In Growth of the Soil (1917), one of Knut Hamsun's chief protagonists, Isak, carves a farm out of the Norwegian backwoods thicket. He seems to successfully thwart the encroachment of mining interests bent on extracting only material wealth from the wildland, establishing a family and a homestead out of, first and foremost, a rigorous individuality. His stubborn will and creativity is mostly spent expanding the self-sufficiency of the private farming enterprise we come to know as Sellanra, in the fabled hinterland of old Norway. The stout, headstrong Inger, a singular woman possessing a quiet, perhaps stronger resolve, joins him early in the story, and their destiny leans towards raising their children away from civilization and all its attendant ills. The physical clearing and caretaking of the land represent one aspect of growth, and we are regaled in several passages by Isak's display of brute strength and perseverance. Those qualities hint at the spiritual dimensions that he must raise up and nurture if he is to survive. The law of the land - for his wife Inger kills their firstborn child - seems at first to threaten their growth and development, a reminder that their outpost is still embedded in a man-made community, replete with rules that may potentially rein in their young family. This is a brief description of how the structure of the state, as espoused by Louis Althusser, will meet with, and be circumvented by, an ideology of nature and organicism that Hamsun metes out in this spare, resplendent narrative.
Isak's philosophy of life is one of work, a seemingly organic toiling on the land that will produce not only the food that will sustain his family, but the knowledge and satisfaction that it was done on their own. He himself works for no man, and stands apart from the men in town who labor for a wage to purchase their sustenance. Such notions will be somewhat lost on their son, Sivert, who sets up shop selling miscellaneous goods to the neighboring folk. All items are imported from the adjacent towns and far-away cities, and where people do not have the money for purchases, he extends easy credit. His business goes bust, as those from the surrounding farmsteads do not earn the wages necessary to ever pay off their debt to the store, or else refuse to. It would appear that the Sellenra farmstead, as an economic concern, and particularly Isak, stand emancipated from such drudgery. His resources are the fertile soil, his oxen, and his hard work ethic. Their dependence on outside labor is minimal, with inputs limited to seed stock and an occasional part to improve the efficiency of the harvest. And that harvest, the fruit of that labor, in turn fuels his body and those of his animals, and allows him to barter for materials to feed his family and expand his settlement.
We might see this humble farmer and his slowly growing family as fulfilling normative roles. One who lives on the fringe of civilization retains more freedom to pursue land of one's own, to cultivate of one's own accord, and to raise a family to continue the tradition. We might read into this a fierce independence, resonant of early American pioneers who struck out to extract wealth from untrammeled wilderness. Isak is portrayed from the beginning as one who has eschewed civilization to become a self-made man. "He never read a book but often thought about God...the majesty of the earth and what was above the earth filled him with a deep devoutness many times a day. He was sinful and godfearing." Not an intellectual, but a resourceful thinker nevertheless, he cannot be different than most men, save for inhuman strength and endurance. He has already, even at this early juncture, taken steps as a single-minded man, whose fates are often deeply tied to early success or failure. At every turn early in the narrative, Isak makes progress. He finds goats to husband. He inquires among the local Laplanders if there is some tireless woman who might come along and join him, and two pages later, we are introduced to Inger. He constructs a simple shelter to call his own. We are convinced – as Isak – that he is autonomous, that this could be happening to anyone who has fled the town for the good life, given enough good fortune, by God or by virtue of hard work. In this sense, Isak is constructed as part of this larger collective, an archetype of the rugged individualist whose growth is still measured in material wealth, and whose success is legitimized by the fascination and exuberance of those around him. He is not a slave to a capitalist system, but he will certainly be confronted by it, and only time will tell if he will subject himself to the system.
When Isak's wife is summoned to the local village to stand trial for the murder of their infant daughter, we understand that such authority must exist, and that grievous acts must be met with careful interrogation to mete out deserved punishment - or freedom in the case of innocence. There is no question that young Inger will have to confront the court, for this is the ritual exercised in the real world. Inger is complicit and perhaps unconscious of this, as are we, as is Isak, and as is every other character that catches wind of their child's death. Standing "among the clever practitioners of the law, she was an inferior party...." This may give us the sense of Althusser's connotation of the legal state authority as a Repressive State Apparatus, one which assumes its own integrity, that those coming before it must prove their integrity, and whose authority in such matters is unquestionable. The judge in this case has a clubfoot, and perhaps in order to ultimately show that such authority can be human, and specifically, empathic, Hamsun here may inadvertently allow us to find favor in this state apparatus. Building to that episode, the feeling of impending doom slowly gives way to melancholic respect for those that decide that Inger meant only to spare her daughter the same torturous, shameful childhood that she herself endured for having a severe harelip that nearly incapacitates her speech.
What, precisely, is the ideological contradiction presented, perhaps unwittingly, by Hamsun in the vignette of Inger’s imprisonment by the state? It is this character’s resilience – dependent upon a dogmatic, God-given will to endure long suffering, and a penitent heart that will not forget her act – that will transform her internment into a time of growth, of gaining the salient qualities that will enable her to subvert the state’s claim over her family’s homestead. Settling into several years in jail, having skirted the death penalty, Inger develops her budding sewing skills, and is granted the opportunity to learn to read and write. Beyond securing greater agency, she undergoes an operation, paid for by the state, which essentially fixes her speech impediment. In no way can we say her life is not improved by her incarceration. The re-invigorated Inger, contrite and now more able to contribute to the Sellenra homestead, returns home. The business of raising their two boys, who stayed at the farm, and a young girl born to her in prison, takes on an almost idyllic nature. Isak is astonished by his young daughter. A creature of civilization, "her speech was like a song, an incredible language from Trondhjem; her father had to get it translated now and then." The rough-hewn figure of Isak, industrious, shy, stubborn, and still possessing the work ethic of an ox, stands in stark contrast to this mother-daughter pair hailing from the city, far away from their organic home hacked out of the wilderness. Inger has been all but reborn, having endured as a subject of the state, but now free to do as she pleases. She will impart to Isak and her children a need for continual growth, of renewed commitment to their place, hewn organically from the first cabin and the first fertile plot of woodland soil, and for Isak specifically, the need for expanded patience and spiritual perseverance in the face of the state’s ceaseless posturing to claim their land for mineral rights. Isak’s commitment to family and homestead becomes revitalized. Beginning to see himself as a patriarch, he becomes heartened to a newfound dedication to the surrounding community that has grown up around Sellanra.
Through an intimate association with the land around them, and the people they barter with and help in their own homesteads, Isak and Inger build an independent-minded community that exists on the fringes of the state. Their civilization has roots in their resourcefulness in their use of the raw landscape, and a dependency on one another. As a farmer, Isak brings a special skill set, passion, and abundant energy in raising his home and fields. As a father, Isak is counseled, shaped, and inspired by his wife’s will to learn new skills. His own skills-based literacy is shared out among his children and neighbors, and the seeds he plants are as much about independence, self-sufficiency, and hard work, and will nurture this community. Inger brings an empathic note to his demeanor, softening his edges, enabling him to reach out to his children and his neighbors in ways that his stubbornness prevented before.
The short-term predictability of a mine on his land – the state’s idea – is nothing compared to the longevity of his farm. The state stands apart from, and cannot lay claim to, what has been established at Sellanra. It takes Inger to engender a faith in this, but it first means he must learn to see the state as a threat to what he has established. Isak, by the stories end, will never enfranchise the state to exploit his land. His stubbornness is now coupled with an awareness of the forces beyond his settlement, and his expanded heart, his new-found patience, will continue to allow it to grow and in return nurture the families that reside there. Such a community is where certain people will be drawn. Hamsun may even be suggesting that the state would do well to not interfere where communities are grown in this way, as though by a natural force all their own, some might say a God-given force.
If literature has a productive role in the formation of ideology, not merely a reflective role, one might say that the Marxist idea of being imbedded in superstructure – that Isak and Inger and their neighbors occupy a peasant class meant to provide natural resources for the state – is shown here to be shallow and threadbare. Althusser believed that specific subjectivities, or ways of being, might emerge within a largely autonomous superstructure, that is, the state and social consciousness. If a society’s base is its economic structure, then these peasants actually engage and operate largely outside of society’s normal relations of production and consumption. Still, within Althusser’s model of people finding their role as subjects to the state, even suggesting that we create ourselves as subjects, there is little room for agency, that basic capacity and consciousness to act in this world as we see fit. So Hamsun’s novel may suggest, again, unwittingly, that this approach falls short. This is all the more compelling when one considers that Hamsun was a dyed-in-the-wool fascist who, quite controversially, sympathized with the Nazi’s. An organicist approach will look not at the great historical structures that shaped the main characters in a narrative, but how our characters evaded them and operated largely on the outside of them. It pays attention to those groups, forces, and voices not readily discussed in history, perhaps even silenced by history. There is an exploration of the minutiae of everyday encounters in the lives of everyday people, particularly those that have been oppressed and are largely disempowered, because these details are anything but trivial. Here is a tale of a couple and their intimate relationship to nature, emblematic of their relationship to one another, with all the attendant mystery of love’s forces and God’s methodical changing of the created seasons, all of which nurtures and sustains them, and forces their growth. Therein lays a great message, perhaps a quandary, for those who only see Hamsun as a scion of an irrepressible ideology, one talked about in dark, complex undercurrents. He has perchance plowed up a land and sown seeds in his writing which hint at how we might prosper on the fringes of our society. Isak and Inger’s interior monologues show us that this particular farmstead will become fruitful, that their lives become fruitful, by consistently agonizing over the details of what is the right thing to do.
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