The Susceptibility of the Human Mind

The Unpredictable Human Mind - The 'Big Idea' behind Hunger.

"Knut Hamsun's Christian Perversions" by James Wood

In his essay ‘Knut Hamsun’s Christian Perversions’ Wood draws connections between the characters of Hamsun’s literature and the author’s own extremist life. After reading Wood’s paper I came up with the conclusion that Hamsun’s novel Hunger has as one of its main themes the instability of the human mind and soul, conveyed by the protagonist of the novel.

What Wood has done in his essay is convey how important Hamsun’s life is when analyzing and understanding his own novels and his characters, comparing Hamsun’s mannerisms to those of his protagonists. In Hunger, Hamsun creates this demented and unstable man, character that falls into his own lies and insanity, and that lives with a constant lack of food and basic comfort, slowly guiding his mind to ruins. Throughout his essay, Wood discusses the nature of such characters in modern literature and the development and refinement of Hamsun’s “stream of consciousness”. These heroes “invent the scenes through which they move, and thus invent themselves afresh on every page”, seeming only “to be escaping from themselves”. Hamsun himself states he dreams “of a literature with characters in which their very lack of consistency is their basic characteristic”. This lack of consistency, also present in Hamsun’s character, is what makes them unstable and constantly overwhelmed and driven by their own emotions. Wood guides us into Hamsun’s life, describing how like his characters he “was addicted to unpredictability, and to self destruction”.

Wood’s essay develops the idea of one of Hamsun’s themes in Hunger, which he describes as a “deliberate perversion of the Christian system of reward and punishment, confession and absolution, pride and humility”. Furthermore, Wood’s essay has allowed me to conclude that one of the major reasons behind Hamsun’s novel is to describe the instability of the human mind and soul, theme conveyed by the behavior of the protagonist.

As mentioned previously, Hamsun’s life is extremely significant for the development of his unstable protagonist in Hunger. In a verge towards insanity, the protagonist is a result of Hamsun’s interest in the “infinite susceptibility of the soul, … the mysteries of the nerves in a starving body”, interest for which Hamsun himself decided to move to a poor district of Christiania (Oslo), to perhaps live through his characters own life. Moreover, during his stay in America, Hamsun experienced poverty, living in cold weathers and wearing newspapers for warmth. With this one must believe that Hunger is a novel based on Hamsun’s own life experiences, since both are “exuberantly confident, hysterical, skittish and often extremely eccentric”. The instability between these traits is what fascinates me the most about this novel. The psychology behind this must be even more complex in order to make the human mind dominate a person’s behavior so much to make themselves believe what they create, their own inventions, circumstance frequently shown by the protagonist in Hunger.

Hamsun’s own life experiences and interest for the susceptibility of the mind is what I believe as a “big idea” behind Hunger. The further deception of modern life and the parody of the Christian posture of martyrdom, of fasting and solitude, are also very key ideas behind the novel. Nevertheless, the vulnerability of the mind is what drives these characters to act the way they do, making them “sin for punishment, and instead of punishing themselves, they punish other people for not punishing them”, also making them believe that they control their own destinies, which is clearly a delusion.