Framing Kafka: YA Texts that Build Background Knowledge Toward Teaching Franz Kafka by Stacy Graber

Do you remember the first time you read Kafka? Do you remember being confused, intrigued, or curious? I think your first experience with Kafka is memorable if baffling. 

Stacy Graber reminds that Kafka just might be perfect for more adolescents than we might think. Stacy is a frequent contributor to Dr. Bickmore's YA Wednesday and her posts always stretch my imagination. Before jumping into Kafka you might check out her posts on Jack Gantos, students and curriculum at the Youngstown English Festival, Updike and others, Kate DiCamillo, Julie Murphy and Joyce Carol Oates, and Semiotics.  Just so you know, none of these posts are quite what you think they may be. Stacy will surprise you.  

Framing Kafka: YA Texts that Build Background Knowledge Toward Teaching Franz Kafka by Stacy Graber

After all, I speak to my own past when I speak to you.  One cannot help being friendly.
--Franz Kafka to 17-year-old, Gustav Janouch

Sadly, the work of Franz Kafka is too often regulated by secondary school culture as literature ostensibly reserved for honors and/or Advanced Placement courses, which is elitist and myopic as his fantastic storylines and gallows humor stand to captivate all readers.  For instance, as a 16-year-old, I remember laughing in awe at the ironic punchline Kafka delivers at the close of “A Hunger Artist,” his unsettling short story focused on carnival freaks and foodways.  Read that piece and you will easily see that kids don’t need David Foster Wallace (2011) to help them puzzle out why Kafka is funny (however charming the explanation).  Young people will understand Kafka’s jokes and love him because he speaks directly to anyone who has ever 1) felt alienated or marginalized, 2) been reduced to bug status by a dictatorial powerbroker, and/or 3) intuited the absurdity of everyday life (--which undoubtedly includes all adolescents).   

In fact, there are so many reasons why Kafka would appeal to adolescents that it almost seems unnecessary to assemble the evidence except to acquaint him with a new audience.  So, toward that end, I will offer a few of Kafka’s themes that would resonate with young people, which I have drawn from patterns observable in his diaries (Kafka, 1975): problematic body-image/self-concept, struggle with anxiety/depression, conflict with a tyrannical father and/or oblivious mother, feelings of entrapment within the prison of a parental home, ambivalence toward intersectional identity, experience of social exclusion/degradation, fear regarding intimacy/sexual impulses, skepticism toward/defiance of authority, intense requirement for solitude, critique of school and work, and transcendence through creative pursuits and/or nature.

Again, toward introducing a new audience to the work of this modernist giant, I will describe resources produced for a young adult audience that do the work of orientation so a high school teacher could contextualize with confidence.

Gustav Janouch (1968/2012), Conversations with Kafka

In this compelling memoir/coming of age account, 17-year old Gustav Janouch lives the fantasy of every Kafka admirer.  The young man’s father, who is employed by the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague, introduces his son to a colleague—the lawyer/writer, Franz Kafka.  And, from that point forward, adopting a level of intimacy seemingly reserved for Kafka’s confidante, Max Brod, Janouch basically enjoys unmediated access to the writer’s thoughts through a series of dialogues captured on several walks through the streets of Prague.

​Hortatory in tone but never condescending, Kafka talks art, literature, science, architecture, language, philosophy, and politics with the young man, while simultaneously offering him a window onto the precarity of his own existence embattled by nemeses such as tuberculosis, anti-Semitism, administrative drudgery, and loneliness.  Janouch’s impulsivity and occasional gaffes are borne patiently and affectionately by Kafka as Janouch reminds Kafka of his younger self (see epigraph); whereas, for Janouch, the conversations suggest a possible future career as a writer/intellectual.  And, though some critics have contested the fidelity of Janouch’s reconstructions, both Max Brod and Dora Dymant praised the account as faithful to the presence or aura of their cherished friend (Brod, 1937/1995, p. 216). 

David Zane Mairowitz and Robert Crumb (1993), Introducing Kafka

​Another remarkable rendering of Kafka’s life and work is David Zane Mairowitz’ contribution to the graphic Introducing… series, the volume on Kafka.  And, no better marriage could there be for a literary tour of the artist’s thematic preoccupations than the angsty, voyeuristic, and satirical art of subversive cartoonist, Robert Crumb.  What this book is able to do perhaps better than any scholarly tome is convey the texture of Kafka’s writing through a series of flickering images, a technique descriptive of the visual style of modernist literary experimentation (BBC, 2018).  

For example, a dialectic of shame and sadism is transmitted through a single panel depicting an image of the father’s rage in the repellent presence of his son/insect in Crumb’s graphic rendering of The Metamorphosis.  Likewise, the futility of an outsider condemned to perpetual exclusion and bleak itinerancy in The Castle is conveyed by Crumb through a kind of cross-hatched, existential shadow puppet theater.  But the union between art and text is strongest in the graphic interpretation of Kafka’s story, “A Hunger Artist,” which Kafka finalized editing as he perished from laryngeal tuberculosis (Mairowitz, 1993, p. 144).  This work, through Crumb’s grotesque and hyperbolic rendering of carnivalesque binaries (e.g., emaciation/corpulence, youth/age, community/solitude, equanimity/compulsion, abstinence/carnality, and vigor/debilitation) makes visible an oneiric grammar of sanctification.       

Mairowitz and Crumb’s rumination on the enduring legacy of Kafka concludes with a representation of the pair as tourists wearing t-shirts emblazoned with Kafka’s image, which is an interrogation of the symbolic economy that greedily exploits the idea of Kafka but cares little about the referent.  

Reiner Stach (2016), Is that Kafka? 99 Finds

​Yet another brilliantly accessible introduction to the work of Kafka is the eminent scholar, Reiner Stach’s (2016) texturally Where’s Waldo-like book, Is that Kafka? 99 Finds.  In a vibrant Q&A session with translator Kurt Beals, hosted by Deutsch Haus (2017) at New York University, Stach remarks that composition of the book was prompted by German high school teachers’ request for a more accessible context-building resource for teaching Kafka—besides the three-volume biography written by Stach.  Seemingly unfazed that his life’s work could not be easily adapted or assimilated, Stach responded to the teachers’ request by writing a book that had the additional benefit of challenging enduring folk-beliefs about the predominately gloomy personality of the writer. 

Indeed, Stach succeeds in creating a more multifaceted portrait of Kafka through a crisp collection of images matched with brief explanatory notes that reveal the writer as a beer-lover, admirer of slapstick humor, bordello patron, proto-techie, closet illustrator, exercise and holistic medicine enthusiast, admirer of indigenous people of North America, committed postcard writer, student of Hebrew, hater of mice, and perhaps even early anti-vaxxer (Stach, 2016, pp. 81-82).  Again, the idea in the array of portrayals is to communicate a less singular and more complicated if contradictory rendering of the artist. Yet, Stach may or may not ultimately disrupt prevailing notions as some of the most compelling primary sources (e.g., Kafka’s niece Gerte’s description of her uncle and Milena Jesenská’s obituary for Kafka (as cited in Stach, 2016, pp. 260-262; pp. 279-280)) confirm the imposing, haunted figure we believe we know.                 

Digital Sources

Of course, this conversation would not be complete without consideration of multimodal, non-print sources that would further serve to frame and animate Kaka’s life and writing for young people.
 
Some of the best resources include the following selections:
Alain de Botton’s (2016) School of Life episode dedicated to Kafka negotiates the meaning of the term Kafkaesque through explanation of imbricated social, historical/biographical, political, and cultural tensions.  Additionally, the style of the video includes the series-characteristic cut-out dramatization and the art of Egon Schiele.
 
Will Self’s (2015) video-travelogue, “Will Self’s Kafka Journey: A Prague Walking Tour,” tracks the cultural critic as he tours biographically significant sites in Prague toward interpreting Kafka’s surreal meditation on the vicissitudes of public service, “A Country Doctor.”
 
Koji Yamamura’s (2007) animated imagining of Kafka’s story, “A Country Doctor,” is a nightmarish vision, which replicates the tone and kinetics of the story through the techniques of distortion, juxtaposition, and tableau.
 
David Foster Wallace’s (2011) reading of a piece originally published in Harper’s Magazine in 1998, “Laughing with Kafka,” includes explanation as to how DFW helps college students understand Kafka’s idiosyncratic sense of humor through study of conceptual metaphors reminiscent of Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980), Metaphors We Live By.

References

BBC Radio Podcasts. (2018).  In our time: Literary Modernism [Podcast].  Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndfxeQSCgM0&t=1534s
Brod, M. (1995). Franz Kafka: A biography (G. Humphreys Roberts, Trans.).  Boston, MA: Da Capo Press. (Original work published in 1937)
De Botton, A. (2016).  School of life: Literature: Franz Kafka.  Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4LyzhkDNBM
Deutsches Haus. (2017).  Is that Kafka? 99 finds: An evening with Reiner Stach and Kurt Beals [Video file].  Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCjjwBklJZg 
Janouch, G. (2012).  Conversations with Kafka (2nd ed.) (G. Rees, Trans.).  New York, NY: New Directions. (Original work published in 1968)
Kafka, F. (1975).  Diaries: 1910-1923.  (J. Kresh, M. Greenberg, & H. Arendt, Trans.).  New York, NY: Schocken Books. (Original work published in 1948)
Mairowitz, D.Z., & Crumb, R. (1993).  Introducing Kafka.  New York, NY: Totem Books.
Self, W. (2015).  Will Self’s Kafka journey: A Prague walking Tour [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niIf080qSfE
Stach, R. (2016).  Is that Kafka? 99 finds (K. Beals, Trans.).  New York, NY: New Directions.
Wallace, D.F. (2011).  David Foster Wallace: Remarks on Kafka [Audio file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzEO0qFFzwI
Yamamura, K. (2007).  Kafka’s, A country doctor.  [Animated short film/Video file].  Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDjmW-gIsKs&t=2s 

Stacy Graber is an Associate Professor of English at Youngstown State University.  Her areas of interest include critical theory, pedagogy, and popular culture. 

Until next week.