A Hunger Artist
The Old Gentleman's Complaint
For a long time I was not very keen on this story. It did not have the clear and exact structures that one can see in Metamorphosis and In The Penal Colony, and the deliberateness of the artist made the events of the story more arbitrary and the main character's actions less sympathetic. There was less of a sense of him having no choice (obviously we discover that he had at the end, but it is having no choice in a different way, again one that could be characterised as arbitrary). There was also less of the assault of familiar reality that one will recognise if one is familiar with earlier Kafka stories.
What made me change my point of view was the incident towards the end when the elderly gentleman complains of cheating and raps the board with his stick. The narrative voice observes that this was the unfairest thing that malice and ill-will could say, for "the hunger artist was working honestly, but the world was cheating him of his reward". This affected my view of the story because it was so passionate. It was the voice of someone who was championing a lone courageous effort. I could sympathise with that. It was not a typical Kafka story, but it managed to touch me in a human way nevertheless.
What this championing attitude implies is interesting from the point of view of the relationship between narrative and protagonist. In Metamorphosis the narrative describes with complete objectivity what Gregor does, how he perceives the changes that take place in his family as a result of his transformation. At all times it maintains the distance, in a way that can at times seem alienating. Only at the end, when Gregor has died and the family are set free does it start to become subjective, but it remains subjective at a distance. It empathises with the Samsas, but does not go further.
But in A Hunger Artist the narrative abandons such careful professionalism, and throws itself into supporting the main character with an astonishing enthusiasm. It is a very emotional story, and I am not at all surprised by the anecdote according to which Kafka, editing the proofs on his deathbed, was reduced to tears. That does not necessarily imply that it had touched something particular in him: it is simply a very emotional story. This comes out clearly, however, if one reads it in the German. The English translation I first read missed that dimension utterly. That level of emotion is quite difficult to bring over in English, I suspect, since English does not have quite the same emotional power as German in general anyway.
This failure of detachment implies to me some kind of final breakdown.
Collapsing Structure
The breakdown of detachment goes hand-in-hand with a kind of collapse of structure which is also discernible in this story. We can speak of significant points in a Kafka story. There is a point of resignation about halfway through, a pivotal period about three-quarters of the way through, and a kind of coda at the end. The pivotal period is generally an echo of the whole story and comprises a moment of total change, peripeteia. The point of resignation is the point at which the main character accepts the truth of his unchanging situation in some way. The coda tends to involve an opening up and to take us away from where we have been into new territory.
In this case the resignation point comes when the hunger artist parts with his manager and leads immediately into the pivotal period, in which he attempts to fast longer than anyone has ever fasted before. The coda comes when the young panther is put into the hunger artist's old cage. The structure is looser, more free-flowing, but also as a result of this more human, more personal. The conclusion is an unrestrained celebration of the sheer life the panther seems to carry in his jaws.
The breakdown of the structure begins from the start, in which the narrator speaks more like a cultural commentator or a journalist than a narrator, describing how the interest in hunger artists has declined. From that there is a - to my mind slightly uncomfortable - shift to a more conventional narrative. What this reminds me of is the peculiar opening of Flaubert's Madame Bovary, at the commencement of which the narrator recalls knowing Charles Bovary at school, a personal connection which is not brought up again. (Personally I have always felt Madame Bovary to be a little odd, and I cannot tell to what extent we are meant to sympathise with her. I attribute this to the writer not completely having made up his mind.)
This story, in common with Investigations Of A Dog, which was written at about the same time, does not keep one foot on the floor outside the bed, as previous Kafka stories were inclined to do. It has a premiss, and it lives completely in the world of that premiss.
Set up 19 March 1999
Last updated 25 March 1999
© R. Millar 1999