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 Non-being, 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 Green 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 Bushman “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.”
As Auden noted, as if in Kafka is treated as is. To bring is to bear on Kafka’s as if will only annihilate them both.
FIFTY CHILDREN IN TWO ROWS
We cannot read “The Hunter Gracchus” without being reminded of all the refugee ships loaded to the gunwales with Jews trying to escape the even more packed cattle cars to Auschwitz, turned away from harbor after harbor.
One of the arrangers of some of these ships was Ada Sereni, an Italian Jewish noblewoman whose family can be traced back to Rome in the first century. In September of 1947 she was involved in secret flights of Jewish children from Italy to Palestine. A twin-engine plane flown by two Americans was to land at night outside Salerno. Ada Sereni and the twenty-year-old Motti Fein (later to command the Israeli Air Force in the Six-Day War) were waiting with fifty children to be taken to a kibbutz. As the plane approached, the fifty were placed in two rows of twenty-five each, holding candles as landing lights in a Sicilian meadow. The operation took only a few minutes and was successful. The children were in orange groves the next morning. “An der Stubentür klopfte er an, gleichzeitig nahm er den Zylinderhut in seine schwarzbehandschuhte Rechte. Gleich wurde geöffnet, wohl fünfzig kleine Knaben bildeten ein Spaller in langen Flurgang und verbeugten sich.” (He knocked at the door, meanwhile removing his top hat with his black-gloved right hand. As soon as it was opened, fifty little boys stood in formation along the hallway and bowed.)
The SS wore black gloves.
DEATH SHIPS
Kafka does not decode. He is not referring us to Wagner’s Flying Dutchman or the myth of the Wandering Jew, or to the pharaonic death ships that had harbors built for them in the empty desert, or to the treasure ships in which Viking lords were laid in all their finery, or to the Polynesian death ships that glided from island to island collecting the dead, or to American Indian canoe burials, or to Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, or to any of the ghost ships of legend and folktale. There is a ghostly hunter in the Black Forest. Ka
fka’s ability to write “The Hunter Gracchus” is evidence of what Broch meant when he said that Kafka is the inventor of a new mythology.
SIND SIE TOT?
At Auschwitz it was difficult to tell the living from the dead.
RAVEN AND BLACKBIRD
Poe’s mind was round, fat, and white; Kafka’s cubical, lean, and transparent.
RIVA
When Max Brod and Kafka visited Riva in September of 1909 it was an Austrian town where eight thousand Italians lived. It sits on the northwest end of Lake Garda. Baedeker’s Northern Italy for 1909 calls it “charming” and says that “the water is generally azure blue.”
AION
Time in Kafka is dream time, Zenonian and interminable. The bridegroom will never get to his wedding in the country, the charges against Joseph K. will never be known, the death ship of the Hunter Gracchus will never find its bearings.
CIRCADIAN RHYTHM
The opening of “The Hunter Gracchus” is a picture of an urban infinity. There is always another throw of the dice. Another newspaper is being printed while today’s is being read; a jug of water must soon be refilled; the fruit seller is engaged in “the eternal exchange of money and goods” (Heraclitus on the shore shaping the sea, the sea shaping the shore); the men in the café will be there again tomorrow; the sleeping patron is in one cycle of his circadian rhythm. Play, reading, housekeeping, business, rest: it is against these ordinary peaceful things that Kafka puts the long duration of Gracchus’s thousand years of wandering, a cosmic infinity.
A KIND OF PARADOX
Reality is the most effective mask of reality. Our fondest wish, attained, ceases to be our fondest wish. Success is the greatest of disappointments. The spirit is most alive when it is lost. Anxiety was Kafka’s composure, as despair was Kierkegaard’s happiness. Kafka said impatience is our greatest fault. The man at the gate of the Law waited there all of his life.
THE HUNTER
Nimrod is the biblical archetype, “a mighty hunter before the Lord” (Genesis 10:9), but the Targum, as Milton knew, records the tradition that he hunted men (“sinful hunting of the sons of men”) as well as animals. Kafka was a vegetarian.
MOTION
Gracchus explains to the mayor of Riva that he is always in motion, despite his lying as still as a corpse. On the great stair “infinitely wide and spacious” that leads to “the other world” he clambers up and down, sideways to the left, sideways to the right, “always in motion.” He says that he is a hunter turned into a butterfly. There is a gate (presumably heaven) toward which he flutters, but when he gets near he wakes to find himself back on his bier in the cabin of his ship, “still stranded forlornly in some earthly sea or other.” The motion is in his mind (his psyche, Greek for “butterfly” as well as for “soul”). These imaginings (or dreams) are a mockery of his former nimbleness as a hunter. The butterfly is one of the most dramatic of metamorphic creatures, its transformations seemingly more divergent than any other. A caterpillar does not die; it becomes a wholly different being.
Gracchus when he tripped and fell in the Black Forest was glad to die; he sang joyfully his first night on the death ship. “I slipped into my winding sheet like a girl into her marriage dress. I lay and waited. Then came the mishap.”
The mistake that caused Gracchus’s long wandering happened after his death. Behind every enigma in Kafka there is another.
“The Hunter Gracchus” can be placed among Kafka’s parables. Are we, the living, already dead? How are we to know if we are on course or lost? We talk about loss of life in accidents and war as if we possessed life rather than life us. Is it that we are never wholly alive, if life is an engagement with the world as far as our talents go? Or does Kafka mean that we can exist but not be?
It is worthwhile, for perspective’s sake, to keep the lively Kafka in mind, the delightful friend and traveling companion, the witty ironist, his fascinations with the Yiddish folk theater, with a wide scope of reading, his overlapping and giddy love affairs. He undoubtedly was “as lonely as Franz Kafka” (a remark made, surely, with a wicked smile).
And some genius of a critic will one day show us how comic a writer Kafka is, how a sense of the ridiculous very kin to that of Sterne and Beckett informs all of his work. Like Kierkegaard, he saw the absurdity of life as the most meaningful clue to its elusive vitality. His humor authenticates his seriousness. “Only Maimonides may say there is no God; he’s entitled.”
* For nicceismo in Böcklin and de Chirico, see Alberto Savinio’s “Arnold Böcklin” in Operatic Lives (1942, translated by John Shepley, 1988) and de Chirico’s Memoirs (1962, translated by Margaret Crosland, 1971). Savinio is de Chirico’s brother.
On Reading
TO MY AUNT MAE — MARY ELIZABETH DAVENPORT MORROW (1881–1964), whose diary when I saw it after her death turned out to be a list of places, with dates, she and Uncle Buzzie (Julius Allen Morrow, 1885–1970) had visited over the years, never driving over thirty miles and hour, places like Toccoa Falls, Georgia, and Antreville, South Carolina, as well as random sentences athwart the page, two of which face down indifference, “My father was a horse doctor, but not a common horse doctor” and “Nobody has ever loved me as much as I have loved them” — and a Mrs. Cora Shiflett, a neighbor on East Franklin Street, Anderson, South Carolina, I owe my love of reading.
Mrs. Shiflett, one of that extensive clan of the name, all retaining to this day the crofter mentality of the Scots Lowlands from which they come, a mixture of rapacity and despair (Faulkner called them Snopes), had rented a house across the street from us formerly occupied, as long as I could remember, by another widow, Mrs. Spoone (“with an e”), she and her son, whom we never saw, as he was doing ten years “in the penitencher.” But before Mrs. Shiflett’s son, “as good a boy to his mother as ever was,” fell into some snare of the law, he had been a great reader. And one fateful day Mrs. Shiflett, who wore a bonnet and apron to authenticate her respectability as a good countrywoman, brought with her, on one of her many visits to “set a spell” with my mother, a volume of the Tarzan series, one in which Tarzan saves himself from perishing of thirst in the Sahara by braining a vulture and drinking its blood. She lent it to me. “Hit were one of the books Clyde loved in particular.”
I do not have an ordered memory, but I know that this work of Edgar Rice Burroughs was the first book I read. I was thought to be retarded as a child, and all the evidence indicates that I was. I have no memory of the first grade, to which I was not admitted until I was seven, except that of peeing my pants and having to be sent home whenever I was spoken to by our hapless teacher. I have even forgotten her appearance and her name, and I call her hapless because there was a classmate, now a psychiatrist, who fainted when he was called on, and another who stiffened into petit mal. I managed to control my bladder by the third grade, but the fainter and the sufferer from fits, both classmates of mine through the ninth grade, when I quit school, kept teachers edgy until graduation.
No teacher in grammar or high school ever so much as hinted that reading was a normal activity, and I had to accept it, as my family did, was part of my affliction as a retarded person. The winter afternoon on which I discovered that I could follow Tarzan and Simba and some evil Arab slave traders was the first in a series of by now fifty years of sessions in chairs with books. I read very slowly, and do not read a great deal as I would much rather spend my leisure painting and drawing, or writing, and I do not have all that much leisure. And as a teacher of literature I tend to read the same books over and over, year after year, to have them fresh in my mind for lectures.
From Tarzan, which I did not read efficiently (and Burroughs’s vocabulary runs to the exotic), I moved on to available books. My father had a small library of a hundred or so, from which I tried a Collected Writings of Victor Hugo, mysteriously inscribed in my father’s hand, “G. M. Davenport, Apr. 24, 1934, Havana, Cuba,” where I am positive my father never set foot. Under this inscription, he (or somebody) drew a
cube, in ink that bled through to appear on the other surface of the page, on Victor Hugo’s forehead in a frontispiece engraving. But Hugo is not Edgar Rice Burroughs, and I could make nothing of him.
Aunt Mae had inherited, with pride, the small library of my uncle Eugene, a soldier in World War I, buried in France a decade before my birth. This contained a complete Robert Louis Stevenson and James Fenimore Cooper, both of whom proved to be over my head. But there was a picture book of Pompeii and Herculaneum, which opened a door of a different sort, giving my me first wondering gaze into history and art. Aunt Mae was herself addicted to the novels of Zane Grey, whom I lumped in with Victor Hugo as a writer unable to get on with what he had to say, as bad at dawdling as Cooper.
And then I made the discovery that what I liked in reading was to learn things I didn’t know. Aunt Mae’s next-door neighbor, Mrs. McNinch, belonged to the Book-of-the-Month Club, which in 1938 — I was eleven — sent its subscribers Antonina Vallentin’s Leonardo da Vinci. Mrs. McNinch, a woman of fervent piety and a Presbyterian, had chosen this book because of The Last Supper. She lent it to me. I had not known until the wholly magic hours I spent reading it, all of a wet spring, that such a man as Leonardo was possible, and I was hearing of the Renaissance for the first time. I read this difficult book in a way I can no longer imagine. I pretended, I think, that I was following the plot and the historical digressions. I have not reread this book and yet I can in lectures cite details of Leonardo’s career from it. Or think I can. I have read some forty studies of Leonardo since, and many books about his epoch, and may be fooling myself as to which source I’m remembering. But I can still see all the illustrations, the codex pages in sepia, the paintings in color.
The Guy Davenport Reader Page 30