Right. Hello, everybody. Um, welcome. Um, very pleased to welcome you here today for this event.
Uh, one of the three parts of the humanities response to Oxford reads Kafka 2024.
Um, one word of housekeeping. Um, in about ten minutes, the front doors of the Western will be shut.
Um, the facilities are still open. Um, uh, and then anybody wanting to leave would have to go out to the Parks Road, uh,
entrance at the side, but you'll be directed at the end, so don't worry about that.
But just anybody that needs to leave early. Um, and let me welcome you then to hunger, artistry, Kafka and the Art of starvation.
Um, in Kafka's Metamorphosis, which I noticed some of you were picking up on the way in,
and some of you already have, um, Gregor, uh, turned into an insect and unable to eat familiar food.
Um, he is music.
And he glimpses the way rotation to the unknown nourishment he longed for after his emaciated body is disposed of at the end of the story,
his stretcher, his sister stretches her young body into the sun full of life and energy.
This is not the only story in which Kafka deals powerfully with hunger, art and change.
The same motifs appear in his 1922 story The Artist, taken up into the collection of stories of the same name in 1924.
It takes its cue from the exhibition fosters,
who until the early years of the 20th century would starve themselves for the entertainment of paying audiences,
and it was really a kind of show business in fairground circuses,
entertainment with, uh, excellent music, counting of the days and watches who would scrutinise to make sure that the one starving hadn't secretly,
uh, eat mistakes happened in 1886, um, to one of the most famous ones.
Um, and ritual weighing and measuring in Kafka story.
After the demise of Kafka's Hunger artist, long after people have forgotten about him,
his filthy cage at the back of the circus is refurbished with a panther.
The keepers bring you the food it relished, and it is filled with a brilliant,
troubling energy and freedom that fascinates all the onlookers and has been read by some as a presentiment of a kind of ugly future.
Vitalism, fascism even.
It seemed to me that this story, like The Metamorphosis, which is the centre of our project this year, and a report to an academy,
the story of an ape apes people to become human and to escape the circus, which we staged a couple of weeks ago here at the old fire station.
All of these are stories of transformation.
All of them question what it is to be human, and all of them are essentially about art.
This story, a younger artist has surprisingly, perhaps given its slightly static nature,
we might talk about that being translated into theatre comic for film animation.
I think we've got a clip here. These are the, uh, from the animation by Tom Gibbons, 2002, which gave us our poster for this event.
Um, and a new ballet which has been commissioned as part of the Oxford Kafka celebrations and which we will hear about more about in a minute.
It's also inspired writers, academics, artists across the world to explore the politics and art of starvation in the 20th century and beyond.
Now, a good reason to discuss it then, and I'm delighted to be able to do that here today with Peter Boxall,
Goldsmiths chair of English, based at New College. Alice Moodie, based at Bard College.
I'm particularly delighted to welcome here Ahere, um, author of the Art of Hunger Aesthetic Autonomy and the Afterlives of Modernism in 2018,
but also working, I saw on the literature of world hunger, um, and more recent project.
I'm Kim Mukherjee, professor of English and World Literature based at Wadham.
Also dealt with Kafka in her first book, Aesthetic Hysteria The Great Neurosis in Victorian Melodrama,
2007, and Mandip Peters, author of books on dancing, modernist literature,
and embodied cognition in literature and Thought, editorials, Bodies and Abilities in Culture, literature,
and the Arts, and he's also part of the HRC funded Kafka's Transformative Communities Project.
Um, put on the exhibition that you might some of you might have seen, um, next to um,
but has also been working with art of Arthur Pitzer and Ed Watson on a new Ballet of Hunger artist,
which will premiere next week in Oxford Fire Station.
So, um, I'm going to the way it's going to work is each of our guests are going to talk
a little about something that particularly fascinates them about this story,
and then we'll have a bit of a conversation, and then it will open up to questions, which I hope you'll have.
Um, so thankfully, without more ado, you don't want to hear from me. Yes, I, uh.
Yeah. Okay. Well, mine just, I was we wanted very much to talk about the text.
Make sure that the text was there in mind, that you've been poring over it in the last weeks and months.
Uh, as part of the preparations for the ballet, I wondered if you could tell us.
You know, what is so special about this Kafka text? I mean, yeah.
So I'm I'm just going to give you a short summary,
and I hope what's special about it comes comes true through the I mean, it's it's very much a story of decline.
The first sentence in George Crick's, uh, translation is in recent decades, interest in hungry artists has greatly diminished.
It starts off with, uh, with the mom and dad that are still interest and attention to hunger.
Archer's archer's artistry. A hunger artist sits in a cage for 40 days and doesn't eat.
And people are. And they're travelling around. He's travelling around Europe with an impresario, and in different cities he will be 40 days.
Um, there are and people will be fascinated.
So the narrative tells us, uh, there will watch him for hours, days, even on ads.
Um, and at the end of the 40 days, there will be a big ceremony.
The cage will be lined with flowers to be a military band playing to a young women
from the city will be very excited to be allowed to carry him out of the cage.
Um, he will be measured and the measurements will be shouted at the audience.
Um, and then he will sit down, uh, for supper and a toast will be given.
Despite all this success, um, there are two main frustrations that the hunger artist has about his artistry.
One is that people just don't believe that he doesn't eat for 40 days.
Um, there are watchers at nights, butchers funnily.
Um, and and they sometimes they will watch him closely, but most of the time they will actually want to give him some space to actually eat.
But that's his frustration that he wants. He wants to make sure people believe what he's doing.
Um, and his second frustration is that he thinks it comes easy to him, and he thinks he can go on much longer than 40 days.
But his impresario, who mainly thinks that people won't pay attention for that long, um, says, no, you have to stop at 40 days.
And sometimes he gets very aggressive, rattles the cage.
Um, and that's for them. Desire is a sign that he's getting weaker.
Finally, and ironically, um, but after a while, the test of audiences changed and The Hunger artist was no longer popular.
So he departs ways with his impresario and signs a contract contract with circus,
where he's put somewhere in the cage and people pass him on on the way to more exciting things such as animals.
Um, and sometimes people will still stop in front of the cage like a man.
All the father who tells his kids of the hey days of, uh, hunger artistry and says,
you know, and tells him, well, you know, when this was still a great art.
Um, it looked much better. Um, basically, um, and then at the end, uh, the some supervisors come to the cage and think, why is this cage empty?
They poke a bit around and find the hunger artist between the straw.
Um, and you ask him why, when will you stop starving?
Because he's actually quite happy there. Because he can starve himself for morning, for today.
So for his sense of artistry, it's also quite good.
And he says, um. His response is that he just wanted to be admired.
And then I say, but. But we do admire you. And he says, well, you shouldn't actually.
Because if I had found food that I liked, um, I wouldn't have been the artist that I am.
And so those are his dying words. And then he gets replaced by a panther, whom, as you said, is impressive.
Vital exudes power. And spell bond.
Spell binds. Um, the audience knew.
So that's kind of their summary. And this lots I think about the tension, about popular culture, but the changing of of, um.
Moods of audiences, of pomp and circumstance, of what is.
What is the artistry in hunger, artistry?
And what's. What's the role of the impresario?
Great questions for Sol. Um, but Anki um, I think it's picking up from that.
What is it then about this text which we've just heard about,
which means that it's something that's been taken up so often, uh, by artists, writers, thinkers since.
Thank you. Years ago, when a brilliant young scholar sought out my supervision to read for a defence on the aesthetics of hunger.
I remember telling her that I'd grown up well-fed in the midst of the poverty and food crises of the Indian subcontinent,
so hunger could never be just a concept metaphor for me.
I urged her to keep that confusion of the literal and figurative in mind,
as she traced the trope from modernism to engagement with embodiment to couture starvation.
Artists in a BuzzFeed South Africa.
Today there is a public exhibition of hunger unfolding in real time, the spectacle of starvation as not an outcome,
but a weapon of war created by the blockade of food and humanitarian aid.
And we are the mindless circus goers in Kafka's A Hunger Artist, with a callous disregard of this unfed and disposed body.
In Rafah, where 1.5 million people have sought shelter.
Men, women and children live hour to hour with malnutrition and starvation.
The entire population of Gaza faces high levels of acute food insecurity.
The IPC, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification rating for Gaza,
is phase three crisis for half the population, and phase five, which is catastrophe and famine for the other half.
A report last month said people in northern Gaza have been forced to survive on an average of 245 calories a day,
less than a 400 gram can of fava beans.
Children are eating animal feed and white wild plants when not dying of starvation.
I have this definition of hunger in mind when I turn to the hunger artist again.
And the first time. First thing I noticed when I read the short story again was that Kafka is using the word hungering, not fasting.
Fasting is abstinence. Hungering is a hankering, a strife.
Peter Waldeck, treating the short story as a study in masochism,
had famously said that the nourishment that the hunger artist seeks is ultimately hunger itself.
Hunger is practice, as Hamsun says in his 1890 novel, A Poetic Force that Makes Me Hunger.
Artistry in Kafka's A Hunger Artist as the indissoluble, of course, from hunger work, the labour that goes into an artistic performance.
And herein lies its trenchant contradiction the instinct to eat is but the blind necessity to live.
But the hunger artist wants to make a living. Through this contract with death.
Hunger. Artists were professional fasters. As Karen has already said, fixtures in late 19th century and early 20th century freak shows and spectacle.
In his wonderful book, The Land of the hunger artists Augustin Near-tum gallant sees hunger artists like the one portrayed in Kafka's short story,
acting as mediators between the human body and the social body, a sight, albeit unstable, of the co-production of knowledge on hunger,
fasting, in addition, and starvation hungry artists in Europe were it inherent, performing in various phases of cages, theatres,
exhibitions, public parks, even streets, and occasionally sealed in the respiration calorimeter metres of physiology laboratories.
As medical orthodoxy is tried to make sense of the phenomenon,
the hungering body synchronising the possible and the impossible in a disappearing borderline was in itself a heterodoxy.
Near to gallon describes hunger artistry as a holistic resistance to reductionist mechanical
understandings of the human body and a form of self surveillance and self-discipline.
That's because hunger, hunger, Ortiz says. I have to hunger.
I cannot do otherwise. In the text, this is related to his deathbed confession that I could not find the food that was to my taste,
which is a partial cancellation of the claims of artistic talent and predilection.
He is a figure of dispossession, and questions of free will and moral choice are complicated in the way the hunger labour is managed.
The hunger artist is cajoled and coerced in his practice of the business,
in his practice by the business impresario accompanies him with his reinforcing of the
40 day duration of the spectacle and by the very limitations of urban entertainment.
The hunger artist has no control over the cultural commodification of the fast or its ending, which is precipitate in The Hunger artists opinion.
So alienated is he made a freak from hunger.
I'm quoting, not Hamsun again,
that the human solicitous ness the watchmen demonstrate these butcher wardens elected by the public to make sure the hunger artist doesn't cheat.
That solicitous ness makes the hunger artist melancholy.
His autonomous performance thrives only when commodified and rendered fully visible by punters with electric flashlights.
When in the circus, the Hunger artist breaks free from civic surveillance and public visibility and is no longer cognisant of time,
symbolised by the striking of the clock, which was the only piece of furniture in his former cage.
This killed him. But in closing, I want to dwell on the affect of the hunger artist labouring honestly at his own materialisation.
In Anthony Maze of Realism, Frederick Jamison compared the differential patterns,
the increase or diminution of intensity associated with affect to art.
The compositional technique that's Wagnerian chromaticism, with its waxing and waning of the scale,
could be called the harmonic vocabulary of effect, he says.
Similarly, Monet's Impressionism,
which momentarily integrates the temporal succession of the shades of passing light on cathedrals into a homogeneity and a temporal unity,
is a handy illustration of the way bodily effect may be orchestrated.
This is also Jameson effect can just as well be about dismemberment and bodily undoing.
As Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Sigsworth, editors of the Aphex theory Reader,
approvingly cite an anecdote where the anthropologist and philosopher Bruno Latour asked his conference audience,
asked his conference audience to write down the antonym of the word body.
As for answers he received, the most curious to him were unaffected and death.
It's the opposite of a body is dead and there is no life apart from the body.
Then to have a body is to learn to be affected effectuated by time, by business impresarios, by the thronging masses.
At a circus that's quite as likely to have read about Claude Seurat, The Human Skeleton and Giovanni Sochi, the, um, professional,
faster artists who became increasingly deranged in their insistence on fasting for impossible lengths of time in Kafka's clothes.
Mark Anderson has written about Kafka's enthusiasm for burlesque and circus entertainments in Prague, and in the body as an aesthetic surface.
In a younger artist, Kafka confronts the possibility of organic self production without nutrition, companionship, or formal definition.
And here in, I think, lies the secret to its longevity.
Kafka immortalised in a younger artist, the work of being an impediment on the way to the menagerie.
Thank you. Um, your confusion on the body there, I think, leads very nicely, nicely into Peter's thoughts,
which were very much about bodily illness and the animal and questioning the limits of the human, I think.
Yeah. And and your introduction. Sort of touches on where I'm where I'm right starting off from,
which is to think about the hunger artist and report to an academy together, partly because they're both being formed in Oxford this month,
um, and partly because they are both reflections, I think,
on this condition that anchors just talked about so eloquently of what it is to be embodied.
Um, and thinking about what it is to be embodied as it relates to being a human or a non-human animal.
One of Kafka's sexual concerns. Um.
And thinking about report to the Academy. I don't know how many of us have recently read a report to an academy,
but thinking about the report alongside Hunger Artist might be to think about to.
So is it do something quite opposite to one another?
Um, it may be that one is about a man becoming an animal, and the other is about an animal becoming a man.
Um, the ape, as many of us will know in report to an academy, forces himself to become human against all his instincts and inclinations,
his desperate to remain an ape, but he his ferocious with himself in insisting that he should become human for strategic reasons.
There's a line which really sticks out to me in this story, where the ape says this one stands over oneself with a whip.
One flays oneself at the slightest opposition.
So my ape nature flowed out of me.
Um. Yeah. The ape forcing himself no longer to be an ape.
And that rhymes for me with what happens. We've already touched on this a couple of times.
What happens at the end of A Hunger Artist? Uh, when the hunger artist on his death is replaced by the Panther?
And this line rhymes with the whip line for me, at the end of the of a hungry artist, we get this line.
He, the panther, seemed not even to miss his freedom.
His noble body furnished almost a bursting point with all it needed.
Seemed to carry freedom around with it to somewhere in its jewels it seemed to lurk.
And the joy of life streamed with such ardent passion from his throat.
But for onlookers it was not easy to stand. The shock of it is something.
Um. So a hunger artist replaces a human with an animal.
Report to an academy. Replaces an animal with a human.
But if this looks like an opposition, I think in fact, it is not so because both stories turn around a zone.
I think that Kafka reaches towards, in his work, a zone of of non-being that he makes briefly thinkable,
and which is neither human nor animal, which does not belong to any typography or regimes of being.
But it's one of the central contradictions of Kafka's work.
I think that this approach to non-being is conducted through his depiction of a brute materiality,
the brute materiality of the body and of the forces that bear down on us as a consequence of being embodied,
that anchors just thought about in relation to Raffa. The special gift of his short fiction in particular,
is to give an almost unbearably intense expression to the fact that being in a body, uh, exposes us to forms of radical unfreedom.
Kafka's creatures learn their unfreedom in their body, and to read Kafka is to feel this unfreedom in our own body.
There is no other writer. I don't think it gives such unmediated expression to this kind of unfreedom.
But there is. And this is what I hope we might discuss a bit today.
A hinge in Kafka's writing, there is a hinge between the revelation of unfreedom that is native to embodiment,
and a kind of release from that condition that is crucially part of the same movement in The Hunger Artist.
This is the sense that fasting is at once an approach to the most intense experience of the body,
and a release from that experience in the most difficult imaginable way.
Fasting and and the mere translation I have translates it as fasting, not hungering, which is a really interesting distinction.
Fasting in this story brings us to some buried junction where the where we see the exposed, the bare place where striving consciousness is fastened,
in Yeats's incredibly grim phrase, to a dying animal consciousness fastened to a dying animal.
Fasting exposes that place. But in a hunger artist, fasting is not only a route towards death,
a kind of negative action in which the biopolitical and socio economic conditions of our survival are laid bare.
It's also a positive action, a kind of inspired artistic activity in which the mind frees itself from
available regimes of being through an approach to their underlying conditions.
This is what the ape feels in report to an Academy,
when he sees that his release from imprisonment is to be found by freeing himself from the basic conditions of his own nature.
But when the ape is caught by the zookeeper, harking back and confined in its tiny cage, the confinement is a reduction also to his bare life.
As an ape, he feels, he says, as he languishes in his cage.
And this is a quote over and above it all, only the one feeling no way out.
As far as hugging back was concerned, the ape thinks the place for apes was in a cage.
Well, then I have to stop being an ape. A fine, clear train of thought which I must have constructed somehow with my belly.
Since apes think with their bellies, it's this fine, clear train of thought that takes the ape past his own nature,
that grants him a way out of the cage of species being.
And it's this same train of thought we find in The Hunger Artist.
This train of thought is a kind of fasting which takes him past the limits of embodiment,
passed the threshold between life and death into some unnamed realm that is the space of Kafka's fiction.
The artist feels he can fast without limit, because fasting does not lead only to death is not simply a negative route towards intention,
but is also a kind of literary thinking which leads to a way out, a way past the place where life is bound to death.
The hunger artist longs for what he calls a, quote, performance beyond human imagination,
because he felt there were no limits to his capacity for fasting.
The hunger artist can fast until he reaches a way out, so that the approach to death leads into the hinge.
In Kafka's work, where a crushing encounter with the death leanness of being meets with a thin, clear exit from its rigour.
Everything that happens in Kafka's writing, I think, and in the writing that follows in his spirit, is conditioned by that hinge that Kafka in place,
where subjection to the grotesquerie of being meets with an exemption from those grotesque, is in a fine, clear line of literary thought.
Thank you very much. Um, and in a sense, coming to those that just worked so well together, those two thoughts.
But we want we're coming back to hunger, which you raised. Thank you as well.
And I know, Alice, um, uh, talking about the art of hungering or fasting, um,
in the context of real world hunger becomes actually quite uncomfortable, I think.
And I wondered if you could shed some light on on that. I'm not 100% sure if that's what I'm doing.
I'm sorry about my voice as well. I had lost it last week.
Okay. Um, so what I, what I wanted to do today was to think about what we learned from.
About hunger, from a hunger artist. Um, I think in some ways, you know, this feels like a very idiosyncratic story.
It feels like something that would be extremely hard to generalise out of and from.
Um, and I guess to kind of like, pre-empt where I'm going.
I think to some extent that's part of what, um, hunger,
what Kafka is kind of thinking about in terms of how hunger functions and what hunger might be.
Um, but in very broad terms, uh, what I'm going to try and do here today is suggest a few ways that, um, Kafka's thinking about hunger, uh,
what what he kind of takes hunger to be,
and then think about how the way that he's thinking about them might help us to think about some of these more real world examples,
whether, um, and, and, you know, I think when I first wrote this paper,
I was predominantly thinking about forms of self starvation, eating disorders, hunger strikes, um, these kinds of things.
But as my colleagues have been talking, I've also been thinking actually about, you know,
RAF or about, um, other forms of hunger that are not necessarily well, and wondering a little,
actually, how hard and fast I want to hold that distinction, which I have tended to hold to,
partly because it's structured and can work in pretty significant ways.
Um, so I want to suggest that for Kafka, hunger is associated with kind of three things.
Not exclusively by any stretch. Um, he's thinking about hunger as a form of passivity,
hunger as something that is fundamentally unobservable and hunger that entails sudden, uh, let's say, problems for sociality.
Um, I'm going to suggest as we go along that many of these are complicated in the way Kafka himself talks about.
Um, but most importantly, I think that these if we think about hunger in these ways, we can learn things that we can then apply elsewhere to first.
I think Kafka's Hunger artist is passive in surprising ways and in some ways.
You know, for those who reading doesn't get beyond the first few pages, one might be surprised by this fact.
Uh, well, in this story, I think we're encouraged to read the hunger out as fast as a kind of heroic feat,
an act of endurance and abstinence that positions him as a figure of admiration.
And that's suddenly how he wants to be seen in the opening, in his kind of like heyday.
Um, but of course, as we've heard, the conclusion of this story makes this framing entirely untenable.
On his deathbed, he insists that we're not to admire him or his fast.
Um, because it's a result simply, um.
And I've always been fascinated by this, by a lack of taste.
The fact that he just couldn't find anything that he wanted to eat.
Um, and he says if he had, he would have just.
I've been reading two different translations, and I don't have precise quotes at anymore from either of them.
But effectively, you know, he would have just stuffed it all down his face and been as happy as everyone else.
Um, so the hunger that is hunger then arises, not as we might be inclined to assume when we're thinking about modes of self starvation,
in particular from an act of, well, but surprisingly, from a kind of absence of desire,
which I think entails a kind of a strange attenuation of subjectivity.
And then, most interestingly to me, a kind of an evacuation of agency.
Um, he to use the term unfreedom. And these are suddenly the terms that I've been thinking about a hunger artist in, um, in my work and more broadly,
a much longer tradition of writers using hunger for thinking about the status of art,
which I think is kind of surprisingly but consistently interested in tying an idea of aesthetic autonomy to forms of embodied,
sometimes political, sometimes social unfreedom.
Um, but again, sorry, for the purposes of this, I think we really see something similar happening.
Um, if we think about eating disorders, for instance, where the question of whether self starvation represents, as is sometimes described,
an act of kind of intense control, right, a desire to fully control one's wild and one subjectivity, uh, on the other hand,
as we might think in terms of its kind of pathologize ation as a form of mental illness, a mark precisely of being out of control, um,
often feels like the kind of the impossible subject position that, um,
anorexics and others with eating disorders are constantly navigating and negotiating.
And I think even something as apparently forceful and, well,
does the hunger strike also likewise gets its power from its passivity, from its dramatisation of hunger as something un chosen.
Something that's been forced upon the starving, uh, protester or activist by the oppressive forces that it seeks to resist.
Um. So first of all, then I think the hunger.
Hunger stages certain kinds of problems about will and agency, especially forms of self starvation.
Um, and this opens them up, I think, in interesting ways, to raise questions about what kind of a subject it is,
who fasts, and what kinds of political problems that then entails.
Secondly, Kafka's hunger out is fast is unobservable.
One of his laments throughout.
Um, and I'm not sure if anyone's discussed this yet, is this amazing line that he is the sole completely satisfied spectator of his own fast.
None of his watches these people watches for some reason,
who are so fascinated to keep God over him is ever fully able to do this that even his impresario really knows for
absolute certain that he isn't sneaking a little sip of water or a bite of his favourite treats when no one's looking.
Um, but because of this unverified ability of the fast, we effectively end up with a form of art,
a form of performance for which there is no perfect audience and really no satisfactory audience as a performance.
Then it becomes a kind of an art for one entirely self-directed and entirely inward facing.
Um, and again, I want to maybe suggest that we can think about this in broader terms,
in terms of actually the whole history of the way hunger's been discussed with the 20th century in scientific terms, um,
where it has posed a constant problem for definition, there is a kind of an ongoing, um, and suddenly in the 20th century,
very lively debate about how one defines hunger, what it is to hunger, what the line is between starvation and malnutrition.
And these are questions that, on the one hand, can sometimes feel very like pedantic, um, when we look at them in an abstract fashion.
But their political consequences are extremely serious because they determine, for instance,
when we're thinking about someone like Rashford, they determine what it means when we say there is a famine happening somewhere.
And often the question isn't simply a question of all food or no food, but how little food one has.
And these difficulties of how we measure what it is to be hunger, what is to be hungering, what it is to be inadequate in our nutritional,
uh, requirements or our nutrition, in how we're meeting our nutritional needs is, uh, a kind of a major political problem.
And I think it's closely connected, again, to the kind of the difficulty of hunger is something that because it's defined by negativity,
defined by what one doesn't have defined by a lack, therefore becomes something that's unobservable,
unverifiable, and difficult to kind of really turn into a form of shared public knowledge, which is a necessary component for,
I think, any kind of political or social, um, kind of action on that hunger can therefore produce.
Which brings me to my final claim, which is that Hunger's, Kafka's Hunger artist, is engaged in a kind of an anti-social practice,
one that, um, is always defined in a kind of tense and difficult relationship to the social.
So I began claiming that this is a kind of an idiosyncratic story, and I think that this idiosyncrasy is itself a kind of,
um, a significant part of the anti-social ness of the the narrative itself and his practice in particular.
Um, we are running out of time. So I'm going to run through this really quickly.
At the beginning of the story, when the hunger artist is at the height of his powers and his influence, he relates to his public.
Only as a constraint. Dreaming of the day he'd be released from the limitations on his fast that their attention imposes.
Right. We've had this already. Um. He dreams of a form of starvation released from the demands of society and the limitations
that he think that this very unfairly imposes on what would otherwise be his,
like, brilliant fasting. Um, this story is ending, though, I think.
And and maybe I'm not sure that I my reading entirely accords with Peter's here,
but I think that this ending really complicates this anti-social dream.
He ends up wasting away in his cage, the lack of interest from others, allowing his past to continue indefinitely,
but under conditions that seem to make it unintelligible, unnoticed, irrelevant.
In the final pages of the story, it becomes clear, I think, that this social, however imperfect and impossible,
given that no one can ever be satisfied with his vast, is an indispensable component of his art.
Um, that he really needs these unsatisfied spectators.
His ambivalent, unsatisfying repudiation of the social, I think, is built again into the experience of starvation,
which widens the gap between the starving individual and the world, even as it embeds them within it and makes them dependent upon it.
Again, I think this is a really common feature of eating disorders, where isolation and idiosyncrasy coexist with social contagions.
And often I've always found this really fascinating, a kind of intense desire to feed others, to be the host of the dinner party.
Um, hunger strikes, I think, require us to overcome the dissolution of the social and hunger demanding for their success at the hunger strike.
It can be read as a representative of a larger group inscribed with social meaning.
Um, but here I'd really recommend, if you haven't seen already, a film like Steve McQueen's hunger, um,
which is this beautiful portrayal of how even an exemplary hunger hunger striker like Bobby Sands,
it's this really intense portrait of his past might be thrown back on himself, severed from his social experience,
from his social significance, which was obviously tremendous by and through the experience of starvation.
And as the film progresses, we get more and more kind of like, um,
sort of isolated within Bobby's own mind and kind of, you know, kind of intense confrontation with his body.
Um, unless maybe we could stop at that point. That's that's just brilliant.
Uh. Thank you. A brilliant lead in, um, before we go into a kind of broader discussion,
we've come from the minutia of the text hungering and fasting up to kind of contemporary politics.
Um, which is just brilliant from this sort of single lens of the story.
Um, but I want to pick up something you said about the dramatisation of passivity,
because one of the extraordinary things about this story, which is so static,
so inward, so hinged on abstract concepts, is that people come again and again and again to create films, theatre productions and performances of it.
And in fact, what is happening in Oxford now.
And so I'd really like to turn to, to mine that who will give us a bit of an insight into how this is being turned into a ballet,
which is the world premiere is happening next week at the old fire station.
Um, because I think it will also touch on some of those issues that we've raised.
Absolutely. Yeah.
And I don't want to, uh, spend too much time, but I spent the last, uh, few days, um, with the artists working on a hunger artist, uh, of today.
So we have Edward Watson, who's the former principal of the Royal Ballet.
Um, Arthur. Peter, uh, they previously did a notation of the metamorphosis before, and I should also.
And there is, um, uh, miaow miaow, who's an Australian singer and cabaret artist.
And so this is still in the studio and where you can see here the cage that, uh,
will be used, I think from what we've been saying or what my colleagues have been saying,
that idea of passivity and incompatibilities kind of works really well with giving the impresario this big role in the ballet, who kind of.
Tries to communicate, you know, the art of starvation, which cannot be communicated through.
Uh, measuring here. Yeah.
Sorry. Measuring, um, the body and you see the kind of passivity, the not wanting to, um,
perform versus the very outgoing performativity of, um, playing on the very idea of performance here.
Um. And this is, I think, from, you know, thinking about the panther at the end.
And I kind of already I mean. Not to go too far, but the the choreographer told me the metamorphosis.
He was thinking about the prongs of of insect.
And so they use two fingers. And here he was thinking about much more to the power and sort of fists rather than the prongs,
which really makes the entire body move in a very different when you kind of see the musculature tensing up into with resting on the,
um, and we have a, I have a very short clip of about 12 seconds.
Can you start now of, uh. What what?
Some. Of the things like you.
That's just to show it. But I think the cage for me was also such a it's an interesting object in this text because why is the cage there?
What is what is it doing for someone who chooses, you know, even if it's a passivity like, and the clock and all these attributes that kind of, um.
Make it a frame. Frame the artist. Right. So that's just my contribution.
I sympathise with those. I am wonderfully with one of the things that came up in everybody's.
Points which I hadn't expected, which is surveillance. And of course.
The watches, the surveillance, the clock, um, the self surveillance.
Um, can we tease out a bit more about that? Because it.
I was very interested. I mean, you know, a lot of literature at the moment is writing about that, but it wasn't quite the case when Kafka was writing.
Is it something we're drawing out now? Is it intrinsic to the dilemmas?
Um, Peter, you're looking at me. I was as, uh, as we were looking at that clip.
I was thinking, was it David Blaine who was in that glass box for that period of time?
And there is something about watching someone do nothing.
You filming David Beckham asleep? Um, I was thinking about about the the observable unobservable.
Um, and as you were talking, I was thinking about the burrow.
People have read the parallel. Um, and there's a similar kind of play going on that, um.
Where the the creature inside the burrow is, wanting to defend himself from observation by anyone coming from above ground,
which I think is the reader, and by anyone coming from beneath, which is some kind of unconscious threat or something.
And although it's always dangerous to analogise.
But the if the person is trying to get into the burrow and work through the intricate passages, which are also the passages of the text.
Um is the reader and the text is refusing to be read.
Yes it is. So I'm going to put a barrier on top of this burrow so that you you can't get in.
You're going to nose around, and I'm going to make sure you can't get in the borough.
The inside of the barrier is refusing to be observed, just as the fast can't be observed.
And that's a brilliant line. Um, no one is going to be satisfied with my fast apart from me, because this piece of this artwork is entirely sealed.
Entirely hermetically sealed. Um. But the beauty of the borough is that we are reading it.
We're reading it every moment. We're inside the passages, even as we're being ejected.
And the beauty of a hunger artist is that we are observing an unobservable phenomenon which which is,
I suppose, the challenge for you in also for whoever wants to to to enact it, you have to enact something.
You have to touch on. What I was thinking of is a hinge that's at the heart of Kafka's watching.
That's absolutely unique to him, but then becomes a kind of.
Foundational ground for a whole style of literary thinking.
And I can spot Model Men's Hunger Artist, which, you know,
for a while I called Starvation Artist without knowing that they were actually interested in changeable words in the 19th century.
So that's kind of her argument as well about the surveillance that, you know,
you do need the open mouth children and the blanching ladies to not just sustain the performance, but to sustain the performance life.
So, you know, that's that's kind of that's a very interesting bit about the unsocial becoming or having
that sort of a very interesting social framework within which it is operating as the enemy.
I think even the description of this as surveillance is really interesting, right?
I've always thought about this dynamic as one that's precisely about the relationship between artist and audience in certain ways.
Um, and we rarely think of that as a form of surveillance.
But I think that one of the things of this story actually does dramatise, maybe surprisingly,
is the way in which that relationship does function as a as a mode of surveillance and as a kind of a form of power and control.
And actually, I'm also thinking here of Beckett's play catastrophe, something like that, or just thinking of catastrophe as we saw that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, that there is this kind of I mean,
this would be a kind of a striking way of thinking about the politics of producing art as a form of
kind of subjection and exposure of the artist and or the text to an audience as a mode of surveillance,
as a mode of an exercise of a certain kind of control.
And I definitely think that within this tradition of writing, that's actually a recurring theme and one that becomes kind of hard to grapple with,
and maybe it's an uncomfortable thing to grapple with because none of us really want to be the,
you know, controlling surveyors when we're reading a text.
And yet and at the end of Beckett's catastrophe, the, the,
the Beckett's version of The hunger artist who's being controlled by the impresario looks up and looks back.
Um. Kind of challenges or refuses the conditions of the performance, but of course it's scripted.
So. So you're you're living in precisely that difficult territory.
Wait wait wait wait. A performance is refusing its own conditions whilst accepting.
And yes, we could talk more about this. Yes, absolutely.
Um, maybe we'll pick up one more thing and then open it out to the public.
I'm sure we'll have, uh, questions. Um, I had a very interesting conversation with Alec about me.
He couldn't be here today. She's in Australia. Um, about Diminution and Kafka at about.
And the word came up several times. And what you were saying about this and of course, it's physical in The Hunger Artist, but also something about,
uh, writers after Kafka following this, uh, this diminution, this, this, uh, attenuated thin line in your words.
Um, and I wondered if we could pick up that because it's not simply a theme, is it?
Or a motif. It's, um, it's a kind of approach.
It's an existential thing for Kafka and for the writers who pick him up.
Um, and key. Um, yes. Thank you. Uh, you know, one of the first, um, questions I had when I read this short story many years ago is why 40 days?
Of course, the the the answer that the story gives you is the impresario thinks that's,
you know, how long people can hold their attention and the spectacle and,
you know, I mean, if if only he had seen this generation, our generation, you know, people 200 50s would be more like it.
Uh, but it's actually it goes back to sort of Jesus's 40 days in the desert.
And I do think that there is something about, you know, that the the diminution is also sort of jogging,
that kind of mythical and also archival and also kind of cultural memory.
It's not it's it's Jesus's emaciated body. It's also Buddha's.
You know, I mean, when I read this, I can't not think about what sort of skeletal body, you know, during one of his, uh, during one of his journeys.
And I do think that that diminution and this kind of vanishing borderline is very much playing on that, that,
that that archive of memory of the body is functioning as this borderline between mortality and what it takes to become immortal.
And, you know, again, that tangible line between the artist and the ascetic, there is work on, uh, the influence of Schopenhauer on Kafka,
which I don't know well enough to actually hold forth on, but I, I did sort of read it at some point,
which deals with exactly that, that on the one hand, he's very influenced by Nietzsche,
but he's also kind of thinking of [INAUDIBLE] show up in Hungary and ideas of what it might be to be sort of like,
you know, to have the, the, the sense, the matter of an ascetic.
And I think the diminution has to be seen as that kind of critical mass of nothing, you know.
No. What are you going to? I was thinking diminution in reduction in terms of nourishment,
which has come up all the way through our discussions that, um, in metamorphosis, you kind of was talking about the line,
the metamorphosis, where, where Gregor is a beetle or cockroach or whatever it is,
whatever he is overhearing his sister playing the violin, saying that was the nourishment that he craved.
Um, but in the in the story, he finds he he can't eat the food that he did.
Like when he was a human. Uh, he can only abject food off milk and disgusting things like that.
Um, and similarly in, in both reports from the Academy and.
A hunger artist. It's about some kind of match between the nourishment that's available to you and the nourishment that you want.
And it's interesting to me that the first thing we hear about the Panther,
which you think of as a as a kind of, uh, uh, an embodiment of fascism or power, who said red by red?
Oh, yeah. Yeah, sure. But that's plagiarism.
And the first thing we hear about him is that he gets everything that he needs.
Um, and I think this kind of gap between between the nourishment it's available to you and the nourishment that you crave is something about.
Being not properly embedded in yourself.
Um, and so the diminishment comes, comes from that, that gap which the artwork.
Lives in music in terms of metamorphosis, but minds the gap.
I think at that point I've banked an extra five minutes so we can run over slightly.
Um, so I think we should open up to questions from the audience.
Comments, observations. There is a roving mic at the back there.
So if you raise your hand, um, and uh, if you've got anything to say.
Uh, Sophia, we got two at the front here. If it's not working, you can have this.
No. Yeah.
Um, first of all, I just wanted to say thank you for the immensely fascinating panel discussion.
Um, I'm a big fan of The Hunger Artist, the original short story, also the, uh,
Mod Alman monograph, which obviously takes inspiration from the same title.
So I found the conversation to be immensely rewarding.
Um, something that I picked up kind of from all of the papers was this underlying idea of the act of consumption and conversely,
the act of starvation or hungering as a negotiation of power and agency,
and how that also relates to ideas of spectacle and witnessing, um, the power and agency that's negotiated in consuming or refusing to consume.
But then also the Paradise negotiated in consuming in terms of witnessing an act or refusing to witness an act.
Um, and I was just wondering if any of you or all of you could maybe expand a bit on that relation.
Um, because I think that it's quite rich then also, maybe not as one dimensional as you might think.
Obviously there is the sort of, uh, dominating mode of consumption.
But then, as Jane Bennett sort of advocates for an edible matter, the idea of a collaborative mode of consumption,
as well as these multiple kind of hierarchies or like forms of understanding consumption being advanced.
Um. Did you get that question?
Yeah, yeah. I don't need to repeat it, which is a good job. Um, I'm not going to let everybody answer.
So a couple of people who'd like to answer. Um, sorry.
Can you just repeat the your question? Just the end of your question again?
Uh, yes. So essentially in relation to consumption and then also the refusal to consume, um,
as in negotiation of power and agency, also in relation to spectacle as consuming a certain spectacle.
Um, and how that relates to different ways in which we think about consumption, power and agency,
the kind of dominating mode of consumption versus the collaborative mode of consumption.
Okay. Thank you. Um, yeah. So one I mean, there's so much in that question,
but maybe one thing that I is worth picking up here is the question of the consumption of spectacle, um, and the consumption more broadly.
Right. So someone at the very beginning mentioned that I think maybe Mandar was talking
about the kind of the negotiation with popular culture that's happening here.
Um, and there's this, you know, really fascinating sort of, um, motif, I suppose that runs through a lot of writing in this period that is, um,
extremely dismissive of what's often called digestible culture or digestible art,
something that can be like too readily taken in or consumed or eaten up.
Um, and, you know, like it runs through a wide range of different thoughts across a wide range of political positions, actually.
So communists are really sceptical of it, but so are people who are, like, anxious about mass culture because they don't like the masses.
Um, um, and,
and so I think there's a kind of there's clearly something going on here about an attempt to produce a kind
of spectacle or to think about a kind of spectacle that's precisely not consumable in a kind of ready,
easy, unthinking, and thoughtless way. Right.
So if one is to, you know, quote unquote, consume the hunger artist's art, I think that you have to do it sort of in the manner that this story does.
You have to sort of reflect on it, think about it, turn it over.
It's a very like probing and difficult.
There is a kind of chewing over of the kind of process that's necessary to kind of come to grips with it in any long term way.
And to some extent, one of the things that's going on when he gets, you know,
shunted off to the animal or the passage to the animals, um, towards the end of the story,
is he's being turned into something that can only succeed if it's easy to consume, um,
which, as we see with the Panther, is also something that can itself consume easily.
So these two things seem to go in this story at least, hand in hand together.
Um, and they do develop a whole kind of, um, theory of the relationship between eating and consumption on the one hand,
and the sort of seriousness of the aesthetic project on the other.
Um, that leads to one side, the questions about power. But I might let someone else take them upside.
Do you want to come in there? I just I think that was fantastic.
Well, I said, that's a brilliant question.
The, the line that was in my mind, as both of you were speaking with Henry James, comment on how valid reading novels English people are.
Um, but he says, if, uh, for English readers, a novel is a novel in a way that a pudding is a pudding.
You know, we have to work out is how to consume, how to consume it.
Um, and, and, you know, Kafka does present us with this difficulty.
How, how how you respond to an experience which is profoundly defended against you consuming.
Um. Thank you. Um, so we had another question here.
Okay. Thank you so much. Um, I had a question about hunger as a form of art.
And to go back to the violin in the Metamorphoses for a second, because the dragon is starving and longs after the nourishment of music.
And, uh, sort of made me think about the way the artist in The Hunger Artist is like,
gets nourishment from his own hunger, any satisfaction he knows and hunger, even he is bodily starving.
And that made me think, well, these are not right in his craft and it's almost evocation.
But towards the end it is revealed that he had no chance in a sense is like its own, was doomed to be a hunger artist.
And that seems to me to point towards a very pessimistic view of art.
I don't know if any of you have. Think it's kind of metaphorical.
Reading doesn't really hold. Thank you. So the pool between craft and artistry and the dilemma between them, then the choices, as it were, of art.
Um, my. I mean, can I can say something? Yeah, I think I can, you pointed out.
I mean, it's a I think it's the second sentence where it says it used to be good.
Life used provides you with a good life. I mean, that's the tension there in.
But what's the life that's being given to you if you're in a cage not eating?
Tension there, which I think. Points maybe to just put attention in what's what's actress tree, um, can do for you?
I mean, I think I think one of the tensions and I mean, it's maybe it's just repeating what you've been said before,
but that that in the inability of the actress career, which is so important and so frustrating for him.
Right, I mean, it's. Yeah.
I mean, I think that's I mean, it does feel very frustrating to, to be that artist who,
who can't communicate what it's like to others and maybe not even.
He wants to be admired, but he he also doesn't want to be admired because he can't do anything else.
And I mean, in Kafka about himself writes about that too.
And and searches what is ascetic lifestyle and breaks of relationships to be around so that he,
he feels so strongly that he is, even if he's not publishing that much.
Right. So, I mean, we shouldn't think that he wasn't publishing, you know, even from an early age.
He knew what he wanted, but he was an art was.
And there, because one thing that I was thinking about actually in your paper,
but had struck me when I reread this story for this was there's a line right towards the end where he says very quickly, like he did honest labour.
And I'm like, I mean, I didn't strike me in the past when I read it, but this time it just grabbed me because it's such a weird claim.
Like, what kind of labour is The Hunger artist actually doing, right?
In what sense is this Labour or work?
Right? It doesn't produce anything. It doesn't seem to require any particular effort of him.
In fact, if anything, it seems to be as much about who he is than what he does.
So, I mean, there's lots of different ways that we might define what work and labour are,
but it's hard for me to kind of grasp at first glance like what kind of labour this is.
And I think this connects to what you were saying about, you know, and the question as well about like, what is the craft here?
Right? Like, what's the nature of the artistry, um, at stake in this work that seems to be defined predominantly by not doing anything right,
even eating well, not only does he not eat, he also doesn't excrete the artist and he doesn't actually move out from the cage.
So we went down the rabbit hole reading about the lives of, you know, zero, who I mentioned,
etc. and then step out of the cage to a fencing match, then go back again, go read newspapers and and and I do think that one if it is art,
you know, if it is honest labour, it is one that is not nourished that that does not excrete,
that doesn't coupled in any, uh, you know, that that doesn't even need companionship.
This is what we see in the circus. It doesn't need the impresario. It doesn't need the open mouth children.
So it's a kind of peculiar model of art where the transfer initial circuit is within the body.
This banged up body of the of the hunger artist.
And and I do think we are asked to pause.
That's what I said that that's Kafka's showcasing that, putting that in the cage.
The impediment on the way to the menagerie. This is not vitality.
It's an impediment. It's like [INAUDIBLE]. You know, there's gonna say one thing it does produce.
And if we're thinking about whether it's a pessimistic view of art and as as you are giving your brilliant sort of survey of the story,
everyone in the room was laughing. I mean, it produces laughter.
That's the, um, it's extremely funny, even though sometimes.
You can't see that as well. I think that's a much better place to finish things.
So, um, I think, uh, the panel for that honest labour tonight, I would like to say to everyone, please do go and see, uh, the exhibition next door.
Please do go and see the brilliant new production of Anger Artist at the old fire station.
Uh, next week. Uh, if your tickets available, do come and hear the gala reading of the Metamorphosis on Monday.
The third in the sheldonian. Um, you're about to be led out a little ways through the park's, uh, road entrance.
But let me close by thanking everybody for coming, but particularly to Alice Peter.
And keep in mind that thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.