INTRODUCTION

During his lifetime Franz Kafka remained almost utterly unknown. Max Brod writes that after his friend’s death it was not easy to find an important publisher who would undertake to bring out a posthumous edition of Kafka’s work. Gerhart Hauptmann, a publisher to whom Brod appealed for help, had never heard of Kafka.

Today—forty-two years since Kafka’s death—the picture is radically changed. The literary world has deep interest in Franz Kafka, the artist described by Claude Mauriac as “this very sick man, stricken in both mind and body” who “personifies the imbalance of our time.” Today almost all literary reviews, whether English or American, French or German, reflect this interest. All of Kafka’s writings are available in English as well as Max Brod’s Franz Kafka, a Biography.

As Max Brod has noted, “Now that the personality of Kafka has more or less entered the common domain, we are faced with the inevitable distortions of his image.” Time only—with its production of many portraitures of Kafka, the man and the artist—will allow the true image of this complex figure to emerge. The reader who desires to know that true image, to understand the “imbalance of our time,” and to see how Kafka personifies it, will welcome this biography written by two well-known French critics, R. M. Albérès and Pierre de Boisdeffre and translated by Dr. Wade Baskin.

The singular value of Kafka: The Torment of Man is that it points out not only the strength of Kafka’s writing but also the profound insights therein. “Today many voices, beginning with Beckett’s,” say the authors, “seem to be echoes of his voice.… With Kafka the writer begins to descend from the regions ruled by power and glory … to those in which he is besieged by uncertainty, anguish, and humiliation.” This prophetic quality was seen, too, by Walter Kaufmann, who has described Kafka as standing between Nietzsche and the existentialists, as picturing “the world into which Heidegger’s man, in Sein und Zeit is ‘thrown,’ the godless world of Sartre, the ‘absurd’ world of Camus.”

Kafka, who in 1906 received his doctorate in Jurisprudence, and who worked first in a private insurance company and then at a semigovernmental post in Prague, never looked upon literature as a career, but it was basic to his life. As Albérès and de Boisdeffre say, to Kafka it was a religion. He said again and again, “I am nothing except literature.” His writing—his literature—was bound word for word to his life. Elements of autobiography, according to those who knew him, rather obviously abound in his work. In his Diaries he wrote: “At this moment I have a great need to root out my anxiety by describing it completely, and as it comes from the depths of my being to transfer it to the depths of the paper.” This moment for Kafka was a lifetime.

Thus to know Kafka one studies biographical facts side by side with such singular productions as The Metamorphosis, The Great Wall of China, In the Penal Colony, The Trial, and The Castle. In these—and in the other works of this Jew, whose mother tongue was German—the strange fascination lies in the fact that if Kafka, as Philip Rahv suggests, “arouses in us a sense of immediate relatedness, of strong even if uneasy identification, it is because of the profound quality of his feeling for the experience of human loss, estrangement, guilt and anxiety—an experience increasingly dominant in the modern age.”

The problem—one of estrangement, guilt and anxiety—with which all Kafka’s work is concerned is a moral and spiritual one. This Edwin Muir has noted in his introduction to The Great Wall of China and he remarks further: “It is a twofold problem: that of finding one’s true vocation, one’s true place, whatever it may be, in the community; and that of acting in accordance with the will of heavenly powers.”

In imaginatively presenting this problem—his own and one that has become crucial in the culture of our time—Kafka has produced a body of work in which negative elements seem to abound, but in which, too, there remains a consuming yearning for the truth. Harry Slochower in “The Use of Myth in Kafka and Mann” says, “He does not end in a Kierkegaardian ‘either/or’, and he does not end with submission or surrender. The quest in Kafka is also an inevitable and persisting feature of man’s way. In its persistence lies the promise of the quest.”

In this literature of quest, of seeking, certainly no problem is solved, no satisfactory answer to man’s plight is offered. Edwin Muir has correctly observed, “The greatness of Kafka lies not in his having solved the problem, which would be absurd, but rather in his having realised it as it has never been realised before, illuminating it with a power of imagination and thought unexampled in his time.”

Margaret C. O’Riley, Ph. D.

Southeastern State College