"I Do Not Write a Life": Hamsun, Psychiatry and Life Narrative

Abstract

Life narratives are written in many different forms. This chapter discusses two such life narratives, constituting two textual explorations of the same ageing self, that of the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun. As part of a legal process following World War II, Hamsun was submitted to a psychiatric examination to assess his sanity. The examination resulted in a written report by the two psychiatrists that was presented to the court of law. A few years later, Hamsun published his memoir, On Overgrown Paths , which is partly an attack on psychiatry and the psychiatric approach to the self that he experienced before the trial. This chapter offers a reading of these two documents, the psychiatric report and the literary response to the report, in light of a notion of narratives and anti-narratives. It argues that a search for a coherent self was an intrinsic element in the psychiatric way of making sense of the self. It further argues that the response from the examinee was made in the form of a memoir that was an anti-narrative, challenging the very notion of a coherent self.