Would he follow Pynchon's lead and squirrelishly sit in a tiny room in Mexico blasting avant-jazz in between blots of acid and hits of weed grown high on golden mountains? Or would he work like Borges preferring to sit in monastic silence to allow for the endless whirrings of his skull?
Perhaps he would listen to music fresh from a few lengths at Prague Swimming Centre or after a quick defeat from Max on the tennis courts. Perhaps he would opt for klezmer music following a conversation on Kabbalah in the park out of earshot of the winter-faced local rabbi. Ever the romantic, the lovelorn Kafka might sit in his pyjamas late at night and put on some trip hop to soothe his wounds following another row with his beloved Felice and then cough severely in a little metal bin overflowing with extinct sentences.
Would he stand in the gardens with Julia and watch the falling rain of fireworks, or hide wounds from Father, trudging with typewriter through grey snow to reach a telephone to complain to Nabokov? He would probably watch television most nights trying to find a similar beast to Reagan and failing. And he might purchase exclusively Kompakt compilations and nod off to the coniferous warmth of Wolfgang Voigt. And he might return from work one glum night to discover his burrow brimming with new inhabitants who have snuck soundlessly in and quietly wrecked everything he holds dear. These new inhabitants are the people he hoped would listen; the people influenced by him and they bump, blind as moles, into the walls he has covered with maps of his imagined America.
If Kafka were alive now, we would admire him for what? Well, the terrifying wonder of his prose, but not solely that. He showered at regular intervals with great conviction, aesthetic joy and moral purpose. He was never late. He gardened when confronted with the nausea of artistic struggle.
Would there be as much critical consideration and furious beard-scratching about Kafka now if he was alive? There is a whole house somewhere, falling apart probably, made out of critical approaches to Kafka. My personal favourite of these is Kafka, The Jewish Patient which interprets all of his work through the lens of psychiatric and medical methodology, turning the sickly, woozy workings of his genius into a mimetic device for actual disorders. The chapters themselves would make great stories (but not great Kafka stories- a distinction that has to be made) purely on titular value: 'On Language, Difference and Mice', 'Kafka Weeps' and 'Fin-de-siecle Jewish Readings of Tuberculosis' that invoke images of a Berlin university run by a single antechamber of deranged academics more profoundly influenced by the repeated narcotic drubbings of the German Autumn than the tangled extraction of meaning from the first bit in Of Grammatology. If we had not lost Kafka and fast-forwarded and forced him into contemporary society with its gross contortions of meaning and brutal dissection and destructions of self, would he be collaborating with David Lynch? Would he be working at all? And would he (or any artist) feel more at ease in a society that they helped articulate, an external world that so badly reflects the one they imagined? It is a problem and not really a new one.
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