[In the essay below, Stallman investigates "A Hunger Artist" as both a metaphysical allegory portraying "the dilemma of modern man: his spiritual disunity" and a sociological allegory depicting "the dilemma of the modern artist: his dissociation from the world in which he lives."]

"The Hunger-Artist" is one of Kafka's perfections and belongs with the greatest short stories of our time. Its theme of the corruption of inter-human relationships, as Winkler defines it, recurs throughout Kafka's work and has its perfect achievement here in this intrinsic whole.

The world of a Kafka story is one of mystery, the mysterious being obtained by a realism that is pushed to the extremes. All his details are simple and commonplace, a critic of The Castle points out; but Kafka subjects them "to a transmutation which makes them seem to compete with each other in enveloping us with some weighty secret." The weighty secret remains a mystification for most readers—even for Einstein. "I couldn't read it for its perversity," he is reported to have remarked upon returning a Kafka novel to Thomas Mann. "The human mind isn't complicated enough." One critic of The Burrow describes that story as "in itself a 'burrow' of the most complicated construction," with an ingenious system of intertwining tunnels of which he interprets the "inner fortress" alone, "whence the whole structure can be overlooked." The present essay attempts to open up the as yet unlocked cage of "The Hunger-Artist."

Realism of detail within a framework of symbolism, as Max Lerner says, is Kafka's unique quality and his special gift to modern fiction. His meanings emerge at several planes at once, and the planes are interconnected. Just try to keep to Kafka's facts as facts! It is impossible to suppress or to minimize their allegorical overtones. For as facts—and they are not "facts" but purely imaginary phenomena—they resist a literal interpretation. Here at the literal plane, as starting-point for our analysis, are the facts of "The Hunger-Artist":

The story is about a once popular spectacle staged for the entertainment of a pleasure-seeking public: the exhibition of a professional 'hunger-artist' performing in a cage of straw his stunt of 'fasting.' His cage's sole decoration is a clock. His spectators see him as a trickster and common circus-freak and therefore they expect him to cheat, to break fast on the sly. But fasting is his sole reason for existing, his life purpose; not even under compulsion would he partake of food. For him, to fast is the easiest thing he can do; and so he says, but no one believes in him. Because the public distrusts him, he is guarded—usually by three butchers—and prevented from fasting beyond a forty-day period, not for humane reasons, but only because patronage stops after that time. His guards tempt him with food and sometimes torture him; yet they breakfast on food supplied at his expense! A great public festival celebrates his achievement, and thus he is "honored by the world." But when he is removed from his cage he collapses in a rage, not from hunger, but from having been cheated of the honor of fasting on and on and of becoming thus "the greatest hunger-artist of all time." Though emaciated almost to the point of death, he quickly recovers and after brief recuperation intervals performs again and again.

Nowadays however he has been abandoned for other spectacles. People visit his cage in the circus-tent, but only because it is next to the stables. His spectators are fascinated by the animals. All's changed: There is no clock, and the once beautiful signs to announce the purpose of his act have been torn down. Now no tally is kept of the number of fasting days achieved. There are no guards. "And so the hunger-artist fasted on without hindrance, as he had once dreamed of doing . . . just as he had once predicted, but no one counted the days; no one, not even the hunger-artist himself, knew how great his achievement was and his heart grew heavy." Thus the world robs him of his reward. Indifference replaces admiration, and on this account he expires. He is buried with the straw of his cage and replaced by a panther, who devours fiercely the food he naturally craves. The people crowd about his cage.

Here then is the matter-of-fact account of the story stripped of interpretation. But every fact seems invested with symbolic significance. For instance, no literal meaning can be ascribed to the bizarre clock in the artist's cage. (A calendar is the logical means for reckoning the artist's fasting days.) This clock does not tick. The unclocked life of the artist outlasts centuries, and periodically he survives starvation sieges that are beyond human endurance. And so it is with all of Kafka's facts: they are symbols and they are fantasies of a dream world. The laws of physics and of biology are defied, the facts of human existence distorted. Kafka's facts ask questions which have their answer at their allegorical meaning level. The literal meaning is not complete or sufficient in its own terms, as James Burnham observes. However resolutely we try to remain at the literal in Kafka, "we always find ourselves being driven and teased and thrust beyond it. The most commonplace phrase, appearing as it will in an irreconcilable context, compels the mind to spin away. We are always walking at the edge of a cliff."

"The Hunger-Artist" at its allegorical level provides three possible interpretations: metaphysical, religious, and sociological. All three circles of meaning intersect, almost coinciding one with the other. No circle is closed, each opens onto the adjoining one and projects us into it. Hence no single self-contained system of meaning defines Kafka's intention; no single complete interpretation is possible.

To begin with a metaphysical interpretation, there is the double contrast between (1) the two occupants of the cage, the human and the animal, and (2) between the artist and his observers, the human beings outside who are but closed in animals uncaged. The noble body of the panther fascinates them, and this physical attraction is that which one animal has for another. For them too, their joy in living issues from their throat—and from their belly. They crave the same food and are nourished, literally, by the same sensations and appetites. What a contrast between the hunger-artist, who is no-flesh, and his spectators, who are all-flesh: the panther who consumes flesh, the butcher-guards who destroy flesh, the doctors who cure flesh! But the knife of a butcher is no release for an animal, nor is the knife of a doctor who by saving flesh saves only matter. As for the contrast between the hunger-artist and the panther, these two beings are at once wholly unlike each other and yet identical. The panther complements the hunger-artist and is parodied by him. In the portrait which opens the story the artist is portrayed as:

deathly pale, dressed in black tights, his ribs protruding powerfully, sometimes nodding politely and answering questions with a forced smile, even thrusting his arm through the bars to let them feel his emaciation, and paying attention to no one, ignoring even the striking of the clock which was the cage's sole decoration, looking straight before him with eyes almost closed, and sipping occasionally from a tiny glass of water to wet his lips.

The hunger-artist is an imitation panther. As artist he imitates life: panther-like he appears black, yet a deathly paleness reveals his true self. Time means no more to him than to the panther. And he has no use for a chair, he prefers straw. He nods his head as though beckoning to onlookers, or half-closing his eyes he stares beyond them as though intent upon some inward vision. But what a poor imitation of reality the artist presents! Protruding "powerfully" from him are ribs, only ribs, and the arm he proudly thrusts through the bars discloses not strength but emaciation. (Notice Kafka's wit here: into his parody he injects bathos.)

While the hunger-artist is a part of the sensuous world of matter, he is yet apart from it. Unlike the animal and the human, his being is spiritual and thus "free" from the claims of matter. Their "freedom," by contrast, resides somewhere in the region of their teeth, that is, in their appetite, which is to say that man as animal is never free—never free from that gnawing dissatisfaction which his purely physical appetencies create in him again and again. The hunger-artist—man as spiritual being—has that true freedom which inheres in the soul; still not even he who hungers for the claims of the divine is free from the claims of the body. He too is caged by a human being's "joy in living." One recalls the quotation from St. John of the Cross which T. S. Eliot takes as caption for his Sweeney Agonistes: "Hence the soul cannot be possessed of the divine union, until it has divested itself of the love of created things." In the world of "The Hunger-Artist" there exists a radical division between the realm of faith—the religious, the qualitative, the spiritual or the supernatural (symbolized by the mystic-faster)—and the realm of practical reason, the quantitative, the sensuous realm of physical matter (symbolized by the panther and the people). Elsewhere in his writings Kafka declares that "what we call the physical world is the evil in the spiritual one." But we do not need external evidence; the internal evidence is positive enough: In the world of "The Hunger-Artist" there is this dichotomy between divine and human, and this dichotomy approaches the absolute.

There is a passage in James Burnham's "Observations on Kafka" (Partisan Review: March, 1947) which defines Kafka's metaphysics: "His world is split by the absolute Manichaean division into Good and Evil, which is identified with the division between Light and Darkness, Spirit and Matter. . . . As with all Manichaeans, the ambivalence remains: he [Kafka] longs for Matter, for the evil natural social world, at the same time that he denies it; he is appalled by Spirit even while he must seek it absolutely." (Italics mine.) Kafka's hunger-artist represents Kafka's doctrine that "There is only a spiritual world; what we call the physical world is the evil in the spiritual one, and what we call evil is only a necessary moment in our endless development." "The Hunger-Artist" is a kind of critique of this doctrine, for here Matter triumphs over Spirit. Though the tone of the story is one of lament for the passing of the hunger-artist, for his decline and death, none the less all the logic is weighted against his efforts at autarchy. As for our neglect of hunger-artists, our present-day practice of honoring a real panther has more to be said for it than our former-day practice of honoring a fake one. The hunger-artist seeks Spirit absolutely; he denies the "evil natural social world" at the same time that he longs for it. And this is his dilemma, even as it is ours. It is not possible for man to achieve a condition of pure spirituality, nor again is it possible for him to achieve a synthesis of spirit and matter. As the agent of divine purity the hunger-artist is a failure. His failure is signified, for instance, on the occasion when he answers the person who has explained his emaciation as being caused by a lack of food: he answers "by flying into a rage and terrifying all those around him by shaking the bars of his cage like a wild animal." This reversion to the animal divests him momentarily of the divine, and it also betrays the split-soul conflict within him. His location next to the stables serves as reminder that the claims of the animal body are necessary claims upon the soul and cannot be denied. And this is true even though matter is wholly evil (i.e., "the evil odors from the stalls," etc.); complete separation from reality can never be obtained. (Compare the idea of "complete detachment from the earth" as it figures in The Burrow.) Pure Spirit is as vacuous as Pure Matter.

Nowadays (to bring this history down to current times) that dualism between Spirit and Matter, which had its two-part representation in the hunger-artist and the insatiable hunger-multitude, is non-existent since one part of the dualism no longer has representation—the mystic-faster is dead. "Fasting" no longer means anything to us; nor did it in former times—except that then it was at least celebrated (albeit not without hypocrisy), honored by rituals conscientiously enacted from fast day to fast day. Everyone attended His service daily, and regular subscribers sat (as in church-pews) "before the small latticed cage for days on end." Everyone pretended to marvel at his holy feat, but not one worshiper had Faith. Yet for centuries he submitted again and again to crucifixion by these pretenders, a martyr for his cause. Because "it was the stylish thing to do," the multitude attended his "small latticed cage" as they would a confessional box. But the hunger-artist as priest hears no confession. Indeed since the multitude does not understand what faith is, it has no sin to confess. Apart from a few acolytes to His Cult, all mankind disbelieves this Christ who many times died for man's sake. And when He dies, see how the disbelievers exploit the drama of His death:

But now there happened the thing which always happened at this point. The impressario would come, and silently—for the music rendered speech impossible—he would raise his arms over the hunger-artist as if inviting heaven to look down upon its work here upon the straw, this pitiful martyr—and martyr the hunger-artist was, to be sure, though in an entirely different sense. Then he would grasp the hunger-artist about his frail waist, trying as he did to make it obvious by his exaggerated caution with what a fragile object he was dealing, and after surreptitiously shaking him a little and causing his legs to wobble and his body to sway uncontrollably, would turn him over to the ladies, who had meanwhile turned as pale as death.

The ladies who so cruelly sentimentalize over his martyrdom represent sympathy without understanding, a sympathy which is self-sentiment. One of them weeps, but not for him. She breaks into tears only in shame for having touched him. It is a mock lamentation these two Marys perform.

And the entire weight of his body, light though it was, rested upon one of the ladies, who, breathless and looking about imploringly for help (she had not pictured this post of honor thus), first tried to avoid contact with the hunger-artist by stretching her neck as far as possible, and then . . . she broke into tears to the accompaniment of delighted laughter from the audience. . . .

What a difference between the theme of the Virgin mourning the loss of her Son as treated in Kafka's parody and as depicted in the famous Avignon Pièta or in Giotto's Lamentation.

It is thus that the religious and the metaphysical meanings of "The Hunger-Artist" coincide: (1) Christ is truly dead. Our post-Renaissance world has discarded the act of faith from its reality. (2) For the superannuated mystic there is no resurrection because today not Spirit but Matter alone is recognized. And it is recognized, this triumph of matter over spirit, even by the dying mystic, who ends a skeptic and a defeatist (not unlike Kafka himself). I had to fast, he admits, because I could find no food to my liking. Fasting is my destiny. But "'If I had found it, believe me, I should have caused no stir, I should have eaten my fill just as you do, and all the others.' Those were his last words, but in his glazed eyes there remained the firm, though no longer proud, conviction that he was still fasting." Here is the key to his enigma. So the fanatic quest of the hunger-artist, to quote Miss Magny, who has a short note on "The Hunger-Artist" in her critical essay "The Objective Depiction of Absurdity" (in The Kafka Problem), "So the insatiable hunger, the divine nostalgia that possesses the mystic or artist perhaps is at bottom only some lack, something unsatisfiable, a fundamental maladjustment, the sign of an imperfect soul."

As metaphysical allegory "The Hunger-Artist" portrays the dilemma of modern man: his spiritual disunity. The story is about man's search for his own meaning: what is man, Matter or Spirit? As sociological allegory "The Hunger-Artist" presents the dilemma of the modern artist: his dissociation from the world in which he lives. Translated into sociological terms, the division is between the artist and his society; in metaphysical terms, between the divine and the human, the soul and the body. The consequence of the corruption of the individual integrity is a corruption of inter-human relationships. There is spiritual disunity within the individual artist and a spiritual disunity between the artist and his materialistic public. (His isolation is symbolized by the cage.) The artist cannot believe in himself, nor can his public believe in him. The loneliness of the artist (in his "ivory tower"), as Miss Magny phrases it, "is the aloneness of the Mount of Olives with the spitting, the insults and the sponge soaked in gall . . ."

For his aesthetic vision the artist has to die daily and be reborn, but his artistic devotion cannot be an end in itself. The artist as poet, no less than the artist as mystic, cannot survive in isolation from society. "Against this lack of understanding, this universal lack of understanding, it was impossible to fight." The division between artist and society can be bridged only by a reciprocal act of faith. But "Just try to explain the art of fasting to some one! He who has no feeling for it simply cannot comprehend it." As the initiated alone understood, "the hunger-artist would never under any circumstances, not even under compulsion, partake of any nourishment during the period of fasting. His honor as an artist forbade such a thing." The integrity of the artist is absolute, but his values are relative. His Ivory Tower is truly a cage. To point Kafka's satire, the artists of the 'Nineties, those pure aesthetes, retreated from life with a gospel of Art for Art's Sake and the disdain of Villiers de I'Isle Adam—"As for living, our servants will do that for us." But life is not irrelevant to art; the material conditions, however delimiting their influence, nourish the creative imagination. Life is at once the subject of art and its wellspring. Art and Life, Spirit and Matter—each fulfills the ever-unfulfilled appetencies of the other. Of course the artist can "fast" as no one else can do. We concede, "in view of the peculiar nature of this art which showed no flagging with increased age," the artist's claim of limitless capacity for fasting. But pure creativeness is nothing; the creative imagination must feed upon reality. Art is but a vision of reality.

True, the artist in the Renaissance and Middle Ages "lived in apparent glory, honored by the world." He had his patron, the impressario who profited from the exhibition and shared the adulatory applause; his critics, the butchers who watched over his creative activity (and always misjudged it); and his historians, the attendants who bibliographed his creative acts or achievements in works produced. An imitation panther in a cage, he was admired for his craftsmanship in imitating life, but not being distinguished from any other circus performer by "the pleasure-seeking multitude" he was taken as "no more than a source of amusement." Society exploited all his deaths and resurrections; it crucified him again and again, not by hostility but by distrust and utter indifference. Hence his despair, the issue of this universal distrust which made his act of creation so difficult for him, and which "filled [him] with a gloomy melancholy which was deepened by the fact that no one understood it." It is our glorification of the practical vision at the expense of the religious and aesthetic vision and the resultant loss of spiritual belief that is Kafka's "Hunger-Artist" theme. Society and the artist, each disbelieves in the other. But the artist disbelieves even in himself. It was a gnawing doubt that truly emaciated him. His unhappiness results from the dualism within himself between the aesthetic and the practical insights, the dichotomy dissociating his spiritual self from his practical being. The aesthetic soul subsists in the physical body, in the realm of matter or not at all. His denial of the realm of matter, the denial which his emaciation signifies, is only one source of his "constant state of depression." The artist is equally at fault even as the society which repudiates him, for he repudiates life itself. By his perverse denial of reality the artist's truths are mummy truths, whereat the living mock. His art is not a vision of reality. Hence the rejection of the emaciated body of art for the healthy body of life (the panther). Perhaps it wasn't his fasting to attain aesthetic perfection that made the artist so emaciated; "perhaps his emaciation came solely from his dissatisfaction with himself"—solely from dissatisfaction with the pure aesthetic vision he too fervently hungered to attain. Thus, "though longing impatiently for these visits [of the living on their way "to the eagerly-awaited barns"], which he naturally saw as his reason for existence, [he] couldn't help feeling at the same time a certain apprehension." He apprehends the necessity of an existence outside the cage and realizes that an absolutism of pure aestheticism is artistic and spiritual death. The people were on their way to the stables, he became convinced, "and his experience in this matter overcame even the most stubborn, almost conscious self-deception." His disillusionment is his apprehension of the fact that art has no sovereignty over life. As for his solipsistic belief that only "he who was the faster could be at the same time a completely satisfied spectator of his fasting," suppose that he had attained his illusionary ideal of artistic purity—as absolute spectator of his triumph over nature he could never comprehend his spiritual achievement without measuring it from the relative world of its physical embodiment. His death-mask conviction of final triumph is a mockery, for the triumph is an empty one.

It is the clock in the cage that triumphs over the artist. Time triumphs over the artist who denies the flux of time, which is his present reality. The clock in the cage is a mockery of the artist's faith in his artifice of eternity. The tragedy of Kafka's hunger-artist is not that he dies but that he fails to die into life. As he dies he seeks recognition from the world he has all his lifetime repudiated: "'I always wanted you to admire my fasting.' said the hunger-artist." It is his confession that the sovereignty of the soul (or of the aesthetic experience) is but an illusion, that spirit is nothing if isolated from matter. It is his confession that the artist must come to terms with his life, with the civilization in which he lives, with reality. "Forgive me, all of you," he whispers to the circus-manager, as though in confessional before a priest; and they forgive him—for his blasphemy against nature.