Illuminations, page 13
We encounter these holders of power in constant, slow movement, rising or falling. But they are at their most terrible when they rise from the deepest decay – from the fathers. The son calms his spiritless, senile father whom he has just gently put to bed: ‘“Don’t worry, you are well covered up.” “No,” cried his father, cutting short the answer, threw the blanket off with such strength that it unfolded fully as it flew, and stood up on bed. Only one hand lightly touched the ceiling to steady him. “You wanted to cover me up, I know, my little scamp, but I’m not all covered up yet. And even if this is all the strength I have left, it’s enough for you, too much for you … But thank goodness a father does not need to be taught how to see through his son.” … And he stood up quite unsupported and kicked his legs out. He beamed with insight … “So now you know what else there was in the world besides yourself; until now you have known only about yourself! It is true, you were an innocent child, but it is even more true that you have been a devilish person!”’ As the father throws off the burden of the blanket, he also throws off a cosmic burden. He has to set cosmic ages in motion in order to turn the age-old father-son relationship into a living and consequential thing. But what consequences! He sentences his son to death by drowning. The father is the one who punishes; guilt attracts him as it does the court officials. There is much to indicate that the world of the officials and the world of the fathers are the same to Kafka. The similarity does not redound to this world’s credit; it consists of dullness, decay, and dirt. The father’s uniform is stained all over; his underwear is dirty. Filth is the element of the officials. ‘She could not understand why there were office hours for the public in the first place. “To get some dirt on the front staircase” – this is how her question was once answered by an official, who was probably annoyed, but it made a lot of sense to her.’ Uncleanness is so much the attribute of officials that one could almost regard them as enormous parasites. This, of course, does not refer to the economic context, but to the forces of reason and humanity from which this clan makes a living. In the same way the fathers in Kafka’s strange families batten on their sons, lying on top of them like giant parasites. They not only prey upon their strength, but gnaw away at the sons’ right to exist. The fathers punish, but they are at the same time the accusers. The sin of which they accuse their sons seems to be a kind of original sin. The definition of it which Kafka has given applies to the sons more than to anyone else: ‘Original sin, the old injustice committed by man, consists in the complaint unceasingly made by man that he has been the victim of an injustice, the victim of original sin.’ But who is accused of this inherited sin – the sin of having produced an heir – if not the father by the son? Accordingly the son would be the sinner. But one must not conclude from Kafka’s definition that the accusation is sinful because it is false. Nowhere does Kafka say that it is made wrongfully. A never-ending process is at work here, and no cause can appear in a worse light than the one for which the father enlists the aid of these officials and court offices. A boundless corruptibility is not their worst feature, for their essence is such that their venality is the only hope held out to the human spirit facing them. The courts, to be sure, have lawbooks at their disposal, but people are not allowed to see them. ‘It is characteristic of this legal system,’ conjectures K., ‘that one is sentenced not only in innocence but also in ignorance.’ Laws and definite norms remain unwritten in the prehistoric world. A man can transgress them without suspecting it and thus become subject to atonement. But no matter how hard it may hit the unsuspecting, the transgression in the sense of the law is not accidental but fated, a destiny which appears here in all its ambiguity. In a cursory investigation of the idea of fate in antiquity Hermann Cohen came to a ‘conclusion that becomes inescapable’: ‘the very rules of fate seem to be what causes and brings about the breaking away from them, the defection.’ It is the same way with the legal authorities whose proceedings are directed against K. It takes us back far beyond the time of the giving of the Law on twelve tablets to a prehistoric world, written law being one of the first victories scored over this world. In Kafka the written law is contained in books, but these are secret; by basing itself on them the prehistoric world exerts its rule all the more ruthlessly.
In Kafka’s works, the conditions in offices and in families have multifarious points of contact. In the village at the foot of Castle Hill people use an illuminating saying. ‘“We have a saying here that you may be familiar with: Official decisions are as shy as young girls.” “That’s a sound observation,” said K., “a sound observation. Decisions may have even other characteristics in common with girls.”’ The most remarkable of these qualities is the willingness to lend oneself to anything, like the shy girls whom K. meets in The Castle and The Trial, girls who indulge in unchastity in the bosom of their family as they would in a bed. He encounters them at every turn; the rest give him as little trouble as the conquest of the barmaid. ‘They embraced each other; her little body burned in K.’s hands; in a state of unconsciousness which K. tried to master constantly but fruitlessly, they rolled a little way, hit Klamm’s door with a thud, and then lay in the little puddles of beer and the other refuse that littered the floor. Hours passed … in which K. constantly had the feeling that he was losing his way or that he had wandered farther than anyone had ever wandered before, to a place where even the air had nothing in common with his native air, where all this strangeness might choke one, yet a place so insanely enchanting that one could not help but go on and lose oneself even further.’ We shall have more to say about this strange place. The remarkable thing is that these whorelike women never seem to be beautiful. Rather, beauty appears in Kafka’s world only in the most obscure places – among the accused persons, for example. ‘This, to be sure, is a strange phenomenon, a natural law, as it were … It cannot be guilt that makes them attractive … nor can it be the just punishment which makes them attractive in anticipation … so it must be the mere charges brought against them that somehow show on them.’
From The Trial it may be seen that these proceedings usually are hopeless for those accused – hopeless even when they have hopes of being acquitted. It may be this hopelessness that brings out the beauty in them – the only creatures in Kafka thus favoured. At least this would be very much in keeping with a conversation which Max Brod has related. ‘I remember,’ Brod writes, ‘a conversation with Kafka which began with present-day Europe and the decline of the human race. “We are nihilistic thoughts, suicidal thoughts that come into God’s head,” Kafka said. This reminded me at first of the Gnostic view of life: God as the evil demiurge, the world as his Fall. “Oh no,” said Kafka, “our world is only a bad mood of God, a bad day of his.” “Then there is hope outside this manifestation of the world that we know.” He smiled. “Oh, plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope – but not for us.”’ These words provide a bridge to those extremely strange figures in Kafka, the only ones who have escaped from the family circle and for whom there may be hope. These are not the animals, not even those hybrids or imaginary creatures like the Cat Lamb or Odradek; they all still live under the spell of the family. It is no accident that Gregor Samsa wakes up as a bug in his parental home and not somewhere else, and that the peculiar animal which is half kitten, half lamb, is inherited from the father; Odradek likewise is the concern of the father of the family. The ‘assistants,’ however, are outside this circle.
These assistants belong to a group of figures which recurs through Kafka’s entire work. Their tribe includes the confidence man who is unmasked in ‘Meditation’; the student who appears on the balcony at night as Karl Rossmann’s neighbour; and the fools who live in that town in the south and never get tired. The twilight in which they exist is reminiscent of the uncertain light in which the figures in the short prose pieces of Robert Walser appear [the author of Der Gehülfe, The Assistant, a novel Kafka was very fond of]. In Indian mythology there are the gandharvas, celestial creatures, beings in an unfinished state. Kafka’s assistants are of that kind: neither members of, nor strangers to, any of the other groups of figures, but, rather, messengers from one to the other. Kafka tells us that they resemble Barnabas, who is a messenger. They have not yet been completely released from the womb of nature, and that is why they have ‘settled down on two old women’s skirts on the floor in a corner. It was … their ambition … to use up as little space as possible. To that end they kept making various experiments, folding their arms and legs, huddling close together; in the darkness all one could see in their corner was one big ball.’ It is for them and their kind, the unfinished and the bunglers, that there is hope.
What may be discerned, subtly and informally, in the activities of these messengers is law in an oppressive and gloomy way for this whole group of beings. None has a firm place in the world, firm, inalienable outlines. There is not one that is not either rising or falling, none that is not trading qualities with its enemy or neighbour, none that has not completed its period of time and yet is unripe, none that is not deeply exhausted and yet is only at the beginning of a long existence. To speak of any order or hierarchy is impossible here. Even the world of myth of which we think in this context is incomparably younger than Kafka’s world, which has been promised redemption by the myth. But if we can be sure of one thing, it is this: Kafka did not succumb to its temptation. A latter-day Ulysses, he let the Sirens go by ‘his gaze which was fixed on the distance, the Sirens disappeared as it were before his determination, and at the very moment when he was closest to them he was no longer aware of them.’ Among Kafka’s ancestors in the ancient world, the Jews and the Chinese, whom we shall encounter later, this Greek one should not be forgotten. Ulysses, after all, stands at the dividing line between myth and fairy tale. Reason and cunning have inserted tricks into myths; their forces cease to be invincible. Fairy tales are the traditional stories about victory over these forces, and fairy tales for dialecticians are what Kafka wrote when he went to work on legends. He inserted little tricks into them; then he used them as proof ‘that inadequate, even childish measures may also serve to rescue one.’ With these words he begins his story about the ‘Silence of the Sirens.’ For Kafka’s Sirens are silent; they have ‘an even more terrible weapon than their song … their silence.’ This they used on Ulysses. But he, so Kafka tells us, ‘was so full of guile, was such a fox that not even the goddess of fate could pierce his armour. Perhaps he had really noticed, although here the human understanding is beyond its depths, that the Sirens were silent, and opposed the afore-mentioned pretence to them and the gods merely as a sort of shield.’
Kafka’s Sirens are silent. Perhaps because for Kafka music and singing are an expression or at least a token of escape, a token of hope which comes to us from that intermediate world – at once unfinished and commonplace, comforting and silly – in which the assistants are at home. Kafka is like the lad who set out to learn what fear was. He has got into Potemkin’s palace and finally, in the depths of its cellar, has encountered Josephine, the singing mouse, whose tune he describes: ‘Something of our poor, brief childhood is in it, something of lost happiness which can never be found again, but also something of active present-day life, of its small gaieties, unaccountable and yet real and unquenchable.’
A CHILDHOOD PHOTOGRAPH
There is a childhood photograph of Kafka, a rarely touching portrayal of the ‘poor, brief childhood.’ It was probably made in one of those nineteenth-century studios whose draperies and palm trees, tapestries and easels placed them somewhere between a torture chamber and a throne room. At the age of approximately six the boy is presented in a sort of greenhouse setting, wearing a tight, heavily lace-trimmed, almost embarrassing child’s suit. Palm branches loom in the background. And as if to make these upholstered tropics still more sultry and sticky, the model holds in his left hand an oversized, wide-brimmed hat of the type worn by Spaniards. Immensely sad eyes dominate the landscape prearranged for them, and the auricle of a big ear seems to be listening for its sounds.
The ardent ‘wish to become a Red Indian’ may have consumed this great sadness at some point. ‘If one were only an Indian, instantly alert, and on a racing horse, leaning against the wind, kept on quivering briefly over the quivering ground, until one shed one’s spurs, for there were no spurs, threw away the reins, for there were no reins, and barely saw the land before one as a smoothly mown heath, with the horse’s neck and head already gone.’ A great deal is contained in this wish. Its fulfilment, which he finds in America, yields up its secret. That Amerika is a very special case is indicated by the name of its hero. While in the earlier novels the author never addressed himself otherwise than with a mumbled initial, here he experiences a rebirth on a new continent with a full name. He has this experience in the Nature Theater of Oklahoma. ‘At a street corner Karl saw a poster with the following announcement: The Oklahoma Theater will engage members for its company today at Clayton Racetrack from 6 a.m. until midnight. The great Theater of Oklahoma calls you! The one and only call is today! If you miss your chance now, you miss it forever! If you think of your future, you should be one of us! Everyone is welcome! If you want to be an artist, come forward! Our Theater can use everyone and find the right place for everyone! If you decide to join us, we congratulate you here and now! But hurry, so that you get in before midnight! At twelve o’clock the doors will be shut and never opened again! A curse on those who do not believe in us! Set out for Clayton!’ The reader of this announcement is Karl Rossmann, the third and happier incarnation of K., the hero of Kafka’s novels. Happiness awaits him at the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, which is really a racetrack, just as ‘unhappiness’ had once beset him on the narrow rug in his room on which he ran about ‘as on a racetrack.’ Ever since Kafka wrote his ‘reflections for gentleman jockeys,’ ever since he made the ‘new attorney’ mount the courthouse steps, lifting his legs high, with a tread that made the marble ring, ever since he made his ‘children on a country road’ amble through the countryside with large steps and folded arms, this figure had been familiar to him; and even Karl Rossmann, ‘distracted by his sleepiness,’ may often make ‘too high, time-consuming, and useless leaps.’ Thus it can only be a racetrack on which he attains the object of his desire.
This racetrack is at the same time a theatre, and this poses a puzzle. The mysterious place and the entirely unmysterious, transparent, pure figure of Karl Rossmann are congruous, however. For Karl Rossmann is transparent, pure, without character as it were in the same sense in which Franz Rosenzweig says in his Star of Redemption that in China people, in their spiritual aspects, are ‘as it were devoid of individual character; the idea of the wise man, of which Confucius is the classic incarnation, blurs any individuality of character; he is the truly characterless man, namely, the average man … What distinguishes a Chinese is something quite different from character: a very elemental purity of feeling.’ No matter how one may convey it intellectually, this purity of feeling may be a particularly sensitive measurement of gestic behaviour; the Nature Theater of Oklahoma in any case harks back to the Chinese theatre, which is a gestic theatre. One of the most significant functions of this theatre is to dissolve happenings into their gestic components. One can go even further and say that a good number of Kafka’s shorter studies and stories are seen in their full light only when they are, so to speak, put on as acts in the ‘Nature Theater of Oklahoma.’ Only then will one recognize with certainty that Kafka’s entire work constitutes a code of gestures which surely had no definite symbolic meaning for the author from the outset; rather, the author tried to derive such a meaning from them in ever-changing contexts and experimental groupings. The theatre is the logical place for such groupings. In an unpublished commentary on ‘A Fratricide,’ Werner Kraft perceptively identified the events in this little story as scenic events. ‘The play is ready to begin, and it is actually announced by a bell. This comes about in a very natural way. Wese leaves the building in which his office is located. But this doorbell, so we are expressly told, is “too loud for a doorbell; it rings out over the town and up to heaven.”’ Just as this bell, which is too loud for a doorbell, rings out toward heaven, the gestures of Kafka’s figures are too powerful for our accustomed surroundings and break out into wider areas. The greater Kafka’s mastery became, the more frequently did he eschew adapting these gestures to common situations or explaining them. ‘It is strange behaviour,’ we read in ‘The Metamorphosis,’ ‘to sit on the desk and talk down at the employee, who, furthermore, must come quite close because his boss is hard of hearing.’ The Trial has already left such motivations far behind. In the penultimate chapter, K. stops at the first rows in the Cathedral, ‘but the priest seemed to consider the distance still too great; he stretched out an arm and pointed with his sharply bent forefinger to a spot right in front of the pulpit. K. followed this direction too; at that place he had to bend his head far back to see the priest at all.’
