Kafka: The Early Years by Reiner Stach

Author:Reiner Stach [Stach, Reiner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2016-10-25T04:00:00+00:00

It was his first publication, at the age of twenty-four, and Kafka was surely heartened. Might it not be possible after all to patch together “Description of a Struggle” into a complete literary work? He was now inclined to let Blei have the “Conversation with the Supplicant” and “Conversation with the Drunkard” for the following volume (a decision he would rue).19 But nothing more than these samples was published in Hyperion; the public did not hear anything about a project for a novel, and as a result, the few critics who did know still regarded Kafka as an author of short prose.

This categorization cried out for comparisons: the current masters of this form were Peter Altenberg and Robert Walser—the former from Austria, and the latter from Switzerland, both of them notorious eccentrics and difficult to get along with personally and professionally. Even the earliest critics recognized that Kafka did not have much in common with Altenberg’s impressionistic dabs, with often comical, yet grief-stricken surges of emotion punctuated by myriad dashes and exclamation points.20 However, people did see a strong connection to Walser, such a strong one, in fact, that there was even speculation that “Franz Kafka” was really a pseudonym of Robert Walser. The notion was not so outlandish, especially among those who knew that the earliest advocate of Walser, when he was a complete unknown, had been none other than Franz Blei. “Kafka is not Walser,” Blei had to state in order to appease an attentive reader, “he is actually a young man in Prague who bears this name.” When Kafka’s first book, Meditation, was published, even Robert Musil expressed his “unease” because it seemed “like a variant of the Walser type,” and he felt “that Walser’s distinctive approach ought to remain unique and is not suited to preside over a literary genre.”21

The extent of Walser’s influence on Kafka is hard to determine conclusively. During the extraordinarily long time it took Kafka to write “Description of a Struggle,” he was bombarded with impressions from literary texts he had read. The simulated schoolboy prose in Walser’s first book publication, Fritz Kocher’s Essays (1904), was not a suitable model, and Kafka does not seem to have known its contents in the conceptual phase of “Description of a Struggle.” Walser’s short prose began to be published in Die neue Rundschau in 1907, when Kafka was already reading sections of his “Description of a Struggle” aloud. Brod recalls that Kafka first discovered Walser at this time and burst into laughter when quoting Walser’s texts.22 Hence, at most Walser could have influenced the undatable pieces in Hyperion that did not originate from “Description of a Struggle”; conceivably this was where Kafka first recognized and came to appreciate the aesthetic weight and the range of shortest prose forms. His later works—beginning with the novel project The Man Who Disappeared—moved quite a distance from the Walser sphere, leaving behind any toying with “impressions” and snapshot views. In 1917, he noted his displeasure with the “use of vague, abstract metaphors” in Walser’s novels.

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