by Franz Kafka
This is very revealing. Here is Kafka trying to write a conventional ‘realist’ narrative, and his heart isn’t in it. The act does not involve him, only its aftermath. But note that the sentence and especially the word he picks out, ‘pour’ (schütten) is no more beautiful or interesting in itself than the words ‘threw’ (warf) and ‘took’ (nahm). It is just that it seems to touch on a truth the rest of the story lacks. I myself would have added the word ‘embarrassment’ (‘her eyes still closed because of fear and embarrassment’), and I would agree that there was just a glimpse of ‘something real’ in the closing description of the landscape, calm and unaffected by the human drama which has just occurred within it.
And yet there are other moods when he can write: ‘The firmness … which the most insignificant writing brings about in me is beyond doubt and wonderful’ (27 November 1913). It is even the case that, at times, he feels that his writing gives him a quite magical power: ‘When I arbitrarily write down a single sentence, for instance, “He looked out of the window”, it already has perfection’ (19 February 1911). Those early stories or gropings towards novels, the ‘Description of a Struggle’ and ‘Wedding Preparations in the Country’, on which he pinned all his hopes in his early twenties, are clearly written in an effort to maintain just this mood. Here what happens is governed not by the conventions of fin-de-siècle story-telling but simply by the feelings of the protagonist: ‘Because I love pinewoods I went through woods of this kind, and since I like gazing silently up at the stars, the stars appeared slowly in the sky.’ Here mosquitoes can fly through the belly of a fat man and the moon ceases to be a moon when given another name. As for the narrator, since the world immediately submits itself to his whims, it is difficult for him to retain any sense of himself as a person. At moments he is an all-powerful human being, at the next he is only an avalanche rolling down a mountainside.
Writing of this kind may initially feel promising, but it soon palls. If I have simply to write something down to summon it into being, if everything depends entirely on my mood as I write, then what is the point of writing anything at all? No wonder these early efforts got nowhere and were eventually abandoned by Kafka.
There is another theme running through Kafka’s early letters and diaries, a theme which Kafka at the time does not seem to know how to explain or exploit, but which is going to play a major part in his mature fiction. In a letter to Brod of 28 August 1904 he writes:
It is so easy to be cheerful at the beginning of summer. One has a lively heart, a reasonably brisk gait, and can face the future with a certain hope. One expects something out of the Arabian Nights, while disclaiming any such hope with a comic bow and bumbling speech … And when people ask us about the life we intend to live, we form the habit, in spring, of answering with an expansive wave of the hand, which goes limp after a while, as if to say that it was ridiculously unnecessary to conjure up sure things.
This is the world of Kafka’s febrile line drawings, which show ludicrously tall or squat people stretching, twisting, leaning towards or away from one another, in what would be grotesque if it was an attempt at realism but which instead conveys perfectly how we sometimes feel, both constrained in our bodies and lunging free, both playing a game and close to desperation. The early diaries are full of detailed descriptions of gesturing, which seems to be a sign of frustration when it is he himself who is doing the gesturing, but is clearly also as much a part of his extreme sensitivity to others as his response to words. These gestures are in fact the visual and physical equivalent of those words which suddenly take on a life of their own and burst free of the sentence in which normal, well-behaved words should quietly lie.
In a late diary entry (24 January 1922) Kafka, looking back at his life, mysteriously but quite specifically linked his writing with such gesturing:
Childish games (though I was well aware that they were so) marked the beginning of my intellectual decline. I deliberately cultivated a facial tic, for instance, or would walk across the Graben with arms crossed behind my head. A repulsively childish but successful game. (My writing began in the same way …)
By this stage in his life Kafka had begun to think of writing not as a form of salvation but, on the contrary, as ‘wages earned in the service of evil’, as he put it in a terrible letter to Brod. But whether one accepts his judgment or not, it does not affect the clear link he makes here between writing and gesticulating. Just as excessive gestures were a way of escaping, even if only momentarily, the confines of his body and the behaviour required by society, so it was with his writing. The obverse of both is the image of the body turned to stone, the head sinking on to the chest, which recurs so often in the diary in moments of depression.
However, in order to grasp precisely what are the links between writing and gesturing we have to turn to a diary entry for 30 September 1911. There Kafka, after commenting on two well-known artists with whom he has obviously come into contact that day, Kubin the painter and Tucholsky the writer, focuses on a third figure:
Szafranski, a disciple of Bernhardt’s, grimaces while he observes and draws in a way that resembles what is drawn. Reminds me that I too have a pronounced talent for metamorphosing myself, which no one notices. How often I must have imitated Max. Yesterday evening, on the way home, if I had observed myself from the outside I should have taken myself for Tucholsky.
But this talent for entering into and becoming another is not an actor’s gift. ‘My urge to imitate has nothing of the actor in it,’ he writes on 30 December. A good actor, he goes on, homes in on the essential details of the person he is impersonating, while the sign of the poor actor is precisely that he is overwhelmed by peripheral detail. Yet it is just such peripheral detail – ‘the way certain people manipulate walking-sticks, the way they hold their hands, the movements of their fingers’ – that he himself finds he can imitate with such ease.
And that fascination with peripheral detail, that ability to enter into the detail and live it, so to speak, is what immediately strikes us about even his earliest and most hesitant writing. The very first sentence of the diary, for example, runs: ‘The onlookers go rigid when the train goes past’ (the German avoids the repetition of ‘go’ and takes up only eight words: ‘Die Zuschauer erstarren, wenn der Zug vorbeifährt.’) Is this the jotting down of something seen that day or the start of a story? As usual with Kafka we cannot tell, and, indeed, the writing forces us to abandon such apparently well-founded distinctions. Though seemingly just a note to remind himself of an incident he has witnessed, the sentence actually catches and conveys an event. The diarist has not just looked hard, he has empathized instinctively not with this or that person on the station platform but with the entire episode of onlookers-at-a-station-platform-as-a-train-goes-past.
Nevertheless, it was to be some time before Kafka discovered what to do with this gift of his for empathy and metamorphosis. In 1912, when Brod urged him to put together a volume of short pieces for publication, he knew only that he must avoid the realism of the rape fragment and the expressionism of the long unfinished stories. Better to choose modest and even rather muted pieces which felt ‘true’ all the way through than fill a volume with excessive noise and falsehood. Thus, like Eliot’s early ‘Preludes’ and ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, or the quieter pieces Schoenberg and Webern were producing at roughly the same time, the ‘stories’ which make up Kafka’s first published collection, Meditation (Betrachtung), are moving and disturbing precisely because they refuse to engage in narrative and yet are clearly more than simple descriptions. ‘Absent-minded Window-gazing’, for example, begins:
What are we to do with these spring days that are now fast coming on? Early this morning the sky was gray, but if you go to the window now you are surprised and lean your cheek against the latch of the casement.
A drama is being enacted here, but it is secret, muffled, hardly aware of itself, as in Joyce’s ‘Eveline’. Elsewhere he retrieves a fragment from the diary entry for 5 January
1912 about suddenly deciding to go out for a walk and in another piece tells how, to lift himself from his miserable mood, ‘I force myself out of my chair, stride around the table, exercise my head and neck, make my eyes sparkle, tighten the muscles around them.’ In ‘The Wish to be a Red Indian’ the whole piece consists of a single sentence, poised between mundane reality and impossible desire:
If one were only an Indian, instantly alert, and on a racing horse, leaning against the wind, kept on quivering jerkily over the quivering ground, until one shed one’s spurs, for there needed no spurs, threw away the reins, for there needed no reins, and hardly saw that the land before one was smoothly shorn heath when horse’s neck and head would be already gone.
Yet, interesting and original as these pieces are, they could clearly not satisfy someone who felt, like Kafka, that a thousand worlds were waiting to burst out of his head. If he was to let them out he would have, sooner or later, to solve the problem of how to write narrative without falling into the traps of either expressionism and realism, of a dependence on subjective whim which was self-defeating and a dependence on the themes and styles of his contemporaries which only struck him as unbearably hollow and false.
I have been talking so far as though Kafka were alone with his demons, though I did give a glimpse of him with Brod and his other friends as the ‘little motor-car story’ was read aloud. Much more important, of course, was the attitude of his family. Kafka has left us plenty of evidence about what his father thought of his work, but the main actor in what is perhaps the key episode in his development as a writer was not his father but an unnamed uncle. Kafka recounts it in his diary on 19 January 1911:
Once I projected a novel in which two brothers fought each other, one of whom went to America while the other remained in a European prison. I only now and then began to write a few lines, for it tired me at once. So once I wrote down something about my prison on a Sunday afternoon when we were visiting my grandparents and had eaten an especially soft kind of bread, spread with butter, that was customary there. It is of course possible that I did it mostly out of vanity, and by shifting the paper about on the tablecloth, tapping with my pencil, looking around under the lamp, wanted to tempt someone to take what I had written from me, look at it, and admire me. It was chiefly the corridor of the prison that was described in the few lines, above all its silence and coldness … Perhaps I had a momentary feeling of the worthlessness of my description, but before that afternoon I had never paid much attention to such feelings when among relatives to whom I was accustomed (my timidity was so great that the accustomed was enough to make me half-way happy), I sat at the round table in the familiar room and could not forget that I was young and called to great things out of this present tranquillity. An uncle who liked to make fun of people finally took the page that I was holding only weakly, looked at it briefly, handed it back to me, even without laughing, and only said to the others who were following him with their eyes, ‘The usual stuff’, to me he said nothing. To be sure, I remained seated and bent as before over the now useless page of mine, but with one thrust I had been banished from society, the judgment of my uncle repeated itself in me with what amounted almost to real significance and even within the feeling of belonging to a family I got an insight into the cold space of our world which I had to warm with a fire that first I wanted to seek out.
This stands, with the equivalent episode of Monsieur de Norpois’ rejection of the young Marcel’s literary efforts, as one of the key moments in modern literature. It is not an episode Chaucer, Milton or Goethe would have made much sense of, I suspect, for in their day it would have been pretty obvious if a young man was gifted or not, and ‘the usual stuff’ would have been less of a put-down than ‘odd stuff’. In our world though – and in this respect Proust and Kafka inhabit our world – matters are different: few can spot what is truly original when it first appears, and the burden on the artist is for that reason much greater: should he trust his instinct, which has so often let him down, or the judgment of others, which seems so massively authoritative and yet is so often at odds with his own?
Of course what makes this moment so important in both Kafka and Proust is not only that they had the ability to describe it for us, but that they had the resources of character to react to it, not by simply dismissing the judgment out of hand, but by incorporating it into their work, thus at the same time accepting and reversing it.
Two and a half years after that terrible Sunday afternoon, on 24 May 1913, Kafka noted in his diary: ‘In high spirits because I consider “The Stoker” so good. This evening I read it to my parents, there is no better critic than I when I read to my father, who listens with the most extreme reluctance. Many shallow passages followed by unfathomable depths.’
‘The Stoker’ is also a story about a young man going to America. But this time Kafka does not wait for someone to wrench the page from him and look at it. He has grown in confidence to such an extent that he actually reads it out loud to the sternest judge of all, his father. And though he notes that his father listened ‘with the most extreme reluctance’, he himself is not in the least put out by this. As he reads he sees clearly that there are ‘many shallow passages’ in the story, but that these are ‘followed by unfathomable depths’.
What has happened to alter things in this way?
To put it simply, what has happened is the experience of the night of 22–23 September 1912. Under the date 23 September he transcribes the whole of a long short story and then comments:
This story, ‘The Judgment’, I wrote at one sitting during the night of 22–23rd, from ten o’clock at night to six o’clock in the morning. I was hardly able to pull my legs out from under the desk, they had got so stiff from sitting. The fearful strain and joy, how the story developed before me, as if I were advancing over water. Several times during this night I heaved my own weight on my back. How everything can be said, how for everything, for the strangest fancies, there waits a great fire in which they perish and rise up again. How it turned blue outside the window. A wagon rolled by. Two men walked across the bridge … The appearance of the undisturbed bed, as though it had just been brought in. The conviction verified that with my novel-writing I am in the shameful lowlands of writing. Only in this way can writing be done, only with such coherence, with such a complete opening out of the body and the soul.
All his life Kafka was to look back to this night as the fulfilment of his dream of writing. Never again was he to feel such total satisfaction: at last he was doing what he had long obscurely felt he had been put on earth to do.
‘The Judgment’ opens with Georg Bendemann sitting at an open window from which, as from Kafka’s window, a bridge can be seen, daydreaming and writing a letter to a friend in far-off Russia. ‘Absent-minded Window-gazing’ had stopped there. Kafka had perhaps sensed that the scene was a kind of metaphor not just for modern life but also for the work of the writer, dreaming at his desk. Now, by bringing writing and window-gazing into the same orbit he discovers the way to move forward. Just as Kafka’s story of the two brothers had been dismissed in a single sentence under the judgment of his uncle, so now both letter and daydreams are banished by Georg’s father. The aged, enfeebled man suddenly rears up in bed where Georg had solicitously – as he no doubt put it to himself – tried to cover him up, and issues a judgment on the writer and dreamer: ‘An innocent child, yes, that you were, truly, but still more truly have you been a devilish human being! – And therefore take note: I sentence you now to death by drowning.’
The terrible sentence is a strange kind of release for both Georg and the narrative: ‘Georg felt himself urged from the room, the crash with which his father fell on the bed behind him was still in his ears as he fled … Out of the front door he rushed, across the roadway, driven towards the water.’ The force which drives him on makes all hesitation, all dreaming on his part, a thing of the past. He swings himself over the side of the bridge, ‘like the distinguished gymnast he had once b
een in his youth, to his parents’ pride’, and then lets himself drop. ‘At this moment an unending stream of traffic was just going over the bridge.’
The indifferent landscape of the fragment about the rape has turned into an image of the world going on its way as Georg’s individual life of desire, frustration and compromise comes to an end. In the earlier fragment the narrator had been guilty but seemed unwilling to recognize his guilt; here he is guilty of no single evil act yet accepts his father’s judgment, and so brings his own life and the story to its end. But it is as though the acceptance of that judgment has allowed a new kind of writing to be born.
Two days later ‘The Stoker’ was written. Karl Rossmann, as the rich long first sentence tells us, has been packed off to America by his parents for having got a serving girl with child, and the ship he is on has now entered New York Harbour. But if America stands – as it has for so many immigrants and writers – for freedom, for the chance to forge one’s own life, one’s own narrative, in the wide open spaces and the bustling cities, then the story promptly turns its back on it. Realizing suddenly that he has left his umbrella ‘down below’, Karl turns back and, descending into the bowels of the ship, finds, in those constraining corridors and boiler-rooms, the space where Kafka’s narrative can function. From now on Kafka too will turn his back on the temptations of the free-floating novel (whether realist or expressionist) and concentrate on the stokers.
Yet free-floating narrative will always exert its pull (Kafka does after all go on trying to write an ‘American’ novel), and it is precisely in the tension between the temptation and its refusal, between the letter-writing by the open window and the self-immolation demanded by the tyrannical father, that Kafka will discover the ever renewable springs of his narrative powers.