It's like shining a searchlight on the cockroach from Searchlight. (My apologies to cockroaches).--PGalt
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Giving Flesh to a GhostBY ERIC ORMSBY - Special to the Sun
A sense of insubstantiality haunted his life, and here his drastic thinness did play a part. "I am the thinnest person I know," he told Felice Bauer, going on to compare his skeletal frame to his stripped-down prose. In his expressive doodles and sketches, the figures are always skinny as rails. His ascetic practices seemed designed to slim him ever further. But the fasting, the vegetarianism, the courses of exercise, the disciplined deprivation, had as their real object not diminishment, but distillation. He reduced himself as a cook reduces a broth. The secret of Kafka's power seems to have lain in such stubborn self-concentration, or what he termed "purity." This had nothing to do with hatred of the body. On the contrary, it was a regimen for strengthening his constitution. Only when he felt his vital forces massed within him could he hope for the miracle, that exalted state in which his greatest prose was born. He learned this in a single night, and we know the exact date: September 22, 1912. That was the night on which, between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., Kafka wrote his terrifying story "The Judgment" in one sustained trance of inspiration. In his diary he noted the circumstances and added, "How everything can be hazarded, how for everything, even for the strangest idea, a great fire is ready in which it expires and rises up again." In the few years left to him, he would bend all his efforts to kindling and stoking that "great fire." Despite his admiration of Flaubert, Kafka was not the sort of writer who steadily, day by day, perfected a paragraph or a page. Instead, day by day, he courted the energy and illumination out of which alone, and in a rush, his best work might come. Though his fiction has a dream-like aura, Kafka was as scrupulous about details as any naturalistic novelist. The details enhance both the horror and the comedy of his characters' predicaments. Gregor Samsa, transformed overnight into a gigantic cockroach, learns all the vexations of an exoskeleton when he topples onto his back and then thrashes to right himself with his six new wiggling legs. His struggle, in Kafka's pitiless description, is all the more appalling for being so slapstick. Despite the sharpness of his descriptions, Kafka himself has remained a sketchy figure. This has not been for lack of biographies, beginning with one by Max Brod himself. Thanks to these efforts, we are more or less familiar with Kafka's family life, his conflicts with his parents, his legal work in an insurance office, his maddeningly frustrated engagements and romantic debacles (worse, I think, for the women involved than for him), the sanatoria and the cures, the final happy liaison with Dora Dymant in Berlin, and his early death of tuberculosis, at the age of 40, in 1924. But these lives of Kafka lacked that specificity of vivid detail that makes his prose so compelling. Now, however, the first of a projected three-volume biography has appeared, which promises to illumine the shadowy background into which Kafka keeps vanishing. "Kafka: The Decisive Years" (Harcourt, 581 pages, $35) is the result of a decade of research by the writer and editor Reiner Stach; the German original, here translated by Shelley Frisch, appeared in 2002. Mr. Stach is that rare creature, a scholar who is not an academic. He writes well (though he tends to ramble) and has no patience with the pieties of those whom Czechs call "Kafkalogues." In fact, he takes a rather refreshing delight in skewering academics who use Kafka merely as a footstool to promotion. Through Mr. Stach's labors, we gain a palpable sense of how Kafka lived and worked and wrote. We also come to understand the milieu within which he struggled and suffered (and made others suffer). Kafka's genuine strangeness is not thereby diminished but is made at least partly comprehensible. By holding fast to what mattered to Kafka himself - his writing, first of all, but also his conflicted yearning for marriage - Mr. Stach avoids facile inferences and glib conclusions. This first volume examines the years 1910-15 in considerable detail. (Mr. Stach sidesteps the earlier years because the pertinent documents are still locked away in the papers of Max Brod and remain closed to scholars.) During those "decisive years" Kafka wrote several of his greatest works: "The Judgment" and "The Metamorphosis" as well as "The Trial." He also came to understand what conditions he had to have to make writing possible. Unfortunately, these stringent requirements - solitude, quiet, freedom from social obligations - clashed with the married state. What woman could live with a man determined to reduce his needs, and himself, to the smallest imaginable circumference? As Mr. Stach shows, during Kafka's long troubled engagement with Felice Bauer, even the prospect of shopping for furniture caused him absurd frenzies of anguish; their tastes differed widely and to him, every chair or table or credenza she admired had the look of a tomb. Mr. Stach relates the painful story of this engagement with great thoroughness, making extensive use of the 350 or so tortuous letters which Kafka wrote to her (hers do not survive). He reconstructs the social milieux of Felice's Berlin and Kafka's Prague, particularly the protocols, strictures, and taboos that governed middle-class assimilated Jewish life within them. He is especially good on small but significant details - for example, such lost conventions as letter-writing, with its binding implications. For Kafka even to write to Felice was in itself a fateful first step toward eventual marriage. Both parties knew this and kept their letters hidden. Kafka dreaded marriage as much as he longed for it; though he sometimes frequented brothels, he had a neurotic loathing of sex. The prospect of children dismayed him, too (not least because they were noisy). What made Felice, and matrimony, so alluring was that his meeting, and budding epistolary relationship with her, inspired his first unmistakably authentic writings. He even dedicated "The Judgment" to her, though he delayed showing her "The Metamorphosis." That she had inspired a tale of a man transformed into a cockroach was too weird a tribute, even for Kafka. The history of the Kafka-Bauer engagement, as Mr. Stach tells it, is both excruciating and comical - much, in fact, like a Kafka novel. But the book is also informative on Kafka's professional life as a lawyer; we almost catch a whiff of that gloomy and bustling fourth-floor Prague office with its hapless customers and eccentric clerks. Mr. Stach provides details of early office equipment - telephone exchanges, primitive typewriters, crude dictaphones - which intrigued Kafka (though he hated telephone conversations) and which resurfaced tellingly in such later works as "The Castle." The accumulation of these homely details never becomes pedantic because Mr. Stach knows how to relate them to the work, and this is what sets Mr. Stach apart from other Kafka biographers. He loves Kafka's writing, and it shows in astute, and sometimes critical, comments. His discussion of "The Trial" is especially impressive and has the rather startling effect of bringing that enigmatic work into sharper focus without compromising its mysterious power. On Kafka the man, Mr. Stach is sympathetic but hardly all-forgiving; he describes, and sometimes chastises, his rather labyrinthine selfishness and has no patience for his frequent whining. He is harder on Max Brod (with good reason) and on Kafka's boorish and overbearing father (whom he manifestly dislikes), but I ended up feeling rather sorry for Hermann Kafka. Mr. Stach even berates him for "inconsiderately" yawning too loudly in his bed and thus disturbing his neurasthenic son (who slept - or rather, lay sleepless - in an adjoining room). But if a man can't yawn in his own bed, where can he? Mr. Stach acknowledges that we will probably never coax Kafka fully into the light and that even if that were possible, mere factual illumination would scarcely explain his genius. But he has given solid flesh to this thinnest of ghosts, and that is no small accomplishment. November 29, 2005 Edition / Section: Arts and Letters |
The surviving photographs of Franz Kafka have a ghostly feel. This is not only the result of his extraordinary slimness. In several shots, he seems to bow toward the viewer, but his slight forward tilt suggests some imminent withdrawal, as though he were merely paying a courtesy to the lens before dissolving into the darkness of the backdrop. In an early jotting, he once mused about remaining in bed while sending his suit to attend a party. The photographs reproduce this fantasy with an eerie fidelity. Only his eyes, remarkably large and unusually luminous, give life to the reluctant suit that must stand up for its owner on such posed occasions.