Word: kafka
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...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...
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." André 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...
...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...