Stats for nerds
3recommend
6mentions
6people
2009–2024years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I somewhat dislike the line of Kafka commentary that focuses on The Trial and The Castle and then associates their bureaucratic themes with his own life experience working various office jobs.
One, because his writing is about much more than this theme (in which kafkesque is too frequently confused/mixed with Orwellian) but more because it pushes away his short stories and aphorisms, which I think are much, much better than his longer works – and more mystical and mysterious in nature. I'd take A Hunger Artist, In the Penal Colony, or some of the aphorisms from the Zürau book over his more famous works any day.
It's unfortunate that writers tend to be known for a single "brand" which causes off-brand works to be pushed to the side.
This is all a long way of saying that if you associate Kafka entirely with insurance administrators and oppressive bureaucracies and don't find this compelling, check out his shorter works.
- Anything by Franz Kafka. Reading him when I was 12 years old was a bad, bad, bad, life-changing decision.
I find his short stories " Josephine the singer or the Mouse Folk", "Before the Law" and " The Hunger Artist" to be unbearably painful.
He is still one of my favorite authors.
- My favorites:
A Hunger Artist [https://records.viu.ca/~Johnstoi/kafka/hungerartist.htm]
A Country Doctor [https://records.viu.ca/~Johnstoi/kafka/countrydoctor.htm]
The Metamorphosis [https://records.viu.ca/~Johnstoi/stories/kafka-E.htm]
- From: https://blog.ayjay.org/re-reading-2/
"I have to think that “Against Rereading,” by Oscar Schwartz, is a massive troll, because the alternative — that Schwartz believes himself to be so omnicompetent a reader, so perfect in his perception, so masterful in his judgment, that he absorbs all that even the greatest book has to offer with a single reading — is unpleasant to contemplate. Or maybe there’s one more possibility: that — like Kafka’s hunger artist, who never found a food he liked — Schwartz has never been sufficiently interested in a book to return to it.
But surely he makes one important point: the problem with our culture today is definitely all those people who don’t want ceaseless novelty. Definitely. I’m almost certain he’s just trolling, though."
- Indeed. I've wondered whether it could have influenced Kafka in writing "A Hunger Artist".
- 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.
