The following decade was a very productive period for Hamsun, although his work was not always favorably received.
Hunger
(1890) garnered excellent reviews, but sales were disappointing, and the reception of his second novel,
Mysteries
(1892), was mixed. Moreover, a series of lectures that he gave in the capital and elsewhere in 1891, while causing a sensation, were severely criticized for the high-handed manner in which he dismissed his immediate predecessors on the Norwegian Parnassus. And Hamsun’s life, though not exactly nomadic, remained unsettled, as he shuttled back and forth between Kristiania and Copenhagen, between one Norwegian town and another, and—during the period from 1893 to 1895—between Norway and Paris. His restlessness seems to have affected his writing as well, to judge by his forays into different genres. Thus, in the interval between
Pan
(1894) and
Victoria
(1898), Hamsun wrote mainly plays, despite his low opinion of dramatic literature and the theater. In a letter written in August 1898, he says: “I’m tired of the novel, and I’ve always despised the drama; I’ve now begun to write verse, the only literature that is not both pretentious and insignificant, but only insignificant.”
10
While calling
Victoria
“some sort of ‘pendent’ [sic] to
Pan,
”
11
he refers to it as “nothing but a little lyricism” and as “full of ‘Stimmung.’ ”
12
If self-demeaning language were in order, a more appropriate pretext might have been the overall plot of this short fiction, a story of star-crossed lovers separated by class and circumstance. Judged by its plot alone,
Victoria
is pure melodrama. However, as in
Pan,
the plot is merely a framework within which Hamsun creates a web of narrative modes, themes, and motifs, the elements that make up the novel’s substance.
Victoria
consists of a mosaic of scenes and situations developed according to a basic psychological scheme: dreamlike amorous expectation followed by triumph and, subsequently, by bitter disappointment. Sometimes the second stage is missing, causing the narrative to alternate between hope and disillusion. Yet, the ultimate effect produced by the novel is not one of disillusionment. This may be partly due to a frequently occurring structural pattern in Hamsun’s narrative, one whereby a flat rendering of an encounter, mostly couched in clipped, constrained dialogue, is amplified by ecstatic recall and, eventually, literary re-creation. Since Johannes and Victoria see each other so rarely, their meetings usually begin very tentatively and awkwardly, but Johannes’ pent-up feelings often break through, as happens in chapter three, where they meet in the city. His ardent confession recapitulates the emotional adventures with which his loving memory of Victoria has enriched him. “I would always see or hear something that reminded me of you, all day, at night too,” he tells her. The scene is rounded off by another dialogue sequence, which ends with her telling him, “You’re the one I love.”
The first part of chapter four employs the same device on a broader scale, as Johannes recalls the entire experience related in chapter three. Being in a state of semidelirious happiness after Victoria’s declaration of love, he overwhelms an irate neighbor peeved by his predawn singing with an ecstatic description of his nocturnal experiences. The story he tells him is a heightened version of the previously noted confession to Victoria. He tells the man that, as he was writing during the night, “the heavens were opened, . . . an angel offered me wine and I drank it, intoxicating wine which I drank out of a garnet cup.” This possible allusion to the baptism of Jesus also appears in what he related to Victoria the previous day.
13
In both instances, remembrance and literary creation are indistinguishable. For while Johannes tells the neighbor that he “lived it all afresh, one more time,” the account he gives him of the meeting with Victoria is a modified version, in some respects quite fanciful. “[W]e met the King,” he says, “and the King turned to look at her, at my beloved, because she is so tall and lovely.” He goes on to describe what he wrote as “an endless song to joy, to happiness. It was as though happiness lay naked before me with a long, laughing throat and wanted to come to me.” That Johannes’ happiness is dispelled after he runs into Victoria and Otto, his well-to-do rival, in the theater conforms to the larger rhythm of disenchantment.
This sequence of episode and recollection-
cum
-creative transformation is only one of several strategies whereby Hamsun complicates the narrative flow of the novel. Having the effect of repetition, it produces a sense of recurring cycles of experience, thereby slowing down the pace of the action and mitigating the melodramatic suddenness of key events. The story’s climax, Victoria and Otto’s engagement party, exhibits another scenic development, equally, if not more, decisive in bracketing the novel’s conventional plot. The scene of scandal, which Hamsun had picked up from Dostoyevsky and used successfully in previous works, assumes in
Victoria
an especially outrageous form, since it develops from a celebratory occasion in high society. Again, the opening note, for Johannes, is one of happy anticipation, of which he is cruelly disabused in the course of the party.
In effect, there is a succession of scenes of scandal taking place at the party. Victoria’s introduction of Camilla, the girl Johannes had saved from drowning some years earlier, is followed by a series of acrimonious exchanges between Victoria and Johannes reminiscent of the barbed words of Glahn and Edvarda in
Pan.
Johannes is overcome by a “hopeless despair” and turns “deathly pale.” Walking around “like an outcast,” he gives and receives refined insults, and when he rises to respond to a toast offered him by Richmond, his future rival for the love of Camilla, Johannes suffers a deep humiliation. Taken aback by Victoria’s wild outbursts, “her eyes blazing,” he is forced to change course and gives a knowingly false retrospective of his relationship with the Castle children. Johannes even implies that his genteel friends had “a large share” in his success as a writer. No wonder Ditlef, Victoria’s brother, remarks to his mother, “I never knew it was really me who wrote his books.” Obviously upset by the erotic electricity passing between his fiancée and Johannes, Otto, now a lieutenant, warns Victoria by threatening to go hunting with a neighbor, then pokes Johannes in the eye and leaves in a dudgeon.
In view of these occurrences, which contravene ordinary canons of logic and reason, the death of Otto, whether self-inflicted or accidental, becomes quite acceptable. Similarly, the cruel irony of Victoria being turned down when she is finally free to offer herself to Johannes, an irony that under more normal circumstances might seem manufactured, is quite in tune with a state of affairs that has lost all contact with decorum and rational order.
Beyond relating a love story,
Victoria
is a celebration of love in all its facets, its ups and downs, its torments and raptures, its capricious twists and turns. It conjures up the charms of adolescent and youthful love, bright and adventurous or desperately unhappy, as well as the fateful attractions of a besetting passion. While Victoria feels obliged to suppress her love of Johannes and, as a result, becomes a prodigy of dissimulation, with occasional bouts of spite and ill humor, Camilla quickly finds herself in a situation where she simulates a love she does not feel. Here, as in
Pan,
the characters reveal themselves as a cluster of inconsistencies and contradictions. Thus, Victoria will tell Johannes, “You’re the one I love,” embracing and kissing him while at the same time attempting to palm off Camilla on him. A comic sidelight on the vagaries of Eros is provided by Victoria’s former tutor, who, having chosen bachelorhood after the failure of a youthful romance, ends up marrying a widow. The tutor is a perfect foil to the central characters’ sublime passions.
The inserted vignettes, or sketches, and the lyrical interludes present a wider array of perspectives on the irrational, and highly ambiguous, workings of desire. The former, mostly depicting situations that involve jealousy and adultery, occasionally assume anomalous forms that, in isolation, would appear implausible or absurd; in context, however, they expand the novel’s narrative and psychological horizon. There is, for example, the husband who, having surprised his wife with her lover, asks, “What do you say to putting horns on him—on the one who just left—?” a question that draws a scream from his wife. No less grotesque is the behavior of a loving couple who, as they grow old and decrepit, vie with one another in constancy, to the point that the husband disfigures his face to match his paralyzed wife’s “deep furrows” of grief.
By dint of its language, carefully structured by anaphoras and refrain, the main lyrical interlude qualifies as a poem in prose. In this poem, love runs the gamut from being “a yellow phosphorescence in the blood” and a “hot devil’s music that set even the hearts of old men dancing” to a “summer night with stars in the sky and fragrance on earth.” The imagery ranges from the idyllic (“wind whispering among the roses”) to the repellent (a garden of “obscene toadstools”), from nocturnal darkness to flashing suns, from heaven to hell. Ultimately, in a pastiche of Genesis, love becomes “God’s first word, the first thought that sailed through his brain. When he said, ‘Let there be light!’ there was love. . . . And love became the world’s beginning and the world’s ruler; but all its ways are full of flowers and blood, flowers and blood.” Love, or desire, has become an all-encompassing metaphysical principle.
Victoria
is unquestionably Hamsun’s most erotically charged novel; here, more than anywhere else, love is an inexorable cosmic force; it rules not only the human world but also nature, and Hamsun evokes its omnipresence by a rich array of sensuous images. The “song to joy” of Johannes is duplicated in the forest by the “wild, passionate music” of the birds, the mating call of the blackcock, and the sound of the cuckoo. In her post-engagement confession, Victoria tells Johannes that his voice at the party “was like an organ,” and in the postscript to her deathbed letter, Victoria notes that she has “even heard some music.” These recurring musical images, together with the images of color—chiefly white, yellow, and red
14
—form a counterpoise to the somewhat ominous connotations of “flowers and blood” in the ambiguous conclusion to the above-cited lyric interlude. They mark a borderland where the experience of Eros coexists with its sublimated forms, such as a felt kinship with all living creatures and the exaltations of artistic inspiration.
With all his attention to Eros as a universal force, Hamsun’s emphasis is nevertheless psychological, as he evokes the complexities of individual erotic experience and the ambiguities of artistic creation. The former are most memorably portrayed through Victoria and Camilla. Although the two women form part of a replicating structure, a kind of round with changing partners, they are nicely individualized. Victoria, a near relation of
Pan
’s Edvarda, is torn apart by conflicting emotions; to her, love approaches a perpetual torment, occasionally interrupted by moments of transcendent rapture. Though the color red is associated with both women, it acquires—together with yellow, the color of joy—a deeper resonance in the case of Victoria: her red hat and parasol, unlikely emblems of passion, are eventually replaced by the red of a hemorrhage, the harbinger of a species of love-death. These symbolic touches are, in Victoria’s case, supported by nonverbal techniques with a be haviorist slant. In the dialogues of Johannes and Victoria, a language of gesture complements the brief verbal exchanges: Victoria’s lips, face, eyes, and hands speak when her tongue is tied. Her lips tremble, she drops her eyes, and her hands make contact, although otherwise she appears cold and unapproachable. But we also hear Victoria’s own voice, in a couple of monologues muted by no inhibiting constraints. Edvarda is given no such opportunity in
Pan;
she has to wait until the publication of
Rosa
(1908), a novel in which she appears, before she can give voice to her true feelings. By comparison with Victoria, Camilla is appropriately superficial, a bundle of bad faith but a perfect embodiment of one face of love, inconstancy, and Victoria’s diametrical opposite.
Fascinating as these two young women are, the novel’s central focus is nevertheless Johannes as a developing writer. Already as a child he cuts “letters and signs” into stones found in the abandoned quarry, one of his favorite haunts. Both the quarry, which he envisages as a cave, and the sea, which also gives rise to romantic fantasies, are images of depths to be explored. His dream of becoming a diver is accidentally fulfilled when, at the age of eighteen, he saves Camilla from drowning. These spaces of refuge and exploration are complemented by images of isolation and power, like being a fearsome “maker of matches” or the ruler of an island guarded by a gunboat. In these images and fantasies creativity is associated with human detachment, an association that the novel will bear out.
Johannes’ two passions, for Victoria and literary art, are interestingly interrelated in the book. They can scarcely be separated. All his poetry is written for her, and his “big book,” completed after years of emotional frustration but before the official engagement of Victoria and Otto, is a transparent reworking of his youthful experiences transposed into the future. We are given his envisioned conclusion to the book, a meeting at an inn between a no-longer-young, graying man and the lady of the castle, easily recognizable as Victoria by her yellow dress. In the emotional scene that ensues, the man sates his pride in a bitter speech, followed by a prayer for forgiveness. One may note that the scene ends with the lady confessing her love and that the very words she uses, “I love you; do not misunderstand me anymore, you are the one I love. Good-bye!” echo Victoria’s declaration of love for Johannes in chapter three. These literary reworkings look like a further development of the pattern demonstrated above, in which the past is creatively transformed. Already in Johannes’ recollections, events are modified, telescoped, and viewed at a distance: the borderline between
Wahrheit
and
Dichtung
is a fluid one. Whatever the motive, in his life as in his art, Johannes creates an imagined world: experience is always mediated.