Does Bartleby remind you of Kafka's hunger artist?
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Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
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Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Afterwords
Did you miss the meeting? Or did we fail to discuss all the questions? Perhaps something slipped your mind, or only occurred to you later. If so, here's your chance to continue the conversation. For the time being, this blog is open for comment only to registered members of the book group. Other readers may contact me at hcrane@cambridgema.gov. Please, no flaming or cussing.
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Does Bartleby remind you of Kafka's hunger artist?
Both the characters and the stories as a whole share a number of similarities. Bartleby and the hunger artist both turn away from life, and become more and more disconnected from other humans and the most basic needs. Both die of starvation, and their troubled relationship with food could be taken to express a "hunger" for something in life that they can't find, and their situation takes on a particularly absurd aspect because of this lack. Bartleby even dies at the end curled up in the fetal position in the prison yard -- as if regressing back to infancy. Both stories could be interpreted as commenting on the difficulties of understanding other human beings (including audiences for hunger artists or writers) whose purposes and motivations remain opaque to us. They also comment on commercialism, money, and publicity.
I was particularly fascinated by Bartleby's "dead-wall reveries." Kafka's hunger artist is also described as "completely sinking back into himself...merely looking out in front of him with his eyes almost shut..." I understood these moments as part of a more general withdrawal from the activities of life, but they also reminded me of an amazing paragraph relating to the character Smerdyakov in Dostoevsky's "Brothers Karamazov" which we read a few years ago.
There is a remarkable picture by the painter Kramskoy, called “Contemplation.” There is a forest in winter, and on a roadway through the forest, in absolute solitude, stands a peasant in a torn kaftan and bark shoes. He stands, as it were, lost in thought. Yet he is not thinking; he is “contemplating.” If any one touched him he would start and look at one as though awakening and bewildered. It’s true he would come to himself immediately; but if he were asked what he had been thinking about, he would remember nothing. Yet probably he has hidden within himself, the impression which had dominated him during the period of contemplation. Those impressions are dear to him and no doubt he hoards them imperceptibly, and even unconsciously. How and why, of course, he does not know either. He may suddenly, after hoarding impressions for many years, abandon everything and go off to Jerusalem on a pilgrimage for his soul’s salvation, or perhaps he will suddenly set fire to his native village, and perhaps do both.
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