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.

More on Red Peter

Reporting to the academy, Red Peter goes through his new repertory of acquired skills such as walking, speaking and drinking. He does this all this for a 'way out';

interesting also are the problematics of these skills and capacities. Distortion of space and time reoccur in Kafkas's work as do the responses of the characters (human and animal) to these distortions. Against this background being able to routinely speak and walk cannot be assumed. Suddenly losing abilities and being arbitrarily assigned new and alien ones is Samsa's lot. Time can stretch out without limit so a journey cannot be completed even in a life time. So there is an account: in one column a set of time/space problems; in the next column a range of possible responses. Kafka's figures burrow, wait in corridors or squeeze into corners. It is not clear who is lost or saved. Benjamin reckons the Nature Theatre Actors to be saved. How so? Surely they, like many other Kafkan characters are trying to respond to the dilemma. After all they are not informed what is expected of them; they simply have to be in the theatre as themselves ie to carry on speaking/walking as if these abilities, tacitly, are problematic (might be lost).

Kafka's monkey

Kafka's Report to an Academy has been turned into a fine play at the Young Vic. Is the ape melancholic? Benjamin derided left wing melancholy as 'tortured stupidity'. Red Peter is not torturedly stupid.  The investigating dog of another Kafka animal story is a more like this; tortured by lack of knowledge-unable to think beyond food. Melancholy is best not seen as a mental state but as a response to unalterable circumstances. Red Peter has some choices and makes one (the stage not the zoo). But this doesn't lead to liberty. Having been wrenched from his jungle home and maltreated he contrives a stage role for himself. This would appear to be a form of liberty but yet is not hence the melancholy. He scoffs at human liberty as 'self controlled movement'. How can The Anatomy of Melancholy help in this case?  On loss of liberty Burton notes 'we are  slaves and servants the best of all'. No help for Red Peter here. For Head Melancholy Burton recommends the right diet referring to Laurentius, Rhasis and Fernelius.

melancholy tailors

....returning to the topic of the physiognomy of students ( Blog- May 12 2008) : think of this as a further contribution to a literature of assistants (Walser,Kafka etc); this is a literature in which jobs (rarely professions) are described in a certain way; personal characteristics are replaced by a single, obsessive act; students press papers to their face, assistants stand around like 'waiters'. These job holders or seekers are melancholic. There is no point checking in the empirical world whether these physiognomies hold true. Charles Lamb wrote a piece on Tailors; they are melancholic, he says. This doesn't call for a survey of tailors. For Lamb the investigation into tailor-melancholy follows Robert Burton; perhaps clothes are the first outward sign of the fall of the human race; or is it because tailors are excessively fond of cabbage. Burton has a sort of method: first identify general features of tailors (melancholy) then move onto to other authorities on the subject, symptoms and causes. For example, fondness of cabbages is a symptom of melancholy.  Blog-July 12 2007 refers to an approach to understanding certain questions from a parabolic aspect; Burton's method offers such an approach.

templates

....further question on templates and their denseness: what is it about an earlier writer that provides resources for future writers? It must be something to do with the texture or physiology of  the template supplied; the pre-modern imagination has a physiological aspect; inner life is represented in this aspect. Nabokov, translating Lermontov, refers to code sentences which do this job: lips go pale, arms are seized, ground is stamped etc. Above all people physiologically change eg change colour: 'a dull colour spread over his face'. This is particularly true of Conrad; in the Nigger of Narcissus, following a storm, the mariners seem thinner or starved. In Outpost of Progress the physiognomy of the two Europeans alters. These code sentences leave us free to work out or infer what is going on without having every psychic move exhaustively listed for us. The same freedom allows Munoz to visually develop into drawings the Outpost of Progress. The code sentences work for the artist as well. Same conclusion!  Is it probable that Will Self will act as a resource in the same way for writers or artists a hundred years from now?

gaslight

What does it mean to read a text in different ways?  Will Self said recently that his work can be read differently much as can Conrad's. How does a text come to be capable of this?  Consider the example of Benjamin's use of gaslight: developing his theory of modernity he draws on R. L. Stevenson's depiction of gaslight in Victorian Edinburgh; R.L.S, he says writes the epitaph of gaslight after which it is electric light that illuminates the life of the gloomy city dweller. R.L.S. did not intend a use of this kind but what he says has to resonate deeply enough for Benjamin to exploit; the earlier intellectual resource has to be sufficient as in the form of a template. Consider further, Munoz who made a series of drawings on the theme of Conrad's Outpost of progress. Are these examples simply 'variations on a theme by...'?  Perhaps there needs to be an equality of imagination between the former and the later. A reader in the far future will need to weigh Heart of Darkness with Liver: A Fictional Organ with a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes.A final thought: does Achebe's charge that Conrad is a racist apply equally to Munoz?

more on Sancho

Dostoevsky says Quixote comes to yearn for realism. Are not the Knight and his squire more worldly than this suggests? For example the adventure of the braying where Q abandons S in face of overwhelming odds; 'I have retreated not fled' says Q; S is unimpressed: Dostoevsky's reading is that faced with the collapse of one fantasy then Quixote (and everyone) invents a further to save the first. The two travellers have a discussion about the adventure and have no problems with realism and fantasy; pragmatism occurs. Maybe this is a turning point for S. Dostoevsky makes too literalist a reading. See blog 6 and how to answer 'what song the sirens sang'.