Bücher online kostenlos Kostenlos Online Lesen
Collected Prose

Collected Prose

Titel: Collected Prose Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Paul Auster
Vom Netzwerk:
My thoughts could not grasp such a thing. It seemed to be a dark beyond all measurement, and I felt its presence weigh me down. I closed my eyes and took to singing half aloud and rocking myself back and forth on the cot to amuse myself, but it did no good. The dark had captured my brain and gave me not an instant of peace. What if I myself became dissolved into the dark, turned into it?

    At the precise moment that he is in the greatest fear of losing possession of himself, he suddenly imagines that he has invented a new word: Kubooa — a word in no language, a word with no meaning.
    I had arrived at the joyful insanity hunger was: I was empty and free of pain, and my thoughts no longer had any check.

    He tries to think of a meaning for his word but can only come up with what it doesn’t mean, which is neither “God,” nor the “Tivoli Gardens,” nor “cattle show,” nor “padlock,” nor “sunrise,” nor “emigration,” nor “tobacco factory,” nor “yarn.”
    No, the word was actually intended to mean something spiritual, a feeling, a state of mind — if only I could understand it? And I thought and thought to find something spiritual.

    But he does not succeed. Voices, not his own, begin to intrude, to confuse him, and he sinks deeper into chaos. After a violent fit, in which he imagines himself to be dying, all goes still, with no sounds but those of his own voice, rolling back from the wall.
    This episode is perhaps the most painful in the book. But it is only one of many examples of the hero’s language disease. Throughout the narrative, his pranks most often take the form of lies. Retrieving his lost pencil from a pawn shop (he had accidentally left it in the pocket of a vest he had sold), he tells the proprietor that it was with this very pencil that he had written his three-volume treatise on Philosophical Consciousness. An insignificant pencil, he admits, but he has a sentimental attachment to it. To an old man on a park bench he recites the fantastic story of a Mr. Happolati, the inventor of the electric prayer book. Asking a store clerk to wrap his last possession, a tattered green blanket that he is too ashamed to carry around exposed to view, he explains that it is not really the blanket he wants wrapped, but the pair of priceless vases he has folded inside the blanket. Not even the girl he courts is immune from this sort of fiction. He invents a name for her, a name that pleases him for its beauty, and he refuses to call her by anything else.
    These lies have a meaning beyond the jests of the moment. In the realm of language the lie has the same relationship to truth that evil has to good in the realm of morals. That is the convention, and it works if we believe in it. But Hamsun’s hero no longer believes in anything. Lies and truths are as one to him. Hunger has led him into the darkness, and there is no turning back.
    This equation of language and morals becomes the gist of the final episode in Hunger .
    My brain grew clearer, I understood that I was close to total collapse. I put my hands against the wall and shoved to push myself away from it. The street was still dancing around. I began to hiccup from fury, and struggled with every bit of energy against my collapse, fought a really stout battle not to fall down. I didn’t want to fall, I wanted to die standing. A wholesale grocer’s cart came by and I saw it was filled with potatoes, but out of fury, from sheer obstinacy, I decided that they were not potatoes at all, they were cabbages, and I swore violent oaths that they were cabbages. I heard my own words very well, and I took the oath again and again on this lie, and swore deliberately just to have the delightful satisfaction of committing such clear perjury. I became drunk over this superb sin, I lifted three fingers in the air and swore with trembling lips in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost that they were cabbages.

    And that is the end of it. There are only two possibilities left for the hero now: live or die; and he chooses to live. He has said no to society, no to God, no to his own words. Later that same day he leaves the city. There is no longer any need to continue the fast. Its work has been done.
    *

    Hunger: or a portrait of the artist as a young man. But it is an apprenticeship that has little in common with the early struggles of other writers. Hamsun’s hero is no Stephen Dedalus, and there is hardly a word in Hunger about aesthetic

Weitere Kostenlose Bücher