Talk about Kafka!

Post Reply New Topic

I was just flipping through my collection of Kafka's short stories, and I just remembered:

Kafka is unmitigated excellence.

I know a few of you out there like Kafka - a reply is mandatory.

One of the things I like about Kafka is also this strange sort of futility. The simplest thing becomes bit by bit increasingly impossible. brazen individuals like K. in the Castle and Josef K. in the Judgment seem to be gradually broken down by the convolutions and separation between them and their adversaries. But it is not just hubris which is punished: Before the Law comes readily to mind, and also the Great Wall of China I think is perhaps his most fabulous extreme of this in which the completely distorted time distances lead to that sort of absent intangible yet ever-present ruler in the form of a Beijing which exists only in the words of messengers.

There is at once a truth a goal or a whatever and likewise a Judgment that goes with the existence of a Law, but also these powers are invariably cruelly unknowable. Man is alone and he must choose alone with the constant specter of a judgment he cannot anticipate.

Kafka makes me think of Alice in Through the Looking Glass: "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas--only I don't exactly know what they are!" Although that sort of ambiguity makes reading Kafka that much more rich.

What do you think of Kafka's views of the individual and the Law, or God?

Favorite stories? Themes? Interpretations?

It's been a while since I read any. I find them "appalling" ( if brilliant) enough in english; I don't get past the first page in a french translation.

What I remember is how they seemed to look with naked eyes on the horrifyingly unfathomable determinism of life. Which I was not up to reading about most of the time.

Will go look at some on internet in english to remind myself.

I once read Metamorphosis seven times in one day. . .

The closest I've ever been to suicide, and perhaps the most inside a piece of literature that I've ever been. . . but beautiful.

It's amazingly awesome, but it does require a certain mental frame to be good.

Franz fanatic topic

Kafka is only one of two writers I hav ever been able to really identify with. In the Penal Colony is my favourite, followed by A Hunger Artist. I can feel everything that the protagonists feel. My third would be The Metamorphosis. All these tales have a sort of dream like structure to them. His visualizing acuity is second to none. I love analyzing the literary structure, in order to understand how Kafka could compose like this. Kafka forces you to live his horror. This is as close as I can come to empathy in a fictional way. Only stories of actual torture and genocidal brutalities can evoke stronger feelings. This may be the reason I read them.

I have been studying Franz for thirty years. If he was not an actual Aspie, he came close. A lot of meat on this bone.

Great topic, Twoshots.

Please read this post all the way...

We had to read Metamorphosis my senior year in high school and I didn't really like it. Probably because I didn't understand it. But for one of my college courses, I had to read An Imperial Message and Before the Law and I liked them. I suppose I can pick up Metamorphosis again...

I must have read them all before I was 19.
Kafka did influence my own prose writing very much ever after - I built from him, into the oneirc and bordering the downright unreadable.

I do like the Penal Colony very much if only for the sheer absurdity of it all.
I suppose the death description in The Penal Colony can find a root in the vivid reports on work related accidents that were part of Kafka's job as a lawyer.
I think it ties nicely with The Trial (and Before the Law) in how the law - if I remember right - was scarified no less than in the accused's own back; everyone gathered around could see the law but he himself could not. . . Also the process killed him by the time it was finished.
In a sense, the accused cannot know the law for whose infringement he's being executed. A punishment, on the back, perhaps not unlike the original-sin reminiscent apple on Gregor Samsa's back (Metamorphosis). . . . not unlike (if I remember right) the scene in The Trial where K visits the tribunal offices and other accused men startle at a defect on K's lip - which they can see but he himself can not - as it confirms his guilt.

I have only read The Metamorphosis. It is an adequate novel of the claustrophobia of human existence, but it was too, well, adolescent-minded. Gregor isn't developed except in his misery; he's That Guy That Turned Into The Roach. The thing could have been written by a gloomy hikikomori teenager with satisfactory writing skills and a Schopenhauer obsession. There have been great books about horribly trapped people, like Notes from the Underground and The Count of Monte Christo. A claustrophobia novel depends on character development, though.

I can see what Kafka was trying to achieve: a tellingly gross portrayal of the arc of the human life. First Gregor is in denial (childhood), then he is angry and fights for a reasonable existence in his hideous new form (adolescence and young adulthood), then he settles into the routine of the thing (middle age). Finally, his body begins to decay and a bleak resignation settles over him; thus he is an old, decrepit man-roach. He puts up a feeble fight at the very end, as some tougher, more dissatisfied people do on their deathbeds. He dies. The end. This is humanity; a roach waiting for death. Uplifting, isn't it?

As for his other works, one of my favorite authors, the incredible multi-talented man-shaped galaxy of literary and scientific genius called Primo Levi, found that The Trial plumbed the depths of horror in a way he himself could not (I beg to differ; Primo Levi was a god). The chillingly mechanical execution scene affected him as a Holocaust survivor and impressed him as a writer. He said that he would be too weak and too "embarrassed" to write such an "honest" scene.

I'll read The Trial someday, but it seems to have the same basic message as Bleak House, and I prefer Dickens for now.

Primo Levi paraphrased and quoted from an essay in The Mirror Maker, a lesser-known collection of essays, short stories, and little reflections, which, by the way, are all incredibly Primolicious.

Talk about Primo Levi topic

Thanks for the Primogenuine spiel about another one of my favourite authors, MissPickwickian.

Dickens I find tedious, repetitive, and circumlocutious.

Too heavy a meal for me. Everyone to his/her own taste.

Last edited by sartresue on 07 May 2008, 9:49 am, edited 1 time in total.

I have to admit, I'm actually not much of a fan of The Metamorphosis; it wasn't until I read The Castle that Kafka had me hooked. I do recommend The Trial (but if you like Dickens then I'm not so sure Kafka would be your cup of tea...) But to a certain extent I think you just need to like Kafka's style (and even though I'm stuck in translation I personally find it absolutely immaculate...)

One interesting thing to note is that everyone uses the word "horror" or something like that to characterize Kafka, but I always thought things like The Castle and The Trial were actually very funny in their own way. The sick part is that I've heard that apparently Kafka agreed . Keep that in mind next time he seems grim...


How does everyone interpret Kafka? I must admit my interpretation is probably skewed by the Muir's translation which I've heard said to excessively exaggerate the spiritual interpretation of Kafka's work, but I have never been able to at all find a really political interpretation to be satisfying. The way that his stories seem to shift ambiguously between politics and 'God' is fascinating in itself.

Kafka's style.... I never would have thought that I'd read a book which would make me love it for being impenetrably dense. Kafka apparently found something very funny about "legalese". I heard one time at some kind of legal proceeding he burst out laughing at the language being used.

I must say I kept finding his descriptions of people and situations rather amusing - especially in The Trial, The Castle and The Penal Colony. I don't myself recall finding them completely unbearable despite the fact that they themselves supposedly were - humor in face of the absurd must have to do with this gap.

I have a book of his short stories, The Penal Colony was brutal, haven't read it in over 25 years, going to have to dig it out of storage. Has anyone seen the movie Kafka with Jeremy Irons
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102181/

I have never heard of Franz Kafka before I saw a rock opera based on metamorphosis on an episode of Home Movies. Then I began to leaf through it and found out i liked it!

I haven't read Kafka since early high school, but I enjoyed it quite a lot. It was my first exploration into Existentialism, and it created an interest in philosophy that has yet to diminish.

I'm taking a class in Continental Literature [primarily focusing on German and Russian literature] next semester, and it says we're to do Kafka on the syllabus. I really look forward to reading more of his work at a college level, both for the different interpretations and the expanded analysis of content.

Maybe there’s something seriously wrong with me but I found In the Penal Colony completely hilarious. It’s the way the whole situation is described in such a verbose and unemotional prose. There’s something grotesquely farcical about it.

I agree, there is an element of the farcical and morso gallows humour in the trial, especially the scene with the court painter, where the futility of the situation is genuinely amusing.

I read The Trial some time ago and loved it. Words cannot express the love I had for it before I had to check it in to the library. The absurdity of it all was quite entertaining and eerie, and the humor was very much appreciated. After that I had high expectations for The Metamorphosis but it didn't impress me, much like MissPickwickian said. Later I read In the Penal Colony, which I enjoyed more, and sometime soon I want to read the rest of a collection of Kafka's short stories that I just bought.