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’.
