Or could it be because I had touched her arm?” (Hamsun 1998, 11). The Hunger hero makes an attempt to explain the woman’s reaction: “Suddenly she blushes and becomes wonderfully beautiful, I don’t know why, maybe from a word she’s heard spoken by a passerby, maybe only because of some silent thought of her own. It is interesting to see that the attempts in understanding and the difficulties in accomplishing this belong not just to the history of literary reception, but starts in the work itself. Personally I think it is difficult to follow the reasoning here, and I frankly believe that some of the fascination of Hunger is precisely because the reader’s causal attribution now and then comes to a halt or appears as quite difficult to accomplish, let alone argue in favor of. For example, Atle Kittang writes about this scene in his book Luft, vind, ingenting: Hamsuns desillusjonsromanar frå Sult til Ringen sluttet (1984) and contributes the following attribution: Considerable ingenuity and imagination have also been used to explain the Hunger hero’s strange feelings and actions. Such causal attribution is part of both psychologists’ and literary scholars’ normal activity. Oatley does also mention odd reactive emotions, but only in the next instance to explain them causally when hidden elements and connections are revealed. The entire episode begins quite accidentally and spontaneously. The element of unexpected change is likely applicable to the episode in Hunger, but it is not likely that there was any real project, aspiration or motivation on the part of the main character. Oatley describes reaction emotions in this way: “ Reactive emotions occur when a concern, a project, an aspiration, has fared either better or worse than we had expected” (Oatley 2004, 10). In that sense it is a matter of what Keith Oatley would call reactive emotions. There is little doubt that the reactions are induced by emotional impulses. The emotional reactions described in this event appear spontaneous and physical they are intense and they lead to actions that are difficult to relate causally to the feelings.

Hunger hamsun novel