A Cage Went in Search of a Bird, page 1
CONTENTS
Introduction
Becca Rothfeld
Art Hotel
Ali Smith
Return to the Museum
Joshua Cohen
The Board
Elif Batuman
God’s Doorbell
Naomi Alderman
The Hurt
Tommy Orange
Hygiene
Helen Oyeyemi
The Landlord
Keith Ridgway
Apostrophe’s Dream
Yiyun Li
Headache
Leone Ross
This Fact Can Even Be Proved by Means of the Sense of Hearing
Charlie Kaufman
Contributors’ Bios
Lines Written by Kafka
INTRODUCTION
Becca Rothfeld
In the inverted world of Franz Kafka, guilt precedes sin and punishment precedes trial—so naturally, the cage precedes the bird.
“A cage went in search of a bird,” he wrote with enigmatic flourish in 1917, when he was convalescing in the pastoral town of Zürau in the wake of his tuberculosis diagnosis. Two years earlier, he had abandoned The Trial, which begins with an abrupt arrest and ends with a roundabout admission of guilt; five years later, he would start The Castle, which begins with a series of vague recriminations and ends with a series of even vaguer wrongdoings, at least insofar as it can really be said to “end” at all. Strictly speaking, both novels are still unfinished: neither satisfied the famously implacable Kafka, whose perfectionism was a crucible, and both were incomplete at the time of his death. They are certainly cages—clenching, claustrophobic—and perhaps they are doomed to remain forever in search of their birds.
The Blue Octavo Notebooks, the journals Kafka kept during the seven idyllic months he spent in Zürau with his sister, are largely aphoristic: indeed, he later culled their contents into a slim volume of gnomic maxims, which were published posthumously, initially under a maudlin title chosen by his best friend and literary executor, Max Brod. Reflections on Sin, Hope, Suffering, and the True Way was eventually renamed The Zürau Aphorisms, probably because its contents are not reflections on “the true way” in the least. The brisk uplift conjured by Brod’s title, which would suit a work of self-help, is nowhere to be found in Kafka’s strange text. Instead, the aphorisms are obscure and oracular, cloudy as fables, ominous as curses. If they are short and spare, sheared of all extraneity, their austerity does not make them any easier to understand. One reads, “Leopards break into the temple and drink all the sacrificial vessels dry; it keeps happening; in the end, it can be calculated in advance and is incorporated into the ritual.” Another warns (or merely reports?), “You are the exercise, the task. No student far and wide.”
Confronted with lines as mystifying as riddles, we might begin to sympathize with the cage looking for a bird, for we, too, are desperate to catch the fugitive flutter of comprehension.
“A cage went in search of a bird” is a fitting title for a collection of stories written in Kafka’s honor on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of his death, especially because so many of the ones in this volume treat precisely the kind of entrapment that obsessed him: the kind that follows us wherever we go. In Kafka’s world, cages crop up in the most inconspicuous and deceptively innocuous places: a man in The Trial is whipped in an office junk closet, and in The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa’s childhood bedroom becomes his cell when he transforms into a giant insect and his family locks him in.
Like Gregor, the varied characters in A Cage Went in Search of a Bird are continually stumbling on prisons in the unlikeliest locales. In Leone Ross’s “Headache,” a woman is trapped first in her body, which subjects her to mysterious headaches; next, in an MRI machine, for what she believes is a standard procedure; and finally, at the hospital, in a room where “the window is hermetically sealed.” No one will tell her what is wrong with her, or when she can expect to be released. In Tommy Orange’s haunting contribution, a plague of desolation called “the hurt” afflicts people at random, driving them to writhe in agony—and even to commit suicide—on the streets. As a public service, handcuffs are distributed throughout the city, with the result that, at any moment, a person can come to—and find herself shackled to a park bench. Sometimes the chains in this volume even pursue the prisoners. In Ali Smith’s “Art Hotel,” a family who lives in a campervan discovers a red line drawn around the vehicle no matter where they park it, as if someone is trying to box them in.
Kafka knew all too well that it is often our homes that ensnare us—he complained incessantly in his diaries and letters of having to share an apartment with his parents and sisters—and homes are an uneasy consolation in many of these stories. In Keith Ridgway’s “The Landlord,” a tenant is trapped by a landlord who often imposes on him, subjecting him to interminable conversation from which he cannot politely extricate himself. Increasingly, he is also trapped in the landlord’s conception of him: “He mispronounced my name,” the tenant writes. “But he did it consistently and confidently, so that after some time I began to suspect that his pronunciation was correct and mine was not.” Ultimately, the tenant confesses, “I am not myself, entirely. How could I be? I am something else. I am an allocated life—here you are, live here.” The cage, it seems, invents the bird. The shackles come first, and we are only their afterthoughts.
What is the lesson of The Castle, The Trial, “The Burrow,” and so many of Kafka’s other works if not that your imprisonment predates you, that it was always waiting for you, that it in effect creates you? This, perhaps, was the fatalistic message that Kafka intended to memorialize in the journal he kept at Zürau, just months after he was diagnosed with the disease that would kill him exactly a hundred years ago: that birds are secondary to their cages.
It is odd that Kafka would write such a gloomy maxim in the town where by all accounts he spent the most blissful months of his life. The critic Roberto Calasso describes them as “his only period of near happiness,” and in letters, he was uncharacteristically ebullient. “I am thriving among all the animals,” he told Max Brod in October 1917. He effused to another friend several days later, “I want to live here always.” He was charmed by the trees, the animals, and the quiet (though, Kafka being Kafka, he did find something to agonize over: in this case, the mice that scurried in his room at night).
Yet it was here, in this picturesque village where he was so serene, that he took to reading Kierkegaard and brooding on sin. The Blue Octavo Notebooks are more overtly religious in theme and more sibylline in tone than any of his other writings. Even as Kafka was feeding the local goats and traipsing over the hills, he was worrying about Evil and our expulsion from the Garden of Eden. The incongruity is so acute that I wonder if the apparent gloom of his aphorisms is really something quite different.
In one entry of the Notebooks, he postulates that there is something worse than the wrath of a god or a monster. “The Sirens have a weapon even more terrible than their song,” he writes, “namely, their silence.” Far more punishing than a God who hates or condemns us is one who never thinks of us at all. The characters in Kafka’s fictions may be enmeshed in an alternative and nightmarish logic—one in which accusations give rise to transgressions and cages give rise to birds—but at least they are not plagued by an absence of significance. Explanations often prove elusive, but no one ever doubts that there are explanations available to someone, somewhere. It does not occur to the lawyers and defendants in The Trial that there may be no legal principle ordering the mad melee of arrests and summonses, and though the land surveyor in The Castle never lays eyes on the fortress he seeks, he is certain of its existence.
On the face of it, the Kafkaesque stories in this wonderfully weird volume are despairing. Many of them present dystopian dreams of a dismal future: in Naomi Alderman’s story, “God’s Doorbell,” a band of machines reminiscent of ChatGPT runs human affairs, and Joshua Cohen’s “Return to the Museum” is narrated by a sad Neanderthal at the Museum of Natural History in New York, where he witnesses a dramatic protest against climate change.
But despite everything, there is a glimmer of Kafka’s characteristically perverse optimism in A Cage Went in Search of a Bird. In Helen Oyeyemi’s “Hygiene,” a character who has become a germaphobic nomad, shuttling between health spas rather than maintaining a permanent residence, reports that she has “learned to exist more scrupulously.” In her new and antiseptically clean life, “steam enfolds us, inexorable angels with loofahs and three-thousand-carat knuckles knead our muscles and peel our old skin away.” She is on the verge of becoming a new creature, perhaps one that surpasses her former self.
It is clear that many of the alternatives to humans in A Cage Went in Search of a Bird are on the verge of outstripping us. The machines in “God’s Doorbell” set out to construct a Tower of Babel and seem perilously close to reaching the heavens; the Neanderthal in Joshua Cohen’s story, perhaps an homage to the simian narrator of Kafka’s “Report to an Academy,” retreats at the end to his display, where he lives with his wife and their “two pride-and-joy children—model children, truly—who are teething like there’s no tomorrow on a raw red gristly strip of what’s ostensibly prime mammoth.”
Reading these ambivalent stories, I recalled Kafka’s notorious conversation with Max Brod about God, in which he proposed that there is “no end of hope—only not for us.” This is as much a happy statement as it is a bleak one. We may never be able to interpret the world’s many dark mysteries, true, but other creatures (maybe the machines, maybe the specimens in the Museum of Natural History) can achieve what we cannot. Perhaps, then, we should strive to emulate Josef K., who believes in a system of justice for which he has no evidence. Another name for his brand of intransigence is faith.
ART HOTEL
Ali Smith
My mother came down to the docking gate to say cheerio to us. For a moment I didn’t recognise her. I thought she was just a woman working at the hotel. She had her hair scraped back off her face and tied in a ponytail and she was wearing clothes so unlike her and so not quite right for her shape that it took me a minute to work out they were her sister’s work clothes, the uniform they made the women and girls here wear, white shirt, long black pinafore apron/skirt thing. The men and boys who worked here got to look more casual. Their uniform was designer jeans and white t-shirts made of stuff that was better than what ordinary T-shirts get made of. The women and girls weren’t allowed make-up or earrings or necklaces etc. and my mother looked smaller, duller, scrubbed clean and cloistery, like serving women from humbled countries look in films on TV.
How is she doing today? Leif asked. How long will she be ill? my own sister asked. My mother gave my sister a look for being rude. Then she shrugged at Leif. Two weeks, Leif said, three? As long as till September? The faraway word September hung in the air round us in the weird tradespeople space and my sister looked at her feet. Leif looked at the walls, concrete and stone, the huge lit candles in the glass jars burning pointless against the daylight. Christ, he said. My mother shook her head, nodded her head, nodded from one to the other of the two statues the hotel had on either side of the docking entrance, shook her head again, then put her finger to her mouth as if to smooth the place beneath her nose, graceful, but really to quieten Leif and us.
They were life-size, the statues, substantial white stone, shining. They looked churchy. They looked related but they were separate. One was of a sad-looking beautiful woman with a cloth round her head exactly like a Virgin Mary and with her arms cupped, open and empty, one hand upturned and her eyes downturned, either closed or gazing down at her own empty lap, at nothing but the folds in her clothes. The other was of the bent body of a man obviously meant to be dead, his head turned to one side, his arms and legs meant to look limp but at the angle he was at on the floor just stiff and awkward, sprawled but frozen, rigor mortis like he’d rock from side to side if you pushed him. Look at that. Talk about pity, Leif said. So this is what happens to art when you think you can make it a hotel.
My mother looked panicked then. She told Leif in a formal-sounding voice, as if she didn’t know us, that she’d be in touch. She did a thing with her head to remind us about the cameras in the corners, she kissed us with her eyes, and then, like we were guests who’d been quite nice to her, she hugged each of us separately, polite, goodbye.
We traced our way back through the crowds of tourists to where we’d left the campervan by using Google streetmap. It was easier to navigate by the shops than by the streets, the names of which were elusive, so we went towards Chanel instead, biggest thing on the map. Now Gucci. Celine. Strange when we finally found the far side where Alana’s flat was, a place not even registering on Google as a place, that Leif got in on the driving side, because it was my mother who always drove, she was good at the campervan which was notoriously tricky, he was going to be less good, less sure of it, which is maybe why he made us both sit in the back even though the passenger seat was empty. Maybe this was to stop us fighting over who got to sit up front. Maybe he just didn’t want to have us watching him too close while he was concentrating.
He turned the ignition. It started. We’ll give it a month then we’ll come back and collect her, whether Alana’s job’s still on the line or not, he said as we left the city. But it was a good thing. It was all in a good cause. Alana was our mother’s sister. We had met her only once before, back when we were too small to know, and she’d been too ill for us to see her this time, but because of our mother she’d keep her job, and we could have our mother all the other summers, we could learn from this summer that this was what family did and what you did for family, and it was a very busy place Alana worked, and it needed its staff, we’d seen that when we’d walked past the night before trying to catch a glimpse of my mother working, hoping to wave hello as we passed. But we couldn’t spot her, there were so many people, the inside restaurant full, the outside front courtyard restaurant full too, of people the like of which I had never seen, not in real life. They were so beautiful, coiffed and perfect, the people eating in the restaurant of the place my mother was working, smoothed as if airbrushed, as if you really could digitally alter real people. I saw a table with what looked like a family at it, a woman, the mother presumably, elegant, raising her fork, it had a piece of something on it and she put it to her mouth rather than in her mouth, as if she were automatonic, then her arm and hand put it back down on the plate, then raised it again, next to her a boy, elegant, stirring indifferently at what was on his plate and staring into space, then the man, the father maybe, rotund but elegant, dressed as if at an awards ceremony on TV and scrolling a phone instead of eating, then a girl, I couldn’t see what she was doing but she was elegant even though she had her back to me. It was like they all had their backs to me. Their disconnect was what elegant meant. It was like something vital had been withdrawn from them, for its own protection maybe? maybe surgically, the withdrawal of the too-much-life from people who could afford it by people masked and smelling of cleanness, inserting the cannula, them sitting in a clinic, its reassuring medical smell, offhand one after the other baring a shoulder, offering an arm.
But then where did it go? What did the surgeon-remover do with the carefully removed life-serum? How could you protect it wherever you stored it, from everything? the disastrous heat, the gutter dirt, the pollution, the things that changed, the terrible leavetakings, the journeying?
They were so still, so stilled. Was that what endurance was? Is it still life? I’d said out loud as we passed. Is what? Leif said. I’d nodded towards the restaurant we’d never have got into. Even though they’re breathing and moving they’re like the things in one of those old paintings of globes and skulls and fruits and lutes, I said.
Leif laughed then and winked down at me.
Art hotel, he said.
Usually when we were this near home my mother would be driving, Leif would be saying the thing he always said on this stretch of the road about how when you went to different places, places you’d never been, especially if you were lucky enough to travel to a different country, the houses all looked strange, special, like they were houses out of fairy tales, and my mother would be telling Leif that he was getting to be a pretentious old bore the way he always said this when we went travelling. It wasn’t that they were fighting, it wasn’t serious, it would be warmth coming from them in the front of the noisy van, Leif saying it over the top of her complaining, no, because when you went to a new place it was like things were new to the eye, charged with what happens when someone tells a story about something, my mother yelling about how there was nothing new in his same old same-old. Today Leif wasn’t saying anything. It was late. It was still light. But this place on the road where this always happened was so near home that it wouldn’t feel like home without somebody saying it, so I said to my sister, hoping Leif would hear me, wasn’t it interesting that different places you went to could make things be like they were out of a story. But he didn’t hear, or if he did he didn’t say, and anyway my sister was asleep leaning against me on the seat.
I loved the campervan. We both did. We loved the way the back window was a square of glass that opened. We loved the tables, how they folded away for safety when we were driving. We fantasised about dangerous driving with the tables unfolded. We loved all the things in the latched-down (for safety when driving) cupboards, exotic because they weren’t the things we ate and drank with at home. We loved when the campervan roof got raised like a single wing; we fantasised about one day having that wing bit of the roof raised while we were on the road too.
