Talk about Kafka!

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I haven't read the short stories in some time, but I did reread The Metamorphosis fairly recently. One of my two shining moments in college was a discussion on Metamorphosis in a world literature class (the other was a test in European history on the feudal system - highest score in the class). At the beginning of the hour my lit teacher asked the class of sleepy looking students (it was after lunch) what we thought of the story. I sheepishly (and not too confidently) said that Gregor's turning into a beetle was appropriate because his family treated him no better than an insect. My prof. kind of stared at me for a moment, and then said to the class, "Absolutely. We can all go home now, it usually takes the whole period to come to that conclusion."

Afterwards a couple of students wanted to study with me because they thought I was smart, but that didn't last long.

The beauty of Kafka is that he makes the absurd natural, and fills it with grim humanity.

I love Dickens.

There's only one book that while reading I felt that I was losing my grip on reality, and it wasn't Kafka. It was Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, as Raskolnikov descends into madness. It made me dizzy and I had to stop and get my bearings.

Z

Primo Levi (yes, him again), who was, as you know, influenced by Kafka, also used gallows humor. Absurdity is one of his staples also. The contrast between Kafka and Levi lies in that Kafka was a pessimist and Levi was an optimist.

I tried reading The Trial
a while back & could not understand
what was going on.

Is reading The Trial worth it?

Also, a lot of movies use Kafka's style
as an aesthetic for the plotline.
Some to check out include the following:

The Machinist
Stay
Fight Club
Stranger than Fiction
The Sixth Sense
Unbreakable
Secret Window
Panic Room
Red Eye
Insomnia

Actually found a copy of The Trial in english at local second hand bookshop 2 weeks ago. Started it.

Can not bear the absence of meaning.

Meaning is persistently hinted at, explanation is promised, ... ... people do things for yes, absurd reasons presented as entirely normal, without reason, ... ... and there is no final reason which makes any sense. It is my worst nightmare. ( Everything seems a crucial bit out of proportion/scale and not to have secure/stable physical existence. I even find the fact that his bedroom opens out into his landlady's dining/sitting room disorientating for instance).

I decided in January to "do-belief" in god because I am tired of/existentially exhausted by just such an unceasing search for meaning, eternally unsatisfied attempts to attribute cause/responsibility. I don't believe in god all the time, but whenever I do I get relief from exactly that unending quest for the perpetually postponed explanation of everything, from that struggling to get to a mirage of meaning/sense.

I find myself thanking god for belief in god.

I understand how it could seem funny. I remember finding his novel "America" an uneasy mixture of humour and disaster/stress and consequently disliking it. And rereading The Trial this time can see how it could resemble "Dumb and Dumber" or "The Pink Panther" for complete absurdity if timed right, or "Clockwise" for total disaster for no sufficient reason. I can remember finding Clockwise painful the first time I watched it, ( whereas now I love it), because I kept wanting/needing the headmaster, Stimpson, to get out of the mess.

Maybe if I read The Trial a few times I would laugh, when I've stopped worrying about the protagonist, if it didn't seem so boring/plodding/stilted. I think it needs a good director.

I like Kafka because it’s cathartic. He mirrors my own feeling of futility and emotional emptiness with his imagery. The fact that it’s so spot on somehow brings a smile to my face. For me reading his stuff didn’t pull the emptiness closer, it somehow made it seem more distant / hypothetical while still maintaining that “sad but true” sense of reality.

The way he writes is so cold and analytical. I can completely understand the protagonist’s perception of reality while still feeling comfortably distant from it.

Seeing a tragedy from an analytical point of view somehow makes it easier to swallow. How can I articulate this concept? Kind of like a person that is terrified of his own mortality but decides to work in a morgue and study the science behind the decay of corpses and the methods used to preserve them. That’s my personality type. I tend to develop a fascination with the very topics that frighten me. I was terrified of lightning as a child, but simultaneously I developed a fascination with it. I hated loud music / noise as a child, yet now I tend to enjoy very harsh / loud / noisy music the most.

It’s the same thing with existential philosophy. It’s easier for me to see the beauty in mortality than to spend my time running from it. For me trying to avoid certain thoughts paradoxically brings them closer. On the contrary, analyzing those same thoughts seems to distance them, or at least take some of their dreadful weight away.

Maybe I’m unusual. I’ve always been somewhat of a ruminator. It’s the only way I can cope with my anxieties. Telling me to "look on the bright side" does not work. It makes me feel worse. I need to acknowledge and analyze my problems / anxieties to feel better about them, even though most people see it as pointless.

Out of curiosity, what translation are you reading?


Yes it's the analyticality that I love so much about Kafka. But at the same time, especially in the Castle, I think Kafka also seems to show how absurd it is; elaborately thought out interpretations of events that go on for pages are shattered and dismissed in the next moment. I'm thinking especially of the conversation between K. and the second bar girl Pepi. Kafka indulged a rather lengthy analysis of events from her at one point, but then K. completely refutes it and attributes it to her narrow sight of events. Characters engage in these completely artificial, very elaborate analytical monologues which are then rendered senseless in the next moment in his work.

The characters are artificial, we can see directly into their struggles for understanding in an absurd world, and we can see its futility.

Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir in 1935. Penguin books. It's a very second hand copy I found.

You've made me think now, because I remember being shocked to discover, when was beginning to read in french here, how much a translation made a difference to the indispensable humour in Agatha Christie books ( which was all the french i was up to reading at first). Some translations lost it completely.

And of course in films; the french dubbing of english language comedy is almost without exception unsatisfactory. As it is in the opposite direction. And in fact comedy/humour seems to suffer more than anything else apart from real horror.

So I need to dust off my German and read the original, or is there a really good english language translation? Not that I am likely to get it while here in france.

Last edited by ouinon on 15 May 2008, 1:52 am, edited 1 time in total.

Me too! Totally. And I only worked this out 3 years ago. It's why I need phrases like "Life is pain", ( my signature), which I privately transform to "Life is s**t" when I really need to remind myself of it.

I can't say it'll cure all your problems with it, but I think the version I read was translated by Breon Mitchell. It has not been my impression that the Muirs' translations are very highly thought of anymore. Breon Mitchell's is fairly recent and is supposed to be more faithful, I think...

It seems strange (and somewhat horrifying) that Kafka fond his own work funny - it's just about the grimmest I've ever read - it's like the dictum in 'Cat's Cradle': 'Man is vile; he knows nothing worth knowing, has done nothing worth doing'
Don't get me wrong, I think Kafka is brilliant, it appeals so directly to a sense of fundamental absurdity and brilliantly portrays the bureaucratic stupidity of many people.