The Malady Was Life Itself

By Stefan Kanfer

FRANZ KAFKA: THE COMPLETE STORIES; Schocken; 486 pages; $22.50

Anguish was not Franz Kafka's central obsession. It was his only one: the misery of illness, the descending sorrows of guilt, estrangement and despair. Torment stains every page of his fiction, and his autobiographical writings are so clotted with disorders that one collection states: "Frequent references to insomnia and headache have not been included in the index."

Not all the sickness was psychosomatic. Kafka succumbed to tuberculosis in 1924 at the age of 40. But he regarded even real disease with paranoid suspicion: "My brain and my lungs must have conspired in secret." He believed in "only one illness, and medicine hunts it blindly like a beast through unending forests." The malady was life itself.

Given this nihilism, this self-loathing that seems the dark side of narcissism, why does Kafka remain, 100 years after his birth, one of the authentic voices of the age? The answer lies in this centenary volume, Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories. His tales, some no more than a paragraph long, have forced their way into the modern consciousness. In The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa turns into an insect; in A Hunger Artist, a professional faster starves himself to death "because I couldn't find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else." In In the Penal Colony, needles write the excruciating message BE JUST on the back of a condemned man. In Investigations of a Dog, the canine narrator cannot admit that his species is subject to the whim and will of a larger power.

These works, and the other 74 tales in the collection, have become secular cabala, subject to endless sifting and interpretation. Hermann Hesse judged Kafka's works "an urgent formulation of the question of religious existence." W.H. Auden called Kafka "the author who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age as Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe bore to theirs." Andre Gide did not know what to admire most, "the naturalistic presentation of an imaginary world, or the daring turn to the mysterious." But Edmund Wilson was not ready to admire either: "Kafka is being wildly overdone," he grumbled. "What he has left us is the half-expressed gasp of a self-doubting soul trampled under."

Two generations later, all of these opinions can still find adherents. Kafka's work is so specific on the surface, and so cryptic underneath, that it can serve any interpreter. His admirers and detractors "agree on only one point: Kafka "was the neurotic artist personified. He despised his work as an insurance clerk but would not quit. He shied from sentiment as a "fatness of feeling" and recoiled from sex: "Coitus is the punishment for the happiness of being together." He could write only about what he knew, and what he knew were his dreams. "My talent for portraying my inner life," he noted, "has thrust all other matters into the background."

In Kafka's fiction the only history is case history: his own. Whether he is called Samsa, Raban or Joseph K., every protagonist is Franz. The oppressive boss, commandant or schoolmaster are all refractions of Hermann Kafka, the father Franz feared: "You acquired in my eyes that enigmatic quality common to all tyrants, whose authority rests not on what they think but on who they are." The accident files that Kafka used by day become A Report to an Academy: "You have done me the honor of inviting me to give an account of the life I formerly led as an Ape." His relations with Felice Bauer, the fiancee he never married, are duly noted in his diary: "I am guilty of the wrong for which she is being tortured, and am in addition the torturer." It is but a step from that summary to The Judgment, which ends in the fiance's shame-filled suicide. To some extent, all writing draws on autobiography, but in no other major writer is the distance from experience to fiction so short. For Kafka, all fantasy is rooted in the personal and the everyday: the miserable home, the suffocating office, the unconsummated affair and, below all, the stale gingerbread city of Prague. Here he was three times an outsider: a solitary, a Jew and a writer in German rather than Czech.

Kafka described himself accurately enough as "weakly and slight," but he had the strength to endure and prevail. He did so by vanishing into his writing. "I don't have 'literary interests,' " he wrote Felice, "literature is what I'm made of." Human relations, love, even health were of no concern; all that came to matter was language, "man's greatest invention."

Every tale, whether it was a novella or a paragraph, was given what Thomas Mann called a "conscientious, curiously explicit, objective, clear and correct style." Kafka's pathological concern for style was so extreme that only a few tales were published in his lifetime. But the meticulousness that made him a dangling, indecisive figure in life produced modern myths in a prose like shards of glass. It was meant to be lucid, and it was intended to cut. It has drawn blood for 50 years.

Yet when the author is praised today, it is less as a spellbinder than as a seer. Bertolt Brecht is typical of those who believe that "Kafka described with wonderful imaginative power the future concentration camps, the future instability of the law, the future absolutism of the state apparat." But Kafka was no East European Orwell staring into the cracked crystal ball. He was wholly apolitical and without any real presentiments of the Holocaust, which was to consume all three of his sisters. He knew of anti-Semitism when it was virulent but not lethal; he experienced bureaucracy before the days of printouts and systems analysts; and the tyranny he understood best was the kind that Freud explored, not the sort that Stalin and Hitler employed.

Kafka was, in fact, an artist by deliberation and a visionary only by happenstance--and a poor visionary at that. On his deathbed he expected his manuscripts to be burned "without exception and preferably unread." That they were not was a betrayal of his wishes, and a permanent grant to world literature. To read him as some Slavic oracle is to miss his importance as a writer who could draw out his soul like leviathan. In Kafka's case, seeing the past was a far greater enterprise than foreseeing the future.

--By Stefan Kanfer This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.