{"id":101381,"date":"2023-02-22T17:05:57","date_gmt":"2023-02-22T15:05:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=101381"},"modified":"2023-02-16T07:34:33","modified_gmt":"2023-02-16T05:34:33","slug":"23-05-80","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=101381","title":{"rendered":"A Kafka for Our Times"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>A Kafka for Our Times<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

MARCO ROTH<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

A new completist edition of Kafka\u2019s diaries lures readers into the Kafkaesque experience of seeing the author dissolve into an auto-fictional scrapheap.<\/strong>.<\/span><\/h4>\n

The contemporary Kafka has been reinterpreted according to the middlebrow progressive narrative of our eraCRISTI CROITORU\/ALAMY<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

My first copy of Kafka\u2019s diaries was salvaged from a crowded shelf in Bookleaves, a secondhand shop on New York\u2019s West Fourth Street. I paid $2 for each volume\u2014the price marked in pencil on the overleaf. Two standard-size (8-inch-by-5.25-inch) paperbacks slid easily into the side pockets of the overcoat I\u2019d thrifted from my father\u2019s closet. By that point, my senior year of high school, my father had lost so much weight from his illness that the coat no longer warmed him. Although the garment always remained too big, it was plenty warm for me, and I never then doubted I\u2019d eventually fill it.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

What I didn\u2019t realize was that I also buying a souvenir of the old West Village as it was crumbling around me, that place and time where \u201cKafka was the Rage\u201d\u2014in Anatole Broyard\u2019s memorably cynical summation of a moment when New York\u2019s bohemians tried to fashion their lives into works of art. Bookleaves is now Cafe St. Tropez, offering a different type of aspirational elsewhereness for people trying to fashion their lives into nonfungible tokens. Like the protagonist of Kafka\u2019s parable \u201cDeparture,\u201d the neighborhood and those in it only want to be something other than themselves: \u201cAway from here, that\u2019s my goal!\u201d The diary editions I picked up were also a souvenir of a different idea of what a \u201cdemocratic publishing culture\u201d should look like. In this now-vanished world, so-called \u201chighbrow\u201d or difficult literature was offered to the \u201cmasses\u201d for self-improvement and what would now be called \u201cself-realization\u201d in the \u201cmiddlebrow\u201d form of inexpensive, portable, and readable paperback editions.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The diaries that came to keep me company on city buses, subway rides, and walks turned out to be only partially the work of \u201cKafka.\u201d First there was Max Brod, originator and custodian of the Kafka myth, who\u2019d produced a heavily circumscribed version of the diaries in German. This text served in turn as the template for translators Joseph Kresh\u2014whose fate is lost to the internet\u2014and Martin Greenberg, the multifaceted poet, translator, editor, and critic whose versatility ensured that he remained less known than his single-minded older art critic brother, Clement. Hannah Arendt added some 20 entries Brod had left out. She was then the editorial director of Schocken Books\u2014unthinkable now even in these times of greater diversity to \u201cempower\u201d an actual intellectual at a publishing house.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

A product of autres temps, autres moeurs<\/em>, also of other desires, the books reached out to me\u2014a teenager in 1992\u2014thanks to their intriguing cover art\u2014an almost abstract photograph of the Karluv Most in Prague\u2014wide margins hospitable to scribbling, the full-page black-and-white reproductions of Kafka\u2019s line drawings, and a neat, easily navigable table of contents furnished with intriguing subtitles meant to lure the curious browser: \u201cMy education has done me great harm,\u201d \u201cThe Yiddish theater troupe,\u201d \u201cThe literature of small peoples,\u201d \u201cHe seduced a girl,\u201d \u201cNew York harbor\u2014a dream.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Here I\u2019d found my own version of \u201cthe axe to break the frozen sea within us\u201d\u2014as Kafka wrote to Oskar Pollack after reading the entirety of 19th-century poet Christian Friedrich Hebbel\u2019s diaries in two weeks, \u201clike a caveman who, initially as a joke and out of boredom, rolls a block in front of the entrance to his cave.\u201d While my high school peers were discovering all the varieties of grass available in Central Park\u2019s Sheep Meadow, here was my true drug, modernist literature, which I would consume in solitude.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The clich\u00e9 about Kafka, which, like all clich\u00e9s, contains some truth, is that he\u2019s the great prose poet of a particular kind of adolescent estrangement, often but not necessarily male: \u201cSomeone must have been telling lies about Joseph K …\u201d \u201cGregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams to find he\u2019d been transformed …\u201d \u201cInjustice has been done to you more than anyone on the ship. Why are you putting up with everything!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

No one transformed ordinary human misery into cosmic unhappiness like Kafka.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

The world inhabited by his characters is arbitrary and capricious. Agency counts for little. The protagonist undergoes, submits, endures, responding instead of acting, making, or influencing. Decisions, when they come, as when K in The Castle<\/em> seduces Frieda, Klamm\u2019s mistress, or Karl Rossmann stands up to his uncle and patron, only open the way to more unintended consequences and changes of state. The stories already felt like my life, so I hoped the diaries would provide me with some clues, some equipment for surviving it.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The Kafka who\u2019d been created by Max Brod\u2019s selection from the diaries was both intimidating and familiar: He spent his time with friends in caf\u00e9s discussing literature and the fate of the Jewish people, he went to plays, he traveled, he yearned, particularly after unobtainable women. There was the perpetual struggle to find time to write: \u201cAwful. Wrote nothing today. No time tomorrow.\u201d (June 7, 1912) The struggle to write within the few hours he found: \u201cComplete standstill. Endless torments.\u201d (Feb. 7, 1915) But then the stark differences! It seemed he\u2019d written all of The Judgment<\/em> (the story about a young man sentenced to death by his own father) in one intense session, \u201con the night of the 22 to the 23 from 10 o\u2019clock in the evening until 6 o\u2019clock in the morning. My legs had grown so stiff from sitting that I could hardly pull them out from under the desk. The terrible strain and joy …\u201d (Sept. 23, 1912). He possessed an ascetic\u2019s nobility, determination, and also an electric prose style. What was not to like?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

My aunt, the first writer I\u2019d met in real life, once tried warning against the tendency toward Kafkaism that she\u2019d sensed growing within me\u2014the idea, as she thought of it, that true literature and art were only born from suffering and that writers were required to lead desperate, unhappy lives. It was an outmoded idea, she said, European rather than American. You could, as she\u2019d done, find fulfillment in marriage, enjoy one\u2019s children and the fruits of one\u2019s labor. That she delivered this advice poolside at the Amagansett house that she and her psychoanalyst husband had bought in the early 1990s might have proved her point. But it also proved my silent counterargument: If I had to share literature with these well-off, well-adjusted people, what would I be left with that I could truly call my own except my unhappiness? That unhappiness only made sense if the world I moved through was, like Kafka\u2019s own, a broken or distorted one. \u201cKafka\u2019s prose sides with the outcasts,\u201d as Adorno wrote.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n

As it turned out, the best cure for my Kafkaism would have been more Kafka, especially in the form of Schocken\u2019s new translation of the complete and unexpurgated diaries and notebooks. The Kafka who emerges from these pages is somehow a smaller man, even if there is altogether more of him. Readers of Kafka\u2019s famous \u201cLetter to his Father\u201d will be familiar with this strategy of diminishment through the bigging up of an object. Exaggeration isn\u2019t required so much as a shift in scale. No longer a prodigy, this Kafka is merely prodigious. The new edition works this magic through a stubborn fidelity to approximating a totality of the available information.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

For the first time in English, readers can now read all 12 of Kafka\u2019s notebooks, from 1910-23, in the very order (or disorder) in which they were written, along with assorted travel journals and various \u201cBundles of Paper\u201d\u2014so named in the new stark table of contents, contained within a single door-stopper of a volume. The intention, in the original German, was a critical edition for scholars, but the effect in translation has been to produce neither a work of scholarship nor of literature, but a massive mess.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The mess is partly by design. In his preface, Ross Benjamin, the heroic and gifted translator, explains that he was aiming for \u201ca glimpse into Kafka\u2019s workshop.\u201d This he obtains by \u201cdeliberately translating fragments, however truncated, cryptic, or seemingly marginal; nonstandard and omitted punctuation; orthographic errors, unorthodoxies, and inconsistencies; occasionally awkward, convoluted, and even mangled syntax; repetitions, abbreviations; contractions; regionalisms; slips of the pen …\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The same originalist and completist approach governs the arrangement of the text. A careful bureaucrat by day, Kafka eschewed standardization in his notebooks: Undated entries are just that; others alternate between Roman numerals for the year and Arabic for the month and date; sometimes he can\u2019t be bothered to write the year; the \u201cStoker\u201d sequence that became the opening of Amerika<\/em> began in the fifth notebook, mainly covering the year 1912, but was continued back in the second notebook, covering both 1911 and 1912, and appears earlier in the book. The reader must stumble on the second half first, without benefit of footnotes or an index entry.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Readers looking for Kafka\u2019s response to the outbreak of World War I have a slightly easier task. Kafka\u2019s well-known laconic entry of Aug. 2, 1914, \u201cGermany has declared war on Russia. Swimming school in the afternoon\u201d floats in the seventh notebook and is properly indexed, but the more trenchant observation a few pages later about patriotic parades organized by Jewish merchants\u2014\u201cOne of the most disgusting symptoms of the war\u201d\u2014has escaped the indexer\u2019s notice. The essay made famous by Deleuze and Guattari as \u201cToward a Minor Literature\u201d and translated in the Arendt\/Greenberg\/Kresh version under the title \u201cThe Literature of Small Peoples\u201d is dispersed into the several fragments in which Kafka orginally wrote it, without a title or index entry.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n

The preface also makes much of the rounder and more embodied Kafka that appears in this complete form, \u201c[his] complex sexuality and all-too-human impulses, ambivalences and shortcomings. \u201dAgain, the critical apparatus of this \u201ccritical edition\u201d lets the reader down: There are no entries for circumcision, gonorrhea, prostitution, sex work, or tuberculosis (the disease that killed him), although Kafka indeed recounts his observations, fears, and experiences with all of these, along with what we\u2019d today call \u201can eating disorder.\u201d The only way to find something is to stop looking for it and read on.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The joke is too obvious: The experience of reading this new edition is Kafkaesque.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The fragmentary elegance of the midcentury diaries has been transformed into something weird, inexplicable, and monstrous: A hypertrophied collector\u2019s item adorned with a single art deco hieroglyph. Ross Benjamin faults Brod for having \u201cpresented the diaries to the extent possible in the guise of a Werk<\/em>, a cohesive and fixed work, rather than Schrift<\/em>, writing as a fluid ongoing goalless activity.\u201d But the paradox of schriftiness<\/em> is that when it\u2019s bound up and published as a book, it is transformed into Werk. <\/em>Plus, anyone with a scholarly interest in Kafka would be able to read him in the original German.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

If the earlier sin of middlebrow Kafka reception was making him out as just another existentialist author (\u201cHe is assimilated into an established trend of thought while little attention is paid to those aspects of his work which resist such assimilation,\u201d sniffed Adorno), the contemporary Kafka, nearing the centenary of his death, has been reinterpreted according to the middlebrow progressive narrative of our era: Kafka is a \u201cworkshopping\u201d auto-fictionist from the wrong place at the wrong time! This is not the Kafka whose work Walter Benjamin appreciated as \u201ca sickness of tradition\u201d\u2014both of European literature and Jewish mysticism\u2014but merely a less fortunate forerunner of a tendency accomplished most recently in Karl Ove Knausgaard and Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux. The diaries are the place where fiction and reality sit literally side by side, bleed into each other, and are largely indistinguishable; all is resolved into text. Kafka comes back into domesticated view as a kind of late avant-garde conceptualist before it was cool, the writer committed to a mystical biological process\u2014the act of writing. Actually, this vision isn\u2019t so far from the earlier middlebrow existential Kafka: i.e., writing being simply what the writer does, whether it\u2019s an enumeration of bowel complaints, the account of a doomed flirtation with a married actress, four versions of an opening to what will eventually become an unfinished story, or a relatively clean draft of the opening chapter of the novel The Missing Person<\/em> that the now much maligned Brod had the genius to market to the world as Amerika<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Here indeed is a Kafka for our time. The author who imagined himself a circus freak displayed in a cage for all the world to see in The Hunger Artist <\/em>and as a speaking ape in Report to an Academy<\/em> was only unfortunate to have died before the advent of \u201cAuthortube\u201d videos in which \u201cthe artist\u201d cheerily narrates her \u201cwriting process\u201d as she turns out another neatly tuned piece of genre fiction for Amazon\u2019s Kindle Direct Publishing algorithm in the hopes of one day landing a contract with Schocken\u2019s parent company.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

But \u201cprocess,\u201d as reading Kafka always reminds us, also has another meaning in German: trial. We cannot banish the artist\u2019s suffering by reframing him or her, nor can that suffering be redeemed by the ritual of exhuming Kafka only to rebury him with full honors inside a leaden, coffinlike box of a book.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Despite all its unintentional distortions in the name of completeness, the new Kafka diaries, just like the older ones, offer plenty of reminders of the author\u2019s true gifts. Kafka\u2019s genius doesn\u2019t lie in his unhappiness and alienation\u2014my aunt was right about that part. What stands out about Kafka is his aliveness on the page, an aliveness achieved by very few writers before or since. The key to that aliveness comes from his devotion to gesture, to bodies in motion and at rest, and it derives from his love of the theater, extensively chronicled in the earliest notebooks. Here are the first three entries: \u201cThe spectators stiffen when the train passes,\u201d \u201c\u2018Whenever he ahsks me\u2019 the ah broken free from the sentence flew away like a ball in the meadow.\u201d \u201cHis seriousness is killing me. His head in his collar, his hair arranged immovably around his skull, the muscles at the bottom of his cheeks tensed in place.\u201d Whether it\u2019s stiffening, flying, or tensing, every sentence quivers.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

When this observation of gestures and bodies matures, it produces writing that even animates mental activity, like this later entry from 1914 on reading Strindberg, \u201cI don\u2019t read him to read him, but rather to lie on his breast. He holds me on his left arm like a child. I sit there like a man on a statue. Ten times I almost slip off, but on the eleventh attempt I sit there firmly, feel secure, and have a wide view.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Is this a parable? A metaphor? One might as well ask that question about a modern dance. Every page of Kafka, whether edited and arranged by Brod, or Ross Benjamin, or filtered through squadrons of translators, offers these irrepressible glimpses of action. On watching a bad play: \u201cAll that remains of the 2nd act is the delicate neck of a girl which is stretched and tensed from shoulders clad in reddish brown between puggy sleeves to the small head.\u201d From there, it\u2019s a quick jump to the concluding sentence of \u201cThe Metamorphosis,\u201d when Gregor Samsa\u2019s sister finally leaves their cursed apartment, boards a tram, springs to her feet and \u201cstretches her young body.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

With the intuition of the best critics, Walter Benjamin understood this immersion in movement to be the signature of Kafka\u2019s style, the essence of the writer, without ever even having laid eyes on the diaries or read his gossipy entries on his friendship with Max Brod. \u201cEach gesture is an event, one might even say a drama in itself. The gesture remains the decisive thing, the center of the event.\u201d And, later, \u201cKafka\u2019s entire work constitutes a code of gestures which surely had no definite symbolic meaning for the author from the outset; rather the author tried to derive such a meaning from them in ever changing contexts and experimental groupings.\u201d It\u2019s in this restless, vivid experimentation that Kafka continues to speak to us, transcending and resisting each and all of the avant-garde and philosophical movements he was adjacent with and later assimilated into: surrealism, expressionism, existentialism, theosophy, Jewish mysticism, and now, the latest of these and probably not the last, post-literary auto-fictional conceptualism.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n

Marco Roth<\/strong> is Tablet\u2019s Book Critic at Large<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n

Zawarto\u015b\u0107 publikowanych artyku\u0142\u00f3w i materia\u0142\u00f3w nie reprezentuje pogl\u0105d\u00f3w ani opinii Reunion’68,<\/em>
\nani te\u017c webmastera Blogu Reunion’68, chyba ze jest to wyra\u017anie zaznaczone.
\nTwoje uwagi, linki, w\u0142asne artyku\u0142y lub wiadomo\u015bci prze\u015blij na adres:
\n<\/em>webmaster@reunion68.com<\/span><\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Kafka for Our Times MARCO ROTH A new completist edition of Kafka\u2019s diaries lures readers into the Kafkaesque experience of seeing the author dissolve into an auto-fictional scrapheap.. The contemporary Kafka has been reinterpreted according to the middlebrow progressive narrative of our eraCRISTI CROITORU\/ALAMY My first copy of Kafka\u2019s diaries was salvaged from a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101381"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=101381"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101735,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101381\/revisions\/101735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=101381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=101381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=101381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}