Elliot's Reading - Week of 9-5-21: Lawrence short stories

 Elliot’s Reading Week of 9-5-21

D.H. Lawrence wrote some great works (Sons and Lovers, Women in Love) and some mediocre works in just about every genre, which is to say: He wrote a lot. The short story seems like a less suitable milieu for him, as he was not known for his subtlety and concision. The 3 stories collected in the RV Cassill short fiction anthology represent a range of DHL’s work in the from; of the 3, The Horse Dealer’s Daughter is the best in my opinion: opening with an adult family, 3 brothers and a sister, in the wake of the death of the horse dealer/father who leaves them with no inheritance; the brothers joyfully more on as the sister remains in near-ruined farmhouse - and once the coast is clear, so to speak, she tries to drown herself in a mud-choked pond - and is rescued by the local vet., a friend of her brothers’, who finds himself overwhelmed by love for this unfortunate sister. The story’s worth reading for, if nothing else, the truly Lawrentian take on the passions that overtake the two, shocking them both with their suddenness and intensity. @nd story, Tickets, Please, is a pre-Feminist take on a group of women who team up to teach a brutal lesson to the man who’s been harassing them on the job - makes you want to stand and cheer for them, but as a story if feels kind of slight. 3rd story, The Rocking-Horse Winner, is DHL at his weakest, contemptuous of his characters, heavy-handed in his symbolism, and preposterous even as a moral fable. Kafka, about whom I posted recently, can get us to believe in almost any bizarre premise: A man turned into an insect? Let’s see how this plays out. DHL as always more of a moralist, a preacher, and how can we for a moment believe that this young child receives visions that enable him to foretell the fortunes of race horses? (There was a great episode of 77 Sunset Strip a million years ago about the attempt to call 6 out of 8 in an upcoming race event.) 

Elliot’s Reading Week of 8-22-21: Kafka's greatest short works

 Elliot’s Reading Week of 8-22-21: Kafka's greatest short works 

Cassill’s short fiction anthology wisely includes two of Franz Kafka’s greatest short works, The Hunger Artist and The Metamorphosis. Everyone knows the premise of Metamorphosis, and it’s Kafka at his weirdest and most uncanny best: One morning a young sales rep, Gregor Sama, wakens and recognizes that he’s been transformed overnight into a beetle of some sort, and the Kafka takes it from there. As is typical of his work, it’s a premise that is carried out as if it were in a realistic narrative; in fact, it is realistic, except for the absurdity of the central premise. Reading the story inevitably gives one the creeps; it’s repulsive and sorrowful, as the Samsa family tries to accommodate itself to this great and humiliating family circumstance. But what does it all mean? Kafka never writes proscriptively or didactically; but there are some hints. Perhaps Kafka recognizes himself in the mode of the “insect,” infesting his family dynamics with his oddity (the experimental writer), struggling against the murderous will of his father. Perhaps he posits that all families live with secret, repulsive histories. Or perhaps he is looking at how society treats the outcasts, the nonconformists, those with illness and disability. The Hunger Artists is a much shorter piece, but similar in structure: From the first sentence establishing a bizarre, almost inhuman premise and letting the story proceed from this “what if” to its dire conclusion. The terrific opening of this piece posits that at one time a great attraction, much like traveling circus acts or musical performers, were the hunger artists, who starved themselves almost to death while dwelling in a cage in the public square; apparently people would pay an admission price to watch the “artists” starve himself. Aside from, once again the uncanny aspect, leavened by a touch of dark humor (the lengths to which officials would go to ensure that the “artists” didn’t cheat on his starvation diet) and the odd historicity of the premise - the first sentence informs us that the hunger-artist fad is passe - it’s hard not to think of the hunger artist, metaphorically, as the “artist” ahead of or even behind his or her times - a misfit, misunderstood, engaged in his/her lonely pursuit, unrecognized, spurned perhaps by family or friends - in other words: Is this how Kafka viewed himself and his work?