Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun

It would be interesting to see whether the spirit of Greta would not now lie over the novel and spoil it of the Nobel prize.  Man is now viewed as the despoiler of nature, the wrecker who should keep to his already tamed and eviscerated tract.  The emphasis now is of rewilding, of rewetting bogland, of returning to nature.  Hamsun was for the taming of the wilderness, clearing, draining, tilling his land, asking it humbly for a home.  Not every place is suitable to dwell and surely inside the Arctic Circle is inhospitable and forbidding.  A month of darkness in which to interrogate your soul, the sudden Spring and an intense release of the ground to your crops that must be saved to help you survive a snow bound Winter.  Peasants everywhere value work. To say of a man ‘he’s a great worker’ is an accolade, not an irony like ‘ a great timekeeper’. 

The Land is the protagonist of this novel.  Everyone has to wrestle with it and it can be said that only Isak throws it and makes soil which is not a given as in other kindlier tracts of the earth. Fertility has to be earned and man’s domain and dominion is hard won.  This is displayed by means of the drama of counterparts which is an organising feature of the novel. You have Isak and Axel, Inger and Babro, the roving Geissler and Eluses the rambling shopkeeper.  Fertility is frustrated by infanticide another major theme demonstrating the new values of elaborate rationalisation in the developing of the nations consciousness.  That’s interesting and the speech of an official’s wife in the trial for infanticide has a modern ring.  Ja, its the patriarchy. That crime hangs over the valley like a fog which Axel encounters returning in the Winter dark from felling trees.

“He got up, and felt suddenly confused. H'm. What had happened now? Nothing, only that he had been sitting down a bit. Now there is something standing there before him, a Being, a spirit; grey silk—no, it was nothing. He felt strange—took one short, uncertain step forward, and walked straight into a look.  great look, a pair of eyes. At the same moment the aspens close by began rustling. Now any one knows that an aspen can have a horrible eerie way of rustling at times; anyhow, Isak had never before heard such an utterly horrible rustling as this, and he shuddered. Also he put out one hand in front of him, and it was perhaps the most helpless movement that hand had ever made……….

Isak was eager to see what would come next; he was shivering still; a coldness seemed to radiate from the figure before him—it must be the Evil One! And here Isak was no longer sure of his ground, so to speak. It might be the Evil One —but what did he want here? What had he, Isak, been doing? Nothing but sitting still and tilling the ground, as it were, in his thoughts—there could surely be no harm in that? There was no other guilt he could call to mind just then; he was only coming back from his work in the forest, a tired and hungry woodman, going home to Sellanraa—he means no harm….”

 Regret is one thing, expiation is another and all has to be achieved before this deflection into the dark side is straightened out.  As in the beasts that Isak cares for and knows, like the flat eared ewe stolen by trickery, coming of good stock is a moral foundation that not everybody has.  The Bredas are a flighty lot of useless yokes.  Will they ever find a clean path that they can follow?  Maybe, but its not a sure thing this luck business.  It might be stumbled on.  They are the sort you don’t hate but you keep out of their way nevertheless.  

Geissler the Lensmand is an unusual figure without a strict counterpart in the novel.  He is a tutelary spirit, that advises, bestows and grants boons.  He turns up, a genius of improvisations that turn out saving strokes.  He is impatient with gratitude or benefitting by the help he gives and the evidence of his own varying fortunes is displayed by the state of his waistcoat:

“Geissler back again. Years now since he was there, but he is back again, aged a little, greyer a little, but bright and cheerful as ever. And finely dressed this time, with a white waistcoat and gold chain across. A man beyond understanding!”

This ‘filthy modern tide’ (Yeats) comes to the valley in the form of mining and the telegraph.  Anything which distracts from the tilling of the soil is morally faulty and won’t be lucky.  So many themes in this great novel.  Not a lot of jokes but one thing you can say about Hamsun even if he walked on the dark side for a while - ‘he’s a great worker’.

 

Bergson's Key Insights in 'Matter and Memory'

 I finished Matter and Memory by Henri Bergson recently reading only a few pages at a time, that immersive sort of reading as though I was writing it. Nice idea but unlikely with this author who can turn a few millimetres of definitional space into a football pitch.  You become acquainted with the truth of his description of the difference between the amateur and the philosopher as demonstrated through the approach to a problem field.  The amateur takes the topic as found in the history, 6 reasons for, 6 against and the path through the middle.  The philosopher hears his own Socratic daimon saying ‘don’t go there’, uh uh; maybe the problem is not as posed and the oppositional poles as in the internal/external, idealism/realism dyads are merely a continuously morphing mistake.  I’m probably completely wrong in thinking that this is the key insight in his first chapter.  Broadly stated the internal demands the presence of the external to be itself.  

“The realist starts, in fact, from the universe, that is to say from an aggregate of images governed, as to their mutual

relations, by fixed laws, in which effects are in strict proportion to their causes, and of which the character is an

absence of centre, all the images unfolding on one and the same plane indefinitely prolonged. But he is at once

bound to recognize that, besides this system, there are perceptions that is to say, systems in which these same

images seem to depend on a single one among them, around which they range themselves on different planes, so as

to be wholly transformed by the slightest modification of this central image. Now this perception is just what the

idealist starts from: in the system of images which he adopts there is a privileged image, his body, by which the

other images are conditioned. But as soon as he attempts to connect the present with the past and to foretell the

future, he is obliged to abandon this central position, to replace (pg 15) all the images on the same plane, to suppose

that they no longer vary for him, but for themselves; and to treat them as though they made part of a system in

which every change gives the exact measure of its cause. On this condition alone a science of the universe becomes

possible; and, since this science exists, since it succeeds in foreseeing the future, its fundamental hypothesis cannot

be arbitrary. The first system alone is given to present experience; but we believe in the second, if only because we

affirm the continuity of the past, present, and future. Thus in idealism, as in realism, we posit one of the two

systems and seek to deduce the other from it.”

Staying at that level of analysis leads to a constant oscillation, the result of the apparently inescapable dualism between me and my world.  Here the philosopher says no, perhaps there is a path to non-duality in which there is what Bergson calls ‘pure perception’. 

If that isn’t knowledge as we know it Henri then what is it, a transcendental swiss penknife or something?  What would make you think it exists unless it evinces itself in some manner. And are you cher Maitre Bergson really saying that we perceive our perceptions?

The Unclassed by George Gissing

 Let me first of all deal with the problem of coincidence in novels, Victorian novels in particular.. The Unclassed by George Gissing is full of them. Does not that flagrant breach of likelihood ruin verisimilitude?  Yes if you view the novel as a tranche of life, a piece of social history using the characters as lay figures.  Of course its not that, it is a story, a world enclosed in a narrative, pure fabulism. It is a restricted world and the relationships of the characters must be worked out within it.  Therefore they must all meet in whatever likely or unlikely way they do. Its a small world..

A good way to bring disparate characters together is school. Right away the enmity which is a central element is established by Ida Starr skulling Harriet Smales with a writing slate knocking her out.  The row has come about through Harriet declaring Ida’s mother to be no better than a street woman which is actually true.  Though Ida who is about 10 or so does not know what this means having been sheltered from this life by a mother who wants to rear her gently being herself from a well off background but a little wayward, seduced at age 18 and by refusing to give up the child, Ida,  is cast out by her father, Abraham Woodstock.  Maud Enderby is a friend of Ida’s and she is being reared by her Aunt who is a strict ascetic non conformist. Maud believes that her parents are dead . Harriet’s father is a compounding chemist, sickly of course as per usual in the novels of Gissing a good percentage of the characters will be ailing.  Harriet is the only child but there is a nephew Julian Casti a few years older than her.  Mother is dead.

That is one assemblage of characters. The other element is the lone figure of Osmond Waymark.who brings them all together by writing an ad in the newspaper looking for a friend of literary bent to meet for conversation and company.  This is some years later than the opening scene. . 

Now this sort of review through dramatis personae is not my usual way of dealing with a novel.  I’m doing it to remind myself that this was the work of a 26 year old man and  his second novel.  It was an extremely complex narrative retaining interest in the characters as they developed over several years.  In some ways the novel is like a therapeutic journal plotting his own internal drama.  Waymark represents the authori himself as the strong writer able by the force of his personality to turn the prostitute Ida to purity and love unsullied by lust.  At the same time he is attracted to the religious Maud Enderby.  Casti represents the side of Gissing easily imposed on by a scheming woman dragged down and neglecting his talent.  At the time of the writing of the novel he had broken with Nell the alcoholic prostitute that he had married.  The intensity of the energies released in the writing creates a like absorption in the reader.  We want the fantasy to correct the sordid aspects of his life and the visualisation to achieve reality.  The speed with which it was written and its journal aspect mitigated the usual writerly orotundity which can make the prose the analogue of lumpy porridge.

Do all the characters meet? Yes they do, of course. There are many well drawn evil characters.  Harriet is a monster of passive aggression, and vengeance, Slimey a Caliban clown, and Mrs. Sprowl an instigator of vile plot.  As in many of Gissing’s novels there are slums noisome, crooked, rotten and with defective plumbing causing night soil to be cast into the yard.  This is a good novel.