The Blowfish Blog

[The Pro Circuit] Kafka’s Porn: The Trial Begins

Making headlines this month is the revelation that legendary German-speaking Czech writer Franz Kafka owned porn. This is according to a book by James Hawes, who appears to be the same James Hawes who wrote a very likeable 1996 crime novel called A White Merc With Fins. Kafka’s penchant for the porno, however, has reportedly been known to Kafka scholars for years, and the Telegraph article says Hawes “said he had made no claims to have discovered Kafka’s penchant for pornography and brothel visits, but had explored why Kafka scholars had chosen to virtually ignore the topic.” Hawes rips into Kafkaites not for trying to cover up his porn interests, but for not exploring them as central ingredients in Kafka’s life. Kafka experts, meanwhile, have fired back at Hawes with a mix of deadpan dismissal and histrionic defensiveness. The response to Hawes accusations seems to prove his point.

Said Hawes to the Telegraph: “[The critics] have pored over every memorandum he ever wrote, every insurance report he ever compiled, looking for clues. Yet they have chosen not to show this undoubtedly very dark stuff.”

When I hear “very dark” associated with pornography, I give myself a high-five, and here the Telegraph says we’re talking about, among other things, “images of a hedgehog-style creature performing fellatio, golem-like male creatures grasping women’s breasts with their claw-like hands and a picture of a baby emerging from a sliced-open leg.” Ach du lieber!

But the Telegraph article quotes Ranier Stach, another Kafka expert as being outraged by Hawes’ “outrageous marketing play,” claiming the so-called porn was “playful.” A baby emerging from a sliced-open leg? I want to know who Herr Stach has been playing with.

Outraged posts by my friends M. Christian and Violet Blue got me interested in this issue, with Violet saying “Of course Kafka checked out porn and had to stash it; it’s a time-honored tradition.”

But was Kafka’s porn known or unknown to scholars, and is this whole thing a cheap ploy to sell Hawes’ books? At press time the Wikipedia article on Franz Blei ridiculed the contrversy, referring to the Hawes story as a “Silly Season press story,” which, like Kafka’s work, gave voice to a nameless existential horror I’ve known all my life — I never knew the term Silly Season, but I always wondered why round about early August, so many fur seals wear bowler hats. But I digress.

Why Franz Blei? A friend and collaborator of Kafka, Blei edited some of the porn in his friend’s stash. In 1905 and 1906, Blei edited two private magazines, Amethyst and The Opals, described by Wikipedia as “mildly pornographic.” They included classic poems by French poet Paul Verlaine (about whose asshole, incidently, Verlaine’s lover Arthur Rimbaud occasionally wrote poetry) and images by Aubrey Beardsley. Kafka apparently had a subscription.

The Wikipedia article references its statement that the journals were “known about by Kafka scholars for many decades” to the Times Online piece, which says nothing of the sort. Instead, that piece focuses on Hawes’ portrayal of Kafka as different than popular and critical consciousness generally portrays him — as a tortured loner who was, as required by his very genius, sexless. Hawes says none of that is true, and in that as far as I am concerned he is very, very right.

Kafka was certainly a man of extraordinary complexity, and he was far from “just” a tortured loner if he was one — which I don’t think he was. He certainly harbored deep and troubling thoughts. He accused his father of emotional abuse throughout Kafka’s childhood, and most biographers seem to agree he suffered from depression and anxiety.

But anyone giving a serious read to his only short novel, “The Metamorphosis,” must be struck by the bizarre humor of it all. Kafka also had a tendency to write unbelievably complex sentences with a humor that would be impossible in any language other than German. This sort of thing is not the behavior of a tortured loner, but of a writer amused by the possibilities of language. For my money a vein of hilarity runs through Kafka’s other works. What’s more, whether or not he was tortured, Kafka was part of a literary clique, as evidenced by his friendship with Blei. He had intense personal relationships.

Does that mean he rubbed one out to images of a hedgehog performing fellatio? Maybe, maybe not. Quite frankly, my own porn stash, if anyone cares, has more than a few things friends sent me that would I would be exceedingly unlikely to wank to.

Did Kafka wank? Of course he did. He was a genius, and wanking’s smart stuff, my friends. Since the history of art is the history of sex, and vice-versa, a serious discussion of Kafka’s porn belongs in any discussion of his life. And if Hawes is just grandstanding and trying to hype up interest for his book, then I’ll give him this, for which I’m grateful: At least he got Kafka back in the newspapers.

Thomas S. Roche blogs about music, politics and hunting Bigfoot at thomasroche.com.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, 20 August 2008 at 8:59 am and is filed under Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.