By Stuart Mitchner

The Culture page of the Bloomsday edition of the New York Times features a photoshopped image of the insect hero of Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” complete with feelers and a smartphone shell. The June 16 dateline of the article by Amanda Hess (“The Very Online Afterlife of Franz Kafka”) inadvertently suggests a comradely connection between Leopold Bloom and Gregor Samsa, whose creator actually happened to be in Trieste in September 1913 when Joyce was working on the “Proteus,” “Lotus Eaters,” and “Hades” chapters of Ulysses.

In Kafka: The Decisive Years (Princeton University Press paperback 2013), Reiner Stach supposes that “if Kafka had met Joyce, there is no telling what direction world literature might have taken.” You never know. As Charlie Chan says in the epigraph heading Chapter 14, (“The Lives of Metaphors: “The Metamorphosis”) — “Strange events permit themselves the luxury of occuring.”

The only other strange event occurring on this Kafkacentric Culture page is the cluster of movie listings in the bottom righthand corner, with titles that ring all the appropriate bells: Film Forum showing Robot Dreams and Evil Does Not Exist, the IFC Center, Ghostlight and Handling the Undead, Film at Lincoln Center Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara. And at the Paris Theatre, it’s “Bleak Week New York: Cinema of Despair.”

And Bleak Week was well before the debacle of the debate and the existential panic that followed, even before the Supremes sang “Where Did Our Law Go?”

Kafka’s Always Here

I’m still staring at that weeks-old Times article, with its subhead about fans posting jazzy little gems on TikTok like “Gorgeous girls lie awake at night mourning Kafka,” a line I can hear Taylor Swift singing even as I type it. One sentence I can relate to — as I do almost every week — suggests that “the personas of dead authors are more fun to play with than those of the living.”

Fun? God knows Kafka can be fun, he’s so adaptable, inspiring his biographer to quote Jimi Hendrix and Charlie Chan while the author of The Castle and The Trial provides material for a new German-Austrian mini-series bearing his name, which, says Mike Hale, “moves back and forth in time and among Kafka’s acquaintances, looking for crucial moments” while “characters break the fourth wall to reinforce or angrily disagree with the narrator’s observations.” So there’s Kafka again on the first Arts page, pictured as played by Joel Basman, face to face with Liv Lisa Fries as Milena Jesenská, one of the three best-known women in his love life, along with Felice Bauer and Dora Dymant. One look at Fries, the jewel in the crown of Babylon Berlin, does wonders for my mood.

The Christian Girl

Probably there’s no room in the new series for the nameless Christian girl who has been haunting me for the past week. For the better part of two decades I lived in the 1914-1923 edition of Kafka’s Diaries. A year ago, when the book broke into three pieces, I bought the brand-new 25th printing of the complete edition so I could have access to Kafka’s thoughts between 1910 and 1914. Perhaps it was the late hour, and the fact that eyestrain had forced me to give up bedtime readings for several months, but the following sentences from the October 15, 1913 entry hit me “right between the eyes” and continue to rouse pleasant thoughts of Kafka and the 18-year-old girl known only as “W” or “G.W.,” who loved him and was loved by him during the ten days they shared at Dr. Hartungen’s sanitorium: “The stay in Riva was very important to me. For the first time I understood a Christian girl and lived almost entirely under the sphere of her influence.”

I have no idea why the words “Christian girl” and the phrase “sphere of her influence” lit up my imagination at 3 a.m. Perhaps it’s because Milena, Felice, and Dora were all Jewish, while as Stach notes, “W” showed not “the slightest trace of ‘western Jewish’ nervousness, an exaggerated desire to please, or tortured craving to belong.” And then there’s the fact that all three of Kafka’s sisters died in the camps, as did Milena.

Excited by Stories

In the October 20 entry, it’s as if Kafka were back in the sanitorium with his love: “I would gladly write fairy tales (why do I hate the word so?) that could please W. and that she might sometimes keep under the table at meals, read between courses,” blushing “tearfully” when she noticed that the doctor had been “watching her.” At this point Kafka makes sure to mention “her excitement sometimes — or really all of the time — when she hears stories.”

Kafka’s predilection for reading — and sometimes laughing — aloud is well documented. Earlier the same year, on June 21, he refers to “The tremendous world I have in my head. But how free myself and free it without being torn to pieces. And a thousand times rather be torn to pieces than retain it in me or bury it.”

Meanwhile it’s unlikely that he dared to read or even mention the story of the traveling salesman who woke up one morning to find himself changed into an insect. In fact, he refers to reading “The Metamorphosis” earlier in the October 20 entry, by then at home, and finding it “bad. Perhaps I am really lost … I don’t even have the desire to keep a diary … perhaps because writing itself adds to my sadness.” And it’s at this moment that he gets himself going by recalling writing fairy tales “that would please W.”

“A Language of Knocks”

The October 20 entry continues, as Kafka cheers himself up remembering all that happened (and didn’t happen) at Riva. After pondering what his acquaintance with W. might have cost him in “pleasures with the Russian woman” whose room was diagonally across from his, he notes that his “evening’s intercourse with W. was carried on in a language of knocks whose meaning we never definitely agreed upon. I knocked on the ceiling of my room below hers, received her answer, leaned out of the window, greeted her, once let myself be blessed by her, once snatched at a ribbon she let down, sat on the window sill for hours, heard every one of her steps above, mistakenly regarded every chance knock to be the sign of an understanding, heard her coughing, her singing before she fell asleep.”

Put simply, it sounds like they had fun. The playful back and forth suggests a sequence out of an Ernst Lubitsch romance. More than that, the game they’re playing shows why this girl and this “shipboard romance” meant so much to Kafka. Fairy tale, for sure. Come to the window, hang down your ribbon, tell me a story.

Two days later, on October 22, Kafka’s heart is still very much in Riva: “Too late. The sweetness of sorrow and of love. To be smiled at by her in the boat. That was most beautiful of all. Always only the desire to die and the not-yet-yielding: this alone is love.”

Stach’s Version

In The Decisive Years, Stach dismisses the October 22 entry as Kafka resorting to “sentimental words and images that sound like greeting card clichés.” His summary of the relationship is cursory. W. is referred to as “the girl from Switzerland” although it was eventually determined that she was a German from Gleschendorf “who sometimes kept a book in her lap to escape boredom while she ate, noticed that her inscrutable table partner was expressing interesting thoughts” and “found the right words when everyone else was searching for them. She knew that he was staying in the room below hers, and she leaned over the railing to say hello. Kafka welcomed the new familiarity. A romance ensued.”

A page later: “This was a summer romance. He played and relaxed, while the lively girl told stories. She loved fairy tales and beautiful clothing, sang a song every evening before going to bed, and tapped on his ceiling every once in a while…. One evening, when he bent over the balustrade of his room and looked up, she blessed him.”

“Imaginary Man”

Today, July 3, is Kafka’s birthday. He was born in 1883 and died of laryngeal tuberculosis a month short of 40 on June 3, 1924. If his presence in the culture keeps growing at the present rate, July 3 will be celebrated as an international holiday.

In spite of the idea that “the personas of dead authors are more fun to play with than those of the living,” I’m thinking of Ray Davies, a living author who turned 80 on June 21 and has been silent since 2017. It’s hard to imagine that the composer of “Big Sky,” “All God’s Children, “ “Waterloo Sunset,” “Stormy Sky,” and the sadly neglected Kinks albums of the 1990s, UK Jive and Phobia, would ever run out of ideas.

Call it my Kafka mood in the wake of a week of dark news, but I’ve been listening to “Imaginary Man,” an extraordinary song Davies wrote and recorded for his solo LP Workingman’s Cafe (2004). It begins, “Is this the final station?” It’s set in New Orleans, where he was shot in the leg at close range while pursuing a thief. As other songs on the album about his hospital stay in a charity ward make clear, it was a serious wound. The chorus, which he sings magnificently, repeats “I am, I am imaginary, I’m the imaginary man.” In the last verse, “I saw my reflection in the glass … Watched as the world went flashing past … I knew the face but could not tell …Why I couldn’t recognize myself.”

Just now looking for further information about the song I found a November 2023 NME interview with Ray where he expresses compassion for the gunman: “Just before he shot me, he looked afraid — and he had a gun…. The look on his face — it’s utter desperation.” The good news is that he sees the potential for a reunion of the Kinks, saying they have enough material “to create about 20 new songs. As for a full-blown comeback, “It’s in the lap of the Gods.” As Charlie Chan says, “Strange events permit themselves the luxury of occurring,” and at the moment I’m thinking of Ray’s song “Americana”: “On that winding trail to somewhere … we did not care what dangers lay in store.”

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Kafka’s Diaries 1910-1913 are translated from the German by Joseph Kresh, and 1914 to 1923 by Martin Greenberg, with the cooperation of Hannah Arendt. Reiner Stach’s landmark biography has been brilliantly translated by Shelley Frisch. Kafka scholar Stanley Corngold was an invaluable consultant; so was his book Expeditions to Kafka.