DANIEL REES Hunger and Modern Writing Melville, Kafka, Hamsun, and Wright DANIEL REES DANIEL Hunger and Modern Writing Melville, Kafka, Hamsun, and Wright Inauguraldissertation zur Erlangung des Doktorgrades der Philosophie an der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München vorgelegt von Daniel Rees aus Guelph, Ontario, Kanada 2015 Erstgutachter: Prof. Dr. Klaus Benesch Zweitgutachter: PD Dr. Sascha Pöhlmann Datum der mündlichen Prüfung: 23.01.2015 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. Hunger is a flexible term, and may therefore be used in conjunction with a range of diverse and often contentious issues and themes. The subject of hunger is found in an expansive field of works that appear to gravitate inexorably toward each other: the literature of hunger strikes, religious fasting, anorexia, poverty, famine, and the Third World may be found alongside a range of works of utopian visions and political ideologies.1 Hunger affects nearly all aspects of human life 1 The broad socio-political and historical relevance of hunger has been addressed in James Vernon’s Hunger: A Modern History, for instance, where Vernon examines the shift in the perception of hunger as being an individual problem to the perception of it being a matter of politics, as well as the view that the poor and underfed were no longer simply idle, but victims of forces beyond their control. Vernon sees hunger as a material and cultural phenomenon, and yet argues that it has increasingly developed a strong political dimension, as food and nutritional matters have become entrenched in issues of class. He juxtaposes the theories of two prominent economists, Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus, and their conflicting explanations of the relevant cause of hunger and of hunger’s existence as a human or divine force. He also charts the late 18th-century devel- opment of the separation of a collective mass of individuals into the three distinct ontological domains of politics, economics, and society and shows how this came to affect the discussion and contextualization of hunger in cultural discourse (see Vernon 2007).