A number of things have happened since my first attempt to reengage with Franz Kafka (1883-1924) for the 100th anniversary of his death. Let me enumerate:

1.
We finished watching the ARD's Kafka series.

Written by Daniel Kehlmann, and produced by David Schalko, this series deserved its good reviews. In particular, there are words of praise from Rainer Stach, whose exhaustive biography of Kafka served as the production's foundation, and who admits he keeps finding new things in Kafka's work.

Each of the six episodes shows Kafka from a different perspective: In his friendship with Max Brod; with his family; in his place of work; and in relationship with the three women who played the biggest role in his life (Felice Bauer, Milena Jesenska, and Dora Diamant).

The series, as the article quoted above notes, is particularly good at representing the fluid transition between reality and fiction: "Kafka's world, as we know it from literature -- eccentric, erratic, bureaucratic -- comes through again and again in the scenes. Some of the dialogues are taken from his stories and letters. And all in all, this creates an almost theatrical setting, a fascinating stage for great acting... Despite its artistic nature, the series conveys surprising sides of Franz Kafka, such as his turn to Judaism, his appreciation of Yiddish humour, and his substantial reputation as an insurance expert. Above all, however, it projects the atmosphere of Kafka's literary world in a congenial way."

Also available on that page is a 30-minute conversation with the film-makers in Prague (definitely worth watching).


From the exhibition noted below, here's Kafka and someone who's NOT Max Brod, even though he looks incredibly like the actor who played Max Brod in the series...

2.
After reading Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, I tracked down his Pages for Kafka, written in 1974 on the 50th anniversary of the author's death.

It sounds kind of gloomy: "He wanders. On a road that is not a road, on an earth that is not his earth, an exile in his own body..." But there's a glimmer of hope: "In the least stone touched, he recognizes a fragment of the promised land. Not even the promised land, but its shadow. And between shadow and shadow lives light. And not just any light, but this light, the light that grows inside him, unendingly, as he goes along his way."

3.
While we were in Oxford, we went to the exhibition at the Western Library (entitled Kafka: Making of an Icon). It was well done, I thought. Very accessible even to casual droppers-in, yet conveying often surprising facets of an author that we all tend to stereotype.

Here are some of the many, many interesting standouts:


"In the 1910s, one employee of the Berlin-based Carl Lindström Company was a woman named Felice Bauer, who would demonstrate the Parlograph at trade shows, and even appeared in a printed photographic flip-book the company had produced to promote the device. However, the Parlograph appalled Bauer’s fiance..."




Kafka and guests at a sanatorium in the Slovakian mountains, 1921


Art work by Tessa Farmer

On exiting, visitors were asked to vote (by means of coloured dots) on whether Max Brod had done the right thing by ignoring Kafka's request to burn most of his stuff. I was a "yes". So were most others at the point when we visited, but there wasn't a lot in it. It proved to be a nice discussion-starter, and we had an interesting little conversation with a guy who was leaning towards "no".


One of these was printed for every student at Oxford... Needless to say -- because students tend to distrust such offers -- many were declined, and therefore made available to visitors to the exhibition... I prefer to read Kafka in German (does that sound pretentious?), but I enjoyed Joyce Crick's introduction and comments, and it was interesting to compare some of the stories in English and German

4.
I read A Cage Went in Search of a Bird.

5.
I am continuing to read Leonard Gaya's insightful pieces, and appreciate that he's sharing his Year of Reading Kafka with us.

Points of particular interest:

-- "Kafka's letters to [Max] Brod provide a fascinating insight into their shared intellectual pursuits, with discussions spanning an eclectic range of authors: Plato..., Goethe, Balzac, Flaubert, Gogol, and even new voices like Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann (especially his recently published novella Tonio Kröger -- it’s no surprise that Mann’s depiction of the artist as an exile from the real world would resonate with Kafka)."


Postcards to Max Brod

-- Kafka insisted that his day-to-day job should have nothing to do with literature. Not for him the journalist/novelist parallelism of folks like Hemingway. He made his job work for him, though, and his "office writings" provided fertile inspiration for his creative oeuvre: "Kafka’s job entangled him in a realm of files, forms, paperwork, legal documents -- a depersonalised conveyor belt of written symbols that later became a central motif in his fiction. The deluge of bureaucratic red tape, the perplexing maze of administrative procedures, the notion of individuals trapped and overwhelmed by colossal, invisible mechanisms—that’s the essence of the 'Kafkaesque,' and it all originated from Kafka’s firsthand experience with the Austro-Hungarian administration."


Kafka's CV

-- Kafka, as we also learned from the television series, partied, loved popular entertainment, and embraced the new medium of film.


Jan Zrvavy's Cafe. The painter frequented the same bars as Kafka and Brod

6.
I also read Betrachtung, Kafka's first published book (it came out in 1912). The word Betrachtung generally means consideration or observation, but the book title has been translated into English as both Meditation and Contemplation.

It's a curious collection of 18 snippets. Snippetlets, really, as they're all very short. According to Joyce Crick, this genre was popular at the turn of the century.

They're all quite striking, but leave you puzzled, in that characteristically disorientating Kafka way.

You can just about discern some common themes. Crick pinpoints: a) wavering self-confidence (where there's a feeling of not belonging, or not being in control); b) liberation through assertion; c) isolation; d) the virile masculine figure; e) a curious fascination with clothes; and f) relations with women, "treated with a quietly wistful air".

Gaya, more helpfully, I think, identifies a consistent pattern in which the stories stand at the intersection between two countervailing impulses: "The urge toward careful, almost clinical observation, and an equally powerful yearning for complete immersion in life experience. The subjects... frequently oscillate between feeling utterly isolated from the world they describe and being suddenly, overwhelmingly drawn, carried away into it."

So, Children on the Country Road depicts that binary state -- dashing around one minute and dozy the next -- that is characteristic of children. Or there's The Unmasking of a Confidence Man, where the narrator can't get rid of his companion, but then realizes what kind of person he is, and feels able to rush up the stairs to his destination. The intersection Gaya describes is illustrated particularly well in The Sudden Walk, one of my favourites, in which the subject engages in just that -- a spontaneous evening walk that ends up by energizing him.

The next one, Decisions, swings the opposite way, towards inertia: "The best advice is to accept everything, to behave like a heavy mass, and feel yourself being blown away -- and to not allow yourself to be lured into any unnecessary steps." The Way Home also charts how a post-thunderstorm exuberance gives way to melancholy once the narrator arrives home: "Only when I enter my room do I become a little thoughtful, despite having found nothing worth thinking about while climbing the stairs." And outside, someone is playing music... Don't you hate that? The Wish To Be an Indian (we assume this means a "Red Indian") seems to speak to the desire to flee, and be at one with the land. The Street Window, meanwhile, focuses on "someone who lives in isolation, and yet wants to somehow make contact", and the story explains that what this person needs is a window... However wearily and purposelessly he might stare out, "the horses below will yet pull him along in their train of carriages and noise, and thus finally towards human harmony".

The Excursion into the Mountains speaks of isolation ("I would quite like -- why not? -- to make an excursion in the company of absolutely nobody"), but it's not a joyless isolation: "How these nobodies are crowded together, all these arms stretched across and linked, all these feet separated by tiny steps." And he adds, in one of those strange little Kafka jokes: "Of course, everyone is wearing tails."


Our current mountains

The Misfortune of the Bachelor is not so upbeat about isolation, on the other hand: "It seems so awful to remain a bachelor, and if you want to spend an evening with people, to ask for acceptance as an old man, while trying to maintain your dignity..." The Businessman similarly exudes loneliness and dissatisfaction, and The Men Passing By reflects the self-justifying isolation of a pedestrian who knows nothing of the stories of those he encounters. The Passenger begins: "I stand on the platform of the electric car, and am completely uncertain about my position in this world, in this city, in my family." Then the narrator's attention is caught by a woman, whom he describes in minute detail. There is no contact, however, and the scene again comes across as isolating. It's the same case with Rejection, which describes a woman's hostile response to a man's overtures, followed by an equally hostile response on his part, meaning the best thing for them both is to go home alone.

The longest piece, and perhaps the most unsettling, is Being Unhappy. It begins: "When it had already become unbearable...", and introduces us to the ghost of a child. The child, very talkative and confident, speaks of a threat from the narrator, who rejects this charge. The ghost says: "I am as close to you as any stranger could be. You know that too, so why the melancholy?" We wonder if this is the narrator's more carefree past surfacing to confront him. The narrator leaves the room, only to encounter a disrespectful neighbour, who indicates he might adopt his ghost. The narrator resists this idea, and the neighbour backs down. The story closes like this: "'That's all right, then,' I said, and could have gone for a quiet walk. But because I felt so forsaken, I preferred to go upstairs, and go to sleep."

There are some that -- to me, at least -- defy classification (not that this would at all have been Kafka's concern). Reflections for Gentlemen Jockeys, for example, calls into question the desirability of winning. The Trees apparently interrogates pretty much everything, in that things seem permanent, but this is purely a matter of appearances. Clothes, meanwhile, seems to emphasize transience.



Absentmindedly Gazing From the Window is a tiny cameo of what sounds like a threat averted, but may be just a bit of photographic observation. Here's the piece in its entirety: "What will we do in these spring days that are now coming so quickly? This morning the sky was grey, but if you go to the window now, you are surprised, and you lean your cheek against the handle. Below you can see the light of the sun, which is admittedly already setting, as it falls on the face of the little girl, who is walking and looking around her. At the same time you can see falling on her face the shadow of the man who is coming up fast behind her. Then the man has already gone by, and the child's face is completely bright."



Gaya concludes: "What emerges from these stories is more than just a collection of experimental sketches -- it’s a sustained meditation on the act of perception itself. Kafka’s narrators are perpetually caught between two modes of seeing: the analytical gaze that dissects and distances, and the sympathetic vision that dissolves boundaries between observer and observed. This tension creates what we might call the distinctively Kafkaesque perspective, where precise observation paradoxically leads not to clarity but to a kind of vertigo... The ultimate irony of Contemplation lies in its title. These pieces aren’t really contemplations or meditations in any conventional sense -- they’re more like experiments in the limits of contemplation itself. Each story seems to ask: What happens when we look too closely? What occurs when observation becomes so intense it threatens to dissolve both observer and observed?"

James S. Whitlark takes these ideas further, discussing how Betrachtung might illustrate the way writing induced what Kafka described in his diaries as altered mental states: "Rather than find how his ordinary and non-ordinary mental states fit together by interpreting them according to some given system, such as Theosophy, what he did primarily was explore this relationship through the literary sketches in that book... To the extent that the 18 literary sketches that constitute Kafka’s Betrachtung are 'stories'..., the dynamic conflict in them is between immersive observation and dissociative contemplation." Whitlark then applies this idea to each piece in turn.

I'll definitely be continuing on the Kafka trail. There's lots more to explore.