Abstract
Abstract By tracing an alternative aesthetics of decomposition and fragmentation, this article offers a new understanding of the literary and poetological strategies Knut Hamsun uses to create a disintegrating text cosmos wherein the idea of ‘creation out of nothing’ (creatio ex nihilo) is one key to artistic originality. The article explores the interdependence of different notions of decline and shows that the image of the (biblical) fall is particularly important to the poetics and aesthetic structure of Hamsun’s Hunger (Sult, 1890). Around 1900, ideas of wholeness crumble, a decomposition which is reflected in the well-established philosophical and anthropological experiments of Nietzsche, Bourget and Simmel. Taking some of their aesthetic assumptions as a point of departure, the present paper argues that Hamsun’s novel offers an aesthetic variation on the decline of unity-based concepts, ranging from the subject to religious belief as well as to traditional storytelling.
Highlights
By tracing an alternative aesthetics of decomposition and fragmentation, this article offers a new understanding of the literary and poetological strategies Knut Hamsun uses to create a disintegrating text cosmos wherein the idea of ‘creation out of nothing’ is one key to artistic originality
The article explores the interdependence of different notions of decline and shows that the image of the fall is important to the poetics and aesthetic structure of Hamsun’s Hunger (Sult, 1890)
Around 1900, ideas of wholeness crumble, a decomposition which is reflected in the well-established philosophical and anthropological experiments of Nietzsche, Bourget and Simmel. Taking some of their aesthetic assumptions as a point of departure, the present paper argues that Hamsun’s novel offers an aesthetic variation on the decline of unity-based concepts, ranging from the subject to religious belief as well as to traditional storytelling
Summary
In a crucial passage which anticipates in nuce the master plan of the novel, the Christian phrase evoking the sacrificial Lamb of God “who takes away the sin of the world”,22 and the description of the incipient bodily and mental decay of the protagonist are explicitly combined: What was the matter with me? Had the Lord’s finger pointed at me? But why exactly at me? [...] I discovered the weightiest objections to the Lord’s arbitrariness in letting me suffer for everybody else’s sake. [...] From that day in May when my adversities had begun I could clearly. I pictured a score of nice teeny-weeny animals that cocked their heads to one side and gnawed a bit, cocked their heads to the other side and gnawed a bit, lay perfectly still for a moment, began anew and bored their way in without a sound and without haste, leaving empty stretches behind them wherever they went. (HG, 151) The beginning of this literary case study in disintegration is unmistakably dated back to the intrusion of parasitic microbes into the body:29 “a swarm of tiny vermin had forced its way inside me and hollowed me out” (HG, 19). The fourth stage of the chain reaction, satiation, is never achieved, and the circular figure breaks down and must be started anew, continually spiraling downwards.
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