The Many Metamorphoses of Franz Kafka

Although "The Metamorphosis" was published during Kafka’s lifetime, some of his best known works did not emerge until after his death in 1924. Kafka aspired to write a novel, but had a hard time finishing anything. (His erratic writing schedule might have had something to do with that.)

Kafka told his executor Max Brod that all his works should be burned upon his death. Instead, Brod published them. The Trial hit bookstore shelves in 1925. It was followed by The Castle in 1926 and Amerika in 1927. In the latter, Kafka somehow makes the mistake of thinking Boston is across the river from New York. His grasp of geography is as ropey as Felicite’s in “A Simple Heart.”

Since then, the phrase “Kafka-esque” has been coined to describe anything that resembles his unique atmosphere of the strange and the real. According to Merriam-Webster, it means:

having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality

Kafka was adamant that his work remained on the page. He said of “The Metamorphosis”: “The insect itself cannot be drawn It cannot be shown even from a distance.”

That hasn’t stopped artists and filmmakers from trying to realize Kafka’s visions. One of the most famous is the underground cartoonist R. Crumb, who illustrated the book Introducing Kafka. This new edition has a cover image of Kafka’s Prague.

In 2003, cartoonist Peter Kuper made a comic strip version of “The Metamorphosis.” Here’s a link to an animated advertisement. (Tip of the hat to Yammerings, Piffle and Flapdoodle, Inc.)

The Trial became a particular obsession of Orson Welles, who directed Citizen Kane and made excellent adaptations of Macbeth and Othello. Here is a scene from his 1962 film version. You may recognize the man playing Josef K as Anthony Perkins, who also played Norman Bates in Psycho.



During the 1980s, Stephen Berkoff directed a theatrical adaptation of “Metamorphosis” with Mikhail Baryshnikov as Gregor Samsa. This guy doesn’t like it, but this news report gives us an idea of the physical nature of the production.



If you’ve got half-an-hour to spare, here is a version by Spanish underground filmmaker Carlos Atanes.




IMDB has a whole category for “Kafkaesque” movies. Here are three.

1. Brazil (1985). This film has also been called "Orwellian," after the author of 1984. Sam Lowry is a clerk in a futuristic megalopolis who falls in love with a freedom fighter, and finds himself caught between the state and a hard place. With Robert de Niro as a guerilla air conditioning repairman.



2. Dark City (1998). Recently reissued on DVD, this interesting fantasy stars Rufus Sewell as a man who learns that the world he lives in is rearranged by mysterious figures while he sleeps. The crazy cast includes Keifer Sutherland and Jennifer Connelly.



3. Institute Benjamenta (1995). The Brothers Quay are American animators who worked on Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" and whose work has inspired Tool's visuals. They have a flair for adapting European novelists like Robert Walser, a contemporary of Kafka. This bizarre film is about a school for servants.



What other movies have you seen that strike you as "Kafkaesque"?

Gustav Flaubert: Permanent Rage

French novelist Gustave Flaubert created a sensation with his very first novel, Madame Bovary, published in 1857. Clinical in tone, it related the life and death of an adulteress in unsparing detail. Flaubert was tried for immorality (and eventually) acquitted. He can also claim to have changed the course of literature.

He was born in 1821, the son of a doctor. As a child, he became enthralled by Romanticism (which he later disowned) and wrote plays that were performed on the family dinner table. His parents wanted him to become a lawyer, but he was able to devote himself entirely to literature after suffering an epileptic attack when he was 25.

A Few Words on Katherine Mansfield

This weekend you have (hopefully) been reading Katherine Mansfield's "At the Bay." The story is based on her childhood in New Zealand, and gives an impressionistic view of a family. We'll be using this story to examine the importance of setting. But who was its author?

Katherine Mansfield went to London to be where the action was, and fell in with a group of writers known as the Bloomsbury Group. During her short life she produced four collections of short stories. "At the Bay" is taken from The Garden Party and Other Stories. She died in 1923 after years of suffering from tubercolosis.

The English newspaper The Guardian has an excellent blog entry on the author. Chris Power writes:

Taken as a whole Mansfield's work confounds because, from 1915 onwards (following her debut she suffered several years of writer's block), the very good and the plain bad arrive tripping over one another's heels. All writers fail as well as triumph, but the gulf between the successful and the disastrous is rarely as wide as it is in her work.

A useful reminder, that not all of them can be masterpieces. But don't worry, "At the Bay" is.

Here goes nothing ...

I've decided to set up a class blog in lieu of a textbook. Here you'll be able to find definitions to some of the terms discussed in class. I'd also like this to be a kind of forum where you can discuss the lessons, the texts, the authors that we discuss in class and anything else that might come up. A reminder that the best way to contact me is through charles dot bottomley at unco dot edu. But if I feel like your query is worth sharing with the class, then I might start a post here. Check the blog regularly, as we'll be posting various definitions which will come in handy during exams.