One of many paradoxes surrounding Kafka is the mismatch between his personal history and his socio-political legacy. There is no evidence that Kafka took serious interest in politics nor is there any indication that he endorsed any large cause or ideology. He lived with his parents nearly until his death, worked for the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague (although not as “a petty clerk” as many commentators wrongly claim, but, at least at some point, as one of the Institute’s highest-ranking officers) and did not lead anything remotely close to an active social life. How did he manage to produce works that have been hailed as prophetic of the darkest pages of the 20th century such as the Holocaust, Stalinist trials, and totalitarianism?
Milan Kundera suggested a possible answer to this question. According to Kundera, Kafka was not a prophet or a social scientist, but had a close knowledge of “intimate totalitarianism” practiced in such contexts as in his relationship with his father and “the psychological mechanisms that function in great (apparently incredible and inhuman) historical events are the same as those that regulate private (quite ordinary and very human) situations.” (Kundera, The Art of the Novel). A passage in Kafka’s famous fifty page-long Letter to my Father is quite revealing in this respect:
“There is only one episode in the early years of which I have a direct memory. You may remember it, too. One night I kept on whimpering for water, not, I am certain, because I was thirsty, but probably partly to be annoying, partly to amuse myself. After several vigorous threats had failed to have any effect, you took me out of bed, carried me out onto the balcony, and left me there alone for a while in my nightshirt, outside the shut door. I am not going to say that this was wrong—perhaps there was really no other way of getting peace and quiet that night—but I mention it as typical of your methods of bringing up a child and their effect on me. I dare say I was quite obedient afterward at that period, but it did me inner harm. What was for me a matter of course, that senseless asking for water, and then the extraordinary terror of being carried outside were two things that I, my nature being what it was, could never properly connect with each other. Even years afterward I suffered from the tormenting fancy that the huge man, my father, the ultimate authority, would come almost for no reason at all and take me out of bed in the night and carry me out onto the balcony, and that consequently I meant absolutely nothing as far as he was concerned.”
It is hard not to see a connection between this personal experience that Kafka actually lived as a child and what happens to his characters in his works. In The Verdict, a farther sentences his son to death by drowning for no intelligible reason (and the son executes the sentence by drowning himself). In The Trial, Joseph K. is accused without understanding, and without being told what wrong he has committed. But, as Kundera highlights in The Art of the Novel, the experiences discussed in these works are of a broader significance, because although they exist as potentialities, they are less known:
“Raskolnikov [in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment] cannot bear the weight of his guilt, and to find peace he consents to his punishment of his own free will. It’s the well-known situation where the offense seeks the punishment.
In Kafka the logic is reversed. The person punished does not know the reason for the punishment. The absurdity of the punishment is so unbearable that to find peace the accused needs to find a justification for his penalty: the punishment seeks the offense.
Not knowing what the charges against him are, K. decides, in Chapter Seven of The Trial, to examine his whole life, his entire past ‘down to the smallest details.’ The ‘autoculpabilization’ machine goes into motion. The accused seeks his offense.”
When reading Kafka, we should be prepared to be transformed. The universe described in Kafka’s stories and novels is not a universe of joy and happiness (you do not want to live in a world described in In the Penal Colony where “guilt is always beyond a doubt”). But as Kafka stated in a letter to his friend Oskar Pollak, there is no point in reading books that make us feel good:
“I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we’d be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
How should we read Kafka to have such an experience? It takes a reader like Nabokov to realize that the insect into which Gregor Samsa, the hero of Kafka’s most famous short story, The Metamorphosis, transformed could not have been a cockroach, as many commentators claim (Nabokov, Lectures on Literature). It takes a reader like JM Coetzee to appreciate the complexity of the relations between “the time of narration” and “the time of the narrative” in Kafka’s short story “The Burrow” (Coetzee, Doubling the Point). Does it take a literary genius to genuinely enjoy Kafka’s works? Not necessarily (although it is worth asking, along with Nabokov, why Gregor the insect never realized that he had wings). However, it is important when reading Kafka to avoid falling into some dangerous traps prepared by what Kundera referred to as “Kafkologists”.
One of the earliest Kafkologists was none other than Kafka’s painfully untalented friend Max Brod. As is well known, Brod refused to honour Kafka’s instruction to burn all his manuscripts after his death. Without Brod, it is unlikely that Kafka would have been celebrated as one of the greatest writers in history, simply because Kafka published very little during his lifetime and never managed to finish his masterpieces – The Trial and The Castle. However, by promoting the view that Kafka’s literary works should be read as religious allegories, Brod failed to understand the universal scope of the questions raised by Kafka. While it is possible to read Kafka in the way suggested by Brod, we should not read Kafka “too Brodly”, as Adam Thirlwell put it: Kafka should not be read as a saint or as a religious thinker, but as an artist endowed with supreme genius.
Another trap to avoid when reading Kafka is the biographical fallacy. Attempts have been made to explain the big themes that animate Kafka’s works – punishment, culpabilisation, arbitrary power, bureaucracy – by reference to various episodes from Kafka’s life. There is no doubt that Kafka’s relationship with his father provided him with first hand knowledge of power and of what Kundera described as “techniques of culpabilization” (Kundera, The Art of the Novel). It is also plausible that Kafka’s professional experience as an office employee enabled him to understand the profound nature of the phenomenon of bureaucracy in a way unmatched by any other writer (as Kundera points out, only someone with intimate knowledge of bureaucracy can appreciate that after finding out that he was transformed into an insect, Gregor Samsa should wonder how he could go to the office or whether he should call in sick). All the same, Kafka did not write autobiography (there is no evidence that Kafka found himself transformed into an insect one morning). Kafka clearly states in Letter to My Father that if his writing was “all about” his father, “it did take its course in the direction determined by me”. In other words, Kafka wrote about the human condition, not about his personal life. He was not interested in publicising his personal experience; he wanted instead to investigate deeply intimate human experiences that had rarely been brought to light before him.
If you happen to be an academic, do your best to avoid reading Kafka academically. By this, I do not simply mean academicising Kafka and identifying themes such as alienation or class relations in his work – nothing could be farther from Kafka’s concerns. By reading Kafka academically, I also mean reading him in a way that is totally insensitive to what Nabokov called “the aesthetic bliss”, which is the true mark of great literary works. Consider an example from Kafka’s newly translated Diaries (translated by Ross Benjamin, Princeton University Press 2022). When I held a copy of the book in my hands, the first entry I looked for was the famous one Kafka wrote on 2 August 1914: “Germany has declared war on Russia. – Swimming school in the afternoon.” There was an endnote attached to that entry, which I immediately checked out of curiosity. The endnote stated as follows: “Among Prague’s river bathing facilities, Kafka favoured the Civilschwimmschule (Civilian Swimming School) located across from the family’s former apartment as well as the swimming school on the Sophieninsel.” I always knew that being an academic is not inconsistent with being an idiot, but I still could not believe my eyes. What prevented the author of the note from acting like a normal human being with normal human sensitivity in front of Kafka’s famous entry is certainly his misguided notion of “academic seriousness”, which Kafka would have found laughable.
It is indeed important to realise that Kafka is funny. When Kafka read the first chapter of The Trial to his friends, they all laughed, and Brod reports that Kafka himself “laughed so much that there were moments when he could not read any further.” (Max Brod, Franz Kafka). It is not easy to associate Kafka, still less his works, with laughter. Yet, the situations in which the main characters of The Trial and The Castle find themselves are comical because of the utter absurdity of those situations. Kafka had an extraordinary gift for living his life in the third person, and when we live in the third person, it is hard to take most things that pass for serious in our daily lives seriously. An episode Kafka relates in a letter to his fiancée Felice Bauer is quite revealing. In April 1910, Kafka was promoted to the position of legal counsellor, and the president of the Institute came personally to celebrate the occasion. Here’s how Kafka described the president:
“It would be too involved to explain to you the importance of this man. But believe me, it is enormous, so much so that an ordinary employee imagines the man as not of this world but residing up above. And since we generally don’t get a chance to talk to the emperor – a situation common, of course, to all large organizations – this man inspires in the average clerk a sense of coming face to face with the emperor.”
But the solemnity of the occasion and the pompous nature of the ceremony was precisely what caused Kafka to burst into uncontrollable laughter:
“Soon I was laughing out loud. I saw my colleagues desperately afraid of getting carried away in turn and felt more sorry for them than for myself, but I just couldn’t stop myself anymore. . . . And of course, once I got going, I laughed not only at the current jokes but at all the past and future ones as well, and by then nobody knew anymore what it was I was howling about. And even this display of indecent behavior might still have been passed over and forgotten. Unfortunately, another colleague, for reason totally unfathomable, chose that precise moment to embark on a ponderous discourse of his own. And as he, hands aflutter, began to dispense his special brand of inanity, it got to be too much for me. The world, of which at least an illusory image had until then persisted in my mind’s eye, simply vanished, and I exploded in gales of laughter as ruthless and hearty as perhaps only grade-school youngsters are capable of.”
Last but not least, we should not read Kafka as a writer writing about nightmarish experiences that do not concern us personally. Kafka once referred to books that are “a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self”. Kafka’s books are precisely of that kind. I do not simply mean that we can find ourselves among victims of Kafkaesque experiences. I also mean that we should not assume that we can only be victims of such experiences and never their originators. If you think that you can never think or act like the Officer in In the Penal Colony, that you have nothing in common with Gregor Samsa’s family (which, as Nabokov observed, are “insects disguised as people” dealing with “a human being in an insect’s disguise”) or with officials depictured in The Trial or The Castle, you are oblivious to what Michel Foucault famously called “the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.” Kafka writes about every one of us, and “quotidian Kafka” should not be sacrificed to “prophet Kafka” (Zadie Smith, Changing Minds). As David Foster Wallace put it in Consider the Lobster, we should approach Kafka’s writings as “a kind of door”:
“To envision us approaching and pounding on this door, increasingly hard, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it; we don’t know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding ad ramming and kicking. That, finally, the door opens . . . and it opens outward – we’ve been inside what we wanted all along.”
Let us go to Kafka’s door and let us let him break the frozen sea inside us.