Brain Pain discussion

This discussion covers the story, A Little Woman

Women are from Venus,
Men are from Mars,
And ne’er the twain shall meet.

Do Kafka's stories sometimes get away from him?

Oh, Kafka!

Wow. There's some real madness in this one. But it can't just be madness. There's no complete and satisfactory explanation of this, I think. We can imagine he's paranoid, but there's enough detail in this for us to also imagine that there really is something to it... he's got his eternal exasperated critic. When he writes:

"...my small critic, grown faint at the very sight of me, sank sideways into a chair, holding on to the back of it with one hand and plucking at her bodice strings with the other, while tears of rage and despair rolled down her cheeks..."

Well, there has to be something to it. And yet, he can't be a normal victim of this arbitrarily vindictive stranger-woman. His own thought patterns are too deranged for us to imagine it, plus the scenario is too implausible if taken that way.

So somethings's going on both in and outside of his his head.

I relate to nuts far too much, so I relate to Kafka and his character (but I'm not a paranoid!).

Entertaining irony: "any connection between us is her own invention and entirely one-sided."

Another thing, Kafka is "great" at description, in that decidedly not-great way that I appreciate. Because I usually hate books that aim for great description. Why are they trying to give a character a mark of distinction in the arch of an eyebrow, or the depth of the crease between nose and mouth? And seriously? Yet Kafka's remedy is the outrageous physical description of this woman: "The impression her hand makes on me I can convey only by saying that I have never seen a hand with the separate fingers so sharply differentiated from each other as hers; and yet her hand has no anatomical peculiarities, it is an entirely normal hand." That and her trademark sudden twisting of the upper torso with hands on hips.

Oh, Kafka! Love ya' man!

Zadignose wrote: "Oh, Kafka!

Wow. There's some real madness in this one. But it can't just be madness. There's no complete and satisfactory explanation of this, I think. We can imagine he's paranoid, but there's en..."

I was thinking some sort of "inner critic" too - maybe a kind of self-loathing.

Well she's small too. But I think this story results, like some of his others, from taking such an idea which could have been presented metaphorically, and then running with a completely literal interpretation of it. Like, what if there was actually a little woman out in the physical world that exhibited some of those same elements of loathing that I might feel for myself, and what if I introduced her relationships with others so that there's enough doubt to defeat a symbolic reading of it...?

Or something like that.

Also, as reader, I eventually leaped to consider a suggested love relationship, or at least a one-way infatuation, which he anticipated and attempted to deny, while the denial itself seems incriminating. (And speaking of leaping to conclusions, he quite admires her talent in this area).

Another interesting paranoid element to it is when he talks of what he is "informed of" with regards to her, without clearly indicating who would inform him, why, or what is the nature of his relationships to... well, anyone or anything? And why should he imagine others would take an interest in this little trivial affair/non-affair of his... while at the same time the others are not really particularly aware of it... or are they... or are they not... or...

I think I kind of resolved on a work-relationship type setting for this as I was reading it, but he doesn't give us enough to be sure of even that.

But in its abstraction it seems almost perfect. No more nor less is given than what I'd want, I think. And this couldn't reasonably have been a much longer work. It's a complete short work, unlike the fragmentary sketches which we encountered in some of the earlier works.