antagonist

Kafka and De Sade II

'Can you achieve good through evil? The strength which sets itself against fate is in fact a weakness. Surrender and acceptance are much stronger. But the Marquis de Sade does not understand that.'

'The Marquis de Sade!' I exclaimed.

'Yes,' Franz Kafka nodded. 'The Marquis de Sade, whose biography you lent me, is the real patron of our era.'

'That isn't really true.'

'Yes. The Marquis de Sade can obtain pleasure only through the sufferings of others, just as the luxury of the rich is paid for by the misery of the poor.'

From Conversations with Kafka by Gustav Janouch.

The Forgetting of Forgetting Itself

Whenever figures in the novels have anything to say to K., no matter how important or surprising it may be, they do so casually and with the implication that he must really have known it all along. It is a though nothing new was being imparted, as though the hero was just being subtly invited to recall to mind something that he had forgottten. This is how Willy Haas has interpreted the course of events in The Trial and rightly so. "The object of the trial", he writes, "indeed, the real hero of this incredible book is forgetting, whose main characteristic is the forgetting of itself... Here it has actually become a mute figure in the shape of the accused man, a figure of the most striking intensity."

Walter Benjamin in Franz Kafka, On the Tenth Anniversary of his Death.

Preconscious Deformities

Recalling a visit with Kafka to an exhibition of French painting, Janousch reports that, in answer to a comment he made on on Picasso's "rose coloured women with gigantic feet" which was to effect that Picasso was a "wilfull distortionist" Kafka replied: "I do not think so... He only registers the deformities which have not yet penetrated our consciousness. Art is a mirror, which goes 'fast', like a watch - sometimes".

(from The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head by Louis Begley)

" We are nihilistic thoughts "

"I remember," Brod writes, "a conversation with Kafka which began with present-day Europe and the decline of the human race. "We are nihilistic thoughts, suicidal thoughts that come into God's head", Kafka said. This reminded me at first of the Gnostic view of life: God as an evil demiurge, the world as fall. "Oh no", Kafka said, "our world is only a bad mood of God, a bad day of his." "Then there is hope outside this manifestion of the world we know." He smiled. "Oh, plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope -but not for us."

From Walter Benjamin's "Franz Kafka. On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death".