Professional Fasters and Snacker Poets
The narrator of Kafkaâs âThe Hunger Artistâ (1922) locates the high watermark of the âprofessional fastâ 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 âspiritual detoxificationâ (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 âvisible expression of inward humilityâ (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 Deweyâs most dedicated disciples was a businessman named Milton Rathbun who fasted for twenty-eight days (losing more than forty pounds in the process) âbecause he wanted to reduce his weight, fearing that its gradual increase might bring on apoplexyâ (Dewey unpag.). Milton Rathbunâs 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 Rathbunâs experiment served as an exemplar that âto do without food without hunger does not tax any vital powerâ and that the sense of hunger or âmere relishâ should be distinguished from ânatural hunger, which would only manifest itself when there would be marked relief from painâ (unpag.).1 He quotes an unsigned article recounting Rathbunâs stunt in the 6 June 1899 issue of the New York Press. The author of the report insists that the businessmanâs achievement was far superior to that of professional fasters such as Dr Tanner (whose forty-day fast carried out in 1880 was âsimply trying to prove that the thing could be doneâ [cited in Dewey unpag.]) and Giovanni Succi (whose forty-five-day fast in 1890 may have inspired Kafkaâs hunger artist), both of whom were âsurrounded by attendants who allowed them scarcely to lift a hand, so that every ounce of energy might be conservedâ (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 dayâs 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 Rathbunâs 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 Deweyâs insistence that Rathbunâs fast âpursued a course diametrically oppositeâ (unpag.) to Succiâs, 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 Bartlebyâs first few days at the notaryâs 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 oâclock, 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, Deweyâs 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 Sinclairâs novel was crucial, for example, in the passing of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906 during Theodore Rooseveltâs âprogressiveâ era. Sinclair was also the author of a politico-dietary tract entitled The Fasting Cure (1910) in which he referred to Deweyâs work and identified the practice of abstinence as an important element in his struggle for social justice.
Percy Bysshe Shelleyâs 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. Shelleyâs thesis is that the misfortunes that plague mankind all stem from his âunnatural habits of lifeâ which, from the original sin onwards, have been responsible for the âdepravity of [his] physical and moral natureâ (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 Miltonâs Paradise Lost, from which Shelley cites the catalogue of âpostlapsarianâ maladies where melancholy is associated with colic, despair with dyspepsia. As an ideological practice, Shelleyâs 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 âon a principle of mortificationâ (Shelley 90). The cooking necessary to render the meat edible is described by the poet as a Promethean âexpedient for screening from his disgust the horrors of the shamblesâ (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 textâs 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 Shelleyâs 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 Keatsâs and one of Shelleyâs most dedicated detractors) mocking the poetâs meticulous carving of his meagre vegetarian meal: âI 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 chickenâ (cited in Morton 2006: 22). Shelleyâs snacking habits are the measure of his self-sacrificial hope that vegan ultra-temperance will triumph over mankindâs tendency to âpimp for the gluttony of death, his most insidious, implacable, and eternal foeâ (Shelley 90). From a Deleuzian perspective, Shelleyâs 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 âblend[ing] into oneâs surroundings, to blur[ring] the distinction between inside and outsideâ and âeating while standing up, alone, writing ⌠is a crime against civilisation, or, at least, in Shelleyâs age, a bloody-minded attempt not to be caught in existing hierarchiesâ (Morton 2006: 26). Morton is right on when he likens Shelleyâs 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, Shelleyâs 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, Bartlebyâs alimentary habits turn him into a grotesque hybrid â half man, half squirrel â 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 Kafkaâs âHungerkĂźnstlerâ, 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, âwhat seems intolerable about Bartleby is how paradoxically visible he makes his social invisibility, even from behind the screen that literally conceals him from viewâ (Ngai 333). Arousing fear and disgust for possessing qualities which his âaudienceâ regard as monstrous and inhuman (the narratorâs âcharityâ largely amounts to âan affective prophylactic against the repugnance he seems noticeably reluctant to admit that Bartleby producesâ [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. Melvilleâs 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 Bakhtinâs 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 âthe place where meaning collapsesâ (Kristeva 2). Such is the context in which the Kayserian grotesque establishes itself as an impersonal expression of an âalienated worldâ resulting from a sudden transformation of the everyday into the fearful, a world to which the artist âmay not and cannotâ 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 clerkâs outlook on life. In doing so, they have added to, rather than resolved, the apparent unreadability of Bartlebyâs fast by multiplying the vectors of its hypothetical meanings in a desperate attempt to âremediateâ an inscrutable character ironically described by the narrator as âan irreparable loss to literatureâ.2 By converting Bakhtinâs ideals of organic interconnectedness and hybridity (which Arthur Clayborough associates with the âregressive-positiveâ art of mythology and folk tales [Clayborough 83]) into a model of opacity and arbitrary distortion, Melvilleâs Bartleby is symptomatic of the progressive degradation of the grotesque from a joyful, ever-creating and expressive celebration of lifeâs 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 Bartlebyâs 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 HungerkĂźnstler starves himself in full public view, Bartleby âperformsâ 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 âare struck by the peculiar aspect of the unaccountable Bartlebyâ [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, Kafkaâs artist does not lose the capacity to discharge his duties efficiently â 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, Kafkaâs 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 âcontractâ, he must break his fast after forty days:
Warum gerade jetzt nach vierzig Tagen aufhĂśren? Er hätte es noch lange, unbeschränkt lange ausgehalten; warum gerade jetzt aufhĂśren, 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 grĂśĂte HungerkĂźnstler aller Zeiten zu werden, der er ja wahrscheinlich schon war, aber auch noch sich selbst zu Ăźbertreffen bis ins Unbegreifliche, denn fĂźr seine Fähigkeit zu hungern fĂźhlte 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 HungerkĂźnstler 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 artistâs 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 âit 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 soâ (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 HungerkĂźnstler weiter, wie er es frĂźher einmal erträumt hatte, und es gelang ihm ohne MĂźhe ganz so, wie er es damals vorausgesagt hatte, aber niemand zählte die Tage, niemand, nicht einmal der HungerkĂźnstler selbst wuĂte, wie groĂ die Leistung schon war, und sein Herz wurde schwer. Und wenn einmal in der Zeit ein MĂźĂiggänger stehenblieb, sich Ăźber die alte Ziffer lustig machte und von Schwindel sprach, so war das in diesem Sinn die dĂźmmste LĂźge, welche GleichgĂźltigkeit und eingeborene BĂśsartigkeit erfinden konnte, denn nicht der HungerkĂźnstler 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)
Kafkaâs absurdist parable â which anticipates many of the extreme experiences undergone by the body artists of the second half of the twentieth century â is solidly an...