Lambent Traces

On the night of 22 September 1912, Franz Kafka completed "The Judgment" in a rush that he experienced as a clear confirmation of his calling as a writer. Many of his later characters, who pursue the Law, a place to belong, or artistic fulfillment, can be read as stand-ins for Kafka's attempt to recapture that one night of creative intensity.

Stanley Corngold, an American critic and translator of Kafka, follows the consequences of this breakthrough. Kafka's main concern, Corngold argues, was less his duty to the society around him than his destiny as a writer, which led him to probe the boundaries of what it means to be human. He also held his hopes for spiritual elevation in check, aware of how unlikely they were to be realized, and he treated that doubt with sharp irony.

Kafka's wish for personal transcendence through writing often clashed, in a painful and witty way, with a second wish for transcendence of a different kind, shaped by a modern form of Gnosticism. Corngold shows how this tension led Kafka to keep examining the intermediaries between self and world, including confessional writing, dreams, the media, marriage, skepticism, asceticism, and the imitation of death.

The book ends by reviewing and critiquing the major interpretations of Kafka by critics such as Theodor Adorno, Sander Gilman, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.