Hunger

As the news from Biafra daily il lustrates, hunger is more than a growl from the stomach; it is a shriek from the soul. Robbed of nourishment, the body consumes its own flesh until the victim is literally no longer himself.

The first casualty is dignity; the sec ond, humanity; the last, life itself. In 1890, out of the remembered pangs of his own despairing struggle with dep rivation, Norwegian Nobel Prizewin ner Knut Hamsun wrote an acrid au tobiographical novel. Two generations later, Scandinavia's moviemakers have finally caught up with Hunger--and surpassed it.

A rural writer (Per Oscarsson) arrives in the city to become a journalist. There are various kinds of starvation, and he soon experiences them all. First he is deprived of recognition, then money, and at last of enough nourishment to endure.

In most drama, events shape the character. In Hunger, nothing happens--and in that vacuum occurs the conflict between the writer's mind and the world's will. At first he is euphoric. But with steady rejection and growing poverty, he becomes like his pencil, inexorably worn away until only a stub remains. Though there is an abortive erotic interlude with a woman (Gunnel Lindblom), for the most part Oscarsson is left alone to disintegrate in the worn suit and the bare room that are the boundaries of his life. Within them he creates a solo performance of unbearable power. The shiny eyes dance behind rimless glasses, the arguments with God become a grudge fight, consciousness and the dream state mix until the tragedy plays itself out upon the bare stage of a wrecked mind.

Recently some social critics have rhapsodized the circumspect 19th century at the expense of the violent 20th.

Hamsun remembered the abject misery that he found in a lawful, ordered society. His writing gave it voice, and Oscarsson gives it substance--articulating the agonies of all the poor, as when he gags on a bone that he has begged. "Damnation," he cries, "is there nothing one may keep for oneself?"

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