An Arendtian Starvation for Kafka's Hunger Artist - Part III

The following supplements my philosophical mapping between Arendt's Human Condition and Kafka's short stories. So far, we have summarized the relevant parts of Arendt's main concepts about the modern corruption of human effort with some socialism theories, and also looked at Kafka's most well-known story, Metamorphosis. Read Part I and Part II if you'd like! In this article, we will review another one of his stories, The Hunger Artist, which, in my opinion, offers an even more moving portrayal of Arendt's grandiose mocking of changing societal mechanisms.

2. The Hunger Artist:

The artistic perspective has seen one of its greatest-ever portrayals through the paradoxical parable of Kafka’s "The Hunger Artist". Amalgamating two polarizing ideas to Arendt – the subsistence of labor and the worldly transcendence of art – Kafka manages to expose fundamental flaws in modern society’s work mentality. This story shows Arendt’s idea of work in a very twisted way by virtue of an artist who eventually dies due to a helpless commitment to his art.

The main character is an unnamed ‘hunger artist’ working under an impresario, living during a time of steadily declining popularity in his craft. The hunger artist is strongly passionate, follows a strict moral code, and is frustrated at the inexperienced judgments of common men who doubt his integrity. With the impresario not being able to organize larger gatherings for his acts, the artist leaves him to join a circus. While at first his cage is surrounded by bold signs which are updated regularly, the people’s attraction to the animal menagerie gradually makes him lose his audience. All the while, he keeps his fast, far surpassing his own expectations as the signs around him wither away, unnoticed by both the crowds and the circus staff. Finally, after inexplicably long, a staff member investigates his cage, expecting it to be empty. He sees a frail skeleton taking his last breaths. On being asked, “why can’t you do anything else?”, the hunger artist mutters his last words: “because I could not find a food I enjoyed.” 

Again, Kafka shows his expertise in conveying irony: the hunger artist dies because of starvation but subsisted off fasting his entire life. He is locked up in a cage and denied physical freedom, but that is where he gains the spiritual freedom to excel at his art and evade the food that awaits him outside. He wanted to live by avoiding eating, something that would eventually kill him. In a nutshell, The Hunger Artist is the Arendtian disaster of merging work and labor, taken to its logical extreme.

Essentially, the hunger artist has made his work to be the opposite of his labor. His starvation has transformed from Arendt’s work into Arendt’s labor, i.e., from the ability of accomplishment to the necessity of survival. The only difference here is that this necessity is psychological – he starves to bear existence – directly competing against his physical necessity. The hunger artist is forced to starve because he never found a food he liked; his acts are a result of his compulsion, not his ability. Therefore, he confesses at the end: “I always wanted you to admire my fasting”, knowing well that he never had any ability for his audience to ever admire. 

This story can be seen as a dialectic to the aftermath of the vita activa’s perversion. The ideas of developing labor for work and making labor into work are very different. Although work and labor are highly interdependent, the vita activa is a nuanced and balanced social philosophy, where changes in definitions can lead to dire estrangement from the self. Another nod to Arendt’s critique of Marx emerges here: Kafka agrees with Arendt on the importance of spiritual freedom. Marx’s writing, in contrast to Arendt, entrenches man in his physical existence, and hunger artist symbolizes that ideology’s failure in his eventual death.

The story also touches on the financial greed inherent in modern society’s work. The impresario goes against the hunger artist’s wishes to fast for longer periods of time, albeit knowing he had the capability to do so. He saw the hunger artist as a commodity to make profits, placing monetary value at a higher importance than mutual courtesy. This is exactly what we see even in the modern capitalist workplace of today: the “plurality” embodying the human condition of consequent action is clouded by the same monetary association in place of true qualitative worth. Instead of focusing on the mass production woes like Arendt, Kafka chooses to show a more deep-rooted, oxymoronic flaw of modern work – collective alienation.