The “Conclusion” presents the potential benefits of human fasting experiments and performances to ‘advance’ medical knowledge, as described by Dr Gunn, a member of the supervisory board of Dr Henry Tanner’s fast in New York in 1880, and one of his biographers. It is through the historical analysis of these ‘benefits’ that this final chapter discusses the actual epistemological value and historical agency of hunger artists, and summarizes the main analytical frameworks of the book. This final chapter also recapitulates the main landmarks of the rich ‘topography’ of the land of the hunger artists, from the long list of cities in which public fasts took place, to the variety of ‘citizens’ of the land who circulated across its vast territory and the places and material objects that brought doctors, fasters, impresarios, and global publics together. At the end of the conclusion, I have added a short discussion about the reasons for the hunger artists’ decline in the 1920s, in an endeavour to place Kafka’s pessimistic view of the metier in a proper context.

In seeking to frame reading as a multimedia event, this chapter looks back to a period in the late nineteenth century when book-makers sought in various ways to refashion their products as audiobooks, and so to undo some of the principles that characterise silent reading. In this way, the chapter elaborates on the familiar history of gramophonic storage media by uncovering a pre-history that stretches right back to the technology of Thomas Edison in the 1870s. This, then, is an experiment in media archaeology, which is alive both to forgotten and aborted attempts to make books talk, and to books that like to imagine in more vicarious ways a reading culture unencumbered by the false principles of an ‘audiovisual litany’, as Jonathan Sterne once put it. The chapter touches on a variety of material – by Edward Bellamy and Bram Stoker, and by the French science fiction writers Albert Robida and Jules Verne – and it does so with a view to showing how imaginative writers anticipated the future of sound media.