Kafka's Prayer

The book's first section analyzes the religious and philosophical significance of aphorisms and statements by Kafka, who Goodman believes to be established as a "great writer" by the passage of time and how reality has come to approximate Kafka's fiction. The book's title comes from a statement by Kafka that "writing is a form of prayer".[1] Goodman holds that Kafka, as a "sick consciousness", uses his literature as a prayer to lift from near-psychotic, self-punishing fear. Despite this anxious melancholy, Goodman argues that moments of Kafka show the release of "natural powers" and "natural morality", revealing man's "general freedom". Goodman encourages Kafka to be read as a procession of self-release, to find life in the escape from misery and repression.[2]

Goodman analyzes Kafka's novels Amerika, The Trial, and The Castle with a Freudian lens, but in his analysis of the shorter parables and aphorisms, uses more religious existentialism and Taoism.[3]

Goodman challenges Max Brod, Kafka's literary executor, on his interpretation of Kafka's novels.[1] The book also addresses Kafka's theology.[4]

Other sections of the book descend into psychopathology of Kafka as expressed through his fiction.[5] Goodman takes a personal approach to his analysis, stating that he approached the task in belligerence, "in hatred and envy" of Kafka, as "a kind of polemic and self-defense" but ultimately found himself endeared to his subject.[6]

Vanguard Press published the book in New York in 1947 with a simultaneous Canada edition by the Copp Clark Company. Hillstone/Stonehill Publishing published a facsimile reprint in June 1976 with an introduction by Raymond Rosenthal.[7] Goodman reused a section of the book in his published dissertation, The Structure of Literature (1954).[8]

In the arc of Goodman's development as a writer, the mid-to-late forties were where Goodman experimented with psychoanalysis and religion. He began a self-analysis in 1946, the year before he published Kafka's Prayer, and came to view psychoanalysis as his religion, preferring its explanations for "animal nature, ego, and the world". Kafka's Prayer was his synthesis of those experiments[9] and one of his early, major works in his psychoanalytic period that would culminate in his collaboration on Gestalt Therapy (1951).[3] At the time of publication, Goodman had been making a career on publishing on Jewish concerns, in this case, Kafka's Judaism.[4] He used the book to grapple with the religious implications of psychoanalysis, a theme that recurred throughout his later work.[3]

Many reviewers and commentators felt that Goodman overanalyzed Kafka.[1][10][5] Literary critic Philip Rahv called Goodman's speculative approach to Freud "so far-fetched as to provoke immediate dissent"[11] and Goodman's literary executor, Taylor Stoehr, wrote that Goodman's Freudian interpretations were so dense as to make the reader resentful.[3] The New York Times too found Goodman's reading of Kafka so personally charged and compressed as to obscure Goodman's many cultural allusions across religion, philosophy, education, and psychology.[1] Rahv credited the book's "utter confusion" to the challenge of a deeply idiosyncratic critic evaluating an idiosyncratic genius, leaving the reader worse off for understanding than they started. Rahv disagreed with Goodman's insertion of his self-expression above his criticism of Kafka, believing that the former has no primacy in literary criticism.[12] The literary critic Kingsley Widmer described the book as "puzzled" in the way that Goodman personally sparred with the subject matter.[6]

Some commentators noted that Goodman overextended specific symbolism.[10][5] While Widmer did not contest the role of some familial elements in Kafka's fiction, such as his relationship with his father and marriage, the critic found Goodman's literalist and clinical interpretations of phallic and sexual imagery to be unhelpful, tiresome, and largely obtuse. For example, how Goodman extended the "paranoiac dream" of The Trial into one of "repressed homosexuality", and turned "The Burrow" into a story of the mother's body and the threat of the father's penis. These arguments, in Widmer's eyes, dampened Goodman's argument that the "natural theology" in Kafka was more allegorical of his self and psychosis than of bureaucracy.[5] Simon O. Lesser in Modern Fiction Studies faults Goodman with over-conflating the story with the author. Goodman, says Lesser, judges The Trial by an "extrinsic philosophical standard" despite the novel being a projection of the author's thought and not necessarily a profession of the author's beliefs.[10] The reviewer, however, wrote that Goodman's other insights outweighed these errors, and appreciated Goodman's biographical linkage between Kafka's warders and executors and Kafka's two brothers who died in infancy.[13] Rahv, on the other hand, in the Saturday Review of Literature, was perplexed at the lack of evidence for this linkage. Goodman's use of psychoanalysis, said Rahv, was less of a science than a "kind of free-for-all dialectic" in which any writer could assert anything they want. Rahv thought that Goodman's utopian conclusions missed the point of Kafka's world of contingency and dread.[12]

The New York Times review challenged Goodman's assertion that little had been written about Kafka, citing a recent biography, anthology, and essays, but wrote that Goodman's analysis was among the most ambitious attempted on Kafka. Goodman's commentary, however, was on par with that which has been written before, particularly his intuition of Kafka's character, familial relationships, and occupation.[1] Widmer too found the writing uneven compared to other period works on Kafka.[5] But as a work of criticism, the New York Times review considered Goodman's reading of Kafka to be "profound and erudite"[1] and Joshua Bloch, in Jewish Criterion, wrote that Goodman "brilliantly analyzed" the "subtleties of anxiety, supplication, pain, and pride" in Kafka's writing.[14] In his assessment of Goodman's impact, Peter Parisi wrote that Kafka's Prayer had "a secure if idiosyncratic place in Kafka studies".[15]

In a hypothetical anthology of Goodman's oeuvre, Widmer suggested that excerpts from Kafka's Prayer and an essay from Speaking and Language would sufficiently portray the foundational effect of literary criticism on his total output.[16] In the trajectory of his thought, Kafka's Prayer marked where Goodman found a dead end in Freudian psychoanalysis and turned towards existentialism and Taoist interpretations.[3] Kafka's Prayer also marked the confluence of Goodman's anarchism and psychoanalysis, where his millenarian social thought matched excerpts from Kafka's texts.[17]

• Excerpt on JSTOR