A Note on Kafka’s ‘a Hunger Artist, Essay Example

[In this essay, he contends that the story is not so much about the alienation of the artist from society but rather it is about the ways in which art affects society deeply enough to bring all of its members together.]

The narrator styles himself, for example, as an observer of “professional fasting” (p. 268); he describes the events as “thrilling performances” (p. 275) in which “the whole effect was heightened by torch flares” (p. 268); he speaks of “records” (p. 276), “rewards” (p. 276), the “art of fasting” (p. 276), and ” placards” (p. 276); he details, almost too fastidiously, the responsibilities and maneuverings of “the impresario” (p. 272). If the narrator is detached, his “detachment” creates a very curious and problematical pattern. Out of context, his dilettantism could be construed as a pose, taken for the purpose of critique. The whole story, however, indicates that the narrator genuinely subscribes to this value system and considers himself one of the few “initiates” (p. 270) who can genuinely appreciate the hunger artist. Item: every group of people in the story is held up to scorn, ridicule, or sarcasm for their failure to be knowledgeable in the art of fasting or for their willingness to abandon themselves to impulse once the task of “watching” is over. No one except the narrator and the artist, it seems, is capable of understanding; for others, enlightenment is “quite impossible” (p. 268). Hence, the narrator refers to the need of “the masses” (p. 268) to be reassured; and he observes that “not every watcher, of course, was capable of understanding” (p. 269) why the artist “would never in any circumstances, not even under forcible compulsion, swallow the smallest morsel of food.” (pp. 268-269) He is openly contemptuous of the “people who argued that this breakfast was an unfair attempt to bribe the watchers” (p. 269) and preens himself, at the expense of others, by mentioning conditions “hardly to be understood by well-fed people” (p. 272). The artist’s misery, the narrator thinks, is caused by the public’s insensitivity: “So he lived for many years, with small regular intervals of recuperation, in visible glory, honored by the world, yet in spite of that troubled in spirit, and all the more troubled because no one would take his trouble seriously” (p. 272).

But does the narrator actually take the artist “seriously”? Or is he the most extreme example in the story of a lack of seriousness? The latter alternative seems more tenable, particularly in view of the cognitive priorities that are revealed in the narrator’s language. In almost every paragraph, we have evidence of a purely visual orientation and a purely visual perception of art; references to eyes and seeing almost become a signature. Additionally, we have the logic of “good reason” (p. 270) and the conclusions that “experience had proved” (p. 270), implying an analytical approach to reality and an attempt to explain art as if its essence could be grasped by recognizing the “premonitory symptoms” (p. 273) and finding the “profound causes” (p. 273). The narrator assumes that he, like the hunger artist, knows “the real situation” (p. 274); and at one point he actually flaunts his enlightened status: “To fight against this lack of understanding, against a whole world of nonunderstanding, was impossible” (p. 273). Or again, even more presumptuously: “Just try to explain to anyone the art of fasting! Anyone who has no feeling for it cannot be made to understand” (p. 276). And throughout the story, of course, there is a clear-cut differentiation between the ‘T’ as connoisseur and the bumblings of the passersby with their “indifference and inborn malice” (p. 276).

Read in this way, Kafka’s story is not an allegory with cri de coeur reverberations. It comes close, both in meaning and spirit, to Dylan Thomas’s “In My Craft and Sullen Art.” In that poem, Thomas tells us that he writes for the “common wages” of lovers. He does not write for proud men, nor for those who think his art is a commodity, nor for those who praise his craft or art, but for those who are experientially affected by what he has to say, who understand why he is “sullen” and who respond to the situation by taking the griefs of the ages into their arms and loving them, thereby spending the “common wages” not on a work of art for the art’s sake but on the acts of love which Thomas’s art commends. It seems to me that Kafka is saying essentially the same thing about the writer’s concern for sufficient love among people and that he uses the narrator in “A Hunger Artist” to make essentially the same point he had made much earlier in his career in a letter to Oskar Pollack: “What we need are books that affect us like some really grievous misfortune, like the death of one whom we loved more than ourselves, as if we were banished to distant forests, away from everybody, like a suicide; a book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.” Only readers can provide the food that would satisfy the hunger artist, and that food is found in a selfless commitment to the human agony of the world–a total immersion and not merely a spectatorial adventure.

Plot summary of “a hunger artist”

“A Hunger Artist” tells the story of an obsessed man whose profession and art is fasting. In the old days, the hunger artist was a figure of awe and respect for the populace, and staging one of his fasting performances was profitable for him and his partner. People would visit the cage in which he spent the fast every day to watch him as he sat on a bed of straw, sometimes responding to questions from the crowd, occasionally holding out a thin arm to show how bony he’d become, but most often as he simply sat there withdrawn into the innermost part of himself.

We learn that the hunger artist takes his fasting as just that–an art–and he is fervently devoted to his craft. Children find him especially inspiring, even if their elders often scoff at the artist and claim he is somehow swindling them all, but the artist himself takes the most interest in those who are hired by the impresario to watch him and make sure that the fast is legitimate. Many of the professional watchers, thinking they are helping him, withdraw from the cage at night, presumably to give him the chance to eat some food he has carefully hidden in the straw or on his person. But far from pleasing him, these watchers enrage him, both because they assume he is cheating in his art and because nothing he can do or say convinces them that he is a hard and honest worker. He much prefers the skeptical watchers who never leave the side of the cage, who are always on guard to catch him in his tricks. These he respects, and he takes pleasure in proving to them that he is truly fasting.

But even the careless, unbelieving watchers are not what upsets him the most. In fact, he is his own greatest disappointment. Not only is he alone in understanding what fasting actually means–and how easy it actually is–but, he finds that he wishes he could continue his fasting past the proscribed limit.

Because of the public’s attention span–it remains keenly interested in the fast for only so long–by tradition the fasting period lasts “only” forty days. At the end of that time, a great ceremony is held, and the artist is led from his cage (dragged in fact) and forced to eat a bit of food. Among speeches, general fanfare, and rousing music, the end of the fast is announced, and all are satisfied in the end–all that is, except for the hunger artist, who wishes to extend his fasting indefinitely.

For many years the hunger artist and the impresario enjoy great fame and attention, all at once, though perhaps not without warning, the public’s taste for fasting wanes, and the hunger artist finds himself less and less often at the center of attention. When at last it seems as if the revulsion against fasting and the hunger artist have become nearly universal, he leaves his partner and takes up with a large circus, hoping to find peace and quiet and perhaps a little attention–much to his chagrin, he finds neither.

His own cage is placed near the circus’ animal cages, and while throngs pass by him, few, if any, take notice of him let alone have any understanding of what he is doing. His cage, at first brightly decorated with placards and a tally of his days fasted, eventually falls into a shabby state of disrepair. Eventually, even the circus staff takes little notice of him and finally forgets about him altogether. Not at all alarmed by this development, the hunger artist continues his fast, unnoticed and unrecognized, but still hoping to break all past records for fasting.

Eventually, an overseer with the circus spots the apparently empty cage and wonders what a perfectly useful piece of equipment is doing there unused. No one can remember why the cage is even there, but finally someone recalls something about a hunger artist. They begin to poke about in the straw, and ultimately they find the emaciated artist is indeed still there, still fasting.

When asked when he intends to stop fasting, the hunger artist asks for their forgiveness rather than offering an answer. He tells the circus workers that all he ever wanted was to be admired, and when they go along with him and say that they do admire him, he answers that they shouldn’t. Thinking him fully out of his mind, the overseer asks why his fasting shouldn’t be admired. The hunger artist tells him that his fasting is unworthy of admiration because he can’t help but fast. And why can’t he help it? Because, the hunger artist answers, he could never find the food he liked. If he had been able to, he assures them, he wouldn’t have eaten his fill, the same as they. With these words, the hunger artist dies. And with no further ado, the overseer immediately has him buried along with the filthy straw that had lined his cage. The cage itself is cleaned and in it is placed a healthy young panther. At the end of the story, people crowd around the panther’s cage, both shocked by and drawn to the power and freedom the animal exudes.

Comic erudition: R. Crumb meets Kafka by Richard Alleva

But even if the series were a hundred times worse than it is, much could be forgiven it for the sake of Introducing Kafka, written by David Zane Mairowitz and illustrated by–oh, Gilbert finding his Sullivan! oh, Mutt finding his Jeff!–Robert Crumb. Yes, that R. Crumb, Natural Man R. Crumb, Fritz the Cat R. Crumb, Head Comix R. Crumb. Because of his art, supported by Mairowitz’s cogent text (which, not incidentally, insists on the painfully comic aspect of Kafka’s work), this title goes far beyond being explication or popularization or survey. Introducing Kafka is a work of art in its own right, a very rare example of what happens when one very idiosyncratic artist absorbs another into his worldview without obliterating the individuality of the absorbed one.

Introducing Kafka works as biography, as critical interpretation, and as storytelling. No more than any of the other Introducing titles does this one pretend to give you what a lengthy, purely verbal book could. But the art work by Crumb produces a version of Kafka’s world–both the real Prague and the strange cities of his fiction–that is simultaneously European and American, redolent of the 1920s and the 1990s, filled with Kafka’s insurmountable neuroses yet also possessed by the all-American, self-help vision of health as an always viable option. Crumb’s visualization of Kafka’s father accurately captures the overpowering, bullying presence of the man, yet this Hermann Kafka is also one of Crumb’s typically sweaty and salivating slobs, with the sweat and the saliva flying in all directions as Hermann bullies and bellows at the dinner table. The women of Kafka’s life and fiction, as drawn here, have exactly that mixture of self-command, tantalizing knowingness, and sly sexuality found in the fiction, and they are also R. Crumb females in their amazonian randiness and thick-limbed physicality. When Kafka dispatches one of his heroes to “Amerika,” the Kafka and Crumb visions become virtually indistinguishable, since Crumb’s native land has always been Amerika.

It may even be unfair to say that Introducing Kafka is the best of this series. The other entries are all previews and purviews of vast fields of knowledge, while the Crumb/Mairowitz masterpiece is an American descendant of its own subject. Though you’ll certainly want to read The Trial and The Castle after finishing this comic book introduction, you may also feel that Crumb and Mairowitz have already taken you into Kafka territory, and parts of the landscape look strangely American.