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Excavating Kafka

Excavating Kafka is an attempt to rescue Kafka the writer from the myth of his biography. It blends Life Writing and academic criticism (Hawes was previously a lecturer in German at the University of Swansea) with a deliberately iconoclastic approach to the hagiography of Kafka. In his book Hawes argues that no writer’s literary reception is so coloured by the alleged facts about his life. Taking a deliberately anti-Barthesian stance, Hawes creates a narrative of Kafka’s actual life which disputes whether Kafka (as seen in the myth) was ever truly “alive” in this sense. Excavating Kafka insists that his works are direct descendants of Dostoyevsky and Dickens, social comedies which we fatally misunderstand by seeing them through the lens by which they were transmitted to a mass “Western” audience (i.e. that of post-Holocaust French existentialism) and whose real nature can only be restored, like that of a great painting, if we strip away the later “varnish” and see the work as it would have been seen by its first receptors.

A writer’s attempt to read a predecessor as a writer, not a literary saint, this book caused a massive stir in Germany, where the author was accused of Anti-Semitism in Der Spiegel, which quickly retracted the charge. In Britain, it received many excellent reviews e.g. “A revelation and a scream, this wonderfully irreverent book ends up paying Kafka a greater compliment than the "K-Myth" ever could by responding to what he actually wrote.” (Scotsman, 5th September 2008).