The indisposition of his outer body came to seem a mere inconvenience. And his illness, like his Jewishness, forced him back into himself. There is no evidence that his tuberculosis decisively interrupted his writing or stunted his exuberant imagination. But would he have written what he did if he had been in robust health, expecting a long life? His tuberculosis relieved him of the need to choose between “living a life and earning a living.”
…
Kafka again and again explained that the inner and the outer worlds ran their separate ways. As he began writing The Castle, in his diary for January 12, 1922, he speculated on the consequences:
First: breakdown, impossible to sleep, impossible to stay awake, impossible to endure life, or, more exactly, the course of life. The clocks are not in unison, the inner one runs crazily on at a devilish or demoniac or in any case inhuman pace, the outer one limps along at its usual speed. What else can happen but that the two worlds split apart, and they do split apart, or at least clash in a fearful manner. There are doubtless several reasons for the wild tempo of the inner process; the most obvious one is introspection, which will suffer no idea to sink tranquilly to rest but must pursue each one into consciousness, only itself to become an idea, in turn to be pursued by renewed introspection.
Secondly: this pursuit, originating in the midst of men, carries one in a direction away from them. The solitude that for the most part has been forced on me, in part voluntarily sought by me—but what was this if not compulsion too?—is now losing all its ambiguity and approaches its denouement. Where is it leading? The strongest likelihood is, that it may lead to madness; there is nothing more to say, the pursuit goes right through me and rends me asunder. Or I can—can I?—manage to keep my feet somewhat and be carried along in the wild pursuit.… I can replace it by the metaphor of an assault from above, aimed at me from above.
(Translated by Martin Greenberg and Hannah Arendt)
It is not surprising that Kafka’s literary product, not of our earthly world, was as idiosyncratic, as inchoate and cryptic in form as in content. The inner world is not so easily ordered as Dante’s levels of the Christian afterlife or Cervantes’s conventions of knightly chivalry. None of Kafka’s long novels was completed. He was prolific in short stories, aphorisms, and parables, all sallies into the inner unknown. His table of contents is an outrageous miscellany, which touches everything that does or does not exist and in no discernible order.
He teases us even by his very definition of a parable:
Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and of no use in daily life, which is the only life we have.… All these parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already. But the cares we have to struggle with every day: that is a different matter.
Concerning this a man once said: Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that rid of all your daily cares.
Another said: I bet that is also a parable.
The first said: You have won.
The second said: But unfortunately only in parable.
The first said: No, in reality: in parable you have lost.
(Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir)
In Kafka it is not allegory but symbolism that entices us. And as his soul mate Max Brod insists, there is a world of difference. Allegory simply makes one thing stand for something else. But in a symbol the thing and the something else are somehow united, like Christianity in the cross. In an allegory realism is superfluous, but not in a symbol, where the thing and what it stands for come together. Every real detail enriches the life symbolized. The brittleness of the insect’s carapace, the yelp of the dog, the emptiness of the burrow—all enrich the real world.
Into everything he touches, Kafka brings this symbolic concreteness and mystery. We can sample it in one of his stories almost as well as in any other. In “The Burrow” (1923), one of the two last stories that Kafka wrote, an animal digs with head and hands to build an underground dwelling. To be still safer against his enemies the animal goes down into the burrow and builds a hole within the hole. Hidden in these unsubstantial labyrinthine tunnels he seeks security. Having built the burrow, the animal comes above ground and suddenly feels free:
Yet I am not really free. True, I am no longer confined by narrow passages, but hunt through the open woods, and feel new powers awakening in my body for which there was no room, as it were, in the burrow, not even in the Castle Keep, though it had been ten times as big. The food too is better up here.… And so I can pass my time here quite without care and in complete enjoyment, or rather I could, and yet I cannot. My burrow takes up too much of my thoughts. I fled from the entrance fast enough, but soon I am back at it again. I seek out a good hiding place and keep watch on the entrance of my house—this time from outside—for whole days and nights. Call it foolish if you like; it gives me infinite pleasure and reassures me.
When others want to know about the burrow, the animal retorts, “I built it for myself and not for visitors.” Perhaps like Kafka’s works? Was the burrow Kafka’s labyrinth inside the labyrinth of himself?
His three long novels—Amerika, The Trial, and The Castle—which we owe to Max Brod’s refusal to obey Kafka’s last instructions, show the wealth and the poverty of this inward world. Of course he had never been to America, but his first novel (1912) was a picaresque tale of the adventures of a poor sixteen-year-old boy packed off across the Atlantic to escape the consequences of his seduction by a servant girl. He explained his intention “to write a Dickens novel” with all Dickens’s “wealth and naive sweeping power.” A combination of fairy tale and Disneyesque caricature, it recounts Karl Rossmann’s rescue by an immigrant German uncle who has become a senator, harassment by hobo thugs, taunting by the daughter of a suburban New York millionaire, tribulations as a resort-hotel elevator operator, and assorted misadventures across the continent. Despite all these American troubles, young Karl ends his journey in an epiphany of optimism at the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma. “Today only and never again! If you miss your chance now you miss it for ever! If you think of your future you are one of us! Everyone is welcome! If you want to be an artist, join our company! Our Theatre can find employment for everyone, a place for everyone!” At first Karl is exultant, and enjoys his try at blowing the trumpet. Then he is frustrated when he must name his occupation, for he thought he was being engaged as an actor. Of course the tyrant father reappears in episodes of unexplained guilt and undeserved punishment, but the father himself remains back in Europe. Kafka’s first title for the book was “The Man who Disappeared.” He was so delighted by this book that he used to amuse himself by reading passages aloud.
The two novels, The Trial and The Castle, that established his fame led W. H. Auden to describe Kafka as “the author who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age as Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe bore to theirs.” One near the beginning and the other near the end of his writing career, these were both excursions to the America within.
The Trial, written in 1914, when he was thirty-one, became for Sartre, Camus, and others in France a parable of life under the Nazis. With the rise of Stalin and his successors in the Soviet Union, and the Cultural Revolution in China, the book retained the aura of prophecy. But when Kafka wrote the book, these gargantuan modern horrors were all in the future.
“Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K.,” The Trial begins, “for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning. His landlady’s cook, who always brought him his breakfast at eight o’clock, failed to appear on this occasion. That had never happened before.” Not knowing what crime if any he has committed, he is pursued by investigators and repeatedly interrogated. He has difficulty finding the court, is subjected to tortured legalistic technicalities, and is repeatedly beaten by a court functionary who simply says “I’m employed to beat people, so I beat them.” His resp
ectable life as a middle-class bachelor is made to seem a kind of guilt. But since Joseph K. refuses to admit his guilt, he must die “like a dog.”
An unpleasant companion piece on the same multivalent theme and also written during the first months of World War I is “In the Penal Colony.” An officer of the Old Commandant has preserved a bizarre instrument of torture to extract confessions. The accused is put in this machine where a set of needles incise into his skin the nature of his crime. There he can read his crime and confess in a final moment of truth. As the explorer arrives he sees a prisoner about to be put in the machine for his crime of disobedience, failing to salute a doorpost. When the explorer objects, the officer releases the prisoner. As an act of faith in the machine and a kind of act of “redemption,” he puts himself on the machine. The machine destroys the officer, who still shows no sign of redemption, then destroys itself.
The leitmotif of many of Kafka’s early stories—uncomprehended guilt and disproportionate punishment—is revealed in his undelivered “Letter to His Father” (1919), rich with Kafka’s autobiographical insights. “My writing was all about you,” he confesses to his father, “all I did there, after all, was to bemoan what I could not bemoan upon your breast. It was an intentionally long-drawn-out leave-taking from you.” We owe an ironic debt, then, to the brutal father who drove Kafka to explore the wilderness within.
Kafka’s works are so cryptic that it is hard to trace development in his thinking. When he began his last long work, The Castle (1922), the decade just past had been wonderfully fertile for him. No longer preoccupied with guilt, and even less realistic than The Trial The Castle for once features a hero who is not merely a victim or culprit of some unknown crime. This hero just reaches up and suffers the consequences. Arriving in a village in the Valley below the Castle he must have authority from the Castle to spend the night or to proceed. “K.” fraudulently claims that the Count has summoned him as a land surveyor. The inn initiates a fruitless effort to communicate with the Castle. Whenever K. seems to have succeeded in communicating, he remains baffled by the response.
Just then in the hut on his left hand a tiny window was opened.… Then a man came to the window and asked, not unamiably, but still as if he were anxious to have no complications in front of his house: “Are you waiting for somebody?” “For a sledge, to pick me up,” said K. “No sledges will pass here,” said the man, “there’s no traffic here.” “But it’s the road leading to the castle,” objected K. “All the same, all the same,” said the man with a certain finality, “there’s no traffic here.”
(Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir)
Still K. cannot make himself at. home in the inn or dispel suspicion in the village, which is his base.
Max Brod, to whom Kafka first read the beginning of The Castle, saw it as an account of the Faust or Don Quixote in each of us, “a book in which each of us recognizes his own experience.… Kafka’s hero, whom he calls simply K., in autobiographical fashion, passes through life alone. He is the loneliness-component in us, which this novel works out in more-than-life-size, terrifying clarity.” The word “Jew” does not appear in The Castle. “Yet, tangibly, Kafka in The Castle, straight from his Jewish soul, in a simple story, has said more about the situation of Jewry as a whole today than can be read in a hundred learned treatises.” Kafka seems to be confessing that inner resources are not enough. But the reach upward and outward brings no response—or only one we cannot fathom. And from whom? Is it perhaps, our own humiliating mistake to try to reach the Castle?
Where does Kafka the creator-artist fit? Kafka’s last finished story, and one which he himself destined for the printing press, was “Josephine the Songstress—or the Mice-Nation” (1923). Among the mice people Josephine is the greatest singer ever to emerge. But piqued by the refusal of her fellow mice to release her from her everyday citizen’s duties, she refuses to sing anymore. Then finally she goes into hiding, hoping she will be sought out and beseeched to resume her singing. “What Josephine really wants is not what she puts into words … what she wants is public, unambiguous, permanent recognition of her art, going far beyond any precedent so far known. But while everything else is within her reach, this eludes her persistently.” And she fails in her arrogant demand that, in return for the gift of her art to them, they guarantee her fame and immortality. “Was her actual piping notably louder and more alive than the memory of it will be? Was it even in her lifetime more than a simple memory?” In the long history of the mice people Josephine is destined to be redeemed not by fame but in quite the opposite way. She “will happily lose herself in the numberless throng of the heroes of our people, and soon … will rise to the heights of redemption and be forgotten like all her brothers.” “She hides herself and does not sing, but our people, quietly, without visible disappointment, a self-confident mass in perfect equilibrium, so constituted, even though appearances are misleading, that they can only bestow gifts and not receive them, even from Josephine, our people continue on their way.”
In Josephine the mice songstress Max Brod, who knew Kafka better than anyone else, found Kafka’s parable of the Jewish literary world and perhaps an explanation of why he wanted his works destroyed. Any artist is deceived if he thinks he alone is chosen. If there is “redemption” for the artist or writer it comes not from his work, but from realizing that, like Josephine, every artist is only “a tiny episode in the eternal history of our people, and our people will get over the loss.”
Finally with self-effacing wit, Kafka expresses his doubts about the superior performance of any artist. Perhaps the artist is only an unusually adept practical joker. Maybe he does the work no better than others but only more consciously, as Kafka noted in the mice nation:
To crack a nut is certainly not an art, therefore no one would dare to bring an audience together and crack nuts before them in order to entertain them. But if someone should do this nevertheless, and if he successfully accomplishes his “art,” then the thing does cease to be a mere nut-cracking. Or rather, it continues to be still a matter of cracking nuts but it becomes apparent that we have normally overlooked what an art it was, because we could do it so easily, and that this new nutcracker was the first person to show us what the real nature of the business was; and it might then even be more effective if he was a little less good at cracking nuts than the majority of us.
Ambiguity is the enduring charm of Kafka’s wilderness within. Some would put Kafka in the tradition of Greek tragedy, others who see him as a surrealist wit complain that translators have left out his humor. The classic photograph of Kafka shows a man who never laughed. But those who knew him say he broke into uncontrollable laughter when he read his stories to friends. The absurd was Kafka’s delight, and he makes it ours. “It’s unjust,” he warned, “to smile about the hero who lies mortally wounded on the stage and sings an aria. We lie on the ground and sing for years.”
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The Garden of Involuntary Memory
THE discovery of the self as a resource of art let the writer bring time within, making his inward life a microcosm of the mystery, a personal laboratory where the vast expanses can be recaptured. Space had seemed manageable, mastered in buildings, in pictures, in words. But time, the elusive dimension, challenged modern creators to flex their ingenuity. In the effort they would demonstrate unsuspected resources of the self. And now, instead of complaining, with Wyndham Lewis, of modern man’s “morbid time consciousness,” we can marvel at what man has made of his most ancient enemy.
Marcel Proust (1871–1922) chose for his work “that invisible substance called time.” In the eight volumes of his fourteen-year lifework he created a new way of conquering time’s transience and evanescence. He was providentially qualified by both his capacities and his infirmities to show what could be made of the encounter of the inward self with time.
Born in Auteuil, a Paris suburb, he inherited a secure social position from his father’s distinction as physician, professor of hygien
e, and eminent government servant. Adrien Proust had come of an ancient Catholic family from Illiers, near Chartres. Proust’s mother came of a wealthy Jewish family, and he kept memories of his Jewish forebears alive by an annual pilgrimage to lay a pebble on the ancestral grave in the cemetery. Jeanne Weil Proust’s difficult pregnancy with Marcel during the Commune and the siege of Paris began a maternal bonding that shaped Proust’s life and work. For a person who saw art as his liberation into eternity, he remained strangely obsessed by his roots, and by his ties to his mother and his maternal grandmother. He spent his childhood holidays at a Normandy seashore resort with his grandmother. His sense of a divided Franco-Jewish inheritance would be intensified, even before he began his great work, by the appalling Dreyfus Affair, which brought out the worst anti-Semitic passions in French society. Proust himself collected petitions to vindicate the unjustly accused Dreyfus and bring him back from Devil’s Island.
His schooling was conventional enough. First to the elite Lycée Condorcet, from 1882 to 1889, where he made his lifelong friendships. There he remembered reading The Arabian Nights, modern French classics, and translations of Dickens, Hardy, Stevenson, and George Eliot. Already known for his personal charm and intellectual precocity, he dazzled classmates by his observations on the miraculous “effect of associated ideas.” Surprisingly, too, he enjoyed his year of conscript military service at Orleans in 1889–90. He might have enjoyed it less if he had had to serve the five years generally required. But under the law he was privileged to serve only one year by having attained his baccalaureate and by his parents’ ability to pay the fifteen hundred francs for his uniform and maintenance. He barely came under the wire before a rigid three-year conscription went into effect.
The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination Page 96