Yellowing Pages #2

A few years ago I was at a point in my reading life where I’d become almost impossible to excite. If you had been over to my place you would still have seen books strewn about everywhere: fiction, non-fiction, dog-eared coffee stained paperbacks, short story collections with bookmarks half way through them and pristine hard covers waiting to be cracked. I was still the guy who read through lunch breaks and deep into the night and still carried a book with me wherever I went. But slowly, and terrifyingly, a thought began to impress itself upon me: I had become a jaded reader.

I had always known ecstatic moments and had wild infatuations with books. One summer in high school I read The Catcher in the Rye three times, pouring over the pages again and again completely caught up in Holden Caulfield’s (and my own) teenage angst. Later, a reading of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment sent me feverishly into a two year Russophilia which I was only cured of by Balzac, who converted me into an almost equally intense Francophile. Yet somewhere on the way to becoming a minor expert of 19th century Russian history, the life of Napoleon and the literary output of the French Existentialists, I seemed to have also acquired something unwanted – a cynic’s cold gaze. I would read, analyze, and consider the relative merits of the work, but, with increasing regularity, the books I read didn’t move me like they once had.

Enter Knut Hamsun’s Hunger. It isn’t possible to have a mild reaction to Hunger; it is far too unnerving and mad of a book for anyone to simply put down and forget. It’s the kind of book that gets under your skin and makes you reevaluate your most comfortable and well entrenched assertions of life. The book opens: “All of this happened while I was walking around starving in Christiania - that strange city no one escapes from until it has left its mark on him….” And in much the same way, Hunger is that strange novel which I could not escape until it had left its mark on me.

Hunger is a novel in four parts that take place within the span of a few months in Christiania, later renamed Oslo, Norway, in 1890. Each part follows roughly the same form: the narrator begins destitute and he wanders, curses, exults and frets his way through the streets of Christiania trying to find inspiration for the stories and articles that are his only source of income. “And why shouldn’t the inspiration come over me at any moment?” he asks. And it does come, fantastic inspirations including an article on “Crimes of the Future” (an allegory about a fire in a bookstore in which he explains “the books are brains”) and a play set in the Middle Ages. However, with one exception these writings bring him nothing … and so he suffers humiliation, he starves, he rants and he fights the degradation of mind and body until he finds a reprieve. A story is accepted that pays him ten kroner and sends him “yodeling around the streets, dumfounded with joy.”

Part two ends when an old acquaintance sees the narrator’s state and lends him enough to get by. In part three a grocer mistakenly gives him change even though he hadn’t paid, and in the abrupt ending of the novel he convinces a somewhat reluctant merchant ship captain to take him on, and he leaves Christiania. While there is a certain pattern of suffering and salvation, the narrator is unmistakably descending towards ruin through the four parts. The accepted article that ends part one and carries him into the night in jubilation is his only real success and we see, or rather the narrator describes, the failure of his mind and body with disturbing lucidity.

Poverty was something that Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) was well acquainted with in 1890. Hamsun’s youth was spent as an almost indentured servant with a stern, pietist uncle. As soon as he could, he left, travelling across Norway working variously as a store clerk, a peddler, a schoolmaster, even as a sheriff’s assistant; all while harboring ambitious literary dreams. Like the narrator of Hunger, his early writings met mostly with rejection. Even his idol, the author Bjornstjerne Bjornson, told him he should give up writing and advised him to become an actor. Undeterred, Hamsun kept at it. After a sojourn in Denmark, he made the first of two trips to America which saw him as a farm hand and part time lecturer in Minnesota; but it ended when he was diagnosed with terminal tuberculosis. He decided to return to Norway, riding on top of the train to New York with his mouth open to take in the curative effects of the rushing air. The inimitable Hamsun’s self cure improbably worked and he recovered. Again, he kept moving and working, now as a road laborer. Then off again to America, conducting a streetcar in Chicago and serving as a farm hand in the Dakotas. In 1888, Hamsun would be back in Norway; when he showed himself in the editorial office of the Politiken, he was thus described in the words of Edvard Brandes to a friend, “I have never 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.” Hardened by suffering, pushed to his limit, the publication of a fragment of Hunger in 1889 would cause a sensation in Norway and give Hamsun his first victory. He paused to publish a satirical book on his time in America and then published the entire novel Hunger in 1890 to universal acclaim.

The sufferings and privations that Hamsun endured over years are distilled into a matter of weeks for the narrator of Hunger, his trans-Atlantic wanderings confined to the city of Christiania. It is, among other things, a book of suffering and its affect on the mind and body. The narrator has no need to tell us about how he lives when he has money and food. As part one ends with his ten kroner story, part two picks up “A couple of weeks later,” with the narrator once again penniless, sitting in a cemetery working on a newspaper article and “terrifically hungry.” The allusion is obvious, he must write or he will die. Images and symbols of death abound, from the wallpaper made from old copies of the Morning Times that adorns his room in part one, and advertises Miss Anderson’s funeral shrouds, to his frequenting of cemeteries and the numerous references to the autumnal cycle of death. He writes and writes, but he goes nowhere. His body is in revolt, he admits that he “can’t starve like he used to,” and by part three we find him physically broken. It is now winter, his thin walled room is cold and “to warm my hands a bit, I pushed my fingers through my hair… small handfuls came loose, tufts came away between my fingers and spread over the pillows.” He is detached from himself, “I didn’t worry about that, it was as if it were not happening to me; I had plenty of hair anyway.” But later he cannot fain detachment. Starving and desperate he chews on wood chips and even rips off one of his coat pockets “chewing on it, not for any purpose particularly,” he is in a stupor but he rallies to ask at a butcher’s stall for a bone, “for my dog.” The butcher obliges and he steals off into a dark spot behind a gate with his prize: “It had no taste at all: a nauseating odor of dried blood rose from the bone, and I started throwing up immediately, I couldn’t help it. I tried again - if I could only keep it down, it would do some good; the problem was to get it to stay there. But I vomited again. I grew angry, bit fiercely into the meat, ripped off a small piece, and swallowed it by force. That did no good either - as soon as the small pieces became warm in the stomach, up they came again. I clenched my fists madly, started crying from sheer helplessness, and gnawed like a man possessed. I cried so much that the bone became wet and messy with tears. I vomited, swore, and chewed again, cried as if my heart would break, and threw up again. Then I swore aloud and consigned all the powers of the universe to hell.”

It is that last line that I see the essence of the novel, for ultimately it is a novel of revolt. Time and again the narrator does battle with the forces that press upon him. Policemen and clocks abound in Hunger: the law and time. He pays both very little mind even as he is subject to them. He revolts against the rational self interest of bourgeois society and he usually gives what little money he manages to get his hands on away. And of course he is in revolt against his body as it revolts against him. After meeting with an editor in part three he feels ashamed for wanting to ask for aid and when he gets back on the street he runs. “I began running so as to punish myself, left street after street behind me, pushed myself on with inward jeers, and screeched silently and furiously at myself whenever I felt like stopping. When I finally did stop, almost weeping with anger that I couldn’t run any farther, my whole body trembled, and I threw myself down on a house stoop. And to torture myself right, I stood up again and forced myself to stand there, laughing at myself, and gloating over my own fatigue.” Finally he assents to his body, he lets himself sit, but on the “most uncomfortable stoop.” It is the battle of the spirit and the flesh. The spirit can conceive of perfect sublimity, but the body has its limiting demands, as does society - and time erases all. Hamsun’s revolt is profoundly humanistic and it offers us Americans in particular, raised on the droll surety of Poor Richard’s Almanac and later Ayn Rand’s objectivism, a valuable insight into the deep, irrational instincts which we try so hard to suppress in the name of efficiency, but which give us our humanity.

The success of Hunger would propel Hamsun out of obscurity and make him one of the luminaries of European literature, culminating in his receipt of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1920. Unfortunately, Hamsun’s unique brilliance would be cast in shadow when his zealous nationalism brought him into alliance with Nazi Germany during the occupation of Norway. His legacy remains equivocal in his homeland and his works remain little read in English, but Hunger, as well as his other novels are still breathtakingly relevant. Enough to jar even the most jaded reader out of his apathy.

The novel ends aboard the merchant ship where the he takes one last glance backward, “I straightened up, wet from fever and exertion, looked in toward land and said goodbye for now to the city, to Christiania, where the windows of the homes all shone with such brightness.” The narrator had fought with all of his strength against the city, his failing body and society and had lost … for now.