Starvation and survival

The cloud also recedes

"I can't take food at all, I'm not that kind of person; it's a characteristic of me." How would a person sitting at home looking at a pile of vegetables and fruits on the ground feel like reading such words? The speaker is not selling there, he is really starving— the name of the book is Hunger.

Cnut Hamson, with a particularly prominent identity: the winner of the 1920 Nobel Prize in Literature. Hunger was his novel published in 1890, and he became a Norwegian cultural celebrity with this autobiographical story with little plot. He debuted almost at the same time as the famous Norwegian painter Eduard Munch, and the style coincided, and the ultimate expression of the mystery of death in Munch's paintings really resonated with the protagonist in "Hunger" who stubbornly despised hunger and despised poverty. As a result, many versions of Hunger look for inspiration from Munch to make covers: people with black hole hole eyes, round mouths, silent shouts, a hint of horror and a kind of funny.

The way Hunger was written was unique in the literary scene of the 1890s, and Hamson began a modernist style, so much so that the American writer Isaac Basheves Singer, the winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature, hailed Hamson as the originator of modernism in his preface to Hunger. But among the great writers who loved Hunger, Franz Kafka was the one who was most directly influenced. Kafka's profound sensibility, and his astonishing foresight of the future of human society at the beginning of the 20th century, become more and more prominent in our current predicament. He left behind three unfinished novels, a number of short and medium stories, essays, letters, diaries, and conversations, all of which were highly original, but he confessed his great admiration for Hamson, whose writings, he said, "are as natural as knots in trees." ”

He also wrote a short story, The Hunger Artist, similarly writing about a hunger strike that was not only not afraid of hunger, but also on hunger strike. We also glance at the less familiar Hamson and look directly at Kafka— a mental and moral obligation to return to him constantly.

Next to the circus is a cage covered with straw, and on the grass sits individuals on a hunger strike. The performance either relies on the body, or on the sound, or on some kind of stunt such as stuffy water, even if it involves eating and drinking Lasa, it is feasible to perform drinking and eating, otherwise there will not be so many so-called "eating broadcasts" on the Internet. But how does a hunger strike work? There are hunger strikers who want to express a certain political attitude, and no one buys tickets to see them; yet Kafka tells us that hunger strikes used to be a very popular performance in which the public could find pleasure. Presumably, this custom must be problematic, and it is not normal for people who are keen on it. When the hungry artist is presented on paper, Kafka hints at the appearance of the public.

Their fun is abnormal, but their thinking is so normal: they suspect that the hungry artist will secretly eat and send someone to sneak a look!

Kafka's charm is evident here. What is obviously crazy and makes us suspicious is completely normal, even inevitable normal. It seems that there is a conspiracy here that the artist may be ugly, or that the audience who suspects that the artist is fake is ugly himself, but at the same time, it is not surprising that these things are so natural and reasonable. Both ends of the spectrum go hand in hand, making you dizzy, and two voices coming out of one of your minds and one mouth at the same time: "This is impossible!" And "Of course! ”

This perverted thing is going so normally. The people in the story never questioned what they did, and at the same time, the starving artist explained himself to us. He said he had reasons to perform hunger, not because the audience loved to watch, but because "hunger strike is the easiest thing I can do" — a phrase that makes sense and is too weak to refute, and it seems very high-profile: a "master" would certainly boast that he did things easily, wouldn't he? However, after listening to his explanation, the audience expressed disbelief, which is also reasonable, if the artist's lies are exposed, so that he can no longer mix... This is exciting to think about.

Hungry artists don't care about these doubts. He was "open-minded". Hunger was his inner pursuit, the purpose of his life, the only reason he existed. On the contrary, people always treated his persistence with ridicule, stared at his every move, set up ambushes, and lured him with food. Like a monk walking through the flowers, he survived these insults and slanders. He succeeded, and after forty days of hunger strike, he was celebrated and given a "sick meal," but that was not the same as putting a blanket on an hour-long marathon runner. The limit of forty days was not for humanitarian reasons, but because the public interest could only last for forty days, and after the expiration of the period, even if he refused the meal and remained on hunger strike, no one would ever come to see his performance.

Every word Kafka uses tightens his inner logic, making "This is impossible!" And "Of course! "The tension between them intensifies. What is even more paradoxical and more logical is that after this celebration, the artist who has been insisting on it actually collapsed physically, not hungry, and he fell on the finish line because of resentment, because the celebration means that people have completed a task that is almost "chasing the drama" and decided to disperse, so that he no longer has the opportunity to continue to challenge himself and win the honor of an "unprecedented hunger master".

He recovered quickly and adjusted his physical condition like a trained actor. But things continued to happen reasonably: after this success, his beautiful sign was torn down, the clock used to calculate the length of the cage was taken away, no one recorded the day of his hunger strike, and the guards who had previously overseen the challenge and prevented him from cheating were gone. When he was deprived of the goal of the challenge, the hunger performance became his mental burden, and he really thought about going on an indefinite hunger strike in the past, but now he couldn't do it..." No one is counting the days, no one knows how great his achievements are, even in his own heart, which makes him feel very heavy. ”

He was being interrupted by the snub. After his death, the concentration of irony reached its peak, and the combination of "this is impossible" and "of course" reached a white-hot degree, as if it were two grunt people, still holding hands tightly in the midst of their resentment toward each other; the impossible continued to happen reasonably, but the tension was so tense that it was about to burn: the corpse was buried with the straw in the cage, and in his place was a black panther, chewing on the food thrown at him, and the people who left the cage were gathered again. In his last conversation before his death, the artist re-explained his hunger strike choices, saying:

"I have to be hungry, I have no choice ... Because I haven't found food for my appetite. If I had found it, then you believe me, I wouldn't have been surprised at first, I would have filled myself up like you and everyone else. ”

No matter how much irony this story has for the masses, the active pursuit of hunger can be said to be an anomaly or even a perversion in itself, but for Kafka, the "constant" and "state" of the world are suspicious. The practice of starvation is generally related to self-purification in religion, which is meant to make people more worthy of the only God who created them, and mandatory purification is bound to cause alienation of people, make people nervously resentful of feeding behavior, and feel uneasy about gastrointestinal peristalsis and excretion. Kafka studied the Jewish occult religion of Kabbalah, and his Metamorphosis and The Investigation of a Dog show that he was fascinated by the aversion and anxiety of the organic being to itself. But Kafka not only exposed some terrible possibilities, but also had the heart to experience abnormalities and perversions, writing in a diary: "I only need a room and a vegetarian meal, and there is almost nothing else." "He said he really felt sick from physical to mental to gulping down. I can't accept food at all" – this idea was fascinating to Kafka.

The starving artist voluntarily chose hunger, and in addition, he had to imprison himself. His cage is guarded (the guards are sent by the audience, usually the butcher), and the cage is placed outside the circus, and people do not come to see him as if they were watching some Houdini-style escape, but the psychology of watching him ugly is also implicit in the act of watching the circus performance: If you can see the artist stealing food, isn't it like seeing a lion, tiger, dog, and bear not obeying orders, as if picking up an Easter egg? In this sense, self-imprisonment is required to challenge the rules of the hunger record, but it seems to be a trap set for the public, in order to induce their decency and ugliness. It's just that no one knows who exposed it to. Show it to God?

The artist knows that those who surround him cannot understand his art, "The art of going to explain hunger to people is a waste of time!" People who lack affection for it simply cannot understand the mystery. "It's an aesthetic conscience, and during the performance, even if he is forced to eat food, he doesn't eat it," his artist honor did not allow him to do. "The only thing he depends on to nourish is his own belief, which is rarely held, so there is only one artist." Yet the public can't understand this art, and they don't believe that the artist is really in a cage—that is, they don't believe he really doesn't eat food. The less they understood, the greater the artist's contempt for them.

It seems that his pure convictions are mixed with what we call vanity. Kafka has no intention of shaping a "no one believes in purity, who gives to the heart" type of soul, because he is also an expert in harsh and ruthless self-examination. When he says that being a writer is nothing more than a "hedonistic construct," he is sincere. When he portrayed Josephine the Rat in his final work, the short story "The Female Singer Josephine or the Rat Nation," his portrayal of vanity maintained the intensity of what he does in The Hungry Artist. Josephine was practically unable to sing, she simply made "a normal whistle", but she did not hesitate to "use the most undignified method to attract attention to her". She is a pseudo-celebrity who specifically picks out the time when others don't notice her to show her voice, and thinks that this is a kind of "high-level recognition" of her by others.

The Starvation Artist was also his own greatest audience and supporter, and his confinement in a cage proved his superiority and allowed him to openly remain hungry, which no one else, who was free to get food, could do. His agents, of course, were shameless, and they transported him from one city to another like a touring exhibition, but when there were few spectators, the agents not only did not shine a flashlight on him, but also made him a spectacle, but also preferred to play cards boringly. He was furious about this: he believed in hunger and was self-congratulatory, but at the same time he needed to be watched and appreciated by others to confirm his existence. How contradictory; but he, like selfie fans and viral video bloggers, doesn't feel there's any contradiction here.

If there's anything they fear, it's that their self-made spectacle has been rejected, the equivalent of sending a video and being ridiculed by hundreds or thousands. The Hunger Artist also has an exquisite idea of this. On the day of the forty-day hunger strike, the cage door was opened, and two doctors entered the cage, after making the necessary tests on the artist, announced the results through the microphone to the whole theater that was filled with spectators, and finally two young ladies came, acting as hostesses, "who were complacent about being selected by lottery", and they led the artist out of the cage and toward the small table where the meal was served. The manager of the troupe came up, gestured to declare the performance a success, and handed him over to the two ladies, and when the light weight of the artist's whole body was "borne by one of the ladies", the woman was unprepared and avoided her face, and her companion did not just hold one of his bone-like hands in a hurry, did not help her. This was, the audience laughed, and the lady cried bitterly, "having to be replaced by a handyman who had been waiting there for a long time."

In Kafka's seemingly effortless prose sentences, the color of sadness and mourning is always transmitted. Starving artists are people with strict cleanliness, and in contemporary civilizations, the decay and extinction of such people is a pity. However, all the logic in the whole story is against him, against the clean path of self-confinement that he has chosen, and at the same time exposes the hypocrisy in it. But his failure and death do not justify snubbing him and not understanding him. In Kafka's view, the masses are always "fun-seeking", and what they are best at doing is to replace the demonstration of individualized spiritual pursuits with entertainment, or to turn them into their favorite forms of entertainment in various ways. How can a person who really has a clean heart count on the eyes of the masses to confirm himself?

However, anxiety because you are seen by others, or not seen by others, is a phenomenon in modern society. In Metamorphosis, Gregory Samsa, who turns into a beetle, tries to forget about it by not looking at himself, but he can't help but feel painfully that someone is spying on him. He felt that colleagues would come to him, and he felt guilty that he had missed office work and faced his boss and others with an empty chair, and this guilt immediately outweighed his fear of physical deformation. Here, when we feel "This is impossible!" Kafka quickly gave a logical explanation: Gregory was the only financial pillar of the family and needed to pay off his parents' debts, so he could only swallow his anger and did not dare to resign, resignation not only made him lose his income, but also made him an untrustworthy son in the eyes of his parents... So we can only admit bitterly: "Yes, of course, of course he must first take care of his position, his company, his income"

Kafka was a well-deserved prophet who had just turned forty when he was killed by tuberculosis and left a will for his friend Max Broad to destroy his work, which Brod did not do, and he compiled and published the strange works. This "betrayed will" is an enduring issue in the history of ideas, because if Brod had been loyal to his deceased friend and done as he said, the human psyche would have been different from what it is now! Now is the era of the best feeling Kafka, when you are clearly dissatisfied and incomprehensible, but you can't find the wronged creditor, and you can only meet a large number of people who "follow the rules" and "obey orders", you fall into Kafka's "Castle"; when you can't buy vegetables, can't go out, but find that it seems that most people are living well, and thus ashamed of their incompetence, you are also meeting Kafka.

Since he wanted to destroy all his works, it can be inferred that "The Hungry Artist" was not intended to be written to anyone, let alone cause confusion and deep thought among many people. The novel survived, and those who read it should also feel like survivors. People are afraid of the prophets, because the prophets are all people who declare that disaster is coming, like the stars of disaster, but if you want to survive after hearing the prophet's prophecy, there is only one way: to become a prophet himself.