"One morning, Gregor Samsa awoke from an uneasy sleep and found himself lying in bed, transformed into a giant beetle."
If you order the exciting beginnings of all literary works, Kafka's Metamorphosis must be at the top.
Published 105 years ago, this novel is widely regarded as the beginning of modernist literature. It is no exaggeration to say that without Metamorphosis, there would be no Western modernist literature. Kafka is also known as the "writer of writers", influencing a number of giants in the literary world, from Márquez, Beckett, Sartre to chinese writers Mo Yan and Yu Hua, all of whom were "milked" by Kafka.
However, in Kafka's eyes, he was a loser who achieved nothing.
96 years ago today, in the last moments of his life, he did not forget to instruct his best friend to burn all the manuscripts of his life.
Fortunately, the good friend went against his last wishes, and the words were preserved, in place of Kafka himself, telling us his story.
Kafka in 1923
Kafka's writings are lonely.
Gao Xiaosong once said: Kafka's books must be read again when they are young, once in middle age, and again in their later years. Reading Kafka at different stages, there will be completely different feelings.
Someone asked him, what kind of different feelings are there?
He smiled and said, "When you're lonely, you'll understand."
<h1 class="pgc-h-center-line" data-track="49" > to father: You are tall and strong, I am thin and gaunt</h1>
On July 3, 1883, in Prague, under Austro-Hungarian rule, the wife of the Jewish merchant Heilmann was giving birth.
It was a hot summer day, and suddenly it started to rain and the temperature plummeted. Heilman wanted to go for a cigarette, and as soon as he turned around, the doctor stopped him and said, "Born, it's a boy." ”
Heilman walked over to his wife, looked at his newborn son, frowned, and said, "Why is he so thin?" ”
Kafka's parents: Heilman and Julie Kafka
This disgusting sentence has always been between Kafka and his father, making Kafka unable to cross for the rest of his life.
After understanding things, Kafka gradually learned that his father, Heilman, started from scratch and struggled to become a famous local businessman by relying on his rough and capable personality. For business, my father always traveled on business and stayed at home for less than 3 months all year round. But his father's strength, health, roughness, and imperiousness still brought great mental pressure to Kafka.
In contrast, Kafka was frail and sensitive and melancholy, and his contrast with his father was so stark that he unconsciously formed a confrontation with his father. As long as his father was at home, he rarely came out of his room, as if his father's powerful aura would swallow him up at any moment.
Childhood Kafka
In order to bring him closer to his son, his father took Kafka for a swim. In the dressing room, Kafka saw his father stripped naked and inhaled a cold breath.
It was a mighty body that was so strong that it was almost aggressive, in sharp contrast to his own thin and weak body, and he was instantly depressed to the extreme, and he couldn't help but cry.
Years later, he picked up a pen and wrote the thirty-thousand-word "To The Father": "I am thin, weak, and haggard; you are wide, big, and strong." ”
The storm in the son's heart, the father knows nothing. After coming home from the pool, he tried to ask his son to play cards with him.
That night, Kafka wrote in his diary: "I sat on the side, completely like a stranger. My father asked me to play a hand, or at least watch them play, and I made up a reason to refuse. Since childhood, I have often repeated this rejection, what is the meaning of it? ”
In this seemingly calm narrative, rather than writing about the embarrassment of his emotional estrangement from his father, it is better to express the deepest sadness and despair in Kafka's heart: even the closest people can hardly share their loneliness.
<h1 class="pgc-h-center-line" data-track="48" > to love:
I loved her, and she loved me, but I had to leave her</h1>
The gap with his father made Kafka inferior and affected his attitude towards love and marriage. At the age of 17, Kafka went to college and was finally able to leave home. It wasn't long before he met a young girl who worked as a waiter in a restaurant, and the two fell in love at first sight and soon had a relationship.
However, Kafka, who had tasted the pleasures of the flesh for the first time, did not get the pleasure and satisfaction he imagined, but found that he had a strange reaction after the joy of the clouds and rains--it was a disgust from the depths of the soul, and he felt disgusted at the thought of what had just happened. He even called the incident "nasty dirty" in a tone of condemnation and criticism.
As he later described in his work "The Village Doctor", two sacred horses ran out of the pigsty, but the sex between the groom and the doctor's maid took place in the pigsty. These people who do dirty things are no different from livestock.
Kafka confided in his diary that he didn't like sex because the assault on him from his father's nakedness in the locker room was too great. From that day on, he considered himself the thinnest man in the world. In fact, he is really thin, 1 meter 82 tall, the peak weight is 110 pounds, the kind that falls as soon as the wind blows.
Therefore he did not dare to confront the nakedness of women. Every time he stripped naked, he would think of the scene of his childhood, worried that women would laugh at him, so he built a defense mechanism in his mind in advance. But women like him. Kafka was good at using words to communicate, and he used wonderful rhetoric to weave a web to make women fall.
During the five years he spent with his fiancée, Phyllis, he wrote more than 500 love letters, which were later collected and published as Love Letters to Phyllis. To another lover, there is the "Secret Lena Love Letter". No wonder Gao Xiaosong said that people who have not seen Kafka cannot catch up with girls.
Throughout his life, he interacted with many women, and his biographer used "non-stop falling in love" to describe his love history.
Among the many female partners, Phyllis Powell is the most important one. On August 13, 1912, Kafka went to dinner at the home of his good friend Brod and met Phyllis. Phyllis returned from a friend's house, and Kafka described the other person's appearance in his diary: there was no expression on the dry and thin face, a collapsed nose, straight blond hair, obvious mandibles, and a face that was not attractive.
Kafka "didn't care at all who she was."
Kafka and Phyllis
But in correspondence with Phyllis, Kafka fell in love.
He loved her, in large part, because Phyllis had become his literary muse.
Not long after meeting Phyllis, Kafka wrote the novel The Trial in just one night. The most important works, Metamorphosis, The Missing, and Si Lu, were also written during his relationship with Phyllis. Many of the women in these works bear the shadow of Phyllis.
He was once engaged to Phyllis and longed to get rid of the repression his father had brought him through marriage.
However, fear struck his body and mind, and he ran away from marriage. He wrote in his diary: "I felt my own incompetence for marriage, fear of union, fear of losing to each other. "To put it bluntly, I just want to fall in love, but I can't get into a real marriage."
Today, Kafka is the originator of the "marriage-phobic family".
In 1917, Kafka, unable to bear the loneliness, was engaged again to Phyllis, but soon found out that he had tuberculosis and dissolved again in December. Two years later, in convalescence, Kafka falls in love with Juliet, then a waitress. They rented an apartment and were ready to get married.
Juliet
On the eve of his marriage, Kafka met his married wife, the Viennese writer Milena, 13 years his junior, and he repented again.
Of course, the love affair with Myronna did not bear fruit.
He said to her, "If you make love to someone you love, you will lose your love for that person." ”
Milena clipped a photo of Kafka in the letter
At the end of Kafka's life, a 20-year-old girl named Dora stayed with him until June 1924, when Kafka died peacefully in pain.
From beginning to end, Kafka never escaped inferiority and loneliness, he never felt happiness and tranquility, which is undoubtedly Kafka's tragedy.
<h1 class="pgc-h-center-line" data-track="72" > to loneliness: My words are given by loneliness</h1>
In the midst of constant emotional struggle, Kafka gained a real painful experience. This pain blossoms, and it is His word.
Kafka was not a professional writer. In college, he wanted to study literature, but his domineering father disagreed, and he had to choose a "more promising" jurisprudence.
After earning his Juris Doctorate, he secured a position in the "Workers' Compensation Insurance Company", the equivalent of today's civil servant. Kafka worked in this official job for 14 years, all the way up, rising higher and higher, but he was not happy at all. In a life long and tedious enough to make people sleepy, Kafka chose to write this martyrdom path of confrontation.
I went to work during the day, and at night I went home to write a book and wrote until two or three o'clock in the morning. Today's young people's favorite "retaliatory stay-up" is all leftovers from Kafka's play a hundred years ago.
In 1915, Kafka published his masterpiece Metamorphosis, which tells the absurd story of a man who wakes up early one morning and finds himself unable to move and inexplicably turns into a large beetle.
"Metamorphosis" penetrates the essence of superficial intimacy between family and affection, but extremely lonely and helpless inside.
The protagonist of the story, After Gregor Samsa turned into a beetle, his father treated him very badly, kicking him with his feet and throwing him with an apple, hoping that he would get out quickly, and his mother was sad and afraid, and even the maids in the house hated him.
At first, his sister was very sympathetic to him and took care of his dietary life. But as time went on, my sister also began to tire of him, seeing him as a heavy burden.
When Gregor Samsa died of indifference and neglect, the family was so relieved that they asked the maid to remove "that thing" and throw it away. After disposing of the body, the whole family went out happily.
The absurdity and loneliness created by "Metamorphosis" are the projection of Kafka's inner loneliness. In his view, everyone is lonely, on the surface, you have relatives and friends around you, but in case of trouble, no one can understand you at all, can only let you fend for yourself.
Cover of the first edition of Metamorphosis
In his other masterpiece, "The Castle", he wrote about his unattainable sense of identity.
The novel tells the story of K, a land surveyor, who is ordered to come to the castle on a snowy night to make measurements. But he tried everything he could until he died, unable to prove his identity and enter the castle.
Cover of the German edition of The Castle
This novel can be said to be a true portrayal of Kafka's lonely feelings, he desperately wants to be recognized, but he has never been able to get close to the lives of others. This loneliness comes from his own situation. Kafka was a Jew, but he was educated in German from an early age, but he did not live in Germany, but in Austria.
The separation from his family and the estrangement from his lover always made him feel extremely depressed. Throughout his life, he wandered outside the entire social group, watching alone and calmly recording.
So he wrote in his diary on August 2, 1914: "Germany declares war on Russia. Afternoon swimming. ”
Today, the world has experienced World War I, World War II, economic crisis, information explosion, and we read Kafka's words again, and we will still be hit by that sense of loneliness and nothingness. The development of science and technology and the circulation of information have not narrowed the distance between people, but have turned us into more isolated islands.
We surf the web, make rough comments about the bloodshed that is happening in the world, expecting reversals, and insult dissidents across the screen, seemingly not hilarious, but in fact everyone is in the echo wall they have created.
Turn off the computer and everyone is one person.
Go back a hundred years. A lonely soul, having just left the insurance company building, crossed the narrow sleeve-like alley.
In the hut at the end of the alley, a desk was waiting for him. Countless spirits of thought are waiting to be born.
Kafka pushed open the door, sat down in front of the window, opened a page of his notebook, and began to write.
— END —