CLASSICS REVISITED
Hungry soul
RAVI VYAS
READERS who get nothing out of classics have not yet come across writers who are truly original, who do not set out to fabricate new forms of expression, or invent theories merely for the sake of appearing new. They attain their originality through extraordinary sincerity, by daring to give everything of themselves, their most secret thoughts and idiosyncrasies. They truly believe in the Socratic principle that the unexamined life is not worth living though they know that the examined life produces no income — just a great deal of angst and quite often hunger. But they also know that an examination of sorts is inevitable somewhere along the journey when the mind reaches the end of its tether and tries to catch its own tail. True originals then are outsiders, especially in a rapidly changing society, who let "the unconscious mind lead the way" to use the Norwegian Nobel Prize winner, Knut Hamsun's phrase in his classic Hunger that anticipated the stream-of-consciousness novels of the 20th Century — James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, some Latin American works, et al.
In stream-of-consciousness novels, events are remembered not in chronological order but as free association brings them to mind. Hence an abundance of soliloquy, omniscient narration of mental processes, both indirect and direct monologue. Essentially, it is a product of self-searching and introspection like Hamsun's Hunger. It takes the basic human experience of hunger (which is a metaphor for all the soul craves for) and makes it so subjective that everything common is dropped away from it. "Truth telling," Hamsun said, "does not involve seeing both sides or objectivity; truth telling is unselfish inwardness." Wonderful to read but difficult to describe, and so we look for parallels.
The parallels between Hamsun's hero, a non-descript conforming outsider and a spiritual drop-out combined with a wholly modern psychological awareness, and Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment are straightaway obvious. Both are neo-literates (neophytes would be more appropriate.) Both are highly tense personalities, bordering on madness. Both are spiritual aristocrats, in the sense they wouldn't budge from their beliefs, whatever the price to be paid. Both are extremely lonely, not because they cannot make friends but because they have no patience for others, or lesser fools.
But persons who look the same are really different: the two heroes are fundamentally different. Dostoevsky gave a graphic picture of Raskolnikov's mother, his sister and her groom, of Raskolnikov's friend, Razumihan, along with an array of various Russian types. Dostoevsky portrayed a society that produced a Raskolnikov. In Hamsun's Hunger we get a glimpse of a city, Christiana, its physical and spiritual climate, its street names and buildings but we get a feeling that the hero is so far removed from his environment as if he was in a foreign land. Hamsun is able to convey both the environment and the alienation, the soil and the extirpation.
His hunger is entirely anti-social. He is starving not because he cannot find a job in the city and feed himself on his wages but because he is determined to live on his writing (a hard enough proposition at any time, then as now) although he is just beginning as a novice. His hunger is for bread and inspiration. He seems to say, "either give me inspiration or I'll kill myself." But destiny neither provides him with inspiration nor allows him to die. He is constantly saved by some temporary relief: an editor prints an article and he gets a few kroners. The ordeal begins all over again. Raskolnikov sought his reckoning with God, Hamsun's hero wrangles with fate.
Hamsun's hero is somewhat like Raskolnikov when he reminds the investigating prosecutor of the possibility of his running away and is told by him that "people like Raskolnikov do not escape." Raskolnikov is tied to Russia; Hamsun's hero is tied to his commitment to be a writer. Raskolnikov is finally redeemed by a term of penal servitude in Siberia, accompanied by his beloved, Sonia, and in a spirit of religious resurrection. Hamsun's hero is set on a one-way road to suicide and although he does not kill himself he destroys himself. This sort of thing often happens with a certain type of monomaniac who dwells too much on a single idea.
Hamsun has often been described as the father of the modern school of literature in every respect — "his subjectiveness, his fragmentariness, his use of flashback, his lyricism." To say this is to suggest that "modernity" — the spirit of the age as it is recognised and explored by the great writers — is itself divided, anxious, self-doubting and dismayed.
But so it has been: modern literature, like modern life, is constant flux, change, and metamorphosis that moves always closer to the abyss in the world of action or the world of inward consciousness. Hence it is said that the whole modern school of fiction in the 20th Century stems from Hamsun, just as Russian literature in the 19th Century "came out of Gogol's overcoat." Literary influences often do not come in a direct fashion but the influences are there if you look closely just as Dostoevsky's Underground Man became the precursor of the modern anti-hero.
In Hunger, Hamsun participated in the general turn towards inwardness in European thought at the end of the 19th Century but unlike his other great contemporaries — Kierkegaard, Jacobsen, Rilke and others — Hamsun turned inward with greater determination. It seems Hamsun kept watch on the moods that rose and fell in his mind, watched its whole course carefully "like an inward astronomer, convinced we have been too casual in watching the movements of the `heavenly bodies' or demonic bodies inside." Hamsun watched with great care but unlike other novelists who describe how their characters' thoughts make curious loops and unexpected turns over a period of time, Hamsun is able to sketch this map for a minute of his character's time. Many of the 20th Century greats — Thomas Mann, Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig, even Hemingway and Fitzgerald owed something to him, whether they acknowledged the debt or not.
If there is one single thread that runs through Hunger it is an almost superstitious faith in the unconscious. Since Hamsun couldn't get along with others, he learned to talk to himself quoting the Spanish poet, Antonio Machado that the writer should listen to himself and, "ought to overtake by surprise some of the phrases of his inward conversations with himself, distinguishing the living phrases from the dead echoes." The main character listens a great deal "with his antennae." He obeys his impulses immediately, revealing the open connection between his unconscious and his consciousness, no matter if it is an impulse to remain hungry on the verge of starvation for long periods.
Hamsun's obedience to the unconscious, even if it entails acute physical suffering, is the path of genius and of learning that remains concealed in the psyche. Perhaps because of his faith in the unconscious, Hamsun was able to show how childish so-called grown ups are. His heroes are all children — as romantic as children, as irrational, often as savage. Hamsun discovered even before Freud that love and sex are a child's game. All this seems to paraphrase William Blake: "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom."
Hunger is not a novel of social protest; it is not a cry against society that allows acute poverty to coexist with an embarrassment of riches. Nor is it an existential novel or a full-fledged stream-of-consciousness like Joyce's Ulysses or Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. Perhaps its greatness lay in two factors. First, its deep scepticism, doubting even the doubts, like a social version of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle which arose because of the fallibility of the observer himself. To Hamsun, man was nothing but a chain of moods that kept constantly changing, often without a trace of consistency. "Man, was therefore, as strong as his weakest mood. The hero of Hunger doubted the existence of God, yet he prayed to Him." Second, his lyricism that flows right through Hunger. Language itself can entertain, how all that one word says, or leaves unsaid, can hold a reader's interest. Whichever way you look at it, Hunger remains a classic for all times.
Hunger, Knut Hamsun, first published in English 1921, Picador paperback edition 1976, £1.50, 1980 edition.
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