Is Franz Kafka Overrated?

CRITICS HAVE LONG TENDED TO SEE HIM AS A MODERNIST MASTER ON PAR WITH JOYCE,
PROUST, AND PICASSO. LET'S RECONSIDER THAT. BY JOSEPH EPSTEIN JUN 19 2013

EDMUND WILSON CLAIMED that the only book he could not read while eating his breakfast was by the
Marquis de Sade. I, for different reasons, have been having a difficult time reading Franz Kafka with my
morning tea and toast. So much torture, description of wounds, disorientation, sadomasochism, unexplained
cruelty, appearance of rodents, beetles, vultures, and other grotesque creaturesall set out against a background
of utter hopelessness. Distinctly not a jolly way to start the day. Kafka doesnt make for very comforting
reading at bedtime, either.

Hypochondriac, insomniac, food faddist, cripplingly indecisive, terrified by life, obsessed with death, Franz
Kafka turned, as best he was able, his neuroses into art. As a character in Isaac Bashevis Singers story A
Friend of Kafka says, Kafka was Homo sapiens in his highest degree of self-torture. Still, the consensus
remains that Franz Kafka is a modern mastera master, more specifically, in the modernist tradition, housed in
the same pantheon as Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky, Mallarm, and other artists who have radically altered
contemporary understanding of the world.

Kafka created obscure lucidity, Erich Heller wrote in his book on Kafka. His is an art more poignantly and
disturbingly obscure, he added, than literature has ever known. One thinks one grasps Kafkas meaning, but
does one, really? All seems so clear, yet is it, truly? A famous aphorism of Kafkas reads: Hiding places there
are innumerable, escape is only one, but possibilities of escape, again, are as many as hiding places. Another
runs: A cage went in search of a bird.

As with Kafkas aphorisms, so with his brief parables. The parables, Walter Benjamin wrote, are never
exhausted by what is explainable; on the contrary, he took all conceivable precautions against the interpretation
of his writings. Whatever these precautions may have been, they were inadequate, for the works of Franz
Kafkaapart perhaps only from the Bible and the works of Shakespearemay be the most relentlessly
interpreted, if not overinterpreted, in the modern world.

The September 7, 2012, issue of The Times Literary Supplement ran a review by Gabriel Josipovici of several
recent books on Kafka. Franz Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt, by Saul Friedlnder, is another strong entry
in the derby. Friedlnder is by trade not a literary critic but a historian. His affinity for Kafka is historical and
personal. Like Kafkas, his family, German-speaking and Jewish, originated in Prague. His father went to the
same university Kafka did, though some 15 years later. As Kafka lost his three sisters, so did Friedlnder lose
his parents in Nazi camps.

Friedlnder is well aware of the competing theories about the meaning of Kafkas small body of work, which
includes three uncompleted novels, some two dozen substantial short stories, an assemblage of parables and
fragment-like shorter works, diaries, collections of letters (many to lovers whom he never married), and the
famous Letter to His Father, which he never sent. Friedlnders method in this short book is to weave back and
forth between the life and the work in an attempt to explain Kafkas significance. He does not doubt Kafkas
greatness, though he resists explaining in what, exactly, it resides.
His own view is that Kafka was the poet of his own disorder. Friedlnder writes, The issues torturing Kafka
most of his life were of a sexual nature. Although he doesnt say so explicitly, he appears to believe that Kafka
was a repressed homosexualthat the shame and guilt Friedlnder mentions in his subtitle were chiefly over
Kafkas hidden sexuality. He offers no clinching proof, and at one point goes so far as to say, It is highly
improbable that Kafka ever considered the possibility of homosexual relations.

Kafka reads like Freud fictionalized. Freuds reputation is now quite

properly in radical decline; Kafkas, somehow, lives on.
Yet in Kafkas stories, Friedlnder finds, there is a secret to be uncovered, something that the protagonist
attempts to hide. Doesnt this bring us back to Kafkas constant efforts to hide his sexual leanings? In the
unending critical Easter-egg hunt for the secret meaning in Franz Kafkas fiction, Friedlnder has retrieved the
gay egg.

At one point Friedlnder remarks on Kafkas interest in young boys. (Death not in Venice but in Prague?) At
another he notes, Kafkas representation of women is grimacing at best. At still another he mentions a
youthful homoerotic interest in friends. In A Country Doctor, a wound in the side of a boy suppurating
worms is, Friedlnder agrees with another critic, symbolic of the vagina. Ah, we sleep tonight; criticism stands
guard.

Kafka, the critic Jeremy Adler holds, is less dazzling than Proust, less innovative than Joyce, [but his] vision is
more stark, more painful, more obviously universal than that of his peers. Kafkas universality derives from his
high level of generality. Places are not named; most characters go undescribed; landscapes, sere and menacing,
appear as they might in nightmares. Joyce and Proust work from detail to generality; Kafka works from
generality to detail, giving his fiction the feeling that something deeply significant is going on, if only we could
grasp what precisely it is.

The vicinity of literature and autobiography could hardly be closer than it is with Kafka, Erich Heller wrote.
Indeed, it almost amounts to identity. The broader lineaments of Kafkas autobiography are well known.
Taken together, they constitute a life of nearly unrelieved doubt and mental suffering.

From Kafkas Letter to His Father, we know that Hermann Kafka was strong and oppressive, a man who left
his son with a permanent feeling of inadequacy. We know of the drudgery of Kafkas job as a lawyer at the
Workmens Accident Insurance Institute in Prague and the firsthand acquaintance it gave him with the hideous
entanglements of bureaucracy, entanglements that now go by the name Kafkaesque. Perhaps most pertinent are
his misfired love affairs. Kafka was engaged to two women, one of them twice, and never married. He died in
1924, at 40, of tuberculosis, without having quite lived except during those solitary nights that, in trancelike
exaltation, he devoted to his writing. Before his death he instructed his stalwart friend Max Brod to destroy
much of his work, but, against Kafkas wishes, Brod chose not to do so, thereby becoming a minor hero of
literature.

The crushing father figure comes in for a good workout in such Kafka stories as The Metamorphosis and
The Judgment. Other stories present pure, unexplained angst. These are the stories whose characters are being
severely punished for petty crimes (In the Penal Colony), or even for crimes they are unaware of having
committed (The Trial). Conveying nightmares in sharp detail, these stories chronicle the unraveling of lives in
which illogic becomes plausible, guilt goes unexplained, and brutal punishment is doled out for no known
offense. Such is the art of Franz Kafka.

In his Kafka biography, The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head, Louis Begley, one of the best
interpreters of Kafkas life, especially of his relationships with women, claims that Kafka wrote about the
human condition. Erich Heller held that Kafkas writing transcended most realities of the age. Neither man,
though, tells quite how Kafka did these things.

Benjamin, Begley, Heller, Friedlnder, and other critics who take Kafkas greatness as self-evident agree that
Kafka cannot be either explained or judged in the same way as other literary artists. Benjamin believed that
Kafkas entire work constitutes a code of gestures which surely had no definite symbolic meaning for the
author from the outset; rather, the author tried to derive such a meaning from them in ever-changing contexts
and experimental groupings.

Kafka felt that his talent was for portraying my dream-like inner
life. But dreams, however gripping, are aesthetically unsatisfying.
In Kafkas fiction, Friedlnder writes, the Truth remains inaccessible and is possibly nonexistent. Begley,
remarking on an object referred to as Odradek in a five-paragraph exercise of Kafkas called The Cares of a
Family Man, writes: Some things cannot be explained. Of The Metamorphosis, Kafkas most famous
story, Heller writes: It defies any established intellectual order and familiar form of understanding, and thus
arouses the kind of intellectual anxiety that greedily and compulsively reaches out for interpretations. In his
Times Literary Supplement review, Josipovici, noting that 100 years have passed since Kafka wrote his story
The Judgment, adds: We are probably no nearer to understanding that or any other of his works today than
his first readers were, nor should we expect to be.

Kafka, in other words, is given a pass on criticism. The argument is that he cannot finally be explained, but
merely read, appreciated, and reread until his meaning, somehow, washes over you. But what if this meaning
seems oddly skewed and in our day even outmoded, in the way great literature never is?

As Friedlnder underscores, Kafka came into his maturity as a German-speaking Jew in anti-Semitic Prague
that is, a minority twice overand the anti-Semitism was to worsen after World War I. Kafka began writing in
the closing years of the Austro-Hungarian empire, a time when Sigmund Freud emphasized the centrality of the
sexual life in human development. Touching on the hothouse intellectual atmosphere of this time, Begley quotes
the German critic Willy Haas: I cannot imagine how any man can understand him at all who was not born in
Prague in the period 1880 to 1890.

And much, it is true, isnt easily understood. For a man who claimed to be under the lash of a tyrannical father,
Kafka nevertheless lived at home until he was 31. He insisted that his job stifled him, yet he never left it until
compelled to by illness. He strung women alongpoor Felice Bauer, twice his fiance over the course of
several yearsholding out promises of marriage on which he did not deliver.

Kafka felt that his talent was for portraying my dream-like inner life. But dreams, however gripping they can
be, are aesthetically unsatisfying, especially in their endings. Kafka himself did not find the ending of The
Metamorphosis, his greatest story, satisfying, and it isnt. Perhaps for the same reason, he was unable to
complete his novels: dreams, especially nightmares, want for artistic endings. Another character in Singers A
Friend of Kafka says of Kafkas novel The Castle, Its too long for a dream. Allegories should be short.

Dour and doleful though Kafkas fiction is, it is not entirely bereft of humor or comic touches in dark situations.
Horses stare through windows into human habitations, an elderly bachelor is followed around his apartment by
two bouncing ballsabsurdity reigns amid terror. When he once read the first chapter of The Trial aloud for an
audience, Kafka laughed at the situation in which he had placed his main character. But the comedy is not what
one remembers in that novel or in any other of Kafkas writings.
Kafka is credited with prophetic powers, because he predicted, through his novels The Trial and The Castle, the
totalitarian regimes that arose after his death, especially that of the Soviet Union, with its arbitrary, insane,
crushingyes, Kafkaesquebureaucratic apparatus for killing. But today the stories of fatherly tyranny carry
too strong an odor of the moribund doctrine of Sigmund Freudthe Oedipus complex and all that. Kafka
claimed to have been thinking about Freuds doctrines when he wrote his breakthrough story, The Judgment,
about a father who sentences his son to death by drowning, causing the young man to jump off a bridge. The
centrality of dreams in his stories also reflects Freuds certainty about the significance of the dream life. The
spread of Freudianism and the rise of Kafkas reputation ran, not without good reason, in parallel. Kafka reads
like Freud fictionalized. Freuds reputation is now quite properly in radical decline; Kafkas, somehow, lives on.
Without belief in Freud, Kafkas stories lose their weight and authority.

All of which brings up the question of whether Franz Kafka is truly a major writer. His greatest proponents,
insisting that he is, cannot say why, and ask for a permanent moratorium on conventional criticism of his
writing. His detractors, a distinct minority, feel that what he left us is the sad story of a lost soul destroyed by
modern life. In the end, Henry James wrote in an essay on Turgenev, what we want to know about a writer is,
How does he feel about life? Kafka found it unbearably complicated, altogether daunting, and for the most
part joyless, and so described it in his fiction. This is not, let us agree, the best outlook for a great writer. Great
writers are impressed by the mysteries of life; poor Franz Kafka was crushed by them.

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