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vendredi, 17 mai 2024

Hamsun l'hyperboréen

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Hamsun l'hyperboréen

par Gennaro Malgieri

Source: https://www.barbadillo.it/114125-hamsun/

Knut Hamsun est bien connu en Italie, et ce depuis quelques années. Ses romans ont toujours eu une fortune inversement proportionnelle aux mésaventures de l'auteur. L'universitaire finlandais Tarmo Kunnas, dont l'éditeur Settimo Sigillo a publié il y a quelques années L'avventura di Knut Hamsun. La grande maison d'édition Adelphi a envoyé en librairie certains de ses romans les plus significatifs. Kunnas en parle longuement dans la biographie la plus complète du prix Nobel de littérature de 1920. Les matériaux ne manquent donc pas pour se faire une idée de l'ensemble de son œuvre, mais surtout de sa pensée et de ses opinions politiques controversées pour lesquelles il a été ostracisé et démoli dans l'immédiat après-guerre. Le livre de Kunnas met d'ailleurs fin à une « diabolisation » scandaleuse, ramenant Hamsun dans le courant principal de la littérature européenne du 20ème siècle, où il occupe une place de choix.

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Son dernier livre à paraître en Italie est un curieux et sage roman philosophico-économique : Il potere del denaro, publié par Iduna avec une introduction de Paolo Mathlouthi. Le protagoniste est Benoni Hartvigsen, un pauvre pêcheur et facteur qui, un jour, devient soudainement riche et fait l'expérience directe du contraste dramatique entre l'argent et le travail, entre la nature et la ville, entre la sérénité d'une vie pauvre mais insérée dans une communauté harmonieuse et l'angoisse d'une existence riche vécue au milieu d'un égoïsme individualiste, en un mot entre la culture et la civilisation. Un roman « conservateur », pourrait-on dire. Et il le ramène à ses origines, à des romans comme La Faim, par exemple, qui a connu une grande notoriété au début du siècle dernier. Au point que beaucoup ont loué ses qualités littéraires et apprécié son éthique.

5937-gf.jpgLorsqu'il reçoit le prix Nobel en 1920, par exemple, Thomas Mann déclare que jamais il n'a été décerné à quelqu'un de plus méritant ; Kafka, Brecht, Miller sont séduits par son style ; Isaac Bashevis Singer estime que « toute la littérature moderne dérive de Hamsun » ; Eugenio Montale le considère comme « le plus digne successeur d'Ibsen et de Björnson dans le ciel de la littérature européenne moderne ».

Après la Seconde Guerre mondiale, il est « jeté » dans la « géhenne où aboutissent les méchants », une géhenne dont il ne sortira jamais par décret de ceux-là mêmes qui ont instauré la « mort civile » pour Ezra Pound, des vainqueurs qui, insouciants de son génie et peu enclins à séparer l'art de la politique, ont construit autour de Hamsun une sorte de cordon sanitaire dont l'écrivain a témoigné dans son examen de conscience Io traditore (Le Traître). Il est vrai qu'il a soutenu Quisling, mais il n'a pas adhéré au national-socialisme. C'est plutôt, comme l'écrit Kunnas, son anti-américanisme et son hostilité à l'Angleterre, « puissance mercantile » qu'il détestait, qui l'ont privé de « respectabilité ». Pour cette raison, il fut d'abord interné dans une maison de travail, puis dans un asile. L'accusation, infondée mais vicieuse, porte sur l'« intelligence avec l'ennemi » et le « collaborationnisme ». Un intellectuel « délinquant », en somme. De la même « famille » que Pound, Brasillach, Drieu La Rochelle, Céline... Mais le temps est gentilhomme et la poussière n'est pas retombée sur Hamsun. En témoigne la réédition constante de ses oeuvres.

Son œuvre, en effet, reste intacte du point de vue littéraire, l'un des derniers romans civilisés. Et elle connaît une surprenante revalorisation (outre sa négligence délibérée dans les différents festivals de littérature nordique) pour les personnages originaux qu'elle présente. Son hostilité au matérialisme, au mercantilisme, à l'absolutisme de l'argent, au conditionnement de l'industrialisme, à la « pensée unique », en somme, en fait un précurseur de la défense de la nature et de l'identité culturelle de son pays, ainsi que de toutes les différences, comme le souligne Kunnas. Cette même nature que l'on célèbre en rendant hommage à une jeune fille et à un mouvement d'opinion écologiste intangible, en négligeant des écrivains comme Hamsun, dont l'écologisme anté-littéral a imprégné sa production littéraire. Ne serait-ce que parce qu'une place dans une revue comme celle de Milan aurait dû être occupée par lui, témoignant du fait que la question du rapport homme-nature est vécue culturellement depuis plus d'un siècle, suscitant des mouvements politiques et littéraires parmi lesquels Hamsun mérite un rôle respectable.

61bFSVP5xeL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpgPlus encore. Pour son biographe Kunnas, Hamsun « représente l'un des analystes les plus perspicaces des formes extrêmes du marché et de l'industrialisation, ainsi que de la vie politique ». En outre, il ne se contente pas d'exalter la « grandeur de l'homme européen », mais il en souligne aussi les limites. Il révèle également « le côté archaïque de chaque homme et de l'humanité tout entière », montrant que le destin de l'individu est loin d'être facile à définir et à déterminer dans le contexte de la civilisation moderne.

Tout cela a été ignoré par l'État norvégien à la fin de la guerre, qui a persécuté Hamsun au-delà de toute raison plausible, étant donné que l'écrivain n'avait été coupable d'aucun crime et qu'il était âgé de près de quatre-vingt-dix ans. Aujourd'hui, nous le considérons comme un écrivain « posthume ». Et Kunnas nous rappelle son « aventure ». Qui revient avec la réédition par l'éditeur Fazi de ce qui fut son dernier livre, Per i sentieri dove cresce l'erba, dans lequel il a bien fait de préciser, dans cette sorte de journal, comment étaient les choses ; un livre de fragments, de souvenirs, de suggestions, défensifs et jamais offensifs, qui devrait être lu aujourd'hui comme il le fut par peu de gens dix ans après la mort de l'écrivain, en 1962, lorsqu'il parut en Italie, aux éditions Borghese, sous le titre Io, traditore, sans susciter d'intérêt particulier.

Les temps ont changé, semble-t-il. Per i sentieri dove cresce l'erba (nouveau titre, nouvelle traduction) ne peut qu'être accueilli comme l'examen de conscience d'un écrivain qui ne cherche pas à se justifier, mais revendique seulement le droit d'être jugé pour ses idées qui, de toute façon, ne préfigurant pas des crimes, ne sauraient être mises à la barre. C'est donc un livre qui nous interroge sur la liberté de pensée et sur l'ampleur de l'intolérance exercée notamment à l'encontre des intellectuels.

Lorsque la Cour suprême a prononcé la sentence, Hamsun a fini d'écrire. Après quatre ans de silence, il s'éteint. Il avait quatre-vingt-treize ans et s'est endormi dans la contemplation de « sa » nature scandinave qui avait servi de toile de fond à presque tous ses romans. Un véritable « hyperboréen », fils d'une ethnie nordique extrême, chère à Apollon.

Gennaro Malgieri

lundi, 25 septembre 2023

Knut Hamsun (précurseur de Kafka) dans un film avec le visage de Max von Sydow

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Knut Hamsun (précurseur de Kafka) dans un film avec le visage de Max von Sydow

Pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, Hamsun a manifesté sa sympathie pour le gouvernement pro-allemand de Vidkun Quisling. À la fin du conflit, il a été jugé pour collaborationnisme. Enfermé dans un hôpital psychiatrique jusqu'en 1948, comme Ezra Pound, un rapport médical conclut à une "altération permanente" de ses facultés mentales: sur cette base, l'accusation de trahison est rejetée.

par Gianni Morocco

Source: https://www.barbadillo.it/111167-knut-hamsun-precursore-di-kafka-al-cinema-col-volto-di-max-von-sydow/

Knut Hamsun interprété par Max von Sydow

J'ai été particulièrement heureux que Gennaro Malgieri évoque dans ces colonnes un écrivain extraordinaire, qui est aujourd'hui, me semble-t-il, quelque peu oublié, le Norvégien Knut Hamsun (Vågå, 1859 - Nørholm, 1952) (https://www.barbadillo.it/111111-ritratti-di-g-malgieri-k... ).

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Il y a quelque temps, à la fin d'un compte-rendu sur la série télévisée Atlantic Crossing, une lecture du drame historique sur la Norvège occupée par les Allemands en juin 1940 - et les événements ultérieurs qui ont occupé la maison royale norvégienne, en particulier l'affaire entre la princesse Martha de Suède et le président américain Franklin D. Roosevelt - a été présentée le 25 juin 2010 à l'occasion de la Journée mondiale de la liberté de la presse. Avec ce film concernant Roosevelt - présenté le 25 octobre 2020 sur NRK en Norvège, puis aux Etats-Unis en 2021 sur PBS, et diffusé en Italie sur Rai Tre à partir de juin 2021, j'avais conclu mon texte sur le site Barbadillo par une observation que je me permets de reproposer ci-dessous, en complément de l'excellent souvenir de Malgieri (avec lequel je suis entièrement d'accord), qui était peut-être passé un peu inaperçu à l'époque.

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Les mesures punitives prises en Norvège, à partir de mai 1945, à l'encontre de milliers de citoyens accusés de soutenir l'occupation, n'ont pas fait l'objet de la narration dans la série télévisée. Ces accusations concernaient les membres du Nasjonal Samling (Union nationale) national-socialiste ainsi que des citoyens ordinaires impliqués dans la collaboration avec les Allemands. Sur les 95.000 personnes arrêtées, environ la moitié ont été condamnées, 17.000 ont été détenues pendant des années et 37 ont été exécutées. Ce n'est pas peu, si l'on considère qu'il y avait moins de 3 millions de Norvégiens à l'époque. L'utilité réelle, la légalité et la cruauté des peines (et pas seulement l'exécution du collaborationniste par excellence, le président Vidkun Quisling) ont fait l'objet d'un débat dans l'opinion publique pendant des années.

Il est presque naturel d'évoquer l'histoire humaine de Knut Hamsun, lauréat du prix Nobel de littérature en 1920. Né dans la campagne norvégienne au sein d'une famille pauvre, il passe plusieurs années en Amérique, voyageant et exerçant divers métiers, puis publie ses impressions sous le titre Fra det moderne Amerikas Aandsliv (De la vie spirituelle de l'Amérique moderne, 1889).

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Déjà partisan du national-socialisme, il exprime sa sympathie pour le gouvernement pro-allemand de Quisling pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale. À la fin du conflit, il est jugé pour collaborationnisme. Enfermé dans un hôpital psychiatrique (l'équivalent occidental du goulag psychiatrique soviétique, bien qu'utilisé à une échelle beaucoup plus réduite) jusqu'en 1948, comme Ezra Pound, un rapport médical conclut que ses facultés mentales ont été "altérées de façon permanente" : sur cette base, l'accusation de trahison est rejetée.

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Hamsun lui-même a raconté cette expérience en 1949, dans On the Paths Where the Grass Grows (Sur les sentiers où pousse l'herbe). Cependant, des poursuites en responsabilité civile ont été engagées contre lui et, en 1948, il a été condamné à payer 325.000 couronnes pour avoir été membre du Nasjonal Samling (un parti qui était légal à l'époque !). La question de savoir s'il était ou non membre du Nasjonal Samling et si ses facultés mentales étaient ou non "altérées" fait toujours l'objet d'un débat. Hamsun a affirmé n'avoir jamais adhéré à un parti politique et est décédé à son domicile de Nørholm, à l'âge de 92 ans, en 1952.

Après la mort d'Hitler - à qui, dans une interview, l'écrivain avait demandé, en vain, de renvoyer le Reichskommissar Josef Terboven, un homme dur et détesté - Hamsun a très naïvement écrit sa nécrologie dans l'influent journal conservateur d'Oslo, Aftenposten, alors que la guerre touchait à sa fin :

    "Je ne suis pas du genre à parler à haute voix d'Adolf Hitler. Sa vie et son œuvre n'invitent pas à l'agitation sentimentale, car il a été un guerrier dans la lutte pour l'humanité, un apôtre de l'Évangile du droit de tous les peuples. Il a été un réformateur de premier ordre. Sa fatalité historique l'a conduit à agir à une époque d'une brutalité sans précédent, dont il a été en fin de compte la victime. Ainsi, chaque Européen de l'Ouest doit se souvenir d'Adolf Hitler. Nous qui avons été ses disciples, en revanche, nous nous inclinons devant sa disparition".

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Hamsun a été acclamé pour la première fois pour son roman La Faim (1890). Pour plusieurs critiques, cet ouvrage préfigure les œuvres de Franz Kafka avec son monologue intérieur et sa logique bizarre.

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Son chef-d'œuvre reste Markens Grøde (L'éveil de la glèbe) de 1917, qui lui a valu le prix Nobel. Pour Thomas Mann, Hamsun était "un héritier de Dostoïevski et de Nietzsche". Pour Gorki, Gide, Galsworthy, Wells, Isaac B. Singer et bien d'autres, il était un maître, un père de la littérature moderne. La prose de Hamsun contient des descriptions vivantes et passionnées du monde naturel, avec des réflexions intimes, des forêts, du littoral norvégien et de la vie bucolique. Il a été associé au mouvement spirituel panthéiste. Pour Hamsun, l'humanité et la nature sont unies par un lien fort et mystique. C'est précisément dans les tons calmes et le style simple et linéaire, typique d'autres auteurs scandinaves, qui donnent au roman un sentiment de sérénité et d'éternité, que transparaît la méfiance à l'égard de la modernité, la crainte que le progrès n'éloigne l'homme de sa dimension la plus authentique et la plus vraie, la dimension naturelle.

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L'auteur danois Thorkild Hansen a étudié le procès et écrit Trial of Hamsun (1978), qui a été accueilli avec indignation en Norvège. Hansen a estimé que le traitement infligé à un vieil homme (86 ans), candide, honnête, romancier et non politicien ou militaire, était un véritable outrage.

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C'est sur cette base que l'écrivain suédois Per Olov Enquist a écrit à son tour son propre Procès de Hamsun, dont s'inspire le film Hamsun de Jan Troell (1996). Le célèbre acteur suédois Max von Sydow, le chevalier du Septième Sceau de Bergman, y joue le rôle de Knut Hamsun. 

Il reste aujourd'hui un grand romancier, charmant et maudit.

jeudi, 28 mai 2015

Knut Hamsun: entre modernité et tradition

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Knut Hamsun: entre modernité et tradition

Knut Hamsun est un aventurier qui a parcouru les styles, les genres et les époques. Génie aujourd’hui infréquentable et oublié, le Norvégien a laissé au monde littéraire une œuvre dense comme une forêt du Nord, tour à tour obscure et enchanteresse. Conteur moderne, il s’est attaché à fuir les carcans de la littérature de son époque, et ceci en travaillant à la fois la psychologie de ses personnages et la langue à la manière d’un orfèvre.

Si l’écrivain scandinave Martin Nag qualifie Knut Hamsun de « Dostoïevski norvégien », c’est sans doute parce qu’il a été très influencé par le réalisme de l’auteur des Possédés (précisons que le réalisme russe n’est pas celui de la tradition française) et ce, même si son parcours littéraire l’a entraîné bien plus loin. C’est au travers d’un article paru en 1890 dans la revue Samtiden, intitulé De la vie inconsciente de l’âme, que Knut Hamsun révèle son projet littéraire. Dans ce pendant théorique de La Faim (1890), roman majeur, l’auteur montre la liaison qu’il entend opérer, tout du moins de façon inconsciente, entre l’individualisme de Nietzsche (quoiqu’il ne l’ait ni lu, ni rencontré) et la modernité de Franz Kafka. Hamsun s’est imprégné de philosophie nietzschéenne grâce à l’influence de Georg Brandes, qui donne à partir de 1888 une série de conférences sur l’auteur du Gai Savoir en Scandinavie. Une mentalité qui se retrouve dans Ciel sombre, ultime chapitre du dernier ouvrage que consacre Hamsun à son voyage en Amérique. Moquant allègrement ses prédécesseurs, et notamment Guy de Maupassant, il s’attache à explorer les tréfonds de l’âme humaine, à commencer par la sienne. C’est ainsi que la Faim prend la forme d’un roman quasi autobiographique. Knut Hamsun fait du personnage principal, un anonyme, un urbain moderne, sans visage, sans racines, preuve de sa volonté de rompre avec les anciens codes du réalisme et du naturalisme du XIXe siècle déclinant. Naturalisme qui s’attachait davantage à décrire avec minutie les lieux, les personnages et les objets, dans l’objectif de retranscrire fidèlement la « nature ».

Knut Hamsun et la modernité de la langue

kh32585.jpgBien plus qu’un roman social traitant de la misère et de l’errance d’un homme dans une capitale européenne qui lui est totalement inconnue, La Faim est un roman psychologique qui met son narrateur en face d’un alter-ego, compagne ambiguë, qu’il entretient pour cultiver l’inspiration nécessaire à son travail littéraire : « J’avais remarqué très nettement que si je jeûnais pendant une période assez longue, c’était comme si mon cerveau coulait tout doucement de ma tête et la laissait vide. » Ce personnage parcourt le roman en équilibre, entre moments de génie et d’éclat, entre tortures physiques et mentales. Il écrit ainsi: « Dieu avait fourré son doigt dans le réseau de mes nerfs et discrètement, en passant, il avait un peu embrouillé les fils… » Ce personnage ambivalent permet à Hamsun d’évoquer ses propres névroses et d’annoncer un autre objectif de sa vie : l’esthétique de la langue. Il n’aura de cesse de la travailler, parfois avec fièvre. Kristofer Janson, poète et prêtre qui a connu Hamsun, dit ne connaître « personne aussi maladivement obsédé par l’esthétique verbale que lui […]. Il pouvait sauter de joie et se gorger toute une journée de l’originalité d’un adjectif descriptif lu dans un livre ou qu’il avait trouvé lui-même ». Dans La Faim, le personnage entretient un rapport imprévisible et tumultueux à l’écriture : « On aurait dit qu’une veine avait éclaté en moi, les mots se suivent, s’organisent en ensembles, constituent des situations ; les scènes s’accumulent, actions et répliques s’amoncellent dans mon cerveau et je suis saisi d’un merveilleux bien-être. J’écris comme un possédé, je remplis page sur page sans un instant de répit. […] Cela continue à faire irruption en moi, je suis tout plein de mon sujet et chacun des mots que j’écris m’est comme dicté. » Son premier roman inaugure donc un travail sur l’esthétique de la langue. Auparavant, Hamsun parlait un norvégien encore « bâtard », paysan, et assez éloigné du norvégien bourgeois de la capitale. C’est probablement ce à quoi il pensait en écrivant dans un article de 1888 : « Le langage doit couvrir toutes les gammes de la musique. Le poète doit toujours, dans toutes les situations, trouver le mot qui vibre, qui me parle, qui peut blesser mon âme jusqu’au sanglot par sa précision. Le verbe peut se métamorphoser en couleur, en son, en odeur ; c’est à l’artiste de l’employer pour faire mouche […] Il faut se rouler dans les mots, s’en repaître ; il faut connaître la force directe, mais aussi secrète du Verbe […] Il existe des cordes à haute et basse résonance, et il existe des harmoniques… »

L’écriture de Hamsun est donc incontestablement psychologique et introspective. La faim qu’entretient le héros sert à exacerber les traits les plus profonds de sa personnalité. De même dans Pan, Hamsun livre le personnage du capitaine à l’exil pour mieux confronter ses pensées à la nature sauvage : « Je suis assis dans la montagne et la mer et l’air murmurent, cela bouillonne et gémit horriblement dans mes oreilles à cause du temps et du vent. […] La mer se soulève en l’air en écumant et chancelle, chancelle, elle est comme peuplée de grandes figures furieuses qui écartent leurs membres et braillent l’une contre l’autre ; non, c’est une fête parmi dix mille démons sifflants qui renfoncent leur tête dans les épaules et tournent en rond, fouettant la mer en mousse du bout de leurs ailes. Loin, loin là-bas… » On remarque aussi l’influence des Carnets du sous-sol de Dostoïevski sur le roman  Mystères et plus particulièrement sur le personnage de Nagel, un homme qui a le goût de la contradiction, et qui nourrit un irrépressible besoin d’évasion. Nagel choque par ses habitudes, par son comportement, par son accoutrement. En effet, si les récits de Hamsun fourmillent de détails concernant les vêtements des protagonistes, on ignore à peu près tout de leur portrait physique. Ainsi, le personnage de la Faim accorde une importance particulière à son gilet, qu’il laisse « au clou » pour pouvoir se procurer quelques couronnes, mais son nom n’est jamais mentionné. Nagel est lui toujours habillé d’un costume et d’un chapeau. Les personnages chez Hamsun sont donc réduits à une silhouette, des aplats de couleurs néo-impressionistes qui ne dévoilent de leurs personnalités que leur psychologie la plus intime et parfois la plus brutale, comme Thomas Glahn de Pan, qui tue son chien sans motif apparent.

kh400338596695.jpgKnut Hamsun, l’homme de tradition

Si les personnages de Knut Hamsun sont modernes par leur traitement résolument introspectif, ils évoluent en revanche dans un cadre étonnamment traditionnel. En effet, Knut Hamsun, élevé dans la tradition protestante par son oncle, et tirant de sa mère un profond attachement à son pays, nourrit ses récits d’une énergie tellurique et presque charnelle.

Hamsun se révèle ainsi de façon moins évidente l’homme de la tradition, par bien des côtés, un « païen qui adore le Christ », pour reprendre une formule de Nicolás Gómez Dávila. On pense notamment au cadre de ses romans, comme Pan, dans lequel il montre là son attachement à la nature du Nord, ou Markens grode (ordinairement traduit par L’éveil de la glèbe ; une traduction plus appropriée étant Les fruits de la terre), une réécriture de la Genèse. Très critique vis à vis de la matérialité bourgeoise, Hamsun conserva toute sa vie un rapport étroit à la spiritualité qui occupe une place importante dans ses livres. Ainsi, dans Victoria (1898) il écrit un éloge des Évangiles : « L’amour fut la première parole de Dieu et la première pensée qui traversa son esprit. Lorsqu’il commanda « Que la lumière soit ! », l’amour fut. Toute sa création fut réussie et il ne voulut rien y changer. Et l’amour, qui avait été à l’origine du monde, en fut aussi le maître. Mais ses chemins sont parsemés de fleurs et de sang. De fleurs et de sang… ». Sa détestation du monde bourgeois transparaît également dans un texte de 1917 intitulé Ville voisine.  Hamsun y évoque une ville « comme ressuscitée des morts », où l’on vit dans des conditions « petites et vieillottes », qui est « comme auparavant, il y a longtemps ». Cette ville voisine est, sur le plan symbolique, en dehors de l’espace et du temps. Cependant, point de nostalgie chez Hamsun qui a conscience des changements et des ruptures de l’époque. Ennemi du monde moderne et acteur majeur du renouveau littéraire norvégien, son destin est à rapprocher de celui d’Ezra Pound aux États-Unis ou de celui de Louis-Ferdinand Céline en France.

mercredi, 29 avril 2015

Knut Hamsun, pagano europeo contro Mammona

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Knut Hamsun, pagano europeo contro Mammona

Autore:

Ex: http://www.centrostudilaruna.it

Quando si crede nell’individuo come persona umana e non come numero imbastardito, si è a disagio nella società dei costruttori di artifici economici. Quando si ama la propria terra natìa, fatta di boschi, paesaggi, volti conosciuti, si lenzi di natura profonda, ci si sente estranei al caos volgare della massa cosmopolita. E quando si crede alla dignità dell’uomo, al suo onore di vivere in sintonia col creato e in armonia con una vita semplice e onesta, nella comunità dei simili solidali, si avverte repulsione per il mondo sub-umano dei trafficanti di denaro, dei lucratori del lavoro altrui, della setta oscura che giorno e notte tesse la tela delle frodi finanziarie e degli inganni ideologici umanitari.

kh1.jpgKnut Hamsun fu di questo stampo: l’uomo europeo eterno. Un figlio della sua terra, la Norvegia, che portò sempre nel cuore anche quando, da giovane, visse a lungo in quell’altro mondo, quel vero e proprio mondo alla rovescia che erano già alla fine dell’Ottocento gli Stati Uniti: la terra promessa della schiuma dell’umanità, dove alcuni avventurieri senza scrupoli erano diventati magnati e grandi capitalisti, dando fondo con l’ottusità fanatica che è tipica del talmudista quacchero a tutto un prontuario di egoismi utilitaristi, in ossequio alla legge oscena del profitto. Hamsun ebbe modo di conoscere bene e da vicino il concetto di “libertà” in uso nella repubblica stellata, i suoi metodi di “umanitarismo” massonico e la sua pratica di perversione acquisitiva. Conobbe di persona l’ignoranza e la rozzezza intellettuale, la povertà spirituale e l’arroganza di un ammasso umano che con l’idea tradizionale europea di popolo non ha mai avuto nulla in comune.

Un paese che, eternamente con la Bibbia in mano, praticò e pratica lo schiavismo molto più a Nord che a Sud e sia in casa propria che in quelle altrui e fin dagli esordi, erigendo quella spaventosa società di paria alienati che è la cosmopoli industriale, nella cui fornace sin dalle origini venivano gettati bambini, donne, negri e immigrati di ogni sorta, al fine di costruire un freddo Leviatano, al cui vertice una ristretta congrega di arricchiti dominava già allora con metodi discriminatori una massa enorme di manipolati. La volgarità dei gusti americani fu ben tratteggiata dal giovane Hamsun, il quale, fin dai suoi tempi, riconobbe la sostanza inferiore di una mentalità che rifiuta l’intelligenza in favore dell’astuzia, non riconoscendo il genio creatore ma solo la scaltrezza necessaria al parvenu per far fortuna con la frode, per accumulare denaro e potere.

In La vita culturale dell’America moderna (1889) il giovane Hamsun avanzava osservazioni che ognuno di noi, a così tanti decenni di distanza, farebbe bene a rimeditare: «Dal punto di vista dello spirito, l’America è in realtà una nazione terribilmente sorpassata. Possiede uomini d’affari energici, investitori scaltri, speculatori temerari, ma ha troppo poco spirito, troppo poca intelligenza… In America si è sviluppata una vita che ha come unici scopi il procacciamento del cibo, l’acquisizione di beni materiali e l’accumulo di patrimoni. Gli Ameriani sono talmente presi dalla loro corsa al guadagno che su questa si concentra tutto il loro ingegno e ogni loro interesse orbita intorno al profitto. I cervelli si assuefanno a lavorare solo con valori e sfilze di numeri, i pensieri non hanno occupazione più gradita di quella offerta dalle diverse operazioni finanziarie».

La miseria morale di un anti-popolo suddiviso fra padroni-detentori della ricchezza e massa anonima istigata all’unica legge del consumo, veniva vista da Hamsun come la degenerazione e il rovesciamento dell’ideale europeo di civiltà. Era già qualcosa di morto nonostante fosse appena nato, qualcosa di corrotto e superato. La sindrome del produttivismo ha generato incoltura e istinti volgari, in un mare di piattezza dozzinale, dove ogni barlume di quella poca cultura ricevuta di seconda mano dall’Europa diventava, allora come oggi, “merce di strada”, giornalismo popolano, sensazionalismo plebeo, una merce priva di ogni stile, qualità, valore: «In America – scriveva Hamsun – non c’è possibilità di sviluppo per le cose che non possono essere misurate in numeri e non c’è, quindi, nessuna speranza che possa nascere una vita intellettuale… Gli Americani sono uomini d’affari, nelle loro mani tutto diventa operazione economica, ma sono gente poco spirituale e la loro cultura è pietosamente inesistente». L’America ha riclato gli sbandati di mezzo mondo, ne ha fatto dei cittadini, ma cittadini americani, e nulla di più. Essi sono un deflagrante miscuglio di iattanza anglo-calvinista e di carenza valoriale, di stampo apolide e cosmopolita. Il tutto, pericolosamente rimestato, ha prodotto il paradossale etnocentrismo statunitense, un’acida infusione di fondamentalismo biblista, insolenza xenofoba, fanatismo provinciale. Hamsun sottolineava con forza questo grossolano oltranzismo: «L’assoluta ignoranza nei riguardi dei popoli stranieri e dei loro meriti è uno dei difetti nazionali dell’America. Gli Americani non studiano il grande sapere universale nelle loro common schools. La sola geografia autorizzata in queste scuole è quella americana, la sola storia autorizzata è quella americana – il resto del mondo viene liquidato con un’appendice di un paio di pagine». Ed è infatti risaputo che le famose università americane, senza la cattura a pagamento dei migliori cervelli europei, sarebbero solo vuote cattedrali di ignoranza e di incolto provincialismo.

kh2.jpgHamsun elogiava l’autoctonia, non il provincialismo; l’autoctonia di chi, avendo come lui molto viaggiato, a ragion veduta riconosce l’importanza delle radici, della Heimat, del contatto con le sane e immutabili origini. Nato nel 1860, Knut Hamsun fin dalla giovinezza fece tutti i mestieri, da calzolaio a maestro elementare a spaccapietre, finché la sua sete un po’ vichinga per gli spazi non lo portò in America dove, anche qui, nonostante il suo animo sensibile e le sue doti di poeta e scrittore, non si peritò di fare il venditore ambulante o il cocchiere: spirito di viandante, non emigrante ignaro e disperato, ma uomo ben cosciente della sua dignità. Tanto che dopo molto aver visto e conosciuto in America, in Europa e in Asia, se ne tornò alla sua terra e di questa, sentita come Madre-patria e scrigno di identità, divenne uno dei massimi cantori che abbia avuto la narrativa europea. Amore per le proprie radici, culto della terra madre, devozione panteista verso la natura e le sue segrete energie, esaltazione della vita semplice dell’uomo dei campi, di colui che difende la propria personalità dagli assalti della violenta società progressista.

Questi i valori di Hamsun. Da uomo antico, egli disprezzava le “mezze culture” che hanno partorito l’industrialismo e la febbre mercantile; in lui il prestigio aristocratico del “signore della terra” è una celebrazione di potenza poetica, che ne fa, insieme ad altri ingegni (pensiamo a Pound, a d’Annunzio, a Heidegger), uno degli ultimi grandi testimoni della civiltà europea. Il suo soggettivismo (che non è individualistico egoismo alla liberale, ma eroismo faustiano di un figlio del popolo) e il suo lirismo naturalistico lo innalzano a figura degna di un paganesimo mistico, che si leva in una vibrante condanna della razza dei profittatori.

Rude anima nordica, la sua, ma capace di passione, di sensuale commozione e di dolci abbandoni, alla maniera della natura, che sa essere ad un tempo selvaggia e tenera. Hamsun era capace di misterici trasporti, conversava con piante e pietre, avvertiva presenze sacre nei silenzi notturni: «È la luna, dico in silenzio, con passione, è la luna! E il mio cuore batte per lei con nuovi battiti. Dura qualche minuto. Un alito di vento, un vento sconosciuto viene a me, una strana pressione dell’aria. Che cosa è? Mi guardo attorno e non vedo nessuno. Il vento mi chiama e l’anima mia assentendo si piega a quel richiamo ed io mi sento sollevato dalle realtà circostanti, stretto a un invisibile petto, i miei occhi si inumidiscono, io tremo. Dio è in qualche luogo vicino e mi guarda…», così scrisse in Pan (1894), uno dei suoi capolavori.

A un simile poeta, tuttavia, la loggia dei fabbricanti d’oro volle riservare l’infamia.Vincitore nel 1920 del premio Nobel per la letteratura, Hamsun aveva aderito fin da giovane al movimento neoromantico nazionalista norvegese, che conciliava laengtam (la volontà inflessibile) con staenming, l’armonia cosmica in cui uomo e macrocosmo si fondono. Amico della Germania ma anche della cultura russa, vide con favore l’ascesa del nazionalsocialismo tedesco, ravvisando in Hitler i tratti del vendicatore della tradizione europea contro i manipolatori economici e finanziari e il creatore di una nuova religiosità di stirpe. Resa visita al Führer nel 1943 al Berghof, collaborò col regime di Quisling, difese il progetto europeo con l’arma della sua penna. E quando Hitler morì tragicamente, lungi dal piegare la testa dinanzi ai vincitori, su un quotidiano di Oslo ne celebrò la figura di «guerriero in lotta per l’umanità, un apostolo del diritto dei popoli e un riformatore del più alto rango».

kh3.jpgCe n’era abbastanza perché, alla maniera con cui gli americani e i sovietici usavano trattare i loro oppositori intellettuali, nel 1945 venisse giudicato pazzo e rinchiuso in manicomio, ripetendo la medesima via di passione imposta a Ezra Pound. Nel suo libro Per i sentieri dove cresce l’erba, scritto negli ultimi tempi della sua vita, Hamsun così ricordava la dichiarazione che aveva reso coraggiosamente davanti ai giudici: «Mi era stato detto che la Norvegia avrebbe occupato un posto eminente nella grande società mondiale germanica in gestazione; chi più chi meno, allora tutti ci credevamo. E anch’io vi avevo creduto… Pensate: la Norvegia del tutto indipendente, rilucente di luce propria nell’estremo nord dell’Europa! E quanto al popolo tedesco, come pure al popolo russo, io li vedevo come astri rilucenti. Codeste due potenti nazioni mi possedevano e pensavo che esse non avrebbero deluso le mie speranze!».

Il sogno europeo di Hamsun parve abominio ai suoi giudici democratici asserviti ai nuovi padroni, la sua passione per la patria eterna proprio dai traditori venne spacciata per tradimento. Condannato nel 1948 a un risarcimento in denaro per i suoi “crimini”, Hamsun fu rovinato moralmente e materialmente e, ultranovantenne, venne infine rinchiuso in un ospizio e ufficialmente diffamato. Ma ciò che a noi resta di lui, e che i suoi persecutori non poterono cancellare, è l’esempio di una vita libera e nobile, di un uomo che non ha piegato la schiena neppure nella sventura. Resta la sua religione della vita, del lavoro onesto e silenzioso, la sua mistica della solitudine creatrice, del senso panico della natura primordiale e del popolo che vive in sintonia con la sua terra. Restano i valori di uomo della tradizione che attraversa la degenerazione della modernità senza farsene contagiare, ma anzi rinsaldando la volontà di opporre la qualità alla quantità, la forza di un Io integro allo sfaldamento coscienziale dell’alveare massificato: tutto questo è racchiuso nei suoi molti romanzi, da Fame (1890) a Terra favolosa (1903), da Un viandante canta in sordina (1909) fino a Il cerchio si chiude (1936). La lotta sostenuta a viso aperto e per tutta la vita da quest’uomo antico e insieme moderno appare oggi un severo e insieme trascinante insegnamento per tutti coloro che non vogliono imboccare la strada della resa di fronte ai dominatori cosmopoliti.
 
Oggi Hamsun rappresenta un esempio straordinario per tutti i popoli gelosi della loro identità, e per quelli europei in modo particolare. La congiura dei dissacratori e dei farisaici materialisti, dal basso di una putrescente “normalità” da insetti, non poteva non giudicare “pazzo” un uomo così diverso da loro, così orgoglioso della sua anima norrena e del suo sangue di contadino europeo.
 
* * *
 
Tratto da Italicum, novembre-dicembre 2014, anno XXIX, pp. 30-32.

mardi, 24 mars 2015

Knut Hamsun : Pan

Knut Hamsun: Pan

Ex: http://www.legoutdeslettres.com

 
livre-hamsun.pngLu Pan, de Knut Hamsun. Livre assez extraordinaire, qui reflète la personnalité hors-norme de son auteur. J’ai rarement vu une telle liberté d'esprit, liberté qui touche parfois à la folie, comme dans La Faim, son roman le plus connu. Il m’est toujours un peu difficile de parler de cet écrivain, et je constate à quel point, malheureusement, il est plus aisé de dénigrer que de louer. C’est que les romans d’Hamsun (ceux que j’ai lus du moins) ne ressemblent à rien de connu. Les mécanismes psychologiques s’y montrent à nu, dans leur instantanéité, sans le moindre commentaire, sans le moindre filtre d'un rôle social à jouer. Mais loin de tomber dans le monologue profus et un peu indigeste à la Joyce ou à la Céline, Hamsun, qui appartient à la génération précédente, conserve la forme épurée, presque elliptique, du récit classique. On a donc à la fois le plaisir d'un style classique et la surprise d’une psychologie tout à fait atypique. Et ce qui est admirable, c’est que, contrairement à Dostoïevski qui fouillait les côtés louches de l’âme humaine, Hamsun, doté d’une grande et noble personnalité, se maintient toujours à cette hauteur pour observer le monde. Il voit parfaitement les ridicules des hommes, mais il ne s’attarde pas, son regard reste distant et détaché. Il n’est pas étonnant que Bukowski, après Gide et Henry Miller, le cite parmi ses romanciers préférés. Après l’avoir lu, on se sent plus libre, et on lui a de la gratitude d’éprouver un tel sentiment.

mercredi, 25 juillet 2012

Paganism & Vitalism in Knut Hamsun & D. H. Lawrence

Paganism & Vitalism in
Knut Hamsun & D. H. Lawrence

 

By Robert Steuckers 

[1]

Knut Hamsun

Ex. http://www.counter-currents.com

Part 1 of 2

Translated by Greg Johnson

The Hungarian philologist Akos Doma, educated in Germany and the United States, has published a work of literary interpretation comparing the works of Knut Hamsun and D. H. Lawrence: Die andere Moderne: Knut Hamsun, D. H. Lawrence und die lebensphilosophische Strömung des literarischen Modernismus [The Other Modernity: Knut Hamsun, D. H. Lawrence, and the Life-Philosophical Current of Literary Modernism] (Bonn: Bouvier, 1995). What they share is a “critique of civilization,” a concept that one must put in context.

Civilization is a positive process in the eyes of the “progressivists” who see history as a vector, for the adherents of the philosophy ofAufklärung [Enlightenment], and for the unconditional followers of a certain modernity aiming at simplification, geometrization, and cerebralization.

But civilization appears as a negative process for all those who intend to preserve the incommensurable fruitfulness of cultural matrices, for all those who observe, without being scandalized, that time is “plurimorphic,” i.e., the time of one culture is not that of another (whereas the believers of Aufklärung affirm that one monomorphic time applies to all peoples and cultures of the Earth). Thus to each people its own time. If modernity refuses to see this plurality of forms of time, it is illusion.

To a certain extent, Akos Doma explains, Hamsun and Lawrence were heirs of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. But which Rousseau? The one stigmatized by Maurras, Lasserre, and Muret, or the one who radically criticized the Enlightenment but without also thereby defending the Old Regime? For this Rousseau who was critical of the Aufklärung, this modern ideology is in reality that exact opposite of the ideal slogan that it intends to universalize though political activism: it is inegalitarian and hostile to freedom, even as it proclaims equality and freedom.

For Rousseau and his proto-Romantic followers, before the modernity of the 18th century, there was a “good community,” conviviality reigned among men, people were “good,” because nature was “good.” Later, in the Romantics, who were conservatives on the political plane, this concept of “goodness” was quite prominent, whereas today one attributes it only to activists or revolutionary thinkers. Thus the idea of “goodness” was present on “Right” as well as on “Left” of the political chessboard.

But for the English Romantic poet Wordsworth, nature is “the theater of all real experience” because man is really and immediately confronted by the elements, which implicitly leads us beyond good and evil. Wordsworth is certainly “perfectibilist”: man in his poetic vision reaches for excellence, perfection. But man, contrary to what was thought and imposed by the proponents of the Enlightenment, is not perfected solely by developing the faculties of his intellect. The perfection of man happens mainly through the ordeal of elemental nature.

For Novalis, nature is “the space of mystical experience, which allows us to see beyond contingencies of urban and artificial life.” For Joseph von Eichendorff, nature is freedom, and in this sense it is a transcendence, as it allows us to escape from the narrowness of conventions, of institutions.

With Wordsworth, Novalis, and Eichendorff, the themes of immediacy, of vital experience, the refusal of contingencies arising from the artificial conventions are in place. From Romanticism in Europe, especially in Northern Europe, developed a well thought out hostility to all forms of modern social life and economics. Thomas Carlyle, for example, praised heroism and disdained the “cash flow society.” This is the first critique of the rule of money. John Ruskin, with his plans for a more organic architecture and garden cities, aimed to beautify the cities and to repair the social and urban damage of the rationalism that had unfortunately arisen from Manchesterism. Tolstoy propagated an optimistic naturalism that owed nothing to Dostoevsky, the brilliant analyst and dramatist of the worst blacknesses of the human soul. Gauguin transplanted his ideal of human goodness in the islands of Polynesia, to Tahiti, among flowers and exotic beauties.

[2]

D. H. Lawrence

Hamsun and Lawrence, unlike Tolstoy or Gauguin, develop a vision of nature without teleology, without a “good end,” without marginal paradisal spaces: they have assimilated the double lesson of pessimism from Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. Nature, for them, is no longer an idyllic excursion, as in the English Lake District poets. It is not necessarily a space of adventure or violence, or posed a priori as such. Nature, for Hamsun and Lawrence, is above all the inwardness of man; it is his inner springs, his dispositions, his mind (brain and guts are inextricably linked together). Therefore, a priori, in Hamsun and Lawrence, the nature of man is neither demonic nor pure intellectuality. It is rather the real, as real as the Earth, as real as Gaia, the real source of life.

Before this source, modern alienation leaves us with two opposing human attitudes: (1) to put down roots, a source of vitality, (2) to fall into alienation, a source of disease and paralysis. It is between the two terms of this polarity that we can fit the two great works of Hamsun and Lawrence: Growth of the Soil for the Norwegian, The Rainbow for the Englishman.

In Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil, nature is the realm of existential work, where Man works in complete independence to feed and perpetuate himself. Nature is not idyllic, as in some pastoralist utopia. Work in not abolished. It is an unavoidable condition, a destiny, an essential element of humanity, whose loss would mean de-humanization. The main hero, the farmer Isak, is ugly in face and body. He is crude, simple, rustic, but unwavering. He is completely human in his finitude but also in his determination.

The natural space, the Wildnis, this space that sooner or later will receive the stamp of man, is not the realm of human time, that of clocks, but of the rhythm of the seasons, of periodic rotations. In that space, in that time, we do not ask questions, we work to survive, to participate in a rhythm that surpasses us. This destiny is hard. Sometimes very hard. But it gives us independence, autonomy; it allows a direct relationship with our work. Hence it gives meaning. So there is meaning. In Lawrence’s The Rainbow, a family lives on the land in complete independence on the fruits of its own crops.

Hamsun and Lawrence, in these two novels, leave us with the vision of a man rooted in a homeland (ein beheimateter Mensch), a man with a limited territorial base. The beheimateter Mensch needs no book learning, needs no preaching from the media; his practical knowledge is sufficient; thanks to it, he gives meaning to his actions, while allowing imagination and feeling. This immediate knowledge gives him unity with other beings participating in life.

In this perspective, alienation, a major theme of the 19th century, takes on another dimension. Generally, the problem of alienation is addressed from three different bodies of doctrine: (1) The Marxists and historicists locate alienation in the social sphere, whereas for Hamsun and Lawrence, it lies in the inner nature of man, regardless of social position or material wealth. (2) Alienation is addressed by theology and anthropology. (3) Alienation is seen as a social anomie.

For Hegel and Marx, the alienation of the people or the masses is a necessary step in the gradual process of narrowing the gap between reality and the absolute. In Hamsun and Lawrence, alienation is more fundamental; its causes are not socio-economic or political; they lie in our distance from the roots of nature (which to that extent is not “good”). One does not overcome alienation by creating a new socioeconomic order.

According to Doma, in Hamsun and Lawrence, the problem of the cut, of the caesura is essential. Social life has become uniform, tends toward uniformity, automation, excessive functionalization, while nature and work in the cycle of life are not uniform and constantly mobilize vital energies. There is immediacy, while everything in urban, industrial, modern life is mediated, filtered. Hamsun and Lawrence rebelled against this filter.

In “nature” the forces of interiority count, particularly for Hamsun, and to a lesser extent for Lawrence. With the advent of modernity, men are determined by factors external to them, such as conventions, political agitation, public opinion that gives them the illusion of freedom while it is in fact the realm of manipulation. In this context, communities are breaking up: each individual is content with his sphere of autonomous activity in competition with others. Then we arrive at anomie, isolation, the hostility of each against all.

The symptoms of this anomie are crazes for superficial things, for sophisticated garb (Hamsun), signs of a detestable fascination for what is external, for a form of dependence, itself a sign of inner emptiness. Man is torn by the effects of external stresses. These are all indications of loss of vitality in alienated man.

In the alienation of urban life, man finds no stability because life in the metropolis resists any form of stability. Such an alienated man cannot return to his community, his family of origin. For Lawrence, whose writing is more facile but more striking: “He was the eternal audience, the chorus, the spectator at the drama; in his own life he would have no drama.” “He scarcely existed except through other people.” “He had come to a stability of nullification.”

In Hamsun and Lawrence, EntwurzelungUnbehaustheit, rootlessness and homelessness, this way of being without hearth or home, is the great tragedy of humanity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. To Hamsun, place is vital for humans. Every man should have his place. The location of his existence. One can not be cut off from one’s place without profound mutilation. This mutilation is primarily mental; it is hysteria, neurosis, imbalance. Hamsun is a psychologist. He tells us: self-consciousness from the start is a symptom of alienation.

Already Schiller, in his essay Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung [On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry], noted that agreement between thought and feeling was tangible, real, interior for natural man, but it is now ideal and exterior in cultivated humans (“the concord between his feelings and his thoughts existed at the origin, but no longer exists except at the level of the ideal. This concord is no longer in man, but hovers somewhere outside of him; it is no more than an idea that has yet to be realized; it is no longer a fact of life”).

Schiller hoped for an Überwindung (overcoming) of this caesura, for a total mobilization of the individual to fill this caesura. Romanticism, for him, aimed at the reconciliation of Being (Sein) and consciousness (Bewußtsein), fighting the reduction of consciousness solely to rational understanding. Romanticism values, and even overvalues what is “other” to reason (das Andere der Vernunft): sensual perception, instinct, intuition, mystical experience, childhood, dreams, pastoral life.

The English Romantic Wordsworth deemed this desire for reconciliation between Being and consciousness “rose,” calling for the emergence of “a heart that watches and receives.” Dostoevsky abandoned this “rose” vision, developing in response a quite “black” vision, in which the intellect is always a source of evil that led the “possessed” to kill or commit suicide. In the same vein, in philosophical terms, G. E. Lessing and Ludwig Klages emulated this “black” vision of the intellect, while considerably refining naturalist Romanticism: to Klages, the mind is the enemy of the soul; to Lessing, the mind is the counterpart of life, born of necessity (“Geist ist das notgeborene Gegenspiel des Lebens”).

Lawrence, in some sense faithful to the English Romantic tradition of Wordsworth, believes in a new adequation of Being and consciousness. Hamsun, more pessimistic, more Dostoyevskian (hence his success in Russia and its impact on such ruralists writers as Belov and Rasputin), persisted in the belief that as soon as there is consciousness there is alienation. Once man begins to reflect on himself, he detaches himself from the natural continuum, in which he should normally be rooted.

In Hamsun’s theoretical writings, there is a reflection on literary modernism. Modern life, influences, processes, refine man to rescue him from his destiny, his destined place, his instincts which lie beyond good and evil. The literary development of the 19th century betrays a feverishness, an imbalance, a nervousness, an extreme complexity of human psychology. “The general (ambient) nervousness has gripped our fundamental being and has rubbed off on our feelings.” Hence the writer now defines himself on the model of Zola, as a “social doctor” who describes social evils to eliminate disease. The writer, the intellectual, and develops a missionary spirit aiming at a “political correctness.”

Against this intellectual vision of the writer, Hamsun replies that it is impossible to objectively define the reality of man, for an “objective man” would be a monstrosity (ein Unding), constructed in a mechanical manner. We cannot reduce man to a catalog of characteristics, for man is changing, ambiguous. Lawrence had the same attitude: “Now I absolutely flatly deny that I am a soul, or a body, or a mind, or an intelligence, or a brain, or a nervous system, or a bunch of glands, or any of the rest of these bits of me. The whole is greater than the part.” Hamsun and Lawrence illustrate in their works that it is impossible to theorize or absolutize a clear and distinct view of man. Thus man is not the vehicle of preconceived ideas.

Hamsun and Lawrence note that progress in self-awareness is not the process of spiritual emancipation, but rather a loss, a draining of vitality, of vital energy. In their novels, it is the characters who are still intact because they are unconscious (that is to say, embedded in their soil or site) who persevere, triumphing over the blows of fate and unfortunate circumstances.

There is no question, we repeat, of pastoralism or idyllism. The characters of Hamsun’s and Lawrence’s novels are traversed or solicited by modernity, hence their irreducible complexity: they may succumb, they suffer, they undergo a process of alienation but can also overcome it. This is where the Hamsun’s irony and Lawrence’s notion of the phoenix come in. Hamsun’s irony ridicules the abstract ideals of modern ideologies. In Lawrence, the recurrent theme of the phoenix indicates a certain degree of hope: there will be resurrection. Like the phoenix rising from the ashes.

Paganism & Vitalism in Knut Hamsun & D. H. Lawrence, Part 2


[1]

Ludwig Fahrenkrog, “The Holy FirePart 2 of 2

Translated by Greg Johnson

The Paganism of Hamsun and Lawrence

If Hamsun and Lawrence carry out their desire to return to a natural ontology by rejecting rationalist intellectualism, this also implies an in-depth contestation of the Christian message.

In Hamsun, we find the rejection of his family’s Puritanism (that of his uncle Hans Olsen), the rejection of the Protestant worship of the book and the text, i.e., an explicit rejection of a system of religious thought resting on the primacy of pure scripture against existential experience (in particular that of the autarkical peasant, whose model is that of Odalsbond of the Norwegian countryside).

The anti-Christianity of Hamsun is rather non-Christianity: it does not give rise to religious questioning in the mode of Kierkegaard. For him, the moralism of the Protestantism of the Victorian era (in Scandinavia, they called it the Oscarian era) is quite simply an expression of devitalisation. Hamsun does not recommend any mystical experience.

Above all, Lawrence is concerned with the caesura between man and the cosmic mystery. Christianity reinforces this wound, prevents it from clotting, prevents it from healing. However, European religiosity preserves a residue of this worship of the cosmic mystery: it is the liturgical year, the liturgical cycle (Easter, Pentecost, Midsummer, Halloween, Christmas, Epipany).

But these had been hit hard by the processes of disenchantment and desacralization, starting with the advent of the primitive Christian church, reinforced by Puritanism and Jansensim after the Reformation. The first Christians clearly wanted to tear man away from these cosmic cycles. The medieval church, however, sought adequation between man and cosmos, but the Reformation and Counter-Reformation both clearly expressed a return to the anti-cosmism of primitive Christianity. Lawrence writes:

But now, after almost three thousand years, now that we are almost abstracted entirely from the rhythmic life of the seasons, birth and death and fruition, now we realize that such abstraction is neither bliss nor liberation, but nullity. It brings null inertia.

This caesura is a property of the Christianity of urban civilizations, where there is longer an opening to the cosmos. Thus Christ is no longer a cosmic Christ, but a Christ reduced to the role of a social worker. Mircea Eliade spoke of a “cosmic Man,” open to the vastness of cosmos, the pillar of all the great religions. From Eliade’s perspective, the sacred is reality, power, the source of life and fertility. Eliade: “The desire of the religious man to live a life in the sacred is the desire to live in objective reality.”

The Ideological and Political Lessons of Hamsun and Lawrence

On the ideological and political plane, on the plane of Weltanschauungen, Hamsun and Lawrence had a rather considerable impact. Hamsun was read by everyone, beyond the polarity of Communism/Fascism. Lawrence was labeled “fascistic” on a purely posthumous basis, in particular by Bertrand Russell who spoke about his “madness” (“Lawrence was a suitable exponent of the Nazi cult of insanity”). This phrase is at the very least simple and concise.

According to Akos Doma, the works of Hamsun and Lawrence fall under four categories: the philosophy of life, the avatars of individualism, the vitalistic philosophical tradition, and anti-utopianism and irrationalism.

1. Life-philosophy (Lebensphilosophie) is a polemical term, opposing the “vivacity of real life” to the rigidity of conventions, the artificial games invented by urban civilization to try to give meaning to a totally disenchanted world. Life-philosophy appears under many guises in European thought and takes shape beginning with Nietzsche’s reflections on Leiblichkeit (corporeity).

2. Individualism. Hamsun’s anthropology postulates the absolute unicity of each individual, of each person, but refuses to isolate this individual or this person from any communal context, carnal or familiar: he always places the individual or the person in interaction, in a particular place. The absence of speculative introspection, consciousness, and abstract intellectualism make Hamsun’s individualism unlike the anthropology of the Enlightenment.

But, for Hamsun, one does not fight the individualism of the Enlightenment by preaching an ideologically contrived collectivism. The rebirth of the authentic man happens by a reactivation of the deepest wellsprings of his soul and body. Mechanical regimentation is a calamitous failure. Therefore, the charge of “fascism” does not hold for either Lawrence or Hamsun.

3. Vitalism takes account of all the facts of life and excludes any hierarchisation on the basis race, class, etc. The characteristic oppositions of the vitalist movement are: assertion of life/negation of life; healthy/unhealthy; mechanical/organic. Thus one cannot reduce them to social categories, parties, etc. Life is a fundamentally apolitical category, because it subsumes all men without distinction.

4. For Hamsun and Lawrence, the reproach of “irrationalism,” like their anti-utopianism, comes from their revolt against “feasibility” (Machbarkeit), against the idea of infinite perfectibility (which one finds in an “organic” form in the first generation of English Romantics). The idea of feasibility goes against the biological essence of nature. Thus the idea of feasibility is the essence of nihilism, according to the contemporary Italian philosopher Emanuele Severino.

For Severino, feasibility derives from a will to complete a world posited as being in becoming (but not an uncontrollable organic becoming). Once this process of completion is achieved, becoming inevitably ceases. Overall stability is necessary to the Earth, and this stability is described as a frozen “absolute good.”

In a literary manner, Hamsun and Lawrence have foreshadowed such contemporary philosophers as Emanuele Severino, Robert Spaemann (with his critique of functionalism), Ernst Behler (with his critique of “infinite perfectibility”), and Peter Koslowski. Outside of Germany or Italy, these philosophers are necessarily almost unknown to the public, especially when they criticize thoroughly the foundations of the dominant ideologies, which is rather frowned upon since the deployment of an underhanded inquisition against the politically incorrect. The cells of the “logocentrist conspiracy” are in place at all the publishers in order to reject translations, keep France in a state of philosophical “minority,” and prevent any effective challenge to the ideology of power.

Vitalistic or “anti-feasibilist” philosophers like Nietzsche, Hamsun, and Lawrence, insist on the ontological nature of human biology and are radically opposed to the nihilistic Western idea of the absolute feasibility of everything, which implies the ontological inexistence of all things, of all realities.

Many of them — certainly Hamsun and Lawrence — bring us back to the eternal present of our bodies, our corporeality (Leiblichkeit). But we can not fabricate a body, despite the wishes reflected in some science fiction (and certain projects from the crazy early years of the Soviet system).

Feasibilism is hubris carried to its height. It leads to restlessness, emptiness, silliness, solipsism, and isolation. From Heidegger to Severino, European philosophy has focused on the disaster of the desacralization of Being and the disenchantment of the world. If the deep and mysterious wellsprings of Earth and man are considered imperfections unworthy of the interest of the theologian or philosopher, if all that is thought abstractly or contrived beyond these (ontological) wellsprings is overvalued, then, indeed, the world loses its sacredness, all value.

Hamsun and Lawrence are writers who make us live with more intensity than those sometimes dry philosophers who deplore the wrong route taken centuries ago by Western philosophy. Heidegger and Severino in philosophy, Hamsun and Lawrence in creative writing aim to restore the sacredness of the natural world and to revalorize the forces that lurk inside man: in this sense, they are ecological thinkers in the deeper meaning of the term.

The oikos and he who works the oikos bear within them the sacred, the mysterious and uncontrollable forces, which are accepted as such, without fatalism and false humility. Hamsun and Lawrence have therefore heralded a “geophilosophical” dimension of thought, which has concerned us throughout this summer school. A succinct summary of their works, therefore, has a place in today’s curriculum.

Lecture at the Fourth Summer School of F.A.C.E., Lombardy, in July 1996.

Source: Vouloir, August 1997; online: http://www.centrostudilaruna.it/paganisme-et-philosophie-de-la-vie-chez-knut-hamsun-et-david-herbert-lawrence.html [2]

 


Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com

URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/07/hamsun-and-lawrence-part-2/

dimanche, 24 juin 2012

Louis-Ferdinand Céline - Knut Hamsun

Louis-Ferdinand Céline - Knut Hamsun

par Marie-Laure Béraud

Ex: http://www.lepetitcelinien.com/

Dans Dialogues outre-ciel (Ed Manuella, 2010), Marie-Laure Béraud a imaginé différentes conversations entre personnalités aussi diverses que Marylin Monroe, Robert Walser, Barbara et Oscar Wilde. Voici le dialogue imaginaire entre Knut Hamsun (1859-1952), écrivain norvégien, Prix Nobel de Littérature en 1920 et Louis-Ferdinand Céline.
 

Louis- Ferdinand Céline, Knut Hamsun Louis Ferdinand râlait, trépignait, faisait les cent pas, jurait, crachait des mots qui cinglaient comme des lames acérées à tel point que les oreilles trop sensibles se ramassaient à la pelle, mais sans la moindre goutte de sang répandue. Dans cette immensité opaque et indéfinissable, il portait des habits de campagne, gros pull de laine, pantalon de velours élimé, une tenue assez négligée qui seyait parfaitement à son visage et ses cheveux en désordre. Lui les limbes il n’en avait rien à foutre il aurait préféré tout de suite aller griller en enfer. 

L F - Crénom de Dieu, tiens Dieu justement parlons-en ! C’est quoi toutes ces putains d’antichambres, ces inventions à la con ? Tous les crétins échoués ici et là, purgatoire, limbes etc… Ils n’ont toujours pas compris que leur sale cœur d’homme eh bien le bon Dieu il en a rien à foutre, qu’il les laisse choir ici pétris de leur cruauté et qu’il se marre de les avoir dupés, qu’il en pisse de rire même ! C’est un p’tit malin. Moi je m’en fous de l’espoir c’est mes clebs qui me manquent , mon perroquet et ses plumes, l'odeur de poil et de pluie mais y’avait un panneau interdit aux animaux à l’entrée et j'ai eu beau discuter avec le larbin, rien à faire, inflexible le gars, drôlement bien dressé. Du coup je suis marron enfin façon de parler puisqu’ici y’a ni odeurs ni couleurs, ils font dans la sobriété, triste à pleurer, nu, vide, gris, froid, chiant,et ces nuées d’anges qui passent et tentent de me toucher le crâne pour me refiler un peu de bonté, la juste esthétique et tout ce fatras de trucs, amidonnés, bien repassés, pile au format de l’étagère ! Eh bien non ! J'en veux pas !

Un homme au regard bleu perçant, très distingué, d’allure nordique, releva avec intérêt le mot format qui le mit en colère. Il en fit presque tomber son chapeau et ses lunettes, pris soudain de violentes convulsions. D'habitude de nature assez calme, ce qu'il venait d'entendre le fit littéralement bondir.

K- Quoi ! Encore cette histoire stupide de l’homme tel qu’en rêvent nos gouvernants ? Soumis, hagard, sans aucune histoire digne d’être révélée, juste humain par fatalité, par accident, qui se lève, qui se couche et recommence jusqu’à son dernier jour d’inconscience, sans fleurs, sans montagnes sans arbres, sans amour, sans rien qui vaille la peine. Non j’ai assez goûté les basses hésitations, les écritures sans talent, les prétentieux, les couards, les théoriciens de la vie, ceux qui pensaient avoir trouvé sans même avoir commencé à chercher, toute cette basse cour trépidant en vain. Les mots, ils n’en ont pas joui, ils en ont eu peur, une peur qui dépassait tout, aucun soubresaut sur la ligne parfaite de leur petite existence, à peine le début d’une mélodie médiocre. Mais ne seriez-vous pas Monsieur Céline ? Celui qui tant d’années après sa mort continue à déchaîner les haines et les passions ? Je me présente Knut Hamsun. Notre destin fut assez similaire savez-vous, écartés et conspués, de vraies maladies ambulantes !

L F- Oui je sais on a trinqué pour tout l'monde, mes congénères ne m’ont pas raté, la vie ne m’a rien épargné, la guerre non plus, ça vous change un homme, ensuite quand on en réchappe, on n’est plus jamais le même. Tant de cruauté ça vous fait partir l’âme en vrille, ça sèche sur pied, ça vous ôte tout sentiment de compassion, et Dieu sait que j’en ai eu de la compassion, tous ces gens misérables et malades que j’ai soignés, que j’ai même sauvés parfois, eh bien Dieu ne me l’a pas rendu, au contraire, il m’a mis au pilori. On m’a entôlé, exilé, faut dire que je l’avais cherché avec "Bagatelles" ça m’a mis dans de beaux draps cette histoire-là, d’écrire sur la haine inextinguible de l’homme pour l’homme, l’impossibilité d’aimer de ceux qui ne furent pas aimés, mais avant ça j’indisposais déjà avec mes écrits éclaboussant le rêve de tranquillité de ces bourgeois, de ces intellectuels  à la petite semaine, aux mains moites, aux mots enrobés de miel, à la langue plate et monotone. Déjà le Voyage avait fait des ravages, j’étais maudit dès le départ. Oui mes livres m’ont dévoré. Toute l’attention, la précision, la passion, le besoin que j’avais d’écrire phrases après phrases, tout cela m’a consumé peu à peu. Écrire m’a assassiné.
 
K- Oui je vous voyais d’ici même vous débattre avec les bêtes que vous aviez provoquées et dont il était impossible de calmer la colère. Puisque je suis votre aîné mais d’assez peu nous avons connu tous deux cette époque de tumulte où j’ai eu tort et vous aussi de croire à une grande Europe possible grâce à l’Allemagne tant je détestais ces britanniques, leur arrogance de colons, leur désir de commerce, d’usines, de fumées, cette gifle odieuse à la nature, ce bruit. Je n’avais pas saisi les desseins de ce petit homme à moustache que je trouvais stratège et fort et en qui je croyais voulant à tout prix échapper à cette emprise anglaise. Je n’y ai vu que du feu, je ne me doutais pas une seconde de ses projets meurtriers, de sa folie. On a eu vite fait de me taxer d'antisémite alors que j’ai passé des jours et des nuits à télégraphier pour tenter de sauver un maximum de personnes des exécutions quand j’aurais pu fuir mon pays pour être à l’abri, d’ailleurs les allemands ont fini par me voir d’un très mauvais œil. Vous c’est assez différent puisqu’il n’était pas seulement question de politique mais d’une haine pour les juifs, exacerbée par des humiliations que certaines personnes vous auraient fait subir dans votre jeunesse et pour lesquelles il vous fallait un coupable. Alors la puissance de cette haine s’est étendue à toute l’humanité, et tel un cyclone, a tout décimé.

L F- Oui c’est sûrement ce sentiment de frustration qui a tout déclenché, c’est souvent cela qui pousse au crime, cette faiblesse de l’homme, la sensation douloureuse qu’il n’est pas reconnu, accepté, le mépris dont il est victime rend la bonté qu’il y a pourtant en lui absolument invisible, muette, paralysée. J’ai baissé les bras, me suis résigné à la contemplation de ma déchéance consentie. Vous savez bien que toute révolte mouvante est liée à l’espoir, je n’avais pas d’espoir. L'espoir est malheureux puisqu'il espère et la prière aussi puisque c'est un cri qui monte et qui vous abandonne. Mais les blasphémateurs dont je suis ne sont-ils pas un peu croyants au fond ? Toutes mes pages, toutes ces phrases qui n'étaient qu'une seule et même question contribuèrent à l'édification de ma pierre tombale. J'ai trop crié ma rage, trop répandu mon désespoir, ils n'aimaient bien que les optimistes, ceux qui racontent des trucs dont on a rien à foutre, leurs petites affaires privées avec un beau brin de plume.

K- Certainement, et comme je vous comprends sur ce point. La révolte des êtres et des mots est vitale, il faut ouvrir la porte sur l'inconnu, ne pas accepter, inventer, explorer, et cela demande une vigilance de chaque instant, un travail immense pour que les mots incarnent les émotions, qu'ils ne fassent qu'un. Cette notion de labeur, de quête infinie a par exemple tout à fait échappé à la plupart des auteurs américains trop aveuglés par une morale inhibitrice menant à un rêve unique et commun, celui de la lumière au bout du tunnel. L'Amérique exactement comme vous m’a terriblement déçu, comme vous j’ai trouvé stupide cette façon de penser que la liberté est à gagner à tout prix selon des règles précises, qu’elle devient fanatique et despotique. Cette notion de liberté si puérile a détruit sur son passage tous les petits chemins de traverse menant à l’autonomie mentale. Ils sont partis ensemble sur la même route, à la conquête d'une chimère. Rien que de prononcer le mot anarchie les faisait frémir et se signer soudain comme s’il s’étaient trouvés face à face avec le diable. L’anarchie c’était de la dynamite là-bas, un mot à proscrire, un intrus dangereux, une véritable menace pour la tranquillité de leurs âmes, un mot pourtant dont ils ne connaissaient même pas la signification.

L F- Ah l'Amérique, New-York , Detroit , Ford, les ouvriers qui bossent comme des chiens et qu'on remplace à la moindre défaillance et tout ça pour gagner un petit coin de paradis sur terre, pour contribuer à l'effort de la nation, ben merde alors! Même les putes font l'même rêve, avoir du pognon pour s'payer des déshabillés affriolants et finir en déambulant dans une petite chaumière bien nickel avec deux ou trois bambins dans les pattes. Ça me rappelle Lola la garce, et puis Molly la douce, ça c'était le bon côté de l'affaire, un peu d'oubli entre les jambes que l'coeur faisait pulser, avant de repartir pour la vraie vie violente, dégradante, exigeante. Bon heureusement y'avait la danse aussi, la danse ça vous transcendait une femme, j'ai toujours été avec des danseuses, sans doute leur côté sucre impalpable, cette façon de se glisser et d'onduler tout en rêvant, de s'enrouler autour de vous avec cette volupté inouïe. De vraies femmes dans leur mission originelle. Sans compter qu'elles pouvaient penser aussi! Bon y'a eu les autres, les hygiéniques, partout, en Afrique surtout, mais pour là-bas on était pas équipés nous les blancs becs, il faisait trop chaud et on attrapait tout un tas de saloperies dans ces corps -là et puis y'avait les moustiques et les mouches et puis on était usé par ce qu'on y voyait, question de vous plomber un homme ils s'y connaissaient! ça crevait dans tous les coins!

K- Vous êtes décidément bien cynique ! Et alors que tout porte à croire en votre nihilisme je vois dans votre regard une grande tristesse, une grande amertume, une lumière presque éteinte et c'est la preuve que vous y avez cru un peu à la vie, sinon vous afficheriez une mine victorieuse et sereine. Vous avez été vaincu par votre conscience, cet animal sournois, qui vous a tourmenté sans cesse jusqu'ici, dont vous n'avez jamais pu vous débarrasser une fois pour toutes. Sombrer dans la folie eût été préférable et à l'heure qu'il est vous auriez peut-être obtenu l'oubli et le calme dans votre trajectoire. Moi on a essayé de me faire passer pour fou à quatre vingt six ans! Ça les arrangeait bien de me coller dans un asile, de m'écarter, s'ils avaient pu ils m'auraient liquidé mais ils ne pouvaient pas se le permettre avec un prix Nobel. Oui mon propre pays m'a dépouillé de tous mes biens, m'a ruiné. Accusé de défendre le national socialisme, je voulais simplement qu'on évite cette guerre, que les norvégiens arrêtent de combattre en pure perte et surtout qu'ils ne se soumettent pas aux anglais ni aux américains.

L F- Je vous approuve, pendant cette foutue guerre ça me déprimait de voir tous ces gens partir au casse-pipe. Et puis je sais de quoi j'parle, j'en ai vu des morts et des abimés des tout sanguinolents, suintant par tous les bouts, j'en ai entendu, des cris insupportables qui vous fichaient des frissons dans l'dos. Ma médaille pour 14 -18 j'me la suis foutue au cul. J'voulais pas que ça recommence ce cirque funèbre. J'voulais plus qu'on fasse la fête à ce stupide paradoxe qui consistait pour tous ces pauvres soldats en première ligne à vendre leur vie pour survivre, à mourir pour ne pas être éliminé par cette société qui prônait l'honneur, le patriotisme, valeurs que défendent rarement les macchabés.

K- Alors la mort est une délivrance. Vous, vous avez eu avec elle un long entretien, avez tenté de voir par quel côté elle arriverait, mais peu d'hommes ont eu comme vous la conscience de son omniprésence, le talent que vous aviez de lui parler comme à un interlocuteur essentiel. D'ailleurs vous étiez mort avant de mourir, elle et vous, aviez fini par être si proches! Amis en somme! Cela m'a beaucoup impressionné, votre courage à l'affronter et même à la désirer comme une ultime maîtresse, comme la dernière conquête possible.

L F- On m'a un peu forcé la main faut dire ! Du coup j'ai un peu moins de mérite, le harcèlement et la calomnie m'ont conduit à faire plus rapidement que quiconque sa connaissance approfondie. Malheureusement ce privilège a eu un prix, et ce plaisir à provoquer la tempête, à dire non et à faire mal avec mes mots pour leur remuer les neurones, pour leur faire voir que, oui, ils sont bien tout seuls et pour toujours, ça m'a coûté un max, une peine à perpèt c'était pareil !

K- Ma façon d'écrire ne leur a pas plu, ils voulaient de jolies phrases inoffensives et romantiques, quelque chose qui laisse l'esprit en paix, qui ne réveille rien, mais je n'ai jamais pu parler d'autre chose que de cette quête impossible d'un homme qui ne trouvera pas. La faim en est une parfaite illustration, cela a été peut-être le sommet de mon art, le récit d'un estomac vide, le mystère des nerfs dans un corps affamé, l'errance d'un homme seul ne voulant pas céder aux bassesses, quelque soit le prix à payer, la quête d'un homme honnête et orgueilleux. Ma vocation fut de prouver que j'étais vivant en cherchant sans cesse, et non pas d'écrire pour distraire mon prochain avec de pauvres histoires à faire pleurer dans les chaumières .Oui j'ai voulu faire de ma langue une langue étrangère, une nouvelle musique , la transcender. Tout comme vous j'étais possédé tout entier, brûlant intérieurement de cette nécessité d'écrire. Vous savez quelque chose m'a vraiment aidé et soulagé après le vacarme de l'Amérique, après toutes ces luttes, et cette chose merveilleuse fut l'Orient, cette manière qu'on les gens là-bas de se taire et de sourire. Plus je m'en approchais moins les hommes parlaient, ils avaient compris la majesté du silence et son éloquence incomparable.

L F- Vous vous êtes montré plus sage que moi, cela ne fait aucun doute, et si j'ai souvent cru que le silence fut préférable aux âneries, je n'ai pu m'empêcher de crier dans chacun de mes livres, de défendre bec et ongles l'esprit contre le poids, le pur sang contre le percheron. Mes livres étaient mon seul refuge possible, ma maison, et mes mots son architecture. La nature et son silence vous ont aidé, moi la nature je l'ai découverte au cimetière, pour vous dire! Ma vraie inspiratrice fut la mort, tapie et ronronnant dans mon sang, qui m'a transformé dès le départ en hérisson d'angoisse.

K- Vous n'avez plus rien à craindre ici! Le crépuscule permanent dont nous sommes entourés vous et moi écarte la laideur, efface la misère et l'horreur, change la poussière en ombre, comme une malédiction en bénédiction. Ici on ne pleure plus, on ne sourit plus, on contemple dans une sorte de béatitude les agitations terrestres et vaines, c'est tout. Nous ne sommes plus. Tous deux prirent place côte à côte, sans un mot, et plongèrent leur orbites vides et noirs sur le monde lointain, où ils pouvaient apercevoir la naissance et la mort des sourires sur le visage des hommes, heureux de n'en faire plus partie.

 

Marie-Laure BÉRAUD

 

Dialogues outre-ciel, Ed. Manuella, 2010.

 

 

 





Nous remercions l'auteur d'avoir bien voulu nous faire partager ce texte.

mercredi, 17 août 2011

Knut Hamsun

Knut_Hamsun.jpg

Knut Hamsun

Kerry Bolton

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

Editor’s Note:

This much-expanded version of a previously-published essay on Knut Hamsun is chapter 6 of Kerry Bolton’s Artists of the Right: Resisting Decadence, forthcoming from Counter-Currents.

Knut Hamsun, 1859–1952, has had a decisive impact on the course of twentieth century literature, both in Europe and America, yet was for decades little discussed let alone honored even in his native Norway.

Ernest Hemingway tried to emulate him as did Henry Miller, who called Hamsun “the Dickens of my generation.” Thomas Mann wrote, “never has the Nobel Prize been awarded to one so worthy of it.” Herman Hesse called Hamsun his favorite author. Admired by H. G. Wells, Kafka, and Brecht,[1] Hamsun always enjoyed a great following not only in Germany but particularly in Russia, where he was lauded especially by Maxim Gorky. Even inside the Communist State Hamsun continued to be published despite his politics, and he remained an influence on such Bolshevik luminaries as Aleksandr Kollontai and Illya Ehrenburg.[2]

Origins

Hamsun was born Knut Pedersen of an impoverished peasant family of seven children on August 4th, 1859. His father was a farmer and a tailor; his mother’s lineage was of Viking nobility. Knut had a hard upbringing on his uncle’s farm where he was sent when he was nine. But his uncle also ran the local library, which gave  him the chance to begin his self-education.[3]

He left his uncle’s farm in 1873, and over the next few years worked at a variety of jobs, laboring, teaching, and clerical, as he widely journeyed about.[4]

America

At 18 he had published his first novel called The Enigmatic One, a love story.[5] He then paid for the publication of another novel Bjorger.[6] But acknowledgment as a writer was a decade away, as there was then little interest in his peasant tales.

In 1882 Knut traveled to the USA, joining the great Norwegian emigration to that country. Between numerous jobs he was able to get some newspaper articles published and began a series of lectures on authors among the Norwegian community.[7] From this early start, Hamsun wrote as an observer of life. He was the first to develop the novel based on the psychology of characters. Hamsun wrote of what he saw and felt particularly identifying with the workers and the tramps. But he was soon disillusioned with America, despite his initial wonder, and he expressed his disgust for American life in articles for Norwegian newspapers[8] upon his return.[9]

In the first sentence of his first article on America[10] Hamsun described the country as “the Millionaires’ Republic,” a reference to the manner by which elections are based on money,[11] and where the “diseased an degenerate human raw material stream every day from all over the world.” Alluding to principles that are today familiarly called “the American Dream,” Hamsun states that the immigrant is soon disappointed when “the principles do not deliver what they promise.”

He was skeptical about the liberty fetish upon which the American ethos is proclaimed, stating that it is in practice not so much a matter of having “liberty” as “taking liberties.”[12] The purpose of being American is to fulfill a “carnivorous, satiating existence, with the ability to afford intense sensual pleasures . . .”[13]

What now seems particularly prescient, Hamsun, in criticizing the “machinelust” of Americans alludes with a mixture of amazement and abhorrence to having eaten even an egg “from a Brooklyn egg factory” (Hamsun’s emphasis),[14] perhaps something that might have seemed pathological for a youthful Scandinavian of country stock.

Hamsun’s next article for Aftenpost centered on New York, and focused on what can be considered the vulgarity of American city-dwellers in comparison to those in Europe; their loudness and their lack of etiquette.[15] “New Yorkers know little about literature or art.”[16] The theater is popular but the “level of dramatic art is so low.”[17]

Hamsun’s first major literary work came in 1888 when he succeeded in getting published a short story in a magazine, which was to form part of his novel, Hunger. The story gained him access to the literary scene in Copenhagen. Hamsun became a celebrity among the young intellectuals. He was invited to lecture before university audiences.[18]

He was commissioned to write a book on America in 1889 setting aside the completion of Hunger. The result was The Cultural Life of Modern America,[19] based on his second trip to the USA in 1886, which had been prompted by his desire to make a literary mark for himself there.[20]

By 1888 he was so repelled by the USA, that he took to wearing a black ribbon in sympathy with four German anarchist immigrants[21] who had been sentenced to death for the Haymarket bombing in Chicago, 1886.

He left a departing message, giving a two-hour lecture on the cultural vacuity of America.[22]

Despite his destitution upon settling in Copenhagen, he wrote to a friend: “How pleased I am with this country. This is Europe, and I am European—thank God!”[23]

It was two lectures on America at the University of Copenhagen that formed the basis of the aforementioned Cultural Life of Modern America. Nelson remarks of Hamsun’s particular disgust, which might to many readers seem completely relevant to the present time: “In particular he was offended by the exaggerated patriotism of Americans, their continual boasting of themslevs as the freest, most advanced, most intelligent people anywhere–boasting from which the foreigner could not escape.”[24]

Hamsun attacked the crass materialism of the  USA. He despised democracy as a form of despotism, abhorring its leveling nature and mob politics. America is a land where the highest morality is money, where the meaning of art is reduced to its cash value. He also expresses his misgivings about the presence of Africans in the USA. The Civil War is described as a war against the aristocracy by northern capitalists. He writes: “Instead of founding an intellectual elite, America has established a mulatto stud farm.”

Literary Eminence

Resuming the writing of Hunger after his musings on America, this appeared in 1890. It has been described as one of the great novels of urban alienation. Like much of his writing it is partly autobiographical. It centers on a young budding writer trying to fend off poverty, wandering the streets in rags, but in some odd way enjoying the experiences despite the hardship. Through an act of will the character maintains his identity.

This was perhaps the first novel to make the workings of the mind the central theme. It was a genre he was to continue experimenting with over the next ten years. Contra orthodox psychological theories, Hamsun held that a diversity of separate personality types within the individual is a desirable state of being. He wrote of this in regard to his aim for literature: “I will therefore have contradictions in the inner man considered as a quite natural phenomenon, and I dream of a literature with characters in which their very lack of consistency is their basic characteristic.”[25]

Hamsun’s next great novel was Mysteries,[26] virtually a self-portrait. One reviewer described Hamsun as expressing “the wildest paradoxes,” a hatred of bourgeois academics and of the masses. The principal character, Nagel, is presented in the form of free flowing thought associations and a stream of consciousness.[27]

Here Hamsun identifies himself as “a radical who belongs to no party, but is an individual in the extreme.”[28] The book caused an uproar among literary circles, but it sold well.

Having outraged the literary establishment, Hamsun next set about critiquing the younger coterie of writers as arrogant and talentless wastrels, whom he represents in Shallow Soil[29] as “a festering sore on the social organism of the Norwegian capital,” in the words of Prof. Wiehr.[30]

Here Hanka Tidemand, a liberated and modern woman of the type detested by Hamsun, finds her true nature back with her hard working husband and children, after an affair with an artist. She realizes her mistaken course, on the verge of divorce, when she sees her children. Here Hamsun sets out his constant theme of rediscovering one’s roots in the simple life, in family and, in children. The well-meaning Mr Tidemand has his wife Hanka leave after she is seduced by one of the bohemian parasites.

[Tideman’s] regard for the individual liberty of his wife amounts really to a fault. He fails to see, however, the grave danger which is threatening Hanka and believes to be promoting her true happiness in according her perfect freedom. His devotion to her never ceases, and when she at last repents, he makes reconciliation easy for her. . . .

Hanka is evidently the product of a misdirected striving for emancipation; she seems to acknowledge no duty except the duty to herself. [31]

The Kareno trilogy of plays (At the Gates of the Kingdom, Evening Glow, and The Game of Life)[32] focuses Hamsun’s growing anti-democratic sentiment in the character of Ivar Kareno, a young philosopher who states:

I believe in the born leader, the natural despot, not the man who is chosen but the man who elects himself to be ruler over the masses. I believe in and hope for one thing, and that is the return of the great terrorist, the living essence of human power, the Caesar.[33]

By now, Hamsun had become a celebrity, cheered in the streets by crowds although he despised the attention, but several decades away from being honored with a Nobel Prize

The Growth of the Soil

The Growth of the Soil is a remarkable book for those who have a yearning for the timeless in a world of the superficial and the transient. Published in 1917, it was the work that was cited when Hamsun was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920.

This is the world of a rough, coarsely-featured farmer Isak, and a woman, Inger, who happened to come by from across the valley, stay with him to sire a children and help Isak work the land, raise goats, potatoes, corn, milk the cows and goats, make cheese, and subsist at one with nature.

Isak and Inger are archetypes of the peasant; the antithesis of the New Yorker and the archetypical “American” described in Hamsun’s essays on the USA.

The sense of a day-by-day part of eternity lived by Isak and Inger is captured, juxtaposing their lives with the grain they sow and the earth they till, as part of a single rhythm that has existed for centuries:

For generations back, into forgotten time, his fathers before him had sowed corn, solemnly, on a still, calm evening, bets with a fall of warm and gentle rain, soon after the grey goose flight. . . .

Isak walked bare headed, in Jesus’ name, a sower. Like a tree stump to look at, but in his heart like a child. Every cast was made with care, in a spirit of kindly resignation. Look! The tiny grains that are to take life and to grow, shoot up into ears, and give more corn again; so it is throughout the earth where corn is sown. Palestine, America, the valleys of Norway itself—a great wide world, and here is Isak, a tiny speck in the midst of it all, a sower. Little showers of corn flung out fanwise form his hand; a kindly clouded sky, with a promise of the faintest little misty rain.[34]

The woman as mother is the highest of peasant values, and indeed of the fulfillment of women, in antithesis to the “liberated woman” that was becoming evident in Hamsun’s time as a symptom of a culture’s decay, a type already described by Hamsun in Shallow Soil and elsewhere.

The rearing of children is the purpose of Being of the wife and mother, as much as that might be sneered at now, but as Spengler noted, there is nothing more important than the continuation of a family lineage, generation-after-generation, and one might add—interestingly—the same values hold as true for the aristocrat as for the peasant; there is no more dread than being the last of a family’s line. Hence, we see something of this feeling described by Hamsun:

She was in full flower, and constantly with child. Isak, himself, her lord and master, was earnest and stolid as ever, but he had got on well, and was content. How he had managed to live until Inger came was a mystery . . . now, he had all that a man can think of in his place in the world.[35]

The feeling is described by Oswald Spengler in The Hour of Decision, which captures the same intent that Hamsun was expressing in drama:

A woman of race[36] does not desire to be a “companion” or a “lover,” but a mother; and not the mother of one child, to serve as a toy and a distraction, but of many; the instinct of a strong race speaks in the pride that large families inspire, in the feeling that barrenness is the hardest curse that can befall a woman and through her the race . . .[37]

This is precisely the type of woman that Inger represents: “She was in full flower, and constantly with child . . .”

A man wants stout sons who will perpetuate his name and his deeds beyond his death into the future and enhance them, just as he has done himself through feeling himself heir to the calling and works of his ancestors.[38]

This organic conception of family, an instinct during the “Spring” and “Summer” epochs of a civilization, becomes atrophied during the “Autumn” and “Winter” epochs, as Spengler aptly terms the morphological cycles of a culture; which is of course the situation today, and was becoming apparent during Hamsun’s time. The culture-problem addressed by Hamsun in Shallow Soil, etc., where the “emancipated woman” leaves her family, is described by Spengler:

The meaning of man and wife, the will to perpetuity, is being lost. People live for themselves alone, not for future generations. The nation as society, once the organic web of families, threatens to dissolve, from the city outwards, into a sum of private atoms, of which each is intent on extracting form his own and other lives the maximum of amusement–panem et cicenses. The women’s emancipation of Ibsen’s time wanted, not freedom from the husband, but freedom from the child, from the burden of children, just as men’s emancipation in the same period signified freedom from the duties of family, nation, and State.[39]

Hamsun addressed a matter of land ownership and purchase, as it had been the habit of the tillers to simply stake out a plot of land and work it, without thought as to how and where to purchase it. Amidst the cycles of struggle, drought, crop failures, births of children, and crop recovery, and the contentedness of Isak and Inger and their family amidst it all, an official calls upon them one day to enquire as to why Isak never bought the land.

Buy? What should he buy for? The ground was there, the forest was there; he had cleared and tilled, built up a homestead in the midst of a natural wilderness, winning bread for himself and his, asking nothing of any man, but working, and working alone.[40]

The district sheriff’s officer finally calls by, looking at the vast tracts of tilled land, and asking why Isak had never come to him to purchase it. Soon after a bit of verbal sophistry, Isak begins to see how the official must be correct. Asking about “boundaries,” Isak had only thought in terms of how far he could see and what he could work. But the State required “definite boundaries,” “and the greater the extent, the more you will have to pay.” To all of this, Isak, could only acknowledge with “Ay.”[41]

From there, the simple life of Isak and Inger is confronted with a bureaucratic muddle, with questions on the money-value of the land, its waters, the potential for fishing, and the possibility of ores and metals.

Then civilization reaches Isak and Inger in the form of the telegraph (which becomes a metaphor for “civilization”) which is to go through his land, and for which he would be paid to upkeep the lines. [42] Furthermore, there was a copper mine in the hills that was to be bought from Isak.[43] Despite the money that now comes to Isak, he remains always a peasant, still toiling, knowing that is who he is and not wanting to be anything else:

Isak understood his work, his calling. He was a rich man now, with a big farm, but the heavy cash payments that had come to him by a lucky chance he used but poorly; he put the money aside. The land saved him. If he had lived down in the village, maybe the great world would have affected even him; so much gaiety, so many elegant manners and ways; he would have been buying useless trifles, and wearing a red Sunday shirt on weekdays. Here in the wilds he was sheltered from all immoderation; he lived in clear air, washed himself on Sunday mornings, and took a bath when he went up to the lake. Those thousand Daler—well, ’twas a gift from Heaven, to be kept intact. What else should he do? His ordinary outgoings were more than covered by the produce of his fields and stock.[44]

The copper mining, which went to Swedish ownership, began encroached increasingly, much to the distress of the villagers. Elesuesu, Isak and Inger’s eldest son, having spent much time away had returned ruined by civilization, improvident,

Poor Eleseus, all set on end and frittered away. Better, maybe, if he’d worked on the land all the time, but now he’s a man that has learned to write and use letters; no grip in him, no depth. For all that, no pitch-black devil of a man, not in Jove, not ambitious, hardly nothing at all is Eleseus, not even a bad thing of any great dimensions.

Something unfortunate, ill-fated about this young man, as if something were rotting him from within. . . . the child had lost his roothold, and suffered thereby. All that he turns to now leads back to something wanting in him, something dark against the light.[45]

Eleseus represents that type which becomes predominate in the “Winter” cycle of a civilization, when the City and money form the axis of living; where the peasant and the artisan emigrant from the country to the city and become either part of the rootless, alienated proletarian mass or a part of the equally rootless bourgeois. The same contrast that Hamsun dramatized was examined several years later by Spengler in his seminal study of cultural morphology, The Decline of The West:

Beginning and end, a peasant cottage and a tenement block are related to one another[46] as soul and intellect, as blood and stone . . . now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it dies in the midst in the midst of an almost uninhibited waste of country.[47]

Hamsun concludes with Geissler, the district official who had once come on behalf of the State to measure the worth and boundaries of Isak’s land, and then to buy the copper mine from Isak, regretting the impact the mining had had upon the village, offering this observation to Isak’s younger son Sivert who had stayed with the land, which encapsulates Hamsun’s world-view and moral of the story:

Look at you folk at Sellanraa,[48] now; looking up at blue peaks every day of your lives; no new-fangled inventions about that, but fjeld and rocky peaks, rooted deep in the past—but you’ve them for companionship. There you are, living in touch with heaven and earth, one with them, one with all these wide, deep-rooted things. No need of a sword in your hands, you go through life bareheaded, barehanded, in the midst of a great kindliness. Look, Nature’s there, for you and yours to have and enjoy. Man and Nature don’t bombard each other, but agree; they don’t compete, race one against the other, but go together. There’s you Sellanraa folk, in all this, living there. Fjeld and forest, moors and meadow, and sky and stars—oh, ’tis not poor and sparingly counted out, but without measure. Listen to me, Sivert: you be content! You’ve everything to live on, everything to live for, everything to believe in; being born and bringing forth, you are the needful on earth. ’Tis not all that are so, but you are so; needful on earth. ’Tis you that maintain life. Generation to generation, breeding ever anew; and when you die, the new stock goes on. That’s the meaning of eternal life. What do you get out of it? An existence innocently and properly set towards all. What you get out of it? Nothing can put you under orders and lord it over you Sellanraa folk, you’ve peace and authority and this great kindliness all round. That’s what you get for it. You lie at a mother’s breast and suck, and play with a mother’s warm hand. There’s your father now, he’s one of the two-and-thirty thousand. What’s to be said of many another? I’m something, I’m the fog, as it were, here and there, floating around, sometimes coming like rain on dry ground. But the others? There’s my son, the lightning that’s nothing in itself, a flash of barrenness; he can act. My son, ay, he’s the modern type, a man of our time; he believes honestly enough all the age has taught him, all the Jew and the Yankee have taught him; I shake my head at it all. But there’s nothing mythical about me; ’tis only in the family, so to speak, that I’m like a fog. Sit there shaking my head. Tell the truth–I’ve not the power of doing things and not regretting it. If I had, I could be lightning myself. Now I’m a fog.[49]

Hamsun explicitly identified the peasantry as the well-spring of a healthy culture, the embodiment of those ever-relevant values that contrast the values of decay represented by the city, the bourgeois, proletarianization, urbanization and industrialization:

A tiller of the ground, body and soul; a worker on the land without respite. A ghost risen out of the past to point the future, a man from the earliest days of cultivation, a settler in the wilds, nine hundred years old, and, withal, a man of the day.[50]

In the August Trilogy,[51] as in The Growth of the Soil and elsewhere, Hamsun had taken up the concerns of encroaching mechanization and cosmopolitanism, epitomized by the USA, and instead championed traditional values, such as those of localism and the rural. Nelson remarks that Hamsun was espousing an agrarian, anti-capitalist conservatism that was becoming popular among the literati in both Europe and America.

Quisling and Hitler

With such views forming over the course of decades, and achieving wide acclaim, Hamsun’s support for Quisling and for the German occupation of Norway during World War II, is consistent and principled within his historical and cultural context.

Hamsun disliked the British as much as the “Yankees” and the Bolsheviks. He had been appalled by the British war against the Boers, which he would surely have regarded as a war by a plutocratic power against an entire folk who epitomized a living remnant of the type portrayed by Isak in The Growth of The Soil.[52] He had also alluded to the “Jews”[53] as harbingers of modernism and cosmopolitanism.

In contrast to Britain, the USA and the USSR, National Socialist Germany claimed to champion the peasantry as the eternal well-spring of a healthy culture, very much in keeping with Hamsun’s views in The Growth of The Soil and elsewhere. This is why the National Socialists saw Hamsun as a fellow-traveler.

In 1933 Walther Darré, a widely recognized agricultural expert, had been appointed Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture, and also had the title “National Peasant Leader.” Goslar was named the “National Peasant City,” and pageants were held to honor the peasantry. Practical measures to deal with the crisis on the land were enacted immediately, including the Hereditary Farm Law, which protected the peasantry from foreclosure and ensured the family inheritance. [54]

Alfred Rosenberg, the primary National Socialist philosopher in Germany, had already paid tribute to Hamsun in his seminal Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), with specific reference to The Growth of the Soil, as expressing the “mystical-natural will” of the peasant better than any other living artist:

No one knows why, with great effort, the farmer Isak cultivates one piece of land after another in god-forsaken regions, or why his wife has joined him and gives birth to his children. But Isak follows an inexplicable law. He carries on a fruitful quest out of a mystical primal will. At the end of his existence he will certainly look back in astonishment at the harvest of his activity. The Growth of the Soil is the great present day epic of the Nordic will in its eternal primordial form. Nordic man can be heroic even behind the wooden plow.[55]

Such was the background when in 1934 Hamsun wrote an article, “Wait and See,” in which he attacked the opponents of National Socialist Germany and asked if a return of Communists, Jews, and Bruning to Germany were preferable. In 1935 he sent a greeting to Der Norden, the organ of the Nordic Society, supporting the return of the League of Nations mandate, Saarland, to Germany, and from the start supported Germany privately and publicly wherever he felt able.[56] Hamsun and his wife Marie remained particularly close to the Nordic Society, which was avid in promoting Hamsun’s works.[57]

In April 1940 the Germans occupied Norway to secure the sea route, after the British had on several occasions breached Norwegian neutrality, included mining of Norway’s territorial waters, about which the Norwegian Government impotently protested. [58]

In 1933, former Defense Minister Vidkun Quisling had established his own party Nasjonal Samling (National Unification). Hamsun had formed a good impression of Quisling since 1932, and wrote in support of Nasjonal Samling’s electoral appeal in 1936 in the party newspaper Fritt Folk. His wife Marie was the local representative of the party.[59]

Ironically, Quisling, his very name becoming synonymous with “traitor,”[60] was the only politician who had campaigned before the war for a strong defense capability, and was particularly pro-British, having been honored by the British Government for looking after British interests in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, where he had been the principal aide to the celebrated Dr. Fridtjof Nansen, who was directing the European Famine Relief to Russia in 1921, with Quisling serving as Secretary for the Relief Organization.[61]

Quisling sought an alliance of Nordic nations including Germany and Britain, in what he called a “Northern Coalition,” against Communism.[62]

The only strong resistance against the German invasion came from a garrison commanded by an officer who belonged to Quisling’s party. The King and Government quickly fled, leaving Norway without an administration or any voice to negotiate with the Germans.[63] Quisling, like Petain in France, and many other figures throughout Europe who were to be branded and usually executed as “traitors,” stepped in to fill the void as the only political figure willing to try and look after Norwegian interests under the occupation. He declared himself Minister President, but because he was not a pliant tool he did not enjoy the confidence of the German military authorities. He was soon forced to resign in favor of an administrative council under German control, but eventually regained a measure of authority.[64]

Meanwhile, Hamsun urged Norwegians to rally behind Quisling so that some form of sovereignty could be restored. He described Quisling as “more than a politician, he is a thinker, a constructive spirit.”[65]

Hamsun’s longest wartime article appeared in the German language Berlin-Tokyo-Rome periodical in February 1942, where he  wrote: “Europe does not want either the Jew or their gold, neither the Americans nor their country.”[66]

Despite Hamsun’s pro-German sentiment, he championed the rights of his countrymen, including those who resisted the German occupation. He attempted in intercede for the writer Ronald Fangen, and many others, who had been arrested by the Gestapo.[67]

In 1943 Hamsun and his wife accepted the invitation of Goebbels to visit Germany. Goebbels wrote of Hamsun as being “the embodiment of what an epic writer should be.” Hamsun was equally impressed with the Reich Minister and sent Goebbels the Nobel medal he had been awarded, which Goebbels accepted as Hamsun’s “expression of solidarity with our battle for a new Europe, and a happy society.”[68]

Whilst en route to Norway from Germany, Hamsun met Hitler, a meeting which did not go well, as Hamsun took the opportunity to condemn the military administration of Norway which had rendered Quisling powerless, and they parted in an unfriendly manner[69]

However, Hamsun continued to support Germany, and expressed his pride when a son, Arild,  joined the Norwegian Legion of the Waffen SS.[70]

In 1945  several strokes forced Hamsun to quiet his activities. But with Hitler’s death Hamsun defiantly wrote a tribute for the press:

I am not worthy to speak his name out loud. Nor do his life and his deeds warrant any kind of sentimental discussion. He was a warrior, a warrior of mankind, and a prophet of the gospel of justice for all nations. He was a reforming nature of the highest order, and his fate was to arise in a time of unparalleled barbarism, which finally failed him. Thus might the average western European regard Hitler? We, his closest supporters, now bow our heads at his death.[71]

Post-War Persecution

Membership of Quisling’s party was declared a criminal offense and Hamsun’s sons Tore and Arild[72] were among the first of  50,000 Norwegians to be arrested as “Nazis” (sic) or as “collaborators.”[73] Marie and Knut were arrested a few weeks later. Due to his age, at 86, Hamsun was sent to a hospital rather than to a prison, although the stress and treatment struck considerably at his still quite good health. He was defiant and stated to the authorities that he would have assisted the Germans more if he could.[74]

He was sent to an old folks home where he was a popular guest. However, prosecuting Norway’s leading cultural figure, like America’s dealings with Ezra Pound, was an  awkward matter. Consequently, Hamsun spent 119 days in a psychiatric clinic. The psychiatrists found in him, as in the characters of his novel’s, a complex interplay of traits, but the most prominent of all they described was his “absolute honesty.” The conclusion was that Hamsun was not insane but that he was mentally impaired. Hence, what Ferguson calls “an embarrassing situation,” given that Hamsun was “first and foremost [Norway’s] great writer, their national pride, a loved and admired and never quite respectable ancient child,” was dealt with by concluding that his support for Germany could be put down to “senility.” This was the party-line taken up by the press throughout the world.[75]

Reading  Hamsun’s post-war autobiographical On Overgrown Paths, written amidst the threats of prosecution and the interrogations, shows him to be perfectly lucid. Hamsun, as this last writing shows, although deaf and going blind, retained his mental faculties impressively, along with a certain fatalism and humor.[76]

Although the Attorney General opted not to proceed against Hamsun, the Crown wished to try him as a member of Nasjonal  Samling. To Hamsun the action at least meant that he was being officially acknowledged as of sound mind. He was fined 425,000 kroner.[77]

With ruinous fines hanging over them, the Hamsuns returned to their farm Norholm.[78] On appeal the fine was reduced to 325,000 kroner,[79] his persistence and courage in speaking on behalf of imprisoned Norwegians under the German Occupation being a mitigating factor. Tore was also fined, and his brother Arild was jailed until 1949 for his membership of the Norwegian Legion. Marie Hamsun was released from jail in 1948.[80]

On Overgrown Paths was published in 1949 and became an immediate best seller,[81] although Hamsun ended his days in poverty on his farm. He died in his sleep on February 19, 1952.

When the Robert Ferguson’s biography appeared in 1987, he wrote that while Norway is especially keen to honor its writers, “Hamsun’s life remains largely uncommemorated by officialdom.” [82] However, two decades later, in 2009:

In Norway, the 150th birthday of Knut Hamsun will be celebrated by theatrical exhibitions, productions, and an international conference. One of the main squares of Oslo, located just beside the national Opera, will henceforth bear his name. A monument will finally be erected in his honor. One might say that the Norwegians have just discovered the name of their very famous compatriot. Recently, a large number of towns and villages have named squares and streets for him. At the place where he resided, in Hamaroy, a “Knut Hamsun Center” will officially open on August 4th, the day of his birth. On that day, a special postage stamp will be issued. Yet Knut Hamsun was denounced and vilified for decades by the Norwegian establishment.[83]

Hamsun’s defiant commitment to Quisling and to Germany during the war was a logical conclusion to ideas that had been fermenting and widely read and applauded over a period of half a century. Yet when it came time to act on those ideals, of fighting materialism, plutocracy, and communism, for the restoration of rural and peasant values against the encroaching tide of industrialism and money, Hamsun’s fellow-countryman reacted with outrage. Hamsun, unlike some of the pre-war supporters of National Socialism or Fascism, for better or for worse, never did compromise his values.

Notes

[1] Robert Ferguson, Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun (London: Hutchinson, 1987), p. 300.

[2] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 301.

[3] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 13.

[4] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 21.

[5] Hamsun, The Enigmatic One, 1877.

[6] Hamsun, Bjorger, 1878.

[7] Richard C. Nelson, Knut Hamsun Remembers America: Essays and Stories: 1885–1949 (Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2003), pp. 4–5.

[8] Knut Hamsun, “Letters from America,” Knut Hamsun Remembers America, p. 7.

[9] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 68.

[10] Hamsun, “The American Character,” Aftenposten, Christiania, Norway, January 21, 1885; Knut Hamsun Remembers America, pp. 17–18.

[11] Hamsun, “The American Character,” p. 19.

[12] Hamsun, “The American Character,” p. 14.

[13] Hamusn, “The American Character,” p. 20.

[14] Hamsun, “The American Character,” p. 21.

[15] Hamsun, “New York,” Aftenposten, February 12, 14, 1895; Knut Hamsun Remembers America, pp. 28–29.

[16] Hamsun, “New York,” p. 29.

[17] Hamsun, “New York,” p. 30.

[18] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 101.

[19] Hamsun, The Cultural Life of Modern America, 1889.

[20] Knut Hamsun Remembers America, p. 7.

[21] Knut Hamsun Remembers America, p. 9.

[22] Knut Hamsun Remembers America, p. 9.

[23] Knut Hamsun Remembers America, p. 10.

[24] Knut Hamsun Remembers America, p. 10.

[25] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 124.

[26] Hamsun, Mysteries, 1892.

[27] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 133.

[28] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 138.

[29] Hamsun, Shallow Soil, 1893.

[30] Josef Wiehr, Knut Hamsun: His personality and his outlook upon life (Smith College Studies in Modern Languages, 1922), p. 23.

[31] Wiehr, Knut Hamsun, p. 24.

[32] Hamsun, 1895–1896.

[33] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 164.

[34] Hamsun, The Growth of the Soil (1920), Book I, Chapter 3. http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/hamsun/knut/h23g/index.html

[35] Hamsun, The Growth of the Soil, Chapter 4.

[36] It needs to be pointed out that by “race” Spengler did not a biological, or “Darwinistic” conception, but an instinct. “Race” means “duration of character,” including “an urge to permanence.” Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision, p. 220.

[37] Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision, p. 220.

[38] Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision, pp. 220–21.

[39]

[40] Hamsun, The Growth of the Soil, Chapter 5.

[41] Hamsun, The Growth of the Soil, Chapter 5.

[42] Hamsun, The Growth of the Soil, Chapter 9.

[43] Hamsun, The Growth of the Soil, Chapter 10.

[44] Hamsun, The Growth of the Soil, Chapter 14.

[45] Hamsun, The Growth of the Soil, Book II, Chapter 11.

[46] “Related to one another” in the sense that they express the analogous features of a culture in its “Spring” High Culture cycle and its “Winter” Late Civilization cycle respectively.

[47] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of The West, 1928 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1971), Vol. 2, p. 102.

[48] The name of Isak’s farm.

[49] Hamsun, The Growth of the Soil, Book II, Chapter 12.

[50] Hamsun, The Growth of the Soil, Book II, Chapter 12.

[51] Hamsun, August, 1930.

[52] The Boers were–and partly remain–an anomaly in the modern world; the vestige of the bygone era who had to be eliminated as a hindrance to the global economic structure. Hence the recent ideological and economic war against the Afrikaner to destroy his “apartheid” was a continuation of the Boer Wars under other slogans, but with the same aim: to capture the wealth of southern Africa–in the name of “human rights”–for the sake of the same kind of plutocracy which had fought the Afrikaners’ forefathers a century previously.

[53] Hamsun, The Growth of the Soil, Book II, Chapter 12.

[54] Anna Bramwell, Blood and Soil: Walther Darré and Hitler’s Green Party (Buckinghmanshire: The Kensal Press, 1985), p. 91.

[55] Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth of the Twentieth Century, 1930 (Torrance, Cal.: The Noontide Press, 1982), p. 268.

[56] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 326.

[57] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 338.

[58] Ralph Hewins, Quisling: Prophet Without Honour (London: W. H. Allen, 1965), p. 201.

[59] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 333.

[60] Hewins, Quilsing, p. 9. Hewins, a wartime journalist, wrote his biography to amend for the part he had played in portraying Quisling as the epitome of “treason” (p. 11).

[61] Hewins, Quisling, p. 55.

[62] Vidkun Quilsing, Russia and Ourselves (London: Hodden and Stoughton, 1931), p. 275.

[63] Hewins, Quisling, p. 208.

[64] Hewins summarizes the situation when writing: “The whole myth of unprovoked aggression by Germany should be abandoned. It is incredible and does grievous injustice to the ‘quislings’ who are quite wrongly alleged to have engineered the German Occupation. There is no truth in this sinister legend” (Hewins, Quisling, p. 198).

[65] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 357.

[66] Hamsun, “Real Brotherhood,” Berlin-Tokyo-Rome, February 1942; Ferguson, Enigma, p. 351.

[67] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 359.

[68] Ferguson, Enigma, pp. 369–70.

[69] Ferguson, Enigma, pp. 374–75.

[70] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 383.

[71] Hamsun, “Adolf Hitler,” Aftenposten, May 7, 1945, p. 1

[72] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 387.

[73] Hewins, Quisling, pp. 357–58. Hewins notes that these thousands of Norwegians were jailed for years often without charge or trial, interrogated for eight hours a time, subjected to “eeling” (being dragged back and forth across broken stones), and a starvation diet of 800 calories a day. “Many prisoners died of malnutrition or starvation, and limbs swollen from privation were a commonplace. Hundreds, if not thousands, died of dysentery and tuberculosis epidemics. Hundreds more bear the scares of kicking, beating and brutality of their guards” (Hewins, pp. 357–58).

[74] Ferguson, Enigma, pp. 387–88.

[75] Ferguson, Enigma, pp. 389–90.

[76] Hamsun, On Overgrown Paths, 1949 (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1968).

[77] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 407.

[78] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 408.

[79] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 409.

[80] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 410.

[81] On Overgrown Paths was also published simultaneously in German and Swedish editions. Ferguson, Enigma, p. 416.

[82] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 421.

[83] Robert Steuckers, “Knut Hamsun: Saved by Stalin?,” Counter Currents, http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/07/knut-hamsun-saved-by-stalin/ The title of the Steuckers article refers to Soviet Foreign Affairs Minister Molotov having intervened in 1945 in favor of Hamsun, stating: “it would be regrettable to see Norway condemning this great writer to the gallows.”


Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com

URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/08/knut-hamsun-2/

samedi, 27 novembre 2010

Paganismo e Filosofia da Vida em Knut Hamsun e D.H. Lawrence

Paganismo e Filosofia da Vida em Knut Hamsun e D.H. Lawrence

por Robert Steuckers
Ex: http://legio-victrix.blogspot.com/

hamsun_3_1093822a.jpgO filólogo húngaro Akos Doma, formado na Alemanha e nos EUA, acaba de publicar uma obra de exegese literária, na qual faz um paralelismo entre as obras de Hamsun e Lawrence. O ponto em comum é uma "crítica da civilização". Conceito que, obviamente, devemos apreender em seu contexto. Em efeito, a civilização seria um processo positivo desde o ponto de vista dos "progressistas", que entendem a história de forma linear. Em efeito, os partidários da filosofia do Aufklärung [*Iluminismo] e os adeptos incondicionais de uma certa modernidade tendem à simplificação, à geometrização e à "cerebrização". Sem embargo, a civilização mostra-se a nós como um desenvolvimento negativo para todos aqueles que pretendem conservar a fecundidade incomensurável em relação aos venenos culturais, para os que constatam, sem escandalizar-se com isso, que o tempo é plurimorfo; quer dizer, que o tempo para uma cultura não coincide com o da outra, em contraposição aos iluministas quem se afirmam na crença de um tempo monomorfo e aplicável a todos os povos e culturas do planeta. Cada povo tem seu próprio tempo. Se a modernidade rechaça esta pluralidade de formas do tempo, então entramos irremissívelmente no terreno do ilusório.

Desde um certo ponto de vista, explica Akos Doma, Hamsun e Lawrence são herdeiros de Rousseau. Porém, de qual Rousseau? Do que foi estigmatizado pela tradição maurrasiana (Maurras, Lasserre, Muret) ou daquele outro que critica radicalmente o Aufklärung sem que isso comporte defesa alguma do Antigo Regime? Para o Rousseau crítico do Iluminismo, a ideologia moderna é, precisamente, o oposto real do conceito ideal em sua concepção da política: aquele é anti-igualitário e hostil à liberdade, ainda que reivindique a igualidade e a liberdade. Antes da irrupção da modernidade ao longo do século XVIII, para Rousseau e seus seguidores pré-românticos, existiria uma "comunidade sadia", a convivência reinaria entre os homens e as pessoas seriam "boas" porque a natureza é "boa". Mais tarde, entre os românticos que, no terreno político, são conservadores, esta noção de "bondade" seguirá estando presente, ainda que na atualidade tal característica se considere como patrimônio exclusivo dos ativistas ou pensadores revolucionários. A idéia de "bondade" tem estado presente tanto na "direita" como na "esquerda".

Sem embargo, para o poeta romântico inglês Wordsworth, a natureza é "o marco de toda experiência autêntica", na medida em que o homem se enfrenta de uma maneira real e imediatamente com os elementos, o que implicitamente nos conduz mais além do bem e do mal. Wordsworth é, de certa forma, um "perfectibilista": o homem fruto de sua visão poética alcança o excelso, a perfeição; porém dito homem, contrariamente ao que pensavam e impunham os partidários das Luzes, não se aperfeiçoava somente com o desenvolvimento das faculdades do intelecto. A perfeição humana requer acima de tudo passar pela prova do elemento natural. Para Novalis, a natureza é "o espaço da experiência mística, que nos permite ver mais além das contingências da vida urbana e artificial". Para Eichendorff, a natureza é a liberdade e, em certo sentido, uma transcendência, pois permite escapar aos corpetes das convenções e instituições.

Com Wordsworth, Novalis e Eichendorff, as questões do imediato, da experiência vital, do rechaço das contingências surgidas da artificialidade dos convencionalismos, adquirem um importante papel. A partir do romantismo se desenvolve na Europa, acima de tudo na Europa setentrional, um movimento hostil a toda forma moderna de vida social e econômica. Carlyle, por exemplo, cantará o heroísmo e denegrirá a "cash flow society". Aparece a primeira crítica contra o reino do dinheiro. John Ruskin, com seus projetos de arquitetura orgânica junto à concepção de cidades-jardim, tratará de embelezar as cidades e reparar os danos sociais e urbanísticos de um racionalismo que desembocou no puro manchesterismo. Tolstói propõe um naturalismo otimista que não tem como ponto de referência a Dostoiévski, brilhante observador este último dos piores perfis da alma humana. Gauguin transplantará seu ideal da bondade humana à Polinésia, ao Taiti, em plena natureza.

Hamsum e Lawrence, contrariamente a Tolstói ou a Gauguin, desenvolverão uma visão da natureza carente de teologia, sem "bom fim", sem espaços paradisíacos marginais: assimilaram a dupla lição do pessimismo de Dostoiévski e Nietzsche. A natureza nesses não é um espaço idílico propício para excursões tal como sucede com os poetas ingleses do Lake District. A natureza não somente não é um espaço necessariamente perigoso ou violento, mas sim que é considerado aprioristicamente como tal. A natureza humana em Hamsun e Lawrence é, antes de nada, interioridade que conforma os recursos interiores, sua disposição e sua mentalidade (tripas e cérebro inextricavelmente unidos e confundidos). Tanto em Hamsun como em Lawrence, a natureza humana não é nem intelectualidade nem demonismo. É, antes de nada, expressão da realidade, realidade tradução imediata da terra, Gaia; realidade enquanto fonte de vida.

Frente a este manancial, a alienação moderna leva a duas atitudes opostas: 1º necessidade da terra, fonte de vitaldiade, e 2º soçobra na alienação, causa de enfermidades e escleroses. É precisamente nessa bipolaridade em que se deve localizar as duas grandes obras e Hamsun e de Lawrence: 'Benção da Terra', para o norueguês, e 'O Arco-Íris', do inglês.

Em 'Benção da Terra' de Hamsun, a natureza constitui o espaço do trabalho existencial no qual o homem opera com total independência para se alimentar e se perpetuar. Não se trata de uma natureza idílica, como sucede em certos utopistas bucólicos, e ademais o trabalho não foi abolido. A natureza é inabarcável, conforma o destino, e é parte da própria humanidade de tal forma que sua perda comportaria desumanização. O protagonista principal, o camponês Isak, é feio e desalinhado, é tosco e simples, porém inquebrantável, um ser limitado, porém não isento de vontade. O espaço natural, a Wildnis, é esse âmbito que tarde ou cedo há de levar a pegada do homem; não se trata do espaço ou o reino do homem convencional ou, mais exatamente, o delimitado pelos relógios, mas sim o do ritmo das estações, com seus ciclos periódicos. Em dito espaço, em dito tempo, não existem perguntas, se sobrevive para participar do refúgio de um ritmo que nos transborda. Esse destino é duro. Inclusive chega a ser muito duro. Porém em troca oferece independência, autonomia, permite uma relação direta com o trabalho. Outorga sentido, porque tem sentido. Em 'O Arco-Íris', de Lawrence, uma família vive de forma da terra de forma independente, apenas com o lucro de suas colheitas.

Hamsun e Lawrence, nessas duas novelas, nos legam a visão de um homem unido à terra (ein beheimateter Mensch), de um homem ancorado em um território limitado. O beheimateter Mensch ignora o saber livresco, não tem necessidade das prédicas dos meios informativos, sua sabedoria prática lhe é suficiente; graças a ela, seus atos tem sentido, inclusive quando fantasia ou dá rédea solta aos sentimentos. Esse saber imediato, ademais, lhe proporciona unidade com os outros seres.

Desde uma ótica como essa, a alienação, questão fundamental no século XIX, adquire outra perspectiva. Geralmente se aborda o problema da alienação desde três pontos e vista doutrinais:

1º Segundo o ponto de vista marxista e historicista, a alienação se localizaria unicamente na esfera social, enquanto que para Hamsun ou Lawrence, se situa na natureza interior do homem, independentemente de sua posição social ou de sua riqueza material.

2º A alienação abordada a partir da teologia ou da antropologia.

3º A alienação percebida como uma anomalia social.

Em Hegel, e mais tarde em Marx, a alienação dos povos ou das massas é uma etapa necessária no processo de adequação gradual entre a realidade e o absoluto. Em Hamsun e Lawrence, a alienação é um conceito todavia mais categórico; suas causas não residem nas estruturas sócio-econômicas ou políticas, mas sim no distanciamento em respeito às raízes da natureza (que não é, consequentemente, uma "boa" natureza). Não desaparecerá a alienação com a simples instauração de uma nova ordem sócio-econômica. Em Hamsun e Lawrence, assinala Doma, é o problema da desconexão, da interrupção, o que tem um traço essencial. A vida social tornou-se uniforme, desemboca na uniformidade, na automatização, na funcionalização extrema, enquanto que a natureza e o trabalho integrado no ciclo da vida não são uniformes e requerem em todo momento a mobilização de energias vitais. Existe imediatidade, enquanto que na vida urbana, industrial e moderna tudo está mediatizado, filtrado. Hamsun e Lawrence se rebelam contra ditos filtros.

Para Hamsun e, em menor medida, Lawrence as forças interiores contam para a "natureza". Com a chegada da modernidade, os homens estão determinados por fatores exteriores a eles, como são os convencionalismos, a luta política e a opinião pública, que oferecem um tipo de ilusão para a liberdade, quando em realidade conformam o cenário ideal para todo tipo de manipulações. Em um contexto tal, as comunidades acabam por se desvertebrar: cada indivíduo fica reduzido a uma esfera de atividade autônoma e em concorrência com outros indivíduos. Tudo isso acaba por derivar em debilidade, isolamento e hostilidade de todos contra todos.

Os sintomas dessa debilidade são a paixão pelas coisas superficiais, os vestidos refinados (Hamsun), signo de uma fascinação detestável pelo externo; isto é, formas de dependência, signos de vazio interior. O homem quebra por efeito de pressões exteriores. Indícios, por fim, da perda de vitalidade que leva à alienação.

No marco dessa quebra que supõe a vida urbana, o homem não encontra estabilidade, pois a vida nas cidades, nas metrópoles, é hostil a qualquer forma de estabilidade. O homem alienado já não pode retornar a sua comunidade, a suas raízes familiares. Assim Lawrence, com uma linguagem menos áspera porém acaso mais incisiva, escreve: "He was the eternal audience, the chorus, the spectator at the drama; in his own life he would have no drama" ("Ele era a audiência eterna, o coro, o espectador do drama; porém em sua própria vida, não haveria drama algum"); "He scarcely existed except through other people" ("Ele mal existia, salvo através de outras pessoas"); "He had come to a stability of nullification" ("Ele havia chegado a uma estabilidade de nulificação").

Em Hamsun e Lawrence, o Ent-wurzelung e o Unbehaustheit, o desenraizamento e a carência de lar, essa forma de viver sem fogo, constitui a grande tragédia da humanidade de fins do século XIX e princípios do XX. Para Hamsun o lar é vital para o homem. O homem deve ter lar. O lar de usa existência. Não se pode prescindir do lar sem provocar em si mesmo uma profunda mutilação. Mutilação de caráter psíquico, que conduz à histeria, ao nervosismo, ao desequilíbrio. Hamsun é, ao fim e ao cabo, um psicólogo. E nos diz: a consciência de si é não raro um sintoma de alienação. Schiller, em seu ensaio Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, assinalava que a concordância entre sentir e pensar era tangível, real e interior no homem natural, ao contrário que no homem cultivado que é ideal e exterior ("A concordância entre sensações e penamente existia outrora, porém na atualidade somente reside no plano ideal. Esta concordância não reside no homem, mas sim que existe exteriormente a ele; trata-se de uma idéia que deve ser realizada, não um fato de sua vida").

Schiller advoga por uma Überwindung (superação) de dita quebra através de uma mobilização total do indivíduo. O romantismo, por sua parte, considerará a reconciliação entre Ser (Sein) e consciência (Bewusstsein) como a forma de combater o reducionismo que trata de encurralar a consciência sob os grilhões do entendimento racional. O romantismo valorará, e inclusive sobrevalorará, ao "outro" em relação à razão (das Andere der Vernunft): percepção sensual, instinto, intuição, experiência mística, infância, sonho, vida bucólica. Wordsworth, romântico inglês, representante "rosa" de dita vontade de reconciliação entre Ser e consciência, defenderá a presença de "um coração que observe e aprove". Dostoiévski não compartilhará dita visão "rosa" e desenvolverá uma concepção "negra", em que o intelecto é sempre causa de mal, e o "possesso" um ser que tenderá a matar ou suicidar-se. No plano filosófico, tanto Klages como Lessing retomarão por sua conta esta visão "negra" do intelecto, aprofundando, não obstante, no veio do romantismo naturalista: para Klages, o espírito é inimigo da alma; para Lessing, o espírito é a contrapartida da vida, que surge da necessidade ("Geist ist das notgeborene Gegenspiel des Lebens").

dh-lawrence_000.jpgLawrence, fiel em certo sentido à tradição romântica inglesa de Wordsworth, crê em uma nova adequação do Ser e da consciência. Hamsun, mais pessimista, mais dostoievskiano (daí sua acolhida na Rússia e sua influência nos autores chamados ruralistas, como Vasili Belov e Valentín Rasputin), nunca deixará de pensar que desde que há consciência, há alienação. Desde que o homem começa a refletir sobre si mesmo, se desliga da continuidade que confere a natureza e à qual deveria estar sempre sujeito. Nos ensaios de Hamsun, encontramos reflexões sobre a modernidade literária. A vida moderna, escreveu, influencia, transforma, leva o homem a ser arrancado de seu destino, a ser apartado de seu ponto de chegada, de seus instintos, mais além do bem e do mal. A evolução literária do século XIX mostra uma febre, um desequilíbrio, um nervosismo, uma complicação extrema da psicologia humana. "O nervosismo geral (ambiente) se apossou de nosso ser fundamental e se fixou em nossa vida sentimental". O escritor mostra-se a nós assim, ao estilo de um Zola, como um "médico social" encarregado de diagnosticar os males sociais com o objetivo de erradicar o mal. O escritor, o intelectual, se embarca em uma tarefa missionária que trata de chegar a uma "correção política".

Frente a esta visão intelectual do escritor, a reprovação de Hamsun assinala a impossibilidade de definir objetivamente a realidade humana, pois um "homem objetivo" é, em si mesmo, uma monstruosidade (ein Unding), um ser construído como se tratasse de um mecanismo. Não podemos reduzir o homem a um compêndio de características, pois o homem é evolução, ambigüidade. O mesmo critério encontramos em Lawrence: "Now I absolutely flatly deny that I am a soul, or a body, or a mind, or an intelligente, or a brain, or a nervous system, or a bunch of glands, or any of the rest of these bits of me. The whole is greater than the part" ("Agora eu nego em absoluto que eu sou uma alma, ou um corpo, ou uma mente, ou uma inteligência, ou um cérebro, ou um sistema nervoso, ou um monte de glândulas, ou qualquer dos restos desses pedaços de mim. O todo é maior do que a parte"). Hamsun e Lawrence ilustram em suas obras a impossibilidade de teorizar ou absolutizar uma visão diáfana do homem. O homem não pode ser veículo de idéias pré-concebidas. Hamsun e Lawrence confirmam que os progressos na consciência de si mesmo não implicam em processos de emancipação espiritual, mas sim perdas, desperdício da vitaldiade, do tônus vital. Em seus romances, são as figuras firmes (isto é, as que estão enraizadas na terra) as que logram se manter, as que triunfam mais além dos golpes da sorte ou das circunstâncias desgraçadas.

Não se trata, em absoluto, de vidas bucólicas ou idílicas. Os protagonistas das novelas de Hamsun e Lawrence são penetrados ou atraídos pela modernidade, os quais, pese a sua irredutível complexidade, podem sucumbir, sofrem, padecem de um processo de alienação, porém também podem triunfar. E é precisamente aqui onde intervem a ironia de Hamsun ou a idéia da "Fênix" de Lawrence. A ironia de Hamsun perfura os ideais abstratos das ideologias modernas. Em Lawrence, a recorrente idéia da "Fênix" supõe uma certa dose de esperança: haverá ressurreição. É a idéia da Ave Fênix, que renasce de suas próprias cinzas.

O paganismo de Hamsun e Lawrence

Sua dita vontade de retorno a uma ontologia natural é fruto de um rechaço do intelectualismo racionalista, isso implica ao mesmo tempo uma contestação silenciosa à mensagem cristã.

Em Hamsun, vê-se com clareza o rechaço do puritanismo familiar (concretizado na figura de seu tio Han Olsen) e o rechaço ao culto protestante pelos livros sagrados; isto é, o rechaço explícito de um sistema de pensamento religioso que prima pelo saber livresco frente à experiência existencial (particularmente a do camponês autosuficiente, o Odalsbond dos campos noruegueses). O anticristianismo de Hamsun é, fundamentalmente, um a-cristianismo: não se propõe dúvidas religiosas ao estilo de Kierkegaard. Para Hamsun, o moralismo do protestantismo da era vitoriana (da era oscariana, diríamos para a Escandinávia) é simples e completa perda de vitalidade. Hamsun não aposta em experiência mística alguma.

Lawrence, por sua parte, percebe a ruptura de toda relação com os mistérios cósmicos. O cristianismo viria a reforçar dita ruptura, impediria sua cura, impossibilitaria sua cicatrização. Nesse sentido, a religiosidade européia ainda conservaria um poço de dito culto ao mistério cósmico: o ano litúrgico, o ciclo litúrgico (Páscoa, Pentecostes, Fogueira de São João, Todos os Santos, Natal, Festa dos Reis Magos). Porém inclusive isto foi agrilhoado como consequência de um processo de desencantamento e dessacralização, cujo começo arranca no momento mesm oda chegada da Igreja cristã primitiva e que se reforçará com os puritanismos e os jansenismos segregados pela Reforma. Os primeiros cristãos se apresentaram com o objetivo de separar o homem de seus ciclos cósmicos. A Igreja medieval, ao contrário, quis adequar-se, porém as Igrejas protestantes e conciliares posteriores expressaram com clareza sua vontade de regressar ao anti-cosmicismo do cristianismo primitivo. Nesse sentido, Lawrence escreve: "But now, after almost three thousand years, now that we are almost abstracted entirely from the rhythmic life of the seasons, birth and death and fruition, now we realize that such abstraction is neither bliss nor liberation, but nullity. It brings null inertia" ("Porém hoje, depois de três mil anos, depois de estarmos quase completamente abstraídos da vida rítmica das estações, do nascimento, da morte e da fecundidade, compreendemos ao fim que tal abstração não é nem uma benção nem uma liberação, mas sim puro nada. Não nos aporta outra coisa além de inércia"). Essa ruptura é consubstancial ao cristianismo das civilizações urbanas, onde não há abertura alguma para o cosmos. Cristo não é um Cristo cósmico, mas sim um Cristo reduzido ao papel de assistente social. Mircea Eliade, por sua parte, referiu-se a um "homem cósmico" aberto à imensidão do cosmos, pilar de todas as grandes religiões. Na perspectiva de Eliade, o sagrado é o real, o poder, a fonte de vida e da fertilidade. Eliade nos deixou escrito: "O desejo do homem religioso de viver uma vida no âmbito do sagrado é o desejo de viver na realidade objetiva".

A lição ideológica e política de Hamsun e Lawrence

No plano ideológico e político, no plano da Weltanschauung, as obras de Hamsun e de Lawrence tiveram um impacto bastante considerável. Hamsun foi lido por todos, mais além da polaridade comunismo/fascismo. Lawrence foi etiquetado como "fascista" a título póstumo, entre outros por Bertrand Russel que chegou inclusive a referir-se a sua "madness": "Lawrence was a suitable exponent of the Nazi cult of insanity" ("Lawrence foi um expoente típico do culto nazista à loucura"). Frase tão lapidária como simplista. As obras de Hamsun e de Lawrence, segundo Akos Doma, se inscrevem em um contexto quádruplo: o da filosofia da vida, o dos avatares do individualismo, o da tradição filosófica vitalista, e o do anti-utopismo e do irracionalismo.

3941.jpg1º. A Filosofia da Vida (Lebensphilosophie) é um conceito de luta, que opõe a "vivacidade da vida real" à rigidez dos convencionalismos, aos fogos de artifício inventados pela civilização urbana para tratar de orientar a vida para um mundo desencantado. A filosofia da vida se manifesta sob múltiplas faces no contexto do pensamento europeu e toma realmente corpo a partir das reflexões de Nietzsche sobre a Leiblichkeit (corporeidade).

2 º O Individualismo. A antropologia hamsuniana postula a absoluta unidade de cada indivíduo, de cada pessoa, porém rechaça o isolamento desse indivíduo ou pessoa de todo contexto comunitário, familiar ou carnal: situa à pessoa de uma maneira interativa, em um lugar preciso. A ausência de introspecção especulativa, de consciência e de intelectualismo abstrato tornam incompatível o individualismo hamsuniano com a antropologia segregada pelo Iluminismo. Para Hamsun, sem embargo, não se combate o individualismo iluminista sermoneando sobre um coletivismo de contornos ideológicos. O renascimento do homem autêntico passa por uma reativação dos recursos mais profundos de sua alma e de seu corpo. A soma quantitativa e mecânica é uma insuficiência calamitosa. Em consequência, a acusação de "fascismo" em relação a Lawrence e Hamsun não se sustenta.

3º O Vitalismo tem em conta todos os acontecimentos da vida e exclui qualquer hierarquização de base racial, social, etc. As oposições próprias do vitalismo são: afirmação da vida/negação da vida; sadio/enfermo; orgânico/mecânico. Daí, que não possam ser reconduzidas a categorias sociais, a categorias políticas convencionais, etc. A vida é uma categoria fundamental apolítica, pois todos os homens sem distinção estão submetidos a ela.

4º O "irracionalismo" lançado sobre Hamsun e Lawrence, assim como seu anti-utopismo, tem sua base em uma revolta contra a "viabilidade" (feasibility; Machbarkeit), contra a idéia de perfectibilidade infinita (que encontramos também sob uma forma "orgânica" nos românticos ingleses da primeira geração). A idéia de viabilidade choca diretamente com a essência biológica da natureza. De fato, a idéia de viabilidade é a essência do niilismo, como apontou o filósofo italiano Emanuele Severino. Para Severino, a viabilidade deriva de uma vontade de completar o mundo apreendendo-o como um devir (porém não como um devir orgânico incontrolável). Uma vez o processo de "acabamento" tendo concluído, o devir detem bruscamente seu curso. Uma estabilidade geral se impõe na Terra e esta estabilidade forçada é descrita como um "bem absoluto". Desde a literatura, Hamsun e Lawrence, precederam assim a filósofos contemporâneos como o citado Emanuele Severino, Robert Spaemann (com sua crítica do funcionalismo), Ernst Behler (com sua crítica da "perfectibilidade infinita") ou Peter Koslowski. Estes filósofos, fora da Alemanha ou Itália, são muito pouco conhecidos pelo grande público. Sua crítica profunda dos fundamentos das ideologias dominantes, provoca inevitavelmente o rechaço da solapada inquisição que exerce seu domínio em Paris.

Nietzche, Hamsun, e Lawrence, os filósofos vitalistas ou, se preferível, "antiviabilistas", ao insistir sobre o caráter ontológico da biologia humana, se opuseram à idéia ocidental e niilista da viabilidade absoluta de qualquer coisa; isto é, da inexistência ontológica de todas as coisas, de qualquer realidade. Bom número deles - Hamsun e Lawrence incluídos - nos chamam a atenção sobre o presente eterno de nossos corpos, sobre nossa própria corporeidade (Leiblichkeit), pois nós não podemos conformar nossos corpos, em contraposição a essas vozes que nos querem convencer das bondades da ciência-ficção.

A viabilidade é, pois, o "hybris" que chegou a seu ápice e que conduz à febre, à vacuidade, à pressa, ao solipsismo, e ao isolamento. De Heidegger a Severino, a filosofia européia se ocupou sobre a catástrofe causada pela dessacralização do Ser e pelo desencantamento do mundo. Se os recursos profundos e misteriosos da Terra ou do homem são considerados como imperfeições indignas do interesse do teólogo ou do filósofo, se tudo aquilo que foi pensado de maneira abstrata ou fabricado mais além dos recursos (ontológicos) se encontra sobrevalorizado, então, efetivamente, não pode nos estranhar que o mundo perca toda sacralidade, todo valor. Hamsun e Lawrence foram os escritores que nos fizeram viver com intensidade essa constante, acima até mesmo de alguns filósofos que também deploraram a falsa rota empreendida pelo pensamento ocidental há séculos. Heidegger e Severiano no marco da filosofia, Hamsun e Lawrence no da criação literária, trataram de restituir a sacralidade no mundo e revalorizar as forças que se esconem no interior do homem: desde esse ponto de vista, estamos diante de pensadores ecológicos na mais profunda acepção do termo. O oikos nos abre as portas do sagrado, das forças misteriosas e incontroláveis, sem fatalismos e sem falsa humildade. Hamsun e Lawrence, em definitivo, anunciaram a dimensão geofilosófica do pensamento que nos ocupou durante toda essa universidade de verão. Uma aproximação sucinta a suas obras se fazia absolutamente necessária no temário de 1996.


Tradução por Raphael Machado

vendredi, 28 août 2009

Hamsun: francobollo commemorativo

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Hamsun: francobollo commemorativo

Come avevo immaginato, non una sola riga è apparsa sui giornali italiani riguardo il centocinquantesimo anniversario di Hamsun.

Intanto ieri in Norvegia è entrato in distribuzione questo francobollo commemorativo da 25 centesimi, stampato in un milione e mezzo di esemplari.

mardi, 04 août 2009

Knut Hamsun: un esprit peu commode

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Helge MORGENGRAUEN:

Knut Hamsun: un esprit incommode

 

Ses admirateurs comme ses ennemis sont d’accord sur un point: Knut Hamsun est l’un des plus importants romanciers de la littérature européenne contemporaine. Nombreux furent ses contemporains plus jeunes comme James Joyce ou Virginia Woolf qui bénéficièrent de son influence de manière décisive. Hamsun a aussi acquis une réelle importance en littérature américaine, notamment par l’influence qu’il exerça sur un écrivain comme William Faulkner: bon nombre d’historiens de la littérature le comptent dès lors parmi les pères fondateurs du roman américain moderne.

 

Des auteurs aussi différents que Maxime Gorki, Thomas Mann, Jakob Wassermann ou Stefan Zweig reconnaissent en Hamsun un géant de la littérature. Dans sa contribution à un “liber amicorum” publié en Norvège en 1929, à l’occasion du 70ème anniversaire de Hamsun, Gorki écrivit qu’il ne voyait personne dans la littérature de son temps “qui égalât Hamsun sur le plan de l’originalité et de la puissance créatrice”. L’écrivain russe alla jusqu’à écrire que “l’écriture de Hamsun relève d’une ‘écriture sainte” pour l’humanité toute entière”. Quant au style hamsunien, Gorki déclare qu’il est “sans aucune pompe artificielle” et que “sa beauté réside dans la simple, pure et aveuglante vérité qu’elle dévoile”. Gorki: “Les figures norvégiennes, qu’il dépeint, sont aussi belles que les statues de la Grèce antique”.

 

La même année, Thomas Mann prend, lui aussi, la parole, pour dire “que l’art magnifique de Hamsun est devenu l’un des ingrédients majeurs” de sa propre formation et que cet art du Norvégien l’a aidé “à déterminer sa propre notion du récit et de la poésie littéraires”. Jakob Wassermann constatait, pour sa part, que Hamsun, “comme tout grand écrivain, est capable de transformer un petit monde aux horizons réduits en un véritable cosmos”, tout “en devenant un témoin majeur de son époque”.

 

Knut Hamsun, pour Stefan Zweig, représente “la forme la plus noble de la virilité, parce qu’elle offre et une tendresse, qui sourd d’une grande force comme l’eau d’une source, et de la passion contenue, qui se dissimule derrière une rudesse abrupte”.

 

Quand certains critiques, appartenant souvent à la mouvance des littérateurs engagés à gauche, jugent d’importantes figures de la littérature universelle comme Knut Hamsun ou de grands voyageurs comme Sven Hedin, on est surtout frappé par leur absence totale de pondération et par leur esprit partisan et haineux; les propos tenus par ces gens-là sont aigres, partiaux et injustes.

 

Hamsun et Hedin sont deux Scandinaves qui, comme pratiquement personne d’autre, ont osé tenir tête à Hitler et lui demander des choses que tous imaginaient impossibles, comme de libérer certains détenus de camps de concentration, d’épargner des vies juives, etc. Lorsque Hamsun rencontra Hitler, l’interprète n’a pas osé traduire tous ses propos. Quand l’écrivain évoqua plus tard cet entretien à son fils Tore, il dira: “Il ne me plaisait pas. “Je”, “moi”, disait-il sans arrêt, “je”, “moi”, toujours “je” et “moi”!”. On ne peut pas dire qu’il s’agit là d’admiration inconditionnelle. Revenu en Norvège, l’écrivain, avec un humour au second degré, racontait “qu’il avait rencontré tant de gens lors de son voyage, qu’il ne se souvenait plus, s’il avait rencontré Hitler ou non”.

 

Sven Hedin a raconté par le menu ses tribulations dans la capitale allemande dans un remarquable livre de souvenirs, intitulé “Ohne Auftrag in Berlin” (“Sans ordre de mission à Berlin”).

 

En 1953, Pablo Picasso a pu rédiger un vibrant hommage à “son cher camarade Staline”, alors que celui-ci avait commandité des massacres à grande échelle qui ont causé la mort d’au moins 55 millions de personnes en Union Soviétique. Cet hommage ne choque pas les nigauds du “politiquement correct”. Ndlr: En revanche, l’hommage rendu par Hamsun à Hitler, quelques jours après le suicide du dictateur allemand, continue à faire des gorges chaudes, alors qu’on  sait très bien que Hamsun n’était pas un inconditionnel du national-socialisme: que seule comptait à ses yeux l’élimination du capitalisme anglo-saxon.

 

Cette hostilité hamsunienne au libéralisme et au capitalisme anglo-saxons est tirée de son propre vécu, lors de ses séjours successifs aux Etats-Unis. Hamsun n’a jamais compris l’attirance qu’éprouvaient la plupart des Norvégiens pour l’Angleterre et l’Amérique. Lors de la première guerre mondiale déjà, et dès le début des hostilités, la sympathie de Hamsun allait à l’Allemagne en guerre, au “peuple germanique frère” d’Europe centrale. Cette sympathie déplaisait à une majorité de Norvégiens.

 

Hamsun n’a jamais renoncé à cette sympathie germanophile, même quand les temps étaient très durs pour l’Allemagne: pour l’établissement marqué aujourd’hui par l’union des gauches et du “politiquement correct”, c’est en cette germanophilie constante que réside la faute majeure de Knut Hamsun. Il avait connu les affres du système américain, pseudo-démocratique et capitaliste et en avait souffert cruellement. Personne de raisonnable ne pourrait lui reprocher de préférer l’Allemagne, à qui il devait ses premiers succès éditoriaux et le lancement de sa carrière internationale, succès amorcés bien avant même que les nationaux-socialistes existèrent et n’exerçassent le pouvoir. De préférer cette Allemagne des lettres et de l’esprit à un monde anglo-saxon, dont le Dieu unique était et reste Mammon (ndlr: c’est exactement le cas de l’écrivain flamand de langue française Georges Eekhoud).

 

Hamsun est donc bien un héritier des Vikings, dans la mesure où jamais il ne choisit les chemins faciles et les pistes tracées à l’avance. Même quand il se trompait, Hamsun restait essentiellement un Germain contestataire de grand format.

 

Helge MORGENGRAUEN.

(article tiré de “zur Zeit”, Vienne, n°31-32/2009; trad. franç.: Robert Steuckers).

vendredi, 05 décembre 2008

De l'illusion à la fidélité


« Ce fut une soirée remarquable, un tournant. Inger s'était écartée longtemps du droit chemin, et il avait suffi de la soulever un instant pour l'y faire rentrer. Ils ne parlèrent pas de ce qui s'était passé. Isak s'était senti honteux d'avoir agi de la sorte à cause d'un thaler, qu'il finirait par donner parce qu'il serait lui-même content de l'envoyer à Eleseus. Et puis, cet argent, n'était-il pas à Inger aussi bien qu'à lui ? Au tour d'Isak de se sentir humble !

Inger avait encore changé. Elle renonçait à ses manières raffinées et redevenait sérieuse : une femme de paysan, sérieuse et réfléchie, comme elle était auparavant. Penser que la rude poigne d'un homme pouvait accomplir de telles métamorphoses ! Il devait en être ainsi ! Une femme robuste et saine, mais gâtée par un long séjour dans une atmosphère artificielle, s'était heurtée à un homme qui se tenait solidement sur ses pieds. Il ne s'était pas laissé écarter un instant de sa place naturelle sur la terre, de son lopin. »

Knut Hamsun, « L'éveil de la glèbe »