A Hunger Artist

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This article is about the 1922 Franz Kafka short story. For the 1987 Richard Greenberg play, see The Hunger Artist (play).

"A Hunger Artist" (Ein Hungerkünstler), also translated as "A Fasting Artist", is a short story by Franz Kafka published in Die Neue Rundschau in 1922. The protagonist is an archetypical creation of Kafka, an individual marginalised and victimised by society at large.

1 Plot
2 Analysis
- 2.1 Perspective
- 2.2 Economics
3 Themes
4 Notes
5 References
6 External links

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The story opens with a description of the old-fashioned hunger or fasting-artist, who spends his time on public display, behind caged spectacles starving for a cause or for art. He lives his lives there, with ribs protruding, allowing young children to look, poke, and fear his awe, strength, and courage. However, there has been a large decline in these fasting-artists in the last decades. The fasting-artists used to persist in a little cage, watched almost constantly by "butcher" night watchmen who look over him at all hours to make sure he does not escape to find food or eat any droppings left by spectators. The manager of the fasting-artist even watched over him to justify his artistry. Women are amazed at the fasting-artist's ability to sing and starve at the same time. When the spectacle is brought to full effect, after forty days of fasting, the artist is brought to a ring in which crowds of people - especially women - pay to watch him. They even bring him food in order to make him say no. Eventually, a young woman leads him out of his cage to a meager meal. However, why would he accept food after such a long fast when he can make it longer? Eventually, the manager spoon feeds the fasting-artist with food, after he had reached his forty days, and the crowd would cheer and disperse. The fasting-artist then remains the only person left alone. However, as this world declines, so does the respect and admiration for the fasting-artist, and he no longer persists in such a miraculous spectacle.^[1]

Years later, the fasting-artist is placed in a circus, with the animals and far from the grand spectacle of decades earlier. Children still stop and look at him, but do not understand the pain and diligence of the art of the fasting-artist.^[1]

The manager does not take care of him as he used to, nor do the people. At the circus, parents of children recall their fond memories of witnessing such amazing feats of the fasting-artist, and soon move on to other spectacles in the circus.^[1]

The previous days of glory did fulfill the artist; he had little rest between his fasts and looked forward to the excitement of the exhaustion and weakness. But, now, that time is over.^[1]

"Just try to explain to someone what the art of fasting is. No one who does not feel it can be made to grasp what it means. The beautiful placards became dirty and illegible, they were ripped down, no one thought of replacing them; the little board showing the tally of days fasted, which at first had been scrupulously changed each day, had now long stayed unaltered, for after the first few weeks the staff had grown weary of even this little task; and so the fasting-artist did indeed go fasting on, as he had once dreamed of doing, but no one counted the days, no one, not even the fasting-artist himself, knew how great his achievement was, and his hearty grew heavy. And once in a while some casual passer-by should stop, ridicule the outdated number of the board and talk about fraudulence, that in its way the stupidest lie that ever indifference and inborn malice could invent, for it was not the fasting-artist who was cheating, he was working honestly, but the world was cheating him out of his reward."^[1]

Years later even, the people stop looking at the fasting-artist and cease to admire his work. His cage looks empty and the circus overseer wonders what became of it. Upon closer look, he sees the week fasting-artist below the leaves in the cage, barely alive. The overseer tells him he no longer has to fast. However, the fasting-artist claims that he must fast; he has no other choice. He would eat happily like the rest of the people if he could only find nourishment that satisfies him. Nothing has ever satisfied him, so he starved out of necessity. Upon proclaiming these words, he dies. The circus buries him and places a young panther in his cage.^[1]

[edit] Analysis

[edit] Perspective

The hunger artist is the typical Kafka protagonist—alienated, misunderstood, and victimized by society. We can trace several features of the story back to Kafka's life. Like the hunger artist in his cage, Kafka always lived in cramped housing; however, the former feels free in his cage, while Kafka felt confined. To support his family, Kafka was forced to take on an office job he hated, especially since he felt it interfered with his writing. Likewise, the hunger artist must hire himself out to a circus, where his art is no longer appreciated.^[2]

"A Hunger Artist" also reveals Kafka's own preoccupation with food. He became a vegetarian out of sanctity for life, famously remarking to some fish in an aquarium "Now I can look at you in peace; I don't eat you anymore." Some critics see his vegetarianism as the product of his inferiority complex next to his strong, burly father. Kafka was always thin, and in 1917 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis (from which he would die in 1924). Being a vegetarian, some interpret, was Kafka's way of actively rejecting the bodily strength he would never have anyway, much like the hunger artist actively denies himself the food he would never like anyway. Nevertheless, Kafka's loathed his undersized physique and was always trying to bulk up.^[2]

Lastly, several parts of the story indicate that the hunger artist is Jewish, or at least symbolically Jewish. Kafka strongly identified with his Jewish ancestry though he never fully accepted Judaism, and the rift was yet another source of alienation for him.^[2]

[edit] Economics

One of Kafka's major topics in his other works and here is the negative effect industrialization and capitalism has on art. Kafka paints a romanticized portrait of the hunger artist as the passionate starving artist who ignores his destitution and the necessity of a regular job. His cage is his cramped apartment from where his artistic inspiration springs, and he never looks at his cage's clock, that ultimate indicator of economics which signals when it is time to go to work. In fact, he never looks at anything else, either; he has total control over his own starvation.^[3]

[edit] Themes

[edit] Solitude

The fasting-artist spends his entire life alone behind bars of a cage. By choice, he lives life as a spectacle starving. After declining into a circus freak, the fasting-artist dies alone in his cage, unknown to the world.^[4]

[edit] Suffering as art

The hunger artist's art is, at a metaphorical level, suffering. The pleasure and artistry of fasting comes from the free will he exercises in his self-denial and masochism. Though he is confined to a cage, he has complete control over his pain and hunger (except when the impresario manages him), pushing himself past human limits in his constant search for a new masterpiece of starvation. Kafka romanticizes the hunger artist as an alienated "starving artist" who flouts capitalist society and concentrates solely on his own art from his virtual one-room apartment.^[5]

However, the hunger artist questions the importance of his strange art at two different points. He admits that fasting is easy, although no one believes him, and with his dying words he says he should not be admired for fasting; he simply never found any food he liked. In other words, he is by nature alienated from the world, and this alienation causes him to suffer; had the world been a better fit for him, he gladly would have chosen not to suffer. This claim undermines the free will he seemingly exercises in his fasting‹not eating is merely an alienated reflex, not a deliberately chosen endeavor.^[5]

Another problem crops up with his art. Most artists have temperaments of suffering, and artists often express themselves through art to relieve this suffering and share it with others. This sharing can be seen as a noble gesture, but there is also something selfish and bitter about it; artists want the audience to suffer as much as they do. The hunger artist fails to enlarge the audience about his suffering, as it is interested in his suffering only as an entertainment (see The audience's fascination with suffering, below), and he selfishly tries to inflict suffering on his watchers (to make them "endure" what he must "endure"). His failure to make people understand him only makes him suffer more, creating a vicious cycle of suffering. Ultimately, a divide springs up in his art: the hunger artist remains artistically unsatisfied, while the audience leaves entertainingly satisfied.^[5]

[edit] Christ and Judaism

The impresario limits the hunger artist's fasts to forty days, the same length of time Jesus fasted in Matthew 4:1-2. Christ is the ultimate figure of suffering, but the major difference between Christ and the hunger artist is that the former suffered for humanity; the latter suffers because of humanity.^[5]

The two may also have something else in common: Christ was, originally, Jewish, and his forty-day fast was most likely an allusion to the Jews' wandering for forty years. Though the hunger artist's religion is unspecified, Kafka's marginalized, alienated characters are often symbolic Jews. It does not seem incidental that the hunger artist's watchers are usually butchers. While the profession indicates the gluttony of capitalist, entertainment-hungry society, it also recalls Jewish kosher guidelines, which prohibit eating pork and prescribe specific ways to prepare meat. (Judging from the butchers' lax attitude toward watching the hunger artist, it is doubtful they meet these stringent conditions.)^[5]

Christ eventually became one of the most significant people in history by absorbing suffering from others and helping them become better people for it. The hunger artist is referred to as a "suffering martyr," and the first two definitions of "martyr" are noble and Christ-like. A martyr is either a person who voluntarily suffers death as the penalty of refusing to renounce a religion or, more generally, a person who sacrifices something of great value‹often his own life‹for a principle. The third definition is less heroic: a victim, or a great or constant sufferer. The hunger artist fits more readily into this last category, and here his association with Christ ends. No one benefits from his death‹if anything, the audience has renewed its fascination with suffering as it takes in the violent, appetitive panther.^[5]