let's cancel kafka!
how do we think about the past online?
It begins as it always does with an offhand comment on Twitter, in this case a screenshot of Franz Kafka’s Wikipedia page, captioned ‘oh!’.1 ‘Kafka was “tortured” by sexual desire’, ‘visited brothels’, and ‘was interested in pornography’, reads the screenshot from Wikipedia, which is itself condensed from his biography by scholar Reiner Stach. Quickly, this was quote-retweeted and rephrased as: ‘porn addict and a john, i hope the girls romanticizing his quotes have a look at this’, which then itself went viral.2 ‘this like kinda ruined my night ngl’, ‘I never knew this, what the fuck’, and ‘delete this’ were common reactions, as well as a further escalation to describing Kafka as a rapist.
There’s a degree to which a horrified gut reaction is reasonable, especially from those who may not have engaged in depth with Kafka’s work itself or the history surrounding it. It is a classic, painful experience of womanhood to discover that your male icons were womanisers or negligent lovers or bought sex from prostitutes. Feminist analysis of a work or figure can draw out those aspects and use them as a critical lens, as Phyllis Rose does in her classic study Parallel Lives, which joins together the personal and the political of five Victorian marriages, more or less contemporaneous with Kafka’s life. And yet. Much of the uproar in response to the Kafka post goes beyond the reasonable. Following the progression of ‘discourse bait’, as expounded by
in her essay on The Discourse Age, everything has escalated.No one is listening to each other, and it all seems to be in a constant, rabid search for an ideological end. A nail with which to seal the coffin of unrest. Who can call someone else an ableist and end the debate, having now determined the bad guy? Who can find the deep-cut tweets revealing this essayists astounding hypocrisy, therefore making their initial point null? Who can free us from this cyclical, open-source, free-for-all gladiator fight? Help!3
In a classic example of ‘the internet getting away from itself’, the discourse has evolved over 48 hours to encompass the rejection of all men in history, whether women had agency before they had legal rights, and the role of sex work in society, with the manosphere jumping in to defend prostitution and impassioned women rejecting a male author who until recently had been the internet’s ‘babygirl’ as a diabolical monster. We’ve jumped from ‘nineteenth century man visited brothels’ to ‘all men in the past raped women’ to ‘women had no agency or power over their lives full stop until today’. Kafka has been cancelled. And everyone is going, well, just a little bit Kafkaesque.
This all has very little to do with the work of Franz Kafka or feminist literary-historical criticism and everything to do with the limited contemporary concerns of the terminally online, for whom ‘having a look’ at a screen-grabbed Wikipedia page is the height of research. Kafka scholars have long analysed the role of sexual repression and expression in his work. Writing at the turn of the nineteenth century, Kafka was familiar with the theories of Sigmund Freud, many of which are premised on ideas about sexuality as a vital part of human development and the source of neuroses. Kafka’s grappling with his own sexuality in the context of the nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries, when sex was both inescapably present and constantly repressed, and the influence of this on his work is a fascinating area of study which is ripe for interpretation, as
puts it on Twitter:
As Tilly notes, there are so many interesting ways to think about this topic, but online there is no thinking going on: only feeling, only gut-reactions of horror and disgust at the discovery that a long dead author famous for his neuroses had a potentially warped perspective on sex. This isn’t exactly a smoking gun. To put it another way: Kafka was always a bit of a freak. And that was kind of why people liked him in the first place.
The gut-reaction, reductive approach to art feels like the outcome of a long trend on the internet: the reaction to literary criticism emblematised by ‘The curtains were blue’. Usually depicted in a Venn diagram, this meme posits a tiny overlap between ‘what your English teacher says the author meant’ (that the curtains were blue as a symbol of emotional turmoil and mental depression) and ‘what the author meant’ (that the curtains were blue). Plenty of perseverant English teachers have picked apart the fallacies of the meme, so I won’t dwell on it here, but it speaks to an unwillingness to interpret art or interrogate the rich networks of meaning which make up human life.4 Add this surface-level engagement with literature which rejects any critical analysis deeper than ‘relatability’ to a toxic brew of puritan morality politics online, and you have the perfect storm waiting to happen.
But why Kafka? Why now? Look at the pattern and you can see it coming. On the internet today, an interest in literature, history, and art has become an identity-marker, a way of projecting a particular vision of oneself to the world. I wrote in my last post about the hollowness of the dark academia aesthetic, in which an interest in literature, history, and art operates merely as a marker of online identity and visual style.
In emphasising the ‘picturesque’ or ‘aesthetic’, the dark academia lifestyle has become one of consumption, not engagement, a contrived signalling of one’s individual erudition whilst actually following trends.5
Think also of BookTok. Literature has become an aesthetic to be emulated, a product to be consumed and re-shared, rather than an art-form to be considered critically and evaluated on the levels of form, content, and context. For many reasons, Kafka’s work and his image have become exemplars of this shift. The Metamorphosis meme, referencing Kafka’s work of the same name, has been circulating since 2011, peaking in 2020 when we were all stuck, Gregor Samsa like, at home, whilst in recent years the man himself has become the subject of online interest and, well, horniness.6 Last year, TikTok has awoken and found itself with a mad crush on Kafka’, whilst Dazed published a piece asking ‘Why is everyone so obsessed with Franz Kafka?’.7
Dazed found an answer in Kafka’s cynicism and absurd plots, which align with Gen-Z’s post-ironic humour, socialist sensibilities, and alienating experience of modern life. Relatability, again; art is good if we can relate to it, if we can make it part of our own identity, which we can then display and commodify online. Indeed, as the viral post attacking ‘the girls romanticising his [Kafka’s] quotes’ indicates, our online engagement with literature, from BookTok’s Colleen Hoover obsession to Twiter e-girls reading Joan Didion at the beach, is less about the literature itself than the dilution of it into palatable, commodifiable, bite-sized snippets which can be used to signify our proximity to a certain community online. No wonder people are shocked to hear that Kafka was weird about sex, if they primarily know his work from a few viral diary entries and quotes which seem so relatable to us today.
Dazed interviewed Dr Dan Hall, lecturer at Warwick University:
He [Kafka] captures in an extraordinarily accessible way the way in which many people – not just young people, but perhaps especially young people – feel about modern life, where authorities have their own incomprehensible and arbitrary rules and the individual is excluded, alienated, isolated, alone.8
Kafka’s work speaks to us on a human level and feels startlingly prescient today. Good art can do that — speak across the divide of time and space. Yet it is still a product of its own contexts, which can be very different from our own. To approach a work from a contextualist perspective is not to excuse or celebrate the contexts that produced the work, but to recognise that it is a product of its own history and we cannot understand it without understanding that history. That relatability is not all there is. Or, as
put it on Twitter:
Much as music fans form parasocial relationships with Taylor Swift, Mitski, and their K-Pop idols, even to the point of creating far-fetched fantasies about their favourite artist’s life (the Gaylor conspiracy is perhaps the most insidious), literary and historical figures have become the subject of ‘stan culture’, an integral part of individual identities and their self-expression online. When Taylor Swift does something we might see as morally dubious or self-interested — spend 166 hours crossing the US in a private jet for her Eras tour in the midst of climate breakdown, for example — Swifties take any criticism as a personal assault.9 Taylor Swift has become such an integral part of the Swiftie’s persona, particularly as it is expressed in online stan culture (with the demise of in person third spaces, often the only place to express one’s passions), that any criticism of Swift herself is a criticism of the Swiftie. Discovering that one’s idol is fallible hurts. It introduces a threatening ambiguity into one’s stable view of the world. That an idol’s deviation from the ideal feels like a painful attack on one’s sense of self can help explain some of the deranged defences some fans come with for poor behaviour, as well as the disgusted way others reject their former icon.10
Kafka — like Taylor Swift — was human. And human beings are notoriously messy and imperfect. Lionising any individual sets you up for failure and pain when reality comes crashing in. But unlike Taylor Swift or Phoebe Bridgers or Megan Thee Stallion, Franz Kafka is long dead. He cannot defend himself, or change his behaviour, or signal his moral virtue to his fans. He lived in a different time and place. Those who have seen him in one light, as that ‘insect guy’ who was a bit of a yearner and struggled to finish a single novel, are now forced to see him in another: the light of history, which casts long shadows and always differs from the safe warm glow of the present.
The hand-wringing over Kafka recalls the treatment of another literary giant and internet darling, Sylvia Plath. Much as Kafka's oeuvre speaks to the alienation and banal absurdity of everyday life in the modern world, Plath has become an icon of girlhood and the female experience. Plath often features in lists of ‘coquette’ or ‘sad girl’ books, her quotes are circulated on Twitter and appear in TikToks soundtracked by Lana Del Rey.11 Yet in the parlance of the twenty-first century, Plath was seriously problematic, and ripe for cancellation. Search ‘was Sylvia Plath’ on TikTok and the first result that comes up is ‘was Sylvia Plath a bad person’. The debate about ‘the death of the author’ and whether we should interpret art through a biographical lens has raged for decades, but it seems that on the internet today we’re neither endorsing nor rejecting the claim that an author’s biography informs their work. Rather, we have rejected the work all together to focus solely on the value of the author themself. Our evaluative apparatus for art and literature has become contemporary moralism, our personal, historically-specific value-judgements about what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. ‘Your fave is problematic’, but for literary-historical figures.
In this framework there is no grey area. But it is in the grey area that literature and art often thrive, and where criticism can stake its ground. What art would survive if we could only consume the ‘unproblematic’, if each artist had to uphold a universal moral standard in order to be considered worthy of our attention? We would have nothing, no art, no literature, no poetry or music. What would survive would be bland, diluted works, closer to moral propaganda or marketing content than art. As
put it on TikTok in the context of Plath’s racism: we can recognise that we ‘live in a different cultural context’ and still love some of the ideas and imaginative power of a particular author or artist.12 Indeed, the interplay between our cultural context and theirs can be a source of literary innovation and powerful critique, enabling new, diverse audiences to engage with classics, for example. And we do not have to make an author or artist an integral part of our own persona to engage with their work.As I read yet another sweeping statement on Twitter, filled with moral outrage that a literary icon has failed us and must be cast out, I think of Jean Genet, the twentieth-century French writer whose life and work was dedicated to the exploration of crime. To read Genet is not to excuse the acts in which he engaged and which he professes a desire to enact, though to read Genet is to be drawn thoroughly into his own alternate moral world. His work asks us to upend our assumptions of morality and social order, to see through his eyes the beauty of evil and appeal of criminality, including his (outlawed) homosexuality. Genet’s work, like Kafka’s, is more challenging than it appears, engaging in a kind of absurdism which sheds a dark light back on society. And yet it is tied to Genet’s own life, as the son of a prostitute, a petty criminal, a prostitute himself and an itinerant vagrant, a life which is by no means ‘good’ (‘I was hot for crime.’)13. Kafka’s work too is about the body as an ambiguous force, which is exploited by capitalism, sexual order, the structures of the family, and which can itself exploit. It is impossible to unpick these themes without at least a rudimentary understanding of the society in which he lived and the life he led.14 And developing that understanding is part of fully enjoying a work; this is why ‘the curtains were just blue’ is so frustrating.
There is a limit, of course, when it comes to art. No one is eager to rehabilitate the films of Leni Riefenstahl, whilst it is vital to draw attention to abuses of power by living artists and auteurs such as Woody Allen or Harvey Weinstein. But when we begin to talk about the past in terms of total black and white, we often lose the ability to have a reasonable discussion. Human life unfurls in shades of grey — many far darker than others, a few far lighter. Black and white, good and bad, moral and immoral; these feel like universal categories of value, but they are in fact shaped by our own contexts and preoccupations. In the West they developed within a long Christian tradition which has more or less vanished from social and intellectual life, but they are still shaped by historical contingencies. Good and bad have not always meant the same thing. Of course it is right to critique the structures of misogyny and patriarchy which have dominated human history and curtailed female autonomy, to examine the exploitation of women’s bodies and souls by the institutions of marriage, prostitution, pornography, and so forth. Understanding these structures can inform our engagement with art and literature and history, but should not become the crude arbiters of universal ethical and artistic value. As Emma Tranter puts it on Twitter:15
And besides — who are we to judge? Can we claim the position of a perfect society, one which passes indiscriminate judgement upon others without nuance or compassion? Must we proclaim ‘Guilty’ or ‘Not guilty’?
As a historian I have to struggle with these questions — how to consider the past on its own terms, whether to be fully objective, what role emotional connection and modern perspectives can play in historiography. Humans are prone to see in categories of black and white, in-group and out-group, and to pass judgement on this basis. My gut reflex when I look at a source is to say 'this person is like me’ or ‘this person is the villain’, to perpetuate a narrative of good and bad. I want to romanticise my female subjects, to cling to them as representatives of myself in the past, to raise myself up as their champion in the present. But as in art, life is complicated, ambiguous. When I emphasise relatability I am at risk of putting my own words in my subject’s mouths, or making their lives conform to my modern moral pattern. This is something historians of gender and sexuality particularly must grapple with, when writing about pre-modern structures of homosexuality which were predicated on relationships between boys and older men, for example. We want to cheer for the people who are ‘like us’, but we find it hard to stomach what we now instinctively see as repulsive pedophilia or prostitution. We struggle with the historical context. With art and literature, we must struggle with both context and content. We must resist the desire to romanticise or to reject, which speaks more to our own contexts than those of our subjects. We must be willing to interrogate ourselves as well as our subjects and accept that the outcome will not always be pretty, or easily meme-able, or summarised in a tweet. Art will not always give us what we want. Kafka, Genet, Plath, even Taylor Swift…if we form our sense of self entirely around them, entangle ourselves too tight, we will always feel the pain of separation, which is the pain of reality.
It is possible to have a meaningful engagement with art which appreciates the universal appeal of its content and and the historical nature of its context. It is possible to have a meaningful engagement with history which neither romanticises nor rejects it. It is possible to feel both desire and revulsion. It is possible to rest in the grey area between good and bad, right and wrong, just and unjust, for a while. It is possible there is merit there, of its own strange and special kind.
Whilst you are there, in the grey space, take a look around. You might just find a new source of light.
This post was bought to you by a Sunday which was meant to be spent reading the TLS with pancakes in bed, but instead has been filled with frenetic writing to get this out before the discourse gallops off into the sunset. Stay tuned for more, because if there’s one thing the internet knows how to do, it’s completely miss the point.
Twenty-first century demoniac is a reader-supported platform, so subscriptions are deeply appreciated, especially paid subscriptions. For less than the price of an oat matcha latte a month, you can pledge your support. I’d also love to hear your thoughts on this topic as it has completely polarised my feed, so please do share your views in the comments.
For example: https://teachingreflection.wordpress.com/2021/07/27/the-blue-curtains/
the oxford effect
I turned up to Oxford University in 2019 with a brain full of misconceptions and a suitcase stuffed with beige cable knit sweaters and H&M tweed. I’d been conditioned by Tumblr compilations of lacy shirts and herringbone coats, Pinterest boards full of Greek statues and women running through art galleries, and a literary diet which was heavy on the Donn…
I laugh, but I can forgive being horny for historical figures. My main memory of studying the 1917 February Revolution is finding Alexander Kerensky weirdly attractive.
https://lithub.com/tiktok-has-awoken-and-found-itself-with-a-mad-crush-on-kafka/; https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/58053/1/why-is-everyone-so-obsessed-with-franz-kafka-metamorphosis-beetle
https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/58053/1/why-is-everyone-so-obsessed-with-franz-kafka-metamorphosis-beetle
https://www.businessinsider.com/taylor-swift-spent-160-hours-using-private-jet-eras-tour-2023-8?r=US&IR=T
There’s definitely some psychoanalysis to back this up but I’ve been at my laptop for 7 hours writing this already, so you can do your own research. Look at a Wikipedia page or something x
I wrote about coquette aesthetics in December and sad girl literature earlier last year:
a girl is an open question
Sometimes when I really feel like torturing myself I look through the Tumblr blog I kept as a teenager. I was on Tumblr for about five years, between 2015 and 2019, or the ages of 14 to 19, a period of my life when puberty coincided with family trauma, mental and physical health issues, and the daily torture of attending an all girls school. I don’t hav…
current reads #2
I’ve spent much of this summer running away from my responsibilities by travelling abroad on other people’s coattails, only to have those responsibilities follow me, clinging to my ankle or my hair. One of the great benefits of travel is the chance to catch up on reading, and I usually find myself travelling with half a suitcase full of paperbacks and a…
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Jean Genet, The Thief’s Journal, p.10
As a side note, I would like to give out copies of Genet’s The Thief’s Journal to much of my Twitter feed and say: discuss. There would be discourse for days.
I saw this the other day and thought someone needs to write about this, brilliant post and I adore your writing. I love that you brought up Plath because it does really portray that this seems to be such a pervasive trend where nobody ever really learns anything about the way we look at things within a binary. I wonder who/what will be next to be placed firmly into a category because it’s so much easier than looking at things critically
you put everything i have been incoherently venting about all day in precise words, the rage bait discourse machine online can barely pass as literary criticism, thoroughly enjoyed reading this sm <3