The Shame
|
There was mentioning of the conservatory,
but only as a beautiful dream, which to become true was unthinkable,
and the parents didn’t even like to hear those innocent words.
|
Franz
Kafka
|
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