The Literature of Evil
- By Jim Hicks
“During these last decades the interest in professional fasting 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. We live in a different world now.”
A "feeding chair" in the Guantanamo medical wing where hunger-striking detainees are force fed. . (Mother Jones)
Today these opening lines from Franz Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist” (in the translation by Willa and Edwin Muir) are no doubt on other minds as well. Over a hundred souls are currently fasting unto death at the U.S. prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Kafka may well be the only modern writer capable of understanding, and even expressing, the level of horror and suffering that has brought them to such a pass.
Long ago, George Steiner argued that Kafka’s work effectively anticipated the Holocaust; the Argentine author Ricardo Piglia, in his magisterial Respiración artificial, imagined the Prague fabulist overhearing in Vienna the racist ravings of a certain failed artist, long before the latter became a militarist and politician.
“At one time,” Kafka’s tale continues, “the whole town took a lively interest in the hunger artist, from day to day of his fast the excitement mounted, everybody wanted to see him at least once a day [. . .] on fine days the cage was set out in the open air, and then it was the children’s special treat to see the hunger artist; for their elders he was often just a joke that happened to be in fashion, but the children stood openmouthed, marveling at him as he sat there pallid in black tights, with his ribs sticking out so prominently [. . .] merely staring into vacancy with half-shut eyes, now and then taking a sip fron a tiny glass of water to moisten his lips.”
Undeniable that “we live in a different world now.” Of the 166 prisoners in the Guantánamo gulag, eighty-six have been pronounced innocent by the dark side itself, and yet they remain imprisoned with no hope of release. These men have been left in hell for over eleven years. The present action—a mass hunger strike that has already led the military to force-feed perhaps two dozen detainees—is an organized revolt against the very oblivion to which our mediatized world has consigned them, a form of social death in which their lives, their families, and even their entire countries matter nothing in comparison to our own petty trials, tribulations, and insignificant preoccupations. At last President Obama himself has again taken notice, now that the heroism of these hundred-plus hunger artists has forced his hand. “The idea that we would still maintain forever a group of individuals who have not been tried,” he said, “that is contrary to who we are, contrary to our interests, and it needs to stop.” Contrary to “who we are”: the ontological argument has always been a slippery one, as unconvincing as it is impossible to refute. If not us, who is it?
Soon, of course, one or more of these prisoners will die. We should remember, now and in the future, that death was never the goal. Georges Bataille—admittedly a man with more than one strange idea—claimed that the task of the artist was sacrifice, pure and simple, and that any true artist would stop short of nothing less. To what end? Bringing poetry into the world, as Auden famously said, makes nothing happen. Yet, as the radical theorist of theater Herbert Blau liked to respond, at least it does that. The nothing that has allowed the prisoners of Guantánamo to languish for over a decade must, and will, be changed.
As for Kafka’s hunger artist, after wasting away, he finally disappears forever—yet another forgotten sideshow. We should meditate carefully on what comes next.
“Into the cage they put a young panther. Even the most insensitive felt it refreshing to see this wild creature leaping around the cage that had so long been dreary [. . . .] The food he liked was brought him without hesitation by the attendants; he seemed not even to miss his freedom; his noble body [. . .] seemed to carry freedom around with it too; somewhere within his jaws it seemed to lurk; and the joy of life streamed with such ardent passion from his throat that for the onlookers it was not easy to stand the shock of it. But they braced themselves, crowded round the cage, and did not want ever to move away.”
