We are digging the well of Babel.1
I have nothing to say about Kafka except that he is one of the rarest and greatest writers of our time.2
Among the rough drafts that Kafka had enjoined Max Brod to destroy after his death were two great unfinished works, The Tried and The Castle, in which the author passes from symbolic expression to allegory. The other Kafkan texts are the fascinating expression of man’s most profound nightmare—the nightmare in which he discovers his instability and solitude. The Trial and The Castle give the impression of being “summations” of this nightmare.
Though unfinished, these books were to have been finished, if not materially (assuming that Kafka had survived), at least symbolically. For they are constructed to constitute the Summation of human failures, to be the image of an unfinished Summation.
For a man to enter a village to reach the castle nearby where he is to fulfil his functions as a land-surveyor, and to fail through a series of misunderstandings, mysteries, apparently neglected opportunities, and incomprehensible interdictions ever to make his way into this Castle—this is a preposterous tale. A brutish, insensitive mind—the opposite to Kafka’s—might wonder why after being refused a means of transportation, after failing to obtain from those living in the castle any hint concerning the time he was expected, this man did not climb resolutely up the hill on his own, if only to demand an explanation.
By the same token, if in The Trial Joseph K. is informed that he is on trial but cannot find judges, information-givers, or lawyers, an independent thinker might conclude that the “trial” does not exist and treat those who talk to him about it as practical jokers.
We do not have to belabor Kafka’s unique art of causing us to accept a lucid, symbolic nightmare. He had already demonstrated this art in his earlier texts—and it is this very art which his imitators are unable to rediscover. For Kafka does not impose belief in the absurd world in which his heroes struggle as a conventional, literary postulate of a tale that purports to be haunting. We do not read The Castle and accept out of politeness the twisting of verisimilitude characteristic of just any fantastic tale. We read The Castle because an impression of perfect—though agonizing—reality compels us to read it to the end. In this sense it is also accessible to the occasional reader with a mediocre education, accustomed to the coarse, dramatic realism of newspaper reporting or stories in magazines. For such a reader the book, once closed, remains “unpleasant” (because he is not accustomed to a heavy diet) but undisputed.
This fascination is the fascination of the half-familiar, half-uncanny objects which surrealists have at times tried to construct: a rational world, but one which has ceased being natural, overpopulated, and excessively hierarchical, and one in which the individual is alone. Everything is familiar, and Joseph K. discusses his “trial” with his landlady and a woman living in the same boarding-house. But this commonplace universe is false since everything that happens is incomprehensible, and especially the orders or information—fragmentary—which subordinates transmit to him from unknown and unknowable authorities.3
In contrast to the exoteric allegories used to excess in medieval literature, The Trial and The Castle are esoteric myths. They correspond to the need for translating into artistic terms certain fundamental fears and enigmas associated with the human condition: the absence of Law or Justice to give meaning to life, the feeling of guilt to which this gives rise in man. Kafka rediscovered the secret which the votaries of enigmas had lost: that the presentation of an enigma must itself remain enigmatic, ambiguous.
It follows that these texts, which are not the allegory of a doctrine but the allegory of an enigma, cannot be explained. They are indeed esoteric, in the sense that to study them with a view to finding one interpretation will always be childish. They are designed to provoke successively every possible interpretation even as each of these interpretations—and their sum as well—remains inadequate. As for a privileged, definitive interpretation, this does not exist for the simple reason that Kafka was not familiar with it and wrote these very texts only to show that it was not to be found.
Thus the most that we can do is to recall the sources and comparisons revealed by literary history or by the ingenuity and partiality of those who have examined these myths. Kafka’s witness, his friend Max Brod, sees the inaccessible castle as the mystery of God’s rule and divine grace; The Trial as a symbol of impenetrable divine justice. These interpretations are not false and seem to be almost too obvious; the only trouble is that they try to illuminate what Kafka sought deliberately to present as an insoluble enigma. But the themes of justice and divine grace are actually the themes of the Cabala, which Kafka had thoroughly assimilated.
When John Kelly interprets the two great Kafkan allegories as eschatological novels dealing with the relations between man and God, he adopts the same principle of interpretation as Max Brod. To this he joins an interesting comparison with the Calvinistic theologian Karl Barth: for Kafka as for Barth, human life cannot be a path to God; that is why it remains absurd and chaotic.
Man is not saved through his works; he must be “called,” elected, chosen, and the anguish of Kafkan heroes is the fear, the near certainty of not participating in this election. Practically unknown in France at the beginning of the twentieth century, Karl Barth was more renowned than Bergson in the Germanic countries (and surprisingly, in Spain). It is possible, therefore, that Kafka had read or studied him and been exposed to some degree to his influence. But this hypothetical source and this startling comparison do not justify the assertion that Kafka’s work is a deliberate expression of Calvinistic theology.
Many other interpretations, less spiritualistic but equally striking, have been advanced: the impression of malediction and absurdity that lies heavy on the heroes of the two novels could be the symbolic expression, by way of a refined, nervous sensibility, of the feeling of oppression caused by sickness and the death sentence which it entails. A socioeconomic interpretation also is possible: K. and Joseph K. wander and wrangle miserably in a bureaucratic world typified by middle-class society as it appears to a petty employee; Kafka has simply translated into hallucinatory terms the picture of the world’s insignificant bureaucrat. Finally, in the heroes who are invisibly persecuted in The Trial and The Castle, and treated as culprits even though no count of indictment has been produced—in these individuals who are subjected to vexations which they discuss but against which they seem to be unable to revolt—one can identify the Jew who dares not and cannot reclaim his rights, inured to arbitrariness, trying to adjust to his situation without causing an uproar, patiently exhausting details, resigned in the face of an unjust principle.
But those are only sources and comparisons: explanations which make the common mistake of purporting individually to be exclusive or primordial. Moreover, against this rationalism which requires one definitive explanation, art on the one hand and esoterism on the other—the very elements joined together in Kafka—have always set creations and myths which are governed by the principle that they mirror reality and may be explained in several different ways.
Thus the great Kafkan allegories are not interpretations of existence; they are the very images of existence.
The problem of the meaning of life cannot be said to have a solution. More exactly, and worse still, its meaning has never been stated precisely. There are insoluble equations; but there are also even more important instances of equations that cannot be stated.
Philosophers make the mistake of trying to formulate the equation which will enable them to discover the meaning of life, then they become less self-centered and realize that their equation has no roots. After Kierkegaard and the negative mystics, Kafka contributes something to philosophy and corrects it: he does not show that the problem is insoluble but only that it cannot be clearly stated. And that is in all probability the true subject of The Trial and The Castle.
This attitude, which might roughly be termed the “reduction to the absurd” of a problem that cannot be formulated, and which in Kafka assumes the artistic form—that is, a pathetic and nonphilosophical form—had existed in what was called “negative theology” which began with Origen, later found expression in Pseudo-Dionysius, then in Meister Eckhart. It consisted, very roughly, in exploring the mystery of the Divinity, and since we cannot know what God is, in defining everything that God is not, obviously in order to arrive at a void-plenum which is our powerlessness to know God and our awareness of his unknowable fullness.
Kafka reacts in the same way in the presence of another mystery, the mystery of the meaning of existence. This problem is more modern in the sense that, after Meister Eckhart, problems descended from Heaven to earth. In an allegorical fable (pleading a case, trying to reach a castle where a job is to be performed) Kafka’s heroes search for the meaning and logic of existence only to discover interminably that it has none which can be stated summarily and simply. He defines the value and logic of life in terms of what they are not, knowing that what they are is undiscoverable, indefinable, forever in question. “It is incumbent on us still to study the negative; we are already given the positive.”4 No true mystic, regardless of his religion, has ever done anything else (except in the case of “apparitions”).
The meaning of life—a modern problem—here is posed as the medieval mystery of knowledge of God was posed for clerics and mystics: by eliminating false solutions, until one comes to grips with the absurd, with anguish. It happens that Kafka was intimately acquainted with Meister Eckhart as well as with the Jewish Cabala, which for the most part is at the root of negative theology.
It is one of the mysteries of literary creation—of literary prophetism, we should say—that representative geniuses appear unexpectedly in a given epoch. The Kafkan universe delineated in The Trial and The Castle seems to be the a posteriori expression of the period of confusion that began at the end of World War I and ended as Julien Green was writing The Closed Garden and Midnight, and Graham Greene The Man Within.
Yet Julien Green and Graham Greene were Kafkans without knowing it. And it was not in 1927 that Kafka—he was already dead—discovered the absurd and the fantastic which were to seem to the men of 1927 like the revelation of their own anguish and the emptiness of the world: he had made his discovery in 1913. Historically, Kafka was inspired not by the expressionist generations, after 1920, but by the generation of post-naturalists, pessimists or symbolists, around 1900 and earlier. This generation combines the dark, fantastic elements remotely inspired by German romanticism, the exacerbation of Strindberg, and the anguish of Dostoevsky. Renato Poggioli quotes the page from The Idiot that anticipates Kafka. It is the passage in which the dying Hippolytus is obsessed by the vision of Holbein’s “Dead Christ.”
In this painting one sees nature as a huge beast, mute and pitiless, or, more exactly, as a tall machine, of the most modern construction, which, sad and insensible, has ceaselessly pounded, crushed, and devoured a great precious Being.… This painting involuntarily expresses and suggests a somber, insolent, unreasonable, and eternal Power to which everything is subjected.5
The first piece of luck in Kafka’s literary fortune was that at the moment of his discovery, around 1925, at the exact moment when for the first time in centuries all “positive values” as such were looked upon with suspicion in literature, Kafka chanced to sum up, gather together, crystallize in a very personal and even involuntary synthesis all the negative qualities, all the anguish, all the “other side” of reality and life that others had sensed, without yet attaching a primordial importance to them, in Pascal, William Blake, Kierkegaard, Sénancour, Kleist, Dostoevsky, etc. The mythology elaborated secretly or timidly by a sick man who would never have dreamed of playing a significant, logical, deliberate role in the history of literature happened to provide a focus for the recombination of convergent and divergent rays. Before Kafka, sporadic, indefinite, exceptional anguish in the face of the fact that human activity does not justify the life of man. After Kafka, by contrast, implicit acceptance of this principle by practically every writer.
Kafka was not responsible for passage from one era to the other, and it was not his influence that was felt. But he “chanced” to be there to express mysteriously this optical conversion, just as it was on the point of becoming a general phenomenon independent of him.
His success was certain but slow. His work, posthumous for the most part, corresponded exactly to the evolution of literary sensibility, but the public had to become conscious of this evolution before consecrating him as their witness, catalyst, or symbol. The great allegories were not published in Germany until 1925 and 1926, a year or two after the writer’s death. In 1925 the Revista de Occidente introduced “The Metamorphosis.” In 1928 a few partial translations were published in Italy and France (Il Convengo, La Nouvelle Revue Française). The Castle appeared in England and the United States in 1930; The Trial was translated into French, Italian, and Norwegian in 1933. In 1938 the three or four great works were diffused: “The Metamorphosis,” and Amerika, for example, reached Argentina, thanks to Guillermo de Torre. Kafka’s revelation was still limited, however, to small groups. Not until after the war was Kafka universally translated, known, discussed, and transformed into a literary myth. In 1945 the weekly newspaper Action indicted him under the caption “Must Kafka Be Burned?” The writer charged that Kafka seems to represent a metaphysical anguish which contributes nothing toward the construction of a new, logical world.
Then it was discovered throughout the world that Kafka had been the herald of the “absurd sensibility” which was asserting itself fifteen or twenty years after his death. Written in 1914, “In the Penal Colony” anticipates the deportation camps of 1943. “The Judgment” and “Letter to His Father” (1919) seem to express the exasperation of 1920-1930, the revolt against authority, the mythical assassination of the father which had its distant source in Freud and was transformed into a literary theme by Herman Ungar (Children and Murderers, 1920), Walter Hasenclever (The Son, 1916), Jakob Wassermann (The Maurizius Affair, 1928). And the world of darkness and imprisonment, of administrative absurdity and fatality evoked in The Trial and The Castle, did not exist for the common consciousness of men or for literary sensibility before the coming of the police state, arrests at dawn, skillful interrogations, forced confessions.
Like all other prophetic writers, Kafka seems to speak of the period that comes after him. In this sense it is difficult to attribute to Kafka’s “Influence” all of the Kafkan themes that have forced themselves upon us between 1924 and today. To be sure, superficial comparisons can be drawn between his work and diverse surrealistic works, especially insofar as surrealism also envisioned another side of the world. The works of Michel Leiris and Henri Michaux (who came after surrealism) also reveal a cruel, mechanical world. Monsieur Plume involuntarily recalls Kafka’s first sketch, for here life is also chopped up in tiny pieces and man is brainwashed, as in “Description of a Struggle” or “In the Penal Colony.” Maja Goth points up clearly the similarity between the torture machine in “In the Penal Colony” and the machine in Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors.6Leaving aside Jean Ferry who writes in the style of Kafka, openly and as his avowed disciple (Kafka or the Secret Society, The Chinese Astrologer, etc.), we cannot fail to discover a Kafkan atmosphere, Kafkan techniques, or a design quite similar to Kafka’s in books such as Armand Hoog’s The Accident or Gilles Rosset’s The Idle Kings.
Dino Buzzati’s The Desert of the Tartars seems to return to the theme of The Castle, which is taken up once again in Julien Gracq’s The Strands of Syrtes. The two worlds of Rex Warner’s The Aerodrome—the village and the aerodrome—are reminiscent of the contrast between the village and the castle in Kafka’s work; in Warner’s novel, however, the allegory is more clearly drawn and defined, leaving no shadows or ambiguities. Similarly, Dino Buzzati’s allegory is more poetic and more lyrical (Barnabo in the Mountains, The Secret of Bois-Vieux). With The Almighty and Death Sentence Maurice Blanchot—though his style is more distorted—plunges consciousness into a state of absurdity more caustic than Kafkan incoherence, which dissolves everything. In his powerful, gripping dramas Samuel Beckett has depicted God’s absence from the world and man’s anguish in the face of loneliness and unrequited expectation. The inanity of human conversation in the face of mysteries that transcend expression is the theme of Ionesco. And why not cite the squalid universe of Paul Gegauff (Rebus), Pinget (Baga), the Michaux-type madness of Sternberg (The Employee), which carried the analysis of the absurd to the extreme by giving a new direction to the techniques of science fiction? This would bring us to the more precise labor of Nathalie Sarraute (Martereau, The Planetarium).
Then, having passed from analogy to analogy, we discover that we have been playing a dangerous game, for Nathalie Sarraute’s intention is almost the direct opposite of Kafka’s. Thus the practice of drawing analogies under the pretext of searching for influences must be viewed with suspicion. Kafka did inspire imitations, whether acknowledged or disguised, as we have already noted. He may provide his imitators with a setting which, on the whole, is readily adaptable (an incoherent, labyrinthine world) or with a problem (the absence of Law and God).
Some writers have managed to transform these themes into procedures: the result has been artificial imitations. Some writers have been influenced involuntarily: for example, Saint-Exupéry by Nietzsche and Claudel by the Bible (only literary history will tell whether this is true of Buzzati and Gracq). Some writers—and this happens most frequently—have found themselves sincerely alone and naked, and have experienced the same moment of literary sensibility that Kafka experienced: this is obviously the case of Julien Green, who certainly has never copied Kafka.
Strangely enough, a problem of this kind (“Did such-and-such an author imitate Kafka, or does he resemble Kafka for other reasons?”) is never resolved by scholars until a hundred years after the death of the author in question. And, at the moment, it remains insoluble. The first chapter of Kafka’s Amerika and all of Camus’ The Stranger seem to have been written by the same author, with the same mixture of human warmth, the same brutal objectivity in narration, the same strength and the same apparent artlessness, almost the same intention. And yet the question cannot be resolved for a hundred years.…
It is impossible for us, contemporaries (in time) of Kafka’s contemporaries (in spirit), to define his influence, which will be the subject of a thesis in the year 2000. Without resolving special cases, we can only determine and measure the huge, powerful shadow which Kafka—who was, moreover, a sickly human being afflicted with a complex—projects on our literary life, our thoughts, our sensibilities.
It is as if a privileged sensibility had had a presentiment of a period of history. If from our era the twenty-second century retained the work of Kafka but did not know the details of his life, birth, or death, future encyclopedias would contain this information:
Czech writer of works in German, probably born around 1915, died almost certainly after World War II. Fragmentary and unfinished, his work nevertheless constitutes a continuous allegory of metaphysical confusion, human despair, and the historical and political persecutions that characterize the period 1933-1956. Like Albert Camus, who inspired him, Franz Kafka expresses himself through symbols and myths of alienation. “In a Penal Colony” clearly despicts life in a concentration camp in 1942, and The Trial describes the harsh police-state measures to which the Czechs were subjected after 1939. Historical inspirations are fused with an ontological theme: the solitude of man in a world without laws. In this sense Kafka was clearly inspired by Julien Green (born in 1900), Graham Greene (born in 1902), Jean-Paul Sartre (born in 1905), and especially Albert Camus, barely his senior (born in 1913).
Everything which seems strange in our hypothetical example also points to the strangeness of Kafka. It is by virtue of his strangeness that he has made such a profound impression on us that we no longer see in him anything except the myth to which he dedicated his work and his life.
NOTES
1. Préparatifs de noce à la campagne.
2. J. -P. Sartre, Situations, I (Paris: Gallimard, 1947).
3. Herman Uyttersprot (Revue de Langues vivantes, No. 42, Brussels, 1953) thinks that a part of the “absurdity” of The Trial is involuntary. He attributes this to the incompleteness of the work and to the fact that Max Brod shuffled the chapters, which could be more logically arranged. This theory is ingenious but without great significance, for the “absurd” is not restricted to The Trial.
4. Notebooks, November 18, 1917.
5. Renato Poggioli, in The Kafka Problem, edited by Angel Flores (New York, 1946), p. 106.
6. Maja Goth, Franz Kafka et les lettres françaises (José Corti, 1955).
Kafka
The Torment of Man
René M. Albérès and Pierre de Boisdeffre
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