COMMENT
Kafka and Orwell: Footnotes
Frederick Karl's biography of
Kafka,
Franz Kafka: Representative Man,
like Michael Selden's of Orwell,
gives the fullest account of Kafka's day-to-day life . It also presents in
greater detail the social milieu into which Kafka was born, and of which
Karl claims Kafka was a representative man. In reflecting his environment,
says Karl, Kafka stood out as the great modernist. The social
background, according to Karl, concisted of a corrupt and dying Austro–
Hungarian Empire, a confusion and competition of languages, a Jewry
torn in its identity and allegiances, a German literary tradition vying with
a native Czech tradition.
This is all true. But the extent to which it explains Kafka's actual
writing is questionable. Does it really explain the very unique and id–
iosyncratic, dream-like transformation of Kafka's personal experience -
his suffering, fantasies, obsessions - into literature? After all, the other
writers of the period lived in the same social situation. Yet they
produced very different works. No doubt, Kafka did absorb some of the
contradictions and conflicts around him. But this is a truism. Karl does
not fail to mention the personal factors in Kafka's fiction, though he
does not emphasize sufficiently their determining role in the conversion
of Kafka's fixations into stories and novels. For example, Kafka's
depiction of a bureaucratic world stems more from his experience when
he was employed by the Workers' Accident Insurance Insititute and even
more from his sense of the family as a bureaucracy ruled by the father,
than it does from the bureaucratic structure of the society around him.
Kafka's feelings about religion, and Kafka's own ideas about authority,
particularly absolute authority, in his relation to his father , were
transposed into the hierarchies and absolutes of the world of
The Trial
and
The Castle.
So, too, his portraits of women emerge from his feelings
about his mother and his sisters. Kafka has been said to offer a preview of
totalitarianism in his novels, yet it is not the totalitarian trends in the
social world around him that he fictionalized, but the suffocating sense
of his own life in interaction with his father, and in the crippling
disorders of his own existence.
True enough, Kafka was a modern writer and a figure of his time.
But it is more suggestive and illuminating to see him as a writer who
turned his life into his work - work which both expressed and lessened
his unbearable suffering.
In some things, Kafka's private vision resembled that of other peo–
ple's public vision; in many things, it was peculiar to Kafka. In some re-
