Title: The Unhappiness Of Being A Single Man
Rating: 4 Stars
I’ll never know the answer, but it’s an interesting thought experiment to try to guess who the future literary critics, many centuries from now, will identify as the author that most represented the twentieth century.
Will it be the authors that wrote the grand epics? Candidates could be Marcel Proust writing In Search of Lost Time or James Joyce writing Ulysses or Thomas Mann writing Magic Mountain.
Perhaps the critics will think of that century as a bunch of inward looking navel gazers? In that case, candidates could be Philip Roth writing Portnoy’s Complaint or Karl Ove Knausgaard writing My Struggle.
Maybe it’ll be the post modernists? Lining up here would be David Foster Wallace writing Infinite Jest or Thomas Pynchon writing Gravity’s Rainbow or William Gaddis writing Recognitions.
As much as I love them, I’m guessing that the least likely to be considered the timeless great will be the post modernists. They seem reminiscent of, and I can’t remember his name now, of one of the great Elizabethan theater critics. He was considered witty, intelligent, and incisive. Unfortunately, he’s unreadable now. His criticism is written in such deep Elizabethan in-jokes, slang, and hyper-local references that his commentary is impenetrable today. Do you really see anyone reading Gravity’s Rainbow, three hundred years after WWII, and trying to make sense out of it? Or about the now incredibly funny but probably soon to be tortuously cryptic references in Infinite Jest? The problem with writing even great novels that live in the immediate now is that they will probably only continue to live as long as the immediate now is remembered.
FWIW, my vote for the author that will be remembered as the great writer of the twentieth century is Franz Kafka.
From the perspective of a couple of centuries hence, what will people think of the twentieth century? This is the century of mass war, mass death, unimaginably large governmental bureaucracies, and unimaginably large corporations. In the face of that, we feel alienated and lose our sense of self. In this unimaginably (again, that word!) large machine that our culture has become, we are nothing more than a faceless cog in it as well as a numbed consumer of it.
Kafka, stuck working at an insurance job, was only able to write in the evenings. His job involved investigating personal injury liability claims. From those claims he saw first hand the corporate maw literally grind its workers into pieces by chewing off fingers and limbs. He died young and essentially forgotten.
Most people, for very good reason, know his novels. There is The Trial, where the narrator is arrested by unnamed officials for unnamed crimes. The narrator spends the entire novel trying to navigate a hostile and opaque bureaucracy to resolve his case. The Castle is the story of a land surveyor that has been summoned to perform a job for the castle authorities. Similar to The Trial, the narrator finds himself thwarted at every turn as he tries to find out how to even get started.
A challenge to Kafka’s novels is that he was an inveterate tinkerer. Neither The Trial nor The Castle is in a finished state. This leaves the reader rather unsatisfied (although an argument can be made that this is actually the appropriate state to be in when considering the twentieth century).
If you are such a reader, you should consider his short stories. They represent, if only in a microcosm, a complete expression of Kafka.
In this collection, there are around two dozen such stories.
Some of the short stories are indeed very short. Several are only a paragraph. Even such stories are well formed and complete.
One common attribute to these stories is humor. Even in tales of alienation, the stories are often quite funny. The eponymous entry is a one paragraph story of the travails of being an adult single man. As an example of such a species, I found it hilarious. In The Truth About Sancho Panza (another one paragraph story), Kafka posits that Panza is actually the cause of all of Don Quixote’s quests and follows him around just for his own amusement.
His stories often veer into the absurd. In The New Lawyer, a firm has just hired a, yes, new lawyer named Dr Bucephalus. For those of you a little light on your Greek history, Bucephalus was Alexander The Great’s horse. With Alexander The Great dead, there is no leader taking the Greeks into India for conquest and no need for violent raids, so Bucephalus needs a job. He studied for the law and the law firm, out of sympathy for him because his previous career is now lost, has taken him on.
In the Penal Colony, prisoners are occasionally sentenced to death. In this world, they are quite literally sentenced. The prisoners are strapped down. A very complex, now failing machine, hovers above them. The machine then stitches into the body the literal death sentence for which the prisoner has been convicted.
Given Kafka’s life story, it’s probably not surprising that he has a couple of stories of obsessive artists. There is A First Heartache, a trapeze artist that refuses to ever come down from his trapeze. There is A Hunger Artist, about a circus performer that people crowd around to watch him starve himself.
Kafka’s work is full of alienation, anxiety, dread, and helplessness in the face of the faceless.
Welcome to the twentieth century!
dorkenstein 