Word: kafka
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Franz Kafka, Parable and Paradox, by Heinz Politzer. The most trenchant study to date of the strange writer in whose nightmarish parables of human alienation 20th century man has found a chilling portrait of himself...
...fault is partly man's own, as Kafka sees it, because the lonely life is a breeding ground for new and universal crimes: torpor, mediocrity, the avoidance of the dare of love. In The Trial, the absolute appears as The Law; in The Castle, as the warder who never appears; in Amerika, as a promise extended but never fulfilled. The bitter loneliness Kafka suffered, Politzer says, was in quest for "the hope beyond hopelessness,'' "the glimmer of light Kafka knew existed...
Politzer spent 20 years with his study, and that was too long. But he is perceptive in ferreting out the "perplexing parables" of Kafka's style. Driven by visions of horror and forebodings of doom, Kafka's great obsession was man's alienation from himself, from other me, from the absolute. "The crows maintain." he wrote, "that a single crow could destroy the heavens. There is no doubt of this, but it proves nothing against the heavens, for heavens simply means: the impossibility of crows." Heavens that possess crows must stop being heavens; laws that touch...
...Inability to Laugh. Kafka's form was magic realism in which, as Politzer writes, "clefts and crags open to reveal depths beyond realistic detail." In breathless, frightened prose, Kafka built his ambivalent fears into ambiguities that empty the spirit. His heroes endure events that seem to mirror their experience, but in fact are tantalizing opposites that contradict everything they know. In The Trial Kafka's hero asserts his innocence until echoes of his own voice convince him of his guilt. Life becomes absurd in a universe whose nature is that guiltless men shall be punished. Kafka never knew...
...loneliness of Kafka and his characters misleads Politzer in his conclusion that Kafka stands alone in literature too. He pays little attention to the insights Kafka gained from Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Gogol and Poe, still less to the enormous influence of Kafka on such writers as Robbe-Grillet, Camus and Sartre. In a final chapter that judges Kafka against Camus (unfairly, and at Camus's great expense), he notes the obvious distinctions in the work of two writers often compared: what Camus says in Olympian detachment, Kafka says in nervous excitement ; where Camus needs crisis to show...