A hundred years ago, on June 3, 1924, the Prague-born writer Franz Kafka died in a sanatorium in Kierling, Austria. He was just 40 years old. At the time, Kafka was relatively unknown, but since his death, his status has grown to such a degree that he is regarded as one of the literary superstars of the modern world. Yet, he would not have become so if his best friend, Max Brod, had honored his dying wish that his unpublished work, which was the great majority of his writing and included his disconcerting novels "The Trial" and "The Castle," be destroyed. Instead, Brod chose to edit and publish it and share Kafka’s genius with the world.
Yet, Kafka’s motivation for writing was not fame, that elixir of many who take up the pen. Rather, he wrote through an inner compulsion that did not need an external audience. Indeed, his work seems only to have had significance for him while he was actually engaged in the process of writing it. At one point he told Brod of his writings that “I respect only the moments at which I wrote them” while afterward they “really mean nothing at all to me.” Even if the works were only personal to him, since their publication, they have become, rightly or wrongly, the property of humankind, making the question of what they are about highly pertinent.
According to Ray Monk, the biographer of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, at one point Wittgenstein was given the works of Kafka to read. Having done so, he expressed the view that “this man gives himself a great deal of trouble not writing about his trouble.” Despite he and Kafka both sharing a similar cultural background – that of bourgeois German-speaking Jews born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the 1880s – it is possible that a philosophical mind obsessed with clarity such as Wittgenstein’s simply cannot grasp the work of someone who speaks in metaphor, for I regard Wittgenstein’s evaluation as utterly wrong. I will argue here that the work of Kafka is a metaphorical explication of his inner world, by which I mean his anxiety.
There are, however, many different interpretations of Kafka’s work. The argument I will put forward precludes the popular idea that Kafka is a political writer, one that foresees the nature of an oppressive modern police or totalitarian state. Such a political reading of Kafka ignores and fails to explain one of the most remarkable elements of his masterpiece and his supposedly key political work, "The Trial," which tells the story of the tribulations of a man, Joseph K., who is suddenly accused of a crime by an obscure legal system without ever being aware of what it is and his subsequent struggles with this system before his being put to death by it. Even if police states do have secret police, the nature of such states is to rule through fear. Obviously, for them to be able to do so, the presence of state forces, whether actually visible on the streets or not, must be constantly on the minds of the populace in order to keep them cowed. In “The Trial,” however, the apparatus that targets K. is unknown to him before his arrest, and even when K. goes in search of it, it is not easy to find. The condition of the pre-arrest K. is clearly that of most of his fellow citizens, for a person connected with the court even exclaims that “our judicial system is not very well known among the public.” Thus, this shadowy legal structure cannot be symbolic of a terror state.
On the other hand, I see much of the work of Kafka, and especially "The Trial" which will be focused on and quoted from here, as an explication of anxiety. Viewed in this way, the issue with "The Trial" just mentioned, as will be seen, resolves itself. It is to be stressed that Kafka is not a writer who happens to write about anxiety. He is an anxious writer who writes. This is why his work so accurately reflects this condition. In an earlier piece for this newspaper on the “Scream”-like figure in the Afyonkarahisar Museum, I quote a remark Kafka made, and I will quote it once again here, as it is of crucial significance in understanding him. In a letter, he expresses his fear of drinking from a glass of milk, for, to him, the glass itself “could easily explode in my face, not by chance but by design, and throw the splinters into my face.”
This remark is significant in that Kafka does not claim that it actually explodes in his face or that he has ever experienced such a happening. Were he to make such a claim, he would have to be regarded as delusional. What marks him out as a sufferer of anxiety is that he sees a potential threat in a situation where a more mentally balanced person would not see one at all. Anxiety is the deep feeling that in the future harm will be done to the sufferer, without compelling evidence to support this.
Thus anxiety diverges from regular fear in a significant way. Regular fear is a natural response to evident threatening environmental factors. Anxiety encompasses this trigger but also maintains a feeling of being threatened without any clear external stimulus; moreover, it sees supposed threats not as random negative occurrences, but as if they are the unified product of a ruthless will that wishes to harm the sufferer. As such anxiety is clearly an emotional and not a rational condition, but that speaks to its sufferer with all the potency that emotionally-based conviction is capable, and as such, overwhelms the intellect
The result is an almost continuous sense of being under threat. This explains one ironic feature of anxiety – its presence when the life of one of its sufferers is actually going well. Due to the feeling of a ruthless will, anxiety, in its delineation of the world around a person, can never be disproved. If something occurs that is bad, then the feelings of anxiety are authenticated. If nothing bad occurs, though, then rather than being falsified, the feelings of anxiety remain or intensify with the idea that the threat has simply not revealed itself yet and is even building in intensity to cause greater suffering.
Kafka’s "The Trial" depicts anxiety in action. It manifests through its shadowy court system the idea underlying anxiety that there is a hidden yet actively hostile element at work attempting to thwart and perhaps destroy the individual and that can strike at any time and without any warning. The latter point especially is reflected in the opening of the novel with the arrest of Joseph K., for which there can have been no premonition whatsoever. It comes out of nowhere, but also as with the onset of anxiety sets off a series of events that cause harm to the protagonist.
The opening reflects the anxiety-caused conviction that such harmful occurrences happen when life is apparently going well, thus reinforcing the deep-set belief that one should never feel comfortable or relaxed but rather be in an anxious constant state of alert. K.’s arrest takes place when he has been experiencing success. The novel reveals that prior to his arrest, in his career, he has with “astonishing speed” advanced to his current “senior position” at a bank, a position that K. himself regards as “respectable.” His arrest seemingly demonstrates that a world with a pitiless will has waited for this moment to strike to cause the greatest impact. Yet, the novel also reflects the fact that the sufferer of anxiety is never really taken aback by anything negative that befalls them. That is why K. admits to being “surprised, but ... by no means very surprised” by his arrest.
From here on, the options K. has to reflect those of the anxiety sufferer. The two possible courses of action open to him is to try to ignore what is happening and the other is to engage with it, as with an anxious person in relation to their anxious thoughts. Yet, when they are engaged with them, the person doing so ironically gives greater strength to these thoughts by opening up new dimensions to them and thus enmeshing themselves in greater anxiety. "The Trial" metaphorically represents this. In the novel, K. initially shocked by but dismissive of his arrest finds the pull towards engaging with the court irresistible. And, once he starts doing so, as he deals more with the court system that is persecuting him and learns more about it, rather than this causing an easing of his situation, he finds himself caught up more and more inside of it.
Once he is enmeshed, there is no real desire on his part to ignore the obsessive thoughts, though. Indeed, as with an anxious person, K. rebukes himself for not being thorough enough in his thinking. He feels that he needs to be more constantly wary: “One basic rule for a defendant must be, he thought, never to let himself be taken by surprise” and he rebukes himself that “it was just against this basic rule that he was always offending.” Thus, as with anxiety, his condition has caused him self-doubt and shattered his confidence.
As for the alternative, that he could rid himself of his condition by ignoring it, that possibility is raised in the novel. Early on K. feels that he is “stil l... sufficiently at liberty to smash the whole court with one blow,” as if one single act of will would free him from his condition. Later, after being worn more and more down by it, this earlier assurance is lost, yet near the end of the novel, K. does consider “how to live outside the case,” feeling sure that it must be possible. Whether it is or not though is a question that is never resolved. Yet, as K. has been drawn to the court, it suggests it is not, as in the parallel case of anxiety it is almost or actually impossible to shut out anxious thoughts once they have taken hold.
The situation of K. also matches that of anxiety in the way it affects him, with the “thoughts” about it “never” leaving “him” but rather “racing wildly through his head.” The effect of this is the same as the effect of anxiety in that it leaves K. “feeling utterly tired” even early in the morning before the day has started properly. His tiredness is referred to over and over in the book. That this comes from his mental strain is also made clear. Moreover, it does not simply cause him tiredness but also causes him to lose weight.
K.’s condition is also like anxiety because it directly affects his ability to work. Rather than being able to continue to give his full attention to his work at the bank, K. now realizes he has “to transfer” some of the mental focus that he had previously given to his bank work to his new situation. Yet it is not really a case of divided attention, but rather one in which his condition more and more takes up his attention. Thus, even when “overwhelmed with work” of his day-to-day kind, K. gives precedence to what is afflicting him. His “best business hours” wind up being wasted “on his own private affairs.” Hence, his condition prevents him from doing his job properly, and as such it is an “obstacle” to his “career.” In any workplace, this would be an issue, but for K. in the highly competitive atmosphere of the bank, this causes him to start to lose ground to a rival. As his condition continues, he is reduced to a situation in which he is often at the window rather than his desk and one in which “he passed many an hour doing the bare minimum necessary to make it appear he was working.”
K.’s situation at work is symbolic of his life as a whole. His situation, as with anxiety, has caused him to isolate himself, “to cut himself off from everything else as far as possible.” This is in part due to the attention he feels forced to pay to it and in part because feeling “shame” about his condition, he wants to keep his matters private to prevent them from being known about. Nonetheless, the novel hints that were he able to free himself from this disabling sense of shame, and share his inner anguish with others, his condition would be improved, and the same is true for sufferers of anxiety who learn to be able to open up. When his uncle, who has learned of K.’s condition, comes to talk to him about it, K. is “suddenly released from” his “tension” which is replaced by “a pleasant feeling of weariness.”
K.’s situation also resembles anxiety in that it also, ironically, offers the false hope that through struggle on the part of the individual, it can be overcome and inner peace gained. K. feels that if he exerts himself against it sufficiently the successful result will “relieve him completely of anxiety.” He believes that he can completely and totally rid himself of this oppression, whereas in fact, it ends up even destroying him.
In closing, I feel compelled to point out what "Hamlet," the most Kafka-like of William Shakespeare’s creations, would have called “the rub” in connection with Kafka and anxiety. In this piece written to mark the centenary of Kafka’s death, the point needs to be made that perhaps Kafka was right to be anxious and distrust the world. This is because when he did not, in his naturopath approach to health which he felt put him in harmony with it and made him healthier, he drank raw unpasteurised milk which seems to have caused him to contract the tuberculosis that killed him.
A remark of such darkness reflects the general tenor of Kafka’s writing, yet, in closing, I must state that for me, his work has been an invaluable ray of light. Kafka’s explication of anxiety has made it easier for me to deal with my own. It seems to be the case that any issue, particularly a hidden psychological one such as anxiety, is hugely amplified by its sufferer if they also feel that it reflects something uniquely wrong with them. But by reading Kafka and thus seeing that I share this condition with him, I feel the same sense of relief that K. does when he can finally share his situation with his uncle. His work thus has therapeutic value for me. His work has also been of great importance to me in that he, above any other writer, has revealed to me the true value of literature – that through the use of metaphor, literature can show the truth with a starkness that seems lost in impersonal scientific or medical writings, for example. That Kafka has played a similarly important role in the lives of others is surmisable from his continuing popularity and his high place in the canons of literature.
Thus June 3 this year is a special day on which to commemorate the centenary of the loss of this first-rate writer.
