Kafka

Kafka, “The Hunger Artist”

Franz Kafka (who was highly influenced by Freud and said so in his journals) wrote in a style known (now) as Magical Realism.  

It wasn’t called this at the time – the term was in use then, but was only being used at the time to refer to a certain sort of painter, like this guy,

or this one.

Magical Realism painting

Another Magical Realism Painting

 Later, it began to be applied to writers.

So what is Magic Realism?  Unhappily, the literary world has yet to settle on a hard and fast definition.  It’s more like a “we know it when we see it” sort of thing. 

But basically, it’s highly realistic fiction that feels too weird to be real, so that, reading it, the reader feels more and more off balance: begins to think something like just hold on now, this writer acts like this is true; but it can’t be – can it? 

The writer is acting like a reliable narrator, in other words, and yet you, the reader, become more and more convinced that he is an unreliable narrator. 

In Magical Realism, fiction will be written, generally, in a straightforward way – the tone will be matter of fact, the language ordinary (if you have read Shakespeare or Faulkner, compare Kafka’s tone and language to theirs). 

The writer of magic realism, rather than trying to awake your sense of wonder at the world, seems to be trying to say, nothing here, folks, move along.  And yet: while writing in that tone, the writer describes old winged men who crash land on the beach; or people who turn into giant beetles; or mythic utopian cities in the jungle.

Further – and this is key – magic realism functions as an aporia. 

APORIA (Greek: "impassable path"): The deliberate act of talking about how one is unable to talk about something. For instance, "I can't tell you how often writers use aporia." The term dubitatio refers to a subtype of aporia in which a speaker or writer pauses and deliberately reveals his doubt or uncertainty (genuine or feigned) about an issue. The aporia in the case of dubitatio is both that pause and the act of intentionally discussing that ambiguous reaction. This rhetorical ploy can make the audience feel sympathy for the speaker's dilemma, or it can help characterize the speaker as one who is open-minded and sincerely struggling with the same issues the audience faces. More recently, literary deconstructionists like Jacques Derrida have high-jacked or modified the rhetorical term aporia, and they use it to suggest a "gap" or a lacuna that exists between what the text attempts to say and what it is forced to mean due to the constraints of language. Aporia is an example of a rhetorical trope. http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/lit_terms_a.html

Magical realism is not an allegory; it is not a parable.  It is a problematic text that defies interpretation.

So!  When we read “The Hunger Artist,” one of Kafka’s classic works (and all of his works are in the school of magic realism) what happens?

From the very start, we begin to feel mystified.  What?  What is this?  People used to fast as a spectacle? 

That can’t be so – can it?  But Kafka’s implied narrator is acting as if it is so…well, maybe this is some sort of metaphor?  (It’s a parable!) (Except…for what?) 

Ooo!  He fasts for 40 days!  Okay, I’m cooking, I’m going somewhere!  And then – bang into a stone wall, because – well, if this is a parable about religion, nothing really fits.  His ability to fast, people’s pleasure at watching him – though the adults don’t really seem that interested, and the kids seem more scared than interested – I guess we could sort of make that hook to religion, only…what’s it mean, exactly? 

Adults aren’t interested in religion, except as a spectacle?  Kids are more scared of religion than anything? Does that fit religion as we know it? 

(Maybe?  Some religions?  Can we run with that for a while?  Does it take us somewhere?) And then…religion ends being a fad that everyone loses interest in, so that the only one who still practices it ends up as a circus sideshow?  Replaced by a panther?

Then what does the panther mean, what’s with the butchers – the ones who guard our religious zealot – what’s with the cage?  What does any of this have to do religion?

No, back to the drawing board.  What is it about fasting that’s interesting?  Can this be a clue?  At the end of the story, notice, a couple of things happen. 

·        People lose interest in fasting (though actually they never were that interested)

·        The hunger artist keeps fasting anyway

·        The people become vastly interested in panthers

·        Panthers are interesting because they’re hungry, and because they have freedom – which is located in their teeth: teeth which (duh) are used to eat – in the panther’s case, meat, which butchers supply.

·        The hunger artist reveals to us that he never was, really, an artist:  it was just that he couldn’t find anything he wanted to eat; that if he had been able to find something he wanted to eat, he would have happily eaten it, and joined the rest of the living world

All of these things occur in rapid succession, leaving us, the readers, a bit bewildered.  What are we to make of these revelations?

Other observations:

·        Notice that the artist doesn’t change as the story progresses.  He starts as a hunger artist; he ends as a hunger artist.  It’s the world that suddenly changes around him, for no reason we are given, and for no reason we can discover.

·        Notice that the hunger artist (like the panther) is kept in a cage.  Why?  The panther being kept in a cage makes sense, clearly – we need to imprison hungry /dangerous/uncontrollable animals.  But why lock up a (hunger) artist?  What’s being implied here (about artists)?

·        People buy tickets to watch the hunger artist fast, just as they later buy tickets to gaze at the panther.  Commodification of – something.  Art?  Only surely the panther is not art.  So commodification of – what, exactly?

·        People watch (or in the case of his butcher observers, do not watch) the hunger artist from a distance and with half their attention, turning away sooner and sooner each time, more and more ready to move on; people gaze at the panther so eagerly they are pressing their bodies against the bars: they don’t ever want to move away.  What’s the difference between the artist and the panther?

·        Those two women who come to take him out of the cage.  What do they mean? (Why women? And notice that they are not at all pleased to be there.)

Note: the most important part of this story is the way in which it resists interpretation.