Beautiful Failing: Franz Kafka and the Curse of the Bambino

"To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure. . . . One is tempted to say: once he was certain of eventual failure, everything worked out for him en route as in a dream."

--Walter Benjamin, "Some Reflections on Kafka" ¹

Making an essay from a synthesis of the career of Franz Kafka and the history of the Boston Red Sox has all the earmarks of a stunt. I cannot even pretend, in the manner of New Historicists, that there is cultural insight to be wrested from the assimilating of elite and popular culture. The history of the Red Sox that I am considering begins in 1919, when Kafka was at a stage of his career between The Trial and The Castle; but Red Sox history has endured more than seventy-five years beyond Kafka's death in 1924.

I first thought of lumping Kafka and the Red Sox to make a simple point about failure. It had to do with the pleasure of failure--the aesthetic, mainly, rather than the psychological, pleasure. I was interested in the way that failure infinitely better than success can unify a life or history. The quickest précis of the theme is that you can lose all the time but you cannot win all the time. Kafka, having passed despite expectations out of the first class at elementary school, having passed despite expectations the entrance exam for the Gymnasium, having passed despite expectations first class at the Gymnasium, admitted that "no, I did not fail, and I went on and on succeeding. What this produced, however, was not confidence: on the contrary, I was always convinced . . . that the more things I was successful in, the worse the final outcome would inevitably be." ²

Emerson said the reverse: "I am Defeated all the time; yet to Victory I am born." ³ But the prophecies are not practically opposite. Kafka can commence failing at any moment without upsetting the order of his life. Any failure would clear out the wilderness of his meretricious and accidental successes and usher in his biographical unity. Emerson, on the other hand, cannot start succeeding at any moment. Success can only be ultimate, or else it would put a limit to the expansion of his soul. Anything but the routing of fate would appear to Emerson as failure, which is why he is fated to fail in the meantime. Defeat is the continuity of both lives.

In one of his first publications, "The Aeroplanes at Brescia," an account of an air show written at Max Brod's instigation, Kafka describes the victory to which the aviator Curtiss was born: "It is a perfect achievement, but perfect achievements cannot be appreciated, everyone thinks himself capable of perfect achievements in the end, for perfect achievements no courage seems to be necessary." ⁴ This looks banal: there is no despair, hence no fortitude, in winning. But the pronouncement has its curiosities. First, because Kafka ups the ante: he is not discussing mere victory but rather perfection. Second, because perfection is not derided for being inhuman (beyond despair) but for being common. It is the religion of perfection, that is, the popular faith that the end will be antithetical in quality to every preceding moment, that Kafka deprecates. What Kafka mocks is comedy. What he needs for his art is unity without closure.

Everywhere in Kafka the game is on--in Kafka there are no agonies that are not agonistic--but there are no beautiful achievements: the Castle is the best defined prize in all Kafkan fiction, but it looks to be squalor. Beauty in The Trial inheres (Kafka says) in being accused, and Benjamin generalizes from the whole oeuvre that beauty is hopelessness. ⁵ The implicit premise may be that the beauty of hopelessness...