In the first of this year’s Quadrivium Lectures, Professor Ritchie Robertson of Queen’s College, Oxford came to Oundle to talk about Kafka.
Faced with a largely Sixth Form audience of linguists, classicists, many from the English and Philosophy departments and even some budding lawyers, his brief was to interpret W H Auden’s quotation ‘Kafka is important to us because his predicament is the predicament of modern man’, and sell Kafka to both experienced readers and those yet to come across him.
This he did in a fascinating lecture entitled ‘Ambivalence and Ambiguity’, in which he explained the rather disconcerting reality and lack of certainty that characterise the daily lives of Kafka’s protagonists. Commencing with Nietzsche’s infamous proclamation that ‘God is dead, and we have killed him!’, Professor Robertson went on to analyse the near impossibility of filling the resulting void and the way in which Kafka’s stories typically end in abject and humiliating failure.
Drawing comparisons with the likes of Dickens along the way, the lecture culminated in Professor Robertson advising young readers to be patient with Kafka and to enjoy the texts for what they are, rather than seeking to decode and arrive at a definitive allegorical interpretation where none exists.
S Jessop