“For what is there apart from dogs? To whom else can one appeal in an otherwise empty world?”
When reading Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883 – June 3, 1924) I find it useful to abandon notions of ‘why’, or ‘who’, or ‘how’ and to be contented with ‘what’.
Because that is what Kafka does. Awaken to find oneself a giant insect? Move right along. We are a dog among dogs? Of course. Never one to explain such oddities, it thus becomes quite natural that Kafka imagines himself a dog or a bug and continues the narrative from that orientation.1.The Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the phrase “willing suspension of disbelief”, speaking of the act of reading his poetry (remember, realism was the prevailing thought back then, if it wasn’t real or true or conjectured with rational thought, it simply wasn’t. Fiction took the form of inventive journalism, like Defoe, or moral argument like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela.) We must shove aside our disbelief for Kafka, too.
What we must not accept, however, is the nightmare of living in such alienation, which I always took to be the meaning of the word Kafkaesque: existence and acceptance in an oppressive, unreal situation from which there is no escape.
This satire of life in the early years of the Soviet Union cost its author dear at the time and it has not lost its provocative power
Claire Armitstead Wednesday 4 January 2017
Mikhail Bulgakov was 33 years old, a former doctor and an up-and-coming playwright and short-story writer when he invited a group of people to a reading of his new novella, The Heart of a Dog. He had held a similar soiree the previous year to launch another novella, The Fatal Eggs, and though the earlier reading had gone well, it had made him anxious enough to muse in his diary: “Is it a satire? Or a provocative gesture? … I’m afraid that I might be hauled off … for all these heroic feats.”
In Virginia Woolf’s experimental novel The Waves, the wistful Bernard reflects “I have lost friends, some by death […] others through sheer inability to cross the street.”
WHEN GRACE FIRST GOT Victor she and Joe walked him on the beach most Sundays. Then a chow chow bit some kid and the parks department restricted dogs to the slough behind the dunes. Grace took Victor there for years, and after she died Joe stepped in and maintained the custom, though he hated it back there. Mushy trail hedged with poison oak. Baking flats of cracked mud broken by patches of scrub. The dunes stifled the sea breeze, leaving the air still and rank and seething with insects.
October 3rd.—A strange occurrence has taken place to-day. I got up fairly late, and when Mawra brought me my clean boots, I asked her how late it was. When I heard it had long struck ten, I dressed as quickly as possible.
A YOUNG dog, a reddish mongrel, between a dachshund and a "yard-dog," very like a fox in face, was running up and down the pavement looking uneasily from side to side. From time to time she stopped and, whining and lifting first one chilled paw and then another, tried to make up her mind how it could have happened that she was lost.
The sea that separates Odysseus from home was the lifeblood of ancient Greece. Homer’s story of return takes us on a journey that goes beyond geography
This is the first one, the big one, the ur-road movie: the Odyssey. Homer’s poem tells of Odysseus’s decade-long attempt to return to his home island of Ithaca – a “man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy”. (Robert Fagles’ translation for Penguin, which I recommend.)
Heartbreaking tales of love, devotion, innocence – and philosophy. From Homer to Kafka, these works show humanity intimately observed by its best friend
Jill Ciment
Wednesday 26 August 2015
Man created dog, or dog created man, about 30,000 years ago somewhere in east Asia. Dogs witnessed us when we were still part very much part of the animal kingdom, marginal creatures foraging for a living, before we had stone tools, before we mastered agriculture, invented money, built cities, and polluted the earth. Dogs are like a first lover who knew us when: they know where we really come from, and who we really are.
They have shared our hearths and meals and affections for longer than any other animal. A 12,000-year-old grave in Israel contains the skeleton of a woman holding the skeleton of a puppy. We have even shared death with them. How could they not make their way into our imaginations?
While dogs have been bearing witness to our behaviour for 30,000 years, we have also been closely observing them. We are their first loves, too. We knew them when they were still wolves, before they tasted kibble, had their nails trimmed and their teeth brushed.
In my novel, Heroic Measures, one of the points of view belongs to Dorothy, a 12-year-old dachshund who stands 12 inches tall and weighs 10lb 2oz. Entering her consciousness seemed no different to me as a writer than visiting the minds of the older couple, Ruth and Alex, who have been Dorothy’s family since she was eight weeks old. Dorothy’s character is as idiosyncratic and individual as any human I have created.
Here are 10 favourite narratives told from a dog’s point of view.
Argos, Odysseus’s loyal hound, is one of the first dogs in western literature. After waiting 20 years for his master’s return, Argos must make a most painful decision. He realises that Odysseus is in disguise. If he greets his master, or if his master acknowledges him, Odysseus will be in mortal danger. Argos has to accept that after two decades of longing for this moment, he will only be rewarded with a glimpse of the man he loves.
All of London’s dog novels hark back to the courting stage of man and wolf, when we were still both beasts. London’s plots are really love stories - two wary beings learn to trust each other and fall in love. Buck, a huge St Bernard/shepherd mix, is kidnapped from his comfortable middle-class home, sold into bondage, and escapes. In the Alaskan wilderness, he discovers the bestial instinct within himself. Only late in life does Buck fall in love with a man, John Thornton, who saves his life. When he loses John to an Indian’s arrow, he returns to the wild and joins a wolf pack. London intends for Buck’s howl, “the song of the pack”, to be a dirge.
Poprishchin, a lowly clerk infatuated with his supervisor’s beautiful daughter, keeps a diary as he sinks into madness. He begins to suspect that his dog, Fidel, is having an affair with her dog, Meggy, and exchanging love letters. The first epistolary dog’s tale.
Narrated from the point of view of a dachshund mix, and presented as a children’s tale, this is a horrifying story of a beaten dog who joins the circus only to return to her original cruel master because she feels more comfortable being kicked than loved. Janet Malcolm, in her book, Reading Chekhov, writes that Kashtanka might be the great man’s most autobiographical story.
Sharik, a stray, finds himself adopted by a successful surgeon and thinks he has entered earthly paradise, only to discover that the doctor’s real intentions are to perform medical experiments on him. During one procedure, the doctor attaches a pair of human testicles to Sharik. To the doctor’s delight and the dog’s astonishment, Sharik transmogrifies into a primitive man. But though he looks like a man …
Franz Kafka, with a dog, in 1905. Photograph: Getty Images
The erudite dog who narrates this meditation on the origins of nourishment believes himself to be not “different from any other dog”, and yet he asks if it is possible for a creature to be “more unfortunate still” than he is. Kafka, like Plato, believed that the dog is the most philosophical beast in the world.
At the end of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the insect-being that had been the man Gregor dies, much to the relief of his family who never reconciled with his horridness. Our narrator in Investigations of a Dog summits on the point of isolation and silence and never really descends. Kafka seems to be saying that knowledge unshared distances us from one another as much as it enlightens.
His biographer Elias Canetti writes:
"The uniqueness of his work, in which emotions hardly appear, though literature otherwise swarms with them, volubly and chaotically. If one thinks about it with a little courage, our world has indeed become one in which fear and indifference predominate. Expressing his own reality without indulgence, Kafka was the first to present the image of this world."
A shot rings out on a farm in rural Illinois – one neighbour has murdered another. Late in the novel, Maxwell allows the murderer’s dog a point of view. The dog has witnessed her human in his most heinous state, but of course she never passes judgment on him.
A grieving man, Joe, is walking Victor, his dead wife’s dog, when they are approached by an aggressive dog twice Victor’s size. The man scares off the mongrel and Victor thinks: “What devotion! Almost canine.” But safe once again, Victor remembers that Joe never wanted him. If not for the wife, Victor would still be in the pound. In a moment of doggy insight, Victor tells Joe that he loved his dead mistress more than Joe loved his dead wife.
King, the dog and guardian of a homeless couple, narrates this story dramatising 24 hours of precarious survival on a scrap heap somewhere near a motorway in France. The term “dog-eat-dog society” has never been more cleanly defined.
The title says it all. A wonderful collection of doggerel. Disclaimer: Sadie, the dachshund whom my character, Dorothy, was based on, has a poem in it.
Welcome to Life Lessons. This week, we honor our favorite Capricorn— David Bowie — by revisiting his September ’95 cover story conversation with our former Editor in Chief, Ingrid Sischy. The interview, in which Bowie laments some of his more mainstream musical forays, took place a year before the enigmatic artist’s mind-bending appearance as Andy Warhol in the Julian Schnabel-helmed biopic Basquiat. So sit back and grab your spacesuit—you just might learn a thing or two.
Welcome to Life Lessons. Now that fashion month is nearly over, we’re paying homage to Kate Moss —rule breaker, fashion luminary, and eternal icon of the supermodel era. This week, we’re flipping through the pages of Moss’s March 1999 cover story, in which the then 25-year-old supermodel sits down for a conversation with Interview’s editor in chief Ingrid Sischy. So sit back, and grab a pen—you just might learn a thing or two.
Welcome to Life Lessons. This week, we’re marking what would have been the 93rd birthday of our founder Andy Warhol with a journey into the archives. In our special April 1996 issue (aptly titled Andy Mania!), a few icons paid homage to our “wigged-out” patron saint in words and images. Among them are the likes of Richard Pandiscio, Candy Darling, Mary Harron, and our legendary former Editor-in-Chief Ingrid Sischy—whose most memorable reflections are found below. So sit down and grab a pen—you just might learn a thing or two.
