dick writes life

As Alan Bennett puts it in his play Kafka's Dick, "Gossip is the acceptable face of intellect." Tidbits of information, like the fact that Kafka had a small penis, "pass for culture" in this country.

The central conceit of Kafka's Dick is that Kafka and his friend / executor Max Brod, turn up at the home of a suburban couple; Sydney, an insurance salesman and his wife, Linda, a nurse. It is late twentieth-century England and Brod and Kafka are, by rights, dead. Kafka is unaware that after his death, Brod did not, as he had promised, burn all of Kafka's letters, manuscripts and published works. As a result, Kafka now has an invite to "that posthumous cocktail party - posterity" as Bennett phrases it. Brod too has an invite because he wrote The biography of Kafka.

Sydney, an amateur Kafka scholar writing a paper for Small Print: Journal of Insurance Studies, is delighted at the opportunity to quiz his subject personally, but is stopped from doing so by Brod who reasons that if anyone in the present-day were to appear interested in Kafka, then Kafka's works must have remained to posterity, a fact which he is of course trying to hide from Kafka. Just as Brod and Sydney think they might have succeeded in keeping his fame from Kafka, the latter's father, Hermann, walks in threatening to tell the world that his son had a small penis unless Kafka renounces claims that his father abused him. These claims are all that posterity knows of Hermann and he wants to clear his name. Accordingly, Kafka protests his father's innocence. Knowing the truth of the matter, the others put Kafka on trial (punning on the title of one of his best known works) in a scene that is a little laboured by Bennett.

"Sydney," protests Linda, "this is persecution." "No it's not" her husband answers, "It's biography."

And sure enough:

A stash of explicit pornography to which Franz Kafka subscribed has emerged for the first time after being studiously ignored by scholars anxious to preserve the iconic writer's saintly image.

Having stumbled by chance across copies in the British Library in London and the Bodleian in Oxford while doing unrelated research, James Hawes, the academic and Kafka expert, reveals some of this erotic material in Excavating Kafka, to be published this month. His book seeks to explode important myths surrounding the literary icon, a "quasi-saintly" image which hardly fits with the dark and shocking pictures contained in these banned journals.

Comments

[ejh]

Using "iconic" = lazy writing. (Also see "excellent".)

[jamie]

Not as lazy as this:

"Hawes, an Oxford graduate and university lecturer, emphasises his total admiration for the literary Kafkaesque genius who wrote brooding classics such as The Metamorphosis, The Castle and The Trial"

Kafkaesque is lazy enough. Using Kafkaesque to describe Kafka is bone fucking idle.

[ejh]

Heh, if I hadn't been such a lazy bastard myself I'd have spotted that.

[jamie]

The "literary's" good too. Who's neice is the author, do we think?

[Fellow Traveller]

Gore Vidal dubbed history 'a higher form of gossip' and this bears witness to the truth of that observation. The middle class prefers the contemplation of trivia over the truth.

The language in the quoted news item reminds me of one of Roland Barthes comments about stereotype in writing -

"the phrases 'explode important myths', 'dark and shocking' and 'banned journals' all support the myth of the newspaper as the exposer of the hidden truth behind the lives of the rich and famous (for a most recent example, one only has to look at the Moseley affair). Whereas, in actuality, the newspapers provide ideological cover for the whole society that permits the existence of this class.

"Someone writes to me that 'a group of revolutionary students is preparing a destruction of the structuralist myth.' I am captivated by the stereotypic consistency of the expression. The destruction of the myth begins from the very announcement of its putative agents with the finest of myths, the 'group of revolutionary students' - quite as good as 'war widows' or 'old soldiers.'

Usually the stereotype is a sad affair, since it is constituted by a necrosis of language, a prosthesis brought in to fill a hole in writing. Yet at the same time it cannot but occasion a huge burst of laughter: it takes itself seriously, believes itself to be closer to the truth because indifferent to its nature as language. It is at once corny and solemn."

Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers Barthes

- punctuation amended (JK)

[Fellow Traveller]

Forgot to close italics. Oops.

[ejh]

Whose niece is the author, do we think?

Er, dunno. What am I missing?

[jamie]

Oh, just random snark to the effect that I doubt the hack got where she is by a rigorous interviewing process.

FT - I think it's more about commerce and hypocrisy than ideology per se, though the things can't be entirely separated. How do you make money out of a dead author already chewed over extensivley? By giving a peek at his porn stash: or rather "exposing" it. It sticks in the throat that the dirty little biographer prasies his own courage in doing so, but I guess that's the territory. Brod should have burned the lot.

[Alex]

Also, "saintly"? He was a lawyer with a reputation as a vicious kaffeehaus wit and a difficult love life, not someone hiding in a (highly stereotyped) garret.

Regarding Barthes, this reminds me of the friend of Robert Graves who was beaten at school for reading Shelley. "Shelley is beautiful!" he protested. Bollocks. Now Barthes, well..