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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
The Czech writer has become the prophet of our absurd era, but a new book intends to strip the author of his saintly reputation.
By Louis Bayard
Read more: Books, Reviews, Book reviews, Louis Bayard
Aug. 1, 2008 | "One does not have to believe everything is true," a priest tells Joseph K in "The Trial." "One only has to believe it is necessary."
I've looked, and I can't find a better summation of the Bush administration's logic. And if there's any doubt that Franz Kafka has supplanted George Orwell as the prophet of our times, remember that the Iraq war was, from the start, driven not by soldiers but by bureaucrats -- specialists detached from general consequences, a class that Kafka understood better than anybody. Like the torturers of Abu Ghraib, like the commanding officers of Guantánamo Bay, the characters in Kafka's stories are simply, preeminently, doing their jobs, and this is the source of their horror.
And their absurdity. In his learned and lively dissection of Kafka-mania, "Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life," James Hawes obligingly lists some of the Czech author's more bizarre scenarios: "A man wakes up and finds that he's a beetle. A man who has done nothing wrong fights for his life against a bizarre court that sits in almost every attic in the world. A machine quite literally writes condemned people to death. A man tries forever to get into a mysterious castle. A man waits in vain all his life by the Door to the Law, only to be told as he dies that this door was only ever meant for him."
In short, Kafka's protagonists are (like the detainees of Guantánamo) running headlong into abstraction. They are modernists against their best wishes, but their problem is timeless. "They think they live in a world that is run on grounds of morality and rationality," writes Hawes, "a world where there is some connection between what we deserve and what we get." Unfortunately, "the basic chasm between the world we want and the world we're in is as vast in the age of electric lights, cars and phones as it is in the Book of Job."
It's best not to take Hawes' title too seriously. He doesn't really care if we waste our lives. His primary mission is to lay waste to what he calls "the K-myth": "the idea of a mysterious genius, a lonely Middle European Nostradamus, who, almost ignored by his contemporaries, somehow plumbed the depths of his mysterious, quasi-saintly psyche to predict the Holocaust and the Gulags."
How could he have predicted those terrors, argues Hawes, when he was so devoutly a man of his time? Which is to say an enthusiastic supporter of the Habsburg Empire who invested heavily in the Austro-Hungarian war effort (and lost his shirt). Not to mention a largely unobservant Jew who identified deeply with Germans and who longed more than anything to leave Prague for Berlin.
No, Kafka won't make it easy for his hagiographers. Consider that he was an enthusiastic porn collector -- how he would have loved the Internet! -- and a regular patron of prostitutes who strung out one fiancée for several years and cheated without remorse on another. Far from being alone and poor, he lived with his family in upper-middle-class comfort, socialized regularly and was well compensated by his employers at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute.
As for being unknown to his peers ... as early as February 1911, he could write confidently in his diary that "in intellectual/spiritual matters there is no doubt that I am now the focal point of Prague." At every turn, Kafka was backed by a potent literary clique that included Rainer Maria Rilke, Hermann Hesse and Robert Musil. In 1915, he won the highly prestigious Fontane Prize (or, rather, the prize's nominal winner donated the prize money, by prearrangement, to Kafka). As Hawes makes clear, Kafka was "a paid-up and active member, right until the end, of the German-speaking élite."
In his zeal to upset "known truths" about the author, Hawes even goes out of his way to be nice to Hermann Kafka, who, in his son's famously bitter (and undelivered) letter, was charged with being a kind of domestic terrorist, poisoning the house with "vigor, noise and hot temper." On the contrary, says Hawes, father Kafka was considered quite amiable and was most indulgent by the standards of his day, giving his son free rein to pursue his own interests, letting him live rent-free, even allowing him to choose his own fiancée, "a modern, big-city Berlin girl" named Felice Bauer who lacked both beauty and dowry.
It was Franz who, according to historical record, made Felice's life a misery, leading her through a long dance of lunge and retreat that left them both exhausted. Love and passion never do quite fuse in the Kafka psyche. In a letter to one of his mistresses, he admits his longing "for a quite specific vileness, for something mildly repugnant, painful, dirty." Hawes is unimpressed by this exhibitionism. "Saying that you are impure and dirty does not make you profound ... Yes, Kafka was uneasy about his sexual tastes, but if feeling more at ease with bad girls than with nice girls (and feeling bad about it afterward) is a sign of potential sainthood, there are an awful lot of men in line waiting for halos."
Next page: "Come along, then, you old dung beetle!"
