Machine Dreams

Franz Kafka’s greatest wish was to disappear. Instead, he became an icon, a legend in the literal sense: the work he left behind demands to be read (legenda means “things to be read”). But the elusive force of his work remains irreducible even as the commentaries and biographies continue to proliferate. If he has disappeared, it is in the mode of abundant appearance. At the end of his life he seems to have anticipated this odd fate, which has become only more evident in the eighty-plus years since his death. In 1924, literally starving to death because tubercular lesions in his throat made it impos­sible to eat or drink, Kafka corrected the proofs of his last story, “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk.” With its singing mouse who barely sings and who in the end vanishes into a self-imposed exile (but was she was ever really there in the first place?), “Josephine” is a wry meditation on the artist’s strange invisibility. Its final sen­tence, which reads like a posthumous farewell, dreams of a “happy” disappearance for the story’s long lost protagonist:

Perhaps we shall not miss her so very much after all, while Josephine, redeemed from the earthly sorrows which to her thinking lay in wait for all chosen spirits, will happily lose herself in the numberless throng of the heroes of our people, and soon, since we are no historians, will rise to the heights of redemption and be forgotten like all her brothers.

This last sentence of Kafka’s fiction rings with a dry, subtle melancholy—a sadness sharpened by paradox. Kafka, who ­self-consciously strove for literary greatness, recognized that true redemption lay in oblivion but also that redemptive oblivion is impossible. Just as Josephine lives on through the narrator, entering into the troubled legends of the mouse people, Kafka, too, became a legend precisely because of his efforts to disappear into a body of work, and even to make that work itself disappear. His notorious in­structions to his friend Max Brod to burn his unpublished manuscripts after his death only extended the legend into the work’s very existence.

What’s most striking in the last words of “Josephine”—the fictional analogue to Kafka’s testament to Brod—is the equation of disappearance with happiness. Rarely is the word, much less the feeling, found in Kafka’s work, and few would accuse him of having been a happy man. But here a reconciliation is suggested, a resolution of conflicts, even an exit from history and a vaguely messianic state of peace. It could be said that this happiness—no doubt a reflection of his final months with Dora Diamant in Berlin—surrounds even the most gruesome parts of his work like the...