Knut Hamsun: The Dark Side of Literary Brilliance (New Directions in Scandinavian Studies)

1. Discourses of Race and Primitivism in Scandinavia

19 1 Discourses of Race and Primitivism in Scandinavia But Greenland is Norwegian land, from times immemorial a Norwegian crown colony, where Norwegians have colonized and later had their bounty as hunters . The island was plundered from us by Denmark in 1814 with the Kiel Agreement and it has since been impossible to wrench it from Denmark. —Knut Hamsun to Reichkomissar Josef Terboven, June 8, 1940 Well, but the Eskimos are not civilized people. They are animals in the woods, animals on the ocean beaches. If they lived as civilized people on Greenland, they would die. —Knut Hamsun, “August Strindberg,” 1889 B eg i n n i n g i n t h e l ate ei g h teen t h cen t u ry a n d i n cre as i n g ly over t h e course of the nineteenth century, a great deal of scientific research in Europe focused obsessively on race and biological degeneration. The topic of degeneration had by the middle of the century become a central concern not only in race biology but also in medical pathology, psychiatry, and criminology, as Nancy Stepan writes in her article “Biological Degeneration: Races and Proper Places.”1 Citing Charles Rosenberg, Stepan stresses that “the idea that social context, not empirical research or internal logic, determined the 20 d i s co u r s es o f r ac e a n d p r i m i t i v i s m i n s c a n d i n av i a contours of hereditarian thought can well be applied to the entire story of biological, racial degenerationism.”2 While the amount of material available on the topic of race research during this era is vast, the insights made by many contemporary theorists reveal the sort of worldview shared by Hamsun and other writers in Scandinavia.3 As is clear in the epigraphs to this chapter, Hamsun, very much in line with prevailing attitudes on race, made a clear distinction between the Inuit (Eskimos), whom he characterized as animals, and “civilized people.” At the same time, he expressed an awareness of the need for adapting to a particular environment. His understanding of survival in the extreme North may be best understood in light of the debates about the survival of the fittest in various global environments both in the scientific literature of the time and in the popular press. Furthermore, he had no appreciation of what we would today call the indigenous territorial rights of the Inuit. The only concern Hamsun had in the 1940s was which European state was going to control Greenland; the Inuit are not even in the picture. Stepan’s essay shows how race biology appropriated the language and methodology of racist discourse in order to justify slavery, colonization, and the marginalization of people of African descent. She also discusses how nineteenth -century scientists theorized about the relationship of people to climate and geography in ways that sought to explain why people of different races thrived in particular regions and why, consequently, the races should not mix. The temperate, civilized world of Europe was, for instance, deemed to be the proper place for the white race. If whites moved away from Europe, the race would start to degenerate biologically and become “tropicalized.” While the inability of whites to survive new diseases bolstered the biologists’ claims, European colonization remained justified as long as the white colonists maintained close ties with their homelands and as long as new whites continued to move to “tropical” zones. As Stepan summarizes the theories of the time, the removal of Africans from their “proper” place, namely, the tropics, had led to the degeneration of the race, which now manifested itself in disease and depravity among Africans outside of Africa. She details how “the thesis of primordial racial distinctions and noncosmopolitanism provided support for the theory that blacks were fundamentally ‘out of place’ in the Americas and were doomed to degenerate as they moved northward into white, temperate territory, and as they moved socially and politically into freedom. . . . It helped perpetuate the status quo at a time when emancipation threatened to change it.”4 The stereotype which held that emancipated blacks were the most degenerate of all of their race and were, indeed, beyond redemption, was d i s co u r s es o f r ac e a n...