The book "Kafka" is an analysis of Kafka's novels and short stories. The book deals with the means contributing to the famous Kafka effect, or - the kafkaesque. These means are partly all technical. Thus, in this book, the author shows how Kafka uses a narratological split of consciousness and a split unconscious of the hero to create the Kafkaesque by a rare trick. In turn, This Kafkaesque generates an interrogation that scrutinizes the contemporary myth of the Freudian theory. This new book shows how Kafka became one of the most prominent artists to create and define Modernity. Kafka took part of the thrilling creation of Self-conscience of the 20ieth century, marked by a constant dialogue with Freud and his works. Self-conscience as Man knew it since St. Augustine, the Italian renaissance writers, Erasmus, Shakespeare, and Montaigne and later with the secular Romantics and Hegel, swiftly developed within Modernism into something much more complex with the appearance of Freud´s "Traumdeutung" in the year of 1900. And Kafka then set out to complete it all.
The works of Kafka appeared as a reaction to 1.) Modern times, to 2.) his own personal alienation and to 3.) Freud.Kafka's answer to Modernity – to the modern condition – was an astonishingly complex one, but it turned out to be very accurate and accomplished right from the very beginning. When other reactions to the modern condition, like Dada, displayed a picture of a chaotic and rebel attitude to reason and morals, Kafka, like Rimbaud, showed a far more complex ability to make the human soul in Modern society understandable to itself, in a universal form.
There is only one phenomenon, Kierkegaard once wrote, that is unconditionally good, and that is to make free. This is what Kafka does. Kafka, in exploring the unconscious, and in doing this with the use of a Romantic "Ästhetik des Schwebens", he is the discoverer of the marvels of mind, and is, in this, equal to Freud.
Kafka's relation to Freud was somewhat like a son's relation to the father. Kafka hence did not at all acknowledge Freud's discoveries, , methods, and notions as truths. But he saw them – ironically enough – as facts. And in a sense, they were. Freud's views were historical facts in their deep influence on mind and society the century. This is why Kafka used Freud as part of the ( revealing ) Modern Myth. Kafka used Freud, but Kafka added on top of Freud another split to human consciousness in his own literary universe. The book "Kafka",by me, is about this split. Kafka thus did not "believe in" Freud, but he was fascinated by him. Freud suited Kafka. He did not at all Freud to a great extent, ... did not own several books by Freud ... but he had – like many others – acquired a sort of immediate understanding of Freud´s ideas through a kind of everyday osmosis. Kafka started out as a writer of lyrical prose, short prose poems in the style of Goethe, Kleist and Flaubert. But his dream was to write a novel, and it ought to be a novel like the one Flaubert once said he wanted to write: a very beautiful book about nothing at all. It also seems as he wanted to develop the style of Tieck and the Romantics. So it happened that Kafka developed a technique for writing novels where he was extending a sole situation into a perfectly static ( i.e. nothingy ) drama displaying a struggle between conscious and unconscious.
Using his extraordinary ( perhaps autistic ) sensibility, Kafka´s technique miraculously was born on one evening in 1912, with the writing of the short story, "The Verdict".
On the fololowing day he asked his fiancée Felice for the meaning of it.
Later, in 1912 with the writing of "The Metamorphosis" and, in 1913, the unfinished The Trial , his technique of displaying the Kafkaesque was already full-fledged. Here he – almost FORCE by his own personal and social catastrophe - introduced a pseudo plot in a kind of pseudo novel displaying a story of a split, a struggle of a conscious instance of a person, shown as a hero-figure battling this person's OWN unconscious.
As it turned out, this battle caused a second unconscious part to appear in the universe of this fiction. It seems that the hero-figure, devoid of his unconscious, HAD TO develop such an unconscious to be able to handle his surrounding world, which was his original unconscious. Here we thus are having a triadic structure and a strange meeting of two unconscious instances.
This fictional condition primarily results in a double exposure of the unconscious and secondly in a strange transcendence of the Ego, which cannot easily be reflected upon, since it has no equivalent in reality.
This is NOT EASY TO UNDERSTAND.
As a result of this kafkaic technique, which probably was unconscious (!) to Kafka himself, we are also – apart from the nausea of double unconscious, a kind of the self-consciousness of the unconscious - experiencing a very intense poetry displaying utter loneliness and in a framwork : a sad pseudo-protest against the super power of civil organization and law in general as well as a melancholy beauty of existence. The like of which never again has been created:
The concept of "Kafkaesque" has been created upon the experience of the works of FK by the Collective Mind, and in some way it has extended our way of perception. I think that the concept is vital for both the being and the understanding of our culture and being and maybe even a necessary one! My questions regarding this concept, which despite its frequency and importance is rather elusive, are mainly two: [ 1. ]: what IS the kafkaesque? And [ 2. ]: how did Kafka DO to create this, the" kafkaesque"?
We are dealing not only with ideological, cultural and psychological matters, but with tacit knowledge, as well as with difficult matters concerning the ontology of fiction. Perhaps the concept of "kafka" is an ongoing question in Modernity itself, that will prevail no matter how much I - and others - are trying to sort out the problem? My intent is to discuss the place of his works in the literary tradition and the place of the troubling Kafkaesque, refuting the not at all uncommon almost childish views of Kafka as ... a "magical realist", or a "religious mystic", or for that matter a "writer of Jewish parables".
Go ahead and BUY my book "Kafka (2021)", available on Amazon!!
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