“‘To eat is a compromise’: Auster, Kafka, and Dietary Politics”
Christian Moraru (University of North Carolina, Greensboro)
c_moraru@uncg.edu

 

My presentation takes its initial cue from Paul Auster’s reiterated narratives of fasting and abstinence, with their emphasis on indigence and hunger as sources of illumination and models of resistance to the “feasting” society. Auster’s fiction taps in striking detail Knut Hamsun’s 1890 novel Hunger, which features a starving young writer wandering through the Norwegian city Christiania, and Kafka’s famous short story, “The Hunger Artist.” In effect, Auster’s The Art of Hunger specifically expounds the outcasts’ refusal to consume and thus participate in society’s symbolic production-reproduction cycle. “To eat,” Auster says in an essay on Louis Wolfson, “is a compromise, since it sustains him within the context of an already discredited and unacceptable world.” Thus fasting equals, the author insists apropos of Hamsun’s hero, a refusal of a way of life if not of life simply put; ultimately, it is a political statement. Warding off the routine of consumption as self-preservation and preservation of a whole array of values and ideologies, the “art of hunger” is, Auster claims, an “existential art.” As such, it brings forth an entire phenomenology of “need” at the end of which, like Kafka, we may have a chance to find ourselves. Kafka’s “hungry artistry,” as Henry Sussman calls it, and the Kafkaesque motif of tragic-absurd transformation are profoundly instrumental to Auster’s own “existential art.” This art, I submit in closing, is not only existential or, if it is, in it the existential, the ethical, and the political intertwine. I explore this intersection with some help from Emmanuel Levinas’s reflections on hunger, self, and otherness, with “Secularization and Hunger” one of my primary references.