The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing, and Imprisonment

by Maud Ellmann

The phenomenon of voluntary self-starvation - whether by political hunger strikers or lone anorectics - is a puzzle of engrossing power, suggesting a message more radical than any uttered aloud. In this fascinating phenomenology, Maud Ellmann teases out this message, its genesis, expression, and significance. How, she asks, has the act of eating become the metaphor for compliance, starvation the metaphor for protest? How does the rejection of food become the rejection of intolerable social constraints - or of actual imprisonment? What is achieved at the extremity of such a protest - at the moment of death?
Ellmann brilliantly unravels the answers; they lie, she shows, in the inverse relationship between bodily hunger and verbal expression. Drawing her examples from Yeats and Kafka, Marx and Freud, Wole Soyinka and the suffragettes, Mahatma Ghandi and Jane Fonda, she explores the entangled meanings of writing and hunger in our culture of starvers. Central to her discussion is an arresting comparison between the Irish Hunger Strike of 1981 and the plot of Richardson's Clarissa, in which the heroine starves herself to death in penance for - or, perhaps, revenge against - her rape. Both cases show a strange excess of words in contrast to the savage reduction of the flesh, as if the bodies of the starvers were devoured by their own verbosity. The Hunger Artists examines this vampirical feeding of words on flesh, revealing uncanny affinities between the labor of starvation and the birth of letters, diaries, poems, books. In her lean and vibrant prose, Ellmann reaches beyond the fashionable preoccupation with the body to the terrifying logic of disembodiment.

Genres: Nonfiction

160 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1993

Reviews

[Ellie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m bitter I can’t write or think as well

[Athira Mohan · Rating 4 out of 5]

For anyone looking for a short read on the politics of self starvation- the gendered aspect of it, as well as how it functions as a protest.

[Iris · Rating 5 out of 5]

a near perfect book, just a total joy to read

[Joonas Uusitalo · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting description of what hunger symbolizes both in art and in real life.

[zar]

For it is only in the world of words that food can function as a metaphor for sex at all, or sex as a metaphor for food. Yet the fact that language issues from the same orifice in which nutrition is imbibed means that words and food are locked in an eternal rivalry. "The mouth speaks with its tongue and tastes flavors," wrote Saint Catherine, who gave up food in order to incorporate the word of God. Since language must compete with food to gain the sole possession of the mouth, we must either speak and go hungry, or shut up and eat.

[Taycia Pérez · Rating 3 out of 5]

I definitely didn't read enough to give a good enough review but I would probably never try to read it again.

[Maggie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really quite excellent. Read for an essay I’m writing on Clarissa.

[l · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wish psychoanalytical theory would just disappear from the face of the planet, tbh. Still, I liked this book. It gives me a framework from which to further investigate disembodiment, discarnation etc.