ecce homo

Zadie Smith has written an excellent review of a new "biographical essay" about Franz Kafka in The New York Review of Books. In it, she considers the the way Kafka has come to us, through biographers and editors. Looming over all the commentary and criticism is Max Brod, the friend who refused to burn the manuscripts but may have damaged them in other ways:

For when it came to editing the novels, Brod's sympathy for the theological would seem to have guided his hand. Kafka's system of ordering chapters was often unclear, occasionally nonexistent; it was Brod who collated The Trial in the form with which we are familiar. If it feels like a journey toward an absent God— so the argument goes—that's because Brod placed the God-shaped hole at the end. The penultimate chapter, containing the pseudo-haggadic parable "Before the Law," might have gone anywhere, and placing it anywhere else skews the trajectory of ascension; no longer a journey toward the supreme incomprehensibility, but a journey without destination, into which a mystery is thrust and then succeeded by the quotidian once more.

Smith also considers how a biographical leveling of Kafka might inform or alter a critical appraisal. Kafka, it turns out, enjoyed exaggeration, positively reveled in accentuating the negative:

For Kafka, the prospect of a journey from Berlin to Prague is "a foolhardiness whose parallel you can only find by leafing back through the pages of history, say to Napoleon's march to Russia." A brief visit to his fiancée "couldn't have been worse. The next thing will be impalement."

And her discussion of Kafka's daily schedule makes Kafka especially concrete--a physical and fallible person prone to frittering away his free hours:

Begley is particularly astute on the bizarre organization of Kafka's writing day. At the Assicurazioni Generali, Kafka despaired of his twelve-hour shifts that left no time for writing; two years later, promoted to the position of chief clerk at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute, he was now on the one-shift system, 8:30 AM until 2:30 PM. And then what? Lunch until 3:30, then sleep until 7:30, then exercises, then a family dinner. After which he started work around 11 PM (as Begley points out, the letter- and diary-writing took up at least an hour a day, and more usually two), and then "depending on my strength, inclination, and luck, until one, two, or three o'clock, once even till six in the morning." Then "every imaginable effort to go to sleep," as he fitfully rested before leaving to go to the office once more. This routine left him permanently on the verge of collapse.