I write a Mon­day Col­umn every cou­ple of months for 3 Quarks Dai­ly. This is the lat­est one.

Reden nur dort möglich ist, wo man lü­gen will.

There is some­thing about Kafka’s writ­ing that gets under your skin. Per­haps that’s because he was always so uneasy in his own skin. Kaf­ka described it as “a gar­ment but also a strait­jack­et and fate”, sug­gest­ing that he saw skin as both cloth­ing, some­thing you choose to wear for a day before shed­ding, but also as a tight­ly bound involu­cre, restrict­ing and suf­fo­cat­ing the self – a bio­log­i­cal fait accom­pli and a life sen­tence. Only Kaf­ka could react so ambiva­lent­ly and with such psy­cho­log­i­cal acu­ity towards some­thing most peo­ple take for grant­ed and indeed scarce­ly think about.

It brings to mind Kafka’s sto­ry “In the Penal Set­tle­ment” with its glass pun­ish­ment machine and its teeth-like rows of gleam­ing nee­dles. The offend­er is strapped into this sadis­tic device and the laws he has bro­ken are slow­ly and painful­ly incised into his skin. The oper­a­tor prais­es its redemp­tive effects on the crim­i­nal: “how qui­et he grows at just about the sixth hour! Enlight­en­ment comes to the most dull-wit­ted. It begins around the eyes. From there it radi­ates.” [1] After twelve hours of agony and of learn­ing the mean­ing of the law through his skin, the coup de grâce is admin­is­tered to the pris­on­er and the embla­zoned body dumped in a ditch. “Like a dog,” as Josef K. says at the end of The Tri­al.

It is one of Kafka’s most grotesque sto­ries, one that swings sick­en­ing­ly between cru­el­ty and human­i­ty. As ever with Kaf­ka, para­dox and ambi­gu­i­ty are fun­da­men­tal. I remem­ber how, as a stu­dent, some of my friends were utter­ly repulsed by this sto­ry, unable to see past the hor­rif­ic details to the chill­ing vision of human strange­ness beneath. As I read it again today I am reas­sured to find it has lost none of its dis­turb­ing inten­si­ty. I can’t say that it is my favourite Kaf­ka sto­ry, although it is unique­ly Kafkaesque, to invoke that tired old cliché.

“The Judge­ment”, “Meta­mor­pho­sis”, “A Coun­try Doc­tor” – all won­der­ful­ly strange sto­ries that share the sense of being caught up in a night­mare, where nor­mal expec­ta­tions are shat­tered and noth­ing seems to make sense any more. Read­ing Kaf­ka is the lit­er­ary equiv­a­lent of an earth­quake: as you read, you can feel the walls of real­i­ty begin to trem­ble and shake until even­tu­al­ly they come tum­bling down around your ears. At the end, you find your­self wan­der­ing in an unfa­mil­iar waste­land. All around are scat­tered the jum­bled frag­ments of what you once recog­nised as nor­mal life. Now you, the read­er, have to begin putting Hump­ty-Dump­ty back togeth­er again.

Kaf­ka has been in the news recent­ly. His friend and execu­tor, Max Brod, died in 1968, leav­ing a suit­case of Kafka’s writ­ings to his for­mer sec­re­tary and lover, Esther Hoffe. Ever since then she has guard­ed it jeal­ous­ly in her Tel Aviv flat. The con­di­tions were far from ide­al. Warn­ings that the doc­u­ments might be dam­aged by damp went unheed­ed. Until two years ago she shared her flat with a menagerie of cats and dogs. Then her neigh­bours final­ly com­plained about the stench and they were removed by health inspec­tors. Now, at the age of 101, Hoffe has died, leav­ing the Kaf­ka cache to her sep­tu­a­ge­nar­i­an daugh­ters.

Among the papers are Brod’s diaries (sold to a Ger­man pub­lish­er for a five-fig­ure sum in the 1980s but as yet unde­liv­ered), let­ters by Kaf­ka as well as his trav­el jour­nal, post­cards, sketch­es and some of his per­son­al belong­ings. A decade ago Hoffe sold Brod’s man­u­script of The Tri­al for £1 mil­lion at auc­tion. How much the remain­ing doc­u­ments are worth can only be guessed. But obvi­ous­ly this is a gold mine for Kaf­ka schol­ars. Josef Cer­mak, author of sev­er­al stud­ies of the Czech-Jew­ish author, told the Guardian: “There are so many mis­truths which have been writ­ten about Kaf­ka. For aca­d­e­m­ic pur­pos­es it is cru­cial that we get to see what the unpre­dictable Miss Hoffe has kept from us for so long.” [2]

I’m as intrigued as every­one else by what the Kaf­ka suit­case con­tains. Indeed its his­to­ry has some­thing delight­ful­ly Kafkaesque about it. I’m sure count­less TV pro­duc­ers have spot­ted this and are at this very minute flock­ing to Tel Aviv to make their doc­u­men­taries. (Part of me hopes that when they open the case, no doubt on live TV, all it con­tains are a few star­tled cock­roach­es.)

The pri­vate lives of famous writ­ers and sci­en­tists are fas­ci­nat­ing. Read­ing Einstein’s cor­re­spon­dence gives you an aston­ish­ing­ly detailed pic­ture of the man behind rel­a­tiv­i­ty. And any­one can do it now thanks to the Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty Press’s superb edi­tion of his Col­lect­ed Papers. Of course, you don’t need to read Einstein’s let­ters to Mil­e­va (his “sweet lit­tle witch”, as he described her in 1901) to under­stand rel­a­tiv­i­ty, although they do place the sci­ence in a won­der­ful­ly human con­text. But peo­ple will read what­ev­er the Kaf­ka cache con­tains look­ing for clues that might explain his fic­tion.

And why not indeed? Lit­er­a­ture, I hear you say, is dif­fer­ent from sci­ence. It’s sub­jec­tive and per­son­al, for a start. Sure, but it’s also a pub­lic activ­i­ty in the sense that most of Kafka’s writ­ing was meant to be read by oth­er peo­ple. Unlike Leonar­do da Vin­ci and New­ton who used mir­ror writ­ing or cod­ed lan­guage in their note­books to obscure their words, Kaf­ka want­ed to tell us some­thing impor­tant. He didn’t set out to cre­ate a series of cod­ed auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal puz­zles in order to keep future lit­er­ary his­to­ri­ans in a job. The Ger­man­ist Mar­tin Swales argues con­vinc­ing­ly that the obses­sion with Kafka’s pri­vate life does not help us to under­stand Kafka’s writ­ing: “an unremit­ting inter­est in the per­son­al­i­ty behind the utter­ance sug­gests that the utter­ance has in some way bro­ken down”. [3]

In a recent arti­cle, Zadie Smith has sug­gest­ed that Kaf­ka is “a writer sul­lied by our attempts to define him”. [4] Nov­el­ist James Hawes, author of a new book called Exca­vat­ing Kaf­ka, seems to agree: “The myth of Kafka’s life so over­shad­ows what he wrote that mil­lions who have nev­er read a word of his know, or think they know, some­thing about the mid­dle-Euro­pean Nos­tradamus, almost unknown in his own life­time, trapped in a dead-end job, whose mys­te­ri­ous, end­less­ly inter­pretable works some­how fore­saw the Holo­caust (and so on).” [5]

Hawes spent ten years writ­ing a Ph.D. on Kaf­ka. Now he is on a mis­sion to decon­struct the “hagio­graph­ic myth” sur­round­ing the Prague author in order to expose the real Kaf­ka. His works are “won­der­ful black come­dies writ­ten by a man soaked in the writ­ings of his pre­de­ces­sors and of his own day”. Indeed, Max Brod pro­vides some evi­dence of this comedic dimen­sion to Kafka’s works. He recalled Kaf­ka read­ing aloud from The Tri­al. At times, he said, Kaf­ka “laughed so much that there were moments when he could­n’t read any fur­ther”. This Kaf­ka has been some­what obscured, but he’s cer­tain­ly there, strug­gling to free him­self from the chiti­nous, bee­tle-like skin into which fate and lit­er­ary fame has sealed him.

It was always a chal­lenge teach­ing first year class­es on Kaf­ka, but reward­ing too. Under­grad­u­ates rarely did any prepa­ra­tion for Ger­man lit class­es (wie immer) and so they turned up know­ing very lit­tle about him apart from a gen­er­al expec­ta­tion that the man who gave us the term Kafkaesque had to be pret­ty weird. They weren’t dis­ap­point­ed on that score. We had three hour-long ses­sions dis­sect­ing the short sto­ry “Das Urteil” (“The Judge­ment”), read­ing it in Ger­man, line by line, often word by word, slow­ing down the process of read­ing as if you were ana­lyz­ing a film frame by frame.

At some point, usu­al­ly towards the end of the ses­sions, I would explain some details from Kafka’s life. For many of the stu­dents, the bio­graph­i­cal infor­ma­tion trans­formed what was a deeply strange, even incom­pre­hen­si­ble, read­ing expe­ri­ence. Sud­den­ly, as if by mag­ic, it all seemed to make sense. Why didn’t you tell us this before, they want­ed to know. Kafka’s writ­ing was psy­chol­o­gy in action, a cathar­tic release. Kaf­ka, fran­ti­cal­ly scrib­bling in his room late at night, was assuag­ing his guilt for fail­ing to live up to parental expec­ta­tions, doing penance for break­ing unwrit­ten laws, and so on.

The process of read­ing a text, line by line, is hard work. Not quite as hard work as writ­ing it, per­haps, but almost. Bio­graph­i­cal inter­pre­ta­tions are an excuse for lazy read­ing. Using an author’s life to crack the code of his texts is just too easy. There are no short­cuts to inter­pre­ta­tion. That was why I spent three hours read­ing ten pages of Kaf­ka with my stu­dents.

It’s only through this intense engage­ment with a text that a read­er can feel what Ter­ry Eagle­ton has mem­o­rably called that “moment of won­der­ing self-estrange­ment” which is unique to the aes­thet­ic expe­ri­ence. [6] It was the Russ­ian For­mal­ists who first pro­posed the idea of defa­mil­iar­iza­tion, or ostra­ne­nie in Russ­ian. In “Art as Tech­nique” (1917) Vic­tor Shklovsky explained what this meant:

“Habit­u­al­iza­tion devours works, clothes, fur­ni­ture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. … And art exists that one may recov­er the sen­sa­tion of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The pur­pose of art is to impart the sen­sa­tion of things as they are per­ceived and not as they are known. The tech­nique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms dif­fi­cult, to increase the dif­fi­cul­ty and length of per­cep­tion because the process of per­cep­tion is an aes­thet­ic end in itself and must be pro­longed. Art is a way of expe­ri­enc­ing the art­ful­ness of an object; the object is not impor­tant.” [7]

This is one of the most per­cep­tive and pow­er­ful state­ments about the pur­pose of art and its abil­i­ty to trans­form our way of see­ing that I know. As in metafic­tion, the defa­mil­iar­iz­ing art­work places the read­er cen­tre stage: you are no longer a pas­sive decoder of signs but active­ly inter­pret­ing, con­struct­ing the­o­ries and being chal­lenged. And it high­lights some­thing which is so often lost in today’s qual­i­fi­ca­tion-dri­ven edu­ca­tion sys­tem – read­ing lit­er­a­ture can actu­al­ly change peo­ple, change how they see the world. It can make the stone stony.

I was remind­ed of this recent­ly when read­ing neu­ro­sci­en­tist Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid. In her fas­ci­nat­ing book, Wolf shows how learn­ing to read changes indi­vid­ual brains for­ev­er, both intel­lec­tu­al­ly and phys­i­o­log­i­cal­ly. Indeed, dif­fer­ent lan­guages put their own unique stamp on the brain, cre­at­ing dis­tinc­tive brain net­works. Read­ing Chi­nese requires a dif­fer­ent set of neu­ronal con­nec­tions from that need­ed to read Eng­lish. As the writer Joseph Epstein has said, “we are what we read”. Indeed, doc­tors treat­ing a bilin­gual per­son who devel­oped alex­ia (inabil­i­ty to read) after a stroke found remark­able evi­dence of this. Although he could no longer read Eng­lish, the patient was still able to read Chi­nese.

Of course, Kaf­ka didn’t need lessons from Shklovsky or any­one on how to make the world strange. In a won­der­ful com­ment, he once dis­agreed with a friend who accused Picas­so of dis­tort­ing real­i­ty. “I do not think so,” said Kaf­ka. “He only reg­is­ters the defor­mi­ties which have not yet pen­e­trat­ed our con­scious­ness. Art is a mir­ror, which goes ‘fast,’ like a watch—sometimes.” [8]

Kafka’s sto­ry “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse-folk” explores this idea. I first read it at uni­ver­si­ty when I was study­ing Ger­man lit­er­a­ture and it has haunt­ed me ever since. (I even named my web­site after it.) It was writ­ten in March 1924, three months before Kaf­ka died. He was in the last stages of tuber­cu­lo­sis of the lar­ynx, and was unable to speak – a poignant back­ground for a sto­ry about a singer. But it was Kafka’s writ­ing, not his trag­ic life, that made such an impres­sion on me.

The sto­ry is about a singer and her place in the com­mu­ni­ty. The fact that Kaf­ka choos­es to make this a com­mu­ni­ty of mice can itself be seen as an exam­ple of mak­ing strange: what bet­ter way to explore the role of the artist in soci­ety than to defa­mil­iar­ize the artist by turn­ing her into a mouse? In fact mice are only men­tioned by name in the title and if this is ignored, then the world described could eas­i­ly be our own. Sim­i­lar­ly, although Josephine is described as a “singer” in the title, she does not sing in the sto­ry, but whis­tles, pipes or squeaks, depend­ing on your trans­la­tion (“pfeift” in the orig­i­nal Ger­man), thus defa­mil­iar­iz­ing the act of singing itself. Sub­tly and with immense skill, Kafka’s lan­guage begins to change our per­cep­tions from the very first words.

The unnamed nar­ra­tor is writ­ing about Josephine in order to under­stand why she played such an impor­tant role in their soci­ety. For Josephine has dis­ap­peared and despite the narrator’s evi­dent ambiva­lence about her, it is clear she has left a hole at the heart of their com­mu­ni­ty. As he thinks crit­i­cal­ly about Josephine, the nar­ra­tor begins to won­der whether the fas­ci­na­tion he feels for her art lies not in the art itself – the singing or “Pfeifen” – but rather in its con­text, in the fact of it being set apart from every­day life:

“To crack a nut is tru­ly no feat, so no one would ever dare to col­lect an audi­ence in order to enter­tain it with nut-crack­ing. But if all the same one does do that and suc­ceeds in enter­tain­ing the pub­lic, then it can­not be a mat­ter of sim­ple nut-crack­ing. Or it is a mat­ter of nut-crack­ing, but it turns out that we have over­looked the art of crack­ing nuts because we were too skilled in it and that this new­com­er to it first shows us its real nature, even find­ing it use­ful in mak­ing his effects to be rather less expert in nut-crack­ing than most of us.” [9]

The con­cept of art for­mu­lat­ed here has much in com­mon with Shklovsky’s the­o­ry of ostra­ne­nie. Accord­ing to the nar­ra­tor, the act of crack­ing a nut does not in itself amount to Art. Yet if one were to call it Art and repeat the same act in front of an audi­ence, then, although it would still be some­one crack­ing nuts, the act itself would be trans­formed, and the audi­ence would see an aes­theti­cized and gesteigert ver­sion of nut-crack­ing. By tak­ing an object out of its usu­al con­text and ren­der­ing it strange, the view­er is grant­ed a height­ened aware­ness of that object and its sig­nif­i­cance with­in the scheme of things.

In his attempt to decon­struct Josephine’s art, the nar­ra­tor reveals the para­dox that lies at its heart: that essen­tial­ly it is noth­ing more than their every­day speech. Her audi­ence may know that her voice is noth­ing spe­cial; but there remains an unde­ni­able yet elu­sive qual­i­ty to her per­for­mances that com­mands atten­tion and moves them all pro­found­ly: “Some­thing of our poor brief child­hood is in it, some­thing of lost hap­pi­ness that can nev­er be found again, but also some­thing of active dai­ly life, of its small gai­eties, unac­count­able and yet spring­ing up and not to be oblit­er­at­ed.” As the nar­ra­tor final­ly under­stands, her singing-pip­ing is “set free from the fet­ters of dai­ly life and it sets us free too for a lit­tle while.” [10] Mun­dane her voice may be, but what Josephine does is art, and with­out it her com­mu­ni­ty feels bereft.

As the nov­el­ist Alice McDer­mott has said, fic­tion is “the way to enter into anoth­er uni­verse, a way to see the world anew”. [11] The singing of Kafka’s mouse set her peo­ple free, if only for a few bliss­ful moments, and with his writ­ing Kaf­ka offers read­ers a sim­i­lar intel­lec­tu­al release. You don’t need a suit­case of yel­low­ing doc­u­ments to know that. Just a dog-eared paper­back copy of his sto­ries will do.

Ref­er­ences

1. “In der Strafkolonie” (1919), “In the Penal Set­tle­ment”, tr Willa and Edwin Muir, in Franz Kaf­ka, Meta­mor­pho­sis and Oth­er Sto­ries (Pen­guin, 1980), p 180.
2. Kate Con­nol­ly, “End of a Kafkaesque night­mare: writer’s papers final­ly come to light”, Guardian, July 9, 2008.
3. Mar­tin Swales. “Why Read Kaf­ka?” Mod­ern Lan­guage Review 76 (1981): 357–66
4. Zadie Smith, “F. Kaf­ka, Every­man”, New York Review of Books, Vol­ume 55, Num­ber 12, July 17, 2008.
5. “The week in books”, Guardian, July 26, 2008.
6. Ter­ry Eagle­ton, The Ide­ol­o­gy of the Aes­thet­ic (Oxford, 1990), p. 89
7. Vic­tor Shklovsky, “Art as Tech­nique” (1917). Orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished as “Iskusst­vo kak priëm.” In Lee T. Lemon and Mar­i­on J. Reis, trs., Russ­ian For­mal­ist Crit­i­cism: Four Essays (Uni­ver­si­ty of Nebras­ka Press, 1965), p. 12.
8. Cit­ed by Zadie Smith, op.cit., from Gus­tav Janouch, Con­ver­sa­tions with Kaf­ka, p. 143.
9. Kaf­ka, Wed­ding Prepa­ra­tions in the Coun­try and Oth­er Sto­ries, trs. Willa and Edwin Muir (Pen­guin 1982), p 176. The orig­i­nal Ger­man text:
“Eine Nuß aufk­nack­en ist wahrhaftig keine Kun­st, deshalb wird es auch nie­mand wagen, ein Pub­likum zusam­men­zu­rufen und vor ihm, um es zu unter­hal­ten, Nüsse knack­en. Tut er es den­noch und gelingt seine Absicht, dann kann es sich eben doch nicht nur um bloßes Nüssek­nack­en han­deln. Oder es han­delt sich um Nüssek­nack­en, aber es stellt sich her­aus, daß wir über diese Kun­st hin­wegge­se­hen haben, weil wir sie glatt beherrscht­en und daß uns dieser neue Nußk­nack­er erst ihr eigentlich­es Wesen zeigt, wobei es dann für die Wirkung sog­ar nüt­zlich sein könnte, wenn er etwas weniger tüchtig im Nüssek­nack­en ist als die Mehrzahl von uns.” (“Jose­fine, die Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse”, in Ein Hungerkün­stler, 1924)
10. Ibid., 184.
11. Car­ole Burns (ed), Off the Page: Writ­ers talk about Begin­nings, End­ings and Every­thing in Between (Nor­ton, 2008), p. 73.