The Essence of 'Kafkaesque'

By IVANA EDWARDS
Published: December 29, 1991, The New York Times

The Essence of 'Kafkaesque'

SO just what does this adjective "Kafkaesque" mean? And why does Frederick R. Karl, author of an exhaustive critical biography of Franz Kafka, believe that the word is as misused as it is used?

Kafka is the only 20th-century literary figure whose name "has entered the language in a way no other writer's has," Mr. Karl says. But "what I'm against is someone going to catch a bus and finding that all the buses have stopped running and saying that's Kafkaesque. That's not."

"What's Kafkaesque," he said in an interview in his Manhattan apartment, "is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behavior, begins to fall to pieces, when you find yourself against a force that does not lend itself to the way you perceive the world.

"You don't give up, you don't lie down and die. What you do is struggle against this with all of your equipment, with whatever you have. But of course you don't stand a chance. That's Kafkaesque."

The word has become the "representative adjective of our times," Mr. Karl says in his recently published book, "Franz Kafka: Representative Man" (Ticknor and Fields) and subtitled "Prague, Germans, Jews and the Crisis of Modernism." Mr. Karl devotes the entire epilogue to this elusive subject. 'Tells Us What We Are'

"Kafkaesque," the author says, "defines us. It's the one word that tells us what we are, what we can expect, how the world works. And to find out what that means, you read Kafka. You read 'The Metamorphosis,' which is about a man who wakes up as a big bug, and then you know."

As Mr. Karl showed a visitor around his book-lined study, it was evident that he is a passionist of the meticulously ordered and maintained book shelf, the straight spine -- nothing is crammed or stuck horizontally in the available space.

He recalled when he first unearthed Kafka's most famous short story ("The Metamorphosis") and how "absolutely stupefied" he was.

"I found it in the stacks of the Columbia University Library as an undergraduate, never having heard of it before," he said. "It was dark, and I sat down to read it under almost perfect conditions -- dark, deserted, spooky."

Today, Kafka is in the mainstream of student reading, and of the reading public, which is largely made up of former students, Mr. Karl said. He believes that "The Metamorphosis," "A Hunger Artist," "In the Penal Colony" and "The Judgment" are among the most widely read Kafka stories. He also says that "The Trial," Kafka's best-known long fiction, with its "trappings based on misinformation," has achieved the mythic symbolism of a world gone berserk.

"The Trial" is about Joseph K., who, although in hot pursuit of the truth, is executed for an unnamed crime. Time and space are rearranged so they "can work either for or against the protagonist; the horror of that world is that he never knows what is happening, or when," Mr. Karl writes. "Thus the Kafkaesqueness of the Kafkan world: that insistence to uncover what is always uncoverable, or to recover what cannot be recovered."

"I had to be very familiar with the psychological and psychoanalytic doctrines so that I could apply them. Kafka without a psychological approach is not Kafka. And I had to be mature enough not to get completely entangled in Kafka, who can seduce you and suck you in, and you're trapped. In other words, not to see everything only through Kafka's eyes."

His initial attraction to Kafka, he said, came partly from overlapping backgrounds.

"Mine is Polish-Russian-Lithuanian Jewish," Mr. Karl explained, "and therefore someone who can get into that Kafka family life. I know how it works. I don't have his hang-ups, but I do have the understanding of somebody who decided to devote himself completely to one thing, which was to be a writer.

"And I do understand a family where it becomes oppressive to the point where you feel that if you don't escape, you're going to be crushed. Kafka never left his family, of course, he stuck.

"He needed it as something to struggle against and that he could hate, and define himself by way of his hatred. That's how he felt toward his father. His father was not that unusual a man; he was a typical Middle European father.

"What the son needed was a monster. I didn't have a father like that, but this is what I grew up observing. This was Jewish life among immigrants in this country. Given one generation, I could have been caught back there on the border between Poland and Russia."

To further his understanding, Mr. Karl even held long psychoanalytic sessions with a friend, a woman who is an analyst, in which Mr. Karl played Kafka and discussed dreams and other pieces of Kafka's life.

"I wanted to see how she could deal with it," he said, "and some of the ideas are outgrowths of these sessions."

Not that Kafka himself would ever have darkened the doorstep of a therapist's office.

"A psychotherapist could not get to first base with Kafka," Mr. Karl said. "They would have been talking at cross-purposes. Kafka is not an analysand of any kind, simply because he had that one unbreakable thing, which was to get these stories and longer works down on paper. There would be no way in which anyone could intrude on that world."

Mr. Karl also conceded that, despite the plethora of published material about his subject, unexplored territory still exists, like Kafka's ultra finicky vegetarian, fletcherizing habit of chewing his food slowly and grinding it before swallowing.

"The sense of catastrophe was just around the corner, and therefore meals can become tense. Kafka played food off against this big, heavy chunk of a father who filled his face, and as the father got bigger and heavier, Kafka himself got thinner and thinner. At close to 6 feet tall, he weighed about 115 pounds."

Kafka's incessant role-playing within role-playing presented Mr. Karl with particular problems.

"It's impossible to pin Kafka down," he said. "The only way to approach him is by surrounding him with everything he was surrounded with in his lifetime. He played one role to his family, another to his friends, another role in his insurance office. We forget he had a steady job for his entire adult life until he became too sick to work.

"He had another role in his relationship with Felice, to whom he was engaged on and off for five years, and then the final role was when everything quieted down in Prague and he sat down and wrote. So you have five or six different Kafkas, a person who had broken himself into all these little pieces.

"I tried to make his writing the very center of his life so that all these different shapes he took on were secondary to the fact that he had to write, that he was going to die writing.

"And I made the story he wrote near the end of his life, 'A Hunger Artist,' a kind of central story, but it's the story of his life. The man who fasts and fasts until he wastes away and dies, and holds the world's record for fasting. This is Kafka."