The Guy Davenport Reader

by Guy Davenport

  I despaired of trying to tell Barnett what his talk of Kentucky folk became in Tolkien’s imagination. I urged him to read The Lord of the Rings but as our paths have never crossed again, I don’t know that did. Nor if he knew that he created by an Oxford fire and in walks along the Cherwell and Isis the Bagginses, Boffins, Tooks, Brandy-bucks, Grubbs, Burrowses, Goodbodies, and Proudfoots (or Proud-feet, as a branch of the family will have it) who were, we are told, the special study of Gandalf the Grey, the only wizard who was interested in their bashful and countrified ways.

  The Hunter Gracchus

  ON APRIL 6, 1917, IN A DWARFISHLY SMALL HOUSE RENTED BY HIS sister Ottla in the medieval quarter of Prague (22 Alchimistengasse — Alchemists Alley), Franz Kafka wrote in his diary:

  Today, in the tiny harbor where save for fishing boats only two oceangoing passenger steamers used to call, a strange boat lay at anchor. A clumsy old craft, rather low and very broad, filthy, as if bilge water had been poured over it, it still seemed to be dripping down the yellowish sides; the masts disproportionately tall, the upper third of the mainmast split; wrinkled, coarse, yellowish-brown sails stretched every which way between the yards, patched, too weak to stand against the slightest gust of wind.

  I gazed in astonishment at it for a time, waited for someone to show himself on deck; no one appeared. A workman sat down beside me on the harbor wall. “Whose ship is that?” I asked; “this is the first time I’ve seen it.”

  “It puts in every two or three years,” the man said, “and belongs to the Hunter Gracchus.”

  Gracchus, the name of a noble Roman family from the third to the first centuries B.C., is synonymous with Roman virtue at its sternest. It is useful to Kafka not only for its antiquity and tone of incorruptible rectitude (a portrait bust on a classroom shelf, at odds and yet in harmony with the periodic table of the elements behind it) but also for its meaning, grackle or blackbird; in Czech, kavka. Kafka’s father had a blackbird on his business letterhead.

  The description of Gracchus’s old ship is remarkably like Melville’s of the Pequod, whose “venerable bows looked bearded” and whose “ancient decks were worn and wrinkled.” From Noah’s ark to Jonah’s storm-tossed boat out of Joppa to the Roman ships in which Saint Paul sailed perilously, the ship in history has always been a sign of fate itself.

  THE FIRST HUNTER GRACCHUS

  A first draft, or fragment, of “The Hunter Gracchus” (the title of both the fragment and the story were supplied by Kafka’s literary executor, Max Brod) is a dialogue between Gracchus and a visitor to his boat. Gracchus imagines himself known and important. His fate is special and unique. The dialogue is one of cross-purposes. Gracchus says that he is “the most ancient of seafarers,” patron saint of sailors. He offers wine: “The master does me proud.” Who the master is is a mystery: Gracchus doesn’t even understand his language. He died, in fact, “today” in Hamburg, while Gracchus is “down south here.” The effect of this fragment is of an Ancient Mariner trying to tell his story to and impress his importance upon a reluctant listener, who concludes that life is too short to hear this old bore out. In the achieved story the interlocutor is the mayor of Riva, who must be diplomatically attentive. The authority of myth engages with the authority of skeptical reason, so that when the mayor asks “Sind Sie tot?” (Are you dead?) the metaphysical locale shivers like the confused needle of a compass in “Ja, sagte der Jäger, wie Sie sehen” (Yes, said the hunter, as you see).

  A VICTORIAN PENTIMENTO

  Between writing the two texts now know as “The Hunter Gracchus: A Fragment” and “The Hunter Gracchus,” Kafka read Wilkie Collins’s novel Armadale, which ran serially in The Cornhill Magazine from 1864 to 1866, when it was published with great success and popularity. A German translation by Marie Scott (Leipzig, 1866) went through three editions before 1878.

  Along with The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868), Armadale is one of the three masterpieces of intricately plotted melodrama, suspense, and detection that made Collins as famous as, and for a while more famous than, his friend Dickens.

  Although its plot contains a ship that has taken a wrong course and turns up later as a ghostly wreck, a sudden impulse that dictates the fate of two innocent people (both named Allen Armadale), it is the novel’s opening scene that Kafka found interesting enough to appropriate and transmute. Collins furnished Kafka with the ominous arrival of an invalid with a ghastly face and matted hair who is carried on a stretcher past the everyday street life of a village, including “flying detachments of plump white-headed children” and a mother with a child at her breast, to be met by the mayor.

  Collins’s scene is set at a spa in the Black Forest (home of the Hunter Gracchus in the fragment). He has a band playing the waltz from Weber’s Der Freischütz, which must have struck Kafka as a fortuitous correspondence. Among the archetypes of the Hunter Gracchus is the enchanted marksman of that opera.

  In Collins it is a guilty past that cannot be buried. The dead past persists. Kafka makes a crystalline abstract of Collins’s plot, concentrating its essence into the figure of Gracchus, his wandering ship, his fate, and the enigmatic sense that the dead, having lived and acted, are alive.

  Collins’s elderly, dying invalid is a murderer. He has come to the spa at Wildbad with a young wife and child. In his last moments he writes a confession intended to avert retribution for his crime from being passed on to his son. Armadale is the working out of the futility of that hope.

  Kafka, having written a dialogue between Gracchus and an unidentified interlocutor, found in Collins a staging. Gracchus must have an arrival, a procession to a room, an interlocutor with an identity, and a more focused role as man the wanderer, fated by an inexplicable past in which a wrong turn was taken that can never be corrected.

  DE CHIRICO

  The first paragraph of “The Hunter Gracchus” displays the quiet, melancholy stillness of Italian piazze that Nietzsche admired, leading Giorgio de Chirico to translate Nietzsche’s feeling for Italian light, architecture, and street life into those paintings that art history calls metaphysical. The enigmatic tone of de Chirico comes equally from Arnold Böcklin (whose painting Isle of the Dead is a scene further down the lake from Riva). Böcklin’s romanticization of mystery, of dark funereal beauty, is in the idiom of the Décadence, “the moment of Nietzsche.” Kafka, like de Chirico, was aware of and influenced by this new melancholy that informed European art and writing from Scandinavia to Rome, from London to Prague.

  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 shipwreck 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 ark, 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 or 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 suported 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 groundwater 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 abstractism [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 completely 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 at 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 ul
timate 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 afairs, 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 in 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.