Illuminations, page 14
Max Brod has said: ‘The world of those realities that were important for him was invisible.’ What Kafka could see least of all was the gestus. Each gesture is an event – one might even say, a drama – in itself. The stage on which this drama takes place is the World Theatre which opens up toward heaven. On the other hand, this heaven is only background; to explore it according to its own laws would be like framing the painted backdrop of the stage and hanging it in a picture gallery. Like El Greco, Kafka tears open the sky behind every gesture; but as with El Greco – who was the patron saint of the Expressionists – the gesture remains the decisive thing, the centre of the event. The people who have assumed responsibility for the knock at the manor gate walk doubled up with fright. This is how a Chinese actor would portray terror, but no one would give a start. Elsewhere K. himself does a bit of acting. Without being fully conscious of it, ‘slowly … with his eyes not looking down but cautiously raised upwards he took one of the papers from the desk, put it on the palm of his hand and gradually raised it up to the gentlemen while getting up himself. He had nothing definite in mind, but acted only with the feeling that this was what he would have to do once he had completed the big petition which was to exonerate him completely.’ This animal gesture combines the utmost mysteriousness with the utmost simplicity. It is possible to read Kafka’s animal stories for quite a while without realizing that they are not about human beings at all. When one encounters the name of the creature – monkey, dog, mole – one looks up in fright and realizes that one is already far away from the continent of man. But it is always Kafka; he divests the human gesture of its traditional supports and then has a subject for reflection without end.
Strangely enough, these reflections are endless even when their point of departure is one of Kafka’s philosophical tales. Take, for example, the parable ‘Before the Law.’ The reader who read it in A Country Doctor may have been struck by the cloudy spot in it. But would it have led him to the never-ending series of reflections traceable to this parable at the place where Kafka undertakes to interpret it? This is done by the priest in The Trial, and at such a significant moment that it looks as if the novel were nothing but the unfolding of the parable. The word ‘unfolding’ has a double meaning. A bud unfolds into a blossom, but the boat which one teaches children to make by folding paper unfolds into a flat sheet of paper. This second kind of ‘unfolding’ is really appropriate to the parable; it is the reader’s pleasure to smooth it out so that he has the meaning on the palm of his hand. Kafka’s parables, however, unfold in the first sense, the way a bud turns into a blossom. That is why their effect resembles poetry. This does not mean that his prose pieces belong entirely in the tradition of Western prose forms; they have, rather, a similar relationship to doctrine as the Haggadah does to the Halakah. They are not parables, and yet they do not want to be taken at their face value; they lend themselves to quotation and can be told for purposes of clarification. But do we have the doctrine which Kafka’s parables interpret and which K.’s postures and the gestures of his animals clarify? It does not exist; all we can say is that here and there we have an allusion to it. Kafka might have said that these are relics transmitting the doctrine, although we could regard them just as well as precursors preparing the doctrine. In every case it is a question of how life and work are organized in human society. This question increasingly occupied Kafka as it became impenetrable to him. If Napoleon, in his famous conversation with Goethe at Erfurt, substituted politics for fate, Kafka, in a variation of this statement, could have defined organization as destiny. He faces it not only in the extensive hierarchy of officialdom in The Trial and The Castle, but even more concretely in the difficult and incalculable construction plans whose venerable model he dealt with in The Great Wall of China.
‘The wall was to be a protection for centuries; accordingly, the most scrupulous care in the construction, the application of the architectural wisdom of all known ages and peoples, a constant sense of personal responsibility on the part of the builders were indispensable prerequisites for the work. To be sure, for the menial tasks ignorant labourers from the populace, men, women, and children, whoever offered his services for good money, could be used; but for the supervision even of every four day labourers a man trained in the building trade was required … We – and here I speak in the name of many people – did not really know ourselves until we had carefully scrutinized the decrees of the high command; then we discovered that without this leadership neither our book learning nor our common sense would have sufficed for the humble tasks which we performed in the great whole.’ This organization resembles fate. Metchnikoff, who has outlined this in his famous book La Civilisation et les grands fleuves historiques [Civilization and the Great Historical Rivers], uses language that could be Kafka’s. ‘The canals of the Yangtze and the dams of the Yellow River,’ he writes, ‘are in all likelihood the result of the skilfully organized joint labour of … generations. The slightest carelessness in the digging of a ditch or the buttressing of a dam, the least bit of negligence or selfish behaviour on the part of an individual or a group of men in the maintenance of the common hydraulic wealth becomes, under such unusual circumstances, the source of social evils and far-reaching social calamity. Consequently, a life-giving river requires on pain of death a close and permanent solidarity between groups of people that frequently are alien or even hostile to one another; it sentences everyone to labours whose common usefulness is revealed only by time and whose design quite often remains utterly incomprehensible to an ordinary man.’
Kafka wished to be numbered among ordinary men. He was pushed to the limits of understanding at every turn, and he liked to push others to them as well. At times he seems to come close to saying with Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor: ‘So we have before us a mystery which we cannot comprehend. And precisely because it is a mystery we have had the right to preach it, to teach the people that what matters is neither freedom nor love, but the riddle, the secret, the mystery to which they have to bow – without reflection and even against their conscience.’ Kafka did not always evade the temptations of mysticism. There is a diary entry concerning his encounter with Rudolf Steiner; in its published form at least it does not reflect Kafka’s attitude toward him. Did he avoid taking a stand? His way with his own writings certainly does not exclude this possibility. Kafka had a rare capacity for creating parables for himself. Yet his parables are never exhausted by what is explainable; on the contrary, he took all conceivable precautions against the interpretation of his writings. One has to find one’s way in them circumspectly, cautiously, and warily. One must keep in mind Kafka’s way of reading as exemplified in his interpretation of the above-mentioned parable. His testament is another case in point. Given its background, the directive in which Kafka ordered the destruction of his literary remains is just as unfathomable, to be weighed just as carefully as the answers of the doorkeeper before the law. Perhaps Kafka, whose every day on earth brought him up against insoluble behaviour problems and undecipherable communications, in death wished to give his contemporaries a taste of their own medicine.
Kafka’s world is a world theatre. For him, man is on the stage from the very beginning. The proof of the pudding is the fact that everyone is accepted by the Nature Theater of Oklahoma. What the standards for admission are cannot be determined. Dramatic talent, the most obvious criterion, seems to be of no importance. But this can be expressed in another way: all that is expected of the applicants is the ability to play themselves. It is no longer within the realm of possibility that they could, if necessary, be what they claim to be. With their roles these people look for a position in the Nature Theater just as Pirandello’s six characters sought an author. For all of them this place is the last refuge, which does not preclude it from being their salvation. Salvation is not a premium on existence, but the last way out for a man whose path, as Kafka puts it, is ‘blocked … by his own frontal bone.’ The law of this theatre is contained in a sentence tucked away in ‘A Report to an Academy’: ‘I imitated people because I was looking for a way out, and for no other reason.’ Before the end of his trial, K. seems to have an intimation of these things. He suddenly turns to the two gentlemen wearing top hats who have come for him and asks them: ‘“What theatre are you playing at?” “Theatre?” asked one, the corners of his mouth twitching as he looked for advice to the other, who acted as if he were a mute struggling to overcome a stubborn disability.’ The men do not answer this question, but there is much to indicate that it has hit home.
At a long bench which has been covered with a white cloth all those who will henceforth be with the Nature Theater are fed. ‘They were all happy and excited.’ By way of celebration, extras act as angels. They stand on high pedestals that are covered with flowing raiments and have stairs inside – the makings of a country church fair, or maybe a children’s festival, which may have eliminated the sadness from the eyes of the tightly laced, dressed-up boy we discussed above. But for the fact that their wings are tied on, these angels might be real. They have forerunners in Kafka’s works. One of them is the impresario who climbs up on the luggage rack next to the trapeze artist beset by his ‘first sorrow,’ caresses him and presses his face against the artist’s, ‘so that he was bathed by the trapeze artist’s tears.’ Another, a guardian angel or guardian of the law, takes care of Schmar the murderer following the ‘fratricide’ and leads him away, stepping lightly, with Schmar’s ‘mouth pressed against the policeman’s shoulder.’ Kafka’s Amerika ends with the rustic ceremonies of Oklahoma. ‘In Kafka,’ said Soma Morgenstern, ‘there is the air of a village, as with all great founders of religions.’ Lao-tse’s presentation of piousness is all the more pertinent here because Kafka has supplied its most perfect description in ‘The Next Village.’ ‘Neighbouring countries may be within sight, so that the sounds of roosters and dogs may be heard in the distance. And yet people are said to die at a ripe old age without having travelled far.’ Thus Lao-tse. Kafka was a writer of parables, but he did not found a religion.
Let us consider the village at the foot of Castle Hill whence K.’s alleged employment as a land surveyor is so mysteriously and unexpectedly confirmed. In his Postscript to The Castle Brod mentioned that in depicting this village at the foot of Castle Hill Kafka had in mind a specific place, Zürau in the Erz Gebirge. We may, however, also recognize another village in it. It is the village in a Talmudic legend told by a rabbi in answer to the question why Jews prepare a festive evening meal on Fridays. The legend is about a princess languishing in exile, in a village whose language she does not understand, far from her compatriots. One day this princess receives a letter saying that her fiancé has not forgotten her and is on his way to her. The fiancé, so says the rabbi, is the Messiah; the princess is the soul; the village in which she lives in exile is the body. She prepares a meal for him because this is the only way in which she can express her joy in a village whose language she does not know. This village of the Talmud is right in Kafka’s world. For just as K. lives in the village on Castle Hill, modern man lives in his body; the body slips away from him, is hostile toward him. It may happen that a man wakes up one day and finds himself transformed into vermin. Exile – his exile – has gained control over him. The air of this village blows about Kafka, and that is why he was not tempted to found a religion. The pigsty which houses the country doctor’s horses; the stuffy back room in which Klamm, a cigar in his mouth, sits over a glass of beer; the manor gate, to knock against which brings ruin – all these are part of this village. The air in this village is not free of all the abortive and overripe elements that form such a putrid mixture. This is the air that Kafka had to breathe all his life. He was neither mantic nor the founder of a religion. How was he able to survive in this air?
THE LITTLE HUNCHBACK
Some time ago it became known that Knut Hamsun was in the habit of expressing his views in an occasional letter to the editor of the local paper in the small town near which he lived. Years ago that town was the scene of the jury trial of a maid who had killed her infant child. She was sentenced to a prison term. Soon thereafter the local paper printed a letter from Hamsun in which he announced his intention of leaving a town which did not visit the supreme punishment on a mother who killed her newborn child – the gallows, or at least a life term of hard labour. A few years passed. Growth of the Soil appeared, and it contained the story of a maid who committed the same crime, suffered the same punishment, and, as is made clear to the reader, surely deserved no more severe one.
Kafka’s posthumous reflections, which are contained in The Great Wall of China, recall this to mind. Hardly had this volume appeared when the reflections served as the basis for a Kafka criticism which concentrated on an interpretation of these reflections to the neglect of his real works. There are two ways to miss the point of Kafka’s works. One is to interpret them naturally, the other is the supernatural interpretation. Both the psychoanalytic and the theological interpretations equally miss the essential points. The first kind is represented by Hellmuth Kaiser; the second, by numerous writers, such as H. J. Schloeps, Bernhard Rang, and Bernhard Groethuysen. To these last also belongs Willy Haas, although he has made revealing comments on Kafka in other contexts which we shall discuss later; such insights did not prevent him from interpreting Kafka’s work after a theological pattern. ‘The powers above, the realm of grace,’ so Haas writes, ‘Kafka has depicted in his great novel The Castle; the powers below, the realm of the courts and of damnation, he has dealt with in his equally great novel The Trial. The earth between the two, earthly fate and its arduous demands, he attempted to present in strictly stylized form in a third novel, Amerika.’ The first third of this interpretation has, since Brod, become the common property of Kafka criticism. Bernhard Rang writes in a similar vein: ‘To the extent that one may regard the Castle as the seat of grace, precisely these vain efforts and attempts mean, theologically speaking, that God’s grace cannot be attained or forced by man at will and deliberately. Unrest and impatience only impede and confound the exalted stillness of the divine.’ This interpretation is a convenient one; but the further it is carried, the clearer it becomes that it is untenable. This is perhaps seen most clearly in a statement by Willy Haas. ‘Kafka goes back … to Kierkegaard as well as to Pascal; one may call him the only legitimate heir of these two. In all three there is an excruciatingly harsh basic religious theme: man is always in the wrong before God … Kafka’s upper world, his so-called Castle, with its immense, complex staff of petty and rather lecherous officials, his strange heaven plays a horrible game with people … and yet man is very much in the wrong even before this god.’ This theology falls far behind the doctrine of justification of St Anselm of Canterbury into barbaric speculations which do not even seem consistent with the text of Kafka’s works. ‘Can an individual official forgive?’ we read in The Castle. ‘This could only be a matter for the over-all authorities, but even they can probably not forgive but only judge.’ This road has soon led into a blind alley. ‘All this,’ says Denis de Rougemont, ‘is not the wretched situation of man without a god, but the wretched state of a man who is bound to a god he does not know, because he does not know Christ.’
It is easier to draw speculative conclusions from Kafka’s posthumous collection of notes than to explore even one of the motifs that appear in his stories and novels. Yet only these give some clue to the prehistoric forces that dominated Kafka’s creativeness, forces which, to be sure, may justifiably be regarded as belonging to our world as well. Who can say under what names they appeared to Kafka himself? Only this much is certain: he did not know them and failed to get his bearings among them. In the mirror which the prehistoric world held before him in the form of guilt he merely saw the future emerging in the form of judgment. Kafka, however, did not say what it was like. Was it not the Last Judgment? Does it not turn the judge into the defendant? Is the trial not the punishment? Kafka gave no answer. Did he expect anything of this punishment? Or was he not rather concerned to postpone it? In the stories which Kafka left us, narrative art regains the significance it had in the mouth of Scheherazade: to postpone the future. In The Trial postponement is the hope of the accused man only if the proceedings do not gradually turn into the judgment. The patriarch himself is to benefit by postponement, even though he may have to trade his place in tradition for it. ‘I could conceive of another Abraham – to be sure, he would never get to be a patriarch or even an old-clothes dealer –, an Abraham who would be prepared to satisfy the demand for a sacrifice immediately, with the promptness of a waiter, but would be unable to bring it off because he cannot get away, being indispensable; the household needs him, there is always something or other to take care of, the house is never ready; but without having his house ready, without having something to fall back on, he cannot leave – this the Bible also realized, for it says: “He set his house in order.”’
This Abraham appears ‘with the promptness of a waiter.’ Kafka could understand things only in the form of a gestus, and this gestus which he did not understand constitutes the cloudy part of the parables. Kafka’s writings emanate from it. The way he withheld them is well known. His testament orders their destruction. This document, which no one interested in Kafka can disregard, says that the writings did not satisfy their author, that he regarded his efforts as failures, that he counted himself among those who were bound to fail. He did fail in his grandiose attempt to convert poetry into doctrine, to turn it into a parable and restore to it that stability and unpretentiousness which, in the face of reason, seemed to him to be the only appropriate thing for it. No other writer has obeyed the commandment ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image’ so faithfully.
