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.