Why read kafka

Edmund Wilson claimed that the only book he could not read while eating his breakfast was by the Marquis de Sade. I, for different reasons, have been having a difficult time reading Franz Kafka with my morning tea and toast. So much torture, description of wounds, disorientation, sadomasochism, unexplained cruelty, appearance of rodents, beetles, vultures, and other grotesque creatures—all set out against a background of utter hopelessness. Distinctly not a jolly way to start the day.

Hypochondriac, insomniac, food faddist, cripplingly indecisive, terrified by life, obsessed with death, Franz Kafka turned, as best he was able, his neuroses into art. All seems so clear, yet is it, truly? His affinity for Kafka is historical and personal. His father went to the same university Kafka did, though some 15 years later. Death not in Venice but in Prague? Ah, we sleep tonight; criticism stands guard. Places are not named; most characters go undescribed; landscapes, sere and menacing, appear as they might in nightmares.

Joyce and Proust work from detail to generality; Kafka works from generality to detail, giving his fiction the feeling that something deeply significant is going on, if only we could grasp what precisely it is.

Taken together, they constitute a life of nearly unrelieved doubt and mental suffering. Kafka always seems excessively reasonable. Why does he do this? The first place we should look for an answer is the story that Kafka devoted to this very problem: the uses, limits, and indeed disasters of reason.

It is to be the perfect burrow, the best possible protection. Now this may remind us of another story of animals building the perfect protection: the three little pigs.

One builds with straw, the second with sticks, but neither is a match for the wolf. The third, however, is clever enough to see that the labor of building with bricks will keep the wolf away.

All of which sounds very logical and reasonable. The moral of the story is that reason and prudence will keep you safe. So far, so good. The physical work is over, but the mental work is never-ending. He has made the entrance to the burrow a weak layer of moss, which makes it easy for him to escape if it were ever invaded.

But this also makes it easy for an enemy to break in. Perhaps, he thinks, he should have covered the entrance with a hard layer of earth, to make it harder for the enemy to get in. But that would make it more difficult for him to get out to escape a predator who had burrowed his way in. Which is better, an entrance that is difficult for the enemy to get into and hard for him to escape from, or vice versa?

There is no answer to this question. At one point he considers two entrances—but that would double the danger. He has placed a labyrinth just below the entrance to confuse an intruder, but on second thought realizes that it is useless: mazes inevitably have thin walls that an intruder could easily smash through.

He has left a decoy entrance at some distance from his burrow. That entrance is wide open but leads nowhere. It diverts attention from the burrow itself, he thinks. But he also realizes that this could signal to the enemy that there must be something worth looking for in the vicinity.

Are the chances of an attack lessened by the diversion of the decoy or increased by the tip-off that there is something interesting going on? Who knows? He has built the burrow on a grand scale, with many passageways and subdivisions. But after a while he realizes that its size will make it easier for a burrowing animal to stumble upon it.

He goes outside and constructs an experimental burrow no bigger than he is. This one is much harder to find—but on the other hand there will be no escape if it is found. Even the setting of the burrow becomes another unanswerable question: he has built it in a lonely spot without much traffic so that his coming and going will not be seen, but it suddenly occurs to him that the bustle of dense traffic might provide better cover.

The third little pig found an answer to his quest for security: to stay alive you need to be smart and prudent, and work hard. Because he is proud of his burrow, he feels protective of it. But pride is not rational. In fact, it makes the animal downright irrational.

He goes outside and conceals himself so that he can watch over it. It gives him unspeakable pleasure to look at this thing he loves so much, and he feels as if he is watching over himself. But he has now inverted his relationship with the burrow: it was supposed to protect him, but now he is protecting it while leaving himself completely unprotected.

He sees nothing and so decides to go back in, but now he has given himself another intellectual headache, another unanswerable question. How can he get back in? When he lifts the cover, enters the burrow, and then lowers the cover, how will he know whether an enemy arrived at that very moment and saw him lowering the cover? Of course, he can lift the cover to look out and see if anyone is there, but as he lowers the cover again the same question arises.

It seems that prudence is also hard to combine with rationality: how much prudence is enough? Prudence ought to be a means to an end: a contented life. If it becomes a full-time occupation, as it does with the animal, it defeats its purpose. But the problem is that there turns out to be no rational answer to the question: how much time should we devote to prudential planning? Forgetting all about his hard physical and mental effort, he accuses himself of being lazy, of never having thought it all through: he has been negligent and has spent his adult years in childish games.

He imagines that he might have built one according to a plan he had long ago in his youth, and as he does so he forgets about the logical problems that have always plagued him.

He dreams of important technical breakthroughs, and he is continually mesmerized by the idea of the theoretical brilliance of his plans. All he needs to do, he thinks, is to start afresh!

Reason—thoroughly detailed reason, thanks to the author—has been the source of his troubles, not their solution. Eventually the animal begins to hear a hissing noise, but when he tries to find its source it never changes volume as he moves about, which means that it must be inside his own head. He is on the way to delirium. T o locate the thing that destroys the animal in the power of reason itself sounds very remote from the spirit of the Enlightenment, that movement which was already a century old when Kafka was born in For the Enlightenment thinkers, the consistent application of reason would solve all the problems created by human foolishness.

When the animal delights in the splendor of his burrow, he has unwittingly brought into play an irrational factor in his commitment to it. The burrow is not just shelter—he loves it so much that at one point he tells us that he would gladly die in it and have his blood drain into its soil.

The logic of the burrow has again been turned upside down: instead of its existing for him, he will sacrifice himself for it. Kafka was an Enlightenment skeptic. Those people who are now supposedly on a better path will still be essentially as they were before. The irrational side of their nature will not have gone away: it will just find another way of expressing itself.

It will co-opt reason and employ it in the service of the same drives, ambitions, and even foolishness that were there all along. T he Enlightenment philosophers had such enormous faith in reason that they thought it must lead us to better moral values too. Needless to say, Kafka was skeptical of this as well.

Aug 09, Will Ansbacher rated it it was ok Shelves: biography , oh-god. It claims to show, with lots of italics that K was a happy, well-balanced post-Habsburg lad with a lusty sex life.

This is supposedly in direct contrast to everything that has ever been written about Kafka. This is of course nonsense. You can feel horribly alone in a crowded party. For example, on being told earnestly p. Yes readers, The Trial and The Castle really can be read as satire! Hawes says, teasingly, on p. Yes, K was obsessed with porn! Hawes must have led a very sheltered life because he devotes many pages to it, even though it is little more than Aubrey Beardsley-style erotica.

In any case it would hardly have been exceptional in a time when there were so few other sanctioned outlets for sexual drive. And it turns out on p. Apparently some scholars have maintained that Kafka was a virgin so Hawes goes to great lengths to prove otherwise.

But it is clear that K was one tortured and mixed-up kid when came to women. For a way more enjoyable read, see the delightful vignette in the year before the storm. I have a feeling that this is perhaps a particularly academic obsession that Hawes is railing against, though he never provides any evidence to back up any of his claims.

OK, on p. What can you make of this syllogism? Hawes is not suggesting that Kafka was anything like Hitler! Why would you think that? He just means No shit. There is no question that Kafka must have been a tortured character, it comes across clearly in his writing and letters.

View all 4 comments. Aug 26, Ginnetta rated it it was ok. I did not want to finish this book. I also did not finish this book. The problem for me was this: While some of myths uncovered about Kafka were interesting, such as Kafka was a lonely writer. I thought the writing presented the book with too many opinions which jumped from one idea to the next. My feeling is this may or may not had anything to do with Kafka.

Yet, as I kept trying to read this book the constant jumping around from thought to I did not want to finish this book. Yet, as I kept trying to read this book the constant jumping around from thought to thought became old and boring. One example: After reading a passage about a letter Kafka wrote to his father as quoted in the book the author writes: "It seems as if we really must take the letter to his father with a very large pinch of salt indeed.

Now, there's a good old Niietzchean argument that artist are somehow beyond truth and falsehood, that Ackroyd says of Dickens: Immediately he seized upon an opinion or a belief it possessed absolute truth and reality in his own mind" Are we are talking about what Ackroyd says of Dickens? I am trying to follow this. Maybe this idea the author intended is about Kafka in an indirect way. The thought that the author may or may not have in mind for us and see where it goes. I keep thinking as I am reading the next sentence.

Suddenly, this thought or idea about the creation of lies and how in my mind this all goes back to Kafka ends abruptly. Out of nowhere. While I am still banging my head on a headboard. The text jumps out and states: The great and, in his personal life, often deeply unpleasant playwright Bertolt Brecht was once asked by an adoring listener "Herr Brecht, what a wonderful story you have just told us!

Is it true? To which the cigar-smoking dramatist replied, with sovereign scorn, "Of course not. If it were true, it would not have been a good story" Now, I am reading about Bertolt Brecht. I don't get it. I just got done banging my brain with an idea of how Akroyd feels about the creation of a lies.

How does Akroyd know? Does anybody know? Maybe, Ackroyd's interpretations of a lie is related to Kafka in an indirect way. If this is the case then please support this for chissakes with more ideas about the relationship to KAFKA! Please do not bounce to Bertolt Brecht interpretations of a lie. I do not care about Bertolt Brecht interpretations of a lie at this point. I just want get some sleep. Before, I have a nightmare. Maybe, a tad about Dicken's interpretations of a lie too since this idea was put in my head by the writer before my head hurt.

If it was indeed related to Kafka. Was it? Now add Bertolt Brecht? Your going to throw him in the mix? I keep wondering why I should care about what else is inside the literary drain the author decided to pad this book with.

View 2 comments. Jun 05, Richard rated it liked it. Observations: 1. I've discovered that I really like to read books about people who write books. As a casually aspiring author I find it's easier to read about people writing than it is to actually sit down and write myself. I like to live vicariously through authors, looking over their shoulder as they labor.

I like to think that I can do what they do. I cannot. Oh well. It's still fun to watch the greats at work. It's like football: a bunch of fat guys at home watching a healthy guy run around Observations: 1.

It's like football: a bunch of fat guys at home watching a healthy guy run around on the screen this metaphor makes sense in my mindI'm the armchair quarterback and Kafka is Brett Favre.

Also, as I have previously mentioned in another review, I am about a million times more likely to read a book is it has a large picture of an animal on the front. Or a woodcut print. Or a woodcut print of a beetle. This book's title is misleading.

It's a fun tour of Bohemian Germany and Kafka was a real angry, manipulative, bitter, spoiled weirdo, that's for sure. In conclusion: fun read. The author, though, often gets too wrapped up in how clever he is. He constantly refers to trivial things that a layman would have no way of knowing about. That's frustrating. Aug 15, Althea rated it really liked it. Engaging style, like hanging out and listening to a rant by one of the PhD candidate buddies.

I'll definitly buy the next several rounds, as many as needed to keep the flow going Aug 27, Theo rated it it was ok. Fun book to read, though probably not steeped in as much scholarship nor as revelatory as it stridently claims to be.

Thesis is that the popular image of Kafka as a tubercular loner, undiscovered, sort of the Van Gogh of between-the-Wars Eastern Europe is a deliberately constructed fabrication.

Real Kafka, the book claims, was a commitment-phobic man-about-town, award-winning author in his own day, and high-wage earner via a coveted civil service job.

The fun in reading this is the tabloidy appr Fun book to read, though probably not steeped in as much scholarship nor as revelatory as it stridently claims to be. The fun in reading this is the tabloidy approach -- a few interesting anecdotes, a lot of harmless sneering, and some untenable, but salacious conclusions. I feel like I did learn a bit about Kafka that I hadn't previously known, and I came away with a hunger to re-read what I've read, and discover what I haven't.

Mar 22, Tony rated it really liked it. I really enjoyed this book, which is a very sophisticated rant about why you should read Kafka despite the industry and mythology that has grown up around him.

It's a warts and all not quite biography that I found easy to read and understand, which is especially good as I've never actually read any Kafka. I know the stories. Or some of them. But I've been a little put off by the mythology of Kafka that Hawes gives a good kicking to here.