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A daily record of what I'm thinking about what I'm reading

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Friday, October 15, 2010

How many writers' names have truly become adjectives?

How many writers' names have entered the lexicon as adjectives? Definitely Proustian. Shakespearean. Flaubertian? Miltonian? Spenserian? Lawrentian? Nabokovian? Dickensian? Dostoyevskian? Tolstoyan? Jamesian? Faulknerian? With exception perhaps of Proustian, all really just mean "similar to or in the style of X." You wouldn't even know what they mean if you hadn't read the author. Proustian has its own meaning, I think: ornate, detailed, rich with memory and recollection. We can talk about a Proustian moment. Shakespearean is unique unto itself - a superlative. But then there's and only one other that stands above even Proustian as a unique adjective, that is, understood be millions who've never read the author: Kafkaesque. It's come to mean strange, surreal, dreamlike, arbitrary with the hint of paranoia. We talk about a Kafkaesque situation, loosely modeled on his novels - usually, the Trial, some weird and interminable bureaucratic mix-up. And that is an accurate description of his work, but it's a surface description. Reading (for the first time) Franz Kafka's "The Castle." And yes Kafka more than any other writer captures the nightmare emotions of repetition, a goal just out of reach, strange behaviors and incongruities. But if his novels were just dreamscapes, they would be just curiosities. The Castle, at least initial pages, not quite as universal in theme as The Trial, with its scary parallels to totalitarian regimes today, but also maybe a deeper psychological study. I'm dissertations and books have been written about what the castle represents or "means" to K, to the reader: some sexual symbol, some repressed aspect of the psyche? Or does it "mean" nothing - it just sets, and keeps, the novel in motion, or stasis?

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