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.
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
