by Franz Kafka
Just as the narrative of ‘The Judgment’ emerges in all its power and inevitability out of a redirection of energy that had earlier been spent half combating and half agreeing with the judgments of his family, so the arbitrary bodily movement described in the early letters and taken up in Meditation, the arm-jerking and head-twisting and all the rest of it, here gives way to Georg’s rediscovery of his earlier gymnastic ability, once the pride of his parents, now the means of his self-destruction. Two months after writing ‘The Judgment’ and ‘The Stoker’ Kafka completed the greatest of his early works, ‘The Metamorphosis’. As he wakes from uneasy sleep Gregor Samsa finds himself transformed into a gigantic insect and thus having to come to terms with a body he cannot imagine and yet which is indubitably his (or should we say ‘indubitably him’?). Forced to lie on his back, he can only glimpse his domelike brown belly, while ‘his numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes’. This is no erstwhile gymnast; on the contrary, it is someone who has for too long tried to live without listening to his body, which now exacts its terrible revenge.
The long dense story which follows charts with dreadful precision the way in which Gregor is gradually forced to learn about what Donne, in a very different context, called ‘my new found land’. And, as with Georg Bendemann, understanding arrives for Gregor, and a kind of peace, only with the recognition that he must accede to the wishes of his family, even – perhaps especially – if those wishes concern his own disappearance. And, like the early rape fragment and ‘The Judgment’, this story ends with the world going on its way regardless of the passion of the protagonist. Here, though, this archetypal story of the body has to end with a celebration of the body as, having taken a tram out into the country, the parents gaze fondly at their sole remaining child, the sister Gregor had so wanted to help, ‘And it was like a confirmation of their new dreams and excellent intentions that at the end of their journey their daughter sprang to her feet first and stretched her young body.’
In ‘Reading Kafka’ Maurice Blanchot has argued persuasively that that last sentence is in a sense the most terrible in the entire story. At the same time every reader has recognized, however obscurely, that our reactions to this, as to all Kafka’s mature stories, are profoundly ambivalent. We experience horror at what happens to Gregor but at the same time a kind of joy at the fact that the story exists and allows us to read it. And if the reaction of the parents and sister mime out in the fiction our own inability to give meaning to Gregor’s ordeal and death, then that too is a part of the meaning of the whole. And if Gregor finds himself constrained more and more by his horrible body, till death comes as a merciful release, then for Kafka the writing of the story was itself a merciful release from the frustration of years, even if he later had doubts about its ending, and a renewal of that sense that ‘everything can be said … for everything, for the strangest fancies, there waits a great fire in which they perish and rise up again’. For now at last the excess of gesture, the arbitrary jerking of arms and legs, has been made the subject not of observation but of narrative; now at last his ‘profound talent for metamorphosing myself, which no one notices’, has found an outlet. Other writers have had the ability to empathize with a wide range of human beings; Kafka has now discovered in himself the unique gift of empathy with everything in the world, even a gigantic insect. It is a gift of which he will make full use in the years that follow.
But before that happens there is one story in the vein of ‘The Judgment’ that still needs to be written, though that does not happen till almost two years later, in October 1914. ‘In the Penal Colony’ is the most repulsive story Kafka ever wrote, for while there is a kind of serenity in the way in which both Georg and Gregor meet their deaths, and a deep sympathy with their bewilderment and despair, this story is glacial throughout. The peculiar horror of the two earlier stories lies in the combination of classic purity in the unfolding of the narrative and the almost unbearable subject-matter; that of ‘In the Penal Colony’ lies in the sense that not only is the subject-matter foul but the story itself, replicating the narrative, seems to have become a sort of malfunctioning machine:
The explorer … felt greatly troubled; the machine was obviously going to pieces; its silent working was a delusion … The Harrow was not writing, it was only jabbing, and the Bed was not turning the body over but only bringing it up quivering against the needles.
Though in death the officer’s look is ‘calm and convinced’, this is the result not of understanding but of madness, for there is no visible sign of ‘the promised redemption’, while ‘through the forehead went the point of the great iron spike’.
The reason for this may lie in the fact that though Kafka was always to look back to his breakthrough as a wonder, a form of grace, he was also perhaps beginning to feel uneasy with the form it had taken. The narratives he had suddenly found it in himself to write and which had, for the first time, given him the kind of satisfaction he had always hoped for from his writing, may have struck him as too extreme, too full of anguish and pathos. It is as though he feels that the ambition of these early stories is too Utopian, too Romantic. ‘In the Penal Colony’ dramatizes the painful discovery that Truth cannot be written, not even on the body.
Other factors were perhaps also involved in the change of direction that now began to manifest itself, chief among them the growing realization of the ambivalence of his desire for marriage, and the coming of the war. Perhaps, he must have begun to think, it was not his job or his bachelorhood or his ill-health which were preventing the full outburst of his talents, but something else, something which had to do with what man is and what art can achieve. And if he suffered as a consequence, what was his suffering compared to what those at the front were experiencing?
Be that as it may, the work he did in the years 1914–17, much of which is included in the 1919 volume, A Country Doctor, shows a marked and significant shift of emphasis.
Kafka put together this volume of fourteen stories with the care of a Yeats or a Wallace Stevens planning a book of poems. ‘The Bucket Rider’, for example, which he had thought of including, he dropped at the last moment, presumably because it did not fit in with the rest of the volume. As it now stands the first and last stories call out to each other across the intervening gap, and each story (including ‘Eleven Sons’) adds a new twist to the central theme.
‘We have a new advocate, Dr. Bucephalus,’ the first story begins. ‘There is little in his appearance to remind you that he was once Alexander of Macedon’s battle charger. Of course, if you know his story, you are aware of something.’ But even the usher at the law courts, who presumably does not know his story, though he is, it is true, ‘a man with the professional appraisal of the regular small better at a racecourse’, finds himself ‘running an admiring eye over the advocate as he mounted the marble steps with a high action that made them ring beneath his feet’.
However, this high-stepping urge is now kept well under control, for ‘[n]owadays … there is no Alexander the Great’. Of course, even in his day ‘the gates of India were beyond reach, yet the King’s sword pointed the way to them’. Today, however, no one even points the way – for in which direction would he point? Many, it is true, still carry swords, ‘but only to brandish them, and the eye that tries to follow them is confused’. So, ‘perhaps it is really best to do as Bucephalus has done and absorb oneself in law books. In the quiet lamplight, his flanks unhampered by the thighs of a rider, free and far from the clamor of battle, he reads and turns the pages of our ancient tomes.’
A loss has been incurred, yet the last little paragraph is neither pathetic nor anguished, but merely resigned: ‘Perhaps it is really best to do as Bucephalus has done.’ His flanks are at least unhampered by the thighs of any rider – yet we recall the high action of his legs as he strides up the staircase of the law courts and feel the waste: a rider pressing into those flanks would at least have given him a goa
l, a sense of direction. Instead, he consoles himself by poring over ancient law books, though whether he does this out of a sense of duty or desire or merely to pass the time, the story does not say.
Resignation and its cost is also the theme of the last story in the collection, ‘A Report to an Academy’. In what is probably the funniest story this great comic writer ever produced, an ape addresses a distinguished gathering, recounting how he dragged himself by sheer will-power out of his simian condition and up to his present position. The reason he has done this, he explains, is not from any innate desire on the part of apes to achieve the level of men, but rather that, having been captured and stuck in a tiny cage, he understood that his only chance of escape lay in imitating the men he could see walking about unconstrained before him.
He cannot, he explains, really comply with the wishes of the academy and speak about his life as an ape; that closed behind him when he was captured and was lost to sight for ever when he decided to transform himself. He can only recount the stages of his transformation: ‘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,’ he explains, unconsciously echoing the tone of countless self-made men, Kafka’s father among them. ‘In revenge, however, my memory of the past has closed the door against me more and more.’ As he grew increasingly at ease in the world of men, ‘the strong wind that blew after me out of my past began to slacken; today it is a gentle puff of air that plays around my heels’. ‘To put it plainly,’ he tells the gentlemen of the academy, ‘your life as apes … insofar as something of that kind lies behind you, cannot be farther removed from you than mine is from me.’ And yet, ‘everyone on earth feels a tickling at the heels; the small chimpanzee and the great Achilles alike’.
He has transformed himself, he explains, because he had no option. Not in order to find freedom, that is too large a word, associated perhaps with his early life in the forests of Africa, but simply in order to find a way out of his horrible predicament. It is solely for that reason that he has learned to imitate the ways of men – smoking, spitting, drinking, talking. As a result of this single-minded effort he is now able to command the best hotel suites and address such august assemblies as this. And ‘[w]hen I come home late at night from banquets, from scientific receptions, from social gatherings, there sits waiting for me a half-trained little chimpanzee and I take comfort from her as apes do’. And yet, ‘[b]y day I cannot bear to see her; for she has the insane look of the bewildered half-broken animal in her eye; no one else sees it, but I do, and I cannot bear it’.
So, like Bucephalus, he has managed to accommodate to new conditions without nostalgia and without recrimination. It is a decent enough life, even, perhaps, in the eyes of some (the animal in the zoo, the soldier at the front) an enviable one, but it entails a hardening of oneself, a willed denial of the breeze licking about one’s heels, of the look in the eyes of the half-broken animal.
Nevertheless, this new-found balance testified to a second great creative period in Kafka’s life. This is the period of the parables, the aphorisms, the re-telling of the myths of Poseidon and Prometheus, the meditations on Ulysses and the sirens and on Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and of the innumerable perfect, tiny, yet ultimately mysterious stories that are as much a part of Kafka’s legacy as the terrible stories of 1912–14. This is the period of the great flowering of his gift for impersonation, and no writer has ever managed to empathize with such a diversity not just of living creatures but even of bridges, and balls in wooden games. (‘If the ball was unemployed, it spent most of the time strolling to and fro, its hands clasped behind its back, on the plateau, avoiding the paths … It had a rather straddling gait and maintained that it was not made for those narrow paths.’)
No story of those years shows more clearly how far Kafka has travelled from his earlier concerns and practices than the one called ‘The Cares of a Family Man’. It tells of Odradek, not exactly an object and not quite a creature, with a name which is not precisely Slav and not exactly German:
At first glance it looks like a flat star-shaped spool for thread, and indeed it does seem to have thread wound upon it; to be sure, they are only old, broken-off bits of thread, knotted and tangled together, of the most varied sorts and colors. But it is not only a spool, for a small wooden crossbar sticks out of the middle of the star, and another small rod is joined to that at a right angle. By means of this latter rod on one side and one of the points of the star on the other, the whole thing can stand upright as if on two legs.
It is not that Odradek once had some sort of intelligible shape and is now only ‘a broken-down remnant’; it has always been like that and though ‘the whole thing looks senseless enough’, it is, in its own way, ‘perfectly finished’. In any case close scrutiny is impossible, for Odradek will never let himself be caught. He lurks in stairs and garrets and disappears for months on end, but always returns to ‘our house’. When you ask him his name he squeaks ‘Odradek’, and when you ask where he lives he squeaks ‘no fixed abode’ and laughs – ‘but it is only the kind of laughter that has no lungs behind it. It sounds rather like the rustling of fallen leaves.’
Not surprisingly he gets on the nerves of the narrator, that Hausvater or ‘family man’. What is going to happen to Odradek? he wonders. Can he possibly die? But only that which is living can die, and ‘that does not apply to Odradek’. Is he then always going to be rolling down the stairs ‘before the feet of my children and my children’s children’? And though he does no harm as far as one can see, ‘the idea that he is likely to survive me I find almost painful’.
Kafka has come a long way from that early reading by Max Brod of the ‘little motor-car story’, when he confided to his diary that despite his desire for ‘something large and whole and well-shaped from beginning to end’, ‘every little piece of my story runs around homeless and drives me away from it’. Odradek is completely himself/itself, yet is neither large nor whole nor well-made, and revels in the fact that he/it has ‘no fixed abode’.
So long as Kafka imagined that art would help him enter a more meaningful realm than the one he inhabited in his daily life, so long as he imagined that the test of the quality of his art lay in the unbroken nature of the work he put into it, then it was inevitable that he would turn on himself and his surroundings in bitterness and frustration: he was lazy, he was weak, he was unhealthy, his family was suffocating him, his bachelorhood was crippling him, the office was destroying him, marriage would be the end of him. But now it is as though he comes to accept the romantic folly of such dreams and such despair. An art that respects the truth, he now comes to see, can only express its own and our human limitations, show that we become immortal only to the extent that we cease to be human and alive only to the extent that we renounce dreams of wholeness and of belonging.
Odradek is nobody’s son and nobody’s father. He does not know the cares of a Hausvater and is not graspable in his essence, only in his movement and his otherness. Odradek does not mean anything: he moves, gets in the way, disturbs. And accepting that writing stories is bringing Odradeks into being gives Kafka back the sense that there need be no end to the writing of stories and that the freedom from human cares lies precisely in such writing. As for us, we should cease to ask of them what they mean and ask instead how they move – both how they move in their own space and how they move us.
Here, for example, is a little piece that Max Brod did not even consider worthy of inclusion in any collection of Kafka’s stories. Yet if it was all we had of Kafka it would immediately strike us as unique and irreplaceable. Though it is barely six lines long it is not a fragment in the sense that the rape piece was a fragment. It is only a fragment in the way an aphorism is a fragment, that is, as a questioning of the very notion of wholeness:
I ran past the first watchman. Then I was horrified, ran back again and said to the watchman: ‘I ran through here while you were looking the other way.’ The watchman g
azed ahead of him and said nothing. ‘I suppose I really oughtn’t to have done it,’ I said. The watchman still said nothing. ‘Does your silence indicate permission to pass?’
The German is considerably denser than the English. ‘Ran past’ misses the sense of ‘overran’ in überlief; ‘then’ hardly does justice to Nachträglich, which means ‘retrospectively’ or ‘retroactively’; and ‘you’ of course fails to convey the fact the German uses the familiar du, with its suggestion that the Watchman is both a figure of authority and one to whom the speaker is very close. But even in English this is a piece of writing which demands to be read at least twice; indeed, as so often in Kafka, the narrative mimics the way we are forced to read it.
A story which told how I ran past the first watchman, hid myself from the second, overcame the third, and finally entered the castle or finally escaped from it, might be exciting to read, but, once read, it would lose all interest for us. Its fire would burn only so long as the end had not been reached, and we would feel, in reading it, as we do in our lives, that everything had gone by too fast, that the experience was somehow thin – but we would not have any idea how to slow things down, how to thicken and deepen the experience. Kafka has managed to do that. But he has done it by dramatizing the fact that we always run past and so are always looking back. Thinness of experience is what we are condemned to. (We would, of course, destroy the story, make it merely thin again, if we were to substitute for it some generalizing comment, such as ‘to hesitate is to be lost’, or ‘human self-awareness will not allow us to act naturally’.)
This little story is almost totally free of the anguish and pain characteristic of ‘The Judgment’ and the stories that followed it. It opens a space and lives in it, a space which we too can enter and in which we too can live, though without Kafka we would never have been able to do so. Just as Ulysses escaped the silence of the Sirens by a mixture of luck, innocence and cunning, so it is with Kafka and these stories of his middle period: he sails unscathed across the sea of narrative and takes his readers with him.