Kafka and the Double Life

The Double Life

In a journal entry dated February 19th, 1911 Kafka writes about the exhaustion of living a double life:

“When I tried to get out of bed today I simply collapsed. There’s a very simple reason for it, I am completely overworked. Not by the office but by my other work. The office plays an innocent part in it only insofar as, if I didn’t have to go there, I could live in peace for my work and wouldn’t have to spend those 6 hours a day there, which have so tormented me that you cannot imagine it, especially on Friday and Saturday, because I was full of my concerns. In the end as I am well aware this is only chatter, it’s my fault and the office has the clearest and most justified claims on me. But for me it is a horrible double life from which insanity is probably the only way out.”

In what did this double life consist? On the one side Kafka’s life as a clerk at an insurance office, on the other, his life as a writer. A life lived on two planes, or rather between two planes, which remain formally incommensurable. That is: they are incongruent, the one world (e.g. the world of insurance) excludes the other (of writing): the one destroys the reality of the other. Put differently, from the perspective of one world, from inside it, the other is rendered false.

It is this incommensurability that splits Kafka and rends him through. His truth, the expression of his being, the trace of which is his writing, gathered together in the evening hours, is obliterated when he walks into the insurance office. At the same time, this tension forms one of the motors of his writing, furnishing him with the intractabilities of life that the writings, at an unconscious level, explore.

But is there no exit from this conundrum? The answer, as everyone who has read Kafka should know, is no. Properly speaking, there is no exit.

Indeed, if there is a single theme that endures throughout Kafka’s writing is that of the exit : of finding a way out when there is no way out. Why is there no way out? Because, as Kafka’s writings bear testament, movements always take place within a given totality or structure, that is, within the coordinates of familial, social, political, and economic life. Real escapes to the outside, if they happen, are rare, precise, and partial. Most movements (whether geographic or socioeconomic (e.g. up or down the ladder)) merely mark a reposition within the current arrangement, and are thus superficial. Anyone who has ever desperately sought escape will know this: escape is only ever temporary.

In Kafka’s stories, it is the impossibility of a (real) escape that triggers the metamorphosis. If the current situation is truly unendurable, and if actual, external escape is by all routes thwarted, then it is the internal that will be transformed: and, like any internal/spiritual transformation, it can only be radical. What is transformed in the spirit? Nothing less than the subject’s appropriation of the world ; an inflection of spirit, an imperceptible rotation, which changes the whole world, opening up new fields of difference/intensity. It is the life of the ‘Hunger Artist’ of the eponymous short story, a spirit that denies the natural order of its body and now only knows how to starve. Only in such starvation can the artist maintain the intensity of the world, its new world, a relation upon which the consistency of its Being depends.

It is here that we happen upon religious quality of Kafka’s work, a quality which brings him closest to his beloved Kierkegaard, and equally marks the point of their disjunction. What these men share in common is their tendency to an internal mortification; a dying-to-the-world. Theirs is a spirit grown too bloated for its body, that turns upon it. A spirit that needs other worlds, new worlds, worlds that they seek to construct. It is by giving language to this need that they have become universal thinkers; it is also reason for the pathological aspect of their work. More on this below.

But there is a difference. Whereas the direction of Kierkegaard’s movement is upwards, seeking the pacification of a loving God within which the subject is meant to ground itself, Kafka refuses such flights of transcendence. His movements are immanent and horizontal: of burrowings beneath the surface of the world and its capture. One stays in bed, but becomes a bug. One cannot enter the Castle, and so one builds a life around it. It is not the spiritual transformation as such that constitutes the content of Kafka’s writing, but the necessity of making one - an attempt which is then botched, which, in its turn, produces new directions. “Reality” stays the same while the world changes.

These starts and failures and their liminal inbetweens form the dialectical motor of Kafka’s writings, best exemplified in his novels, which could go on forever. More than any other modernist writer, Kafka’s writings are formal mirrors of life: their form (endless, serpentine, and unpredictable) is homologous to the immanent and infinite unfolding of problems which must be solved. Therein lies Kafka’s “existentialism”: Life is a series of problems that open up onto other problems until one meets a problem which one cannot solve, and one dies.

The result is the uncannny, elliptical, mundane, and labyrinthine worlds that today we call Kafkaesque. Worlds, the sense of which are produced by reversals, doublings, accelerations, pointless adventures, movement for movement’s sake. Worlds that are the movement of an unceasing charge of life. All of it done, we realise, to resist the truth that confronts us in the diaries : the blackhole of despair.

On Despair

What is despair? For Kafka despair is capture. It is not suffering as such, but suffering for nothing. Rather like a smothering. A suffering beyond help, powerful but without a clear source, one which straddles inside and outside, always new but ever eternal. Brought to its conclusion, despair tells of certain destruction. A life gone and wasted. Time swallowed up. The dread of death, of living death, but without peace of death. In short, a life of unfreedom, of slavery, but one which continues in meaning, in the meaningful horrendous, without anaesthetics.

Despair is the life of the Ape in “A Report to The Academy” whose cage is too low to stand in and too narrow to sit down in, and thus one can only squat “knees bent and trembling.”

Despair is the life of Gregor who cannot get out of bed for if he should face the hatred and misunderstanding of his family (those he loves most in the world) it will destroy him. Unable to be himself, and unable not to, caught between these two impossibilities, he turns away from the intensities of this cruel and over-coded field (the Nuclear family) and, in doing so, away from the human entirely (for it is only by and through this matrix that he knows the human, and by extension, himself). Gregor becomes the wretchedness of his being, a beetle: the figure of squashing, of abject.

Despair is the life of Franz Kafka, who, for whatever reason, was in excess of something. There is something in Kafka, a thorn in his side let’s say, that exceeded both world and self; equal parts an anguish, an ecstasy, and an ingenuity, for which writing, and only writing, served as reprieve.

Kafka wrote to give expression to his strongest and queerest passions. For a moment’s respite, outside of time. As an exercise of discipline. To contend with his strange self-loathings (and body dysmorphia). But he also wrote to oppose the worlds that debased him and others by taking on the structural forces of social control. How? By challenging and upending their logics in a subliminal manner. Kafka is not the type to name the enemy and rage against him, and this, rather than a failure, is part of his appeal. More interesting for him is the complicity, by ourselves and others, in these logics. Kafka subverts by following these logics while injecting new, strange or uncanny terms that disorient us, thereby hitting on the (personal and political) unconscious. (R.I.P David Lynch, a big fan of Kafka, whose work followed a similar path.)

Writing … and everything else

And yet, despite his life, which as he once put it “belonged to literature,” Kafka is duty bound to his insurance work. He admits as much in the diary entry. This, we can speculate, both for financial reasons, as well as a need to be what his parents and society no doubt demanded of him: to be a bourgeois family man.

But I suspect there is another reason that prevented him from living a life devoted solely to writing … he didn’t want it. Not because he was afraid of it, but because he knew his body and mind could not have handled it.

This is why, relative to other writers, he wrote as little as he did (time constraints notwithstanding). The truth is, Kafka’s writings are unsustainable; and precisely in this lay their genius. His writings are traces of an imagination contending with so much that it threatens to overwhelm him. He needed something else, the another world - the ‘everything else’ - that served as an anchor in his life. Much as he despaired of it, Kafka knew that, without his double life, he would be overcome by the internal burrowings and find himself lost in the maze. This is the reason for the despair, which takes the form of the threat of ‘insanity’: that which deadened him kept him alive.

It is fashionable now to quip that these anguished poets and writers could have benefited from therapy. That these men - alienated, spiritually morbid, absolute-obsessed - are the way they are because of the structures they found themselves in (e.g. toxic masculinity, the alienation of industrial life). There is more than a kernel of truth in this.

That being said, I wonder if all therapy in the world would have ‘cured’ Kafka of his excess, or if such a ‘resolution’ would have been desirable for him or for us. We might apply to Kafka the point once made of of Nietzsche, that, to paraphrase, pathological formations are not a reason to dismiss a thinker ipso facto. Why? Because such distortions open up onto real and interesting problematics. Put differently, the formations are the embodiment of real (ontological, psychic, libidinal) problems/contradictions. (Whether they are ‘worked through’ correctly is another question.) After all, what else is the history of culture if not the output of boredom, restlessness, and frustration?

Then again, I do like to think a healthy dose of therapy might have allowed Kafka to be loved. It is the thing I believe he longed for most in the world.

Whatever the reasons, whatever we want to make of Kafka, whatever he should or should not have done, of this we can be certain: Kafka wrote because he had to. Writing for him was an addiction. We are all subject to addictions, of excesses. Spurred on by the need to go on as long as we can, we seek the knife’s edge between life and death. Whether smoking, drinking, frantic activity or ineluctable vegetation. Despair, if it is to be endured, must be sublimated and shot through with a perverse pleasure. (This being one definition of the Freudian death-drive.)

It is for this movement for need of movement, of attempted escape, of transmogrification, the burrowings and gnashings of a chained animal, the gallows humour that we love Kafka and we read him - this, and for his kindness.

(This essay was inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature.)