Hamsun i Tromsø V: Rapport fra den 5. internasjonale Hamsun-konferansen, 2011 by Even Arntzen, Nils M. Knutsen, Henning Howlid Wærp (review)

Let me be blunt; this is an uneven collection of essays that contains a few very bright spots. The desire to harmonize Hamsun dominates the essays, and some of them ramble or verge on “appreciation” rather than scholarship. The laudable aim of the collection is to include new voices from both Norway and abroad (p. 7), but as a whole, it would have benefited from a much more stringent round of editorial and peer review. The essays in some cases appear to have been published exactly as delivered at the International Hamsun Conference, with little or no revision or copyediting. Yet the book contains a number of interesting insights, and two essays in particular offer important correctives to previous Hamsun scholarship. In the following I will discuss these two essays and outline the remaining thirteen contributions briefly.

Peter Sjølyst-Jackson’s contribution provides a well-argued and meticulously documented corrective to the portrayal of the literary and personal relationship between Hamsun and George Egerton, and makes a case for re-evaluating their respective contributions to literary modernism. Sjølyst-Jackson gives an explanation for why both Egerton and Hamsun remained at the margins of British historical accounts of modernism despite the obvious qualities of their literary experimentation. Next he explores the only superficially paradoxical link between Egerton’s New Woman feminism and her enthusiasm for Nietzsche. He then carries out a comparative reading of Egerton’s short prose and Hamsun’s Sult (Phillipsen, 1890; Hunger) and Mysterier (Phillipsen, 1892; Mysteries). It is in the latter section of the essay that Sjølyst-Jackson’s skills as a close reader truly shine. In reading the meeting in Mysterier between Kamma and Nagel in the context of the real life encounter between Egerton and Hamsun, he challenges the way both Hamsun himself and his biographers have represented the intellectual and aesthetic crosscurrents between the two writers.

Troy Storfjell offers a similarly ambitious and meticulously constructed interrogation of both the socio-economic underpinnings of the fictional universe of Markens Grøde (Gyldendal, 1921; Growth of the Soil) and the ethics of reading such a text. While Storfjell astutely points out the often-overlooked “global regime of industrial and speculative capital” (p. 249) upon which the Sellanrå utopian fantasy is built, this is not a “gotcha” argument that seeks to bring down Hamsun; on the contrary, Storfjell wants readers of Hamsun to use such paradoxes as a prompt to “recognize the complexity and contradiction in our own approaches to questions of progress, modernity, nature and what we a few years ago were referring to as the ‘glocal’” (p. 250). This generous ethical position navigates between the established battle lines in Hamsun reception; while the author is often either condemned outright ideologically, or read in a vacuum of praise for his aesthetic qualities, Storfjell encourages us as readers to read Hamsun critically so that we may recognize our own blind spots.

The collection contains four essays that focus on specific motifs in Hamsun’s novels. Henning Howlid Wærp contrasts two loci in Chapter the Last [Siste kapitel ] (Gyldendal, 1923)—the shieling and the sanatorium—as utopian and dystopian respectively, and in doing so, provides an excellent example of the cultural and narrative insights that a reading of place in Hamsun’s works can offer. Nils Magne Knutsen presents an overview of what hands signify and how they are used as characterization in Hamsun’s literary universe. Maryline Sinniger Faaland uses Mikhail Bahktin’s notion of the chronotope in her analysis of how nature functions in Hamsun’s oeuvre. While the essay’s focus on the significance of transience is promising, Faaland misses key studies on nature in Norwegian literature that would have better framed her discussion of what is unique about Hamsun’s use of nature motifs, most notably, Gudleiv Bø’s Å dikte...