Re-Noted: Franz Kafka's Ambivalent Notes
"In the diary one finds proof that, even in conditions that today seem unbearable, one lived, looked around and wrote down observations, that this right hand thus moved as it does today…"
Franz Kafka (1883-1924) left instructions: Upon his death, all “diaries, manuscripts, letters…sketches, and so on” should be burnt.1 Kafka also left his papers to the one person he knew would not burn them—his greatest literary advocate, Max Brod.
Deciding to leave his papers to Brod reflects Kafka’s deep ambivalence, according to Ross Benjamin, who recently translated the diaries. Indeed, Kafka’s life was riddled with ambivalence—over Felice, the woman he loved, but could not bring himself to marry,2 and over his published writings, including The Metamorphosis.
Most profoundly, Kafka was deeply ambivalent about his own body. It was too weak, he felt, too liable to break down. When he coughed blood (the first sign of tuberculosis) in 1917, his satirical imagination decided that his organs had conspired against him. He wrote to Brod:
Sometimes it seems to me…that my brain and lungs came to an agreement without my knowledge. ‘Things can’t go on this way,’ said the brain, and after 5 years the lungs declared that they were ready to help.3
Kafka was darkly funny. And his sense of estrangement from his own body—and from the world he lived in—have become an enduring aesthetic: the Kafkaesque. The nightmarish qualities of Kafka’s published works are everywhere in his notes. We find them, too, in the evocative sketches throughout his notebooks.
Kafka’s Diaries
Kafka’s diaries served multiple purposes. Sometimes he recorded what he did in a day, but he records many other things—here’s a sample:
drafts of letters
reviews of books, plays, and other cultural events
descriptions of other people
descriptions of his own bodily functions
excerpts from books he read
dreams
drafts for future works
aphorisms4
Many diary pages are not dated, and he would write in whatever notebook was closest—breaking the neat chronology we might expect from diaries. Often, he separated entries with dashes, as he does on this, the very first page of the first diary:
Kafka re-reads his diaries and finds in them both despair and comfort. He finds little of value, but he also finds little worth throwing away. Nevertheless, he finds comfort in his diary’s record of past troubles. It shows that he could survive difficult things:
An advantage of keeping a diary consists in the fact that one becomes aware with reassuring clarity of the transformations one incessantly undergoes…In the diary one finds proof that, even in conditions that today seem unbearable, one lived, looked around and wrote down observations, that this right hand thus moved as it does today… 5
One of the more surprising aspects of Kafka’s diaries are the frequent drawings. Kafka’s sketches most often represent the human body—often abstract forms without solid borders, they threaten to disintegrate in a dreamlike state bordering on the grotesque. In the diary, these figures attend entries that document Kafka’s frustration with his own body. Consider the following page:
I write this very decidedly out of despair over my body & over a future with this body.
When despair presents itself so definitely, is so closely bound to its object to firmly held back, as if by a soldier who covers the retreat and for this purpose lets himself be torn to pieces, then it is not real despair. Real despair has immediately and always overtaken its goal, (at this comma it became apparent that only the first sentence was correct)
Kafka scrutinized his sentences and edited his diaries—as in this last parenthetical comment. Ever the craftsman, Kafka labored over his private sentences.
Kafka’s Sketches
So much of Kafka’s writing seems to cry out—what a strange thing it is to have a body! Consider the most famous example, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis—about a man who awakes to find himself transformed into an insect. Kafka explores the strangeness of our embodied existence further in his sketches, which mostly focus on the human form. There’s no other word to describe them but Kafkaesque.
We find Kafka’s illustrations all over his work. Yes, they are in sketchbooks, but they also appear throughout his diaries, letters, and loose scraps of paper. In fact, you can purchase a gorgeous printed edition of Kafka’s drawings.
As the scholar Judith Butler notes, Kafka’s sketches reduce the body to a line, and, in doing so, clear the body of its often burdensome functions.6 Consider the cluster of heads on the right in the following sketch—they are completely disembodied. Reduced to floating eyes, they watch the other figures.
These bodies have already broken down. They float through the page as apparitions. I particularly love this image—which I’ve dubbed “writer at desk.”
Kafka’s Metamorphosis
It might surprise you to know that Kafka was ambivalent about his published works, including The Metamorphosis. He disliked the ending of this particular story. He was interrupted while writing it, called away on a business trip; when he returned, he couldn’t recapture his initial inspiration. In his diary, he documents:
Great aversion to [“Metamorphosis”] Unreadable ending. Imperfect almost to its depths. It would have turned out much better if I hadn’t been interrupted at the time by my business trip.7
But even if he “finds it bad” as he wrote in another diary entry, Kafka invested a lot of time and energy in its publication.
Repeatedly, he asks that the creature not be depicted in the cover illustration. It was more important that the reader conjure the pest’s visual appearance. Instead, Kafka recommended an open door, leading to the creature. You can see for yourself how Kafka’s design allows our own visual imagination to take flight.
Notes on Kafka’s Notes
Notebooks need not have any order: Kafka was not precious with his notebooks. He used them as he needed them, without designating specific purposes for most notebooks.
Think across art forms: So many of the figures I’ve covered in Noted have found their creativity crossing genre boundaries. Add Kafka to the list of writers/musicians who were talented visual artists (Sylvia Plath, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Eminem, Beatrix Potter, and Kurt Cobain come to mind).
We are not always the best judges of our own work: The Metamorphosis remains a classic of modern literature, so it is shocking to know that its own author found it flawed. Of course, we don’t always see our own work clearly. And in this particular case, I think we can all agree that Kafka was wrong.
Noted is fueled by you. Your ❤️’s and comments inspire me. As always, I would love to know your thoughts.
Yours in note-taking,
P.S. I can’t possibly write about Kafka without mentioning Mason Currey’s wonderful newsletter, Subtle Maneuvers, named after a Kafka quote.
Kafka, Franz. The Diaries of Franz Kafka. Translated by Ross Benjamin, Schocken, 2023, p. xvii.
Part of the reason is that Kafka’s father dissaproved of Felice. To learn more about Kafka’s relationship with his father, read Maria Popova’s stunning analysis of “Kafka’s Remarkable Letter to His Abusive and Narcissistic Father.”
Letter to Max Brod, September 14, 1917.
Benjamin, Introduction to The Diaries of Franz Kafka, p. vii.
The Diaries, p. 158.
When the body becomes a line and its density is flattened and reduced, it seems to eliminate the unmet needs of the body, including food, shelter, and protection from the murderous deeds of others.
Butler, Judith. “But What Ground? What Wall?" Franz Kafka: The Drawings. Kilcher, Andreas B., editor. Yale University Press, 2022, p.280
The Diaries, p.328. Benjamin translates Kafka’s title, “Die Verwandlung” as “The Transformation.”
As a person with a chronic illness who feels betrayed by my own body, it was reassuring to me that I am not the only one to feel like that, to feel my parts conspiring against me. I love the drawings so much. Thank you for sharing this.
Strong ending! I recently visited Prague and there's a Kafka street in the central square! Special to see that. I need to find a picture. I had no idea of his notes and they look messy but that just goes to tell you can have a clever mind, be articulated and produce structured work despite appearances. It's also completely news to me that he made drawings! Loved this post.