Mark Bold

“As Shakespeare spoke for mankind on the threshold of the modern world, you speak mankind’s farewell in the authentic voice of the twentieth century.”

Alan Bennett directs these words at Kafka from the character of Max Brod (Kafka’s best friend and executor) in his play Kafka’s Dick. There is no doubting Kafka’s position as one of the greatest writers of modernity, but the writer and man himself tends to be hidden in the shadow of this reputation, or, more often perhaps, confused with the main characters in his stories and novels. The story of his life may be quite well known to readers of Kafka through the publication of his diaries and voluminous correspondence with the women he was often engaged to, but it is to rescue Kafka from the simplifications of the adjective Kafkaesque that Murray has written this new biography.

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‘The revolutions of thought which shape the basic outlook of an age are not disseminated through text-books - they spread like epidemics, through contamination by invisible agents and innocent germ-carriers, by the most varied form of contact, or simply by breathing the common air.’ (1979, p151)

Koestler is describing the impact of the Copernican revolution in the sixteenth century, comparing it to changes in belief that spread through Western society from the work of other writers, such as Darwin and Marx. The terminology is eerily memetic, yet his real concern is to show how established ideas (in this case the Ptolemaic belief that the sun revolves around the earth) hold sway over thinkers until there is a sudden break with the past, and a completely new belief system becomes accepted. The process of scientific advance he describes is very similar to the paradigm shift, introduced by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (published within a few years of The Sleepwalkers), and now a familiar term. Both writers are trying to show that science does not move forward in a gradual advance of knowledge, but in fact jumps forward and sometimes sideways in leaps and gear shifts.

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Perhaps Bryan Sykes, an Oxford Professor of Human Genetics, started out on this book by attempting a serious study of the Y-chromosome, and the ability this gives geneticists to trace paternal descent and the groupings and origins of the common male ancestors of all people on the planet. He had achieved a similar study of mitochondrial DNA and our common female ancestors with The Seven Daughters of Eve. But this time maybe the publishers insisted that he rewrite his manuscript with a slightly hysterical style, speculate about how men are doomed, and slap the dystopian title Adam’s Curse, A Future Without Men (together with a misleading picture of monkeys becoming men becoming women) on the front cover. The result is a strangely uneven mix of scientific explanation and wild speculation.

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Pop science publishing relies on metaphors and often inadequate conceptual comparisons to make ideas from academic and scientific activity easier to understand for the mass market. Converting hard data and theory, analysis and documentation from universities and laboratories into a paperback format involves massive simplification, a disregard for accuracy, and a bubbling mix of metaphorical allusions. Richard Dawkins’ blind watchmaker and Susan Blackmore’s meme machine spring to mind, without even attempting to enter into the always farcical world-views of full time social scientists. But the technique has reached its limit with Steven Johnson’s Emergence, in which the reader is subjected to an onslaught of similes and inept conceptual mismatching until the argument of the book is completely unclear.

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Cecil appears late in A Room With A View; we do not meet him in Italy, but at Windy Corner in Part 2 of the book, where Forster is concentrating on the resolution of Lucy’s muddle. The first mention of him, in a letter from Lucy’s mother while she is still in Florence is inauspicious. The news of Cecil is what “interested her least”. And this ambivalence of Lucy’s towards Cecil is continued when he appears in Part 2, and we learn it is his third attempt at proposing marriage.

Because of this late addition to the characters, Forster is explicit in his description of Cecil. But this description is of a Gothic statue, and the impression we gain at this early stage is of an inhuman character. The posture of the statue suggests the superiority and arrogance that Cecil will reveal as the narrative continues. Forster also connects Cecil and Mr Beebe, hinting that both represent the “medieval” that conflicts with the “Renaissance” of Lucy’s development. Mr Beebe’s early judgement of Cecil is that he is “better detached”, and this opinion seems increasingly accurate as we learn more of Cecil’s character.

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