Kafka, Calasso, Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman, and somehow Cixous & Duncan manage to make an appearance
Cover image of K. by Roberto Calasso. Off-white cover with title in black. The lower right stroke of the letter K features a row of identical photos of Kafka. Below this: “Roberto Calasso author of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony”
The last time I was at the Book Mill with my friend Ell, I picked up a copy of Roberto Calasso’s K., an odd but illuminating book that I read in tandem with Breon Mitchell translation of The Trial. Calasso is a skilled and dutiful exegete, hovering for the most part a consistent distance above Kafka's texts. This consistency made me relish the little touches where Calasso permits himself to gesture to his beloved corpus of vedic texts. His lack of equivocation or hesitation in his observations and assertions was occasionally off-putting, because I didn’t always find his conclusions as self evident.
Cover image of The Trial by F. Kafka, with title and author’s name in the lower right corner. Cover has cream border, with a red background. There are two columns of illustrations of blue eyes. The lowest eye on the left, next to the title and author, is brown.
This is a minor quibble, but towards the end of K., Calasso participates in the seeming critical consensus which judges Max Brod as a sentimental sap. If he was such a sap, why was Kafka friends with him? I'm asking not simply out of an over-identification with Brod, but out of curiosity, and with a suspicion that it's worth our time to think harder about the figures who mediate between uncompromising intellects and the public.
It was interesting to re-read The Trial. I haven’t seriously or systematically read Kafka for years, despite him being part of the curriculum of the soul set out by Hélène Cixous. I had forgotten how much of a prose stylist he is, and had completely forgotten the erotic charge that adheres to Josef K. when he becomes a defendant. Kafka is difficult to read, being one of those authors (like Poe) whose atmospheric qualities become legendary and come to obscure the text itself. Reading and re-reading are a way to cut through the fog of reputation, as well as the fog produced by the feeling that there are certain texts and authors that I am always reading in the sense that they are part of my inner life.
An example of this is Robert Duncan’s The HD Book, which I describe to people as a “kitchen sink” book, since it feels like it has everything in it. But the process of slowly reading it aloud with a group, has helped me renew my grounding in the text itself—supplementing, and sharpening, my internalized understanding of it as a friend and guide.
Cover of Metaphysical Animals which features a black and white photo of Somerville College Dining Halls, 1930s, bordered with Sunrise furnishing fabric by Lucienne Day. The authors’ names, Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, are at the top, and the subtitle, “How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life” is near the bottom.
Speaking of literary friendships, the last time I was at the library, I picked up a copy of Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman’s Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life. It really brings me back to the series of classes on the literature of friendship (which began with the epistolary record of two women philosophizing: Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt), being both an study on the social context of its subjects (Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, Philippa Foot, and Iris Murdoch), and an instance of it (the back cover flap lists Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman as friends and has a sweet photo of them).
This continues to be an ideal of friendship for me. Not that friendship has to be productive or possess a public character, but the idea of sustained intellectual and creative intimacy is very beautiful to me. Thinking and making are always already social for me, but sometimes I feel siloed off from potential collaborators due to the scission between the freelance world I’m living in and the academic world to which I’m adjacent. That and my own shortcomings as a collaborator (who doesn’t have some?), the exigencies of making a living, the lack of institutional support that really helps big projects like this come off. But that doesn’t mean I don’t hold it as a dream and goal. I do. Do you?
Speaking of reading, I'm starting a podcast called Your Favorite Book. Simple premise: the guest tells me their favorite book, they re-read it, I read it, and we have a conversation about it. But what if I have more than one favorite book? I'm already imagining having people come back on, so it won't necessarily be your last shot to talk about a book you love. It's still a couple months away from being launched, but if you are interested being a guest, please let me know.