Elliot’s Reading Week of 8-22-21: Kafka's greatest short works

 Elliot’s Reading Week of 8-22-21: Kafka's greatest short works 

Cassill’s short fiction anthology wisely includes two of Franz Kafka’s greatest short works, The Hunger Artist and The Metamorphosis. Everyone knows the premise of Metamorphosis, and it’s Kafka at his weirdest and most uncanny best: One morning a young sales rep, Gregor Sama, wakens and recognizes that he’s been transformed overnight into a beetle of some sort, and the Kafka takes it from there. As is typical of his work, it’s a premise that is carried out as if it were in a realistic narrative; in fact, it is realistic, except for the absurdity of the central premise. Reading the story inevitably gives one the creeps; it’s repulsive and sorrowful, as the Samsa family tries to accommodate itself to this great and humiliating family circumstance. But what does it all mean? Kafka never writes proscriptively or didactically; but there are some hints. Perhaps Kafka recognizes himself in the mode of the “insect,” infesting his family dynamics with his oddity (the experimental writer), struggling against the murderous will of his father. Perhaps he posits that all families live with secret, repulsive histories. Or perhaps he is looking at how society treats the outcasts, the nonconformists, those with illness and disability. The Hunger Artists is a much shorter piece, but similar in structure: From the first sentence establishing a bizarre, almost inhuman premise and letting the story proceed from this “what if” to its dire conclusion. The terrific opening of this piece posits that at one time a great attraction, much like traveling circus acts or musical performers, were the hunger artists, who starved themselves almost to death while dwelling in a cage in the public square; apparently people would pay an admission price to watch the “artists” starve himself. Aside from, once again the uncanny aspect, leavened by a touch of dark humor (the lengths to which officials would go to ensure that the “artists” didn’t cheat on his starvation diet) and the odd historicity of the premise - the first sentence informs us that the hunger-artist fad is passe - it’s hard not to think of the hunger artist, metaphorically, as the “artist” ahead of or even behind his or her times - a misfit, misunderstood, engaged in his/her lonely pursuit, unrecognized, spurned perhaps by family or friends - in other words: Is this how Kafka viewed himself and his work?