“We admire in her what we are far from admiring in ourselves; in which matter, by the way, she is in full agreement with us.”
Josefine, the Singer, or the Mouse People

kafka_metamorphosis1The 2007 Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Kafka’s short stories and novellas covers 20 years of his literary life, from 1904 to 1924. While it includes published fragments of his three unfinished novels (such as Before the Law, which was part of The Trial, or The Stoker, the first chapter of Amerika), it stops just short of anything longer than the Metamorphosis novella.

The collection is organized chronologically, and it is interesting to witness the evolution of the writer as he grows into a more expert storyteller. The early pieces often feel more like exercises, exquisite vignettes depicting an isolated incident without meaning or point-in-time sensations; it is however striking how artful they are already, the writing precise and elegant, the pictures vividly drawn.

In time the fragments expand to short stories, or even novellas, and yet the reader never loses the troubling sensation that something is missing. The explanations are just not to be found, whether it’s Kafka’s way of saying that they do not exist, that they do not matter, or that they’re just absent for the reader that we are, but who knows if another… Another feeling I had was that the stories grew darker. Certainly, the same themes kept reappearing: the call of freedom, the attraction of otherness, the deadly wonderfulness of people, the pragmatic world and its demands not to be denied, the constant judgment characters endure… But where the child in the very first story, Children on the Road, was a first-person hero who broke free of his origins to joyously go become “a fool”, the later characters will not quite so succeed. It is perhaps telling than in the very last story of the collection, Josefine, the Singer, or the Mouse People, the artist is held at a distance from the narrator, considered a little absurd and denied the freedom she requests to better dedicate it to her art.

It would not make sense here to look at every single story, as the collection contains forty of them, but that theme of the artist as an outsider who cannot be completely approved of is probably the one that struck me most. Much has been made of Kafka’s status as a perfect outsider (a man who “consisted of literature”, in his own words, born to a pragmatic and somewhat narrow-minded businessman; German-speaking among the Czechs, Jewish among Germans, and a non-believer among Jews), and he himself probably has added to the image with such pronouncements as “I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe”…  Yet there is something amused in his looking at artistic pretenses; it is Gregor, in Metamorphosis, who gets transformed into a giant insect, not his somewhat predatory parents, and to add insult to injury, this happens just after his menial talents have been put to creative use making a frame for a pretty picture, and just before he can put to execution his plans to send his sister to the Conservatory; it is the free monkey who tries to become a crude human in A Report to an Academy; it is the Hunger Artist, in the eponymous story, who dies disregarded when he finally realizes his art to the fullest; it is Josefine who embodies something un-admirable in her race, which she simply brings to light, feeling full of herself for doing so – and whatever it is that she does, which appears to be indescribable, certainly it is made clear that it should not be excessively valued.

To my current state of mind of wanting to escape the necessities of business to explore my literary side and aspirations, this was an interesting read, id slightly anxiety-inducing at times. To this reader, in this reading, Kafka’s humor remained quite secondary to the anguish seeping from stories such as The Judgment, In the Penal Colony, Metamorphosis or A Country Doctor! And yet it was there, pointed not only at the absurdity of the world but also at the ridiculousness of our pretense, and I cannot think that Kafka excluded himself and his oft-commented life struggles from this amusement. Certainly that makes the task ahead seem a little less daunting: if ever he can be poked fun at, then my own ridicules will be in good company!

[summaries in a different article]