As some of you know, from time to time, we at KR ask for guest contributions to the blog. It is in this spirit that I introduce to you David Marcus, a 2006 graduate of Kenyon College and a current editorial intern at Nextbook.
Unlike his contemporaries Thomas Mann and Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka never made it to America. Mann and Freud arrived, visited New York briefly, and then went back to Europe disapproving of the raucous Americans (of course unbeknownst to the violence about to erupt in their own homelands). But the Czech writer never made it to the New World. Miserable, timid Kafka barely left his family’s Prague home, venturing out into the unfettered adult world of Berlin at the age of 38. Yet of the three, he was the only one to fictionalize America in his unfinished novel tentatively titled The Man Who Disappeared–otherwise known by the name Max Brod gave to it: Amerika.
Expectedly, the novel misappropriates New York, replacing the city with a picaresque, urban caricature filled with paternalistic politicians, thieving acquaintances, hideous skyscrapers and, most expressively, a Statue of Liberty that bares an upraised sword instead of a torch. Like Saul Steinberg’s New Yorker cover, it is also quite conveniently located–only a bridge away from Boston and a couple hours drive from San Francisco.
Perhaps it is fitting reparation that over the years, particularly in America, Kafka has become victim to constant misappropriation. Since his friend Max Brod went against his request to destroy his manuscripts, a cottage industry has sprung up around the writer who, besides a few short stories, was largely unpublished while alive. Beginning with Brod’s own successful–if not always accurate–biography, there are seven available in English, more than a handful films–including Orson Welles and Harold Pinter’s take on The Trial and Steven Soderbergh’s biopic Kafka, where a reed thin Jeremy Irons plays the titular character–and countless plays. On the web, there’s a video game dedicated to him and in Prague, there’s the Franz Kafka Museum, featuring Epcot-style 3-d installations and audiovisuals. Even Andy Warhol, having grown tired of Campbell Soup cans, reproduced the writer’s image.
The writer has become a prodigious symbol invoked to represent, depending on motivations, a whole slew of 20th century problems: totalitarianism; the failure of European Jewry; the loss of individualism; bourgeois ennui; existentialism; troubled father-son relationships; even impotence. Kafka the Icon–the one whose image can be found on t-shirts and coffee mugs–trumps his books, his life, his debilitating shyness.
Recent interpretations of his work and his life are so varied that in two New York theater explorations–one on his life, the other on The Trial–Kafka ends up being spokesman for both Zionism and the current plight of Muslims in post-9/11 America. The Great Conjurer portrays Kafka as he composes “The Metamorphosis.” Loosely based on Brod’s biography, the play recreates Kafka as three characters–K. the writer, N. a female narrator of his prose, and G. the vermin (from “Metamorphosis”)–and “toward the end, the parallel between K’s impotence and European Jewish fate is made explicit,” Dara Horn writes of it. The final scene culminates with a violin rendition of the Israeli National Anthem, Hatikvah. Although much has been made of Kafka’s interest in Kabbalah as well as his Zionist interest–he picked up Hebrew in his later years–it is a long stretch to call him an ardent Zionist. An agnostic on a good day, he was ambivalent about any mainstream religious or nationalist movements. “I represent the negative elements of my age,” he writes in his diary. “Unlike Kierkegaard, I was not guided in life by the now heavily sinking hand of Christianity, nor have I caught hold, like the Zionists, of one of the ends of the flying prayer-shawl of the Jews.”
In Rene Migliaccio’s The Trial, Joseph K becomes Yusef K, a Pakistani in America. The play begins with a 10-minute video montage that includes, as Mark Blakenship points out, “everything from the World Trade Center being attacked to Muslim women praying” and, as explained on its website, is an elaboration on society’s “ability to polarize individuals against one another and to ostracize one particular segment of the population. The Trial’s powerful message still rings true today. Following the horrific events of September 11, 2001, hundreds of people of Arab descent found themselves in positions not unlike that of Joseph K.” Granted this is not an unfair reading nor, for that matter, an original one. The court system featured in Kafka’s The Trial has hints of greater political injustices that have occurred in history. However, the novel’s intention–rather than its later application–is more psychological. Joseph K’s guilt emanates from internal sources as much as external, judiciary ones. The matter of Joseph’s ethnicity–Jewish or otherwise–is not raised nor disclosed. The political polarization of a people, even of an individual, is not at stake. These material concerns did not interest Kafka. For documentary accounts of the brutal subjugation of a particular people read Primo Levi, or Solzhenitsyn.
The Trial’s genius, on the other hand, is born from Kafka’s ability to manifest Joseph’s inner world–particularly his guilt and anxiety–externally. The metaphysical becomes physical. Joseph K’s abstract uncertainties are transmuted into corporal reality. His guilt–one of subconscious, tacit feelings–becomes the guilt declared by the court. The novel focuses obsessively on a nightmare that has been actualized whereas Migliaccio’s play does the opposite. It imposes the worldly–specifically the political results of 9/11–upon the unworldly landscape of Kafka’s fiction and takes a conflict of global proportions and minimizes it.
How Kafka is interpreted and used, though, is not the point. Although problematic on its own terms, I am less interested in the particulars of his easy corruptibility–whether it comes in the form of political agendas or kitsch–and more interested by the phenomenon itself. His image is constantly reproduced through the refracted lens of contemporary, and many times conflicting, interests. His icon, not his literature, has become commodified. It is consumed, not understood. Unfortunately, what might be Kafka’s most enduring legacy is not his idiosyncratic style or his way of transmuting his own psychological distress into the physical reality of his stories–most evocative in stories like “The Starving Artist” and “The Metamorphosis”–but his ability to be interpreted in such polysemous variation.
On a recent visit to Brooklyn’s Central Library, I was disappointed to find that the critical works on Kafka far outnumbered his original work. His dusty translations sit between two mystery novels whereas, in the non-fiction section, his biographies and critical studies stake out two shelves. They wait in bay, bullying enforcers for Kafka’s sparse output and unwanted reputation. Luminaries such as Hannah Arendt, Elias Cannetti, Theodore Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Heller, Milan Kundera all weigh in. In “I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting,” Philip Roth more playfully re-imagines him as his Hebrew school teacher. In Jonathan Lethem and Carter Scholz’s Kafka Americana, Kafka is exorcized as Hollywood screenwriter (among other things). There’s also a Marxist study of his writings, an odd, esoteric Italian book titled K., and Hanns Zischler’s Kafka Goes to the Movies, where Kafka’s first film attendance is (far too) meticulously discussed.
Walter Benjamin argues that the value of Kafka’s work lies in his ability to offer “the complement without being aware of what surrounded him.” More cynically, Adorno quips of Kafka critics: “Of that which has been written on him, little counts“he is assimilated into an established trend of thought.” In fact, the more one reads on Kafka, as well as the more one reads of Kafka, one becomes aware of a subversive malleability in his literature, one that the writer–perhaps in the midst of artistic and personal uncertainty–decided to intentionally embed into his fiction. After all, he was aware of the possibility of posthumous misunderstanding. He writes in a letter to his on-again-off-again lover Felice Bauer:
Incidentally, won’t you tell me what I really am? In the latest issue of the Neue Rundschau, ???The Metamorphosis’ is mentioned and rejected on reasonable grounds; then there are these lines, more or less: ???There is something German about K’s art of narration.’ In Max’s essay, on the other hand, ???K’s narratives are among the most Jewish documents of our time.’ A painful case. Am I a circus rider on 2 horses?
There’s an old Jewish aphorism: “You can’t dance at two weddings.” Ubiquitous Kafka danced, and still dances, at many.