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LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP

   LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP               In A Painful Case (one of the short stories narrated by James Joyce in Dubliners ), the hero opines: “Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse.” It is not clear from the text whether this statement is made by Joyce’s hero as a consequence of a personal disappointment or is meant to be the author’s statement of a universal truth. This essay sets out to establish that, in general, the statement is a fallacy.             The difficulty in construing and applying Joyce’s statement stems from the fact that the two seminal words – ‘love’ and ‘friendship’ – are inadequately defined and hence are often misleading when used in everyday language. The confusion that may arise from imprecision in l...
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KAFKA’S FEET OF CLAY

          KAFKA’S FEET OF CLAY   I            Franz Kafka died in obscurity about one hundred years ago.   After three decades, the worn-out cliché, ‘he was one of the greatest authors of the 20 th century’, was applied to him. I am dubious. For some, Kafka is good reading.   His is the world of the bizarre, the phantasmagorical and the absurd: a reader can embrace it, admire it and enjoy Kafka’s black humour. All in all, though, Kafka was an eccentric and unworldly writer. [1] Some readers are repelled by him.             My decision to express my views about him assumes that Kafka did not seek to confine his address to literary critics. If this had been his object, I would consider myself out of my depth: I am an ordinary, albeit widely read, middle-class person. This entitles me to form a view about books I study and their authors. Th...
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