Connor, thank you so much for coming to talk today. Um, about, well, an approach to Cafcass.
We've got we've had various people talking about the way Kafka resonates in various international contexts,
um, but also various ways of reading Kafka. And you're interested, I know, in thinking about Kafka in an ecological light.
Uh, can you tell me a little bit about that? Because in a way, it seems, uh, you know, an odd way to go into Kafka.
It was. Yeah. I think, um, for a lot of people, when they hear, uh, ecology or when they think of an ecological writer,
partly what they might think of is, um, is something like nature writing.
So they might think of kind of romantic poets or any form of writing that is trying to show us sort of the joy and the beauty of, of nature.
Um, and anyone who's ever opened a book by Kafka knows that's not the type of ecological writer he is.
Um, you'd be hard pressed to find, um, find a plunked in Kafka in any way that's described in,
you know, in detail, except in a maybe a sort of a vague or abstract way.
Um, so he's certainly not trying to kind of open our eyes to the beauty of the world around us.
Um. But I think that the way in which we can understand Kafka as an ecological writer is actually much more interesting than that.
It's kind of. It's a bit darker and a bit stranger and actually a bit more radical.
What he's doing, um, both for his time and now in our, in our current context.
Um, so I think it maybe helps if we distinguish a term like ecology from a word like the environment.
Um, so if we think of environmental writing or the,
the idea of the environment that actually keeps the separation upheld between us and the world around us.
So kind of in the German Umwelt, you know, the world surrounding us, and it keeps us as humans separate from that.
And the idea of ecology emphasises much more the ways in which we are kind of interconnected with
and tangled up with all the other parts of the the biosphere and all the ways in which our kind of,
um, our categories and our ways of separating creatures from one another.
But, um, you know, when we zoom out or zoom in that they actually start to start to,
um, dissolve, uh, and that's something that I think Kafka's really interested in.
Yeah. So that's, that's the way in which I see him as an ecological writer. Well, I love that point about zooming and zooming out the scale.
So we will come back to that. But I wanted to kind of ask straight away about one of the things that's come up in a number of talks we've had,
which is about animals and the the sort of fascination at the moment with the animal, the creaturely.
Um, and how does that relate to Kafka? Yeah.
I mean, I think that is the main. So if we don't see if we don't see kind of, uh, trees or flowers in Kafka, then we see animals everywhere.
Uh, that's probably the most obvious way in to this topic.
I think what Kafka does with animals is just endlessly fascinating, as I'm sure has kind of come up, um, in the videos up till now.
It points us, I think, in in kind of two different directions, one of which is more sort of, um, conceptual and more philosophical,
and another of which I think is actually more practical, which sounds kind of counterintuitive for Kafka, or more to do with, um, with action.
Um. So if we take this example of, uh, there's a story that I think is a good companion piece to The Metamorphosis,
the one that these videos are focusing on. It's a story called unpolished for an academy, a report to an academy.
And in fact, there's a performance of that as part of the celebrations.
Oh, okay. My show by Tony Mambo. Okay. Oh, it's great that you've mentioned that, like here in Oxford or here in Oxford.
Always thought of it as a metamorphosis story. It is. Yeah.
It's kind of the you know, if we have with the Metamorphosis, we have, um, Craig or the human turning into a bug and in,
in, uh, reports in the academy, we have an ape called Red Peter who is, um,
from the Gold Coast of Africa and is captured as part of a colonial expedition and in response to his captivity on a ship that's bound for for Europe,
he realises that his only way out is to become human.
So he actually he keeps his, you know, he remains an ape in body, but he learns to think and talk like a human.
And so the report that he's meant to give to the Academy is about his his previous life.
Um, except that he finds he can't actually really do that because now he thinks in human language.
So this is kind of part of, um,
a wider strand of German language literature around the turn of the 20th century that we call the dark phase of the crisis of language.
And this is a kind of a, you know, a form of writing Kafka is quite influenced by.
That's. Worried about the idea that language.
Um. Has become a sort of self enclosed system that basically prevents us from gaining any kind of access to the material world,
to bodily experience, and to perspectives other than our own.
Um, including, for instance, the perspective of other species and of course, literally in The Metamorphosis.
Gregor, uh, is still thinking as a human but can't communicate and and is frustrated by that gap.
Uh, mind the gap. You know, this the language crisis is very much about that isn't completely.
Yeah. Yeah, completely. So they're actually almost, um, mirror images of each other, these two stories.
Um, so when Red Peter tries to describe his his existence as an ape,
the only thing he can really say is that he has to sort of reconstructed retrospectively in human terms.
And he says that he, um, he must have made this decision to become human with his belly because apes think with their with their belly.
Uh, and that's the type of philosophical interest that was driving this writing on the one hand.
And on the other hand, um, in a way that I think is kind of where that is very interesting,
just in general, broadly for how we think about ecological writing.
There's a strand to Kafka's writing or an aspect of his work that is actually about action and about how.
The story. The text that we read is supposed to affect us as embodied readers and change our behaviour in the material world.
And I often think of this through the fact that Kafka himself was a devoted vegetarian.
And when we were teaching students about Kafka, of course, one of the first things we do is say, don't reduce things to biography.
That's a way of kind of simplifying the the ambiguity and the mystery of the text.
And that's not at all what I would want to do by making that connection.
But I think that this, this personal decision on Kafka's part links to things that he does in his work and in his authorial statements about his work.
Um, he's very attentive to the relationship between language and bodies.
So there's this, for instance, this authorial statement on Kafka's part that has become a kind of,
uh, sound bite that's been quoted to death on Goodreads and other places online.
Um, from a letter to his friend Oscar Pollock, where he says that books that we should only read, books that that bite and stingless, um,
that books should be the axe for the frozen sea within us and the signs,
because it's not so widely quoted as the science kind of, um, almost twee or cliched or sort of, uh, pseudo poetic.
But actually,
I think that that is quite a radical statement about how we should relate to literature and how we can't expect to read a text like The Metamorphosis,
or we shouldn't expect to read it and emerge unscathed or unchanged.
So in a way, that changes totally. I mean, exactly, yeah.
The biting and the stinging. Yeah. Yeah, that's fascinating actually, isn't it?
Yeah. So it's kind of a you know, if we think of ecology as partly about constant, uh, forms of exchange,
then in a way readers and texts are also in some sort of symbiotic or symbiotic relationship with one another.
We're in the process of reading. You are supposed to be changed, um, by the text,
and your behaviour afterwards should presumably be somewhat different than if you had never read this text.
Um, so I think, you know, without, uh, going to heavy on Kafka being a vegetarian,
it seems to me that that his his literary texts also do care about action.
There's this lovely story from Max port, uh, about Kafka.
Soon after he's become vegetarian, um, visiting an aquarium in Berlin and saying to the fish, now I can look at you in peace.
Now I don't eat you anymore. Um. And to me, those those two.
Those two strands sort of inform each other when I see things in Kafka's texts that are about the relationship between the story and and the body,
including our bodies as readers. That's that's what I think of. Oh, that's a lovely that's a lovely image, isn't it?
That's great.
I mean, that leads us into thinking a bit more, um, at a sort of structural level about I know some of the things that you're very interested in.
So, for example, action and inaction and, um, denial and perplexity and scale.
So moods or attitudes, in fact, that the reader is confronted with in the text.
Perhaps you could take us through those. I know it's a lot, but perhaps we'd start with this question of action and inaction.
Yeah, completely. So I think this is another reason when I'm when we're talking about this topic
and sort of ecology as another framework in which we can read Kafka's writing,
um, I think we can kind of distinguish between the ways in which it's on a,
in the general sense, interesting for ideas about ecology and in a more, uh, you know, specific sense,
the ways in which his writing now chimes with our specific 21st century context 100 years after his death.
And, um, one of those is, I think, how we are currently responding to the climate and biodiversity crises.
Um, so while, you know, I've said that there's something going on there,
and Coffin's writing about action and about how the texts are meant to affect us and to make us act,
he's also really adept at showing us all the things that thwart our action.
Um, both when problems are too big or too intractable and have more parts of them than we realised.
Um, and just in the guise of our own thinking, our own failure to confront or inability to confront things head on.
So if we think of the metamorphosis.
I mean, to me, that's one of the most vivid and remarkable portrayals of how we can be in a state of denial that we find in literature.
You know, you you start with this really arresting, really shocking opening sentence, this famous line of a man waking up as some type of bug.
And then for pages, we just watch him kind of, uh, you know,
thinking his way around this without actually addressing it and how he's going to get to work.
Yeah. Worrying about. I missed the train. Oh, he must have a cold.
Uh, his job is so stressful and not, you know, confronting the fact that this changes everything.
Um, and I think, again, it's part of what the text is doing is trying to show us our own thinking in order to sort of shock us out of it.
That's a really radical way of of doing it.
And it also is no accident, I think that that, uh kryger, when he wakes up, realises that he's slept through his alarm.
So, you know, we can read this alarm clock in all sorts of ways.
We could, you know, in some ways it's literally about the working conditions in modernity.
Um, but it also captures really well this condition that I think a lot of us now find ourselves in,
of having this nagging feeling that something has gone very wrong,
um, that there's something we're not facing, that, uh, it'll soon be too late or that it's already too late.
Um. I think that that atmosphere of anxiety and that feeling of a problem being to all
encompassing to confront is something that the terms of that current context very strongly.
You're reminding me that some, some of the climate protesters have, you know, banners and slogans,
don't they, about it either being too late or it's not yet too late, but it soon will be.
And this sort of temporality of the anxiety is really interesting.
Um, so that's that's fascinating.
Um, I mean, one of the things that strikes me about that is, is the sort of dual location of the problem, both without and within.
Um, that seems to me to lend itself very much to Kafka.
The simultaneous without and within.
Does that make sense? Yeah. Do you mean like, within the world, outside our heads and in the world inside?
Yes. Yeah. Um, yeah. I think that's spot on.
And this kind of play of inside and outside is something I think is going on all the time in Kafka.
So the. The I mean, on the one hand, something like metamorphosis as well as forward to an Academy is about disrupting inside,
outside in the form of species boundaries. Um, and in that sense, again, you know,
the to read The metamorphosis as an ecological text is is a great antidote to this nature writing idea because it's,
you know, um, it's also gross and creepy. It's not a, it's not some type of charismatic or cute animal that Gregor has been turned into.
It's, um, something that we even as we kind of condemn the behaviour of his family towards him, we can actually understand their revulsion.
Um, it kind of gives you that creepy sensation that you might have at certain moments in, in an Attenborough documentary.
Or, you know, if in the supposedly clean, safe human space of your home, you're confronted with some animal life that's not supposed to be there.
Um, so, you know, if we think of ecology is partly about being disrupting those categories that we set up so that in ecology, you know,
in true ecological thinking, there's really no such thing as a weed or like, how do you define what a weed is as opposed to a desirable flower?
Um, it, it kind of, um, really.
Makes that issue unavoidable for us, that type of thinking. So that's, I suppose, you know, a way of disrupting the boundaries.
But you're right that then the, the problem in the world outside, um,
being reflected in the world in your head or in your thinking processes, that's something that goes on very strongly.
Yeah. And you can kind of, uh, it's certainly not writing that wants to offer us a solution per se.
I think that's important to say. It's not writing that is. Mhm.
Purpose driven or that kind of. Offers us a way out other than to maybe face things that we're not facing.
And when you said it's sort of this zooming in and zooming out and scale, I mean,
obviously at a very literal level, the creature they in metamorphosis, it's not clear of the scale.
At one point, you know, this is a fully adult human, but later this is something that can crawl up the wall or can hide under it, sort of sofa.
Um, and so but that's not, I think, quite what you mean.
Is it by ambivalence of scale or disrupting scale? Um, it's it's related.
I think so, yeah. You're right.
We have also the father who changes size or seems to change size in relation to, um, Craig or which is something that crops up a lot in Kafka.
Um, so I think, I mean, within, uh, thinking about about the climate and biodiversity crisis,
that's something that comes up again and again as a problem for action that we can't seem to we
can't seem to conceive of things on the appropriate scale that a problem that size with so many,
um, components to it. Um.
Sort of thwarts our ability to connect our daily lives to.
You know what is now currently happening on the the Gold Coast in Africa, for instance, or the sort of, you know,
the colonial history that it's caught up in the ways in which the, um,
the problem unfolds on a global scale and is also, um, a problem of all sorts of.
Political institution.
You know, it's kind of a problem with with many extremely complex, um, material, social, political, cultural aspects and I think.
Kafka's work, so maybe not so much The Metamorphosis, although I think it's connected to moving a scale there.
But in other stories, such as so he's got a story called, um, The Great Wall of China or the building of the Great Wall of China by Bonacci.
Decision. MOA that shows this, this kind of semi imagined, um, realm of China on this enormous scale.
That's kind of I think part of what he's interested in is the is the size of this empire
and the ways in which it would be impossible for anyone to have an overview of it.
So it kind of, um, tells us over and over again how many,
how many villages there are in each province and how many provinces there are in the whole thing,
and how many people are in each village, and sort of, um,
those that almost numerical type of thinking where it becomes too big for you to think about.
Um, and again, even when we look at the, the protagonists of his novels, who.
Always bite off more than they can chew. Who think they can confront the authority of the court or of the castle, and then find that this,
um, this institution, this problem is just so much more complex than they realised.
I think that's the sort of flip side of the action thing, is that it just.
He shows us both. In the failures of our own thinking.
How we. You know, struggle to take action, and also how the complexity of the world outside, um, makes that kind of impossible, how the individual um.
Can't quite match up to all the forces that are sort of working on it and pitted against it in some way.
Um, which sounds, I mean, a bit despairing. And I don't mean to be, you know, I think, uh, just precisely.
Yeah. Just leave it. No, no, exactly.
I suppose my question with my last question would be, then does that lead us to a kind of moment of existential and political despair?
And I'm guessing not because cafcass has been very important to, for example, people behind the Iron Curtain or in totalitarian regimes,
or does it inspire us in some way to look, I suppose, for a way to intervene?
Um, you don't need to say it's my instinct.
It's certainly I don't think it leads us to despair. I think part of that is because it's so humorous.
I think that's really important to say with Kafka. He's really funny. And the type of.
Humour that his work set up in the face of seemingly, uh, you know, unbeatable odds is important.
And I think that would be an important part of why it, um,
continued to inspire people behind the Iron Curtain or in all sorts of contexts of, um, of kind of repression and.
Why it can help us face. Problems like the climate and biodiversity crises with in a serious way, but also one that,
you know, the kind of zooms far enough out that the absurdity becomes clear.
That sounds sort of flippant to say, but it feels like that's maybe the only appropriate response to, uh, to something on that scale.
And I do think that that maybe it's in this communion or this interaction or symbiosis
between the text and the reader that he draws our attention to and again and again,
that there has to be some type of hope, maybe not of of a very effective intervention or maybe a recognition that there might be,
um, nothing in the end that we can by ourselves do.
But then I suppose, I mean, part of part of the project that's going on in Oxford at the moment is also about Kafka and community.
So maybe that's an interesting angle on it that I haven't thought enough about how those, you know,
the interaction between text and reader that affects us on an individual level could lead us to some form of, um, you know, collective action.
Maybe that's something that's not 100% there in the texts, but that is a direction that's hinted at that we could maybe take this in.
That sounds really hopeful. Thank you very much. Con me.
Speak to you. Thanks for having me.