
The Hound of the Baskervilles / The Return of Sherlock Holmes
David Stuart Davies looks at the novel that suggested that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was not quite
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May
08
May
15
For an author so
revered and obsessively studied, Franz Kafka remains as enigmatic as his
fiction. Like Shakespeare, he is a writer about whom so much has been written
that it would now be impossible to read it all in a lifetime. And any scrap of
textual evidence, however quotidian and inane – a laundry list, an address on
an envelope – will be pored over by academics searching for hidden meaning.
His best friend
and later biographer Max Brod likened Kafka to Goethe and Tolstoy. Brod
characterised his writing as a metaphysical quest for God – an opinion shared
by Thomas Mann – while the literary scholars Harold Bloom, Lothar Khan and
Pavel Eisner all saw Kafka as the quintessential ‘Jewish writer’. Wikipedia
categorises him as a ‘Modernist’ and his work has been claimed by the
Expressionist, the Surrealists and Absurdists, just as an argument can also be made
that he anticipates postmodernism, or perhaps, like Samuel Beckett, forms a conceptual
bridge between the multiple and complex discourses of modernism and
postmodernism.
W.H. Auden called Kafka the ‘Dante of the 20th century’, and Nabokov, William Burroughs and Gabriel Garcia Marquez have all cited him as a major influence. For Burroughs, Kafka’s literary focus was always the struggle, pain, and solitude of the human condition, and the search for connection. Fellow Czech author Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being) reads Kafka as inverting Dostoyevsky’s view of crime and punishment, reflecting life in a totalitarian state. Conversely, the influential French post-structuralist philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have argued that the themes of alienation and persecution in Kafka’s work seized on by generations of critics have been overemphasised at the expense of Kafka’s subversive sense of humour. Brod wrote, for example, that when Kafka read the final scene of The Trial to his friends, taught in universities around the world as a powerful symbol of the plight of modern man in a godless universe and the futility of the cosmos, he could barely speak for laughing. The Israeli literary critic, Dan Miron, has, meanwhile, made a case for Kafka the Zionist, and the National Library of Israel was able to acquire unpublished manuscripts bequeathed by Brod to his secretary – and probably lover – Esther Hoffe as ‘cultural assets belonging to the Jewish people’ after a lengthy court battle.
In his own day Kafka
was largely unpublished, unknown and unread. As Brod put it, ‘Few writers have
had the fate which was that of Franz Kafka: alive, to remain almost entirely
unknown; dead, to become world famous almost overnight’. Occasionally
publishing in small Expressionist journals, Kafka was admired by Der enge
Prager Kreis (‘The Close Prague Circle’), a tight group of writers and
intellectuals who hung around the Café Arco in Prague after the Great War as
European Modernism flourished. But his hyper-critical dismissal of his own
writing and his anxiety over dealing with publishers did not exactly broadcast
his beautiful but confusing prose to a wider audience. Only later did it find favour
with European and American Modernists between the wars after his three
unfinished novels were posthumously published by Brod. As Kafka himself told
the young Czech poet Gustav Janouch:
Max
Brod, Felix Weltsch, all my friends always take possession of something I have
written and then take me by surprise with a completed contract with the publisher.
I do not want to cause them any unpleasantness, and so it all ends in the
publication of things which are entirely personal notes or diversions. Personal
proofs of my human weakness are printed, and even sold, because my friends,
with Max Brod at their head, have conceived the idea of making literature out
of them…
‘Publication of
some scribble of mine,’ he concluded, ‘always upsets me.’
To the occupying
Nazis, Kafka’s work was Entartete Kunst (‘Degenerate
art’), and unpublished manuscripts in the hands of his last lover, the Berlin
schoolteacher Dora Diamant, were
seized by the Gestapo in 1933 and almost certainly burnt. After the war, the
now Stalinist Czechoslovakia and her Soviet masters didn’t know what to do with
Kafka’s legacy, defined by the influential Marxist critic Georg Lukács as ‘bourgeois’
and ‘aesthetically appealing, but decadent modernism’. Although obviously not
conforming to the ideal of ‘Socialist Realism’, some Marxist critics read Kafka
as a satire on the crumbling Austro-Hungarian Empire, others arguing that his
work embodied Marx’s theory of alienation and the rise of socialism, although
Marxist critics nearly always argue this… (They banned him, anyway.) At a
conference in Prague in 1963, Czech communists finally allowed Kafka a place in
their literary history as a ‘humanist’ writer whose work challenged the rise of
German Imperialism. To ordinary Czechs, however, who had lived under Habsburg
rule, then German, then Russian, The Trial (Der Process) was a
realist narrative, reflecting the political system in which they lived, where
people of high and low estate alike were routinely accused of crimes they
hadn’t committed and publicly convicted at show trials. After the ‘Prague
Spring’ of 1968, Kafka’s books were once more banned by the Communist Government.
Only after the sametová revoluce
(the so-called ‘Velvet Revolution’) of 1989 did Kafka return to Prague, now a
as mainstay of the city’s thriving tourist industry, his haunted face looking
out from posters, T-shirts, keyrings and novelty ashtrays, and a museum
dedicated entirely to his life and work.
Kafka the man is
also wildly subject to interpretation. The psychologist Marino Pérez-Álvarez
has claimed that Kafka may have been schizophrenic, citing evidence in Kafka’s
diaries and his seminal short story ‘The Metamorphosis’ (‘Die Verwandlung’). The
Italian psychiatrists Alessia Coralli and Antonio Perciaccante, on the other hand, have downgraded this to a borderline
personality disorder, exacerbated by the insomnia of which Kafka complains
frequently in his diaries. This is further developed by the American
psychologist Joan Lachkar, who described ‘The Metamorphosis’ as ‘a model for
Kafka’s own abandonment fears, anxiety, depression, and parasitic dependency
needs,’ concluding: ‘Kafka illuminated the borderline’s general confusion of
normal and healthy desires, wishes, and needs with something ugly and
disdainful’. German psychiatrist Manfred M. Fichter, meanwhile, believes that
Kafka was in fact anorexic.
David Zane
Mairowitz, in his book on Kafka (illustrated by another neurotic and
controversial genius, Robert Crumb), wryly notes that the psychoanalytic open
season on the bones of Franz Kafka include published papers arguing that his
work denotes an unconscious desire to have sexual relations with his father as
well as interpreting the ‘Door to the Law’ in The Trial as the
unattainable entrance back into the womb. But perhaps Kafka’s first English
translator, Edwin Muir, came closest to capturing the essence of this troubled
and brilliant artist. Kafka was, wrote Muir, ‘a strange and disconcerting
genius’.
Although the
speculative psychological diagnoses would have almost certainly appalled the
private and shy author, it is tempting to think that the wildly various
critical trajectory of his work through an equally mad century would have
raised a smile. In an ultimate application of the term ‘Kafkaesque’, Brod, who
made it to Israel and lived a long life, wrote that one day the 20th
century will be labelled ‘the century of Kafka’, not so much because of his
literary standing, but because the surreal horror of modern history closely
resembled the plot and setting of many of Kafka’s stories and, let’s be honest,
still does. This idea was made more concrete and universal by Gustav Janouch in
later life, as a Jew and former Czech resistance fighter now living under the
yoke of the Warsaw Pact:
Then
came long years of restless wandering, culminating in the misery of the second
world war and the confusion and troubles of the present day. I experienced
deadly fear, persecution and imprisonment, animal hunger, filth and cold, the
stupid brutality of officialdom, and chaos as the principle underlying an
apparently rational world; Kafka’s twilight kingdom of shadows became a
perfectly ordinary day-to-day experience.
Kafka’s three
sisters and his lover Milena Jesenská, a Czech journalist, all died in Hitler’s
death camps. Had Kafka not died in 1924, he would have
almost certainly shared their fate.
But beyond the
crushing weight of history and, indeed, literary criticism, the real
Franz Kafka can still be glimpsed in the fragments of texts he left behind, in
his surviving and highly self-deprecating diaries and correspondence, and of
course his short stories and incomplete novels. Then there are the portraits by
those that knew him personally or claimed to have. Janouch’s description of
meeting Kafka for the first time, albeit embellished by memory or, as some have
argued complete invention, remains particularly vivid:
Behind
one of two desks standing side by side sat a tall, shy man. He had black hair
combed back, a bony nose, wonderful grey-blue eyes under a strikingly narrow
forehead, and bitter-sweet, smiling lips.
Janouch goes on to
describe Kafka’s famously semaphoric physical gestures:
Kafka
speaks with his face. Whenever he can substitute for words a movement of his
facial muscles, he does so. A smile, contraction of his eyebrows, wrinkling of
the narrow forehead, protrusion or pursing of the lips – such movements are a
substitute for spoken sentences … The eyes always looked at people a little
from below upwards. Franz Kafka thus had a singular appearance, as if
apologizing for being so slender and tail. His entire figure seemed to say, ‘I
am, forgive me, quite unimportant. You do me a great pleasure, if you overlook
me.’
Brod’s 1937
biography of Kafka also mentions his friend’s hands constantly in motion when
he spoke, which was not often and was always very measured, if not downright
profound. Janouch makes a similar point:
He
spoke both Czech and German. But more German. And his German had a hard accent
… It seemed angular because of the inner tension: every word a stone. The
hardness of his speech was caused by the effort at exactness and precision.
Janouch’s father
worked in the same office as Kafka, to whom he had shown some of his son’s
poetry. A mentoring relationship grew out of this, and Janouch published a
memoir of this period called Conversations with Kafka in 1951, with the
support of Brod, who recognised his old friend in every line. Academics
nowadays view this as part of the legend rather than a primary source, but they
are perhaps asking too much of the memoirist. (That the men knew each other is
not in doubt.) Janouch certainly captures the essence of the mysterious writer,
as well as the relationship between master and pupil (we do tend to idealise).
In his first
description, Janouch writes that Kafka’s way of talking ‘resembled his hands’,
which, he continues, were ‘strong’ and ‘broad’ but with ‘fine fingers’ and ‘prominent
yet very delicate bones and knuckles’. He concludes this image: ‘When I
remember Kafka’s voice, his smile and his hands, I always think of a remark of
my father’s. He said, “Strength combined with scrupulous delicacy: strength,
which finds the small things the most difficult”.’ This, in a line, is Kafka: a
brilliant, driven, and meticulous man who never saw in himself the qualities
that his friends, lovers and admirers did, and who found the everyday business
of life and basic social interaction to be cripplingly hard. ‘What an effort to
keep alive!’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Erecting a monument does not require the
expenditure of so much strength.’
Kafka was born in
Prague on July 3, 1883, the oldest of six children, to a prosperous
middle-class Jewish family. Then the capital of Bohemia, Prague was a melting
pot of different nationalities, languages, politics and customs, all of which
existed uneasily side-by-side, trying to find a clear and unified cultural
identity. To be a Jew in Prague at the turn of the century was to walk a
tightrope. The Kafka children were encouraged to speak German to distance
themselves from the immigrant Jewish diaspora; Germans looked down on Czechs;
Czech nationalism was on the rise, so they hated the Germans, and, as ever,
everyone hated the Jews. As one of the oldest ghettos in Europe, Prague had its
own Talmudic saints, and Kafka grew up in the city of Rabbi Judah Loew ben
Bezalel, who was said to have raised the Golem, the Jewish Frankenstein. For
the young Kafka, his hometown was seeped in Yiddish legend and mysticism, as
well as rabid nationalism, growing Zionism and virulent anti-Semitism, all of
which would influence his writing.
Although not a political
activist, Kafka flirted with anarchy before becoming a not particularly
committed socialist. He did, however, attend rallies and riots thrown by
various factions, apparently drawn by the need to observe extreme human
behaviour. He was fascinated by Yiddish texts and his own writing has a similar
sense of magic realism and arcane mystery. But he declared himself an atheist
and never really came to terms with his own heritage, writing in his diary:
‘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 studied
literature and medicine before settling on the law as a profession that he
believed would allow him most time to write, which was now increasingly
important to him although he was never satisfied with the results. He graduated
from Prague University with a doctorate in law, going first into insurance and
then the semi-governmental Worker’s Insurance Office, where his intelligence
saw him quickly rising through the ranks, though he always resented office work
and admired artisan labourers. (In his most optimistic novel, Amerika –
Der Verschollene – it is notable that the protagonist is a blue-collar
worker rather than a bureaucrat.) He was also a partner in Prager Asbestwerke
Hermann & Co, an early asbestos factory, which is probably what killed him.
His two brothers
dying in infancy led Kafka’s father, Hermann, to invest the wrong kind of
effort in his only son and heir. Hermann was an overbearing and self-made man
who never understood the bookish, intellectual sensibility of young Franz, who
more closely resembled his more educated mother and related to his sisters. In
trying to make a man out of the boy, Hermann instead broke his child’s spirit
forever. Franz never rebelled, and instead lived with his parents almost his
whole life, even after he became financially independent. This Freudian
inversion is dramatised memorably in his short story ‘The Judgment’ (‘Das
Urteil’, (literally ‘The Verdict’), and oppression by patriarchal authority
figures is a recurring theme in his work. Kafka also wrote a fifty-page letter
to his father explaining his fear of the man and the effect on his life with a
tragic insight into his own paralysing neuroses, but it was never delivered.
Kafka never
married, although he liked women and was engaged several times. His diaries
cover some of these relationships and their ends, which could provoke a sense
of relief alongside suicidal despair. He had a complex relationship with his
own sexuality, a muddle of what reads in the diaries as low self-esteem, body
dysmorphia and general self-loathing crossed with a high libido. ‘Sex keeps
gnawing at me,’ he wrote, ‘hounds me day end night. I should have to conquer
fear and shame and probably sorrow too to satisfy it; yet on the other hand 1
am certain that I should at once take advantage, with no feeling of fear or
sorrow or shame, of the first opportunity to present itself quickly, close at
hand, and willingly.’ He visited brothels to satisfy this need but was unable
to ever truly commit to marriage, being torn, as with the day job, between the
need for security and the space to write. Everything was subordinate to
literature, which was another insufferable trial. He hated writing, he hated
not writing, he hated having written… he kept writing. As James Baldwin later wrote,
‘The terrible thing about being a writer is that you don’t decide to become
one, you discover that you are one.’ Inconclusive relationships with well-built
and powerful women, with much foreplay but no climax, became another recurring
theme in his fiction, the subject of which was always himself. His protagonists
were often represented by cryptograms of his name, or simply the letter ‘K’, which
his inwardly turned and self-harming depression despised. ‘I find the letter K
offensive,’ he wrote, ‘almost disgusting, and yet I use it…’ At other times, he
made himself small, writing from the perspective of animals and insects.
As is well known,
his most famous works concern the hopeless yet oddly hopeful struggle of the
individual against the machinations of omnipotent, anonymous and elusive bureaucracies
that seem to at once determine his existence and block him at every turn, like
some terrible, Manichean destiny. And in this, we might read his struggle with
his own mental illness, that great crush of anxiety, despair and self-hatred
that made even the most straightforward tasks exhausting, or his art, or his
father, or the Austro-Hungarian Empire, anti-Semitism, nationalism, his own
Jewishness… or Life, God, and/or the Universe. These are quests that always
fail, realism becoming surrealism as the hero approaches but never reaches a
conclusion aside from his own death, each notionally simple but beautifully
observed and wilfully opaque episode adding to an overall air of menace and
uncertainty. Humour there is, but it is very, very black. It’s the gallows
humour of the generation that had survived the trenches, the subsequent pandemic,
and the death of God, and knew that there was no other human response to the
waiting grave but to laugh at it.
I was born, Kafka
seems to say, into a world I didn’t want, understand or comfortably fit, only
to be randomly killed by it (The Trial) or given a place in it – provisionally
– only after death (The Castle – Das Schloss). And who’s to say
this isn’t exactly what happened to him? Like life then, aside from death these
stories seem to have no end. Kafka’s novels were never finished, just
abandoned, although the final chapters were written or planned. His episodic narratives
are potentially infinite.
Having been
diagnosed with laryngeal tuberculosis in 1917, Kafka died on June 3, 1924, aged
forty, in a sanitorium just outside Vienna, a city he loathed. He had literally
starved to death, the pain in his throat so severe he was no longer able to
eat. He was editing ‘The Hunger Artist’ (‘Ein Hungerkünstler’) until the end,
although predictably he left instructions that all his papers should be burnt,
unread, by his executor, Max Brod. Brod, of course, did not comply, writing in
a postscript to The Trial that he had always told his friend that he
would never destroy his work, and if Kafka really wished it so he could have
chosen a different executor.
Although a
successful writer himself, Brod’s literary legacy is Kafka. Brod, like everyone
else, had his own personal Kafka, whose work he interpreted in a specific and spiritual
way, editing as best as he could incomplete drafts and Da Vinci-esque notebooks
filled out of order, sometimes even written backwards. It was Brod who saw
Kafka’s major works to print and secured his place in history as one of the
most significant and influential writers of the 20th century –
something that Brod always knew but which Kafka, tragically did not. Would he
have cared for fame? Who knows? For all his poetic insight into his own
psychological processes, Kafka never learned to manage his anxiety, depression
and low self-esteem, so may have continued to find the experience of
publication profoundly negative, despite the compulsion to keep writing. Or
perhaps the exuberant Yiddish storyteller in him would have seen the funny side,
because that too is what it is to be Kafkaesque… It isn’t all doom and
gloom!
But in the end, you must make up your own mind. Forget the scholars and critics; pick up a copy of Kafka’s collected works and immerse yourself in some of the deepest, crisp, darkly comic and evocative prose you will ever read. And as for the man himself, let’s let him rest in peace. In the end, that’s probably all he wanted.
Peter Forsberg / Alamy Stock Photo