The Aphorisms of Kafka: An invaluable guidance along this shadowy path

Early on the morning of August 11th, 1917, Franz Kafka suffered a pulmonary haemorrhage and coughed up blood. He knew at once that he had contracted tuberculosis, at the time an incurable disease which would almost certainly kill him, sooner rather than later. He had just turned 34. He would die in 1924, at the age of 40.

He greeted the onset of the illness with a strange, buoyant serenity. He wrote to his friend Max Brod: “Sometimes it seems to me that my brain and lungs came to an agreement without my knowledge. ‘Things can’t go on this way,’ said the brain, and after five years the lungs declared that they were ready to help.”

The “five years” he speaks of was the span of his sporadic and deeply troubled love affair with Felice Bauer, whom he had met at Brod’s home in 1912. That first encounter seemed less than auspicious. In his diary he described Felice: “Bony, empty face that wore its emptiness openly. Bare throat. A blouse thrown on.” Nevertheless, he knew immediately that he was fated: “by the time I was seated I already had an unshakeable opinion”.

Five years later, the question of marriage had become urgent. Dithering as ever, and racked by guilt, Kafka sought desperately for a way out. His lungs, as he wrote, were ready to help. Stricken by a fatal illness – “the infection whose inflammation is called Felice”, says the diary – he was able to breathe easily again.

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Reiner Stach provides the apt Freudian term for the gift Kafka had been delivered: “primary morbid gain”. Becoming an invalide would relieve him of many of the pressures of life, pressures that, since he was Kafka, weighed on him with an unnatural severity. Now, Stach writes, he “could not be forced to do anything at all, neither commit to marriage nor work overtime at the office, much less take the needs of his publishers, critics and readers into account...”

The winter and early spring of 1917 had been unusually productive for this usually costive writer. His sister Ottla had lent him a cottage she had rented in Golden Lane below Hradčany Castle in the heart of Prague. Here he could write in peace, away from the distractions of his parents’ apartment, where he still lived.

Ottla had moved to the tiny village of Zürau in northern Bohemia, where she worked as a farm manager. Kafka secured extended sick leave from his job at the workers’ insurance agency in Prague, and a month after the haemorrhage he moved in with her, to begin a stay that lasted for eight months. Ottla Kafka, who was to die in a Nazi concentration camp, is one of the quiet heroines of 20th-century literature.

In Zürau, Kafka collected a series of aphorisms, 109 of them, which he transferred from notebooks on to a set of single, thin sheets of paper. In these gnomic jottings, some of them consisting of no more than a few words, he had moved into new literary territory. As he wrote, “I have never been in this place before.” Here he was dealing with, as he saw it, ultimate things. From fictional writing “I can still have passing satisfaction,” he noted, “but happiness only if I can raise the world into the pure, the true, and the immutable.”

This is an extraordinary departure from his previously tentative artistic ambitions. In fact, in the aphorisms he seems less artist than philosopher, or even a scholar of the Talmud. A Platonist, he had always held that beyond and above the world of mere things lay the world of the spirit – the real world – and it was in the latter that he now sought the redeeming flame. As he wrote in Aphorism 62, “The fact that there is nothing but a world of the spirit takes away our hope and gives us certainty.”

In Stach and Frisch’s book, the aphorisms are printed in German and English on the left-hand pages, accompanied on the right by deeply perceptive editorial commentaries. Reiner Stach is the author of a masterful, and surely definitive, three-volume biography of Kafka – if you haven’t read it, you should – and his commanding knowledge of Kafka’s life and work richly informs his interpretations of these hitherto generally neglected masterpieces of concentrated thought and quasi-mystical insight.

Stach provides invaluable guidance along this shadowy path. The aphorisms are as enigmatic as they are beautiful. Probably the most famous is Aphorism 16, “A cage went in search of a bird” – note that kavka is “jackdaw’ in Czech – but many others speak things we seem always to have known, without knowing we knew them. Indeed, it could be argued that, for all their brevity and compression, in the aphorisms we find the essential Kafka.