This Just In: Kafka Salutes the Arrival of the Modern Age

Germany has declared war on Russia—swimming in the afternoon.

—Franz Kafka, diary entry, August 2, 1914.

[[Reprinted in Modris Eckstein, Rites of Spring: The Great War
And the Birth of the Modern Age 55 (1989)]

Kafka on Alienation

I wrote (link):

I remember reading somewhere—Walker Percy?—that Kafka’s first readers (listeners?) in Prague used to collapse in helpless hilarity.

Yep, here it is: it's part of Percy's argument that "there is no such thing, strictly speaking, as a literature of alienation:"

The reading [person] rejoices in the speakability of his alienation and in the new triple alliance of himself, the alienated character, and the author. His mood is affirmatory and glad. Yes! that is how it is!--which is an aesthetic reversal of alienation. It is related that when Kafka read his work aloud to his friends, they would all roar with laughter until tears came to their eyes. [Emphasis added-ed.] ... To picture a truly alienated man, picture a Kafka to whom it had never occurred to write a word."

--Reynolds Price, "The Man on the Train,"
in The Message Found in the Bottle 83 (1975)

Now, if I could find the one about Chekhov...

News Flash: War Between Men and Women Not Over

..and probably never will be.

When I meet a pretty girl and beg her: "Be so good as to come home with me," and she walks past without a word, this is what she means to say:

"You are no Duke, with a famous name, no broad American with a Red Indian figure, level, brooding eyes and a skin tempered by the air of prairies and the rivers that flow through them, you have never journeyed to the seven seas and voyaged on them wherever they may be, I don't know where. So why, pray, should a pretty girl like myself go with you?

"You forget that no automobile swings you through the street in long thrusts: I see no gentlemen escorting you in a close half-circle, pressing on your skirts from behind and murmuring blessings on your head: your breasts are well laced into your bodice, but your thighs and hips make up for that restraint; you are wearing a taffeta dress with a pleated skirt such as delighted all of us last autumn and yet you smile--inviting mortal danger--from time to time."

"Yes, we're both in the right, and to keep us from being irrevocably aware of it, hadn't we better go our separate ways home?"

--Franz Kafka, "Rejection," Wedding Preparations and Other Stories 99
(Penguin Paperback 1979)

Levi: Not Like Kafka

I’m a great Primo Levi fan but I have sometimes struggled to explain what it is about Levi that makes his prose so magical, even when he is writing about one of the must wretched hours in human history (link). Lucid? Well, sure, but a good 12^th-grade term paper is lucid. Unadorned? Very often, but he can slide into flights of powerful rhetoric. Writes like a chemist? In an odd sense, perhaps he does write like a chemist, but it’s probably misleading, obscuring the true flavor.

Just I just now stumbled on the best possible account of Levi’s writing from—Levi himself. He’s comparing himself to Kafka:

In my writing, for good or evil, knowingly or not, I’ve always strived to pass from the darkness into the light, as…a filtering pump might do, which sucks up turbid water and expels it decanted: possibly sterile. Kafka forges his path in the opposite direction: he endlessly unravels the hallucinations that he draws form incredibly profound layers, and he never filters them. The reader feels them swarm with germs and spores: they are gravid with burning significances, but he never receives any help in tearing through the veil or circumventing it to go and see wht it conceals. Kafka never touches the ground, he never condescends to giving you the end of Ariadne’s thread.

So, how does Levi write? Not like Kafka. Oddly enough, I think this gets it exactly right.

Source: Anita Desai, quoting, in “What If?” a review of a collection of Levi stories, New York Review of Books 51, July 19, 2007.