Felice Bauer

Friday essay: 'All I am is literature' – Franz Kafka's diaries were the forge of his writing

Retrieved on: 
Saturday, June 10, 2023

It is the closing years of the Austro-Hungarian empire, before the Great War changed such scenes forever.

Key Points: 
  • It is the closing years of the Austro-Hungarian empire, before the Great War changed such scenes forever.
  • A young man with sound prospects is to meet his fiancée’s father for the first time.
  • The convention of the day would require him to lay out his credentials and his family’s pedigree for the match to proceed agreeably.
  • The decision to put his thoughts in a letter was entirely consistent with the epistolary nature of his relationship with Felice.

Uncanny writing

    • As his dairies repeatedly show, Kafka’s life, his existence, was literature, and that existence was not shareable as a “lived experience”.
    • Each of these things he saw as challenges, counter forces, to his writing.
    • His existence was entirely directed towards what was, for him, both the necessary and the uncanny nature of writing.
    • For Kafka, writing was a strange way of thinking and being in the world.

Kafka’s literary legacy

    • Brod became Kafka’s literary executor.
    • Perhaps more than those of any other published writer, the diaries of Franz Kafka have a special value in providing insight into his modest but profound literary output.
    • It was the only literary honour Kafka would receive during his lifetime.
    • Meyer had a background in the business side of publishing; he showed little interest in cultivating relationships with authors or discussing the literary content of their work.
    • It thus fell to Brod to establish Kafka’s posthumous legacy as a literary genius.
    • But in doing so he tightly entwined his own literary reputation with that of his friend.

A forge for sentences

    • But this also meant Kafka’s reception was influenced too heavily by Brod’s concern with his own reputation.
    • Benjamin’s new translation of Kafka’s diaries, in their presentation and arrangement, enables English readers to see them, for the first time, as the forge of his craft.
    • We can now read in the diaries Kafka the writer rather than Kafka the author.
    • Restored are the frequently ungrammatical and sometimes half-legible sentences that Brod often completed or replaced with the syntax of High German.
    • Restored are the homoerotic observations, descriptions of visits to brothels, and negative comments about well-known people, including the odd barb directed at Brod himself.
    • The dairies require us to suspend our familiar habit of asking who is speaking and trying to place who is being referred to.

The law of the diary

    • This parallels the way we habitually think of the movement of a life and its recording in a journal.
    • Maurice Blanchot tells us the only “formidable law” of the diary is that it must respect the calendar.
    • Frequently, Kafka abides by this law:
      Wrote nothing […] Wrote almost nothing […] Awful.
    • And later still:
      It has become very necessary to keep a diary again.
    • As the notebooks start increasing, the dating falls away, transgressing Blanchot’s law completely.

A new literature

    • The diaries act not only as a forge for Kafka’s writing; they also forge a new possibility for the diary’s place within literature.
    • He also makes the allusive suggestion that diary-writing has its analogue in the literature being produced by his Jewish contemporaries in Warsaw and Prague.
    • This new literature, Kafka says, is united by a Hebrew mother tongue assimilated within the dominant German language culture.
    • It was a literature seeking modes of expression for the effects of that assimilation.
    • literature is less an affair of literary history than an affair of the people […] everyone must always be prepared to know, to defend the part of literature that falls to him and at least to defend it even if he doesn’t know or bear it.