Thread of Max Brod Hate

let's ask jose luis borges what he thinks

The fact is, a man who really wishes to see his work consigned to oblivion does not entrust the task to someone else. I believe that Kafka and Virgil did not truly want such destruction to take place; they merely longed to disburden themselves of the responsibility that a literary work imposes on its creator.

yeah but then again he said burn them.

The case of Franz Kafka seems to be more complex. His work could be defined as a parable or series of parables on the theme of the moral relationship of the individual with his God and with his God’s incomprehensible universe. For all their contemporary setting, his stories are less close to what is conventionally called modern literature than they are to the Book of Job. They presuppose a religious conscience, specifically a Jewish conscience; formal imitation of Kafka in another context would be unintelligible. Kafka saw his work as an act of faith, and he did not want it to discourage other men. Because of this, he asked his friend to destroy it. However, I suspect further reasons. Kafka knew he could dream only nightmares and was aware that reality is a continuous sequence of melancholy nightmares. Added to which, he appreciated the dramatic potential of delays and postponements; this is apparent throughout his work. But both these themes, melancholy and delay, undoubtedly wearied him in the end. He might perhaps have preferred to be the author of a few happy pages — such as his honesty would not allow him to write.

ok forget i asked.

death of the author

Harlan Ellison wants his wife to do the same thing, really hope she pulls a Brod so we can get the last fucking Dangerous Visions book.

Borges is a book fiend and will craft any self-serving argument in the service of there being more books in the world

Harlan Ellison wants his wife to do the same thing

is this really true? he's so in love with the sight of his own name it's hard for me to imagine but he's also a big control freak so I can see it. w/TLDV the stories should all revert to the authors obviously but anything he wrote for it should be consigned to the fire barring other instructions, should he ever die, which he probably won't, he's probably got some AM the supercomputer future already mapped out

Proust's maid obeyed her master's wishes to burn his papers and diaries I think. Now she was the sick one - only thing is there is so much else left that it will keep us busy enough so its not as disastrous if Brod had complied w/K.

I think Genet meant to burn one of his novels and never went through with it and wish he had...can't remember which one now. Probably being a cry-baby like K.

Artists just make the work, and that's the way it should be.

^^^ guy keeps making my point for me about how diligent artists much be in destroying as much of their work as possible. meanwhile I'm getting a Proust's maid tattoo, there's an actual hero for you

every destroyed work is a victory against the grotesque sense of sensate entitlement expressed by "readers"/consumers like xyzzzz___

so, the platonic ideal as a professional artist is to sell your work to people who will immediately burn it without consuming it, is the takeaway I'm getting here

the ideal situation is to make the one work that cures you of the desire to create, destroy it, and go back to being a line cook

DJP - what you are getting is an "artist" being a drama queen.

well that's just unpleasant

“What is it they want from a man that they didn't get from his work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he's done his work? What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology.”

^^William Gaddis

"My dear friend Max Brod, when I die, I ask of you one thing: burn my Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Yelp, LinkedIn, Gmail..."

I plead guilty to the grotesque sensate entitlement indictment but the fact remains, that you and I have read works that Brod rescued. Like Borges I am a book fiend, but the ethics of Brod's decision aside, we are nonetheless enriched by his (conceivably) pernicious acts.

Franz K is the mayor of Jungborn sanatorium

that's kind of an unsustainable position re: kafka, xxyyetc. He did the hard work of destroying the stuff he still owned afaik - claiming "drama queen" on artists who actually do the best they can to get their wishes carried out isn't fair or sporting. I mean I get that you're trapped in an 80s understanding of the death of the author but everybody else moved on from that shit ages ago.

there's certainly an aspect to this that is akin to having amazing, mindblowing sex with the corpse of the person who kept telling you "no" while they were alive and wearing provocative clothing

brb, jackin'

otoh "The Trial" rules

woah

In most respects, Brod and Kafka could not have been more different. An extrovert, Zionist, womanizer, novelist, poet, critic, composer and constitutional optimist, Brod had a tremendous capacity for survival. In his biography of Kafka, Ernst Pawel recounts how Brod, having been given a diagnosis at age 4 of a life-threatening spinal curvature, was sent to a miracle healer in the Black Forest, “a shoemaker by trade, who built him a monstrous harness into which he was strapped day and night.” Brod spent an entire year in the care of this shoemaker, emerging with a permanent hunchbacklike deformity, which did not impede him in a lifelong series of overlapping relationships with attractive blondes.

aero have you read the stuff Brod saved?

the ideal situation is to make the one work that cures you of the desire to create, destroy it, and go back to being aline cookn insurance adjustor

Yet he singularly failed to do this and referred to contemptuously to his Brotberuf.

two things seem pretty obvious to me:

1. leaving aside kafka's wishes for the moment, we are all extremely fortunate to have kafka's work to read
2. max brod is a steaming pile of human shit. blatantly betraying the written wishes of the dead, particularly a dear friend, is about as shitty as it gets.

dead people are dead

I think we should make the world a better place for people who aren't dead cause their happiness matters more than dead people happiness

good news

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/15/world/middleeast/woman-must-relinquish-kafka-papers-judge-says.html?_r=0

i know ppl itt calling kafka a crybaby are just trolling but seriously, it was the man's dying wish that his own work be destroyed. this shit wasn't published - that would be a different story - but denying an artist that finality he so desperately wants is pretty gross i think

no, he had that finality

lol @ dead people

now he's dead

I think we should make the world a better place for people who aren't dead cause their happiness matters more than dead people happiness

― iatee, Friday, November 9, 2012 11:14 AM (31 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

idunno, brod got lucky that kafka happened to be so good. the act itself is the shitty thing imo

there's certainly an aspect to this that is akin to having amazing, mindblowing sex with the corpse of the person who kept telling you "no" while they were alive and wearing provocative clothing

― I loves you, PORGI (DJP), Friday, November 9, 2012 11:06 AM

*forwards post to FBI*

aero have you read the stuff Brod saved?

I was getting into it in high school like most people and then as I got into it I started reading the supplementary stuff in the anthologies about how he wanted it destroyed and I thought about it some and thought "you know what, fuck this, this shouldn't have been published." It seems personally kinda shitty to me to read stuff that the guy who wrote it explicitly did not want to exist, so once I'd thought that q through I stopped reading Kafka.

i like how we've arrived at the 'it is impossible to have moral obligations to the dead' defense quicker than anyone bothered to articulate the 'but ... but ... GREAT ART' defense

not impossible, just dumb

cool, i dig that xpost to aero

dead people are dead

past isn't even past iirc

aero suppose kafka had in fact said "dear max brod, i have unbeknownst to you trained in secret as a doctor and i have carried out research that will enable humankind in the future to wipe out smallpox five years earlier,* thus saving lives numbered in the thousands, however i hate this work and i want you to burn it", where would you stand on this

*kakfa in addition to being a medical doctor in this counterfactual is also a soothsayer

thomp are u talking about what americuns did with nazi and japanese ww2 medical experiments

that's kind of a facile comparison

no i don't know anything about that, i'm talking about a hypothetical world in which franz kafka was a virologist who could see into the future

i'm happy to have kafka's novels and the aeneid and whatever other stuff, but the kind of reverse causality defence of brod makes a mess of what seems to me to be a pretty simple ethical question. yeah the world is a better (and maybe more notably, ~different~) place for having these works in it, but even as much as brod liked the works that's not something he could have reasonably foreseen, so ultimately his act was the act of a douche.

I don't think its fair on people who like to read to be told they are entitled consumers or whatever -- that is drama queen behaviour there.

Its fine if you'd like your work destroyed, but people who make works need to be better at destroying them. Not showing them to anyone and building people's enthusiasms for them in the first place would be a start..

Kafka never did anything of substance to get his wishes carried out (never mind "his best"). That was a pathetic note.

the correct thing to do would be to copy the cure to smallpox, burn the original, then anonymously mail the copy to contemporary author-doctor Herman Hesse

i am not as extremist as aero in that i will totally read his work though, i mean if there's this amazing literature that everyone else gets to read i'm gonna read it too, my own morals be damned. similarly i hope to god salinger kept like 20 glass stories lying around

aero suppose kafka had in fact said "dear max brod, i have unbeknownst to you trained in secret as a doctor and i have carried out research that will enable humankind in the future to wipe out smallpox five years earlier,* thus saving lives numbered in the thousands, however i hate this work and i want you to burn it", where would you stand on this

no sale man, sorry. I know, I know - Kafka's work has been meaningful to many, and who's to say it hasn't "saved their lives"*, but it's not really analogous in any way to the theoretical situation you propose. medical science is not self-expression.

*me

what if the cure to smallpox was a short story about a dude turning into a box elder bug

artists can be the worst stewards of their own work, the ideal situation is to hide all of their works from them until they are dead

I meant her diaries are as great as her novels.

O I thought the frowny face meant you couldn't make the separation and you wish you could

When someone asks which Woolf to read I say To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves and A Writer's Diary.

what about the diary of anne frank?

did Anne Frank have a friend who she explicitly asked to make sure her diary be destroyed?

anne frank wanted her diaries to be published -- she actually went back and rewrote earlier entries that she didn't think were good enough.

wish I could find the Cynthia Ozick essay about Anne Frank.

I cannot stop laughing at that last Gregor samsa comic

I have not read Kafka since high school which I loved at the time, but I want to read it again since I may be able to appreciate the humor more as a well adjusted adult than when I was a brooding teenager

it being the trial or Amerika or the shrt stories

A broding teen

aero dunno if you're still lurking this thread but I'm curious if you have established directives for the disposition of the undoubtedly extensive analog & digital materials associated with Aerosmith's creative process, vis a vis archiving/burning/cynical-easy-buck-making.

in general I find the weirdnesses of artistic executorship fascinating. My favorite thing to think about is the Beckett estate's extremely active interest in ensuring that productions of his plays adhere to his directions. The estate recently failed to halt a production of Godot with female cast members, but as the article says, succeeded in that line in the past.

am still pissed at Beckett's estate for nixing the all-Chuckle-Brother production of Happy Days

FK was such a miserable awful person that I really can't be bothered caring what he might've wanted. Did he order Milena to destroy his letters to her? Unlikely, as that might've necessitated normal decent behaviour. Fuck that guy, man

OTOH: Publishing a desperately mentally ill person's writings c/d

CLASSIC why bcz lols

(jokes, obv)

The Castle is kinda funny tbh

the castle is really funny!

i'm bleak tho

It wasn't very conciously done as a result of my stance in this thread -- more part of me reading/re-reading/trying to find more German Lit this year -- but I got around re-reading/more Kafka than I had in the past. I re-read The Trial (in a diff translation from the Muir), and then the letters to Felice and Milena, as well as the Diary, fo the first time.

All pretty incredible, anything this guy committed to paper was literature. Amazing to think of the conditions -- mental and physical at which much of this must've been written -- he transmit those to you, its the source of its power, but only one of many. The Diary is of such rigour. I only got to understand the points aero was making after reading it. He was incredibly hard on himself -- like an insight to what an artist with a capital A is really thinking. Its not so much whether Brod was his friend or not, its whether Brod understod him or not. If he had then you could see a burning. He didn't though = he did not understand his friend. And of course we all have friends we often don't understand.

There is a volume that collects the writing that Kafka published in his lifetime, tr. on Penguin by Michael Hofmann, and I suppose that + the letters to Felice - which he left no instructions for I suppose - would've been enough. I've been reading Buchner, and its about 300 pages worth of material there. I suppose my fear was that Kafka would've been wiped from history had Brod carried out his wish. It was silly to think so.

But in the end, no, you could never burn The Trial.

Probably fine to burn America as its first chapter was published during his lifetime.

Will get round to reading The Castle before the end of the year so I'll pass sentence then.

(slightly dull response to that post but)
how do you rate other translations vs the Muirs? (Me, I like them, but have spent very little time with other versions. )

(at least someone has read my post thanks)
The answer to that is I don't know (must've read the Muir a decade ago). According to J.P.Stern (in the intro to the Scott/Waller translation) the Muirs broke up some of Kafka's sentence structures, at times.

http://io9.gizmodo.com/terry-pratchetts-unpublished-work-has-been-destroyed-j-1798633413

https://www.thenation.com/article/who-owns-kafka/

New Directions is bringing out a volume of "lost" works, though they weren't lost, just untranslated -- here's an interview with their EIC about them, and one of the stories is in this month's NYer.

Was thinking about this thread while reading all that yesterday.