children on a country road

In Kaurismaki's Le Havre Elina Salo reads to Kati Outinen, while she is ill in hospital, from an unusual text: Kafka's Children on a Country Road. Specifically she reads the concluding lines 'just think they never sleep...because they are fools'. Now Kaurismaki's work abounds in references to writers, often French; eg Micheaux and Prevert; but does the Kafka quote denote more than referentiality?  Benjamin discusses a clan of sleepless types who occur through Kafka: students, assistants, waiters, residents of the city in the south. About the faces of these figures he notes that Kafka says 'they seem to be those of grown ups, perhaps even students'. Kaurismaki does not derive films from Kafka but the 'grown up' look of the students may be very similar to Kati Outinen's persistent unblinking stare.

Odradek's proverbs

There are not many proverbs in Kafka although many of his shorter pieces are like fairy tales. However in The Next Village the Grandfather says 'even the span of normal happy life may fall short of the time needed for such a journey'; if not a proverb it can, spoken by a Grandfather, be cast in the form of a sententious remark intended to say a something meaningful about collective experience. But this is not quite like the familiar proverbial form like Chaucer's 'I haste and evere I am behinde'.
So what can we learn from the Next Village proverb? Certainly it does not convey a common sense truth like Chaucer's. Kafka's Odradek only speaks twice: to provide his name and address (no fixed abode). But if he did speak further he would probably speak only in proverbs ie worn out phrases and cliches. For Walter Benjamin, Odradek is the commodity that survives to no purpose or an image of an outlived world of things-a kitsch entity and peddler of proverbs. But most proverbs are transparent like Chaucer's. Virginia Woolf remarked on the difficulty of presenting the lives of ostlers and rat catchers etc in fiction; they rapidly become curiosities or stereotypes. In Chaucer, she adds, they are simply themselves so the above proverb would have meant something to the Canterbury travellers. Can the same be said for householders in the Prague of 1917? What could 1917 Prague Householders learn from Odradek? Perhaps that, no longer able to be themselves, condemned to rely on worn out and used-up proverbs, they are like Odradek.

like a red indian

There are other aspects to Kafka than distortion of place and time; certainly his characters typically try to squeeze into tiny spaces, appear too small or take an infinity of time on small events. It is said (Benjamin) that these moments are gestures like the gestures in early expressionist films; it is easy to imagine this; silent film actors have to exaggerate.
Contrasting gestures are for example Wishing to Be a Red Indian ie being instantly alert, leaning against the wind, throwing away the reins etc. Better to be a Red Indian than the student who reads obsessively, book pressed to his face, the same book, forever? Possibly. Benjamin thinks these lighter gestures have their home in The Nature Theatre of Oklahoma: there are actors and angels; also the theatre is on a race course offering opportunities for Red Indians to lean against the wind and throw away the reins. Are these gestures of hope offering an escape from melancholy? Melancholy is the predicament of immutable circumstance not a mental state. Kafka's people/animals are never depressed. But they are resourceful; there is no hope for the ape or the dog but they press on always coming up with new ideas. The nearest to hope is resourcefulness eg the ape learns to talk and drink. The highest form of this facet however is found in Pancho and Bucephalus; both send their demons off on the maddest exploits while they stay behind in an armchair, reading and turning the pages of ancient tomes in the quiet lamplight.

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