Very Kafkaesque

I went to the Franz Kafka Museum today, located near the burgeoning tourist trap of the Charles Bridge. Outside the museum, oddly enough, is a fountain with two men replenishing the water with their genital watering cans.

I wasn’t expecting much from the place, especially considering it only cost 60 crowns (less than three bucks). But Yao-za, this place was a post modern playhouse erected to the literary giant of Prague. In a hall dedicated his book The Trial, part satire/part nightmare about the impossible tyranny of bureaucracy, one walks down a cramped hall of filing cabinets from head-to-toe, with several drawers pulled out to give information on the work. Incessant telephones ring in the distance, adding to the effect.

Even more captivating was an expressionistic video dedicated to The Castle. A projector played onto one screen, but mirrors encapsulated the viewer, so spindling lines extended into infinity. The video itself was designed to make you think about what you usually don’t see—we tend to focus on one image, or one set of patterns, and miss a great deal (or so the concept goes). The video played on this theme, having villages slowly melt into ominous fortresses, turning sunrays into storms. Words vanished in and out of my peripheral vision. And in the end these words flashed across the screen:

“You don’t live in the village.
You don’t live in the city.
You are nothing.
But unfortunately, you are something.”

Honestly, I was having a hard time keeping it together during the video, and I think anyone on psychedelics would have straight lost it. It was that intense.

I’ll leave you with this quotation from the museum, which I’ve been pondering since this afternoon:

Literature is at its most potent when it disjoints the powerful fictions that govern men’s lives. A powerful fiction is a discourse which time has converted into an unquestionable truth, whose fantastic origin has been forgotten.