[In the following excerpt, Politzer praises "A Hunger Artist" as "a perfection, a fatal fulfillment that expresses Kafka's desire for permanence.]

[With "A Hunger Artist"] Kafka returns to the motif of the unknown nourishment which he had introduced in The Metamorphosis. In the earlier story this image pointed quite generally to the never-to-be disclosed mystery governing man's life. Here it has been integrated in the theme of art, the Hunger Artist's art.

The tale deals with the art of fasting as well as with fasting as an art. The Hunger Artist is willing to dedicate his existence to the perfection of his craft; hence he feels justified in making all-inclusive claims in return. "Just try to explain to anyone the art of fasting!" he exclaims at the height of his career. "Anyone who has no feeling for it cannot be made to understand it." In the original this creed of the Hunger Artist is patterned rhythmically after the words with which Goethe's Faust pronounces the superiority of his all-embracing view of the world over the petty rationalism of his entourage. Even if our artist is not a superman like Goethe's hero, he is certainly a virtuoso, a star of starvation, and his appeal, like the fascination of any romantic hero, is consciously emotional.

His desire for starvation is insatiable. He is convinced that his capacity for fasting has no limits whatever. He is inspired by the ambition to be "not only the record hunger artist of all time, which presumably he was already," but to surpass himself "by a performance beyond human imagination." This grasp for what can no longer be grasped identifies him as a Kafka hero. So does the paradox that he will have to die from starvation as soon as he succeeds in living up to his noble aim.

His impresario has imposed a forty-day limit on his fasting, a period which is measured, absurdly enough, by a clock instead of a calendar. Yet his reason for limiting the Hunger Artist's enthusiasm for perfection has nothing to do with the performer. He does not act from a realization that the Artist, too, is subject to the necessities of life. Instead, his reason—which Kafka with a touch of malice calls a "good" one—is concerned with the audience. The manager has observed that "for about forty days the interest of the public could be stimulated, . . . but after this the town began to lose interest." It is not the Artist, but the public that matters. The performer should be convinced by this argument. But his attitude toward the spectators is as paradoxical as his attitude toward himself and his art.

Not only is this Artist a man driven by the desire to achieve perfection. He is also a showman who needs spectators as he achieves his unheard-of deed. To suffer starvation by himself and for himself would not satisfy him. He depends on the acclaim, the excitement of the crowds, the military bands, the young ladies, and all the other ritual paraphernalia of a popular success. And yet this popular success forces him to interrupt his achievement long before he has come anywhere near the stage of accomplishment he feels able to reach. "His public pretended to admire him so much, why should it have so little patience with him; if he could endure fasting longer, why should not the public endure it?"

It is the public which answers this question, although in an unexpected way. For reasons unknown to Artist, impresario, and reader alike the crowds begin to disperse and his fame starts to decline. "Everywhere, as if by secret agreement, a positive revulsion from professional fasting was in evidence." Thereupon the Artist dismisses the impresario and hires himself to a circus, a big enterprise which accommodates him somewhere near the animal cages. The former star has now been moved from the center of attention to the periphery; the one-man show has degenerated to something less than a side show; the virtuoso is treated like an animal or even worse; "strictly speaking, he was only an impediment on the way to the menagerie."

Now he is able to reach perfection by starving himself to death. He is at liberty to indulge in his life's dream undisturbed. No more limits are set for him. But the audience he had hoped would watch him perform his supreme act is gone. He is left to solitude and oblivion. Time itself is suspended; the little board which used to tell his fasting days has long been showing the same number, and no more mention is made of his clock. He is breaking all records, but his achievement remains unrecorded since the public is absent.

And when once in a time some leisurely passer-by stopped, made merry over the old figure on the board and spoke of cheating, that was in its way the stupidest lie ever invented by indifference and inborn malice, since it was not the Hunger Artist who was cheating, he was working honestly, but the world was cheating him of his reward.

The reward he has in mind is the public acknowledgment that he is reaching perfection now. Without this acknowledgment perfection will forever be imperfect.

One of Kafka's "Reflections" reads as follows: "One must not cheat anyone, not even the world of its victory." But in the case of the Hunger Artist the world has seen to it that the victory remains in its possession. Moreover, it forces the dying man to realize the contradictions inherent in his life's occupation. "Forgive me, everybody," he whispers with his last strength. If he has really been cheated by the world, why should he now ask the cheater, the world, to forgive? "I always wanted you to admire my fasting," he continues. The admiration he claimed was based on the assumption that the efforts he devoted to his task were extraordinary. He alone was able to do what he did, and more than common exertions were needed to overcome difficulties that no one but he could master. This is the very nature of records and record breaking. Yet in the same breath he says about his fasting: "But you should not admire it." Kafka has prepared us well to grasp the meaning of this blatant self-contradiction. Early in the story he informs us that this Artist's uniqueness consisted solely in the fact that "he alone knew, what no other initiate knew, how easy it was to fast." The very thought of a meal, we learn, has given him nausea. But only now, with his last words, does he betray his secret: "I have to fast, I cannot help it, . . . because I could not 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."

The art of this Artist is a negative performance. His fasting represents a passive act, which is a paradox. Running counter to human nature, it may, at least in the minds of a curious crowd, have proved attractive, so long as it was performed as a show of self-denial and a feast of sacrifice. Our Artist, however, was cheating even when he thought that he was working honestly; he could not help starving himself; he was forced into his fanatically pursued profession by the absence of the unknown nourishment appropriate to him and his tastes. His art is produced by a deficiency, and the question whether he is at fault for not finding the right food or whether the world is to be blamed for not providing him with it, this question aims ultimately at the meaning of the role that the artist performs in any kind of human context.

We are not surprised to discover that Kafka refrains from spelling out an answer to this question. He does, however, allow the Artist to die with the conviction that his performance is going to outlast his life. "In his dimming eyes remained the firm though no longer proud conviction that he was still continuing the fast." Disregarding the world and its neglect, humbled by the cognition of the deceit that was his art, he carries the paradox of his existence beyond the threshold of his life. Only there, in the beyond, is the nature of the nourishment that would have satisfied him revealed. Knowing it, he appears to be sated for the first time. He need not strive any longer; he possesses it at last. Therefore his face shows conviction without pride, firmness without the triumph of victory. It is, alas, the face of a dead man.

Previously Kafka had used many images related to food and eating to express the paradox of existence. One of the most persuasive is the following: "He gobbles up the leavings and crumbs that fall from his own table; in this way he is, of course, for a little while more thoroughly sated than all the rest, but he forgets how to eat from the table itself. In this way, however, there cease to be any crumbs and leavings." Unable to lead a fulfilled life, he depleted its very substance by doggishly feeding on its waste. Thus he never came to know the nourishment, the nurturing elements, of his own existence. The Hunger Artist, on the other hand, refuses to accept the waste—and in an act of daring revaluation he declares all ordinary food to be waste. Refusal becomes custom; custom turns into sickness, a sickness unto death. Yet from this sickness he derives fulfillment, the deadly fulfillment of his art. Literally he pays with his life for having partaken of the sublime nourishment, perfection. Kafka seems to revert here to the aesthetic philosophy pronounced in Thomas Mann's "Tonio Krö ger." But what was an intellectual disquisition for Tonio Krö ger and his author became a fatal reality for this Hunger Artist as well as for his creator.

The story ends with the Hunger Artist's demise and transfiguration. Although the artist's self-fulfillment is alluded to in most discreet tones, Kafka was not satisfied with this comparatively conciliatory ending. He added a more drastic finale. A great cat takes the place of the dead man. The animal, a leopard rather than a panther, is supposed to balance the art of the Artist by the uninhibited vitality of a young animal that has remained completely natural in spite of its imprisonment. "It lacked nothing," while the Artist was consumed by universal want. "The food he liked was brought him without hesitation by the attendants," whereas the impresario had to use dubious tricks to persuade the Artist to accept even a bite. The animal's "noble body, furnished almost to the bursting point with all that it needed, seemed to carry freedom around with it, too." The Artist's freedom, on the other hand, was identical with his deadly idea of perfection. Needless to say, the leopard attracts the crowds that the Artist missed when he tried to find fulfillment.

The image of this leopard is masterfully realized in a few sentences that convey a feeling of the strength which animates the animal. It is nevertheless an oversimplification. If Kafka had wanted to allegorize in his Artist the impotence of the spirit as opposed to the unbroken power of life, the leopard's joie de vivre would, by contrast, have revealed the intention of the story. But such a simple antithesis cannot have been Kafka's purpose. His story was meant to show that the Hunger Artist's life problem was a paradox and remained unsolved. Thus the magnificently unequivocal image of the cat was superfluous and, perhaps, even out of place.

On the other hand, Kafka uses the simplicity of the leopard to reveal the complexity with which the figure of the Artist is endowed. He has been interpreted as "a mystic, a holy man, or a priest," as an allegory of "man as a spiritual being" or as a parabolical example of the possibility of achieving a "free spiritual existence" by ascetic practices. In supplying interpretations for this figure, the critics seem to have overlooked the fact that here more than in any previous story the paradox of Kafka's own literary genius has been stated in purely artistic terms. The Hunger Artist shares with his author an insatiable desire for a spiritual security. Yet now his quest is reduced to the sphere of art, and most of the mystery of the story is vested in the artist-hero. There are, in other words, no more intermediaries confusing his dealings with the outside world. Even the impresario is "his partner in an unparalleled career. Nor is there any supreme authority who would summon him or whom he could challenge. The heaven and hell of perfection is bred in his own heart. His conflict, still metaphysical, still insoluble, has been confined to the realm of his art.

This art is fatal since it can only be perfected by the Artist's death. In view of the place it assumes in Kafka's work and the mastery of its execution, this story is a perfection, a fatal fulfillment, or at least comes very close to it. Who, after having read it, would deny the Artist a degree of permanence? One cannot help wondering whether Kafka, by stating in his will that it was to be exempted from unconditional destruction, had not suggested that he himself was willing to perish like his hero and yet harbored the hope that he would, however conditionally, survive in the story itself. The Hunger Artist is dead; may the "Hunger Artist" live!