5 - Kafka’s short fiction

Summary

In a letter to Felice Bauer Kafka writes about the venue of his writing, explaining that his letter 'is no longer written from the office, for my office work defies my writing to you; that kind of work is completely foreign to me, and bears no relation to my real needs' (29.x.12; LF: 18). He refers in other letters to the 'particularly awful' and 'voracious world' (7.xii.12; LF: 96) of his office life, where his 'depressing office desk' (17/18.xii.12; LF: 109) 'is littered with a chaotic pile of papers and files; I may just know the things that lie on top, but lower down I suspect nothing but horrors' (3.xii.12; LF: 84). We know all too well from comments like these how troubling he found it to balance his 'day job' with his need to write the works for which he became famous.

While the ‘Kafkaesque’ experience is one in which the everyday becomes uncanny, weird, and anxiety-ridden, for Kafka, the everyday meant going to an office job he hated. It meant dealing with business matters that made him want to run away and at one point even to contemplate suicide. It meant living a double life, one during the day, the other during the night. But for Kafka day time was the dark side of existence.