Most readers know Franz Kafka as the reclusive author of stories and novels that have since become monumental works of modern literature. Some readers also know him as a bureaucrat who, unhappy in his office, castigated the “hell of office life.” But few know that he rose at the end of his life to the position of Senior Legal Secretary at the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague (called, after 1918, the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Czech Lands). Kafka was no Bartleby the Scrivener, no harmless office drudge. Rather, he was a brilliant innovator of social and legal reform in “the Manchester of the Empire,” which at the time of Kafka’s tenure, between 1908-1922, was one of the most highly developed industrial areas of Europe.
Kafka’s professional writings have become more and more interesting to scholars seeking the elusive patterns of his thought. Today, his relation to “the office” seems predictably conflicted but by no means entirely negative. In 1913 he wrote the comment to his fiancée Felice Bauer that has dictated the popular view:
Writing and office cannot be reconciled, since writing has its center of gravity in depth, whereas the office is on the surface of life. So it goes up and down, and one is bound to be torn asunder in the process.
But Kafka’s being torn asunder is not the whole story. In his own words, he was a “natural” official fully aware of “the deep-seated bureaucrat” inside him, and he was not blind to its advantages. In an amazing letter written in 1922 to his friend Oscar Baum, he wrote “of our fumbling interpretations, which are powerless to deal with the ‘evolutions,’ embellishments, or climaxes of which the bureaucracy is capable.” If the office stood in the way of his writing, he could also breathe an élan into it and even furnish it with a human gaze, as a sort of brother adversary. In a letter to his lover Milena Jesenská, Kafka describes the office as precisely not a machine in which workers like him might be “a little cog” or “a big wheel.” Rather, “To me,” he wrote, “the office is a human being—watching me with innocent eyes wherever I am, a living person to whom I have become attached in some way unknown to me.” The office, in his words, “is not dumb, it is phantasmal.”
These remarks suggest Kafka’s awareness of the impact of his office life on his literary imagination. “It brought him into direct contact,” writes the Kafka scholar Jeremy Adler, “with industrialization, mechanization, and bureaucracy as well as with the struggle between capital and labor, and his official writings antedate his literary breakthrough.” At the end of his life Kafka sought to overcome imaginatively his earlier hostility to the office. In his novel The Castle, a hero named K., Kafka’s “vice-exister,” struggles to enter a strange “castle,” which runs on principles reminiscent of Kafka’s insurance institute. The ambition of this K.-figure is something of a riddle, and readers will wonder what it can mean for Kafka, who did not have to struggle to enter his office, where his presence was needed and paid for. But the theme of seeking entry into a higher institution runs throughout Kafka’s diaries in different directions. When he writes of craving to enter another place or sphere, it is very often to come into his authentic being as a writer (he coined the German word Schriftstellersein or “writerly being”). We will still wonder what connection can exist between creative, hotly intense imaginative writing and the life-blood of the office, the writing of briefs and filling in of forms? The answer lies in Kafka’s analogies.
For him, both institutions—writing and the law—practice feats of imaginative embellishment: both reach for heights of complexity, for “climaxes,” in their procedures. In their operations and their subject matter, especially in Kafka’s case, both deal with concepts of fault, of standards and the failure to meet standards, of dereliction and shortcoming. “How do I excuse my not yet having written anything today?” he writes, on a typical day. “In no way. . . . I have a continual invocation in my ear: ‘If you would come, invisible court!’” And, finally, very importantly, both sorts of writing, the legal and the literary, at their best proceed impersonally. Consider Kafka’s great description of his fate as a writer:
If there is a higher power that wishes to use me, or does use me, then I am at its mercy, if no more than as a well-prepared instrument. If not, I am nothing, and will suddenly be abandoned in a dreadful void.
What is striking about Kafka’s last novel is that his personal castle, the “house of writing” into which he forever sought entry, wears the features of bureaucracy, so that in the end these two kinds of being become indistinguishable. In The Castle we glimpse the imaginative “reconciliation” of office and writing.
###
In his daytime office work, Kafka was preoccupied above all with accident insurance, a “business” that, as he wrote in an early letter, “interests me greatly.” It stands to reason that as a full-time specialist in industrial accidents, from 1908 on, he would have introduced something of the logic of accident insurance into his novels and stories. On this assumption, one of the principles of Kafka’s literary world could be called “culture insurance.” Kafka’s stories and novels bring together fragments of many different cultural discourses—family language, subjective psychology, sexuality, literature, music, artistic performance, law, political agitation, religious ideology, war, and more, always profiling the conflict of values that informs them.
Kafka’s second novel, for example, The Trial, was written in 1914, contemporaneously with his harrowing story “In the Penal Colony.” In The Trial, a high-ranking bank official is arrested without his ever learning the grounds of his arrest and subsequent execution. “In the Penal Colony” sees a high-ranking officer lay a prisoner on a machine that writes into his body the text of the law he has broken. But before the story is over, it is the high-ranking officer who lays himself on the machine for punishment. The two stories vary with haunting complexity the conflict between highly placed persons and the lower order persons they punish, while introducing these conflicts into several different cultural discourses. Both The Trial and “In the Penal Colony” allude to historical epochs of Western law, to the bureaucratic agonies of the day, to the Old and New Testament, to Talmudic disputation, to Chinese torture gardens, to the Dreyfus case, to the Hollerith punch card machine. In proceeding allusively and comprehensively, Kafka performs for his culture an operation similar to the operation that accident insurance performs for the work life. His stories identify, differentiate between, and then bundle together opposing positions within different cultural enterprises and in this way level the risk of defeat to one or the other party to the conflict. The Trial contains a literal example of this “bundling” together of the disputants: court and supplicant, once distinct, merge when, as the prison chaplain, declares, “The judgment isn’t simply delivered at some point; the proceedings gradually merge into the judgment.” This is to say that the verdict of the court is a judgment on the way in which the accused conducts his defense: the accused delivers his own verdict. Both parties, court and victim, share responsibility for the killing.
Where wider cultural enterprises are concerned (empires, nations, religions in conflict), Kafka bundles risks by the strategic use of stereotypical images to create a common ground. He invests such stigmatizing metaphors as “nomads,” “apes,” “vermin,” “dogs” with features and values that are common to each of the conflicting groups; in this way, a discourse of enmity and dissociation becomes a discourse of likeness and community. Consider, for example, the figure of the acculturated ape Red Peter in “A Report to an Academy,” who is at once the trained animal, the incipient language speaker, Esau (“And the first came out red, all over like an hairy garment,” Genesis 25), the adolescent experiencing orgasm, the Jew venturing on “civility,” the fraternity duelist qualifying with a scar, the circus artiste, the “European of average culture.” Few groups, generally stigmatized or not, would fail to find themselves represented in this figure.
Again, the goal of the 1917 story “Building the Great Wall of China” is to protect the Empire from the nomads. These nomads might be identifiable in turn as any minority population wanting to be included in a nation state, but here, the Chinese Empire, threatened by irredentism, seeks to exclude them with an inevitably discontinuous and porous wall. To the question, How can a wall afford protection when it is not built continuously? the narrator replies,
Indeed, not only can such a wall not protect, but the construction itself is also in continual danger. Those sections of the Wall left abandoned in barren regions can easily be destroyed, over and over, by the nomads, especially since at that time these people, made anxious by the construction of the Wall, changed their dwelling places with incomprehensible rapidity, like locusts, and so perhaps had a better overview of the progress of the Wall than even we ourselves, its builders.
The key to the wall is its design. Its design is incomprehensible, except, perhaps, to the nomads whom it is meant to ostracize. This fact, taken strongly, means that the builders are dependent on the beings from whom it is their entire purpose to obtain protection. Invaders and invaded share the risk of mutual destruction. At the same time the paradox of the breachable wall almost certainly alludes to Kafka’s affirming a system of comprehensive accident insurance for both on-site and off-site industrial injuries that nonetheless allows for negotiable gaps.
Throughout Kafka’s office writings, we see him transforming materials from these documents into his literary work. Images of land surveyors, planing machines, and underground fortification wander dreamlike into his fiction; more importantly, perhaps, so do modes of legalese argument. Kafka’s official policy might best be put as redefining the being of things and relations through the risk they constitute. An “automobile,” for example, as the Vienna office proposed, is a factory, housing machinery capable of causing potential harm to its “workman”—the chauffeur. The automobile owner, henceforth a factory owner, would thus be required to pay insurance fees set on the basis of the fees levied on other factories harboring comparable risk. Kafka, as it happened, thought the idea unacceptable for the pragmatic reason that automobile owners were already required to pay high fees merely for the fact of owning the thing. Kafka’s stance of distributing responsibility equipollently between contesting parties—a stance informing his fiction and generally arousing displeasure among his readers—in fact reflects the spirit of pragmatic negotiation that he employed at the office.
The discourse of risk insurance suggests another complementary view on the heroes of Kafka’s fiction: they are the victims of accidents for which no insurance has been devised and might never be devised, such as a policy protecting persons from the consequences of waking up one morning as a verminous beetle. It would be too difficult to monetize the risk. One has so little data.
The office provided Kafka with a trove of material images (add on quarries, cognac, photographs, peasants) that, duly transmuted, surface in his work. But the best connection between the legal writings and the fiction is captured only by moving one stage higher on the order of thought— from shared images and tropes to the plane of accident, unintelligibility, unreadability. I have been describing some of the ways in which the logic of accident insurance comes into in Kafka’s novels and stories. We would then have two compatible “agencies”—on the one hand, accident insurance, which responds to a growingly uncontrollable and impersonal event by aiming to restitute the alienated subject; and on the other hand, the narrative of individual minds confronting wild accidents (such as waking up as a bug; being arraigned and killed for a never specified crime; or, as in the case of the hunter Gracchus, losing one’s way to death). Both systems aim to contain such accidents, make readable the unreadable, monetize risk, gain “a dear purchase” on chance. Except that the fictions must do without that deus ex machina—i.e. statistical norming—and must instead report the failure of individual minds to discover the norming reason for the accident that has befallen them in the creaturely order. Yet, “a certain truth,” as Kafka wrote in his notebooks, “might lie only in the chorus [of voices]”—the chorus for which we have substituted the discursive logic of insurance—a bundling together of contrapuntal voices within the narrative or a bundling together of the voice we are hearing with the voices in other texts of Kafka, always available to be heard contrapuntally.
xxx
Originally published in Berlin Journal.