Growth of the Soil
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The Growth of the Soil (Markens Grøde) is the novel by Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun which won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920.
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[edit] Theme
The essential elements of this novel are expressed in the words of the English translator W W Worster in his footnote in December 1920:
"It is the life story of a man in the wilds, the genesis and gradual development of a homestead, the unit of humanity, in the unfilled, uncleared tracts that still remain in the Norwegian Highlands.
It is an epic of earth; the history of a microcosm. Its dominant note is one of patient strength and simplicity; the mainstay of its working is the tacit, stern, yet loving alliance between Nature and the Man who faces her himself, trusting to himself and her for the physical means of life, and the spiritual contentment with life which she must grant if he be worthy.
Modern man faces Nature only by proxy, or as proxy, through others or for others, and the intimacy is lost. In the wilds the contact is direct and immediate; it is the foothold upon earth, the touch of the soil itself, that gives strength.
The story is epic in its magnitude, in its calm, steady progress and unhurrying rhythm, in its vast and intimate humanity. The author looks upon his characters with a great, all-tolerant sympathy, aloof yet kindly, as a god. A more objective work of fiction it would be hard to find--certainly in what used to be called "the neurasthenic North."
Stylistically it has a simplicity which reflects its subject matter and there prevails what Worster calls a “Miltonic monumental calm”. Hamsun also has the qualities of a Norwegian Steinbeck in his tale of the tragedies and joys of everyday life. There are also 'Bergmanesque' elements in its blacker episodes: the two infanticides; Axel left to die in the snow by the jealous and resentful Brede, whom he has gone out of his way to help and support; and the actions and words of the poisonous, spiteful and grasping Oline. Yet these are relieved by an underlying humour and lightness and all characters seem to have their redeeming features. Tragedy and evil rarely lead to unmitigated disaster, often because of the inner strength and fortitude of the principal characters. Isak, the patriarch, suffers silently the infidelities of his wife, Inger. Axel forgives both Brede's inhumanity in leaving him to die, and Brede's faithless, shallow and cold-hearted daughter, Barbro. He forgives both the murder of his child and is prepared to take her back and care for a child not his.
The injustices of life and society and the ironies of Fate are not underscored by Hamsun; unlike Hardy, he sees no Immanent Will at work or thwarted purposing in life.[1]
Thus, the innocent, compassionate Inger who murders her hare-lipped child to save its undergoing the same suffering she has undergone is imprisoned for six years (potentially for life); yet Barbro who kills two new born babies for social convenience escapes conviction and receives a misplaced sympathetic treatment by the courts. Yet we are left to reach our own conclusions on the outrageous injustice and ironic tragedy of this situation. Hamsun hints that even the feckless Barbro may eventually 'come right'. There is, it seems, eventual redemption for all.
[edit] Characters
[edit] Isak
Worster (ibid.) describes Isak as “Deliberately shorn of all that makes for mere effect. (He) stands out as an elemental figure, the symbol of Man at his best, face to face with Nature and life. There is no greater human character--reverently said--in the Bible itself.” But Isak has little depth of character and comes across as more of an icon of the long-suffering, industrious, pioneering labourer. There is something of the 'Boxer' about him: “I will work harder”[2]
Hamsun himself sums up Isak towards the end of the novel in the following words:
“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.”
And perhaps Isak evokes our greatest sympathy in his silent suffering and his easy forgiveness of his wife's infidelities and his prodigal first son's indolence, improvidence and eventual desertion.
Finally, it is Isak is the survivor, the builder, the man whom the land and the country needs. While the ephemeral copper mine and its promised wealth comes and goes, Isak continues and grows and an enduring prosperity builds around him.
Geissler, the disgraced Lendsman, recognises Isak's qualities from the very beginning, but it is in his words to Sivert at the end of the novel that he really identifies the essence of the man:
“'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.”
[edit] Inger
In many ways Inger is a far more complex character. At first a paragon of virtue, then a figure of great suffering when cruelly treated by circumstances and society, she is later unfaithful and tempted by the attractions of a different life. This would seem scarcely credible but as Hamsun explains:
“With her disfigurement, she had been cheated of her spring, and later, had been set in artificial air to lose six years of her summer; with life still in her, what wonder her autumn gave an errant growth?”
She evinces sympathy because of her disfigurement, because of her injust imprisonment, because of the way she selflessly toils to serve the man who has taken her into his life, but whom she does not love. She oscillates between a kind of puritan endurance and her latent, suppressed desires to love, be loved and indulge life to the full. However, like Isak, we can forgive her everything.
[edit] Eleseus
Their first-born, Eleseus, is in no sense his father's son. At first he seems to be the one with talent and promise; he will grow into someone with greater prospects and achievements than his slow-witted younger brother, Sivert. Yet it is the practical, hard working and canny Sivert who will continue to build what Isak has created.
Eleseus leaves for America, and we are abruptly told, never returns.
From the beginning, we begin to realise that there is “Something unfortunate, ill-fated about this young man, as if something were rotting him from within.”
It is Eleseus who symbolises the superficiality of the modern world; the businessmen who look for quick profits in exploiting the land for copper mining; those like Barbro who are seduced by the fleshpots of Bergen.
Hamsun sums him up well in these words towards the end of the novel:
“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 love, not ambitious, hardly nothing at all is Eleseus, not even a bad thing of any great dimensions.”
[edit] Geissler
Geissler is also one of the central and all-pervading characters who makes his appearances at every major turn in the narrative. He is wise, far-sighted, yet not infallible, and through his eyes we are able to recognise the foibles and virtues of the other characters. He is more recognisably human, 'normal', or 'modern' than the true country folk, a yardstick for the reader in coming to an understanding of and empathy with them.
It is Geissler himself who identifies his own essential role in the novel:
“I'm something, I'm the fog, as it were, here and there, floating around, sometimes coming like rain on dry ground.”
