Franz Kafka, metamorphosed against his will

Franz Kafka had no desire to wake up one morning and find that his kinked visions of altered realities had metamorphosed into any sort of publishing success story, let alone that he’d become an “icon”. Walking into the Kafka: Making of an Icon exhibition at the Weston Library in Oxford, the first thing you see are Kafka’s famous words to his friend and literary executor Max Brod—“Dearest Max, my last request: burn all my diaries, manuscripts, letters… completely and unread”—flicker to life on a screen, licked at by the computer-generated heat of the flames that Kafka hoped would take his works with him to the grave.

What sort of friend disregards last requests? What sort of literary executor would torch the very legacy put in their care? The relationship between Kafka and Brod, and Brod’s fateful decision to ignore his friend’s final wishes, is the glue that binds this excellent exhibition of manuscripts, letters and photographs, marking the centenary of Kafka’s death in 1924, together. It was Brod who set the icon-making in motion, to the extent that we now might regard the most famous photograph of Kafka—his pained eyes peering out from an image snapped a year before his death—as Josef K himself, the protagonist of Kafka’s novel The Trial, under trial for crimes that are never revealed to him (or us). Absorbed so wholly into the modern world, Kafka’s identity has become inseparable from his writing. Ironic that this 1923 photograph was taken for an identity card.

Perhaps Kafka sensed that his fate, unless his work was destroyed, was to be forever a footnote to his own imagination. Waking up as an insect, finding yourself at the whim of an indecipherable legal system, or trying to crack the code of a castle that might hold the key to everything, is a painful business; Kafka’s psyche was never going to allow him to wake up as an angel. No doubt he would have considered this current exhibition as another unwelcome intrusion into an imaginative world spooked by secrets, filled with imaginative leaps towards the unknown, into which none of us have any business meddling. Yet moments of normality—joy, even—help construct a Kafka beyond the Kafkaesque icon.

I was moved to read that, in 1912, Kafka wrote “The Judgement”, a short story rehearsing the plot and atmospherics of The Trial, in a single overnight sitting, an experience that left him elated, “a complete opening of body and soul,” he wrote in his diary. His day-job, as an insurance lawyer, required he clock in the following morning. But Kafka pulled a sickie, sending a note to his employer complaining of “a little fainting fit”.

We learn of his struggle to sustain concentration as a young man, trying to write around the noise of his parents and siblings. His loves, his habit of exercising naked in front of an open window, his fixation on what then passed for popular culture—especially magazines about the circus—take us further behind those haunted eyes. And as a counter to those oft-quoted entries in Kafka’s diary noting “1 June. Wrote nothing”—then, the next day, “Wrote almost nothing”—there is evidence aplenty of his fluidity on the page. The opening sentences of The Metamorphosis, which we see in manuscript, clearly tripped off the pen with a spontaneous flow, with only minor clarifications added later.

Had Brod not intervened, only 5 per cent of the Kafka we know would have survived. Brod acted quickly after Kafka’s death. His edition of The Trial appeared in 1925; The Castle a year later. He had kept nothing from Kafka, informing him that he was minded to ignore his final wishes. Those needing to absolve Brod from the sin of betraying his friend point out that Kafka himself could easily have lit a match under his manuscripts. Also that one letter contains a potential get-out clause: Kafka invited Brod “alone” to take a look again at his writings—with the question left hanging, “with a view to what?”

Kafka’s work would find its place in the world only after his death, when it was felt his writings were mirroring the tumultuous history of the early 20th century. But looking at his neatly ordered manuscripts, webs of spidery handwriting inside unlined notebooks, the sense that his was a deeply private world into which we’re intruding recurs. So much of his writing, including The Trial and The Castle, is about what happens in situations one cannot control. Kafka surely realised that death represented the ultimate loss of control, so better to burn the lot.

In 2024, as we grapple with fake news, AI and “alternative facts”, Kafka’s dystopian tales of disempowered people similarly losing control, struggling against forces that are unaccountable and determined to remain so, speaks to us ever more powerfully. In a distorted reality in which competing versions of “the truth” grab at our attention, where Supreme Courts go rogue, offering immunity to whoever shouts the loudest, perhaps we’ve all woken up in a world where we no longer recognise ourselves, wires emanating from our dehumanising devices like so many mutant insect legs. We can’t say Franz didn’t warn us.

Yet I emerged from the exhibition with my guard up. Asked to define “Kafkaesque” on Post-it notes, many exhibition-goers wrote “call centres!” and “have you tried getting a passport these days!”, but it was never Kafka’s job to help us navigate humdrum bureaucratic inadequacies, the corporate insincerity of apologising for any inconvenience caused. His art was a pure expression of self, the everyday turned so weird that Kafka was left as freaked out as anybody else. A hundred years on from his death, his writing continues to unsettle our imaginations and to burn—hotter and more fiercely than any flames Kafka himself might have wished for.