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Friday, November 07, 2008
“I have no literary interests; something else: I am made of literature.”
So wrote Kafka on LF 304 and BrF 444. No, I don’t know what those mean either. Princeton only posted Stanley Corngold’s introduction to Franz Kafka: The Office Writings, so the citations function as cryptic references to private files collected, collated, duplicated and made available to people in the employ of a vast bureaucracy.* (Apt, ain’t it?) Corngold likes to pair the titular quotation with nonce word from Br 384 and L 333: Schriftstellersein, which he translates here as “the being of a writer,” but elsewhere [.pdf] as “the condition of being a writer."**
His intention, here as at that elsewhere, is to create a continuum between Kafka’s Schriftstellersein and his Beamtensein, or “official self,” that is, between the literature he scratched out between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. and the sanctioned documents he produced at the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. Intuitively, this seems as sound as “Petition of the Toy Producers’ Association” sounds like it could adorn one of his short stories. There’s a catch:
Kafka didn’t write “Petition of the Toy Producers’ Association,” but “Petition of the Toy Producers’ Association in Katharinaberg, Erzgebirge,” a title whose specificity ruins its effect. It’s a document Kafka never distilled, never labored over as he did his literary work. Not that he wasn’t an able lawyer: on 26 November 1912, he won a settlement of 4,500 kronen on behalf of the Institute, but he did so on a “maddening trip to Kratzau” (LF 64). Why “maddening”? Because it’d interrupted the proper composition of “The Metamorphosis”:
This kind of story should be written with no more than one interruption, in two ten-hour sessions; then it would have its natural spontaneous flow . . . . But I haven’t got twice ten hours at my disposal. So one has to try to do the best one can, since the very best has been denied to one. (LF 64)
Obviously, Kafka’s emphasis is formal, not rhetorical here--the flow of the story shaped by experience of its composition--but that’s my point: when Kafka stood before the District Court of Kratzau in November 1912, he read a document he’d written to persuade the Court to settle in his favor. It’s no more literary than the fifty-three letters he’d written Felice Bauer in November and December 1912 to persuade her that he would visit, couldn’t visit, wouldn’t visit, must visit, will visit never mind won’t visit her that Christmas. (That’s undecidability in action, folks.***) Not that it isn’t important. As an historicist, I value the documents in the same way I value the letters. But I don’t understand the desire for equivalence here.
Kafka may’ve written about and on behalf of bureaucracies, and there’s no small amount of interest in the intersection, but that’s no reason to collapse one into the other. This isn’t like David Foster Wallace’s notes for The Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, which are aimed at writers composed in his signature stylistic quirk. Or is it? Talk me down, people, lest I flatten every last bit of word by a genius into. That way lies madness.
(x-posted.)
*Sometimes I play coy. So shoot me, but then consult--if you can brave the German--Briefe an Felice, ed. Erich Heller and Jurgen Born. (Cowards can try their hand at Letters to Felice, trans. James Stern and Elizabeth Duckworth.)
**A distinction of interest to hardcore Heideggerians, no doubt, but me not so much.
***Not really.
Comments
Kafka’s writings allow us to see the potential genius in “Petition of the Toy Producers’ Association in Katharinaberg, Erzgebirge.” To see how he transformed the stuff of his rather banal life into the chilling (and still banal) stuff of his literature is exactly to see his genius. So it’s not that the work papers are art, but that the art has taught us how to view the work papers.
It’s like the end of *The Usual Suspects*: once the (con) artist has his way with the materials, it’s impossible not to see the world his way. It’s like it has always been right there in front of you (cuz it has); but you didn’t see it until the artist wove a pattern out of it.
Kafka may’ve written about and on behalf of bureaucracies, and there’s no small amount of interest in the intersection, but that’s no reason to collapse one into the other.
The business of trying to turn Kafka’s non-literar y writings into Kafka’s literary writings may have started with the letter to his father (sorry, the “Letter to His Father"). The other letters were then a natural extension of that. And now, it turns out, his business writings are to follow. Oh well.
I think Kundera is wonderful on Kafka’s posthumous mistreatment, in his chapter on Kafka in Testaments Betrayed, although I don’t remember if he specifically talks about Kafka’s letters and the incessant desire to treat them as literature.