Kafka in the Office:
'A Cage in Search of a Bird'
It sounds like a piece of sketch comedy, like a fake ad for Tupac's Greatest Voice Mail Messages or Jimi Tunes His E String!, but actually I don't know that I've been more excited about any book in a long while than I am about Franz Kafka: The Office Writings: "Kafka's most interesting professional writings, composed during his years as a high-ranking lawyer with the largest Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute in the Czech Lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire." Yes, it's his worksite inspection reports, memos on safety, policy recommendations and even his letters demanding a raise!
Besides the fact that there can never be enough Kafka, the fascination is because his work focuses so much on the existential-nightmare side of bureaucracy and business: Looking at these documents will be kind of like seeing a photo of the prostitute that posed for the Mona Lisa. As Stanley Corngold says in his introduction (downloadable at the Princeton site): "The specter of bureaucracy haunts Kafka day and night in every corner of his writing life." It was both his subject and his nemesis, his "hook into the real," and in many ways it gave his writing form, in a mutually parasitic relationship - his office work leeched on his time and energy as a writer, and yet his writing sucked blood and guts out of office life, aka the trial, aka the castle, etc.
Besides which it's always fascinating to catch an iconic figure when they're not being iconic. Kafka's letters and diaries are too much part of his legend to fill that function, so in a way seeing him wearing the mask of officialdom is humanizing - not that there's ever anything less than human about Kafka's writing, but more in the "celebrities, they're just like us" sense: "They pretend to care about bullshit at work - and they probably do care a little, actually." Although we know that doubledness from Kafka's own account, those accounts are always about how the mask felt, not how it looked. In this version, it is like we get to see Franz Kafka playing Don Draper (cf. Mad Men).
I can't decide which I want to read first: "Petition of the Toy Producers' Association in Katharinaberg, Erzgebirge (1912)," "Measures for Preventing Accidents from Wood-Planing Machines (1910)" or "A Public Psychiatric Hospital for German Bohemia (1916)."
General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, October 29 at 3:24 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (2)
COMMENTS
I was also excited about this book but then I browsed it in a bookstore (and saw the price) and now I think I'll wait for the library to get it. I'll still have a go at it in case there are any interesting bits, but it looks very dry.
Posted by Kevin on November 7, 2008 10:07 PM
I'm kind of excited about this but there's something deeply perverse about it too. To exhaust every last piece of text, down to office correspondence, produced by a man who explicitly wanted his literary legacy burnt makes it seem like they're deliberately trying to torment his ghost...
Posted by Mark Slutsky on October 30, 2008 11:47 PM