3/14/2023 0 Comments Kafka writerAh, we sleep tonight criticism stands guard. In “A Country Doctor,” a wound in the side of a boy suppurating worms is, Friedländer agrees with another critic, symbolic of the vagina. (Death not in Venice but in Prague?) At another he notes, “Kafka’s representation of women is grimacing at best.” At still another he mentions a youthful “homoerotic” interest in friends. Doesn’t this … bring us back to Kafka’s constant efforts to hide his sexual leanings?” In the unending critical Easter-egg hunt for the secret meaning in Franz Kafka’s fiction, Friedländer has retrieved the gay egg.Īt one point Friedländer remarks on Kafka’s interest in young boys. Yet in Kafka’s stories, Friedländer finds, “there is a secret to be uncovered, something that the protagonist attempts to hide. Freud’s reputation is now quite properly in radical decline Kafka’s, somehow, lives on. He offers no clinching proof, and at one point goes so far as to say, “It is highly improbable that Kafka ever considered the possibility of homosexual relations.” His own view is that Kafka was “the poet of his own disorder.” Friedländer writes, “The issues torturing Kafka most of his life were of a sexual nature.” Although he doesn’t say so explicitly, he appears to believe that Kafka was a repressed homosexual-that the shame and guilt Friedländer mentions in his subtitle were chiefly over Kafka’s hidden sexuality. He does not doubt Kafka’s greatness, though he resists explaining in what, exactly, it resides. Friedländer’s method in this short book is to weave back and forth between the life and the work in an attempt to explain Kafka’s significance. As Kafka lost his three sisters, so did Friedländer lose his parents in Nazi camps.įriedländer is well aware of the competing theories about the meaning of Kafka’s small body of work, which includes three uncompleted novels, some two dozen substantial short stories, an assemblage of parables and fragment-like shorter works, diaries, collections of letters (many to lovers whom he never married), and the famous Letter to His Father, which he never sent. His father went to the same university Kafka did, though some 15 years later. Like Kafka’s, his family, German-speaking and Jewish, originated in Prague. His affinity for Kafka is historical and personal. Friedländer is by trade not a literary critic but a historian. Franz Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt, by Saul Friedländer, is another strong entry in the derby. The September 7, 2012, issue of The Times Literary Supplement ran a review by Gabriel Josipovici of several recent books on Kafka. The parables, Walter Benjamin wrote, are “never exhausted by what is explainable on the contrary, he took all conceivable precautions against the interpretation of his writings.” Whatever these precautions may have been, they were inadequate, for the works of Franz Kafka-apart perhaps only from the Bible and the works of Shakespeare-may be the most relentlessly interpreted, if not overinterpreted, in the modern world. “His is an art more poignantly and disturbingly obscure,” he added, “than literature has ever known.” One thinks one grasps Kafka’s meaning, but does one, really? All seems so clear, yet is it, truly? A famous aphorism of Kafka’s reads: “Hiding places there are innumerable, escape is only one, but possibilities of escape, again, are as many as hiding places.” Another runs: “A cage went in search of a bird.”Īs with Kafka’s aphorisms, so with his brief parables. Kafka created “obscure lucidity,” Erich Heller wrote in his book on Kafka. As a character in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story “A Friend of Kafka” says, Kafka was “ Homo sapiens in his highest degree of self-torture.” Still, the consensus remains that Franz Kafka is a modern master-a master, more specifically, in the modernist tradition, housed in the same pantheon as Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky, Mallarmé, and other artists who have radically altered contemporary understanding of the world. Hypochondriac, insomniac, food faddist, cripplingly indecisive, terrified by life, obsessed with death, Franz Kafka turned, as best he was able, his neuroses into art. Kafka doesn’t make for very comforting reading at bedtime, either. Distinctly not a jolly way to start the day. So much torture, description of wounds, disorientation, sadomasochism, unexplained cruelty, appearance of rodents, beetles, vultures, and other grotesque creatures-all set out against a background of utter hopelessness. I, for different reasons, have been having a difficult time reading Franz Kafka with my morning tea and toast. Edmund Wilson claimed that the only book he could not read while eating his breakfast was by the Marquis de Sade.
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