Franz Kafka

[Sybarite]

... Now in 1984 how can you not like Winston, who is willing to kill, lie, steal and throw acid into peoples' faces for freedom?

Quite easily. I think he's pathetic. I detested the book (only read it a couple of years ago) and found it completely unsympathetic. It's good to know where all the famous phrases ('Bog Brother', 'hate week', 'Room 101') come from, and Orwell's predictions of a surveillance society are worryingly coming true.

But I didn't enjoy the writing and there was not a single character that I felt anything for.

I think that Winston doesn't really make informed and considered decisions about what he's doing but simply gets drawn along on a tide of events.

 

[fausto]

Well, it's sort of the point, isn't it?

 

[Sybarite]

Well, it's sort of the point, isn't it?

Indeed. But as I said, I can sympathise with Sam Lowry in Terry Gilliam's Brazil ? so it is possible to illustrate the helplessness etc, but without losing sympathy for the person caught at the centre of it.

 

[Heteronym]

But Lowry isn't passive: he's a cog in a well-oiled machine; and he gets in trouble because he starts working out of tune. His problem, much like Winston's, is that his actions don't ever amount to much.

 

[Sybarite]

But Lowry isn't passive: he's a cog in a well-oiled machine; and he gets in trouble because he starts working out of tune. His problem, much like Winston's, is that his actions don't ever amount to much.

I just personally find him massively more sympathetic. I don't think that the issue is what actions amount to (in this context) but how much he attempts to take action. And there is an extent to which everyone is a 'cog' in the machine ? K is in the Kafka too. Such a story has to begin with someone who is inside the system in order to show the nightmarish nature of the system itself.

I came to 1984 only having previously read Orwell's Animal Farm (which I like a lot) and expecting much. I was hugely disappointed. I finished it, but really didn't enjoy it one iota. I thought Winston utterly wet.

 

[Eric]

Next time I'm having a pee in a public lav, I'll remember that: "Bog Brother is watching you".

I think Kafka and Orwell are rather different beasts. As I always claim, the biography, nationality and background of a person is usually very relevant to their writings.

Orwell is greatly respected in Eastern & Central Europe for seeing through the rhetoric and lies of the Soviet system. He had his fill of Commies in Catalonia: they wanted to get rid of Franco, but then started their own purges in the ranks. But Orwell is still a bit of a Burmese policeman (maybe the r?gime needs a few now...). His humour points outwards - he is criticising Communism, something "out there" which didn't affect his everyday life once Erridge, as parts of him are called in the Anthony Powell novels, gets back to Britain. He was a good observer.

Personally, I think that while Animal Farm is a comic caricature, 1984 does examine the more creepy aspects of a totalitarian system, like thought control, censorship and state lies. And the erosion of private life. The last paragraph of 1984 is an excellent reflection of how people, after torture or mistreatment (e.g. a decade in the Gulag) ended up loving Stalin in the Soviet Union, because it was the easiest way out psychologically. Even today, there are veterans of WWI alive who think that the sun shone out of Stalin's arse. They cannot see that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the mass murder of key Russian generals by Stalin will have made WWI a much tougher fight. Orwell picked up this mentality and reproduces it well. Orwell is a good author to read when thinking about life in North Korea today.

On the other hand, Kafka's experience of the Yiddish theatre and the sheer absurdity of everyday life in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, gave him a more zany outlook on life. He is more the self-deprecating Jewish clown, like so many American comedians. Even at his blackest, Kafka is still somehow humorous. The Absurd is writ large in his books and stories. His take on all this is much more from the inside - he was living in Prague, not on Jura.

 

[Stewart]

There's an essay in the Telegraph by Zadie Smith regarding his "biographical aura".

 

[cuchulain]

The first article I mentioned was, in fact, a review of Reiner Stach's 728-page book called simply "Kafka". This appeared in a slightly shorter English translation in 2006:

Excellent book. I bought it recently. Already had Pawel's and Calasso's book. Pawel was the Kafka bio for me. Also excellent. Really places him as a minority among minorities among minorities. Also, Kafka, Love and Courage, about Milena Jesenska is fascinating. Her own life, and her time with Kafka.

I loved The Trial and The Castle . . . and have read most of his short stories several times. I think his short stories are his strength. His endless search for perfection hurt his longer works. He could never finish them. Like a painter who paints and overpaints and turns everything to a shade of gray. Well, no. Not like that at all, really.

Of course, even unfinished, Kafka's two major novels are masterpieces. But I think his temperament was for the short work. Like Borges and Pessoa. Sprinters rather than marathon runners.

(Murakami takes that to a whole new level as he actually runs marathons. Says it helps his writing . . . . )

All in all, I think Kafka is the most important writer of the 20th century. Not necessarily the best. But the most important. He tapped into the zeitgeist in an unprecedented manner, before it was even there in full. Really, when there was just a hint about it. He was perhaps more prophet than novelist, more oracle than master of the longer form. He's a giant either way . . .

 

[Eric]

I agree about Kafka. But you should beware of too many superlatives:

All in all, I think Kafka is the most important writer of the 20th century.

I would be more inclined to say "one of the most influential writers of the 20th century", as that avoids singling out one writer at the pinnacle. Remember, all ratings of this sort depend on translations into many languages. If Max Brod had burnt more, or the Brits had turned their noses up at Kafka, he might never have had the widespread influence he had. And his reputation depends on the fact that he was translated into a lot more languages than English only.

A giant, fair enough, but the most important writer? This implies a kind of pyramid, where there's only room for one author at the pointy top.

 

[Mirabell]

I agree about Kafka. But you should beware of too many superlatives:



I would be more inclined to say "one of the most influential writers of the 20th century", as that avoids singling out one writer at the pinnacle. Remember, all ratings of this sort depend on translations into many languages. If Max Brod had burnt more, or the Brits had turned their noses up at Kafka, he might never have had the widespread influence he had. And his reputation depends on the fact that he was translated into a lot more languages than English only.

A giant, fair enough, but the most important writer? This implies a kind of pyramid, where there's only room for one author at the pointy top.

For once, I agree with Eric.

 

[Ellen]

The problem is that I did only read his book "The Metamorphosis". "The Trial" is still on my to-do list.

 

[rabbitfast]

I've only read The Trial (just finished it a couple of days ago) but I definitely plan on reading more. I read K. more as someone who refuses to conform to the norms that are clearly absurd than simply a passive man who doesn't try hard enough to survive. Maybe I'm misreading but certainly one of the messages I get from the whole thing is "conform or die"...a metaphor for life almost. One might find the world and its norms absurd and pointless... and yet, one has to conform to a certain extent in order to survive. I'm not sure that I'm making sense.

 

[Eric]

Both The Trial and The Castle deal especially with the absurdity of man-made rules. But protagonists are on a kind of journey through a maze of illogical events. The settings also reflect this. I imagine that Kafka drew a lot of his inspiration from real life in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The Wikipedia article gives a good all-round view of him:

Franz Kafka - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The section on his style is illuminating:

Style of writing

Kafka often made extensive use of a trait special to the German language allowing for long sentences that sometimes can span an entire page. Kafka's sentences then deliver an unexpected impact just before the full stop - that being the finalizing meaning and focus. This is achieved due to the construction of certain sentences in German which require that the verb be positioned at the end of the sentence. Such constructions cannot be duplicated in English, so it is up to the translator to provide the reader with the same effect found in the original text. One such instance of a Kafka translator's quandary is demonstrated in the first sentence of The Metamorphosis.

Another virtually insurmountable problem facing the translator is how to deal with the author's intentional use of ambiguous terms or of words that have several meanings. An example is Kafka's use of the German noun Verkehr in the final sentence of The Judgment. Literally, Verkehr means intercourse and, as in English, can have either a sexual or non-sexual meaning; in addition, it is used to mean transport or traffic. The sentence can be translated as: "At that moment an unending stream of traffic crossed over the bridge." What gives added weight to the obvious double meaning of 'Verkehr' is Kafka's confession to his friend and biographer Max Brod that when he wrote that final line, he was thinking of "a violent ejaculation." In the English translation, of course, what can 'Verkehr' be but "traffic?"

This shows two things that the translator has to wrestle with: long sentences and ambiguity.

 

[Stewart]

I managed to have a flick through Kafka's The Office Writings yesterday. If you don't know about it, then it's pretty much the last translations of Kafka's work. And in this sense work is exactly what it is. It's four hundred pages, or so, of the writings he made whilst working at the Prague Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute. Aside from official documents and the like it also contains letters written to different bodies about safety issues and the like. In theory, it sounds interesting, but probably more as one you would dip into sporadically rather than devour from cover to cover.

 

[A Common Reader]

I enjoy reading writers who follow in Kafka's footsteps, whether knowingly or unknowingly. Themes such as

Wandering through cities never quite getting your bearings
The sense of needing to be somewhere else but unable to get there
Having done something wrong but not quite knowing what it is.

Examples among many:

The Shoe Tester of Frankfurt - Wilhelm Genazino
Metropole - Ferenc Karinthy
The Game of Cards - Adolf Schroder
The Unconsoled - Kazuo Ishiguro
Missing Persons - Hartmut Lange

If anyone knows any more perhaps they could let me know as I'd like to read them.

Tom

 

[nnyhav]

I enjoy reading writers who follow in Kafka's footsteps, whether knowingly or unknowingly. Themes such as

Wandering through cities never quite getting your bearings
The sense of needing to be somewhere else but unable to get there
Having done something wrong but not quite knowing what it is.

You surely know of the more direct takes by Murakami and Coetzee, for example.

So, some perhaps less familiar examples of defamiliarization:
Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading
Lem, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub
Robbe-Grillet, Topology of a Phantom City, Recollections of the Golden Triangle
Lispector, Hour of the Star (cf kpjayan)

 

[A Common Reader]

Thanks nnyhav

I don't know any of those books and will look them up.

Tom

 

[nnyhav]

An Alienation Artist: Kafka and his Critics by Alexander Provan

What is the Kafkaesque? It is the scene described in Kafka's story "A Report to an Academy," in which an eloquent ape candidly recounts his arduous path toward civilization: "There is an excellent idiom: to fight one's way through the thick of things; that is what I have done." It is, Begley suggests, that familiar existential predicament so often played out by Kafka's characters, who "struggle in a maze that sometimes seems to have been designed on purpose to thwart and defeat them. More often, the opposite appears to be true: there is no purpose; the maze simply exists." It is the explosion of the international market for mortgage-backed securities and derivatives, in which value is not attached to the thing itself but to speculation on an invented product tangentially related to (but not really tied to) that thing. It is FEMA's process for granting housing assistance after Hurricane Katrina: victims were routinely informed of their applications' rejection by letters offering not actual explanations but "reason codes." It is the Bush administration's declaration that certain Guant?namo Bay detainees who had wasted away for years without trial were "no longer enemy combatants" and its simultaneous refusal to release them or clarify whether they had ever been such. It is, as Walter Benjamin wrote, "the form which things assume in oblivion." "Kafkaesque," in other words, is a phrase that has come to represent very much about modern life while signifying very little.

(via)

 

[Cavalier Bizarre]

I would implore those interested in Metamorphosis to read Nabokov's lecture (Nabokov's Metamorphosis) on it, or watch it as wonderfully acted and delivered by Christopher Plummer (YouTube - Vladimir Nabokov - The Metamorphosis -- note: part two is in related videos), if they have not already.

Besides Metamorphosis, The Trail, The Castle, I find myself really enjoying his short stories, notably A Country Doctor, A Hunger Artist, and The Vulture.

I highly recommend Koji Yamamura's visual adaptation of A Country Doctor of the same name, which is, in my opinion, the best Kafka adaptation to any visual medium. The animation style is deliciously surreal and Yamamura clearly comprehends the story on a high level, which is very likely about the birth of psychoanalysis and Freud's use of his own personality to spark its beginnings. I have an article, Kafka, Freud, and "Ein Landarzt," by Eric Marson and Keith Leopold that explores the subject in depth; if you are interested in it, let me know and I will send it to you.

Prevrashchenie, a Metamorphosis adaptation directed by Valeri Fokin, is another film I would recommend to you.

Does anyone have any thoughts on The Vulture? This story intrigues me very much.

 

[Heteronym]

That's a pretty disturbing story, but it has everything that defines Kafka: the incomprehensible horror, the useless cry for help, the sense of loneliness. I was tempted to call it a parable, but of what? A parable must refer to something common in human behavior. But the final moral I get from it is, endure suffering alone for a long time rather than have it kill you in a moment.

Maybe that's life: you must go through it alone and in the end no one can help you. Maybe the vultures are time, consumming the man little by little.