The Man Who Disappeared
Via Bookslut, a link to Michael Dirda�s review of a (relatively) new translation, by the poet Michael Hofmann, of Franz Kafka’s Der Verschollene. (The translation was published in the UK some years ago as The Man Who Disappeared; the Brod-inspired addition of “Amerika” deleted). Dirda wants to shift the emphasis onto Kafka’s shorter works. I’m with him on this. He also articulates thoughts I’ve had about Kafka, even if the comparison he makes is jarring!
“[Kafka] seems scarcely human to us, as sensitive and weird in his own way as Michael Jackson. It’s always surprising to realize that people in our lifetime knew Kafka, heard him laugh, even went to bed with him. Nabokov thought he once glimpsed the writer on a Berlin streetcar in 1927. Einstein could have met him at a Prague salon they both used to visit.”
Nabokov would have seen him then only as a ghost, as he died three years earlier. Yet, perhaps Kafka always was a ghost, if one excuses the inexcusable romance of such a notion. That’s what he seemed to want too; to disappear, that is, if not wholly. Through fiction, at least, he became less corporeal. Dirda refers to a beautiful anecdote summing up Kafka’s humour in this regard: “Please look on me as a dream, he once told some sleeping people he had accidentally disturbed.” This expresses Kafka’s genius for being self-regarding and self-effacing at the same time, and it is also what makes his writing timelessly modern, if you’ll also excuse that romantic oxymoron.
I thought of another Kafka anecdote when I saw Granta’s much-discussed list of twenty British novelists under forty who we’re all meant to keep an eye on. One of the qualifications to be on this list is that the writer is published, which is perfectly understandable (I haven’t read one of them though, I’m ashamedly proud to admit). However, in 1907, in a book review, Kafka’s great friend Max Brod listed four young writers as the best German stylists of the day: Heinrich Mann, Frank Wedekind, Gustav Meyrink and, much to his friend’s embarrassment, Franz Kafka. The thing was, you see, while the first three writers were already established names, the twenty-four-year-old Kafka had, as yet, published nothing. (And let us not forget that he never, ever, completed a novel, let alone saw one published).
Perhaps Kafka wrote at his best in short stories because they withdrew from the slightly Messianic tendency of our wish for a Great Novelist; the kind of person we wish to be the voice of a generation, or to provide the Great London Novel, as I read some twerp demanding recently. In fact, some of Kafka’s most important work, if important means anything here, appear not even as short stories, but as aphorisms. They are collected in a tiny book that’s not available anymore (The Collected Aphorisms, edited by Gabriel Josipovici):
“How can one take delight in the world unless one flees to it for refuge?“.
For “world” read “novel”.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Judgement Day again
- Zadie’s Kafka
- Zadie on Kafka again
- Kafka and Smog The secondary literature on Kaf…
- In the Penal Colony: the movie
