numerus clausus a poem by Karen Chamisso

 

Numerus clausus

 

A little extermination

is mixed into the formula.

In indifferent arms they lay

 

smudged by the dark angel

from whose connosieur’s fingers

they were untimely taken.

 

-         Untime being their time

in the ward, the asylum,

the camp, the out-of-the-way.

 

Its monopoly over the heart’s

promptu surges.

Henry Darger’s worlds

 

Charlotte Solomon’s worlds.

Feel the animal warmth

throat hunger, caried dribble

 

onlooker. In our larger crime

their scheduled prowling. In our time.

conservatism from the margins

 

Conservatism from the margins

Conservative parties have long dominated the political scene in the top OECD countries, and dominate policy choices even when so called “social democratic” or progressive parties are elected. That degree of domination has not, so far, been matched with an intellectual history of the movement that does not merely move from head to head: from, say, St. Thomas Aquinas to Edmund Burke. I  am too much the left-bot, the Marx reader, to think that this is satisfactory. I take the conservative claim to monopolize or articulate “common sense” as a clue to understanding how the conservative effect emerged in the modern world. I’d maintain that the effect has two sources: one, rooted in the establishment – the alliance of landowners and Capital  – adopted a  strategy well summed up by the Prince in The Leopard with the famous phrase, “everything must change so that everything stays the same”. But Burke, I think, is an emblem of another kind of conservatism:  a conservatism from the margins. This kind of relationship is drawn to the organic notion of the social, identifying the organic with a form of lifestyle that is in the crosshairs of liberalism. The  marginal conservatives derive from various nostalgic pictures of an original society: the Catholic population of Ireland, the Bretons  in the French revolution, the Austrians (among others) in the Austro-Hungarian empire, etc. Their effect is to produce a double vision of conservatism as not only the natural ideology of the ruling class, but also, paradoxically, as the victims of the liberal order. This victimhood is systematically undervalued, if seen at all, by the liberal order – by those who generally have succeeded in Capitalism’s circulation sphere, per Marx – the emblematic winners in the world of non-productive labor.

University of Austin (the real one)

 

I suppose it is time to announce this: I, too, am starting a university I am calling University of Austin! A total alternative to "credentialled" liberal universities. Our curriculum consists of curated YouTube videos. We encourage students to take out those sweet sweet loans now! Our distinguished faculty will be such personages as Albert Einstein and Cicero and Robert E. Lee - all on Youtube of course, but we aree in negotiation to bring in character actors to portray them for you, our students - cost is no object! many of these fine actors will be found at blood banks, but we will provide them with employment - which is where some of that sweet sweet loan money will be going tol

In our classes, students will learn to oppose the horrors of political correctness, big government (get those loans now!), and entitled "minorities" - as opposed to the good ones! - who are even now brainwashing our youth. Also, evolutionary psychology will be taught (on many excellent Youtube videos, for instance by a man calling himself "avenging Bat") to show why women generally are bad at math and good in the sack! among other treasured items of our Western Heritage!
So apply now. Our tuition (10,000 per semester) is a bargain, and your education will be crowned, if all goes as planned, with a YouTube uploaded ceremony that you can design for yourself!
For those of you out therre - that brave band who have read their John Adams, their Cicero, their Jordan Peterson's Seven Habits of Highly Successful People - who want to support my venture in freedom, but are for some reason unable to attend classes, you can buy a t shirt: Proud to be Privileged - University of Austin (the real one) 2022 for the low low price of 45.99. That's right, 45.99. Along with the T-shirt you will also get an Associate's degree in Contrarianism suitable for framing!

The villainous empath

 

Wayne Booth’s book, The Rhetoric of Fiction, appeared in 1961 – a year of Cold War promise. It became one of the references for the exploration of fiction by a New Criticism that was organized to explicate poetry.

Booth used tools of both New Criticism and the traditional philology of sources – notebooks, letters – to explicate (a word tendered in the classroom to gently initiate the vaguely astonished, note-taking, crewheaded rows into the arcana of literature) the novel. Among the canon that passed through his hands was The Aspern Papers. I’ve been re-reading the Aspern Papers, thinking about its highly nasty narrator, and I’ve turned to the explicators for some discussion. Booth’s notion is that James set himself a rather impossible task – an irresolvable double-focused task: on the one hand, the goal of the Aspern Papers is to obtain material – letters especially – from a poet of the romantic period, a sort of American Shelley, from his now aged and dying lover, Juliana Bordereau – and on the other hand, in order to accomplish his task, he has to stoop to various deceits strongly reminiscent of a con-man.

“We have here, then, two neatly distinct subjects. There is a plot, the narrator’s unscrupulous quest for the papers and his ultimate frustration; it is a plot that requires an agent of a particular insensitive kind. There is secondly a “picture”, an air or an atmosphere, a past to be visited and record with all the poetic artistry at James’ command.”

To me, the comedy of Booth’s point comes in with that “insensitive”. There, in that word, we find summoned a whole ideology of the golden era of the University and the humanities: the notion that scoundrels are, by their nature, insensitive. And that comedy came to be exploited over and over again, starting with “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” and ending with the novels of Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge, where the academic sensitives, those who memorize the verses, turn out to be quite as insensitive as Rotary businessmen, becomes a perpetual astonishment.  Booth’s notion here is that conmen, or those unscrupulous enough to manipulate people, through lies and pretences, in order to get what they want, could not possibly exude “pictures” of the high artistry of James, which entails a certain fatal counterfeiting in the confection of his story. To understand and express Venice with such language is the result of climbing Maslow’s ladder – or at least Matthew Arnold’s – where “all the best that is said and done” evidences the highest degree of sensitivity. In a latter phase of the litcrit business, this is labelled empathy and literature is worthy of study in as much as it promotes same. Myself, I think this underestimates entirely what entertainment is about. In a sense, Booth’s discomfort with “The Aspern Papers”  is with a mirror that reflects his own working procedure and self-fashioning as a critic. Though ‘science” has entered into the humanities (the epochē of the author’s life, the formalist attention to the text, etc.), still, “sensitivity”, that echo of an earlier era of connoisseur-ship, remains as the untransformable base. A base that should not be base in the moral sense. And here Booth is confronted, by one of the master texts, with a narrator proposing to use any “baseness” to get hold of Jeffrey Aspern’s private letters to his lover.

Surely, the discrepancy is the flaw in this particular Golden Bowl.

I rather like James’s transformation of the villain – although there is a sense where the villain, since at least Iago’s time, has been the better psychologist than the hero. The path of the villainous empath leads us through all kinds of matters, literary and extraliterary.

Doestoevsky translates Henry James

 Dostoevsky translates Henry James

 

…here were time and reverse-time, co-existing, cancelling one another exactly out. Were there many such reference points, scattered through the world, perhaps only at nodes like this room which housed a transient population of the imperfect, the dissatisfied; did real time plus virtual or mirror-time equal zero and thus serve some half-understood moral purpose? – Thomas Pynchon, V

 

Dostoevsky scholarship has largely ignored Dostoevsky’s translation of Henry James’ Altar of the House of the Dead. In this paper, we  attempt to chart the hitherto unremarked influence of James on Dostoevsky. Under-remarked is, perhaps, the fairer, the choicer, the more exact assessment – in Leon Edel’s four volume biography of Dostoevsky, volume 2 devotes a good three pages to the circumstances of the translation, but – in spite of his, that is to say Edel’s, extraordinary extensiveness, his rather beautiful and at the same time rather ‘creepy’ ability to slip, as it were, like some rich letter into the envelop of Dostoevsky’s life, we believe that more can be made of this small but characteristic nuance in the life of the great American writer.  James, at the time Dostoevsky encountered his work in Paris, was almost unknown in the English speaking world, although this was a fate that he shared with most of the great Russian writers of the time, save for Turgenev – whose novels were circulated in the same trans-Channel circle as those of Flaubert and George Eliot. A circle that included, of course, Dostoevsky himself, although at the time we are speaking of more as an apprentice to that bright company than a trusted associate thereof. It wasn’t until Constance Garnett translated James’ work at the turn of the century that he became known,  or depending on your stance on her rather free  and as much as was in her power easy translations, mis-known first to the British, and then to the American, public, resulting in that craze for the Russian novel which we can now see through for all its exoticism, with its compounding the myth of the “Slavic soul” and the great criminal type,  but which is nevertheless a definite marker on the board game of the cultural moment. In elevating James to the headiest of heights, the English critics (not so much the Americans) had a tendency to invidiously compare the supposed pallor of the parlor politics of the American-English novel, with exaggerated gestures leaving it to one side of the great current of human thought. In this accusation of a commitment to a whole world of trivia, Dostoevsky’s work suffered by comparison: why should we care what overcoat his character, Basil Raskolnikov, choses to wear to his first meeting with Olive Karenov in that famous chapter of the Bostonians, after all?  Haven’t we, as it were, overcoats of our own? Yet the slings and arrows once shot at Dostoevsky’s work in the 1910s and 20s were, when all is said and redone, not exactly killing – a mere glancing at the extremities and never a piercing of the beating, momentous heart. We now know that literature is big enough to contain both Dostoevsky and   James. And yet we persist, erroneously I believe, in placing them into different regions of fiction’s vast atlas, as though they were separate poles, a North and a South.  All the more reason, given this phantasmal, as I would call it, cast of  exoticism – so reminiscent in my own case of the sea tan of a certain favorite Uncle whose employment as a Captain in the Merchant Marine led me, once, to dream of more thrown and carefree destinies -  to revisit Dostoevsky’s translation.

 

We must start this revisiting (quite in the Dostoevsky manner – I am here not so distantly influenced by the phrase in his preface to The Papers found in Aspern’s Mousehole that the past can be divided into that which one can visit with the standard Baedekers of history and that which one can only speculate upon with whatever lyric genius one has acquired from one’s experience or one’s nightmares) with Cesare Lombroso,. It was Lombroso, in his  remarks about James in Men of Genius: a study in a peculiar criminal type (1870) (Genio e Follia),  who brought James in particular to the bilious gaze of a Europe still surfeited with its classical liberal certainties. He so influentially used him as a literary touchstone in constructing his theory of the doubleness of the criminal consciousness,  with all its enfolding and alienating affinity to genius, as the skulls of one race show, in spite of the individual weather suffered by the ossature of this or that particular, broadly similar traits . Lombroso might well have met James on his voyage to Russia in 1867. We know that they both frequented the one salon in St. Petersburg in which both the foreign tourist or emissary and the Russian intelligentsia and ministerial official were brought together:  Fanny Assingham’s famous Saturdays. Assingham, the wife of Frederick Assignham, the head of the British legation, made her well appointed mansion, situated on 18 Bolshaya Moshkaya street (rented, her diary says, from Antonin Faberge), into a veritable crossroads of the most advanced thought. We know from James’s diaries that he took a decidedly satirical and even, sometimes, rather denunciatory view of his hostess’s circle of  “nihilists and future dynamiters”  – although this was tempered with his empathy for Fanny’s situation as a sort of female Robinson Crusoe, cast adrift on the terra incognita of a Russian empire that was tugged into shape, as it were, by those arch twin tuggers,  God and the Devil, both foreign entities to Fanny’s type, of a mind so sociable no thought of the divine could penetrate it.  Characteristically, James used his knowledge of Fanny’s character to outline the personality of Vavara Petrova, the expatriate Russian hostess in his Venice novel, The Possessed Ambassador, with her attention to the silverware and her failure to grasp the Russian spirituality that assumed, in the larger imagination, the quite material appurtenances of the bomb and the pistol. The hapless hostess has in fact become a type that entered Russian  phrase and fable as a byword for missing the point: Assingham’s silverware.  

 

James did not note down everything in his diary, or recount every Assingham evening in his letters, feeling no obligation, as we would comically like him to have intuited,  to his future biographers or critics, just as one imagines the lightning bolt to be quite unconscious of meteorologists. Thus, we have no notice of Lombroso in James’ notes. It is a speaking absence, perhaps – James, with his passion for Italy, would surely have fallen into discussion with the young Italian philosopher if seated next to him before Assingham’s cosy fireplace.  And surely the topic of Lombroso’s book would have attracted his notice, especially as it would have given James the impression that his fame had penetrated to the capitals of Europe. However Slavophile James became at the end of his life, he was always sensitive to the quite deplorable and at the same time quite interesting events in Europe. We know from his letters to his French translator how very au courant James was, in this respect, and even more so given his rivalry with Turgenev, a typically Jamesian love-hate affair of gambling debts, mistresses and a polemically proposed spiritual shallowness. However that may be on James’ side, on Lombroso’s we have the witness of his book that the young Italian philosopher was aware, or made aware (is this the guiding hand of Fanny?) of the extraordinary “event”, one  might say, of James in the progress – or decline - of mankind at least as it was composed of the frockcoated members of the species. Lombroso’s craniological and pseudo-Darwinian theories are now seen as quaint, if not maleficent, but in his time he was, of course, an intellectual force to be reckoned with. Dostoevsky did not pick up Men of Genius out of a need merely to amuse himself with one of the recently chic:  the doubleness of the human character is, after all, one of his great themes as well, however much Dostoevsky set his characters in a less volatile set than James. Murder, yes, would rattle their teacups; but one could well ask whether, for instance, Milly Theale in Dostoevsky’s The Injured Dove, that victim of a conspiracy mounted, after all, by her best friend in the world, was not in a manner hunted, all without the appearance of gunpowder, down.

 

One voyage should not be inflated into any kind of real familiarity with the ins and outs of the intricate Russian in which James is acknowledged as one of the great masters. Lombroso took his bearings from an uncertain Italian translation of James’ The Golden Idiot. Although one doubts that D H Lawrence or Virginia Woolf, to give two famous examples, ever studied Lombroso, deplorably associated with the generation of the Shaws and the Bennetts, or knew him as more than a name that appeared in the journals,  we know that Dostoevsky did, in fact, read this book, in its French translation (L’homme de genie) , and, as we can see from the copy of the book found among Dostoevsky’s possessions, he made numerous marginal remarks on the passages in which Lombroso analyses James’s “epiloidal-obsessive” type. Dostoevsky was not equipped with the depersonalizing New Critical insight that the author should be separated from the text – it was, in fact, alien to his whole notion of literature as a branch, the golden bough as it were, of human reality. So he did not hesitate to project shamelessly James’s own psychology upon the character of Prince Amerigo, whose obsessive pursuit of Natasya Fillipovna, his wrenching her away from her perverse “guardian”, his spending his fortune upon her, and his final murder of her, was as well the blurry light by which Lombroso interpreted the subterranean decays of the liberal order.  We argue that James’ passionate struggle to mold an image of Christ in terms of Russia’s unique redemptive role profoundly effected Dostoevsky’s conception of his own fundamental task, which was, as he put it, “ to disclose the abjured figure, the wrecked aboriginal, the buried Caliban, in the great American carpet.” One remembers, as though it were some task du jour noted on a piece of paper and crammed into the pants pocket and retrieved oh so tardily from thence that Dostoevsky’s father was a great American Swedenborgian, and that however secular Dostoevsky’s own work sometimes seems – a paucity of mentions of Christ such as to make it seem an emanation from a preternaturally secularized society – the striving for grace was never far from his conception of character.

 

Dostoevsky purposely so dissolved the boundary between his fiction, his “lying muse” and his biography that the formalist tenet of the impersonality of art, besides being pertinent more to a mode of art of which he was the conscious, and uneasy, precursor than to his own aims or methods, simply must throw up its hands in despair at a case so hard as to be virtually uncrackable.. Thus, to understand how Dostoevsky came not only to read the Altar of the House of the Dead sitting in a Parisian café with a “brand new copy” of L’Observateur de Deux Mondes in 1870, but to understand further how the necessitous grip of the story was of such a degree that it interrupted the flow of his own work on the novel that eventually became The Portrait of the Possessed (1876), we must adduce the ‘personality of the artist,’ and, indeed, horror of horrors, his very historical circumstances, which were, after all, the stock of newspaper headlines. Although the translation acted as an interruption, one which other commentators have overlooked as so much not to the point and always to be condemned to the hell of footnotes, we see both sides, the regal and as it were the callipygious, of the coin, here: the other side was a release “devoutly to be wished,” upon the completion of which Dostoevsky embarked upon a series of novels and stories that were of a markedly different quality – indeed, his own quality, the ‘Dostoevsky’ who became, along with his beloved Hawthorne, Melville and Twain, the abiding American novelist – than the comparative hack work he had done before.

Hence, in spite of the strictures in which we were once schooled, we recall to the reader some biographical fact: in 1870, Dostoevsky was thirty years old. Five of those years he’d spent in prison in California for attempting to assassinate the governor. As he wrote of the narrator in his autobiographical novella, In the Cage:

 

“I had hoped, in visiting Paris again, to commune with the young man I had been, as I was assured by others if not, wholly, by the direct proofs and confidences of my own memory, at nineteen. But the lesson I learned was, perhaps, as old as Achilles, who though knowing that his invulnerability extended only to cover the majority of his public person, and not his very all, never in spite of this returned to douse himself, with a final completeness, in the holy water of the River Styx, no doubt instructed by the oldest of human instincts that tells us that fate transacts its business all at once, with the immediate brightness and crash of a lightning bolt, and that no dickering, no returning, no excuses, no, as it were, satisfaction guaranteed or your money back, counted with that covert power. So too, douse as I would in the mellow air of that incomparable thing, a Paris Spring, I could never, as it were, touch bottom – so that, indeed, there were mornings of a grimness in my room at the Jockey when, in a fantastic mental rush, I was returned to hopeless days sitting in much less promising quarters, the smell of my own extruded necessity assaulting my nostrils. There was something in the memory that deprived me of breath, something that seemed to disclose a darkness as of a deep, an endless well, narrowly constructed, in which I fell further and further from the pale glare of the light that signalled the mouth and possible, or impossible, exit to the architecture. What had happened to me once could happen to me again – nay, could happen to any man. It was hard, then, to see the complacent paletot, the bourgeois opera hat, the bustle around some extraordinary product of the hour’s chef, without envisioning it all collapsing in a like darkness. I was, in a word, convict company, which it turned out was absolutely the right temper for encroaching into the high literature of that time and place.”HE MIRROR

Diaries, letters and novels

 

Virginia Woolf once began a diary entry by saying that the day had been dreary and that nothing happened. Then she reproached herself: this was no way for a writer to treat even a day on which nothing seemed to happen. She compared such days to trees in winter. The glory of the tree, the leaves, have fallen, and all that is left are bare branches and the trunk. One tends not to see the tree, then. And yet it is in this state that you can most see the tree, its growth against the damage of insect, lightning strike, impoverished soil, and weather – in short, what it had become.

I think that is a rather brilliant comparison, even though writing for others is all about brilliant and hyperreal days, where the criminal is escaping the police, where the adulterous love affair begins to germinate at the party, where Madame Bovary takes poison and spontaneous cumbustion claims the ragman. But the forest in which these events take place is vast, and consists of dreary or happy days where nothing happened, and nobody looked.

I like the fact that Woolf knew that is exactly where she should look.

Given the diary’s chronographic power, there is an obvious allure here for the novelist, ever alert to find among text types in real use – catalogs, memos, or the diary’s cousin, letters – matter with which to incorporate story. In the 18^th century, at least, letters – in Les liaisons dangereuses, in Clarissa, in Die Leiden der jungen Werther, in La nouvelle Heloise – were inseparable from plot. But the realistic novel pulled away from the allure of diary and the letter for the main part. The realistic novel, and its multiple permutations, liked to find an escape route marked in the social – hence the image of a mirror carried down a road – where self-reflection and action could pierce through happy days, sad days, and nothing days to give us the larger picture. That picture was heroic – even if the modern hero was not at all the ancient hero. The former was not the founder of the city, but a dweller within it, or a renegade without it. “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show” – the first sentence of David Copperfield – was emblematic of the realistic novel, which was attached by every social bond to the hero of some type.

The diary and the letter are marked by a different affordance– the affordance of the detail. The detail, in the novel, pulls us in the direction of inertia, and is used as a counter-force to heroic action, which pulls us towards the heroic social position: even Raskolnikov’s, as a repentant murderer. There is a certain narcissism that administers the diary and letter, and that whittles the detail to its proportions. Narcissism, in the Freudian schema, precedes the ego. It is all partial objects and the tentative advance into language, the pulling back to the I from investment in the outer object. In Freud’s essay, Introduction to the Theory of Narcissism, Freud plays with the idea of  hypochondria as having a moment in every form of neurosis – and being itself a kind of neurotic process, shaped by an anxious play  with the erogenous dynamic of the object.  The detail that creeps into the diary – however that detail reveals itself, as conversation recalled, choses vues, a family, love, or job situations  – has this hypochondriac aura. “…. Hypochondria stands in a similar relationship to paraphrenia [schizophrenia} as the other active neuroses stand to hysteria and compulsive disorders, and thus depends on the I libido as the other from the object libido: the hypochondrial fear being the counterpart of the I-libido elevated to neurotic anxiety.”

 A flat materialist  history of the novel and its form might see the diary and letter as simply available text types to make the fiction plausible. But that plausibility, in Freudian terms, is shot through with the socialization of the libido, which provides a hidden dynamic within each form: the direction of the libido in diaries and letters is, on this account, something that is difficult to colonize under the realistic regime, and resists the escape route through the social.  Rather, it exists, with its insistence on the something there of blank days, as a continual temptation and taunt, standing just outside  fiction’s playing field.

Hazlitt's body under the bed

 

Two images of the artist’s posterity – that shaky successor of the afterlife. Not that, as is generally said in an overview of this type, the afterlife is dead. I think that, on the contrary, the vast majority in all regions of the World still believe in some kind of afterlife. But among the makers of public opinion – the college educated, the managerial, the “creatives” – the afterlife, like a lightbulb left on too long, has gone out.

Yet among that same group, it is easy to get a contest going by, for instance, proposing a list of names of the contemporary philosophers who will be remembered – or artists, or poets, or actors, etc. Being remembered/being the greatest – this is both a parlour game and the serious business of culture, which is not only a matter of social reproduction but of memory reproduction.

Two images, then; The first is from Diderot, who staked out a strong pro-posterity position. He claimed, in a series of letters to an artist named Falconet, that posterity acted as the great motive to the artists. It is, when one considers it, an odd claim for a man whose own work was so often written under a pseudonym or distributed in such an underground fashion that one of his key works – Rameau’s Nephew – first appeared in a German translation by Goethe some forty years after Diderot’s death. Yet perhaps not so odd, for Diderot’s image of posthumous fame is a firm twist on the notion of the name being handed down for generations.

« Because it is  sweet to hear, during the night, a flute concert that is performing some distance away, and of which there is carried to my ear only some stray sounds that my imagination, aided by the fineness of my hearing, succeeds in piecing together, out of which it makes a coherent song that charms it all the more in that it is partly its own work – I believe that concerts which are performed in closer quarters also have their value. But my friend, can you believe it ? I think it is not the latter but the former that are the most intoxicating.”

Diderot was surely aware, when he wrote that, of the work of putting together fragments of ancient texts that grounded the contemporary knowledge of ancient culture. The image, however, is startling in its frank pleasure in way contemporary reading “makes up its own song” from these fragments. Posterity, here, is transformed from the image of the monument that has long been associated with it – the imperial power that demands homage from future generations. The keyword of the Enlightenment, Roberto Calasso has contended, is “sweet” – using a remark by Tallyrand as the key to 18^th century culture: Nobody born after the French revolution will ever know the sweetness of that time.

I can accept Diderot’s image of posterity in that spirit. Posterity, the afterlife, is not thrust upon us, but comes as an intermittent music that we are either entranced by and add to or that passes us by.

The second image is more romantic, or even, to use a detestable “post” word, post-romantic. Or more accurately, it images the “creative” in the new world that has substituted industry for the patronage upon which artists used to rely – for good and ill.  Hazlitt, who depended for his existence on the press, was among those who Carlyle disdainfully called a “thing for writing articles” – count on Carlyle for the contemptuous epitaph. The thing died in a lodging house in 1830, having lived into the era of consensus among the Tories and the Whigs that saw Britain, after Napoleon’s defeat, as the great imperial upholder of wealth and liberty. For Hazlitt, of course, it was a great era of toad-eating.

So there he was, and there he died, in Mrs. Stapledon’s Frith Street lodgings. Mrs. Stapledon’s ideas of posterity were, no doubt, orthodox Anglican or at least Methodist. But her idea of the Jetz was much more practical. Hazlitt died owing her rent, and she sold off his effects to even the account. However, she was not unfeeling. She bought a box for his corpse. And, when showing his rooms to potential renters, she hid it under his bed. When his friends came by, she hauled it out, and they gazed their fill on his remains. Then they commissioned a death mask, and the hat went round, and Hazlitt was even buried.

Still – the body of the writer in a box under his bed while potential renters poked through his stuff and measured his windows for new curtains – what an irresistible situation in which to imagine the writer’s afterlife! Did Kafka ever read about Hazlitt? I guess it doesn’t matter. Kafka intuited that situations like this must exist, and that they formed a sort of labyrinth under the official culture.