Word: kafka
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...science, 1883 was the natal year of a pair of Czech novelists whose lookouts on the problem of monolithic authority and what to do about it are presently very much in point. In a country which has earned its reputation as the common stamping ground of optimistic power, Franz Kafka and Jaroslav Hasek came to know the texture and stink of vast administratives schemes so vicious, irrational, and irremediably tacky that they generate comedy and tragedy, like industrial waste, in awe-some volume, beyond any man's capacity to absorb without the saving intercession...
About the nature of the problem the two writers would have had, I think, little quarrel. But about the solution their views are crucially divergent. In Kafka there was simply none available, for the very qualities which render the dreaded state intolerable--its impressive size, structural inefficiency, and grotesque involution--also render it effectively invulnerable. Hasek, on the other hand, saw in these same qualities the faults which invite the wedge: nothing so ludicrous could really expect to survive. Hasek created the figure of Schweyk, the good soldier, whose will to survive encompasses his will to resist, and whose native...
These days, Kafka's version is very much with us, and justly so. But like the people say, consider the alternative. In the extremely informal comfort of an Eliot House main dining room spotted with wrestling mats, army blankets, cushions and chairs, the next weekends offer a free, funny, and frequently poignant update on Hasek, in the form of a rare English language production of Bertolt Brecht's Schweyk in the Second World War. An update it is, for in his telling epilogue to the production, translator Charles Sabel would have it emphasized that even for folk heroes times change...
...Builders by Boris Vian, which opened off-Broadway last week as the French playwright's first New York production, nearly a decade after his death at 39. Vian, who was also a novelist, poet, composer, translator, jazz trumpeter and engineer, obviously owed much to the work of Franz Kafka. Ordinary, everyday characters are beset and beleaguered by fantastic circumstances beyond their control-neither exactly allegorical nor neatly symbolic -which fill them with dread. As the play progresses, The Sound drives the increasingly unsettled father into even smaller and poorer apartments. The members of the menage disappear...
There is more P. G. Wodehouse in The Do-Gooders than the deadly amoral wit of Bruce Jay Friedman or Joseph Heller. The true black humorists spring from Franz Kafka, Céline, James Joyce and Nathanael West. Imitations like this owe their origins to the pop-art Campbell soup cans, underground "art" movies, and the overpowering amplification systems that give rock music its driving force...