The enigmatic Kafka and his continuing influence

[Part 1]

Another important facet of Franz Kafka’s writings is his clarity of language. The German language, very often, is associa0ted with convoluted and ponderous verbal constructions. This is not wholly accurate; however the impression remains. Kafka, in contrast, wrote a clear and lucid prose minus the frills and flamboyance. This in itself is a noteworthy feature. But what is more significant about this lucid style is that it is deployed to depict the terrifying contours of the dark , threatening and anxiety-producing world that Kafka deals with.

In other words, there is a disjunction between what is said and how it is said. Interestingly, it adds to the potential menace. Prof Peter Gay, the distinguished historian, who has written so insightfully on German society and culture, says the following:

‘His style is always unruffled and precise in tone that everyone who has written on Kafka has praised it as pitch-perfect. Some of his most celebrated stories are matter-of-fact in the midst of the most horrifying detail – in Metamorphosis the leading character wakes up one morning as a large bug, while the protagonist of the penal colony is a machine that inscribes a criminal’s offences on his body with sharp needles and kills him.’

A scene from the film

What is interesting about these stories is that Kafka presents them in a calm and matter-of-fact tone. Clearly, there is a disparity between the horrific nature of the situations and the way Kafka has elected to depict them. This disparity lends greater force to his narratives.

Impact

As a writer, Franz Kafka sought to exert a deep impact on his readers and jolt them into a newer awareness. He wanted to present narratives full of suspense but also which carry critical thought, new ways of feeling and imagining. When we read novels such as The Trial and Castle and short stories such as Metamorphosis and The Penal Colony, this fact becomes evident. In one of his numerous letters, Kafka asserted, ‘I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading for….but we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.’ It has to be conceded that many of Kafka’s works lived up to this expectation.

Some critics have identified a partiality for the absurd in Kafka’s writings; for them, this predilection invests his writings with vibrancy and density. Albert Camus, closely associated with the concepts of existentialism and the idea of the absurd was an admirer of Kafka’s fiction. Speaking of The Trial, he remarked, ‘He lives and he is condemned. He learns this on the first pages of the novel. He is pursuing in this world, and if he tries to cope with it, he nonetheless does so without surprise. He will never show sufficient astonishment at the lack of astonishment. It is by such contradictions that the first signs of the absurd work are recognised.’

It has been pointed out by some critical commentators that Kafka is a writer of fables. This, it seems to me, is an over-simplification. It is indeed true that he had a powerful fabulist imagination; however, his imagination overflowed the bounds of fables to capture other significant aspect of reality. The way he handled fables, to be sure, allows us to enter into his imaginative worlds with greater ease and self-assurance. Let me cite two short moral fables of his to enforce this point.

The first is a story of eighty words. It is called Little Fable, ‘Alas said the mouse, the world becomes narrower every day. At first, it was so wide that it frightened me; I ran on and was happy when I began to see walls in the far distance to my right and left, but these long walls race so quickly towards each other that I have already reached the last room, and over there in the corner is the trap into which I am running. You need only change your direction, said the cat, and ate up the mouse.’

Clearly, this is a fable and the title also suggests it. However, it is different from the standard fable in that traditional fables carry an unambiguous moral message and this one does not. The intention of the author is not to illustrate a moral or a norm of conduct; his goal is to convey a state of mind or a disturbing situation – the nature of hopelessness and meaninglessness. Indeed, this is a state of mind and a disturbing situation that one encounters frequently in his major fiction as well.

Discovery

Let us consider another fable; this is titled Give Up and consists of 120 words. ‘It was very early in the morning, the streets clean and deserted. I went to the railway station. Comparing a public clock with my watch, I noticed that it was much later than I had thought; I had to hurry; upset about the discovery, I became unsure of my way; I didn’t know this city very well; fortunately, a constable was nearby; I ran up to him and asked him breathlessly for the way. He smiled and said; do you expect me to tell you the way? Yes, I said. I cannot find it myself. Give up, give up, he said and turned away from me in a wide circle, as people do who want to be alone with their laughter.’

Here the situation is totally realistic. It is one with which most of us are familiar. We are in an unfamiliar city; we are lost and ask for help from a policeman. The normal response of the policeman would be to be helpful and show us the direction we are seeking. Here the response of the policeman is bewildering.

The fable captures a horrifying situation of helplessness. In our moment of need, there is no one to turn to. Indeed, this is a situation that one finds in many other works of Kafka as well. Like the fables of the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard, those of Kafka provoke us to fresh thinking. This fabulist imagination runs through many of his writings and some critics have made the not unreasonable argument that it is a defining feature of his fictional work.

Commenting on Franz Kafka’s novels, short stories and fables, the well-known literary critic Harold Bloom, a great admirer of Kafka says that Kafka explored the idea of human guilt with remarkable prescience.

Many writers before Kafka, including Shakespeare had selected guilt as a privileged theme worthy of sustained exploration. But in the case of Kafka, it is demonstrable that this theme was central to his work and he brought a new vision and understanding to its depiction.

As Harold Bloom says, ‘Hamlet suffers guilt only for the murder he has not yet performed. Shrewder in this regard than Goethe, Kafka seems to have understood that guilt, in Shakespeare, is now not to be doubted and precedes all actual crimes, not Christian original sin but the Shakespearean-Freudian unconscious sense of guilt is the law of Kafka’s cosmos also.’ Bloom believes that guilt has priority in Kafka because it can be regarded as the payment exacted by our indestructibility.

According to Kafka we are guilty precisely due to the fact that our deepest self is seen to be indestructible. As Bloom says,’ I suspect that Kafka’s evasiveness and allusiveness alike are defences for his sense of the indestructible, a sense bequeathed by him to Beckett at his best in Endgame, Krapps Last Tape, Malone dies and how it is.’.

This indestructibility that Bloom refers to is not a substance but an energy that keeps on flowing when everything else has stalled. Kafka, then, glosses the idea of guilt in a new and insightful manner. This concept is deeply embedded in his projected vision.

Obsession

Another interesting facet of Kafka’s writing that gives it a distinctive shape and direction is his obsession with paternalism. It grows out of his childhood experiences – his dislike for his father, his conviction that his father never tried to understand him and exercised an authoritarian presence which Kafka felt was stifling. This antipathy towards his father, it seems to me, he expanded to cover all forms of authoritarianisms – from bureaucracy to legal proceedings.

His novels such as The Castle and The Trial bear this out. Kafka’s relations with his father were fraught. His father was a big, self-made man who was unafraid or unwilling to exercise his authority on his family. And Franz Kafka was subject to his severe disciplinary gaze.

He felt a sense of self-diminishment in his father’s intimidating physical and emotional presence. He wrote a long letter to his father titled Letter to His Father which was never delivered. In it Kafka is merciless in his condemnation of his father. Passages such as the following abound in his letter.

‘In keeping, furthermore, was your intellectual domination. You had worked your way so far up by your own energies alone, and as a result you had unbounded confidence in your opinion.

That was not yet so dazzling for me as a child as later for the boy growing up. From your armchair you ruled the world. Your opinion was correct, every other was mad, wild, not normal. Your self-confidence indeed was so great that you had no need to be consistent at all and yet never ceased to be in the right.

It did sometimes happen that you had no opinions whatever about a matter and as a result all opinions that were possible with respect to the matter were necessarily wrong, without exception. You were capable, for instance, of running down the Czechs, and then the Germans, and the Jews, and what is more, not only selectively but in every respect, and finally nobody was left except your self. For me you took on the enigmatic quality that all tyrants have, whose rights are based in their person and not frreson.al least so it seemed to me.’

Indictment

What is interesting about this letter to his father is that it is not only a severe indictment of him and the kind of terror he exercised; it s also an attempt to look at things from the father’s perspective.

As Erich Heller accurately observed, ‘it is safe to say that no father has ever had a son so aggressive as a prosecutor and so effective as the same father’s defence attorney, with both the prosecutor and the defence attorney distinguishing themselves as psychologists of the first order.’

This letter allows us to understand deeply the fears and anxieties that Kafka entertained about paternalism, bureaucracy and the law as well as the complicated relationships he saw between guilt and punishment.

Franz Kafka was a deeply committed writer – his commitment to literature was boundless. Everything else, including his personal life, was of secondary importance.

As he said emphatically in one of his letters, ‘I consist of literature and am unable to be anything else.’ Hence, it can be said and as indeed has frequently been said, the line dividing the personal and the literary in the case of Kafka is undoubtedly more illusory and elusive. In a diary entry, Kafka once remarked, ‘who is to confirm for me the truth or probability of this, that it is only because of my literary mission that I am uninterested in all other things and therefore heartless.’ A writer who comes close to Kafka in this regard is Flaubert.

Franz Kafka is a hugely talented writer who invites diverse interpretations. There are almost as many interpretations of his fiction as there are commentators. I will discuss later this aspect of his writings in detail. The range of interpretations of Kafka’s writings is immense and Kafka is in many ways responsible for encouraging this interpretive proliferation. It is as if he wanted his compositions to not be subject to the disturbing effects of interpretation.

The celebrated German critic Walter Benjamin recognised this fact. He said that ‘he (Kafka) took all conceivable precautions against the interpretation of his writings….one has to find one’s way in them circumspectly, cautiously and warily.’ and Auden went so far as to assert,’ Perhaps when he wished his writings be destroyed, Kafka foresaw the nature of too many admirers.’

The challenges that Kafka’s writings offer to the potential interpreter grow out of his techniques and visions. The celebrated French critic and theorist Roland Barthes understood this well.

He said, ‘Kafka’s technique says that the world’s meaning is unutterable, that the author’s only task is to explore possible significations, each of which taken by itself will be only a (necessary) lie but whose multiplicity will be the writer’s truth itself.

That is Kafka’s paradox.’ The paradox is that art depends on truth, but truth, because it is indivisible, cannot know itself. Hence, to tell the truth is to lie. The writer is the truth, and yet when he speaks he lies. This paradox that Roland Barthes draws attention to, of course, makes the act of interpreting Kafka’s work that much more difficult.

What I have sought to do so far is to point out some of the distinctive features that mark Franz Kafka’s writings. That he was one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century who had an impact on writers as various as Borges, Camus, Sartre, Beckett, Garcia Marquez and Elias Cavetti is abundantly clear.

His writings served to introduce a new word into the English language - Kafkaesque. This adjective refers to the bewilderment, anxiety, chaos, disorientation, nightmarishness, and illogicality that characterise the world of Kafka, and by extension the world we inhabit. Readers and writers in many parts of the globe have reacted this Kafkaesque world with a sense of ready recognition. That is a measure of Kafka’s sensitivity and perspicacity.

Franz Kafka, to be sure, is no stranger to us in Sri Lanka. A number of his works have been translated into Sinhala. Since the 1960s his short stories and novels have been subject to commentaries by local critics. Kafka’s work seems to have influenced several modern Sinhala writers such as Simon Nawagattegama. I myself, in a series of critical essays written in Sinhala in the 1960s sought to underline the importance of Kafka’s work and his potential relevance for us. And each generation, I believe, needs to understand for itself the potential resonances of his writings.

Kafka is a writer who enjoys a universal appeal and this is attested by the fact that he is one of the most widely translated authors in modern times. At the same time, it has to be recognised that his writings emerge from a specific socio-cultural background and distinct biography.

Hence it is important to have some notion of his growth as a writer. As I stated earlier, there is indeed an intimate connection between his life and work. Franz Kafka was born in Prague on July 3 1883.

His father, a self-made businessman, was Hermann Kafka and his mother Julie Lowy. He was the oldest child in the family; he had two brothers and three sisters. He grew up during a period when Austria-Hungary, of which Bohemia formed a part, was on the verge of separating out into its constitutional nationalities. Kafka was a German-speaking Jew in Prague, and that made him a minority of a minority. He was sent to a state grammar school and later to the German University of Prague, where he studied German literature and law. It is evident that both these fields of study had an impact on his later creative writings.

Kafka displayed an interest in writing from his young days. .At the age of 20 he worked on a novel titled The Child and the City, and the manuscript apparently is lost. Two years later he meets Max Brod who became his closest friend and literary executor.

He exerted a profound influence on Kafka’s life and reputation as a writer. Kafka asked Brod to destroy all his writings after his death; Brod, fortunately for us, defied Kafka’s orders and published his works after his death; some of them, such as The Trial and The Castle and Metamorphosis, became the literary masterpieces they are. In 1907 he wrote a fragment of a novel titled Wedding Preparations in the Country. In the same year he accepted a job in a Prague insurance company. Two years later he published eight prose pieces, and they constituted parts of a later volume titled Meditation.

Death

In 1911 he started working on his novel America which was published after his death. Three years later he began working on his novel The Trial, which was also published after his death and gained a worldwide reputation as a masterpiece. The same year he published his famous short story the Metamorphosis.

Kafka had several love affairs but never married; twice he broke his engagement to Felice Bauer. Kafka feared that marriage would get in the way of his literary ambitions. In 1919 he wrote two of his celebrated stories, The Penal Colony and A Country Doctor.

The same year he wrote his famous long letter to his father that I referred to earlier; it was never delivered to him. In 1922 he started writing his famous novel The Castle and also his well-received story A Hunger Artist.

Franz Kafka was a sickly child and later he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. After the diagnosis, he knew his end was near.

He died on June 3 1924 and was buried eight days later in the Jewish cemetery in Prague. His two brothers died in their infancy and his sisters in Nazi concentration camps. Kafka, as I said earlier, was steadfastly committed to his writing and nothing else mattered more to him. He set the highest standards for himself and often felt that he had failed to meet them. He

constantly reiterated the total surrender to writing that is required of a writer. He once made the following claim.‘Writing means opening up oneself to an excessive degree; the most extreme openness of heart and giving of oneself, in which a human being believes he is about to lose himself in his intercourse with other human beings – for everyone wants to live as long as he is alive – this openness of heart and giving of oneself is much too inadequate for writing.’ And he felt that he had not captured that intensity. ‘What I have written was written in a lukewarm bath, I have never experienced the eternal Hell of true writers.’ Many would agree – and I certainly feel that way – that Kafka is being too harsh on himselF.

To be continued