Will Self on Franz Kafka
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- Опубликовано: 19 май 2020
- With his nightmare visions of incomprehensible bureaucracies, petty authorities and social conformity, Franz Kafka summoned up the terrifying frustration and ceaseless anxiety of life and work in industrialised society. In this talk, award-winning novelist and broadcaster Will Self presents a guide to his work and thought.
The inspiration behind works as diverse as Catch 22, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, and Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Kafka’s imprint on culture is indelible.Scarcely known in his lifetime, his reputation was at once saved and bowdlerised by his friend and executor Max Brod, who refused to burn the unpublished novels, as requested by Kafka. This was a curiously apt fate, for Kafka’s genius lay in blending acute realism with flights of surreal and sometimes terrifying fantasy. One of the very few writers to become meaningfully adjectival, even in our increasingly poorly read era, his name remains synonymous with the very minatory essence of modernity.
Very stimulating. Thanks a lot. The phrase 'I think Kierkegaard does howl around the eaves of Kafka's thought' stopped me in my tracks. I also admired the definition of culture he gave in the latter part of the talk, that it's 'a vector of thoughts, beliefs and practices which carries our mode of being in the world into the future'.
I could listen to this bibliophile intellectual all day!
So wonderfully and unashamedly deep and thoughtful.
@@Johnconno
Lol! He is clever though.
imagine being that smart, it must be amazing...especially on drugs
Brilliant talk - had it playing while stewing in the bath. As I began to wash my crown jewels I increasingly found myself agreeing with Self. With every nod of the head a gush of water splashed limply into the dirty pool. I was entranced. The only sound I could hear was Self himself. Even his image appeared before me, right over the tip of my... For a moment I thought he had joined me in the bath. There was room enough. It was certainly possible. Alas, not so: my surprise was less traumatising. As I rose to leave, grabbing my towel from the towel rack , I glanced down to find that I'd turned into an insect; Self's own "Kafkaesque" cockroach. So this is what he meant! Wise ol' thing.
Very funny! Cracked me up for real, and very well put - regarding Will's brilliancy, of course.
Great Presentation Will. Very enjoyable. I find the wit and pertinence of 'The Castle' reminiscent of C S Lewis, with a sarcasm for reality which is charming and beautiful. If a reader is getting only misery from Kafka, they are simple not 'getting' Kafka.
Was listening to this last Friday when I got the call that my father had died from Covid. I just want to remember, though I doubt I’ll forget.
Will Self is important to me because he really got me into reading. Thanks Will!
couldnt think of a greater waste of time lol
@@uploaderofmonkeybath.mp4761 Reading?
@@gerryb154 yes
@@uploaderofmonkeybath.mp4761 I'm sure if you tried really hard you might think of a greater waste of time.
@@gerryb154 i have a backlog of memories, all you will have are books, may as well be playing video games, accomplishing about as much.
I found this very interesting; my favourite work by Kafka is The Castle; also The Burrow; approaching Kafka's creativity from my psychological dimension one is perhaps limited by thoughts that the intense introspection of Kafka was essentially schizoid; like two other major schizoid writers - Emily Bronte and Samuel Beckett - this creative schizoid stereotype certainly within just these three writers one arrives at major differences in their presentation of 'burrows' and 'castles'. One hears so much about bipolar creativity yet it is perhaps the schizoid mind that creates the uniquely greatest and most simply complex of human fantasy worlds. Thank you Mr Self; much appreciated.
Friend of mine showed me a photo of an imagined cover of a kafka novel, the title: "Brexit". I laughed until i stopped.
I've never heard better commentary on Kafka than from Will Self and V. Nabokov.
Read in the case of the latter
40:33 is this a A) Brechtian analysis of Kafka B) Not Brechtian analysis of Kafka or C) An acknowledgement that Kafka's characters - as points of awareness - influenced Brecht. Only, it sounds a lot like Brecht and his representitive Gestus acting etc.
I think Kafka was just a comedian, Will, a dark one for sure but he made his friends laugh, they always wanted more and he was happy to oblige. Similar characters created "The Goons", Spike Milligan et al., disillusioned Services survivors of WW2 whose dark comedy they played out at The Windmill Theatre - the "stand-up" of their day - and who were soon adopted by BBC Radio's Light Programme. Kenneth Horne & Kenneth Williams had a similar fate - "Round The Horne" - although their general direction was "camp". "Ooooh! Stop messin' about!" 😉 (Green Fire) 🌈🦉
PS: If you had a supernatural experience today would you dare tell a psychiatrist? 🤔
"I was ashamed of myself when I realized life was a costume party; and I attended with my real face."
Franz Kafka
Proud that I always found Zeno funny.
Very interesting. I've never discussed Metamorphosis with anyone so your talk was much appreciated. I read it about 50 years ago.
Love Kafka
I think Kafka is best consumed as a child. It cuts the fluff, presents ideas upfront, and goes with it and plays with it. It's one of the few things i actually enjoyed reading as a child, no page long expositions before you get to the meat of the idea, just here you are, this is now the reality you're in. Will feel forever fresh.
Me too. I can't remember how I picked up the book. I was a sophomore in HS.
I think the best age is 26 to read Kafka, because that's when I read it.
Fascinating observations on Kafka, especially the parts about his manipulation of time, belatedness, and so on. You mention that your Hofmann has "vermin" instead of "cockroach"; I'm very puzzled by this because my Metamorphosis Hofmann (Penguin Classics) does indeed opt for "cockroach"! Hofmann even justifies his use of the word in the introduction, where he also chides Nabokov, who diagnoses Gregor's precise species of beetle (and argues all other translations are "wrong"), for insisting on an overly entomologically correct approach. Hofmann writes that "Ungeziefer" (vermin), is "a flat-out rejection that denies all possible scientific curiosity." Presumably, therefore, Hofmann thinks that any nasty old bug will do, so he opts for "cockroach" for effect. But now after viewing your video I'm a bit confused; has Hofmann updated his translation?
wait what's the third element of hofman's 'Kafka-time'?
John Berger criticised Francis Bacon for how the worst has already happened in his paintings - as if this were a limitation of the possible horror, therefore that somehow Bacon had blown it, made an oeuvre based on spoilers. Kafka certainly puts the lie to that one.
Interesting, but that's a very strange criticism from Berger. With Bacon, the idea that the bad is finite is surely obviously nonsense. The forms (partly) suggest endless horror, don't they?
Good post.
So this is what talking to Will Self on skype is like
Ratatouille - Anton Ego?
There is a slight misunderstanding of what Kafka meant to Kundera. Franz Kafka was Milan Kundera's George Orwell - the poet of totalitarianism. There is a rhetorical question that Milan Kundera makes in his reflections on Kafka (on Kafka's Das Schloss, to be more precise): Why there are so many professions in and around the castle but no policemen? Milan Kundera goes on to argue that it is so because there is no need for the policemen at all, since every citizen in the village beneath the Castle is already a policeman, reporting on his fellow citizens (the allusion to the communist regimes and their notorious ways of control).
When it comes to the talk itself, in general, there are lots of flaws, factual errors, unjustified improvizations, and the lack of novel insights. All in all, not particularly illuminating, especially for those who have read and studied Kafka's work in depth and with passion.
The danger is that people read the implications of his work rather than the actual work. The backdrop to The Trial is Edwardian, not Soviet.
I am an ear-wig. Wiggle wiggle. 🐜
I am Kafka.
@Divita Jain no me.
Very Kafkaesque
so good interesting .
Longitude 127 Seoul Okinawa Soul Axis -- Bahai Faith Rael
Jesus Huh kyung young Great veritas .
Hahahah! 47:29 😜
That this is the same man from the Hernia Hotline sketch MAKES NO SENSE. Or maybe it makes perfect sense.
mate get a professional microphone....
Caaalf ka. Kafkaism. Caallf ka.Kafka. Make your mind up.
Okay after 5 minutes I gotta say GET BACK from the damned camera. I'm trying to listen but he's so "up in my face", and when he looks down I gotta lean back because I do not want to be that close to ANYONE's scalp that aint family. Do it Again Will; only this time show some damn respect for personl space.
It is awfully off-putting, isn't it? It feels like he is trying to head-butt us with his balding pate and all the lurching about and hand flailing is enough to make you seasick.
You twats
didn't think he was jewish
?
@@jonharrison9222 I didn't think Will Self is Jewish.
Ask him about how he treated his dying wife.
what a nasty comment to post.. you sound like a depressing person.
The truth is ugly! Realization of this simple fact makes people try to escape in either various fantasies or to various despair of Kafkian style. To me, it looks like denial of the truth by turning it into meaningless senseless reality and then looking down to it from the height of ones own ability to realize the ugliness of truth.
Yes, sort of look at the world with disdain, superciliously
Rephrase for people who don’t speak waffle.