ARNE MELBERG: IN FAIRYLAND
"I'm sitting here at home, that is, away, in my own way."
Knut Hamsun is on a trip to a foreign country, he finds himself in Moscow, which makes a colossal impression, he has gone out on a whim to get a button cooked and then ended up in a restaurant where he is thus in his "ace": At least that's how he remembers the matter when he writes down his travel memoirs, which in 1903 are published under the title I adventurerland . The subtitle "Experienced and dreamed in the Caucasus" tells us where the journey takes us and that Hamsun mixes his memories with imagination. In the restaurant in Moscow where he is at his "ace", unusually much fantasy and adventure mix in the experiences of memory. The broken button makes the Hamsun reader (and perhaps Hamsun himself) think of Nagel's management in Mysterier . The button-making and the drawn-out restaurant scene actually have qualities that can both remind one of Kafka and surrealism: the reader cannot possibly separate Hamsun's actual Moscow from his memory fantasy, and it is just as difficult to decide whether it is a nightmare or a wishful dream.
Hamsun is gone when he is at home , at home when he is gone. It suggests a restlessness that is familiar from all of Hamsun's works, where the ideology of rootedness is perforated by that of mobility. It also suggests a modern predicament, where identity and belonging are always located somewhere else, always "away". In fairyland is also a modern reseberättelä in many ways, almost modernist. Hamsun narrates in the present tense, which he only rarely mentions in order to admit that the journey is well prepared and that it is reworked when the story is written down. Hamsun on the journey is similar to Nagel in Mysterier: charming with gallantry and swindling with fake business cards. Hamsun on the journey is not so much reminiscent of the Hunger hero, who is indeed in a constant present, who wanders around in reality driven by his impulses and fantasies and who would be in his "ace" if he could only go to a restaurant in Moscow. Hamsun is as lonely and outcast in the world as the Hungry hero: the fact that he is actually accompanied by Mrs. Hamsun has only marginal significance for the story, which instead portrays him just as rootless and restless as Hamsun does not want man to be.
This modern impression intersects, as so often with Hamsun, with literally reactionary elements. The journey to the Caucasus is a journey back: Hamsun is on his way to the origin and maybe he hopes for a rebirth ex oriente ? His Caucasus is the threshold to the Orient and there is everything he lacks in the modern "Americanized" civilization. There is poetry and authenticity. "The Caucasus, the Caucasus! It is not for nothing that the greatest poetic giants the world knows, the great Russians, have been with you and east of the springs..." The path to the origin goes through the Russland of the slaves. "Slaves! I think and look at them, the people of the future, the conquerors of the world after the Germans!" Hamsun not only makes appeals to the Slavic and the Oriental, but also a small essay on Russian writers, where he repeats his well-known tributes to Dostoyevsky, his split admiration of Tolstoy, both at the expense of Ibsen and other Europeans who only "create themselves": "The posture is to stand on one leg, the natural position is to stand on two without creating yourself." The Orientals are just "natural". They are natural fatalists, they have a penchant for "this old and tested philosophy with the simple and absolute system". Of course, they are not attacked by our modern inventions and they avoid our loss of identity and rootlessness. "And they don't have human rights and suffrage and trade unions. And they don't go with 'Vorwärts' in their pockets. Poor Orient, we Prussians and Americans must regret you, must we! ..."
Of course, Hamsun makes enemies on his way to the Orient: his coachman and guide prove to be unreliable and a helpful officer turns out to be a fraud. Hamsun spins an extensive fantasy around this fake officer. His "Jewish nose is unbearable", which made Hamsun suspicious from the start. In his world of imagination, the Jews are an unpleasant and foreign element, an obstacle on the way to the truly different, the truly oriental. Jews are also associated with erotic fantasies, which Hamsun avoids: in his Orient, women are as marginal as his own society.
Unfortunately, the Orient also turns out to be infiltrated by modernity. Tbilisi is purely European, although there is an old Asian district as an oriental enclave. In Baku, Hamsun feels that "America invaded" and "roared" - there it is the oil industry that interferes with his oriental fantasy. Hamsun reaches his destination, which is the Black Sea, but his destination still does not exist, at least not in the original and authentic form that he expected. However, he does not allow himself to be discouraged. When he comes home to write down his travelogue, he not only fills it with what he experienced but also with his imagination of a world beyond the world, an origin and a fatalistic immutability that precedes modern changeability. We who read get to share both his experiences and his dreams. We get glimpses of Russia and the Caucasus at the turn of the last century and a mixed but strong impression of Knut Hamsun as the hero of his own story.
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Arne Melberg is a professor of literary studies at the University of Oslo.
