Persistence was repaid in my reading of James Hawes’s Excavating Kafka. My initial impulse was to throw the book across the room. Hawes, who took a Ph.D. on Kafka and Nietzsche, draws on impeccable research, yet the early pages grated: the tone, smug and self-satisfied, dressed cynicism as irony, a style too familiar in certain English circles. Sentences like “No wonder the Herr Doktor passed the Royal and Imperial Austrian Army’s medical board just this June, for the second time” litter the first chapters. Hawes frequently refers to Kafka as Herr Doktor, our hero, our lawyer, and the effect is draining. Thankfully, he eases up as the book progresses, allowing the deeper current of his work to surface.
Drawing on his own research and the biographies of Reiner Stach and Peter André-Alt (still unavailable in English translation), Hawes sets about dismantling what he calls the K-Myths: that Kafka was almost unknown in his lifetime, that he wanted his works destroyed after death, that his Jewishness is essential to understanding his writing, that his style is mysterious and opaque, that he lived poor and lonely, that his father was monstrous, that he was crippled by tuberculosis for years. Hawes seeks to humanise Kafka, to pull him down from the saintly pedestal where dazzled biographers so often leave him, and in doing so, he succeeds in making Kafka no less extraordinary, but far more real.
There is a moment when Hawes writes: “Kafka thus takes the novel one step further from Dickens and Dostoyevsky. He pushes the dominance of the ‘unreal’ over the ‘real’, of psychological states over mappable facts, right to the limit. But he never over-steps that limit, though he comes perilously close in The Castle. The Trial, his greatest work, still has the unmistakable smack of a real place. This is what makes the story so endlessly wrong-footing.”
The final chapters, where Hawes enters into Kafka’s writing with seriousness and a kind of reverence, redeem the book. In the end, it was worth the small battle.
>Which biographers other than Brod placed him on a saintly pedestal? For anyone who knows Kafka and acquaintance with the secondary literature, those k-myths are pretty lame.
>Stephen – I've a worshipful biography by Pietro Citati that puts Brod in the shade. Hawes cites Ronald Hayman as "never free of adulation"and is critical of Nicholas Murray's.Reading the diaries is sufficient to dispel each of the k-myths. Hawes' book is worthwhile though, and adds a dimension.
>Hi Anthony, can you say more about Myth 2?K
>Hi Kevin, Kafka wrote two wills, the second equivocal on what he wished (if anything) to be burned. As a trained lawyer Kafka was capable of writing a legally binding will, if his intention was to have his works, diaries and letters destroyed. By entrusting Brod, who thought him a genius, with the mission to burn his work, Kafka knew it would be preserved.The position fits into a wider argument that Hawes makes, that Kafka consistently manoeuvred people into making the big decisions in his life, to keep up the fiction that he was a "man without intentions. a mere plaything of other's desires(meaning that he could never be held guilty for the results)."