When David Foster Wallace popularized the idea at the turn of this century that Franz Kafka was a funny man, he probably did not know that he was inaugurating a major revisionist project. Wallace meant funny in a highly nuanced way—“comedy is always also tragedy, and this tragedy always also an immense and reverent joy”—a definition that upon closer examination may better describe his own work. In any case, the idea caught on, and now Kafka’s metamorphosis is complete. He is no longer typically thought of as a prophet of Cold War totalitarianism, a perception most memorably visualized in Orson Welles’s adaptation of The Trial. Now Kafka is increasingly considered a wry humorist whose gloomy sensibilities are highly relevant to our own social and political misfortunes.
Part of the reason for the transformation is that Kafka is a great writer, and his work, like anything great, is easily adapted to the needs of successive generations. The rest is marketing. Kafka has long been a favorite among teenagers who devour dystopian fiction, in this case his novella The Metamorphosis, some of his more popular short stories, and The Trial. Kafka’s promoters, who understand that the dystopian is one of the few profitable genres left, are more than willing to advertise his work as such. Of course this has been the case for a while. But more recently, especially since Kafka became funny, his impresarios have attempted to reinvent his image entirely—this time as a literary pop star.
A case in point is Kafka: Making of an Icon, an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum running through April 13, which sought to present the author as approachable, relatable, and—I wince as I write this—lovable. I visited the exhibition earlier this year, and it was a strange experience. It had on display all the usual items one might expect: manuscripts, letters, ink doodles, all of which were on loan from the Bodleian Library at Oxford. But what struck me more was the inclusion of what the Morgan termed “Kafka’s afterlife.” This was the icon part: Andy Warhol’s portrait, Philip Roth’s laudatory writings, and an assortment of other literary and visual tributes. On top of these, the Morgan added its own attempt at mythmaking, Kafka and the Doll, a picture book about the author’s kindness to children, available for sale in the museum gift shop. My daughter and I flipped through it; she quickly lost interest.
The museum also attempted to appeal to younger audiences with a writing contest. The prompt was “Imagine a more Kafkaesque New York,” a directive inspired by Kafka’s depiction of the city in the unfinished novel Amerika, where he presents the Statue of Liberty as holding a sword and the Brooklyn Bridge as connecting New York to Boston. There is some scholarly debate over whether or not these inaccuracies are intentional: Kafka never visited the United States and had only the vaguest idea of how the place worked. The Morgan, for what it’s worth, sides with those who argue that the geographical lapses were deliberate choices. This much becomes clear in the museum’s appeal to teenagers, which instructs them to “describe a landmark, location, or other feature of New York, but add your own fictitious twist,” presumably something dystopian. “How has your space been transformed? Is it more welcoming or sinister? Does it draw crowds or repel them? Who will inhabit your imagined space, and what will they do there?”
To ask those questions is to miss the point of Kafka almost entirely. He did not need to envision the future, nor did he need to alter his present circumstances to see a dark and darkly amusing world, where, as he famously remarked, there was hope for God, but not for us. The Trial, for instance, does not describe an ominous future à la Nineteen Eighty-Four or Brave New World. Joseph K.’s struggle to come to terms with a nameless accusation by forces beyond his understanding is more or less just a depiction of life as most of us already live it, with only a touch of exaggeration for effect. The novel is funny, but it is not funny because Kafka is making jokes; the humor is inherent to the material itself. The same could be said for The Metamorphosis, which is basically a descriptive account of what happens if you put in too many hours at the office. When read aloud, it sounds like one big, shaggy joke.
That effect is by design. Kafka’s literary executor, Max Brod, who saved most of the author’s unpublished work after his death in 1924, wrote that when Kafka read his work aloud he did so in “a rhythmic sweep, a dramatic fire, and a spontaneity such as no actor ever achieves.” Very often he would devolve into laughter as he spoke. These fits were likely a nervous condition, but it is hard not to smile when reading “An Imperial Message” or “The Hunger Artist,” for example. There is something undeniably funny—tragic, too, of course—about how useless and yet completely necessary our earthly toil is. Philip Roth called Kafka a “sit-down comic,” the best descriptor of the author I have ever encountered.
My own understanding of Kafka was largely shaped by Harold Bloom, whom I came across in my senior year of high school just after I first read Kafka. Bloom identifies him as the defining writer of the 20th century. “From a purely literary perspective, this is the age of Kafka, more even than the age of Freud,” Bloom writes in the Western Canon, adding that “Freud, slyly following Shakespeare, gave us our map of the mind; Kafka intimated to us that we could not hope to use it to save ourselves, even from ourselves.” Kafka communicates that determined hopelessness most succinctly in his aphorisms and short stories, where, as Bloom observes, his characters are neither dead nor alive, neither in true motion nor in stasis. Or, as Wallace puts it, for Kafka, “our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.” You have to admit that’s pretty funny.
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