Tedious Rooms of Hunger Artists
How Kafka, Pessoa, and The Beatles deal with 'nobodiness'
I just rewatched Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary after I found out that it was quietly released on DVD and I no longer needed to subscribe to DisneyPlus.
Well, for what it’s worth, I wrote this essay in 2021 (when Get Back originally came out) for a Continental Literature class and remembered there being some gems in it.
I’m artificial.
—Bernardo Soares / Fernando Pessoa
All act naturally then.
—John Lennon
The celebrity artist of the twentieth century is often an isolated person, who either out of necessity to their craft, or by nature of becoming too popular to walk around on the streets as they normally would, changes into a living parody of themselves, an avatar. In this essay, I will explore three main consequences of making art in the modern era: the alter-ego / heteronyms, the cage, and the spectacle. I will compare Franz Kafka’s narrator in “A Hunger Artist” (1922), Bernardo Soares who is the fictional narrator of Fernando Pessoa’s the Book of Disquietude (1929), and The Beatles as they are portrayed in Peter Jackson’s new documentary Get Back (2021).
Heteronyms, or alter-egos, are often used by artists as a way to protect themselves from taking direct criticism or responsibility for their works. It is also helpful during the creative process to take on a persona, especially for authors and musicians. Pessoa, for example, under his own name, presents the Book of Disquietude in a preface, before presenting the works of his heteronym Bernardo Soares, indicating an authorial and artistic distance from his heteronyms. By taking his heteronyms or semi-heteronyms seriously — as real entities who live their own lives and can even die (note: in Pessoa’s case he may have actually had a multiple personality order), Fernando Pessoa is no longer merely a writer, he is an artist manager and curator. Kafka in the same way plays essentially the same three functions: a manager role ‘holding the torch’ to the cage of his narrator in an estranged fair ground, an artist as author role, and an artist as character. In the Beatles’ Get Back, in response to the omnipresent cameras and microphones recording their every conversation, the members of the band seem to be exaggerated hyper-self-aware versions of themselves. They are constantly doing things to protect themselves from overexposure to the public eye, such as make jokes or nicknames for each other, turn up their guitars to hide what they are saying, or speaking in private, but even the private conversations are often captured by hidden microphones. Even their songs are filled with fictional characters with lavish literary names—often, their songs are not from the perspective of who is singing. They are essentially using Pessoa’s technique of making a heteronym, and the most obvious example is the Beatles’ band name itself, in this context they are ‘literary cartoon’ versions of an idea of a cohesive group which acts as a vehicle to carry symbolism, artistic expressions, and metonymic ideologies and they are often misconstrued because of the confusing nature of deciphering what is real and what is fiction. Which is in part, why they must isolate themselves, for their own physical, or mental safety.
The mise-en-abyme present in the Book of Disquietude divides and mirrors the writer’s isolation with that of his heteronyms, and the writer functions as a ‘space provider’ for his created entities, which have various levels of happiness, depth, angst, and solitude — none seem to have agency. Compare the places in which the storytellers reside in Pessoa’s, Kafka’s and the Beatles’ works. In Pessoa, we are shown a room on the fourth floor which represents art, residing on Rua Dos Douradores, which represents life. Pessoa’s Soares finds comfort in old furniture and novelty items. “He explained that with this kind of an interior he could ‘maintain the dignity of tedium’. In rooms decorated in the modern style, tedium becomes a discomfort, a physical distress” (Pessoa 32). In other words, he attempts to distract himself from tedium through the temporally displaced décor. Kafka’s hunger artist, on the other hand, is in his cage, in an unidentified, carnival-esque location for comparison:
. . . he sat there pallid in black tights, with his ribs sticking out so prominently, not even on a seat but down among straw on the ground. . .withdrawing deep into himself, paying no attention to anyone or anything, not even to the all-important striking of the clock that was the only piece of furniture in his cage (Kafka 1).
In the Beatles Get Back, the musicians are in a large empty TV stage called Twickenham Studios, where they were doing rehearsals for a concert scheduled to happen in three weeks’ time. However, due to poor sound quality, the overly spacious ceilings, and walls, and tensions in the band with George Harrison not being taken seriously as a songwriter, they decide to move to a smaller location at Apple studios, which is a more intimate and smaller room with white walls, sound padding, and a window for the control room.
The striking element about these three locations is that they set up an immense level of tension between the maximalist tendencies of modernism and minimalism. Pessoa’s Soares needs to have a “semblance of luxury” (Pessoa 32) in his room to distract himself, or perhaps to metamorphosize feelings of self-disgust, but in the end, the feelings come anyway, and Soares cannot break free from this room or from the imagined landscapes within which Pessoa allots him. Kafka’s hunger artist is quite literally in a cage, with only straw and a clock as furniture. He remains however, somewhat dignified (at least during his popularity) in his role as a public spectacle. The Beatles’ need to control their sound so that it can be captured with a certain standard of quality is strangely akin to both Pessoa and Kafka’s emphasis on place in their story telling. In fact, despite personal struggles between George Harrison and the rest of the band, their relationship seemed to drastically improve with the change of studios, mirroring the improvement of sound quality. In all these artists, the ‘master’ Pessoa, Kafka, and producer George Martin, are well aware of the public fascination of the hunger artist for they are hunger artists themselves. Kafka’s artist sticks his arm out the cage, allowing people to feel how thin he is. Pessoa does the same with Soares. The Beatles do this with their albums and live performances, interviews, photographers, and visiting friends, but they always seem to be in character of a ‘Beatle’. Perhaps heteronyms are ways to stick the finger out of the isolated cage.
(Painting by author)
The concept of a room and cage is a paradox because they bring comfort to an introverted artist, yet they cause a lifetime of imprisonment and limitations. In Pessoa, comfort is a soft armchair, in Kafka it is the straw on the floor. For the Beatles it is tea, biscuits, cigarettes, pillows, and chairs to sit in while they rehearse. Pessoa’s Soares is perhaps an embodiment of this great paradox; the immense anxiety felt when going out for a simple rendezvous at a café. In this passage he finds the company of others desirable yet impossible for him, “Solitude devastates me; company oppresses me. The presence of another person derails my thoughts. . .” (Pessoa 90). Part of the paradox too resides in the fact that he is disclosing this information in such a vulnerable and public medium — writing. It is possible Pessoa intentionally left this book in a big trunk in his house to be found, because a part of him wanted to be discovered, seen, and loved just as Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr decided to allow (after 50 years) Peter Jackson to make the documentary out of 60 hours of unpublished film and 150 hours of audio. There is something irresistible to the artist to go out again and again despite the cycle of anxiety and catharsis. Even if the concert, story, or conversation is received positively, Soares says it well, “. . .the dreaded encounter is utterly insignificant, justifying none of my anxiety, but the next time is no different: I never learn to learn” (Pessoa 91). The hunger artist finds comfort in his cage, all the while, longs to be somewhere else, to have a full meal, to feel satisfied with being ‘normal.’ This is of course impossible. Kafka shows this convincingly, when at the end of a fast, the hunger artist struggles to reenter society:
. . . he was comfortable sitting in the straw, and now he was supposed to lift himself to his full height and go down to a meal the very thought of which gave him a nausea that only the presence of the ladies kept him from betraying, and even that with an effort. (Kafka 2)
In this scene, Kafka’s narrator explains how the hunger artist wishes he could fast for longer than forty days, but the audience grows tired of him and loses interest. The pain and anxiety of getting out of the mental state of ‘creation’ for an artist who feels a praxis so viscerally, is shown with a sense of immanent dread — being lifted and brought out of the cage as a type of martyr:
The artist now submitted completely; his head lolled on his breast as if it had landed there by chance; his body was hollowed out; his legs in a spasm of self-preservation clung close to each other at the knees, yet scraped on the ground as if it were not really solid ground, as if they were only trying to find solid ground. (Kafka 2)
The space around him as he reenters ‘reality’ is nearly invisible, like an unrendered videogame. This recalls the line uttered by Soares, who perhaps feels more real than Pessoa himself at times, “There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street” (Pessoa 222). According to these works, the sense of reality is anchored by the long-duré of tedium, hunger, and disgust, without it the artist loses a sense of footing, and the nausea at the mere thought of being a standard member of society is too much to bear.
In Get Back, the long-duré, tedium, and disgust of the film allows the viewer to ‘hang out’ with the Beatles and see the complicated relationships between them and between the world surrounding them. It is a microcosm of interactions and reactions. The viewer begins to like and dislike the members of the band as the members of the band like and dislike themselves (or perhaps the roles they are playing). Tedium and hunger simultaneously drive these artists to creation and despair as they are seen both having fun and resenting each other. Pessoa in this line, begins a thought and cuts it off — perhaps because he is in the process of both disdain and withdrawal and realized mid-sentence he is content with nothing, “Only Tedium, which is a withdrawal, and Art, which is a disdain, gild with a semblance of contentment our .....” (Pessoa 107). The thought is left unfinished, and the reader is left to wonder what he wanted to say. Reading Pessoa feels like the experience of hunger pangs which loop in slightly different places each time and emphasizes strong beginnings and endings.
In the introduction written by Robert Zenith of the Book of Disquietude, we learn that Pessoa had seemingly endless amounts of ideas for books and stories, and constantly wrote fragments on newspapers and advertisements (Pessoa 10). To be out in public and writing is similar to how people are on their phones in the twenty-first century. But the addiction to keep writing and to keep ‘decorating’ the interiority of ones’ life is perhaps a means of not allowing real life to feel too materialized — to live among ideas and fragments of other states of mind. Julian Barnes, the Booker Prize winning English novelist speaks of this eloquently, “. . .perhaps the sweetest moment in writing is the arrival of that idea for a book which never has to be written, which is never sullied with a definite shape, which never needs be exposed to a less loving gaze than that of its author” (Barnes 116). In this way, writing is merely a means to bring the writer room or cage with the artist wherever they go, so that with only a sheet of paper, guitar, and writing apparatus one does not have to escape the imaginative realm for a Real world. However, there are side-effects to the addiction of accessing this state, and Kafka’s metaphor of self-inflicted hunger is an all too real one. Because if taken too extreme one can starve. In the book, Hunger on the Stage by Angel-Perez, the problematic metaphor of food-as-a-trope in the context of an Elizabethan drama is useful here:
This ambiguity first pertains to the stomach and what is hidden within it. The body, common vehicle of both hunger and sexual desire, is presented as an interface where dietary and erotic patterns commingle. The ambiguity of the body also rests on its ability to represent the mental processes of desire and hunger as physical phenomena. In terms of dramaturgy, hunger and desire therefore raise the central question of the link between mind and body: whereas they resist representation as psychological phenomena, their bodily counterparts invite spectacular, and even obscene treatments on stage. (Angel-Perez 18)
Interesting to note the relation between not only hunger and art, but hunger and sex. According to Robert Zenith, Pessoa was largely abstinent from sexual intercourse, a decision which was, “by his own account a conscious choice, which he apparently sought to justify in The Book of Disquietude, with passages insisting on the impossibility of possessing another body, on the superiority of love in two dimensions” (Pessoa 15). The comparison of art or writing as an act of lovemaking has been notably written about by Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text where the text must desire its reader. Perhaps, in devotion to his art, Pessoa, like the hunger artist chose to be celibate since it seemed he could not ‘turn off’ his god-like status as a writer/playwright of the subconscious and imagination. What is the desire to be an artist if not to be oneself?
When the Beatles and their partners went to India in February 1968, they brought along with them some cameras and filmed their experience. In Get Back there is an interesting scene where they discuss the film and the nature of travelling and learning of how to be-oneself:
PAUL. Linda was saying, sitting up on his roof and looking at that view, didn’t you ever really feel like going out in it?
GEORGE. Well, we were out in it, weren’t we?
PAUL. Yeah, but I mean the bit in the villages and stuff.
PAUL. It’s that thing you know, we probably sort of should have. . .
JOHN. Been ourselves.
PAUL. A lot more, yeah.
GEORGE. That is the biggest joke, to be yourselves. Cause that was the purpose of going there to try and find who yourself really is.
JOHN. Yes. We found out, didn’t we?
GEORGE. And if you were really yourself, you wouldn’t be any of who we are now.
JOHN. All act naturally then.
(Get Back)
This dialogue between the members of the Beatles reveals an interesting aspect to the hunger artist: even in a spiritual place which is far from their home, the alter-ego remains at work and the concept of being oneself is perhaps, as George Harrison said it, a big joke. The Beatles struggled with integrating into public life at the height of their careers because of fans and mobs. Harrison was being charged for assaulting a photographer in France—people often waited for them to land at airports, to leave clubs, and they had to run to their cabs. But there was also a spiritual and metaphysical running. “Symbolism and the Alienation of the Artist in A Hunger Artist” by Abu-Snoubar and Tamador Khalaf, describes how this plays out on a larger dichotomy, “One has to comprehend the fact that the act of physical separation executed by the hunger artist with his spectator goes on to actively mirror the essence of the spiritual segregation of the public will and the artistic ego of the individual” (Abu-Snoubar, Tamador Khalaf 160). When the spiritual segregation of the public will mirrors the artistic ego, the artist’s aesthetic choices are largely determined by how they choose to address the tension between public expectations and self-exploration.
In the 2021 stage adaptation of Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist” starring actor Larry Cedar, the third person narrative is transformed into the first person. A subtle shift which adds a whole new dimension to the artist as an isolated spectacle. “Am I shut in, or is the world shut out, ah, the hunger artist knows” (Cedar 8:10). Larry Cedar has notably performed Kafka’s “the Burrow” (2020) which accents the isolation that an artist consciously prepares as a defense to the outside world, and yet, paradoxically he shows exactly how his traps, and defense mechanisms work to the reader or audience. In the case of “the Burrow” the act of showcasing the performance on Zoom via a YouTube video to an audience from all over the world, created an exciting new possibility of entry-points into ‘the burrow of the text’ or the burrow of the artist’s mind, which among these new technological windows, is only beginning to be fully explored by artists. Get Back is a good example of a window into the burrow of the musician’s studio. The cage or room is now being filmed and broadcast to a wider public more than ever before. According to Noorbakhsh Hooti, in The Profound Sense of Dissatisfaction Kafka’s hunger artist is someone anticipating dying in their cage, unable to have an appetite because nothing else outside of the cage appeals to them (Hooti et al. 56). And thus, their perception is altered by their very ideals of how art should be performed and consumed. Thinking about the room and cage in the expansion of the internet and streaming platforms complicates the dynamics between artist, viewer, and food.
Modernity, in the early twentieth century, brought upon artists and people in general to experience heightened feelings of anxiety, nostalgia, melancholia, and disgust. These sensations were by no means completely new as Bruno Latour famously explains in his book, We Have Never Been Modern. But based on the readings of Kafka, Proust, Joyce, Pessoa, and several others of the era, we are shown that while many of the situations presented in these rich works are universal and temporally dislocated from any ‘real’ world moment, there is something fundamentally of-era in their presence and style. With the shifting in the heart of the twentieth century artist — we notice a strong level of tension between dualities of comfort/discomfort, decadence/hunger, sensory input/spiritual output (or lack thereof), machine/human, and fragment/form. For example, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the proliferation of trains affected notions of time and distance, making it significantly easier to tour Europe, allowing the bourgeois to travel for pleasure. How writers respond to these inventions varies. According to Julian Barnes, Gustave Flaubert hardly writes about trains at all. Pessoa writes, “I don’t need fast cars or express trains to feel the delight and terror of speed. All I require is a tram and my gift for abstraction, which I’ve developed to an astonishing degree” (Pessoa 75). Perhaps this would be like Paul McCartney singing about the 4-track tape machine, the Struder J37 they used to record Sgt. Pepper’s. But with these capabilities of speed, and access to new technologies such as a typewriter, or multi-tracking recording equipment the artist becomes more at odds with modernity, and in many cases feel overwhelmed by the progress, perhaps because of the timeless nature of the dream state in which artists are comfortable in. In fact, in the Beatles documentary, they mention several times that the main reason of the Get Back sessions, is to ‘get back’ to a simpler time where the live performance was the record, even though they still contradict themselves and use overdubs on the actual record and even upgrade to an 8-track tape machine. The Beatles are a walking contradiction, embodiments of the effects of modernity, progress, as well as hunger artists, and choose to view the world as a stage and a dream, perhaps out of pure necessity.
The more the Real becomes at odds with our ‘natural’ dreamscapes, the disgust towards our environments grow. This is at the heart of ‘tédio’ which at its Latin root taedium means disgust (Esgalhado 135). How tedium and disgust (in relation to the artist) are represented mainly through ‘style’ is of important interest. Style is part visible and part invisible, it is both presence and absence, and is in my opinion what draws people in to witness a hunger artist. Julian Barnes writes in his work Flaubert’s Parrot, “Style is a function of theme. Style is not imposed on subject-matter but arises from it. Style is truth to thought. The correct word, the true phrase, the perfect sentence are always ‘out there’ somewhere; the writer’s task is to locate them by whatever means he can” (Barnes 88). Based on the notion that style is being true to thought, one could argue that Kafka, Pessoa, and the Beatles’ profound truth lies at showing the vulnerability of appearing mad because of the grotesque nature of their imaginative landscapes, and unhinged mise-en-scène which highlights an elastic sense of discomfort, tedium, and self-destructive tendencies. What becomes apparent however, is not the uniqueness or importance of their biographies — the absent father (in the Beatles case the recent death of Brain Epstein in 1967) or the strange over-protective mother (the unnecessarily controversial presence of Yoko Ono) — but in the universal, yet rare sensitivity that all these artists have in capturing their tedious meditations. It is often a seven-day work week for the hunger artist. Kafka’s narrator states rather brashly, that there is nothing easier than being a hunger artist but nothing could be more difficult than living in the real world for them.
In the end, the subjectivity of the artist’s choice in how they work and represent themselves is often a result of the public’s interpretation of the artist’s work ethic and personality, which may in turn be simply a reflection on the public’s vanity and not the artist themselves. If for example, the public rewarded the avant-garde, experimental music, and the use of psychedelics in the name of art instead of criminalizing them, the Beatles would have most likely created entirely different music in 1969. George Harrison differs from Kafka’s hunger artist who never feels content leaving the cage, Harrison comments on the magical place they visited in Rishikesh, India, “I wouldn’t mind having two months out of every four months in a place like that though” (Get Back). Even if they traveled as ‘inauthentic’ pop stars, there is something truthful in the mere attempt to find out who they were, to leave the studio. The same for Pessoa in his fourth-floor apartment room, and Kafka’s cage—what happens after that is personal, and sadly in the idolization of popular artists, culture did not allow them to do anything without being in the context of ‘being in a band’ or ‘being a writer’. I am fascinated by this contradictory phrase by Soares, “Artificiality is the best way to enjoy what’s natural. Whatever I’ve enjoyed in these vast fields I’ve enjoyed because I don’t live here” (Pessoa 93). Is this Pessoa describing that he does not live in Soares’ headspace, or is this Soares saying that he does not live in the Real world? What is natural? Where is the here he speaks of? Pessoa authenticates the artificial and makes his readers believe in his heteronyms as if they were more real than himself, just as Kafka’s empty stomach is more grotesquely visceral than Kafka himself just as the Beatles are symbolically showing viewers and listeners truth in the struggle of the hunger artist in modern times.
Works Cited
Abu-Snoubar, Tamador Khalaf. “Symbolism and the Alienation of the Artist in A Hunger Artist.” Forum for World Literature Studies, vol. 12, no. 1, Wuhan Guoyang Union Culture & Education Company, 2020, p. 158–.
Angel-Perez, Elisabeth, and Alexandra Poulain. Hunger on the Stage. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008.
Barnes, Julian. Flaubert’s Parrot. First Vintage International. New York, 1990.
Cedar, Larry. Theater Adaptation of “A Hunger Artist” by Franz Kafka. Porters of Hellgate, Los Angeles, 2021.
Eurico Carvalho. “The End Of The Art, The Tedium And Misery Of Everyday Life: Guy Debord’s Work: An Essential Place From The Critical Point Of View Of Our Times.” Aufklärung (João Pessoa, Paraíba, Brazil) 1.1 (2014): 191–202. Web.
Get Back. Directed by Peter Jackson. Performance by the Beatles. Disney Plus, 2021.
Hooti, Noorbakhsh, and Mohammad R. M. Borna. "The Profound Sense of Dissatisfaction: A Comparative Study of Franz Kafka's "A Hunger Artist" and Maulana Jalalu-d'-Din Muhammad i Rumi's "A Man of Baghdad"." Advances in Language and Literary Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, 2014, pp. 53-57. ProQuest, https://www.proquest.com/scholarly- journals/profound-sense-dissatisfaction-comparative-study/docview/1895976796/se- 2?accountid=10771.
Kafka, Franz. “A Hunger Artist” from Ein Hungerkünstler. Verlag Die Schmiede, Germany, 1924. Print.
Pessoa, Fernando. The Book of Disquietude. Edited and translated by Richard Zenith. Penguin Classics, USA, 2001.
Zenith, R. (1991a). About Bernardo Soares and The Book of Disquietude. Translation. XXV. 19-20.
Zenith, R. (1991b). Introduction. In R. Zenith (Ed.), The Book of Disquietude (pp. xii- xvii). Manchester Carcanet Press Limited.