1 00:00:05,420 --> 00:00:09,520 Custom. Thank you so much for being here. Um, to talk about, uh, Kafka. 2 00:00:09,530 --> 00:00:17,780 Um, we're talking to various people about different sort of national receptions of Kafka, but also about ways of thinking about him. 3 00:00:17,840 --> 00:00:22,150 And you're here to talk about a bit of both, actually. Um, particularly race. 4 00:00:22,160 --> 00:00:26,180 I think that's something that you're interested in. That's right. Exactly. I think thank you very much for having me. 5 00:00:26,220 --> 00:00:35,780 Um, I'm generally interested in how, um, authors and theorists have looked to Kafka for models about how to capture the form 6 00:00:35,780 --> 00:00:40,430 of things that feel sort of impossible to think or put into words thematically. 7 00:00:40,460 --> 00:00:41,780 So that's where my interest comes into. 8 00:00:41,780 --> 00:00:49,940 And race is one of those and so unspeakable things genocide, colonialism, racism, terrorism, environmental collapse. 9 00:00:50,330 --> 00:00:57,950 Okay, so we won't be talking about humour then. Um, but I mean, on the face of it, talking about metamorphosis, for example, 10 00:00:57,950 --> 00:01:02,510 as a starting point, it's not an obvious place necessarily to think about race or is it? 11 00:01:03,140 --> 00:01:05,719 Well, it's funny because as a thematic trope, 12 00:01:05,720 --> 00:01:13,850 it seems to crop up all over the place in authors thinking about questions of racial othering or exploitation of racial passing, 13 00:01:13,850 --> 00:01:19,760 hybridity, or counterfactual realities where one's usual markers of race have been inverted somehow. 14 00:01:20,120 --> 00:01:23,839 And there are loads of examples there. Um, authors from all over the world. 15 00:01:23,840 --> 00:01:27,620 He's he's borrowed it from Kafka for that reason. 16 00:01:28,370 --> 00:01:38,510 Um, I mean, I can I can list a few. Well, give us a taste of um, so there's Nigerian author, a Coney Barrett, his black ass, um, 17 00:01:38,810 --> 00:01:45,460 is about a man who a black man who wakes up white, with the exception of the body part mentioned in the title. 18 00:01:46,160 --> 00:01:50,899 Uh, there's British Pakistani author Mason Hammett's the Last white Man there. 19 00:01:50,900 --> 00:01:55,520 It's a white man who wakes up black South African author Ahmad Dong. 20 00:01:55,540 --> 00:02:05,810 Or, um, his novel is fittingly called Kafka's Curse, the post-apartheid novel where a white passing protagonist, uh, is transformed into a tree. 21 00:02:06,800 --> 00:02:13,640 Um, there's Martinique, and also Patrick Shum was his the old slave, and the mastiff, 22 00:02:13,640 --> 00:02:18,950 both slave and hound, transform a sort of colonial prey and predator together. 23 00:02:19,640 --> 00:02:24,500 Uh, Haitian author Marie. You're sure they have postcolonial love? 24 00:02:24,500 --> 00:02:29,840 Anger, madness, uh, features a vengeful protagonist that's a cunning, a cunning bedbug. 25 00:02:30,620 --> 00:02:32,960 Uh oh. So. So there's it's a lot, a lot. 26 00:02:33,260 --> 00:02:38,690 And but actually, the interesting thing, if we look at them more closely, is that although there's the obvious thematic metaphor, 27 00:02:38,690 --> 00:02:44,450 what they're really interested in isn't the trope of transformation, but it's the process of becoming other. 28 00:02:45,500 --> 00:02:49,350 So can you tell us a bit more about that? 29 00:02:49,370 --> 00:02:55,729 Um, I mean, uh, in what sense of, uh, um, and what does it mean in these context? 30 00:02:55,730 --> 00:03:04,700 And what does it do, uh, as a reading? It's I think Kafka sort of gives us all of this in his first sentence already. 31 00:03:04,700 --> 00:03:08,630 And what the authors are really bringing out is what's already there in his works. 32 00:03:09,110 --> 00:03:12,800 But the very first sentence which which in English reads As Craig was, um, 33 00:03:12,890 --> 00:03:21,410 I woke up one morning from Uneasy Dreams, uh, he found himself transformed into some kind of monstrous vermin. 34 00:03:23,060 --> 00:03:29,840 And it's even clear in the German, because of the quirks of German syntax, the stresses on the last word of the sentence, which is the verb. 35 00:03:29,840 --> 00:03:33,830 So it's on transformed, not on the object of the transformation. 36 00:03:34,100 --> 00:03:38,299 And even in the English, we can see it's some kind of monstrous verb and is already vague. 37 00:03:38,300 --> 00:03:44,990 The German has ungenerous um, gets even with a double negation, which really does make it appear as a nonentity. 38 00:03:45,440 --> 00:03:50,870 And Kafka was adamant that he didn't want the critter featured in an illustration anywhere in the book. 39 00:03:50,870 --> 00:03:56,599 He didn't want people to have a specific form in mind, so the emphasis seems to be on transformation. 40 00:03:56,600 --> 00:04:01,159 And what's more is not only is it not just about the metaphor, 41 00:04:01,160 --> 00:04:06,260 but that The Metamorphosis isn't a single completed one, it's not an actual state change. 42 00:04:07,640 --> 00:04:11,420 I mean, we see that in the bit where it says he found himself transformed. 43 00:04:12,230 --> 00:04:18,290 That means we're not sure how long the metamorphosis has actually been going on for the moment at which cake or awakens to it. 44 00:04:19,100 --> 00:04:25,870 And of course, it also has an over at the moment to which he wakes up. Um, it keeps going until he isn't even a creature anymore. 45 00:04:25,880 --> 00:04:27,800 He's just a monstrous brown stain. 46 00:04:27,800 --> 00:04:36,470 And then it continues as his family members keep transforming in relation to him and after his death, um, although of course, 47 00:04:36,470 --> 00:04:44,480 he's never, as you say, he's never completely transformed because we always have the the sense of his inner self as a human self. 48 00:04:44,900 --> 00:04:48,950 That's exactly right. That's the one thing that he found himself tells us, isn't it? 49 00:04:48,950 --> 00:04:52,489 The fact that actually it's not so much a transformation, 50 00:04:52,490 --> 00:05:01,640 it's a doubling in the splitting because he retains his human consciousness even as he shape shifts and tries to adapt to his new physical form. 51 00:05:02,060 --> 00:05:04,790 And in fact, he retains its human consciousness up until the very end. 52 00:05:05,230 --> 00:05:14,200 Even once he's completely internalised the dehumanising othering, he still retains a human consciousness, an almost superhuman consciousness. 53 00:05:14,680 --> 00:05:23,050 At the end, when he considers his death a sort of sacrifice willingly undertaken and so a kind of internalised otherness, 54 00:05:23,080 --> 00:05:27,940 um, that's where we are again, with race. That's exactly right. That's where the interest comes into it. 55 00:05:27,940 --> 00:05:36,700 For authors thinking about the question of race. Um, I mean, in a really striking parallel thought construct, if you look at someone like, um, 56 00:05:37,960 --> 00:05:43,660 Frantz Fanon, who's a, uh, Martinique comes from Martinique, which back then was a French colony. 57 00:05:44,050 --> 00:05:49,030 He's a political philosopher and the psychiatrist and one of the most important, um, 58 00:05:49,030 --> 00:05:55,840 thinkers in the process of the struggle against European colonialism in the earlier 20th century. 59 00:05:56,500 --> 00:06:03,399 Uh, he writes in a study called Black Skin White Masks from 1952 about the experience 60 00:06:03,400 --> 00:06:07,780 of being a black man in a white world and likens it to transformation and says, 61 00:06:08,290 --> 00:06:18,399 um, it's being transformed from a subject to an object from a me to a him, from, um, a man into something that and as he puts it, 62 00:06:18,400 --> 00:06:27,190 precedes by crawling and with its long antennae, creeps into corners and hides there in fear and shame. 63 00:06:27,190 --> 00:06:33,729 I think he says so. Obviously the insect imagery is really interesting to note there, but actually more striking is that, 64 00:06:33,730 --> 00:06:38,380 again, what we've got is, is a sort of doubling and splitting rather than actual transformation. 65 00:06:38,800 --> 00:06:49,540 The human consciousness is fully retained. Um, but and the sort of the human who's being othered remains aware of his humanity on some level. 66 00:06:49,930 --> 00:06:57,759 But at the same time, uh, there is a real risk that the dehumanising perception imposed by others will be internalised. 67 00:06:57,760 --> 00:07:07,150 And that leads to a sort of double whammy. Uh, African-American civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois is quoted double consciousness in in 1903. 68 00:07:07,780 --> 00:07:11,319 Um, and that, yeah, as you say, is is where the interest comes into it. 69 00:07:11,320 --> 00:07:15,040 For authors and thinkers grappling with the question of race. 70 00:07:16,070 --> 00:07:22,090 Um, I know you've got a particular novel that you want to talk about and, and, uh, this regard, 71 00:07:22,090 --> 00:07:27,200 um, uh, and again, I've been really excited to read lots of new things doing this. 72 00:07:27,220 --> 00:07:30,400 Um, can you tell us a little bit about, uh, three strong women? 73 00:07:30,910 --> 00:07:32,440 Yes, it's in French. 74 00:07:32,440 --> 00:07:40,479 It's called twist some pissant in English, as you say, three strong women, um, by French author, French author, Senegalese background. 75 00:07:40,480 --> 00:07:45,580 Um, Marines. Yeah. And it's it's heavily influenced by Kafka to thematic level. 76 00:07:45,580 --> 00:07:52,330 But again, we also see the kind of structural process of of becoming other that runs like a thread throughout. 77 00:07:53,710 --> 00:08:01,890 And, um, so I know this sort of shapeshifting and animal and, uh, you said heavily influenced by Kafka. 78 00:08:01,900 --> 00:08:07,540 I haven't read everything. I'm finished yet. Um, tell me a little bit about how you think it. 79 00:08:08,170 --> 00:08:12,880 Well, writes back to Kafka or transforms Kafka in its own way. 80 00:08:13,630 --> 00:08:25,180 So the book is a trip to three stories, and in each of them, um, the main protagonist is a black woman whose skin colour renders her vulnerable to, 81 00:08:25,300 --> 00:08:35,530 um, to being exploited in an environment that proves whiter and therefore stronger than she is, but also stronger and therefore whiter. 82 00:08:36,280 --> 00:08:40,959 Um, so, uh, and in each of the three stories, 83 00:08:40,960 --> 00:08:48,490 the experience of being dehumanised proves over time so corrosive that it can no longer sustain human form. 84 00:08:49,210 --> 00:08:54,880 There is lots of shapeshifting, but the main metamorphic theme is avian, so birds abound. 85 00:08:54,880 --> 00:08:58,900 And again, it's not just the women, but also the people around them who transform in relation to them. 86 00:09:00,310 --> 00:09:08,470 Um, in the. So if I briefly summarise each, it'll become apparent how there are thematic connections to Kafka in the first one. 87 00:09:09,190 --> 00:09:18,820 Uh, the protagonist is, uh, a mixed racial woman called Nora, and she's caught between her black father and her white lover, 88 00:09:19,540 --> 00:09:24,279 and her white lover is a German speaking immigrants called Kaleb. Uh, who with his daughter. 89 00:09:24,280 --> 00:09:31,960 Who's telling? You know, Greta moves into Nora's flat and makes himself at home there and, um, takes advantage of her. 90 00:09:33,700 --> 00:09:39,249 And there are really if you read very closely, there's some interesting connections, so you know where he goes. 91 00:09:39,250 --> 00:09:43,150 Father embeds in Gregor's flank and apple. 92 00:09:43,390 --> 00:09:50,020 It says in an earlier story that the coal plants in Norris flank his tiny bobs. 93 00:09:50,020 --> 00:09:52,660 And so there are tiny little connectors there. 94 00:09:53,350 --> 00:10:04,420 But the sort of the end of the day, it's that the father, the violent, domineering father figure who wins out, um, and Nora, uh, transforms into a. 95 00:10:04,560 --> 00:10:12,070 But in order to be able to join the father of a tree where he is perched entirely phosphorescent, the text has. 96 00:10:12,070 --> 00:10:18,580 And it's striking how each of the male figures, regardless of their actual skin colour, appears in a white to light. 97 00:10:18,730 --> 00:10:28,180 The more they gain control over Norah and by the end of the text her she has petals on her dress which have morphed into the flowers of the tree. 98 00:10:28,180 --> 00:10:39,190 And so she's been completely animated. Um, and then the kind of the interesting thing is how the father's. 99 00:10:41,590 --> 00:10:47,230 Response to his own daughter, in a way, is, is, um, racist or racialized because, um, 100 00:10:47,650 --> 00:10:56,410 his response to his own racist objectification that he's experienced is to pass it on to someone weaker than him. 101 00:10:56,830 --> 00:11:05,770 Um, and so we find that he abandoned her as a child because of what he termed the irremediable defect she had of being too much like him. 102 00:11:05,770 --> 00:11:11,500 And by this he means to black. Um. And yet still she comes back to him to join him. 103 00:11:12,430 --> 00:11:16,120 So we've got sort of racist, racist othering that, um, 104 00:11:16,120 --> 00:11:21,309 is rooted in an attempt to really stabilise one's own sense of self in relation to a weaker person. 105 00:11:21,310 --> 00:11:30,820 And that then pans out into the next narrative, um, where the main protagonist is called Fanta and is a teacher of French literature in Senegal, 106 00:11:31,270 --> 00:11:35,740 where she attracts the attention of, uh, her white husband to be rude. 107 00:11:36,610 --> 00:11:45,010 Uh, and Rudy tricks Fantine to leave France with him, uh, even though he knows that she has no professional prospects there. 108 00:11:45,400 --> 00:11:54,850 Uh, and once they're there, she keeps vacillating in his perception of her between being a small hand with clipped wings vertically, 109 00:11:54,850 --> 00:11:59,650 a vengeful bird of prey, a buzzard who he thinks is is preying on him, 110 00:12:00,400 --> 00:12:06,430 uh, and correspondingly, his treatment of her switches between him saying to her that she should go back to where she came from, 111 00:12:06,670 --> 00:12:10,090 but at the same time ensuring that she absolutely has no chance of escape. 112 00:12:10,720 --> 00:12:18,160 Uh, and by the end of the text, he, um, has run over the buzzard in his car and now feels light as a bird again himself. 113 00:12:18,820 --> 00:12:21,100 Um, and yeah. 114 00:12:21,340 --> 00:12:31,390 And the final paragraph again has, uh, fonts are completely animated and merged with a tree retaining her bird like features, but merged with a tree. 115 00:12:31,630 --> 00:12:35,740 So there's an interesting play, isn't that between, um. 116 00:12:38,080 --> 00:12:41,680 Being other and, uh, and being a victim. 117 00:12:42,130 --> 00:12:45,400 Um, then liberation uh, some level. 118 00:12:45,400 --> 00:12:49,750 So some characters are liberated and of course birds, we associate them with a kind of liberation, 119 00:12:50,080 --> 00:12:53,229 um, which I guess is also the ambivalence is also there in Kafka, isn't it? 120 00:12:53,230 --> 00:13:01,060 Because do we read, uh, the family coming out of the apartment into the light as liberation, 121 00:13:01,300 --> 00:13:04,420 or are they going to turn on Gretta and it's all going to start again? 122 00:13:04,810 --> 00:13:08,380 Uh, how does how how does how does it come out, really? 123 00:13:08,530 --> 00:13:12,610 It sounds to me like it's going to end badly in this text. 124 00:13:12,790 --> 00:13:19,960 Um, I mean, Indigo himself. You're quite right. He there are moments of liberation for him in his new body where he feels better and that he's and, 125 00:13:20,350 --> 00:13:24,009 you know, sort of release from his some of his duties and responsibilities. 126 00:13:24,010 --> 00:13:28,329 And the same is true in the eyes. He plays with the, the idea of liberation. 127 00:13:28,330 --> 00:13:31,930 But but it's always only ever a short lived illusion. 128 00:13:32,440 --> 00:13:36,129 Um, uh, and particularly painfully actually. 129 00:13:36,130 --> 00:13:38,110 So in the reading is quite painful of it. 130 00:13:38,110 --> 00:13:46,480 In the last story of the three, where the protagonist is called Katie and she is probably the closest actually to to Kafka's original, 131 00:13:46,960 --> 00:13:53,670 so much so that it's hard not to hear. Her name is the French homophone cul de sac hyphen decode. 132 00:13:53,690 --> 00:14:09,610 Okay. Almost. Um, so Katie is a widowed woman from an unspecified African country who, uh, the text houses has willingly turned herself into a, uh, 133 00:14:09,610 --> 00:14:19,839 poor, selfish facing creature after her husband has died and her husband's family have, um, separated her from the human community. 134 00:14:19,840 --> 00:14:27,670 It says in the text. And they then kick her out, tell her she has to migrate to Europe and send back money to support them. 135 00:14:28,450 --> 00:14:36,309 And she tries to turn herself into a bird of passage. And so there's a moment there of potential liberation of individuals determination, self agency. 136 00:14:36,310 --> 00:14:44,590 Um, and she, uh, is taking control and has a moment of awakening, a bit like Kagawa. 137 00:14:44,980 --> 00:14:46,809 But then she meets a fellow migrants. 138 00:14:46,810 --> 00:14:53,500 Initially they are lovers, but he then takes advantage of her, then prostitutes her, steals her money and leaves her in the desert. 139 00:14:53,960 --> 00:15:00,810 Uh. She eventually makes it to the border that she is marked out as a dead woman walking. 140 00:15:00,810 --> 00:15:03,820 You see that she has blackish marks on her skin that suggests she may have an active. 141 00:15:04,420 --> 00:15:13,300 Aids infection when she dies trying to scale the water wall, uh, where she gets impaled on the barbed wire and then falls out of the sky. 142 00:15:13,960 --> 00:15:22,240 Um, and it says in the text, uh, as less than a breath, barely a puff of, uh, which, 143 00:15:22,240 --> 00:15:29,139 of course, makes us think of the last breaths that faintly flows from Cagle or as he expires. 144 00:15:29,140 --> 00:15:32,170 And in Kafka's original. Um. 145 00:15:32,170 --> 00:15:38,590 And the the fellow migrants, uh, makes it to the West, uh, at her expense. 146 00:15:39,040 --> 00:15:47,469 But then, um, is shown to in turn or he's shown in turn to be the product of colonialism and sort of post-colonial inequality, 147 00:15:47,470 --> 00:15:55,690 and that once he's in the West, of course, he's then taken advantage of and exploited, um, having to sell his services undocumented and, and, um, 148 00:15:55,690 --> 00:16:03,309 valued so that the panning out is quite interesting from the first story that gives us the father's racist othering, 149 00:16:03,310 --> 00:16:10,719 the intern is embedded in his own dehumanised experience of being treated in a racist manner, 150 00:16:10,720 --> 00:16:18,670 which then pans out to the white husband as the exploitive who is also a representative of the former colonial regime. 151 00:16:19,450 --> 00:16:23,559 And that then pans out again to the black exploiter. 152 00:16:23,560 --> 00:16:28,210 But he's embedded in a critique of racism and colonialism more broadly. 153 00:16:29,710 --> 00:16:33,970 So, yes, it ends badly. But there's also a gender aspect in there. 154 00:16:33,970 --> 00:16:40,240 And there's a gender aspect, um, in that. And that's really interesting to read Kafka and Die alongside each other. 155 00:16:40,240 --> 00:16:45,130 So he's Didn't Die has remained faithful to the dynamics in The Metamorphosis, 156 00:16:45,640 --> 00:16:50,100 but she's also up the stakes, as it were, and is sort of saying, you know, 157 00:16:50,270 --> 00:17:00,430 um, like Kafka, she shows us the, the double consciousness in an individual who's had dehumanising, othering imposed on them from the outside. 158 00:17:00,880 --> 00:17:07,960 Um, but she also says that for a black woman, um, this is so much more precarious that the, um, 159 00:17:08,230 --> 00:17:14,410 and particularly a black migrant woman, uh, the precariousness of this position is significantly enhanced. 160 00:17:14,410 --> 00:17:18,670 And that consciousness isn't just doubled. Its, as it were, multiply split. 161 00:17:20,200 --> 00:17:23,440 Um, one thing I've been thinking about quite a lot is, um, 162 00:17:24,010 --> 00:17:32,920 it's sort of obvious why Russian writers or Czech writers or writers from East Germany latched onto Kafka as soon as they could. 163 00:17:33,370 --> 00:17:41,680 Um, but why does a writer like Andy, um, treat these really important themes via Kafka? 164 00:17:42,130 --> 00:17:52,780 Um, there's something very odd about that. Isn't that going via a white European male, um, Jewish with all the history that that brings into it? 165 00:17:53,080 --> 00:17:59,320 Um, what do writers gain by going via Kafka to express these very contemporary events? 166 00:17:59,350 --> 00:18:04,059 It is that sense that somehow, despite the very, very different background, 167 00:18:04,060 --> 00:18:09,040 this is an author who has captured the experience of being two souls at once, 168 00:18:09,040 --> 00:18:13,270 of being the self that tries to live its life, and the self that is, uh, 169 00:18:13,630 --> 00:18:17,890 constantly looking at itself through the lens of how others perceive it all the time. 170 00:18:17,890 --> 00:18:22,480 And that is a form of double consciousness which doesn't have the same race mark as in Kafka. 171 00:18:22,480 --> 00:18:27,980 Although, uh, recent scholarship on Kafka has been expanded by being read, uh, 172 00:18:28,060 --> 00:18:33,820 under the rubric of postcolonialism, or through its invocation of racial exploitation. 173 00:18:34,450 --> 00:18:38,799 And the metamorphosis itself has been read as a figuration of of racial blackness, I think, 174 00:18:38,800 --> 00:18:43,630 most persuasively by, um, Mark Thompson in his brilliant study, uh, Kafka's Blues. 175 00:18:44,170 --> 00:18:54,159 So it's it's maybe the I don't know, but but it's a structure that have some double or multiple split consciousness at the same time. 176 00:18:54,160 --> 00:18:58,630 And, and Kafka offers the form for that, for capturing that, not just the theme. 177 00:18:59,020 --> 00:19:03,790 So, um, and the I does this as well very extensively. 178 00:19:03,790 --> 00:19:07,809 In Kafka, we find that his, um, 179 00:19:07,810 --> 00:19:13,180 his use of narrative perspective and the structures that arise from this in his texts exhibit the property quite often of, 180 00:19:13,180 --> 00:19:18,850 of being, of hovering between two or more perceptual states without resolving the ambiguity. 181 00:19:19,510 --> 00:19:26,799 Um, and that these I think where he becomes interesting so his hybrids this perspectival 182 00:19:26,800 --> 00:19:32,230 hybrids of first and third person within one individual a things that authors borrow. 183 00:19:32,800 --> 00:19:38,680 But what di then was again in in the vein of upping the stakes is um, that she um, 184 00:19:39,610 --> 00:19:47,169 she takes that form but uses it ends up using it against her protagonists almost so that in each case, 185 00:19:47,170 --> 00:19:51,520 by the end of the story, the female's point of view can't be sustained. 186 00:19:51,520 --> 00:19:58,720 It becomes so weakened from the outside that it's ultimately displaced entirely by someone else's third person perspective. 187 00:20:00,950 --> 00:20:07,879 As happens and as happens in Kakko, of course. Yes. Well, though in Kafka he kind of manages to hang on to, at least in The Metamorphosis. 188 00:20:07,880 --> 00:20:17,959 There is something about the way in which his death can be viewed, or at least is viewed by him as a sacrifice, 189 00:20:17,960 --> 00:20:24,200 and that gives him just a tiny measure of control, because that way he gets to control the timing of it. 190 00:20:24,620 --> 00:20:29,450 But also, of course, he gets to retain a points of view right up until his death. 191 00:20:29,660 --> 00:20:33,230 And it's a point of view that, in turn, informs the reader's point of view. 192 00:20:33,650 --> 00:20:38,690 And that's not the case for this character's cousin is fascinating. 193 00:20:38,720 --> 00:20:42,290 Thank you so much for talking about this today. Thank you so much for having me.