The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing, and Imprisonment by Maud Ellmann

By Maud Ellmann

The phenomenon of voluntary self-starvation - even if by means of political starvation strikers or lone anorectics - is a puzzle of engrossing strength, suggesting a message extra radical than any uttered aloud. during this attention-grabbing phenomenology, Maud Ellmann teases out this message, its genesis, expression, and importance. How, she asks, has the act of consuming turn into the metaphor for compliance, hunger the metaphor for protest? How does the rejection of meals turn into the rejection of insupportable social constraints - or of tangible imprisonment? what's completed on the extremity of any such protest - in the intervening time of loss of life? Ellmann brilliantly unravels the solutions; they lie, she exhibits, within the inverse courting among physically starvation 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 starvation in our tradition of starvers. valuable to her dialogue is an arresting comparability among the Irish starvation Strike of 1981 and the plot of Richardson's Clarissa, within which the heroine starves herself to loss of life in penance for - or, maybe, revenge opposed to - her rape. either situations exhibit a wierd far more than phrases unlike the savage aid of the flesh, as though the our bodies of the starvers have been wolfed by way of their very own verbosity. The starvation Artists examines this vampirical feeding of phrases on flesh, revealing uncanny affinities among the hard work of hunger and the start of letters, diaries, poems, books. In her lean and colourful prose, Ellmann reaches past the trendy preoccupation with the physique to the terrifying common sense of disembodiment.

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Extra resources for The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing, and Imprisonment

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Within the hollow center of this diabolical persona another selfhood, fat with sensuality and power, struggles vainly to be born. The ostensible desire to be thin, integral, and immaculate is subverted by a secret longing to be "great with" food and babies and to swallow up the universe into the self. As Lewis Hyde puts it, "The desire to consume is a kind of lust. We long to have the world flow through us like air or food. "33 Likewise, the wish to be enwombed conceals a deeper wish to be reborn and to be fat enough to burst out of this chrysalis of fire.

The infant sees his stomach as a safe in which he hoards his loot, thus learning his first lessons in private property. The genesis of secrecy may also be attributed to eating, for it is well known that the best way to keep a secret is to eat the evidence. The stomach is a place almost as private as the grave. 1S Most important, it is by eating that the infant establishes his body as his own, distinguishing its inside from its outside. " That is to say: "It shall be inside me" or "it shall be outside me" .

Other such zones include the anus and the genitals which, like the mouth, originally serve digestive needs but later function as the "props" for sexuality. These orifices not only give the infant pleasure but also commemorate the mother's care, mapping her desire on his body. As zones of care, they also represent the loci of exchange, of which the primal gift of food provides the prototype for later forms of camal and linguistic intercourse. "14 In effect, they are the apertures through which the desire of the other is inscribed into the self, like a forged letter in the body's broken "envelope," to borrow the epistolary image from Laplanche.

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