The short story was published twice under two different titles. I interpret the fact that they do not meet privately as an image of their inability to act out their desires.” At the same time, they are partly protected from the gaze of others. “They meet in places where nobody pays any attention to an encounter between two men. Tuberculosis was often aestheticized in contemporary art. “I think it is significant that the meeting places are not private, they do not meet in someone’s home, but they are not entirely public either,” he says. Both the first and the fourth encounter take place in Copenhagen, the second on board a train in Germany, and the third in a gambling joint in New York. Johnsson also emphasises the places in which the two men meet in his reading of the erotic attraction between the two. At the same time, those who are open for or look for such topics will easily recognise them.” The significance of place “In this way, the reader is led towards the horrific and away from what may be the story’s actual topic, such as homosexuality. “The gothic genre enabled writes to write about topics that it was unacceptable to talk about, by hiding unlawful or unacceptable topics behind gothic elements of horror,” he explains. The genre thematised topics such as death, decay, ghosts and curses. Gothic literature was a genre that originated in the romantic period. For instance, the writer Sigurd Mathiesen wrote gothic horror stories in the same period that were precisely about homoerotic love.” “The relationship between the narrator and the stranger may also be read as a doppelganger motif, in which case the stranger may be interpreted as a part of the narrator’s ‘I’ that he does not want to acknowledge,” he says. “I find it reasonable to read the power struggle between the narrator and the stranger as sexually charged: Two men battle with a homoerotic desire that they cannot act out, and they fight and struggle because they need to repress their true feelings.” Horror as pretextĪt the same time, the short story is also a type of horror story, Johnsson maintains. “In Hemmelig ve, however, there is a man who pursues another man, but no-one has interpreted that as erotic. Researchers have often interpreted this as an erotic motif.

They meet four times, and there is a sort of power struggle going on between them.”Īccording to Johnsson, there are several examples of men pursuing women in Hamsun’s texts. “The two of them have a very strange relationship. Henrik Johnsson reads the short story Hemmelig ve (‘Secret Suffering’) as a story about homoerotic desire.

Tales of Love & Loss by Knut Hamsun