The Morgan Museum’s Kafka Show Is … Kafkaesque

Exhibitions focused on writers are often an uneasy balance of biography and interpretation, image and text, but Franz Kafka, who continues to fascinate and confound readers well into the 21st century, presents an especially complex case. A show dedicated to the author at the Morgan Library & Museum is worthwhile for any fan. At the same time, it sheds light on the limits of this exhibition model. Themed groupings of archival materials (e.g., photographs, manuscripts, and letters and postcards from Kafka to friends and family) from Oxford University’s Bodleian Library carry viewers through his short life and key works — notably, his most famous story, “The Metamorphosis” (1915), and his final, incomplete novel, The Castle (1922, published 1926).

Works by a few other artists and writers are on view, including some marked-up manuscript pages from Philip Roth, but the Kafka material is the draw. The curators highlight connections between his life and writing, but prioritize biography over interpretation, so visitors can come to their own conclusions. It’s a relief to avoid the hackneyed interpretations of Kafka that multiply with each new edition. Yet, for an author so singular that his literature spawned its own adjective, something about all the archival information feels frustrating … almost bureaucratic.

Then again, what could be more Kafkaesque than circling the show, trying to enter his world but never quite managing, just as K, the protagonist in The Castle, never reaches his destination? The idea of mounting a Kafka exhibition seems itself like a Sisyphean task. There will always be a barrier to getting in or out because, like K, we are relying on the information we’re given to try to reach a mythologized goal that is always out of reach. 

But we are given enough details to contextualize some of his writing and cobble together a partial image of Kafka. In a telling quote from 1902, for example, he describes his home of Prague as “a little mother” with “claws.” The comment speaks to the atmosphere of entrapment and claustrophobia that weighs down so many of his scenarios. He also had a good sense of humor, evidenced in the cheeky postcards he sent to his sister and brother-in-law. These are reminders of the humor laced throughout his stories.

One theme that recurs through the show’s archival materials is his health. Kafka died in 1924 of tuberculosis, just shy of his 41st birthday. A heightened bodily awareness from poor health and self-consciousness is reflected clearly in “The Metamorphosis,” in which the protagonist inexplicably transforms into a large insect. But it can be seen in other writings as well — most violently in “In the Penal Colony” (written in 1914, incidentally, the year that World War I broke out), which centers a torturous execution device, but also in the contrast between human and nonhuman embodiment in “A Hunger Artist” (1922), in which a fasting human is juxtaposed with a feasting panther, to name just two examples. 

“A Report for an Academy” (1917), cited in the section on “The Metamorphosis,” continues the animal theme. The exhibition didactics explain that the story of Red Peter, a captured ape who adopts human behaviors, “tell[s] us as much about human brutality as it does about nonhuman ways of life.” Yet it could equally be about denaturalizing human behavior, or exposing the slippage between human and nonhuman animals. The protagonist states at one point: “My ape nature fled out of me, head over heels and away, so that my first teacher was almost himself turned into an ape by it, had soon to give up teaching and was taken away to a mental hospital.”

In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975), a study of the author worth reading, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari write, “The line of escape is part of the machine.” For anyone who’s connected with these stories and novels, the statement should ring true. They also ask: “How can we enter into Kafka’s work?” What they’re really asking, though, is “how can we find a line of escape?” from the stifling structures of work, family, social relations, or obligations that trap and work us like rats or dogs, as people often say — but not as rats or dogs. One thing Deleuze and Guattari surely admired in Kafka was his realization in art of their theoretical concept of “becoming-other” — the liberatory process of losing the metaphor and absorbing the qualities of something other than oneself. 

“Like a dog” are also Josef K’s last words as he’s stabbed at the end of The Trial (1914–15), bringing his bureaucratic nightmare to its only possible end. Maybe the line of escape, for Kafka, was to let go and simply become the dog.

Franz Kafka continues at the Morgan Library & Museum (225 Madison Avenue, Murray Hill, Manhattan) through April 13. The exhibition was curated by Carolin Duttlinger, Katrin Kohl, and Barry Murnane along with Meindert Peters and Karolina Watroba. It was supported by Ritchie Robertson and Malgorzata Czepiel.