Are the 4 short pieces by Kafka in current Yew Yorker worth reading?

Current New Yorker has 4 “stories” by Franz Kafka – all apparently previously unpublished, and soon to be part of a collection of Kafka’s unpublished stories. Kafka famously was a perfectionist as a writer – discarding and destroying many drafts – and not the best judge of his own work; in fact, as is well known, he asked his best friend and executor to destroy all of his unpublished works, and it’s a good thing he didn’t as among other pieces we would have lost The Trial. As to the forthcoming collection of short pieces, obviously their merit will lie in what they tell us about FK’s more substantial and developed work (work that he had published in his lifetime) and about Kafka himself, which he would have hated but, oh well, the prize of even posthumous fame. Of these 4 pieces, one seems more like a note-to-self (on the Prometheus myth), one two seem like a sketch or a fragment for something greater than FK never developed. One, however, seems substantial and illuminating, the piece about a man who is accosted on a country road by a farmer who begins to tell the man – a stranger – of his marital difficulties and asks the man to help him; the man reluctantly agrees and then they begin “negotiations” about the price to be exacted for this beneficence – a price that becomes increasingly absurd, until at last negotiations break off. Can we help but see this as Kafka’s take on the then-new medical innovation of psychoanalysis?

How well does Wallace Stegner's Crossing to Safety hold up over time?

Have started (re)reading Wallace Stegner’s novel Crossing to Safety (1987), spurred in part by R.O. Scott essay in appreciation of WS in the NYTBR. I’d first read Xing to Safety when it was new, a review copy in fact, and praised it highly as a great work of American literature (later, no doubt as a result of that review, the publishing house arranged a dinner for WS and I was seated next to him – a fine, intelligent, and thoughtful man; can’t recall what we discussed but probably mostly publishing gossip). Now, +30 years later (gulp), I’m finding (as did Scott) that the novel holds up well and is one of the few works in our literature celebrate the fast friendship of adult couples. In essence, the novel – set in the 1970s – begins with the narrator and his wife, Sally, visiting the summer Vermont retreat of their best friends, Sid and Charity Lang; it seems that Sid has recently died [ek note: this is not correct] (and Sally is in fragile health), though we know little about the back story. After careful scene-setting – WS was highly skilled in evoking the look and feel of a specific locale (in both time and space) – the narrator takes us back some 40 years to when the two couples met in Madison, Wisc., where both the men were untenured faculty members. WS gives us some really powerful scenes of dramatic writing – Sally’s difficult delivery of their 1^st child; boating accident on the lake; narrator’s nearly 24-hour drive from Madison to Vt. – but the true strength of this section of the novel come from the evocation of the academic milieu in that day: competitive, snobbish, rarefied – not all that different from the scene some 40 years later as I experienced it. The narrator (is his name Larry Morgan?), a bit of an outsider because – gasp! – he’s from UC Berkeley and not an Ivy – works twice as hard as any of his colleagues, and, though he receives no recognition from the University of Wisconsin, does begin publishing stories and, unsolicited, unagented, first try publication of his first novel. One can believe this is this is Stegner’s own story in any way, although such ascension seems impossible today. The fly in the ointment is that Sid is obviously envious of his best friend’s success – and the quality of the novel, ultimately, will be how, or whether, WS builds into his plot some kind of crisis or “collision of forces”; so far, about a third of the way through, it feels great as a piece of auto-fiction as it would be called today, but so far the characters are fortunate and blessed and there’s no fuse, yet, being lit beneath them. As a further note, today this novel would be castigated, rightly or wrongly, for its narrow scope - focused entirely on socially advantaged, white academics, politically inert (there's a wisp of anti-Semitism, though not much made of that). That said, the world WS is evoking was, in fact, all-white and rarefied - his depiction holds true to the facts of the time and place.

Two (disappointing) stories in the New Yorker "double issue"

A quick look at two of the stories in the New Yorker so-called “double issue” (love the Nyer, but these “double issues” are just a dodge imposed on subscribers), first, Haruki Murakami’s Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey. HM has been writing about talking animals – birds, cats, monkeys, and others – for 35 years or more now, and the thrill is gone. What once in his work seemed imaginative and mysterious now just seems to be mannered, a tic, a relic. In this piece a young man traveling in a remote area of Japan checks in at a small hotel and, in the evening, strikes up a conversation with a monkey, who tells him he learned language at a young age and is now employed as a servant in the hotel. The monkey “confesses” that he has fallen in love w/ several human women and, unable to strike up any relationship with any of the women, he has stolen part of the woman’s name. In a bit of a twist that differs from his earlier talking-animal stories, here HM’s narrator says that he completely disbelieves this whole episode and thinks he might have been hallucinating or dreaming – until, years later, he meets a woman who has trouble remembering her own name! OK, so where does this leave us? I’d like to say the story is a tribute to the power of imagination, but it feels, at this point in HM’s career, like well-trodden ground. The third story in the magazine (the first was the Hemingway story, which I’d posted on previously) is Emma Cline’s White Noise, a depiction of the Harvey Weinstein on the day before the jury is to begin its deliberations. No doubt Cline is a skilled writer and has her finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist – she seems to have an uncanny knowledge of the lifestyles of the rich and notorious – but what is the point here?? There’s no insight into HW’s perverse character or behavior; we develop neither sympathy, empathy, nor understanding of this man, and we by no means come to feel sorrow and pity for him: We knew he was despicable before reading the story and we still know it at the end; nothing’s been offered to challenge us or change us or inform us. Why would anyone even write this story? He’s a hateful man – and why even think about him unless you can bring some new perspective or insight. The “twist” in the story is HW’s supposition that the man in the house next door is the novelist Don DeLillo; what this is based upon I have no idea, but in this story it feels like pointless name-dropping (you’d have to be really in the know to recobnize the somewhat reclusive DeLillo). HW seems to want to adapt DD’s novel White Noise (the title of this story) into a film; fat chance of that – and btw it would make a lousy film.

The conclusion of Kafka's The Trial

The end of Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1946, 3^rd edition; completed 1915, published posthumously 1925) is almost comic because of its sudden, abrupt conclusion to this complex, obsessive narrative. Up to this point, the novel consisted exclusively of the struggles Joseph K. goes through in response to his unexpected and unexplained arrest: He has no idea what transgression he may have committed, he is never informed about the progress of the case against him nor will he ever be, he gets conflicting advice from many sources, and his entire life is devoted to trying to get some kind of fair trial and justice and dismissal of the charges, which he is repeatedly warned will never and can never happen. The, in the final (and shortest) chapter, two strange characters – you can imagine them as the inspiration for Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon – with dispatch arrest Joseph, get him in a tight grip, and march him to a quarry at the city limits where they waste no time in shooting him death. Thus, justice is served. Neither we nor Joseph learn anything about the substance of his so-called crime nor about the process of adjudication that led to his execution. And that’s the point, of course: Life, Kafka seems to be saying, is a condition in which we are constantly under the burden of our sins, crimes, and misdemeanors; absolution is impossible because simply to be alive places us in a condition of constant adjudication, by and for ourselves, and by and for others (friends, neighbors, lovers, the state, a God). We the living neither receive nor deserve a “fair trial.” The system of justice is an absraction and bears no relationship to our internal life, our sufferings. There is no doubt that Kafka himself was deeply troubled, and not all readers will accept his verdict on the human condition – but there’s also no doubt that Kafka’s work feels more true and valid a century later, following the Holocaust and numerous crimes against humanity, following despotism and fascism in many countries including the supposedly “advanced,” than writers could have imagined a century ago. Kafka is an anomaly and an enigma – but also he was frightfully ahead of his time.

A 4th possible reading of Kafka's The Trial

I’ll briefly add a 4^th way in which to read Franz Kafka’s The Trial (posthumously published in 1925): the Personal. I haven’t delved into Kafka’s notebooks, journals, and letters, but without even doing so it’s evident from this and other works of his that he was a man of great suffering, besieged by guilt and shame. Why this may have been, I can’t even speculate – but the suffering that Joseph K experiences throughout this book of torment suggests a need for expiation and a crushing sense of dread that permeates Joseph K’s life and discolors and and all of his worldly success. In this novel, Joseph K (the abbreviated patronym left as a clear marker pointing toward the author) wakes one morning to be accused by some nebulous legal authority of some undisclosed and unknown crime; in some ways this is a motif for many of Kafka’s works – in particular, the most famous of his stories, in with Gregor Samsa wakes up to find that he’s been “metamorphosed” into a cockroach. Though K’s situation is less revolting, it’s in some ways more frightening to the reader, as it’s within our scope of possibility: You really could be wakened by a police force knocking on your door for some unknown (and unjustified) reason. I haven’t finished (re)reading The Trial, but I suspect we will never know the reason behind the accusation; but on a personal level we see that this book summarizes Kafka’s struggle with demons of persecution, without being able to offer or articulate the reason for his guilt and shame.

Why was Hemingway's "story" Pursuit as Happiness left unpublished?

Curious to find in the New Yorker summer “double-issue” a previously unpublished short story by Hemingway. Or is it a short story? In the online edition a brief q&a w/ Hemingway’s grandson Sean answers, and raises, several questions. Sean H, preparing for a new edition of Old Man and the Sea came across the manuscript among EHs papers in the Kennedy Library. The papers date from anytime from the 30s to the 50s. The story as published – Pursuit as Happiness – bears clear relationship to Old Man, but it feels more like a memoir than like any of EH’s other many, great stories: the people in the “story,” including the narrator, EH himself, are referred to be their real names, and there are a # of references to EH’s writing and his writing practices, quite unusual in his short fiction. The piece itself involves EH’s attempt to land a +500-lb marlin off the coast of Cuba, and it exudes all of the so-called manly virtues of the hunter – will win no fans among those opposed to the slaughter of animals for sport! – and gives a real sense of the physical difficult and needed dexterity in the landing of such a prize. Well, it gets away, to the great chagrin of the 2 crew members who should, but seldom do, deserve as much recognition as the rich guy paying the fare for the “sport.” It would be my guess that this was an early attempt to EH to write about his fascination with deep-sea trophy fishing; he must have set this aside until he figured out a better way to pretend the material as both a sporting story and an allegorical narrative, which he ultimately did on Old Man: same material, but without the author’s presence and with the fish getting away not because of a crew-member’s mistake in cutting the lines but, after the successful catch, the carcass gets devoured by sharks en route back to port. In the novel, unlike this unpublished fragment, the struggle itself is its own source of victory – even w/out validation and recognition from the world at large.

Lydia Davis's thoughts on memory and her closest readings of literary texts

Over the past few months I’ve been reading, on and off, Lydia Davis’s Essays: One (2019), and completed reading it last night, as her collection ends w/ a knockout-punch essay Remember the Van Wagenens, which is really LD’s reflections and observations about memory and how it can be evoked by sensory stimulation and how it can be false and misleading and strange. For example, she writes: Say you’re traveling in Austria and come to the house where Mozart lived and you stand and stare at the house in wonder and it’s a deeply moving experience for you. And say that months or maybe years later you learn that you had the wrong address and the house had nothing to do w/ Mozart. So how does that information change the nature of your profound experience? Did you really have a moment of grace? Or should that experience be erased from your memory? Can it? She also writes about her yearning to recover her first French childhood textbook, which she can picture, right down to the font – and then gets a copy and it’s quite different from her memory, but does that make her memory suspect? Or is it still “accurate,” though metamorphosed by time? As noted in an earlier post, many of the best essays in this collection concern the art of writing, with much shrewd if eccentric advice to young writers. The second half of the volume includes many of LD’s reviews, often of works by obscure European writers, and several of her pieces on the visual arts. Her strength, though, comes from her writing about well-known works of literature, bringing to the works her extreme attention to details of text, the most intense versions of  “close reading,” such as only a writer (only a translator?) can bring. Note in particular her essays on Madame Bovary, which she has translated, and on some passages in the Bible, OT and NT.

3 possible readings of The Trial

I’ve started (re)reading Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial (1925, posthumous publication) in the Schocken “definitive” edition. Everyone knows the basic premise of this novel: Joseph K., 30-year-old bank employee in an unnamed city, is wakened by an officious man who tells him he’s under arrest and due for trial, and over the course of the novel K tries unsuccessfully to find out what he’s been accused of and whatis expected of him (for ex., he receives a call at work informing him that he much be present for an interrogation on Sunday, but he’s not given the time – he arrives at the remote street address, which seems to be nothing more than a row of tenements; he enters, wanders through corridors, takes some time before he arrives at the hearing room – a grand open space filled with spectators). It strikes me in the early going that there are at least 3 ways to interpret and understand this novel: First, the psychological. Inevitably, K’s persecution and frustration seem and feel like a vivid high-anxiety dream, as K’s search for information about the supposed case against him seems to follow a painful and disturbing dream logic and the extreme frustration that dreams, at least for me!, often encompass. Second, the political: Hard not to draw comparisons between the oppression of K and the political show trials against the innocent and unaware, usually in oligarchies, dictatorships, and monarchies – and increasingly, as we painfully see, in democracies. Third, the allegorical: As K is put “on trial” in a public setting for undisclosed crimes, there is a sense that all of us are on trial in some way or manner: Have we done all we can or should to rectify injustice, poverty, and cruelty in our world? Will we all face a final judgment in a way that we cannot imagine or articulate? Are we, in a sense, on trial every day, as there’s so much we can do in every living moment that can be helpful or hurtful?

Thoughts on reading in another language: L'etranger

I have just (re)read Albert Camus’s 1942 novel, “L’etranger” (aka The Stranger, The Outsider), and I use the French title because I read it in French. I have not posted on this novel while reading it; only now, at completion – and that’s because reading it in French, a language I can speak a little but couldn’t possibly write and can read only the simplest of texts, is an entirely different experience (for me) than reading it in English would have been. (I’d supposedly read it in French in college, but I know I must have bent the rules and read it in English). In any event, struggling to read it in Fr., with a dictionary at my side, lead me to focus much more on the language than on the novel. But there’s a reason this novel was so often prescribed for mid-level Fr. Courses: the plot (spoiler alert) is minimal (a young Algerian-French man, Mersault, feeling remote and detached from other people, an “existential” anti-hero, for no apparent reason shoots and kills an Arab on the beach and is quickly arrested, imprisoned, tried, and sentenced to death by guillotine), the language (first-person narration) is straightforward, w/ only a few passages of descriptive prose. I found in reading it that at times it was better to not look at all at the dictionary – as I could make sense of most of the passages just skipping over the words that were unfamiliar to me (often, you can figure out the meaning, though I’m sure that had I written out the sentences in English there would have been many howlers); at times, though, I was checking the dictionary at almost every sentence, which made the reading tough going: I’d get the meaning, but miss the story, so to speak. Still, even for those like me w/ rudimentary French, the attempt to read the novel in its language of composition entails “close reading,” intense reading, sentence by sentence, at times word by word: I hadn’t paid such close attention to any prose text I’d read in years, maybe ever. But that’s not to say I “got” everything out of this novel. What I really read was no L’etranger but le francais.