Fasting at the Feast of Literature

I am arguing not that there is no crisis in the humanities but rather that crisis is the normal state of the humanities. Indeed, the history of our own association [the MLA] is a running account of crises and disputes [. . .] It is the job of humanists not to deny crisis but rather to overcome each successive crisis by acts of critical understanding and creative interrogation.

Theodore Ziolkowski
MLA Presidential Address 1985¹

Kafka's story, "Ein Hungerkünstler," [A Hunger Artist] begins: "In den letzten Jahrzehnten ist das Interesse an Hungerkünstlern sehr zurückgegangen. Während es sich früher gut lohnte, große derartige Vorführungen in eigener Regie zu veranstalten, ist diese heute völlig unmöglich." ["During the last decades, the interest in hunger artists has markedly diminished. It used to pay very well to stage such great performances under one's own management, but today that is quite impossible."]²

The joke of the story is that there never was a time in which hunger artists thrived. Hunger artists cannot thrive. Instead of nostalgia for a bygone era and its works of art, readers of this story become aware of a thing not merely of the past but irrevocably and inexplicably distant. What is a hunger artist? Only and always a figure in a literary text, there is no substance to the hunger artist. He rises from an absence, a formerly blank page, which reveals itself as a trope for the groundless ground of the world in which he hungers, a literary world. All that we read here is a construction, a fiction about an event that never happened and a figure who never existed. We always already know this about a literary text but a supreme work of fiction makes us forget. The book becomes real for us, that is, unless we should foolishly try to consume it, and then we would face the reality that it would be bitter and pasty and in any case it would not satisfy our hunger. We generally do not purport to eat books, but we say we devour them. In Medieval learned society, clerics ruminated on books and digested them. But what kind of sustenance do books provide? What hunger do books satisfy? Or is it rather books that make us hungry? Books, literature, poetry: they demand to be devoured and then deny satisfaction. With the figure of a hunger artist the starving artist comes to mind, but why do artists starve? The hunger artist confesses that he had never found anything good to eat. Not a very useful answer. An artist can always find something to eat, can always find some odd job to supply the next few meals. But an artist prefers not to. Despite the extreme odds against success, the artist would rather starve than do something other than art.

The literary scholar desires literature and, at least to a point, is willing to fast in reality in order to feast in spirit. The current crisis in the humanities centers on this "point." At what point is one no longer willing to fast in order to feast? Although I do not suggest that professors of literature start calling themselves artists, it is vain to assume that they (we) can avoid the particular difficulties of literature simply by treating it as an object of study. A passionate hunger for literature or language has brought most—if not all—of us to this profession. In many respects a loose analogy can be made between the literature professor and the artist: Despite the extreme odds against success the literary scholar would rather come close to starving than do something else. In the past decade or so this devotion has been put to the test. However, the choice to study and to profess literature has never been an economically-motivated decision, although opting not to do so may come down to fiscal considerations.³ From what I have read and...