"For writing means revealing oneself
to excess…"
Management expert Peter Drucker
believed Franz Kafka invented the hard hat construction workers wear. How
ironic it would be if that were true (and there is no evidence to prove that it
is), because if anyone in human history would have had a safe or girder
fall on him, it would have been Kafka, and, of course, the hat would have done
him no good.
It's no surprise that
Kafka's work as an insurance claims analyst in Prague often involved investigating
claims by factory workers whose fingers had been scissored off or whose legs had been mangled to
jelly.
During his short and exceedingly
unhappy life, Kafka, who died of tuberculosis at age 40 in 1924, wrote stories
and novels that are the quintessence of dread. Misery, shame, claustrophobia, self-loathing,
disgust, horror, anguish, fear, anxiety—those words all describe what one feels when
reading his tales of existential meaninglessness.
In some respects, Kafka was a
coward. He lived most of his life under the same roof as his overbearing,
selfish father, suffering in silence in their cramped apartment.
His love life might best be
described as excruciatingly excruciating. Engaged to marry three times, his self-esteem was so low the word 'esteem' doesn't even apply. He feared sexual encounters, once writing that he perceived of
"coitus as punishment for the happiness of being together." And also:
"The idea of a honeymoon trip fills me with horror." No wonder that a
woman in 'Annie Hall' says to Woody Allen "Sex with you is
really a Kafkaesque experience."
He was even unable to take joy in
his own creativity, once telling his diary, "The story came out of me like
a real birth, covered with filth and slime."
"Be quiet,
still, and solitary"
He wanted only to be left alone to
write—"You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table
and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The
world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will
roll in ecstasy at your feet."
The greatness of Kafka's work comes
thanks to his courage—the bravery with which he revealed his tortured soul on
paper. One of his friends praised him for his "absolute
truthfulness."
As Kafka wrote in his diary "For
writing means revealing oneself to excess; that utmost of self-revelation and
surrender, in which a human being, when involved with others, would feel he was
losing himself, and from which, therefore, he will always shrink as long as he
is in his right mind."
He lived to write, he
yet felt that doing so was akin to dying. "My talent for portraying
my dreamlike inner life has thrust all other matters into the background,"
he wrote. "My life has dwindled dreadfully, nor will it cease to dwindle…I
waver on the heights; it is not death, alas, but the eternal torments of dying."
Yet Kafka also called the hours he spent writing "a form of prayer."
Guilt and punishment obsessed him. The central
theme of his work is that individuals, through no fault of their own, must
suddenly pay for crimes whose nature is never known. To Kafka, it was as if
life itself was a punishment and that brutal chastisement served no purpose and
had no meaning.
In 'Der Process' (The Trial), Josef
K. is arrested by unknown authorities. Neither he or the reader is never told
what crime he has committed. When
the story ends, he is stabbed to death. His last words? "Like a dog!"
"A monstrous
vermin"
'Die Verwandlung' (Metamorphosis)
begins with the sentence: "When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from
unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin."
Not necessarily a beetle as is commonly believed but something worse—"a
vermin."
Trapped in his room, he either
disgusts his relatives or is ignored by them, until his father attacks him. "No
plea of Gregor's availed, indeed none was understood; however meekly he twisted
his head his father only stamped the harder." Finally, the father kills
him by hurling apples at him, one of which becomes embedded in his flesh.
'In der Strafkolonie' (In the Penal
Colony) an explorer is shown 'the harrow,' an instrument which embroiders into
a prisoner's flesh the text of the rule he has disobeyed.
'My guiding
principle is this: guilt is never to be doubted.' The prisoner is never told
the nature of his crime. There would be no point in announcing it to him. You see, he gets to know it in the flesh," says the officer who runs the machine and who then makes the fatal mistake of submitting himself to its frenzies.
Although Kafka wrote and re-wrote this story
between 1914 and 1919, one sees in it and in many of his other works a
foreboding of what was to come in Europe. In 'Der Bau'
(The Burrow), he writes of a mole-like creature who dwells in a sealed labyrinth of tunnels and chambers. Says the beast: "I live in peace in the
heart of my burrow, and meanwhile from somewhere or other the enemy is boring
his way slowly towards me."
Kafka's three sisters Ottla, Valli, and
Elli were murdered by the Nazis. All were deported from Czechslovakia to
Poland. Elli and Valli died in the Lodz Ghetto, the second largest ghetto the
Nazis created in Poland. His favorite sister Ottla was sent to Theresienstadt
concentration camp. While there, she volunteered to accompany 1,260 children as part of a
"special transport" to Auschwitz where she was killed.
"Man cannot live without a permanent trust in something
indestructible within himself," Kafka wrote. "Though both that
indestructible something and his own trust in it may remain permanently
concealed from him. One of the ways in which this hiddenness can express
itself is through faith in a personal god."
MORAL: If you wake up and think you are vermin,
you're just having a bad dream. In reality, you are a fox or a
tiger or a butterfly. Or maybe a rose.
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