In 1919 Franz Kafka (1883-1924) published a short story called “Die Sorge des Hausvaters” [“The Cares of a Family Man”]. It’s one of Kafka’s shortest pieces, but it is emblematic of the endless, malleable, interpretive, and hard-to-pin-down quality of his writing.

The story is the first person narration of the family man in the title, and is about a creature or entity called Odradek. In 1934 Walter Benjamin said Odradek “is the form which things assume in oblivion.”

Kafka describes it as:

At first glance it looks like a flat star-shaped spool for thread, and indeed it does seem to have thread wound upon it; to be sure, they are only old, broken-off bits of thread, knotted and tangled together, of the most varied sorts and colors. But it is not only a spool, for a small wooden crossbar sticks out of the middle of the star, and another small rod is joined to that at a right angle. By means of this latter rod on one side and one of the points of the star on the other, the whole thing can stand upright as if on two legs.

Odradek’s laugh sounds like “the rustling of fallen leaves” and has “no fixed abode.” It does not die and has no aim in life. The narrator concludes by saying:

that he [Odradek] will always be rolling down the stairs, with ends of thread trailing after him, right before the feet of my children, and my children's children? He does no harm to anyone that one can see; but the idea that he is likely to survive me I find almost painful.

Odradek has no exact meaning, but has meant nearly everything. Interpretations range from it being a useless object, a critique of capitalism, a symbol of memory, a Jewish folktale, a piece of the narrator himself, and so on.

Reading this story 100 years after it was written yields clues to a parable: our own observations are not always linear, don’t make sense, have no prescribed meaning, or deliberately fluff and muddle our sense of well-being. Feeling the Odradek is all around us: its unspooling into all facets of interpretation, its ability to outlast human limitations, and its tethering of our memories of a past that cannot be grasped.

Kafka said:

Each of us has his own way of emerging from the underworld, mine is by writing. That’s why the only way I can keep going, if at all, is by writing, not through rest and sleep. I am far more likely to achieve peace of mind through writing than the capacity to write through peace.

Writing is tantamount to thinking.

If that’s the case, then the act of writing should clarify, refine, and sharpen our thoughts. But is this clarity always good for the writer? Is writing an automatic good?

Some people find writing cathartic: absorbing, expressing and releasing the energy of their lives. I’ve never found this to be the case. To me, writing is an endlessly frustrating task. The challenge of filling a blank page only gets harder, the further I go. What’s more, whatever clarity I gain through writing leads to more questions, more confusion, more frustration. The purpose of writing is to provide questions rather than answers.

Of all the writers that ever lived, Kafka is the one with whom I feel the most connection. Even though he had no poetry in his soul, it’s Kafka whom I admire and understand the best, and who offers me the most understanding in return. Perhaps it’s because our lives are layered on the same template. We had similar upbringings, and shared similar anxieties; similar ways of filtering all anxiety into our digestive system.

Kafka published few of his stories during his lifetime, but his fundamental struggle with writing the truth about his own psychological conundrums—what he called “the floors of my interior Tower of Babel”—makes his fiction seem almost prophetic.

His plots—a prophecy of nameless bureaucracies putting people on trial without any explanation, confronting one’s smallness in the world by becoming an enormous beetle, a machine that carves the sentence of a condemned prisoner on his skin over twelve hours—these see a world like our own, but different from our own. His metaphors are as apposite to the 21st century, as to the early 20th century, when he wrote them.

His essential worldview was something frightening and familiar; something “scintillating with wickedness” about which, nonetheless, he could laugh.

But writing, to Kafka, was no laughing matter. On Friday August 1, 1913, Franz Kafka wrote to his fiancée, Felice Bauer, to correct a misunderstanding they’d had:

So in spite of everything you want me to take up the cross, Felice? Attempt the impossible? You misunderstood me: I did not say that writing ought to make everything clearer, but instead makes everything worse; what I said was that writing makes everything clearer and worse. This is what I meant. But this is not what you mean, and yet you wish to be mine.

Felice thought Kafka meant that writing ought to make everything clearer. Kafka was actually saying that writing makes everything “clearer and worse.” What Kafka meant by this, and what was happening in his life at the time, is worth explication. The implications of his statement—the clearer and the worse—are important for writing.

Clearer: To devote oneself to writing means first of all, being dissatisfied with the way things are. It asks that we look directly into the pale eyes of reality, to be aware of all life and death palpitating around us, and to name it with as much clarity and beauty as possible.

Worse: To do these things honestly does not bring happiness. It means listening to every input pinging at all moments; it means living in a difficult way that’s not often aligned with the terms of the world around us.

So, it’s both.

Kafka and Felice Bauer met the evening of Tuesday, August 13, 1912 at a dinner at his friend Max Brod’s house. Kafka was working as a lawyer for the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute. His job was to assess workplace accidents, injuries, and deaths at various factories in Bohemia, determine their insurance rates, and assess whether or not they were complying with state insurance laws.

Since 1909, Felice had been working at Carl Lindström, Inc., a German manufacturer of gramophones and office machines. She was in charge of sales of Parlographs—for the time, a sophisticated dictation machine. Her responsibilities included traveling to sales conventions, and she had dozens of meetings a day, often until 7 pm.

Kafka and Felice were engaged twice, but as the letter I quoted above shows, they constantly misunderstood one another. They never married.

Kafka valued being alone, and believed everything he accomplished in his writing was the result of being alone. He wrote in his diary of his “fear of the connexion, of passing into the other. Then I’ll never be alone again.” At the same time, he felt that he was “incapable, alone, of bearing the assault of my own life, the demands of my own person, the attacks of time and old age, the vague pressure of the desire to write, sleeplessness, the nearness of insanity.”

“Clearer and worse” exemplifies Kafka’s essential contradictions. His ability to understand the contradictions inside himself made it possible for him to locate the contradictions of the world around him. The prophecy is not being foretold so much as accurately described.

Kafka lived his life with unsettling intensity. His characters—K., Gregor Samsa, and Joseph K.—illustrate the tenor of his life. He was a deeply interior person caught in a bureaucracy, haunted by conflicted feelings for his father and Felice, made anxious and alienated as a German-speaking Jew, a double minority in Prague at a time of rising antisemitism.

Writing can make things more clear, because writing is tantamount to thinking. Writing poems is risky because it means we must refuse to accept words as they are; the inert bricks that they are in daily use.

There is no such thing as clear writing and unclear thinking. Often when poems have some kind of block it’s because the poet’s thinking is stuck somewhere; technical facility is nothing without clear thinking.

Writing makes things worse. Once a poem is finished there is a release and a breath, but it’s short-lived. There is a cost for the clarity poems provide. It’s intolerable to write, and it’s intolerable not to write.

Many writers experience a kind of “postpartum” depression when their book comes out: they’ve devoted so many years of energy to the book, and once the book exists apart from the poet who made it, the poet doesn’t know what to do with themselves.

In poem after poem, the poet must face the knotty, disappointing, mystifying truth within themselves—and then leave that truth exposed in the world. And it’s impossible for a poet to look both deeply into their interior, and intently at the outside world, without experiencing their alienation from both spaces.

These are the real costs of writing.

So, the writer in some ways represents the conundrum of our moment: to face reality without blinking and without judgment; to clarify it, to brush it and smooth it until it is so transparent, that—like Kunitz said—you can look through it and see the world.

Kafka experienced all this in his body. And then he died, of tuberculosis, in 1924. His sisters were murdered in concentration camps in the Holocaust. Felice escaped the Nazis to Switzerland, and moved to the United States in 1936. In 1950, she sold her letters from Kafka to Schocken Books for a mere $8,000. She died in Rye, New York in 1960.

We don’t know what to make of Felice Bauer’s misunderstanding—her letters were never saved, so we can’t know what she might have said in response—but in her misunderstanding we can read our own frustrations. We expect writing to make things better, but it makes things both better and worse.

Sean Singer is the author, most recently, of Today in the Taxi (Tupelo Press, 2022), winner of the 2022 National Jewish Book Award for Poetry. His earlier collections are Honey & Smoke (Eyewear Publishing, 2015, finalist for the 2011 National Poetry Series), and Discography (Yale University Press, 2002), winner of Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and selected by W.S. Merwin for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Sean holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Rutgers University-Newark, and has been awarded fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. He shares poetry curations and weekly essays on craft at his substack, The Sharpener. *** This essay is part of the "Teaching..." series launched by The Montreal Review in 2024 and edited by Stephen Haven and Laura Ann Reed. The series publishes essays by scholars, writers, and artists on teaching and interpreting the work, ideas, and lives of prominent authors, philosophers, artists, and political figures.

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