Andrés Vaccari

K. (2005)
By Roberto Calasso
Translated from the Italian by Geoffrey Brock.

The work of Franz Kafka seems custom made for endless interpretation. Indeed, no other modern author has inspired such a feeding frenzy of critical exegesis. Kafka’s disturbing and enigmatic worlds immediately compel the reader to search for explanations and possible meanings. We are certain that something profound is being said, if only we knew what.

Nonetheless, Kafka has managed to emerge unscathed, and as inscrutable as ever, from successive attempts at elucidation by various intellectual fads. Psychoanalysis and existentialism have been particularly eager to adopt him as their prodigal son and smother him in endless interpretation. These approaches to his work, however, have dated quickly and nowadays sound narrow and stuffy.

Postmodernism was not quite sure what to do with Kafka. Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature stands out as the most intriguing post-structural reading; yet this Kafka is clearly a mouthpiece for the philosophers’ theories, a mirror for their own concerns. Other commentators have eschewed ‘master narratives’ and focused on local, specific aspects of his work, such as the impact of the Kabbalah or juridical thought.

Without doubt, the strangest and most enduring of Kafka’s literary creations has been himself. The legend portrays a misanthropic, neurotic and guilt-ridden recluse prone to physical and mental infirmity, growing in the shadow of a tyrannical father who was obsessed with money and social status. Kafka’s real life took place on the page, yet he published little during his lifetime. He received a doctorate in law and got a boring job in an insurance company. Most of his working life was spent at the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute–a truly Kafkaesque name. Terrified of sexual intimacy, he held a long engagement to Felice Brauer, whom he seldom met in person although he lived a short train ride away. After a copious and tortured correspondence, he broke off their engagement at the last moment. Yet Kafka established mature, intimate friendships with various women, who thought highly of him. His friends and colleagues found him enchanting, intelligent and funny, and his letters and diaries reveal a sensitive man keenly in touch with cultural and social developments around him.

Kafka died of tuberculosis one month before his forty-first birthday, after ordering his literary executor Max Brod to burn everything he had ever written, including his unpublished manuscripts and every copy of his published work Brod could get his hands on. To the eternal gratefulness of Western culture, Brod refused, and Kafka went on to become the most iconic and significant writer of the modern age. No writer in the twentieth century escaped his influence, at least not any writer worth reading. Like Dante and Macciavelli, Kafka received the ultimate writer’s honour of having a word coined after him. Arguably, if one adjective could sum up last century, it is ‘Kafkaesque’.

Like Samuel Beckett, Kafka was smart enough not to comment on his works or offer his own interpretations. But a few things are clear. Kafka’s world is hermetic and self-contained, devoid of cultural and historical references. He developed a mythography that requires its own peculiar grammar. Also, Kafka set down the definitive portrait of modern power, exploring the dehumanisation and absurdity unleashed by modern forms of administration, bureaucracy and social life. He rendered a world abandoned by any possibility of divine redemption. But, unlike Dostoevsky, Kafka did not yearn for the return of God, for God had never been there to begin with.

These themes are vast and of great consequence; yet they fail to exhaust what Kafka was about. It is about time someone rescued Kafka and welcomed him into the twenty-first century. And Roberto Calasso rises up to this difficult challenge, producing one of the best books ever written about Kafka. Calasso is best known for his books on mythology, in particular the brilliant The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, which revisits ancient Greek myth. An exemplary and meticulous reader, Calasso consulted Kafka’s original manuscripts, and integrates deleted passages and fragments into his discussion.

For Calasso, the main failure of Kafka’s exegetes has been to look for transcendental frameworks of explanation, “all-encompassing interpretations”, which end up being “voluble and intrusive”. Kafka has usually been considered a writer of allegories, fables and parables; but Calasso goes against the grain: “Kafka can’t be understood if he isn’t taken literally,” he says. “But the literal must be grasped in all its power and in the vastness of its implications.”

Rather than looking for overarching explanations or trying to fit Kafka into pre-existing theories, Calasso’s strategy is to linger on the surface of the texts, digging into obscure corners, pursuing parallels, resonances and contrasts. He begins with The Castle and The Trial. Both novels are about someone being elected by an invisible, all-pervading power. In the former, K. yearns to be elected, to become an employee for the castle; but it is uncertain if he has been summoned or not, and the whole narrative orbits around that uncertainty. In The Trial, on the other hand, the election of Joseph K. is certain from the beginning, yet it is also a condemnation. Both works “unfold on the threshold of a hidden world that one suspects is implicit in this world.” Calasso argues that Kafka’s world is not a sacred world, nor is it a world abandoned by the sacred or divine. The divine has been absorbed into the social order, where it continues to operate. In this world nothing is “glaringly important”, yet “nothing is insignificant.” This is why even the most mundane detail acquires such symbolic weight. The web of connections extends into other texts, most importantly Kafka’s own life, as revealed in his Diaries. Many commentators have used the writer’s biographical circumstances as the final determinant of his work. But for Calasso the connections between fiction and life are seamless; they extend into one another without any of them taking precedence. Calasso also makes repeated allusions to Hindu cosmology, which he uses sparingly, to illuminate certain aspects of Kafka (and this makes K. part of Calasso’s ongoing work on myth).

Calasso finds original points of entry into well-trodden territory, small details that prove to be of major significance. For example, his reading of “In the Penal Colony” begins with the two ladies’ handkerchiefs the guard has tucked under his collar. And “The Metamorphosis”, he says, is a story “of doors that open and close… doors that are locked or forced.”

For Kafka, as well as for Calasso, knowledge is fundamentally metaphorical. To explain is to produce an image of something, which must then be recognized as “only an image”. The process continues forever, for there is no knowledge that is not an image. “This vicious circle offers no exit and perhaps approximates a definition of literature.” All that remains are enigmas that “can be resolved only by further enigmas.” Calasso does not identify any ‘master’ themes; with the exception, perhaps, that all of Kafka’s works begin with a variation on the theme of foreignness: K. arriving to the village around the castle, Joseph K. suddenly finding himself an outsider in his own world, Gregor Samsa waking up transformed into an insect, Karl Rossman arriving to America, and so on. K. is a series of interlinked, aphoristic meditations on Kafka. Yet Calasso’s journey is worth it, and does not leave us disappointed. Calasso is scrupulous without being pedantic, respectful without being sycophantic. And his utter lack of romanticism is refreshing. While revealing fruitful connections that bring into relief the organicity of Kafka’s work, Calasso preserves the mystery, and leaves the reader enough space for their own reading. This is exegesis without interpretation, a journey without closure or final point of arrival. Kafka would have approved.

This admirable work will inspire adepts of Kafka to reread him, and test Calasso’s theories. For the uninitiated or those lingering at the border, this is the second best place to begin.