Orwell & Kafka on Radio 4

[Belgrove]

Since the once diverse intellectual forests of Radio 3 is being transformed into a cultural desert, those seeking something rather more worthwhile than listening to DJ’s saying how wonderful classical music is maybe tempted to tune in to Radio 4 this Saturday, where Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four is being serialised across the day:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00201vg

It forms part of a ‘Orwell vs Kafka’ (sic) series of programmes over the weekend,

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00201vk

that includes a dramatisation of The Trial on Sunday afternoon:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00201sr

[french frank]

So there is someone, somewhere at the BBC ... I am a little surprised.

[smittims]

For me, Kafka's work is an endlessly-evolving phenomenon. The number of things he appears to have foreseen goes on proliferating , from the holocaust to the frustrations of trying to contact British Gas or get a doctor's appointment in 2024. I find myself using the word ' Kafkaesque' more and more as I struggle with everyday life in 21st-century England. It's refereshing to read his life amd to discover that despite all his ill-health and anxieties he was basically a cheerful fellow who was liked by his friends . I thinkthis explains how dear Felice, who apparently took no interest in his writings, put up with him for so long.

I was amused when I found that literary critics were fascinated and puzzled for years by the strange world of his novels, No-one who had spent 26 years in the Civil Service would have found it strange at all.

[Serial_Apologist]

For me, Kafka's work is an endlessly-evolving phenomenon. The number of things he appears to have foreseen goes on proliferating , from the holocaust to the frustrations of trying to contact British Gas or get a doctor's appointment in 2024. I find myself using the word ' Kafkaesque' more and more as I struggle with everyday life in 21st-century England. It's refereshing to read his life amd to discover that despite all his ill-health and anxieties he was basically a cheerful fellow who was liked by his friends . I thinkthis explains how dear Felice, who apparently took no interest in his writings, put up with him for so long.

I was amused when I found that literary critics were fascinated and puzzled for years by the strange world of his novels, No-one who had spent 26 years in the Civil Service would have found it strange at all.

Whereas for me the adjective most appropriate for modern-day life is Orwellian. But I do agree with you - the latest hack on NHS computerised systems for NHS records and bookings in London is the latest episode in a sad tale of wonderment that systems of this kind should have been introduced in the first place - yet another case of more haste less speed, and I am sure the reason had little to do with saving trees otherwise earmarked for paper manufacture, more with doing away with clerical staff. Meanwhile the NHS goes further and further down the tube.

[LMcD]

Since the once diverse intellectual forests of Radio 3 is being transformed into a cultural desert, those seeking something rather more worthwhile than listening to DJ’s saying how wonderful classical music is maybe tempted to tune in to Radio 4 this Saturday, where Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four is being serialised across the day:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00201vg

It forms part of a ‘Orwell vs Kafka’ (sic) series of programmes over the weekend,

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00201vk

that includes a dramatisation of The Trial on Sunday afternoon:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00201sr

A commendable series of programmes, no doubt. but I was a bit miffed when I found out why my TV hadn't recorded 'From Our Own Correspondent' this morning!

[Master Jacques]

Whereas for me the adjective most appropriate for modern-day life is Orwellian. But I do agree with you - the latest hack on NHS computerised systems for NHS records and bookings in London is the latest episode in a sad tale of wonderment that systems of this kind should have been introduced in the first place - yet another case of more haste less speed, and I am sure the reason had little to do with saving trees otherwise earmarked for paper manufacture, more with doing away with clerical staff. Meanwhile the NHS goes further and further down the tube.

The recent cyber attack on London's hospital systems in fact hit a private partner called Synnovis, introduced to provide certain services on the cheap. Having myself already suffered Synnovis's incompetence in the phlebotomy department of St Thomas's - what used to be the smoothest internal system in the world had thudded down to a third-world lottery under their smiling "patient focus" - I wasn't surprised to find that this cheapskate outfit had managed to reduce its NHS paymaster to a shambles.

As for Orwell and Kafka, what I caught of 1984 convinced me that, despite Orwell's pleasantly plain writing style, we were hearing one of those books which has eaten itself. By which I mean, that its lessons have formed the way we look at the world to the extent that it has nothing more to say. For younger generations, today's gaming environment teaches similar lessons much more effectively, inviting us all to play Winston Smith for ourselves.

I think the same is true of The Trial, which has one (important) thing to say and repeats it to the point of tedium. It's not K's best book, as he himself recognised, as he left the ending ambiguous. The version we usually get, with the hero "dying like a dog", was an alternative chosen by Max Brod (also the dubious champion of Janacek in Germany). Kafka also provided a less melodramatic ending, in which K walks away from the whole thing, scarred but whole. That doesn't quite work either, as he'd written a book for which any resolution had to seem false. Again, gaming does this better these days (and has done since Douglas Adams' text-game masterpiece for Infocom, Bureaucracy).

[smittims]

I'm not an Orwell fan (which means I neither criticise nor praise him) but I must disagree with your remark about Kafka's The Trial. If it really had only 'one (important ) thing to say and repeats it to the poiint of tedium' I don't think I and many others would have read it so many times . I find it endlessly fascinating, like all the best works of art, something I get more out of each time.

[Serial_Apologist]

The recent cyber attack on London's hospital systems in fact hit a private partner called Synnovis, introduced to provide certain services on the cheap. Having myself already suffered Synnovis's incompetence in the phlebotomy department of St Thomas's - what used to be the smoothest internal system in the world had thudded down to a third-world lottery under their smiling "patient focus" - I wasn't surprised to find that this cheapskate outfit had managed to reduce its NHS paymaster to a shambles.

As for Orwell and Kafka, what I caught of 1984 convinced me that, despite Orwell's pleasantly plain writing style, we were hearing one of those books which has eaten itself. By which I mean, that its lessons have formed the way we look at the world to the extent that it has nothing more to say. For younger generations, today's gaming environment teaches similar lessons much more effectively, inviting us all to play Winston Smith for ourselves.

I think the same is true of The Trial, which has one (important) thing to say and repeats it to the point of tedium. It's not K's best book, as he himself recognised, as he left the ending ambiguous. The version we usually get, with the hero "dying like a dog", was an alternative chosen by Max Brod (also the dubious champion of Janacek in Germany). Kafka also provided a less melodramatic ending, in which K walks away from the whole thing, scarred but whole. That doesn't quite work either, as he'd written a book for which any resolution had to seem false. Again, gaming does this better these days (and has done since Douglas Adams' text-game masterpiece for Infocom, Bureaucracy).

Yes I strongly agree with this assessment of 1984 and with your analogy with modern-day gaming as more than what a Freudian interpretation would see in terms of forms of displaced substitutionalism. Inevitably as things "move on" clearer methodologies of evaluation arise to clarify past asumptions and make evident what could only have been conjectured given previous knowledge and understanding. This was one of the things about Orwell, especially, that we can now argue to have been remarkably insightful and farseeing.

[Master Jacques]

I'm not an Orwell fan (which means I neither criticise nor praise him) but I must disagree with your remark about Kafka's The Trial. If it really had only 'one (important ) thing to say and repeats it to the poiint of tedium' I don't think I and many others would have read it so many times . I find it endlessly fascinating, like all the best works of art, something I get more out of each time.

The Castle strikes me as a more subtle exploration of the territory, less prone to "eating itself". Of course Kafka wanted both unfinished manuscripts (amongst others) destroyed at his death, and we have Brod to thank for disobeying his wish. I confess that my negative response to The Trial now has partly to do with Brod's editorial interferences, and partly to do with over-exposure to the text as an undergraduate. I can't read it now without impatience, which is my loss.

As to why we read books multiple times, there may be reasons for that which don't necessarily prove their literary quality. I've read Augustus Carp five or six times, which doesn't mean that I think it's a masterpiece beyond compare (though I always find something new in it). I wonder if The Trial has quite the same impact on younger generations, who've sucked in its lessons from more lively, contemporary retellings?

[Belgrove]

… we were hearing one of those books which has eaten itself. By which I mean, that its lessons have formed the way we look at the world to the extent that it has nothing more to say.

I don’t understand the point being made here. Surely the book can provide lessons to those who have not read it or who reread it and extract something new?

It is one of the few novels I return to every decade or so, and in so doing its scope has broadened from being a satire on totalitarianism to encompass organised religions too. That the Party must compel Winston to reject and betray his ‘heresies’ before eliminating him provides the Party with a dogma and mechanism that, in its view, legitimises its requirement for every instrument of the state to conform. Conformity is the thing, the substance forming what the Party’s currently believes is entirely mutable. A conversion occurs in Room 101, O’Brien is the exorcising and instructing Priest who consigns the convert to the cleansing purgatory of the Chestnut Tree Cafe, populated by other former sinners, before the proselyte is obliterated.

I’ve not listened to the abridged readings yet, but a long journey approaches which will afford an opportunity to do so.

[Master Jacques]

I don’t understand the point being made here. Surely the book can provide lessons to those who have not read it or who reread it and extract something new?

What sustenance can today's readers extract from something which has already been consumed? 1984 has largely served its purpose, and has gone the way of most dystopian satire.

What do I mean? When a didactic, satirical parable - which is what 1984 essentially is, lacking the ambiguities and multiple perspectives necessary for fiction hoping to reinvent itself over time - has been absorbed by the culture, that culture moves on to other moral/political/social questions. Such linear tracts soon lose their brightness and land with the dull thud of a fallen meteorite, which seems (to me) what's happened to Orwell's neat and effective parable. He wrote it as a warning for the post-war world, which absorbed many of its concepts and catch-phrases immediately.

I think we'd agree that 1984's didactic lessons as to totalitarianism of all kinds - including, as you say, organised religion - have indeed been absorbed by the culture, and redeveloped in modern fictions (such as The Handmaid's Tale) and computer games. New generations prefer to have new parables, and 1984 is now a slightly creaky period piece, with characters who don't reflect modern concerns so well. So (for me) it has "eaten itself", like the symbol of the snake swallowing its own tail, to become reborn in new forms.

I've had the strong impression with Radio 4's readings of these two books, that they've both had their time. It's more a wake than a celebration. I suggest we're better off reading Salman Rushdie's new memoir Knife, for a more vital reflection on ourselves here and now, before it too is eaten by time!