Kafka before Kafka: The Early Stories

Summary

KAFKA — AND ALL THE ASSOCIATIONS that name carries with it — has become so much a part of today’s culture that it is hard to imagine the course of modern literature without his presence. Yet when Kafka’s first stories appeared, many readers thought the name was a pseudonym adopted by the Swiss writer Robert Walser. Walser’s short prose texts, which had been appearing sporadically in little magazines since 1899, had a seemingly unmistakable style. In a quietly playful, childlike and yet knowing, sometimes even slyly ironic tone, they presented everyday experiences and familiar human types. While they gently mocked creative genius and the laborious process of narrative composition, they also derived a kind of rapture from noticing small details in the world around the narrator, as he wanders through natural landscapes, engaging in flights of fantasy. The voice that narrates the texts is a personal one, and if it is at times a little eccentric, it is predominantly charming, even captivating. None of this sounds very much like the Kafka we know. Nor is it, in fact, identical with the tone of Kafka’s earliest writings; but turn-of-the-century readers can be forgiven if they were inclined to confuse the two authors.

The texts that Kafka’s contemporaries found so Walseresque were eight short pieces that appeared in the journal Hyperion in 1908 and five pieces that appeared in the Easter supplement of the newspaper Bohemia in 1910. They were reprinted, along with five new texts, in Kafka’s first book-length volume Betrachtung (Meditation), published in December 1912. The brevity of the texts, their often whimsical character, and the way they dwell on minute observations seemed to point in the direction of Robert Walser. So did the fact that several of them depicted a walk or an outing. Yet however much these early prose pieces owe to Walser’s writings, they also add their own characteristic twist to the Swiss author’s narrative schema. It is of course easier to see this in hindsight than it can have been for contemporary readers. Robert Musil, for example, felt troubled by the way in which Kafka’s Betrachtung seemed like a “Spezialfall des Typus Walsers, trotzdem es [= das Buch Betrachtung] früher erschienen ist als dessen Geschichten” (special instance of the Walser type, even though it appeared earlier than Walser’s Stories; Musil 9:1468).