सुरवातीला या ब्लॉग वरची ऑगस्ट १६ २०१७ ची पोस्ट पहा.
जेम्स ह्या विषयावर पुढे लिहतात:
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....
"...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...."
