Franz Kafka

From Philosopedia

Kafka, Franz (3 July 1883 - 3 June 1924)

Kafka, the Prague-born novelist who wrote in German, is one of the most influential of 20th century writers. Although he came from a middle-class Jewish family from Bohemia, he had a quadruple alienation, according to Martin Seymour-Smith:

(a) from his Jewishness;

(b) his Czech identity, as a German speaker;

(c) his family; and

(d) from his own potentiality to lead a full life.

As Seymour-Smith explains, Kafka and his near contemporary Rainer Maria Rilke were “torn between art (which reveals life) and life (which rejects the solitariness, selfishness, lovelessness of the dedicated artistic condition).” Unlike Rilke, however, Kafka could not find full faith in his writing and his life, except for a few moments, was even more wretched and guilt-ridden. Kafka’s characters are functional but he is

• tragically uninterested in character: all are mysteriously in the right, trying him for the crime of human insufficiency, for dedication to inadequate words. Joseph K in Der Prozess (1925), The Trial, is being tried for nothing he can specify but he feels guilty and is executed. Karl Rossmann in Amerika (1927), America, is punished for allowing himself to be seduced; and despite the relatively comic surface of the book, it remained tragically unfinished because Kafka wanted to end it on a note of reconciliation and could not do it. As for the castle in the again unfinished novel of that name, Kafka’s greatest: ultimately this, too, is reconciliation: the possibility of being a writer and being a full human being, who has a family and a human function.

The opening sentence of The Trial is exemplary of Kafka’s portrayal of enigmatic reality:

Someone must have slandered Joseph K., because one morning, without his having done anything wrong, he was arrested.

Das Schloss (1926, The Castle) was unfinished but contains the curious plot in which it is believed someone might be listening at the other end of a telephone line (God?) but no one responds (no God?).

“Kafkaesque,” as a result, has come to describe surreal distortion and a sense of impending danger. Kafka’s world is both dreamlike and real, as shown in The Metamorphosis, in which the character of Gregor Samsa, when the story is cross-read, lends himself to a kind of floating meaning.

“I was Gregor Samsa,” Paul Monette once confessed, adding, “It was not the last time I would take my life out of a book.” Other gay writers have agreed, pointing out that the work is like a parable of closeted denial and coming out.

Numbers of others have commented similarly about how they have felt the alienation from family that Kafka described so uniquely. Critics speak of Kafka’s spinelessness against a strong-willed, self-made father, a man who would not comprehend his son although Kafka desperately desired his approval.

Despite the “father = Father = God” equation and despite his bug-like dependence, Kafka never is able to find happiness, as shown in Die Verwandlung. Not with whores or girlfriends. He broke off an engagement with one girlfriend, then became engaged to her again, then became engaged in 1919 to another, then broke that off. In 1923 he met Dora Dymant, who was twenty years younger, and she stayed with him until his death in a sanatorium near Vienna, tragically unable ever to find what he had been searching for: personal salvation.

His literary legacy was Kafka’s sole concern. In his desk upon his death was a note to Max Brod, a friend:

• Here is my last will concerning everything I have written . . . the only books that can stand are . . . The Judgment, The Stoker, Metamorphosis, Penal Colony, Country Doctor . . . I do not mean that I wish them to be . . . handed down to posterity. On the contrary, should they disappear altogether that would please me best. . . . But everything else of mine . . . without exception is to be burned, and I beg you to do this as soon as possible.

Brod, however, not only failed to comply but edited The Trial, The Castle, and America for posthumous publication.

J. M. Coetzee, professor of General Literature at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, prefers the 1998 translation of The Castle by Mark Harman, explaining that Edwin Muir’s translation is not nearly so good and suggesting that Muir because of his limited knowledge of German guessed at Kafka’s meaning, often missing the point.

Most critics do not find Kafka “a Jew,” although his mother was a Jew and he learned from his parents about guilt, salvation, and the very concepts that made his life so miserable. Rather, he was not actively into any organized religion . . . none except art.

{CE; GL; OCP; PA; J. M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books, 14 May 1998; WWTCL}