An Anatomy of Ambivalence: The Works of Franz Kafka

AN  ANATOMY  OF  AMBIVALENCE

THE  WORKS  OF  FRANZ  KAFKA

Silke M. Hesse

Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Modern Languages, German Section.

The original text has been revised but not updated. (2014)





Monash University

November 1967
Preface

            This thesis is concerned with the problem of ambivalence in the works of Franz Kafka. Part I attempts an analytic investigation while Part II places the emphasis on the interpretation of individual works, on their continuity, the development of the writer’s art and, in relation to his art, his personality. As far as possible, an assessment of Kafka’s life and character has been avoided as here the danger of bearing false witness is greatest. References in the text and footnotes attempt to show up the continuity of the major themes and topics but, to avoid unnecessary complexity, this has not been stressed. It is presumed that the reader has some familiarity with Kafka’s work and biography; on the whole, stories are not retold and biographic details not recounted. Apart from giving sources of and evidence for assertions made in this text, footnotes are to suggest relevant reading on marginal issues, to give some insight into the scope and nature of Kafka scholarship (in the interest of which many quotes have been included) and to give, to some extent, a critical assessment of secondary literature. Here the opportunity has occasionally been taken to make remarks on critical method and for this purpose some short reviews have been included. Several hundred books and articles were reread after the manuscript had been written and everything that seemed to have a relation to this thesis has been mentioned. As a result, the bibliography of cited literature should in effect include a large number of significant contributions to Kafka research. There will of necessity be omissions for which I must apologize. I should also like to acknowledge here my debt to countless other books and articles on Kafka read throughout the the years that have no doubt influenced my views in ways hard to account for and certainly helped me to assess the possibilities of a reader’s reaction to Kafka, important evidence for the basic approach of my thesis.

            In this context I should also like to acknowledge remarks that students and other readers of Kafka have made to me as well as the initial stimulus of a doctoral seminar in Bonn conducted by Professor Benno von Wiese which I attended nine years ago.  Thanks are due to my supervisor, Professor Leslie Bodi, in particular for drawing my attention to the importance of psychoanalysis for an understanding of Kafka, to my husband and some friends and colleagues who read sections of the manuscript and commented on them, Paul Hatvani for first-hand information about Expressionism, Dr. W. Verständig for information about Hassidism, Dr. S. Billigheimer for lending books not otherwise available, and the Monash University Library and German Department for ordering and procuring books.

           

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part I

INTRODUCTORY SUMMARY OF AMBIVALENCE

LITERATURE AND AMBIVALENCE

The Writer

     The Creative Process

     The Dream Work

The Work of Art

      Parable

      A New Genre

The Reader

      Subjectivism

      The Emotional Response of the Reader

AMBIVALENCE AND LIFE

      The Cultural Situation: Expressionism

      Biographical Material

      Thought and Faith

SUMMARY

Part II

ORIENTATION OF THE YOUNG WRITER

Beschreibung eines Kampfes

Betrachtung

Amerika

MARRIAGE OR MARTYRDOM

Das Urteil

Die Verwandlung

Der Prozess

THEORIES

In der Strafkolonie

Ein Landarzt

Schakale und Araber

Die Brücke

Der neue Advokat

Ein Bericht an eine Akademie

INDIVIDUATION

Das Schloss

THE ARTIST STORIES

Erstes Leid

Ein Hungerkünstler

Forschungen eines Hundes

Eine kleine Frau

Der Bau

Josefine die Sängerin oder das Volk der Mäuse

CONCLUSION: THE OPEN QUESTION

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

An Introductory Discussion of Ambivalence

            As the title suggests, this study falls into two parts. Part I will attempt to investigate the phenomenon we shall call ‘ambivalence’, in the aspects that appear to have relevance for a study of Kafka’s writings. Part II will interpret Kafka’s writings with particular emphasis on the nature and significance of their ambivalence. No attempt will be made to connect the two parts directly for any such close correlation must bring with it a measure of distortion and falsification. It is hoped that they will nonetheless illuminate each other.

            By definition, ambivalence refers to something that has “both or either of two contrary values or qualities”. (O.E.D.) The “both or either” gives to the word an element of doubt or query or active investigation which is essential to our use of it. Where the emphasis is on diversity of meanings the word ‘ambiguity’ will be used as a sub-category of ‘ambivalence’. In all cases, the reader is asked to suppress pejorative associations.

            The abstractions of this introductory summary are to be seen as supplementary concepts that can offer us points of departure but should certainly not be accorded any finality. All matters here mentioned will be discussed in detail later in the thesis.

            In the main, we will be considering three aspects of ambivalence. The first is poetic ambiguity. The richer and more complex a work of art is, the more it will contain truths that cannot be resolved into formulas, situations that cannot be unambiguously described, and a morality that evades fixed standards. It is the nature of true art to be in some sense ambiguous. But in view of the diverse possibilities of literature, the author has a choice between comparatively clear and linear genres that are, on the whole, rationally determined and those forms shaped by imagination and emotion that are in the first place irrational.

            If we go further to investigate the psychology of literary creation, new perspectives will open up. Jung has contrasted the process by which constructed art is made, with that by which what is traditionally called inspired art is brought forth. This is a division into extremes which rarely occur in their pure forms, yet it seems to have relevance for Kafka, in whose work both extremes are found almost simultaneously, namely in the constructed Amerika and in ‘Das Urteil’ which came as a genuine birth.

           

            Having experienced both styles of writing, Kafka’s preference rested with the subconscious. But this is not naturally at the command of the author. It appears that Kafka both sought to induce and encourage such states in himself and that he tried to learn the style that is characteristic of writing of this kind, the ambivalent style which Freud described in connection with dreams. As regards genre, we are left with something almost amounting to a new, or at least hitherto little known and used form which we shall term ‘parable’.

             Ambivalence must, secondly, be seen as a social and cultural phenomenon. Freud had shown ambivalence to be a characteristic of the subconscious mind. But the subconscious can be made conscious. Freud’s insistence on the desirability of a rather narrow norm of sanity based on a very limited definition of reality made it possible for him to give the ambivalent material arising from the subconscious fixed and definite meaning.[1] When Freud’s interpretation of the subconscious is dropped, however, what comes to the surface is ambivalence.

            Once man was no longer judged solely on the merits of his conscious efforts to master life (and Freud brought morality to bear on the subconscious too) the whole question of ethics had to be rethought. The perception of what had up to then been the natural state of man – namely that he led a limited conscious existence and possessed a wealth of thoughts and emotions of which he had no knowledge and which he more or less ignored – changed to a state where man, having far greater access to his subconscious, was less of a secret and more of a problem to himself.

            Myth and religion, which had previously discreetly tended the subconscious, were superseded by science, and a new definition of metaphysical values had to be found. In other words, the concept of natural man, the concept of religion, and the concept of morality changed overnight.

            Hundreds of social and cultural factors, of course, contributed to the disorientation of twentieth century man. But it seems that in the case of Kafka, psychoanalysis was the dominant influence, even though others were active. The Austrian cultural centers were more aware of the potential psychoanalytic revolution at this early stage than most other parts of Europe.

            In the wake of psychoanalysis, man’s outlook on self also changed. Freud’s and Jung’s psychological language suggested that personality was to be thought of  as a symbiosis of personifications: the ego, the super-ego, the id, the censor, the anima and more. The ego could thus envisage itself as living in its own inner community. This and the challenge to discover one’s own unconscious encouraged a preoccupation with self that gave the German Romantic tradition a new lease of life in Subjectivism.

            The loss of known values with the ensuing need to discover new values, and scientific introversion replacing mystical introversion were phenomena bound to have their sociological implications. Kafka was of the generation forced to say farewell to a centuries old order of the mind and to find a new order to replace it. His maxim was patience, so that all premature solutions might be avoided.

            Kafka must be taken seriously as a sociological thinker. He began not at the political end, however, but at the point where the individual has to define himself as a social being and find values for himself. With the one exception of Amerika, what appears to be a social order is in the first place the symbol for an inner order. The symbol is so complex that many truths about the social order can be deduced from it. But when it comes to the final assessment of Kafka’s works, the inner order should be given precedence and Kafka should not be condemned, as he has been, for inadequate social or political insight. The reader of Kafka faces a situation in which whole complexes of life become symbols for other complexes.

            In the third place ambivalence can be an attitude of the critical mind that becomes an interim value. With its help the author achieves a close equivalent of scientific neutrality with regard to his material, stripping off prejudices and conventions without committing the error of inadvertently adopting new ones that have just as little genuine validity as those discarded. If Kafka consciously created ambiguity, if was not in order to glorify chaos but in order to clear the way for new insights. In the critical destruction of old values, Nietzsche was the dominant thinker of the times and we shall see that Kafka’s own thought was in active exchange with Nietzsche’s.

            Here a brief digression on Kafka and Freud seems called for. Doubtless Freud, as the product of a culture, as the mind dominating the age and to a lesser extent, as a direct influence, was a point of departure for Kafka. But Kafka’s understanding of Freud was original. He did not accept Freud’s definition of reality and his thought reached out from Freud into almost every other area of human knowledge. In the Freud-inspired attempt at a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon of man, Kafka resembles Jung, as also in the attempt at continued scientific neutrality at a time when his own religious faith was envisaged in outlines.

            The names of Kafka and Freud have frequently been connected by critics but in most cases, it would seem, invalidly. Kafka is seen either as the uncritical perpetrator of aspects of Freud’s theories, as by Charles Neider[2], or he is seen as a typical Freudian case and judged by those standards of normality and according to that severely limited concept of reality that has occasionally proved itself wholesome when a mental invalid had to find his feet in life after a period of disorientation. But such theoretical prescriptions are too narrow to be of value in assessing the complex and varied phenomenon of man. Individuality exists on the basis of departure from the norm and the prerequisite of culture, man’s specific achievement, is that there be a wealth of individualities. In much the same way, art aims at the nuances of reality, not at the norms to which reality can be reduced. The confusion that comes about when values are derived not from the conscious behavior of the individual but from the subconscious as well, and when literature is seen as the presentation of norms, is demonstrated by a number of Kafka studies, among them

that of Sokel.[3]

  

            We shall attempt in this study to show the interweaving of the various aspects of ambivalence we have discussed and their bearing on the themes of Kafka’s stories which, in turn, must be seen to some extent in relation to Kafka’s life and times.

LITERATURE AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

            Aesthetics have always been aware of a link between style and the psychology of the writer. On the whole, the approach has been by means of analogy, that is imaginative rather than scientific. With the studies of Freud and Jung and their contemporaries, however, something like a poetics of the unconscious can be envisaged and Kafka, as we shall see, is perhaps one of the first to do so. This, combined with the fact that it is difficult to describe and appreciate Kafka’s writing in terms of traditional poetics, suggests that a rough sketch of ‘psychoanalytic poetics’ – and at this stage no more than a rough sketch is possible – may take us further, and we shall attempt to approach Kafka in this way. Part I will do no more than introduce certain aspects of this; others will be discussed in the sectional introductions and in the interpretation of Beschreibung eines Kampfes. All observtions will of necessity be fragmentary; we shall mention only psychoanalysts who were Kafka’s contemporaries and who may possibly have influenced Kafka directly or indirectly. In other words, we shall not try to take our psychoanalytic poetics further than Kafka himself might have envisaged it. Any proof of influences is impossible.

The Writer

The Creative Process

            C. G. Jung has given a description of the poles of creative activity, namely conscious and unconscious writing. Kafka knew both and described the second in connection with the writing of  “Das Urteil”. We shall quote Jung’s descriptions, in this case not to suggest any direct influence but because they systematize what Kafka said and experienced.

There are works, verse as well as prose writings, that proceed wholly from the author’s intention and resolve to produce this or that effect. In this case the author submits his material to a definite treatment that is both directed and purposeful; [...] the other class of works [... flow ...] more or less spontaneous and perfect from the author’s pen [...] These works positively impose themselves upon the author; his hand is, as it were, seized and his pen writes things that his mind perceives with amazement. The work brings with it its own form [...] While his consciousness stands disconcerted and empty before the phenomenon, he is overwhelmed with a flood of thoughts and images which it was never his aim to beget and which his will would never have fashioned. Yet in spite of himself he is forced to recognize that in all this his self is speaking, that his innermost nature is revealing itself.[4]     

Kafka’s account of the writing of ‘Das Urteil’ tallies closely with Jung’s description of inspired writing.

23. September 1912. Diese Geschichte ‚Das Urteil’ habe ich in der Nacht vom 22. bis 23. von zehn Uhr abends bis sechs Uhr früh in einem Zug geschrieben. Die vom Sitzen steif gewordenen Beine konnte ich kaum unter dem Schreibtisch hervorziehn. Die fürchterliche Anstrengung und Freude, wie sich die Geschichte vor mir entwickelte, wie ich in einem Gewässer vorwärtskam. Mehrmals in dieser Nacht trug ich mein Gewicht auf dem Rücken. Wie alles gesagt werden kann, wie für alle, für die fremdesten Einfälle ein großes Feuer bereitet ist, in dem sie vergehn und auferstehn. (T. 293)

On the other hand, our own reading of the novel Amerika, a knowledge of the sources of the material of this novel of which Jahn[5] gives a good comprehensive summary, and Kafka’s remark ‘daß ich mich mit meinem Romanschreiben in schändlichen Niederungen des Schreibens befinde’ (T 294) all suggest that Amerika was very much a constructed piece of literature.

But Kafka’s own estimation of subconscious writing is not completely positive. From an interview with Rudolf Steiner, which Kafka recorded in his diary, we gather that these visionary states of almost automatic writing had been known to Kafka before but had never produced anything exceptional.[6] ‘Das Urteil’ too, is not one of Kafka’s best stories.

What was probably the creative process for most of Kafka’s mature works is well described by Foulkes in his essay ‘Dream Pictures in Kafka’s Writings’. Foulkes draws attention to the fact that Kafka thought in images, offered to him either by experience or his subconscious. “What does seem probable”, Foulkes continues, “is that Kafka possessed an unusually sharp awareness of his own subconscious world. He was able to assume the role of spectator to the vivid play of his own imagination.”[7] The accessibility of the subconscious stands in relation to Kafka’s mental predilection for image. One may also assume that a state of mind that allows a comparatively free interchange between the subconscious and conscious is suited for artistic creativity, that the secret of imagination is the breaking down of barriers.

But it is likely too that Kafka acquired a technique of unconscious writing, insofar as this resembled ‘dream-work’, and that this helped him to master the longer prose forms. Here Freud’s analysis of the dream-work might have proved helpful to Kafka. It is almost certain that Kafka read this book before ‘Das Urteil’ was written in connection with a discussion of it in the Fanta circle.[8]

There are critics who feel that the subconscious nature of Kafka’s art entitles them to treat it as a personal document and, in answer to these, others who feel compelled to insist on the completely conscious nature of Kafka’s writing. While it is true that the final decisions for a work of art will rest with the conscious mind, this does not mean that subconscious writing can not be perfect without conscious alteration, nor does it mean that the relation between a piece of subconscious writing and the personality of the writer is simple or easy to assess. The man who has even partial command of his subconscious mind belongs to a different category from Freud’s cases. The psychology of the creative imagination has by no means yet been adequately investigated and what Kafka’s writing reveals to us must be taken as evidence in a fairly new field of study. We cannot overlook the fact that Kafka, like most writers, was not fully aware of all the implications of his stories and freely admitted this. Another aspect of the creative process, namely the levels of the subconscious mind from which the writer draws, will be discussed later in connection with “Beschreibung eines Kampfes” and the “Landarzt” stories.

The Dream-Work

            Freud’s chapter on the dream-work in his epoch-making book The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) provides a useful analysis of certain literary possibilities as long as we remain aware of Freud’s basic limitation, which is that he recognizes only one variety of dream. Freud knows only the dream that purposely hides meaning, whereas Jung has shown that there is at least one other category of dreams, the dream that presents material from the unconscious that is likely to be of use to the dreamer. To Freud “the dream has above all to be withdrawn from the censorship, and to this end the dream-work makes use of the displacement of psychic intensities, even to the trans-valuation of all psychic values.”[9] It is the purpose of the dream to deceive the dreamer.

Looking at the techniques of destruction and confusion Freud describes, we cannot help wondering whether such dreams are not intended to discharge excrements, to relieve the mind of superfluous matter it no longer requires. This supposition seems necessary to assess the significance of Freud’s dream theories for literature.

The value of The Interpretation of Dreams for literary students is then not what it tells us about Freud’s theory of the nature and function of destructive dreams but for its description of what is typical of all dreams: unconscious, subconscious, or semi-conscious, dreams of the type Jung most commonly describes, of the type Freud himself describes, or the hypnagogic hallucinations Herbert Silberer studied.

Let us briefly list the characteristics of the unconscious, subconscious, and semi-conscious style. (For greater simplicity, we will in future speak only of the unconscious – in the sense of not conscious – style where all three are meant). The first characteristic of the dream is extreme condensation: “the dream is meagre, paltry and laconic in comparison with the range and copiousness of the dream thoughts”.[10] Compression is one of the accepted characteristics of symbolic writing also. The work of displacement, as Freud describes it, is however probably not characteristic of all dreams and we may disregard it.

Important too is the observation that the dream has no means of representing logical relations between dream-thoughts: ‘If, because, as though, although, either-or’ and other such concepts cannot be rendered by the unconscious which in most cases disregards them. […] It is left to the interpretation of the dream to restore the coherence which the dream-work has destroyed,” Freud concludes.[11] While causality can sometimes be suggested by temporal continuity combined with emphasis of one of the elements, the either-or relationship cannot be expressed. Dreams tend to take both members of the alternative “into the same context, as though they had an equal right to be there.”[12] In other words, the dream is by nature ambivalent. The choice is left to the dreamer; the dream does not offer solutions but waits for a conscious decision on its interpretation. This aspect of the dream is important. Similarly antitheses are reduced to uniformity. The dream has no way of saying “no”. “The mechanism of dream-formation is favourable in the highest degree to only one of the logical relations”, according to Freud. “This relation is that of similarity, agreement, contiguity, ‘just as’. “[13] This is another characteristic of dreams that concerns us closely; they are by nature figurative. Others are the predominance of the visual and the inhibition of affects which also makes for ambiguity.

What Freud describes here is basically the genre of parable, before the thoughts it is supposed to illustrate have been revealed. To Freud himself there seemed to be no doubt that every dream was allegorical by nature, i. e. that every dream was the compressed image or hieroglyph of a definite thought.

The dream-thoughts and the dream-content present themselves as two descriptions of the same content in two different languages [...] The dream-thoughts we can understand without trouble the moment we have ascertained them. The dream-content is, as it were, presented in hieroglyphics whose symbols must be translated, one by one, into the language of the dream-thoughts.[14]

            While this may be true for the type of dream that serves to destroy conscious contents, in other words, the dream that transfers conscious thoughts into images, it is not true for the type of dream Jung describes and which he calls symbolic. Attacking Freud’s use of the word “symbol”, Jung defines it in the following way:

The true symbol should be understood as the expression of an intuitive perception which can, as yet, neither be apprehended better, nor expressed differently. When, for example, Plato expressed the whole problem of the theory of cognition in his metaphor of the cave, or when Christ expresses the idea of the Kingdom of Heaven in his parables, these are genuine and true symbols; namely attempts to express a thing, for which there exists as yet no adequate verbal concept.[15]

This definition would be acceptable to most literary scholars though some, generally basing their definition on Goethe’s use of symbol, would give the word a more limited application and use it only where it points to a part in a coherent system of experience, rather than thought.[16]

           

Those literary critics who use the word in the manner of Freud have made no contribution to the value of the term. It is probably the word “intuitive” that best describes what distinguishes symbol from allegory. In German literary criticism it is usual to reject the allegorical as unworthy of art; this would link up with our rejection of Freud’s allegorical dreams in their relevance for art.

           

If the relation of “similarity, agreement. contiguity, ‘just as”’  is that best expressed by dreams, this means that dreams as such are likely to be allegorical, symbolical or parabolic in nature, that the dream is essentially a figurative form of expression. Freud and Jung, as we saw, treat it as such. We shall venture two corollaries: that artistic images on the whole originate in the unconscious, and that unconscious art is generally figurative or symbolic art. Returning to Kafka, as the writer of the unconscious, we will notice that he is quite generally read as a figurative writer of some description, though opinions vary as to the particular variety of figurative writing with which his work should be classed.

The Work of Art

Parable

            Before we begin a discussion of figurative writing, we should perhaps attempt to review the terms available to us. We are here not primarily concerned with random equations such as the cipher – in its conventionally established form the hieroglyph – nor with other conventionally determined forms like the emblem.[17] A distinction that does appear significant is that between figurative forms that place the emphasis on relations and actions, on the verbal element, and those that place it on the nominal element, that is ideas, objects and configurations. Allegorical and symbolical forms seem to stress the nominal; fable, myth, fairy-tale and, in the particular definition Marache[18] gives it, the extended or activated metaphor stress the verbal. There is little doubt that in Kafka’s writing the emphasis is on relations and not on objects. Marache and Busacca[19] are among the critics who have drawn attention to this, the former in reaction to Emrich’s discussion of the works of Kafka under the categories of symbol and allegory.[20]

            Of the forms emphasizing relations, the fable is clearly a consciously intended piece of writing that makes sense only within a known and accepted system of abstractions. Kafka’s completely ambiguous “Kleine Fabel” must be seen as a parody of the consciously didactic fable. There is little sense in extending the term to unconscious or subjective writing.

            As psychoanalytic studies have shown, myth and fairy-tale are related and have their home in the unconscious. The distinction is that in myth the meaning tends to be metaphysical or religious in nature, while in the fairy-tale the latent meaning is more or less disregarded for the sake of the story as such. Since these particular limitations of reference have no relevance for Kafka’s writing, both terms seem basically unsuitable for describing it, although attempts have been made to use them. Kurt Weinberg[21] speaks consistently of myth and Marie-Luise Harder[22] has based her thesis on the theory that Kafka is a writer of fairy-tales.

            The term “expanded metaphor” is used with considerable discrimination by both Sokel[23] and Marache[24]. Its value is that it in no way lays down how the stories should be read; its disadvantage is that a metaphor, even when expanded, is but a single implied equation and far too simple to describe the immense complexity of Kafka’s longer works. Apart from that, the word is clumsy and it is impossible to form an adjective from it.

            The term that seems to have acquired the greatest popularity among Kafka critics is “parable”. This is perhaps because it is the most indeterminate of the terms available. Though it was traditionally regarded as a form of conscious writing (Hegel and even Brecht still treat it as such)[25] it has, thanks to psychoanlysis, a certain standing as a designation for unconscious writing.[26] In German it has the additional advantage that it can be distinguished from “Gleichnis” in much the way that metaphor is distinguished from simile. Though this distinction is basically technical, a stated comparison always points in the direction of consciousness and an implied comparison in the direction of unconscious writing. If we accept that the piece of writing Silberer discusses in Probleme der Mystik is a parable, it might be said that in the parable either relations or configurations can predominate. Again, while Norbert Miller[27] still sees the parable as a predominantly conscious and didactic form, other recent studies have placed the emphasis so strongly on the “new” parable as to almost define it as an essentially ambiguous, subjective form of writing. Bourk[28], Arntzen[29] and Allemann[30] are examples.

           

When we also take into account that Miller describes the parable, old and new, as “eine ausgeschriebene, in Szene gesetzte Metapher”,[31] thereby equating the expanded and activated metaphor with the parable, it would seem we are justified in choosing the term “parable” for a general description of Kafka’s writing. Though Hillmann[32] feels that the category of parable should be reserved for short prose pieces, I would suggest that this use is unnecessarily restrictive and the parable can usefully be placed in a line with the major genres. 

The New Genres

            Traditional poetics has known of three major genres. Of them, the lyric is the least and the epic the most conscious. When dealing with modern literature it is useful to add an additional genre to either end of the scale: the highly conscious essay with its dwarf form, the aphorism,[33] on the one side, and the often quite unconscious parable on the other. It is interesting to observe that Kafka mastered only the parable and the aphorism, that is the two extreme border forms. Though he attempted lyrics, dramas (‘Der Gruftwächter’ and one which Dora Diamant burnt and which may have been identical with ‘Ein Flug um die Lampe herum’, recently attributed to Kafka)[34] and a realistic epic Amerika, he perfected none of these forms.

            Kafka’s preference for the two border forms, a preference he shared with many moderns, could be taken as an indication that the cut Freud had made between the conscious and subconscious mind, and which is still the basis of the psychoanalytic approach, actually influenced the understanding writers had of themselves and their art. For earlier generations literature seemed by definition to reside somewhere between the extremes.

            A more important observation to make here is probably that the abstractions of thought on the one hand and the images of the subconscious on the other are a far better source of ambiguity than those areas of the creative mind in which thought and image achieve some kind of harmony. Many of Kafka’s writings – exemplary in this respect is ‘Der Bau’ –  could almost be described as parables with an aphoristic superstructure; but the two types of ambiguity do not merge into harmony and singleness of vision, rather, they aggravate each other. One is still forced to think in terms of parable and aphorism.

      The Reader

Subjectivism

            Freud’s account of the dream-work placed emphasis on two things: one was the figurative, the other was ambiguity with the possible choice it afforded. It is to ambiguity we must turn now. Doubtless, the more consciously a dream or vision from the unconscious is received – and in the creative processes which Jung and Kafka describe the vision is revealed to the waking mind – in other words, the closer to language the vision comes, the less call there is for ambiguous writing. Where an author chooses the techniques of ambiguity in spite of this, as Kafka does, we must look for a deeper reason.

           

While one cannot attribute any kind of systematic philosophy to Kafka, there appears to have been one philosophical issue about which he did not waver. This was subjectivism in the field of cognition. “Beschreibung eines Kampfes” emphasizes with monotonous consistency that men do not have a common reality or any proof that what their senses convey to them is truth. For this reason they can no longer communicate. Even language breaks down as a reliable link. Brod recalls the effect Hohmannsthal’s  “Chandosbrief” – a powerful testament to the loss of faith in language – had on Kafka.[35] In his dissertation on Kafka’s aphoristic writings, H.-G. Pott elaborates on the following aphorism to describe Kafka’s subjectivism:

Verschiedenheit der Anschauungen, die man etwa von einem Apfel haben kann: die Anschauung des kleinen Jungen, der den Hals strecken muß, um noch knapp den Apfel auf der Tischplatte zu sehen, und die Anschauung des Hausherrn, der den Apfel nimmt und frei dem Tischgenossen reicht. (11/12, H 40)

Der Text ist ein Gleichnis für die Relativität jeglicher Erkenntnis und damit des Verfügens oder Nicht-Verfügens über das Erkannte. Die „Verschiedenheit der Anschauung“ bedeutet eine verschiedene Wirklichkeit, die eben von den Bedingungen des Erkennenden abhängig zu sein scheint. Die Wirklichkeit der Dinge und Vorgänge wird hier zwar nicht geleugnet, aber das menschliche Bewußtsein kann sie nur spiegelbildlich oder als „Erdichtungen“ registrieren.[36]

            While Kafka does not deny the existence of truth, of an indestructible reality that is common to all men, he seems to agree with Franz Brentano that the human mind has access only to personal and individual realities. Speaking of the possibility of an immediate knowledge of facts, „unmittelbare Tatsachenerkenntnisse“, Brentano writes: „sie beziehen sich (alle) auf uns selbst, d. h. auf unsere Seele und ihre Akzidenzien, die ihr als einem Denkenden (im weitesten Sinne als Bewußtseinhabendes) eigen sind. Der Erkennende ist hier identisch mit dem Erkannten.”[37] Brod has strongly denied any influence of Brentano on Kafka,[38] a possibility to which Wagenbach[39] had directed attention and which Marie-Luise Harder elaborated on.[40] Brod argues that though Kafka for some time frequented the weekly meetings the students – better disciples – of Brentano had in the Café Louvre, he was never really interested in systematic philosophy nor did he enjoy going to the meetings. This does not, however, seem a conclusive argument, for it does not require time and study to receive a limited impulse in support of one’s own ideas and it is perfectly plausible that a man like Kafka should then prefer to make original and creative use of this, rather than hear the same ideas expounded night after night. But even if an influence cannot be proved, there is no doubt a parallel between Brentano’s theory of cognition and Kafka’s.

            What does a writer do who no longer has faith in a reality common to him and his audience and the power of words to convey reality? The early Kafka of “Beschreibung eines Kampfes” spoke to his readers about the impossibility of communicating and in a sense led himself ad absurdum. The mature writer found a different solution. It is best explained with the help of an example. When Jean Paul writes: ‘[...] diese Seeleneinkäufer erpressen vom bezwungenen Wesen noch zuletzt das Zeugnis der Freiwilligkeit ‘, he has used language in a new and original way by creating a compound designed to communicate as precisely as possible not only the character of the men he is describing but also his attitude to them. Language is here used on the understanding that the writer and his audience share a common reality. When on the other hand Goethe writes about a river: “doch ihn hält kein Schattental” he has also created a new compound and made original use of language but not for greater precision. The word “Schattental” can suggest anything from a pleasantly shaded valley to a valley with deep dark shadows, even a valley of shades or the valley of the shadow of death. The word is ambiguous; whatever Goethe had in mind, the reader is free to envisage all or any one of these things, as his own experience of reality prompts him. Language is no longer a direct bridge between the minds of men; rather, it has acquired the nature of a stimulant that awakens in each man his own self. We will find that almost every element of language can be used either to create ambiguity or to give precise information. Illusive things like the general suggestiveness of words, their overtones in a certain context, can also work in both directions. Even realistic anecdotes, insofar as they do not attempt to interpret reality – Kleist’s “Das Bettelweib von Locarno” and Hofmannsthal’s “Erlebnis des Marschalls von Bassompierre” may serve as examples –, can confront the reader with complete ambiguity.

            While well into the eighteenth century, poetic language was used primarily with a view to communication, we begin to find both uses in the poetry of Goethe and his successors, until in the twentieth century the subjective use of language comes to ever greater prominence. The conviction that each individual should make a creative contribution to life and must therefore be encouraged to discover himself, is the positive aspect of this view. The negative aspect is that people are isolated, unable to make contact with each other and that they feel the need to conceal ideas and experiences that are of value to them because these must invariably suffer distortion and perversion if taken up by another.

            In these characteristics, as in many others, Kafka was a writer of our times, on the one hand saddened and discouraged by his inability to communicate with other men, to be understood by them, on the other, full of faith in the redemptive power of individualism. In his study Franz Kafkas Glauben und Lehre, Max Brod feels it necessary to defend Kafka against the intimation of individualism. Quoting the following aphorism of Kafka’s; „Der Messias wird kommen, sobald der zügelloseste Individualismus des Glaubens möglich ist“, he protests: „das kann im Munde Kafkas und nach seiner eben dargelegten Terminologie, die den Individualismus (und gar einen ‚zügellosen’ Individualismus) verurteilt, kein Lob, sondern nur Ironie bedeuten.“[41] But it is obvious that the type of individualism Brod is referring to is the egotistical independence from society and human relations that Kafka saw symbolized in bachelorhood, in other words, a moral individualism of the type Nietzsche proclaimed. Morally Kafka was no individualist but he was one in the sense described above.

           

A good description of subjective writing, worth quoting in this context, has been given by Roland Barthes, who sees this trend in modern literature very much in the nature of a catastrophe. He writes:

Das Wort ist enzyklopädisch, es umfaßt gleichzeitig alle Bedeutungen, unter denen auszuwählen es durch eine rationale Rede gezwungen wäre. Es verwirklicht also einen Zustand, der nur im Wörterbuch oder in der Lyrik möglich ist, da, wo das Nomen ohne seinen Artikel leben kann, zurückgeführt auf eine Art Nullzustand, der alle vergangenen und zukünftigen Spezifizierungen enthält.

Dieser Hunger nach dem Nomen, der der gesamten modernen Lyrik gemeinsam ist, macht aus dem lyrischen Wort ein furchtbares, ein unmenschliches Wort. Es schafft eine Rede voller Hohlräume und Lichter, voller Abwesenheiten und übermäßig nährender Zeichen, die weder vorhersehbar noch andauernd in ihrer Intention sind und die dadurch der gesellschaftlichen Funktion der Sprache so entgegengesetzt sind, daß die einfache Zuflucht zur diskontinuierlichen Rede allem Außernatürlichen den Weg öffnet. Die klassische Sprache reduziert sich immer auf ein überzeugendes Ganzes, sie postuliert den Dialog, sie setzt ein Universum, in dem der Mensch nicht allein ist, in dem die Worte niemals das furchtbare Gewicht der Dinge haben, in dem die Rede immer Begegnung mit einem anderen Menschen bedeutet.[42]

Secondary literature on Kafka shows that many readers react to his writings in just the way Barthes describes and long for the comfort and security classical literature gives them. Though the preference for nouns and the dislike of limiting adjectives is not a necessary characteristic of classical writing, we do find this use of nouns in Kafka too.[43]

The success of Kafka as a subjective writer is evinced by the fact that he has been read in so many different ways. No two critics seem to agree on the “meaning” of any story. To some, Kafka is a religious writer and to others he is a nihilist, to some his religion is hopeful, to others he is a damned man. Some see him as a social critic and some as the resigned sufferer of social chaos. To many he is just the victim of his neuroses. Christian or anti-Christian to the Christian, Jewish or anti-Jewish to the Jew, existentialist to the Existentialist, Kafka has been interpreted in almost every conceivable way.[44]

            There arises the question of what our attitude should be to such a wealth of versions of what Kafka supposedly meant. Is it to be welcomed that so many people have been roused to clarify and express their ideas about God and the world? Would Kafka, the subjectivist, have condemned their readiness to communicate these ideas? Perhaps not, for he was always eager to listen to the convictions of others. But he would certainly have protested against having these ideas attributed to him, for though most Kafka critics speak of their own intuitions and beliefs, either these or their opposites are loaded onto Kafka’s shoulders. Subjective Kafka criticism – which might provide us with an interesting museum of human intuitions, conceived and expressed by people who have probably not the gift for a genuine creative effort and might therefore otherwise never reveal their ideas – is vitiated by the fact that it poses as objective criticism. It must be rejected, not only to protect Kafka but because in most cases the individual insights are spoilt and adulterated in order that they may appear to come from the mouth of Kafka. Kafka himself seemed to take up some of these questions in his late ‘artist stories’ and we shall return to them in this connection.

           

In this thesis, we are attempting to avoid subjective criticism. Whether or not this attempt is successful, others must judge. Two things will preoccupy us: in the first place we will try to show up ambiguity, some of the techniques by which it is achieved and its potential power as a stimulant to thought; in the second place we will try to discover the value of such writing for Kafka himself. Here it stands to reason that a subjective writer, insofar as he does not just let the words ‘dribble out of the nozzle of his fountain-pen and let the reader do all the work’, to speak with Aldous Huxley, must have a relation to his work which does not necessarily tally with that of his readers.

           

In the case of Kafka, the value of his works for himself seems to have been less that they expressed secret solutions to the problems of life, than that they asked immensely detailed and complicated questions. Their very complexity carried in them the promise of a solution, for a well-formulated question often reveals more than a simple answer. It follows that Kafka’s reading experience of his writings was probably not essentially different from that of his readers, for to both reader and writer these writings presented an open question. But whereas on Kafka’s side, the works were loaded with references to experiences that were of significance to him, the reader is left free to fill them with his own experiences.

            In the following chapters an attempt will be made to suggest some of the experiences in which Kafka’s questions originated and through which they gained substance. Such an attempt can, by the nature of things, be only partly successful. We can never have access to all Kafka’s experiences nor tell with certainty what they meant to him. But even if only some of the interpretations prove convincing, a contribution may have been made towards the better recognition of Kafka the writer, and towards an understanding of both subjective and unconscious art.

The Emotional Response of the Reader

            For many readers of Kafka the emotional impact is so strong in the direction of fear, horror or revulsion that our theory of ambiguity seems to be jeopardized. There are several things to be considered here. One is the taboos of society which art must gradually conquer for itself. While modernity has now sanctioned many formerly repulsive subjects as literary material, the material of Kafka’s writing had only begun to be freed of its traditional taboo with the publication of the works of Freud and other psychoanalysts.

            For people who are accustomed merely to suffer their subconscious visions and not to confront them critically and analytically, the hypnotic effect of Kafka’s parables can either be sedatious – as though the mind naturally relegated such things to sleep – or it can have a nightmarish intensity that is almost unbearable. In an essay on Das Schloß, Homer Swander writes as a spokesperson for such readers:

The closer we get to the heart of his work, the more likely he is to cripple us in his own image. It is thus necessary for even the most reverent critics to shake off the infection – actually to offend the spirit of his art – in order to achieve the definitions which make explication and criticism possible.[45]

            But it is not necessary to see explication and criticism as offending against the spirit of Kafka’s art; rather it would seem that Kafka’s ideal reader is the man with the exploratory and critical attitude to his subconscious that Freud encouraged. Both the initial intense experience and the ensuing sober analysis are necessary to appreciate Kafka’s writing.

AMBIVALENCE AND LIFE

          It cannot be attempted here to give an account of Kafka’s life in all its personal, social and intellectual aspects. This has been done many times, particularly in the biographical studies of Brod and Wagenbach.[46] What we are primarily concerned with is the attitude the student of Kafka’s writings should adopt towards this material that consists, on the surface, of plain facts and has by many critics been taken up in this spirit. Where apparently ambivalent writing can be confronted with unambivalent biographical facts, it tends to assume in retrospect a clarity and consistency that was not originally its own and a disturbing discrepancy between work and author must in some way be accounted for. The suspicion can arise that the author’s ambiguity is due to lack of skill and Kafka has been accused of this. H. S. Reiss complains of Kafka’s lack of clarity: “Sie führt den Leser in Sackgassen des Denkens und macht die Erzählungen schwer lesbar und unbefriedigend”,[47] and this complaint is made on the assumption that we have clear facts about Kafka’s life and opinions. What we are insisting on in these brief and necessarily fragmentary chapters is, that Kafka’s life and thought are by no means simple and unambiguous, that they cannot be used to pin down meaning, and should only be consulted cautiously to corroborate one’s independent reading of the work. This does not, however, mean that there are no recognizable links between the author’s life and his writing.

The Cultural Situation: Expressionism

            A prominent Kafka critic, Walter Sokel, has pronounced Kafka to be the classical example of an Expressionist. Sokel defines Expressionism with a view to the idea in which it seems to culminate, and from this point of view one might agree with him. Sokel writes:

Expressionism as abstract form, as part of the modernist movement, and Expressionism as formless shriek arise from the same factor – subjectivism. This subjectivism in turn results from a peculiar social-cultural constellation endemic to Germany since the eighteenth century. Germany was the homeland both of “autonomous art”, abstractness in the best sense, and of a tradition of rhetorical formlessness, abstractness in the worst sense. This double aspect of abstractness also underlies Expressionism, which is firmly rooted in certain German traditions even though it rebels against others. But abstractness also underlies the whole phenomenon of modernism.[48]

We have already spoken of Kafka both from the point of view of subjectivism and of autonomous art. If however, we define Expressionism with a view to the dominant characteristics of the Expressionist decade and of the writers who saw themselves as Expressionists, Kafka might not pass as an Expressionist. Kafka undoubtedly wrote his important works during the Expressionist decade. He also published in Expressionist journals and with the greatest Expressionist publisher, Kurt Wolff. His best friend, Max Brod, was the spokesperson for the Prague Expressionists – few of whom were Expressionists in the strict sense of the word – and his other friends also belonged to this circle.

            But in this group, Kafka was an outsider and observer. One might argue that his relationship to Expressionism was secondary to his friendship with Max Brod, that it was Brod who chose Kafka’s publishers, that Kafka took over Brod’s friends, generally even corresponding with them through Brod and meeting them in Brod’s company.

           

Like the Expressionists, Kafka was burdened with the heritage of subjectivism, confused through the modern physicist’s abstract view of the world, and withheld from living nature in the prison of the city. Like them, he was sceptical of conventional solutions. But a common heritage does not necessarily mean a common style. To Kafka, as to the Expressionists, psychoanalysis revealed the unconscious which became a great source of inspiration and, as for them, awareness was for him both visual and intellectual. The father conflict, a recurring Expressionist motif, was decisive for Kafka too.

            But unlike the Expressionists, whose common purpose it was to give to man solutions of some kind – political, social, ethical, religious – Kafka seemed to have an almost superstitious fear of solutions or , more exactly, of any but the most individual solutions. Unlike the Expressionists, he did not aim his writing at an audience and quite definitely not with propagandistic intentions. His work was in the first instance quite personal and its effect on readers – something which, for Kafka, was a source of anxiety – has always been personal. Kafka’s use of language, far from being revolutionary and eccentric, was classical and measured. Many of Kafka’s motifs – his yearning for nature and his attempt to find some solution to the problems of the natural and the biological –  are not typically Expressionist. It would appear that Kafka and the Expressionists shared little more than a common heritage and a common scene. In some ways, Kafka is in intention closer to the Naturalists and the Youth Movement.[49]

            Nevertheless, Kafka was always associated with Expressionism and in contact with it. One might argue that one of the main impulses of his work was his continual and active rejection of Expressionism, its idealism, its extremism, its activism, its contortionism, its noisiness. Yet it is hard to envisage Kafka without Expressionism. It was the stone on which he whetted his knife. If the element of personal sympathy is not taken into account, the friendship with Brod seems to have been of this nature too, a stimulant, not a shared vision or pursuit. Expressionism and its followers helped Kafka to find himself.

            But apart from being influenced by Expressionism, it appears that Kafka also influenced Expressionism. It is hard to trace this influence precisely but as one reads Expressionist poetry one is occasionally aware of echoes of Kafka’s early prose in, for example, ‘Betrachtung’ and the fragments of ‘Beschreibung eines Kampfes’. The following example is worth quoting as it describes the mental and emotional background of Expressionism. It is Heinrich Nowak’s “Elend”, published in 1917.

In die Winterkälte, in der die Nächte weinen und ächzen,

            jagt mich ein Sturm.

            Von Golgatha fliegen Raben auf und krächzen.

            Irgendwo ist viel Leid geschehn. –

            Über den Städten der Menschen

            flattert es in dunklem Flügelwehn.

            Der liebe Gott hat den Himmel versperrt

            und weint.

            Der Mond stirbt; sein Antlitz ist von Qualen

            verzerrt.

            ‚Der Mond ist tot!’

            sagt jemand, zündet eine elektrische Bogenlampe an

            und beginnt unsinnig lustig zu werden.

The last lines of this poem sound very much like a summary of the monologue about the moon that ends up being a paper lantern and the nonsensically merry address to the drunkard in Kafka’s “Gespräch mit dem Betrunkenen” published in 1909, which in a sense drew the conclusions from Germany’s cultural development up to the beginning of the twentieth century.

            The story “Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer” can help us sum up the topic: Kafka and Expressionism. Written in 1917, it can easily be read as a parable about the Expressionist movement and was perhaps intended as such. The great wall, built in a communal effort with tremendous religious and patriotic fervour to keep out the evil tribes of the north (which no one has actually seen), built in fragments, the whole so large that no living man could ever be sure of its final completion, and built as it would seem unnecessarily, for the danger, if it exists at all, is distant: this manifestation of idealistic human endeavour, with its illuminating insights and its futility, reads much like an assessment of Expressionism; it could, of course, be taken more generally too. The other centre of unity for the great country of China is the ancient castle-city of Peking with its eternal emperor in the changing guise of ever unknown individual emperors whose messages stand no chance of reaching the man for whom they were intended. We see at first sight how much closer the castle image is to Kafka’s thought. Whatever his contribution to the wall, his deep concern was for the emperor and his message. His scepticism touched both.

           

      Biographical Material

         

It has been acknowledged by most critics that Kafka’s personal experiences and problems provided the greatest formative influence for his writing. Ample use has been made of his biography which is available to us through his letters, his diaries, the information which Max Brod, who for years saw Kafka almost every day, has passed on in a number of books, and the information that Wagenbach collected from various sources. What is generally forgotten when this material is used, is that most of these sources (not only the biography of Brod) are coloured and those who work with them should be careful.

The most reliable sources are the actual facts the diaries and letters contain. Brod has accused Wagenbach of factual inaccuracies and Brod himself has been accused of occasional inaccuracies, for instance by Politzer.[50] But only minor points are at issue in each case; the Kafka biographies are valuable.

Another certainty to work with is the impression Kafka made on his friends. There is complete agreement which should make us wary of uncritically adopting the popular view of Kafka as a gloomy nihilist. Felix Weltsch writes:

Es ist schwer, fast unmöglich, diesen Menschen, der allen Eindrücken so offen stand, der sich so tief in Menschen hineinzusenken wußte, dessen Augen so viel Hilfsbereitschaft ausstrahlten, der ein so helles Urteil hatte, kurz der sich mit der ihn umgebenden Welt in so positiven, sinnvollen Kontakt zu setzen wußte, als einen Nihilisten oder hoffnungslos Verzweifelten zu betrachten.“[51]

It seems quite impermissible to ignore such impressions formed as the result of years of friendship with Kafka. Brod’s shocked rejection of Anders’ study seems justified.[52]

           

That a Freudian analysis of any man will present the elements of his mental make-up but tell us next to nothing of their all-important organization, has been pointed out by psychoanalysts such as Jung[53] and Silberer. In his book Probleme der Mystik , Herbert Silberer gives a diagram which may serve us as a table of conversion when we read such Freudian Kafka criticism. For him each element in the nature of man has a retrograde and an anagogic aspect, i. e. it can be seen in relation to the biological and infantile or in relation to mental progress and character development. Among the various manifestations of human maturity, Silberer emphasizes the religious, more precisely the mystic, but as Kafka has a good deal of the mystic in him, this is no disadvantage for us.

Retrograder Aspekt                                               Anagogischer Aspekt

1. Töten des Vaters                                           Töten des alten Adam

2. Begehren der Mutter (Faulheit)                         Introversion

3. Inzest                                                                 Liebe zum Ideal

4. Autoerotik                                                         Siddhi (phantasierte Erlebnisse, die                      

                                                                              Wünschen schmeicheln)

5. Zeugung mit der Mutter                                    Geistige Wiedergeburt

6. Verbessern                                                         Neuschöpfung

7. Todeswunsch                                                     Aufgehen im Ideal[54]

It is obvious that an anagogic account of a man’s personality will sound quite different from a retrograde.

            To some extent Kafka himself is to blame for the fashion of interpreting his life and works in the Freudian manner. Few amateurs who come into contact with psychology will successfully resist the urge to attempt an amateur self-analysis and Kafka’s “Letter to his Father” as well as a number of diary entries read much like such a self-analysis. It is unlikely that they would have been written in this form had Kafka lived a century earlier. Psychoanalysis itself can become a style of seeing and creating things, and as what Kafka tells us about himself is generally on the way to becoming art, we do well to see psychoanalytic elements as a style of writing rather than taking them too literally.

For Kafka, literature – and Kafka’s diaries and to some extent his letters must here be seen as literature – was a way of living, of mastering life. Within this complex literary life, the diaries were the link between immediate experience on the one hand and art and life on the other. Moods, frustrations, worries, uncertainties that might disturb the normal flow of life find their way into them and were there neutralized and clarified. They are as little part of Kafka’s moral character as the elements of personality that emerge in Freudian analysis. Half-fledged and half-serious thoughts, half-formed imaginative material are recorded in the diaries. We know that Kafka saw in a diary a valuable source for studying the dynamics of personality.[55] They showed him how man can change, sometimes almost beyond his own recognition, from day to day and month to month. Any biographer of Kafka must be aware of the fact that what the diaries report as true for one day is not necessarily true for the next. Again, with anyone who is writing a diary not as an exhibition piece but to master his life, pessimistic utterances are likely to predominate.

Kafka’s self-accusations must therefore not be taken too seriously. They might well be exaggerations of his faults for his own benefit. It deserves to be mentioned too, that a fault that has been recognized is on the whole a fault that has been overcome. Achievements and virtues will find comparatively scanty mention in such a diary. We must learn to read and evaluate Kafka’s diaries before we use them as sources for his biography.

Another pitfall for biographers is an unrealistic conception of the “normal personality”. Is it not natural that a profession and a serious hobby may collide? It seems far-fetched to use these problems in Kafka’s life to support the current myth[56] of the artist being less able to master life than most other people. All one might say is that he is probably more ready and able to admit his frustrations than other people are, and that in general he is trying to fit more into the twenty-four hours of the day than others. Kafka’s marriage problems need not be seen in an unduly pathological light either, for it is not unusual that people take time to find the partner that suits them. Kafka’s inability to leave home and in particular his father has in general been given a pathological interpretation.[57] But would Kafka have stayed at home if the frictions with his father had not proved fruitful for his writing? He himself wrote to his father: “Mein Schreiben handelte von dir”. We shall take up this point again in connection with the story “Eine kleine Frau”.

Of course nobody will deny that Kafka had his problems. Among the more important were his relationship with his father who was unwilling to accept a son so little like himself, his unfulfilled desire for an ideal marriage that would not interfere with his vocation as a writer, his bad conscience about bachelorhood which he saw as an asocial and egotistic way of life, his distrust of a mechanized society and the unnatural way of life it forced upon people, after 1917 his illness for which he blamed his own desire to escape from marriage, and finally, secularized Judaism as a religious non-entity that nevertheless forced, to some extent, an outcast existence upon the Jews. All these problems were for Kafka either directly or symbolically related to the father problem which was certainly the central inspiration of his writing. We shall return to all of them in the various interpretations of Kafka’s stories that follow. 

Thought and Faith

Kafka did not have a philosophy in the strict sense of the word but he did appear to have insights and beliefs that linked up to point in the direction of a faith or philosophy. He envisaged a goal but was never able to describe, other than by means of questions, the way that lead there. „Es gibt ein Ziel aber keinen Weg. Was wir Weg nennen ist Zögern“, he writes. These thoughts and ideas in their continuity emerge most clearly in the aphorisms of 1917, published by Brod in Kafka’s compilation under the title “Betrachtungen über Sünde, Leid, Hoffnung und den wahren Weg.”[58]

If something resembling a personal religion emerges here, we must remember that it is the religion of 1917 and that this was the year of the outbreak of Kafka’s lethal illness and of the second dissolution of his engagement. Walter Benjamin points out that authors, following the paths their own works lead them, may change their minds about opinions formerly held. To speak of opinions in Kafka’s case is of course already a mistake. Seen on its own, every one of Kafka’s aphorisms is essentially ambiguous and can be construed in various ways. But that Kafka himself did see continuity of thought and conviction in the cycle as a whole and felt that this had validity both for the past and the future can be deduced from remarks in a letter to Milena written (in self-address) about two years after the aphorisms referred to.

Denke auch daran, daß vielleicht die beste Zeit deines Lebens, von der du eigentlich noch zu niemandem richtig gesprochen hast, vor etwa zwei Jahren jene acht Monate auf einem Dorf gewesen sind, wo du mit allem abgeschlossen zu haben glaubtest, dich nur auf das Zweifellose in dir beschränktest, frei warst, ohne Briefe, ohne die fünfjährige Postverbindung mit Berlin, im Schmutz deiner Krankheit und dabei garnicht viel an dir verändern, sondern nur die alten engen Umrisse deines Wesens fester nachziehen mußtest (im Gesicht unter den grauen Haaren hast du dich ja kaum verändert seit deinem sechsten Jahr). (M 68)

           

If we keep to the notes of this period we may avoid the suspicion of having invented a philosophy from the chance remarks of a lifetime. It is proper to place more emphasis on the aphorisms of “Betrachtungen [...]” as Kafka himself compiled the collection choosing from the material of the notebooks.

            The defining myth underlying Kafka’s philosophy is that of the Fall of Man. The aphorisms do not investigate the nature of original innocence, though the story “Bericht an eine Akademie” does this to some extent. They circumscribe it as “das Unzerstörbare”, the indestructible, and see this as common to all men and in itself indivisible.

             

70/71 Das Unzerstörbare ist eines; jeder einzelne Mensch ist es und gleichzeitig ist es allen gemeinsam, daher die beispiellos untrennbare Verbindung der Menschen. (H 47)

It is their relation to original or eternal innocence that unites men and makes possible a symbolic representation of one through the other (a thing which can become important for both sinner and saint).

            The paradox of being at one and the same time isolated and in intimate communion with all men is related to the paradox between time and eternity, in both of which men participate. The conclusion which Kafka draws from this is the following:

64/65 Die Vertreibung aus dem Paradies ist in ihrem Hauptteil ewig: Es ist also zwar die Vertreibung aus dem Paradies endgültig, das Leben in der Welt unausweichlich, die Ewigkeit des Vorganges aber (oder zeitlich ausgedrückt: die ewige Wiederholung des Vorgangs) macht es trotsdem möglich, daß wir nicht nur dauernd im Paradiese bleiben können, sondern tatsächlich dort dauernd sind, gleichgültig ob wir es hier wissen oder nicht. (H 46)

It is to be assumed that men can be both in a state of innocence and in a state of original sin. Here Kafka differs decisively from Kierkegaard who works with similar paradoxes but without ever suggesting that men could on some unconscious level of being still be innocent. The dichotomy of conscious and unconscious, temporal and timeless life, innocence and guilt is central to the story “Das Urteil”. Kafka sees the original sin itself as impatience,  i. e. the unwillingness to let things fully mature, the desire to come to conclusions too quickly. (He sees psychology as doing this: “Psychologie is Ungeduld”.) (H 72)

2. Alle menschlichen Fehler sind Ungeduld, eine vorzeitiges Abbrechen des Methodischen, ein scheinbares Einpfählen der scheinbaren Sache.

3. Es gibt zwei menschliche Hauptsünden, aus welchen sich alle anderen ableiten: Ungeduld und Lässigkeit. Wegen der Ungeduld sind sie aus dem Pardiese vertrieben worden, wegen der Lässigkeit kehren sie nicht zurück. Vielleicht aber gibt es nur eine Hauptsünde: die Ungeduld. Wegen der Ungeduld sind sie vertrieben worden, wegen der Ungeduld kehren sie nicht zurück. (H 39)

Superficial and dissecting knowledge is that to which the serpent tempts man. True knowledge is of a different nature.

Erkenne dich selbst, bedeutet nicht: Beobachte dich.  Beobachte dich ist das Wort der Schlange. Es bedeutet: Mache dich zum Herrn deiner Handlungen [...] (H 80)

The evil impulse is always the desire to simplify, palliate, falsify knowledge. Instead of eating of the Tree of Life man ate of the Tree of Knowledge, instead of remaining whole, he chose to dissect himself. This not having eaten of the Tree of Life is the other aspect of original sin.

           

83. Wir sind nicht nur deshalb sündig, weil wir vom Baum der Erkenntnis gegessen haben, sondern auch deshalb, weil wir vom Baum des Lebens noch nicht gegessen haben. Sündig ist der Stand, in dem wir uns befinden, unabhängig von Schuld. (H. 48)

The desire to eat of the Tree of Life, which is still awaiting us in an undestroyed Eden, should motivate our actions. It carries, so to speak, the unknown food which so many of Kafka’s characters seek unsuccessfully. In active life, the search may be described as for the organic unity of things (Kafka believed firmly in “the natural way of life”)[59], for a symbolic understanding of all things, for a sacramental way of life of the type attempted in Hassidic mysticism[60], sacrament implying faith in the symbolic nature of the world. Kafka tried to explain death as the inevitable result of the Fall in the following way: - Original sin gave us knowledge of good and evil: but you cannot know good without desiring it, desiring it, man has not the strength to achieve it. Therefore he must destroy himself in the attempt. Of this self-destruction in the service of good, which is death, he is afraid. To avoid it, man pretends to himself that knowledge of good and evil has yet to be achieved; he starts motivating his actions. We are back to psychology and the original sin of impatience.

86. Seit dem Sündenfall sind wir in der Fähigkeit zur Erkenntnis des Guten und Bösen im Wesentlichen gleich; trotzdem suchen wir gerade hier unsere besonderen Vorzüge. Aber erst jenseits dieser Erkenntnis beginnen die wahren Verschiedenheiten. Der gegenteilige Schein wird durch folgendes hervorgerufen: Niemand kann sich mit der Erkenntnis allein begnügen, sondern muss sich bestreben, ihr gemäß zu handeln. Dazu aber ist ihm die Kraft nicht mitgegeben, er muß daher sich zerstören, selbst auf die Gefahr hin, sogar dadurch die notwendige Kraft nicht zu erhalten, aber es bleibt ihm nichts anderes übrig, als dieser letzte Versuch. (Das ist auch der Sinn der Todesdrohung beim Verbot des Essens vom Baume der Erkenntnis; vielleicht ist das auch der ursprüngliche Sinn des natürlichen Todes). Vor diesem Versuch nun fürchtet er sich; lieber will er die Erkenntnis des Guten und Bösen rückgängig machen (die Bezeichnung Sündenfall geht auf diese Angst zurück); aber das Geschehene kann nicht rückgängig gemacht, sondern nur getrübt werden. Zu diesem Zweck entstehen die Motivationen. Die ganze Welt ist ihrer voll, ja die ganze sichtbare Welt ist vielleicht nichts anderes als eine Motivation des einen Augenblick lang ruhenwollenden Menschen. Ein Versuch, die Tatsache der Erkenntnis zu fälschen, die Erkenntnis erst zum Ziel zu machen. (H 49)

Psychology, the science of motivation, comes to represent for Kafka the entire world of appearance as distinct from what Kant called  “the thing in itself”:  the world described and condemned in Beschreibung eines Kampfes.  This then includes the sensual as distinct from the sensuous.

             

85. Das Böse ist eine Ausstrahlung des menschlichen Bewußtseins in bestimmten Übergangsstellungen. Nicht eigentlich die sinnliche Welt ist Schein, sondern ihr Böses, das allerdings für unsere Augen die sinnliche Welt bildet, (H 49)

But true experience and knowledge are possible. Kafka speaks of them as “Erlebnis und Intuition”.

Ist „Erlebnis“ das Ruhen im Absoluten, kann „Intuition“ nur der Umweg über die Welt zum Absoluten sein. Alles will doch zum Ziel und Ziel ist nur eines. (H 116)

It is possible that Kafka saw his own clairvoyant states, of which he spoke to Rudolf Steiner, as such “Erlebnisse”. [61]

            The world of appearances (or psychology) would not be dangerous if it did not contain elements of the divine which, being hidden, tend to dissuade man of the existence of the divine. This is above all the case with sensual love.

79. Die sinnliche Liebe täuscht über die himmlische hinweg; allein könnte sie es nicht, aber da sie das Element der himmlischen Liebe unbewußt in sich hat, kann sie es. (H 48)

As the sensual contains sparks of the divine it must not be rejected in the Manichean way. Kafka sets celibacy and suicide against marriage and martyrdom, the first as rejections of the body,  the second as acceptance of the body.

Zölibat und Selbstmord stehen auf ähnlicher Erkenntnisstufe, Selbstmord und Märtyrertod keineswegs, vielleicht Ehe und Märtyrertod (H 87)

33. Die Märtyrer unterschätzen den Leib nicht, sie lassen ihn auf dem Kreuz erhöhen. Darin sind sie mit ihren Gegnern einig. (H 42)

Martyrdom and marriage seem to be symbols of the positive in Kafka’s writing.

            In line with the philosophies of such widely separated thinkers as Aquinas and Buber,[62] evil has no independent reality. (See above.) The way to be good is to be yourself completely, which means also that your faith must be completely in accordance with your own being.

           

Der Messias wird kommen, sobald der zügellostese Individualismus des Glaubens möglich ist –, niemand diese Möglichkeit vernichtet, niemand die Vernichtung duldet, also die Gräber sich öffnen. Das ist vielleicht auch die christliche Lehre, sowohl in der tatsächlichen Aufzeigung des Beispieles, dem nachgefolgt werden soll, eines individualistischen Beispieles, als auch in der symbolischen Aufzeigung der Auferstehung des Mittlers im einzelnen Menschen. (H 89)

Every man, insofar as he is himself completely, can be a Messiah.  This suggests the teachings of Hassidism. Each man has a different way to go, a different door to the law, intended only for him, to speak with Kafka’s parable “Vor dem Gesetz”:

Glauben heißt: das Unzerstörbare in sich befreien, oder richtiger: sich befreien, oder richtiger: unzerstörbar sein, oder richtiger: sein. (H 89)

Faith takes you from self-realization to “being as such”; by freeing yourself, you free the indestructible and eternal in yourself, thus becoming the Messiah for yourself and whatever enters your sphere.  The Messiah in person will not come till the end of time, until the sum of men who lived a life true to their innermost being has brought redemption to completion.

Der Messias wird erst kommen, wenn er nicht mehr nötig sein wird, er wird erst einen Tag nach seiner Ankunft kommen, er wird nicht am letzten Tag kommen, sondern am allerletzten. (H 90)

None of the responsibility of redemption is taken from individual man. It is difficult here to distinguish between following in the footsteps of Christ and auto-messianic action with a view to the Messiah to come, particularly as Christians too await the final return of the Messiah at the end of time and Judaism traditionally knows of two Messiahs – the Messiah Ben Josef, Christ, who falls in the fight and the Messiah Ben David, who will come at the end of time and whom Kafka seems to be referring to in his aphorism.[63]

            It would appear that Kafka acknowledged the relationship of Christianity and Judaism but himself remained closer to Judaism in its Hassidic form, perhaps also because it directed attention towards the future and the work still to be done by each living man in the course of his life.[64] But Kafka never committed himself to either religion, just as he never really belonged to either.

Ich bin nicht von der allerdings schon schwer sinkenden Hand des Christentums ins Leben geführt worden wie Kierkegaard und habe nicht den letzten Zipfel des davonfliegenden jüdischen Gebetmantels noch gefangen wie die Zionisten. Ich bin Ende oder Anfang. (H 121)

A similar decision to stay outside all churches was made by another modern mystic, Simone Weil, and explained in the following way:

I should betray the truth, that is to say the aspect of truth which I see, if I left the point, where I have been since my birth, at the intersection of Christianity and everything that is not Christian. [65]

For those who know Kafka’s writing, its severe pessimism must appear to stand in direct conflict with this positive faith. Here three things should be remembered. For Kafka the attempt to achieve good involved self-destruction or martyrdom. Therefore suffering became something good.

Das Leiden ist das positive Element dieser Welt, ja es ist die einzige Verbindung zwischen der Welt und dem Positiven. Nur hier ist Leiden Leiden. Nicht so, als ob die, welche hier leiden, anderswo wegen dieses Leidens erhöht werden sollen, sondern so, daß das, was in dieser Welt Leiden heißt, in einer anderen Welt, unverändert und nur befreit von seinem Gegensatz, Seligkeit ist. (H 108)

            Secondly, it must be remembered that to free the way that leads to good, the world too must be actively destroyed;  nothing is won if one simply withdraws from it.

Diese Welt ist unsere Verirrung, als solche ist sie [...] etwas, das nur durch seine Zu-Ende-Führung, nicht durch Verzicht zerstört werden kann, wobei allerdings auch das Zuendeführen nur eine Folge von Zerstörungen sein kann, aber innerhalb diser Welt.

(H 109)

In the third place, one must keep in mind what is said in the little parable of Sancho Pansa. The writer Sancho Pansa wrote in order to divert his devil, whom he later named Don Quixote and who was the epitome of unreality and semblance, from himself and occupy him with such harmless pursuits as fighting windmills. Kafka’s devil might be described as the urge to doubt and dissect.

           

Sancho Pansa, der sich übrigens dessen nie gerühmt hat, gelang es im Laufe der Jahre, durch Beistellung einer Menge Ritter- und Räuberromane in den Abend- und Nachtstunden seinen Teufel, dem er später den Namen Don Quixote gab, derart von sich abzulenken, daß dieser dann haltlos die verrücktesten Taten aufführte, die aber mangels eines vorbestimmten Gegenstandes, der eben Sancho Pansa hätte sein sollen, niemandem schadeten. Sancho Pansa, ein freier Mann, folgte gleichmütig, vielleicht aus einem gewissen Verantwortlichkeitsgefühl, dem Don Quixote auf seinen Zügen und hatte davon eine große und nützliche Unterhaltung bis an sein Ende. (H 77)

Insofar as writing meant for Kafka diverting his personal devil from himself onto “nothing”, in other words writing about his devil and “nothing” instead of about his vision, the following aphorism from the collection “Er” does not surprise us:

Der Unterschied zwischen dem „Ja“ und „Nein“, das er seinen Zeitgenossen sagt, und jenem, das er eigentlich zu sagen hätte, dürfte dem von Tod und Leben entsprechen, ist auch nur ebenso ahnungsweise für ihn faßbar. (BeK 298)[66]

  Summary

What has been said in the various sections of Part I falls under three main headings.

Kafka opened up, as perhaps no other has done, the realm of the unconscious (in the sense of not-conscious) to literature, not only as material for writing – many had begun to do that – but also insofar as it led to a style, even a genre, and insofar as it was the source of creative processes that could be brought under control. As a result of this, form and structure of Kafka’s writings have only weak links with conventional forms.

 Secondly, though Kafka did eventually have ethical and metaphysical convictions and beliefs, he was concerned with asking the questions these posed, not giving answers. This was something new in the European tradition where writers who had a “Weltanschauung” in general expressed this in their writings.

Thirdly, Kafka’s writing was, for himself, a way of mastering life, of clarifying personal, general and universal problems.

The chapters of Part I should have made it clear that there are different origins, kinds, uses and finally, different degrees of ambivalence. If we claim that Kafka is basically a writer of ambivalence this does not mean that his works have no fixed points and no direction; without a certain continuity of thought and vision we should not be prepared to accept them as works of art. In Part II we will try to show how Kafka’s experience of ambivalence and his attitude to it changed in the course of his development. The main stages of this will be summed up in a brief introduction to Das Schloss.

      Orientation of the Young Writer

          In his earliest known works, Kafka explores the possibilities of literature in an age in which the writer has become a lonesome figure with no social connectedness or function and the world itself seems to have lost its substance, sanity and reality. This is the situation described in “Beschreibung eines Kampfes”. Should a writer write about the unreal world, now a world of private isolation and individual disorientation, and if he did so, would this be more than a mere amusement (Belustigung) for himself? What effect would writing of this kind have on a reader or conversation partner if others were allowed to listen to such musings? Could it damage him or cause him to harm himself,  to follow, for instance, a narrator’s prompt and produce a knife to thrust into his arm, rendering himself incapable of further action? This is just what the narrator’s partner in

“Beschreibung eines Kampfes” does.  Where would such a disconnected writer find valid material? Would he end up drinking one glass of Benedictine liqueur after the other to gain access to his rambling unconscious? And what form should such writing, for which the directedness and conclusiveness of a story could hardly be appropriate, take? In “Beschreibung eines Kampfes” the form Kafka chooses is musical rather than narrative, a cyclical series of variations on a theme with recurring motifs. But this is only one of the forms Kafka experiments with in these early still Impressionistic days. The eighteen small prose pieces of “Betrachtung”, written at about the same time, were partly inspired by Kafka’s contemporary Robert Walser, while Amerika was, according to Kafka himself, a modern reminiscence of a Dickens-type novel and best read with this foil in mind.

Beschreibung eines Kampfes

            “Beschreibung eines Kampfes” is the earliest of Kafka’s works we possess and it is a trying and exhausting text to read. We shall nevertheless discuss it in some detail because it records Kafka’s exploration of the possibilities of writing about and through the unconscious and shows us his long-standing single-minded determination to make that his mission. It is also his attempt to write in the Expressionist vein which was fashionable at the tiem. Unfortunately there is only a patched text available. The latter part of our text follows an early transcript, and the early chapters a later copy which may have been made and revised with a view to publication. But there are occasional switches to the earlier version where Brod felt they brought an improvement. Two of the dialogues, “Gespräch mit dem Beter” and “Gespräch mit dem Betrunkenen” were published in a version authorized by Kafka.

           

The construction of “Beschreibung eines Kampfes” is complicated. The basic story is of two men who have met at an evening party and then go for a walk because one of them wants to confide in the other.[67] This story is divided to form a frame for the whole; then there are two short dreamlike pieces, a third (a dreamlike account of an imagined soirée), again divided to form a frame for the remaining pieces, and following that without transition a “conversation” one of the imagined characters has with a drunkard. This division is still further complicated by the various Roman and Arabic numerals and letters with the help of which Kafka tried to make his maze-like construction comprehensible to the reader.  (Brod remarks on the similarity with school compositions which were required to be planned in this way.)[68]      

The framing story tells of a self-conscious, retiring, but also lonely young man, who is sitting more or less bored at a party eating biscuits and sipping liqueur when a casual acquaintance he met on the stairs going up approaches him to tell him about the amorous adventure he has just had with a servant girl. With a mixture of embarrassment, consideration for the dignity of the other man, and a desire for companionship that is not free from the hope of gaining recognition and esteem in the eyes of another person, the young man suggests a walk to the Laurenziberg as the best time and place for confessions – and perhaps for cooling down too, for it is freezing outside and there is black ice on the roads. But all that either of the men says, does or thinks seems to miss the other (most of the dialogue is in any case only imaginary or strongly coloured by imagination), probably because in both men a selfish wish for relief or support is the prime motive. The narrator is tired, a little drunk, he is uneasy about the other man, the cold outside is stunning after the warm house, and before he reaches the bridge, that is early on in the walk, he has a fall in which he hurts his knee. Tiredness and drunkenness let dreamlike visions rise; the cold and the dark act both as stimulants and impediments to normal spontaneity; nervousness and pain seem to activate a desire to escape. We have abnormal physical conditions favouring an upset of mental equilibrium which of course normally relies on a predominance of the conscious mind. Exaggerated joviality at the start, morbid sensitivity, images seen with visionary vividness (a man is described as resembling “eine Stange in baumelnder Bewegung”), imaginary dialogues, disjointed memories that can have no meaning for the listener, faltering logic, a sense of persecution, hallucinations, finally the suggestion that the other should kill himself, and then the sudden return to something approximating to sobriety and concern when the companion does stab himself and blood flows: these are the progressive stages of the irrational.

            Kafka’s narrator finds it impossible to have communion with other men. He cannot engage them in conversation, nor can he really love or hate them or have meaningful intercourse with them, although he also seems to need them and depend on them for support. All this comes to a head when the narrator’s companion, under his influence or as his puppet, rejects his girl-friend and denies the possibility of love in the final section of the piece.[69] The theme is carried throughout by the conversations, particularly those of the first and last sections and “Gespräch mit dem Beter”. It is grotesquely exaggerated in the conversation with the drunkard, and then contrasted with a remembered, quite matter-of-fact conversation between the narrator’s mother and another woman: “‘Was machen Sie da meine Liebe? Ist das eine Hitze!’ – ‚Ich jause so im Grünen.’ Sie sagten es ohne Nachdenken und nicht besonders deutlich, als hätte jene Frau die Frage, meine Mutter die Antwort erwartet.“ (B.e.K. 43) The two women here appear to be able to take themselves, each other and external realities for granted.

            For the central figure, however, other human beings cannot be taken for granted. They tend to take on a wooden, or mechanical, or flimsy, or puppet-like appearance.  Kafka is here using the imagery of Expressionism. But its effect is primarily illustrative and does not support his narrative as the animal images later will. He does not use it again. A series of quotations will show the persistence with which these images recur:

[...] setzte er sich mit einem Ruck nieder, legte sich zurück und ließ seine Arme hängen. Dann drückte er sie mit spitzen Ellenbogen zurück und begann mit ziemlich lauter Stimme vor sich hin zu sprechen. (BeK  8)

           

Mein Bekanner kam über die Trottoirfläche auf mich zu, rasch, als sollte ich ihn auffangen. Er zwinkerte mit den Augen wegen irgendeines Einverständnisses [...]

(BeK 12)

Mein Bekanner streckte sich, den Rücken, die Schultern, den Hals und hielt den Oberkörper, der auf seinen gespannten Armen ruhte, über das Geländer vorgebeugt. (BeK 15)

Als ich heute meine Treppe hinunterstieg, um vor der Abendgesellschaft noch einen kleinen Spaziergang zu machen, mußte ich mich wundern, wie meine Hände in den Manschetten hin- und herschlenkern und so lustig haben sie das gemacht. (BeK 16)

Gerade verbeugte ich mich mit diesen Worten, als ich mit Unwillen bemerkte, daß sich mir der rechte Oberschenkel aus dem Gelenk gekugelt hatte. Auch die Kniescheibe hatte sich ein wenig gelockert. (BeK 46)

Dabei machte mir mein rechtes Bein viel Ärger. Denn anfangs schien es ganz auseinandergefallen zu sein und erst allmählich brachte ich es durch Quetschen und sinngemäßes Verschieben halbwegs in Ordnung. (BeK 46)

Von Zeit zu Zeit packte er mit der ganzen Kraft seines Körpers seinen Schädel und schmetterte ihn seufzend in die Handflächen, die auf den Steinen auflagen. (BeK 35)

- wie eine Stange in baumelnder Bewegung sieht er aus, mit einem schwarzbehaarten Schädel oben. Sein Körper ist mit vielen kleinen mattgelben Stoffstückchen behängt, die ihn vollständig bedeckten, denn bei der gestrigen Windstille lagen sie glatt an.

(BeK 14)

The women described seem to consist of little more than their dress. They are like glove puppets; the dress hides a non-existent body. This image would correspond with contemporary sexual taboos but also with the unsociable narrator’s experience of women.

Die Hausfrau stand mitten in dem Zimmer und machte bewegliche Verbeugungen, während in ihrem Rock gezierte Falten sich schaukelten. (BeK 7)

Sie trug ein schwarzes Kleid, welches auf Schultern und Nacken aus durchsichtigen Spitzen bestand – der Halbmond des Hemdkragens lag unter ihnen – von deren unterem Rande die Seide in einem wohlgeschnittenen Kragen niederhing. (BeK 37)

The images culminate in the parable about “Mädchenschönheit”:

Oft wenn ich Kleider mit vielfachen Falten, Rüschen und Behängen sehe, die über schöne Körper schön sich legen, so denke ich, daß sie nicht lange so erhalten bleiben, sondern Falten bekommen, nicht mehr gerade zu glätten [...] Doch sehe ich Mädchen, die wohl schön sind und vielfache reizende Muskeln und Knöchelchen und gespannte Haut und Massen dünner Haare zeigen und doch täglich in diesem einen natürlichen Maskenanzug erscheinen, immer dasselbe Gesicht in ihre gleich Handfläche legen und von ihrem Spiegel wiedererscheinen lassen. (BeK 62)

A significant break in these dream images comes when the girlfriend of the narrator’s companion farewells her lover on the stairs, for here there does seem to be a live body beneath the clothes:

Ihr Hals war nackt und nur unter dem Kinn von einem schwarzen Samtband umbunden und ihr lose bekleideter Körper war gebeugt und dehnte sich immer wieder, als sie vor uns die Treppe hinunterstieg, die Lampe niederhaltend. Ihre Wangen waren gerötet, denn sie hatte Wein getrunken und in dem schwachen, das ganze Stiegenhaus erfüllenden Lampenschein zitterten ihre Lippen. (BeK 9)

But she is an exception; love seems to be the only thing that can give life to people and make them seem real. A comparison with a silhouette of tissue-paper then extends the mechanical dress-puppet image:

Sie sind ihrer ganzen Länge nach aus Seidenpapier herausgeschnitten, aus gelbem Seidenpapier, so silhouettenartig, und wenn Sie gehen, so muß man sie knittern hören. (BeK 47)

Just as people become puppets, landscapes become theatrical scenery.

           

Und die Häuschen, die oft wie auf kleinen Rädern über den Plaz rollen, sind ganz festgestampft – still – still – man sieht gar nicht den dünnen, schwarzen Strich, der sie sonst vom Boden trennt. (BeK 52)

This way of seeing live things as inanimate or subhuman and of seeing inanimate or natural things as more mobile, more subject to the human will than they really are, carries right through. The companion becomes a horse, the fat masses of the fat man overlap the stretcher like a carpet, nature, in the delirious dream, is responsive to man’s commands. In the fat man dream, the danger and the fallacy of all this then  become manifest.

            The imaginative “killing off” of actual surroundings, which  laps over into actual life when the hero-narrator suggests to his companion that he must kill himself – “Sie werden sich morden müssen” – calls for the creation of a surrogate world. This is achieved by self-detachment with its possibilities of observing the self, particularly the dreaming self, and splitting oneself into imagined characters.[70] What Kafka presents with great precision is a spectrum of unconscious imaginative activities, all related to the situation which is presented in the frame.

            “Spaziergang”’, the first of the independent parts, is grouped together with the last section of the first part of the frame, and can be seen as a delirious aberration of the mind. The delirium is caused by a combination of drunkenness, tiredness and pain from the fall. In delirium, the mind remains partly conscious of its surroundings: there is the bridge with its statues, later the narrator is walking along a road, then the Laurenziberg with its straggling brushwork is in front of him, there is a moon in the sky, and then the wooded surroundings. But much of the real surroundings are not seen, and much that is seen and experienced is not real: the flying, the circling around the statues, the logic of events. Natural events such as the falling of trees happen upon the command and according to the will of the narrator. The narrator does unlikely things like lying down on the moss (when the ground is snow-covered), climbing a tree etc.[71] Pain, tiredness, the annoying presence of the acquaintance are all just cancelled out. On the other hand, the sudden terrors, usually aroused by unexpected physical sensations, that seem characteristic of deliria are not missing either: “Meine abschüssige Straße schien gerade in diesen erschreckenden Mond zu führen” (BeK 26) (the moon which has suddenly become visible seems terrifying), “als der Weg mir unter den Füßen zu entgleiten drohte” (BeK 27) (possibly a steep descent or just giddy tiredness) “aus dem Innern des Waldes hörte ich das sich nähernde Krachen stürzender Bäume” (BeK 27) (perhaps some noise interpreted as the falling of trees). But in each case, the mind calms itself again; the fears never grow to nightmares.

            As against “Spaziergang”, “Ritt” must be classed with the dreams. It is simplest to speak of it in Freudian categories, and although we have no proof that Kafka had at that time read Freud’s  The Interpretation of Dreams, which was published four of five years before Kafka’s text was written, we can suspect that at least some of the argument of the book  (or of ideas in the air at the time coming to a head in Freud’s work) may have reached him through conversation. If this was not the case, we can regard Kafka’s observations as a peculiar corroboration of Freud’s.

            “Ritt”, the second independent piece, is comparable to Freud’s wish-fulfilment dream with a sexual bias. Whereas in reality the “I” feels inferior to his acquaintance, whom he apostrophizes at the end with “Du Lieber, Lieber [...] Du bist so schön gestellt, von Freundlichen umgeben, am hellen Tage kannst du spazierengehen, wenn viele Menschen, sorgfältig gekleidet zwischen Tischen oder auf Hügelwegen zu sehen sind,“ (BeK 66), the dream promotes the narrator to being the dominant one. He uses his acquaintance, who is completely at his mercy, as a horse, kicking him, boxing him, and choking him, and when his horse finally falls, hurting his knee (as the narrator himself had done earlier) abandons him and has him guarded by vultures.

           

It becomes more or less clear in the framing story that the narrator envies the acquaintance his girlfriend and his erotic experience with her. The motif of riding a horse is in folklore and dreams frequently a reference to sexuality.[72] Both the movement of riding and the fact that “exceptional potency” is an attribute of the mythological horse, relate to sexuality. Kafka must have known many ballads of the type of Bürger’s “Lenore” (in English Keats’ “La Belle Dame sans Merci” comes to mind) which combine the motifs of sexual fascination or desire with riding a horse. In folklore the horse frequently turns out to be a woman. Kafka’s narrator, who can attain the woman only via his acquaintance, rides the acquaintance.

            A negative form of the wish-fulfilment dream is also described by Freud.[73] Here the dreamer faces up to the most awkward and embarrassing situations in oder to forestall such things happening in real life. The first part of “Geschichte des Beters” is a typical dream of this kind. It describes a soirée, probably much like the one the narrator has just left, in which the dreamer behaves awkwardly and ridiculously and is slighted by the company. Just as he is bowing his introduction to a young lady his leg starts falling apart. He sits down and tries to continue his elegant small-talk while unobtrusively pushing his joints back into place. The young lady keeps on repeating “Sie imponieren mir gar nicht” (BeK 47) then starts to insult and ridicule him by drawing his, nevertheless valid, caricature. While he is taken up with a lengthy response to her remarks, she has suddenly walked off to talk to others. The dreamer is apparently quite imperturbable: in spite of the various slights we hear that he is still “zufrieden und erwartungsvoll” (BeK 47), “da kam ich in gute Lust” (BeK 47), “ich trank darauf froh ein Glas Wein” (BeK 49). He then asks to be allowed to play the piano although he knows he can’t. Here the element of wish-fulfilment becomes manifest. „Ich bin nämlich im Begriffe glücklich zu sein. Es handelt sich um einen Triumph“ (BeK 49). When he finally pushes the pianist aside and makes to play, two gentlemen carry him away on his seat. He is given a mock ovation, is then asked to leave buttoned up in somebody else’s overcoat that is far too tight, and dismissed by the hostess with ironic friendliness. Since the “dream” is attributed to the “Beter”, the praying man, the lack of embarrassment may be due also to the narrator-dreamer’s pleasant feeling that all this is not happening to him.

           

To a conscious mind, both the dreams we have discussed couple distortion with cruelty, first sadism, then masochism, a combination which seems to be characteristic of much in literature and the visual arts that we commonly call grotesque. In these dreams, however, the good temper of the dreamer who knows his wishes catered for, bemantels the cruelty, and the shock, which characteristically accompanies the grotesque, misses us. When this type of dream is “turned into literature”, it can be grotesque, but need not, depending on whether such underlying satisfaction is felt or not. If we look at the literature which seems to derive from such expiatory self-punishment dreams we find both. Fairytales such as Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes” or Chamisso’s “Peter Schlemihl”, which clearly have much in common with such dreams, never let the reader forfeit the feeling that basically “all’s well with the world”. This seems to be the nature of fairytale. Meyrink’s versions of such dreams, on the other hand, are grotesque horror stories. As in our real nightmares, there is in them no accompanying pleasure to comfort us.

           

This is of interest here, as Amerika, Kafka’s earliest novel, resembles a reassuring “punishment and embarrassment dream”. The hero passes through the cruel and distorted world quite unharmed, without ever being worried or upset by it, but also without the least ability to improve or alter it. And in the end there seems to be a utopia waiting for him, just as distorted and uninviting as everything else. But borne on by the feeling that all’s well, Karl and the reader accept it. Seen in the light of such dreams, the intention and purpose of the novel Amerika seems to be to give us the feeling that things can and will never be as bad for us as they appear to be.

           

            The piece about the fat man “Der Dicke” is what one would call a symbolic dream. (Brod drew our attention to the fact that the image of the enormously fat man being carried on a wooden stretcher by servants goes back to a Japanese woodcut popular at the time and circulating on postcards.)[74] It is at first sight far less connected with the events of the preceding evening, which lets us suspect an indirect relationship. This is corroborated by the fact that throughout the dream the narrator is the emotionally incolved but helpless spectator. What goes on has direct relevance to him, but its figurative nature prevents his intervention. One can cautiously interpret the symbols along the following lines. The fat man seems to be the thinker or philosopher. He is unwilling to let nature affect his senses and emotions, unwilling even to look at it properly, and resentful of the fact that he cannot for long escape looking at it because it takes revenge. “Die Landschaft stört mich in meinem Denken”, he complains. (In the next section he admits to the “Beter” that he cannot look at nature without cultural associations. He calls the poplar the “Tower of Babel” and a moment later “Noah when he was drunk”.) Bloated by knowledge spun out into endless thought, he has never become substantial because he has never had real contact with life. A gnat can pass through his body without interrupting its flight. He is afraid of anything unempirical or vague, the heavens or the dawn which can never be attained, and instead likes to have a comprehensive overview of the attainable, “Erreichbares in schönem Überblick” (BeK 31) but always from afar. He allows himself to be carried or supported by others, never putting his feet on the ground. When finally, as a concession to nature, he agrees to cross the river (of time? of life?) it is again on the backs of others. ( We are reminded here of the narrator trying to gain support for his personality from his chance acquaintance. “Ich glaubte [...] zu erkennen, daß mein Bekannter in mir etwas vermutete, was zwar nicht in mir war, mich aber bei ihm in Beachtung brachte dadurch, daß er es vermutete [...] Wer weiß, dieser Mensch [...] war vielleicht instande, mir vor den Leuten Wert zu geben, ohne daß ich ihn erst erwerben mußte.“ (BeK 13) Then remembering the girls: „Wenn sie ihn küssen, küssen sie mich ja auch ein wenig, wenn man will; mit dem Mundwinkel gewissermaßen.“ (BeK 13) And the „Beter“, another version of the narrator, explains his eccentric behaviour: „Bedürfnis ist es für mich [...] von diesen Blicken mich für eine kleine Stunde festhämmern zu lassen [...] Die Frommen halten mein Benehmen für natürlich und die übrigen halten es für fromm.“ (BeK 41)) It is a parasitic, make-believe, unreal existence, and once you enter the stream of life others can no longer support you. The bearers go under and drown and the fat man sails along for a little while on the reflection of a cloud, as insubstantial as his own being, till he is drawn over the cliff and dissolves to clods and smoke (“Klumpen und Rauch”) (BeK 59) together with the water: till death destroys him. He goes under, we are told, like the wooden image of a deity that is no longer wanted, „wie ein Götterbild aus hellem Holz, das überflüssig geworden war und das man daher in den Fluß geworfen hatte.“ (BeK 43) It seems that the man who sees himself as a deity, who stands above life, who likes to think in the abstract with his eyes shut, to see the things of nature as cyphers for his own thoughts, has outlived himself. The ideal of an ivory tower existence, of the absolute supremacy of ‘Geist’, on which the cultural achievement of the last century had largely rested, was no longer acceptable.[75] (That Kafka himself was convinced of this is evinced by the fact that as long as his health permitted, he remained an official of the Workers’ Insurance.

            It is clear that the dream characters are all versions of the narrator. After the destruction of the fat man, the dreamer turns to a more direct metaphoric interpretation of himself, now suggested once more by the physical state of his body. His head feels as tiny as an ant’s egg and his eyes are so small their expression if no longer visible. Tiredness and inability to think become symbolic of “Geist” being almost a non-entity. His hands like rainclouds vague and large and his legs which no longer stand on the earth, casting a shadow over the forests and villages, are suggestive of an unreal and insubstantial approach to life. They derive from tired limbs almost floating on air. The megalomania of this cosmic image is straightway checked by another. The dreamer is now small, but he is rolling, he has lost control of himself and become like the stone at the centre of an avalanche, picking up everything in its way to hurl it to destruction, - he himself but the passive instrument of devastation.

            Interpreted symbolically, this is a dream full of self-recognition and insight; the self-condemnation is quite honest and unequivocal. This is the level of the unconscious in which Silberer and Jung took such interest because they saw its relation to recurrent myth. Even leaving myth out of account, the general significance of these images is clear. They all have their place in the German language: „Über die Welt erhaben sein“, „hoch über den Dingen thronen“, „sich von etwas tragen lassen“, „getragener Stil“, „alles ist im Flusse“, „der Lebensstrom“, „im Leben untergehen“, „hinabgezogen werden“, „in der Versenkung verschwinden“. This shows that they are images of a “collective consciousness” so to speak, and can be intuitively understood.[76]

            In contrast with these typical night dreams, “Gespräch mit dem Beter” is characteristic of the daydream.[77] There is far greater logical and causal coherence, less density, and the unabashed wish-fulfilment of actual dreams is replaced by a desire to glamorize and palliate failings and inadequacies.

            A common motive for day-dreaming is the desire to develop ideas by expressing them to, and testing them on an imaginary partner.  Usually the ideas are made more vivid and attractive by being presented in live situations. Although the day-dreamer himself often does not actively participate in the day-dream, the characters he invents are as a rule not more than mouth-pieces for his own ideas and the usually not too serious doubts he has concerning them. They seem to understand each other automatically, give way to each other all too readily. There are rarely more than two partners. At its best the day-dream can promote the birth of thought, as its worst it is an avoidance of real criticism, of perhaps unresolvable conflicts, of having to adjust to somebody else and tolerate him. The day-dream can seem to offer the sort of companionship and human contact that Blumfeld, the elderly bachelor of one Kafka’s stories, was looking for. Blumfeld was beginning to find „daß dises vollständig einsame Leben recht lästig sei [...] Irgendein Begleiter, irgendein Zuschauer [...] wäre Blumfeld sehr willkommen gewesen.” (BeK 141) The day-dream is ideal for the shy and withdrawn person who wants an easy way out. In this sense, this day-dream is (along with “Gespräch mit dem Betrunkenen”) probably the only one of the inset pieces that justifies the title “Belustigungen” and it is plausibly motivated by the narrator’s desire to escape his companion: ‘Warum gehst du mit diesem Menschen? Du liebst ihn nicht und du hassest ihn auch nicht, [...] Also geh mit ihm zwar weiter auf den Laurenziberg, denn du bist schon auf dem Wege in schöner Nacht, aber laß ihn reden und vergnüge dich auf deine Weise, dadurch – sage es leise – schützt du dich auch am besten.” (BeK 23)

            In this day-dream the narrator, ostensibly the fat man, has taken over from the original narrator the rather vague desire for a more or less unattainable girl whom he admires from a distance as she prays in a corner of the church. The rather foolish jealousy of the original narrator is certainly glamorised and romanticised. The fall on the church steps,  now converted to prostration inside the church (and endowed with the glamour of eccentricity) along with the strong desire for recognition and acclaim the original narrator has, have combined to create the imaginary partner of the conversation, the “Beter” (praying man). The dreamer lingers for a while over these two successful inventions, putting difficulties in the way of the desired conversation. When the two actually meet, there is again some procrastination before the self-diagnosis of the „Beter“ is expressed: „Nicht Spaß, Bedürfnis ist es für mich [...] von diesen Blicken mich für eine kleine Stunde festhämmern zu lassen, während die ganze Stadt um mich herum – „ (BeK 41) And the other interrupts: „Ist euch nicht so, daß ihr vor lauter Hitze mit den wahrhaftigen Namen der Dinge Euch nicht begnügen könnt [...] Die Pappel in den Feldern, die ihr den ‚Turm on Babel’ genannt habt, denn ihr wolltet nicht wissen, daß es eine Pappel war, schaukelt wieder namenlos und ihr müßt sie nennen: ‚Noah, wie er betrunken war’.“ (BeK 42) Again we notice that while the confession of the “Beter” is comparatively open, that of the fat-man-narrator is evasive because he attributes the inadequacy to the “Beter”, rather than to himself. He by-passes the more relevant complex of human relations and instead gives a rather far-fetched example of  the same sort of thing, drawing on the imagery of the fat-man dream. The instance of unproblematic neighbourly relations and taking one’s life for granted (“Ich jause so im Grünen”) (BeK 43) earlier given by the “Beter”, which would probably baffle most people, is again so readily understood by the fat man as only one’s own memories normally are. The conversation then makes the best of the unique opportunity the day-dream offers to talk of one’s queer but personally significant imaginings and impressions to someone without making a fool of oneself: “Oft fallen Menschen auf der Gasse und bleiben tot liegen. Da öffnen alle Geschäftsleute ihre mit Waren verhangenen Türen etc. [...] ‚Ich bin Geheimpolizist’,” etc. (BeK 44), possibly adaptations of other day-dreams that suggest an inner world as sealed as that of “Der Bau”.

            Similarly strange are the hallucinatory impressions that are described: “Heute bläst einmal ein Südwestwind. Die Spitze des Rathausturmes macht kleine Kreise. Alle Fensterscheiben lärmen und die Laternenpfähle biegen sich wie Bambus. Der Mantel der heiligen Maria auf der Säule windet sich und die Luft reißt an ihm. Sieht es denn niemand?” (BeK 45) Such attention-seeking claims to exceptional experiences distract from human and moral issues, weaving a colourful arabesque about them. At the end, the “Beter”, after having helped the fat-man narrator to serve the dreamer’s purpose, takes back his confession so that no harm to his image is done.

            In “Gespräch mit dem Betrunkenen” finally, Kafka investigates the conscious and controlled level of the mind in its imaginative possibilities. The piece is published under that title in Erzählungen but in Brod’s edition of “Beschreibung eines Kampfes” it is merged with “Geschichte des Beters” where its separate character is far less obvious. On the conscious level here examined, the mind has the greatest flexibility and diversity of styles. The piece begins with a meditation suggested by a feeling of unreality and insubstantiality. “Was ist es doch, daß ihr tut als wenn ihr wirklich wäret. Wollt ihr mich glauben machen, daß ich unwirklich bin, komisch auf dem grünen Pflaster stehend.“ (BeK 51) Then comes an address to the moon which, on close examination, reveals itself to be a controlled though somewhat crazy train of thought:

           

Gott sei Dank, Mond, du bist nicht mehr Mond, aber vielleicht ist es nachläßig von mir, daß ich dich Mond benannten noch immer Mond nenne. Warum bist du nicht mehr so übermütig, wenn ich dich nenne „vergessene Papierlaterne in merkwürdiger Farbe“. Und warum ziehst du dich fast zurück, wenn ich dich „Mariensäule“ nenne, und ich erkenne deine drohende Haltung nicht mehr, Mariensäule, wenn ich dich nenne „Mond, der gelbes Licht wirft“. (BeK 52)

            The argument follows these lines: reality is inaccessible so we should stop pretending that the moon is the moon simply because it is called “moon”. Why not compare it to something that at least looks like it and describe it as a strangely coloured forgotten paper lantern? Or should we name it for something for which it is a traditional symbol, like the Virgin Mary, the moon to Christ’s sun, often depicted with the moon as her pedestal? But neither of these strategies enhance the reality of the moon. A merely functional, scientific description “moon that reflects yellow light”, however, does not make the moon any more real. What sort of language can we use to make the moon seem real?      

            Since thinking about the moon brings us no closer to its reality (“es scheint mir wirklich, daß es euch nicht gut tut, wenn man über euch nachdenkt”) (BeK 52) one might as well openly accept the unreal world of the drunkard: „Gott, wie zuträglich muß es sein, wenn Nachdenkender vom Betrunkenen lernt!“ (BeK 52) The first step in that direction is the pretence of taking a conceit as reality. “Und die Häuschen, die oft wie auf kleinen Rädern über den Platz rollen, sind ganz festgestampft – [...] man sieht gar nicht den dünnen schwarzen Strich, der sie sonst vom Boden trennt.“ (BeK 52) The world of the drunkard seems as real as any other.

            Then, when the narrator actually meets the drunkard, pretence becomes the law of conversation. He addresses the drunkard as “zarter Edelmann” (BeK 53) and does not release him from this disguise again, though nothing in the manners, dress or speech of the man supports this fantasy.

The address to the drunkard that follows could conceivably have been ironic or satirical. But Kafka’s far too elaborate images do not support a satirical intention and the whole tirade strikes the reader as slightly insane rather than funny because it has no relationship to reality. In the latter half of the address („Nicht wahr, diese Straßen von Paris sind plötzlich verzweigt; sie sind unruhig, nicht wahr?  Es ist nicht immer alles in Ordnung [...]”) (BeK 54) real concern, even anxiety seem to find expression. Once you surrender reality, almost anything could happen. The characteristic failing of the narrator – his inability to achieve contact with other people, to share a reality with them – is again a factor. Wit and irony can be effective only when they refer closely to mutually accepted realities. Where these no longer exist, absurdity is the best that can be achieved.

If we read the address to the drunkard as a writer’s exploration of what possibilities remain to him if reality is forfeited, there is a last option suggested in this piece. It is the observation and description of atmosphere, impression and mood, of a subjective and personal experience of the world : “Es war vielleicht diese kleine, ganz ruhige Pause zwischen Tag und Nacht [...] “ (BeK 55) Many of the “Betrachtung” pieces, composed more or less simultaneously with “Beschreibung eines Kampfes”, are written in this Impressionist vein.

Summing up, Kafka has here presented the imaginative range and moral truth of about six different levels of consciousness: the fully conscious (“Gespräch mit dem Betrunkenen”), the day-dreaming three-quarter conscious (“Gespräch mit dem Beter”), the delirious semi-conscious (“Spaziergang”), the dream elaborating on a situation just experienced (“Geschichte des Beters”, the primarily somatic and erotic dream (“Ritt”), and the symbolic dream of self analysis (“Der Dicke”) which is, if we are to pre-empt later developments in psychoanalysis, a dream of Jung’s unconscious rather than Freud’s subconscious.  In the presentation Kafka gives, and this seems to be fairly accurately observed, the symbolic unconscious on the one hand and the fully conscious mind on the other, are the least random in their explorations and offer the greatest chances of penetration, the greatest range, and the greatest generality. The conscious level seems suitable primarily for those who have an open mind for the world around them and not for those who tend to withdraw into a world of their own. The logical consequences which Kafka (whom we may class with the introverted without identifying him with his narrator) drew for himself as a writer, was that the unconscious symbolic level carried for minds such as his the greatest promise. Though the realization may not have been in the nature of a clear-cut decision, it would almost certainly have occurred to him in the course of this early search for a genre and a style.

           

Finally, we should perhaps try to assess this early work as a literary artefact. In content it is, as we have seen, an intricate philosophical examination of the nature of reality and the implications the widespread loss of a sense of the real has for a twentieth century communicator such as a writer. The labyrinthine structure of the text reflects this futile search and though this is artistically appropriate, it is tiring and confusing for a reader. With regard to genre, the rhythmic, repetitive, cyclical nature of the form of the text is musical and therefore lyrical, but its length of sixty pages and its apparent narrative orientation combine to confuse a reader’s expectations. Perhaps Kafka hoped that by introducing his text with a stanza of verse would help readers onto the right track.

           

            Und die Menschen gehn in Kleidern

            Schwankend auf dem Kies spazieren

            Unter diesem großen Himmel,

            Der von Hügeln in der Ferne

            Sich zu fernen Hügeln breitet.   

We have here a verse in the Impressionist vein of  poets such as Hofmannsthal and up to a point the period style of Impressionism best characterizes “Beschreibung eines Kampfes”. But the light-heartedness of the verse is severely at odds with the disturbing visions Kafka’s text conveys which are far more in the vein of Expressionism; it is the differences of sentiment between this poem and Kafka’s “story” about the struggle to stay alive in a treacherous and winterly world that are above all apparent to any reader.

Though Kafka’s text masquerades as a story, its only real outcome is that the narrator’s companion is sufficiently disturbed by the experience of this excursion onto which the narrator has lured him to end up stabbing himself in the arm. He does this at the narrator’s suggestion that he must murder himself and though the narrator then flies into a panic and does all he can to stem the flow of blood, he knows that he is responsible. While no really serious harm has been done, the injury will restrict the victim’s ability to act for a while. In line with this recognition, he decides to give up his girlfriend (as Kafka twice gave up his fiancé Felice Bauer) though she had made him so happy earlier that night that even the hostess had remarked on it when he said goodbye on leaving the soirée. It is worrying to think that apparently normal and happy people walk around with a knife in their pocket and may well use it to injure themselves if they should happen to encounter people like the narrator. Kafka was obviously aware that his pessimistic view of life could easily become a danger for other people. Perhaps it is as just well that it is unlikely many of his less serious readers would have persevered with this text.

Betrachtung

            At the time Kafka was writing “Beschreibung eines Kampfes”, he was also occupied with his other early work Betrachtung, a collection of eighteen short prose pieces, some only a few lines of print, that were published in book form by Ernst Rowohlt in 1913. A smaller collection of eight pieces had appeared in Hyperion in January 1908 [78] and five pieces in Bohemia  in March 1910. All were written in the years between 1904 and 1912.

           

At first sight only a common atmosphere of loneliness, intensified by the feeling that the things described are all seen through the same eyes seem to combine these pieces. [79] Though there is no need to presume that each speaks of the same person, the uniformity of vision is clear. The little “observations” collected here are the residue of a search which occupied Kafka for many years. It is the search for the “patches of density” in reality, for the occasions, moments and places when little things seem to become temporarily heavy with meaning. Most importantly, it is the search for the conditions that lead to such brief revelations, the external and the psychological, as offering the key to an evaluation of the reality or truth such heightened moments can have. One might regard Betrachtung as an investigation of the nature, scope and value of Impressionist writing as practiced for example by one of Kafka’s favourite writers Robert Walser.[80]

            “Kinder auf der Landstraße” (1908) draws on the intensity of childhood experience. In the first paragraph it is a combination of impressions that enables the writer to call to life a scene with only a few phrases: the passing of cars, the loopholes in the greenery, the cracking of hot wood, the laughter of the workers – a laughter the child reacts to with mingled delight and consternation “dass es eine Schande war”. Still greater intensity is achieved when the child begins to project its own physical sensations onto the landscape. Birds rise up as in a single breath, it seems not they are rising but he is falling; as the air becomes cooler, shivering stars appear. There is no apparent coherence in the enumerated details but as is characteristic of Impressionism, the need of the eye or the imagination to create links takes the flatness out of the picture and gives it the dimension of life. A little later, the exaggerated and irresponsible use to which children put words creates an intense response, conjuring up a premonition of adult despair. „Ist wirklich alles verloren?” “Keine Gnaden!” – is all really lost? no respite, no grace! Then the life of make-believe begins, closely linked with sensations, above all of tiredness. It gains the upper hand when fairytale is taken literally, and the child sets off alone through the night to find the legendary village in the south where people need no sleep because they are fools. With this, the threads that run between man and nature are abruptly severed. The somatic origins of such experiences reveal themselves and legend is traced to jocular adult irony. An impression of beauty, but quite divorced from any abiding sense of security or truth, remains.

           

“Entlarvung eines Bauernfängers” (1904/6) shows us how a tiny gesture, here the nuance of a smile, can for indefinable reasons suddenly clarify a confused situation. Here the smile is the “moment of density”, the spark to light up events. But the smile has no intrinsic meaning; different people will be awakened by different things.

            In “Der plötzliche Spaziergang” (1912) the sudden, at this hour unexpected and not very sensible decision of the narrating self to go for a walk – a commonplace thing, of no significance of itself – seems to give it self-definition, permanence and truth: “Während man selbst, ganz fest, schwarz vor Umrissenheit, […] sich zu seiner wahren Gestalt erhebt.” (E32f) The self-assertive effect of willed action is intensified, we are told, if it is followed by a meeting with a friend. Here we have apparently found a more permanent form of intense living, but the undertone of irony that intrudes when physical details (hinter die Schenkel sich schlagend) come too close to elevated feelings, is disturbing. We can not take this momentary and wilful manifestation of determination seriously. Tomorrow the self will feel as vague as before.

The next piece “Entschlüsse” (1912) confirms our suspicions. The will makes fine resolutions but the unavoidable little mistakes build up a negative intensity that spoils all. “Aber selbst wenn es so geht, wird mit jedem Fehler, der nicht ausbleiben kann, das Ganze, das Leichte and das Schwere, stocken, und ich werde mich im Kreise zurückdrehen müssen.“ In resignation one falls back into a state that approximates to non-existence. Attention is drawn to the telling gesture that characterizes this state: „das Hinfahren des kleinen Fingers über die Augenbrauen“. (E33)

           

“Der Ausflug ins Gebirge” (1904) describes the suggestive intensity of ordinary language. A simple phrase “no one will help me” awakens in the imagination a personification of no one; phantom figures emerge and the self finds itself with them in a phantom world that is, however, sterile: song is not possible. The life conjured up by language ends up being imaginary and unreal.

            “Das Unglück des Junggesellen” (1911) shows how the mind creates a concept. The typical traits of many bachelors are amalgamated and under the domination of the resultant idea of bachelorhood, the self is in danger of losing himself. The little piece ends with the outcry: „nur dass man auch in Wirklichkeit heute und später dastehen wird, mit einem Körper und einem wirklichen Kopf, also auch einer Stirn, um mit der Hand an sie zu schlagen.“ (E35) The typical destroys what is individual; it is a fallacy to think that escape into the anonymity of a concept can give you support. Perhaps the fleeting and idiosyncratic sensations of Impressionism are preferable after all.

            “Der Kaufmann” (1907/8) again has a psychological preoccupation. The nervousness and excitement induced by the worries of business life evoke for moments imaginary states akin to hallucinations. These are intensified when supported by the physical sensation of weightlessness that the elevator arouses and the vision of the self splitting when confronted by its mirror image. There is no logic or aim in the overwrought images that arise on these flights of fancy, only magical beauty that comes with a burst of emotion. The moment the lift stops, all is back to normal.

            In “Zerstreutes Hinausschauen” (1908/10) the random repetetiveness of language takes over. Die Frühlingstage „die jetzt rasch kommen“; geht man zum Fenster „so ist man überrascht“; der Schatten des Mannes „der hinter ihm rascher kommt“. The rush and speed, the intensity of spring, but also its transitoriness seem embodied in the word. Caught up in its magic, we see the morning’s grey sky clearing for the setting sun, the light of the setting sun on the face of the childlike girl who walks ahead but looks back, walks away from the man and yet calls him back with her glances, and the shadow of the man crossing her like a fleeting sorrow or sin as he overtakes her; then he has passed and the face of the child is bright once more. For moments, superficial external reality will seem to foreshadow or echo an internal hope or vision. But it is a mere coincidence. The moment passes as quickly as it has come.

            “Der Nachhauseweg” (1910/12) describes how the weather can mould a person’s mood. The atmosphere after a thunderstorm has powers of persuasion. „Meine Verdienste erscheinen mir und überwältigen mich, wenn ich mich auch nicht sträube.“ (E 38) The self is inflated to the extent that it feels itself to be master and creator of the world. But the moment the narrator enters his house, the mood goes and cannot be revived: another transitory and therefore misleading form of intense experience.

            “Die Vorüberlaufenden” (1908/10) presents the self as encountering two running men, one apparently chasing the other. It is mesmerized by observation and rejects the hackneyed presumption of pursuit, which would have been the only thing that could have led to quick and effective action. Why must it always be a case of pursuit? the evasive self asks and misses the moment for purposeful intervention. The moral that might be abstracted is that the observing, impressionist mind, always in search of experiences to be savoured, misses their significance when there is a real life emergency.   

            In “Der Fahrgast” (1908/10) the narrator has completely lost his self-confidence. Aware of this and worried by it, he suddenly encounters all he himself seems to lack in an unknown young woman who happens to be travelling on the tram with him. The details of her appearance, important to him because they seem to corroborate his impression of the perfect organic whole she represents, appear to us irrelevant and meaningless. By some strange alchemy she has become a screen for his own desires.

            “Kleider” (1904/5). As party dresses that are never changed gradually lose their beauty, so faces always desiring to be seen at their most beautiful gradually become shabby. Beauty as a visual impression subject to the ravages of time is fleeting.

            “Die Abweisung” (1906) gives a catalogue of ideal images, images originally created by poets, welling up as a young man and girl meet and pass. These block out reality. For better or worse, the two people miss each other. So this is what the poet achieves by recording beauty.

            The next piece “Zum Nachdenken für Herrenreiter” (about 1909) speaks of the emblematic recognition of accomplishments. The distinction of being the winner of the race and officially proclaimed as such invites all kinds of embarrassing misunderstandings. Signs and tokens tend to be out of sync with real life. The celebrated moment is past long before they can be awarded.

            “Das Gassenfenster” (1904/7). The framing window upon the world is another device to collect what is momentary and shifting into some sort of picture. A window can awaken event the dullest mind to momentary enthusiasm. “Und steht es mit ihm so, dass er gar nichts sucht und nur als müder Mann, die Augen auf und ab zwischen Publikum und Himmel, an seine Fensterbrüstung tritt, und er will nicht und hat ein wenig den Kopf zurückgeneigt, so reißen ihn doch unten die Pferde mit in ihr Gefolge von Wagen und Lärm und damit endlich der menschlichen Eintracht zu“. (E47f) But the horses and carriages move on and their observation is likely to leave little of substance.

            In “Wunsch Indianer zu warden” (1910/12) the desire for freedom gives rise to an ecstatic vision of freedom in the stereotypical image of the Indian racing across his prairies. But desire strong enough to give rise to such a vision is again a momentary experience, nothing more than a transitory respite from the burdens of daily life.

“Die Bäume “ (1904/5) tells us: However carefully we conduct our observations, nothing is ever like it seems.. Trees in the snow look as though they were resting there, smooth surface on smooth surface, and could simply be pushed aside. In reality, of course, they are firmly rooted in the ground. But that too is an illusion. Humans are like these trees. There is no guarantee that what we think we know about ourselves is true because our observations are utterly unreliable. Consequently a literature based on observations, like Impressionism, is unlikely to give us real insights.

            “Unglücklichsein” (1910) is the last of these prose pieces. It describes the appearance of a ghost, - a real ghost! The self, who neither believes in ghosts nor has any interest in this particular half-grown male ghost, does not know what to think of it or do with it and the conversation they have is inane. All the same, the self is possessive about its ghost; it is an oddity it has discovered and which it feels owns and does not want to surrender. In our modern age, the supernatural has lost its power. Ghosts, traditionally reputed to be an invariable source of fear and horror, no longer arouse the slightest emotional reaction. It is perhaps the loss of the supernatural that has driven modern people to search out and value the small sensations Impressionism specializes in; but they cannot make people happy. “Unglücklichsein” seems a permanent state.

            Betrachtung is an exploration and ultimately demasking of Impressionism, one of the styles on offer in that era of loss of faith and purpose. It shows that our experiences, however vivid  and captivating, have no relation to any higher or general truth. Their significance is merely personal and momentary and a literature that makes much of them has given up the search for real meaning in life. So Betrachtung becomes indirectly an argument for consistent and probing subjectivism, though Kafka as yet cannot envisage it. It is perhaps significant for an understanding of the relationship between Max Brod and Kafka that Brod, to whom the collection is dedicated, seems to have seen the beauty rather than the spuriousness of its celebration of transitoriness.[81]

Amerika

            While Kafka’s first work, “Beschreibung eines Kampfes” , described the breakdown of meaning within the mind and personality of the individual, his other long early work, the novel Amerika , shows the breakdown of meaning in the social sphere. At the same time it is Kafka’s exploration of realism in the Dickensian vein. However, he completely undermines the basic principles of that style by refusing to give his characters, in particular his hero Karl Rossmann, a psychological dimension.

In Kafka’s fictitious modern continent, Amerika, (the English translators have emphasized the fact that this is a parabolic Amerika by retaining the k-spelling) the basic ideals on which democratic society is founded, freedom and justice, have lost all reality. The assumption of the validity of probability and causality, as laws to be relied upon, is likewise proved wrong and as a cause or effect of this, perhaps both, what are normally the guidelines of human behaviour, namely moral principles and practical efficiency, no longer serve a purpose.

           

As young Karl Rossmann, exiled to Amerika by his parents because he was seduced by a servant girl who had a child by him, sails into the harbour of New York, he sees the Statue of Liberty in a sudden beam of sunlight: “Ihr Arm mit dem Schwert ragte wie neuerdings empor, und um ihre Gestalt wehten die freien Lüfte.” (A9) Is it only Karl who mistakes the torch for a sword or is this the newest version of freedom, a freedom as chaotic and destructive as the freedom of the free winds and skies or, a little later, the freedom of the waters and those borne by the waters: “Eine Bewegung ohne Ende, eine Unruhe, übertragen von dem unruhigen Element auf die hilflosen Menschen und ihre Werke!” (A25) The idea of freedom as destructive chaos seems to be borne out by Kafka’s novel.

           

The ship’s Stoker, Karl’s first acquaintance, has grievances which he carries to the Captain. He is given the democratic right to speak and be heard. On a closer look, this right is not accorded impartially but primarily to impress the Senator. It is then wasted by the Stoker, who is not intelligent and clear-minded enough to put it to good use, instead quite innocently abusing the privilege and wasting valuable time. The man whom the Stoker accuses, Schubal, takes advantage of the democratic right to defend himself with the aid of witnesses: „ich bin bereit, jede Beschuldigung an der Hand meiner Schriften, nötigenfalls durch Aussagen unvoreingenommener und unbeeinflusster Zeugen, die vor der Tür stehen, zu widerlegen.“ (A31) As is obvious to the reader and expressed by the author’s observer, Karl, these witnesses cannot possibly be unbiased and almost every sentence of Schubal’s speech reveals his guilt. But in the judges the desire to be free of the stoker outweighs rationality and the sense of justice. We are not exposed to having to listen to Schubal’s witnesses, but it is clear that the outcome of all the commotion will be the suppression of the Stoker and toleration of Schubal as the lesser of two evils. All that freedom of speech has led to is waste of time and re-establishment of the former state of affairs, namely, freedom of the privileged.

            Rescued from the chaos of the masses by his wealthy uncle, Senator Jakob, Karl enjoys the leisure of the rich and is free to prepare himself for his life in Amerika. According to the Uncle’s decree, this preparation involves learning English and riding. But when a friend of his Uncle extends an invitation to visit him in his home, in other words to get to know the Amerikan way of life a bit better and practise his English as well, it becomes clear that with the Uncle conscientiousness has become self-defeating rigour. A single evening is more than the Uncle is willing to allow Karl in the way of time off.

„Ich kann sein Studium nicht so in Unordnung kommen lassen. Später, wenn er in einem an und für sich geregelten Berufsleben sein wird, werde ich ihm sehr gern auch die längere Zeit erlauben, einer so freundlichen und ehrenden Einladung zu folgen.“

„Was das für Widersprüche sind!“ dachte Karl.

              

Leisure, or in other words time in which one is free to do as one wishes, becomes meaningless without a sense of proportion. People either regiment themselves and others or they dissipate their freedom as do Delamarche, Robinson and Brunelda.

           

Apparent freedom of choice becomes the dictator’s mask and far more dangerous than an outright command when the Uncle allows Karl to choose whether he will go with Mr. Pollunder. A little later, when Delamarche describes the Uncle’s business methods, it becomes more than clear that success in a democratic capitalist society is based on ruthlessness, tyranny and complete selfishness; the character of the successful man is so warped by his struggle that he is no longer capable of human emotions, even where he wants to show them, for we can be sure that the Uncle would not have undertaken the almost hopeless task of looking for Karl, if he had not genuinely wanted a “son”.

           

In the hands of dehumanized men, any kind of freedom become illusory. But the reverse is true too: even the most precise command can be given a kindly or malicious interpretation, as Green’s handling of the Uncle’s letter shows. In fact, where human beings are involved, there is little difference between apparent freedom and apparent obedience to commands. Can we draw the conclusion that capitalist democracy and dictatorship, both based on dehumanized society, have more in common than distinguishes them?[82]

           

If one wanted to criticize Kafka’s novel, it would be along the lines that the causes and psychological processes of dehumanization are hardly shown, merely the effects in terms of the situations in which the principles we have been led to rely on are proved inadequate. None of the characters described, except perhaps Karl who remains the “human” outsider, the author’s representative, the lode-star of our judgment and the unharmed, ever innocent victim of Amerika for the whole of the novel, are more than indications of types.[83] We hear nothing of why they became as they are; on no occasion is the hood of the chauffeured vehicle of society, in which they are rushed from station to station, raised to show us the workings of the social machinery. Much as the novel itself is but a row of episodes, our interpretation too can do little more than give a list of observed facts. We might agree with Kafka when he says after writing „Das Urteil“ that he now realized, „dass ich mich mit meinem Romanschreiben in schändlichen Niederungen des Schreibens befinde“. (T294) Kafka’s psychology is so rudimentary, that it will scarcely allow us to go further than to say that the Uncle’s freedom is jeopardized by his concept of “Treue”, i.e.  consistency and faithfulness, Klara’s presumably by passion, though we have no proof of this as her knowledge of ju-jitsu gives her the upper hand in the situation described, and Pollunder’s presumably by greed. His exaggeratedly high standard of living is self-defeating, for in his enormous house the essentials – light, furniture, comfort – are missing. On the whole, we must be content to continue listing observed instances of the breakdown of the social foundation.

           

Freedom becomes almost unbearable chaos in the dormitory of the lift-boys, which seems to be governed by no rules whatever. All human rights: privacy, the right to sleep in peace, the right to ownership of personal things, and the right to concentrate on a task, in Karl’s case to study, are annulled. Similarly, the right to vote, being freedom to take an active part in determining the fate of the nation, becomes a mere farce as a result of political campaigning with all its stunts. The tiny candidate on the shoulders of his supporters, uncontrollably swayed by the masses, caught occasionally in a beam of light which would, incidentally, more than blind him and that is then almost immediately extinguished by the violence of those supporting a rival candidate, has symbolic significance. To clinch our realization of the absurdity of the electoral machinery, the student informs us that this candidate, though he has not the least chance of success, is particularly capable.

           

Simultaneously with the breakdown of freedom comes the breakdown of justice. We have observed it in the case of the Stoker and the political candidate. Our sense of justice is again injured when both the Uncle and Green completely disregard Karl’s best intentions of pleasing the Uncle, even where it involves embarrassment to Karl himself, and pass the harshest of verdicts on him. But nowhere does Kafka make us so painfully aware of injustice as in the hotel-scene immediately before Karl’s dismissal. Robinson, Karl’s chance companion for a night at an inn and a day on the road, suddenly turns up at the hotel, badly intoxicated and ready to cause Karl and the management of the hotel a maximum of embarrassment. Karl acts as efficiently as he can without being inhumane and leaves his lift to the care of another boy for about five minutes while he takes Robinson to his own bed in the lift-boys’ dormitory. On returning, he finds that his absence has been discovered. He is called to account before a panel of judges constituted of the malicious Head Doorman, the comparatively sober but suspicious Head Waiter, and the well disposed Manageress, who seems to have the decisive word. Here we experience the breakdown of any logic based on causality. What the reader knows to be true, namely that Robinson is an acquaintance who came to the hotel without Karl’s consent, that Karl would have given him only the night’s tips, and that Karl had spent all his spare time studying in the dormitory, is creditably disproven in favour of a story which attributes to Karl a wild night-life with money not rightfully his and dissipated friends. The goodness of a forgiving nature on the part of the Manageress, and uninhibited and unchecked sadism on the part of the Head Doorman hold sway. If the world is a mixture of the kind and unkind, justice certainly has little part in it. Somewhat later, we are still more outraged when Karl, who had from a sense of decency accompanied the mock invalid, Robinson, home and paid for the taxi, is made responsible for excess fees which the taxi driver demands. When he cannot pay them, and has no identification papers, having lost them in the tussle with the Head Doorman, he is to be arrested and taken back to the hotel for further questioning. And again the policeman is doing nothing but his duty as decently and honestly as he can. But in a society where mechanical logic is given greater credence than the word of the individual, injustice is the necessary consequence.

           

Not only the value of the concept of causality is questioned in Kafka’s novel; the law of probability, another of the axioms of sociology, becomes suspect when again and again, in the best tradition of the picaresque novel, the improbable happens. For it is improbable that the Uncle should run into Karl on the ship and recognize him with nothing but the Cook’s bad description to go by; and it is also surprising that among the hundreds of people in the hotel dining-room, Karl should be singled out by the Manageress for special favours. There are obviously such things as good luck. bad luck and personal magnetism or “Sympathie” that play havoc with the apparently so stable law of probability.

           

While the human in man can never be extinguished sufficiently to make him an efficient machine, it can be warped to such an extent as to make him a bad human being. Morality is mechanized and becomes “principle”. Karl’s parents punish their son by sending him to Amerika because he has offended against the principle of purity; that he is innocent in the best sense of the word plays no part in the decision.[84] While in the old world the inescapable social taboos make principles on the part of the individual necessary, the new world knows no social taboos and principles become quite arbitrary. An example is the Uncle’s notion of “Treue” with its disproportionately dire consequences for Karl.

           

That a dehumanized conception of efficiency is self-defeating is demonstrated by the utter confusion prevailing in the enormous dining-room of the Hotel Occidental. In spite of a self-service buffet and waiters hurrying to and fro, it is quite impossible to secure service; the food laid out is spoilt by the bad air and smoke in the hall; the behaviour of the guests, and there is democratic lack of discrimination in the choice of the guests, can no longer be controlled by the staff: “An manchen Stellen räumten Gäste selbstherrlich das Büfett ab und setzten sich aufs Pult […]” (A134)

           

The architecture arising from a utilitarian conception of the world is labyrinthine, random and ghost-like as for example the maze of ship’s corridors and the channel-like streets of New York: “Alles in beiden Riesenstädten [New York and Brooklyn] schien leer und nutzlos aufgestellt” (A125) and “In den wahllos hingestellten einzelnen Mietskasernen zitterten die vielen Fenster in der mannigfaltigsten Bewegung und Beleuchtung […]” (A124).

           

In the prevailing dissolution, Karl is the only one who completely preserves his integrity and with it his sense of the human and his sense of situation. Even the Manageress and Therese are not infallible here, and if we observe things carefully, it is the moment in which the erotic enters that veils the clarity of their vision and intentions. Therese, obviously in love with Karl, is prepared to condone any crime; the Manageress, seduced by the tactful caresses of the Head Waiter, is inclined to overestimate his perspicacity and underestimate Karl’s veracity. Karl alone, paradoxically deported for a sexual offence, at no stage falls victim to the demon of sex. The servant girl, Klara, Therese, and last but not least Brunelda, who epitomizes sexual dissolution, can none of them provoke him to even an impure thought. Karl is, of course, still a boy and the end of the novel shows him in happy friendship with another boy of his age. But what happens when maturity is reached? Here the novel knows no answer and the problem accompanies Kafka through all his writing.

           

The devastating description of “Amerika” ends with a utopian chapter on the Naturetheatre. It is in its way as symbolist as the rest of the novel and to interpret it fully one must take the images beyond their emotional range.[85] We shall attempt this, not so much to rehabilitate the novel, but to ascertain in what direction Kafka saw hope for mankind.

           

The name “Naturtheater” immediately suggests the Baroque topos “Welttheater”: “all the world’s a stage”. The otherworldliness of religion and the insubstantiality of art were here fused to a philosophy which regarded life as a game, a disguise, a pretence in view of the reality to be found in a life beyond. As against this, Kafka’s combination of nature and art, where nature so to speak replaces religion, is clearly of this world.[86] From Kafka’s diaries and other writings we gather that nature, certainly at this period of his life, meant for him the natural way of life (naturopathy, fresh air, physical fitness, gardening, nudism etc. in line with the “Lebensreform” of the contemporary Youth Movement) and not Pantheism. In other words, Kafka’s fusion of nature and art should probably not be seen in any but loose connection with the philosophies of Goethe or the Romantics.

           

The stage for Kafka’s Naturetheatre at this point is the sports-ground. Everything takes place in the open air or under slight shelter. The home of the Naturetheatre is Oklahoma, the wild west state of cowboys and Indians. We can expect an intensification of the natural once the theatre group nears home, probably of the kind suggested by the view from the train window:[87]

Am ersten Tag fuhren sie durch ein hohes Gebirge. Bläulich-schwarze Steinmassen gingen in spitzen Keilen bis an den Zug heran, man beugte sich aus dem Fenster und suchte vergebens ihre Gipfel, dunkle, schmale, zerissene Täler öffneten sich, man beschrieb mit dem Finger die Richtung, in der sie sich verloren, breite Bergströme kamen, als große Wellen auf dem hügligen Untergrund eilend und in sich tausend kleine Schaumwellen treibend, sie stürzten sich unter die Brücken, über die der Zug fuhr, und sie waren so nah, dass der Hauch ihrer Kühle das Gesicht erschauern machte. (A331)

In Oklahoma we can obviously expect the full concentration of natural beauty, grandeur and force.

           

Just as the “nature” of the city sportsground, where city people train their bodies, is infinitely inferior to the “nature” of the mountains, so we can expect the acting of the recruiting team to be inferior to the real theatre in Oklahoma. Karl sees only one photograph of the theatre and it shows the box of the President of the United States: “Nach diesem Bild zu schließen, mussten aber alle sehr sehenswert sein.” (A327)

           

As the sports oval is for the city dweller the first step towards a natural life, so the recruiting troup and what it represents may be seen to embody what attracts the layman in art. We might sum this up as beauty, or more precisely glamour; it is also clear-cut divisions into good and bad – angels and devils – however random they may be; then there are the pedestals onto which people are set in art (with slight distortion of their natural proportions); we have here too a vision of gender according to which men are “devils”’ and women are “angels” and all act their parts, a world in which it is impossible to behave like a Klara or a Brunelda. Karl’s recognition of a childhood friend from home, Fanny, may mean that for those attracted, the schematic angels and devils take on the shape of people once known whose memory has been idealized or demonized. Of course Fanny is there in actual fact too, as it were a guarantee that the best of one’s friends will always be found to belong to this theatre. The chaotic music of the recruiting group – music in the abstract which becomes mere noise – shows that this group of artists is still far from perfect, for Karl has seen that there is nothing wrong with the instruments: “Waren alle Instrumente von gleicher Beschaffenheit, so wurde ein großer Missbrauch mit ihnen getrieben.” (A310) Compared with these angels and devils, Karl is an “artist”: “du bist ja ein Künstler.” (A310)

            Whether the angels and devils are to suggest that the Naturetheatre will serve as a compensation for lost religion, or ironically hint that its utopia can only be found in an afterlife when one has stepped over the barrier between either angels or devils (and innocent Karl would naturally cross while the angels are on duty), remains open to question. It is quite possible that we do right to listen to such ironic overtones.[88]

           

What, actually, will these “artists” do once they reach Oklahoma? In one sense we can assume that each will play the part he is naturally intended to play in life, by birth, training, ability and personal preference, in much the way that in the old theatre of the world the king acted the king and the beggar the beggar. But another order seems to show up beneath this. There are apparently those who watch, like the President of the United States, those who act, like the “Schauspieler” (and Karl feels he would be a bad actor), and finally the technicians. Is one to deduce from this that Karl, in the name of his author, is not interested in making a fine show of his life, but instead is concerned with strengthening the structures that support and further life? This would very likely coincide with Kafka’s view of his art and his talents.

           

Apart from suggesting a philosophy of life, Kafka’s Naturetheatre is probably also intended to indicate an ideal social order, a workable democracy. The democratic “all men are equal” becomes “ all men are useful if properly employed”. Justice is extended in that each man’s qualifications are investigated carefully and he is then also asked what he would like to do. Money is apparently not paid out but all men are catered for. This is in keeping with the socialist ideals of the young Zionist pioneers, in whose plans and activities Kafka was interested. For the sake of adequate organization, men owe obedience to whoever is in charge. (This would work towards avoiding the sort of chaos that reigned in the lift boys’ dormitory.) Here there are no dictators. When the views of those in charge are too narrow, the secretary is given a say in the matter, as is the case when Karl is accepted in spite of the misgivings of the man in control. Irregularities such as lost identification papers and pseudonyms are not encouraged but not given undue importance either. Speed and efficiency are there not for their own sake but to extend leisure times, in this case meal-time. All this is of course hardly more than an indication of a workable social order, but it does do to offset the chaotic state of affairs the rest of the novel had described.

           

In Kafka’s fourth notebook there is a brief sketch entitled “Die besitzlose Arbeiterschaft”. Whether it was conceived by Kafka or goes back to one of the idealistic projects of the time cannot be said with certainty, but the similarity of this later reference to a socio-political solution with the “Naturtheater” chapter in many essential points is clear. It appears that here a team of idealistic workers, ready to help wherever the need arises is envisaged. We read such things as:

Kein Geld, keine Kostbarkeiten besitzen oder annehmen […]

Nur durch Arbeit den Lebensunterhalt erwerben [...]

Mäßigstes Leben [...]

Das Verhältnis zum Arbeitgeber als Vertrauensverhältnis behandeln, niemals Vermittlung der Gerichte verlangen [...]

Maximalarbeitszeit sechs Stunden, für körperliche Arbeit vier bis fünf.

Bei Krankheit und im unfähigen Alter Aufnahme in staatliche Altersheime, Krankenhäuser.

Das Arbeitsleben als eine Angelegenheit des Gewissens und eine Angelegenheit des Glaubens an den Mitmenschen. Etc. (H 126f)

Trust, a genuinely ethical approach to work and your fellow man, poverty within the limits of the acceptable, security at all times, plenty of leisure, seem common to both social orders. The sociological is touched on again in some of Kafka’s other works but it does not become central, as in Amerika. [89]

Of all Kafka’s works, Amerika is perhaps the furthest on the periphery, the only work concerned primarily with social problems, the only work written in a realistic vein with a tendency towards caricature. This is not Kafka’s strength; only the first chapter is aesthetically successful in the manner of poetic realism. The others fall more or less flat for lack of symbolic depth, psychological intricacy, and visualization of unfamiliar scenes. Most disturbing for the reader accustomed to the traditional rules of realism and most subversive of the realist novel as we know it is Kafka’s refusal to give Karl the psychological dimension we have come to expect. It was a decision clearly made by a mature Kafka who believed that all psychology was mere impatience, a temporary solution of a premature question. The last chapter then already points to the later Kafka in that it is the first instance of parable of the type of the Landarzt stories, though far simpler and emotionally less convincing than these. Here as later, Kafka uses parable to present problems in a general but concrete way, thus avoiding limiting and often confusing individual situations as well as the simplifications and distortions of theory. Amerika is a realist novel on the way to becoming a parabolic novel and therewith vintage Kafka.

MARRIAGE AND MARTYRDOM

         

With Das Urteil Kafka’s writing entered a new phase. We quoted the diary passage in which Kafka described the night of inspiration which gave birth to the story, and what this meant for him.[90] Das Urteil was the first and most exclusively unconscious of Kafka’s stories. His comments on it emphasize that he did not gain conscious control of either form or meaning during the writing[91] and there are consequently  inadequacies in the artistic form he gave it. As a result, the interpreter faces certain problems. The story has a unique symbolic wealth which places it in the vicinity of archetypal dreams and of myth. This makes Ruhleder’s[92] parallel with the Uranos myth and others seem plausible, though it would hardly have been intended. It also has, like our best dreams, a multiple biographic reference. Steinberg is probably right in conjecturing that:

[…] it may well be that the story’s savagery and the tremendous burst of energy in which it was written are a result of the fact that the three continuingly important problems in Kafka’s life became critical at the same time.[93]

These problems were the father problem in its connection with the problem of Jewish religion, the problem of the artist, and the bachelor-marriage problem. The first has been emphasized by Steinberg, the second by Kate Flores[94], and the third by Politzer[95]. Sokel[96] has succeeded in giving a fuller view of their interrelation. Das Urteil is ambivalent, in the same way that the parable Silberer treats in his book Probleme der Mystik is ambivalent, and can be given various interpretations. It is also ambivalent in the sense that a situation cut out of the context of life is ambivalent because its connections with other situations cannot be fully investigated. (A dream seen in separation from the dreamer’s life is such an ambivalent situation too.) Das Urteil is not ambivalent in the sense that Das Schloss is, where a closed circuit has been achieved and the questions rotate within the work of art. More than any other of Kafka’s works Das Urteil  may legitimately be seen both in relation to Kafka’s biography and to universal myth. An intrinsic interpretation is meaningful only where the form has adequately separated the material from life. In the process of such a separation, the originally biographical material will necessarily suffer distortion which in turn will render such material unsuitable for biographical investigation.[97]

            Since this study is concerned neither with Kafka’s biography nor with universal myth, we shall try to understand the artistic form of the story, determining where its imperfection lies, and then examine what the story may have meant to Kafka in the way of general and acceptable truths once he consciously came to grips with it. Using Silberer’s terms[98], we are concerned with the “anagogic” not the “retrograde” aspects of Kafka’s parable, for on the assumption that all literature is in some sense in search of values of general significance, it is only the anagogic that has artistic relevance.

           

The two works that follow in this section, “Die Verwandlung and Der Prozess, both have the characteristics of unconscious writing[99] including condensation and complexity but they seem far more self-contained as works of art; their ambivalence is the ambivalence of art, not life, and an interpretation can move with greater assurance. “Das Urteil” provided a pattern from which Kafka could then more consciously construct works suited to his purpose.  Yet even in “Die Verwandlung”  and Der Prozess, it is likely that Kafka had comparatively little conscious command of the ideas which the stories seem to contain and which were, in essentials, expressed in later aphorisms.[100]

            When we speak of these ideas, we must stress again that these are the ideas the stories most probably conveyed to Kafka. In themselves, the stories are open to a great many interpretations, as we hope to show in our analysis. Kafka’s reading will in each case be only one possible version of the story. Investigating this will contribute to our appreciation of the story as literature only insofar as it will show us that at least one consistent interpretation is possible. Indirectly, an understanding of the writer’s ideas helps our appreciation and understanding of literature because it allows us to see what meaning a poet’s writing had for himself and therefore could have for others.

            Our justification for calling something “Kafka’s version of the story” can only come from a knowledge of Kafka’s life, of the ideas he expressed directly and of the whole of his work. If we can show that all Kafka’s stories can be seen to link up to present a single train of thought developing through his life – and we hope to do this – then there is a greater likelihood that these ideas were actually Kafka’s own. The peculiar separation between an autonomous artistic form and a “Weltanschauung”, which would be next to impossible with a writer like Goethe, is a characteristic of the parable form with its combination of basic ambiguity and individual message. We tried to explain in Part I why such a form could be congenial to Kafka.

            What we might call “Kafka’s meaning” of the three works to be discussed in this section centres on the idea of the resurrection of the body. An aphorism of Kafka’s that was quoted earlier[101] sees marriage and martyrdom as glorifications of the body in the religious sense, celibacy and suicide as negations of the body. The fallen state of man, which Kafka experienced strongly as the fallen state of the body – sex that disgusts and to which one is driven by physical desires all the same[102] –  seems to call for a rejection of the body. Yet all mental and spiritual perfection can only be achieved by making the best possible use of the body. According to Kafka, a healthy and strong body was the prerequisite of a healthy and strong mind. So man is in a quandary. The “fallen” body must be rejected as impure but in the measure that man rejects his body he becomes inhuman and therewith sub-human. In Kafka’s writing, the animal becomes both the image for body as the prerequisite of mind and true humanity and as that which is not yet mind and true humanity. In mounting the stairs of evolution, man must take his body with him otherwise he falls out of the reach of life into the nothingness of a mechanical, lifeless, inhuman existence. This is constantly happening to Kafka’s figures.

            What can man do, placed in this situation? Nietzsche’s simple solution of declaring the Fall to be a myth and man as a perfect, unbroken creature if only he would recognize his perfection, was not acceptable to Kafka because his own experience of man was the Jewish experience that man is not perfect and can never become perfect of his own free will.

           

Whenever mankind has found itself in a situation that offered no way out, some sacrifice has been necessary. It is the possibilities of personal sacrifice that the three works of this group investigate. In terms of Kafka’s life this meant: while a pure marriage between pure people must be one of the ultimate “goods” of life[103], is an impure marriage between impure people permissible or bearable or are we not called upon to sacrifice it in the cause of purity?[104] The stories of this section of our study were all written during the years when Kafka was trying to decide whether or not to marry Felice, aware that their marriage would not be perfect but also aware of the selfishness of a bachelor’s life and the sterile immaturity of a manhood dominated by puerile ties.

            To justify the fact that we have spoken of the essential ambiguity of these works, of their personal significance for Kafka, and of the uncertainty of whether Kafka consciously understood this while writing, we might again draw the parallel with dream. A recounted dream that has not been understood by the dreamer will in general seem completely ambiguous to the unbiased listener. To the dreamer himself it will offer up its meaning if he searches for it long enough. According to our interpretation, unconscious writing has here the qualities of dream. The inspired and as yet not fully understanding writer might be imagined as using his artistry to leave open all channels of understanding for himself too, so as not to lose the true meaning which he feels the dream vision must contain. It is quite possible that at this stage Kafka created ambiguity less to withhold disturbing personal convictions from the reader[105] than to aid his own understanding.

Das Urteil

            “Das Urteil” was written in the night before the 23^rd September 1912, eight or nine years after “Beschreibung eines Kampfes” was begun and during the period Kafka was working on Amerika.

            The protagonist of “Das Urteil” , Georg, is a businessman who has taken over his father’s business at a time when sons normally do, has with youthful vigour enlarged it, proved himself successful in life and consequently entitled to marry an attractive, clear-minded, realistic young woman from a good family that has only recently moved to the town (thus no chance of inbreeding). We gather from the father’s description „weil sie die Röcke so gehoben hat, die widerlich Gans“ (E64) that she is attractive, from a sentence like „Und wenn sie dann rasch atmend unter seinen Küssen noch hervorbrachte [...]“ (E 57) that Georg is attracted, and that she is clear-minded and realistic and not without some insight from her reaction to the problem of the friend. She realizes that if the friendship is not going to be actively renewed, as would be necessary in view of the completely changed situation marriage creates, and instead rely only on memories of the past, there will always in some way be a conflict between family and business interests on the one hand and past loyalties on the other. Either live the myth of friendship or take the road to success, which is inevitably one with muddy patches. It is an illusion to think that a business can be successfully managed and extended without “gewisse unschöne Dinge” (E 60) occurring every now and again, just as a marriage of this type cannot but have aspects that must offend those who believe in marriage for love. But the important thing, as Frieda suggests, is by what rules you are trying to live and that you abide by them consistently. “Wenn du solche Freunde hast, Georg, hättest du dich überhaupt nicht verloben sollen” (E 57) his bride says and the corollary is implied: “If you want to be engaged and marry you should do away with such friends”.

This, however, is what Georg is not prepared to do. It is clear that the friend will not return to his home town permanently and it would be wrong to suggest this to him. He does not even seem prepared to come back for a visit, for his excuses are hardly persuasive. The friend’s interest in Georg’s life seems slight. We are told that his response to the death of Georg’s mother was very unemotional: „Von dem Todesfall von Georgs Mutter, der for zwei Jahren erfolgt war und seit welchem Georg mit seinem alten Vater in gemeinsamer Wirtschaft lebte, hatte der Freund wohl noch erfahren und sein Beileid in einem Brief mit einer Trockenheit ausgedrückt, die ihren Grund nur darin haben konnte, dass die Trauer über ein solches Ereignis in der Fremde ganz unvorstellbar wird.“  (E 55) Since the friend is an unsuccessful businessman, a sense of propriety would force Georg to exclude all reference to his business life and interests from mention. The friend is also unsuccessful with women and has apparently resigned himself to being a permanent bachelor. For this reason Georg’s sense of tact also precludes any mention of his engagement. Obviously there is therefore no basis for active friendship any more. And the suggestion that Georg’s wife will be a sincere and valuable friend to such a man, living in Russia at that, seems no more than a polite phrase. “Außerdem bekommst du in meiner Braut, die dich herzlich grüßen lässt, und die Dir nächstens selbst schreiben wird, eine aufrichtige Freundin, was für einen Junggesellen nicht ganz ohne Bedeutung ist.“ (E 57) Georg has known all along that conventional politeness could be the only reason for informing his friend of his engagement, but on this particular morning the promise of early spring and the optimistic mood it has engendered seem to demand the temporary suspension of reason. Georg writes the letter. But he is still not confident enough to post it without at least informing his father before he does so.

           

That suggests that in spite of all he has apparently achieved, Georg has not yet completely emancipated himself from the childhood world in which his father is the one and only authority and in which myth is at home. This is a static world, a world of closed windows, rooms darkened and protected by high walls, of souvenirs of the dead and newspapers long outdated, a world of fairytale and myth, of giants and gods. The first description of the father already suggests this: „Sein schwerer Schlafrock öffnete sich im Gehen, die Enden umflatterten ihn – Mein Vater ist immer noch ein Riese, sagte sich Georg,“ (E 59). Since his mother’s death, which had in some way relegated the order of childhood to the past, Georg had seen his father only on contemporary ground. They had met in the office during business hours and had read their current newspapers together of an evening. But now on a Sunday morning, when business rests and the timeless traditionally takes precedence over the temporal, Georg leaves the ground of everyday life to meet the father in his room. The significance of this on a symbolic plane is clear, and the justification of the question the father puts to him: “ do you really have that friend in Petersburg?” (E 60) is obvious. Like Georg’s bride, the father wants Georg to make an unequivocal choice of the world to which he intends to belong. And again Georg refuses to understand the question and to commit himself. He implies by what he says that he has a friend in Petersburg, and yet tries to show by all else he says and does that he is fully committed to the real everyday business world. He reminds his father of past meetings with this friend. But then he goes on to reprimand him for leading such an unhealthy life, suggest that he should in future eat his breakfast, change his underwear more frequently, rest more, air the room or, better still, move to a sunny room. Finally he carries him into bed (and is in some way shocked by the symbolic disregard for time his father shows when he plays with Georg’s watch chain)[106]. He tucks him in as one would a sick man, suggests that the doctor be called as a final judge of the situation and resolves, like a good son, to take the father into his house after his  marriage, although he knows that this will be an encumberment to both himself and his wife.

From a realistic standpoint Georg’s behaviour is beyond reproach,[107] and yet from the symbolic or mythical point of view it is wrong and bad on all counts. As the father interprets it, Georg has betrayed his friend, the memory of his mother, and most of all the father himself. The solicitous bedding of the father takes on the meaning of first treating him like a child, then wanting to bury him with the dead. The suggested changing of rooms emerges as the wish to usurp the father’s role. If we continue, as we may, to take Georg’s realistic point of view, the father’s accusations will seem no more than the crankiness of an old dotard. But then how are we to understand the ending? Is this sensible and responsible young man actually going to allow himself to be driven to suicide by an old madman within about half an hour of entering the room? Has Georg, in spite of what we thought of him, so little inner stability? On what plane of reality are we to see the father episode?

            There is a suggestion, so slight that probably most readers would not notice it, that the second part of the story could be a dream in which the timeless and preconscious realities of symbol, myth and religiousness find expression. Before Georg goes over to his father with the letter, he sits pensively at his desk for a while. „Mit diesem Brief in der Hand war Georg lang, das Gesicht dem Fenster zugekehrt, an seinem Schreibtisch gesessen. Einem Bekannten, der ihn von der Gasse aus gegrüßt hatte, hatte er kaum mit einem abwesenden Lächeln geantwortet.“ (E58) The claustrophobic sensation that comes with the father’s room and the ecstatic fall at the end are also typical of dreams, as are the exaggerations and the partly very unreal dialogue. Kafka’s artistic problem was apparently that he did not want to weaken the impact of the second half of the story by making it “only” a dream, and on the other hand needed two distinct realities, the everyday and the mythical. The solution here is not ideal, perhaps because the dream suggestion is too weak as compared with the continuity of the action. Most readers seem puzzled by the story. They do not see it as the paradox of opposite ways of viewing life but as the story of a sensible young man quite suddenly giving way to madness  (the most plausible reason being that unknown to the reader and himself he must have had a “father complex”- and that’s what complexes can do to you! The moral of the story would become: go and have yourself psychoanalysed as soon as possible.)

This seems definitely not what Kafka wanted to say. The final image of the stream of traffic running across the bridge and the stream of water running beneath the bridge – the two streams of life, from which you may choose, and which run on different levels and at right angles to each other – returns again in the parable of the bridge across the abyss and in the first aphorism of the collection that Brod named: “Betrachtungen über Sünde, Leid, Hoffnung und den wahren Weg”:

1.Der wahre Weg geht über ein Seil, das nicht in der Höhe gespannt ist, sondern knapp über dem Boden. Es scheint mehr bestimmt stolpern zu machen, als begangen zu werden. (H 39)

The pun on the word “über” suggests two possibilities normally not distinguished. Are you expected to use the rope as a path, as a tightrope, so to speak, or are you expected to step over the rope and continue on an ordinary path? You cannot do both. The rope and the path must run at right angles to each other, just as the river and the bridge. And they run on different levels. The paradox is expanded in another aphorism:  

32. Die Krähen behaupten, eine einzige Krähe könnte den Himmel zerstören. Das ist zweifellos, beweist aber nichts gegen den Himmel, denn Himmel bedeuten eben: Unmöglichkeit von Krähen. (H 42)

This aphorism plays on the fact that “Himmel” in German means both “heaven” and “sky”. By flying through the sky the crows prove that the sky is not heaven. Actually, it needs only a single crow to prove this. (We know that the name “Kafka” means “crow” and that he jokingly spoke of himself as a crow.) On the other hand, the existence of a symbolic or otherworldly heaven would disprove the existence of the crow, for while the real crow can fly through the sky, it can not fly in a heaven (unless it has become a symbolic crow too). With time it is much the same:

40. Nur unser Zeitbegriff lässt uns das Jüngste Gericht so nennen, eigentlich ist es ein Standrecht. (H 43)

This brings us closer to our story. In the world of time, of everyday reality, the judgment comes at the end of a life or at the end of time. In the timeless symbolic world it is just there. Sin does not come about on a certain day but is there from the moment life has begun and leads to inevitable judgment. The idea that timeless and temporal worlds coexist is one of the important keys to an understanding of the story. To discover the meaning the story probably had for Kafka, we will have to struggle through the many possible interpretations that can be given to the symbols. They should make the essential ambiguity of the story amply clear, if the many interpretations it has been given have not already done so.

            To return to the image of the two ways. At the end of the story the fall (from the bridge) – which could be seen both as punitive execution like the original Fall of Man and self-sacrifice – coincides with the crossing of the vehicle that safely conveys people over the eternal river. It has been pointed out by Ruhleder[108] that the literal meaning of Auto-omnibus is “self for all” and that this could in the context point to the principle of representative action, in the sense that Christ’s self-sacrifice was representative action. The noise of the Auto-omnibus drowns the Fall. It is clear that we are speaking of principles of action and not suggesting that Georg be identified with Christ.

           

As Georg falls, there is a free flow of traffic across the bridge; life and movement is suggested. But Kafka apparently mentioned to Brod that he had also intended his phrase to suggest uninhibited sexual intercourse taking place.[109] (This, incidentally, confirms that Kafka was working with puns, if not consciously, at least in the unconscious way described by Freud, recognizing this in retrospect.)[110] That indicates that for Kafka the annihilation of sexual shame and sexual inhibition were an aspect of the redemption envisaged. If pun is to prevail, then the cry of the startled servant who calls “Jesus” after Georg as he hurries past her down the stairs might be taken literally to suggest redemptive sacrifice. Georg’s action resembles that of Jesus also in that it is performed by a loving son. His last words are “liebe Eltern, ich habe Euch doch immer geliebt” (E 68); they differ from those of Christ in that they are addressed to both parents, and this difference should probably be seen as significant. The mother-figure is missing in Jewish-Christian religion, which knows only the male divinity.[111] In the story, we will remember, she had died, and by her death the original order of things had suffered some form of disruption. Georg here gives her equal love with the father, who had earlier accused Georg of defiling the memory of his mother by his attitude to his bride. The mention of the mother also points in the direction of a rehabilitation of sexuality, which we had earlier seen connected both with ecstasy and flow of life (“der unendliche Verkehr” über die Brücke) (E 68). At first sight it seems paradoxical that a rehabilitation of sexuality should demand the surrender of marriage. We shall return later to the question of what is actually meant here.

           

But the full scope of Georg’s expiatory action is probably greater. One of his responsibilities is not to give up the friend in Petersburg (are we to take the name as an allusion to the church of St. Peter?) this friend who, quite in the tradition of Christian saints, is a determined bachelor and hermit. He tells of blood crosses slashed into a priest’s hand to subdue Anarchist revolutions[112] which Georg sees as threatening the friend: “Verloren im weiten Russland sah er ihn. An der Türe des leeren, ausgeraubten Geschäftes sah er ihn.“ (E64) This friend seems to be dearer to the father (i.e. the Jewish Father God)[113] than his own son. The death of the mother is, in keeping with his Christian spirituality, of little consequence to the friend. And almost certainly as a result of this he is ill: “Schon vor drei Jahren war er gelb zum Wegwerfen.” (E 67) If the friend and what he represents are to be saved, Georg must act quickly to secure the kind of redemption we described earlier.

            But what actually does it mean to drown yourself in the river? The answer here is not straightforward. On the religious level the sacrifice envisaged could be baptism, which is symbolic purification, death and resurrection in Christ, culminating in the entering of the Holy Spirit into the body. Christ’s own baptism was in the River Jordan and after it the heavens opened, the Holy Spirit descended, and the voice of God was heard to say: “this is my beloved son”, an affirmation for which Kafka yearned. But in view of what we said earlier, baptism can hardly have been the solution envisaged, for in this context it would mean little more than becoming another “friend in Russia”.[114] A second possible religious allusion is to the Jewish bath of purification, originally in the river Jordan, which requires complete immersion, Kafka tells of his great-grandfather who was so pious that in winter he would hew a hole into the ice so as not to forego his bath. In Buber’s Hassidic Legends,  well known to Kafka, we read: “Israel’s Tauchbad ist Gott.”[115] There are clearly links between the Christian and Jewish customs.

           

Another possible allusion is to introversion. Silberer writes:

           

Die Introversion (Aufsuchen des Uterus oder des Grabes) ist eine notwendige Voraussetzung der Wiedergeburt oder Auferstehung; und diese ist eine notwendige Voraussetzung der mystischen Erschaffung des neuen Menschen. Das Wasser ist eines der häufigsten kultischen Muttersymbole (Taufe). Bei den ältesten Alchemisten wird der eherne Mann zum silbernen, der silberne zum goldenen durch Eintauchen in den heiligen Quellbrunn.[116]

  

The following words ascibed to the Hassidic Rabbi Pinchas describe introversion within the Jewish faith:

Das Korn, das in die Erde gesät ist, muß zerfallen, damit die neue Ähre sprieße. Die Kraft kann nicht auferstehen, wenn sie nicht in die große Verborgenheit eingeht. Gestalt ausziehn, Gestalt antun, das geschieht im Augenblick des reinen Nichts. In der Schale des Vergessens wächst die Macht des Gedächtnisses. Das ist die Macht der Erlösung. Im Tag der Zerstörung, da liegt die Macht auf dem Grunde und wächst. Darum gehen wir an diesem Tag (der Zerstörung Jerusalems) auf die Gräber, darum wird an diesem Tag Messias geboren.[117]

            Death, sleep, unconsciousness, submersion leading to purification and redemption seem to be interchangeable images for something summed up in the theology of baptism and purification, as in the psychology of introversion. Though the mystic way has the irrevocable earnestness of martyrdom, it will in general not involve death literally. The dream ending in ecstasy to relieve an earlier claustrophobia can represent it. The claustrophobic sensation of being locked in a phial, or a furnace, or a close room is an essential stage in the mystic process.

            It appears that writing this story was of the nature of a mystic experience for Kafka. In describing it, Kafka uses the alchemist image of the cauldron: „Wie hier alles gesagt warden kann, wie für alle, für die fremdesten Einfälle, eine großes Feuer bereitet ist, in dem sie vergehen und auferstehen.“ (T293) A curious corroboration of this aspect of religious purification might be seen in the circumstance that this story was written on the Eve of the Jewish Day of Atonement, the religious festival of the expiation of sins against God the Father. This is a time the pious Jew spends in the Temple or Synagogue. There are indications that Kafka was aware of this festival time and conscious of its significance.[118]

In seeing Kafka’s writing, at least in part, as a manifestation of the mystic process, we have the support of Kafka’s own word. In an interview with Rudolf Steiner, Kafka describes his moments of inspired writing as being similar to the clairvoyant states Steiner had discussed, but says at the same time that Theosophy, though it attracted him, was more inclined to confuse than help him, for writing was his only true interest.[119] We gather from Kafka’s statement that he felt that mystically inclined people had a choice between spiritualism and writing and he was predestined for the latter. In consequence, writing and religion remain separate though parallel forces throughout his life.

            What course of action, then, does the story suggest? It seems to be to give up the bride, who in Kafka’s own words represented for him the world, to detach himself from the father, not in anger but as a loving son who would never become his rival, to channel the energies of sex into creative writing, to write as a Jew with a deep experience of the fallen state of man and the longing and prayer for some kind of redemption, because of this profound experience to write as the introvert, knowing that a revelation of his unconscious self must lead to a clarification of the need and the prayer. On the whole, Kafka seemed to follow this programme, though he did not finally give up the bride till 1917 and probably never quite succeeded in befriending his father. In view of this, it is not surprising that years later Kafka still stresses the tremendous importance the story had for him as a breakthrough.

Die Verwandlung 

            The story of Georg told of a man drowning in the sacred river of dream, symbol or the unconscious. In Die Verwandlung, written a few weeks later, the letters of the man’s name have been slightly rearranged to Gregor, and moreover person and name have been split into two, the brother and sister, Gregor and Grete, one condemned, the other redeemed it would seem.[120] The theme, one might say, is the animal in man; the story tells of Gregor’s metamorphosis to a beetle and his life and death as a beetle.[121]

           

It is not the first time we encounter the beetle image in Kafka. In Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande (1907) the young man, about to visit his fiancée in the country, contemplates for a moment the advantages of sending only his clothed body and himself remaining behind, safe and comfortable, in the shape of a beetle. We are told that this is what he used to do as a child “als Kind bei gefährlichen Geschäften” (H 11). Without knowledge of the later story, the image here seems little more than a variant of the frequent human wish to bury one’s head in the sand when matters get a little difficult. It is an image of evasion to which Sokel seems to give too much weight when he sees it in direct contrast to the later beetle image as “mystische Ruhe der Abgeschiedenheit”,[122] emphasizing Raban’s beauty in comparison with Gregor’s ugliness. This beauty is perhaps more a characteristic of Kafka’s at that time still strongly impressionistic style; the point made by Emrich[123] that Raban’s dream is a pleasant daydream, rather than a highly ambiguous situation resembling a night dream, should be kept in mind. Kafka had not yet plumbed the depths of the human mind nor faced the complexity of human volition. “Die Verwandlung” cannot profitably be contrasted with the early work, though it must be seen in close relation to Das Urteil and Der Prozess and to a lesser extent, all other mature works that followed, in particular the animal stories.

            Much like Georg, Gregor is a modern man, caught up in the machinery of the modern business world, hurrying with trains from one place to the next, studying timetables on his evenings off, living in hotel rooms, up and out of bed long before his best sleep is over, enslaved by the financial interests of his boss and by his family’s financial needs, forced to suppress sickness, forego love, be an outsider to the family, allow himself to be humiliated by his superiors and spied on by their staff, in short, to be nothing but a link somewhere in the huge economic machine. In this inhuman world, the more consciencious one is, the more one is degraded to being a mere object; the fact that Gregor has never been ill in his five years of service to the firm is taken as proof against the genuineness of any future such claim; good will and diligence are seen only in the light of mechanical efficiency. Yet Gregor yearns for freedom and peace, to rest in the lap of the family, listen to his sister’s music, and possess the woman of his desire. It is a limited vision of happiness, but it is there like the rust to corrode the steel. One morning the link no longer moves as it should; though the alarm must have rung at four o’clock, Gregor does not wake till half past six. His animal needs for sleep and comfort have got the better of him. In other words, he has become an animal: „Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt.“ (E 71) This is the first sentence of the story and not for a moment are we given a chance not to take it literally.[124]

           

When a human automaton like Gregor becomes an animal he does not become the panther described in “Ein Hungerkünstler”:

Ihm fehlte nichts. Die Nahrung, die ihm schmeckte, brachten ihm ohne langes Nachdenken die Wächter; nicht einmal die Freiheit schien er zu vermissen; dieser edle, mit allem Nötigen bis zum Zerreißen ausgestattete Körper schien auch die Freiheit mit sich herumzutragen; irgendwo im Gebiss, schien sie zu stecken; und die Freude am Leben kam mit derart starker Glut aus seinem Rachen, dass es für die Zuschauer nicht leicht war, ihr standzuhalten.“ (E 268)

The animal in Gregor, in contrast, is only an insect whose greatest strength lies in the fact, to cite the German expression, that he has “einen breiten Buckel, an dem alles abrutscht”, a broad back meaning insensitivity to abuse and injury. His appetite is not good, however, and becomes progressively worse as the boredom of imprisonment grows on him. The freedom which the panther’s body seems to carry about with it has been perverted to directionless listlessness in the insect. “Seine vielen, im Vergleich zu seinem sonstigen Umfang kläglich dünnen Beine flimmerten ihm hilflos vor den Augen.“ (E 71) Even when the many little legs have firm ground under them and sort themselves out, their activity is useless: „Wenn die Möbel ihn hinderten, das sinnlose Herumkriechen zu betreiben, so war es kein Schaden, sondern ein großer Vorteil.“ (E 110)

Though the first paragraph can describe distinctly the insect Gregor has become, it seems that his metamorphosis is not quite complete at the beginning of the story. Gregor doubts its reality „als erwarte er […] die Wiederkehr der wirklichen und selbstverständlichen Verhältnisse“ (E 77) and suspects some real or imagined illness:

Er erinnerte sich, schon öfters im Bett irgendeinen vielleicht durch ungeschicktes Liegen erzeugten, leichten Schmerz empfunden zu haben, der sich dann beim Aufstehen als reine Einbildung herausstellte, und er war gespannt, wie sich seine heautigen Vorstellungen allmählich auflösen würden. Dass die Veränderung der Stimme nichts anderes war als der Vorbote einer tüchtigen Verkühlung, einer Berufskrankheit der Reisenden, daran zweifelte er nicht im geringsten. (E75)

But more importantly, his voice, though a little squeaky, is initially still understood by the family. It is only when he forces himself to betray the animal in himself by getting out of bed, even though this is physically almost impossible and quite painful, and in addition to that adopting the now unnatural upright “human” position, still more painful to the lower part of this body, that his voice becomes quite obviously an animal voice that cannot be understood.

Had Samsa stayed in bed, an assumption, of course, which we are really not justified in making, the “animal”’ might have been only a passing phase, a bit like early childhood, or an illness, a sexual episode, a dream, in all of which man’s conscious mind plays little part and he is almost limited to his body. To go still further, it might have been that final episode of the unconscious body, death, in which the dung-beetles take over to become the “life” of the body until only the dry bones are left. But Gregor does not stay in bed. He forces himself to betray all natural versions of the misfortune that has befallen his body and by doing this intensifies his and his family’s misfortune to an unnatural or even supernatural one.[125] We are now caught in a world of fairytale and lose all orientation. It is clear that Gregor’s family feel that the misfortune that has befallen them is greater and more terrible than any misfortune that has ever come upon any other family, and the head clerk and the servant girls seem to agree with them.

           

The reason why Gregor has no choice but to get out of bed is that, made suspicious by his restless and inhuman life as a travelling salesman, he has acquired the habit of locking himself in at night and has taken to doing this even at home. In other words, he has taken to shutting out all men, whether friendly or hostile, and has thereby put himself out of reach of human help. The mother and sister, who would doubtless have been only too willing to nurse a sick man, are given no opportunity to do so. The help the sister finally offers is of a nature almost surpassing human strength for she has to overcome a metaphysical dread of the animal. The mere sight of it is almost unbearably terrible, and Gregor finds he must not only hide beneath the couch but also cover the part of him that protrudes with a sheet. Moreover, the sister has to overcome an overwhelming sense of disgust which forces her to rush to the window and open it as soon as she enters the room. Neither animals nor sick people would normally arouse reactions of this nature, particularly from someone who is fond of them.[126] It is probably not without significance that the hospital across the road, still distinct early on the first morning, is gradually lost completely to Gregor’s dimmed eyesight.

            We must ask: what is the animal Gregor in relation to the human Gregor?[127] His emotions and attitudes seem to have undergone no change, if anything they have become more intense. His memories are still intact, even though for moments the animal is in danger of underestimating their value. The “soul”, so to speak, is there in both man and animal. The split in Gregor is obviously not one into body and soul. It cannot be seen as the split into conscious and unconscious mind either, certainly not once Gregor has become a “metaphysical’ animal, for the beetle’s appraisal of the situation is quite conscious and rational. Perhaps the only thing we are justified in saying about the animal Gregor is that it is in almost every way the opposite of the man Gregor. The man’s posture is vertical, the animal’s horizontal; the man moves on the plain, the animal within the cube, for it can crawl on walls and ceiling; the man hurries about in trains across great stretches of country, the animal is confined to a single room where it moves about very slowly; the man is time-conscious, the animal loses track of time; the man sleeps in the bed, the animal under the sofa; the man likes fresh food, the animal wants it to be decayed; the man lives in lighted rooms, the animal in the dark which his failing eyesight intensifies; and so we might continue. But by saying that the metaphysical animal is the opposite of ordinary modern men, we have not really said very much.

            If we ask further, how humans view animals, we again get a variety of answers. We hear invective of the type Kafka’s father used to address his employees and his children: “Diese Reisenden sind wie Ungeziefer”, “Du alter Mistkäfer” and the like.[128] It could well come from the mouth of Gregor’s boss as he perches on his desk towering over his employees, or from the Chief Clerk whom Gregor has in mind when he thinks:   “Waren denn alle Angestellten samt und sonders Lumpen, gab es denn unter ihnen keinen treuen, ergebenen Menschen der, wenn er auch nur ein paar Morgenstunden für das Geschäft nicht ausgenützt hatte, vor Gewissensbissen närrisch wurde […]“ (E 79) It strikes us as ironical, in a context where nothing better is expected of the employee than to be a piece of well-polished machinery, to hear words like “treu, ergeben, Gewissen” etc. The person who uses them in this way has obviously lost a sense of genuine moral standards.

           

A second common attitude to the animal adopted by society and exemplified by the story is that it ought to be caged. As soon as Gregor has unlocked his door at the request            of the family it is locked on him again with the keys now on the outside. Only at the end of the story, once the mortal wound has been inflicted, does the family’s attitude become a little more relenting. Towards the end of the last century the body, its needs and functions, were taboo in a perhaps unprecedented measure. This attitude existed above all with regard to sex, but sayings like “Vom Essen spricht man nicht” show that it went further too. Emotions of any but the mildest kind also came under this taboo. There was agreement that the human animal should be suppressed and caged, that its contact with sex should if possible be no closer than Gregor’s contact with the magazine beauty clothed all in fur, meaning : attraction, carving a golden frame of idealization, and then unification through the glass of the frame (even this an act that causes the mother to drop in a faint and the father to punish his son severely).[129] Of course in a city all animals kept as pets must be kennelled or caged, at best confined to the apartment.

           

The animal in man has traditionally been regarded as the symbol of death and decay[130] (according to much Christian theology the animal is without a soul and therefore not subject to redemption). Gregor’s development begins with an appetite for decayed things. He goes on to harbour death and decay in his body (the apple his father throws at him) and from there to final disintegration of all but the lifeless shell. The story could be seen as demonstrating that man, in spite of his pretensions, is nothing but an animal. It has likes and dislikes (such as the woman in the boa, or music) that it tends to inflate to insights, and will one day decay, then dry up and disappear from the earth completely.

            There is, however, also another view of the animal.  It is represented in the Christian tradition by Kafka’s namesake Saint Francis of Assissi and it comes closer to Kafka’s personal beliefs. It sees the animal as good, innocent, unharmed by the sin of the Fall, open to the call of God.[131] Kafka was a vegetarian, not for health reasons but from a genuine fondness for animals. The dying look of a fish he has eaten haunts him, and makes him resolve never again to break the self-imposed commandment not to eat flesh of any kind. In all Kafka’s many animal stories (least perhaps in “Die Verwandlung”) the animal is described with peculiar sympathy. But Gregor too can be seen as the dumb, suffering creature – the creature as such and the creature in man – which other humans, even where they mean well, will always misinterpret. Appearances are so much against such creatures (we so readily see a love of dirt as symbolic of an impure soul) and they are so hopelessly out of place in a “human” context.

            We can see how all four views of the animal could be used as the basis of at least a limited interpretation of this story. Yet though they do not necessarily at all points conflict with each other, it would be difficult to harmonize them completely; and difficult equally to bring them into line with what we have described as the “metaphysical” animal who seems in every way the opposite of modern man. Under the circumstances, one is almost tempted to accept these no doubt intended suggestions as blind alleys in a maze, or side tracks for those from whom Kafka wanted to hide his intuitive knowledge.

           

Linking up with the idea of the innocent animal, is the tradition of the sacrificial animal. The sacrificial animal as possessing identity with and therefore representing the man who sacrifices it, is an important part of the Jewish cult, carried over into the Christian religion with the conception of Christ being the “Lamb of God” offered up for mankind. The sacrificial animal is by definition a “metaphysical” animal.

            There is clearly an element of sacrifice for the family both in Gregor’s life as a travelling salesman and in his death after the sister has declared that he must disappear:

           

An seine Familie dachte er mit Rührung und Liebe zurück. Seine Meinung darüber, dass er verschwinden müsse, war womöglich noch entschiedener als die seiner Schwester. In diesem Zustand leeren und friedlichen Nachdenkens blieb er, bis die Turmuhr die dritte Morgenstunde schlug. Den Anfang des allgemeinen Hellerwerdens draußen vor dem Fenster erlebte er noch. Dann sank sein Kopf ohne seinen Willen gänzlich nieder, und aus seinen Nüstern strömte sein letzter Atem schwach hervor. (E136)

           

It seems likely that a reference to the death of Christ is intended here; the third hour of the afternoon becomes the third hour of the early morning; the darkness that enveloped the death of Christ becomes here the early light of day. The situation is reversed.[132]

            But to see Gregor as the sacrificial animal would be to reverse the normal in more than one way, for  the necessary attribute of the Jewish sacrificial animal is purity and if any animal is apparently impure it is the dung-beetle. On the other hand one does well to remember here that this very dung-beetle, under the name of scarab, was a symbol of  fertility sacred to the ancient Egyptians. To view disintegration and decay in the light of new fertility, while perhaps an alien thought to the orthodox Jew, was a natural thought to the ancient enemies and sometime masters of the Jews.

            The actors in Kafka’s story are father, mother, son and daughter, a symmetrically representative family. The symmetry is of course further emphasized by the similarity of the names Gregor and Grete. Five years before the story begins the father was the genuine head of the family and had his own small business. Gregor, the son, had been given a commercial training to make him capable of succeeding his father and was serving in the army, happily aware of the dignity his uniform and his bearing gave him. We have the young man ready to protect the family while the old man provides for it, the mother leading the household and the sister helping a little in preparation for her future role and otherwise looking after herself so as to be attractive for a suitable man. Then the father’s bankruptcy destroys the harmony of ideal circumstances. The family is plunged into hopelessness, the father seems to retire overnight to complete uselessness, and Gregor, the son, takes over, determined to free the family from their unscrupulous creditors. To do this, he has to put himself into the hands of these creditors. So while the women’s circumstances do not change much, the men are gradually dehumanized, one by lack of activity, the other by too much work.

It appears that both men are to some extent at fault, the father for becoming too involved with amoral business people, Gregor for his high pretensions which cause him to choose lodgings that are too large and expensive and force him to take over from the father (who is obviously quite willing to retire) instead of just helping him. The father, in turn, is not quite fair to the son, for instead of using extra money to help the young man rid himself of his burden sooner, he adopts the caution of saving it. In other words, once economic forces become a factor within a family, harmony and innocence are destroyed. The breakdown, physical, mental, moral, or even less tangible, within the slave of the business world comes with almost complete necessity. And when the supporter of the family breaks down, this must of necessity be felt by the others. They are shocked out of their life of pretentious uselessness, forced for the first time to give service to Gregor and to society, and forced to face up to the fact that they are living beyond their means. It seems almost a process of nature that the destruction of one should lead to the rehabilitation of others, - the philosophy of the dung beetle: out of decay comes fertility. Or, if one person allows himself to be destroyed completely enough, this will awaken the others to a realization of danger. After Gregor’s death the servility of the family to their paying guests and employers suddenly ceases, they decide to get a smaller flat, they leave the town for an excursion into nature and at their destination realize that the sister has become a marriageable woman. The natural balance seems to have been restored as completely as is possible in our world and future fertility ensured.[133]

            But the natural balance is more than just social; it appears that, as in “Das Urteil”, we cannot ignore a higher religious level. The father heading the family suggests the Father God presiding over a limited racial family. But being a racial God he becomes bankrupt in a situation where the Jewish race is dependent on larger economic factors that force their sons into slavery; instances are the Babylonian and Egyptian captivities, the domination by the Roman Empire around the time of the birth of Christ and the diaspora since then. The sons become homeless, estranged from the family even though they still honour it and form no new ties. “Fleeting encounters” is the most they have; there seems to be no prospect of marriage for Gregor. For father and mother, however, sex is still something natural and good. After Gregor’s defence of his sexual ideal on the photo of the fur-clad lady and his unification with this image, we are told how the distressed mother runs to the father: “wie sie stolpernd über ihre Röcke auf den Vater eindrang und ihn umarmend, in gänzlicher Vereinigung mit ihm – nun versagte aber Gregors Sehkraft schon – die Hände an des Vaters Hinterkopf um Schonung für Gregors Leben bat.”        (E 118) Later again the marital bed is mentioned. It seems that here full-blooded sexuality, as the prerequisite of fertility and “race” is to be contrasted with the sterile, cheap and bestial magazine view of sexuality Gregor has, which could never promote a race. It is in connection with this false image of sexuality that the father pelts Gregor with apples and the apple of the Fall penetrates Gregor’s thick shell gradually rotting in his body. According to the traditional interpretation, eating of the prohibited apple of the Fall in Eden brought sexual knowledge, shame and the curse of death to Adam and Eve. Because of Gregor’s reluctance to part with his former life, represented by the wardrobe with its contents and the desk (both of which the sister has decreed must be removed from Gregor’s room) it is impossible for him to escape traditional values.

But Gregor does not want to be simply the animal. He recognizes the necessity of his death, a necessity also proclaimed by the sister in the name of the future race she represents, and he acquiesces in it. If we accept the parallel with Christ, it is again the representatives of the Jewish race, here the sister and parents, that demand the sacrificial death predetermined in connection with the Fall by the father. But whereas Christ was made “sin” for the sake of Christians, Gregor is made physically repulsive for the sake of the family. Where Christ was true man and true God, this sacrificial figure is true man and true animal. The Jewish tradition of the animal sacrifice and the Christian of the sacrifice of the son by the father (preconceived in the Jewish story of Abraham and Isaac) are combined into a vision of a Messiah whose death will mean the resurrection of the body, the rehabilitation of sexuality and the preservation of the chosen race. Marriage is the prospect with which the story leaves us. The three male paying guests, who have become parasites in the Samsa household, taking over the living room and thereby forcing the family to withdraw to the kitchen, seem to be an ironic reference to the Christian male hierarchy,[134] the Trinity. While this Trinity is actually dependant on Judaism, it has tried to take over from it and displace it.

            When the three boarders have been shown the door, their descent is simultaneous with the ascent of a butcher-boy: „als ihnen entgegen und dann hoch über sie hinweg ein Fleischergeselle mit der Trage auf dem Kopf in stolzer Haltung heraufstieg, verließ bald Herr Samsa mit den Frauen das Geländer, und alle kehrten, wie erleichtert, in ihre Wohnung zurück.“ (E 140) Reading the German, there may be a reference to “Auferstehung des Fleisches”, resurrection of the body, and certainly the image suggests the triumph of vitality.[135]

While Gregor’s death meant the resurrection of the body for the family, it also meant the end of the sister’s violin music which meant so much to Gregor that it seemed to him like the unknown food he had been yearning for all his life. He had asked himself: „War er ein Tier, da ihn Musik so ergriff? Ihm war als zeige sich ihm der Weg zu der ersehnten unbekannten Nahrung.“ Rather than seeing the sister’s destiny in marriage, like the parents do, he had intended to send her to the conservatorium and pay for her studies there. To the parents, as to the boarders, Gregor’s music had meant very little. Paradoxically, it is the “animal” for whom ‘music’, which here seems to stand for artistic or even spiritual activity, is all important in the same way that literature was all important for Kafka himself.[136] It was a love he, to some extent, shared with his sister Ottla, who found herself caught between her brother’s and her parents’ values. Because Kafka gives such emphasis to the fact that the animal, not the human is the music lover, we are again powerfully confronted with the enigma of what the animal actually is, an enigma that will remain the powerhouse of Kafka’s writing.

            To return to Kafka’s myth of the Fall. Two things seem to be described there: the awakening of knowledge, recognition and consciousness, and connected with it, sexual shame. The sacrifice of Christ gave to the Christian world the Holy Spirit, which redeemed knowledge with revelation, but at the expense of the body. Virginity became a supreme value. Only one aspect of the sin of the Fall had apparently been forgiven. A second redemption seemed required to complete the first. It is probably in order to emphasize the complementary nature of these two necessary redemptions that Kafka made Gregor die in the third hour of early morning with the prospect of light ahead, instead of in the third hour of the afternoon with enveloping darkness, as was the case with Christ.

Der Prozess

            Kafka’s second novel Der Prozess, written in 1914, is closely linked to the two preceding stories in theme, though the material is quite different. Some of its probable sources should be mentioned to indicate the significance of the material. There is a diary entry of 20^th December 1910 expressing Kafka’s desire for spiritual judgement: “Ich habe immerfort eine Anrufung im Ohr: ‘Kämest du, unsichtbares Gericht!’’”(T31) In nucleus, this is a formulation of the theme of Der Prozess. Then one might consider that Kafka’s law studies, which brought him into contact with Prague’s courts of law, were identical for him with the job that tortured him, his responsibility to society and his neglect of his vocation as a writer. Dagmar Eisnerova[137] shows that the apparently anonymous scene of Der Prozess is in reality Prague, that the buildings and atmosphere of Prague “the mother who held onto him with claws” and would not release him to a life of his own, were in fact the law courts of Der Prozess. The ties of tradition and home, the responsibilities towards society, the demands of legality as against conscience, the fear of and desire for final and valid judgement, are all elements of Der Prozess as we shall interpret it. That Fräulein Bürstner is again F.B., Felice Bauer, with whom Kafka had just broken off his engagement on 12^th July 1914, is beyond doubt. The problem of marriage is central to the novel. Pasley[138] points to two possible literary sources of Der Prozess of which one, a passage from Salomon Maimons Lebensgeschichte which concerns itself with the peculiar association of holy and obscene acts, seems to have inspired a certain passage in the novel and supported the theme of the incombatability of sacred and natural eroticism.

            But among the literary sources there is one which appears to have significance for the whole of the novel in that it is both illustrated and criticised by the novel. It is a passage from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Several of Kafka’s works seem to be critical appraisals of Nietzsche’s ideas.

            Vom bleichen Verbrecher

Ihr wollt nicht töten, ihr Richter und Opferer, bevor das Tier nicht genickt hat? Seht, der bleiche Verbrecher hat genickt: aus seinem Auge redet die große Verachtung. „Mein Ich ist etwas, das überwunden werden soll: mein Ich ist mir die große Verachtung des Menschen“: so redet es aus diesem Auge.

Daß er sich selber richtete, war sein höchster Augenblick: laßt den Erhabenen nicht wieder zurück in sein Niederes! Es gibt keine Erlösung für den, der so an sich selber leidet, es sei denn der schnelle Tod.

Euer Töten, ihr Richter, soll ein Mitleid sein und keine Rache. Und indem ihr tötet seht zu, daß ihr selber das Leben rechtfertigt.

Es ist nicht genug, daß ihr euch mit dem versöhnt, den ihr tötet. Eure Traurigkeit sei Liebe zum Übermenschen: so rechtfertigt ihr euer Noch-Leben!

„Feind“ sollt ihr sagen, aber nicht „Bösewicht“; „Kranker“ sollt ihr sagen, aber nicht „Schuft“, „Tor“ sollt ihr sagen, aber nicht „Sünder“. Und du, roter Richter, wenn du laut sagen wolltest, was du alles schon in Gedanken getan hast: so würde jedermann schreien: „Weg mit diesem Unflat und Giftwurm!“ [...]

Ein Bild machte diesen bleichen Menschen bleich. Gleichwüchsig war er seiner Tat, als er sie tat: aber ihr Bild ertrug er nicht, als sie getan war.

[...] Seht diesen armen Leib! Was er litt und begehrte, das deutete sich diese arme Seele, - sie deutete es als mörderische Lust und Gier nach dem Glück des Messers. [...] Ich bin ein Geländer am Strome: fasse mich, wer mich fassen kann! Eure Krücke aber bin ich nicht. –[139]

Nietzsche’s figure of the pale-faced criminal, schematic as it is, bears resemblance to Josef K. Both are men who lack vitality, men with a bad conscience about something that may not even be a crime, men who are to some extent a prey to the view society takes of their actions, the interpretations other men give to them. It is the reactions of others that first set Josef K. thinking in moral terms, a thing he had not done before. And immediately the judges become active to condemn him because of his awakened bad conscience rather than because of any wrong action. Kafka with his eternally bad conscience must have identified himself quite naturally with Nietzsche’s pale criminal. But he does not share the certainty of Nietzsche’s estimation of this figure. Did Josef K. acquiesce in his execution or merely suffer it? He does not despise himself and mankind or say with Nietzsche: „Mein Ich ist etwas, das überwunden werden soll: mein Ich ist mir die große Verachtung des Menschen.“ Though he hesitates for a moment in front of the railing across the stream, he turns away from it again.

Alle drei zogen nun in vollem Einverständnis über eine Brücke im Mondschein, jeder kleinen Bewegung die K. machte, gaben die Herren jetzt bereitwillig nach, als er ein wenig zum Geländer sich wendete, drehten auch sie sich in ganzer Front dorthin. [...] „Ich wollte ja gar nicht stehenbleiben“, sagte er zu seinen Begleitern, beschämt durch ihre Bereitwilligkeit. (P 269)

Josef K. does not accept the offer to grasp hold of Zarathustra’s interpretation of life: “Ich bin ein Geländer am Strome: fasse mich wer mich fassen kann.” He has no “mörderische Lust und Gier nach dem Glück des Messers”, only a half-hearted sense that he has a duty to dispose of himself.

K. wußte jetzt genau, daß es seine Pflicht gewesen wäre, das Messer, als es von Hand zu Hand über ihm schwebte, selbst zu fassen und sich einzubohren. Aber er tat es nicht, sondern drehte den noch freien Hals und sah umher. (P 271)

The images seem chosen as a rejection, though not a clear contradiction of Nietzsche’s very simple and schematic judgment. For Kafka human problems are never simple.

Before we turn to Kafka’s own presentation of the “pale criminal”, we should perhaps make a few preliminary remarks about the style of Der Prozess. More than in the stories, it becomes necessary here to develop a new reading technique to do the novel justice. Where this has not been done, the interpretation no longer serves the work but becomes a thing in its own right, at its worst usurping the authority of Kafka’s name for something little better than a plagiaristic remodelling of the material. This may be said to be what happened in Orson Wells’ film version of  The Trial.

           

            It may be well to begin by pointing out some of the devices used to give the story its parabolic ambivalence, for it will become clear then that in Kafka’s novels we can no longer rely on our naïve emotional response as we do in conventional novels. The first thing to draw attention to is the ambiguity of the key words. The title Der Prozess means in German both the process and the trial, so that what is described could be a natural development or a moral or legal investigation.[140] In the later chapters, particularly those with the advocate, the word “Prozess” is generally replaced by “Verfahren”. This too can be both “court case” and “way of acting”. The emphasis has changed from passive to active, but the ambiguity remains. Similarly “verhaftet sein” can mean both “to be arrested” or “to be caught up or involved in something”. Such ambiguities appear to have been intended to intimate that even when the emphasis is so obviously on the legal and ethical, man is free to interpret what happens to him existentially too. A Nietzschean approach to life is as possible as a moralist one. Even the word “Gericht”: “court of justice” moves into the vicinity of “Richtung”: “direction” and “gerichtet sein”: “to be directed towards or at”, when it is used for instance by Miss Bürstner in close proximity to the word “Richtung”:

            Das Gericht hat eine eigentümliche Anziehungskraft, nicht? Aber ich werde in dieser

Richtung meine Kenntnisse sicher vervollständigen, denn ich trete nächsten Monat als Kanzleikraft in ein Advokatenbüro ein. (P 38)

Whether the additional implications of the chosen words are in all cases conscious is probably of little importance. Where they enrich the meaning they should be registered. All key words in Kafka’s prose must be read with a view to pun, though certainly not all possible puns will be meaningful ones. It would probably be wrong to attribute to the word “Aufseher”, “supervisor”, its other meaning of “he who looks up’. This sort of inconsistency, unavoidable in a work of such length, is what we might call with Silberer “Überdeckungsfehler”.[141]

            Summing up and fusing the various ambiguities is the abstraction “Gesetz”, “law”, the key word of the parable “Vor dem Gesetz”, which in its turn may be regarded as the key-stone of the novel. “Gesetz” can refer to any law: natural laws, moral laws such as the Thora, or even to the law of love. Does this mean that at the highest level of understanding distinctions become meaningless? And is this more of a triumph or a defeat?

            A further source of ambiguity is perspective. Where it is not just a neutral report, Kafka’s story is told from the point of view of Josef K. but the author does not identify himself with his protagonist. We know nothing that Josef K. does not know, always know less than he knows, and only occasionally have the privilege of being informed of his thoughts and opinions. We, the readers, are not competent to speak in terms of cause and effect because we do not possess the continuity of knowledge. We are not competent to judge Josef K.’s character either because our real world knowledge of him is very sparse and our understanding of the things he passes judgment on inadequate. In consequence, an emotionally formed reaction on the part of the reader must be very open to suspicion. Perspective is completely in the service of parabolic ambivalence.[142]

           

Another thing we will notice as we read the novel is that we can never be quite sure on which level to take it. A figure like the uncle will probably have justice done to it if it is taken primarily as comic relief. Some of the scenes in the bank too are adequately appreciated if seen as humorous realism or caricature. But one would certainly miss the point of figures like Leni, the advocate or the washerwoman if one emphasized caricature to the neglect of symbolism. The three young officials of the bank, Rabensteiner, Kullich and Kaminer, (reminiscent of the boarders in “Das Urteil”) seem obvious caricatures and yet we become more and more uneasy about them as in the course of the novel their importance as signs cannot be overlooked. Yet to find the link between their caricatures and their significance seems almost impossible. They remain a riddle that unnerves us in the same way that the inexplicable meeting of two worlds in some detail of everyday life can unnerve us.[143] Here one might say that Silberer’s “Überdeckungsfehler” themselves have become an artistic device with the objective of making the reader uncertain about how to take life.

It would seem strange that in a novel with such insistence on questions of judgment, of guilt and innocence, ambivalence should reign supreme and I think we are wrong if we accept this to be the case. The steppingstones which, if chosen carefully enough, should combine to become a path, appear in this novel to be suggestions or allusions. The likelihood of an allusion being significant can be supported by our prior knowledge of Kafka’s ideas and by the way it links up with other allusions. But we will never have proof, only probability, in favour of our interpretation. Once a coherent system of allusions is found, the reader overcomes to some extent the limitations imposed on him through being confined to Josef K.’s experience. He then has greater knowledge than K., so to speak, and may even feel free to pronounce a “condemned” or “redeemed” at the end in the face of Josef K.’s uncertainty. The effect of the novel as a whole in its combination of ambiguity and purposefulness is that of multidimensionality rather than confusion. A discussion of some of the techniques of the novel was necessary so that our interpretation might not be prematurely condemned as inconsistent in its approach to the material.

Like Die Verwandlung, Der Prozess begins with the metamorphosis of a business man. But in the novel this is far more complex. For one thing, the old life is not given up but runs parallel with the new. Then, the change is not nearly as tangible and far more gradual than that of Gredor Samsa. The end in each case is death, accepted as a necessity though not self-executed. The change Gregor Samsa undergoes remains in some way a puzzling mystery. The image is too dominant, the continuity of the story too complete, the initial shock too powerful. As with fairytale, we have no great desire to leave the story and investigate the underlying problem. It is enough that we see its shadow move behind the colourful screen, to give assurance of its presence. But the problem as such admits of, even calls for, differentiated treatment. This is probably why Kafka took up the theme again, this time moving it from the small family context to the wider one of society as a whole and, by forfeiting some of the mystery, making of what we called “the metaphysical animal in man” or the irrational in man a vaguer and more complex thing, more easily open to investigation.

Up to the point where the novel begins, Josef K. has been one of those intelligent, unproblematic, methodical people our civilization not infrequently brings forth, who call to mind computers, robots, machines rather than anything specifically human. Josef K.’s life is one that is earned and paid for in terms of money; he is an official of the Bank in the symbolic as well as the actual sense. He pays Mrs. Grubach for his room and has a right to his breakfast, he pays for his seat at the “Stammtisch” or club which meets at regular intervals, he pays for his sex with Elsa, his outings seem to be in the service of business diplomacy (the sailing trip to which his enemy, the Assistant Director, invites him is an example), his cultural interests are also dictated by diplomacy (“das Entscheidende aber war, […] dass K. eine Zeitlang, übrigens auch nur aus geschäftlichen Gründen, Mitglied des Vereins zur Erhaltung der städtischen Kunstdenkmäler gewesen war.” P 239). When therefore one morning the due breakfast does not arrive, this is almost enough to shatter Josef K.’s world and at the first court session his impassioned harangue is actually in defence of economic stability and the illegality of theft. It is the banker speaking and the inhumanity of his mechanical sense of justice does not become clear to him until he witnesses the chastisement of the warders in the storeroom of the bank.

It is difficult to describe exactly what change takes place in Josef K. with his sense of arrest. It appears to be the awakening of imagination to the point of hallucination, the awakening of conscience to replace the sense of legality we spoke of earlier, the awakening of love to replace mere sex. The bedroom in which the initial awakening takes place suggests the preponderance of dream. Mrs. Grubach’s living room (almost bare of useful furniture) yet stuffed full of knick-knacks, the sort of things the people from the flats keep in the attics that are the headquarters of the law courts, suggest perhaps the useless material generally repressed in the unconscious and now suddenly cluttering up the mind. Miss Bürstner’s room, where the arrest is officially confirmed, seems to point to the likelihood that the roots of this sudden awakening lie in love.

What happens to Josef K. is that he exchanges an unproblematic existence for a problematic one, and naïve self-assurance for what one might call a sense of sin. From this point of view his experience is comparable to the Fall of original man and as though to make this point, Kafka lets Josef K. eat an apple instead of his breakfast on the first morning. But K.’s state of innocence is by no means that perfect naturalness and organic wholeness generally attributed to original man and found in some measure in the innocent child. Josef K. is one of those people who appear never to have been a child. In the novel he has no real parents; Mrs. Grubach and the Uncle, who was apparently his guardian, are but poor substitutes. Tellingly, he cannot find his birth-certificate to legitimize himself and proffers a cyclist’s licence instead. Every German who hears the word “Radfahrerlegitimation” will immediately think of the colloquial meaning of “radfahren”, namely bowing to those above and kicking those below with a view to making progress. This is the normal behaviour of a typical official, one might say; with Josef K. it seems to have replaced life. The haunting curiosity of the old couple later joined by the powerful young man who appears to be their son, which pursues Josef K. throughout the first chapters, seems to be an unwelcome reminder of the existence of parents and sons. Josef K. then refuses to face the son who comes out to meet him. K. seems only half to exist, as though grown of a cell that had not been fertilized, living a pre-human life of its own, by now no longer capable of merging with his other half, whether that be his suppressed self or the woman whose love could fulfill him. His personality remains split as in schizophrenia. Duality, of course, is the essence of human life to which our dual origin, our dual sex, our dual experience of the world as night and day, high and low, rich and poor etc. (all these contrasts are significant in the novel) testify. For Josef K. the possibility of this full existence might have been given in love. But the opportunity is missed.

            That love of, or even marriage with Miss Bürstner was a genuine possibility is suggested by means of symbols in the first scene of her room. The white blouse indicates purity, if not chastity, the photos on the wall seem to prove that she has had experiences of value to her and friends whom she does not forget. This speaks for her eligibility. On the bedside table, which is used for the hearing, a book suggests knowledge or culture, the pincushion sex, the candle the flame of love, and the matches the sparks to light it. None of the essentials seem missing. The following scene confirms this impression. Miss Bürstner is described as a graceful and attractive person, neat and tidy, yet with the exuberance of youth: her hat is small but decorated with an abundance of flowers, her soft reddish hair is firmly caught at the back. She is intelligent with a kind of humorous alertness as her reaction to K.’s confession of his arrest shows, reserved without being prudish, keen to learn (“ich möchte alles wissen” P 37) with an interest in matters concerning the law strong enough to cause her to seek work in a lawyer’s office. Potentially, she could be of help to K. there too. But the meeting is ill-fated even though Mrs. Grubach’s slander has not put K. off. Miss Bürstner is very tired after a night at the theatre, K. too excited after the experiences of the day and the long wait to be duly considerate, and this lack of consideration coupled with K.’s self-centredness leads to disaster when he calls out his own name too loudly. Hauptmann Lanz next door is alerted and knocks on the wall, K., upset by this, gives way to passion and Miss Bürstner in her turn can do nothing but withdraw from him. The narrow morality of the bourgeois world surrounding them has broken into their private sphere to destroy it. Hauptmann Lanz causes Josef K. to fear for Miss Bürstner. Later, it is then for “Tischler Lanz” that K. asks when he is in search of the law-court to which he has been summoned, perhaps to defend himself against the sort of accusation Lanz would have made in the matter.

            Josef K. himself sees nothing reprehensible in his behaviour towards Miss Bürstner: „er dachte eine Weile über sein Verhalten nach, er war damit zufrieden, wunderte sich aber, dass er nicht noch zufriedener war.“ (P 43) After this episode Miss Montag, an unattractive young school teacher, who is apparently on good terms with the Hauptmann, moves in with Miss Bürstner. Privacy becomes impossible, the school teachers have the day, the workaday world (Monday) takes over Miss Bürstner’s life too. The Hauptmann (translated literally: “main man”) whose name “Lanz”, lance, bears a dual allusion to masculinity, is apparently the type of man whom Miss Bürstner must eventually choose. This seems to be the end of the relationship though a surprising and perhaps misguided reference to Miss Bürstner is made in one of the later chapters (“das Verhältnis zu Fräulein Bürstner schien entsprechend dem Prozess zu schwanken.” P 152). Only the last chapter brings back a memory of her. (Two mentions in the fragments, P 292 and 303, may be disregarded.)

            Once the possibility of love has been forfeited or lost (to what extent the guilt lies with K. and to what extent it lies with the world remains a moot point), the newly awakened irrational falls apart and becomes disturbing. Here a reading on several levels must begin: one moment we will speak about the law courts as hallucinations, the next as symbols, then again as everyday realities. None of these versions can be seen as having exclusive validity. The confusion and uncertainty is the artistic echo of K.’s state of mind.

            As Josef K.’s personality falls apart, hallucinations start interfering with normal reality;  the imagination runs amok. The scene of the flogging in the storeroom of the bank is certainly hallucinatory in character, but the same can probably be said of all the scenes that take place in the realm of the attics and the scene of arrest could quite easily be accounted for as a dream. A preponderance of the imagination verging on insanity goes hand in hand with loss of concentration – try as he will, K. can no longer give adequate attention to his work in the bank – and with physical infirmity. After a walk through the attics during which he nearly faints, K. wonders: „Solche Überraschungen hatte ihm sein sonst ganz gefestigter Gesundheitszustand noch nie bereitet. Wollte etwa sein Körper revolutionieren und ihm einen neuen Prozess bereiten, da er den alten so mühelos ertrug?“ (P 92). This clinical picture is  confirmed by the fact that so many of those that move in the spheres of the court or in their vicinity are either sick like the Advocate, or obsessed men, cowed and wasting their lives like the clients in the corridors. K. however, is alert to these dangers and not willing to succumb to them. The way we must trace for him is not what Silberer would call the retrograde but the anagogic.

            With the initial arrest goes a feeling of degradation. Simple working-class people suddenly become K.’s superiors, like the guards Franz and Willem; there comes a feeling of being neglected (no breakfast), under observation (the old couple at the window), the object of a conspiracy or joke. All this almost immediately crystallizes in a sense of guilt, grown from this feeling of estrangement from the world and not from a knowledge of guilt.[144] It is K. who keeps on insisting that he is being indicted while at the same time protesting his innocence; the guards themselves and later the supervisor know of no accusation, only of the order of arrest. Miss Bürstner too is incredulous at the mention of any tangible guilt though she hesitates to proclaim him innocent. It appears that the sense of sin or guilt is the primary thing and almost co-extensive with loss of security; guilt itself, though probably existent, is far harder to pinpoint. While there is no sense of sin nothing will appear like guilt; with a sense of sin even the smallest error of tact or caution can appear to be guilt. This is a version of the psychology of the Fall. It is not unlike Kierkegaard’s who characterizes the state of insecurity as “Angst” (dread) though Kafka’s perceptions are almost certainly not influenced by Kierkegaard. Guilt as an objective reality is difficult to define. But Josef K. with his sense of guilt and conviction of innocence wants to know what guilt is. He realizes that his trial is only a trial insofar as he recognizes it as such: “es ist ja nur ein Verfahren, wenn ich es als solches anerkenne. Aber ich erkenne es also für den Augenblick jetzt an, aus Mitleid gewissermaßen.“ (P 55) “Mitleid” here, apart from its concescending surface meaning, is probably intended to convey the sense of responsibility which one sufferer feels for all fellow sufferers. The only thing that can help is revelation of a law applicable to all men.

            The first intimation of values comes from Mrs. Grubach who is suspicious of Miss Bürstner because she has seen her walking in the streets with two different young men, and from her nephew Hauptmann Lanz. This is the narrowest form of bourgeois propriety, quite unacceptable to Josef K.. Following on this, comes K.’s citation to the law courts. These courts are situated in the attics of large tenement houses on the outskirts of town. The tenants themselves use the attics to store superfluous possessions – as one uses the unconscious to store unwanted experiences and knowledge – and to dry their washing – as one uses the unconscious to purify experiences. (The woman in the ante-room of the court-room is busy washing.) They are described on a Sunday morning as happy, natural, friendly, uninhibited people: “Männer in Hemdärmeln”, “kleine Kinder”, “Bettzeug”, „der zerraufte Kopf einer Frau“, „vor einer Pumpe ein schwaches junges Mädchen in einer Nachtjoppe“. „Manche Frauen hielten Säuglinge im Arm und arbeiteten mit der freien Hand auf dem Herd. Halbwüchsige, scheinbar nur mit Schürzen bekleidete Mädchen liefen am fleißigsten hin und her. In allen Zimmern standen die Betten noch in Benützung, es lagen dort Kranke oder noch Schlafende oder Leute, die sich dort in Kleidern streckten“ (P 50). These people are only too willing to help Josef K. find Tischler Lanz though they have never heard of him. The washerwoman however, at home in the attics, knows straight away what is meant. In the attics of these happy, natural people the first court session takes place. We never hear of Mrs. Grubach’s house in which K. is at home having an attic; K. must go to attics that are foreign to him. As indicated, the attic in its symbolic significance seems, insofar as it is a storeroom for unwanted material, to suggest the sub- or unconscious; insofar as it is not the cellar of the house (“Unterbewusstsein” and “Tiefenpsychologie” call to mind depth) but the highest part, the attics can suggest “das Höhere”, a sublimated or religious unconscious or a collective unconscious that evokes reminiscences of Jung, though an actual influence can not be proved.

            Only one storey below the attics and already within the precincts of the courts, an assembly of men headed by a judge is awaiting the defendant, Josef K.. The judge, a fat jovial little man, obviously Josef K.’s intellectual inferior, is hardly able to control the assembly, still less the accused. The scene constantly rouses our sense of the ridiculous, jeopardizing its own dignity. How can we remain serious at the thought of those on the gallery padding the ceiling above their heads with cushions brought for that purpose! It is disturbing that Josef K. takes it so seriously, particularly as we suspect lack of humour rather than politeness to be the cause. The childishness of it all is pointed out by the fact that a little boy is K.’s guide into the room and the judge’s books are grubby school exercise books. The title of one of the law books “Die Plagen welche Grete von ihrem Manne Hans zu erleiden hatte” suggest a chap book or a popular Punch and Judy puppet play; the pornographic picture shows such lack of skill that naivety characterizes it rather than indecency.

Ein Mann und eine Frau saßen nackt auf einem Kanapee, die gemeine Absicht des Zeichners war deutlich zu erkennen, aber seine Ungeschicklichkeit war so groß gewesen, dass schließlich doch nur ein Mann und eine Frau zu sehen waren, die allzu körperlich aus dem Bilde hervorragten, übermäßig aufrecht dasaßen und sich infolge falscher Perspektive nur mühsam einander zuwendeten. P.67.

It is in this way that children might talk about sex, their ignorance and innocence thwarting their curiosity about the indecent. The front rows are occupied by the wise old men with long white beards who are a feature of all primordial gatherings, be they in African villages or Jewish synagogues. All wear badges as a sign of community. Though there are apparently two parties, the distinction seems to be a random one. It is clear that the verdict of such a court can hardly mean much to a man like K. It is the cultic crystallization of the unconscious communal conscience of very simple people whose original innocence is that of children and not as with K. that of the machine.[145] He has very little in common with them. He is not self-sufficient as they are but in need of the completion only a partner in love can give.  Before Josef K. finally leaves their realm, he searches it for love. The washerwoman, however, is capable of love only within her own horizon; though K. fascinates her, he has  no power over her. Her love is love of all that belongs to the courts of law (so crudely erotic that it conflicts with her marriage), an inept attempt at love of “the law” which Miss Bürstner possesses in the sublimated form of a passionate interest and desire to know.[146] The young girl who resides in the attics permanently has an air of nun-like severity about her and is not an object of desire (the washerwoman lives on the storey below the attics). From a psychological point of view, this young girl could be described as completely introverted, from a social aspect she is probably meant to symbolize the spiritual life of the votary or nun.

            The closest Josef K. comes to finding a personal attic is when he discovers the storeroom in the bank, significantly at night after regular banking hours. It is cluttered with the characteristic gear of the writer: “unbrauchbare, alte Drucksorten, weggeworfene leere irdene Tintenflaschen lagen hinter der Schwelle” (p.103). In it the flogging of Franz and Willem takes place. Their transgression was, it will be remembered, against the stability of an economically conceived world. In the strict sense, they had been guilty of theft, though tradition had always condoned such thieving. Here it seems worth noticing that while Josef K. bears the initial of Kafka’s surname, the warder Franz bears his Christian name, as though he were Kafka’s real self. The name Willem in turn could suggest the word “Willen”, “will-power”. We are encouraged to ask whether in contrast with the people in the tenement houses, who repress experience or knowledge – acquired articles with which they might have furnished their homes –  Josef K., the bank official, suppresses tendencies within his nature that amount to his true self and the will-power with which he might have created a life for himself, because these tendencies would conflict with mechanical efficiency. The cruel flagellation of these suppressed tendencies takes place with the help of pen, ink and print at nights, in some neglected corner of the public sphere. Is this to be understood as a skit on Kafka’s own life as an official and writer, on the sort of thing he described himself as doing in the Sancho Pansa fable? Certainly the presentation is harsher than Kafka deserved and Josef K.’s reaction, in consequence, differs from Kafka’s own. The ultimate aim of these storeroom figures is authority in order to exert cruelty, to become “Prügler”, authority figures in the worst sense of the word.

            To come to another facet of the names: the biblical Josef was the Jew functioning as economist and functionary for a foreign power (be it ancient Egypt or the Austrian Empire) much like Kafka, Franz is the man who wants to marry while in reality no bride is waiting for him, again Kafka. The banker K. between his two guards (they, just as he, figures of the public sphere) is Franz Josef Willem, combining the names of the highest representatives of the German-speaking world of the time, the Emperors Franz-Josef and Wilhelm of Austria and Germany respectively. Did Kafka intend Josef K. to be a symbol of the individual within the German civilization of the time, as well as a symbol of himself? It would explain the apparent harshness of self-criticism, for the reader’s impression of the scene of the flogging is of uncontrolled sadism or masochism.

            K’s next step towards finding an acceptable verdict is dictated by his uncle and former guardian who takes him to his old friend, the Advocate Huld, the word “Huld” meaning grace with an undertone of condescension, the favour with which a potentate might honour a subordinate. Huld is the master who would have his clients believe that his own prowess and his personal connections with the upper worlds of the law-courts are sufficient to save the accused. He reigns, not with worldly power but with the tyranny of the invalid to whom the utmost respect and consideration must be given by all who do not wish to become his murderer. As the Uncle is the prototype of the father as the unaffectionate, self-centred autocrat, still posing as guardian to a grown man, so Huld is the prototype of the spiritual father who, far from being prepared to release his son to spititual majority when the time comes, does all he can to increase his dependence. This becomes more than obvious in the ill-timed scene with Block, where the merchant receives and accepts treatment no better than a dog would get, in order that the sight might arouse in K. the instincts of the son, or rather the slave. Insofar as Huld is the great master, he represents all masters of monastic orders or religious sects who hold absolute authority. Block’s confinement in the cell-like room where he is intended to study incomprehensible texts in virtual darkness is reminiscent of monastic discipline. But more than the abbot, Huld is the great charlatan who, like a spider in his web, catches clients to suck their blood. His own account of the inefficacy of his intervention or lack of intervention, the fact that none of his contentions can ever be verified, make it hard to believe that he is himself unaware of the false nature of his pretensions. But Huld is not to be simply dismissed, for he poses the more serious problem whether one individual’s knowledge of things of the mind and the spirit can ever be of real use to another and whether personal relationships are reliable. Loyalties to different friends can clash. Who will guarantee, thinks Josef K., that the interests of the clients will always be given precedence over the interests of the judges? He does the unheard-of thing and leaves Huld.

            While Huld exercises the tyranny of the invalid, his nurse, Leni, in whom K. has been far more interested than in her master from the very start, exercises the tyranny of the nurse who sees in the man somebody in need of help and herself prescribes the help that is to be given. She insists that she cannot help K. until he humbles himself and admits his guilt, a thing which K. is not prepared to do, more especially as Leni does not love him but rather the class of accused men as such. All those who have in some way lost their self-esteem and have admitted their neediness by coming to the Advocate are attractive to her. With her webbed fingers she is the mermaid both as seductress and as the cold, power-hungry woman, out to humiliate and ultimately destroy victims like Block. Realizing how hopelessly ineffective Huld’s defence has been, K. decides to take up his own defence by writing a report justifying the main actions of his life.

Er wollte […] eine kurze Lebensbeschreibung vorlegen und bei jedem irgendwie wichtigeren Ereignis erklären, aus welchen Gründen er so gehandelt hatte, ob diese Handlungsweise nach seinem gegenwärtigen Urteil zu verwerfen oder zu billigen war und welche Gründe er für dieses oder jenes anführen konnte (P 137).

But he finds it hard to know where to begin; work in the office prevents him from making a start at a time when this might have been possible; he considers setting aside the nights for this purpose and if necessary taking leave for a while. (Night-work and long periods of leave made possible by his illness were Kafka’s own solution to the problem in later years.) Josef K. never gets further than planning his own defence.

               A new suggestion for a source of help comes from a factory owner who is a client of the bank. To the first court session K. was sent indirectly by a member of the lower middle classes, Hauptmann Lanz, to the Advocate by his middle-class uncle. The painter Titorelli is suggested to him by a member of the rich bourgeoisie. Titorelli’s attitude to his clients is deferential, he depends on them for support; but he is also an intelligent and able man who has no desire to waste time. The information he gives is brief and concise. There are three types of solutions: a clear acquittal, an apparent acquittal and indefinite postponement of the case. A clear acquittal is theoretically possible but there is no known precedent. Apparent acquittals have the advantage of giving the accused a period of virtual freedom before a new arrest is made. Postponement is achieved by keeping the case apparently moving but never allowing it to proceed to any critical point. For both solutions Titorelli’s personal connections with the judges are of use, he claims. Judging retrospectively, it appears as though a decision of the first court could  at best have meant apparent acquittal and as though Huld’s endeavours had aimed consistently at postponement. Josef K., however, wants the verdict of innocence; as matters stand, the painter cannot help him other than by explaining the state of affairs.

But in return for this information, K. is forced to take a closer look at the life of the painter. Titorelli lives in a little annex to the court rooms, stifling and airtight as these, again an ivory tower existence. The room is actually a passage to the rooms of the Court but Titorelli has blocked the door that leads to them with his bed. Faced with the necessity of blocking one of the doors, he left that to the outside world open. The judges whom he paints generally enter by climbing over his bed, which may be understood as an allusion to dream. K. finds the hot, soft bed, in which he is forced to relax, most distasteful; he has no desire for semi-conscious reverie. Titorelli strikes him in one way as repulsive, in another way like a refreshing cold bath. He is the craftsman whose trade is inherited along with its secrets, much as artistic talents are inherited. He holds a court position by nature, not by choice and while taking the court and all connected with it for granted, is free to view it with critical detachment, even cynicism, a cynism probably transmitted through generations. Much like K., Titorelli has only a partial existence, his sphere being the courts, as K.’s is the bank. To accentuate this he seems to have lost his real name, much like K. who has but the initial of Kafka’s surname while Kafka’s Christian name has been split off for the guard Franz. Titorelli’s only known name is an artist’s pseudonym. Like K., Titorelli is presumably at the pinnacle of a certain class of mentally and vitally impoverished people. Titorelli’s existence grows out of what is unclean. Rats and stinking refuse along with crippled and perverse children characterize his tenement building as against the wholesome naturalness of the first such building K. was led to. The creative vision which an erotic attraction to youth can engender in the artist becomes impossible where youth is stunted and unnatural. Eroticism is no longer the creative power it was for a creative nation like the Greeks; it has become a superficial and distracting worry, something that is neither physically nor mentally satisfying. When Titorelli comes home at night he finds the girls hidden under, not in his bed.[147]

            In consequence, Titorelli’s art is the art of meaninglessness and frustration. In his official capacity he paints, as his name suggest, people elevated by titles and he does so in the grand Italian style. Poor little judges sitting on kitchen chairs are enthroned in majesty on his portraits. He who, as no other, has insight into the falseness and subterfuge of the courts is, ironically, responsible for spreading the image of their grandeur. In his private capacity, Titorelli is the painter of the sterility and impoverishment of nature. His landscapes all show the same scene: sunset, a barren heath, and two spindly trees far apart. Typical paintings of the Worpswede school of painters that influenced Rilke so strongly could come to mind.  The “waste land” atmosphere was characteristic of much of the art of the early 20^th century, including Kafka’s.

            Josef K. is already acquainted with Titorelli’s judges through the Advocate. For the heath landscapes he has been prepared and they mean little to him. New and revealing is Titorelli’s vision of Justice in its dubious relation to Victory.

„Es ist die Gerechtigkeit,“ sagte der Maler schließlich. „Jetzt erkenne ich sie schon,“ sagte K. „Hier ist die Binde um die Augen und hier die Waage. Aber sind nicht an den Füßen Flügel und befindet sie sich nicht im Lauf?“ „Ja“, sagte der Maler, „ich musste es über Auftrag so malen, es ist eigentlich die Gerechtigkeit und die Siegesgöttin in einem.“ „Das ist keine gute Verbindung,“ sagte K. lächelnd,“die Gerechtigkeit muss ruhen sonst schwankt die Waage, und es ist kein gerechtes Urteil möglich.“ (p. 176) [...] K. sah zu, wie unter den zitternden Spitzen der Stifte anschließend an den Kopf des Richters ein rötlicher Schatten sich bildete, der strahlenförmig gegen den Rand des Bildes verging. Allmählich umgab dieses Spiel des Schattens den Kopf wie ein Schmuck oder eine hohe Auszeichnung. Um die Figur der Gerechtigkeit aber blieb es bis auf eine unmerkliche Tönung hell, in dieser Helligkeit schien die Figur besonders vorzudringen, sie erinnerte kaum mehr an die Göttin der Gerechtigkeit, aber auch nicht an die des Sieges, sie sah jetzt vielmehr vollkommen wie die Göttin der Jagd aus. (p.177)

Justice belongs to the realm of impartiality and timelessness. It is too simple a measure for the eternally moving stuff of life. We speak of the final victory of Justice, “der Sieg der Gerechtigkeit”, but since justice is not a concept that can be realized in a temporal world, the victory of justice becomes “justice is with the victor”. He who wins determines what justice is. But the victor with his justice is the hunter of all those who do not conform to his vision. The pursuit of justice becomes a hunt as the sunset gleam of blood begins to surround the judge’s head. This depiction corroborates the impression of justice we have gained in the course of the novel. It explains why there can be no such thing as innocence, no such thing as acquittal, why it is impossible for the individual to justify himself or to know where to begin and end such a justification because it would be refuted by each new minute of life. Justice can be but obedience to the standards one has decided to accept or has been forced to accept. (K. does not finally give up the Advocate till after his talk with Titorelli). Ironically, the notion of the hunt is taken up again by the huntress Leni who accuses the people in the bank of hounding K. (“sie hetzen dich”, P 244) when the Director asks K. to take a guest through the Cathedral.[148] It is characteristic of the hunt that the hunters all accuse each other of being hunters.

            The logical conclusion now would be to cease thinking in terms of guilt and innocence and to accept life as being “Jenseits von Gut und Böse” (Nietzsche). But K. cannot simply lose his sense of sin. He again allows himself to be drawn into the realm of the courts. Though ostensibly he has come to take an Italian visitor around the Cathedral, the deeper, now unconscious attraction of the church is due to his desire to be justified. The Prison Chaplain points this out:

„Ich habe dich hierher rufen lassen,“ sagte der Geistliche, „um mit dir zur sprechen.“ „Ich wusste es nicht,“ sagte K. „Ich bin hierher gekommen um einem Italiener den Dom zu zeigen.“ „Lass das Nebensächliche,“ sagte der Geistliche. (P 252)  

  

This time K. is sent by the Director of the Bank, an old, ailing, highly cultured, tactful and kind gentleman who understands K. and his needs intuitively. We realize on the instant that this man is the real spiritual father of K. and stands closer to him than anyone else we have met in the novel. By sending K. on an errand he had himself intended to go on and would have been able to see to better than K., for his knowledge of both Italian and art was greater, he makes K. his mental and spiritual successor, as the Assistant director is his worldly successor, for this has now become clear. K. however is too blind to realize this and still regrets his loss of working time at the bank because at this stage it can only mean loss of power and prestige. The Director is the old father who willingly and freely hands over to the son, aware of both the honour he is bestowing and the hardship he is inflicting. He apologizes to K. but without justifying himself. The apology can only aim at the fact of the two successors, a sign that the world is falling apart or has fallen apart into spiritual and worldly spheres. But it is obvious that the sympathy of the Director lies with K. and not with the Assistant Director. He has bequeathed to K. his better though less attractive half. But K. is not a promising heir, for apart from having less knowledge and experience than the Director, he is also by now a sick man, suffering from a serious chill. The sad thing is that all this does not matter much; there is no call for a spiritual successor, as the Italian visitor has no genuine interest in art. First he requests to see only the Cathedral and then he does not even turn up there. After his departure K. and the Director remain, two defeated men. With the Titorelli episode K., whose interest in “art” had originally been directed by business ambitions, had become too deeply involved with it to free himself again.

            In contrast to the overcrowded court-rooms, the giant Cathedral is empty except for the verger and an old woman kneeling in front of a statue of Mary. She later disappears too. This building, roomy and airy enough to hold the largest congregation, harbouring ancient and genuine art and religion, no longer attracts people. Moreover, it gradually becomes steeped in darkness. A random flash of K.’s torch reveals a knight leaning on a sword he has plunged into barren ground. Is it in order that the sword may become a plough shear? He remains at the very edge of the picture observing the scene but for some strange reason not attempting to take part in it. Perhaps, K. thinks, he was intended to stand guard. The scene the knight was observing turns out to have been an entombment of Christ, a conventional conception of the subject and a recent painting. What should a knight of justice, a “Ritter der Gerechtigkeit”, do in the face of the stereotypical claim of our century that Christ is dead? Obviously there must be other paintings of Christ in the Cathedral: the birth, the life, the resurrection, the ascension, but in the darkness K. does not see them. The great pulpit conveys no more definite knowledge. Its roof is adorned with two empty golden crosses, meeting to make a third. Are they empty because Christ is no reality or because he has risen? Or do the crosses of the two condemned men crucified with Christ, one a repentant the other an unrepenting sinner, one representing Christ’s triumph the other Christ’s failure, combine to create the cross of Christ? The crosses are semi-prostrate; because they are rising or because they are falling? The supporting column of the pulpit grows out of the simpler manifestations of life and the spirit: a tangle of green leaves into which little angels grasp. But behind these there is impenetrable darkness; K. tries to feel his way through one of the gaps to what is behind. What happens to religion, we might ask, once the naïve stage is passed?

            The pulpit from which the Prison Chaplain addresses K. is a smaller one, unsuited for its purpose, built as though to torture the preacher. Only an ascetic would consent to use it. It is more like a niche intended for the statue of a saint than a pulpit, and the Prison Chaplain is in some way both saint and statue. Justice, Kafka’s novel seems to be telling us, is not a category of life but of a timeless beyond-life and the wisdom that comes with justice is not the wisdom of life.[149] The Chaplain’s parable, intense with meaning though it may seem, has no easy applicability to life. We are reminded here of what Kafka himself said about parables in another place.

Viele beklagen sich, dass die Worte der Weisen immer wieder nur Gleichnisse seien, aber unverwendbar im täglichen Leben, und nur dieses allein haben wir. Wenn der Weise sagt: „Gehe hinüber,“ so meint er nicht, dass man auf die andere Seite hinübergehen solle, was man immerhin noch leisten könnte, wenn das Ergebnis des Weges wert wäre, sondern er meint irgendein sagenhaftes Drüben, etwas, das wir nicht kennen, das auch von ihm nicht näher zu bezeichnen ist und das uns also hier garnichts helfen kann. Alle diese Gleichnisse wollen eigentlich nur sagen, dass das Unfassbare unfassbar ist, und das haben wir gewusst. Aber das, womit wir uns jeden Tag abmühen, sind andere Dinge.

Darauf sagte einer: „Warum wehrt ihr euch? Würdet ihr den Gleichnissen folgen, dann wäret ihr selbst Gleichnisse geworden und damit schon der täglichen Mühe frei.“

Ein anderer sagte: „Du hast gewonnen.“

Der zweite sagte: „Aber leider nur im Gleichnis.“

Der erste sagte: „Nein, in Wirklichkeit; im Gleichnis hast du verloren.“ (BeK 96)

Parable with its apparent fixedness of form but endless circling of ideas, opinions, supposed solutions as soon as a question is put to it, is the perfect expression of the simultaneity of timeless and everyday worlds. Both are accessible to men separately but it seems impossible to live in both worlds at once. You can be either the saint or the knight, either the worldly-wise Josef of the spiritually wise Chaplain, either the “Geistlicher” or “Mann des Geistes”. If you are the saint you are a just man, but if you are the knight you will by nature be sinful.[150] The Chaplain from his point of view beyond the prison cell of the world in which all men are accused men can say, almost with certainty, that by rights Josef K. must be guilty.

Man hält dich für schuldig, Dein Prozess wird vielleicht über ein niedriges Gericht gar nicht hinauskommen. Man hält wenigstens vorläufig deine Schuld für erwiesen. (p.252)

The low courts are those we have encountered all through the novel which judge according to the shifting concepts of worldly justice. They will almost certainly condemn K.. But what would be the verdict of a high court if K. could bring his case before it? Among K.’s last words in dying is the question: „Wo war das hohe Gericht bis zu dem er nie gekommen war?“ (P 272)

            Even to the Chaplain, K. cannot admit guilt. “Ich bin aber nicht schuldig, es ist ein Irrtum. Wie kann denn ein Mensch überhaupt schuldig sein. Wir sind hier doch alle Menschen, einer wie der andere.“ (P 253) This is what K. has learnt from Titorelli. The concepts of guilt and innocence are not applicable to the everyday world. And the Chaplain from his point of view says: „Das ist richtig, aber so pflegen die Schuldigen zu reden.“ (P 253) He insists, however, that he is not prejudiced against K.. Personally he has reached no verdict. The parable which he tells K. and which he interprets variously at great length seems to include both the verdicts of the lower and the higher courts. According to the lower courts, the man from the country must obey the doorkeepers: the Judge, the Advocate, the Painter and the Chaplain.[151] But this does not bring him any closer to the light of the law. The best that can happen is that death brings a brief vision of it. But surely the judgment of the higher court must take into consideration only the earnestness with which the light is desired.[152] For the higher courts the command of the doorkeepers has little relevance. We had already heard from Huld how little respect the advocates are given. From Block we learnt that the efforts of Huld aimed at avoiding the scales of justice.

“Für den Verdächtigen ist Bewegung besser als Ruhe, denn der, welcher ruht, kann immer, ohne es zu wissen, auf einer Waagschale sein und mit seinen Sünden gewogen werden.“ K. sagte nichts, er staunte nur mit unbeweglichen Augen diesen verwirrten Menschen an. (P 230)

For K. it is incredible that anyone should wish to avoid justice, although if there is no such thing as true justice, he is willing to discard a false sense of justice. (P 254)  As K. himself at every point rejects the lower courts for the sake of a higher ideal, we feel that in spite of his inadequacies he should be eligible to be tried by the higher courts. That the Chaplain does not see this, shows that eventually he too was a door-keeper. It is his advice to K. to avoid women that labels him as such. It is not acceptable to K.

           

“Du suchst zu viel fremde Hilfe,“ sagte der Geistliche missbilligend, „und besonders bei Frauen. Merkst du denn nicht, dass es nicht die wahre Hilfe ist?“ „Manchmal und sogar oft könnte ich dir recht geben,“ sagte K., „aber nicht immer. Die Frauen haben eine große Macht.” (p. 253)

But when he accuses all judges of being interested in nothing but women he too is wrong, having in mind only the lower courts for some of which this may hold good. The cry of the Chaplain “Siehst du denn nicht zwei Schritte weit,” rouses him. While K. may be right about the importance of women, the particular use he would put them to is wrong. This recognition comes at the very end of the novel after he has left the Chaptain too, when it becomes possible for him to let Miss Bürstner pass without desiring her or her help. Was she the last gate-keeper K. meets? Does the achievement of passing a certain number of gate-keepers die with each man or can it be handed on like a torch? Is the person who stretches his hands out to the dying K. from a lighted window high and far away one who will carry on? Or is it the friend waiting within the law for those who have gone the way intended for them?

            Though we, the readers, may usurp the powers of the highest court and acquit K. on the grounds that he has gone as well as he could along the path intended for him, K. himself dies in far greater uncertainty. His final walk to his death is full of repentance.[153] At first his instincts were to fight death; but a vision of Miss Bürstner, or someone who reminds him of Miss Bürstner, drives home to him the senselessness of resistance. Having lost her as a result of his impatience, possessiveness and selfishness, he has given up life. Now the best he can do is to remain self-possessed to the end and considerate towards those accompanying him. His sin is that of “impatience”: according to Kafka’s aphorism the original sin. “Ich wollte immer mit zwanzig Händen in die Welt hineinfahren und überdies zu einem nicht zu billigenden Zweck. Das war unrichtig.” (P 269) He feels that he ought to condemn himself to death and commit suicide but is too weak to do so, if this be weakness as he thinks it is.[154] We know that Kafka distinguished two types of people, those whose attitudes led them in the direction of celibacy and suicide, a condemnation of life and the body of which the Chaplain might have been capable, and those whose ideals were marriage and sacrifice. Josef K. belongs to the latter group and he is slaughtered almost like a sacrificial animal upon an altar (even though his pose there is not quite natural). His last words are “like a dog”. In the hour of his death K. is no better than the despised Block with his dog-like submissiveness. But unlike Block, he is ashamed and the ambiguous last sentence makes us wonder whether a man’s shame over his imperfections is not the eternal and surviving part of him, the essentially positive element in his nature.: “Es war, als sollte die Scham ihn überleben.” (P 272)[155]

            The last scene is again a masterpiece of symbolization in the vein specific to Kafka. The two executioners who call for Josef K. vaguely bring back a memory of the original guards, Franz and Willem.  In their black suits, with their impeccable manners and attempts to cover up business with tactfulness they suggest funeral parlour men. Their almost disgusting cleanliness, their insistence on regarding the live K. as a mere object and their use of the knife suggest surgeons performing an operation with a fatal outcome. All the associations that go with a civilized death are there to mingle with our impression of primitive cruelty.

            Throughout our interpretation we have spoken of Der Prozess as a novel, simply because no other classification seemed to offer itself. In doing so, we must keep in mind, however, that it is by no means a typical novel, mainly because the continuity is to be sought not in the logic of events but in the logic of symbol and truth. Emotional intensity is not what matters but intellectual plausibility. Therefore attempts like Uyttersprot’s and Richter’s relying on the premise of conventional narrative logic are doomed to failure.[156] It would not be right to speak of Kafka’s specific form of continuity as unrealistic, for as modes of experiencing meaning, both the continuity of event and of symbol can assume importance and therefore both can, with equal justification, be stylized to a literary form. It is also a fact of life that Kafka gives expression to by means of his literary craft, that the more important symbols we encounter are often barely visible and go virtually unnoticed while the less important make much of themselves and often have far more immediate emotional force. In a novel such as Der Prozess, emotion is not a criterion for truth.

            It would therefore be wrong to object that the symbols suggesting K.’s relationship to Miss Bürstner have such little emotional force, in spite of the fact that Miss Bürstner is in some way the key figure of the book. The possibility she suggests is never fully grasped by K.. The reader too must use his imagination to complement the sparse pointers. One might attempt to define Miss Bürstner’s importance by suggesting that in the love she might have been capable of offering K., Eros and Ethos would not have fallen apart into separate pursuits but remained one. The novel ends on a note of resignation or uncertainty which seems at moments to blur the vision of the “true way” it also contains. That is because the positive potential of life, namely love, never becomes convincingly clear. This is Kafka’s human limitation rather than an artistic flaw. His love for Felice was clearly not strong and comprehensive enough to give reality to Kafka’s vision of a perfect love. But a weakness of the novel it does remain, for as a result of the sketchiness of the positive vision the universality of the novel suffers and tragedy is replaced by an impression of human inadequacy. Just as the problem of the animal in man was not really sufficiently defined in Die Verwandlung, so the problem of the helping grace of love is hardly more than touched on in Der Prozess. Kafka took up both topics again in later works, the first in Bericht an eine Akademie, the second in his last great novel Das Schloss, with a new love to guide him. Probably as a result of the inadequate conception of the love story, Josef K.’s development from the bank automaton to the mature and pious man never really takes shape. Josef K. is lifeless in a way that the K. of Das Schloss no longer is.[157] But the optimistic vision of love on which the earlier novel relies is almost shattered in The Castle. In spite of its limitations, it could be argued that Der Prozess is Kafka’s great  masterpiece.

THEORIES

            We spoke of Beschreibung eines Kampfes and Amerika as conscious writing and of the stories following Das Urteil as unconscious. This is of course a simplification. The conscious and unconscious minds cannot be neatly separated; the writing down of an unconscious vision will involve a certain amount of conscious activity and on the other hand, the material of conscious writing will partly originate in the unconscious. Nevertheless, it is a basic distinction worth making.

            With the Landarzt stories we seem to have come to a new kind of writing which we may loosely call the semi-conscious. A description of its origins is given by Herbert Silberer.[158] For experimental purposes, Silberer induced in himself what he called “hypnogogic hallucinations”. He forced himself to think out difficult intellectual problems in a state of extreme tiredness, the result being that at a certain point consciousness would suddenly be blackened out and in its place a dream or hallucination would arise. This dream could represent either the problem that the mind had just been concerned with, or it could give a picture of the state of the dreamer’s psyche, its activity or its structure. With regard to those dreams that represent the material of thought, Silberer speaks of “material symbolism”, with regard to those that represent the nature of the psyche of “functional symbolism”.[159]

Material Symbolism

           

In a state of great sleepiness, Silberer is contemplating the nature of transsubjective judgments. Suddenly the thread of thought is cut and the following hallucination takes its place. A great circle or a transparent sphere floats in the air. Men reach into this sphere with their heads. Interpreting the hallucination, Silberer says that it is a summing up of what he had been thinking. Trans-subjective judgments have relevance for all people without exception: the circle encloses all heads. But not all judgments are transsubjective. With bodies and limbs men are outside or beneath this sphere and stand upon the earth as separate individuals.

Functional Symbolism

           

In a sleepy state Silberer is thinking about something but his mind begins to stray and when he tries to return to the problem contemplated earlier the following hallucination forms. He is climbing in the midst of mountains. The closer mountains are hiding the more distant ones from which he originally came and to which he wishes to return. The interpretation is of course that the dreamer had lost the main thread of his thought and embarked upon others which were now hiding his point of departure from him.

            The theory we shall try to put forward here is that the Landarzt stories basically make use of “material symbolism”, that is, they are a direct graphic presentation of problems Kafka was concerned with. There is nothing to prove this except the fact that a number of these stories do seem to be capable of interpretation as presentations of problems which we know interested Kafka, and the fact that their occasionally disturbing intricacy is difficult to account for if one takes these stories simply as fairy-tales or playful fantasies.

            It can hardly be doubted that Kafka was aware of the meaning of these stories when he wrote them down, and it is highly likely that he elaborated them when writing. The question that arises in connection with them is why he did not give his readers a pointer to their meaning. Even subtitles such as “Ein Landarzt oder das Problem Freud” or “Schakele und Araber, oder die Zionisten” would have helped us considerably (always presuming that our theory concerning these stories is correct). Several explanations might be given. The first is that Kafka expected his contemporaries to understand his allusions as the problems presented were being discussed quite generally by Central European intellectuals of the time. Another is that he did not want to spoil their value as fairytales for those readers who were not familiar with the problem and therefore not naturally aware of the allusions. A third is that he realized the stories would have to survive on their merits as stories and not as topical literature. Spenser’s Faerie Queene has value for us today insofar as it is poetry; its topical references may be traced by the scholar but they can no longer be an active component of our experience of this work. Kafka’s subjectivist convictions might be a fourth reason for his secrecy, for these stories are often quite close to expressing opinions or passing judgments. As a number of Kafka critics have looked for and found topical allusions in these stories, we can regard their work as something like a confirmation of our theory. Various writers have seen the problem of Freud in Ein Landarzt.[160] Three stories that seem to present personal rather than general problems, “Elf Söhne”, “Besuch im Bergwerk” and “Die Sorge des Hausvaters” have been ably discussed by Malcolm Pasley.[161] We shall not mention them here as their material interest is slight for a general public. They too could easily have originated in hypnagogic hallucinations.

            Another group of writings which cannot be discussed in detail in this dissertation but which deserves mention probably originated in semiconscious dreams with functional symbolism. “Der Steuermann“, „Nachts“, „Gib’s auf!“, „Der Geier“ and „Der Aufbruch“ are typical examples. They clearly describe conditions of the psyche. It is of course quite impossible for us to relate them to any specific state of mind Kafka was in when he dreamt them, but as conditions of the mind they are as universal to men as the adjectives Silberer lists to describe the various mental states these dreams might refer to (rasch, träge, leicht, schwer, gehemmt, nachlässig, freudig, zwangsmäßig, fruchtlos, erfolgreich, zwiespältig, in Komplexe zerspalten, einheitlich, zuständlich wechselnd, getrübt etc.).[162] These little pieces are taken up imaginatively by many readers, almost as though here a new, far richer and subtler language of adjectives was on offer. The possibilities of the little piece “Gib’s auf!” have been probed by Politzer.[163] How much more complex and precise this symbol is compared to words like “worried” and “baffled” which are probably the nearest equivalents in ordinary language!

            Compared with the true unconscious stories with their proximity to genuine myth, these “adjectival stories” obviously have a far shallower reference. They, as well as those using material symbolism, take us no deeper than the conscious and logical mind can take us. In this sense they are of a kind with the essay which relies on the conscious mind and logical thought. It is mainly the narrative medium of presentation that differs; the level or depth of significance is much the same.

            Compared with the essay, these stories with their unified plots have greater emotional force. There is organic continuity which is immediately convincing and their appeal is wider, for while children can enjoy the story, mature readers can turn to the problem. The symbolic form makes possible greater brevity and a multidimensional technique, in comparison with the linear logic of the essay. The distance from the learned discourse is of course greater than in the essay; though Kafka’s knowledge of his topics may have been sound and detailed, there is nothing to prove this. As a sister form of the essay, Kafka’s “semiconscious” story must be viewed on its own merits and these are probably great enough to suggest that he developed a new literary genre to rival the essay.     

In der Strafkolonie

            Although In der Strafkolonie was written simultaneously with Der Prozess in 1914, three years before the other Landarzt stories, it is in character closer to these for it is concerned with theories rather than lives. In all these stories the theories investigated stand in thematic proximity to the earlier works and in the case of In der Strafkolonie the links with Der Prozess, which also describes a system of justice, are obvious. Yet to emphasize them seems to me to the detriment of both works.[164] Not only are they distinguished by a completely different perspective, the visions of justice too have little in common.

            Apart from its immediate impact of horror, the description of torture and death which In der Strafkolonie gives produces suggestive impulses in several directions. This is not surprising, for Kafka seems to have summed up and arrested in images a religious tradition, together with a philosophy and practice of life derived from it, that is basic to European civilization.[165]In accordance with this, the image can work in two ways namely, to confront us with a religious tradition secularized, if the realism of the story affects us most or, if we prefer to give more weight to the symbolic, to let us see it as a symbol of things religious.

            The religious tradition here relevant is again that of  the Fall. At some point in time, which the story itself does not touch upon, all the prisoners of the Penal Colony must have been convicted of some crime in order to be deported to the colony, just as at some point beyond time man committed the sin of eating the “apple”, the consequence being expulsion from the fertile garden into a barren land, hard labour, sorrow and finally death. As the original sin was one of disobedience to authority and the first of the commandments given to Moses was that of honouring the authority of God: “I am the Lord thy God, […] thou shalt have no other gods before me”, so the sin for which the prisoner of the Penal Colony is to be tortured and executed is that of having broken the commandment “honour your superior”, of revolt against authority. And as the Jewish God is primarily a god of justice,  so in the Penal Colony authority can only condemn itself for injustice: “Sei gerecht” is the admonition tattooed onto the flesh of the prisoner and later the Officer. (E 228)

            Apart from the work of the day, there seem to be duties of the night for him.

Er hat nämlich die Pflicht, bei jedem Stundenschlag aufzustehen und vor der Tür des Hauptmanns zu salutieren. Gewiss keine schwere Pflicht und eine notwendige, denn er soll sowohl zur Bewachung als auch zur Bedienung frisch bleiben. (E 207)

These duties call to mind both monastic practices which require you to rise several times during the night to perform acts of cultic significance and army regulations connected with the watch. Rules like that ignore the animal needs of man for continuous refreshing sleep, demanding an ascetic disregard of the body. Chastisement with the whip follows a breach of the law and thereupon the “animal in man” can get the better of him.

Statt nun aufzustehen und um Verzeihung zu bitten, fasste der Mann seinen Herrn bei den Beinen, schüttelte ihn und rief: „Wirf die Peitsche weg, oder ich fresse dich.“ (E 207)

It is obviously only the revolt of a moment, prompted perhaps by a deeper knowledge of himself into which man dips in dream, for a little later the Traveller notices the Prisoner’s dog-like submissiveness. He believes one would only have to whistle for him to come. Submissiveness to a higher will and ascetic disregard of the flesh constitute the ethical code of the Penal Colony, as they have the ethics of western civilization if one excepts the humanist periods. Both Christianity and worldly institutions such as the army have, on the whole, bowed to an ascetic ideal, over and above the functional justification for such asceticism. One of the things Kafka’s story seems to suggest is that the historical roots of this philosophy of life lie in Judaism, in its vision of “unnatural” justice, relying on conformity with the law rather than humanity and conscience. For the law, in turn, authority is essential. Its axiom is “all men are guilty”. With this axiom both church and state authorities seem to have worked at all times. The result is the constant need for punishment.

            Superimposed on the Jewish view of the world as a penal colony – the vision of the Old Commandant of the story – is that of the New Commandant, whose interest in justice is slight. Since his rise to office, there is no longer an audience at executions and the machine has been allowed to fall into disrepair. The New Commandant’s enthusiasm is for the harbours or ‘havens’ he builds. Perhaps the havens of grace Christianity offers are being alluded to, also Christian and humanist tolerance of outside influences (such as Greek influence adulterating Judaist ideas in Christianity).[166] What in effect the philosophy of  “love”, superimposed on the old law, seems to amount to is that the condemned prisoner is stuffed with goodies which make him sick when he comes into contact with the disgusting gag the machine forces on him – which means discomfort for the prisoner and added work and unpleasantness for the executioner – and that he is given favours by the ladies that are quite useless to him and in any case confiscated by the executioner who puts them to dishonourable use.[167] His death is drab, lonely, and made more unpleasant by a broken machine. The dying man is no longer a centre of public interest surrounded by people who envy him for the insights death brings. Instead his apparently inevitable death is hushed up. All that surrounds him are the just judge, the soldier brutal by profession, the screeching machine, the searing sun, and the bare desert valley. The festivity of the audience and the beauty of the silent machine no longer cover up the reality that this is the valley of death. All ascetic philosophies have idealized and beautified death, be it the soldier’s, the martyr’s or the repentant sinner’s death. All humanist philosophies have tried to forget the cruelty and ugliness of death. (We are probably justified here in talking about death in general, not only by our interpretation, but also by the fact that Kafka in his letters and diaries seemed to speak quite generally of death as Hinrichtung, execution.)[168]

            If this then is the story’s estimation of Christianity, or secularized Christianity as superimposed on Judaism and secularized Judaism, the detached observer, left with the choice between the Old and the New Commandant, can only see that the Penal Colony as such, the whole conception of mankind as being essentially guilty, must be escaped. But this escape here seems to be above all flight, irrational, with no new goal in sight, though we may accept that the traveller’s search will continue. Both his homelessness and his disgust with the brute-like inhabitants of the Colony prevent him from letting any of them escape with him. In the Colony itself a sickly humanism, in line with a “gentle Jesus meek and mild” Christianity, will reign supreme. We wonder how authority can be maintained.

            The story ends with justice in the person of the Officer condemning itself as injustice, thereby destroying the machine of justice and annihilating itself.[169] But there is no insight into the wrong of the old vision of justice or any recognition of a new form of justice to replace it. It seems that when the concept of justice is relativised it is at the same time led ad absurdum. The Officer dies without the moment of insight.

            Any system stands and falls with its upholders. Their destruction is destruction, not birth of anything new. Eventually the death of the Officer probably means only that the consequences arising from the death of the Old Commandant have finally been drawn and that his vision, which had begun to disintegrate with his death, has been destroyed. Nevertheless there exists the legend, unlikely though it be, that the Old Commandant will rise from the dead: there are always those Jews who believe in a regeneration of Jewish religion. Or is it the legend that asceticism will be acknowledged again? The legend is discussed in the tea-house of the Colony, as in the coffee-houses of Prague and Vienna by emancipated Jews and radical politicians.

            The justification of the ethics of asceticism is “the moment of insight” before death. “Wie nahmen wir alle den Ausdruck der Verklärung von dem gemarterten Gesicht, wie hielten wir unsere Wangen in den Schein dieser endlich erreichten und schon vergehenden Gerechtigkeit!“ (E 218) the Officer reminisces in memory of old times. We and the Traveller have no opportunity to witness such a transfiguration, only the Officer’s word that it invariably takes place in the condemned. It supposedly comes in connection with recognition of the law that has been broken, which the machine has by that time engraved into the flesh of the condemned. That suggests an acceptance of the verdict and repentance.

            This broken law, however, appears also to become the law of the man’s life, the sole law he recognizes, a psychological observation of probably great truth. Though we hear only of the two laws, it appears that the drawings in the Officer’s possession comprise many laws, that original Judaism had a wider focus than justice alone. In the Old Commandant’s world, the moment of insight seems to involve momentary recognition of the sanctity of justice, justice in its turn being in truth justice only for the moment of insight. For what other meaning could the phrase “finally obtained and already passing justice” have. While the system of justice needs the executioner, the vision of justice needs the visionary to uphold it.

            But transfiguration does not alter the fact of final complete destruction by the machine, of the “unto dust thou shalt return”. The supernatural seems excluded from this view of the world which, however, does not therefore become unequivocally meaningless. The phenomenon of transfiguration remains a mystery and leaves both us and the Traveller uneasy. This again seems to represent Judaism, a religion in which the finality of the dissolution of death is emphasized, redemption not yet found but where there is, even so, some knowledge of transcendence.

            The Officer, who is irreproachably just according to his system of justice, cannot experience transfiguration through the machine. The face of the dead Officer is what it was in life. He stands for a system. He also wears a uniform which represents “home”, European traditions, even though it is unsuitable for this hot climate. He has supreme power and complete knowledge and no other insight is possible. Insight comes to the guilty, to those who experience the law with their bodies, to those who have no articulate knowledge, who do not understand French and do not know why they are condemned, to those who are semi-animals and yet want to understand, listening hard to every explanation the Officer gives the Traveller. The officers on the other hand, the aristocracy of the colony, seem to need the prisoner’s moment of insight. Is it because the guilty recognizing the law through their bodies proves the law and its justification to those who represent it? Is it because knowledge is always a dead thing without living experience? Is it because those who recognize no dimension above and beyond that which they understand would be nothing but a robot of their system, a servant of the machine, were it not for those who suffered knowledge. The “just God” would be nothing but the mechanic servicing a useless machine were it not for living man. While the death of the guilty or sinful man seems to have something like redemptive force for himself and his surroundings, that of the “godlike officer” can mean but destruction. Perhaps the Officer would need to become a prisoner (and be condemned for the prisoner’s sin) as Christ needed to become man, to experience man’s plight and to bring redemption.

            So far, we have spoken of the Officer. Originally he was only the right hand of the Commandant who ruled the Colony. To speak of him as a “god” would obviously be a perversion. It is as though Moses, originally no more than the recipient and executor of the law, had been deified on the death of the real God, the Old Commandant. Of course the Officer is not a Commandant, but as the sole representative of the Old Commandant and the sole judge within the colony, he seems to have taken over the part of the Old Commandant. He has no original vision, no actual power, though he has some persuasive power. Has Moses with his commandments taken over from Jehova in the Christian-European tradition? That could only mean a diminution of the religious.

            The Old Commandant had a comprehensive vision of life. “Hat er denn alles in sich vereinigt? War er Soldat, Richter, Konstrukteur, Chemiker, Zeichner?“ (E 205) the Traveller asks in amazement. The conception of the Penal Colony  is his work and so unified that change seems almost impossible.

Wir, seine Freunde, wussten schon bei seinem Tod, dass die Einrichtung der Kolonie so in sich geschlossen ist, dass sein Nachfolger, und habe er tausend neue Pläne im Kopf, wenigstens während vieler Jahre nichts von dem Alten wird ändern können. Unsere Voraussage ist auch eingetroffen; der neue Kommandant hat es erkennen müssen. (E 201)

The relation of Judaism to superimposed Christianity has always been a theological problem for Christianity and reluctant but inevitable tolerance coupled with hostility has been the traditional answer, quite in line with the New Commandant’s attitude to the Officer.

             Let us now attempt a secular interpretation. According to this, religions and cultures are seen as dependent on the original vision of a great genius. In Kafka’s story, the Old Commandant is the genius and his great work, which has become pivotal for civilization, is the machine. The machine is an intensified presentation and interpretation of life for those who are caught up in it, as one might be emotionally caught up in the work of e.g. Dante or Goethe or Nietzsche. The Old Commandant’s machine interprets life as stretching from the moment of conviction for unrecognized guilt to inevitable death. That any vision of life turned into an active and determining force to live by can become a violation of the individual and his rights as a human being is made more than clear by the torture machine. Perhaps a realization of this made Kafka conceal so carefully whatever his view of life, presuming he did have a view of life, was. Literature encrypts rather than states and that can be a saving grace. 

            Far from being just an instrument of torture or an execution machine, the Commandant’s creation is complex and widely suggestive. It consists of three parts: the bed, the harrow and the marker. The prisoner is strapped onto the bed which is lined with cotton-wool and provided with a gag and a bowl of food. The bed vibrates like the beds in certain hospitals, perhaps an allusion to psychiatric clinics.[170] The specially treated cotton-wool also suggests hospitals and illness. In addition, there is the German saying “auf Watte gebettet”, meaning a spoilt or pampered existence which of course hospitals provide if one overlooks the underlying cruelty of the final “execution”. (Mention of the cotton-wool momentarily predisposes the Traveller for the machine.) The gag – this could be many things from injections to hush a patient to conventions and taboos – cannot be refused; it would break the prisoner’s neck which in German can be read both literally and to mean social ruin. In the machine, your life is ruled by physical handicap: you are strapped down. Food is provided, namely the bowl of rice that will proverbially cover a simple man’s daily food needs. The bed is there to hold in custody the body; pain, sickness and privation – the bonds of the flesh – seem to determine this vision of life. Not surprisingly, the bed looks like a black chest or coffin: “eine schwarze Truhe”.

            The “Zeichner” or marker, to represent mind, also has the aspect of a black coffin. It contains the cryptic drawings of the Old Commandant with their mixture of ornamentation and legislation, the aesthetic and the didactic.[171] “Zeichnungen” can also refer to “plans” and these drawings are the plans for the work to be done on the prisoner who becomes “der Gezeichnete”, the stigmatized with the mark of recognition on his body, as Cain was stigmatized for his crime or St. Francis for his holiness. We are free to interpret.

Between bed and marker hangs the harrow to plough the field of the body for the word, or better commandment of God so that it may bring forth fruit, a hundredfold to speak with the biblical parable to which there may be an allusion. The “fruit” to be brought forth is clearly the moment of vision. Painful irritation of the wounds with some acidic fluid and then ablution accompany the infliction of minute punctures all over the body for the course of twelve hours, as long as day lasts. These are the wounds of life which fate or the divine will inflict, some merely ornamental but a small central band containing the law of life. “Vom Leben gezeichnet“, „der Pflug des Lebens“‚ „der Spruch des Schicksals“ are common expressions.[172]

            To many who have read The Penal Colony since World War II, it has immediately brought to mind the torture chambers and concentration camps that proliferated during the Nazi era, primarily for the persecution of Jews. Kafka has in this connection been called a prophet. As the ideas which Hitler drew on were not new, it might be interesting to investigate the prophetic nature of Kafka’s writings. M. Pasley has drawn attention to the similarity between certain passages in Nietzsche’s Zur Genealogie der Moral and Kafka’s story,[173] acknowledging his debt to T. J. Reed whose essay on Schopenhauer’s influence on Kafka is mentioned elsewhere. With reference to this story, Schopenhauer is also cited as speaking of life as a penal colony. Important quotes from Nietzsche are where he speaks of ‚die ganze lange, schwer zu entziffernde Hieroglyphenschrift der menschlichen Moral-Vergangenheit’ and asks:

Wie macht man dem Menschen-Tiere ein Gedächtnis? [...] „Man brennt etwas ein, damit es im Gedächtnis bleibt: nur was nicht aufhört, wehzutun, bleibt im Gedächtnis“ – das ist ein Hauptsatz aus der allerältesten (leider auch allerlängsten) Psychologie auf Erden [...] Es ging niemals ohne Blut, Martern, Opfer ab, wenn der Mensch es nötig hielt, sich ein Gedächtnis zu machen; die schmerzlichsten Opfer [...] die widerlichsten Verstümmelungen [...] die grausamsten Ritualformen aller religiösen Kulte [...] alles das hat in jenem Instinkte seinen Ursprung, welcher im Schmerz das mächtigste Hilfsmittel der Mnemonik erriet.  

           

            Another passage Pasley quotes relates to the ceremonial and public nature of punishment:

Die Götter als Freunde grausamer Schauspiele gedacht – o wie weit ragt diese uralte Vorstellung selbst noch in unsere europäische Vermenschlichung hinein! [...] Die ganze antike Menschheit ist voll von zarten Rücksichten auf „den Zuschauer“, als eine wesentlich öffentliche, wesentlich augenfällige Welt, die sich das Glück nicht ohne Schauspiele und Feste zu denken wusste. – Und, wie schon gesagt, auch an der großen Strafe ist so viel Festliches!

           

            Nietzsche’s ideas of punishment as intended to create a conscience, and of Christianity interpreting suffering as the machinery of salvation are well known. Fundamental to Nietzsche’s condemnation of Christianity is his condemnation of Judaism. Dangerous hints are here dropped for those who wish to take them up while ignoring their specific contexts. It is highly likely that Kafka was stimulated to write this story not only as a result of his intimate experience of parental authority, as the interpretation of Satish Kumar would have it, but also as a response to Nietzsche.

            Another probable source of the story needs to be mentioned here. It is the Dreyfus Affair which was finally settled in 1906, eight years before the story was written, and which received considerable publicity at that time, particularly insofar as it symbolized wide-spread anti-Semitism. The barren French penal islands, of which Devil’s Island, on which Dreyfus was confined, was one, could probably have been imagined as the scene of the story by most readers of the time. The fact that French was spoken by the officers would also have been a pointer. In other words, a model case of anti-Semitism is linked with the views of Nietzsche. No wonder we see Hitler foreshadowed.

            We spoke earlier of the potential tyranny of genius. That the vision of the genius, if the genius is Nietzsche and his aide-de-camp with persuasive force Hitler, can violate countless lives became all too clear during the Nazi era. The whole of Germany was remodelled much along the lines of a penal colony in which there were millions of “criminals”, guilty for the main part even before birth and due sooner or later for the death machine of the concentration camp, and in which power resided with the flawlessly “just”, often inhumanly convinced officers and the guards who were brutal by profession. All this is common to authoritarian states. What is noteworthy is that Hitler’s attack was directed almost solely against the Jews, as though he were mockingly usurping the role of the “jealous God”, inflicting Jobian tribulations for the “original sin” of being a Jew and demanding complete, humiliating submission to authority, though without the Jobian happy ending.  Hitler’s ending is that of Kafka’s Penal Colony, the death pit and before the bodies were flung into the mass graves “the way they died”. It was the terror or composure of the victims in the face of death that appears to have had a strange fascination for the “executioners”. One asks whether these victims, made to suffer a fate that could so readily be interpreted in terms of their religion, did not cater for some need in the executioners. For while the Jews might see themselves as submissive to the will of God, would not their Nazi torturers have seen in this acceptance of their fate a final affirmation of the need to exterminate the fallen race in favour of an unbroken master-race that needed no redemption because it was good, naturally good, an aristocratic Aryan race. It is peculiar how Kafka’s own life, in submission to the autocratic will of his father, suffering evil and deprivation while yearning for redemption, is almost an anticipation of the later fate of six million Jews, with them Kafka’s three sisters.

 

          Like many Jewish people, foremost among them the Zionists, Kafka yearned for a renewal of the natural in man. But it was the ‘natural’ preached by Hassidism rather than by Nietzsche. He saw no meaning in the authoritarian and moralist religion whose last vestiges his father represented. A passage in one of the letters to Milena might almost have been written by Hitler:

Manchmal möchte ich sie eben als Juden (mich eingeschlossen) alle etwa in the Schublade des Wäschekastens dort stopfen, dann warten, dann die Schublade ein wenig herausziehn, um nachzusehen, ob sie schon alle erstickt sind, wenn nicht, die Lade wieder hineinschieben und es so fortsetzen bis zum Ende. (M 57)

We have here in nucleus that peculiar paradox of the Jews both agreeing and disagreeing with Hitler on the point of their extermination which may have paralysed rebellion. But to place Kafka in the party of Hitler, as Burgum does, is ridiculous.[174] The conclusion of the story makes this quite clear. For it is there not the prisoner who is the sacrificial figure. The upholder of the philosophy of torture is condemned or rather condemns himself to die. Paradoxically, In der Strafkolonie might be called one of Kafka’s utopian stories. Only the annihilation of cruelty can make possible a natural and humane order. The trouble however is that cruelty can only be annihilated with the help of cruelty and the man who on principle condemns cruelty, himself becomes the cause of cruelty. (We meet here the kind of reaction the recently begun World War aroused in Kafka.) The Traveller flees from the colony almost like a guilty man.

            With one or two breaks in the perspective, the story is told not from the point of view of the Traveller but of another completely detached observer who recounts with neutrality whatever he sees and hears, as little omniscient as any of the others but quite free from judgment. Perhaps this is the voice of the real Kafka, someone who in the final instance must withhold judgment in view of too much complexity. And yet there is a passage in the notebooks in which one feels that Kafka, the individual, gives his personal opinion of the Penal Colony.

Das Teuflische nimmt manchmal das Aussehen des Guten an oder verkörpert sich sogar vollständig in ihm. Bleibt es mir verborgen, unterliege ich natürlich, denn dieses Gute ist verlockender als das wahre. Wie aber wenn es mir nicht verborgen bleibt? Wenn ich auf einer Treibjagt von Teufeln ins Gute gejagt werde? Wenn ich als Gegenstand des Ekels von an mir herumtastenden Nadelspitzen zum Guten gewälzt, gestochen, gedrängt werde? Wenn die sichtbaren Krallen des Guten nach mir greifen? Ich weiche einen Schritt zurück und rücke weich und traurig ins Böse, das hinter mir die ganze Zeit über auf meine Entscheidung gewartet hat. (H 75)

            One is tempted to suggest that the Traveller might be Nietzsche, the Weltbürger, condemning both Old and New Commandant and yet remaining vague and unhelpful when actual solutions are needed. He himself escapes, but leaves the people of the Colony with increased rather than diminished problems. The story has no need of being taken as a  Schlüsselerzählung; its own symbolic impact is strong enough. It is likely, however, that the Jewish problem, as seen by Nietzsche, was at the back of Kafka’s mind when he wrote it, though this cannot be proved, and that the secularized reading, which deals with the genius and his disciple was little more than a vague additional possibility for him. But the irony of a situation in which Nietzsche, the one-time detached observer, becomes the determining genius and his aide-de-camp a Hitler must be obvious to all. 

           

Ein Landarzt

          Several critics have discussed Ein Landarzt under the theme of Freud. But since their interpretations seem open to amendment, we shall treat the story again here.[175] The setting of Ein Landarzt is an endless winter: blinding snowstorms, stark and rigid cold, immobility, unhealthiness, and a world that is a desert. In this climate, a country doctor is attempting to do his work, a doctor much in the situation of Kafka’s uncle in Triesch with whom he occasionally stayed and whom he admired. Mentally, we may substitute for this endless winter an age and culture that is old, rigid and dead, and many historians would agree that the late nineteenth century might well be seen as having these characteristics. The doctor’s equipment – his carriage, his bag of instruments, his clothing – is perfectly adequate, as a modern doctor’s equipment is in comparison with earlier ages, but the driving impulse behind his work has died from fatigue in this icy winter. The horse is what takes the doctor to his patients: his desire to help, his sense of a mission, his hope of success, his faith in his own powers, his vision of the meaning of illness in relation to the patient and his human condition.[176] It is the night calls above all that have broken the doctor’s drive to help his patients. This could be the case quite literally for one of the most problematic aspects of a doctor’s work is the broken nights, but in this context we must understand the night calls also as referring to the illnesses that are created by the unconscious which is, characteristically, active at night, among them the hysterical illnesses which baffled Freud because of their apparently somatic nature and their refusal to respond to medical treatment.[177] They first suggested to him an investigation of the subconscious. Were not the age and culture so rigidly positivist and puritanical, this unhealthy suppression of the subconscious might not have occurred. As there are no others prepared to lend the doctor their horse, no others who have a new creative vision of medicine that will help the doctor to cope with his night calls, the doctor must help himself.

            The discovery of the pigsty is only a coincidence. We sense an allusion to “schweinisch”, a common assessment of the grosser aspects of sexuality.[178] It is surprising that the pigsty does not yield pigs but a pair of the noblest of horses. [179]The traditional view of sex as repulsive relies on mere surface impressions. But with the erotic impulse emerges also the lewd figure of the groom, representing the amorality and violence of sex.  He does not accompany the doctor to the patient – the doctor had wanted to take him to prevent him from doing harm but was determined to refuse him the reins – instead he violates the doctor’s maid-servant and companion, the beautiful young Rosa. There are several things which come to mind here: the sterile “platonic” ideal of love which was popular among the cultured before Freud’s ideas began to circulate: the doctor had never before become aware of the beauty and attraction of Rosa. He had seen in her, as countless husbands saw in their wives, a good and willing servant. But before he, as the representative of many men of his kind, can make good his neglect to enrich his love and deepen his appreciation of woman, the uncontrolled greed of passion has taken over to frighten, shock, and perhaps destroy the girl.[180] Freud’s revelations about sex were certainly not intended to break down ancient traditions, but his tampering with taboos was always likely to create at least temporary disorder and there is no doubt that Freud’s ideas did. Freud himself, like the Country Doctor, while lamenting this, was not in a position to alter the situation. By pursuing his investigations, he had forfeited the innocent, unreflective approach to sex which is necessary for a full appreciation of its beauty.

            The journey to the patient and the speed of the uncontrollable horses is in itself almost like an erotic eruption. The first thing the doctor notices is the stifling atmosphere of the sick room. The air is hardly breathable. In defiance of the cold outside the warmth is suffocating. Apart from the motherly warmth and solicitude displayed by the family, all the emotional stimulants such as coffee and alcohol are known and treasured by this family. (Although the reference could be to malt-coffee, the formulation “von der sorgenden Mutter mit Kaffee durchtränkt, aber gesund “ (E 149) seems to point to the stimulant.) The warmth here is unhealthy and unnatural, as in many of the simple “natural” families, and the doctor feels urged to open the window. In actual fact it is the horses that eventually do this. A medical examination proves the patient to be healthy, a little pale, with poor blood circulation, but on the whole somebody who ought to have his ears boxed ‘am besten mit einem Stoss aus dem Bett zu treiben. (E 149) This is the situation with which one patient after the other confronted Freud and which caused him to investigate hysteria. The most obvious characteristics of this patient are lassitude, lack of vitality, loss of the will to live. This attitude is something characteristic of many hysterics, more generally people with mental illnesses, and cannot be overcome with the traditional approach. The parents insist that the patient is ill in spite of his apparent health, in other words, that morality is no cure. The boy’s father suggests rum might help the doctor in his diagnosis, a little intoxication to stimulate the doctor’s imagination, but the latter is scientist enough to reject the help of stimulants. The sister holds up a blood-stained handkerchief  that could suggest either consumption – Kafka himself experienced this as a psycho-somatic illness – or the cloth of Saint Veronica which supernaturally held the imprint of Christ’s bleeding face.[181] And we do approach the realm of the supernatural as now the “unearthly” horses make their contribution to insight – “ach, jetzt wiehern beide Pferde; der Lärm soll wohl, höhern Orts angeordnet, die Untersuchung erleichtern” – as though a higher will had ordered them to. Science will never cease to be baffled by the phenomenon of intuitions that lead on to scientific discoveries.[182] A re-examination of the patient reveals what is obviously the psycho-somatic wound. And curiously, the doctor suddenly speaks as one who has seen many such wounds: “deine Wunde ist so übel nicht” (E 152). A peculiarity of such discoveries is that they articulate what has been common knowledge.

            The description of the wound both appeals to our sense of beauty and evokes our strongest disgust.[183] It resembles a flower, there is a suggestion of a pink-coloured rose with many stamen which are, in reality, worms eating the flesh of the patient and aggravating his wound. „An dieser Blume in deiner Seite gehst du zugrunde.“ There is a profusion of allusions. One of the oldest and most famous Christmas carols comes to mind: „Es ist ein Ros entsprungen aus einer Wurzel zart […] mitten im kalten Winter, wohl zu der halben Nacht.“ The rose is traditionally the flower of paradise but it is also the flower of sex.[184] Rosicrucian symbolism knows both meanings. The visual impression of the would is that of sex. The worms devouring the flesh suggest death and decay. The position of the wound, vaguely described to be in the region of the hip, can either imply sexuality (in Bericht an eine Akademie the wound beneath the hip clearly does) or refer to the wound of Christ which, in its turn, could become an erotic symbol for a man like Zinzendorf whom Silberer quotes: “So phantasiert sich der Fromme (Graf von Zinzendorf) mit lüsterner Vorliebe in das ‘Seitenhöhlchen’ (die Seitenwunde) im Leib Jesu, mit nicht zu verkennender Identifikation dieses Ritzes mit der Vulva.”[185] In the context, “rosa”, the word which introduces the description of the wound, must necessarily be associated with the girl Rosa, and she in turn may suggest to us one of the traditional apostrophes of Mary “Rose ohne Dornen”. We have paradise, death and decay, sex in both its perverse and beautiful aspects combined in this image in strange confusion. It is a confusion characteristic of psychoanalysis, for science brings together phenomena that ethics would separate widely. Who is this boy? Is he a Christ figure, is he the ideal and intended bridegroom of Rosa, is he the weakling, the representative of a decadent and doomed society, or is he in some sense the pervert of sexuality? Psychoanalysis being a science can give no answer.

            The young boy is blinded by the “life” in his wound. He does not see the threat of death in the worms but the promise of salvation.

 „Wirst du mich retten?“ flüstert schluchzend der Junge, ganz geblendet durch das Leben in seiner Wunde. (E 151)

His listlessness has completely left him. The old doctor is more sceptical:

So sind die Leute in meiner Gegend. Immer das Unmögliche vom Arzt verlangen. Den alten Glauben haben sie verloren; der Pfarrer sitzt zu Hause und zerzupft die Messgewänder, eines nach dem andern; aber der Arzt soll alles leisten mit seiner zarten chirurgischen Hand. (E 151)

Under the circumstances it is inevitable that the psychoanalyst will be misused for sacred purposes. He will have to be wise man and magic man, father confessor and bestower of spiritual redemption and in spite of all this always only the doctor, without the protection of a divine office. Any failure will meet with revenge: „Und heilt er nicht, so tötet ihn! S’ ist nur ein Arzt, ‘s ist nur ein Arzt.“ (E 152)

            So far little more than a revelation of the wound has been accomplished. Now the doctor is required to heal the wound. The family and the elders of the town in their concern for the patient and, one may assume, the general standard of morality unclothe the doctor. School teachers and children sing a threatening chant. Once Freud had begun to admit knowledge, doctors and students, those in authority and those connected with the various patients, wanted to see results; a man who breaks taboos must legitimize himself by showing that this is of use to society. His efficiency and his personal integrity are immediately under scrutiny. Freud found that in the endeavour to justify himself he had to reveal to the public his own most intimate being, his dreams which harboured feelings of guilt, sexual desires and the like. Looking much like a well-known portrait of Freud, the Country Doctor stands pensive, his fingers in his beard. But this is not enough. He is undressed and thus naked is placed in the bed beside the patient (by these standards all men are ill), against the wall a little like a criminal about to be executed, hemmed in by the wall on one side and the patient on the other.[186] But the patient too feels restricted by the doctor’s being: “Statt mir zu helfen, engst du mir mein Sterbebett ein.” Freud, relying almost solely on a knowledge of his own being for his analysis of others, necessarily misunderstood and cramped these personalities to some extent. The erotic intimacy of the two naked people lying together in bed is an effective image for the erotic attachment which almost invariably occurs as part of the psychoanalytic process. What ideally the lover would do for a patient is here done half-heartedly and with restraint by the analyst. All the doctor can eventually tell the patient is the equivocal “deine Wunde ist so übel nicht” (E 152); many men desire the distinction of such a wound which is the first step towards mastering the unconscious. And once it has been mastered, have we lost or won by this? There will always be those who protest that a human being without his sub- and unconscious intact is like the earth without its forest belts, an arid and lifeless thing. The words of the doctor, from which the patient is to draw his reassurance, work through little more than a trick of the voice or the subterfuge of compassion. The patient cannot be helped. The song of the children is misleading:

            Freut euch, ihr Patienten,

            Der Arzt is euch ins Bett gelegt! (E 153)

More honest is the statement which the spelling conceals: “Wenn ihr Freud wählt, ist euch der Arzt ins Bett gelegt”,[187] a statement that would straightway solicit the question: “And what good would that do?”, the answer clearly being “none”. The story ends with the doctor’s words: “Betrogen! Betrogen! Einmal dem Fehlläuten der Nachtglocke gefolgt – es ist niemals gutzumachen.“ (E 153) 

            Kafka puts in the doctor’s mouth an admission of failure. Would Freud have agreed? We are left with a vision of desolation: the doctor naked, his most secret thoughts revealed to the world, his fur, which suggests animal warmth, out of reach, all naivity lost, the impulse with brought him lame and old, the earthly carriage and the unearthly horses as little connected as conventional medicine was with Freud’s new ideas, Rosa lost, the violent passions released and, perhaps bitterest of all: “ein Nachfolger bestiehlt mich, aber ohne Nutzen, denn er kann mich nicht ersetzen.” (E 153) Does this aim at Jung whom Freud had welcomed as his great disciple and who had dropped many of Freud’s axioms, among them the supremacy of sexuality?[188] In this state Freud is a helpless prey of the frigidness of the age. There is no aid or understanding to be had from the ranks of the patients: “keiner aus dem beweglichen Gesindel der Patienten rührt den Finger.” (E 153) Does this imply that the patients of Freud were in fact ethically mediocre, that the stern conventional approach to them might have been more in place? We hear echoes of the bitterness that seemed charactertistic of the older Freud. Jung gives instances of this in his autobiography.[189] It is impossible to ignore the tragedy of this life of extreme honesty, of self-sacrifice wasted because the wrong call was followed. To quote Kafka: “Psychologie ist Ungeduld!” In this last paragraph it is Kafka speaking, the man who feared self-revelation above all other things. Nevertheless it is an opinion we have every reason to consider.

Schakale und Araber

            It is a temptation to see this story, published in Martin Buber’s periodical Der Jude in 1917, in relation to two articles by Buber printed in the same periodical the year before.[190] The first entitled “Völker, Staaten und Zion” is a letter to Hermann Cohen in reply to his article “Religion und Zionismus” published the same year. The second, “Der Staat und die Menschheit’ replies to Hermann Cohen’s published answer to Martin Buber.[191] The issue at stake is Zionism and there seems little doubt that Kafka’s story too is concerned with Zionism. We may assume that he had read these articles for he possessed the 1916-17 issues of Der Jude.[192] Cohen’s views are presented at some length in Buber’s essays so that it is also hardly necessary to presuppose that Kafka had actually read him to be familiar with his opinions. Cohen’s article aims at a clear distinction between Jewish nationalism and Judaist religion. He speaks for those who want to be Jews by religion at the same time as being well assimilated German nationals. Cohen admits that the growth of anti-Semitism endangers the assimilation of the Jews and that in this situation Zionism seems to be a solution but that in reality, Zionism aggravates the situation too by emphasizing the difference between Jews and other men. This then prompts many Jews to give up their Jewish religion in the cause of assimilation. In other words, Zionism works directly against the interests of those Jews who wish to remain part of the cultural and political community in which they live. But Cohen’s criticism goes deeper. He attacks Zionism’s claim that the community of Jewish nationals professing the Jewish religion must become the cell of redemption on earth and that Jews scattered in exile cannot fulfill this mission. Buber’s answer that Zionism is not Pantheism but orthodox Judaism, as all covenants with God were made with the “seed” and the people of Abraham, is not quite to the point for it overhears the genuine warning that a religious definition of race and nation has been proven by history to be a dangerous thing. The relationship between things earthly and things divine must be conceived and controlled with extreme caution. Cohen accuses Zionism of frivolously ridiculing the highest ideal of Jewish religion, that of a messianic humanity. Buber’s retort to this accusation is again polemic rather than convincing, for once more he evades the warning that an equation of religion, nationality and race could not only lead to hubris of the Jewish people but might favour the identification of a political or national hero with the Messiah.

            We can assume that Kafka intended his story as a veiled attack on Buber which Buber apparently did not understand, for he accepted it for his periodical and years later answered a question concerning this story with a statement that he had also published in this periodical literature that did not concern itself with specifically Jewish problems.[193] It is hard to judge how many of the readers might have understood the reference. For those who did, a presentation of the problem that avoided the misleading tricks of polemical argumentation might have been valuable. An image is often the best way to present a set of facts for scrutiny impartially.

            The issue of Zionism was much to the fore at the time Kafka wrote this story. Approximately ten months later the Balfour Declaration which promised the Jews a national state in Palestine was signed.[194] The promise conflicted with a more or less simultaneous promise by Lawrence of Arabia, who had organized the Arab Revolt on behalf of Britain, that Palestine would be given to the Arabs. This was not widely known till after World War I. It is hard to tell how well Kafka was informed about these things but since Zionism was a world-wide movement, with settlers in Palestine on the one hand and prominent representatives in London during the war, among them the first Chief Rabbi of the Holy Land, Abraham Isaak Kook,[195] perhaps the most important representative of the mystic conception of Zionism, we may assume that Prague Zionists had access to information. Was Lawrence of Arabia ever approached by one of the prominent Zionists in the cause of Zionism?

            Once we are aware of all this, we may tentatively associate the jackals with the Zionist Jews, their leader with a man such as Kook with his mystic vision of Zionism, and the European coming from the far north with the English in general and possibly, though this is not very likely, Lawrence of Arabia in particular.[196] The titles of periodical articles printed in late 1916 and early 1917 (“Vorgänge in Arabien”, “Südarabien Kriegsschauplatz”, “Arabien als englisches Kriegsziel”, “Kampf um Arabien zwischen der Türkei und England”)[197] suggest that a certain amount of information about Britain’s part in the Arab Revolt was available to German readers. The possible reference to current affairs is however not necessary for an appreciation of the story; in fact it is hardly more than an amusing detail. Even the reference to Zionism is not essential to the message of the story; criticism of the Jewish character and, ironically, of all “Blut und Boden” mysticism has a wider relevance.

            Why does Kafka represent the Jews with an animal image? There seem to be several answers. Did the mystic Jews as a people come close to Kafka’s vision of the animal in man, in both its positive and negative aspects, the vision which had already created Die Verwandlung? Apart from this perhaps deepest reason, the animal also permitted Kafka to describe a dual world. As man to animal, so God to man, would be one possible equation. As dog to man, so Jew to the master race dominating him, another. But the choice also appears to be that of the caricaturist, who will tellingly combine a man’s particular features with an estimate of his character by giving him an animal’s face.

            By means of the jackal-image Kafka succeeds in caricaturing many of the features popularly regarded as “typically Jewish”. The sleek movements that seem trained to the whip find their counterpart in the sleek servility of the “typical Jew” occasioned by centuries of virtual slavery which, however, has exaggerated rather than broken his feeling of self-assurance. An innate cowedness, even cowardliness, which causes him to retreat rather than attack is occasionally overcome by the fanatical pursuit of religious ideals which, irrational as it is, leaves him an easy prey to any attacker. His refusal to fight for his rights – in post-biblical times the Jews had never been the attackers, always the victims – his insistence that others have a duty to fight for him, make him seem in some ways effeminate. The race, led by men, counts its generations by mothers: „ meine Mutter hat gewartet und ihre Mutter und weiter alle ihre Mütter bis hinauf zur Mutter aller Schakale.“ (E 160) As this conflicts with biblical custom, we may assume that Kafka wanted to emphasize the feminine characteristics of the race. On the other hand, Jewish law states that a child born of a Jewish mother (not father) is Jewish, so that Kafka is not departing from fact. The distinction between what I, the Jew, may do and what the Gojim, the non-Jews may do, which leads at times to a peculiarly ambiguous ethical outlook, is brought out. It is against the commandment of the Jews to kill and they refuse to do this; but this does not prevent them from desiring the death of their enemies and asking God (as in many psalms) or men to kill for them. The fact that it is not possible to remain pure and get what you want at the same time leads to a peculiar lack of self-sufficiency, for there must always be someone else to do what the Jews themselves are not permitted to do; they rely on helpers, divine or human; they cannot live without the shifting concept of a Messiah who is both human and superhuman.

            Perhaps the cleverest use to which Kafka puts his image is in the presentation of the Law. The jackals accuse the Arabs of killing live animals and despising carrion. There is reference to the commandment “thou shalt not kill”, also to Jewish kosher slaughter rules which in their insistence on painless killing are a compromise in the direction of kindness to animals that Kafka’s vegetarian outlook took to its logical conclusion. The blood of the animal is impure and must be drained from the meat: „Ruhig soll alles Getier krepieren; ungestört soll es von uns leergetrunken und bis auf die Knochen gereinigt warden. Reinheit, nichts als Reinheit wollen wir.” (E 163) The Jackals regard blood as impure but in a peculiar paradox they drink what is impure to create purity, drink it with voluptuous craving and the purity that remains is that of dry bones in the clean air of the desert. It appears as though Kafka were here pointing out a conflict between the denial of life as something unclean, a fallen state, which is characteristic of many of the Prophets, and the sensuous enjoyment of life the Hassidim generally professed. Kafka may have felt this conflict to be characteristic of Zionism: people leaving a life of culture and ease in the case of the Zionist leaders to retire to the hardships of a desert existence in order to remain pure, yet seeking in this retirement a romantically primitive enjoyment of the simple life amounting almost to a nature cult. The insistence on the value of carrion may also be intended to refer to the Zionist emphasis on the value of the old (Cohen had attacked this): the old country, old traditions, ancient writings and a dead language, Hebrew, to be put in the mouth of the people to replace the living language they were speaking. The story impresses on us the sterility of all this, the narrowmindedness, the misguidedness: “eng zusammengekauert, die vielen Tiere so eng und starr, dass es aussah wie eine schmale Hürde, von Irrlichtern umflogen”. (E 163) The peculiar confusion of thought is summed up in the symbol of blood that stands for race (“ein sehr alter Streit; liegt also wohl im Blut”) (E 161), also for life (“nehmen wir ihnen also ihr Blut und der Streit ist zu Ende”) (E 161), and for impurity, food and perhaps even sacrifice (“das Blut des Kamels lag schon in Lachen da, rauchte empor”) (E 164). The only idea these images have in common is the emphasis on man as a creature which, undifferentiated, is a pre-religious conception of man.

Kafka’s caricature of Jews and Jewish religion in this manifestation would have to be considered rather extreme were it not for the fact that the “animal in man” or “man the animal” is for Kafka something worthy of serious consideration. As in many of Kafka’s stories, the animal image here connects up with the image of music. Harmony is what they have in common. „ ‚Herr’, rief er, und alle Schakale heulten auf; in fernster Ferne schien es mir eine Melodie zu sein.“ (E 163) It is an impression of music, more than a certainty. Hassidic mysticism attempted to achieve a harmony of existence in which the sensual and the spiritual, the trivial and the grand, the human and the divine were fused and Kafka, while esteeming the value of such an ideal, saw also its limitations. The story expresses them in the complaint that animals have no hands, for everything they do, the good and the evil, they have only their mouths. They can speak and sing and they can eat and exist but any form of decisive and willed action is already a disruption of harmony. The jackels appeal to the European: „mit Hilfe deiner alles vermögenden Hände, schneide ihnen mit dieser Schere die Hälse durch.“ (E 163) The Tzaddiks or Jewish Holy Men characteristically did not act other than through prayer and advice. In most cases they neither followed a profession nor left their houses except to go to the temple or synagogue. We may see in “Jackels and Arabs” two mutually exclusive versions of humanity, the Arabs representing asceticism, decisiveness to the point of cruelty, clear black and white distinctions, and pride, the sin of the fallen: “Aus diesem kalten Hochmut, weißt du, ist kein funken Verstand zu schlagen” (E 161): “Schmutz ist ihr Weiß; Schmutz ist ihr Schwarz” (E 163). The Jackals can see no virtue in the Arabs with whom the European seems to get on perfectly well. The European is human as are the Arabs, distinguished only by greater tolerance and greater sensitivity and an appreciation of things that differ from his outlook. He is as surprised by the fervour of the Jackels’ hopes in him as we might be in a similar situation.

What actually are the Jackals’ hopes? Our first impression of them is that they are messianic in nature:

„Ich bin der älteste Schakal, weit und breit. Ich bin glücklich, dich noch hier begrüßen zu können. Ich hatte schon die Hoffnung fast aufgegeben, denn wir warten unendlich lange auf dich; meine Mutter hat gewartet und ihre Mutter.“ (E 160)

A few moments later we hear that it is “Verstand”, rationality or understanding, in which the Jackals place their hopes. The European Enlightenment had been a forceful attraction for eastern Jews throughout the last centuries, assuming for many the proportions of a redemption from a sub-human life. Most of the prominent Zionists stood in the tradition of the European Enlightenment. Their primitivism was little more than the romantic reaction against this that was fashionable in the early 20^th century, a by-product of an ideal of enlightenment never quite surrendered.

            A third vision of the European that again follows without transition sees him as the active helper, the fighter for the Jews. He is asked to kill all Arabs with the help of a pair of sewing scissors that is the traditionally hallowed weapon for this purpose. The symbol of the sewing scissors is baffling. It drives home, of course, the absurdity of the request and again emphasises the effeminate nature of these animals; whether envisaging it hanging on the “Eckzahn” (there are reminiscences of “Eckstein”, the corner-stone, an image of the Messiah) and therefore necessarily falling open in the form of a cross is to point to the Messiah’s weapon, the cross, is hard to say.

So this European is to incorporate 1) the traditionally awaited Messiah, 2) the ideal of European enlightenment, and 3) decisive military and political help in conquering the desert for the Jews, three things that can hardly be reconciled. The combination verges on sacrilege and is bound to offend; yet in a subtler form this confusion was characteristic of Zionism. The split level of the story helps to make the confusion felt. Are the Jackals a sub-human race seeking human help, or are we expected to conjure up an image of the tribe of the Jews roaming the desert, surrounded by the threatening idols of other peoples but firm in its expectation of messianic help?  The unwillingness or inability to distinguish between things essentially different appears to be one of the gravest dangers inherent in a mystical view of life. But even if Kafka is here pointing out the dangers inherent in Zionism and thereby supporting Cohen’s argument, which above all demands clear distinctions, we have no right to conclude that Kafka rejected an individual mystical approach to life. We also have no right to interpret his criticism of Zionism here as a decisive condemnation. It seems that Kafka was never quite decided on this point [198]but in later life adopted, perhaps in view of the growing strength of  anti-Semitism, a generally positive attitude.[199] Yet the surrender of the individual freedom enlightenment offered always seemed a bitter sacrifice; the concept of the Zionist state merged for him with the father concept, and a childhood overshadowed by parental authority made him reluctant ever to accept the authority of a religion, a state, or a communal ideal.[200] More than Ein Landarzt with its confusing load of detail, Schakale und Araber has the simple charm and the continuity of a tale that can be enjoyed on its own merits. But ultimately, it would probably not survive as such. Much of its value will continue to lie in the contribution it makes to the better understanding of a contemporary conundrum, the future dimensions of which few would have understood at the time.
Die Brücke

            Though the sketch “Die Brücke” was written at the time of the Landarzt stories in January/ February 1917, Kafka did not publish it in that collection. It was actually not published at all during Kafka’s lifetime. But in nature it belongs to this series.[201] The image of the bridge is one of the universal images of language whose applicability is as wide as that of most general abstractions. To bridge a gulf, “Brücken schlagen”, “etwas überbrücken”, “eine Brücke sein”, “to be a bridge between” – both English and German know and use the metaphor. What Kafka’s story seems to prove is that men cannot bridge gulfs for several reasons. It is inhuman to lie stark and stiff for years, waiting for an occasional wayfarer. And if the wayfarer then does come, the human being is not stiff and dead enough to be an adequate bridge. Then, taking the image as literally as the description would suggest, one might add that a gulf that can be bridged by a human body could perhaps be leapt across and that this would obviously be less effort than bridging the gulf and would then permit a life in a ‘beyond’.

   

            If one takes the image in its greatest generality, Kafka’s statement is obviously not justified. There are gulfs that can be bridged and there are people who can promote communication and conciliation. The search for a more specific reference is indicated and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra comes to mind. Kafka had read Zarathustra  with great enthusiasm at the age of 17 and acquired the book four years later.[202] We saw that one of the passages of Zarathustra may have been alluded to in Der Prozess. In this case Kafka is probabl;y responding to the following passage:

Der Mensch ist ein Seil, geknüpft zwischen Tier und Übermensch – ein Seil über einem Abgrunde.

Ein gefährliches Hinüber, ein gefährliches Auf-dem-Wege, ein gefährliches Zurückblicken, ein gefährliches Schaudern und Stehenbleiben. Was groß ist am Menschen, das ist, dass er eine Brücke und kein Zweck ist; was geliebt werden kann am Menschen, das ist, dass er ein Übergang und ein Untergang ist.

Ich liebe die, welche nicht zu leben wissen, es sei denn als Untergehende, denn es sind die Hinübergehenden.

Ich liebe die großen Verachtenden, weil sie die großen Verehrenden sind und Pfeile der Sehnsucht nach dem anderen Ufer.

Ich liebe die, welche nicht erst hinter den Sternen einen Grund suchen, unterzugehen und Opfer zu sein: sondern die sich der Erde opfern, dass die Erde einst des Übermenschen werde.

[...]

Ich liebe den, welcher nicht einen Tropfen Geist für sich zurückbehält, sondern ganz der Geist seiner Tugend sein will: so schreitet er als Geist über die Brücke.[203]

A superficial comparison reveals similarities. There is no doubt that Kafka’s bridge is „ein Übergang und ein Untergang“. There are many parallels: „ein gefährliches Hinüber“ – geländerloser Balken (BeK 111); „ein gefährliches Auf-dem-Wege“ – kein Tourist verirrte sich zu dieser unwegsamen Höhe (BeK 111); „ein gefährliches Zurückblicken, ein gefährliches Schaudern und Stehenbleiben“ – and first with regard to the tourist: „mit der Eisenspitze seines Stockes beklopfte er mich [...] In mein buschiges Haar fuhr er mit der Spitze und ließ sie, wahrscheinlich wild umherblickend lange drin liegen“, then with regard to the bridging human: „Ich erschauerte in wildem Schmerz, gänzlich unwissend [...] Und ich drehte mich um ihn zu sehen.” (BeK 111)  Nietzsche’s statement “Was groß ist am Menschen, das ist, dass er eine Brücke und kein Zweck ist” is perhaps ironically echoed in the story, for Kafka’s bridge certainly serves no purpose, though it would like to.

            Reading Nietzsche’s passage, we will find it hard to come to grips with the confusion of the images. It is permissible in a philosophical text to let the image shift from “rope” to “bridge” to “transition” to “arrow of yearning towards the other shore”, for the idea behind all these images is basically the same. But when man is spoken of alternately as the rope and the person crossing the rope, as the bridge and at the same time the destruction of the bridge, we may find it difficult to tell what precisely Nietzsche is trying to say. The initial equation is: man is the bridge between animal and superman. The image suggests that there is an animal realm and a realm of the superman but that the area of humanity is confined to being a bridge. Being humans, we want to know what to do and we are told that we are a) to bridge the gulf, b) to cross the gulf, c) not to be a “Zweck” or purpose which is probably intended to mean that we must not see ourselves as the final stage of a process or , more generally, something of value in itself and d) that we are to destroy ourselves. Translated into abstract language this probably means that the human species as such has no intrinsic value but is to consider itself as a transitional form that will pass, and is to look ahead towards the higher species in the direction of which it is developing. This is a statement of opinion rather than a genuine guide to action as which it seems to pose in Nietzsche’s passage. Kafka’s statement ‘dass die Worte der Weisen immer nur Gleichnisse seien, aber unverwendbar im täglichen Leben, und nur dies allein haben wir’ (BeK 96) comes to mind. Words like „Gefahr“, „Größe“, „was geliebt werden kann“ ‚“Verachtung“, „Verehrung“, „Sehnsucht“ are at best vaguely suggestive here.

            Kafka tidies Nietzsche’s passage up and builds a neat little story of it, the story of a human bridge in desolate country waiting for someone to use it but then not equal to the task. The accent changes: a vague atmosphere of hope is replaced by the fact of failure. Nietzsche’s „zwischen Tier und Übermensch“ becomes simply between „diesseits“ and „jenseits“. Nietzsche’s psalmic couple rhythm, which in this passage helps to erase the importance of man, becomes in Kafka’s prose a definite triple rhythm. On no other occasion does Kafka attempt rhythmic regularity of this nature, so perhaps we may take this too as part of the reply to Nietzsche. Kafka could be understood as saying: a) your images and ideas are wooly, b) your concepts of animal and superman say little more than this side or the other of man and c) humanity is of consequence to us and its destruction must be in the eyes of man a tragic failure.

            But Kafka’s criticism probably goes deeper. The idea of a bridge has meaning only if one envisages people passing across it. If this image is to stand for human existence then that means that our lives are meaningful only in so far as they help other men on in the direction of a higher existence. We can presume that Nietzsche, in his way, is trying to do this and that he wrote the prophetic and didactic Zarathustra in order that it might be a bridge in the direction of a ‘superman’ existence.[204] But what happens if, trusting its appearance, you want to use this bridge? It has no strength to carry you; its prophetic fervour proves hollow; all you see is a writhing human body beneath you. Many students of Nietzsche may agree that there have been few philosophies so intimately and uniquely related to the character and peculiarities of the philosopher conceiveing them. The deeper we investigate Nietzsche, the more we encounter Nietzsche the man rather than a philosophical system. Rudolf Steiner says about this:

Nietzsche ist kein Messias und kein Religionsstifter; er kann deshalb sich wohl Freunde seiner Meinungen wünschen; Bekenner seiner Lehren aber, die ihr eigenes Selbst aufgeben, um das seinige zu finden, kann er nicht wollen. In Nietzsche’s Persönlichkeit finden sich Instinkte, denen ganze Vorstellungskreise seiner Zeitgenossen zuwider sind [...] Was andere Menschen empfinden, wenn ihnen die Gedanken: Schuld, Gewissensbiss, Sünde, jenseitiges Leben, Ideal, Seligkeit, Vaterland durch den Kopf gehen wirkt auf Nietzsche unangenehm. Diese (die Freigeister) kennen alle Verstandeseinwände gegen die „alten Wahnvorstellungen“; aber wie selten findet sich einer, der von sich sagen kann: seine Instinkte hängen nicht mehr an ihnen.[205]

If we ask what happens to the man who attempts to make a bridge of himself we hear that he becomes stiff and cold. His life is one of extreme loneliness, he is subject to mental derangement – “meine Gedanken gingen immer in einem Wirr-warr und immer in der Runde” – , to torturing doubts about whom he might be helping – “wer war es? Ein Kind? Ein Traum? Ein Wegelagerer? Ein Selbstmörder? Ein Versucher? Ein Vernichter?” (BeK 111) – and in consequence, he is no longer able to face an actual challenge successfully. His good intentions – “und wie ein Berggott schleudere ich ihn an Land” – fail because he is not the “mountain god” as whom Nietzsche paints himself in Zarathustra. The earth to which man is to sacrifice himself („sich der Erde opfern“) turns out to be made of sharp rocks: „ich stürzte, und schon war ich zerrissen und aufgespießt von den zugespitzten Kieseln, die mich immer so friedlich aus dem rasenden Wasser angestarrt hatten“. (BeK 112) We do not know how much of Nietzsche Kafka had read apart from Zarathustra and therefore it is probably futile to argue about how valid Kafka’s criticism is when applied to Nietzsche as a whole. Perhaps it is doubts in this direction which caused Kafka to exclude it from his Landarzt collection, assuming he expected that at least some of his readers would recognize his allusions.[206] His pessimistic estimation of bridge-building from the material of personal intuitions probably gives us the reason why he avoided stating his opinions and beliefs in any but a veiled form.[207]

Der neue Advokat

Through the image of the king and conqueror Alexander the Great on his battle-steed, Kafka conjures up for us an ideal image of human and animal working together in “Der neue Advokat”. In Alexander we have man as the superior will while Bucephalos represents man as a being with the instinctive certainty and vitality of the animal. In heroic times they used to coexist in fruitful and harmonious cooperation. Mounted on Bucephalos, Alexander was the great leader who could point the way to India and who could take people out of the narrow confines of their natural surroundings in the direction of some high ideal. Without the strength, the surefootedness, the instinct for danger, and the physical endurance of his horse, Alexander could never have been what he was or achieved what he did. At the banquet table, Kafka tells us, Alexander was wicked like all those are who assume for themselves the right to lord it over others: “An der Geschicklichkeit, mit der Lanze über den Bankettisch hinweg den Freund zu treffen, fehlt es nicht.” (E 145) Today there are still many such people, just as there are many who wield swords. But no longer borne by a battle steed as Alexander was, they create only confusion: „Viele halten Schwerter, aber nur, um mit ihnen zu fuchteln, und der Blick, der ihnen folgen will, verwirrt sich.“ (E 145) High but realistic ideals are achieved through the combination of vitality and instinct on the one hand and will-power and intellect on the other. The two ways of living, the two types of personality, must work hand in hand.

Significantly, Alexander is a post-classical Greek. By choosing him as the subject of his sketch, Kafka seems to reject the ideal of classical Greece which had still characterized his own school education. We read in Wagenbach about the history lessons at Kafka’s school and that they presented a picture of antiquity

das ganz unter dem Eindruck von Schillers „Götter Griechenlands“ stand: „Bessre Wesen, edlere Gestalten […] heldenkühner, göttlicher die Tugend […] Schöne lichte Bilder scherzten auch um die Notwendigkeit“. Burckhardt’s Griechische Kulturgeschichte, die ein vollkommen neues Bild brachte, erschien erst 1898-1902; die Gefahren, besonders der durch die Parteienkämpfe zerrissenen „klassischen“ griechischen Zeit, blieben völlig unter der Horizontlinie. [208]

No ideal of classical harmony is implied in “Der neue Advokat”. The question that arises is: what becomes of the battle steed once there is no longer an Alexander to bear into battle. The nobel horse, the king’s helpmate is now in a difficult position and deserves our consideration: „Mit erstaunlicher Einsicht sagt man sich, dass Bucephalus bei der heutigen Gesellschaftsordnung in einer schwierigen Lage ist und dass er deshalb, sowie auch wegen seiner weltgeschichtlichen Bedeutung, jedenfalls Entgegenkommen verdient.“ (E 145)

There are two ways in which the steed Bucephalus has tried to adjust to his situation. In the first place he has attempted to become as human as possible and apparently he has succeeded reasonably well. “In seinem Äußern erinnert nur wenig an die Zeit, da er noch Streitross Alexanders von Mazodonien war. Wer allerdings mit den Umständen vertraut ist, bemerkt einiges.“ (E 145) His true identity is suspected by only a few. Bucephalos has taken basically the same step that the ape in Bericht an eine Akademie takes and as in that story there is an incomplete and in consequence somewhat ludicrous metamorphosis. In the second place Bucephalus has, in accordance with the trends of the time that recognize only intellectual goals (“heute sind die Tore ganz anderswohin und weiter und höher vertragen” E 145) transferred the battle, in which he assists, to the field of the mind; he is concerned now with legal attack and defence. His instincts and vitality are no longer of much use to him; instead he studies the ancient law books. What else was there left for him to do if he was not to become simply a racehorse or a sportsman, using his vitality and sure-footedness to break records in a stadium? It is „der Fachblick des kleinen Stammgastes der Wettrennen“ (E 145) that suspects his true nature. „Vielleicht ist es deshalb wirklich das Beste, sich, wie es Bucephalus getan hat, in die Gesetzbücher zu versenken. Frei, unbedrückt die Seiten von den Lenden des Reiters, bei stiller Lampe, fern dem Getöse der Alexanderschlacht, liest und wendet er die Blätter unserer alten Bücher.“ (E 146) And yet the conception of a horse masked as a barrister, spending his time reading ancient books by artificial light, is grotesque enough to permit us to retain our doubts about the value of this readjustment. The question remains: what does a vitally gifted person in need of a leader do in our technological and democratically inclined age?

There is no real need to take the interpretation further. But we have material which allows us to give the story a more personal interpretation. We know from one of Kafka’s aphorisms that there must have been a painting of the “Alexanderschlacht”, Alexander the Great’s battle against the Persians, in one of Kafka’s school classrooms:[209] “Der Tod ist vor uns, etwa wie im Schulzimmer an der Wand ein Bild der Alexanderschlacht” (H 50) Kafka writes in one of his aphorisms. Furthermore we know that Kafka’s classics teacher, who was also his class teacher right through high school, a large and strong man, full of vitality, had a purely formal bookish approach to the classics. “[Die Schule] predigte einen abgestandenen Humanismus, der sich in eingepauktem grammatikalisch-lexikalischem Wissen erschöpfte, dass zudem stets prüfungspräsent sein musste.“[210] As a Piarist monk, the classics teacher had withdrawn from life in this world to a cell. Another detail of interest here because the story alludes to it is that the broad flight of steps leading up to the Kinsky Palais in which Kafka’s school was located was the sole prerogative of the teachers, among them Gschwind; pupils had to use the servants’ entrance. “Die Würde des Lehrers wurde durch sein Recht, die herrschaftliche Treppe des Palais zu benutzen, dokumentiert, den Schülern waren die Lakaienaufgänge zugewiesen.’[211] Might not the school-boys have watched the massive Gschwind ascend the steps of the Kinsky Palais much as the Bucephalus of the story is watched? Did Kafka and maybe his friends nickname Gschwind, whose surname implies speed, “Bucepahlus”? On this presumption one might read the story as a demonstration of the blatant misuse of what has come down to us from classical times and, connected with this, the ridiculous perversion a physically gifted man such as Gschwind was forced to undergo for lack of a leader who showed the way and as a result of an over-intellectualist age. Whether this is a valid estimate of Gschwind, presuming the story alludes to him, we cannot say. Just as the story recognizes the adaptive achievement of Bucephalus, so Kafka and his class-mates presumably also had considerable admiration for Gschwind. But Kafka was also an enthusiastic adherent of the new culture of the body that had arisen with the Youth Movement and no doubt felt sad that the generation of his teacher had been forced to neglect their physical abilities. His criticism is levelled at the times and not at the man.

Ein Bericht an eine Akademie

“Ein Bericht an eine Akademie” again takes up the image of the animal turned man which we encountered in “Der neue Advokat”.[212] This time Kafka projects his own symbolic language onto Darwin’s theory of the evolution of man from the ape. Kafka’s ape has been asked to report about his metamorphosis into a human being. The academy, the British Royal Academy comes to mind, has asked for a report about his “äffisches Vorleben” but the ape refuses to adopt this disparaging view of the worth of the animal and substitutes the neutral word “Affentum”. The first sentences already reveal that Kafka is here not retelling Darwin’s theory but juxtaposing two different views of evolution. This does not prevent the ape from occasionally lapsing into human language during his presentation: “förmlich von einem Affen erfunden” (E 186).

Because the ape has no memory of his original existence as an animal in natural surroundings he can tell us nothing about it. What the true animal once was remains a mystery. Consciousness awakens only once the animal has entered into some first relation to human beings. There are hints towards interpreting the original state. Our animal past could have been a prenatal state: „Das Loch in der Ferne […] durch das ich einstmals kam, ist so klein geworden, dass ich, wenn überhaupt die Kräfte und der Wille hinreichen würden, um bis dorthin zurückzulaufen, das Fell vom Leib mir schinden müsste, um durchzukommen.“ (E 184) A return to something resembling prenatal or prehuman existence could probably only be achieved in death. There is also a suggestion, reminiscent of Rousseau, that the animal state was early youth. “Diese Leistung wäre unmöglich gewesen, wenn ich eigensinnig hätte an meinem Ursprung, an den Erinnerungen der Jugend festhalten wollen.“ (E 184) An allusion to the myth of the Golden Age could be seen in the phrase: “Ich stamme von der Goldküste.” (E 185) Here a historical past is suggested, an early age of man.  The suggestion of a lost paradise comes with the image: „War mir zuerst die Rückkehr, wenn die Menschen gewollt hätten, freigestellt durch das ganze Tor, das der Himmel über der Erde bildet [...]“ (E 184). Initially the sky, or heaven, had been a huge gate for him which then later closed.

In contradiction of Darwin, these interpretations of a lost animal state are overwhelmingly positive.[213] The ape confirms this when he condemns the shot that wounded him so as to catch him as „frevelhaft“, sinful: „wählen wir hier zu einem bestimmten Zwecke ein bestimmtes Wort, das aber nicht missverstanden werden wolle – die Narbe nach einem frevelhaften Schuss.“[214] (E 186)

But once the animal state of which we have no knowledge is lost, it is useless to pine for it. If death, either in the form of the ocean or the devouring giant snakes is not to be chosen, we must find a way out. The distinction between the two deaths is not very obvious but presumably the ocean offers a return to the elements whereas the caresses of the giant snakes suggest a moral, sensuous death, death at the hands of the tempter.[215] The decision to become a human, and it is a decision, is a “way out”.

Ich hatte keinen Ausweg, musste ihn mir aber verschaffen, denn ohne ihn konnte ich nicht leben. Immer an dieser Kistenwand – ich wäre unweigerlich verreckt. Aber Affen gehören bei Hagenbeck an die Kistenwand – nun, so hörte ich auf, Affe zu sein. Ein klarer, schöner Gedankengang, den ich irgenwie mit dem Bauch ausgeheckt haben muss, denn Affen denken mit dem Bauch.’ (E 188)

A decision conceived with the stomach is intuitive and visionary.[216] We read in Silberer:

Die Nabelgegend spielt eine nicht geringe Rolle als Lokalisationsort für die ersten inneren Empfindungen bei mystischen Introversionsübungen. Die Angaben der indischen Yoga-Lehre stimmen mit den Erlebnissen der Omphalpsychiker überein. Staudenmaier glaubt bei seinen magischen Versuchen die zum Teil auf die Hervorrufung extrem deutlicher Halluzinationen hinausliefen, beobachtet zu haben, dass nur dann lebenswahre himmlische oder religiöse Halluzinationen zustande kommen, wenn die „spezifischen“ Nervenkomplexe (des vegetativen Systems) „bis herunter zu den peripheren Endgebieten in der oberen Dünndarmgegend erregt sind.“ Viele schwärmerische Autoren wissen Wunderdinge von Kräften in der Magengegend und im Sonnengeflecht zu erzählen.[217]

That apes think with their stomachs could be taken as another piece of information to help us define the nature of animals. It matches up loosely with the description of the animal other stories have given us.

Things become clearer when the story begins to describe what goes towards making a man of an animal. In the first place there is the intention of other men to catch the animal. The animal does not voluntarily place himself in the hands of man; a “higher will” is responsible. The ape is caught with the help of two wounding shots, One shaves his cheek, but that is of little consequence, the other wounds him more seriously beneath the hip. This seems to imply a sexual wound,[218] particularly in combination with the loss of the beard which must be understood as a diminishment of manhood. Orthodox Jewish and Eastern Christian religion insist on the beard. And the biblical account of the Fall of Man can be read as the infliction of a sexual wound after the prohibition against eating the apple from the Tree of Knowledge has been ignored. Shame awakens and Adam and Eve prudishly cover themselves with fig leaves; Eve is moreover condemned to bear children in pain. But in Kafka’s story there is no complicity in the capture and the wounding, no sense of guilt and consequently no shame.[219] The ape is happy to show off his wound. Is this perhaps an allusion to post-Freudian openness about sexual wounds or even an attempt to interpret circumcision as a public admission of the sexual wound? In orthodox Judaism this would mean a recognition of guilt in the interests of a reconciliation with God. But Kafka’s ape was wounded by other humans; he is innocent. It was the “Firma Hagenbeck”, responsible for the first zoos in Germany, that committed the crime. The way men catch animals is reprehensible, even if it is to show off their skills and beauty, an accusation that the ape upholds in spite of his later reconciliation with the leader of the hunting expedition: “mit dem Führer habe ich übrigens seither schon manche gute Flasche Rotwein geleert.” (E 185) If there is an allusion to original sin, the accents have changed. The victim is merely the victim, no longer the culprit. Where Freud insisted that the sexual wound was a decisive component of psychic illnesses, Kafka seemed to regard it more generally as a decisive component in the making of man, for better or worse.

After the wounding comes encagement as a drastic narrowning down of natural possibilities. The animal is taken out of its natural surroundings and put in a purely artificial situation. It can no longer adopt its natural posture; almost all activity is curtailed. Perhaps this is an allusion to the education of children at the time; it was widely held that the utmost severity and the denial of all forms of freedom were the best way to make a child tractable and ‘civilized’. Boarding schools for boys were at the forefront here. The ape is isolated from others of his kind, much as older children were separated from the young when sent off to school. His desperate current situations drives home to him the need to fight for a “future”, something of which the animal probably had little conception for focus on the future requires a narrowing down of universal possibilities: “dieses große Gefühl der Freiheit nach allen Seiten. Als Affe kannte ich es vielleicht […]“ (E 188) to a single path ahead. Among the first things the ape learns is to shake hands, a sign of “openness”: “Handschlag bezeigt Offenheit” (E 185) a surrender of the furtive nature of wild things. He learns to spit, the sign of judgementalness and contempt, but hardly applies it seriously yet: “Spucken konnte ich schon in den ersten Tagen. Wir spuckten einander dann gegenseitig ins Gesicht; der Unterschied war nur, dass ich mein Gesicht nachher reinleckte, sie ihres nicht.“ (E 191) The ape still feels the need to cleanse himself from all manifestations of contempt; for him these are synonymous with filth. Then he also learns to smoke a pipe, man’s tranquillizer, though at first he does not realize it is a drug : “den Unterschied zwischen der leeren and der gestopten Pfeife verstand ich lange nicht” (E 191). But all this is of little importance compared with the brandy bottle.[220] The ape has to fight against a deep-rooted revulsion here, the revulsion against the unnaturally heightened states alcohol causes, with their unreality and loss of proportion. In mastering the brandy bottle he masters language. This suggests that the loss of reality to the point of the merely fictional and hallucinatory is the essence of language. But language is also communication. The first word the ape speaks is “hallo”, a greeting to others, and with this cry he leaps into the community of men.

Up to this point the ape has learnt by passive imitation, in the manner of the young child. This had been facilitated by the fact that the men who surrounded him all seemed exactly alike to him. Their creaturely heaviness, their calm good-naturedness, their enjoyment of the simple things of life, in other words, their proximity to the animal world predisposed them to be ideal teachers for the ape in this preliminary stage.

Once he has access to language a new stage in the development of the ape begins. He now has the choice between the two basic possibilities, the zoo existence which Die Verwandlung  and  Ein Hungerkünstler allude to – one might temporarily substitute a contemplative life – and a life in the circus. He does not hesitate to choose the circus life.

Ich zögerte nicht. Ich sagte mir: setze all Kraft an, um ins Varieté zu kommen; das ist der Ausweg; zoologischer Garten ist nur ein neuer Gitterkäfig; kommst du in ihn, bist du verloren. (E 194)

And now a period of intensest learning on his own initiative begins; he himself employs the teachers, as many as five at a time sitting in five different rooms through which he darts backwards and forwards, converting his animal vitality into mental energy till his teachers suffer nervous breakdowns.

Die Affennatur raste, sich überkugelnd, aus mir hinaus und weg, so dass mein erster Lehrer selbst davon fast äffisch wurde, bald den Unterricht aufgeben und in eine Heilanstalt gebracht werden musste. (E 194)

As a result of this enormous effort he achieves the average education of a European.

            What does Kafka have in mind when he speaks of “Varieté”? Years of training particularly in method and technique, perfect self-control, artificiality – even the clown’s accidents are premeditated – superficiality and sensationalism, for only the extraordinary and the exaggerated are of interest. In the circus everyone does what he is not naturally predestined to do; the melancholy man is the clown, the ape acts the human and the human acts the ape.

           

Oft habe ich in den Varietés vor meinem Auftreten irgendein Künstlerpaar oben an der Decke an Trapezen hantieren sehen. Sie schwangen sich, sie schaukelten, sie sprangen, sie schwebten einander in die Arme, einer trug den anderen an den Haaren mit dem Gebiss. „Auch das ist Menschenfreiheit,“ dachte ich, „selbstherrliche Bewegung“. Du Verspottung der heiligen Natur! Kein Bau würde standhalten vor dem Gelächter des Affentums bei diesem Anblick. (E 188/9)

This is the moment when we realize how much the ape is still ape and not human. It would not occur to him for a moment that a human might say of his performance: “Verspottung des heiligen Menschseins”, and he is full of consternation at the thought that people see no difference between him and a trained ape: “so als unterscheide ich mich von dem unlängst krepierten, hie und da bekannten, dressierten Affentier Peter nur durch den roten Fleck auf der Wange.” (E 186) It seems to me quite wrong to equate circus life with the artist’s life. There are aspects of the artist in the circus performer in much the same way as language, as here described, has certain things in common with the circus performance. But in this story circus life is most generally the extreme opposite of all things natural; as we said, the circus is the place where the human attempts to be the animal and the animal the human. Is it only the achievement of having apparently reversed nature that counts, or of having, by individual effort disproved the necessity of its laws, or is the circus the scene of some real assimilation between man and animal? As the story shows us neither an animal nor a human, nor a human attempting to become an animal once more, we will find it hard to answer this question. But it is suggested that what is specifically “human” is the ability to change or pervert nature and that what is characteristic of the animal is being natural, but that it is possible to be both, an ape with regard to sexuality and a man in the company of other men, an ape in the spontaneity of narration, a man in the clever premeditation of expression, an ape at home where he pulls down his pants and scratches himself and a man for the length of each circus performance. It is likely that Kafka admired in his own father some such combination of natural strength and vitality along with a disregard for manners and proper behaviour, in conjunction, however, with civilized self-command and a knowledge of propriety acquired by clever imitation. Yet at the same time Kafka must have seen the ludicrous incongruity of all this. The style of the story in its mixture of the conversational and the official, of the educated and the slangy expression, of well built hypotactic sentences and inadequately constructed paratactic ones, of human dignity and of extraordinary lapses of taste demonstrates this incongruity.

            Asked what relation all this has to Darwin’s theory of the evolution of man from the ape one might say: yes, it is possible that under certain circmstances an ape could become something approximating to a man, but it is also true that men can come pretty close to being apes; some succeed better and some not quite so well like the ape’s chimpanzee partner who has “den Irrsinn des verwirrten dressierten Tieres im Blick”. (E 196) But do all men necessarily descend from apes? There is talk somewhere in the story of the ten thousand greyhounds who write in the newspapers. Where do they fit in? We can answer neither the question what is an animal nor the question what is a man. Though Darwin thought he could, he was mistaken. In this story Kafka seems to approach Nietzsche’s view that man is but a bridge, a transitional phase between the animal and the superman, tending more or less in the direction of one or the other though in essence far distant from the pure state of either. But whereas Nietzsche envisages the “superman” as the great goal while the idea of the animal (and Nietzsche was a great animal lover) remained vague in his works, Kafka apparently found it far easier and more productive to concentrate on the animal, though realizing all the while that there could be no return to the animal state. The problem of evolution is confirmed as a problem.

INDIVIDUATION

            The topic of individuation is already broached in Kafka’s earliest work Beschreibung eines Kampfes with its emphasis on subjectivism on the one hand and loss of individuality on the other. It is then never actually forgotten and becomes central again in Das Schloss. There appears to be a relationship between the development of this theme and Kafka’s changing approach to ambivalence and its techniques which warrants a brief recapitulation of the various stages of Kafka’s development.

            In Beschreibung eines Kampfes everything is ambivalent because everything is seen subjectively. If no two people share an impression of reality, reality must be something open to endless interpretation.

            In the stories grouped here under the title “Marriage and Martyrdom”, the comparison with dream comes to mind. There appears to be complete ambivalence here but on a closer look definite strands on meaning relevant to Kafka himself are discernable, vaguely and intuitively rather than rationally. We have a mixture of question and envisaged answer. Kafka himself appeared to have to study these stories for the meaning he felt they had.

            In the Landarzt stories there is specific social criticism but a withholding of solutions. It is the visual technique with its avoidance of logical linearity that helps to give rise to the many questions.

            Das Schloss in turn poses the tragic and unanswerable question of: why does life go wrong? Ambiguity seems consciously constructed to accentuate the complexity of life. The question is asked in terms of human nature and left unanswered because the novel, and life, are unfinished and far too complex.

            Where the human world is perceived as a primarily subjective reality, gaining maturity becomes not so much a matter of achieving social integration but of finding one’s own self. Insight into the significance of one’s dreams is generally a first step in this direction; the next is to free oneself from theories and opinions; a third to understand and secure one’s place in life, as K. is trying to do; and a fourth the retrospective assessment of life which the “Artist Stories” attempt. Kafka’s work as a whole seems to reflect a process of individuation of which Das Schloss gives an epically broad depiction.

Das Schloss

            Das Schloss is the longest and most complex of Kafka’s works. There are a variety of interpretations and many discussions in general studies of Kafka. We cannot vie with these here nor can we do them all justice. Our own analysis shall attempt two things: to identify what seems to us to be the kernel of the novel and to discuss some aspects of ambivalence and the techniques involved that have hitherto not received adequate attention.

            As in many of Kafka’s longer works – other examples are Die Verwandlung and Der Prozess – the story introduces us to an almost limitless number of possibilities of interpretation. But unless one strand of meaning, and therewith of questioning, is given central importance – and it seems to me that a precise reading of the novel permits us to recognize this strand – experience of the novel and the thinking stimulated by it are confused, not directed. This does not mean that once the centre of unity has been found answers are easily available – questioning continues to the very last – nor does it mean that the other areas of meaning are excluded. It means only that within the context of this  novel one theme serves as the centre of organization. Interpretations that place emphasis on other themes cannot, however, be simply cast aside; what a critic might point out is that the balance is wrong. If such a central line of search or endeavour or questioning is not identified, ambivalence will be little more than labyrinthine confusion, a nihilistic surrender rather than an active concern with life.

            Das Schloss can be read in turn as a depiction of social structures, of religious concerns, or of personality and its development. Here we shall see it as a description of the process of individuation. This means that the macrocosm of the social world is ultimately little more than an image for the microcosm of the inner world. But the relationship between macrocosm and microcosm is closer than that between image and meaning normally is, for there are here actual causal connections. Nevertheless, in the final instance, the emphasis should be placed on the microcosm and not on the macrocosm.

            Our first step in justifying this approach will be an attempt to prove that the emphasis should be placed not on external reality but on internal reality. Here a study of the sources of the novel and of the perspective it uses may serve our purpose. Eventually, of course, the plausibility of the interpretation itself must serve as its justification.

            A minor contribution towards an underpinning of our reading can be made by the following considerations. Seen in abstraction, the theme of Das Schloss can be described as man’s exchange of a unified view of life for an antithetical one. On the whole, this theme seems to have had diminished relevance in the twentieth century. As democracy and socialism gained prominence, the dualism between ruler and subject became, in theory, ever less extreme; similarly, the strong dualisms of life and afterlife, good and bad, spirit and body etc. inherent in traditional religion seemed no longer of central concern in the twentieth century, for rationalism and positivism had placed the accents elsewhere. The antithetical relationship between the sexes was also diminishing; in the Prague of the early twentieth century the emancipation of women was well advanced. It is therefore difficult to imagine that in themselves these things should have become topics for Kafka. But there was at the time one field of human study in which dualism was assuming increasing importance. This was psychoanalysis with its division of personality into a conscious and sub- or unconscious mind. As a result of this, other dualisms seemed to regain importance and be seen in a new light. Jung emphasizes the basic differences between the sexes. The supernatural becomes a topic once more. Adler with his power-principle brings the dichotomy of ruler-subject to the notice again. Schizophrenia becomes the disease of the age. As Kafka’s thinking was in tune with his times, we are probably justified in taking notice of such developments.

            An examination of the sources of The Castle also suggests that the material was treated as an image rather than as a simple reality. Klaus Wagenbach has shown convincingly that the novel originated in childhood memories of Wossek, the home village of Kafka’s father.[221] Wossek had a “Schloss” surrounded by an upper village. That castle, whose owners rarely resided there, was administered by an unproportionately large bureaucracy of officials. In the upper village there was an inn owned by the castle. In the all Jewish lower village there was a two-room school and apparently a chapel. The upper village was Christian. In line with this, there were two classes of villagers in the novel. A bridge and then an inn marked the entrance to the lower village. Kafka probably last saw Wossek when he was seven, in the snowy winter month of December on the occasion of his grandfather’s funeral. (This links up with the projected ending of the novel.) This grandfather had not been accorded the right to marry till after the emancipation of Jews in 1848. There are other points of resemblance. The atmosphere of the wintery village as experienced by the bewildered child and the associations all this had with the authoritarian figure of Kafka’s father certainly determine the novel more than any realistic aspects of the material.

Who is K.?

           

The pages that introduce the reader to K. and the Castle are a masterpiece in the art of ambivalence. Who tells us in the first paragraph: „auch nicht der schwächste Lichtschein deutete das große Schloss an“ (S 9)  and: „K. [...] blickte in die scheinbare Leere empor“ (S 9)? Is it a narrator who wants to point out that though K. does not know it yet, a castle exists and the emptiness is only apparent? Or is it K. who knows about the Castle, has come there to work for or fight with the Castle but cannot see it for mist on that first night? If the narrator is speaking, then K.’s question: “In welches Dorf have ich mich verirrt? Ist denn hier ein Schloss?” (S 10) would present the true situation and the story about being summoned there as a surveyer, a Landvermesser, almost certainly an invention.

K.’s claim that he is a “Landvermesser” (surveyor) comes immediately after the young man Schwarzer has accused him of being “vermessen” (presumptuous) and a “Landstreicher” (tramp): “Landstreichermanieren! […] Ich verlange Respekt vor der gräflichen Behörde!” (S 10) This could mean that K.’s claim to be a “Landvermesser”

was a witty parry to counter the inhospitability of the village and find a home for himself. The sense of ironic humour carries over into the next paragraph. The passage itself again does not make it clear whether this is the narrator’s or K.’s humour. There are further examples of an ironic undertone: „ein Ton, der genug gedämpft war, um als Rücksichtnahme zu gelten, und laut genug, um ihm verständlich zu sein“ (S 11) and „wenn nun der junge Mann telephonieren musste, dann konnte er beim besten Willen K.’s Schlaf nicht schonen [...] Dann hatte es aber freilich auch keinen Sinn, den Schlafenden zu spielen, und er kehrte deshalb in die Rückenlage zurück.“ (S 11)

            Besides being a witty parry, K.’s claim to be a “Landvermesser” could also have a deeper symbolic meaning. K. would then be saying to Schwarzer as representative of both village and Castle: “You call me bold, presumptuous, arrogant. Very well, I will accept that role and title for you obviously need a heretic in this place where dependence on the Castle is such that it interferes with basic human rights and a traveller who has lost his way on an icy winter night is turned out of doors again. I will stay to fight for these rights, for hospitality and tolerance.” It sounds almost like a threat when K. says: „Sonst aber lassen Sie es sich gesagt sein, dass ich der Landvermesser bin, den der Graf hat kommen lassen.“ (S 11)

            Another interpretation would be, that K. had set out originally to fight the narrowness and inhumanity of the Castle (knowing it from hearsay) and is now revealing his intentions in a veiled form. This version would resemble K.’s mission as described in the early “Fürstenzimmerfragment”. Thus if one took Landvermesser on the symbolic level, it would make comparatively little difference whether the first paragraph had been written from the point of view of the narrator or K.

            There is a fourth possible interpretation, namely that K. is actually a surveyor who has been summoned by the Castle only to be enmeshed in red tape and ambiguities once he has arrived. In this case, paragraph one would need to be read as narrated from K.’s point of view. Let us turn to another important paragraph:

K. horchte auf. Das Schloss hatte ihn also zum Landvermesser ernannt. Das war einerseits ungünstig für ihn, denn es zeigte, dass man im Schloss alles Nötige über ihn wusste, die Kräfteverhältnisse abgewogen hatte und den Kampf lächelnd aufnahm. Es war aber andrerseits auch günstig, denn es bewies, seiner Meinung nach, dass man ihn unterschätzte und dass er mehr Freiheit haben würde, als er hätte von vornherein hoffen dürfen. Und wenn man glaubte, durch diese geistig gewiss überlegene Anerkennung seiner Landvermesserschaft ihn dauernd in Schrecken halten zu können, so täuschte man sich; es überschauerte ihn leicht, das war aber alles. (S 13)

Can this paragraph still be interpreted to suit the four versions initially suggested? The fourth, namely the realist version, provides the greatest difficulties. One would then have to read the paragraph as being the narrator’s view on the matter or that of the village people. One would not, however, expect the village people to be so articulate. The narrator, in the course of the novel, seems to avoid giving opinions. The introduction to the passage “K.horchte auf”, the “gewiss überlegene Anerkennung” and the end “es überschauerte ihn leicht” hardly admit of any other interpretation than that this is K.’s opinion. Small alterations in this passage would have allowed the way to remain open for all four interpretations. If Kafka had omitted “K. horchte auf”, „seiner Meinung nach“ and „es überschauerte ihn leicht“ etc. and had altered the second last sentence by one world to „durch diese geistig überlegene Anerkennung seiner Landvermesserschaft ihn dauernd in Schrecken halten zu können so täuschte er sich wohl“, the passage could have been the opinion of the narrator or village people as well as of K.. Did Kafka wish to narrow down the possible meanings of his novel, was it lack of skill which made him drop one on the way, or was it that the realistic as the least important of the interpretations could for moments be forgotten?

One has little difficulty reading this paragraph in the light of the other three interpretations. The fact that the Castle smilingly takes up the struggle would suggest that the Castle has seen the joke, is prepared to play along with it and give K. a certain amount of “Narrenfreiheit” or fool’s licence: “dass er mehr Freiheit haben würde, als er hätte von vornherein hoffen dürfen.” (S 13) One of the first thing the Castle does is to send K. assistants who are jokers and no good for anything but being jokers. In other words, the Castle has employed K. to be its practical joker while K. himself had intended his joke to act as a deception and literally wants to be employed as a surveyor. He has thereby turned legitimate, because playful deception into a lie. When does the change take place? At least till the end of the first chapter the tone appears to be humerous (e. g. the description of the Castle, the teacher etc.) Is it the icy cold and the deep snow making escape impossible, the realization that no one will be hospitable of their own accord, or finally the prospective union with Frieda that make K. fight so hard for security, of whatever nature it might be, and cause him to lose his sense of humour? Does he regain it having lost Frieda and encountering Pepi’s comic but genuine offer of hospitality? For in the conversation with Pepi K. seems to have retrieved the wisdom that comes with humour and self-irony and with it the power to help and heal.

The version that K. more or less on the spur of the moment decides to attack the Castle for its lack of humanity and its mechanical approach to life can also be seen as supported by the paragraph quoted. To the extent that this mechanization can be the result of either bureaucratic and dictatorial social organization, or bureaucratic and dictatorial religious organization, the fight K. wages can be seen as aimed at either religious or social systems insofar as they promote prejudice, suspicion and intolerance. The exposition of the novel, in spite of symbols already being introduced, relies structurally on a skilful manoevering of perspectives so as to leave the way to all versions open. This exposition is limited to the night of arrival and with the paragraph “Nach dem Frühstück” the actual novel begins, in which the narrator is closely attached to K. and in which the symbols are the elements that produce poetic ambiguity, whereas in the first few paragraphs the symbols – night, snow, wooden bridge, warmth of the inn – seem to be more constant and comprehensible factors. With the beginning of the first day all things are seen from the point of view of the hero while the symbols and the symbolical figures shift from level to level. But this too is a simplification of the situation that confronts us. Because the circumstances surrounding K.’s arrival in the village are so ambiguous, narration from his point of view would always remain something the reader must find difficult to assess  and to identify himself with wholeheartedly, even if there were not the added complication of the many symbolical levels on which the story might be understood. Due to the fact that K. is referred to in the third person throughout the novel, the narrator has freedom to choose to what extent he will or will not identify himself with K.. Thus the switch from exposition to the main novel remains practically unnoticed.[222] The bewildered and sleepy state K. is in on the first night seems to both justify and conceal the author’s use of perspective here. Besides being a device to cover up an artful introduction, it is organically related to the whole of the novel in that, depending on K.’s mental and emotional state, the narrator seems to have more or less access to K.’s inner thoughts and feelings. In the last chapter with Pepi, where K. is resigned to failure and free from the tenseness of the search, we warm to him most and feel most humanly towards him.

Apart from perspective, elements of drama are used to help support ambiguity. There is a considerable amount of direct speech by characters who are strange to us. But in comparison with drama, there are here no gestures, facial expressions or tones of voice to guide us in our interpretations of such utterances and to help us distinguish the genuine from pretence, irony from seriousness.[223] With but few exceptions, it appears as though the characters had conspired to do and say everything with poker faces.

Dramatic too, is the mimic and scenic exaggeration that is characteristic of the whole of the novel. We might spontaneously take it for burlesque, were it not for the fact that K. never laughs at it. Is it intended to be laughed at? Listening to Jeremias we might say yes, but with a view to K.’s love for Frieda, no. The final effect is a little like the experience a modern audience might have with the Everyman plays: an uneasy uncertainty about whether we are intended to excuse preposterous naivete or laugh wholeheartedly to spite, or in spite of those matters of utmost importance that are being presented. For once we begin to laugh, how could we not laugh at the plughole view of fat, drowsy Klamm, the great lover, and yet this would be to make a farce of the novel. It appears that one must either take everything seriously like K., or everything lightly like the helpers. Yet both attitudes make us uneasy.[224] The ambiguous introduction K. is given in the novel is carefully supported by all the references made to his arrival and appointment throughout the novel. When Fritz says over the telephone “Ich weiß schon, der ewige Landvermesser” (S 33) the “ewig” can refer to K.’s insistence or to the fact that there is no reality to the claim or position of being surveyor to the Castle, that the whole business can only be an eternal symbol or a joke. Even the remark to the Herrenhofwirtin in the very last chapter tells us nothing:

„Was bist du denn eigentlich?“ „Landvermesser.“ „Was ist denn das?“ K. erklärte es, die Erklärung machte sie gähnen. „Du sagst nicht die Wahrheit?“ „Auch du sagst sie nicht.“ (S 413)

           

Is it K.’s claim or the particular description of his profession that he gives to the woman that is untrue? He does admit to some untruth, unless it is just the looseness of colloquial language that lets the “auch” creep in. The ambiguity of K.’s claims and intentions is supported by the ambiguity of all communications that come from the Castle.

            We have so far spoken of the ambiguity surrounding K. as though it were due to our enforced ignorance, and in the context of the social image Kafka has chosen, we can do little else. But if the Castle presents primarily an inner reality, such as the unconscious, the ambiguity can be seen as residing in K. himself. What we have described would then reveal itself as being the uncertainty about personal motives, the impossibility of self-knowledge and perhaps, most specifically, the peculiar relation man has with what he considers his calling or vocation.[225]

The Castle Complex

           

            Even more ambiguous than K.’s attitude to the Castle is the castle symbol itself. Our most precise vision of the Castle is the early description given through K.’s eyes, though even this is amended and questioned by his later impressions. Nevertheless, it at least gives us some notion of what K. seeks and sees in the Castle at this early stage, particularly as it is described in contrast to K.’s home village which has a church but no castle.

Der Kirchturm der Heimat […] bestimmt, ohne Zögern geradewegs nach oben sich verjüngend, breitdachig, abschließend mit roten Ziegeln, ein irdisches Gebäude – was können wir anders bauen – aber mit höherem Ziel als die niedrige Häusermenge und mit klarerem Ausdruck, als ihn der trübe Werktag hat.

Der Turm hier oben – es war der einzig sichtbare – der Turm eines Wohnhauses, wie es sich jetzt zeigte, vielleicht des Hauptschlosses, war ein einförmiger Rundbau, zum Teil gnädig von Efeu verdeckt, mit kleinen Fenstern, die jetzt in der Sonne aufstrahlten – etwas Irsinniges hatte das – und einem söllerartigen Abschluss, dessen Mauerzinnen unsicher, unregelmäßig, brüchig, wie von ängstlicher oder nachlässiger Kinderhand gezeichnet, sich in den blauen Himmel zackten. Es war, als wenn ein trübseliger Hausbewohner, der gerechterweise im entlegensten Zimmer des Hauses sich hätte eingesperrt halten sollen, das Dach durchbrochen und sich erhoben hätte, um sich der Welt zu zeigen. (S 18)

That one village has a castle and the other has not, points to the fact that one represents a monistic world and the other a dualistic one.[226] The home village is dominated by the church: church as giving a clear interpretation of life, as standing for ideals, “mit höherem Ziel”, as something unwavering, broad-roofed to protect the congregation but of this earth as the red bricks, made of earth and the colour of blood, show. Enlightened philosophies come to mind where religion is basically ethics and aesthetics. The mystical or otherworldly aspects of religion are here of no relevance.

            In contrast, the village seems to have no church, only a chapel “scheunenartig erweitert, um die Gemeinde aufzunehmen”. This suggests temporariness (a chapel is normally only part of a church or a very tiny church) but because it is barn-like, it could also allude to the parable about judgment when the wheat will be harvested and the corn separated from the husks. Yet one never actually hears of people going to church, or of a parson, or even of God. Anything resembling religion in the novel is directed at the Castle and its officials. And what is the Castle? It seems to be a collection of dwelling houses; there are no representative buildings and as far as one can make out from a distance, it looks to be simply another village built on a hill. But it has a tower. From the preceding description of K.’s home village it appears that a tower is something that gives direction, point and distinction to the village. But this tower? It is not interesting in design “ein einförmiger Rundbau” fortunately half covered with ivy (half nature, half artifact and its natural aspect seems almost the better). It has little windows (small glimpses of the world?) which flash up in the sun (flashes of inspiration perhaps which these small insights kindle in an observer) and there is something crazy, insane, about such flashes: “etwas Irrsinniges hatte das”. Moreover, the tower was apparently intended as a fortification, it has “einen söllerartigen Abschluss mit Mauerzinnen” (we are reminded of “the Lord is a tower of strength to his people”, “ein feste Burg ist unser Gott”) but the whole idea of attack and defence seems to be determined by fear or naivety “wie von ängstlicher oder nachlässiger Kinderhand gezeichnet”. There is something childish about this Castle and silhouetted against the blue heavens it looks ungainly and unfinished. If the Castle represents religion, the Enlightenment’s criticism of it as childish, insane, unimpressive, piecemeal, cowed, despondent, and without beauty is very much to the fore.

            A little later, however, when K. is returning from his unsuccessful attempt to reach the Castle we are told the following:

           

Das Schloss dort oben, merkwürdig dunkel schon, das K. heute noch zu erreichen gehofft hatte, entfernte sich wieder. Als sollte ihm aber noch zum vorläufigen Abschied ein Zeichen gegeben werden, erklang dort ein Glockenton, fröhlich beschwingt, eine Glocke, die wenigstens einen Augenblick lang das Herz erbeben ließ, so als drohe ihm – denn auch schmerzlich war der Klang – die Erfüllung dessen, wonach es sich unsicher sehnte. (S 27)

Though a sober inspection of the distant Castle can find little that is attractive and worthwhile about it, the irrational effect it has on the feelings seems the exact opposite, joyful and heartwarming, though there is an element of sadness too, and full of the promise of fulfillment. We face here the paradox inherent in most religions, certainly in Judaism and Christianity, of apparent shabbiness on the one hand and mysterious glory on the other. Throughout the novel there are frequent images that support this paradox. One is the telephone with its unintelligible messages and its chaos of voices mingled with a sound as of music. While the positive always seems to depend on brief and unreliable communications to the senses rather than the intellect, its power is sufficient to urge people on in its pursuit. And when it comes to attainment, the mystically inclined like Frieda do best and the rationally inclined like K. worst.

           

            In the monistic view of life, the church as a clearly defined reality is part of the village. In the dualistic, there is no church but a rival village, a rival world on the mountain. Whereas the village church seems to be a Protestant Christian church, the city or castle on the mountain can be many things, even a “New Jerusalem”.

            One of the likely sources of the castle image is, as we have mentioned, the village of Wossek from which Kafka’s father came.[227] In the feudal system still prevailing in Wossek during the lives of Kafka’s grandparents, the Jews had to have special permission to work and to marry. Kafka’s grandfather was, as we said, not allowed to marry till quite late in life. Imagining for a moment that time were reversed and a Franz Kafka, who was not only a Jew but a complete outsider had come to this primitive feudal village, how much more difficult his struggle for a livelihood would have been than it was in Prague.. But why would a man like K., standing for Kafka, leave a modern society that in spite of the feudal vestiges in the K and K bureaucracies had almost achieved democratic equality? Perhaps Kafka felt that the struggle with authority, the struggle to make a living, of which Kafka’s father frequently spoke, was what produced men like his father whom he envied all his life for his strength and vitality. Certainly the K. of The Castle is, in character at least, as close to Kafka’s father as to Kafka himself. (Wagenbach’s research on Wossek suggests that Kafka may even have had his grandfather in mind.)

Is social dualism the order which brings out the distinctions between the sexes most emphatically? Not the official (Kafka himself was an official) but the nobody fighting against the official order was the man whom all women felt attracted to. Thus authority becomes necessary in order to make possible the manly struggle against authority. Authority accepted, as it was by the child Franz Kafka and as it is by most of the peasants of the Castle has exactly the opposite effect. There are of course exceptions among them like Brunswick who welcomed the proposal to have a surveyor and fought to marry a girl from the Castle, but they are rare.

            Beside the feudal order of Wossek, Kafka’s novel also seems to allude to the castle of fairytales. The castle is a standard element in such tales and characteristically the hero has to enter it with the help of strength, prowess and virtue in order to conquer for himself the fairy princess who is often under the spell of the supernatural.[228] If things go well, which they do in fairytales, he ends up becoming the new king of the castle. In much the same way, K. wants to enter the Castle not only to prove his superiority but to be given Frieda officially by Klamm, the equivalent of the king. Since fairytales may be taken to be symbolic representations of psychological realities, we can postpone a discussion. The atmosphere, however, which comes with faith in a supernatural world of whatever order and which pervades The Castle, as all primitive societies, is another characteristic of a consistently dualistic view of the world.

            Another possible source of the castle image to which Reed draws attention is a passage in Schopenhauer. There the philosopher speaks of the difficulties of recognizing Kant’s thing-in-itself in terms of a castle image: „Wir sehen hier, dass von außen dem Wesen der Dinge nimmermehr beizukommen ist; wie immer man auch forschen mag, so gewinnt man nichts als Bilder und Namen. Man gleicht einem, der um ein Schloss herumgeht, vergeblich den Eingang suchend und einstweilen die Fassaden skizzierend.“[229] This description applies well to Kafka’s The Castle where we are given changing impressions of the fassade. As regards the inhabitants, we are given the names of countless virtually unknown officials as mysteriously inscrutable as the thing-in-itself. But the thing-in-itself, if it is the subjective phenomenon which Schopenhauer takes it to be, can quite easily be located in the vicinity of such psychological phenomena as the unconscious or the self which are necessarily mysteries in much the same way. The psychologist C.G. Jung’s ideas are of interest here. He discusses the castle and the city as universal images and sets them in relation to his own psychological concepts. As Jung’s descriptions link up with what we have said and Jung’s categories, derived from a vast knowledge of myth, legend and literature as well as individual case histories can provide a guide for understanding the pattern of events in The Castle, we shall solicit the help of his ideas, making no claim to show up influences but professing faith that a science of human nature can give us insights which will at times be useful.

            According to Jung the castle or city is an archetype: “From the circle and quaternity motif is derived the symbol of the geometrically formed crystal and the wonder-working stone. From here analogy formation leads on to the city, castle, church, house, room and vessel.”[230] This archetype can stand for the self though it is in the first place a maternal symbol. Jung writes: “The city is […] a woman who harbours the inhabitants in herself like children.”[231] “Christians are children of the Higher City, not sons of the earthly city-mother. – The symbol-creating process substitutes for the mother the city, the cave, the Church etc.”, the significance of this symbolic substitution being that “the infantile attachment is a crippling limitation for the adult, whereas attachment to the city fastens his civic virtues and at least enables him to lead a useful existence.”[232]

            In the case of Kafka’s Castle it seems best to see the whole complex of Castle and village as the self, for as the landlady of the Brückenhof says, the two realms are in reality one. The Castle is the locked or unconscious part of the self (the word ‘Schloss’ suggests this too) which in certain of its aspects is occasionally also present in the village (e.g. the visiting officials) whereas the village is everyday consciousness.[233] To link the sub- or unconscious with a mother symbol would not be far fetched, for unconsciousness is never deeper than in the mother’s womb. The supernatural too is close to the world of the unconscious while religion and legend are concerned with the archtypes of the unconscious;  there seems thus to be sufficient basis for this identification. We even read in Jung: „Unsere Verbeugung vor Gesetz und Staat ist ein empfehlenswertes Muster für unsere allgemeine Einstellung zum kollektiven Unbewussten. Es gibt in der Welt aber auch Faktoren, zu denen unser Gewissen nicht unbedingt ja sagt, und wir verbeugen uns vor ihnen. Warum? Es ist praktisch zuträglicher als das Gegenteil. Gleicherweise gibt es Faktoren im Unbewussten, wo wir nichts als klug sein müssen.“[234] There are symbolic authority figures within the unconscious, as within the state or the law, of which we may not fully approve but which it makes sense to accept. The officials of the Castle fall into this category. The village’s critical attitude to rebellious people like Amalia and K. here seems to find a plausible justification.

            The details of Kafka’s castle image also supports an interpretation of the Castle as the unconscious insofar as it registers every action and event ( the protocols and files) no matter whether or not it is of consequence. The Castle’s officials are constantly busy, racing backwards and forwards from village to Castle, communicating with each other through countless telephones, though for conscious ears this is only a hum as of blood rushing through the heart or air passing through the lungs -  a rhythmical “music” – and all this, it seems, to very little purpose. When the conscious mind tries to observe the “distribution of files”, to watch the registering and ordering process of the unconscious, inhibition and as a result confusion set in. Yet in the realm of the conscious, in the village, these busy officials seem to be constantly asleep, either in beds, like Bürgel, who does all his work in bed, or sleeping at a desk like Klamm. The unconscious works above all in bed and during sleep. Its communications, Klamm’s letters, are ambiguous and unrealistic like dreams. Its often grossly sexual preoccupations can certainly shock an innocent and decent young girl like Amalia, though moral shock is out of place.[235] Not many people have the ability to consciously observe their unconscious, not many have access to the Castle. Dreams as often as not are unremembered.

            Its emissaries too can help us approach the meaning of the Castle. Jung’s investigation On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure (1954) provides us with an aid to understanding the significance of the helpers sent by the Castle. Jung says of the trickster: “He is a forerunner of the saviour, and, like him, God, man, and animal at once. He is both subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and divine being, whose chief and most alarming characteristic is his unconsciousness.”[236] Furthermore: “The trickster makes his influence felt on the highest levels of civilization, even where, on account of his stupidity and grotesque scurrility, the trickster no longer plays the role of a ‘delight-maker’. In many cultures this figure seems like an old river-bed in which the water still flows. One can see this best of all from the fact that the trickster motif does not crop up only in its mythical form but appears just as naively and authentically in the unsuspecting modern man – whenever, in fact, he feels himself at the mercy of annoying ‘accidents’ which thwart his will and his actions with apparently malicious intent. He then speaks of ‘hoodoos’ and ‘jinxes’ or of the ‘mischievousness of the object’. Here the trickster  is represented by counter-tendencies in the unconscious, and in certain cases by a sort of second personality of a puerlile and inferior character, not unlike the personalities who announce themselves at spiritualistic seances and cause all those ineffably childish phenomena so typical of poltergeists.”  K., feeling himself thwarted and at the mercy of accidents due to the unconscious countering his conscious, is shadowed by the helpers whose designation points in the direction of the saviour figure though in actual fact they seem to have little in common with it, and who are without doubt puerile and inferior in character, a mixture of the demonic and the childish in much the same way as we encounter it in the “poltergeist”.[237] Kafka’s version of the self and the mind as presented in Das Schloss was in tune with the latest discoveries of pschoanalysis.

The Process of Individuation

            Our investigation of the castle image has shown that a number of the things it seems to allude to can be viewed in conjunction if we see it in relation to Jung’s unconscious. It must be stressed again that we are making no attempt to assert this relationship as an absolute or necessary one. It is merely a useful parallel that remains useful as we turn to discuss the configuration and development of the characters in the novel. In a study entitled Die Beziehung zwischen dem Ich und dem Unbewussten that developed out of an essay published in French and English in 1916, Jung gives a schematic description of the stages in the process of individuation. It is theoretically possible that Kafka was familiar with Jung’s ideas. If he was, he would have used them only to organize his real life material in a manner which would have seemed to him at times a little comic, comic as all stylizations and abstractions appear by the standards of a reality that has been intensely experienced and suffered, but also valuable because of the detachment this made possible. It is more likely, however, that Kafka invented his own image-borne diagram of human nature to destroy the immediacy of experience. For the “influence” at the heart of Kafka’s novel is without doubt his deep and tragic love for Milena and the final impression The Castle leaves on the reader is wrought above all by this.

            Let us turn to an examination of the figures of the novel. In the hierarchy of those approaching individuation, Pepi and her room-mates are lowest. They are at home in a warm, dark, windowless little room where the beds are wardrobe shelves, made for objects rather than people. It is somewhere in the back regions of the village inn, the Herrenhof frequented by Castle officials, but neither really of the village or of the Castle. The girls never seem to leave the house. It is obviously a region where conscious and unconscious mingle without clear distinction, a place that resembles the womb in its cramped warmth. What the girls know of life is the tiny excerpts one observes through the keyhole and they relate these observations to themselves and their dark and unreal wishes and fancies.

When Pepi is called to take up a position in the world, to be barmaid in Frieda’s stead, the first thing she does is to make herself a dress. It appears that dresses in this novel can be more or less identified with what Jung calls the ‘persona’. A persona is a mask: „eine Maske, die Individualität vortäuscht, die andere und einen selber glauben macht, man sei individuell, während es doch nur eine gespielte Rolle ist, in der die Kollektivpsyche spricht.“[238] For the woman, this mask is the ideal woman as she conceives her; for the man, it is the ideal man. Pepi’s idea of a dress is unsuitable for a young person: it is dark grey and tight around the legs so that it restricts movement. Her appearance in it is exaggerated and comic. The material for the dress is not her own and the design too is a communal effort.

Simultaneously with the persona, the animus, a complementary figure of the unconscious, forms. Applied to a man, Jung describes the process in the following way:

Die Persona, das Idealbild des Mannes, wie er sein sollte, wird innerlich kompensiert durch weibliche Schwäche und wie das Individuum außen den starken Mann spielt, wird es innerlich zum Weibe, zur Anima, denn es ist die Anima, die der Persona gegenüber tritt. Weil aber das Innen für das extravertierte Bewusstsein dunkel und unsichtbar ist, und man sich überdies seine Schwächen destoweniger denken kann, je mehr man mit der Persona identisch ist, so bleibt auch das Gegenstück der Persona, die Anima, völlig im Dunklen und wird daher zunächst projiziert.[239]  

In the case of the barmaid Frieda, who is capable of self-criticism and does not identify herself with her dress, the animus takes the form of one of the figures or achetypes of the unconscious. But for someone like Pepi, Klamm does not come down to the guestroom and so she projects her animus dream onto K.. In consequence, she cannot hold onto her new position and drops into her former immaturity, hoping that K. will follow her to her room to be her protector, her helper and her possession. Jung says of the men who are suited to carrying the projection of the animus that they are either “lebende Nachbilder des lieben Gottes, die über alles den richtigen Bescheid wissen, oder verkannte Neuerer.”[240] K. belongs to the latter category; he is not the type of the all-knowing god but of the unrecognized reformer.  

            Surprisingly, the landlady of the Herrenhof is little more than a Pepi run amock with wardrobes full of overladen, old-fashioned and unsuitable dresses or personas. In the same way, she is hostess to probably hundreds of Castle officials throughout the year, to hundreds of animus figures from the unconscious. But multiplication of the old does not lead you to a new level of existence. The landlady remains a person of little consequence whose life is quite unreal.[241]

            In contrast, the landlady of the Brückenhof, the bridge-inn, with her three intense and quite personal unprojected experiences of the animus-figure, is a far maturer person. Her mistake is, that she cannot believe that she will encounter anything beyond these experiences. Her animus vision overshadows her marriage and suppresses her husband who might have been a free and happy person but for this. To her Frieda, with whom she has much in common, is like a daughter. Though attracted to K., she feels hostile to him because she does not understand that the animus figure too must be overcome in the final stages of individuation.

            Of the women to whom the novel introduces us, Frieda has reached the highest stage of individuation for apart from having a definite persona (her yellowish blouse, cut provocatively low and almost merging in colour with her skin colour, is clothing that reveals rather than bemantels her individual characteristics) she has a distinct, constant and accessible, unprojected animus-figure. More than that, she has acquired Klamm’s “mana”, his magic power. There is a peculiar power in her eyes; she has command equally over herself, the passions that follow in the train of the unconscious (Klamm’s Dienershaft or servants) and over other people, such as the innkeeper who respects her highly. She knows at first sight that K. is the man she loves, that he is worth the loss of her persona Klamm, and that she is prepared to surrender herself to him completely. A successful love relationship would have meant full individuation.

            But at the decisive moment something goes wrong. Is it that the passions do get the upper hand as she and K. roll about in the beer puddles on the floor? Kafka suggests this not only by his description of the night of love, which is repulsive, but he also tells us that in the morning Klamm’s servants, whom she had always controlled up to now, become impudent towards Frieda. Another factor contributing to failure is that K. is at this stage not able to match her maturity and love for he has not yet come to grips with his own unconscious. Loving Frieda, a desperate sense of the necessity of this overcomes him. He is determined to speak to Klamm and all means to this end seem justified to him. Frieda for her part cannot understand why, in his quest for Klamm, he is always running away from her to others of whom she cannot approve. It is not simple jealousy but a far deeper concern that takes hold of her. She does not realize that it is to win her with Klamm’s blessing that K. is doing all this. External insecurity adds to the problems. The only solution Frieda can now envisage is that they leave the realm of the Castle completely. But K. is not prepared to do this, for it would mean surrendering everything that had made Frieda attractive and valuable to him and giving up the peculiar manliness he was beginning to achieve in his struggle with the Castle, manliness which was probably what had made him attractive to Frieda in the first place.

            Leaving the “Herrenhof”, Frieda and K. first go to the hostess of the Brückenhof, the great mother figure. Jung writes that in the hierarchy of the unconscious the animus is the lowest step and only one of the possible figures and that when you overcome it, another collective figure appears: „es ist eine mütterlich überlegene Figur, die große Mutter, die Allerbarmerin, die alles versteht and alles verzeiht und immer das beste gewollt hat, die stets für andere gelebt und niemals das Ihre gesucht hat, die Entdeckerin der großen Liebe […]“.[242] This reads like a good description of the Brückenhofwirtin. As K.’s hold over Frieda loosens, this mother-figure whose influence Frieda had originally tried to avoid, acquires greater power over her. Frieda loses her Mana, her brightness and her energy, till she finally falls a prey to one of the inferior figures of the unconscious, the trickster-helper Jeremiah, who satisfies her motherly instincts for the brief period until she can find her way back to Klamm. There is little doubt that she will regain Klamm and her former superiority. But she fails in the final step of individuation and there is almost no prospect of a future marriage as K. admits to Pepi. Though in some ways more mature than K., she is also less ambitious. Unlike him, she does not attempt to get free access to both the Castle and the village, or recognition by the Castle of her conscious life in the village.

            K. is more determined and more ruthless in his determination. We gather that he is a mature man with considerable experience behind him when he enters the Castle world. He appears to have been a surveyor with assistants and there is talk of him having left wife and child, though “so weit von Weib und Kind” (S 14) could be taken just as a turn of phrase. Yet K. is thoroughly inexperienced in matters of the Castle, meaning in the kind of dualism that separates between the conscious and unconscious, between the natural and the supernatural, between subjects and rulers. Nevertheless, he has made up his mind that this is his field of work and this the place where he is going to make his home. With the stranger’s detachment and the mature man’s sovereignty of mind, he sets about trying to understand this new world in all its aspects – a thing which not one of the residents of the village has tried to do – and immediately the conflict between knowledge and life arises. The acquaintances he chooses are people from whom he can learn something, not people with whom he wants an active relationship of any kind. That he wants only with Frieda and knowing this, he sees no harm in taking up contact with other people, especially women. He wants to know what happens when one suppresses the ‘lewd’ unconscious, like Amalia, whether the passions, as servants of the unconscious, can reveal to Olga anything of its deeper nature, how reliable those probably visionary messages Barnabas brings are, and what nature and knowledge a woman who was raised in the Castle like Brunswick’s wife might have. This does not necessarily mean that he approves of these people, though he may be fond of them as one is of sisters or brothers following a common pursuit. K. is genuinely fond of both Olga and Barnabas. And it is precisely this fondness, the fact that the knowledge which comes with experience will never be free from the emotions that accompany experience, makes every encounter K. has appear to Frieda like a betrayal. To do Frieda justice, K. must know more about Frieda’s world, to know more about Frieda’s world, K. must do Frieda injustice. It is a vicious circle from which there is no escape and the situation is complicated further by the taboos of society, which Frieda adheres to.

            At this point we might deviate briefly to examine the specific allusions that seem to accompany the names in the novel. Few interpreters of The Castle have not made mention of what at first sight suggests itself as a meaningful network of allusions.[243] On closer examination, however, the references are ambiguous and confusing, obviously intended both to stimulate and frustrate our search for knowledge and understanding, in other words, to place the reader in a situation resembling that of K..[244] Only very occasionally does a name appear to give us a specific clue and then the reference tends to be immanent to the novel world, rather than general. Religious allusions have been made much of as several of the names are biblical or suggest biblical ideas. As a result, Brückenhof, Herrenhof and Barnabas family have been equated with Protestantism, Catholicism and Judaism. Such suggestions should be approached with caution. The Herrenhof does resemble Catholicism in its formality, the Jews are traditional outcasts like the Barnabases, and Protestantism, much like the Brückenhof, has few decisive characteristics. But Jeremias with his Jewish name is not a member of the Barnabas family and Barnabas was the Jewish-Christian missionary that assisted Paul in his mission to the heathens, a Jew by race only. It is extremely difficult to find any relation the name Galater could have to the figure that bears it. The more suggestive names are probably intended to remain riddles.

            A great deal has been interpreted into the name of the central official, Klamm. Perhaps the best way of understanding it would be along the lines of: “Klamm has as many letters as Kafka, among them a K and an A.”, a pattern of personal allusions we are familiar with in Kafka’s works. This would suggest that Frieda’s ideal or animus is related to K. not only in bearing the same initial but also in presumably referring to Kafka, so that K., in seeking to find Klamm, was not only attempting to match up with her masculine ideal but also with their mutual author. In reality, unbeknown to K., the official intended for him, much as Frieda was the wife intended for him, was probably Friedrich, whose secretary Bürgel had so to speak “guaranteed” him (verbürgen) the grand solution in sleep. But there is also another Frieda in the novel, namely the little Brunswick girl. She is the daughter of an extrovert father, the noisiest rebel in town, and an introvert mother, a girl from the Castle, and thus a harmony of opposites, the equilibrium of the conscious and unconscious. And this must be what K. is striving for, the necessary condition of the security and independence he is seeking.

            The question to which the novel forces us to return again and again is: why did the love of Frieda and K. fail? The names can perhaps give us a new answer. It could be because K. sought contact with the wrong official, the wrong archetype. It was against Frieda’s will that he waited for Klamm, rested in his coach and drank his spirits. One could point out that Frieda has as many letters as Milena and the same vowels. But Frieda was also the name of the first woman mentioned in a Kafka story, in Das Urteil, and the name there stood for Felice, the initial and the number of letters coinciding.[245] Kafka had sought the “peace”, Frieden, alluded to in the name with both women. But was he, in giving these two figures representing different women the same name, admitting that he sought in each his ideal of woman rather than the individual person. On 12^th Febrary 1922, during the period that Kafka wrote The Castle and two years after he first met Milena, a diary entry reads:

Die abweisende Gestalt, die ich immer traf, war nicht die, welche sagt: „Ich liebe dich nicht“, sondern welche sagt: „Du kannst mich nicht lieben, so sehr du es willst, du liebst unglücklich die Liebe zu mir, die Liebe zu mir liebt dich nicht.“ Infolgedessen ist es unrichtig zu sagen, dass ich das Wort „Ich liebe dich“ erfahren habe, ich habe nur die wartende Stille erfahren, welche von meinem „Ich liebe dich“ hätte unterbrochen werden sollen, nur das habe ich erfahren, sonst nichts. (T 573)

            Though in theory it might be easy to distinguish between an anima projection and a person really loved, in practice, particularly in the case of a person of Kafka’s emotional maturity, there will be few or no simple cases. When Kafka condemns himself, as here, for loving the “anima” rather than the real person, we would do wrong, knowing his letters to Milena and other diary entries, to accept uncritically this diagnosis. We get the impression that Kafka was more than critical when it concerned his own motives and maturity. The very fact that he has the insight to judge himself in this way should make us wary of judging him. But the diary entry does show us that Kafka thought along these lines and that we are consequently permitted to introduce these ideas into our interpretation of the novel.

            When K. first sees Frieda he is struck by the power of her gaze, by her mana, in Jung’s terminology, and by the way she controls the lewd servants. Her spiritual love for Klamm gives her her power and superiority. (There may be an allusion here to Milena who apparently married her Jewish husband partly for idealistic reasons of which her father so strongly disapproved that he sent her to a psychiatric clinic. Wagenbach points out that the Vienna café frequented by Milena’s husband and his literary colleagues was called “Herrenhof” and nicknamed “Hurenhof”. Kafka apparently felt inferior to Ernst Pollak and his circle, amazed that Milena should prefer him. The biographical references add to our understanding but do not conflict with a more general interpretation.) The prerequisite for this love, however, is the complete control of the passions. To pass from such spiritual love to love of an individual person has traditionally been regarded as a come-down. If we follow Jung’s psychology we might see it differently, for according to him the animus or anima figure should be relinquished in the process of complete individuation. But this is undoubtedly a difficult step, for marital love involves the acceptance of the physical passions which, through long suppression, become almost uncontrollable. This is the case with Frieda whose now excessive passion frightens rather than satisfies K. (Kafka’s reaction to the adulterous union with Milena was also one of “Angst”.) While Frieda’s courage and humility in choosing full love must not be disparaged, she sinks beneath herself on that first night of passion. Yet what attracted K. in Frieda was not the physical, her body was skinny and frail, but her spiritual strength, which must at least temporarily wane if she is to give herself to K. For Frieda feels that her mystic love would conflict with her perfect love of K. Only the maturity gained from it must be taken over into the new stage. K., by insisting that she should not surrender Klamm, shows that he is not mature enough to appreciate her love.

            K. loves the ideal in Frieda and is not prepared to accept with it what is problematic in her nature. He himself tries to meet up with her ideal, Klamm, attempting the impossible, namely to eradicate the problematic from his own nature and to be fully accepted by the Castle. It is probably permissible to say that K. loves his anima in Frieda,[246] and the little scene where K. hides under the counter and Frieda puts her foot on his chest like the conqueror on the conquered reminds us again of Jung:

Weil das Innen für das extravertierte Bewusstsein dunkel und unsichtbar ist, und man sich überdies seine Schwächen destoweniger, denken kann, je mehr man mit der Persona identisch ist, so bleibt auch das Gegenstück der Persona, die Anima, völlig im Dunkeln und wird daher zunächst projiziert, wodurch der Held unter den Pantoffel seiner Frau kommt.[247]

On that first night Frieda is the conqueror but we feel not because she wants to triumph over K. but because K. does not take the initiative, although both seem aware of the necessity of their union. When the lights have gone out, Frieda lies for a moment awaiting K. before she throws herself upon him. The traditional roles of man and woman are reversed and one of the reasons may be that K. sinks to Frieda’s level of passion, nauseated by it, ashamed and exhausted. Thus the experience with Frieda lets the discrepancy between the physical and spiritual seem so great, that K. must go to Olga to discover whether the passions can reveal anything about the Castle. K.’s preoccupation with the Castle rather than Frieda results in a situation where Frieda, in spite of her efforts to subjugate herself to K., remains the dominant partner who knows what to do, makes the decisions, controls the servants, and does most of the work in the school.

It is of course K. who is the official ‘Schuldiener’. He, in the arrogance that comes with his exaggerated idealism, does not realize that removing the filth from the school, purifying learning, is a necessary preamble to resurveying the ground of the Castle and does not take his work seriously. Any reversal of the roles of man and woman is generally regarded as detrimental to marriage. K. is of course justified in feeling that the position of the “Schuldiener”, the school janitor, unpaid as it is and involving his private life to such an extent, must be given up as soon as possible. But he is almost certainly wrong about the best way of doing this. Kafka may have felt like this about his writer’s career. Would he have been tempted to let Milena earn the money with her journalism, pointing out the minor faults of society, while he went off trying to become a “Landvermesser” and neglecting her in the process? It is perhaps along these lines that we should interpret the symbols.

            The problem of man and woman in relation to anima and animus is further complicated in western society by the fact that the spiritual hierarchy in Jewish-Christian religion is completely male, so that while the woman can always find a spiritual figure upon which to project her animus conceptions, the man will find nothing but real women upon which to project his anima. This would make it much more difficult for a man to remove his anima projection from the woman he loves and to see her as she is, than it is for a woman to do the same. As K. can find no spiritual love in the all-male Castle, Frieda must remain his spiritual love. (Psychologically, according to Jung, the value of Mary in the Catholic Church is that she satisfies this need.) Brunswick’s wife with the veil over her head and the child at her breast is a madonna-like figure,[248] but she is only the daughter of a dish-washer in the Castle, not one of the hierarchy, much as Mary is not part of the divine hierarchy. On the night when K. awaits Klamm on the wonderfully soft furs of his sledge, with the erotic excitement Klamm’s brandy has instilled in him, he comes close to a sublimated homosexual eroticism.

            A last reason for the failure of marriage which the novel describes is the clash between female and male characteristics in daily life. Frieda and K. clash over the helpers who, as children, as servants, as other-worldly people, stimulate Frieda’s womanly playfulness, mildness, forgiveness and motherly solicitude while they bring out masculine harshness, cruelty, deternmination and uncompromising earnestness in K.[249] Here, where differences in the male and female temperaments lead to different moral standards, the final rift between K. and Frieda comes.

            We might conclude: how much easier would life be in a world not based on antitheses, where religion has a definite and commensurate place in the world, where the sexes are felt to differ only in their role with regard to procreation, where there are (at least theoretically) no mysteries that cannot be solved, no supernatural phenomena that cannot be accounted for. In other words: how much simpler would life have been in the world K. left behind him and to which he refuses to return. But the more complex life and people become, the more interesting also, the more rewarding a victory if it finally takes place. From this point of view we can sympathize with K.’s determination to remain in the Castle realm. It is probably right to say that because he stays in the Castle realm with its extreme complexity, K. loses Frieda. He is left with the choice of being school janitor, a job he is little suited for without Frieda’s help, of being Olga’s guest in an outcast existence, or Pepi’s secret treasure in her little maid’s room. It almost appears as though he had decided to accept the last and lowliest choice.[250] Or will he be appointed dress consultant to the landlady of the Herrenhof? This could be regarded as a step towards becoming “Landvermesser” for the landlady’s taste in dress obviously needs to be revised. Are K.’s amused and kindly attempts at correcting Pepi’s opinions also surveyor’s work, a reallocation of boundaries? It cannot be overlooked with how much more assurance K. speaks in the last chapter of this unfinished novel, almost as though, now Frieda was lost, he was beginning to find his own feet. As the carrier of his ideal, Frieda remains; he does not speak of her bitterly or disparagingly to Pepi, but with the highest regard.

            Should not K. be satisfied? The world is not unremittingly hostile to him. Perhaps Klamm’s letter praising his work was more genuine than K. had thought. And yet where the vision of love has once been perceived, a sense of tragedy will pervade and with it a sense of defeat and futility. Almost as much as the obscurity of the images, the emotional duality between tragedy and complacency contributes towards the sense of confusion with which many readers leave this novel, the same kind of confusion with which these readers might turn from their own lives to find a compensatory clarity in literature. Kafka’s clarity here is of the kind that maps complexity, not of the kind that presents solutions.

THE ARTIST STORIES

            Kafka’s final creative phase began in late 1921 or early 1922 with the story “Erstes Leid”. Four of the six stories, namely “Erstes Leid”. „Ein Hungerkünstler” (1922), „Eine kleine Frau“ (1923) and „Josefine die Sängerin, oder das Volk der Mäuse“ (1924) were being prepared for publication by Kafka just before his death. Two others “Forschungen eine Hundes” (1922) and “Der Bau” (1923/4) were for some reason excluded from the collection.[251]

            All the stories are concerned with aspects of Kafka’s life as an artist and have again and again been treated in light of this. But critics have tended to assume identity or near identity of Kafka with these artist figures[252] and as a result an ever more complex picture of Kafka as the neurotic and guilty artist, in the manner of Freud or Thomas Mann, has been drawn and accepted as true by the greater number of critics.[253] Diary entries which speak of art as “Teufelsdienst” or stress the artist’s human inadequacy seem to support this view which is, however, an impermissible simplification. No man of the ethical sensitivity of Kafka can be imagined as not having occasional doubts about his profession, whatever it be, and a diary is the natural receptacle for these. Kafka had read Freud; he had also read Thomas Mann[254] and will not have been immune to the suggestive power of their artist interpretations, particularly as he had always tended to doubt himself.

            All the same, these last artist stories are not self-criticism but self-justification; they describe the negative possibilities with which his artist existence tempted Kafka and the by-ways he avoided, keeping on the straight path to greatness. Not one of the stories depicts Kafka’s own way, and we must deduce it from our knowledge of his works. It follows that this last section gives us the opportunity to sum up Kafka’s achievement as a creative writer by contrasting it with various ‘hunger-artist’ existences.

Erstes Leid

            “Erstes Leid” takes over the image of the trapeze artist we had briefly encountered in “Bericht an eine Akademie”. The trapeze artist is here the human who has trained himself to be the ape once more. In a certain sense, this story is therefore the counterpart to “Bericht”, though no attempt is made press the parallel and there is now no allusion to the ape. The trapeze artist resembles the ape, not only in the way he swings from his trapeze as the ape does in the trees, but also because he lives on his trapeze. On fine days his life up in the heights is as healthy as a natural existence; the sun streams into the tent and there is plenty of fresh air.

Doch es war oben auch sonst gesund, und wenn in der wärmeren Jahreszeit in der ganzen Rundung der Wölbung die Seitenfenster aufgeklappt wurden und mit der frischen Luft die Sonne mächtig in den dämmernden Raum eindrang, dann war es dort sogar schön.

            Though an adult, the trapeze artist has kept the face of the child. There was a suggestion in “Bericht” that the ape’s natural existence had something in common with childhood. The artist, we may assume, as against the successful man of the world who is the ape become human, is the human on his way back to being the natural animal. We can accept this definition if we consider that art, and particularly the art of Kafka, is born in the unconscious mind – the animal mind, so to speak.

            But comparing life beneath the forest roof and the natural ease of the ape with the tremendous effort that goes into being a trapeze artist, we can hardly suppress a feeling of the absurdity of  such an achievement. The ape’s comment comes to mind:

Oft habe ich in den Varietés vor meinem Auftreten irgendein Künstlerpaar oben an der Decke an Trapezen hantieren sehen. Sie schwangen sich, sie schaukelten, sie sprangen, sie schwebten einander in die Arme, einer trug den andern an den Haaren mit dem Gebiss. „Auch das ist Menschenfreiheit“, dachte ich, „selbstherrliche Bewegung.“ Du Verspottung der heiligen Natur! Kein Bau würde standhalten vor dem Gelächter des Affentums bei diesem Anblick. (E 189)

Absurdity is also the impression gained from the trips between performances. Here, when it becomes temporarily impossible to be an animal, the trapeze artist prefers to be treated like a piece of baggage rather than sit on the seat like a human being. He travels in the luggage rack though this can have few of the advantages of a trapeze.

            The shyness typical of the only partly “human” artist which makes him wish he were an object rather than a member of society was well known to Kafka as the story of Raban in the early fragment “Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande” shows. Also well known to him was the desire to live his art day and night. With regard to the second trapeze one might recall Kafka’s interview with Rudolf Steiner where he says that theosophy as a second intellectual preoccupation in addition to writing – as a second trapeze to perform on – though it tempted him, would certainly be ruinous.[255] In actual fact Kafka chose the world, everyday life, and not a second trapeze.He put much effort and love into relations with family and friends and much energy into his professional work with the Workers’ Insurance. He showed an active interest in the Czech national movement, in the aspirations of the Zionist Jews and other current issues, clearly making a point of being a citizen as well as an artist. If he sometimes complained of too little time for writing, this does not mean that he regretted time given to other things but rather that the organization of his life was an almost insoluble problem, for he needed long stretches of time for writing.

            We began by interpreting the story from the perspective of the earlier animal story “Bericht an eine Akademie” and in the context of Kafka’s work as a whole this is justified. Read on its own, however, the strongest impression the story leaves is one of loss of footing, of lack of self-sufficiency, of a ridiculous narrowing down of the world, of dangerous living up in the clouds, and of almost uninterrupted loneliness, all dangers inherent in the creative life that Kafka was very aware of and sought to avoid.

Ein Hungerkünstler

            As metaphors cannot be fruitfully extended beyond a certain point, the story “Erstes Leid”, relying as it does on “Bericht an eine Akademie”, cannot lead us far. “Ein Hungerkünstler” again takes up the motif of the human attempting to become an “animal” and again this attempt is made by the “artist”. The hunger-artist spends his life in a cage furnished with a clock where he sits on straw, concentrating on the vegetative side of his being in a peculiar perversion of both vitality and ascetic single-mindedness. In the context of the stories mentioned above, he is the zoo-animal, whose existence the ape had rejected as meaningless, and at the same time the negation of the animal, which the ape had managed to preserve in himself. This is because by rejecting all food he destroys the very roots of his vitality. Human in the hunger-artist is his reliance on time and this is this life-preserving limitation or sin. It is his desire to be admired for a mere oddity of his natural disposition – he is unable to find food that appeals to his taste – that makes time necessary, for his “achievement” can only be assessed in terms of time, both by himself and others. In the judgment the hunger-artist passes on himself in the face of death, he actually condemns the last vestiges of humanity in himself, namely the desire to live in time and in contact with the community. Can such self-starvation be what Kafka means when he calls on man to actively destroy himself?[256]

            Both images, that of the trapeze artist and that of the hungering man, occur in combination in Kafka’s diaries as early as 1910 in a passage concerned with the bachelor:

[Der Junggeselle] steht nun einmal außerhalb unseres Volkes, außerhalb unserer Menschheit, immerfort ist er ausgehungert, ihm gehört nur der Augenblick, der immer fortgesetzte Augenblick der Plage, dem kein Funken des Augenblicks der Erholung folgt, er hat immer nur eines: seine Schmerzen, aber im ganzen Umkreis der Welt kein zweites, das sich als Medizin aufspielen könnte, er hat nur so viel Boden, as seine zwei Füße brauchen, nur so viel Halt, as seine zwei Hände bedecken, also um so viel weniger als der Trapezkünstler im Varieté, für den sie unten noch ein Fangnetzt aufgehängt haben. (T 21)

That there are intimate connections between the hunger-artist and Kafka’s symbolic bachelor is hard to overlook. He too has excluded himself from time and the community, severely limited the space he calls his own, and is ceaselessly concerned with his suffering. About this bachelor Kafka writes:

[…] nur das Weglaufen konnte ihn auf den Fußspitzen und nur die Fußspitzen konnten ihn auf der Welt erhalten, stattdessen hat er sich hingelegt, wie sich im Winter hie und da Kinder in den Schnee legen, um zu erfrieren. Er und diese Kinder, sie wissen ja, dass es ihre Schuld ist, dass sie sich hingelegt oder sonstwie nachgegeben haben [...] (T 21)

Would this be Kafka’s critique of the hunger-artist too?

            Two years after these diary entries Die Verwandlung was written. Here the motifs of  “animal” existence, starvation because the right food is not available, imprisonment, and exclusion from the community occur in combination, just as in “Ein Hungerkünstler”.  But though Gregor is perhaps partially responsible for his fate, this is by no means self-imposed. He is genuinely the sufferer at the hands of fate and men: he wants to act unselfishly and in consideration of others. His life can therefore become a true sacrifice. The fate of the hunger-artist, however, is self-imposed. He has made of life an art of living and has thereby cut himself out of the context of life.

            Aphorisms from the collection “Er” written in 1920 again take up the theme. The first introduces the image of the self-imposed prison or cage.

Mit einem Gefängnis hätte er sich abgefunden. Als Gefangener enden – das wäre eines Lebens Ziel. Aber es war ein Gitterkäfig. Gleichgültig, herrisch, wie bei sich zu Hause strömte durch das Gitter aus und ein der Lärm der Welt, der Gefangene war eigentlich frei, er konnte an allem teilnehmen, nichts entging ihm draußen, selbst verlassen hätte er den Käfig können, die Gitterstäbe standen ja meterweit auseinander, nicht einmal gefangen war er. (BeK 291)

The imprisonment of the hunger-artist is also voluntary and could be terminated if he wished it. It too is a life in the “market-place” in the midst of the crowds who flood past his cage. “Als Gefangener enden, das wäre eines Lebens Ziel”: for a limitation that was not self-imposed but inflicted by some superior force, the prisoner would not need to feel responsible. Responsibility, however, makes imprisonment in some way an end in itself. Innocence of one’s fate would render it possible to direct all efforts towards introversion, contemplation and meditation. Being but the sufferer, man could concentrate upon making suffering fruitful. Only a victim like the ape, for whom there is no way out, can break through to positive action. Only he who is starved against his will, will be insistent enough to find the food he needs. How can the hunger-artist find the unknown food when he sits passively in his cage, asking to be admired for hungering? Another aphorism says:

„Du machst aus deiner Not eine Tugend.“

„Erstens macht das jeder, und zweitens tue gerade ich es nicht. Ich lasse meine Not Not bleiben, ich lege die Sümpfe nicht trocken, sondern lebe in ihrem fiebrigen Dunst.“

„Daraus eben machst du eine Tugend.“

„Wie jeder, ich sagte es schon. [...]“ (BeK 297)

The hunger-artist does just what the second speaker does, he resigns himself, making a virtue of necessity. One frequently gains the impression that the “Er” aphorisms were five-finger-exercises for these late stories. The hunger-artist knows of no food to his taste so he makes a profession of hungering. Faced with a similar situation Kafka himself made a profession of seeking. Finding no acceptable religion or ideology, no cause to work for and no woman to marry, he never ceased to look for them.

            Yet with Kafka, as with the hunger-artist, there seems to have been a premature youthful decision to be a poet of deprivation, a decision which would have forestalled the attempt to find food. An aphorism tells how the young Kafka decided to become the hunger-artist.

Ich saß einmal vor vielen Jahren, gewiss traurig genug, auf der Lehne des Laurenziberges. Ich prüfte die Wünsche, die ich für das Leben hatte. Als wichtigster oder als reizvollster ergab sich der Wunsch, eine Ansicht des Lebens zu gewinnen (und – das war allerdings notwendig verbunden – schriftlich die anderen überzeugen zu können), in der das Leben zwar sein natürliches schweres Fallen und Steigen bewahre, aber gleichzeitig mit nicht minderer Deutlichkeit als ein Nichts, als ein Traum, als ein Schweben erkannt werde. Vielleicht ein schöner Wunsch, wenn ich ihn richtig gewünscht hätte. Etwa als Wunsch, einen Tisch mit peinlich ordentlicher Handwerksmäßigkeit zusammenzuhämmern und dabei gleichzeitig nichts zu tun, and zwar nicht so, dass man sagen könnte: „Ihm ist das Hämmern ein Nichts,“ wodurch ja das Hämmern noch kühner, noch entschlossener, noch wirklicher und, wenn du willst, noch irrsinniger geworden wäre.

Aber er konnte garnicht so wünschen, denn sein Wunsch war kein Wunsch, er war nur eine Verteidigung, eine Verbürgerlichung des Nichts, ein Hauch von Munterkeit, den er dem Nichts geben wollte, in dass er zwar damals kaum die ersten bewussten Schritte tat, dass er aber schon als sein Element fühlte. Es war damals eine Art Abschied, den er von der Scheinwelt der Jugend nahm, sie hatte ihn übrigens niemals unmittelbar getäuscht, sondern nur durch die Reden aller Autoritäten rings herum täuschen lassen. So hatte sich die Notwendigkeit des Wunsches ergeben. (BeK 293/4)

Kafka did become the poet of “nothing” insofar as he conscienciously avoided giving solutions. But he was the dog of “Forschungen eines Hundes” too, searching and probing.

            Again, Kafka avoided the exhibitionism of the hunger-artist even to the point of asking to have his works destroyed after his death. He did not turn starvation into bourgois entertainment as many of this contemporaries did, who settled down quite happily with their despairs and made good money out of them. The image of the hunger-artist understood in this way reflects on “beatnik” existences whose sole purpose it is to give a picturesque manifestation of the fact that life is not palatable. A man who experienced the elusiveness of meaning as deeply as Kafka did, could not help but find some justification in the public manifestation of such an attitude. The children see in the hunger-artist the promise of a better future. But the hunger-artist is useful only as a symbol. What impresses us in this story is the almost fatherly gentleness with which Kafka describes this way of life, its misguided ambition and pathetic end. An error of youth which was recognized before it stunted his own life could suffer a kindly condemnation.

            In this late story which has such multiple references to Kafka’s earlier writing, it is comparatively easy to construe Kafka’s attitude towards his protagonist. Yet read in isolation, this story too has a genuinely ambivalent structure. The first thing that makes for ambivalence is the lack of obvious positive values. The reader is used to finding the negative counterbalanced by a vision of the positive. Disconcerted, he is left with the choice of creating his own positive value or of giving either the hunger-artist or the panther who takes over the cage from him a strong positive accent.

            If the positive accent falls on the Hungerartist, this can be achieved either by exaggerating sympathy with him, or by seeing him as a symbol of spiritual realities. The constantly changing perspective of the story – the point of view is alternately that of a neutral narrator, of the hunger-artist, of the manager and of the audience – makes various attitudes to the material of the story possible;[257] the obviously child-like qualities of the hunger-artist can make him appear both as the unspoilt human or as the sub-human, according to one’s choice.

            “Ein Hungerkünstler” is in many ways a typical “novella”. Its material is the sensational and unheard-of, yet not impossible.[258] In most novellas, the historical situation is emphasized to reinforce a sense of reality. And just as medieval man found it hard to see a comet fall without taking this rare occurrence as an omen, so moderen man still finds it hard to face the extraordinary without attributing to it symbolic significance. In combination with its realism, the typical novella has a hidden symbolic structure that relies strongly on the psychological likelihood that the reader will normally want to give to facts a symbolic significance. There is almost a compulsion on us to say that the food which the hunger-artist cannot find is in reality spiritual food.[259] But it is left largely to our own discretion how far we wish to take the symbols. In other words, an essential characteristic of the story is the tension between the possibilities of a realistic or a symbolic reading.

The structure of the story is also genuinely ambivalent. We are faced with two audiences and two eras with completely different attitudes to hunger-artists. There are those who admire the ascetic and honour him with prizes without enquiring about the wherefore of his effort, and there are the primitivists and hedonists who reject all he represents as a hindrance to the enjoyment of vitality. Neither group does justice to the hunger-artist; but then which audience could do justice to a life which is its own contradiction? We are left free to identify ourselves with either of the audiences or with the hunger-artist himself. While Ingeborg Henel’s interpretation[260] shows admiration for the achievement of precariously balancing a paradoxical life, von Wiese[261] adopts more or less the standpoint of the first audience. Kafka’s own attitude was probably, with some qualifications, closer to that of the second audience, though of course he himself was far more like the hunger-artist than the panther.[262]

Forschungen eines Hundes

            The motif of starvation central to “Ein Hungerkünstler” is taken up again in “Forschungen eines Hundes”. But starvation is here not the proud manifestation of a freakish disposition, of limited value insofar as it can make men thoughtful. It is an experimental situation. In the world of the dog starvation is a crime and the dog starves himself in secret and only because he hopes to gain knowledge about an elusive truth.

            The story again makes it clear that we are not to identify the dog with Kafka. We are told expressly that the dog has a healthy lung and heart, while we know that Kafka at the time of writing had neither, and that the dog was independent at an early age while Kafka remained within the family almost till his death. Nevertheless, the dog is an abstraction and remodelling of one of the tendencies in Kafka; he is, so to speak, Kafka the investigator who probes the problems of life with all the powers of understanding while at the same time refusing to be the traditional scientist or scholar.

            The dog has a vision of a new kind of „Wissenschaft“, „einer anderen Wissenschaft als sie heute geübt wird, einer allerletzten Wissenschaft“ (FeH 290). This science does not rely on the accumulated, scientifically established knowledge of other scientists and scholars, but above all on personal instincts and intuitions. Scepticism is here no longer the merely limiting force it was for the positivists, demanding that every fact not established beyond all doubt be questioned, it is also the positive force that sees in every experience or conceivable fact that has not yet been scientifically disproved the possibility of its actual existence. While the logical mind is the tool for establishing facts, intuitive experiences that result from heightened sensitivity, be it through youthful anticipation of the world, through hunger, or through other means, provide the sources for new investigations.[263] The dog feels that the collected intuitive knowledge of individuals should be available to investigators  and deplores the fact that there is so much knowledge that men will not admit to having. In the positivistic European society at the turn of the century, one did not want to be labelled superstitious. And basically, the investigating dog is no different; his limiting scepticism sees to that:

Nun könnte man sagen, du beschwerst dich über deine Mithunde, über ihre Schweigsamkeit hinsichtlich der entscheidenden Dinge, du behauptst, sie wüssten mehr, als sie eingestehen, mehr, als sie im Leben gelten lassen wollen, und dieses Verschweigen, dessen Grund und Geheimnis sie natürlich auch noch mitverschweigen, vergifte das Leben, mache es dir unerträglich [...] Nun also, warum machst du den anderen die Schweigsamkeit zum Vorwurf und schweigst selbst? Leichte Antwort: Weil ich ein Hund bin. Im Wesentlichen genau so wie die anderen fest verschlossen, Widerstand leistend den eigenen Fragen, hart aus Angst. (FeH 256)

Certainly the fear of revealing too much, of becoming an object of ridicule and suspicion to the sceptic in himself and others, was very strong in Kafka. His stories, rather than admitting intuitions, question unadmitted intitions and insights. Brod’s description of Kafka as a man of deep faith and deep doubt is just the apparently paradoxical combination that becomes in the dog a scientific method.[264]

            The main problem the intuitive method brings with it is that the reluctance to admit unproven intuitions – be it to escape ridicule or prevent falsity – places each investigator on this own. He is forced to rely on his own knowledge and the fortuitous end which death puts to his investigations is the absolute end.

Ich war voellig auf mich allein angewiesen, begann mit dem allerersten Anfang und mit dem für die Jugend beglückenden, für das Alter dann aber äußerst niederdrückenden Bewusstsein, dass der zufällige Schlusspunkt, den ich setzen werde, auch der endgültige sein muss. (FeH 259)

According to the dog, only if the sum of all intuitions were available to an individual who was prepared to go to the trouble of investigating and assessing his material, could true knowledge be revealed: “Eisernen Knochen, enthaltend das edelste Mark, kann man nur beikommen durch ein gemeinsames Beißen aller Zähne aller Hunde.” (FeH 257) Yet there is no missionary urge in the dog that would persuade him to communicate such knowledge. He desires it, fully aware that it must be poison, for if the little knowledge that a single individual can gain is acquired at the cost of being natural and only in the vicinity of death, how much greater the damage to health would there be in complete knowledge. “Das Mark von dem hier die Rede ist, ist keine Speise, ist das Gegenteil, ist Gift.“ (FeH 257) One of the questions the story seems to ask, and which modern science has persistently repeated in recent years, is: what is the value for humanity of knowing about the nature of things if this knowledge seems to contribute towards the destruction of man. Is wanting to know not merely a suicidal peculiarity of certain individuals? From this aspect the dog becomes the brother of the hunger-artist. Close too are the links with K. of Der Prozess who, in his own words, dies like a dog, aware of the many questions his investigations have left unanswered and with the distant hope for a kindred spirit prepared to pick up the threads of his life.

            As a literary piece, “Forschungen eines Hundes” relies on an artfully manipulated trick worthy of the best “trapeze artist”. In every detail relating to the society of dogs we recognize ourselves, that is, humanity in its earth-bound self-sufficiency. There are reminiscences of old fertility rites, of an ancient tradition of empiricism, of humanist laws to guard what is natural and prevent what is unnatural, of common sense attitudes, and of the unfortunate need to specialize which estranges man from man as it does dog from dog. There is a background world of more limited creatures which the dogs study as we study animals. And there is above all the strong sense of community in spite of all differences which is characteristic of man as a social animal. We seem to recognize the questions of the dog quite readily. Does our food come from the ground or from above, is the earth our provider or are we supernaturally sustained? The answer is at hand almost without thought; all things that sustain us, mental or physical, have their natural origins. This axiom cannot be challenged and the investigating dog does not really do this. But there is a constricting narrowness in the assurance with which the answer is given, for it simply blacks out a whole region of life.

            How well readers on the whole accept such simple solutions is echoed by the fact that so many take quite some time to recognize the fundamental device of the story. It is, of course, that dogs are domestic animals, have masters who feed them, throwing the food or passing it down to the dog, masters who might even go in search of a straying dog to bring him food (the point the starving dog had tried to prove, though not knowing of the existence of human masters, he was not able to formulate this clearly), masters who determine the many strange professions the various dogs follow: watchdog, retriever, sheep dog, blind dog, lap dog, nurse-maid dog and the like.[265] Once we have accepted the fact that for some peculiar reason dogs can see man as little as we can see the gods that have adopted us as their domestic animals, so to speak, we will find a simple explanation for the miracle of the seven music dogs. Seven circus dogs, trained beneath the whip to do an act, are being rehearsed somewhere in the forest at night with the help of a flashlight that is turned off when the dance, performed to the accompaniment of music is finished. The act requires the dogs to stand on their hind legs in human fashion. The circus, as we saw, always demands the unnatural in the name of art; it asks the ape to be human and the human to be an ape. The incident of the hunter dog finds a still easier interpretation. The dog, chasing ahead of the hunter, is sent to clear the area of disturbing presencces, the hunter comes behind, singing or whistling, and the dog joins in with the “music”. In each case, not the conservative but the most daring hypothesis proves to be true.

            There are three things Kafka’s presentation of the problem teaches us. It is in the first place the importance of the intuitive and imaginative abilities of man in the pursuit of accurate knowledge. Then it is that almost certainly the collected intuitions of the dogs would at best be able to give a very rough sketch of the higher world of humanity. Without a vision of man, a superior intelligence, and a great deal of additional knowledge many things concerning humanity could not be deduced. The third thing is that even if the existence of a master species of ‘gods’ were proved, the evaluation of such knowledge would still present difficulties. Does superior just mean more complicated, more knowledgeable, more powerful, or does it mean “better” in an ethical sense too? Is this human world a Greek Olympus, a Darwinian higher species, or a Nietzschean race of supermen? Can it tell us anything at all about the one perfect God of Judaism and Christianity; does it disprove this God or is it just irrelevant to the idea of this god?

            From the reader’s point of view, the limitations of the investigating dog are obvious. His account of experiences and experiments is confused. There seems at first sight to be very little logic to the order of his studies; he has an experience of music, this causes him to study the origin of food, and when this in turn yields no results he reverts to music. On the other hand, it is clear that there is more intuitive certainty in these investigations than in those of conventional scholars who explain geometrically the path by which food descends.

            The story mentions a third class of scholars, the “Lufthunde”. The name brings to mind the word coined by Max Nordau at the first Zionist Congress to describe the Ghetto Jews who had no visible means of support but relied on chance earnings and the money gifts of wealthier relatives. He called them “Luftmenschen”, a word that soon became part of the general vocabulary in Jewish circles. For these “Luftmenschen”, religion was almost the sole content of life and religion, on the whole, meant studying the Talmud, studying commentaries on commentaries of the Thora in a manner little related to life. Insofar as Kafka intended an allusion to “Luftmensch” it is obviously the Talmudian scholars he has in mind, but these as representing all scholars whose studies are divorced from living reality. He characterizes them in the following way:

           

Immerfort haben sie zu erzählen, teils von ihren philosophischen Überlegungen, mit denen sie sich, da sie auf körperliche Anstrengung völlig verzichtet haben, fortwährend beschäftigen können, teils von den Beobachtungen, die sie von ihrem erhöhten Standpunkt aus machen. Und obwohl sie sich, was bei einem solchen Lotterleben selbstverständlich ist, durch Geisteskraft nicht sehr auszeichnen, und ihre Philosophie so wertlos ist wie ihre Beobachtungen, und die Wissenschaft kaum etwas davon verwenden kann und überhaupt auf so jämmerliche Hilfsquellen nicht angewiesen ist, trotzdem wird man, wenn man fragt, was die Lufthunde überhaupt wollen, immer wieder zur Antwort bekommen, dass sie zur Wissenschaft viel beitragen. (FeH 262)

The minute size of the animals the dog describes would suggest flying foxes or “fliegende Hunde”, a fruit eating variety of bat which must seem to a dog like a travesty of a dog. Remembering the invisible human masters, however, the airborne dogs could also be lapdogs, carried on their invisible masters’ or mistresses’ arms and therefore apparently flying. Both images support the meaning; it is tempting to imagine scholars and theologians as lap-dogs of the “gods”, but the bat image too does not lack the wicked joke for bats are traditionally inhabitants of the underworld. In comparison with such scholars Kafka’s dog comes out favourably.

            To fit into the context of Kafka’s artist stories, “Forschungen eines Hundes” should also present a possible aberration of Kafka the artist. In this case, the formulation of the error is simple: the dog is no artist but a scientist or pseudo-scientist, trying to make simple scientific discoveries with the help of his intuitions while the real value of these intuitions lies in their unique complexity. The detailed and exact description of irrational experiences is a greater contribution to knowledge than trying to use them to prove limited facts. We, the privileged readers, are in a position to judge that a precise description of the experience with the music dogs tells us more about the higher worlds than a spurious experiment out to prove “dass, wenn ich von der Nahrung zurückwich, nicht der Boden sie schräg zu sich herabzog, sondern ich es war, der sie hinter mir her lockte.” (FeH 276) To speak with Benedetto Croce: though intuition can be of use in many walks of life, the area to which it essentially belongs is art. Croce insists on the identity of intuition and expression and the identity of art and intuitive knowledge.

“We have frankly identified intuitive or expressive knowledge with the aesthetic or artistic fact, taking works of art as examples of intuitive knowledge and attributing to them the chracteristics of intuition, and vice versa.” And he continues: “What is generally called par excellence art, collects intuitions that are wider and more complex than those which we generally experience, but these intuitions are always of sensations and impressions. Art is the expression of impressions “[…] [266]

Kafka’s own intuitions have at times been misunderstood as contributions to the newly established science of psychoanalysis: we saw how Beschreibung eines Kampfes encouraged this kind of misunderstanding. But it did not take Kafka long to realize that “psychology is impatience”, that intuitively perceived truth was simplified and thereby falsified if it was treated in the scientific manner. If Croce’s views on art are accepted, it follows that art in some sense complements science and its reliance on logic and abstract concepts in the pursuit of truth. The motives for artistic creation change. It is no longer the joy of imitating life around us, the Aristotelian mimesis, nor is it the drive to express emotions that motivates art, as perhaps in Expressionism: it is the need to see your own intuitions clearly and this can only be achieved if you express them. Croce is relentless on this point:

One often hears people say that they have many great thoughts in their minds, but are not able to express them. If these thoughts seem to vanish or become few and maegre in the act of expressing them, the reason is that they did not exist or really were few and meagre.[267]

So art would find its personal justification for the writer by being his path to knowledge. We have tried to show in the course of this study how writing was for Kafka the way to clear if complex knowledge in many fields. It cannot be proved that Kafka had read Croce, but since his Aesthetic was published in 1902, it is not unlikely that Croce’s ideas would have reached him at second hand, if not directly. To our argument, Kafka’s acquaintance with Croce is of no essential relevance as these ideas were in the air at the time.

Eine kleine Frau

            At first sight, “Eine kleine Frau” may seem out of context in this collection and the relatively few critics who have taken noltice of the story have made ingenious attempts to find a meaningful place for it. Norbert Fürst speaks of her as Kafka’s muse.[268] Heinz Hillmann is of the opinion that she must not be seen as a real person: “[man darf] die kleine Frau nicht als einen realen Menschen auffassen”,[269] but that she represents art in its connection with the innermost court of judgment, “Kunst als Zusammenhang mit dem innersten Gericht”.[270] Elaborating this point he writes: „Sie ist die in ihm selbst aufgestandene, innerste richtende Instanz, ist seine Nachtseite oder besser: der Teil seines Ichs, den er, weil er die glückliche Tagseite bedroht, in die Nacht verweisen will.“[271] Hillmann’s argument that she cannot be seen as a real person is not convincing; few of Kafka’s characters are as real as she and the fact that she also represents an inner reality is no proof against her actual existence. Moreover, Dora Diamant has told us that the model for this character was Kafka’s first landlady in Berlin.

            But it seems that the meaning of the story in connection with the artist stories should be sought elsewhere. The relation of the little woman to the narrator is similar to the relation of Kafka’s father to Kafka. According to Kafka’s accounts, everything in the son annoyed the father intensely. It was a situation of natural incompatibility that was more actively upheld by the father and constantly suffered by Kafka. When a similar relationship developed with his Berlin landlady, it seems that Kafka used this to symbolize the other. Here we can agree with Fürst, for Kafka’s father was in a sense Kafka’s muse, his most constant source of inspiration, as of suffering. In his letter to his father Kafka wrote: “Mein Schreiben handelte von Dir, ich klagte dort ja nur, was ich an Deiner Brust nicht klagen konnte” (H 203) and the importance his “father-complex” had for his writing is stressed by almost every critic. Brod writes that he repeatedly tried to persuade Kafka to give his father less importance in his life. There is probably an echo of this in the story when the ‘good friend’ suggests that temporary absence might be the solution, which of course it was not. The story makes it quite clear that not even suicide would take the virulence out of the little woman’s constant annoyance. There was no escape.

            But though there was no escape, there was a solution for Kafka; the negative that cannot be avoided can be creatively turned into a positive force. Kafka never learnt to shake off the weight of his father’s disapproval but he moulded story upon story out of it. If he had shrugged his shoulders instead of taking it seriously, and Brod was probably not the only friend to suggest this, he would have gained nothing and lost much. “Eine kleine Frau” is part of this series of Kafka’s artist stories because it too shows us a possible pitfall in his life as a writer which he succeeded in avoiding. Kafka did not content himself with the knowledge that the world thought well of him and that consequently he was justified, but allowed himself to suffer and record the insecurity and the feelings of guilt the relationship to his father produced in him. It is almost as though Kafka were proving by this story: “if I had been more like you, Father, I would have missed my vocation”, demonstrating through the easy flow of his precise, even-tempered, kindly and somewhat humerous prose how this fraught relationship ultimately nourished his creativity rather than destroying his self-confidence and friendliness towards others.

Der Bau

            “Der Bau” takes up an image that had accompanied Kafka for the greater part of his life. Malcolm Pasley has collected references from Kafka’s diaries and notebooks in an introductory summing up of the strands of meaning in this story.[272] As Pasley shows, the words “Bau” and “bauen” have a variety of meanings, among them that of the edifice and of building, that of the mine, and that of the agricultural tilling of the soil. As a symbol, “der Bau” can also stand for a variety of things: for creative achievement, for the home, for the self, for the womb, and for the grave. In other words, both the term and the symbol are multidimensional. Kafka made use of almost every aspect of the image and clearly tried to keep all these strands of meaning alive in his narration. In consequence, the story affects the reader like a complicated aphorism, throwing him from one extreme of thought to the other, forcing him to find links between incompatibles and to illustrate abstractions with his own experiences.

            But beneath the darting, exploratory thinking the story occasions, and in extraordinary contrast with it, is the almost sedatious monotony of the image. The story can be read simply as an animal story that tries to translate into words the irrational mind of the creature, its furtiveness, its yearning for security, for silence and peace, its instinctive and unaccountable fear of enemies. We identify ourselves with the animal because to some extent we share its irrational desires and fears. They often determine our lives more than we generally like to admit; when excessive, they become the neuroses we all  know in their mildest, and fear in their extreme forms. “Der Bau” allows us to experience how one lives when the rational mind is denied or fails.

            “Der Bau” has great interpretative potential insofar as interpretation is understood as a meditative elaboration upon the suggestions the story makes. In a stricter sense, it is difficult to interpret. In the context of this study we shall limit ourselves to an examination of what it tells us about the artist and his problems.

            The animal of “Der Bau” has built its own elaborate burrow beneath the ground and much of the story describes this: the entrance labyrinth, the many little resting places, and finally the big central “Burgplatz” or “castle courtyard”. Attempting to translate this into the terms of Kafka’s life one might say: out of the earth that is common to all, out of the universal unconscious, the writer Kafka chose a little patch which he proceeded to form into an underground burrow. The emphasis is not on exploration, though this is an aspect of the work, but on creation, on making something that can fulfill the animals’s needs, that is unified, completely familiar, a home for the self and a storehouse for those things by which the self is sustained. The food of the creative animal, we might say, consists of the positive and living experiences the self has; the instrument of creation is the forehead or the mind.

            These images give us two insights: the first is that if it is to become food, living experience must be killed. As long as the prey is still alive, it is uncontrollable; it may escape or may attack, it has a will of its own, it can never be fully recognized. Once it has been killed, however, fixed and defined, it is in the possession of the hunter. By a process of natural disintegration, it then gradually changes and becomes something new. The smells that develop in the course of time fascinate and intoxicate the animal. Though a hunter in the first place, he is, like the jackals of the earlier story, a carrion eater, someone for whom the smell of what is decaying has value in itself. The storing and refashioning of experiences, by whatever means, can be seen as killing what is live and then watching its gradual disintegration.

            The instrument with which the animal makes its burrow in the unconscious is the thinking mind.[273] It hammers out the hollows with it, using its hard forehead against the dense earth, much as the conscious mind tries to excavate the dense unconscious, both its own unconscious and a universal unconscious. “Sein eigener Stirnknochen verlegt ihm den Weg, an seiner eigenen Stirn schlägt er sich die Stirn blutig” (BeK 292) is one of the aphorisms of “Er” which shows us the desperate struggle of mind against mind within ourselves and seems to reveal a second nucleus of the imagery of the story. It is unavoidable that two nuclei of an image when subjected to the logic of the story will give rise to what Kafka calls ‘Überdeckungsfehler’, clashes of meaning. What the conscious mind is good for is to beat out the breathing spaces by means of which we live within the great unknown, the air pockets which for a little while prevent the earth from being our grave.

            Kafka’s animal – it is useless to attempt a zoological description – has the choice of living above ground or underground, much as we have the choice between an extrovert and introvert life. Except for very brief periods, it chooses introversion. In the burrow image we encounter the familiar first step of introversion, namely submersion, going deep down to “the mothers” to speak with Goethe’s Faust. But in Kafka’s story we do not break through to an image of light, as in mysticism. His animal is nothing but the animal. It knows no desire for a higher life. The state for which it yearns – loneliness, silence, tranquility, freedom from danger – has the qualities of death. The animal hungers for dead things, lives with dead things. It almost seems an embodiment of the death wish. Freud attributed to man an innate unconscious death wish, as much a part of him as the instinct of self-preservation. If burrowing in the earth is an image for the symbolic death of introversion, building the house is a symbol for discovering and creating the self. C. G. Jung’s autobiography tells us how at a  certain stage in his life an urge came upon Jung to build a house in an attempt to find his own self. When the animal builds his burrow he is finding himself too; but unusually, his house is completely underground.

            Kafka built his house not by means of architecture but with the help of literature. We recognize in the animal’s labyrinth – “eine allzu dünnwandige Spielerei” – Kafka’s first long work Beschreibung eines Kampfes, still close to the surface of consciousness, devious and intricate in its structure.[274] Kafka did not consider it a successful piece. He writes about this story to Milena: „ jedenfalls ist es eine abgründig schlechte Geschichte; mit einer Leichtigkeit, wie nichts sonst, könnte ich, liebe Frau Milena, Ihnen das fast Zeile für Zeile nachweisen [...] Dass Sie die Geschichte gern haben, gibt ihr natürlich Wert, trübt mir aber ein wenig das Bild der Welt.“ (M 15) In spite of Milena’s positive judgement, Kafka’s verdict that his first literary effort was flimsy and trivial remained unchanged.

Then there are the many different resting places, the many shorter and longer stories Kafka wrote. Finally there is the “Burgplatz”.  It is larger than the other areas. The word “Burg” immediately brings to mind Das Schloß, the most ambitious of Kafka’s works. The animal deplores the fact that it has managed to construct only one “Burgplatz”, one “castle court-yard”; it believes that every burrow should have at least two or three. The writer Kafka could, of course, be seen as having created more than one of these castle court-yards if one counts in Amerika and Der Prozess. It appears that Kafka wished to make it clear that his animal was less than its creator, that he and it were not identical.

The animal then goes on to describe the ideal design of a “Burgplatz”: it is to be like a globe, connected with the ground in only one spot and thus surrounded by a hollow space which separates it from the surrounding earth. In Das Schloß, as we saw earlier, something like an almost complete separation from real life was achieved through the use of perspective in the service of estrangement. Thus what was presented as only a utopian plan in the animal’s story, had actually been realized in Kafka’s novel. It is in this hollow space, this no man’s land, that the animal would like to spend its days and nights, on the body of the “Burgplatz” but not within it, supported by the creation it has made but not itself imprisoned in this fictitious world.

“Der Bau” then is a parable of the writer living within the world of his own creations. The sterility of this life, once the creation has been completed, becomes obvious in the story; what was initially a positive intellectual force is now wasted in useless criticism of what can no longer be changed. Still, there is enjoyment of the peace the burrow gives and there is the possibility of carrying the experiences of life, the hunter’s prey, from one story or storey to the other, arranging them ever differently. For each new work of Kafka’s brings out new aspects of basic themes and returns to old motifs. The burrow standing for his collected works permits the writer a full and diverse enjoyment of his experiences.

            Once the burrow is well under progress, these experiences are gathered less and less from the more varied surface of life, the everyday world, and are almost solely transmitted through the channels the mice have dug. All kinds of little animals come through these. With a view to Kafka’s mouse story, written some months later, we might see the mice as the minor writers or artists whom Josefine represents. Their work transmits certain experiences but these are weak and bloodless compared with outside realities. Kafka perhaps felt that he was relying more and more on his reading for stimulation as his health began to fail.

We mentioned that the animal carries its stores from one place in the burrow to another. It is, for instance, interesting to note how the artist stories seem to link up by passing on images. The dog takes over the discipline of hungering from the hunger-artist; „Der Bau“ takes up an image we inadvertently stumble across in „Forschungen eines Hundes“ („Sehe ich die Fundamente unseres Lebens, ahne ihre Tiefe, sehe die Arbeiter beim Bau, bei ihrem finstern Werk […]“ FeH 257), an image which, incidentally, shows us how far apart the worlds of the dog and the burrowing animal are; and “Josefine” takes up the image of the mice in “Der Bau” while all these stories share the already well-known images of food and “music”.

            For most of the burrowing animal’s life, food is all important. It is only at the end, ushering in the process of dissolution, that sounds which scarcely deserve the name of music attract its attention: they are alternately a hissing and a whistling. The animal now remembers to have heard such sounds very early in life but they had not seemed important then. Now with the leisure of the completed work and after experiencing the disruption of an excursion to the daylight world, the noise becomes disturbing. An alert  reader may have little doubt that the alternate hissing and whistling is caused by the breathing of the animal itself; its lungs are weakening, it has become the prey of illness, a forerunner of death. (Kafka’s own lungs were by this time affected by tuberculosis.) But the animal seems able to think only in terms of an outside enemy. Sickness awakens a sense of persecution. Since the rational mind can conceive of no enemy to match the strange noise it is hearing, superstition devises a supernatural enemy, a figment of the imagination, to account for what the mind is unable to comprehend. And it is then to this spectre, on which the animal concentrates all the persecution fears of a life-time, that the animal falls victim; not only it  but its burrow too, that burrow which it wanted no other creature ever to discover, is destroyed by these fears. In the face of death, the animal’s sense of being hunted, persecuted, enclosed, gets the upper hand.

            Contrasting Kafka with the animal of the burrow one might make the following distinctions: In the first place, Kafka did have good friends he trusted, among them Max Brod in whose hands he placed the fate of his “burrow” by asking him to destroy his writings after his death, Milena to whom he lent his diaries, his sister Ottla, and Dora, the devoted companion of his last years. Secondly, Kafka never declared his burrow to be finished but worked on it to the very end of his life; he did not allow himself to rest on his laurels, his Burgplatz. And thirdly, the aphorisms show that for Kafka introversion was not a descent into darkness and spiritual death but a pursuit of “the light”: “das Licht auf dem zurückweichenden Fratzengesicht ist wahr, sonst nichts.” (H 46) And yet there were certainly elements of the animal in Kafka and it was probably to these that Brod attributed Kafka’s wish to have his writings destroyed. Whether Brod was right in refusing to do his friend’s bidding or whether Kafka’s deeper fear that his writings, however valuable they had been to him personally, might prove misleading or disturbing to others prompted his request, will remain an open question.  

Josefine, die Sängerin, oder Das Volk der Mäuse

Of this last series of artist stories, “Josefine” is the one least closely related to the writer Franz Kafka. Not only is there a female heroine, but the lightness, the warm detachment with which the story is told point to this fact. We almost forget that mice are vermin like Gregor the beetle;  in this story they are the quaint little animals which for those who do not happen to have an instinctive horror of mice we observe with a kind of humorous enjoyment mingled with admiration from our superior position.[275] The setting in the mouse world helps the writer to avoid the needless detail which a direct presentation of the human world would have required but it also helps to create the atmosphere of warm condescension which makes the story so attractive. The story is first and foremost a disguise for things human; it makes no contribution to Kafka’s animal theme, perhaps the only one of his animal stories of which this can be said.[276]

The topic the story is concerned with is the nation and its national poet-singer-actor, for composition and performance are combined in the figure of Josefine.  Kafka defends his either-or title: „Die Geschichte bekommt einen neuen Titel. Josefine, die Sängerin – oder – das Volk der Mäuse. Solche Oder-Titel sind zwar nicht sehr hübsch, aber hier hat es vielleicht besonderen Sinn. Es hat etwas von einer Waage.”[277] The questions it seems to ask are: does the nation need the singer or the singer the nation to uphold it? Is the singer the leader of the nation or the nation the father of the singer? Is the singer merely a part of the nation or does the nation achieve its apotheosis through the singer? There appears to be little difference between what the nation says or sings and what Josefine says or sings. Does the secret of Josefine’s power lie in the fact that she is a member of the nation or does it lie in her own personality? The answers to these questions are not given. The narrator is neither a supporter nor an opponent of Josefine, simply one who wonders about her success. The greater part of the story is concerned with the little wiles and tricks of the singer, her affectations and her apparent presumptuousness. We recognize and enjoy Josefine as a representation of the provincial prima donna, as somebody at least partially embodying the phenomenon of what today we might call celebrity.

 For readers unfamiliar with Kafka’s life, the story of Josefine will be little more than an extended fable, again distinguished by the lack of a clear moral. Those who look for allusions would do best to see the folk of mice as the Jewish people: „ [278][…] dieses Volk […] das leidensgewohnt, sich nicht schonend, schnell in Entschlüssen, den Tod wohl kennend, nur dem Anscheine nach ängstlich in der Atmosphäre von Tollkühnheit, in der es ständig lebt, und überdies ebenso fruchtbar wie wagemütig [...] dieses Volk [...] das sich noch immer irgendwie selbst gerettet hat, sei es auch unter Opfern, über die der Geschichtsforscher – im allgemeinen vernachlässigen wir Geschichtsforschung gänzlich – vor Schrecken erstarrt.“ (E 277) The description suits particularly the impoverished Eastern Jews who were constantly in danger of persecution and had to suffer pogroms that caused immeasurable bloodshed. Histories of the Jewish people in diaspora hardly existed before this century. Art of any kind had been virtually non-existent during the whole diaspora period, though there were the psalms of old, the music of which had been forgotten. “Trotz unserer Unmusikalität habe wir Gesangesüberlieferungen; in den alten Zeiten unseres Volkes gab es Gesang; Sagen erzählen davon und sogar Lieder sind erhalten, die freilich niemand mehr singen kann.“ (E 269)

After centuries of a cultural life in which there was no self-consciously artistic production, a Yiddish theatre grew out of the tradition of Purim plays early in the twentieth century. For the first time in history, it appeared, Jewish folk art had developed, not in the learned Hebrew tradition but in the jargon of the people and due to the initiative of the people. As early as 1911, Kafka was going to the performances of a troup of Yiddish actors in the Prague Café Savoy. His diaries describe the plays, the amateurish actors, and the audience in detail and show how much the performances impressed him. It appears to be the Yiddish theatre that first made him conscious of being a Jew in the sense of belonging intimately to a people of a very particular character. It also seemed to be his first real encounter with the eastern Jewish tradition. After the entries relating to the theatre we read: „Heute Geschichte des Judentums von Grätz gierig und glücklich zu lesen angefangen.“ (T 132) From this time on, Kafka never lost interest in Jewish problems and his library eventually contained more than fifty books that concerned themselves with things Jewish, while letters and diaries make it clear that he had read many more. A friendship developed with the leader of the group, Löwy, and a passionate love for one of the actresses, Frau Tschissik. Kafka even gave a talk about the Yiddish language to introduce a poetry reading by Löwy. His own half amused, half serious amazement at the force of his love for Mrs. Tschissik who was neither beautiful, nor very young, nor a good actress by western standards, seems to be recalled in this late story “Josefine”. New immediacy must have come to the old experience through the fact that Kafka’s companion, Dora, brought up in the Eastern Jewish tradition, began to learn acting on his advice and with his help and later, in her London exile after Kafka’s death, wrote Yiddish plays herself, an ambition of which perhaps Kafka had known. It is probable that both these women actresses contributed to the conception of Josefine and that Kafka, in this story, was making a playful attempt to by-pass his love and assess rationally what such art was worth, something he had not quite succeeded in doing thirteen years earlier, as a diary entry shows:

Die Schauspieler überzeugen mich durch ihre Gegenwart immer wieder zu meinem Schrecken, dass das meiste, was ich bisher über sie aufgeschrieben habe, falsch ist. Es ist falsch, weil ich mit gleichbleibender Liebe [...] aber wechselnder Kraft über sie schreibe und diese wechselnde Kraft nicht laut und richtig an die wirklichen Schauspieler schlägt, sondern dumpf sich an dieser Liebe verliert, die mit der Kraft niemals zufrieden sein wird und deshalb dadurch, dass sie sie aufhält, die Schauspieler zu schützen meint. (T 113)

Why was Kafka’s love for these actors so great? Feeling warm and secure in the body of the Jewish nation – a joy which the story “Josefine” also stresses and which Kafka had missed up till then – was certainly an important element of this love. It is described in the diaries:

Bei manchen Liedern, […] manchem Anblick dieser Frau, die auf dem Podium, weil sie Jüdin ist, uns Zuhörer, weil wir Juden sind, an sich zieht, ohne Verlangen oder Neugier nach Christen, ging mir ein Zittern über die Wangen. (T 81)

But there was perhaps an even stronger fascination which Kafka would not have been able to describe at the time because in 1911 he had as yet written nothing in his own peculiar subjective style. In the ‘Josefine’ story, written only weeks before his death, it finds expression. It is neither the song, which is a mere whistle, nor the singer that inspires the people. The great achievement of such folk art is that it gives people who still have the actively creative minds of children the chance to dream, the chance to discover their own imaginative world without leaving the warmth and security of communal life. The point may become clearer if we illustrate it with parallels: A normal child , reading a sentimental story in general does two things. It picks up the fragments of reality to which the story draws his attention and meditates and dreams about them in a manner little related to the story in question. The child welcomes the story because it draws his attention to individual elements within the confused complexity of everyday life and because it frees these from such shackles. He enjoys the flush of emotion which the sentimentality produces as the stimulant which activates his imagination. Even though such writing may have very little value as art, it helps the creative young mind to find itself. While genuine poetry demands a highly disciplined and restrictive use of the imagination, such mediocre writing, where it is reacted to uncritically, gives full scope to the young creative mind. When such mediocre art is folk art, it has the added advantage of awakening individual “dreams” against the background of a common emotional experience. The individual and the communal achieve some sort of balance, so that the rejuvenating forces of individual originality become active while the sense of community, which these forces could ideally serve, is not lost. This is the nature of Josefine’s achievement. She is not an artist, but the servant of the community.

Bei ihren Konzerten, besonders in ernster Zeit, haben nur noch die ganz Jungen Interesse an der Sängerin als solcher […] die eigentliche Menge hat sich – das ist deutlich su erkennen – auf sich selbst zurückgezogen. Hier in den dürftigfen Pausen zwischen den Kämpfen träumt das Volk, es ist, als lösten sich dem Einzelnen die Glieder, als dürfte sich der Ruhelose einmal nach seiner Lust im großen warmen Bett des Volkes dehnen und strecken. Und in diese Träume klingt hier und da Josefines Pfeifen; sie nennt es perlend, wir nennen es stoßend; aber jedenfalls ist es hier an seinem Platze, wie nirgend sonst, wie Musik kaum jemals den auf sie wartenden Augenblick findet. Etwas von der armen kurzen Kindheit ist darin, etwas von verlorenem, nie wieder aufzufindendem Glück, aber auch etwas vom tätigen heutigen Leben ist darin, von seiner kleinen, unbegreiflichen und dennoch bestehenden und nicht zu ertötenden Munterkeit. Und dies alles ist wahrhaftig nicht mit großen Tönen gesagt, sondern leicht, flüsternd, vertraulich, manchmal ein wenig heiser. Natürlich ist es Pfeifen. Wie denn nicht? Pfeifen ist die Sprache unseres Volkes, nur pfeift mancher ein Leben lang und weiß es nicht, hier aber ist das Pfeifen frei gemacht von den Fesseln des täglichen Lebens und befreit auch uns für eine kurze Weile. Gewiss, diese Vorführungen wollen wir nicht missen. (E 282)

            Because Josefine is no artist but a mere servant of the community, she will never achieve personal immortality.

Josefine aber […] wird fröhlich sich verlieren in der zahllosen Menge der Helden unseres Volkes, und bald, da wir keine Geschichte treiben, in gesteigerter Erlösung vergessen sein wie alle ihre Brüder.  (E 291)

Though her own estimation of her significance is wrong, she probably means more to her people than a genuine artist ever could. Kafka was no Josefine. Whatever temptation there might have been to become a Jewish artist, he avoided it. His writings will mean as much or as little to Jews as to anyone else in the world. But Kafka did learn from Josefine and her kind the importance and value of awakening the uniquely individual within each listener, of stimulating him to personal activity rather than informing him of the writer’s own ideas. And he also learnt the value of experiencing individual thoughts and emotions in a communal setting. Kafka had always been fond of public readings; he often read from his stories to his friends or family and on one occasion he even read “In der Strafkolonie” to a public audience. He transcended Josefine and could look back to her with gratitude and a certain condescension.

CONCLUSION: THE OPEN QUESTION

            It should have become clear in the process of this study that Kafka’s work, like the work of all great writers, has the undefinable complexity of a living organism. We began with something resembling an anatomical study, we continued to describe the dynamics of his writing, much as psychology attempts to describe the dynamics of a personality, and it would be well to conclude with an artist’s portrait to restore an impression of unity and life to the whole.  Such artist’s portraits of Kafka’s work as a whole exist. Probably the best and earliest is that by Walter Benjamin, written in commemoration of the tenth anniversary of Kafka’s death.[279] It is a masterpiece in the choice of salient observation, of examples and images that not only clarify meaning but create background and colour, of quotes from Kafka’s writings that sound as though they were being spoken at your elbow. But the creator of such a portrait is permitted to take licences with reality that offend against the spirit of more exact studies. In an artistic portrait of Kafka’s work things may be presented out of context and given inaccurate interpretations as long as they contribute to the truth and intensity of the portrait. But we ourselves, having insisted on precision for so long, cannot now change our standards without throwing doubt on all that has been said. Nevertheless, with only a few slightly altered accents, Walter  Benjamin’s essay could be imagined as the ideal conclusion to our study.

            Kafka’s work, in our description, resembles a pair of scales in constant quivering motion. Any systematic summing up would contradict our thesis. It is not possible to circumscribe the meaning of, for example, Kafka’s animal symbol in a way that it is possible to circumscribe Goethe’s symbol of light. For Goethe’s light is an answer envisaged, whereas Kafka’s animal is a question asked.

            Kafka’s questions, always unanswered, all concern the nature of man. They are phrased with the help of two main symbols that appear at first sight to represent the two poles of human nature: the animal and the social order. But in the actual works the superficially simple antithetical relationship no longer exists. Are the dog and mouse worlds social or animal? Is the Castle not perhaps closer to the burrow of the animal than to the social world?

            Self-evident, as a result almost meaningless, and through their very meaninglessness predestined to be cyphers for mysteries are the recurring symbols of food and music. It is Benjamin who draws our attention to the fact that music, though it obviously stands for a spiritual reality, gives us no clue to the nature of spirit. Is it of that nebulous, whimsical, and probably sub-human realm in which K.’s helpers are at home, as Benjamin suggests?[280] In Kafka’s works the idea of ‘spirit’ is essentially as ambivalent as any natural phenomenon.

            The web of names in which the works are caught is just as inexplicable, it seems. Are Josef K. and Josefine linked to emphasize their differences or their similarities or simply to play a trick on us? What is the necessity that lets the three Friedas share a name? What do the bearers of the cryptogrammic five-letter “Kafka” names have in common? Is there a fraternity of K.s or is it only chance that links them? Whatever the patterns of Kafka’s works are, they draw questions from us. Every attempt to achieve for oneself the comfort of knowledge is thwarted. Form has here become the activating and unstable priciple of art, where it had once seemed the restful and eternal. Perhaps a summary of the meaning of Kafka’s writings would have to list questions. But as each question has validity only in its specific context, it is obviously impossible to arrive at a valid list of questions. All that we can conclude is that the essence of Kafka’s art is the open question. The question is open both in the sense that it is never answered and in the sense that it is able to take into itself the material of life.

            But Kafka’s road through life, guided by his works, can be recognized. We are here concerned with a man who possesses an unusually strong gift of imagination and who is anxiously and critically aware of the human and moral dangers that go with this. Early on, Kafka makes a somewhat inept attempt to solve the problems of life with the help of common sense, before he licenses his imagination to question the very roots of human existence: Does the law of goodness lie in society, divinity or in ourselves? What must a god do to redeem humanity? What truth can there be in the various theories, ideas and convictions of men? What is a man? What can woman be to him? Knowing what the artist must not be, can we deduce what he should be? Have I, Kafka, achieved this?

            The answers critics have given him to that last question have most often been negative. Some have told him that he failed as a human being, perhaps through no fault of his own, for his childhood wounds had been incurable. Others have said that he failed to give the advice society had a right to expect from the works of a writer. Still others have regretted his lack of clarity. Many have seen him not only as the prophet of doom but as the doomed man too.[281] Kafka’s testaments have in general been taken seriously as admissions of some kind of failure. But like all things connected with Kafka, these testaments too have a decidedly ambiguous character. Might not Kafka have felt that only a fellow writer’s conviction that the value of his writings warranted the disregarding of his last will, was a valid verdict that they deserved to survive? This interpretation, which we would tend to favour, may stand with the scores of others offered throughout the years to prove that Kafka will remain the poet of ambivalence.

            And it is this ambivalence that makes him so fascinating to his readers. The openness of his stories encourages us to fill them with our own experiences and concerns to an extent never before on offer from literature. As the number and diversity of often incompatible interpretations shows, readers have flocked to take up this offer to use Kafka’s texts to think about their own lives and the personal beliefs that guide them, and to communicate these thoughts to others. In this study we have tried to relate Kafka’s writings to his biography and by doing so to discover the origins of the uniqueness  of his literary works and the constructive role they played in his own life. As all his friends have attested, Kafka the man was a kindly, playful, fun loving, socially responsible and considerate person though he was also shy and always grossly overworked. It was not easy to have such a literary output at the same time as holding down a job and trying to do your duty towards family and friends. Of course the average reader would know very little about Kafka the person and Kafka himself would not have wanted him to go in search of such knowledge. This was perhaps another reason why he felt that his works might be best destroyed. Up till then, readers had always expected answers from literature, not questions which they were expected to answer themselves. But the world’s readers have taken up the challenge to a quite extraordinary extent; they have shown themselves to have come of age as human beings and to accept responsibility for their own lives.

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Hemmerle, Rudolf  Franz Kafka. Eine Bibliographie. Munich, 1958.

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-:  Franz Kafka in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten. Rowohlts monographien. Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1964.

-:  „Wo liegt Kafka’s Schloss?“. In: Kafka-Symposion. Ed. J. Born et al., Berlin 1965. pp. 161-179.

Walser, Martin  Beschreibung einer Form. In: Schriftenreihe: Literatur als Kunst. München, 1961.

Warren, Austin  „The Penal Colony“. In: The Kafka Problem. Ed. A. Flores. New York, 1964. pp. 140-142.

-:  “Franz Kafka”. (from: Rage for Order, 1948) In: Kafka. Critical Essays. Ed. R. Gray. Englewood Cliffs, 1962.

Weinberg, Kurt  Kafkas Dichtungen. Die Travestien des Mythos. Bern & München, 1963.

Weltsch, Felix „Religiöser Humor bei Franz Kafka“. In: Kafkas Glauben und Lehre. Ed. Max Brod. Winterthur & München, 1948. pp. 155-184.

Wiese, Benno von  „Franz Kafka. Ein Hungerkünstler“. In: Die deutsche Novelle von Goethe bis Kafka II. Ed. B. v. Wiese. Düsseldorf, 1956. pp. 325-342.

-:  „Franz Kafka. Die Verwandlung“. In: Die deutsche Novelle von Goethe bis Kafka II. Ed. B. v. Wiese. Düsseldorf, 1956. pp. 319-345.

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[1] For Freud’s concept of reality see Lionel Trilling’s essay ‘Freud and Literature’ in The Liberal Imagination, p.34 ff.

[2] The reference is to Charles Neider’s The Frozen Sea.

[3] Walter Sokel’s Kafka study Franz Kafka: Tragik und Ironie, 1964, must be praised for not evading the complex implications of Kafka’s writings and for trying to show up the continuity within the work as a whole. It falls short, however, in our opinion when it comes to balancing and estimating the relationship of the various elements. It overemphasizes Freudian patterns supposedly repeated throughout the stories. Where these actually exist, it is not the discipleship but the completely altered context that should be stressed. See also Heinz  Ide’s review of Sokel’s book.

[4] C. G.Jung: ‘On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetic Art’, p. 169.

[5] Wolfgang Jahn: Kafkas Roman ‘Der Verschollene’. See appendix and references in text.

[6] See T 57

[7] A. P. Foulkes: ‘Dream Pictures in Kafka’s Writings’, p. 26. Foulkes’ argument seems acceptable and supported by relevant quotes from Kafka’s personal writings. See also Max Brod: Franz Kafka’s Glauben und Lehre, p. 68.

[8] For the argument in favour of Kafka having read Freud’s Traumdeutung, see Eric Marson and Keith Leopold: ‘Kafka, Freud and “Ein Landarzt”, p. 146 f.

[9] The analysis of the dream-work: ‘Traumarbeit’ is to be found in chapter VI of Sigmund Freud’s Die Traumdeutung. For greater ease in reading, I shall wherever possible quote from the English translations of Freud and Jung. Here: The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, ed. A. A. Brill, p. 467.

[10] Ibid: p. 320.

[11] Ibid: p.341

[12] Ibid: p.344

[13] Ibid: p.346

[14] Ibid: p.319

[15] C. G. Jung: ‘On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetic Art’, p.167.

[16] W. Emrich consistently uses symbol in the sense Goethe gave to it and can therefore prove philosophically that Kafka cannot have used symbols. See. Franz Kafka, p. 80.

Walter Sokel gives a good summary of the theories of symbol in the Goethe-Schelling-Hegel line. “Nach Hegel lässt die Kunst eine universale Idee in einem individuellen Phänomen transparent warden. Diese Ansichten über das Symbol setzen also das Nebeneinanderbestehen der Persönlichkeit und einer kosmischen Ordnung, sowie die Möglichkeit einer engen Beziehung zwischen ihnen voraus.“ In: Der literarische Expressionismus,  p. 44.

[17] For definitions and characterizations of the emblem and hieroglyph see Albrecht Schöne: Emblemata. Versuch einer Einführung.

[18] See Maurice Marache: “La metaphore dans l’oevre de Kafka”, p. 23-41. Marache describes Kafka’s process as giving the image its concrete value and then activating it by making it the theme of a procedure or a series of actions which recall an extended metaphor.

[19] See Basil Busacca: “A Country Doctor.” Busacca writes of Aesop’s fables: “The meaning could be expressed in the x’s and y’s of symbolic logic more economically than in language, albeit less charmingly, because it is concerned with particular relations and not with specific termini […] the formula of relations (the meaning) may, like a proverb such as ‘a stitch in time saves nine’, be applied to any set of specific termini whose relations may be conceived as analogous.” P. 45.

[20] Emrich in Franz Kafka.

[21] Kurt Weinberg: Kafkas Dichtungen. Die Travestien des Mythos.

[22] Marie-Luise Harder: Märchenmotive in der Dichtung Franz Kafkas.

[23] Walter Sokel: Der literarische Expressionismus, p. 63 ff.

[24] Maurice Marache:“La metaphoere dans l’oeuvre de Kafka.“

[25] See Norbert Miller: „Moderne Parabel“, p.201 f.

[26] I am thinking here primarily of Herbert Silberer in: Probleme der Mystik.

[27] Norbert Miller: „Moderne Parabel.“

[28] Alfred Bourk: „Geste und Parabel.“

[29] Helmut Arntzen: „Franz Kafka. Von den Gleichnissen.“

[30] Beda Allemann: „Kafka: Von den Gleichnissen.“

[31] Norbert Miller: „Moderne Parabel“, p. 202.

[32] Heinz Hillmann: Franz Kafka. Dichtungstheorie und Dichtungsgestalt. See note p. 165.

Walter H. Sokel: „Das Verhältnis der Erzählperspektive zu Erzählgeschehen und Sinngehalt etc.“ attempts to distinguish (on the basis of perspective) two genres in Kafka’s writing: “Parabel-Bericht” and “Geschichte-Roman”. Parables are for Sokel those stories in which the author is not identical with the suffering hero. Two things speak against this definition: the term parable stresses the image component, and perspective with Kafka is so complex a phenomenon that Sokel’s division can hardly be maintained.

[33] Hans-Günter Pott: „Die aphoristischen Texte Franz Kafkas“, p. 14. In his dissertation, he examines Kafka’s aphorisms in detail. He too draws the parallel between the essayistic and the aphoristic. Speaking of his own definition of aphorism he says: „Diese Bedeutung des Aphoristischen […] scheint teilweise identisch zu sein mit dem Begriff des Essayistischen.“ Pott’s shortcoming is that he includes dwarf forms of the parable in his category of the aphorism.

[34] For a text of the play see: Literatur und Kritik, July 1966, No. 4, and for comments on the likelihood of Kafka’s authorship: Literatur und Kritik, Nos. 6, 8, 10. Judging from the statement of Ludwig Mandaus, quoted by Friedrich Karp (No. 10) Kafka at best permitted his notes to be used in the construction of the play. That notes by Kafka have been incorporated has been shown by Pasley and Goldstücker in Nos. 6 & 8 respectively. But one can hardly speak of Kafka writing a play. For Brod’s comment on a play destroyed by Dora Diamant see: Eine Biographie, p. 248.

[35] Max Brod: Franz Kafkas Glauben und Lehre,  note p. 78 f.

[36] H. G. Pott, p. 92 f.

[37] Franz Brentano: Die Lehre vom richtigen Urteil.  (1874-95) p. 192.

[38] Max Brod: Streitbares Leben, p. 248 ff.

[39] Klaus Wagenbach: Franz Kafka. Eine Biographie seiner Jugend. P. 112.

[40] Marie-Luise Harder: Märchenmotive in der Dichtung Franz Kafkas,  p. 97ff.

[41] Max Brod: Franz Kafkas Glauben und Lehre, p. 37.

[42] Roland Barthes:“Gibt es eine Schreibweise der Lyrik?“ p. 225.

[43] We shall speak of this in connection with the novel Der Prozess.

[44] Many books on Kafka contain good summaries of the trends in Kafka criticism. Special mention should be made of those in the first chapters of the following books: Charles Neider: The Frozen Sea; Ronald Gray: Kafka’s Castle; and Helmut Richter: Franz Kafka. See also Marthe Robert: „Kafka in Frankreich“ and Hans Mayer: „Kafka und kein Ende“.

[45] Homer Swander: “The Castle. K’s Village”, p. 137.

[46] The important contributions to Kafka’s biography are: Max Brod: Eine Biographie, and Streitbares Leben, and Klaus Wagenbach: Franz Kafka. Eine Biographie seiner Jugend. 1883-1912.

[47] H. S. Reiss: Franz Kafka. Eine Betrachtung seines Werkes. P. 166.

[48] W. H. Sokel: Franz Kafka. Tragik und Ironie,  p. 11 ff. Also The Writer in Extremis, quote from p. 4. Against Sokel, Paul Raabe: “Franz Kafka und der Expressionismus” also stresses that Kafka belonged to the Expressionist Movement only externally and that his style cannot be defined on this basis.

[49] See W. Emrich: Franz Kafka, p. 30-40. Also Georg Lukacs: Wider den missverstandenen Realismus.

[50] Max Brod: Streitbares Leben, pp. 239, 248, 251. Also Heinz Politzer: Franz Kafka. Parabel and Paradox,  p. 300 f.

[51] Felix Weltsch: ‘Religiöser Humor bei Franz Kafka’, p. 122.

[52] Max Brod: ‘Ermordung einer Puppe namens Franz Kafka’ in: Biographie, p. 340-358. See also Michael Hamburger’s estimation of Günter Anders: Kafka. Pro und Contra in: From Prophecy to Exorcism, p.113 f.

[53] Herbert Silberer’s study Probleme der Mystik is based on the assumption that the Freudian approach is inadequate. C. G. Jung in his article “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetic Art” writes: “The reductive method of Freud is purely a method of medical treatment that has for its object a morbid and unsuitable structure […] When applied to the work of art this method leads to the results depicted above. From beneath the shimmering robe of art it extracts the naked commonness of the elementary homo sapiens, to which species the poet also belongs.” P. 166.

[54] H. Silberer: Probleme der Mystik,  p. 168.

[55] Kafka writes about this: „Ein Vorteil des Tagebuchführens besteht darin, dass man sich mit beruhigender Klarheit der Wandlungen bewusst ist, denen man unaufhörlich unterliegt, die man auch im allgemeinen natürlich glaubt, ahnt und zugesteht, die man aber unbewusst immer dann leugnet, wenn es darauf ankommt, sich aus einem solchen Zugeständnis Hoffnung oder Ruhe zu holen. Im Tagebuch findet man Beweise dafür, dass man selbst in Zuständen, die heute unerträglich scheinen, gelebt, herumgeschaut und Beobachtungen aufgeschrieben hat, dass also diese Rechte sich bewegt hat wie heute, wo wir zwar durch die Möglichkeit des Überblickes über den damaligen Zustand klüger sind, darum aber desto mehr die Unerschrockenheit unseres damaligen, in lauter Unwissenheit sich dennoch erhaltenden Strebens anerkennen müssen.“ (T. 202)

[56] This will be elaborated in the last section of our study.

[57] One of the few writers who succeeded in seeing both Kafka’s pathological and ethical achievement is Michael Hamburger. Here the question arises: Is a fruitfully mastered neurosis still to be spoken of in these terms, particularly in a not strictly psychoanalytical context, or is it better here to think in terms of personal idiosyncrcies and characteristics, since speaking in terms of neuroses can lead to the kind of rather crude condemnation Kafka has been given at times by Neider, Sokel, Politzer and others.

[58] Aphorisms not included in this collection are found in the notebooks of that year. In discussing Kafka’s ideas we shall limit ourselves to this period of his life and as nearly as possible to the collection he authorized. Diary entries will not be considered here as the likelihood of these being chance remarks that Kafka would not have upheld is too great.

[59] Christoph Bezzel: Natur bei Kafka examines Kafka’s relation to things natural.

[60] In the opening address to the Liblice conference on Kafka, a friend of Milena recalls the gatherings in Milena’s home to which Kafka also came. „Wir allerdings trieben uns in den noch frischen Spuren Nerudas umher, während er gleichsam in den fünfhundert Jahre alten Fußstapfen des Rabbi Löw herumspazierte.“  p. 9.

[61]See Tagebücher p. 57.

[62] For both these thinkers, evil is lack of reality, not an entity in itself. “Kein Seiendes heißt übel insofern es seiend ist, sondern insofern ihm ein gewisses Sein ermangelt.“ In: Summa Theologia, 5th Invest., 3rd. Article. Martin Buber’s philosophy of evil is well presented in: „Der Glaube des Judentums“, p. 187-215 in: Der Jude und sein Judentum.

[63] Max Brod: Heidentum, Christentum, Judentum. Vol. I, p. 95: „Es ist wenig beachtet worden, dass das Judentum zwei messianische Zeiten unterscheidet [...] Der Talmud kennt zwei Messiase, den Messias ben Joseph, der im Kampfe fällt, und den vollendeten Messias ben David.“

[64] Martin Buber emphasizes the distinction between Christian and Jewish religiousness in his essay: “Der Glaube des Judentums”, p. 187-215 in: Der Jude und sein Judentum.

[65] Quoted from F. C. Happold:Mysticism, p. 142.

[66] In a section of his book Leid und Verwandlung, Walter Falk has attempted a representation of Kafka’s philosophy. But there are weaknesses. The first of these is that no clear distinction has been made between Kafka’s experience of life, often strongly coloured by circumstance, events, health etc. and what he himself considered his “philosophy”. In keeping with this, the aphorisms of 1917 have not been given separate consideration but have been mixed with quotes from other works. Thus, for instance, Falk claims that sex for Kafka was something basically negative, while in reality not his philosophy but his experience of sex was negative. As Falk disregards Kafka’s positive approach to nature and things natural and practically overlooks Judaism, greatly simplified Kafka’s view of “the animal”, and among many significant influences on Kafka sees only Nietzsche’s, which he overemphasizes, disregarding the paradoxical structure of Kafka’s thought, his conclusions seem to take Kafka far closer to Christian Manicheism than permissible. Another weakness of method seems to be that the author’s interpretation of stories is used to establish the fact that Kafka held certain views, whereas it should at best serve as a corroboration of Kafka’s views.

[67] Walter Sokel: Tragic und Ironie, sees annoyance as the motive for suggesting the walk.

[68] See BeK  p. 346.

[69] Sokel op. cit. sees the acquaintance primarily as the other pole of the narrator’s personality. To us, he is in the first place a very real person though the narrator then takes him over as a figure of his own imagination. The effect that walking with a man, who is preoccupied with him on the one hand and oblivious of him on the other, has on the acquaintance is like that of a vampire sucking his blood. In the end, he has lost all confidence in himself and life. This seems a demonstration of the destructive power of the apparently harmless man who is only dreaming. The carriers of the fat man are the first to drown and the acquaintance is such a carrier for the narrator.

[70] Both Helmut Richter in Franz Kafka. Werk und Entwurf and Walter Sokel seem to ignore the creative element in loneliness.

Freud commented on the relationship between art and neurosis in “Neurotic and Artist”.

[71] According to Freud “the deliria are the work of a censorship, which cancels regardlessly anything to which it objects, thus causing the remnant to appear disjointed.” The Interpretation of Dreams,  p. 483.

[72] See Ernest Jones: „Der Alptraum in Beziehung zu gewissen Formen des mittelalterlichen Aberglaubens“, 1912. Also: On the Nightmare.

[73] See Freud: Interpretation of Dreams, p. 557.

[74] BeK, p. 347.

[75] The breakdown of Idealism as it is reflected in Kafka’s works, is well described by Wilhelm Emrich in the introductory chapters of Franz Kafka.

[76] Both Freud and Jung constantly emphasize the links between the idiom of language and the images of the sub- and unconscious.

[77] See Freud: “The Relation of the Poet to Daydreaming”.

[78] Ludwig Dietz in “Franz Kafka und die Zweimonatschrift Hyperion” was the first to point to the publication of these stories in Hyperion.

[79] One of the few critics who have lingered over Betrachtung is Helmut Richter in Werk und Entwurf. Richter conscienciously interprets each piece and comes to the conclusion that loneliness is the point of departure and the central motif of the cycle. „Das Gefühl der individuellen Not und Lebensangst greift endlich auf die Umweltauffassung über: der Betrachtende sieht hier eine letztlich sinnlose Gleichförmigkeit und Unerträglichkeit. Bei diesem radikalen Zweifel kann auch der Gedanke an einen möglichen Erfolg im Leben keine positiven Aussichten mehr eröffnen. Es bleibt nichts anderes übrig als sich in völlige Einsamkeit zurückzuziehen.“ P. 79. From his Marxist standpoint, such withdrawal from society must be a matter of concern for Richter and he points out that this is not the right way to live. To us, loneliness in this context seems to be not so much a phenomenon in its own right, as simply the prerequisite for the type of poetic experience being described. The emphasis must be placed on the “moments of density”, not on the loneliness that gives rise to them.

[80] We might agree with Politzer in Franz Kafka. Parable and Paradox  that Betrachtung is a “five-finger exercise” in that it investigates artistic possibilities, but not with Politzer’s rejection: “it is a hodgepodge of reminiscences and promises, an odd assortment of paragraphs, gleaned from a poet’s imaginative diary”. 

P. 29.

[81] Max Brod writes in Eine Biographie p.153: ‚Die neunundneunzig Seiten der jetzt sehr seltenen[...] Erstausgabe ähneln in ihren Riesenlettern antiken  Votivtafeln. Und damit ist [...] der innerste Charakter dieser großen Prosa eigentlich unübertrefflich zum Ausdruck gekommen.’ See also p. 160 f.

[82] Wilhelm Emrich: Franz Kafka, p. 238 ff. sees Amerika as the description of a dehumanized world in which a sense of possession has replaced love and the Marquis de Sade reigns. His interpretation of the novel most closely approximates to our views of it, particularly as he also sees Karl himself as an unproblematic character.

[83] We disagree with those critics (e.g. Mark Spilka: “Amerika. Its Genesis”; Lienhard Bergel: “Amerika: Its Meaning”; and John W. Tilton: “Kafka’s Amerika as a Novel of Salvation”) who see Karl as a developing hero. Karl does not change in the course of the novel; there is no evidence for his sinfulness (Spilka); it can only very deviously be interpreted into his character. There is no place in the novel in which we can honestly condemn Karl. It seems meaningless to relate the message of the novel too closely to Karl, to speak of oepipal complexes, guiltless sinfulness, real education and development etc. and better to accept the essentially simple Karl as our guide through the novel.

[84] J. W. Tilton interprets the story of Amerika as a repetition of the story of the Fall. To us, Kafka seems to be dwelling on innocence in spite of technical faults. If the myth of the Fall is alluded to, it can only be in a parodistic way.

[85] Bergel sees the novel as presenting the process of emerging from childhood. But it seems the very point  that Karl does not emerge. Whereas in Kafka’s later works, e. g. Der Prozess, it is permissible to take the images beyond their emotional range, this cannot be done in a realistic novel.

[86] We do not agree with Bergel who sees the Naturtheater as representing the Church.

[87] Some critics (e.g. Uyttersprot: Eine neue Ordnung der Werke Kafkas) have stressed the fact that Oklahoma is a sterile and uninhabited desert. There is no evidence in the novel, though it is, admittedly, incomplete, that Kafka knew this and the concluding description of nature so strongly emphasizes natural grandeur that one feels that Kafka might have stressed the openness and freedom of the desert, in the manner of “Wunsch Indianer zu warden”, more than its barrenness.

[88] Emrich emphasizes the “Seelenlärm der Frauen” (p.249), the emotional noise of the women. But as we are informed that the men with their noise take over from the women at regular intervals, there seems no justification in giving this so much significance.

[89] Of the Kafka critics, H. Richter has probably given greatest prominence to the sociological in Amerika. As he is committed to a Marxist ideology, he does not quite escape a schematization of the novel. As a result, Karl becomes the bourgeois, with all the limitations of this class, and the good-for-nothings, Delamarche and Robinson, become the proletariat. Consequently, Richter does not see that Kafka is envisaging new solutions here.

[90] See p. 8.

[91] Five months after writing „Das Urteil“, Kafka notes in his diary: „Anlässlich der Korrektur des ‘Urteil’ schreibe ich all Beziehungen auf, die mir in der Geschichte klar geworden sind, soweit ich sie gegenwärtig habe. Es ist dies notwendig, denn die Geschichte ist wie eine regelrechte Geburt mit Schmutz und Schleim bedeckt aus mir herausgekommen und nur ich habe die Hand, die bis zum Körper dringen kann und Lust dazu hat.“(T 296) This shows that he only gradually began to understand what the story meant to him and that he felt it had a level of meaning to which only he had access.

[92] Karl H. Ruhleder „Franz Kafka’s ‚Das Urteil’“.

[93] Erwin R. Steinberg “The Judgment in Franz Kafka’s ‘The Judgment’”’.

[94] Kate Flores “The Judgment”.. Flores’ analysis is based on an understanding of the abnormal psychology of a man with a father fixation and is a typical example of a “case-history reading” of Kafka. The friend in Russia is identified, a little too firmly, for the story gives barely more than hints in this direction, as Kafka the writer in opposition to Kafka the well-adjusted businessman. Kafka’s own conflict between writing and marriage and his wish that his father might approve of his writing are seen as the theme of the story. Its essence, according to this view, is masochistic wish-fulfillment. The shortcomings of this analysis are that many strands of meaning are lost and the story looks like an embarrassingly personal dream of the Freudian wish-fulfillment variety, that this approach forestalls any assessment of the story as literature or any description of its significance for the general reader, and that it gives no help in understanding the cathartic value Kafka claimed the story had for him. An interesting conclusion Flores draws from her analysis as that all Kafka’s stories and diaries present Kafka the writer going under the name of K. in conflict with Kafka the businessman or narrator, who has no understanding of K. and only outside knowledge of him. But this view can hardly be maintained; the psychology of the two selves is seen far too mechanically. It would also be hard to show whether the K.s are more Kafka the writer or Kafka the man of the world.

[95] Heinz Politzer Franz Kafka. Parabel and Paradox.  Politzer comes to the conclusion that “The Judgment does not convey any clearly discernable message beyond the warning against the loss of bachelorhood.” (p. 63) Politzer refuses to contemplate the phenomenon of inspired or unconscious writing, or the fact that a poet while writing is hardly ever consciously aware of the full significance of what he is creating.

[96] Walter Sokel Franz Kafka. Tragik und Ironie.

[97] See p. 22 of this study.

[98] See p. 21 of the study.

[99] See p. ? for the characteristics of unconscious writing.

[100] See p. ?

[101] See p. ?

[102] Sokel (op. cit.) sums this problem up well: „In seiner mächtigen Tendenz zur Askese, zu einer Existenz der ‘Einheit’, der alle fleischlichen Genüsse zutiefst zuwider sind, ist Kafka’s eigentliches Ich dem Freund ganz ähnlich. Dazu gehört vor allem Kafka’s physischer Ekel vor Frauen, deren ‚natürliche Unreinheit’ und ‚geplatzte Sexualität’“ (T 314) ihm unerträglich waren. Den Coitus empfand er als „Bestrafung des Glückes des Beisammenseins“. Und während er einerseits die Verlobung mit Felice Bauer ernstlich in Erwägung zog, stellte er als sein Ideal auf, „möglichst asketisch zu leben, asketischer als ein Junggeselle“. „Das“, schrieb er, „ist die einzige Möglichkeit für mich, die Ehe zu ertragen.“ Da er weiss, dass dies keine Ehe wäre fügt er hinzu: „Aber sie?“ (T 315)’. (p. 51) In our context, the desire for asceticism in marriage would assume a different meaning.

[103] From his knowledge of Kafka, Max Brod emphasizes that Kafka’s refusal to marry was the result of too high an ideal of marriage. Franz Kafkas Glauben und Lehre, p. 93 ff.

[104] The diagram summing up the problem of marriage which Kafka constructed in 1916 begins:

                Rein bleiben                                          Verheiratetsein

                Junggeselle                                           Ehemann

                Ich bleibe rein                                       Rein?                      (H 238)

[105] See chapters on “Subjectivism” and “Die Brücke”, also the summing up of the Artist Stories in this study.

[106] Ruhleder sees the watch as a sign that Georg stands for Chronos. He has taken over “time” from the father by taking over the business and his father’s role in active life.

[107] Most interpretations make a of point of finding fault with Georg’s behaviour. But to judge Georg, one has to make the choice whether to see him as a realistic or symbolic figure for the outcome is likely to be quite different in each case.

[108] Ruhleder, op. cit., p. 17.

[109] Max Brod Biographie, p.158.

[110] See S. Freud Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens.

[111] This is only partly true. In Catholicism the figure of Mary is important while the Church is seen as the bride of Christ. In Hassidic mysticism the Shechina or Soul of God is feminine.

[112] Politzer op. cit. p. 55 suggests that the historical source of this anecdote is the role Father Gapon played in the October uprising of 1905.

[113] Max Brod Franz Kafkas Glauben und Lehre, p. 77f.

[114] Politzer comes to the conclusion that “Das Urteil” lets Georg become just another “friend in Russia” but nothing in the story itself suggests this.

[115] Martin Buber Die Hassidischen Bücher, p. 565.

[116] Herbert Silberer Probleme der Mystik, p. 194 f

[117] Buber op. cit. p. 654.

[118] See Steinberg, p. 23 ff.

[119] Kafka writes: „Ich fühle, wie ein großer Teil meines Wesens zur Theosophie hinstrebt, gleichzeitig aber habe ich vor ihr die größte Angst. Ich befürchte nämlich von ihr eine neue Verwirrung, die für mich sehr arg wäre, da eben schon mein gegenwärtiges Unglück nur aus Verwirrung besteht. Diese Verwirrung liegt in Folgendem: Mein Glück, meine Fähigkeiten und jede Möglichkeit, irgendwie zu nützen, liegen seit jeher im Literarischen. Und hier habe ich allerdings Zustände erlebt (nicht viele), die meiner Meinung nach denen von Ihnen, Herr Doktor, beschriebenen hellseherischen Zuständen sehr nahestehen, in welchen ich ganz und gar in jedem Einfall wohnte, aber jeden Einfall auch erfüllte und in welchen ich mich nicht nur an meinen Grenzen fühlte, sondern an den Grenzen des Menschlichen überhaupt. Nur die Ruhe der Begeisterung, wie sie dem Hellseher wahrscheinlich eigen ist, fehlte doch jenen Zuständen, wenn auch nicht ganz. Ich schließe dies daraus, das ich das Beste meiner Arbeiten nicht in jenen Zuständen geschrieben habe.’ (T 57) See also p. 9 and p. 264.

[120] Walter Sokel emphasizes the similarlity of this story with “Das Urteil” and sees Grete as taking over the function of Frieda, whereas Gregor’s beetle existence is a manifestation of the being of the friend. While there are of course resemblances, it seems dangerous to stress them because the uniquely individual in both stories suffers. The resemblances certainly seem less telling than the differences. See also note 3 of Part I.

[121] In contrast with Sokel’s in many ways good analysis, we are stressing the general significance of the story rather than the biographical. Both interpretations are possible, but there seems to be agreement that the universal, not the personal aspects of the story make of it true literature. Sokel’s description of the paradox of the story in categories of action, as aggression and helplessness seems misleading. Better suited to Kafka’s static story is Emrich’s definition of the paradox as distortion and longing for perfection. For a similar interpretation see Foulkes, p. 28.

[122] W. Sokel Tragik und Ironie, p. 81.

[123] W. Emrich Franz Kafka, p. 122.

[124] Emrich writes: „Die Kühnheit dieser Dichtung liegt in der Konsequenz, mit der sie den Konflikt aus der psychologisch innerseelischen Ebene heraushebt, auf der er seit Jahrhunderten von anderen Dichtern abgehandelt wurde – etwa schon in Wilhelm Meisters Konflikt zwischen Kaufmannsberuf und ‚Sendung’.“ (p. 120) This is true, but means also that the conflict in Kafka’s story can no longer be isolated and formulated in this way; along with the view-point, the centre of gravity also moves. 

[125] The metamorphosis could be understood as emphasizing man’s estrangement from the creature in himself which is the prerequisite of his humanity.

[126] It might be suggested that cockroaches and other vermin do call forth exaggerated reactions in many people. Goethe would have used the word “daemonic” for the triggers of such irrational experiences.. He claimed that many creatures in the animal kingdom were of a wholly daemonic kind.

[127] Sokel writes: „Der Käfer erscheint hier also als Bild und Symbol des nackten oder ‘reinen’ Ichs. Dieses Ich ist unmenschlich.” (p. 80) Nothing in the story suggests that the metamorphosis was a voluntary action or that the animal Gregor is less human than the man was. Emrich (p. 120) sees the animal as the self (which of course needs to be defined) as against the impersonal “man” or “one”. B. v. Wiese „Die Verwandlung“ (p. 329 f.) concentrated on the functional significance of the image: „Die Fiktion des widerlichen Tieres besteht ja nur gleichnishaft, und wir müssen doch wohl annehmen, dass dieses Bild den für die Familie nicht mehr erkennbaren, den hoffnungslos in die Isolation hineingedrängten Menschen meint, einen Menschen also der noch da ist, der aber nicht mehr als er selbst gesehen, nicht mehr vernommen wird, den Menschen, der in seiner Krankheit auch noch das Primitive und zugleich Unschuldige des Tierhaften auf sich genommen hat, der aber wie in der Maske des ‘Ungeziefers’ erlebt wird, und zwar dergestalt, dass die ihm Nahestehenden mehr und mehr die Maske für die Person selbst halten.“ This sums up only some of the aspects of the image.

[128] Th. Adorno has drawn attention to this in Prismen (p. 260).

Foulkes gives an interesting description of the possible evolution of the beetle image. (p. 27 f.) See also    H. 222.

[129] Sokel notes that the woman’s arm is raised as though in self-defence and concludes that Gregor wanted women to reject him. The quote from Kafka’s diaries he gives need not be read in support of this view. Perhaps one should rather see the picture as symbolic of the conventional pose of woman: animal attraction along with defence against the man who wants to possess her. (Sokel p. 94-5)

[130] This symbolic possibility of the beetle image is significant for those who see Gregor’s death as the ultimate meaning of the metamorphosis, e. g. Sokel: “Der innerste Sinn der Verwandlung war Gregors Tod, so dass die Familie, von seiner falschen Rolle erlöst, wieder leben konnte.” (p. 96) or Paul Landsberg: “the Metamorphosis […] portrays in its successive stages Man’s instinct for death, the desire for a return to the inorganic of which Freud has shown the power in the human subconscious.” (p. 126)

[131] Emrich Franz Kafka (p. 124) sees the metamorphosis in this light: „Es geht um die unbekannte Nahrung, die es auf Erden nicht gibt. Er ist als Tier zugleich auch mehr als Tier: seine Verfremdung hatte den Sinn, in ihm die Sehnsucht nach dieser Nahrung zu wecken.“ Wiese’s interpretation is similar.

[132] In the wording of the Bible, darkness set in from the sixth to ninth hour, but it is general knowledge that the ninth hour corresponded with our 3pm.

[133] Rudolf Kassner’s rejection of the ending is not justified on the grounds of what we see as the meaning of the story. Kassner writes: „Die Verwandlung mit ihrem großartigen Anheben sollte gar keinen Schluss haben, kein Ende, gleich wie ein Alpdruck keines hat und plötzlich aufhört. Das Ende dieser Erzählung ist nicht nur widerwärtig, was es vielleicht im Sinne der Existenz, der bloßen, sein soll, sondern auch falsch, was es nicht sein darf.“ (p. 837) We might do better to see it as the typical tragic ending which takes us just far enough to see life on a lower plain continuing normally in spite of the hero’s death.

[134] See K. Weinberg, p. 241.

[135] See K. Weinberg: p. 242.

[136] In her article “Kafka’s Two Worlds of Music”, Alison Turner comes to the conclusion that: “The ‘inner music’ which plays so important a part in Kafka’s works symbolizes the creative ecstasy of the writer who possessed by his genius, succeeds momentarily in transcending the normal limitations of existence.” (p. 275) There seems, however, to be no basic conflict between the two interpretations of music.

Walter Benjamin gives to Kafka’s world of music a more trivial meaning  (p. 203-4).

[137] Dagmar Eisnerova in ‘
„Bemerkungen zur ethischen Problematik in Kafkas Romanen und über den Prager Hintergrund im Prozess,“ writes: „Ich bin der Meinung, dass die Art und Weise, in der Kafka den Prager Hintergrund seines tragischsten Romans gleichzeitig enthüllt und verheimlicht, davon zeugt, dass Prag sozusagen, in der ersten, realen Ebene direkt gegen Josef K. steht […] In dieser realen Ebene, in der es sich im wesentlichen darum handelt, dass der Einzelne vor der Gemeinschaft Rechenschaft über sein Leben ablegt, dass er in die menschliche Gemeinschaft aufgenommen oder von ihr verworfen wird, wird das ablehnende Urteil im Prozess nicht nur in Prag, sondern auch in seinem Namen gefällt.“ (p. 139 f.)

[138] Malcolm Pasley “Two Literary Sources of Kafka’s Der Prozess”.

[139] Friedrich Nietzsche Werke in drei Bänden, ed. Schlechta. München 1955, vol. II, p. 303 ff.

[140]  Alberto Spaini in: The Trial suggests that K. has been struck by an incurable disease and is awaiting death. In substance, K. does not fight against destiny, he fights against himself. Kafka has imposed on himself the superhuman task of making this struggle moral: “Man’s secret is that of forcing destiny onto a spiritual plane.” (p. 147) Although we do not read Der Prozess  primarily as an outbreak of disease, there is nothing in such an interpretation that would necessarily conflict with ours.

[141] See Silberer Probleme der Mystik, p. 161: „So ergibt sich denn für die typischen Symbole eine doppelte Perspektive. Die Typen sind gegeben; man kann durch sie nach vorne schauen und nach hinten. Es wird in beiden Fällen nicht ohne Bildverzerrungen abgehen; man wird öfters Dinge übereinander projiziert sehen, die nicht zu einander gehören; man wird Konvergenzen in Fluchtpunkte wahrnehmen, die nur der Perspektive zuzuschreiben sind. Ich möchte der Kürze halber die so entstandenen Fehler ‘Überdeckungsfehler’ nennen.“ (p. 145)

[142] For a good analysis of perspective see Beda Allemann Der Prozess: „Der Leser erfährt fast nichts über das Innenleben einer Figur, mit deren Augen und Ohren er doch scheinbar die Welt dieses Romanes wahrnimmt.“ (p. 238) „Die Perspektive des Erzählens selbst ist bei Kafka im Grunde rein funktional bestimmt, durch die eigentümliche Sehweise des verborgenen Erzählers. Diese Sehweise besitzt die Eigenschaft, dass aus ihr gleichsam alles Primäre ausgefiltert ist. Sie ist punktuell gegenwärtig, die ‚Voraussetzungen’ des Gesehenen mag sie gerade nicht zu erfassen, weshalb diese Voraussetzungen, wie im Einleitungssatz, ausdrücklich nachkonstruiert werden müssen, wobei dann in der Regel eine Täuschung mit unterläuft. Dieses voraussetzungslos und zusammenhangsfremde Sehen schließt von vornherein jeden erzählerischen ‚Überblick’ im konventionellen Sinne aus […] Es führt nicht weiter, wenn man erklärt, dass diese eigentümliche Sehweise durch die Bindung der Perspektive an die Hauptfigur zustande komme.“

(p. 240) See also: Keith Leopold: „Breaks in Perspective in Franz Kafka’s Der Prozess.“

[143] Antonin Vaclavik: „Franz Kafka und seine Kunst der psychologischen Analyse“ gives a good description of the relation of the realistic and symbolic in Kafka’s work: „Kafka entwickelt in der Regel gleichlaufend zwei Ebenen – eine Ebene, in der die äußere Welt empirisch genau beschrieben wird, und eine Ebene großer dichterischer Imagination, die fast fantastische Bilder und Kombinationen hervorbringt, die von einem unstillbaren Durst nach dem Unendlichen zeugen. Die gegenseitige Beziehung dieser Ebenen ist sehr kompliziert, im großen und ganzen kann man jedoch sagen, dass die erste Ebene der zweiten dient – Elemente der realistischen Mikrozeichnung stehen letzten Endes im Dienste des Dialogs mit etwas Geheimnisvollem, das auf dem Wege der Vernunft nicht erfassbar ist. Gerade daraus entspringt bei Kafka jene sonderbare ‚konkrete Irrationaliät’, die darauf beruht, dass die Spukgestalten der Phantasie durch das Prisma komplizierter seelischer Erlebnisse hindurchgehen, um beinahe ‚greifbar’ zu werden und auf diese Weise glaubhafter und wirkungsvoller erscheinen.“ (p. 272) A realistic reading like that of Helmut Richter must find the novel lacking in many ways. Taking into account the fragmentary material, Richter tries to assess how many of the chapters of the novel are unwritten. To our predominantly symbolic reading of the novel, in contrast, it appears to be a closely integrated whole.

[144]. Dagmar Eisnerova contends that Kafka’s sense of guilt arose from his feeling of estrangement from the world because of his pronounced sense of social responsibility. Roman Karst “Ein Versuch um die Rettung des Menschen” takes this view further and sees Josef K.’s guilt in his lack of social responsibility. “Josef K. ist persönlich unschuldig, aber er ist sich seiner Verantwortung für das, was außer ihm existiert, nicht bewusst, und das ist seine Schuld, die er sühnen muss.“ (p. 148)

[145] We basically agree with Emrich’s description of the lower courts as „nichts anderes als ein Bild der unendlichen, sich ständing kreuzenden und wandelnden ‚Ansichten’, die die Menschen jeweils voneinander haben.“ (p. 263) But it should also be emphasized that the courts as such are not shown in the novel, only various courts or aspects of the courts in relation to executors or interpreters of justice. Like Emrich, we see the high courts in close relationship to “das Gesetz”.

[146] M. Pasley in “Two Literary Sources of Kafka’s Prozess” quotes the following passage from “Salomon Maimons Lebensgeschichte” ed. Jakob Fromer, Munich 1911, pp. 357 ff.: „Geheimnisse einer Religion sind Gegenstände und Handlungen […] deren innere Bedeutung von großer Wichtigkeit ist, die aber ihrer äußeren Form nach etwas Unanständiges, Lächerliches oder sonst Widriges haben. Sie mussten daher dem gemeinen Auge, das nicht ins Innere zu sehen vermag, auch dem äußeren nach verborgen bleiben, und also für ihn ein zwiefaches Geheimnis sein. […] Von der Bundeslade des zweiten, nach der babylonischen Gefangenschaft erbauten Tempels finde ich im Talmud eine Stelle, die zu merkwürdig ist, als dass ich sie hier nicht anführen solle. Nach dieser Erzählung fanden die Feinde, die sich des Tempels bemächtigt hatten, im Allerheiligsten das Bildnis zweier Personen von beiden Geschlechtern in dem Vereinigungsakt begriffen – und entweihten dieses Heiligtum durch eine krasse Auslegung seines inneren Sinnes. Dieses Bildnis sollte eine lebhafte sinnliche Vorstellung von der Vereinigung der Nation mit der Gottheit sein und musste nur zur Verhütung des Missbrauchs dem Auge des gemeinen Volks […] entzogen warden.“ This passage has its counterpart in P 42. In the novel, K’s reaction to the drawing is that of the “enemies”; he sees the “gemeine Absicht”. But he does not see anything rude or inappropriate in his natural relationship with women. The court on the other hand, while sanctioning every form of religious eroticism, however crude ( e. g. the scene with the washerwoman during the court hearing), takes a stern view of all “natural” eroticism. The hiding of the picture in the Holy of Holies implies this too. The strict separation of religious and secular eroticism has, on the whole, been a characteristic of western religion. Hasidism with its emphasis on the sanctity of marriage seems one of the few instances where the rift was bridged  through symbol. Kafka was strongly attracted to these ideas.

[147] Emrich in Franz Kafka (p. 278) gives a different assessment of Leni which we do not find convincing: “Kralle und Schwimmhaut, das sind Hilfmittel totaler Lebensverbundenheit. Mit dem Strom schwimmen und jeden Unnachgibigen mit Krallen zu sich herabziehen, das ist ihr Lebensprinzip.“ Leni seems to us colder and more calculating.

[148] Emrich sees Titorelli as the genuine artist. “Titorelli dagegen verleiht die Klarheit des Blicks. Er macht den Menschen frei.” He interprets the girls with a view to their needs, not to the painter’s nature. “Sie verlangen nach Darstellung, Bildwerdung, Klärung.” (p. 289) We should prefer to stress the decadent, sterile aspects of the painter.

[149] Sokel’s generalization that woman is always the huntress seems unwarranted, though Leni certainly is. He writes: “Die Frau ist hier Helferin und Verbündete, nicht der Verfolgten, sondern der Verfolger. Ihre Rolle ist die der Treiberin bei der Jagd. Sie treibt die Opfer den Fängern und Vernichtern zu.“ (p. 194)

[150] W. H. Auden in “Kafka’s Quest” makes a similar point. “Man […] cannot know the whole truth, because as the subject who knows, he has to remain outside the truth, and the truth is therefore incomplete.” (p. 52)

[151] In “Kafka’s Chaplain” Ignatz Feuerlicht concludes his investigation by stressing the complete ambiguity of the Chaplain: “This prison chaplain, who is shown neither in a prison, nor to be fulfilling a chaplain’s duty, nor even to be religious, remains to the very end, as impenetrable as the Court, whose unquestioning servant and apologist he apparently is.” (p. 220) Though he is certainly an enigmatic figure, we feel that in the context of the novel he has a more definite function.

[152] Politzer also sees these figures as doorkeepers. “Like the doorkeeper, they stand before the Law, turning their backs upon it, unaware of the radiance that streams forth from it. Yet they need not see it, since they take part unconsciously and mysteriously in the proceedings of the Court.” (p. 180)

[153] Ingeborg Henel in “Die Türhüterlegende und ihre Bedeutung für Kafkas Prozess” also interprets the legend as saying that man should ignore the doorkeepers. But we cannot agree with her when she accuses Josef K. of making no attempt to enter and just stagnating before the gates. (p. 67)

[154] Sokel claims that women, for Kafka, were merely weapons in the fight for power. This is of course the less amiable interpretation of women being his means of self-realization.

[155] Critics have tended to take Josef K.’s guilt as a fact. On p. 140, Sokel accuses K. of a triple crime,  “Schuldig wird Josef K. […] Gegen das Gericht, gegen seine Familie und gegen sein reines Ich.“ And: „Er wird schuldig an seiner Menschenwürde und an der seiner Mitmenschen“, „schuldig gegen seinen Körper, seine biologische Pflicht der Selbstbewahrung gegen den Tod.“ The trouble with such an enumeration of crimes is that each crime could also be interpreted as a virtue, and the novel is abstract and ambiguous enough to permit of this being done. The standard of values according to which the hero is judged must be gained from within the novel and it is clear that it can only be through an interpretation of the parable. If the doorkeepers are to be passed, the parable almost forces us to respect K.’s aggressiveness, to which Sokel gives a strongly negative emphasis: “ Aggressivität, Gewalttätigkeit, Rebellion, und Anmaßung, die aber wie ein Podium aus einem Boden aufragen, der aus Angst, Unsicherheit, Schuldgefühl und Ohnmacht besteht.” (p. 154) On p. 217 Politzer discusses the various possibilities of interpreting shame.

[156] See H. Uyttersprot Eine neue Ordung der Werke Kafkas.

[157] H. Politzer also makes this observation: “As a human character Josef K. shows as little body and soul as the monolinear figures Kafka drew on the margins of his manuscripts. K. is a literary image, and not a portrait, let alone the self-portrait of his author.” (p. 166)

[158] Herbert Silberer „Bericht über eine Methode, gewisse symbolische Halluzinationserscheinungen hervorzurufen und zu beobachten”, 1909 and Probleme der Mystik, 1914. The 1911 edition of Freud’s Traumdeutung, which Kafka may have used to prepare for the Fanta discussion evenings, has on p. 35 the following footnote mention of Silberer: „H. Silberer hat an schönen Beispielen gezeigt, wie sich selbst abstrakte Gedanken im Zustand der Schläfrigkeit in anschaulich-plastische Bilder umsetzen, die das Nämliche ausdrücken wollen.“ It is possible that this could have aroused the interest of Kafka and caused him to look up the article mentioned. 

[159] See Probleme, op. cit., p. 150.

[160] R. H. Lawson (1957), H. Salinger (1961) and Marson and Leopold (1964).

[161] J. M. S. Pasley „Two Kafka Enigmas“ and „Franz Kafka. Ein Besuch im Bergwerk“.

[162] Silberer Probleme  op. cit., p. 150.

[163] Heinz Politzer Parabel and Paradox.

[164] Sokel sees the “Penal Colony” as a repudiation of Kafka’s earlier stories. We are, however, not convinced of the legitimacy of identifying the Father of “Das Urteil” with the Old Commandant, Georg with the New Commandant and the Friend with the Officer. H. Richter also believes that the „Penal Colony“ offers a critique of earlier stories: „Der Gedanke drängt sich auf, dass diese Erzählung, entstanden zwei Jahre nach dem ‚Urteil’ und nach der ‚Verwandlung’, eine Selbstkritik das Autors Kafka enthält, dass er damit eingesteht, als strafender Richter von einem unmenschlichen Abstraktum ausgegangen zu sein, als er so leichthin seinem Helden die Existenzberechtigung absprach.“ (p. 126)

[165] Sokel , on p. 115f, shows how “In der Strafkolonie” points to aspects of Christianity, Judaism and modern Irrationalism.

Austin Warren’s interpretation of the machine as scholastic philosophy seems too narrow. Similarly, Satish Kumar’s limitation of the meaning to the father problem – he sees the condemned man as Kafka the son, the Traveller as Kafka the visionary, the New Commandant as a figment of Kafka’s wishful thinking – is both too narrow and too distorting, for in this story personal problems are certainly not prominent, even though there may be some reminiscences of them. See Kumar “Franz Kafka. In der Strafkolonie.”

[166] Politzer sees the women and their favours as alluding to the destructive influence of sex. “Here as elsewhere in his stories Kafka uses women as symbols to show how the order of the law is weakened by the temprtations of sex.” (p. 110) Politzer supports his view, which seems plausible (see also our interpretation of Amerika) with the help of a fragmentary alternative version of the story that mentions the serpent as the great whore.

[167] Sokel sees the officer’s action as an attempt to demonstrate the miraculous effect of the execution apparatus. (p. 109) But this does not seem to be the officer’s primary motive. The reason for failure Sokel sees as the following: „Indem der Offizier dem Zeichner ein rationell-ethisches Ziel, ‚Sei gerecht’ unterschiebt, versucht er den Willen der Machtgestalt zu begründen und zu bestimmen und pfuscht so in ihr Werk hinein.“ (p. 128) We cannot agree with this interpretation for it seems obvious that the executioner’s sin, insofar as he represents the system, can only be seen in terms of justice.

[168] Death as Hinrichtung *

[169]  The reference to “Heil”, salvation, should also be seen.

[170] Politzer (p. 113) rightly points out that the implications of the word “Schrift” as scriptures should not be overlooked in this context.

[171] Kumar “Franz Kafka. In der Strafkolonie” interprets the three parts of the apparatus as the legislative, judiciary, and excutive functions of the law.

[172] See Sokel, p. 116 f..

[173] M. Pasley: Introduction to “Ein Hungerkünstler” in Franz Kafka: Short Stories, 1963, p. 18 f. *

[174] See Edwin Barry Burgum “The Bankruptcy of Faith”.

[175] Richard H. Lawson, in his article “Kafka’s ‘Der Landarzt’”, 1957,  was probably the first to presume a direct reference to Freud in this story. He sees the anti-Freudian theme running parallel with an autobiographical theme and concludes that Kafka is here anti-sex, anti-love while pro-Judaist. While it seems possible that Kafka saw a link between secularized Judaism and psychoanalysis, Freund being himself a secularized Jew like many of the early psychoanalysts, this argument has not been clearly developed. In most details I would not agree with Lawson’s interpretation. Certainly it does not seem to me to follow from the story that Kafka was anti-sex and anti-love.

Herman Salinger’s “More Light on Kafka’s ‘Landarzt’”, 1961, investigates the Freudian allusions further. Salinger sees the story as an allegory of the psyche as composed of ego (the doctor), superego (“Läuten der Nachtglocke”, i.e ringing of the bell), id (groom and horses), and anima (Rosa). A similar allegory of the inner man in given by Emrich Franz Kafka, p. 129-137, but not in obviously Freudian terms. Such an interpretation does not conflict with our view of Freud as the country doctor and gradual discoverer of various components of the psyche. Salinger goes on to give the story a clearly religious interpretation. The doctor ‘oscillating between Christ-like values and the assumption of paternal judge-like values, rejects the symbol of suffering humanity and becomes a second “Wandering Jew”.’ *

Marson and Leopold in “Kafka, Freud und ‘Ein Landarzt’” (1964) see the story as a more general discussion of Freud and psychoanalysis. They conclude: “Not only are the form and technique a conscious application of Freudian principles but the content is a subtly disguised depiction of the origins of psychoanalysis, of Freud the man, of various aspects of psychoanalytical processes and above all of the futility and ineffectiveness of psychoanalytic therapy.” (p. 160). While basically agreeing with this analysis, my interpretation of many of the details varies. Marson and Leopold relevantly draw attention to the conscious imitation of Freud’s dream-style as described in the chapter “The Dream-Work” of The Interpretation of Dreams.

[176] According to Lawson, the horse is a traditional symbol of faith.

[177] This point is also made by Marson and Leopold.

[178] It seems to us most unlikely that the pigsty refers to the custom of gentiles and secularized Jews of keeping pigs, as Lawson suggests. More convincing is Marson and Leopold’s claim that “the disused pigpen is a very telling symbol for the doctor’s subconscious”.

[179] Lawson sees the horses as “fractious, abnormal and in this case also unclean” but they seem to us to stand for an uncontrollably dynamic force without deprecation.

[180] This could be seen as an echo of Kafka’s personal view of sex.

[181] Salinger draws attention to the Veronika allusion. Lawson, however, sees the blood-soaked towel as epitomizing Kafka’s disgust with sex.  

[182] We shall refer again to the phenomenon of intuition in connection with “Forschungen eines Hundes”.

[183] As against Marson and Leopold who see the sense of beauty as an aspect of “dream-concealment” and disgust as the genuine emotion, we would prefer to see intentional ambivalence.

[184] See Bluma Goldstein “A Study of the Wound in Stories by Franz Kafka”, 1966. “The rose in religion and literature has been a symbol of the divine and heavenly spirit, identified in Christianity with the Virgin Mary, her divine love and spiritual bliss, and with Christ, his martyrdom and resurrection.” p. 215.

[185] Silberer Probleme der Mystik, p. 169.

[186] In his autobiography C. G. Jung claims: “Freud himself had a neurosis, no doubt diagnosable and one with highly troublesome symptoms, as I had discovered on our voyage to America […] Apparently neither Freud nor his disciples could understand what it meant for the theory and practice of psychoanalysis if not even the master could deal with his own neurosis.” Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, p. 162.

[187] Lawson is probably the first to draw attention to the possibility of a pun.

[188] Jung writes: “I can still recall vividly how Freud said to me, ‘My dear Jung, promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. That is the most essential thing of all. You see, we must make a dogma of it, an unshakable bulwark.’” Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 147. Jung of course did abandon the sexual theory. We cannot be certain to what extent Kafka was aware of Freudian views being supplanted by his followers.

[189] Ibid. Jung writes: “There was one characteristic of his that occupied me above all: his bitterness. It had struck me at our first encounter but it remained inexplicable to me until I could see it in connection with his attitude to sexuality. Although, for Freud, sexuality was undoubtedly a numinosum, his terminology and theory seemed to define it exclusively as a biological function. It was only the emotionality with which he spoke of it that revealed the deeper elements reverberating within him. Basically he wanted to teach – or so at least it seemed to me – that, regarded from within, sexuality included spirituality and had an intrinsic meaning. But his concretistic terminology was too narrow to express this idea.” (p. 149) The wound could be seen as a symbol of Freud’s ambivalent attitude to sexuality.

[190] Hemmerle Franz Kafka. Eine Bibliographie, p. 25.

[191] The relevant articles were reprinted in: Martin Buber Der Jude und sein Judentum: Gesammelte Aufsätze und Reden, 1963. See bibliography under Cohen and Buber.

[192] Wagenbach Biographie, p. 257.

[193] G. Schulz-Behrend in „Kafkas ‚Bericht an eine Akademie’: An Interpretation“ quotes from a letter to him by Buber: „Dichtungen habe ich im Juden nicht ihres jüdischen Inhalts wegen veröffentlicht, sondern wenn es mir für meine Leser wichtig schien sie zu kennen.“ (July 1960)

[194] The Balfour Decaration was signed in November, a month after Kafka’s story was published.

[195] See Isidor Epstein: Judaism, p. 311: “Among the rabbinic authorities who more than any other , influenced orthodox Jews in support of Zionism was Abraham Kook (1868-1935), the first Chief Rabbi of the Holy Land, who was indubitably the most gigantic spirit of religious Judaism in his generation. He held fast to the conviction that the national movement, not withstanding the secular tendencies it exhibited, was, in the final analysis, religious at heart and sprang from the peculiar gift for godliness with which the Jewish people were endowed. In his view there were two factors which conduced to the holiness of the Jewish people and their attachment to the idea of godliness. One factor was their heritage, the inner spirituality which was transmitted to them by heredity by their ancestors and which could never disappear entirely. The second factor was the good deeds of the individual. The Messianic fervour with which the national movement was charged and the universal ideals of justice and righteousness which animated it, could only be accounted for by the spirit of the heritage of the nation which informed the Jewish masses. This made the national movement one of redemption, not withstanding the fact that the religious conduct of the individuals was not much in evidence.”

[196]  T. E. Lawrence’s work in connection with the Arab Revolt began in October 1916 when he accompanied to Jidda Sir Ronald Storrs who had initiated the negotiations which culminated in the Arab Revolt. (Dictionary of National Biography, 1931-40, p. 528)*

[197] Titles of articles named in IBZ.

[198] Kafka’s attitude to things Jewish, in particular to Zionism, is outlined in Hartmut Binder’s article “Franz Kafka und die Wochenschrift ‘Selbstwehr’”. This provides additional evidence for Brod’s representation of Kafka’s attitude to things Jewish in Chapter 7 of Franz Kafkas Glauben und Lehre.

[199] See G. Janouch Conversations with Kafka, p. 63: “Kafka was a convinced adherent of Zionism.”

[200] Max Brod Franz Kafkas Glauben und Lehre, p. 77.

[201] Compared with the other “Landarzt” stories, “Die Brücke” is simpler and more monumental. At first sight, we seem to have here “functional” rather than “material” symbolism. The image of being a rigid but useless bridge could well describe a state of being rather than an intellectual problem. The interpretations of Emrich and Marache should be taken seriously and probably present the timeless significance of the story. Emrich clearly interprets it as functional symbolism when he writes: „der denkende Mensch, der kraft seines Denkens die Antinomien des Daseins in Gestalt einer über den Abgrund gespannten Brücke allenfalls noch aushalten kann, wird in dem Augenblick, als er auch nur den Versuch unternimmt, universellen Überblick zu gewinnen,  d. h. sich ‚umzudrehen’, seine eigene Existenz zu verkehren, sich gleichsam über sich selbst zu stellen, von den vorher so ‚friedlich’ unter den ‚rasenden’ Wassern liegenden Dingen aufgespießt. Im Widerstreit zwischen inneren Giften und empörten Dingen geht der Mensch ‚schon am Suchen’ zugrunde (B 59). Das ist der Sinn der Untergangs- und Todesvisionen Kafkas.’ (p. 114) Marache sees the story in the nature of a metaphor for Kafka’s use of the expanded metaphor and for the creative mind that creates such metaphors. Such interpretations enrich rather than conflict with ours. The test for an enduring work of literature is that it must continue to have meaning, even when the historical and biographical allusions are not recognized. “Die Brücke” has meaning even when the Nietzsche reference is not picked up.

[202] See B 495. Also Wagenbach, p. 259.

[203] Friedrich Nietzsche Werke in 3 Bänden, Vol. 2, p. 281f.  

[204]  In Nietzsche’s „Vom bleichen Verbrecher“, quoted in connection with Der Prozess, Zarathustra describes himself as „ein Geländer am Strome! Fasse mich wer mich fassen kann!” though the image here is not of a bridge, it shows clearly Zarathustra’s intention or helping or rescuing people by letting them hold on to his philosophy. K. of Der Prozess rejected the offer.  

[205] Rudolf Steiner Friedrich Nietzsche. Ein Kämpfer gegen seine Zeit. P. 16.

[206] Öne of these might have been Max Brod. In Streitbares Leben, p. 236ff. he describes how he and Kafka first met Nietzsche whom Kafka at the time admired (it was spring 1903) and Brod, who at the time was a Schopenhauer disciple, despised. It is likely that there would have been other such conversations which might have influenced Kafka’s Nietzsche picture.

[207] See chapter on “Subjectivism” in this study. Our description of Kafka as a man who believed firmly that the individual must go his own way seems supported by the following reminiscence Brod gives in Verzweiflung und Erlösung: “Kafka ließ einen gern in gefährlichen Situationen allein, in pädagogischer Absicht gleichsam, beispielweise beim gemeinsamen Schwimmen, beim Kahnfahren. Hilf dir selbst, deutete seine spitzbübische Miene und Geste an.“ P. 71.

[208] See Wagenbach, p. 43. (Wagenbach’s Schiller quotes do not seem to have been taken from the poem he refers to.)

[209] Brod Franz Kafkas Glauben und Lehre, p. 35. „Wer österreichische Gymnasien erlebt hat (und Kafka und ich wurden in einem solchen Gymnasium erzogen), der kennt das große Wandbild, nach einem berühmten antiken Mosaik angefertigt, das den mordenden, sogenannten Helden Alexander von Makedonien und den furchtbaren Schreckensblick des von Alexanders Lanze durchbohrten Persers, das Leid der Besiegten zeigt. Es ist der grauenhafte Würgegriff am Hals, von dem Kafka an einer anderen Stelle (VI, 164) spricht, der Griff der Kausalität, die gewöhnliche Ordnung der Natur, in der der Stärkere notwendig den Schwächeren unterjocht und nichts von der Freiheit des Geistes weiß.“ The mosaic actually shows Alexander when he is not mounted on horseback, i.e. Alexander the murderer.

[210] Wagenbach Bibliographie,  p. 36.

[211] Ibid. p. 35.

[212] Sokel compares the story with „Die Verwandlung“: „Gregor ist äußerlich verwandelt und innerlich geblieben, was er war. Der Affe hat äußerlich dieselbe Gestalt wie vorher, aber innerlich ist er verwandelt, angehöriger einer anderen Art und Gattung geworden.“ (p. 331). And: „Gregor verwandelt sich unbewusst, im Schlaf. Rotpeter erkämpft sich seine Verwandlung ganz bewusst. Sie ist eine kolossale Leistung seiner Willenskraft und Konzentrationsfähigkeit. Sie geht auch nicht wie die Gregors in einer Nacht vor sich, sondern benötigt Jahre dauernden Lernens, um bewältigt zu werden. Während Gregors Verwandlung der Fluch seiner mangelnden Selbstkontrolle war, ist die Metamorphose des Affen die Frucht beispiellosester Selbstdisziplin.“ (p. 330) While it is useful to compare the two characters, we do not weight the judgment quite so much in favour of the ape. We do not agree with Sokel that Gregor’s metamorphosis is merely the expression of his split personality, while the ape’s is an altogether valuable process of sublimation: “Der Bericht ist die Demonstration eines Sublimierungsprozesses.” (p. 345)

[213] Sokel expands on the ideological allusions of the story: „In dieser Geschichte verfasste Kafka eine Parabel der Existenz die sowohl den romantischen als auch den Freudschen Mythos des Menschen und der Kultur im Bilde darstellt und zugleich im Affen das Portrait eines im Schillerschen Sinne sentimentalischen Ironikers zeichnet. Romantisch ist die Antithetik von ‚Freiheit’ und ‚Ausweg’, die der Affe aufstellt, vom paradiesischen Glück am Busen der Natur und nüchterner, etwas schäbiger Lebensrettung durch die Zivilisation. Dieselbe Antithetik kehrt im Freudschen Mythos wieder, in der Gegenüberstellung des narzistischen Paradieses des Säuglings, der alle Wünsche erfüllt bekommt und in gottgleicher Freiheit und Allmacht am Busen der Mutter thront, zu der Resignation und Bescheidung des gesitteten erwachsenen Kulturmenschen. Die Romantik sieht aber den Preis, den der Mensch für die Zivilisation zahlt, als zu hoch an, Freud hingegen hält die Opfer, die der Zivilisation gebracht werden, ‚der Mühe wert’, da sie das Überleben erleichtern und die Existenz des Einzelnen und der Menschheit sicherer machen. Der berichtende Affe schließt sich der Freudschen gegen die romantische Ansicht an.“ (p. 345) We would agree with this interpretation, only one must remember that the ape is not Kafka and that the style, which we will discuss later, shows the author’s detachment. It would seem that Kafka viewed his ape with the mixed feelings of admiration and contempt he had for his father. Richter in Franz Kafkas Werk und Entwurf also sees the ape’s achievement as a necessary and valuable compromise and assumes that Kafka is disparaging himself in this story for leading such a despicable life. (p. 158) Sokel does not approve of that interpretation. (note 12, p. 565)

[214] Sokel seems to overlook the marked emphasis on the word “frevelhaft”. For him the ape is proud that his wound has healed. He is not accusing his captors but demonstrating successful sublimation. “Der Affe ist eben stolz darauf, dass seine Heilung so tadellos geglückt ist.“ (p. 339)

[215] The giant snake, apostrophised as “Madame”, apparently symbolizing the temptations of sex, is known to us from Kafka’s notebooks. It is likely that Kafka had the waywardness of the flesh in mind here too.*

[216] Robert Kauf in “Once Again, Kafka’s Report to an Academy” points out that Homeric gods and heroes think with their diaphragms. We were unable to verify whether the Hungarian phrase, pointed out by L. Bodi, “to think with one’s stomach” was used in the Prague Mauschele dialect – which Kafka knew – for vegetative thinking.

[217] See Silberer Mystik, p. 262.

[218] This wound could hardly represent castration as Kauf suggests, for the ape is sexually potent. (p. 362) It is a sexual wound in the sense that sex has become a problem for man that affects his mental and physical health. Sokel’s description of the wound as existential is to be preferred. (p. 348)

[219] Sokel also makes this observation on p. 337.

[220] Here Sokel’s interpretation differs completely from ours: „Nun scheint das Dionysische in der Schnapsflasche gezähmt, muss ‚schulgerecht entkorkt’ werden, ist ‚Trinken von Fach’, Disziplin, Kunst geworden.“ (p. 347) The trouble with this interpretation is that the story gives us no evidence that the ape’s former state was “das Wilde, Rasende, Ekstatische und Irre, gerade das Element also, das Nietzsche das Dionysische genannt hat.” (p. 347)

[221] Klaus Wagenbach Wo liegt Kafkas Schloss? pp. 161-179.

[222] Perspective in the novel has been discussed by Beissner, Walser and Fietz among others. In every case the flexibility of perspective that goes with the third person has been overlooked.

[223] Politzer draws attention to the mirror technique that comes about through Kafka’s use of informative conversations: “K’s dialogues with his antagonists (act) as an elaborate constellation of mirrors reflecting the Castle, each other, and K. simultaneously.” (p. 237)

[224] On the whole, critics seem to take The Castle as serious rather than humorous writing. A notable exception is M. Denton. It seems to us that the same standards apply herre as in dream. Dreams that seem serious, even tragic when dreamt will appear hilariously funny when remembered on waking. But access to their meaning is gained only when we take them seriously. All the same, our waking consciousness rebels against this, almost as though it were an indignity. Kafka’s works are distinguished from the truly humorous in that laughter does not open up but destroys their meaning.

[225]  Sokel compares K.’s vocation with that of the hunger-artist and Josefine. “Was sich in diesen ‘Berufen’ bzw. Berufungen verbirgt, ist die Sonderstellung des Ichs, etwas Undefinierbares und Geheimnisvolles, was diese ‘Berufenen’ von allen Mitgeschöpfen radikal unterscheidet und verfremdet.“ (p. 391)

[226] Homer Swander in “The Castle: K.’s Village” also makes much of this passage and comes to similar conclusions. (p. 175f.)

[227] Klaus Wagenbach Wo liegt Kafka’s Schloss?

[228] See also M. L. Harder’s ‚Märchenmotive in der Dichtung Franz Kafkas’.

[229] Quoted from T. J. Reed ‚Kafka and Schopenhauer’.

[230] C. G. Jung Aion, Vol. 9, Pt. II, p. 223f. Neider op. cit. (p. 123) concludes from the fact that Kafka did not choose the cathedral symbol that the novel has nothing to do with religion.

[231] Jung Symbols of Transformation, Vol. 5, p. 208.

[232] Both quotes ibid, p. 213.

[233] Neider sees the village as representing the semi-conscious while the Castle represents Freud’s inaccessible ‘unconscious’.

[234] C. G. Jung Die Beziehung zwischen dem Ich und dem Unbewussten, p. 133.

[235] This is a point Jung makes emphatically. See e.g. his essay “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetic Art”.

[236] C. G. Jung Die Beziehung zwischen dem Ich und dem Unbewussten, p. 263.

[237] What inspired the Helper figures was most likely the two characters from a Yiddish play which Kafka described in his Diaries, p. 79ff.

[238]  C. G. Jung Die Beziehung zwischen dem Ich und dem Unbewussten, p. 47.

[239] ibid., p. 88.

[240] Ibid., p. 102.

[241] Emrich’s description of the Herrenhof landlady as the woman marked by death does not touch on her central characteristics, though her life is obviously sterile and moribund. In: Franz Kafka,  p. 399f.

[242] Ibid., p. 124.

[243] See R. Gray, E. Heller, C. Neider, W. Sokel etc.

[244] Politzer op. cit. p. 244f. Also sees Kafka’s use of names as intended to confuse the reader.

[245] Sokel is of the opinion that Frieda of The Castle bears many of the characteristics of Felice too. (op. cit. p.426) If so, it is probably by mediation of the characters in Kafka’s earlier works that resemble Felice, in particular Miss Bürstner of Der Prozess. The love tragedy in The Castle should perhaps be seen as picking up an incomplete strain in the Prozess novel.

[246] Donald Pearce “The Castle: Kafka’s Divine Comedy” sees Frieda as K.’s anima, as his Beatrice. This is only true insofar as one acknowledges that Frieda is also a real woman with her problems and that K. is aware of her shortcomings too.

[247] C. G. Jung Die Beziehungen zwischen dem Ich und dem Unbewussten, p. 88.

[248] See R. Gray  Kafka’s Castle, p. 18.

[249] The evaluation of the differences between K. and Frieda varies with the interpretation given to the Helpers. Sokel interprets them, perhaps too narrowly, as innocent children. Emrich sees in them forced merriment, disturbing in an adult. But they seem to us functional figures rather than actual characters and our understanding of them can permissibly vary with the situation. At various times, both Sokel’s and Emrich’s view of them seems justified, and Frieda’s attraction to them can seem as valid as K.’s aversion to them.. Unfortunately it is not possible here to do justice to the countless partial or complete interpretations of The Castle that would have influenced our reading of the novel. Emrich’s long section in his Kafka book which in many ways corresponds with out own even though the terms of reference are different must be acknowledged. Ronald Gray’s book on The Castle with its excellent discussion of Kafka’s techniques of ambiguity and its good interpretation of the Barnabas family, in particular Olga whom we have neglected, deserves consideration. Sokel gives a sensitive analysis of K.’s relationship to Frieda.Certain observations, such as those concerning the symbolical aspects of the word and vocation “Landvermesser”, have become common property to such an extent that it is difficult to acknowledge an original author. Pasley’s useful discussion of the Schloss-manuscript should be mentioned, though it had no direct bearing on our interpretation  (“Zur äußeren Gestalt des ‘Schloss’ Romans”.)

[250] Another possible future for K. is hinted at in a fragment (S 494). We have ignored it as it seems to take the novel in a new direction.

[251]  The dates are taken from the chronologies established by Wagenbach and Pasley.

[252] Among the numerous commentators who have identified Kafka with the artist figures are von Wiese, Hillmann and Richter.

[253] Charles Neider in The Frozen Sea sees Kafka very much as the neurotic artist in Freudian terms and seems to have inspired later critics to do the same, e.g. Sokel and Hamburger. Heinz Hillmann in Franz Kafka- Dichtungstheorie und Dichtungsgestalt appears to have taken Thomas Mann’s analysis and criticism of the artist as his point of departure, though this is not explicitly stated. In conformity with Emrich he sees Kafka as a man without inner security and a determining viaion of life and therefore incapable of self-detachment. If our interpretation of the artist stories is correct, this theory would be disproved. A more balanced picture of the artist is drawn by Fritz Billeter.

[254] In 1917 Kafka wrote in a letter: „Mann gehört zu denen, nach derem Geschriebenen ich hungere.“ (B 182)

[255] In his introduction to Franz Kafka. Short Stories, Pasley observes that the trapeze, suspended from above, is an other-worldly attachment. (p.30)

[256] R. W. Stallmann in “A Hunger-Artist” makes the important point that “complete detachment from physical reality is spiritual death.” (p. 66)

[257] Herbert Deinert examines the perspective of the story in “Franz Kafka. Ein Hungerkünstler”, p. 84.

[258] It seems more useful to see what has traditionally been called ”die unerhörte Begebenheit”, typical of the novella, in relation to what A. Jolles has called the “Casus”, than as a single event. The word “Begebenheit” is misleading here. Probably this interpretation of the nature of the novella is at the root of von Wiese’s claim that Kafka’s story is not a typical novella. See Wiese Die deutsche Novelle von Goethe bis Kafka, vol.1, p. 325.

[259] Stallmann op. cit. makes the point that the clock must of necessity be taken as a symbol because the logical way of measuring the hunger-artist’s achievement would be the calendar. (p. 64)

[260] See Ingeborg Henel’s sensitive interpretation of the story.

[261] Wiese op. cit.

[262] Kafka’s admiration of his father’s vitality which he himself did not posssess is well described in their visit to the public baths, mentioned in his “Letter to the Father” (H 168).

[263] In his book Intuition, Ezequiel Martinez Estrada has emphatically pointed to Kafka’s connections with “the new technique for understanding and divining the world – intuition- created by the simultaneous functioning of the mental and sensory organs” and placed him in line with other heralds of intuition such as Kierkegaard, Gauss, Poe, Nietzsche, Whitehead, Spengler, Lobatchevski, Einstein, Schrödinger, Dostojevski and Joyce. Estrada goes on to draw interesting but daring parallels between Kafka’s style of writing and the structure of an intuitively perceived world.

[264] Brod makes this point, specifically in the introduction to Franz Kafka’sGlauben und Lehre.

[265] The first to draw attention to this device was Felix Weltsch: „in ‚Forschungen eines Hundes’ wird Leben und Umwelt der Hunde vom Standpunkt eines Hundes mit höchster Genauigkeit, ‚wissenschaftlich’ behandelt, hierbei aber die Existenz des Menschen vollkommen gestrichen. So kommt es denn, dass der berichtende Hundewissenschaftler äußerst komplizierte Theorien darüber ersinnen muss, dass die Hundenahrung, die doch eigentlich immer auf der Erde wächst – und zu diesem Zwecke ‚besprengen’ die Hunde die Erde so fleißig und ausdauernd – rätselhafterweise fast immer von oben aus der Luft herunterkommt. Es werden also die Schwierigkeiten geschildert, mit denen es eine a-humanistische Weltanschauung der Hunde, gleichsam ein Atheismus der Hundewelt, zu tun hat.“ In: “Religiöser Humor bei Franz Kafka”, p. 112.

[266] Benedetto Croce Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, p. 12f.

[267] Croce op. cit. p. 9.

[268] Norbert Fürst Die offenen Geheimtüren Franz Kafkas. Fünf Allegorien, p. 77.

[269] Heinz Hillmann Dichtungstheorie und Dichtungsgestalt, p. 76.

[270] Hillmann op. cit., p. 82.

[271] Hillmann op. cit., p. 78.

[272] Pasley in the Introduction to Franz Kafka: Der Heizer, In der Strafkolonie, Der Bau, p. 23.

[273] Lienhard Bergel in “The Burrow”, p. 199, emphasizes the rational construction of the burrow a little too strongly. He writes: “The central theme of this story is the relationship between mind and reality, between the effort of man to construct a rational world, a ‘burrow’, which is entirely his own creation, and the outside world which is dominated by irrationality. The burrow becomes a pure construction of the mind, a substitute for reality. It is man’s desire for metaphysical security which drives him to build his burrow. He knows it would be futile to search for any transcendental entity which would give this security, or to expect any mystical illumination; he can only rely on his own mind.”

[274] Pasley interprets the burrow as Kafka’s works. He too sees the labyrinth as „Beschreibung eines Kampfes“. In op. cit., p.24 ff. Politzer in Franz Kafka. Parable and Paradox, p. 324, identifies the labyrinth with “Das Urteil”.

[275] That Kafka to some extent shared this instinctive horror of mice is expressed in a letter to Felix Weltsch that told of a “night of mice”. This could have been an experience underlying the story. „Eine Mäusenacht, ein schreckliches Erlebnis […] Was für ein schreckliches stummes lärmendes Volk das ist [...] Auf die Kohlenkiste hinauf, von der Kohlenkiste hinunter, die Diagnale des Zimmers abgelaufen, Kreise gezogen, am Holz genagt, im Ruhen leise gepfiffen und dabei immer das Gefühl der Stille, der heimlichen Arbeit eines unterdrückten proletarischen Volkes, dem die Nacht gehört [...] am Morgen konnte ich vor Ekel und Traurigkeit nicht aufstehen.“ (B 197 f.) This ambivalence also characterized Kafka’s attitude to the Jewish people. (M 57)

[276] More than one critic has made the point that only the title expressly mentions mice. The whistling, of course, is adjusted to the image of mice but otherwise little prevents the reader from substituting men for mice throughout.

[277] Max Brod Biographie, p. 251.

[278] Max Brod was probably the first to equate the mice with the Jewish people in Franz Kafkas Glauben und Lehre (43 ff.) See also Pasley in the introduction to “Josefine” in Franz Kafka. Short Stories. Van Caspel in “Totemismus bei Kafka” sees Josefine as the totem figure of her people. “Das Volk braucht ein Symbol, ein überindividuelles Sinnbild. Dieses Symbol bildet jedesmal den Mittelpunkt der feierlichen Volksversammlung.“ (p. 124). Caspel goes on to show the connection between the prophet, the totem figure and finally the crucifix, sign of the dead prophet. The Jewish people cannot recognize a live Messiah. He sees Josefine’s request for an exemption from work as a call for the Jewish people to progress from cult to religion. (Here one could interpose that the dead Josefine is hardly mentioned in the story.) Though it may be possible to read the story in this way, a proof of its flexibility as a parable, it seems unlikely that this specific meaning was central to Kafka’s conception. Caspel’s interpretation sees only one side of the “scale”, the people; the problems surrounding Josefine he ignores. But Kafka himself defended the alternative title on the grounds that the story was “a little like a scale”.

[279] Walter Benjamin „Franz Kafka“ in Schriften, vol. II, pp. 196-228.

[280] Ibid. p. 203 f.

[281] Michael Hamburger writes: “Kafka was aware that there are individuals so warped by their personal experience as to be incapable of seeing anything in perspective; his unspoken faith was that even these are not damned is they have the strength to expose themselves utterly.” In From Prophecy to Exorcism, p. 115.

In The Disinherited Mind Erich Heller writes: “It was a curse, and not a word of light, which called the universe of Kafka’s novels into existence. The very clay from which it was made bore the imprint of a malediction before the creator had touched it. He builds to a splendid design, but the curse runs like a vein through every stone.” (p. 176) But Heller goes on to acknowledge: “Only a mind keeping alive in at least one of its recesses the memory of a place where the soul is truly at home is able to contemplate with such creative vigour the struggles of a soul lost in a hostile land; and only an immensity of goodness can be so helplessly overcome by the vision of the worst of all possible worlds.” (p. 201 f.)

Günther Anders’ condemnation is more decisive though even he concedes to Kafka a degree of personal goodness: “Er ist Realist der entmenschten Welt; aber auch deren Apologetiker. Er ist Moralist: fragt aber nicht nach Gut oder Böse der Welt, die er in ihrer ganzen Miserabilität respektiert. Er will hin zur Welt; aber grandsätzlich scheiternd. Er verlangt das Paradies; aber nicht herzustellen, sondern zu betreten. Er ist von der Übermacht der verdinglichten Welt erschreckt; aber gibt den Schreck in Form von Bildern weiter. Er entstellt, um festzustellen; aber uns ‚stellt’ er gleichfalls ‚fest’, d.h. er lähmt uns. Er diskutiert Rechte; aber er weiß nicht einmal, ob er dazu Recht habe. Er ist Atheist; aber macht aus Atheismus eine Theologie. Er ist Philosoph; aber als Agnostiker. Er ist Skeptiker; aber skeptisch seiner eigenen Skepsis gegenüber. Was ist, ist ihm (wenn auch nicht „vernünftig“, so doch) berechtigt: Macht ist ihm Recht. Und der Entrechtete schuldig. Seine Philosophie ist die des vergeblichen Gleichschalters, der sich mit den Augen der vergeblich umworbenen Macht sieht. Gegen Kafka als Menschen, seine Integrität, Wärme, Pathoslosigkeit besagt dieses Urteil wenig. Und von seiner Freundlichkeit des Herzens wissen wir nicht nur indirekt. Sie dringt durch alle Ritzen seines Gorgoneions hindurch, wenn auch nur wie das tröstende Wort des Zellennachbarn im Gefängnis.“ (p. 100)

J. P. Stern also seems to condemn Kafka and demand, like Anders, though less outspokenly, that the reader actively reject him: “With unparalled clarity he saw and described the passionless anonymity of bureaucratic power; the unspeakable humiliations to which the powerless opponents and victims of the ruling party would soon be put; the abuse of technology in the service of sadism; and above all the silent isolation of the prisoner who has no redress, no authority to appeal to, no hope of mercy and reprieve […] the insinuation that the exterminator is not wholly in the wrong, that there is a foothold for his authority in the victim’s soul, as though his hold over his victim were something more than a matter of superior might, as though his hold were somehow a matter of right – that insinuation too is a part of Kafka’s prophecy. Perhaps the kind of reader Kafka wanted was one who would understand the suggestion and, in his understanding, repudiate it.” Franz Kafka. The Labyrinth of Guilt, p. 47.

Helmut Richter, as a spokesperson for Marxist criticism, also feels that Kafka evaded the author’s social responsibility to show humanity a positive road into the future. But he condemns Kafka’s environment rather than the writer: „In einer umfassenden Untersuchung von Kafka’s Umwelt und Biographie sind die Gründe nachzuweisen, die dafür verantwortlich sind, dass seine künstlerischen Intentionen sich nicht verworklichen konnten und dass sein dichterisches talent zwar nicht zerstört, aber doch in eine Richtung getrieben wurde, in der eine echte Entfaltung und Selbstverwirklichung nicht möglich würde, so das ser endlich sein Werk selbst zurücknehmen musste.“ In Franz Kafka. Werk und Entwurf, p. 300.

Klaus Hermsdorf sees undue generalization as the basic flaw of Kafka’s work: „Denn die entkonkretisierte Verallgemeinerung führt zur Verabsolutisierung, zur untreffenden Verallgemeinerung und zur Abstraktion.“ In: Künstler und Kunst bei Franz Kafka, p. 410.

H. S. Reiss’ criticism of Kafka’s lack of clarity was cited earlier. These selected quotations give some idea of the kind of rejection Kafka has met with.HamburgeHHHH