Pan by Knut Hamsun

First published: 1894 (English translation, 1920)

Type of work: Psychological romance

Time of work: 1855-1861

Locale: The Norwegian seacoast town of Sirilund and an adjacent forest

Principal Characters:

• Lieutenant Thomas Glahn, the first narrator, an outdoorsman who falls in love with Edvarda Mack
• Edvarda Mack, the spoiled daughter of a successful trader
• Herr Mack, Edvarda’s father, the town’s wealthiest man
• The Doctor, one of Glahn’s rivals for Edvarda
• Eva, a blacksmith’s young wife who gives herself to Glahn
• The second Narrator, Glahn’s hunting partner in India, who shoots him

The Novel

Pan depicts the stormy romance between the vacationing Lieutenant Thomas Glahn and Edvarda Mack, the beautiful daughter of the most influential businessman in the Nordland region. The story is narrated by Glahn himself, who, two years after the events of 1855, has decided to write down his memories, as he says, for his own amusement. A second narrator, Glahn’s murderer, relates the events of 1861 leading up to the fatal act.

Glahn’s narration is prompted by a mysterious note that contains two green feathers. Although he feigns indifference, his emotions are stirred by these tokens. As the reader comes to learn, they are the belated and nearly final interchange in his volatile relationship with Edvarda.

Glahn had journeyed to this wild, northern region in order to indulge his passion for nature’s magnificence and for the independent life of hunting and fishing. Beginning in the late spring, he lived with his dog, Aesop, in a simple hut, occasionally venturing into the nearby coastal town of Sirilund. On one of those visits, Herr Mack, his landlord and a wealthy trader, introduces him to the Doctor, a lame older man who seems to have been chosen by Herr Mack for his daughter, Edvarda. At first, Edvarda makes little impression on Glahn, but soon he is fascinated by her beauty and manner.

Their mutual attraction is enormous, but each is willful and perverse. Edvarda is sometimes vulnerable, often coquettish, and at times disdainful. Glahn can never be sure where he stands with her, and yet this unpredictability continues to attract him, even while he senses that he is being played for a fool. The mixture of serenity and awe that Glahn feels during the long summer days in this magnificent setting is counterpointed by the complexity of his anxiety-ridden affair.

Part of the complication grows out of Glahn’s own nature. Socially awkward, his courtship of Edvarda puts him in situations which show his worst side. On one such occasion, he gives her two feathers of the kind that he uses to make fishing lures. Only a short time later, he disgraces himself by impulsively throwing her shoe into the water. Further social engagements trigger irresponsible, insulting actions that embarrass Edvarda while making Glahn less and less welcome to Herr Mack. The stubborn pride in both characters makes apologies and forgiveness difficult. Drawn to each other by an overpowering erotic magnetism, they routinely destroy each other’s happiness. In fact, their egoistic actions are finally self-destructive.

Glahn is attracted to other women, partly as a consolation for the wounds that he suffers at Edvarda’s hands. After all, she measures him against her father’s favorites: first the Doctor and then the Baron. Eva, the young wife of the blacksmith, provides Glahn with uncomplicated comforts. She gives while asking nothing in return, while Edvarda, a social creature, is her antithesis.

Herr Mack, aware of Glahn’s fondness for Eva, tries to irritate him by making Eva’s life difficult. As her employer, he assigns her arduous tasks for long hours. Unsure of his control over Edvarda, Herr Mack plans a series of slights, threats, and ugly incidents to drive Glahn away. In his perverse way, Glahn enjoys countering Herr Mack.

As Glahn’s humiliation at the hands of Edvarda grows, he becomes more and more irrational. At one point, in a fit of jealousy, he shoots himself in the foot in order to win sympathy and to resemble the limping Doctor. To get back at the Mack family and all they represent, Glahn drills holes beneath a boulder in preparation for sending it crashing down on the Sirilund dock, the site of Herr Mack’s trading enterprises. Glahn believes that Herr Mack, who seems to have discovered this plan, may have set fire to the hut. When Glahn ignites the powder packed into the drilled holes, the boulder not only does its damage but also kills Eva, whom Herr Mack had assigned to work there.

Meanwhile, Edvarda has her own battle. On the one hand, she recognizes Glahn as her spiritual soul mate, turning to him again and again when he least expects affection from her. On the other hand, she is flattered by the attentions of the respectable suitors whom her father has encouraged. Furthermore, she resents Glahn’s periods of independence as well as the hold he has on her emotions. Each waits for the other to find the means of saving the relationship, but neither is able to do anything but watch and contribute to its disintegration.

As Glahn prepares to leave the territory and Edvarda’s marriage to the Baron is planned, she makes an outlandish request: She asks Glahn to give her Aesop, his most valued personal possession. Stunned, once again, by Edvarda’s unpredictable charm and her seeming admission of their special relationship, Glahn agrees. Remembering her past cruelties and his need to assert himself, however, Glahn shoots Aesop and sends her the grotesque gift of the corpse. Soon after, Glahn leaves and his narrative ends.

A brief second section of the novel is presented as a paper written in 1861 explaining the death of Lieutenant Glahn. The writer, a man who had become Glahn’s hunting companion in India, describes a haughty, reckless Glahn who goes out of his way to irritate others. Attractive to women, Glahn steals Henriette, a beautiful native girl, away from the narrator and, in so doing, seems to invite retaliation. Glahn’s behavior becomes more and more self-destructive, as though the memories of his affair with Edvarda have never given him peace.

Glahn receives a letter that the reader assumes is from Edvarda, once again testing or tormenting him in some way. He becomes sullen and even more reckless. By provoking his hunting partner a number of times, Glahn makes it clear that he fully intends to have himself killed. His last act is to fire purposely a gun inches from the narrator’s head, and then insist that the enraged rival take his revenge—which he does, putting Glahn out of his misery once and for all.

The Characters

Knut Hamsun’s intent is to demonstrate the power of irrational forces at work in his characters. Like other late nineteenth century European writers, such as August Strindberg and Fyodor Dostoevski, Hamsun creates character studies that seem to anticipate the theories formulated by Sigmund Freud and his followers. In particular, Hamsun demonstrates how the subconscious precipitates actions that are contrary to an individual’s conscious motives and acknowledged self-interest.

The case is especially clear with Glahn. As much as he is attracted to Edvarda, he resents the intrusion of this uncontrollable element into his life. He is a man who thrives in isolation, living by and for himself. He feels compromised by relationships and social codes. Once drawn into the world of courtship and social convention, he becomes uneasy. Without knowing the reasons, Glahn does impulsive things that mark him as a dangerous eccentric: He throws Edvarda’s shoe into the water, he speaks abusively in polite company, he shoots himself in the foot, he dynamites a boulder which destroys a dock, killing Eva, he spits in the Baron’s ear, and he shoots his beloved dog.

The reader can understand this behavior, in part, as a kind of survival instinct, the means by which Glahn extricates himself from a relationship and forces himself into the isolation in which he thrives. Yet Glahn’s ego and his passion for Edvarda lead him, on the conscious level, to attempt to master situations in which he finds himself rather than run from them. Though his subconscious breaks through in these embarrassing and often painful ways, Glahn does not heed these warnings. He is at war with himself.

Hamsun underscores his intentions by identifying Glahn with Pan, a mythological figure associated with the forest, hunting, sexual energy, and a consequent magnetism. The identification is made most pointedly by the image of Pan on Glahn’s powder horn, and in this way, the destructive potential is foreshadowed: Glahn will use his rifle powder as a tool for a vengeance that is in part sexually motivated. Pan is often portrayed as goat-footed, a detail that may be psychoanalytically translated into both lameness (without normal foot formation) and sexual potency (goat-like). Hamsun brings these associations together through the lame Doctor, Glahn’s rival, who tries to tame Edvarda by constantly correcting her speech, and through Glahn’s act of identification through self-mutilation. Above all, Pan is a phallic deity, and many of his legends are stories of seduction. Glahn’s actions toward Eva and Henriette dramatize this aspect. These women parallel the nymphs and shepherdesses of Greek mythology.

Edvarda is another matter. With her somewhat masculine name and boyish figure, she is a confused character in her own right, unable to choose successfully between her social needs (Freud’s superego) and her id’s passion for Glahn. The choice she makes—her father’s choice, one assumes—is made out of spite and brings her no happiness, as her periodic correspondence to Glahn demonstrates. Her habit of domination has been learned, as the daughter of the town’s wealthy leader, and this habit conflicts with another, more submissive, part of her personality.

The other characters exist largely as aspects of Glahn and Edvarda or as the means to reveal these two more fully. They are treated more as types than as individuals: The Doctor is an intellectual bully, the Baron is an aristocratic snob, and Eva is the incarnation of idyllic, passive femininity.

Critical Context

Hamsun’s works published before 1890 are of little interest. Beginning with the publication of Sult (1890; Hunger, 1899), however, he became recognized as one of Europe’s foremost innovators in a new genre later to be called the lyrical novel. Rebelling against the prevailing rationalism of his day and against the convention of novels focused on society, Hamsun explored the terrain of the human psyche in all its complexity and inconsistency. With Mysterier (1892; Mysteries, 1927) and Pan, he continued to fashion a series of attractive, somewhat tragic nonconformists. The nihilistic spirit of these works aligns him with the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, the great German philosopher. In fact, Nietzsche’s conception of the contrast between the Apollonian and Dionysian spirits provides a handy orientation for understanding the tensions in Pan.

Hamsun’s poetry and his later novels maintained but did not surpass the high standard of the 1890’s, a period of high achievement which concluded with Victoria (1898; English translation, 1929). The one exception is Markens grode (1917; Growth of the Soil, 1920), for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920. By the time Hamsun had written this work, his heroes were no longer rootless vagabonds but people wedded to their labors.

Hamsun’s work has been widely praised by Andre Gide, Thomas Mann, and other giants of modern world literature who recognized Hamsun as a towering, iconoclastic genius both in his perception of the human spiritual condition and in his crafting of a flexible, highly evocative style. Pan is the novel in which this genius was fully realized for the first time. Though far less known than these writers in England and the United States, Hamsun stands with them.

Bibliography

Ferguson, Robert. Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun, 1987.

Gustavson, Alrik. Six Scandinavian Novelists, 1940.

Larsen, Hanna Astrup. Knut Hamsun, 1922.

Naess, Harald. Knut Hamsun, 1984.

Sehmsdorf, Henning K. “Knut Hamsun’s Pan: Myth and Symbol,” in Edda. LXXIV (1974), pp. 345-393.

Vige, Rolf. Knut Hamsun’s Pan, 1963.