There are even places where people believe they can attain salvation through cowbells! - mysteries in Mysteries

No, I don’t know what that means.  It’s in Chapter 13 of Knut Hamsun’s Mysteries.

At Vapour Trails, Séamus has written about the mysteries of Mysteries.  The religious mysteries, mostly Christian, perhaps something else.  The next novel, Pan, is the pagan one.  I was surprised, this time though, how much religious language there was in Hunger, and there is far more in Mysteries.  The deliberate link of the two main women in the novel, Dagny and Martha, with Mary (Magdalena) and Martha  –  Séamus has completely convinced me about that.  And about how the Midget works as an alternative Christ figure to the crazy protagonist Nagel.

Séamus puts the novel in the tradition of the crisis of faith that was engaging so many writers at the end of the 19th century and would scoop up countless more.  Religious belief, shaken by all of the social and scientific changes of the time, wither had to be rebuilt (Dostoevsky’s solution) or replaced with a less satisfying alternative – science or philosophy or art.  Less satisfying for many people, at least, including Knut Hamsun who pushed his characters to extremes of behavior and irrationality to challenge, however futilely, the rational forces that were destroying something essential around them.

Hamsun was hardly alone here.  Another of my favorite lines:

“You mentioned Ibsen,” Nagel continued, in the same state of agitation, though no one had mentioned the name. (Ch. 13)

This is the one place where I truly identified with Nagel.

My experience has been that people who search for meaning usually find it somewhere.  Pykk has read far more Hamsun books than I have, so he is able to move the story along into his later writing.  Where others see religion, Pykk writes, “I, thinking about Hamsun some more, I see houses,” as Hamsun eventually replaces his homeless, restless wanderers, present in all three of these early novels but also in Hamsun’s books of the next twenty years, with a belief in place and soil that will cause trouble for him when the Nazis pick up the idea along many other much worse ideas that an elderly Hamsun could not see, flattered and blinded as he was by the German interest in this one particular idea of his.

Mysteries was the only one of these three novels in which I could glimpse Hamsun’s future political problems.  The third person narrator and the stronger role of characters living a community, contrasted to this wild outsider, made the proto-fascist aspect of Nagel’s irrationalism easier to see, especially in the Nietzsche an twaddle about “great men” in his last long stream of consciousness rant in Chapter 17.  not that the novel itself is fascist – if anything, the opposite – but I can see how a writer on this path could, with some historical bad luck, make a terrible wrong turn.  And similarly, I can see how László Krasznahorkai could make such fruitful use of Mysteries in his 1989 novel The Melancholy of Resistance, which is explicitly about the fascist impulse in our attraction to the irrational.

The Vapour Trails and Pykk posts are both typically insightful – thanks!  Séamus gives a nod to Nagel’s story-telling, which would make for a good post of its own.  Just for example, the long story in Chapter 10 where the narrator pees his pants because he doesn’t want his date to know he needs to visit a bathroom, or the genuinely frightening ghost story in Chapter 11.  Someone else should write that one.

when I get on the subject of my cowbells, I get carried away - Hamsun gets carried away

The key place where Hamsun updates Dostoevsky is in Chapter 7, where the oddball outsider Nagel is at a party arguing about Gladstone.  The British Prime Minister, that Gladstone.  I am not entirely sure why this is the context.  Hamsun loathed England and everything about it, and though this would get him in big trouble forty years later, I do not understand it here.  But it is Dostoevsky I am after, Hamsun’s improvement on Dostoevsky:

“He is a tenacious fighter for good causes, daily assumes personal responsibility for justice, truth, and God.  How could he possibly fail?  Two and two is four, truth has conquered, glory be to God!  Now Gladstone can go beyond two and two.  I have heard him claim, in a budget debate, that seventeen times twenty-three is three hundred ninety-one, and he came off with a smashing, enormous victory…  I stood there checking his arithmetic – three hundred ninety-one – and it was correct, yet I turned it over and over 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, this man who made it his business to be in the right.”  (Ch. 7, ellipses mine)

As Dostoevsky’s Underground Man said, “I agree that two times two makes four is a splendid thing, but if we’re going to lavish praise, then two times two makes five is sometimes also a very charming little thing.”  And given that, imagine the insouciant piquancy of 17 x 23 = 397.

Dostoevsky was at this point arguing directly with Nikolay Chernyshevsky, making Mysteries a direct descendant of Chernyshevsky, which is amusing.

Nagel has “a burning need to preserve my conviction of what is right” even when he is “unquestionably” wrong.  How can Hamsun’s characters be of such interest if they are merely insane?  They are fictionally embodied protests against the Enlightenment.  The idea that is so shocking and destructive is that the wrong answer, wrong decision, even wrong moral act is in some psychological way necessary.  Hamsun is after Dostoevsky one of the great early depicters of the kind of irrationalism that is going to preoccupy so many later writers.

The distance created by the third person allows Mysteries to offer a counter-argument, an implicit defense of rationalism tempered by compassion and community.  Nagel is saved from self-destruction at one point, for example, by what I take to be the kind action of the weakest citizen of the town.    My guess is that, given the ambiguities of the novel, Hamsun is recognizing the power and importance of the irrational without endorsing it.  But who knows.

Nagel himself has an oddly quantitative bent.  Another favorite bit from Mysteries:

“Have I told you about my cowbells? Well, I see you don’t know anything about me.  I’m an agronomist, of course, but I have other interests as well.  Thus far I’ve collected two hundred and sixty-seven cowbells.  I began ten years ago and now, I’m happy to say, I have a very fine collection.”  (Ch. 15)

Although, to pick a single line, this earlier mention of the cowbells, used as a kind of pickup line – he later proposes to the woman he is addressing – can’t be beat:

“But to get back to the point – when I get on the subject of my cowbells, I get carried away.”  (Ch. 9)

We can all get behind that kind of irrationalism.  What else am I doing here?

Tonight I made a fool of myself and shocked everyone by my eccentric behavior - Hamsun steals from Dostoevsky

Everyone who reads Hunger compares it to Dostoevsky.  I did it, too.  The voice of the narrator makes him feel like a cousin of a Dostoevsky character, of Raskolnikov or the Underground Man.  The religious and philosophical base is quite different, with Friedrich Nietzsche replacing the Orthodox church.  Boy does that sound glib.  It’s not so far off, though.

Mysteries does not feel so much like Dostoevsky.  Rather it openly rips off Dostoevsky, repeatedly.  Two examples today and one tomorrow.  I’ll bet there are more I missed.

Chapter 8 is the only one with a title: “White Nights.”  That is also the title of a Dostoevskynovella from 1849.  In Hamsun’s novel, weirdo Nagel wanders around in the woods with beautiful Dagny.  He tells her strange stories and falls in love with her.  She is not entirely unresponsive, but they will have to just be friends.  In the Dostoevsky story, replace “the woods” with “St. Petersburg.”  Both stories, the chapter and the novella, successfully represent an ecstatic state caused by some combination of the possibility of romantic love and the strange northern summer night.

I will interrupt myself to note that this chapter begins with the best paragraph in the entire novel:

It was a beautiful night.  The few people who were still on the streets looked gay and animated.  In the cemetery a man was pushing a wheelbarrow and singing to himself, despite the hour.  Everything was so still that his voice was the only sound to be heard.  The town lay sprawled below the doctor’s house like a strange, monstrous insect, flat on its belly with its tentacles stretched out in all directions.  Here and there it would extend a leg or draw in a feeler, as now down on the fjord, where a small steamer glided along seemingly without a sound, leaving a black furrow behind it.

The insect is part of the best single sentence.  Kinda changes the mood a little.  The word “strange” has appeared several times in this post already.

Just as blatant is Hamsun’s parody of The Idiot.  Nagel is a parody of the Christ-like Prince Myshkin, who desires to do good put somehow destroys whatever he gets near.  A major difference is that Nagel is also a devil figure.  He constantly flips from charity to chaos, friend to bully, without warning.  He is manipulative where Myshkin is guileless – but at times he seems to want to be guileless.

The place to see Nagel as Myshkin most clearly is in Chapter 6, when he crashes a party and tells a bizarre and outrageous story of a dream that climaxes with a brutal beating.  Prince Myshkin’s story ends with an execution, so Hamsun has toned it down a bit.  Oddly, in both cases the inappropriate stories end up impressing a woman who would have been better off ignoring at all.

“Tonight I made a fool of myself and shocked everyone by my eccentric behavior in order to get you into a kinder frame of mind so that you would listen to me when I tried to explain.  I succeeded, you listened to me and you understood.”  (Ch. 6)

Mysteries can also be described as a story about a stalker.  Someone who knew more about the subject could write a good piece about that.

If only I were done with Dostoevsky, but I will save the last example for tomorrow.

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.

And strange moods are born within me and the blood rises to my head - loving the twigs, kissing the grass, flinging the shoes - Pan is odd

A little bit if Knut Hamsun weirdness.  Pan, like Hunger, is awful weird.

Also awful awful in some ways.  Pan’s story features some genuine shockers, horrible jaw-droppers. 

Then I did something that I regret and have not yet forgotten.  Her shoe slipped off; I seized it and hurled it far out over the water – whether from joy at her nearness or from some urge to assert myself and remind her of my existence, I do not know.  It all happened so quickly; I did not think, I just acted on an impulse.  (Ch. 15, 65)

Like that except much worse.  The above is part of the love story I mentioned yesterday, where gestures that in another context might be flirtatious or playful go wrong, so that whatever love there is curdles.

I’ll move earlier, when the cursed couple has just met, a happier time.  Note the change of tense.

The monotonous sighing of the wind and the familiar trees and stones mean much to me; I feel a strange sense of gratitude, everything reaches out towards me, blends with me, I love all things.  I take up a dry twig and hold  it in my hand as I sit there and think my own thoughts; the twig is nearly rotten, its meagre bark distresses me, and pity steals through my heart.  And when I get up to go, I do not fling away the twig but lay it down and stand and gaze fondly at it; finally, with moist eyes, I give it one last look before I forsake it.  (Ch. 6, 27)

The possibility of earthly love causes the narrator to becomes a transparent eyeball, or in Schopenhauer’s terms to catch a glimpse of Will as embodied in the beloved rotten twig, certainly among the greatest beloved twigs in the history of Western literature.

A later passage is even better.  I am giving away all the best parts of the book.  Spoiler alert, etc.  Note that this comes just after the narrator has thrown his girlfriend’s shoe into the sea.

If I could win her, I would become a good man, I thought.  I reached the forest and thought again: if I could win her, I would serve her tirelessly as no other would, and even if she showed herself unworthy of me, if she took it into her head to demand impossibilities of me, still would I do all in my power and rejoice that she was mine…  I stopped and fell on my knees; and in humility and hope I licked the blades of grass by the side of the path; then I stood up again.  (Ch. 15, 69, italics his, not mine)

Did you see that coming, the part with the grass?  Maybe I had over-prepared you with the twig.  It was a surprise to me.

The novel is narrated from the distance of two years, and is obviously self-serving, so anything the narrator writes is open to question from a number of angles.  The most unusual artistic effect, though, is a sort of layering of different levels of reality – are some parts invention?  Are some parts perhaps dreams or hallucinations?  Almost everything can be taken as real – when I had doubts it was really an effect of language, a shift in rhetoric, where the narrator describes an event as if it were not real, which, of course, nothing in the book is.  An explicit dream or forest fantasy in Chapter 20 (“And strange moods are born within me and the blood rises to my head,” 92) perhaps gives a clue to how some other scenes might be taken.

A crazy narrator, the senses heightened to the point of suffering, by hunger or passion – no surprise that the fictive reality of scenes in Hunger and Pan are often ambiguous, or that the much of the art of the novel depends on my confusion.

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.

I could feel my brain moving nearer and nearer to chaos - Hamsun's intensity, Hamsun's influence

Should I go into influence and literary history and all that?  I may enjoy it a little too much, but it is so important.  It helps answer the “Why this book?” question, which in turn illuminates the “What is this book?” question, always the most important question.

The puzzle is the narrowness of Hunger.  For a book of its stature and time – mainly the latter – Hunger is a narrowly focused novel.  We are used to this now.  Nothing could be more common.  But compared to the social sprawl of Trollope and Zola, or the ambitions of Buddenbrooks or Hardy, or simply the amount of incident in a Stevenson or Kipling novel, Hunger might seem like a fragment of a novel.

The action of Hunger is repetitive and trivial (the narrator sleeps in the woods or tries to sell a blanket), the social context stripped away as much as possible,*and the ambition – well, Hamsun is working through or enacting some ideas of Schopenhauer and maybe Nietzsche, so he is plenty ambitious.  Small-scope ambition, though.  One character, one setting, one problem.

What I found inescapable both when I did not know what would happen and when I reread the novel was the intensity of the narrator, of his voice or perhaps I mean his presence.  To what extent is he a genius, to what extent a lunatic? 

I snapped my pencil off between my teeth, leaped up, tore my manuscript in two, ripped every page of it in shreds, threw my hat down on the street and jumped on it.  “I am a lost man!” I whispered to myself.  “Ladies and gentlemen, I am a lost man!”  And I repeated that over and over as I went on jumping on my hat.  (Ch. 4, 224)

The narrator is imbalanced – I mean not mentally but as a fictional creation – in the way we can find in Dostoevsky.  Hamsun’s narrator is a cousin of the Underground Man and several characters from the big, sprawling, incident-filled, ambitious novels, characters like Crime and Punishment’s Raskolnikov.

 Hunger has not penetrated too far into American or English literature, but it was much read by not just Scandinavian but German and Russian writers.  Isaac Bashevis Singer claims that Yiddish and Hebrew writers like David Bergelson were influenced by Hamsun, too.  “European writers know that he is the father of the modern school of literature in every aspect – his subjectiveness, his fragmentariness, his use of flashbacks [not really present in Hunger], his lyricism” – this is I. B. Singer, in the introduction to my edition of Hunger, p. ix.  Too strong to be true, surely, but that is the idea.

Wild ideas popped up again in my head.  What if I quietly went over and cut off the mooring ropes on one of the ships?  What if I suddenly cried fire?  I walked farther out on the pier, found myself a wooden box to sit on, and folded my hands; I could feel my brain moving nearer and nearer to chaos.  I did not move this time, did absolutely nothing to prevent it.  (Ch. 4, 231)

The next page is the last one, so salvation or catastrophe is near.  I wonder if this is really what so many writers found interesting.  I do not wonder that much, actually, since I know what they were writing.  They were ready for fiction about chaos.

*   Aside from the physical setting, Christiana, which is pretty interesting.  I suspect it would be possible to track the narrator’s wanderings on a map.

My joy overpowered me - Mr. Hunger tries to sell his buttons

Each of the four sections of Hunger escalates the narrator’s misery.  Each time he has gone without food for longer; he has a harder time finding even a scrap of money.  The structure of the chapters is repetitive, but I would guess few readers find them repetitive in practice.  The narrator’s suffering creates tension.  The fact that in each chapter his suffering gets worse is itself a source of tension.  I know, from the first sentence that the starving writer does not, in the end, starve, yet I experience something close to genuine relief when, at the end of each chapter, gets some money in his hands.

Chapter 3 violates the pattern in numerous ways, which I am ignoring.  There is a woman involved in that one, a different appetite.

In Chapter 2, the narrator has become so hungry that he decides to sell the buttons of his coat.  Or, he has become so craze with hunger that he believes he can get money for his buttons.  He has already sold everything else of value, and tried to sell everything of no value. 

The hope of selling these five buttons cheered me up instantly, and I said: “See, it’s all going to come out all right!”  My joy overpowered me, and I immediately started cutting he buttons off, one after the other.  All that time, I kept up a silent chatter with myself:

“Well, you see, a man becomes a bit pressed for money, just temporary of course….  Worn out, you say?  You mustn’t make reckless statements.  Just show me someone who wears out fewer buttons than I do. [snipping the fantasy conversation] All right, all right, go and get the police then.  I’ll wait here while you’re looking for a policeman.  And I won’t steal a thing from you…  Yes, good day! Good day!  My name is actually Tangen, I’ve been out a little too late…”  (Ch. 2, 93-4, all italics in original)

To be clear, this is one side of an imaginary conversation the narrator, whose name is not “Tangen,” is concocting while cutting buttons off his coat.  Even his fantasy ends with humiliation and even the police.

Later, more desperate, the narrator finally gives the buttons a try:

How well I knew that large basement shop, my refuge in dark evenings, my vampire friend!  One by one, all my possessions had vanished down there, the little things I had brought from home, my last book.  (110)

That, however vague, is almost the only time any mention is made of the character’s past.  No family, no education, no hometown – this all remains a blank.

“Well, I have something here, and I wanted to ask you if you had any use for – something that was really in the way at home, you understand, no room for them, some buttons.”  (110)

This is the real conversation.  The narrator is, throughout the book, an imaginative and implausible liar, lying as he does here to shield himself from humiliation. The actual pawnbroker does not call the police but does something perhaps worse.

The old pawnbroker laughed and went back to the desk without saying a word.  I stood there.  I hadn’t actually hoped for much, and yet I had thought it possible I would get something.  The laugh was a death sentence.  (111)

Yet, when I turn the page, I see that the chapter is ending and our poor hero is, by a stroke of luck and kindness, saved.

From my earlier reading, years ago, I remembered this scene with the buttons more vividly than anything else in the book.

I was in the mood to conquer obstacles - Knut Hamsun's Hunger

Knut Hamsun, Mysteries, 1892.  I will be writing about this novel, which I have not yet read, in conjunction with Caravana de recuerdos, at the end of October.  Please, join us, anyone.  The novel is supposed to be good.

I have read Hunger (1890) and Pan (1894).  I recently reread Hunger and hope to get through Pan again before long.  The disadvantage of picking Mysteries as the joint book is that it at around 340 pages by far the longest, which is still not very long.  But Hamsun is intense, exhilarating but also exhausting.  Hunger is just over 200 pages, Pan just under.  Even a short book can feel like too much, especially when it is as concentrated as Hunger.

All of this happened while I was walking around starving in Christiana – that strange city no one escapes from until it has left its mark on him…  (first sentence, ellipses Hamsun’s)

And this is what the narrator does.  He is a freelance writer who has trouble writing,  and thus has trouble eating.  Perhaps the causality should be reversed.  Shall we watch him write?

I had taken my pencil and paper out again and was sitting mechanically writing 1848 in all the corners.  If only one good thought would rush in, then words would come!  That had happened before, I had had times when I could write out a long piece with no effort at all, and it would turn out to be first-rate besides.

I wrote 1848 twenty times, wrote it crossways and intersecting and every possible way, waiting for a usable idea to come.  (I, 32)

This is not the way to make a living writing for newspapers, especially given the narrator’s ambitions:

My courage had now returned; it was not enough any longer to write an essay on something so elementary and simple-minded as “Crimes of the Future,” which any ass could arrive at, let alone read in history books.  I felt ready for a more difficult enterprise, I was in the mood to conquer obstacles and I determined on a consideration in three parts of Philosophical Consciousness.  (I, 12)

This will involve a thorough refutation of Kant, or at least a reworking of “the problem of Space and Time” (13).  Norwegian newspapers must have been loads of fun circa 1880.

In each of the novel’s four parts, he has reached a material crisis – no food, no money, just some hope for money that will allow him to stagger forward.  The money obviously does appear at least three times, or else the novel would come to an abrupt end.  Come to think of it, unless the narrator is a ghost, that first sentence suggests that he keeps body and soul together, however tenuously.

This tension between the demands of the material world and this intellectual’s radical desire to be free of it.  He wants to exist in a state of perfect integrity, but his attempts to do so inevitably lead to violations of integrity, the most basic of which is the pain of hunger.  Few things so inescapably pull us back into the physical world as hunger.  I suppose I should be thankful that the workings of the excretory system were still taboo.  I am sure a later novelist has written that book, Hunger re-written for the bowels.

The translation is Robert Bly’s.  I have done nothing yet to make the novel sound as good or interesting as it really is.

Denmark, Sweden, Norway - more Scandinavian books - I can't read all this

More Scandinavian literature, this time from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.  I won’t read it all, I am no kind of expert, I am stuck with English, etc.  But it is easy to get me excited about literature, so suggestions are most welcome.  And if anything looks appealing, perhaps we can read it together.

Denmark

At the forefront are Hans Christian Andersen and Søren Kierkegaard.  The former I read in some quantity just before I started Wuthering Expectations, which was a while ago, I admit, but close enough that I doubt I will revisit him now.  The latter is, I fear, a philosopher, and thus spinach.  In real life, I like spinach, so that is just a metaphor.

More to the point are two short books by Jens Peter Jacobsen, the 1880 novel Niels Lyhne and the 1882 collection Mogens and Other Stories.  Jacobsen has had a strange career in English, kept alive by the glowing testimony of Rainer Maria Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet, where Rilke seems to rank Jacobsen with the Bible.  I should see for myself.

Another novel, Pelle the Conqueror (1910) by Martin Andersen Nexø, I have meant to read for twenty-five years since I saw the magnificent 1987 Bille August film adaptation.  The novel will unfortunately not feature Max von Sydow, but it likely has other virtues.  It is long – the film only covered a fraction of the book – and grim.  I have no idea how it is written.

Isak Dinesen’s work is from the 1930s and later, but so many of her stories are set in Denmark’s past that she would fit well with the older writers.   I am thinking of Seven Gothic Tales (1934) and Winter’s Tales (1942) in particular.

By chance, unconnected to this project, I began reading the contemporary conceptual poet Inger Christensen, and I would like to continue my study of her work.  And I mean study – anyone want to help me work on her cosmic long 1969 poem it?  It (it) features elaborate mathematical patterns – tempting, yes?

Sweden

Even poking around, I still know nothing about Swedish literature.  August Strindberg obviously tops the list, and I hope to read a number of his plays, ranging from the 1888 Miss Julie to the strange 1907 Ghost Sonata.  But there are also novels, stories, essays, some freshly translated.  Please, I beg you, recommendations, guidance.

The Queen’s Diadem (1834) by Carl Jonas Love Almqvist is a novel I encountered a year ago in this post by seraillon.  It is either deeply original, or a knockoff of E. T. A. Hoffmann, or something in between.  The Hoffmann connection by itself would give me something to write about.

Hjalmar Söderberg is another novelist I met through book blogs.  I have read a number of convincing posts about his short, intense 1905 novel Doctor Glas.  If I like it, there are a couple of other Söderberg books in English.

Norway

Henrik Ibsen, of course.  I have read six Ibsen plays, I realize, yet I still feel at sea.  I want to read or re-read a good chunk of them, although I will likely follow conventional opinion and ignore his early phase.  Critics are always dividing Ibsen’s work into phases.  Expect lots of Ibsen.

Knut Hamsun had a long, complicated career, but I know him from his early novels Hunger (1890) and Pan (1894).  Talk about intense.  I would like to revisit those and also read another from the same run, Mysteries (1892).  Then – then I don’t know.  Hunger would likely make my Top 50 Novels of the 19th Century list, if I were to make such a thing.

Off the track – far, far off – is Farthest North (1897) by Fridtjof Nansen, a favorite of min kone, the account of his insane attempt to reach the North Pole by freezing his ship in the winter ice.  Eventually, he just decided to walk.  Utterly nuts.  Sounds wonderful.

Now, some trouble.  Henrik Pontoppidan, Karl Gjellerup, Selma Lagerlöf, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Erik Axel Karlfeldt, Verner von Heidenstam, Frans Eemil Sillanpää – the early Scandinavian Nobelists, the ones who, unlike Hamsun or Sigrid Undset lost their place in English, or never had one.  I gaze upon these names in ignorant awe.

I have often thought that it would be a great book blog project to sort through these and other old prize winners.  I do not believe it is my project.  Yet already comments in the previous post have me warily eying a long, recently translated Pontoppidan novel, the 1904 Lucky Per, which sounds either like a standard attempt to move Naturalism into Danish, or else something much stranger.  Hmm hmm hmm.

Please feel free to correct my errors and recommend more books. 

The necessary but onerous duty of summary

The phrase is pilfered, more or less, from 10 Rules for Criticism by D. G. Myers.  Please note that Prof. Myers does not specify what needs to be summarized, and also note Rule 10, which suggests something about the spirit of the list.

James Wood, in How Fiction Works (2008), includes chapters titled “Detail,” “Language,” “Character,” and so on, but none called, or at all about, “Plot” or “Story.”  Wood is, though, an eminently professional critic – he dutifully summarizes.  What does he summarize?  How does he do it?  Here he is introducing Robert McCloskey’s Make Way for Ducklings:

Mr. and Mrs. Mallard are trying out the Boston Public Garden for their new home, when a swan boat ([clarification on what a swan boat is]) passes them.  Mr. Mallard has never seen anything like this before. (How Fiction Works, 12)

A quotation from the McCloskey's book follows.  This strikes me as something close to ideal.  What the book is about in one clause, followed by an illustrative incident.  Wood follows the identical pattern on the next page, this time with What Maisie Knew by Henry James.  Wood claims to be a gleeful revealer of plot secrets, but he is fibbing.  He in fact reveals only what he plans to use, like any parsimonious writer.  It might well still be too much for a reader far over on the experience side of the continuum, but his touch is delicate.

I find it hard to understand how Wood’s plain plot summary is any more intrusive than something like this, another type of necessary summary:

The nameless narrator of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger is highly unreliable, and finally unknowable (it helps that he is insane)…  Italo Svevo’s Zeno Cosini may be the best example of truly unreliable narration.  He imagines that by telling us his life story he is psychoanalyzing himself (he has promised his analyst to do this).  But his self-comprehension, waved confidently before our eyes, is as comically perforated as a bullet-holed flag. (How Fiction Works, 6)

Wood has now given us specific instructions on how to read these two novels.  Good instructions, yes, but aimed directly at the core experience of reading the books.  The thrill of discovery in these novels lies exactly in figuring out what these lunatics are doing, why and how they’re telling us their stories.  The plots, the incidents, just give the narrators something to do.  The narrators could do a range of other things with similar results, although the first chapter of The Confessions of Zeno, the “last cigarette” chapter, is irreplaceable.  Hunger is particularly pure – it has a “theme and variations” plot, a repetition of a specific kind of rise and fall in tension.  I seem to have summarized it in three sentences in this antique post, which, oddly, also has movie recommendations, darn good ones.

Hunger and The Confessions of Zeno are Modernist novels, working on principles that directly question earlier methods of fiction.  Pre-Modernist novels also question earlier methods of fiction, often in similar ways, but let's just stay on the standard path here.  I read on Modernist principles (other principles, too), regardless of what I am reading, so I feel comfortable with these novels.  I have been trained by them (experience), and by critics like Wood (knowledge). 

The service Wood is providing as a critic is to provide a point of entry into these books for readers not used to their peculiarities.  Wood is not suppressing discovery, but allowing it, encouraging exploration.  Or so I hope.  In those last two sentences, please replace “Wood” with “I,” “is” with “am.”

Why I read Knut Hamsun, and why I don't

Here's a Sven Birkerts review of two Knut Hamsun novels, Hunger (1890) and The Growth of the Soil (1917).

Hunger is a first-rate novel, narrow but original and rich in ideas. It's about a starving writer who wanders the streets of Christiana (Oslo) thinking, about his writing, or about what he can sell to get money (for example, can he sell his buttons but keep the rest of his coat?). Over four chapters, his situation becomes worse and worse. But he refuses to surrender his integrity, however he defines it. The tension and hallucinatory, hysterical tone sometimes resembles Dostoevsky, but the attention to detail and the intellectual concerns of the novel are in a different world. A great book.

Growth of the Soil is an "agrarian" novel that won Hamsun the Nobel prize, but I haven't read it, for the simple reason that the Nazis liked it. This hasn't kept me from enjoying Wagner or Nietzsche, so there's no consistency here. I could be convinced. But for now, no.

Two movie recommendations:

1. Hamsun, in his old age, was a Nazi collaborator, actively supporting the Quisling government in Norway. The movie Hamsun (1996) covers this terrible story. Hamsun is played by Max von Sydow, reason enough to see the movie.

2. There's a Danish version of Hunger (1966) starring another superb Swedish actor, Per Oscarsson. The movie is a serious adaptation, trying to recreate the internal state of the character. Really well done.

These are both available through Netflix, amazingly.