SOURCE: "Kafka's A Hunger Artist: A Cautionary Tale for Fausti an Man Caught Between Creativity and Communion," in Germanic Notes and Reviews, Vol. 24, No. 1, Spring, 1993, pp. 9-12.

[In the following essay, Vulpi views Kafka's hunger artist as a representation of the Faustian man, one who "pursues an idea or creates something primarily to please himself, gain power, or satisy his ego."]

Whether or not Kafka's "A Hunger Artist" ("Ein Hungerkünstler") is about the fate of the artist in twentieth-century society has been a much-discussed question. Critic Meno Spann [in Franz Kafka, 1976] comments as follows:

The word Hungerkünstler is misunderstood. The word Künstler by itself means artist, but in compounds it designates performers in the circus or in a variety show like Trapezkünstler ("trapeze artist") or Entkleidungskünstler ("stripper"), both of whom display skills but are not artists. Besides, Kafka never concerned himself with the artist and his relation to society.

Allen Thiher [in Franz Kafka: A Study of the Short Fiction, 1990], on the other hand, states: "The question of the artist and the function of art underlies nearly all of Kafka's work. . . ." Thiher also says that in "A Hunger Artist" Kafka is giving a literal representation of the cliche about the "misunderstood artist."

W. C. Rubenstein [in "A Hunger Artist," in Monatshefte XLIV, No. 1, January 1952] insists that "the hunger artist is the painter, musician, poet or what you will, who devotes himself ascetically to his art." But H. Steinhauer [in "Hungering Artist or Artist in Hungering: Kafka's A Hunger Artist" in Criticism IV, No. 1, 1962] believes that "Kafka is not writing about an artist but about an ascetic saint."

It seems abundantly clear, to the present writer at least, that the hunger artist (artist in the conventional sense or not) is a representation of the Faustian man. He is a relentless striver after something out of the ordinary. As Spengler has noted in his The Decline of the West, our entire culture is Faustian. He claims that the "body" of the Faustian soul "is the Western Culture that blossomed forth with the birth of the Romanesque style in the 10th century in the Northern plain between the Elbe and the Tagus."

We in the West hold it good to ceaselessly strive and to be dissatisfied with any particular past achievement. As he strikes his bargain with Mephistopheles, Goethe has his Faust say: "If ever I lay me on a bed of sloth in peace, / That instant let for me existence cease!" Artist, religious ascetic, business entrepreneur, craftsman, politician—any profession can inspire a monomaniacal devotion. The devotee may be willing to forgo many of the usual familial and social responsibilities or pleasures in order to pursue his goal.

Nietzsche's "will to power" aptly describes the Faustian striver. Michael E. Zimmerman, speaking of Nietzsche [in Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity, Technology, Politics, and Art, 1990] claims that

For him, Will was the unconditioned subjectivity of life which strives to become ever stronger: the Will to Power was essentially the Will to Will, the aimless striving for ever more striving. This ever-expanding circle never opens up beyond the self-contained limits of blind striving. Humanity, stamped by this Will, is reduced to a clever animal striving for more power.

If an individual pursues an idea or creates something primarily to please himself, gain power, or satisfy his ego, then the originator of that idea or creation can properly be termed a Faustian man.

Does Kafka call into question the wisdom of the Faustian man? I think he does. Kafka's hunger artist is a powerful example of a Faustian man who, in his preoccupation with his ego and personal objectives has become irrevocably estranged from his community and the life around him.

The alternative to working primarily for oneself and towards goals which are established by the individual (and consequently often valuable or relevant only to that individual) is to work in community with others towards a common goal.

In his book, Between Man and Man, Martin Buber outlines this dichotomy between working towards creativity and working towards community. Calling the creative instinct the originative instinct, he says:

There are two forms, indispensible for the building of true human life, to which the originative instinct, left to itself, does not lead and cannot lead: to sharing in an undertaking and to entering into mutuality.

Sharing in an undertaking and entering into mutuality are clearly aspects of community. Buber comments upon the isolating effect of individual achievement as follows:

Action leading to an individual achievement is a "one-sided" event. There is a force within the person, which goes out, impresses itself on the material, and the achievement arises objectively . . . so long as he is engaged in his work spirit goes out from him and does not enter him, he replies to the world but he does not meet it any more.

Buber finally concludes: "Yes; as an originator man is solitary."

In order to build "true human life" (or, in Buber's parlance, to enter into an I-Thou relationship with others), the instinct for communion must override the originative instinct: "What teaches us the saying of Thou is not the originative instinct but the instinct for communion."

For Buber "to be conditioned in a common job, with the unconcious humility of being a part, of participation and partaking, is the true food of earthly immortality." And only if the originator has another person grasp his hand "not as a 'creator' but as someone lost in the world . . . does he have an awareness and a share of mutuality."

Even Goethe's Faust ultimately recognized the validity of working towards the common good. G.M. Priest has written the following [in "An Outline and Interpretation of Goethe's 'Faust'," in Faust: Parts One and Two, 1941]:

As long as Faust was striving toward the goal of an ambitious egoist, he found no satisfying moment. To no moment could he say: "Ah, linger on, thou art so fair!" Now, as one of many free and active men, he knows that there can be such a moment . . . Faust has affirmed life; he has done what he never thought he would do. He sees that life can be worth living . . .

According to Buber, even if the Faustian man does seek communion and "strives" to attain it, he will not succeed. For communion means "being opened up and drawn in." The individual, no matter how driven and intent upon it, cannot "produce" communion with others by willing it. The "other" has to readily cooperate, and both must put aside their personal agendas, preconceived ideas, and any previous decisions made about what the nature of the relationship will be and how it will satisfy their own needs.

Communion occurs only when mutual respect is felt and the awareness of the other's autonomy is acknowledged. Communion happens "between" two people—two people who are opened up to it and are willing to be drawn in to it. Communion stands over and against the compulsive yet "aimless" striving described by Zimmerman as Nietzsche's Will to Power. Buber says that

At the opposite pole from compulsion there stands not freedom but communion . . . At the opposite pole of being compelled by destiny or nature or men there does not stand being free of destiny or nature or men but to commune and to covenant with them.

The hunger artist is a most extreme illustration of the Faustian man: as he reaches perfection in his work (that is, as he starves himself longer and longer) he naturally approaches death and thus, not only figuratively, but literally dies to the possibility of communion.

Kafka strongly delineates the discrepancy between the objectives of the Faustian man (with his originator instinct) and the Buberian man (who longs to enter into communion with others) by bestowing upon his title character an activity which (despite all the dedication and gravity the hunger artist lavishes on it) cannot possibly be of any use to his community. Of course this polarizes the two opposing instincts—creation and communion—and eliminates the confusion of ideals, motives, and fears out of which most of us act in the real world.

Many real-world Faustian strivers do produce work from which others benefit. They are undoubtedly motivated by concern for others as well as by ego gratification, and their activities and the vigor with which they pursue them are not inevitably detrimental to their physical or emotional well-being, or incompatible with the instinct towards communion. Nontheless, an unhealthy obsession with their work usually results not in a literal death but in a spiritual stagnation, an atrophed emotional growth, or in the cessation of some process vital to their psychic health.

The hunger artist helps no one through his activity: his work is useless, self-destructive, and arbitrarily determined upon. He acts alone and he alone understands his motives. He is a simplified, schematized version of the Faustian man, untroubled by any vestigial notions of tribal solidarity, self-preservation, or love. In the hunger artist, the striving towards his goal as an end in itself leads to death. He is an extreme example of the originator instinct, unadulterated by even the meagerest appetite for communion. Consequently, he has what would be for most of us the severest penalty imposed upon him.

It is a measure of the maleficent nature of his self-centered striving that the man living solely by this principle must die. And it is a measure of the hunger artist's aberrant temperament that he chooses an activity necessarily inimical to life itself and therefore incompatible with the notion of communion. The very nature of his activity (fasting) prevents him from partaking of life, and from participating with others. To fast as long as possible is to consume life in order to reach a goal. Thus life is merely the means of attaining a desired end, and this particular end is attained only when life is completely consumed. To apply this attitude to any activity necessarily glorifies the end and holds the means valuable only in its function as a method of obtaining that end. Thus the originator instinct places priority upon the product of its endeavors, which is, inescapably, a non-human entity. The instinct towards communion, however, finds value in the process that generates the product. Since this process is inevitably a part of the life of the people involved in the undertaking, holding this process to be valuable is fundamentally a life-affirming attitude.

At the story's end, the hunger artist insists that he should not be admired for fasting. When asked why, he exclaims: "Because I have to fast, I can't help it . . . I couldn't find the food I liked." This indicates, as Ronald Gray has noted [in Franz Kafka, 1973], that the hunger artist "makes somes spiritual progress, in that, at his dying moment, he is no longer proud of his achievement." For the hunger artist, success was fatal. The pride and the egotistical satisfaction that he felt from his accomplishment prevented the hunger artist from seeking communion with others. At the end of the story, he has so habituated himself to his isolation that had he desired to reenter the community of men, one must doubt that he could have "found the food he liked."

Accustomed to finding his self validation in his egocentered activities (self-destructive as they were) his desires and needs (growing increasingly perverse with time) would possibly not have been gratified by entering into communion with others. But at least the hunger artist ultimately realizes that his efforts were fruitless and meaningless, and that his energy has been misplaced. For other Faustian strivers, too, pride in the success of their individual achievements reinforces their destructive behavior and moves them further from the idea of working in community with others. They, like the hunger artist, can only progress spiritually if they recognize the futility of finding lasting fulfillment in the originator instinct.

The hunger artist's activity is built on an alienation of a most radical nature. By refusing to partake of food (an activity which when conducted with others symbolizes community perhaps more effectively than any other activity) he implicitly tries to deny his need for community and his humanity itself. Striving towards his goal, that of fasting ever longer, the hunger artist courts death. Attaining his goal inevitably means embracing death. Goethe's Faust, upon attaining his final goal (a goal which results from harnessing his originator instinct to the service of the community and which, consequently, gives him enough satisfaction to be momentarily content) also finds death.

Perhaps "A Hunger Artist" is Kafka's commentary on the Faust legend, a fragmentary twentieth-century annotation, an ironic extraction of its conceptual kernel. The originator man discovers the extremity of his isolation in the moment of supreme achievement: his triumph has been a personal one, a victory wrested from the intransigent world through willpower, persistence, and sometimes heroic effort. He imposes his achievement upon the world, whether it will or no, and expects recognition or compensation. The Faustian striver has no one to share his triumph with, no one who truly shared in it and with whom he can now go on to other joint ventures. He must arbitrarily assign himself another task and stave off desolation by immersing himself in it. Otherwise he risks experiencing a kind of spiritual or psychological death, unless he can redirect his energy towards communion.

At the end of his story, Kafka contrasts a life-affirming leopard, which replaces the hunger artist in his cage, to the death-desiring hunger artist. The leopard, however, submerged in his animal nature, is no viable alternative to the hunger artist. We can, upon reading this cautionary tale, perhaps prevent ourselves from going the way of the hunger artist, but we cannot, in our attempt to administer Kafka's prescription, turn ourselves into leopards. We can turn away from the originator instinct, not from creation itself, but from the impulse that leads us to create primarily in order to glorify the ego. That impulse leads us to find ultimate satisfaction in the contemplation of the creation itself, which is no more than a mirror brilliantly reflecting the ego which engendered it. We can, in other words, seek communion with others first and foremost. We can create, together, a community that would profit from all of our talents, one in which our individual efforts would prove more meaningful than we could anticipate.

Perhaps Kafka, in "A Hunger Artist," means to have us look closely at what he considers to be the inevitable evolution of the Faustian striver: a man imbued exclusively with the originator instinct, and one who therefore awards highest priority to his own desires and needs; one who finds the utmost significance in the pleasure he derives from his own ideas, creations, and the completion of self-imposed tasks. Obviously, this man is already with us, and has been since time immemorial: the armaments manufacturer who takes ultimate satisfaction in the sophistication of his weaponry, eschewing thoughts of the havoc it will wreak on humanity; the great industrialist or business entrepreneur content in the size of his financial empire, oblivious to the fate of his employees; the lawyer preoccupied with the quality of his legal work and in obtaining a favorable verdict for his client, inured to the amoral climate in which he works, habitually exercising immoral options because they produce the desired results and fall within the law.

Even the self-centered work of the artist, hungry or not, is usually embarked upon not in a spirit of community but in one of self-aggrandizement and unspoken competition with others. The competitive spirit and the need to satisfy our desires are basic to our survival, but by acting solely on these principles we court extinction. We must always remain open to the possibility of communion and take that possibility with us into every encounter with our fellow creatures. It must be the fundamental motivation in all of our undertakings and must infuse all of our hopes for ourselves and for the world.

Buber says this on the possibility of communion:

. . . it cannot be dispensed with and it cannot be made use of in itself; without it nothing succeeds, but neither does anything succeed by means of it: it is the run before the jump, the tuning of the violin, the confirmation of that primal and mighty potentiality which it cannot even begin to actualize.