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By attempting to reveal, within approximately 100 pages, the links among anorectics, Irish hunger strikers, and writers, The Hunger Artists is an ambitious project. Its author, Maud Ellmann, a Cambridge University Lecturer in English, addresses the phenomenology of self-starvation, examining the similarities in the rituals of self-starvation and elucidating its metaphors. In this beautifully written book, she nonetheless seems to be trying to accomplish too much, encompass too much, and force connections where they do not exist.
Although this is not a psychoanalytic book, psychoanalytic theories are discussed. Ellmann calls on Freud, Klein, and Lacan to demonstrate how sexuality originates in early eating experiences and is haunted by images of ingestion. Indeed, Ellmann is at her best when discussing the object relations origins of eating, starving, and speaking. Food is clearly the prototype of all exchanges with an other and, in her words, “To refuse food is to deny the other at the cost of annihilation of the self: to sever the umbilicus of intersubjectivity” (p. 55). Illustrating the psychoanalytic view that anorexia is a defense against cannibalistic fantasies toward others, she further states: “Self-starvation represents an exorcism of the ghosts encrypted in the graveyard of the ego” (p. 42). On the other hand, Ellmann emphasizes the significance of the spectacle of self-starvers to highlight a different aspect of their object relations. Thus anorectics engage in self-destructive rituals because they “starve for attention.” Kafka's “Hunger Artist,” from whom Ellmann borrows her title, starves in a cage for the amusement of the populace. And Irish hunger strikers seek attention through the spectacle of starvation they so deftly engineer. Unfortunately, Ellmann does not attempt to reconcile the starving person's need to annihilate the object with his/her desperate need for the object's attention.