I’ve started the literature course of my self-constructed program in Scandinavian Studies.
I began my literature course with the book Hunger (Sult in the original Norwegian), by Knut Hamsun. I selected it because a few sites I surfed referred to this particular book as instrumental in introducing modern literature, with a long list of well-known authors who claim it shaped their writing. This appealed to me as a writer, I sort of felt like I might want to be part of that club.
That was one reason. The other reason I started with Hunger is that it happened to be one of the first three books I downloaded on the Kindle, sort of as practice to make sure I knew what I was doing, because it’s the first time I’m using a Kindle. I bought it expressly for this Scandinavian Studies program I’ve created. The other options were Hedda Gabler, a play by Henrik Ibsen, and Miss Julie, a play by August Strindberg. I chose the novel over the plays.
Then, dutiful student I am, I read Hunger. I wouldn’t say hungrily, but with interest. It’s about an impoverished writer in his twenties, wandering around Oslo back in the 1880s when Oslo was called Christiania. The protagonist spirals slowly out of control due to hunger and whatever psychosis plagued him, whether it was his lofty ideals or something medical or both. I waited until I was done reading to look at any critiques and analyses and I haven’t discussed the novel with anyone in any depth, just the basic plot.
I noticed as I read that I began to relate my personal story to the unnamed protagonist, not because I am the same age now, nor starving nor crazy, but because I had once been a young man in my twenties in a foreign city (Regensburg) who was trying to be a writer, living frugally though by no means wanting for food, renting a single room along Hinter der Grieb in a building 700 years old, without any idea about how to sell anything I wrote, doubting constantly that what I wrote was worth writing, and looking in an awful lot of windows at what I imaged were cozy and comfortable existences as I walked the streets in my cheap black jean jacket from an Aldi store, wondering how I belonged in all this, this, world.
Hamsun’s protagonist was far more extreme, the sort of person talking and yelling to himself, unwashed, emaciated, the type of person that puts you on high alert when you encounter him. And I find now, as I start to read about the story, that Hamsun drew on his own feelings of being a wandering writer in a city that didn’t care if he was there or not, an outsider looking in. I bet all those famous writers found their own inner selves in Hamsun’s protagonist, too, and as it turns out, in Hamsun himself.
Fair enough. Now, since this is the first piece of literature of my Scandinavian Studies course, I am left wondering how much analysis I am supposed to do to make the experience academic. I’m trying to think back to high school and university courses. What did we do? Discuss the chunk of assigned reading, usually trying to say what we thought the teacher or professor might like to hear. Sometimes we read aloud in class. In high school we wrote book reviews, at the university we wrote essays.
I’m free from these requirements, of course. I’m the student, yes, but also the teacher, dean, president, and accrediting agency. So I have hit on this: I am going to submit as my homework questions that the story raised for me. Perhaps the type of questions a professor might offer as writing prompts for students. Thank you to Irina Lupu and the conversation we had this morning about the worth of creating one’s own program of study, that is the genesis here.
- In what way is it realistic to attribute the modernization of the novel to a single book?
- As Hamsun was writing the book, did he feel he was doing something extraordinarily innovative? Does that matter to how we perceive the role of the book in the history of literature?
- To what extent was it necessary that Hamsun himself be suffering like his protagonist (since there are many parallels during Hamsun’s time in Copenhagen, while writing the first part of the book)?
- Do authors write as they write because it is how they know how to write, or are they in some sense attuned to “playing” their potential audience? (This actually comes up in Hunger, when the editor of the newspaper tells the protagonist to write something people want to read, to move away from his esoteric philosophical inquiries that the editor cannot pay for. The protagonist assures the editor that he can do that, but … he can’t.)
- Why do we take “academic measures” after reading a novel or listening to a symphony or looking at artwork? Does the analysis cheapen the experience? Does the analysis as a group create unhelpful groupthink? Could we imagine a class in which university students read a book without a requirement to analyze? Could we give credit for such an experience? And does this hint at a need to analyze as a manner to justify the position or status of the instructor?
- What did I miss in understanding this novel due to the number of years between right now today and when it was first published (135 years)? What might I have gained? What meaning might have shifted because I read the novel in English translation?
- One analysis I read claimed that Hamsun was influenced by the protagonist of Dostoeyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. (As much as I remember, that unlucky character killed a woman with a blunt object for a small amount of money and, from that point on, suffered a psychotic breakdown due to his swirling thoughts of guilt – his punishment. If that isn’t the usual interpretation, it’s because I read the book on my own, during that time I was wandering the streets in Regensburg, not as a student of literature.) How might we ever trace the importance of the influence of whom and what we read on our own thinking?