Kafka and the Girls
Author: (French) Daniel de Marche Translator: Guan Xiaoming
One page folio| Beijing United Publishing Company September 2019
Dora, Kafka's last lover, met Kafka in 1923, and the two lived together until Kafka's death on June 3, 1924.
Milena, who met Kafka in 1920. The two corresponded with each other for about a year and a half, in considerable numbers and in great literary terms.
Juliet had a brief marriage with Kafka in 1919.
Kafka and Phyllis, 1917. Phyllis and Kafka met in 1912, and the two were engaged twice and dissolved.
In Max Broad's pen, Kafka was a literary saint who "had to write." His entire life was built on a literary career, and even the most insignificant moments in his life were "a sign and proof of his creative impulses." In addition, Brod likes to repeatedly remind readers to pay attention to the hot light in Kafka's eyes: "I'd rather bite life than bite my tongue." "Don't despair, don't despair of you. When it all seems to be over, there will be new forces, which means that you are alive. He said Kafka took a step out of the gray despair and toward the bright despair.
But in Daniel de Marche's biography Kafka and the Maidens, Kafka becomes ambiguous and complex. In the suspected forgery of Kafka's Talks, which Was fully endorsed by Brod, Kafka barely talks about women. But in this book, we find that Kafka has been circling women all his life, simply a literary devil who survives by sucking the essence of a young girl. For some female readers, Kafka here may disappoint them, even extremely disgusted.
1 Do not understand the style of a girl
Look, this man. He was ruthless, often stepping on two boats, sometimes three. He seduces young girls with wonderful rhetoric and expresses love with his talents. And after igniting the passion of the other party, he could not hand over the same flame. So he repeatedly fell into the "danger of love": "I love a girl, and the girl loves me, but I have to leave her." He firmly believed that "the soul embraces more passionately and madly than the body" (Flaubert). He was always more willing to communicate by letter than skin to skin. He uses long speeches to touch and torture lovers, and uses their crying blood to "drive" the "machine" of literature. The author, De Marche, even believes that most of Kafka's works are not finished because the brilliance he received from the maidens was too short-lived and insufficiently nourished.
Of course, correspondence must be accompanied by photographs from time to time, preferably from childhood. Without Phyllis's lovely childhood photos, we have reason to suspect that Kafka wouldn't even have made the decision to get engaged. The Eternal Maiden was the pathetic staircase that led him up to the temple of literature. A person who wants to reach the summit must forget the stairs behind him.
From this, we think of a question that the author of this book does not explicitly mention: Does this "blood-sucking" behavior of relying on exploiting women's emotions to achieve self-fulfillment constitute a moral stain?
Answering this question may require some bubbles. The one that flies the highest of all the bubbles is undoubtedly love. In a letter to Milena, Kafka was blunt: "What I love is not you, far from you, but my life, my life embodied through you." This unsound love sentence has a selfish sincerity: If I can't see myself in you, can I still love you? Life is pathetic, but if two people who love each other agree with this, life may not be so bleak. Kafka was obsessed with this moment of acquaintance, forgetting that it was accepted that love rejected misfortune. He did not understand the style of a girl, and a man could not possess anything he did not understand. As a result, he could only go into exile in the Atlantic of love, never reaching the happy "United States". The last maiden, Dora, was an exception, for at the time of Kafka's death he had no strength to find himself in the eyes of a woman, and he had stopped writing.
2 Fear and intoxication of women
Strictly speaking, there are as many pairs of lovers in this world as there should be. But people prefer to believe in a love that is independent of all explanations, in which the scale of time is "forever", sex is just embellishment, and all elements must be cheerful. People often say that marriage is the graveyard of love, but forget that love is also killing marriage. Kafka, the tomb keeper, chose to keep his eyes open at night. He "gives high status to sexual desire", affirming the ambiguous zone between love and sex. Fear and intoxication of women alternately dominate Kafka. The flesh is a lifebuoy, but also a whirlpool. In Castle, the lovers are "like two dogs desperately planing around on the ground," an almost terrifying image that can be seen everywhere in his novel. Kafka may agree with Baudelaire's judgment: "The only and sublime pleasure of love lies in the conviction that one is doing evil." "Overly sensitive to the boredom and evil in sex, Kafka entered the modern age earlier than his contemporaries.
Kafka's night is thus a modern night. "If you say you love me, I'll be terrified; if you say you don't love me, I'll die immediately." "Some people claim that because of the sun, we have no sorrow. He thinks that because we are sad, there is no sun. ”...... Perhaps we can say that all those who were touched by these aphorisms have more or less experienced Kafka's night. This experience is easily met with incomprehensible contempt, and Kafka's father was full of confusion about his son: you have not been to the front, you have not experienced the hardships of starting from scratch, you have not even been hungry, so what do you mean by pain? The fathers who sat "on the back chairs and ruled the world" never thought that in this world, in addition to the economic bottom, there is also a spiritual bottom. However, contrary to the definition of economics, in the spiritual world, the richer and fuller people are, the more poor they are. In the attempt to escape from his parents, in the entanglement of resisting work, in the shiver of fear of marriage, Kafka felt that he had been living in the "vestibule of the underworld", in "dying with his life".
In a letter to another teenage girl, Min Tse, Kafka spoke more thoroughly of the abyss of life: "Every man carries in him his own devil, which torments him and destroys his nights. This is not good or bad, because this is life: without the devil, there can be no life. Therefore, what you curse within is actually your life. In other words, in order to successfully survive such a Kafka night, you must admit and face the devil in your heart.
3 Guard the boundaries of man
We can't slay demons, but we can have an exorcism ritual. For Kafka, this ritual was writing. Unhappiness does not add value to a person, but writing misfortune can because it helps people understand unhappiness. Kafka believed that a man who could not cope with life could, in addition to "fending off the despair that envelops this fate with one hand," "scribbled down with the other hand everything he saw in the ruins", because such a person was "different from what others see, and more". Conversation loses its importance immediately and forever, but if it is written down, "sometimes a new importance is acquired." He hated "everything that has nothing to do with literature", for which he deduced the form of writing to the point of no return: "In order to write I need to be alone, not like a hermit, that is not enough, but like a dead man." He had to live in a cave like the living dead and write, without which he would not be able to "whisk away the thought of seeking death."
For Kafka, literature was never a hobby, but a life, a mission. He developed literature into a religion, the writing table was his holy baptism, the writing was his prayer, and the recitation was his singing of hymns. Thus, in kafka's emotional entanglement with the girl, the real question may be only one: can a person who pleases a woman still please God? Kafka spread his hands and said he had no way to answer, and he could only continue to "wander into nowhere." "I write differently than I speak, I speak differently than I think, and I think differently than the way I should think. And so on until you enter the deepest darkness. "He was a literary hero who won by incompetence, perhaps the only one. Kierkegaard's confession seemed more appropriate to place on him: "Ten months in the womb of a mother is enough to make me old. ”
It is difficult to test the effectiveness of writing to resist the invasion of death, but at least it is certain that Kafka escaped death with the help of writing. But anyone who has endured even one-tenth of Kafka's inner torment will probably not be able to sustain his life. And he not only lived to the last moment, but also insisted on writing, always seeking love and giving his own love. This in itself is already a miracle of life, or a miracle of literature.
So, what about moral issues? The world seems unblemished and never makes mistakes, perhaps only because they never think about anything worth thinking about, and never doing anything worth doing. They never really retreated from "them" into "him," so that "they" could always defeat "him," not "by refuting him," kafka was irrefutable, but by proving their own superiority in power. A person who trembles all day in an overly full spiritual world always gets empty discussion.
Kafka wants to die, but he wants to live like a girl. In his dealings with the maiden, Kafka was not clean, but he longed for holiness. The twist here may seem easy, but it is as long as "the radius of the Earth's orbit." The difference between a person and a group of people is reflected in this turning point. Perhaps we can say that it was in the overcoming of mephistopheles's gravitational temptation that Kafka guarded the boundaries of man and maintained a posture of looking up. He walked out of the room and faced the pouring rain, and he glided in the rain, but slowly, "Just like that, straighten up and wait for the sudden and endless surge of sunshine."
Written by/Far Son