"At last I understand Kafka"

Since the beginning of this blog, I've been ostentatiously listing on the sidebar the books I've read in the current year, which I then convert into a mammoth end of year round-up of sorts. I don't really know why I do this, other than I enjoy lists and like keeping track of my reading. Regardless, there is a tension even in such a simple exercise as this. If I've read a book, do I claim to have read it well? Or to have understood it? Some weeks ago, I added Blanchot's Friendship to the list; given my admitted struggles with Blanchot's writing, how did I do with this particular book? I confess that I was unable to get much of anything out of some of the essays, whereas others I found myself able to read and profit from. I don't pretend to have a full grasp of all of Blanchot's major themes, but the best of the essays are remarkably supple and subtle pieces that I hope to return to again and again.

This reminds me of a passage from William H. Gass' marvelous introduction to William Gaddis' imposing novel, The Recognitions. It is one of the great introductions, and I've read it several times. Here is Gass:

No great book is explicable, and I shall not attempt to explain this one. An explanation—indeed, any explanation—would defile it, for reduction is precisely what a work of art opposes. Easy answers, convenient summaries, quiz questions, annotations, arrows, highlight lines, lists of its references, the numbers of its sources, echoes, and influences, an outline of its designs—useful as sometimes such helps are—nevertheless very seriously mislead. Guidebooks are useful, but only to what is past. Interpretation replaces the original with the lamest sort of substitute. It tames, disarms. "Okay, I get it," we say, dusting our hands, "and that takes care of that." "At last I understand Kafka" is a foolish and conceited remark.

(Keeping with the theme of this post, yes, I have "read" the novel, too, some ten years ago, though I was under no illusion at the time that I was equal to the task; a second reading, in the context of the seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time Gaddis Drinking Club group blog, was aborted about halfway through (and my only two posts at the blog weren't even about the reading itself but about introductory material). Ours was not the only well-intentioned but short-lived group blog devoted to reading The Recognitions; there was also Reading Gaddis from last year, and no doubt there are others. The book seems to inspire such projects. Lately the gang at An und für sich have themselves embarked on what looks like a fruitful group reading, which isn't too surprising given that blog's particular focus on theology and philosophy; the relevant posts are collected here.)

Peeking Through

Er, right. I didn't expect to drop off like that. The last couple of weeks have slipped past me in a fog of sleepiness (so sleepy) and distraction (the World Series, where my Phillies lost, no shame, but to the Yankees, those bastards). Nonetheless, I do have a few things in the works. In the meantime, check out Yareah, a bilingual literary monthly, the November issue of which is largely devoted to Kafka, including my short piece, "Kafka and Brod" (which originally appeared here).

Kafka and Brod

What if Brod had destroyed everything? Would Kafka have become Kafka? Would we know his writing? Yes, several stories were published in his lifetime, and would have remained theoretically extant. And this includes, crucially, not just "The Metamorphosis", probably his most famous work, but also "In the Penal Colony", "A Report to an Academy", "First Sorrow", and "A Hunger Artist". Overall, by my edition of the collected stories, approximately 250 pages of fiction, much of it essential reading. Obviously, we would not have The Trial, the second most famous work, or any of the other novels, or certainly the diaries.

Brod emerges as something of a comic figure, pathetic even, the lesser writer in the shadow of his friend, ethically unforgivable to some for the singular crime of not following Kafka's directive to burn. But how much of Kafka's reputation rests on Brod's efforts? That is, without Brod providing a critical framework, in the context of the posthumous novels and saved stories, do these early published stories necessarily survive? Not survive literally, but gain a foothold? I know I'm asking a more or less impossible question, but I like to think about contingency, how easily things could have been different, worse, better.

On Kafka and the pre-modern

Kafka again. The Diaries, the Collected Stories. After dipping into the shorter pieces in the latter over a period of several months alongside other reading, I finally had both the time and the inclination to read the longer stories (though, so far, just the ones published in his lifetime). One doesn't mind disrupting the reading of a novel, but stories need to be read in one sitting. "The Stoker", for the first time (it is also the opening chapter of Amerika, which remains the only unread novel); "The Metamorphosis"--this for the perhaps fourth or fifth time--remarkable how little I remember in it! "In the Penal Colony"--I remember the basic horrible idea, certainly, but the particulars and the conclusion are as if new to me.

From these stories, I've entered into a more systematic reading of the rest of the collection. In doing so, I noticed something odd in my expectations, coming into focus while reading "Eleven Sons". In this story, a father simply describes his eleven sons, one paragraph for each, in pedantic, critical detail, each son in some way somehow failing to measure up. For example, the second son has "a small irregularity of the spirit that somehow corresponds to [a physical blemish], a kind of stray poison in the blood, a kind of inability to develop to the full the potentialities of his nature which I alone can see." That kind of thing. And that's it. Five pages and out. In that same paragraph on the second son, we read this:

He is clever too, but has experience of the world as well; he has seen much, and therefore even our native country seems to yield more secrets to him than to the stay-at-home. Yet I am sure that this advantage is not only and not even essentially due to his travels, it is rather an attribute of his own inimitable nature, which is acknowledged for instance by everyone who has ever tried to copy him in, let us say, the fancy high dive he does into the water, somersaulting several times over, yet with almost violent self-control. To the very end of the springboard the emulator keeps up his courage and his desire to follow; but at that point, instead of leaping into the air, he sits down suddenly and lifts his arms in excuse.

At the word "springboard" I was suddenly made aware that I had been imagining this son's diving taking place at an old watering hole. No big deal possibly, except that I further realized that I tend to take Kafka's stories as somehow pre-modern. In some respects this is plainly ridiculous: isn't the cliché about Kafka that he is the quintessential chronicler of the modern condition? Alienation, bureaucracy, office work, claustrophobia, all of that? I don't subscribe to that short-hand, but even so, the modern world abounds in Kafka's fiction. Isn't Gregor Samsa a traveling salesman for a big, modern firm? Doesn't "The Stoker" take place inside a large, modern ship? The detailed description of the machine in "In the Penal Colony" speaks of a world in which mechanical devices are ordinary, even if this machine in particular is far from it. More than this, though several stories do not, contrary to the cliché, speak of an exclusively modern condition, little details of the modern world continually appear, in Kafka's literal way. Like that springboard. What is my problem?

I'm again talking about the timeless, mythical quality of Kafka's fiction, the tendency, enabled by Kafka's apparently plain prose style, for his stories to read like parables or fables, whatever they may actually be about. And fables and myths are ancient, and so it follows. There is that slippery, if literal, writing. Of course, some of the stories reinforce my pre-conception. "A Country Doctor", for example, could take place almost anytime. There is the recasting of Don Quixote with Sancho Panza as the hero, there is the story about Poseidon stuck doing paperwork, unable to actually enjoy the seas over which he presides (though someday, perhaps, someday), there are stories with emperors and noblemen and peasants and villages, all arguably contributing to this overall sense of pre-modernity. But the other stories, the ones that are unquestionably in a modern setting, are no less fables, to the extent that at times the very modernity on display brings me up short, forcing me to consider it.

Pastoral Thinking

At Sponge!, Lee Rourke writes about the great meditation on walking in Roubaud's The Great Fire of London, a marvelous bit of writing I neglected to mention in my long post on the novel (which Lee graciously links to):

When walking, he argues (and to paraphrase) we are in ‘possession of time’: each footfall counts its passing. We can choose to stop, to turn, to slow down at our own pace, to meander and wend, to backtrack and shortcut; within this act of possession things are infinitely freer. Whereas on a train, plane, or in a car, time has captured us, we are at its mercy, carried by it with no control, it dictates our decision to be free; we are not free in this sense.

Apologies to Lee for quoting the entirety of his post (but it's very short and my own paraphrastic powers are at an extremely low ebb these days), but I wanted to highlight the freedom associated with this "possession of time". We are so rarely truly in possession of our time, with jobs and commutes and so on. Even when we do have time to ourselves, it is bounded by those demands on our time over which we have little real control. This domination by speed, by time, this unfreedom, affects our very thinking. Some will argue, and do, that this is fine and dandy, a newer, quicker thinking has come into being. I might have made this argument at one point, but these days I find it wanting.

By coincidence, last night I was reading in Kafka's Diaries and came across an entry on Goethe's diaries (would that in Goethe's diaries he were writing about yet another's diaries, but it was not to be). Kafka remarks that Goethe's observations while traveling are different than they would have been in Kafka's day

because made from a mail-coach, and with the slow changes of the region, develop more simply and can be followed much more easily even by one who does not know those parts of the country. A calm, so-to-speak pastoral form of thinking sets in. (translation by Joseph Kresh)

I want this, this calm, this quiet, this slowness, space to think, time to work things out. Down with speed!

Noted: Franz Kafka

From the Diaries (translation by Joseph Kresh):

I would gladly explain the feeling of happiness which, like now, I have within me from time to time. It is really something effervescent that fills me completely with a light, pleasant quiver and that persuades me of the existence of abilities of whose non-existence I can convince myself with complete certainty at any moment, even now.

Those Beckett Letters

As has been fairly widely noted, Cambridge University Press recently published The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1, 1929-1940. Not too long ago, I would have looked on this event with something close to complete indifference, whether I'd begun reading Beckett or not. I had no interest in biographies in general and extended this lack of interest to diaries and letters--I saw interest in these latter two categories in particular as bizarre and puerile. In part my indifference had to do with my resistance to the reading of fiction through the lens of biography. This particular resistance has not lifted, but I can now see value in reading good biographies of literary figures, biographies that are interested in the writing, or that might perhaps help with reading the author in question, by attending to the his or her problems writing. That is, not merely a series of events, alongside breathless sales reports and the biographer's tedious speculation as to the psychological make up of the author.

I admit that letters and diaries still seem weird to me, but my view has been softening. I've always blanched at the thought of some of my own letters and journal entries being published, in the extremely unlikely event that I became famous enough that some poor soul should have to read them. (I've also wondered at the problem for scholarship posed by email chains, versus physical correspondance, at least when I operated under the assumption that society would continue without catastrophe. Ahem. But I digress.) Of course it's the personal nature of such documents that has bothered me, the writing being obviously not intended for public consumption.

So they seem weird, but as I say, my attitude has changed somewhat. I must confess to having developed an interest in certain diaries, certain letters, such as those of Kafka (of course, by now I've already read his Letter to His Father, which at least one reader thinks perhaps ought not have been published at all) and, obviously, Beckett. My attitude had softened somewhat already by this time, but when I read Josipovici's On Trust two years ago, I became fascinated by some of what Kafka had to say in his letters and diaries, and how those related to the problems of writing, the problems of suspicion and trust. I was similarly moved by Beckett's approach to writing, his problems, as revealed till then only in his biographies, which made use of some of his letters.

But anyway, here I am unexpectedly wanting to read Beckett's letters, like now, knowing it's foolish, that I'm being pointlessly impatient, since I have a quite a bit of Beckett's fiction still to read, as well as the two biographies, Dierdre Bair's Samuel Beckett and James Knowlson's Damned to Fame (both recently acquired, though in somewhat beaten used copies). Not to mention piles of other books (which I also want to read now). I was not expecting this. Nevertheless, I do plan to hold off, for a while. In the meantime, I'm enjoying the bits and pieces revealed by others. For example, Steve Mitchelmore really got the ball rolling, for me, with this post, which included two tantalizing excerpts. Here's part of one:

Is there something paralysingly sacred contained within the unnature of the word that does not belong to the elements of the other arts? Is there any reason why that terrifyingly arbitrary materiality of the word surface should not be dissolved, as for example the sound surface of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony is devoured by huge black pauses, so that for pages on end we cannot perceive it as other than a dizzying path of sounds connecting unfathomable chasms of silence?

Then at his fine blog, A Piece of Monologue, Rhys Tranter wrote about the book a few days ago, which he had not quite dived into yet. But he quoted from the introduction. I will finish up by excerpting one of his equally tantalizing excerpts. The letters, say the writers of the intro:

demonstrate his numerous commitments: to reading in a systematic way the classics as well as the literatures of several cultures; to training himself in music and the visual arts; to learning languages, becoming fluent in at least five and familiar with many more; to keeping up with a broad range of acquaintences, friends, and professional associates; to answering in polite and timely fashion practically every letter that was addressed to him, even when he became famous and the inquiries grew in number; to writing, of course - criticism, fiction, poetry, drama; and perhaps more surprisingly, a commitment to getting published and to seeing his dramatic work realized on stage. The letters also show the author's endeavor to lead the life that would make all these commitments realizable.

The Letter

Very early in Thomas Bernhard's Gargoyles, before we encounter the Prince or any of the other grotesque character portraits, the narrator mentions a letter he had recently sent to his father. He describes it:

. . .I had tried to sketch the uneasy relationship among us three, between him and me and between him and my sister and between me and my sister. . . [...]

In the letter I had tried to define certain things about our relationship by citing seemingly simple but to me extremely important details. In the writing I had taken the greatest pains not to offend my father. Nor to offend anybody. From my years of observation I found it fairly easy to sketch a picture of us that could be considered truthful from all three sides. My letter had been composed very calmly; I did not allow myself to show any excitement, although I did not evade the central matters that concerned me [. . .] I had long wanted to write such a letter and had started on it repeatedly, but had each time been overcome by doubts about the usefulness of this sort of accounting. It had always been impossible for me to write to him. Each time I would immediately become aware of the awkwardness of suddenly expressing in black and white things that for years had only been private thoughts, speculations. Then too I was checked by a reluctance to bring up possibly long-forgotten matters as essential evidence for my view of us. For I would have had to proceed with sincerity and therefore ruthlessness, and yet show consideration for all concerned. That, too, made such a letter impossible for such a long time.

This letter sounds to me like an excellent description of Kafka's famous letter to his own father. Unlike the letter sent by this narrator, Kafka's letter was apparently never received or read by his father, because, I believe, of his mother's intervention. One can see why she would have stopped it from being read. While in many respects it is a model of understanding and fairness, there is no sense that Kafka's father, if he in any way resembled the portrait that emerges from the letter, could have read the letter as anything other than an affront. And this is not necessarily to take Kafka's "side" against his father, whatever that might mean at this juncture far removed from the situation. But the letter, more than any real attempt to explain anything to his father, really reads like a performance, just as any piece of writing is a performance. Kafka performs a version of himself for the purposes of his letter. And perhaps he was being as scrupulously honest as it was possible for him to be. Even so, the letter remains a performance, a writing, something to which a real-life figure, it seems to me, could find all but impossible to respond to. Bernhard's narrator speaks of "doubts about the usefulness of this sort of accounting", and he's right, is he not? There comes a time, in some relationships, when such an accounting is quite beside the point--too late to do anyone any good--and in others, if the gulf in communication is enough to precipitate this kind of letter, then what good could it do anyway, however well intended, other than as a way of performing one's own confession, one's own account, one's own perspective?

The very notion of wholeness

Of Kafka's story fragment "The Watchman", mentioned in the last post, Gabriel Josipovici also writes: "It is only a fragment in the way an aphorism is a fragment, that is, as a questioning of the very notion of wholeness." What does he mean?

In a short discussion over at Jacob Russell's blog, I echoed something I wrote in an earlier post. I said: "My sense of Modernism, before reading Josipovici, was that it was simply this moment in time in which new techniques expanded (or advanced) the modes available to writers. Since reading Josipovici, most references I see to Modernism appear to be based on the same conception." Jacob replied that "[n]ew techniques were more than a reaction to old techniques: they were reactions to modes of perception, to ways of conceptualizing the world" and that it seems that Josipovici is less "concerned with techniques in themselves, [than] with the broader agenda they were meant to serve". I've been a little uneasy diving into discussions about literary Modernism, primarily because my reading in the critical literature has been so shallow, outside of Josipovici. And yet, his work has struck such a chord with me, that I feel compelled to step into the fray, with him as my primary guide.

To return to this question of wholeness, I want to talk a little about Josipovici's take on James Joyce. Joyce, it seems to me, is for many people the quintessential Modernist. This is how I had viewed him in the past, and it was because of this view that I saw the Modernists as a whole as a particularly difficult group of writers. I was thus surprised and intrigued when I noticed, well over a year ago by now, a comment from Steve Mitchelmore (I don't remember whether it appeared at This Space or in comments elsewhere) to the effect that Ulysses was less the greatest 20th century novel (its customary panel-selected position) than the last great 19th century novel. If I looked at the idea long enough, I could almost feel as if I understood what he meant, though I'd yet to read Ulysses (and, in fact, have still not read it). Steve made a similar comment at least one other time, specifically referencing Josipovici. When I'd read Josipovici's On Trust, I had a better idea what might be meant by this idea, but he doesn't spend any time on Joyce in that book.

Recently, I asked Steve if there was an essay in which Josipovici writes specifically about Joyce. He referred me to an older collection, The Mirror of Criticism: Selected Reviews 1977-1982. I promptly found the book for cheap online. The piece in question is titled, ironically enough, "The Last Great Book". In retrospect, it's a good thing that I wasn't hoping for a lengthy essay or interested in the book only for this piece. The review is only a few pages long and doesn't say a whole lot more than what Steve had already said (happily, the rest of reviews in the book are well worth reading). But there are some choice lines worth attending to. One of the books under discussion is Hugh Kenner's fine study, Joyce's Voices--which Josipovici calls "criticism of a very high order":

Nevertheless, a doubt remains. Not about Kenner, but about Joyce. No objective style, Kenner rightly insists, can be said to exist; no truth can be discovered by aligning so many words to so many things; every attempt to simulate such a Truth will, as in the case of Hemingway, itself quickly become a 'style'. 'The True Sentence, in Joyce's opinion, had best settle for being true to the voice that utters it.' Yet what Kenner fails to see is that in the end Joyce does, against his own deepest insights, cling to one unquestioned Truth, that of the complete work. If there is no True Sentence, then why is there a True Work? This, it seems to me, is a major weakness of Joyce, his refusal to recognise the vulnerability of the Muse, his insistence, against the evidence, that to make a book is itself a valuable activity.

Compared with Proust and Beckett, Kafka and Eliot and Virginia Woolf, Joyce presents a strangely rigid attitude; he refuses ever to let go, to trust the work to take him where it will. Every 'letting go' has to be carefully fitted into its place in the overall design, even though there is no longer, by his own admission, any authority for the pattern the design itself assumes.

[. . .] there is ultimately something cosy and safe about Ulysses: underlying it is the belief that the mere accumulation of detail and complexity is an unquestioned good. Far from being 'the decisive English-language book of the [twentieth] century,' as Kenner suggests, it is perhaps the last great book of the nineteenth.

Whereas we seem most often to be concerned with new techniques established by the Modernists writers, especially if we buy into progress, into advancement of the arts, here the techniques themselves are of less concern. I realize that this is one of the reasons why Ulysses has seemed so forbidding. Perhaps I get on better with the more exploratory, less domineering fiction of Proust, Beckett, Kafka, and now Woolf.

If we return to Kafka's fragment, we see ourselves, we overrun it, return to it. "It opens a space and lives in it, a space which we too can enter and in which we too can live. . ." So writes Josipovici, again in his introduction to the Collected Stories (itself collected, as "Kafka's Children", in The Singer on the Shore), in language recalling his remarkable essays about the Bible, including The Book of God itself. In the 19th century novel, the novelist takes over from God, controlling his or her created world, without doubting the justification for this move.

In the short piece on Joyce, Josipovici is reviewing what are, in effect, "reader's guides" to Joyce's writing. Such guides abound, of course, and point to another factor keeping Ulysses at arm's length for me. As Josipovici puts it, Joyce's "works cry out for explication, footnoting and the exercise of those crossword puzzle skills at which the academic mind excels." This, he suggests, is indicative of a weakness in Joyce's art. With Joyce acting as God, academics serve as the priests and Talmudists explaining and interpreting his every word. With this in mind, the first sentence of Josipovici's review is hilariously apt: "If Joyce had not existed the professors would have had to invent him."

The watchman said nothing

In the comments to my recent post about Kafka's story "First Sorrow", there was a brief discussion about what it is about Kafka's stories that makes them on the one hand so interesting and alive, and on the other so slippery, even easily forgotten. Lloyd Mintern wrote the following:

Perhaps the reason Kafka's stories are so susceptible to being forgotten, that they slip away in whole, is that they are so familiar. They seem on the one hand like little artistic gems, but at the bottom they are utterly plain and life-like. For instance this trapeze artist story I think is entirely based on that last sentence; it works from the ending, and he arranges it thus, in order to get to that one observation, the question. I would conjecture that Kafka wrote it after staring at a furrow line in someone's face (or his own). Applying the question of how a worry line in a face comes to be stamped there, asking for its history so to speak, needs just a context to explore; the exotic (and comical) trapeze artist will do in this case. The length is expandable, like all parables, internally; and the content is so true to life one can . . . live with it, and thus forget it for a time, until, coming back, one is shocked that someone else got it so closely.

Many of Kafka's stories are like mini-parables. I'm suddenly reminded of something Ezra Pound wrote in connection with Confucius, in his Guide to Kulchur (which I previously mentioned here, and which I haven't read more than five pages from since that post):

Said Szetsun, or rather so says his translator: "The sayings of the great sages are ordinary." This I take to mean that there is nothing superfluous or excessive in them. When one knows enough one can find wisdom in the Four Classics. When one does not know enough one's eye passes over the page without seeing it.

Many of Kafka's stories now, for me, emerge as much more than they were when I first approached them.

In the introduction to the edition he edited of Kafka's Collected Stories, Gabriel Josipovici quotes the entirety of the super-short story fragment "The Watchman":

I ran past the first watchman. Then I was horrified, ran back again and said to the watchman: 'I ran through here while you were looking the other way.' The watchman gazed ahead of him and said nothing. 'I suppose I really oughtn't to have done it,' I said. The watchman still said nothing. 'Does your silence indicate permission to pass?'

This is the kind of piece that, if encountered in the pages of a collection, on its own, in the midst of other similarly short pieces, there's a good chance I'd have read it and moved on, without it having made any impact. Though perhaps I'd have been puzzled and returned to it. Why is this piece here? Josipovici writes: ". . .this is a piece of writing which demands to be read at least twice; indeed, as so often in Kafka, the narrative mimics the way we are forced to read it." This is precisely so. I read it, fly by it in fact, but I'm stopped short. What was that? I must return to it.

I think, to combine Lloyd's observation with Gabriel Josipovici's, we have a writer who writes in a style that is so plain, so familiar, that it seems to invite us to ignore it, while also insisting on being re-read. (I know that when I was reading Kafka in the midst of the exuberant, noisier writers I was reading, all that Amis and Self and Rushdie, and even the great Nabokov, he somehow seemed not to fit, and I had trouble with his stories. Though the claustrophobia of the novels was somehow easier to retain.) For example, though it's hard to forget Gregor Samsa's condition in "The Metamorphosis", many of the details of that story slip right past, in the plainness of the style. Looking for one thing, I instead get another.

The First Furrows of Care

I've been thinking it's time to return to Kafka. It's been years since I read The Castle, more still since The Trial. Quite by accident, it seems, I've read "The Metamorphosis" more often than any other single piece of fiction, but again, not for many years. Some months ago, I bought the Collected Stories, in the handsome Everyman edition, edited by Gabriel Josipovici. I was in need of a new collection of the stories, if only because my other edition contains only those stories published in Kafka's lifetime (awkward blurb from Martin Amis, winning the war against cliché, so the rest of us can get on with our lives: "Acquire this necessary book"). Then, recently, I read Letter to His Father. I hope to say more about this remarkable document in another post, but for now, suffice it to say that I think I am beginning to see Kafka a little better.

Last night I dipped into the Collected Stories, looking for one of those extremely short fictions. I turned to "First Sorrow" and I read. And by the end, I was reminded of "Bartleby the Scrivener", Melville's story, which figures so prominently in Vila-Matas' intriguing Bartleby & Co. In that story, we have a man, a scrivener, who, no matter the question, "would prefer not to", confounding his boss, the narrator of the story. Some of us may "prefer not to" do any number of things life throws our way, but Bartleby is not kidding around. Ultimately, he "prefers not to" himself right to death. He (and Melville) follows his position to its logical conclusion.

"First Sorrow" is about a trapeze artist who, first, "had so arranged his life that, as long as he kept working in the same building, he never came down from his trapeze by night or day". He is a great artist, so the management puts up with it. He is able to have his needs attended to by relay system, and necessary, eccentric travel accommodations are made. Finally, however, he announces "that he must always in future have two trapezes for his performance instead of only one". No problem, says the manager. But the trapeze artist repeats his demand: "The very idea that it might happen at all seemed to make him shudder." The manager repeats his assurance, but the artist breaks down. And here is how the story ends:

Deeply distressed, the manager sprang to his feet and asked what was the matter, then getting no answer climbed up on the seat and caressed him, cheek to cheek, so that his own face was bedabbled by the trapeze artist's tears. Yet it took much questioning and soothing endearment until the trapeze artist sobbed: 'Only the one bar in my hands -- how can I go on living!' That made it somewhat easier for the manager to comfort him; he promised to wire from the very next station for a second trapeze to be installed in the first town on their circuit; reproached himself for having let the artist work so long on only one trapeze; and thanked and praised him warmly for having at last brought the mistake to his notice. And so he succeeded in reassuring the trapeze artist, little by little, and was able to go back to his corner. But he himself was far from reassured, with deep uneasiness he kept glancing secretly at the trapeze artist over the top of his book. Once such ideas began to torment him, would they ever quite leave him alone? Would they not rather increase in urgency? Would they not threaten his very existence? And indeed the manager believed he could see, during the apparently peaceful sleep which had succeeded the fit of tears, the first furrows of care engraving themselves upon the trapeze artist's smooth, childlike forehead. (Translation by Willa & Edwin Muir)

I must have read this story before--it's in the other collection, having been published during Kafka's lifetime as part of A Hunger Artist--I've read this story before, and yet I have absolutely no memory of it. It must not have made much of an impression on me. I'm a different reader now, and now I find this story astonishing. The manager can see what must happen, even if the trapeze artist is momentarily assuaged. The manager can see this, and he is troubled. He knows there is nothing he can do, nothing that can be done. The logic of the situation is such that the trapeze artist will never quite be free of this torment. And Kafka, of course, follows the needs of his fiction right to the end. Just as, in "Bartleby", where it might be more "realistic" for the man to give on certain things--I might prefer not to go to work, or prefer to silently protest against the absurdity of life, but odds are I'm going to break down and eat when I get hungry enough--instead, Melville follows the idea through. Here, Kafka does the same, only more so, and with more economy. He has only to have the manager consider the logic of the situation--"would they not threaten his very existence?"--and notice the trapeze artist's furrowed brow and know that he has not imagined it, for the fable to be complete.

Other People on Kafka

I haven't had much blogging time lately, but I'm ducking in here with a couple short posts noting what some other people have been saying.

I was tempted to write something myself about Lee Rourke's post from two weeks ago about the new Michael Hofman translations of Kafka, but I didn't get to it and others addressed it brilliantly. Rourke praised the translations generally and specifically agreed with Hofman's use of the word "cockroach" in "The Metamorphosis". His post led to an interesting discussion in the comments section about what makes a good translation, as well as fantastic posts from Steve Mitchelmore and Ellis Sharp on why the choice of "cockroach" is wrong. Steve and Ellis may agree that the word is wrong, but Ellis otherwise disagrees with Steve's interpretation.

From Steve's post:

As he must have known, Nabokov's zoological points are irrelevant [in the comments to Lee's post, someone quoted a passage which had immediately occurred to me from Nabokov's Lectures on Literature on this point]. One has to read the word as it is before our eyes: vague and open to interpretation. Openness is everything. There's no need to make these detours into etymology. Yes, Walter Sokol makes a good case for "cockroach" by highlighting how it is nauseating and parasitical yet also defenceless and pathetic - which is certainly how Gregor appears to everyone - but "insect", as the Muirs had it, does all that too and retains the vagueness of Kafka's word.

More to the point is Lee's assertion that "Kafka wanted to denote the marginalised, detested individual". The insect is both real and symbolic, unreal and unsymbolic. However, even if we knew Kafka had intended that, it wouldn't tell the whole story. Gregor is marginalised and detested not only because he has become an insect but also because he is no longer the reliable salesman keeping his family afloat. He has been transformed into a threat to the family's petit-bourgeois world. How terrible is the banging on his bedroom door when he fails to leave for work, how sickening when his boss visits the flat to investigate a single lost day? It is, as we know still today, a world of fierce taboos resisting the forces of change, of decay, illness and death. Gregor has, in effect, died but not left the building. His death stains the parents' starched clothing, stinks out the flat. This is how he might be read from a Marxist perspective: Gregor is the harbinger of the social problems inherent to early modern capitalism. But change also afflicts Marxists. The hope of political redemption is soon also faced by despair.

Steve goes on to invoke Blanchot and our inability to "choose between hope and despair". Ellis objects to this reading:

In ‘Metamorphosis’ concealment is of the essence. Compartmentalisation is involved – thematically and structurally. ‘Metamorphosis’ is not a single fast-flowing river of prose but, like the body of an insect, divided into segments – three chapters. Gregor dies on the stroke of three. There are three doors to Gregor’s room: three ways in, three ways out. Not one way. There is no single way in and out of this story. You cannot exclusively capture it for a metaphysical reading. It slips free. In its multiplicity – in its totality – it resists the net of exegesis. The jacket cover on my edition calls it a ‘haunting parable on human reaction to suffering and disease’ which is both true and horribly limiting.

The reaction of everyone in the story to Gregor’s transformation is, surely, the exact opposite to despair. There is no despair. On the contrary, the story gives us characters learning to cope with an extreme situation, as humans do. One or two of the characters shun Gregor and depart; most stay. Their responses range from disgust, fear and irritation to compassion, curiosity and breezy acceptance. Nobody finally gives up on Gregor; nobody sinks into paralysis. Everyone grudgingly accepts his presence. No one despairs, not even Gregor. Everyone bravely, absurdly, comically, maintains the rigmarole of everyday life.

This is great stuff. For me, this is what blogging about literature is all about and is the kind of thing I was hoping to find when I started looking on the web for literary discussion.

Stendhal Postscript

Last year I read Vertigo, the novel by W.G. Sebald. On the back cover we're told:

Traveling in the footsteps of Stendhal, Casanova, and Kafka, the narrator draws the reader line by line into a dizzying web of history, biography, autobiography, legends, literature, and--most perilously--memories.

And, indeed, the opening section of the book begins:

In mid-May of the year 1800 Napoleon and a force of 36,000 men crossed the Great St. Bernard pass, an undertaking that had been regarded until that time as next to impossible. For almost a fortnight, an interminable column of men, animals and equipment proceeded from Martigny via Orsières through the Entremont valley and from there moved, in a seemingly never-ending serpentine, up to the pass two and a half thousand metres above sea level, the heavy barrels of the cannon having to be draged by the soldiery, in hollowed-out tree trunks, now across snow and ice and now over bare outcrops and rocky escarpments.

Among those who took part in that legendary transalpine march, and who were not lost in nameless oblivion, was one Marie Henri Beyle.

Marie Henri Beyle is, of course, Stendhal. Naturally, I did not know this when I started reading Vertigo, nor did I know it by the time I'd finished the entire section dealing with Beyle and his memories of this march. Sebald does not identify Beyle as Stendhal; the reader is expected to know it. Granted, it's not taken to be an earth-shaking piece of information, but I usually don't pay much attention to literary biographies. I'd had some vague notion that Stendhal was a pseudonym, but beyond that, I'd never given the matter any thought. (In fact, I didn't realize till I was actually reading The Red and the Black that it's simply "Stendhal", with no other name attached to it.)

Perhaps inevitably, given how much his biography's been picked at, I happen to know bits and pieces about Kafka's life, so I was able to piece together that the section "Dr. K. Takes the Waters at Riva" is about Kafka. And it was this that made me wonder whether I'd been expected to know who Stendhal was earlier (I'm smart like that sometimes).

I said that I don't pay much attention to literary biographies, which is true. But, oddly, it's Kafka that might change my mind about that. It's hard for me to say exactly why. I've read The Trial, The Castle, and most of the stories, and I intend to read them again, but I've never wondered where they came from or why they exist. So it's not that. But all of a sudden, in the last year, I feel a need to read a good biography of him. His Diaries, too. Is it for a glimpse of the literary? A peak into the mind of this person who had to write, but then wanted it all destroyed at his death? I don't know. Maybe it's memory, the working through of memory on the page. Will I know why when I finally do read them?