Reading Kafka

March 1, 2022
Clorindo Kafka | by

Edmund Wilson claimed the only book he cannot read while eating their breakfast had been by the Marquis de Sade. I, for different explanations, are having a hard time reading Franz Kafka with my early morning beverage and toast. So much torture, description of wounds, disorientation, sadomasochism, unexplained cruelty, appearance of rats, beetles, vultures, as well as other grotesque creatures—all set-out against a background of utter hopelessness. Distinctly maybe not a jolly way to start the day off. Kafka does not lead to extremely comforting reading at bedtime, either.

Hypochondriac, insomniac, meals faddist, cripplingly indecisive, terrified by life, enthusiastic about death, Franz Kafka turned, as best he had been ready, his neuroses into art. As a character in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s tale “A buddy of Kafka” claims, Kafka ended up being “Homo sapiens inside the greatest level of self-torture.” Still, the consensus remains that Franz Kafka is today's master—a master, much more specifically, when you look at the modernist custom, housed in identical pantheon as Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky, Mallarmé, as well as other performers who've radically modified contemporary understanding of society.

Kafka developed “obscure lucidity, ” Erich Heller typed inside the book on Kafka. “His is an art much more poignantly and disturbingly obscure, ” he added, “than literature has ever understood.” One thinks one grasps Kafka’s definition, but does one, actually? All appears so clear, yet can it be, certainly? A famous aphorism of Kafka’s reads: “Hiding locations you can find countless, escape is one, but possibilities of escape, once more, tend to be as many as concealing places.” Another operates: “A cage moved in search of a bird.”

Much like Kafka’s aphorisms, therefore together with brief parables. The parables, Walter Benjamin wrote, tend to be “never exhausted with what is explainable; on the contrary, he took all possible precautions contrary to the interpretation of his writings.” Whatever these safety measures might have been, they were insufficient, when it comes to works of Franz Kafka—apart maybe just through the Bible together with works of Shakespeare—may be the most relentlessly translated, if you don't overinterpreted, when you look at the globalization.

Source: www.theatlantic.com
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