Growth of the Soil

"Well—Hamsun is here because there is no way around him. He tore apart both the grammar and the lexicon of our language, mixed high and low, dialect and aristocratic speech, and put all the pieces beautifully together again—in the totally new fashion we call contemporary Norwegian literature. As every Russian writer is rolled out of Gogol’s coat, every Norwegian one is an offspring of Hamsun, admittedly or otherwise. This is a very typical Norwegian subject—and typical for many small countries, I guess, that have gone through such dramatic changes in just a generation or three. Nostalgia looms large. The art is, of course, not to be nostalgic yourself, in your writing head, but to handle it as a literary concept, something that comes naturally to human kind, so that it can be X-rayed from every angle. “We have made a taciturn deal—to punish him postmortem for his political ideas, and simultaneously, and reluctantly, praise him for his contribution to literature” Then you will be able to see also the problematic and reactionary aspect of nostalgia, and I am not sure Hamsun quite managed to do that…—he was, after all, a committed and incurable Nazi. So we (at least most of us) have made a taciturn deal—to punish him postmortem for his deeds and political ideas, and simultaneously (and reluctantly) praise him for his contribution to the Norwegian language and literature. We simply have no choice, he is our Luther, our King James Bible. As a result of this attempted pragmatism, we still read and cherish his work, but we do not name streets and oil platforms after him (they are left to more palatable creatures, such as Henrik Ibsen, Alexander Kielland, etc…)"