Word: kafka
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...Trial. "The right perception of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude one another." This slyly smiling sentence, inserted by Franz Kafka in the final pages of The Trial, holds a subtle point at the throat of any man so rash as to interpret the most eerie and profound of all the fables written by the apocalyptic insurance clerk of Prague. Is The Trial a psychotic nightmare, the case history of a persecution complex, an allegory on the theme of justice, a prophetic vision of the totalitarian state, an analysis...
Orson Welles, who wrote and directed the first film version of Kafka's masterpiece, has wisely declined to decide. He accepts every possible interpretation as a limb of the author's allegorical monster, as a circle of the Hell in whose image he imagined man is made. Into this pit, his cameras rolling like the eyes of Lucifer, Welles plunges with tartarean energy; and if he cannot quite get to the bottom of it all he nevertheless comes up with a film of infernal brilliance, perhaps the most exciting picture he has made since The Magnificent Ambersons...
...blackout is easier to follow than Kafka's story line, but Welles keeps right on its tail. One fine morning, "without having done anything wrong," a bank clerk named Joseph K. (Tony Perkins) is arrested-or is it all just a bad dream? Two plainclothesmen burst into his bedroom, order him to dress, refuse to say what law he has broken, badger him for bribes, steal his best shirts, subject him to an apparently pointless "interrogation." And then breeze off, leaving K. in a sweat. Were they really plainclothesmen-or were they crooks? Is he really arrested...
...hear some people tell it, a modern U.S. military man should study Kafka as well as Clausewitz, since the terrain he must now operate in is more like Kafka's maze than Clausewitz's certainties. In a day of allies, proxy battles and limited wars, the military needs a whole new technical arsenal-politics, diplomacy, science, economics-to enable it to employ precise degrees of power in imprecise situations. All this asks of U.S. officers unprecedented competence, character and wisdom...
...Franz Kafka, Parable and Paradox, by Heinz Politzer. A brilliant guide to the nightmarish parables of a writer who saw individual man as a helpless insect lost in the mass world he has helped create...