[Reader-list] On Kafka.

[Taha Mehmood]

Dear all,

Below is a review, of a biography on Kafka, by Zadie Smith. I still have to
read the book but going by the review I think Kafka, the man and the world
he conjured in his head was in many ways quite telling. I think the excerpts
below indicate a lot about his dilemmas on Zionism, nationalism and self
identity.

Excerpt 1- On Zionism

I admire Zionism and am nauseated by it.

At times I'd like to stuff them all, simply as Jews (me included) into, say,
the drawer of the laundry chest. Next I'd wait, open the drawer a little to
see if they've suffocated, and if not, shut the drawer again and keep doing
this to the end.

Isn't it natural to leave a place where one is so hated?... The heroism of
staying is nonetheless merely the heroism of cockroaches which cannot be
exterminated, even from the bathroom.

Excerpt 2- On Judaism

"My people," wrote Kafka, "provided that I have one." What does it mean, to
have a people? On no subject are we more sentimental and less able to
articulate what we mean. In what, for example, does the continuity of
"Blackness" exist? Or "Irishness"? Or "Arabness"? Blood, culture, history,
genes? Judaism, with its matrilineal line, has been historically fortunate
to have at its root a beautiful answer, elegant in its circular simplicity:
Jewishness is the gift of a Jewish mother. But what is a Jewish mother?

Regards

Taha






http://www.powells.com/review/2008_09_01

The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical
Essay
by Louis Begley<http://www.powells.com/nyb/search/DTSearch/search?author=%20Louis%20Begley>

 F. Kafka, Everyman A review by Zadie Smith

*1.*

How to describe Kafka, the man? Like this, perhaps:

It is as if he had spent his entire life wondering what he looked like,
without ever discovering there are such things as mirrors.

A naked man among a multitude who are dressed.

A mind living in sin with the soul of Abraham.

Franz was a saint.

Or then again, using details of his life, as found in Louis Begley's
refreshingly factual *The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz
Kafka: A Biographical Essay*: over six feet tall, handsome, elegantly
dressed; an unexceptional student, a strong swimmer, an aerobics enthusiast,
a vegetarian; a frequent visitor to movie houses, cabarets, all-night cafes,
literary soirees and brothels; the published author of seven books during
his brief lifetime; engaged three times (twice to the same woman); valued by
his employers, promoted at work.

But this last Kafka is as difficult to keep in mind as the Pynchon who
grocery-shops and attends baseball games, the Salinger who grew old and
raised a family in Cornish, New Hampshire. Readers are incurable fabulists.
Kafka's case, though, extends beyond literary mystique. He is more than a
man of mystery -- he's metaphysical. Readers who are particularly attached
to this supra -- Kafka find the introduction of a quotidian Kafka hard to
swallow. And vice versa. I spoke once at a Jewish literary society on the
subject of time in Kafka, an exploration of the idea -- as the critic
Michael Hofmann has it -- that "it is almost always too late in Kafka."
Afterward a spry woman in her nineties, with a thick Old World accent,
hurried across the room and tugged my sleeve: "But you're quite wrong! I
knew Mr. Kafka in Prague -- and he was *never* late."

Recent years have seen some Kafka revisionism although what's up for grabs
is not the quality of the work, but rather its precise nature. What kind of
a writer *is* Kafka? Above all, it's a revision of Kafka's biographical
aura. From a witty essay of this kind, by the young novelist and critic Adam
Thirlwell:

It is now necessary to state some accepted truths about Franz Kafka, and the
Kafkaesque.... Kafka's work lies outside literature: it is not fully part of
the history of European fiction. He has no predecessors -- his work appears
as if from nowhere -- and he has no true successors.... These fictions
express the alienation of modern man; they are a prophecy of a) the
totalitarian police state, and b) the Nazi Holocaust. His work expresses a
Jewish mysticism, a non-denominational mysticism, an anguish of man without
God. His work is very serious. He never smiles in photographs.... It is
crucial to know the facts of Kafka's emotional life when reading his
fiction. In some sense, all his stories are autobiographical. He is a
genius, outside ordinary limits of literature, and a saint, outside ordinary
limits of human behaviour. All of these truths, all of them, are wrong.

Thirlwell blames the banality of the Kafkaesque on Max Brod, Kafka's friend,
first biographer, and literary executor, in which latter capacity he defied
Kafka's will (Kafka wanted his work burned), a fact that continues to stain
Brod, however faintly, with bad faith. For his part, Brod always maintained
that Kafka knew there would be no bonfire: if his friend were serious, he
would have chosen another executor. Far harder to defend is Brod's
subsequent decision to publish the correspondence, the diaries, and the
acutely personal *Letter to My Father* (though posthumous literary morality
is a slippery thing: if what is found in a drawer is very bad, the shame of
it outlives both reader and publisher; when it's as good as *Letter to My
Father*, the world winks at it).

If few readers of Kafka can be truly sorry for the existence of the works
Kafka had consigned to oblivion, many regret the way Brod chose to present
them. The problem is not solely Brod's flat-footed interpretations, it's his
interventions in the texts themselves. For when it came to editing the
novels, Brod's sympathy for the theological would seem to have guided his
hand. Kafka's system of ordering chapters was often unclear, occasionally
nonexistent; it was Brod who collated *The Trial* in the form with which we
are familiar. If it feels like a journey toward an absent God -- so the
argument goes -- that's because Brod placed the God-shaped hole at the end.
The penultimate chapter, containing the pseudo-haggadic parable "Before the
Law," might have gone anywhere, and placing it anywhere else skews the
trajectory of ascension; no longer a journey toward the supreme
incomprehensibility, but a journey without destination, into which a mystery
is thrust and then succeeded by the quotidian once more.

Of course, there's also the possibility that Kafka would have placed this
chapter near the end, exactly as Brod did, but lovers of Kafka are not
inclined to credit him with Brod's variety of common sense. The whole point
of Kafka is his uncommonness. Whatever Brod explains, we feel sure Kafka
would leave unexplained; whichever conventional interpretation he foists on
the works, the works themselves repel. We think of Shakespeare this way,
too: a writer sullied by our attempts to define him. In this sense the idea
of a literary genius is a gift we give ourselves, a space so wide that we
can play in it forever. Thirlwell again:

It is important, when reading Kafka, not to read him too Brodly.

Take this passage from Brod's 1947 biography: "It is a new kind of smile
that distinguishes Kafka's work, a smile close to the ultimate things -- a
metaphysical smile so to speak -- indeed sometimes when he used to read out
one of his tales for us friends of his, it rose above a smile and we laughed
aloud. But we were soon quiet again. It is no laughter befitting human
beings. Only angels may laugh this way...." Angels! It is often
underestimated, how much talent is required to be a great reader. And Brod
was not a great reader, let alone a great writer

True. Maybe we can say instead that Brod was a great talent-spotter. Of his
own literary capacities, Brod had few illusions. His friendship with Kafka
was monstrously one-sided from the start, a thing carved from pure awe. They
met after a lecture on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, given by Brod, after
which Kafka approached the lecturer and accompanied him home. "Something
seems to have attracted him to me," writes Brod. "He was more open than
usual, beginning the endless walk home by disagreeing strongly with my all
too rough formulations." The familiar pilgrim's pose, two steps behind the
prophet, catching wisdom as it falls. These days we tire of Brod's rough
formulations: for too long they set the tone. We don't want to read Kafka
Brodly anymore, as the postwar Americans did so keenly. It's tempting to
think, had we ourselves been those first readers, that we would have
recognized at once -- without such heavy prompting -- the literary greatness
of an ex-ape talking to the academy or tiny Josephine "piping" for her mouse
people. I wonder.

There exists a second Brod account of Kafka reading aloud:

We friends of his laughed quite immoderately when he first let us hear the
first chapter of *The Trial*. And he himself laughed so much that there were
moments when he couldn't read any further. Astonishing enough, when you
think of the fearful earnestness of this chapter.

Here the crime of Kafka's first biographer is rather benign: a slight
overdose of literary respect. Brod couldn't quite believe that Kafka was
being funny when he was being funny. For how could Kafka, in his fearful
earnestness, be funny? But it's strange: Kafka revisionism is also, after a
fashion, in love with Kafkaesque purity. We can't credit the Brodish idea
that Kafka writes of "the alienation of modern man" -- too obvious. And how
could Kafka be obvious? How could Kafka be anything that we are? Even our
demystifications of Kafka are full of mystery.

*2.*

But if we're not to read Kafka too Brodly, how are we to read him? We might
do worse than read him Begley. Gently skeptical of the biographical legend,
Begley yet believes in the "metaphysical smile" of the work, the possibility
that it expresses our modern alienation -- here prophet Kafka and quotidian
Kafka are not in conflict. He deals first, and most successfully, with the
quotidian. The Kafka who, like other diarists, indulged a relentless
dramaturgy of the self; the compulsive letter-writer who once asked a
correspondent, "Don't you get pleasure out of exaggerating painful things as
much as possible?" For Kafka, the prospect of a journey from Berlin to
Prague is "a foolhardiness whose parallel you can only find by leafing back
through the pages of history, say to Napoleon's march to Russia." A brief
visit to his fiancée "couldn't have been worse. The next thing will be
impalement."

The diaries are the same, only more so: few people, even in that solipsistic
form, can have written "I" as frequently as he. People and events appear
rarely; the beginning of the First World War is a matter to be weighed
equally with the fact that he went swimming that day. The Kafka who wrote
the fictions was a man of many stories; the private Kafka sang the song of
himself:

I completely dwelt in every idea, but also filled every idea.... I not only
felt myself at my boundary, but at the boundary of the human in general.

I am the end or the beginning.

Life is merely terrible; I feel it as few others do. Often -- and in my
inmost self perhaps all the time -- I doubt that I am a human being.

One could quote pages of similar sentiments: Kafka scholars usually do.
Thankfully, Begley has more of a comic sense than most Kafka scholars,
tending to find Kafka in quite other moods; at times whiny, occasionally
wheedling, often slyly disingenuous, and, every now and then, frankly
mendacious. The result is something we don't expect. It's a little funny:

It turns out we really do keep writing the same thing. Sometimes I ask
whether you're sick and then you write about it, sometimes I want to die and
then you do, sometimes I want stamps and then you want stamps....

This, writes Begley, is

Kafka's characterization (in a moment of despondency) of the letters that he
and Milena exchanged [and it] is not far off the mark for many of them, and
applies with even greater force to many of the letters to Felice.

Certainly the love letters are repetitive; there is something mechanical in
them, not deeply felt, at least, not toward their intended recipients -- the
sense is of a man writing to himself. Impossible to believe Kafka was in
love with poor Felice Bauer, she of the "bony, empty face, that wore its
emptiness openly.... Almost broken nose. Blonde, somewhat straight,
unattractive hair, strong chin"; Felice with her bourgeois mores, her offer
to sit by him as he worked ("in that case," he wrote back, "I could not
write at all"), her poor taste in "heavy furniture" (a sideboard of her
choosing puts Kafka in mind of "a perfect tombstone or a memorial to the
life of a Prague official").

For Kafka she is symbol: the whetstone upon which he sharpens his sense of
himself. The occasion of their engagement is the cue to explain to her (and
to her father) why he should never marry. The prospect of living with her
inspires pages of encomia on solitude. Begley, a fiction writer himself, has
an eye for the way fiction writers obsessively preserve their personal
space, even while seeming to give it away. You might say he has Kafka's
number:

It's all there in a nutshell: the charm offensive Kafka commenced with the
conquest of Felice as its goal; reflexive flight from that goal as soon as
it is within reach; insistence on dealing with her and their future only on
his terms; and self-denigration as a potent defense against intimacy that
requires more than words.

Poor Felice! She never stood a chance. In his introductory letter Kafka
claims:

I am an erratic letter writer.... On the other hand, I never expect a letter
to be answered by return...I am never disappointed when it doesn't come.

In fact, counters Begley,

The opposite was true: Kafka wrote letters compulsively and copiously and
turned into a hysterical despot if they were not answered forthwith,
bombarding Felice with cables and remonstrances.

Kafka frantically pursued Felice, and then he tried to escape her, Begley
writes, "with the single-minded purpose and passion of a fox biting off his
own leg to free himself from a trap" -- a line with more than a little Kafka
spirit in it. "Women are snares," Kafka said once, "which lie in wait for
men on all sides, in order to drag them into the merely finite." It's a
perfectly ordinary expression of misogyny, dispiriting in a mind that more
often took the less-traveled path. Apropos: having had it suggested to him
by a young friend that Picasso was "a wilful distortionist" who painted
"rose-coloured women with gigantic feet," Kafka replied:

I do not think so.... He only registers the deformities which have not yet
penetrated our consciousness. Art is a mirror, which goes "fast," like a
watch—sometimes.

Kafka's mind was like that, it went wondrous fast—still, when it came to
women, it went no faster than the times allowed. Those who find the personal
failures of writers personally offensive will turn from Kafka here, as
readers turn from Philip Larkin for similar reasons (the family resemblance
between the two writers was noted by Larkin himself). In this matter, Kafka
has a less judgmental biographer than Larkin found in Andrew Motion; Begley,
though perfectly clear on Kafka's "problems with girls," does not much
agonize over them. Literary nerds may enjoy the curious fact that for both
those literary miserabilists (close neighbors on any decent bookshelf)
modern heating appliances appear to have served as synecdoche for what one
might call the Feminine Mundane:

*He married a woman to stop her getting away
Now she's there all day,
And the money he gets for wasting his life on work
She takes as her perk
To pay for the kiddies' clobber and the drier
And the electric fire....*

I yield not a particle of my demand for a fantastic life arranged solely in
the interest of my work; she, indifferent to every mute request, wants the
average: a comfortable home, an interest on my part in the factory, good
food, bed at eleven, central heating....

Yet as it was with Larkin, Kafka's ideas about women and his experiences of
them turn out to be different things. Women were his preferred
correspondents and inspiration (in 1912, the Felice correspondence competes
with the writing of *Amerika*; in 1913 it wins), his most stimulating
intellectual sparring partners (Milena Jesenska, with whom he discussed "the
Jewish question"), his closest friends (his favorite sister, Ottla), and
finally the means of his escape (Dora Diamant, with whom, in the final year
of his life, he moved to Berlin). No, women did not drag Kafka into the
finite. As Begley would have it: *the opposite was true*. Usefully, Begley
is a rather frequent and politic employer of modifiers and corrections. *In
reality*,* the truth was*,* the opposite was true*. Kafka told his diary
that the only way he could live was as a sexually ascetic bachelor. In
reality he was no stranger to brothels.

Begley is particularly astute on the bizarre organization of Kafka's writing
day. At the Assicurazioni Generali, Kafka despaired of his twelve-hour
shifts that left no time for writing; two years later, promoted to the
position of chief clerk at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute, he was
now on the one-shift system, 8:30 AM until 2:30 PM. And then what? Lunch
until 3:30, then sleep until 7:30, then exercises, then a family dinner.
After which he started work around 11 PM (as Begley points out, the letter
-- and diary-writing took up at least an hour a day, and more usually two),
and then "depending on my strength, inclination, and luck, until one, two,
or three o'clock, once even till six in the morning." Then "every imaginable
effort to go to sleep," as he fitfully rested before leaving to go to the
office once more. This routine left him permanently on the verge of
collapse. Yet

when Felice wrote to him...arguing that a more rational organization of his
day might be possible, he bristled.... "The present way is the only possible
one; if I can't bear it, so much the worse; but I will bear it somehow."

It was Brod's opinion that Kafka's parents should gift him a lump sum "so
that he could leave the office, go off to some cheap little place on the
Riviera to create those works that God, using Franz's brain, wishes the
world to have." Begley, leaving God out of it, politely disagrees, finding
Brod's wish

probably misguided. Kafka's failure to make even an attempt to break out of
the twin prisons of the Institute and his room at the family apartment may
have been nothing less than the choice of the way of life that paradoxically
best suited him.

It is rare that writers of fiction sit behind their desks, actually writing,
for more than a few hours a day. Had Kafka been able to use his time
efficiently, the work schedule at the Institute would have left him with
enough free time for writing. As he recognized, the truth was that he wasted
time.

*The truth was that he wasted time!* The writer's equivalent of the dater's
revelation: *He's just not that into you*. "Having the Institute and the
conditions at his parents' apartment to blame for the long fallow periods
when he couldn't write gave Kafka cover: it enabled him to preserve some of
his self-esteem."

And here Begley introduces yet another Kafka we rarely think of, a writer in
competition with other writers in a small Prague literary scene, measuring
himself against the achievements of his peers. For in 1908, Kafka had
published only eight short prose pieces in *Hyperion*, while Brod had been
publishing since he was twenty; his close friend Oskar Baum was the
successful author of one book of short stories and one novel; and Franz
Werfel—seven years Kafka's junior—had a critically acclaimed collection of
poems. In 1911, Kafka writes in his diary: "I hate Werfel, not because I
envy him, but I envy him too. He is healthy, young and rich, everything that
I am not." And later in that same year:

Envy of the apparent success of Baum whom I like so much. With this, the
feeling of having in the middle of my body a ball of wool that quickly winds
itself up, its innumerable threads pulling from the surface of my body to
itself.

Of course, that wool ball -- a throwaway line in a diary! -- reminds us how
little call he had to envy anyone.

*3.*

The impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing German, the
impossibility of writing differently. One might add a fourth impossibility,
the impossibility of writing.... Thus what has resulted was a literature
impossible in all respects, a gypsy literature which had stolen the German
child out of its cradle and in great haste put it through some kind of
training, for someone had to dance on the tightrope. (But it wasn't a German
child, it was nothing; people merely said that somebody was dancing.)

A perfect slice of Kafka. On May 3, 1913, Kafka's diary conceives of a
butcher's knife "quickly and with mechanical regularity chop[ping] into me
from the side," slicing thin, Parma ham style, *pezzi di Kafka.*... The
quote above is like that: it has the marbled mark of Kafka running through
it. It traces a typical Kafka journey, from the concrete, to the
metaphorical, to the allegorical, to the notional, which last—as so often
with Kafka -- seems to grow obscure the more precisely it is expressed. From
this same quote Begley efficiently unpacks Kafka's "frightful inner
predicament," born of his strange historical moment. A middle-class Prague
Jew ("the most Western-Jewish of them all") both enamored of and horrified
by an Eastern shtetl life he never knew; a Jew in a period of virulent
anti-Semitism ("I've been spending every afternoon outside in the streets,
wallowing in anti-Semitic hate") who remained ambivalent toward the Zionist
project; a German speaker surrounded by Czech nationalists. The impossible
"gypsy literature" an aspect of an impossible gypsy self, an assimilated
Judaism that was fatally neither one thing or the other.

In Kafka's world there were really two "Jewish questions." The first was
external, asked by Gentiles, and is familiar: "What is to be done with the
Jews?" For which the answer was either persecution or "toleration," that
vile word. (Writing to Brod from an Italian *pensione*, Kafka describes
being barely tolerated at lunch by an Austrian general who has just found
out he is Jewish: "From politeness he brought our little chat to a sort of
end before he hurried out with long strides.... Why must I be a thorn in
flesh?")

The second Jewish question, the one that Kafka asked himself, was
existential: "What have I in common with Jews?" Begley does not shy from
citing this and many of the other quotations "used by scholars to buttress
the argument that Kafka was himself a Jewish anti-Semite, a self-hating
Jew":

I admire Zionism and am nauseated by it.

At times I'd like to stuff them all, simply as Jews (me included) into, say,
the drawer of the laundry chest. Next I'd wait, open the drawer a little to
see if they've suffocated, and if not, shut the drawer again and keep doing
this to the end.

Isn't it natural to leave a place where one is so hated?... The heroism of
staying is nonetheless merely the heroism of cockroaches which cannot be
exterminated, even from the bathroom.

To this evidence, Freudians add exhibit number one: fantasies of
self-slaughter ("Between throat and chin would seem to be the most rewarding
place to stab"), shadowing Kafka's lineage (grandson of the butcher of
Wossek), and those tales of Jewish ritual murder that are as old as
anti-Semitism itself. For Begley, though, the accusation of
auto-anti-Semitism is "unfair and, in the end, beside the point." He sees
rather the conflicted drama of assimilation: "The fear was of a crack in the
veneer...through which might enter the miasma of the shtetl or the medieval
ghetto." In this version, affection and repulsion are sides of the same
coin:

It would have been surprising if he, who was so repelled by his own father's
vulgarity at table and in speech, had not been similarly repelled by the
oddities of dress, habits, gestures, and speech of the very Jews of whom he
made a fetish, because of the community spirit, cohesiveness, and genuine
emotional warmth he was convinced they possessed.

It's an awkward argument that struggles to recast repulsion as "the
cumulative effect on Kafka of the ubiquitous anti-Semitism" all around him,
which in turn caused a kind of "profound fatigue," compelling him to
"transcend his Jewish experience and his Jewish identity" so that he might
write "about the human condition" -- a conclusion that misses the point
entirely, for Kafka found the brotherhood of man quite as incomprehensible
as the brotherhood of Jews. For Kafka, the impossible thing was collectivity
itself:

What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with
myself, and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can
breathe.

Kafka's horror is not Jewishness per se, because it is not a horror only of
Jewishness: it is a horror of all shared experience, all shared being, all *
genus*. In a time and place in which national, linguistic, and racial groups
were defined with ever more absurd precision, how could the very idea of
commonness not turn equally absurd? In his *Memoirs of an Anti-Semite*,
fellow Austro-Hungarian Gregor von Rezzori presented the disquieting idea
that the philo-Semite and the anti-Semite have something essential in common
(the narrator is both): a belief in a collective Jewish nature, a
Semiteness. Kafka, by contrast, had stopped believing. The choice of
belonging to a people, of partaking of a shared nature, was no longer
available to him. He often wished it was not so (hence his sentimental
affection for shtetl life), but it *was* so. On this point, Begley quotes
Hannah Arendt approvingly though he does not pursue her brilliant
conclusion:

...These men [assimilated German Jews] did not wish to "return" either to
the ranks of the Jewish people or to Judaism, and could not desire to do so
-- not because... they were too "assimilated" and too alienated from their
Jewish heritage, but because all traditions and cultures as well as all
"belonging" had become equally questionable to them."

Jewishness itself had become the question. It is a mark of how disconcerting
this genuinely Kafkaesque concept is that it should provoke conflict in
Begley himself.

"My people," wrote Kafka, "provided that I have one." What does it mean, to
have a people? On no subject are we more sentimental and less able to
articulate what we mean. In what, for example, does the continuity of
"Blackness" exist? Or "Irishness"? Or "Arabness"? Blood, culture, history,
genes? Judaism, with its matrilineal line, has been historically fortunate
to have at its root a beautiful answer, elegant in its circular simplicity:
Jewishness is the gift of a Jewish mother. But what is a Jewish mother?
Kafka found her so unstable a thing, a mistranslation might undo her:

Yesterday it occurred to me that I did not always love my mother as she
deserved and as I could, only because the German language prevented it. The
Jewish mother is no "Mutter," to call her "Mutter" makes her a little
comical.... "Mutter" is peculiarly German for the Jew, it unconsciously
contains, together with the Christian splendor, Christian coldness also, the
Jewish woman who is called "Mutter" therefore becomes not only comical but
strange.... I believe that it is only the memories of the ghetto that still
preserve the Jewish family, for the word "Vater" too is far from meaning the
Jewish father.

Kafka's Jewishness was a kind of dream, whose authentic moment was located
always in the nostalgic past. His survey of the insectile situation of young
Jews in Inner Bohemia can hardly be improved upon: "With their posterior
legs they were still glued to their father's Jewishness, and with their
waving anterior legs they found no new ground."

Alienation from oneself, the conflicted assimilation of migrants, losing one
place without gaining another.... This feels like Kafka in the genuine
clothes of an existential prophet, Kafka in his twenty-first-century aspect
(if we are to assume, as with Shakespeare, that every new century will bring
a Kafka close to our own concerns). For there is a sense in which Kafka's
Jewish question ("What have I in common with Jews?") has become everybody's
question, Jewish alienation the template for all our doubts. What is
Muslimness? What is Femaleness? What is Polishness? What is Englishness?
These days we all find our anterior legs flailing before us. We're all
insects, all *Ungeziefer*, now.

Zadie Smith is the author of three novels, most recently On
Beauty<http://www.powells.com/s?kw=on+beauty+zadie&x=0&y=0>
.