Not Kafka—he's a Czech!  —Why the Kafka store wasn't destroyed in antisemitic rioting

        What do I have in common with the Jews?  I don't even have anything in common with myself!  —Kafka

        Despite all his denials and beautiful evasions, [Kafka] quite simply is Jewish writing. —Harold Bloom, The Western Canon

         But with much admiration for Kafka, I find it impossible to take him seriously as a major writer and have never ceased to be amazed at the number of people who can...To compare Kafka...with Joyce and Proust and even with Dante...is obviously quite absurd...putting K beside writers with whom he may properly be compared, he still seems rather unsatisfactory...I do not see how one can possibly take him for either a great artist or a moral guide.  —Edmund Wilson, “A Dissenting Opinion on Kafka”
 
         Kafka—perhaps the greatest artist of them all—lived an almost impossible life of tedium, writing novels and stories that boil down to a sustained cry: "God is dead!  God is dead!  Isn't he?  I mean, surely he is, isn't he?  God is dead.  Oh, I wish, I wish, I wish he weren't." —James W. Sire, The Universe Next Door

         I couldn't put my name to a work that implies man's ultimate surrender.  Being on the side of man, I had to show him in his final hour undefeated. . . I do not share Kafka's point of view in The Trial. I believe that he is a good writer, but Kafka is not the extraordinary genius that people today see in him.
        He [Joseph K.] is a little bureaucrat. I consider him guilty . . . He belongs to a guilty society; he collaborates with it.
        What made it possible for me to make the picture is that I've had recurring nightmares of guilt all my life: I'm in prison and I don't know why—going to be tried and I don't know why.  It's very personal for me.  A very personal experience, and it's not at all true that I'm off in some foreign world that has no application to myself; it's the most autobiographical movie that I've ever made, the only one that's really close to me.  And just because it doesn't speak in a Middle West accent doesn't mean a damn thing.  It's much closer to my own feelings about everything than any other picture I've ever made.     —Orson Welles, on his film version of The Trial
 

         I think the movie (The Trial) is a bit of a mess....The concept of a guilty Joseph K., a sort of obsequious and weak hero, seemed very antithetical to the spirit of Kafka's book. After a couple of days of shooting I said to Orson (Welles), 'Don't you think it's going to be interpreted that K. is guilty?' He said, 'He is guilty! He's guilty as hell!' And I thought,'Oh, well, okay." I believed then, as I do now, in the authenticity of the director's vision, and I'll do anything to make it come true. —Anthony Perkins, about his role as Joseph K. in The Trial

         The inner core of shame gives the child a sense of being flawed and defective.  The flaw is felt as coming not from doing but from being.  In other words, it's not just that I make mistakes or do "bad" things.  The way I am, my very beingness, is defective.
         Franz Kafka wrote about this inner sense of defectiveness brilliantly in his novel The Trial.  Joseph K., the protagonist, wakes up one morning to find that he has been arrested.  He has no idea what he has done wrong.  He is simply judged and indicted.
         Kafka wrote in his diary, "Healthy men dispense the phantoms of the night."  But in The Trial, the phantoms are there in the morning, only they are not recognizable.  Joseph K.'s arrest is the beginning of a series of nightmares, a lifelong sentence of mystification.  He is picked up and taken to court, where he must defend himself before a judge.  But he does not understand what the charges are and therefore feels powerless to defend himself.
         I interpret this novel as a symbolic presentation of Kafka's awareness of the deep inner antagonisms that split his life apart.  All the characters in the story are aspects of his own inner life.  He was plagued by an inner voice of critical accusation, which is represented in the story by a police inspector whose name is Franz.
         Kafka was an unusually sensitive and highly creative child.  He was dominated by a patriarchal father who had no sense of his son's uniqueness.  Young Franz felt compelled to give up his own ideas and conform to the banal, standardized world of his father.  Even after he left home, his father's voice continued to live on inside of him, constantly accusing him for thinking and feeling differently.  In his father's world, simply being different was a crime.  Yet Franz could not escape the fact of his own uniqueness; he was condemned inner secrecy, despairing of ever being able to really express his authentic self.  Anyone who does not measure up to patriarchy's absolute measures is judged guilty, and Joseph K.'s crime was his wanting to be himself and therefore different. . .
         As far as I know, no one has ever described the darkness of the mystified false self any better than Franz Kafka.
  —John Bradshaw, Creating Love
 

         This relentless optimism drove me to Kafka, that incorrigibly unrepentant codependent...
         There is a Kafka parable about a man, K, who seeks admittance to the Law.  The gate to the Law is open, but a gatekeeper denies him entry, with the warning that he is only the lowliest gatekeeper;  there are others, more powerful, along the way.  K believes he should have access to the Law but does not challenge the gatekeeper or try to slip past him.  Instead he sits down before the gate, pleading with the gatekeeper, bribing him in vain, and watching him incessantly for many long years, the rest of his life.
         "Never ask permission," I once took the moral to be.  "Never settle for a low-level no," a friend suggested, remembering what he'd learned on his first day at Harvard over twenty years ago.  But K sits and waits, and in the end he is an old man talking to the fleas in his fur collar, begging the fleas to get the gatekeeper to let him in.
         This parable is told by a priest in The Trial.  K is being tried for a crime that is never revealed to him, by an omnipotent court with no discernible rules.  At first K tries to argue, to reason with the Court, but, like a man in quicksand, the more he struggles the deeper he sinks.  Verdicts are always inevitable, he learns.  His guilt is not just presumed, it's assigned.
         You can read this as an argument for faith and calm acceptance of passivity.  Maybe K should have done nothing.  Maybe trusting the Court would have saved him.  You can read it as an argument for nihilism—"Curse God and die," Job's wife tells him, while he is complaining that God isn't fair.  Or you can read K's story as a cautionary tale about the perils of victimhood, the perils of choosing blind faith or nihilism, the virtues of leaving some dilemmas unresolved.
         There are, however, no dilemmas like this in recovery, where higher powers are always entirely benign and faith is not in general a subject for debate.  Today Kafka would be considered terminally codependent—overwhelmed with shame (the legacy of his abusive, "shaming" father) and cut off from his "feeling reality" (he was always intellectualizing).  A recovering person interpreting K's story would probably dismiss it by saying that K was thinking with his head and not his heart, pointing out that you cannot reason your way to faith or recovery. . .
         "A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us," Kafka wrote.  Self-help is how we skate.
 —Wendy Kaminer, I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional
 
 

     My love, my love, my good one!  —Dora Diamant's heartbreaking cry on Kafka's death

 
     He was clear-sighted; too wise to be able to live and too weak to be able to fight.  — From Milena Jesenská's obituary

 
       If you have any more choice bon-bons to add, please e-mail me and I'll put them up.