by Franz Kafka
But it was not to last. For Kafka this rich creative period was only a moment on a fateful journey, only a point on the circumference of his dreams and desires. In 1917 he was found to be suffering from tuberculosis and broke off finally with Felice. The precarious balance of these years was disturbed by the intrusion of his body and the stench of mortality. In his last stories the pain of ‘The Judgment’ and ‘Metamorphosis’ returns, but displaced, so to speak, no longer at the heart of the narrative but at the periphery. I am not sure if it is not the more painful for that.
‘A Hunger Artist’, the story whose proofs Kafka was correcting as he lay dying in Kierling Sanatorium in the spring of 1924, is the fullest expression of the change. ‘I always wanted you to admire my fasting,’ says the Hunger Artist. ‘We do admire it,’ says the overseer. ‘But you shouldn’t,’ says the Artist. ‘Well then we don’t,’ says the overseer. ‘But why shouldn’t we admire it?’ ‘Because I have to fast, I can’t help it.’ ‘What a fellow you are,’ says the overseer, ‘and why can’t you help it?’ ‘Because I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.’
Like Bucephalus and the ape the Hunger Artist has simply done what had to be done. In his case, however, it is not enough, for fasting, unlike the reading of old books or lectures to academies, kills.
‘Well, clear this out now!’ said the overseer, and they buried the hunger artist, straw and all. Into the cage they put a young panther. Even the most insensitive felt it refreshing to see this wild creature leaping around the cage that had so long been dreary.
But even this is perhaps still too close to pathos for Kafka. ‘Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk’, probably the last story he wrote, takes matters one step further. Josephine’s art, of which she has been so proud, is perhaps not even art, her singing no different from the cheeping of all the other mice when properly listened to. Her people will not miss her when she is gone, and, ‘since we are no historians,’ says the narrator, she will soon be forgotten, ‘like all her brothers’.
Many years before, Kafka’s uncle had taken the manuscript from his hands and declared to the assembled family that it contained only ‘the usual stuff’. In this story Kafka sends a final answer to that uncle. For it recognizes the human desire for song, for art, that will give meaning to our world and bring the singer recognition. But it accepts at the same time that such desires are, from another perspective, absurd, childish, and unwarranted.
We are far, in this story, from the young Kafka’s mixture of self-confidence (‘I … could not forget that I was called to great things …’) and self-doubt (‘with one thrust I had been banished from society’). We are rather in the hands of a master who must have taken pride and pleasure in what he could do and yet who could also recognize its complete insignificance, and who had the skill and the imagination to convey this double perspective without self-pity and without denying the total validity of either.
The paradox is that, because he gives us food we need, Kafka himself will not be forgotten as long as there are books to read and human beings to read them. He lives for us in his fragmentary and living children more than he ever lived for himself in the bosom of his family, the Kafkas, and his city, Prague.
Gabriel Josipovici
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
Contrary to current belief, Kafka was as concerned as any author to see his works in print, and as careful as any poet about the order in which the stories in any particular collection should be printed. However, like Eliot, he was extremely fastidious and only published a very small number of works in his lifetime. In 1912, largely at Brod’s urging, and with considerable misgivings, he put together a volume of early pieces, which was published the following year under the title Betrachtung, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir as Meditation. 1913 also saw the publication of his two great early stories, ‘The Judgment’ and ‘The Stoker’, followed in 1915 by his longest and greatest early work, ‘Die Verwandlung’, translated by the Muirs as ‘The Metamorphosis’. In 1919 two more slim volumes came out, ‘In the Penal Colony’, which he had written in October 1914, and A Country Doctor, a collection of fourteen stories written between 1914 and 1917. He had originally intended to include ‘The Bucket Rider’, but eventually decided that it did not fit into the volume, and it was published separately in the ‘Prager Presse’ in December 1921. In the last two years of his life Kafka was planning a further volume, consisting of four stories, and this appeared shortly after his death, in 1924, as Ein Hungerkünstler, translated by the Muirs as A Hunger Artist. Everything else, including the three novels, Amerika, The Trial and The Castle, remained in manuscript, to be eventually published by Brod in a variety of formats.
The most readily available edition of the Collected Stories, edited by Nahum Glatzer (Penguin originally but now Minerva, 1992) divides the stories into two sections, ‘longer’ and ‘shorter’. This seems needlessly arbitrary, and in the present volume I have preferred to follow the procedure of the Fischer Verlag edition of the stories, Sämtliche Erzählungen, edited by Paul Raabe and first published in 1970. Raabe essentially divides the stories into those published in Kafka’s lifetime and those which remained unpublished. This has a number of advantages. It allows the reader of Meditation, A Country Doctor and A Hunger Artist, to see these collections as wholes, made up of more than their parts; and it makes clear which stories carry titles given them by Kafka and which by later editors. One or two of the unpublished stories, it is true, such as ‘The Great Wall of China’, were given titles by Kafka, but even these do not, obviously, carry the authority of the titles of the published stories where, as in ‘The Cares of a Family Man’ (‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’), discussed in the Introduction, the title forms an important part of the meaning.
Like Raabe, but unlike Glatzer, I have included ‘The Stoker’, which Kafka subsequently intended should form Chapter I of Amerika. As I suggest in the Introduction, this remained an important story in its own right for Kafka and helps us understand his development. I have also naturally left in place in A Country Doctor two short pieces, ‘Before the Law’ and ‘An Imperial Message’, which Kafka incorporated into The Trial and ‘The Great Wall of China’ respectively. Since ‘The Great Wall of China’ is included here, ‘An Imperial Message’ appears twice. However, I have taken the opposite decision for two fragments from the early ‘Description of a Struggle’. Since Kafka published these in magazine form but did not see fit to include them in Meditation it seemed pedantic to print them twice in this volume. I have also refrained from including the play, ‘The Guardian of the Tomb’ or variants for some of the stories, as Glatzer did. We still await a full critical edition of Kafka’s writings, though that is under way, and it will be for that to provide us with all the versions and variants. What is needed at the present time is a full and clearly organized volume of the stories.
But what do we mean by ‘the stories’? Brod himself has admitted that the task before any editor of Kafka is in a way an impossible one, since it will always be a matter of personal decision as to which bits of the notebooks and diaries one chooses to regard as finished stories. I have added two stories to Glatzer’s selection which have been translated and published by Malcolm Pasley in Franz Kafka: Shorter Works, vol. I, Secker and Warburg, London, 1973: ‘The Proclamation’ and ‘New Lamps’; and eight stories which I have culled from the Diaries and Notebooks: ‘The Student’, ‘The Angel’, and ‘An Ancient Sword’, from The Diaries of Franz Kafka, edited by Max Brod, translated by Joseph Kresh and by Martin Greenberg with the co-operation of Hannah Arendt, Peregrine Books, Harmondsworth, 1964, and ‘A Splendid Beast’, ‘The Watchman’, ‘Hands’, ‘Isabella’ and ‘A Chinese Puzzle’, from Wedding Preparations in the Country, translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser, Secker and Warburg, 1954. These are not the only stories I could have chosen, they merely reflect my own sense that they are as good as many of the pieces in the Glatzer
volume and that they should be included in a volume of Collected Stories. The titles of these stories are, of course, my own.
It is often impossible to date accurately the stories Kafka did not choose to publish in his lifetime, but I have arranged them in roughly chronological order. The reader can thus follow two separate trajectories through Kafka’s writing life, from Meditation (1913) to A Hunger Artist (1924), and from ‘Description of a Struggle’ (1904–05) to ‘The Burrow’ (1923–24).
Gabriel Josipovici
About the editor: GABRIEL JOSIPOVICI is a novelist, playwright and critic, and part-time Professor of English at the University of Sussex. His many books include The World and the Book and The Book of God: A Response to the Bible and the novels Contre-Jour, The Big Glass and In a Hotel Garden.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
As with any writer, the best way in to Kafka’s stories is through other works of his. His novels, diaries and letters are all available in English.
There is no outstanding biography but Ronald Hayman’s A Biography of Franz Kafka (Weidenfeld, 1981) and Ernst Pawel’s The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka (Harvill, 1984) are both interesting and informative.
I have learnt most from the following books and articles:
Walter Benjamin, ‘Franz Kafka on the Tenth Anniversary of His Death’ and ‘Max Brod’s Book on Kafka’, both in Illuminations, edited and introduced by Hannah Arendt and translated by Harry Zohn, Cape, 1970.
Maurice Blanchot, ‘Reading Kafka’, ‘Kafka and Literature’, and ‘Kafka and the Demands of Literature’, all in The Sirens’ Song: Selected Essays of Maurice Blanchot, edited and introduced by Gabriel Josipovici and translated by Sacha Rabinovitch, Harvester, 1982.
Elias Canetti, Kafka’s Other Trial, tr. C. Middleton, Calder, 1974 (reprinted as the Introduction to the Penguin edition of the Letters to Felice).
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, tr. Dana Polan, University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Erich Heller, ‘The World of Franz Kafka’, in The Disinherited Mind, Penguin, 1951.
Milan Kundera, ‘In Saint Garta’s Shadow’, Times Literary Supplement, May 24, 1981.
Marthe Robert, Franz Kafka’s Loneliness, tr. Ralph Manheim, Faber, 1982.
I have dealt with aspects of Kafka’s life and work in ‘An Art for the Wilderness’, in The Lessons of Modernism, Macmillan, 1977, and in ‘A Bird Was in the Room’, in Text and Voice: Essays 1981–1991, Carcanet, 1992.
CHRONOLOGY
Please note: Text is repeated below at a larger size.
DATE AUTHOR’S LIFE
1883 Birth in Prague (3 July) of Franz Kafka, son of a prosperous Jewish businessman who will later insist on German schools and the German University. Franz Kafka is brought up as a non-orthodox, Western Jew.
1889 Attends German elementary school until 1893. Birth of the first of his three sisters (two younger brothers die in infancy).
1893 Attends German Staatgymnasium until 1901.
1901 Studies Law at the German Karl-Ferdinand University in Prague but is drawn to the literary circles of the city.
1902 Kafka very quickly defines his ideal style – cool, sober and very elegant: a language ‘ohne Schnörkel und Schleier und Warzen’. Meets Max Brod.
1904 Begins ‘Description of a Struggle’.
1906 Receives law degree. Embarks on his year of practical training in Prague Law Courts.
1907 Writes ‘Wedding Preparations in the Country’. Takes temporary position with Assicurazioni Generali, Italian insurance company.
1908 Accepts position in Prague with Workers’ Accident Insurance Company, the Arbeiter-Unfall-Versicherungs-Anstalt.
1909 Eight prose pieces published in Hyperion. Trip to Riva and Brescia (with Max and Otto Brod). Writes Die Aeroplane in Brescia.
1910 Begins to write a diary in which he relentlessly analyses his inner life. Five prose pieces published in Bohemia. Trip to Paris (with Max and Otto Brod). Visit to Berlin.
1911 Official trip to Friedland and Reichenberg. Trip (with Max Brod) to Switzerland, Italy and France, writing travelogues. Becomes interested in Yiddish theatre and literature.
1912 Meets a Jewish girl from Berlin, Felice Bauer, to whom he will be engaged twice. The short story ‘Das Urteil’ (‘The Judgment’) is written six weeks later. Visits Leipzig and Weimar. Works on a novel to be called Der Verschollene, to be published posthumously in 1927 as Amerika.
1913 Publication of Betrachtung (Meditation), The Judgment and Der Heizer (The Stoker). Visits Felice in Berlin. Travels to Vienna and Italy. Meeting with Grete Bloch and beginning of correspondence. (She becomes the mother of his son who dies in 1921, and of whose existence Kafka is ignorant.)
1914 Engaged to Felice. Breaks off his engagement. Visit to Germany. Starts working on Der Prozess (The Trial). Writes ‘In der Strafkolonie’ (‘In the Penal Colony’).
1915 ‘Die Verwandlung’ (‘The Metamorphosis’), an acknowledged masterpiece of precision, lucidity and grotesque implication, is published. Reconciliation with Felice.
1916 Resumes writing after two years’ silence: the fragment of ‘A Country Doctor’, ‘The Hunter Gracchus’ and other stories later included in A Country Doctor.
1917 Tuberculosis of the lung is confirmed. Relationship with Felice ends. Writes stories, among others: ‘A Report to an Academy’ ‘The Cares of a Family Man’ and ‘The Great Wall of China’. Learning Hebrew.
1919 Stays in various sanatoria. Briefly engaged to Julie Wohryzek who inspires him to write ‘Brief an der Vater’ (‘Letter to his Father’). ‘In the Penal Colony’ and A Country Doctor are published.
1920 Meets Milena Jesenska-Pollak, with whom he later corresponds.
1921 Goes back to work with the Workers’ Accident Insurance Company. ‘The Bucket Rider’ published.
1922 Writes Der Schloss (The Castle), ‘A Hunger Artist’ and ‘Investigations of a Dog’. Breaks off relations with Milena Jesenska-Pollak. Retires from the insurance company because of his ill-health and works until his death in a sanatorium near Vienna. ‘A Hunger Artist’ published.
1923 Meets Dora Dymant, daughter of an orthodox Polish rabbi, and lives with her for a time in Berlin. His illness drives him to Prague before he enters a sanatorium near Vienna. Writes ‘The Burrow’.
1924 Moves back to Prague. Writes ‘Josephine the Singer’. He is nursed in his last months by Dora Dymant, in a nursing home at Kierling. Dies there and is buried in Prague. Collection, A Hunger Artist, published shortly after his death. He leaves a testamentary direction that his work has to be destroyed after his death, which is disregarded by his friend and executor Max Brod.
1925 Publication by Max Brod of Der Prozess (The Trial).
1926 Publication by Max Brod of Das Schloss (The Castle).
1927 Publication by Max Brod of the unfinished Amerika.
DATE LITERARY CONTEXT
1883 Maupassant: Une Vie. Nietzsche: Thus Spake Zarathustra (to 1884). Death of Turgenev.
1884 Huysmans: À Rebours. Tolstoy’s What I Believe is banned.
1885 Howells: The Rise of Silas Lapham. Maupassant: Bel Ami.
Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil.
1886 Rimbaud: Les Illuminations.
Hardy: The Mayor of Casterbridge.
Tolstoy: The Death of Ivan Ilych. His play, The Power of Darkness, offends the Tsar and is banned.
Henry James: The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima.
1888 Mallarmé: Poésies.
Strindberg: Miss Julie.
Sudermann: Frau Sorge.
Birth of Anna Akhmatova.
1889 Ibsen: Hedda Gabler.
Hauptmann: Before Sunrise.
Strindberg: The Creditors.
Birth of Jean Cocteau.
1890 Hamsun: Hunger.
Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Critic as Artist.
Henry James: The Tragic Muse.
William James: The Principles of Psychology.<
br />
1891 Wilde: The Soul of Man under Socialism.
Howells: A Modern Instance.
Shaw: Quintessence of Ibsenism.
Birth of Bulgakov.
1892 Hamsun: Mysteries.
Ibsen: The Master Builder.
Hauptmann: The Weavers.
Hofmannsthal: The Death of Titian.
1893 Fontane: Frau Jenny Treibel.
Tolstoy: The Kingdom of God is within You.
Sudermann: Heimat.
Schnitzler: Anatol.
Death of Maupassant.
1894 Hamsun: Pan.
Bryusov publishes The Russian Symbolists.
Heinrich Mann: In a Family.
1895 Hardy: Jude the Obscure.
Fontane: Effi Briest.
Wilde’s trial and imprisonment; writes An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest.
Gorky: Chelkash.
Birth of Ernst Jünger.
1896 Chekhov: The Seagull.
Fontane: Poggenpuhls.
1897 Housman: A Shropshire Lad.
Henry James: What Maisie Knew.
1898 Tolstoy: What is Art?
Zola: J’accuse.
Shaw: Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant.
Wilde: The Ballad of Reading Gaol.
Strindberg: Inferno.
Thomas Mann: Little Herr Friedemann.
Svevo: As a Man Grows Older.
Birth of Erich Maria Remarque.
Death of Fontane and Mallarmé.
1899 Yeats: The Wind Among the Reeds.