Kafka Was My Boyfriend

KafkaFor the gloomy teenage girl with literary pretensions, Franz Kafka was The One. The dim-but-cool kids went gooey for Kerouac; the jocks-with-brains thumped each other with battered copies of Hemmingway. But for the determinedly miserable lit-nerd, there was only one bloke in the game: K. It helped, of course, that he met the standard requirements of an emo Ken doll—tall, dark, handsome, and riddled with tuberculosis—but what really got this maudlin adolescent’s heart a-poundin’ was the TORMENT. Oh, the torment!

I read the short stories and The Trial and The Castle, of course—teenagers in love are such completists—and I was vaguely aware that all this nightmarish bureaucracy stuff somehow spoke deeply to adults, or at least made them say Kafkaesque every time the office photocopier jammed. But bureaucracy wasn’t much of a force for evil in my young life (the indignity of compulsory ballroom dancing lessons not withstanding), and what really moved my soppy teenage heart were his letters to Felice and Milena.

Writing letters…means to denude oneself before the ghosts, something for which they greedily wait. Written kisses don’t reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts.

Reason

I kept the two volumes of letters on my bedside table, along with a black and white photo of Kafka in a bowler hat and a copy of my favorite Kafka biography, The Nightmare of Reason, which I liked as much for the Scream-ish sunset on the cover as for its insightful commentary. I wrote ridiculous marginalia—Am inglorious failure! Must learn German!—and cultivated vehement opinions concerning the relative merits of my rivals-in-love. Felice was conventional and had troubling teeth; Milena was dashing and clever and her horrible father once had her locked away in an asylum for being a bit naughty. Surely every young Kafka obsessive must be Team Milena? I told my mother that if I one day had a daughter I would name her Milena. My mother, a nurse, advised me against it; with a name like that, there would be teasing.

He wasn’t the perfect boyfriend, of course. I had to overlook the visits to prostitutes and his insistence on chewing every bite of food thirty-two times before swallowing—but what romantic relationship is without vexation? I also had to ignore the not inconsiderable biographical evidence that suggested Kafka was in fact a dapper, popular fellow who spent his evenings gadding about at proto-hipster shindigs, since my Kafka spent his evenings alone in an attic, sitting at a small wooden desk, troubled by headaches, thank you very much. But all in all, he served me well. Tracing a path of logic through his labyrinthine sentences made my brain work better, and the purity of his writing wiped the ironic smirk off my adolescent face. He made me laugh (no, really; dude is funny), and his neurotic meanderings were a peculiar consolation.

What happened was that the brain could no longer endure the burden of worry and suffering heaped upon it. It said: ‘I give up; but should there be someone still interested in the maintenance of the whole, then he must relieve me of some of my burden and things will still go on for a while.’ Then the lung spoke up, though it probably hadn’t much to lose anyhow. These discussions between brain and lung which went on without my knowledge may have been terrible.

Eventually I grew up, stopped being so morose, and expanded my obsessions (step aerobics has not stood the test of time nearly so well). But I still love the letters and diaries, still read them from time to time, still think of them as some of the most beautiful sentences I’ve ever read. And I will happily force a volume or two into the hands of anyone whose cheerful adolescence robbed them of a perfectly miserable Sunday afternoon in bed with Kafka.

Note: The two quotes above are from Letters to Milena; I cut-and-pasted them from a teenage girl’s Tumblr. Plus ça change….

One thought on “Kafka Was My Boyfriend

  1. While Kafka was keen with some back in my high school day, Dostoyevsky was the king of the hill. Take them all, I want to be The Grand Inquisitor. I mean he gets a kiss on the cheek from Jesus.

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