Kafka

Franz Kafka (1883-1924)

According to Gabriel Josipovici, Kafka is the representative poet of the 20th century because he is ‘the great poet of solitude’, ‘even though he lived with his family for most of his life:

Solitude is not a matter of living alone, […] it means […] feeling in your bones that you no longer belong as of rights to the family of man’ - Gabriel Josipovici, Moo Pak, Manchester: Carcanet, 1996, p. 55.

Like life itself, Kafka’s stories are bizarre, frustrating and ultimately inexplicable. His texts gesture towards conventional realist narrative, only to frustrate and perplex readers by refusing to adhere to those conventions. When we read Kafka, we struggle to understand: that is the point. The stories and novels seem to cry out for interpretation, but also resist it stubbornly. They do this by means of the narrative technique, which uses free indirect speech (called ‘erlebte Rede’ in German), the subjunctive mood and the allegorical mode in order to disorient and tantalise the reader. [The standard work in English on Kafka’s use of free indirect speech in his stories is by Roy Pascal, see reading list below]. An allegory is a description which points towards a higher (religious) truth. Kafka’s texts adopt this gestural mode, but they point towards the inaccessible. His fictional statements undermine, relativize, and contradict each other. His protagonists are shut off from the truth which they seek, deny, embody or ignore. They fail, but they fail in very interesting ways. To quote Samuel Beckett: ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’

[This Beckett quotation is also used by David Constantine to characterise both Kafka’s work and the way we should read it, in ‘Kafka’s writing and our reading’, in The Cambridge Companion to Kafka, ed. by Julian Preece, see reading list below, p. 9]

Kafka was born and lived most of his life in Prague, which at the time was the capital of Bohemia, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Kafka and his family belonged to a German-speaking Jewish ethnic minority in a city whose official language was German, but which was predominantly Czech-speaking and Catholic. From 1901-06 Kafka studied at the German University in Prague, graduating with a doctorate in law. In order to complete his qualification as a civil servant, he served a twelve-month unpaid internship in court from 1905-06. In 1907-08 he worked for the Assicurazioni Generali and then in 1908 he became an employee of the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute, where he remained until he was pensioned off in 1922 on grounds of ill health. Kafka began publishing stories in literary periodicals in 1908. In the winter of 1911-1912, Kafka was impressed by the performances of a Yiddish-language theatre group that visited Prague, and he became good friends with one of the actors, Yitzchak Lowy.

Kafka's first collection of stories, Betrachtung; Contemplation was published in 1912. 1912 was also the year in which Kafka found himself as a writer, producing his breakthrough stories Das Urteil; The Judgement and Die Verwandlung; Metamorphosis; Transformation. From 1912 to 1917 Kafka corresponded with Felice Bauer. In late 1917 he developed symptoms of tuberculosis. In 1919 Prague became the capital of independent Czechoslovakia. Kafka became increasingly ill and in the last year of his life he found love with Dora Diamant. He died of tuberculosis in Vienna in 1924.

Kafka's three novels were published posthumously by his friend and literary executor Max Brod (1884-1968). Kafka had instructed Brod to burn his unpublished work upon his death. Brod refused and had Kafka’s works published instead.

Together with Max Brod, Felix Weltsch and Franz Werfel, Kafka was a member of a group of writers called the Prague Circle. (This is not to be confused with the Prague linguistic circle around Roman Jakobson and Jan Mukařovský). On the literary Prague circle, see Margarita Pazi, ‘The Prague Circle’, in Donald G. Daviau (ed.), Major Figures of Austrian Literature: The Interwar Years, 1918-1938 (Riverside, CA: Ariadne, 1995), pp. 355-85.

Kafka’s many short stories include:

Betrachtung; Contemplation (collection of short stories; published 1912)

Beschreibung eines Kampfes; Description of a Struggle (written between 1904 and 1910, published 1936)

Das Urteil; The Judgement (written 1912, published 1916)

Die Verwandlung; Metamorphosis; The Transformation (written 1912, published 1915)

In der Strafkolonie; In the Penal Colony (written 1914, published 1919)

Blumfeld ein älterer Junggeselle; Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor (written 1915, published 1936)

Ein Landarzt; A Country Doctor (time of writing unknown, published 1917, dated 1918)

Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer; The Great Wall of China (written 1917, published 1931)

Ein Bericht für eine Akademie; Report for an Academy (written and published 1917)

Ein Hungerkünstler; A Hunger Artist (written and published 1922)

Forschungen eines Hundes; Investigations of a Dog (written 1922, published 1931)

Der Bau; The Burrow (written 1923, published 1931)

Eine kleine Frau; A Small Woman (written 1923-24, published 1924)

Josefine, die Sängerin oder das Volk der Mäuse; Josefine the Singer or The Mouse People (written and published 1924)

Kafka’s three novels, all unfinished, are:

Der Verschollene; The Man who Disappeared; Amerika (written 1911-14, published 1927)

Der Process; The Trial (written 1914-15; published 1925)

Das Schloss; The Castle (written 1922, published 1926)

In 1917-18 whilst staying in Zürau Kafka wrote a series of metaphysical, religious and linguistic reflections known as the Zürau aphorisms.

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