Knut Hamsun’s “White Negro” from Ringen Sluttet (1936)—Or the Politics of Race

Abstract

Knut Hamsun published Ringen sluttet (The Ring is Closed, RC) in 1936, at the age of 77. In the 1930s, Hamsun and his family, disillusioned over parliamentarism, and fearful of organized labor and international bolshevism, rallied around Vidkun Quisling and his Nasjonal Samling (National Unification, NS) party. The NS, still split between various factions in 1933, had, by the end of 1934, developed into a party with a clear profile based on race as one of its main ideological axes (Bruknapp). Jon Alfred Mjøen, the internationally acclaimed eugenicist and an acquaintance of Hamsun, was considered one of the spiritual fathers of the party.² The various NS publications—Fronten, Ragnarok, and Nationalt tidsskrift for instance— that Hamsun read and sometimes wrote for, idealized the Nordic race and used other races as emblems of archaic, primeval aliens, and/or modern degeneration. As influential as Mjøen and NS propaganda might have been, Hamsun’s race attitude had appeared as early as the 1890s. It colored his portrayal of Others in a number of his texts, most visibly perhaps in his 1889 book Fra det moderne Amerikas Aandsliv (The Cultural Life of Modern America, CLMA) and his 1910 play Livet Ivold (In the Grip of Life, GL).³ The utopian primitivism of his 1917 novel Markens grøde (Growth of the Soil, GS) is also tainted by the skewed portrayal of the Lapps.

The Negroes were playing, and people were dancing on an oblong polished surface in the middle of the room—it was the same here as all over the world. ¹