In high school, a guy in my English class told me he was having recurring dreams about waking up as a giant cockroach. I thought that was really fascinating, so I made out with him in the prop room after play practice. A couple months later, we read “The Metamorphosis,”and I realized he’d used Kafka to get in my pants. This was, of course, not the first time in history that literature has been used for such purposes, and it certainly won’t the last, but it is my first memory of Kafka, his starting point on the line of my life.
My first year of college, we read Kafka—“The Metamorphosis,” The Trial, and several critical essays. I remember thinking that the sentences were too long. There was too much description. And what’s the bug supposed to mean, anyhow? Is the bug God? I thought the whale from that other book was God. How come everything is God?
***
I transferred to an American school in Florence, because why not? I worked as a figure model for drawing classes and read Dante (really long sentences. Lots of description. Does God really mean God?). One day, in an English bookstore, I found a used copy of Kafka’s The Complete Stories. I can’t tell you how many times I read it, but at some point during that book, I decided I didn’t want to study literature anymore. I wanted to write it.
***
I transferred to an art school in Chicago that had a Fiction Writing Department—a place committed to treating our work as an art form, same as dance and painting and theater. For one of my first papers—on Kafka’s “The Bucket Rider”—I wrote about historical context, global poverty, and why I thought the story sucked. My teacher handed the paper back, asking me to instead consider place, point-of-view, movement, and how these aspects of craft informed my own work.
It was the first time I’d thought about how a story was crafted.
I left every class wanting to run home and write.
***
Sometimes, you have to read a story ten, twenty times before you really get it. I was on the L, on my way to a bartending job I hated, reading “The Metamorphosis”yet again, and I had an epiphany—light bulbs appearing overhead, choir of angels coming forth from the Heavens, the whole nine yards—Gregor doesn’t want to go to work, either! So he turns into a bug! I spent the whole day imagining everything I could turn into instead of working at that bar: a dragon, a British spy, a tidal wave of molten lava.
I’ve since read “The Metamorphosis”about a thousand times, and I always get it in a different way.
Not long after, I wrote my very first story that I ever considered good. It happened all in one sitting, late at night into the early morning, in a very similar way to how Kafka wrote “The Judgement:”
“The fearful strain and joy, how the story developed before me, as if I were advancing over water.” (Diaries 212).
It was about a woman who woke up in bed with The Incredible Hulk. I figured, hell, if Kafka could wake up as a bug…
***
It was eerie: I’m sitting in a coffee shop, reading “In the Penal Colony,” thinking, Kafka, What the hell even is this? The ‘Harrow’? What the fuck is a ‘Harrow’? And as soon as the words ran through my head, I got to the next sentence in the story: “‘The Harrow?’ asked the explorer. He had not been listening very attentively” (The Complete Stories 142).
I looked up to see if Kafka was watching me.
He wrote that story in 1914, and here he was in my head nearly a century later.
I kept reading, and every time I was confused or lost or questioned the action, the explorer character would jump off the page and ask exactly what I was thinking.
“’And how does the sentence run?’ asked the explorer” (142).
“’But he must have had some chance of defending himself,’ said the explorer” (145).
“‘I do not approve of your procedure,’ said the explorer” (159).
At the time, I had no idea how Kafka pulled that shit off, but since I’ve started paying attention, I see the technique used everywhere: books, TV shows, pretty much every cop movie ever made. The older, jaded detective (usually played by Morgan Freeman) is showing the hot-headed, dead sexy rookie (who in my day was played by Brad Pitt, but maybe it’s someone else now. I am old) around the precinct, explaining who’s who, and what cases are still unsolved, and the dead sexy rookie asks all sorts of questions that are meant for us, the audience.
I’ve ripped this off many times in my own work, plus a hundred other things I’ve seen Kafka pull off on the page. It’s mind-blowing, what his work has taught me.
What’s that line?
When the student is ready, the master appears.
***
Tell me if this sounds familiar: I was in my mid-twenties. I was lonely. The writing wasn’t going well. Probably I drank too much and went home with people I shouldn’t have gone home with. Then one day, I’m minding my own business, reading Kafka’s “Wedding Preparations in the Country,” and I get to this line: “And so long as you say ‘one’ instead of ‘I,’ there’s nothing in it and one can easily tell the story; but as soon as you admit that it is you yourself, you feel as though transfixed and are horrified” (The Complete Stories 76).
Let’s try it out, shall we?
Last night, I went to the bar and did something dumb.
You know when you go to the bar and you end up doing something dumb?
Occasionally, when one goes out to the bar, one might do something less than intelligent.
I realized then how often I’d been speaking about myself in the third person, how much I tried to distance myself from my own actions.
Fuckin’ Kafka.
For anyone reading this who is, right now, at this very moment, obsessing over someone in a less than healthy sort of way, I invite you to sit down with Kafka’s Letters To Felice and immediately feel better about yourself.
***
When I started teaching, I assigned Kafka—The Complete Stories, The Trial, and Diaries. “I’m already taking a Kafka class,” a student said, and I asked to see her reading list. Out of twelve required texts, not one was anything Kafka himself had written; they were all criticism of what he’d written. Twelve—twelve—books of criticism.
***
“This wall is number one,” I tell my students, “and the opposite wall is number ten. Imagine two, three, four, five, etc., written on the floor between them. So let’s say number one is ‘My work is political,’ and number ten is ‘My work doesn’t have anything to do with politics.’ Move to wherever you stand.” This first time I played this game, I was backed against the Not Political wall.
“I write love stories,” I said.
A gay friend of mine was backed up against the opposite wall, and he said, “I write love stories, too.”
I thought about that for a beat or two.
Then I walked across the room and stood next to him.
That day I decided I started to consider the impact of my work. Not the intention—the impact. I’d like to have an impact. I’d like to contribute to a greater dialogue. I’d like my work to mean something, and truly, how the hell do you pull that off? One of the stories I return to as I consider these questions is Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist.” I stand outside that cage, day in, day out, admiring his fasting, and I see things in myself of which I’m not proud.
***
In 2003, the stars aligned in some crazy way, and I got a job in a summer Study Abroad program in Prague teaching courses on Kafka. Over the next several months, in preparation, I read everything by and about him—his journals and letters and biographies—and what blew my mind was this: he’s an actual person. A genius, yes, but also normal, albeit somewhat freaky, with all sorts of insecurities and problems. It always amazes me to discover that these writers I idolize are really just people. Like if Jesus walked into my living room and asked for a beer. That’s what reading Kafka’s journals was like.
***
Kafka is everywhere in Prague. His face is on T-shirts, coffee mugs—anything that can squeeze a few Euros out of tourists. But if you look past all that, you can see he’s also in the bricks, the statues, the chilled mist like a blanket on the Vltava River. You can page through his journals and find the flats he lived in, the bars where he’d read his work aloud to his friends. I sat in the back room of Café Montmartre, imagining his voice. It wasn’t hard. They have really good wine at Café Montmartre.
***
I didn’t have much of a religious upbringing. So when I took my students to visit Kafka’s grave, we spent a good three hours wandering around this beautiful old cemetery with its mausoleums and overgrown vines and crumbling sculptures, totally unable to find the guy. Finally, we figured out that we were in the Christian cemetery next door to the Jewish cemetery where Kafka is buried.
Looking for Kafka in a Christian cemetery; it was very Kafkaesque.
***
When we finally got to his grave, my students wrote notes and left them under rocks. A few of them were crying. The air was heavy; history crawled on our skin.
***
When I got back to the States, I went to the restaurant where I’d waited tables back in grad school and asked for one shift a week for a year. The cash I saved bought me a year to write in Prague. The following summer, when I got off the plane in to teach my Kafka class, I walked straight to the ticket gate and extended my return ticket from six weeks later to a year later.
It was one of the greatest moments in my life.
***
My boyfriend and I rented a one-bedroom walk-up in Namesti Miru, an idyllic little expatriate neighborhood a two-stop tram ride from Old Town Square. Every day, I wrote in that back room at Montmartre. It was a dream. I’d never written like that before, nor I haven’t since; not volume or content, inspiration or ease.
***
We often went to beer tastings, and one night, while my boyfriend got drunk with a tableful of Czech guys, I had the following conversation with an older man who’d been a public school teacher:
HIM: What are you doing in Prague?
ME: I’m teaching Kafka.
HIM: Czech people hate Kafka.
ME: Why?
HIM: He is too depressing. Czech people, we are not depressing! We are fun!
Look at how much fun!
***
We spent a week in Czesky Raj, which translates to “Czech Paradise”—five hundred miles of protected hiking forest with stairs cut into rocks and rolling hills and beautiful scenery. We were out there so long it got dark, nearly pitch, and we couldn’t find our way back. And did I mention we were on ecstasy? Eventually, our feet found the stone staircase back to our hotel, and I thought of Kafka’s line from “The Advocates:” “As long as you don’t stop climbing, the stairs won’t end, under your climbing feet they will go on growing upwards” (The Complete Stories 451).
Dude, I thought, climbing those stairs. Kafka is like… here.
***
Sometimes, students tell me they don’t like Kafka. His sentences are too long, they say. There’s too much description, and what the fuck’s up with the bug? That’s fine, I say. Who knows what writers will influences our lives, how their work will grow and change for us as we grow and change with it. I’ve been reading Kafka for nearly twenty years, and every time, I understand him and myself in a different way.
You don’t have to like him, I tell my students. But keep going, now or next week or next year. I wonder who I’d be if, at seventeen, I’d stopped at too long sentences, too much description, or that fucking bug.
***
All said and done, here’s who Kafka is to me:
When I’m writing—sitting there at my desk, trying to figure out what happens next, getting pissed when the screensaver pops up ‘cause I haven’t typed anything in so long, getting pissed when rejections show up in my inbox, thinking about giving up. There’s got to be something easier, right? Then, Kafka is a Godsend because when you open his Diaries, you see this:
“Today, painfully tired, spent the afternoon on the sofa” (Diaries 198).
“I will write again, but how many doubts have I meanwhile had about my writing” (237).
“But I will write in spite of everything, absolutely; it is my struggle for self-preservation” (300).
“Read In the Penal Colony aloud; am not entirely dissatisfied, except for its glaring and ineradicable faults” (318).
“My work goes forward at a miserable crawl” (321).
It goes on like that, page after page. He always goes on. He always kept climbing. Up to his dying day, under his climbing feet the stairs grew upwards.
***
Kafka, Franz. Diaries. New York; Schocken Classics, 1988. Print.
Kafka, Franz. The Complete Stories. New York; Schocken, 1971. Print.
Buy Once I Was Cool at Curbside Splendor.
Megan Stielstra is the author of Once I Was Cool, a collection of essays. Her work appears in The Best American Essays 2013, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, and elsewhere, and her story collection, Everyone Remain Calm, was a Chicago Tribune Favorite of 2011. She’s the Literary Director of the 2nd Story storytelling series and teaches creative writing at Columbia College Chicago.
