STÅLE DINGSTAD: HAMSUN AND POLITICS IN 1880-1945

Knut Hamsun was a political person throughout his adult life. He was interested and engaged in what was happening in society. He followed the major changes that characterized Norway during the period closely. Through various types of work, travel and socializing, through what he read and what he wrote, Hamsun came to leave his mark on his surroundings. But Hamsun was no politician. He did not participate in ordinary political work. He was poorly acquainted with the political decision-making processes, and his influence on them was small. More than helping to shape modern society, he contributed with a specific view of modern society.

What he wrote can be read with advantage in the context of the social development of which he was a part, but not everything he wrote has the same political relevance. Hunger (1890) was hardly intended as a contribution to social debate, even though the book has its premises in the naturalism's command that you should write your life. Nor is Mysteries (1892) a distinct contribution to social debate, despite the fact that Nagel discusses politics and tries to get others on board. But the next two novels , Ny jord (1893) and Redaktør Lynge (1893), are already tendentious novels in the tradition of critical realism. And later it is the tendencies and types of critical realism that will characterize Hamsun's novels.

That there is a political commitment in his writing is most clearly seen in the series of articles. Hamsun wrote in the many genres and wanderings of non-fiction over 70 years, from the modest "Church Song in Vikør" in Søndre Bergenhus Folkeblad 1879 to the speech in Sand district court that was incorporated into the book På jengrodde stier in 1949. These include reader contributions, open letters, travelogues, reviews, essays, chronicles, obituaries, petitions, speeches, lectures, forewords, portraits and pamphlets, etc. Thematically, he can address everything from song and poetry to language disputes, infanticide, tourism, agriculture, industry and Norway as a nation among other nations. Politically, he also positions himself along the entire scale from the radical through the liberal and conservative to the deeply reactionary.

Until the dissolution of the union in 1905, Hamsun wrote in almost every genre. He wrote romance novels, a number of dramas, poems, short prose and articles on a wide variety of subjects published in books, newspapers and magazines. He has a large literary reserve to draw from, but the audience is still small and he has to publish often to earn enough. Gradually, Hamsun concentrates on two genres, namely the novel and the article. These complement each other and illuminate each other mutually. But the tendency is clear. In the years after the turn of the century, it is the novel that becomes Hamsun's medium. It is there that he puts his artistic and intellectual capacity into practice. It is there that he observes, reflects and criticizes the society of which he is a part. It is there that he thematizes the developments that he views with increasing skepticism.

Hamsun had a prominent predecessor in Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, whom he occasionally highlighted as exemplary. Several have also believed that expectations were created for Hamsun that he would take on a similar role as a poet and politician in Norwegian society. But Hamsun probably resembled his literary opponent Henrik Ibsen more. In part, he was a bad democrat, he himself admitted that. In part, he was a merciless critic and satirist. He had little of Bjørnson's idealism left and directed his criticism primarily at the new that was emerging, the changes that were taking place, the modern that was corrupting. Furthermore, Hamsun and Ibsen had in common that they prioritized themselves and their own. They worked to build up their own writing, establish a large audience and make themselves financially independent. They both succeeded in this, but they also toned down their direct political involvement.

Indirectly, however, the series of novels is clearly political. One thing is that they address themes of the time that Hamsun also illuminated in the form of articles. More importantly, they do so in an inclusive way. Hamsun does not focus on the specifically literary or the eternal and universal in art. He writes about the most human, and he is oriented towards the concrete, the present, what moves people and what touches them most. Hamsun takes with him the entire register of experiences from childhood and upbringing and writes forward towards his own contemporaries. In the last novel, The Ring is Closed (1936), we can therefore read about something as mundane as cinema shows with robbers and horse races and trained dogs, about blacks touring with their jazz orchestras, about cars speeding away, about press photographers who are on hand when something happens, about stocks that suddenly lose their value, about bankruptcies in the familiar style, about unemployment that wreaks havoc on family life, about church robberies, drunkenness, divorces, adultery, smuggling and murder, in short, about the whole of modern life in a small Norwegian coastal town.

The trend is clear again: Hamsun is critical of the emergence of modern society, and he does so by exposing those who are driving it. He looks at modern Norwegian society through an inverted lens and presents nation-building with the wrong side out. The clearest example is perhaps August. The three novels about this Don Quixote of Norwegian literature, Landstrykere (1927), August (1930) and Men livet lever (1933), are a satire on human vanity and folly and on the time that August is an expression of. August is primarily concerned with something happening, that not everything remains the same. But what he does lacks moderation. He creates life and stir, but drives it into nonsense and stir. He has an idea of ​​progress and development that he preaches for, but as a speaker and missionary he is not very successful. Consequently, he himself must take the lead and act as a man of action. August has knowledge of modern life, but lacks knowledge of the essential connections in modern society. They are present only as externalities. When August returns home and takes with him the idea of ​​a modern industrial society without knowledge of its establishment, the result is a display of the absolutely meaningless.

There are no direct lines of connection from Hamsun's socially critical novels to his political affiliations before and during the war. There is no necessary connection between the novels and the positions in the political articles he wrote before and during the war of 1940–45. But they were all written by the same man. And there is much to suggest that Hamsun viewed Hitler and the Nazi seizure of power in Germany in 1933 as a real opportunity to change a social development that he could not agree with and that he did not see as possible to change in any other way, for example democratically. In any case, Hamsun took a clear position in a number of articles for Hitler and his policies and later stuck to this choice. Even after the war, Hamsun hesitated to acknowledge that it was a mistake, a misfortune for himself and a catastrophe for others. Instead, he did what he could to explain away and trivialize the whole thing. Hamsun was not alone in this way of dealing with the problem. He had many people with him in his affiliation with Hitler, and almost as many in the problematic settlement after the war.

______

Ståle Dingstad is an associate professor at the Department of Linguistics and Nordic Studies at the University of Oslo.