Hamsun’s hunger artist dreams of writing a three volume work that would be greater philosophical monument than Kant’s Critiques, but who can finish nothing but articles that the newspaper editor turns down. Ragged, emaciated, he refuses the loan the editor would offer him, and when a tramp, pitying him, refuses his charity, he becomes angry, just as he is angry at all those whom he passes in Kristiania, imagining that they were all recipients of his own charity. He is a man of potential who has achieved nothing so far; but he also lives from the sense that his achievements are already real; that this writer without works (but does that make him a writer?) is in awe of what he might be.
In his dreams, he is already an author, having substantialised himself as the author of mighty works, having already revealed that greatness as yet unknown to those who pass him in the street. One day, it will all have made sense; one day, his hunger and poverty will have been revealed as the royal road that led to his triumph; from the heights of his authorship, he will survey the difficult path that led him towards where he is now, and the still greater peaks before him rising in the distance.
But isn’t there a sense, too, that he will never seize upon the work of which he dreams; that they will flee ahead of him, known only to him in its fleeing, leading him on what is never quite a quest? Perhaps this is why he willfully denies himself the opportunities offered him. He knows that it remains what it is only as it flees – that the unfinishable and incompletable work rises far higher that the peaks across which he might imagine himself crossing. And his life will never be retrospectively justified; it must remain as it is: a failure.
But then, too, in its jerks and hesitancies, this would-be writer’s soul is still made of its relation to the work, to the impossible dream of a finished book? It is as if all his inadequacy has been pulled along in a single direction; that he is at least orientated towards what he lacks, as it is has taken the form of the book which would retrospectively make sense to others of everything he had suffered.
One day I will show you: this is what the adolescent says. One day – when I’m truly an adult – or, in this case of this hunger artist, an author. And then the plan will have been revealed; then the biographers will come swarming and the scholars will pore over my notebooks. One day: but only when I die; only when I die among those who must now admit that they knew nothing of what I was. This will be my charity, which is always in retrospect: mine was always the condition of one who lived ahead of his times.
And doesn’t he reveal, Hamsun’s narrator, the condition of the modern writer, who writes without criteria and even without authority? Who has emerged from the shelter of the church and the state, who runs up anew against the impossibility of writing? Which is only to say, that he can now confront writing in its impossibility, measured against the work to which it might give body?
But the work will not be made flesh; the sought after Word will not be spoken. What does this new kind of martyrdom witness? A dying for nothing – nothing, pure nihilism. But perhaps also another experience of the notion, and of nihilism. For by incarnating the experience of the impossibility of writing, of finding a place to begin the work, Hamsun lets us experience writing as impossibility – as a kind of test, a trial.
Why does the narrator starve? Because he cannot do otherwise; because he cannot find anything he wants to eat: so Kafka’s hunger artist. Hamsun’s narrator bites down on the stone he keeps in his mouth to satiate hunger. Bites down – such is his delusion. And likewise the narrative bites down upon another imaginary stone that would make substance where there can be none; that lets a book appear only where the work is not.
Hamsun finishes his book, even as the narrator does not finish his. He finishes the book – but what of the relation to the impossible work that takes his narrator as its subject? Impossible. And this is the comedy of Hunger. This is why its narrator is a self-deluding fool, biting down on what can give him no satiety. Upon what has Hamsun bitten?
To a correspondent he says, Hunger ‘is not a novel about marriages and coutnry picnics and dances up at the big house. I cannot go along with that kind of thing. What interests me is the infinite susceptibility of my soul, what little I have of it, the strange and peculiar life of the mind, the mysteries of the nerves in a starving body.’ (via)
Hamsun’s narrative incarnates a new kind of mortification. A discipline that attempts to give itself rules. Strange bloom of a narrative that tells only of the impossibility of satiation. How to give flesh to the work? By showing what it is not, and that it runs ahead of everything. By giving flesh to this nothing, to the starvation that comes forward in our place when writing no longer has a model.
Can the modern writer appear to be anything but stubborn, perverse and self-deluding? Can he fail to swell with an unearned pride? Sometimes his task will appear great, sometimes inconsequential. Sometimes he would like to turn back to the sunlight of the world. How foolish he was to sequester himself! How idiotic to turn from all human nourishment! But then he knows, too, that he has no choice: that, like Kafka’s hunger artist, he could find nothing to eat.
His stubbornness is all he has, and so he becomes proud of that. Tenacity, but without project: so he becomes proud of that, too. Discipline, but with nothing to which to devote itself: more pride. What do the others around him know? What have they sought for? What have they achieved. He closes his eyes. A great mountain range rises before him. One day he will ascend. One day, he will look back and down at them all, and they will look up at him, without comprehending. He lives on the mountain peaks, and they far below in the valleys.
Or is that he lives below everyone, far below? Is it that he is incapable of the simplest utterance, that he lives far below the surface of life, deprived of all that would make life simple. They put a panther in place of the hunger artist. The sister stretches her young body when the insect dies in Metamorphosis. Life is simple – surely that. Life is simple, for anyone but him.
The modern writer has a stone in his mouth. A stone that will give him no nourishment when he bites. But he bites.
Lars Iyer's Blog 