The Politics and Aesthetics of

Hunger and Disgust

This study examines how hunger narratives and performances contribute

to a reconsideration of neglected or prohibited domains of thinking
which only a full confrontation with the body’s heterogeneity and plas­
ticity can reveal. From literary motif or psychosomatic symptom to revo­
lutionary gesture or existential malady, the double crux of hunger and
disgust is a powerful force that can deine the experience of embodiment.
Kafka’s fable of the “Hunger Artist” offers a matrix for the fast, while
its surprising last­page revelation introduces disgust as a correlative of
abstinence, conscious or otherwise. Grounded in Kristeva’s theory of ab­
jection, the igure of the fraught body lurking at the heart of the negative
grotesque gathers precision throughout this study, where it is employed
in a widening series of contexts: suicide through overeating, starvation
as self­performance or political resistance, the teratological versus the to­
talitarian, the anorexic harbouring of death. In the process, writers and
artists as diverse as Herman Melville, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Christina
Rossetti, George Orwell, Knut Hamsun, J.M. Coetzee, Cindy Sherman,
Pieter Breughel, Marina Abramovic, David Nebreda, Paul McCarthy,
and others are brought into the discussion. By looking at the different
acts of visceral, affective, and ideological resistance performed by the
starving body, this book intensiies the relationship between hunger and
disgust studies while offering insight into the modalities of the “dark
grotesque” which inform the aesthetics and politics of hunger. It will be
of value to anyone interested in the culture, politics, and subjectivity of
embodiment, and scholars working within the ields of disgust studies,
food studies, literary studies, cultural theory, and media studies.

Michel Delville is Professor in the Department of Modern Languages

and Literatures at the University of Liège, Belgium.

Andrew Norris is Senior Lecturer at the Université Libre de Bruxelles,

Belgium.
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74 The Politics and Aesthetics of Hunger and Disgust

Perspectives on the Dark Grotesque
Michel Delville and Andrew Norris
The Politics and Aesthetics
of Hunger and Disgust
Perspectives on the Dark Grotesque

Michel Delville and

Andrew Norris
First published 2017
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Contents

Introduction: Studying Hunger 1

1 Activists of the Belly: Starving Clerks and

Schizo­Strollers 21

2 The Spectacle of Starvation 53

3 The Materiology of Disgust 73

4 The Violence of Self­Starvation 97

5 The Anti­Capitalist Reading of Anorexia:

Self­Starvation as Resistance 119

6 Hunger and Consumer Capitalism 173

Epilogue: Empathising with the Disembodied 209

Works Cited 227

Index 233
Introduction
Studying Hunger

The growing success of food studies and their various “gastrosophical”

extensions over the last quarter century is bound up with a theory of
consciousness which falls halfway between knowing and tasting; a the­
ory which encompasses those moments when food crosses over into
discourse and thus complicates the relation between body and world.
Recent examinations of the culture of consumption in different periods
of literary history have interrogated the connections between incorpora­
tion and introjection while redeining orality as the space where speech
and food meet and interact.1 Whether they are carried out within the
realm of cultural studies, anthropology, or literary criticism, such proj­
ects are aimed at a general, transdisciplinary poetics of the sense of taste;
they attempt to tease out a particular relation to consciousness, a rela­
tion characterised by a desire not simply to report on sensory experience,
but also to render it intelligible to the reader.
Even though gastrosophy and food studies are primarily (and under­
standably) interested in food rather than in the refusal of food, they
remain relevant to a study of hunger and starvation in that they relect a
determination to get to the bottom of the aesthetic, cultural and political
questions raised by the need or desire to be fed. As will become clear in
the following chapters, however, the aim of this book is less to contri­
bute to an examination of the dark or “negative” side of food studies
(a ield of study which some disciplinary crazed academics might elect to
coin “hunger studies”) than to examine the starving self as an unstable
and incomplete being, hesitating between identiication and alienation,
incorporation and rejection, nature and culture, intimacy and extimacy,
pleasure and disgust. This in turn will lead to a fuller apprehension of
the political status and agency of this starving subject.
The emphasis on embodiment and the dialectics of starvation and dis­
gust orients this study towards recent developments in food studies and
philosophical and psychoanalytical theories of hunger. While this book
can be placed alongside other studies of hunger, it constitutes both a
response to and an extension of Maud Ellmann’s brief but foundational
investigation of the relationships between abstinence and the production
2 Introduction
of writing in The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing and Imprisonment
(1993). Since then, several monographs and collective works have ap­
peared that explore the political and aesthetic meanings of writing and
hunger from a wide range of literary and non­literary perspectives.
These include Leslie Heywood’s Dedicated to Hunger: The Anorexic
Aesthetic in Modern Culture (1996) and Isabelle Meuret’s Writing Size
Zero: Figuring Anorexia in Contemporary World Literatures (2007),
both of which, however, pursue different goals from ours in that they
focus primarily on the aesthetics of anorexia and deal almost exclusively
with literary texts. 2 The Politics and Aesthetics of Hunger and Disgust
shares Ellmann’s interest in hunger as an instrument of social protest
and her desire to offer a political reading of the connections between
food denial and writing (one thinks, for example, of the ingenious par­
allels she draws between the Irish Famine and Bram Stoker’s Dracula,
in which “the vampire – like the empire – feeds upon the blood of other
nations” (Ellmann 11), or between Bobby Sands’s hunger strike and
the ictional starvation enacted by the heroine of Samuel Richardson’s
Clarissa). Considering Primo Levi’s accounts of life in the Nazi con­
centration camps, Ellmann writes that “the mouths that lick their lips
and move their jaws are also squirming with unspoken sentences, and
it is impossible to say which is the greater agony: to be unfed or to be
unheard” (112). Ellmann’s approach to the mouth which eats and the
mouth which speaks suggests that any concrete or symbolic confronta­
tion with edible matter (or the lack thereof) is necessarily an encounter
with the body itself in its relation to its immediate concrete and cultural
environment. This book has afinities with some of Ellmann’s attempts
to delineate a general poetics of hunger that serves to raise questions
about authority and political representation. We are however less com­
mitted than Ellmann to following “the adventures of [self­starvation’s]
metaphors” (15) and more concerned with relocating the experience of
hunger in the body and embodiment, there where symptoms coalesce
around food and its absence and where the symbolic struggles to emerge
from material phenomena of lived experience through a testing of
the very possibility of metaphor. As the following chapters will show,
the description, analysis, or staging of alimentation per se engenders
forms of philosophical negotiation which threaten to fall outside dis­
cursive and analytical thinking and action. This concern is relected in
this book’s two­fold methodology, which intensiies the relationship
between hunger and disgust studies while offering insight into the mo­
dalities of the “dark grotesque” which inform the aesthetics and poli­
tics of hunger. By looking at the different acts of visceral, affective and
ideological resistance performed by the starving body, we thus hope to
open further avenues of research into areas which exceed the dominant
paradigms of food and hunger studies, whether of the aesthetic or the
cultural/sociological variety.
 Introduction 3
The Fat and the Skinny: Inappetence and Resistance
Our decision to focus on late nineteenth century and twentieth century
artists is perhaps best understood in the light of Lucien Dällenbach’s
thesis that the birth of modernism relects “la lute viscérale que se livrent
depuis la nuit des temps les Gras et les Maigres” (Dällenbach 115) [the
visceral ight which has opposed the fat and the skinny since the begin­
ning of time]. For Dällenbach, “on pouvait légitimement s’attendre que
les Modernes se rangent du côté de la minceur … culte bourgeois du
copieux, science inégalée des apprêts: cela déjà aurait sufi à la leur faire
prendre en grippe” (115) [“one could legitimately expect the Moderns to
side with thinness … the bourgeois cult of the copious, the unequaled
science of table dressing: this was already enough to make them take a
dislike to it”]. In addressing the relationships between the dynamics of
the material signiier and the consumption of material goods, Dällen­
bach stresses an essential aspect of hunger aesthetics and politics, namely
the antagonism between the starving artist and the replete bourgeoisie
which is central to several of the key narratives analysed in this book.
This antagonism emerges most markedly perhaps through the insistence
of certain tropes and character­types such as the hungry clerk and the
starving writer, two igures which haunt the history of hunger narratives
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That our corpus
should be based mainly on Western culture – whether of the canonical
or the marginal variety – should come as no surprise since the works we
set out to discuss relect different forms of resistance to speciic products
of Western ideology. These include the myth of the closed, self­contained
body, the pressures of capitalist consumption, the relegation of the prox­
imal senses to the margins of speculative thought, as well as the igure
of the starving artist itself which, as Ellmann has argued, originates in
speciic historical circumstances such as the decline of patronage and the
birth of the self­employed writer (26).
Dällenbach suggests that the conjunction of words and foodstuffs
provides us with a useful tool for a reappraisal of modern (though not
speciically “Modernist” in the Anglo­Saxon sense) notions of the body
and subjectivity. This claim paves the way for a typology of the “literary
stomach” which fails to transcend the simple dichotomy of the “fat” and
the “skinny”, or indeed that of the “pre­moderns” and the “moderns”.
These oppositions inevitably suggest others, generating new interpreta­
tive possibilities for the analysis of body and text. Here are some of
the binary oppositions encountered most frequently in nineteenth­ and
twentieth­century hunger art:

closed body open/uninished body

integration marginality
voracity inappetence
4 Introduction
joviality melancholy
desire disgust
normalcy monstrosity
logorrhea silence

This book explores these dichotomies in the context of speciic texts

and performances that investigate the relationship between diet and dis­
course. As the mouth that refuses to eat becomes the mouth that refuses
to speak, the fraught body of the starving or fasting artist challenges
traditional dichotomies between signiier and signiied, self and world,
production and consumption, mind and matter. The visceral, as one ver­
sion of what, in deference to Lacan, we might call the Real of the body, is
notoriously dificult to represent; it almost invariably engenders a light
into iguration – simile, analogy, metaphor, indeed the entire parapher­
nalia of the “as if” characteristic of languages, whether visual or writ­
ten/spoken. Our attempts to invoke the fraught body are motivated by
a desire to focus on the visceral of the starving subject long enough to
weigh and calibrate its lair for generating some of the founding motifs
of subjectivity. One of the most essential of these is the distinction be­
tween what is inside and what is outside the self.

Fraught Bodies: The Materiology of Hunger and Disgust

Among the binaries cited above, the opposition between the closed and
the open body looms large in our study of hunger in the arts and soci­
ety. The fact of being caught between openness and closure, of having
to be both open and closed (“pinned and wriggling” (Eliot 15) in the
Prufrockian idiom of helpless exposure) can be theorised in different
ways: subjectivity as a divided sense of both being and having the body;
the social dilemmas revolving around intimacy and privacy, divulging
and concealing, conforming to or transgressing the founding taboos of
cannibalism and incest; the mechanisms of repression and the constant
threat of their failure, leading to a return of the repressed; or more liter­
ally, the idea of being physically or psychologically trapped. All of these
ind expression in a repertoire of motifs congregating around food and
its consumption or non­consumption. While these motifs might sound
like mere metaphors (e.g. vomiting as a return of the repressed), the ma­
teriality of food as an absolute requirement of bodily survival (of all
the senses, taste is the only one which is associated with considerations
of survival) constitutes a Real at the heart of the metaphorical around
which the subjective narratives and performances of hunger and disgust
are organised and played out. Hunger and disgust, as psychosomatic
givens of the human condition, crystallise the dialectics of open and
closed, full and empty, active and passive which deine that condition,
and which achieve expression in such distinct areas as fasting, anorexia,
 Introduction 5
inappetence, disgust or asceticism. In the following chapters, Paul
McCarthy’s food performances, Primo Levi’s account of starvation and
atrocity in the Nazi death camps, Arthur Rimbaud’s poem “Damned
Cherub”, J. K. Huysmans’s Against the Grain, Franz Werfel’s “Jesus and
the Carrion Path” and Marco Ferreri’s The Grande Bouffe provide some
of the key contexts for our discussions of these dialectics. These and
other works and processes will allow us to approach hunger and dis­
gust as sensations that raise questions about and offer insights into such
themes as identity, desire, agency, political expression and mental illness.
From Aurel Kolnai’s seminal 1929 essay to the recent efforts of Winfried
Menninghaus, William Miller and Carolyn Korsmeyer, disgust theorists
have been struggling with the ambivalent meanings of “disgust” as an
emotional, physical and moral category. Kolnai identiies disgust as a
“‘defence reaction’” (Kolnai 30) against speciic elicitors such as putre­
faction, body secretions, the viscous, crawling animals, spoiled food, the
inside of the body, “exaggerated fertility” (61) and bodily deformation.
While this deinition of disgust as a “gatekeeper emotion” representing
one of the “modes of aversion alongside dislike, hate, sorrow” (30) is
largely shared by experimental psychologists and clinical psychiatrists
such as Paul Rozin and Susan B. Miller, 3 Kolnai also acknowledges the
possibility that “the physiological can be said somehow to include the
moral sphere” (29) and insists upon the role played by disgust “in moral
rejection and in our recognition of the unethical” (81). Korsmeyer and
Barry Smith describe disgust as

a powerful, visceral emotion … rooted so deeply in bodily response

that some theorists have even hesitated to classify it as an emotion in
the fullest sense, considering it more akin to involuntary reactions
such as nausea retching, and the startle recoil.
(Korsmeyer and Smith 1)

For William Miller – who devotes one chapter of his study, The Anatomy
of Disgust, to “the moral life of disgust” (W. Miller 179) – such resis­
tance is due to the fact that “disgust looks too much like a purely instinc­
tual drive, too much of the body and not enough of the soul, more like
thirst, lust, or even pain than like envy, jealousy, love, anger, fear, regret,
guilt, sorrow, grief, or shame” (7).
While subscribing to Korsmeyer’s recognition of the ontological
in­betweenness of disgust, poised between “affective appraisals” and
“embodied judgments” (Korsmeyer 2011: 27), this book concentrates
more speciically on how disgust functions as a mediating agent between
involuntary and self­inlicted starvation. Harbouring disgust as a con­
stant possibility, when not a necessary protection against the threat of
pollution and contamination, the body must nevertheless feed and be
fed. The fat builds or the body fades through inanition, the physical
6 Introduction
fate of the subject is lived as an absurd and frightening psychodrama
turning around the possibility of eviction from the site where the body
may be opened and closed to satisfaction. A multitude of confusions
are possible at the psychosomatic level, confronting the act of feeding
with its contrary impulse. In response to such crises the subject can at­
tempt to impose itself consciously or unconsciously, staking its conti­
nued status as subject on the success or failure of its intervention. Such
risky assertions of subjective agency are often seen as despairing man­
ifestations of mental illness (see our discussions of Deleuze and of the
aesthetics of starvation and schizophrenia in Chapters 3 and 5), though
it would perhaps be more just to think of them as acts of protest of one
form or another; a possibility that will be examined in this study in
relation to Franz Kafka, Georges Duhamel, Herman Melville, William
Shakespeare, Knut Hamsun, J. K. Huysmans, Samuel Beckett, David
Nebreda, the Irish Republican hunger strikers and the discursive con­
structions surrounding anorexia nervosa.
Similarly, subjects may be victimised at the level of the clamant body
by the authoritarian machinations of a state, by socio­economic forces,
beliefs, taboos, ideologies and by other perverse or megalomaniacal sub­
jects themselves struggling with the issures opened by hunger and dis­
gust. The body is fraught in fact by everything it isn’t, irst and foremost
by the subjectivity which inhabits it, which it envelops and expresses in
the form of symptoms, and with which it is forced to coexist. As exti­
mate phenomena, subjective but also transcending subjectivity, hunger
and disgust offer analytical insights into this fraughtness, conceived as
a tension between openness and closure and a fearful loss of the distinc­
tion between inside and outside. The ambivalence of skin, conceived as
the barrier organ that is unit for purpose, sealing up the body while
sensitizing it to the world outside, is a theme we will address at several
points in our expositions.
The impact of starvation on bodily experience can be studied in the
context of a series of overlapping dichotomies which would seem to con­
stitute its structure: subject and object, spiritual and physical, conscious
and unconscious, willed and accidental, hollow and illed, starved and
stuffed are just some of the oppositions which contribute to our sense
of who and what we are. Studying hunger and disgust requires special
attention not only to the workings of human consciousness but also to
the organic circuitry beneath our skin. Within the frame of reference de­
veloped in this book, embodiment is conceived as an opening that needs
to be closed, or a closure that needs to be opened. Hunger and disgust
represent and enact this tension. The theoretical and practical consider­
ations of the open, visceral body explored in this study imply a radical
departure from the traditional hierarchy of the senses which constitutes
one of the epistemological foundations of philosophy, literary criticism
and, more generally, Western civilisation.
 Introduction 7
The Marginalization of the Stomach
Western culture has not treated the senses equally. Given philosophy’s
marginalisation of the sense of taste (empiricists and sensualists such as
John Locke and Etienne Bonnot de Condillac are no exception insofar as
they preserve an impermeable boundary between feeling and thinking),
it is hardly surprising that the representation of hunger and disgust in the
arts has remained under­theorised until the second half of the twentieth
century. For a long time, the sense of taste was relegated to the lowest
position in the hierarchy, excluded from the realm of aesthetic judge­
ment, and disqualiied by the majority of philosophers for its almost
sinful proximity to the object studied or described. The sense of taste,
it was felt, was just too close physically to that which the subject was
preparing to savour, ingest and digest, or simply reject. Thus, for Kant,
the eating subject is barred from any real knowledge of things comestible
because such knowledge belongs to the realm of the private and the sub­
jective and thus cannot lay claim to any universal validity. All our taste
buds can do is to convey fugitive impressions and sensations that are too
intimate and private to carry any broader, transpersonal signiicance.
Only the “superior” senses of sight and hearing are deemed capable of
transcending particular sensual experience. For Hegel too, the exclusion
of taste from the realm of cognition, meaning and representation is jus­
tiied by the sheer physical proximity of the lower senses to their objects.
The sense of closeness one experiences when tasting food precludes the
critical distance between the subject and the object, the perceiver and
the perceived, which allows objective pronouncements to be attempted,
especially in the context of Hegel’s conception of art as an operation of
the spirit becoming conscious of itself. Hegel thus excludes the sense of
taste from the enjoyment and the apprehension of art, “for smell, taste,
and touch have to do with matter as such and its immediately sensible
qualities” (cited in Korsmeyer 2011: 61; our emphasis). Taste and the
other lower senses, Hegel concludes, “cannot have to do with artistic ob­
jects, which are meant to maintain themselves in their real independence
and allow of no purely sensuous relationship. What is agreeable for these
senses is not the beauty of art” (61). This open disdain of philosophy for
everything connected with the gustatory sense presupposes the belief
that gustative desires and sensations are, to a large extent, circular, in­
transitive and self­directed; that they can only refer us back to what the
food tastes like, not to what it means.
As the recent success story of food studies demonstrates, the mar­
ginalisation of the stomach as an object of philosophical and aesthetic
enquiry has become a research topic in and of itself. It is also of ma­
jor importance for the support it lends to the myth of the closed body
(classical, bourgeois, or otherwise); a body which is impermeable, sealed
off, self­suficient and consistent enough to repel any threat posed by
8 Introduction
the instability of the border separating inside from outside, and to the
forces which traverse it and test its limits.4 This ideal of the closed body
is precisely what the narratives of hunger discussed in this book rise
up against; just as they challenge the traditional hierarchy of the senses
within which smell and taste are subordinated to taste and vision. As
we will see, this is particularly true of the end of the nineteenth century
and the irst half of the twentieth, when the desacralised body began
to be perceived by many as a sort of machine intent only on breaking
down the raw materials fed into and separating them into product and
waste. Francis Ponge, for example, described the body as a meat factory,
an assemblage of “moulins et pressoirs à sang” [mills and presses for
processing the blood]: “tubulures, hauts fourneaux, cuves y voisinent
avec les marteaux­pilons, les cousins de graisse … et tout ça refroidit
lentement à la nuit, à la mort” (Ponge 32) [tubing, blast furnaces, tanks,
cohabit with the sledgehammers and fatty cladding … and all this cool­
ing slowly during the night, after death]. Examples abound of this kind
of exploratory, “materiological” writing of the viscera. One might think,
for instance, of the “Lestrygonians” chapter of Ulysses, which exposes
the body’s peristaltic mechanisms with a meticulous irony, describing
man as an uninished creature dominated by chemical and mechanical
processes beyond his control. Bloom’s phobic excursions into Dublin’s
eating houses constitute a literary landmark of the “dark” hunger gro­
tesques explored below. The implications of this in the context of a study
of hunger are manifold and include a broad range of issues relating to
(self­)knowledge and sense­experience. In the ield of art production, as
some of the most recent developments of hunger art demonstrate (see
our close readings of “stercorous” art in Chapter 3) the avant­garde’s
physiology of taste favours a predominantly abject aesthetic which seeks
to encompass the complexities and intricacies of the uninished body,
which includes not only the consumption but also the digestion and ex­
cretion of edible matter.

The Politics of Starvation and Disgust

Hunger art can refer to extreme situations of poverty and deprivation
or – in the case of self­enforced fasting – to equally extreme explorations
of the Platonic idea that food is an unwelcome distraction for the mind.
Studying the aesthetics of hunger amounts to addressing hunger not only
as a sensation but also as the object of philosophical and political re­
lections and speculations about self­deinition and social identity. The
works discussed in this book regard starvation as the paradoxical site of
fear and hope, suffering and ecstasy, power and emancipation, silence
and self­expression. Some of their salient features include ascetic quests,
starvation tied into forms of socio­political deprivation, igures of abjec­
tion, ennui, neurosis and psychosis, the conjunction of starvation and
 Introduction 9
textual emaciation, as well as various acts of “passive” resistance to au­
thority. Common reactions to such stories and cases alternate between
attraction and repulsion, desire and fear, fascination and disgust.
In different but related ways, the artists and writers gathered in this
volume raise questions of embodied aesthetics and political resistance
that can be tested against the paradigm of the “hunger artist” made
famous by Kafka. Our discussions bring together ideas and perspectives
from different disciplines, including philosophy, psychoanalysis, art his­
tory and literary criticism, while remaining grounded in the speciic cir­
cumstances in which the works emerged. “A Tale from Wall Street”, for
example, the subtitle of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener”, in­
vites us to explore a particular proto­Kafkaesque example of the modern
hunger narrative through a consideration of the socio­economic condi­
tions that prevailed at the time of its composition. While Melville’s story
invites us to puzzle over the irreducible psychology of its eponymous
character, it also presents us with a strangely spectral example of “hun­
ger activism” which in turn echoes a number of precursors in the ield
(Shelley’s alimentary radicalism and Emerson’s transcendentalism come
to mind as key inluences which helped to shape Melville’s iction).
This study considers narratives of hunger as a vast category compris­
ing various art forms and genres alongside factual and scientiic accounts
of (self­)starvation. As the story of Kafka’s Hungerkünstler suggests, the
“art” of hunger, far from being limited to its textual avatars, is inextri­
cably linked with performance. The starving body can only become the
vehicle of art after it has become converted into a spectacle destined to
be consumed by an audience – hence our interest in the visual, theatrical
and cinematic avatars of the hunger artist (dis­)embodied by the likes of
Marina Abramovic, David Nebreda, Marco Ferreri, David Blaine, Luis
Buñuel and Paul McCarthy. For all their diversities, what these artists
have in common is a tendency to explore the abject and the obscene
implications of hunger insofar as they relate to how loss of appetite can
originate in boredom, illness, repression, anger, self­loathing as well as
various disgust­oriented psychopathologies and forms of compulsive
behaviour.
The body opens onto to the world through its senses, intellect and or­
iices, but the subject must ind a way of regulating the low both in and
out. The social effects of global political trends exacerbate the psycho­
somatic confusions. This politicisation of the body leads to imbalances
and irregularities in the vascular economy of the body lived as subjective
need and desire. Hunger and how to appease or resist it is a focal point
for this politicisation and its effects. How the body is lived, how it is
rent and regulated by disgust, how hunger is satisied or not, all of these
issues relect both the synchronic conditions in which the subject must
seek to do more than simply exist (family, community, workplace, envi­
ronment …) and the broader diachronic movements sweeping through
10 Introduction
human societies and civilisations (the rise of the bourgeoisie, fascism,
the globalization of the consumer society, technological revolutions,
productivism versus sustainable development or de­growth …). These
conditions and movements represent the contexts in which the partic­
ular cases discussed in this book are situated and on which they shed
their own particular light. Hunger will thus emerge in the subsequent
chapters as a political crux, a point at which the subject is traversed by
multiple crises – moral, social, libidinal, intellectual, environmental and,
probably sooner than we think, existential.

The Starving Body and the Grotesque

Hunger and disgust manifest themselves at the point of exfoliation
where complexity and contradiction take over from the simplistic binary
of nature and culture. It is at this point also that the intimacy of private
experience opens onto the extimacy of social being and political agency,
where our assumptions of impermeability, the sense that we can control
our outermost borders and move through the world as self­contained
units, vacillates and calls for reform. Bakhtin’s analysis of grotesque re­
alism provides us with a useful starting point for a discussion of what
happens to the open body under the effects of hunger. It also provides us
with a model by which to understand the starving body’s dysfunctional
organic patterns.
On a supericial level, Bakhtin’s approach to the “low” and his
anti­idealistic stance (“the essential principle of the grotesque is degra­
dation, that is, the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, idea, abstract”
[Bakhtin 19]) seems entirely in tune with a general poetics of the body
as an entity consuming and being consumed by the world as well as
by other bodies (personal or public, real or imagined), a process which
neutralises any claim to a unique, self­present or transcendental nature.
“Contrary to modern canons”, Bakhtin’s grotesque body is “not sep­
arated from the rest of the world”, “it is not a closed, completed unit;
it is uninished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits” (26). The
grotesque stresses “those parts of the body that are open to the outside
world, that is, the parts through which the world enters the body or
emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out to meet the
world” (26). Likewise, hunger and disgust partake of the grotesque as
an art in and of the body which challenges cultural myths of the self­
contained embodied subject, as a model which understands the bodily
folds, excrescences and oriices (“the apertures or convexities … ramii­
cations and offshoots: the open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts,
the phallus, the potbelly, the nose”) as the site of negotiations between
self and world which “discloses [the body’s] essence as a principle of
growth which exceeds its own limits only in copulation, pregnancy,
childbirth, the throes of death, eating, drinking, or defecation” (26).
 Introduction 11
Bakhtin’s insistence that the “archaic” grotesque “displays not only
the outwards but also the inner features of the body: blood, bowels,
heart and other organs … the outward and inner features [being] often
merged into one” (318) lends support to a theory of the body which
displaces the centre of attention from traditional idealistic notions of
selfhood to the materiological, the visceral and the teratological, while
challenging distinctions between the body’s surface and depth and the
deining functions of its oriices. Lastly, the grotesque body and its con­
nections with freakdom and the carnivalesque (the clowns, tricksters,
giants and dwarves which people Bakhtin’s “folk carnival humor”) as
well as its rebellion against authoritarian ideologies5 offer useful ways of
exploring hunger as a spectacle of protest, an idea which is as central to
our readings of Melville’s Bartleby and Kafka’s Gregor Samsa Bartleby
as it is crucial to our discussions of Coetzee’s Joseph K. or Abramovic’s
Balkan Baroque.
Bakhtin’s model informs our attempts to delineate a theory of the
body grounded in the complex correlations of expression and expul­
sion, ingestion and introspection. However, applying Bakhtin’s model
of the open body, an unenclosed, “uninished” organism which has “no
façade, no impenetrable surface” (339), to the aesthetics and politics of
hunger becomes more complicated when one considers the practical and
theoretical consequences of fasting and other forms of self­inlicted hun­
ger. The refusal of food results in a physiological blockage that would
seem to represent the antithesis of Bakhtin’s main themes, which include
“the open mouth, the gullet, the teeth and the tongue” (338) as so many
organic instruments of the material interpenetration of self and world.
More generally, the foreclosure of oriices effected by the faster or hun­
ger striker seems antagonistic to the Bakhtinian gaping mouth, which
hungers for satisfaction and expression and seeks to ill itself with an
abundance of life and its pleasures.
Despite its insistence on debasement and degradation, its interest in the
lower strata of bodily activities and its materialist opposition to idealised
visions of the closed self, the grotesque body remains an ambivalent en­
tity in which life and death, the tragic and the comic, the horrifying and
the pleasurable pre­condition each other and become organically inter­
twined. By celebrating the “fertile depths” and “procreative convexities”
(339) of the body’s folds and oriices while representing the material
effects of death and decay, the happy cyclical patterns presiding over
Bakhtin’s “endless chain of bodily life” subsume all dualities to the su­
perior necessities and pressures of an essentially positive, life­afirming
model celebrating the power of “gay matter” to contain “the grave and
the generating womb, the receding past and the advancing future, the
becoming” (195).
Examining the starving body against the background of the gro­
tesque amounts to simultaneously building upon and destabilising the
12 Introduction
foundations of Bakhtin’s model. More importantly, studying hunger in
the context of the uninished body leads us to confront Bakhtin’s gro­
tesque with extreme forms of blockage and repression where the empty
belly cannot, or refuses, to be illed and fulil its life­afirming purpose.
In such a context, the image of the pregnant womb gives way to gloom­
ier and more menacing perspectives which interrupt the “gay” cycle of
rebirth and renewal and, ultimately, threaten to convert Bakhtin’s cos­
mic optimism into an abject caricature of itself.
By closing its oriices and shielding the skin, the body attempts to
make itself impermeable to the real. This emphasis on self­control and
refusal of the world implicit in many of the hunger experiments related in
this book runs counter to Bakhtin’s ininitely polymorphous plasticities.
In contrast to the Bakhtinian grotesques, the hungry body often seems
to be less than the sum of its parts: instead of entering the material world
and allowing him or herself to be permeated by it, the faster strives to
break free of matter. The violence of this rupture often leads the faster to
cannibalize him or herself from within. By combating the permeability
of the body, the fasting subject attempts to empty itself of all teleological
meaning and emerges as the darker, negative twin of grotesque realism.
A central question emerges at this point: how does Bakhtin’s insis­
tence that the social and the corporeal form part of the same domain
of thinking and speculation correlate with the starving activist’s refusal
of the world outside. One possible answer to this question lies in a con­
sideration of the hunger artist as a (dis)embodiment of the via negativa
of grotesque realism, that which is opposed to the celebratory and inds
its ultimate vocation in social and psychological marginalization. Such
a scenario is best understood in the light of other, post­Bakhtinian the­
ories of the grotesque in which the predominance of disgust and other
“gatekeeper emotions” (to use Susan Miller’s expression) unveil its anx­
ious, fraught, or repressed implications. One such model is offered by
Kristeva’s psychoanalytical take on the grotesque body developed in
Powers of Horror. As evidenced in the following chapters, the experi­
ence of extreme hunger and experiments with food refusal are apt to
produce a range of unpalatable bodily and mental transformations that
emphasize weakness, terror and disease. In this sense they seem almost
bound to cross over into the abject, and Kristeva’s abject can be regarded
as a negative extension of Bakhtin’s grotesque:

both Bakhtin and Kristeva are interested in ive central categories:

the margins of the body; the maternal; food; death; and the text.
Bakhtin’s approach to each attempts to reclaim a positive sense of
the grotesque. Kristeva, by contrast, tries to explain why the phe­
nomena associated with each of these categories might seem to us
“coarse and cynical”, disgusting and obscene.
(Vice 164)
 Introduction 13
Kristeva’s abject turns the humanist logic of the Bakhtinian grotesque
upside­down and exposes its most sinister allusions and implications:
where Bakhtin praises “the folkloric conception of the depths of the
earth as the maternal womb” (Bakhtin 391), Kristeva posits the fear of
the generative powers of “the archaic mother” uncontrolled by patri­
linearity (Kristeva 77). Where Bakhtin concentrates on the comforting
meaningfulness and the sense of connectedness afforded by the unin­
ished body, Kristeva insists that the formless is liable to be experienced
as terror and argues that the dissolution of borders draws us to “the
place where meaning collapses” (2). Kristeva’s abject converts Bakhtin’s
uninished body into a body that harbours the contaminating waste of
what has not been eaten, digested and excreted. It is uninished in that
its cycles and processes have stalled or been interrupted. What cannot
be processed, either because it is too much or perhaps too alien, de­
ines the body as incomplete from within: “Remainders are residues
of something but especially of someone. They pollute on account of
incompleteness” (76).6

Hunger, the Abject and the Dark Grotesque

The proximity of Kristeva’s abject to a study of hunger and disgust pro­
vides us with a different perspective on the starving body at the limit of
physical existence. While later sections of The Politics and Aesthetics of
Hunger and Disgust investigate the speciic relevance of the Kristevan
abject to Kafka’s gastro­poetics, Kristeva’s negative invaginations of gro­
tesque realism traverse the whole book from Hamsun’s naturalist varia­
tions on the schizo­lâneur to Abramovic’s The House With the Ocean
View. Hunger grotesques point to a general transition from an archaic,
optimistic, pregnant grotesque to its modern, life­denying, abject twin.
This is a transition which can be considered against different historical,
cultural and ideological contexts including the history of hunger strikes,
the legacy of the Holocaust, the permutations of realism and naturalism,
the impact of psychoanalytical theories about identity and the body, the
relationship between gender, anorexia and disgust, and the shock tactics
of the contemporary avant­garde. In his study of American iction and
the metaphysics of the grotesque, Dieter Meindl sees this “abject turn”
as a consequence of “the rise of an individualistic outlook” which has
“oriented the grotesque … towards its pole of horror” (Meindl 205) by
subordinating the Bakhtinian communality, connectedness and totality
to the pangs and pleasures of the individual consciousness at odds with
its social environment. This process led Thomas Mann to call the gro­
tesque “the genuine anti­bourgeois style” (Mann quoted in Meindl 26),
a stance that characterizes most of the hunger artists considered herein.
Meindl’s main model is not Bakhtin’s but Wolgang Kayser’s version of
the grotesque, with its emphasis on the disjunctive, the disintegrative
14 Introduction
and the devastating realization that “the familiar and apparently har­
monious world is alienated under the impact of abysmal forces, which
break it up and shatter its coherence” (Kayser cited in Meindl 15). This
is particularly apparent, Meindl argues via Heidegger’s decentred meta­
physics of presence, in Romantic literature from Poe onwards, where
“the descent from consciousness to Being involves eclipsing the psyche
in madness and death and igures as a terror­provoking means of re­
gression to the primal sphere” (205). From an historical perspective, the
progressive transformation of the grotesque from a celebration of life’s
organic excesses into a category dominated by the abject and the dis­
gusting, which has gathered pace in the last half century, has ushered
in the now dominant stercorous aesthetics (see our discussion of eating
disorders and the abject in contemporary art in Chapter 3). The growing
popularity of this tendency in post­Second World War aesthetics testiies
to a growing rejection of idealised notions of the self­contained, imma­
nent body, often from a perspective which relies on the gender speciics
of hunger: one thinks of the works of Cindy Sherman, Adrian Piper,
Eleanor Antin and Marina Abramovic, where hunger and anorexia –
poised between symptom and critique – function as a questioning of
cultural norms and ideals of femininity.

Aestheticising Hunger
There is something profoundly disquieting about the proximity of ex­
treme forms of physical and psychological pain to the grotesque. An
uncomfortable parallel might be drawn with the spectacularisation of
eating disorders and natural disasters: hunger and famine are liable to
fascinate readers and viewers and generate various forms of voyeuristic
pleasure. The aestheticisation of the violence of hunger and self­starvation
(which is a topic that traverses this study) remains a relatively neglected
phenomenon and is perhaps best understood against the background of
the general aestheticisation of violence itself in both high culture and the
mass media. Xavier Morales’s review of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill,
Vol. 1, for example, calls the ilm “easily one of the most violent movies
ever made” and “a breathtaking landscape in which art and violence
coalesce into one unforgettable aesthetic experience” (Morales unpag.).
If we leave aside divergent opinions as to whether such ilms operate
as cathartic converters of violence (or perhaps parodic ones in Taran­
tino’s case), channelling anti­social impulses into acceptable outlets, or
whether they contribute to a Ballardian death of affect, such represen­
tations of violence – once transposed into the register of hunger – beg
the question of what happens to the mind of the reader or viewer when
starvation is hypostatised into a consumable fetish or genre convention
(the Holocaust documentary, the news spot about world famine, the an­
ti­anorexia publicity campaign, etc.).
 Introduction 15
This book is not about how to end world hunger, but one of its
purposes is to delineate a number of recurrent patterns and methods
through which speciic representations of starvation are disseminated
and processed into popular icons. The following sections concentrate
on images and narratives of starvation and explore their aesthetic and
cultural dimensions, paying particular attention to how such material
is processed into cultural phenomena located at the intersection of art
of politics. Still, the sense of guilt and unease remains at the time of
writing: spending time writing a scholarly book about hunger as per­
formance after Auschwitz and bearing in mind that millions of people
who will never read these pages will continue to suffer from malnu­
trition is a luxury that only well­fed Western thinkers can afford, at a
time when poverty and malnutrition rates remain alarmingly high and
largely ignored by the mass media, and while starvation is being used
as a weapon of mass coercion and murder by various dictatorships.7
This uncomfortable realisation calls for a radically politicized reading
of cultural representations of hunger that centres as much on the con­
ceptual force and complexity of starvation as on its corporeality. Such a
method, which studies the ways in which art echoes and/or responds to
speciic clinical cases and historical events, is evidenced as much in our
analysis of anorexia nervosa as a discursive phenomenon (Abramovic,
Antin), as in the naturalist approach to poverty and deprivation repre­
sented by Hamsun, Sinclair, Zola and, to some extent, the pre­decadent,
post­Naturalist Huysmans.
Dealing with hunger and starvation as a cultural phenomenon calls for
a maximalist method that uses themes, ideas and tropes as the structur­
ing, transversal blocks. Rather than delineating a chronological account
of hunger artistry based on a series of successive readings of artworks or
documents, this book casts a wide referential net and deploys the con­
ceptual risks necessary to pin down intuitive associations and confront
them with extensive close readings of individual works. The structure
of this volume acknowledges the tension between closed and open form
that the starving body inds itself confronted with. Viewed from this
angle, the “body” of this volume and its range of aesthetic and cultural
contexts relect a principle of conceptual interpenetration and cross­
referencing inspired by our understanding of the fraught grotesque as a
mode of representation and philosophical speculation.
Chapter 1 sets out to delineate a poetics of hunger and disgust in­
corporating both “high” and “low” cultural forms and practices. At a
time when the body has clearly moved to the centre stage of art history,
gender theory, anthropology and cultural studies alike (not to mention
emerging research ields speciically related to the study of the human
sensorium, such as food studies, affect theory and sensory studies),
it is hardly surprising that such a method has been impacted by the
ever­expanding body of (post­)Freudian, (post­)Bakhtinian and (post­)
16 Introduction
Deleuzian critical theory. While focusing on corporeality, such research
typically argues for a reconsideration of the body itself as a discursive
and social construct within the dominant institutions of knowledge and
power. The speciic cases of hunger activism investigated in this opening
section include Shelley’s radical vegetarianism, nineteenth­century mir­
acle diet cures, Kafka’s “Ein Hungerkünstler” [“The Hunger Artist”],
and Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Tale from Wall Street”, which
is examined against the background of nineteenth­century capitalism,
dyspepsia and the work ethic. In different but related ways, these texts
insist on the necessity of approaching the somatic and visceral aspects
of hunger and disgust and their relationship to more philosophical and
political concepts revolving around the relationship between starvation
and the principle of civil disobedience and “passive resistance” (an ex­
pression used in Melville’s text) which runs from Thoreau to Gandhi
and beyond. The chapter includes an extended discussion of the igure of
the hungry clerk, an anti­hero of social and political dissent that haunts
the works of Melville, Gogol, Dickens, Kafka, Huysmans, Poritzky and
Duhamel.
The transformation of hunger into a spectacle of starvation support­
ing speciic aesthetico­political agendas is the subject of the second chap­
ter of this book. Here we take up the notion of hunger performance
as a middle­ground between the aesthetic and the political, where the
fraught body communicates its condition and challenges traditional no­
tions of deformity and monstrosity. From Kafka’s “The Metamorpho­
sis” to David Nebreda’s abject anorexic art and on to David Blaine’s
hunger stunts, Chapter 2 presents a series of textual, visual and perfor­
mative examples which delineate types of deformities and monstrosities
related to hunger as a physical condition and/or art form while under­
lining how the mechanics of (self­)disgust and abjection question the
myth of the self­contained body. This, in turn, leads to a reconsideration
of the hunger artist and his or her experience of death (or near­death),
loneliness and disease from a variety of social and cultural perspectives
which exceed the domain of the aesthetic. Special attention is given to
Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” as a hunger narrative which forces us to
think about the body as something which belongs to the unthinkably
revolting while relecting the author’s more general sense of disgust with
orality and sexuality. The chapter contains an extended close reading of
Marco Ferreri’s The Grande Bouffe, which places its viewers in the awk­
ward position of having to consider hunger as a simultaneous prompting
of the pleasure principle and of the death drive, an aspect of Ferreri’s
ilm which also evokes the simultaneous attraction and repulsion char­
acteristic of disgust. The contradictions implicit in this response serve
to illustrate how the body’s relationship to food (and to the notion of
taste in all its aesthetic and ethical senses) is caught up in a dialectic of
surplus and lack. The performance of hunger, or its representation as
 Introduction 17
performance, heightens the capacity of the pleasure/pain/death nexus
to erode subjective certainties while creating opportunities for political
exploitation, abuse and cruelty.
Chapter 3 continues to develop a practical theory of hunger based
on a closer examination of recent philosophical and psychoanalytical
investigations of disgust (Korsmeyer, Menninghaus, Miller, Kelly). The
oscillation between negative and positive emotions effected by aesthetic
representations of hunger can operate in many different ways. It can
create discomfort while eroticising the vital functions of the living, in­
jured, or decaying body (e.g. Baudelaire’s “Carrion”). It can unleash the
powers of exaggeration and the grotesque to make revolting sights shed
their capacity to shock or disgust. It can also convey a sense of sadness
or meaninglessness that veers towards a more moral or philosophical
appreciation of the sickening or terrifying in human existence. Surfeit
and nausea can work in the opposite direction, converting the appetising
and the desirable into the repulsive and the unbearable. Such effects, if
transposed into the political domain, clearly have implications at the
level of power and its use in manufacturing consent and provoking dis­
sent. The chapter pauses with Alfred Hitchcock’s atrocity footage of
the death camps and proceeds to consider the increasing popularity of
the abject and the stercorous in contemporary art (McCarthy, Sherman,
Serrano, Delvoye).
Chapter 4 returns to the theme of self­starvation as a technique of
political resistance, introduced in the opening sections of this volume. It
further explores the visceral and affective impact of starvation on both
its victims and its spectators and proposes an extended consideration
of the fast or hunger strike as a complex dialogical statement involving
the repellent and its capacity to fascinate or even entertain. One the one
hand, the social aspect of the fast reveals a subjective bid for objectiica­
tion as a resolution of the split between being and having, characteristic
of bodily experience. On the other hand, objectiication involves a shed­
ding of signiiers. This attempted withdrawal from discourse provides a
context in which self­starvation can be understood as a repudiation of
the experience of embodiment. The political eficacy of self­starvation is
tested against the experience of hunger in Hamsun’s Hunger, Sinclair’s
The Jungle and the Irish Republican hunger strikers who became mar­
tyrs to meaning. As a counter argument, Marina Abramovic’s Balkan
Baroque is analysed as a refusal of objectiication, here conceived as a
form of violence that is indicative of political failure. This analysis is
extended to Melville’s Bartleby and Coetzee’s Joseph K. The narrators
of these ictions express the anxiety provoked by the violent spectacle of
objectiication through hunger considered in Chapter 2.
The second half of Chapter 4 extends the scope of the book’s social
and political analysis while remaining grounded in a close examination
of a contemporary aesthetics, especially as regards its relationship to the
18 Introduction
monstrous and the teratological. Continuing the investigation of the uses
and meanings of hunger in totalitarian systems, it begins by investigat­
ing the process through which a human being within a dystopia can be­
come a monster, and how this transformation can be expressed through
feeding and starvation. The totalitarian state pushes humanity towards
a crisis at the level of species identiication, and hunger – as a totalitar­
ian emotion – can serve to distinguish the human from the non­human.
A comparative discussion of 1984, I Am Legend, Soylent Green and The
Hunger leads to the suggestion that the post­human totalitarian state
is characterized by its lack of access to the monstrous. The ambivalent
igure of the modern vampire, as a transitional being between human
and monster, provides the focal point for a discussion of the human and
post­human in terms of eating and abstaining. This opens up another
context in which to question the political eficacy of self­starvation,
which is considered here as a form of unconscious resistance to the col­
lapse of the distinction between the human and the monstrous.
Chapter 5 focuses on the globalized consumer society, which shares
some of the characteristics of the political dystopias discussed in the
previous chapter. Here, the refusal to choose, understood as an act of
resistance to the exigencies of capitalist consumption, is explored as a
form of verbal fast. The urgency of this stance is underlined by the ten­
dency within consumer society to promote the dissociation of desire and
enjoyment; one of several ways in which consumerism (and the ideology
which sponsors it) enters into a morbid dialectic with the fraught body of
the consumer. Anorexia is one of the pathological products of this dialec­
tic. The permanent now of fraught consumerist pleasure turns food into
shit, while self­starvation represents an attempt by the subject to reclaim
its own historicity. Baudrillard’s insistence on the structural necessity of
waste within the consumer society is introduced here. With reference to
Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Breughel’s painting The Land of Cock-
ayne, this wasteful remainder is re­conceived as a surplus. The product
of a disjunction between work and the body, this surplus incorporates
and juxtaposes disgust and hunger, while raising the spectre of negative
consumption, or deicit. While delineating another version of the crisis
of subjectivity that we associate with the fraught body, this notion of
deicit also functions in the West as a socio­economic bogey that is used
to shore up forms of political authority in an age of declining democracy.
The next chapter, “Hunger and consumer capitalism” broadens the
discussion of the crisis of individual subjectivity in an age of rampant
consumerism, and how this is expressed through hunger and disgust.
With reference to Freud’s account of the unconscious structure of addic­
tion and Lacan’s formulation of the discourse of capitalism, we develop
the idea that a literalisation of oral pleasure works beneath the surface of
consumption, deviating social impulses and dividing them between can­
nibalistic satisfaction and auto­erotic isolation. This is illustrated through
 Introduction 19
an analysis of Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin’s video sequence Any
Ever and followed with an exploration of the multiple meanings of the
bitten­off corner of the Apple apple. This opens up a number of perspec­
tives on the status and function of hunger within the accelerating dyna­
mics of consumer capitalism: the debt which accrues around the irst bite
of the forbidden fruit; the sexual double bind endured by the Victorian
gentlewoman; the inverted ethics of consumerism through which desire
mutates into need; the anorexic refusal of the consumer object.
“Empathizing with the disembodied”, the inal section of this book,
considers hunger once again in terms of its proximity to death, and
focuses on the idea that anorexia involves a hosting of a dead other
within a living body. The symptomatic discourse of anorexia, it is ar­
gued, tests the limits of empathy by converging, through this hosting,
on a condition of meaninglessness, a key property of Kristeva’s notion of
the abject. We return once more to the performative dimension of self­
starvation, this time focusing speciically on its relation to temporality:
Marina Abramovic’s The House With the Ocean View is analysed as a
performance which can disarticulate body time into inside and outside,
thus offering a variation on the open/closed model which has informed
our notion of the negative grotesque. The repressed anxiety engendered
by Abaramovic’s hunger artistry leads us to a critical examination of
the skin as that which separates the internal from the external, sealing
or failing to seal the body’s apertures. Any performer runs the risk of
losing or failing to gain the empathy of the audience, a situation that can
engender a catastrophic excess of subjectivity. Anorexia can sometimes
involve an attempt by the subject to void itself of the other by provoking
just such a catastrophe. To discuss and illustrate this process we return
one more time to Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist”. The anorexic harbouring
of death suggests comparisons with demon possession and vampirism,
and raises a inal question to test the limits of grotesque embodiment
and its relation to disgust: is it possible to grieve for the death of some­
one who is still alive?

Notes
1 Denise Gigante, Taste: A Literary History (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2005); Timothy Morton, ed., Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite:
Eating Romanticism (New York: Palgrave, 2004); Michel Delville, Food,
Poetry, and the Aesthetics of Consumption: Eating the Avant-Garde
(London: Routledge, 2008).
2 Patrick Anderson’s So Much Wasted: Performance, and the Morbidity of
Resistance (2010) contains a section on hunger and performance art but
concerns itself primarily with the ontologies of performance and subjectivity
in a perspective which centres on the clinical and carceral manifestations of
anorexia and hunger strikes. As for Food and Appetites: The Hunger Artist
and the Arts (Ann McCulloch and Pavlina Radia, eds., 2012), it focuses on
food and/or hunger in a variety of cultural and historical contexts. As a book
20 Introduction
of proceedings, however, it (understandably) lacks the irm methodological
direction of Ellmann’s monograph and hosts, instead, a variety of case stud­
ies pointing to different ways of understanding the cultural importance of
“metaphors of nourishment” and “the intimate relationship between nature
and science, the arts and human experience” (McCulloch and Radia xviii).
3 See, for example, Paul Rozin, Jonathan Haidt, and Clark R. McCauley,
“Disgust” (1993) and Susan B. Miller, Disgust: The Gatekeeper Emotion
(2004).
4 See Timothy Morton’s remark that “the study of eating in philosophy traces
how eating complicates such basic metaphysical assumptions as the differ­
ence between an inside and an outside–something that every oyster should
ponder as it slips down the throat of a sentimental poet” (Morton 2004:
xviii) or Kathleen Rowe’s suggestion that the grotesque body “exaggerates
its processes, bulges, and oriices, whereas the static, immanent, monumen­
tal ‘classical (or bourgeois) body’ conceals them” (Rowe 33).
5 As Michael Holquist has suggested, Bakhtin’s grotesque realism can be seen
as a response to Stalinist Social realism and the increasing homogenisation
of cultural life (Holquist 8).
6 Though it is important to remember that Kristeva acknowledges the ambiva­
lent character of residues, which are poised between deilement and regener­
ation, as apparent, for example, in Brahmanic cosmology (Kristeva 76–77).
7 A recent study carried out by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting reports
that The New York Times only included substantial information about
poverty in 0.2 per cent of its election stories: http://www.commondreams.
org/views/2012/09/07/media­not­concerned­about­very­poor (accessed 28
September 2016).
1 Activists of the Belly
Starving Clerks and
Schizo­Strollers
(Dewey, Shelley, Melville, Kafka, Huysmans,
Duhamel, Hamsun, Poritzky)

Professional Fasters and Snacker Poets

The narrator of Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist” (1922) locates the high
watermark of the “professional fast” in the middle of the nineteenth cen­
tury, a period in which the popular entertainment offered by the hunger
artist was capable of monopolising the attention of whole towns. The
period identiied by the narrator as the golden age of the fast as spectacle
coincides with a contraction of the symbolic and religious value of absti­
nence. The context for this progressive secularisation of the fast was its
intensive commercialisation; the selling point being its reputed beneicial
effects on digestion and health in general.
It was in the mid­nineteenth century that the success story of the fast
as a physical therapy, dissociated from its presumed value as a form of
“spiritual detoxiication” (Grifiths 600), began to impose itself. The
aim was no longer to arm the soul in its battle against sin, or even to
sculpt the body as a “visible expression of inward humility” (600) usually
conceived as a token of devotion to the famished body of Christ. Thus
at the moment when spiritual asceticism was giving way to secularised
abstinence, there were already plenty of signs that the latter would be re­
cycled as a key tenet of the work ethic and its religious sources and corol­
laries, particularly within the context of American Puritanism. In 1895,
the American doctor and surgeon Edward Hooker Dewey denounced
overindulgence in his book The True Science of Living, subtitled The
New Gospel of Health. Dietary excess, according to Dewey, was re­
sponsible for all the ills of mankind, from mental suffering to madness,
suicide and even crime. Among Dewey’s most dedicated disciples was a
businessman named Milton Rathbun who fasted for twenty­eight days
(losing more than forty pounds in the process) “because he wanted to
reduce his weight, fearing that its gradual increase might bring on ap­
oplexy” (Dewey unpag.). Milton Rathbun’s testimony was a particular
pleasure to Dewey since it conirmed the thesis that fasting could bring
erring members of the workforce back into line with Calvinist teachings
and (to adopt a Weberian perspective) the capitalist ethic they spon­
sored. Dewey congratulated himself that Rathbun’s experiment served
as an exemplar that “to do without food without hunger does not tax
22 Activists of the Belly
any vital power” and that the sense of hunger or “mere relish” should
be distinguished from “natural hunger, which would only manifest itself
when there would be marked relief from pain” (unpag.).1 He quotes an
unsigned article recounting Rathbun’s stunt in the 6 June 1899 issue of
the New York Press. The author of the report insists that the business­
man’s achievement was far superior to that of professional fasters such
as Dr Tanner (whose forty­day fast carried out in 1880 was “simply
trying to prove that the thing could be done” [cited in Dewey unpag.])
and Giovanni Succi (whose forty­ive­day fast in 1890 may have inspired
Kafka’s hunger artist), both of whom were “surrounded by attendants
who allowed them scarcely to lift a hand, so that every ounce of energy
might be conserved” (unpag.). Rathbun recounts:

I had been in the habit of getting to my ofice about 8; now I get

there at 7. I generally had left at 5.30; I now stayed until 6.30. I had
been in the habit of taking an hour or an hour and a quarter for lun­
cheon. The luncheon was now cut off, so I stayed in the ofice and
worked. I sat there at my desk and put in a long, hard day’s work,
constantly writing.
At night I drank a bottle of Apollinaris, and went to bed at
8.30 and slept until 4 in the morning. I never enjoyed better sleep
than in those four weeks. And I was in excellent condition as far
as I could see in every other way. My mind was clear, my eye was
sharper than usually, and all the functions were in excellent working
order. (unpag.)

The same article from the New York Press describes how Rathbun’s diet
became a local attraction and then, by a seemingly inevitable declension,
a public performance motivated by a desire to outdo his previous efforts
and establish new records in abstinence. Despite Dewey’s insistence that
Rathbun’s fast “pursued a course diametrically opposite” (unpag.) to
Succi’s, the manner in which the ascetic businessman performed his fast
in front of a limited audience of concerned employees, close friends and
relatives anticipates the competitive ethos of the Kafkaesque hunger art­
ist while reminding us of Bartleby’s irst few days at the notary’s ofice,
where he works with such energy and eficiency that his employer feels
proud of him. Dewey writes:

Every day his friends would come in and talk to him about it. At
irst they told him he was foolish; that nobody could fast that length
of time, much less continue his work without interruption. Then as
the days went on and he kept up without a break they began to be
frightened.
A crowd would gather about him every night at 6.30 o’clock,
when he would leave his ofice, for that was his hour for weighing.
Some days he would lose two or three pounds from the weight of the