kafka

no link. i typed it (as you can see)

which is to say: look, it's certainly admirable to attempt to unseat a lot of the myths that swirl around Kafka, to separate the actual work from the legend, to unsettle conventional wisdom that's settled into received fact. But why the paranoia and deliberate overstatement of your own in tempering what you see as falshoods? Why "admitting to Kafka's porn also unlocks the truth of his whole literary life"? WTF does that even mean? Why paint acadamics, of all people, as evil lords of information who don't want readers to know the truth? Or: "a man who had no more inkling of the Holocaust than anyone else"? Who does he think claimed that Kafka had actual foreknowledge of the Holocaust, rather than suggesting that his works seem to foreshadow it in retrospect?

Yeah, that's...yeah.

Anyway, a timely revival as I've finally read The Trial. The various eternal explications of legal policy had me in stitches.

I love the novels (had a soft spot for parts of 'America', its been years since I've read him tho'). Funnily enough I never got round the short stories so I'll do that now.

He's certainly not the first to point out that Kafka had a sense of humor. What I really want to know is, exactly what was in that locked bookcase? Titles, please.

Anyway, a timely revival as I've finally read The Trial. The various eternal explications of legal policy had me in stitches.

I also just finished it. A few thoughts:

1. The traditional existentialist interpretation is an ill fit.
2. There's a lack of focus, compared to his short stories.
3. It feels like Kafka wrote about 1/2 of it before he died, not 7/8ths.

Also, fixed:

Titties, please.

"Wow, she has a nice set of Kafkas!"

that is a joke like Jeffrey Dahmer was a chef

I find the novels dull, but that's the point, in a way. However, I can read the short fiction and letters over and over.

Kafka is totally a porn name

K.

terrible writer

I remember Orson Welles speaking about his (seriously underrated IMHO) "Trial" adaptation as part of that epic BBC interview he did , and saying that people didn't realise that Kafka's work was meant to be funny. Couple of significant references to Pr0n in the movie, too.

And "titties please'? Excuse me for being interested, and excuse me for having a sexuality, but I seriously want to know: If he had first editions of Sade, or Sacher-Masoch, or whomever, that becomes an influence and throws a whole different light on his work.

I love Welles' movie.

yeah alot of his work was definitely meant to be comedic.

"The clarity and concreteness of Kafka’s sometimes Chaplinesque vision underlie another comic moment, a great moment in Western civilization. In 1914, shortly after war broke out, Kafka read aloud the first chapter of The Trial. Now keep in mind what happens there: Joseph K. awakens one fine morning to find himself rudely arrested under dubious authority for an unspecified crime. So Kafka sat and read. "We friends of his," Brod says, "laughed quite uncontrollably when he let us hear the first chapter of The Trial. And he himself laughed so much that at moments he couldn’t go on reading."

Can't a dude just enjoy some fine titties without having to bring the Marquis de Sade into it?

Hey, you're the one that pulled me over for asking for specifics. And, yes, I want to know.

Even if it is just Bohemian Farmers Wives Vol III

I didn't pull you over, and I can see why nobody "gets" Kafka's humor now 'cause everyone who reads him is a humorless sniffer!

joeks, de bruv

OK. But I think that there's a legitimate interest in Kafka's erotica collection (porn stash) as a literary influence. Particularly when looking at, say, 'In the penal colony', for example.

For example, you can't look at Bruno Schulz without acknowledging he was a total foot-freak.

am i right in thinking that kafka meant us to assume that

uh SPOILER i guess

gregor samsa didn't literally transform into a "monstrous vermin," and that stress plus living with a truly shitty family had just driven him insane?

Dude you can interpret it all you want, but the fact is that Gregor Samsa awoke one morning to find himself transformed in his bed into a giant insect.

I saw a staged production of this, it was v well done with Samsa's bed mounted vertically high on the rear wall, and the actor playing him was athletic circus dude who climbed and swung all around the walls. But he never actually turned into an insect (except for one bit where they showed an insect form in silhouette) so yah I was basically disappointed.

g00b otm

Yeah, Samsa definitely actually transformed into an insect.

I seen it with my own two eyes!

evidence for:

— everyone in the story accepts that the giant bug is gregor (instead of, like, "hey, there's this bug in the room, where'd gregor go?")
— several people in the story (cleaning woman, three boarders) are amused by gregor rather than terrified
— the family IS terrified, but it could be argued that they act the way any family might if one of its members started chirping like a bug and crawling around
— gregor becomes increasingly ill throughout story and loses his appetite -- because he's eating rotting food!
— kafka said he didn't want any picture of an actual bug used to illustrate the story

evidence against:

— people can't climb walls and ceilings
— "hello, you old dung beetle!"

has anyone ever done a film of this story?

surely there must be a Polish animation from the 80s or something.

Having spent a lot of time reading Kafka, I think you're looking for a neat, simple explanation of the kind that doesn't generally exist in Kafka. Yes, the fact that he transforms into an insect probably has some metaphorical significance for the condition of a stressed out, alienated traveling sales dude living with his shitty family, but Kafka stories are never that literal (it was really a dream, he went insane, etc.). You have to take Kafka stories at face value and as existing on their own plane of reality.

Nabokov gave a marvellous, marvellous lecture on The Metamorphosis, in which he discusses this (there is a great passage where he tries to entomologically determine exactly which kind of insect Samsa becomes). It was published in Lectures on Literature, but the text is also here.

am i right in thinking that kafka meant us to assume that

uh SPOILER i guess

gregor samsa didn't literally transform into a "monstrous vermin," and that stress plus living with a truly shitty family had just driven him insane?

in a german class i took a while ago where we read the metamorphosis this was one of the interpretations we discussed. one of the things i like best about the story, and kafka's work in general, is that there are dozens of ways of interpreting it — i would go so far as to say that the best way to enjoy the story is to interpret it in as many different ways as possible. i don't know if i would say that kafka means for us to assume anything that specific, because he seems to have avoided making points that direct and clear-cut, but i do think it's entirely possible that he deliberately left it open as one of several possibilities.

It was no dream.

best line of the story imo^^^

I mean, isn't that what gives the story such power? To wake up turned into a giant beetle or cockroach or whatever is so extreme, so awful, so at odds with what you think of as a likely thing to happen to us first thing in the morning, that it has to be a dream, or a hallucination, or an indication that you've lost your mind. But: It was no dream. No matter what you expected, what your ideas are of the possible, how you conceive of the world, what is happening to you is happening because it's happening.

And if that doesn't have resonance with your life, you probably haven't lived long enough yet. Or you've lived a charmed life. I don't know.

Swiss bank to lift lid on hidden Kafka works

has anyone ever done a film of this story?

This story being "Metamorphosis". I saw a Swedish or Norwegian (I think) film of it, when I was but a boy, on BBC2. Need to google this.

Swedish, 1976

there's a russian film from 2002

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0328279/

and, of course, the TV film of Berkoff's play with Tim Roth as Samsa.

In the Swedish film you do get to see a great big beetle though, dunno abt the Russian one

Best Final Fantasy baddie ever!

Read 'The Castle' recently, I'm still wondering how much kabbalism it allegorises..

My instinct was that Kafka would probably not have known much about the Kabbalah. It's not the sort of thing secular, middle-class Jews would have looked into much. It only became fashionable in recent years for anyone but the most devout religious scholars to study it.

Google searching suggests that I was right, although there are scholars who think his work is open to that interpretation:
http://www.kafka-franz.com/Franz-Kafka-Kabbalah.htm

I wonder if j0hn is on hand to comment over this.

Saw an inetrview with John Banville on Newsnight. His line was that even if 2-3 aphorisms come out of this the excavation of the remains will be worth the bother.

Manuscripts et al found

Reading his biography, it was surprising how literal and autobiographical his fiction could be (e.g., Metamorphosis).

Almost finished "Amerika". What a great, strange, funny book.

http://www.theonion.com/video/pragues-franz-kafka-international-named-worlds-mos,14321/

LOL x 1,000,000