Czech books I have read recently - robot love, plus Kafka and Cather - Only you, love, will blossom on this rubbish heap

Maybe I should have put Franz Kafka in this category.  I organize literature by language, mostly, but it was Klaus Wagenbach’s little biography Kafka (1964) that had me frequently consulting a little map of central Prague.  It helped, too, that I have been there, briefly.  Kafka’s day-to-day world was so small, centered around the main square, the GrosserRing.  His father’s shop was in the same building as his high school.

The Kafka of today, poor fellow, is writing intense fables about people who are trampled by Segway tours and clobbered by selfie sticks.  Or maybe wake up after uneasy dreams to find themselves transformed into selfie sticks.  I did not have the best experience right there in the center of Prague where Kafka lived and worked.  The rest of Prague was great.

The Wagenbach biography is good, but I assume at least a but outdated now.  The Harvard University Press edition (2003, tr. Ewald Osers), has especially nice paper, presumably because it has so many photos.

Maybe I should count My Ántonia (1918), too, but I have not finished it.  Czechs – Bohemians – in Nebraska.  Ántonia and her family sound just like my Bohemian great-uncle, so Willa Cather got that right.

Otto pretended not to be surprised at Ántonia’s behavior.  He only lifted his brows and said, “You can’t tell me anything about a Czech; I’m an Austrian.” (I.18.)

One thing that has surprised me about Kafka, in the biography and in his diaries, is how German, as opposed to Austrian, he is.  Of course he visits Vienna and reads Austrians, but he visits Germany more, he reads German authors more.  On the periphery of one culture, living in another, he constantly looks to others.

I have not seen a mention, in the Kafka stuff I have been reading, of the one purely Czech writer I read recently, Karel Čapek.  What a shame if Kafka never saw R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) (1920).  Will humanity ever tire of stories of robot’s destroying humanity?  It is one of the perfect science fiction conceits, transcending whatever specific story the author tells.  What I mean is that Čapek’s story suggests a profusion of other good stories.  Maybe once the robots actually do take over, that will be the end of it.

In Čapek’s play, an industrialist manufactures robots – androids, really – to replace human workers.  Everything goes well until the robots inevitably organize, destroy, and in the uplifting final page, replace humanity.

Only we have perished.  Our houses and machines will be in ruins, our systems will collapse, and the names of our great will fall away like autumn leaves.  Only you, love, will blossom on this rubbish heap and commit the seed of life to the winds.

So says the last human in the last lines of the play, as the robot Adam and Eve leave the stage.  How ridiculous this sounds will be very much in the hands of the actor and director.  I can imagine a wide range of tone.  I would love to see this play.

I understand that a number of Čapek’s novels are good?

I read the Penguin Classics edition, in Claudia Novack translation.

The most inept Melville - organizing The Piazza Tales

I wonder if I have anything else to say about The Piazza Tales (1856)?

Herman Melville followed the failure of Moby-Dick (1851) and cry for help of Pierre (1852) – act of revenge – whatever it was – with the first of his dramatic career shifts – or second, since the move from seafaring to author was the first – by abandoning the novel for the short story.  “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853) was actually his first short story.  A strong start.

Melville published in prestigious magazines like Putnam’s and Harper’s, but looking at the table of contents of Great Short Works of Herman Melville, which contains his complete short works, the problem is evident.  Compared to earlier magazine writers like Poe and Hawthorne, or later ones like James and Twain, Melville could not write enough material to make much of a living.  So it was one more flop novel and then silence and a job in a customs house.  After that, poetry of high originality and ambition; eventually, a return to fiction with the great and sadly posthumous Billy Budd.

In the meantime, though, Melville had collected five of his stories – his favorites? his best reviewed? – as The Piazza Tales, adding a preface that explained the title.  “Bartleby the Scrivener,” “Benito Cereno,” “The Encantadas” – which is not at all a short story, but some kind of blend of fiction and travel writing, which of course describes plenty of Melville – these are the famous ones, much studied, analyzed to the bare bones.

Then there are three short allegories of creativity, I guess, “The Piazza,” which introduces the volume, “The Lightning-Rod Man,” and “The Bell Tower.”

That last one is the only dud.  Look, bibliographing nicole agrees with me, good.  Melville “putting on some other writer’s clothes,” as she describes it, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” passed through Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Italian tales.  The editor of Great Short Works, Warner Berthoff, calls it “the most inept” of the bunch, and the writing “arthritically clumsy.”  He “wish[es] it might be proved that somebody else was the real author” (223).  This from a fan!  Not that I have a defense.  “The Bell Tower” does feature a clockwork robot, making it a kind of proto-science fiction.  Hoffmann, Poe, Melville, Ambrose Bierce – I do enjoy an old timey murderous clockwork robot story.

Of course the robot is murderous.  Why bother otherwise?  I was going to at least give a quotation describing the robot, but as I page around, eh, “most inept.”

“Benito Cereno” has no shortage of good lines (I am referring to bibliographing again) – unusual descriptions, creepy atmosphere.  It is about a slave ship that has run into trouble.  The story uses some thriller devices, “don’t go in the basement” kind of stuff that likely seems less original now than it once did.  Critical interest lies in two areas, one social, Melville’s most direct look at black slavery, one conceptual, since significant parts of the story are taken directly from real documents.  Both of these really depend on references outside the text to be interesting – the second one is, of course, invisible.

Maybe I will try to write about “The Encantadas.”  It is hardly as iconic as “Bartleby,” but to me it is the most Melvillean part of The Piazza Tales.  Worth a try.