It's The Text, Stupid!

In his collection of essays on criticism and art, The Sacred Wood (1920), T.S. Eliot wrote in the essay titled, "Tradition and the Individual Talent", "[T]he more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates." We suspect author P.D. Smith, writing for the blog, 3 Quarks Daily, would agree.

There is something about Kafka’s writing that gets under your skin. Perhaps that’s because he was always so uneasy in his own skin. Kafka described it as “a garment but also a straitjacket and fate”, suggesting that he saw skin as both clothing, something you choose to wear for a day before shedding, but also as a tightly bound involucre, restricting and suffocating the self — a biological fait accompli and a life sentence. Only Kafka could react so ambivalently and with such psychological acuity towards something most people take for granted and indeed scarcely think about.

[...]

Reading Kafka is the literary equivalent of an earthquake: as you read, you can feel the walls of reality begin to tremble and shake until eventually they come tumbling down around your ears. At the end, you find yourself wandering in an unfamiliar wasteland. All around are scattered the jumbled fragments of what you once recognised as normal life. Now you, the reader, have to begin putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again.

[...]

Unlike Leonardo da Vinci and Newton who used mirror writing or coded language in their notebooks to obscure their words, Kafka wanted to tell us something important. He didn’t set out to create a series of coded autobiographical puzzles in order to keep future literary historians in a job. The Germanist Martin Swales argues convincingly that the obsession with Kafka’s private life does not help us to understand Kafka’s writing: “an unremitting interest in the personality behind the utterance suggests that the utterance has in some way broken down”.

In a recent article, Zadie Smith has suggested that Kafka is “a writer sullied by our attempts to define him”. Novelist James Hawes, author of a new book called Excavating Kafka (or in the US, Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life), seems to agree: “The myth of Kafka's life so overshadows what he wrote that millions who have never read a word of his know, or think they know, something about the middle-European Nostradamus, almost unknown in his own lifetime, trapped in a dead-end job, whose mysterious, endlessly interpretable works somehow foresaw the Holocaust (and so on).”

[...]

Biographical interpretations are an excuse for lazy reading. Using an author’s life to crack the code of his texts is just too easy. There are no shortcuts to interpretation.

And, we might add, not only "just too easy," but too easily misleading.

RTWT here.