Reading - Kafka, Singer
2026-02-02 05:00![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
asher553I finished another chapter of Kafka's 'The Castle', too, although I am finding it slow going; I have to agree with Bamberg in the I.B. Singer story 'A Friend of Kafka' that it's "very interesting, but what is he driving at? It's too long for a dream. Allegories should be short." In the preface to 'The Collected Stories' (1983), Singer warns that the "verbal pitfalls of so-called 'experimental' writing have done damage to even genuine talent", and I agree. Singer doesn't name names, but he might well have Kafka in mind, and almost certainly Joyce.
The translator's introduction to my edition of 'The Castle', by Mark Harman (1998), faults the earlier effort of the Muirs: "The literary sensibility of Edwin Muir, the primary stylist, was molded by nineteenth-century figures such as Thackeray and Dickens, and he had little sympathy with contemporary figures such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. He had this to say about Ulysses: 'its design is arbitrary, its development feeble, its unity questionable.'" And I would probably agree with Muir. Harman cites this quote as a point against his predecessor Muir, but it only reminds me (reading the volume now a quarter-century later) that nothing stays "modern" forever, and that 'Ulysses' and 'The Castle' - both dating from 1922 - are over 100 years old. What still sounded edgy and "modern" to an academic in the 1990s now sounds old-fashioned. Let Harman preserve Kafka's run-on sentences and comma splices, by all means, in the interests of being true to the work and the author's style; but it is this very "modernness" itself that makes the work sound dated. [270]
The translator's introduction to my edition of 'The Castle', by Mark Harman (1998), faults the earlier effort of the Muirs: "The literary sensibility of Edwin Muir, the primary stylist, was molded by nineteenth-century figures such as Thackeray and Dickens, and he had little sympathy with contemporary figures such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. He had this to say about Ulysses: 'its design is arbitrary, its development feeble, its unity questionable.'" And I would probably agree with Muir. Harman cites this quote as a point against his predecessor Muir, but it only reminds me (reading the volume now a quarter-century later) that nothing stays "modern" forever, and that 'Ulysses' and 'The Castle' - both dating from 1922 - are over 100 years old. What still sounded edgy and "modern" to an academic in the 1990s now sounds old-fashioned. Let Harman preserve Kafka's run-on sentences and comma splices, by all means, in the interests of being true to the work and the author's style; but it is this very "modernness" itself that makes the work sound dated. [270]
