No future for hyacinths

Franz Kafka "The Little Hunchback" Illuminations Walter Benjamin

Knut Hamsun starts us off in this segment of the essay. Wikipedia says he was an influential writer for Kafka, Benjamin does not relate this. What Benjamin does let us know is he would write editorials for news papers from time to time. The one in particularly noted is where Hamsun decides to cut his ties from the town he lives in over a trial of a mother who murdered her child but wasn't punished harshly.

After this Benjamin hurries to announce that Kafka cannot be interpreted naturally, supernaturally, psychoanalyticly, or theologically. I'm not sure what could be left but an emphasis of loss of essence and embodiments of repression.

In the stories which Kafka left us, narrative art regains the significance it had in the mouth of Scheherazade: to postpone the future. 

We have again the theme of judgement but now we pin it more directly to Kafka outside side of his stories to reveal how his stories reflect him as a person. 

His testament orders their destruction. This document, which no one interested in Kafka can disregard, says that the writings did not satisfy their author, that he regarded his efforts as failures, that he counted himself among those who were bound to fail.  

The intense anxiety that seeps through also seems to embody in Benjamin's criticism. Particularly how he does away with essential qualities of what he speaks of and we observe only the remnants of what is left after he annihilates them. This particularly happens in previous essays about what stories are. At first he says they come about by labor and then he says they phantoms using death as their muse and their meanings are obscure as a requisite.

Hyacinthus Imagines Philostratus

Here we read about the dubious throw of a discus by Apollo. I believe that he is also a god that shares likeness to the sun so maybe his discus throw is related to the sun rising and setting.

But the throw is described as a technical matter. To throw it means the body is shaped in a certain way that one has to look not where it is going to be thrown but at the grown. Which is also tied to Hyacinthus who is killed by the errant discus but is transformed into a flower that bares his name. The bloom of flowers resembles his curly hair.

Apollo did not mistake anything in his throw but the path of the discus was altered by god that oversees the wind. Curiously he was being mischievous but there seems to be a bit of eros in it being that this god has a crown of flowers.