2.) Kafka - a Freudo-Structuralist Analysis

      "The most mindboggling experience I ever had in my entire life was, and is, that I wrote a book, and that probably nobody has ever read it, or at least nobody has understood it, or at least nobody ever has commented upon it."

( Kaj Bernh. Genell )

THIS book explains one of the most central features present in the main works of the marvellous and magnificent Franz Kafka.          What was unique with Kafka?
    Kafka uses high-Romantic Esthetik des Schwebens and without this reference to the Romantic Tradidition, there would have been no Kafkaesque.



What - then - is meant by the term ´Kafkaesque´? We are - with the Kaflaesque as our prime object of study - looking into this Concept unravelling the secret behind it.
THUS
Kafka - a Freudo-Structuralist Analysis is an analysis of Kafka´s novels and short stories, with special regard to the concept of the Kafkaesque. This book concentrates on understanding what contributed to the famous Kafka effect. We are displaying the ´Kafka Code´. The author explains the structural triplicity of a discourse seen as consciousness. He is also explaining how Freud, Romantic irony, and Symbolistic literature simultaneously co-worked to form the mythical subtext to Kafka´s work.
Franz Kafka created something that would become part of defining Modern Man. Understanding Kafka is the road to understanding Modernity.





    Many Dissertations and Essays on Kafka have dealt with the strange "dreamlike character" or effect of Kafka´s novels and short stories. This has always been dealt with as if the "kafkaesque" was brought about by the adding of "Freudian symbols" to something. Nothing could be further from the truth! Which is what this book shows. Rather, the case is the following:
Kafka´s structural, literary form is based upon a refined mega-structural narrative split.    
It is the split between subject-voice and object-voice on the one hand, and human conscious and uncons©ious mind, on the other. This is not easy neither to describe, nor to understand! The uniqueness of the works of Franz Kafka and the perplexing historical accuracy of the concept of the Kafkaesque are both phenomena that many readers and scholars have noticed over the years. Through the years, a fruitful explanation of the uniqueness and accuracy of these works has been missing.

Scholars have ever from the 1930ies been noticing the extraordinary qualities of the Kafka text. Strange - Kafkaesque ...- features have been attributed to the short stories and the novels of Kafka. The Kafka hero has - rightly - been seen as a mere figure, and the dream-like landscape-universe has been seen as a characteristic, and one has frequently been looking upon these entities, together with a few stylistic features, as technical dominants in the shaping of the concept of the Kafkaesque.

Genell´s book displays a model, together with a biographical survey and a historical perspective on possible influences, that, reversely, forms a hermeneutic, actual explanation to these features, as well as to what is denoted by the concept, from the perspective of a dynamic contextual center, explained in a model containing three levels, levels forming the discourse, typical of Kafka.



This book tries to unravel the enigma of the concept by reference to the process of creation and by Kafka´s use of TWO unconscious levels within the universe of his most important works. The veil of mystery may never be lifted regarding Kafka´s eerie half a dozen classics of Modernity, like it will never be lifted when it comes to literature as a whole.

Still, it might be essential - in order not to fall into any metaphysical trap - to know about the technique behind the Kafkaesque to be able to reflect upon the Self-Consciousness of Modern Man of the 20ieth century, a century so intensely marked by a dialogue between society and the works and ideas of Sigmund Freud. Self-consciousness of Man, as it appeared with St. Augustine, the great Italian Renaissance writers, Erasmus, Shakespeare, Montaigne, the German secular Romantics, and Hegel, swiftly developed into something even much more complex with the appearance of Freud and the groundbreaking publication of his Traumdeutung in the year of 1900, and, more so, with the creation of the Kafkaesque, with the works of Kafka, around the year of 1912. The birth of the Kafkaesque can be dated to the night in the autumn of 1912 when Kafka wrote Das Urteil.
The book here, revolves almost solely about this strange split of ©onsciousness and its ©onsequences.
    The Kafkaesque is brought about by two phenomena, and the book discusses merely the first one.
The two phenomena are 1.) A literary trick, built upon a split Unconscious ( strange as it of course may sound, and difficult -) and
2.) a unique mental sensibility.

Svensk upplaga. Swedish version:

Försäkringsjuristen Franz Kafka - född i Prags Altstadt 1883 på Franz Josef I.s tid - definierade, kanske mer än någon annan modernistisk fictionförfattare, det speciella med 1900-talet. Det skedde inte genom innehållet i vad han skrev, men mer genom ett stilgrepp i novellerna och romanfragmenten, nämligen i stor grad genom det som - så kryptiskt - kallas det "kafkaeska". Men vad är då det kafkaeska? Vad är det för ett slags stilbegrepp, och vad, exakt, denoterar detta begrepp? Hur kom begreppet till? Och hur kunde Kafka skapa något stilistiskt, eller stilistiskt stämningsmässigt, som var så unikt, så att det blev upphovet till ett begrepp?
Det är dessa frågor - och de som visar sig höra samman med dessa - som t.ex. Franz Kafkas egenartade förhållande till Sigmund Freuds verk - som denna bok försöker ge svar på. Även om Kafka stort sett inte läste Freud, mer än två essäer av denne, så tycks han ha tillägnat sig en kusligt djup insikt om vad Freud avsåg med begreppet "det omedvetna".
Boken inleds med ett biografiskt avsnitt om Kafka, som är nödvändigt för förståelsen av alla samband som begreppsförklaringen i sig ger upphov till. Sedan följer ett avsnitt innehållande en mer specifik, och helt teknisk, analys av det kafkaeska och av grundstrukturen i Kafkas litterära teknik. I denna teknik är "det dubbla omedvetna" något centralt. Så koncentreras bokens analys - i dess andra del - till detta, och författaren hävdar att just det kafkaeska är det bärande och unika i det författarskap som så tragiskt avbröts med Kafkas död i Österrike 1924.)
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This Kafka-book thus contains
a discovery, a real discovery!

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