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Kafka novelist11/11/2023 ![]() has with these authorities - the two assistants appointed to him, the letters he receives, the phone call he overhears - appears to confirm his appointment. arrives in a village believing he has been appointed land-surveyor by the authorities (the village is ruled by a castle). He gives us the basic outline of the novel’s plot: a stranger known only as K. Kafka himself seemed to intuit this: “I am the end or the beginning,” he wrote.Įrich Heller, who, like Kafka, became a doctor of law at the German University in Prague, makes a strong case for the central paradox of Kafka’s writing in his canonical essay on The Castle (collected in 1952’s The Disinherited Mind). ![]() He either founded a new genre or dissolved all of them. He is the prophet of 20th-century atrocity a slapstick vaudevillian in the Buster Keaton mold the grim reaper of post-religious modernity. In the century or so since his work was first introduced to a reading public, he has been hustled in under a plethora of interpretive awnings: Judaism, Christianity, Psychoanalysis, the Holocaust, Communism, Symbolism, Existentialism - you name it. Erich Heller once wrote of the “pathetic plight of critics in the face of Kafka’s novels.” How one sympathizes! Kafka’s entire oeuvre is an assault on interpretation, on meaning it is the most formidable rebuttal in the history of literature to the undying but misguided question: “What does this text mean?”Īnd yet, ironically, few authors are so burdened with the cargo of meaning as Kafka. The old tools - character, plot, style - are useless to us those solemn tomes of theory might as well be returned to their exile on the lower shelves the recourse to undergraduate Freudianism had better be checked. It takes just a few pages for all our preconceptions about literature to become unmoored.
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