Hypochondraical, insomniac, food faddist, cripplingly indecisive, terrified by life, horrified by death, Franz Kafka turned, as best he was able, his neuroses into art. As a character in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story “A Friend of Kafka” says, he “showed homo sapiens in his highest degree of self-torture.” Still, the consensus remains that Franz Kafka is a modern master—a master, more specifically, of modernism, housed in the same pantheon as Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky, Mallarmé, and other modern artists who have radically altered contemporary understanding of the world.
Kafka’s wrote in what Erich Heller called “lucid obscurity,” adding that “his is an art more poignantly and disturbingly obscure than literature has ever known.” One thinks one grasps his meaning, but does one, really? All seems so clear, yet is it, truly? One of Kafka’s famous aphorisms reads: “Hiding places there are innumerable, escape is only one, but possibilities for escape, again, are as many as hiding places.” Another runs: “A cage goes in search of a bird.”
With Kafka’s aphorisms, so with his parables. Walter Benjamin wrote that “Kafka’s parables are never exhausted by what is explainable; on the contrary, he took all conceivable precautions against the interpretation of his writing.” Whatever these precautions may have been, they were inadequate, for the works of Franz Kafka, apart perhaps only from the Bible and Shakespeare, may be the most relentlessly interpreted, if not over-interpreted, in the modern world.
The September 12, 2012 issue of the London Times Literary Supplement ran a review of no fewer than five new interpretive books on Kafka. Franz Kafka, The Poet of Guilt and Shame by Saul Friedlander is the latest entry in the Kafka interpretive derby. Mr. Friedlander is not by trade a literary critic but an historian. His affinity for Kafka is historical and genealogical. His family origins, like Kafka’s, are in Prague, German-speaking and Jewish. His father went to the same law school that Kafka did, though fifteen years later. As Kafka lost his three sisters, so did Mr. Friedlander lose his parents, in Nazi death camps.
Mr. Friedlander is well aware of the competing theories about the meaning of Kafka’s small body of work. This includes three uncompleted novels, fewer than two dozen short stories, an assemblage of fragment-like shorter works, his diaries, collections of letters mostly to fiancées whom he never married, and his famous Letter to My Father, which he never sent. Mr. Friedlander’s method in this short book is to work back and forth from the life to the work in the attempt to explain Kafka’s significance. His own view is that Kafka was “the poet of his own disorder.” He has no doubt about his greatness, though he resists explaining in what, exactly, it resides.
“The issues torturing Kafka most of his life were of a sexual nature,” Mr. Friedlander writes. Although he doesn’t say so straight out, he appears to believe that Franz Kafka was a repressed homosexual—that the guilt and shame of his subtitle were chiefly over his hidden sexuality. He offers no clinching proof of Kafka’s homosexuality, and at one point goes so far as to say “it is highly improbable that Kafka ever considered the possibility of homosexual relations.”
Yet in Kafka’s stories, Mr. Friedlander finds, “there is a secret to be discovered, something that the protagonists attempt to hide. Doesn’t this recurrent metaphor bring us back to Kafka’s constant effort to hide his sexual leanings?” In the unending critical Easter-egg hunt for the secret meaning in Franz Kafka’s fiction, Mr. Friedlander has retrieved the gay egg.
At one point Mr. Friedlander remarks on Kafka’s interest in young boys (Death not in Venice but in Prague). At another he remarks that “Kafka’s representation of women is grimacing at best.” A youthful “homoerotic” interest on Kafka’s part in friends is noted. In the story “A Country Doctor,” the wound in the side of the boy the doctor has been called out to heal, a wound suppurating worms, is, Mr. Friedlander 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.” Kafka’s universality derives from his operating at a high level of generality. Places are not named, characters often go undescribed, landscapes sere and menacing appear as they might in nightmares. Joyce and Proust work from detail to generality, Kafka from generality to detail, giving his fiction the feeling of parable, of something deeply significant 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,” wrote Erich Heller, “indeed, it almost amounts to identity.” The broader lineaments of Kafka’s autobiography are well-known. Taken together they comprise a life of nearly unrelieved doubt and mental suffering.
From his Letter to My Father, we know that Kafka’s father Herrmann Kahn was strong and oppressive, a man who left his son with a permanent feeling of inadequacy. We know of the drudgery of Kafka’s work as a lawyer at the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute in Prague, and the first-hand acquaintance it gave him of the hideous entanglements of bureaucracy (that now go by the name Kafkaesque). Perhaps most pertinent are his misfired love affairs. Kafka made four different marriage proposals, and never made good on any of them. He died in 1924 at forty-one, of tuberculosis, without having quite lived except during those solitary nights that, in trance-like exaltation, he devoted to his writing. Before his death, he instructed his stalwart friend Max Brod to destroy much of his work, but against Kafka’s 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 “Metamorphosis” and “The Judgment.” In other stories, one is presented with 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 lucid detail, chronicling the unravelling of lives in which illogic becomes plausible, guilt goes unexplained, and brutal punishment doled out for no known offense, such is the art of Franz Kafka.
In his The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head, A Biography of Franz Kafka, Louis Begley, one of the best interpreters of Kafka’s life, especially of his relationships with women, claims that in his fiction he “wrote about the human condition.” Erich Heller, in his Modern Masters book on Kafka, held that his writing transcended “most realities of the age.” Neither man, though, tells quite how he did these things.
Benjamin, Begley, Heller, Friedlander, and other critics who take Kafka’s greatness as an artist as self-evident hold that he cannot be either explained or judged in the same way as other literary artists. Walter Benjamin believed that
Kafka’s entire work constitutes a code of gestures which surely had no 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.
“In Kafka’s fiction,” writes Mr. Friedlander, “the Truth remains inaccessible, and is possibly non-existent.” Mr. Begley, remarking on an object referred to as “Odradek” in a five-paragraph exercise called “The Cares of a Family Man,” writes: “Some things cannot be explained.” Of “Metamorphosis,” Kafka’s most famous story, Erich Heller writes that
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 interpretation.
Gabriel Josipovici, noting that one hundred years have passed since Kafka wrote his story “The Judgement,” writes:
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.
In other words, Kafka is given a pass on criticism. The argument is that he cannot finally be explained, but merely read, appreciated, re-read until his mea
ning, somehow, washes over one. But what if this meaning seems oddly skewed and even outmoded in the way great literature never is?
Claustral was Kafka’s life, and claustral is the feeling that accompanies reading him today. As Mr. Friedlander underscores, Kafka came into his maturity as a German-speaking Jew in anti-Semitic Czechoslovakia—as a minority, in other words, within a minority—a condition that was to worsen after the death of the relatively benign rule of Emperor Franz Josef. Kafka’s fiction was created in the closing years of the Austro-Hapsburg Empire, where Otto Weininger, author of Sex and Character, and even more Sigmund Freud, emphasized the centrality of family and the sexual life in human development. Touching on the hot-house intellectual atmosphere of this time, Mr. Friedlander quotes the German critic Willy Haas (1891–1972): “I cannot imagine how any man can understand him [Kafka] at all who was not born in Prague in the period 1880 to 1890.”
And much, it is true, isn’t easily understood. For a man who claimed to be under the lash of a tyrannical father, Kafka nevertheless lived at home until he was nearly forty. He strung women along for years—poor Felice Bauer, his longest standing fiancée for five years—holding out hopes for marriage on which he could not deliver.
Kafka felt that his “talent was for portraying his inner dream-life.” But dreams, however gripping they can be, are aesthetically unsatisfying, especially in their endings. Kafka himself did not find the ending of “Metamorphosis,” his greatest and most famous story, satisfying. Perhaps for the same reason, he was unable to complete his novels: dreams, especially nightmares, have no artistic endings. Another character in Singer’s story “A Friend of Kafka’s” says of The Castle, “It’s too long for a dream. Allegories should be short.”
Kafka is credited with powers of prophesy in predicting, through his novels The Trial and The Castle, the totalitarian regimes that would arise after his death, especially that of the Soviet Union with its arbitrary, insane, yes Kafkaesque, crushing bureaucratic apparatus for killing. But today, the stories of fatherly tyranny carry too strong an odor of the now moribund doctrine of Sigmund Freud—Oedipus Complex and all that. His breakthrough story, “The Judgement,” about a father who sentences his son to death by drowning, causing the young man to jump off a bridge in suicide, he claimed to have written under the influence of the doctrines of Sigmund Freud. The centrality of dreams in his stories also reflects Freud’s certainty about the significance of the dream life. The spread of Freudianism and the rise of Kafka’s reputation ran, not without good reason, parallel. Kafka often reads like Freud fictionalized. Freud’s reputation is now quite properly in radical decline, Kafka’s, somehow, lives on undiminished.
All of which brings one round to the question of whether Franz Kafka was truly a major writer. His greatest proponents among critics, insisting that he is, cannot say why he is, and ask a permanent moratorium on conventional criticism of his writing. His detractors, a distinct minority, feel that what he left us was, in the words of Edmund Wilson, a “half-expressed gasp of a self-doubting soul trampled under.” In the end, wrote Henry James in his essay on Turgenev, we want to know what a writer thinks about life. Kafka found it unbearably complicated, altogether daunting, and for the most part joyless—not, let us agree, the best prescription for a great artist.
Orwell
(1990)
Six years after the heavily over-Orwelled if otherwise unfateful year of 1984, and fully forty years since his death in 1950, one still feels that nothing like a clear picture of the precise quality of George Orwell has yet to emerge. Fame—a great, billowy, international cloud of fame—has got in the way. Ozone-like layers of controversy, chiefly having to do with conservative and left-wing claimants to Orwell’s political legacy, have further obscured the atmosphere. The highly uneven nature of Orwell’s writing has sent up yet more in the way of mist. Q. D. Leavis, for example, who early praised Orwell’s essays and criticism, asked that he write no more fiction. Then there is Orwell’s life, which from one standpoint appears so seamless, an unblemished sheet of uninterrupted goodness, and then from another makes him appear a cold and rather tasteless fish indeed, whose first wife felt that her husband’s work came before her and in fact before everything else in life and who died during an operation for an illness—presumably cancer—he scarcely knew about.
Fame of the kind enjoyed by performing artists, politicians, and other public figures is rarely available to writers and creative artists generally. Whenever he was in danger of thinking himself famous, Virgil Thomson used to say, he had only to go out into the world to disabuse himself of the notion. Soon after the burial of Balzac, a writer always keenly interested in fame, the bookkeepers at the Père-Lachaise Cemetery sent their bill for services to the family of “M. Balsaque.” Surely there must be a lesson here somewhere.
George Orwell’s fame—which has been largely a posthumous phenomenon—has been not only extraordinary but across the board: popular, academic, intellectual. What put Orwell on, in fact all over the map were his two international best-sellers, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). These books have been translated into more than thirty languages and have by now sold scores of millions of copies. In the English-speaking world, they are nearly unavoidable; for some years now students have generally encountered Animal Farm in junior high school or its equivalent and Nineteen Eighty-Four in secondary school and are frequently asked to read an Orwell essay or two in university composition courses: “A Hanging” (1931) or “Shooting an Elephant” (1936), perhaps, or “Politics and the English Language” or “Why I Write” (both 1946). Among schoolchildren nowadays, the name George Orwell may be better known than William Shakespeare. George Orwell’s fame has been not only extraordinary but across the board: popular, academic, intellectual.
Unfortunately for Danielle Steel and Euclid, it is neither number of books sold nor number of children forced to read an author that confers upon him true literal fame. Instead it is the currency of his ideas that matters. Here Orwell has scored, and scored heavily. “Orwellian” has clearly left “Kafkaesque,” “Chekhovian,” and other literary eponyms far behind. Partly, of course, this is owing to recent decades having been—if you will allow the expression—highly Orwellian. But partly it has to do with the stark clarity of Orwell’s ideas, or at least the chief ideas of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. So much is this less so in Orwell’s other writings—his essays and nonfictional books—despite the lucidity of each discrete work, that the question of whether Orwell was finally a man of the Left or not will probably never be entirely settled.
Between the “finer grain” and the “broader outline” writers, Orwell was surely among the latter—among, that is, those writers whose work can be reduced to its essential ideas, as the work of Henry James, Marcel Proust, and George Santayana cannot. So much have the ideas extracted from Orwell’s writing been in the air that one needs scarcely to have read him to have a strong notion of what these ideas are. Just as one need not have read through Marx to be aware of the class struggle and economic determinism, or have read much of Freud to know about the Oedipus complex and the importance of dreams, slips, and early sexuality, so one does not really have to have turned a page of Orwell to know that “some pigs are more equal than others,” that “Power is Knowledge,” and that Big Brother (the creep) is watching you.
In personal testimony to this fact, I can report that, toward the end of 1984, the year of the great Orwell glut, I was asked to add to the slag heap by giving a little talk on Nineteen Eighty-Four, which I glumly agreed to do. It was only when I sat down to prepare this talk that I realized that I had never read Nineteen Eighty-Four. I had seen the American movie version, with the impressively sweaty-faced Edmund O’Brien playing Winston Smith; I had for years heard bandied about—no doubt bandied about myself—such terms as “newspeak” and “doublethink”; I had read a number of essays on the novel; but as for actually having read the novel itself, nope, I
couldn’t rightly say that I had. When I did get around to reading it, I found it rather disappointing; like most of Orwell’s fiction, it was thin on detail, and the working-out of the plot seemed unconvincing. As a dystopian novel, I thought it less prescient than Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932); as a specifically Cold War novel, it couldn’t lay a glove on Arthur Koestler’s masterpiece, Darkness at Noon (1940). But the more interesting point is that, such has been the fame of Nineteen Eighty-Four, one not only can come to believe one has read the novel when one hasn’t but, more amazing still, such has been the spread of the novel through the general culture, it may well be that one doesn’t really have to have read the novel at all, so long as one doesn’t agree to go about giving talks on it.
Not only does Orwell’s fame spread wide and cut deep, but there has become, somehow, something sacrosanct about him and his works. This, too, is a posthumous phenomenon. While he lived, Orwell had more than the normal allotment of enemies. Chief among them were political intellectuals, and in the 1930s, when Orwell came to literary maturity, to be intellectual was by definition to be political. One of Orwell’s specialties was attacking intellectuals, and especially catching them out at disseminating left-wing cant, upon which he, Orwell, loved to stomp. (“All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham,” he wrote in his essay “Rudyard Kipling” [1942], “because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy.”) Orwell was much better at influencing people than at making friends, at least when alive. Now the situation appears nearly to be reversed. Excepting only the most artery-hardened Marxists and academic feminists, everyone is Orwell’s friend nowadays. Devotion to Orwell has become no laughing matter. Or so I conclude from the fact that, after all these years, no one so far as I know has published a parody of Orwell—an easy enough job, one would think, given the many strongly characteristic tics and turns of Orwell’s readily recognized prose style, with its aggressively commonsensical spin. Here is my attempt at the job:
The Ideal of Culture Page 18