The Description of a Struggle
This story is odd in a way uncharacteristic of Kafka.
Only the first first few pages bear a semblance to reality: A man at a party makes the acquaintance of a tipsy Lothario who has just returned from kissing a maid on the stairs. On the pretext of escaping the conversation (and avoiding the embarrassment of listening to an indiscreet story before the other guests) the narrator suddenly jumps to his feet and says, “Yes, a walk! What a splendid idea!” and heads for the door. Unexpectedly, his new "friend" follows him and together they ramble at random through the deserted streets. Here the story takes its first bizarre and nightmarish turn. For the narrator, as they walk, whimsically contorts his body, which has become sort of rubbery, so that his head hovers along a few inches from the ground and the conversation, too, becomes so disjointed and nonsensical that the reader is hardly surprised when the narrator climbs onto the shoulders of his companion and goads him with numerous kicks to gallop up a gravelly roadway. Reading all this, I had the feeling of being trapped in some absurd, feverish dream—a feeling that became more distinct when the narrator began to change his surroundings by the power of thought. Mountains are banished. Roadways are summoned fourth. The clouds are dismissed and stars (since the narrator is fond of them) assigned by him to their various positions in the night’s sky. At length the companion is dismounted and abandoned and the narrator wanders to a river where an obese man on a palanquin bourne by four naked male attendants comes crashing through the bramble to the water’s edge. After a pompous speech to the moon and stars, the man demands to be carried across the river. But the water is too deep, the bearers drown, and their charge is left floating down the river on his sinking platform while the narrator stumbles along the riverbank, matching his speed to the current, so that the two remain side by side. The rest of the story consists of what the man manages to relate before his obsene bulk is carried over a waterfall: a tale just as exaggeratedly absurd and phantasmagoric as everything that has gone before it. There is a penitent who thumps his head on the floor while he prays, women without lower bodies who float through the air trailing petticoats behind them, and a great deal of conversation that sits ambiguously between mystical allegory and word salad… It's pointless, I now realise, to go on attempting to summarize this story because it is not a story at all. It's gossamer, smoke, darkness and flashes of light: an atmosphere conjured forth by one long and uncompromisingly weird incantation. It’s also Kafka’s most unpopular story. In his foreword to The Complete Stories John Updike advised readers who were new to Kafka to skip it. But despite his advice (which I agree with) The Description of a Struggle not quite as gratuitous and unreadable as it sounds. I think it is worth mentioning, for instance, that a quarter of the way in a meaningful framework for all the madness is clearly suggested. The narrator (reclining in a tree that materialized at his command) says to himself, "Your life was monotonous. It really was necessary for you to be taken somewhere else. You ought to be content." I suddenly wondered whether a young Kafka didn’t pen this after an especially boring day at work. Maybe it was a hastily contrived bolthole from reality, one that, however gloomy, chaotic and insane, was still preferable to the tedium of drawing up legal contracts for an insurance company. But whatever the explanation for this early effort, so inferior to everything that would follow, I believe it does credit to the brilliance of Kafka. And this is the reason: Despite being the worst thing he ever wrote, I still enjoyed reading it. |
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