Knut Hamsun’s Victoria
Franz Pokorny
That the world’s most asocial nation should have delivered such an outsized contribution to literary realism in the 19th century is a historical irony requiring some explanation, though you shall not have it here. Dr. Stockmann’s people are of a solitary, pensive type optimised to roam the wooded hills and dales and generally live the life under which Wittgenstein wrote the Tractatus; should the northman busy himself with social justice, it is only as a quaint hobby equivalent to folk dancing or collecting unusually shaped pieces of driftwood. In any event, this seems to have been a brief, historical aberration, and today Norway’s preeminent litterateurs (think Fosse or Knausgaard) are of a more introverted cut; a countercurrent whose spiritus rector is nevertheless a man of Ibsen’s time — Knut Hamsun, Nobel Prize winner and apart from that nothing else.
It is all too easy to read Hamsun as the contrary pole to Ibsen, Bjørnson, and their co-combatants in the national canon; indeed, Hamsun himself gave such interpretation his imprimatur through his open and rather frank criticism of the former. Yet though the contrast between his emotional prose and the older generation’s socially conscious objectivity might make for a tidy periodisation for the high school literature textbooks, Hamsun came of age as a writer under the influence of the Christiania literary establishment and, even while departing from its stylistic conventions, strove to preserve what was good in it, namely its overarching concern with social currents. Whether consciously or not, Hamsun grasped that the society of the 20th century wrestled with a feistier spirit than Ibsen’s sober, social-critical style could pin down, and that telling the truth of the times would require a new approach in which inner experience would provide the novel’s structure and substance. This modern spirit — repressed, but never quite dispelled, by our own age — fills the pages of Hamsun’s most timely work, Victoria (1898).
Writing is an unconscious art, and what lasts is only ever coincident with the writer’s aims. „If you can look into the seeds of time and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak!“ My own few felicities are daughters of necessity, melodious bricolages of wrong words salvaged whilst groping about in the dark for the right ones, born of the imperative to flag down the feeling before it goes forever into the night. They are slung out to e-girls and bored housewives in a sunless hour, typed by sweaty thumbs on crowded trains before the thought goes forgotten in the crush, oddly capitalised and always with more Hs than really need be. If my poxy feuilletons have not pushed the front of European letters one inch closer to Moscow, these pensées have at least left a visceral impact. But what is the quality that makes a word endure? The debate over whether the property of a great writer is a heightened sensitivity to the temper of the times or an intuition for the timeless has rumbled on for what feels closer to the latter, and there is usually something of either side in every meritorious pen. Nor need they be opposed: what both ultimately treat of is the essence that places man on equal footing with God; the particle in which history and eternity meet.
