Sjølyst-Jackson, Peter. 2010. Troubling Legacies: Migration, Modernism and Fascism in the Case of Knut Hamsun. London: Continuum Literary Studies. 186 pages. ISBN: 978-0-8264-3815-7.
Peter Sjølyst-Jackson’s book has a twofold aim: he wishes “to reflect upon Hamsun’s
multiple, contradictory, even mutually exclusive legacies” (6) through the lenses
of deconstruction and psychoanalytic theory, and he wants to point
out the compelling nature of Hamsun’s work and its relevance for “other fields of
literature, politics and theory” (7). The book operates on a number of registers simultaneously.
In it Sjølyst-Jackson
presents readings of Hamsun’s texts intermingled with a critique of Hamsun’s reception
in various contexts and eras. The readings are at times predicated upon insightful
philological comparisons of different editions of Hamsun’s texts, at times upon deconstructionist
techniques, and at times upon historical contextualization. As a whole the book is
uneven, with passages of real insight and impressive scholarship in the later chapters
after what can only be described as a rough start.
In the introduction, Sjølyst-Jackson positions his work in relation to two strains
within Hamsun scholarship, Marxist criticism represented primarily by Leo Löwenthal,
and deconstructionist criticism represented by Atle Kittang. He is also concerned
with the divide that, he argues, still keeps Hamsun scholarship outside the mainstream
of Anglo-American criticism, and contrasts Hamsun’s reception in the rest of Europe
with that of the UK and US. Sjølyst-Jackson rightly argues that both the apologist
position in regard to Hamsun’s Nazi sympathies and the out-of-hand rejection of Hamsun’s
writing on ideological grounds are equally reductive, and he uses a brief reading
of Hamsun’s early publication From the Cultural Life of Modern America to illustrate why he finds Hamsun’s shifting rhetoric and self-contradictory writing
resistant to such categorical readings, and thus worthy of scholarly attention.
In the chapter on Hamsun’s Hunger, Sjølyst-Jackson sets out to argue that “the strange city” of Kristiania that Hamsun
produced in the text “proceeds not simply from the author’s times of starvation in
Kristiania, but more
profoundly perhaps, from the way the text of Hunger re-inscribes, and so displaces and condenses, the author’s experience of migration”
(21). Sjølyst-Jackson opens with a convincing critique that explains why Walter Baumgartner
and others are misguided in applying “the city/nature dichotomy” (22) to Hunger, and touches in passing on earlier Marxist and deconstructionist analyses of the
text, before settling into an analysis of “The City as a Figure of Migration” (25).
Sjølyst-Jackson ties this reading of the city directly to questions of language
in the text, arguing that it demands “re-thinking the status of the ‘city’ and, moreover,
the work of ‘writing’” (25), stating “I wish to reconsider, as it were, the city within the writing and the writing of that city – after which I shall consider the hero’s flighty project of writing within that city” (25, italics original). Here one would expect Sjølyst-Jackson to
build on the many strong readings of the
writing in/of the city in Hunger (Cease 1992, Sandberg 1999, Selboe 1999 and 2002). None of these, however, appears
in Sjølyst-Jackson’s bibliography. After a brief
analysis of the fictions produced by the protagonist within the text, Sjølyst-Jackson
veers off into a discussion of the three English translations of Hunger. He claims that Hunger is unusual because it “seems to put the very principles of re-translation to work”
(31). This claim of a special narrative quality in Hunger is insupportable. Even if the translations by Egerton, Bly and Lyngstad varied dramatically
(they do not), the fact remains that every literary text has the potential to produce
variation in translation. That the three translators happen to have chosen “tipsy,”
“intoxicated,” and “drunk” respectively, does not in fact indicate that “The translators’
innumerable choices and unaccountable decisions locate in the original
a certain force of arbitrariness which, nevertheless, affirms an effect of invention
and re-invention; the bottomless pit of hunger” (31). Sjølyst-Jackson returns to the
theme of migration briefly at the very end of the
chapter, linking his reflections over the invented word “kuboaa” to the topic through
the protagonist’s musing over “emigration” as one of many possible meanings for the
word.
In his second chapter, Sjølyst-Jackson discusses Hamsun’s intellectual relationship
to Friedrich Nietzsche, as mediated through Georg Brandes and August Strindberg. He
discusses Hamsun’s polemics in “From the Unconscious Life of the Mind” (1890) and
the 1891 lectures on literature, and offers a comparison of Mysteries and Strindberg’s By the Open Sea, concluding that “Although Hamsun echoes Nietzsche, Brandes and Strindberg when he
rejects the homogenizing
stupors of bourgeois ‘democratic’ literature, the trouble is that he fails to realize
how his own elaboration of fragmented psychology recognizes difference in a way that
is far more democratic than his politics would ever accommodate” (56). This is an
important insight. The chapter is, however, flawed by a failure to engage
with previous studies that examine the question of “Aristocratic Radicalism” in Hamsun’s
writing. It would have been interesting to see how Sjølyst-Jackson would
respond to, for example, Rolf Nyboe Nettum’s book from 1970, Konflikt og visjon: Hovedtemaer i Knut Hamsuns forfatterskap 1890-1912, which also offers a comparative analysis of Mysteries and By the Open Sea (130–31), or Michael J. Stern’s Nietzsche’s Ocean, Strindberg’s Open Sea (2008), which, in addition to presenting an extended reading of By the Open Sea, discusses “From the Unconscious Life of the Mind” along with Hamsun’s 1889 article,
“Lidt om Strindberg” (121–26), which differs in important ways from Hamsun’s outspoken
criticism of other writers
in the 1891 lectures.
Sjølyst-Jackson’s focus in chapter three is on
Mysteries and
Pan and the question of “how these novels might
destabilize their own investment in masculine authority – through laughter” (58, italics original). The basic argument regarding Hamsun’s
use of laughter, which Sjølyst-Jackson links
to Freud’s theorization of repetition, is convincing: “The involuntary and compulsive
‘insight’ of Hamsun’s fictions do not lead to any ‘understanding’
in the classical sense of the word, but, rather, to what the author himself called
‘an involuntary understanding’, and what Freud called the compulsion to repeat’, the
force of repetition,
repeating” (73, italics original). Drawing on the work of Simon Critchley, the chapter examines
five ways of understanding
laughter in Hamsun’s oeuvre: as “Comedy and Humbug and Deceit” (58), as excess, as
spite, as feminine laughter that provokes male spite, as dark
irony, and, finally, as a compulsion to repeat. The textual analysis that Sjølyst-Jackson
offers is, at times, problematic. His point that “Eva’s name is split in Edvarda’s
name – E(d)v(ard)a – and in the story itself” (71) was, for example, already made
by Nettum in 1970 (228). We are, of course, all capable of such oversights at times.
Far more questionable,
then, is the analysis of names in
Mysteries that Sjølyst-Jackson offers. After suggesting a parallel between Dagny Kielland and
the character Nagel refers to as “my little Danish Kamma” through the shared “initials”
of “DK” (70), he goes on to argue
The Hamsunian ‘answer’ comes in another configuration of the double: ‘Miniman Grøgaard’
and ‘Martha Gude’, who share the initials ‘MG’, which is very spooky indeed, as MG
is also the abbreviation of ‘Markens Grøde’, Growth of the Soil (1917), Hamsun’s ‘back
to the land’ novel written over 20 years later. In the face of laughter, my reading
is essentially this: the Danish currency (DK) is haunted by the inscription of the
soil (MG). (70–71)
This is, I think, a stretch that will cause many readers to balk. And once
again, the chapter is weakened by a missed opportunity to engage with previous scholarship,
in this case Stefanie von Schnurbeinʼs work on constructions of masculinity in
Pan (2001a and 2001b).
Thankfully, the following chapter, which focuses on Hamsun’s travel narratives In Wonderland and “Under the Crescent Moon,” is a much more stringently constructed analysis, and
it offers real insight into
Hamsun’s position in relation to national identity, in terms of the perennial “language
question” in Norway, his transformation into a “national poet” upon the death of Bjørnson,
and, not least, in his questioning of identity at the
“margins” of Europe in the travel narratives. In this chapter, Sjølyst-Jackson engages
closely
with Kittang and with Elisabeth Oxfeldt, offering a useful and insightful critique
of their work. He argues that both unwittingly perpetuate the East/West dichotomy
that they claim to want to subvert, because they in his view fail to see that “The
Hamsunian binary is … counterintuitive, because it posits the margins of Europe above and in opposition
to the Western metropolitan centres” (85). In the context Hamsun constructs, Norway
and the Caucasus hold a similar status
in relation to metropolitan centres of power, and Hamsun’s concern in his travelogue
is at least in part the documentation of difference in the margins—which Sjølyst-Jackson
associates with what Gayatri Spivak calls “other Asias” (87). He offers a sustained
reading of the character referred to in the narrative as “The Jew,” pointing out the
inherent tension in the narrator’s rhetorical position: “The comic irony of the narrator’s
position does not undermine or overturn in any decisive
manner, the anti-Semitic stereotype as such” (89), and demonstrates that Hamsun here
employs a strategy of avoidance and displacement.
Sjølyst-Jackson concludes by stating that “Hamsun’s position does not fall in line
with the East/West dichotomy articulated in
the traffic of perceptions between the metropolitan blocks and their margins; he articulates,
instead, a certain alterity, at once self-assured and uneasy” (90), in which Hamsun’s
disdain is directed at the centres of imperial power, rather than
the racialized Other.
Sjølyst-Jackson examines what he calls the “multiple aftermaths” (96) of Growth of the Soil “by retrieving aspects of the conceptual background of the novel alongside the international
history of reception, and … by tracing the complex figure of growth in the literary text” (95–96). He explains
that the appropriation of the text for the European “back to the land” response to
World War I actually contradicts Hamsun’s own, more pragmatic or realist
conception of agrarian life: “Growth of the Soil entails no ideology of ‘submission’; on the contrary, it re-inscribes a tradition
of liberal independence in the figure of the self-sufficient peasant” (97). Sjølyst-Jackson
is less convincing, however, in his analysis of the complexities
of Hamsun’s figurations of the Sámi in the text. Yet again, his analysis is weakened
by a lack of engagement with previous scholarship, in this case the work of Kristin
Jernsletten (2003, 2004, 2006) and Troy Storfjell (2003), both of whom examine Hamsunʼs
representations of the Sámi in this text.
In what is perhaps the strongest chapter in the book, “Reading Hamsun, Reading Nazism,”
Sjølyst-Jackson presents a cogent and complex analysis of, on the one hand, how Nazi
ideologues read and appropriated Hamsun, and, on the other hand, how Hamsun himself
“read” Nazism, as evidenced primarily by his polemical writings. Without excusing
Hamsunʼs
discriminatory and anti-democratic positions, Sjølyst-Jackson articulates a clear
distinction between Hamsunʼs views and those that predominated in Nazi ideology:
the figure of “blood” in Hamsunʼs writings was much less concerned with biology and
racial purity than
the problem of national identity amid the conflicted legacies of nation building and
the lingering traces of migration and displacement. No overt or implicit rhetoric
of national rootedness, including Hamsunʼs own, would ever be reconciled with those
traces and fragments, the foreign bodies of migration, that everywhere animate his
literary works, most obviously in the ambivalent figure of the rootless wanderer.
(134)
The chapter is particularly insightful in pointing out that it is precisely
the ruptures and displacements of Hamsunʼs writing that ideologues as diverse as Alfred
Rosenberg and Martin Heidegger exploited, and it thus serves as a welcome corrective
to Kittangʼs postulate that the disruptions of Hamsunʼs texts subversively oppose
Nazism (118).
The bookʼs final chapter, “Treacherous Testimony: On Overgrown Paths and the Rhetoric
of Deafness,” also offers important insights, not only in relation to Hamsunʼs last
major work,
but also into a way of understanding Hamsunʼs entire oeuvre in terms of the “autobiographical
inscription,” which “concerns both the historical sense by which the author may not
always coincide or
agree with himself, and the rhetorical sense by which the narrating ‘Iʼ may not always fully coincide
or agree with itself. These splits and schisms are not found between the author and the text, but within the ‘authorʼ – within the text” (153, italics original). Sjølyst-Jacksonʼs reading of deafness and hearing
(in both its physiological and
legal senses) as recurring tropes and figures in On Overgrown Paths is inspired as a way of accessing how the legacy of Hamsun has been “heard” and “misheard”
ever since.
This book is well copyedited, but rather surprisingly, many of the dates given for
publication are incorrect in the body of the text, despite appearing correctly in
the chronological list of Hamsunʼs works provided. Is this the same ambiguous fatal
flaw that caused Hamsunʼs Hunger protagonist to write 1848 on his application to work for Merchant Christie by mistake?
In sum, this is a difficult work to evaluate. It offers many rewarding readings of
Hamsun’s texts and cultural positioning for scholars who are well oriented in Hamsun
scholarship, and who are able to recognize when Sjølyst-Jackson’s insights truly add
something new. In this respect, the book fulfills Sjølyst-Jackson’s first goal of
reflecting upon Hamsun’s “multiple, contradictory, even mutually exclusive legacies”
(6). The book is, however, more problematic in regards to Sjølyst-Jackson’s second
goal
of highlighting Hamsun’s relevance to other fields because, in part, of the way that
his work misrepresents the field of Hamsun scholarship, primarily through omission.
I do not mean here to imply that Sjølyst-Jackson is derivative; rather, it seems clear
that engagement with more of the existing literature would simply have spurred him
to produce more of what is good in this book.