A Hunger Artist | Franz Kafka |
Die neue Rundschau | 1922 (1938 english) | short story
It's interesting that I chose this story for Storytime because I was only spurred to reread A Hunger Artist after reading Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener when one of the characters, who also happens to suffer starvation and imprisonment by their own choosing, reminded me of Kafka's classic tale.
The main reason I chose A Hunger Artist over Bartleby for Storytime is because I thought it offered the better lesson for a visual storyteller in how to make a simple story yield rich symbolic and allegorical visuals in a minimalist (albeit absurdist) way.
Read them both, anyway, since they are enjoyable reads and are also relevant for insights into our celebrity culture and our capacity to be inhumane to ourselves and to others for selfish or even unexplainable motives.
Although, I can't front... Bartleby was frustrating at times because the narrator drove me crazy with all the shit he put up with... was his compassion real? was he just scared? was Bartleby more a story about the narrator then about Bartleby? I'll have to revisit that one another time.
DURING THESE LAST decades the interest in professional fasting has markedly diminished. It used to pay very well to stage such great performances under one’s own management, but today that is quite impossible. We live in a different world now. At one time the whole town took a lively interest in the hunger artist; from day to day of his fast the excitement mounted; everybody wanted to see him at least once a day; there were people who bought season tickets for the last few days and sat from morning till night in front of his small barred cage; even in the nighttime there were visiting hours, when the whole effect was heightened by torch flares; on fine days the cage was set out in the open air, and then it was the children’s special treat to see the hunger artist; for their elders he was often just a joke that happened to be in fashion, but the children stood openmouthed, holding each other’s hands for greater security, marveling at him as he sat there pallid in black tights, with his ribs sticking out so prominently, not even on a seat but down among straw on the ground, sometimes giving a courteous nod, answering questions with a constrained smile, or perhaps stretching an arm through the bars so that one might feel how thin it was, and then again withdrawing deep into himself, paying no attention to anyone or anything, not even to the all-important striking of the clock that was the only piece of furniture in his cage, but merely staring into vacancy with half-shut eyes, now and then taking a sip from a tiny glass of water to moisten his lips.Read the rest here.
It's interesting that I chose this story for Storytime because I was only spurred to reread A Hunger Artist after reading Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener when one of the characters, who also happens to suffer starvation and imprisonment by their own choosing, reminded me of Kafka's classic tale.
The main reason I chose A Hunger Artist over Bartleby for Storytime is because I thought it offered the better lesson for a visual storyteller in how to make a simple story yield rich symbolic and allegorical visuals in a minimalist (albeit absurdist) way.
Read them both, anyway, since they are enjoyable reads and are also relevant for insights into our celebrity culture and our capacity to be inhumane to ourselves and to others for selfish or even unexplainable motives.
Although, I can't front... Bartleby was frustrating at times because the narrator drove me crazy with all the shit he put up with... was his compassion real? was he just scared? was Bartleby more a story about the narrator then about Bartleby? I'll have to revisit that one another time.
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