Another Terrible Person, Great Writer

Sort of following up on my Bad People, Good Art.

I know about Knut Hamsun, yet have never read him. I was vaguely aware of his Nazi connections. There is more detail in Breakthrough and disgrace: Knut Hamsun’s Hunger and Pan in retrospect by Terence Cave and Tore Rem on the OUPBlog.

Hamsun’s Nobel prize was awarded, essentially, for his 1917 novel Growth of the Soil, the story of a pioneering Norwegian farmer who labours to cultivate the land in a remote Norwegian province. This novel cemented Hamsun’s already considerable reputation and was praised for its “idealistic” qualities. The Nobel committee was critical of the experimental qualities of Hamsun’s works of the 1890s, but there is no sign that they reacted against his political ideas. Yet Growth of the Soil was widely read in Germany and was to become a favourite of the National Socialist regime, for which it was held to exemplify the virtues of a Germanic love of the soil. It thus played a central role in making Hamsun a favourite for Goebbels and others in the Nazi leadership when they looked for major cultural figures who could promote their values. Hamsun became, in short, a new Goethe from the north.

This soon led to ideological challenges at home. How was one to read Hamsun? The apologetic Hamsun tradition was started already in 1936 by the communist playwright, later celebrated resistance poet, Nordahl Grieg. He wanted to save a writer whom he loved and insisted that Hamsun was a political idiot but a poetic genius. Life and work ought to be thought of as separate.

What is most remarkable about Hunger and Pan, the early Hamsun works that now appear in new English translations, is that, in their quite different ways, both are accessible, deeply moving, hilarious (Hunger in particular), and rich in strange ways of looking at the world and its inhabitants, while at the same time constantly challenging conventional modes of storytelling. Both also illustrate (again in contrasted ways) what Hamsun meant by “a poetry of the nerves,” his phrase for the mode of inner dissonance that governs his fictional imagination. This is what one reads these works for, and it is also these qualities that give him a unique place in the rise of European modernism. It is what made them seem so fresh and sensational when they first appeared. Hamsun’s fiction, like that of so many of his twentieth–century successors, calls out post-romantic, nostalgic, and emotionally complacent modes of storytelling. These are not doctrinaire novels, but explorative works of fiction, even when they no doubt query certain aspects of the modernity to which they belong; one has to look to Hamsun’s essays and letters for more outright expressions of socio-political opinion.

How one reads Hunger and Pan will thus depend critically on the reader’s choice of perspective. You can regard them as poetic experiments, as uniquely brilliant instances of the early modernist imagination, or, more sombrely, as embryonic symptoms of the twentieth-century European catastrophe. Hamsun’s life and works are suspended between these two polarities.

The same problem exists for the French writer Céline (minus the Nobel Prize). Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. recommended him, I finally got my hands on Journey To The End of Night. Great novel. His politics are idiotic, too, and if there are politics in the novel, they are hard for me to detect. Luckily, one need not subscribe to the politics to enjoy the novel. The Guardian has this on him: Céline: French literary genius or repellent antisemite? New film rekindles an old conflict.

sch 11/6