The short story of Franz Kafka “A Hunger Artist” is a vibrant masterpiece of classic literature. It penetrates deeply into the readers’ minds and sets a challenge to recognize a unique grandeur and understand a great mission of this text. In his “confession” story, Franz Kafka touches upon complex and serious themes of art, death, isolation, asceticism, spiritual desolation and disharmony of human and the world. Therefore, it triggers an exceptional interest on how the readers treat and interpret the text, what thoughts, feelings and emotions come into their mind, how they perceive the main character and what they think about after reading the story. Thus, the short story in question is a bright example to examine in terms of reader’s reaction and interpretation of the sense and intention implied by the author.
Recently, the researches of critical analysis have been trying to estrange standardized and old-fashioned perspectives on the text and instead, bring in some new streams that could enlighten a literary work from absolutely new sides. Reader-response approach to critical analysis is often considered to be one of the most effective and productive approaches, as it can investigate the scope of reader’s contribution to the text as well as its importance. According to Philip Goldstein (1), “reader response criticism maintains that the interpretive activities of readers, rather than the author’s intention or the text’s structure, explain a text’s significance and aesthetic value.” Since each and every text has its target audience, it is of utmost importance to get to know what is the reader’s opinion about the text, its characters and author. Aesthetic value of the text also consists in the fact that how exactly the text is useful for the readers and what didactic or developing function it performs.
When I read “The Metamorphosis,” I am struck by the meaning that only comes from a contemplation of the meaninglessness in the story. There are so many things that, at first blush, make no sense in that tale. Why would Gregor Samsa’s boss come to the house the first time Samsa ever calls in sick, when he has been a reliable employee? Why would his mother be utterly unable to come into her son’s room and tend to him? If his mother cannot help him, why is his sister able to do so? Why would a young man turn into a dung-beetle in the first place? The final answers of course, boil down to the fact that life itself lacks meaning, and that the result of life in this modern century (and perhaps all along) is to render us all dung-beetles, so that once we start living up to the expectations that others have for us, that exile and death are the only next steps (Nabokov). After all, Gregor has had some random manifestation that makes him now unable to work, unable to contribute to his family, unable to conform to the rest of humanity. The only path left to him is a descent through the grotesque into death.
As a reader I noticed some striking similarities between “The Metamorphosis” and “The Hunger-Artist.” While the hunger-artists obviously lives his life in the public eye, his inner self is just as hidden away as the dung-beetle that was lurking inside Gregor Samsa. The hunger-artist has spent his life living up to the expectations of others. Even though he could have lasted in his fasts longer than the forty days that he would perform, he went through the consistent routine of letting his handler drag him out of the cage after forty days and force feed him, because he knew that was the audience had been expecting to see. Over time, he becomes frustrated, and in the end he ends up a sideshow at a circus, more a curiosity that people glance at as they walk into the more interesting tents. Eventually, no one notices him, and he wastes away. Indeed, no one even knows how long he has been in the cage, not eating, because his attendants forget to change the sign each day. When the overseer finally notices him, he is down to his last words, and he utters that he had never wanted to eat because he had not found food that he enjoyed (Wolk). The suggestion is that the hunger-artist failed to entertain because he could not conform to the expectations of society. Not only could he not remain content with the forty-day cycle, but privation stopped being entertaining. This is why, when they replace him in that very cage with a panther, that the spot becomes popular. If you do not think that a sense of energy and appetite is important to compel people’s attention in modern times, then you have not been paying attention to the 2016 Republican primaries, in which a reality show star with a penchant for sexual appetite and grandiose statement was able to eliminate a former governor of Florida from consideration primarily by criticizing him for having low energy levels.
Reader-response criticism is perhaps one of the best lenses through which to view the works of Kafka, because he is foremost an artist and less a philosopher. There are some who view his writing itself as “the ‘meaning’ of his work[the suggestion is that] the meaning does not lie behind the words, but in them, in their body” (Steinhauer, p. 28). When one approaches a text from the reader-response point of view, one is not certain what outcome will protrude from the text, but that is in a way a power of the format. Because different readers can come away with widely different interpretations of Kafka’s works, that does not render the work confusing or diffuse, but instead richer than works that hammer the reader into accepting a particular philosophical viewpoint. Consider a novel like The Scarlet Letter, in which Nathaniel Hawthorne bludgeons the reader with his opinions about Puritan New England, leaving the reader with really only one way to view Dimmesdale and Pearl at the end. However, in a work such as “The Hunger-Artist,” there is almost an infinite set of meanings that one could draw, and those meanings likely vary with one’s interpretive collection of experiences that filters the way one sees the story. So what was a powerful story because of its haunting rendition of the emptiness of a life beyond the expectations of society to this reader could mean something quite different to another. But that’s the power of Kafka.
Works Cited
Goldstein, Philip. “Reader-Response Theory and Criticism.” The Johns Hopkins
Nabokov, Vladimir. “Lecture on ‘The Metamorphosis’ by Vladimir Nabokov.” The
Kafka Project. n.d. Web. 19 May 2016.
Steinhauer, Harry. “Hungering Artist or Artist in Hungering: Kafka’s ‘A Hunger
Artist.’” Criticism 4 (1): pp. 28-43.
Wolk, Joan. “Franz Kafka’s Ein Hungerkuenstler: Metaphor of Conflict.” The
Kafka Project. n.d. Web. 19 May 2016.
