Re: new yorker

Camille Scaysbrook (c_scaysbrook@yahoo.com)
Mon, 30 Aug 1999 17:35:55 +1000 

Someone or other in this discussion wrote:
> > Wow.  I had always thought that Kafka was a very
> > serious artist.  Hunger Artist comes to mind, maybe he
> > was making fun of the caged man.  Maybe he's another
> > jackass.  I wish I hadn't read that but I'm sort of
> > glad I did.  Everyone seems to be analyzing him for
> > his relationship with his father and they often forget
> > to describe the author. That's dissapointing, but I
> > will still read him.  

There's a wonderful Australian play called `Kafka Dances', by (ahem) a
friend of mine named Timothy Daly. If it can be found in cyberspace
anywhere, read it, because like Kafka's writing itself it is funny,
terrifying, sad and serious all at the same time (it concerns the short
period in which Kafka was engaged to a woman named Felicite, who Cate
Blanchett played in the production that I saw.)

I find Kafka extremely funny in a very perverse way. His laughter is that
which is chortled in the face of certain doom, and there's something almost
Holdenesque about the many characters in his writing who find themselves in
bizarre and threatening situations in which they have absolutely no idea of
how they got there. The Trial and, my favourite, Metamorphosis, would
satisfy this criteria. I've often said that I can see Metamorphosis, (like
Catcher), as a story about adolescence - after all, what is the experience
but waking up as an altered beast and having to deal with it? What else is
Holden doing when he is growing grey hair, losing his breath and growing
six inches in a year?

Camille
verona_beach@geocities.com

> No, don't be discouraged by psychoanalysis of his relations with his
> father.  He is serious.  But perversely so.  I mean, consider the
> opening of "The Trial" -- what could be more terrifying than having the
> authorities show up at your door to arrest you, and you don't know why,
> and you know no way of stopping it?  




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