Tidens tröskel: Uppbrott och nostalgi i skandinavisk litteratur kring sekelskiftet 1900 by Anna Jörngården (review)

The third volume of Eric Hobsbawm's history of the long nineteenth century, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914, opens with an anecdote concerning the chance encounter in Egypt of his Austrian mother and English father. It is unlikely, he writes, that such an encounter would have taken place at an earlier period. The end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth was, from a British perspective, an age of empire. It was also a harbinger of what we might call our own age of globalization.

Scandinavians were among the most mobile of Europeans at this time. Millions of Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes emigrated, above all to North America, while for many Scandinavians and artists, a sojourn on the continent was an essential part of an artistic education. Some, such as Ibsen, stayed abroad for decades.

Anna Jörngården's Tidens tröskel focuses on three Scandinavian writers whose experience of travel left a deep imprint on their writing: Ola Hansson, August Strindberg, and Knut Hamsun. It is a suggestive juxtaposition, for while Hansson and Strindberg traveled mainly to the cultural capitals of Europe, Hamsun's most important journey was to North America, where he worked at odd jobs and from which he returned to express a profound distaste and mistrust for American culture and society. Hansson and Strindberg sometimes evoked their experiences abroad in terms of a voluntary or involuntary exile, a word often used to describe the experiences of privileged individuals who choose or are forced to live and work outside their countries of birth. In contrast, Hamsun's experiences in the United States evoke above all those of the migrant worker, although he had already begun to write before he set out.

For Jörngården, what links these three writers above all is their ambivalent experience of travel and their nostalgia and longing for a home that may no longer exist. In Hansson's work, this ambivalence takes striking forms, represented primarily in the figure of the literary double. Strindberg's writings of the 1890s oscillate between a fascination with evolution and the natural sciences, on the one hand, and alchemy on the other, and between the here and now and imagined and invisible worlds. But in contrast to the writings of Hansson, Strindberg's texts bring into focus the unstable and fragmentary nature of experience in contemporary Europe. As in the writings of Walter Benjamin, the harmonious unity evoked by some of Strindberg's narrators is a response to the shocks of the city. As Jörngården puts it, "där Hansson skriver en inåtvänd, kontemplativ text som sträver efter helhet och ett återupprättande av das unrettbare Ich skriver Strindberg en fragmenterad text av skilda, ej sammanhållna iakttagelser, där det upplösta jaget pekar mot ett radikalt nytt sätt att tillskriva tillvaron" (97) [whereas Hansson writes an inward, contemplative text that strives for totality and a restoration of the irretrievable ego, Strindberg writes a fragmented text of divergent, incoherent observations, where the dispersed ego points toward a radically new way to describe existence].

But the contrast between the two Swedish writers and Knut Hamsun is far more striking. For Jörngården, Hamsun's works are steeped in nostalgia and the longing for an authentic kind of experience he sees as utterly at odds with modernity. This longing is crystallized in Markens grøde, the novel for which Hamsun received the Nobel Prize. But although the idyllic life on the land described in the narrative certainly struck a chord with readers such as Katherine Mansfield, it was not a way of life that Hamsun could accept, although he liked to pose as a farmer.

Hamsun's later support of the Nazis is the most obvious expression of the underside of turn-of-the-century nostalgia, but occasional anti-Semitic and even racist remarks occur in the...