Kafka Thought a Book Should Hurt
At twenty, in a letter to a friend, Franz Kafka wrote the most demanding definition of literature ever set down. He then spent his life writing books he asked to have burned.
Franz Kafka had a theory of what a book is for, and comfort was not part of it.
He was twenty when he wrote it, in an 1904 letter to his friend Oskar Pollak. We should only read, he argued, the books that wound and stab us. And then the line people never forget: a book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.
It is a startling thing to want from art, that it should break something open in you rather than soothe it. But it explains Kafka completely. His stories are frozen seas cracking: a man wakes as an insect, another is arrested for a crime no one will name, a castle sits on a hill that can never be reached.
The life around the work was quietly Kafkaesque before the word existed. He spent his days in a Prague insurance office, wrote at night, published almost nothing, and when he was dying of tuberculosis in 1924 he asked his friend Max Brod to burn every manuscript he left behind.
A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.
Brod refused. He published The Trial, The Castle, The Metamorphosis, and handed the century one of its essential writers. The man who wanted his own work destroyed became the adjective we reach for whenever the world turns absurd and airless. His axe is still swinging.
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