The Death of Picasso

by Guy Davenport

  Kafka’s distinction is that he stripped it of those elements that would quickly soften into kitsch.*

  “Zwei Knaben sassen auf der Quaimauer und spielen Würfel.” Two boys were sitting on the harbor wall playing with dice. They touch, lightly, the theme of hazard, of chance, that will vibrate throughout. “History is a child building a sandcastle by the sea,” said Heraclitus two and a half millennia earlier, “and that child is the whole majesty of man’s power in the world.” Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard, with its imagery of shipreck and pathless seas, was published in 1897 when Kafka was fourteen. ”God does not play at dice,” said Einstein (whom Kafka may have met at a Prague salon they are both known to have attended). Kafka was not certain that He didn’t.

  There is a monument on this quay, a säbelschwingende Held, a sword-flourishing hero, in whose shadow a man is reading a newspaper. History in two tempi, and Kafka made the statue up, much as he placed a sword-bearing Statue of Liberty in Amerika.

  A girl is filling her jug at the public fountain. (Joyce, having a Gemini in the boys, an Aquarius in the water jug, and a Sagittarius in the monument, would have gone ahead and tucked in the full zodiac, however furtively; signs and symbols have no claim on Kafka, who wrecks tradition rather than trust any part of it.)

  A fruit seller lies beside his scales (more zodiac, Libra!) staring out to sea.

  Then a fleeting Cézanne: through the door and windows of the café we can see two men drinking wine at a table in der Tiefe, all the way at the back. The patron is out front, asleep at one of his own tables.

  Into this de Chirico high noon comes a ship, eine Barke, “silently making for the little harbor.” The sailor who secures the boat with a rope through a ring wears a blue blouse, a French touch that makes us note that two French words have already turned up (quai and barque). It’s the late, hard spare style of Flaubert, as in the opening paragraphs of Bouvard et Pécuchet, that Kafka is taking for a model and improving upon.

  Gracchus, like Wilkie Collins’s Armadale, is brought across the quay on a bier, covered by a large Victorian shawl, “a great flower-patterned tasselled silk cloth” perhaps taken from Collins’s carpet speckled with “flowers in all the colours of the rainbow,” and like Armadale he seems to be more dead than alive.

  Gracchus’s arrival is strangely ignored by the people in the square, as if he were invisible. A new set of characters—a committee of innocents—takes over: a mother with a nursing child, a little boy who opens and closes a window, and a flock of biblical doves, whose associations with fated ships fit Kafka’s diction of imagery, Noah’s dove from the ask, and Jonah’s name (“dove” in Hebrew).

  The mayor of Riva arrives as soon as Gracchus has been carried inside a yellow house with an oaken door. He is dressed in black, with a funereal band on his top hat.

  FIFTY LITTLE BOYS

  These fünfzig kleine Knaben who line up in two rows and bow to the Bürgermeister of Riva when he arrives at the house where the Hunter Gracchus has been carried remind us of Max Ernst’s collages, of Paul Delvaux’s paintings; that is, they enact the surrealist strategy of being from the dream world, like Rudyard Kipling’s hovering ghost children in “They” or Pavel Tchelitchew’s children in his painting Hide-and-Seek.

  Another horde of children, girls this time, crowd the stairs to the court painter Titorelli’s studio in The Trial. Their presence is almost as inexplicable as that of the boys. They live in the mazelike tenement where Titorelli paints judges and where brokers gossip about cases in process. They are silly, provocative, brazen pests. Like the boys, they line up on either side of the stairway, “squeezing against the walls to leave room for K. to pass.” They form, like the boys, a kind of gauntlet through which the mayor of Riva and K. have to pass to their strange and unsettling encounters.

  In December 1911 Kafka, having witnessed the circumcision of a nephew, noted that in Russia the period between birth and circumcision was thought to be particularly vulnerable to devils for both the mother and the son.

  For seven days after the birth, except on Friday, also in order to ward off evil spirits, ten to fifteen children, always different ones, led by the belfer (assistant teacher), are admitted to the bedside of the mother, there repeat Shema Israel, and are then given candy. These innocent, five-to-eight-year-old children are supposed to be especially effective in driving back the evil spirits, who press forward most strongly toward evening.

  At the beginning of Armadale, the Bürgermeister of Wildbad in the Black Forest, awaiting the arrival of the elder Armadale (“who lay helpless on a mattress supported by a stretcher; his hair long and disordered under a black skull-cap; his eyes wide open, rolling to and fro ceaselessly anxious; the rest of his face as void of all expression … as if he had been dead”), is surrounded by “flying detachments of plump white-headed children careered in perpetual motion.”

  In 1917 Kafka wrote in his Blue Notebook (as some of his journals have come to be called): “They were given the choice of becoming kings or the king’s messengers. As is the way with children, they all wanted to be messengers. That is why there are only messengers, racing through the world and, since there are no kings, calling out to each other the messages that have now become meaningless.” (There is another sentence—“They would gladly put an end to their miserable life, but they do not dare to do so because of their oath of loyalty”—that starts another thought superfluous to the perfect image of messenger children making a botch of all messages.)

  All messages in Kafka are incoherent, misleading, enigmatic. The most irresponsible and childish messengers are the assistants to K. in The Castle. (They probably entered Kafka’s imagination as two silent Swedish boys Kafka kept seeing at a nudist spa in Austria in 1912, always together, uncommunicative, politely nodding in passing, traversing Kafka’s path with comic regularity.)

  THE NEW MYTH

  Despite Kafka’s counting on myths and folktales about hunters, enchanted ships, the Wandering Jew, ships for the souls of the dead, and all the other cultural furniture to stir in the back of our minds as we read “The Hunter Gracchus,” he does not, like Joyce, specify them. He treats them like ground-water that his taproot can reach. Even when he selects something from the midden of myth, he estranges it. His Don Quixote, his Tower of Babel, his Bucephalus are transmutations.

  Hermann Broch placed Kafka’s relation to myth accurately: beyond it as an exhausted resource. Broch was one of the earliest sensibilities to see James Joyce’s greatness and uniqueness. His art, however, was an end and a culmination. Broch’s own The Death of Virgil (1945) may be the final elegy closing the long duration of a European literature from Homer to Joyce. In Kafka he saw a new beginning, a fiercely bright sun burning through the opaque mists of a dawn.

  The striking relationship between the arts on the basis of their common abstraction [Broch wrote], their common style of old age, this hallmark of our epoch is the cause of the inner relationship between artists like Picasso, Stravinsky and Joyce. This relationship is not only striking in itself but also by reason of the parallelism through which the style of old age was imposed on these men, even in their rather early years.

  Nevertheless, abstractism forms no Gesamtkunstwerk—the ideal of the late romantic; the arts remain separate. Literature especially can never become abstract and “musicalized”: therefore the style of old age relies here much more on another symptomatic attitude, namely on the trend toward myth. It is highly significant that Joyce goes back to the Odyssey. And although this return to myth—already anticipated in Wagner—is nowhere so elaborated as in Joyce’s work, it is for all that a general attitude of modern literature: the revival of Biblical themes, as, for instance, in the novels of Thomas Mann, is an evidence of the impetuosity with which myth surges to the forefront of poetry. However, this is only a return—a return to myth in its ancient forms (even when they are so modernized as in Joyce), and so far it is not a new myth, not the new myth. Yet, we may assume that a
t least the first realization of such a new myth is already evident, namely in Franz Kafka’s writing.

  In Joyce one may still detect neo-romantic trends, a concern with the complications of the human soul, which derives directly from nineteenth-century literature, from Stendhal, and even from Ibsen. Nothing of this kind can be said about Kafka. Here the personal problem no longer exists, and what seems still personal is, at the very moment it is uttered, dissolved in a super-personal atmosphere. The prophecy of myth is suddenly at hand. [Broch, introduction to Rachel Bespaloff’s De l’Iliade (1943, English translation as On the Iliad, 1947)]

  Prophecy. All of Kafka is about history that had not yet happened. His sister Ottla would die in the camps, along with all of his kin. The German word for insect (Ungeziefer, “vermin”) that Kafka used for Gregor Samsa is the same word the Nazis used for Jews, and insect extermination was one of their obscene euphemisms, as George Steiner has pointed out.

  Quite soon after the Second World War it was evident that with The Castle and The Trial, and especially with “In the Penal Colony,” Kafka was accurately describing the mechanics of totalitarian barbarity.

  PERPETUAL OSCILLATION

  Kafka, Broch says, had “reached the point of the Either-Or: either poetry is able to proceed to myth, or it goes bankrupt.”

  Kafka, in his presentiment of the new cosmogony, the new theogony that he had to achieve, struggling with his love of literature, his disgust for literature, feeling the ultimate insufficiency of any artistic approach, decided (as did Tolstoy, faced with a similar decision) to quit the realm of literature, and ask that his work be destroyed; he asked this for the sake of the universe whose new mythical concept had been bestowed upon him.

  In the Blue Notebooks Kafka wrote: “To what indifference people may come, to what profound conviction of having lost the right track forever.”

  And: “Our salvation is death, but not this one.”

  Kafka’s prose is a hard surface, as of polished steel, without resonance or exact reflection. It is, as Broch remarked, abstract (“of bare essentials and unconditional abstractness”). It is, as many critics have said, a pure German, the austere German in which the Austro-Hungarian empire conducted its administrative affairs, an efficient, spartan idiom admitting of neither ornament nor poetic tones. Its grace was that of abrupt information and naked utility.

  Christopher Middleton speaks (in a letter) of “the transparent, ever-inquiring, tenderly comical, ferociously paradoxical narrative voice that came to Kafka for his Great Wall of China and Josephine the Singer: Kafka’s last voice.”

  The paradox everywhere in Kafka is that this efficient prose is graphing images and events forever alien to the administration of a bureaucracy. Middleton’s remark comes in a discussion of the spiritual dance of language.

  I’m reading about Abraham Abulafia, his “mystical experience,” theories of music and of symbolic words. There was a wonderful old Sephardic Rabbi in Smyrna, Isaak ha-Kohen, who borrowed and developed a theory, in turn adopted and cherished by Abulafia, about melody, a theory with obviously ancient origins, but traceable to Byzantium, melody as a rehearsal, with its undulatory ups and downs, of the soul’s dancing toward ecstatic union with God: to rehearse the soul, bid your instrumentalists play … so melody is a breathing, a veil of breath which flows and undulates, a veiling of the Ruach (spirit). When you listen to recent re-creations of Byzantine music, the theory seems more and more childish, but the facts it enwraps become more and more audible—even the touching of flute-notes and harp strings enacts the vertiginous conspiracy, the “letting go,” out of any succession of instants into an imaginable nunc stans, an ingression into “the perfect and complete simultaneous possession of unlimited life” (as dear old Boethius put it). Oddly enough, this (what’s “this”?) is the clue to the narrative voice (I conjecture) … that came to Kafka for his Great Wall of China.

  What Kafka had to be so clear and simple about was that nothing is clear and simple. On his deathbed he said of a vase of flowers that they were like him: simultaneously alive and dead. All demarcations are shimmeringly blurred. Some powerful sets of opposites absolutely do not, as Heraclitus said, cooperate. They fight. They tip over the balance of every certainty. We can, Kafka said, easily believe any truth and its negative at the same time.

  LUSTRON UND KASTRON

  Gracchus’s Lebensproblem, as the Germans say, is that he cannot encounter his opposite and be resolved (or not) into Being or Nonbeing, as the outcome may be.

  Opposites do not cooperate; they obliterate each other.

  In 1912, at a nudist spa in Austria, Kafka dreamed that two contingents of nudists were facing each other. One contingent was shouting at the other the insult “Lustron und Kastron!”

  The insult was considered so objectionable that they fought. They obliterated each other like the Calico Cat and the Gingham Dog, or like subatomic particles colliding into nonexistence.

  The dream interested Kafka; he recorded it. He did not analyze it, at least not on paper. He knew his Freud. There are no such words as lustron and kastron in Greek, though the dream made them Greek. If we transpose them into Greek loan words in Latin, we get castrum (castle) and lustrum (the five-year recurring spiritual cleansing of Roman religion). Both words are antonyms, containing their own opposites (like altus, deep or high). Lustrum, a washing clean, also means filthy; the cast- root gives us chaste and castrate. And lust and chaste play around in their juxtaposition.

  At the spa Kafka records, with wry wit, the presence of the two silent Swedish boys whose handsome nudity reminded him of Castor and Pollux, whose names strangely mean Clean and Dirty (our chaste and polluted). These archetypal twins, the sons of Leda, Helen’s brothers, noble heroes, duplicates of Damon and Pythias in friendship, existed alternately. One lived while the other was dead, capable of swapping these states of being. They are in the zodiac as Gemini, and figure in much folklore, merging with Jesus and James.

  When Gracchus claims in the fragment that he is the patron saint of sailors, he is lying. Castor and Pollux are the patron saints of sailors, the corposants that play like bright fire in the rigging.

  Pollux in Greek has a euphemism for a name: Polydeukes (the Sweet One). When the Greeks felt they needed to propitiate, they avoided a real name (as in calling the avenging Fates the Eumenides). Pollux was a boxer when all fights were to the death.

  Dirty and clean, then, tref and kosher, motivated Kafka’s dream. The insult was that one group of nudists were both. Kafka was a nudist who wore bathing drawers, a nonobservant Jew, a Czech who wrote in German, a man who was habitually engaged to be married and died a bachelor. He could imagine “a curious animal, half kitten, half lamb” (derived from a photograph of himself, age five, with a prop stuffed lamb whose hindquarters look remarkably like those of a cat). He could imagine “an Odradek,” the identity of which has so far eluded all the scholars.

  We live, Kafka seems to imply, in all matters suspended between belief and doubt, knowing and ignorance, law and chance. Gracchus is both prehistoric man, a hunter and gatherer, and man at his most civilized. He thinks that his fate is due to a fall in a primeval forest, as well as to his death ship’s being off course.

  Kafka could see the human predicament from various angles. We live by many codes of law written hundreds or thousands of years ago for people whose circumstances were not ours. This is not exclusively a Jewish or Muslim problem; the United States Constitution has its scandals and headaches. Hence lawyers, of whom Kafka was one. He dealt daily with workmen’s accidents and their claims for compensation. What is the value of a hand?

  His mind was pre-pre-Socratic. His physics teacher had studied under Ernst Mach, whose extreme skepticism about atoms and cause and effect activated Einstein in quite a different direction.

  Walter Benjamin, Kafka’s first interpreter, said that a strong prehistoric wind blows across Kafka from the past. There is that picture on the wall that Gracchus can see from his bed, of a B
ushman “who is aiming his spear at me and taking cover as best he can behind a beautifully painted shield.” A bushman who has not yet fallen off a cliff and broken his neck.

  “Mein Kahn ist ohne Steuer, er fährt mit dem Wind, der in den untersten Regionen des Todes bläst.” (My boat is rudderless, it is driven by the wind that blows in the deepest regions of death.)

  This is the voice of the twentieth century, from the ovens of Buchenwald, from the bombarded trenches of the Marne, from Hiroshima.

  It was words that started the annihilating fight in Kafka’s dream, meaningless words invented by Kafka’s dreaming mind. They seem to designate opposite things, things clean and things unclean. Yet they encode their opposite meanings. The relation of word to thing is the lawyer’s, the philosopher’s, the ruler’s constant anguish. The word Jew (which occurs nowhere in Kafka’s fiction) designates not an anthropological race but a culture, and yet both Hitler and the Jews used it as if it specified a race. “The Hunter Gracchus” inquires into the meaning of the word death. If there is an afterlife in an eternal state, then it does not mean death; it means transition, and death as a word is meaningless. It annihilates either of its meanings if you bring them together.

  The language of the law, of talking dogs and apes, of singing field mice, of ogres and bridges that can talk—everything has its logos for Kafka. (Max Brod recounts a conversation in Paris between Kafka and a donkey.) Words are tyrants more powerful than any Caesar. When they are lies, they are devils.

  The purity of Kafka’s style assures us of its trustworthiness as a witness. It is this purity, as of a child’s innocence or an angel’s prerogative, that allows Kafka into metaphysical realities where a rhetorical or bogus style would flounder. Try to imagine “The Hunter Gracchus” by the late Tolstoy, or by Poe. The one would have moralized, the other would have tried to scare us. Kafka says, “Here is what it feels like to be lost.”