The figure of the troubled, acutely sensitive young man is a well-established one in modern fiction, seen in the work of writers such as Goethe, Dostoyevsky, Rilke, and Kafka. But the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun’s Hunger (Sult, 1890) achieves the most timeless, most mythic, and most disturbing representation of this figure. Though Hamsun was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature a century ago for Growth of the Soil, few would dispute that Hunger, in its both nauseating and galvanic portrayal of a young writer struggling and starving in Christiania (now Oslo), is Hamsun’s greatest contribution to literary culture. By situating the psychological anguish and unrealized artistic ambition in a physically suffering body, Hamsun contends that growth without hardship is an illusion and that art without confrontation is mere entertainment.
It would be misleading to say that nothing much happens in Hunger, though the book’s external action is repetitious and banal to a degree that would have shocked its first readers. Our unnamed narrator—he relies on pseudonyms even in dealings with the police—wanders Christiania, writing little, eating less, pawning his few possessions, and discomfiting everyone he encounters. He lies with abandon. Retrieving a pencil stub from a waistcoat he’d pawned, he tells the pawnbroker that it has sentimental value: With this pencil he composed his three-volume treatise on Philosophical Consciousness. He hunts for work but fails to find it, the reader guesses, because he appears so enfeebled, unwell, crazed.
He rages, inwardly, and resents what he perceives as the effortless happiness of others. His abstruse writings, occasionally accepted by a sympathetic editor, are overheated inquiries into abstractions like “Crimes of the Future” or “Freedom of the Will.” He is reduced to sleeping rough in cemeteries or in an abandoned tinsmith’s shop, and one night has himself locked in the drunk tank just for a relatively luxurious place to stay. Notwithstanding his youth, women hold little appeal for him, and the feeling is very much mutual. A brief flirtation leads nowhere. At last, his appetite for starvation, disintegration, and a sort of negative ecstasy satiated, he signs on to a vessel and sets sail from Norway.
Of this disjointed, unpleasant narrative, Hamsun said that it “plays on just one string, but tries to draw hundreds of notes from it.” The string in question is a human consciousness, twisted like catgut and stretched to the breaking point. Hunger is short on incident but a dazzling, horrifying catalogue of physical and psychological states: optimism and panic, mania and exhaustion, grandiosity and despair. Praise in its time more by writers than critics, Hunger marked an early-modernist foray into uncharted interior spaces. It describes in meticulous detail the contortions of a mind that can find nothing meaningful to connect with in the tumult of urban life.
As the American poet Robert Bly, a translator of Hunger, notes, necessity taught Hamsun attention to his mental states. He spent years before his breakthrough, both in Norway and in the U.S., engaged in backbreaking physical labor with people who could not meet his brilliance or ambition on their own terms. The alienation the novel captures is not merely of a misfit from the faceless crowd, but specifically of an artistic misfit estranged from those who are satisfied simply to work, eat, reproduce, and exist. Hamsun's spare but propulsive prose can lend his narrator’s misery an indomitable or even heroic quality.
Such alienation can be deeply unattractive, especially to those who reckon success in financial or social terms, and Hamsun’s narrator is nothing if not insufferable. But the paroxysms of this narrator’s emotions and attitudes attend his emergence from a blind, struggling, ravenous larval state to—we may infer from Hamsun’s own biography—an artist.
That said, Hamsun’s artistic success was not without grave complications. As is widely known, discussed, and rationalized, he was ultimately seduced by Nazism and rejected by his countrymen. The power of Hunger, attested to by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, Paul Auster, and countless others, yet endures. But Hamsun’s moral and political disgrace contains a warning to young malcontents whose artistic journey flirts with real darkness. Isolation, eccentricity, debasement, and anger may eventually hack out a path toward art, and even to recognition in one’s own time. Take care that the path ends up somewhere you can be proud to live.