1 - Kafka’s writing and our reading

Summary

It is not always helpful to know what a writer thinks about the vocation and the act of writing, but in Kafka's case it may be. It may help us to read him better. In letters and diaries he says many things about writing in general and about his own in particular which, illuminating in themselves, may also do a real service. They may alert us to the peculiarity of his novels and stories, and so to how we might best try to read them. Certainly, there is no key to Kafka, but just as certainly there are better and worse ways of reading him. Had I needed a motto, I could have looked to some bleakly courageous little sentences in Beckett's Worstward Ho. They are: 'Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.' They seem to me a noble epitaph for Kafka's writing and a good injunction for our reading.

Writing

The premise is necessity. Writers have to write. They are not necessarily people to whom writing comes more easily than to others nor do they necessarily enjoy writing, in any usual sense of the word ‘enjoy’. They are people who have to write. Friedrich Hölderlin’s friend Christian Neuffer, who certainly thought of himself as a poet and wrote a great deal of verse, all of it bad, told Hölderlin one day that he was taking a break from poetry for a while – ‘hanging my harp up on the wall’ was his actual phrase. Hölderlin replied: ‘And that is fine, if you can do it without pangs of conscience. Your sense of yourself is founded on other worthwhile activities too, and so you are not annihilated if you are not a poet.’ Hölderlin knew he was ‘annihilated’ – vernichtet, made nothing – if he could not write poetry. And Tasso (Goethe’s at least) said:

If I am not to ponder things and write poetry

Then life to me will not be life at all.