ANE FARSETHÅS: KNUT HAMSUN AND LITERARY QUALITY

It is no secret that authors' views on literary quality are often intimately connected to their own ambitions and literary program.

This is particularly evident in the case of the young Hamsun . His famous lecture tour with its powerful confrontation with realism in general and Ibsen in particular heralded a new literature. But the attack on the established was also obviously suitable for creating hype about his own emerging writing. In Hamsun's case, the publicity was so overt, and his personality and public appearance so suited to the media and the marketplace, that both at the time and afterwards people have been vigilant to ensure that the interests Hamsun served with his lectures were not just a purely idealistic claim .

The literary modernism that emerged around the turn of the century around 1900, and of which Hunger is a part, has largely succeeded in getting its narratives about the past accepted as truth. “On or about December 1910 human character changed,” wrote Virginia Woolf in a famous epigram. And subsequent literary historians often seem to have taken this welcome formula a little more seriously than is suggested by Woolf’s rhetorical exaggeration.

If you read back , you will see that the realistic literature of the 19th century was not at all as square, as simple, as superficial or stereotyped as Woolf or Hamsun would have it, when the latter, for example, argued that "such poetry, which is so predominantly concerned with action, must by its nature be mainly entertainment reading." On the contrary, realism, in its leading practitioners, can stand for nuances in character portrayal, psychology and environmental depiction that are lost in such a caricature. The modernist rebels were nevertheless somewhat right in pointing out that realism, at its weakest, could harden into external ostentatiousness and melodrama.

It is an obvious paradox that after his creative flowering in the 1890s, Hamsun himself came to produce many more works within a traditional realism than he came to write urban soul descriptions about the whisper of blood and the prayer of bone pipes. It was precisely stories about the ups and downs of families, the gossip of small-town society around the water fountain – “funerals and balls, prayer meetings, suicides and herring traffic in great diversity”, which he had previously resented – that became his literary path in the majority of his writing; and not always without a touch of melodrama. The older Hamsun writes works that the younger one would have despised. And over time he also changes his aesthetic preferences – in line with his own development.

Yet one can detect a hint of doubt in the aging author, and a fear that he was now writing "boring and endless old man's talk", no longer on par with the time when he was young, promising and in opposition to the whole world.

The older Hamsun's novels prove that the young Hamsun's caricature of literary quality criteria was just that: a caricature. For aren't the August trilogy or Segelfoss by much more than square pre-made modules – despite the fact that they contain funerals, balls, land trips and herring traffic? In this sense, the older Hamsun took revenge on the younger's arrogance. The later novels have not only won a large readership, but have also, especially in recent years, been the subject of renewed interest in literary research nationally, with several fruitful new interpretations. And Markens grøde has, in Sebastian Hartmann's critically acclaimed production at the National Theatre in 2007, shown that a novel about a natural force of a settler can function as a basis for innovative theatre today.

At the same time, it cannot be ignored that internationally, it is the works of young people that primarily arouse literary interest. In this sense, the young rascal was right in the end: in the eyes of the world, the modernist Hamsun outlives the traditionalist.

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Ane Farsethås is a literary critic and writer.