Ignoring the several (all equally convincing) claims to have found a 'code' to Kafka's writing; to therefore read A Hunger Artist 'plain' -
* Franz Kafka's 'A Hunger Artist' - the basic need for recognition. It's Kafka and the bare bones of existence again isn't it? He covers the essentials of what it is to be a solitary creature (The Burrow, First Sorrow); and he covers the essentials of what it is to be a social creature - charity (The Bucket Rider), guilt (The Trial), acceptance (The Castle), loneliness (Blumfeld); and in the case of A Hunger Artist it's the need for recognition.
In typical fashion of course, Franz Kafka goes straight to the thwarting of this want. His hunger-artist used to get what he wants - some amount of attention from the general public. And now they have taken it away.
Kafka's keen grasp of the humour in all misfortune - provided you are in a position to separate yourself from the misfortune - guides his pen when choosing what angle to take on this thwarted need for recognition: his hunger-artist is placed in a cage outside the circus, and his cage is placed on the way to other cages, cages containing strange wild circus animals:
'he became convinced only too quickly - and even the most stubborn, almost deliberate self-deception could not hold out against the experience - that, judging by their intentions, most of these people were, again and again without exception, only visiting the menagerie.'
And Kafka writes-in a little of the complexity within the mind of a man denied the applause he wants: he writes of how the 'view from a distance', in other words the imagined response to his fasting-performance, is one thing; but it's the close-up reality that's important, and the hunger-artist is hurt by the group who rushes past 'with long strides' to get to the menagerie, and of how he is hurt far more by the group who do take their time looking at him but who do so 'not with any understanding but on a whim or from mere defiance.'
Obviously there are clear similarities with Kafka's Josephine The Singer.
* Franz Kafka's 'A Hunger Artist' - people who want applause for doing less, rather than more. People who seek out applause are, at the very least, recognizable. However, to step up on to a stage before spectators who are supposed to applaud you, and to deliver a performance of denial, not of activity, oh that is far more odd.
The problem of course arises, and Kafka does indeed write a take on it, when people stop to ask - applause for doing what exactly?
Those who deliberately step in front of the crowd and make music, or art, and those who eat-up all their meat and do sport, lifting a very heavy thing or throwing a thing a very long way - they have kept a public audience. But those who get up on stage and do less, what is the 'point' of them? Perhaps unsurprisingly, Kafka's narrator takes this fasting, this hunger artist, perfectly seriously for it is easy to see how Franz would be drawn to something so ready-made 'Kafka', and reel it in.
What's interesting, surely, is Kafka's ability to make vivid, matters of 'less' and of 'denial' and to create a moving narrative that ends up, of course, with something that is forgotten about.
'Finally the cage caught the attention of a supervisor, and he asked the attendant why they had left this perfectly useful cage standing here unused with rotting straw inside. Nobody knew, until one man, with the help of the table with the number on it, remembered the hunger artist. They pushed the straw around with a pole and found the hunger artist in there. "Are you still fasting?" the supervisor asked.'
Oh the horror of some humour!
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