About Hunger (Sult) by Knut Hamsun (1890)
Knut Hamsun: Sult (Hunger). Front cover of the first edition (1890).
Hunger is the tale of the onset of madness in a young, poor and starving writer as his existence proves more and more intolerable. He cannot write without food, nor can he eat without any money. In Hamsun’s breakthrough novel the hunger experienced by the main character takes on both psychological and physiological proportions. The author explores the “ubevidste Sjæleliv” (the unconscious life of the soul) and the proud young man’s experience of modern society is depicted with great sensitivity, accuracy and humour. Streets, houses and objects all lose their recognisable form and take on an increasingly threatening character.
The state of mind of the main character also influences the language of the novel. In a key scene which takes place in the darkness of a police cell for vagrants, the narrator suddenly sits up in bed and exclaims, «... Good heavens man, you have invented a word... Kuboaa ... of great grammatical significance...». This impossible word, which means absolutely nothing, can be viewed as a symbol of Hamsun’s dream of a new language, indeed as the very conception of a new type of literature. In Hunger, Hamsun erases the dividing line between dreams and real life, the outer and the inner world, hallucination and reality. The novel thus marks a break with the realistic literary tradition and introduces international modernism into the literary landscape of the 1890s.
