1 00:00:05,360 --> 00:00:14,299 Alex, it's really great that you were here. Um. Oxford reads Kafka is looking at Kafka's texts themselves, but also how Kafka has been translated, 2 00:00:14,300 --> 00:00:18,530 transposed, uh, taken up by authors from across the world. 3 00:00:18,830 --> 00:00:28,940 And I it's really great that we're here to talk about another great, indeed, Nobel Prize winning author, um JM Cozzi and, um, and his work with Kafka. 4 00:00:28,940 --> 00:00:34,370 And instead of, as with many of the people I've been talking to, looking at one individual work, 5 00:00:34,370 --> 00:00:38,840 in a sense, Kafka has accompanied him throughout his work, hasn't he? 6 00:00:39,110 --> 00:00:45,649 Um, yes. I mean, I think, uh, Kafka has been amongst other modernist writers, 7 00:00:45,650 --> 00:00:57,770 has been incredibly generative for Casey as a writerly interlocutor, as somebody whose work and ideas and atmosphere he has. 8 00:00:58,340 --> 00:01:04,520 I am not going to say all the time, but frequently had in mind when writing his own fiction. 9 00:01:05,810 --> 00:01:12,680 Um, uh, why does a writer like C cleave to Kafka? 10 00:01:12,710 --> 00:01:17,360 I mean, you said atmosphere. You said he has in mind. That was an interesting phrase you used as well. 11 00:01:17,360 --> 00:01:21,830 What what what is there for him in Kafka? This. 12 00:01:23,100 --> 00:01:37,390 What? We might want to call, for want of a better term, Kafka's modernist aesthetic that is kind of honing down to essential features. 13 00:01:37,900 --> 00:01:43,600 Um, working with the generic in order to imply the specific. 14 00:01:44,020 --> 00:01:52,220 Which, um, I mean, you know, Victorian writing, 19th century, you know, British writing did the other way around. 15 00:01:52,240 --> 00:01:58,480 You know, you, you, you, you hone in on the detail and you build a picture out from that. 16 00:01:58,840 --> 00:02:11,470 So, um, so I think Chrissie has like that, that spare, sketchy, almost skeletal aesthetic that, that Kafka perfected in his short life. 17 00:02:13,040 --> 00:02:19,910 Although Kafka is full of details, Kafka is full of concrete things, gestures. 18 00:02:20,360 --> 00:02:28,310 Um, I was just at an event last night talking about the ballet of metamorphosis, and it was all about the gestures, which are all there in the text. 19 00:02:28,670 --> 00:02:38,730 How do those two things go together? Well, fiction exists in in as a real world setting. 20 00:02:39,300 --> 00:02:46,250 Uh, you know, it has to. To suspend disbelief and and and I too was having a, uh, 21 00:02:46,260 --> 00:02:54,720 a quick look at Kafka again this past week and thinking about those very precise details that, 22 00:02:55,290 --> 00:03:02,900 um, that Kafka used, for example, in metamorphosis, the sister is, you know, you know, is going to the music school. 23 00:03:02,910 --> 00:03:06,690 I mean, that is that is a very, very specific desire whereby we, we, 24 00:03:06,690 --> 00:03:15,150 we understand a whole world, you know, a whole world of, you know, Prague in the 19 tens, say. 25 00:03:15,750 --> 00:03:19,280 Um, so Cassie does something very, very similar. 26 00:03:19,290 --> 00:03:30,330 He two will, um, kind of stage universal conditions, um, say, um, you know, a character keeping alive in a, 27 00:03:30,630 --> 00:03:38,790 in a complicated Civil War situation, as in Life and times of Michael K, which is one of his Kafkaesque works. 28 00:03:39,150 --> 00:03:49,730 Um. But he will bring that situation to his readers with some very, very clearly evoked specifics. 29 00:03:49,750 --> 00:03:58,450 So, um, there's a particular scene of lying under an ox wagon on a starry night. 30 00:03:59,110 --> 00:04:08,350 And, you know, he he, the writer takes us into that and and thereby gives us a kind of, uh, uh, a whole landscape, 31 00:04:08,830 --> 00:04:17,860 dry desert, like, um, in which he then situates his character like, okay, his Kafka esque character, um, like, okay. 32 00:04:18,820 --> 00:04:23,500 I want to come back to Michael in a second, but, um, I mean, one of the arguments that's been made, 33 00:04:23,500 --> 00:04:30,430 you mentioned Kafka's status as a modernist sort of European modernism in its most pared down sense. 34 00:04:31,060 --> 00:04:37,990 And yet, in a way, see is also about the reality of contemporary life. 35 00:04:37,990 --> 00:04:41,950 It's about politics. It's about, you know, really an a kind of engaged writing. 36 00:04:42,550 --> 00:04:47,500 And that's one of the tensions also, isn't it? Um, for reading Coetzee. 37 00:04:48,730 --> 00:04:50,020 It is, and it isn't. 38 00:04:50,020 --> 00:05:03,999 I would push back a little on the word engaged, because Keats's writing is, is often at a, at a parable, like an allegorical level, the, the politics. 39 00:05:04,000 --> 00:05:09,310 And this is, again, I think, something that he learns imparted Kafka's, um, feet. 40 00:05:09,610 --> 00:05:18,669 Um, know others to other models too. But, you know, he implies a politics, but it's it's not ever explicitly realised. 41 00:05:18,670 --> 00:05:25,540 I think somebody, um, once said of his work, you know, that the that the two words South Africa. 42 00:05:27,540 --> 00:05:34,230 Which is the country where he kind of sits. Arguably his most interesting political political fictions. 43 00:05:34,560 --> 00:05:39,060 Those two words don't actually feature in his creative prose. 44 00:05:40,200 --> 00:05:45,750 Oh, that's very interesting. I don't know his work well enough to realise that that's that's really. 45 00:05:45,870 --> 00:05:54,359 So he and and in fact, he was, uh, widely, um, you know, accused as possibly too strong, 46 00:05:54,360 --> 00:06:02,060 but he was charged with being two a political at a time of political polarisation in his, in the country of his birth. 47 00:06:02,070 --> 00:06:11,040 So, so the question of his being an engaged writer is, is, is, is a is a kind of a very thorny question in certain in certain contexts. 48 00:06:11,280 --> 00:06:20,490 And, and and I think he has negotiated his way, um, around that how to deal with politics in fiction, 49 00:06:20,880 --> 00:06:26,730 in part actually by learning from that very spare, 50 00:06:27,300 --> 00:06:36,240 you know, homing in on the specifics and implying a wider world, but not actually always explicitly, uh, pointing to it from Kafka. 51 00:06:37,430 --> 00:06:39,380 That makes that make sort of sense. 52 00:06:39,590 --> 00:06:46,220 I mean, the thing that when I was thinking about talking to you, the thing that struck me, of course, is the obvious thing is outsiders. 53 00:06:46,640 --> 00:06:54,500 Um, Kafka is, you know, famously known as the the sort of apotheosis of the outsider and deals with outsiders in almost every text. 54 00:06:54,500 --> 00:07:01,610 And it seemed to me that was kind of way into reading Katz's, Katz's The Reception of Kafka to it with that. 55 00:07:01,730 --> 00:07:11,570 Does that chime? Um, yes. Yeah. I mean, uh, Katz's characters, his central characters are often those who kind of refuse, who opt out. 56 00:07:12,020 --> 00:07:19,220 Um, as I think I could see himself puts it at one point, um, and, you know, 57 00:07:19,490 --> 00:07:26,360 tangentially referring to Michael Kay, who move through the system without being a term in the system. 58 00:07:26,810 --> 00:07:34,310 Um, anarchic figures also. Um, but certainly outside of figures, um, those who do not participate, 59 00:07:34,400 --> 00:07:46,670 those who stand back and live in times of Michael K is a fictional study in what it means to be such a person in a fraught, 60 00:07:46,790 --> 00:07:54,189 highly polarised political situation. I mean, what's interesting, I'm just trying to think of Kafka's works. 61 00:07:54,190 --> 00:07:57,070 Um, and obviously we've been talking a lot about The Metamorphosis. 62 00:07:57,460 --> 00:08:06,730 Um, Kafka's outsiders, uh, suffer from that outside of, um, I mean, they are rendered outsiders, generally in society. 63 00:08:06,730 --> 00:08:10,240 I'm just trying to think if if I'm remembering them all. But. 64 00:08:10,690 --> 00:08:14,679 So your take on cookie is that they choose to be outsiders. 65 00:08:14,680 --> 00:08:22,780 They they are, uh. Or is it. No, no, no, I mean, the system which focuses the, uh, the apartheid system, 66 00:08:22,780 --> 00:08:29,110 the system of racial segregation, um, that ended in the 1990s, um, in South Africa. 67 00:08:29,260 --> 00:08:35,830 His, um, his case would be that that is, um. 68 00:08:37,050 --> 00:08:46,020 That that is something that the state that, um, situation is something that the system imposes and, and with refusal comes to suffering. 69 00:08:46,290 --> 00:08:53,070 Um, if, if we think of another example waiting for the barbarians, the magistrate figure there, um, 70 00:08:53,580 --> 00:09:03,630 reflects at length on suffering and on torture and on the consequences of not subscribing to the rules of the regime, 71 00:09:03,780 --> 00:09:12,390 which, uh, which are negative consequences for him and for all others who refuse, for the, you know, for the for the, the barbarians. 72 00:09:14,320 --> 00:09:20,560 Um, the word barbarians actually leads me to something I've been thinking about, although it's not quite linked, but, um, which is animals. 73 00:09:20,680 --> 00:09:24,820 Um, uh. And I'm reminded of the end of disgrace. 74 00:09:25,420 --> 00:09:28,540 Um, like a dog? Yes. Dying like a dog? 75 00:09:28,570 --> 00:09:37,750 Yeah. Uh. Is that. I mean, I'm very struck by what kind of waves of Kafka interpretation. 76 00:09:37,750 --> 00:09:43,810 And at the moment, everybody really wants to talk about the, uh, human animal, as I'm told. 77 00:09:44,020 --> 00:09:48,100 Uh, we call it now the kind of post-human, the animals. And there are so many animals and Kafka. 78 00:09:48,400 --> 00:09:51,670 Is that something? Is that a place that they come together as well? 79 00:09:51,820 --> 00:09:56,620 I noticed that you'd also written an article on the The Creature in the burrow. 80 00:09:56,620 --> 00:09:58,510 Kafka's one of Kafka's last stories. 81 00:09:58,960 --> 00:10:11,050 Um, well, could see, um, is is, you know, famously, um, a vegetarian and against vivisection and, um, is very concerned with the rights of animals. 82 00:10:11,050 --> 00:10:15,640 He, he writes about this at some length in the novel Elizabeth Costello, 83 00:10:15,640 --> 00:10:24,790 which is based on a series of lectures that this fictional writer character Elizabeth Costello gives and where she reflects on abattoirs being the, 84 00:10:25,060 --> 00:10:31,180 um, um, the kind of the torture chambers of, you know, our period. 85 00:10:31,690 --> 00:10:42,459 Um, and, um, yeah, I mean, uh, I'd also like to pick up on the idea that that that you just sort of offered all of these waves of interpretation. 86 00:10:42,460 --> 00:10:48,790 They are, in a sense, waves of Kafka interpretation that run across germ Katz's work. 87 00:10:49,000 --> 00:10:57,819 So, um, so there is the kind of the, the, the, the human animal wave that kind of takes us from 1999, 88 00:10:57,820 --> 00:11:03,790 which is the, the, the year of the publication of disgrace and which ends dying like a dog. 89 00:11:04,150 --> 00:11:16,210 That Kafka esque line, um, to Elizabeth Costello, which is about 2002 and 2004, um, and, um, you know, and then there's the kind of the, the, 90 00:11:16,220 --> 00:11:25,450 the pre-human animal phase, which is the spare aesthetic, the, the, the, the, the item that moves through the machine without being part of the code. 91 00:11:25,990 --> 00:11:33,520 Um, and, you know, there's arguably a post, say, 2005 phase where, you know, 92 00:11:34,330 --> 00:11:40,209 could say is particularly interested in refugee figures, those who kind of move across borders, 93 00:11:40,210 --> 00:11:51,430 who are rejected by society, which is, um, his kind of Australian phase, which, again, can be interpreted as an engagement of a kind with Kafka. 94 00:11:52,740 --> 00:11:56,430 It's amazing how many facets of Kafka actually are coming. 95 00:11:56,580 --> 00:12:03,510 One of the things I noticed in this article was that I came across accidentally was his interest in the Boro was about time, 96 00:12:03,810 --> 00:12:09,780 narrative time, and the business of narrative time being the time of action as well. 97 00:12:09,990 --> 00:12:13,980 Does that does that strike a chord with you thinking about cuts? 98 00:12:16,170 --> 00:12:19,079 Um, I'm I'm always fascinated. 99 00:12:19,080 --> 00:12:27,360 And, you know, I don't want to claim that he learns this from Kafka, but I am fascinated with how I could see managers present tense writing. 100 00:12:27,510 --> 00:12:34,860 He always and arguably to to to my eye, as a reader, this is something that Kafka manages in a slightly different way, 101 00:12:34,860 --> 00:12:43,040 using different techniques, but also manages very, very well. Could see uses this this relentless to some readers present tense. 102 00:12:43,050 --> 00:12:47,940 But what that does and I'm here I'm speaking as as a writer myself. 103 00:12:48,030 --> 00:12:55,380 What that does is that it always situates us in the moment that the that the character is in, we are right there. 104 00:12:55,590 --> 00:13:01,160 And so what that actually also does, going back to what we're saying right at the beginning about setting, um, 105 00:13:01,170 --> 00:13:06,450 what that also does is that sort of obviates the need to do too much set up, 106 00:13:06,720 --> 00:13:12,990 because if we are in the moment, in the present tense moment, this now with the character right here. 107 00:13:14,370 --> 00:13:17,370 We don't need to worry too much about what is around them. 108 00:13:18,680 --> 00:13:26,270 That makes a lot of sense. Um, let's have a word about, um, the life and times of, uh, Michael Kay or Michelle Carr. 109 00:13:26,300 --> 00:13:29,690 I wanted to say, um, it's been ready to take on the trial. 110 00:13:30,050 --> 00:13:34,030 Um, uh, but also involves Clai story. 111 00:13:34,160 --> 00:13:43,520 Yes. Uh, Koolhaas. Of course. Um, and it seems to me I, I didn't really read it as the trial, actually, 112 00:13:43,520 --> 00:13:47,360 to be honest, but I understand other people have, and this seems to be a way into it. 113 00:13:47,780 --> 00:13:53,450 Um, and certainly there is judgement, um, and a kind of element of the penal colony. 114 00:13:53,780 --> 00:14:01,490 Absolutely. Um, it seems a kind of compendium of all Kafka's major themes and perhaps the themes of modern times as well. 115 00:14:01,970 --> 00:14:11,780 Yeah. I think Kafka is at a second remove to that novel in a way that the Kleist is not. 116 00:14:11,780 --> 00:14:20,630 I think Kleist, you know, informs the, the kind of the, the central shape and unfolding of of of of the story. 117 00:14:20,960 --> 00:14:24,020 What is to and I don't know. 118 00:14:24,200 --> 00:14:29,180 Um, as much as I should about Kafka's ways of working, but, um, 119 00:14:29,930 --> 00:14:35,959 the quasi archive at the Harry Ransom centre does give us a very clear sense of how could C works. 120 00:14:35,960 --> 00:14:45,110 And what is really interesting to observe is how he writes and und writes, you know, he, he, he and, 121 00:14:45,110 --> 00:14:59,150 and and repeatedly and um, and kind of indefatigably writes himself out of the script so that, 122 00:14:59,570 --> 00:15:07,610 you know, he, he begins with, with quite, um, arguably, you know, recognisable apartheid story and, 123 00:15:07,610 --> 00:15:16,040 and, and refines that sifts, refines, sifts until the Kleist frame, if you like. 124 00:15:16,250 --> 00:15:21,020 And the Kafka esque motifs, say, from the trial are still there. 125 00:15:21,680 --> 00:15:29,960 But the if you like the, the, the messiness of history has been completely kind of written out. 126 00:15:30,500 --> 00:15:36,920 So, so that's not that's probably not a direct answer to the question, but it is um, 127 00:15:37,520 --> 00:15:46,220 it is interesting how the literary struts of Katz's writing kind of remain like almost sort of, 128 00:15:46,460 --> 00:15:55,760 you know, like a steel frame while the content is kind of repeatedly purged from the frame. 129 00:15:57,050 --> 00:16:01,220 I mean, the vocabulary that you're using reminds me, obviously, of The Hunger artist. 130 00:16:01,280 --> 00:16:04,410 Um, this eradication. Yeah, yeah. 131 00:16:04,440 --> 00:16:09,450 Um, uh, does that come up anywhere directly in cuts, or is it a kind of aesthetic? 132 00:16:09,470 --> 00:16:11,390 It's in the settings. Yeah, yeah. 133 00:16:11,810 --> 00:16:20,180 And it's a I mean, there is a fascination in C and arguably also in Kafka with, with what we can do with the least possible. 134 00:16:21,700 --> 00:16:25,629 You know, I mean, the aesthetic of bare life. You know. 135 00:16:25,630 --> 00:16:29,620 Well, what are the limits beyond which we cannot go? 136 00:16:29,620 --> 00:16:34,649 And what does life look like at that limit? A kind of literature of limits. 137 00:16:34,650 --> 00:16:45,690 That's really interesting. Um, when you said he wrote himself out, you know, in the manuscripts, um, it reminded me. 138 00:16:45,690 --> 00:16:51,570 So Kafka's manuscript of The trial, he wrote the beginning and the end, the first two chapters together, 139 00:16:51,840 --> 00:16:59,999 and then every chapter in between is an attempt really to kind of write himself towards the end, and some of them tail off and in the middle. 140 00:17:00,000 --> 00:17:04,410 It says in your process, your trial is not going very well. 141 00:17:04,500 --> 00:17:07,730 No, it's not going very well. And he because he can't get back, you can't get to. 142 00:17:07,740 --> 00:17:15,090 And so he's sort of writing himself as well. So that's does that I mean is that a bit like the the see that this is a consciousness about that. 143 00:17:15,120 --> 00:17:23,730 Yes, absolutely. Yeah. There's a constant in the notebooks is a constant reflection on the process of the writing as it is unfolding. 144 00:17:23,850 --> 00:17:29,639 Yeah. So that is another link with Kafka, isn't it, where, you know, this idea that literature is everything for him, 145 00:17:29,640 --> 00:17:36,450 that he is totally turned towards literature as a sort of existential aspect of his being? 146 00:17:36,630 --> 00:17:40,470 Yes. I think there's a there's a quote from could see that I used in a lecture the other day. 147 00:17:40,470 --> 00:17:49,320 So I should get it more and more, more or less. Right. Which is something like, um, writing writes us as we write it. 148 00:17:50,130 --> 00:17:53,280 All writing is life. Writing, says Casita. 149 00:17:54,000 --> 00:17:58,270 Or writing is autofiction, autofiction or tra fiction. 150 00:17:58,270 --> 00:18:07,920 Not autofiction, but autofiction. So are you try playing on the the French idea of auto so the other so we are constantly, 151 00:18:08,220 --> 00:18:11,370 as it were, externalising ourselves in the process of writing, 152 00:18:11,370 --> 00:18:19,570 but then also actually incorporating that into into how we understand ourselves through writing, writing ourselves as we go. 153 00:18:19,620 --> 00:18:23,249 Yes, yes, that makes a lot of sense with Kafka as well. 154 00:18:23,250 --> 00:18:30,959 It was a sort of existential experience, wasn't it? Always for him and but but it's got to the same in that regard. 155 00:18:30,960 --> 00:18:36,030 It seems to me more sovereign. I think he's a maybe he's, um. 156 00:18:36,810 --> 00:18:44,160 I'm not I'm not sure about this. This is sort of comes out of what we've just been saying, but maybe he's a, um, 157 00:18:44,550 --> 00:18:51,930 he's a Kafkaesque writer who who found himself in a particular political situation. 158 00:18:52,410 --> 00:19:00,720 Um, and now, again, with the refugee crisis globally, um, from which he could not turn his eyes as an as an ethical being.