What Would Kafka Do? [by Stacey Harwood]

On October 21, 1985, The New Yorker published this poem by Raymond Carver:
 
Kafka’s Watch

I have a job with a tiny salary of 80 crowns, and
an infinite eight to nine hours of work.
I devour the time outside of the office like a wild beast.
Someday I hope to sit in a chair in another
country, looking out the window at fields of sugarcane
or Mohammedan cemeteries.
I don’t complain about the work so much as about
the sluggishness of swampy time.  The office hours
cannot be divided up!  I feel the pressure
of the full eight or nine hours even in the last
half hour of the day.  It’s like a train ride
lasting night and day.  In the end you’re totally
crushed.  You no longer think about the straining
of the engine, or about the hills or
flat country, but ascribe all that’s happening
to your watch alone.  The watch which you continually hold
in the palm of your hand.  Then shake.  And bring slowly
to your ear in disbelief. 

            To a devoted Carver fan, the poem seemed uncharacteristic: more lush than the spare style that tagged Carver as “minimalist.”  I loved the poem, clipped it, and committed it to memory.

            Ten years later while reading Kafka’s letters, I came across this passage, written in October 1907, when Kafka was 24 and had begun work for the Italian insurance company Assicuraziono Generali:           

My life is completely chaotic now.  At any rate, I have a job with a tiny salary of 80 crowns and an immense eight to nine hours of work; but I devour the hours outside the office like a wild beast.  Since I was not previously accustomed to limiting my private life to six hours, and since I am also studying Italian and want to spend the evenings of these lovely days out of doors, I emerge from the crowdedness of my leisure hours scarcely rested . . .

            I am in the Assicurazioni Generali and have some hopes of someday sitting in chairs in faraway countries, looking out of the office windows at fields of sugar cane or Mohammedan cemeteries; and the whole world of insurance itself interests me greatly, but my present work is dreary.

            I don’t complain about the work so much as about the sluggishness of swampy time.The office hours, you see, cannot be divided up; even in the last half hour I feel the pressure of the eight hours just as much as in the first.Often it is like a train ride lasting night and day, until in the end you’re totally crushed; you no longer think about the straining of the engine, or about the hilly or flat countryside but ascribe all that’s happening to your watch alone, which you continually hold in your palm . . .

My immediate reaction was dismay. Although I know all about collage and "sampling," I wondered about the propriety of what RC had done. Did he take too many liberties? Does the title indicate that this is a “found” poem? When Carver later published Kafka’s Watch in a collection, he added the epigraph “from a letter.” Does that addition make it right? Or is it plagiarism pure and simple?

Would Kafka approve?  Do you? -- sdh

from the archive; first posted November 29, 2014

Comments

[Emily Fragos]

I am dismayed, too. Perhaps if he had clearly indicated that it was a found poem, after a letter, but he did not seem to do that, so it is plagiarism, pure and simple, in my humble opinion.

Would Kafka mind? Kafka did not have the highest opinion of his fellow humans. He might have shrugged it off. On the other hand, he was a perfectionist, a stickler, at his job and in his writing. This comes across quite plainly in his letters. He might have been appalled.

Of course, Carver wrote brilliant stories and wonderful poems, too.

[sarah gelder]

Very dismaying, and it reminds one that Carver's editor Gordon Lish deserves a great deal of credit for the success of the author's stories.

[Howard]

First of all, it's a really weak poem -- and I'm a Raymond Carver fan -- and so whoever was the poetry editor at The New Yorker at the time -- should be given a slap on the wrist -- with an Apple watch -- from nine to five. If it was the great Howard Moss, perhaps someone somewhere ought to prune the tree hovering his graveside.

Second, nearly every line from this "poem" is drawn from Kafka's letter. If one considers the authors who've written 400-page books wherein a number of lines from a few paragraphs strike the thought police as DNA-incriminating evidence, how could this not be plagiarism?

[Angela Ball]

Stacey, thank you for this article. I think that "from a letter" makes it OK, though I would add something to the end notes saying it is largely quoted, a found poem. I disagree with the notion that Lish deserves "a great deal of credit." Some credit, for sure. But if you read the two versions of "A Small, Good Thing" you may prefer the original as having more emotional richness.

[Jacquelineditor]

Found poem. Sloppy attribution. The Big Boys did things like that, and still do.

But, even you did not catch a typo when you set up this blog entry. "You no longer thing [sic] about the straining/of the engine..." (in the poem) Experience doesn't matter in today's online writing, and neither does accuracy--if I were to point out such a small error on Facebook, I'd get trashed. I may even get trashed here. And meanwhile, the horrors about which Kafka wrote are just outside our windows. Again.

[David Lehman]

Excellent and troubling article, engendering very thoughtful comments."From a letter" doesn't quite acquit the writer (and it appeared belatedly; far many more readers would have encountered the version in "The New Yorker"). This is not a found poem. It is rather an entry in a commonplace book, and that's not intended as a put down. The commonplace book, as Auden did it, and Lord David Cecil, is an undervalued genre.

In my own writng I love sampling, echoing, alluding, lifting, etc., and have ever since I read "The Waste Land" in college and took to heart TSE's "immature poets imitate, mature poets steal." But "Kafka's Watch" does not merely sneak in a sentence or two; the whole thing is an unacknowledged theft.