Mysteries by Knut Hamsun

First published:Mysterier, 1892 (English translation, 1927)

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: 1891

Locale: A small Norwegian coastal town

Principal Characters:

• Johan Nilsen Nagel, an eccentric and mysterious outsider, supposedly an agronomist
• Johannes Grogaard, the Midget
• Dagny Kielland, a parson’s daughter who is engaged to a naval officer
• Martha Gude, a humble older woman to whom Nagel proposes

The Novel

When Johan Nilsen Nagel disembarks from a steamer one midsummer evening, wearing a loud yellow suit and an oversized cap and carrying only a suitcase, a violin case, and a huge fur coat, he inevitably becomes an object of curiosity in the small Norwegian coastal town to which he has come. His eccentric appearance, his unusual behavior, and his lack of any discernible purpose for being in the town make him a bizarre and mysterious stranger. The only thing that the hotelkeeper is able to learn about his guest is that he is supposedly an agronomist who just returned from abroad and plans to spend some weeks in their town.

Nagel’s first act is to befriend Johannes Grogaard, the Midget, a grotesque but likable character who survives by playing the fool for the town sadists. One night, Nagel intervenes when the Midget is being ordered by his tormentor, the deputy Reinert, to drink a glass of beer which has been used as an ashtray and to dance and grind his teeth loudly for the amusement of the hotel cafe’s patrons. Nagel beats Reinert, drives him from the hotel, and, to the astonishment of the easily astonished townspeople, invites the Midget to his room for champagne and cigars. The Midget reveals that he is from a good family (the son of a parson and a relative of one of the authors of the country’s constitution), but since an accident (a fall from the ship’s rigging while he was a sailor), he has lived with and worked for his uncle, a coal dealer. Nagel gives him money and admonishes him to remember his family name and breeding and not to accept “clown money” any longer.

Nagel uses his friendship with the Midget to extract information from him about the townspeople who interest him. He asks about Karlsen, a young divinity student who recently committed suicide, and he asks about Dagny Kielland, whom Nagel has already encountered and frightened by his aggressive behavior. He learns that Dagny is the parson’s daughter and is engaged to a naval officer currently on duty in Malta, the son of a wealthy businessman. He manipulates the Midget into confessing that he carried a letter from Karlsen to Dagny, thus giving added weight to the rumor that the unfortunate Karlsen killed himself because of his unrequited love for her. Nagel also inquires about a woman, prematurely gray, whose eyes remind him of a woman he once loved. He learns that she is Martha Gude, a respectable spinster, the daughter of a deceased sea captain, now reduced to selling eggs for her meager living.

Nagel is invited by Dr. and Mrs. Stenersen to a party at their home, where he distinguishes himself by his loquacity and his iconoclastic views. He dismisses the Christiania (Oslo) of which they are so proud as a cultural backwater; he characterizes the celebrated Grand Cafe, gathering place of great artists, as a place where nobodies are “elated because other nobodies acknowledge them.” He is arrogant and insolent but also intriguing, particularly to Dagny Kielland, whom he walks home. When Nagel totally misrepresents his quarrel with Reinert, making himself out to be in the wrong, Dagny, who has heard of Nagel’s noble defense of the Midget, cannot understand why Nagel is lying. He confesses that it is all part of a strategy: Through such false self-denigration, he hopes eventually to appear better than he is; further, he would do anything to make her pay attention to him. At the evening’s end, Dagny’s only response is that now at least she will have something interesting to write her fiance, but Nagel has fallen deeply in love with her. He begins spending evenings near her home, hoping for a glimpse of her, and nights in the woods nearby, praying for her (or perhaps to her). When at length he confesses his passion, Dagny angrily accuses him of destroying their friendship and tells him that she wishes never to see him again.

Nagel attempts to divert himself from his obsession with Dagny by inviting Dr. Stenersen, Hansen the lawyer, Holtan the schoolmaster, Oien the student, and the Midget to a stag party. As alcohol flows freely, discussion of writers, politics, and religion becomes heated. Nagel denounces Leo Tolstoy as a mediocrity and attacks Guy de Maupassant, Victor Hugo, and particularly Henrik Ibsen. The doctor, a liberal, attacks the socialist views of the lawyer. When the talk turns to suicide, Nagel shows the group a vial of prussic acid that he keeps in a vest pocket in case of need but confesses that he lacks the courage to use it. The evening ends with everyone smashing glasses—a successful party overall, but for Nagel, unsuccessful as a diversion from his self-destructive passion for Dagny. He begins to think of Martha Gude.

Despite Nagel’s diatribes against the false nobility of charity and philanthropy, much of his time is spent in being a secret benefactor to people in need. He gives money and clothes to the Midget, always swearing him to secrecy. Posing as an antique dealer, he cultivates Martha’s friendship and tries to push a large sum of money on her in payment for a worthless broken chair. He invites her to the town bazaar. He lavishes his attention on her (at the same time looking for Dagny), dazzles her with his garrulous storytelling, awes the crowd by playing a borrowed violin, escorts her home, and proposes to her. The elaborate fantasy that he sketches for her of a cottage in the woods, a simple Edenic existence, and unending happiness seems so real and so appealing that she begins to believe him and agrees to marry him. When she changes her mind the next day, Nagel realizes that Dagny turned her against him and thus ended his only hope of tolerable life.

He throws the mysterious iron ring that he wears into the sea, goes to the woods near Dagny’s house, and drinks from his vial. When at length he finds himself still alive, he realizes that the Midget has removed the poison and substituted water. For a short time, he is ecstatic at being alive, but this mood soon gives way to depression and despair. Instead of being grateful to the Midget, Nagel is enraged to find on his return to town that the Midget has reverted to his former ways, self-abasement for money. Nagel calls him a scoundrel, accuses him of secret depravity beneath his surface goodness, and vows to rip off his mask and expose the evil which is there. Nagel falls ill and suffers Dostoevskian nightmares and hallucinations. Shaking with fever, disoriented, and desperately needing (for some unknown reason) to recover the strange ring that he threw away, he rushes to the pier, throws himself into the sea, and drowns.

The following April, Dagny and Martha talk as they return from a party where the strange story of Johan Nagel was evidently a topic of discussion. Their conversation reveals that Nagel’s intuitions about the Midget’s secret sin are correct: He was guilty of some unspecified but evil behavior toward Martha. Since Martha had told no one, Dagny marvels at how Nagel could have known.

The Characters

Nagel appears nearly as mysterious to readers as he does to the townspeople. Despite two long monologues which narrate Nagel’s chaotic thoughts directly, little of substance is conveyed; the remainder of the book, a third-person narrative, reveals remarkably little about his past, his true identity, or even his real name. A woman known as “Kamma,” with whom he was previously involved briefly, visits him in his hotel room, calls him “Simonsen,” is amused by his assumed identity of agronomist, tearfully declares that she still loves him (although she knows he no longer cares for her), accepts the money he proffers, and leaves on the next steamer.

Nagel’s character is mercurial, paradoxical, and exasperating. He alternates between ecstasy and despair, clarity and confusion, impulse and contemplation, self-abasement and self-exaltation, and loathing and love of his fellow human beings. He contemptuously denounces charity as a form of egoism but continually gives away money. In his flights of fancy, his stories of the supernatural, and his fantasies, he appears to be a poet, but he is also given to an incomprehensible garrulousness which embarrasses even him. There are other inconsistencies: The violin case he so prominently displays in his room contains nothing but dirty linen; he denies that he is a rich man but consistently behaves as one; and his luggage appears costly, but he wears a cheap iron ring of some mysterious significance. His strategy of causing others to believe the worst of him is another perplexity. He lies about a medal that he carries, bestowed to him for saving a drowning man, and tells Dagny that he bought it. The truth is that he did earn the medal, but he has doubts about how heroic it may be to save a man who wants to drown.

The Midget is equally problematic. He appears to accept with exemplary Christian submission the many cruelties and humiliations the townspeople (and life) have heaped upon him. He appears to be all forgiveness to his enemies and all gratitude to his benefactor. Yet Nagel comes to believe that the Midget’s behavior is an act beneath which lurks a scoundrel. Inexplicably, Nagel for a time even suspects the Midget of having murdered Karlsen, the divinity student, although the evidence clearly indicates suicide and the Midget’s motive would be difficult to fathom. Knut Hamsun once said that the Midget was Nagel’s alter ego, but this idea does not seem well developed. The powerful influence of Fyodor Dostoevski, with his interest in doubles and divided selves, however, is apparent here as elsewhere in the novel. “Your virtue brings out the brute in me,” Nagel shouts at the Midget, recalling Dostoevski’s perception that the higher part of the soul calls forth the lower part.

Dagny Kielland and Martha Gude appear as opposites: the one, proudly beautiful, self-assured, much sought-after; the other, awkward, plain, and looking older than she is. The two correspond to a story that Nagel tells about the beautiful Klara and her hunchbacked sister (although Martha is by no means deformed or repulsive). True to that story, Dagny does not want Nagel, but she also does not want Martha to have him. Thus she intervenes, successfully destroying his chances with Martha and, ultimately, his hope and his life. It is important to realize, however, that at no point does Hamsun make use of the possibilities of third-person narrative technique to reveal the inner thoughts of his female characters or of any character other than Nagel. Thus, all judgments about character are necessarily colored by Nagel’s view.

Critical Context

Mysteries is in part a reaction against the work of older realist writers, such as Ibsen, who tend to represent people as basically rational, understandable beings whose social problems are presented for a reader’s edification. Hamsun is less interested in abstractions such as “society” and “social problems” and more interested in individual psychological analysis, particularly of exceptional people—eccentrics, outsiders, and wanderers such as Nagel. The so-called outcast from society is a type which appears in other early Hamsun novels, such as Sult (1890; Hunger, 1899) and Pan (1894; English translation, 1920). His preference for such protagonists seems to derive from his belief that unusual, iconoclastic types are more interesting and more important than ordinary, bourgeois people. Hamsun is no Democrat (a fact which became scandalously obvious with the revelation of his pro-Nazi views). As critics have noted, there is in much of his work a Nietzschean contempt for the average person and especially for what the average person regards as a truly great man. Hamsun confessed, “I am completely incapable of writing for the masses; novels with betrothals and dances and childbirth, overlaid with an external apparatus, are a bit too cheap for me and have no interest for me.... I address myself to an intellectual elite, and it is the appreciation of this elite that I value.” Clearly, Nagel’s scorn for what he calls “the carnivores,” the commonplace, the average, and for all merely received ideas (a telling phrase), accords well with his creator’s views. Still, it is important to acknowledge that later, in Markens grode (1917; Growth of the Soil, 1920), Hamsun created strong, positive characters whose simplicity, commonness, and even primitiveness are their greatest virtues.

Mysteries prefigures much that became insistent in the twentieth century novel: the reaction against realism and naturalism, the turn toward the inner life and the resultant disintegration of an earlier, more stable and coherent sense of self, the preoccupation with the absurd and the irrational, the elevation of instinct over reason, and the search for “the secret power of the word.” All these features mark Mysteries as a significant, pioneering novel.

Bibliography

Gustafson, Alrik. “Man and the Soil,” in Six Scandinavian Novelists, 1940.

Larsen, Hanna Astrup. Knut Hamsun, 1922.

McFarlane, J.W. “The Whisper of the Blood: A Study of Knut Hamsun’s Early Novels,” in PMLA. LXXI (1956), pp. 563-594.

Naess, Harald. Knut Hamsun, 1984.

Naess, Harald. “Who Was Hamsun’s Hero?” in The Hero in Scandinavian Literature, 1975. Edited by John M. Weinstock and Robert T. Rovinsky.