The enigmatic Kafka and his continuing influence

[Part 2]

What I have done so far, in my earlier columns on Kafka, is to present a broad picture of the man and his work with a view to displaying his uniqueness. What I wish to do now is to re-capture very briefly some of the dominant approaches to his writings advocated by diverse commentators and critics. These approaches, which are more suggestive than exhaustive, index the breadth and range of possible interpretations. Kafka was indubitably an enigmatic writer and it is clear that he consciously cultivate that image. In one sense, it was a self-protective measure. It had the effect, to be sure, of provoking varying exegeses from diverse vantage points.

As Paul Auster reminds us, of all modern writers, Kafka can be described as the most private, the most difficult of access. Indeed, his life and writings have often been misunderstood. He published very little during his lifetime and but for the devotion of his friend Max Brod who decoded to publish Kafka’s writings after his death, despite his request that they be destroyed, we would have been derived of these masterpieces.

As Auster says,’ the very appearance of his work, then, was surrounded by mystery and ambiguity. Why had the novels remained unfinished? And why, given the obvious brilliance and originality, had their author want to suppress them? An image grew up of Kafka as a cringing bureaucrat, a classic victim of modern society, a kind of shadow-man.’

Contradictions

As a man and a writer, Franz Kafka incarnated several dominant contradictions. His friends and close associates saw him as a man with an indubitable wit and sense of humour who was generous and full of high spirits. On the other hand, the image of Kafka that e merges from his diaries and other intimate writings is one of a man overcome by self-doubts, self-hatred, intensely alert to his deficiencies. He was fully aware of the fact that he had been endowed with literary talent; at the same time he had serious doubts about the merits of what he had written.

Kafka made no distinction between his life and writing. Indeed his radical ambition was to transform his life into a literary work. As he once claimed, ‘I have no literary interests, but am made of literature. I am nothing else, and cannot be anything else.’ These contradictions serve to deepen the mystery surrounding Kafka. Hence, it is hardly surprising that different literary commentators have opted for different paths of interpretation of his writings.

I would like to identify eight such approaches. The first is the biographical approach. Given the mystery surrounding his life and works, it is only natural that many literary critics were drawn inexorably towards this approach. They examined very carefully his diaries, his published letters, the testimony of friends and associates and girl friends to gather as much information and insights as they could in the fond hope that they would serve to illuminate better his creative writings.

When examining Franz Kafka’s body of writing from a biographical perspective, two prominent themes, it seems to me, stand out. The first is his complicated relationship with his father. The second is his precarious existence as a German-speaking Jew in Prague. Indeed, he was as a result, doubly marginalised.

In recent times, with the rise of structuralism, post-structuralism and post-modernism, with their emphasis on linguistic productivity rather than authorial inventiveness, the biographical approach has suffered a serious set back. Even so, many commentators have been drawn to this approach in order to make greater sense of Kafka’s writings. For example, some critics have found his letters extremely useful. Reading private letters, which were meant to remain private, can leave us with a sense of unease.

However, in the case of Kafka, they are extremely illuminative in that they occupy an intermediate space between the inward struggles depicted in the diaries and the so-called objective descriptions contained in the biographies. As Paul Auster accurately pointed out his letters enable us to understand his relations with the world and give us a context in which we can penetrate his character.

Information

Kafka’s letters to his friends contain much valuable information regarding his interests and investments as a writer and his outlook on the world of words. For example, in a letter to his friend Oskar Pollack, he memorably says that, ‘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 to the head, what are we reading it for? ….But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone who loved more than ourselves, like a 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.’

I stated earlier that one of the themes in his writings that biographically-oriented critics have fastened on to his complicated relationship with his father. He saw his father, rightly or wrongly, as an excessively intimidating figure, and he extended this counter-productive paternal authority to include the adverse effects of law and bureaucracy. His novels like The Castle and The Trial bear testimony to this fact.

In a letter titled Letter to His Father, Kafka sought to explain the fraught relationship between his father and himself. Kafka asserts that as a child he was incessantly dwarfed by his father’s imposing physical presence; at the same time he was proud of him. He recalls how he was totally defenseless against his orders. Consequently he was rapidly losing his self-confidence and overwhelmed by a sense of guilt. Some critics claim that Kafka’s obsession with law, bureaucracy and authority emanate from this unhappy encounter with his father.

Imagination

Similarly, his Jewishness, his minority status, according to some commentators, activated his imagination and led to his literary creations. Once again, the biographically-oriented critics are quick to pursue leads contained in his diaries, his letters as well the testimony of his friends and acquaintances to explore this theme. The biographical approach, it seems to me, despite it being somewhat old-fashioned, has yielded valuable results.

However, not all are happy with this approach. For example Kafka’s fellow-countryman and the eminent writer Milan Kundera scorns biographical criticism that draws on letters, diaries and other documents to illuminate Kafka’s literary creativity and inventiveness.

The second important approach to Kafka’s writings that I wish to identify can be termed the philosophical approach. Many critics seem to favor this mode of interpretation. For example, the well-known writer Erich Heller contends that the key to Franz Kafka’s novels and short stories is to be found in Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy. He advanced a philosophy that can be described as the philosophy of the universal will. It was Schopenhauer’s belief that all beings are foredoomed to a life of suffering; their suffering is that of the will he argued that this will which generates suffering is the blind and unconscious ground of all being. (Schopenhauer, it needs to be remembered, was influenced by Asian traditions of thought).

Existentialism

Erich Heller is of the opinion that this idea permeates Kafka’s writings. His characters display a propensity to fall victim to a sense of guilt. This guilt arises, according to Heller, not from anything that they have done but from the fact of their very being. For example, Joseph K. in the trial, is forced to suffer not because he has committed any objectionable act but because he is a human being.(There are many critics who disagree with this viewpoint forwarded by Heller)

Another line of philosophical thinking that has been advanced to make greater sense of Kafka’s writings is that of Existentialism. It is hardly surprising that stalwarts associated with existentialism such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus estimated Kafka so highly. Existentialism advocates the view, as opposed to rationalists and empiricists who believed that the universe is pre-determined, and that it constitutes an ordered system intelligible to the reflective observer; he or she can come to know the natural laws that regulate human beings and appreciate the importance of reason as the force shaping human actions. Existentialists, on the other hand, stress the chaos, disorderliness and absurdity that mark human existence. Clearly, Kafka’s writings are closer to the second view than the first.

The existentialists argue that the problem of being must take precedence over that of knowledge in philosophical inquiry. They contend that it is not possible to make being the subject of objective investigation; the individual arrives at an understanding of being through reflections on his or her distinctive and specific existence. An important facet of their belief-system is that human beings are enveloped in a condition of anxiety emanating from the realisation that life in meaningless. Writers and thinkers such as Albert Camus subscribed to this mode of thinking, and t is evident that Kafka’s worldview overlaps with this. It’s no surprise, therefore, that existentialists like Sartre ad Camus thought so highly of Kafka’s work.

The third approach to Kafka’s work that I wish to identify is the psychological approach. This is, in many ways, connected to the philosophical approach that I discussed in the earlier paragraphs.

Kafka, in his writings, focused on issues of paranoia, tense relationships between father and son, inner conflicts between ego, id and super ego, the suppressive impact of civilization on human fulfillment and so on.

All these themes have clear Freudian resonances. Some critics have sought to invoke the formulations and concepts of Sigmund Freud to make greater sense of Kafka’s novels and short stories.

The idea of dream narrative is central to Kafka’s efforts. It can be said that he found his way to dream narratives more through introspection than any deployment of Freud’s ideas. He was, no doubt, familiar with Freud’s work, but it was the observation and reflections on his own mental activity that urged him along this path. Like Freud, Kafka believed that dreams were a way of allowing the unconscious to make its presence amidst the imperious authority of the conscious. There are other parallels. Martin Greenberg says that, ‘Freudian ideas undoubtedly influenced Kafka and may have helped him to find himself as a writer in 1912. Kafka’s subjective world of apparent irrationality hiding a heart of meaning is Freudian through and through. His literal and mythopoetic quality is Freudian. His conception of the dream is in the larger sense the same as Freud’s; both understood it as an expression of unconscious experience.’

Franz Kafka’s relationship to Freud was complex. He followed Freud’s writings closely, and wrote after completing one of his short stories, ‘thoughts about Freud, of course.’ He also, at one moment in his life, hoped to publish an anti-patriarchal journal with one of Freud’s disciples. At the same time, he had his antipathy to psychoanalysis; and felt that therapy would have the effect of destroying conflict fundamental to his creative writing. There are several critics who have sought to make use of Freud to shed light on Kafka’s endeavours. In more recent times, the psychoanalytic writings of Jacques Lacan have inspired commentators who are more inclined towards postmodernism.

Psychoanalysts

Speaking of psychoanalysts, I would like to propose the name of Donald, Winnicott as one who would be able to illuminate Kafka’s literary endeavours in interesting ways. I don’t know whether this connection between Winnicott and Kafka has been made previously, but I would like to make it now. Winnicott was an object-relations psychoanalysts. In works such as Playing and Reality he made a case for the importance of what he termed the potential space or the transitional space. This space occupies an intermediate position between the inner world and outer world and combines the vitality of both. Works of literature, cinema, music and so on can be most profitably understood when seen in relation to the power of this third space. Kafka’s writings, it seems to me, end themselves more easily than those of many others to be examined in relation to Winnicott’s ideas. This is indeed a line of inquiry well worth pursuing in depth.

Fourth, there are critics who are determined to explore Kafka’s work not in terms of psychological features but in terms of social factors. These commentators are keen to explain Kafka’s writings as critiques of industrial society, of bureaucratization, of exploitation, of social fragmentation, of totalitarianism and the ever expanding power of capitalism. There are others who choose to examine the portrayal of gender and sexuality in Kafka’s work in relation to the tensions and contradictions generated within capitalist societies. They seek to investigate the crises depicted in Kafka’s novels and short stories in terms of the problems unleashed by modernity. A recent writer who has cogently argued for this approach is Elizabeth Boa.

She says that, the emancipation of both Jews and women need to be understood as features of the process of social modernization. It is her contention that the discourses of race and gender as those of nationalism, imperialism, class do not merely coexist but interfuse and provide us with contexts for understanding Kafka’s fiction. Elizabeth Boa says that, ‘Kafka’s work offers a profoundly political vision of society and of individual subjectivity as sites of struggle in action and thought.’

She also makes the important point that Franz Kafka started to write at a time when the new century was seen as ushering in an age of freedom as well as new threats and challenges to stable identity. The perception of change was promoted by the economic processes of industrialisation, the rise of the stock market, and the expansion of international trade by means of transport and communication and the changing balance between the urban and rural sectors.

Contradiction

There was a contradiction within capitalism. It sought to promote liberal individualism; at the same time, it resulted in the callous disregard for the effects of the modernizing process leading to class inequalities, unfulfilled aspirations of the new proletariat, sprawling urban growth ushering in disease and prostitution, generational tensions etc. it is against these social experiences, critics like Elizabeth Boa argue, that Kafka’s writings need to be examined. It is in this light that she in her book, Kafka: Gender, Class and Race in the Letters and Fictions offers us fascinating readings of The Trial and The Castle.

The fifth critical approach to Kafka’s writings that I wish to identify can be termed the political approach and it is, to be sure, closely linked to the social approached that I discussed earlier. In this regard, I wish to single out the book Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature by the distinguished French writers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattarii. In their book, they counter the widespread notion that sees Kafka’s work as a case of Oedipalised neurosis and a flight into transcendence, guilt and inwardness.

They maintain that Kafka was a man of joy who promoted a radical politics and challenged established hierarchies in this book, Deleuze and Guattari propose the concept of minor literature in relation to Kafka’s writings. By minor literature they refer to the use of a major language by a minority writer to subvert it from within. They argue that Kafka writing as a Jew in Prague in German becomes a stranger within it and sought to subvert it from within. It is their contention that Kafka’s work serves as a model for comprehending all critical language that must function within the parameters of a dominant language and culture.

This book by Deleuze anf Guattari has been most influential and has generated a great deal of discussion. Post-colonial theorists picked up their concept of minor literature and deployed it in their respective interpretations to great advantage. For example, they wanted to examine the English writings of Indian or Nigerian writers in the light of these subversive intentions. While there have been many who welcomed Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature as an insightful work, there are others who dismissed it as based in a misunderstanding.

For example the influential scholar of German literature, Prof. Stanley Corngold of Princeton university says that their thesis is aberrant because what, after all, is the subversive Prague German literature that Kafka wrote? Corngold complains that Deleuze and Guattari provide no philological descriptors at all.

The sixth interpretive approach to Kafka’s writings that I wish to highlight is what I term the parabolic approach. Kafka wrote several short parables that I referred to in my earlier columns. In addition, his major works such as The Trial, and The Castle contain many parabolic elements. He encouraged allegorical readings of his fiction. The isolation of the individual was a central concern of his; to portray, ‘completely unsure of my footing in the world, in this town, in my family.’ To enhance this effect of alienation, he eliminated the distinctive cultural signs that had conventionally served to situate works of fiction in a specific time and place. As Mark Anderson points out, ‘almost all place names, dates, proper names, and other references to a world outside the text were effaced.’ Furthermore the physical laws and social norms that guided the activities of this external world were also ignored. For example, a salesman turns into a large insect. A number of critics have sought to make use of a framework of parable to get to grips with Kafka’s fiction.

Cultural critic

The brilliant German cultural critic Walter Benjamin also favored a similar approach. He talked about the work of Kafka being an ellipse with foci far apart and are determined by mystical experience; at the same time, the experience and sensibility of the modern urban-dweller impinges on it Benjamin goes on to say that the reality precipitated by modernity can no longer be experienced by the individual, and that Kafka’s world with its playfulness and interventions of angels is the exact complement of his times.

The two celebrated European thinkers Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben were also interested in pursuing the idea of the parable in discussing Kafka’s work. For example, Derrida and Agamben disagreed regarding the best way of reading Kafka – in fact, Agamben’s views of the parable by Kafka, Before the Law, was exactly the opposite of Derrida’s.

The sixth approach to Franz Kafka’s writings that I would like to delineate is what I term the engagement with Kafka’s Jewishness. Kafka was a Jew living in Prague, and writing in German. Hence, as I pointed out earlier, he was doubly marginalised, and this marginalization inevitably found expression in his writing. The engagement with Kafka’s Jewishness has to proceed along two tracks. The one would focus on his contemporary plight as a Jew in Prague and the social, political, cultural issues connected with this fact. The other track should focus on his Jewish religion, his attitude to God and divine order. His friend and literary executor Max Brod was of the opinion that Kafka’s fiction should be understood in terms of his engagement with, and partiality to, the Jewish religion. Some of the observations of Gersholm Scholem, Harold Bloom (though to a lesser extent) point in this direction.

Kafka’s relation to Jewish Gnosticism is one important area. Gerhard Kurtz, who wrote a most insightful monograph on the death drive that animated Kafka’s texts. said that, ‘Kafka’s literature of existence speaks of border skirmishes between life and death – of anxiety, the experience of death, guilt, and suffering. Its recurrent metaphysical paradigms are….homelessness, the loss of orientations, impotence, “thrownness”, exposure, vulnerability, anxiety, madness, sickness, imprisonment, alienation. All are metaphors of Gnostic origin.

Scholar

Another Kafka scholar. Corngold says that Gnosticism is literally present in Kafka’s writings, although much of it appears foreign to him. However, as a number of Gnostic features have a haunting relevance to the larger interests of Kafka, they can be characterized as a Gnosticism suited to a reading of his fiction. He goes on to say that Gnostic elements permeate Kafka’s work; however, they do not overwhelm it. Therefore, it can be said that what we find in Kafka’s texts is a Gnosticism with a simple g. critics have found in many descriptions and imagery the influence of Gnosticism. For example, in the following passage taken from his story the metamorphosis, the image of the father is reminiscent of Gnostic formulations. ‘ Truly this was not the father he had imagined to himself…..and yet, and yet, could that be his father? ……From under his bushy eyebrows his black eyes darted fresh and penetrating glasses….as he advanced with a grim visage.’

While commentators such as Gershom Scholem. Gerhard Kurtz and Max Brod saw direct connections between Kafka’s texts and Jewish religious thought, critics like Harold Bloom perceived indirect, but not insignificant connections. As Bloom remarked, ‘Kafka, despite Gershom Scholem’s authoritative attempts to claim him for Jewish Gnosticism, is both more and less than a Gnostic, as we might expect.’ Gnosticism underlines the fact that the presence of God remains in the deepest recesses of self and he is both alien and intimate. This fact, it seems to me, informs much of Kafka’s writings.

The seventh is what I prefer to term the comic approach. There are those critics who argue that the best way of understanding Kafka’s baffling work is through the lens of comedy. The well-known American novelist Philip Roth once imagined film version of Kafka’s The Castle in which Groucho Marx played the role of K, the land-surveyor and Chico and Harpo Marx as his two aides. As Milan Kundera emphatically stated, ‘the comic is inseparable from the very essence of the Kafkan.’ This might appear to be a strange remark in view of the fact that many of Kafka’s texts are somber, even morbid, infused with a darkness and terror However, when we delve beneath the surface we are also confronted by a pervasive comic imagination

In the humour of Kafka, one observes a curious blending of the comic and the horrific. Kundera says that, ‘but it’s small comfort to the engineer to know that his story is comic. He is trapped in the joke of his own life like a fish in a bowl; he doesn’t find it funny,’ Indeed, a joke can be considered a joke only if one is outside of the bowl. In the case of Kafka what happens id that he takes us into the belly of the joke. Kundera calls this the ‘horror of the comic.’

There is another important distinction to be made about the comic imagination of Kafka. As critics like Kundera have pointed out, in the world of Kafka, the comic is not presented as a counterpoint to the tragic. Unlike in the case of Shakespeare’s plays, the function of the comic is not to make the tragic more endurable by lowering the tone. On the contrary, it is an attempt to uncover the true shape and intent of the tragic.

The following passage from Milan Kundera, which is highly suggestive, captures for me a very important and defining element of Franz Kafka’s comic imagination. Speaking of the comic element in Kafka he says that, ‘it doesn’t accompany the tragic, not at all, it destroys it in the egg and thus deprives the victims of the only consolation to be found in the (real or supposed) grandeur of tragedy. The engineer loses his homeland, and everyone laughs.’

Modernism

The eighth approach to Kafka’s texts that I wish to single out is what I term the post-modernist approach. Here I am using the term post-modernist in a very broad sense to include post-structuralism and deconstructionism as well. Kafka is regarded as representing the high watermark of modernism; he is invariably associated with the growth of European literary modernism.

However, in recent times, there have been attempts made to assimilate him into post-modernism just as much as Marcel Proust, a leading light of modernism, has been linked by some to the interests of post-modernism.

The way literary representation has been turned into a problem by Kafka as well his playfulness, border crossings, blending of reality ad fantasy, de-valuing history are all features that hold a deep attraction to post-modernist thinkers.

There are many ways in which efforts have been made to incorporate Kafka into the post-modernist fold. Let me, as one example, cite Roland Barthes’ effort. He makes a distinction between symbol and allusion. The symbol is, for him, a convinced sign that enforces the analogy between form and idea. There is a singularity of purpose, certitude in the symbol. Allusion, by contrast, seeks to undermine the analogy the moment it is established. Barthes is of the opinion that Kafka’s narratives are not woven around symbols, as many have claimed, but around allusions. Roland Barthes cites a passage from the trial.

‘K is arrested on the orders of a tribunal; that is a familiar image of justice. But we learn that this tribunal does not regard crimes as our justice does; the resemblance is delusive, though not effaced. In short…. K feels he has been arrested, and everything happens as if K were really arrested.’ From this passage, Barthes extracts a dominant feature of Kafka’s art. ‘Kafka creates his work by systematically suppressing the as ifs; but it is the internal event which becomes the obscure term of the allusion.’

Barthes expresses the view that the shift from symbol to the allusion that Kafka has effected is the technical means by which the shift from assertion to interrogation is attained. This has clear post-modernist implications. Barthes seems to believe that the two phenomena assertion and interrogation are exclusive modes of reacting to the world and living. He says that the ‘allusive system functions as a kind of enormous sign to interrogate other signs.’ This interrogation of other signs is a preferred approach of post-moderrnists. Barthes points to the paradox at the heart of Kafka’s literary endeavour in the following manner.

Significations

‘Kafka’s technique says that the world’s meaning is unutterable, that the artist’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: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisible, cannot know itself; to tell the truth is to lie. Thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speaks he lies.’ Barthes formulation is indeed complex and needs careful unpacking.

What I have sought to do, then, in this short essay is to identify what I think are some of the most important interpretive approaches to Kafka. The list is more suggestive than exhaustive; one can, to be sure, usefully add to it. My intention has been to present to Sri Lankan readers unfamiliar with the vast exegetical literature that has grown around Kafka’s work as clearly as I can its nature and contours. It is, no doubt, a daunting task.

The classifications and commentaries that I have presented here somewhat sketchily are based on my readings and my understandings of this exegetical literature generated by Franz Kafka’s texts. Kafka constantly challenges us to read him in new ways.

To be continued