Kafka: a Guide for the Perplexed by Koelb Clayton;

Author:Koelb, Clayton;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2019-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

Kafka’s strategy in dealing with Grillparzer’s story is similar to the strategy in the letter to his father: he tears the victim apart with skill and apparent relish, even though the victim is none other than himself. In this case the victim appears in the guise of another writer, but the distinction between Kafka and Grillparzer disappears under the force of Kafka’s emotional identification with his predecessor.

It is particularly telling, and entirely typical, that Kafka’s negative judgment of Grillparzer’s prose (and his own) undergoes a metamorphosis into something positive. The long list of criticisms (the story is ‘wrong,’ ‘ridiculous,’ ‘dilettantish,’ and so on) comes to a head with the assertion that the narrative is so bad that it essentially tears itself apart. But the next sentence paradoxically swerves in the opposite direction:

Of course there is no more beautiful fate for a story than to disappear, and in this way. Even the narrator, that droll psychologist, will agree to this completely, since he himself is probably the real poor fiddler, playing this story as unmusically as possible, exaggeratedly thanked by the tears from your eyes. (Milena 82)

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