Hunger (2 page)

 

The young Norwegian who appeared in the editorial office of
Politiken
one morning in the fall of 1888 has been described, in the words of Edvard Brandes, by the Swedish writer Axel LundegÃ¥rd. When he visited Brandes that same evening, the latter told him: “I have seldom seen anybody so down and out. Not just that his clothes were tattered. But that face! As you know, I'm not sentimental. But the face of that man moved me.” Reading through the manuscript Hamsun had brought, he knew before long that here was something out of the ordinary, worthy of Dostoyevsky. In the middle of his reading, he told LundegÃ¥rd, “it struck me that the author was walking about town hungry. I was overcome by a sense of shame and ran like crazy to the post office and mailed him ten kroner.”
⁸

Brandes' suspicions were fully justified. The condition indicated in the title of Hamsun's book was one which the author had experienced several times in his life, in Kristiania as well as in Copenhagen: in early 1880—when he was staying at 11 Tomte Street, where the hero of
Hunger
lives in Part Three and Four of the book—in the winter of 1885- 86, and in 1888, as well as at other times. In a letter of December 2, 1888, Hamsun says he is living in an “attic where the wind blows through the walls; there is no stove, almost no light, only a single small pane in the roof,”
⁹
a description substantially replicated in the novel. About a week later he writes to the same person: “During the last six weeks I have had to wrap a kerchief around my left hand while I was writing, because I couldn't stand my own breath on it.” That summer had been particularly bad, he writes: “A couple of times I was quite done for; I had pawned all I owned, I didn't eat for four days on end, I sat here chewing dead matchsticks.”
¹⁰
Another letter reveals that the night spent by the hero in the city jail is based on an actual episode from the summer of 1886.
¹¹

While periods of want and near starvation contributed the main substance of the novel, its imagery and motif structure also draw on other experiences of the young Hamsun, most notably the feelings of revolt and defiance that possessed him in the summer of 1884, when he was “sentenced to death” by his Minneapolis doctor. In an extraordinary letter to Erik Skram at Christmas in 1888, he expresses the sense of outrage he felt at this news; he confesses that it inspired a “des perate desire to go down to a brothel in town and sin[,] . . . sin in grand style and kill myself doing so. I wanted to die in sin, whisper hurrah and expire in the act.”
¹²
Here may be the germ of the “fanatical whore” in the hero's last literary project, a character who sins from a “voluptuous contempt of heaven,” as well as a source of his general cosmic revolt. The follow-up in the letter is equally relevant to
Hunger
. For when his plan was foiled, Hamsun tells Skram, his “passion broke out in other ways: I took to
loving light
.” He calls it a “downright sensual love, carnal lust,” which made him understand Nero's “exultation at the burning of Rome.” Indeed, one night he set fire to the curtains in his room: photomania turned into pyromania. “And as I lay there watching the flames,” he writes, “I literally had the feeling, in all my senses, that I was ‘sinning.' ”
¹³
While light and fire in general are important elements in the image structure of
Hunger
, one is particularly struck by their erotic connotations. Reminded of Ylajali in Part Three, the hero experiences the same phenomenon described in his letter: the voluptuous light that “penetrates” his mind becomes in the end an all-consuming, apocalyptic fire.

The presence of these “crazy states of mind,” as Hamsun calls them, should make the reader beware of giving a too narrow, physiological explanation of the hero's bizarre mental states in
Hunger
. Referring to the “oddities” in Dostoyevsky's books, Hamsun tells Skram that, to him, they are nothing out of the ordinary; he says he experiences “far, far stranger things just going for a walk. . . . Alas!”
¹⁴

 

Hamsun's intention in writing
Hunger
is directly related to these “strange” states of mind. In numerous letters he expresses contempt for the stereotypic novel—in fact, he says
Hunger
is not a novel, meaning it has nothing that could be called plot: there are “no weddings, no balls, no picnics.” He finds “character” equally suspect, following in this August Strindberg (1849-1912) in his preface to
Miss Julie
(1888), which Hamsun greatly admired. His book, he says, is “an attempt to describe the strange, peculiar life of the mind, the mysteries of the nerves in a starving body.”
¹⁵
In a letter to an American friend in late 1888, he speaks about what the subject of literature should be in terms similar to those he uses in his programmatic article
Fra det ubevidste Sjæleliv
(From the Unconscious Life of the Mind), published in
Samtiden
(The Contemporary) in 1890: “The mimosas of thought—delicate fractions of feeling; one wants to delve into the most subtle tissues of psychic life. Delicate observations of the fractional life of the psyche.”
¹⁶
He uses similar language in an article about Kristofer Janson that appeared in the same issue of
Ny Jord
as the
Hunger
fragment. Moreover, that essay champions a new literary language, one that possesses “all the scales of music,” a language whose words can turn into “color, into sound, into smell.” The writer must know the “secret power” of words, so that his language combines a “hectic, passionate intensity” with a “latent . . . tenderness.”
¹⁷
Yet, his measuring stick of modernity remains psychological, as evidenced by a letter to Georg Brandes, who had found
Hunger
monotonous. Hamsun says there are no more “states of feeling” in
Crime and Punishment
or in the Goncourt brothers'
Germinie Lacerteux
than in his own book.
¹⁸

The above goes to show that Hamsun had his finger on the intellectual pulse of his times. In the wake of Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, pioneers in revolutionizing the human image, and influenced by Darwin's epochal discoveries, writers of fiction were articulating a more complex concept of man. Joseph Conrad was to show the unexplored depths of the psyche in
Heart of Darkness
(1902), as was André Gide in
The Immoralist
the same year.
¹⁹
The early Hamsun finds his place among these proto-modernists, both thematically and formally. Thematically, the recently translated novels of Dostoyevsky cast doubt upon the very foundations of the western humanistic tradition. His depth-psychological concept of the “broad” Karamazov nature
²⁰
opened up the entire realm of the irrational, with divided consciousness, gratuitous acts, and the cult of intuition.

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).