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Kafka. The Torment of Man

Kafka

The Torment of Man

René M. Albérès and Pierre de Boisdeffre

With an Introduction by Margaret C. O’Riley

Translated by Wade Baskin

CONTENTS

Introduction by Margaret C. O’Riley

Translator’s Foreword

I.  Birth and Development of Genius—Kafka before Kafka (1883-1913)

II.  Kafka’s Torment—The Post-Naturalist Generation (1906-1913)

III.  Kafka and the Prospect of Marriage (1912-1921)

IV.  The Burrow of the Individual and the Labyrinth of Men

V.  The Survivor—Loneliness, Creation, and the Prospect of Death—The Last Love Affair—Sickness, Death, and Survival (1921-1924)

VI.  From Allegory to Legend—Myths and Influence of Kafka

Chronology of Important Dates

Bibliography

INTRODUCTION

During his lifetime Franz Kafka remained almost utterly unknown. Max Brod writes that after his friend’s death it was not easy to find an important publisher who would undertake to bring out a posthumous edition of Kafka’s work. Gerhart Hauptmann, a publisher to whom Brod appealed for help, had never heard of Kafka.

Today—forty-two years since Kafka’s death—the picture is radically changed. The literary world has deep interest in Franz Kafka, the artist described by Claude Mauriac as “this very sick man, stricken in both mind and body” who “personifies the imbalance of our time.” Today almost all literary reviews, whether English or American, French or German, reflect this interest. All of Kafka’s writings are available in English as well as Max Brod’s Franz Kafka, a Biography.

As Max Brod has noted, “Now that the personality of Kafka has more or less entered the common domain, we are faced with the inevitable distortions of his image.” Time only—with its production of many portraitures of Kafka, the man and the artist—will allow the true image of this complex figure to emerge. The reader who desires to know that true image, to understand the “imbalance of our time,” and to see how Kafka personifies it, will welcome this biography written by two well-known French critics, R. M. Albérès and Pierre de Boisdeffre and translated by Dr. Wade Baskin.

The singular value of Kafka: The Torment of Man is that it points out not only the strength of Kafka’s writing but also the profound insights therein. “Today many voices, beginning with Beckett’s,” say the authors, “seem to be echoes of his voice.… With Kafka the writer begins to descend from the regions ruled by power and glory … to those in which he is besieged by uncertainty, anguish, and humiliation.” This prophetic quality was seen, too, by Walter Kaufmann, who has described Kafka as standing between Nietzsche and the existentialists, as picturing “the world into which Heidegger’s man, in Sein und Zeit is ‘thrown,’ the godless world of Sartre, the ‘absurd’ world of Camus.”

Kafka, who in 1906 received his doctorate in Jurisprudence, and who worked first in a private insurance company and then at a semigovernmental post in Prague, never looked upon literature as a career, but it was basic to his life. As Albérès and de Boisdeffre say, to Kafka it was a religion. He said again and again, “I am nothing except literature.” His writing—his literature—was bound word for word to his life. Elements of autobiography, according to those who knew him, rather obviously abound in his work. In his Diaries he wrote: “At this moment I have a great need to root out my anxiety by describing it completely, and as it comes from the depths of my being to transfer it to the depths of the paper.” This moment for Kafka was a lifetime.

Thus to know Kafka one studies biographical facts side by side with such singular productions as The Metamorphosis, The Great Wall of China, In the Penal Colony, The Trial, and The Castle. In these—and in the other works of this Jew, whose mother tongue was German—the strange fascination lies in the fact that if Kafka, as Philip Rahv suggests, “arouses in us a sense of immediate relatedness, of strong even if uneasy identification, it is because of the profound quality of his feeling for the experience of human loss, estrangement, guilt and anxiety—an experience increasingly dominant in the modern age.”

The problem—one of estrangement, guilt and anxiety—with which all Kafka’s work is concerned is a moral and spiritual one. This Edwin Muir has noted in his introduction to The Great Wall of China and he remarks further: “It is a twofold problem: that of finding one’s true vocation, one’s true place, whatever it may be, in the community; and that of acting in accordance with the will of heavenly powers.”

In imaginatively presenting this problem—his own and one that has become crucial in the culture of our time—Kafka has produced a body of work in which negative elements seem to abound, but in which, too, there remains a consuming yearning for the truth. Harry Slochower in “The Use of Myth in Kafka and Mann” says, “He does not end in a Kierkegaardian ‘either/or’, and he does not end with submission or surrender. The quest in Kafka is also an inevitable and persisting feature of man’s way. In its persistence lies the promise of the quest.”

In this literature of quest, of seeking, certainly no problem is solved, no satisfactory answer to man’s plight is offered. Edwin Muir has correctly observed, “The greatness of Kafka lies not in his having solved the problem, which would be absurd, but rather in his having realised it as it has never been realised before, illuminating it with a power of imagination and thought unexampled in his time.”

Margaret C. O’Riley, Ph. D.

Southeastern State College

TRANSLATOR’S FOREWORD

Translating this remarkably insightful essay on one of the most intriguing writers of the twentieth century has truly been a labor of love. It is regrettable that Franz Kafka is frequently introduced to readers in such a way as to discourage all but the boldest, and I was pleased to find that two of the most eminent critics of contemporary literature have done much to correct the shortcomings of their predecessors. This brief essay exemplifies the traditional French virtues of clearness, simplicity, and sound judgment. In all likelihood, the reader who reads past this foreword will be encouraged or compelled to re-examine the writings of Kafka in the light of the ideas and insights presented in the essay. It is altogether fitting that the essay should have been co-authored by critics already distinguished by their studies in contemporary literature: R. M. Albérès, author of philosophical and literary studies including works on Jean-Paul Sartre and Miguel de Unamuno; and Pierre de Boisdeffre, a novelist in his own right, author of many critical studies, and the editor of a French Dictionary of Contemporary Literature.

I would like here to acknowledge my indebtedness to those who have helped me to prepare this translation. I am indebted to Miss Gayle Ann Brown and Mrs. Nelda Wade for their help in compiling the appended bibliography. For their assistance in checking various details, I am indebted to Dr. Donald Brown, Mr. Gene Franks, Mme. Nicole Hatfield, Mrs. Mary Frye, M. Dominique Penot, Miss Mildred Riling and Dr. Hans Schmitt. For the shortcomings which persist despite their contributions, I alone am responsible.

W. B.

I

BIRTH AND DEVELOPMENT OF GENIUS

KAFKA BEFORE KAFKA

(1883-1913)

At the outset, Kafka seemed to be a completely normal young man.1

It would be tempting for us to approach the work of Kafka without stopping to examine the circumstances surrounding his birth. Indeed, many critics today claim that only the internal study of a text has any worth and that all other considerations must be excluded. We recall how Péguy ridiculed Lanson, charging him with having carried the method of Taine and Sainte-Beuve to the point of absurdity (“If he produced an Iphigenia, it was because he was the grandnephew of the uncle of someone who had once written a draft of it and had managed to find this draft among his father-in-law’s papers”).2 Proust had no difficulty in showing—in the case of Stendhal or Baudelaire, for example—that the outward appearance of a writer may well hide, from even the most astute critics, the inner depths of the ego which, almost without his knowledge, creates a work.3 Quite apart from its necessity, however, internal criticism alone will not illuminate Kafka’s work. Maurice Blanchot and Marthe Robert have tried this approach and have themselves been forced to acknowledge its limitations, for in this instance the work is inseparable from the situation which it expresses. It reflects, as in a series of mirrors, man’s original contradictions. These contradictions must be brought to light if we are to find our way through the Kafka labyrinth and grasp Ariadne’s thread which, from birth to death, leads the writer to the “dark void” into which truth sends its rays.

It is impossible for us to separate Kafka’s work from his person. Furthermore, instead of taking the lead, he let himself be guided by his work to such a degree that a merger occurred. His work was not an object or an undertaking to be carried to its completion but a master of whom he became the slave and the victim. In his view man was but “a will-of-the-wisp with a silken sheen,” but behind the tiny dancing flame burned the inextinguishable fire of truth. It is truth that Kafka pursues, truth that he seeks to discover even though he knows that it is forbidden him and that its approach is mortal. Even during adolescence, he renounced action, desiring to be only a look, and the social animal in him gave precedence to the man within. Thus the deceptions of social life did not enslave him; he was badly treated, misunderstood, unhappy, but he never lied to himself, never ceased to look, and the radiance of his eyes was the “sole source of light” in the “dark redoubt” in which he lived.

Whether his name is Joseph K., Raban, Gregory Samsa, the Land Surveyor, Georg Bendemann, Josephine the Singer, the Hunger Artist, or the Trapeze Artist, the hero of his books is none other than Kafka himself. Suspect and guilty—of being born, of existing, of thinking, and of loving—he searched for a city that would welcome him. But to enter this city he had to be able to justify his existence in the eyes of others as well as to himself, and that is the one thing he could not do. Weighing on Kafka was his original situation, which prevented him from “possessing truth in one soul and one body.” “In a world of lies,” he says, “one lie cannot even be destroyed by its opposite, it can be destroyed only by a world of truth.” What was this “world of lies,” this curse that never ceased to weigh heavily on Kafka?

… a Löwy with a certain amount of Kafka in his make-up.…4

On July 3, 1883, in the middle of the commercial section of Prague, at the corner of Karpfengasse and Maisegasse, Julie Kafka, a Löwy by birth, brought into the world the first of six children—Franz Kafka.5 Living among Czechs under Austro-Hungarian domination, a German-speaking Jewish child was certain to be acutely aware of his oddness. All during his elementary schooling (in German) in the Masnytrh, and his secondary schooling in the Staromestké Gymnasium, then reputed to be the best German academy in Prague, Franz had ample time to document his isolation. He felt at home only in the ghetto, in the precarious shelter of a family strongly rooted in its own traditions and beliefs.

He was closest to his mother, but it was from his father that he received the impressions that were to dominate his life. Hermann Kafka, son of a butcher in Wossek, had suffered much during childhood. “All his life Franz was overshadowed by the figure of his powerful and extraordinarily imposing father … who, at the end of a life full of work and success, but also full of worries and illness, succeeded in leaving a large family … and … a block of flats in the center of Prague. The way this firm was founded by a widely ramified family and kept with great sacrifice and effort in good middle-class style by nothing but its founder’s own hard, thorough, careful work, always remained a shining example for Franz’s imagination and creative genius.”6 But the example of this ambitious businessman, far from inspiring confidence, actually served to paralyze his son.

The relations between these two men, united by love without understanding, are detailed in an extraordinary document—an interminable letter (forty-five typewritten pages) which Franz, then thirty-six, wrote to his father.7 It is a meticulous autobiography, an indispensable tool for anyone who seeks to penetrate the mystery of Kafka. In it Kafka tries to answer the question raised by his father: “Why are you afraid of me?” We find at the outset a statement of the father’s grievances against his singular child.

This is more or less your view of the situation: You have worked hard all your life, you have sacrificed everything for your children, especially me; in consequence, I have “had a carefree life,” I have been entirely free to learn what I wished, I have been protected from material worries, with the result that I have had no worries at all; you have not asked for my gratitude in exchange, for you know “the gratitude of children,” but you expected at the very least a little kindness, a sign of sympathy; instead, I have always run from you and sought refuge in my room, with my books, with foolish friends or extravagant ideas; I have never had a heart-to-heart talk with you, … never been a part of the family, never taken an interest in your business or in your other affairs.8

Kafka wanted to come to terms with his father, to eliminate the inferiority complex which obsessed him in the presence of this “real Kafka” with “his strength, health, appetite, loud voice, eloquence, self-satisfaction, feeling of being superior to the world …” “I needed someone to help me clear my path, but instead you obstructed it in the interest, praiseworthy, to be sure, of making me choose another one … more than anything else, I needed encouragement. For I was already crushed by the mere existence of your body.” Then Kafka adds with a touch of humor (his main defense against the hostility of the world):

Thanks to your energy, you had risen all alone to such a high position that you had unlimited confidence in your own opinion. From your armchair you governed the world. Your opinion was right, any other was foolish, extravagant, abnormal. And because your confidence in yourself was so great, you did not need to be logical in order to be right. It sometimes happened that you had no opinion whatsoever about a matter and as a result all opinions that were at all possible were necessarily wrong, without exception … For me you took on the enigmatic quality that all tyrants have whose rights are based on their person and not on reason.9

A slight change in the lighting would be enough to slant the portrait unequivocally toward either comedy or tragedy. The father was in fact a temperamental man, benevolent, coarse, foul-mouthed but not mean, sharper with words than with deeds, and taken all too seriously by a son easily overawed by his father’s authority.

It also is true that you have never beaten me, so to speak. But your shouts, your flushed face, your brash manner of snapping your suspenders and putting them on the back of a chair—all of this was almost worse than blows. The same thing applies to a man who is on the point of being hanged. If he is actually hanged, he dies and everything is ended. But if he is obliged to witness all the preliminary steps and told that he has been pardoned only after the noose is hanging over his shoulders, he may have to suffer for it throughout his whole life. To complete the picture, the accumulation of all these moments when, according to the opinion which you manifested clearly, I deserved a beating and barely escaped it only because of your pity, again made me acutely aware of my guilt. You cut me down from all sides at the same time.10

In short, Kafka tells his father, you have acted toward me as if you wanted to humiliate me mortally while demonstrating to me three things: “… first that you are blameless, second that I am to blame, and third that out of sheer magnanimity you are ready not only to forgive me but also … to try to convince yourself—contrary to the truth of course—that I am also blameless.”11

And Kafka reaches the bitter conclusion that “Nothing, not even your distrust of others, equals the distrust of myself on which I have been raised by you.”

The contrast between the two temperaments is striking: on one hand an extrovert, a sanguine, presumptuous man, a man of action, a realist who believes only in facts; on the other, an introvert, a weak, unassuming neurotic, an intellectual, an artist who seeks out the symbols behind things. For Franz, language is not a means but an end, inseparable from the creation of a work which beckons the author even though the latter still does not know what shape it will take. Similar contrasts are found in the relationship between many artists and their families—for instance, Gérard de Nerval, Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, and Katherine Mansfield. But with Kafka, as with Kierkegaard, this contrast gave rise to a sickness affecting his whole personality: the Oedipus complex was resolved only because it unconsciously assumed a religious significance. The Father is a despotic God (the Yahweh of the Old Testament) who prohibits his son from picking the fruit from the Tree of Life and places upon him the burden of a radical, permanent culpability. Furthermore, this unreasonable legislator does not observe the laws that he enacts. At the table his child has to submit to rules from which the Father is excused.

We did not have the right to crack bones, but you did. We did not have the right to lap vinegar, but you did … We had to be careful not to let a single crumb fall to the floor, but at the end there were always more around your place than anywhere else! We were supposed to do nothing except eat at the table, but you cleaned and trimmed your nails, sharpened pencils, cleaned your ears with a tooth-pick …12

It follows, Kafka states, that his world proved to be divided into three parts: in one the son lived like a slave; in another the father wielded absolute power, busying himself with “giving orders” and “getting upset because they were not followed”; the third, presumed to be happy, was inaccessible. “The only countries where I can find a place to live,” concludes Kafka, his humility tinged with humor, “are those which you do not hide from me or those which are beyond your reach; considering how big you are in my imagination, they are neither very numerous nor very comforting.”

Kafka could never answer this fundamental question which his father asked him: “Who are you? What do you wish? Where are you going?” He was never able to justify his existence. “Lamentable” in his father’s sight, Kafka remained so in the presence of the whole world. He did not revolt. Far from condemning his father, he preferred to think that he himself was wrong: “Loneliness and repression gave birth to a feeling of guilt which is the key to his life and work.”13

If he had been lacking in courage or insight, he would have escaped—into dissipation, the pleasures or pursuits of worldly life. If he had felt himself strong enough to resist, he would have chosen revolt. If he had found in the world a mediating love, he might have been able to transcend his original situation. All these roads were closed to him.

Kafka’s childhood was spent under the influence of this original curse, under the gaze of a father “who was always angry, always threatening.”14 As a schoolboy, he saw his father’s look in the features of his teachers. He wonders how he, “the most unfit and beyond a doubt the most ignorant,” has managed to steal his way into the classroom. He lives in fear of being the object of general attention: “I would be expelled immediately for the greatest jubilation of these righteous ones …”15

As an adolescent he affected an indifference which would protect him, he believed, against the hostility of the world. His father had given him freedom to choose his own career. “But did I still have at my disposal such freedom? Did I have enough confidence in myself to choose a true profession? … I used to say to myself: face to face with reality, everything will be as indifferent to me as the subjects studied in school, so the important thing is for me to find the profession which will best accommodate my indifference. Consequently the study of law seemed to be the obvious choice … I drew my spiritual nourishment from sawdust which thousands of mouths had already chewed before me.”16

His friend Max Brod, the unfaithful executor to whom we owe our knowledge of the man and his work (it was Brod who preserved and later published one by one the notebooks which Kafka had turned over to him for burning), advances a more satisfactory explanation.

Both of us felt ourselves honestly drawn only to creative art, but that we did not yet admit; furthermore, we had far too high a regard for art to care to connect it with all the sordidness that lay in the words and idea of “earning one’s living”—besides, we had no one to guide us, no one who could show us the way, if there was a way at all. We were so without guidance that to both of us the idea that there could be any other refuge than our hated studies never occurred seriously.17

These studies in law and the profession to which they led weighed heavily on Kafka, who quite naturally conferred on his superiors the father’s “magical” power. On this issue, his friend Milena reports a characteristic trait. She had begged him to come to her home one day, but in vain.

He did not sleep for several nights, he chafed, wrote letters vilifying himself, ate his heart out, but he did not come. Why? He was unable to ask for permission … He could not even manage to tell him that he was coming to see me! And to tell him something else … how could he? Lie to a Director? Impossible!18

In “normal” lives human love generally wipes out the last vestiges of the Oedipus complex. As we shall see, however, this means of resolving the conflict was withheld from Kafka as it had been withheld from Kierkegaard.19 Or rather, Kafka himself rejected it. He drew up an interminable indictment which forced him to acknowledge that he was totally unfitted for social living and therefore for marriage. The strange oneiric delirium that consumed the last part of his existence was simply the sequel to this verdict.20

But the Kafka who feverously neared the age of thirty still had not become the fabulous animal whose last convulsions we observe in the Kierling sanatorium. He was simply a young man, intelligent, perceptive, pessimistic, attentive, and courteous, whose friends admired his gifts and were astounded by his failure to put them to better use. He had the mind and sensitivity but not the faults of a budding writer. His most striking qualities were humility as opposed to arrogance and naturalness as opposed to artificiality. At that time he resembled the young Proust, who was also treated as a dilettante because he showed no obvious signs of ambition and had too little appetite for material things. Still, he had not yet become the recluse, the desperate philosopher who would produce the masterworks of his maturity. He was a brilliant, often peerless conversationalist and—still like Proust—an admirable reader capable of breathing life into the least significant text, even a dull chapter by Georges Ohnet. Nor was he to be typed as a disembodied intellectual. As a youth, Max Brod relates, he was a helpful friend, a good swimmer, a good rower. But his personality can be summed up by saying that he had three traits that did not change—his culture, his modesty, and his inability to dominate his own life.

That he was a highly cultured person is not surprising, for between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five he discovered the works that were to appeal to him throughout his lifetime. His education consisted of superimposing on the Talmudical training befitting a young Jew an intensive German initiation into the classics, supplemented by the essential works of the Western heritage. Not cursory headings but complete intimacy with writers whom he loved. According to Max Brod,

… The love he felt for Goethe and Flaubert never changed in all the two-and-twenty years I was a close friend of his. In the case of some writers, such as Hebbel and Grillparzer, Kafka liked their diaries better than their works—or so it seemed to me, at least. I have never heard him pass disrespectful remarks against the great, never heard him use the method of bluff which is so popular nowadays, and which consists in an impertinent and effectively delivered sneering reference to a writer’s “youthful period” and his “puerilia.”21

In French literature, for example, he liked particularly Pascal (quoted in his Diaries), Balzac, and Flaubert, whom he read in the original. Among contemporary writers, he liked Francis Jammes and Claudel (whom he met when the poet was consul in Prague).

He deciphered the Greek text of Protagoras, but he returned again and again to the Bible, the great fountain of sacred art, and to Goethe, the patron saint of profane art. Among the great writers of Germany, he assigned an important place to Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Hans Carossa, and also to Kassner, Emil Strauss, and Wilhelm Schafer. Just as he had been one of the first admirers of Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger, he was able to assign Hofmannsthal to his rightful place. But their influence is scarcely discernible in his work, which owes much more to the Bible (whose overtones infuse it and constitute an invisible substructure); to the approach and presence of war; to his observations in the office or factory; and, natu rally, to meditation of Kierkegaard, whose work often parallels his own.

Kafka’s modesty, unlike Proust’s, was a subterfuge, a mask that enabled him to observe his contemporaries. Quite natural in his case, it co-existed paradoxically with the ironic look which he fixed on living beings and things. If he discovered something ridiculous in great men whom he respected, it was with “a quiet tear of regret.”22

The slightest difficulties encountered in life were for him mountains. He proposed to substitute for the motto engraved on Balzac’s cane (“I break every obstacle”) a motto of his own: “Every obstacle breaks me.”

Only lengthy entreaties could persuade Kafka to permit his friends to glance at his manuscripts. This attitude was due not to pride but to exaggerated self-criticism—according to Max Brod, who was his friend long before learning of his writing—even though this fact seems strange to anyone who knows how fervently young people long to have others admire their scribblings. He nevertheless offered to read a few fragments from his first work to his friend Oskar Pollac (a young historian of art who was killed in the flower of manhood) but was quick to warn him about the lack of discipline which, according to Kafka, explained the inadequacy of these “childish sketches”: “Art needs hard work more than hard work needs art.”

Only the entreaties of his friends could persuade him to publish. He had used a pseudonym to participate in a literary contest sponsored by the Vienna Zeit in 1906. Three years later he read to Max Brod the first part of a long story, “Preparations for a Wedding in the Country,” in which Raban, the hero—who is like a brother to Kafka—leaves his workshop to go and see his fiancée. The long description of the station, the train, the travelers, and Raban’s reflections are reminiscent of Proust’s first writings, notably Jean Santeuil. This text was enough to convince Max Brod that “here was no ordinary talent speaking, but genius” and to cause him to add Kafka’s name to a list of prominent authors (Blei, Mann, and Wedekind) as early as 1907, before his friend had published anything. It was in Franz Blei’s journal that Kafka’s first works were published; soon others appeared in the Prague daily, Bohemia—notably—but without eliciting any reaction—his first “Meditations” (Betrachtungen).

Literary creativity, following the normal course of events, should have rid Kafka of his complexes. For when experienced with such intensity, it acts as a catharsis: the writer uses imaginary beings to rid himself of temptations and obsessions which he alone could not exorcise. And surely art could have provided a solution to Kafka’s problem. At any rate, Kafka never imagined another solution. He says again and again, “I am nothing except literature … I cannot and will not be anything else … Everything except literature bores me and I detest it.” But he never looked upon literature as a career: it was a religion. Writing could not be an occupation like other occupations; it was “a form of prayer.” Kafka found it normal to sacrifice to art his pleasures, his serenity, his health, even his life; and this is exactly what he did, once he became convinced that “by staying alive I should interrupt my writing less … than by dying.”23

Thus, when he had to choose a career after he had studied law for one year (the day after he took his doctorate in jurisprudence at the University of Prague, on June 18, 1906)—for the father could not allow his son to waste time “scribbling”—Kafka decided that “his job should have nothing to do with literature. That he would have regarded as a debasing of literary creation.” In spite of what Max Brod thinks, Kafka was probably fortunate in having steered clear of journalism, for it exhausts the writer without enriching him. In July of 1908 he managed to obtain a semigovernmental and highly coveted post with a “single shift,” which enabled him to keep his afternoons free for literary creation.24

But he was unable to profit from these few hours which many others would have cherished. After leaving the office, he still suffered from the obsession of the sterile work to which the morning had been devoted. Sleeping in the afternoon and writing at night, though he tried to follow this plan for some time, was not a solution compatible with his frayed nerves. Consequently he finally came to look with horror on his post. “My job is unbearable because it goes counter to my sole desire and my sole vocation which is literature,” he wrote to his fiancée’s father. “Since I am nothing except literature, since I cannot and will not be anything else, my job can never excite me, but it can easily distract me completely. I have almost reached that point …”

His experience with bureaucracy was certain to instill in him the elements of absurd symbolism illustrated in The Trial and The Castle. According to Max Brod, “it was the uneasiness associated with his work and not the father complex that initiated the process which was to bring him closer and closer to the heart of suffering, before bringing him to sickness and to death.” Kafka’s superiors, sympathetic and tolerant, remembered him as a punctual, meticulous, and singular employee; but he himself could not keep from thinking that “any employer is unhappy with his employees, the difference between employers and employees being too great to be offset by simple obedience on the part of the latter!” This compensation could only be accomplished “through their mutual hatred.”

Inside this Purgatory which he made into a Hell, Kafka enjoyed some moments of remission, beginning with the annual vacation—two or three weeks only—which made it possible for him to travel in Europe with friends, most often with Max Brod. He would then depart from Prague for Germany, Italy, the Adriatic coast (the beach at Riva), Switzerland (August, 1911), the Italian lakes, or even for Paris (October, 1910).

Even in Prague he was not completely cut off from other writers of his time, for he associated with members of the BarKochba circle and with men like Buber, Pick, Baum, and Franz Werfel. His friends were struck by “the deep sureness” on which his wit was based, the constant originality of his words (all the more striking because they were not forced) untarnished by banality.

In his presence one felt directly that true greatness defies change, even when every appearance speaks against it—that the noble kernel of the world remains untouched by all the abuses and perversions that exist. He did not say this, it is only very rarely that he speaks about things like that, and when he does it is only hesitatingly, in fleeting images that often sound almost like jokes.

But his whole behavior, down to the smallest detail, even if you only watch the way he brushes his hair, is based on the belief that there is, as a premise taken for granted without discussion, a mode of life which is right, thorough, clean, and in complete conformity with nature. But to find it, to arrive at it—that is the difficulty. Deny this enormous difficulty—that he is far from doing … He knows that one cannot take a step without getting into complications, without stumbling. And yet there is deep confidence that the inner excellence will mature.25

Max Brod’s idealized portrait is in all probability tinged with optimism. Still, Kafka did not admit that he had been overpowered by life even though he was approaching the age of thirty. He felt that everything in him was ready for literary creation, which would be “a divine solution,” “a real entry into life.” Then he could escape from the office in which, each day, he had “to force a piece of writing for his office out of himself as if he were tearing a piece of flesh out of his own body.”26

But in 1912, when he was beginning The Trial, The Stoker and The Metamorphosis, “absorbed in his work,” he felt an aura of peace descend upon him. His life, “monotonous, empty, misspent,” suddenly acquired meaning and justification. Did art bring him the salvation to which he aspired? One thing is certain: while he hoped to find happiness at last with F. B.,27 he plunged into his creative work with the zeal of a preacher and the patience of an artist. From September to the end of November, 1912, “Kafka ecstatically devoted his nights” to the writing of Amerika and “The Metamorphosis.”

NOTES

1.  Max Brod, Franz Kafka, eine Biographie (Frankfort: Fischer, 1951; first published in 1937).

This basic work has been translated into English by G. Humphreys Roberts and Richard Winston (New York; Schocken Books Inc., 1947, 1960).—Quotations, unless otherwise identified, are based on the French translation by Hélène Zylberger (Paris: Gallimard, 1945). [Trans.]

2.  Charles Péguy, L’Argent.

3.  Cf. Contre Sainte-Beuve (Gallimard).

4.  Unless otherwise noted, all epigraphs are from the writings of Kafka.

5.  Two of the boys died at an early age, with the result that Kafka’s only companions were his three sisters.

6.  Max Brod, Franz Kafka (English edition), p. 5.

7.  The letter was never sent to his father.

8.  “Letter to His Father,” in the French collection Préparatifs de noce à la campagne (Paris: Gallimard, 1957).

9.  Ibid. Translation follows Heinz Politzer’s Franz Kafka, Parable and Paradox (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1962), p. 10 [Trans.].

10.  Ibid.

11.  Ibid.

12.  Ibid.

13.  Charles Moeller, Littérature du XXe Siècle et Christianisme, III.

14.  Kafka nevertheless knew brief periods of happiness which he re called nostalgically: When his father shared in the suffering of one of the family causing love and kindness finally to appear on his face, “there were tears of happiness, and I weep now again as I write this.” He also recalls his father’s “particularly engaging way of smiling, silently, peacefully, benevolently,” but adds that in the end the only result of these remissions was to increase his feeling of guilt.

15.  Quoted by Charles Moeller, op. cit.

16.  “Letter to His Father.”

17.  Max Brod, Franz Kafka (English edition), pp. 41-42.

18.  Letters to Milena.

19.  Worth noting here, for the first time, is the spiritual and moral bond between these two destinies. Though separated by hundreds of miles and three-quarters of a century, Kierkegaard and Kafka are linked by so many common traits that they might pass for spiritual twins.

Each sprang from a middle-class family, well-to-do but only by virtue of recent successes. Each was crushed by the weight of a father’s smug superiority and tried to escape by means of a marriage which was both indispensable and impossible; moreover, neither of them dared to conclude a marriage. The literary output and lives of few men are more instructive than theirs concerning the mysterious links between the inner life and creation. With Kierkegaard and Kafka the power of retrenchment which can be exercised by a work during the period of its gestation in a man whom it gradually isolates from the outer world, the singularity which it develops in him, sacrifice which it imposes on all the passions in the name of a single passion reached an intensity almost unparalleled in literature; it is as if each of them, in order to achieve total communion with a creation to which he sacrificed his life, had to imprison himself in a state of loneliness comparable to that of the mystics. Cf. Pierre de Boisdeffre, Solitude et Communion chez Kierkegaard et chez Kafka, Mélanges Georges Jamati (Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1956).

20.  Cf. chap. iii, “Kafka and the Prospect of Marriage.”

21.  Franz Kafka, op. cit.

22.  Ibid. (English edition), p. 51.

23.  Ibid. (English edition), p. 93.

24.  Kafka worked first for a private insurance company (Assicurazioni Generali), then took a semigovernmental post in Prague (Work men’s Accident Insurance Company).

25.  Max Brod, op. cit.

26.  Ibid. (English edition), p. 88.

27.  Felice Bauer. See Heinz Politzer, op. cit., pp. 48 ff, [Trans.]

II

KAFKA’S TORMENT

THE POST-NATURALIST GENERATION

(1906-1913)

You don’t have to leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t even wait, be absolutely silent and alone. The world will come to you and let you take off its mask, it can’t refuse.1

Between 1902 and 1910 Kafka began to write. Writing was for him an imperious need born of loneliness. “The fact of being alone has power over me, unfailingly. My inner being dissolves (superficially for the moment) and prepares to let something more profound emerge.”2

There is no question about the subject of his first writings, nor even about their intention. From the outset they convey an inner truth impervious to ordinary logic; they express something deeper than consciousness and compel rational consciousness to remain silent.

Nor is there anything exceptional about this conception of art in Germanic literature. Narration without any apparent logic, motivated by an inner force, had also been a necessity to the German Romantics. Jean Paul Richter defined it in his Poetics and illustrated it in Princess Brambilla and Stories of the Dog Post. In defining “the absurd” in Kafka’s writings, one must guard against confusing truly Kafkan absurdity—the personal torment of the individual or the mythology of The Trial and The Castle—with a certain poetic inconsistency in narration which belongs generally to the Romantic tale—the Märchen. Only Nerval made use of this genre in France, but in the German-speaking lands—after Novalis, Tieck, Hoffmann, and Jean Paul—its characteristics and imaginative qualities are familiar to everyone, in spite of its neglect during the realist period.

This creative attitude brings us in direct confrontation with realism. The writer does not copy the world and does not try to explain it; he declares his dissatisfaction with it and suffers. The French who bear the closest affinity to Kafka are easily recognized: Nerval, Baudelaire, Flaubert. The poet, then, is necessarily cursed (maudit) since, to be a poet—to be tempted to search for a secret truth in the “misunderstanding” which separates man from the world—he obviously must have had direct acquaintance with this misunderstanding in an experience (voluntary or involuntary), such as Nerval’s madness, Baudelaire’s satanism, or Flaubert’s exasperation.

Kafka’s unhappy condition, the condition in which he discovered the thing that made him a “seer,” was loneliness: loneliness within his family, misunderstanding between himself and his father, isolation as a member of a Jewish community and, consequently, moral and religious exile, and finally the loneliness experienced by Kafka and transformed into a Passion, which he calls bachelorhood. As early as 1911, long before the drama of his meeting with F. B. and their broken engagement, Kafka viewed the state of bachelorhood as the symbol of his crucified life.

The bachelor’s unhappiness is so easily discerned by others that in every case, even when he would have remained celibate for his own pleasure or in secret, he will curse his decision… The further he withdraws from the living for whom he must nevertheless work, and this is the worst irony—for example, a conscious slave who does not have the right to express his consciousness—the smaller will be the space with which they think he should be satisfied … Beginning at the midpoint of his life, apparently in acccordance with his own will, he restricts himself to an ever diminishing space, and if he dies the shroud is exactly what he deserves.3

The prose poems of Meditation have as their essential theme the single man whose loneliness is revealed to him by the strangeness of the world.

How bitter to remain a bachelor … To solicit an invitation and at the same time to preserve one’s dignity as a grown man, when one does not want to spend an evening alone.…

It seems so dreadful to be a bachelor, to struggle as an old man desperately to keep one’s dignity while begging to be accepted whenever one wants to spend an evening in company … to say good bye at the front door.…4

Vignettes or sketches like Baudelaire’s, these short, rhythmic texts reveal his careful observation of life; its emptiness and vanity led him to question its meaning. Meaningless encounters and aimless wanderings characterize the episodes of “Preparations for a Wedding in the Country” and “Description of a Struggle.”

When one goes through the streets at night, one sometimes sees from afar a man running ahead, for the street slopes downward and the moon is full … It is a twilight world, a dark world, a world in which one goes out into the labyrinthine town without having anything to do there, a world in which one is alone, knowing neither who he is nor whose son or father or lover he is, nor perhaps whether he is a man …

The world appears empty to the lonely man. His look moves on and discovers the indecision of the universe; these roving despairing eyes hope to discover the light of reconciliation.

One who lives in isolation and yet would like to have a few ties with others … One who, making allowances for the changes that issue from the different moments of the day—fair weather or foul, professional circumstances or a thousand other facts—wishes simply to see an arm, any arm to which he can cling … this person cannot be deprived indefinitely of a window facing the street! And if there is a man who no longer has anything to pursue, if there is a tired man who draws near his window and lets his eyes rove between the sky and the street (he waits for nothing, his head is thrown back slightly).… Then, down below, the horses are pulling him along in the procession of carriages and the din to the final reconciliation with the rest of the world.5

Like all those who are destined to be seers or half-wits at the threshold of the mysterious, Kafka seems to create at will the very conditions of his own martyrdom. All of this led quite naturally, around 1910, to the solitary room in which a charming individual—today he would be labeled a man with a complex—perhaps already sickly, smiling but misunderstood, was writing strange texts.

The bulb lighted, the apartment silent, darkness outside, the last instants of my vigil gave me the right to write, even if I wrote the most wretched things. And I hastily took advantage of this right. This, then, is what I am.6

Kafka wrote “hastily,” especially when in a very peculiar state of exile, confinement, or alienation. He is known to have drafted the entire text of “The Judgment” between ten o’clock at night and six o’clock the next morning, on September 23, 1912. The next day he went to work at the office. And the office itself, his boring bureaucratic job, provided him with the myth of solitude. “As long as I am not freed from my office, I shall be lost, purely and simply.”7 He also had to suffer, like Flaubert, in order to create: “What anguish I suffered at first (not to be compared, of course, with my present anguish)! What coldness in my writing, which then haunted me for days!”8 Still, without a doubt, writing was for him a means of justification: “In spite of all my uneasiness, I rest on my novel just as a statue which looks into the distance rests on its pedestal.”9 A month later he found the same observation in the Correspondence of his cherished Flaubert: “My novel is the rock to which I cling and I know nothing about what goes on in the world.”

Before 1911 Kafka did not give to his writings the legendary value and symbolic character which were to characterize the works of his maturity. For him writing is indissolubly linked to the Passion of men doomed to the tortures associated with clairvoyance and poetry. One must contemplate the world and the slightest accidents of this world in order to find out what lies behind it: “Objects can be photographed mentally. My stories are a way of closing my eyes.”10

Thus as with Flaubert (much more closely bound to the surface of the world, however), anguish does not exclude realism. Reality appears again and again in Kafka’s tales; it only awaits exorcism. Nothing in Kafka is more characteristic of Flaubert than the beginning of “Description of a Struggle” (1906?).

At the stroke of midnight several guests arose, bowed, shook hands, and stated that they had spent a very pleasant evening; then they passed through double swinging doors into the vestibule to collect their coats. Standing in the middle of the drawing room, the lady of the house gaily returned curtsy for curtsy. The folds of her dress undulated elegantly with each movement.

Seated in front of a small round table with three slender, curved legs, I sipped a third benedictine, without losing sight of the small store of pastries which I myself had selected and carefully placed on my plate …

No phantasmagorical element appears here; instead, we find minutiae, simplicity, and the preference for details which makes for good scholarly narration, mixed with a civil servant’s matter-of-factness, a certain artlessness, and humor. This “realistic” talent always allowed Kafka to evoke an oppressive, unknown world without subjecting himself to the accusation that he had left the so-called real, familiar world represented by the three legs of a table.

After this description of a mundane gathering in Prague as seen through the eyes of a petty employee, we might expect a “realistic” story. Everything, it seems, will take place among well-balanced, egotistical, cultivated people; there will be a competent, careful description of the social life and psychology of a few individuals. Imperceptibly, however, “Description of a Struggle” abandons logical decorum and becomes a series of incongruous episodes which remain realistic and true individually but collectively constitute a nightmare. The narrator—let us call him K., as in The Trial—leaves the mundane gathering and his cupcakes, accompanied by a friend whom he has met that evening. The two men walk in the darkness and talk.… This is the theme of nightly walks, the obsession of the single man.

Then the plot thickens and becomes phantasmagorical: after wandering through the city for a few hours and agreeing to go for a walk in the country, K. suddenly becomes afraid (why?) that his friend will take advantage of the darkness and kill him.… He runs, falls, gets up, and we discover him again in the next chapter, fleeing in the darkness, perched on the neck of a person whom he has taken as an animal for riding, whom he treats somewhat sadistically, and who must be the Friend (although there is nothing which will enable us to be certain about this). Furthermore, the second chapter has a revealing title: “Diversion, or Impossibility of Life.” Everything is going to become more and more improbable, but this very lack of realism is explained in the title: since stable, rational, regular life is the illusion under which we hide our anguish and the futility of our destiny, we can depict this life only by transforming it into a disconnected succession of illogical events.

The animal ridden by K. breaks down and is not seen again. K. falls asleep in the country, but this region near the city is transformed into an almost virgin setting. At dawn K. awakens beside a stream and sees a fat man on a litter carried by four naked men. The crossing proves fatal to this quintet: the porters drown, the litter is seized by the current which forces it toward a cataract. But K. has remained on the bank, and before slipping into the whirlpool, the fat man has time to deliver very calmly and in a narrative style (even though he is on the point of drowning) some explanations and reports that take up twenty-four pages of the text. (These stories were published by Kafka in 1909 under the titles “Conversation with the Praying Man” and “Conversation with the Drunkard”; each has its own unity even though the meaning remains elusive.) After taking an hour and a quarter to drift to the cataract, the Fat Man is swallowed up; K., who has been listening to him from the bank, makes no move to save him. Afterwards K. again finds the Friend who had accompanied him as he left the party the previous night and returns to town with him. But the Friend plunges a knife into his own arm as he says goodbye, and goes away, disheartened.

The narrator rarely, except for a brief lyrical passage, abandons the simple, somewhat pedantic tone of a man telling a logical tale. Here we see Kafka’s involuntary procedure: without abandoning the tone of realism—each episode has the ring of truth—he links together episodes which do not form a coherent story in the mind of a rational man. German Romanticism, the symbolist period (to which Kafka belongs), surrealism, films like The Blood of a Poet have accustomed us to such sequences. One might still ask, however, what Kafka is trying to communicate.

His aim is in no way didactic. The simple truth is that he knows and senses that life is not so coherent and rational as upright people—heads of families, successful men—try to make themselves believe. Spontaneously, without intending to startle the reader (“Description of a Struggle” was never published during his lifetime), he changes a story with a realistic beginning into a baffling narrative. More than other writers, because he is not trying to play tricks on the reader, he feels himself powerless in the face of life. Yet he refuses to impose on it the false superficial logic which comforts men secure in their existence: “I am incapable of bearing up under the assault of my own life, the aggression of time and old age, the vague impulse of the pleasure of writing, insomnia, flirtation with madness.”11 The incoherent brutality of Kafka’s tales is not that of madness but that of lucid anguish. Moreover, he confides to Max Brod: “What I have to do, I can do only alone. Become clear about the ultimate things.”12 This illuminates all of Kafka’s works, including his first writings: even though men may live according to their petty human logic, the definitive meaning of their acts remains in suspense; consequently our acts and the events that press upon us must not be painted with too much logic. We hasten to make them rational, but they remain unjustified. That is why the poet writes nonsensical things in which incoherence gives us an image of the absence of justification. And in this way he raises a question—the question of “ultimate things.”

Still, there was nothing disconcerting about the strange concatenation of episodes—in “Description of a Struggle” as well as in “Preparation for a Wedding in the Country”—when Kafka wrote these stories between 1906 and 1912. Taking up the uncanny, fantastical elements of the Märchen and using them in a new way (called “symbolist” in France), Hugo von Hofmannsthal had evolved a charming Viennese predecessor (Prose Writing, 1907) to these brilliant and somber episodes. The Woman Without a Shadow dates from 1923, but in it we find the same grotesque and fantastic details as in Kafka’s first sketches. Like Kafka, he too was a part of the world but a stranger to the world, talkative and jovial but lonely and tortured. Hofmannsthal also wrote under the impulsion of a nervous imagination given to frequent shifts. Like the author of Meditation, he perceived only the unusual relationships in reality and transformed them into states of poetic anguish which in his case were even more charming and facile.

Was not Rainer Maria Rilke a spiritual kinsman of Kafka? Exacting and dreamy, also tormented, alternately impulsive and hesitant, he had written a work which Kafka must have known, The Stories of Prague (1899), to say nothing of New Tales (1907) and especially The Journey of My Other Self (1930). Also Kafka’s kinsman, at first a writer on the Jewish question, was Jakob Wassermann, who reacted against naturalism and reintroduced into literature the problem of personality, the individual’s torment.

Because Kafka was known to the public only after 1925, he is often assigned to the “expressionist” generation of Werfel and Hasenclever, characterized by revolt and aggressiveness. But Kafka belongs in fact to the previous generation of Hofmannsthal and Rilke and is scarcely the youngest of them. He is one of those who broke away from the naturalistic universe in order to re-establish the primacy of inner anguish over objective, social description. He is the successor and heir to the second generation of naturalists, the generation which, raised in the spirit of positivism, far from finding in it any certitudes, rediscovered anguish and pessimism: Knut Hamsun, Strindberg, J. P. Jacobsen, and even Ibsen.

Kafka does, of course, exhibit an individual, timeless vocation which links him to a “race” of men and a body of followers: Pascal, Sénancour, Lenau, Kleist, Kierkegaard, etc. But he also belongs to a literary moment—the moment of “despair” incorporated, as naturalism came to an end, in the works of the great Norwegian dramatists. French literature was scarcely affected by this European crisis, hidden by the arabesques of symbolism. But from pure symbolism, as it was interpreted by Hofmannsthal, for example, Kafka had taken the best part, the sense of esoteric writing. And from “despair” as it was interpreted at the end of the century—from despair which coincided with his vocation of suffering and which he freed from the pedantry of social and psychological description—he fashioned his inner life, his legend and his creation.

The young office employee who, in the solitude of his room, wrote obsessive, disconnected texts, still had not mastered the art of lucidity and continuity. After 1911, even as his personal crises became more acute (he met F. B. and entered a sanatorium for the first time), his genius took shape.

Disordered narration became ordered narration, the first form of myth. It was in 1911 that Kafka wrote a compact story, “The Verdict,” and drafted the first chapter of Amerika, which was published in 1913 under the title “The Stoker.” The same year he published Meditation, but he had already lost interest in this collection. In 1912 he began “The Metamorphosis,” and in 1913 The Judgment, which he dedicated to his fiancée.

Many of Kafka’s works were unfinished and were published after his death. Although they are incomplete, sometimes fragmentary, or even distorted (if Max Brod modified the arrangement of the chapters in The Trial), all of them convey a striking impression of unity. This sense of unity appears for the first time in “The Judgment” and “The Stoker,” at the end of his youthful period.

Written in one night, “The Judgment” is an admirably coherent text whose themes become oppressive and precise. Kafka himself admits that Freud, Wassermann, and Werfel’s The Giantess “were thrashing around in my head” while he was writing the story.

This fascinating tale is truly a psychological drama, but it is one that could be felt by Kafka, who had been pushed to the brink of exasperation and even of madness. Georg Bendemann, a young businessman, is troubled by one thought: he has failed to notify a friend living in Russia of his engagement. He talks with his father about the problem, and the old man’s behavior is cruel and absurd. The Father pretends at first not to remember Georg’s Russian friend, then in a nervous outburst reveals that for years he himself has been carrying on a secret correspondence with this distant friend. He has never ceased to complain to the Russian friend about the turpitude of his son, who is abandoning his old parents for marriage. “Hypocrite!” Georg shouts out in spite of himself, then, after it is too late, realizes his mistake and bites his tongue.

Nothing is illogical in this violently offensive psychological drama. We need only imagine that the neurotic father is on the verge of a breakdown, and the apparent psychological absurdity of the characters is only the absurdity of neurotics. Still, Kafka develops the situation in a “dark” style: maddened by the paternal curse Georg Bendemann flees, runs though the streets, reaches a bridge, and leaps over the parapet.

He clung for still an instant, his grip weakening, watched between the bars for the passage of a bus which might drown out the sound of his fall, cried out faintly, “Dear parents, after all I have always loved you,” and fell into the void.

An unending steam of traffic was just going over the bridge.13

Here his concern for art is revealed: the last lines would serve for what is technically called a “fade-out” scene in a filmed melodrama. Even under the excitement of a cruel psychological tale, Kafka still “composes.” Everything is contained in the virulent drama of his narrative, motivated from start to finish by a feeling of agonizing guilt—pathological guilt, one might say—which grows in intensity until it culminates in madness: Georg’s guilt with respect to his distant friend, then the father’s guilt with respect to his son, and finally the son’s guilt with respect to his father. Anguish grows in intensity until it leads to suicide. If everything is exasperating, unexpected, shocking, everything is nevertheless coherent, in the atrocious logic of cruelty.

In contrast to this cruelty, goodness—rare in the writings of Kafka—predominates in “The Stoker.” Here too, in a narrative of doubtful verisimilitude, unity of feeling manifests itself, almost to the point of tenderness.

How naive young Karl Rossmann is! Seduced by a maid, he becomes a father and is dispatched to America by parents eager to avoid complications. When the ship arrives at the Statue of Liberty, Karl sets his trunk on the deck and runs down into the hold of the ship to look for his umbrella. He quickly forgets his first intention, for he meets a stout, uncouth “stoker” who has just been dismissed by the Chief Engineer. Forgetting his umbrella and trunk, Karl sides with this man and takes him to the Captain. He pleads for his new friend, but the Stoker is boorish and loses his case because he presents it with sincerity and vehemence (incidentally, is this not very good “psychology”?). Karl then discovers in the Captain’s office his Uncle Jacob, an American senator and a capitalist, who takes him away by force, depriving him of the Stoker’s friendship.

Everything is unexpected—still and always—in this fast-moving narrative. Rather comical too: the boy who had been deported from Europe with his meager baggage is welcomed to New York by a millionaire uncle. But the pathetic element of the narrative resides in the attachment which this young boy, beset by a thousand other cares, manifests for no discernible reason for the clumsy bunker-hand whom he has met by chance. “And Karl began to cry as he kissed the Stoker’s hand; he took that cracked, almost lifeless hand, pressing it to his cheek like a treasure which he would soon have to give up. But his uncle, the Senator, was already at his side …” Speaking of this text, Kafka told Janouch, “Love is not in the story but in the very nature of what is told.”14

With its surprising succession of events, its harshness and tenderness, this text, a forerunner to Camus’ The Stranger, is at once pessimistic and optimistic. Six other chapters complemented the novel, but without completing it. Furthermore, nothing ever happened after 1911 to dispel the impression that Kafka intended to blend into the absurdity of events an element of joy and goodness.

The remaining chapters of Amerika show Karl in the home of his uncle, the Senator, exploited by a worldly society ready to make a fool of this charming boy cast by Europe on the shores of the New World, then deceived again by two poor drifters who travel in vain through New York without finding work—though their laziness and instability make them unfit for work. Karl nevertheless blames no one: he loves everyone he meets just as, by contrast, all of Kafka’s other heroes, more numerous, are afraid of everyone they meet. It matters little that Karl humbly carves out for himself a place in the Stifling, hierarchical organization of a large hotel (characteristic of the organs of Administration that crowded Kafka’s universe), then falls into the hands of a crook and a madwoman before he finally discovers hope of a job and happiness by joining a gigantic circus which contrasts sharply, by virtue of its good organization and its attentiveness to its employees, with the absurd Administration of the hotel. It is indeed an optimistic theme—generosity compensates for absurdity and incoherence—which Kafka had begun to develop in the first chapter of Amerika. Though he later continued the novel in the same vein, all his other books refute such optimism. It is altogether fitting, however, that Kafka should have drafted, around 1911, a fanciful tale, almost in the style of Chesterton, free of obsession and pessimism.

By their coherence and consistent inspiration “The Judgment” and “The Stoker” introduced Kafka, around 1911 and 1912, to the art of persuasion: he learned to write and to force his myths on the reader. Thus the first period of his literary life concludes with the mastery of imagination and style. His inspiration, however, remained fluid. To the anguish of the single man was added the Kierkegaardian drama of a broken engagement.

Another spasm of despair was to penetrate and sear him, causing him to sublimate his torture and become a creator of myths and legends. The man within him had to suffer, hesitate, and doubt in order to bring about the metamorphosis which, thanks to his acquired mastery, would shift the Kafkan world from the disordered romantic tale toward the lucid and almost impersonal allegory.

NOTES

1. In the collection Préparatifs de noce à la campagne (Paris: Gallimard, 1957).

2. Diary, December 26, 1910.

3. Ibid., November 3, 1911.

4. “Bachelor’s Misery,” quoted by Heinz Politzer, Franz Kafka, Parable and Paradox (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1962), p. 30.

5. “The Window,” in Meditation (Betrachtung).

6. Diary, December 25, 1910. The same thoughts are expressed in the early writings of Proust.

7. Diary, December 16, 1910.

8. Diary, January 19, 1911.

9. Diary, May 9, 1912.

10. Gustav Janouch, Gespräche mit Kafka (Frankfort: Fischer, 1951). Quoted from French translation Kafka m’a dit (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1952), p. 29.

11. Max Brod, Franz Kafka, eine Biographie (Frankfort: Fischer, 1951). Translated by G. Humphreys Roberts and Richard Winston (New York: Schocken Books, Inc., 1947, 1960).

12. Ibid. (English edition), p. 166. Italics added.

13. “The Judgment.” Quoted from the French translation by A. Viallate, in La métamorphose (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), p. 130.

14. Janouch, op. cit., p. 27.

III

KAFKA AND THE PROSPECT OF MARRIAGE

(1912-1921)

Without forebears, without marriage, without descendants, with a violent desire for forebears, marriage, descendants.1

… Even under the most favorable circumstances, it is probable that in a happy union I would despair.2

What I have to do, I can do only alone. Become clear about the ultimate things.3

In 1912 Kafka not only began enthusiastically to compose his first great works but also met F. B. and came to grips with the problem of marriage. To say that he took the problem seriously is an understatement: he recognized it immediately as the dramatic choice of his life. The problem had two aspects: first the problem of marriage itself, which was already enough to frighten him; then the nature of his relations with F. B. and the prospect of a common life with her. These two problems were naturally indissolubly interlinked, yet the solution of one would not contribute to the solution of the other. In other words, Kafka might decide that he was capable of living with his fiancée and still not believe himself fitted for marriage—and vice versa. Here comparison with Amiel, and to an even greater degree with Kierkegaard, is inescapable. Forever reluctant, these men were unnerved by the very prospect of marriage which pointed up “the impossibility of living.”

With Kafka as with Kierkegaard,4 the father’s example inspired the vision of marriage: patriarchal authority suffused the image of the hearth (Max Brod sees in a story such as “Eleven Sons” the symbol of Kafka’s desire for fatherhood, for “founding a family, which can be held up against the father’s example as something of equal value”).5 First let us follow Kierkegaard’s itinerary, which Kafka seems to have taken as his model. Kierkegaard, who then planned to devote his life to the ministry, became engaged (September 10, 1840) to Regine Olsen the day after his father died. All too soon, however, his joy gave way to dreadful hesitations, with the result that he was unable to accept the notion of marriage. His Diary yields only an imperfect explanation of his mental state and casts even less light on the true reasons for his definite break with her, in October of 1841. “The only thing that consoles me,” wrote Kierkegaard in the fall, “is that I could be about to die and still, at the hour of my death, confess this love which I shall never dare to confess as long as I am alive and which by the same token constitutes my happiness and my grief.”

Like Kafka, Kierkegaard was crushed by the weight of his own destiny. How could he have dared to have another person share it? How could he think of marrying when he sensed his almost disembodied nature? A “born spirit,” as his translator Knud Ferlov realized, he saw persons only against a background of clear ideas. He knew that there was something incorporeal about himself, “something that makes it impossible for anyone to see me every day and have a real relationship with me. To be sure, in the light overcoat in which I exhibit myself daily the situation is different, but in my home anyone would see that I live essentially in a world of spirits. I have been engaged to her for a year, and she has not really known me.”

This exaggerated shyness was so transparent that the young lady’s father had gone so far as to promise his future son-in-law never to set foot in their home if Kierkegaard would consent to marry Regine! To free his fiancée Kierkegaard thought that he had to disguise himself as a seducer, and he took this role so seriously that he was probably the only one actually to be deceived by the production. Nevertheless, the responsibility for the break weighed heavily on him. When he learned of Regine’s engagement to her first suitor, Fritz Schlegel, he did not forgive her any more than he forgave himself for it.

Alone with himself thereafter, Kierkegaard no longer had any occupation other than his work, any support other than the presence of God. In leaving Regine, he had “chosen death.” Cut off forever from happiness, he devoted himself to his work, to preaching “the ultimate things” to his blind comtemporaries.

We find similar incidents, but a much more complicated development, in Kafka’s amorous experience. He speaks approvingly of marriage: “To get married, to found a family, to accept all the children that are born, to maintain them in this uncertain world, and even, if possible, to give them some guidance,” he wrote to his father, “is in my opinion the utmost that a man can achieve.”

But Kafka, subtle hair-splitter and self-destroyer, immediately adds: “That so many people apparently succeed so easily is no proof to the contrary, for in the first place only a few actually succeed, and in the second place these few do not ‘accomplish’ this task but only ‘submit’ to it.” He is acutely aware that he is “as ill-suited as possible” for marriage; his experience with life is “practically null”; as for the “practical advice” (“Give it up”) offered him by his father during his adolescence, he was scandalized by it and refused to take it seriously. His real motivation for marrying was something else: as we have already noted, the state of bachelorhood terrified him. Reduced to his own existence, “having neither past nor future,” the bachelor has only the moment, the space which he occupies in life becomes smaller and smaller, and when he dies, the shroud is exactly what he deserves. “Bachelorhood and suicide occupy the same degree on the scale of knowledge.” Marriage, on the other hand, would make Kafka equal to his Father: “I could be a free son, grateful, not guilty, upright, and you, a father who would no longer oppress me, no longer tyrannize me, but would be compassionate and pleased.” But the son would have to possess the qualities of the Father, and he was already unable to bear living alone. Would marriage give more strength, more “resistance” to his existence? That was the heart of the problem.

Once more Max Brod played the role, involuntarily this time, of the Deus ex machina, presenting Kafka to a friend in Berlin, the young lady referred to in the Diary as F. or F. B. Kafka described the meeting, on August 13, 1912, in the seemingly indifferent tone which he often affected in speaking of himself.

When I arrived at Brod’s house on August 13, she was seated at the table, and I nevertheless mistook her for a maid. Although I was not at all curious to find out who she was, I accepted her right away. Bony, insignificant face that wore its insignificance openly, slender neck, blouse flung over her shoulders, she seemed to be dressed in every detail as a housekeeper even though this was by no means true as I was able to verify later, nose almost broken, blond, rather straight, unattractive hair, strong chin … As I sat down I looked at her for the first time: once seated, I already had a firm opinion of her.

Notwithstanding this rather unromantic description, Kafka had to confess that he was deeply moved and soon thought of marriage, though without managing to exorcise the anguish still connected with this word. The interminable correspondence initiated after F. B. returned to her family could only alarm the young lady concerning the intentions of this strange correspondent, more adept at explaining himself than at committing himself. Max Brod quotes the rough draft of a letter (November 9, 1912) which dwells on the fears of his friend.

Dearest Fräulein, you must not write to me any more, and I shall not write to you any more either. I could not fail to make you unhappy if I wrote to you, and I myself am beyond all help. To admit that to myself, I did not have to count every stroke of the clock all night long, for I was fully aware of it before my first letter, and since I tried to cling to you in spite of everything, I would deserve to be cursed if I were not already cursed … Quickly forget the ghost that I am and live in happiness and peace as you did before.

Kafka’s hesitations were to last for almost five years. During this time he, like Kierkegaard and Amiel, would never stop weighing the advantages and disadvantages (the latter always more compelling than the former) of the two solutions between which he could not make a choice. In successive pages of his Diary he oscillates like a pendulum between praise of solitude and homage to marriage. Even though he deplores “the afflux of blood in his head and its sterile reflux,” he is beset by an almost constant ebullition of images and themes. If he could be sure of reconciling literary production and married life, he would elect marriage. Modestly he recapitulates the arguments “for and against my marriage.” His long, conscientious balance sheet, dated July 21, 1913, lists the following points:

Inability to bear living alone, not inability to live, quite the opposite; it is even unlikely that I can live with someone, but I am unable alone to bear the onslaught of my own life, the assault of time and old age, the vague stimulus of the desire to write, my sleeplessness, the near approach of madness. Alone, I am unable to bear all this, I shall add naturally “perhaps.” My union with F. will confer new strength, new powers of resistance on my existence.

A little later, however, he adds “I must be alone a great deal. All that I have accomplished is the result of solitude.” We have already called attention to his next observations.

I hate everything which is not connected with literature. Conversations bore me, paying calls bores me, the joys and sorrows of my relatives bore me insufferably. Conversations remove the importance, the seriousness, and the truth from everything I think.

Fear of being tied down, of overflowing into another personality. Then I would never again be alone … Single, I might perhaps really give up my job one day; married, I can never do this. Everything given to the woman would be taken from literature. This, above all else, must not be!

There is more; carnal union (as an obligation and pattern of conduct) horrifies him. “Copulation is punishment for the happiness of living together.” The sole possibility of tolerating marriage is “to live as ascetically as possible, more ascetically than a bachelor.”

In short, the balance sheet remains negative.

Under these conditions, it is not surprising to find that Kafka looks upon breaches of their relationship with sorrow perhaps, but also with a sense of relief. After the first break, August 13, 1913, he writes:

What I may suffer, what she may suffer is nothing in comparison with the mutual suffering that will ensue. I shall recover slowly, she will marry, that is the only possible outcome when two human beings are involved. We two cannot blast a road through the rocks for ourselves; it is enough for us to have wept and tormented ourselves for a whole year because of that. She will understand that from my last letters.

But he adds immediately: “If she does not, I shall surely marry her for I am too weak to refute what she thinks about our mutual happiness, and completely unable to resist undertaking, insofar as I am able, what she considers to be possible.”6 Still, pleasure—“punishment for the happiness of living together”—must be ruled out. Candidly Kafka raises questions. What will F. B. think? Will she understand?

Thus for days Kafka struggles against contradictions from which there is no escape—in a labyrinth in which he exhausts his mental strength in the attempt to overcome these contradictions—caught between the horror of loneliness and the terror of marriage, between fear of disappointing his fiancée by abandoning her and fear of destroying her by marrying her.

For five years his attempts to reach a decision dominated his life and were the source of “his literary works and his religious qualms.”7 The hopeless situation into which he had slowly forced F. caused him to feel that he had an obligation to marry her—an obligation which was “ineluctable but not without limit.” He drew up a lengthy statement, intended for the father of his beloved, in which the lucidity of his poignant confession is infused with dark humor which could reasonably be expected to lead to the rejection of his request. The following are extracts from this letter, truly of capital importance.

My job is unbearable because it is inconsistent with my sole desire and my sole vocation, which is literature. Since I am nothing except literature, since I cannot and will not be anything else, my job could never inspire me but it could sidetrack me completely. I am almost at that point now. I am constantly being overpowered by nervous disorders of the worst kind, and this year, marked by the worries and torments occasioned by my future and your daughter’s, has definitely proven my lack of resistance….

Contrast me with your daughter, this healthy, gay, unpretentious, robust person. As I have told her in about five hundred letters, although she has pacified me each time with a “No” based on grounds that are in truth hardly convincing, the fact remains that, if I have any foresight in the matter, she is certain to be unhappy with me. This is not simply a consequence of my external situation; it stems rather from a flaw in my true nature, for I am withdrawn, silent, unsociable, unsatisfied. I cannot, however, claim title to a predisposition to unhappiness, for it is only the reflection of my aim. Conclusions can at least be drawn from my way of life. Well! I live with my family, the best, most loving persons—and yet I am stranger than a stranger. To my mother I have not spoken twenty words a day, on the average, for the past several years; with my father I have hardly chanced to exchange anything more than daily greetings. As for my married sisters and brothers-in-law, I do not speak to them at all, yet am not on bad terms with them. The reason is simple: I have not the slightest thing to say to them. Everything that is not literature bores me and I hate it, for it upsets me or handicaps me, even if this sounds presumptuous. At the same time, I lack any sense of family life; at best, I am simply an observer. I have no feeling of kinship and look upon visits as spiteful intrusions on my privacy. Marriage could not change me, no more than my job can change me.

Here is the true reason for his retreat from marriage: loneliness in his vocation. Kafka often records this fact in his Diary. For instance, this sentence, written in 1911, throws much light on his thought: “Apart from human relations, there is in me no visible deceit. The limited circle is pure.”

Still, his hesitations were to last a long time: tacit engagement at the end of 1912, broken in the summer of 1913; official engagement in April, 1914, broken the following July; relations restored in 1915, new engagement the next year, followed by a new, definite break!

In his inmost self Kafka knew that it was impossible for him to change his life. But he clung to the notion of marriage, while he began to see that solitude would provide the answer to his problems. That is why he said ironically that he would marry an old maid with buck teeth once he reached the age of forty! All those around him urged him to marry. Like Mme. Alphonse de Lamartine and Mme. Adrien Proust—like every mother—Frau Kafka thought that marriage and children would reduce her son’s excessive interest in literature “to the dose which cultivated people need.” When he heard such statements Kafka, who still hoped that he would one day fall suddenly in love with a girl, thought that “if he remained a bachelor like his uncle in Madrid, this would not be a catastrophe.”

With every passing month, he became more firmly attached to his loneliness which was an integral part of his life. It was the climate of his spiritual life, the necessary precondition for his sojourn in the strange world which he had already glimpsed. Still, every time he broke with F. B., like Kierkegaard he passed judgment on himself and condemned himself. He had deserted his duty, destroyed the future of the one he loved. “I shall isolate myself from all others, blotting them out of my consciousness. I shall be an enemy to everyone. I shall speak to no one.” Blissful remorse, bitter delight!

The same penchant for self-destruction is discernible in the penultimate love affair of his life—his rash, poignant relationship with Milena Jesenská. Kafka was tormented by fear throughout the affair, as if he had a presentiment that the companion whom he had wrenched from her family for a brief period had already been promised to the Hell of Ravensbruck. The “burning bond” that united them quickly became “a wall, a mountain, or more exactly, a tomb.”

Separated from her husband, Milena belonged to an old Prague family which had been prominent since the battle of White Mountain.

Milena herself reminded one of a great lady of the sixteenth century; she was a character like those sought by Stendhal in the old Italian chronicles—Sanseverina or Mathilde de la Mole—passionate, bold, indifferent, circumspect in her decisions, but unscrupulous in the choice of means when it came to the satisfaction of her passion.… Her love was boundless, her goodness boundless, her resourcefulness boundless.… her demands boundless.8

Correspondence between Kafka and his Czech translator, begun in 1920, at Merano, had resulted in a passionate love affair. But Kafka warned his friend that it was “impossible for me to live as human being.” He was wedded to a being more to be feared than a legitimate spouse, “to anguish,” his way of participating in existence: “if it ceases, I abandon life as easily as I close my eyes.” Here he is referring not to a crisis that recurred at regular intervals but to a permanent threat, indissolubly linked to his own life: “I shall never cease to inspire fear, especially in myself.” Love itself, beginning with “hideous flesh,” simply intensifies the threat. “No sanatorium will ever cure him,” his friend sadly observes. “He will never recover so long as he suffers from this anguish which involves not only me but everything that lives without shame—for example, the flesh. The flesh is too denuded; it cannot tolerate being seen.” Milena’s love is the knife with which he, a new Baudelaire, probes his wounds. Finally, Kafka comes to love his fear just as Baudelaire his decadence: “She is worthy of love and nothing else in me.” Thus gradually but inexorably, he draws close to the madness that he dreads and invites.

Happiness is denied, love impossible. Besides, how would Kafka bear the burdens of conjugal life and the responsibilities of a father? To a friend he confides: “What I have to do, I can only do alone. Become clear about the ultimate things; the Western Jew is not clear about them and therefore has no right to marry.”

God had not allowed him to escape from paternal authority by introducing the blood of an alien wife into the familial community. Kafka, moreover, was perfectly aware of the choice which had caused him to reject the provisional responsibility of a father to his children (which ceased, he thought, at their majority) in favor of the responsibility of the creator to his creation, which never ceases. By remaining a bachelor, he could concentrate all his strength on this creation.

On a more subtle level Pierre Klossowski undertakes through careful exegesis to draw a parallel between Kierkegaard’s and Kafka’s retreat from marriage and the sacrifice of Abraham. “Kierkegaard,” he writes, “in renouncing his fiancée, sought to reproduce in his own life Abraham’s gesture of faith beyond which the temporal would be returned to him in the eternal, as Isaac was returned to Abraham. But Kafka does not see the possibility of salvation.”9 In fact, Kafka himself recalled Abraham’s situation: Abraham dreams of the sacrifice but cannot believe that he has been called upon to make it. Thus, Kafka concludes, “on the way he is transformed into Don Quixote.” What then, Klossowski asks, is at the root of such irony if not the feeling of having had nothing to sacrifice? “And so Abraham’s gesture remained inimitable.”

Whatever the radical reason for his choice, the die had been cast: Kafka’s sole posterity would be his creation. He had renounced marriage to preserve his creative self. He left his job for the same reasons when he became aware of the exclusive character of his literary vocation.

Everything converged in this direction and left no time for those talents associated with the joys of sex, food and drink, philosophical reflection, and first and foremost, music. I have grown thin in every way. It was necessary because my strength was so meager to begin with that it could serve my literary aim after a fashion only if concentrated exclusively on it.10

When he fell sick, his malady seemed to him to be a sign sent by God to legitimatize his solitude. He was finally going to be able to “become clear about the ultimate things.” Afflicted by tuberculosis in September of 1917, he felt as if he had had a great weight lifted from him: it was not himself, he reasoned, but God who had made him incapable of living. Without love, without a profession, without friends, alone at last, free at last, placed “under the protection of an affliction,” he was to be able to limit himself to “the unquestionable.” It was not “laziness, ill will, or lack of skill” that had caused him to be a complete failure (“in family life, friendship, marriage, profession”) but “the absence of soil, air, law”: “to create these for myself—that is my task.” He has ceased to be a stupid overgrown child: “I am an end or a beginning.”

Nothing was given to him from the outset. He had to achieve everything: at the price of his happiness, health, life, and, perhaps, the integrity of his spirit.

NOTES

1.  Diary.

2.  Diary.

3.  Conversation with Max Brod.

4.  Cf. Pierre Boisdeffre, “Solitude et Communion chez Kierkegaard et chez Kafka,” in Mélanges Georges Jamati.

5.  Max Brod, Franz Kafka (English edition), p. 139.

6.  Diary.

7.  Max Brod, op. cit.

8.  Alexandre Vialatte, introduction to Lettres à Milena (Paris: Gallimard, 1956).

9.  P. Klossowski, introduction to Journal intime de Kafka (Paris; Grasset, 1945).

10.  Diary.

IV

THE BURROW OF THE INDIVIDUAL

AND THE LABYRINTH OF MEN

I have never felt the weight of any responsibility except that of the existence, look, and judgment of other men.1

Kafka truly became Kafka when—between 1912 and 1914—to anguished poetic narration he added fear and horror. Begun in 1911, “The Stoker” (the first chapter of Amerika), which was awarded a literary prize in 1915, expressed tenderness and grief in an atmosphere which was at once realistic and extravagant. But was Kafka aware of this? He invoked Dickens as his model and entertained the notion of writing a new David Copperfield.

Between 1912 and 1914 his intentions, though quite different, are clear. In “The Metamorphosis” and “In the Penal Colony” as well as in “The Judgment,” all produced during this period, we no longer find the realism—the imaginative, fantastic, picaresque details tinged with melancholy—of Amerika, nor even the uncanny qualities of the disordered episodes in “Description of a Struggle.” What we find is something more cruel and sadistic than anything in the later myths of The Trial and The Castle—horror experienced as such, or even, putting it another way, horror limited to horror. We would be close to the “tale of horror” or “frenzied romanticism” if the method of achieving tone and style did not eliminate any feeling of complaisance.

Everything in “The Metamorphosis” is well balanced and quite commonplace, and it is without the slightest warning, without the slightest nod to the reader, that the author develops the story of Gregor Samsa who, as he “awoke one morning from uneasy dreams … found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” In the presence of a man who has been changed into a vermin, the family is upset, but not really any more so than if the man had had bronchitis. And the first part of the story is devoted in its entirety to the difficulty experienced by Gregor, a commercial traveler, in making the General Manager of his firm understand that he is no longer in a position to visit businessmen in neighboring towns.… Does he suffer from his transformation into a repulsive insect? Kafka is careful not to reveal the answer. He diverts attention from whatever might be scandalous and revolting. Gregor should begin to scream, to think that he has gone mad, but he does not. He concentrates on how he, with his numerous clumsy legs and his inflexible shell, can move about: “He set himself to rocking his whole body at once so that he could swing out of bed. In this way he could protect his head from injury by holding it up as he fell.” His sister comes in calmly to clean the multiped’s room. His mother seems completely crushed, his father takes precautions to keep the neighbors from learning what has happened.

Thus the lack of realism is not proclaimed, not called to our attention, not emphasized. It is felt and accepted as naturally as humble people accept misfortunes. And it is for this reason that it becomes atrocious.

Here atrocity means only sadness—unfathomable sadness. When this multiped dies in its room, the maid touches it with her broom: “Mrs. Samsa made a movement as if to stop her, but checked it. ‘Well,’ said Mr. Samsa, ‘we can thank God.’ He crossed himself, and the three women followed his example.” Later the maid comes in and says, “You need not bother about how to get rid of the thing in there. It has been done already.…”

Similarly, only the author’s restrained, scrupulous artistry enables us to accept the sadistic tale “In the Penal Colony,” which describes a penitentiary in which the condemned are severely punished for the slightest mistake. An officer shows a traveler who has been invited to visit the penitentiary the Machine used to punish the prisioners. This precisely engineered machinery, described seriously and in detail through several pages, is designed to imprint on the skin of the culprit the commandment which he has broken. The needles of the machine communicate the guilt of the accused to him by engraving the same sentence in his flesh, deeper and deeper always, for six hours. Jets of water and layers of cotton wool are provided for washing and sponging wounds, as well as outlets for the blood and water. The Machine is automatic; at the sixth hour, the condemned man generally begins to die.

Here minutiae heighten the sense of atrocity. Still, not a single expression or word betrays complaisance. Kafka does not delight in sadistic creations of the imagination; patiently he constructs the mechanisms of sadism, but he does not allow the mechanism to overpower him or invite the reader to participate in it; finally, the torture machine goes to pieces, and the only effect of the patient, disquieting tale is an immense sadness, without grief and without pity.…

These narratives overawe us not only because of their unnerving character but also because of their consummate artistry. To be sure, in “The Metamorphosis” we find diabolical meanings of every sort: of the powerlessness and loneliness of the individual who, when he becomes aware of the hypocrisy of his existence, feels himself transformed into a hideous object, condemned to the barren death of an insect. But a symbol is inadequate. Though unexpressed, it is all too visible and easy; it would not become significant without the somber, well measured art that transforms it into a legend.

Thousands of men whose hearts and minds were tortured have been able to imagine Kafkan myths, have proclaimed them loudly or expressed them lyrically, yet have been misunderstood or even mistaken for fools. Kafka’s imagination verges on madness, but a law of sobriety or consummate art dominates his writing.

This art is the product of a calculated attempt to express the improbable as if it were real—to describe it in minute detail. Even in his Diary and his first sketches, Kafka was accustomed conscientiously to record insignificant details, gestures, attitudes.

When my superior discusses routine matters with me (today it was the card-index), I am unable to look him in the eye for any length of time without showing, in spite of my best efforts, a trace of bitterness which causes his gaze or mine to shift.… So I resort to a more active defense and accelerate the zigzags of my own look, preferring to consider the line of his nose, his beard, and his cheeks.…2

The penchant for precision and the pattern of dwelling on details and commenting on them confer on the fantastic narrative a harsh impression of reality. The result is a nightmare, but a nightmare so exact it conveys the feeling of something lived through, as in the dream recorded by Kafka in 1911. In this dream he moved through a number of rooms.

Perhaps I was going through a series of bedrooms. I remember a typical bed which stood on one side, to my left, against a sloping wall, as in an attic; dark or dirty, it had on top of it a low pile of sheets and bedspread which seemed to be only a heavy linen sheet and which tapered downward to the floor …3

Inherent in this apparently ingenuous precision is the difference between a dream in which one believes and a dream in which one does not believe. Kafka’s painstaking description seems to prefigure far in advance the “anti-novel” school of French writers which came into existence around 1956, for even to report a dream, he practices exact delineation in minute detail.

To the left there was a full wall while to the right the wall was not complete: one could glimpse, down below, the court, although one could not see the bottom, toward which a gray, dilapidated stairway led by way of different landings.

Paradoxically, this attentiveness to objects or things only reinforces the impression of penetrating into a consciousness. The explanation is that we then participate in the petty activities of a consciousness which busies itself with seeing things.

If Joseph K. is strikingly real in The Trial, this is because he is thinking not of his trial but of passageways, a door, the manner of opening a door. Furthermore, no Kafkan text reveals to us the soul of the hero or the feelings that he ought to have, but only his mind occupied by the things that surround him or by a thousand trivial designs. Kafka gives us the sensation of psychological life by speaking not of psychological life but of the objects by which it is aroused.

Kafka wrote “objective novels” before the term was coined! He refuses to give us the impression conveyed to us by things and gives us instead the thing itself—strange, weird, unclean.

In our synagogue lives an animal about the size of a marten. He is frequently seen, but at a distance of about two meters; he allows no one to come closer. His color is light greenish-blue; no one has touched his fur. Thus nothing can be said about him, and one might even state that his true color is unknown.4

Here the object is real by virtue of the very distance that separates it from the narrator; the information obtainable about it is at once precise and limited.

It is through dry, minute details that Kafka creates the impression of reality within unreality. The world evoked by him is often improbable, but it exists. It exists because we are never sure that we can explore it, because we feel that it is more luxuriant than any world that could possibly be described. In each of his works, moreover, Kafka makes us feel the invisible presence of an infinite number of characters—of whom some must be sacrificed.

This attentiveness to the accessory characters that I meet in novels, plays, etc. This feeling of solidarity that I experience then with respect to them! In The Maidens of Bischofsberg … it is a matter of two seamstresses who are making the wearing apparel of the only married woman in the play. How do they fare? Where do these girls live? What have they done to deprive themselves of the right to appear in the course of the play? …5

Kafka’s art of narration resides in this concern for invisible dressmakers. The truth of his style and imagination lies in his diligence in trying to follow conscientiously every possible trail. He deplores the fact that “in writing a story” he does not really “have the time to reach out in all directions, as one should.”6 Thus the world becomes a labyrinth. A world which is more and more phantasmal or symbolic, yet more and more real. The sadistic act of capital execution in “In the Penal Colony,” for example, “draws its reality entirely from the administrative and technical seriousness with which the officer describes the horrible Machine.”

Along with a total mastery of the art of cruel or absurd narration, Kafka also acquired, between 1912 and 1914, the fundamental themes that were to be expressed in allegories in his masterworks. At this stage, a narrative is for him a combination of events that lead nowhere. Whereas a story ordinarily opens up new perspectives and the possibility of new adventures, the Kafkan narrative closes these perspectives. It functions like the Torture Machine described in “In the Penal Colony,” engraving in the flesh a sentence which the condemned man is unable to read. The outcome is inevitable: just as repetition of the bloody imprinting entails death, repetition of the nonsensical details of everything that happens also leads to death. This is the principle of tragedy, in which everything is sensed in advance. But the Kafkan narrative is a gray tragedy which lacks even an illusion, a tragedy which is not enacted because the fatality and futility of human effort is felt from the outset. Man senses from the beginning that he is losing his struggle, and only the monotony of the event—completely futile, moreover, because the outcome is predetermined and offers no hope—can create an illusion of drama and life in a world already dead.

Kafka takes up his themes and buries himself in them as an animal buries itself in its hole. His fascination often is attributable to his art of enclosing himself and his narrative in a bunker—his art of withdrawing into himself and creating a wall between himself and the outside world. For before he expresses man’s loneliness in the face of an empty heaven, he expresses man’s inner loneliness. In this sense “The Burrow” is representative of the structure and inspiration of a number of his stories. For page after page we see the designs of a lonely animal that lives under the earth, digs passageways, constructs an underground citadel: “I have completed the construction of my burrow, and it seems to have turned out well.” In the process of laying out the inside of his dwelling, this creature seems to confuse himself with it, with the plans which he is always making for its completion, and with the pleasure which awareness of its existence causes him to experience.

…Then it seems to me that I am not in the presence of my house but in the presence of myself, a sleeping self, and that I have the good fortune to be in a deep sleep and at the same time to watch over myself like a sentry.

Here loneliness is withdrawal into oneself, alienation of self in a limited pseudo-self created for oneself. In much the same way the insignificant employee in “Bachelor’s Misery” becomes entrenched and isolated in the minute organization of his life, and “A Hunger Artist”—a man who exhibits himself in a sealed cage at fairs—withdraws into himself and gives himself over exclusively to fasting, to the pleasure of fasting, to the absurd ideal of fasting, until he dies the death of an insect which recalls the death of Gregor Samsa.

Thus there are two forms of loneliness: the silence of the world and the loneliness of withdrawal—the temptation which a human being feels to create his own prison inside himself or inside a projection of himself—an employment as absurd as the burrow fashioned by the subterranean creature. Kafka knew the intoxication of this temptation and was often overcome by it. In the short stories—some brief sketches, some fragments—published in 1919 in the collection A Country Doctor, in 1924 A Hunger Artist, and in 1931 in The Great Wall of China and Other Stories (a collection edited by Max Brod) one story out of three owes its magic spell to Kafka’s ability to enclose himself vertiginously, from the very outset, in a cloistered, uneasy world and to make this world hauntingly real: “Everything falls on my shoulders. In the anteroom two girls, the typewriters, and the ledgers. In my office, the table that I occupy, the conference table, the Safe, a large English chair, the telephone.…”7 Each human being takes refuge in his own meticulous labyrinth. That Kafka’s world is a barren world for man has been observed repeatedly, but not enough attention has been paid to the fact that, even before we are overwhelmed by the incoherence and silence of the universe, the primordial truth is that each individual is a prison. Men construct around themselves, in order to hide themselves, the gigantic walls of a molehill: “Hiding places are numberless, deliverance is unique; but there are as many possibilities of deliverance as there are hiding places.”8 In many of the stories which he started to write, in the opening lines of many stories (even fragments consisting of a few lines recorded in his Notebooks) we find the first passageway of a burrow. Kafka is generally inspired by nothing more than a few sentences that create the closed universe of a being imprisoned in himself.

I am a valet but an unemployed valet. I am shy, not forward. I don’t even dare to put myself on an equal footing with others, but this is perhaps only one of the reasons for the idleness which they force on me.9

This beginning can subsequently be developed in minute detail: no exit is to be found. Each man is attached to his own little dwelling, hutch, burrow, routine, possession; but the fastidious mania that possesses him transforms this small enchanted world into a frightening labyrinth. Kafka achieves something resembling a universal “metaphysical” resonance because he plunges each time into a singular existence: “Each human being is singular and called upon to act by virtue of his singularity, so he must take a liking to it.”10 But Kafka does take a liking to his singularity. None of his heroes is charged with representing man in general, but each of them is a strange, eccentric being. The Castle would be meaningless if K. were not a Land-Surveyor in a world that cannot be measured.

To express common, universal anguish, Kafka always chooses a narrow, definite, limited character—a country doctor, a miner, a bureaucrat, a trapeze artist. The individual is always eccentric. In “First Sorrow” the trapeze artist cannot live unless he is always perched on his trapeze. In “The Giant Mole” the village schoolmaster has but one aim in life—to demonstrate in his scholarly memoirs the existence of a giant mole which he has never seen.

Thus human solitude is the first fact associated with man. It also happens that the dreadful singularity that imprisons man in a mania and separates him from the world is experienced by a living individual as an ineluctable condition of his being, an external curse, obligation, or decree of fate. In this case, with a troubled human conscience, he is forced to adjust to a body and destiny that limit him. As Gregor Samsa became a multiped, the hero of “The Bridge” is—a bridge.

I was stiff and cold, I was a bridge, I spanned an abyss. My toes sank into the ground on one side, my hands clutched the earth on the other side.… I was there, then, and I waited; and I was obliged to wait. Without crumbling, a bridge, once it has been built, cannot cease to be a bridge.

Let us enumerate the heroes of Kafka’s tales: a man who was transformed into a multiped, a professional hunger artist, a commercial traveler, a mole, the ghost of a hunter (“The Hunter Gracchus”). Each of them has a conscience—its activity guides the narrative—but it is imprisoned in a grotesque body which transforms it into an eccentric conscience. Let us add to these a mouse (“Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk”), a dog (“Investigations of a Dog”), a monkey changed into a man (“A Report to an Academy”). This is the explanation of the theme of animal metamorphosis. In sketches that have the obsessive, precise form of memoirs, Kafka always begins anew (and rarely finishes) with a “trapped” conscience. This entrapment is especially obvious when, in keeping with Gnostic beliefs, the soul has fallen into the body of an animal. “The Metamorphosis” is simply the first form of this obsession. For we find in “The Burrow” the repetitive moralizations of an animal; in “Investigations of a Dog,” the tiresome repetitions of a limited, patient, pedantic, complicated creature proud of his condition even though he senses that he is a prisoner.

It must be assumed that, for all my peculiarities, which I readily acknowledge, I am the least exempt from the laws of my species. Indeed, when I think about it—and I have time, disposition, and capacity enough for that—the canine world is strange. Around us dogs there are all kinds of creatures—wretched, limited, dumb creatures who have only animal cries; … many of us dogs study them, have given them names, try to help them, educate them, uplift them, etc. For my part, so long as they do not try to disturb me, I make no distinction between them, I ignore them.

Here we undoubtedly rediscover the inspiration of Hofmann’s tale “Murr the Cat.”

Dogs know everything, they have all the questions and all the answers. If only this knowledge could be put to use, brought fully to light; if only they did not know infinitely more than they acknowledge or admit to themselves.

But the humor is the same in “Josephine the Singer,” a sociological study of the success of a singer; only at the end of the story do we discover that it concerns mice and the success of a mouse that could sing. And in a short tale recorded in the Notebooks, a family gathers around a dead relative; conscientiously they devour the corpse; the characters are all rats. Kafka is obsessed by animality, the symbol of a creature falsified by its slough. This accounts for the great number of cockroaches and skunks in his works.

Perhaps Kafka was remotely inspired by the satire which his friend Franz Blei wrote (The Great Literary Bestiary) depicting men of letters under the guise of animals. But Franz Blei was not tormented, and there is something else in Kafka: cultivation of delight in moderate or severe eccentricity which expresses the dreadful loneliness and astounding singularity of creatures enclosed in their own skins. “I have a strange beast,” he writes, “half kitten, half lamb. I inherited it from my father. But it did not develop until I came into possession of it; before that, it was more lamb than cat. Now it is half one and half the other.”

“Metamorphosis” or terror of falling into animality is traceable to an unconsciously Gnostic idea which might well have been transmitted to Kafka by way of the Cabala. Gnosticism—which incorporates Manicheism and which inspired a parallel Jewish tradition—reduces the destiny of created spirits to an upward or downward movement on the scale of living beings. A popularizer of these doctrines, Victor Hugo explained them in Words of the Voice of Darkness. Man may die at any moment and, depending on his past merits, be reborn as an angel, a weasel, a cockroach or a pebble. The soul is imprisoned at various depths in matter, from which it tries to free itself as it moves upward by degrees. By depicting the plight of animals and their fallen consciences, Kafka expresses the terror of being obliged to move like a bottle imp through all degrees of salvation and the abyss. And he reveals himself, involuntarily but clearly, as a Gnostic and Manichean when he states that Evil is the Fall in a form of incarnation that becomes progressively darker. “There is nothing except a spiritual world; what we call the sensible world is Evil in the spiritual world and what we call Evil is merely a momentary necessity in our eternal evolution.”11 This is precisely the Gnostic and Cabalistic vision which Hugo, for example, had popularized.

A creature is a prisoner of its form of incarnation, and if it takes delight in this form, it is condemned to descend still further. But if fallen beings shut themselves up, they also feel—and quite obviously—that the world is closed to them.

“Alas,” said the mouse, “the world becomes narrower each day. It was once so big that I was afraid. I ran, and I ran, and I was happy to see finally, on all sides, walls rising into view on the horizon; but these long walls run together so quickly that I am already in the last room, and I see down there the trap into which I am going to fall.”

“You need only change direction,” said the cat as he devoured the mouse.12

Is this not already the whole problem of The Trial? Kafka’s numerous stories are apologues. In some, conscience is a prison; in others which complement them, the world is a labyrinth, ridiculous perhaps, but inexorable.

I had fallen into an inextricable bush. I shouted as loudly as I could for the keeper of the park. He came running, but he could not reach me.

“How did you manage to get yourself in there?” he shouted. “Get yourself out the same way!”

“Impossible,” I answered, “there is no way. I was walking along calmly, lost in thought, and suddenly here I am! As if the bush had grown up around me. I’ll never get out, I’m lost!”

“Child,” said the keeper. “You begin by taking a forbidden road, you get into this terrible bush, and you complain … But you are not in a virgin forest! This is a public park. You will be set free.”13

But he was not set free.…

In some stories Kafka evokes the “burrow,” a small closed universe, frightfully logical and circumscribed. If the animal leaves this lair, he discovers an unlimited but absurd world.

Between the lonely creature sweltering in his heat (“The Burrow,” “Investigations of a Dog”) and God who can satisfy him, there is a meeting ground—life. But life refuses to provide the occasion for the meeting. When in order to live a creature ventures forth on his lands, he finds only a new labyrinth. Life should guide man to his ultimate end—that is, to God—but it causes him to become lost in its passageways, in a tunnel.

From our sullied point of view, we are in the situation of travelers on a train who have been held back in a long tunnel by an accident; the tunnel has a section in which the light from the entrance is no longer visible and the light from the exit is so tiny that it must constantly be sought out only to be lost from sight; during all this time both the entrance and the exit are uncertain.14

On leaving his burrow, the creature finds that light and life around him contribute nothing new but condemn him to wander endlessly. The world is long, time is short.

My grandfather used to say, “Life is astonishingly short.” As I look back on it, life seems so foreshortened that I can hardly understand how a young man can resolve to set out on horseback for the next village without fearing that—not to mention accidents—even the span of a normal life untroubled by mishaps may fall short of the time needed for such a ride.15

Then there appears in the thematic structure of Kafka’s imaginative work the symbol of an eternally unfinished world, the world of Babel, which men do not know how to construct and which God abandons. “In the beginning, when they started to build the Tower of Babel, everything went along fairly well; there was even too much order; too much talk of signposts, interpreters, workers’ housing, means of communication.” The construction of the universe was diverted from its end; instead of building the tower of Heaven and Earth, the workmen’s city was first laid out, and the men argued over their quarters.

Between two wars, they worked to beautify the city, and this in turn provoked new outbursts of jealousy which resulted in new struggles. That was how the first generation spent their time; and nothing has changed since!16

We rediscover Babel in a world without communications described in The Great Wall of China. In the nameless village lost in the vast regions of Asia, distances are measureless: “We have some news from here and there concerning border wars, but almost nothing concerning the capital.” Yet the distant capital determines the fate of these isolated men though it is a myth which may no longer exist: “In the last century the capital itself was destroyed; a new one was established some distance from it, then the latter was in turn destroyed and the old one reconstructed, yet this did not have the slightest repercussion on the life of our little town!”

Kafka’s Chinese obey orders issued by a power which perhaps no longer exists, just as we now study the light which issued from a star which is perhaps already dead and which has taken a thousand years to reach us.

The Great Wall of China immerses man in the relativity of time and space: what is true here and now was so long in reaching us that its source is superannuated. But what is to be done about it? If the distant powers were questioned concerning their intentions, the messenger would arrive after their death. Man imprisoned himself in an individual universe; now he disintegrates in a world that is too vast. And still soldiers arrive, workers are recruited, and for reasons unknown the Great Wall of China is built: “The works accomplished rival those associated with the Tower of Babel …” Superimposed on the theme of a world without communications, dissolved in space, is the theme of the great unfinished construction.

It is in this universe that man works assiduously, errs, loses his way. His need of logic is never satisfied, his hope of identifying a goal is forever vanishing. “A man from the country appears and asks to be admitted to the law. But the guard tells him that for the moment he cannot grant him admission.” The man reflects, then asks if he will be granted admission later. “That is possible,” says the guard, “but not now.”17

But what is it that deprives this world of clarity? Is it human failure or God’s silence? Why is this world illogical? It seems sometimes—when Kafka depicts the stupidity of subordinates, the confusion of the business world, the impossibility of obtaining exact information, the intangibility of regulations—that the absurd represents a failure on the part of men. Because they have fallen—that is, from the Gnostic point of view, become immersed in matter (and in Bureaucracy!)—God does not reveal himself to them. Most of the sketches written between 1917 and 1924, several of them contemporaneous with The Castle, suggest that God has abandoned the world common to men and not the individual himself. Our own presumption causes us to place ourselves in a false situation.

They have to make a choice: they have to become kings or messengers of kings. Like children they all choose to become messengers; they rove the world and, since there are no kings, shout to each other tidings which have become absurd. They would gladly end their miserable existence but dare not because of their pledge of fidelity.18

But in The Trial it is the individual who feels not only that he is crushed by a badly organized society but also that he is fundamentally guilty. And in The Castle the Absolute and the Transcendent take refuge behind a wall of silence and misunderstandings.

NOTES

1.  Diary.

2.  Diary, October 21, 1911.

3.  Diary, November 9, 1911.

4.  “In Our Synagogue.” From the collection Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer (Berlin: Kiepenheuer Verlag, 1931). Partially translated into French by Jean Carrive (Seghers, 1944) and by Carrive and A. Vialatte (Gallimard, 1950).

5.  Diary, December 16, 1910.

6.  Diary, August 15, 1911.

7.  “The Neighbor.” From the collection Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer.

8.  Notebooks, November 18, 1917.

9.  “The Examination.” From the collection Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer.

10.  From the Notebooks. French translation in “Cahiers divers et feuilles volantes,” in Préparatifs de noce à la campagne (Paris; Gallimard, 1957), pp. 209-358.

11.  “Meditations on Sin, Suffering, Hope and the True Way.” French translation in Préparatifs de noce à la campagne, op. cit., pp. 35-62.

12.  “Little Fable.” From the collection Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer.

13.  “The Burning Bush.” Ibid.

14.  Notebooks, October 20, 1917.

15.  “The Next Village.” From the collection Ein Landartz (Leipzig: Wolf, 1919). French translations by Alexandre Vialatte in La Métamorphose (Gallimard, 1955) and Un médecin de campagne (1952).

16.  “The Arms of the City.” From the collection Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer.

17.  “Before the Law.” From the collection Ein Landartz.

18.  Notebooks, December 2, 1917.

V

THE SURVIVOR

LONELINESS, CREATION, AND

THE PROSPECT OF DEATH

THE LAST LOVE AFFAIR

SICKNESS, DEATH, AND SURVIVAL

(1921-1924)

Desire for solitude approaching loss of consciousness. Alone with myself.

After 1920 the “Metamorphosis” was accomplished. “I became someone else.” The man Kafka wasted away in order to facilitate the growth of the fabulous animal—the only creature capable of crossing over the “last terrestrial frontier” and recording what happens in the other world. Kafka did not decide to live with Milena, and his meeting with Dora Dymant—the last feminine mediation—came too late to accomplish the miracle of linking him to other men. It would seem that he abandoned himself, giving up his carnal husk in preparation for death. But he intended to die with his eyes open; he was less concerned with surviving through an operation in which he scarcely believed than with living again in another world to which he was drawing nearer each day. Life seemed clearly to continue, but “liberation” was approaching. In 1919 and 1920 the Diary, truly a Wild Ass’s Skin,1 is reduced to a few decisive lines. “The presentiment of a definitive liberation is by no means refuted by the fact that, the next day, captivity continues without change or worsens,” he writes, “or even by the explicit statement that captivity will never cease. All of this, on the contrary, may be a necessary precondition of definitive liberation” (January 9, 1920).

To win more freedom for himself, Kafka gave his notebooks to Milena. He no longer needed to keep the Diary: like Proust, he was “a memory come to life”—and this “accounts for my insomnia.” His health failed; he had known since the summer of 1917 that he had tuberculosis. “I have let my body decay. I wanted to avoid any distraction, to remain aloof from the lusty life of a healthy, useful man. As if despair and sickness were not at least as distracting!” When he goes for a walk he looks at people with mixed condescension and envy: they have trivial occupations which lead them nowhere, but they live and convey the illusion of being happy. Keeping his madness buried in his head “as in a shroud,” the solitary walker is certain to envy the happiness of the couples he meets, even though he realizes clearly “that in one of these happy unions he would despair.”

Systematically, year after year, Kafka had been destroying himself. The dike was about to break. What would happen? Now he knew: he would have to die to discover Canaan. Waiting for this last act, he was overcome by a feeling of absolute distress. Alive, he “does not come to the end of life”; where is the helping hand that could “dispel some of the despair brought on by his destiny”? At the beginning of 1920, during the course of his medical treatment at Merano, he hoped that this hand would be Milena Jesenská’s. But if he grasped it, he dared not cling to it, he capitulated in the face of his fear and plunged again into his loneliness, even as his love drew from him heart-rending cries.

… And I love you, foolishly, as the sea loves the fine gravel in its depths; my love is no less possessive.… But when I say that you are the one I love most, this is perhaps not love … love is the knife that I turn over in my wound.… Why speak to me, Milena, of a common future which will never be.… Few things are certain, but one is that we shall never live together, in the same house, elbow to elbow at the same table—never; not even in the same town.2

Condemned by the vagaries of his sickness and his relapses to wander from seaside resort to sanatorium, from the Tatra Mountains to Prague and from Spindelmühle to Müritz, in 1921 and 1922 he divided his time between the Czech capital and the mountains. “Collapse, impossibility of tolerating life or more exactly the course of life.” At the age of forty he would find time to rest for a moment: now he knew he would be unable to do so, for fear of the future cast a terrible cloud over the present. He was one of the uneasy Jews of the Western world who have never known a minute’s peace.

Nothing is given to me, I have to acquire everything, not only the present and the future but also the past, the thing every man receives gratuitously as his lot; that too I should acquire, and it is the hardest task; if the earth turns to the right—I do not know whether it does—I should turn to the left in order to recapture the past. But I have not the least power to satisfy these obligations, I cannot bear the world on my shoulders, which hardly endure the weight of my winter jacket.… It is sheer folly for anyone to try to pull through alone—folly paid with folly.3

Yet his “folly” was not without remission. In the summer of 1923 he was in Müritz on the Baltic, having gone there with his sister and nephews. There he discovered a holiday colony of the Berlin Jewish People’s Home; he took a lively interest in the work of this group—indeed, in everything having to do with Zionism. It was there also that he met Dora Dymant, a Polish Jew who had been brought up in the Hasidean tradition and had escaped from her strict patriarchal family, ruled by the intangible Law of Moses. Having gone first to Breslau and then to Berlin, she had two apparently contradictory passions: the theater and Hebrew. Franz, who had applied himself to the study of Hebrew, read aloud with her long passages from the Book of Isaiah. Soon a new love arose; the last rays of autumn came to brighten his life.

Kafka decided to try to acquaint himself at last with a normal life. He was ready to try with Dora the experiment in conjugal living that he had refused to undertake with Milena. That she consented is probably due to the fact that she was Jewish whereas Milena was not. “Without ancestors, without marriage, without descendants, with a violent desire for ancestors, marriage, descendants,” he tried to create a shelter for want of roots.

Undeterred by the objections of his family, he lived with Dora in the suburbs of Berlin, first in Steglitz, then in Zehlendorf. Was he to know at last “the happiness of married men, young and old” (“happiness which is beyond my reach and which, even if it were not, I would find unbearable … yet the only happiness on which I would like to sate myself”)? In any case, he seemed calmer, more relaxed, almost happy, and he had eluded his demons. “They search for me but do not find me, for the moment at least.” Max Brod writes, “I saw that Kafka was truly happy with his companion.” He even managed to sleep well, “an unheard-of novelty in these years.” Writing, which a few weeks earlier had called for superhuman efforts, again became simple if not effortless. He prepared for publication in short order “The Burrow,” “Josephine the Singer,” “Investigations of a Dog,” and turned over to the publisher the four short stories in A Hunger Artist (naturally it was Max Brod who found a publisher for him—the Schmiede publishing house).

It seemed that he had found salvation. For the first time in his life he had discovered that he could live with another person, enter into a conjugal relationship with the one he loved. This was an extraordinary revelation which would have filled him with pride if he had been capable of pride. But his demons returned, more wicked and more numerous. They made him pay for his unseasonable happiness. They were announced by a thousand signs: first the harsh winter of 1923, when the ravages of the cold were added to the ravages of inflation.

Ruined by defeat, humiliated by the occupation of the Ruhr, shaken by riots, the Weimar Republic staggered under the successive blows of communists and fascists. On November 9, 1923, following the red uprisings in Hamburg, Hitler tried but failed to bring off the Munich Putsch. But this was only a reprieve: ten years later, the flag tinged with Bauriedl’s blood—the Blutfahne—was to be venerated as a talisman.4 To be sure, by issuing new notes—Rentenmarks—Schacht the magician saved the German economy, as Erhard was to do twenty-five years later. But the middle classes were ruined. Kafka shared their plight: rent, food, his physician’s fees went up faster than his meager income, and his royalties were soon exhausted. Still, he distributed to those whose need was greater than his own the provisions sent to him by his family. The sanatorium, the clinic, and even the hospital were too expensive. One would have to “earn gold-marks in order to live here.”

For years he had been having a temperature in the evening. He finally came to accept his sickness and hoped that he could manage to live with it. Had he not already endured the chains of his job, the test of loneliness, and the anguish of creation? The sanatorium was too expensive, that was all; he must not even think about it any more. But Kafka’s family, alerted by Max Brod, became alarmed, and on March 17, 1924, his friend personally took him to Prague, where his parents opened their arms to him. The writer ceased to be “the Father’s equal” and became once again the delicate child that he had been for so long. This he felt as a defeat, as the failure of all his plans for achieving independence. “Protected and exhausted,” he did not even have the strength to run away.

Thereafter everything moved swiftly. Early in April he had to be taken to the sanatorium. But the results of the medical examinations were so bad that the Wiener Wald refused to assign him to a room: his larynx was already infected.

Transferred to the Vienna clinic of Professor Hajek, Kafka was unhappy: he received routine but impersonal treatment—he was treated as “the patient in room number so-and-so”—in spite of the interventions of Robert Klopstock and Franz Werfel. Finally he was taken to Kierling, near the Vienna Woods, where he had a room filled with flowers, and Dora to watch over him. But in May his lungs and his larynx were in such a state “that no specialist could help him any more, and the only thing one can do is to relieve pain by administering morphine or pantopon.”5

Kafka could no longer talk and communicated in writing with those around him. He decided to ask for Dora’s hand, but he did so, as always, without daring to believe that his request would be granted. In a very humble letter he explained to Dora’s father that he was not a “true believer” but a penitent who would require much time to become worthy of Dora. As soon as he received this strange letter, the old man consulted one of his friends who was a rabbi—“the miracle-working rabbi”—and was dissuaded from accepting the patient for a son-in-law.

Kafka was dumbfounded. He had done his best to link himself to the human world, to seize the hand held out to him; it was not his fault that this hand was abandoning him at the most difficult stage. Today was not the beginning of his being tired of life. “This pitcher was already broken long before going for water.” “Nothing here is either my fault or the fault of men. I belong to profound silence; that is the climate which suits me.”6

Henceforth everything fitted into the pattern of the last stage. The “final period” arrived—the period of “terrible moments,” “impossible to enumerate, almost uninterrupted.” “Walks, nights, days, incapable of everything except suffering.”7 Each evening an owl, the sign of death, appeared at the window of the dying man—whether in dream or in reality is of little consequence.

A brilliant month of May fell upon the sanatorium in which an ultrabrilliant mind continued to function inside a tattered body. “The only way of consoling oneself would be to say: that will happen, whether you wish it or not. And what you wish provides only imperceptible support. More than a consolation would be: you too have weapons.”8 There were the last dated lines, written a year earlier in his Diary. Kafka no longer entertained doubts: he was approaching an end which would be the beginning of everything. Before entering into the Holy of Holies he had to divest himself of his shoes, his luggage, all of his clothing; lay bare his nudity and “everything hidden under nudity”; abdicate his intelligence and everything that can rob us of “the inextinguishable fire” of conscience. Only this fire would be worthy of making contact with the Holy of Holies. Kafka wondered also what punishment awaited him. Doubtless the father’s contempt, the impossibility of marrying, the failure of his health had already sanctioned his original failure; but these were only the signs or premonitory symptoms of definitive punishment. Had Kafka been expelled from Paradise, had Paradise been destroyed, or—and this would be “the most terrible” punishment—would Paradise always remain inaccessible to him, “leaving the rest of things unchanged”?

On Monday, June 2, he wrote a long letter to his parents, trying to dissuade them from coming to Kierling. He was getting along better, though not well enough to receive them, for he would hardly be able to talk to them. “The truth is that the proprietor of the sanatorium is a sick old man who cannot be bothered with my case very much, and my relations with the very unwelcome assistant doctor are more on friendly than on medical terms.” Thus he took pains jokingly to reassure his family. But during the night he had difficulty in breathing, asked for morphine and, when the doctor hesitated, said to him, “Kill me, or you are a murderer!” A short time later he tore off his icepack and threw it on the floor (“Why torture me any more?”). When Dr. Klopstock, moving away from him for a moment, reassured him, “But I am not leaving you,” Kafka quickly retorted, “But I am leaving you.” A few moments later, he died.

Thus the dark, regal humor which had saved him so many times did not desert him in the presence of death. The “Kafkan” interjections inspired by this supreme moment recall Descartes’ famous admonition to a Swede named Diafoirus when the latter tried to bleed the dying philosopher: “Gentlemen, don’t waste French blood!”

All of his friends were deeply aware of their loss. Prostrate, Dora Dymant kept repeating his name for hours. Klopstock, who was later to become one of the leading lung specialists, contemplated this regal face “from the oldest and noblest stock” and wrote: “The gentleness of his human existence has gone; only his matchless spirit still shows through the rigid features of his face, which has the beauty of an ancient marble bust.” What had already been said of Proust some eighteen months earlier might well have been said of him: “This is not the end for Pascal.” His family buried him in the Jewish cemetery of Prague on a misty, dismal morning. There was a crowd around his parents, his sisters, and Dora Dymant, who collapsed on his grave. Did Dora then recall Kafka’s words, “The cruel part of death is that it brings the intense suffering associated with the end, but not the end”?9

“I must confess that one day I envied someone very much,” he had written to Milena. “He was loved, well protected by strength and by reason, and laid to rest under flowers. I am always quick to envy.” This was now his fate. It was also to Milena that he had explained that a work begins to live only after the death of the author.

… living writers maintain a vital interest in their works. They fight for or against, solely because they are there. The true, independent life of a book begins only at their death, or more exactly, some time after their death. But then the book is alone and can rely solely on the strength of its own vitality.10

When we read these lines, we are reminded of many writers who died before their works, like Kafka’s, actually took flight: Descartes, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Marcel Proust. There is an obvious parallelism between the life and experience of Proust and of Kafka: both were Jewish or half-Jewish, both were bachelors, both were obsessed by a creative project to which they sacrificed their lives, both were inclined to see underneath the appearances of reality something besides the ordinary world which satisfies the rest of us.

It was Proust who wrote these lines which might be from the pen of Kafka: “Happiness is salutary for the body but sorrow develops the strength of the mind … is indispensable in reminding us always of the truth and forcing us to take things seriously.… It is true that this truth, which is not compatible with happiness or health, is not always compatible with life.”11 But it was Kafka who wrote the following lines, which could be from the pen of Proust:

… One who is alive and does not succeed in life has need of a helping hand to mitigate somewhat the despair brought on him by his destiny—he is only partially successful in this respect—but on the other hand, he can write what he sees under the rubbish, for he sees more than others and sees things in a different light. Is he not dead even as he lives? Is he not the authentic survivor?

Three misfortunes produced in an indolent Marcel Proust the exclusive concentration on literary creation which a happy life would have denied him: his asthma isolated him, his parents died, and uranism finally locked him in a mental prison from which he emerged only to “revictual” his work. The paternal curse, the impossibility of marrying, and sickness played an identical role with Kafka. But the lonely hermit of Prague carried humility, renunciation, detachment further than the recluse of the Boulevard Haussmann. During his last days, of course, Proust—who was stripped of his “enjoyment of the universe,” deprived “of movement, of speech and of the simple comfort of not suffering,” “evicted as it were from himself,” and who no longer left his room but took refuge in his work, exclusively preoccupied with giving it “the unreservedness which was denied him”—bears a striking resemblance to Kafka. But “he still exhibited vanity, an awareness of social levels, and a passion for producing work which would be his revenge on life.” Nothing like this in Kafka. In the case of Proust, the man of letters killed the man; Kafka was a prophet, a vates in the old Latin sense, who was concerned neither with his own fate nor with the fate of his creations. For example, his friends had to force him to surrender his manuscripts for publication. In his will Kafka gave Max Brod the responsibility of destroying his unpublished manuscripts, and he himself burned more than one notebook.

To be sure, Kafka does not deny that literature is his sole vocation. Twenty texts bear witness to this certainty. Writing gives meaning to his “monotonous, empty, misdirected” life. It is “the only road that can lead to progress.” A vast world seethes inside his head. “Better to burst a thousand times than to push it back inside myself or bury it; for that is why I am here; on this subject I have not the least doubt.” Literary creation even confers upon him a certain invulnerability. When he writes, he feels “bold, naked, powerful, extraordinary.” But he is never sure of the result. His state of mind is that of a mountain climber lost on a high peak: he knows that he will be saved if he reaches shelter before nightfall; he sets out courageously, but something tells him that he will never arrive in time. No matter what, he is condemned: condemned if he stays where he is, he is not saved because he advances. Nor must he become impatient: impatience and negligence issue from the same sin against Spirit. One would have to believe without needing hope, and this is manifestly impossible.

Twenty times Kafka—like Proust—undertook to “change his way of living” in order to devote himself exclusively to the life of the spirit, to the exploration of the other world.

But it is impossible to calculate how much strength I have for this undertaking. It may already have vanished forever; it may come back to me once again, even though the circumstances under which I live are not favorable to it. So I vacillate, fly incessantly to the peak of the mountain, but cannot rest on the height even for a moment. Others also falter, but they are in lower regions and have more strength. Faced with the threat of falling, they are caught on the wing by a close relative who walks beside them and is there for this purpose. But I falter on the heights, not, unfortunately, because of death but because of the eternal torments of death.12

In order to climb to “the peak of the mountain” Kafka was willing to cut the bonds that still linked him to men “in lower regions”—occupation, family, country, church—and to assume responsibility for his singularity. Fortunately—or unfortunately—he was a Jew, and “a Jew is nowhere a stranger and nowhere fully assimilated.” Everything around Kafka seemed to anticipate death: Czechoslovakia in 1924, like Austria-Hungary in 1914, was but a fragile conglomeration of heterogeneous nationalities coveted by a Germany which would soon fall prey to Hitlerism. Kafka too was suspect: suspect as a Jew in the eyes of the Czechs and Germans around him, suspect as a German and a Czech among the Jews. But he was a German only by virtue of his language. “Thus his fate as a writer is inscribed, like his life, under the sign of the impossible: impossibility of not writing, impossibility of writing in German, impossibility of writing in another language. To these he would have liked to add a fourth impossibility: the impossibility of writing.”13 The result was this disquieting consequence: literature was for him only the temporary state of someone who writes his testament “Just before hanging himself”; but this temporary state “may well last a lifetime.”

Caught between these two fires—the impossibility of writing and the even greater impossibility of not writing—Kafka accepted his impossible vocation. He plunged to the bottom of the abyss. Wandering like a sleepwalker in an infrahuman universe, he found the answer to the question of his original anguish. He knew that he had destroyed any semblance of human equilibrium within himself. What counted was no longer this life but the other life. “He gives the appearance of working to feed and clothe himself … but each visible mouthful is matched by an invisible mouthful, each visible garment by an invisible garment.” Each sunny morning reminds him that he has no future except his death. He does not fear it, for it is but an apparent end. “Everything happens as if interaction between the universal and the particular occurs on the real stage while life in the universal is inscribed only on the backcloth.” Death is only a door to pass through, the end of a terrestrial fever.

For a long time he had believed—still like Proust—that his creation would be his salvation. He soon had to admit that it was also a terrible ordeal. Still, he continued to write “in spite of everything, at any price.” It was no longer a question of salvation but of survival—not of preserving life but of avoiding its complete loss.

He no longer had any doubts. His quest was to culminate in madness. Since the night of December 22, 1912, when he wrote “The Judgment,” he had transcended “the last terrestrial frontier.” Committed to a route “which deviates from the human route,” sealed alive inside his own literary creation, “incapable of everything except suffering” and “extracting words from the void,” fleeing from his equals not in order to live in peace but in order to die in peace, “banished from down there, rejected here, overwhelmed at the dividing line,” Orpheus descended to the underworld and would not return to the surface.

To find the matchless pearl he paid the price from which all others recoiled: he paid it not only with his happiness but with the integrity of his spirit. The cries that echo through the last pages of the Diary are not only the cries of a drowned man “pounded for millenniums under oceanic pressures”; they are also the cries of a man who cannot find consolation for his failure and who still gropes for the Promised Land. Yet he himself had given the answer: “It is not because his life was too short that Moses failed to reach Canaan but because his was a human life.”

Kafka’s words, like his writings, are striking in their originality, in their “congenital indifference to customary ideas.”14 They are free of platitudes and, to an even greater degree, banality. The inimitable logic of his thought resembles the unfolding of “a strictly individual narrative in which the different moments are obscure events which have never before been reproduced and will never again be reproduced.”15

Even in the case of current events, his reflections reveal profound insights. As early as 1920, for example, he had not only had a presentiment of the direction which anti-Semitism was to take but had understood it perfectly. “Jews and Germans,” he told his friend Gustav Janouch, “are outsiders.” Is it because of their qualities that they are hated? No. “The reason for this hatred goes even deeper. In the final analysis, it is religious. This is easily discernible in the case of Jews but less so in the case of Germans, for their temple has not yet been destroyed. But that will come.”

In the same way, and even though he claimed that he understood nothing about politics, Kafka had divined the religious tendency of the Russian revolution (“But Bolshevism attacks religion! It does this because it is itself a religion”). He had glimpsed, in the turmoil of the twenties, “The beginnings of a terrible religious war.” As he was passing a procession of workers, marching with flags unfurled, he murmured:

They are masters of the street and think that they are masters of the world. And yet they are wrong. Behind them come secretaries, bureaucrats, professional politicians—all of the modern sultans whose accession to power they are facilitating. The revolution subsides, leaving only the slime of a new bureaucracy. The chains of tortured humanity are forged from administrative papers.16

Had the lonely Prague hermit divined Stalinism even before the death of Lenin?

Such is the absurd genius—in contrast to the solar genius of a Goethe or Hugo—of Kafka: he sees further than humanity but does not see his feet. His intelligence illuminates history but he is incapable of applying it to the conduct of his life. Kafka knows but one definite thing, “and that is suffering.” He does not recoil in its presence, for “the writer’s mission is to guide that which is accidental into that which is isolated and mortal to the infinite life, to transform that which conforms to the law.”

Nietzsche dreamed of an art of apotheosis—“the nimbus and the dithyramb”—which would express our gratitude for a world finally worthy of man, a world glimpsed by Homer and Rubens. “To disparage, slander, vilify is Jewish and Christian!” he kept repeating. He would have seen in Kafka’s work an inadmissible bill of indictment in which the author fused in an indefinite confession, regret for a lost Paradise, the humiliation of being excluded from it, and the impossibility of ever being a part of it. Nietzsche dreamed of setting above common humanity a monstrous and superior animal, inhuman and superhuman; his promethean dream culminated in madness. Kafka asked only for the humble joys of common humanity, but in the end he also manifested a singularity that bordered on madness. But he at least chose it whereas the author of Zarathustra experienced it. None of the motives that incited other young men of his time to write—desire for glory and wealth, investigation of an influence or power—seems to have had the slightest effect on Kafka. He was interested only in essentials, in the fundamental dialectic of a human being in search of justification—innocent and guilty, uncertain of his origins and his future, incapable of founding his existence upon justice and truth.

He anticipated the death of “literature,” the triumph of abstract writing, the ejection of the real from a work of art which should no longer be anything except an interrogation of “the ultimate things.” Today many voices, beginning with Beckett’s, seem to be echoes of his voice (“I have nothing to do, that is, nothing in particular. I have to talk, that is certain. I have to talk, having nothing to say.… Not knowing how to talk, not wishing to talk, I have to talk”).17 With Kafka the writer begins to descend from the regions ruled by power and glory (the regions inhabited by Voltaire, Goethe, Hugo, Barrès) to those in which he is besieged by uncertainty, anguish, and humiliation. If he hardly dares to raise his voice, the reason is that he no longer is absolutely certain that he is alive.

NOTES

1.  Balzac’s Wild Ass’s Skin (La Peau de chagrin, 1831), a fantastic tale inspired by Hoffmann, abounds in recollections of wretched times and symbolizes a constant theme: the dissipation of vital energy through the satisfaction of desires. [Trans.]

2.  Letters to Milena.

3.  Ibid.

4.  Andreas Bauriedl (1879-1923) was one of the sixteen Nazis killed at Munich on November 9, 1923. [Trans.]

5.  Max Brod.

6.  Diary.

7.  Diary.

8.  Diary.

9.  Préparatifs de noce à la campagne.

10.  Letters to Milena.

11.  “La Prisonnière,” in A la recherche du Temps Perdu.

12.  Diary.

13.  Marthe Robert, preface to the French translation of Kafka’s Diary (Paris: Grasset, 1954).

14.  Maurice Blanchot, La part du feu.

15.  Ibid.

16.  Quoted by Gustav Janouch, Kafka m’a dit (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1952).

17.  L’Innommable.

VI

FROM ALLEGORY TO LEGEND

MYTHS AND INFLUENCE OF KAFKA

We are digging the well of Babel.1

I have nothing to say about Kafka except that he is one of the rarest and greatest writers of our time.2

Among the rough drafts that Kafka had enjoined Max Brod to destroy after his death were two great unfinished works, The Tried and The Castle, in which the author passes from symbolic expression to allegory. The other Kafkan texts are the fascinating expression of man’s most profound nightmare—the nightmare in which he discovers his instability and solitude. The Trial and The Castle give the impression of being “summations” of this nightmare.

Though unfinished, these books were to have been finished, if not materially (assuming that Kafka had survived), at least symbolically. For they are constructed to constitute the Summation of human failures, to be the image of an unfinished Summation.

For a man to enter a village to reach the castle nearby where he is to fulfil his functions as a land-surveyor, and to fail through a series of misunderstandings, mysteries, apparently neglected opportunities, and incomprehensible interdictions ever to make his way into this Castle—this is a preposterous tale. A brutish, insensitive mind—the opposite to Kafka’s—might wonder why after being refused a means of transportation, after failing to obtain from those living in the castle any hint concerning the time he was expected, this man did not climb resolutely up the hill on his own, if only to demand an explanation.

By the same token, if in The Trial Joseph K. is informed that he is on trial but cannot find judges, information-givers, or lawyers, an independent thinker might conclude that the “trial” does not exist and treat those who talk to him about it as practical jokers.

We do not have to belabor Kafka’s unique art of causing us to accept a lucid, symbolic nightmare. He had already demonstrated this art in his earlier texts—and it is this very art which his imitators are unable to rediscover. For Kafka does not impose belief in the absurd world in which his heroes struggle as a conventional, literary postulate of a tale that purports to be haunting. We do not read The Castle and accept out of politeness the twisting of verisimilitude characteristic of just any fantastic tale. We read The Castle because an impression of perfect—though agonizing—reality compels us to read it to the end. In this sense it is also accessible to the occasional reader with a mediocre education, accustomed to the coarse, dramatic realism of newspaper reporting or stories in magazines. For such a reader the book, once closed, remains “unpleasant” (because he is not accustomed to a heavy diet) but undisputed.

This fascination is the fascination of the half-familiar, half-uncanny objects which surrealists have at times tried to construct: a rational world, but one which has ceased being natural, overpopulated, and excessively hierarchical, and one in which the individual is alone. Everything is familiar, and Joseph K. discusses his “trial” with his landlady and a woman living in the same boarding-house. But this commonplace universe is false since everything that happens is incomprehensible, and especially the orders or information—fragmentary—which subordinates transmit to him from unknown and unknowable authorities.3

In contrast to the exoteric allegories used to excess in medieval literature, The Trial and The Castle are esoteric myths. They correspond to the need for translating into artistic terms certain fundamental fears and enigmas associated with the human condition: the absence of Law or Justice to give meaning to life, the feeling of guilt to which this gives rise in man. Kafka rediscovered the secret which the votaries of enigmas had lost: that the presentation of an enigma must itself remain enigmatic, ambiguous.

It follows that these texts, which are not the allegory of a doctrine but the allegory of an enigma, cannot be explained. They are indeed esoteric, in the sense that to study them with a view to finding one interpretation will always be childish. They are designed to provoke successively every possible interpretation even as each of these interpretations—and their sum as well—remains inadequate. As for a privileged, definitive interpretation, this does not exist for the simple reason that Kafka was not familiar with it and wrote these very texts only to show that it was not to be found.

Thus the most that we can do is to recall the sources and comparisons revealed by literary history or by the ingenuity and partiality of those who have examined these myths. Kafka’s witness, his friend Max Brod, sees the inaccessible castle as the mystery of God’s rule and divine grace; The Trial as a symbol of impenetrable divine justice. These interpretations are not false and seem to be almost too obvious; the only trouble is that they try to illuminate what Kafka sought deliberately to present as an insoluble enigma. But the themes of justice and divine grace are actually the themes of the Cabala, which Kafka had thoroughly assimilated.

When John Kelly interprets the two great Kafkan allegories as eschatological novels dealing with the relations between man and God, he adopts the same principle of interpretation as Max Brod. To this he joins an interesting comparison with the Calvinistic theologian Karl Barth: for Kafka as for Barth, human life cannot be a path to God; that is why it remains absurd and chaotic.

Man is not saved through his works; he must be “called,” elected, chosen, and the anguish of Kafkan heroes is the fear, the near certainty of not participating in this election. Practically unknown in France at the beginning of the twentieth century, Karl Barth was more renowned than Bergson in the Germanic countries (and surprisingly, in Spain). It is possible, therefore, that Kafka had read or studied him and been exposed to some degree to his influence. But this hypothetical source and this startling comparison do not justify the assertion that Kafka’s work is a deliberate expression of Calvinistic theology.

Many other interpretations, less spiritualistic but equally striking, have been advanced: the impression of malediction and absurdity that lies heavy on the heroes of the two novels could be the symbolic expression, by way of a refined, nervous sensibility, of the feeling of oppression caused by sickness and the death sentence which it entails. A socioeconomic interpretation also is possible: K. and Joseph K. wander and wrangle miserably in a bureaucratic world typified by middle-class society as it appears to a petty employee; Kafka has simply translated into hallucinatory terms the picture of the world’s insignificant bureaucrat. Finally, in the heroes who are invisibly persecuted in The Trial and The Castle, and treated as culprits even though no count of indictment has been produced—in these individuals who are subjected to vexations which they discuss but against which they seem to be unable to revolt—one can identify the Jew who dares not and cannot reclaim his rights, inured to arbitrariness, trying to adjust to his situation without causing an uproar, patiently exhausting details, resigned in the face of an unjust principle.

But those are only sources and comparisons: explanations which make the common mistake of purporting individually to be exclusive or primordial. Moreover, against this rationalism which requires one definitive explanation, art on the one hand and esoterism on the other—the very elements joined together in Kafka—have always set creations and myths which are governed by the principle that they mirror reality and may be explained in several different ways.

Thus the great Kafkan allegories are not interpretations of existence; they are the very images of existence.

The problem of the meaning of life cannot be said to have a solution. More exactly, and worse still, its meaning has never been stated precisely. There are insoluble equations; but there are also even more important instances of equations that cannot be stated.

Philosophers make the mistake of trying to formulate the equation which will enable them to discover the meaning of life, then they become less self-centered and realize that their equation has no roots. After Kierkegaard and the negative mystics, Kafka contributes something to philosophy and corrects it: he does not show that the problem is insoluble but only that it cannot be clearly stated. And that is in all probability the true subject of The Trial and The Castle.

This attitude, which might roughly be termed the “reduction to the absurd” of a problem that cannot be formulated, and which in Kafka assumes the artistic form—that is, a pathetic and nonphilosophical form—had existed in what was called “negative theology” which began with Origen, later found expression in Pseudo-Dionysius, then in Meister Eckhart. It consisted, very roughly, in exploring the mystery of the Divinity, and since we cannot know what God is, in defining everything that God is not, obviously in order to arrive at a void-plenum which is our powerlessness to know God and our awareness of his unknowable fullness.

Kafka reacts in the same way in the presence of another mystery, the mystery of the meaning of existence. This problem is more modern in the sense that, after Meister Eckhart, problems descended from Heaven to earth. In an allegorical fable (pleading a case, trying to reach a castle where a job is to be performed) Kafka’s heroes search for the meaning and logic of existence only to discover interminably that it has none which can be stated summarily and simply. He defines the value and logic of life in terms of what they are not, knowing that what they are is undiscoverable, indefinable, forever in question. “It is incumbent on us still to study the negative; we are already given the positive.”4 No true mystic, regardless of his religion, has ever done anything else (except in the case of “apparitions”).

The meaning of life—a modern problem—here is posed as the medieval mystery of knowledge of God was posed for clerics and mystics: by eliminating false solutions, until one comes to grips with the absurd, with anguish. It happens that Kafka was intimately acquainted with Meister Eckhart as well as with the Jewish Cabala, which for the most part is at the root of negative theology.

It is one of the mysteries of literary creation—of literary prophetism, we should say—that representative geniuses appear unexpectedly in a given epoch. The Kafkan universe delineated in The Trial and The Castle seems to be the a posteriori expression of the period of confusion that began at the end of World War I and ended as Julien Green was writing The Closed Garden and Midnight, and Graham Greene The Man Within.

Yet Julien Green and Graham Greene were Kafkans without knowing it. And it was not in 1927 that Kafka—he was already dead—discovered the absurd and the fantastic which were to seem to the men of 1927 like the revelation of their own anguish and the emptiness of the world: he had made his discovery in 1913. Historically, Kafka was inspired not by the expressionist generations, after 1920, but by the generation of post-naturalists, pessimists or symbolists, around 1900 and earlier. This generation combines the dark, fantastic elements remotely inspired by German romanticism, the exacerbation of Strindberg, and the anguish of Dostoevsky. Renato Poggioli quotes the page from The Idiot that anticipates Kafka. It is the passage in which the dying Hippolytus is obsessed by the vision of Holbein’s “Dead Christ.”

In this painting one sees nature as a huge beast, mute and pitiless, or, more exactly, as a tall machine, of the most modern construction, which, sad and insensible, has ceaselessly pounded, crushed, and devoured a great precious Being.… This painting involuntarily expresses and suggests a somber, insolent, unreasonable, and eternal Power to which everything is subjected.5

The first piece of luck in Kafka’s literary fortune was that at the moment of his discovery, around 1925, at the exact moment when for the first time in centuries all “positive values” as such were looked upon with suspicion in literature, Kafka chanced to sum up, gather together, crystallize in a very personal and even involuntary synthesis all the negative qualities, all the anguish, all the “other side” of reality and life that others had sensed, without yet attaching a primordial importance to them, in Pascal, William Blake, Kierkegaard, Sénancour, Kleist, Dostoevsky, etc. The mythology elaborated secretly or timidly by a sick man who would never have dreamed of playing a significant, logical, deliberate role in the history of literature happened to provide a focus for the recombination of convergent and divergent rays. Before Kafka, sporadic, indefinite, exceptional anguish in the face of the fact that human activity does not justify the life of man. After Kafka, by contrast, implicit acceptance of this principle by practically every writer.

Kafka was not responsible for passage from one era to the other, and it was not his influence that was felt. But he “chanced” to be there to express mysteriously this optical conversion, just as it was on the point of becoming a general phenomenon independent of him.

His success was certain but slow. His work, posthumous for the most part, corresponded exactly to the evolution of literary sensibility, but the public had to become conscious of this evolution before consecrating him as their witness, catalyst, or symbol. The great allegories were not published in Germany until 1925 and 1926, a year or two after the writer’s death. In 1925 the Revista de Occidente introduced “The Metamorphosis.” In 1928 a few partial translations were published in Italy and France (Il Convengo, La Nouvelle Revue Française). The Castle appeared in England and the United States in 1930; The Trial was translated into French, Italian, and Norwegian in 1933. In 1938 the three or four great works were diffused: “The Metamorphosis,” and Amerika, for example, reached Argentina, thanks to Guillermo de Torre. Kafka’s revelation was still limited, however, to small groups. Not until after the war was Kafka universally translated, known, discussed, and transformed into a literary myth. In 1945 the weekly newspaper Action indicted him under the caption “Must Kafka Be Burned?” The writer charged that Kafka seems to represent a metaphysical anguish which contributes nothing toward the construction of a new, logical world.

Then it was discovered throughout the world that Kafka had been the herald of the “absurd sensibility” which was asserting itself fifteen or twenty years after his death. Written in 1914, “In the Penal Colony” anticipates the deportation camps of 1943. “The Judgment” and “Letter to His Father” (1919) seem to express the exasperation of 1920-1930, the revolt against authority, the mythical assassination of the father which had its distant source in Freud and was transformed into a literary theme by Herman Ungar (Children and Murderers, 1920), Walter Hasenclever (The Son, 1916), Jakob Wassermann (The Maurizius Affair, 1928). And the world of darkness and imprisonment, of administrative absurdity and fatality evoked in The Trial and The Castle, did not exist for the common consciousness of men or for literary sensibility before the coming of the police state, arrests at dawn, skillful interrogations, forced confessions.

Like all other prophetic writers, Kafka seems to speak of the period that comes after him. In this sense it is difficult to attribute to Kafka’s “Influence” all of the Kafkan themes that have forced themselves upon us between 1924 and today. To be sure, superficial comparisons can be drawn between his work and diverse surrealistic works, especially insofar as surrealism also envisioned another side of the world. The works of Michel Leiris and Henri Michaux (who came after surrealism) also reveal a cruel, mechanical world. Monsieur Plume involuntarily recalls Kafka’s first sketch, for here life is also chopped up in tiny pieces and man is brainwashed, as in “Description of a Struggle” or “In the Penal Colony.” Maja Goth points up clearly the similarity between the torture machine in “In the Penal Colony” and the machine in Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors.6

Leaving aside Jean Ferry who writes in the style of Kafka, openly and as his avowed disciple (Kafka or the Secret Society, The Chinese Astrologer, etc.), we cannot fail to discover a Kafkan atmosphere, Kafkan techniques, or a design quite similar to Kafka’s in books such as Armand Hoog’s The Accident or Gilles Rosset’s The Idle Kings.

Dino Buzzati’s The Desert of the Tartars seems to return to the theme of The Castle, which is taken up once again in Julien Gracq’s The Strands of Syrtes. The two worlds of Rex Warner’s The Aerodrome—the village and the aerodrome—are reminiscent of the contrast between the village and the castle in Kafka’s work; in Warner’s novel, however, the allegory is more clearly drawn and defined, leaving no shadows or ambiguities. Similarly, Dino Buzzati’s allegory is more poetic and more lyrical (Barnabo in the Mountains, The Secret of Bois-Vieux). With The Almighty and Death Sentence Maurice Blanchot—though his style is more distorted—plunges consciousness into a state of absurdity more caustic than Kafkan incoherence, which dissolves everything. In his powerful, gripping dramas Samuel Beckett has depicted God’s absence from the world and man’s anguish in the face of loneliness and unrequited expectation. The inanity of human conversation in the face of mysteries that transcend expression is the theme of Ionesco. And why not cite the squalid universe of Paul Gegauff (Rebus), Pinget (Baga), the Michaux-type madness of Sternberg (The Employee), which carried the analysis of the absurd to the extreme by giving a new direction to the techniques of science fiction? This would bring us to the more precise labor of Nathalie Sarraute (Martereau, The Planetarium).

Then, having passed from analogy to analogy, we discover that we have been playing a dangerous game, for Nathalie Sarraute’s intention is almost the direct opposite of Kafka’s. Thus the practice of drawing analogies under the pretext of searching for influences must be viewed with suspicion. Kafka did inspire imitations, whether acknowledged or disguised, as we have already noted. He may provide his imitators with a setting which, on the whole, is readily adaptable (an incoherent, labyrinthine world) or with a problem (the absence of Law and God).

Some writers have managed to transform these themes into procedures: the result has been artificial imitations. Some writers have been influenced involuntarily: for example, Saint-Exupéry by Nietzsche and Claudel by the Bible (only literary history will tell whether this is true of Buzzati and Gracq). Some writers—and this happens most frequently—have found themselves sincerely alone and naked, and have experienced the same moment of literary sensibility that Kafka experienced: this is obviously the case of Julien Green, who certainly has never copied Kafka.

Strangely enough, a problem of this kind (“Did such-and-such an author imitate Kafka, or does he resemble Kafka for other reasons?”) is never resolved by scholars until a hundred years after the death of the author in question. And, at the moment, it remains insoluble. The first chapter of Kafka’s Amerika and all of Camus’ The Stranger seem to have been written by the same author, with the same mixture of human warmth, the same brutal objectivity in narration, the same strength and the same apparent artlessness, almost the same intention. And yet the question cannot be resolved for a hundred years.…

It is impossible for us, contemporaries (in time) of Kafka’s contemporaries (in spirit), to define his influence, which will be the subject of a thesis in the year 2000. Without resolving special cases, we can only determine and measure the huge, powerful shadow which Kafka—who was, moreover, a sickly human being afflicted with a complex—projects on our literary life, our thoughts, our sensibilities.

It is as if a privileged sensibility had had a presentiment of a period of history. If from our era the twenty-second century retained the work of Kafka but did not know the details of his life, birth, or death, future encyclopedias would contain this information:

Czech writer of works in German, probably born around 1915, died almost certainly after World War II. Fragmentary and unfinished, his work nevertheless constitutes a continuous allegory of metaphysical confusion, human despair, and the historical and political persecutions that characterize the period 1933-1956. Like Albert Camus, who inspired him, Franz Kafka expresses himself through symbols and myths of alienation. “In a Penal Colony” clearly despicts life in a concentration camp in 1942, and The Trial describes the harsh police-state measures to which the Czechs were subjected after 1939. Historical inspirations are fused with an ontological theme: the solitude of man in a world without laws. In this sense Kafka was clearly inspired by Julien Green (born in 1900), Graham Greene (born in 1902), Jean-Paul Sartre (born in 1905), and especially Albert Camus, barely his senior (born in 1913).

Everything which seems strange in our hypothetical example also points to the strangeness of Kafka. It is by virtue of his strangeness that he has made such a profound impression on us that we no longer see in him anything except the myth to which he dedicated his work and his life.

NOTES

1.  Préparatifs de noce à la campagne.

2.  J. -P. Sartre, Situations, I (Paris: Gallimard, 1947).

3.  Herman Uyttersprot (Revue de Langues vivantes, No. 42, Brussels, 1953) thinks that a part of the “absurdity” of The Trial is involuntary. He attributes this to the incompleteness of the work and to the fact that Max Brod shuffled the chapters, which could be more logically arranged. This theory is ingenious but without great significance, for the “absurd” is not restricted to The Trial.

4.  Notebooks, November 18, 1917.

5.  Renato Poggioli, in The Kafka Problem, edited by Angel Flores (New York, 1946), p. 106.

6.  Maja Goth, Franz Kafka et les lettres françaises (José Corti, 1955).

CHRONOLOGY OF IMPORTANT DATES

1883, July 3

Franz Kafka is born in Prague, in a house on the corner of Karpfengasse and Maisegasse.

German studies in the elementary school in the Masnytrh (Fleischmarkt), then the Staromestké, the best German secondary school in Prague. (One of his schoolmates is Hugo Bergmann, future rector of the University of Jerusalem; his professors are Paul Kisch and Emil Utitz.) He lives with his family at 36 Niklasstrasse (today Parizska), then on the corner of Niklasstrasse and Staromestké Namesti (Old Town Square) near his father’s place of business on the same avenue, in the Palais Kinsky.

1901

Begins his studies in law. Brief stay in Munich.

1902

Beginnings of friendship with Oscar Pollak (the future historian of Baroque art) and Max Brod. Summer in Liboch, then in Zuckmantel.

1906

Receives his doctorate in Jurisprudence (June 18, at the University of Prague). Summer in Triesch with his uncle, Dr. Siegfried Löwy.

1907

First literary works (“Description of a Struggle,” “Preparations for a Wedding in the Country,” etc.). Is mentioned by Max Brod in the Berlin weekly Die Gegenwart.

Takes a position (in October) with the Assicurazioni Generali.

1908

Leaves the Assicurazioni Generali to work half time in a semi-governmental position (Workmen’s Accident Insurance Company). Makes fair copies of his first stories.

1909

Two sections from “Description of a Struggle” published in Hyperion, Franz Blei’s journal. Vacation on the Italian lakes with Max Brod.

1910

Begins to keep his Diary.

In October, first trip to Paris with Max Brod.

1911

Many trips—to East Prussia, Switzerland, northern Italy, Paris.

1912

Begins Der Verschollene (“The Boy Who Was Never More Heard Of,” the first sketch of the work published posthumously as Amerika); “The Judgment” and “The Metamorphosis.”

Summer at Weimar and in the Harz Mountains. On August 13, he meets F. B., “the girl from Berlin.”

1913

Betrachtung (in English, the chapter “Meditation” in The Penal Colony published by Rowohlt, followed (in May) by the first chapter of Amerika (“The Stoker”), published by Kurt Wolf.

Trips to Vienna, Venice, Riva (in September, at the Hartungen Sanatorium, a brief romance with a Swiss girl).

1914

Engagement in Berlin to F. B., followed by their first break (“I was bound like a criminal”).

Trips to northern Germany.

Beginnings of The Trial and The Penal Colony. Friendship with Franz Werfel and Dr. Weiss.

Declaration of war (Kafka, a civil servant, is not subject to the draft).

1915

Again meets F. B.

Travels in Hungary.

In October, receives the Fontane Prize for “The Stoker” (following the withdrawal of Sternheim).

1916

Changes of residence. From Kilkova and Dloudha Trida, Kafka moves to Ulicka, in Prague.

Vacation at Marienbad, with F. B.

Conference in Munich in November. Writes “A Country Doctor.”

1917

Moves to Alchymistengasse, then to the Palais Schönborn. New engagement to F. B., followed by a new break.

Tuberculosis (first attack of blood-spitting in the month of August) and sick leave.

Studies Hebrew and reads Kierkegaard. Publishes “Two Animal Stories.”

1918

Long sojourn in Zürau, then Prague. Writes “Aphorisms” and “The Bucket-Rider”; begins “The Great Wall of China.”

1919

Completes A Country Doctor, published by Kurt Wolf, and The Penal Colony. In Schelesen, writes Letter to His Father (November).

1920-1921

Vacation and treatment in Merano; affair with Milena Jesenská. Winter in a sanatorium in the Tatra Mountains. First draft of The Castle.

1922

Sojourn in Prague and on the Baltic.

1923

Meets Dora Dymant, who will never leave him, in Müritz.

In Berlin, begins “The Burrow,” “Josephine the Singer,” “Investigations of a Dog,” “A Hunger Artist.”

1924

Max Brod brings Kafka back to Prague. Dora Dymant’s father refuses to give his consent to her marriage.

Dying, Kafka goes from clinic to sanatorium: the Wiener Wald, Hajek’s clinic, then the sanatorium in Kierling, where he dies on June 3. Burial in Prague, in the Jewish cemetery of Straschnitz.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EDITIONS OF KAFKA’S COMPLETE WORKS

Gesammelte Werke, ed. Max Brod; Briefe an Milena, ed. Willy Haas. 9 vols. Frankfort: Fischer, 1946-1958.

Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Max Brod. Berlin: Schocken, 1934 (vols. I—IV). Prague: Mercy, 1936-1937 (Vols. V, VI).

RECENT BIBLIOGRAPHIES OF KAFKA

Beebee, Maurice and Naomi Christensen. “Criticism of Franz Kafka.” Modern French Studies, VIII (1962), 80-100.

Benson, Ann Thornton. “Franz Kafka: An American Bibliography.” Bulletin of Bibliography, XXII (1958), 112-114.

Flores, Angel, “Bibliographical Index of the Works Available in English and Biography and Criticism: A Bibliography,” in Franz Kafka Today, ed. Angel Flores and Homer Swander. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1958. Pp. 215-285.

Politzer, Heinz. “Bibliography,” in Franz Kafka—Parable and Paradox. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1962. Pp. 367-371.

BOOKS IN ENGLISH

Brod, Max. Franz Kafka: A Bibliography, trans. by G. Humphreys

Roberts and Richard Winston. New York: Schocken Books Inc., 1947. 2nd ed., 1960.

Goodman, Paul. Kafka’s Prayer. New York: 1947.

Gray, Ronald, ed. Kafka: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood

Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1962.

Heller, Erich, The Disinherited Mind. London: 1952.

Janouch, Gustav, Conversations with Kafka, trans. by Goronwy

Rees. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., 1953.

Neider, C., Kafka; His Mind and Art. New York: Oxford University Press, 1949.

Politzer, Heinz. Franz Kafka—Parable and Paradox. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962.

Rhein, Phillip H., The Urge to Live: A Comparative Study of Franz Kafka’s Der Prozess and Albert Camus’ L’Etranger. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964.

Russell, F., Three Studies in Twentieth Century Obscurity. New York: Dufour, 1963.

Spilka, Mark, Dickens and Kafka: A Mutual Interpretation. Blooming ton: Indiana University Press, 1963.

Tauber, Herbert, Franz Kafka; An Interpretation of His Works, trans. by G. Humphreys Roberts and Roger Senhouse. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948.

ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS (SELECTED LIST)

In addition to longer works such as The Trial, Kafka wrote more than a half hundred shorter works. Most of these were published by the author in collections which took their titles from the first story. Translations into English were rarely based on his formula, with the result that chronology has rarely been respected. The titles below are grouped according to the order in which the works were completed or, if the details are not known, in the order of their publication.

1906

“Description of a Struggle,” in Description of a Struggle, trans. by Tania and James Stern. New York: Schocken Books, Inc., 1958. Also contains “Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor,” “The Warden of the Tomb,” “The Refusal,” and “Short Pieces” (“Poseidon,” “The Vulture,” “The Departure,” “Give it Up!,” “At Night,” “The Helmsman,” “The Top,” “The Test,” “Advocates,” “Homecoming,” “Fellowship,” Fragment of “A Report to an Academy,” Fragment of “The Great Wall of China,” “The Conscription of Troops,” Fragment of “The Hunter Gracchus”).

1909

“Preparations for a Wedding in the Country,” published under the title “Wedding Preparations in the Country,” in Dearest Father, trans. by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins. New York: Schocken Books, Inc., 1948. Dearest Father also includes “Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope, and the True Way”; “The Eight Octavo Notebooks”; “Letter to His Father”; “Fragments from Notebooks and Loose Pages”; and “Paralipomena.”

1910-1913

The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910-1913, ed. Max Brod, trans. by Joseph Kresh. New York: Schocken Books, Inc., 1948.

1913

“Meditation,” in The Penal Colony, trans. by Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: Schocken Books, Inc., 1948. “Meditation” includes eighteen short pieces (“Children on a Country Road,” “Unmasking a Confidence Trickster,” “The Sudden Walk,” “Resolutions,” “Excursion into the Mountains,” “Bachelor’s Ill Luck,” “The Tradesman,” “Absent-minded Window-Gazing,” “The Way Home,” “Passers-by,” “On the Tram,” “Clothes,” “Rejection,” “Reflections for Gentlemen-Jockeys,” “The Street Window,” “The Wish to be a Red Indian,” “The Trees,” “Unhappiness”).

The Penal Colony also contains “Conversation with the Supplicant”; “The Judgment”; “The Metamorphosis”; “A Country Doctor” (“The New Advocate,” “A Country Doctor,” “Up in the Gallery,” “An Old Manuscript,” “Before the Law,” “Jackals and Arabs,” “A Visit to a Mine,” “The Next Village,” “An Imperial Message,” “The Cares of a Family Man,” “Eleven Sons,” “A Fratricide,” “A Dream,” “A Report to an Academy,” “The Bucket Rider”); “In the Penal Colony,” “A Hunger Artist” (“First Sorrow,” “A Little Woman,” “A Hunger Artist,” “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk”). An “Appendix” includes “The First Long Train Journey,” written in collaboration with Max Brod; “The Aeroplanes at Brescia,” translated by G. Humphreys Roberts; and “Three Critical Pieces” (“A Novel about Youth,” “On Kleist’s ‘Anecdotes,’” “Hyperion”), translated by Clement Greenberg.

1913

“The Stoker,” first chapter in Amerika, trans. by Edwin Muir. New York: New Directions, 1946.

1914-1923

The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1914-1923, ed. Max Brod, trans. by Joseph Kresh. New York: Schocken Books, Inc., 1949.

1916

“The Metamorphosis,” published in The Penal Colony. “The Judgment,” published in The Penal Colony.

1919

“Letter to His Father,” published in Dearest Father, trans. by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins.

“In the Penal Colony,” published in The Penal Colony.

1920-1921

Letters to Milena, trans. by Tania and James Stern. New York: Schocken Books, Inc., 1953.

1924

“A Hunger Artist,” published in The Penal Colony.

1925

The Trial, trans. by Willa and Edwin Muir and E. M. Butler.

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1957.

1926

The Castle, trans. by Willa and Edwin Muir, Eithne Wilkins, and Ernst Kaiser. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1954.

1927

Amerika, trans. by Edwin Muir. New York; New Directions, 1946.

1931

The Great Wall of China, trans. by Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: Schocken Books, Inc., 1946. Includes “Investigations of a Dog,” “The Burrow,” “The Great Wall of China,” “The Giant Mole,” “The Hunter Gracchus,” “The Married Couple,” “My Neighbor,” “A Common Confusion,” “The Bridge,” “The Bucket Rider,” “A Sport,” “The Knock at the Manor Gate,” “The City Coat of Arms,” “The Silence of the Sirens,” “Prometheus,” “The Truth about Sancho Panza,” “The Problem of Our Laws,” “On Parables,” “A Little Fable,” and “Aphorisms” (“He,” and “Reflections on Sin, Pain, Hope, and the True Way”).

RECENT ARTICLES IN ENGLISH (SELECTED LIST)

Baumgaertel, Gerhard, “Franz Kafka: Transformation for Clarity.” Revue des langues vivantes, XXVI (1960), 266-283.

Beebe, Maurice, and Naomi Christensen. “Criticism of Franz Kafka: A Selected Checklist.” Modern Fiction Studies, VIII (1962), 80-100. Collins, Hildegard Platzer, “Kafka’s Views of Institutions and Traditions.” German Quarterly, XXXV (1962), 492-503.

Deinert, H. “Kafka’s Parable ‘Before the Law.’” German Review, XXXIX (1964), 192-200.

Foulkes, A. P. “Dream Pictures in Kafka’s Writings.” Germanic Review, XL (1965), 17-30.

Freedman, Ralph, “Kafka’s Obscurity: The Illusion of Logic in Narrative.” Modern Fiction Studies, VIII (1962), 61-74.

Freidman, Maurice, “The Modern Job: On Melville, Dostoievsky, and Kafka.” Judaism, XII (1963), 436-455.

Glaser, Frederick B., “The Case of Franz Kafka.” Psychoanalytic Review, LI (1964), i, 99-121.

Greenberg, Martin. “The Literature of Truth: Kafka’s Judgement.” Salmagundi, I (1965), 4-22.

Gunvaldsen, K. M. “Franz Kafka and Psychoanalysis.” University of Toronto Quarterly, XXXII (1963), 266-281.———“The Plot of Kafka’s Trial.” Monatshefte, LVI (1964), 14.

Kartiganer, Donald M. “Job and Joseph K.: Myth in Kafka’s The Trial.” Modern Fiction Studies, VIII (1962), 31-43.

Lesser, Simon O. “The Source of Guilt and the Sense of Guilt: Kafka’s The Trial.” Modern Fiction Studies, VIII (1962), 44-60.

St. Leon, R. “Religious Motives in Kafka’s Der Prozess: Some Textual Notes.” Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association, No. 19 (1963), pp. 21-38.

Spahr, Blake Lee, “Franz Kafka: The Bridge and the Abyss.” Modern Fiction Studies, VIII (1962), 3-15.

Spilka, Mark, “Dickens and Kafka: The Technique of the Grotesque.’” Minnesota Review, I (1961), 441-458.

Steinhaur, Harry, “Hungering Artist or Artist in Hungering: Kafka’s ‘A Hunger Artist.’” Criticism, IV (1962) 28-43.

Stern, J. P., “Franz Kafka: Labyrinth of Guilt.” Critical Quarterly, VII (1965), 35-47.

Turner, Alison, “Kafka’s Two Worlds of Music”, Monatshefte, LV (1963), 265-276.

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Альберес Рене Мориль Kafka. The Torment of Man