Franz Kafka, A Hunger Artist

There is a central paradox in all of Franz Kafka's tales that is never resolved or even fully explained. One consequence of that paradox is the impossibility of reducing Kafka to any single interpretation. The same has been said of the allegorical quality of the Bible. Many lenses have been used, but neither one appears sufficient.

"A Hunger Artist" is one such tale. The central figure, a public performer, has locked himself in a cage and fasts for weeks on end, practicing an art of starvation that beguiles and disturbs his spectators. Eventually, admiration and sympathy are mixed with general suspicion of the authenticity of the act, and guards are dispatched to ensure the hunger artist is not secretly feeding himself. What's more, his promoter insists on a forty-day fasting limit, believing that public interest could not be stretched or capitalized on any further. That distrust and cynicism irritates the hunger artist, and when his art finally outlasts its fame, he employs himself in a circus.

He is confined to a shadowy corner of the circus, surrounded by animals in cages. Crowds of spectators pass, noisily and indifferently, and the hunger artist, who had hoped to exceed his own powers, grows more and more depressed by his surroundings. But he continues to fast, losing count of the days. When an overseer looks into his cage one day and finds him near death, the hunger artist begs forgiveness for his act. In response to the inspectors' feigned admiration, he replies, "But you shouldn't admire it." He says he fasted only because "I couldn't find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else." He dies shortly after.

There's the paradox. And the only attempt at resolving it is vague--once the hunger artist's body is removed, a panther is placed in the cage. "And the joy of life streamed with such ardent passion from his throat that for onlookers it was not easy to stand the shock of it. But they braced themselves, crowded around the cage, and did not want ever to move away."

For all its critics' assertions of the artist's solitude and alientation in modern society, "A Hunger Artist" escapes interpretation. It has an incompleteness that is typical of Kafka's other stories, as though refusing totality (or affecting a failure to achieve total understanding). Why are the hunger artist's final words so banal? Is he mocking the onlookers? Is he mocking life and the artist's struggle within it? Are we meant to understand? Kafka was making a statement, about art, interpretation, modernity, truth. The hunger artist was making a statement, too, but nobody could know for certain what it was.

Who's Afraid of the Enlightenment?

For the German social critics, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries advanced freedom at the cost of freedom. While the triumph of reason and rationality emancipated the individual from superstition, religion, and prejudice, it laid the ground for another kind of domination. In their essay, "The Dialectic of Enlightenment," Adorno and Horkheimer argued that, in subordinating the natural world to man's will, modern science and technology tended to convert reason into an instrument of domination, of which the Nazi death camps were a glaring testimonial. The empowerment of reason, in effect, was irrational. Reason for reason's sake, the condition for true freedom, was incompatible with modernity's hyper-capitalist, advanced industrial order.

Many post-war intellectuals in the arts and humanities were skeptical, not so much about science, but of scientism. They saw traditional forms of human community eroding, individuality and self-determination suppressed by technology. Urban centers in industrialized nations were particularly vulnerable. Accordingly, critiques of modern science often invoked the conformism and standardization which scientific progress supposedly entailed. The human being, for these thinkers, was becoming machine-like. His victory over nature was also a victory over his natural self; in its place, man developed a formalized morality, susceptible to external control and manipulation. As Adorno and Horkheimer theorized, this was indeed the negative legacy of the European Enlightenment.