K. by Roberto Calasso
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Man Possessed

Roberto Calasso, I think correctly, identifies the poles of Kafka’s personality as election and judgement, creating a sort of field of force in which he oscillated continuously. Calasso traces this dynamic throughout Kafka’s work in a brilliant exegesis, using references to Kafka’s notes, diaries, and letters as well as the stories themselves. Layer by layer he reveals not only the significance of the work but also how that work is inseparable from Kafka’s psychology.

Although Kafka clearly wrote about himself, his mode of being in the world to use the existentialist phrase, his writing wasn’t therapeutic. He considered he compulsion to write as demonic. Writing was not only painful it was also spiritually unrewarding. In accordance with the dominant themes of election and judgement, Kafka was doomed to be an author. He had no choice in the matter. And as an author, he exposed himself - not just the literary work but himself - to public assessment.

Kafka’s stories are literally about himself. In The Castle, its protagonist K has been chosen and summoned for service. In The Trial, Josef K. is arrested and subject to a tribunal for crimes unknown. Yet despite their radically different positions, both are subject to the mysteries and vagaries of an invisible and unreachable source of power. The chosen is also the victim and vice versa. Both share what power decides so the status of each is indistinguishable from the other. Both are constantly being watched and assessed against some hidden standard.

Perhaps the strangeness of Kafka’s stories is precisely because they are about his attempts to penetrate his own unconscious, not to fix it but to make it visible and then to merge with it totally. To become, perhaps, the enormous beetle of The Metamorphosis or the condemned man of In The Penal Colony who has his crimes written on his entire body and who must read them by feeling them.

It strikes me that Kafka developed a unique psychological point of view (theory would be too pompous a word). As for Freud, there is Another within us whom we must recognise and understand to be ourselves fully. And as for Jung, the contents of this unconscious realm is not private, nor even personal, but cosmic and reflect a realm beyond language, another world entirely. So for Kafka the search for Self is the search for the eternal which is camouflaged in the mundane.

But Kafka knows that this search is presumptuous. In some manner it offends the Archons, those in power. It is also selfish, a kind of narcissism:

“Writing is a sweet, marvelous reward, but for what? In the night it became clear to me, as clear as a lesson for children, that it’s the reward for having served the devil… [I]ts diabolical element seems absolutely clear. It’s the vanity and the sensuality they circle continuously around our own figure, or someone else’s—in which case the movement multiplies, becomes a solar system of vanity—and feast on it.…Blasphemy with respect not to a God but to the whole.”

Kafka described himself as a creature that “… is bound by invisible chains to an invisible literature and who screams when approached, thinking someone is touching that chain.” To say he was a man possessed, therefore, is no exaggeration. The expression of that possession was his own personal and singular myth. Calasso’s articulation of that myth is remarkable.

View all my reviews