The word "Kafkaesque" entered the English language, if the Oxford English Dictionary has it right, on January 4th, 1947, when the New Yorker magazine referred to "a Kafkaesque nightmare of blind alleys". In 1954 Arthur Koestler invoked a time "long before the Moscow purges revealed that weird, Kafkaesque pattern to the incredulous world".
The Soviet pattern was enforced between 1936 and 1938 when Stalin ordered the arrest of the remnants of the Bolsheviks who had turned against him. Torture led to false confessions and show trials in which Stalin invited the world, credulous and incredulous, to witness the righteousness of the Soviet regime.
Executions followed as night the day. Koestler's Darkness at Noon and George Orwell's Animal Farm concentrated the minds of English-speaking readers on issues of totalitarian violence. Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Humanism and Terror performed a similar exercise, more philosophically, in French. "Kafkaesque" is often used loosely to refer to any damned stuff that happens; more strictly, to official, impersonal terror.
Triumph of retribution
Franz Kafka was born in Prague on July 3rd, 1883, to quite well-off, assimilated Jewish parents. He died of tuberculosis of the larynx in a sanatorium in Austria, a month short of his 41st birthday, on June 6th, 1924, and was buried in Prague. His father, Herman, was a rough-and-ready fellow, aggressive, thick, but a competent man of the world who made money in a fancy-goods store. He knew that German, not Czech, was the language of advancement in Prague, so he kept his eyes on that object.
He had no interest in his son's writings: when a new book or a story appeared he told Franz to leave it on the side of a table. Kafka paid off many an old score by writing his first irresistible short story, The Judgment (1913), and Letter to My Father (1919), a triumph of retribution. But he also acknowledged that "as a father you were too strong for me". His mother was more accessible.
Kafka wrote three novels, The Trial, Amerika and The Castle, none of them satisfactorily completed. His shorter fiction consists of many parables, fables, aphorisms and stories, the most famous being The Metamorphosis, The Great Wall of China and In the Penal Colony. He was not a full-time writer. He worked first for an Italian insurance company in Prague and later for a trade-union insurance company, also in Prague, that employed him to deal with industrial accidents, employment in which he excelled.
As a sideline he became a partner in an asbestos factory that his brother-in-law set up, but he rarely went inside the building or fulfilled any of his duties. However, much as he complained of not having enough time to write, he didn’t seriously think of giving up his insurance job until near the end, when he was wretchedly ill.
Tall and strikingly good-looking, Kafka was appallingly attractive to women, and spent a lot of time and energy writing to them. I think he was a voluptuary of letters. He consumed five years explaining to Felice Bauer by letter why he could not contemplate marriage. Besides, it was easier to express his passion in letters when the woman in the case was not around. His diaries, which he kept from 1910 to 1923, contain some of his most memorable sentences, most of them notations of trouble. “I have always been discontented,” he wrote, “even with my contentment.” But he must have been occasionally serene, for he loved his sister Ottla and had several lasting friends. “The distance to my fellow man is for me a very long one,” he confided to one of his notebooks, but sometimes he was prepared to go the distance.
Three volumes
Reiner Stach, the latest biographer of Kafka, planned his work in three volumes, two of which are now available in English. The Decisive Years, published in German in 2002, deals with the life from 1910 to 1915. The Years of Insight was published in German in 2008; it tells of Kafka's terrible last years, from 1916 to 1924. The first volume, not yet published, will describe Kafka's childhood and youth. It has been delayed because of legal problems connected with the archives of Kafka's friend Max Brod. Meanwhile, the two volumes come to nearly 1,200 pages of mettlesome writing, continuously vivid. Stach spends too many pages dismissing his biographical colleagues, but he treats the large issues with impressive candour.
Often he writes a sentence that stays in one's mind most tellingly, as when he refers to "Kafka's extraordinary ability to use facts that have shed their material origins". I thought I understood that phrase when I first came to it, but now I'm not sure. How have these facts shed their material origins? Stach may simply mean facts that Kafka has forgotten, except for a trace of them that remains. Or facts that later, as a writer, Kafka treated to a formal deflection. Or, more likely, he may mean what Walter Benjamin, Kafka's first and best critic, meant when he wrote that Kafka "divests the human gesture of its traditional supports and then has a subject for reflection without end". I recall several episodes in The Trial, Amerika and The Castle where we have to think of the circus or of vaudeville to make a context, rather than otherwise to think of life: the seven dogs in The Trial, the antics of K's two assistants in The Castle, the perfunctory "Nature Theatre of Oklahoma" in Amerika.
Kafka made life even more difficult for himself than it had to be, by refusing to practise the domestic economy of any received ideas, any ideology, any system of sentiments that he might take for granted. As in A Country Doctor, he wrote of horrific things in a sober, deadpan style, as if he were forbidden to enjoy the full pleasure of the language. He was free to specialise in a certain sense of life but not to feel gratified by the exertion of such freedom.
Reiner Stach maintains that "in Kafka's late works, guilt and punishment would no longer have a prominent role". But it is hard to forget the moment in In the Penal Colony when the officer says to the explorer: "This is how the matter stands. I have been appointed judge in this penal colony. Despite my youth. For I was the former Commandant's assistant in all penal matters and know more about the apparatus than anyone. My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted."
Or the first sentence of The Trial: "Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning."
Ultimate values
Many attempts have been made to propose ultimate values that Kafka might be supposed to endorse, notably religion, metaphysics, politics and society. To no convincing avail. Reverting to Walter Benjamin's sentence about divesting the human gesture of its traditional supports, the first one that Kafka divested was what Lionel Trilling called "the world in its ordinary actuality . . . as we know it socially, politically, erotically, domestically".
The second one was the respect the traditional novel accords to character. There are no characters in Kafka's fiction; there are only forces that collide, bouncing off each other. These forces are what they are; they do not develop as characters develop, by achieving some degree of self-understanding or by the impact of one character on another. In The Castle K is cheeky, and that is nearly his only quality. The relation between K and Frieda is not a relation at all; it is the operancy of two forces, differing in intensity but in no other respect. It might make sense as the interaction of agents in chemistry or biology.
The third divestiture was the bearing of morality. The question of morality arises no more with K and Frieda than it does with Punch and Judy. Neither of them has a conscience. The show ends when the puppeteer has had enough; he brings it to an end without regard to justice or the moral imperative. So does Kafka. He is not great in the organisation of vast materials: comparison with Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Stendhal, James or George Eliot is off the point. Kafka’s novels come to an end when he can think of no good reason to have them continue.
He is a writer of extraordinary force when the issue is power, but even then he has a short breath. Several chapters in the novels, such as "In the Cathedral", chapter 9 of The Trial, would do just as well, if not better, as independent short stories. Perhaps he is best in his shortest stories, like this one which I quote in full:
“Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.”
That story is taken from one of Kafka's notebooks, but there is a sentence above it that the story may be expected to illustrate: "Do not let Evil make you believe you can have secrets from it."
Denis Donoghue's new book, Metaphor, will be published by Harvard University Press in early 2014
