The Hunger Artist
Franz Kafka wrote “A Hunger Artist” in 1924. It follows a fasting artist who starves himself as a public spectacle. The story begins at the height of his fame, crowds pressing against the cage to watch a man not eat. Slowly, the public loses interest. The spectacle becomes old news. His final act is in a cage at the circus, tucked next to the animal exhibits, where he pushes himself to new personal records that nobody is counting anymore. The circus stops updating the number on the sign outside his cage. So no one, including the fasting artist himself, has any idea how long he endured before he took his final breath.
His dying words to the overseer were a confession. He could never find food that he liked to eat.
The story is dark and remarkably 90 years ahead of its time. Nowadays hunger artists make their living doing spectacles on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. The arc of the attention they receive follows the same pattern Kafka described a century ago. In the beginning, the novelty of the spectacle draws a crowd. Over time you just kind of become known as the guy who hurts himself for attention. The sign stops getting updated. The crowd thins. The algorithm moves on.
Most performative arts fall in this category to a degree. Stand-up comedians point out the absurdity of the ego in modern situations. Actors draw upon the real emotional vault of things they have felt to bring their performances to life. The audience consumes, applauds, and leaves. The performer sits alone with whatever they pulled out of the vault and tries to put it back.
I have my own experience with this.
I often found an audience at Cottonwood Hot Springs, sitting in the river when it dropped below 35 degrees. I’m not sure why, but I have a real knack for sitting in cold bodies of water long past the period where my peers throw in the towel. There is a point in the cold where the pain stops being pain and becomes something else entirely. A stillness. A silence in the body that you can’t manufacture any other way. People watched. People asked how. I sat there longer.
I don’t know if that was discipline or spectacle. I’m not sure I knew at the time.
Kafka’s genius is in the confession at the end. The fasting artist wasn’t performing mastery over hunger. He simply never found food he liked to eat.
This is the question the story forces you to sit with. Was the fasting artist doing this by choice, or was this some unresolved means of coping that he had learned to dress up as art? Kafka leaves it to the reader. I think the answer is both, and I think that’s what makes it devastating. The thing he was best at was the thing that was killing him. And he couldn’t tell the difference between the two because the audience couldn’t either.
Becoming an expert in anything naturally involves a version of what the fasting artist went through. Toiling away in a cage of beliefs you’ve built for yourself with no promised reward in sight. Years of sitting with discomfort that other people would have walked away from. There is something to be celebrated in that endurance. There is also something to be honest about.
Sometimes the cage is discipline.
Sometimes the cage is avoidance.
Sometimes it’s both on the same day.
I think we can learn from the fasting artist. Knowing when to ask for help instead of maximally committing to our coping mechanism of choice. No matter how artistic we may think it is, sometimes asking for help is the only way for us to get out of our own way.
The fasting artist’s story ends with him dying in the cage. He is replaced by a wild panther who thrashes violently against the bars, much to the delight of the onlookers who visit the circus. A reminder that no matter how great an artist we fashion ourselves to be, the next great spectacle is guaranteed after our passing. The crowd that forgot the fasting artist had no trouble understanding the panther. Perhaps that was because they didn’t have to grapple with the cages we all build around our lives to appreciate what the panther was doing. The panther’s art required nothing from them. The fasting artist’s art required everything.
The story leaves two questions hanging in the air that I keep coming back to. Is the value of art measured by the eye of the beholder, or by the relief it grants the artist from never learning what food he liked to eat? And if the crowd moves on that easily, who were we performing for in the first place?