The Mystical Life of Franz Kafka by June O. Leavitt (review)

Despite almost multitudinous interpretations of Franz Kafka’s oeuvre it still remains in many points a conundrum. Kafka readers would therefore be grateful for every new explanation as all the interpretations presently at hand can illuminate only a part of their matters of interest. Of essential importance in interpreting Kafka’s writings, is to pose the question as to what the author Kafka himself wanted and thought, and not the variety of things which the recipient might find within this opalescent oeuvre. And it seems that Leavitt’s now presented Kafka book wanted to follow exactly this norm when she inquires after Kafka’s mystical experience from which his writings not infrequently result. That Kafka had an inclination toward mystical or better esoteric traditions has been a communis opinio for a long while, not hindermost by the reviewer’s own book on Kafka and the Kabbalah. Leavitt’s central concern is to show that Kafka’s adoption of mystics was not merely a literary one, acquired by reading or lecture, but that he himself had mystical experiences, and clairvoyant moments: “Not one word in the literature on Kafka has been published in favor of the possibility that his ‘cabalistic’ worldview was informed by genuine mystical experience—lapses into paranormal states, dialogues with spirits, and angelic visions brought on by occult techniques” (124). And indeed, Leavitt seems to be able to make this plausible, above all on the evidence of Kafka’s diary entries, and especially the one of June 25, 1914, in which Kafka depicts in a text written in the first person a seemingly all-day meditative preparation which finally culminates in a vision of colors and one angel as well as in absurd acts by the first-person narrator.

In the first part of her book, Leavitt uses often the subjunctive, she speaks of a “possibility” that Kafka’s own mystical experiences could have been described here, and not merely a literary fiction. In order to remove any doubts about that, in the further parts of her book Leavitt uses as reference above all texts of the at the time rampant “theosophy,” especially those by Rudolf Steiner, author of pertinent publications, and who even once granted Kafka a brief audience. The central thesis throughout Leavitt’s book is that virtually everything which concerns the aspects of Kafka’s oeuvre which are regarded as “mystical” derive from this encounter and the experience of theosophy. But, in order to bring this to proof, Leavitt does exactly the same thing she reproaches other exegetes of Kafka’s writings of doing, namely, she refers to publications—here above all by Steiner—which are supposed to manifest the authenticity of Kafka’s mystical experience. But exactly here lies the central problem of every mystic research of which Leavitt even seems to be aware of, that in fact we never exactly know what the mystic really experiences, and that we only know his subsequent narrations. And these narrations of a mystical experience are always culturally determined. This means that the mystic employs a given language and theology by means of which he puts in words the inexpressible mystical experience. This means on the other hand that these preexisting cultural parameter settings predetermine the description of the experience, and only this, and nothing else, is what the researcher has at his disposal as an object of study. It is therefore extremely difficult to make a diagnosis of the mystical experience on the basis of such a description, especially as the narrating mystics make a big effort to conform as far as possible to these cultural specifications.

What the reader is left with is indeed this, which is of essential interest for the reader of literary texts—these are its validity and its concern. But it is exactly this aspect, which comes off badly with Leavitt. We are told that Kafka had states of clairvoyance but not what he wanted to convey by...