Jack Barron

.
Diaries, Franz Kafka trans. Ross Benjamin, Penguin, 2024, pp. 704, £24.00
.
Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka, Karolina Watroba, Profile Books, 2024, pp. 256, £18.99
.
.

Beginnings are always difficult. But Kafka tries: ‘The municipal officer Bruder came home from his office only toward 9 o’clock in the evening. It was already completely dark’. So far, so Franz. The lines recall the precise indeterminacies of The Trial and ‘The Metamorphosis’, and bear qualities recurrent across Kafka’s work generally: haunted by detail, but. somehow obliquely disinterested; the inaugural ‘the’ implies familiarity, the name Bruder even suggests family, but ‘municipal officer’ remains inscrutable, returning from – and repeating in – ‘his office’ with uniform bathos; the atmosphere is distinctly uncertain: ‘It was already dark’. Kafka made this recognisable start as a diary entry in 1914, and though it courts that officious wrongness for which Kafka’s prose is known, and indeed caricatured, something isn’t right: the story was quickly abandoned – marked off with a dash. He tries again: now a description of Alfred Kubin’s ‘Yellowish face, sparse hair lying flat over his skull, gleam in his eyes incited from time to time.’ And again: a transcription of a Dostoyevsky letter. Again: a squib of self-portraiture (‘a branch scraping weakly across my head’). Again: ‘Too tired’.

Kafka’s Diaries, freshly retranslated by Ross Benjamin, displays a mind at irrepressible work, as though sentenced to write without end or satisfaction. Published to mark the centenary of the writer’s premature death, it goes on the shelf – alongside Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and Simone Weil’s notebooks – as one of those great repositories of provisionality: a sustained glimpse into a working practice shaped by fragments and yet wholly diverse, unlimited – though not uncomplicated – by the bounds of a specific literary form. Ross Benjamin himself calls it a ‘workshop’, a place in which a compositional mode, at its most fractious, is revealed, a place in which the studied ambiguities of Kafka’s published prose is practised, formed and failed. Indeed, it is Benjamin’s stated purpose to restore Kafka’s disjecta to its full – and original – glitching glory, to translate

fragments, however truncated, cryptic, or seemingly marginal; nonstandard and omitted punctuation; orthographic errors, unorthodoxies, and inconsistencies; occasionally awkward, convoluted, and even mangled syntax; repetitions; abbreviations; contractions; regionalisms; slips of the pen; and other linguistic idiosyncrasies and departures from conventional High German.

It is, essentially, a translation that undoes the work of Max Brod, who occupied that doomed position of Kafka’s friend and editor, and who enacted the kind of ‘smoothing out’ that Bejamin resists: the latter uncorrects such corrections to syntax, grammar and spellings, as well as insults levelled at their social circle and the occasional homoerotic frisson that Brod sought to excise, and, in so doing, dispels the myth of Kafka as unerring saint of the uncanny. In reality (or as close to reality as a diary can get us), we find a writer distracted by bad digestion, worse sleep, trips to the theatre, a recourse to aphorism, an interest in Yiddish, lucid descriptions of dreaming, accounts of parties, and, very frequently, the inability to write anything at all: ‘1 June 1912 Wrote nothing’.

The straightening of records that guides Benjamin’s editorial and translatory practice finds a mirror-image in Karolina Watroba’s Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka. Part biography, part autobiography and part literary criticism: Watroba leaves the riddling interiorities of the notebooks and, instead, attempts to locate Kafka among his many and varied readers – both during his lifetime and since his death. It is a constellation of responses, a map of what Benjamin calls the ‘ever-expanding cosmos of secondary literature’, and includes everyone from Max Brod to Watroba herself, from Kafka’s own sister, with whom he shared a flat down Zlatá ulička, a tiny alley in Prague, to the purveyors of Kafka-themed tat who now populate that same alley. Kafka’s work, whether desirably or not, has produced extraordinary and unpredictable echoes across the globe, and Watroba sets about tracing them with a sense of optimistic discovery (by turns refreshing and grating) and rigorous scholarship. She begins, as seems obligatory in mainstream literary criticism, with her own, personal Kafka odyssey – starting with the manuscripts housed safely in Oxford, before tracking her quarry back to Prague and beyond. In doing so, she hopes to get closer to the man behind the texts, and weaves her own experiences with those of other – ahem – ‘Kafkologists’. This can be a little twee – ‘I spend many a happy hour here [Café Louvre] during my stay in Prague, leisurely reading Kafka and jotting down some notes on the tiny notecards’– but it also allows the chimerical centre of Kafka, and his writing, some well-deserved room to breathe.

We hear, for instance, of a staged re-iteration of ‘The Metamorphosis’, prematurely, and somewhat ironically, closed down by the coronavirus bug; there are discussions of The World of Franza Kafka, Kafkopolis, the Korean Kafka Society, and other permutations of ‘the brand Kafka’; the standard genuflection to AI; a welcome recitation of Richard Dawkins’ fantastically thick Tweet about Kafka (look it up); and Watroba’s own thoughtful response to Kafka’s various gravesites and commemorative plaques, which turns out to tell us much about the writer’s fraught cultural- national heritage as a Prague-born German-speaking Jew. He was, that is, a hyphenated being, and the array of interpretative responses is aptly multiple and fragmentary.

Of course, the variety and quantity of these responses is due also, in part, to the studied ambiguity that structures Kafka’s prose – what Gerhard Neumann names the gleitendes – or ‘sliding’ – paradox. That is, Kafka’s writing is, by turns, crystalline and elliptical: he perfectly exploits the gap between utterance and its fraught genesis to construct a writing of deepest ethical and aesthetic indefiniteness. Take, for instance, ‘A Hunger Artist’: a story of a professional faster left starving in a carnival cage as public interest wanes. It was composed in Kafka’s own dying days, and, aptly enough, displays an emaciated, voiceless subject nonetheless contorting itself into an object of ever-diminishing attention: an ‘I’ brought to the very edges of utterability. Literary criticism adores a vacuum like this, and Kafka is condemned to suffer a similar fate to that of Samuel Beckett and Emily Dickinson, whose narrative lacunae become more important than the technical precisions with which these enigmas are constructed. They become open to endless interpretative possibility. Or, as Watroba repeatedly points out, ‘there is no definite version of it’: ‘it’ is precisely the pronoun that best captures the evasiveness of what we call – often unthinkingly – Kafka-esque: a porousness that is, at once, a blessing and a curse. Whatever ‘it’ is, it can be yours.

All too frequently, however, we find recourse to buzzwords like ‘relatability’ and ‘resonance’, the latter of which seems a largely inappropriate metaphor for a writer so interested in textual disconnection. Kafka’s most famous work, ‘The Metamorphosis’, can be taken as exemplary of this problem: there is no doubt that its cultural impact is one of the most profound and long-living in literature, and this is, surely, due in part to its evasiveness, to its neat obscurity. Because of this, it becomes an endlessly pliable metaphor – a fact that Watroba enumerates with enthusiastic wonder. It is about identity, about Covid, about death, about the working class, about Watroba herself: it means something to all of us, and this, apparently, is its power. But it is as much a story about being misunderstood as anything else: a man who has not only become an insect, but has been translated into another alien voice, one that not even his family can comprehend. One wonders, then, when Watroba details, with bright-eyed delight, the manifold interpretations of Kafka, whether there is not some danger here. Just as there are good and bad interpretations, there are simply good and bad misinterpretations, and discriminating between them is the key to seeing Kafka’s obscurity clearly. ‘The Metamorphosis’ is as much about unimaginability as it is boundlessly applicable allegory.

Part of the problem for Watroba’s book, then, is finding critical definition: are all readings equally valid? Are some more equal than others? Or should we distinguish between a carefully researched appraisal of Kafka’s existentialist influences and, say, a mug with his face on it? For the most part, Watroba refrains from such discrimination, and she approaches everything and all with a happy, and frequently convincing, generosity. At times, however, it can strike as a little ill-disciplined. This is a shame, because Watroba’s own close readings, when directed at the texts themselves, are excellent – particularly as she glissades between languages, spinning silk-fine arguments from minor translatory variants. In the middle of so many readings, it can be easy to forget the writing that started it all, and Watroba is best when working in Kafka’s own meticulous textual worlds.

This is also perhaps one of the uncited reasons why Watroba doesn’t care for the diaries: much more so than the published prose, they offer repeated disturbances to our attentiveness, spasmodic and tired, perennially distracted, grammatically makeshift, and sometimes incredibly boring. She also sees the act of reading the diaries as inherently transgressive, that Kafka himself ‘would be truly mortified at the thought of strangers reading and analysing his diaries in this way’, and that psychological portraits drawn from such evidence are bound to misrepresent. I find this an odd position for several reasons. First, it smuggles in its own psychological portrait based on – supposedly – more reliable forms, like his biography or purposefully enigmatic published works (meant for the fire anyhow). Second, published diaries are always inflected with transgression, which is part of their literary power, but it is also naive to assume that diarists do not have their own eye on a future audience: that is, they never were direct representations of a person’s internal workings, but performative objects, tangled up with the many ways in which we perceive ourselves, and how we imagine we are perceived by others. As Benjamin puts it in his introduction, they are ‘arena[s] where many writers enact the drama of linguistic self-creation’. The diary is a form in which the first-person pronoun – Kafka’s I – is put under intense and persistent pressure: working on the dialectic exchange between self-expression and recession, it is, at once, a scene of writing most adapted to being truthful and a place of the innermost instability, wherein one’s personhood is continually called into doubt. This is perhaps especially true for Kafka, who subjected his own subjectivity to insistent grammatical disintegrations: ‘I make ghosts for myself’; ‘I frail as before and always’; ‘at times heard myself in myself, roughly like the whimpering of a young cat, but still.’

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, diary-aversion undoes the fact that Kafka was his first, and often most critical, reader: you are your own worst audience. The Diaries, therefore, are by no means uncomplicated psychological portraits, but revelations in a mind’s composing: a writing practice of great pain and labour, based in fragment and anaphora, trying and trying again, sentences that frequently lead nowhere, or suggest an elusive new beginning. It is no accident that Kafka’s writing works along those contact points between our aesthetic and moral languages: ‘The Judgement’, Der Process, the sentence: writing, for Kafka was intimate with punishment, and indeed the Diaries, as Watroba finds, can be extremely difficult to read. But it is important to read them. To borrow a line from ‘In the Penal Colony’, a story in which criminals have their sentences literally carved directly – and bloodily – on their bodies by a seemingly impossible machine: ‘I’m going to describe the apparatus first before I set it in motion. Then you’ll be able to follow the proceedings better.’ Of course, in the end, the machine goes wrong, but the trial matters as much as the error.
.
.

Jack Barron teaches English at the University of Cambridge. His writing has appeared in PN Review, Burlington Contemporary, Shearsman Magazine and elsewhere. He was recently shortlisted for the 2024 Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism.