A stash of explicit pornography to which Franz Kafka subscribed has emerged for the first time after being studiously ignored by scholars anxious to preserve the iconic writer's saintly image.
Having stumbled by chance across copies in the British Library in London and the Bodleian in Oxford while doing unrelated research, James Hawes, the academic and Kafka expert, reveals some of this erotic material in Excavating Kafka, to be published this month. His book seeks to explode important myths surrounding the literary icon, a "quasi-saintly" image which hardly fits with the dark and shocking pictures contained in these banned journals.
So Kafka had a thing for "shocking" sexual imagery. So what? Frankly, I find it more endearing than anything else.
2 comments:
"So Kafka had a thing for "shocking" sexual imagery. So what? Frankly, I find it more endearing than anything else."
Yeah, I agree. Big whoop. NBFD.
Of course, this is a sort of postmodern viewpoint. Back then ...well, it suggests more than anything he was a non-conformist, which is a plus in my book.
It does make him not only more endearing, but also more real, and human, with probably fairly standard prurient tastes, or desires, like most people who aren't frozen, or "quasi-saints"--got enough of them in the past and running around today pretending to be more than human.
Uh, just as long as his stash didn't involve, like, insectoid porn, or beetlemania. Now that would be a bit weirdish. Might even bug me a little. Does that make me an exoskeletal prude? 8^}
I can imagine the Kafka scholars getting themselves all pink and wrinkled at the thought that their beloved writer was a chronic porn addict. Then again, academics aren't really human, which is why they hide in huge brick buildings and ignore other humans.
In grad school I wanted nothing more than to be a Literature professor, but once I got started down my Master's degree path I quickly changed my mind. I started looking for mentors, people to oversee my PhD, and realized that I had no business being a Lit. professor when I saw what sort of things they were interested in. Everything was sociologically economic and homophobically political, and none of it had to do with actual literature or expressiveness. It was all to do with "the economic background here forced this author to think this way, and see how this character is really a reflection of the failed policies of the government at this time." Blech. Double blech. Run away, run away!
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