Franz Kafka discussion
"Kafkaesque"
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Nathanimal
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May 03, 2013 08:41AM
I just want to say that whining about the term "Kafkaesque" having become a cliché has itself become a cliché.
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Even if it is a cliche, or talking about it being a cliche has become a cliche, I'm still going to use it, even if I never completely understand how.
A new world is introduced to the dictionary because of his work.How many writers have accomplished this?
That's is something reserved for the genius.
Harold Bloom mention something about this in: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51...
Perhaps we should vote . . . Department of Motor Vehicles. Kafkaesque?
The Republican Party. Kafkaesque?
A weekend at my in-laws. Kafkaesque?
Joking aside, I do think it's a useful adjective. After all, the point is that Kafka described a kind of modern anxiety that had not been described before. And we need new words for new things.
I think the point of the article that I linked to is that the meaning of "Kafkaesque" has been so reduced by over use that it only cartoons what is actually going on in Kafka's work. Or perhaps like all clichés it's just stopped meaning anything a long time ago. Sure, these are reasonable complaints.
Still, every time some scholar smugly rolls his eyes when someone says "Kafkaesque" all I hear is: "You think you know Kafka? You don't know Kafka. I know Kafka." Which seems worse to me than the sin of uttering a cliché.
“Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories — and come up with nothing but clichés… You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.” Milan KunderaEven though I don't know Kafka or understand half of him anyway, there is something there within me that clicks with his writing. I have no idea why. And I don't even care. Amateur, presumptuous readers have this same smugness when it comes to James Joyce's Ulysses. I'm comfortable with confessing my 'dumbness' because this, then, keeps your mind open to new and different interpretations, rather than getting you haughty over nothing.
I saw this somewhere when I google the term and had to laugh as I just got on a dating site and was going to use kafka somewhere in my screen name when my daughter told me i was going to have enough issues getting a date with my profile without throwing that out there." Would you date a person whose writing style on a dating website registers as Kafkaesque?"from www.jewcy.com
