#sparkchamber 070323 — Franz Kafka
The interconnection of madness and genius, of adversity and inspiration, of torment and emotional expression drives today’s #sparkchamber as we highlight novelist, short-story writer, and birthday boy Franz Kafka. Born on this day in 1883 in Prague in what’s now the Czech Republic, and widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th century literature, Kafka is one of the earliest German-speaking authors to examine concepts of absurdity, existential anxiety, and alienation.
He was the third son welcomed into a prosperous middle-class Jewish family, but the first to survive beyond infancy. His overbearing father and subservient mother formed a “timid, guilt-ridden, and obedient child,” liked and respected by his teachers and classmates. Bubbling on the inside, however, opposition and rebellion. He denounced the authoritarian, dehumanizing structure of his education, and opposed established society, when, “as an adolescent, he declared himself a socialist as well as an atheist.” He expressed solidarity with socialists and anarchists throughout his adult life, despite being passive and politically disengaged.
A combination of factors led to and intensified his feelings of detachment and estrangement: “As a Jew, Kafka was isolated from the German community in Prague, but, as a modern intellectual, he was also alienated from his own Jewish heritage. He was sympathetic to Czech political and cultural aspirations, but his identification with German culture kept even these sympathies subdued. Thus, social isolation and rootlessness contributed to Kafka’s lifelong personal unhappiness.”
Feeling pressure from his parents — who lacked “comprehension of their son’s unprofitable and, they feared, unhealthy dedication to the literary ‘recording of [his]…dreamlike inner life’” — Kafka studied law at the University of Prague, receiving his doctorate in 1906. There he met Max Brod, a sympathetic friend and confidante who would eventually become Kafka’s literary executor, and in that role, “he emerged as the promoter, savior, and interpreter of Kafka’s writings and as his most influential biographer.”
In 1907, Kafka took a job at one insurance company, then another in 1908, where he worked tirelessly and faithfully until he was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1917, spending frequent sabbaticals in sanatoriums until the illness forced his retirement in 1922. He died in 1924. “Kafka was a charming, intelligent, and humorous individual, but he found his routine office job and the exhausting double life into which it forced him [for his nights were frequently consumed in writing] to be excruciating torture, and his deeper personal relationships were neurotically disturbed.”
His relationship with his father in particular cast a shadow over his existence, and informed much of his writing. The Father Figure is “one of his most impressive creations. In his imagination, this coarse, practical, and domineering shopkeeper and patriarch who worshipped nothing but material success and social advancement belonged to a race of giants and was an awesome, admirable, but repulsive tyrant.”
In his most important attempt at autobiography, Brief an den Vater [Letter to Father] written 1919, Kafka probes the deep roots of tension and frustration defining his relationship with his father, attributing “his failure to live, to cut loose from parental ties and establish himself in marriage and fatherhood, as well as his escape into literature, to the prohibitive father figure which instilled in him the sense of his own impotence. He felt his will had been broken by his father.” Notions of despair and futility, of desperation against an overwhelming power, of struggle against isolation, and the impossibility of ever finding true communion with other human beings are recurring themes in his work.
Kafka reluctantly published several short stories and two novellas before his death, including The Metamorphosis [1915] — an allegory about the struggle for existence in a hostile and indifferent society — and In the Penal Colony [1919] — also an allegory, this time, an existential commentary on human torment caused by strict devotion to an ambiguous task — but none of his novels were released in his lifetime.
Crippled by self-doubt, guilt, and self-loathing, and dying of tuberculosis, Kafka left his estate to good friend Max Brod, with instructions to destroy all of his unfinished work upon his death. Which Brod did not do. Instead, he published the majority of the work Kafka had left behind which included three novels: The Trial [1925], a commentary on law and justice, concluding that notions of “right” and “wrong” are wholly arbitrary, and therefore meaningless; The Castle [1926], one man’s struggle against authority and bureaucracy; and Amerika [1927], a European traveler in the United States faces oppressive and intangible systems landing him in bizarre situations — all of which are now considered classics.
“Each of his works bears the marks of a man suffering in spirit and body, searching desperately, but always inwardly, for meaning, security, self-worth, and a sense of purpose. Kafka himself looked upon his writing and the creative act it signified as a means of ‘redemption,’ as a ‘form of prayer’ through which he might be reconciled to the world or might transcend his negative experience of it. The lucidly described but inexplicable darkness of his works reveal Kafka’s own frustrated personal struggles, but through his powerless characters and the strange incidents that befall them, the author achieved a compelling symbolism that more broadly signifies the anxiety and alienation of the 20th-century world itself.”
That anxiety and alienation, in a word, Kafkaesque. The term was coined to describe the types of situations encountered by his characters — surreal, nightmarish distortion; indeterminate impending danger; intricate dehumanizing bureaucracy; complex, illogical justification of known falsehoods. Sadly, all that is feeling remarkably timely and relevant at this stage of the 21st century.
Happy birthday Mr. Kafka. We feel your pain, and thank you for your exploration and expression of it.
1.] Where do ideas come from?
A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us
2.] What is the itch you are scratching?
Not everyone can see the truth, but he can be it
3.] Early bird or night owl? Tortoise or hare?
Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable
4.] How do you know when you are done?
The spirit becomes free only when it ceases to be a support