)

[In the following excerpt, Magny discusses the theme of "fundamental solitude" in "A Hunger Artist."]

One must not look on Kafka merely as a spirit of denial, who ridicules all human ambitions because he cannot comprehend their nobility: he feels on the contrary very strongly the nobility of any aspiration or effort, whatever its object. The end of the ape's Report [in "A Report to an Academy"] is full of legitimate pride, the pride of the life that has attained exactly the goal it set and which does not admit the suggestion that "perhaps it was not worth the trouble." Kafka simply refuses to consider the ontological value of the end toward which man aspires and gives us only the most humble, and usually grotesque and vulgar, expressions of it. In Kafka our loftiest aspirations become the ambition of the ape to escape from the zoo and reach the music hall, or, better still, the ambition of K. to obtain an interview with a petty official of the Castle. His work resolves itself into a kind of mysticism without God, in which the hero seeks, almost always in vain, and by most strange and sorrowful means—at times against his will—an ecstasy which circumstance withholds from him. The most typical story in this respect is "The Hunger-Artist," the story of a professional "hunger-artist" who shows himself in a cage from circus to circus, for whom fasting the longest time possible is his life purpose, an end in itself, yet with no idea of accomplishing anything else through the fast. The spectators see merely a circus stunt, a means of earning a living in which it is natural to try to cheat. The most humane among those set to watch him turn their backs, so to speak, in the night and play cards in the corner, leaving him the chance to eat on the sly. The fatality of his existence is that they never permit him to fast as long as he would like, never more than forty days, and that only in the large cities; not for medical or humane reasons, but because the interest of the public would fall off over a longer period. When they do bring him out of his cage, with great pomp, the professional faster is ready to faint, not from hunger, as the public believes, but from rage and humiliation that they will not let him fast longer. He ends by passing out of fashion and dying forgotten, without the public or anyone bothering to count the days of his fast. Here we find the theme of fundamental solitude symbolized materially by the cage (as in the story of the ape) and, morally, by the lack of understanding on the part of the public. A rejuvenation, if you wish, of the theme of the "loneliness of the artist," of the "ivory tower" or of the "Albatross," with the difference that this aloneness holds nothing poetic (it is, on the contrary, terribly vulgar, at once horrible and grotesque); it is the aloneness of the Mount of Olives with the spitting, the insults and the sponge soaked in gall; nor is it due to the public's hostility . . . merely to its indifference, and the inability of the crowd to understand anything; in the last analysis, it is nowhere said that this aloneness constitutes superiority: before dying, the mystic faster gives the key to the enigma: if he fasts, it is because he can do nothing else; it is a fate, not a vocation; he has never found the food he could savor; if he had, he would have gorged himself with it as all of us do. So the insatiable hunger, the divine nostalgia that possesses the mystic or artist perhaps is at bottom only some lack, something unsatisfiable, a fundamental maladjustment, the sign of an imperfect soul.