Assistants and Messengers

There are no shortage of messengers in history-a noble role; what about assistants? No shortage in Google world: 2 million images of assistants worldwide. There is a literature of assistants including, of course, top-of-the-league Sancho but also the increasingly popular Robert Walser who both was an assistant and wrote a novel on the subject. There is more to this role than being 'one who helps'. Kafka writes about this role at length mainly in The Castle. K is expecting the arrival of his own assistants but they never appear; they are replaced, seamlessly, by 2 local characters who know nothing of surveying; they act more like idiots- almost indistinguishable from the local peasants who follow K everywhere like sheep-hinderers not helpers. Barnabas is a more familiar figure: that of the cryptic messenger. Arthur and Jeremiah carry no messages; they crouch in corners and in other tiny spaces trying to be invisible. Benjamin brackets all these types as 'unfinished' and incomplete; in-between-people, incapable of reflection; their squeezing into tiny spaces and clinging to each other denote this incompleteness. Benjamin further notes that for assistants there is hope; hope through being in an unfinished state Where does that leave Kafka's dogs, moles, mice and apes?

How did the sirens sing?

....following on the Thomas Browne blog there is another question: he inserts a parable-like thought about Achilles and the Sirens in the middle of a discussion about urns and antiquities. How do you tell which is which? Benjamin says something similar about Kafka on 2 occasions; take a piece of empirical description, he says, and you'll find the Kafka stamp on it; he cites a paragraph from Eddington on the physical world and another from Metchnikoff on the canals of the Yangste. Now the latter reference follows some comments of Benjamin on the "Great Wall of China". The story is parable-like; in it Kafka doesen't list facts about canals; he sets out the myth of the Great Wall. The Eddington piece is a bit different; in imagining physical perplexity as imagined by a popularising scientist there is a similarity with Kafka's 'heaviness' that is missing in Metchnikoff.
This quality is not obviously present in Kafka's surviving risk assessment documents that he wrote as an insurance officer explaining to operatives how to avoid severing fingers at work. Maybe the answer is Benjamins's idea of the substitutability of Kafka's prose; ie don't look at each sentence for meaning but find uses for blocks of his text and then insert them where appropriate. So the choice is with the substituter; no one wants to use risk assessment material; it is already pasted on every workplace wall as Health and Safety warnings; so that leaves symbolic activities like myth making, praying, theatre etc.

what song the sirens sang?

...asked Sir Thomas Browne; interesting question! Poe agreed and quoted it at the beginning of the Rue Morgue story. But what sort of answer did Sir Thomas expect? He asks another about the dead in Hades: Agamemnon can predict Ulysses' future but has nothing to say about his own son. It is a mistake to see this as contradictory; Browne's interest is not empirical (eg did Atlantis exist and where?).
Kafka brings up the issue of the sirens and his conclusion gives a clue as to the sort of answer that is required; K's approach is more akin to a parable; while Browne is not writing a parable he is asking questions (occasionally) that fit into a parable. K's answer is that the sirens are silent and Benjamin's explanation of why this is so would have interested Sir Thomas Browne.

pleasure at work

UK Radio 3 ran a show this week about work: there was talk about being 'passionate about work' etc and a literature of work including Melville, Dickens and Grossmith + some research about friends/marriages through work. This literature was narrow and described 'people at work'. The 'Office' has a richer history. Consider Samsa: now an insect his main worry is being late for work; lets stick with the insect theme: Brecht and Benjamin at Svendborg conversed about this and concluded that Kafka saw people at work as antlike separated by their forms of life together. Kundera further develops this idea but adds that Kafka also sees the office as fantastic, a labrynth; writing to Milena he says the office is ' more fantastic than stupid' and that 'he can't drag himself away from it'. K in The Castle will never get a promised job/will wait forever like his cousin in Before the Law and the innumerable other characters whose mission is to 'wait' or like the 10% of staff at Microsoft who are routinely shed each year while the remainder bask in 'pleasure at work'. Any literature of work should start with Kafka and concentrate on his definition of pleasure at work-a place 'he couldn't drag himself away from'

Traces of Poe in the Arcade

There is a literature of 'the trace' beginning with Benjamin (WB) who finds its origins in Poe's Man of the Crowd where all the drapery of the crime vanishes and leaves only a set of traces; thus 'the trace' appears at the time of Second Empire in France. Thereafter, WB notes, traces turn into government's 'multifarious web of registrations' as endlessly discussed by Foucault, Donzelot and Castel. It is a modest step from the man in the crowd to our world of risk management where the individual disappears and is replaced by Castel's ' calculus of probabilities or factors and statistical correlations of heterogeneous elements likely to produce risk (usually a file). Another strand in the history of the trace is the collapsing of heterogeneous laboratory elements (experimental rats) into tractable and portable traces (Latour).

Benjamin, Kipling, Borges and Nabokov

Kipling has some good friends none of whom are 'realists'. Nabokov, writing to Vera commends a poem of Kipling where 'bird winged butterflies flap through'-he especially likes 'flap'. Compared to the complexity of Kipling, Borges says, Maupassant's work is like a 'child's drawing'. More interesting is Walter Benjamin (WB) for whom Kipling's Barrack Room Ballads are one of the last refuges of The Storyteller. At one level it is fashionable to rubbish the realism of Kipling and Stevenson; one way past this is to put aside conventional approaches to these writers and see them through the prism of WB's Arcades; see for example his work on Stevenson and Poe; there is room in the Arcade for Kipling also. Around 1900 Kipling prophesied that a new poet would appear; this person is to be Browning's successor and can distill the best of the past and provide continuity into the future. If the new arrival is late Kipling will leave a posthumous letter of private suggestions. He got it exactly right but did not get what he bargained for: in 1922 The Waste Land was published. But there was continuity: of Kipling's poem The Appeal Eliot wished he'd written it himself

Auden,Benjamin, Kafka & Sullivan

Why did Kafka ask for his work, on his death, to be destroyed? Auden puts this down to Kafka's theory of writing as a private act like praying. Walter Benjamin makes a similar point ie that Kafka is always addressing the same themes: (1) Surprise at the inexplicable. (2) Guilt about the inability to explain the inexplicable. (3) the need to investigate (1), hopelessly. So each piece of Kafka's prose is substitutable by another piece offering an inventory of infinitely varied responses to 1,2 and 3. Benjamin wonders if the items of such an inventory can be inserted into passages of argument at any time. These items could be replicable gestures or actions (scurrying, gazing, gaping, bending and staring, hurrying/staying close to the wall etc). Think of this inventory as being like Catherine Sullivan's video installation Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land made up of 50 multiply repeated pantomime-like actions. It is clear why Kafka asked for his work to be destroyed. What he left behind was a template that could be written on forever. He foresaw, Auden concludes, the nature of too many of his admirers- like watching Ice Floes for eternity.

The Path to Success; thesis 1.3

This post proposes a link between Walter Benjamin (WB), Auden and Catherine Sullivan. In WB's thesis for success 'presence of mind' (power) in financial wizards etc is revealed via the body or gestures. Auden chooses not to write poetry about these wizards because what they do is less to do with character than with the quantity of 'impersonal force at their disposal'.Catherine Sullivan presents a selection of these gestures in her video