Kafkaesque
Franz Kafka once wrote that, "In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite." Kafka, poetic in his own way, seems to echo this idea in his writing. He explores it throughout his life, creating parallels in his work that are sometimes difficult to understand.

Kafka is widely recognized as a master of the written word, but even as a child, he was interested in language and often wrote plays for he and his sisters to perform. Brought up with the Czech language popular in the day, he managed to master German at a young age, and later incorporated it into his own stories. He began pursuing writing in 1898, but he deemed most of his early works as unworthy and destroyed them. His second foray into writing was undertaken in 1913, when a university friend convinced Kafka to publish a collection of short stories and drawings, entitled Meditation.

Most of Kafka’s works are a mesh of bizarre, tragic, and often confusing scenes. Many deal with the sensations of loneliness and persecution, and any social interaction is characterized by a “surreality,” which is perhaps a reflection of his difficulties with society and family (his father was controlling and unsupportive). Kafka remained quiet and withdrawn for most of his life, maintaining only a few close friends, saying that, “Isolation is a way to know ourselves.”

These situations in his writing, as well as his own inclination toward withdrawal from society, become more interesting when one looks at his sexual life. While being very active, Kafka’s letters and diaries indicate that he abhorred sex and saw it as nothing more than an immediate fulfillment of base desires. He once wrote, “If I felt in love, I would be in a world in which I could not live,” but this doesn’t begin to describe the extent to which he enacted this idea. His experiences with women were unusual, to say the least. In Kafka’s mind, there were two kinds of women: whores and those who are respectable. There was no gray area between these ideals for a woman to exist in. And though he was engaged to several women, the engagements were always broken off, often at the last minute. One of his steady relationships, with Felice Bauer, lasted nearly five years, though their own engagement was broken off twice and inevitably ended when Kafka was diagnosed with tuberculosis.

During this relationship, Kafka produced many of his most famous works, including The Judgment, written in 1912, which he dedicated to Felice, and The Metamorphosis. In fact, many of his relationships seem to have given him inspiration: a strange fact given his own view towards women. A later relationship, with a woman named Milena, appears to have been the muse for his longest (though unfinished) work, a novel entitled The Castle. His final, and arguably most satisfying, relationship, with a woman named Dora, produced “The Burrow,” “A Little Woman,” and “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk.”

While Kafka’s writing is certainly unusual, it is not wholly senseless. His work can be read strictly from an isolated view, but it’s much more significant when interpreted biographically. As with any author, the events in his life could provide an important key to understanding his writing. They seem to correspond with the different levels of anguish in his stories.