The Hunger Artist
November 24, 2005
Here’s one for the archives: Google (images) ‘Hunger Artist’
Happy Thanksgiving, by the way.
Thank you, Ines!
Modern day hunger artist
The Hunger Artist in Birmingham…
debra at 8:04 | | post to del.icio.us
Sponsors
Related entries
Cooking out of doors An outdoor kitchen on a Shanghai street corner. This restaurant was serving breakfast, lunch and d...
Tonijn voor het Publieke Domein That's Dutch for Tunafish Salad for the Public Domain, the title of the bad weather picnic that I ...
Brain Food This terribly sad but well written book by Mark Kurlansky is a gripping history from the perspecti...
Fortunately the food was slow and dry When the 'slow' is the Slow Food Movement and the 'dry' is Dutch design collective Droog Design,...
I love smoking everything in moderation Last year in Delhi I reported on why it's a good idea to keep a positive attitude while experime...
Wasteware, it's everything but the squeal in food recycling Rhubarb and carrot waste formed into little bowls for cherries and berries. Man and Humanity ma...
Soy story: food subculture club visits an exhibiton of Romanian otaku culture An array of Romanian textured soy products What could be more obvious than the fact that the no...
Foodmiles design competition winners win some JUICE Image of judging panel used with non-tacit permission Tuesday, one week ago today was devoted ...
Support culiblog
My most recent
food-related photos
Licensing
Writer Franz Kafka is perhaps best known for his dark and edgy stories filled with fantastic settings and almost unbelievable characters. But what of his sense of humor? Not only do his stories contain passages of ironic situations, but the dialogues engaged in by the peoples of these stories have a certain “gallows humor” about them.
Perhaps the best example of Kafka’s use of irony is held until the end of his 1922 story “The Hunger Artist.” “The Hunger Artist” is the story of a man whose “art” is fasting for forty days, to not only show that it can be done, but that it can be done with style. Greatly admired in his youth, the artist is now aging and interest in his art is waning. As he grows despondent over this lack of interest he decides to break the forty day “rule” and just keep going. As he is about to die from starvation, the artist is roused by the manager of the sideshow he now exhibits at. With his final breath he explains his real reason for being a hunger artist wasn’t to be the best hunger artist there was but rather, “Because I couldn’t find the food that I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else” (Kafka 277). The crew of Monty Python could not have staged a more twisted or obtuse ending to this strange story.
Comment by Dr. Theodore Mangrove — November 28, 2005 @ 19:09
What an honour to have the smartest man on earth comment on my weblog! However do you find the time?
Comment by debra — December 6, 2005 @ 23:51
I’m truly mortified by his post because I myself used the word “specificity” yesterday and as soon as I did I thought, “you pretentious tool” but then I left it there anyway because it’s a rather pleasant-looking word.
Comment by Mark — December 9, 2005 @ 7:26
I quite like the term ‘pretentious tool’!
Comment by Debra — December 16, 2005 @ 20:03