“Green by this Time Tomorrow!”: Knut Hamsun's Alternative Modernity

Abstract

The Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun's erratic behavior during the 1930s and early 1940s, when he publicly endorsed the German war effort, has tarnished the reputation of his Nobel Prize-winning novel Growth of the Soil (1917) and in some circles stigmatized it as reactionary, antimodern and even proto-fascist text. Placing Hamsun within an international context and drawing on both critical theory and revisionist scholarship into the back-to-the-land movement, I find instead that contemporary land and life reformers' conflicted attempts to map out alternative modernities are mirrored in Growth of the Soil 's fraught negotiation with modern technology, producing a complex dialectic of critique and affirmation that cannot simply be dismissed as backward-looking. Rather than directly prefiguring the political mobilization of retrograde anxieties in the mass movements of the 1930s, Hamsun's agricultural book signifies ambiguously within a heterogeneous space of conflicting discourses and practices directed against and towards the modern world.