ATLE KITTANG: KNUT HAMSUN - THE AFTERMATH

The piece of writing by Knut Hamsun that has provoked the most and at the same time been the most difficult to understand is the obituary of Adolf Hitler that the poet published in Aftenposten on May 7, 1945 – the day before Liberation Day. Here the German dictator is hailed as “a warrior for humanity and a preacher of the gospel of justice for all nations”, “a reformist figure of the highest rank”; but he had the misfortune of working “in a time of the most unprecedented brutality, which ultimately brought him down.” The final statement surpasses most in its blind loyalty: “This is how the ordinary Western European dares to look at Adolf Hitler. And we, his close followers, now bow our heads at his death.”

The Hitler obituary will forever symbolize the dark spot in Knut Hamsun's legacy. In its blatant absurdity, it is also part of the Knut Hamsun mystery. Why did Hamsun write the way he did in the obituary – indeed, why did he write an obituary at all? We know that Hitler was hardly particularly high in the poet's esteem after the famous meeting between the two in Berchtesgaden in 1943. So perhaps it was the need to stubbornly hold on to a conviction to the very end that was expressed so uncompromisingly? Or was it "out of chivalry", as he himself is said to have said afterwards? But he must have known that this would only strengthen the image of him as an implacable Nazi, and weaken his position in the showdown that might come. Is it rather something as simple as the boundless naivety of a socially isolated old man that we are witnessing?

Most actions have a complex causal connection, so we probably have to include all of these reasons if we are to explain why Hamsun acted as he did on a May day in 1945. But perhaps there was another need that was expressed as well, namely the need to provoke. If we look at Hamsun's life and work as a whole, we can get the feeling that there must have been a doctor in him like a pulsating impulse throughout most of his life. There is a line going back from the obituary's provocation to the year 1920, when he received the Nobel Prize for his peasant idyll about Isak Sellanraa and his people, at the same time as he presented a very special reply to his own "field crops": He gives his expectant audience one of his most bitter books, the novel about the castrate Oliver Andersen and his illusory family life in the Hamsunian small town. But this is the same Hamsun who, as early as 1879, managed to annoy an entire rural community with his arrogant newspaper articles about the hymn singing in Hardanger, and who, in 1891, demolishes all of contemporary European literature with his literary lectures. And when, in 1892, towards the end of Mysteries , he describes how Nagel ends his seductive violin playing at the bazaar with some “horrible strokes, a desperate howl, a wailing sound so impossible, so revolting that no one knew where it was going” – is this not a kind of prophetic picture of the noises that the Hitler obituary was to mix into the euphoria of the May Days of 1945?

So many questions. But Hamsun's mystery is not primarily to be found in such mixtures of provocation and seduction, which are also characteristic of the Hamsun style. The mystery lies in the unsettling nature of his texts. They challenge our ideas about right and wrong, they create beautiful and homely feelings in us that they force us out of the next moment, they confront us with the unsafe and sinister in existence – and often they force us into self-defense, into pure and clear resistance to the provocative force that resides within them.

During the war and in the hectic days of peace, people destroyed his books or got rid of them. After the trial, the verdict and his death in 1952, most people probably thought that both the poet and his work were literary history at best. But in 1954 Gyldendal republished Samlede werker . And when his centenary was celebrated with a celebration that was unheard of ten years earlier, he was as widely read as before the war. Since then, the books have been published in ever new editions, ever new printings, and have been devoured by ever new generations of readers. Johan Borgen told in his time how he had to fight to get out of the power field of the Hamsun style and find his own tone. Nowadays, Hamsun continues to resonate in the books of several of our most popular prose writers, even though there are still voices among young authors who believe that his writing is both shallow and politically reprehensible.

All of this is part of Hamsun's legacy and shapes it in a classic paradoxical entanglement of love and hate. Psychology has a word for this: ambivalence. More than fifty years after his death, Hamsun is our only international poet besides Ibsen. But he will never achieve the status of an uncontroversial icon. On the contrary: every time a proposal is made to honor his memory in some official way (with a bust, a street name or something like that), the collective anger comes to life. In recent years, discussions about art and politics in his books have also gained new life among critics and academics. Many have presented new and old arguments in writing and orally that his writing from beginning to end reflects a poet's path into Nazism. At a seminar in Germany in 1997, it was even claimed that what indelibly clings to Hamsun as a shame is his "betrayal of literature."

But our ambivalence towards Hamsun's books is not just a post-war phenomenon. Mysteries , which, together with Hunger, is one of the most important prose works of early European modernism, was received negatively by most when the novel was published in 1892. Not only that: the author himself was accused of being as much a charlatan and a humbugger as the main character. The poetry and bittersweet love story in Pan certainly seduced his contemporary readers, but the "fist novels" Redaktør Lynge and Ny jord , which date from the same period, were received most unkindly. Contemporary criticism downplayed the sparkling autobiographical fictions In adventure land , Under the autumn star , and A wanderer plays with a muffled voice . Then Hamsun seriously tightened his grip on both the critics and the readers with the socially satirical Segelfoss novels and the peasant idyll Markens grøde . Actually, this success should have made us more thoughtful than it has been, because it is in such books that Hamsun is at his most ideological. The Women at the Water Tap probably delivered a punch to an expectant audience that thought they deserved better after the Nobel Prize. It took a Thomas Mann to see that the novel is also about the necessary place of imagination and art in human life. With the novels about August, Hamsun once again seduced his readers. So why on earth would he round off his literary output with the unsatisfying and completely illusionless novel about the idler and “hippie” Abel Brodersen: The Ring Ended ?

The history of Hamsun's reception is thus about a permanent zigzag movement between seduction and provocation, falling in love and disappointment. But it would be a long time before the ambivalence settled along political-ideological fronts. From about 1910 onwards, it became quite difficult to explain away the positions and aggressiveness in many of Hamsun's contributions to current newspaper debates (about infanticide, or language policy, or the destructive effects of tourism on the nation's health). The pro-German attitudes were visible long before the First World War, as was his negative view of England. But there were many who shared such attitudes in neutral Norway – and elsewhere in the Nordic countries at the time. It was only with a strengthened labor movement in the interwar period and increasingly sharp fronts in working and social life that the criticism became ideological. Here too, however, a provocation was needed before it was given a precise address. Hamsun's famous attack on the German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky marked a turning point. But at the same time, it was now, around the mid-1930s, that another typical feature of Hamsun's reception began to emerge: the need to distinguish between the social actor and the poet. "His self-greatness is in the reaction, but the deepest part of his poetry is untainted by it," wrote the communist and fellow poet Nordahl Grieg in 1936. But don't we hear the whistling of the boomerang in such characterizations? The cultivation of nature and life that Grieg believes is the deepest part of Hamsun's poetry, is it not the same nature ideology that the Nazis were to use as bait in their successful fishing for followers – in Germany and in other countries? If it is not then the very ideological basis on which their civilization-destroying activities rested? At least that was Leo Löwenthal's opinion when he published the first systematic ideological critique of Hamsun's writings in 1937. Since then, there have been a number of them – but not many have reached Löwenthal's level.

Yet another paradox in our relationship to Hamsun – and thus in his legacy: What we love in his books is probably what we should approach with the greatest skepticism. And conversely: What we initially experience as foreign and a little creepy is perhaps what we should study with the greatest attention. Why is that? Probably because it is all too human to seek the safe and familiar, and to recoil from what is unsafe and un-familiar. This has to do with the social psychological basis for the experience of art – for our experiences of art are not only subjective, but to a high degree social phenomena. But it also has to do with morality – the morality of art, and our moral relationship to art.

Behind the name Knut Hamsun lie many figures. Which of these is the true one? The itinerant peddler, the casual laborer, the American traveler? Or the settled farmer and patriarch with an address in Skogheim or Nørholm? The teasing, provocative and PR-hungry lecturer from his youth? Or the moralizing and reactionary preacher who emerged later? The anarchist or the Nazi? The questions are rhetorical. The author and the person Knut Hamsun is precisely this collection of many conflicting personalities; the most important basis for his poetic legacy is probably the dynamic interplay between them. Sometimes this interplay can be dominated by figures with whom it is not easy to sympathize. But even when Hamsun's reactionary preacher's voice rings out strongest, it is strangely the rootless wanderer who still wields the pen. Such is the case with The Crop of the Field . The author of the novel is more akin to the paradoxical wanderer Geissler than to the steady Isak Sellanraa, even though it is in Isak Hamsun's preaching that he concentrates.

Hamsun's epilogue , On Overgrown Paths , arouses indignation even today, sixty years later, because the poet does not do what we demand and expect of him, namely that he should admit his mistakes and repent of his sins. Instead, he defines himself as a victim of the legal system and psychiatry, or he evades, masks himself, and talks about completely different and sometimes shamefully fabricated things. In our moral self-righteousness, we hold him accountable in relation to the role that all good Norwegians throughout the post-war period would like to see him in: the role of repentant sinner. In the least memorable sections of the book (the letter to the Attorney General and the defense speech in court), Hamsun slips into the opposite and almost equally welcome role of self-righteous Nazi without remorse. This is the aporia in which the entire moral dispute about Hamsun's legacy is caught. And in that aporia, Hamsun's art is on the retreat. That it nevertheless survives – not only in On Overgrown Paths , but also for posterity, is itself a miracle. For when Hamsun continues to write about what he experiences, conceals his own surprising approach to love and life behind a Martin Enevoldsen, an Ol'Hansa, a Pat and a Nut, creates a fictional dialogue between warring spouses to simulate a reconciliation, perhaps, as real life denies him, then he realizes a freedom that makes life possible to live – even in the most extreme old age, in the greatest humiliation, in the heaviest confusion about right and wrong.

Against our sturdy , self-confident and sometimes vengeful morality, another, far more fragile and yet at least as durable moral force is set: the art of poetry itself. Anyone who has read On Overgrown Paths with an eye for things other than Hamsun's criticism of psychiatry and his defense speech must acknowledge this. The moral challenge to all of us is to allow such an acknowledgement to be present and to shape the poet's legacy.

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Atle Kittang is a professor at the Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies at the University of Bergen.