The Thammasat University Library has acquired a new book that should be useful for students interested in literature, European history, sociology, philosophy, Jewish studies, and related subjects.
The Diaries of Franz Kafka in a new English translation provides information about a Czech novelist and short-story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature.
The TU Library collection includes many books by and about Kafka.
Kafka often described people caught in nightmarish situations with government bureaucracies and employers. His characters are seen as representing the situation of many nations in the modern world, although Kafka spent his life in Prague, Czechoslovakia.
The word Kafkaesque in the English language is often used to refer to something marked by a senseless, disorienting, often menacing complexity, with surreal distortion and a sense of approaching danger.
Here are some thoughts by Kafka from books, some of which are owned by the TU Library:
Ours is a lost generation, it may be, but it is more blameless than those earlier generations.
- “Investigations of a Dog”
So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.
- “Investigations of a Dog”
“Everything you say is boring and incomprehensible,” she said, “but that alone doesn’t make it true.”
- “Description of a Struggle”
Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning. His landlady’s cook, who always brought him his breakfast at eight o’clock, failed to appear on this occasion. That had never happened before.
- The Trial (1920)
Here are some interpretations of Kafka from authors represented in the TU Library collection:
The whole art of Kafka consists in forcing the reader to re-read. His endings or his absence of endings, suggest explanations which, however, are not revealed in clear language but, before they seem justified, require that the story be reread.
- Albert Camus, Hope and The Absurd in the Work of Franz Kafka.
The way in which he experienced estrangement was literature, with an intensity greater than that of any other writer of this century, more inexorably than Joyce or Proust or Mann. From this experience flows the power of Kafka’s works to comprehend all forms of alienation, and to suggest a response to political estrangement different from political counterterror: the effort to illuminate this condition by grasping through literature that play is the reward for the courage of accepting death.
- Stanley Corngold, as quoted in the Introduction of The Metamorphosis (1972),
The work of Kafka … has been subjected to a mass ravishment by no less than three armies of interpreters. Those who read Kafka as a social allegory see case studies of the frustrations and insanity of modern bureaucracy and its ultimate issuance in the totalitarian state. Those who read Kafka as a psychoanalytic allegory see desperate revelations of Kafka’s fear of his father, his castration anxieties, his sense of his own impotence, his thralldom to his dreams. Those who read Kafka as a religious allegory explain that K. in The Castle is trying to gain access to heaven, that Joseph K. in The Trial is being judged by the inexorable and mysterious justice of God.
- Susan Sontag, in “Against Interpretation” (1964), in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)
Do you realize that people don’t know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories — and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.
- Milan Kundera
In 1988 I was arrested in Prague for attending a meeting of one of Vaclav Havel’s ‘Charter 77’ committees. That outwardly exciting experience was interesting precisely because of its almost Zen-like tedium. I had gone to Prague determined to be the first visiting writer not to make use of the name Franz Kafka, but the numbing bureaucracy got the better of me. When I asked why I was being detained, I was told that I had no need to know the reason! Totalitarianism is itself a cliché (as well as a tundra of pulverizing boredom) and it forced the cliché upon me in turn. I did have to mention Kafka in my eventual story. The regime fell not very much later, as I had slightly foreseen in that same piece that it would. (I had happened to notice that the young Czechs arrested with us were not at all frightened by the police, as their older mentors had been and still were, and also that the police themselves were almost fatigued by their job. This was totalitarianism practically yawning itself to death.) A couple of years after that I was overcome to be invited to an official reception in Prague, to thank those who had been consistent friends through the stultifying years of what ‘The Party’ had so perfectly termed ‘normalization.’ As with my tiny moment with Nelson Mandela, a whole historic stretch of nothingness and depression, combined with the long and deep insult of having to be pushed around by boring and mediocre people, could be at least partially canceled and annealed by one flash of humor and charm and generosity.”
- Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir
No writer in our time has been more isolated than Kafka, and yet few have achieved communication as well as he did.”
- Eugenio Montale
Give us this day our daily dread: it is difficult to imagine the Kafka family going out to eat, though that is what it would have taken for the death grip of mealtime to loosen, let go. At home, at the table, little Franz Kafka was eaten alive. By the time of the famous “Letter to Father,” he was vaporized. He says so himself: A good deal of the damage done to the young psyche occurred at table. The neighborhood restaurant might have rerouted the oppressive domesticity of home rule—it might have introduced a hiatus or suspensive regime change that would allow for hunger’s pacing. Part of a spectacle of public generality, the theater of ingestion—possibly also of incorporation—the restaurant causes the hold on the child to slacken, if only because there are witnesses and waiters whose work consists in diminishing the intensities of paternal law and the sacrificial rites that underlie their daily distribution—the daily apportionment of dread.
- Avital Ronell, Loser Sons: Politics and Authority
Reading Kafka, I sense that the elicited questions are always just beyond my understanding…. They promise an answer but not now, perhaps next time, next page. Something in his writing… allows me approximations, intuitions, half-dreams, but never total comprehension…. Kafka offers me absolute uncertainties which fit so many of my own.
- Alberto Manguel, Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)