It is an intimate picture of one of the 20th century’s most influential writers as an individual — he had left explicit instructions to Brod to destroy all his papers after his death, Brod overrode the request.
For entire generations, Gregor Samsa has put the Kafkaesque into existential dread. The protagonist in Franz Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis, who wakes up to find that he has been transformed into a giant insect, has been the biggest advocate of his creator’s predilection for urban angst.
But turns out, Kafka might not have been as given to solemnity as his writings make him out to be. A new exhibition, “Kafka: Making of an Icon”, that opens at Oxford’s Bodleian Library on May 30 to mark the Austrian writer’s death centenary in 2024, hopes to give his image a makeover by showing that there’s more to Kafka than gloom and doom. And that, for someone who died at 40 and suffered from a debilitating bout of tuberculosis in the last few years, a degree of pessimism was not entirely out of place.
A touch of the earnest marks Kafka’s humour: Among the papers that will go on display, there is a letter to his superior at the insurance company where he worked around 1912. It is an application for a sick leave, only Kafka had not been gallivanting in the time he played truant — he had pulled an all-nighter working on his story, “The Judgment”. In another document, his friend and literary executor Max Brod writes of a man given to bouts of hysterical laughter during reading sessions.
It is an intimate picture of one of the 20th century’s most influential writers as an individual — he had left explicit instructions to Brod to destroy all his papers after his death, Brod overrode the request.
Later-day readings of Kafka have contended that the nightmarish tenor of alienation that has come to characterise his works might possibly have been a matter of overinterpretation. Perhaps there is some truth to it. After all, who can deny the thread of absurdity that comes from a man giving in to self-pity and imagining himself to have turned into a “monstrous vermin”?
