SOURCE: "Franz Kafka's Leopard," in The Germanic Review, Vol. XXXIV, No. 2, April, 1959, pp. 85-104.

[In the following excerpt. Spann argues that the images in 'À Hunger Artist" symbolize Kafka's own personal experiences rather than abstract allegories.]

In contrast to most of Kafka's other short narratives, "Ein Hungerkünstler" has a detailed, closely-knit plot which can be clearly outlined.

A hunger artist, easily the best in his field, enjoys great popularity, but nevertheless he is frustrated because neither his impresario nor the spectators properly appreciate his achievements. The impresario does not permit him to break his fasting record for business reasons; the spectators suspect the showman of trickery; and even those who know that he is an honest performer do not believe his assertion that fasting is easy for him and that he would like to fast on and on. After many gala performances, ending dramatically with music, speeches, and "lady volunteers" from the audience leading the exhausted performer to his first meal after the heroic fast, his popularity suddenly declines. The public loses interest in public fasting, and the hunger artist has to accept a position with the side show of a circus. Hardly noticed by the people who rush past his cage to see the wild animals, he now can fast as long as he wishes. But his new employers are not interested in the unbelievably high number of fasting days—they even stop recording them.

As in the majority of Kafka's works, the death of the hero is the end and climax, but in no other story excepting Der Prozeß has he given that climactic end such weight and importance. The entire narrative exists only for this denouement. Since much of the disagreement about this story concerns its closing paragraphs, these will have to be quoted.

One day an overseer noticed the cage and asked the attendants why this perfectly good cage with the rotten straw inside was unoccupied. Nobody seemed to know until one of them, aided by the tablet which had listed the fasting days, remembered the hunger artist. They dug in the straw with poles and found him. 'You are still fasting?' asked the overseer. 'Aren't you ever going to stop?' 'Forgive me, all of you,' whispered the hunger artist; only the overseer, who put his ear against the bars, understood him. 'Of course,' said the overseer, and tapped his forehead to indicate the state of the hunger artist to his men. 'We forgive you.' 'I always wanted you to admire my fasting,' said the hunger artist. 'We really do admire it,' the overseer said to humor him. 'But you must not admire it,' said the hunger artist. 'All right, then we won't admire it,' said the overseer; 'but why should we not admire it?' 'Because I must fast, I can't help it,' said the hunger artist. 'Fancy that,' said the overseer, 'and why can't you help it?' 'Because,' said the hunger artist, raising his wasted face a little and speaking with his lips pursed, as though for a kiss, directly into the ear of the overseer, so that nothing should be lost, 'because I could not find the food I liked. Had I found it, believe me, I would have eaten my fill without much ado, like you and all the others.' These were his last words, but in his glazed eyes there was still the firm, though no longer proud, conviction that he was continuing his fast.

'Come on now, get things in order,' said the overseer, and they buried the hunger artist along with his straw. Into the empty cage they put a leopard. It was a relief even for the least sensitive to see this wild animal bound about the cage that had so long been desolate. He lacked nothing. It was not difficult for the keepers to decide upon and bring him the food he liked. He did not seem even to miss his freedom. This noble body, filled to bursting with all it needed, seemed to carry freedom within. It seemed to be hidden somewhere between his fangs; and the joy of life came so hot and strong from his throat that it was difficult for spectators to hold their ground in front of his cage. But they crowded around in spite of this and did not want to move away.

The first interpretation of "Ein Hungerkünstler" appeared in H. Steinhauer's introduction to his textbook edition of 1936, the last so far in 1957. It is a four page commentary in a book by Felix Weltsch, who belonged to the inner circle of Kafka's friends and is one of his earliest interpreters. In those twenty-one years the little narrative about the professional inediant has been freely allegorized by all the commentators the author has examined. The resulting allegorical equations have been varied and sometimes mutually exclusive. The story has been interpreted as a praise—but also a criticism—of asceticism. Other commentators see in it an allegory of the suffering of the great artist, or of the sham artist, or of the relation between the artist and his public. One interpreter is "reminded" of the food shortages during the First World War and the postwar marathon craze. Some details of the story are also decoded. The lady helpers represent the ruling class which flirts with religion, or they "remind" the critic of Kafka's fiancée. The watchers with the flashlights are the conscientious critics, etc. Finally the leopard is the businessman, the philistine, sensualism, even the somber shadow of advancing German fascism. One of these commentaries, the chapter on "Ein Hungerkünstler" in von Wiese's book on the German Novelle, differs from those of his predecessors in length and thoroughness. Like other Kafka scholars who have written about Kafka in recent years, he criticizes commentators of the older school for their fanciful speculations. However, he believes with many of them that Kafka's style prevents to a large degree the application of traditional categories of literary criticism. In particular, the distinction between symbol and allegory seems of little use to von Wiese.

The present article, because of a basically different approach, arrives at an interpretation of Kafka's work quite different from that of von Wiese. The distinction between allegory and symbol, for example, was of great help to the author. Definitions of the two terms will follow later, but a single illustration may serve, for the present, to clarify the main difference between them. Von Wiese defines Kafka's style as follows: "Es gehört zum Wesen dieses Stiles, daß sich das Abstrakte, Geistige und Problematische nur in der gleichnishaften Bildlichkeit aussagen läßt." The geistige Aussage, the intellectual, the abstract conveyed by images—that is the definition of allegory. Though von Wiese does not use the term, he treats Kafka's work as an allegory. It must be stressed, however, that in his disciplined interpretation there is no room for the free associational play of the imagination that we find so often in other commentaries

The author shares von Wiese's conviction that what Kafka had to say could only be said through images. But these images are in the author's opinion symbols expressing nothing intellectual. It must be said in anticipation that Kafka's "Ein Hungerkünstler" will be interpreted as an intimate revelation of Kafka's Lebensgefühl Most of Kafka's works seem to us to express how it felt to be Franz Kafka. He himself said that much when he defined the purpose of his writing: "die Darstellung meines traumhaften inneren Lebens." Rilke's magic with symbols makes the taste of an apple and an orange an experience mediated through words, but the respective sonnets are not allegories in that they do not communicate anything abstract. The Erlebnis of a fruit and the Lebensgefühl of Kafka required symbolic, not allegorical, expression. There seems to exist in modern criticism a sometimes unconscious rationalism which prefers a thought to a feeling or experience, even if this thought—we are thinking of some of the older allegorizers of Kafka—is only trivial.

The Aussage which von Wiese considers to be the meaning of our story is certainly not trivial but it is a highly abstract part of an allegorical equation: "Die Vernichtung des Naturhaften—bis zum Eigensinnigen gesteigert—zeigt auf eine indirekte und zwar grotesk entstellende Weise die auf einem anderen Wege nicht mehr darstellbare, auf Askese gegründete freie geistige Existenz." According to von Wiese, this geistige Existenz, the life of an artist for example, suffers in the world which is absurd and animalistic, though to this world such an intellectual ascetic seems absurd. The ascetic displays himself, and he sins by priding himself on his exceptionality. But he wins the final victory, he is the superior being even when the fascination of life appears in the form of a young leopard. Does this or a similar philosophy underlie Kafka's story? Does he unequivocally take the side of the suffering spirit against the Naturhafte? Is the little narrative an allegory? A reexamination of the story, of Kafka's life and autobiographical statements, and an examination of "Ein Hungerkünstler" in relation to his other stories and to Western literature may suggest another answer.

Any experienced reader encountering Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea for the first time knows that this is "more" than just a deep-sea fishing story—such as are found in Field and Stream; and reading Kafka's "Ein Hungerkünstler," he knows that this is "more" than just a circus story in the vein of J. Tully's Circus Parade. In the case of writers like Hemingway and Kafka, this something "more" is taken for granted, since the reader knows the author's rank and, with that, something about the critics' opinions of his work. But, though there is seldom the tabula rasa required for unbiased criticism, a sensitive reader will soon discover for himself whether he is dealing with a work of art or a mere adventure yarn.

Let us assume such a reader encountering Kafka's story in Die Neue Rundschau without knowing anything about its author. He will notice certain accents which remove that little tale, almost at the beginning, from the category of mere circus stories. The children, e.g., as figures of contrast, are more than just part of the crowd. Then there is the importance of the hunger artist, which is raised above the level of the fame and admiration he might acquire in a naturalistic story. Correspondingly, the final degradation and neglect suffered by the showman go beyond anything possible within an actual circus. There is ultimately, throughout the story, an intensity of feeling which has nothing to do with the mere banal admiration or pity a circus character's life might provoke. This intensity of feeling calls for weighty words and expressions, as for example, "die Welt betrog ihn um seinen Lohn," "neue kommende gnädigere Zeiten," etc., which would not fit into a tale about the freak show.

The reader's interest, however, stays within the narrative and with its symbolic hero, the hunger artist, who keeps his identity and remains the center of widening, but concentric circles of meaning—to use the familiar metaphor for a symbol's effect. All through the story, his Lebensgefühl becomes an ever more definite experience, while the character grows in tragic significance. His fall from the height of popularity to the level of a superfluous sideshow attraction is the tragic peripeteia. The ensuing catastrophe is carefully set off and lifted above the rest of the story by a number of stylistic devices.

Up to the climax of the story, Kafka presents the hero's professional and inner life in a summary style, applying adverbs and phrases like "gewöhnlich," "oft," "kein allzu häufiger Glücksfall," all of which skip time intervals. Abruptly, the passage of epic time slows down with the phrase, "Doch vergingen wieder viele Tage," which introduces the climax. With the first appearance of direct discourse, the action slows down further to give the illusion of "real" time, in this case the last minutes before the hero's death. Through this change of tempo and through the transition from a summarizing report to the dramatic presentation of one particular, atypical scene, everything that is said and done in this scene stands out. The transition from indirect to direct discourse is all the more impressive because it is the first time that we hear the hunger artist speak. Only once before in the story has he expressed his thoughts; this was neither in direct nor indirect discourse, but in that subtle variation of the interior monologue, sometimes called erlebte Rede or style indirect libre. In this passage, his thoughts were concerned with the great grief of his life, or better, with what he then considered as such: his impresario's insistence that he end his fasting periods after forty days. And this when he, the champion performer, knew that he could fast ad infinitum. Now, in direct discourse, he speaks of his final and greatest grief: the realization, arrived at in articulo mortis, that his hunger act was a farce. With his dying words: "Verzeiht mir alle . . . immerfort wollte ich, daß ihr mein Hungern bewundert, etc." begins the climax of the story. By the word "ihr" the dying man certainly does not mean the circus roustabouts and the stupidly amused overseer. The delirious showman has a vision of the enthusiastic audiences that used to fill the halls where he was on exhibition at the height of his fame.

Any unbiased reader will listen intently to the last words of the hero, for it is a device often encountered in literature and the dramatic arts to make an important point—often to present the climax—through the words of a dying man. A reader familiar with Kafka's work will recognize the "Too late!" as he knows it from "Vor dem Gesetz," Der Prozeß, and Das Schloß. Josef K. in Der Prozeß, too, recognizes the futility of his life a few moments before he dies "like a dog!" The hunger artist is buried like a dog with the dirty straw on which he died. His last words indicate that he has arrived at the insight that his life was built on illusion and error, and was indeed a vie manquée. The outstanding achievements in his profession, which had been the pride and the meaning of his existence, were of no value; they were the result of an innate deficiency. He could not eat the food others liked, and therefore was not a complete human being. This weakness, this essential lack, was, however, the foundation of his fame. The crowds came to admire the hero with the iron will who could do what no other mortal could do so well: conquer man's grimmest enemy, hunger. However, what they really saw was a sick freak.

A modern name for the life of the hunger artist would be Heidegger's "unauthentic existence." Rilke, in whose Duino Elegies Heidegger observes poetic parallels to some of his own ideas, sees in the women, the child, the so-called primitive man, the animal, "Begnadete des Seins," because they above all have authentic existence. "Women" do not appear in the story, only two "young ladies," themselves feeble, unauthentic creatures. The authentic characters appear as figures of contrast: the children with their searching, sparkling eyes approach the hunger artist with sincere admiration, while the crowds of spectators merely want to be thrilled. The primitive men are the butchers. They too approach the hunger artist with genuine feelings, sympathy in this case; and their healthy appetite contrasts favorably with the showman's fasting.

The outstanding contrast figure, however, is the leopard, Kafka's beautiful leopard, so often besmirched by his anagogizing interpreters. It seems that Steinhauer in his commentary and by referring to Kafka's leopard as a panther introduced the "denigration" of the big cat. He rendered the German word Panther, which is the poetic synonym for leopard, by its English cognate which is commonly understood to designate the melanistic variety of the leopard, called in German Schwarzpanther or Sunda-panther. The translation "panther" is misleading, since it symbolizes to many an American and English critic all that is black and evil. They may thus even feel encouraged to think of Dante's allegorical leopard, representing wantonness and envy. Such associations make the critic impervious to the beauty of Kafka's prose poem, a beauty equal to that of Rilke's famous quatrains on the leopard and as much a votive offering to Orpheus as that poet's sonnet on the Russian stallion.

As the reader of the Rundschau enjoys the last tumultuous scene in which the young leopard is the hero, his understanding expands within three concentric circles. True to his symbolic, not allegorical, character, the leopard is and remains the center of these circles. The understanding of his different aspects does therefore not proceed realiter, spiritualiter, and mystice; it is an unfolding understanding, not one that moves on different disconnected planes.

The leopard is first of all a beautiful animal. Anders denies the existence of "das Schöne im Alltagssinne" in Kafka's work. He seems to mean by this questionable phrase the beautiful as it is generally understood. The leopard passage proves him wrong, as do several other passages in the writer's work to be discussed later. Kafka has created by means of his simple prose a leopard, seen of course, as Hofmannsthal said, "mit den Augen der Poesie . . . die jedes Ding jedesmal zum ersten Mal sieht, die jedes Ding mit allen Wundern seines Daseins umgibt." By its mere presence, Kafka's leopard throws everything which was humanly questionable in the story into relief: the insincerity of the impresario and the two "young ladies," the vulgarity of the overseer and the crowd, and, most important of all, the human imperfection of the professional inediant, who lacked everything. His lack of appetite had led him into a meaningless existence, deprived of dignity, joy, and freedom; but about the leopard the author says, "Ihm fehlte nichts." "He lacked nothing." He had an abundance of everything the hunger artist missed. The reader joins the people on the circus lot who crowd around the cage, fascinated by something higher than the sensational or merely aesthetic appeal of the predator. The hunger artist appears now in all his frailty and ugliness as something inimical to life, and therefore condemned by it.

The fascinated reader, like the crowd, does not want to move away from the cage. He is still under the influence of the leopard as he puts the Rundschau away. But doubts now appear. The leopard has conquered; but was his conquest not a little too easy? Nature, das Naive in Schiller's sense, "das Dasein nach eigenen Gesetzen, die innere Notwendigkeit, die ewige Einheit mit sich selbst," wins easy victories over man, whom Thomas Mann once defined as das Sorgenkind des Lebens." Another passage from Schiller's essay Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung may come to the reader's mind: "Solange wir Naturkinder waren, waren wir glücklich und vollkommen; wir sind frei geworden und haben beides verloren. Daraus entspringt eine doppelte und sehr ungleiche Sehnsucht nach der Natur, eine Sehnsucht nach ihrer Glückseligkeit, eine Sehnsucht nach ihrer Vollkommenheit. Den Verlust der ersten beklagt nur der sinnliche Mensch; um den Verlust der anderen kann nur der moralische Mensch trauern." This mourning over a lost perfection accompanies the remembrance of the hunger artist; it is the last feeling the leopard evokes in the reader as a moralischer Mensch. He thinks of the complexity of the unfortunate man, which made the selection of food problematic for him. The modern Kafka critic might well think of Kafka himself, for whom the choice of food was a lifelong practical difficulty, and whose vegetarianism was not the result of the fad of his day, so popular among writers and thinkers. Vegetarianism was an almost religious concern for Kafka. He even compared the vegetarians to the first Christians. Once Kafka is remembered as a suffering vegetarian, the hunger artist as a symbol loses much of his mystery. Seen in this light, the disillusioned showman is still defeated by the leopard but he is not shamed by him. He is buried like a dog, dirty straw and all, but even that last indignity degrades him no more than the relegation to the trash pile did Gregor Samsa, the cockroach man, in Die Verwandlung.

Von Wiese, who sees in the story an allegorical tale of the conflict between Geist and Natur, comes to a different conclusion: "Wer aber dennoch unbelehrbar bleibt und dem Panther vor dem Hungerkunstler den Vorzug gibt, sich also gegen den hungernden Geist und seine Absurdität und für die Faszination des Lebens entscheidet, der hat sich damit auch in jene verfremdete, tierhafte Welt zurückbegeben, die Kafka . . . aus den Angeln zu heben versuchte." Like unimpressed by the leopard's beauty and heile Existenz is Felix Weltsch. In full agreement with von Wiese he interprets the last and deepest Sinnlinie: "Im tiefsten Grunde hungert er also aus Ekel vor dem Essen, das den Menschen geboten wird, das die Natur des Menschen verlangt und deren gesunder Repräsentant der Panther ist, dem die Fleischfetzen, . . . so herrlich munden. Und man kann—und muß wohl—den Ekel des Hungerkünstlers vor dem Essen des Menschen weiter führen bis zum Ekel vor der ganzen sinnlichen Natur des Menschen." The main part of this paper will be an argument against these misobiotic interpretations but it should be pointed out right away that Weltsch shifts the accents of the showman's last speech and thus alters the meaning of the story. The dying man does not realize that he always felt disgust for food; he realizes that he could not find the right food and that consequently his performance was meaningless. He would have preferred the ability to eat like all the rest to his questionable achievement.

One might call the end of this story a Fortinbras-end, since the relation of Fortinbras and Hamlet is one of similar ambivalence. Kafka liked this kind of finish, as its repeated occurrence in his work proves. At the conclusion of Die Verwandlung the parents look with pride and delight at their beautiful marriageable daughter, who will compensate for the monstrosity rotting in a pile of garbage, the noble sufferer Gregor. Das Urteil ends with Georg's fatal fall from the bridge, which is followed by the almost brutal statement: "In diesem Augenblick ging über die Brücke ein geradezu unendlicher Verkehr." In Josefine, die Sängerin, the little problematic cantatrice is quickly forgotten in gesteigerter Erlösung, whereas das Volk continues in its unbroken strength.

We left the Rundschau-reader contemplating the ambivalent end of the story. Will he now try to extract its "theological" or "philosophical" content? He has not yet read Brod and Muir's commentaries, nor, as a German refugee in America, the faulty translations of two key passages in Brod's biography which make a saint of Kafka. Therefore, we do not believe that he will convince himself that the story must be an allegory about the role of religion in modern society, as the first commentator called it with great assurance. As a German reader, moreover, he would not be tempted by the compound -Künstler in the title to think of an artist. His verbal associations would be Zauberkünstler, Kartenkünstler, Trapezkünstler, even Entkleidungskünstlerin; they would stay in the realm of the circus and variety show. We imagine the reader would put away Die Neue Rundschau pondering the experience of a strange Lebensgefühl which the symbolic language of this story had conveyed to him. The modern reader of Kafka's fiction, diaries, and letters might feel that this Lebensgefühl is the author's own. He ordinarily does not feel it because he also knows that he must look for allegorical equations, preferably of a religious nature, in Kafka's works.

Shortly before the composition of "Ein Hungerkünstler," Kafka had spoken of a Plan der selbstbiographischen Untersuchungen. Our story is the most intimate of these investigations. Kafka was, even before his illness, very conscious of his body. Throughout the tale of the hunger artist we recognize, though it is presented in grotesque exaggeration, his own Körpergefühl. The skeletal thinness of the showman was a physical condition the suffering author knew from personal experience. At the time he wrote "Ein Hungerkünstler," Kafka weighed only 55 kg though he measured 1,81 m, hence more than six feet, a fact known from one of his frequent laments about his thinness in a letter to Milena. In those years he still detested meat, as the following scene of forced feeding in an imaginary sanatorium shows: "Was soll ich dort? Vom Chefarzt zwischen die Knie genommen werden und an den Fleischklumpen würgen, die er mir mit den Karbolfingern in den Mund stopft und dann entlang der Gurgel hinunterdrückt." Similar feelings are present in the reaction of the hunger artist led to the Krankenmahlzeit, which the impresario will force down his throat. Later on, in the circus, he is deeply depressed at the sight of raw pieces of meat transported past his cage.

The Körpergefühl of the showman is only a part, though an important one, of his Lebensgefühl. The dominant feeling in the earlier years of his life was frustration. The world he wanted to impress with his feat did not permit him to do his utmost. During the last weeks of his life this same world fails to realize that he is still there, though dying in the straw. The grim insight ripens in the forgotten man that his life was built on error. Behind the muted sadness and the quixotic courtesy of this pitiable bag of bones is hidden despair over a vie manquée. We recognize the somewhat distorted image of Kafka as he appears in the last years of his life in his letters to Milena and in the descriptions of his friends.

The literary excellence of the story lies in the organic connection of Körpergefühl and Lebensgefühl in the interplay between food in the literal sense and food in the metaphorical sense, i.e., as the condition of heile Existenz as the leopard represents it. But these two aspects are inseparable, and here lies the deepest reason that any allegorical separation of the "lower" and the "higher" world destroys the very structure of the little tale. The feelings emanating from this almost real showman and this very real leopard grow in the reader into something surpassing their individual cases, but they are feelings, not ideas. The showman and the leopard remain as the core of the aesthetic experience. We do not discard them like empty husks as we do with Dante's leopard, once we have understood him spiritualiter as envy and wantonness, or as we discard Pharaoh's fat and lean cows, once Joseph has translated this dream allegory. Goethe defined allegory and symbol as follows: "Es ist ein großer Unterschied, ob der Dichter zum Allgemeinen das Besondere sucht oder im Besonderen das Allgemeine schaut. Aus jener Art entsteht Allegorie, wo das Besondere nur als Beispiel, als Exempel des Allgemeinen gilt; die letztere ist aber eigentlich die Natur der Poesie: sie spricht ein Besonderes aus, ohne ans Allgemeine zu denken oder darauf hinzuweisen. Wer nun dieses Besondere lebendig faßt, erhält zugleich das Allgemeine mit, ohne es gewahr zu werden, oder erst spät."

Thus the symbolic character of the story makes it impossible to "translate" the meaning of each of its individual scenes. It is the totality of details which communicates the aesthetic experience. The allegorizer must find for each of these details a corresponding interpretation unless he assumes that Kafka allowed himself some chevilles. None of these interpreters have been that thorough, and the allegorical equations they present for the details they selected to explain are unconvincing, sometimes fantastic.

Kafka's other works contain passages which, in their metaphors or topicality, show a relationship to "Ein Hungerkünstler. " They all center around the idea of a vie manquée, of authentic and unauthentic existence, to use these anachronistic but useful terms. Georg Bendemann (Das Urteil) grasps—"wie ein Hungriger die Nahrung"—the bridge railing from which he is going to fall to an atoning death. Gregor Samsa (Die Verwandlung) tries to crawl to his violin-playing sister: "Ihm war, als zeige sich ihm der Weg zu der ersehnten unbekannten Nahrung." The vulgar scrubwoman, who announces his death and disposes unceremoniously of his remains, has the same function as the overseer in "Ein Hungerkünstler." Grete Samsa's epitaph in its literal and symbolic sense fits the hunger artist: "Seht nur, wie mager es war. Er hat ja auch schon so lange Zeit nichts gegessen." In Der Bau, the problem of food shortage is one of the animal's main problems, but here, too, the metaphorical usage of food appears: "Denn alles, was ich dort [im Bau] tue, ist gut und sättigt mich gewissermaßen." Eating and food also play an important symbolic part in Amerika. The horror and misery of Brunelda's world is accentuated by the disgusting way in which Robinson eats sardines and licks candy. In contrast the banquet in the nature theater in Oklahoma reflects paradisiacal conditions. And this is paradise as Kafka described it to Brod in a conversation about the novel's conclusion: "Mit rätselhaften Worten deutete Kafka lächelnd an, daß sein junger Held in diesem fast grenzenlosen Theater Beruf, Freiheit, Rückhalt, ja sogar die Heimat und die Eltern wie durch paradiesischen Zauber wiederfinden werde." Kafka defined Rückhalt in the same sense with a far cry from Kierkegaard: "Eine Frau haben, das hieße Halt auf allen Seiten haben, Gott haben." There is an abundance of such outcries in his diaries and Kafka's life story shows how he sought so intensely and, tragically enough, found too late, Erlösung durch das Weib. How could this man have glorified in his hunger artist that ascetic contempt and opposition to nature and world which the majority of the interpreters postulate?

Closely related to the quoted passages from his work are diary entries and statements in his letters that attest the autobiographical character of "Ein Hungerkünstler." These are to be found in all the phases of his life and culminate, so to speak, in that symbolic tale. Early in his university career he wrote: "Man beiße lieber ins Leben als in seine Zunge." Full participation in life, "engagement," would remain Kafka's ideal, but isolation was his fate. At a later time (1912), he describes himself as life's hunger artist: "Als es in meinem Organismus klar geworden war, dass das Schreiben die ergiebigste Richtung meines Wesens sei, drängte sich alles hin und ließ alle Fähigkeiten leer stehen, die sich auf die Freuden des Geschlechtes, des Essens, des Trinkens, des philosophischen Nachdenkens, der Musik zuallerest richteten. Ich magerte nach allen diesen Richtungen ab." (Italics mine) This intermingling of the physical (Organismus) with the inner life, reaching a climax in the metaphor abmagern, is typical of the structure of "Ein Hungerkünstler," where lack of appetite in the literal sense was fused with the Lebensgefühl of an unauthentic existence. Significantly enough, Kafka returns in the same diary entry to food in the literal sense. After he has once more decried his ignorance of love and music, he laments at the same pitch his frugal New Year's meal, consisting of Schwarzwurzeln mit Spinat. The simple food metaphor makes an occasional appearance, e.g. "Strindberg gelesen, der mich nährt." In the months preceding and following the composition of "Ein Hungerkünstler" (October, 1921 to March, 1922), however, it occurs frequently. "Da ich doch Mensch bin und die Wurzeln Nahrung wollen . . . weil meine Hauptnahrung von anderen Wurzeln in anderer Luft kommt, auch diese Wurzeln kläglich, doch lebensfähiger; . . . Nur vorwärts, hungriges Tier, führt der Weg zur eßbaren Nahrung, atembaren Luft, freiem Leben, sei es auch hinter dem Leben . . . Es ist die Nahrung, von der ich gedeihe, auserlesene Speisen, auserlesen gekocht. . . . Das Glück der jungen und alten Ehemänner, das einzige, an dem mich zu sättigen ich Anlage habe." The sudden increase in food metaphors is accompanied by frequent laments over his unfulfilled existence. Kafka was conscious of approaching his fortieth year, which to him as to Goethe meant a caesura in man's existence. Goethe said: "Ich will lernen und mich ausbilden, ehe ich vierzig Jahre alt werde." One of Kafka's self admonitions begins with an allusion to this Goethe passage: "Lerne (lerne Vierzigjähriger). . . ." He now condemns himself because of his wasted life as he had condemned Josef K. ten years before nel mezzo del cammin to the Inferno of The Trial. The most remarkable of these laments about his vie manquée was written shortly before the composition of "Ein Hungerkünstler" :

Die Eltern spielten Karten; ich saß allein dabei, gänzlich fremd; der Vater sagte, ich solle mitspielen oder wenigstens zuschauen; ich redete mich irgendwie aus. Was bedeutet diese seit der Kinderzeit vielmals wiederholte Ablehnung? Das gemeinschaftliche, gewissermaßen das öffentliche Leben wurde mir durch die Einladung zugänglich gemacht . . . trotzdem lehnte ich ab. Ich habe, wenn man es danach beurteilt, unrecht, wenn ich mich beklage, daß mich der Lebensstrom niemals ergriffen hat, daß ich von Prag nie loskam, niemals auf Sport oder ein Handwerk gestoßen wurde und dergleichen.—Ich hätte das Angebot wahrscheinlich immer abgelehnt, ebenso wie die Einladung zum Spiele. Ich lehnte es aber immer ab, wohl aus allgemeiner und besonders aus Willensschwäche, ich habe das verhältnismäßig sehr spät erst begriffen. Ich hielt diese Ablehnung früher meist für ein gutes Zeichen (verführt durch die allgemeinen großen Hoffnungen, die ich auf mich setze).

The food metaphor is not used in this passage, but we find here important parallels to the inner life of the hunger artist: the unwillingness to participate in life, to partake of life's food, the reason for this unwillingness—a weakness; the illusion that this weakness is a sign of greatness; and the late recognition of this tragic illusion.

An extraordinary man like Kafka is always on display; he must make a "show" of himself, no matter how retiring he may be. Kafka's "spectators" reacted like the hunger artist's audiences—with admiration, with concern for his literal and metaphorical Abmagern, with doubts of his sincerity, sometimes with open mockery.

In another diary entry from his last period Kafka describes in glowing colors a likewise glowing picture of Sunday boating on the Thames. His description, it seems to the author, fits Edward J. Gregory's painting "Boating on the Thames" showing a fleet of rowboats, canoes, punts, and launches near Boulter's Lock above London. They are headed for the tea gardens and picnic grounds beyond Cliveden Reach. If Kafka cannot join this sensuous festival of life, if he, the poor Hungerleider, has to stand aside at the shore, the reasons are his "Abstammung, Erziehung, körperliche Ausbildung" and not a Neo-Platonic or Christian disgust with sensuous pleasures. Yet the majority of interpreters of "Ein Hungerkünstler" envisage a confession of asceticism in this and many other tales of Kafka the oarsman, the swimmer, the frustrated athlete, who wanted to find delivery in a spouse's arm and before a cradle.

The ambiguity of the leopard scene has been discussed. There can be, however, no doubt that the loving description of the leopard was dictated by Kafka's sincere admiration for the animal's authentic existence even in captivity. The closest parallel in his diaries to the leopard scene is a passage written about six months before the story appeared. "Buschleben. Eifersucht auf die glückliche, unerschöpfliche und doch sichtbar aus Not (nicht anders als ich) arbeitende, aber immer alle Forderungen des Gegners erfüllende Natur. Und so leicht, so musikalisch." Symbols representing this heile Existenz are rare in his work, since he described the hunger he knew so well but seldom the desired food. Besides the leopard, there is the chimpanzee before he was humanized. The only human representatives are Samsa's sister (Die Verwandlung), the American (Die Abweisung), and, on a heroic level, Alexander the Great (Der neue Advokat).

On his deathbed Kafka read the proofs of the book "Ein Hungerkünstler" and events in his life which were related to the title story went through his mind. The moribund patient wrote his thoughts on slips of paper, since he had to rest his infected larynx. He describes a childhood scene, in which he, the little Knochenbündel, after a bath at the public swimming pool, was treated to sausage and beer by his gigantic father. He develops once more the leopard motive with allusions to the leopard scene in his story. "Mein Cousin, dieser herrliche Mensch. Wenn dieser Rob-ert. . . auf die Sophienschwimmschule kam, die Kleider mit ein paar Griffen abwarf, ins Wasser sprang und sich dort herumwälzte mit der Kraft eines schönen wilden Tieres (italics mine), glänzend vom Wasser, mit strahlenden Augen und gleich weit fort war gegen das Wehr zu—das war herrlich." It was the tragic irony of Kafka's last year that he, life's hunger artist, was beginning to discover the food he liked in the real and in the metaphorical sense. A child from a beloved woman, a Heimat without the melancholy quotes he was forced in his last years to put around that word when referring to Prague, these seemed to be within his reach when death intervened.

Kafka's influence on other writers is often pointed out, but the fact that he, too, was influenced is generally neglected, though his work is part of the tradition of Western literature. Seen against this larger background, it gains in depth and clarity of meaning. "Ein Hungerkünstler" is no exception; and the basic assumption of the author that it is the story of a vie manquée gains additional support from this viewpoint.

There is a close resemblance in both structure and content between Kafka's tale and Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyitch, one of Kafka's favorites among Tolstoy's writings. Kafka had reread Tolstoy's story as late as December 23, 1921, and "Ein Hungerkünstler" is mentioned for the first time early in 1922. There seems to be sufficient cause to assume that he wrote his story shortly after reading the Russian tale of a vie manquée which, as stylistic and thematic similarities indicate, had obviously inspired him. Tolstoy uses the same devices to skip time intervals already encountered in Kafka's story: "Nach siebenjähriger Amtstätigkeit in derselben Stadt" . . . "In dieser Weise gingen noch sieben Jahre hin" . . . "So war Iwan Iljitschs Leben während der siebzehn Jahre seiner Heirat gewesen." With the beginning of Ivan's fatal disease, the passage of epic time slows down from months to weeks, finally from days to the moments preceding death. Not until a few days before the final agony does the pensive sufferer arrive at the tragic insight: "Mein ganzes Leben, das bewußte Leben, ist wohl in der Tat nicht das rechte gewesen." Like the hunger artist, Ivan cannot reveal to anyone the truth his dimming eyes have seen. His insensitive wife watches him die with compassion but with as little understanding as the overseer had for the dying hunger artist. The role of the contrast figure, corresponding to Kafka's leopard, falls in Tolstoy's story to Gerassim, the young peasant lad and servant of Ivan. He is the only one living an authentic existence in that household of sham beings: "Die Kraft und Lebensfreudigkeit Gerassims kränkten ihn nicht, ja, sie wirkten beruhigend auf Iwan Iljitsch."

Closely related to the motif of la vie manquée is that of der Fahrende as one of its representatives. The saltimbanque and the circus performer had become familiar symbols in the twentieth century of that century's growing feeling of forlornness and metaphysical wretchedness. The Saltimbanque pictures of Picasso and Rilke's fifth Duino elegy are the outstanding examples. The hunger artist has colleagues in Kafka's melancholy circus. The first of these to appear was the equestrienne in "Auf der Galerie." The unpitying circus director and the unfeeling spectators force the ailing equestrienne to perform on and on in the surreal circus ring. The tragedy and the sham existence of this performer are revealed to an outsider. He would like to but cannot break through this sham beauty and false front behind which a gruesome reality hides, a reality revealed in the hyena grin of Seurat's and Lautrec's circus directors. In "Erstes Leid" the grim revelation occurs early in the career of the showman, the trapeze artist, who realizes his Haltlosigkeit: "Nur diese eine Stange in den Händen, . . . wie kann ich denn leben!" To all of Kafka's showmen apply the opening lines of Rilke's Saltimbanque Elegy which appeared one year after Kafka's story:

Wer aber sind sie, sag mir, die Fahrenden, diese ein wenig
Flüchtigern noch als wir selbst, die dringend von früh an
wringt ein wem—wem zuliebe
niemals zufriedener Wille?

The germs of Kafka's circus stories, together with the basic motifs of other, yet unwritten works, appear in one of his earliest diary entries, written twelve years before "Ein Hungerkünstler," further proof that these circus symbols were expressions of his own inner life. The unmarried author decries his lack of attachment to life: "Der Mann [the Kafkaesque bachelor—this and the following parenthetical insertions are mine] steht nun einmal außerhalb unseres Volkes [K. in Das Schloß], ausserhalb unserer Menschheit ["Ein Hungerkünstler"], immerfort ist er ausgenhungert ["Ein Hungerkünstler"], ihm gehört nur der Augenblick, der immer fortgesetzte Augenblick der Plage ["Auf der Galerie"], er hat . . . nur so viel Halt, als seine zwei Hände bedecken, also um so viel weniger als der Trapezkünstler im Variété ["Erstes Leid"]."

A few remarks should be made about the Verfremdung in our story. Some allegorizing interpreters consider it more fantastic than it is because certain naturalistic aspects of Kafka's showman and his life seem to them to be the author's grotesque inventions. Kafka took his subject matter for "Ein Hungerkünstler" from life; he was sympathetically and empathetically familiar with the world of der Fahrende. To illustrate the "objective correlative" for Kafka's hunger artist and to facilitate the recognition of naturalist aspects in his story, the English handbill advertising a German Hungerkünstler may be quoted. The showman's sobriquet is, significantly enough, Heros: "Come and see the Starvation Artist Heros; World's Champion in 1950 at the Frankfurt Zoo with 56 days of starvation; he will establish a new World Championship, 75 days without taking any food in a sealed glass box; medical care, controlled by the Red Cross Frankfurt-Main; during his time of starvation Heros will have only cigarettes and Hassia Mineral Water. . . ." The methods and accoutrements of this starvation artist are much the same as those of the fictitious one. Carbonation has been added to the plain water of Kafka's showman, he smokes cigarettes and sits in a glass box, instead of a cage, but those are simply negligible modern touches.

Other aspects of the story are also explainable in view of the particular "objective correlative". The opening sentence: "In den letzten Jahrzehnten ist das Interesse an Hungerkünstlern sehr zurückgegangen" sounds at first reading like the "Once upon a time" of an allegorical fairytale, but it is correct. The "golden age" of hunger artists was in the eighties of the nineteenth century. The American physician Dr. Henry Tanner established in 1880 a world record with forty fasting days which was broken when the Italian Merlatti endured fifty days of supervised fasting in the great hall of the Grand Hotel in Paris. That Kafka's showman feels he could go far beyond the forty day mark is believable. Heros' latest (1956) record is 93 days.

Fortunately the allegorizers, particularly the religious school, overlooked the opportunities the number forty offers to cabalistic interpretations. They missed the forty days of Christ's fast and the forty years of the Israelites in the desert. They might have considered Goethe's explanation that the figure forty is dedicated to Beschauen, Erwarten, above all to Absonderung. It is, however, unlikely, considering the realistic details of the story, that Kafka even thought of the cabalistic character of the number forty. Not the Bible but the records of Dr. Tanner, Succi, and Merlatti, well known to Kafka's generation, furnished the forty fasting days. These forty days are just as real as the protruding thorax, the black tights, the attacks of raging mania, and the final delirium inanitionis of his professional inediant. The only distortion, Verfremdung, in Kafka's story is the indifference of the circus to the fate of its unsuccessful employee. The freak of the sideshow would in reality be on the payroll and, hence, on the conscience of the circus management.

Much older than the motif of der Fahrende is the topos "man and the big cat," which plays such a decisive part at the end of the story. Using the concept of topos, we imply also the idea of tradicionalidad literaria, confident that such an approach does not make Kafka's work less original but more intelligible. The topos of man and the big cat is older than the Mycenean gate and the Homeric similies. When man was confronted with the lion, it was done to praise him or make a statement about his status. Up to the time of Goethe, man's superiority was always assumed wherever the topos was used, but that changed during the nineteenth century. At first particular human types, finally, in the twentieth century, man in general was humbled before the predators which are usually lion, leopard, and eagle. Nietzsche, the most articulate and passionate accuser of nascent modern man, turned his metaphorical leopards loose on the drab Northern European Herdenmenschen: "Das du in Urwäldern / Unter buntgefleckten Raubtieren / Sündlich gesund und bunt und schön liefest." One cannot escape the melancholy observation that the praise of the "sinfully healthy" leopard in Nietzsche's and kafka's case stems from mortally sick authors.

After Nietzsche's time, the conviction spread among those concerned with literary symbols and the evaluation of man that a great metaphysical loss has been suffered, that man has been "unkinged," in Emerson's sense. The topos with its reversed evaluation of man and beast is now incorporated in the works of authors ranging from Hermann Hesse to Ernest Hemingway. The two following examples again are chosen because of their chronological proximity to Kafka's work. In the fourth of his Duino Elegies Rilke accuses man of losing his cosmic rhythm and being poisoned by an incomplete understanding of death. He concludes:

"Und irgendwo gehn Löwen noch und wissen
solang sie herrlich sind von keiner Ohnmacht."

Two years after Kafka's story Der Zauberberg appeared. In it, Thomas Mann also speaks about man, life's problem child, about his Stand und Staat and he, too, uses the topos in its "modern revision." A few days before his long-contemplated suicide the regal Mynheer Peeperkorn leads his "followers" on an excursion into the mountain wilderness. Here Settembrini and Naphta do their dialectical best to impress the company with a display of their counterpositions. Peeperkorn interrupts their gladiatorial oratory and points to an eagle soaring high above the group of quarreling sick men: "Der Adler, meine Herrschaften, Jupiters Vogel, der König seines Geschlechtes, der Leu der Lüfte! . . . Stoß nieder, schlag ihm mit dem Eisenschnabel auf den Kopf und in die Augen, reiß ihm den Bauch auf, dem Wesen, das dir Gott. . . Perfekt! Erledigt! After the company has settled down for one of Peeperkorn's impromptu banquets, the topos is taken up again in a way which strongly suggests "Ein Hungerkünstler" as a model: "Es gab Einkehr, es gab ein Essen und Trinken, ganz ausser der Zeit, jedoch mit einem Appetit, der durch das stille Gedenken an den Adler befeuert ward." If Mann's eagle was inspired by Kafka's leopard, then these passages in Der Zauberberg may be considered the first though indirect commentary on "Ein Hungerkünstler" and, in the author's opinion, a better one than many of those which followed.

The appetite that Kafka's leopard may inspire is weakened by the stille Gedenken the dead hunger artist deserves. When used by literary masters, the common topoi appear in subtle variations—and Kafka was a literary master. His work, we would like to emphasize in conclusion, is part of the Western tradition of literature, from which he borrowed and to which he added, for example, a beautiful leopard whom the allegorizers want to poison. For that life, among other things, we are pleading in this article.