I am currently writing a book on autism and anorexia that explores the connection through lived experience, historical anecdotes, scientific research, and philosophical exploration. Here, I am sharing the chapter AN AUTISTIC ARTIST that dives into the genius of Franz Kafka through an autistic anorexia lens.

AN AUTISTIC ARTIST

“I had to fast. I can’t help it,” said the hunger artist.

These words from a Franz Kafka short story provide an intimate view into the lived experience of one of the most remarkable artists in the history of literature.

I was led to this particular story of Kafka’s after having a conversation with my dad in which I was explaining ARFID to him.

“You know what that reminds me of?” he asked. Before I could answer, he continued: “A Hunger Artist by Franz Kafka. It’s about a man locked in a cage, fasting for days on end as a public spectacle. No one in the audience understands why he won’t eat, and in the end he reveals it’s because he couldn’t find a food he liked.”

Intrigued, I ordered a copy of A Hunger Artist right after we ended the call and finished reading the story a half hour later. While the ARFID component made sense in some regards, my concluding insight was more concrete: Only an autistic person with anorexia could have written this.

But who was Franz Kafka, and what was his relationship to the hunger artist?

Kafka wanted to be literature, to be pure art

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was the eldest of six, born in Prague to a middle-class Jewish family. He studied law and worked for an insurance company but consistently wrote in his diaries about how “unbearable” his job was because “it conflicts with my only desire and my only calling, which is literature… I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else.” But beyond his day job, Kafka was most plagued by his relationship with literature itself. His diaries and letters yield a raw glimpse into his unwavering self-doubt, perfectionism, and pursuit to “communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones.”

In fact, Kafka was so tormented by the impossibility of capturing the uncapturable that he burned over 90% of his work. On his deathbed, Kafka asked his closest friend Max Brod to destroy everything that remained – but Max didn’t listen, and posthumously published Kafka’s diaries, letters, and (unfinished) novels including The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika.

There is an ongoing debate on the morality of Brod’s choice to dishonor Kafka’s wishes, especially as they denote to Kafka’s most private writings. Yet I can’t help but feel grateful, for Kafka’s work has been one of my greatest sources of solace. My mom and I have a running joke that when I feel particularly “existential,” I comfort myself by reading Kafka. Not only is his art validation that words will forever fail – and thus, removes the pressure to make my own writing “perfect” – but Kafka’s vulnerability helps me feel less alone because of the way he describes himself as an “alien being.” And when you read the words of another autistic alien, you just can’t help but feel connected to all of the autistic aliens out there!

Was Franz Kafka Autistic?

In 2017, researcher Jerry Stuger published a paper in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders presenting the hypothesis that Kafka was autistic. “Kafka’s autism is an integral diagnosis which encompasses both his personal life and his work,” something previous interpretations could only partially explain. The “big secret” of Kafka scholarship had always been how he was able to write like he did, like no one before him. Stuger’s hypothesis: autism is that secret. Kafka engaged with the world “from a different neural frame of reference,” which is precisely what made his work so complex and resonant for those who of us who share that frame of reference.

Max Brod’s biography of his best friend supports this interpretation. “Absolute truthfulness was one of the most distinctive features of his character,” Brod writes, along with “unimaginably precise conscientiousness” that made it impossible for Kafka to overlook the “slightest shadow” of injustice. His fiction is fueled by this sensitivity, featuring characters caught in kafkaesque situations: quasi-absurd worlds where nothing makes sense yet everyone acts as though it should. In The Trial, for instance, Josef K. is arrested for a crime that’s never named, trapped in a system whose rules are never explained. When Kafka first read the opening chapter aloud to his friends, “we laughed quite immoderately,” Brod recalls, “and he himself laughed so much that there were moments when he couldn’t read any further.” This, about one of the most unsettling novels ever written.

Kafka was a quiet, shy, and reserved person with a few close friends. During the day, he carefully concealed his inner plight, channeling it into his writing at night. He wrote from late evening till early morning, using his insomnia to enter a trance-like state, a bridge to his subconscious. Kafka drafted The Judgment in a single eight-hour sitting, from 10 PM to 6 AM. “Only in this way can writing be done,” he recorded in his diary, “with such coherence, with such a complete opening out of the body and the soul.” Yet for all he concealed – or perhaps, because of it – when Kafka spoke, “everyone had to listen immediately because it was always something that hit the nail on the head.” Brod said Kafka possessed “an unusual aura of power” and called him “a prophet from which the divine shone.”

Just as myself and many of my clients experience our giftedness as pressure, Kafka’s power was inseparable from his suffering. To perceive the world with such clarity – to see through the absurdity, the mundane, the unjust – is precisely what makes existing in that world so unbearable. Kafka called this his “earth weight.” The very sensitivity that made him a prophet also made him a prisoner. “I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me,” he wrote. “I cannot even explain it to myself.”

An Anorexic Attempt to Shed Earth Weight

Kafka wanted to be literature, to transcend the limitations of this kafkaesque world. He wanted to transcend words, transcend body, transcend earth weight. His solution was to diet in all directions: “When it became clear in my organism that writing was the most productive direction for my being to take, everything rushed in that direction and left empty all those abilities which were directed towards the joys of sex, eating, drinking, philosophical reflection, and above all music. I atrophied in all these directions.”

Like Saint Catherine of Siena who devoted herself to God through starvation, Kafka’s fasting was ascetic, a devotion to pure writing. In his 1987 paper The Anorexia Nervosa of Franz Kafka, psychiatrist Manfred Fichter characterized Kafka’s lifestyle as “an ascetic attitude and abjuration of physical enjoyment and pleasure.” For Kafka, writing was “a form of prayer.” Perhaps his fasting was too. He was a lifelong vegetarian, abstained from alcohol, and his diaries are filled to the brim with passages about food, exercise, and appearance:

“This evening the whimpering of my poor mother because I don’t eat.”

“Without weight, without bones, without body, walked through the streets for two hours…”

“Was afraid of mirrors because they showed in me an ugliness which in my opinion was inevitable.”

As for most individuals struggling with anorexia, mental hunger was not foreign to Kafka either. He frequently fantasized about gorging, describing a “greed” from his stomach that felt “perverse,” and cravings to commit “terrible deeds of daring with food.” In Kafka’s eyes, hunger itself was a sin – proof of his mortality, betrayal of his devotion. But perhaps nothing captures Kafka’s relationship to food more clearly than this: “My greatest joy is sitting at a large table where there is an abundance of hot steaming food and all the people are eating, except me.”

Did Hunger Artists Actually Exist?

So here we have the story of an autistic artist struggling with anorexia, writing a story about a hunger artist. While this might seem kafkaesque, Kafka didn’t invent the hunger artist – it was an actual profession in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Akin to sword swallowing, snake charming, and fire eating, hunger artists were performers who publicly starved themselves for entertainment. Crowds paid to watch them waste away in glass cages at circuses, fairs, and amusement parks across Europe and the United States. In contrast to “fasting girls” that were romanticized since the time of St. Catherine and then medicalized by the Victorian Era, “hunger artists” were almost exclusively male.

The most famous was Giovanni Succi (1853–1918), an Italian who performed over thirty public fasts and is widely considered the primary inspiration for Kafka’s story. Doctors and scientists closely studied Succi, attempting to unlock the physiological secrets of prolonged starvation, but audiences were less curious, calling him a “sick freak” and “clever fraud.” Yet Succi himself believed he was possessed by a spirit that enabled him to live without food, and claimed to have discovered a magic potion during his travels that eliminated the need to eat. The connection between art and misunderstanding was one Kafka lived like no other, so he decided – as he himself was dying from tuberculosis – to immortalize it.

A Hunger Artist Analysis

Kafka is known for his opening lines, A Hunger Artist being no exception. We immediately meet the narrator, already in mourning. He recalls a golden age when entire cities took interest in public fasting, when crowds gathered and children marveled at the skeletal man in the cage. But that world is now gone – and perhaps, it never existed to begin with.

What follows is not so much a plot as a meditation on the loneliness of being perceived but never understood. True to form, Kafka layers on existential symbols, each worth analyzing for its own sagacity. Yet part of Kafka’s power lies in the fact that his work resists singular interpretation – so here I share my own suppositions, reading through anorexia autistica glasses, with lenses Kafka didn’t need labels for because he himself was the beholder.

First, there is the cage, of course. Although the hunger artist sits in an actual cage, it’s not merely his stage. It’s his boundary, his identity, his raison d’être. The physical body enables existence while limiting the soul, anorexia provides safety while forming a prison. For someone who wanted to be literature, the limitations of words – the vehicles that make literature possible – comprised Kafka’s cage. At the same time, the cage can be interpreted as another barrier between the artist and the audience, which Kafka establishes with what I consider the core quote of the entire piece: “It was impossible to fight against this lack of understanding, against this world of misunderstanding.”

Then comes “the ticking of the clock, the only furnishing in the cage,” creating yet another boundary – notably, an internal one. Time does not belong to the audience, but is the artist’s only companion. The clock is constantly confronting the artist with his mortality, bringing us full circle to the constraints of the physical body. Yet I am now reminded of my favorite Da Vinci quote: “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” The hunger artist’s work is possible precisely because he is mortal, yet is forever incomplete because “he could have endured it for much longer.”

Which brings us to an external boundary: the 40-day limit imposed on the hunger artist by his impresario. While the impresario’s reason is strictly commercial – experience had shown that crowds lose interest after 40 days – Kafka’s choice of this number is no accident. The 40-day fast is spiritually significant, appearing throughout biblical tradition as a period of testing and transcendence. The hunger artist “felt there were no limits to his capacity for fasting” because his ultimate goal was to transcend humanity altogether. We see a reflection of Kafka’s own suicidal ideation when the narrator muses, “Of course, it was certain that the popularity of fasting would return someday, but for those now alive that was no consolation. What was the hunger artist to do now?” His art would only be fully celebrated once he had transcended, but that transcendence was antonymous with earth weight.

The desire to become divine – to be pure art – was incomprehensible to outsiders. Or at least, to most of them. “While for grown-ups the hunger artist was often merely a joke, something they participated in because it was fashionable, the children looked on amazed, their mouths open, holding each other’s hands for safety.” The only sliver of connection the hunger artist feels to the external world is with the children because they are full of curiosity and wonder, as opposed to the adults that are only watching out of conformity. But worse than the ridicule of the adults were the watchers. “Nothing was more excruciating to the hunger artist than the watchers.”

Permanent watchers were assigned to ensure the hunger artist wasn’t secretly eating, and Kafka adds a layer of grotesque comedy by making them butchers. Men who carve flesh for a living are tasked with monitoring a man trying to escape it. But again, the watchers are merely a symbol. They represent the world’s distrust, the artist’s pain of not being believed. Because “never, under any circumstances, would he have eaten the slightest thing, not even if compelled by force. The honor of his art forbade it.” Only the artist knew the depth of his devotion, and to hold that truth – alone – was its own kind of cage.

Eventually, the world moves on. Because the hunger artist was now “too old to take up a different profession, but was fanatically devoted to fasting more than anything else, he said farewell to the impresario and let himself be hired by a large circus. In order to spare his own feelings, he didn’t even look at the terms of his contract.” The hunger artist is placed near the animal cages, an afterthought on the way to the menagerie. Crowds rush by without stopping, the placard announcing his fast grows dirty and illegible, and no one counts the days anymore. The irony, of course, lies in the meaninglessness of his freedom; finally, the hunger artist can go beyond the 40-day cap and pursue “the easiest thing in the world,” but now his fasting has faded into the background. His art has become obsolete.

The days drag on, the hunger artist withering away, disappearing into rotting straw. A supervisor wonders why they’ve left this perfectly good cage unused, until they remember the hunger artist.

“I always wanted you to admire my fasting,” said the hunger artist.

“We do admire it,” said the supervisor.

“But you shouldn’t admire it,” said the hunger artist.

“Well then, we don’t admire it,” said the supervisor, “but why shouldn’t we admire it?”

“Because I had to fast. I can’t help it,” said the hunger artist.

The hunger artist wanted admiration, but when he received it, he rejected it. Why? Because they were admiring the wrong thing. The audience applauded the hunger artist’s discipline, willpower, and endurance “to fast as none of them could.” But the artist wasn’t choosing to fast; it was his art. Art was who he was. This is the autistic experience of anorexia, and frankly, life at large. People believe anorexia is about discipline and willpower, while in reality, it’s a desperate cry to be seen, understood, and valued. We crave authentic connection, expressed by the hunger artist when he leans in “with his lips pursed as if for a kiss,” confessing to the supervisor that he didn’t eat “because I couldn’t find a food I enjoyed. If I had found that, believe me, I would not have made a spectacle of myself and would have eaten to my heart’s content, like you and everyone else.”

Symbolism in A Hunger Artist

Like all his work, Kafka’s story transcends words. A Hunger Artist isn’t actually about fasting; it’s about wanting to live a meaningful life that transcends the shallow, transcends the unbearable weight of being human. The hunger artist is offered food, but not the right food. He’s offered existence, but not one he could digest. “Try to explain the art of fasting to anyone! If someone doesn’t feel it, then he cannot be made to understand it.”

After his confession, the hunger artist dies and is replaced by a young panther. Our final symbol, the panther represents pure embodiment.

“Even for a person with the dullest mind it was clearly refreshing to see this wild animal throwing itself around in this cage, which had been dreary for such a long time. It lacked nothing. Without giving it a second thought, the guards brought the animal food. It enjoyed the taste and never seemed to miss its freedom. This noble body, equipped with everything necessary, almost to the point of bursting, also appeared to carry freedom around with it. That seemed to be located somewhere or other in its teeth, and its joy in living came with such strong passion from its throat that it was not easy for spectators to keep watching. But they braced themselves, crowded around the cage, and had no desire to move on.”

The crowd prefers the panther because the panther makes sense to them. It wants what they want: food, movement, life. The hunger artist was trying to nourish something that doesn’t eat – art – while neglecting the vessel from which that art is made possible.

Kafka edited A Hunger Artist while he was wasting away from tuberculosis, his body giving in at the sacred age of 40. But Kafka’s soul never died; in the most kafkaesque way, he transcended mortality by becoming literature.

“I never wish to be easily defined,” Kafka once wrote. “I’d rather float over other people’s minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable; more like a transparent, paradoxically iridescent creature rather than an actual person.”

This chapter has been an emotional one for me to write, as I felt Kafka beside me the whole time. Not as a person, but as that iridescent, immortal creature he always longed to be. So hereby, I want to thank you, dear Kafka. You are one of my biggest inspirations, one that continuously empowers me to keep tapping into my autistic artist, to keep showing up for my literature.

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Sources:

1. Kafka, F. The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1910-1923 (New York: Schocken Books, 1948)
2. Kafka, F. Letters to Milena (New York: Schocken Books, 1953)
3. Stuger J. (2017). Kafka and Autism: The Undisclosed Logic Behind Kafka's Work. Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 47(8), 2336–2347.
4. Brod, M. Franz Kafka: A Biography (New York: Schocken Books, 1960)
5. Fichter, M. “The anorexia nervosa of Franz Kafka.” International Journal of Eating Disorders 6 (1987): 367-377.
6. Vandereycken, W, and Ron van Deth. From Fasting Saints to Anorexic Girls: The History of Self-Starvation (London: Athlone Press, 1994)
7. Nieto-Galan, Agustí. “Useful Charlatans: Giovanni Succi and Stefano Merlatti’s Fasting Contest in Paris, 1886.” Science in Context 33, no. 4 (2020): 405–22.