from Pan

KNUT HAMSUN

It is customary to think of madness as a desert, where solitude, isolation, and monomania join forces to turn the mind away from the world and into itself. Madness might also be thought of as a wood, where the constant hum and rustle of multiplicitous forest life intrudes on the sanctity of thinking, denying it peace, preventing rest. What would happen if the hum of the everyday suddenly became a bit louder? The continual hum of passersby, the buzz of the refrigerator, the dull rumble of each and every thing is normally audible only if you think about it. But if you started to think about it, weren’t able not to think about it, it would drive you crazy within a day. A day, then madness.

Consciousness is all about creating filters, sieves to reduce the too much of which we are ultimately given too little. Fine grit to polish down the edges of the too rough, the too raw, the too direct. I think of all this when I think of the writers who’ve gone mad, of those who’ve turned to suicide or alcohol. In the film Barton Fink, the aging, Faulkner-based character explains: “Writing is peace”; otherwise drink. Later in the film his lover elaborates, “We all need to be understood.”

Among memorable chronicles of the onset of madness—Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart,” Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo—Knut Hamsun’s fin-de-siècle Pan is the most environmental. The dark, living woods of northernmost Norway mirror the teeming fullness of the mind of Glahn, the solitary hunter. Having grown accustomed to his hermitage, he suddenly finds himself falling in love with the daughter of his only neighbor. And he begins to slip. He attends parties at her father’s house across the lake, and his animal nature both intrigues and grates against the society she represents. Then one night, he takes her shoe and hurls it into the lake. It is an unexplainable act, patently absurd. He is lost.

In the passage that follows, Glahn, in his loneliness, imagines a sexual encounter with mythic forest-goers Diderik and Iselin. Immediately after, he is found by a village girl who, having heard rumor of the barbarity in his eyes, wants to know what’s behind them. Glahn, losing the superego, becomes a primal enactment of the id.

A few days passed as best they might; my only friend was the forest and the great solitude. Dear God, I had never known such solitude as on the first of these days. It was full Spring; I found wintergreen and yarrow in the fields, and the chaffinches had arrived; I knew all the birds. Sometimes I took a couple of coins from my pocket and chinked them together to break the solitude. I thought: what if Diderik and Iselin came along!

Soon there began to be no night; the sun barely dipped his face into the sea and then came up again, red, refreshed, as if he had been down to drink. How strangely affected I was sometimes these nights; no man would believe it. Was Pan sitting in a tree watching to see how I would act? And was his belly open; and was he crouching so that he seemed to sit and drink from his own belly? But all this he did just to keep one eye cocked on me; and the whole tree shook with his silent laughter when he saw all my thoughts running away with me. In the forest there was rustling everywhere; animals snuffled, birds called to each other, their whirring mingled with that of the moths so that there was a sound as of whispering back and forth all over the forest. How much there was to hear! For three nights I did not sleep, I thought of Diderik and Iselin.

See, I thought, they might come. And Iselin would lure Diderik over to a tree and say: “Stand here, Diderik, and watch, keep guard over Iselin; that hunter shall tie my shoelace.”

And I am that hunter and she will sign to me with her eyes so that I may understand. And when she comes, my heart understands all and it no longer beats, it booms. And she is naked under her dress from head to foot and I place my hand on her.

“Tie my shoelace!” she says with flaming cheeks. And in a little while she whispers against my mouth, against my lips: “Oh, you are not tying my shoelace, you my dearest heart, you are not tying . . . not tying my . . .”

But the sun dips his face into the sea and comes up again, red, refreshed, as if he had been down to drink. And the air is filled with whispers.

An hour later she says against my mouth: “Now I must leave you.”

And she waves back to me as she goes and her face is still flaming, her face is tender and ecstatic. Again she turns to me and waves.

But Diderik steps forth from the tree and says: “Iselin, what were you doing? I saw you.”

She answers: “Diderik, did you see? I did nothing.”

“Iselin, I saw you do it,” he says again. “I saw.”

Then her loud and happy laughter sounds through the forest and she walks away with him, exulting and sinful from head to foot. And where does she go? To the next one, a hunter in the forest.

It was midnight. [My dog] Aesop had broken loose and was out hunting on his own; I heard him baying up in the hills and when I finally had him again it was one o’clock. A goatherd girl came along; she was knitting a stocking and humming and looking about her. But where was her flock? And what was she doing there in the forest at midnight? Nothing, nothing. Perhaps she was restive, perhaps just glad to be alive, what does it matter? I thought: she has heard Aesop barking and knows I am out in the forest.

When she came, I stood up and looked at her and saw how young and slender she was. Aesop also stood and looked at her.

“Where are you from?” I asked her.

“From the mill,” she answered.

But what could she have been doing in the mill so late at night?

“How is it that you dare to walk here in the forest so late at night,” I said, “you who are so young and slender?”

She laughed and answered: “I am not so young, I am nineteen.”

But she could not have been nineteen, I am convinced that she was lying and was only seventeen. But why did she lie and pretend to be older?

“Sit down,” I said, “and tell me what they call you.”

And, blushing, she sat down by my side and said she was called Henriette.

I asked: “Have you a sweetheart, Henriette, and has he ever embraced you?”

“Yes,” she answered with an embarrassed laugh.

“How many times already?”

She remains silent.

“How many times?” I repeated.

“Twice,” she said softly.

—translated by James W. McFarlane