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Rating:
It strikes me that on this site there isn't even a single review of a work by this great author. The importance of his production is obvious, so much so that American Nobel laureate Isaac Singer claimed that the entire narrative of the 20th century derives from Hamsun, while Hemingway succinctly stated that this Scandinavian gentleman taught him the art of writing, not to mention the enormous debt accumulated by Herman Hesse, Louis Ferdinand Celinè, Henry Miller, and the entire Beat Generation towards him. The greatest acknowledgment of esteem comes from the gruff, rough, and cynical pen of a certain Bukowski (who, at least after death, has grasped fame) who called him unequivocally "the greatest writer in the world" (specifically in the novel "Women").
However, my objective is not to write an encomium stuffed with rhetoric, even though my esteem for the Norwegian writer is high and increases as I delve into his production. The reason he is so unknown to the masses is simple: history has inflicted upon him an undeserved "damnatio memoriae" (in short, the subject of this analysis of mine is a true "desaparecido" from any anthology of literature). In short, Hamsun publicly expressed sympathy for Nazism. Dozens of intellectuals sided in favor of totalitarian regimes between the two wars; almost all of them, to be objective, did so for opportunism, very few because they were "exalted" by the pan-Germanism presented by Nazi ideology. However, it's a mistake to define Hamsun as opportunistic or "exalted," as he was always a solitary, proud, arrogant, "apolitical" man (not inclined to stabilize his restless and neurotic nature with the securities offered by the "political ideologies of the moment"), and if he sided with Hitler, it was because he believed, conscientiously, that "pan-Germanism" was the only way to escape the abyss of apathy towards which modernity and capitalism are dragging humanity (Knut Hamsun is one of many literary specimens straddling the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries who hated his own time and considered the last lifeline to be the "panic" relationship between man and nature). Undoubtedly a very debatable position. Before the war, he was the symbolic writer of a country, having received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920, specifically for "The Growth of the Soil". Then World War II broke out, and therein lay the error that compromised his reputation: the expressed sympathy for Hitler (without joining the party or committing any crime). The war ends, with the victory of the Allies, and Hamsun definitively sends his literary prestige to the scrap heap: he writes a funeral eulogy for the Teutonic dictator in a newspaper. However, Hamsun's moral integrity emerges right after 1945, as he does not recant the opinions expressed during the world conflict, becoming the only pro-Nazifascist European intellectual to "pay" on all fronts. And it should be noted that this gentleman pays a hefty price as an over-octogenarian.
"On Overgrown Paths" is a diary starting from 1945, when the Norwegian writer is taken by the police to be taken to a hospital. Immediately, one perceives that the hostility of his compatriots pours onto the back, now curved with age, of the elderly writer like an ocean in a storm, and that he clings with nails and teeth to the rock of writing and absolute self-sufficiency in solving the necessary needs for survival (despite physical deficiencies represented by deafness and incipient blindness). Humiliations accumulate, becoming more numerous and harder to bear: the postponements of the trial (the postponements are so many that even in the eyes of a child it would all seem like a shameful farce, a sly expedient to "remove" a now defenseless man), the very strict and (almost) impolite treatment by the hospital staff (at the beginning of the novel, the image of a bewildered Hamsun repeatedly popping up asking nurses or the "head nurse" questions that receive no response), the police guard preventing him from walking around, and finally even the transfer to an asylum for old demented people. The ordeal proceeds and from Hamsun's dry and essential pen neither lamentations nor complaints emerge; at times, suddenly, flashbacks pop up functional to relieve the despondency caused by all these undeserved sufferings. However, there are no missing acts of gratitude: this reviewer was struck by the fragment in which a girl, an admirer of his novels, presents herself in his "corner," naively violating the intimacy of the old man, intent on putting on his denture, to return a book stolen secretly and to give him yarn to mend socks worn out by time.
The Norwegian government decides that it is time to deliver the coup de grace to the "old lion" broken down and badly wounded: internment in a clinic for mental illness patients. Here, a personal reflection (susceptible to criticism) is in order: totalitarianisms, in their being ruthless, and inhumane, maintain a trace of loyalty by explicitly declaring who must be eliminated physically; democracies, instead, before proceeding with the "democratic" debate, seek to eliminate "undesirable subjects" in a veiled, cunning, and, above all, antithetical way to the principles they profess. This story is the paradigm. Hamsun is publicly declared insane by the government, but he is perfectly lucid, not coincidentally writing this novel in real-time. And it will be the internment to diminish the mental energies of the old writer, but also the overwhelming awareness of the vanity of "human affairs":
“Man, it is you I am thinking of. Of everything that lives in the world, only you were born without a reason, or almost. You are neither good nor bad, you were created without a contemplated purpose. You come from the fog and will return to the fog, so great is your imperfection."
Needless to say, the trial, prolonged in an inexorably embarrassing manner, sees a Hamsun inflexible in his pan-Germanist positions, also tinged with "paternalism" towards his countrymen, and concludes in 1948 (Hamsun was 89 years old at the time) with a sentence providing for the confiscation of assets (another slap in the face for a person who suffered long-hunger, wandered around the most disparate places, and acquired relative well-being only in late age). The novel ends in a glacial manner: "St. John's Day 1948. Today the Supreme Court has delivered its verdict, and I will write no more." There is no more hope of coming out unscathed, the curtain falls, the pen stops as the culmination of a calvary is reached, more painful even than old age and death.
Post Scriptum: What does "On Overgrown Paths" represent in a few phrases? The defeat of a man of enormous dignity who is whipped to blood by fate (just to cite a beautiful and noble poem too often flaunted recently by some television broadcast), humiliated by "contingent" events, but whose literary production rises from the oblivion imposed by History, to the eyes of the disinterested reader, like a phoenix from the ashes. The phoenix, the noblest of all birds (mythological and otherwise), thus survives any storm, just as art that intertwines with life persists for centuries and then inexorably merges with it. This is the creed (the absolute coexistence between literature and life) that permeates all his written legacy, beyond any political ideology.
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