Kafka. . . Borges. Benjamin . . Bloomberg?

Jon Stewart's recent interview of Michael Bloomberg (which you can watch here) began with an interesting interaction between the two. Stewart asked the mayor for his autograph, which Bloomberg dutifully provided, leading Stewart to reveal that what he had actually signed was an "all access 5 borough parking pass." At this point Bloomberg told Stewart to look at the name he had signed, which turned out to be not Michael Bloomberg, but Jon Stewart. I'm not certain how much of this little scene was planned, and perhaps it's even more telling if it wasn't, but for me it had an immediate, albeit initially hazy, literary echo.

Walter Benjamin begins his essay on Kafka ("Franz Kafka, On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death," collected in Illuminations) with an anecdote about Grigory Potyomkin (spelled Potemkin below) relating a remarkably similar event (the anecdote is usually attributed to Pushkin):

It is related that Potemkin suffered from states of depression which recurred more or less regularly. At such times no one was allowed to go near him, and access to his room was strictly forbidden. This malady was never mentioned at court, and in particular it was known that any allusion to it incurred the disfavor of Empress Catherine. One of the Chancellor's depressions lasted for an extraordinary length of time and brought about serious difficulties; in the offices documents piled up that re quired Potemkin's signature, and the Empress pressed for their completion. The high officials were at their wits' end. One day an unimportant little clerk named Shuvalkin happened to enter the anteroom of the Chancellor's palace and found the councillors of state assembled there, moaning and groaning as usual. "What is the matter, Your Excellencies?" asked the obliging Shuvalkin. They explained things to him and regretted that they could not use his services. "If that's all it is," said Shuvalkin, "I beg you to let me have those papers." Having nothing to lose, the councillors of state let themselves be persuaded to do so, and with the sheaf of documents under his arm, Shuvalkin set out, through galleries and corridors, for Potemkin's bedroom. With out stopping or bothering to knock, he turned the door-handle;

portrait of Grigory Potyomkin by Johann-Baptist Lampi

the room was not locked. In semidarkness Potemkin was sitting on his bed in a threadbare nightshirt, biting his nails. Shuvalkin stepped up to the writing desk, dipped a pen in ink, and without saying a word pressed it into Potemkin's hand while putting one of the documents on his knees. Potemkin gave the intruder a vacant stare; then, as though in his sleep, he started to sign—first one paper, then a second, finally all of them. When the last signature had been affixed, Shuvalkin took the papers under his arm and left the room without further ado, just as he had entered it. Waving the papers triumpantly, he stepped into the anteroom. The councillors of state rushed toward him and tore the documents out of his hands. Breathlessly they bent over them. No one spoke a word; the whole group seemed paralyzed. Again Shuvalkin came closer and solicitously asked why the gentlemen seemed so upset. At that point he noticed the signatures. One document after another was signed Shuvalkin . . . Shuvalkin . . . Shuvalkin. . . .

Benjamin presented this story as a herald of Kafka's work, which is probably why, when I could not recall where I had read the story, the first place I thought to look for it was in Borges's essay "Kafka and His Precursors" (collected in Selected Non-Fictions). This mistake itself has also proven revelatory since, beyond Borges and Benjamin's shared desire to identify Kafka's forerunners, there is another reason this little scene led me to Borges. Bloomberg and Stewart's recreation of a scene (or a variation on a scene) which has occurred hundreds of years earlier, probably without even realizing that they were recreating it, is also the main point of Borges's short story "The Plot":

To make his horror complete, Caesar, pressed to the foot of a statue by his friends' impatient daggers, discovers among the blades and faces the face of Marcus Junius Brutus, his ward, perhaps his very son, and so Caesar stops defending himself , and cries out Et tu, Brute? Shakespeare and Quevedo record that pathetic cry.

 Death of Caesar by Vincenzo Camuccini

Destiny takes pleasure in repetitions, variations, symmetries. Nineteen centuries later, in the southern part of the province of Buenos Aires, a gaucho is attacked by other gauchos, and as he falls he recognizes a godson of his and says to him in gentle remonstrance and slow surprise (these words must be heard, not read), Pero, ¡che! He dies, but he does not know that he has died so that a scene may be played out again.

This, in turn, is also the main concept behind James Joyce's Ulysses, where the events of one day in the life of a pudgy and unheroic Jewish man echo Odysseus's epic journey (and, in case you're wondering, it is for this reason that I gave this post its title, a reference to Samuel Beckett's essay on Joyce: "Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce").

Jorge Luis Borges on the Task of Art

Only rarely does it occur to me to look for videos relating to my favorite writers. This might have something to do with the fact that most of my favorites are from several generations ago, making videos of them rare or nonexistent (I still find it hard to accept that Beckett died 2 days before my 10th birthday - that we existed within the same world for such a long time), but occasionally I do stumble upon such a video, like this brief interview with Borges:

Overrated

Over on The Huffington Post Anis Shivani presents an amusing and suitably vitriolic list of the 15 most overrated contemporary writers. The list includes six poets and a couple of critics, but seems to be chiefly directed at workshop-generated novels whose authors work with a checklist (family dysfunction, drug use, multiculturalism). He also proposes an interesting theory regarding the cause for the preeminence of these authors - the lack of major critics to champion the truly worthy:

since the onset of poststructuralist theory, humanist critics have been put to pasture. The academy is ruled by "theorists" who consider their work superior to the literature they deconstruct, and moreover they have no interest in contemporary literature. As for the reviewing establishment, it is no more than the blurbing arm for conglomerate publishing, offering unanalytical "reviews" announcing that the emperor is wearing clothes.

This assessment leads him to include The New York Times's critic Michiko Kakutani on the list as the "enabler-in-chief" for the rest, which I'm not sure I agree with. I think Kakutani, much like James Wood, tends to be excessively breathless when she encounters a book she really likes, but can also be insightful, and actually provides what reviews are supposed to, giving us a sense of what the book is about and whether it's worth reading (a surprisingly small amount of reviews actually do that). Plus, both Wood and Kakutani can be very amusing when they review a book they disliked (e.g. Kakutani's review of Beatrice and Virgil or Wood's review of Paul Auster's fiction).

So who else is on the list? the omnipresent Jonathan Safran Foer, of course. He's the only writer on both The New Yorker's "top 20 under 40" list and this one (though Wells Tower is parenthetically mentioned here as well), and Shivani offers an accurate summary of his career:

...gimmick after gimmick is what Foer excels at. Always quick to jump on to the bandwagon of the moment. Debuted with harmless multiculturalism for the perennially bored in Everything Is Illuminated, with cute lovable foreigners and the slacker generation digging lovableness; a more pretentious "magical realist" novel was never written. Rode the 9/11-novel gravy train with Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, giving us a nine-year-old with the brain of a--twenty-eight-year-old Jonathan Safran Foer. Having cashed in on 9/11, and seeing no obvious fictional goldmine to plunder, moved on to nonfiction with Eating Animals, hanging on to J. M. Coetzee's coattails.

A few more irresistible quotes:

• William T. Vollmann - "determined to churn out a full Pynchon a year."
• Michael Cunningham - "Uses Mrs. Dalloway as a convenient modernist football to play with..."
• Junot Diaz - "Might one day move beyond writing about pussy-hunting nerds and write in a language above that of his childish protagonists'..."

Ars Prosa Word Cloud

A Short Story by Kafka You've Probably Never Seen Before

A couple of weeks ago there was some buzz regarding the opening of some safety deposit boxes containing Max Brod's papers, which include some writings by Franz Kafka. As I've mentioned in one of my previous posts, I find it quite difficult to believe that researchers would find anything there that has not already been published by Brod. I've also had a few e-mail correspondences with friends about this, one of whom expressed disappointment that there "won't be any new stories" to be found. I believe my response was something like:

"You say that as if you've already gone through his diaries, letters, and notebooks twice."

To which he replied:

"I have no intention of going through all his diaries and letters, I'm not a Kafka addict, like SOME people I know."

Which is a shame, but also touches on a rather common misconception that all of Kafka's short fiction is to be found in a volume like The Complete Stories (I'll admit, the title is misleading). In fact, even including the sporadically available Parables and Paradoxes, which collects some famous short works like "The Green Dragon" and "The Hunger Strike", some works are left out, particularly those that only appeared in Kafka's letters.
For example, Kafka's earliest surviving work of fiction, "Shamefaced Lanky and Impure in Heart," is not included in any collection of his stories that I've come across, and only survived because Kafka incorporated it into a 1902 letter to Oskar Pollak (included in Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors).
And since there's nothing I'd like better than to be sued by the greedy heirs of Max Brod and/or Oskar Pollak, here is the complete story for your enjoyment (click on the text for a better view):

Saved!

Yes, I know, I've been neglecting my regular Tuesday news round ups. My excuses include a lot of work, general laziness, and the heat, dear god, the HEAT! I'll try to post more often, but no promises, work (both the paying and the writerly kinds) comes first.

Anyway, I just wanted to share this image of three great Modern Library books I rescued a couple of days ago, along with 18 paperbacks (including books by Pindar, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Andre Gide, Aldous Huxley and Carson McCullers), from four boxes of books someone on my street decided he (or she) no longer desired (I believe all the books eventually found homes, all of them were gone by the time I passed down the street several hours later). I think this, along with my recent purchases in Oxford, puts my library at about 900 books. I think I'll go read some right now.

Kafka in Tel Aviv

It seems the big story in the last few days (and I'm basing this simply on the fact that it has been forwarded to me by several people) is the opening of the vaults in Tel Aviv which contain Kafka's manuscripts. Though it's hard to find a bigger Kafka fan than me (see: Kafka's collected works), I'm finding it difficult to get excited. These papers were in Brod's possession for years, and he was notorious for obsessively publishing just about everything Kafka ever wrote, so there's virtually no chance that there's anything new there.

The article claims that a never before seen short story is among the manuscripts but that does not seem likely. This is basically a fight over who has the right to the manuscripts, Brod's heirs (assuming Brod had the right to them to begin with) or the state of Israel, claiming the papers are "cultural assets belonging to the Jewish people." Anyone familiar with Kafka's works will recognize the irony of this situation. Maybe the most appropriate solution would be to finally respect Kafka's request and burn the papers.

Flaubert, Nietzsche, Dentists, and Lobsters - Woody Allen's Prose

I've recently read Woody Allen's 2007 collection of stories/ sketches/ articles Mere Anarchy, and while it is not as successful as his three earlier collections - Getting Even(1971), Without Feathers(1975) and Side Effects(1980), collected in a single volume under the title The Insanity Defense - I still have to wonder why Allen is often given the slightly dismissive title of "humor" writer, in the vein of Dave Barry, rather than simply a short story writer. While it's true that many of his pieces are not strictly stories, they all fall under the heading of "fiction," and are not much different in form than certain works by Donald Barthelme or Jorge Luis Borges. Many also have a decidedly literary pedigree, including the 1978 O. Henry Award winning story, "The Kugelmass Episode"(SE), Wherein a CCNY professor is magically injected into Madame Bovary to carry on an affair with Emma, much to the confusion of Flaubert scholars.

Other pieces which suggest Allen as a tongue-in-cheek Borges include "The Metterling Lists"(GE), a review of a book analyzing Hans Metterling's laundry lists, and "By Destiny Denied" (SE), containing notes towards the 800 page novel "they're all waiting for." Like Barthelme, Allen is also a fan of mixing high and low culture, as in "If the Impressionists Had Been Dentists"(WF), "Thus Ate Zarathustra"(MA), and "Notes from the Overfed"(GE), inspired by Dostoevsky and "a Weight Watchers magazine." Other pieces include comic variations on established genres like Hassidic tales, Detective fiction, Socratic dialogues, literary memoirs, and Kafkaesque parables and the plays "Death", "God" (both in WF), and "Death Knocks" (GE), which exhibit the familiar style and humor of Allen's early films.

You're bound to get some sense of repetitiveness if you read all four collections (perhaps even a certain motion sickness from too many one-liners, a sort of Schtick-nausea), but even the less successful pieces have at least a line or two of Woody Allenisms which make them worth reading, so if you find the following video enjoyable, I suggest you read them.

Some recent essays by Allen published in The New Yorker (where many of these collected pieces were originally published) are available online, including "Think Hard, It'll Come Back to You" and "Tails of Manhattan," which tells the story of two wealthy Manhattanites bilked by Madoff and reincarnated as lobsters.

Unfamiliar Quotations - Harry Mathews

- Tlooth, Harry Mathews, 1966

Beckett Entire

The list of recommended readings Donald Barthelme gave his writing students includes one particularly laconic entry - "Beckett Entire;" no other writer on his list was awarded this honor. Since Barthelme's death in 1989 (almost five months to the day before Beckett's death) the definition of "entire" has grown, with the 1992 publication of Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Beckett's first novel, and the first volume of his letters, from 1929-1940, published in 2008.

Unrelated to Barthelme's list, I also decided at some point that I wanted to read Beckett's entire oeuvre (probably sometime in 2004/5 after reading the Molloy and Waiting for Godot), though in my case there were other writers I wished to read everything by (Kafka and Borges, both mentioned in earlier posts, as well as Pinter, Coetzee, Raymond Carver, Nathanael West, and Nabokov, some of which I assume will come up in future posts). The following list is for people who wish to do the same and want to know which books they should get, or people who just want to know which of his books are worth reading (unlike Barthelme, though I aim to read Beckett's complete works, I wouldn't recommend all of it).

You might assume that getting a hold of The Grove Centenary Editions of Samuel Beckett Four Volume Boxed Set is a simple, albeit expensive, way of getting all his works, but these editions do not include the posthumously published letters or first novel. Besides, what fun would that be? Wouldn't you rather discuss 17 books than 4?

In the following table books marked V under Bloom were included in Harold Bloom's inescapable Western Canon; books marked V under Me were read by me and are discussed below.

Books	Bloom	Me	Notes
Proust	-	-	Essay
Dream of Fair to Middling Women	-	-	Novel
More Pricks than Kicks	-	-	Stories
Murphy	V	V	Novel
Watt	V	-	Novel
Mercier and Camier	-	V	Novel
Three Novels (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable)	V	V	Also known as The Trilogy
Waiting for Godot	V	V	Play
Endgame	V	V	Play
Happy Days	-	V	Play
How It Is	V	-	Novel
Nohow On	-	V	3 Novellas
Disjecta	-	V	Various writings and a dramatic fragment
Complete Short Prose	-	V	Stories and texts
Collected Shorter Plays	"Krapp's Last Tape"	V	Short plays and scripts
Collected Poems in English and French	-	V	Poetry
Letters Volume 1	-	-	Letters

Novels:

Molloy is my personal favorite, and though the other two (Malone Dies and The Unnameable) gradually become more solipsistic and repetitive, all three novels are definitely at the top of my recommended list. The writing is brilliant in all three, funny and at times poignant, though very little ever seems to happen (and if something does happen the narrators often focus on its minutest details).

The other novels I've read are Murphy, which was enjoyable but didn't impress me as much as the others, and Mercier and Camier, which for some reason I found rather annoying and uninteresting (though written in 1946, Beckett withheld the novel from publication until 1970; perhaps he knew what he was doing).
The three novellas collected in Nohow On (Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho) are often set up in relation to the "Three Novels," as a further exploration of the same themes with even less of a plot and context, which is perhaps why I found them to be too abstract. Though some of the passages exhibit wonderful prose, without any real characters or events it's very hard for each of these pieces to coalesce into a recognizable whole.

Short Stories and Texts:

The Complete Short Prose includes all of Beckett's short fiction - excluding the ten stories concerned with the character Belacqua Shuah that make up the collection More Pricks than Kicks - spanning his entire career, from 1929 to 1989, thus offering an interesting view of his development. The stories "First Love," "The End," "The Expelled," and "The Calmative" are among his best fiction and, being short, offer the best introduction to his non-dramatic work. Later works in the collection, as in the case of the novels, tend towards greater abstraction and could often not even be classified as "stories" in the traditional sense - they are texts, fragments, "fizzles." This collection reveals, all within the space of a single volume, Beckett's movement from Modernist stories to Postmodernist fragments, where stories are no longer required, as one of the texts explicitly states:

...once there is speech, no need of a story, a story is not cumpolsory, just a life, that's the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.

Of these later writings the best are the 13 "Texts for Nothing," "Heard in the Dark" 1 & 2, and "Stirrings Still."

Plays:

I sincerely hope that I don't have to tell you how great Waiting for Godot is, or actually tell you anything about it. Even if I did need to acquaint you with this play I wouldn't say anything about it, I would just advise you to go read it. Or better yet, watch it (I was lucky enough to see it last summer at the Theatre Royal Haymarket with Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen as Vladimir and Estragon). Endgame is also a masterpiece, though bleaker (I only fully appreciated it after seeing it on stage - at BAM in 2008, with John Turturro as Hamm).  Happy Days is also enjoyable, and if you can find the video version from Beckett on Film it's worth viewing.

The Collected Shorter Plays includes all of Beckett's dramatic work excluding the three plays mentioned above. It also includes his radio and television plays, mimes, and the screenplay for Film (a 25 minute movie starring Buster Keaton, which you can find on YouTube). Some of these texts are barely readable - consisting of a series of instructions for actors, directors, or lighting technicians, making it difficult to visualize exactly what Beckett was going for, and at any rate having much less of an effect than one would probably get from the actual performance. Of the 29 pieces collected here "Krapp's Last Tape" stands out as the best; other works worth reading are "Rough for Theater" 1 & 2, "Rough for Radio" 1 & 2, "A Piece of Monologue," "Ohio Impromptu," and "Play" (In the UK Beckett's Complete Dramatic Works are available in a single volume published by Faber & Faber).
All of Beckett's plays and playlets (a total of 19 works) were filmed as part of the Beckett on Film project (available as a DVD Box set) and videos of many of the other works can be found online.

Scene from Krapp's Last Tape, part of the Beckett on Film project,

directed by Atom Egoyan and starring John Hurt

The Rest:

Disjecta collects Beckett's miscellaneous writings, including "Dante ... Bruno . Vico ... Joyce" which he originally wrote for Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, a 1929 volume of laudatory essays about James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (at the time published serially under the title Work in Progress). Other works include essays on writers, artists, his own work, and a single scene from an unfinished (or mostly unwritten) play about Dr. Samuel Johnson. It is well documented that Beckett himself didn't think much of these pieces and nor do I. Some critics claim that these texts, particularly "Three Dialogues," provide a sort of self-commentary on Beckett's struggle with expression, but I find them superfluous - that struggle is expressed clearly enough through his fictional works.

I have not yet read Beckett's long essay Proust, perhaps because I was uninterested by the nonfiction pieces collected in Disjecta, perhaps because I have not yet read Proust (that's right, string me up!). Beckett's Collected Poems in English and French are decidedly minor, and the ones in French are not always translated, but a few are quite fun, such as the one with which I'll conclude my overlong brief survey, "gnome":

Spend the years of learning squandering

Courage for the years of wandering

Through a world politely turning

From the loutishness of learning