The Kristiania (Oslo) of Knut Hamsun is a much different place than that of Norwegian writers who emerged not two decades before him. It is not so much that Bjørnson, Lie, Kielland, and Ibsen do not show some of the darker side of life; they do. (Though consider, as I pointed out in my review of Jonas Lie’s The Visionary, how the protagonist’s mental illness is so much tamer than author’s own real life mental illness.) But in Hunger (1892), Hamsun shows us the trevails of a young man for whom the darker side of life *is* life; darkness and the injustice of poverty are not a deviation for Hamsun, but rather a daily reality.

Bourgeois, this book is not. We see our protagonist making material trade-offs in the first chapter: he sells his waistcoat to buy a meal, then realizes he left his only pencil for writing the articles he lives on inside that waistcoat, then has to go back to the pawnbroker to retrieve his pencil, revolving in his head all the while how he will retrieve it while not seeming ridiculous, while not making his poverty known. Then, when he sets out to write something saleable, he is too distracted to write, all organized thought flees him. This is a strikingly true-to-life depiction of life as a poor writer; it hides nothing; it calls shenanigans on the politics of respectability as it had heretofore governed the plotting of a novel–a starving writer scans newspaper ads, stalks women, and runs back to a pawnbroker to retrieve his pencil from his jacket pocket? Isn’t this all beneath the dignity of fiction? But Hunger proves that the dignity of fiction is a shibboleth, that writers need not present the surface-level reality of their characters as pleasant; if that surface level is unpleasant, then it is not out-of-bounds to minutely show what’s true.

It is no surprise Hunger scandalized the Norwegian public upon its release, nor that modern readers often find the book unpleasant to read. The book committed a cardinal sin which still retains some element of taboo, even today: namely, Hamsun refuses to clean up reality and make it dignified. It is still the case that a writer’s affect determines our perceptions of him or her; it is still the case that poverty is something we’d rather look away from like a blinding sun. (As I mentioned in a review of Robert Walser’s The Tanners, the protagonist of that book goes to great lengths to distract himself from it, even as he himself was its victim.)

Hamsun is often described as one of the earliest Modernists (though, to be sure, Flaubert and the Goncourts preceded him), though the manner of Hamsun’s Modernism differs from theirs. Flaubert showed the wild fancies that a French country woman might entertain, how the earthiness of her actual life might feed the glamor of an imagined one. The Goncourts are naturalists of a different stamp: they wish to present a particularly granular take on reality. I am not altogether certain that Hamsun can be called a Modernist in this French tradition; the psychology in the later Dostoyevsky obviously influenced him–but not the heteroglossian dialogue–so it is hard to say (as far as I’ve gotten) if Hamsun has any other tools of Modernism to deploy. He is modern in what he is willing to put on page, what he does not keep concealed.