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Tanaka Chidora Literature Today
THIS year, while razor sharp rays of sunlight were piercing the blue glasses that we occasionally shook around to deal with the ice that filled them to the brim, I had a conversation with an eminent mind. I still remember we were also gnawing at some pork bones at Mega II and listening to some 80s and 90s RnB (how I miss those golden decades!). Suddenly, my host remarked, “You know, I think there is a link between syphilis and genius. Or madness and genius. Or desolation and genius.”

I had lifted my glass to take a hefty gulp, but I had to freeze my act mid-air. I didn’t like the sound of it. I didn’t like the way the declaration kinda like gate-crashed into our thoughtful process of gnawing at bones and drinking. You know when things are happening thoughtfully, slowly, and something just wafts in to throw spanners in the works? Young people of today would probably say, “Zvadirwa jecha”.

“By the way, have you ever checked how Shakespeare died?”
He dragged his cigarette solicitously and blew the smoke upwards, like he was writing something on the base of the air that hung like a ghostly roof above us. The truth is I knew how Shakespeare died. And I remembered that the diary entry of John Ward, the vicar of the Holy Trinity Church, stated that, “Shakespeare, Drayton and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting, and it seems drank too hard; for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted.”

When I recited this entry to this eminent mind, he chuckled, and after another meticulous drag, he asked, “What about Oscar Wilde? Or Maupassant? Or Charles Baudelaire? You know how they died?” I shook my head.
“Syphilis.” That was his one word method of filling the gap in my knowledge.

“What about Kafka? Have you read any of his works?” I had read “The Trial” and was in the process of coaxing a friend to give me “The Castle”. So I told him about “The Trial”.

“You need to read ‘The Castle’”, he advised. “Therein lies the real Kafka, that desolate soul.”
When I finally read “The Castle”, I had to admit that sadness and desolation are the motifs that drive that great novel. When the central character, K. arrives in a village whose central authority is a collection of ramshackle structures piled on top of each other, and which the villagers venerate as The Castle, we are not prepared for this torturous journey into what it means to be unfree, and to exist in isolation among living people.

K. is ostracised throughout the story by the villagers because of his effrontery to ask questions, to question authority and, above all, to disrespect The Castle which, on its own, is just another building.

But The Castle is not just another building, at least in the heads of the villagers. Because it lives in their heads, because it has become an obsession that lords over the everyday lives of the villagers, The Castle assumes a life which, without the villagers, it would not have possessed.

While reading the novel though, you get this feeling that you are reading Kafka’s life. The isolation that pursues K. seems to be the isolation that pursued Kafka. Besides, Kafka begins with a K right? At one point, he wrote in his diary entry: “The tremendous world I have in my head. But how to free myself and free them without ripping apart? And a thousand times rather that tear in me they hold back or buried. For this I’m here, that’s quite clear to me”. This is something that only a lonely and depressed person can write.

Kafka was a genius. So was Shakespeare. So was Maupassant. So was Baudelaire. So was Wilde.
Do you see any connection here?
And oh, Kafka died at the age of 41.

When I told one of my friends, an award-winning writer, what that eminent mind had said, my friend panicked and vowed never to write another book again! He said, “Tanaka, people tell me I am a genius. But I don’t think I still want to be reminded.”
I think that eminent mind had a point, although I can’t say the link he highlighted has been scientifically proven.

For me, the books I read are aesthetically beautiful when they are sad. I actually think that literary fiction is largely concerned with chaos, disorder, sadness, desolation and man’s perpetual attempts to understand the world, attempts that are both futile and irrelevant. I don’t know how I reached such a conclusion.

But I am sure the only time we actually understand what’s going on here is at that flashpoint, that less-than-a-minute movie reel point when your whole life flashes before you — the highs, the lows, the debauchery, the dirt — before the curtain falls down. That flashpoint usually comes at the end.