On Kafka – V.S. Pritchett in NYRB in 1982:

‘In his private self Kafka was isolated as the intellectual son of a bullying and shouting father, an ambitious Jewish shopkeeper who ridiculed the Jews of Prague and thought the boy was spineless and incompetent. In fact Kafka slaved at law as a student, achieved his doctorate, and became a conscientious official at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute and was often traveling responsibly to their conferences. This employment he regarded with disgust (though the travel suited his restless nature) and confirmed his view of himself as a nonperson; but the job was invaluable to him as a writer. There was another, more important, estrangement. As a German-speaking Czech (as he said of himself) he is not quite a Czech; as a German-speaking Jew detached from Judaism (until later on in life), he was not quite of Bohemia. As a Bohemian he did not quite belong to Austria, and as the son of a rising middle-class man he was not quite a worker, though he dealt exclusively with the disasters of working-class life.’

(…)

‘ He was capable of four kinds of prose, as indeed Hayman commendably notes: at the lowest level he was forced to write reports at the insurance office. Being taciturn he hated to be overheard dictating this official stuff and would dry up. Then, there was the prose of his diary, in which he trained himself to use his eye for concrete detail, to give self-examination a fine edge and to keep it moving; after that comes the talking prose of his letters to women. He needed women to be distant so that he could conduct a dialogue with himself by way of them; and finally, there is the exact, liberated prose of the fables, in which he achieved his desire to “consist of literature and nothing else.”’

(…)

‘These letters minutely display all the frantic indecisiveness, fearfulness, coldness of feeling, and the tense idealism. For those who find a vein of cruelty in Kafka’s writing, Canetti says shrewdly, “His cruelty is that of the non-combatant, who feels the wound in advance. He fearfully avoids confrontation, everything cuts into his flesh, and the enemy goes unharmed.” Fear of superior or hierarchic power is central to him: he resists it by becoming insectile.’

(…)

‘What he did not suspect was power as terror, that is to say, the lengths power would go to. Had he survived there would have been no trial: he would have died in Auschwitz as his beloved and heroic sister Ottla and her schoolchildren did. Power would become barbarous. It would exterminate. His touching letters to this sister, when she was a child and as a young married woman, are beautifully simple, tender, and fresh. In them one sees the side of his nature that was not estranged. It is lucky they have been preserved.’

Read the article here.

This is an interesting piece, V.S. Pritchett manages to do injustice to Kafka on so many levels.

Is Kafka dealing ‘exclusively with the disasters of working-class life?’ Really, then most literature from last century with the disasters of working-class life in one way or another.

Did he need women to be distant so that he could conduct a dialogue with himself? Again, I don’t see any evidence for this and it’s a rather mundane interpretation of all the letters he wrote to women.

That he was estranged, except fo the letters to his beloved sister, is once again a sign of this fatal combination of moralization and medicalization.

It’s easy to turn Kafka into the Kafka you think you need, but there is a text, and sometimes it’s wise to go back to the text.