HUNGERBy Knut Hamsun (1980): FEELING HUNGRY is a commonplace human experience; food is a basic need. There are many levels of hunger. Eating is often determined by merely the time of day, but extreme hunger, starvation, results in being no longer capable of digesting food.
The narrator of Hamsun's groundbreaking novel is neither a beggar nor a typical unemployed drifter; he is an aspiring writer - intense, frenetic, educated, desperate and starving. The streets of Christiania, now Oslo, have become his private battleground. His thoughts are chaotic, torn between his wild plans for literary success and his outraged awareness of his body weakening, failing. At first he believes his problems will be solved by his next article, he offers stories to editors and waits for what he thinks will be certain triumph. Waiting is dominated by his lack of food.
Even now, more than a century since its first publication, Hungerremains one of those timeless rite-of-passage, outsider as anti-hero novels. It is also a lucidly nightmarish narrative introducing the self-conscious into fiction, for the narrator the story is his story; the characters he meets exist only in relation to him and his problems. There are no heroics, no social polemic. Hamsun, born Knut Petersen into a Norwegian peasant family, had worked at a range of labouring jobs, before eventually, through Hunger, establishing a literary career which continued long after he won the 1920 Nobel Prize for Literature. His reputation suffered because of his support of Nazism. Yet the younger, decidedly apolitical Hamsun who wrote Hungerwas an introspective expert in physical hardship and humiliation, his physical hardship and humiliation.
Those long months wandering about the city, pestering editors and fleeing unpaid landladies as recalled by the narrator, a peevish, egotistical individual who is not interested in our sympathy, is drawn on more than a decade's worth of wandering through Norway and the US as endured by Hamsun. The narrator begins his account with a tone that suggests a sense of detached wonder: "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 . . . "
Hungerhas forced him to pawn everything he owns, stopping short of his spectacles. "I was becoming more and more nervous and irritable, and several mornings lately I had been so dizzy I had had to stay in bed all day. Occasionally when my luck was good I took in five kroner or so from one of the newspapers for an article."
It all begins rather conversationally; the narrator is sharing his memories. Hamsun then introduces an element of mounting frenzy: "How steadily my predicament had got worse . . . I didn't even have a comb left, or a book to read when I felt hopeless." The more exasperated he becomes the more he echoes Dostoyevsky's Underground Man and to some extent, Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment (1865). But Hamsun's narrator, although he does think, looks no further than his personal embarrassment and the slights to which he is subject.
There are comic set pieces such as when he sets off in vain to pawn his green blanket. "For God's sake, be careful . . . Two delicate vases are inside. That package has got to get to Smyrna!" Abandoning journalism, he begins to write a play and his mind is overwhelmed by lines of dialogue to be uttered by medieval monks. Yet all the while hunger, gnawing like rats, intervenes. Briefly a candle becomes more important than food. There is also the difficulty of sitting down to write without lodgings to write in. He considers eating his finger so he bites it but decides against continuing that project. The narrative voice is direct, the exasperation compelling; here is a character concerned only with his survival. He tells us what happened and how he felt. Having endured his hell, he finally secures escape by asking a ship's captain for work. Hamsun's finest novel, Mysteries, was published in 1892. He would continue writing until his death in 1952 aged 93, yet Hungerremains his most famous work.
This is a weekly series in which Eileen Battersby revisits titles from the literary canon
