"The Lord stuck His finger in the net of my nerves": Knut Hamsun's starving man argues with God in the Bible's own words
A passage from Part I of Knut Hamsun's Hunger (1890), in George Egerton's 1899 English, with a close read of a starving man who borrows the Bible's cadence to put his case against God.
Knut Hamsun's Hunger (1890) is a novel about a hungry man in a city that has plenty, and it is told from inside his head. Hamsun had spent several years in America doing odd jobs before he came home to Norway and wrote it, drawing on his own lean years in Kristiania, the city now called Oslo; the book appeared in 1890 and made his name at once 12.
The passage below comes from the first of the novel's four parts. The narrator has no money and has gone hungry for weeks, and he has walked up to a park above the city and taken a seat on a bench. There he puts his case to God, and then he reaches for the only language of argument he owns 3.
The English words are George Egerton's, from the first translation of the novel into English, published in 1899. The text quoted here is the 1920 New York printing, which is complete; the American sixth printing of 1921 cut about three pages from it 3.
Passage
I sat there on the seat and pondered over all this, and grew more and more bitter against God for His prolonged inflictions. If He meant to draw me nearer to Him, and make me better by exhausting me and placing obstacle after obstacle in my way, I could assure Him He made a slight mistake. And, almost crying with defiance, I looked up towards Heaven and told Him so mentally, once and for all.Fragments of the teachings of my childhood ran through my memory. The rhythmical sound of Biblical language sang in my ears, and I talked quite softly to myself, and held my head sneeringly askew. Wherefore should I sorrow for what I eat, for what I drink, or for what I may array this miserable food for worms called my earthy body? Hath not my Heavenly Father provided for me, even as for the sparrow on the housetop, and hath He not in His graciousness pointed towards His lowly servitor? The Lord stuck His finger in the net of my nerves gently — yea, verily, in desultory fashion — and brought slight disorder among the threads. And then the Lord withdrew His finger, and there were fibres and delicate root-like filaments adhering to the finger, and they were the nerve-threads of the filaments. And there was a gaping hole after the finger, which was God's finger, and a wound in my brain in the track of His finger. But when God had touched me with His finger, He let me be, and touched me no more, and let no evil befall me; but let me depart in peace, and let me depart with the gaping hole. And no evil hath befallen me from the God who is the Lord God of all Eternity.— Knut Hamsun, Hunger (Sult, Copenhagen: P. G. Philipsens Forlag, 1890), Part I; translated by George Egerton (1899), text of the 1920 New York printing (Alfred A. Knopf). Quoted from Project Gutenberg ebook 76692 and checked against a scan of that printing 34. Printed as it stands, with the printer's spaced dashes kept; where a modern transcription reads "earthly" at my earthy body, the 1920 printing reads "earthy".
Gloss
- "Wherefore … Hath not my Heavenly Father provided for me, even as for the sparrow on the housetop" — "Wherefore" is the King James Bible's word for "why", and the whole sentence is scripture assembled from memory. The Sermon on the Mount tells its listeners, "Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink"; the psalmist calls himself "as a sparrow alone upon the house top" 5. The Bible puts these questions expecting agreement. A starving man puts the same questions expecting nothing, and that difference turns the sentence into an accusation.
- "in desultory fashion" — Desultory means passing from one thing to another without order or rational connection 6. It is a Latinate literary word of the 1890s, and it lands in the middle of a sentence built to sound like the Bible: the moment the borrowed liturgy slips back into the narrator's own century. The Norwegian behind that phrase is lempeligt, ganske løseligt, "gently, quite casually", and Egerton's "yea, verily" has nothing under it in the original 7.
- "this miserable food for worms called my earthy body" — Hamsun's Norwegian is den usle Maddiksæk kaldet mit jordiske Legem: the wretched food-bag called my earthly body 7. Egerton's "earthy" is the King James word for the stuff the first man was made of — "the first man is of the earth, earthy" (1 Corinthians 15:47) — and "food for worms" points at Job, who expects that "after my skin worms destroy this body" (Job 19:26) 5. In her hands the sentence grows more scriptural than the Norwegian it translates.
Close read
The passage announces its own device two sentences before using it. Fragments of the teachings of my childhood ran through my memory. The rhythmical sound of Biblical language sang in my ears. Hamsun has just shown the narrator complaining to God in the flat modern accent of a man filing a grievance — "I could assure Him He made a slight mistake" — and now tells the reader that a second voice is on its way, arriving as sound before it arrives as sense. The narrator recites it with his head tilted: "I talked quite softly to myself, and held my head sneeringly askew."
Then the register changes, and the change is done with grammar. "Wherefore" is the Bible's "why". "Hath not my Heavenly Father provided for me" is the shape of a question the Bible answers with yes, asked by a man on an empty stomach. The borrowed voice even supplies its own small creature, the sparrow, to set beside "this miserable food for worms called my earthy body".
The writing then does something more deliberate than parody. God "stuck His finger in the net of my nerves gently — yea, verily, in desultory fashion — and brought slight disorder among the threads." To say that something touches a nerve is worn-out, ordinary speech. Hamsun takes that figure literally: he gives the nerve a finger, and then he follows the finger's consequences the way a body would. The finger withdraws and material comes with it — "there were fibres and delicate root-like filaments adhering to the finger" — and what stays behind is "a gaping hole after the finger … and a wound in my brain in the track of His finger."
Those sentences are built the way the King James Bible builds them, on a chain of "And … And … But … And", and the word "finger" comes round five times in four sentences. A hole in the brain therefore arrives in the metre of liturgy. The last line works the same turn on the Bible's closing formula: "let me depart in peace, and let me depart with the gaping hole. And no evil hath befallen me from the God who is the Lord God of all Eternity." Every word of the consolation is in place, and the wound sits inside it. The critic James Wood calls this narrator's performance "a grotesque parody of the traditional Christian posture of martyrdom, of fasting and solitude", which is what the passage stages: the fasting is real, the martyrdom is quoted 1.
Part of that scriptural texture belongs to the translator. Egerton's "yea, verily" has nothing under it in the Norwegian, and the housetop she gives the sparrow comes from Psalm 102 rather than from Hamsun, whose birds are "sparrows under the sky" 7. The device is Hamsun's — he writes a man reciting — and the English carries it one register higher than the original.
Why it still matters
Hamsun set out his own programme in 1890, the year Hunger appeared: a writer should describe "the whisper of the blood, the entreaty of the bones", the unconscious life of the mind, and treat the movement of a nervous system as proper subject matter for a novel 2. The passage above is that programme performed. Fiction before it could report that a man was hungry; this reports what hunger does to his sentences.
The technique became common property. Hamsun pioneered the interior monologue and the stream of consciousness that readers now connect with Joyce, Woolf and Proust, and his influence runs through Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka and Ernest Hemingway 2. Isaac Bashevis Singer went further in a preface to a later translation: "The whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun" 1. Kafka is the name critics reach for most often, because this novel's interior monologue and strange logic point forward to his 1.
The book's subject holds its force for a plain reason: a person with no money and no food in a city that has plenty, working out how to keep his dignity. Hamsun's narrator refuses food that is offered to him and refuses to admit what he has become, and the passage above is one of the shapes that refusal takes — a proud man arguing with the order of the world instead of begging from it.
The author is the harder matter. Hamsun supported Hitler and the German occupation of Norway, gave his Nobel medal to Joseph Goebbels, and was charged with treason after the war; the court fined him and left him unconvicted, citing his age and his mental condition 2. Hunger was written fifty years before any of that. Both facts stay on the record: the novel that helped open a century of psychological fiction, and the old man who ended his life in disgrace.
Reflection
The narrator has gone hungry for weeks, and when he finally complains, he does it in scripture — a language he was taught as a child and, by this point in his life, has stopped believing. When you are at your worst, what inherited language do you reach for, and what does it let you say that your own words cannot?
References
- 1Wikipedia: Hunger (Hamsun novel)
en.wikipedia.org
- 2Wikipedia: Knut Hamsun
en.wikipedia.org
- 3Project Gutenberg: Hunger, by Knut Hamsun
gutenberg.org
- 4
- 5
- 6Wiktionary: desultory
en.wiktionary.org
- 7
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