Kafka (graphic novel)

AUTHOR: Mairowitz, David Zane

ARTIST: Robert Crumb (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Icon Books; Fantagraphics Books

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 1993 (Introducing Kafka); 2007

Publication History

Kafka was originally published in 1993 by Icon Books in the United Kingdom as a stand-alone trade paperback in its “Introducing” series and was issued by its American imprint, Totem Books, in the same year. British and American editions are known as Introducing Kafka or Kafka for Beginners. Subsequent English and non-English reprint editions may have alternate titles, including R. Crumb’s Kafka. The 2007 English edition from Fantagraphics Books has an index and is simply titled Kafka.

Cover design varies among editions but usually includes Robert Crumb’s distinctive drawings or details from illustrations by him. Different editions or versions exhibit variations in font styles, physical qualities, and other internal typographic features. Crumb’s expressive hand lettering in Kafka is lost in translated versions and editions.

Plot

Kafka is a biographical sketch of the Czech writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924) told in short chapters or sections based on his fiction and augmented with material from his parables, diaries, and letters. The weird atmospherics associated with Kafka the historical figure and Kafka the cultural icon are suddenly and graphically announced early in the book. The title page features a cartoon portrait of a dapper Kafka in a stylish bowler followed by an image of the same figure having the side of his head sliced off with a meat cleaver.

The first section describes the cultural milieu of Kafka’s childhood in a late-nineteenth-century Prague ghetto, which provides the backdrop for Kafka’s emerging sense of alienation from family, community, the body, and everyday life. Drawings of Old Town Prague architecture and aspects of Jewish mysticism are significant.

The second section, “The Judgment,” features a young man named Georg who lives with his aging father. The relationship between the protagonist and the abusive father mirrors Kafka’s relationship with his father. After telling his father about a letter he has written to an old friend in Russia announcing his engagement, the old man begins abusing Georg in sudden, paranoid outbursts. A sense of revulsion, loathing, guilt, and intimidation overwhelms Georg as he confronts the obscene presence of his father’s physicality and brutal personality. Shame over his own body and subsequent humiliation by his father lead Georg to fantasize about death or disappearance. He will effectively exploit his fear of abusive authority for literary purposes, though his ambivalence toward his father will never abate.

Section 3 is based on one of Kafka’s most famous novellas Die Verwandlung (1915; The Metamorphosis, 1936). The main character, Gregor Samsa, awakens one morning transmogrified into a bug. While trying to cope with this unusual situation he is immediately confronted by his parents and some clerks from his firm, whose concern over the fact that he is late for work quickly turns to revulsion when they finally barge into his bedroom and see him as a horrifying insect. Aware of the fear and disgust he provokes in his family, Gregor attempts to elude their gaze even as he experiences wonder over the curious biological features of his new insect body. Alternately, he grieves over his sudden inability to work and provide for his family.

Gregor subsists on scraps and slops of food placed on the floor of his bedroom by his sister, Grete. After bouts of compassion, loathing, and resentment, Grete persuades her parents to let Gregor die from a festering wound caused by a rotten piece of apple lodged in his back. Samsa sympathizes with his family’s wish that he disappear. He finally dies, and his corpse is found and disposed of by a charwoman. On vacation soon after his death, Gregor’s parents and sister become rejuvenated, happy over the fact that Grete is blossoming into vigorous young womanhood.

The fourth section, called “The Burrow,” reflects Kafka’s adult life living at home even though he was employed and could have lived on his own. He found it difficult to work on his writing in this environment. The burrow’s terror of discovery becomes a metaphor for Kafka’s hypochondria, which is connected in these panels to his sense of Jewish self-abasement. To overcome physical insecurities and self-loathing, Kafka engages in various physical fitness schemes and begins the first in a series of tortured epistolary relationships.

Kafka performs important and useful work at the Workman’s Accident Insurance Institute in Prague, but this, along with intense focus on his writing, are not enough to allay his irrational fears. In the end, the fantastic molelike creature in “The Burrow” cannot elude its self-imposed torment.

Section five, “In the Penal Colony” (“In der Strafkolonie,” 1919; “In the Penal Colony,” 1941), features a Traveler and the chief administrator of a remote penal settlement who demonstrates the workings of justice by describing a frightful execution machine. The reader quickly learns that the administrator of this settlement is both judge and executioner. An abject prisoner whose guilt is never in doubt is gagged and bound to the execution machine, which consists of a vibrating bed positioned under a stationary harrow. The harrow slowly inscribes both the offense and the sentence into the prisoner’s flesh before it slices through his body, killing him. The administrator delights in the machine’s efficient design features, including the fact that it dumps corpses into an adjacent pit for easy disposal.

The interlude takes a strange twist when the Traveler indicates disapproval of the operation. The administrator then whips a piece of paper out of his wallet, on which is vaguely scribbled the imperative “Be Just,” which he shoves in the Traveler’s face. The chief administrator next orders the prisoner to be freed, places the scrap of paper on the machine bed, has himself bound and gagged as if he were a condemned prisoner, and promptly orders his own execution. The machine quickly malfunctions and bloody fragments of the administrator’s shredded corpse hang from the harrow with a spike rammed through his forehead.

The final sections of Kafka examine “The Hunger Artist” (Ein Hungerkünstler: Vier Geschichten, 1922; A Hunger Artist, 1945). Kafka’s death and posthumous reception suggest that Kafka’s fiction and other writings are—despite the academic industry and pop-culture iconography that has grown up around him—the best guide to his work.

Characters

•Franz Kafka (1883-1924), the biographical subject, is an unmarried author who lives most of his life with his parents in Prague. He works as a claims assessor for the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute for Bohemia.

•Hermann Kafka (1852-1931) is Franz’s overbearing father, an assimilated Jew, and a Prague shop owner. Father and son never get along well. In response to Hermann’s lifelong rejection of him, Kafka writes his famous Brief an den Vater (1952; Letter to His Father, 1954).

•Georg is the protagonist in Kafka’s story “The Judgment,” a thinly veiled account of Kafka’s troubled relationship with his father.

•Gregor Samsa is the protagonist in Kafka’s story The Metamorphosis. One day, he finds himself mysteriously turned into an insect and is unable to return to work as a traveling salesman. After Gregor has a series of harrowing misadventures at home, his family decides to let him die from a wound.

•Grete is Gregor’s sister in the Metamorphosis. At first, she is shocked by her brother’s transformation, but she overcomes her revulsion and brings him scraps of food. Eventually, she persuades her parents to let him die when his continued existence as an insect threatens the family’s financial situation.

•A mole, in the “The Burrow,” is one of various animals used by Kafka to examine the world of terror and alienation and related fantasies of escape.

•Josef K is the protagonist in Der Prozess (1925; The Trial, 1937), the story of a man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a vague crime, about which he can learn nothing from judicial authorities. After a fruitless struggle to learn the truth about his situation in regard to the law, he is executed.

•Milena Jesenská (1896-1944) is one of Kafka’s girlfriends. Letters he wrote to her were published after his death.

•K, the protagonist in Das Schloss (1926; The Castle, 1930), is a land surveyor who is mysteriously summoned by inaccessible authorities to a remote castle staffed by bureaucrats who work in a maze. Klamm is one of the officials associated with the castle.

•Frieda is Klamm’s mistress and a bartender at a village inn near the castle with whom K has a sexual encounter and an even briefer engagement to be married.

•Olga and Amalia are sisters in The Castle who provide K with companionship.

•Ottla (1892-1943) was Kafka’s younger sister and the person to whom he was closest in his family.

•Dora Diamant (1898-1952) is a young woman who lived with Kafka in Berlin at the end of his life.

•Karl Rossmann is the emigrant protagonist in Kafka’s unfinished novel Amerika (1927; America, 1938, better known as Amerika, 1946), an odd fantasia in which he ends up working for a carnival-like operation improbably called “The Nature Theatre of Oklahoma.”

Artistic Style

Crumb and David Zane Mairowitz’s collaboration highlights prominent themes from Kafka’s life and writings. Crumb’s trademark crosshatch drawings and expressive hand lettering convey the claustrophobia and absurdity of Kafka’s fictional universe. The photographic record of Kafka’s milieu provides the basis for a realistic depiction of period clothing and associated social roles just prior to the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire. Dense cross-hatching suggests a noirish sense of Prague’s old buildings and ghetto area. Interiors are oppressive, while both city life and remote locales appear menacing. Nuances of setting and psychology emerge through Crumb’s black-and-white cartooning, especially through his precise rendering of the grotesque. Facial expressions are often crazed or oddly impassive. The mise-en-scène evokes irrationality and paranoia, with Mairowitz’s factual narrative offering a sharp contrast to Crumb’s illustrated narrative.

Crumb’s moody drawings are especially effective at highlighting Kafka’s conflicted sexual experiences. Recurring erotic escapades goad ambivalent male protagonists into farcical situations. In The Trial, Crumb draws a sequence of panels in which a bemused K and a hesitant Kafka attempt to negotiate carnal situations. The same sequence occurs in the chapter on Amerika, where Karl Rossmann is first seduced by his uncle’s daughter and later bullied by the slatternly Brunelda.

Emotional stress and trauma are represented by the traditional cartooning device of sweat marks and exclamation lines drawn near characters’ heads. Crumb’s illustrations of crowds and ensembles in Kafka suggest the dangers lurking in mob psychology. In this setting, group portraiture becomes a record of panic, cruelty, indifference, and curiosity. In contrast, some of the individual portraits in Kafka convey warmth and humanity.

Themes

The themes in Kafka are as varied as Kafka’s complex personal life and the writing he produced in a relatively short lifetime. The allegorical and the personal are subtly interwoven, though dread is pervasive throughout Kafka’s fiction. His use of symbolic animals to explore alienation and consciousness is given vivid expression in Crumb’s drawings. Some critics see The Metamorphosis and “The Burrow” as allegories of dehumanization and social marginalization. The novels The Castle and The Trial and the short story “In the Penal Colony” explore an important thematic cluster concerning the “law” and its obscure workings in bureaucratic regimes rooted in guilt, power, and authority. The characters in Kafka seem animated by occult forces, but episodes of overt brutality and violence erupt throughout these narratives. Men are usually feckless or authoritarian, while women are depicted as objects of longing or revulsion and occasionally as benign.

Maneuvering Kafka’s problematic fictional world in an attempt to find resolution or clarity seems to evoke the very conditions that undercut such a possibility. Though compelled to do so, Kafka’s protagonists are frequently confronted with opaque obstacles or have difficulty decoding meaning. Social roles and processes become subtly distorted or overdetermined. The organization of space and architecture undermines normal expectations. Consequently, transformation plays a central role in Kafka’s fiction, as if change into allegorical creatures or sudden flight will offer relief from traumatic or dangerous situations. Karl Rossmann, the émigré hero in the unfinished novel Amerika, for example, hopes to find a fresh start in the “new world” after a kerfuffle forces him to leave Bohemia. Since Rossmann’s fantasy about life in the United States simply inverts the particular conditions of his old life in Europe, his raw frontier experiences mostly result in alienation. The twist comes with his eventual employment in a kind of vaudeville company called “The Nature Theatre of Oklahoma,” an ironic utopia that Crumb depicts as a scene from a 1930’s Busby Berkeley musical.

Impact

As an individual graphic guide that has been reprinted and translated many times since its original publication in 1993, Kafka has provided readers with a concise overview of major themes in Kafka’s life and work. Crumb’s prominence in the underground comics community and his likely sympathy toward many of Kafka’s fixations enhance Kafka’s value as a reference guide, particularly since his illustrations easily resonate across cultures.

Further Reading

Crumb, Robert. The Complete Crumb Comics (2011).

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. R. Crumb Sketchbook (1992- ).

Bibliography

Crumb, Robert. “R. Crumb, the Art of Comics, No. 1.” Interview by Ted Widmer. The Paris Review, no. 193 (Summer, 2010): 19-57. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6017/the-art-of-comics-no-1-r-crumb.

Crumb, Robert, and D. K. Holm, ed. R. Crumb Conversations. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004.

Crumb, Robert, and Peter Poplaski. The R. Crumb Handbook. London: MQ Publications, 2005.

Holm, D. K.. Robert Crumb. North Pomfret, Vt.: Pocket Essentials, 2005.

Schmitz-Emans, Monika. “Kafka in European and U.S. Comics Inter-medial and Inter-cultural Transfer Processes.” Revue de littérature comparée, no. 312 (2004): 485-505.