Discontented contentment

Denis Donoghue on Reiner Stach’s Kafka: The Years of Insight:

Often he writes a sentence that stays in one’s mind most tellingly, as when he refers to “Kafka’s extraordinary ability to use facts that have shed their material origins”. I thought I understood that phrase when I first came to it, but now I’m not sure. How have these facts shed their material origins? Stach may simply mean facts that Kafka has forgotten, except for a trace of them that remains. Or facts that later, as a writer, Kafka treated to a formal deflection. Or, more likely, he may mean what Walter Benjamin, Kafka’s first and best critic, meant when he wrote that Kafka “divests the human gesture of its traditional supports and then has a subject for reflection without end”. I recall several episodes in The Trial, Amerika and The Castle where we have to think of the circus or of vaudeville to make a context, rather than otherwise to think of life: the seven dogs in The Trial, the antics of K’s two assistants in The Castle, the perfunctory “Nature Theatre of Oklahoma” in Amerika.

See also, ‘Kafka’s Wound’, a digital essay by Will Self; ‘Understanding Kafkaesque.’