The Complete Stories
During his tenure at Cornell, Vladimir Nabokov instructed his students to read with their "spine." When I first heard this I did not understand. To me it seemed incongruous, absurd, as if Nabokov had said, "Write with your eyebrows." But a moment later the penny dropped: As the insectile clicking of a Geiger counter indicates the presence of radiation, so the tingling of a reader's spine will indicate that he or she is in the presence of good literature. Borges may have had a similar notion in mind when he noted that, “There are books that touch us physically, like the closeness of the sea or of the morning.”
Asked to identify a single quality unifying The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka I would have to start with that vague but essential one. Then I would mention the narrative voice which guides you through the heterogeneous nightmare. Kafka’s prose style contrasts with what it describes in that the cosmic irrationalities, dizzying infinities and chaotic absurdities of the “tremendous world” inside his head are unfolded before the reader with incredible precision, calmness and clarity. Kafka is, somewhat paradoxically, a serene and almost indifferent ethnographer of his own harrowed psyche and the result is a literary art form that is heterodox in its conception but orthodox in its execution; or, to express it slightly differently, radically original but also very readable… And finally I would have to attempt to articulate the most important and obvious unifying quality which I save for last because I despair of doing it justice: The easily-intuited but almost-impossible-to-describe theme running though all his work. Enigmatic works of art seldom lend themselves to a single interpretation and the dutiful reader of editorial forewords to Kafka’s novels will encounter several. According to one, Kafka was an existentialist and a pessimist who sought to portray the universe as an incomprehensible and hostile place in which the individual was lonely, perplexed and threatened. Another perceives in the persecution of his characters by vast and mysterious forces a religious allegory where the protagonist’s guilt, as in Christian theology, is presupposed, and the multiplying complications which stand between him and the resolution of his predicament are a symbol for the impassable gulf between God and his fallen creations. Borges, to mention still another interpretation, opined that, “the first of Kafka’s precursors is Zeno’s paradox of motion,” and therefore saw all three novels as elaborate Eleatic parables. All three interpretative threads will come in handy as you navigate your way through Kafka’s labyrinth because there is pessimism, guilt and paradoxicality in good measure. The problem is that they each seem too facile on their own but are extremely difficult to bind together. There is pessimism in Kafka but Kafka is not a pessimist; some of his stories have a religious aspect but he is not a theologian; his work abounds in paradoxes but he is not merely a paradoxician. Kafka simply will not fit to the procrustean bed of monocausal explanation without being hacked to pieces. This is the main challenge faced by his readers. And though I am a mere nobody, I am also one of those readers, and would like to suggest a solution. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy has one of his characters say, "Without knowing what I am and why I'm here, it is impossible for me to live; and I cannot know that, therefore I cannot live." In my view this was Kafka’s starting point: the absurdity of life; the awareness that man is a being with an intrinsic need for meaning in a universe that is intrinsically meaningless—an animal at odds with its world. Of course this is well-trod ground for existential philosophers. But there is something else which sets Kafka apart from Sartre and Camus. Where they offered up philosophical stopgaps to living in a meaningless world, Kafka actually seemed to find profound meaning in life’s very meaninglessness and expressed this discovery throughout his work with amazing originality and skill. The idea, while itself a contradiction, resolves a number of contradictions to be found in an overview of his literary output: The overwhelming pessimism but lack of nihilism; the persistence of hope in the face of total hopelessness; the unavailing but unwearying pursuit of a God that has receded to infinity. Kafka’s stories are far more than object lessons in retaining one’s rationality and humanity against the crushing opposition of an irrational and inhuman cosmos—as if they could all be reduced to the stale refrain, “Life is meaningless but chin up, my friend!” And their religious implications also extend far beyond the specious notion that the cosmic persecution of man implies, at least, the existence of a cosmic persecutor… I really hope I am not getting carried away here, but reading Kafka, I feel as if I were on an endless staircase towards some Ultimate Truth—and while it is true that “under my climbing feet the stairs go on growing upwards forever” I am encouraged by this vague thought: If Truth cannot be obtained with a finite effort, as Kafka seems to imply, then the very impossibility of arrival is an indication that one is on the right path. With these ideas in mind, I am almost tempted to read all of Kafka as a prolonged gloss on a single line from the Torah. “It is not given you to understand the law,” it instructs its students; “neither are you free to desist from it.” |
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