He's Just Not That Into Writing

Kafka, that is, er, was. Review of new bio at Powell's.

The book: It is rare that writers of fiction sit behind their desks, actually writing, for more than a few hours a day. Had Kafka been able to use his time efficiently, the work schedule at the Institute would have left him with enough free time for writing. As he recognized, the truth was that he wasted time.

The review: The truth was that he wasted time! The writer's equivalent of the dater's revelation: He's just not that into you. "Having the Institute and the conditions at his parents' apartment to blame for the long fallow periods when he couldn't write gave Kafka cover: it enabled him to preserve some of his self-esteem."

It's a lighthearted review. The book is The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay by Louis Begley. The book also addresses Kafka's contradictions and neuroses, about writing, about women, about being Jewish.

How interesting that the man who wrote The Metamorphosis also wrote:


Life is merely terrible; I feel it as few others do. Often -- and in my inmost self perhaps all the time -- I doubt that I am a human being.
and
Isn't it natural to leave a place where one is so hated?... The heroism of staying is nonetheless merely the heroism of cockroaches which cannot be exterminated, even from the bathroom.

Or maybe the title of this post should have been The Cockroach and the Jewish Question. When I read The Metamorphosis in high school, as a shiksa, it didn't occur to me that the metaphor of turning into a bug had anything to do with Jewishness -- it was never even brought up that Kafka was a Jew living in an anti-Semitic culture. Obviously, he had a little self-image problem, but quite a lot of pimply, late adolescent males of my acquaintance had that, and could be expected to mine it for their literary ambitions, if any.

The Magical Negro

The flip side to the negative stereotypes, from Strange Horizons.

"These days, however, I don't think the Magical Negro's existence is so conscious. I hypothesize that the Magical Negro in film continues to live because a lot of the less savory beliefs about race are still in the American public's psyche. And because so much of art these days is commercial, the great machine needs to "give 'em what they know."

"[Stephen]King's Magical Negroes most often fit the stereotype of a person of color with mystical powers. According to general racial pigeonholes, people of color, especially blacks, are more primitive than whites. And because they are more primitive, they are more in tune with their primitive powers, the magic of the earth and spirits. One may see a lot of these assumptions with Native Americans, also. It is also this stereotype that the myths of the oversexed black woman and the well-endowed black man spring from, for to be primitive is often equated with being more sexual. The stereotypical primitive person of color is familiar to audiences and thus instantly understood. To assume such a role implies a certain primitiveness about all people of color."

Reminds me of Jubilee, Dr. Margaret Walker's historical novel about her great-grandmother, in which a white woman's insistence that "colored grannies" are the best (midwives) paves the way for her family to settle in an all-white town after the Civil War.

Blacks as saints or sinners, but nothing in-between, I guess. Kinda like artists...hm, wonder if it's the outsider category coming into play. Scapegoats and messiahs, but not just plain folks.