HENNING WÆRP: HAMSUN AND NATURE
Knut Hamsun's three major novels from the early 1890s, Hunger, Mysteries and Pan, have, in addition to being considered the pinnacle of his writing, been seen as three positions in an exploration of the individual's position in the field of tension between culture and nature.
Hunger (1890) is the modern big city novel, with anonymity and endless street wanderings and a labyrinthine network that locks the individual in repetition and monotony. Mysteries (1892) is the small town novel, with the rectory forest as an idyll. While the self in Hunger appears within the city's framework, in Mysteries Nagel constantly alternates between the small town and the rectory forest. Civilization has here acquired a counterpoint. In Pan (1894) the line is continued and goes from the big city, from which Lieutenant Glahn comes, to a trading post in Nordland, the forests and mountains there. A movement from the center and outwards: the big city – the small town – rural Norway. While the first person in Hunger has a rather anxious overnight stay out in Bogstadskogen, the rectory forest has an alluring and enticing effect for Nagel. And in Pan Lieutenant Glahn can end his writing with: "Because I belong to the forests and solitude." The contrast between city and country that so many associate with Hamsun's writing is established here.
Three main positions in the span between culture and nature, city life and country life, have been tested. This is impressively achieved within just a few years of writing.
A common feature of the novels is the main characters, pastless young men, "nerve men", like other hypersensitive heroes of the 1890s. Lieutenant Glahn's piety of nature alternates with ecstasy, a pantheistic nature eroticism. One could go so far as to say that Glahn is as much exposed to his own imaginations as to perception. There are also fluid transitions in the novel between the plane of reality on the one hand and myth, dream, fairy tale on the other. As in chapter 13, where a specific biotope slips into a more obscure flora: "Away at the edge of the forest stand ferns and storm hats, the milkberry heather blooms [...] But now in the hours of the night large, white flowers have suddenly unfolded in the forest [...] they are spirits [...] they are intoxicated." The concrete nature of the North, which Hamsun knows so well and depicts precisely, is constantly on the verge of becoming a symbolic world. The forest god Pan is, for example, not far from the trading post where merchant Mack rules. The secret of nature and the arrogance of power are explored in the same novel.
Hamsun's Pan is related to the vitalism that was strong in art at the end of the 19th century. Vitalism (from the Latin vita: life) is a belief that there is a "life force" in all living things, independent of physical and chemical forces.
Vitalism had no separate program or prominent advocates, but Nietzsche's criticism of the cultural state, his emphasis on the irrational, and on the superman, are central features of the vitalist currents.
From Pan there is a line to Markens grøde , although now it is a new harvester, Isak Sellanraa, who is the main character, and not a brooding hunter from the capital on a “holiday” up north. When the novel was published in late autumn 1917, most reviewers focused on it as a gospel of the earth, and the Norwegian Farmers' Association sent a telegram to Hamsun thanking him for this “peculiar and warm-hearted work about the earth” that created “much joy among the farmers”. Hamsun himself was partly to blame for the one-sided focus on the agricultural theme in the novel with an article in Aftenposten , “Menneskene og jorden”, in which he urged people to use “a hoe, a spade and a spade.” Naturally, there is no such appeal in connection with the publication of the story about Lieutenant Glahn. The feeling of nature is enough here.
Later readings have focused on other features of The Harvest of the Field and, among other things, studied the wandering figure Geissler in the novel: a wandering fabulist who has similarities with earlier figures in Hamsun's writing. Namely, Isak does not. And it is only in The Harvest of the Field that Hamsun has chosen a farmer as the main character. Hamsun himself became a farmer, first at Skogheim on Hamarøy, then at Nørholm near Grimstad. But the wanderer always accompanied him, we know today that Hamsun spent a lot of time in hotels and guesthouses writing, and that it was what he wrote, and not what he cultivated, that provided money for further farming.
We find this division between the rooted and the wandering in the August trilogy. When the first volume was published in 1927, Hamsun wrote in Grimstad Adressetidende : "I pity the emigrants [...] the adult Norwegian who goes there becomes homeless in the deepest sense." But again, Hamsun has created a contradictory work; while some reviewers considered the story of August and Edevart as a hymn to the new clearing men and those who lived off the land and fishing, others saw it as a tribute to the vagabond life. And both readings are possible, since both an unquenchable unrest and an indefatigable sense of home lie there like a warp in the fabric. The aspen grove in Polden, the "five small aspers that waded", function as a mediating element. Here Edevart returns again and again after his unsuccessful stay in the United States, here he seeks to rediscover the connection to what was lost. Edevart has become placeless.
In On Overgrown Paths (1949), Hamsun is under house arrest for periods, first at Grimstad Hospital, then at Landvik Nursing Home, due to the treason case against him. Nevertheless, he steals away for short walks, where his alertness to his surroundings is quite striking. He prefers to go off the beaten track and take possession of an area, making it his own. Of the walks up in the heath while he is at Grimstad Hospital, he writes: "It was I who had invented them, and it was trees and stones that I recognized."
While the nature experiences in Hamsun's early novels, such as Pan and Mysteries , are of an ecstatic nature, an experience for the chosen one, it is a more sober depiction of nature and landscape that we encounter in On Overgrown Paths . But here too, a glance is required to see. From his stay at Grimstad Hospital, Hamsun writes: "My outer world is less to say about. Here is only a bare mound [...] the weather is sharp, the wind is almost always a gale." But that is not all that is said. Others might stop here, with this statement, and not stop their walks here. And in any case, not spend any more words on it. But Hamsun continues, in a turn inward or downward: "Oh, the world is beautiful here too [...] Here is rich with colors even in stone and heather, here are matchless shapes in the ferns, and there is still a good taste on the tongue after a beetroot that I found." The wanderer has a peculiar sensibility. The narrow hill transforms into a place "rich in color", a place with "incomparable shapes", indeed, into a place that leaves "a good taste even on the tongue". This does not happen with imagination as in the novels of the 1890s, not in an ecstasy of nature or autosuggestion, but in an attentiveness to the seemingly insignificant. The place surrenders itself to the one who sees it.
It may be worth noting here a word Hamsun uses in På jengrodde stier : "inntrykksømhet" – "we do not all have the same intrykksømhet". It is implied that he has more of it than others. We recognize this word, which is not found in any dictionaries, from Hamsun's early writings, from the program article "Fra det ubevste sjeleliv", in 1890: "My intrykksømhed var nu üstris sensifik, helem opfisset", it is said here somewhere. While 'inntrykksømhet' represents the external influence, 'tenderness' represents something internal: "warm, heartfelt, affection, love and care" are the key words given by the Norwegian Dictionary of the Norwegian Language. The term covers not only observation and intuition, but also an active interest in the outside world.
And Hamsun never loses this interest . Even though the great events can be viewed with indifference, the presence of the senses is quite striking, as in this passage from On Overgrown Paths : "A branch moves with a small bird on it. I stop on the contrary" – a small experience that is followed by the exclamation: "Oh, the infinitely small in the midst of the infinitely large in this matchless world."
While Marie Hamsun writes about the nature of Nørholm and Agder in her memoir Regnbuen (Rainbow ) (1953): "The landscape itself was and became unfamiliar to me"; "I missed long ridgelines, wide views, everything was so close" – she had grown up in Eastern Norway – there is little to indicate that the northerner Hamsun felt alien in Southern Norway. One can find exclamations such as: "Open water. It is March. And after the wonderful weather now in February and March, the Nørholm wedge has already begun to rise. It is more than just the one that rises, dear, it is the thawing of ice in people."
It is the wanderer's ability to enjoy what is here and now, we see here. You don't need the midnight sun and northern Norwegian mountains, as in Pan , to become intoxicated by nature. And no self-suggested ecstasy as in Mysteries . Nor does the soil need to be broken, as in Markens grøde . And you don't even need to return home, like Edevart in Landstrykere . A short stroll in the local area provides enough stimuli and joy. For those who can see. All positions are there – and together they constitute pieces of the picture that constitutes Hamsun's perception of nature.
With new ways of reading, we also see new things. In ecocriticism, which emerged in literary studies in the 1990s, the focus is on literature that teaches us to live in a different and better way in relation to nature than we do today. In a time when climate issues are constantly in the news, the search for solutions is correspondingly numerous; it is often about technological innovations, which are expensive, but also about changes in attitudes. And attitudes are free. That is, they must come from somewhere, have a powerful origin that touches us enough to want a change. This is where art often comes in. Is Isak Sellanraa perhaps the man of today after all? He does not see nature simply as a resource, but as a value in itself. For Western man, nature has been considered mute, in contrast to the indigenous people's experience of the living landscape. Within ecocriticism, it is then important to learn to listen to nature again. Because who wants to exploit nature that speaks to you?
For Isak, nature is not silent. Already at the beginning of the novel, when we meet him walking into the field, it says: "it is getting dark, but he hears a small rush of a river, and this small rush revives him as if he were alive." There is a sensitivity in the walk, an attention to where one sets one's foot: "He walks in blueberry heather and lingonberry heather, in the seven-pointed forest star and in small ferns." Everything gets attention, everything has meaning: "not even the big cow mushrooms are bland."
Perhaps it is not agriculture that we should learn from The Harvest of the Fields . Not everyone can turn their backs on the city. But everyone can learn something about sensitivity to nature and respect for the natural surroundings – a type of sensitivity to the environment. Or to use Hamsun's words, from the program article "From the Unconscious Soul" in 1890: impressionability. His literary thinking around this concept does not go out of fashion anytime soon.
Henning Wærp is a professor of Nordic literature at the University of Tromsø.
