Kafka:

Other Writers Who Interest Me

August Strindberg

Most famous for his misogyny - he denied he was a mere anti-feminist and insisted on being regarded as a misogynist - Strindberg's plays show the relations between the sexes as outright war. Germaine Greer regarded him as an early feminist, I think because he described the relations between men and women so honestly. (See The Madwoman's Underclothes.) Women in general appear to have found Strindberg appealing: despite his views he was married three times.

I was only a few pages into The Father before I was hooked. However the plays are much easier to read than the novels or autobiographical writings. Kafka's comment to Felice Bauer sums up the experience of reading him: "One has only to close one's eyes, and one's own blood delivers lectures on Strindberg."

His writing, although apparently unstructured, has a great personal integrity. A Dream Play shows the sufferings of humanity as seen by an Indian goddess coming down to earth. It makes one feel for humanity, enduring that ordinary drudgery of life that becomes a torment. Strindberg is an eloquent spokesman for the dreadful things that people do to one another.

Jorge Luis Borges

A difficult if deceptively (very deceptively) simple writer. He makes perversity into an art form. His stories are like acts of magic, attempts to change reality without being changed. One can become dangerously obsessed by Borges.

In one of his stories, The Garden Of Forking Paths, we hear the story of a man whose lifework was to create a maze "in which every man might become lost". This phrase also describes Borges' work. His stories are such a maze. They invariably end with an impossibility: a reversal of reality, or of ethics.

Gabriel Josipovici

An underrated but mainly unknown writer, Gabriel Josipovici is modernist and avant-garde, but this does not make him inaccessible. His stories, simple like those of Borges, whom he admires, consist of repetitions of the same small movements, the same actions, again and again, at first unimportant, then gradually growing in importance, until perhaps something happens, or again does not happen. This is a reflection of the routine nature of our lives as we live them today.

His books are built like bridges, with a tensile strength that rests in the structure rather than the individual random detail. He has a remarkably straightforward English style. His ordinary sentences are beautiful: he does not attempt to be "exuberant".

In A Hotel Garden is an attempt to respond to the Holocaust "without distorting or falsifying". He approaches this task not by trying to describe the Holocaust itself, but only by touching indirectly on its continued influence on people's lives over forty years later.

Moo Pak, one of his more recent, for me his most enjoyable, consists in conversations between two friends who walk through parks in London. We hear only one of the friends. As we listen, something of the friendship between the two men comes through. The book is the clever solution (as you will discover if you read it) to a difficult problem!

Josipovici is also a very good literary critic, with interesting thoughts about Kafka.

Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol

A writer who went mad, Gogol left an unusual legacy, and along with Pushkin was venerated as one of the greats of early nineteenth century Russian literature.

His novel Dead Souls, of which only Part I survives in full, is a magnificent failure. Halfway through, when he had reached the end of Part I, his plan for the novel changed: it was to be the novel that would save Russia. As one reads it - and perhaps in this it anticipates subsequent Russian history - one has the impression of a great creative effort missing its footing and falling apart spectacularly.

Before we write it off, however, we should note that the work survives, and that failure in art is often a key to success. Part I is very very striking aesthetically but dodgy from an ethical perspective; what remains of Parts II and III seems to me to balance out Part I, in that they are obsessed with Chichikov's ethical behaviour, but at the expense of the aesthetics.

Mervyn Peake

One of those odd writers that you occasionally come across in English literature. Peake's Gormenghast Trilogy survives the fifties by creating a Gothic fantasy which is not like our world, but not so far from it either, set in the great castle Gormenghast. The last book, Titus Alone, is, frustratingly, neither science fiction nor surrealism. Where it stands exactly in relation to the world that we know is difficult to say.

It walks a carefully balanced tightrope of aesthetic and ethical considerations. Every sentence stands out. One is surprised that he can think of all these words. How fantastic he can make his world without removing it from reality! The second novel begins: "Titus is seven. His confines, Gormenghast. Suckled on shadows; weaned, as it were, on webs of ritual: for his ears, echoes, for his eyes a labyrinth of stone..."

But the characters nevertheless have a familiar moral sensibility, however little we expect that. The extreme and unnatural conventions of Gormenghast bow to a rebellious youth, who should have taken over his father's seat.

One line from Titus Alone amusingly sums up this balance of ethics and aesthetics: "The truth is not in you, and your feet smell."
One aspect of the Gormenghast trilogy which has arisen as a result of the TV series is the question of reading it. It is like riding a bicycle. Once you have got your balance and understand the way that it works, reading it is a positive pleasure. Most people who pick it up for the first time find it difficult to get into and often give up on it, either because of its detail or its scope. That is because (I surmise) they have expectations of the book which it is not going to fulfil. The most important aspect of the book is its language: it is a literary construct, not a mere description of some external reality. In this respect Peake can be seen as something of a modernist, in that he is drawing attention to the work as something created.

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Set up 26 October 1998

Last updated 26 March 1999
© R. Millar 1998-1999

August Strindberg	Most famous for his misogyny - he denied he was a mere anti-feminist and insisted on being regarded as a misogynist - Strindberg's plays show the relations between the sexes as outright war. Germaine Greer regarded him as an early feminist, I think because he described the relations between men and women so honestly. (See The Madwoman's Underclothes.) Women in general appear to have found Strindberg appealing: despite his views he was married three times. I was only a few pages into The Father before I was hooked. However the plays are much easier to read than the novels or autobiographical writings. Kafka's comment to Felice Bauer sums up the experience of reading him: "One has only to close one's eyes, and one's own blood delivers lectures on Strindberg." His writing, although apparently unstructured, has a great personal integrity. A Dream Play shows the sufferings of humanity as seen by an Indian goddess coming down to earth. It makes one feel for humanity, enduring that ordinary drudgery of life that becomes a torment. Strindberg is an eloquent spokesman for the dreadful things that people do to one another.
Jorge Luis Borges	A difficult if deceptively (very deceptively) simple writer. He makes perversity into an art form. His stories are like acts of magic, attempts to change reality without being changed. One can become dangerously obsessed by Borges. In one of his stories, The Garden Of Forking Paths, we hear the story of a man whose lifework was to create a maze "in which every man might become lost". This phrase also describes Borges' work. His stories are such a maze. They invariably end with an impossibility: a reversal of reality, or of ethics.
Gabriel Josipovici	An underrated but mainly unknown writer, Gabriel Josipovici is modernist and avant-garde, but this does not make him inaccessible. His stories, simple like those of Borges, whom he admires, consist of repetitions of the same small movements, the same actions, again and again, at first unimportant, then gradually growing in importance, until perhaps something happens, or again does not happen. This is a reflection of the routine nature of our lives as we live them today. His books are built like bridges, with a tensile strength that rests in the structure rather than the individual random detail. He has a remarkably straightforward English style. His ordinary sentences are beautiful: he does not attempt to be "exuberant". In A Hotel Garden is an attempt to respond to the Holocaust "without distorting or falsifying". He approaches this task not by trying to describe the Holocaust itself, but only by touching indirectly on its continued influence on people's lives over forty years later. Moo Pak, one of his more recent, for me his most enjoyable, consists in conversations between two friends who walk through parks in London. We hear only one of the friends. As we listen, something of the friendship between the two men comes through. The book is the clever solution (as you will discover if you read it) to a difficult problem! Josipovici is also a very good literary critic, with interesting thoughts about Kafka.
Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol	A writer who went mad, Gogol left an unusual legacy, and along with Pushkin was venerated as one of the greats of early nineteenth century Russian literature. His novel Dead Souls, of which only Part I survives in full, is a magnificent failure. Halfway through, when he had reached the end of Part I, his plan for the novel changed: it was to be the novel that would save Russia. As one reads it - and perhaps in this it anticipates subsequent Russian history - one has the impression of a great creative effort missing its footing and falling apart spectacularly. Before we write it off, however, we should note that the work *survives*, and that failure in art is often a key to success. Part I is very very striking aesthetically but dodgy from an ethical perspective; what remains of Parts II and III seems to me to balance out Part I, in that they are obsessed with Chichikov's ethical behaviour, but at the expense of the aesthetics.
Mervyn Peake	One of those odd writers that you occasionally come across in English literature. Peake's Gormenghast Trilogy survives the fifties by creating a Gothic fantasy which is not like our world, but not so far from it either, set in the great castle Gormenghast. The last book, Titus Alone, is, frustratingly, neither science fiction nor surrealism. Where it stands exactly in relation to the world that we know is difficult to say. It walks a carefully balanced tightrope of aesthetic and ethical considerations. Every sentence stands out. One is surprised that he can think of all these words. How fantastic he can make his world without removing it from reality! The second novel begins: "Titus is seven. His confines, Gormenghast. Suckled on shadows; weaned, as it were, on webs of ritual: for his ears, echoes, for his eyes a labyrinth of stone..." But the characters nevertheless have a familiar moral sensibility, however little we expect that. The extreme and unnatural conventions of Gormenghast bow to a rebellious youth, who should have taken over his father's seat. One line from Titus Alone amusingly sums up this balance of ethics and aesthetics: "The truth is not in you, and your feet smell." One aspect of the Gormenghast trilogy which has arisen as a result of the TV series is the question of reading it. It is like riding a bicycle. Once you have got your balance and understand the way that it works, reading it is a positive pleasure. Most people who pick it up for the first time find it difficult to get into and often give up on it, either because of its detail or its scope. That is because (I surmise) they have expectations of the book which it is not going to fulfil. The most important aspect of the book is its language: it is a literary construct, not a mere description of some external reality. In this respect Peake can be seen as something of a modernist, in that he is drawing attention to the work as something created.