Life Sentences by William H Gass

Author:William H Gass [Gass, William H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: nepalifiction, TPB
ISBN: 978-0-307-95744-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-01-16T18:15:00+00:00

Did this action bring the fire department, consume the house, damage his relationship with the husband? We are never told. We aren’t told Hamsun had bronchitis instead of TB either.

Unfortunately, Kolloen is infatuated with this rhetorical device. He employs it to render nearly every section of Hamsun’s life as routinely as if he were slicing a loaf of rye. Eventually, its appearance becomes annoying: “A man walked in and sat at the neighboring table.… Hamsun had been a guest in his house on several occasions.… Now, they pretended not to see each other.… There was good reason for Hamsun to be unsettled by this chance encounter with Erhardt Frederik Winkel Horn. He had been having an affair with his wife.”

The conviction Hamsun has that each man is a mystery (except for English tourists and other objects of his scorn—they are just the stupids we take them for) is rather delightfully played out in Mysteries, a surprisingly lighthearted little novel that unpacks like a box of puzzles the inner selves of its characters, yet leaves the puzzles puzzling even after we’ve found a place for all the pieces. I think the reader is supposed to feel that a mystery is what we each ought to strive to be. We are to run away and play hide-and-no-seek in our unconscious.

Three problems: (1) If Hamsun is always working out personal issues and settling scores in his books, how shall he manage to escape the egocentric predicament? Joyce’s mememoreme seems to account for everything. (2) The psyche is a strange unfunny place; it tends, when unveiled, to be ugly, or silly, or dumb, or childish, or really evil. Where do the generosities lie concealed—those virtues too shy to be ordinarily seen? A few acts of benevolence in Hunger succeed brilliantly in undermining themselves; that is, they turn out to be not so nice after all. (3) In trying to render the random and the inexplicable, the text may exhibit the paradox of imitative form (Coleridge’s famous caution to Wordsworth that he should not render a dull and garrulous discourser by being dull and garrulous). Hamsun’s stories wander with apparent aimlessness. Why not call several Wanderers? He did so.

After Hunger, Pan is perhaps the most celebrated of Hamsun’s novels. It also makes allegorical gestures, but its loyalty to its symbolic structure is a bit more devoted. In Hunger, the town through which our hero caroms is called Christina (an early name for Oslo), and the text will suggest, on more than one occasion, that its hero’s suffering is Christlike; on the other hand he complains like Job and curses God and in the end simply leaves town. Making a holy mess and then leaving is Hamsun’s principal fictional formula. It always seemed to work in his life.

The principal struggle that Hunger depicts is between the body and the ego’s ambitions. Neither God nor his city is an agent of the ensuing suffering. In Pan the pain is self-inflicted, too (Pan shoots off his big toe, an old enlistment dodge), with pride and power, as well as the rifle, the punishing instruments.

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