Elizabeth Dalton
KAFKA AS SAINT
The centennial anniversary of the birth of Franz Kafka in
1883 seems to have provoked a growth spurt in an already immense
bibliography. A number of new critical and biographical works have
appeared in the last four or five years, older works have been
reprinted, more of the correspondence has been published. The
earliest criticism of Kafka featured a lively debate about the meaning
of his work and even about his status as a writer. But although he
was once so strange and incomprehensible, Kafka now seems famil–
iar: he and his characters are the emblematic modern antiheroes,
and everything in our lives, from a boring meeting to the nuclear
arms race, has become "Kafkaesque." The critics have come to re–
gard Kafka as being on our side against the irrationality of the
world; he is our representative and champion.
However, there have been other views of Kafka, some quite at
odds with the positive opinion that prevails now. In an incisive little
book first published in German in 1951, Gunther Anders accused
Kafka of acquiescent nihilism : "He is a realist of the dehumanized
world, but also its exalter." He warned against the danger of a cult,
saying
"It
is not Kafka's works that must be destroyed, but their
dangerous fascination. The severest treatment which we should in–
flict on Kafka would be perhaps to understand him so well that his
appeal is destroyed ."
No one, of course, was more ambivalent toward his work than
Kafka himself, or more doubtful of his right to literary fame. At
times he seemed to claim the central place we now accord him, as
when he wrote in his journal, "I represent the negative elements of
my age." Yet he published only a fraction of his work and, as we
know, instructed Max Brod to destroy the rest after his death. He
feared the "negative elements" he dealt with, as though they did in–
deed have the dangerous powers attributed to them by Gunther
Anders.
Some of the most influential recent criticism of Kafka, how–
ever, almost entirely suppresses this idea of something equivocal or
morally dangerous in his work . Max Brod's view of his friend as a
religious writer has come back; there seems to be not only a Kafka
cult, as Anders feared, but a movement for his elevation to saint–
hood.
