Franz Kafka's "A Hunger Artist"

Cross-posted at A Curious Singularity

I have a copy of Kafka's Complete Stories; it's been sitting on my shelf for quite a while, and I'm not sure if I'll ever read all the stories in it, but I would like to read more, as I enjoyed "A Hunger Artist." I feel like I've read a lot of Kafka, but when I think about what, exactly, I've read, I realize it's only The Trial, and that I read over a decade ago. Maybe I've read a lot about Kafka and that makes me feel like I've actually read a lot of his work. The term "kafka-esque" is very easy to throw around in conversation, and so it's not hard to begin to think I've got him all figured out.

I don't think I've got him all figured out, but "A Hunger Artist" didn't upset my expectations of what I'd find in a Kafka short story -- you could call it "kafka-esque": it feels like a parable; it deals with ideas as least as much as characters and more so than plot; it's absurd, and yet the story is told as though it weren't; it's about darkness and suffering and yet there's something fine and admirable about it.

At the center of the story is the paradox of the "hunger artist" himself -- how can one be a hunger artist? What's artistic about not eating? The narrator tells us the hunger artist believes in "the honor of his profession," and we learn that no one but the hunger artist can know for sure he is not cheating, so "he was therefore bound to be the sole completely satisfied spectator of his own fast." So there is something mysteriously artistic about fasting, and not only that, but the hunger artist is the only one who really understands it. He also says that although no one else knows it, fasting is easy, further undermining the "artistic" element of it. And there's the twist at the end where we learn that he fasts because he can't find food he likes to eat. So in what sense is fasting artistic?

I don't know, really, but it defines art as a complex give and take between artist and viewer. The artist knows fasting is easy, but the viewers won't believe it, so they insist that they are witnessing an act in one sense or another -- the artist is either "out for publicity or else was some kind of cheat who found it easy to fast because he had discovered a way of making it easy," i.e., he managed to sneak food into his cage. So part of the "art" is simply doing nothing and then letting viewers make what sense of it they will. The more the artist insists he's doing nothing, the more "artistic," partly as in "artifice" and "artificial," the viewers think it is.

Art in this story is nothing -- it's negation and refusal. It's about letting the body waste away, until it disappears at the story's end. And yet the art is nothingness that creates an event. It's a refusal of the body that's also a display of that body -- a weird denial of and celebration of the body. If art here is about nothing, it's also about death -- the artist makes his living off of dying.

No wonder taste is changing and people pass him by to head for the menagerie, and no wonder they prefer to see the panther, so full of the joy of life. And yet I don't think the story is leading us to sympathize with this changing taste; the hunger artist seems to be an admirable figure, and the people who refuse to appreciate him are refusing to see something real and true about life. It's like the hunger artist is the one who can recognize the true nature of things -- that everything ends in death and nothingness. He is an artist because of the way, simply by placing himself in a cage and refusing to eat, he can turn nothing into something -- he makes some kind of meaning, difficult and distressing though it may be, out of emptiness.

Alice Munro

I finished Runaway last night and have decided, much to nobody's surprise, that Alice Munro is a genius. I will agree that too much Munro might not be a good thing, but too much of anybody is probably not a good thing.

There are eight stories in this collection, all of them with a woman as their main character, at all different stages of life. Often Munro will cover decades in one story, so we might see a young woman as she meets a man and gets engaged, and then we see her as a widow, and we learn how the marriage turned out. Munro gives long stretches of time and she does it gracefully, the information on what happened in intervening years worked into scenes so that it doesn't feel like summary.

I particularly liked a sequence of three stories about the same character, Juliet. She's off to her first teaching job in the first story, in the second, she's returning home to visit her parents after a long absence, and in the third she's an older woman and the story is about her relationship with her daughter. Each story is fairly focused in time, but together they give a sense of Juliet's entire life. I like this scale; the stories show both how much Juliet gets wrapped up in each event in her life and what the events mean in the larger picture. We get the emotions of the moment which we can place in the context of an entire life.

I've read criticisms of Munro's work that claim she's too narrowly focused on the personal and private and doesn't let larger world events into her fiction. This may be a valid point, but one important social and political event that does inform her stories is the women's movement. Juliet, for example, is a graduate student whose male professors do not take her intellect and her job prospects seriously:

Her professors were delighted with her -- they were grateful these days for anybody who took up ancient languages, and particularly for someone so gifted -- but they were worried, as well. The problem was that she was a girl. If she got married -- which might happen, as she was not bad-looking for a scholarship girl, she was not bad-looking at all -- she would waste all her hard work and theirs, and if she did not get married she would probably become bleak and isolated, losing out on promotions to men (who needed them more, as they had to support families). She would not be able to defend the oddity of her choice of Classics, to accept what people would see as its irrelevance, or dreariness, to slough that off the way a man could. Odd choices were simply easier to men, most of whom would find women glad to marry them. Not so the other way around.

As she ages, however, and as her society becomes a little more open to ambitious women, she finds ways to take on a public role. The public world -- the world outside the family and the self -- does have a place in Munro's fiction; it's just indirect and muted. It's not the focus. But this strikes me as realistic, in its own way; many of us deal with significant world events in indirect and muted ways.

I remember somebody calling Munro's stories "novelistic," in the sense that are so rich with emotion and complexity that they could fill the space of a novel -- this makes sense to me, although I wouldn't want to sound like I'm denigrating the short story genre by calling excellent stories "novelistic." Perhaps I should just say that these stories are satisfying in the way they capture whole worlds and lives and minds and emotions.

I enjoyed my experience of reading a book of short stories, which I have rarely done, and I think I would like to read more. The trick, for me, is to read them fairly slowly, meaning only one at a time, and to read them in one sitting if I can. To read a whole series of stories at once would confuse me (just as reading a whole series of poems would), but to sit down and read one an evening or every other evening works well.

This book, as you can see in the sidebar to the left, is my second book in the Winter Stacks challenge -- three more to go!

Short stories

I began Alice Munro's book of short stories Runaway last night, and I finished the first one, the title story. I haven't been a big reader of short stories; what Diana said about the effort it takes to get into a story and the fatigue of having to do it again and again with a book of stories really resonated with me. With a novel, you orient yourself once, or maybe a couple of times with new characters and locations, but then you're set, and you're in a world for as long as the novel lasts, and you can return again and again to that world every time you pick the book up. I like to live with characters for a while.

But I do want to read more stories, and while A Curious Singularity, the short story discussion group, is helping me, I'm eager to read some collections of stories on my own. Okay, that sounds more planned and organized than I really feel -- I got inspired to read stories when I saw the Munro book, and I'm getting the feeling that I should continue to read stories now and then.

So, the Munro story was good [spoilers ahead]. It's about a young married woman Clara, her husband Clark, and their older neighbor Sylvia; Clara turns to Sylvia for help when she realizes how unhappy she is in her marriage. Munro describes the marriage dynamic extraordinarily well; I can see just why Clark was so difficult, just why Clara would have been attracted to him in the first place, and just why she'd think about leaving him. And why she'd return, as much as I didn't want her to. Munro can dramatize all this history and all these feelings so effortlessly.

I remember a commenter telling me to look out for the goat in this book -- well, the goat appears in this first story and turns out to be the story's symbolic center. Clara's goat Flora is missing through most of the story, but she appears at a crucial moment near the conclusion when Clark confronts Sylvia for helping Clara run away. The goat comes walking out of a fog, illuminated by passing headlights, and frightens the two characters, so that Clark grabs Sylvia's shoulder in a protective move and she lets him do so, although the two had just been fighting. Sylvia writes to Clara later that:

[Flora's] appearance at that moment did have a profound effect on your husband and me. When two human beings divided by hostility are both, at the same time, mystified -- no, frightened -- by the same apparition, there is a bond that springs up between then, and they find themselves united in the most unexpected way. United in their humanity -- that is the only way I can describe it. We parted almost as friends. So Flora has her place as a good angel in my life and perhaps also in your husband's life and yours.

And yet -- if you've read the story, you'll know this is not what happens at all. Flora comes to stand for something much different -- much darker -- in their marriage. So the story ends, not with the issues resolved and not with the kind of reconciliation Sylvia hopes they might have had:

All she could hope was that perhaps Clara's flight and turbulent emotions had brought her true feelings to the surface and perhaps a recognition in her husband of his true feelings as well.

If Clara and Clark have recognized their true feelings by the end of the story, this recognition is not an easy or a rewarding one. Sylvia's hopes are a dark counterpoint to the reality of the marriage -- a marriage in which Clara now seems firmly entrenched.

Okay, now I'm depressed. But, sigh, this seems like real life to me. I suppose part of Munro's genius is to capture a rich, if dark, emotional world in such a short space. I'm looking forward to the rest of the stories in this collection.

Katherine Mansfield's "At the Bay"

Cross-posted at A Curious Singularity

I appreciate A Curious Singularity for introducing me to new authors and stories; I'd never read Katherine Mansfield until now and I'm glad I've read "At the Bay." It's quite a long short story with a relatively large cast of characters; it's structured in a series of vignettes that tell the stories of members of the Burnell family. It takes place over the course of one day, opening with a fairly extended scene filled with descriptions of the natural world. We see a shepherd leading a flock of sheep past the bungalows of a summer colony in an unnamed place, although it's presumably New Zealand where Mansfield was born.

From there we get brief stories about the characters who range in age from the very young, unnamed "boy" and his three older sisters to the mother Linda Burnell, her husband Stanley, and Linda's sister Beryl. I found these stories unsettling. Stanley seems supremely self-absorbed, expecting the entire family to cater to his every need, and when he returns at the end of the day contrite and apologetic for not having said goodbye to Linda that morning, he only gets irritated when he realizes she has no idea what he is apologizing for. In the section devoted to Linda, she confesses that she doesn't love her children, and at the story's end, we read about Beryl's sinister encounter with the husband of her friend.

The most enjoyable parts of the story were the descriptions of the children. Mansfield captures the feeling of being young very well, but even here the story is jarring as Linda's daughter Lottie becomes distressed when she can't figure out how to follow the game the children are playing and screams when she sees a strange face in a window. Another daughter Kezia, in a scene where she is napping with her grandmother, realizes for the first time what death means. She tries desperately to get her grandmother to deny that she will die one day, but she gets no answer and instead her attention is diverted. Instead of answers all we get is distraction.

These unsettling stories are framed by quiet, peaceful nature scenes, a pattern that reminds me of Virginia Woolf's "Kew Gardens," where descriptions of nature also predominate. In Woolf's story, the natural world showed the brevity and relative insignificance of the human lives; her story of the snail trying to get past the leaf seemed just as important as anything happening in the people's lives. In Mansfield's story there seems to be more of a contrast between the peaceful natural setting and the discontented humans who populate it. Mansfield highlights the precariousness and uncertainty of human experience by contrasting it with the stability of nature. Here's the closing section:

A cloud, small, serene, floated across the moon. In that moment of darkness the sea sounded deep, troubled. Then the cloud sailed away, and the sound of the sea was a vague murmur, as though it waked out of a dark dream. All was still.

In contrast to this stillness and serenity, the people seem stuck in a "dark dream."

I think this story is most effective in the way it creates a mood -- it evokes a feeling of dreaminess that begins to shade over into a nightmare at times. It doesn't have a strong story line, but instead it gives a brief glimpse into a number of characters' lives and through those glimpses builds its atmosphere.