卡夫卡是谁
最新书摘：
-
Efkfra2013-03-25A slight misdemeanour, barely recognizable as such or defined by an arbitrary code, meets with a punishment of utterly disproportionate severity.
-
Efkfra2013-03-25In his fierce criticism of contemporary child-rearing Kafka agreed with many enlightened educators. Kafka was particularly impressed by the radical psychoanalyst Otto Gross, whom he met through Max Brod in 1917; they discussed founding a journal to be called Pages on Combating the Will to Power. Gross took drugs, had many lovers (including Frieda Weekley, later the wife of D. H. Lawrence), and considered the conventional family the source of patriarchal authority, which needed to be overthrown by revolution.
-
Efkfra2013-03-25The Man Who Disappeared, the story of an essentially innocent boy adrift in America, begins by baldly introducing ‘the seventeen-year-old Karl Rossmann, who had been sent to America by his unfortunate parents because a maid had seduced him and had a child by him’. Not only does Karl retain his love for the parents who have so monstrously punished the victim, but it becomes clear that he has suffered abuse, having been forced by the maid into an act of intercourse which he found ‘disgusting’, made him feel ‘a shocking helplessness’, and left him ‘in tears’.
-
Efkfra2013-03-25Gregor Samsa, the loyal son who has supported the family single-handedly since his father’s bankruptcy, he learns after his transformation that his parents had put some money by and did not really need his self-sacrifice; his family lose interest in him, cease to feed him, and use his room to store junk; and finally, when Gregor threatens their economic interests by frightening away their lodgers, they decide, by the illogic typical of Kafka’s characters, that the insect cannot be Gregor. Their self-deception emerges from the confusion of pronouns when the sister first denies that ‘it’ can be Gregor, then exclaims: ‘he’s at it again!’ The alternation between ‘it’ and ‘he’ dehumanizes Gregor and turns him into a piece of animated garbage. Yet he feels no resentmentLike Georg, he dies full ...
-
Efkfra2013-03-25The first institution that anyone encounters is the family. For Kafka, the family is the place where oppression starts. The oppression Gregor Samsa suffers from his family is vividly embodied in the layout of his room, which has three doors (Gregor locks them all at night), at each of which a member of his family, his father, mother, and sister, knocks, urging him to get up and go to work. Kafka spoke of parental love as smothering, and of family life as a battleground.Kafka repeatedly complains that adults seek to suppress children’s individuality. A photograph of Kafka as a small boy shows him (to quote Walter Benjamin’s description) ‘in a sort of greenhouse setting, wearing a tight, heavily lace-trimmed, almost embarrassing child’s suit’. One feels for the little boy who gazes sadly ou...
-
Efkfra2013-03-25Kafka was fascinated by institutions. Institutions are types of social organizations serving particular purposes, such as the household, the family, the business corporation, the government ministry, the school, the hospital, the prison.A similar ambiguity inhabits the word Kafka used, Anstalt. He uses it to refer to the organization where he worked, the Arbeiter-Unfall-Versicherungs-Anstalt für das Königreich Böhmen (Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia), but in different contexts it can mean an educational institution (Erziehungsanstalt) or lunatic asylum (Irrenanstalt).The family, for Kafka, is also the place where power, guilt, law, and punishment originate. The ‘Letter to his Father’ describes how Hermann Kafka laid down strict laws on good behaviour from...
-
Efkfra2013-03-24This relative freedom from gravity represents a fantasy often indulged in Kafka’s fiction. We have the trapeze artist of ‘First Sorrow’, who spends all his time,except when travelling, aloft on his trapeze; the speaker who escapes from wartime fuel shortages by sitting astride a coal-scuttle and ascending ‘into the regions of the ice mountains’, never to be seen again; and the fantasy of endless, autonomous movement formulated in the early sketch ‘Longing to be a Red Indian’.
-
Efkfra2013-03-24Reading Kafka’s later stories and aphorisms, one sometimes feels strangely transported back to the world of early Christian and Jewish mystics and martyrs. The rejection of the body seen in ‘A Life’ may remind us of the belief attributed to the early Gnostics that the flesh belonged to the hateful and despicable world of the senses which had been created by an evil god to estrange humanityfrom the unimaginably remote realm of purity governed by the good deity.One of Kafka’s most provocative early interpreters, Erich Heller, found here a Gnostic outlook, according to which phenomena are most beautiful when most ethereal, most nearly spiritual, but become gross and commonplace when embodied in matter, or, as in this case, by making direct contact with the body.
-
Efkfra2013-03-24Corporeality sometimes appears, as in this story, as a brutal and frightening irruption into a life that has become an unsatisfying routine. It can also appear as a wound, an image that preoccupies Kafka’s imagination.
-
Efkfra2013-03-24The physicality and sexuality repressed by Kafka’s protagonists, usually busy professional men, returns in frightening or disgusting forms of which Gregor’s insect guise is only the most drastic example. Both disgust and violence attend the animal imagery evoked in the story ‘A Country Doctor’. The doctor has been summoned by a patient who lives ten miles away, but his horse has died: how can he get there? He accidentally kicks an abandoned pig-sty, and it opens to reveal a stable, from which emerge two huge horses, ‘mighty creatures with powerful flanks [ . . . ] dipping their shapely heads like camels’, and a groom who himself seems half-animal: he calls the horses ‘brother’ and ‘sister’; he embraces the doctor’s servant girl and bites her in the cheek, whereupon the doctor, threatening ...
-
Efkfra2013-03-24Fasting is central to Kafka’s imagination. As a means of abandoning the physical world, and possibly entering a spiritual one, it fascinated Kafka, but also aroused his scepticism. Its supreme exponent in his writings is the Fasting Artist, whose superhuman powers of starvation are displayed to the public at fairs.because I could never find the nourishment I liked. Had I found it, believe me, I would never have caused any stir, and would have eaten my fill just like you and everyone else.So apparently it is not a vocation, but simply a distaste for ordinary living, that made him into an artist. Or is that just the selfdeprecation forced on him by his too-tender artistic conscience?Refusing to eat places one outside the ordinary bestial world in which life feeds on other lives. Kafka fig...
-
Efkfra2013-03-24In Kafka’s case, however, this physical activity does not indicate an untroubled acceptance of his body. It is one side of a deep ambivalence. The other side finds expression in constant complaints in his diary about his thin, unhealthy body, which he fears is too long for his weak heart to be able to pump blood through it. Some alarming diary entries imagine a hideous punishment being inflicted on his body. Thus on 4 May 1913 he compulsively imagines the kind of circular blade that cuts meat into strips rapidly slicing into his body. A letter he wrote to Milena in September 1920 is illustrated with a picture of a man tied by his hands and feet to two poles which are being moved so as to tear him apart. If for Kafka the body is capable of redemption through healthy living, it is also the s...
-
Efkfra2013-03-24The above examples also illustrate Kafka’s humour, something for which he receives too little credit. Sometimes, as here, his humour consists in the exposure of self-serving illogic. Sometimes it circles around a paradox, as in the description of the indescribable Bucephalus. Kafka’s love of paradox often issues in wit; most devastatingly, on his deathbed he asked for euthanasia, saying: ‘If you don’t kill me, you’re a murderer.’ Sometimes Kafka exploits the figure of regress, as when the Village Mayor asserts that not only are the authorities monitored, the authorities do nothing but monitor one another; or in the diary entry in which Kafka, feeling he has to build up his life from the beginning, compares himself to a theatre director:However, Humor (humour) in German denotes neither com...
-
x人2011-08-181922年1月，他在一家山区旅馆登记住宿时，发现里面的工作人员因为看错的预定记录而把他的名字写成了“Josef K”."我是该让他们纠正过来呢，还是让他们把我纠正过来呢？“他在日记里问道。
-
x人2011-08-18当我尽力用一个短句概括一切，我说：“人可以体现真理，但是他却无法明白真理。”——W.B.叶芝
-
x人2011-08-18其中许多逸事与小说中一个最有争议的片段有关：巴纳巴斯的妹妹阿玛丽亚收到一封信，信中言辞鄙俗。写信人是城堡官员索尔蒂尼，目的是叫她去陪他睡觉。村里的绝大多数姑娘会觉得有权力的男人如此恩赐是一种荣誉，可是阿玛丽亚不同，她拒绝了。从此以后，她的家人就受到村民的排斥，进而相信自己已经失宠于城堡了。他们在路边苦苦守候，希望能碰上哪个官员正好路过，然后向他乞求饶恕。阿玛丽亚的姐姐奥尔加与城堡的侍从在马厩里过了一夜又一夜，当他们的性玩物，希望他们好歹能说上一两句话，能对一家人争取恢复地位那么一丁点帮助。在此期间，阿玛丽亚变得冷漠、孤僻。父母因为伤心家门耻辱，落得未老先衰，阿玛丽亚现在一心只顾着照顾父母。可是尽管如此，其实没有任何迹象显示出城堡做过什么事情去伤害他们家，或者对阿玛丽亚违抗城堡有什么具体不满。这一家人迷信城堡的权威，充当了自己迷信行为的受害者。迷信城堡权威的破坏性后果，从奥尔加肉体上出卖自己以及阿玛丽亚情感上变得孤独离群可见一斑。阿玛丽亚抗拒索尔蒂尼占有她，这确实算得上一个有尊严的自我肯定之举。但是，要是她反抗权威却导致她深陷于权力结构中逃脱不了的话，她的反抗就白费了。一如尼采笔下的查拉图斯特拉所云：“和龙斗争的人，自己也变成了龙。”
-
x人2011-08-18他们可以选择是当皇帝还是当皇帝的信使。像孩子一样，他们都想做信使。于是，现在只有信徒了。他们满世界乱闯，由于没有皇帝，只能相互之间叫嚷着一些毫无意义的信息。他们可以很高兴地结束自己可怜的生命，可是他们又不敢，因为他们曾宣誓效忠皇帝（卡夫卡1917-1918年写的一段格言） 这里没有权威，而不要权威，是人们自己决定的结果。不过，人们还是努力活着，似乎头上依然有权威存在，尽管他们的生活痛苦而无意义。
-
醋梨儿2011-07-13永恒观念中然人沮丧的地方：一是在永生中，时间必须永远接受的、无法理解的合理性证明；而是由此而来的关于我们如何存在的合理性证明。
-
醋梨儿2011-07-13世事无非两类：真实与谎言。真是没有分身术，所以真实不能认识自身。任何人试图要认识真实，他必定是[个]假象。
-
醋梨儿2011-07-10社会机构是指各种其不同作用的社会组织，如家庭、公司、政府机关、学校、医院、监狱等等。这个词的意思有从笼统向具体转变的倾向，现在尤其指那些号称为了其成员利益，而违背他们的意愿对他们加以限制的机构，例如养老院、精神病院、监狱等。