[ Pages from Der Amethyst (1906) ]The Gate
An erotic book of Kafka was recently discovered from a
British Library in London and at the Bodleian Library (Oxford University) by
James Hawes, the academic and Kafka expert. Hawes revealed some of this erotic
material in Excavating Kafka, published by Dr Franz Blei. Blei was the man who
first published Kafka in 1908, with Meditation, a series of miniature stories
later gathered in his book, according to the Friday, August 15 2008 edition of
The Guardian.
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Czech-born German-speaking Franz Kafka is considered
the father of modern fiction and his posthumously published novels and short
stories like The Metamorphosis, The Castle and The Trial are treated as modern
classics in the global literature. A common theme in those works is the
alienation of 20th century man.
He was born no July 3, 1883 into a middle-class family
in Prague, the capital of Bohemia, a kingdom then part of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, and grew up in an atmosphere of familial tensions and social rejection
that he experienced as a member of Prague's Jewish minority. His attitude to
his Jewish heritage was ambivalent. In a diary he wrote: ''What have I in
common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand
very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.'' Kafka was the eldest of
six children. He had two younger brothers, George and Heinrich (who died at the
ages of fifteen months and six months, respectively) and three younger sisters,
Gabriele ("Elli") (1889–1941), Valerie ("Valli")
(1890–1942), and Ottilie ("Ottla") (1892–1943). Ottilie was sent to
the concentration camp and died there.
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In Kafka’s The Trial, the three major points of the
novel are found in the ninth chapter:
1) One has to enter through the gate.
2) The gate is forbidden for him
3) The gate is only meant for him.
The novel is about a country man comes to appear before
the law and he is not allowed to enter. The gatekeeper tells him, "If it
tempts you so much, try it in spite of my prohibition. But take note: I am
powerful. And I am only the lowliest gatekeeper. But from room to room stand
gatekeepers, each more powerful than the other. I can’t endure even one glimpse
of the third."
The man from the country has not expected such
difficulties. He thinks the law should always be accessible for everyone, but
as he now looks more closely at the gatekeeper in his fur coat, at his large
pointed nose and his long, thin, black Tartar’s beard, he decides that it would
be better to wait until he gets permission to go inside. The gatekeeper gives
him a stool and allows him to sit down at the side in front of the gate. There
he sits for days and years.
He makes many attempts to be let in, and he wears the
gatekeeper out with his requests. The gatekeeper often interrogates him
briefly, questioning him about his homeland and many other things. But they are
indifferent questions, the kind great men put, and at the end, he always tells
him once more that he cannot let him inside yet. The man, who has equipped
himself with many things for his journey, spends everything, no matter how
valuable, to win over the gatekeeper. The latter takes it all but, as he does
so, says, "I am taking this only so that you do not think you have failed
to do anything."
During the many years the man observes the gatekeeper
almost continuously. He forgets the other gatekeepers, and this one seems to
him the only obstacle for entry into the law. He curses the unlucky
circumstance -- in the first years, thoughtlessly and out loud and as he grows
old, mumbling to himself. He becomes childish and, since in the long years
studying the gatekeeper he has come to know the fleas in his fur collar, he even
asks the fleas to help him persuade the gatekeeper. Finally his eyesight grows
weak and he does not know whether things are really darker around him or
whether his eyes are merely deceiving him. But he recognizes now, in the
darkness, an illumination which breaks inextinguishably out of the gateway to
the law. Now he no longer has much time to live. Before his death, he gathers
in his head all his experiences of the entire time up into one question which
he has not yet put to the gatekeeper. He waves to him, since he can no longer
lift up his stiffening body. The gatekeeper has to bend way down to him, for
the great difference has changed things to the disadvantage of the man.
"What do you still want to know, then?" the
gatekeeper inquires. "You are insatiable."
"Everyone strives after the law," says the
man. “So how is that in these many years, no one except me has requested
entry?"
The gatekeeper sees that the man is already dying and
in order to reach his diminishing sense of hearing, he shouts at him,
"Here no one else can gain entry since this entrance was assigned only to
you. I’m going now to close it."
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Away from conventional critical appreciation that the
‘gate’ is a symbol of religion and God, let us think of another alternative.
What else can this ‘gate’ and ‘gatekeepers’ stand for?
It is said that Kafka had many girlfriends, many
affairs, and a number of broken engagements. During 1911 and 1912, he was
attracted to Flora Klug and Mania Tschissik, both actresses in the Prague
Jewish Theater. On August 13, 1912, he met Felice Bauer, a 24-year-old
businesswoman from Berlin. Their relationship lasted for five years. Felice
later moved to the United States, where she died in 1960. In August 1917, Kafka
discovered that he had contracted tuberculosis and during his treatment, he
fell in love with a woman named Milena Jesenská, a 24-year-old writer who had
translated some of his stories into Czech. Kafka's fear of sexuality was
probably the main reason for his decision to leave Milena. In 1913, he wrote in
his diary Der Coitus als Bestrafung des Glückes des Beisammenseins, [The Coitus
as punishment of the luck of the gathering] and in the winter of 1920-21, he
stopped sending her regular letters. After they separated, she worked as a
journalist and died in a German concentration camp in 1944. After their
relationship ended, Kafka wrote his last novel, The Castle, where ‘K’ the
protagonist of the novel. arrives at a village, claiming to be a land surveyor.
In January, 1919, Kafka met Julie Wohryzek in the
Italian Tyrol. It was a short-term relationship and perhaps Kafka lost his
interest but interestingly enough, he may have enjoyed a brief physical
relationship unlike to his other relationships.
Kafka also enjoyed a brief loving friendship with Minze
Eisner before met Dora Diamant, a 25-year-old woman from an Orthodox Jewish
family who worked in the kitchen of a holiday camp in 1922. In 1924, Kafka
moved with Dora to the Kierling Sanatorium outside Vienna. When he wrote to
Dora’s father and proposed marriage to Dora, the reply was "no.” Kafka
died of tuberculosis on June 3, 1924. However, Dora later described herself as
"the wife of Franz Kafka." She died in London in 1952.
Throughout his life, we observe Kafka’s deep feelings
towards his girlfriends as well as his concerns about their suitability as
married partners. We also observe his growing fears about his health, and most
important, we observe his decision to place the discipline of his art above his
hopes for personal happiness.
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Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis) was the short story
with which Kafka’s first creative period started. In this story, the
protagonist, Gregor Samsa, awoke from uneasy dreams to find out that he had
turned, overnight, into a giant insect. He remained trapped in his room by his
petit bourgeois family. His father threw an apple core at Gregor and Gregor
dies. As the protagonist spent more time as an insect, he began to heal at an
accelerated rate. "Am I less sensitive now?" he asks. Gregor
virtually felt himself alienated and lonely. If Prufrock was T.S. Eliot, it is
also fair to say that Gregor Samsa was Kafka, who was basically a giant
consumptive insect in a world of strangers. His mother’s intentions from the
beginning appeared to be more concerned for her financial support than Gregor's
happiness. His sister was very close to him and was the only member of the
family who truly only cared about his happiness or well being She was the only
member of the family that brought him food or ventured into his room after his
metamorphosis. She even took the care to notice what foods Gregor particularly
liked and brought more of the same for him.
We once again see the significance of a picture when
Gregor's mother and sister begin moving things from his room to accommodate his
new shape, Gregor becomes enraged, as he does not want to completely give up
his old life and is torn between his new desires and the good memories of his
life. The one item in his room that he decides to keep is his picture of a
woman in a fur coat. His mother and sister are trying to move the picture, by
distancing him from his personal feelings. Gregor chooses to make a stand on
that which represents his effeminacy. He displays his sexuality and his mother
witnesses it, much to her shock and dismay. Gregor's father returns to find his
mother passed out and becomes enraged at Gregor. Gregor marvels at how
different his father seems now than before his metamorphosis: "And yet,
and yet, could that be his father?"
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What I want to point out is that Kafka’s relationship
with those close to him has always remained under suspicion and through his
physical intimacy with other gender (say Gregor’s sister), it kept him away,
mentally. This may be why Kafka didn't find any particular success with
relationships in his love life. Unable to reconcile his physical urges with his
romantic longings, he had a series of prolonged, probably chaste, engagements
that invariably ended in his breaking off the relationship. It makes a clear
distinctive reason that the ‘suppressed libido’ of Kafka may have caused him to
write a porno book along with all the other masterpieces he created.
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Kafka never visited the United States. But Kafka wrote
Der Verschollene (retitled Amerika), which was published as his posthumous
unfinished novel in 1927. The protagonist of the novel is Karl Rossmann, a
17-year-old young adult. As he enters New York Harbor as an immigrant and sees
the Statue of Liberty, he observes that she holds in her right hand not a lamp,
but a sword. For Kafka, we can find a great resemblance between sexuality and
America. He had never experienced these two, yet they both bothered him.
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So for Kafka, sexuality was the gate...
1) One had to enter through the gate.
2) The gate was forbidden for that person
3) The gate was only meant for that person
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