’Walk Away!’ Vagabonden som modernitetskritisk figuration hos Knut Hamsun

In May 1929, an international ‘Convention of Vagabonds’ (Vagabundentreffen) was held in the German city of Stuttgart. Along with a number of other well-known authors, one of the invited literati was the Norwegian Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun. Hamsun did not show up, but he kindly acknowledged the invitation with a greeting to organizers and the flamboyant collection of attendees. This incident shows, firstly, how big a name Hamsun was in anarchist and communist circles in the interwar period, as they had invited him and, secondly, that he must have been sympathetic to vagabondism, which in the light of the subsequent development in Hamsun’s political stance is quite remarkable. Already in his earliest articles and essays from the 1880s, Hamsun had dealt with mobile, socially disadvantaged individuals, especially in the years when he himself lived in the United States. In Hamsun’s entire oeuvre, wanderers, travelers, hobo’s and ‘rootless’ people can be found everywhere, e.g. in Sult (Hunger) (1890), in the so-called ‘August trilogy’ (1927-1933) and in his last, the autobiographical hybrid Paa gjengrodde Stier (On Overgrown Paths) from 1949, just to mention a few. This article examines how the figure of the vagabond functions as a vehicle for Hamsun’s critique of modernity in various texts from different phases in Hamsun’s authorship. The point of departure is one of his early memoir essays from the 1880s, the focus then shifts to the first two novels in the August trilogy (1927-1933) – at the core of Hamsun’s authorship – and finally his last book, the autobiographical On Overgrown Paths is discussed.