Volume 12, Number 7 · April 10, 1969
K.
By Matthew Hodgart
The Trial
by Franz Kafka
Definitive edition Schocken, 282 pp., $1.95 (paperback) (paper)
The Terror of Art: Kafka and Modern Literature
by Martin Greenberg
Basic Books, 256 pp., $5.95
There Goes Kafka
by Johannes Urzidil
Wayne State University Press, 231 pp., $7.95
Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Castle
edited by Peter F. Neumeyer
Prentice-Hall, 122 pp., $3.95
Kafka's drawings, said to be newly discovered and now published for the first time, are witty, disturbing, and rather like Rorschach ink-blots. This is not surprising, since the writings themselves are like ink-blots, and the manifold interpretations (a sample of which can be found in the collection of essays edited by Peter Neumeyer) perhaps tell more about the interpreters than they do about Kafka. The drawings are not all easy to place in relation to the chapters of The Trial: one is obviously Joseph K. before the Court: his stance is defiant, the hands behind his back are anguished, the out-of-perspective railings suggest claustrophobia and vertigo. Others show him collapsed over his desk at the Bank, and tottering feebly with a stick. In the fourth he is either throwing this stick or thrusting with it rapierwise against the invisible antagonist, with gay defiance, but the weapon like his body is going limp. Fifth, he stands before a mirror or an easel, narcissistic in either case. The last I think would be just as suitable for The Castle: he sits on the ground overcome by the awful fatigue that affects everyone in that story, holding a giant pair of compasses, appropriate to the Landsurveyor, indeed his body itself forms a disintegrating set-square.
Review, 2829 words
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