Hamlet and Identity

Hamlet is one or more of the following:

A university-trained scholar.

A scientific rationalist.

A follower of stoic philosophy.

Montaignean skeptic.

Clinically depressed son/son-in-law/nephew.

A paltry lover.

Actor/dramaturge.

A Christian prince.

A pagan warrior.

Machiavellian killer.

A tricky fool, more fit to be son of the late king's jester than son of the late king himself.

"To thine own self be true": to which of these selves ought he be true? All of them, apparently, at one point or another.

Hamlet tries out the different roles until he finds the one that is most dramatically expedient. The play is like a maze, a game that Hamlet plays until he finds his way out--which is to say that he finds his fate, which is death.

The identity Hamlet creates for himself in Act 5 is a result of his experiences in Act 4, Scene 4, and in Act 5, Scene 1: the only two scenes in the play that take place outside of Elsinore. Hamlet has to get outside, get a bit of fresh air, observe Fortinbras, and dig about in the dirt a little to figure out his motivation. The graveyard scene is perhaps most apt: Hamlet fears death; he muses on the fate of the body, and then he viacariously encounters that fate in the most direct of fashions. He even ends up inside of a grave for a while, wrestling with Laertes. Finally, death is no longer a thought but a reality. Hamlet learns something from the gravedigger as well: that death is something one can grow accustomed to in such a way that the jokes can lose their sting. What is death to the gravedigger? A business opportunity, and that is all.

It is the intersection of all of the above identities that Hamlet stands upon in Act 5, Scene 2. Hamlet's allusion to scripture, his belief in the "special providence in the fall of a sparrow," is less a full-fledged Christian precept than it is a representation of the intersection of Christianity and stoicism, where the two modes of living arc together on the Venn diagram. Hamlet summarizes his acceptance of fate in two words: "Let be." He knows the role he is supposed to play, and he plays it. And in doing so, he robs death of its glory, which is and always has been merely the fear of it.

Hamlet and Montaigne

Montaigne establishes one of his essays upon a quotation from Cicero: "To Philosophie is no other thing, than for a man to prepare himself for death."

Shakespeare knew Cicero. Shakespeare also certainly read Montaigne, or at least some Montaigne, later in his career; we have passages from The Tempest that mimic Montaigne's "Of the Caniballes" as proof. Shakespeare was reportedly a friend of John Florio, Montaigne's first English translator, and may have read early translations before they were published in 1603.

Hamlet was written some two or three years before the publication of Montaigne's essays in English, but it is thrilling to think that there may be some link between the two. Certainly, there is a likeness in sensibility. Hamlet seems an enactment of a principle asserted by Montaigne:

So have I learned this custome or lesson, to have alwaies death, not only in my imagination but continually in my mouth. And there is nothing I desire more to be informed of, than of the death of men; that is to say, what words, what countenance, and what face they shew at their death. (Book I, XIX)

Montaigne writes: "You have seene many who have found good in death, ending thereby many many miseries" (Book I, XIX). This is the very lesson Hamlet seems to have learned by Act V.

Hamlet represents a revolution in drama, a new mode not only for Shakespeare but for all literature. The intense inwardness of the title character was previously unknown to the stage, to poetry, even. The soliloquys are unprecedented in their depth of expression, in their complexity. Rank biographical speculation bears little fruit, I believe, but here is a plum: what if Shakespeare's reading of Montaigne prompted this revolution?--prompted Hamlet?

We can never know the extent to which Montaigne influenced Shakespeare. Regardless, the two operate so much in parallel that they are rightly acknowledged as co-founders of the modern sensibility, giving us, among other things, the vision of the fragmented self and a modern attitude toward death that, despite the real or supposed Christianity of both authors, is founded ultimately upon a secular humanist attitude, one borne of much reflective thought.

Wherefore Hamlet?

One of the challenges of reading Hamlet is to figure out what the fuss is all about.

To wit, Hamlet's most famous soliloquy, "To be or not to be ..." Some of the most famous lines in the English language.

Why? Most of us do not walk around in a suicidal depression on a day to day basis.

But we do possess an awareness of our own mortality, and Hamlet dealt with that awareness on a level more profound than anyone before and perhaps since. And we do, each of us, have to find a way to live in this world, which is to endure the suffering that it presents to us. And in the modern world, with a multiplicity of viewpoints beyond the received truth of the medieval church, this challenge takes on further complications.

Hamlet wanted to know the meaning of death. He questioned it bluntly and boldly and with a degree of thoughtfulness previously impossible. A by-product of the Reformation, Hamlet inhabits a world that is not fully Catholic or Protestant; he is in a sense the first post-Christian figure in literature because conventional religious sensibility is insufficient to him in answering questions about death. This does not necessarily make Hamlet an atheist, but it does make him agnostic or at least a doubter. No one could have gotten away with a public expression of doubt in those old Church of England days except for a character on stage; the law wouldn't have allowed it. But certainly people were thinking it: with Catholics and Protestant splitting each other to bits all across Europe, it might lead a sensible person to doubt the validity of the enterprise altogether. But one couldn't say so except on a stage.

Then there's the matter of two value systems in conflict: the Christian one that forbids suicide as a mortal sin and the classical-stoical one that condones it under certain circumstances. Hamlet grapples with stoical precepts throughout the play, but he cannot free himself from his passions, from his own depth of feeling. If stoicism is about the denial of feeling in order to endure the "slings and arrows" that come automatically with living in this world, then Hamlet is not a stoic, because Hamlet is nothing if not two things: thoughtful and full of feeling. It is above all his capacity for emotional depth and not his critical thinking skills that make him admirable. And it is depth of feeling that an audience expects to see when they see Hamlet.

Hamlet and Meaning

I.
Either meaning is transcendentally signified, or it is not. In Hamlet, it is not. Thus Hamlet's predicament: there are no set principles upon which to act, so he must define them himself. No mean task, that.

A. D. Nuttall uses the word "vertiginous" to describe Hamlet's famous line "there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so." Indeed, the entire play could be described as vertiginous. Hamlet's vertigo, then, is the consequence of understanding that things are only what you define them to be, that you are only what your mind defines yourself to be. Here is the power of mind, which is both a creative force and a destructive force at once. Out of it, Hamlet must invent a self. He has less than four acts left to do it. How?

II.
Polonius offers us the stoic commonplace, so often quoted out of context, "to thine own self be true." To determine the utility of this advice, we must not only look at the character who speaks these words (at best, a doddering fool; at worst, right-hand to a fratricidal murderer) but also consider how they might apply to Hamlet himself were the advice given to him: to what self ought he to be true? Hamlet begins the play a mopey undergrad and ends as something entirely different, not quite a warrior, but someone who can play the role of the warrior to good effect. In between (that is, for the vast bulk of the play), he is nebulously defined. Vertigo is his only identity.

Hamlet is merely an amalgam of words, always shifting, disappearing. He wishes the body to "resolve itself into a dew," but it is only identity that proves itself vaporous, not the body for which Hamlet has so much disdain. Either he possesses no self to which to be true or the self to which he ought be true is no self that's going to get him anywhere he wants to be. Hamlet is a modern character because he faces the same predicament we face in the modern world: he must invent the idea of that self that he hopes to become, and he must then struggle to become it. Easier said than done, even for a character whose only existence is words on a page (or drifting to the heavens from the stage).

III.
Thus Hamlet's preoccupation with drama, which is also Prospero's preoccupation with drama, which also must certainly be Shakespeare's obsession with drama. It is through drama that Hamlet hopes to discover truth. One philosophy of Polonius that is actionable: "by indirections find directions out." Reality--that is, certainty--can be mined by sifting carefully the grains of illusion.

It has been observed that Hamlet is out of place in his own play, a tricksy fool miscast in the part of the prince. Hamlet needs to learn his part, and once he does the actions will define him.

IV.
Harold Bloom says that Hamlet is no more obsessed with death than any other Shakespeare play, but that can't be right. A play that not only contemplates life and death but hinges on suicidal impulse must be said to explore the meaning of death from a singular perspective. The core of the play is the "To be or not to be" soliloquy, and in this speech Hamlet identifies the uncertainty of death--"the undiscovered country"--as that which "puzzles the will." Hamlet does not know if death is something he ought to embrace or something he ought to flee from. He accuses himself of cowardice, but if this is so it is a cowardice in need of qualification: a metaphysical cowardice--looking over the edge of the abyss and not knowing where to place your foot--and no mere knocking of the knees with fright.

Hamlet's core problem is that he does not understand the meaning of death.  Once he figures that out, he can learn how to live, even if to do so means to proceed posthaste toward his own certain death.  Thus, as Montaigne, quoting Cicero, has it: "To philosophize is to learn how to die."  Hamlet confronts the uncertainty of death until he finds certainty: and the certainty is that of the grave. This knowledge becomes bedrock for him in Act 5.

V.
The experience upon which Hamlet forges an identity--the experience upon which he rights himself and overcomes his vertigo--is the direct confrontation with death. More than Fortinbras, more then the gravedigger or even Yorick, it is the soil itself--the desolate patch of ground that Fortinbras sends an army to its potential doom to gain, the muck of Yorick's grave, the fresh dirt of Ophelia's--the soil that he will relentlessly become, that gives Hamlet certain knowledge of death. Once he knows it--once he has prepped for his part, practiced the method--then he knows he can play the part. "The readiness is all": Hamlet decides to determine his being through his actions and not through his death. He decides to accept his fate and not to defy it. He will face the uncertainty, which has become a certainty: that the "quintessence of dust" is indeed just that, just so many skulls in the dirt.

VI.
Ultimately, Hamlet goes beyond good and evil, beyond God, beyond character as it is traditionally understood, to a secular mode of being that is on its own level, framed in the mind. There is a relativism at work here, both ethical and epistemological, and it is true that Hamlet--like every other Shakespeare play--offers no moral truths. In fact, it is predicated on the assumption that there are no hard and fast moral truths as we wish to understand them.  That is, there are no transcendentally signified moral truths.  The only values that matter are the ones that Hamlet himself resolves to believe in.

One cannot disavow relativism simply because it bears the potential to present unpleasant consequences. Hamlet gives us those unpleasant consequences--and, in its final act, a way to get past them. It is the power of the mind that causes trouble for Hamlet--more so than his uncle, a middling sort of villain for Shakespeare--but it is also the power of the mind that renders to Hamlet a sense of self, forged from experience.

A Soul at the White Heat

Brenda Wineapple's White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson is, if nothing else, worthwhile for one great feat that it accomplishes: to rescue the reputation of Higginson from that of being a mere sidenote in the story of how Emily Dickinson's poetry was first published to the masses. In Wineapple's presentation, Higginson is not so much the bumbling editor who nearly demolishes Dickinson's accomplishments in the process of preparing her poems for posthumous publication, or the product of the then-fading era of Transcendentalism who cannot recognize The New when he really sees it, as he is a man on the cusp of two movements, a man on the verge of the modern but not wholly of it, who has the sensitivity to recognize Dickinson's genius without the capacity to fully understand it. In fact, no one in Dickinson's time understood her poetry; Higginson at least realized that the future would understand her. And Dickinson realized that she had an ally in Higginson, someone who would at the least be receptive to the possibility of her genius at a time when no one else was willing to entertain the thought of it. What Dickinson sought from Higginson, despite all the talk of "precepter" and "pupil" in her letters, was sympathy, it seems.

Higginson is (and was even in his day) less of interest for his own literary efforts than he was for the way in which he captured the ethos of his time. If Emerson was the great armchair Transcendentalist who enjoyed nature best from the comfort of his study and Thoreau the man of deed who translated the attitude of the movement into action through his experimental living in Emerson's back forty, Higginson is somewhere between the two but closer to Thoreau, though more politically involved. In addition to writing essays, novels, a few poems, and yet more essays, Higginson received a saber cut while storming the gates of the federal courthouse in Boston in an attempt to free the captured slave Anthony Burns, he ran guns to free-staters in Kansas, and he--not Robert Gould Shaw--was in fact the first to lead a regiment of black soldiers during the Civil War. Higginson was a Unitarian minister, as well. For years, he was a regular contributor to the Atlantic Monthly, the medium through which he first sparked the interest of Miss Dickinson. Though his writing is not without some moments of eloquence (Wineapple cites some of the finer passages), he is not remembered as a major writer of his era for a reason. Rather, it is fullness of his life story that prompts our attention today--that and his relationship with Dickinson.

Like most biographies of this sort, White Heat sometimes veers a little too close to rank speculation. Did Higginson harbor romantic feelings toward Dickinson? The books suggests that maybe he did ... then pulls back on that assumption, because if he did he certainly did not tell anyone in any direct manner. Wineapple wisely lets most of the speculations on Dickinson's sexual behavior resonate on their own. Was Dickinson in love with her sister-in-law, Sue Dickinson? The two were close in an odd sort of way, but Wineapple stops short of drawing any conclusions. That Dickinson fell in love with Judge Otis Lord is not to be doubted; what is uncertain, however, is the precise nature of their love affair and whether it was ever consummated in full-blown fashion. Lord, the very epitome of crusty, conservative cranks, seems a truly odd choice for the feisty and spirited Dickinson, but this relationship merely furthers the point that Dickinson's private life, including the precise nature of her feelings for Higginson, whom she did meet several times before she died, will forever be fraught with unknowns.

Which bring us to the poetry itself. Any literary biography is primarily of interest in its capacity to bring greater depth and meaning to a writer's work. And in this case, our appreciation of Dickinson's poetry is enhanced by a greater understanding of how her contemporaries received it--and in particular how Higginson perceived it. Wineapple points to Mabel Loomis Todd, Higginson's co-editor in preparing Dickinson's poems for publication, as the one with the heavy hand in the editing process. The examples she presents do indicate that some blunt and savage editing work was done by Todd, though Higginson was indeed guilty of altering the poems to make them more presentable to a mainstream literary audience of the 1890s. Regardless, the poems in their current "restored" form (first published as such in 1955) still have the power to captivate a contemporary audience with their startling sensibility, and they remain the most unique and idiosyncratic body of verse in American literature--a challenge, certainly, for any editor.

Cambridge Journal

I.
I came here with new glasses, and I'm still getting used to them, so that when I climb a stairway I look down at the steps and they appear to me to be curved. I keep looking down at my feet, wondering how they got to be all the way down there, wondering how I got to be so tall. My eyes haven't learned yet how to navigate the depths of what they take in. My left eye is the good one -- better than 20/20, the optometrist said. The right one is weak. I can close my right eye and read the label on an electric fan from ten feet away with my left. With my left eye closed, everything is a blur in the right.

II.
Harvard Yard: six in the morning on a Sunday, the Fourth of July. I forgot to wear my glasses, but even through the blurred edges that form the shapes of things around me I can tell that we are the only ones about, Ben and me. Ben is unusually quiet in his stroller. I wonder what he sees, how he is learning to process it. He is just learning his colors, and we are practicing with the things we see on our walk, especially the blue of the hydrangeas, which look as though someone had spray painted them: it doesn't seem like they could be real. To me, without my glasses, they look like cotton candy on a stick, something out of Dr. Seuss.

We cut between buildings, through alleys of brick, through the silence of Divinity Avenue this early in the morning. Automatic sprinkler systems are shooting water deep into the green of green grass. There's enough brick here to build a castle in four dimensions, enough wrought iron to build an ocean liner. Wonder how all that iron railing made it through the war without being commandeered by the government, but then again this is Harvard. We don't quite belong here, feel a bit like intruders, but this early on a Sunday morning any place is yours if you are walking through it quietly enough: on tippy toes.

The moon is still up in the sky, fragmentary, pouring out of a cup you might make with your left hand. Ben points it out to me. Signs: It's natural ... Organic Landscaping; All Pets Must Be On A Leash, stick man walking stick dog. Commemorative plaques, various and sundry in nature. The words are ragged around the edges, but I can still read. The difference between what's there and what I see is only a little less pronounced than it ever is, even with glasses. I'll never know what it is that a bird sees, what stick man walking stick dog sees. Through the gate by Canady Hall and up on top of the building there to the left, a hawk screams from a high perch. Not a warning to the little birds below but a summons to some other hawk somewhere else, a hypothetical bird that might be in the vicinity: a call to all hawks, if anyone out there is listening.

Still no one else. Then we see a jogger, and the gig is all up. We're no longer the sole inhabitants of the grounds of America's oldest university.

Past the statue of John Harvard: once I walked by here, years ago, and he had a pigeon on his head. It seemed apt, somehow, a humbling message: that we all might end up splattered with pigeon shit someday. There are more people now, a couple standing at the top of a set of monument-worthy stairs: Widener Library, repository of knowledge. It's late night for the lovers, I can tell. They are oblivious to anything, lost in their embrace. Summer school students who found each other more truly and more strange, it seems. One wonders where they are off to next, if they'll see each other again when summer's over. Either way, it couldn't matter to them now: they are embedded in the moment.

A covered passage through the middle of Wigglesworth Hall and into Harvard Square. Rampant commercialism tamed, at rest on a Sunday morning. That is, nothing's open. We pause at the bookstore, look over the titles, the names of visiting authors posted on the calendars, used books for sale. I tell Ben about the books I'd like to get, but he doesn't seem much interested. He quietly waits it out. The couple walks by, down from their vertiginous perch and among the walking and fully awakened once more. Hand in hand, delighted still at each other's company, and who would ever begrudge them that? The world is newly created for them and they the only couple. Just don't set foot ouside of the garden, I want to tell them. Stay here forever. If you can.

And then we wander through the residential areas below and to the east of campus. A good place to live, no doubt, with brick sidewalks and gardens well maintained in the side yards. They're New England gardens: the hydrangeas are tall and upright from the long New England spring and the mild summer, bright blue from the acidity of the soil. Onward and around, I'm looking up and squinting at street signs, registering the names and cataloguing landmarks for future navigations.

I pride myself on my sense of direction. I refer to it as innate, a natural product of the midwestern sensibility, but it's not. I claim that it comes from a childhood spent lying flat next to my brother in the bed of our dad's pickup truck, looking up at the blank of a blue sky as we crossed over the line from Johnson County into Wyandotte, guessing where we were and taking occasional glances over the edge of the truck bed to see if we were right. But more likely it comes from my willingness to learn the ground the old-fashioned way, on foot, finding a few landmarks and fixing them in my mind: an apartment building on Kirkland that I can recognize from any direction, a patch of sidewalk under construction, a walkway that I discovered that leads you out of a dead end street. Keeping track of your turns and always knowing which way is north.

Soon I've navigated our way through slums of hydrangea and clematis and brick sidewalks and back to our street, Francis Avenue, wondering about the prices, what it would cost to live here instead of just staying here for a month. The phrase "prohibitively expensive" comes to mind. Then we are on the grounds of the Divinity School. Is everything holy here? What about the infidels, the non-believers -- like us? What does it take to believe in things you can't see when you're not even sure about the things you do see?

These questions don't matter much to Ben: he's ready to get out of the stroller by now and go inside for a cool drink of water.

III.
My daughter wakes late, still terrified of the redcoats. The patriots, too, for that matter: anyone with a gun. The re-enactors are out in force this weekend. Yesterday she had a bad run-in with the redcoats on Boston Common; cannons were involved. Fourth of July on a Sunday, the cradle of liberty: that's what you get. There's the particular and peculiarly fervant brand of patriotism espoused by New Englanders. The revolutionary era is their heritage. They bring out cannons to every major park around and fire them off at fifteen minute intervals. No live rounds, of course, or at least we assume.

This is arguably the best place in the country to be on July Fourth, but Edie will have none of it. My wife explained to her that the redcoats were the bad guys, the others (white shirts, mostly, it seems, coarse cloth) are fighting for freedom. More or less. I'm about to side with the redcoats myself, thinking that maybe we should have just shut up and paid our taxes, then we wouldn't be dealing with cannons going off right next to the playground. I might openly declare myself a Tory. Edie goes about with her fingers in her ears, asking questions -- the answers to which she can't hear because her ears are covered. She can't figure out why anyone would ever want to go to war. We tell her that guns aren't allowed on campus, that she's safe here. No one is ever allowed to bring a gun on campus, and certainly not a cannon. Not in the residential areas, either. (I explain to her what a residential area is: it's a place where people live, and they don't want to be bothered. There are playgrounds in these residential areas that we can visit. No cannon, no musket, no grape shot.) She's very sensitive about noise, despite the fact that on any given parcel of land where she might find herself she is usually the loudest thing there -- no volume control yet. She had bad dreams last night about the redcoats.

Just outside the range of the cannons, though, we find ourselves in a little utopian socialist enclave, also known as the playground at Cambridge Commons. Wood bricks and plastic buckets are all held in common. Children work together to send water through a stainless steel aqueduct. It's an inversion of the instinct of mine at work here: no such thing as private property, and that takes the kids a bit of getting used to, but it's a good thing. The redcoats are forgotten, for the time being, at least. Boston may or may not be the hub of the universe, still, but it boasts the best playgrounds I've ever seen, anywhere.

IV.
Later in the morning, we are all walking together through Harvard Square. I stop into a cafe for coffee to go, and when I come out my wife is gesturing wildly at a figure just crossing the street. I turn to look and I know who he is instantly, and after the initial shock of recognition the entire mystery of his character suddenly makes sense.

Even from half a block away, he is easily distinguished by the particular qualities of his gait, the guitar that he carries with him everywhere in a hard shell case. I have my glasses on, but the pattern of his movements is so distinct that I think I would recognize him even without them on. He wears a rumpled suit, a white shirt with no tie, and his white hair is combed back, down almost to his collar: this is the same ensemble, the same look that I have associated with this fellow for almost twenty years. His face is red, weathered from walking so much, but at the same time you don't get the sense that he lives out of doors. He's a walker, a wanderer, no stranger to public transportation. Shabby but dignified. He comes from a cultured background. For twenty years, he was a fixture of Lawrence, Kansas, the town where Amy and I live, but here he is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and as I said it all somehow makes sense.

The man with the guitar is named John. For years, Amy and I seemed to see him wherever we went. He could often be found sitting quietly at a coffee shop, staring at nothing in particular. He played guitar -- expertly -- during Sunday brunch at a restaurant where I worked. We track him down. He has a head start, and the walk signals are against us, but Amy catches up with him when he stops at a newsstand. He is happy to see us. He recognizes me, or he pretends to -- it's hard to know. He has a soft, refined voice, and he is very courteous. He grew up here, he says, and after twenty years of living in Lawrence he has just moved back. He plays every Monday night for the dinner crowd at such-and-such restaurant here in Cambridge, and he encourages us to come see him, and we agree to do so even though we know that it's not likely, given the fact of the young children who seem somehow to follow us around wherever we go.

A small world, I say, as we prepare to part ways, but even as I say it I know it's not true. The world is big and wide, and Boston, sadly, is no longer its hub, and there is much to see throughout the world's expanse. It's not a small world, you just keep running into the same crowd everywhere you go, like these children who keep following us around. We go our own ways. I have no doubt that we will run in to him again: he's the kind of person you keep running in to. Nevertheless, for some reason, we are all indescribably happy to see each other, even though if pressed on it none of us would be able to explain in the least why, except that we have these two places in common, here in the whole wide world.

V.
The kids go to bed around eight o'clock on the Fourth of July. Ben is too young to get much out of fireworks, we assume, or at least we don't want to navigate the crowds with him in tow, and Edie is still terrified of loud noises, explosions, and it's their bedtime, anyway. So here we are, the best place in the world to experience Independence Day, and it's lights off at eight-thirty. I set my glasses aside for the evening; I don't need them now. Amy and I stay up reading until she falls asleep. I turn off the light, then go into the bathroom so as not to keep her up and sit on the edge of the tub reading: about why we need wolves in the wilderness today, about an underappreciated Danish painter whose paintings radiate with an inborne light, about new translations of old scriptures -- what do the words mean, and where did they come from? The extreme degree to which Christianity depends upon translation -- translations of translations, even, of works by a person or persons unknown. All of which is to say that we do indeed see darkly through the glass. Advertisements for books, ridiculous personals: Uninhibited telephone exploration of your sexual fantasies. Call Julia. Dating/Intimacy Coach: Manhattan, Upper East Side location. The hand-in-hand couple are far, far away from this now.

I crinkle the magazine shut, then I, too, head for the mattress. It's a heat wave, and there's no air conditioning in our apartment. We've got four fans running. We had hoped to escape the heat by coming here, but the heat came with us and settled in, at least for a few days, at which point the winds off the ocean will push it back to where it came.

I lie in bed for a long time, awake, waiting to get settled in to the darkness, but I know that when I do sleep I will sleep until dawn. We're not so different from John, the man with the guitar. We're different from the hawk. You might remember things (scenes, images) but you don't know what it's like anymore to be young, to be very young. I see now what I see when my eyes are awake.

Hunger

All through the book, we wait for the big moment: when the narrator finally makes it as a writer, when the money comes in -- a hundred kroner, say -- that lifts him up out of poverty and obscurity and allows him a decent place to live and a steady diet -- and a modicum of respect, to boot. It doesn't have to be a fortune, even: just enough to get by, to get his waistcoat out of hock, enough for him to claim with accuracy that he makes a living by his pen.

Of course, the moment never comes -- not in the pages of this book, at least. The writer in question, the quasi-autobiographical narrator of Knut Hamsun's Hunger, gives the perfect picture of the motive to write, but the means are at a loss. We have to extrapolate from the novel's conclusion: when the unnamed speaker takes to the seas, a habitat hostile to the craft (but, apparently, if Melville is to be considered, not hostile to the formation of the proper temperament). It is then and only then -- in the last page and a half of the novel -- that we figure out how the narrator got out of the mess he was in -- starvation-grade poverty -- and made it to the point at which he could actually pull together the wits required to tell his own tale. It isn't so much the sea, though, that catalyzes this writer's pursuance of his craft; rather, in keeping with the point of the book, it's the fact that he finally has the benefit of a steady diet. Forget five hundred dollars and a room of your own -- it's daily bread that a writer needs above all.

And without that daily bread, how good a writer can this character be? We know better than to assume that the masterpieces he believes himself to be crafting in the midst of his poverty are genuine. It's clear from his inane ramblings -- and the sympathetic but sensible rejections he repeatedly receives -- that whatever he is trying to write in the midst of maintaining his unwonted hunger diet is not material on par with the final product -- the novel we are reading, written in the style of a memoir. It's only after the fact, with the benefit of looking back from a very different vantage point, that the narrator can present this kind of experience with any kind of clarity or artfulness. The narrator himself is not so much unreliable as much as he is reliably capturing an unreliable state that he inhabited in the past; alternating between complete arrogance and a supreme self-loathing, he himself realizes as much when he is in the latter mode. The voice of this novel has a perfect immediacy, but at the same time we can recognize a certain distinct distance. The experience has passed, but it has remained with him.

Hunger reads like a leaner, more taught Crime and Punishment, only there is no murder -- no galvanizing, irrevocable act -- to force the young would-be man of consequence into the crucible of his fate. The narrator of Hunger does, however, give Raskolnikov a run for his money when it comes to alienation. The alternating currents of self-doubt (a hazardous and even self-destructive sense of pride) and delusions of grandeur are common to both. Both are crazed and alienated by the dire poverty of their situations. Both are prompted equally by impulses of dire cruelty and seemingly random impulses toward utter kindness; if impulses toward kindness could be said to reach a hysterical pitch, they do so with both of these fellows. Both of them reside within the very midst and broil of the city yet are separated from everyone around them. Both talk to themselves aloud, oblivious as they wander the streets. Yet Raskolnikov commits his irrevocable act based on logic -- to prove a theory, to put thoughts into action. Hamsun's narrator, by contrast, doesn't seem capable of sticking with a particular train of thought long enough to see it through to the name of action; he is too sicklied over with a cast of thought that is not only pale but fractured as well. Laughing at himself, jumping on his hat, weeping his way through the streets, throwing what little money he has to near-perfect strangers, selling off his near-worthless possessions one by one to pawnbrokers ... In that sense, Hamsun's narrator matches Raskolnikov almost deed for deed. But the case could still be made: without any ability to hold a thought together long enough to act upon it, Hamsun delivers in a certain unmistakable way the crazier of the two. This we recognize as a kind of modern paralysis, bearing with it the sting of a psychological acuity that is Freudian in nature. The voice of the novel is the crucial element here, what allows this insanity to be rendered with such relentless precision.

Given the limitations of the mental state of the narrator at the time of the events he recounts, it's a bold move to use first-person here. But the use of first-person is also exactly what makes Hunger work. What it sacrifices in terms of clarity, though, it makes up for in expressiveness. The real feature that separates Hunger from Crime and Punishment -- what, in fact, makes it not only a leaner novel but a more realistic and more modern novel -- is Hamsun's trenchant use of voice, the psychological depth that is conveyed not only by the story but by the language of the story. Hunger reaches beyond the psychological depravity of Poe, for instance, because it deals with a more realistic and less sensational fringe. The voice carries this book. It is, one might argue, the most modern of 19th century novels, one that is full thirty years ahead of its time, and in addition it deserves to be lauded for not doing what we might expect it to do: to give us the story of how and why a writer became a writer. In that sense, Hunger keeps good company: neither The Bell Jar nor This Boy's Life tells us directly how the person speaking came to be the person writing; we have to extrapolate from the data provided. John Fante's Ask the Dust runs most nearly parallel to Hunger. We can see the drive, the examples that prove, over and over, the capacity for verbal fluency and the will to pursue the writer's life. What goes into the formation of a writer, though, is perhaps ultimately something very hard to know, even for the writers themselves. What Hunger proves, though, is that the writer's life begins with hunger and only reaches fruition when there is food to be had.