Journeys from Scandinavia: Travelogues of Africa, Asia, and South America, 1840—2000

Three: The Ironic Traveler: Danger and Identity in Knut Hamsun’s Oriental Travelogues

58 three The Ironic Traveler Danger and Identity in Knut Hamsun’s Oriental Travelogues In terms of literary history, the travelogue has, as indicated in the introduction, been regarded as a precursor to the novel. Meanwhile in terms of the individual author’s biography, traveling is often viewed as a precondition for his writing activity. In the case of Knut Hamsun, his novels—from Sult (Hunger, 1890) and onward—are tied to travel literature , both thematically by focusing on the traveler and generically by constantly crossing the boundaries between fact and fiction as the lives of the hero, the narrator, and the author slip into one another. The travelogue is, as we have seen, a genre always operating in a gray zone between fact and fiction, and through its basic epistemological uncertainty it is a genre that may appeal especially to the modern writer and reader. This indeterminacy , in any case, is what Hamsun so clearly emphasizes and plays upon in the title of his depiction of his journey to the Orient, I Æventyrland: Oplevet og drømt i Kaukasien (In Wonderland: Experienced and Dreamt in the Caucasus). Traveling, however, is not just a matter of the author’s opening himself to new impressions and experiences, but also of his exposing himself to a state of annihilation. Abroad, he risks losing his identity, and he may well find all his previous knowledge to be of no help in comprehending the foreign . While these moments of identity loss are rarely, if ever, experienced and expressed in earlier travel literature—such as that by Hans Christian Andersen and Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann—they rather become the norm around the turn of the century, correlating with the rise of early modernism.1 When Knut Hamsun undertakes a journey to the Orient in 1899, he also stresses what a courageous man he is: THE IRONIC TRAVELER 59 Is it not pretty well done to plant one's foot in Turkey of all places? I continued thinking. Not everybody has shown this courage. The Turk does not eat people anymore, oh no. But does anyone dare claim he is toothless? Has any other Norwegian author dared come to this country? Goethe once traveled from Weimar to Italy; but did he visit Turkey? To put it briefly, it is pretty well done.2 What the narrator’s commentary reveals is an indirect wish that the Turk not be toothless. The reason is that once it becomes clear that the Orient does not constitute a physical threat, it begins to represent an existential threat to the European traveler. In terms of narrative strategies, Hamsun is able to work within the travel genre by turning the traditional battle scenes against external dangers into internal battles. The text turns into a psychological thriller in which the tension does not rely on the traveler’s surviving concrete dangers in the Orient, but on his surviving an existential and textual identity crisis. The battle in the Orient turns into one between fantastic expectations versus reality; illusions versus disillusionment; and the traveler’s construction of his own identity as a brave explorer versus his identity as a tourist walking in the footsteps of thousands of other tourists with his wife and his Baedeker. If we compare the turn from depicting external to internal dangers with the more famous case of Hamsun’s contemporary Joseph Conrad, we may speculate that Conrad’s serious mode reflects his direct involvement with a colonizing power—the British in Africa—while Hamsun, representing a peripheral nation with no direct colonizing involvement in the Orient, can view events at a greater distance, with more irony. As such, Hamsun is able to take on a satirical attitude toward traveling outside Europe that the writers representing the imperial powers cannot allow themselves, and Hamsun—as early as at the turn of the nineteenth century—ends up prefiguring a postmodern, parodic mode fully realized a century later, I would argue, in the writings of Erlend Loe (see chapter 8). Less ironically, Hamsun’s home audience also viewed his courage as exceptional; Vilhelm Krag, for instance, published his deep admiration— and perhaps encouragement—regarding his literary idol’s travel plans. In Fædrelandsvennen (1890) he wrote: Hamsun is the new human being in Nordic literature . . . The newspaper tells me that he is strong as a lion and plans to go to Constantinople. A decision as 60 THE IRONIC TRAVELER...