Many writers have been influenced by Kafka since he came into vogue, but few seem to have gotten more than a set of mannerisms from him. To get more, they would have had to grasp the innerness of Kafka’s vision, and that innerness, Clement Greenberg maintains, remains inaccessible without sense of Kafka’s relation to things Jewish.
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Much of the strangeness in Kafka’s writing can well be attributed to his neuroses, and beyond them to a personality that remains unique when all the neuroses have been “explained” away. But beyond both personality and neuroses there lie more general antecedents and causes. There was the literary tradition of the language, German, in which he wrote. There was the city of Prague, in which he was born and lived most of his life. There was the Jewry of that city, and its past, and the larger past of all Central and East European Jewry. Kafka carried with him a kind of “racial” memory of that past. Though he was an emancipated Jew, he was still its product and after-effect.
And though Western culture was the only culture he commanded, he seems not to have felt altogether at home in it On the other hand, his insights into certain large if subtle truths of the Jewish past and its culture were founded on relatively little direct knowledge of either. Such anomalies echo through Kafka’s writing and may account for things in it that must otherwise seem arbitrary and opaque.
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Time moves differently for Kafka than for any other story-teller who has used a modern European language. The tension is that of existence in time, certainly, but it is tension towards beginnings and towards the presence of the present rather than towards outcomes or eventualities. Yet, though Kafka’s protagonist lives in fear of these, somehow everything has already been settled, the crucial decisions have already been made. If doom and resolution approach without ever quite arriving, it is because they are already and always have been present. Actual life only recapitulates a point made somewhere else.
At the same time, the ultimate and the immediate, the exceptional and the everyday, the crucial and the incidental, intersect everywhere and at every moment. Hence everything that happens exerts equal pressure and requires, in the telling, equal emphasis. But it is not, on the face of it, exaltation which thus levels everything upward. The vision that produces the words of Kafka’s fiction tries to fix most literally, most anxiously, everything that happens to be the case. (Fortunately, most of physical reality is not the “case”; otherwise it is unlikely that Kafka would ever have gotten beyond the description of his face in the mirror.) The prosaic may be heightened, but it is not deprived of the quality of being prosaic. What exaltation, or rather eloquence, there is in Kafka is ironical and comes at the point where the facts of the case invite a summing up that must, inevitably, be inadequate to them.
Kafka seems to write with the aim of resolving the portents given him by his sensibility. He intends to be transparent, to deflate every mystery. The result is successful art precisely because he fails. Fictive reality remains throughout what it started out as in his sensibility: a tissue of figures, likenesses, parables. Yet without the sustained effort he makes to thread the tissue and rationalize it away—that is, if he were simply satisfied with his own “poetry”—Kafka would be no more than a fantasist, a kind of Jean Paul Richter: a writer of originality, no doubt, but one who would not move us deeply.
Kafka’s protagonist cannot orient himself by the objective coordinates of chronology or geography or by those, either, of history, culture, social life, religion, science, or any department or discipline whatsoever of knowledge or practical activity. He is faced with immediate data of a nakedness, of an opaque brutality in their nakedness, such as can be found elsewhere only in fairy tales and the Arabian Nights. And, as in these, the data are all touchy, subject to a magic that inheres in the texture of reality and is the agent of nothing but itself.
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Kafka’s typical hero is resigned to the settled, routinized life he is leading when the story opens. (The Castle is the only important exception in this respect, yet even here the settled life is what the hero strives to achieve or return to.) The action begins with the disruption of routine, whether imagined or actual, and proceeds as the hero tries to assimilate the disruption itself to routine. To this end, he constructs hypotheses that will permit him to regard the changed situation as normal, and to continue to act rationally. But these hypotheses are always refuted, as often by his own criticism as by the acts of others. For his own criticism embodies the anonymous, inscrutable yet somehow coherent trend of reality itself. And as the narrative unfolds, inside as well as outside his mind, he begins to see that it is not merely his settled way of life that is endangered by reality’s trend, but his very existence or his very reality—which can be interpreted, too, as his rationality or sanity insofar as the attack upon himself is delivered by those agents of reality which are imbedded in his own personality.
Processes of logical thought constitute much of the “action” in Kafka’s fiction, and the story is often that of the inefficacy of thought, and nothing more. No one has ever made thought so vivid as an object rather than subject. And no one has succeeded so well in capturing its processes for the ends of imaginative literature.
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As it happens, there is a precedent for this kind of vision, but one that lies outside Western tradition. The treadmill of routine, permanence, and pattern, with scrupulous thought as its constituent and enabling principle, to which Kafka’s heroes look for their safety bears many resemblances to what is envisaged in that all-important department of post-Biblical Judaism called Halachah. Halachah is the rational derivation—and derivation upon derivation—and application of Jewish religious law on the basis of the precepts found in the Pentateuch. Law, or Torah, extended and elaborated by means of Halachah, inside and outside the Talmud, sanctifies as much as possible of human existence by fixing it in routines whose observance pleases God. Life is consecrated by being subjected to repetition.
The assumption, as I see it, upon which Halachah proceeds as it legislates and routinizes is that history stopped with the extinction of an independent Jewish state in Palestine and will not start up again until the Messiah comes to restore it. Meanwhile Jewish existence is to be kept in hand, kept sacred and safe and Jewish, by being rendered humdrum, thoroughly prosaic, and historically immobile within the “fence”—the “Chinese wall”—of the Law. Such history as persists is Gentile history, profane, meaningless in its novelty, at best an indifferent matter to the Jew, at worst a threat to his physical person and his routine.
Though Gentile history has finally brought Kafka emancipation, it still remains Gentile, therefore essentially dangerous to the Jew, emancipated or not. For the sake of safety alone—no longer of safety as an increment of salvation—he must still seek his refuge in a version of Halachic order and immobility. However, being irreligious now, he cannot build his “fence” against history on the original divine ordinances, but only out of the most general and self-evident features of the traditionally Jewish way of life: middle-class orderliness, routine, prudence, sedentary stability, application to daily tasks—and chronic anxiety about the future that leaves little room for sentiment about the past.
The price Kafka pays for the safety he may feel—if not actually find—in this secular, unwritten, and unspoken neo-Halachic system is claustrophobia. Whereas the old Halachah knows of the history that created the precedents from which it derives its authority, Kafka knows only that there was some history in the past, but not what history. Religious Halachah, while denying the Jewish hunger for history its immediate satisfaction, promises it future satisfaction with the Messiah. Kafka’s neo-Halachah contains no such promise; yet he, the emancipated Jew, feels the inveterate Jewish yearning for history with a consciousness and an impatience that no Orthodox Jew could permit himself; and feels it all the more because it is he himself, not divine providence, who must deny himself history as long as he continues to fear it.
One can see why Kafka became a Zionist. It is the classical Zionist position in its abiding, secular distrust of the non-Jewish world and non-Jewish history that he states. Marx and other emancipated Jews tried to hurry the Messiah by looking for him in Gentile history and foreseeing the imminent conversion of the Gentiles—not exactly to Judaism, but to a kind of humanity to which Jews could assimilate themselves. Kafka, the Jew of Prague, could not be so disloyal to what his immediate experience told him. His sense of the world around him was the sense of a trap, and as a Jew he was right, as the Jews of Europe had reason to know twenty years after his death, and as those in Prague ten years later still had reason to know.
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His historical clairvoyance adds nothing intrinsic to the merits of Kafka’s art; it could, conceivably, still be there were his art much less than it is. Only we are better able to understand and enjoy that art when we grasp the part that history, and Kafka’s feeling about the Jewish relation to history, play in it. It is history’s menace to the Jew that is figured—among other, less definable things—in the scratched “entries” of “barbaric mountain-dwellers” on the stones trimmed for the new temple; in the nomad barbarians who devour living animals under the windows of a passive, hidden emperor; in the unknown enemies of the animal hero of “The Burrow”; in the cats (presumably) that prey on Josephine’s mice nation. Once we are aware of what history means to Kafka, the “Hunter Gracchus” fragments, “Dr. Bucephalus,” “The Tower of Babel,” and other short pieces that seemed the purest of poetry in prose turn out to be less “pure,” without losing anything of their power thereby. It is not essential to the effect of Kafka’s writing that the reader be any more mystified by his matter than the author himself is.
Nor is it as paradoxical as it might seem that Kafka figures forth history in the persons of barbarians. As a Jew, he feels post-Exilic history to be remote and capricious, hostile to intelligible ends. It belongs somehow to external nature and the restlessness of external nature, and so do nomad barbarians as, presumably, the human metaphors of capriciousness. In other places servants, janitors, coachmen, messengers, innkeepers, and anonymous Gentiles in general represent external nature and its ceaseless historical movement. Such figures are less symbolic than the barbarians because they are less transposed from Kafka’s immediate experience; they are as well as represent, being the plebeian, lower-class, “folkish” Gentiles whom the Jew actually fears more than he does the seemingly more powerful “authorities.”
That Kafka’s hero is frustrated and doomed by the “authorities,” whereas he is only harassed by the lower classes, does not change this. At least the “authorities” observe the forms and doom him only piecemeal; the plebs, left unrestrained in their malevolence, would obliterate Jews as they would animals. Kafka was clairvoyant here, too, if we judge from the case of Nazi Germany, where for the first time the plebs became the “authorities” in spirit.
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Needless to say, the “Jewish meaning” of Kafka’s work does not exhaust its content. Nor is that meaning as consistent as I, for the purposes of exposition, have made it appear. (Least of all is it consistent with respect to the Gentile plebs, towards whom Kafka had the typically ambivalent feelings of an enlightened, emancipated Jew, and in whom he could at times, as in The Castle, see potential allies as well as present enemies.) It would be wrong in any case to pin Kafka down to specific allegorical meanings. There is allegory in his fiction—the most successful allegory in a century and more of literature—but what makes it succeed when it does is that it transcends all final interpretation by virtue of its form.
Yet Kafka’s form is Jewish, too. While he is not alone among great modern writers in finding it difficult to charge his matter with dramatic—as distinct from “nervous”—tension and draw it to dramatic resolution (think of Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Mann), Kafka makes it more difficult for himself by proceeding, as Halachah does in evolving and deciding law, with a patient, if selective, circumstantiality that belongs more to description and logical exposition than to narrative. By dint of being manipulated, the details manage to move the story, but at what is often an intolerably slow pace. Kafka’s scrupulousness, governed by so anxious a vision, risks appearing mannered at times, and the manner risks boring us.
This is why, in my opinion, his shorter efforts are generally more successful than his novels or extended short stories like “The Metamorphosis.” Where description and exposition provide most of it, the action must be short. Beyond a certain point the peculiarly stealthy, gradual movement in time and perception that Kafka is able to achieve tends to bore the reader—whose patience is further taxed by the insufficient promise of a resolution. For resolutions and denouements would tear apart the fabric of Kafka’s universe, in which conclusive acts and events cannot but be anti-climactic, too particular and local in meaning and time to resolve the entire weight of suspense, doubt, and ignorance. States of being are what are conclusive here, and these for Kafka can have no beginnings or endings, only middles. What is more, these exclude moral issues, and hence no moral choices are made in Kafka’s fiction. To the extent that this fiction succeeds, it refutes the assumption of many of the most serious critics of our day—F. R. Leavis is notably one of them—that the value of a work of literary art depends ultimately on the depth to which it explores moral difficulties.
A world all “middle” is claustrophobic. Nor is this the only source of claustrophobia. Alien forces invade Kafka’s system of safety, but they do not let air into it. Rather, it turns out that they have been in it from the first, built into it, and that the system is not one of safety, but of doom. Doom has been there all the time, as orderly, implicit, and immobile as safety was supposed to be. Kafka’s neo-Halachah is a mockery of the old one: it is wide open inside a closed and stifling world. In conveying this Kafka says, essentially, everything he has to say. The premises of his vision and sensibility necessitate certain conclusions so absolutely that it requires relatively little “business” to act or worry them out. I think that Kafka had some realization of how tautological his imagination was on the plane of fiction—enough to feel disappointed by his attempts to create fiction that would feel like fiction. This may be the reason, or part of the reason, why he asked Max Brod to burn his writings after he was dead.
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More than anything else, Kafka wanted to accept himself as a writer, not as a seer, prophet, or visionary—as a writer of fiction, not of oracles, and a writer of fiction in prose, not a kind of hybrid poet. Under other circumstances he might indeed have been a poet in form as well as substance, but, as it was, too much spurious culture, too many alien associations were connected with verse—in German or any other European tongue—for Kafka’s requirements. Poetry in meter would have been too high-falutin, too Gentile, would have involved a mortal falsification.
And might not fiction, too, and literature in general be falsification? One feels that what Kafka wanted to convey transcended literature, and that somewhere, inside him, in spite of himself, art had inevitably to seem shallow, or at least too incomplete to be pro-found, when compared with reality. (This, too, was in the Jewish tradition.) Insofar as he radically tests the limits of art or literature, Kafka is one of the most “modern” of writers. But to say this is not to bestow undiluted praise. If the forms and conventions of fiction are not completely adequate to Kafka’s vision, his own work suffers for it. Its shortcomings are due, more than anything else, to his effort to compel writing, language, literature, to do things they could not. This, too, makes him a “modern” writer.
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