Franz Kafka’s life runs like a truly great comedy. The mythology of Kafka goes to the point where I heard the word Kafkaesque before Kafka. When we think about Kafka’s life for long enough, it is not necessary that each person walks out with the same convictions. If there is one thing that I can say about Kafka with utmost conviction is that his life was dwarfed by literature. In his adulthood, Kafka himself went on to claim that- “I am literature and nothing else.” As we start delving into the life of Kafka, I need you to just read the story as it is and by the end of it, have your convictions about him and his life.
If I had to sum up Kafka’s lineage in a line, I would say that Kafka was born in Prague in a family of scholars and eccentrics complete with depressions. Kafka, as a child bemoaned living in Prague. He would always say, “Prague doesn’t let go.” Having no other option, he was stuck in a city he didn’t love with an aggressive and volatile father who could never love the sensitive Kafka the way he wanted. His parents used to run a fancy goods store and were not home for most of the time. As a child, he lost two of his brothers to measles and meningitis. These fluctuations in his life did not only result in a state of constant frenzy and depression but also in a deep rooted mistrust in the inevitability of human relationships in which every face he fell in love with could vanish in an instant. His father did not help the situation and Kafka always found himself at extreme ends with his father. Later on, in life, he wrote a seventeen page letter to his father explaining how in trying to make Kafka a man like himself, he instilled feelings of worthlessness, and a sadness that wouldn’t leave. Trapped in a situation where a slim, anorexic Kafka was expected to be a strong, burly man like his father and being reminded about his incapability at every point, for a boy as sensitive as Kafka, inner escape was the only possible strategy. As Statch puts it very eloquently, “He drifted out of his life into literature.” Perhaps, he drifted into literature till the point he forgot life.
By the age of 12, Kafka had decided that he wanted to be a writer. Living as a Jew in central Europe, he preferred identifying himself as a German. Having completed his education in law, he started working as an insurance clerk. He hated his job as an insurance clerk but still stuck to his desk as if was his only solace. He would turn up at work exactly at 8:15. This goes on to show the theme in many of his works later on as a working class man in those times, like Gregor Samsa in Metamorphosis, having turned into as insect is less worried about the weird change but more about being late to his job. Kafka hugely inspires from his life but still makes it sound detached. In 1920, he described his lifelong wish in his diary of having a life which although was a life filled with ebbs and rises but was recognized as nothing but a hovering dream. He wanted the duality of being and nothingness at the same time. The elements in his literature show in his real life too, as he always makes plans in a manner that ensure their eventual unmaking. He met his best friend Max Brod in 1902, during his years at Charles University and they remained friends till Kafka’s death. It is owing to Brod’s relentlessness and his refusal to accept Kafka’s death wish of destroying all his literature that we can read Kafka today. Kafka never published any of his writings during his lifetime and was always doubtful of his talent. It was Brod’s constant encouragement that he forced Kafka to maintain a diary and to continue on writing. Kafka’s adult life is a juxtaposition of practical with the emotional, where he is getting on Brod’s nerves about keeping the windows open or closed, or whining about leaving his job to become a soldier but never really acting on it, asking his father to open an asbestos factory but then not helping with the factory which consequently loses money and goes under, asking his sister to buy a magazine that published his story, not paying taxes. Desperate to write fiction, he takes a two week holiday but then ends up writing a sixteen page unsent letter to his father. Thus we see adult Kafka, as a man who often starts but doesn’t always finish.
“The outside world is too small, too clear cut, too truthful to contain everything that is inside.” Kafka often used to doubt that he is a human being. He was not just a man who was trying to escape responsibility as it might seem at point. Kafka himself found Kafka difficult. Kafka met Felice Bauer, who was a marketing rep for a dictation company at the house of Max Brod. This sparks an exchange of letters at frequent intervals between the two lovers over the course of five years during which they engage, un-engage, re-engage but never marry.
He writes- “For instance, I answer one of your letters, then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you. I belong to you; there is really no other way of expressing it, and that is not strong enough. But for this very reason I don’t want to know what you are wearing; it confuses me so much that I cannot deal with life.” But still meets Felice not more than fifteen times during the five years. On days he did meet Felice, he would remain sullen and withdrawn and write that he was highly disappointed with the real Felice. He writes- “if one bolts the doors and windows against the world, one can from time to time create the semblance and almost the beginning of the reality of a beautiful life.” Kafka seems like a man more in love with an idea of Felice who exists as a character in his letters rather than herself. At the end, Kafka seems like a man who seems unable to refrain from inciting affection, which he later finds unbearable and retreats from. This happens with a Hungarian doctor Robert Klapstock who moves to Prague to be near to Kafka but faces Kafka’s disdain. But that is not the end, and subsequently Kafka falls in love with Milena Jesenska who he openly elicits his love in a letter- “You belong to me.” She remains deeply erotic but unattainable for Kafka. Kafka does not come across as a very sexual person but he understands the power of sexuality.If I had to sum up Kafka’s love life, it might be in one of his letters to Felice, “If we value our lives, let us abandon it all… I am forever fettered to myself, that’s what I am, and that’s what I must try to live with.”
Kafka seems to be living a situational comedy. He moves to the countryside calling it the most beautiful place the first day but gets tired the next day. He sends his sister fake articles about a cure being discovered for tuberculosis, through which he abuses the joy of his family. He might have been gay. He visits sanatoriums and looks at naked men describing them eloquently. In his diary, he also accepts having sexual feelings for his sister. A lot of Kafka is just left to speculation, having no clear roots to the truth of him. In the end of his days, he meets Dora Damiant, his last love who stays by his side for a major part of which Kafka fight tuberculosis. They used to live together and Dora directed all her energy to his care. He writes- “How many years will you be able to stand it? How long will I be able to stand your standing it?” Though, it seems rather weird to believe in Kafka’s words, but of all who knew them claim that the last year was the happiest of his life. They had planned to escape to Palestine. Kafka died of tuberculosis at the age of 1924.
In great irony or intense self awareness Kafka wrote, “I do not trust words and letters… I want to share my heart with people but not with phantoms that play with the word.” Kafka’s life at all points seems like a man living a story and not reality. He seems to have found an escape in his childhood, which he felt comfortable in and decided to live in forever. Though as he nears death, we see a change in both his writing and life, where he does accept that despite life being the way it was, we all have a choice to change it and I believe that is what Kafka leaves me with, as he leaves behind a world of literature for us.
