ABSTRACT
I owe Thomas Ogden my acquaintance with Kafka’s short story “A Hunger Artist.” Although I was familiar with some of Kafka’s works, I never came across this one. I can still recall the rush of rage I could feel, physically, when I read the three-page story. The immediate association I had was that of the Buddhist quantum, concerning the “noise” a tree makes when falling alone in the woods. I could never relate to the “noise” riddle, but was always furious about the tree’s alone-some. This is what I felt when I read Kafka’s story – it wasn’t the hunger artist’s choice of self-starvation that caught my attention but his avoidant audience and the two ladies who could not bear to “stand” the horror when escorting him out of his cage. My reading of the story was different than that of Ogden, and I must admit I related to the artist as a “real” person, someone I could identify myself with. I took the story as a tale of not only somatization and its role in one’s expression of psychic pain and the absence of the other, but also as a story related to social constructs, of our responsibility to one another.
