Hunger (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

by Knut Hamsun, Monika Zagar (Introduction)

Overview

The story of a starving writer in Norway, Hunger is a pivotal masterpiece of European modernism. The protagonist is anonymous and the plot is meager. What holds the text together is the focus on the protagonists emotions. These emotions are reveled to the reader by the minute descriptions of the inner landscape of the mind, interspersed with the unnamed writers random encounters with strangers and acquaintances in the streets, or short meetings with various editors.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781411429857
Publisher:	Barnes & Noble
Publication date:	09/01/2009
Series:	Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	846,265
File size:	511 KB
Age Range:	3 Months to 18 Years

About the Author

Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) is both revered as one of the pioneers of modernist writing-of which Hunger is a perfect example-and vilified as an enthusiastic and unwavering supporter of the Nazi occupation of Norway during 1940-45. While the debate about his political convictions has raged unabated since his 1946 trial, intensifying after the release of Jan Troells 1996 movie Hamsun, the consensus about his literary genius has never been shaken.

Introduction

Hunger (1890) by the Norwegian novelist and Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun is one of the early yet pivotal masterpieces of European modernism. This predecessor to the twentieth century's stream-of-consciousness writing epitomized by the work of writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett is as captivating to the twenty-first-century reader as it was notorious to Scandinavian audiences of the 1890s. Hunger is a book in four parts-Hamsun insisted that he had not written a novel-that describes the struggles of an aspiring, and starving, writer in Christiania (now Oslo). Although the protagonist is anonymous and the plot is meager, what really holds the text together is the focus on the protagonist's mind, moods, impulses, and emotions. The minimal plot is offset by the minute descriptions of the inner landscape of the mind, interspersed with the unnamed writer's random encounters with strangers and acquaintances in the streets, or short meetings with various editors.

Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) is both revered as one of the pioneers of modernist writing-of which Hunger is a perfect example-and vilified as an enthusiastic and unwavering supporter of the Nazi occupation of Norway during 1940-45. While the debate about his political convictions has raged unabated since his 1946 trial, intensifying after the release of Jan Troell's 1996 movie Hamsun, the consensus about his literary genius has never been shaken.

This self-taught writer, who spent his teens and twenties in a variety of places in Norway and tried his hand at a range of trades and professions, never doubted his talent and showed early literary ambitions. He was born as Knut Pedersen in 1859 in Lom in the Gubrandsdal valley of central Norway. In 1862, his family moved to the north of Norway, to a farm called Hamsund near Hamarøy in Nordland. At the age of nine Hamsun was sent to work on a nearby uncle's farm. His uncle was a strict disciplinarian and a devoutly religious man who influenced Hamsun profoundly. The dramatic northern landscape and its quality of light likewise made a life-long impression on him, and many of his later novels are set in that distinct landscape. He subsequently worked as a cobbler's apprentice, a peddler, and a road worker. His breakthrough work, Hunger, came late, when he was almost thirty, after much poverty, many disappointments, with several minor texts published, and after two visits to the United States.

Hamsun's two stays in the United States (1882-84 and 1886-88) left him disappointed over the promised land of Amerika, the destination of millions of European emigrants, not least of whom were Scandinavians. While some of his experiences were conducive to his personal and artistic growth-certainly his position with the Unitarian priest and writer Kristofer Janson in Minneapolis where he could avail himself of Janson's library; or the opportunity to lecture in Minneapolis on contemporary literature-he formed opinions of the United States that would be reflected in his work for years. Although tinted with ambivalence and uncertainty, his basic experience and perception of America were of pervasive immorality and hypocrisy, greed, bluff, and deceit. While he appreciated Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and, in a slightly different category, the dynamic if hyperbolic writing of American journalism, Hamsun was highly critical of the American arts. He returned to Copenhagen, the artistic capital of Scandinavia, in 1888, as poor as he had left it. He began writing feverishly and produced a number of articles and a book on the United States (The Cultural Life of Modern America), gave lectures, and finished Hunger, although not until June 1890. It was his 1886 article on Mark Twain that provided the pen name 'Hamsun.' Although he signed the article 'Hamsund,' it was misspelled by a printer, and he decided to keep it as Hamsun for the rest of his life.

In the November 1888 issue of the radical and trendy Copenhagen literary journal Ny Jord (New Soil), Hamsun published anonymously what is essentially part two of Hunger. An instant sensation because of its style, drive, and content-or lack of traditional content-it had that hard-to-define yet unmistakable quality of something extraordinary and completely new. This sensational literary debut happened just as Hamsun had imagined it. He had worked hard for many years, determined to publish a work of art that was uniquely his. He had desired artistic fame but on his own terms rather than imitating his contemporary legends Henrik Ibsen and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. It was not until June 1890 that the entire book as we know it was published, to a notorious reception among readers, a positive reception among fellow writers, and largely, if not completely, positive critical reviews.

Hunger's first-person narrator both acts on his impulses and tracks them in detail for the reader, revealing a keen sense of observation as well as a critical and at times ironic reflection on the contradiction between his shabby existence and his megalomaniac artistic goals, which include writing an article on Correggio and a play set in the Middle Ages. However, the narrator's grotesque and humiliating poverty is not the subject of sociological criticism but rather a willed state of frenzy; a game that pushes the limits of his body and mind; a vehicle leading into a creative state undisturbed by the mundane, everyday chores of a job. Except for some details of nineteenth-century urban life-like rather typical newspaper advertisements, horse carriages, pawnshops, and so forth-the events of the novel are independent of the times. It is this absence of any lengthy description of the external world that enables the twenty-first century reader to identify with the reality of the inner experience. The protagonist, the would-be writer, is constantly reminded of his own hunger, in fact of his lack of everything but talent and will. His hunger for food, for love, and for recognition, are offset by his drive to write, and the text hops over the short periods when he has enough money to feed himself.

Early in his career Hamsun criticized literature as a discussion of social or political topics; this critique is already articulated in his 1887 lectures in Minneapolis' Dana Hall where he discussed modern writers such as the Frenchmen Honore de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and Emile Zola, and the Swede August Strindberg, in addition to the Norwegian writers of the day. This criticism is repeated during his notorious 1891 lecture tour of Norway's southwestern coast where he mercilessly dispatched the four grand Norwegian writers: Bjørnson, Kielland, Lie, and Ibsen. Hamsun, in these lectures, suggested that literature needs to address the complexity, and ultimately the mystery, of the human mind and human behavior. With Hunger, and with his essay "From the Unconscious Life of the Mind" (1890), which was a kind of literary manifesto, he staked out the ground for a new kind of literature: a literature of the inner mind with modern protagonists who are complex, contradictory, and ultimately impenetrable.

The main protagonist of Hunger is precisely such a modern man. We do not really know much about him, his family, or his education. On the first page of the book he wakes up in a nondescript lodging and registers the ads from the newspaper that is used to insulate the thin walls. On the last page of the book, while newly employed on a ship leaving Christiania, he promises he will be back. Within these external boundaries we witness a segment of his life. He describes the nuances of his starvation while busily writing an article or a treatise; he idles away time in the streets, cemeteries, and parks of the city, meeting long-forgotten acquaintances and odd passers-by. Woven in is a love story: he feels attracted to a mysterious woman whom he calls Ylajali. He manages to meet her, and for a short while she returns his feelings. When he discovers that what for him is a dangerous reality is for her a quasi-bohemian amusement, the brief relationship abruptly ends. However, he continues to challenge his existence and to believe in his artistic mission. Even when in prison, creativity magically and unexplainably affirms itself: in the deepest darkness, a word without meaning appears to him-Kuboa-but it is a word nevertheless, which he interprets as a sign of his creativity.

Several of Hamsun's later heroes resemble the anonymous protagonist from Hunger. Hamsun's exploration of the odd outsider continues in his next novel, Mysteries (1892), by inventing Nagel, the main protagonist, who unexpectedly appears in a small Norwegian coastal town dressed in a bright yellow suit. Nagel is just as lonely as the protagonist of Hunger, and controversial within the local community. Hamsun's twentieth-century novels, which are written in a more broadly epic style, also contain rootless and restless modern protagonists; even his most idyllic novel, The Growth of the Soil (1917), has room for Geissler, a modern, unreliable, slightly alcoholic, and creative individual. Abel, from Hamsun's 1936 novel The Ring is Closed, is an even closer parallel to the protagonist of Hunger: Abel ends up shedding all of his material possessions to live alone in a hut, like an animal. The crucial difference between the two protagonists from the beginning and the end of Hamsun's career, between the anti-hero of Hunger and Abel, is that Abel nurses no creative agenda, which can be read as a sign of Hamsun's increasing disillusionment, old age, or the combination of the two. If there are traits in Hunger that could be tied into Hamsun's later reactionary politics, they would be the extreme individualism of the protagonist; the aesthete's repulsion at seeing lame, old, or fat individuals; and the aristocratic will to artistic success, a will to prevail.

As unique a writer as Hamsun was, he was also the product of his time. Hunger is a perfect expression of a shift toward the exploration of the internal mind, both as an exciting new arena investigated vigorously by the hard sciences and as a reaction to the sense of loss of the stable, coherent, and comforting world of the mid-nineteenth century. Hamsun compared his literary debut, and rightly so, to the insights and writings of a Russian writer whom he admired all his life, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. While Hamsun was no reader of philosophy, Friedrich Nietzsche's reflections on the aristocratic individual and his will conflated with Hamsun's own understanding of his immense and surprising talent, with his world view, and his disinterestedness in the masses. Closer to home, Hamsun greatly admired August Strindberg and felt an affinity for his modern approach to art as explained most clearly in Strindberg's preface to his 1888 play Miss Julie.

But the reverse is also true: while Hamsun describes the universal experience of urban rootlessness and modern angst, he produced a unique work of art based on his own experiences, drawing on his own suffering and starvation, his own endurance and creative drive during the winters of 1880-81 and 1885-86 in Christiania. If we need to use a genre label for Hunger it would be a mixture of autobiography and novel.

In spite of all the commotion around Hunger in 1890, it was not selling that well and a German translation (1891) gave Hamsun financial hope as well as wider European exposure. Even before the publication of Hunger in book form, it was reviewed and then serialized in German in the influential new journal Freie Bühne. After Hamsun met Alfred Langen in Paris in 1893, his publishing house Langen Verlag became and remained Hamsun's German representative. During the 1890s, Hamsun wrote at a tremendous pace and published novels, short stories, and plays, of which especially Pan (1894) and Victoria (1898) became popular and critical successes. But the turn of the century is marked by his restlessness. His first marriage to Bergljot Geopfert failed (1898-1905), and while his second, to the actress Marie Andersen in 1909, lasted the rest of his life, it was marked, increasingly and mutually so, by jealousy, bitterness, and separations.

After 1900, Hamsun continued writing and publishing although he changed his poetics from intense lyricism to a more paced, epic realism. His 1917 novel Growth of the Soil, about settling northern Norway and describing the pleasures and patience of hard work on the land, brought him the Nobel Prize in 1920. This novel was followed by the much harsher yet captivating The Women at the Pump (1920), which focused on the castrated Oliver Anderson's illusions and hard reality. After being one of the first Norwegians to undergo psychoanalysis in the 1920s, Hamsun published his so-called "August trilogy" on the adventurous, restless, scheming, yet entrepreneurial and likeable August and his idealistic and trusting friend Edevart (Wayfarers, 1927; August, 1930; The Road Leads On, 1933). He concluded his interwar novels with the pessimistic and baffling The Ring is Closed about the sailor Abel, a modern Everyman, who cannot and does not really want to find a home anywhere in the world. These works all reinforced his reputation as one of the leading European writers of the time.

Complex and varied, Hamsun's novels are most often set during the period of early industrialization in Norway, beginning around the 1850s, a time of intense and rapid social change from family-based farms and the simple life of fishermen to the first factories, timber mills, urban towns, and banks. Although Hamsun availed himself of contemporary inventions-he was one of the first people in Norway to have a six-seat Buick-he did not cheer modern developments and achievements, be they in science or education, material gains, or travel. On the contrary, he saw them as distractions, robbing individuals of a simple and contented life. There was nothing sadder for Hamsun than an educated woman-and in his fiction he usually portrayed her as childless-or a former peasant turned factory wage-earner, rootless yet arrogant toward his superiors. Except during his radical youth, Hamsun always displayed conservative if not reactionary tendencies: in Norway it was the early rural local lord rather than the emerging middle-class that had his trust; in the United States it was the Southern white elite rather than East Coast intellectuals; in the Old World it was the fatalistic Orient rather than the enlightened France that captured his imagination. Hamsun shared with many of his contemporaries views on the inferiority of non-Europeans, and he was terrified of the radical ideas put forth by the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia and feared their influence on Norwegian society. His fellow Norwegians Fritjof Nansen and Vidkun Quisling undertook humanitarian missions in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and testified to the suffering and starvation of the people following their civil war. To a certain degree, Hamsun's endorsement of the Nazis' seizure of power was predicated on his fear of communism. That being said, Hamsun supported Norway's inclusion in the Third Reich to the bitter end not out of political naiveté, but out of conviction. From writing articles in support of the good work by German submarines to seeing his sons serving the German occupiers; from presenting his Nobel Prize medal as a gift to Goebbels, the Third Reich's propaganda minister, to writing a deeply felt eulogy for Hitler in May 1945, Hamsun never wavered in his support for the Nazis. After the war he was deeply resented by the majority of Norwegians, especially those who had been imprisoned or who had lost loved ones. He was arrested soon after the war ended, interrogated, mentally evaluated, and tried; although he was not sentenced to any additional jail time, he was fined a large percentage of his personal wealth. His wife and his son Arild, however, were imprisoned for their activities in support of the Nazis. In 1949, Hamsun published his autobiographical novel On Overgrown Paths, which was in part reminiscences of events long past and in part a defense treatise.

Hamsun lived his final years at Nørholm, his estate on the southern coast of Norway. His wife Marie, whom he exiled from his life for her alleged betrayal during his postwar mental evaluation, was eventually allowed to join him, and she cared for him until his death in 1952.

Despite his political collaboration with the Nazis, Hamsun belongs to the European canon and deserves to be better known for his literary contributions than he is today. Major European writers of various persuasions, including Thomas Mann, Herman Hesse, and Robert Musil, as well as Maxim Gorky, Boris Pasternak, and even Andre Gide, have praised Hamsun's creative magic. In his home country of Norway, every aspiring writer has had to struggle with Hamsun's legacy, and many have acknowledged his influence, among them the well-known contemporary writers Dag Solstad and Lars Saaby Christensen. In the United States writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, Robert Bly, and Paul Auster have acknowledged his attraction and power with words. Even today, Hamsun's novel Hunger remains fresh and provocative, and it is an ideal book to begin to acquaint oneself with the work of this formidable writer.