Hacker News Reader

Comment by blockwriter | Hacker News Reader

To me, Kafka’s work is particularly axiomatic. It has an internal logic and tends toward involution. I could see how this would appeal to technically minded people, whereas Dickens, or Austen, authors whose work tends to be discursive, might seem boring or without basis.

View on HN

What do axiomatic and involution mean in this (presumably literary) context?

They are axiomatic in that Kafka's worlds are frequently built upon a set of conditions, and the development is contingent upon how these conditions interact, whereas other writers often depart from pre-established rules because they become cumbersome, or they introduce new ones as a matter of convenience. Kafka, in a story like The Burrow, seems to be in search of a complete system that becomes fully expressed by virtue of an exhaustive exploration of its potential, in accordance with its own stipulations. It develops like a drop of ink in a glass of water. Due also to a desire not to retread ground, as he criticizes Dickens of doing, this may be why much of his work went unfinished.

By involution, I mean that Kafka's stories, to a greater extent than just about any other writer, forestall the influence of "outside" forces. His worlds do not rely on historical context, and his characters hardly, if ever, propose a new and narrative-changing idea from whole clothe, although the conclusions they draw are often strange, novel, and sudden. Kafka's land surveyor in The Castle is always circling back to the fact that he is a land surveyor as the basis for his behavior, even though he never actually fulfills or comes close to fulfilling his vocational imperative.

I always recommend Reiner Stach's three volume biography of Kafka to people. The author does a great job of looking into the literature as much as he looks into the life.

I recently watched an interesting conversation between Todd McGowan and Walter Davis on Kafka[1] which you might enjoy.

There's a bit in the aforementioned interview where they mention if one is learning German, a good introductory route is reading Kafka and Heidegger's Being and Time. I've been contemplating whether I should learn German to read my favorite thinkers in their primary written language (and even potentially make a move to Germany, away from the weariness of California), or, rather, become more grounded in the English language.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gdjx7ZanqAg

Thank you for the link, I got 17 minutes into this lazy slop and got to the something about law (judicial law that is) being "alive and sexual" and couldn't take any more.

Little useful is extracted, it's mainly academics grooming each other over their cleverness. I just couldn't bear it any more.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com