Of Kafka, computers, e-books, hard hats and tip jars
NaNoWriMo, aka national National Writing Month, is almost here, and Robert Nagle will be along with the details. The idea is to get something on paper even if you rush the job. Meanwhile I’ve been reading, on my Sony PRS-505, one of the fiction’s most famous procrastinators. Yes, that’s Franz Kafka to the left.
Kakfa wrote his share of finished short stories. But novels? Even The Trial was incomplete, missing certain chapter numbers and parts of some chapters.
What he did write might come out in paragraphs of Faulknerian length, and Sony-style machines are better than PDAs at coping with this. The sharp E Ink on the six-inch screen can display several hundred words at once—far more than on a typical PDA.
Kafka’s hypothetical machine and Ellison’s real Osborne
So how would Kafka have fared in the era of computers and word-processors? As in Ralph Ellison’s case, where we’re talking reality in the form of an Osborne 1, scholars might hold a debate. Would Kafka the perfectionist have procrastinated even more while he lingered on minor details and used the Osborne to address them? Or would computers have made it possible for him to shuffle words around more easily and give us more completed-works?
Returning to the negative, could someone as obsessed and nerdish as Kafka have actually forsaken novel-writing for programming? He actually loved doing corporate annual reports or at least was proud of his output.
Franz as a techie: The Hard Hat connection
In his own way and in his own time, Kafka was actually a techie—having invented the civilian hard hat. Oh, the connections to be made, trivial or not! I remember the Nixon propaganda machine’s fondness for Hard Hats, the human variety, the Silent Minority members. And then from there, yes, we think of the Kafkaesque qualities of the Patriot Act and today’s Nixon, George Bush, who makes Tricky look like Clarence Darrow. W. is right out of The Trial, considering his love of bureaucracy and secretive "justice" and lack of government accountability.
The tip jar angle
Finally, here’s another Kafka-related question. Would tip jars have helped Kafka if he’d had the nerve to share his works more widely through the Net and otherwise. Robert thinks so, and I can see certain possibilities here, given the quality of Kafka’s writing and the passion of his few but ardent fans. But my guess is that Kafka would still have been at work at day job like his insurance company gig—leaving it up to more commercial geniuses like Philip Roth to capitalize eventually on, say, the concept behind The Metamorphosis.
October 30th, 2007 at 3:53 pm
See also my essay, Would kafka have kept a weblog? .
about the novel being unfinished, actually I think a good part of trial was essentially finished, though it was never officially published (to my knowledge). there’s a good chance kafka might have revised it again, but who knows.
Far less certain was the Castle, which was definitely incomplete. For Kafka,he composed the chapters as though they were individual beasts. They almost could stand alone as individual pieces. so we already understand the overall conflict even if individual parts are a bit sketchy or rough.
the act of revising was considerably more strenuous back then than it is today (thank god for word processors and cut and paste). that’s why many of the shorter forms seem more polished–they were easier to rewrite.
kafka really had little sense of how to market his works, and frankly near the end of his life he was more concerned about his health and his family to be able to focus on that.
speaking as someone who tries to write creatively, I have lots of old and half-finished manuscripts lying around, and it would take a long time (even with modern word processing) to get everything to a point where I’d be “happy” with it. While it is true that Kafka was particularly shy about publishing, it’s quite normal to have lots of old unfinished stuff lying around.