At the end of Franz Kafka's story, "A Hunger Artist," a starving man decreases in size to the point that he vanishes into the straw bedding of the circus cage in which he has performed his otherwise uninterrupted act. This, in any case, is one way to read it. That is to say: the hunger artist does not die in the story, though the story tempts us to say as much. Thus, too, Kafka's breakthrough story, "The Judgment," which ends when the protagonist leaps off a bridge and
Precisely.
There is today a hunger artist on the steps of the Sudanese Embassy in Washington. Or at least there was on April 14th. Perhaps he's now dead, or if anything just infinitely small. As The Washington Post writes,
...he has no illusions that his lone protest will make a difference. "I'm here because my brothers and sisters are being killed. It's not my responsibility what others do. It's only my responsibility what I do. I can do nothing less in the face of this atrocity." He pauses to swallow his welling tears. "I wish I had thousands of lives to give. But I have mine and this is how I choose to spend it."What Kafka understood is that the infinitely small embrace everything, and that the sized, the ambitious, consume themselves. A hunger artist is patience, and patience is raw compassion (Mitglied). A hunger artist says, "There is nothing here worth eating."
Bon appetit.
8 comments:
I may have to cite this post in the paper I'm writing on Melville, in which I'm dealing with the very idea you mention: that the "outsized," especially those intent on growing ever larger through acquisition and consumption, ironically devour only themselves. The central image I'm looking at from Moby-Dick, which can easily be applied, for instance, to what they told us in high school was called the "triangle trade," in which human beings were exchanged for distilled sugar cane -- sugar cane which these very people were being sold to produce -- is the image of the wounded shark, who endlessly devours his own disembowelments, in an autocannibalistic re-enactment of this circular process of buying and selling, eating and shitting, and so on.
AND, don't forget: on a more low-brow note, you have the citation of Spaceballs: The Movie, where Pizza the Hut is trapped in his limousine and eats himself to death.
--CGB
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