The Shame

 

Kafka’s diaries cover the period from 1911 to 1923, but he was seen scribbling in notebooks as early as 1898. Relatives came for a visit. They had coffee while the boy sat in his corner, chewing on his pen and writing. Somebody asked: “What is he writing?” An uncle took away the notebook from under the boy’s hand and looked. “Oh nothing. The usual stuff” (Diaries 1/19/1911).

Franz was hurt, he never forgot the remark, but the earliest piece of unprinted work - the “Description of a Struggle” - is still an example for a writer with nothing to say but jerking it off: “Childish games, I deliberately cultivated a facial tic, or would walk across the ditch with arms crossed behind my head. My writing began the same way” (Diaries 1/24/1922). That’s how it begins with everybody and by 1915 this at last earned Kafka the Theodor Fontane Award - 800 Reichsmark, a considerable sum. He was as eager as every other author to get published. The habitually irreverent Bertolt Brecht, too, expressed respect in his reviews.

So it would be wrong to think Kafka didn’t receive any recognition. He did, just not from the person that mattered most to him.

At home there was little support for his artistic ambitions. He had three sisters - Elli, Valli and the youngest, Ottilie or “Ottla.” “My sisters were only partly on my side. Elli when she was a child was such a clumsy, tired, timid, bad-tempered, guilt-ridden, over-meek, malicious, lazy, greedy, miserly child, I could hardly bring myself to look at her, certainly not to speak to her, so much did she remind me of myself. But all this changed when, at an early age - this is the most important thing - she left home, married, had children, and became cheerful, carefree, brave, generous, unselfish, and hopeful” (Letter to the Father).

Ottla was Kafka’s favorite sister and his staunchest supporter and ally against the father. Unlike her brother she knew how to hold her own and took nonsense from nobody. “You simply can't talk to her at all, she flies straight in your face," said the father, and it was she who between 1915 and 1917 rented for Franz a studio in 22 Alchemist Lane in Prague’s Castle District. It was the first place he had for himself and Kafka could write undisturbed well into the grey hours of the morning.

Up until then he had lodged with the family in Number three Celetna Street, where the window of his room opened to a small lane “across from a dress shop, where a shop girl always used to stand in the door. There I was in my room, just a little past my twentieth birthday, incessantly passing back and forth, busy cramming for the bar exam, trying to memorize material that made no sense to me whatsoever. It was summer, very hot at the time, altogether unbearable. I kept stopping at the window, the disgusting Roman law clenched between my teeth, and finally we managed to communicate by sign language" (Letter to Max Brod). The sordid beginning for many more sordid one night stands with barmaids, waitresses, and shop girls.

They left their traces in his novels and the diary: “He seduced a girl in a small place in the Iser mountains. After a brief effort to persuade her, he threw the girl - his landlord’s daughter who liked to walk with him in the evening after work - down in the grass on the river bank and took her as she lay there unconscious with fright. Later he had to carry water from the river in his cupped hands to pour it over the girl’s face to restore her. The simple girl who lay before him, now breathing regularly again, her eyes still closed because of fear and embarrassment, could make no difficulty for him; with the tip of his toe, he, the great, strong person, could push the girl aside. She was weak and plain, could what happened to her have any significance that would last even until tomorrow? Would not anyone who compared the two of them come to this conclusion?” (Diraries 3/12/1012). Most of Kafka’s women are depicted as sluts and easy prey.

“A nondescript little blonde with sad features, thin cheeks, and a surprising gaze, a gaze of exceptional superiority. When this gaze descended on K., it seemed to him to be the gaze that had already decided matters concerning him, whose existence he himself still knew nothing about, but of whose existence that gaze now convinced him. K. kept watching Frieda from the side even while she spoke with Olga” (The Castle, trans. Mark Haman).

Frieda is the girl behind the bar in the tap-room and she is the mistress of Klamm, one of the lower ranking stewards in the castle. Only hours later the new arrival and the girl are rolling on the floor under the counter. “Her small body was burning in K’s hands; they rolled a few paces in an unconscious state from which K. repeatedly but in vain tried to rescue himself, bumped against Klamm’s door, and then lay in the small puddles of beer and other rubbish which littered the floor. And as though Frieda had been fortified by K’s consent, she clenched her fist, knocked on the door, and cried “I’m with the surveyor. I’m with the surveyor.”

This was not what ‘K.’ had intended. “K. rose, knelt beside Frieda, and looked about in the dull early morning light. What had just happened? Where were his hopes? What could be expected from Frieda, now that all was betrayed” (The Castle).

Not surprising, once she looked through this conman, Frieda is going to jilt ‘K.’ for one of his assistants, after, thanks to ‘K.’ she had lost her employment and reputation. But ‘K.’ isn’t running short of women. There is Olga to fall back on, Amalia, and Pepi. “For a moment he had to cover his eyes, so lecherously was he staring at her” (The Castle). In “The Trial,” we read of this Fraulein, a mysterious Miss ‘Bürstner.' The protagonist - ‘Joseph K.’ - has a crush on her. The name derives from the verb "bürsten" - German for "brushing" - which in German is also a vulgar euphemism for sexual intercourse. And this is no coincidence. There is sex all over the place.

‘Joseph K.’ is starting an affair with his attorney's maid on the very first consultation, right under her employer's nose; shabbily dressed judges simply carry away women into their chambers; in the painter’s studio, the king-sized bed barely leaves space for anything else, and you hear the painter's models giggle in the background.

The "Trial" is the most guilt-stricken of Kafka’s stories, even more so, than the “Metamorphosis.” From scene to scene the shadows thicken. “Uneasy he looked around; the light of the candle fell far short of the opposite wall. And indeed something began to stir in the corner. His uncle lifted the candle higher, and in the light, an older gentleman could be seen sitting by a little table.” He “arose laboriously, apparently displeased that he had been brought to their attention. It seemed as if he wanted to wave off all greetings and introductions with his hands, which he flapped like little wings, as if he wished by no means to disturb the others by his presence, imploring them to return him once more to darkness, to forget his presence” (The Trial, trans. Breon Mitchell).

This apparition in chiaroscuro is supposed to be the clerk of the court - but what kind of court one wonders? What court allows a capital verdict to be announced by proxy?

In the mystifying twilight of the Cathedral ‘Joseph K.’ is the only visitor, lured to the church under the pretense of a business appointment. The verdict is passed from the pulpit by a priest. After his pronouncement he steps down from the pulpit and turns out to be the most amiable person. The two discuss the parable “Before the Law.”

The parable tells of someone who wants nothing else so badly but access to the law and speaks of an “entrance assigned only” to this particular person. “I’m going now to close it” says the guard to the dying supplicant. Yet one should not isolate the story from its surrounding, and before speculating on the meaning of this, it helps to keep an eye on the novel’s running parallel between illicit sex and dingy justice. In 1912 the Viennese critic Karl Kraus (1874-1936) had published a series of essays under the title "The Chinese Wall."

Kraus was attacking Austria's legal system and spoke up against the harassment of prostitutes by the authorities. Kafka knew Kraus, he used to attend his public readings, so he might have picked up on the concluding phrase, I heard it on an old gramophone recording. From the top of his voice Kraus used to scream at his audience that “justice is a whore!" (which no doubt it is).

In Kafka’s book, the protagonist, ‘Joseph K.,’ is making polite conversation but shows only a superficial interest in the exegetic explanations of the friendly priest. An other indicator that Brod’s editing went astray. In the original order of the chapters, the novel opens with the protagonist visiting a club and socializing with senior figures of the establishment:“It consisted almost exclusively of judges, public prosecutors, and attorneys. ‘K.’ had been introduced into this company by the bank’s legal representative. He was soon acknowledged as an expert in business, and his views on such matters were accepted - though not without a touch of irony - as the final word. ‘K.’ had a good advisor at his side in Hasterer, the public prosecutor, who also drew closer to him as a friend” (The Trial). So the arrest, which Max Brod’s reshuffle of the chapters has placed at the beginning, should be the second chapter and it hits the protagonist with even greater force than in the novel’s present shape.

In Kafka's “Trial” the hearings convene in the strangest places, in attics and lofts, under the bare rafters of top floors, in the sub-tenancies of unfinished housing projects. The lower charges at these conventions are beggarly and sly, and you never know whether your friendly janitor is not one of them.

It is the fantasy out of a nightmare, neither resembling the Brazilian death squads nor the institutional terror of a totalitarian state. And it is some sort of justice after all. The “Trial’s” protagonist is a haughty character, not untypical for a senior manager on the climb. A sharp dresser, who moves with ease in the company of chief administrators, and CEOs. ‘Joseph K.’ works in the head office of a bank. He has competitors in the hierarchy and the trial begins to sap his strength. There was a time when he commanded the time of his clients; now, at the sight of him, they pull up the brief case under their arm a little tighter, and their shoes point in an angle towards the exit; the bank’s vice president quite literally is pitching camp on the tabletop of ‘Joseph K’s’ desk.

In the era of Stalin and McCarthy it became fashionable to read into Kafka's novels a brooding indictment against oppression and persecution. In the book ‘Joseph K.’ is never told the charges, yet, in keeping with his character, something quite reasonable seems to be expected, a change of heart perhaps, or a sign for redeeming humility. ‘Joseph K.’ is as disgusting as the Insect in the Metamorphosis.

He is bound to lose the trial, because he is guilty in the full sense of the word. A maggot living in the cheese. Like all of Kafka’s novels, the "Trial" is an unfinished fragment, in which even the order of chapters is still a matter for debate. This is even more the case with the Castle. When I read this book for the first time, I, too, noticed of course the indifference by the staff in the castle. From the outset it is a struggle just to get their attention. The protagonist’s shenanigans leave everybody unimpressed, except for the women at the lower end. Max Brod’s editing seems to suggest a kind of “Pilgrim’s Progress” playing into the hands of Sartre’s bogus-philosophy. W.H. Auden in “The Dyer’s Hand” is asserting the opposite, that the castle, far from being a place of redemption, appears to be the nesting place for a horde of “Gnostic demons” (Auden). Apparently none of the critics cares that “K.” the surveyor, is a con-man, a trickster, who tries to wheedle his way into a community that has no actual need for a surveyor. “Surveyor, I see now that you will have to give up many fantasies before you can become a decent janitor” (The Castle).

So when the people in the castle unexpectedly honor this charade and even provide ‘K.’ with two assistants, they actually give him a chance. But “K.” is far from seeing this as an opportunity. He is too self-centered - a typical trait of protagonists in Kafka’s stories.

Instead, as mentioned, he is going to start the affair with Frieda, and after being jilted another affair, all of which makes it another example for Kafka’s very characteristic brew of illicit sex and dingy circumstances. Throughout the novel the protagonist’s self-esteem is riding high to the point of preposterous conceit; he rather identifies with members of the castle’s staff than with the lowly people who actually help him survive. But he has no qualms of exploiting them.

Like most of Kafka’s protagonists, this character is incapable of empathy. In Kafka’s books all the characters are ciphers in a context beyond individual comprehension, there is an element of allegory. In 1919 Kafka published the collection “A Country Doctor,” with the story of the “Eleven Sons.” In a letter to Max Brod, Kafka explains “The eleven sons are quite simply eleven stories I am working on this very moment.” A “Visit to the Mine” and “Josephine the Singer” are running self-commentaries in the form of allegories; it is the commentary of a storyteller. Even when he is commenting Kafka is telling stories, tales that are supposed to be self-explanatory in the only way that really expresses what the author means to say.

“If it could be paraphrased and ‘explained,’ then I wouldn’t need writing it,” says Samuel Becket (1906-1989) somewhere. It means the author himself is providing the key; interpretations are not supposed to be elicited from the rants of the diarist or some unguarded reply in exchanges over a beer. What an author means to say he says in public; at home he is a private person like everybody and his opinions are of no more significance than the fleas on my Jack Russell. It itches and Johnny scratches, pulling faces in the ecstasy of the moment. And that is that. Nobody is supposed to be looking.

But what Kafka managed to make public is clear enough. It was 1924 and Kafka was already on his deathbed when he corrected the galley proofs for a new collection: “A Hunger Artist.” The title story summarizes Kafka’s view on the modern artist’s social insignificance. It was the last thing Kafka was able to say. “During these last decades the interest in professional fasting has markedly diminished. It used to pay very well to stage such great performances under one’s own management, but today that is quite impossible. We live in a different world now” (The Hunger Artist, trans. Muir).

It is not just all about rejection.

“Only the one bar in my hands, how can I go on living?” says the trapeze artist in “First Sorrow.” Writing is a weird form of making a living. In the end the truth of the matter is rather simple: “I always wanted you to admire my fasting,” said the hunger artist. “We do admire it,” said the overseer, affably.” “But you shouldn’t admire it,” said the hunger artist.” “Well then we don’t admire it,” said the overseer, “but why shouldn’t we admire it?” “Because I have to fast, I can’t help it,” said the hunger artist. “What a fellow you are,” said the overseer, “and why can’t you help it? Because,” said the hunger artist, lifting his head a little and speaking with his lips pursed, as if for a kiss, right into the overseer’s ear, so that no syllable might be lost, “because I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself, like you or anyone else” (The Hunger Artist).

The abandoned manuscript of the “Castle” was Kafka’s most extensive exploration on the theme of the artist as a social parasite. A whole lifetime Kafka had written libel against his father’s disregard and in the end he had to admit defeat.

At one point Kafka was putting in a letter what he didn’t dare saying to his father’s face. “The aversion you naturally and immediately took to my writing was, for once, welcome to me. My vanity, my ambition did suffer under your soon proverbial way of hailing the arrival of my books: "Put it on my bedside table!" My writing was all about you; it was an intentionally long and drawn-out leave-taking from you. But how little all this amounted to! In the place where I lived I was spurned, condemned, fought to a standstill; and to escape to some other place was an enormous exertion, something that was, with small exceptions, unattainable for me.” (Letter to the Father, trans. Kaiser and Wilkins). Kafka’s mother made sure that nothing of this ever reached the addressee.

So what was the way out for Kafka? For a journalist it may be the next assignment in Zambia, but for the artist the only “way out; right or left, in any direction” (A Report to an Academy, trans. Muir) is the escape into fantasies. “America” or “The Missing” is the purest example. It sometimes matches Dickens in its intensity. Kafka himself considered the first chapter, later separately published as “The Stoker,” “a sheer imitation of Dickens” (Diaries 10/8/1917): “A cop who was just doing his rounds in the street, took in the shirt-sleeved man into his lowered gaze, and stopped. Robinson, also spotting the cop was foolish enough to call out to him from the other window, ‘it’s nothing, nothing at all,’ as though it were possible to shoo away a policeman like a fly.” The young Karl Rossmann eventually arrives in the “Theatre of Oklahoma,” a fantasy that should have put a smile on the face of Sigmund Freud.

“‘Karl,’ called one of the angels. Karl looked up, and was so pleasantly surprised he started to laugh. It was Fanny. ‘Fanny,’ he cried and waved up to her. ‘Come here!’ called Fanny, and she parted her robes, revealing her pedestal and a narrow flight of steps leading up. ‘Am I allowed to go up?’ asked Karl. Only now did Karl begin to grasp the size of America” (America, trans. Michael Hofmann). Yet like every of Kafka’s attempts at the novel, the book was doomed to fail from the start. Automatic writing doesn’t lend itself to the format. “This story, ‘The Verdict,’ I wrote in one sitting during the night of the 22-23rd, from ten o’clock at night to six o’clock in the morning. I was hardly able to pull my legs out from under the desk, they had got so stiff from sitting. The anxious strain and joy; how the story developed before me, as if I were walking on water. Several times in this night I carried my own weight on my back. How everything can be expressed, how for everything, the strangest fancies, there waits a great fire to perish and rise again. It turned blue outside the window. Two men walked across the bridge” (Diaries, 9/23/1912).

Much, if not all of the printed work had begun as an entry in the diaries and for Kafka writing in a state of trance was the only way to go about it. He was the Jackson Pollock of literature. (Remember? Jack the Dripper?) Yet one doesn’t write an entire novel in one sitting. The creative impetus ebbs and flows, “I only now and then began to write a few lines, because it tired me at once” (Diaries 1/19/1911).

A novelist better possesses the logistic ingenuity of Napoleon’s chief of staff, or of the author of “Peace and War.” Together with a touch of commercial acumen, and the skill to get on the good side of a publisher, this goes a long way towards having the damn thing published. The problem is, for a creative mind this can be too much to ask. That’s why we have authors, publishers, and critics. In an ideal world each would be trying to supplement what the other is lacking.

Unfortunately this world is far from ideal.

A critique is supposed to be serviceable for the blurb on the dust jacket, and dust jackets are meant to do the author’s PR. Since all we want is getting rich, this seems fair enough. But it puts the critic - who should be the reader’s advocate - in his true place as the publisher’s sales rep. After all what really is literature? Maybe it is indeed a free for all, and that’s why Kafka’s critics found it more interesting what they made of his stories, than what he actually had intended to say. Or literature is more of a “dispatch,” a note addressed to the world, in which case we better catch the author’s meaning. There is also another possibility, a somewhat spooky option, but it may be the truth. That stories are free floating organisms, messages in the bottle, drifting into the light of day out of the murky haze of the untold tales and unwritten poems which are enveloping our planet; a narrative limbo, whose denizens wait for all eternity to find the one voice that will speak for them. In which case the subject of “meaning” is a somewhat moot affair. What is the meaning of “Moby Dick?”

There are two types of imaginative literature. Stand-up routines and pieces that try to convey a story. Charles Dickens is definitely the prime-example for a stand-up comedian, and he and Shakespeare have this in common, that one reads them both mainly for their turn of phrase.

Kafka on the other hand was lacking any talent for stand-up. Mocking self-depreciation is the staple of wit in such performances, but Kafka’s circular rant is cloying and unfunny, the result of exhaustion after a night of writing in trance, like this: “I can understand the hesitation of my generation, indeed it is no longer mere hesitation; it is the thousandth forgetting of a dream dreamt a thousand times and forgotten a thousand times; and who can damn us merely for forgetting for the thousandth time? But I fancy I understand the hesitation of our forefathers too, we would probably have acted just as they did; indeed I can almost say: well for us that it was not we who had to take the guilt upon us, that instead we can hasten in almost guiltless silence toward death in a world darkened by others” (Investigations of a Dog, trans. Muir).

What Kafka really needed, was a typewriter.

Yet he wrote by hand, and if it didn’t pour out of him he felt no joy in writing. The more arid moments Kafka filled with writing letters. Some six hundred have reached us from his correspondence with Felice Bauer (1887-1960), his fiance from 1912 to 1917. The two engaged and separated twice, and when Kafka in 1919 announced his engagement to Julie Whoryzek (1891-1939), the daughter of a synagogue janitor and shoemaker, his father said he would have to sell the store and emigrate to escape this shame for the family name. It was the final insult in a long history of downers, and by now Kafka should have been used to it: “She probably put on a fancy blouse, something these Prague Jewesses are good at, and right away, of course, you decided to marry her. And that as fast as possible, in a week, tomorrow, today. I can’t understand you: after all, you're a grown man, you live in the city, and you don't know what to do but marry the first girl who comes along. Isn't there anything else you can do? If you're frightened, I'll go with you." (Letter to the Father). Kafka’s creative response was The Metamorphosis, The Verdict, and The Penal Colony.

“He went up to the explorer, pulled out the small leather wallet again, turned over the papers in it, found the one he wanted, and showed it to the explorer. ‘Read it,’ he said. ‘I can’t,’ said the explorer. ‘I told you earlier that I can’t make out these scripts.’ ‘Try taking a close look at it,’ said the officer and came quite near to the explorer so that they might read it together. But when even that proved useless, he outlined the script with his little finger, holding it high above the paper as if the surface dared not be sullied by touch, in order to help the explorer to follow the script in that way. The explorer did make an effort, meaning to please the officer in this respect at least, but he was quite unable to follow. Now the officer began to spell it, letter by letter, and then read out the words. ‘“Be just!” is what is written there,’ he said, surely you can read it now.’” (The Penal Colony, trans. Muir).

In the final analysis, all literature is a fantasy. “Fantasy” in exactly the sense sales assistants sort their merchandise on the bookshelves. But at times even Kafka could write with the sensibility of a lyricist and his work is driven by a purely linguistic impulse.

“Milena: what a rich, heavy name, almost too full to be lifted and in the beginning I didn’t like it much, it seemed to me a Greek or Roman gone astray in Bohemia, violated by Czech, cheated of its accent, and yet in color and form it is marvelously a woman, a woman you take into your arms and away from the world, away from the fire, and she presses herself willingly and trusting into your arms; only the strong accent on the ‘i’ is bad, doesn’t the name keep leaping away from you? Or is it perhaps only the leap into luck you make yourself under your burden?”

Judging by his letters to her, Milena Jesenska (1896-1944) was Kafka’s love of his life.

I guess every author has in the back of his mind a model, the last line of defense, the trench from which he will launch and go over the top, the benchmark for his own stylistic explorations. In Nabokov’s case, that seems to have been Andrej Belij. “Bent Sinister” is a not very successful attempt to emulate Belij’s “St. Petersburg” in English. Kafka used to quote to his friend Max Brod a sentence from Flaubert’s “Sentimental Education.” In my case it is Seneca. Not the philosopher, but his father, Seneca the Elder (BC. 54-39 AD.). In his “suasoria” I found this gem of declarative power in the lower key: “So the lad has slept with a whore! Too bad! You know, it happens at that age. He is young. Soon he is going to marry.”

For all his life Kafka hoped to write something “large and whole, well shaped from beginning to end; and it would be possible, calm and with open eyes to hear it read as the blood relation of a healthy story” (Diaries, 10/20/1911). And he did. My personal favorite is “A Country Doctor.” Kafka’s art had fully matured and he created a paradigm of modern literature.

“I was in great perplexity; I had to start on an urgent journey; a seriously ill patient was waiting for me in a village ten miles off; a thick blizzard of snow filled all the wide spaces between him and me; I had a gig, a light gig with big wheels, exactly right for our country roads; muffled in furs, my bag of instruments in my hand, I was in the courtyard all ready for the journey; but there was no horse to be had, no horse” (The Country Doctor, trans. Muir).

It will not stop him, he will see his patient, yet in the end the good doctor is not to be the healer and suffers eviction from his home.

It was Kafka’s realization: the modern artist is speaking for nobody but himself, and based on nothing but his inner resources. Which raises the question what makes him so special? Why should the rest of us grant him a hearing? “He had a look at the face of the corpse. It was as it had been in life; no sign was visible of the promised redemption; what the others had found in the machine the officer had not found; the lips were firmly pressed together, the eyes were open, with the same expression as in life, the look was calm and convinced, through the forehead went the point of the great iron spike” (The Penal Colony).

 

© - 21/4/2008 - by michael sympson,

4950 words, all rights reserved