Our relationship with Kafka, a century after his death
KAFKA Making of an icon Weston Library, Bodleian, Oxford, until October 27
KAFKA Making of an icon RITCHIE ROBERTSON, EDITOR 175pp. Bodleian Library Publishing. £35.
IN SEPTEMBER 1912, in one feverish night of manic scribbling, Franz Kafka became a writer. Such, at least, was his own version of the story: by submitting his protagonist Georg Bendemann to the “judgement” of his father, by having him throw himself into the river in compliance with the paternal sentence, Kafka found his voice. “The Metamorphosis”, The Trial, the “Kafkaesque”: they all ensued from this exhilarating moment. An adjective was born.
That Kafka’s conception was not, of course, immaculate is one of the lessons of the Bodleian’s enjoyable exhibition, curated by the Oxford Kafka Centre to mark the centenary of the writer’s death. For one thing, his afterlife was very nearly stillborn: Kafka’s famous injunction to Max Brod to burn all his papers “completely and unread” is the first thing the visitor sees, before segueing to the manuscript of “The Judgement” and its mythical moment of self-creation. Whatever posterity may think – arguments abound to the effect that Kafka knew his friend would ignore him, given that Brod had forewarned him of his editorial intentions – it is not self-evident that Brod did the right thing. The curators, to their credit, acknowledge the dilemma, inviting visitors to indicate what they would have done by adding a sticker either to a “burn” or a “publish” column. (How many, I wonder, will dare choose the former?)
Kafka’s breakthrough took place in a very specific context. The exhibition carefully sets the scene: Prague of the early twentieth century, a city that Kafka imagined as a “little mother with claws”. In contrast to the cliché of the withdrawn, alienated author, Kafka took pleasure in the city’s cultural offerings, enjoying Czech, German and Yiddish theatre and participating in the literary life centred around the Café Arco (with its circle of writers nicknamed, almost inevitably, the Arconauts). His ambivalence and fluctuating sense of self are nicely captured by a diary entry of February 1911 in which he claims, on the basis of a handful of minor publications, that “without a doubt, I am now the intellectual centre of Prague”. That he then violently crossed out this uncharacteristic burst of self-confidence – to the point, almost, of illegibility – tells its own tale of ambition and anxiety.
Kafka’s sense of place extended to his flat. The exhibition helpfully includes a model, making clear the extent to which the physical configuration of the living space – Kafka’s parents had to walk through his room to get to theirs – reflected its psychological tensions. Readers of “The Metamorphosis” will recall Gregor
