Post date: 03.15.06
Issue date: 03.06.06
Kafka: The
Decisive Years
By Reiner Stach
Translated by Shelley Frisch
(Harcourt, 581 pp., $35)
here
is a tantalizing gap between our increasingly detailed knowledge of
Kafka's life and our imperfect understanding of his achievement as a
writer. His work seems to cry out for biographical readings and has
often been subjected to them, characteristically along psychoanalytic
lines. Yet the obvious connections between life and work have not
explained much about the work. Kafka's tormented relationship with his
father, for example, disturbingly etched in that strangest of
autobiographical documents, "The Letter to His Father," would seem to
be directly reflected in his story "The Judgment"; but the hypnotic
power of the story, a breakthrough for Kafka in 1912, resists reduction
to the writer's all-too-evident sense of guilt and inadequacy.
One should be careful not to think of either Flaubert or Kafka as an exemplary figure. The nexus between art and neurosis, though common enough, is by no means inevitable, nor is art--even "high" art--necessarily achieved through the renunciation of life. Nabokov, who was a great admirer of Flaubert and held at least some of Kafka's fiction in high esteem, pursued a Flaubertian ideal of finely wrought fictional artifice without feeling any need to give up the pleasures of married life, the delights of devotion to science and natural observation, an exuberant sense of playfulness in social intercourse, and the sustaining recollection of what appears to have been a genuinely happy childhood.
[. . .]