HAMSUN AND CAMUS: CONSCIOUSNESS IN "MARKENS GRØDE" AND "THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS"

the beginning, Knut Hamsun's Markens gr0de has been regarded as a novel with a message, "et moderne laeredigt," as Charles Kent termed it in 1919.1 Hamsun himself, while writing it, appears to have viewed it in the same way, calling it "et Varsku til mit Slaegtled;"2 and within the novel both the narrator and his agent Geissler talk occasionally as if they have something urgent to tell us about the problems of the day. However, Markens grflde's primary address, it seems to me, is not to the problems of Hamsun's time or of ours but rather to the problems which bedeviled Hamsun's central male characters from Suit to Ringen slut t et. Thus, a life lived close to the soil gives Isak the strength to survive separation from the woman he loves, and later her promiscuity, as well as the strength to rid her, during one rocky period of their marriage, of a number of "modern" notions, chief among them the notion that she has an equal say in running the home. Isak's way of life also provides the solution to the only specific ethical question raised by Hamsun in his authorship: the value of children in the modern world. The novel tells us that, in an agrarian society, even a deformed child may be useful whereas, in modern society, a child no matter how comely has no particular use at all, and value only if someone chooses to value it.3 Above all, in Markens grflde the people of Sellanrâ are in direct contact with nature: they experience its power immediately and are awed by it. In Hamsun's fictive world, this numinous relationship to nature represents either a precondition for religious faith or a substitute for it. Curiously enough, in Markens gr0de it is variously regarded as both, depending upon whether the viewpoint is that of the characters, who are conventionally Christian, or of the novel's narrator, who isn't.4 Once, however, Isak has met and overcome most of the major obstacles that have thwarted other Hamsun heroes, he must face one