Misanthropy Has Its Perks: On Pan by Knut Hamsun
Essays
By Gavin Thomson
Knut Hamsun, the misanthropic Norwegian writer who in 1920 won the Nobel Prize for literature and who later suicided his reputation by eulogizing Hitler, renders the joy of introspecting alone in the woods so convincingly that sometimes, during bad moods, I wish I understood firsthand how it feels to hate other people (without becoming a Nazi) as much as he did, purely so that I could enjoy solitude. Unlike Hamsun, I find it painful to introspect, especially in the woods. If thoughts are rakes, which they aren’t but no matter, then introspecting in the woods is like stepping on a rake and having it smash my face, then stepping on another rake and having it smash my face and so forth. Some people say they like to wander the woods because it helps them get out of their heads. Are they mental? I am mental. (My psychiatrist has in fact advised me to stop taking walks alone in the woods and instead find a more social form of exercise.) But pines only appeal to me when I pine for them in the city, especially when riding the subway beside a man who flosses his teeth and flicks plaque on my cheek. To mosey through the woods is to mosey along a road of rakes toward the moldy basement of my mind, where things aren’t right. “My mind’s not right,” wrote Robert Lowell, whose mind wasn’t right, in “Skunk Hour.” A few lines later: “I myself am hell.” Exactly.
How I envy Lieutenant Glahn, the narrator of Hamsun’s lyrical novel, Pan (1894). Glahn, a young man, feels happy when alone in the woods.
Hamsun was an eccentric autodidact whose childhood, much of which he spent north of the Arctic Circle with an uncle who beat him, would make Marcus Aurelius sad. In his late twenties and early thirties—decades before he became a fascist, and when he wrote his best books—he was fanatically dedicated to the literary potential of introspection. From the black skies and cold fjords and deep valleys of his youth, he conjured a no-less-than-revolutionary aesthetic of inwardness. He famously said to a friend (he did have friends), “What interests me are my little soul’s endless emotions, the special, strange life of the mind, the mysteries of the nerves in a hungry body.” Appropriately, his first and semiautobiographical novel, Hunger (1890), was a barely plotted, proto-stream-of-consciousness, first-person account of a hungry young literary man in Oslo, who can’t eat because he can’t write and can’t write because he can’t eat—an artist too hungry to make art. Hamsun published Hunger one year before Freud published his first book, On the Aphasias: a Critical Study, which was a neurophysiological, not psychoanalytic, look at aphasia; and two years before William James published The Stream of Consciousness, thereby coining the titular phrase. Hamsun navigated the unconscious by means of a stream-of-consciousness style avant la lettre—before “stream of consciousness” and “unconscious” took the stage and rapidly grew into the towering lexical celebrities they are today.
Indeed, it’s hard to overstate how profound was Hamsun’s influence on the modern and postmodern novel. Internal monologues, an absurdist misfit hero (or antihero), the artist as clown—these features now seem as elemental to the novel as fluoride is to tap water. But Hamsun (at least according to many of his English-speaking critics) was one of the first to deploy them. This may be why Isaac Bashevis Singer has said that, just as Russian literature in the nineteenth century “came out of Gogol’s greatcoat,” the whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century came from Hamsun. It might also be why Charles Bukowski called Hamsun the greatest writer to have ever lived. He was wrong, of course. There is for example Shakespeare. But Bukowski didn’t entirely miss his mark.
The hero of Pan, Glahn, is an energetic soul with a complex unconscious. He’s more human than the talking cardboard caricatures that, thanks to Norway’s literary daddy, Ibsen, cluttered Scandinavia’s otherwise-sparse landscape. Glahn is no more alive, or at home, than when alone or with his good dog, Aesop, in the woods, introspecting. Glahn knows something I don’t.
Unsatisfied by doggy-paddling like a wimp, Hamsun dives with gusto into Glahn’s murky mind and emerges, still breathing, with shiny pearls of insight. A person is little more than the sum total of his or her moods. The self is not like a rock but rather like a wayward river. If consistency exists, it exists in the outer world, which doesn’t care about people. The inner world is unstable and in flux. It surprises, delights, enrages, torments. Moods provoke impulses, impulses provoke actions, actions provoke moods, and so on. It’s naïve to think one has a certain character; one has many masks, many moods, many characters. Glahn (and even more so the narrator of Hunger) is not a man without qualities; rather he’s a man with too many to count. But one thing is certain: Glahn feels damn good in the woods.
Lieutenant Glahn escapes the city for Nordland, a small county in northern Norway, where his story takes place. Pan begins, “The last few days I have thought and thought of the Nordland summer’s endless day.” Nordland is a place where in summer the sun rarely sets and in winter it rarely rises. It’s a moody place. Also, it’s very far away from Oslo’s shushed herd of Scandinavians with their hollow cheekbones, fish pudding, and seasonal affective disorders. From his humble hut, Glahn can see “a confusion of islands and rocks and skerries, a little of the sea, a few blue-tinged peaks; and behind the hut . . . the forest, an immense forest.” Glahn has found his home. “Only in the forest did all within me find peace, my soul became tranquil and full of might.” Where are the rakes? There are no rakes, not for Glahn.
It is 1855. Glahn uses the sun as a clock. He and his dog, Aesop, hunt for food, and they roast and eat what they kill. Glahn talks to his dog, the trees, ptarmigans, grass. They don’t talk back, and Glahn prefers it this way. A herky-jerky love affair with a local, the miller’s daughter—a girl who’s either seventeen or twenty, depending on whom he asks—eventually disrupts Glanh’s inner peace, as love affairs do; and he shoots himself in the foot. But at first Glahn enjoys a sort of pantheistic marriage with the woods and its creatures both cuddly and spooky. Yes, Glahn has no human friends. But a boulder?
There was a boulder outside my hut, a big grey boulder. It always seemed by its expression to be well-disposed towards me; it was as if it saw me as I came past and knew me again. I used to like making my way past this boulder when I went out in the morning, and it was as though I left a good friend there who would be waiting when I got back.
The boulder is Glahn’s friend! The big rock is his rock. It will never hurt him or be hurt by him. A boulder, unlike a person, doesn’t mind if Glahn accidentally addresses it with the informal du rather than the formal de. Nor does it mind if he threatens to shoot it with his gun, as Glahn in one swift scene impulsively threatens Nordland’s doctor, moments before Glahn shoots himself in the foot.
Although, as Glahn believes, “it is within ourselves that the sources of joy and sorrow lie,” joy comes most readily to him when no one can disturb it. He can be safely happy in the woods—so happy, for example, that a twig moistens his eyes—because he knows no one will see his tears. With twig as his witness, he is happy enough to cry. Not coincidentally, he sees natural things with more clarity than do most people, me included. I’m not sure if he would do swimmingly on an Emotion Recognition Task. But he notes how a little green caterpillar looping its way along a branch “looks like a bit of green thread slowly stitching a seam along the branch.”
It’s plausible that writing about being alone in nature was for Hamsun more pleasurable than actually being alone in nature; that solitude and nature—and solitude in nature—were better when recollected in tranquility than when experienced firsthand as a farmhand, which for some time Hamsun was. After all, Hamsun did begin writing Pan in Paris. Yet the truth probably is that Hamsun found both being alone in nature and writing about it equally gleeful, which is saying a lot for a suicidal man (who never went through with it). Glahn, a horny bad boy with an “animal look” and the social graces of a mid-pubescent homeschooler, does very much find nature pleasant. Whereas with people he ruminates, in the woods he luxuriates. Nor does he pity himself. Nor does introspecting feel to him like rakes to the face. Nor does he get itchy. Forest paths lead Glahn to Eden. In one scene, intoxicated by “an absurd feeling of joy,” Glahn kneels and in “humility and hope” licks grass. It doesn’t get more Edenic than that.
Glahn escapes the rush and hustle of the city but, more specifically, other people. He is more like Sartre than Lowell (or Milton, to whom Lowell alludes in “Skunk Hour”). The self is not hell. Other people are. What I mean to say is that Glahn wouldn’t love the woods so much if he didn’t despise people. And Glahn wouldn’t despise people if they didn’t humiliate him. It’s his humiliation that flowers his misanthropy—and Hamsun’s art. Auden once said to his friend and fellow poet Stephen Spender, “Art is born of humiliation.” This is especially true in Hamsun’s case. People humiliated the thin-skinned Hamsun, and the woods mended his wounds. And then he wrote brilliantly about it.
Although one could not say that Glahn’s solitary attachment to the woods is healthy, Hamsun proves that misanthropy has its perks. So I cannot help but wonder: is becoming a misanthrope worth it, if it’ll allow me to feel joy in the woods?
Or wait, perhaps I’m missing the point. Perhaps what I need is a dog. Yes, I’ll get a dog and name him Aesop. But, unlike Glahn, I won’t shoot Aesop and send his body to the woman I love. I can’t do that, it’s impossible, as I’m not in love with anyone, not romantically, not now.
It just struck me that, since the last time I visited the woods, I may have become a misanthrope. Therefore, I’ll give the woods a second go.
Gavin Thomson recently completed his MFA (fiction) at Columbia, where he was a Felipe P. De Alba Fellow and also nominated for the Henfield Prize.
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