by Franz Kafka
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 want 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 objective and 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 this 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 sweeping nature of the hunger artist's abstention is made plain by 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 Jesenska wrote to Brod: "Frank cannot live. Frank does not have the capacity for living. . . He is absolutely incapable of living, 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" represents 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 zoomorphs, and invests them with more of their creator's soul than all but a few 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." Hermann 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 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 1910 shows more than a touch of arrogance on his heavy features. No doubt he was sometimes brusque with his sensitive only son, and indifferent to the boy's literary aspirations. But Hermann 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 world of the Emperor Franz Josef, 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 Workers' 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 Hapsburg Empire 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 of 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."
* His application for employment at the Assicurazioni Generali gives his height as 1.81 meters, or over five foot eleven.
Janouch also says 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 golden interim for European Jewry; but all three of his sisters were to perish in the concentration camps. The Kafka household had been perfunctorily observant; Hermann 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 Lowy, 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 than I had thought, and I had to stop here and there in order by resting to allo
w my Jewishness to collect itself.
He taught himself considerable Hebrew and, with Dora Dymant, dreamed of moving to Israel. Yet churches loom larger than synagogues in Kafka's landscapes, and 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 inaccessibility; 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 remained unindicted. In his shorter tales an affinity may be felt with the parables of Hasidism, that 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:
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. ü]
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.
It is the shorter stories, too, that sparkle most with country glimpses, with a savor of folk tale and a still-medieval innocence. 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 the secret. He received from his father an impression of helpless singularity, of being a "slave living under laws invented only for him." 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 get back in. He felt, as it were, abashed before the fact of his own existence, "amateurish" in that this 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.
Beverly, Massachusetts
1983
TWO INTRODUCTORY PARABLES
Before the Law
BEFORE THE LAW stands a doorkeeper. To this doorkeeper there comes a man from the country and prays for admittance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he cannot grant admittance at the moment. The man thinks it over and then asks if he will be allowed in later. "It is possible," says the doorkeeper, "but not at the moment." Since the gate stands open, as usual, and the doorkeeper steps to one side, the man stoops to peer through the gateway into the interior. Observing that, the doorkeeper laughs and says: "If you are so drawn to it, just try to go in despite my veto. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the least of the doorkeepers. From hall to hall there is one doorkeeper after another, each more powerful than the last. The third doorkeeper is already so terrible that even I cannot bear to look at him." These are difficulties the man from the country has not expected; the Law, he thinks, should surely be accessible at all times and to everyone, but as he now takes a closer look at the doorkeeper in his fur coat, with his big sharp nose and long, thin, black Tartar beard, he decides that it is better to wait until he gets permission to enter. The doorkeeper gives him a stool and lets him sit down at one side of the door. There he sits for days and years. He makes many attempts to be admitted, and wearies the doorkeeper by his importunity. The doorkeeper frequently has little interviews with him, asking him questions about his home and many other things, but the questions are put indifferently, as great lords put them, and always finish with the statement that he cannot be let in yet. The man, who has furnished himself with many things for his journey, sacrifices all he has, however valuable, to bribe the doorkeeper. The doorkeeper accepts everything, but always with the remark: "I am only taking it to keep you from thinking you have omitted anything." During these many years the man fixes his attention almost continuously on the doorkeeper. He forgets the other doorkeepers, and this first one seems to him the sole obstacle preventing access to the Law. He curses his bad luck, in his early years boldly and loudly; later, as he grows old, he only grumbles to himself. He becomes childish, and since in his yearlong contemplation of the doorkeeper he has come to know even the fleas in his fur collar, he begs the fleas as well to help him and to change the doorkeeper's mind. At length his eyesight begins to fail, and he does not know whether the world is really darker or whether his eyes are only deceiving him. Yet in his darkness he is now aware of a radiance that streams inextinguishably from the gateway of the Law. Now he has not very long to live. Before he dies, all his experiences in these long years gather themselves in his head to one point, a question he has not yet asked the doorkeeper. He waves him nearer, since he can no longer raise his stiffening body. The doorkeeper has to bend low toward him, for the difference in height between them has altered much to the man's disadvantage. "What do you want to know now?" asks the doorkeeper; "you are insatiable." "Everyone strives to reach the Law," says the man, "so how does it happen that for all these many years no one but myself has ever begged for admittance?" The doorkeeper recognizes that the man has reached his end, and, to let his failing senses catch the words, roars in his ear: "No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it."
Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir
An Imperial Message
THE EMPEROR, so a parable runs, has sent a message to you, the humble subject, the insignificant shadow cowering in the remotest distance before the imperial sun; the Emperor from his deathbed has sent a message to you alone. He has commanded the messenger to kneel down by the bed, and has whispered the message to him; so much store did he lay on it that he ordered the messenger to whisper it back into his ear again. Then by a nod of the head he has confirmed that it is right. Yes, before the assembled spectators of his death — all the obstructing walls have been broken down, and on the spacious and loftily mounting open staircases stand in a ring the great princes of the Empire — before all these he has delivered his message. The messenger immediately sets out on his journey; a powerful, an indefatigable man; now pushing with his right arm, now with his left, he cleaves a way for himself through the throng; if he encounters resistance he points to his breast, where the symbol of the sun glitters; the way is made easier for him than it would be for any other man. But the multitudes are so vast; their numbers have no end. If he could reach the open fields how fast he would fly, and soon doubtless you would hear the welcome hammering of his fists on your door. But instead how vainly does he wear out his strength; still he is only making his way through the chambers of the innermost palace; never will he get to the end of them; and if he succeeded in that nothi
ng would be gained; he must next fight his way down the stair; and if he succeeded in that nothing would be gained; the courts would still have to be crossed; and after the courts the second outer palace; and once more stairs and courts; and once more another palace; and so on for thousands of years; and if at last he should burst through the outermost gate — but never, never can that happen — the imperial capital would lie before him, the center of the world, crammed to bursting with its own sediment. Nobody could fight his way through here even with a message from a dead man. But you sit at your window when evening falls and dream it to yourself.
Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir
THE LONGER STORIES
Description of a Struggle
And people in their Sunday best
Stroll about, swaying over the gravel
Under this enormous sky
Which, from hills in the distance,
Stretches to distant hills.
I
AT ABOUT MIDNIGHT A few people rose, bowed, shook hands, said it had been a pleasant evening, and then passed through the wide doorway into the vestibule, to put on their coats. The hostess stood in the middle of the room and made graceful bowing movements, causing the dainty folds in her skirt to move up and down.