New Makers of Modern Culture

KAFKA, Franz 1883-1924
Austrian novelist

The timid, reticent son of a robust self-made businessman, Kafka was born in Prague, and educated at the German Gymnasium and then the German University, where he read law. After receiving his doctorate he worked from 1908 until 1922 for the 'Workers' Accident Insurance Institute', where his duties were to write reports concerning the dangers of various trades and recommending methods of accident-prevention. Until 1915 Kafka lived with his parents, helping in their shop during his spare time, a fact which, combined with the exigencies of his profession, left him with little time for writing. He was thus compelled, to the eventual detriment of his health, to do his writing at night, and in 1909 and 1910 published a number of short prose pieces in literary journals. Through his close, lifelong friend the writer Max Brod, Kafka, in August 1912, met Felice Bauer, a young woman from Berlin, with whom, for the next five years, he pursued a troubled relationship involving him in profound vacillation. Twice engaged to Felice, Kafka found himself torn between reluctance to bear life alone and the fear that marriage would involve a threat to the solitude which he saw as a necessary precondition of his art. In the event, Kafka never married, although a number of women in addition to Felice played an important part in his emotional life, including Dora Dymant with whom, towards the end of his life, he lived for a short time in Berlin. But the quickened development of tuberculosis, which had been diagnosed in 1917, caused him to return to Prague and thence to a sanatorium in Vienna, where he died in 1924, leaving instructions to Max Brod that his unpublished writings should be burned. Brod disobeyed, thus rescuing from oblivion the three unfinished novels, America (Amerika, largely written 1911-14, trans. 1949), The Trial (Der Prozess, 1914-15, trans. 1937), and The Castle (Das Schloss, 1922, trans. 1930, rev. 1969).

During his lifetime, Kafka published only a proportion of his shorter fiction in various collections. Late in 1912, he wrote the two stories which are generally regarded as his first mature achievement, The Judgment (Das Urteil, trans. 1928) and The Metamorphis (Die Verwandlung, trans. 1961). Each is the history of its hero's regression from the confident certainties of 'normal' life to a state of overwhelming psychic bewilderment and finally death: in the first story the protagonist unquestioningly accepts the death sentence passed upon him for his dishonesties and inadequacies by a spectacularly rejuvenated father; in the second, the hero is transformed overnight into an enormous beetle while retaining a lucid human consciousness as ironic accompaniment to his physical degradation. In both cases—and this is a recurrent feature of much of Kafka's work—the punishment unconsciously incurred by the protagonist seems monstrously disproportionate to any ascertainable crime. Yet the works transcend the status of mere paranoid fantasies by virtue of two factors: the meticulous lucidity of the writing and the gain in metaphoric range occasioned by the disconnection of effect from cause. The described effect thus acquires the status of free-standing or unascribed metaphor, so that the area of suggestivity which radiates from the central situation is vastly enlarged.

In the relatively immature novel, America, Karl Rossmann's emigration to the USA is in itself a punishment, inflicted by his parents: so that in the bizarre adventures which ensue (in which the hero is on a number of occasions actually or implicitly brought to trial) the causes of events, no matter how grotesquely refracted, are at least dimly perceptible. But in Kafka's most famous work, The Trial, the protagonist, Josef K, is suddenly arrested for no apparent reason, and finds himself plunged into a world in which absurd appearances correspond to no ascertainable reality, where explanations make a mockery of logic and where the individual is subject to a power whose mechanisms are obscure and whose ultimate nature remains wholly inscrutable. Josef K, a victim of the ineluctable force known simply as The Law, is both constrained and attracted by it. Armed only with the hopelessly inadequate powers of human perception and language, he seeks unsuccessfully to establish the nature of his guilt and, though still questioning, submits passively to a grotesque execution.

In The Castle, the hero, here called simply K., has in common with his namesake in The Trial the fact that he undergoes, vis-à-vis an oppressive authority, a progression from defiant arrogance to a relative humility. At the beginning of the work K. has arrived at a nameless village in order to take up a post as land-surveyor. More hindered than helped by the intricate network of bureaucracy which is the castle's representative presence in the village, K. finds that in effect no conscious exercise of will or intention can in any way advance his aims. His position in the village, he is told, is paradoxical: he has been appointed land-surveyor, but none is needed. Officials whom K. tries to contact for clarification of his position prove elusive, even fugitive; the two assistants assigned to him seem to K. childish to the point of imbecility; and, humiliated by being given a menial position as school caretaker, K. is, in effect, left to fumble his own way through the maze of irrationality that constitutes the life of the village. Thus the world into which he enters unremittingly challenges his expectations, his will, his entire sense of himself. Any achievement, he is told in a crucial interview with the official Bürgel, would be inadvertent: having accidentally slipped through the castle's protective net, he would find himself able to command all he wished. But this information—which is in any case couched in a plethora of cautious subjunctives (for Bürgel is in effect describing theoretically the position in which K. actually finds himself at this point)—comes ironically at a moment where K. is too drugged and fatigued to make use of it: unable, that is, to enforce a will which he has by this time effectively abandoned. Shortly after this, the novel breaks off, unfinished: but a note communicated by Max Brod roughly summarizes Kafka's intended ending—at the moment of K.'s death a message arrives from the castle with the ironic information that K. has no official right to live in the village, but will 'in view of certain peripheral circumstances' be permitted to do so. The nature of these 'peripheral circumstances' is, of course, not clarified: but it is a reasonable negative inference that the circumstances are peripheral to anything which K.'s assertive ego, or his ego-related perceptions, may be capable of establishing.

The hallmark of The Castle then, as of Kafka's work as a whole, is ambiguity. The castle itself is no more an image of Divine Grace than it is of ultimate Evil: it is a symbol whose range of implication encompasses both these possible extremes. More importantly, the central feature of the novel is less the castle itself qua symbol than the castle as apprehended by K. But to what extent is K. possessed of a consciousness adequate to the task imposed upon it? Is consciousness itself, refracted and distorted by the pressures of immediate vicissitudes and the clamorous demands of self-interest, an adequate instrument for the apprehension of the world in which we find ourselves? Conversely, does the castle itself, in concrete actuality, exist at all?—or is it no more than the focal point of a web of errors, half-truths and conflicting assertions?

Kafka's work raises far more questions than it ever answers. ('To ask questions is the main thing,' Josef K is told by his advocate.) Not surprisingly, then, Kafka has been more widely and more variously interpreted than almost any other modern author. His fascination has remained undiminished by any changes in literary fashion: and it is perhaps a wholly appropriate irony that Kafka's work should have proved, in its very elusiveness, more relevant to the bewilderments of twentieth-century man than that of many writers who speak with louder voices and more confident tones.

Corbet Stewart

See: Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Max Brod and Heinz Politzer (1945-7). Translations of the novels are by Willa and Edwin Muir. See also: The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzner (1971); Letters to Felice, ed. Erich Heller and Jürgen Born, trans. James Stein and Elizabeth Duckworth (1974). About Kafka: H. Politzer, Franz Kafka. Parable and Paradox (1966); A. Thorlby, Kafka: A Study (1972); R. Gray, Franz Kafka (1973); R. Sheppard, On Kafka's Castle (1973); E. Heller, Kafka (1974); F. Kuna, Kafka: Literature as Corrective Punishment (1974); Ronald Hayman, Kafka: A Biography (1981); Julian Preece (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Franz Kafka (2002); Ritchie Robertson, Kafka: A Very Short Introduction (2004); Richard T. Gray (ed.), The Franz Kafka Encyclopedia (2006).

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