Failing Authorship in Knut Hamsun’s Sult (1890).

This article compares models of authorship presented in Knut Hamsun’s Sult (1890) against the novel itself. It argues that the experiencing narrator’s aspirant authorship is inhibited by psychological anxiety, created by the conflicting models of authorship presented in the novel: the extremely authoritarian, omnipotent, even tyrannical creative power to which the narrator himself aspires on the one hand, and an exclusively monetary valuation of writing work, that of the city around him, on the other. This conflict of authorial models which blocks the experiencing narrator’s writing efforts is undermined by the text itself, which suggests an authorship atomized by anxiety, where the experiencing narrator’s selective, anxious thinking, his body and the city together generate the text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]