A Short Commentary on Letters to Milena by Franz Kafka

“The easy possibility of writing letters must have brought wrack and ruin to the souls of the world. Writing letters is actually an intercourse with ghosts, and by no means just the ghost of the addressee but also with one’s own ghost, which secretly evolves inside the letter one is writing.”

“In a way, you are poetry material; You are full of cloudy subtleties I am willing to spend a lifetime figuring out. Words burst in your essence and you carry their dust in the pores of your ethereal individuality.”

“I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful.”

“You are the knife I turn inside myself; that is love. That, my dear, is love.”
“I miss you deeply, unfathomably, senselessly, terribly.”

A compendium of letters written by Kafka to Milena, which was published posthumously. The former never intended for any of the epistolary expressions to be publicised, but some decided it necessary.
In any case, it has been several months since I’ve finished reading this, but some fervent memories remain. Vignettes of life and love…with all its concomitant agony and sorrow. There was something unimaginably sad about Kafka’s limpid prose… the “fragments of four days snatched from the night”, the idylls of their love affair that soon became “pure anguish”… then followed soon after by his passing.

Brief Commentary on The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

During the turn of the 19th century (and early 20th century), there emerged a renewed fascination for the “involuntary workings of the mind”. Samuel Butler propounded a theory about the “collective unconscious” (His Erewhon (1872) is a most interesting read), Myers wrote about the “sublimal self”, William James penned much about a concept known as “stream of consciousness”, which had preponderant influence on early 20th century literature.

And of course the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, requires no introduction.

It should therefore come as no surprise that Kafka incorporated Freudian symbology into the inner workings of the Samsa family.

The father possesses both physical and sexual authority, and subverts Gregor’s frivolous attempts at leaving his room (“breaks out”) by throwing apples, kicking him, and others.
At the end of Part II, Gregor’s mother embraces her husband, nearly naked, imploring for him to spare Gregor’s life. And as Ritchie Robertson writes, “his mother uses sex as a
means of cajoling his father into sparing his life”.

There is perhaps too much to expound upon about the confluence of Expressionist and Realist narrative in The Metamorphosis , the many biblical allusions, the “Why did Kafka choose a cockroach?” question. In many tales about repugnant creatures, such as that of Flaubert’s The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitalier , the leper turned out to be no creature, but Jesus Christ. Kafka could have had Gregor metamorphosed into any other creatures or insects, the distinction made perhaps requires additional thought.