[In this excerpt, Karl analyzes "A Hunger Artist" in the context of Kafka's life and times.]

Kafka in "A Hunger Artist" was not merely creating emblems of the self. He was playing roles, as he had in his letters and in many other of his fictional works. The role he played out was that of a man who feared invalidation of self more than he feared death: he had to carry through in his imagination the most extreme form of art to justify himself as an artist, although his justification led to the artist's death. It was better to play such an extreme role, leading to certain death, than to chance the fact that he might live without having made that final sacrifice. Roleplaying here has the typical shape of a Kafkan paradox: one seeks sure death in order to validate a life that is worth little unless it can confront final matters through some meaningful gesture.

Biographically, "A Hunger Artist" is a gold mine of meaning. It permitted Kafka to flout his family, by rejecting all its ideas of food, nourishment, and health, a death blow to any family and especially an upwardly mobile Jewish family in Middle Europe. Next, he could finalize a role he had played all his life, as finicky, panicked eater, vegetarian, fletcherizer. Further, the role gave him celebrity; he could use his own internal dilemmas and problems as a means of exhibiting himself and gaining fame. As an exhibition, he could gain a public by becoming a pariah, a strange object, a bizarre artifact, all the elements he had harbored in himself. Still further, as someone already sensing his death, he could play with the edges of dying and death, approaching the end in ever finer gradations, until, with one misstep, he would be over the edge. And finally, and most importantly, all his obsessions with food, sex, and his body could be channeled into a symmetrical shape, into something he could present to the world as representing him and yet, because of its art, transcending him. It was a final act of rebellion. He located himself so far outside bourgeois society he became transformed, transcendent, even transfigured. All the earlier yearning to validate his "difference" now had a solid shape.

The hunger artist gloats over his difference; he vaunts his deprivation. His superiority lies in every moment of his indifference to what others consider life-sustaining and part of their indulgence. By not eating for more than forty days, he can demonstrate not only a record for a hunger artist, but the perfection of his art, an absolute moment that only the highest artists can achieve. In this achievement, he finds the artistic equivalent of orgasm: a perfection that transcends usual bodily enjoyment, that moment when all comes together, Kandinsky's "spiritual" moment.

The hunger artist is not past his prime. What happens as his public deserts him is that it itself, now interested only in sensational experiences, has changed. In this, Kafka has caught the shift in his part of Europe, in the early 1920s, when the countries adjoining Czechoslovakia were teetering on the edge of lawlessness, disorder, their own forms of wildness. There is a profound political message in "A Hunger Artist." It is not good news either for artists or for Jews. In this respect, the artist figure is a perfect symbol of the Jew and his position. Like the artist, the Jew has not fitted, has not been part of the establishment, was considered a kind of freak of nature or clown, and, as part of his fascination for the public, was exhibited. But as "tastes" changed, the Jew was not afforded that precarious position. As the public passes the hunger artist by for wilder experiences, for the jungle animals, for example, we sense their perceptions shifting; and although there is still no "leader" in view, it is clear the spectators want blood, not refinements.

In a related sense, the artist is rejected for presenting a decadent art. The Jew as artist is an equation that many nationalists and populists made to justify squashing first one and then the other. With his art judged decadent and, therefore, as corruptive of the society, the artist observes the public moving away to more wholesome exhibitions, those fitting a folk art, a folk people, a people attuned to the blood and the senses, not to the intellect. The explosion of folk art that came with the Weimar Republic and with the Bauhaus fit well into that backlash against anarchic, uncontrollable Modernism in the social and political spheres. The relationship of the hunger artist, in 1922, to these shifts in public opinion and to the way the public was manipulated cannot be neglected. Kafka may use obsession with food as his pivot, but his meanings extend well into social, political, racial, and ethnic considerations.

In this respect, Modernism itself is on trial. The artist tries to prolong the refinement of taste on which his art depends, on the qualities of intellect, will, and definition it offers to the discriminating spectator. Modernism was, after all, a fine art, and it required dedicated artists, those who, like Kafka, would commit themselves completely to their craft. When because of shifts in public tastes that was rejected (although Modernism never had a large or particularly receptive audience), then the end not only of art but as well of a kind of civilization was imminent.

Kafka was insistent on this, as we see here and in nearly everything else he wrote in the last years of his life, including those extraordinary diary entries. . . . He was describing the end of things, the final moments of a civilization, the morbid directions of a new sensibility, all by way of manifesting these elements in himself. He was careful to demonstrate that the hunger artist is not being abandoned because he is losing his powers. His performance does not depend on age factors. When he is rejected, he is in fact refining his performance. As it turns out, the audience judges him as negating life because he is rejecting food itself; his artistry does not lie solely in negation, however, but in his assumption of a role that opens up the audience (and himself) to great mysteries, analogous to those rituals associated with the myths of life and death. The hunger artist is becoming a shaman, a clairvoyant, a seer, and if he is intense and successful enough, he will transmit his "vision" to those observing him. He has questioned the very foundation of the existence of the ordinary. He opens up questions of existential experience, of the individual edging toward the abyss, of a creature attempting to move ever closer, in asymptotic steps, toward that forbidden borderline between life and death where the ultimate mysteries lie.

What is outrageous about the artist is his lack of interest in that well-being that characterizes ordinary people and is part of ordinary life. He is tuned in to one era, they to another; and when they desert him they have relegated him to the past, to memory, elements that have no place in their new social and political sensibilities. They have put history behind them, as the German-speaking world tried to put the humiliations of the Versailles treaty behind it.

The audience seeks coarseness in its new experience, something to gratify more sensual sensibilities. The new public enjoys the smell of the menagerie and watches as raw lumps of meat are fed to the wild animals, an experience the very opposite, of course, of that offered by the refined hunger artist. It is a public associated with the bread and circuses of the late Roman Empire, to the gladiatorial fights, to orgies that left little to the imagination or intellect. With such interests, the public can gain its excitement only from sensational moments. The slow development of sensibility required by the hunger artist is a source of boredom and distaste. Also a source of distaste is the weak, frail, exhausted hunger artist—the Jew as pitiful, the artist as enervated and played out, especially when compared with the wild animal, the intense and powerful figure of the present moment.

The hunger artist becomes indistinguishable from the straw he lies in. Organic matter passes slowly into inorganic, until he is swept up as part of the garbage pile. The artist asserts he cannot find the food he likes, that if he had found it, he would have made "no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else." These are his last words. But such expressions make him sound like an imposter, as though he were, as the audience has suspected, a mountebank of sorts. In the final moments, he wavers, for his denial and rejection have not depended on "taste" but on choice. The panther who has replaced him in his cage makes no such decisions. After the artist is cleared out, with the trash, the young panther eats and does not seem to mourn its loss of freedom; its noble body is sleek, bursting with energy: "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; and the joy of life streamed with such ardent passion from his throat that for the onlookers it was not easy to stand the shock of it. But they braced themselves, crowded round the cage, and did not want ever to move away."

This Kafka panther is still young, still bursting with energy. Rilke's panther [in Duino Elegies] knows better. In time, it too will become enervated, as the strength implicit in its "mighty will" is slowly extinguished; and when that animal slows, the audience will desert it for some new sensation, leaving that panther to a deserted cage. The final lines of Rilke's poem would seem a fitting epitaph not only for panthers in captivity but for Kafka:

From time to time the curtain of the pupilssilently parts—Then an image enters,goes through the taut stillness of the limbs,and is extinguished in the heart.

Nearly all of Kafka's works after this are comparable expressions of farewell.