“Resistance, Rebellion and
More: Understanding the Pain and Pangs of Hunger in
Literature”
Parvinder Mehta (University of Toledo)
pmehta@gmail.com
In Franz Kafka’s famous story, “A Hunger Artist” we come across a starving artist who refuses to eat any food provided to him in a ritualized act of fasting. From an individual vantage position, the artist is then relocated in the story to a circus wherein he becomes an object of spectacle for a sometimes confused, and at other times a detached audience that cannot understand the pain and the pangs of the suffering artist. The lamenting body of the hunger artist becomes an iconic figure yet one that is easily replaceable by a hungry panther that likes his meat and never suffers. The story’s references to the metaphorical hunger in the society are clearly visible. Kafka’s representation of hunger, denial of food as well as a rejection of available food might be seen as a symptomatic modernist display of symbolic emotions. Can we see the dying hunger artist’s individual protest as against the mass ideology of consumption signified by the unfeeling audience and the energetic, lively panther as one filled with depression and anxiety or is it a case of passive suffering of a martyr?
How does hunger loom in literature? Is it always a cultural referent to a moral starvation, social deprivation, isolation and modernist anxiety or can it be a way to protest without castigating the act for its debilitating implications? This paper will address such questions, beginning with Kafka’s hunger artist as one example to examine and theorize the functions of literary hunger. The paper will establish how the hunger artist’s self-deprivation in the story does not really resolve the conflicting paradigms of the hungry/satiated and the suffering/consuming polarities.
Taking the example of a contemporary representation of a self-depriving individual named as the “stone-eating girl” in Meena Alexander’s memoir Fault Lines (1993 rev. 2003), the paper will shift its focus and elaborate on the stone-eating girl’s act of fasting initially as protest and rebellion and then eating stones by way of habit. Are Kafka’s “hunger artist” and Alexander’s “stone-eating girl” connected by their rebellious act of self-imposed hunger? While the two characters are clearly demarcated by genre, gender as well as histories, can their ideological implications be seen as different perhaps even dialectically opposite? By analyzing the “stone-eating girl” and her rebellion through eating stones in Alexander’s memoir of displacement and dislocation from multiple homes, histories and memories, this paper will re-situate the Kafkaesque function of self-deprivation as represented through the hunger artist and hope to theorize hunger in innovative ways as a materialized emotion deeply invested with humanism yet also becoming a gendered act of self-transcendent, communal consciousness. The paper does not intend to imply that Alexander’s “stone-eating girl” and her act of self-deprivation better represents the pangs of hunger and embodies a more impressive approach to hunger than Kafka’s hunger artist. Instead, the paper will attempt to address how hunger in both the texts underscores two deeply-embedded representational strategies that point to the humanistic endeavor amidst an apathetic community in one case and a more encouraging expression of multiple meanings and contexts in the other. While the hunger artist dies in Kafka’s story and is thus framed forever in a suffering mode, Alexander’s “stone-eating girl,” although a woman from childhood memory, forever lives through memories and is even transformed to include a plethora of different meanings beyond suffering.