Re: Life imitating art

Jim,

Actually, Kafka gives the performance of the artist, when he's at his peak of
popularity, quite the showboating feel, if you'll remember. The impresario
is running things at that point, and he stages the thing with all the
flourishes. Each time the artist finishes, the impresario makes the artist's breaking
the fast a big show with bands and beautiful girls to lead him out and all the
rest. It's deliberately hyped, even though the artist would rather not come
out and would prefer to push his art to the limits he knows he can reach.
He's prevented from doing this, of course, because of his audience's attention
span and commercial interests. Later, after he loses his audience because his
art has gone out of fashion, he can push himself beyond the limits of his own
art, but he's by that point he's holed up in the corner of a circus where no
one watches him or cares and he has no audience, and then it gets desperate and
Kafkaesque. It is of course one of the great meditations on the relationship
between the writer and his readers and his art that I have ever read. And the
last line, the explanation the artist uses for why he did what he did and why
he should not be admired for doing so, is a slight variation on the line
Kafka always used about why he wrote.

But anyway, when the Hunger Artist is popular and doing his thing in the
middle of big cities, like Blaine in London, it is all hyped to the max by the
impresario as some sort of pageant and has the same artificially staged,
showboating feel. In fact, the very same concerns about cheating and everything else
spoken of in the article are said about the artist a well, almost verbatim.

But since we're telling stories, back in the eighties some time, Derrida was
invited to Czechoslovakia to deliver a lecture on Kafka for a symposium. It
seems the authorities at the time did not like what he had to say or his
politics. When he tried to return to France, he was stopped at the border and
border guards, while they were "searching" his luggage, planted cocaine in it (they
later copped to this). He was immediately arrested and placed in a cell for
the night. During the evening, one of the guards said to him, when he
complained about something, "Try to think of this as a Kafkaesque experience."

Cute, huh?

All the best,

--John

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Received on Sun Oct 5 07:16:31 2003