by Joanna Kavenna
Fiction writing is hardly a glamorous profession. True, novelists avoid the timetables of office work and can cultivate eccentric habits. But if they are going to get anything done, they still have to spend hours of each day hunched over a desk. The tedium of the writer's life means biographers either have to bore their readers senseless or fashion a 'myth' - exaggerating picturesque elements of the writer's personality, embroidering anecdotes and, in the end, rendering the writer as a fictional character. For every major literary figure, there are dozens of myths flying around.
In Excavating Kafka, James Hawes tackles some of the myths that have built up around the writer. He suggests that Kafka is generally touted - both in 'popular culture' and in the worthy avenues of academe - as a gaunt, melancholy, saint-like type, staring out of blurred black-and-white photographs with anguished eyes. He was a man who ordered in his will that his works should be destroyed, who languished in obscurity throughout his lifetime, who was 'crushed by a dead-end bureaucratic job' and, equally, by a tyrannical father. This Kafka was an all-round seer who had no interest in the reception of his work, so preoccupied was he by his 'Kafkaesque' imagination. 'These are the building blocks of the K-myth,' writes Hawes in his introduction. 'Unfortunately, they are all rubbish.'
Hawes, a former academic who spent 10 years studying and teaching Kafka, insists that he was not a 'lonely Middle European Nostradamus'. Rather, he lived with his parents and was set up with a relatively cushy job (six hours a day for the equivalent of £58,000 today), leaving him plenty of time to write. Thanks to his literary connections, he won a major literary prize in his early thirties before even publishing a book. He was not tragically unrequited in his love affairs; nor was he virtually unknown in his lifetime ('we see him named three times in two entirely different articles in a single edition of the Prague Daily News in 1918'). Hawes even proposes that Kafka didn't really want his work to be burned after his death and knew full well that the loyal Max Brod would never do it.
Hawes's Kafka is a canny, funny, worldly man who liked to relax by socialising with his many friends, visiting the occasional prostitute - and reading porn. The fact that Kafka subscribed to two erotic journals is presented as a grand revelation: 'No one has ever shown his readers what we are about to see: Kafka's porn.' There follow some pretty weird pen-and-ink drawings, fin de siècle in style, although Hawes also admits that 'Kafka's porn is no real secret. The mystery is that it should seem like one.' This aspect of the book has caused a furious row to erupt among German-speaking Kafka scholars, with several accusing Hawes of sensationalisation, prudishness and even anti-Semitism.
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Fiction writing is hardly a glamorous profession. True, novelists avoid the timetables of office work and can cultivate eccentric habits. But if they are going to get anything done, they still have to spend hours of each day hunched over a desk. The tedium of the writer's life means biographers either have to bore their readers senseless or fashion a 'myth' - exaggerating picturesque elements of the writer's personality, embroidering anecdotes and, in the end, rendering the writer as a fictional character. For every major literary figure, there are dozens of myths flying around.
In Excavating Kafka, James Hawes tackles some of the myths that have built up around the writer. He suggests that Kafka is generally touted - both in 'popular culture' and in the worthy avenues of academe - as a gaunt, melancholy, saint-like type, staring out of blurred black-and-white photographs with anguished eyes. He was a man who ordered in his will that his works should be destroyed, who languished in obscurity throughout his lifetime, who was 'crushed by a dead-end bureaucratic job' and, equally, by a tyrannical father. This Kafka was an all-round seer who had no interest in the reception of his work, so preoccupied was he by his 'Kafkaesque' imagination. 'These are the building blocks of the K-myth,' writes Hawes in his introduction. 'Unfortunately, they are all rubbish.'
Hawes, a former academic who spent 10 years studying and teaching Kafka, insists that he was not a 'lonely Middle European Nostradamus'. Rather, he lived with his parents and was set up with a relatively cushy job (six hours a day for the equivalent of £58,000 today), leaving him plenty of time to write. Thanks to his literary connections, he won a major literary prize in his early thirties before even publishing a book. He was not tragically unrequited in his love affairs; nor was he virtually unknown in his lifetime ('we see him named three times in two entirely different articles in a single edition of the Prague Daily News in 1918'). Hawes even proposes that Kafka didn't really want his work to be burned after his death and knew full well that the loyal Max Brod would never do it.
Hawes's Kafka is a canny, funny, worldly man who liked to relax by socialising with his many friends, visiting the occasional prostitute - and reading porn. The fact that Kafka subscribed to two erotic journals is presented as a grand revelation: 'No one has ever shown his readers what we are about to see: Kafka's porn.' There follow some pretty weird pen-and-ink drawings, fin de siècle in style, although Hawes also admits that 'Kafka's porn is no real secret. The mystery is that it should seem like one.' This aspect of the book has caused a furious row to erupt among German-speaking Kafka scholars, with several accusing Hawes of sensationalisation, prudishness and even anti-Semitism.
Read more:
