yet I turned it over and over again in my mind, saying to myself: Wait a minute. Seventeen times twenty-three is three-hundred ninety-seven! I knew very well that it was ninety-one, but against all logic I decided on ninety-seven, just to oppose this man, the man who makes it his business to be in the right!

(p. 67).

Throughout this novel of twenty-three chapters Nagel pits his own savage arithmetic of the soul against the formidable virtue of the world's public computations.

Nagel's hypnotic arithmology has a curious counterpart in Arthur Conan Doyle's singular revenge upon the confident Darwinist science of the early twentieth century. The authors of an article entitled ‘The Perpetrator at Piltdown’, in the magazine Science 83, argue that it may well have been Doyle who arranged the famous Piltdown hoax⁵⁵. Hamsun's Mysterier proves itself by the numbers to be that kind of hoax. It is also interesting that Doyle had hoped to rid himself of the burden of Holmesian cerebration and all its imitators by having the detective drown in Reichenbach Falls, in the clutches of the villain Moriarty (The Final Problem was published in The Strand, Dec. 1893). Hamsun of course has his detective drown himself in an unnamed Norwegian harbour.

Certain numbers begin to emerge in the novel and suggest pattern, order, structure, solution to the mystery, and among them is the number three with its multiples, as in 6 June, 12 June, 18 July. We read for example that Nagel arrives by steamer at six pm and appears on deck as one of three passengers. But even when the ship's bell rings for the third time, he fails to disembark for some reason, and then re-arrives on 13 June. Nagel goes to a party at the physician's home, on 24 June, at 6; he buys one of three chairs from Martha Gude, who is twelve years older than he (p. 191), on 6 July (p. 173); he leaves town for three days, without explanation (p. 182); attends a bazaar on 9 July at 9 pm and plays a violin, handed down through three generations, with three initials on it (p. 188), and so on. We have already noted the calendar of the novel: a six-week period from 12 June to 18 July, and the midnight drowning. After dinner on the first day Nagel goes out and does not return to the hotel until ‘før klokken slog tre’ (p. 6) ‘before the clock struck three’, p. 6). It is on the third morning when he first sees the Midget, with his fateful three-syllable name Johannes; Nagel's full name contains six syllables. In his room are the three telegrams he sent himself, and a picture of Napoleon III on his wall. But the enigmatic self-propagandist, man of fashion, master calculator and master of the coup d'état evidently reminds Nagel too much of himself. He asks the maid to remove the picture, confirming the genealogy of the Hamsun hero, and with that, in advance, all the connections Walter Benjamin found between the political methods of Napoleon III and Baudelaire's style in his theoretical writings (Charles Baudelaire, p. 9-10).

The reader-detective could continue to decode the text of Mysterier for further components of what appears to be a meaningful narrative arithmetic, but would find only that in one combination or another the number three bedevils the novel's twenty-three chapters and frustrates any multiplication or division to discover the expected principle of integration, the expected solution to ‘mysteries’.

Nagel himself, watch in hand, counting minutes, rushes outside to the docks to drown himself at midnight. Earlier he had thought of buying a pistol (Norwegian ‘Seksløper’, ‘six-shooter’) to commit suicide, to pay for his behaviour ‘i tidens fylde, nar klokken slog’ (p. 192; ‘with my soul when the time comes, when the clock strikes’, p. 207). The novel culminates then in Nagel's obsessive counting of hours and midnight panic, but all the numbers in all the twenty-three chapters do not yield a pattern divisible by three, which is all the more baffling inasmuch as the number three suggests itself again and again as a reliable clue and principle of order and sanity.

It is possible to define two kinds of three in Mysterier. There are threes that ‘rhyme’ with multiples of three, and there are threes that mock the rhyme-scheme by participating in combinations that are always one short of being a multiple of three, as twenty-three chapters are one short of twenty-four and twenty-nine short of thirty. However one divides, there are always remainders in fractions. There is 6 June (Karlsen's death) and 12 June, 24 June (‘White Nights’) and 9 July (the bazaar); but there is also 13 June, Nagel's actual arrival, and 29 June, his 29th birthday, and of course 23 June, Midsummer or St. John's Eve. At one point Nagel tells Dagny a story about an eccentric friend who once organized an excursion. ‘Engang hadde han fat i sinde a foranstalte en uhyre kjøretur. Han hadde ingen bekjendtskaper, han leiet derfor alene for sig selv fire og tyve vogner som han satte i gang en efter en. De tre og tyve kjører aldeles tomme og i den fire og tyvende—den siste—der sitter sa han selv, skuende ned pa de spaserende, stolt som en gud over det svære optog han hadde fdat istand’ (p. 144; ‘He didn't have any companions, but he hired twenty-four carriages, which he dispatched one by one. Twenty-three of them were empty, and in the last one, the twenty-fourth, he sat alone, looking down at the pedestrians, elated at the sensation he was creating’, p. 156). The arbiter and principle of order, the one who counts the twenty-three empty carriages, sits in the twenty-fourth, alone with his attempt to create meaning, or mock it. In the structure of the novel the meaning of Nagel's life and death, Karlsen's fate, and the Midget's transgression, are contained in the uneven number of twenty-three chapters, and the twenty-fourth, which would have provided structural symmetry, balance, and resolution, a correspondence between public and private, reader and narrator, reader and author, is withheld.

Chapter twenty-three is the shortest of all the chapters of Mysterier, little more than a half-page of text, and as such a stark contrast to Nagel's elaborate monologues, harangues, and visions. Goethe had ended Werther in a similar fashion, with bare reportage, sober registration of facts and events that return the reader of Werther's ecstasies and terrors of imagination to hard reality. But the reader of Mysterier is an eavesdropper who can only speculate about the Midget's bad end, and about what the Midget did to Martha Gude, who in this final scene walks home from a party with Dagny, late one night in the April following Nagel's death, nine months after the six-month calendar of the action, in other words. As the two women help one another over icy patches on the dark road, the reader overhears sentences that conceal rather than reveal and witnesses gestures referring to a story that has not been told. Dagny and Martha, arm in arm, avoid, as it were, the reader's inquiry.

If Nagel's relationship to Johannes Grøgaard began as an attempt to rescue the Midget from the town's abuse, began, in other words, as a social or political project to rescue the downtrodden, aid the poor, and besides that to advocate mythic thinking over scientific logic, charisma over democracy⁵⁶, and if Nagel fails, as he does, in these projects, then Mysterier cannot be said to represent a proto-fascist ideology. Everything Nagel represents is scrupulously cancelled by an ironic narrative structure that denies coherence, that calculates with contradictions, and parodies the function and meaning of the smallest mythic ingredient in storytelling, the number three, the three of fairy tales, of ‘knock three times’ and ‘say it thrice’. Sequence of number for Nagel is not a progression but an insistent, inexplicable refrain, as when he meets a small girl awkwardly holding a cat: ‘Er det din kat? Ja. To fire seks syv. Jasa, du kan tælle ogsa? Ja. Syv otte elleve to fire seks syv’, (p. 45; ‘Is that your cat?’ ‘Yes. Two - four - six - seven’. ‘So you already know how to count?’ ‘Yes. Seven - eight - eleven - two - four -six - seven’, p. 49; the Norwegian ‘tælle’ calls attention to the etymological relationship between counting, in the Germanic language family, and telling: German ‘erzählen’ and ‘zählen’, which is what the bankteller does). Nagel's calculation is a desperate alertness in a state of dread, an attempt at control and delay at the brink of a terrifying abyss, such as is experienced by the narrator in Poe's “A Descent into the Maelström”: ‘six hours of deadly terror’ (p. 127), at a specific longitude and latitude, on a specific day, 10 July, beginning when the narrator's watch stopped at seven. His ‘unnatural curiosity’, as his boat begins its ‘sickening sweep of the descent’ (p. 136) leads him to speculate ‘upon the relative velocities’ of objects caught in the maelstrom. Analysis and horror are inseparable.

While Nagel counts in desperation, the narrator of Mysterier counts to frustrate interpretation, especially by way of the number three. The number three, the first real number to the Pythagoreans, the number representing the union of opposites (in Böhme's mysticism as well as to the Romantics) is mocked in Hamsun's Mysterier, and with it not only all the clocks and calendars of civilized order but traditional myths and modern detection as well. Narrative structure is a matter of spurious arrangements, a Piltdown hoax on behalf of the mysteries of imagination and the sovereign ego of the storyteller who cannot free himself from the suspicion that fiction is also fraud, that ‘jedes Wort eine Maske [ist]’ (‘every word is a mask’, Nietzsche, Werke, II, 752), that farming is perhaps better than writing. In the later novels, such as Markens grøde (Growth of the Soil 1917) and Landstrykere, Hamsun no longer calculates his irony and contradicts narrative structures, but simplifies storytelling in order to locate irony in life itself. ‘De var Menneske og kravlet, de gik frem efter sine Kaar og de levet til de døde’ (p. 26; ‘They were human beings’, he writes in Landstrykere, ‘stumbling on, carrying on as circumstances permitted; and they lived until they died’). Time-telling now becomes the registration of eternal, inevitable rhythms: ‘Men det gik ogsaa paa den Maaten, alting gaar’ (Landstrykere, p. 453; ‘All life goes on …’). But Hamsun prefers irony to inevitability and either-or; irony is life. One can imagine the aged Hamsun sitting with his glassless red kitchen clock in his lap, feeling the minute and hour hands with his fingertips, and now and then, perhaps, holding the hands, pushing them back a little, toying with their inevitable progression.

Notes

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in drei Bänden, edited by Karl Schlechta (Munich, 1960), I, 642. All further references to this edition are given after quotations in the text.

2. Robert Ferguson, Enigma. The Life of Knut Hamsun (New York, 1987), p. 100. All further references given after quotations in the text.

3. Rakel Christina Granaas, ‘Ironie und Ideologie. Eine Analyse von Knut Hamsuns Kinder der Zeit, in Auf alten und neuen Pfaden. Eine Dokumentation zur Hamsun-Forschung, edited by Heiko Uecker, Texte und Untersuchungen zur Germanistik und Skandinavistik, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1983), II, 295-318 (303).

4. See D. C. Muecke, The Compass of Irony (London, 1969). Remarkably, Muecke manages a study of irony without once mentioning Nietzsche.

5. In interpreting Nietzsche on the self I follow Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche. Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA. 1985). See Part II, ‘The Self’, pp. 141-234 (p. 186).

6. Curt Paul Janz, Friedrich Nietzsche. Biographie, 3 vols. (Munich, 1981), II, 637; on Dostoevsky, II, 505-507.

7. Janz, II, 584-590.

8. Frederick R. Karl, Modern and Modernism. The Sovereignty of the Artist 1885-1925 (New York, 1988), p. 185, footnote.

9. Harald Næss, Knut Hamsun, Twayne's World Author Series, 715 (Boston, 1984), p. 30. All further references given in parentheses in the text.

10. Dolores Buttry, ‘Knut Hamsun: A Scandinavian Rousseau’. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1978. See also Scandinavica, 19 (1980), pp. 121-150.

11. Anni Carlsson, Ibsen. Strindberg. Hamsun. Essays zur skandinavischen Literatur (Kronberg, 1978), p. 87. See also Klaus von See, ‘Knut Hamsun—Naturschwärmer, Herrenmensch, Faschist? Eine Auseinandersetzung mit seinen Verehrern und seinen Kritikern’, in Auf alten und neuen Pfaden. Eine Dokumentation zur Hamsun-Forschung, II, 237-243.

12. Theodor Ziolkowski, Dimensions of the Modern Novel. German Texts and European Contexts (Princeton, 1969), pp. 183-214. See also Walter Jens, Statt einer Literaturgeschichte (Pfullingen, 1957), pp. 23-58, and Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918 (Cambridge, MA, 1983), pp. 1-130.

13. Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal, translated by Richard Howard (Boston, 1983), p. 82.

14. Knut Hamsun, Wayfarers, translated by James McFarlane, Berkley Books (New York, 1985), p. 453.

15. Michael Hofmann, ‘Without fear or shame’, review of Robert Ferguson's Enigma. The Life of Knut Hamsun, in TLS, Oct. 2-8, 1987, p. 1081. References to Hamsun's Hunger are to the translation by Robert Bly, Bard Books/Avon (New York, 1975), and will henceforth appear in the text after quotations. References to the Norwegian edition of Sult in Samlede Verker (Kristiania, 1921), I Bind, will likewise appear in the text.

16. John Vernon, Money and Fiction. Literary Realism in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. (Ithaca, 1984), p. 117.

17. For a Marxist interpretation of hallucination in Hunger, see John Vernon, Money and Fiction, pp. 142-170.

18. Knut Hamsun, Paa Turné: Tre Foredrag om Litteratur (Oslo, 1960), p. 69.

19. See Dolores Buttry, ‘A Thirst for Intimacy: Knut Hamsun's Pyromania’, Scandinavica, 26 (1987), pp. 129-139.

20. András Masát, ‘Handlungs- und Wertstrukturen in Hamsuns Hunger und Pan. Modell und Interpretation’, in Auf alten und neuen Pfaden, II, 319-336.

21. See Walter H. Sokel, Franz Kafka. Tragik und Ironie (Frankfurt am Main, 1964), pp. 30-31.

22. Nietzsche's insight into the character of the dandy, as discussed by Helmut Pfotenhauer, Die Kunst als Physiologie. Nietzsches ästhetische Theorie und literarische Produktion (Stuttgart, 1985), p. 108.

23. Nietzsche, Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 30 vols (Berlin, 1967-1978), VIII/2, p. 64f.

24. Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Tales and Poems, the Modern Library (New York, 1938), p. 281. All further references to this edition will appear in the text after quotations.

25. See Helmut Pfotenhauer, Die Kunst als Physiologie, p. 1.

26. Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. Vol. II: The Tender Passion (New York, 1986), p. 60.

27. August Strindberg, Plays Vol. I., translated by Michael Meyer (New York, 1964), p. 102.

28. As translated by James W. McFarlane in his ‘The Whisper of the Blood. A Study of Knut Hamsun's Early Novels’, PMLA, 71 (1956), p. 568. The essay is printed in Knut Hamsun, Artikler 1889-1928, Fakkel-bøkene F73 (Oslo, 1968), pp. 33-44.

29. Peter Kirkegaard, Knut Hamsun som modernist (Copenhagen, 1975), p. 182. Further references to this study will appear in the text.

30. The parallels in the early work of Hamsun and Munch have been noted by Wilhelm Friese, ‘Hamsun und der Jugendstil’, in Auf alten und neuen Pfaden, II, 78; Harald Næss, Knut Hamsun, Preface, and pp. 18;38;61; by Ferguson, p. 131, and by Reinhold Heller, Munch: His Life and Work (Chicago, 1984), pp. 43 and 70.

31. Ronald G. Popperwell noted this already nearly twenty years ago in ‘Critical Attitudes to Knut Hamsun, 1890-1969’, Scandinavica, 9 (1970), pp. 13-14.

32. Peter De Mendelssohn, Der Geist in der Despotie. Versuche über die moralischen Möglichkeiten des Intellektuellen in der totalitären Gesellschaft (Berlin-Grunewald, 1953), p. 78.

33. Sven H. Rossel, A History of Scandinavian Literature 1870-1980, translated by Anne C. Ulmer (Minneapolis, 1982), p. 100; Trygve Braatøy, Livets Cirkel (1929), p. 77, quoted in Edvard Beyer, ‘Knut Hamsuns Mysterien’, in Auf alten und neuen Pfaden, p. 252; also Baumgartner, p. 269, has the same opinion (see note 36).

34. Gregory Nybø, Knut Hamsuns ‘Mysterier’ (Oslo, 1969).

35. Ronald G. Popperwell, ‘Critical Attitudes to Knut Hamsun, 1890-1969’, Scandinavica 9. (1970), p. 13.

36. Walter Baumgartner, ‘Nagel und Minute im kommunikativen Clinch. Vorschlag zu einer entmystifizierenden Lektüre von Knut Hamsuns Mysterier’ (1982), in Der Nahe Norden. Otto Oberholzer zum 65. Geburtstag. Eine Festschrift, edited by Wolfgang Butt and Bernhard Glienke (Frankfurt am Main, 1985), p. 265.

37. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main, 1974), VI, 143.

38. Knut Hamsun, Mysteries, translated by Gerry Bothmer, Bard Books/-Avon (New York, 1975), p. 7. Knut Hamsun, Mysterier, Lanternebøkene L 147 (Oslo, 1978), p. 7. All further references to these editions will follow quotations in the text.

39. See Fritz Paul, ‘Hamsun und der Faschismus’, in Wege der Literaturwissenschaft (Bonn, 1985), pp. 303-314. See also Gabriele Schulte, Hamsun im Spiegel der deutschen Literaturkritik 1890 bis 1975 (Frankfurt am Main, 1986).

40. See Edvard Beyer, ‘Knut Hamsuns Mysterien, in Auf alten und neuen Pfaden, I, 254.

41. To borrow from R. D. Laing, The Divided Self (New York, 1960), pp. 78ff.

42. Bernard Wasserstein, The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln (New Haven, 1988).

43. Noted by Erich Heller in his The Disinherited Mind (New York, 1959), p. 216, and Walter Sokel, Franz Kafka. Tragik und Ironie, p. 451. See also Jürgen Born, ‘Kafkas unermüdliche Rechner’, Euphorion, 64 (1970), p. 409.

44. Harald S. Næss, ‘A Strange Meeting and Hamsun's Mysteries’, Scandinavian Studies, 36 (1964), pp. 48-58.

45. Alfred Turco, ‘Hamsun's Pan and the Riddle of Glahn's Death’, Scandinavica, 19 (1980), p. 14.

46. Harald Næss, ‘Who was Hamsun's Hero?’ in The Hero in Scandinavian Literature from Peer Gynt to the Present, edited by John M. Weinstock and Robert T. Rovinsky (Austin, 1975), p. 67.

47. Ronald G. Popperwell, ‘Interrelatedness in Hamsun's Mysteries’, Scandinavian Studies, 38 (1966), p. 297.

48. Rolf Nyboe Nettum disagrees with Næss on this point, in his review of Næss's Knut Hamsun, Scandinavica, 24 (1985), pp. 233-235.

49. Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens (Berlin, 1938-41), IX, pp. 1008-1032.

50. Reinhard H. Friederich, ‘Kafka and Hamsun's Mysteries’, Comparative Studies, 28 (1976), p. 48, note 20.

51. Kulturhistorik Leksikon for nordisk middelalder fra vikingstid til reformationstid (Copenhagen, 1966), XI, 612-613.

52. See Walter Benjamin's discussion of Freud's Jenseits des Lustprinzips in Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire. Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus, Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft, 47 (Frankfurt am Main: 1980), pp. 108-111.

53. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, II/2, 431.

54. In the essay ‘Kristofer Janson’, published in Ny Jord, Copenhagen, Oct. 1888, pp. 371ff, quoted in McFarlane, ‘The Whisper of the Blood’, p. 567.

55. John Hathaway Winslow and Alfred Meyer, ‘The Perpetrator at Piltdown’, Science 83, Number 7 (1983), pp. 32-43.

56. On ‘Fascist Modernism’ see Russell A. Berman's argument in his The Rise of The Modern German Novel. Crisis and Charisma (Cambridge, MA, 1986), Chapter 9.