Article on Nobel Prize Winner’s Masterpiece in Today’s Wall Street Journal Misses Multiple Personality

https://www.wsj.com/articles/suffering-and-anxiety-as-the-crucible-of-art-11596223191

from January 31, 2020

“Hunger” by Knut Hamsun (another Nobel Prize winner): Nameless narrator, a fiction writer, has multiple personality, but not from hunger

The translator’s Introduction mentions the protagonist’s symptoms of multiple personality (without using that term):

“…Any reader of Hunger is struck by a number of truly astounding psychological facts: first…The life of the mind is depicted in Hamsun’s first novel as discontinuous. Secondly…a divided psyche: several selves may inhabit one and the same body simultaneously…While the device recalls Dostoyevsky’s treatment of the double, Hamsun uses it in a novel manner. Often, the self-division becomes the occasion for humorous playacting as the hero launches into interior dialogues between one part of his psyche and another…” (1, translator’s Introduction).

But Hunger is mostly about the effect on the mind of actual hunger and starvation. Which might raise the question in some readers’ minds at to whether multiple personality could be caused by an impaired brain.

In one episode manifesting multiple personality, the nameless narrator—search “namelessness,” “nameless narrator,” and “nameless”—says, “…my confused state was running away with me, giving me the craziest ideas, which I obeyed one after the other. No matter how much I kept telling myself that I was behaving like an idiot, it was no use; I made the stupidest faces behind the lady’s back and coughed furiously several times as I walked past her…I vaguely felt that it wasn’t I…However estranged I was from myself in that moment, so completely at the mercy of invisible influences, nothing that was taking place around me escaped my perception…” (1, pp. 12-13). The “invisible influences” were alternate personalities pulling his strings from behind the scenes.

A “confused state” in the sense of a delirium from malnutrition would have impaired his faculty of attention; whereas, at the time of the above episode, his attention was quite good (nothing around him escaped his perception) (and around that time, he was still getting inspired and writing publishable articles). Later on, when his brain was impaired from malnutrition, he had no symptoms of multiple personality.

In short, the writer in this novel shows evidence of multiple personality, but only when he is not starving and his brain is working normally, because multiple personality is an ability and mental feat that requires an intact brain with good powers of concentration and memory. It is not from hunger.

1. Knut Hamsun. Hunger [Norway, 1890]. Translated by Sverre Lyngstad. New York, Penguin Books, 1998.