Wounds and Scars in Kahlo
and Kafka
Rosa Navarro
SLE Tutor- Michael Kieffer
Suzanne Greenberg
May 16,1999
Essay # 2
Franz Kafka and Frida Kahlo use strong, bold often violent images
to outwardly convey the pain and struggles of their personal reality.
Kahlo is considered a figurative surrealist, creating fantastic and
incongruous images by means of unnatural combinations, especially that
of portrayals of the human body. Kafka’s stories also have a surreal
atmosphere in the way that absurd and illogical events are treated as
completely normal and logical by the characters involved. An element
that plays a crucial role in depicting the growth of identity of the
characters in Kafka’s stories and which help portray painful life
experiences in Kahlo’s self-portraits, is that of the bodily wound or scar.
Much of the experiences and aspects of their own lives is reflected
in Kafka’s and Kahlo’s works. Kafka started working full time for an
insurance company in 1907. He left this after a year to take up a job in
the Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. Here he
worked for the claims department, in which his duties consisted of
following up on factory worker’s accident claims. He would be faced with
maimed workers, many whose limbs were caught in machinery, and then
he would have to sketch the severed limb for record keeping. The impact
of such a job is reflected in one distinct aspect of his style of writing, in
which he produces a type of shock value in his stories with the
unexpected and often violent wounding and scaring of his characters.
Similarly, Kahlo’s surreal style was influenced by events in her life.
When she was a little girl she suffered from polio and was hospitalized,
then in 1925 when she was eighteen years old she had a horrific
accident. A trolley smashed the bus she took home from school. A
handrail punctured through Frida’s abdomen. Her spinal column was
broken in three places; her pelvis was fractured; her collarbone, two ribs,
and her right leg and foot were all broken, and her left shoulder was
dislocated. Frida told a friend that she had lost her virginity in the
accident because the steel rod had entered a hip and come out through
her vagina (Frida Kahlo: The Paintings, pg. 35). Due to this traumatizing
experience it is likely “that the association of sex with pain, seen in
several of her paintings, is connected with her memory of being
penetrated by the handrail” (Frida Kahlo: The Paintings, pg. 36). As in
Kafka, the use of open wounds, tearing of skin and flowing blood in
many of Kahlo’s self-portraits often manifests this pain.
This aspect of Kahlo’s style can be found in her painting La
Columna Rota, which is translated into The Broken Column. Painted in
1944 soon after Frida had undergone surgery and while she was
confined to her (body brace, apparatus) it is one of her most powerful
paintings. In this painting, Frida uses physical pain, nakedness, and
sexuality to express her spiritual suffering. The bleak, forbidding dreamlike landscape serves as an outer expression of her inner desolation. The
title is a reference to the fractured vertebrae she suffered in a terrible bus
accident. In the painting the artist stares through her tears to the viewer
(and to herself in the mirror while painting), her naked body strapped
with bands and pierced by nails, her torso split wide open down the
middle. The exposed spine inside her is a shattered Greek column.
In The Broken Column, Kahlo uses the element of the body wound,
the large gash traveling from under her jaw all the way to her loins, as a
means to allow the observer a glimpse of the deterioration of the column
inside. This column representative of where her spine should be is
crumbling, just as she suffered from spinal diseases and operations that
forced her to wear a body brace for months at a time. Also the column as
a rigid component of traditional architecture is representative of
structure and tradition. Therefore, it can also be symbolic of Kahlo’s life
in the respect that she defied the traditional role of a Mexican woman of
her time; she was involved in various activities that could have been
considered extraordinary for the average woman. In this way Kahlo broke
down traditional boundaries that were the foundation of the expected
woman role in society, paralleling the broken column that serves as
support of a building, like the spine supports and holds up one’s upper
body.
To render her physical pain and suffering more visible once again
Kahlo applies her use of the bodily wound by showing the face and body
pierced by nails. This puncturing of the human flesh can have a religious
connotation as well since “such mortification of the flesh is graphically
anticipated in the images of Spanish baroque martyrs and of the
flagellation of Christ, who in some versions was tied to a column as he
was beaten” (Artweek; A Politician of The Personal, pg. 7). This allusion to
the self sacrificial sufferings of Christ allows the observer to better grasp
the sufferings of the woman in the painting, who had to give in and
sacrifice herself to the diseases and deformations of her own body.
The power of the bodily wounds in the painting is emphasized by
the presence of the orthopedic corset that appears to be the only thing
that holds the two sides of the body together and serves as a symbol of
the invalid’s imprisonment. The corset appears harsh and sterile binding
her body; it’s white straps with metal buckles juxtaposing the
delicateness of Frida’s beautiful naked breasts. The beauty and
perfection of her body serves to make the wound seem even more absurd
and horrific.
Inside the wound, besides the presence of the deteriorating
column, her body is vacant. There are no organs, but the absence of the
heart and of the uterus have specific importance to the painting. The
absence of the heart suggests lack of life, and corresponds to the lack of
flowing blood from the open wounds and nail punctures. This lack of a
natural bodily reaction accentuates the inhuman mortification of her
body as well as adds to the surreal atmosphere of the image. Then there
is the absence of the uterus, the source of fertility and of new life in a
woman’s body. Kahlo was unable to have any children after due to the
bus accident and lost three children during her marriage to Diego
Riviera, therefore the absence of her reproductive organs is symbolic of
her barrenness.
The immense and barren plain in the background heightens this
feeling of sterility. The background landscape as well is slashed with
ravines, which can be considered a type of “wound of the land”, mirroring
the body wounds on the woman. Also the landscape is desert-like,
deprived of the capacity to create life, paralleling Frida’s lack of bearing
children and producing life. The “wounded” landscape is immense
conveying the loneliness of the physical and emotional suffering of Kahlo,
completely surrounding her in the painting. In the far distance there is a
thin strip of blue ocean beneath an empty, and cloudless sky. This water,
a source of life, seems to represent the hope that is not found in the
desolate, barren landscape; yet it is so far away from the broken woman
making her situation seem completely hopeless.
Besides the physical obstacles Kahlo endured she also faced many
emotional hardships, especially those resulting from her husband’s,
Diego Riviera, various extramarital affairs. When Frida discovered that
Diego was having an affair with her own sister, Cristina, she was torn by
this betrayal by two of the people she loved the most and expressed her
inner emotional scarring as visual wounds in various paintings soon
after. As Hayden Herrera said in Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo, “Frida
depicted the female body (usually her own) in actual physical pain or
death, in Memory and Remembrance she has begun to use physical
wounds as symbols for psychic injury”. In Memory a shaft pierces
through a hole in her chest where her heart should be, which instead
has been yanked out of her chest and lies by her feet, oversized as a sign
of the immensity of her pain. The shaft as well recalls the handrail that
pierced her in the fateful bus accident. Again one can see how Kahlo
uses wounds and scars in her painting as visual manifestations to
convey experienced personal physical and emotional pain.
In Kafka’s stories there can also be found many examples of
wounds and scars that are symbolic of his character’s inner emotional
struggles. In The Metamorphosis Gregor Samsa deals with inner conflicts
of identity and that of his place in the family after undergoing a physical
transformation into a huge beetle-like insect. Whereas before Gregor’s
identity lay in being the sole financial supporter of his family, he is
reduced to complete helplessness and is eventually isolated from the
family. The climax of the story, and when Gregor realizes that things
have changed for good, is when his father attacks him with apples, until
one eventually hits Gregor hard on the back, sinking into his flesh. This
wound is very symbolic for various reasons. The apple itself alludes to
original sin, representing the guilt that Gregor developed at no longer
being able to support his family. Also since one does nothing but be born
to achieve original sin, this parallels how, since it remains unexplained,
it appears that Gregor did nothing in particular to cause his
metamorphosis. Here one can see how Kafka employs the use of his scar
to raise the question “why?” that so often the reader is left with at the
end of his stories.
The act of wounding in Kafka also serves as a means of gaining or
enforcing power over the wounded one. Gregor’s father asserts his
authority when he turns to attack Gregor, as if by wounding Gregor he is
regaining his place as head of the family from Gregor, who assumed ‘the
father role’ as the sole provider of the family after his father’s business
collapsed. To Gregor the wound was important because it served towards
his realization that the events taking place have changed his place in the
family and the way he is treated, it symbolizes his change of identity.
Gregor soon after realizing that he now is more of a burden to the family
than anything else gives up all hope and stops eating, willing his own
death.
In A Report to an Academy, we see again how a wound is symbolic
of a change of identity of a character. In making his report about his
change in lifestyles, from that of an ape to that of a man, Red Peter
describes how he was named: “I was hit in two places…once in the
cheek; a slight wound; but it left a large, naked, red scar which earned
me the name of Red Peter” (A Report to an Academy, pg. 175). Again we
see how the act of wounding gives power to the wounder, here the
hunters who scarred the ape exercised their power over him by naming
him. With his name, Red Peter gained a new identity; he was no longer
an ape in the wild but an ape in captivity that was forced to assimilate
into the culture of man in order to survive.
Throughout his life, Kafka was often the outcast: he was a Jew,
living in a majority Czech speaking nation, who only spoke German; in
his own family he never felt fully accepted by his father, and he also had
problems committing to women. In A Report to an Academy, the ape is
also an outcast, who is forced to see complete assimilation as his only
way out: “I could never have achieved what I have done had I been
stubbornly set on clinging to my origins, to the remembrances of my
youth” (A Report to an Academy, pg. 173). This quote recalls Kafka’s
personal experience of the alienation of a group within society; therefore
we see how events in his life have influenced what he wrote about, just
like events in Kahlo’s life influenced what she painted.
The second wound that Red Peter received is a severe wound in the
hip, which caused his limping thereafter. This wound is significant
because it alludes to the story of Jacob wrestling all night with the angel
in the Bible. Jacob was also wounded, and like Red Peter, his wound was
significant of a change of identity, being given a new name by his
wounder: “Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Isreal…” (Genesis
32:25-32). Red Peter, like Jacob, undergoes a transformation that uses
wounds as physical representations of his metaphysical change of
identity.
Kafka’s In
After the fateful accident, Frida was confronted with the “feeling that sufferingand death-is inevitable; since we each carry the burden of our fate, we must try
to make light of it” (Frida, pg. 73).
In 1922 he was forced to retire from this job after having suffered for five years
with tuberculosis. He received a pension, and in 1923 moved to Berlin to get
away from his father and devote himself to writing. However, a year later, he died.
At work, Kafka was liked by his boss and colleagues, and was both hard
working and
ambitious. However, he found the combination of working during the day
and writing
during the night to be an "excruciating torture".
FRIDA KAHLO:
“Painting was part of Frida Kahlo’s battle for life. It was also very much a part of
her self-creation: in her art, as in her life, a theatrical self-presentation was a means to
control her world. As she recovered, relapsed, recovered again, she reinvented herself”
(Frida, pg. 75).
Her face is always a mask; her body is often naked and wounded, reflecting her
feelings. Frida “turned to painting as a form of psychological surgery” (Frida, pg. 74).
“Frida Kahlo faced all adversity- personal, societal, political- with tremendous inner
strength. If her [images] …speak to a human condition, if [they] transcend the personal
and enter the realm of the universal, it is because through art Kahlo was able to transform
her personal misfortune into accessible and meaningful icons, if not of hope, then at least,
of will”(Frida Kahlo: The Paintings, pg. 114).