Kafka’s Impossible Desire to Metamorphose into Pure Language
Much has been made of Franz Kafka’s homoerotic fantasies as they now appear in Ross Benjamin’s recent English translation of the famous Diaries. For reasons of image management, the few passages expressing them were removed by Max Brod, Kafka’s friend and literary executor, prior to the Diaries’ first publication in the late 1940’s. Brod also corrected the text that remained, as Benjamin writes in his Translator’s Preface, eliminating “the notion of Kafka’s impeccably proper written High German” (xiii).
The inevitable — and supremely Kafkaesque — result was that “Kafka’s [initial] worldwide reception was shaped by a misrepresentation of what he had actually written” (xvii). In his new translation, Benjamin attempts a different, more natural approach: “rather than giving Kafka’s writing a uniformly well-crafted veneer from start to finish, I have opted to let emerge a portrait of the writer making his way — at times gropingly — toward the writer he would become” (xvi).
In his faithfulness to the original text of the Diaries, in his effort to show Kafka the writer struggling with his language, identity, abilities, his very world, Benjamin gives us a portrait of a man whose most pronounced, complex desire — if not the most discussed by readers — is both existential and linguistic. These Diaries make plain that Kafka wanted more than anything not merely to be recognized for his literary talents but also, tragically, to become language itself. The impossibility of such a desire becoming fulfilled contributed much to his renowned unhappiness.
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” Wittgenstein wrote three years before Kafka’s death (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus). Perhaps no twentieth-century author embodied this more than Kafka himself. “I am nothing but literature,” he writes in a draft of a letter to the father of his fiancée, Felice Bauer, “and can and want to be nothing else” (Diaries 304). This desire defined and limited his existence. It was the main reason for the conflict between Kafka and his own overbearing father, who misunderstood his son and belittled his ambitions to the point of causing lifelong trauma (e.g., “Letter to His Father”). Nearly every page of the Diaries is saturated with expressions of the tension Kafka felt as he attempted to navigate the two disparate worlds he was a part of: that of his family and his livelihood (during the day he worked in insurance and for several years was reluctantly involved in his family’s investment in a Prague asbestos factory) and that of his calling to become a writer. The language he wanted to speak, to become — the language of literature — was incompatible with, even antithetical to, the one used by his father, with whom he lived in Prague for many of the years in which he kept the Diaries.
But Kafka was just as hard, if not harder, on himself, than was his father when it came to his use(s) of language. In various entries of the Diaries, he is upset with himself for what he’s written — results which aren’t up to his standards, as when he calls the conclusion of “The Metamorphosis” “[u]nreadable” and “[i]mperfect” (328). In others, he rebukes himself for not having written anything at all (68, 222, 223). And when his first book, Contemplation, a collection of short works, is published, he almost immediately writes of his wish to “undo it, so that I would be merely as unhappy as before” (226). Per his own impossible standards, he’s damned if he does write, damned if he doesn’t.
This holds true throughout the Diaries except in those rare, nocturnal moments when he — the physical Franz Kafka — becomes one with his writing in the act of composition. He famously wrote “The Judgment” in one overnight sitting in 1912 (working during the day allowed him only the wee hours to pursue his avocation). Reflecting on the event the following day, he says, “Only in this way can writing be done, only with such cohesion, with such complete opening of the body and soul” (242). When he can’t completely commit himself to this impossibility, he might as well give up: “Didn’t yield to my great desire to begin a new story,” he writes in January 1915. “It’s all useless. When I can’t chase the stories through the nights, they escape and get lost” (377). Only when he can do this does he feel as if he’s achieving anything approaching his life’s purpose.
Writing in the 1980’s, Charles Bernheimer traces this desire back to the young Kafka’s reading of Flaubert:
…what Kafka admired most in the writing of the French master [Flaubert]: his ability, as Kafka put it in a letter to Felice, to immerse himself so completely in the scriptive process that he disappears from human sight, becoming one with his text, thereby emptying the world of any presence other than that of language itself. (8)
The problem with this — when taken to its logical conclusion, as it is in Kafka— is that it entails the sustained pursuit of the unrealizable. We aren’t — and can never become — one with our language any more than the blacksmith can become one with his hammer. Both are tools, and both have their uses and their limitations. As a writer, an artist whose material was language, Kafka was keenly aware of this, but still he sought the impossible. It was a project doomed to failure from the start, yet his attempts — as Benjamin presents them in this new translation — are still worth reading a century after his death, even if Kafka’s would be the first and strongest voice to disagree.
Works Cited
Bernheimer, Charles. “The Splitting of the ‘I’ and the Dilemma of Narration: Kafka’s Hochzeitsvorbereitungen Auf Dem Lande.” Franz Kafka (1883–1983): His Craft and Thought, edited by Roman Struc and J.C. Yardley, Wilfred Laurier University Press for The Calgary Institute for the Humanities, 1986, pp. 7–23.
Kafka, Franz. The Diaries. Translated by Ross Benjamin, Schocken Books, 2022.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by F.P. Ramsey. The Ludwig Wittgenstein Project, 1921, https://www.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php?title=Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus_(English).
