Franz Kafka's First Sorrow is a short prose-piece. If you haven't read it - there's one thing that everyone remembers about First Sorrow: it's the one where there's a trapeze-artist who doesn't come down.
Kafka, surely, is dealing with the bare bones of a solitary existence again isn't he? An over-arching theme that occurs in his 'Burrow' and some other stories? But this time the cause of one solitary existence is unpacked. If you need a symbol of any performer's devotion to his craft, then there can't be many better ones than this. The all too human detail is there; what (staying aloft on the trapeze) starts out as a desire to perfect a skill, later becomes a custom that is too strong for the performer to break; the isolation perhaps broken by a workman repairing something up there, or by a fellow acrobat occasionally swarming up the ladder to see him.
And then of course the 'ideas' begin to torment him - could his trapeze-performance be done differently?
No comments:
Post a Comment