The Enveloping Imagination: Wildfire Consuming the Open Prairies of the Mind
(Part II of II)

Wildfire on the mind-lands, burning books and paintings, consuming ink and hue—this marks the imagination in action. It reaches for Van Gogh one moment, Kafka the next. Flames lick at critical reflections from Arendt and Kaufmann—smoke and soot surround C. S. Lewis and J. S. Mill in Dickensian fashion. The prairie is full of fire. The enveloping imagination burns wild.

Last time at Bookbread, readers were initially presented with comments by Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) on Kafka and van Gogh and how the final act of creation occurs when the audience begins to think:

It often appears in works of art, especially in Kafka’s early prose pieces or in some paintings of van Gogh where a single object, a chair, a pair of shoes, is represented. But these art works are thought-things, and what gives them their meaning—as though they were not just themselves but for themselves—is precisely the transformation they have undergone when thinking took possession of them.
(The Life of the Mind Vol. I. Thinking, (1971), ed. Mary McCarthy (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co, 1978), p.184)

Arendt’s remarks should be compared to those of Walter Kaufmann (1921–1980) when he compares the letters of Kafka (1883–1924) to those by Van Gogh (1853–1890). Kaufmann sees a similarity in how each artist was able to almost detach themselves from themselves while thinking about themselves:

If ever a great artist worked under the spell of inspiration it was Vincent van Gogh. He created literally hundreds of the finest paintings in the world in a mere four years. Of his high emotional tension and total, self-sacrificing devotion there is no doubt, yet his copious letters to his brother show how far he was from regarding the fruits of his inspiration as sacrosanct. Even when committed to an asylum, he never lost or disparaged his critical powers. He discussed his works as well as his situation with a rarely equaled lucidity that furnishes a startling contrast to Buber, not to speak of Benjamin, Adorno, and Heidegger. Freud’s and Kafka’s letters are also free of falseness, pretense, and murkiness but not so intense. All three men—van Gogh, Kafka, and Freud—were distinguished by an amazing capacity for detachment from themselves and could see themselves from above.
(Discovering the Mind Vol. II: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Buber, (New York: McGraw Hill, 1981), p. 256)

At one point in the 1919 letter to his father, Kafka’s explains what he’s trying to do with his writing:

I have already indicated that in my writing, and in everything connected with it, I have made some attempts at independence, attempts at escape, with the very smallest of success; they will scarcely lead any farther; much confirms this for me.
(Brief An Den Vater (Letter to his Father), trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins, (New York: Schocken. 1971), p. 117)

And about forty years before Kafka’s letter, at one point in a letter to his brother, Van Gogh explains what he’s trying to do with his painting:

Of the drawings which I will show you now I think only this: I hope they will prove to you that I am not remaining stationary in my work, but progress in a direction that is reasonable. As to the money value of my work, I do not pretend to anything else than that it would greatly astonish me if my work were not just as salable in time as that of others. Whether that will happen now or later I cannot of course tell, but I think the surest way, which cannot fail, is to work from nature faithfully and energetically. Feeling and love for nature sooner or later find a response from people who are interested in art. It is the painter’s duty to be entirely absorbed by nature and to use all his intelligence to express sentiment in his work, so that it becomes intelligible to other people.
(“To Theo, The Hague, July 31, 1882,” The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, trans. (London: Constable, 1929), ed. Mark Roskill, (New York: Touchstone, 2008), pp. 159–60)

But back to Arendt and her observation that “the transformation they [Kafka and Van Gogh’s early works] have undergone when thinking took possession of them”––for C. S. Lewis (1898–1963), the great artist like Kafka or Van Gogh presents a “total response to the world”:

Very roughly, we might almost say that in Rhetoric imagination is present for the sake of passion (and, therefore, in the long run, for the sake of action), while in poetry passion is present for the sake of imagination, and therefore, in the long run, for the sake of wisdom or spiritual health—the rightness and richness of a man’s total response to the world….

The idea of a poetry which exists only for the poet—a poetry which the public rather overhears than hears––is a foolish novelty in criticism. There is nothing specially admirable in talking to oneself.
(A Preface to Paradise Lost, (Oxford UP, 1942; Galaxy Book, 1961), p. 54)

Lewis is here riffing on an earlier observation by John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) that:

Poetry and eloquence are both alike the expression or uttering forth of feeling. But if we may be excused the seeming affectation of the antithesis, we should say that eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard. Eloquence supposes an audience; the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude, and bodying itself forth in symbols which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet’s mind. Eloquence is feeling pouring itself forth to other minds, courting their sympathy, or endeavoring to influence their belief, or move them to passion or to action. (“What is Poetry?” (1833))

Between Kaufmann, Lewis, and Mill, readers might surmise: whatever the status of the reader, writer-artists tend to overhear themselves when they are rereading-rewriting their works. As overhearers of their own works, writer-artists must somewhat negate themselves during the act of overhearing (if overhearing here means the process of rereading-rewriting). The enveloping imagination negates as it consumes. Yet a fire cannot catch itself on fire…..

I think Kafka hints at the overhearing-through-reading mentioned by Mill when, in an early story, Kafka’s character of Raban points out the inevitable connections that are made between reading two random works:

“Well, it isn’t so important,” Raban said. “I was only going to say books are useful in every sense and quite especially in respects in which one would not expect it. For when one is about to embark on some enterprise, it is precisely the books whose contents have nothing at all in common with the enterprise that are the most useful. For the reader who does after all intend to embark on that enterprise, that is to say, who has somehow become enthusiastic (and even if, as it were, the effect of the book can penetrate only so far as that enthusiasm), will be stimulated by the book to all kinds of thoughts concerning his enterprise. Now, however, since the contents of the book are precisely something of utter indifference, the reader is not at all impeded in those thoughts, and he passes through the midst of the book with them, as once the Jews passed through the Red Sea, that’s how I should like to put it.”
(“Hochzeitsvorbereitungen Auf Dem Lande” (“Wedding Preparations in the Country”) (1907–08), trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins, The Complete Short Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, (New York: Schocken, 1971), pp. 74–75)

It is as if, while reading, one overhears the comparison of one book to another, or one passage from one book to another (much like how this blog post was written).

Van Gogh was, at least in his early life, notoriously unmethodical (that is, random) in his reading. As his sister-in-law Johanna Van Gogh-Bonger observed:

No other thing has taken its place yet; he draws much and reads much, among others, Dickens, Beecher Stowe, Victor Hugo, and Michelet, but it is all done without system or aim.
(“Memoir by His Sister-in-Law,” The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, p. 50)

And as Mark Roskill, editor of Van Gogh’s letters, put it:

It was characteristic of him to identify himself with fictional heroes, and to pick out from the books he read whatever seemed to have a moral and spiritual application to his own destiny.
(“[Note to] To Theo, Paris, February 19, 1876,” The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, p. 94)

Other critics of Vincent have noted:

Van Gogh always needed an intellectual framework for defending his opinions, his projects, and the positions he took. When he fell in love with his cousin Kee Vos, for example, he plumbed Michelet in search of justifications for his stubborn arguments for marriage, contrary to the opinions of everyone around him, and also contrary to the wishes of the person in question. Along the way, he did not hesitate to take quotations out of context, to abbreviate them, to paraphrase them … an effective way of joining ranks with a thinker whose aura and gravity preclude any attempt at further argument.
(Wouter van der Veen and Peter Knapp, Van Gogh in Auvers: His Last Days, (New York: Monacelli Press, 2009), pp. 40–41)

Yet is there any way the arguments in this blog post could be taken further?

Let the present reader find something more random than Bookbread can feed them—perhaps only then could the argument be carried along to some new place—only by a kind of overhearing of oneself whilst reading….. burning while brooding…. the enveloping imagination transfixed on the unbound horizon of the mind-land prairie it has yet to consume…. yearning to burn all into the background.

The Enveloping Imagination: Wildfire Consuming the Open Prairies of the Mind
(Part I of II)

This fire, these flames, is and are the imagination ablaze across the range and country and prairies and hollows and wildlands that encompass the globe of my mind. Here this mad rush of heat and energy waves both smoke and light on acquired knowledge and endured experience.

This enveloping imagination of mine reaches for whatever it can grab, then, connects it with the larger patch of bursting energy burning across the semiconscious land.

The flames grab Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) and her remarks on certain works by Kafka and van Gogh––how the final act of creation occurs when the reader-listener-viewer begins to think:

It often appears in works of art, especially in Kafka’s early prose pieces or in some paintings of van Gogh where a single object, a chair, a pair of shoes, is represented. But these art works are thought-things, and what gives them their meaning—as though they were not just themselves but for themselves—is precisely the transformation they have undergone when thinking took possession of them.
(The Life of the Mind, (1971), ed. Mary McCarthy (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co, 1978), Volume I. Thinking, p. 184)

And flames of the enveloping imagination found and flung and fed on Arendt’s comments, then, connected them to passages from that tale from 1912––“Das Urteil” (“The Judgement”) by Franz Kafka (1883–1924)––and that tale’s absences of the character of “mother” and of the place of “Russia”––and how those absences reemphasize and highlight the ideas of “mother” and “Russia” rather than negate them:

Two years ago his mother had died, since when he and his father had shared the household together, and is friend had of course been informed of that and had expressed his sympathy in a letter phrased so dryly that the grief caused by such an event, one had to conclude, could not be realized in a distant country….

Georg stared at the bogey conjured up by his father. His friend in St. Petersburg, whom his father suddenly knew too well, touched his imagination as never before. Lost in the vastness of Russia he saw him. At the door of an empty, plundered warehouse he saw him. Among the wreckage of his showcases, the slashed remnants of his wares, the falling gas brackets, he was just standing up. Why did he have to go so far away! ….

 “You have no friend in St. Petersburg. You’ve always been a leg-puller and you haven’t even shrunk from pulling my leg. How could you have a friend out there! I can’t believe it,” [said Georg’s father].
(“Das Urteil” (“The Judgment”), trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, The Complete Short Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, (New York: Schocken, 1971), pp. 78, 85, 83)

And the flames move on. They now consider and consume shoes painted by Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890):

(Wiki Commons)

The flames now run wild—consuming and connecting everything before them. Before Arendt, Kafka, and van Gogh, there was Gotthold Lessing (1729–1781), who suggests in a line from his play Emilia Galotti (1772), that “one praises the artist most when, in looking at his work, one forgets to praise him.”

(Nathan the Wise, Minna von Barnhelm, and Other Plays and Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Anna Johanna Gode von Aesch, (New York: Continuum, 1991), I, iv, p. 80).

Somewhat following Arendt, Walter Kaufmann (1921–1980) encouraged readers to ponder the negation and opposition of an idea, if one is to understand the motivations behind that idea. This process of imagining the negative—as in the case of Van Gogh’s shoes––is, at least according to Kaufmann, sometimes but haphazardly called Hegelian dialectic.

(Discovering the Mind Vol. I: Goethe, Kant, and Hegel, (New York: McGraw Hill, 1981), p. 266).

The fire now burns deep: it compares C. S. Peirce (1839–1914)––a reader, but perhaps, not a follower of Hegel––and how, as Peirce and fellow philosopher-logicians might say that the sociology of humans being is based on semiotics––though non-philosopher-logicians might instead say that a human’s place in his or her community is itself a symbolic relation—a relation where the human is a symbol to the community. As Peirce puts it:

There is no element whatever of man’s consciousness which has not something corresponding to it in the word; and the reason is obvious. It is that the word or sign which man uses is the man himself. For, as the fact that every thought is a sign, taken in conjunction with the fact that life is a train of thought, proves that man is a sign; so, that every thought is an external sign, proves that man is an external sign. That is to say, the man and the external sign are identical, in the same sense in which the word homo and man are identical. Thus my language is the sum total of myself; for the man is the thought….

Finally, as what anything really is, is what it may finally come to be known to be in the ideal state of complete information, so that reality depends on the ultimate decision of the community; so thought is what it is, only by virtue of its addressing a future thought which is in its value as thought identical with it, though more developed. In this way, the existence of thought now depends on what is to be hereafter; so that it has only a potential existence, dependent on the future thought of the community. The individual man, since his separate existence is manifested only by ignorance and error, so far as he is anything apart from his fellows, and from what he and they are to be, is only a negation. This is man.
(“Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2 (1868))

Flame and soot and smoke and ember—elements indeed of any and all’s imagination––now burn close. Closer to our own time, Umberto Eco (1932–2016) summarizes what Peirce is getting at:

It may seem paradoxical to talk of the icon, which Peirce held was the first moment of an absolute evidence, as pure disposition-to, of pure absence in some way, an image of a thing that is not there yet. It would seem that this primary icon is like a hole, given that we have everyday experience of it but nonetheless have difficulty defining it, and given that 152 can be recognized only as an absence within something that is present. And yet it is precisely from that nonbeing that one can infer the shape of the “plug” that could stop it up.
(“Cognitive Types and Nuclear Content,” Kant e l’ornitorinco (Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition), trans. Alastair McEwen, (New York: Harcourt, 1997), pp. 110–11. On the point of the plug, Eco cites: Roberto Casati and Achilie C. Varzi, Holes and Other Superficialities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994))

Wittgenstein (1889–1951) has also pointed out that space and object probably cannot be logically isolated. My imagination says I should say “probably” because Wittgenstein left some possibility open by suggesting we humans may not have yet exercised our imaginations to the fullest extent—we have not yet burned through everything:

An atmosphere that is inseparable from its object—is no atmosphere.

Closely associated things, things which have been associated, seem to fit one another. But in what way do they seem to fit? How does it come out that they seem to fit? Like this, for example: we cannot imagine the man who had this name, this face, this handwriting, not to have produced these works, but perhaps quite different ones instead (those of another great man).

We cannot imagine it? Do we try?––

(Philosophie der Psychologie – Ein Fragment (Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment) [formerly Philosophical Investigations Part II] in Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1953, 1958, 2001), Revised Fourth Edition by Hacker and Schulte, (2009) (Revised Fourth Edition, 2009), (II, vi, 50), p. 192)

Or, as Owen Barfield (1898–1997) once put it, imagination “seeks to sink itself entirely in the thing perceived.”

(Romanticism Comes of Age, (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1967), p. 39).

Do readers-listeners-viewers really sink themselves into Kafka’s quasi-stories and the painted shoes depicted by van Gogh? I really don’t know. But it sort of makes sense to me—me, neither firefighter nor firestarter—me, only a beholder of the enveloping imagination burning across my mind’s land.

The Riddling Imagination – Part IV

(Read PART I here.)

(Read PART II here.)

(Read PART III here.)

Toward the end of Franz Kafka’s (1883–1924) final work, the riddling narrative “Josefine, die Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse” (“Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk”) (1924), the narrator asks:

Was her actual piping notably louder and more alive than the memory of it will be? Was it even in her lifetime more than a simple memory? Was it not rather because Josephine’s singing was already past losing in this way that our people in their wisdom prized it so highly?
(The Complete Short Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, (New York: Schocken, 1946, 1971), p. 376)

Here readers are asked to ask: is holding the memory of the piping more important than unlocking the riddle to whether or not the piping is singing? Compare a reflection in Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Dom dzienny, dom nocny (House of Day, House of Night) (1988):

Oddly, it’s never the actual story that comes back to me, but the memory of Marta telling it, a small figure, with her round shoulders in the cardigan with the loose buttonholes and her bony fingers.
(House of Day, House of Night), trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones, (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002), p. 5)

But suppose it is important for readers to consider the question of whether Josephine’s piping is prosaic, while true singing is something poetic? Does her piping constitute a sort of poetry? Or is piping mere prose, so that true singing, then, is true poetry? What if Kafka’s narrator is tone-deaf? And what do readers of Kafka remain blind to when reading “Josephine the Singer?”

While discussing blind John Milton (1608–1674), Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), himself nearly half-blind since childhood, once explained that:

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason…. Invention is almost the only literary labour which blindness cannot obstruct, and, therefore, he [Milton] naturally solaced his solitude by the indulgence of his fancy, and the melody of his numbers.
(“Milton,” Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779))

Compare that to when Wittgenstein (1889–1951) spoke of blindness and imagination:

When blind people speak, as they like to do, of blue sky and other specifically visual phenomena, the sighted person often says “Who knows what he imagines that to mean”––But why doesn’t he say this about other sighted people? It is, of course, a wrong expression to begin with.
(Bermerkungen Über Die Farben (Remarks on Colour), ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. Linda L. McAlister and Margarete Schättle, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), III, no. 294)

What might the right expression be? According to Owen Barfield (1898–1997):

In a word, imagination involves a certain disappearance of the sense of ‘I’ and ‘Not I’. It stands before the object and feels ‘I am that’.
(Romanticism Comes of Age, (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1967), p. 30)

In other words, imagination is not “I am” or “I am that I am,” but––“I am that”––as when uttering the old folk phrase, There but for the grace of God go I. As Barfield explains, imagination “seeks to sink itself entirely in the thing perceived,” (Romanticism Comes of Age, p. 39).

And this ability to momentarily lose one’s sense of ‘I’ in imagining ‘I am that’—is a kind of freedom, as Lessing (1729–1781) recognized:

Now that only is fruitful which allows free play to the imagination. The more we see the more we must be able to imagine; and the more we imagine, the more we must think we see….. In poetry a robe is no robe. It conceals nothing. Our imagination sees through it in every part.
(Laokoön oder Über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie (Laocoön: an Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry) (1766), trans. Ellen Frothingham, (Boston, MA: Roberts Brothers, 1887), III, V)

Finally, let readers here at Bookbread return to Johnson on Milton, and how:

These are very imperfect rudiments of Paradise Lost; but it is pleasant to see great works in their seminal state, pregnant with latent possibilities of excellence; nor could there be any more delightful entertainment than to trace their gradual growth and expansion, and to observe how they are sometimes suddenly advanced by accidental hints, and sometimes slowly improved by steady meditation.

Kafka’s works are, if nothing else, pregnant with latent possibilities of excellence. Reading them requires steady meditation—the kind of meditation that leads to self-abnegation––where one loses one’s sense of an ‘I’ while reading.

I find this particularly true of his final work “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk.” Or should I say: I find this particularly true upon reflection of the memory of reading Kafka (but perhaps not during the act of reading Kafka)? ’Tis but another riddle I imagine.

THE RIDDLING IMAGINATION – PART III

(Read PART I here.)

(Read PART II here.)

The pipes, the pipes are calling,
From glen to glen,
And down the mountainside.

More thoughts on imagination and Franz Kafka’s (1883–1924) final work, the riddling narrative “Josefine, die Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse” (“Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk”) (1924).

Again, throughout the “story,” the narrator repeats (emphasizes?) the difference between true singing and mere piping—amid differentiating this difference emerges an enormous riddle. Here is what I imagine to be the story’s key passage:

Is it in fact singing at all? Although we are unmusical we have a tradition of singing; in the old days our people did sing; this is mentioned in legends and some songs have actually survived, which, it is true, no one can now sing. Thus we have an inkling of what singing is, and Josephine’s art does not really correspond to it. So is it singing at all? Is it not perhaps just a piping? And piping is something we all know about, it is the real artistic accomplishment of our people, or rather no mere accomplishment but a characteristic expression of our life.

We all pipe, but of course no one dreams of making out that our piping is an art, we pipe without thinking of it indeed without noticing it, and there are even many among us who are quite unaware that piping is one of our characteristics. So if it were true that Josephine does not sing but only pipes and perhaps, as it seems to me at least, hardly rises above the level of our usual piping––yet, perhaps her strength is not even quite equal to our usual piping, whereas an ordinary farmhand can keep it up effortlessly all day long, besides doing his work––if that were all true, then indeed Josephine’s alleged vocal skill might be disproved, but that would merely clear the ground for the real riddle which needs solving, the enormous influence she has.

(The Complete Short Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken, 1946, 1971), p. 361)

Kafka was born only 51 years after the death of Johann von Goethe (1749–1832). They were not as far apart as sometimes seems. Early on in his autobiography Aus Meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth from My Own Life) (1811–1830), Goethe recalled the civic piping from his childhood—a piping that linked the living to the dead—generational sounds shared, all received in one accord:

It was impossible to have these ceremonies, with their power of conjuring up the past, explained to use without leading us back into former centuries and informing us of the habits, customs, and feelings of our ancestors, who in a strange way were made present to us by pipers and delegates, apparently risen from the dead, and even by tangible gifts which we might ourselves possess.

(Poetry and Truth from My Own Life, trans. R. O. Moon, (Washington D. C.: Public Affairs Press, 1949), “Book I,” p. 16)

Kafka’s narrator in “Josephine” also recognizes some social advantages to the piping—that it lets the citizen-listener forget about the workaday world for a little while:

Of course it [Josephine’s singing] is a kind of piping. Why not? Piping is our people’s daily speech, only many a one pipes his whole life long and does not know it, where here piping is set free from the fetters of daily life and it sets us free too for a little while. We certainly should not want to do without these performances. (The Complete Short Stories, p. 370)

Can one gamble on a riddle? If so, then, under the credit of my imagination, I wager that Kafka’s narrator recognizing the social advantages of piping partially answers the great riddle presented in his tale of “Josephine.”

But to gamble is to dream. It is not so much that gambling and dreaming lack certainty but that each activity slacks on certainty (or “certainality”). Without certain certainty there are only resemblances and contrasts. Camouflage versus distinction. One gambles on the resemblance (or contrast). One dreams up the resemblance (or contrast). And if concerns song or pipe, one listens for resemblance (or contrast).

Is the following a resemblance or a contrast? In the preface to his 1946 novel The Great Divorce: a Dream by C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) dreams of a hierarchy that sets the structure for all things Good. Oh, were Kafka’s narrator such a dreamer rather than a riddler! For then: if piping be not as good as singing, Good singing should then continue to differentiate itself from mediocre pipping. As Lewis theorizes:

We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork you must make a decision. Even on the biological level life is not like a pool but like a tree. It does not move towards unity but away from it and the creatures grow further apart as they increase in perfection. Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good.

Recall that readers have been told to imagine it was the Pied Piper who took away the children of Hamelin, not a singer like Josephine, nor a dreamer like Lewis. In Hamelin, piping ruined the community rather than soothed it: Yet why the piping ruined the town, remains, as in “Josephine,” the great unsolved riddle:

Parallel to their collection of Volksmärchen, the Grimms also gathered Deutsche Sagen, legends and sagas, which appeared in two volumes in 1816. Only one, but perhaps the best known in this country, is included here, “The Pied Piper of Hamelin.” It is, of course, not a fairy tale but a popular legend with a basis in historic fact, most probably the story of recruiting officers who enticed young people away to do battle or to colonize in the East.

(Helmut Brackert, “Introduction,” The German Library Vol. XIX: German Fairy Tales, eds. Brackert and Volkmar Sander, (New York: Continuum, 1985), p. xxix)

THE RIDDLING IMAGINATION – PART II

(Read PART I here.)

I again return to Franz Kafka’s (1883–1924) final work, “Josefine, die Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse” (“Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk”) (1924).

Again, throughout the “story,” the narrator repeats (emphasizes?) the difference between true singing and mere piping—and that differentiating this difference presents an enormous riddle:

Is it in fact singing at all? Although we are unmusical we have a tradition of singing; in the old days our people did sing; this is mentioned in legends and some songs have actually survived, which, it is true, no one can now sing. Thus we have an inkling of what singing is, and Josephine’s art does not really correspond to it. So is it singing at all? Is it not perhaps just a piping? And piping is something we all know about, it is the real artistic accomplishment of our people, or rather no mere accomplishment but a characteristic expression of our life.

We all pipe, but of course no one dreams of making out that our piping is an art, we pipe without thinking of it indeed without noticing it, and there are even many among us who are quite unaware that piping is one of our characteristics. So if it were true that Josephine does not sing but only pipes and perhaps, as it seems to me at least, hardly rises above the level of our usual piping––yet, perhaps her strength is not even quite equal to our usual piping, whereas an ordinary farmhand can keep it up effortlessly all day long, besides doing his work––if that were all true, then indeed Josephine’s alleged vocal skill might be disproved, but that would merely clear the ground for the real riddle which needs solving, the enormous influence she has.

(The Complete Short Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, ed. Nahum Glatzer, (New York: Schocken, 1946, 1971), p. 361)

In Kafka’s one dramatic work Der Gruftwächter (The Warden of the Tomb) (1916–17), readers-audiences encounter the following exchange:

PRINCE: And what about the guard in the tomb itself?

CHAMBERLAIN: In my opinion this would have a police connotation. It would mean a real guarding of unreal things beyond the human sphere.

(The Complete Short Stories, trans. Tania and James Stern, p. 207)

How would one differentiate the two, between the real singing and the unreal singing?

Thus the riddle: What kind of imagination did Kafka, as a writer of “Josephine the Singer,” display? I’ve generally been bred by books to read the Penman of Prague’s texts as a combination of spontaneity and calculated brooding. Every line in the story seems accidentally inevitable as well as inevitably accidental. He sometimes comes across so precise as to seem mechanical—Professor Nabokov (1899–1977) once said of Kafka’s (Germanic) style in The Metamorphosis was nearly “scientific.”Yet Kafka (as a writer) remains wholly, utterly, and merely human-all-too-human.

Though that’s not so bad. For Kafka (or his literary characters and narrators) are often good-humored humans, even amid intense anxiety of the story’s situation—in the case of “Josephine”—readers are treated to a trial over judging whether certain sounds are vibrant songs or simple pipe tunes.

Confession: I also hear a spirit of reverie welling up out of Kafka’s narrator in the passage from “Josephine the Singer” And in my own reverie of rereading and remembering Kafka and his narrator, I recall what, though in quite a different context, Dr. John Locke (1632–1704) said of the concept of reverie:

When ideas float in our mind without any reflection or regard of the understanding, it is that which the French call reverie; our language has scarce a name for it:

(An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), (II, xix, 1))

For Marie-Henri Beyle a.k.a. Stendhal (1783–1842), a prolonged period of reverie may involve a thousand details—yet those thousands may lead to what he calls “crystallization”:

The imagination finds its progress barred by the ominous warnings of memory, and crystallization stops dead….

I have been advised in the first place to dispense with this word, or, if I cannot do that, to include frequent reminders that by crystallization I mean a certain fever of the imagination which translates a normally commonplace object into something unrecognizable, and makes it an entity apart. Among those who can only achieve happiness through vanity, the man who wishes to excite this fever must take great pains with his cravat and be constantly on the watch over a thousand details, none of which must be neglected.

(De l’amour (Love) (1822), trans. Gilbert and Suzanne Sale, (New York: Penguin, 1957, 1975), (I, xv), pp. 64–65)

Under Stendhal’s scheme, such crystallization is what the seriously idle reader would eventually hope for in the grand (and unrewarding) attempt to understand Kafka’s narrator.

For there remains part of me as a reader that wants to say: Kafka’s narrator is engaged in a Franco-Lockean reverie of determining authentic, bardic singing from the derived pipping of jesters. Kafka’s narrator is trying to determine: What is real, what is unreal? He (or she) is trying to unriddle a riddle. And most of us do this to some extent in everyday life. Will the car ahead actually turn left just because it’s blinker indicates it will? (“Are these girl-scout cookies made from real girl scouts?”)

Post Script

Stendhal the Frenchman (though pretending to be an Italian in his essay De l’amour) goes on to explain two kinds of imagination:

1. Keen, impetuous, spontaneous imagination, leading instantly to action, chafing and languishing at a delay of even twenty-four hours…. It is characterized by impatience, and flares into anger against what it cannot obtain. It perceives external objects but these merely add fuel to its fire; it assimilates them and at once converts them to increase the passion.

2. Imagination which kindles only slowly, but which after a time no longer perceives external objects and succeeds in becoming exclusively concerned with, and dependent on, its own passion. This kind of imagination is quite compatible with slowness and even scarcity of ideas. It is conductive to constancy.

(De l’amour, (§ Various Fragments), p. 228)

Thus one can only hope that a deep reverie in piping may lead to the recognition (re–cognosis, as in, a repeated gnosis—to re-know what you already know, as in Plato’s Menon) of actual singing––a recognition that might even lead to the actualization (via crystallization) of pure song. The great unutterable thing in itself. One cannot rid oneself of the riddle.

The Riddling Imagination – Part I

[Look at you trying to read Kafka—like some goody-two-shoes English Major from the late-twentieth-century…. Kafka won’t cure cancer or homelessness or traffic congestion. Why bother with the great be-puzzler of Prague when you have bills to pay in Austin?]

I (finally and) recently got around to reading Franz Kafka’s (1883–1924) final work, “Josefine, die Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse” (“Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk”) (1924), a story which, like most of the other works by that slippery author, evades interpretation.

(Let the last reader then instead try excavation and extrapolation upon this last of stories).

Throughout Kafka’s story, the narrator repeats (emphasizes?) the difference between true singing and mere piping—and that differentiating this difference marks an enormous riddle:

Is it in fact singing at all? Although we are unmusical we have a tradition of singing; in the old days our people did sing; this is mentioned in legends and some songs have actually survived, which, it is true, no one can now sing. Thus we have an inkling of what singing is, and Josephine’s art does not really correspond to it. So is it singing at all? Is it not perhaps just a piping? And piping is something we all know about, it is the real artistic accomplishment of our people, or rather no mere accomplishment but a characteristic expression of our life. We all pipe, but of course no one dreams of making out that our piping is an art, we pipe without thinking of it indeed without noticing it, and there are even many among us who are quite unaware that piping is one of our characteristics. So if it were true that Josephine does not sing but only pipes and perhaps, as it seems to me at least, hardly rises above the level of our usual piping––yet, perhaps her strength is not even quite equal to our usual piping, whereas an ordinary farmhand can keep it up effortlessly all day long, besides doing his work––if that were all true, then indeed Josephine’s alleged vocal skill might be disproved, but that would merely clear the ground for the real riddle which needs solving, the enormous influence she has.

(Franz Kafka – The Complete Short Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, (New York: Schocken, 1946, 1971), p. 361)

With a riddle, at least for a bookly-breaded reader like Christopher Landrum, one is never content until it is solved. As Antipholus of Syracuse says in the Comedy of Errors:

He that commends me to mine own content
Commends me to the thing I cannot get. (I, ii, ll. 33–34)

I don’t know if William Arden Shakespeare (1564–1616) held this opinion personally. I know only that Shakespeare was capable of imagining someone else thinking, believing, and feeling this restless way about solving the riddle––the experience of one’s doubt searching for certainty—the mental sensation of an original emptiness currently seeking a final contentment—a drive of conscience that distorts the very way (both as a means and a path) to which it is driven.

To further scratch this itch I turn to Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), for whom I think has a very good answer (or beginning to an answer) to the riddle presented by Kafka’s narrator above. According to Russell:

I think it is the duty of the philosopher to make himself as undistorting a mirror [of nature via language] as he can. But it is also his duty to recognize such distortions as are inevitable from our very nature. Of these, the most fundamental is that we view the world from the point of view of the here and now, not with that large impartiality which theists attribute to the Deity. To achieve such impartiality is impossible for us, but we can travel a certain distance towards it. To show the road to this end is the supreme duty of the philosopher.

(“The Retreat from Pythagoras,” My Philosophical Development, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1959)in The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, eds. Robert E. Egner and Lester E. Denonn, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961), p. 256)

Russell’s holding that “distortions are inevitable” seems to be one answer to the riddle of Kafka’s tale.

Yet the answers may be legion, infinite—because that’s what you get when you get to Kafka. So I read it this way: the duty of the serious writer (whether philosopher, historian, or prose poet) is to solve the riddle of differentiating pipping from singing––to differentiate the silence that teaches from the silence that forgets.

SHORT STORY REVIEW: “OCTOPUS” (2022) BY NATHAN WILLIS

In Nathan Willis’s short story “Octopus” (Necessary Fiction, Feb. 16, 2022) the reader must confront randomness. There’s some seemingly radical juxtaposition going on, with words, images, and ideas focusing around octopi, the theatricals of choking in public, as well as hostage negotiation. But, overall, it also involves the notion that, while children may later remember specific moments and actions done by their parents, they rarely (even upon reflection in their own old age) understand why their parents did the things they did when they did them.

So “Octopus” is about the nostalgia (grown) children have for certain memories that involve them being with their parents. The mood of the story is contemplative, combined with a detached sympathy of the narrator toward his father—things that remind me of Nicole Nesca’s poem “What would Hemingway Say?” (Let It Bleed: Screamin’ Skull Press, 2017, p. 1), as when she writes:

I never tried to be my father.

But, I was and am him.

Everything that we learned happened before we were ten years old.

But compare a character in Denis Wong’s short story “The Resurrection of Ma Jun” (Missouri Review, Spring 2018) who remarks:

Thinking about this stuff drives me crazy. Who cares about made-up ideas like God? “We can only rely on ourselves,” is what Quian and I have always believed. Not even our parents can save us. (p. 60)

Though I refuse to summarize Willis’s story that was a joy to (re)read, I will say that parts of “Octopus” have––in terms of style––a Wittgensteinian “family resemblance” to some of Kafka’s short stories––particularly “Forschungen eins Hundes” (“Investigations of a Dog”) (1922) and “Der Bau” (“The Burrow”) (1933) with the way each sentence seems to take the story in a new direction than it was seeming headed beforehand.

For the plot in Willis’s “Octopus” makes incredible strives sentence-by-sentence, where, like a corkscrew, each line and clause twists the narrative more and more––and all this strongly resembles the storytelling methods found in the anonymous Tale of Aladdin, a near-novella often lodged in copies of Tales from the Thousand and One Nights but technically not an original part of that anthology.

In terms of substance—particularly the (yes, I know) surrealistic content of radical juxtaposition to be found in “Octopus”––this reader also detects some resemblances to Nesca’s short story “Child,” (from Let It Bleed), the late, great Norm MacDonald (1959–2021) and his quasi-memoir-novel Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir (Random House, 2017), as well as Me & Mr. Cigar (Soho Teen, 2020) by Gibby Haynes…. (perhaps even Terry Southern (1924–1995) and his novel The Magic Christian (1959)….)

While I won’t quote from “Octopus,” which is brief enough to be read across a single lunch break, with regard to substance, things in it can be found that are reminiscent of the way Norm could twist a seemingly ugly remark until it blossomed into revelation:

 “Yeah,” says Adam Eget. “I really wish I’d met him, but it was before my time. There are so many great Kinison stories at the Store [a New York stand-up comedy club]. It’s so unfair that guys like Sam have to die so young and a sonofabitch like Nelson Mandela lived to be an old man.”

“Nelson Mandela wasn’t a sonofabitch. He fought apartheid and they put him in prison for more than twenty years. And when they finally released him and he took power, he never exacted revenge on his enemies. Instead, he exacted forgiveness on them and brought his torn nation together.”

“I thought he stole some diamonds.” (pp. 30–31)

The randomness of “Octopus,” furthermore, harkens back to my recent reading of Gibby’s own randomness, as when in his debut novel Me and Mr. Cigar he writes:

About halfway there in the wooded hollow right before Catfish Creek (where you’re more likely to catch a washing machine than a catfish), there’s a police car on the side of the road. Halfway across the bridge, just past the cop, I sneak a look back. He’s pulled out onto the road and turned on his lights. The cab of the pickup is suddenly filled with red flashing lights. For some reason the thump-thump-thump of the metal slats on the bridge is particularly loud tonight. I pull the truck over, stick it in park and look over at Lytle and Mr. Cigar. Wide-eyed, we simultaneously mouth an elongated Ohhhh shiiiiit. (p. 141)

So check out Nathan Willis’s “Octopus”––I think you’ll like it.

My Best Read for 2021: Short Story Review of “The Feast” by Mark Marchenko (2020)

After spending a month brooding on what I’ve read over the past year, I’ve determined that Mark Marchenko’s “The Feast” (Zeenith, (Wyandotte, MI: New Pop Lit, 2020) was the best short story I read for 2021.

It is a straightforward narrative of entanglement with bureaucracy (and those armed bureaucrats we call “cops”), genuinely Kafkaesque in the best sense of the word (as the LA Review of Books recently pointed out)—a nightmare of inane questioning, hindering, holding (as in being held in custody):

“Yes, I understand,” I assured him, but at the same time, to say the truth, I felt a bit lost. It is like when you explain something so simple that is not even worth explaining, and if you are not understood, you start doubting if the problem is not in reality on your side. (“The Feast”)

In other words, this is a place where all logical arguments fail to change the circumstances. The story also contains a bit of radically juxtaposed imagery, in a very dreamlike, authentically surreal manner.

And though it is a “fictional” Moscow where Marchenko’s story takes place, the endless netting and knotting of empty explanations from security officials, accompanied by a preference for nonsensical commands that must be obeyed, reminds one of Baylor professor Alan Jacob’s recent encounters with American healthcare bureaucracy—a nauseous trek and trial that led him to later compare his experiences to Dicken’s circumlocution machine. For Jacobs, “the object of these systems is the generation of despair.”

 Yet I was also reminded of the dread from Yiddish writer (originally from Ukraine) Sholom Aleichem’s (1859–1916) short story of “The Pair”––a story where a couple are doomed to be cannibalized, and yet, while in their holding cell (or coup), one explains to the other how

There is nothing in the world to which God’s creatures can’t become accustomed. Our prisoners had grown so used to their troubles that they now thought things were as they should be, just like the proverbial worm that has made its home in horseradish and thinks it sweet. (“The Pair,” trans. Shlomo Katz, A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, eds. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, (New York: Viking, 1954) p. 202)

Marchenko’s “The Feast,” however, also resembled that moment in “The Bridge of Khazad-Dûm” chapter to The Lord of the Rings, where Gandalf reads from the Book of Mazarbul the words of the doomed dwarves: “we cannot get out.” But while the circumstances are crystal clear for the characters in Tolkien, in Marchenko’s tale, the main character is trapped in convolutions of organizational documentation, entangled in endless obscurities:

The document consisted of two parts: the main text and the area below where you put your signature. The annotation said that the person who signed it was aware of the information in the text and that this person was not going to file any complaints should he decide that he in fact wasn’t acknowledged with the text. (“The Feast”)

Still, let us hope for Marchenko’s protagonist, as well as for Jacobs and ourselves, that we never get too used to these obstacles of institutionalization. Let us hope that we too, like the hardy band in Tolkien, are able to “get out.”

Tim Frank’s “TV Dreams” (Misery Tourism, November 2020) is a powerful little short story.

Frank’s efficiency and economy of words, is incredible, reminiscent of Kafka’s “Das Urteil” (“The Judgment”) (1912) and Camus’ “Le renégat” (“The Renegade”) (1957)––where in all of these, nearly every sentence and clause twists, churns, and chugs the narrative along unexpected pathways, via a good, invisible prose style that doesn’t call attention to itself. For:

*Prose by itself is a transparent medium: it is at its purest—that is, at its furthest from epos and other metrical influences—when it is least obtrusive and presents its subject-matter like plate glass in a shop window. It goes without saying that such neutral clarity is far from dullness, as dullness is invariably opaque.

(Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1957) 265.)

“TV Dreams” is part science fiction, part psychological thriller. When the story’s main character Jamal finds himself between waking life and sleep, confined in a room surrounded by curtains—and all this severely juxtaposed against moods of dread and intrigue, yet narrated in a calm, soothing tone–-it reminded me somewhat of the works of David Lynch, Rod Sterling’s Twilight Zone, the latter half of King Crimson’s “Lonely Moonchild,” and Vangelis’s “Reve.” These images in “TV Dreams” felt particularly Lynchian:

The Being guided Jamal to take the insomniac by the hand and as soon as he did so the insomniac stood upright and walked over to the TV, unplugged it and carried it under his free arm. Despite the fact the insomniac’s eyes were closed, and the TV wasn’t connected, his viewpoint was still projected on the television set….

The rest of the hosts were there too, holding hands with their own insomniacs – eyes closed, carrying unplugged TV or PC screens, transmitting various sounds and images directly from their minds.

*****

Still, I feel if a few lines were omitted from “TV Dreams,” it could very well be a perfect story. From the line “We are here to collect people….” to end of the sentence “Be my ally….” are, in my opinion, unnecessary exposition.

Though this exposition is somewhat self-aware of its own expository nature—e.g., “‘You don’t have to explain yourself,’ thought Jamal,”––and this self-aware exposition is similar to the final chapter (titled “Historical Notes”) of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1986)––I feel the narrative of “TV Dreams” would be strengthened by the omission of this passage, much like the needless penultimate expository scene to Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960).

However, I may be wrong. Karl Wenclas, writer and publisher of New Pop Lit, someone whose literary opinions I read closely, has recently suggested that contemporary short stories need a little more exposition in them:

And, after having recently rewatched, after many years, Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. I and Vol. II in one continuous sitting, for he’s an artist whose work I have always taken seriously, I noticed that Vol. I is paced much faster than Vol. II, where in the latter, Tarantino allows David Carradine (“Bill”) to ramble exposition at a very leisurely pace—and in a way that makes the exposition itself entertaining. So: no, not all exposition is bad. And Tim Frank’s “TV Dreams” is an amazing story nonetheless.

I once knew a writer in the mid-80s, one of nondenominational Christian songs, and about the only lyric I can now remember (for I was then but a child) is “my life’s a vapor.”

This writer was in his twenties then; he later died in his forties (some kind of cancer, I heard about it third- or fourth-handed years later). So, like some poets, his lyrics (or at least the one I remember) ended up being prophetic.

So, when part of your childhood mindset is “life’s a vapor,” carpe diem and all that, it is quite natural to be suspicious of something that calls itself “flash fiction.”

I used to think flash fiction was just a gimmick to lure Gen-Z readers and writers into the ever nonlucrative world of modern publishing.

And there is Hamlet’s remark that “brevity is the soul of wit,” but he may be mad when he says it, and besides, not all brief texts, whether fiction or otherwise, are witty.

All that being said, I’m willing to reconsider things after reading Chris Drangle’s “Animation” (Chattahoochee Review Spring 2018), for here one finds intense, interesting brevity.

Here is a barest-of-bones narrative told seamlessly (or perhaps one should say “without fracture”)—like James Thurber’s (1894–1961) “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” (1939), the Ficciones of Jorge Borges (1899–1986), and some of Kafka’s (1883–1924) parables.

I shall now be more receptive to this genre (and may sometimes admit that even I make mistakes.)