Deliberate Starvation: Hunger Artists in Kafka, Różewicz, and Sinking Ship

Stefano Boselli

doi:10.33303/gpsv6n1-2a127

Authors

Stefano Boselli University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Keywords:

Hunger artists, Franz Kafka, Sinking Ship, Tadeusz Różewicz, deliberate starvation, Actor-Network Theory, Bruno Latour

Abstract

How can a negative action, the decision to abstain from food, be enacted on stage? Examining hunger as a conscious choice to avoid food for spectacle rather than an unwanted need arising from lack of basic nourishment, this article illustrates several ways to make hunger visible in performance. Through the critical lens of actor-network theory (ANT), hunger’s apparently scarce dramatic action is shown to be framed by and networked with the performance of several other human and non-human actors. Case studies chart a process of “translation” of the typical hunger artist performance from its historical examples to its contemporary theatre-within-the-theatre adaptations.

In the West, self-inflicted starvation became a form of entertainment more distinctly in the late nineteenth century, when living skeletons and hunger artists were shown at circuses, fairs, and amusement parks, and produced income for themselves and their impresarios. Franz Kafka’s short story “Ein Hungerkünstler” (“A Hunger Artist,” 1922) looked back at the history of the profession, identifying the main components of the spectacle of hunger. Polish playwright Tadeusz Różewicz turned the short story into a play, Odejście głodomora (The Hunger Artist Departs, 1977), exploring the potential for dialogic interactions at the textual level and developing side-characters only implied by Kafka. By contrast, the contemporary NYC-based company Sinking Ship created A Hunger Artist (2017), an adaptation that expanded the short story’s theatricality around a single performer who plays multiple characters with the aid of all the resources of theatre, from puppets to audience members “enrolled” in the show.

Author Biography

Stefano Boselli, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Stefano “Stebos” Boselli is a theatre and performance scholar, stage director, and dramaturg who enjoys combining theory with practice. He is currently Assistant Professor of Theatre History and Dramaturgy and Resident Dramaturg for the Nevada Conservatory Theatre at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In his recent monograph Actor-Network Dramaturgies: The Argentines of Paris (Palgrave Macmillan 2023) he illustrates how the study of theatre history can be significantly enriched through the lens of actor-network and assemblage theories, focusing on a group of Argentine artists who moved to France and dominated the Parisian scene between the 1980s and 90s. His peer-reviewed book chapters and articles have been published in several collections and academic journals. He received his PhD in Theatre and Performance from the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

References

Anonymous. Cenni Biografici. Giovanni Succi. Esploratore d’Africa. Già delegato della ‘Società di Commercio coll’Africa’ di Milano e membro della ‘Società psicologica di Madrid.’ Tipografia Economica, 1897.

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2010. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv111jh6w

Boselli, Stefano. Actor-Network Dramaturgies: The Argentines of Paris. Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32523-6

Bouman, P. J. Revolutie der Eenzamen: Spiegel van een Tijdperk, 34th ed. Van Gorcum, 1954.

Callon, Michel. “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay.” The Science Studies Reader, edited by Mario Biagioli, Routledge, 1999, pp. 67–83.

Callon, Michel, and Bruno Latour. “Unscrewing the Big Leviathan: How Actors Macro-Structure Reality and How Sociologists Help Them To Do So.” Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an Integration of Micro and Macro-Sociologies, edited by K. Knorr-Cetina and A. V. Cicourel, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981, pp. 277–303.

Cozzi, Enzo. “Hunger and the Future of Performance.” Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, vol. 4, no. 1, 1999, pp. 121–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.1999.10871652

Ellmann, Maud. The Hunger Artists. Starving, Writing, and Imprisonment. Harvard University Press, 1993. https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674331082

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Vintage Books, 1995.

Genette, Gérard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. University of Nebraska Press, 1997.

Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Northeastern University Press, 1986.

Gooldin, Sigal. “Fasting Women, Living Skeletons and Hunger Artists: Spectacles of Body and Miracles at the Turn of a Century.” Body and Society, vol. 9, no. 2, 2003, pp. 27–53. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X030092002

Hutcheon, Linda, with Siobhan O’Flynn. A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd ed. Routledge, 2013.

Kafka, Franz. “A Hunger Artist.” Selected Short Stories of Franz Kafka, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir, The Modern Library, 1952, pp. 188–201

Lange-Kirchheim, Astrid. “Das fotografierte Hungern: Neues Material zu Franz Kafkas Erzählung ‘Ein Hungerkünstler.’” Hofmannsthal Jahrbuch zur Europäischen Moderne, vol. 17, 2009, pp. 7–56. https://doi.org/10.5771/9783968216935-7

Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford University Press, 2005. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199256044.001.0001

Laera, Margherita. “Introduction: Return, Rewrite, Repeat: The Theatricality of Adaptation.” Theatre and Adaptation: Return, Rewrite, Repeat, edited by Margherita Laera. Bloomsbury, 2014, pp. 1–17. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781472526533

Law, John. “Actor Network Theory and Material Semiotics,” 25 April 2007, http://www.heterogeneities.net/publications/Law2007ANTandMaterialSemiotics.pdf, accessed May 1, 2024.

Mitchell, Breon. “Kafka and the Hunger Artists.” Kafka and the Contemporary Critical Performance: Centenary Readings, edited by Alan Udoff, Indiana University Press, 1987, pp. 236–55.

Moody, Alys. The Art of Hunger: Aesthetic Autonomy and the Afterlives of Modernism. Oxford University Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198828891.001.0001

Nieto-Galan, Agustí. “Mr Giovanni Succi Meets Dr Luigi Luciani in Florence: Hunger Artists and Experimental Physiology in the Late Nineteenth Century.” Social History of Medicine, vol. 28, no. 1, 2014, pp. 64–81. https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hku036

Rader, Peter. Playing to the Gods: Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse, and the Rivalry That Changed Acting Forever. Simon & Schuster, 2019.

Różewicz, Tadeusz. The Hunger Artist Departs. Mariage Blanc and The Hunger Artist Departs: Two Plays by Tadeusz Różewicz. Translated by Adam Czerniawski, New York, Marion Boyars, 1983, pp. 71–109.

Shaw, Helen. A Hunger Artist (review). Time Out, December 10, 2019. https://www.timeout.com/newyork/theater/a-hunger-artist. accessed May 1, 2024.

Vandereycken, Walter, and Ron van Deth. From Fasting Saints to Anorexic Girls: The History of Self-Starvation. New York University Press, 1994.