The BBC reports:
An Israeli court has ruled that a collection of Franz Kafka’s works must be handed to Israel’s national library. The ruling settles a long legal dispute over ownership of the documents. Kafka gave the writings to his friend Max Brod, whose secretary insisted he left them to her. After her death, her daughters refused to hand them over. It is thought the manuscripts might include unpublished material by Kafka.
However:
Hoffe in fact kept most of the collection locked away, and sold some of it.
So the courts ruled that the writings must be given to any public library, recommending Israel’s:
But a Tel Aviv family court ruled on Sunday that Brod had explicitly ordered Hoffe to catalogue and transfer his collection “to the library of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem or the Tel Aviv municipal library, or any other public institution in Israel or abroad”.
The Guardian reported the same news, but ended their article with the strangest of quotes from the author Will Self:
“There’s enough of what Milan Kundera terms ‘Kafkaology’ about as it is: seldom has a writer been as profitlessly anatomised – and that largely as a function of writings other than his fiction – as Kafka. This evolution will surely result only in more of this: more unread and unreadable doctoral theses, more bowdlerised applications of this or that critical theory to the Kafka corpus,” he said. “Brod himself was intent on canonising Kafka as a Zionist saint, and the Israeli state holding the papers ensures that this falsification will continue apace – still, it matters not, the works are out there in all their contrariety, sparking different and heterodox sensations as legion as their readers.”
Whose fault is that then, Will Self?
Let’s turn to the London Review of Books:
- In his role as Professor of Contemporary Thought at Brunel University, Will Self, in an unprecedented inter-departmental collaboration, challenged staff and students to produce creative digital responses to the Kafka story. This inspired music, animations, films and texts that can be found via multiple routes through the essay.
- Archival material was unearthed (much of it previously unavailable in digital form) and added into the text providing both depth and context.
- Readings, interviews, translations and debates have also been interwoven, as has the process of creating the essay, documented in blogs and videos, allowing readers a unique insight into the writer’s intellectual journey. The developments of the first two months of the project are recorded in Will Self’s ‘Writer’s Blog’.
In fact, Will Self has a whole blog about Kafkaology!
Where you can read things like:
The estrangement of the contemporary Czech Republic is and is not that of Kafka: the belief in the widespread corruption of the government is just as pervasive.
And:
In Prague, Kafka seems reduced to the status of a logo rather than an icon: his streamlined marine features, smoothed back into his slicked-down hair, stare down from wall plaques and are painfully anodised in bronzes and bas-reliefs.
And:
I like the idea of people logging on and getting assigned Kafka avatars – Max Brod, Felice Bauer, Hermann and Julie Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Canetti, naturlisch – and then wandering in to one room where they see poor Franz having his first tubercular haemorrhage, then into another where the boy lies calmly with his gaping wound, then entering that wound, only to re-emerge on the sixth floor of the Festival Hall, where they’re offered a miniature Danish pastry.
And:
This, then, from one of Kafka’s final letters to his twice-failed-fiancée Felice Bauer, dated Prague, 9 September 1917: ‘Here is the reason for my silence: two days after my last letter, precisely four weeks ago, at about 5.00 a.m., I had a haemorrhage of the lung. […]
And so on and so on.
Let’s get this right.
For the last couple of years, Will Self has been running a project of writing unreadable nonsense about Kafka, based on details about his life and times, and his fiction, and how they somehow relate to contemporary society.
Now Will Self is basically saying, knowing more about Kafka is a bad idea, because there’s too much unreadable nonsense out there about Kafka, based on details about his life and times, and his fiction, and how they somehow relate to contemporary society.
Will Self’s latest view makes no sense. If you click on the link on the Guardian, hovering over Will Self’s name in the article about Brod and Kafka, you get taken a piece Self wrote two weeks ago, about Kafka’s musical tastes.
You even can watch a video of Will Self travelling to Prague in the footsteps of Kafka.
So Will Self was the worst Kafkaologist of the lot!
Now I’d be quite interested in reading the documents from the Brod library, which according to the BBC might contain more writings by Kafka himself. That would be a lot more fascinating, than reading Will Self on Kafka. But Self seems to think these papers shouldn’t be in Israel’s public domain, because it’s helping maintain some image of Kafka as a “Zionist saint”.
In reality, the Israeli court did not even press for the papers to be given to Israel – this was a suggestion that would really make sense. According to the BBC, though, it would be sufficient for Hoffe to give the papers to any public library.
This does not matter for Will Self, who is intent on seeing malice on the part of Israel, whom he thinks will help maintain Zionist myths about Kafka which were started by Brod.
If it’s just that Will Self is sick of people writing unreadable and pretentious nonsense about Kafka, then maybe he could simply stop doing that himself.
