Tuesday, October 28, 2014

I’ve never heard of anything so insane! - let's get the Knut Hamsun Mysteries readalong moving

What am I waiting for?  Here it is, the Knut Hamsun Mysteries readalong event, where a number of thrill-seeking readers enjoy one of the all-time craziest novels of the 19th century.

The way this usually works is that I kick things off with a light, superficial post, and then link to the subsequent, better, writing by other readers.  The only difference this time is that Jean at Howling Frog Books has already put up a clean summary of the 1892 novel, calling it “a mystery all the way through.”  I was ready to argue with that judgment, until I thought about the novel’s final page.  No, Jean’s right.  Maybe we can work out what kind of mystery it is.  Not a police procedural, not a cat mystery, not a locked-room mystery.

Jean read the most recent translation by Sverre Lyngstad, now a Penguin Classic; I read the 1971 Gerry Bothmer version; Pykk showed me a quote from the 1926 Arthur G. Chater translation that was so different in tone from what I read that it could be from a different novel.  I make no judgment about which is best.

In the Penguin edition, an important secondary character is named Miniman, while in Bothmer he is The Midget.  There is not just a vocabulary difference here, but rather an interpretive one, because as far as I can tell the character names The Midget is not actually a midget, and is not even unusually short in anything but self-confidence.  He has picked up the diminutive nickname as part of the degrading abuse to which he is subjected.  So one translator picks a word that we have but is not quite right, while the other goes for an invented word.

Maybe an abused Midget who is not really a midget gives an idea about the peculiarities of this novel.

The story is in the “stranger comes to town” category.  Nagel is a chaos seed, or wants to be one.  He descends on a little Norwegian town with the intent of disrupting it somehow.  He is insane: a pathological liar, a depressive, perhaps a sociopath.  He is something of a devil figure, in that he tries to corrupt the weakest members of the community.  Also something of a Christ figure in a very strange way.  Well, not Christ exactly, but rather a Christ-like Dostoevsky character, which is not the same thing.  That I want to save for tomorrow.

Reading Hunger, published two years earlier, I wonder how crazy the narrator is really supposed to be.  He spends the novel reduced to an extreme state of desperation, so he is hard to judge.  In Pan, published two years after Mysteries, the narrator is pretty clearly insane at certain points in the novel, although there is some question about other times.  Both novels are written in the first person, in retrospect, which by itself is a source of ambiguity.

The main character of Mysteries is a close copy of those other two, and since the novel is in the third person, the filter is removed.  The question is not is he crazy but how crazy?  The device of the outside disembodied floating narrator allows distance and eventually certainty.  The occasional moves into free associative stream of consciousness rants only emphasize the similarity of the three characters.

I was really wondering why Hamsun bothered to use the third person in Mysteries.  The answer is that he needed it for the last page, a bit of ambiguity-multiplying technical outrageousness that had me laughing.  Maybe I should stop writing about the last page.  There is plenty more to keep me busy.

The title quotation is near the end of Chapter 11.

23 comments:

  1. Miniman seems a little too Austin Powers for me. I have been playing around with the whole metaphorical Christ thing in my head. I just found out over at Howling Frog that Nagel means nail which convinces me that this is 'a' right track.
    I'm really glad I read it, it makes me want to read more Hamsun. The book seems to prefigure some of my favourite books, such as Miss Lonelyhearts and Wiseblood. Thanks for the push.

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  2. If I had the time and money, I'd join you! Hamsun sounds more and more appealing with each new post.

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  3. Séamus, yes, I suspect "Miniman" will seem all too ridiculous to readers who have seen certain movies.

    I wish I could tell you why I have never read Miss Lonelyhearts. Wise Blood is a good pick for a descendant. I'll write about the Dostoevsky stuff later today. That will cover as much of the narrator-as-Christ, or anti-Christ, or whatever he is, as I can handle.

    Miguel, Hamsun is one of the most appealing unappealing writers I know. There are not so many of those in the 19th century.

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  4. Anybody know what Miniman/Midget was in Norwegian? I can't find the full text in the original online, though I can find plenty of others, just not that one.

    OK, "Christ-like Dostoevsky character" I can go for better than "near-parody of Christ."

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  5. Nagel is a parody not of Christ but of Prince Myshkin. That's what I plan to take 500 words to say.

    No idea about the Norwegian. Good question.

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    1. For what it's worth, I was taught in Norway that Nagel was "en gal" slightly reconfigured, ie. "A crazy person".

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    2. "en gal" - plausible. More than plausible.

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  6. It's a long time since I read the book, but in the film version I watched recently (with Rutger Hauer and Sylvie Krystal, she of Emmanuelle fame), the midget was indeed a midget.

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  7. Solves certain problems, doesn't it? You don't have the entire audience whispering to each other "Why did they call him a midget?"

    I like that they move the film to the Netherlands and add nudity. Very funny.

    In my translation, the Midget is "rather short" while Nagel "was below average in height."

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    1. IIRC he's not that short, he just has to hobble around because of his injuries. I took it as being a derisive name that was more about his total lack of importance and/or manliness than about his actual size.

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    2. My copy calls him "Miniman" and introduces him with "small of stature." "He was an insignificant-looking man, small of stature and very badly dressed." The origin of the nickname is the most important and telling thing about it: it comes from bullies, and a bully wants to humiliate the victim holistically. I agree that the Miniman name is distracting for Austin Powers reasons but I think it gets closer to the message of the bully. Everything in you that might reflect manhood and strength, is miniature and contemptible.

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  8. Sadly I couldn't find Project Gutenberg copy of the book and I didn't have time to track one down from the library and if I had I'm not sure I would have managed to read it. For now I will enjoy the book through your posts and be left to wonder about the last page.

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  9. My version has Pykk's quote exactly except for "rather short" in place of "small of stature." Curious that there is a little bit of stickiness there, a little problem to solve.

    But I think we all agree on the purpose of the nickname, all of us not making a film adaptation set in Holland.

    The last page - you know the kind of story that has a last page revelation that upends everything you thought you knew blah blah? Mostly idiotic but once in a while there's a clever one. Mysteries kind of has one of those, although I don't think it necessarily upends anything but rather adds another source of ambiguity. It is all so vague - maybe it reveals nothing at all.

    It's an amusing effect, anyways.

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  10. He's "Minutten" in Norwegian. It sounds pretty cozy. One could translate it really terribly as "the minute", though I'm glad no one did. Not, I should add, to be confused with the time measurement. That would have been "Minuttet."

    He's described as "en uanselig mand, liten av vækst og ytterst fattig klædt; hans gang var så besværlig at den var påfaldende og alikevel kom han nokså hurtig avsted."
    My artless translation, trying not to miss anything: "an insignificant man, short of stature and extremely poorly dressed; his gait was so strenuous that it was conspicuous, but he still got around fairly quickly." I should add: "Poorly" here meaning like a poor person, not necessarily in bad taste.

    It was my intention to be quite literal in my translation, but this just worked as a reminder that there really is no such thing.

    "[L]iten av vækst" would be the significant phrase in your discussion. "Small of growth" if we were to speak in translatese. It is a common phrase and is not necessarily something that would make people think of midgets.

    I've only read the first chapter, so I probably won't take part in this conversation, unfortunately. But I'll try to chime in if any context or issues of translation turn up.

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  11. So cruel through its belittlement, not inherently cruel. "Midget" is too deliberately cruel. Not that I have a better idea.

    Thanks for the help. Thanks for any future help.

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    1. "Titch" or "Shorty" are obvious colloquial alternatives, though that could be waht's wrong with them. Would they be the right words in nineteenth-century rural Norway?

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    2. No one in this household knew the word "titch." What a great word!

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    3. Titch is good (though reminiscent of Asterix comics). I thought maybe Tiny...?

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    4. My argument with Tiny is that it is already almost always used ironically. Tiny is always 6'10" and 300 pounds. Using it here ironizes the irony. I was also wondering about the possibility of "Big Guy."

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    5. Something like Half-pint? Squirt? Shrimp? Or there's a colloquial construction in Ireland where you put 'sen' at the end of a word to make a diminutive - manden, which is kind of affectionate rather than insulting.

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    6. I would say those are all too affectionate. In theory, at least. They could be made sinister. Might need an actor rather than a writer.

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  12. Nagel as a "chaos seed" and your line about that "ambiguity-multiplying technical outrageousness" at the end are really fine observations, Tom. I'm not sure why exactly--and would probably have to attribute some of this to what I've seen of Hamsun in photos and read of him in interview excerpts, not usually a wise move--but I'm not sure that our novelist and Nagel are all that far apart in craziness with a little artistry aside here and no empty violin case in tow there. The insanity seems too convincing to be a total put on, y'know?

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  13. Fiction allows the crazy writer to play with, bend, question, mask himself with other kinds of crazy. Some of the crazy ideas in these first novels are, for example, ideas held by a younger Hamsun, since abandoned for different crazy ideas. Some are other people's crazy ideas mixed in, parodied, mocked.

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