On Kafka

I once tried to justify my love for Kafka to a pair of incredulous friends. My failure was total. Not only were they not convinced, but my own faith in Kafka's works was shaken by my inability to locate their substance. After numerous false starts, I was confronted by the nihility of that which I was trying to defend. Why is Kafka great? I was left with the most idiotic of claims: because he is really unusual.

And so, let me make another attempt, in a vacuum this time. Something of the extraordinary nature of Kafka's modest oeuvre makes itself evident when one reads interpretations of his writing. Invariably, these interpretations appear grossly inadequate to their task. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the satisfactory interpretation of Kafka is the despair of any theoretical scheme. This is the obstacle which none of them manages to overcome. In each case, the attempt brings the interpretive method to the brink of its own dissolution. Strangely enough, the reason for this seems to be that each one works so well.

Kafka as the prophet of totalitarianism, Kafka as the psychoanalyst avant la lettre, Kafka as theologian for an absent God, Kafka as writer of minor literature. All these attempts are idiotic.

Without access to any of the works I have read or the many more which I have only perused or read about, I cannot substantiate my easy dismissal of all this scholarship, no doubt written by people more learned and intelligent than I. But whenever I read an interpretation of Kafka, I am left with the impression - although I have succeeded in articulating this impression only now - that the interpretive process crushes the supremely delicate tissue of the work, smashes it into dust, and leaves nothing but its own superstructure standing.

Any interpretation of Kafka in accordance with a given theory leaves nothing except that theory. Kafka disappears. He is explained away. If one wants, one can reduce Kafka to weird father-son relationships, monstrous women, dark corners, beds, and laws written down in porno books. Gregor Samsa and the protagonist of "The Judgment" are sons who can find no light in the shadows of their fathers. So total is their domination that they turn into insects or carry out their own death sentences. There's quite a lot of guilt here, you know. Or "Investigations of a Dog" is a theological allegory: dogs are to people as people are to god. But the allegorical aspect is totally irrelevant to the narrator's pursuits. The dogs' obliviousness to humans is less an indictment of their ignorance than it is a dismissal of the irrelevant "higher" beings. What the investigator is searching for is eminently immanent to the world of dogdom.

If K.'s attempts to reach the castle are like man's attempts to reach God, then God is absolute banality.

Kafka's works are striking in that they seem to be symbolic, when they are not. If "The Metamorphosis" seems to be the most symbolic work, then maybe this accounts for its popularity. It is the easiest of the stories to understand.

If Kafka has been misread by those emphasizing the tortured interiority of his works, then what to make of "The Cares of a Family Man?" Was the audience supposed to laugh at this story too? It is wrong to interpret laughter as signaling the opposite of seriousness. Sometimes one laughs in despair. This is not the kind of tepid laughter that one encounters among people at uncomfortable parties.

A few years ago, there was a book released portraying Kafka as an active man-about-town, successful bourgeois bureaucrat, and connoisseur of high-end pornography. The attempt was to humanize him, I suppose, and that is a worthy enough endeavor. There have been enough hagiographies of Kafka. It is all too unfortunate, then, that in the 21st century, to humanize a person is to point out his hemorrhoids. Kafka purchased pornography? You don't say! [and really, you don't, insofar as the 'pornography' was a literary journal. Show Kafka a modern Russian pop video, and he would probably have cried.] The publication of Kafka's office writings does not do much to convince me that he was an exemplar for the managerial class or that one can produce the works he did while 'enjoying' the 'life' which is served to us with added vitamins and minerals.

If the attempt to humanize a writer means making him as banal and worthless as I, his reader, am, then I think I prefer the hagiographies. There is a reason I read Kafka instead of re-writing him.

If I were an artist, I would create life-like statues of attractive naked women and position them in a landfill. Honesty and freedom. I would insist that this is not an allegory, but merely a paraphrase of life as it is.