As the piece didn't seem to be explicitly trying to prove the point I thought it was an incidental feature exposing such a thematic device, to which I was told that it... probably was intentional, actually. Still, I wrote a thing, and I like how the class made me consider literature in a deeper way, providing some means of a consistent approach to doing so via perspectives like Marxism or Feminism.
Hope you enjoy/are interested by this review of a piece of literature you can find here (I have no affiliation to the link, I just found a copy of the story online for you), have yourself a lovely day, and see you Wednesday for more of the leftovers from my classes! (This is the first in a series of pun-entitled essays I wrote, none of them feel like a huge stretch to me.)
Please Do Not Feed the Hunger Artist by Mac Clevinger
The short story A Hunger Artist by Franz Kafka is a piece of literature that, from a Marxist perspective, threatens the very fabric of an equal society. It is, simply put, not good. This piece suggests that the artist, or the common man, must and can only work his art at the beck and call of another, wealthier, person for the sake of their profit. It poses the thought that, once their value is no longer readily apparent for the sake of monetary gain, they are useless to their society and in need of replacing by more subservient creatures that willingly play into this system of abuse.
The unnamed Hunger Artist performs his feat for the sake of the artistry of fasting, finding his life’s meaning in the act and always striving to do more with his craft. However, his freedoms are limited to explore fasting to his own satisfaction by the impresario, for whom the Hunger Artist works in attracting ‘tourists’ to whom the impresario sells novelty items at the artist’s expense. As the Hunger Artist approaches finding true satisfaction in his craft, the only wealth he seeks in his life, the impresario forces him to start anew in the name of his own profit, trapping him in a cycle of dissatisfaction with his own life for another’s benefit until that profit begins to dry up. A Hunger Artist is not written as a story of liberation, the downfall of the abusive order, or as the rejection of the need for another to profit off of one’s art for one to continue to find worth in it; the Hunger Artist re-enters that same relationship again with a circus, portrayed as needing someone to profit off of his work for him to find satisfaction in it. The owning of one’s own work and breaking free of the oppressive slavery of the upper echelons of society are key points of Marxism that are rejected in A Hunger Artist.
What replaces the Hunger Artist in that cage, however, portrays exactly what his masters want. Not a thinking artist, not a feeling man or woman, but an animal. A pretty, submissive, dumb beast that is content to carry out a short existence for the pleasure and profit of others. Not a sad beast regretting its place, not a creature that wishes for more out of its life; the animal is happy to be caged. That is what the circus, the impresario, the society driven by the holders of the artist’s contract wanted all along: not a man to respect for more than his monetary worth, but a content beast unaware of how it is abused for the sake of profit. The beast is happy, like so many others that do the bidding of their masters without thought or question, whilst the Hunger Artist was depressed and regretful. He expressed emotions that made things more difficult for profit to smoothly flow, so of course he would be left to die, buried without ceremony, and forgotten.
The short story A Hunger Artist by Franz Kafka propagates ideas that would see men and women evaluated purely for their worth; not to society and its culture, but to the pocketbooks of the greedy that want a dumb and unfeeling stock to choose its workers from. Reinforcing the idea that abuse in the name of profit is a natural and accepted part of our lives is a far cry from Marxist ideals, and instilling a sense that our proper state of being is joyful in our ignorance of how we are exploited fully contradicts Marxism, making this a bad work of literature.