The roots of modernist narrative: Knut Hamsun's novels 'Hunger,' 'Mysteries,' and 'Pan'

This study argues that Hamsun's early novels Hunger (Sult), Mysteries (Mysterier), and Pan are modernist. Although they were not seen as modernist during Hamsun's lifetime, some recent critics attempt to classify them as such. While these critics' arguments are based on thematic comparisons of Hamsun's works with modernist ones, my study is the first to extensively compare their narrative forms. Such a project is necessary for the modernist assessment of Hamsun's novels because the standard definitions of aesthetic modernism involve, as for example Astradur Eysteinsson and Art Berman demonstrate, the concept of formal disruption of the cultural codes of modernity.;My method is "historical narrative poetics": I compare various forms of narrative representation in a cultural-historical perspective. The goal is two-fold: first, to show that Hamsun's formal innovation arises from thematic concerns and a view of literature's function that he shares with modernists; second, to show how Hamsun's use of narrative techniques differs from earlier narrative aesthetics and corresponds to that of modernists. My approach to modernist narrative poetics is inspired, first of all, by the narrative theories of Dorrit Cohn, Franz K. Stanzel, and Monika Fludernik. Together, they correct several drawbacks of mainstream narratology which prevent us from rethinking the issues of modernist narrative representation-Cohn and Stanzel primarily because they historicize narratology, and Fludernik because she moves most consistently away from narratology modeled on the oral utterance toward reconceptualizing narrative representation as textual simulation.;I find that in Hunger Hamsun enables a typically modernist presentation of the character's subjectivity by suppressing explicit narratorial voice and by extensive use of techniques for simulating consciousness such as free indirect discourse. In Mysteries Hamsun replaces the mimetic image of narrator as a coherent personality with a non-mimetic blend of narrative functions, anticipating a perspectivization we find in later modernist art and literature. In Pan, the form of the first-person narrative reveals the psychological mechanisms of self-deception that went into its making, exposing the story's alleged romanticism as the narrator's psychological construct. This undermines the (neo)romantic overtones of the novel and enables a modernist reading instead.