The Politics and Aesthetics of Hunger and Disgust

Perspectives on the Dark Grotesque

Michel Delville, Andrew Norris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315472195
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire moderne

This study examines how hunger narratives and performances contribute to a reconsideration of neglected or prohibited domains of thinking which only a full confrontation with the body's heterogeneity and plasticity can reveal. From literary motif or psychosomatic symptom to revolutionary gesture or existential malady, the double crux of hunger and disgust is a powerful force which can define the experience of embodiment. Kafka's fable of the "Hunger Artist" offers a matrix for the fast, while its surprising last-page revelation introduces disgust as a correlative of abstinence, conscious or otherwise. Grounded in Kristeva's theory of abjection, the figure of the fraught body lurking at the heart of the negative grotesque gathers precision throughout this study, where it is employed in a widening series of contexts: suicide through overeating, starvation as self-performance or political resistance, the teratological versus the totalitarian, the anorexic harboring of death. In the process, writers and artists as diverse as Herman Melville, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Christina Rossetti, George Orwell, Knut Hamsun, J.M. Coetzee, Cindy Sherman, Pieter Breughel, Marina Abramovic, David Nebreda, Paul McCarthy, and others are brought into the discussion. By looking at the different acts of visceral, affective, and ideological resistance performed by the starving body, this book intensifies the relationship between hunger and disgust studies while offering insight into the modalities of the "dark grotesque" which inform the aesthetics and politics of hunger. It will be of value to anyone interested in the culture, politics, and subjectivity of embodiment, and scholars working within the fields of disgust studies, food studies, literary studies, cultural theory, and media studies.

1 Activists of the Belly

Starving Clerks and Schizo-Strollers

(Dewey, Shelley, Melville, Kafka, Huysmans, Duhamel, Hamsun, Poritzky)

Professional Fasters and Snacker Poets

The narrator of Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist” (1922) locates the high watermark of the “professional fast” in the middle of the nineteenth century, a period in which the popular entertainment offered by the hunger artist was capable of monopolising the attention of whole towns. The period identified by the narrator as the golden age of the fast as spectacle coincides with a contraction of the symbolic and religious value of abstinence. The context for this progressive secularisation of the fast was its intensive commercialisation; the selling point being its reputed beneficial effects on digestion and health in general.

It was in the mid-nineteenth century that the success story of the fast as a physical therapy, dissociated from its presumed value as a form of “spiritual detoxification” (Griffiths 600), began to impose itself. The aim was no longer to arm the soul in its battle against sin, or even to sculpt the body as a “visible expression of inward humility” (600) usually conceived as a token of devotion to the famished body of Christ. Thus at the moment when spiritual asceticism was giving way to secularised abstinence, there were already plenty of signs that the latter would be recycled as a key tenet of the work ethic and its religious sources and corollaries, particularly within the context of American Puritanism. In 1895, the American doctor and surgeon Edward Hooker Dewey denounced overindulgence in his book The True Science of Living, subtitled The New Gospel of Health. Dietary excess, according to Dewey, was responsible for all the ills of mankind, from mental suffering to madness, suicide and even crime. Among Dewey’s most dedicated disciples was a businessman named Milton Rathbun who fasted for twenty-eight days (losing more than forty pounds in the process) “because he wanted to reduce his weight, fearing that its gradual increase might bring on apoplexy” (Dewey unpag.). Milton Rathbun’s testimony was a particular pleasure to Dewey since it confirmed the thesis that fasting could bring erring members of the workforce back into line with Calvinist teachings and (to adopt a Weberian perspective) the capitalist ethic they sponsored. Dewey congratulated himself that Rathbun’s experiment served as an exemplar that “to do without food without hunger does not tax any vital power” and that the sense of hunger or “mere relish” should be distinguished from “natural hunger, which would only manifest itself when there would be marked relief from pain” (unpag.).¹ He quotes an unsigned article recounting Rathbun’s stunt in the 6 June 1899 issue of the New York Press. The author of the report insists that the businessman’s achievement was far superior to that of professional fasters such as Dr Tanner (whose forty-day fast carried out in 1880 was “simply trying to prove that the thing could be done” [cited in Dewey unpag.]) and Giovanni Succi (whose forty-five-day fast in 1890 may have inspired Kafka’s hunger artist), both of whom were “surrounded by attendants who allowed them scarcely to lift a hand, so that every ounce of energy might be conserved” (unpag.). Rathbun recounts:

I had been in the habit of getting to my office about 8; now I get there at 7. I generally had left at 5.30; I now stayed until 6.30. I had been in the habit of taking an hour or an hour and a quarter for luncheon. The luncheon was now cut off, so I stayed in the office and worked. I sat there at my desk and put in a long, hard day’s work, constantly writing.

At night I drank a bottle of Apollinaris, and went to bed at 8.30 and slept until 4 in the morning. I never enjoyed better sleep than in those four weeks. And I was in excellent condition as far as I could see in every other way. My mind was clear, my eye was sharper than usually, and all the functions were in excellent working order. (unpag.)

The same article from the New York Press describes how Rathbun’s diet became a local attraction and then, by a seemingly inevitable declension, a public performance motivated by a desire to outdo his previous efforts and establish new records in abstinence. Despite Dewey’s insistence that Rathbun’s fast “pursued a course diametrically opposite” (unpag.) to Succi’s, the manner in which the ascetic businessman performed his fast in front of a limited audience of concerned employees, close friends and relatives anticipates the competitive ethos of the Kafkaesque hunger artist while reminding us of Bartleby’s first few days at the notary’s office, where he works with such energy and efficiency that his employer feels proud of him. Dewey writes:

Every day his friends would come in and talk to him about it. At first they told him he was foolish; that nobody could fast that length of time, much less continue his work without interruption. Then as the days went on and he kept up without a break they began to be frightened.

A crowd would gather about him every night at 6.30 o’clock, when he would leave his office, for that was his hour for weighing. Some days he would lose two or three pounds from the weight of the day before; some days only one, but always something. And as the record was scored up on the book each night his friends would shake their heads and warn him to beware. (unpag.)

At the turn of the century, Dewey’s patients and the new apostles of physical culture and militant fasting and vegetarianism, such as Bernarr MacFadden, began to spread the new Gospel of Health by way of illustrated treatises and explanatory photographs, a tendency which still survives today in recent discoveries that intermittent fasting fights cancer by triggering stem cell regeneration. In the United States, Upton Sinclair made sure that the literary world would not be left out of the burgeoning movement of dietary reform. His 1906 novel The Jungle inspired large-scale changes aimed at guaranteeing better regulation of the food industry and tighter control of the quality of food produced. An unprecedented example of the conjunction of dietary aesthetics and politics, the influence of Sinclair’s novel was crucial, for example, in the passing of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906 during Theodore Roosevelt’s “progressive” era. Sinclair was also the author of a politico-dietary tract entitled The Fasting Cure (1910) in which he referred to Dewey’s work and identified the practice of abstinence as an important element in his struggle for social justice.

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s pamphlet A Vindication of Natural Diet, published in 1813, is one of the earliest and most striking precedents for dietary activism in the history of English literature. Shelley’s thesis is that the misfortunes that plague mankind all stem from his “unnatural habits of life” which, from the original sin onwards, have been responsible for the “depravity of [his] physical and moral nature” (Shelley 85). In arguing his case, Shelley marshals literary references, examples drawn from comparative anatomy and quotations from dieticians such as William Lambe, who insisted on the beneficial effects of a vegetarian diet in his 1809 work Peculiar Regimen in Scirrhous Tumours and Cancerous Ulcers. A key reference is Book 11 of Milton’s Paradise Lost, from which Shelley cites the catalogue of “postlapsarian” maladies where melancholy is associated with colic, despair with dyspepsia. As an ideological practice, Shelley’s romantic vegetarianism is equally concerned with both bodily wellbeing and the ethical and political choices an eater might make. The absorption of meat becomes the material and cultural marker of the corruption and intoxication of a body that is at once individual and social. It is also blamed for the shortening of life expectancy and Shelley cites as evidence the legendary longevity of the early Christians for whom abstinence from animal flesh was based “on a principle of mortification” (Shelley 90). The cooking necessary to render the meat edible is described by the poet as a Promethean “expedient for screening from his disgust the horrors of the shambles” (90). Cooking, for Shelley, is also perceived as the culinary symptom of the domination and abusive exploitation of nature. This precocious form of dietary activism is accompanied by a critique of colonialism, as certain foodstuffs, such as sugar or exotic spices, hail from the West Indian slave trade and are thus proscribed by the Shelleys.

The text’s appendix claims that Shelley and his wife lived exclusively off vegetables during the eight months leading up to the writing of the pamphlet. The testimony of his contemporaries indicates that Shelley’s own dietary regime was even more radical than his ethically inflected writings on the subject. The poet had a horror of sit-down meals and preferred to nibble alone and at irregular hours. He could survive for long periods on nothing more substantial than water, grapes, hazelnuts and breadcrumbs mixed together in a bowl and placed on his writing desk (Morton 2006: 26). Timothy Morton quotes the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon (a friend of Keats’s and one of Shelley’s most dedicated detractors) mocking the poet’s meticulous carving of his meagre vegetarian meal: “I did not know what hectic, spare, weakly yet intellectual-looking creature it was, carving a bit of broccoli or cabbage in his plate, as if it had been the substantial wing of a chicken” (cited in Morton 2006: 22). Shelley’s snacking habits are the measure of his self-sacrificial hope that vegan ultra-temperance will triumph over mankind’s tendency to “pimp for the gluttony of death, his most insidious, implacable, and eternal foe” (Shelley 90). From a Deleuzian perspective, Shelley’s refusal of meals can be interpreted as the rejection of a ritual that sets a firm, impermeable boundary between nature and culture. To snack and subsist on uncooked fruits and vegetables would thus amounts to “blend[ing] into one’s surroundings, to blur[ring] the distinction between inside and outside” and “eating while standing up, alone, writing … is a crime against civilisation, or, at least, in Shelley’s age, a bloody-minded attempt not to be caught in existing hierarchies” (Morton 2006: 26). Morton is right on when he likens Shelley’s snacker poetics to that of a Deleuzian schizophrenic stroller, an anti-Oedipal ascetic hermit determined to subtract himself from normative socialising influences.

Even though their historical contexts and ideological agendas set them apart, Shelley’s frugal diet is in actual fact not far removed from that of Bartleby who, we are told, never goes to the restaurant, never shares a meal, and lives exclusively off ginger biscuits, until he gives up food once and for all after losing his job. While pointing to a perverse resolution of the conflict between nature and culture, Bartleby’s alimentary habits turn him into a grotesque hybrid – half man, half squirrel – a laboratory rat whose behaviour is constantly observed and analysed by a narrator who is also his employer. A nebulous, taciturn character, Bartleby exists at the crossroads of the verbal and physical fasts and, the narrator speculates, is apparently immune to the stimulating effects of the ginger-nuts he subsists upon:

He lives, then, on ginger-nuts, thought I; never eats a dinner, properly speaking; he must be a vegetarian, then; but no; he never eats even vegetables, he eats nothing but ginger-nuts. My mind then ran on in reveries concerning the probable effects upon the human constitution of living entirely on ginger-nuts. Ginger-nuts are so called, because they contain ginger as one of their peculiar constituents, and the final flavouring one. Now, what was ginger? A hot, spicy thing. Was Bartleby hot and spicy? Not at all. Ginger, then, had no effect upon Bartleby. Probably he preferred it should have none. (unpag.)

Like Kafka’s “Hungerkünstler”, Bartleby is practically mute and makes a spectacle, albeit involuntary, of his privations and renunciations: whether he wills it or not, Bartleby becomes a human exhibit in a cabinet of curiosities containing other grotesque figures (including his dysfunctional colleagues Turkey, Nippers and Ginger Nut, to whom we shall return shortly) but in which he remains the central and most singular attraction. As Sianne Ngai has remarked, “what seems intolerable about Bartleby is how paradoxically visible he makes his social invisibility, even from behind the screen that literally conceals him from view” (Ngai 333). Arousing fear and disgust for possessing qualities which his “audience” regard as monstrous and inhuman (the narrator’s “charity” largely amounts to “an affective prophylactic against the repugnance he seems noticeably reluctant to admit that Bartleby produces” [333]), Bartleby becomes a caricature taking on a life of its own and, as most contemporary interpretations have suggested, perpetuating itself as a durable stereotype of radical social and existential resistance in the face of meaninglessness and the inscrutability of death. Melville’s variation on the hunger artist motif thus partakes of the darker modes of the grotesque identified in the Introduction to this book. The negative, Kayserian twin of Bakhtin’s life-affirming grotesque realism, Bartleby continues to haunt the minds of contemporary critics precisely because his impermeability and inscrutability is liable to be experienced as alienating and potentially terrifying, capable of leading us to “the place where meaning collapses” (Kristeva 2). Such is the context in which the Kayserian grotesque establishes itself as an impersonal expression of an “alienated world” resulting from a sudden transformation of the everyday into the fearful, a world to which the artist “may not and cannot” attempt to give meaning (cited in Clayborough 64; 66). In order to counter the meaninglessness (or to fill the signifying void) created by the fasting scrivener, contemporary criticism and theory have sought to conjure up explanations for the clerk’s outlook on life. In doing so, they have added to, rather than resolved, the apparent unreadability of Bartleby’s fast by multiplying the vectors of its hypothetical meanings in a desperate attempt to “remediate” an inscrutable character ironically described by the narrator as “an irreparable loss to literature”.² By converting Bakhtin’s ideals of organic interconnectedness and hybridity (which Arthur Clayborough associates with the “regressive-positive” art of mythology and folk tales [Clayborough 83]) into a model of opacity and arbitrary distortion, Melville’s Bartleby is symptomatic of the progressive degradation of the grotesque from a joyful, ever-creating and expressive celebration of life’s organic excesses into a more somber, seriocomic vision which, over the last two centuries, say from Gogol through Kafka, Beckett and beyond, has been dominated by the uncanny, the meaningless, the repulsive and the absurd.

While Bartleby’s status as a paradigmatic figure of the modern grotesque has been acknowledged,³ his status as an anti-performing hunger artist has been neglected. While the Hungerkünstler starves himself in full public view, Bartleby “performs” in private within the four walls of his self-imposed retreat, first in the midst of his office (we are told that the clients entering the study “are struck by the peculiar aspect of the unaccountable Bartleby” [Melville unpag.]) and later from behind the screen which separates him from the other clerks after the narrator has deemed his presence professionally compromising. There are however two fundamental differences between these two pivotal figures of professional asceticism. First of all, unlike Bartleby, Kafka’s artist does not lose the capacity to discharge his duties efficiently – on the contrary, he takes pride in his work, raising it to the level of a skilled trade with its own techniques, protocols and dignity of status. Second, Kafka’s character offers his show as popular entertainment; he tours Europe and is professionally managed by an impresario. He is an artiste, not a neurotic misfit or a victim of social or political circumstances, and it is only at the very end of the story that Kafka begins to portray him as a tragic character. The greatest frustration he finds in practising his art is that he is never allowed to carry his performance through to its end, since, according to the terms of his “contract”, he must break his fast after forty days:

Warum gerade jetzt nach vierzig Tagen aufhören? Er hätte es noch lange, unbeschränkt lange ausgehalten; warum gerade jetzt aufhören, wo er im besten, ja noch nicht einmal im besten Hungern war? Warum wollte man ihn des Ruhmes berauben, weiter zu hungern, nicht nur der größte Hungerkünstler aller Zeiten zu werden, der er ja wahrscheinlich schon war, aber auch noch sich selbst zu übertreffen bis ins Unbegreifliche, denn für seine Fähigkeit zu hungern fühlte er keine Grenzen.

(Kafka 1994: 265)

[Why stop fasting at this particular moment, after forty days of it? He had held out for a long time, an illimitably long time; why stop now, when he was in his best fasting form, or rather, not yet quite in his best fasting form? Why should he be cheated of the fame he would get for fasting longer, for being not only the record hunger artist of all time, which presumably he was already, but for beating his own record by a performance beyond human imagination, since he felt that there were no limits to his capacity for fasting?]

(Kafka 1983: 271)

It is only when he decides to part with his impresario and join the circus menagerie that the Hungerkünstler can finally give himself up to his project without constraint. However, it is just at this moment, when at last he is able to fast freely, that his audience begins to lose interest: if someone still lingers in front of his cage, it is only to cast aspersions on the authenticity of his performance. The hunger artist’s hubris lies in his failure to recognise that one can only achieve fame by exposing oneself to the crowds and casting oneself out of the logic of (self-)competition; there is a truthfulness and credibility to be earned through a suspension of ego assertion. As Maud Ellmann writes, the moral of the story seems to be that “it is not by food that we survive but by the gaze of others; and it is impossible to live by hunger unless we can be seen or represented doing so” (Ellmann 17). By abandoning himself to the ecstasy of starvation and considering his hunger stunt as an end in itself he eventually loses track of time and converts his fast into a perfect, limitless but ultimately unmonitored and invisible performance:

und so hungerte zwar der Hungerkünstler weiter, wie er es früher einmal erträumt hatte, und es gelang ihm ohne Mühe ganz so, wie er es damals vorausgesagt hatte, aber niemand zählte die Tage, niemand, nicht einmal der Hungerkünstler selbst wußte, wie groß die Leistung schon war, und sein Herz wurde schwer. Und wenn einmal in der Zeit ein Müßiggänger stehenblieb, sich über die alte Ziffer lustig machte und von Schwindel sprach, so war das in diesem Sinn die dümmste Lüge, welche Gleichgültigkeit und eingeborene Bösartigkeit erfinden konnte, denn nicht der Hungerkünstler betrog, er arbeitete ehrlich, aber die Welt betrog ihn um seinen Lohn.

(Kafka 1994: 272)

[and so the artist simply fasted on and on, as he had once dreamed of doing, and it was no trouble to him, just as he had always foretold, but no one counted the days, no one, not even the artist himself, knew what records he was already breaking, and his heart grew heavy. And when once in a while some leisurely passer-by stopped, made merry over the old figure on the board, and spoke of swindling, that was in its way the stupidest lie ever invented by indifference and inborn malice, since it was not the hunger artist who was cheating, he was working honestly, but the world was cheating him of his reward.]

(Kafka 1983: 276)

Kafka’s absurdist parable – which anticipates many of the extreme experiences undergone by the body artists of the second half of the twentieth century – is solidly an...