By Stuart Mitchner

While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any[one] endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?

—Henry David Thoreau,
from Walden (1854)

The epigraph comes by way of the first Arts page in Monday’s New York Times. At least once or twice every year, the Newspaper of Record throws out a line that hooks me. Picture a Dr. Seuss-style fisherman, perhaps the Cat in the Hat, dandling a brain-rot lure as a Dr. Seuss fish leaps out of the water, grinning idiotically while I’m thinking “This is not how I meant to begin a December 4 column on Franz Kafka; no, this is not what I meant to do, not at all, not at all.”

Probably Kafka would love it. As would Frank Zappa, who died on December 4, 1993, having accomplished among many more notable wonders a track called “The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny” on the Mothers of Invention’s third album, We’re Only In It for the Money (a travesty of Sgt. Pepper that memorably pictured four grossly alluring “Mothers” instead of John, Paul, George, and Ringo). In his liner notes, Zappa claims that “The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny,” with its electronic crackling and screeching, is intended to give “a musical approximation” of Kafka’s “In The Penal Colony.”

Kafka’s Diaries

Given my fealty to our publication date, and the Times’ glorification of “brain rot,” I’m beginning in a darker place than I intended, with a nod to Casper Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Languages, who admits that choosing the Word of the Year “is a bit of a dark art.”

Glad to be back in Kafka’s Diaries 1910-1923 again, a foolproof remedy for “brain rot,” I find him on December 4, 1913, pondering the idea of “a young but mature person” choosing to kill himself: “Such would be my plight now. To die would mean nothing else than to surrender a nothing to the nothing, but that would be impossible to conceive, for how could a person, even only as a nothing, consciously surrender himself to the nothing, and not merely to an empty nothing but rather to a roaring nothing whose nothingness consists only in its incomprehensibility.”

Kafka’s rhapsody on “nothing” makes a kind of incidental music relevant to my original plan, which was a quest to find evidence contrary to the notion that Franz Kafka, like his devoted fan Vladimir Nabokov, was uncomfortable with music. But first, still with “brain rot” as the word of the day, I have to deal with Kafka’s scarily prophetic entry on October 9, 1911 that begins, “If I reach my fortieth year” before intimating what would actually occur on June 3, 1924: “I’ll hardly reach my fortieth birthday, however; the frequent tension over the left half of my skull, for example, speaks against it — it feels like an inner leprosy, which, when I only observe it and disregard its unpleasantness, makes the same impression on me as the skull cross-section in textbooks.”

Girls Singing Brahms

Two months later, on December 11, 1911, Kafka attends a Sunday Brahms concert by the Singing Society at Prague’s Rudolfinum. Seemingly reaffirming his oft-stated “unmusicalness,” the “inability to enjoy music connectedly” since the effect it has is seldom “a musical one,” he admits that the “natural effect of music on me is to circumscribe me with a wall, and its only constant influence on me is that, confined in this way, I am different from what I am when I’m free.” Yet while listening to Brahms’s Tragic Overture, he’s feeling the music, hearing “slow, solemn beats, now here, now there,” while watching “the music pass from one group to another” and following it “with the ear.” Referring to the songs from texts by Goethe (“Beherzigung”) and Schiller (“Nänie”), Kafka also makes somewhat voluptuous note of the way the “melody held open the mouths of the singing girls,” who “stood up on the low balustrade as though on a piece of early Italian architecture.”

The reference to architecture brings to mind a corrective to Kafka’s much-quoted and misunderstood claim “that he was unable to discern between The Merry Widow and Tristan and Isolde.” Quoted in the October 5 Guardian, Will Self points out that “Kafka manages in a single aside to undermine the entire airy and castellated edifice of late German romanticism.”

Flora Klug

According to a post by Aaron Carpenter on jewishstudies.washington.edu, Kafka found a clarification of his Jewish identity at a performance by Yitzhak Löwy’s Yiddish acting troupe at the Café Savoy in Prague. In a diary entry dated October 6, 1911, Kafka describes how he and the other audience members were enthralled when Yiddish actor Flora Klug sang about “jüdische Kinderloch” (little Jewish children)…. Kafka was fascinated by these actors, calling them “people who are Jews in an especially pure form.” It was the beginning of “an 11-month intensive study of Yiddish language and culture and many return trips to the theater.”

On December 19, Kafka refers again to Flora Klug: “Listening to her always lively singing does nothing less than prove the solidity of the world, which is what I need, after all.” Earlier in the same entry, he writes, “the melodies are long, one’s body is glad to confide itself to them.”

Reading as Music

A week earlier, on December 3, 1911, Kafka describes a performative reading of poet Eduard Mörike’s memoir before an audience of his sisters, which “began well enough but improved as I went on, and finally, my fingertips together, it conquered inner obstacles with my voice’s unceasing calm, provided a constantly expanding panorama for my voice, and finally the whole room round about me dared admit nothing but my voice.” After a loaded pause: “Until my parents, returning from business, rang.”

Kafka’s predilection for reading aloud is well documented. Max Brod and various witnesses have said that he was known to “laugh” when reading his own work. It’s also said that he laughed with pleasure while reading aloud the bravura “Nature Theatre of Oklahoma” chapter from his unfinished first novel Amerika (1927). I wonder how he approached the first public reading of The Metamorphosis, which, according to the chronology in Stanley Corngold’s Modern Library edition, he wrote from November 17 to December 7, 1912, “reading parts of the unfinished story aloud to friends on November 24.” Among the novel’s “Backgrounds” provoded by Corngold are letters to Felice Bauer in which Kafka imagines “how fine it would be to read this story aloud to you and be forced to hold your hand, for the story is a little horrible” and “would give you a real scare.”

“Please Not That!”

Writing in 1914 to the first publisher of The Metamorphosis about the illustration for the title page, Kafka worried that the illustrator might want to draw the insect itself: “Not that, please not that!… The insect itself cannot be drawn. It cannot even be shown at a distance.” With this conundrum in mind, I’ve been exercising my brain wondering how a film might honor Kafka’s wishes. Imagine perhaps a reading presumably by the author himself, cloaked in shadows and played by a gifted actor who shares Kafka’s delight in reading aloud and an ability to make sure “the whole room round about me dared admit nothing but my voice.”

Keep in mind the notes to Felice Bauer referring to the story as “infinitely repulsive” and “extremely voluptuous.” Also keep in mind that the audience is likely to know the gist of the opening paragraph, wherein Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman, wakes “to find himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.” There are bound to be anticipatory intrusions of nervous laughter, that, who knows, may cause the author himself to join in, perhaps when he reads lines such as “This getting up early makes anyone a complete idiot. Human beings need their sleep.”

As the necessarily abbreviated reading proceeds, an infectious hysteria unhinges some members of the audience acutely aware of the fact that a shadow cast by the invisible author is changing shape until it arrives at something resembling the “infinitely repulsive” object on everyone’s mind. The denouement is incited and accompanied by music, as Gregor’s sister begins playing the violin, “beautifully, her face leaned sideways,” thrilling Gregor, who feels “as if the way were opening before him to the unknown nourishment he craved.” Now comes the moment when the intoxicated monster edges into the kitchen, imagining just the two of them, she so touched by his adoration that she bursts into tears, moving Gregor to imagine raising himself to her shoulder to “kiss her on the neck.” Here the reader stops, as if anticipating his parents ringing the bell, as they did during the other reading, the lights go on, chasing the shadows, and the reader’s chair is empty.

The Phantom Ship

Until “brain rot” intruded, the theme of this column was set on December 4, 1872, when the mysteriously abandoned Mary Celeste was discovered adrift on choppy seas about 400 miles east of the Azores. The ship’s fictional afterlife began a decade later with a story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (who renamed it Marie Celeste) and surfaced in the 1935 U.S. release, Phantom Ship, starring Bela Lugosi.

In fact, every one of these columns is haunted by the births, deaths, and various other events recorded on the upcoming date of publication. December 4 has additional significance for Frank Zappa, who was performing with the Mothers at the Montreux casino on December 4, 1971, when someone in the audience set off a flare that torched the roof, eventually destroying the building, with no loss of life because most of the audience was stoned.

From the Independent travel section (December 5, 1999): “There is more to Prague than the writer Franz Kafka, whose haunted image is plastered across T-shirts, posters and mugs all over town. It is also full of surprises, a medieval city with a rock ‘n’ roll vibe, from the dazzling graffiti of the John Lennon Wall to the appointment a decade ago of the late Frank Zappa as the city’s cultural attaché.”

Kafka at the Morgan

In his introduction to The Metamorphosis, Stanley Corngold examines a manuscript page from Kafka’s diary where the line in which Kafka’s claim to be “the midpoint of the intellectual and spiritual life of Prague” has been “inked through again and again.” Corngold refers to “lucky readers who may have seen this diary page on display at Oxford’s Bodleian Library.” According to a press release from the Morgan Library & Museum announcing the current exhibit, which runs through April 13, 2025, the museum will present, “for the first time in the United States, the Bodleian Library’s extraordinary holdings of literary manuscripts, correspondence, diaries, and photographs related to Kafka, including the original manuscript of The Metamorphosis.”