Re: Life imitating art

Now you're reminding me how long it's been since I've read
Kafka....might pick up that story over the next couple days if it's
short enough.

Jim

Omlor@aol.com wrote:

> Jim,
>
> Actually, Kafka gives the performance of the artist, when he's at his
> peak of popularity, quite the showboating feel, if you'll remember.
> The impresario is running things at that point, and he stages the
> thing with all the flourishes. Each time the artist finishes, the
> impresario makes the artist's breaking the fast a big show with bands
> and beautiful girls to lead him out and all the rest. It's
> deliberately hyped, even though the artist would rather not come out
> and would prefer to push his art to the limits he knows he can reach.
> He's prevented from doing this, of course, because of his audience's
> attention span and commercial interests. Later, after he loses his
> audience because his art has gone out of fashion, he can push himself
> beyond the limits of his own art, but he's by that point he's holed up
> in the corner of a circus where no one watches him or cares and he has
> no audience, and then it gets desperate and Kafkaesque. It is of
> course one of the great meditations on the relationship between the
> writer and his readers and his art that I have ever read. And the
> last line, the explanation the artist uses for why he did what he did
> and why he should not be admired for doing so, is a slight variation
> on the line Kafka always used about why he wrote.
>
> But anyway, when the Hunger Artist is popular and doing his thing in
> the middle of big cities, like Blaine in London, it is all hyped to
> the max by the impresario as some sort of pageant and has the same
> artificially staged, showboating feel. In fact, the very same
> concerns about cheating and everything else spoken of in the article
> are said about the artist a well, almost verbatim.
>
> But since we're telling stories, back in the eighties some time,
> Derrida was invited to Czechoslovakia to deliver a lecture on Kafka
> for a symposium. It seems the authorities at the time did not like
> what he had to say or his politics. When he tried to return to
> France, he was stopped at the border and border guards, while they
> were "searching" his luggage, planted cocaine in it (they later copped
> to this). He was immediately arrested and placed in a cell for the
> night. During the evening, one of the guards said to him, when he
> complained about something, "Try to think of this as a Kafkaesque
> experience."
>
> Cute, huh?
>
> All the best,
>
> --John

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Received on Mon Oct 6 10:57:29 2003