(Leaf 44) – Reflection
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| Last known photograph of Franz Kafka (c.1923) |
Today marks the 101st anniversary of the death of the writer, Franz Kafka in 1924. As a teenager and in my early twenties I was a huge fan of Franz Kafka’s short stories. I avidly read and re-read his diaries and his letters to Milena. There was something about the darkness and alienation which really spoke to me; plus, I loved the whole aesthetic of his world in 1920s Prague – as I imagined it, at any rate. Slightly macabre and unsettling. Stiffly starched collars, and bowler hats. Powerful, sooty, piston-driven steam locomotives, whistling at high-speed; and old-fashioned automobiles, with their clown-like hooters sounding as they rattle along smoggy, rain-soaked streets. Cities lit by tall, glowing gaslit lampposts. Things set at odd angles and off-kilter, seen in tarnished antique mirrors. It made me think of the films of Fritz Lang, G.W. Pabst, or Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari (1920). While I was a student at Sixth Form College, I was a member of the College’s Creative Writing Group and the kind of short stories I wrote at this time were more like prose sketches or prose poems. I remember I hammered one out on an old typewriter, titled ‘The Corridor.’ A single page. It was inspired by seeing one of my student friends leaning against a wall at the end of a corridor in one of the upper floors of the College, after reading Kafka’s ‘On the Tram.’ I showed it to my English teacher, who also ran the Creative Writing Group. He was one of my most favourite teachers. He didn’t really like it. It was far too “Kafkaesque” for him. He preferred Henry James and Jane Austen.
Uneasy dreams,
a black beetle
crossing my pillow.
First published in still 4:
four (2000).
***
An excerpt from ‘The Corridor’ (unpublished, 1992):
“[…] Nothing bore any significance towards itself or anything else within the corridor’s confines. The only thing which appeared to be fixed was the brightness of the white, which itself was not tangible. Silence isn’t an object, no more than it exists before all else. In the corridor there was a reality that stood fixed yet fell at every attempt the mind made to fathom it and hopefully progress. Once it resigned itself to the fact that understanding was being derided and shot down like an unlucky bird singled out in the mass of a migration, it would find contentment. At least the corridor offered an opportunity of security, even if reality defined it purely to be an illusion that existed only to fill a gap that emerged between uncertainty and all else that had set itself like concrete.
The corridor, then, became an illusion. It covered and concealed the confusion that was all that really existed anywhere.
At one end, a girl rested her back, one foot, and her blonde head against the bright white wall. She stared down its length at the enlarging figure – which, inside itself, was filled with uncertainty.”
