ABSTRACT: Knut Hamsun’s book In Wonderland (1903) is a travelogue from his journey through Russia and Caucasia to Constantinople
in 1899. Though this book was recently translated into English by Sverre Lyngstad
(2004), it remains one of Hamsun’s less studied works. The article will trace Hamsun’s
attitude to travel literature and discuss the journey into the Orient as a journey
backwards in his own life, to places of the mind. After returning home, Wonderland
becomes the label for Nordland in Hamsun’s writing, the county in northern part of
Norway where he grew up, and not for the Orient.
RÉSUMÉ: Le livre In Wonderland (1903) de Knut Hamsun est un journal de bord tiré de son voyage à travers la Russie
et le Caucase jusqu’à Constantinople en 1899. Bien qu’ayant été récemment traduit
en anglais par Sverre Lyngstad (2004), il demeure l’un des ouvrages de Hamsun les
moins étudiés. Cet article retracera l’attitude de Hamsun envers la littérature du
voyage et abordera son périple vers l’Orient comme un voyage à rebours au cœur de
sa propre vie, aux lieux de l’esprit. À son retour, Wonderland deviendra l’appellation
qu’utilisera Hamsun pour désigner le Nordland, le comté de la Norvège où il a grandi,
et non l’Orient.
In 1927, in a survey for Gyldendal’s Christmas catalogue, Knut Hamsun was asked what
book he liked best. “Jeg er ikke glad i Bøker” [I don’t like books], Hamsun replied,
in customarily provocative manner. “Men” [But], he continued, “jeg sætter høit en
sandfærdig Flugthistorie fra Sibirien av Klatszko” [I think very highly of a true
story by Klatszko about an escape from Siberia]. Whenever Hamsun expressed his views on reading, novels consistently came out badly
compared with travelogues, hunting tales, memoirs, correspondence and history books.
To his friends Bolette and Ole Johan Larsen, Hamsun wrote from Paris in 1895: “Tænk
om du kunde sende mig en Historiebog, Bolette. Det skulde være en med Historie
i, ikke romaner, for Guds Skyld. Men en historisk Bog altsaa om fjærne Ting og Tider.
Eller en Rejsebeskrivelse fra fjærne Lande” [If only you could send me a history book,
Bolette. It should be a book of history,
not novels, for God’s sake. But a history book, you know, about far-off things and
times. Or a travel book about distant countries] (Letter 359). And in a letter to his friend Albert Engström, Hamsun wrote: “Snart begynder jeg
med Hedins Tibetbok, slikt noget er herlig Læsning; men Romaner
og Dette Land dernord Skuespil brækker jeg mig over” [Soon I’ll make a start on Hedin’s
Tibetan book, such things make wonderful reading;
but novels and plays nauseate me] (Letter 980).
Hamsun collected Julius Clausen and P. Frederik Rist’s Memoirer og Breve [Memoirs and Letters], running to 40 volumes, and exclaimed contentedly in 1911 that: “Nu er hele min
række fuld, og det er absolut det interessanteste i min Boghylde” [Now my whole series
is complete, and it is absolutely the most interesting thing on
my bookshelf]. Nonetheless, for Hamsun, travel books seem to have occupied pride of place among
documentary literature. In a letter to Marie, he tells her how he has cut hundreds
of pages of a travel series out of the newspaper (Letter 915), and in reply to a
query from the German translator, Heinrich Goebel, Hamsun says
that: “Reisebeskrivelser og de Opdagelsesreisendes Bøger [er] min kjæreste Læsning” [Travelogues
and books by explorers (are) my most precious reading] (Letter 886). In a thank-you
note to the author Eilert Bjerke for his travel book Judæa drømmer [Judaean Dreams], Hamsun praises him precisely for his choice of genre: “Det er dem
som har Hode som gjør slikt, jeg vet ikke en eneste stor Dikter som ikke
har gjort det, Goethe, Hugo, Bjørnson … Heine” [It’s people with good heads that do such things. I don’t know of a single
great writer
who has not—Goethe, Hugo, Bjørnson … Heine] (Letter 1228). And he once more gets in a kick at Ibsen; the fact that the
man had not written
a travelogue is, for Hamsun, further proof that Ibsen was not to be counted among
the great writers!
Hamsun himself wrote a travelogue,
In Wonderland [
I Æventyrland], which bears the sub-title
Oplevet og drømt i Kaukasien [
Experienced and dreamt in the Caucasus]. (The sub-title has been dropped in the
Samlede verker [
Collected Works] as also in the translation.) The book was published in 1903, but the journey was
undertaken in 1899. Hamsun was a newly-wed at the time—having married Bergljot Goepfert
in 1898—the novel
Victoria had just been published, and he had received a stipend of Kr. 1500 from Kirke: og
Undervisningsdepartementet [the Norwegian Department of the Church and Education].
In November 1898, the newly-weds moved to Finland, where, according to letters home,
they froze through a long, unhappy winter, before setting off on their great journey
east to St. Petersburg, Moscow, Vladikavkas, Tblisi, Baku on the Caspian Sea, Batumi
on the Black Sea, and then home via Constantinople. Hamsun’s interest in Russia dated
from his years of reading the great Russian writers. After publication of the programmatic
article “Fra det ubevidste Sjæleliv” [From the unconscious life of the soul] in the
journal
Samtiden in 1890, Hamsun wrote to Bolette Pavels Larsen in Bergen:
Rigtig fornuftige folk synes, jeg er gal for min sidste Samtidsartikels Skyld,—synes
De ogsaa det? Jeg har gaaet Tingen hensynsløst paa Klingen, gaaet det længste , en
fornuftig Mand kan gaa (minus Russerne, som kan gaa engang til saa langt).
[Thoroughly rational people think I must be mad because of my latest article in Samtiden—do you think so too? I have pressed the issue ruthlessly, gone as far as any rational
man can go (apart from the Russians, who can go twice as far).] (Letter 146)
And Dostoevsky could go further than anyone else. He is for Hamsun the judge of the
human mind par excellence: “Dostojevskij er den eneste Dikter jeg har lært noget av,
han er den vældigste av de
russiske Giganter” [Dostoevsky is the only writer from whom I have learned anything,
he is the greatest
of the Russian giants].
In 1899, Hamsun would finally enter the Russian Empire. He was by no means unaccustomed
to travel: in two periods, 1882-1884 and 1886-1888, he had travelled around North
America, in the the areas settled by Scandinavians in the Mid-West. And in the years
1893-1895 he lived for lengthy periods in Paris. In America he was a vagabond and
itinerant worker, and in Paris he was an artist—it was not travel for the sake of
it that had taken him to these places. So, to that extent Hamsun was telling the truth
when he told his German publisher, Albert Langen, in 1902: “Jeg skriver nu blandt
andet paa en liden Bog om min Rejse gennem Kaukasien,—den eneste
Rejse jeg har gjort i mit Liv” [Among other things, I am now writing a little book
about my journey through the Caucasus—the
only journey I have undertaken in my life] (Letter 600).
Hamsun had long dreamt of precisely this kind of travel for the sake of the journey
itself. As early as 1890, he had had plans for a trip to Constantinople, but his financial
situation did not allow it. Two years later, he made another attempt. In May 1892,
he wrote to his friend Caroline Neeraas: “Herregud, hvor jeg glæder mig til at komme
til Tyrken! … at komme ind i dette ukendte, sære, det hidser meg” [God, how I look forward to getting
to Turkey! … to entering this unknown, strange place, it excites me] (Letter 198). But money was
once again the problem; he was not to enter that “unknown, strange place”—it was only
in his writing that he could go there (consider how the last part of
Pan takes place in the Orient, or more precisely India).
When, in 1899, Hamsun finally set out on his journey, however, Turkey had become less
important to him. Constantinople was only a stop on the return leg, and even his account
of the journey ends already in Batumi. This is not because he has nothing to relate
from Turkey; in fact Hamsun published a seven-part travelogue from Constantinople
in Aftenposten in the spring of 1903, just before In Wonderland appeared. However, this part of the journey was not included in the final book; Turkey
is in a sense pushed out of Wonderland. Nor does the Constantinople travelogue possess
the same literary quality that is a feature of the diary of his Russian journey.
While Constantinople was among the places that fascinated in the early 1890s, a zone
of exoticism for young poets, it was towards Russia that Hamsun would later gravitate.
Here are his great models, and here was to be his great market. Indeed, in 1909 Hamsun
went so far as to suggest to his Russian translator that his books henceforth need
only come out in Russian, rather than Norwegian, German, English and other languages (Letter
977).
Italy was the classic destination of the Grand Tour, which originated in the Renaissance and was common throughout the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, and which young men from England and Northern Europe were expected
to undertake. The young men were expected to acquaint themselves with the art and
the important places of the Western tradition; the journey was the affirmation of
a universal inherited civilisation. While the Grand Tour was for the traveller a step
up the scale of civilisation, Knut Hamsun’s journey to the East expresses a desire
to take a step down; it is a journey back in time in search of more archaic forms
of consciousness, in line with the late-nineteenth-century cult of anti-intellectualism
and primitivism (e.g., Gauguin’s voyages to Tahiti).
The writer of In Wonderland is not interested in gaining entry to elevated social circles, or in meeting artists
and intellectuals, but in experiencing everyday life. The Caucasus is orientalised,
made strange; it is not infected by the stress and fuss and materialism of the West.
The East-West dichotomy is highlighted again and again, and to the people of the East
are attributed positive qualities: peace, dignity, time: “det var ikke spor av hast
i hans bevægelser” (183) [there wasn’t a trace of haste in his movements] (42), he
observes of a Persian boarding the train. The food is also better in the East:
“Druerne er de herligste jeg endnu har smakt i mit liv og jeg skammer mig litt over
at jeg før i tiden hadde spist slikt noget som europæiske druer med velbehag” (p.187)
[The grapes are the most delicious I´ve ever tasted, and I feel a bit ashamed that
I have previously eaten such things as European grapes with pleasure] (48). America
comes to represent the West and all that the traveller wants to get away
from.
However, there is a glaring mismatch between the pace attributed to the orientals
and the speed maintained by the travellers. We know from letters and journals that
they left Helsinki on 8 September 1899, and arrived in Istanbul only three weeks later.
In terms of nineteenth-century means of transport, this must surely be called an “American”
pace. However, the first-person narrator presents the journey as a lengthy one, probably
to present it as a state. From Constantinople he writes to his friend Wentzel Hagelstam:
“Det er i min fortumlede Hjærne mindst et Aar, siden vi forlod Finland. Jeg paastaar
iblandt, at det er tre Aar siden” [In my bewildered brain it is at least a year since
we left Finland. I sometimes claim
it was three years ago] (Letter 526). In fact, it had been only three weeks earlier.
But time stands still in Wonderland.
For Hamsun, the Orient was the expression of a kind of eccentricity. The Orient was
seen as the image of an irrationality and an anti-intellectualism that Hamsun had
lauded in all of his writing of the 1890s—note how Ylajali in the novel Hunger (1890) is imagined as a Persian princess. In the introduction to the travelogue,
he writes: “Jeg skal med statsstipendium gjøre en reise til Kaukasien, til Orienten,
Persien, Tyrkiet” (165, my emphasis) [I’ll be traveling to Caucasia, the Orient, Persia, and Turkey on a government grant] (20). When we leave the travellers in Batumi at
the end of the account, he writes again:
“Imorgen drager vi igjen til Baku og siden videre mot Østen” (290) [Tomorrow we again
go to Baku and then onward to the Orient] (184). In fact, Hamsun was not travelling
east at all at this point, but west by ship across
the Black Sea to Constantinople. Persia is never reached, but lies ahead of them like
a promise or a prophecy. It lends the journey a unique aura that we as readers cannot
accompany him into his final adventure. That the travellers themselves never got there
either is another matter.
What is Hamsun looking for in Wonderland? It is perhaps easier to say what he finds.
He finds his way home—home to Nordland. In 1899, it was twenty years since he had
left Hamarøy, with money from the merchant Zahl, to become an author in Copenhagen.
And he had not been home since. Now things begin to remind him of home. Even in the
opening chapter, on the way to Moscow, the first-person narrator begins making comparisons
with things experienced back home. He hears the starling, which has now left Norway
for the winter; he sees men standing in doorways in their shirtsleeves, “likesom hjemme”
(167) [like at home] (23); he sees a man following a path into the forest: “Det er
noget så hjemlig ved dette billede, jeg har været hjemmefra så længe og ser
det nu med glæde” (168) [There is such a feeling of home about this picture; I’ve
been away from home for so
long that the sight gives me joy] (24). What he has been away from for a long time
is not really Norway, but Nordland. The
journey into new territory also becomes a journey backwards in his own life, to places
of the mind. From the train he sees people threshing grain, which leads his thoughts
back to his father’s mill, which ground corn from Arkangel.
Indeed, the further away he gets, the more present the past becomes. “Jeg husker fra
min barndom i Nordland en sælsom nat” (203) [I remember a mysterious night from my
childhood in Nordland] (69), begins one passage of reminiscence, before being checked
by an ellipsis. Later comes
another memory of a night in Nordland, which once again is interrupted by ellipsis
(213; 83). This graphic effect gives the event an unfinished character—it is both
intangible and important at one and the same time. The ellipses indicate states rather
than chains of effect. We are glimpsing fragments of something the writer does not
really want to explore. But he gradually reveals more and more, and in chapter 9 we
get a longer retrospective look at his childhood on Hamarøy.
“Denne verden er ikke som nogen anden verden jeg kjender og det kommer atter dertil
at jeg kunde ville være her for livet” (235) [This world is like no other world I
know, and again I come to think I could wish to
remain here for life] (110), writes the traveller. How does this insistence on strangeness
fit in with the feeling
of being at home? “Jeg sitter og er hjemme her, det vil borte, altså i mit æs” (174)
[I feel at home here, being away from home and accordingly in my element] (32). Roland
Barthes reflects on a similar phenomenon in a passage in his book Camera Lucida: Reflections on photography. When he sees a beautiful landscape, he always has the feeling of having been there
before, or that he was supposed to come to precisely this place, writes Barthes. He
describes a yearning for places that are “fantasmatic, deriving from a kind of second
sight which seems to bear me forward to
a utopian time, or to carry me back to somewhere in myself.” Barthes is referring
here to Freud, who has said of the mother’s body that there
is no other place of which one can say with quite as much certainty that one has been
there before. “Such then would be the essence of the landscape (chosen by desire),”
says Barthes; “heimlich, awakening in me the Mother (and never the disturbing Mother)”
(40).
The passage in Freud to which Barthes is alluding is a passage in the essay “Das Unheimliche,”
from 1919, where Freud says that “‘Love is home-sickness’; and whenever a man dreams
of a place or a country and says
to himself, while he is still dreaming: ‛this place is familiar to me, I’ve been here
before,’ we may interpret the place as being his mother’s genitals or her body” (Vol.
17 245). It is suppressed feelings towards the mother that here come to the surface.
The
analogy should not be stretched too far in this case. But one might speculate as to
why Hamsun had not been home in twenty years. Lack of money cannot be the only reason,
since he had managed to finance passages to America, Paris, Munich, Sweden and Denmark.
Had Hamsun perhaps, in the years when he had been struggling to become an author,
put a lid on his childhood memories and landscapes? Some support for such a view may
be found in Lars Frode Larsen’s account of the Hamarøy years and Hamsun’s relationship
with his parents in Den unge Hamsun [The Young Hamsun]. Larsen shows how Hamsun’s relationship with his mother, who suffered
frequent nervous
breakdowns, must have been particularly traumatic, but this was something Knut Hamsun
himself never mentioned (Larsen, Chapter 2).
A conclusive answer to the question of why Hamsun had not been home in twenty years
is probably impossible to find, but it is striking how memories of Nordland keep surfacing
in the travelogue. He has even apparently had a block about writing about his childhood:
“Jeg har siden forsøkt å skrive noget om dette; men det har mislyktes for mig. Jeg
har villet prøve å sætte det litt i stil for å bli forståt, men da har det kommet
bort for mig” (233) [I have since attempted to write about it, but without success.
I wanted to try shaping
it up a bit in order to be understood, but then I lost it] (108). But on his journey,
or rather in the travelogue, he does succeed in doing so. In
the Caucasus, the first-person narrator has a feeling of having returned to an original
state; and one of the places visited is tellingly named Kilden, the Source (215; 85).
Interestingly, on his return Hamsun decides to visit his parents; in spring 1900,
he is back home on Hamarøy again. We might also note that Hamsun later chooses no
longer to use the name Wonderland of the Orient or Russia, but of Nordland.
The Orient appears in Hamsun’s travelogue as a spectacle, a tableau vivant. The traveller also locates himself within this tableau, by taking us back through
his own life, to America in particular via comparisons between working practices and
processes, and to the Nordland of his childhood, the latter with more emphasis on
fairytale landscapes. The Orient becomes a stage in capturing the attention of the
reader, as the Orient had been in so much other writing before. And here we arrive
at the real purpose of the journey: the journey is undertaken for the sake of the
writing. The writing situation is thematised again and again, in both the diary entries
in the past tense and the editing in the present.
The sub-title, Experienced and Dreamt, alludes to two different modes of experience, to what, following Irish poet Seamus
Heaney, we might call the “geographical country” and the “country of the mind” (132).
Geographical experience has a processual character, while stativity is more characteristic
of the geography of the mind. The encounter with landscapes becomes an interaction
between the place in which the journey takes place and the place of the mind that
emerges, between new sights and old memories. Place triggers memory. The Orient appears
in this perspective as a pendant to the (fairytale) landscape of his childhood. The
peace and authenticity of the Orient touch upon the child’s experience of nature.
For the literary scholar, a travelogue is first and foremost a good or bad story,
any value it may have as a literary source takes second place. Any travelogue is a
fictional account, and Hamsun goes a long way to distance himself from his (ostensible)
documentary models. On the other hand, In Wonderland measures up to Hamsun’s other fictional writings. It is the poetic function of the
story rather than its referentiality that provides the necessary power to convince
the reader and that links it with the rest of his production. All the same, the book
should be acknowledged as a travelogue, rather than counted among Hamsun’s novels.