In this story Kafka presents a character whose profession is to go hungry.
I was reminded of it by the last bit of "How to be a loser":
Thoreau said that most men lead lives of quiet desperation. It seems that that’s true, but with the following proviso: some men do eke out contentment, and they get there by gradually ratcheting down their expectations. Their appetites fade. They compromise, and rationalize, and eventually settle.
I think Steve Jobs said something similar: "Always stay hungry."
I see the original poster's point. The punch line of the story is that the hunger artist has simply given up on finding food that he likes. Instead of continuing playing the game of trying new foods, a game at which he has always lost, he's given up, and learned to find some small contentment with constant hunger.
I didn't see that angle myself when I read the story, to be honest. It just goes to show how great writers can touch our psyche in deep ways that bring out our personal feelings about hunger, fame, or isolation.
That would be stretching it, I think. If you read the context of the sentence "because I couldn't find the food I liked" you'll find it's not about desperation but about fame. The hunger artist says he has finally learned that he should not receive admiration for what he does as his artistry is simply a consequence of his never having run into food he wanted to eat. His fasting is not a skill but a circumstance.
This interpretation is consistent with the rest of the story, which mostly talks about fame (well, and the artist's loneliness amidst all the admiration, of course). Nowhere in this story does Kafka mention "quiet desperation" or "ratcheting down [....] expectations." An interpretation that tries to read that into this story is therefore, I think, invalid, as there is nothing in the text to support it.
I would wager that Kafka has never been used for that because his work tends to concern itself with failure rather than with success.
But I agree with you. More business types should read his work, if only to develop a more realistic outlook on life. The sky is not the limit, petty bureaucrats in the castle you're never, ever going to be allowed into for no discernable reason at all are.
Oh I don't know. Surely "The Bucket Rider" can tell us something about dealing with bad customers. It's clear to me that Kafka meant this as a tale about how to be a sharp businessperson.
Read the story again, but this time without your myopic web startup goggles on. Because, really, those seem to have caused you to truly spectacularly misread what is essentially a story about loneliness as yet another piece of entrepeneurial feel good fluff.
It seems like you liked the story, and I'm glad for that. If you haven't read it before, then I'm especially happy that I introduced you to it. It's one of my favorites, and I've probably read it at least 30 times over the years.
However, it seems like your comment was only intended to shoot down what you perceived as my interpretation of the story, and to do so in an insulting manner. I'd like to know why you think the story is essentially about loneliness and what you think it says about loneliness, and I'd appreciate it if you did so in a way that's not insulting.
My response was less than civil, yes. Your bringing Steve Jobs' "Always stay hungry" into it struck me as exceptionally shallow and myopic and since I happen to be a big fan of Kafka's work, more bile went into my response than would have been proper, I guess.
The comment you've posted since (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1124805) seems a lot more sensible. So it appears I have misjudged you, though, reading it over again, I'm still not convinced that I did that with your original comment itself.
Yeah I did see that in your comment - "wow this guy really likes Kafka, that's awesome." :)
In my original comment I should have written something like "It's interesting to compare what jsomers wrote / Steve Jobs said to what Kafka has written, though for now I'm reserving my opinion." I remember reading something along the lines of, "people rarely understand each other, and when they do it's usually by accident." Anyway, I'm sorry I wasn't clearer originally.
In my original comment I was trying to be neutral when I said "I was reminded of this story by this other thing that was on Hacker News." I was not trying to imply that the original essay, "How to be a loser", and Kafka's story have the exact same message. My intention was only to point out what specifically spurred the association without giving any analysis or opinion. Evidently I didn't do a good job, and I wish I had.
But here is my opinion on the story, if only to disabuse mtts of the rather presumptuous notion that I wear "myopic web startup goggles" and think this great story is "another piece of entrepreneurial feel good fluff":
I've loved this story since I first read it 9 or 10 years ago. It's emotional, mysterious, and ambiguous. It lives up to Kafka's claim that "A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside your soul."
I think I can see what mtts is saying when he says the story is essentially about loneliness, but I'd love to hear more. Because I think the story is about other things as well - about ambition, about art, about being misunderstood, and about greatness.
Kafka's hunger artist is a man who feels like he has never reached his potential. He's always convinced that he can accomplish more than is allowed, and has a troubled spirit because of it and because he perceives that his management and public are keeping him from reaching his potential while at the same time completely misunderstanding why he feels as he does.
Yet when he finally is left to fast for as long as he wants, at the end of it he says "You shouldn't admire it. Because I have to fast, I can't help it. Because I couldn't find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else."
Why would he say that? What's Kafka trying to say? It seems like Kafka means to communicate that great artists aren't admirable, that in fact there's something wrong with them. In the end, their constant hunger isn't a noble trait, it's not an acquired virtue. It's a defect, a kind of obsessive compulsive disorder of the soul.
This is probably why the public reacts to the hunger artist as they do. They find him fascinating, and culturally he's celebrated to an extent, but the public can't truly value what he does. It's horrifying. It's inhuman.
So, I in fact brought up this story because if it's related to the "How to be a loser" essay, it's as a contradiction. jsomers presents constant hunger as something admirable, and those who are content as people who are only fooling themselves into believing they're not living lives of "quiet desperation". The other way of looking at "winners" and "losers" is to say that "winners" are so compelled to satisfy their hunger that they're not capable of being normal, healthy, content humans.
Since I snapped at your previous comment, it's only fair I try to respond to this rather more thoughtful one.
I agree with your assessment that the story is about "about ambition, about art, about being misunderstood, and about greatness". No argument there.
The loneliness is all over the text, sometimes quite literally:
* "withdrawing deep into himself, paying no attention to anyone or anything, not even to the all-important striking of the clock that was the only piece of furniture in his cage, but merely staring into vacancy with half-shut eyes, now and then taking a sip from a tiny glass of water to moisten his lips"
And of course the hunger artist is lonely because he stands apart from the world (quite literally - he lives in a cage, after all) and does something no one quite understands (not to mention that after a while he can't even find an audience for his art anymore).
It has nothing to do, I think, with winning or losing. The hunger artist wins, if you want, when he is at the height of his fame in the beginning of the story, but in the end he withers away in his cage, ignored by the public and ultimately is replaced by a panther, which if you want to put a label on it would be losing. So if Kafka is saying anything about winning or losing at all, it would seem to be that fortune is transient and has nothing to do with the drive to do something (the hunger artist is committed to his art regardless of the size of his audience).
And even his commitment to his art is ultimately questioned: he has no drive to excel at fasting but rather has simply never come across food that he liked to eat. The great artist in the end turns out to be nothing more than a victim of his circumstances.
Hardly an uplifting or inspiring message, I think.
Which is not to say I don't like this story: I do. I think it's, like a lot of Kafka's work, fantastic. I'm not sure whether it belongs on HN, but I enjoyed reading it again and thinking about it. So thanks for posting.
I was reminded of it by the last bit of "How to be a loser":
Thoreau said that most men lead lives of quiet desperation. It seems that that’s true, but with the following proviso: some men do eke out contentment, and they get there by gradually ratcheting down their expectations. Their appetites fade. They compromise, and rationalize, and eventually settle.
I think Steve Jobs said something similar: "Always stay hungry."