Arnon Grunberg

Tuxedo

Jeans

On the continuation of Kafka – Patricia Lockwood in LRB:

“She had a friend who reserved the greatest hatred for Max Brod – he should never have published his papers, the world should have been a closed eye against Kafka, after all he was his friend. No, she couldn’t quite get there. She preferred a world that was stark and staring, that looked unforgivably into the drawer. She and Kafka were practically twins. Like her, he suffered badly from Who Foot Is That, like her he was dying from I Am What I’m Looking At syndrome, yet he was able to go to cabarets – every night it sometimes seemed – and observe the red knees of the girls.
‘So good. A major classic,’ she had told a friend in high school of The Castle, which she hadn’t read. At that point she strongly felt she had read books she had only heard of, for imagine her getting this far in the first place! Plus she just loved castles, they were so good, a major classic. So her friend read it, and on the day that their book reports were due looked at her sideways, and she responded with a sideways look that said: ‘Some people just aren’t ready for it.’ After that they were less good friends, like Kafka and Max Brod after he published his papers.
Why was Kafka possible to read, when everything else looked like the alphabet ejaculated at random on the ground? Kafka ejaculated the alphabet in order. Every so often an article came out in the New Yorker about how he masturbated constantly to the craziest porn – she couldn’t remember exactly what, but maybe etchings, and pictures of bloomers, and puppets freaking out on their strings – so that it was a wonder he had any time left to write.”

(…)

“She read Kafka in a pair of jeans she could not remember buying – it must have been last summer when her body began disappearing. They were Gap, size 4, and she must have gone into the fitting room, the manager must have spelled her name wrong as usual, TRISHA, her heart must have been exploding as it always was then, to think that there were stores in this world full of the fabric, which she had recently begun to feel between her fingertips, the cotton and the canvas of what was, she must have wrestled her way into the jeans she could not remember, which she would wear for – how long? The rest of her life? Surely the tuxedo Kafka was trying to buy was the body, and the lining a permanent caress within it, which the maker had never heard of, which could not be obtained. ‘Trisha,’ the manager must have called, rattling the lock of the door. ‘Are we still doing OK?’”

(…)

“Her husband had bought a T-shirt in the gift shop, with a drawing of Kafka’s head on the body of a bug. The sleeves didn’t fit his biceps, so he cut them, and then it shrank in the wash, so he chopped off the midriff. He just kept cutting off bits of it until it appeared that Kafka was strapped to his chest like a baby, and then the two of them would go into the garage and lift weights together. That was his relationship to all literature, and also to all clothing.”

(…)

“She had thought of the way she wanted the diaries to end, with a sudden parting gift in the palms of her hands – what was it he had written? ‘The work draws to an end the way an unhealed wound might draw together.’ But it snuck up on her gradually, in bare feet and with pale swinging pendulum, the knowledge that Kafka seems to have spent time in a nudists’ colony. For four hundred pages he had written of people who were clothed and then the ribbons swished, the buttons popped, the shapes all fell to the forest floor. ‘When I see these stark-naked people moving slowly past among the trees (though they are usually at a distance), I now and then get light, superficial attacks of nausea. Their running doesn’t make things any better.’ How could he know what she needed, from the moment she read about his unattainable tuxedo, the silk lining, the tailor who could not yet understand the language he spoke, to the moment that he wrote, ‘It is impossible to clean the kind of clothes we wear today!’”

Read the diary here.

I liked this sentence a lot:

“She read Kafka in a pair of jeans she could not remember buying – it must have been last summer when her body began disappearing.” Especially the first part of the sentence, we have read quite a lot about bodies disappearing. The best novel I know about this subject is The Vegetarian by Han Kang.

The sentence about Kafka in The New Yorker and the craziest porn is also substantial.

Once again, it is established that Kafka is usable for all our fantasies, anxieties, angst, even it’s just about trying on a pair of jeans in a fitting room.

Kafka himself had a fondness for nudity camps – as most human beings he could be fond of many things at the same time – but he was slightly more down to earth than some of his fans are willing to admit:

‘At the Jungborn nudist sanitarium in 1912, Kafka noticed “2 handsome Swedish boys with long legs, that are so shaped and tight that the best way to get at them would be with the tongue.” Such a homophilic observation was apparently not atypical in the diaries, and is cited by both Stach and Friedlander.’

Read it here.

If there is consent, try the tongue. Read Kafka afterwards.

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