The Nation.

30 May 26, 2008

Tonight No Poetry
Will Serve
Saw you walking barefoot
taking a long look
at the new moons eyelid
later spread
sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair
asleep but not oblivious
of the unslept unsleeping
elsewhere
Tonight I think
no poetry
will serve
Syntax of rendition:
verb pilots the plane
adverb modifies action
verb force-feeds noun
submerges the subject
noun is choking
verb disgraced goes on doing
there are adjectives up for sale
now diagram the sentence
ADRIENNE RICH
Ibsen took it upon himself to open the dolls
house and rethink womens roles; Bjrnson
championed the peasants in one decade,
and in the next he took on the church. But
Hamsun, a nihilist already, threw social
responsibility out of literature; from the
beginning, he was a champion of no one
but himself.
H
amsuns mature career began onstage.
On December 11, 1887, in Minne-
apolis, where he was living, Hamsun
began a series that would showcase
his hard-won knowledge of modern
literature, lecturing on Balzac, Flaubert,
Zola, Bjrnson and Ibsen. As Fer guson
writes, one witness remembers that Ham-
suns clothes were frayed; his pants were
too short, and his jacket was tightly but-
toned, as if to hide an unsuitable shirt:
Often he bit his lip, started as though in
surprise, and then a salvo of passionate
phrases would come literally tearing out of
his throat. He wasnt yet ready to betray
the older generation, but he did make spe-
cial mention of the young Swedish play-
wright August Strindberg, claiming that he
was no great thinker but merely a great
original geniusa distinction that self-
taught Hamsun would lean on in the future
as a mandate.
It must have been sweet, lecturing on
Eu ropean literature to a Sunday crowd, when
the previous winter he had been conduct-
ing streetcars in Chicago, insulating his
uniform with newspaper, doggedly read-
ing Aristotle between stops. Hamsun had
originally come to America on Bjrnsons
recommendation, hoping to become the
voice of a growing Norwegian community
there. But this hope had been frustrated,
and Hamsun fell back on hard labor and
odd clerkships to survive.
After a few weeks of earning his keep by
minding pigs, Hamsun gave a final lecture,
held on Norwegian National Day, May 17,
1888, devoted to attacking America, as his
biographer Ferguson surmises. Hamsun
re sented democracy, calling it mob rule,
and viewed the American Midwest as a land
of poverty and rootlessness. At this time
Hamsun was wearing black ribbons that
indicated sympathy for the anarchist vic-
tims of the Haymarket massacre. His first
sym bolic quarrel with the establishment
was political.
His next was aesthetic. To write Hunger,
the book he began later that year, Hamsun
had to give up on being the next Bjrnson.
He wrote about being hungry not only be-
cause he had good material but because he
decided that suffering brought psychological
insights a Bjrnson would never have. And
Hamsuns first implicit break with Bjrnson
emphasized their class differences: Bjrnson
had made a tour of America, and was wel-
comed in many towns with a brass band; he
never got his hands dirty, as Hamsun had. In
a scandalous lecture series in Copenhagen,
Hamsun told his own truth about America.
The wildly nonfactual, antidemocratic book
he published afterward, On the Cultural Life
of Modern America, included this motto:
Truth is neither objectivity nor the balanced
view; truth is a selfless subjectivity. From
the beginning, political recklessness and
Modernist subjectivity were fused. Hamsun
actually fantasized that Bjrnson would de-
nounce the seriesand that Nietzsches great
popularizer, Danish critic Georg Brandes,
would then come to the aid of Hamsun, the
young profaner.
Bjrnson remained aloofbut Hamsun
had found his voice. He would be both self-
pitying and self-aggrandizing. It was in
those days when I wandered about hungry
in Kristiania, that strange city which no one
leaves before it has set its mark on him.
So he begins Hunger, with an ellipsis. He
then switches to the present tense, waking
up, so to speak, in his own novel. He finds
himself in a cheap attic room, starving at
6 am, so hungry that a newspaper ad for
bread starts to swell before his eyes.
The Hunger narrator was one of the first
in a parade of alienated moderns beginning
with Baudelaire and Raskolnikov and con-
tinuing with Rilkes Malte Laurids Brigge
and Becketts Molloy. He crosses and re-
crosses the city of Kristiania (Oslo), chas-
ing odd loans and sleeping on benches,
writing in cemeteries and then suddenly
rushing off on an imagined errand. The
novel is set not so much in the city as in the
narrators mind. Its divided into four al-
most interchangeable parts, the only rising
action being the narrators deepening debts.
At the end of every section, he gets some
moneybut by the beginning of the next,
hes broke.
Brandes, the critic Hamsun most wanted
to hear from, confessed that he found the
book monotonous. A reader today might
disagree: Beckett and Camus have taught
us to read similar tales with far less incident
and overt emotion than Hamsun unself-
consciously provides. But he felt he had to
defend himself: I have avoided all the usual
stuff about suicidal thoughts, weddings,
trips to the country and dances up at the
mansion house. This is too cheap for me.
What fascinates me is the endless motion
of my own mind.
At a cerebral level, the Hunger narrator
enjoys his crises: I had passed over into the
sheer madness of hunger; I was empty and
without pain and my thoughts were run-
ning riot. But occasional euphoria is inci-
dental to the narrators soaring stubborn-
ness about his situation. So many chances
slip through his fingershe puts the wrong
date on an important job application; he
turns up his nose at a loan; he bypasses a
homeless shelters free morning meal in
order to maintain the illusion that he is an
important journalist who stayed up all night
at an expensive club and lost his key. Every-
thing becomes a test of pride.
H
unger is available in two recent Eng-
lish editions. Sverre Lyngstads trans-
lation forms the initial number in an
ongoing project, including eight
novels so far, that gives us a unified
English Hamsun for the first time. The
other edition, a reprint of Robert Blys 1967