बंडखोर सेक्स ची जागा काफ्का यांच्या दी कॅस्टल मध्ये स्पर्श घेतो...But for Kafka, the Touchstone is the Tenderness

सुरवातीला या ब्लॉग वरची ऑगस्ट १६ २०१७ ची पोस्ट पहा.

Clive James, 'Franz Kafka' from 'Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories From History and the Arts', 2007:

"...For the narrator of The Castle, the girl Frieda is his only connection with a sane order of events as he reluctantly but steadily realizes, in the opening section of the book, that the castle has a mind of its own, and the mind will marshal infinite resources to shut him out. In Frieda’s arms he can momentarily believe that she, at least, is not doing what the castle wants. The lovers soon find that they can’t go to sleep together without expecting to find spectators gathered around them when they wake up. Even during their first sexual encounter there are probably other people in the room: it is hard to tell, but one of the novel’s mechanisms is not to permit us to rule out such a possibility. Much later, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell reprised the same relationship of physical love to hopeless odds. Orwell wanted the tenderness reduced to raw sex: Winston Smith presses Julia to admit that the act itself is enough, as if Orwell was looking for a touchstone, an irreducible impulse that the totalitarian state cannot eliminate even by control. But for Kafka, the touchstone is the tenderness. Presciently, Kafka’s nightmare state is even more controlled than Orwell’s..."

ऑरवेल आणि जीए यांच्या वाङ्मयातील बंडखोर सेक्स ची जागा काफ्का यांच्या दी कॅस्टल मध्ये स्पर्श घेतो.... 

जेम्स ह्या विषयावर पुढे लिहतात:

"...Allegorical interpretations of Kafka’s major novels are no doubt valid – with the usual proviso that if they are all valid they might all be irrelevant – but for once the biographical element begs to be brought in. In real life, Kafka sent his imagination to rest in the minds of women. If he had not done so, his fiction would have been less different: more like ordinary fiction, and less like fact – the facts that were yet to happen. There are good reasons for believing that he could prophesy the nature of the totalitarian state because as a Jew he had already lived with its mechanisms of exclusion, the first parts of the totalitarian state to develop: he knew them so intimately, and thought them to be so pervasive, that he came to agree with them, providing one of our most tragic examples of self-directed Judenhass. But much of the prophetic element in Kafka comes from his extreme sensitivity to evanescence, and that sensitivity was centred squarely on what time could do to a woman’s life. Milena Jesenska, the woman worthy of his intellect, was wooed from the distance at which she was kept. Felice Bauer (on whom the Frieda of the book was probably based) never had a chance: even if a marriage had followed upon the repeated engagements, nothing would have happened. Kafka thought sex was a disease. But he also thought that it was a gift, or he would not have asked himself, only a short time before his death: ‘What have you done with the gift of sex?’ (Was hast du mit dem Geschenk des Geschlechtes getan? You can hear the integrative rhythmic force of his prose even at the moment of resignation.) We hope that Dora Dymant, with whom he shared a brief spell of happiness in Berlin, would have said that he had done at least something with it. And he would never have written to Milena with his desperate complaint about the certainty of their never living together Korper an Korper (body to body) if he had not wanted that above all things, even in his consuming fear of the wish coming true...."