The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Knut Hamsun · Sult · a novel in four numbered parts, with no chapters within them · P. G. Philipsen, Copenhagen, 1890, after a fragment of the opening printed anonymously in Ny Jord in 1888 · scored on Hamsun’s Dano-Norwegian, read from knowledge, with Sverre Lyngstad’s translation (1996) beside it for sense and Robert Bly’s (1967) for comparison; no text in hand, the original quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s plain English beneath, and no translation quoted
Mode
First-person novel of consciousness; psychological study, comedy of compulsive invention and record of starvation in one voice
Mythos
The starving artist, the ascetic in the desert, Job railing at a silent God, the city as a labyrinth no one leaves unmarked: patterns evoked at the edge of a particular case
Phase
Some months of one autumn and winter in Kristiania, in four cycles of starvation, delirium and reprieve, closing on the narrator’s departure by sea
Presentation
Four numbered parts with no chapters within them; first person throughout, in a past tense that slides without warning into the present; the narrator unnamed
Register
From the exact record of physical sensation through farce at a bench and a pawnshop to delirium in a dark cell and a curse thrown at God, held in one register of nervous exaltation
Scale
One young writer, the strangers he meets in the streets, a young woman he follows, an editor, a policeman, a landlady’s household, in one city
Governing Proposition
A young writer, never named, goes about starving in Kristiania through some months of one autumn and winter, pawning what he has, writing articles that are turned down, lying to strangers, refusing the charity he begs for, following a young woman he names Ylajali, and spending a night in a police cell under a false name, until at the close he signs on a ship bound out of the fjord. The wager of the book is that a novel can drop plot, development and thesis and be made of the nerves in motion, and that a mind deprived of the body’s support, split into an observer and a performer, can be shown from inside as the source of its own ruin.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Det var i den Tid, jeg gik omkring og sulted i Kristiania, denne forunderlige By, som ingen forlader, før han har faaet Mærker af den”
(It was in the time I went about starving in Kristiania, that strange city no one leaves before it has set its marks on him). The book begins in the past tense and at a distance, as a time looked back on, and the distance will not hold. The narrator is a young man who writes, in Kristiania, the city now called Oslo, over some months of one autumn and winter. He is never named. He has no money, and he goes about the streets in search of a little, of a meal, of a room.
Hamsun published Sult in full in 1890, with P. G. Philipsen in Copenhagen; a fragment of the opening had appeared, anonymously, in the Danish journal Ny Jord two years before. It was a first novel by an unknown, written after years of failure. It is short, and in four numbered parts with no chapters within them. Each part is a single cycle of starvation, delirium and brief reprieve, and each ends in a remission, a sale, a loan, a room, that fails at the start of the next.
The Scandinavian novel of that year was Zola’s and Kielland’s, the novel of the Breakthrough, with a plot and a social problem to argue. In the same year Hamsun’s essay “Fra det ubevidste Sjæleliv”
(From the unconscious life of the mind) called for something else, a fiction of the nerves, and Sult is that fiction made. It has no plot, no development and no thesis. Its events are chosen for what they do to one mind, and the city of its first sentence, which marks everyone who leaves it, is not cruel to him. It is indifferent.
Movement II
He lives by what he can pawn and what he can write. The waistcoat goes to the pawnshop. He writes articles and takes them to the editor called the Commander, and they are turned down. In the street he chews shavings to cheat his stomach, and the taste of them is set down exactly, as the weakness in his knees is set down. The body is recorded with precision, and the mind that records it is coming apart.
It comes apart into two. One part watches; the other performs, and the performer will not stop. On a bench he meets an old man and tells him, at length and for no gain, the lie of a Herr Happolati and his inventions. He lies in the same way to the pawnbroker. The timing of these scenes is the timing of comedy, and it is exact: the reader laughs at a man who is starving, and the book means the laugh.
The performer’s pride does more harm than the hunger. He gives money he needs to a cake seller. He cannot keep the excess change a grocer has given him, and gets rid of it. He begs for charity and refuses it when it comes. Nothing in the city persecutes him; what he suffers he arranges, and the book shows the artist’s claim to be sovereign over his life as the same thing as his ruin, and passes no sentence on either.
Movement III
He spends a night in a police cell, under a false name he has given the police, “Andreas Tangen”. The cell is in total darkness. He is offered a ticket for a free meal, and out of shame he refuses it. The false name, the pride and the refusal belong to one gesture: he will not be what he is in front of others.
In the dark he finds a word. “Kuboaa”: he coins it, and it means nothing, and he cannot define it. He is seized by joy and terror at once. A word without a meaning, made in a mind that has lost the body’s support, is the book’s nearest approach to the abyss, and it arrives as a fever of language, comic and terrible at once.
The scene is the form of the whole book in small. There is no check on the narrator but himself: the reader is inside the split, and cannot tell, at the moment, what is lived and what is invented, because he cannot. The past tense slides into the present where the distance of narration gives way, and the cell, the false name and the coined word are told by the observer while the performer acts them out.
Movement IV
He follows a young woman, and gives her a name of his own making, “Ylajali”. She is a name and a fantasy more than a person, and desire in the book is what the name holds. The passages on her repeat their pattern, and one or two of them only show again what the first showed: he approaches, invents, performs, and withdraws.
Hunger takes him further down. He begs a bone from a butcher, as if for a dog, and gnaws it in a side street, and vomits it. He bites his own finger to taste the blood. On the steps of a church he curses God. The quarrel with God has the shape of Job’s, and the hungry man in the city the shape of the ascetic in the desert, but the shapes are moods of the delirium, shadows at the edge of a particular case, not a structure the book is built on.
In the fourth part he lodges in a boarding house, with the landlady’s family and a paralysed grandfather, and here the book loosens. The narration slackens into incident, the cycle runs on rather than closing, and the exclamatory crisis that was a discovery at the start has become a manner. The law of the book holds even here, everything seen through the one unreliable mind, but the form has lost some of its grip.
Movement V
The end comes suddenly. He decides to go to sea, signs on a ship bound out of the fjord, and takes leave of the city that marks everyone who leaves it. The decision comes from outside the cycle, the one place the book’s law bends; it can also be read as the last remission, the one the book does not show failing. The city of the first sentence is the city of the farewell, and the reader knows by now what marks it leaves.
The book outlived its moment and its author’s name. Kafka, Hesse, Thomas Mann, Gide, Henry Miller, Bukowski and Auster are named among its readers and debtors, and Kafka’s hunger artist is its nearest heir, the figure of art as fasting made explicit where Hamsun left it at the edge. Henning Carlsen filmed it in 1966. Paul Auster’s essay “The Art of Hunger” read it as a book about refusal and the making of art from nothing. Its ground was not wholly new: Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground had come first, but its narrator argues, and Hamsun’s does not.
Hamsun’s support for the Nazi occupation of Norway, and his trial after 1945, cost his name a generation in his own country, and the book has since been read against its author, for the will to dominance in the narrator’s pride. The politics are not in the book. What is in it is a young man in Kristiania whose mind performs for itself until it nearly kills him, written in a form that lets the reader stand where he stands, and it has been read without break for some thirteen decades.
Act III · The Twelve
The book is built of episodes, which invites the subtractive test, and most episodes pass it, because each is a step in one descent and one psychology: the waistcoat pawned, the shavings chewed in the street, the long lie told to an old man on a bench, the night in the police cell where the narrator, under a false name, refuses the free meal ticket out of shame, the bone begged from a butcher, gnawed and vomited. The repetition of the cycle across four parts is the argument: the mind learns nothing and falls the same way. What the test finds is in the fourth part, the long stay in a boarding house where the narration slackens into incident, and in one or two passages on Ylajali that repeat what the first already showed.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. A mind deprived of the body’s support does not fail evenly; it splits into an observer and a performer, and the performer’s pride, more than the hunger, is what destroys him. He gives money he needs to a cake seller, cannot keep the excess change a grocer has given him, refuses the charity he has begged for, and lies to strangers compulsively and for no gain. The book shows the artist’s claim to sovereignty as the same thing as his self-ruin, and moralises neither. It discloses the modern city as indifferent rather than cruel: no one in Kristiania persecutes him. Held below the top because the social condition is bracketed on purpose. Poverty is a laboratory for consciousness, and what is uncovered is the mind more than the order that starves it.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The elevations are frequent and of one kind: the delirious, comic and terrible at once. In the cell, in total darkness, he coins a word, “Kuboaa”, and is seized by joy and terror at a word that means nothing. He bites his own finger to taste the blood. He curses God on the steps of a church. At the close he takes leave of the city from the fjord. The book rises often, but always inside one register of nervous exaltation, and it never reaches grandeur or the tragic. Its transports are fevers, and it knows they are. The mark is high for frequency and held where it is by range.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The book touches deep patterns and does not build them: the ascetic in the desert, Job railing at a silent God, the artist whose fasting is his art, the city as a labyrinth that no one leaves unmarked. The narrator’s quarrel with God is a mood of the delirium, not a structure the book stands on. Ylajali is a name and a fantasy, not a figure carrying the weight of myth. The starving artist is a myth the book helped make for its successors, Kafka’s hunger artist the nearest of them, but within the novel the particular stays a nervous young writer in Kristiania, and the archetype is a shadow at its edge. Myth evoked, and evoked well; not load-bearing, and so short of the gate.
Score: 7.9 / 10
In 1890 the Scandinavian novel was Zola’s, Kielland’s and the Breakthrough’s: social naturalism, a plot, a problem. Hamsun’s essay of the same year, “Fra det ubevidste Sjæleliv”
(From the unconscious life of the mind), called for a fiction of the nerves, and this book is its execution: no plot, no development, no social thesis, a narrator without a name, a past tense that collapses into the present, events chosen only for what they do to a mind. It is not Dostoevsky’s departure repeated: the underground man argues against an interlocutor and a thesis, and Hamsun dropped both. The stake was real, a first novel by an unknown, after years of failure, published on the wager that nothing would happen in it. The departure held and became a road.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The form is the knowledge. A first person with no outside check is the only form in which the book’s finding can be made: the reader is inside the split and cannot tell, at the moment, whether a scene is lived or invented, as the narrator cannot. The slides of the past tense into the present enact the collapse of narrated distance in a starving mind. The four-part cycle, each part ending in a remission that fails, makes the claim that hunger is not a story with a turn but a recurrence. Told in the third person, or as a plot of fall and rescue, the book would say nothing it now says. Held from the nineties by the fourth part, where the form loosens and the cycle runs on rather than closes.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Evidence, not promise: more than a century of return, and the book still yields. It has been read as a psychology of starvation, as a portrait of the artist, as the first modernist interior monologue, and as a comedy, which is what most first readings miss and later ones find. After 1945 it was read against its author’s politics, critics looking for the will to dominance in the narrator’s pride. Paul Auster’s essay “The Art of Hunger” reads it as a book about refusal and the making of art from nothing. What holds the axis in the low eights is a range narrow by design: one consciousness in one condition, whose depths, though real, are all of a single kind.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The field is European fiction of the late nineteenth century. The intrinsic force is high: the book reorganised what a novel could be made of, turning the movement of a mind from moment to moment into the subject and the plot into its by-product, a decade and more before the high modernists. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is one of the founding books of the modernist novel of consciousness; Kafka, Hesse, Thomas Mann, Gide, Henry Miller, Bukowski and Auster are named among its readers and debtors, and Henning Carlsen’s film of 1966 carried it again. Held below the top because much of the redirection is shared with Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, which came first on near ground, and because the influence ran as much through the persona as through the form.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Survival weighed on form, then presence. Form: the text survives whole as published in 1890; Hamsun’s later revision of its spelling to the newer Norwegian norm is context and does not touch the work. Presence: some thirteen decades of continuous reading in Scandinavia, in print in English and the major languages through the twentieth century, taught as a founding text of the modernist novel. The charge falls on presence. Hamsun’s support for the Nazi occupation of Norway and his trial after 1945 cost his name a generation at home, and outside Scandinavia the book is held more among writers and students of the modern novel than across the wider readership. That keeps it at the foot of its band rather than at the widest figure.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged on the Dano-Norwegian as far as its syntax, its tenses and a close translation carry it; its sound is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged. The prose bears the load. The short declarative sentences, the abrupt shifts of tense, the exclamations and the addresses to himself, the precision of physical sensation (the taste of the shavings, the weakness in the knees, the cold of the cell) make a style that sounds artless and is controlled throughout. The comic timing of the lies told to the old man and to the pawnbroker is exact; the dialogue is spare and right. What holds the axis below the nineties is the narrator’s exclamatory crisis, which by the fourth part has become a manner, and the slack building of the boarding-house episodes.
Score: 8.8 / 10
One law governs: everything is seen through a mind made unreliable by hunger, and the book never breaks it, not for the city, not for Ylajali, not for the end. Take the two most distant elements, the farce of the old man on the bench and the lie of Herr Happolati, and the near-death in the garret. They obey the same physics: both are the mind performing for itself. The ending, the sudden decision to go to sea, comes from outside the cycle and is the one place the law bends, though it can be read as the last remission. The range the law covers is narrow, one mind in one condition, and narrowness is not coherence: the figure is held by it.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Judged on what a short novel holds, and the lowest of the twelve. One consciousness, one city, one season. The mind is held fully; then the body under deprivation; money, credit and the pawnshop; the literary marketplace, in the editor called the Commander and the articles written and turned down; the classes of the city, glimpsed in its streets; the sacred, as the God he curses; desire, in Ylajali. They are integrated through the one mind, not listed. What holds the axis here is what is absent or nearly so: the family, labour other than writing, the state except as a policeman, history, the natural order. Every order present is held in one vantage and one condition. A low mark on a short form describes the form.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve and The Imperishable at 9.0, then The Living Form, Pressure on Tradition and The Made at 8.8. A first novel that dropped plot, development and thesis to write the nerves in motion, on the wager that nothing would happen in it; a text whole since 1890 and read without break in Scandinavia and beyond; a first person with no outside check, a past tense that gives way to the present and a cycle of four failed remissions, so that the form makes the finding; one of the founding books of the modern novel of consciousness; and a prose that sounds artless and is controlled throughout.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.0, held by one consciousness in one city and one season: the mind, the body, money, the literary market, the city’s classes, the sacred and desire pass through the one vantage, while the family, labour other than writing, the state beyond a policeman, history and the natural order are absent or nearly so. Next above it, The Archetypal Deep at 7.9: the ascetic, Job and the starving artist evoked at the edge of a particular case and not built, which keeps the work from the Epochal Gate. The sound of the Dano-Norwegian is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Swerve at 9.0, The Imperishable at 9.0, Pressure on Tradition at 8.8 and The Unconcealment at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 7.9 falls six tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below 7.9, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.0. The work is held below the summit by its aggregate and by the Epochal Gate.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Knut Hamsun’s Sult, scored as the complete novel published by P. G. Philipsen in Copenhagen in 1890, in its four numbered parts. An anonymous fragment of the opening printed in the Danish journal Ny Jord in 1888 is part of the book’s history, not a separate unit. Hamsun’s later revision of the spelling to the newer Norwegian norm is context and does not change the work. Every score is judged on the Dano-Norwegian original, which is not in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. The novel is known episode by episode, and the original only in its opening sentence and a handful of words and names; Dano-Norwegian is quoted on this page only where its words are certain, and beneath each quotation stands a plain English rendering in parentheses, made for this page and not taken from any published translation. Translation · Sverre Lyngstad’s (Canongate, 1996; Penguin, 1998) is the version best known to this reading and was used for sense, because it keeps the shifts of tense and the roughness of the original. Robert Bly’s (1967), which smooths them, was used for comparison. George Egerton’s of 1899 is abridged and bowdlerised and is not the book. None is in hand, none is quoted, and nothing in any of them is charged to the work. The verbal axes are argued from syntax, tense and episode, which survive translation; the sound of the original is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged. References are by part only where the part is certain, and most episodes are given without one. Facts that could not be verified, among them the year of the action within the 1880s, the destination of the ship at the close, the length of the book in pages or words, the placing of most episodes within the four parts, and the source of a much-quoted later judgment of Hamsun’s place in modern literature, are not given.