By James Wood
Published in the London Review of Books on 26 November 1998
A young man, hectic and dirty, sits on a park bench in a cold city. He is wild, nervous, seems to fiddle with his soul. Beside him, an old man is holding a newspaper. The young man begins a conversation. In its course, the old man reveals that he is blind. He asks the young man where he lives. The young man decides to lie, and names a pleasant square, somewhere he could not afford in his present circumstances. The blind man knows the square, knows the building, in fact. What is the name of the landlord again, asks the blind man. The young man says the first word that comes into his head: ‘Hippolati.’ Ah yes, says the blind man, Hippolati, that’s right, he knows the name, it was on the tip of his tongue. The young man is enjoying this; he froths his lies up into greater extravagances. He reminds the old man that Hippolati is something of an inventor, that he invented an electric prayer book. Yes, says the blind man, he recalls hearing some thing like that. And, Hippolati was for seven years a cabinet minister in Persia, adds the young man. Ah yes, says the old man.
Now the young man, who is clearly unstable, begins to get angry. Why is the old man so blandly gullible? Why is he agreeing to these ridiculous lies? But instead of accusing him of being a dupe, he does the opposite, and bizarrely accuses him of not believing his stories. He yells at him:
Perhaps you don’t even believe that a man with the name Hippolati exists! What obstinacy and wickedness in an old man – I’ve never seen the likes of it. What the hell is the matter with you? … Let me tell you sir, that I’m not at all accustomed to such treatment as yours, and I won’t stand for it.
The old man looks frightened, and moves away as fast as his legs will take him, running with his small, geriatric steps.
Knut Hamsun’s greatest novels – from which this is a typical scene – throttle reason. In Hunger (1890), Mysteries (1892) and Pan (1894), the Norwegian writer founded the kind of Modernist novel which largely ended with Beckett – of crepuscular states, of alienation and leaping surrealism, and of savage fictionality. He took from Dostoevsky the idea that plot is not something that merely happens to a character, but that a really strange character leads plot around like an obedient dog. He took from Strindberg the idea that the soul is not a continuous wave but a storm of interruptions – something ‘patched together’, in Strindberg’s words. In Hamsun, characters provoke apparently pointless encounters which they then disown or annul at whim. They are epistemological brawlers, always challenging meaning to a fight. They invent the scenes through which they move, and thus invent themselves afresh on every page. More than most fictional heroes, the hero in Hamsun writes the novel we read, plots it for us. Yet, like escaped convicts, these heroes erase their tracks as they proceed, and this seems to be hapless rather than willed: they carry no continuous memory of what they have said or done from scene to scene. They seem only to be escaping themselves.
Read on…
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v20/n23/james-wood/addicted-to-unpredictability
Latitude Bites 