SOURCE: "A Hunger Artist," in Franz Kafka: A Study of the Short Fiction, Twayne Publishers, 1990, pp. 80-96.

[In the following excerpt, Thiher examines "A Hunger Artist" in the context of Kafka's ironic commentary on the role of the artist throughout several of his works.]

The notion of the "artist" in postromantic Germany could still conjure up the image of a creative demiurge, though Kafka's artists hardly fit this description. They are more likely to call forth a snicker. Kafka is hardly the first writer to present the artist as a laughter-provoking beast hardly worthy of serious consideration; I ask the reader to consider the following lamentation about the poet's plight by a romantic writer whom Kafka read with the greatest interest, E.T.A. Hoffmann: "Once glowed in the breast of the chosen ones the inner, holy striving to express in glorious words that which they had most deeply felt; and even those who had not been chosen had belief and devotion; they honored poets as prophets who could prophesy of a glorious unknown world full of shining riches; and they did not suppose that those who weren't elected might be able to enter that holy realm about which poetry gave them a distant annunciation. Now everything has changed." The romantic Hoffmann thus offers at once a description of both the artist's task and the remote period when the artist could accomplish that task, all of which is couched in a complaint about the present day's fall from that glorious past. This is a familiar historical configuration. Once things were different; the poet-prophet could enter the superior realm of the sacred and the ideal. But that moment has been lost. It might appear that, as modern philosophers such as Heidegger or Derrida would have it, poets always find themselves as those who once had access to a sacred sphere, that once there was no fallenness. But in the present moment artists have "always already" undergone a fall from some moment of privileged annunciation. Or as Kafka put it in his views on our fall into history, poets are always repeating the past's decline. They live it as an eternal repetition in the present.

Hoffmann goes one step further in dramatizing this lamentation, and this is the step that interested Kafka. Hoffmann's speaker, complaining about the difference between then and now, is a dog. He is, to be sure, a rather famous dog, the Berganza that Cervantes first described in a story about his conversations with Scipion (in his Novelas ejemplares or Exemplary Tales) and whose adventures Hoffmann continued in his tale called "Nachricht von den neuesten Schicksalen des Hundes Berganza" ("Report on the latest Fate of the Dog Berganza"). The dog Berganza, like Kafka's horse Bucephalus, is well placed to report on the fall, for this canine has lived several centuries, and in his latest avatar, I think, he has become Kafka's beast artist and thinker of the twentieth century.

Reports on the fall—the fall from true humanity—are appropriately made by dogs and apes and other utterly fallen artists. We have already seen some of these fallen or degraded artists in Kafka's earlier work in which beasts are looking for knowledge and redemption, such as "Investigations of a Dog" (written in 1922, at the same time as the tales in A Hunger Artist), or, even more obliquely, in The Metamorphosis. One of Kafka's most remarkable portrayals of the artist as beast is found in a piece he published in 'A Country Doctor," "A Report to the Academy." On reading this tale narrated by an ape, one immediately wants to draw analogies with James Joyce's portrait of the artist as a young man and the later portrait of the artist as a young monkey by Michel Butor, for Kafka's portrait is situated clearly in a development that leads from a view of the artist as a heroic forger of myth to one of the artist as a dealer in aping junk. But the best starting point for looking at intertextual affinities is again a romantic text, again by Hoffmann, namely his fantasy piece called "Nachricht von einem gebildeten jungen Mann" ("Report from a Cultured Young Man") which contains a letter from Milos, a well-educated ape, to his friend Pipi in North America. Hoffmann's primate has learned to ape all the mannerisms of Europeans of good education and has become a consummate artistic charlatan merely by using the instinct for imitation that causes us to laugh at apes—and which we say is the basis of our art. From the time of Aristotle to the present day Western art has constantly returned to mimesis—imitation and representation—as the basis for its existence; therefore, if the artist is an imitator, he is, as Hoffmann and, even more pointedly, Kafka show, quite literally an ape.

Kafka's ape narrator in "A Report to the Academy" is also a product of a long history, to wit, the history of the ascent of man that Darwin told in his version of the origin of the species. Kafka's ironies about art and science leave one uncertain as to whether he is presenting man as an elevated ape, or his ape as a fallen man. In any case, in Kafka's tale the well-educated ape finds that his instinct for imitation is a part of a historical process for which he must give an account; Kafka's ape is in fact reporting on his origins—the origins of a, if not the, species of ape artists—and in this respect Kafka offers the artist as a strange culmination of one of nature's more bizarre evolutionary branchings.

Beyond Darwin, Kafka's parody aims at the myth of origins itself, at that myth that would assign some end to the retrospective expansion we can create as the tale of our history. Origins are always already given by the desire to construct a limit for the distances we see behind us; or, as Kafka's ape narrator says, in pointing out the arbitrary nature of these creations: "It is now nearly five years since I was an ape, a short space of time, perhaps, according to the calendar, but an infinitely long time to gallop through at full speed, as I have done. . . ." Yet we all believe that in some sense we are still tied as apes to that long trip that took us from our origins, over evolutionary distances, to the present moment: "To put it plainly . . . your life as apes, gentlemen, insofar as something of that kind lies behind you, cannot be farther removed from you than mine is from me. Yet everyone on earth feels a tickling at the heels; the small chimpanzee and the great Achilles alike." Our animal origins remain with us, and perhaps man—or the Kafkan artist—can only exist as a beast. Kafka's ape, like all of us apparently, has become or tried to become a man by imitating what a man is. He has aped man, has followed his animal instinct for imitation, so that paradoxically he becomes a man by using his skills as an ape.

There is one noteworthy if subtle difference between Kafka the artist and his aping creation, for Kafka's correspondence and diaries reveal that his greatest agony was that he could not find the freedom to be, in the simplest terms, himself, that is, the artist he longed to be. The ape who imitates man, on the other hand, claims that he did not begin imitating in order to gain his freedom once he was captured; rather, he merely wanted an Ausweg, a way out: "I deliberately do not use the word 'freedom' . . . may I say that all too often men are betrayed by the word freedom. And as freedom is counted among the most sublime feelings, so the corresponding disillusionment can be also sublime." For the ape has observed freedom in art and has become disillusioned:

In variety theaters I have often watched, before my turn came on, a couple of acrobats performing on trapezes high in the roof. They swung themselves, they rocked to and fro, they sprang into the air, they floated into each other's arms, one hung by the hair from the teeth of the other. "And that too is human freedom," I thought, "self-controlled movement." What a mockery of holy Mother Nature! Were the apes to see such a spectacle, no theater walls could stand the shock of their laughter.

The ape sees our artists as practitioners in freedom, but in their human freedom they are a distortion of nature, a comic deviation that, in some sense, marks art for Kafka as a kind of derisive activity, sacred and risible at the same time.

The trapeze artist, the circus equestrienne, and the writer all use or practice freedom, but they are all deviants with regard to pure nature: freedom is a superfluous notion for a natural being. Our ape narrator, half human artist, half mimicking animal, retains a memory of a nature that asks for none of the redundant gestures of freedom, or the dubious doublings of mimesis. The natural being, like the sister at the end of The Metamorphosis or the panther that replaces the artist in starvation at the end of "A Hunger Artist," has a body that bursts with sufficiency, that has no need of the freedom that the artists need. The caged panther, for instance, "seemed not even to miss his freedom; his noble body, furnished almost to the bursting point with all that it needed, seemed to carry freedom around with it too; somewhere in his jaws it seemed to lurk." The self-sufficiency of the natural world, like a paradise from which we are forever driven, remains in the back of our ape's mind; and once this ape has been put in his cage in Africa, the most he can desire is a way out: he decides to become an artist.

As Kafka portrays the ape in "A Report to the Academy," he becomes an artist who practices Aristotle's Poetics by imitating what he sees about him:

What a triumph it was . . . when one evening before a large circle of spectators—perhaps there was a celebration of some kind, a gramophone was playing, an officer was circulating among the crew—when on this evening, just as no one was looking, I took hold of a schnapps bottle that had been carelessly left standing before my cage, uncorked it in the best style, while the company began to watch me with mounting attention, set it to my lips without hesitation, with no grimace, like a professional drinker, with rolling eyes and full throat, actually and truly drank it empty; then threw the bottle away, not this time in despair but as an artistic performer.

With this acting performance he breaks into speech and into the human community. The way out leads then from Zoological Garden to the variety stage and, on the way, leaving his apedom behind, he can reach the cultural level of the average European. Having attained this level, the ape-artist, now a comically redundant expression, can take up a proto-Kafkan position and sit by the window in his rocking chair and gaze out on that exterior world to which he is a stranger.

Kafka's ape is metamorphosed into an ironic representative of a poetic tradition that once vouchsafed the greatest philosophical seriousness to aping, and his sitting by the window figures the kind of alienation the modern artist feels in looking back on that tradition that believed imitation brought one into the realm of nature. Moreover, the tale is one of several in which Kafka seems to take pleasure in revealing that the artist is, if not a deviant, then a superfluous being whose work can just as well be done by mere imaginings, with no need for concrete realization. This minimalist strategy underlies, for example, the anticipation of conceptual art that Kafka offers in "The City Coat of Arms," a later parable written two years before "Investigations of a Dog." This exemplary text begins by saying that all was going well in the construction of the Tower of Babel, perhaps too well, since people thought more about "guides, interpreters, accommodations for the workmen, and roads of communication" than about actually building the tower up to the heavens: "People argued in this way: The essential thing in the whole business is the idea of building a tower that will reach to heaven. In comparison with that idea everything else is secondary. The idea, once seized in its magnitude, can never vanish again. . . ."

Baukunst—or architecture, as the emblem of all arts—is reduced to a mere conceptual matter. It matters little if the edifice is ever built, since that would entail the haphazard material manifestation of the idea (every century will have its own building techniques, and usually better ones as time goes by, so why be in a hurry?). Kafka pushes the idea of mimesis to a kind of absurdly logical conclusion: if art imitates the idea or ideal, the artist need not bother with the derivative act of imitation, since the idea continues to exist independently. The idea needs no material embodiment, since, as with the concept of the Tower of Babel, it can circulate freely and traverse great historical expanses of time that, in fact, the realized work could never cross. The idea of the Tower of Babel can, for example, pop up in a parable by a German language writer living in Prague at the beginning of the twentieth century. The concept of the tower is clearly contained therein, even if the parable exists to explain the nonexistence of the material realization of the concept, which can then take on other, variant forms of nonexistence, such as the pit of Babylon that Kafka saw as a project that one might have burrowed into existence.

If the artist's creation is at best apery, and in any case a derivative act better left undone, then the artist is thrown back upon himself to find some reason for his existence. Denied recourse to some problematic exterior realm of the ideal, he is obliged to look within himself and find the sources of art in his innards. In a sense all that is left to him is to discourse on his own condition and literally to turn himself into art—as Kafka shows in "First Sorrow," and especially in his initiation into body art, "A Hunger Artist." Art here is the process of art, which is to say, art feeds on the mere process of the artist being an artist. Or one might say that Kafka's idea of art is minimalism with a vengeance: the artistic process is the act that can lead to the disappearance of the artist.

The first story in A Hunger Artist is "First Sorrow," the tale of the initiation into suffering of the fanatical trapeze artist who is the story's protagonist. Swinging on a trapeze is of course a nonmimetic art and offers an ambivalent image of art as a trivial if intense process. Kafka's choice of circus artist is ambivalent in that it seems to stand for the kind of fallen status of the artist at the same time that it suggests that the artist can be found anywhere, perhaps everywhere—always already about to fall into our midsts. Living on the margins of culture, his trapeze artist is not just an acrobat who turns his body into art: he is an artist who does nothing else. Kafka is again pursuing his absurd logic to a reasonable conclusion. For if the artist is an artist only insofar as he practices his art—a proposition that Kafka entertained in several contexts—then the only way to exist as an artist is always to be an artist, that is, never to stop. So the trapeze artist never comes down from his exalted position "high in the vaulted domes of the great variety theaters." Day and night he stays on his trapeze. . . .

The hunger artist, like the trapeze artist, never stops practicing his art. He would fast for days on end, even forever, if he could. He literally uses his body for his art. And in this process of ascesis he has the capacity to symbolize every artist hero from the Christian Creator, who allowed his body to be hung up on public display, to the body artists of the sixties and seventies who, subjecting their flesh to public demonstrations of sado-masochism, proclaimed they were the art of the immediate moment. Or, from another perspective, the hunger artist looks back to these performers of degraded spectacle that were once found in the circus and the music hall, the freaks and the misfits (and historically real hunger artists) who are another double of the fallen artist who can only use his own body for his art. Kafka probably never created a character capable of generating a richer allegory, at once both specific in its description of the artist, and capable of derisively portraying the structure of most of our beliefs in artistic revelation.

Fasting, like all art, has had a historical development—and that development can only take the form of a fall. Once popular, fasting has known the fate of all art forms or movements; it has lost audience favor, and as the story progresses, the reader sees the hunger artist relegated to the periphery of our culture, finally disappearing as his art form becomes incomprehensible. Of course, the reader never sees that moment of great popularity that fasting once knew. This moment can only be remembered, recalled by a narrator who begins the story by saying that "During these last decades the interest in professional fasting has markedly diminished"; and then goes on to say that the art pays little today in this world that is so different from the one in which people flocked to see hunger artists. Like Hoffmann's dog recalling those days when poet prophets were honored, the narrator of "A Hunger Artist" remembers a time when people were not revulsed by the hunger artist, when they "understood" him and his achievement. But, the reader will ask, was there a time when art was not already a victim of misunderstanding? For this is always (and already) the meaning of the present in Kafka's work.

The narrator, like the guardian of the machine of In the Penal Colony, can claim to remember when the hunger artist would spend his forty days before appreciative crowds during the day, and then would be watched at night. At night, to allay suspicion that he might be eating, he would push his art even further, for "sometimes he mastered his feebleness sufficiently to sing during their watch for as long as he could keep going, to show them how unjust their suspicions were." It would seem that the hunger artist was not entirely appreciated in those past days either, for the guards would react to his song by wondering how he could sing while putting food in his mouth. In one sense Kafka is giving a literal representation of the cliché about the "misunderstood artist," but with an ironic twist: this artist is truly misunderstood in that no one realizes that he cannot find the sustenance he needs, the sustenance that would free him from his miserable art. The hunger artist would, he says later, cease fasting if he were able to find a food he liked; so he must bear the watch of those who can, like healthy animals, fling themselves in the morning with keen appetite on the breakfast that the hunger artist buys for them.

Kafka is dramatizing the most minimal art here, the art of turning a lack of substance (or sustenance) into an art form. But for the artist who cannot find the sustenance he wants this is not a difficult task, though his audience may not wish to believe it: "For he alone knew, what no other initiate knew, how easy it was to fast. It was the easiest thing in the world. He made no secret of this, yet people did not believe him, at the best they set him down as modest, most of them, however, thought he was out for publicity or else was some kind of cheat who found it easy to fast because he had discovered a way of making it easy, and then had the impudence to admit the fact, more or less." I quote the above lines because it seems to me there is something devastating about the way Kafka, with an ironic smile, admits that starving is the easiest thing in the world. Starving is easy, and within the right framework—in a cage or a book—we can then look upon it as art. And while I do not wish to run the risk of inflating the importance of my subject—though this hardly seems possible when dealing with Kafka—Kafka appears here to be anticipating the total disarray of our current literary and artistic scene; with incomparably more irony and self-awareness than most of today's artists, he outlines the position of the artist as the fraudulent, the necessarily if haplessly fraudulent minimalist.

The changing historical understanding of art, the changing artistic fashions as it were, gives the hunger artist the opportunity to show the ease with which he fasts, though nobody is likely to be concerned with his record-setting performance. Since the hunger artist can no longer attract "today" the crowds he once did, he can no longer work alone. But a large circus agrees to take him on and places his cage near the animal cages, on a concourse that the public uses in going to and from the main attraction. He thus finds himself unwittingly in competition with the animals as a spectacle. When the way is blocked in front of his cage, people stop; fathers even remember for their children the great feats of hunger artists, but this is of little interest to the children. To increase his alienation, the hunger artist must suffer the nauseating stench of the raw meat that the keepers bring to feed the beasts of prey.

Ignored by the public, finally forgotten by the circus management, the artist fasts on and on until one day an overseer wonders why there is an empty cage standing about unused. The hunger artist has fasted himself into near invisibility. And it is at that moment that we learn that he is another of Kafka's protagonists who, for lack of sustenance, is withering away in spite of himself. As he dies he tells the overseer that he should not be admired:

"Because I have to fast, I can't help it," said the hunger artist. "What a fellow you are," said the overseer, "and why can't you help it?" "Because," said the hunger artist, lifting his head a little and speaking, with his lips pursed, as if for a kiss, right into the overseer's ear, so that no syllable might be lost, "because I couldn't find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else." These were his last words, but in his dimming eyes remained the firm though no longer proud persuasion that he was still continuing to fast.

Like Gregor, the vermin of The Metamorphosis, the hunger artist falls from language into silence and then death because he cannot find the sustenance he needs. The difference between vermin and artist may appear minimal in this awful perspective, but an even more extraordinary parallel is found in their last erotic gestures—Gregor reaches up to his sister with vermin tenderness, the hunger artist purses his emaciated lips "as if for a kiss." Moreover, Kafka ends each story with an image that presents the antithesis of a withered speechless beetle or an emaciated hunger artist; he presents the image of animal self-sufficiency that the sensual sister or the sleek panther proposes. I stress this parallel because it seems to me that these two stories complement each other not only in the way they show that hunger, speechlessness, and art are parts of the same configuration, but also in the way that their final image shows that the contrary of spiritual fulfillment in Kafka is mere animal plenitude. And this is another speechless state, a natural state devoid of the sin of self-consciousness. And, finally, art stands out clearly as belonging to those who practice it as a surrogate for something they cannot name, except perhaps negatively through art.