

A Hunger Artist, by Franz Kafka (brought to mind by "How to be a loser") - nonrecursive
http://www.zwyx.org/portal/kafka/kafka_hunger_artist.html

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nonrecursive
In my original comment I was trying to be neutral when I said "I was reminded
of this story by this other thing that was on Hacker News." I was not trying
to imply that the original essay, "How to be a loser", and Kafka's story have
the exact same message. My intention was only to point out what specifically
spurred the association without giving any analysis or opinion. Evidently I
didn't do a good job, and I wish I had.

But here is my opinion on the story, if only to disabuse mtts of the rather
presumptuous notion that I wear "myopic web startup goggles" and think this
great story is "another piece of entrepreneurial feel good fluff":

I've loved this story since I first read it 9 or 10 years ago. It's emotional,
mysterious, and ambiguous. It lives up to Kafka's claim that "A book must be
an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside your soul."

I think I can see what mtts is saying when he says the story is essentially
about loneliness, but I'd love to hear more. Because I think the story is
about other things as well - about ambition, about art, about being
misunderstood, and about greatness.

Kafka's hunger artist is a man who feels like he has never reached his
potential. He's always convinced that he can accomplish more than is allowed,
and has a troubled spirit because of it and because he perceives that his
management and public are keeping him from reaching his potential while at the
same time completely misunderstanding why he feels as he does.

Yet when he finally is left to fast for as long as he wants, at the end of it
he says "You shouldn't admire it. Because I have to fast, I can't help it.
Because I couldn't find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I
should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else."

Why would he say that? What's Kafka trying to say? It seems like Kafka means
to communicate that great artists aren't admirable, that in fact there's
something wrong with them. In the end, their constant hunger isn't a noble
trait, it's not an acquired virtue. It's a defect, a kind of obsessive
compulsive disorder of the soul.

This is probably why the public reacts to the hunger artist as they do. They
find him fascinating, and culturally he's celebrated to an extent, but the
public can't truly value what he does. It's horrifying. It's inhuman.

So, I in fact brought up this story because if it's related to the "How to be
a loser" essay, it's as a contradiction. jsomers presents constant hunger as
something admirable, and those who are content as people who are only fooling
themselves into believing they're not living lives of "quiet desperation". The
other way of looking at "winners" and "losers" is to say that "winners" are so
compelled to satisfy their hunger that they're not capable of being normal,
healthy, content humans.

~~~
mtts
Since I snapped at your previous comment, it's only fair I try to respond to
this rather more thoughtful one.

I agree with your assessment that the story is about "about ambition, about
art, about being misunderstood, and about greatness". No argument there.

The loneliness is all over the text, sometimes quite literally:

* "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"

And of course the hunger artist is lonely because he stands apart from the
world (quite literally - he lives in a cage, after all) and does something no
one quite understands (not to mention that after a while he can't even find an
audience for his art anymore).

It has nothing to do, I think, with winning or losing. The hunger artist wins,
if you want, when he is at the height of his fame in the beginning of the
story, but in the end he withers away in his cage, ignored by the public and
ultimately is replaced by a panther, which if you want to put a label on it
would be losing. So if Kafka is saying anything about winning or losing at
all, it would seem to be that fortune is transient and has nothing to do with
the drive to do something (the hunger artist is committed to his art
regardless of the size of his audience).

And even his commitment to his art is ultimately questioned: he has no drive
to excel at fasting but rather has simply never come across food that he liked
to eat. The great artist in the end turns out to be nothing more than a victim
of his circumstances.

Hardly an uplifting or inspiring message, I think.

Which is not to say I don't like this story: I do. I think it's, like a lot of
Kafka's work, fantastic. I'm not sure whether it belongs on HN, but I enjoyed
reading it again and thinking about it. So thanks for posting.

------
nonrecursive
In this story Kafka presents a character whose profession is to go hungry.

I was reminded of it by the last bit of "How to be a loser":

Thoreau said that most men lead lives of quiet desperation. It seems that
that’s true, but with the following proviso: some men do eke out contentment,
and they get there by gradually ratcheting down their expectations. Their
appetites fade. They compromise, and rationalize, and eventually settle.

I think Steve Jobs said something similar: "Always stay hungry."

~~~
neilk
I don't see what Kafka's hunger artist has to do with such bromides.

You give me an idea though. The genre of famous-author-gives-anachronistic-
business-advice has never been done with Kafka before. I see a great need.

~~~
akamaka
I see the original poster's point. The punch line of the story is that the
hunger artist has simply given up on finding food that he likes. Instead of
continuing playing the game of trying new foods, a game at which he has always
lost, he's given up, and learned to find some small contentment with constant
hunger.

I didn't see that angle myself when I read the story, to be honest. It just
goes to show how great writers can touch our psyche in deep ways that bring
out our personal feelings about hunger, fame, or isolation.

~~~
mtts
That would be stretching it, I think. If you read the context of the sentence
"because I couldn't find the food I liked" you'll find it's not about
desperation but about fame. The hunger artist says he has finally learned that
he should not receive admiration for what he does as his artistry is simply a
consequence of his never having run into food he wanted to eat. His fasting is
not a skill but a circumstance.

This interpretation is consistent with the rest of the story, which mostly
talks about fame (well, and the artist's loneliness amidst all the admiration,
of course). Nowhere in this story does Kafka mention "quiet desperation" or
"ratcheting down [....] expectations." An interpretation that tries to read
that into this story is therefore, I think, invalid, as there is nothing in
the text to support it.

------
gnosis
Knut Hamsun's "Hunger" is also excellent (better even than Kafka, but less
well-known):

<http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/8hngr10h.htm>

