There's nothing especially objectionable in Digby's post on Guantanamo and the Supreme Court today, but it does show how poorly Americans--even relatively educated, literate Americans--understand literature.
I think Kafka thought he was writing a parable when he wrote The Trial.Now The Trial is not precisely a parable in the way that, say, "Before the Law" is a parable. It's too long; it has too many elements of allegory and satire; it's too insistently novelistic and too modern. I've sometimes thought that The Trial is to the folk parables of the Ashkenazim what Ulysses is to the classical epic: a great, wicked pastiche of the form that becomes its own self-defined and self-defining genre.
But I havent' come to categorize. I just want to note that Kafka wasn't writing some small tale about the excesses of bureaucracy or the perversions of judicial processes. He was writing about the absurdity of life in society, circumscribed by State and God, driven in every moment to behave at the bidding and in the interest of a vast, impenetrable, and interlocking system of systems that is opaque not only to its victims but also to its operators, and possibly to itself. This is the often unremarked theme that makes The Trial one of the great works of prose literature. Unlike 1984, which certainly covers similar territory, and which is an extraordinary book but not a great one, The Trial isn't only a tale about the depredations of tyranny and the excesses man is capable of in order to acquire and retain power. 1984 posits explicitly a tyranny that understands what it is doing. O'Brien, the Inner Party Member, explains this precisely to Winston Smith during his long torture and rehabilitation. Even though it ends hopelessly, Orwell's novel nevertheless locates the source of tyranny in human actors with wicked but understandable human intentions. They are men who want power, have acquired it, have determined to keep it, and have resolved to undertake any measure to do so. That's monstrous, but it's also almost comforting, for even as O'Brien claims that the Party has constructed an infallible mechanism for maintaining control, we know that so long as the Party is made up of and directed by men, no matter how resolved, then it is fallible and mortal.
The Trial has no party, no central committees, no intentions, no self-conscious authorities. It is a bottomless depth. Within every wheel is another wheel; every mirror faces another mirror. Its authority is concealed and concealing, obscured and obscuring, endless, personless, utterly implacable, and totally inhuman. It has no reason, no goals, no purpose, and no desire. Although it operates through human interlocutors, it is utterly and completely alien. Unlike Orwell's Party, it isn't malevolent, nor evil exactly. Kafka's authority is a vast, meteorological force of nature: a disaster, perhaps, but something totally impenetrable to moral or ethical speculation. It's more mysterious than God. His vision is terrifying for precisely these reasons. Winston Smith, at last, is able to understand the reason for his imprisonment, torture, and execution. Josef K. is not. Josef K. is the truer exemplar of our condition than Winston Smith. Even the most vicious and powerful among us, the Presidents and Vice-Presidents and Candidates-for-Life, just as much as poor Josef K.'s judges and executioners, are operating in the service of something totally beyond their capacity to understand.
17 comments:
A bureaucratic entity (corporate or governmental) can become a "Super-organism", like an anthill, a beehive, or 'Star Trek's Borg... a life form which is different than simply the sum of its parts, and has purposes all its own, which the participants probably don't understand, and sometimes might include the sacrifice of its small parts for the greater good of the hive.
That is a really great post. It ties together much of what you've been saying recently.
More posts about literature, please!
Not really the same genre. Different literary traditions, and different milieux. Orwell was a journalist, a realist, a didact, an Englishman; his fantasy is bound to the world that he knew, ripped from the headlines. The need for clear moral conclusions naturally makes his characters less accurate as human portrayals. Kafka also grew up in a dying state, but this one the detritus of a terrestrial empire, and saw himself I think as more of a mad painter than a photographer. The comparison is a bit unfair to both, like trying to decide between Salman Rushdie and Sy Hersh.
I do like your reading of the Prozess, however. Interesting that the resident of a state that has disintegrated should have so much insight into their dynamics: like determining DNA sequences by putting biological material in a centrifuge. It's weakness that gives us insight, not power.
Orwell was a novelist, as well as those other things. I'm not sure what the clear moral conclusion of 1984 is supposed to be, in any case. "Why I Write" tells us that he wrote everything in favor of Democratic Socialism "as I understand it," but that is the sort of authorial pronouncement I intrinsically distrust.
I set up the comparison, in any case, for extrinsic purposes. "Orewllian" and "Kafkaesqe" are used more or less interchangeably by American liberals reflecting on the current state of affairs, and it's instructive to put one next to the other.
I do take the point about Rushdie and Hersh, but I think that might be a stretch for these authors.
The most interesting piece I’ve read on George Orwell is here. It is one of the few unflattering things I’ve read about him. I myself have only read Animal Farm, 1984 and Politics and the English Language, all of which I enjoyed.
Another rare example is Isaac Asimov’s review of 1984. I suspect he was irritated to see Orwell attacking the left, but the point about how such a dysfunctional state could operate all that complicated surveillance is a good one. It can be found here.
Thanks, tggp. I'm very interested to read these.
speaking of The Trial, and 1984 -
I just found out that there's a deluxe DVD edition of Terry Gilliam's Brazil - one disk has the director's cut, one disk has the non-director's anti-cut (i.e. all the stuff he didn't want, including the happy ending) and another disk has context/background/historical material/filler.
By the way, everything I write is in favor of Social Democracy (if any) - or more generally: truth, justice, the potentially sentient way, unselfish love, tasty nourishing food, and a comfortable place to read an interesting book.
The other thing I meant to say about 1984 was that Orwell's tyrants knew what they were doing in part because Kafka had previously written The Trial. In the wrong hands, a satire is also a cookbook.
Fascinating review of _1984_ by Isaac Asimov... [spoiling some contents of the review]...
But...
...even though I like Asimov, including his non-fiction work, and even though I'm more of a big-government liberal than an anarchist these days ...[no knock against our anarchist host, IOZ is so right so much of the time]... I think Asimov's review has some notable failings. Some of the inaccuracies of Asimov's review are much easier to spot in 2007 than when Asimov wrote in 1980 -- but the whole point of saying that Orwell was a good writer, was that Orwell saw those things in 1949.
For example, 'tggp' cites the excellent point that "how such a dysfunctional state could operate all that complicated surveillance" is problematic. Asimov writes that as many as five watchers would be needed to surveil each citizen, and each watcher would himself have to be watched, etc. An excellent objection, but on the other hand, I seem to recall it explicitly stated in the book that the watching was not constant. But it was still effective since one never knew if one was being watched or not, and a single slip-up on the part of those being watched was typically fatal. So you could never dare assume that you weren't being watched.
This causes those under surveilance to censor and police themselves. And after a little bit of self-censorship and self-policing, the citizenry starts to take the oppressive principles of the State to heart. Frankly I think this was one of Orwell's great insights (not that he invented this technique, it existed before Stalin -- but Orwell found a way to "throw back the curtain" and explain it to the non-political reader.)
Wasn't Orwell himself the one who said [paraphrase] "A trained dog jumps at his master's command, but a particularly well-trained dog knows when to jump without the master needing to say a word." Asimov misses this point entirely.
Asimov takes Orwell to task for failing to predict things like computers and new vices. He therefore says that _1984_, if it is science fiction at all, is not "good" science fiction. But Asimov obviously knows better than most, that "good" science fiction doesn't really revolve around technological advances and gadgets, but instead imagines how eternal, ancient facets of human nature react to new situations. Good sci-fi is never about the gadgets and ray guns, but instead about _how_ people _use_ them to satisfy caveman impulses.
For example, Orwell's "Newspeak" may have been a rather clunky literary device in Asimov's opinion, and maybe in 1980 Asimov had an alibi to claim that it was implausible. But I don't think anyone who is politically aware today in 2007 can deny that we have witnessed the raw power of Rove/Luntz Republians hamhandedly manipulating debate by favorably defining existing words, and this experience has shed light on the ways both Democrats and Republicans have manipulated language to preserve hegemony for at least three or four decades prior. (The Carter Doctrine conflating "national interest" with "petroleum", just to name an obvious example.)
Orwell's insight about self-policing leads towards Kafka, even though Kafka preceded him. When the masses censor themselves and take the State's principles of self-repression fully to heart, the ruling elites of course need to think, do and act differently in order to keep controlling the masses rather than joining them. And this double-derivative constant philosophical change may well be the motivating factor which keeps institutions and bureacracies inscrutable and gives them a life of their own apart from their constituents. Kafka saw the end results of this process in a decaying society; Orwell worried about how we got there from here.
Uh IOZ - check the novel - Winston was NOT executed ...
don't you remember the ending - he's sitting there crying into his gin because he had finally "learned" to love big brother", and all the while the calliope is playing:
Underneath the chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me ...
Well, that's quite a bleak vision. Almost enough to send one back into the comforting arms of patrio-ligion.
"I seem to recall it explicitly stated in the book that the watching was not constant. But it was still effective since one never knew if one was being watched or not"
Jeremy Bentham's panopticon.
Thank IOZ. The Trial has been one of my favorite books since I first read it.
tggp:
Reading that first piece, I have to say that he's fond of quoting Orwell out of context.
For example (page 3), in down and out in Paris and London, Orwell did not write that "the destitute" have:
“given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them
from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees
people from work”.
He said: There were eccentric characters in the hotel. The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people - people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and have (“given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them
from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees
people from work”). Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived lives that were curious beyond words."
He's not exactly saying they're something to emulate. The basic message I got from the book was something along the lines of - beggars, tramps and the poor are people too.
That's just one example. I haven't all of orwell, so I can't judge every bit of the essay, but I wouldn't give it much credence. Methinks perhaps the Libertarian alliance has an agenda. You'd do better to read orwell and judge for yourself.
Keeping in mind of course that I agree with Ioz re: Orwellian vs. Kafkaesque.
Also, I'm not a huge fan of animal farm.
But, notes on Nationalism is a very good essay I believe.
Yessir
I'm glad to see I caused this reaction. Perhaps it was my plan all along to derail the discussion, though I wouldn't have bothered to rustle up those links now if I hadn't already written a post to copy/paste from.
I agree that it is asking too much of a sci-fi author to make accurate predictions, but I also think Asimov has a good point that Orwell was rather unimaginative in simply changing political situation and leaving most other things in stasis. It can't even be considered original, because G. K. Chesterton's "The Napoleon of Notting Hill" took the "future is just like today but under a different system" approach about four decades earlier.
I don't find it all unlikely that the Libertarian Alliance has an agenda. It's typical for libertarians to try to grab Orwell for themselves (conservatives try to do it too) as an opponent of both fascism and communism and I found it refreshing to see someone go after the Great Man.
I thought Winston was executed. The Party still kills people like the Nazis did, but they break them first and get genuine confessions unlike the shams put on by Stalin. I could swear there's a part about how he knows (or experiences) a bullet going into the back of his head after a walk down a hallway, but it's been a while.
". . . the longed-for bullet was entering his brain . . ."
But it's unclear whether or not that's actually happening or if he's just anticipating it. However, we know that whether it is or is not happening, it will happen, because it is what inevitably happens. O'Brien tells him that it will happen, and as you'll recall, O'Brien has "never lied" to Winston.
the walk down the hallway is from Koestler's Darkness at Noon, which if it hasn't been brought up in this thread yet, probably should have been by somebody.
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