Topic started by Gokul (@ 192.190.51.13) on Wed Jun 14 14:35:11 .
All times in EST +10:30 for IST.

Thread to continue the discussion on Kafka from the Camus thread.

Responses:

• From: Saranath (@ soc162.soc.lsa.umich.edu) on: Wed Jun 14 19:01:05 EDT 2000
  
  Part-1.
  I am continuing this from the previous discussion on Kafka in the Camus thread.
  Research routinely humbles you. I need to write a long piece here about this humbling experience. May the gods in charge of this web site forgive me the sinner here. It is for a good purpose.
  I wrote long pieces on Kafka here, in a fit of temper, as I saw that his contribution was being maligned and dismissed out of what seemed to me to be a lack of knowledge. I may be wrong in assuming that it was inadequate knowledge that produced such comments. It could be deliberate and ideological stand on writers like Kafka, which made such comments possible. The leftists in India and elsewhere have always maligned Kafka, for some peculiar reasons. Left always resents freethinking intellectuals. It is as if the left reserves the right to be critical of all societies but does not like criticisms levelled against authorities when such criticism comes from non-left sources. Please refer to part 2 next.
  
  
• From: saranath (@ soc162.soc.lsa.umich.edu) on: Wed Jun 14 19:01:58 EDT 2000
  
  Part 2.
  I had started writing a long piece on Kafka (in Tamil) a few years back and did not finish it then for various reasons-the chief one being I could not access the source books I was referring to in the article, as I ended up in madras for a couple of years after I started writing the article. Yesterday I felt that giving up on that article was a mistake, as it will have brought enough information on Kafka to us in TN, where the left has routinely maligned him for years as a reactionary ‘art for art’s sake’ writer, or as anti progressive and all that. Most Tamil Nadu leftists still think of Kafka in Stalinist terms, and that is a pity. Those who doubt this need to know the reaction to charvagan’s ‘pattinikkalignan ‘ in J.K’s ‘Gnanaratham’ when Jeyakanthan started it sometime in 1966 or 67. While non-left critics castigated charvagan for not acknowledging the original of the story as kafka’s short story, leftists were angry that kafka was being brought into discussion by one who was till then thought of as a leftist! The peculiarities of Tamil left are manifold. It is as if the cat closes its eyes and imagines the world is dark. (To part-3)
  
  
  
• From: saranath (@ soc162.soc.lsa.umich.edu) on: Wed Jun 14 19:04:13 EDT 2000
  
  Part 3
  I am not sure if I saw charvagan accept this charge of adaptation. But to most then, the piece was nothing but a loose adaptation of a similar short story by Kafka. After that there had been a few debates on Kafka himself and his contribution in little magazines. While the left fulminated against him, the more non-political modernists- many individualist writers- did not fare much better in writing about him. I am blanking on the venue of these debates; quite probably it was in early issues of KachatathapaRa. They routinely misread him as apolitical or as a mysterious protestor against bureaucracy and all that. He was for all Tamil critics an extreme individualist. They did not know him as a political activist. His metaphysical side appealed to his foes and friends. From then on a mythology of Kafka had been built up in Tn about the writer.
  
  The reason for my wishing to write a piece on Kafka during 1996-97 was the repeated encounter with this mythology in Tn as well as in a translation of Kafka that was published by CREA. I thought the introduction to book that the translator wrote was considerably flawed, less due to details, than due to misreading of the man’s work. The translator knew German and was apparently a fan of kafka. So one would expect a better rendition of Kafka’s contribution to world literature and humanity. No, it was the same old, same old –praising Kafka for wrong reasons. This mythology was going strong twenty years after the first set of writings on Kafka surfaced in Tamil during the 60’s. That is still in need of correction.
  (To Part-4)
  
  
• From: you know who (@ soc162.soc.lsa.umich.edu) on: Wed Jun 14 19:05:16 EDT 2000
  
  Part -4
  But when I wrote the notes here earlier, I had written from memory and made many mistakes. I wish to correct them now. I did a speedy search to verify what I wrote and found a few factual errors, but the spirit of my defense of Kafka, I am happy to say stands up to this scrutiny. It could have been better, a stouter defense. But that can wait.
  Now for the errors-
  1) Marshall Berman, not Zygmunt Bauman, wrote the piece on Kafka in ‘the nation’ I referred to. How did I conflate the two? It is foolishness, especially considering that I ought to know my social science literature much better than that. I apologize. Anyway, it is Berman who wrote ‘All That is Solid melts Into Air’. Bauman writes on modernity too but he is a different breed. He is more prolific and has a postmodern slant. Berman had a good book on Marxism in 1999. I am quite humbled by this slip.
  2) The other slip is where I said Kafka was for Hebrew. No, he was for Yiddish, the other Jewish language (dialect?). But what I said of Kafka rooting for the creation of a Jewish state, I am glad to say that is correct. Kafka however was for Hebraism. I am not sure what that means in political terms. When he died in 1924 I doubt if there was any movement for Hebrew. Most East Europeans of his time, who faced a daily dose of anti-semitism and active hatred across Europe, always dreamed of a homeland for Jews. They were hated if they were a success. They were hated if they were failures. They were hated if they married the locals, hated if they did not. They were hated for settling in or for wandering. No nation in Europe wanted to give them citizenship proper.
  
  
• From: saranath (@ soc162.soc.lsa.umich.edu) on: Wed Jun 14 19:06:38 EDT 2000
  
  Part 5
  What is more, if they used local languages fluently they were hated, if they did not and stuck to Yiddish they were hated. They were hated if they participated in politics, and hated if they did not. Their usage of local language was hated by the local elites and disparaged particularly by local language ‘purists’. Yet many Jew is writers did write in the local languages. For example Marcel Proust for all his prodigiousness in French was disliked as a Jew too. They were hated, period. Nothing they did was ever right for the locals. Sounds like it could fit some communities in TN very well.
  3) The third confusion is about Kafka’s nationality. I know he was in Prague. But for some reason the Austrians consider that he is their native son. I found out from my Professor here that Prague was a part of the austro-hungarian empire for a long time. That explains my confusion over why Kafka was eulogized by Austrians, of all people.
  4) As for Kafka, Jewishness and his obsession with health or with the lack of that need many threads.
  (onto part 6)
  
  
• From: saranath (@ soc162.soc.lsa.umich.edu) on: Wed Jun 14 19:07:23 EDT 2000
  
  Part-6
  I will end this all here by giving some references so you could go to do some research for your self, if you like such things. I only hope you will shed your stereotypes about Jews or Kafka in the end, if you had any to begin with.
  Bibliography
  ‘Kafka family values-Franz Kafka: the Jewish Patient by Sander Gilman’ a book review by Marshall Berman, in ‘The Nation’ New York, Nov 20, 1995
  ‘Retrospective prophets: Vico, Benjamin, and Other German mythologists’ by Joseph Mali in ‘Clio’, Fort Wayne, summer 1997
  (The above will make the marxists truly paranoid, despite the fact Walter Benjamin who wrote on Kafka was a cultural Marxist of sorts. I am sure half baked progressives (dialectical thinkers!) in TN will fulminate against this piece too.)
  ‘Franz Kafka: The Jewish Patient’ reviewed by Rolf Goebel, Jr. (What a name, guy! With such a name who will want to read you?) in The Germanic Review, Washington, Fall 1996 –quite sharp support for Gilman here.
  ‘Kafka’s Identity Politics’- by Paul Ritter, in ‘The nation’ May 22, 2000. This was quite good too.
  (Sub ref:
  Prague territories: national conflict and cultural innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siecle’ by Scott Spector “’The Jewish Question’ in German Literature, 1749-1939: Emancipation and its discontents’’ by Ritchie Robertson
  ‘The Nightmare of Reason: a life of Franz Kafka’ by Ernest Pawel 1984. Berman considers this one of the truly great biographies of the year. I really liked the take on Kafka in this book.
  The end!
  
  
• From: vj (@ lucre.tcom.purdue.edu) on: Thu Jun 15 01:55:47 EDT 2000
  
  My little attempt at understanding Kafka's mind on reading his work..
  
  1. He was wonderfully lonely, probably by wonderful choice
  2. He had an unique view to what fiction can do.
  You can read a couple of pages and know we are in his world. That can explain why 'Kafkaesque' has a right to be in the dictionary.
  3. He was cynical about the World and that always is an excellent source for ideas. I think he was very much a humanist.. a believer in existence and co-existence but was highly (and justifiably) disillusioned with the powers-that-be.
  
  What I liked best were his short shorties, or 'fables' as they are called. One of them stays in my mind. Its about a person who wants to leave an Inn. The Inn-guy asks him where he's going and the person who is leaving says that he does not know that but the thing he does knows is that he does not want to be here. That kind of caught my mind because it seemed to sum up the human condition. Always staying for a while before knowing for certain that you have to move but not knowing where.
  
  
  
• From: saranath (@ soc162.soc.lsa.umich.edu) on: Thu Jun 15 18:00:47 EDT 2000
  
  i like Vj's last two lines quite a bit. It does capture kafka's personal predicament in life very well. thanks Vj, for putting it nicely. i do not admit to cynicism on the part of kafka. he knew that he was battling huge odds, but his little men never seem to give up. May be i need to read all his works to get a better idea of him, and you could be right in the end.
  
  
• From: ich bins (@ moppelchen.uzh.uni-freiburg.de) on: Wed Dec 19 09:20:26
  
  Naja ich bin nicht ganz sicher was ich sagen soll. Vielleicht ist wird besser wenn Sie den Text auf deutsch lesen. Und auch ein bisschen ueber den deutsche Geschichte, wo Kafka wohnte, gehoert damals oft zu deutschland/preussen.
  
  

Want to post a response?