Illuminations, p.15
Illuminations, page 15
‘It was as if the shame of it was to outlive him.’ With these words The Trial ends. Corresponding as it does to his ‘elemental purity of feeling,’ shame is Kafka’s strongest gesture. It has a dual aspect, however. Shame is an intimate human reaction, but at the same time it has social pretensions. Shame is not only shame in the presence of others, but can also be shame one feels for them. Kafka’s shame, then, is no more personal than the life and thought which govern it and which he has described thus: ‘He does not live for the sake of his own life, he does not think for the sake of his own thought. He feels as though he were living and thinking under the constraint of a family … Because of this unknown family … he cannot be released.’ We do not know the make-up of this unknown family, which is composed of human beings and animals. But this much is clear: it is this family that forces Kafka to move cosmic ages in his writings. Doing this family’s bidding, he moves the mass of historical happenings as Sisyphus rolled the stone. As he does so, its nether side comes to light; it is not a pleasant sight, but Kafka is capable of bearing it. ‘To believe in progress is not to believe that progress has already taken place. That would be no belief.’ Kafka did not consider the age in which he lived as an advance over the beginnings of time. His novels are set in a swamp world. In his works, created things appear at the stage which Bachofen has termed the hetaeric stage. The fact that it is now forgotten does not mean that it does not extend into the present. On the contrary: it is actual by virtue of this very oblivion. An experience deeper than that of an average person can make contact with it. ‘I have experience,’ we read in one of Kafka’s earliest notes, ‘and I am not joking when I say that it is a seasickness on dry land.’ It is no accident that the first ‘Meditation’ was made on a swing. And Kafka does not tire of expressing himself on the fluctuating nature of experiences. Each gives way and mingles with its opposite. ‘It was summer, a hot day,’ so begins ‘The Knock at the Manor Gate.’ ‘With my sister I was passing the gate of a great house on our way home. I don’t remember whether she knocked on the gate out of mischief or in a fit of absent-mindedness, or merely shook her fist at it and did not knock at all.’ The very possibility of the third alternative puts the other two, which at first seemed harmless, in a different light. It is from the swampy soil of such experiences that Kafka’s female characters rise. They are swamp creatures like Leni, ‘who stretches out the middle and ring fingers of her right hand between which the connecting web of skin reached almost to the top joint, short as the fingers were.’ ‘Fine times,’ so the ambivalent Frieda reminisces about her earlier life; ‘you never asked me about my past.’ This past takes us back to the dark, deep womb, the scene of the mating ‘whose untrammelled voluptuousness,’ to quote Bachofen, ‘is hateful to the pure forces of heavenly light and which justifies the term used by Arnobius, luteae voluptates [dirty voluptuousness].’
Only from this vantage point can the technique of Kafka the storyteller be comprehended. Whenever figures in the novels have anything to say to K., no matter how important or surprising it may be, they do so casually and with the implication that he must really have known it all along. It is as though nothing new was being imparted, as though the hero was just being subtly invited to recall to mind something that he had forgotten. This is how Willy Haas has interpreted the course of events in The Trial, and justifiably so. ‘The object of the trial,’ he writes, ‘indeed, the real hero of this incredible book is forgetting, whose main characteristic is the forgetting of itself … Here it has actually become a mute figure in the shape of the accused man, a figure of the most striking intensity.’ It probably cannot be denied that ‘this mysterious centre … derives from the Jewish religion.’ ‘Memory plays a very mysterious role as piousness. It is not an ordinary, but … the most profound quality of Jehovah that he remembers, that he retains an infallible memory “to the third and fourth, even to the hundredth generation.” The most sacred … act of the … ritual is the erasing of sins from the book of memory.’
What has been forgotten – and this insight affords us yet another avenue of access to Kafka’s work – is never something purely individual. Everything forgotten mingles with what has been forgotten of the prehistoric world, forms countless, uncertain, changing compounds, yielding a constant flow of new, strange products. Oblivion is the container from which the inexhaustible intermediate world in Kafka’s stories presses toward the light. ‘Here the very fullness of the world is considered as the only reality. All spirit must be concrete, particularized in order to have its place and raison d’être. The spiritual, if it plays a role at all, turns into spirits. These spirits become definite individuals, with names and a very special connection with the name of the worshipper … Without any scruples their fullness is crammed into the fullness of the world … The crowd of spirits is swelled without concern … new ones are constantly added to the old ones, and all are distinguished from the others by their own names.’ All this does not refer to Kafka, but to – China. This is how Franz Rosenzweig describes the Chinese ancestor cult in his Star of Redemption. To Kafka, the world of his ancestors was as unfathomable as the world of realities was important for him, and we may be sure that, like the totem poles of primitive peoples, the world of ancestors took him down to the animals. Incidentally, Kafka is not the only writer for whom animals are the receptacles of the forgotten. In Tieck’s profound story ‘Fair Eckbert,’ the forgotten name of a little dog, Strohmi, stands for a mysterious guilt. One can understand, then, that Kafka did not tire of picking up the forgotten from animals. They are not the goal, to be sure, but one cannot do without them. A case in point is the ‘hunger artist’ who, ‘strictly speaking, was only an impediment on the way to the menagerie.’ Can one not see the animals in ‘The Burrow’ or ‘The Giant Mole’ ponder as they dig in? And yet this thinking is extremely flighty. Irresolutely it flits from one worry to the next, it nibbles at every anxiety with the fickleness of despair. Thus there are butterflies in Kafka, too. The guilt-ridden ‘Hunter Gracchus,’ who refuses to acknowledge his guilt, ‘has turned into a butterfly.’ ‘Don’t laugh,’ says the hunter Gracchus. This much is certain: of all of Kafka’s creatures, the animals have the greatest opportunity for reflection. What corruption is in the law, anxiety is in their thinking. It messes a situation up, yet it is the only hopeful thing about it. However, because the most forgotten alien land is one’s own body, one can understand why Kafka called the cough that erupted from within him ‘the animal.’ It was the most advanced outpost of the great herd.
The strangest bastard which the prehistoric world has begotten with guilt in Kafka is Odradek [in ‘The Cares of a Family Man’]. ‘At first sight it looks like a flat, star-shaped spool for thread, and it really seems to have thread wound around it; to be sure, they probably are only old, broken-off bits of thread that are knotted and tangled together, of all sorts and colours. But it is not just a spool, for a small wooden cross-bar sticks out of the middle of the star, and another small rod is joined to it at a right angle. With the aid of this latter rod on one side and one of the extensions of the star on the other, the whole thing can stand upright as if on two legs.’ Odradek ‘stays alternately in the attic, on the staircase, in the corridors, and in the hall.’ So it prefers the same places as the court of law which investigates guilt. Attics are the places of discarded, forgotten objects. Perhaps the necessity to appear before a court of justice gives rise to a feeling similar to that with which one approaches trunks in the attic which have been locked up for years. One would like to put off this chore till the end of time, just as K. regards his written defence as suitable ‘for occupying one’s senile mind some day during retirement.’
Odradek is the form which things assume in oblivion. They are distorted. The ‘cares of a family man,’ which no one can identify, are distorted; the bug, of which we know all too well that it represents Gregor Samsa, is distorted; the big animal, half lamb, half kitten, for which ‘the butcher’s knife’ might be ‘a release,’ is distorted. These Kafka figures are connected by a long series of figures with the prototype of distortion, the hunchback. Among the images in Kafka’s stories, none is more frequent than that of the man who bows his head far down on his chest: the fatigue of the court officials, the noise affecting the doormen in the hotel, the low ceiling facing the visitors in the gallery. In the Penal Colony those in power use an archaic apparatus which engraves letters with curlicues on the backs of guilty men, multiplying the stabs and piling up the ornaments to the point where the back of the guilty man becomes clairvoyant and is able to decipher the writing from which he must derive the nature of his unknown guilt. It is the back on which this is incumbent. It was always this way with Kafka. Compare this early diary entry: ‘In order to be as heavy as possible, which I believe to be an aid to falling asleep, I had crossed my arms and put my hands on my shoulders, so that I lay there like a soldier with his pack.’ Quite palpably, being loaded down is here equated with forgetting, the forgetting of a sleeping man. The same symbol occurs in the folksong ‘The Little Hunchback.’ This little man is at home in distorted life; he will disappear with the coming of the Messiah, of whom a great rabbi once said that he did not wish to change the world by force, but would only make a slight adjustment in it.
When I come into my room,
My little bed to make,
A little hunchback is in there,
With laughter does he shake.
This is the laughter of Odradek, which is described as sounding ‘something like the rustling in falling leaves.’
When I kneel upon my stool
And I want to pray,
A hunchbacked man is in the room
And he starts to say:
My dear child, I beg of you,
Pray for the little hunchback too.
So ends the folksong. In his depth Kafka touches the ground which neither ‘mythical divination’ nor ‘existential theology’ supplied him with. It is the core of folk tradition, the German as well as the Jewish. Even if Kafka did not pray – and this we do not know – he still possessed in the highest degree what Malebranche called ‘the natural prayer of the soul’: attentiveness. And in this attentiveness he included all living creatures, as saints include them in their prayers.
SANCHO PANZA
In a Hasidic village, so the story goes, Jews were sitting together in a shabby inn one Sabbath evening. They were all local people, with the exception of one person no one knew, a very poor, ragged man who was squatting in a dark corner at the back of the room. All sorts of things were discussed, and then it was suggested that everyone should tell what wish he would make if one were granted him. One man wanted money; another wished for a son-in-law; a third dreamed of a new carpenter’s bench; and so everyone spoke in turn. After they had finished, only the beggar in his dark corner was left. Reluctantly and hesitantly he answered the question. ‘I wish I were a powerful king reigning over a big country. Then, some night while I was asleep in my palace, an enemy would invade my country, and by dawn his horsemen would penetrate to my castle and meet with no resistance. Roused from my sleep, I wouldn’t have time even to dress and I would have to flee in my shirt. Rushing over hill and dale and through forests day and night, I would finally arrive safely right here at the bench in this corner. This is my wish.’ The others exchanged uncomprehending glances. ‘And what good would this wish have done you?’ someone asked. ‘I’d have a shirt,’ was the answer.
This story takes us right into the milieu of Kafka’s world. No one says that the distortions which it will be the Messiah’s mission to set right someday affect only our space; surely they are distortions of our time as well. Kafka must have had this in mind, and in this certainty he made the grandfather in ‘The Next Village’ say: ‘Life is astonishingly short. As I look back over it, life seems so foreshortened to me that I can hardly understand, for instance, how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that, quite apart from accidents, even the span of a normal life that passes happily may be totally insufficient for such a ride.’ This old man’s brother is the beggar whose ‘normal’ life that ‘passes happily’ does not even leave him time for a wish, but who is exempted from this wish in the abnormal, unhappy life, that is, the flight which he attempts in his story, and exchanges the wish for its fulfilment.
Among Kafka’s creatures there is a clan which reckons with the brevity of life in a peculiar way. It comes from the ‘city in the south … of which it was said: “People live there who – imagine! – don’t sleep!” – “And why not?” – “Because they don’t get tired.” – “Why don’t they?” – “Because they are fools.” – “Don’t fools get tired?” – “How could fools get tired?”’ One can see that the fools are akin to the indefatigable assistants. But there is more to this clan. It is casually remarked of the faces of the assistants that they seem to be those of ‘grown-ups, perhaps even students.’ Actually, the students who appear in the strangest places in Kafka’s works are the spokesmen for and leaders of this clan. ‘“But when do you sleep?” asked Karl, looking at the student in surprise. “Oh, sleep!” said the student. “I’ll get some sleep when I’m finished with my studies.”’ This reminds one of the reluctance with which children go to bed; after all, while they are asleep, something might happen that concerns them. ‘Don’t forget the best!’ We are familiar with this remark from a nebulous bunch of old stories, although it may not occur in any of them. But forgetting always involves the best, for it involves the possibility of redemption. ‘The idea of helping me is an illness and requires bed rest for a cure,’ ironically says the restlessly wandering ghost of the hunter Gracchus. While they study, the students are awake, and perhaps their being kept awake is the best thing about these studies. The hunger artist fasts, the doorkeeper is silent, and the students are awake. This is the veiled way in which the great rules of asceticism operate in Kafka.
Their crowning achievement is studying. Reverently Kafka unearths it from long-lost boyhood. ‘Not very unlike this – a long time ago – Karl had sat at home at his parents’ table writing his homework, while his father read the newspaper or did bookkeeping and correspondence for some organization and his mother was busy sewing, drawing the thread high out of the material in her hand. To avoid disturbing his father, Karl used to put only his exercise book and his writing materials on the table, while he arranged the books he needed on chairs to the right and left of him. How quiet it had been there! How seldom strangers had entered that room!’ Perhaps these studies had amounted to nothing. But they are very close to that nothing which alone makes it possible for something to be useful – that is, to the Tao. This is what Kafka was after with his desire ‘to hammer a table together with painstaking craftsmanship and, at the same time, to do nothing – not in such a way that someone could say “Hammering is nothing to him,” but “To him, hammering is real hammering and at the same time nothing,” which would have made the hammering even bolder, more determined, more real, and, if you like, more insane.’ This is the resolute, fanatical mien which students have when they study; it is the strangest mien imaginable. The scribes, the students, are out of breath; they fairly race along. ‘Often the official dictates in such a low voice that the scribe cannot even hear it sitting down; then he has to jump up, catch the dictation, quickly sit down again and write it down, then jump up again and so forth. How strange that is! It is almost incomprehensible!’ It may be easier to understand this if one thinks of the actors in the Nature Theater. Actors have to catch their cues in a flash, and they resemble those assiduous people in other ways as well. Truly, for them ‘hammering is real hammering and at the same time nothing’ – provided that this is part of their role. They study this role, and only a bad actor would forget a word or a movement. For the members of the Oklahoma troupe, however, the role is their earlier life; hence the ‘nature’ in this Nature Theater. Its actors have been redeemed, but not so the student whom Karl watches silently on the balcony as he reads his book, ‘turning the pages, occasionally looking something up in another book which he always snatched up quick as a flash, and frequently making notes in a notebook, which he always did with his face surprisingly close to the paper.’
Kafka does not grow tired of representing the gestus in this fashion, but he invariably does so with astonishment. K. has rightly been compared with the Good Soldier Schweik; the one is astonished at everything, the other at nothing, the invention of the film and the phonograph came in an age of maximum alienation of men from one another, of unpredictably intervening relationships which have become their only ones. Experiments have proved that a man does not recognize his own walk on the screen or his own voice on the phonograph. The situation of the subject in such experiments is Kafka’s situation; this is what directs him to learning, where he may encounter fragments of his own existence, fragments that are still within the context of the role. He might catch hold of the lost gestus the way Peter Schlemihl caught hold of the shadow he had sold. He might understand himself, but what an enormous effort would be required! It is a tempest that blows from the land of oblivion, and learning is a cavalry attack against it. Thus the beggar on the corner bench rides toward his past in order to catch hold of himself in the figure of the fleeing king. This ride, which is long enough for a life, corresponds to life, which is too short for a ride – ‘… until one shed one’s spurs, for there were no spurs, threw away the reins, for there were no reins, and barely saw the land before one as a smoothly mown heath, with the horse’s neck and head already gone.’ This is the fulfilment of the fantasy about the blessed horseman who rushes toward the past on an untrammelled, happy journey, no longer a burden on his race horse. But accursed is the rider who is chained to his nag because he has set himself a goal for the future, even though it is as close as the coal cellar – accursed his animal, accursed both of them. ‘Seated on the bucket, my hands up on the handle, with the simplest kind of bridle, I propel myself with difficulty down the stairs; but once down below, my bucket ascends, superbly, superbly; camels lying flat on the ground do not rise any more handsomely as they shake themselves under the sticks of their drivers.’ There is no more hopeless vista than that of ‘the regions of the ice mountains’ in which the bucket rider drops out of sight forever. From the ‘nethermost regions of death’ blows the wind that is favourable to him, the same wind which so often blows from the prehistoric world in Kafka’s works, and which also propels the boat of the hunter Gracchus. ‘At mysteries and sacrifices, among Greeks as well as barbarians,’ writes Plutarch, ‘it is taught that there must be two primary essences and two opposing forces, one of which points to the right and straight ahead, whereas the other turns around and drives back.’ Reversal is the direction of learning which transforms existence into writing. Its teacher is Bucephalus, ‘the new attorney,’ who takes the road back without the powerful Alexander – which means, rid of the onrushing conqueror. ‘His flanks free and unhampered by the thighs of a rider, under a quiet lamp far from the din of Alexander’s battles, he reads and turns the pages of our old books.’
