Hunger by Knut Hamsun
translated by Sverre Lyngstad
"Here I was walking around so hungry that my intestines were squirming inside me like snakes..."
This is just one of the passages in Hamsun's novel, Hunger, that forces the reader to empathize fully with a man who is literally starving to death. He represents the outcast, the forgotten longer, the famishing artist, in a world that is oblivious to his very existence.
"I felt I was myself a crawling insect doomed to perish, seized by destruction in the midst of a whole world ready to sleep."
Partly based on Hamsun's own poverty-stricken existence, the 200-page book is easy to read on an intellectual level but difficult to stomach psychologically. As someone who has experienced intense hunger, I found parts of the book almost unbearably painful. Indeed, there are parts that are so vividly imagined, it is as if we are watching a film. Because the book is written in the style of a moment-to-moment internal monologue, it's impossible not to feel that we're travelling with the protagonist down his path of bleak disintegration. "Rotten patches were beginning to appear in my inner being," he says at one point. "Black, spongy growths that were spreading more and more."
Hamsun intended for Hunger to be "an attempt to describe the strange, peculiar life of the mind, the mysteries of the nerves on a starving body." And in many respects, that's what it is. As the protagonist becomes more and more hungry, he begins to have delusions. When he encounters a woman outside a bookshop, he imagines that the buttons on her dress are staring at him "like a row of terrified eyes". Although fantasies of such a nature might lead the reader to imagine that the protagonist is going insane, when a person goes long enough without food, the mind can start playing all sort of nonsensical tricks on them. One of the most effective aspects of this book is how Hamsun enables the protagonist to reflect objectively on his state, viewing himself as through the eyes of someone else:
"Look, you are sorely troubled, fighting an awesome battle with the powers of darkness and with big, silent monsters at night, and you hunger and thirst for wine and milk and receive them not. That's the pass to which you've come."
Perhaps this distancing of himself from the tortuous existence he is leading is his only way to avoid madness. Sometimes we must numb our souls, cutting ourselves off from all feeling, in order to bear the pain that we are suffering, whether physical or emotional. Although there are plenty of moments of heightened sensitivity, in which the narrator sees objects and people with almost supernatural clarity, his attitude towards life and death reflect his estrangement from himself and his own mortality.
"When all is said and done, wasn't it a matter of indifference whether the inevitable happened one day earlier or one day later?"
Though most people rarely think of death resulting from not getting enough to eat, Hamsun examines the harrowing consequences of living without a basic necessity that so many of us take for granted. He does not opt for subtlety, but forces the reader to live through the protagonist's anguish as his hunger becomes more and more overpowering. Although it might be difficult to fathom what going days without food would do to a person, Hamsun makes use of relentless, almost grotesque realism to give readers a clear idea.
"There was a meticulous gnawing in my chest, a queer silent labor was going on there. I pictured a score of nice teeny-weeny animals that cocked their heads to one side and gnawed a bit, then cocked their heads to the other side and gnawed a bit, lay perfectly still for a moment, then began anew and bored their way in without a sound and without haste, leaving empty stretches behind them wherever they went."
If you have ever experienced a true, ravenous inner craving for food, these words will grip you with a force that is indescribable. The narrator becomes so frantic for food that he rips a pocket out of his coat and begins chewing it. When he encounters a meat stand, he concocts a story about a pet dog to procure a bone to gnaw on. Yet, in spite of his desperation, there is nothing he can find that will alleviate his hunger. Both his stomach and his mind are empty. He is utterly and perhaps permanently depleted. His ultimate destruction seems imminent:
"I had a feeling there wasn't much life left in me, that I was in fact nearing my journey's end. It mattered very little to me, one way or another, I didn't trouble my head with it in the least. Rather, I bent my steps downtown, toward the docks, father and father way from my room. For that matter, I could just as well have lain right down in the street to die."
If a less realistic author had written this book, it would not be the dark, oppressive book that it is. As it is, I found it to be a novel of torment that haunted my psyche for days afterward. Hamsun's prose may be seamless and splendid, but his realism is brutal. Never once does he allow you to imagine that the protagonist is doing anything but suffer. In many novels that start bleakly, we have reason to hope that the situation the character finds himself or herself in will improve. In this case, however, we are well aware of the fact that the protagonist will only disintegrate as he observes himself getting more and more emaciated. He asks at one point:
"What was the matter with my face? Had I really started dying? I pressed my hand along my cheeks: thin--of course I was thin, my cheeks were like two bowls with the bottoms in."
But does he care? Or, as I hinted before, has he already accepted his fate? Maybe rather than simple acceptance he has simply come to terms with the inevitable--and perhaps, in spite of its finality, death will at least bring an end to the gnawing hunger. There are only brief seconds of self-pity. For the most part, the protagonist observes even his mortality with a dry, detached eye:
"Good God, what an awful state I was in! I was so thoroughly sick and tired of my whole wretched life that I didn't find it worth my while to go on fighting in order to hang onto it. The hardships got the better of me, they had been too gross: I was so strangely ruined, nothing but a shadow of what I once was."
In a time when novels were structured along specific lines, with plots that were often stereotypical, Hunger must have been an anomaly. There is no plot in this book, and Hamsun never attempts to make us believe there is. In spite of the tragic circumstances the main character finds himself in, there is no sentimentality and no nostalgia. He doesn't recall past moments of his life when things were better nor does he dream of a bright, utopian-like future. He exists in the moment, in a universe that is cold and unfeeling.
Though lacking the incandescent beauty of Pan and the enigmatic aura of Mysteries, the stark realism of Hunger might well make it Hamsun's most gripping work. Its psychological implications have been analyzed extensively, and Hamsun's theories have compelled some critics to put him on a par with such influential thinkers as Sigmund Freud. Paul Auster, who has written an essay on Hunger entitled "The Art of Hunger", saw the book as symbolic of "an art that is the direct expression of the effort to express itself."
An anonymous fragment from Chapter Two of Hunger first appeared in the Copenhagen journal, Ny Jord (New Earth) in November 1888. The full text of the novel was not published until 1890, and the full English translation wasn't available until 1899.
My rating: *****
~Titania
"The whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun. They are all Hamsun's disciples: Thomas Mann and Arthur Schnitzler....and even such American writers as Fitzgerald and Hemingway." ~Isaac Bashevis Singer
translated by Sverre Lyngstad
"Here I was walking around so hungry that my intestines were squirming inside me like snakes..."
This is just one of the passages in Hamsun's novel, Hunger, that forces the reader to empathize fully with a man who is literally starving to death. He represents the outcast, the forgotten longer, the famishing artist, in a world that is oblivious to his very existence.
"I felt I was myself a crawling insect doomed to perish, seized by destruction in the midst of a whole world ready to sleep."
Partly based on Hamsun's own poverty-stricken existence, the 200-page book is easy to read on an intellectual level but difficult to stomach psychologically. As someone who has experienced intense hunger, I found parts of the book almost unbearably painful. Indeed, there are parts that are so vividly imagined, it is as if we are watching a film. Because the book is written in the style of a moment-to-moment internal monologue, it's impossible not to feel that we're travelling with the protagonist down his path of bleak disintegration. "Rotten patches were beginning to appear in my inner being," he says at one point. "Black, spongy growths that were spreading more and more."
Hamsun intended for Hunger to be "an attempt to describe the strange, peculiar life of the mind, the mysteries of the nerves on a starving body." And in many respects, that's what it is. As the protagonist becomes more and more hungry, he begins to have delusions. When he encounters a woman outside a bookshop, he imagines that the buttons on her dress are staring at him "like a row of terrified eyes". Although fantasies of such a nature might lead the reader to imagine that the protagonist is going insane, when a person goes long enough without food, the mind can start playing all sort of nonsensical tricks on them. One of the most effective aspects of this book is how Hamsun enables the protagonist to reflect objectively on his state, viewing himself as through the eyes of someone else:
"Look, you are sorely troubled, fighting an awesome battle with the powers of darkness and with big, silent monsters at night, and you hunger and thirst for wine and milk and receive them not. That's the pass to which you've come."
Perhaps this distancing of himself from the tortuous existence he is leading is his only way to avoid madness. Sometimes we must numb our souls, cutting ourselves off from all feeling, in order to bear the pain that we are suffering, whether physical or emotional. Although there are plenty of moments of heightened sensitivity, in which the narrator sees objects and people with almost supernatural clarity, his attitude towards life and death reflect his estrangement from himself and his own mortality.
"When all is said and done, wasn't it a matter of indifference whether the inevitable happened one day earlier or one day later?"
Though most people rarely think of death resulting from not getting enough to eat, Hamsun examines the harrowing consequences of living without a basic necessity that so many of us take for granted. He does not opt for subtlety, but forces the reader to live through the protagonist's anguish as his hunger becomes more and more overpowering. Although it might be difficult to fathom what going days without food would do to a person, Hamsun makes use of relentless, almost grotesque realism to give readers a clear idea.
"There was a meticulous gnawing in my chest, a queer silent labor was going on there. I pictured a score of nice teeny-weeny animals that cocked their heads to one side and gnawed a bit, then cocked their heads to the other side and gnawed a bit, lay perfectly still for a moment, then began anew and bored their way in without a sound and without haste, leaving empty stretches behind them wherever they went."
If you have ever experienced a true, ravenous inner craving for food, these words will grip you with a force that is indescribable. The narrator becomes so frantic for food that he rips a pocket out of his coat and begins chewing it. When he encounters a meat stand, he concocts a story about a pet dog to procure a bone to gnaw on. Yet, in spite of his desperation, there is nothing he can find that will alleviate his hunger. Both his stomach and his mind are empty. He is utterly and perhaps permanently depleted. His ultimate destruction seems imminent:
"I had a feeling there wasn't much life left in me, that I was in fact nearing my journey's end. It mattered very little to me, one way or another, I didn't trouble my head with it in the least. Rather, I bent my steps downtown, toward the docks, father and father way from my room. For that matter, I could just as well have lain right down in the street to die."
If a less realistic author had written this book, it would not be the dark, oppressive book that it is. As it is, I found it to be a novel of torment that haunted my psyche for days afterward. Hamsun's prose may be seamless and splendid, but his realism is brutal. Never once does he allow you to imagine that the protagonist is doing anything but suffer. In many novels that start bleakly, we have reason to hope that the situation the character finds himself or herself in will improve. In this case, however, we are well aware of the fact that the protagonist will only disintegrate as he observes himself getting more and more emaciated. He asks at one point:
"What was the matter with my face? Had I really started dying? I pressed my hand along my cheeks: thin--of course I was thin, my cheeks were like two bowls with the bottoms in."
But does he care? Or, as I hinted before, has he already accepted his fate? Maybe rather than simple acceptance he has simply come to terms with the inevitable--and perhaps, in spite of its finality, death will at least bring an end to the gnawing hunger. There are only brief seconds of self-pity. For the most part, the protagonist observes even his mortality with a dry, detached eye:
"Good God, what an awful state I was in! I was so thoroughly sick and tired of my whole wretched life that I didn't find it worth my while to go on fighting in order to hang onto it. The hardships got the better of me, they had been too gross: I was so strangely ruined, nothing but a shadow of what I once was."
In a time when novels were structured along specific lines, with plots that were often stereotypical, Hunger must have been an anomaly. There is no plot in this book, and Hamsun never attempts to make us believe there is. In spite of the tragic circumstances the main character finds himself in, there is no sentimentality and no nostalgia. He doesn't recall past moments of his life when things were better nor does he dream of a bright, utopian-like future. He exists in the moment, in a universe that is cold and unfeeling.
Though lacking the incandescent beauty of Pan and the enigmatic aura of Mysteries, the stark realism of Hunger might well make it Hamsun's most gripping work. Its psychological implications have been analyzed extensively, and Hamsun's theories have compelled some critics to put him on a par with such influential thinkers as Sigmund Freud. Paul Auster, who has written an essay on Hunger entitled "The Art of Hunger", saw the book as symbolic of "an art that is the direct expression of the effort to express itself."
An anonymous fragment from Chapter Two of Hunger first appeared in the Copenhagen journal, Ny Jord (New Earth) in November 1888. The full text of the novel was not published until 1890, and the full English translation wasn't available until 1899.
My rating: *****
~Titania
"The whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun. They are all Hamsun's disciples: Thomas Mann and Arthur Schnitzler....and even such American writers as Fitzgerald and Hemingway." ~Isaac Bashevis Singer
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