Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  What kind of insect is Gregor? Popular belief has him a cockroach, which would be appropriate for a city apartment, and the creature’s retiring nature and sleazy dietary preferences would seem to fit. But, as Vladimir Nabokov, who knew his entomology, pointed out in his lectures upon “The Metamorphosis” at Cornell University, Gregor is too broad and convex to be a cockroach. The charwoman calls him a “dung beetle” (Mistkäfer) but, Nabokov said, “it is obvious that the good woman is adding the epithet only to be friendly.” Interestingly, Eduard Raban of “Wedding Preparations” daydreams, walking along, “As I lie in bed I assume the shape of a big beetle, a stag beetle or a cockchafer, I think.” Gregor Samsa, awaking, sees “numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk.” If “numerous” is more than six, he must be a centipede—not a member of the Insecta class at all. From evidence in the story he is brown in color and about as long as the distance between a doorknob and the floor; he is broader than half a door. He has a voice at first, “but with a persistent horrible twittering squeak behind it like an undertone,” which disappears as the story evolves. His jaws don’t work as ours do but he has eyelids, nostrils, and a neck. He is, in short, impossible to picture except when the author wants to evoke him, to bump the reader up against some astounding, poignant aspect of Gregor’s embodiment. The strange physical discomfort noted in the earlier work is here given its perfect form. A wonderful moment comes when Gregor, having been painfully striving to achieve human postures, drops to his feet:

  Hardly was he down when he experienced for the first time this morning a sense of physical comfort; his legs had firm ground under them; they were completely obedient, as he noted with joy; they even strove to carry him forward in whatever direction he chose; and he was inclined to believe that a final relief from all his sufferings was at hand.

  When “The Metamorphosis” was to be published as a book in 1915, Kafka, fearful that the cover illustrator “might be proposing to draw the insect itself,” wrote the publisher, “Not that, please not that!… The insect itself cannot be depicted. It cannot even be shown from a distance.” He suggested instead a scene of the family in the apartment with a locked door, or a door open and giving on darkness. Any theatrical or cinematic version of the story must founder on this point of external representation: a concrete image of the insect would be too distracting and shut off sympathy; such a version would lack the very heart of comedy and pathos which beats in the unsteady area between the objective and the subjective, where Gregor’s insect and human selves swayingly struggle. Still half asleep, he notes his extraordinary condition yet persists in remembering and trying to fulfill his duties as a travelling salesman and the mainstay of his household. Later, relegated by the family to the shadows of a room turned storage closet, he responds to violin music and creeps forward, covered with dust and trailing remnants of food, to claim his sister’s love. Such scenes could not be done except with words. In this age that lives and dies by the visual, “The Metamorphosis” stands as a narrative absolutely literary, able to exist only where language and the mind’s hazy wealth of imagery intersect.

  “The Metamorphosis” stands also as a gateway to the world Kafka created after it. His themes and manner were now all in place. His mastery of official pomposity—the dialect of documents and men talking business—shows itself here for the first time, in the speeches of the chief clerk. Music will again be felt, by mice and dogs, as an overwhelming emanation in Kafka’s later fables—a theme whose other side is the extreme sensitivity to noise, and the longing for unblemished silence, that Kafka shared with his hero in “The Burrow.” Gregor’s death scene, and Kafka’s death wish, return in “A Hunger Artist”—the saddest, I think, of Kafka’s stories, written by a dying man who was increasingly less sanguine (his correspondence reveals) about dying. The nature of the hunger artist’s abstention emerges in the opposing symbol of the panther who replaces him in his cage: “the joy of life streamed with such ardent passion from his throat that for the onlookers it was not easy to stand the shock of it.” In 1920 Milena Jesenská-Pollak wrote to Brod: “Frank cannot live. Frank does not have the capacity for living.… He is absolutely incapable of lying, just as he is incapable of getting drunk. He possesses not the slightest refuge. For that reason he is exposed to all those things against which we are protected. He is like a naked man among a multitude who are dressed.” After Gregor Samsa’s incarnation, Kafka showed a fondness for naked heroes—animals who have complicated and even pedantic confessions to make but who also are distinguished by some keenly observed bestial traits—the ape of “A Report to an Academy” befouls himself, and his fur jumps with fleas; the dog of “Investigations” recalls his young days when, very puppylike, “I believed that great things were going on around me of which I was the leader and to which I must lend my voice, things which must be wretchedly thrown aside if I did not run for them and wag my tail for them”; the mouse folk of “Josephine the Singer” pipe and multiply and are pervaded by an “unexpended, ineradicable childishness”; and the untaxonomic inhabitant of “The Burrow” is the animal in all of us, his cheerful consumption of “small fry” existentially yoked to a terror of being consumed himself. An uncanny empathy broods above these zoömorphs, and invests them with more of their creator’s soul than the human characters receive. So a child, cowed and bored by the world of human adults, makes companions of pets and toy animals.

  Kafka, in the long “Letter to His Father,” which he poured out in November 1919 but that his mother prudently declined to deliver, left a vivid picture of himself as a child, “a little skeleton,” undressing with his father in a bathing hut. “There was I, skinny, weakly, slight; you strong, tall, broad. Even inside the hut I felt a miserable specimen, and what’s more, not only in your eyes but in the eyes of the whole world, for you were for me the measure of all things.” Herrmann Kafka—“the huge man, my father, the ultimate authority”—was a butcher’s son from a village in southern Bohemia; he came to Prague and founded a successful business, a clothing-and-notions warehouse selling wholesale to retailers in country towns. He was physically big, as were all the Kafkas (Franz himself grew to be nearly six feet†), and a photograph of Herrmann in 1910 shows arrogant, heavy features. No doubt he was sometimes brusque with his sensitive only son, and indifferent to the boy’s literary aspirations. But Herrmann Kafka cannot be blamed for having become in his son’s mind and art a myth, a core of overwhelming vitality and of unappeasable authority in relation to which one is hopelessly and forever in the wrong. It is Franz Kafka’s extrapolations from his experience of paternal authority and naysaying, above all in his novels The Trial and The Castle, that define the word “Kafkaesque.” Like “Orwellian,” the adjective describes not the author but an atmosphere within a portion of his work. Kafka’s reputation has been immeasurably enhanced by his seeming prophecy, in works so private and eccentric, of the atrocious regimes of Hitler and Stalin, with their mad assignments of guilt and farcical trials and institutionalized paranoia. But the seeds of such vast evil were present in the Europe of Emperor Franz Josef and Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Kafka was, we should not forget, a man of the world, for all his debilities. He attended the harsh German schools of Prague; he earned the degree of doctor of law; he had experience of merchandising through his father’s business. He worked thirteen years for the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia—his speciality was factory safety, and his reports were admired, trusted, and published in professional journals. He retired as Senior Secretary, and a medal of honor “commemorating his contribution to the establishment and management of hospitals and rest homes for mentally ill veterans” was on its way to him as the Austro-Hungarian monarchy collapsed in 1918. Out of his experience of paternal tyranny and decadent bureaucracy he projected nightmares that proved prophetic. A youthful disciple, Gustav Janouch, who composed the hagiographic Conversations with Kafka, once raised with him the possibility that his work was “a mirror o
f tomorrow.” Kafka reportedly covered his eyes with his hands and rocked back and forth, saying, “You are right. You are certainly right. Probably that’s why I can’t finish anything. I am afraid of the truth.… One must be silent, if one can’t give any help.… For that reason, all my scribbling is to be destroyed.”

  Janouch also alleges that Kafka, as they were passing the Old Synagogue in Prague (the very synagogue Hitler intended to preserve as a mocking memorial to a vanished people), announced that men “will try to grind the synagogue to dust by destroying the Jews themselves.” His ancestors had worn the yellow patch, been forbidden to own land or practice medicine, and suffered onerous residence restrictions under the emperors. Kafka lived and died in a relatively peaceful interim for European Jewry; but all three of his sisters were to perish in the concentration camps. The Kafka household had been perfunctorily observant. Herrmann Kafka had been proud of the degree of assimilation he had achieved, and the Judaism he had brought from his village was, his son accused him, too little; “it all dribbled away while you were passing it on.” Kafka’s mother, Julie Löwy, came from an Orthodox family and remembered her grandfather as “a very pious and learned man, with a long white beard.” As if to assert himself against his father, Franz took a decided interest in Jewishness; his diary of 1911 records:

  Today, eagerly and happily began to read the History of the Jews by Graetz. Because my desire for it had far outrun the reading, it was at first stranger to me than I had thought, and I had to stop here and there in order by resting to allow my Jewishness to collect itself.

  He studied Hebrew and, with Dora Dymant, dreamed of moving to Palestine. Yet churches loom larger than synagogues in Kafka’s landscapes; he also read Kierkegaard. His diary of 1913 notes:

  Today I got Kierkegaard’s Buch des Richters [Book of the Judge, a selection from his diaries]. As I suspected, his case, despite essential differences, is very similar to mine. At least he is on the same side of the world. He bears me out like a friend.

  Kierkegaard’s lacerating absolutism of faith would seem to lie behind the torture machine of “In the Penal Colony” and the cruel estrangements of The Trial, and to have offered Kafka a certain purchase on his spiritual pain. But in 1917 he wrote Oskar Baum, a fellow writer in Prague, “Kierkegaard is a star, although he shines over territory that is almost inaccessible to me.” Kafka came to resign himself to this inaccessibility of faith; of his theology it might be said in sum that though he did not find God, he did not blame Him. The authority masked by phenomena escapes indictment. In his shorter tales an affinity may be felt with the parables of Hasidism, the pietist movement within Judaism which emphasized, over against the law of Orthodoxy, mystic joy and divine immanence. Certain of the parables share Kafka’s relish in the enigmatic, his sublime shrug:

  A man who was afflicted with a terrible disease complained to Rabbi Israel that his suffering interfered with his learning and praying. The rabbi put his hand on his shoulder and said: “How do you know, friend, what is more pleasing to God, your studying or your suffering?”

  [Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim, Vol. II]

  But there is little in the Hasidic literature of Kafka’s varied texture, his brightly colored foreign settings, and the theatrical comedy that adorns the grimmest circumstances—the comedy, for instance, of the prisoner and his guard in the penal colony, or of the three bearded boarders in “The Metamorphosis.” The Samsas, one should notice, are Christian, crossing themselves in moments of crisis and pinning their year to Christmas; Kafka, however unmistakable the ethnic source of his “liveliness” and alienation, avoided Jewish parochialism, and his allegories of pained awareness take upon themselves the entire European—that is to say, predominantly Christian—malaise.

  Some of his shorter stories sparkle with country glimpses, with a savor of folk tale and of medieval festivity. They remind us that Kafka wrote in a Europe where islands of urban wealth, culture, and discontent were surrounded by a countryside still, in its simplicity, apparently in possession of the secret of happiness, of harmony with the powers of earth and sky. Modernity has proceeded far enough, and spread wide enough, to make us doubt that anyone really has this secret. Part of Kafka’s strangeness, and part of his enduring appeal, was to suspect that everyone except himself had it. He received from his father an impression of helpless singularity: “I, the slave, lived under laws that had been invented only for me.” A shame literally unspeakable attached itself to this impression. Fantasy, for Kafka even more than for most writers of fiction, was the way out of his skin, so he could precariously get back in. He felt, as it were, abashed before the fact of his own existence, “amateurish” in that this sensation had never been quite expressed before. So singular, he spoke for millions in their new unease; a century after his birth he seems the last holy writer, and the supreme fabulist of modern man’s cosmic predicament.

  To Seven Gothic Tales, by Isak Dinesen

  WHEN THE YOUTHFUL Book-of-the-Month Club announced Seven Gothic Tales as its selection for April of 1934, its newsletter said simply, “No clue is available as to the pseudonymic author.” But even then, with some detective work by the newspapermen of Denmark, this utterly obscure author was emerging into the spotlight as one of the most picturesque and flamboyant literary personalities of the century, a woman who had “style” as well as an anachronistically grave and luminous prose style, and whose works as they followed her veiled debut seemed successive enlargements of her dramatic persona. She relished what she called “the sweetness of fame” and the company of the great and glamorous; she received in her native Denmark and while travelling elsewhere the attention due a celebrity. In her frail last years, on her one trip to the United States, she went out of her way to meet Marilyn Monroe, and recently has herself become a movie heroine, as played by Meryl Streep in the scenic adaptation of Out of Africa. Since her death in 1962—stylishly, the cause of death was given as “emaciation”—the many-named woman known to the world as Isak Dinesen has been the subject of a number of biographies, including a truly excellent one by Judith Thurman, from which I have drawn most of the following facts.

  Karen Christentze Dinesen was born in April of 1885, in a manor house near the coast fifteen miles north of Copenhagen. Her father, Wilhelm Dinesen, the younger son of a Jutland landowner who had once travelled through Italy with Hans Christian Andersen, was a soldier, an adventurer, and a writer; his epistolary memoir, Letters from the Hunt, ranks as a minor classic of Danish literature. Karen’s mother, Ingeborg, came from a family of wealthy traders and merchants; hard-working, with social views both liberal and prudish, the family had attempted to discourage her liaison with the rakish, countrified, somewhat aristocratic Dinesens. Ingeborg, though reserved and domestic by nature, had travelled, spoke several languages, and described herself as a “free-thinker” and a “bookworm of the most gluttonous sort.” She married Wilhelm in 1881 and within five years was the mother of three daughters, of whom Karen, nicknamed “Tanne,” was the second; two more children, both sons, followed in the next decade. Tanne was her father’s favorite and confidante; all the greater the blow, then, to the little girl when Wilhelm, whose careers in both politics and literature had taken discouraging turns, and who had a history of restlessness and “soul-sickness,” committed suicide, by hanging, shortly before Tanne’s tenth birthday.

  Karen grew up, in the strongly feminine company of her mother and sisters and servants and aunts, as the family fantastic, who from the age of ten or eleven concocted plays that were performed within the domestic circle, the children and their friends taking the parts of Columbine and Harlequin, Blancheflor and Knight Orlando. Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens held a carved and gilded pantomime theatre, and the stock figures of the commedia dell’arte and the emotionally charged artifice of masks and masquerades ever fascinated Isak Dinesen. As a child, she drew and painted, expertly and copiously, and several times in the course of her spotty education escaped her mother’s house to study art. Bu
t like most upper-class girls she was being prepared principally for marriage, and except for excursions to improve a foreign language was kept sheltered and close to home. In adolescence she became obsessed with the figure of her dead father and the notion that his ideals and romantic spirit had descended into her. When, in her early twenties, she published a few tales in Danish magazines, it was under the pen name “Osceola.” Osceola was the name of Wilhelm’s dog, with whom the father and daughter used to take their walks; the name came from that of a Seminole chief born to an English father and a Creek mother. This allusion to a disparate parentage declares an allegiance to her father; he had travelled in America, written admiringly of the American Indians, and published under the pseudonym of Boganis, another Indian name. In 1934 Isak Dinesen explained to a Danish interviewer that she had taken a pen name “on the same grounds my father hid behind the pseudonym Boganis … so he could express himself freely, give his imagination a free rein.… In many things I resemble my father.” And when, in early 1914, at the near-spinsterish age of twenty-eight, she married, it was to a Swedish aristocrat, her cousin Bror Blixen, who like her father was restless, impractical, and cavalier. Though he was to be an unfaithful husband, he gave her two wedding gifts faithful to her fantastic sense of herself: he made her a baroness, and he took her to Africa.