A Cage Went in Search of a Bird

When I was young I remember arguing with George Steiner about an essay in which he said old men don’t read fiction. Well, I’m an old man and I don’t read much fiction; whatever fiction gives you, I don’t seem to need it any more.
novelist John Banville, interviewed in Guardian, 12/11/2022

Well, I'm almost an old man (I reckon "old" starts at 70) and I have to say I agree with old man Banville, 76, and very old man Steiner, who died in 2020, aged 90. I no longer feel any great desire to keep up with contemporary "serious" fiction, as if that were even possible. Even ignoring the "90% of anything" that is rubbish, there are hundreds of allegedly good-to-brilliant novels published every year in the English language, of which, on current showing, I might at most read a dozen – I may even be exaggerating there, thinking of the past few years – and of those a quarter or more will turn out to have been a bit of a waste of time. Been there, read that. As the old man says, whatever it is that fiction gives you, it seems I don't need it any more.

I certainly used to need it. My parents were intelligent working-class people but, denied the benefits of post-war state education, were about as far from bookish as it's possible to be without manifesting active philistinism. My father would probably have liked to have read more, but my mother resented being in the same room as a reader – I think she felt she was being ignored – and would quickly make her displeasure known. It was far easier for them both to settle down to watch the TV all evening, and most nights I would retreat to my bedroom to read, under cover of "homework".

But I had become a reader well before the advent of the grammar-school burden of three sets of homework every night. I suppose in many perfectly normal, un-bookish families there's some outlier like me, who – as the un-bookish like to say – always has his nose in a book. It wasn't always so, but when I started winning the annual prize for English at my primary school, these prizes would inevitably take the form of a book, and at my school in the 1960s they were usually entertaining accounts of his adventures by the naturalist brother of novelist Lawrence Durrell, Gerald: My Family and Other Animals, The Bafut Beagles, and so on. I loved them, and, I suppose around the age of 9, discovered that I simply loved reading. Pretty much every night my parents would find me fast asleep in bed with my bedtime reading spread across my face: literally with my nose in a book. It became a family joke.

However, a few years after Gerald Durrell had switched on the reading lamp, so to speak, my reading matter changed, along with my hormones. I think it's difficult for those brought up in homes where reading "proper" literature is a normal and well-established habit to realise how hard it is to know what to read. So, as an adolescent, financed by my book tokens and pocket money, I would scan the shelves of W.H. Smith looking for promising-looking paperback covers, or for the sort of books that were being passed around or whispered about at our all-boys school, which were never "literary", and often American. In this way I read Catch-22 multiple times, The Dice Man, Last Exit to Brooklyn, Slaughterhouse-Five, the schlock-horror oeuvre of Dennis Wheatley, the brutal war tales of Sven Hassel and Jerzy Kosinski, and so on. I can honestly say that – quite unlike most of my contemporary students of English when I arrived at university – I had never read a single classic "literary" novel other than those we were required to read for exam purposes. Which, as I recall, were Dandelion Days for English O-level, of all things, a volume in Henry Williamson's "Flax of Dream" tetralogy and about which I can remember absolutely nothing, Little Dorrit for English A-level, plus Middlemarch and most of Virginia Woolf for Oxford entrance.

So I had the need to read, but the resort to the official canon of "great novels" as a source of wisdom, inspiration, and pleasure had never quite been installed in me; it was rather too much like extra homework, I suppose. But my appetite for semi-junk novel-reading continued into the years when others were taking their deep dive into the canon. Instead, I was reading my way through the rival classics of the counterculture, from Kerouac and Burroughs to Richard Brautigan and Tom Wolfe, not to mention entertainingly wacky stuff like Erich von Däniken and Carlos Castaneda. Literary novels were not and have never been my thing: in the subsequent 60 years I have yet to read another Dickens, have never read a single Jane Austen, or indeed most of the prose classics that form the bedrock of the Western literary mind. This is not a boast, or a confession, just a fact. I suppose I might get around to them, some day, but, to repeat: whatever it is that fiction gives you, it seems I don't need it any more.

For sources of wisdom and inspiration, as opposed to entertainment, I tend to look elsewhere. Primed, perhaps, by the sort of attention demanded by the lyrics of songwriters like Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, or Joni Mitchell, poetry has always "spoken" to me, and I have always appreciated the short, the weird, and the challenging (don't look at me like that, I'm 5' 6"). I'll take a double shot of poetic spirits over a litre of prose beer any day. So it was a stroke of great good fortune to find myself studying A-level German in a year when a book of Franz Kafka's short stories was one of the set texts, rather than some turgid novel. Somehow, it seemed like fate, as if my path had been heading that way all along. It turned out that a familiarity with Erich von Däniken and William Burroughs might even have been a better preparation for this than a devotion to, say, George Eliot or Jane Austen: "Kafka" was clearly where the more seriously far-out counterculture hung out with canon culture. Like, say, Rothko or Zappa, to Anglo ears the very name Kafka had more than a hint of the exotic; so much so you couldn't help but wonder whether – like Houdini, or Groucho, Chico, and Harpo – it had actually been made up as a literary stage-name.

Now, most literate people will have heard of Kafka, and many think – without ever having read a single word – that they know what his writing is all about; "Kafkaesque", after all, has entered the language and the dictionaries. Frustrating encounter with a bureaucracy? Kafkaesque! Nightmarishly bizarre and illogical experience? Kafkaesque! See: Orwellian! See also: Bad trip! None of which is altogether wrong, but is like reducing Shakespeare to men in tights and the confusing proliferation of titles of nobility: "Get thee to Gloucester, Essex. Do thee to Wessex, Exeter, etc." [1]; it's both superficial and an evasion of the actual experience on offer.

Kafka is much more complicated than that. This is not the place to write a semi-scholarly essay on why and how Kafka is complicated (I'm not sure I could do that any more, anyway); suffice it to say that he is a multifaceted author, an insurance company clerk who combines the qualities of a comedian, a storyteller, a secular mystic, an adept of the via negativa, a neurotic self-doubting nerd, a genius truth-teller, a womaniser but a bottler and bolter when it came to commitment, all wrapped up in a German-speaking Jew from Prague who was only too aware of living under an impending death-sentence, finally carried out by TB at the age of 40 in 1924.

Anyway, the thing is, what I really mean (sorry, Elton)... I've increasingly found myself revisiting old literary haunts, rather than looking for new ones. In particular, recently I've been rediscovering Kafka's 109 numbered bits of gnomic reflection, collected as the Zürau Aphorisms: Zürau – now Siřem in the Czech Republic – being where Kafka went to stay on a farm with his sister after his TB diagnosis in 1917. I actually have these so-called "aphorisms" on my shelves in four versions: a volume of a Secker & Warburg "definitive edition" collected works in translation by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins, bought when it was discarded by my home-town public library; the original German in the Bibliothek Suhrkamp series as edited by Roberto Calasso; a tiny little Penguin "Syrens" series version, translated by Malcolm Pasley; and a very nice small hardback from Schocken, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir and Michael Hoffmann.

Some of these are quite well-known:

16. A cage went in search of a bird.
18. If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without climbing up it, that would have been permitted.
84. We were created to live in Paradise, and Paradise was designed to serve us. Our purpose has been changed; we are not told whether the same has also happened to the purpose of Paradise.

If you know a little German, it can be instructive (and at times baffling) to compare the translations. But, in order not to prolong a post which is probably of limited interest to you, anyway, I simply want to draw your attention to no. 32:

Die Krähen behaupten, eine einzige Krähe könnte den Himmel zerstören. Das ist zweifellos, beweist aber nichts gegen den Himmel, denn Himmel bedeuten eben: Unmöglichkeit von Krähen.
(The crows like to insist a single crow could destroy heaven. This is incontestably true, but it says nothing about heaven, because heaven is just another way of saying: the impossibility of crows). [2]

That head-spinning, Escher-esque paradox is typical of the Zürau Aphorisms. So many of them resemble a sort of Jewish koan, a Möbius strip of twisted logic in which the absence of divinity or ultimate human purpose are also proof of  their existence, and vice versa. And what are the chances Ted Hughes had read no. 32 before writing Crow? Or, come to that, what are the chances it has been perched patiently in the back of my own mind for half a century? Unlike the contents of Dandelion Days, Little Dorrit, or even Catch-22.

Oh, and look, this week sees what is possibly the most Kafkaesque SMBC yet: Give Me a Sign...

The Metamorphosis...

"Ein ungeheures Ungeziefer" (a monstrous verminous bug")

(I reckon one of these little bastards is what FK really had in mind)

1.  Beyond the Fringe, "So That's the Way You Like It".

2. One of the more difficult ones to translate, as "Himmel" wobbles between singular and plural (i.e. Heaven and the heavens), and "beweist gegen" ("prove against") feels wrong in English. FWIW I'd offer: Crows reckon that just one crow could destroy heaven. True, but heaven is unaffected, because the meaning of heavens is precisely: the impossibility of crows.