What does Kafka mean today?
Kaj
Bernhard Genell 2023
What was unique about Kafka?
Kafka – as a
matter of fact - used high-Romantic Ästhetik des Schwebens and without
this reference to the Romantic Tradition, there would have been no Kafkaesque.
The Kafkawsque – of course – is what most of all interests us, when it comes to
Kafka.
But
what - then - is meant by the term "Kafkaesque"? We are - as our
prime object of study - looking into this Concept.
THUS Kafka - a Freudo-Structuralist
Analysis
is an analysis of Kafka's novels and short stories, with special regard to the
concept of the Kafkaesque. This book concentrates on understanding what
contributed to the famous Kafka effect. The author explains the structural
triplicity of a discourse seen as consciousness. It also describes how Freud,
Romantic irony, and Symbolistic literature simultaneously co-work as the
mythical subtext of Kafka's work. Kafka created something that would become
part of defining Modern Man. Understanding Kafka is the road to understanding
Modernity.
Many a Dissertation and many an Essay on Kafka have
dealt with the strange "dreamlike character" or effect of
Kafka´s novels and short stories. This has always been dealt with as if the
"kafkaesque" was brought into the game by someone adding
"Freudian symbols" to something. Nothing could be further from the
truth! This is what Genell´s book Kafka - a Freudo-Structuralist
Analysis
(2021) shows.
Rather, the case is this:
Kafka's structural, literary form is based upon a refined mega-structural
narrative split.
It is the split between subject-"voice" and object-"voice"
on the one hand, and human conscious and uncons©ious mind, on the other. This
is not easy either to describe or to understand! The uniqueness of the works of
Franz Kafka and the perplexing historical accuracy of the concept of Kafkaesque
are both phenomena that many readers and scholars have noticed over the years.
Through the years, a fruitful explanation of the uniqueness and accuracy of
these works has been missing.
Scholars have ever from the 1930ies been noticing the extraordinary qualities
of Kafka text. Strange - Kafkaesque - features have been attributed to the
short stories and the novels of Kafka. The Kafka hero has - rightly - been seen
as a mere figure, and the “dream-like” landscape universe has been seen as a
characteristic, and one has frequently been looking upon these entities,
together with a few stylistic features, as technical dominants in the shaping
of the concept of the Kafkaesque.
Genell´s Kafka - a Freudo-Structuralist
Analysis displays
a model, together with a biographical survey and a historical perspective on
possible influences, that, reversely, forms a hermeneutic, actual explanation of
these features, as well as to what is denoted by the concept, from the
perspective of a dynamic contextual center, explained in a model containing
three levels, levels forming the discourse, typical of Kafka.
This book tries to unravel the enigma of the concept by reference to the
process of creation and by Kafka´s implicit use of TWO unconscious levels
within the universe of his most important works. The veil of mystery may never
be lifted regarding Kafka´s eerie classics of Modernity like it will never be
lifted when it comes to literature as a whole. Still, it might be essential -
in order not to fall into any metaphysical trap - to know about the technique
behind the Kafkaesque to be able to reflect upon the Self-Consciousness of
Modern Man of the 20ieth century, a century so intensely marked by a dialogue
between society and the works and ideas of Sigmund Freud. Self-consciousness of
Man, as it appeared with St. Augustine, the great Italian Renaissance writers,
Erasmus, Shakespeare, Montaigne, the German secular Romantics, and Hegel,
swiftly developed into something even much more complex with the appearance of
Freud and the groundbreaking publication of his Traumdeutung in the year of
1900, and, more so, with the creation of the Kafkaesque, with the works of
Kafka, around the year of 1912. The birth of the Kafkaesque can be dated to the
night in the autumn of 1912 when Kafka wrote Das Urteil.
The book, Kafka - a Freudo-Structuralist
Analysis
revolves solely around this strange split of ©onsciousness and its
©onsequences.
The Kafkaesque is brought about by two phenomena, and Genell
is in his book discussing only the first one.
1.) A literary trick, built upon a split Unconscious ( strange as it of course
may sound, and difficult -) and
2.) a unique mental sensibility.
WHAT IF one had a Dream of
a Dream and the two of them could communicate?? That is what happens in a Franz
Kafka story! The book Kafka - a Freudo-Structuralist
Analysis
deals with Kafka's novels and short stories from the aspect of the Kafkaesque,
and it does so by looking for the means that create this effect. These means
turn out to be largely technical. Thus, this book, Kafka - a Freudo-Structuralist
Analysis,
shows how Kafka uses a narratological split, split consciousness, and SPLIT
Unconscious of the hero to create the Kafkaesque by a rare trick.
This new book shows how Kafka became one of the most prominent artists to
create and define Modernity. Kafka took part in 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, primarily with the appearance of Freud's
"Traumdeutung" in the year of 1900. And Kafka - rebutting Schnitzler
- 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 astonishingly complex, but it turned
out to be very accurate and accomplished right from the beginning. When other
reactions to the Modern Condition, like Hugo Ball, Appolinaire, and Dada,
displayed a picture of a chaotic and rebellious attitude to reason and morals,
Kafka, much like Rimbaud actually, showed a far more complex ability to make
modern society's human-understandable itself, in a universal narrative. Kafka,
in exploring the Unconscious, as by Freud, and in doing so using a Romantic
"Ästhetik des Schwebens," is the unique discoverer of the marvels of
mind, and is, in this, equal to Freud. Kafka - a Freudo-Structuralist
Analysis
sets out to explain how the Kafkaesque itself generates - even today, 100 years
after its birth - an interrogation that scrutinizes the Freudian theory and our
conception of the unique human consciousness.
Kafka's relation to Freud was somewhat like a son's relation
to the father. Hence, Kafka did not 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 profound
influence on the Mind and Society of the century. Kafka used Freud as part of
the revealing of Modern Myth, and the
myths used by Modernity.
Kafka used Freud, but Kafka added on top of Freud´s model of the human psyche
another split to human consciousness in his literary universe. Kafka thus did
not "believe in" Freud, but he was fascinated by him. Freud suited
Kafka well. Almost too well. He did not look at all to 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 actually started 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 like the one Flaubert in his usual rage once claimed he wanted
to write: a lovely book about nothing at all. So it happened that Kafka - not
at all being highly intellectual or an eloquent philosopher - 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. It also seems as he tried to develop the style of
Tieck and the Romantics. Using his extraordinary ( perhaps autistic )
sensibility, Kafka's technique miraculously was born on one evening in 1912,
writing the short story "The Verdict." The following day, he even
asked his fiancée Felice for its meaning. 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. ( Examples can be
found in Kafka - a Freudo-Structuralist
Analysis
.) 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 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 Kafka-technique, which
probably was unconscious (!) to Kafka himself, we are also – apart from the
nausea of double Unconscious, a kind of self-consciousness of the Unconscious -
experiencing a very intense poetry, depicting utter loneliness in a framework
of a sad pseudo-protest, parallel to Weber´s, against the superpower of civil
organization and law in general, as well as a hymn of the melancholy beauty of
existence the like of which nobody else in the 20ieth Century has created: The
concept of "Kafkaesque" has been created upon the experience of the
works of Kafka by the Collective Mind, and in some yet not quite analyzed way,
it also has extended our mode of perception. The concept of the Kafkaesque, and
the Kafkaesque itself, AS IRONY, is vital for both the being and the
understanding of our culture and being! The questions regarding this concept,
raised in Kafka - a Freudo-Structuralist
Analysis
questions somewhat elusive, are mainly two: [ 1. ]: what IS the kafkaesque?
(…that is caused by this split ) And [ 2. ]: how did Kafka DO to create this,
the" Kafkaesque"?
These questions are highly original and deal with
ideological, cultural, and psychological matters and tacit knowledge, and
complicated issues concerning the ontology of fiction. Perhaps the concept of
"Kafka" is an ongoing question in Modernity itself that will prevail
no matter how much Kaj Bernh. Genell - and others - keep trying to sort out the
problem?....
Kaj Bernh. Genell 2023.
Copyright Kaj Bernh. Genell
2023.
Kaj Bernh. Genell was born in Gothenburg,
Sweden, in 1944. After having endured an adventurous youth, he became
interested in philosophy and, in 1983, after many years at the University of
Gothenburg, published a book exclusively on existential ( in the Sartreian
sense of the word ) Irony - “Ironi och existens.” Genell here established
himself as a fighter for irony. This position was and is a rare one in Sweden.
Soon hereafter, Genell, who since his teens had a great interest in one of the
giants of Modernism, Franz Kafka, wrote a series of papers at the University of
Gothenburg related to Kafka, partly under supervision of the renowned stark
Marxist Kurt Aspelin, who then was a senior teacher and avid lecturer there.
This would later result in the now disappeared ebook “Kafka och det Kafkaeska”
(2018), an essay in Swedish on the Literary Technique of Kafka, and then later
- published in English - an extended version of this book as “Kafka - a
Freudo-Structuralist Analysis” (2021).
As a fiction writer Genell started out
with several books in the Swedish language, such as “Pistolen”, “Tavelstölden”,
“Tegelkrona och skönheten”, ”Höstdrama” and the horror story “Skjuta sig fri”. These
books – of course – have nothing to do with Kafka. Under the pseudo “ Bill
Clactoe ”, the first novel in English by Genell appeared in 2021,” called
Fell´s Point,” a small idyllic crime story set in Baltimore, USA. With “The
Lion´s Disease,” Genell has under his own name in his second English novel
created a psychological and philosophical comment on pandemics by describing an
odyssey to Indonesia on a Bulk Cargo Carrier.
- Reading a book is to look into oneself.
In 2022 Kaj Bernh. Genell became a stipendiary, by being awarded a large
sholarship from Sveriges Författarfond ( National Fund for Authors ).
www.kajgenell.com, Kaj Bernhard Genell Real
Home Site. The main subject here is Kafka and the kafkaesque and the book, Kafka - a Freudo-Structuralist
Analysis.
