Paul Auster and Charles Reznikoff: The Hunger-Artists of Jewish America

Despite the fact that they represent various degrees of remoteness, Charles Reznikoff, a New York modernist poet, and Paul Auster, an author of post-modern fiction and an admirer of his predecessor’s work, have at least one thing in common: they write in the tradition of Kafka and his hunger-artist. Though rarely discussed by the critics, the theme of dieting as a peculiar trend, “the vogue for hunger” in Kafka’s words, informs both authors’ writing to an astonishing degree. Exploring multiple connections between food and Jewishness in Jewish philosophy, religion, along with constructions of masculinity, the author presents the ideal of a “total fast” as a diasporic survival act—preserving Rosenfeld’s “organic dissatisfaction” to avoid the dangers of fulfillment and forgetfulness. Following current psychology and its claim that the body often becomes “the target of unstable social situations,” called predicaments, she closely examines Auster’s and Reznikoff’s literary chronicles of starvation to see how they reflect social anxieties of their times.