Hamsun contra Ibsen

Knut Brynhildsvoll: Hamsun contra Ibsen – From polemical provocation to aesthetic programme: A misunderstanding and its cementation in literary history

When in 1891 the young Knut Hamsun was travelling around on tour with lectures on modern psychological literature, he was in the first instance concerned with making a name for himself and his performances, at the expense of the established writers and their position among the literary public. This intent conditioned the aggressive form and one-sided viewpoint of his lectures at the same time as they demonstrated an ambitious young author's insight into marketing mechanisms and self-assertion strategies. In order to get the greatest possible advantage and maximum attention directed at himself, it was necessary to undermine the prevailing literary paradigms and to attack their most significant representatives and declare their literary production to be the expression of something old-fashioned and laid to rest.

It was, as we know, first and foremost Henrik Ibsen who was on the receiving end. He was even at that time a European figure and everywhere he enjoyed the highest respect as a man who had breathed new life into modern drama. If one had once made up one's mind to create publicity for one's own name, this was the format on which Hamsun could sharpen his rhetorical talent. Hamsun's tactical polemical approach consists in the fact that he builds up a picture of Ibsen which, with his notorious irony and satirical talent, he then breaks down and reduces ad absurdum. He knows how to score points by making fun of a difference he has essentially constructed himself. One of his main points is that Ibsen is a superficial psychologist, a representative of the most coarse-grained production of types and characters, who operates with a handful of basic psychological constants. It is true that Hamsun concedes that the scenic form of expression requires certain simplifications in the depiction of characters, but even if this limitation that is conditioned by the medium is taken into consideration, Ibsen's dramatic figures are in Hamsun's eyes far too square and constructed. According to Hamsun this is connected with the fact that Ibsen to a high degree thinks in terms of whole categories, not in fractions. One therefore misses in his stage figures intermediate tones and nuances. As an example of this lack of complexity in Ibsen's characters Hamsun mentions Johannes Rosmer, whom he perceives as the very epitome of a noble soul. He never falls out of his role. He is and remains himself, as Hamsun asserts with reference to a well-known Peer Gynt formulation. He is so consistently noble and good that Hamsun finds it difficult to imagine him as a human being. From his own elitist position Hamsun looks with scepticism upon what he calls the “democratisation” of the nobility and the noble as it manifests itself in this levelling of diversity and complexity.

It is not difficult to share Hamsun's view if one accepts his premises. Hamsun's concretisation of his perception of Ibsen is, however, an illustrative example of his wicked argumentation strategy. First he constructs a simplified and one-sided Rosmer in order afterwards to make Ibsen responsible for the figure he has himself reduced to a “type” or “character”. It is difficult to imagine that Hamsun did not see with what a precise feeling for psychological nuances Ibsen created Rosmer and the field of conflict in which he is placed. There is therefore good reason to suppose that Hamsun against his better judgement and on an unsound basis created a simplified version of Rosmer that better served his own purposes, which in his contrastive argumentation were to present himself as the spokesman of modernity and Ibsen as out of date.

In retrospect one has a feeling that Hamsun could hardly have chosen a poorer example than Rosmer and Rosmersholm once he had set himself the aim of illuminating Ibsen's alleged lack of capacity for psychological depiction. It is a well-known fact that Sigmund Freud saw in Ibsen a dramatist who with merciless stringency devoted himself to the task of “doing psychological accounting” – and in his analysis of Rosmersholm in the journal Imago (1911) he refers in concurrence with similar notions in Otto Rank to the fact that in his drama Ibsen gives a masterful portrayal of the incest problem and the Oedipus complex. It can hardly have escaped Hamsun's attention that in Johannes Rosmer, Ibsen depicted with analytical precision the phenomenon of decadence by means of a character who has lost his sexuality and who as a result of this seeks to conceal his impotence in manners of speaking that emphasise the purely spiritual, pure and lustless community of free nobility. Hamsun chooses instead to ignore this interpretation of the Rosmer character, which Ingjald Nissen also touched on in his book Sjelelige kriser i menneskets liv. Henrik Ibsen og den moderne psykologi (1931), in which he asserts that Ibsen was at the latest from The Wild Duck onwards a “psychologist of the individual” and as such he was first and foremost concerned with analysing his characters' “fictive projects” – for example Hjalmar Ekdal's “neurotic life plan” – in their compensatory effects on the characters themselves. Instead Hamsun chooses to consider Rosmer's monomaniacal uttering of propaganda for cohabitation in its purest form as the expression of an attitude marked by failure to differentiate and reduction of diversity. It may seem as if Hamsun reacts polemically to something he perceives as corruption of the noble, which according to Hamsun's innermost conviction represents a quality that is not democratisable, but reserved for the few to live up to. Hamsun's elitist understanding of the concept of the noble in company with his polemical intention gets in the way of an adequate understanding of the Rosmer character. He cannot see – or will not see – that Rosmer's behavioural motivation stands under the sign of the rhetoric of compensation and springs from an inner urge for legitimation. Hamsun therefore ignores the subtlety in Ibsen's management of Rosmer's communication strategy, where he makes use of indirect dialogicity in order at one and the same time to conceal and reveal Rosmer's crisis of identity. By installing communication on two levels he uses Rosmer's manifest speech as a means to illuminating his latent psychological state.

One can hardly help noticing that in his one-sided emphasis of the manifest communication level in Rosmer, Hamsun makes the mistake of ignoring this level's complicated relation to the underlying psychological substratum in him. It is tempting to suspect Hamsun of deliberately having overlooked Ibsen's double-coded dialogicity – probably with the intention of toning down or contesting the point that his own aesthetic conceptions are basically more closely akin to Ibsen's than for the sake of the occasion he is willing to concede.

Before I go a little more closely into this, it is not uninteresting to observe that Hamsun's own polemical intentions and profiling needs easily bring him onto a collision course with the aesthetic aims he himself stands up for in his own literary production. When, as in his article on “the psychology of the subconscious” in Samtiden (1890), he chides Ibsen for his tendency to mystify his characters and to let them speak in deep riddles, he is attacking Ibsen for precisely the same aesthetic practice of which he himself makes extensive use in his novels and which is an element in the modernising of the psychological literary discourse that he himself so ardently supports. It is in such a context symptomatic that both Hamsun and Ibsen are interested in psycho-pathological phenomena and therefore eo ipso direct attention to mental complexes that deviate from the static personality norm. It is in the light of this utterly and completely misleading when Hamsun rebukes Ibsen for sacrificing psychological ambiguity on the altar of harmonisation and with interpretative anchorage in this self-constructed hermeneutic angle of approach makes Ibsen a representative of the old-fashioned character psychology, while he himself sees himself as an exponent of the new psychology of the individual.

With reference to Hamsun's postulated delimitation there is, however, reason to recall that in his book Abnorme Charaktertypen in der dramatischen Literatur the German philologist and neurologist Wilhelm Weygandt pointed out as early as 1910 that in Ibsen's dramas there are a lot of “psychologically abnormal people”. Paul Heyse and Leo Tolstoy place Ibsen's dramatic production in the same psychological context. Heyse speaks of Ibsen's “hospital poetry”, Tolstoy of “delirium and decadent confusion”. These and similar statements cannot easily be reconciled with Hamsun's view of Ibsen's characters as figures and types with few and transparent qualities.

Much of Hamsun's prejudice against Ibsen seems to rest on his aversion to the analytically rational element in Ibsen's literary production, which is liable to cause offence to a rebellious young poet with ambitions of depicting what is spontaneous, incalculable and contradictory in the mental forms of expression. To make his argumentation more plausible and to subdue some of the polemical tone of his attacks, Hamsun claims that Ibsen's alleged tendency to portray stereotype character traits is to a certain extent grounded in the fact that with his retrospective technique he is forced to treat concluding psychological complexes, while he himself claims to be interested in psychological processes in statu nascendi or in the aspect of process in the present in his characters' forms of being and coming into being. It is nevertheless a question of whether this distinction is tenable. It is true that Ibsen seldom portrays psychological states at the moments in which they come into being; he does not deal with them until they are in a much later phase, in which psychological conflicts and anomalies are revealed as determined by past events. By thus unravelling his dramatic cases backwards, Ibsen proceeds according to the same method as is used in the practice of psychoanalysis, where it is a matter, in the form of a conversation, of finding the way to the traumatising causes of crises and neuroses in the present. Ibsen's reconstructive method does not, however, contribute to making his dramatic works less oriented towards the present than Hamsun's prose texts, even though Ibsen, by shifting actions from the level of their happening to the level of reflection on them, introduces a distancing factor that is alien to Hamsun.

On the occasion of Ibsen's 70th birthday in 1898 a Festschrift was published with contributions from among others Holger Drachmann, who in a poem to “The Master” asserted that “No-one has looked into the depths of the soul as you have done”. In another contribution Valdemar Vedel pointed out that Ibsen had had his most faithful readers among people interested in psychology in the broadest sense, and he mentioned as examples Julius Lange, Harald Høffding and Jens Peter Jacobsen. There is on the basis of such assertions reason to suppose that the reception of Ibsen in the Nordic countries focused to a high degree on the Ibsen drama's psychological determinants. Since Hamsun so vehemently distances himself from this fundamental consensus and adopts a contrary position, it may strengthen us in a suspicion that he is out to grind his own axe rather than provide an intersubjectively communicable picture of Ibsen as a psychological author. For in substance they do not even appear to be so far from each other as Hamsun chooses to argue. Both Ibsen and Hamsun wrote hybrid texts that overstepped boundaries. Ibsen de-dramatised drama by introducing narrative structures; Hamsun de-epicised narrative texts by introducing drama structures, as in Hunger for instance. This relativises Hamsun's argument about the dramatist's urge to work with more or less stereotype and simplified character templates.

In order to get a clearer picture of where and how Ibsen's and Hamsun's texts touch one another and converge on a point where the concept of psychology loses its relevance, it is necessary to take a little look back. According to all we know, Hamsun's view of psychology was strongly influenced by contemporary thinking. The conception of psychology expressed in his lectures on literature owes, to put it mildly, a clear debt to Strindberg. Many of his views are practically literal borrowings or re-writings of reflections from Strindberg's foreword to Miss Julie. If one investigates the matter a little more closely, one will, however, have no difficulty in ascertaining that much of the contemporary new thinking in psychology was akin to Romantic theories about the subconscious. If one keeps sight of the fact that the psychoanalytical theory of the subconscious world of the mind, which in the 1890s was in the process of being formulated, also has connections with Romantic aesthetics, one will be able to see more clearly that Hamsun's concept of psychology is connected with psychoanalysis through the common connection with the aesthetics of Romanticism. In his study Die Philosophie des Unbewussten (1869), which according to Harald Beyer contributed to preparing the paradigm shift of the 1890s, Eduard von Hartmann refers to Carl Gustaf Carus, who in his book Psyche in concurrence with Schelling expresses the view that “conscious activity is to be considered as dependent on subconscious activity” and that the key to cognition of the conscious world of the mind lies in regions of the subconscious. If one looks at Hamsun's and Ibsen's works in a genetic context of this kind, one will be able to ascertain that they both in their texts thematise the subconscious life of the mind, but that they surprisingly enough tend to transform the subconscious impulses into mythical-allegorical figurations and models. In Ibsen's case this tendency has been the object of a number of studies, while as far as Hamsun is concerned, little attention has been paid to it. With Hunger as the reference text, I have myself argued that on account of the extremely solipsist perspective he adopted, Hamsun fails to produce the psychological differentiation he sought to achieve and that his depiction instead assumes a mythical-allegorical character. This approach to forms that incarnate abstract forces in the mind is something of which we find plenty of examples in Ibsen's works. That this transformation of an aesthetic subject into an allegorical one had long since been prepared in literary terms, and not just in Ibsen, was made clear enough by Hans Robert Jauss in his studies of Baudelaire.

There is in other words a great deal to indicate that Ibsen and Hamsun are in practice not so far from each other as it has been customary to claim. If one were to describe the difference between them in psychoanalytical categories, one might perhaps postulate that Ibsen takes over the role of the therapist in that he analyses the production of the subconscious as in all essentials unsuccessful suppression of the conscious – i.e. as revenants – but Hamsun assumes the role of object of analysis, who under the guise of spontaneity and authenticity knows how to conceal his cunningly devised and deliberately steered fantasy constructs and thereby how to simulate for the outside world the coming into being of the speech and writing of surrealism as it manifests itself through application of the écrire automatique technique. Both these poles, which in the theory and practice of psychoanalysis complement each other, are played out against each other and isolated from each other by Hamsun – and here lies probably an important cause of Hamsun's distorted picture of Ibsen, which with surprising acceptance and tenacity of life has been taken by subsequent writers on literary history as support for a change of literary period from the beginning of the 1890s onwards.


This article summarises some points of view from one of the chapters of the author's monograph Sult, sprell og Altmulig. Alte und neue Studien zu Knut Hamsuns anti-psychologischer Romankunst, Frankfurt am Main 1998.