Hunger

by Knut Hamsun

  The formal corollary of this new focus is the outsider hero, internal monologue, and a novelistic strategy that draws as much on the principles of music as on those of traditional narrative. Thus Hunger, with its four roughly equal parts, employs the musical form of variations on a theme some dozen years before Thomas Mann used the sonata form in Tonio Kröger (1903). Gide’s The Immoralist, with its three-part structure, offers a nice parallel: both Hamsun and Gide were dealing with marginal experiences, such as could not be contained within the old plot schemata. Gide chose a strict, tripartite geometrical form to convey his explosive emotional content; similarly, Hamsun’s external form is very strict, whereas the substance often borders on frenzy, plunging the reader into a vortex of the most intimate personal experiences.21

  While the first-person novel was not very common at the time, it had been used by a Kristiania bohemian, Hans Jæger (1854-1910). His book Fra Kristiania-Bohêmen (1885; From the Kristiania Bohème) is a shameless self-revelation by a countercultural intellectual whose slogan was to “write one’s life.” But while Hamsun uses this narrative strategy with staggering virtuosity in Hunger, his version of “writing one’s life” accomplishes something incomparably broader than his predecessor in the genre. While we follow the personal vicissitudes of the Hunger hero with intense interest, we are simultaneously made to contemplate the human condition in general. The struggling artist in Kristiania in the year 1890 becomes in the reader’s mind a representative of humankind, facing the possibility of failure and, yes, even death in an alien world, a world that has no use for him. A comment Hamsun made in a letter to Edvard Brandes in 1888 may be relevant here; he says he “hadn’t wanted to write for Nor wegians. . . . I wanted to write for human beings wherever they found themselves.” He felt more of a European than a Norwegian, he says.22 Hamsun’s breakthrough novel may owe its wide appeal, in part, to this broad perspective.

  The ancestor of Hamsun’s wanderer in the streets of Kristiania can be traced to the Romantic hero, now become a kind of flâneur by virtue of finding himself down and out. In the spirit of that hero, he is in revolt against heaven and at odds with society. Like Cain—a favorite of the Romantics—he is a marked man whose adversities echo the curse on the Biblical outcast. Moreover, whether the hero’s sufferings recall Job or Oedipus, playthings of God or fate, Hamsun has recourse to romantic irony, which confers an absurdist note upon the hero’s rebellion. This is particularly evident from his elaborate curse of God in Part Three—which he afterward sees as “nothing but rhetoric and literature”—and from the way he dismisses his final appeal to Ylajali as “just claptrap and rhetoric over again.” This device turns the light of parody on the hero’s pretensions; cutting him down to size, it makes him distinctly modern.

  The accompanying disenchantment suggests comparison with a theme central to such realistic novels as Balzac’s Pe‘re Goriot (1834-35) and Lost Illusions (1837-43) as well as Dickens’ Great Expectations (1861): that of the young man from the provinces trying to make his career in the capital. The only worthy antagonist to the hero is the city of Kristiania, which will eventually “set its mark upon him”; significantly, the book begins and ends with a reference to that city. But whereas the “campaigns” of the heroes of Balzac to conquer the city achieve a modicum of practical success, in recompense for their lost illusions, the battle of the Hamsun hero assumes the form of petty, often imaginary skirmishes with individuals, whom he hopes to dispatch “in grand style” but who eventually get the better of him. Even the insects refuse to leave him alone.

  The Napoleonic motif, so strong in nineteenth-century fiction, makes Rastignac issue his challenge to the city of Paris at the end of Pe‘re Goriot in a spirit of the utmost self-assurance: “A nous deux maintenant!” Though Hamsun’s hero displays an inkling of that motif—he envisages himself as a “white beacon in the midst of a turbid human sea with floating wreckage everywhere” and shows a superb contempt for “the brutes”—he is incapable of maintaining a consistent attitude of superiority. In consequence he goes downhill, in every respect, from the very beginning.

  While naturalism, with its affinity for decline and attrition, may provide part of the answer to this development, the hero’s artistic ambition is clearly the root cause. With editors being able to use only what is “popular,” his Romantic notion of inspiration—shown when he exclaims after his “exalted moment” in Part One, “It’s God! It’s God!”—can never satisfy the expectations of bourgeois society. Consequently, he loses out in the struggle for existence. His situation is not unlike that described by Marmeladov in Crime and Punishment when he implies that he has “nowhere . . . to go”:23 the city has become a labyrinth, a place without exit, and society a dead-end street. However, unlike Dostoyevsky, Hamsun accentuates the absurd aspects of this quandary.

  Here is perhaps what today’s reader will find most congenial in Hamsun’s protagonist, namely, his awareness of the absurdity of all things human. Twenty-five years before Kafka created Gregor Samsa, man as an insect, and more than fifty years before Camus popularized the absurd hero as a modern Sisyphus, Hamsun in Hunger did both. The book swarms with insects and insect images, applied in describing the hero as well as other figures: “I felt I was myself a crawling insect doomed to perish, seized by destruction in the midst of a whole world ready to go to sleep” (Part One). The chief difference from Kafka is that Hamsun maintains a basically realistic perspective. Like Sisyphus, the hero keeps rolling his rock without letup: “When a piece was finished I began a fresh one, and I wasn’t very often discouraged by the editor’s no,” he writes (Part One). The book’s very form, with each of four parts representing a new beginning, expresses the Sisyphean struggle and defeat, followed by renewed efforts.

  Specific similarities with Camus’ notion of the absurd include, from the very outset, the hero’s confrontation with death in the form of Madam Andersen’s “shrouds” and his “broken-down coffin” of a room. These reminders of mortality are the more poignant because of the hero’s vulnerable physical condition. He experiences Heidegger’s authentic “Being-toward-death.” Much of his strange behavior, even his joie de vivre—so paradoxical under the circumstances—can be understood in the light of the imminent threat of dying. That threat is most vividly evoked in the jail sequence, where he fears being “dissolved” into the impenetrable darkness of the cell (Part Two). Only a word meaning something “spiritual” can help him preserve a certain integrity. But it is his unrelenting pride that pulls him through the worst: metaphorically as well as physically, he wants to “die on . . . [his] feet” (Part Four). While the thought of suicide does occur to him, it never becomes a real possibility; nor does he seek solace in a transcendent hope, metaphysical consolation. As in Camus’ work, the accent is on a peculiar kind of modern heroism, one totally devoid of metaphysical guarantees. It is not, however, devoid of metaphysical humor, as when the hero parodies Biblical language in a reversal of the man-God relationship: he will turn his back on the hypothetical God he addresses, he says, because “you did not know the time of your visitation.” Like Stephen De dalus, in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), he proclaims Non serviam: “I shall renounce all your works and all your ways,” he says, parodying the Christian vow to forgo the Devil (Part Three).

  It is a staple of Hamsun criticism that the social perspective is non-existent in Hunger, by contrast to the overt socio-critical tendencies in the naturalistic literature of the period. This view overlooks the fundamentally ironic mode of the book’s narrative discourse. The hero is as much out of tune with bourgeois society as he is with the order of creation, allegedly guaranteed by an all-powerful, all-knowing God. Indeed, Hamsun seems to conflate official Christianity with the middle-class social order. Here it stands him in good stead that the name of the city is Kristiania (or Christiania, which highlights the Christ connection); but beyond that, there are references to “Christ’s Cemetery,” “the clock of Our Savior’s,” and a business
man named Christie who refuses to give him a job because he cannot handle numbers. The clock, symbol of regulated, conventional bourgeois life, is associated with major social institutions: the university, the church, and the jail. The hero, having pawned his own watch, is dependent on these official indicators of public time, but he clearly has difficulty attuning his own private life to their mechanical rhythms. Thus, he is constantly either too early or too late for his appointments. Ironically, even the promise of salvation is dependent on observing regular office hours: when he arrives at the pastor’s, “the hour of grace was past” (Part Two). Policemen seem to be the favorite targets of the hero’s nonconformist rage; they become the lightning rod for his metaphysical as well as his social defiance.24 Implicitly, if not explicitly, Hunger abounds in criticism of the established order, from a seemingly anar chistic perspective.

  But this is only one side of the coin. Due to his inability to follow the clock, the hero is relegated to the role of a clown. Yes, Hamsun anticipates Picasso, Thomas Mann, and many other modernists in portraying the artist as clown—a superfluous man who knows the depths of human suffering but makes light of it, turning it into entertainment both for himself and others. The hero of Hunger approximates such a figure. Most often he plays a clown to himself, but at times he also plays to the public, accepting his hopelessly irrelevant position in a society that judges everything by monetary values.

  Some critics contend that the hero’s excessive generosity is evidence of a compulsive desire to starve, to be a hunger artist much like Kafka’s famous character, arguing that his state of hunger is a necessary condition of his creative affla tus.25 This, it seems to me, casts him in a more abnormal role than the text justifies. True, he does say he was once “good at starving,” as though going hungry were a kind of art, and he is incapable of holding on to his cash. But his generosity seems little more than a temperamental tic, indicative of his visceral contempt for material values. The narrative absence of the carefree periods in his life conforms to one of the most banal facts of human experience: happiness is aesthetically uninteresting, as Tolstoy was well aware judging by the first sentence of Anna Karenina (1875-77): “Happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” It is also worth noting that, while Hamsun’s urban wanderer experiences an abundance of extravagant moods and fantasies during his periods of want, the story is written in retrospect: his creative efforts while going hungry amount to very little. But he can play the clown, which he does to the hilt.

  The psychology of Hunger has given rise to many studies, including a book-length psychoanalytic critique in German. 26 Too much may have been made of Hamsun as a depth psychologist on a par with Freud and other delvers into the subconscious. What Hamsun describes is the phenomenology of consciousness—if not “the shower of innumerable atoms . . . as they fall,” in Virginia Woolf ’s parlance,27 then something very close to it: Hunger offers a minute, moment-by-moment evocation of the hero’s stream of thought, at times with near-hallucinatory effect. But the narrator does not analyze unconscious motives, at least not to any depth; he simply records the vagaries of conscious and semiconscious life—the flux of thought, feeling, and fantasy in a person whose sensibilities have been brought to a supernormal pitch by virtual physical collapse. It is perfectly legitimate, of course, to go behind and beyond the explicit narrative, to apply explanatory models that reach beneath the text to get at the dynamics of its genesis, as has been done by Atle Kittang in his pioneering study of Hamsun’s so-called “novels of disillusionment.”28 And it can be tempting to link the book’s sexual symbols, such as the wounded finger and damaged foot, with the hero’s seeming sexual ineptness, the presence of a primal scene and so forth, and in consequence diagnose Hamsun as the victim of a castration or inferiority complex.29 My final comments, however, will touch on some surface phenomena.

  Any reader of Hunger is struck by a number of truly astounding psychological facts: first, the contingency of mental states, their sheer arbitrariness, whereby what happens in one moment is separated by vast lacunae from what precedes and follows. The life of the mind is depicted in Hamsun’s first novel as discontinuous. Secondly, the book orchestrates several levels of perception, thought and feeling, some only half conscious, producing representations of a divided psyche: several selves may inhabit one and the same body simultaneously. In Hunger, this is shown through the many self-identifications of the hero, with the crippled old man, with the little boy spit in the head by the red-bearded man, even with the oleograph Christ, who seems to observe the scandalous scene of the landlady’s adulterous coupling along with the hero. While the device recalls Dostoyevsky’s treatment of the double, Hamsun’s uses it in a novel manner. Often, the self-division becomes the occasion for humorous playacting as the hero launches into interior dialogues between one part of his psyche and another. Nevertheless, in the midst of the breaches in his mental landscape, he stubbornly insists he is of sound mind, at one with himself. And indeed, through an unrelenting stoic battle, he manages to maintain a modicum of psychic unity amid the chaos of impressions and impulses that make up his stream of thought.

  In the last analysis, however, what holds the hero together is nothing but his emaciated body, which to a large extent determines the behavior of his mind. The very imagery of the book, with its wealth of physiological metaphors for mental happenings, supports this view. From this perspective, Hunger is a vivid example of “the writing of the body.”30

  Eventually, any theory of how to read Hamsun’s Hunger comes up against the work’s subjective mode of presentation. The epigraph of Hamsun’s book on America reads, “Truth is disinterested subjectivity.” The force of this quasi-Kierkegaardian slogan permeates Hamsun’s early novels. Though Hunger is written retrospectively, the narrator tends to merge with the character he describes, a process that cannot but affect one’s response to the book. The intensity of Hamsun’s style, an impressionism that shades into the realm of the surreal and grotesque during states of reverie and psychic dissociation, exerts a virtually hypnotic effect. Only occasionally does the narrator step back to cast an ironic glance at the character whose experiences he is relating. But he rarely judges him. The book contains no self-evident standard of truth or value that might help the reader take the measure of the hero’s behavior. The same action is viewed in different lights at different times, and narrative distance fluctuates with the constant tense shifts from past to present and back again. The reader must find his own way among the welter of impressions, passions, and fantasies that make up this strange work.

  Though the character who is the bearer of this wildly subjective world may not be immediately attractive—in fact, he is sometimes quite the contrary—he does elicit our interest and occasionally tugs at our heartstrings. If, in addition, the reader should recognize, with a shudder of delight or horror, some of the hero’s strange proclivities in his or her own soul, the labor of making this new translation of Hamsun’s breakthrough novel will have been richly rewarded.

  NOTES

  1 “Knut Hamsuns Sult,” in Søkelys på Knut Hamsuns 90-årsdiktning, ed. Øystein Rottem (Oslo, 1979), p. 39.

  2 “Knut Hamsun,” in Skildringer og stemninger fra den yngre litteratur (Kristiania, 1897), p. 15.

  3 Letter to Svend Tveraas of Feb. 29, 1884, in Knut Hamsuns brev 1879-1895, ed. Harald S. Næss (Oslo, 1994), p. 42; Selected Letters, ed. Harald Næss & James McFarlane (Norwich, England, 1990), p. 42. Hereafter referred to as Brev and Letters. The translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.

  4 Harald Næss, Knut Hamsun (Boston, 1984), pp. 12-13.

  5 Letter to Nikolai Frøsland of Jan. 19, 1886, in Brev, p. 63.

  6 Letter to Erik Frydenlund of Sept. 4, 1886, in Brev, p. 69; Letters, p. 58.

  7 Letter to Bolette and Ole Larsen of November 1894, in Brev, p. 431; Letters, p. 214.

  8 As quoted by Tore Hamsun in Knut Hamsun—min far (Oslo, 1992), pp. 102-03.

  9 Letter to Johan
Sørensen of Dec. 2, 1888, in Brev, p. 87; Letters, p. 71.

  10 Letter to Johan Sørensen of Dec. 8, 1888, in Brev, pp. 91- 92; Letters, pp. 75-76.

  11 See letter to Erik Frydenlund of Sept. 20, 1886, in Brev, p. 73. In Letters (p. 61); rådstue is mistakenly rendered as “doss house” instead of “jail.”

  12 Brev, p. 98; Letters, p. 81.

  13 Brev, p. 99; Letters, p. 82. For commentary, see Dolores But-try, “A Thirst for Intimacy: Knut Hamsun’s Pyromania,” Scandinavica 26 (1987): 129-39.

  14 Letter to Erik Skram of Dec. 26, 1888, in Brev, p. 99; Letters, p. 82.

  15 Letter to Gustaf af Geijerstam in May or June 1890, in Brev, p. 160; Letters, p. 118.

  16 Letter to Yngvar Laws of August-November? 1888, in Brev, p. 82; Letters, p. 88.

  17 “Kristofer Janson,” Ny Jord, II (1888): 385.

  18 Letter of May-June? 1890, in Brev, p. 161; Letters, p. 114.

  19 Marlow states: “The mind of man is capable of anything—because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future.” The Portable Conrad, ed. Morton Dauwen Zabel (New York, 1952), p. 540. The following statement by Gide’s Michel sounds like an echo of Conrad: “Everything is within Man” (The Immoralist, tr. Richard Howard [New York, 1970], p. 157).

  20 There are several references to the “broadness” of human nature in Dostoyevsky’s last novel. See The Brothers Karamazov, tr. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky (New York, 1991), pp. 108 & 733.