Our Hunger for Stories, Stories of Our Hunger
The literary critic Hillis Miller (1990) has examined the eternal human hunger for stories by asking three foundational questions: Why do we need stories at all? Why do we need the same story over and over? Why do we always need more stories? while around the same time, the cognitive scientist, Daniel Dennett (1991), claimed that it was as natural for humans to tell stories as it was for beavers to build dams and for birds to build nests. Humans were, in effect, ‘wired’ by nature to tell stories in order to fashion their cognitive environments. In this section, we combine the views of Miller and Dennett to specifically focus on stories of hunger, based on ongoing archival work and fieldwork here in India.
Two texts on Hunger
A poem · a page of fiction
Hunger
It was hard to believe the flesh was heavy on my back. The fisherman said: Will you have her, carelessly, trailing his nets and his nerves, as though his words sanctified the purpose with which he faced himself. I saw his white bone thrash his eyes. I followed him across the sprawling sands, my mind thumping in the flesh’s sling. Hope lay perhaps in burning the house I lived in. Silence gripped my sleeves; his body clawed at the froth his old nets had only dragged up from the seas. In the flickering dark his hut opened like a wound. The wind was I, and the days and nights before. Palm fronds scratched my skin. Inside the shack an oil lamp splayed the hours bunched to those walls. Over and over the sticky soot crossed the space of my mind. I heard him say: My daughter, she’s just turned fifteen… Feel her. I’ll be back soon, your bus leaves at nine. The sky fell on me, and a father’s exhausted wile. Long and lean, her years were cold as rubber. She opened her wormy legs wide. I felt the hunger there, the other one, the fish slithering, turning inside.
Hunger
“What was it he had called me? Idiot? I would show that policeman what it meant to call me an idiot. Then I turned around and ran back down the street. I felt fiery hot with anger. My God, what weird things you get into! I said angrily to myself—running like a madman on wet streets when it is black as pitch!
The pains of hunger were unbearable and never let me alone. I swallowed spit over and over to take the edge off, and I felt it did some good. I had had very little to eat generally for several weeks, even before this current trouble, and my strength now was falling off noticeably. Whenever I had been lucky and scraped up five kroner by some maneuver or other, the money never managed to last long enough to get me back on my feet before a new famine fell on me.
How could it be that nothing ever turned up for me! Didn’t I have the same right to life as anybody else, Pascha, the rarebook seller, for example, or Hennechen, the steamship clerk? And didn’t I have shoulders like a giant and two strong arms for work, and hadn’t I in fact tried to get a job chopping wood on Møller Street to earn my bread? Was I lazy? Hadn’t I applied for jobs… and worked night and day like a madman? And hadn’t I lived like a miser, eaten bread and milk when I was rich, bread when I wasn’t, and gone hungry when I had nothing? Did I live in a hotel, did I have a suite of rooms on the second floor? I lived in a shack, a loft, in a tinsmith’s shop deserted by both God and man since last winter because snow came in.
