A subject fraught with danger for all writers

Few topics for a writer are as fraught with danger as the story of the suffering, misunderstood artist: the danger of self-pity, of narcissism, of narrow scope, of pallid unoriginality, among others. Many of the greatest writers have taken on the theme, with varying success - and usually in a veiled form: the sensitive soul sometimes portrayed as a painter rather than a writer, for example. And sometimes the story is not so much about the suffering artist but about the artist coming to shape his or her vision and sensibility: Joyce's Portrait is one great example, Proust's opus another (the narrator never defined as an artist - but clearly it's about Proust's maturing aritistry and personality), Mann's Tonio Kroger, to site three of the best, each radically different in style and format. And then there's Kafka: as with everything about Kafka, his portrait of the artist is strange and off-center and completely original and shocking - as in his short story "The Hunger Artist," where the art is not literature or the plastic arts but a performance art, an art of starving nearly to death while on public display. The essence of the story is that The Hunger Artist used to be a world-famous performer but now nobody appreciates his art anymore and he's stationed in a little cage outside a zoo, where a few people sometimes stop to look at him on their way to see the animals; when he dies, he's not found for days, and they replace him in the cage with a leopard. That's a very quick synopsis, but you get the drift: he's an artist unappreciated in his time, when people are drawn to popular entertainment - an all-too-common lament in every age. Could anybody have better claim to this lament that K., however? - a great thinker and writers whose works were at least 50 years ahead of his time, who was barely published and hardly appreciated in his lifetime, but must have known that he had a vision that would guide world literature for a century and would change, as much of the work of any writer in the past 100 years, the way we read and the way we think - a writer whose name would literally enter the dictionary as a descriptor: Kafkaesque.