KAFKA LITE 

In January 1912 Kafka had noted

in his diary: “I am supposed to

pose in the nude for the artist

[Ernst] Ascher, as a model for

St Sebastian”—Saul Friedländer,

Franz Kafka: The Poet of

Shame and Guilt

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Yes, my dears - plainly and succinctly put – I prefer KAFKA LITE. Nude, tied to a post - my own personal precocious S/M Boss Cupid. Erect nipples, pouty Prague Prick - the struggling, suffering queer quintessence of St Sebastian himself.

But why should I consider it necessary to ramble on & on like this about Miss Kafka - because you already know as well as I do what I'm going to say next: Miss Kafka Lite is exquisitely gay 'kafkaesque'.

_________________________

Much more 'kafkaesque' than you or I could ever want to be I suppose. After all who wants to be ‘kafkaesque’ anyway – you don’t have to be if you don’t want to be. On the other hand, if you’re a closet-case like the person in Kafka’s parable “Before the Law” – you may or may not enjoy being tres ‘kafkaesque’ and stuck in some proverbial closet the rest of your life.

The closet-case parable “Before the Law” is a quickie preview of what comes later on in Miss Kafka’s gay oeuvre - the tortuous treadmill of THE TRIAL and the even more tortuous transgressive transformations of THE METAMORPHOSIS. I don’t want to kvetch too much though – nor am I pretending to pull the ivy down from THE CASTLE walls of Yale University. Understanding Miss Kafka, Gregor Samsa & the other gay protagonists in Kafka’s various  ‘kafkaesque’ novels, short stories, parables & queer diary entries is a fairly easy exercise – in fact Miss Kafka hints, suggests, invites it.

________________

“Kafka Lite” is a phrase that sounds rather like some kitschy bourgeois cliché. And yet it’s like Franz Kafka posing in the nude as St Sebastian for the artist Ernst Ascher in his Prague studio.

As if the infamously enigmatic Miss Kafka could or would possibly reveal or divulge himself to anybody – just by posing nude in an artist’s studio. The Sebastian-esque pose is quite revealing though – a kind of burlesque ‘kafkaesque’ coming out of the closet portrayed in the parable “Before the Law.”

____________

What other self-revealing ‘kafkaesque’ portrayals exist down along the line of Miss Kafka’s oeuvre of coming out of the closet? Could the “Before the Law” trope be a key – to unlocking the closet-door of what it means to be a Prague Austro-Hungarian fin de siècle fag?

Miss Kafka worked as an attorney and insurance agent for the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. The job involved investigating and assessing compensation for personal injury to industrial workers; accidents such as lost fingers or limbs were commonplace at this time.

___________

Did Kafka’s work with the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute somehow train him to see himself as a typical legal-insurance “case” no different than all the cases he handled and was responsible for.

Does Kafka’s writing reflect investigating and assessing compensation for his own perceived personal injuries—accidents of more than just lost fingers and limbs?

Is there a cure or compensation for 'gay kafkaesque'?

Nuvem

THE CLOSET CASE 

"No one else could ever be 
admitted here, since this gate 
was made only for you. I am 
now going to shut it."
—Franz Kafka, Before the Law

http://www.kafka-online.info/before-the-law.html
______________

You grow up in this small cramped closet. You notice that the closet door is open, but closed enough for you not to see anything out there.

The closet has this doorknob that can lock and talk. The doorknob is a guard that always says, “You may not pass without permission.”

You point out that you can easily get out of the closet, and the guard agrees. Rather than be disagreeable, however, you decide to wait until you have permission. 

You wait for many years, and when you're an old, shriveled wreck, you get yourself to ask: 

"During all the years I've waited here, no-one else has tried get out of this closet and go through the door. Why is this?" and the guard answers: 

"It’s true that no-one else has passed here, that is because this closet door was always meant solely for you, but now, that you’re dying, it’s closed forever." 

The guard then proceeds to close the door and calmly walk away. 

This is in fact, one of Kafka’s parables or short stories about being a closet-case, and it’s very typical of his style, i.e. kafkaesque.

Was Kafka a closet-case? 

All About Franz

ALL ABOUT FRANZ: by ADDISON DEWITT 

“We all have abnormalities in common. 
Especially us Kafka literary critics.
We're a breed apart from the rest of 
humanity, we literature folk. We are the 
original displaced personalities.”
—Addison DeWitt (George Sanders)
ALL ABOUT FRANZ (2013)
_____________________

For those of you who don’t read, don’t attend the movies, watch Orson Welles’ THE TRIAL or know anything of the world in which you live, it is perhaps necessary to introduce myself. 

My name is Addison DeWitt. My native habitat is Literature. In it I toil not, neither do I spin. I am a critic and commentator. I am essential to the literary criticism.
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That I should need to comment on Kafka at all suddenly strikes me as the height of improbability. But that in itself is probably the reason—Kafka is such an improbable person, my dears, and so am I. 

Kafka and I have something in common. Our contempt for humanity and inability to love and be loved, our insatiable paranoia, and, of course, our talent. We deserve each other.
____________________

Tell me, dear readers, what do you take me for? Is it possible, even conceivable, that you've confused me with that gang of backward academic literati and biographers who play games and tricks on you, even though I have the same contempt for you as they do?

Look closely, my dears. It's time you did. I am Addison DeWitt. I am nobody's fool, least of all yours. It's important right now that we talk, killers to killers. 

Dreary Digressions

DREARY DIGRESSIONS DRAG MISS KAFKA THROUGH THE DIRT 

— Waldo Lydecker New York Times 7/26/2013

“How singularly innocent 
I look this morning.”
—Waldo Lydecker, LAURA (1944)
__________________

Was Franz Kafka a fag?

Was Franz Kafka a closet case?

Was Franz Kafka fond of pretty Prague penises?

I’m shocked—simply shocked, my dears!!!

Nevertheless, such rude probing tacky questions need to be asked I suppose.

Not only by all of us esteemed literary Critics in the Big Apple such as myself—but by all the various and sundry esteemed hoity-toity riff-raff readers of the astute New York Times.

After all, Enquiring Minds need to know.

Now then, as all of you know by now—I don't use a pen. I write with a goose quill dipped in venom.

Yes, I know I’m not kind—I'm vicious. It's the secret of my literary critic charm.

I shall never forget the weekend Franz Kafka died. A black comet burned through the sky like a huge flaming magnifying glass. It was the hottest Sunday in my recollection. I felt as if I were the only human being left in Prague. 

For with Kafka's horrible death, I was alone. I, Waldo Lydecker, was the only one who really knew him, and I had just begun to write Franz's story when another of those tacky detectives from THE TRIAL came to grill me. I had him wait. I could watch him through the peep-hole in the door.

Fussy str8t literary biographers were also knocking at my door—all the way from SF to Poughkeepsie. As well as from NYC all the way to Bangkok. They were all anxious to burden me with their rude intrusive dreary digressions into the dirt of what really went on there in Miss Kafka’s bedroom.

I’ve always pleaded innocence when it came to spilling the beans about Kafka’s private life. Usually I act dizzy and simply dillydally about this and that.

I mean after all, get real. We live in tres moderné times these days. Especially now that once controversial gay marriage has become rather ho-hum commonplace these days. 

It seems truly the height of chutzpah to get too personal about what happened in Miss Kafka’s bedroom.

After all, anyone who’s read THE METAMORPHOSES knows that something terribly seductive and forbidden and rather vulgar was going on in there behind locked doors. 

Something that most people would rather not know about too much. Unless, of course, they’re somewhat exquisite voyeurs and connoisseurs of Cock… Cockroaches, that is.

Yes, my dears, something disgustingly profane and much too outré was going on in Kafka’s penthouse. Shocking even for the smooth sophisticated dry martini crowd sipping their martinis and gossiping like the good old days back when Miss Capote was doing her thing.

I must say that Kafka’s “Cockroach Drag” routines were rather risqué back then—back when Miss Kafka threw parties for Bette Davis, Marilyn Monroe and Addison Dewitt, the famed drama critic.

But the star was Franz Kafka. His native habitat was the Novel. In it he toiled not, neither did he spin. He was the ultimate high society critic and bitchy commentator. He was essential to Literature.

B. Barends

 KAFKA: A DIFFERENT KIND OF CLOSET CASE? 

“For Kafka, who once declared "my way of life is geared solely to writing" and dreamed of a fusion between literature and life, for whom all kinds of literary experience were matters of life and death, the coincidence might have been one reason for his crush”— Marco Roth, 'KAFKA: THE DECISIVE YEARS,' BY Reiner Stach, “Franz the Obscure Review’ by NYTimes January 1, 2006
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What coincidence? What crush?

Kafka and Brod had gone to visit Goethe's house in Weimar, where Kafka developed a crush on Margarethe, the hopelessly ignorant daughter of the caretaker. These things could happen to anybody. 

But Stach never tells us that Margarethe - usually shortened to Grete or Gretchen - is also the name of the naïve girl seduced by Faust after he makes his pact with Mephistopheles in Goethe's play

The biographer Stach's own indecisiveness turns this book into a kind of a choose-your-own biography which is more fun to read if you know about such Goethe coincidences with Kafka already. 

Successful seduction would have made Kafka a Faust. Pursuing her in a way that was doomed to leave him alienated and humiliated would put him in the company of Goethe. 

For Kafka, who once declared "my way of life is geared solely to writing" and dreamed of a fusion between literature and life—this so-called coincidence between Greta and Goethe would seem to be as good as any other excuse to fuse life and literature together as an “affair.”

This so-called Greta-Goethe crush and all the other various and sundry womanizing affairs could be said to be a closeted way of marrying literary experience with matters of life and death.

All this is speculative interpretation, of course, but gay biographers have earned the right to play and to indulge their gay readers' yearning to have other gay/closeted lives made sense of, as well as their own.

KAFKA FILM REVIEW 

“There is, however, one major
expression of modernist culture
that Kafka avidly soaked in:
the world of film.”
—Saul Friedländer, Franz Kafka: 
The Poet of Shame and Guilt

“They die—Dead!!!
I die—Alive!!!”
—Bela Lugosi,
Son of Frankenstein (1939)
___________

What does it mean to be Ygor?

It means to live—a kind of living death. Ygor knows his fate isn’t simple—but he has a talent for portraying his nightmare-like inner life. Bela Lugosi does this much better in Son of Frankenstein rather than Dracula.

Ygor is still living in the gloomy dumpy castle—with its secret passageways and crypts below ground near some fuming hellish sulfur pits. There’s an old Count Frankenstein laboratory down there—and a special hideaway for the Creature.

Ygor asks the Baron’s son for help—to revive his friend from a deep monster coma. He got out one night during a lightening storm and got zapped by a lightening bolt right into his neck-bolts. What a orgasmic thrill it was—but it was too much even for such a huge terrible monster. He’d been half-dead half-alive ever since then—with Ygor worrying about him like an old woman.

Frankenstein’s monster tries to please Ygor—but he doesn’t have any energy left. Lightening is his mother—and he needs another shot of joy juice. Basil Rathbone struggles with his guilty conscience—but is persuaded to move forward with his father’s daring experiments. Ygor hangs out in the background—like a jealous lover. He knows he’s just an old aging hunchback—with a bone in his throat from a mishandled hanging.

Ygor wants his big brute lover-boy back—in fact in another episode in The House of Frankenstein Ygor wants his brain to be transplanted into the Creature so that he can escape his crippled body and have some fun around the joint.

But what is it like to be a Monster? Monsterhood is an exciting, wonderful livelihood—terrorizing the countryside and getting revenge for Ygor on the Burgomaster and his cronies. Ygor plays his crummy little flute—and there’s the Monster played by Boris Karloff mostly in a reclining position. But he manages to get it up and move around—thanks to Basil Rathbone and all that art deco electronics down below the castle. One by one Boris knocks off each petty official in Frankensteinville—all the creeps that had poor Ygor hung by the neck.

What’s it like to be a Monster—stitched together like a rag-doll with human arms and legs and all those squishy organs inside? To be reborn and not know who you are—except that your body is constantly struggling against itself and your brain belongs to a serial killer from Budapest? Nature embraces you with dubious binding spirits—and surely it’s the devil in disguise that peers at you from the mirror?

Being a Monster must be like the Living Dead—none of your organs no longer knows anything about where they came from or who once enjoyed this or that throbbing once-alive organ? It must be truly a bonfire of vanities—your whole body craving enjoyment but discombobulated so much that you don’t know what’s up or what’s down?

KAFKA'S BOYFRIENDS 

“They were offered the choice between 
becoming kings or the couriers of kings. 
The way children would, they all wanted 
to be couriers. Therefore there are only 
couriers who hurry about the world, 
shouting to each other—since there are 
no kings—messages that have become 
meaningless. They would like to put an 
end to this miserable life of theirs but 
they dare not because of their oaths of 
service.”—Walter Kaufman, Existentialism 
from Dostoevsky to Sartre

Perhaps it’s not so much that we live in a world of lies—but that we’re all busy-body couriers running around with imperial messages. Running around in circles—with nowhere to go. His imperial majesty is dead—and the whispered messages have been making their strange detoured circuits for a long time now. 

But the couriers have all forgotten the message—and they’ve all been diverted and lost in the vast corridors and labyrinths of the Castle of language for a long time now. Endless doorways going on and on forever—and each doorway has its own bodyguard to keep the riff-raff couriers away. Whatever the imperial message was—it’s lost and been lost for a long time now.

.
What makes Kafka seem so Kafkaesque—is perhaps that his style is so simple, straight-forward, legal and as cold as an insurance policy, appealing to the modern anxious mind while also plunging us into an alienated subverted transgressive Kafkaesque world. 

Just as Gogol does in The Nose or The Overcoat with his at first deceptively simple prose which proceeds to slip and slide us through the storyline—until all of a sudden a trapdoor opens up and there’s a jerk as we fall through space and time until we hit the end of the rope and suddenly see a million shooting stars. 

All the young handsome couriers, the lost Kafkaesque boyfriends.