Current New Yorker has 4 “stories” by Franz Kafka – all apparently previously unpublished, and soon to be part of a collection of Kafka’s unpublished stories.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the best judge of his own work; in fact, as is well known, he asked his best friend and executor to destroy all of his unpublished works, and it’s a good thing he didn’t as among other pieces we would have lost The Trial.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?
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