Illuminations, page 16
Werner Kraft once wrote an interpretation of this story. After giving careful attention to every detail of the text, Kraft notes: ‘Nowhere else in literature is there such a powerful and penetrating criticism of the myth in its full scope.’ According to Kraft, Kafka does not use the word ‘justice,’ yet it is justice which serves as the point of departure for his critique of the myth. But once we have reached this point, we are in danger of missing Kafka by stopping here. Is it really the law which could thus be invoked against the myth in the name of justice? No, as a legal scholar Bucephalus remains true to his origins, except that he does not seem to be practising law – and this is probably something new, in Kafka’s sense, for both Bucephalus and the bar. The law which is studied and not practised any longer is the gate to justice.
The gate to justice is learning. And yet Kafka does not dare attach to this learning the promises which tradition has attached to the study of the Torah. His assistants are sextons who have lost their house of prayer, his students are pupils who have lost the Holy Writ. Now there is nothing to support them on their ‘untrammelled, happy journey.’ Kafka, however, has found the law of his journey – at least on one occasion he succeeded in bringing its breath-taking speed in line with the slow narrative pace that he presumably sought all his life. He expressed this in a little prose piece which is his most perfect creation not only because it is an interpretation.
‘Without ever boasting of it, Sancho Panza succeeded in the course of years, by supplying a lot of romances of chivalry and adventure for the evening and night hours, in so diverting from him his demon, whom he later called Don Quixote, that his demon thereupon freely performed the maddest exploits, which, however, lacking a preordained object, which Sancho Panza himself was supposed to have been, did no one any harm. A free man, Sancho Panza philosophically followed Don Quixote on his crusades, perhaps out of a sense of responsibility, and thus enjoyed a great and profitable entertainment to the end of his days.’
Sancho Panza, a sedate fool and clumsy assistant, sent his rider on ahead; Bucephalus outlived his. Whether it is a man or a horse is no longer so important, if only the burden is removed from the back.
Max Brod’s Book on Kafka
AND SOME OF MY OWN REFLECTIONSfn1
Max Brod’s book on Kafka is characterized by the fundamental contradiction between the author’s thesis concerning his subject and his attitude toward him. The latter serves to discredit the former seriously, and one has other reservations about his thesis, which states that Kafka was on the road to holiness. As for the biographer’s attitude, it is one of supreme bonhomie, with a lack of reserve as its most striking characteristic.
The very fact that this particular attitude could be paired with this particular view of the subject deprives the book of its authority from the outset. How this is done is illustrated, for example, by the turn of phrase with which ‘our Franz’ is introduced to the reader on a photograph. Intimacy with a saint has a definite designation in the history of religion: Pietism. Brod’s attitude as a biographer is the pietistic stance of an ostentatious intimacy – in other words, the most irreverent attitude imaginable.
The carelessness with which the book is put together is promoted by habits which the author may have acquired in his professional life. At any rate, it is hardly possible to overlook the traces of journalistic routine, down to the very formulation of his thesis: ‘The category of holiness … is really the only proper category under which Kafka’s life and work can be viewed.’ Is it necessary to state that holiness is a category reserved for life and that works do not belong to it under any circumstances? Is there any need to point out that the term ‘holiness,’ used outside a traditionally established religious structure, is nothing but a novelist’s phrase?
Brod lacks any sense of that pragmatic strictness which one may demand of a first biography of Kafka. ‘We knew nothing of first-class hotels, and yet we didn’t have a care in the world.’ Because of the author’s striking lack of tact, of a feeling for thresholds and distances, journalistic clichés have crept into a text which its very subject should have obliged to keep to a certain standard. This is not so much the reason for, as evidence of, the extent to which Brod has been denied any authentic view of Kafka’s life. His inability to do justice to his subject becomes particularly objectionable when Brod discusses Kafka’s famous testamentary instructions charging him with the destruction of his unpublished writings. Here if anywhere would have been the place to lay open basic aspects of Kafka’s existence. (He was evidently not willing to be responsible to posterity for a work the greatness of which he was at the same time well aware of.)
The question has been discussed from all sides since Kafka’s death; it would have been logical to pause here. Of course, this would have taken some soul-searching on the part of the biographer. Kafka presumably had to entrust his posthumous papers to someone who would not want to do his will. And neither the testator nor his biographer would be harmed by considering things in this way. But this would have required the ability to gauge the tensions which permeated Kafka’s life.
That Brod lacks this ability is shown by the passages in which he undertakes to interpret Kafka’s work or his style. He does not get beyond dilettantish rudiments. The strangeness of Kafka’s personality and his writings is certainly not merely an ‘apparent’ one, as Brod would have it, nor does one grasp Kafka’s productions with the insight that they are ‘nothing but true.’ Such statements about Kafka’s work only serve to render Brod’s interpretation of Kafka’s Weltanschauung questionable from the start. When Brod says of Kafka that he was more or less in line with Buber, this amounts to looking for a butterfly in the net over which it casts its hovering shadow. The ‘virtually realistic-Jewish interpretation’ of The Castle suppresses the repulsive and horrible features which Kafka attributes to the upper world in favour of an uplifting interpretation which Zionists ought to be the first to view with suspicion.
Occasionally this easygoing attitude, so utterly out of keeping with its subject, betrays itself even to a reader who is not too particular. It was Brod’s privilege to illustrate the complex of symbols and allegories which he deems important for the interpretation of Kafka by means of Andersen’s ‘Steadfast Tin Soldier.’ According to Brod, the soldier constitutes a valid symbol because he not only ‘expresses much … that loses itself in infinity’ but ‘also comes close to us as tin soldier via a detailed personal story.’ It would be interesting to know how the Shield of David would look in the light of such a theory of symbols.
An awareness that his own interpretation of Kafka is weak makes Brod sensitive regarding the interpretations of others. It strikes one as distasteful that he brushes aside the surrealists’ not-so-foolish interest in Kafka as well as Werner Kraft’s interpretations of the short prose pieces, some of which are significant. But beyond that he clearly makes an effort to deprecate future writing on Kafka as well. ‘Thus one could go on and on explaining (and people will indeed do so), but necessarily without coming to an end.’ The accent on the parenthesis is quite obvious. That the ‘many private, accidental failings and sufferings of Kafka’ contribute more to the understanding of his work than ‘theological interpretations’ is an unwelcome statement from a man who is resolute enough to base his own presentation of Kafka upon the concept of holiness. The same disparaging sweep is applied to everything that Brod found disturbing in his relationship with Kafka – to psychoanalysis as well as dialectic theology. It permits him to contrast Kafka’s style with the ‘bogus accurateness’ of Balzac (all he has in mind here are those transparent rodomontades which are an inseparable part of Balzac’s work and its greatness).
None of this fits Kafka’s style and character. All too frequently Brod misses Kafka’s assurance, his self-possession. There lives no man – as Joseph de Maistre said – who cannot be won over by a moderate opinion. Brod’s book is not designed to win one over. It exceeds moderation both in the way in which he pays homage to Kafka and in the familiarity with which he treats him. Both presumably have their prelude in the novel, which Brod based on his friendship with Kafka.fn2 The inclusion of passages from this novel by no means constitutes the smallest blunder in this biography. By his own admission the author is surprised at the fact that outsiders have seen in the novel a tactless disservice to the memory of the deceased. ‘This was misunderstood, just as everything else is … People failed to remember that Plato in a similar, albeit much more comprehensive way wrested his friend and teacher Socrates away from Death, all his life seeing him as a companion who continued to live, work, and think by his side and making him the protagonist of almost every dialogue he wrote after Socrates’ death.’
There is little chance that Brod’s Kafka will someday rank with the great basic lives of men of letters, in a class with Schwab’s Hölderlin or Bächthold’s Keller. It is all the more memorable as the document of a friendship which is not among the smallest mysteries of Kafka’s life.
You will see from the foregoing why I consider it unsuitable for me to make Brod’s biography the premise for revealing my own view of Kafka, even in a polemical way. It is, of course, not for me to judge whether the following jottings will succeed in outlining this view. In any case, they will convey to you a new aspect, one that is more or less independent of my earlier reflections.
Kafka’s work is an ellipse with foci that are far apart and are determined, on the one hand, by mystical experience (in particular, the experience of tradition) and, on the other, by the experience of the modern big-city dweller. In speaking of the experience of the big-city dweller, I have a variety of things in mind. On the one hand, I think of the modern citizen who knows that he is at the mercy of a vast machinery of officialdom whose functioning is directed by authorities that remain nebulous to the executive organs, let alone to the people they deal with. (It is known that one level of meaning in the novels, particularly in The Trial, is encompassed by this.) When I refer to the modern big-city dweller, I am speaking also of the contemporary of today’s physicists. If one reads the following passage from Eddington’s The Nature of the Physical World, one can virtually hear Kafka speak.
I am standing on the threshold about to enter a room. It is a complicated business. In the first place I must shove against an atmosphere pressing with a force of fourteen pounds on every square inch of my body. I must make sure of landing on a plank travelling at twenty miles a second round the sun – a fraction of a second too early or too late, the plank would be miles away. I must do this whilst hanging from a round planet head outward into space, and with a wind of aether blowing at no one knows how many miles a second through every interstice of my body. The plank has no solidity of substance. To step on it is like stepping on a swarm of flies. Shall I not slip through? No, if I make the venture one of the flies hits me and gives a boost up again; I fall again and am knocked upwards by another fly; and so on. I may hope that the net result will be that I remain about steady; but if unfortunately I should slip through the floor or be boosted too violently up to the ceiling, the occurrence would be, not a violation of the laws of Nature, but a rare coincidence …
Verily, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a scientific man to pass through a door. And whether the door be barn door or church door it might be wiser that he should consent to be an ordinary man and walk in rather than wait till all the difficulties involved in a really scientific ingress are resolved.fn3
In all of literature I know no passage which has the Kafka stamp to the same extent. Without any effort one could match almost every passage of this physical perplexity with sentences from Kafka’s prose pieces, and there is much to indicate that in so doing many of the most ‘incomprehensible’ passages would be accommodated. Therefore, if one says – as I have just said – that there was a tremendous tension between those of Kafka’s experiences that correspond to present-day physics and his mystical ones, only a half-truth is stated. What is actually and in a very literal sense wildly incredible in Kafka is that this most recent world of experience was conveyed to him precisely by this mystical tradition. This, of course, could not have happened without devastating processes (to be discussed presently) within this tradition. The long and the short of it is that apparently an appeal had to be made to the forces of this tradition if an individual (by the name of Franz Kafka) was to be confronted with that reality of ours which realizes itself theoretically, for example, in modern physics, and practically in the technology of modern warfare. What I mean to say is that this reality can virtually no longer be experienced by an individual, and that Kafka’s world, frequently of such playfulness and interlaced with angels, is the exact complement of his era which is preparing to do away with the inhabitants of this planet on a considerable scale. The experience which corresponds to that of Kafka, the private individual, will probably not become accessible to the masses until such time as they are being done away with.
Kafka lives in a complementary world. (In this he is closely related to Klee, whose work in painting is just as essentially solitary as Kafka’s work is in literature.) Kafka offered the complement without being aware of what surrounded him. If one says that he perceived what was to come without perceiving what exists in the present, one should add that he perceived it essentially as an individual affected by it. His gestures of terror are given scope by the marvellous margin which the catastrophe will not grant us. But his experience was based solely on the tradition to which Kafka surrendered; there was no far-sightedness or ‘prophetic vision.’ Kafka listened to tradition, and he who listens hard does not see.
The main reason why this listening demands such effort is that only the most indistinct sounds reach the listener. There is no doctrine that one could absorb, no knowledge that one could preserve. The things that want to be caught as they rush by are not meant for anyone’s ears. This implies a state of affairs which negatively characterizes Kafka’s works with great precision. (Here a negative characterization probably is altogether more fruitful than a positive one.) Kafka’s work presents a sickness of tradition. Wisdom has sometimes been defined as the epic side of truth. Such a definition stamps wisdom as inherent in tradition; it is truth in its haggadic consistency.
It is this consistency of truth that has been lost. Kafka was far from being the first to face this situation. Many had accommodated themselves to it, clinging to truth or whatever they happened to regard as truth and, with a more or less heavy heart, forgoing its transmissibility. Kafka’s real genius was that he tried something entirely new: he sacrificed truth for the sake of clinging to its transmissibility, its haggadic element. Kafka’s writings are by their nature parables. But it is their misery and their beauty that they had to become more than parables. They do not modestly lie at the feet of the doctrine, as the Haggadah lies at the feet of the Halakah. Though apparently reduced to submission, they unexpectedly raise a mighty paw against it.
This is why, in regard to Kafka, we can no longer speak of wisdom. Only the products of its decay remain. There are two: one is the rumour about the true things (a sort of theological whispered intelligence dealing with matters discredited and obsolete); the other product of this diathesis is folly – which, to be sure, has utterly squandered the substance of wisdom, but preserves its attractiveness and assurance, which rumour invariably lacks. Folly lies at the heart of Kafka’s favourites – from Don Quixote via the assistants to the animals. (Being an animal presumably meant to him only to have given up human form and human wisdom from a kind of shame – as shame may keep a gentleman who finds himself in a disreputable tavern from wiping his glass clean.) This much Kafka was absolutely sure of: first, that someone must be a fool if he is to help; second, that only a fool’s help is real help. The only uncertain thing is whether such help can still do a human being any good. It is more likely to help the angels (compare the passage about the angels who get something to do) who could do without help. Thus, as Kafka puts it, there is an infinite amount of hope, but not for us. This statement really contains Kafka’s hope; it is the source of his radiant serenity.
I transmit to you this somewhat dangerously compressed image – in the manner of perspective reduction – with all the more ease as you may sharpen it by means of the views I have developed from different aspects in my Kafka essay in the Jüdische Rundschau.fn4 My main criticism of that study today is its apologetic character. To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure. The circumstances of this failure are manifold. One is tempted to say: once he was certain of eventual failure, everything worked out for him en route as in a dream. There is nothing more memorable than the fervour with which Kafka emphasized his failure. His friendship with Brod is to me primarily a question mark which he chose to put in the margin of his life.
