On once again re-reading the penultimate fragment of Robert Walser’s Jakob von Gunten—the part where Herr Benja-menta and the narrator go off traveling together, dreaming of absolute freedom—I sense a possible family resemblance with “The Wish to Become an Indian,” one of the short prose pieces in Contemplation, Kafka’s first published book. In that brief, indecisive piece of juvenilia, Kafka reveals his genuine desire to be an Indian, always on the alert and riding his horse at full gallop through the wide world. While it is an indecisive piece, and dates from very early in his career, there, in all its plenitude, is the spirit of a Kafka newly emerged from reading Walser.
Revisiting that brief text written by the incipient Kafka—a prose that already contains in condensed form the simultaneously incomprehensible and surprisingly diaphanous writer that he became—makes me realize that Kafka was not always Kafka. Nowadays we are accustomed to reading him in that guise, but there was a period—a time full of indecisions and vacillations—when he went through the classic phase all such writers go through, those writers who want to gallop through the world, having cut themselves adrift from the pusillanimous, domestic literary landscape of their time, which is to say that Kafka also had to forge his own style. He invented it in the shadow of Walser, but also of Kleist, Chekhov, Dickens, and the Cervantine Flaubert.
No one has perhaps made a finer study of those early years than Reiner Stach in Kafka: The Decisive Years. It’s a book I returned to recently and which I think provides a perfect antidote to the all-consuming, over-the-top veneration of Kafka felt by readers who still believe his creativity came out of nowhere, simply because he was a genius. Kafka probably was a genius, but he was not so blinkered as to think that he could write out of an inner life bereft of experiences. “On the contrary, his skilled use of influences and realia reveals that he is an author of Modernity, in this regard on a par with Musil, Joyce, Broch and Arno Schmidt,” writes Reiner Stach in his study of the years in which a writer from Prague was trying to become Kafka, and how in order to do so, he had first and foremost to liberate himself from his friend Brod, who suggested they write books together, à quatre mains. Once he had freed himself from that tedious project, he began to read seriously, Dickens, for example, an author whose works are full of humor, a humor people have taken a very long time to find in Kafka, who wrote his episodic The Man Who Disappeared (otherwise known as Amerika) with the intention of writing a comic Dickensian novel, which is why Walter Benjamin said of the book that it was, above all, a knockabout comedy with a laugh on every page. And even in The Castle and The Trial, books that ooze oppressive angst, there are still many scenes that provoke real hilarity, but this often escapes the reader, who is too immersed in the absurd, problematic, and quite simply terrifying plot. However, those humorous elements are the counterpoint Kafka himself used to defuse the drama, and that humor dates from the days when he would read Robert Walser out loud to himself and crease up laughing, especially when reading Jakob von Gunten: “One learns very little here, there is a shortage of teachers, and none of us boys of the Benjamenta Institute will ever come to anything.”
Kafka found his teachers in the books written by his favorite authors. During his apprenticeship, around 1910, he began working in a very peculiar laboratory of influences, the most remarkable of the twentieth century. On the one hand there were the Diaries, and on the other the tentative prose pieces that became that first book, Contemplation, published in 1912. One might say that Kafka had begun to be Kafka many years before and had left behind certain indecisions. “I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this town, in my family,” he wrote in “The Passenger.” At the time, Kafka didn’t even feel able to justify what he was doing there on that platform, holding on to that strap, letting himself be carried along by that tram. Even then, though, Kafka was implacable. For example, with the girl who takes up her position near the exit, ready to alight. “She is as distinct to me as if I had run my hands over her… Her small ear is close-set, but since I am near her, I can see the whole ridge of the whorl of her right ear and the shadow at the root of it,” he writes. And he concludes by wondering how it is that the girl is not equally amazed at herself, but instead keeps her mouth tightly shut and says nothing.
All this happened during those years of decisive reading, the years of uncertainties lived out on the platforms of all those trams. When the Nabokovs were living in Berlin in 1922, they would ride the same tram as Kafka, the Berlin-Lichterfelde. They never spoke to Kafka because they didn’t know it was him, but Vera Nabokov always claimed to remember his face: “its pallor, the tightness of the skin, those most extraordinary eyes, hypnotic eyes glowing in a cave.”
Almost no one ever quite emerges from the dark cave of their formative years. Not even Kafka. At the time, no one required him to justify what he was reading, nor what he was doing standing on life’s strange platform, but the great tram carrying him beyond those initial influences was already setting off. “Nobody asks me to put up a defense, but that is irrelevant.”
(Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa)
Enrique Vila-Matas is considered to be one of Spain’s finest writers, with many prizewinning books translated into numerous languages; his novel Mac & His Problem, published in 2019, was longlisted for the International Booker Prize. His translator, Margaret Jull Costa, has been doing literary translations from Spanish and Portuguese for over thirty years.
