I think about that “wound” of Kafka a lot, though albeit Kafka’s quote is new to me. I did a lot of research in trauma and literature and I think Donald Kalsched’s Trauma and the Soul will speak to this - the shock, perhaps is to be spectacle, but the wound of literature is to either highlight or unveil (perhaps in Heideggerian notions of Aletheia) the vulnerabilities of the human condition. For Kalsched trauma is only healed with a communal element that is often times transcendental and that if we are to be wounded by the world as humans, fragile, frail, etc. Then we look for healing. The wound is not something to be feared or be in awe about, though certainly there is a sense that the wound is how we are able to comprehend the numinous, or even be in the spectacle of shock, but is the point in which we can fully lean into our becoming. The wound of literature for me is one that seeks to transform us beyond just intellectual exercise or even melodramatic entertainment but allows us to know ourselves in ways in which we couldn’t understand otherwise unless we are wounded, which in tern leads us to our soul and to an aspect either of the transcendental or the divine.

Very interesting point about the loss of interest in sitting quietly and reading. But you really added the point about the masses. The film schools do well bc film is more accessible. There is no way we develop as a species, as a sentience, if we don’t rediscover our sense of epiphany called “ shock” here. The idea of processing less conscious elements into consciousness is a core aspect of self actualisation or individuation. So depth reading as an experience of epiphany is necessary for humans, film being the more popular cousin who is easy to access. The reason your style of book review is so helpful is that it always goes to the psychological woundedness of humans and finds a way toward hope. Kafka so searched for hope in his life, and to the extent he found it, it drove his writing. What literature could do without is the transparent elitism of the bigger the book the better, the more twisted the book the better, the more nihilistic the book the better…..these are all forms of echo chamber elitism (which leaf by leaf avoids). So I agree with Kafka and this literature professor but I would argue leaf by leaf generally seeks an epiphany for readers and avoids the obvious elitism of the literati . For the wounded everyone, an optimistic epiphany is needed. But a depth integration of unconscious woundedness is also needed. Stay true to great books and keep making them accessible Chris. You are tending to the very wound Kafka posits, and offering all of us a road to deep epiphany. Great film needs great literature. A literature that’s hopeful and not elitist!

Shock, especially in your formative years, can come from the understanding, through literature or other means, that you are not alone and that you too can belong in the world. That's why, for instance, representation (but not tokenism) is important in literature and in any form of art, so that no matter who you are, where you are or when you are, you end up knowing that you are not alone in this great confusing mess that we're all soaking in together. Like you said, the way you perceive the initial shock over time, and especially after many years, can leave you a little underwhelmed because you have integrated what shocked you into your "system" as a result of your personal growth. Yet, what shocked you when you were 14 or 20 years old and barely makes you bat an eye today might give someone else the same thrill that you have experienced as a younger person and help them grow, understand themselves, accept themselves, or open themselves to a different world of ideas they didn't know about. For me, growing up in a boring small town pre-internet, shock was mostly looking at art books and understanding when I was 13 or 14 as I wanted to become a painter that art was not only grand old religious paintings and impressionism but so much more. And I clearly remember thinking, while I finally found a book about Francis Bacon: Oh! One is allowed to paint like this. The shock was immense. It changed the way I looked at the world forever. Today, I look at the same paintings with a more precise and informed eye. I still love them, but I am different. And I am different because I was made so by the initial shock, and many many others. Shock in literature was also, for instance, reading Cosmos by Gombrowicz and not understanding what it was all about yet being mesmerized, no matter the lack of plot and strange subject matter. Your channel is part of the jolt of energy that can shock someone into discovering new worlds through reading. Yes, you are not working in academia, yet you probably speak to many more people in one day than some professors in a year, and what you have to say about literature is just as valid, researched, and informed. As I finish reading Solenoid and prepare to read all I can find by Cartarescu, I feel indebted to you for pushing me towards this literary shock I didn't know I could get from an author I still wouldn't know about save for your hard work. Thank you Chris!

Any encouragement I can send to you Chris I will . What you are contributing to the relevance of literature can’t be overstated. I don’t know where you get the energy tbh. Thank you!

I think Kafka's concept of the wound was very specific to his psychological (psychoanalytic) makeup rather than a generalised attitude. Think "A Country Doctor" and "Metamorphosis", where wounds are bound up with their progress of decay, infection, corruption and taint etc. But I like the idea of (good) literature as shock - and wonder if it could be as simple as the shock of a sentence/idea/image/metaphor being new to the reader's conception of the world and opening their eyes to a new thing, a new way of thinking/seeing/conceptualising? Loved the whole series Chris! bests. marc

I think shock is when a piece of art completely subverts your current worldview. In a lot of videos on KZfaq people describe pieces of art “breaking” them or saying, “This Broke Me.” In your Q&A you said you enjoy novels with ontological and epistemological uncertainty, perhaps that’s because they completely subvert your worldviews. For me, the reason I enjoy Moby-Dick and The Tunnel so much is because they continue to generate their own intellectual ecosystems in my mind and, by extension, continue to subvert my assumptions about myself and the world.

I think the shock stems from something similar from experiencing strong emotions in a "safe" space, so to speak: your self and your core has been moved, yet you're still sitting in a chair with the ink and the pages. And that shock I think comes when you read an idea or aesthetic that ticks something truly specific and new (or dormant) in your mind. Every end of the year that I go back on what were the best books I read, usually there's that impression of shock that feels still strong, even in the distance (tying it up to previous episodes, also rediscovering who I was and who I am through the books). The most obvious example of "books that wound us" that came to my mind were those of Svetlana Alexievich; literature that blurs the line and makes you face something painful. Or a book like Cartarescu's Solenoid (Kafka references aside) which directly deals with how we feel pain and anguish through a prose that highlights how we try to break from the mundanity of it all. The form is also the main way of shock, like the first time one reads Thomas Bernhard, monstrous paragraphs full of rage and without a full stop, ticking something that feels like a revelation in its cadence and introspection. Or Di Benedetto's Zama in how the prose in each part keeps disintegrating with its narrator. It goes on and on. But I truly need to keep exploring that shock, because when I think about it enough, it's the mark that doesn't leave those books that follow me around.

I was musing that, although the two words are not not etymologically related, Wunde is only one letter away from Wunder. (Sorry for that, but I'm reading Eco's The Search for the Perfect Language, so tonight I'm getting lost in Becanisms and Goropisms....) Coincidentally, it was the absolute, unrepeatble perfection (both of form and content) of Kafka's Verwandlung that gave me one of the most wonderful shocks the second time I read it (the first time I was too young to get it and, besides, it was an assigned reading). A shock I'm afraid I haven't recovered yet from- nor am I planning to.

You helped me finish a crossword today. It was "part of a book" - L E A F

I'm not sure whether I can contribute something, I'll have to mull it over some more and organise all the thoughts that this episode sprung up. But I did just already want to say that I think this is another splendid episode! It gave me a 'shock' and for me that's one of the reasons, if not the main reason, why I read.

Another dystopian predication from Fahrenheit 451 becomes reality? I hope she's wrong. People have been predicting the death of books and reading for a long time, but the truth is that it has always been relatively small part of humanity that read and marveled at books. To your question - my interpretation is that books give us relief from being inside our own heads 24/7, and books that don't bring new thoughts and ideas, and change the way we think - why read them? Another great episode - thank you!

"Contents of consciousness that have not yet been processed." This has been a thought provoking discussion, as usual...but I have to think about these ideas as I remember books that have opened up these pockets of consciousness in the past. Like you, I have re-read books from decades ago that I thought were so consciousness-expanding and they seem a bit juvenile today. So the books we read might be thought of as that yardstick some of our parents used to measure our height as we grew into our physical body...but we hope there is no finite stopping point for our minds...I suppose we choose the stopping point and that might be why reading books that open these pockets of consciousness are sought out by fewer people today. Movies can have their impact seen much more readily and quickly. I think Kafka might have been a film director today because he seemed intent on opening as many pockets as quickly as possible...perhaps? I have only read one of his books (Metamorphisis) and it seems to be designed to wound the rational mind out of its mechanized habit... Thanks again for these videos, they really help me stay engaged with literature that remains mostly unseen in this algorithm of culture.

Novelists today needs to realize that they live in todays world and not the world of the litterary classics, meaning there are alternatives to consuming stories used by other mediums and they are so easily available and digestable. The novel has to offer something that the other mediums cannot deliver in order to stand on its own, i.e Blood Meridian. This is the novelists job today. If another medium can represent the artistic outcome in a more effective way then, im afraid, the novel will be overlooked.

Great video, thank you. I'm curious to know what the books are that you shocked you when you were younger but no longer do when you reread them.

Look at literacy rates, especially after covid. Illiteracy is your culprit, not films.