Blooms Literary Themes - THE TRICKSTER.pdf - ymerleksi - home

106
Franz Kafka
evoked by the narrator’s words, which are made all the more poignant
by the impresario’s insistence that his suff ering has passed and the
pervasive suggestion that his suff ering has just begun. Just as mythic
trickster fi gures challenge cultural taboos by urinating, defecating,
farting, thieving, and copulating in inappropriate ways, the hunger
artist performs a sacred ascetic form of self-sacrifi ce for the sake of
aesthetic self-expression—a posture that makes the artist and the
performance itself both sacred and profane. Th e artist destroys himself
to express himself; the ascetic penitently honors himself and the
godlike importance of his task. As the hunger artist himself concludes,
such a life does and does not deserve our admiration.
When the hunger artist becomes irate with audience members
who console his “troubled” spirit by suggesting that his fasts might be
the cause of his unhappiness, the impresario punishes him by lauding
his “high ambition,” “good will,” and inspiring capacity for “self-denial”
(249). Th e impresario rationalizes his outburst to the onlookers by brandishing
a photograph of his emaciated body after forty days of fasting.
Ironically, we learn that the hunger artist thinks this is a “perversion of
the truth,” factually accurate though it may be (250). When the popularity
of fasting fades, the narrator informs us that the hunger artist is
“not only too old for [a diff erent career,] but too devoted to fasting,”
which, upon reading the story again, becomes absurd: Can one be “too
devoted” to a compulsion? As the hunger artist’s audience diminishes,
his freedom to pursue his art increases accordingly. Time itself ceases
to witness his performances: Th e clock that was in his cage during his
glory days is gone; the circus attendants no longer update the calendar
affi xed to his new cage. Th e more the hunger artist achieves in the art
of fasting, the more familiar he becomes. Kafka’s story tricks readers in
much the same way that the hunger artist misleads his audiences. Th e
protagonist of Kafka’s short story is a paradoxical fi gure, an artist who
has literally devoted his life to his art: the art of dying. But, we fi nd
out, the hunger artist performs these feats with no eff ort, as he fi nds
no earthly food satisfying. Th us, the hunger artist occupies an intermediate
position among art, life, and death. When his audience stares
at him through the bars of his cage, they are witnessing a spectacle in
which the artist’s life is yoked to his aesthetic creations, which are in
turn pointed inexorably toward death. Art, in eff ect, calls for its own
destruction within the confi nes of “A Hunger Artist.”