Huenemanniac

Clayton Koelb, in his Kafka: A Guide for the Perplexed, notes that Kafka often altered his manuscripts to make them weirder. On several occasions he would write a passage that helpfully described a character’s action or attitude (typically some form of anxiety). For example, he might write something like:

Pedro could only imagine what the old woman thought of him as he left the table without clearing away his own dishes.

And he would then cross it out and replace it with:

Pedro tried unsuccessfully to put his coat on, flapping his arms to no avail, and the old woman looking on shrieked in horror.

(My made-up examples.) The first passage is straightforward, reminding us of occasions when we felt self-conscious about violating a social expectation. If we focus on that modest cocktail of self-consciousness, embarrassment, shame, and outrage, and turn it up to 11, we get the second passage, which makes us wonder why it is so difficult to simply put a coat on, how ridiculous anyone would appear in the pathetic effort, and the highly exaggerated response on the part of the observer, which only adds to our embarrassment. It’s a weirder passage, to be sure, though also decided clearer in what it conveys: try to read the second passage without asking “What the hell?!” or even wincing.

Words should convey something (a state of affairs, one’s feelings, a plan of action, etc), and very often in stories we expect the words to convey what happens and how characters feel about it, and when we read Kafka looking for that information the work becomes frustratingly obscure. But perhaps Kafka is conveying what he wants to convey with surgical precision. It’s not a set of events and attitudes. It’s a fundamental discomfort with being in a body, in a world, in a society. Anyone reading Kafka and saying, “It’s so weird! And always shifting about in crazy ways! What’s the point of it?!” has received his message exactly right.