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Okay, to really understand why Hunger is such a beloved novel in the Scandinavian canon, we're gonna need to have a bit of a lesson in literary history. There's a lot of Scandinavian words coming up, so feel free to say them out loud in your best imitation of the Swedish Chef, despite most of them hailing from Norway and Denmark in these examples. History time! The year is 1871. Denmark is in the dumps – they're still reeling from the failure of Nationalistic fervor that ended with them losing Schleswig-Holstein (that bit at the top of Germany with really difficult accents that are kinda Danish) to what is now Germany in 1864, as well as losing Norway to Sweden in 1814 thanks to some spectacularly bad decisions in the Napoleonic Wars. Enter a man named Georg Brandes – a cool, revolutionary critic who took one look at Danish literature versus that of the rest of the world and decided that it was schmaltzy, Romantic crap that would lead to them getting ignored on the international stage. So, he decides to do something about it – on a frosty November day, he delivers the first in a series of lectures entitled Hovedstrømninger i det 19de Aarhundredes Litteratur or, in normal-person speech, Main Currents in 19th Century Literature. This is the period known as the Modern Breakthrough – the one time that Scandinavia got to stand on top of the world, revolutionizing literature and writing cool poo poo that other people wanted to read. People take notice of Brandes' declaration: he wants literature to engage with the world. He wants realistic fiction – fiction that depicts the lives, struggles, and the real debates that people were having. Without that, he argued, their literature would dry up and die. And believe me, he inspired a lot of people. Now, let's head to the North – to Norway. At the time, Norway was still a part of Sweden, even though they'd written their own constitution in 1814, during the brief period of time where it seemed like Denmark and Sweden couldn't figure out what to do with them. Their constitution was neutered by the Swedish kings, who refused to let Norway's parliament meet until 1863, and they were kept as pretty much vassals of Sweden despite some clever legislation on their part to prevent them from being forced into wars they didn't want to fight. In the years leading up to Brandes' lectures/books, they were mostly concentrating on developing a national identity for themselves – Romanticism was big, and some of the heavyweights of Norwegian culture emerged at this point – Edvard Grieg (Best known for his work with a dude we'll be talking about in a second), Jørgen Moe and Peter Christian Ashbjørnson (Like the Grimm Brothers of Norway), Henrik Wergelund and Johan Welhaven (The original Norwegian rap feud), and Andreas Munch. They mostly concentrated on building up the sense of ”Norwegianness” and contributing to the Romantic mood. Well, in 1871, a few folks in Norway took notice of Brandes' lectures. They were getting tired of Romanticism – real tired. They wanted to say something about the state of the world, and the written word was the best way they could think of. These four men – known as De Fire Store, or The Four Greats, are basically the Beatles of Norwegian Modern Breakthrough literature. You see the dudes in my avatar, with fabulous facial hair and angry looks? That's the facial hair of the Four Greats. Three of them aren't really that well-known outside of Scandinavia these days – Jonas Lie, Alexander Kielland, and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. The fourth, however, is pretty familiar to a lot of people – Henrik Ibsen, the man behind such plays as The Four Greats were dutifully praised, elevated to the status of literary giants, and generally appreciated fairly well, apart from the whole ”leaving Norway due to how contraversial some of their works were” bit. But, like all great literary institutions, new people had to come, and that brings us to the reason why I'm writing up this long-rear end post about Scandinavian literary history. Now, Knut Hamsun didn't believe that all these socially-conscious pieces of literature were really doing anything for the literary world of Norway. He delivered a series of lectures, in fact, attempting to ”topple” the Four Greats, attacking their obsession with social issues to the point of ignoring the internal psychology of the main character. Having been put through the wringer – even briefly living in America (and hating it due to how big of a jackass some of the people there were) before a tuberculosis scare brought him back to his beloved-ish Norway – he managed to get a story serialized in 1888 in a Danish newspaper, and later expanded into a full novel in 1890. That story became Hunger. It was bold – a rejection of the Realism that Brandes had prized so much, dedicated to exploring the struggle of a starving writer in Christiania – known today as Oslo, one of two cities Americans know exist in Norway. The whole thing is quite remarkable – one of the earliest examples of stream-of-consciousness writing, a blending of hallucination, symbolism, and subtly-altered autobiography that drew on the author's own time as a starving writer. It was translated, and quickly brought him some degree of fame – a landmark text in this period that was so focused on realistic portrayals of the world. There's one more point to consider, and bring out in the open – know how we were all really, really uncomfortable with last month's BOTM title? Well, I hate to break it to you, but Knut Hamsun was kind of a Nazi. As in, ”sent his Nobel prize to Goebbels” kind of a Nazi. As in, ”The Norwegian government had him declared mentally unsound because he was so embarassing” level of Nazi. But at the same time, we can divorce the life of the author from our enjoyment of the work – Hamsun is really, really complicated as a person, and saying that he should be ignored because of his – frankly incredibly lovely – political beliefs is doing a disservice to literature and to yourself. Hunger is well before those days – I'm not going to defend him, but I am going to say that it's one of the most pivotal works in the Norwegian canon of literature. So, read Hunger, fellow book nerds – it's a drat great book.
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Mar 3, 2015 07:37
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ulvir posted:To keep a Scandinavian trend going, I'll add Doctor Glas by the swedish author Hjalmar Söderberg to the list of suggestions drat, that's the book I teach right before having my students read Hunger. Good stuff there. But, seeing as people want some more modern texts by Nordic authors - as well as women - I'm going to recommend Gerd Brantenberg's Egalia's Daughters. It's a fantastic feminist text that plays a lot with language, and the translation into English is incredible; it's one of those books I teach to help my male students learn about feminism; the entire premise of the novel is a world of reversed gender norms, with the language modified to match, and it plays with this by rewriting the first chapter in more familiar language, without the reversed gender elements. It can be a bit heavy-handed, but it's a fantastic novel. Otherwise, Karin Boye's Kallocain is a fantastic dystopian novel from 1940 that deals with questions of identity and the subsumption of individuality by the collective, plus there's an acceptable translation available for free online. It's a hell of a novel.
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Mar 22, 2015 04:39
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ulvir posted:What level do you teach? Upper secondary school or university? University: general Nordic literature in translation course for non-majors that gives a broad survey of 20th century texts to provide a nice overview of some of the major authors of the period, as well as some personal preferences that I feel give a good idea of currents in Nordic lit. Might be adding some Tranströmer this semester now that I've had time to work with his poetry a bit more.
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Mar 23, 2015 01:06
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