Written 10-1-2022
After reading Pan over the course of the last two days, I’m surprised that Hamsun isn’t read in America more widely. The book is short, clear, and elaborate, all things that I would imagine would make for a great read in schools or reading lists. References to historical events, Victorian morality, and anarchist detachment from cultural norms set Hamsun up as an exciting case study of a free thinking artists, playing with these literary symbols in effort to convey his main points regarding freedom of man and his relationship to society and nature. And, in addition, his focus on the psychological.
All that’s been said thus far doesn’t yet address the elephant in the room, his style. With one foot in prose and another in poetry, the style is stark but uses its negative space to great effect. The words and repeated phrases seem to bleed between the lobes of one’s brain, exposing the structure of the character’s and the reader’s mind in the process. The primary driving force of the novel, the protagonist’s love for Edvarda, is a maze of biases, dreams, and tramas that surface twisted amongst one another, making one indistinguishable from one another unfolding for the reader the complicated relationship that one’s memories have with the their own experience. The epilogue reinforces this when it shifts perspective, showing the protagonist to be not at all the person he’s realized himself to be in the main writings. This throws an already dodgy narrative to the wind, making the situations how they’re described multilayered by introducing at least 3 realities to the reader: the protagonist’s perceived reality, the 3rd party’s perceived reality (which is really a summation of all the other characters), and the implied “true” reality constructed by the reader using the negative space of the previous realities. All this and the prose’s lucidity sets up for an engaging story that is both further wise and complicated then its length or subject matter might let on.
That being said, Hamsun’s philosophical conjectures are more a product of his style than any one aspect of the story. The story itself is of a love gone wrong through confusion, distrust, and expectations. The protagonist plays something of a hunting nature boy, and the woman he falls in love with is a party loving puzzle for our protagonist. They both play different parts of Pan and the typical mix of modern fiction with ancient myth works all right here, but it’s downplayed for the most part. More interesting perhaps is the character of nature and the small town which are respectively seen as free life giving and oppressing and delivered with beautiful prose.
From what I’ve gathered this book is considered a paradigm shift for literature and a move into what is considered to be the modern style. I see both his morals and style especially in Hesse, Mann, and Kafka, matching the claim. This book in particular feels both cleaner in the execution of an idea (fragmented reality, stream of consciousness prose etc) and messier in terms of narrative. This messy nature perhaps feeds into the overarching philosophy in a way that is more endearing than, say, Steppenwolf, which comes across less mature compared to the execution here, but might have a more interesting moral stance. Overall highly recommended and it got me to go out and buy another Hamsun book, Hunger.
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZIRR3wQc3E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ietodNXUIC4