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Vagabond heroes were not unknown in European fiction. They can
be traced as far back as Don Quixote and are the staple of
Balzac and Dostoevsky’s novels. The quest heroes of American
literature such as Natty Bampoo and Ishmael are their cousins.
But Hamsun’s vagabond is different. In Hunger he is a
nameless poet out of kilter with the world outside, struggling
to create art in the face of hunger, poverty and deprivation. In
a later novel characteristically called Vagabond, the
hero is willing to integrate and find his place in the social
fabric.
The combination of
the artist and the vagabond has been integral to Hamsun’s
work. Like the hero of Hunger, Hamsun himself went
through restless roving before the novel came out. He tried many
trades, but his ambition to write was uppermost in his life. The
experiences of the hero mirror his own rebuffs before he was
recognised as a writer of substance in a country where Ibsen and
Bjornsen had held absolute sway.
Hunger
represents a kind of realism that has nothing to do with
photographic detail. A psychological study, it presents life in
the impressionistic mode of a Gaugin or a Cezanne; hence, the
delirious movement of its narrative, shifting focus without a
well-delineated plot. It has something of the quality of life as
‘a series of gig-lamps’ claimed by Virginia Woolf. The
hero-poet encounters the hostile streets of Christiana (a
stand-in for Oslo). He is another face of Ibsen’s ‘master
builder’ seeking a new mode of expression for himself. For him
the infernal city of romantic literature offers only
frustrations.
It is the moral
superiority of the protagonist as well as the author’s ironic
perspective that hold the book together. The former allows the
hero occasionally to compromise in order to survive, as in the
episode of pawning his friend’s blanket and attempts to give
himself different names. This has to be viewed against another
episode in which he shares his meagre earnings with a beggar and
bestows favours on a prostitute. It also makes his denunciations
of God part of a raging battle within himself.
Hamsun’s hero
(unnamed because his anonymity is emblematic of a struggling
artist) stands up in defiance of ‘Jehovah, the great Baal’,
whom he condemns as the invisible god of life. At one stage he
becomes openly abusive: "I tell you, I would rather be a
bondsman in hell than a free man in your mansions! I tell you, I
am filled with a blissful contempt for your divine
paltriness."
Refusing to yield,
he creates alternative realities of imagination. He becomes a
poetic voice seeking oneness with nature, the wild nature of his
Northland. In moments such as these he overcomes, however
briefly, the squalor of life in rooming houses and shelters for
the homeless. The memory of the ideal non-existent beloved
Ylajali fires him up further: "Devils of fire, an abyss, a
wilderness, a hurricane, a universe in brazen ignition…"
Hamsun’s
protagonist oscillates between the extremes of physical and
social humiliation on the one hand, and the exaltedness of the
imagination on the other. The result is a complete withdrawal
from the world and a bristling feeling of hurt quivering
underneath his self-concern. Here, the author’s irony cuts
athwart our conventional expectations. Instead of dying a doomed
romantic, as should have been expected, he escapes abroad on a
ship.
He is not like
Kafka’s Hunger Artist making hunger itself his obsessive
concern. His writer’s block clears only infrequently. But in
those moments he overcomes all. Even though he can’t create a
lasting work, he rises above his wretched condition and becomes
a protagonist in the Sartrean mould—a prototype for later
protagonists.
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IN
an earlier piece in these pages I invoked J. M. Coetzee’s remark
that a literary classic is ‘what survives’ changes in the
history of taste. Hamsun’s is one such novel still widely read
more than a hundred years after its first publication in 1890. This
latest translation indicates its power to affect the reader beyond
its immediate time and place.
