and find ourselves to be foreign, not least to ourselves, and that our bodies are somewhere beyondus, as strange as our minds, and, like them, also barely within our agency.
âWhat shall I become through my animal?â Kafka asks in 1917, in The Blue Octavo Notebooks. He no longer wants to be either an adult or a man. And we might ask of the hunger artist, whose body is also destroyed, what sort of diminished thing does he want to be? Is he a starving saint, idiot, or sacrificial victim? Self-harm is the safest form of violence; you are, at least, no danger to anyone else. No one will seek revenge. To starve oneself, or to become a bug, is to evacuate oneâs character, to annihilate oneâs history and render oneself a void. But what are these transformations in aid of? Is this living sculpture showing us that we ask for too much, or showing us how little we need? What sort of demonstration is this spiritual anorexic engaged in?
The hunger artistâs âbodyworkâ resembles some of the âperformanceâ art of the twentieth century, which existed outside the conventional museum, and was probably most influential in the 1970s. Human bodies had been torn apart in the wars, revolutions, medical experiments, pogroms and holocausts of the twentieth century. Subsequently, artists who had formerly disappeared behind their ideas would become overt autobiographers, literally using their bodies as their canvas or material, mutilating, cutting, photographing or otherwise displaying themselves before an audience, a âtheatre of tortureâ, if you like,showing us the ways in which our bodies are a record of our experience, as well as what we like to do to one another.
Kafka, who loved theatre and cabaret, and hated his own âpunyâ body, particularly in comparison to his fatherâs hardy, âhugeâ physique, was more interested in the tortured male frame than the female form. Not that Kafka wasnât interested in women, and not that he didnât torture them. This was a pleasure even he could not deny himself. As is clear from his many letters, he practised and developed this fine art for a long time, until he became very good at maddening, provoking and denying women. He also went to enormous trouble to ensure that none of the women engaged with him was ever happy or satisfied. In case she got the wrong idea, or, worse, the right one â that he was a panther masquerading as a bug â Kafka pre-emptively describes himself, to his translator and friend Milena Jesenská in 1919, as an âunclean pestâ.
Kafka met Felice Bauer at Max Brodâs in 1912. She must have panicked him, since soon afterwards he wrote âThe Metamorphosisâ in three weeks, quickly making it clear that he would rather be a bug or a skeleton than an object of female desire. He made sure, too, never to write a great woman character. Kafka could not portray the eroticised, sexually awakened subject; the body was always impossible and a horror, and he worked hard all his life to remain a grotesque infirm child. Too much love and sexualexcitement on both sides would have been exposed, and Kafka, the paradigmatic writer of the twentieth century, is, above all, a writer of resentment, if not hatred. In his world view â and all artists have a basic implicit fantasy which marks the limits and possibilities of what they might do â there are only bullies and victims; nothing more. The women had to learn, repeatedly, what it was like to be refused. No woman was going to get a drink of water from Franz Kafka.
Yet Kafka constantly solicited information from his women, making them âcaptive by writingâ, as he put it in a letter to Brod. He insisted they follow his instructions; he always wanted to know âeverythingâ, as he puts it, about a woman. There is, of course, nothing in this kind of ceaseless âknowingâ. There is no actual knowledge in such a heap of
âWhat shall I become through my animal?â Kafka asks in 1917, in The Blue Octavo Notebooks. He no longer wants to be either an adult or a man. And we might ask of the hunger artist, whose body is also destroyed, what sort of diminished thing does he want to be? Is he a starving saint, idiot, or sacrificial victim? Self-harm is the safest form of violence; you are, at least, no danger to anyone else. No one will seek revenge. To starve oneself, or to become a bug, is to evacuate oneâs character, to annihilate oneâs history and render oneself a void. But what are these transformations in aid of? Is this living sculpture showing us that we ask for too much, or showing us how little we need? What sort of demonstration is this spiritual anorexic engaged in?
The hunger artistâs âbodyworkâ resembles some of the âperformanceâ art of the twentieth century, which existed outside the conventional museum, and was probably most influential in the 1970s. Human bodies had been torn apart in the wars, revolutions, medical experiments, pogroms and holocausts of the twentieth century. Subsequently, artists who had formerly disappeared behind their ideas would become overt autobiographers, literally using their bodies as their canvas or material, mutilating, cutting, photographing or otherwise displaying themselves before an audience, a âtheatre of tortureâ, if you like,showing us the ways in which our bodies are a record of our experience, as well as what we like to do to one another.
Kafka, who loved theatre and cabaret, and hated his own âpunyâ body, particularly in comparison to his fatherâs hardy, âhugeâ physique, was more interested in the tortured male frame than the female form. Not that Kafka wasnât interested in women, and not that he didnât torture them. This was a pleasure even he could not deny himself. As is clear from his many letters, he practised and developed this fine art for a long time, until he became very good at maddening, provoking and denying women. He also went to enormous trouble to ensure that none of the women engaged with him was ever happy or satisfied. In case she got the wrong idea, or, worse, the right one â that he was a panther masquerading as a bug â Kafka pre-emptively describes himself, to his translator and friend Milena Jesenská in 1919, as an âunclean pestâ.
Kafka met Felice Bauer at Max Brodâs in 1912. She must have panicked him, since soon afterwards he wrote âThe Metamorphosisâ in three weeks, quickly making it clear that he would rather be a bug or a skeleton than an object of female desire. He made sure, too, never to write a great woman character. Kafka could not portray the eroticised, sexually awakened subject; the body was always impossible and a horror, and he worked hard all his life to remain a grotesque infirm child. Too much love and sexualexcitement on both sides would have been exposed, and Kafka, the paradigmatic writer of the twentieth century, is, above all, a writer of resentment, if not hatred. In his world view â and all artists have a basic implicit fantasy which marks the limits and possibilities of what they might do â there are only bullies and victims; nothing more. The women had to learn, repeatedly, what it was like to be refused. No woman was going to get a drink of water from Franz Kafka.
Yet Kafka constantly solicited information from his women, making them âcaptive by writingâ, as he put it in a letter to Brod. He insisted they follow his instructions; he always wanted to know âeverythingâ, as he puts it, about a woman. There is, of course, nothing in this kind of ceaseless âknowingâ. There is no actual knowledge in such a heap of
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