Our reality is stranger than Kafka’s fiction precisely because it is no longer fiction, and no longer confined to the hunger artist. Our guardians and experts demand that we, the public, are morally obliged to give our approval to each and every authentic choice. It is a matter of human rights.

The ancient Romans encapsulated man’s depravity with a proverb: Homo homini lupus. Man is a wolf to man. The Austrian Jewish novelist Franz Kafka, living in a time of virulent anti-Semitism, gave it expansive expression. He depicted the dehumanization of individuals living in a society which had rejected God in favour of personal autonomy legislated by the state. As Chesterton remarked, “Instead of the 10 Commandments, we now have 10,000.” In arguably his most brilliant of parables, the 1922 tale “A Hunger Artist,” Kafka depicted an artist who starved himself for art’s sake, public approval, and to make a living. The irony is thick.

The story cannot be reduced to a work of art about art. For one, it chronicled an actual historical practice. Hunger artists had been starving themselves for paying crowds since the beginning of the Age of Reason. Never were the consequences of idealizing autonomy, and removing the Judeo-Christian boundary markers that distinguished performing and living, acting and suffering, sanity and madness, and truth and deceit laid so bare; never was a universe constructed without God so starkly scrutinized as in that era’s version of reality television. How terribly authentic the depravity!

The vulgarity of the method actor resides in the fact that he lacks imagination to act. He must live the part. The reality television of our day exceeds it by requiring no imagination in its audience. It must become vulgar to live the part. For this fiction to become realistic, it must obliterate any sense that there is life outside it, judging it. The stage must become the world, and the world the stage. The fourth wall of public morality must go.

The problem then as now is that human nature kicks in. Mankind cannot bear too much reality. As Kafka’s work recounts, however zealously his performer abases himself, his audience remains unpersuaded. Such extreme method acting brings with it unshakeable suspicions of “cheating.” It’s not the artist’s fault. The audience could only truly be satisfied that his performance was real if there were no encore.

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