treyf 22's List: 09_Pre-WWII/Modernism

Without Freud, Expressionism and particularly Surrealism are gutted; without Freud, Thomas Mann is a windbag, Molly Bloom an imbecile. So why is Freud not discussed at length? Could it be that Gay needs to downplay the darker aspects of the modern?

What kind of a writer is Kafka? Above all, it's a revision of Kafka's biographical aura. From a witty essay of this kind, by the young novelist and critic Adam Thirlwell:   It is now necessary to state some accepted truths about Franz Kafka, and the Kafkaesque.... Kafka's work lies outside literature: it is not fully part of the history of European fiction. He has no predecessors—his work appears as if from nowhere—and he has no true successors.... These fictions express the alienation of modern man; they are a prophecy of a) the totalitarian police state, and b) the Nazi Holocaust. His work expresses a Jewish mysticism, a non-denominational mysticism, an anguish of man without God. His work is very serious. He never smiles in photographs.... It is crucial to know the facts of Kafka's emotional life when reading his fiction. In some sense, all his stories are autobiographical. He is a genius, outside ordinary limits of literature, and a saint, outside ordinary limits of human behaviour. All of these truths, all of them, are wrong.

What is the Kafkaesque? It is the scene described in Kafka's story "A Report to an Academy," in which an eloquent ape candidly recounts his arduous path toward civilization: "There is an excellent idiom: to fight one's way through the thick of things; that is what I have done." It is, Begley suggests, that familiar existential predicament so often played out by Kafka's characters, who "struggle in a maze that sometimes seems to have been designed on purpose to thwart and defeat them. More often, the opposite appears to be true: there is no purpose; the maze simply exists."