Brain Pain discussion

This discussion covers the story, A Country Doctor.


Doc really needs to lay off the late-night grande burritos with extra jalapeños…

So, nightmares of a country doctor? Or something else?

This is like a fairytale, if a fairytale were a nightmare. Like a fairytale, there are unexplained magical solutions to problems (as in the sudden appearance of the horses and groom, the miraculously fast journey), and also unwanted and terrible compromises (the groom's designs on Rose being like Rumplestiltskin's designs upon the poor girl's future child... I'll help you, but at a terrible price).

The story has the familiar Kafaka ambivalence: It's urgent that the doctor should go, at the same time that it is entirely futile for him to go.

It also has its note of doom. It ends very well!

The story is much shorter than I remembered. It's an absurdist whirlwind stripped down to bare bones, and still pulls off some huge reversals... (he's not sick at all... wait, he's terminal! Reminds me of the baby in Eraserhead).

This is one of the stories that stuck in my mind as a "classic." I don't know why. What makes "A Country Doctor", or "The Judgment" stay in one reader's mind as classics, while other stories like "Blumfeld" might easily slip the mind?

According to my table of contents, it's mostly the tales which were published during Kafka's lifetime which I retained most strongly in my mind and which seemed like the classics of Kafka. Yet I also feel that way about The Burrow, which was not published while Kafka lived... and now Blumfeld seems like one that I should always remember. Hmmm...

Zadignose wrote: "This is one of the stories that stuck in my mind as a "classic." I don't know why. What makes "A Country Doctor", or "The Judgment" stay in one reader's mind as classics, while other stories like "Blumfeld" might easily slip the mind?.."

We ought to consider Freudian dream analysis to answer these questions. The groom as the doctor's base desire to rape the servant girl, hero flying to the rescue, fear of being eaten by the worms after death, being naked in an inappropriate setting (blizzard), and so on. This story shares these kinds of common unconcious fears that are also found in The Judgment, whenceforth* Blumfeld is more the territory of the conscious absurd/comic, and so the bouncing balls are a kind of sight gag that is easy to forget when compared with a maggot-filled gaping wound....



(*Cross-discussion reference. See Argall, Week Three...)

I am somewhat persuaded.

This is my favorite Kafka story, but as with a lot of things on my faves shelf, I have a hard time explaining why. I have not re-read it yet but will tonight and I hope to express something a little more substantial than open-mouthed befuddlement.

A false alarm on the night bell once answered--it cannot be made good, not ever.

omfg

Gregsamsa wrote: "This is my favorite Kafka story, but as with a lot of things on my faves shelf, I have a hard time explaining why. I have not re-read it yet but will tonight and I hope to express something a litt..."

It really is an excellent short piece, and for me, a good representation of a dream. I have similar dreams where all kinds of strange things are happening, but somewhere in the middle, I start to have conscious thoughts related to what's happening and how they relate to my waking life, much like the doctor contemplating his place in the community and how thankless his position is amongst the country people.

BTW, Thanks to my earlier typo, I'm now going to stick with "Kafaka" as the adjectival form.

Zadignose wrote: "BTW, Thanks to my earlier typo, I'm now going to stick with "Kafaka" as the adjectival form."

I thought it was just the German spelling of "Chaka Khan"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX9E4...

Wow Zad, you were right! This thing is SHORT! Over the years in my mind it had expanded big as night. It's so strange how time and memory can make such things telescope like that. I had remembered "The Judgement" as a much briefer piece, just a vignette of the conversation between Georg and his father, forgetting entirely the strange first two thirds with all that other weird stuff about his friend and his fiance.

And now this one, which has loomed so large and dark in my mine, so brief I'm astonished. I'm going for a second read, since it'll take just a few seconds. I still can't believe that.

Henry wrote: "Jim, what are you trying to tell us with your dream/conscious analysis?"

As Freud might say, "The question isn't what I'm trying to tell you. The question is how does it make you feel?"

Henry wrote: "Jim, what are you trying to tell us with your dream/conscious analysis?"

It's pretty clearly a dream. Surprisingly so, in how well the narrative captures the amorphous nature of nighttime hallucinations.

Dunno that dragging Freud out is warranted, though.

Well, I would say that it is akin to a dream, but not that it is a dream. It's not a dream, as there was no one sleeping to dream it. But some writers, including Kafka, write things that are at odds with our normal conscious experience of the world, which have absurd elements, which cause ambiguous emotional stirrings, which may be mysteriously significant, which toy with our guilt, fear, lust, revulsion... I also see Jim's point regarding stories being more memorable and leaving a lasting impression when they dig into our unconscious a bit, as opposed to those that appear silly but not significant on an intellectual level... I hadn't thought of it that way, but I get it.

A fairly well-read friend of mine once asked me if Kafka was any good. To avoid coming off like some kind of asshole I strove mightily to suppress my immediate reaction, which was like stifling a powerful sneeze. So I had her read this story first. Her reaction was "At first I was confused until I realized it was a dream." I thought well, actually all his stuff is like that, but quickly checked anyway to make sure no one woke up from anything or went to sleep or any other clues.

The idea that it was literally a dream had never even occurred to me, as so much of the other stories I'd already read seemed more or less dreamlike in their own way, as well as the novels. To me this story continues, in an even more surreal mode, anxieties that come up in so much of his work. When his groom sends him off on his way and then attacks Rose, Doc has the familiar Kafkaesque guilt-without-real-culpability, as he goes off to fulfill social expectations and entanglements with typical K. reluctance and chagrin.

Those two anxieties, guilt without having actually done anything wrong (The Metamorphosis, The Trial, The Judgement), and the dread of social obligation (Description of a Struggle--the first part, Jackals and Arabs, The Castle) are what I think of when I think of Kafka.

I find that this is a topic that I come back to occasionally, at least in my own mind, and so I was thinking more about it. The thing is, to me, even if the story were framed with a guy going to sleep at the beginning, and waking up at the end, it wouldn't have any impact on what goes on within the frame, and thus this kind of "aha" realization is never a solution to anything. It's more of a dismissal. Thus your friend's reaction:

-"At first I was confused until I realized it was a dream."

Seems, to me, indistinguishable from:

-"At first I was confused until I realized it was a book."

You know, I'd never thought about it that way before but, yeah, it's like... dream or not, it was written...

Kafka's stuff always has a dreamlike or nightmarish quality, it is true -- labyrinthine corridors, faceless bureaucrats, towering guards, pervasive anxiety and helplessness -- but Country Doctor in particular is like reading a remembered dream from someone's journal.

The surreal or outright fantastic elements (the horses emerging from a pigsty, the fatal wound that appears out of nowhere, the stripping of the doctor's clothes, the horses thrusting their heads through the house windows) defy logic and experience in a way that is characteristic of dreams, but different from, say, Kafka's novels.

Of course, it is a story, by virtue of being written and published (no doubt with some attempt to rationalize the behaviour of the doctor) -- but it is a story that only makes sense as a dream. This is not "an event that happened to a country doctor", real or fictional.

Let's call it oneiric... because that's a fun word.

But questions that remain are:
-How does calling it a dream help make sense of it?
-If it's a dream, what does the sudden appearance of horses from a pigsty--along with a randy groom--signify, and how is this different from what it would signify if it were not a dream.
-Why do we not call Jack and the Beanstalk a dream, when it has as many fantastical elements as A Country Doctor and it proceeds from wish fulfillment, etc.?
-Why do we call Alice in Wonderland a Dream when, in fact, though it is certainly weird, it doesn't resemble any kind of dream I've ever had?
-What can we make of Luis Bunuel's films in general, which sometimes put strange elements within the frame of a dream, sometimes without a dream device, and sometimes against intuition the dream is more like waking life while the waking life is like a dream.
-Other points of investigation: Life is a Dream in which the device of a dream framed by real life is abused by the characters within the play to create a false distinction (and thus make us doubt the reality of our own lives), and Locus Solus which is hard to relate to either dream or waking life.

But it seems to me, when a story has both an inside- and an outside-the-dream, this tends to add to the ambiguity, complexity, and challenge of the work, rather than resolving it, whereas if there is no frame, or if the frame is nearly as large as the book itself (i.e. Alice), then the dream/story becomes the whole world and there's no security in stepping out of it... except in the sense that we can end our experience of any story by closing the book and reassuring ourselves "it's not real, it's not real." At best, to frame it becomes a method to isolate ourselves from the work, or to deny its potency.

To call it a dream is to distinguish it from, say, magical realism. The difference, of course, is in the sense of realism that underlies the magical or surreal events. Magical realism has a foundation of realism; dreams do not.


Dreams are inherently inconsistent. Contrary to popular belief, dreams do not hold up to all but the most surface interpretation.

In the memorable words of Major Briggs,

A vision I had in my sleep last night. As distinguished from a dream which is a mere sorting and cataloging of the day's events by the subconscious. This was a vision.

Thus, to refer to something as being "a dream" is, to an extent, dismissive. It indicates that we should not perform more than a surface analysis (to identify, for example, sources of anxiety), as the details are more likely to be haphazard than symbolic.

This is how I feel about A Country Doctor.

Sure, there are identifiable anxieties, and probably a reflection of the people and problems with which the author was involved at the time. But the details of the story provide no meaningful information. Why did the horses come out of the pigsty? Because the dreamer cannot trust his own independence. Why did the maggot-ridden wound suddenly appear? Because he doubts his own skill and feels a fraud.

Of course, referring to A Country Doctor as a dream is also a compliment. Most authors and filmmakers entirely fail to grasp the nature of dreams (remember Dali's spectacular mishandling of the dream sequence in Spellbound), and depict them as a sort of magical realism or reality-with-overt-symbolism. Kafka gets it right with this story, which is even more impressive if it was not derived from one of his personal dreams.


On a side note, I am surprised that you mention Locus Solus as an example. That book is neither dreamlike nor surreal. Roussel seems to have been enamored with turn-of-the-century technology, but with no real grasp of science or engineering. He develops interesting vignettes, then over-explains their implementation. Modern sci-fi authors tend to do the same.

Re: Locus Solus, I would not say that this is particularly akin to sci-fi, though I see Roussel made use of an inventor character and certainly has an obsession for belabored detail. But his grasp of engineering, or lack thereof, is not to the point. It's like Voltaire's grasp of Zoroastrianism, Huron culture, and extraterrestrial beings. I.e., a bit of window dressing behind which the author feels free to make up just about anything. But surely Roussel did not imagine that technology would lead to a method whereby the individual strands of hair on a nearly-bald man's head would leap out of his scalp and replant themselves in an ordered sequence to imitate a jig like the one danced by the pirates who stamped the man's infant child to death, right?

I find Roussel's fascination fascinating. That is, his "overexplanation" which is more bizarre than the phenomena would be if they were left unexplained, and the fact that he almost ritualistically is compelled to describe everything twice.

I agree that his book is not dreamlike, nor surrealistic (or maybe it is that, because anything can be or can not be that). BUT, one could say its like an infinitely concrete version of a dream which is subject to deep explanation and analysis, yet retains all its mystery. It's uncanny, unlike the waking world, or any world, it's built upon a mix of impressions and ideas.

It also, by the way, contains dream sequences which are, in nature, virtually indistinguishable from the non-dream sequences. Those, though they may not seem "dreamlike" are dreams for the simple reason that the author says they are.

Zadignose wrote: "one could say i's like an infinitely concrete version of a dream which is subject to deep explanation and analysis, yet retains all its mystery. It's uncanny, unlike the waking world, or any world, it's built upon a mix of impressions and ideas."

That is a good point about Locus Solus. It is easy to see it as a series of dream-pieces, which then were (over-)explained by the author.

In fact, it is difficult to explain the vignettes themselves in any other way. I found the clockwork explanation of the implementations to be amusing, but dated; however, the scenes themselves were bizarre and quite imaginative.

Mkfs wrote: "To call it a dream is to distinguish it from, say, magical realism. The difference, of course, is in the sense of realism that underlies the magical or surreal events. Magical realism has a foundat..."

Coincidentally, Rev. Powell, on Monday we'll begin our discussion of Susan Sontag's The Benefactor. I've read the first four chapters so far, and it's all about the narrator's dreams and how he chooses to deal with, interpret, and integrate his dreams into his waking life. I don't know where Sontag is going with this story, but quite interesting so far. Check it out if time permits...

Jim wrote: " on Monday we'll begin our discussion of Susan Sontag's The Benefactor"

That sounds pretty interesting -- I doubt I'll have it finished by Monday, but I've chucked it on the Kindle.

The only novel this summer that has coincided with my to-read stack is Smuggler's Bible (though Europe Central looks promising).

Mkfs wrote: "Jim wrote: " on Monday we'll begin our discussion of Susan Sontag's The Benefactor"

That sounds pretty interesting -- I doubt I'll have it finished by Monday, but I've chucked it on the Kindle.

..."

We'll be discussing The Benefactor for 3 weeks. Monday covers just the first 97 pages...