Franz Kafka

Excerpt from Loners: Writers, Thinkers, and Solitude

Chapter excerpted from my book Loners: Writers, Thinkers, and Solitude, available in paperback and kindle versions. Read the introduction for free here.

In his “Letter to his Father” Franz Kafka writes as follows: “But being the way we are, marrying is barred to me because it is your very own domain. Sometimes I imagine the map of the world spread out and you stretched diagonally across it. Then it seems to me that I could consider living in only those regions that either are not covered by you or are not within your reach.”¹ He also claims that “my writing was all about you. . . It was an intentionally long and drawn-out leave-taking from you, yet although it was enforced by you, it did take its course in the direction determined by me.”²

I have suggested that the peculiar solitariness of those in my group of loners often stems from difficulties and complications in what psychologists call the space of separation-individuation. That space dominates the mental world of the young child and continues to play a role in future attachments, separations, and losses. As a species, we are now forced to move into cultural situations in which the pressures on individuation and separateness, on coming up with an adequate mental architecture for articulating complex structures of what is self and what is other, are much greater than they could possibly be in hunter-gatherer societies. In the quotations above, Kafka shows us some of these complexities. In the child’s early awareness of a world of self and others, it may well appear that certain crucial individuals occupy their positions permanently. When Kafka looks at the case of the father-mother-child marriage structure, he sees his father as so inevitably and powerfully occupying the paternal space that he himself could never come to occupy it. A key aspect of our cultural training is to learn to look more abstractly and formally at various positions and moves in strategy games and cultural systems. In board games, you may have hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place in one game while a different player has them, along with their monetary privileges, in the next game. In another arena, if you improve your skills, you may come to take over the more desirable positions of pitcher or shortstop in baseball. These are slots to be filled that are structurally defined and you or others may come to fill them. In a similar manner, you come to recognize that father, mother, and child are such fillable slots. Evolutionary scientists say it is extremely unlikely that a young child would actually wish to kill the father or have sexual intercourse with the mother. There might well be competition with the father over the affections of the mother and anger at his controlling interventions. But the so-called “Oedipal” resolution of childhood is more likely the increased mental understanding that the father-mother-child triangle is a structure of slots that can be filled by different individuals at different times. As in board games or sports, you must satisfy certain conditions before you can take over one of the slots. You recognize that it will take a long period of growth and maturation before you are able to fill the slot of the husband and parent on your own, to have your own wife and children, where the filler of that slot of wife will not be the same person who now is wife to your father. In the meantime it will be good to observe, and to identity with, the kinds of things someone does who now occupies that slot.

But Kafka remains, even as an adult, in the earlier space of separation-individuation, where that more abstract space of slots and moves has not been well internalized and where it seems that occupants of a position must be displaced if one is to put oneself there. His own identity seems so overwhelmed by that of his father that he can find no position for himself except through an extraordinary effort at separation. All of his writing, as he says in the quotation above, has been a “leave-taking” from his father, a move in the complex process of leaving behind earlier attachments and achieving a self-sustaining separateness. It is important to him that even though his father forced that sort of leave-taking upon him, he was the one himself, so he claims, who determined the ultimate shape it took. In that sense, at least, he can count this long-term process as his own. The difficulty of this effort is very clear if we consider how complex, shifting, and mobile are the identifications and investments that Kafka comes to deploy, for example in his relation with Felice Bauer, in handling this dialectic of attachment and separation.

What seems to happen, as I suggested in my introduction, is that erotic energy, arriving with some effects long before puberty, can be recruited for the task of individual identity-formation. Writing and intellectual activity can then find their roles in that process. Humans are very good at turning mental activity normally designed for interaction with others into a self-to-self activity. Nietzsche shows how this process takes place on a large cultural scale with a Christian design for an inner self trained to turn its aggressive, lacerating energies against itself. In the transitional space where separation is being negotiated, there may easily be a blurring, a mobility, an oscillation among other-to-self, self-to-other, and self-to-self relations. Is a child playing tenderly with a doll learning to care for another individual or does the doll represent him and he occupies the slot of the mother and is soothing this projected self as he desires to be soothed? In such a space of mobile, shifting relations there can be a compression of several different structures into a single relationship.

We see this happening in Kafka’s The Castle (C). Three of the characters K. finds himself engaging with are Barnabas the messenger, Hans Brunswick the schoolboy who honorably volunteers to assist K., and Bürgel the Castle official with whom K. spends part of a night in bed. It is as if Kafka is pressuring us to find some kind of connection among these three with their common B names. There are homoerotic suggestions in all three cases. Barnabas is said to be slender, limber, and spry in his tight-fitting clothes. He reminds K. of a woman he had recently seen in the village. His face is clear and open, “his eyes very large.” (C 23) His smile is extraordinarily cheering, with his lips moving in a manly yet gentle way. It is impossible to imagine him causing awkwardness to anyone, says K., and “his eyes, his smile, his carriage seem to be a message in themselves, even if he didn’t know it.” (C 127) K. asks him to link arms as they walk and soon “he was only able to get along now with the support of Barnabas.” (C 28) He holds on so tightly to Barnabas that it almost hurts his own fingers. They visit the two sisters of Barnabas, who resemble him but whose features are not as fine and comely as his.

Hans Brunswick, the young student who comes to assist K., looks calmly at K. with his big brown eyes and stands very upright. He is described as having a mixture of childish innocence and adult gravity. Sometimes he speaks to K. as if he were the teacher and K. only a boy. “It turned out he was a little boy who sometimes seemed to speak almost like a clever, energetic, and far-sighted man.” (C 127) There is a slight smile on his soft mouth as if he is playing a game, but a serious one. At one point Hans thinks for a little while, “his eyes fixed, like a woman contemplating something forbidden and looking for a way to do it with impunity.” (C 131) “Long before this K. had told Hans to leave the bench and come up to the teacher’s desk, where he held him between his knees, caressing him soothingly from time to time.” (C 132) Hans envies him, K. thinks, for his gnarled walking-stick, with which Hans has been absent-mindedly playing as they talked. (C 134) He promises to make him an even better one.

Bürgel the Castle official has “childishly merry” eyes and childish cheeks but the rest of his features indicate a capacity for deep thought. Sitting on the bed in which Bürgel has been sleeping, K. falls asleep himself and dreams of fighting a naked secretary “who greatly resembled the statue of a Greek God.” (C 231) The secretary has to use his arm and fist to cover his nakedness. K. presses forward in the dream and the secretary seems not to resist but to be squealing like a girl being tickled. K. wakes and sees that Bürgel is the Greek god of his dreams. K. needs to prop his arm on the bed to keep from falling and by chance takes hold of Bürgel’s foot under the bedclothes. Bürgel lets him hold the foot. Soon Bürgel stretches “with a wild and willful movement like a little boy.” (C 236) Finally K. goes out without a word, "as if he had taken leave of Bürgel long ago." (C 237)

Note how in all three cases there is a shifting character to the other individual. Each has strongly boyish characteristics yet also seems grave and adult-like and is compared in some manner to a woman or a girl. One is reminded of Melville’s Billy Budd, who has the strength of an adult male, a grace and beauty more commonly thought of as feminine, and an appearance so boyish that he is called Baby Budd. K., trying to affirm his own individuation, can identify with, and be supported by, the beautiful, self-contained quality or the noble uprightness of the other individual or the qualities in the other that remind him of a Greek god. In each of the three cases K. seems to achieve some degree of supportive identification through a primitive mental process, common in ancient cultures, that holds that physical contact can make one take on some of the qualities of what is touched. K. holds very tightly to Barnabas as he seems to lose his footing in the snow and he holds Hans between his knees and caresses him. He supports himself from falling out of bed by holding onto Bürgel’s “foot” beneath the bedclothes. A crucial point of these encounters is that none of them succeed in getting K. what he wants: access to the Castle and recognition of his role as land surveyor. Barnabas the castle messenger and Bürgel the castle secretary and Brunswick through his mother’s connections may all seem to promise that access. But all moves toward successful communication, toward reconciliation of oppositions, or toward the achieving of larger unities and resolutions, are failures in The Castle.

Kafka may here be making both a personal point and a larger cultural one. The personal point has to do with strategies for shaping a worthwhile architecture of self and other in the difficult project of individuation. The scenes I pointed to in The Castle show a psychological pattern of mobile, shifting, oscillating investments where the position of what is self and what his other, what is adult and what is child, and what is male and what is female seem to switch unstably. That instability allows for a certain compression of different internal program goals into a single relationship. The other person can be an idealized self with a confident wholeness that can be identified with as well as allowing one to retain some measure of childhood and feminine identifications that more generally one has been forced to leave behind.

Yet this strategy, the novel suggests, does not work. K. does not find any integration into, or even proper communication with, the social world of the Castle, with its complex bureaucracy of positions and rules. Kafka himself, instead of moving into the available social world with its slots of marriage and fatherhood, will remain to a considerable extent in an earlier childhood world where more basic issues of separation and individuation are still in play. He will not learn to play the board games of culture, where a formal grammar of positions allows a clearer stabilizing of identity and the recognition that such formal positions can be occupied by others as well. One drawback of K.’s strategy in the scenes at issue here is that he tries to gain greater assurance of self-identity through quite primitive means, that is, through the primitive magic of believing you may take on the qualities of what you come in physical contact with, as some religious persons believe that touching the relics of a saint will make them take on some of the qualities of that saint. That magical expectation on K.’s part, as shown in his contact with Barnabas, Hans Brunswick, and Bürgel, means that he will not work on his own to develop the desired qualities within and for himself.

Another feature of Kafka’s own life seems reflected in K.’s outlook. I mentioned earlier how accomplished humans became at turning self-to-other relations into self-to-self ones. In recruiting erotic and other mental energies for the project of self-formation, Kafka became skilled both at engaging in an interior self-to-self dialogue and in turning relations with others into attempts at reassuring and controlling his own self-identity. One outcome will be that he has fewer mental resources for investing in others who, as genuinely other, can be partners in a large enterprise that does not belong to him alone. As it is, he turns to writing. Writing, as we will see, offers an activity that can take full advantage of the difficulties within the psychological space of separation-individuation. Writing offers a rich pattern of investments that allow the self to form, at this higher level, a self-sustaining rhythm and style of selfhood, a stable phenomenology of engaging the invasive powers of the world, a way of shaping the architecture of self and other so that engaging with what is other is, through the very structure of writing, a form of self-determination.

The fragility and shifting quality of self-identity in that space of individuation may lead to still another feature. One may keep fearing that one’s separation from an early, all-powerful caregiver has not quite been successful. One is anxious about being drawn back into an engulfing power, of having one’s boundaries and the very space of the self blur and dissolve. Perhaps there is a desire for this outcome at the same time, for it would mean giving up the pressures of separateness, of sustaining the self on one’s own, and of responsible agency, with its accompanying guilt and regret. An overall result is that sexuality itself, the intimate association of body parts, may become linked with these ambiguities regarding self-identity. If one has not separated securely, and if sexual interaction with others involves the project of assuring self-identity rather than the forming of a partnership for more sophisticated psychological and social enterprises such as child raising, then there may be a strong association between sexuality and the loss of the self. Kafka in 1913 wrote the following: “Coitus as punishment for the happiness of being together. Live as ascetically as possible, more ascetically than a bachelor, that is the only possible way for me to endure marriage.”³ This is when he is supposed to be contemplating marriage to Felice Bauer. Kafka engages in more personally open discussion with Milena Jesenská, who wrote to Max Brod that Kafka’s fear “applies to everything that is shamelessly alive, also to the flesh for example. Flesh is too uncovered; he cannot stand the sight of it.”⁴ In a letter Kafka confesses: “I can love only what I can place so high above me that I cannot reach it.”⁵ Also to Brod: “you are right in saying the deeper realm of sexual life is closed to me.”⁶ Women in Kafka’s novels may be domineering or repellent in their sexual voraciousness. Yet Kafka also writes in his diary, during a trip to the Jungborn nudist sanatorium, about “2 handsome Swedish boys with long legs, that are so shaped and tight the best way to get at them would be with the tongue.”⁷

Do we wish to think of Kafka as gay then? Perhaps it is better not to try to answer this question as such. Cognitive scientists sometimes speak of the human mind as like a parliament with competing parties working to form coalitions able to bring about significant activity. Some inner mental programs are like the European Social-Democratic parties, able on some occasions to rule on their own and on others to enter into enduring coalitions. Other inner programs are like the Greens, occasionally strong enough to join the governing coalition but more often a minority party that requires specific contingent circumstances for it to express its power. Homoerotic drives, desires, and investments in a particular individual’s mental life may be more like those Social Democrats or more like these Greens. Kafka has emotionally strong relations with certain women, but it is clear is well that he has a considerable homoerotic fantasy life, as expressed in his writings and his diaries. To a significant degree his fantasy life as a whole appears to be masochistic. He seems an excellent exemplar of what Nietzsche describes in The Genealogy of Morals: an aggressive individual who turns his aggressive energies inward upon himself in a self-lacerating, masochistic fashion and with very strong feelings of guilt, of deserving punishment because of some obscure but grandiose debt that he cannot articulate or pay. We see this process happening in The Trial, where Josef K. looks into a room where a man in leather is making two court officials strip bare and be whipped because of a complaint made by Josef K. himself. Josef feels bad and wonders if he should offer his own body to be whipped instead. One fantasy Kafka described was being pulled upward through several floors of a building until by the top he is just a bloody stump. Beyond that masochistic side, the larger point is that even regarding his more benign homoerotic fantasies and mental life, the lesson seems to be that this direction must be a psychological failure. The very structure of K.’s interactions with Barnabas, Brunswick, and Bürgel means that his mobile, shifting, primitive attempts at an identity-securing identification will be insufficient to encourage his development to a more sophisticated pattern of relationships. The homoerotic aspects of his mental life cannot become the dominant coalition-forming member of his inner parliament. Perhaps, then, it is best not to think of him as gay.

One may note how often a particular combination appears among the literary modernists: the richness of a sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit homoerotic content and a negative assessment overall of homosexuality. Proust says that one goal in writing his long novel was to show that homosexuality is an illness. Eliot’s The Waste Land abounds in implicit homoerotic illusions, as I will demonstrate, but that form of eroticism is associated in the poem with decadence, with threats of drowning or dissolution, and with invasive threats to the self. Thomas Mann says that while homoerotic drives offer fertile conditions for making great art, they are associated with illness and dissipation and are dangerous to the necessary moral fabric of the culture. Nietzsche, while strongly praising the homoerotic friendships of the ancient Greeks and the intense male friendships of his own time, seems to leave sexuality behind as he shows how one’s scattered biological drives can be transfigured, elevated, and integrated through sublimation so that a much more powerful mental configuration results. That early modernist Melville in his 1891 Billy Budd lets us see how Captain Vere’s intense visual identification with Billy when the beautiful sailor ascends lightly from oceanic levels to the highest point of the rigging must end in Billy’s reassignment to the unconscious oceanic depths. It is an interesting question whether the entire psychological and social worlds associated with homosexuality have changed so much that we no longer have much to learn from such figures about the recruitment of homoerotic eros to the project of self-formation and separation. For now, let us note how much the homoerotic themes in the literary modernists have to do with difficulties but also subtleties in the process of forming oneself as a separate individual through various investments of the self in what is other. Proust’s very long novel can be seen as an almost lifelong response, through the process of writing, to the childhood situation of trying to control precisely the conditions of attachment, separation, distancing, and grief in relationship to his mother. Eliot’s The Waste Land, as we will see, is an examination of a large number of variations on the theme of whether the separating out of an individual life or of Western culture as a whole has been successful, given all the gravitational pulls that threaten that success.

I claimed that Kafka himself in The Castle might likewise be making both a personal point about his own psychology and a much larger one about the culture around him. He makes sure we have clues about what is going on when he gives the name of Barnabas to the Castle messenger and that of Galanter to one of the Castle officials. ‘Galanter’ is German for Galatians, the recipients of Paul’s epistle regarding whether non-Jews who became Christian had first to be circumcised as Jewish and then to be required to follow Jewish dietary and other ritual practices. Paul is contending with the Jerusalem faction led by James. Those in this faction wish Christianity to remain fundamentally a Jewish sect. Paul, of course, wants to sacrifice key elements of Judaism in order to form a more universal religion better designed to fit into the larger Greco-Roman culture that carries the great weight of culture in the Mediterranean world. Barnabas, Paul’s companion, is caught in the middle, at times siding with Paul and at times turning toward the Jerusalem faction.

Kafka also names the head of the Castle as Count Westwest. This name is likewise significant. Kafka himself was not much of a reader of philosophy, but the Jewish intellectual friends he hung around with in Prague were deeply interested in the subject and wrote books about it. So Kafka at least vaguely knew that a great narrative behind much European intellectual discussion, including for Marx, was Hegel’s philosophy of history. This narrative saw an advance of the notion of freedom or self-determination from the east to the west, ending its progress in the Christian countries of northwestern Europe. So one might think of the Castle under Count Westwest as the great hierarchical bureaucracy of Hegel’s Logic, whose principle of being self-determining in one’s relations with what is other is supposedly being incarnated in the developing social and political institutions of the west.

Jewish intellectuals in Prague will surely notice that Judaism is assigned a particular role in that the Hegelian narrative. It is praised for coming up with a lofty notion of the divine as fully separated from nature and from all natural happenings. This is a great cultural advance. But it retains the absolute opposition between divine and human, between spirit and nature. It does not understand the Christian notions of incarnation of the divine and of Geist or spirit. Hegel’s Christianity is ultimately given a philosophical, rather secularized form. Geist is the principle that reconciles the radical tensions and oppositions that emerge in culture by articulating higher-level, unifying arrangements. While Hegel comes to praise Judaism more warmly over his career, in his early theological writings he is more negative. The Jews, not being able to comprehend the reconciling activity of Geist, are left with a radical opposition between a lofty, ineffable divine and a world that has become prosaic and material, with practices that are arbitrary and slave-like. If the divine is ultimately for Hegel the activity of rational autonomy, of being self-determining in being related to what his other, then the Jews, without the notions of divine incarnation in the human and of Geist, can never come to embody freedom in their cultural practices. They can never come to form a national state that can express the full legacy of the westward unfolding of the idea of freedom through practices that make self-determination real and practical.

What will a Prague Jew think of all this background? Kafka’s name Count Westwest will suggest not just the Hegelian narrative but also a great debate among Jews themselves about what is referred to as a West Jew. This is someone who thinks that Jews, including Jewish intellectuals, should fully inhabit and contribute to the cultural forms of life of Western Europe. One will continue, for example, the German tradition in philosophy, literature, and music and hope to make one’s own notable contributions to these. In another sphere, one will assimilate as a businessman and citizen to the social life of a modernized, liberal Europe and try to show that that liberal Europe is an extension of the prophetic and ethical writings of the Jews, while particular Jewish dietary and ritual practices can be left behind. The opponent of the West Jew thinks that such a strategy loses the powerful authenticity of being Jewish that remains among eastern Jews in Poland, Russia, and Austria-Hungary who have not been modernized and liberalized, but remain deeply invested in a Jewish ritual form of life. Or his opponent believes that the future of Judaism lies not in an assimilation to the practices of a liberal Christian west but in a Zionist return to Palestine and the establishment of a specifically Jewish state.

So, Kafka might be seen as facing something rather like the situation of Barnabas in the ancient world. That ancient decision was about whether to maintain a narrow, more parochial Jewish religion that strongly resisted Hellenizing and Romanizing influences upon it or to jettison enough aspects of Judaism so that it could be transformed into a more universal, if Hellenized, form of life. To accept the latter is to accept something that can seem to Jewish purists to allow forms of idolatry and a reversion to some aspects of natural religion. Kafka and others have a similar choice: transform their own parochial Judaism into something more universally Western (more Hegelian, one might say), or develop an inassimilable, more strictly Jewish standpoint. (Kafka himself was deeply sympathetic toward Hasidic Jews from the east.) If Christianity from a Jewish standpoint allows a return to idolatry and nature religion, then Kafka may feel a need to resist any regression into a natural, animal existence, as happens in The Metamorphosis.

What answer does Kafka give on this issue in The Castle? He portrays all efforts at communication with, and successful integration into, the western Hegelian cultural superstructure as failures. Messages do not arrive. Encounters with Castle officials produce little. If Christians believe in Christ as the word of God adequately delivered to mankind, the Kafkaesque scene is one where there are doubts whether any message has actually been sent. There is no Hegelian embodiment of the Castle’s formal structure in the patterns of life of the village or if there is such an embodiment, it is one that involves sexual harassment, prostitution, and arbitrary treatment, not an incarnating of justice and freedom. Arbitrariness in general, rather than a plausible incarnation of a higher level in a lower one, seems to characterize those Castle/town relations. Barnabas has two sisters. Amalia was propositioned by a court official and turned him down completely. The family has since been isolated and shunned by many. Olga, in contrast, thinks she can restore the family’s position by sleeping with Castle officials, while hoping that they will provide her the key to that familial restoration. Amalia remains adamantly opposed to any connection to the Castle.

Kafka as a writer does not take sides, but his sympathies seem to be with Amalia. She is like the Jews of the ancient world who did not wish to reconcile themselves with the Hellenic and Roman worlds but rather to remain a purer, more parochial culture with its own strong self-identity. Benjamin and his friend Theodor Adorno for their part will join Kafka in refusing any reconciliation or mediation with the ongoing social and political structures of western Europe. It is an illusion for them that these structures embody the Hegelian “divine” principle of rational self-determination. They are an architecture of sheer arbitrary domination that brings damage and ruin to everything, with no autonomy at all being actualized in human individuals and institutions. If there is to be a genuine message, it must come from beyond the Hegelian logical realm and beyond the Castle’s intricate bureaucracy. It is unclear whether there will ever be such a message or whether we could recognize it if it came. It will not appear from the inner self-unfolding of the Hegelian system of mediations, of making differences commensurable. It will arrive only from a realm incommensurable with our own and must appear as an arbitrary, messianic, unpredictable entrance from without. It is important in the meantime to avoid any idol worship or false messiahs, to resist believing that the divine has entered into human history in a Hegelian or a Christian manner and is being incarnated and actualized now in present institutions. We should be suspicious of any claim that a messenger has delivered the message that we need. Earlier I described Benjamin’s work on German baroque drama, written around the same time as Kafka’s novel. He emphasized the increasingly arbitrary, detailed, multiple, and poorly convincing character of the allegorical instruments employed by these dramatists. Kafka appears to be doing something rather similar. The possible connections to the Castle, and even more the connections of the Castle to some loftier spiritual order of things, prove increasingly arbitrary and unlikely of success.

Kafka, I granted, was not a reader of philosophy in the way that Max Brod was. But the Hegelian notion of Geist or spirit as referring to the general realm of culture was very much a commonplace among intellectuals. Since Geist also means ghost, Kafka likely has that background in mind when he speaks of the ghosts that are constantly undermining his efforts of communication. Hegelian Geist is supposed to be a space of mediation, of commensurability, that allows very different stances to enter into direct communication. Kafka sees matters differently. Humans, he says, are always trying to bring about an immediacy of connection. That is why they invent trains, cars, airplanes, the postal system, the telegraph, the telephone, the wireless.⁸ But the ghosts intervene and distort all these attempts: “Written letters never arrive at their destination; the ghosts drink them up along the way.”⁹ They have learned to strengthen themselves by every human invention aimed at immediacy. Kafka writes: “The systematic destruction of myself over the years is astonishing . . . The spirit that brought it about must now be celebrating triumphs . . .”¹⁰ He confessed to fear whenever he wrote: “Every word, twisted in the hands of the ghosts . . . becomes a spear turned against the speaker.”¹¹ The sphere of Geist seems to be a malevolent, distorting realm that does not bring about successful communication but continually thwarts it, so that one’s paranoia is justified.

Still, it is within the space of his writing that Kafka feels he must work out whatever he can of the project of separation-individuation, one that will save him from dissolution. Others can move on to take up positions within the grammar of the social world. But he cannot. Speaking of himself he says: “You who have to fight incessantly for your inner subsistence with all your might – and even that is not enough - you now want to set up a household of your own, perhaps the most necessary but surely the most affirmative and boldest act there can possibly be? What surplus of strength will you draw on? You who can barely manage to bear the responsibility for yourself from moment to moment now want to add on the responsibility for a family?”¹² So he must remain committed to that earlier childhood project of achieving and sustaining separateness, self-identity, and autonomy (his “inner subsistence”) rather than moving on to the world of adult responsibilities and of forming stable adult institutions.

Kafka remains within that space of identity-formation, working out an architecture of self-to-other relations as well as self-to-self ones that will prevent him from losing himself completely. He tells Felice Bauer, the woman he was engaged to twice and wrote to for over five years, that he would always, even with her, be under an irresistible compulsion to regain his solitude. “I am alone here and talk to hardly anyone except for the hotel staff; I am filled with sadness to the point that it is almost overflowing, and yet I think I feel this condition is appropriate to me, allotted to me by some divine justice, not to be transgressed by me but endured to the end of my days.”¹³ Enduring the great sadness that comes to him with solitude seems to be something of a destined condition, the proper space he must negotiate if he is to find his own way of securing an identity. He recognizes that he has lived in a state of dependency on his parents well beyond the time that most adults would find appropriate. After breaking up with Felice in July 1914, he writes his parents of his plans to go on his own to Berlin or Munich. “Up to now I have grown up in a state of dependency and outward comfort . . . There are certainly people who know how to endure their independence everywhere, but I am not one of them.” In his family, he says, “everything is organized in a way that keeps one, a person craving dependency, in it.” Outside Prague “I can become an independent, calm person...” He recognizes how much farther he needs to go if he is to make even modest progress in the overall project of separation-individuation, a project he recognizes himself to have failed at so far. But the war intervenes almost immediately after he makes these plans and he has to stay in Prague.¹⁴

Kafka recognizes that, considering his fragility as a self, his fears of dissolution, and his being tormented by violent fantasies, his own project of self-formation will not involve a move into the normal occupations of adulthood but will require a reliving, through his own private rituals, of the basic maneuvers that may keep securing the self. Eros will be recruited for that space and that work. His letters to Felice rarely seem to consider negotiations for a future adult partnership. Instead he seems to be testing out rituals of distancing and separateness that make gestures toward intimacy but then derail its possibility. When Felice tries to initiate such negotiations, he withdraws. He is like Proust’s narrator as a child testing how he can control certain rituals of attachment and separation with his mother. Many find these letters to be manipulative of Felice’s emotions as he stages various scenes whose psychological features he is in control of. But these are not the manipulations of a cad, rather those of someone desperate to preserve the frail individuality he has actually achieved. He makes a great show of listing his various faults, of showing all the ways he is not cut out for marriage. But these confessions are in the service of a goal of stating that he can never change who he is. He has set things up so that he will make no compromises in the marriage; all the compromises, all the adjustments to his need for solitude, will be on her part.

One thing he realizes quite early on is that the great task of securing the self against threatening intrusions, both external and internal ones, will be accomplished only in and through his writing. He writes to Felice’s father: “My whole being is directed toward literature; I have adhered to this direction up to my thirtieth birthday; if I leave, I cease to exist . . . it is the earthly reflection of a higher necessity.”¹⁵ To Felice he writes: “All I possess are certain powers that merge into literature at a depth almost inaccessible under normal circumstances . . . Could I but commit myself to them, they would undoubtedly, of this I am convinced, lift me out of my inner misery in an instant.”¹⁶ Speaking of the satisfaction he gets from writing, he says: “But happiness only if I can still raise the world into the pure, the true, and the immutable.” ¹⁷Also: “The strange, mysterious, possibly dangerous, possibly redemptive comfort of writing: it is a leap out of murderers’ row – observation, deed – observation in which a higher type of observation is created – a higher, not a keener type – and the higher it is and the less within reach of the ‘row,’ the more independent it becomes, the more obedient to its own laws of motion, the more incalculable, joyful, ascendant its path.”¹⁸

In that still basic space of self-formation, one may feel that one’s fragile identity is under threat from overpowering external forces, from possible re-engulfment by the early caregiver, from the pressing, dangerous desires within oneself, and from the mere physicalness of one’s being, which joins one to a realm of decay, sickness, and death. To enter into a world of words and ideas is to enter a realm where items maneuver lightly and swiftly, as if no longer bound by physical limitations. Increasing mental capacity also allows one to expand or contract one’s presence in time and space, so that one seems to be observing matters from a distance that is not pressured by the immediate circumstances of the moment. Writing can take advantage both of such advancing mental capacities and of the mobile, shifting space of separation-individuation in order to find a stance that offers more security to the self. One can rise into a realm of thoughts and words that seem to leave one’s physical limitations and one’s fragility behind, and one comes to identify with less tangible movements that appear to suggest a purity of form, an inevitability, an autonomy, a lightness of interaction. Through that identification, one may seem, for while at least, to have such qualities oneself in the way that Ibn Rushd and other medieval philosophers believed that identification with the agent intellect gave one, while thinking at the highest level, a temporary union with an immortal realm. The profound difficulties of the project of individuation are resolved, or at least tempered, not by moving into slots defined by the grammar and strategy games of the social universe, but by finding a very special type of identification that writing enables. K. in The Castle was unable, through an eroticized, tactile identification with each of the three B’s, to take on their qualities of self-sustaining form and upright character. But by making a literary universe that is his own creation and that also takes on a compelling life of its own, Kafka can feel its attractive autonomy, enduring power, and purity to characterize himself as well, if only for a time, and thus to support his efforts at a more confident self-identity. Like Benjamin he is interested in allegory. The feeling of spiritual elevation comes along with a sense that the ordinary objects and scenes he is describing are suggesting some extra level of meaning that we cannot quite articulate, the suggestion of an order that remains absent. Being connected to that order, at least in the kind of ascent that writing enables, prevents one’s dissolution into mere bodiliness.

The dialectic of distance and closeness that Proust portrays in such detail in The Captive and The Fugitive seems not all that different from Kafka’s relations with Felice. He writes to her that he wants desperately to see her, but when she offers him opportunities to visit her in Berlin he finds excuses to reject the invitations. He keeps telling her how important being alone is to him, how crucial the activity of writing is to his most basic self-identity. He finally proposes to her and meets her at the Tiergarten in Berlin. When she turns him down on this occasion and says that she just cannot make all the adjustments and sacrifices that life with him would entail, he becomes desperate at the thought of her rejection and claims that he will make any changes at all that she wishes him to. One is reminded of Proust’s narrator who is planning on telling Albertine that she must leave, as he is bored with her company. Once she beats him to the punch and leaves on her own, he is thrown into a state of desperate sadness and anxiety and will do anything at all to get her back.

At one point Kafka suggests to Felice that the only possible future for them might be an intensifying of their friendship in a celibate partnership short of marriage. Then his horror of sexuality as leading to dissolution and loss of self would not come into play. When it comes to my central topic of the project of separation-individuation, an especially revealing document is a diary entry by Kafka in 1914, when he is considering a possible marriage to Felice. He feels intensely the pressure of individuation, of selfhood. “… I am incapable when it comes to the onslaught of my own life, the demands of my own person, the attack of time and age, the vague pressure of the desire to write, insomnia, the nearness of insanity – I am incapable of enduring all this alone.”¹⁹ But then he adds: “I need to be alone a great deal. What I have achieved is only a result of being alone.”²⁰ He speaks of a “fear of the union, of passing over to the other. Then I will never be alone again.”²¹ “I hate everything,” he says, “that is not related to literature.” All conversations with others bore him. All the joys and sorrows of the lives of others bore him. “Conversations take the importance, the seriousness, the truth out of everything that I think.”²² One notes that here is no reference, as he considers marriage, to what might be the precise character of Felice’s hopes and desires. The project that matters is that of assuring his own self-identity, of being able to face up to the overwhelming pressures on his sense of individuation (“the onslaught of my own life”). Being alone is an extremely painful state because of those pressures, but it is also the only state in which he seems able to generate an activity, that of literature, that constructs an adequate psychological response to his sense of the weight of aloneness and separateness. He wonders if marriage to Felice would be an additional support against the pressure of isolation and solitude. But given how boring he finds almost all interaction with others to be, and given the fact that marriage will reduce the time he can spend alone writing, the strategy of marriage to avoid solitude is likely to be a failure. It will not only threaten a dissolution of the self in the social life and physicalness of the other. It also will make far less available the very conditions that make possible his only strategy for defeating his profound anxieties about self-identity. When he considers marriage, it seems that what he wants is something closer to the young child testing out, in relation to his mother, certain phases in the process of separation-individuation. When he makes his moves of autonomy and separateness, as when he wishes to find a private room and to write alone, his wife should encourage him and put no pressure on him. But when he feels suddenly the extreme painfulness, weight, and fragility of that sense of separateness, she should be, as in the case of the young child with his mother, automatically available to him for nourishment and support, but never in a smothering manner. That is not quite a marriage; it sounds more like what psychologists call the “hatching” period in the young child’s experiments with separateness.

A Jewish writer who, like Kafka, was living in the Austro-Hungarian empire just prior to the first world war was likely to be very familiar with two books: Degeneration, by Max Nordau, and Sex and Character, by Otto Weininger. The first, by one of the founders of Zionism, was supposedly a doctor’s critique of the ways that modernity’s speeded-up and anxiety-inflating condition of life severely compromised the nervous systems of those who were not physically and mentally strong and resilient. The result was physiological and psychological decline, expressed in males in an incapacity to take on the familial, commercial, and civic duties of an adult. The nervous system of the decadent individual will favor exquisite, subtle experiences and aesthetic occupations, while leading one to avoid marriage and children. Wilde, Verlaine, and Nietzsche are for Nordau examples of such decadence. Nordau believes he can examine their facial types and skulls, as a doctor, to determine their degree of degeneration and of nervous system decline, most notably in the case of Verlaine. He is especially interested in the fate of the Jews. They may well appear to observers to be examples of degeneration in the physiological types in which they now appear, but that is because they have been confined for so long to unhealthy European ghettos. Jews are actually a physically very healthy race and will show themselves to be such provided they get far more sun, fresh air, and vigorous exercise, as in gymnastics clubs. If they are able to found their own state in Palestine, they will return to a natural setting that requires them to be physically vigorous. Their history, from way back in the time of the Maccabees, shows how healthy they truly are as a race if given optimal conditions for growth.

Weininger’s Sex and Character seems to have in its intellectual background the work of Kant and, to some extent as well, that of Schopenhauer (and ultimately Plato). For Kant, the highest human good is the state of rational autonomy, of being able to legislate the moral law for oneself, apart from the pressures of others and the inclinations and desires of one’s own body. Schopenhauer defines intellectual and aesthetic genius as requiring that one take on the stance of an overall subject of the universe, no longer entrapped in the pushes and pulls of an individual biological life, in competition with others and driven by bodily desires. Weininger believes that the only worthwhile life is to achieve intellectual and ethical genius. As in Kant, we truly become individuals only to the extent that we achieve a level of autonomy determined by reason rather than by the drives of the body. We must attain as well the impartial world-viewing capacity of the intellectual and aesthetic genius. One will, as a result, be able to appreciate such notions as beauty and justice, as well as the nature of an autonomous individuality. But most humans cannot achieve these things. Males who have the highest quality of masculine substance within them will have the best chance of doing so. But women, Jews, homosexuals, and effeminate men will not be candidates for ethical, intellectual, and aesthetic genius. They remain too much bound up in the constraining forces of nature, and cannot think in pure ideas but only in ideas contaminated by images.

If you take the books by Nordau and Weininger with some degree of seriousness, what kind of behaviors would you aim for in your life, especially if you are a Jewish writer with a rather complex and sometimes shameful psychological life? You might feel, along with Nordau, that you have to take up a vigorous life of rowing, swimming, long hikes, and visits to spas where exposure to maximum sunlight is a goal. When you experience fragility in your style of self and have anxieties about dissolution, you will feel, along with Weininger, that the only strategy to resolve these issues is a life devoted to an undertaking of intellectual and aesthetic genius, so that you rise above the ordinary conditions of life to a higher plane where activity is more autonomous and more joyous, with the crude demands of the flesh left behind. Yet at the same time you may believe, along with Nordau, that you have proved yourself as a healthy individual only if you get married and can at least envision having children.

Kafka seems to feel just such pressures upon himself. While we tend to picture him as a sickly figure, that was the result of the tuberculosis he was affected with in his later years. Before that, he was well-tanned, a rower, a swimmer, a distance hiker. He was obsessive regarding health diets and recommended health practices, such as chewing his food a certain number of times, sleeping with windows open even in winter, and buying popular books on calisthenics and exercises with weights. He vacationed once at a well-known nudist spa, though he felt shame about his own body. So he seems an eminent example of what Nordau expected the new healthy Jew to be like, someone who is resisting the decadence or degeneration, expressed in pathologies of the nervous system, that ghetto Jews might appear to be examples of. Nordau had himself used the German term ‘Ungeziefer’ or ‘vermin’ to refer to anti-social, unhealthy ghetto inhabitants unsuited for the nervous-system demands of modernity. Kafka, as if expressing his own anxieties in regard to Nordau’s account, imagines himself degenerating into an example of just such hideous vermin, not merely any ordinary bug, in The Metamorphosis. With the pull of natural drives and forces upon him, those aspects which he found disgusting in himself and others, he seems to picture himself as someone capable of moving up or down among different metaphysical or biological levels. He might regress to the level of a disgusting animal, but he might also, through his writing, ascend to a level beyond what most humans are capable of. The cool progression and uninflated purity of his German prose could handle disturbing images from his unconscious, such as misogynistic images of women with oppressively vulgar or overweight bodies or sadistic images of whipping in The Trial or sex with the barmaid in a puddle of beer behind the bar in The Castle. The parable-like quality of his texts might suggest that a higher and purer level of meaning is leaking into the world of entrapping physicality and failed communications that he inhabits. He could attain through his writing a stance approaching that of Schopenhauer’s genius, so that he could survey the world and his happenings without being overwhelmed by the forces of desire within him.

There is an obvious conflict between the advice given by Nordau’s book and that given by Weininger’s. The first sees the formation of a secure, well-formed selfhood as expressing itself in being married and having a family. The second sees those very choices as preventing the self from advancing to a higher achievement. On Weininger’s view, one must leave behind women, Judaism, homosexual inclinations, and the realm of materialism and low-level desires in order to find a truly admirable individuality that expresses a genuine autonomy. Kafka has aspects within himself that press him toward both outcomes. He recognizes that there is something wrong with living with one’s parents well into maturity and he wishes to be married. But marriage and sexuality always make him feel that he is slipping back into a realm where he can no longer sustain his integrity as a self. So, of the two strategies for securing the self, writing will always take precedence over, and be a more winning strategy than, marriage or a marriage-like intimacy. He is destined to be a loner. It is in a private world of self-to-self relations that the machinery necessary for his psychological survival will have its crucial functioning. Much of his erotic energy will be recruited into a project of securing the self within what remains for him a still-negotiated space of separation-individuation, with its mobile self-other structures, its fears of engulfment, and its anxieties about separateness, aloneness, and loss. Explicit sexuality will be linked to early fears about sustaining individual integrity and may be associated with disgust, anxiety, and shame.

But erotic energy may also be repurposed toward a sublimating ascent into a space of writing where the compelling stances, the confident rhythms, the sense of an achieved distance, and a lightness of maneuver seem, all in all, a promise against a regression into a repulsive bodily realm. That solution requires a strong grounding in, and a retention of, earlier maneuvers in the project of individuation. The testing of one’s self-identity through such practices of self-relating done alone means that solitude will be Kafka’s frequent condition. To write is to enact a certain style of self-to-other experiencing that is open to the powerful challenges of the world and that also shows a self-sustaining capacity in the face of them, and such a project is done alone, not by collaboration. The dangerous elements have been allowed to enter, with their fullest pressure, a space governed by one’s own self-arranging capacities so that, as in the manner of the medieval divinity, one’s most profound relation to otherness is now also a free self-relational, self-determining activity. Testing out such a structure, in being alone, is very different from getting recognition from other individuals in the strategy games of culture. To keep engaging in such rituals of self-securing, in a space that compresses together the early childhood space of separation-individuation and the divine-like writing space just described, makes one a very poor candidate for marriage-like intimate relations with others. The psychological energies for such relations, including the erotic ones, have been invested elsewhere, in projects of self-identity that have to be achieved in solitude. Felice Bauer, over five years of letters and a few meetings, gets treated more as a theatrical player in Kafka’s schemes of securing and testing individuation than as a potential life partner to be negotiated with. He can make up epistolary and rhetorical gestures of intense intimacy, but once the real thing is possible, he appears obsessive about noting her physical flaws, and he seems an original expert at the “it’s not you, it’s me” gesture of separateness. He offers extravagant self-blame when he is totally controlling the conditions of presentation. But when his inappropriately intimate letters to one of her closest friends, Grete Bloch, at a time when he is engaged to Felice, are revealed to her and she quite properly calls him to account, he is furious. It appears that he never forgives her for bringing him before an informal court (including Grete and Felice’s sister) that would inevitably find him guilty and worthy of shame. The two are engaged twice, but eventually the thought of buying heavy household furniture with her seems like a foretaste of death and he leaves her unceremoniously at a railroad station.

It is interesting that for all their differences, Nordau and Weininger agree on devaluing homosexuality. For the former, it is one of the characteristics displayed by many of his chief decadents, such as Verlaine and Wilde. Their oversensitive, pathological nervous systems make them incapable of taking on the healthy adult responsibilities of heterosexuality, marriage, children, and mature civic participation. For Weininger, the homosexual, like the woman, is incapable of thinking in pure thoughts uncontaminated by images and cannot achieve true moral autonomy or individuality. If Kafka had strong homoerotic elements to his psyche, as Saul Friedländer claims in his Kafka biography for the Yale Jewish Lives series, then he would have had further reasons, as someone familiar with the arguments of those books, to structure a form of life that would keep those aspects at a distance. There might have been more encouraging reading in the work of Hans Blüher. He claimed that strong homoerotic ties between men were crucial for the male bonding that generated the most accomplished powers and the highest political, intellectual, and aesthetic achievements of a culture. But on Blüher’s own narrative, that option for validating to some degree one’s inner homoerotic inclinations would not have been available to Kafka. For the right kind of healthy homoerotic bonds, while characteristic of Germans, were definitely not characteristic of Jews.

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1. Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Years of Insight, trans. Shelley Frisch (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 298.

2. Saul Friedländer, Franz Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 28.

3. Friedländer, 68.

4. Friedländer, 70.

5. Friedländer, 72.

6. Friedländer, 73.

7. Friedländer, 81.

8. Stach, Kafka: The Years of Insight, 444-45.

9. Stach, Kafka: The Years of Insight, 445.

10. Stach, Kafka: The Years of Insight, 445.

11. Stach, Kafka: The Years of Insight, 446.

12. Stach, Kafka: The Years of Insight, 284.

13. Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years, trans. Shelley Frisch (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 370.

14. Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years, 450-51.

15. Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years, 322.

16. Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years, 326.

17. Stach, Kafka: The Years of Insight, 231.

18. Stach, Kafka: The Years of Insight, 424-25.

19. Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years, 319.

20. Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years, 319.

21. Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years, 319.

22. Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years, 319.