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Hunger and Modern Writing DANIEL REES Hunger and Modern Writing Melville, Kafka, Hamsun, and Wright DANIEL REES DANIEL Daniel Rees · Hunger and Modern Writing Herausgegeben von Modern Academic Publishing (MAP) 2016 MAP (Modern Academic Publishing) ist eine Initiative an der Universität zu Köln, die auf dem Feld des elektronischen Publizierens zum digitalen Wandel in den Geisteswissenschaften beiträgt. MAP ist angesiedelt am Lehrstuhl für die Geschichte der Frühen Neuzeit von Prof. Dr. Gudrun Gersmann. Die MAP-Partner Universität zu Köln (UzK) und Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) fördern die Open-Access-Publikation von Dissertationen forschungsstarker junger Geisteswissenschaftler beider Universitäten und verbinden dadurch wissenschaftliche Nachwuchsförderung mit dem Transfer in eine neue digitale Publikationskultur. www.humanities-map.net Daniel Rees Hunger and Modern Writing Melville, Kafka, Hamsun, and Wright Herausgegeben von Modern Academic Publishing Universität zu Köln Albertus-Magnus-Platz 50923 Köln Gefördert von der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Text © Daniel Rees 2016 Erstveröffentlichung 2016 Zugleich Dissertation der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München 2015 Umschlagbild: Pablo Picasso, Das Mahl des Blinden, 1903, Öl auf Leinwand, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, © VG Bild-Kunst Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http:/dnb.dnb.de abrufbar. ISBN (Hardcover): 978-3-946198-16-1 ISBN (PDF): 978-3-946198-19-2 ISBN (EPUB): 978-3-946198-17-8 ISBN (Mobi): 978-3-946198-18-5 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.16994/baf Diese Arbeit ist veröffentlicht unter Creative Commons Licence BY 4.0. Eine Erläuterung zu dieser Lizenz findet sich unter http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Diese Lizenz erlaubt die Weitergabe aus der Publikation unter gleichen Bedingungen für privaten oder kommerziellen Gebrauch bei ausreichender Namensnennung des Autors. Herstellung & technische Infrastruktur: Ubiquity Press Ltd, 6 Windmill Street, London W1T 2JB, United Kingdom Open Access-Version dieser Publikation verfügbar unter: http://dx.doi.org/10.16994/baf oder Einlesen des folgenden QR-Codes mit einem mobilen Gerät: Contents Acknowledgements VII Summary IX I. Introduction 1 I.i Methodology and structure 6 II. Theoretical Overview of Hunger and Modern Writing 15 II.i Hunger and the body 15 II.ii The writer under conditions of modernity 22 Part 1: Herman Melville and Franz Kafka 27 1. “‘I would prefer not to’”: Absence and Appetite in Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” 29 1.1 “Dollars damn me…” 30 1.2 The Wall Street lawyer 33 1.3 The mechanical scrivener 39 1.4 Visionary, artist, or madman? 42 2. Alienation and the Unknown Nourishment in Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung and “Ein Hungerkünstler” 49 2.1 Kafka’s modernism 53 2.2 Kafka’s Die Verwandlung 56 2.3 Kafka’s “Ein Hungerkünstler” 69 Part 2: Knut Hamsun and Richard Wright 83 3. Starvation and Self-Destructiveness in Knut Hamsun’s Hunger (Sult) 85 3.1 Hunger 86 3.2 Hunger and subjectivity 95 3.3 “Cheap happiness” 102 3.4 “Noble suffering” 108 4. Hunger and Self-Fashioning in Richard Wright’s Black Boy (American Hunger) 111 4.1 Wright’s naturalism 114 4.2 The grim, hostile stranger 122 VI Contents 4.3 Hunger, reading, and the self-made man 126 4.4 Wright’s American Hunger 133 Conclusion 139 Abbreviations and Works Cited 143 Acknowledgements I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Prof. Dr. Klaus Benesch, for his continuous support throughout my project, as well as for his encouragement, patience, and invaluable insights. His guidance helped me throughout the research and writing of this book. I would also like to thank PD Dr. Sascha Pöhlmann for his perceptive com- ments and constant support, along with Dr. Andrew Estes and my friends and fel- low members of the Research Colloquium at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich (LMU) for stimulating discussions and great times together. I am especially grateful to the Bavarian American Academy for providing fund- ing for my research at the Library of Congress, Washington D.C., and to Dr. Nancy Mathews, Michael Mathews, and Josh Arnson for their warm hospitality during my stay in North America. My gratitude to Dr. Anna Lena Deeg, who was a bright light on many a cloudy day, for her patience, kindness, and inspiration. And, last but not least, I would like to thank my family: my parents, Ray and Denny Rees, for their invaluable help, astute suggestions, and continual support throughout my project, and my brother, Zac Rees, for his faith in my ability and his motivational skills. My deepest gratitude—I couldn’t have done it without you all. Munich, December 2015 Daniel Rees Summary This book examines the relevance of hunger in the writing of Herman Melville, Franz Kafka, Knut Hamsun, and Richard Wright. It argues that hunger is an important theme not only for the selected works of these authors, but also for the way it is deeply involved with concepts of modernity and modernist literature and how it is bound up with a writer’s role in modern society. In my discussion I draw upon two contentious and complex views of hunger: the first is material, relating to the body as a physical entity that has a material existence in reality. Hunger in this sense is a physiological process that affects the body as a result of the need for food, the lack of which leads to discomfort, listless- ness, and eventually death. The second view is that of hunger as an appetite of the mind, the kind of hunger for immaterial things that is normally associated with an individual’s desire for a new form of knowledge, sentiment, or a different way of perceiving the reality of the world. By means of this dualistic approach I address the ongoing discussion regarding the figure of the modern author, a creative individual who strives for indepen- dence of thought and action, yet is influenced by the same biological, cultural, and economic forces that shape the rest of society. By introducing the theme of hunger into this debate, I argue that the interaction between the artist’s immaterial, cre- ative life of spontaneous thought and emotion and the way in which this inner life is rooted in the material world of the body offers an approach to the work of these canonical writers that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. The first of this book’s four chapters examines how Melville draws upon two aspects of hunger—appetite and absence—in his portrayal of the scriveners on Wall Street, and it supports the idea that Bartleby exhibits an artistic temperament. Chapter 2 explores the link between modernist art and the alienation of the indi- vidual in Kafka’s writing, and it examines how hunger is bound up with both the physical decline and the spiritual withdrawal of Kafka’s heroes, which culminate in their death from starvation. Chapter 3 demonstrates the significance of hunger for Hamsun’s narrator with regard to his self-destructive tendencies, and how his rejection of society and willingness to act against his own interests may be read as an expression of Hamsun adopting an anti-modern stance comparable to that of Dostoevsky’s. Chapter 4 discusses how, in Wright’s text, hunger is bound up with self-fashioning, an important theme in the narrative that is also relevant to an appreciation of the book as an intellectual autobiography. All four chapters discuss how perceptions and experiences of hunger may alter reality in the narrative and how hunger impacts and transforms the substance and conditions of the protag- onists’ lives. The works of Melville, Kafka, Hamsun, and Wright can thus be directly linked with conflicting concepts of modernity and its consequences for the individual and the author, as well as with conflicting concepts of a hunger that can be read X Summary both as a symbol of a materialist, capitalist modernity and as a potential cure for its inherent ills of greed and indifference. This book examines the inconsistencies and contradictions in the selected authors’ conceptualization of hunger as both desire and absence of desire, or as both a creative and a destructive force, and argues how these contradictions relate to the broader conflicts relating to the writ- er’s role in modern society. I. Introduction Versuche, jemandem die Hungerkunst zu erklären! Wer es nicht fühlt, dem kann man es nicht begreiflich machen. - Kafka, “Ein Hungerkünstler” Hunger, in the most fundamental, primal sense, is a physical need that is com- mon to all living things. The word denotes a general need for sustenance, and the resulting effort to secure a regular supply of food to meet the body’s requirements is one of the most fundamental drives and challenges for sustaining life. There is, however, another kind of hunger, if we look beyond the reflexive drive of the appe- tite. It is one that belongs exclusively to humanity: the hunger that is inherent to personality and intellect. This form of hunger manifests itself in different ways and to different degrees in each individual. The problem of identifying the object of hunger and its source, of understanding its particular dynamic and all the myriad profusion of places, people, and events that it involves, is precisely an issue of char- acter, of observing the minutiae of a person’s language and behaviour. The ratio- nalization of the term “hunger” as a physical, intellectual, or emotional state, one that may be described in either sweeping or narrowly individualistic terms, offers a range and depth of possible meanings. It is the versatility of the concept of hunger that has motivated the kind of comparative study of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener”, Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung and “Ein Hungerkünstler”, Knut Hamsun’s novel Hunger (Sult), and Richard Wright’s Black Boy (American Hunger) undertaken here.
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