Long My Motto

You cannot judge the importance of things by the noise they make. ... And these things that have mattered for thousands of years are not going to be snuffed out because some stink merchant in his laboratory invents a new kind of mischief.

Good-Bye Mr. Chips, James Hinton (1934)

Thinking About Kafka

I had a large coupon and store credit to spend at Borders back in December, so I decided to give myself the Christmas gift of purchasing entirely at whim. (For fun, I also had my self-present gift wrapped.) The sparkly that caught my eye that day was James Hawes's Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life. (And seriously, check out that cover. Can you blame me?)

Titled Excavating Kafka in Britain, this book is Hawes's attempt to debunk the "K-Myth," the author's name for the mystique that surrounds the idea of Kafka even in the minds of those who have never read him - that image of mysterious, bleak, tortured Orientalism, conveyed as much by piercing stare of the iconic 1905 portrait as by that Z-and-two-Ks virtually engineered to tantalize westerners.

A few aspects of the K-myth Hawes wishes to debunk:

• Kafka was a neglected genius in his lifetime. (According to Hawes, Kafka played the contemporary literary scene rather masterfully, though he did chose to withhold rather a lot of his work from publication during his lifetime, for various reasons.)
  
  
• Kafka plodded away at a dead-end job, and struggled to find time to write. (Hawes: Kafka was a government lawyer with an unmistakably upper-middle-class salary.)
  
  
• Kafka was tormented by fear of sex. (Hawes: Kafka maintained a rather expensive pornography habit and was a connoseur of Prague's better brothels.)
  
  
• Kafka was destructively honest about himself to the women in his life. (Hawes: Kafka was a manipulative jerk with all of his multiple girlfriends and fiancees.)
  
  
• Kafka takes us into bizarre worlds. (Hawes: Kafka's settings were biting and obvious caricatures of the Hapsburg world that any of his countrymen would have recognized. Except for the whole cockroach thing - and that was a literary construction.)

Like other pieces of populist expose, Why You Should Read Kafka exagerates its own originality and, perhaps, significance. Though I've read some Kafka over the years, I'd never read a great deal about him, nor studied him in depth, but I was still familiar both with what Hawes terms the K-myth, and, casually, with several of the arguments against it.

In an extreme example, Hawes tries to point out that the opening image of The Metamorphosis, in which the story's hero wakes up to find himself transformed into a giant insect, was lifted directly out of the opening passage of a major work of Goethe, a central piece of the German literary canon, and that, in a century of Kafka scholarship, nobody has noticed this before. Not only is this as far-fetched as it sounds, I can attest that it isn't true, since I've certainly heard that before, and I'm no scholar of Kafka or Goethe.

I admit that these criticisms should have implications in terms of the book's credibility, but they're strangely easy to forgive, presumably on some combination of the following grounds:

1. They're all the kind of exaggeration that's familiar enough in works of popular, rather than rigorous, scholarship.
   
   
2. The general thrust stays believable - really, the whole Kafka-mytique is so over-the-top romantic that anyone with sense should know to doubt it.
   
   
3. The presentation is rollicking good fun.

If nothing else, reading this did get me curious about Kafka and his influences and has got me reading and re-reading his work. More on that later, no doubt.