Pan - Knut Hamsun

PAN – KNUT HAMSUN

If ever a book can be said to be heavy with symbolism then it is Pan by Knut Hamsun. On the surface it's the story of a love affair conducted over a summer between a hunter who lives alone in a hut in the woods and the daughter of a local merchant in a coastal village in northern Norway. All well and good and all very Scandinavian but it's only once you come to the end of it that you think: 'Hang on, what is this I've just read?'.

Pan is indeed the story of a love affair but it is also about the chasm and even the clash between nature and civil society. It's about perception and interpretation. It's about sex and love and the joining of the two but also about separation. It's a bee dance but with people rather than insects moving and circling around each other. It's about not knowing what to do with love when it happens. It's about the beauty of love but how it also causes pain and damage. It's about being touched by love and never being able to recover. It's about the flitting in a blink of an eye between objectivity and subjectivity, reality and dream, and truth and illusion. It's about messages communicated by actions. It's about communication via objects. It's about life in all its glory and all its knotted, bound-up frustration. It's about the beauty of the world and the ugliness within it. It's about free will. It's about contradiction, suspicion, confusion, despair, jealousy, worthiness, nature, the seasons, attrition, fragmentation, self-destruction, lust, obsession, exultation, paranoia, rivalry, pride, and sorrow.

That's all.

Whilst on the subject of Knut Hamsun, there's a conversation to be had here regarding artists, their work, their personal lives and their politics, and whether the three can or even should be separated? It's a very old debate that crops up every year or so and has just recently surfaced again.

There's a scene in The Joker where Joaquin Phoenix dances down a flight of steps to the tune of Gary Glitter's old song, Rock'n'Roll Part 2. It's well choreographed and the music fits the scene perfectly. The question being, however, that should a song by a convicted paedophile have been used at all? The answer was that Gary Glitter holds no publishing rights to the song so he wouldn't make any money from it, and that also in America the same song is often played at football matches so is viewed in a different context to how it's viewed in England.

In a recent essay, Nick Cave wrote disparagingly about anti-fascists, suggesting they are in a mutually self-sustaining marriage with the Far Right. Cave's political naivety was embarrassing and displayed a complete lack of understanding of the danger presented by the Far Right if not challenged. Could his lack of political insight be kept apart from his art or did it represent a shadow now cast upon it?

In regards to Knut Hamsun, it turns out that this towering figure in Norwegian literacy and according to Charles Bukowski “the greatest writer who has ever lived” was a supporter of Hitler, though there's no indication of this in any of his books. For Norwegians, this has apparently been the cause of endless grief for them that they've wrestled with ever since, trying to separate their world-famous writer from his political beliefs.

Does now knowing this about Hamsun colour his books? Yes, of course it does. In the same way that if Hamsun had been a vocal or even physical opponent of the Nazis it would surely enhance his books - or the reception of them at least. In the same way that you can blind taste wine you can also read books, hear music or watch films with one eye closed. Once the blind-fold is lifted, however, there is no escape from the truth which then leads to the dilemma. The saving grace is that the decision made as to whether you continue reading, listening or viewing or whether the art has been spoilt forever is a personal one. These questions are the stuff of being human. The stuff, in a way, of Knut Hamsun's writings

John Serpico