The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (124 page)

To discover and prevent risks on the job, Kafka was assigned to inspect neighboring factories outside Prague in the rapidly growing industrial complex of northern Bohemia. There he viewed the costs of the new industry, in fingers lost and arms and legs crippled. He was both impressed and discouraged by the “modesty” of the men. “They come to us and beg. Instead of storming the company and smashing it to little pieces, they come to us and beg.” The hopeless quest for justice glimpsed in
The Trial
and
The Castle
was rooted in this personal experience. “Wept over the account of the trial of twenty-three-year-old Marie Abraham, who, through want and hunger, strangled her almost nine-month-old child with a tie which she was using as a garter and which she unwound for the purpose. A thoroughly typical story.”

At the insurance company he was supposed to classify trades by their
degrees of risk and to find ways to prevent accidents. Apparently he never thought of himself as a first-class bureaucrat, despite the high opinion his superiors held of him. Noting a certain naiveté, they admired his regularity, his devotion to duty, and his good nature. Kafka was on his way to a respectable career.

But in 1912, the turning point of his life, he became a born-again Man of Letters. “Who is to confirm for me the truth or probability of this,” he wrote in his March diary, “that it is only because of my literary mission that I am uninterested in all other things and therefore heartless.” This destiny, he explained to himself, was shaped by “my talent for portraying my dreamlike inner life … my life has dwindled dreadfully, nor will it cease to dwindle.”

We do not know the precise cause of his self-discovery. One element may have been his summer pilgrimage with Brod to Weimar pursuing the spirit of Goethe and Schiller. Using the additional vacation he had because of “a pathological nervous condition manifesting itself in nearly continuous digestive disturbances and sleep problems,” he went for a three weeks’ “cure” to Justs Jungborn (Just’s Fountain of Youth), an open-air resort in the Harz mountains that featured nudism, vegetarianism, and Eastern mysticism. With the motto “Light, Air, Mud, Water,” the resort was known to specialize in “raw vegetables and uncooked ideas.” In the “sun-and-air parks” guests walked about naked, but Kafka refused to conform and so was called “the man in the swim trunks.” Outside they wore “reform” clothing and sandals designed by the proprietor, who lectured on “Nature and Christianity.” The Jungborn vegetarian diet that Kafka followed in later years emphasized “various nut meats—which must be recognized as the central ingredient in human nourishment.” There was a Bible in every room and Kafka seems then to have made his first effort to read both the New and the Old Testaments. Unfortunately nudism and vegetarianism were not strong enough medicine for what ailed his body.

At twenty-nine, Kafka had discovered himself as a writer, as he recorded in his diary for September, 1912:

A parable of Kafka’s life, “The Judgment” is a bizarre tale of a son who decides to marry, and is about to write the news to an old friend in Russia. He goes to his aged father to ask whether he should send the letter. The father, unaccountably offended, accuses the son of deceiving him. “You have no friend in St. Petersburg. You’ve always been a leg-puller and you haven’t even shrunk from pulling my leg. How could you have a friend out there? I don’t believe it.” Upset by the son’s “deception” the father collapses and the son puts him gently to bed. Then the father confesses that he himself has been writing to that friend, who “knows everything a hundred times better than you do yourself, in his left hand he crumples your letters unopened while in his right hand he holds up my letters to be read through.” After another accusatory interchange, the father concludes, “An innocent child, yes, that you were, truly, but still more truly you have been a devilish human being!—and therefore take note: I sentence you to death by drowning!” At which the son rushes out of the house, leaps over the railing at the water’s edge, and into the water to drown. “Dear parents,” the son exclaims as he leaps, “I have always loved you all the same.”

In the next months Kafka began to write
Amerika
. Then he wrote his best-known piece, “The Metamorphosis,” which he called an “exceptionally repulsive story.” Gregor Samsa, an ordinary traveling salesman living with his father, mother, and sister, awakens one morning to find himself transformed into a gigantic insect. At first, in his “regular human bedroom,” he tries to ignore his transformation, but his family cannot. Since Gregor can no longer contribute to the family support, they must take in boarders. The family tries to keep him confined to his room, but they cannot, nor do they feed him properly. The horrified boarders move out. To the family’s relief, Gregor the insect dies. Then his sister “bloomed into a pretty girl with a good figure … it would soon be time to find a good husband for her.”

Kafka had begun his ceaseless exploring of the wilderness within, both stimulated and obstructed by abortive love affairs. In his “Letter to His Father” he blamed Hermann for not having prepared him for the good life—“marrying, founding a family, accepting all the children that come, supporting them in this insecure world and even guiding them a little.” In August 1912, at Max Brod’s house, he met Brod’s distant relative Felice Bauer, who was twenty-four and had come from Berlin on her firm’s business. He was much taken by her but the next morning was already worried that she had distracted him from his revision of
Amerika
with some “stupidity.” They announced their engagement in June 1914, but broke it off stormily in a few months, while he explained to himself that it was “because he felt chained by invisible chains to an invisible literature.”

And now he was relieved at “the feeling that my monotonous, empty,
mad bachelor’s life has some justification. I can once more carry on a conversation with myself, and don’t stare so into complete emptiness.” His health was already weak enough to make him “physically unfit for military service,” and he was not drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army in World War I. In March 1917 he was once again engaged to Felice. Then one morning that summer, to his horror, Kafka began spitting blood, disclosing the “illness which had been coaxed into revealing itself after [five years of] headaches and sleeplessness.” The doctor gave him a Kafkaesque reassurance. “All city dwellers are tubercular anyway, an inflammation of the lung tips (one of those figures of speech, like saying piglet when you mean big fat sow) isn’t all that terrible; a few tuberculin injections will take care of it.” But he would never recover.

All the rest of his life he would be taking intermittent sick leave, trying one sanatorium after another, as described in Thomas Mann’s
Magic Mountain
. Tuberculosis would force him to take his pension and retire from his insurance job in 1922, at the age of thirty-nine. This now provided still another reason to break off his engagement to Felice, and Kafka welcomed so “miraculous” a release from office routine. He gave an inward and conspiratorial explanation of his disease:

Naturally he saw his father in this conspiracy. “If my father in earlier days was in the habit of uttering wild but empty threats, saying: I’ll tear you apart like a fish—in fact, he did not so much as lay a finger on me—now the threat is being fulfilled independently of him. The world—F[elice] is its representative—and my ego are tearing my body apart in a conflict that there is no resolving.”

The indisposition of his outer body came to seem a mere inconvenience. And his illness, like his Jewishness, forced him back into himself. There is no evidence that his tuberculosis decisively interrupted his writing or stunted his exuberant imagination. But would he have written what he did if he had been in robust health, expecting a long life? His tuberculosis relieved him of the need to choose between “living a life and earning a living.”

…

Kafka again and again explained that the inner and the outer worlds ran their separate ways. As he began writing
The Castle
, in his diary for January 12, 1922, he speculated on the consequences:

It is not surprising that Kafka’s literary product, not of our earthly world, was as idiosyncratic, as inchoate and cryptic in form as in content. The inner world is not so easily ordered as Dante’s levels of the Christian afterlife or Cervantes’s conventions of knightly chivalry. None of Kafka’s long novels was completed. He was prolific in short stories, aphorisms, and parables, all sallies into the inner unknown. His table of contents is an outrageous miscellany, which touches everything that does or does not exist and in no discernible order.

He teases us even by his very definition of a parable:

In Kafka it is not allegory but symbolism that entices us. And as his soul mate Max Brod insists, there is a world of difference. Allegory simply makes one thing stand for something else. But in a symbol the thing and the something else are somehow united, like Christianity in the cross. In an allegory realism is superfluous, but not in a symbol, where the thing and what it stands for come together. Every real detail enriches the life symbolized. The brittleness of the insect’s carapace, the yelp of the dog, the emptiness of the burrow—all enrich the real world.

Into everything he touches, Kafka brings this symbolic concreteness and mystery. We can sample it in one of his stories almost as well as in any other. In “The Burrow” (1923), one of the two last stories that Kafka wrote, an animal digs with head and hands to build an underground dwelling. To be still safer against his enemies the animal goes down into the burrow and builds a hole within the hole. Hidden in these unsubstantial labyrinthine tunnels he seeks security. Having built the burrow, the animal comes above ground and suddenly feels free:

When others want to know about the burrow, the animal retorts, “I built it for myself and not for visitors.” Perhaps like Kafka’s works? Was the burrow Kafka’s labyrinth inside the labyrinth of himself?

His three long novels—
Amerika, The Trial
, and
The Castle
—which we owe to Max Brod’s refusal to obey Kafka’s last instructions, show the wealth and the poverty of this inward world. Of course he had never been to America, but his first novel (1912) was a picaresque tale of the adventures of a poor sixteen-year-old boy packed off across the Atlantic to escape the consequences of his seduction by a servant girl. He explained his intention “to write a Dickens novel” with all Dickens’s “wealth and naive sweeping power.” A combination of fairy tale and Disneyesque caricature, it recounts
Karl Rossmann’s rescue by an immigrant German uncle who has become a senator, harassment by hobo thugs, taunting by the daughter of a suburban New York millionaire, tribulations as a resort-hotel elevator operator, and assorted misadventures across the continent. Despite all these American troubles, young Karl ends his journey in an epiphany of optimism at the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma. “Today only and never again! If you miss your chance now you miss it for ever! If you think of your future you are one of us! Everyone is welcome! If you want to be an artist, join our company! Our Theatre can find employment for everyone, a place for everyone!” At first Karl is exultant, and enjoys his try at blowing the trumpet. Then he is frustrated when he must name his occupation, for he thought he was being engaged as an actor. Of course the tyrant father reappears in episodes of unexplained guilt and undeserved punishment, but the father himself remains back in Europe. Kafka’s first title for the book was “The Man who Disappeared.” He was so delighted by this book that he used to amuse himself by reading passages aloud.