Book Report: Growth of the Soil

Moral Conflict

After I picked up Growth of the Soil at the library, but before I began reading it, I found out that Knut Hamsun was a Nazi sympathizer. Nowadays, many readers refuse to read authors whose personal behavior they disapprove of. But as Isak in Growth of the Soil says, “We are none of us as we should be.” Most good works of art transcend the personality of the artist, and I don’t think we should conflate the author with the work. On the other hand, it’s impossible to completely separate them. We all have our problematic faves, but there are so many marginalized voices creating amazing stories to keep me busy that I might never get around to reading Lovecraft. Knut Hamsun, on the other hand, was already sitting in my library bag.

Book Blurb

Growth of the Soil is the story of a man who walks into the wilderness with nothing but patience and strength. With decades of hard work, he transforms the forest into a large and wealthy farmstead. The book takes place somewhere in the north of Norway, somewhere in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Racist Author, Racist Book

Even if I had not found out about Hamsun’s Nazi views, his racism would have marred the book. I don’t agree with readers who avoid depictions of racism. If Norwegian farmers would have been prejudiced against “Lapps” in the mid-nineteenth century, I don’t want to read a novel in which the Sámi and farmers get along (unless it’s an alternate history novel, which can be super fun). But I do expect the author to portray individual characters who experience prejudice rather than a group who deserve it.

Lapps always keep to the outlying spots, in dark places; light and air distress them, they cannot thrive; it is with them as with maggots and vermin.

-Growth of the Soil

He even manages to get a dig in against Native Americans, though there are none in the story.

If his brother were anything but a lousy Indian savage, he ought to give back half.

Growth of the Soil

Sexist

There are only four speaking roles for women in this book. Two murder their own newborn children. Once is basically a con artist. And the last is a social reformer who barely appears on stage, is disliked by everyone in the book, and exists only to illustrate the folly of “progress.”

Old Oline is a beggar who lives by her wits and feeds off scraps of the trouble she stirs up. Barbro is, in contemporary parlance, a thot. She has no values, doesn’t stick to anything, sleeps around, and kills the resulting babies.

Even Isak’s wife, Inger, who is supposed to exemplify the “good farm wife,” has no brain of her own. She is swayed by any outsider, is only chaste as long as there are no other men available, and basically must be managed like the livestock. Inger is a “good woman” because she works hard and only needs to be treated violently once to behave. She, too, kills a child, which provides the only hint of depth her character gets. Having lived with “harelip” (cleft lip) and suffered cruel treatment for it her whole life, she smothers the baby born with the same anomaly.

Biblical Justice

Unfortunately, the human story in this episode is almost completely wasted. Instead, the dual infanticides are used to mock progressive values. Inger, whose murder is tragic, spends years in jail where she learns to read, gains a trade, and has her own cleft lip repaired. She returns home from her punishment a happier, better woman, if somewhat preoccupied by shallow concerns after her long separation from the good earth. Cold-blooded Barbro is defended by the sheriff’s wife in a feminist courtroom speech. She is acquitted by a judicial system that has

more and more abandoned the practice of punishing crimes … in accordance with the doctrine of the Old Testament …

Growth of the Soil

Barbro goes free and is unrepentant.

Frontier Literature

There is a whole genre of frontier literature – mostly American, natch –whereby both the ownership and value of land is measured by the labor humans apply to it. The human-centered world-view of John Locke and of frontier literature fails to recognize the natural productiveness of the land. It categorizes the richness of the American prairie and the Norwegian forest as wasteland. Growth of the Soil fits comfortably in this category.

Isak is frequently described as “a log of a man” and a “water troll.” He has no interest in art, ideas, or money. He lacks the imagination to enjoy any kind of leisure or think of anything more than practical solutions to homely problems. Yet we are to believe that he is the best kind of man, because he works hard and patiently to convert the “wasteland” of the wilderness into “productive” land.

Ironically, Hamsun uses America as the dumping ground for people who can’t handle the pioneer life in Norway’s wilds. (I suspect that I also need a “Homosexist” subheading here, too, since the character who can’t cut it and escapes to America is pretty gay-coded.)

Flaw of the Frontier

Hamsun often refers to the forest as “the common,” probably in reference to its government ownership, but it quite appropriately reminds the modern reader of the tragedy of the commons. Rather than increase productivity, human toil has depleted topsoil and endangered species. Even in the book, the flaw is apparent. Much of the farm’s expansion is funded by the sale of timber, but Isak does no replanting. The growth of Isak’s farm is unsustainable.  

It’s hard to overlook the fact that the point of a book like Growth of the Soil has been debunked. But authors can’t help the scientific knowledge of their time, and many modern readers are drawn to the hopeful attitudes and faith in the future inherent in pioneer stories. Pioneer literature encourages readers to take heart at the power of human beings to accomplish seemingly impossible tasks. But it requires us to ignore the poor choice of task used as an example.

Geissler

Isak and his family work hard. But their hard work would only have kept them subsisting at poverty levels, if it weren’t for Geissler. Something of a Trickster character, Geissler shows up at unexpected times, acts in mysterious ways for unexplained motives, and then disappears again. Although he is vindictive toward the village and seems to experience great highs and lows in his own life, his appearance always benefits Isak Sellenrå. His quixotic-seeming actions are as much responsible for the success of the farm as Isak’s slow labor. His speech near the end of the book serves as a stand-in for the author explaining the moral, but his very existence undercuts that moral. Geissler is either a symbol I can’t interpret, or a lazy plot device.

The Last Word

Comparisons with Halldor Laxness’ Independent People (1934) are almost impossible to avoid. Hamsun’s slow-minded, stubborn farmer tilled the earth before Bjartur, but Laxness’ book comes off better. Laxness manages to show his characters’ failings with just as much wryness but less cynicism and more truth.

Even so, Growth of the Soil is a good book. The authorial voice is a strangely distant third person but somehow also shares exactly what is going on inside the characters’ heads. These characters are mostly taciturn, simple people, but he handles the relationships between them with a fine sensitivity to their feelings and cleverly decodes their unspoken communications.

There are beautiful sentences and moments of transcendent beauty in Growth of the Soil. The moments of epiphany that Hamsun’s simple characters find in nature – Sivert’s rapture at the language of ducks, Inger’s empathic connection to the tiny fish in a puddle – ring as true as they are poetic.

Do they make up for Hamsun using his platform as a Nobel laureate to proclaim that the Nazis were on the right track? Probably not.

Growth of the Soil

Knut Hamsun, 1917

Translated by Sverre Lyngstad, 2007