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The Whisper of the Blood: A Study of Knut Hamsun's Early Novels

1956; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 71; Issue: 4-Part-1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/460632

1938-1530

Jenny McFarlane,

Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis

With that little stump of prose, twenty-nine magazine pages long, Knut Hamsun had laid the foundation of a new literature in the North.’ This assessment, so near in time to the event and yet so far-sighted, was that of Carl Naerup writing in 1895; the ‘stump of prose’ was the fragment of Hamsun's first novel Hunger , which appeared anonymously in the Danish periodical Ny Jord in 1888, two years before the publication of the completed work. At that time it took vision to see the real achievement behind the extravagance; the eye was too easily caught by the uninhibited exuberance of Hamsun's literary début to perceive the high seriousness behind it, his vehemence was misinterpreted as the antics and posturings of one whose chief object was self-advertisement; even the sympathetic Bjørnson, who acknowledged the greatness of some of Hamsun's early work, could not suppress an attitude of tolerant amusement: ‘In the field of literature,’ he wrote in 1896, ‘Hamsun began by committing just about all the stupidities that it is possible for a gifted madcap to get away with in a civilized society. … It seems the belief that no young author can any longer win his place without first trying to sweep away all the others is something that must be called typically Norwegian.’