Knut Hamsun. Selected Letters. Vol. II1898-1952 
edited by Harald Næss and James McFarlane.
Norvik, 351 pp., £14.95, April 1998, 1 870041 13 5
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Hunger 
by Knut Hamsun, translated by Sverre Lyngstad.
Rebel Inc, 193 pp., £6.99, October 1996, 0 86241 625 6
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A young man, hectic and dirty, sits on a park bench in a cold city. He is wild, nervous, seems to fiddle with his soul. Beside him, an old man is holding a newspaper. The young man begins a conversation. In its course, the old man reveals that he is blind. He asks the young man where he lives. The young man decides to lie, and names a pleasant square, somewhere he could not afford in his present circumstances. The blind man knows the square, knows the building, in fact. What is the name of the landlord again, asks the blind man. The young man says the first word that comes into his head: ‘Hippolati.’ Ah yes, says the blind man, Hippolati, that’s right, he knows the name, it was on the tip of his tongue. The young man is enjoying this; he froths his lies up into greater extravagances. He reminds the old man that Hippolati is something of an inventor, that he invented an electric prayer book. Yes, says the blind man, he recalls hearing some thing like that. And, Hippolati was for seven years a cabinet minister in Persia, adds the young man. Ah yes, says the old man.

Now the young man, who is clearly unstable, begins to get angry. Why is the old man so blandly gullible? Why is he agreeing to these ridiculous lies? But instead of accusing him of being a dupe, he does the opposite, and bizarrely accuses him of not believing his stories. He yells at him:

Perhaps you don’t even believe that a man with the name Hippolati exists! What obstinacy and wickedness in an old man – I’ve never seen the likes of it. What the hell is the matter with you? ... Let me tell you sir, that I’m not at all accustomed to such treatment as yours, and I won’t stand for it.

The old man looks frightened, and moves away as fast as his legs will take him, running with his small, geriatric steps.

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Letters

Vol. 20 No. 24 · 10 December 1998

Paul Auster’s 1970 article ‘The Art of Hunger’ opens with the fact that Hamsun’s struggling protagonist ‘has no name’. James Wood (LRB, 26 November) declares that his ‘name we fumblingly learn about half way through the book to be Andreas Tangen’. But it’s clear – as early as page 58 of Sverre Lyngstad’s much praised new translation – that the narrator is lying. Indeed, he tells us so himself.

Hamsun’s deliberately unnamed individual, perhaps Everyman, his would-be writer self, seeks meaningful identity. He must stubbornly remake himself. Until he does, he remains nameless. The nuances of naming are important in Hunger. Put on the spot, facing authority (the police), the homeless young drifter promptly and purposefully reinvents himself. He gives the name ‘Andreas Tangen’ (which he at once finds absurd and privately disavows): it’s less nom de plume than nom de guerre. He claims to be a ‘journalist’, which is at least partially accurate as he hasn’t yet published a full-length work; nor had Hamsun. But later, still starved of publication, Hamsun’s protagonist simply ends by drifting off and thus continuing to exist. He exits from city as from book, performing the ultimate confidence trick, writing an end, an escape where none seems in sight.

Alexis Lykiard
Exeter

Vol. 21 No. 2 · 21 January 1999

Alexis Lykiard (Letters, 10 December 1998) is quite right to point out that, in Knut Hamsun’s novel Hunger, the narrator announces his name to a policeman only to tell the reader immediately that he is lying: ‘I lied unnecessarily.’ I had written that the reader ‘fumblingly’ learns that the narrator’s name is Andreas Tangen, with the hope that my wavering adverb might catch some thing of the ambiguity of this revelation. But Lykiard upbraids me, certain that the narrator has no name, and that he is de finitely lying at this moment: ‘the narrator is lying. Indeed, he tells us so himself,’ writes Lykiard. But one of the thrusts of my article was that Hamsun uses stream-of-consciousness, which is generally the reader’s way of divining a character’s true depths, against itself, to show how bottomless character is. Hamsun’s narrator is not re liably unreliable. Thus it seems quite possible that Hamsun’s narrator lies to us at the very moment he tells us he had lied, and is in fact called Tangen all along. It would be just like this narrator to name himself and then tell us, falsely, that he has just lied. After all, 16 pages after he tells us that he is not called Tangen, he indulges in a monologue, which he finishes: ‘My name incidentally is Tangen, I’ve been out a bit late.’ Whether Hamsun’s narrator is call ed Tangen or not, I don’t believe, as Lykiard does, that he is searching for ‘meaningful identity’. If anything, he is discarding meaningful identity, precisely that identity which would enable a reader like Lykiard to pin him down and say confidently: ‘the narrator is lying. Indeed, he tells us so himself.’

James Wood
Washington DC

Vol. 21 No. 3 · 4 February 1999

Where is the evidence that Knut Hamsun was ‘Céline’s great influence’, as James Wood asserts (LRB, 26 November 1998)? Céline scholars, certainly, seem unaware of this: in three volumes of biography Gibault doesn’t mention Hamsun once; Alméras fleetingly evokes a ship in Guignol’s Band, the Kong Hamsun; while Godard concedes that the Norwegian’s habit of novelising his own experience puts him among ‘romanciers avec lesquels Céline n’est pas sans quelque rapport, sur un plan ou sur un autre’: hardly a ‘great influence’. Céline treated practically all his contemporaries with contempt; his only open admiration was for his friend Paul Morand and for Henri Barbusse, whose Le Feu recounts the misery of the Great War, in which Céline was wounded. If James Wood is trying to say that both writers were anti-semitic, sympathised with the Nazis, and were prosecuted after the war, then he should say so, rather than inventing a literary influence in its place.

Mat Pires
Paris

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