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The Audience / Public
For most of the hunger artist’s career—if it can be called that—the manager presides over his act, taking care of the business dealings and apparently looking after the well-being of his investment. But the impresario is a capitalist through and through, and only cares about the hunger artist as a means of making profit. He is also a deceitful figure: when the hunger artist complains angrily about being limited to forty-day fasts, the manager slyly convinces the public that his anger is due to his poor condition (when in fact it’s because the hunger artist is depressed at having his “great art” interrupted). The manager is concerned with entertainment, not art. He orchestrates gaudy celebrations at the end of the forty-day fasts, complete with brass bands and flower garlands. He forces a meal on the hunger artist and squeezes him to make him seem even more weak and vulnerable. The public’s changing whims ultimately get the better of the manager and his investment, however, and after dragging the hunger artist around Europe in desperate search of an audience, they finally part ways.
The Manager / Impresario Quotes in A Hunger Artist
The A Hunger Artist quotes below are all either spoken by The Manager / Impresario or refer to The Manager / Impresario. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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A Hunger Artist
Quotes
He had never yet—that people had to concede—left his cage of his own free will. The maximum period of starvation had been set by the manager at forty days, he permitted no longer stints than that, not even in major cities, and for a very good reason. He had learned from experience that by gradually intensified publicity the interest of a city could be kept alive for forty days, but at that point the public failed, there was a perceptible drop in the level of interest.
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So then on the fortieth day the door of the flower-garlanded cage was thrown open, an excited audience filled the amphitheatre, a brass band played, two doctors entered the cage to perform the necessary tests on the hunger artist, the results were relayed to the hall by means of a megaphone, and finally two young ladies, thrilled to have been chosen for the task, came to lead the hunger artist down a couple of steps to where a small table had been laid with a carefully assembled invalid meal.
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The Manager / Impresario Quotes in A Hunger Artist
The A Hunger Artist quotes below are all either spoken by The Manager / Impresario or refer to The Manager / Impresario. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
A Hunger Artist
Quotes
He had never yet—that people had to concede—left his cage of his own free will. The maximum period of starvation had been set by the manager at forty days, he permitted no longer stints than that, not even in major cities, and for a very good reason. He had learned from experience that by gradually intensified publicity the interest of a city could be kept alive for forty days, but at that point the public failed, there was a perceptible drop in the level of interest.
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Explanation and Analysis:
So then on the fortieth day the door of the flower-garlanded cage was thrown open, an excited audience filled the amphitheatre, a brass band played, two doctors entered the cage to perform the necessary tests on the hunger artist, the results were relayed to the hall by means of a megaphone, and finally two young ladies, thrilled to have been chosen for the task, came to lead the hunger artist down a couple of steps to where a small table had been laid with a carefully assembled invalid meal.
Related Characters:
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Explanation and Analysis:
