Hunger Artist

The dilemma with the hunger-artist in his cage represents the dilemma with the artist in the modern world: his dissociation from the society in which he lives. By this reading of the story, ''A Hunger-Artist'' is a sociological metaphor. But we can also interpret the hunger-artist to represent a mystic, a holy man, or a priest. A third possible interpretation ventures us into a metaphysical metaphor: the hunger-artist represents spirit, man as a spiritual being; the panther, in contrast, represents matter, the animal nature of man. If the story is translated into metaphysical terms, the separation is between the spiritual and the physical; into religious terms, between the divine and the human, the soul and the body; into sociological terms, between the artist and his society. Consider first the story as a metaphor for the dilemma of the artist. He is set in contrast to the masses. The people who attend his exhibitions of fasting cannot comprehend his art. ''Just try to explain the art of fasting to someone! He who has no feeling for it simply cannot comprehend it.'' The artist starves himself for the sake of his vision. He has faith in his vision, faith in himself, and integrity of aesthetic conscience. As the initiated alone understood, ''the hunger-artist would never under any circumstances, not even under compulsion, partake of any nourishment during the period of fasting. His honor as an artist forbade such a thing.'' It is his vision, solely this, which nourishes him. Of course the artist can ''fast'' as no one else can do. It's not everyone who is an artist. We concede, ''in view of the peculiar nature of this art which showed no flagging with increasing age,'' the claim he makes of limitless capacity for creating works of art. But if his public is unaware of any sympathetic understanding of the artist and of his art, if his public has no faith in him, how then can he cling to this faith in himself? It is because his public is a nonbeliever that the artist is in a cage (the cage symbolizes his isolation). Society and the artist--each disbelieves in the other. And so the artist comes to disbelieve, finally, in himself; he cannot survive in isolation. Complete detachment from physical reality is spiritual death. What is man, matter or spirit? The story might be described as a kind of critique of this philosophical problem. Spirit and matter--each is needed to fulfill the other. At the moment of his death the hunger-artist recognizes his failure as an artist or creator. For this superannuated artist there is no possibility of resurrection because in our present-day world not spirit but matter is recognized. It is recognized by the dying hunger-artist that matter has triumphed over spirit as he confesses his secret. Throughout the story the author grieves the passing of our hunger-artists, their decline and extinction in our present-day civilization. But nonetheless throughout the story all the logic is weighted against this hunger-artist's efforts at autarchy. In his last words we are given his confession that the artist must come to terms with life, with the civilization in which he lives, the world of total reality. ''Forgive me, all of you,'' he whispers to the circus manager, as though in a confessional before some priest. And they forgive him. They forgive him for his blasphemy against nature. The hunger-artist seeks Spirit absolutely; he denies the ''evil natural social world'' at the same time that he longs for it. And this is his dilemma, even as it is ours. It is not possible for man to achieve a condition of pure