In Pan, Hamsun speaks of nature with a romanticist’s voice, but he takes a bluntly realistic approach to human psychology. It is hard to tell whether Hamsun meant this as an authentic portrait of the romantic histrionics of his age, like a modernist version of Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, or as a study of mental illness, since Glahn is clearly unhinged. One can’t help but admire the realism with which Hamsun details the twists and turns in this relationship, yet the relentless pettiness, verbal cruelty, and spiteful retaliations make for an unpleasant read.
Competition for Edwarda’s affections comes in the form of other suitors, which threatens Glahn’s fragile self-esteem. Hamsun starts to paint Edwarda as a manipulative and fickle coquette, and Glahn proves to be no saint himself. If the two are at a party, for example, and don’t speak to each other for 15 minutes, petty jealousies arise and resentments fester. He falls in love with Edwarda, the daughter of a local landowner, and the two embark on what would appear to be an innocent love, the ideal union of wilderness and civilization.Īs the relationship develops, however, it becomes less idyllic and more and more twisted. He socializes with citizens of a nearby town and even attends parties, though when he does he can’t help but display a marked social awkwardness that often leaves him feeling ashamed. Glahn is never far from civilization, however. At first the book reads like it’s going to be a variation on Thoreau’s Walden set in a Norwegian wood.
Glahn brings to mind other nomadic woodsmen in Hamsun’s body of work, such as the narrator of Under the Autumn Star and A Wanderer Plays on Muted Strings, or the hero Isak from Growth of the Soil.
In the opening passages of the book, Hamsun vividly describes the beautiful natural environment and Glahn’s intimate relationship to it through his primitive way of living. The narrator, a Lieutenant Glahn, is spending the better part of a year in a cabin in the woods, living alone with his dog Aesop and hunting for his food. The story begins in 1855 in the Norwegian county of Nordland. Norwegian Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun’s novel Pan was first published in 1894.
0 kommentar(er)
