Monday, October 6, 2014

Hamsun's Pan, another Hamsun readalong, and some antipoetry - a chaotic post

“Yes, that sounds horrible, doesn’t it?  I must admit it does.  But if you repeat it to yourself seven or eight times and think it over a little, it soon sounds better.”  (Pan, Ch. 15, p. 60)

All too soon Ricardo de la Caravana de recuerdos, and I hope many, many others, will join me in a reading of and conversation about Knut Hamsun’s 1892 novel Mysteries.  If it is like other Hamsun novels, some of that “conversation” will be closer to stunned silence and questions like “What is this?”  It is not too late to scramble your plans and join in on a whim.  It’s just a regular old novel, 338 pages, 23 chapters, no big deal, I hope.

Sometime around the end of October, more or less, one or more of us will write something, comments will follow, then more posts, and more comments, until interest in the whole idea slides into the abyss as if it never happened.

At the same time, which will be a good trick, Richard and I plan to read and write on Chilean poet Nicanor Parra’s legendary 1954 Poemas y Antipoemas, so join us for that as well, why don’t you?  Some resources: the original text (pdf), a selection of English translations (click Anthology), and a 14,000 word essay on Antipoetry by Edith Grossman (click Essays).  This year is, as with Tove Jansson and Romain Gary, Nicanor Parra’s centennial – but he is still alive, so we will wish him a happy 100th from afar.

So even though both of these ideas sound horrible, I admit, just repeat them to yourself seven or eight times until they sound better and then head to the library.

Meanwhile, I have been reading Hamsun’s subsequent novel, the 1894 Pan, which is, curiously, a book about the pleasures of hunting and fishing, much like William Henry Harrison’s Adventures in the Wilderness, except set in the northern forests of Norway rather than New York.  The two books even share semi-Transcendentalist appreciations of natural beauty.  The main difference is that Pan is narrated not by a married Boston pastor but rather a lust-crazed madman.  I suppose the title of the book is a tipoff, since the narrator is or becomes an avatar of the ancient Greek god.

The core of the story is a love affair between the hunter and a local young woman.  Hamsun does what writers rarely do successfully, or at all – he shows by a series of seemingly inconsequential encounters and gestures how the two people fall in love, and then at the same level of detail the tiny, awkward misunderstandings that turn the love into hate, the petty jealousies, imagined slights, statements that would normally be innocuous but in this precise context wound.  The blossoming and collapse of the romance is quite insightful.  I can imagine a similar novel, with a sane narrator, where that is the point of the book.

But that’s not Pan.  I’ll write at least one more post about the crazy side of Hamsun’s novel.

I’m reading the 1956 James W. McFarlane translation.

24 comments:

  1. The only Hamsun I've ever read was "Hunger" - many, many moons ago. But all this is very intriguing and I really think I must explore further. I do have "Victoria" on my shelves - but "Pan" is calling....

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  2. Pan is quite intense, I recall. The animal-like hunter and his fierce lover in a wilderness setting.

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  3. Well, here is an off point question: How on earth do you find so much time for so much reading? I am envious. With my teaching schedule and my reading speed being at a snail's pace, I barely have time to read a sonnet or two in an evening. Oh, I am so envious. Hamsun, huh? Well, perhaps.

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  4. Pan and Hunger are similarly intense. They are both about radically subjective narrators confronted with radically objective obstacles. In a manner of speaking.

    Victoria sounds good, too. I don't know if I'll get to it this round, but it's certainly short enough.

    RT, teacher's have grading. Not me. When I leave the office, that's it for the day, not another thought directed towards work. My reading speed has become slower over time, for good reasons as well as bad.

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  5. Hm, Mysteries sounds way too tempting. Don't you know my month is already full of books??

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  6. I do know! I have the same concern. It will all work out somehow.

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  7. I have Pan and Hunger on my Kindle but have not gotten to them yet. You are tempting me though to throw all caution to the wind and read Mysteries.

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  8. Yes, it would be a wild leap. Hunger and Pan are in the first person, Mysteries in the third.

    I suppose most readalongs would mention what the novel is about rather than how it is narrated.

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  9. Looking forward to getting started on Mysteries. I'd better start soon as my reading rate has slowed down and my blogging pace has slowed even more dramatically. The end of October isn't far away.

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  10. I keep regretting never having read Hamsun; Tom, you make him sound so enticing!

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  11. Séamus, I know, I had dragged my feet writing about Pan, but I thought, I gotta get moving. Even 338 page novels do not simply read themselves. Well, they might, I don't know what books do when I'm not around. But it does me no good.

    Miguel, Hamsun is a special case. Critics - and I've done it, too - spend so much time comparing him to other writers, Dostoevsky especially, because they are flailing around looking for some way to hold on to this slippery, weird, not entirely artful but unique writer.

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  12. I'll read along. I went through four Hamsuns in a row about a year ago, and the sentence that has stayed with me from Pan, is the one in which he retrospectively lets you know that he is going to shoot his dog, that happy bomb in chapter one. "I had no company but Æsop; now it is Cora, but at that time it was Æsop, my dog that I afterwards shot."

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  13. Pykk's comment would be even better on the next post. The order of shocks in Pan is peculiar but effective. I wonder, now, what happened to Cora, who is not in the epilogue.

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  14. Gombrowicz allegedly used Pan as a model for his Cosmos. And that must be a very bad omen for Cora...

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  15. That was my fear. I did not know that about Gombrowicz. Never read him, unfortunately - he is high on my list of writers I surely would have read if I had kept reading that kind of book rather than this kind of book.

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  16. I read chapter 1 of Mysteries late last night and found it as oddball enjoyable as much of Musil's The Man without Qualities. There's an, ahem, "different" vibe to this novel, noticeable even early on. At least in chapter 1. Glad to see another reader for the group read and so many maybes!

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  17. All right, I read the first chapter, too. I suspect this is essentially the same fellow as in Pan and Hunger, now seen with some distance.

    If I knew nothing about Hamsun, I would worry that Mysteries will merely be quirky.

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  18. I still have to walk over to the library and pick it up; I've been reading Growth of the Soil in the meantime. One of the characters is becoming sophisticated. "He had grown more sensitive and finer feeling than ever before. He knew that a fork was really just as necessary as a knife" (tr. W.W. Worster).

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  19. Wait until that guy learns about spoons! His eating of soup will never be the same.

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    1. Finished book. Spoiler: never discovers spoon.

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    2. He gets a spoon in most of the Growth of the Soil fanfic, though.

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  20. I picked it up from work. Haven't started yet.

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  21. Now I've read two chapters - already I have An Idea.

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