SOURCE: "A Hunger Artist: Content and Form," in American Imago, Vol. 35, No. 4, Winter, 1978, pp. 357-74.

[In the excerpt below, Mahony analyzes Kafka's literary technique in "A Hunger Artist" and provides a psychoanalytic interpretation of the story.]

In a recent book on applied psychoanalysis, two critics have rightly said that "Kafka's 'A Hunger Artist' is perhaps one of the most powerful, perfectly told tales ever written" [Morton Kaplan and Robert Kloss, "Fantasy of the Devouring Killer: Kafka's A Hunger Artist," in The Unspoken Motive: A Guide to Psychoanalytic Criticism, 1973]. Most of the power of Kafka's story, I would add, comes from the author's technique of broadening levels of meanings, establishing a continuum among those levels, and subjecting them to many reversals in the literary and psychoanalytic sense of the term. A clarification of Kafka's technique of inclusivity and expansiveness brings to light other dimensions affected by his utilization of reversals.

Kafka's majestic short story has attracted a great deal of stimulating criticism which according to its orientation has advanced a multitude of biographical, historical, and aesthetic perspectives. The very nature of Kafka's fiction, beset internally as it is by countless thematic balances and modifications, promotes an ever-eddying textual criticism. This notwithstanding, I still feel that much of essential importance remains to be said about the meaning and technique of "A Hunger Artist."

One of Kafka's principal techniques of inclusivity or broadening levels of reference lies in his structuring of vertical reference. Specifically, the hunger artist is polyvalent, occupying a mediating and Janus-faced position within the triadic hierarchy of meaning that maps out the story:

I. the religious ascetic the creative artist	the immaterial, ethereal and sublimated level
II. the hunger artist	a) the immaterializing level (hunger of itself)
	b) the worldly level (the artist's sensationalism)
III. the leopard	the physical level

The originality of this frame of reference is that it introduces an upward and downward thrust between levels, thereby departing from the uni-directional upward reference so widespread in conventional allegory. Furthermore, the levels in the above schema do not exist in absolute isolation from one another. Accordingly, Kafka has achieved a quasi-anthropomorphological description of the leopard's awareness, thus pushing the animal up towards level II, whereas the groanings and animalistic rage of the caged artist turn him down towards level III. Levels I and II are spanned by the ambiguity of "Künstler" in its double meaning of artiste and artist. The movement between levels may also be appreciated through I. A. Richards' analytical categorization of metaphor into tenor or idea and vehicle or image. When in the end, the hunger artist unimpededly extends his fasting, he literally wastes away into a diminished insignificance that must be searched out with sticks poked into a pile of straw. In other words, as the vehicle or the physical level diminishes, the tenor monopolizes the meaning and there is an upward thrust in the story; with the dwindling of the very percept, the reader himself is induced into a commentary of a radically conceptual nature. This dramatic evolution of partial allegory into near pure allegory is a rare literary achievement and stands apart from the frequent non-dramatic presentation of allegory as a donné.

Kafka's great genius manifests itself in the choice of artist on level II. A less talented writer might conceivably have selected as protagonist an artisan of pottery who would put more "soul" into his artifacts as he improved, with the banal result that the substantiality of the artifact would be maintained till the very end. By contrast, Kafka shows his genial narrative gift in creating a type of artist who, by the literal emaciation of his body into death, becomes an inevitable and relentlessly overwhelming conceptual indicator. In this light, hunger is radically economic within the immaterial-physical hierarchy: a refined tenor succeeds a wasting body. But the very summit of narrative brilliance and suggestive reversibility is instanced by the jarring juxtaposition of the most etherealized part of the story (the death of the artist) alongside the most physical level (the rampant leopard).

The three-leveled hierarchical scheme in "A Hunger Artist" raises the age-old question of allegory, a theoretical question ideally receiving sustained study in its own right. Be that as it may, the nature of allegory will never be fully defined without our first settling the domain of literary allusion, its techniques and properties, a domain that is even more unexplored. It would seem, at any event, that as allusion becomes less sporadic and at the same time refers to a higher "Platonic" plane of meaning, it tends to become allegorical. "Embraces" here is an indispensable qualifier of "refers to," for a mock epic, on the other hand, contains a sustained allusion to a higher level which is simultaneously rejected. Kafka's technique of poly-reference at times is rather close to that of the mock epic (as in The Castle and, par excellence, Metamorphosis). But, even if Kafka is to be associated with allegory proper, we must grant that Kafka's penchant for thematic modification, remodification, and ironical inversions breaks him off from the main allegorical tradition. Kafka's originality lies in the fact that his allegory specifically operates as a dystopia, an upside-down world where the ideal is debased or demystified and where iconoclasm is wanton, as opposed to traditional allegory in which there is a realm, immediate or distant, where the ideal remains intact.

It has been said that "A Hunger Artist" is strictly a literal story, but to this one may object that since a story may be coherently comprehended on the literal level, the possibility of other levels is not at all obviated. And in fact, there is allegory in Kafka's story but it is continual, not continuous. What demands even more interpretative tact is that the two more abstract domains—religious and aesthetic—are not necessarily concurrent, for at certain times they may succeed each other or just overlap. And even where there is a double reference there may not be a weight equally distributed among its individual terms, much like the distributional variability of the overdetermined dream image. In the text at hand, the artist's eventual confession that he would have eaten if he found the right food certainly applies in a critical sense more to the absolutist claims of all religions than to the Romantic artist's self-asserted mythic vocation. On the other hand, a firmer reference to aesthetic creativity is found in the statement that children inside or outside school have not been prepared for the lesson of fasting.

In the realm of religious and ascetic references, the most remarkable are those which play freely with biblical narrative and relate to Christ. First, the two lady assistants to the faltering martyr replace Simeon who helped carry the Cross, and secondly recall the two Marys present at the crucifixion, an event alluded to again in Kafka's story. The termination of the forty-day fast is announced by the impresario who is a parody of Christ's harbinger, John the Baptist. Although a herald, the impresario is untrue to his subject and does not understand him:

The impresario came forward, without a word—for the band made speech impossible—lifted his arms in the air above the artist, as if inviting Heaven to look down upon its creature here in the straw, this sufferng martyr . . .

The passage combines the scenes of Christ as Infant laid in straw and His baptism by John. The third chapter of Matthew's gospel depicts the latter scene, rendered so familiar by religious iconography:

And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out the water: and lo, the heavens were opened unto him.

An ironical reversal is added. In Matthew and Luke, the baptism is immediately followed by Christ's fasting for forty days, whereas in "A Hunger Artist," the baptismal parody concludes the forty-day fast. Kafka's subsequent portrayal of the artist fuses iconographic representations of Christ both falling beneath the Cross and also crucified:

. . . his head lolled on his breast as if it had landed there by chance; his body was hollowed out; his legs in a spasm of self-preservation clung close to each other at the knees, yet scraped on the ground as if it were not really solid ground, as if they were only trying to find solid ground; and the whole weight of his body, a featherweight after all, relapsed onto one of the ladies . . .

In a more general sense, the grand public did not believe in the hunger artist, living or dead. Kafka's dying protagonist who begs forgiveness is the ironic contrast of the dying Christ forgiving the spectators.

Contributing an added dimension to the ironies in the vertical technique of hierarchical inclusivity is the technique of horizontal expansion, which deftly manipulates the particular as a universal. This technique of expansion operates in two ways: the hunger artist can be both an individual and class figure; secondly, certain events centering around him, though occasional in occurrence, are softly focused so as to appear typical. More precisely, the term "hunger artist" acquires a generic dimension in occurring four times without the definite article, contrasting with over fifty occurrences with the definite article. The overall result, a stylistic coup de grâce, is the illusory union variously created between the definite and indefinite, the general and particular. After the singular and indefinite "a" in its title, the story opens with a generic statement explicitly referring to hunger artists as a class and ascribing a certain experience suffered by them all:

During the recent decades the interest in hunger artists has lessened.

Subsequently in the first paragraph of the German version, Kafka thrice precedes "hunger artist" by the definite article, yet in each case the epithet is generic in nature:

At one time the whole town took a lively interest in the hunger artist . . . everyone wanted to see the hunger artist at least once a day . . . and then it was the childrens' special treat to see the hunger artist . . .

Then, in the course of the second paragraph, there is a delicate shift to the particular hunger artist or protagonist of the story. An amateurish trait would have been to write "a hunger artist" or "the hunger artists" to designate the class. But Kafka does nothing of the kind; he deftly moves with grammatical legerdemain from the general to the particular. And yet the hunger artist is surely individualized, for not every one of his peers would sing, like to tell jokes, and so forth.

The other two occurrences of "a," in paragraphs six and eight, are limited in tonal influence. If Kafka desired indefiniteness as the predominant tone, he would have certainly employed "a" in place of "the" in the penultimate paragraph where the artist is submerged in a pile of straw. Instead, Kafka retains the major though not exclusive stress on particularity with the definite article. In this way, although the particular hunger artist is the cynosure of the story, as an allusive and inclusive force, he expands both in horizontal and vertical directions, representing other hunger artists and also those of a "higher" productivity.

Attendant with the skilful gliding between the particular artist and the artist class there is the element of the double nature, unique or occasional, and typical, of some episodes. Periodicity is surely the keynote of the hunger artist's life—his fasts are broken with small regular intervals of recuperation. Similarly, the band music and fanfare announcing the termination of his fasts is a recurrent ritualistic event ("But then there happened yet again what always happened"). In the course of this ritual, however, an episode took place which, upon second look, was by no means invariable. When the artist collapses, the two lady assistants react in their own personal ways. However, the particularization of their reactions within a cyclical chain of events fades into an impression of generalization. The detail of the nearby attendant in readiness along with the generalizing pressures of the muted style tones down the transition from the typical to the non-typical and in that manner unites the two poles. Likewise, one may see aspects of the same technique in the elaborated incident of the artist's outrage, where the typical and predictable (he raged especially when fasting a long time) dominates the particular.

In terms of point of view as well, "A Hunger Artist" reveals an inclusive soft focus and ultimately involves both the narrator and reader in the fabric of its reversals. In the first place, the narrator adopts a shifting partiality, favouring the hunger artist while he is alive:

Of course there were people who argued that this breakfast was an unfair attempt to bribe the watchers, but that was going rather too far.

. . . and never yet, after any term of fasting—this must be granted to his credit—had he left his cage of his own free will.

And when once in a time some leisurely passer-by . . . spoke of swindling, that was in its way the stupidest lie even 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.

But subsequent to the artist's death, the narrator presents the bias of the circus spectators in a somewhat favorable light:

Even the most insensitive felt it refreshing to see this wild creature leaping around that cage that had so long been dreary.

Narrative soft focus is also found in the ambiguity or doubtfulness of the narrator's omniscience. It is impossible to tell whether he is totally omniscient and therefore merely revealing the partial knowledge of the protagonists or whether he is partially omniscient and thereby participating in the partial knowledge of the protagonists. There are three outstanding instances of such ambiguity:

Yet for other reasons he was never satisfied; it was not perhaps mere fasting that had brought him to such a skeleton thinness that many people had regretfully to keep away from his exhibitions, because the sight of him was too much for them, perhaps it was dissatisfaction with himself, that had worn him down.

For meanwhile the aforementioned change in public interest had set in; it seemed to happen almost overnight; there may have been profound causes for it, but who was going to bother about that.

. . . perhaps they might even have stayed longer had not those pressing behind them in the narrow gangway . . . made it impossible . . .

A note of indefiniteness also occurs with respect to the reader-audience. Its presence is somewhat implied or felt by the narrator's use of "of course." Once, however, the audience is directly addressed—in the second person-singular and it is not clear whether the address issues from the reflecting artist, the narrator, or both:

He might fast as much as he could, and he did so; but nothing could save him now, people passed him by. Just try to explain to anyone the art of fasting!

Briefly, the twentieth-century fascination for Kafka's works is to some degree due to their unmooring, their peculiar indefiniteness and inclusive shifting perspective which on the one hand releases from traditional stable perspectives and, on the other hand, as a result of their fragmented formal nature, command further speculation on the part of the reader.

Given Kafka's technique of inclusivity and expansiveness, we are now in a better position to pursue the material which he has subjected to reversal, both in its psychoanalytical sense of defense and in the literary sense as a principle of narrative structure. As I suggested before, much of Kafka's fiction is a mixture of allegory and dystopia or upside-down utopia. If the traditional thrust of allegory is upward, in reference to abstractions, morality, religion, and the like, the Kafkaesque allegory has a downward movement, de-idealizing abstract forces, exposing their corruption and attendantly showing their unattainability. The Trial spectacularly testifies to such a reversed conception, and somewhat in the same category is "A Hunger Artist" with its various reversals, ironies; it presents no resting place or solution except death, for any other solution is inverted and begins another series of problems.

The standard analytical commentary on reversal is in Freud's metapsychological paper "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes." There, Freud lends special attention to two defenses: reversal into the opposite and turning around upon the subject's self. They are among the ego's very oldest defenses and may here be conveniently assimilated into the one rubric, reversal. In treating reversal, Freud has recourse to two pairs of component instincts (sadism and masochism, voyeurism and exhibitionism) and what he calls the total ego activity of love. Reversal may involve:

1. a change of instinctual aim, as from activity to passivity. e. g., instead of my torturing another, the other tortures me;
2. a change of object, while the instinctual aim remains the same—this is reflected by the Greek middle voice, e. g., instead of torturing another, I torture myself.
3. a reversal of content, in the one instance of love giving way to hate. In effect, writes Freud, this topic is quite complicated and he posits three opposites for love: loving-hating, love-being loved, and love and hate taken together as antithetical to unconcern or indifference.

Now, the artist is not only a simple exhibitionist (he stares into vacancy while others are looking at him) but can simultaneously be an exhibitionist-voyeur (he looks at others while they are looking at him) or then again, there's a reversal into sheer voyeurism: he triumphantly looks at the tired watchers eating after a sleepless night. The masochistic element in this voyeurism is clear, for on the other hand, the artist is depressed at seeing the meat destined for the caged animals, to which he feels inferior; similarly, he is pained by the self-asserting starers. In parallel fashion, the fasting artist is not only masochistic, but is also sadistic: he goes to great lengths to keep the watchers sleepless throughout the night, and he wants the public to maintain at considerable inconvenience their interest in his fasting past the forty-day limit.

Indeed, the story puts forth various combinations and reversals of the four component instincts: the lady assistants who, in striving for the exhibitionistic post of honor, coldly exploit the artist's exhibitionism; the spectators who sadistically delight at the distress of a lady assistant; the circus visitors that fear the leopard's roar yet in rapt voyeurism crowd around his cage to look at him; the artist's delusional madness that he can fast indefinitely, with the final result that he neglects to keep up-to-date the notice board and dwindles from sight underneath the straw, to the complete undoing of exhibitionism. And then again, concern may give way to indifference, as when the public forgets the artist; or concern may give way to a combination of both hatred and indifference as in the case of the accusation of the malicious passer-by.

The mechanism of reversal not only applies to the story's thematic elaboration of the component instincts but also the irony which Kafka uses to structure the narrative. The public would rather suppress or repress than be fully aware of its caprices, a fact brought out by the story's very last sentence which ironically reverts to the story's first sentence which sequentially complements it:

But they braced themselves, crowded round the cage, and did not want ever to move away.

During these last decades the interest in professional fasting has markedly diminished.

What is more, exhibitionistic demonstrability of the artist's fasting is ultimately self-defeating and self-punitive, for the public's voyeuristic capability is unequal to the artist's exhibitionistic powers. Only he himself can be adequate witness to his performance, but no one will believe him. Verifiability of his fasting exceeds the spectators' masochistic tolerance of inconvenience. All this adds up to the consideration that breaking a public record feeds on public acknowledgment and acclaim, and without that response, record-breaking occasions further isolation.

Hence, the artist is prisoner of his enterprise. It is possible that his very thinness is counterproductive and keeps people away; his melancholy is misunderstood as caused by fasting whereas the logical reverse was true: although he truthfully says that fasting is easy, he is accused of being modest or deceiving, and when he sings to prove he's not eating for the neglectful watchers playing cards at some distance away, they admire his hypocrisy and cleverness that much more. Even the paradoxical possibility of being intriguing because of his temporary unpopularity boomerangs against the artist:

People grew familiar with the strange idea that they could be expected, in times like these, to take an interest in a hunger artist, and with this familiarity the verdict went out against him.

The most poignant reversal, in a dramatic sense, occurs at the end of the story when the artist undergoes a change of character. He rejects the surface heroism of his past fasting as essentially an involuntary act. Though maintaining his dying decision to fast, he is no longer proud about it. This final humility from an otherwise deranged borderline character is taken as craziness itself by the overseer who continually reverses his logical position:

"Forgive me, everybody," whispered the hunger artist . . .

"Of course," said the overseer, and tapped his forehead with a finger to let the attendants know what state the man was in, "we forgive you."

"I always wanted you to admire my fasting," said the hunger artist.

"We do admire it," said the overseer, affably.

"But you shouldn't admire it," said the hunger artist.

"Well then we don't admire it," said the overseer, "but why shouldn't we admire it?"

"Because I have to fast, I can't help it," said the hunger artist.

"To me you look strange," said the overseer, "and why can't you help it?"

"Because," said the hunger artist, lifting his head a little and speaking, with his lips pursed, as if for a kiss, right into the overseer's ear, so that no syllable might be lost, "because I couldn't find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I wouldn't have made any scene and would have stuffed myself like you or anyone else."

It is an ironic reversal that the artist's physical diminution is concomitant with the diminution of his fame. Ultimately visuality in all its forms fails as a compensation for orality. The narcissistic relation between eye and mouth finally collapses, to be succeeded by aurality and a quasi-osculation. The sadistic impresario gives way to the overseer who, befitting his partial role as superego, with his head turned sidewards, listens to the artist's final confession.

In Kafka's story, reversal is the creative matrix out of which the content and form are elaborated; it keynotes the gliding of levels of meaning into each other, the story's use of Biblical allusion, the dramatization of the four component instincts, and the technique of including the general in the particular and vice versa. As well, reversibility defines the story's narrative structure, whose beginning is also to be understood as following its ending. Summarily: In "A Hunger Artist" the aphoristic reduction of the content and imaginative structure reveals a common factor which extends in nature from an unconscious defence to some kind of counterpart in the autonomous conflict-free ego, with the latter functioning centrally in the creation of aesthetic form. The final result is a Symbolic Gestalt.