A Voice From The Burrow
BY DAN JACOBSON
TN speaking of Franz Kafka, it is as well to 'speak of him first as a Jew, because in doing so one is able to arrive at an idea of the extreme, the crippling, degree of isolation and alienation from which he suffered as a man and an artist. Commentators on Kafka have often written as though the relation between Kafka's Jewishness and his isolation were a simple and self- evident one; but this seems to me to betray an inadequate notion of what was amiss with Kafka himself, and an altogether external notion of what it means to be a Jew.
Kafka was born of bourgeois parents in Prague; his father was a crass, conventional man on whose shoulders Kafka was later to lay the blame for his own personal inadequacies and failures; Kafka's mother was descended from a distinguished rabbinical family. The family observed the customs of Orthodox Judaism, not so much out of belief, apparently, as out of con- ventionality. Kafka attended synagogue regularly as a child; his lifelong friend, Max Brod, who was to become his biographer, was a devoted Zionist; and in the last few years of his life Kafka returned to the study of Hebrew and the Talmud. It has often been remarked that the `dialectic' of the Kafka fable has unmistakable affinities with the characteristic methods of Talmudic exegesis; and his humour, too, has been considered to be typically Jewish, in its irony, tenacity and self-depreciation. All this may well be true; but whether we consider Judaism as a formal religion, or `Jewishness' as the vague but potent fusion of convention, habit, family loyalty and community feeling it so often is, we cannot but be struck by how positively `un-Jewish' is the spirit of Kafka's work. Judaism, as a religion, is essentially normative; of all religions it is the one which sets most store by direct unambiguous commandments, governing not only religious observances and ethics but also the minutia; of everyday living. And in the Jewish tradition, the study of the Law, as it has been revealed, is the highest activity open to man. I believe that in writing, as he so often did, of a man who is found guilty of a crime he did not commit, under a law he is ignorant of, Kafka was expressing symbolically, among many other things, his own sense of being profoundly sundered from the tradition in which he had been brought up. The inversion of Judaism, so to speak, cannot be accidental. Again, if we are to talk of 'Jewish- ness' merely, it seems clear that in their very isolation, their lack of antecedents, families or friends, Kafka's heroes are not recognisably Jews at all. To be a Jew is certainly to know social unease, under the best conditions, and to face appalling dangers and degradation under the worst; but the isolation this involves is of a very different kind from that suffered by Kafka's heroes. If we say that as a, Jew, or because he was a Jew, Kafka knew loneliness and powerlessness, we are saying only that he knew all the disadvan- tages but none of the very real advantages of being a Jew--neither the authority and stability of the Jewish Law, nor the common, human, frail satisfaction of simply being Jewish.
But then what did Kafka know or show in his work of stability of any kind; what did he know of the common, frail advantages of simply being human? To ask this question as if it were a reproach may seem to show very little charity to a man who suffered so much in his life, and who in his work was able to embody that suffering in works which 1 have no doubt will remain of Pe manent interest. Nevertheless, the question Of be asked, if only because during the vogue Or his work, some years ago, so many people were ready to hail him as the voice of modern I 3urof4 —a claim which it seems to me cannot possibl/ be sustained. In Kafka's work there is nothing °f the world of nature, nothing of the delight of the senses, nothing of love, of family affection, friendship. It might seem here as though this ° to condemn Kafka simply because his work it too 'gloomy' or 'pessimistic,' but that is not the point at all. On the contrary, it can be as pare° and children, husbands and . wives, that '" suffer most deeply; we can come to know own impotence because of our perception of 111 vastness and indifference of the world outside ourselves; it is because our senses can fee delight that they can feel pain too. But of th‘lv,1 pains Kafka can tell us as little as he can of thelf complementary or concomitant pleasures. S. Ile simply knew too little about them. And not only was his knowledge extreol°11 limited; he was incapable of even trying to lear° more. As incapable, in fact, as any of his he°, ever are of trying to move away from the aii°' kinds of imprisonment in which they find the' selves, or of protesting against the malice of °Ie authorities who confine them, or of desi royin! themselves sooner than allowing themselves _At° be destroyed. In The Castle the hero is et join'''. to leave the village, where he is being endlessly tormented by the staff on the castle hill. But, '1 can't go away,' replied K. 'I came here l° $ stay. I'll stay here.' And -giving utterance to self-contradiction which he made no effort explain, he added as if to himself, 'What cou..t. have enticed me to this desolate country except the wish ,to stay here?' Exactly; and it is just this wish, or rather, the faci that he is incapable of wishing for anything el54' w even momentarily, which makes him '0 o 05 representative a hero. In The Trial Joseph that Ille explicitly to the Examining Magistrate tl trial is one only as long as he, Joseph K, recoi nises it as such. 'But for the moment,' he ad 'I do recognise it'; and he does not cease to d° 5v throughout the book. The Trial opens with I!" sentence: 'Someone must have been telling lie about Joseph K, for without having done any thing wrong he was arrested one fine morn!' Now anyone thinking of Kafka'as a twoltie,,fir century Jew may reflect, when he reads this, 11' the sentence is almost literally true to what harp pened during the years of the Nazi hegemony ly Europe to almost six million living indijdua„," Someone had indeed been telling lies about tileePti and as a result they were taken away to "' fates at least as gruesome as that meted %tit 10 the" Joseph K at the end of the book. But „' people, unlike Joseph K, were not self-con dc ing solitaries. What is most dreadful 'about thed fate, what one cannot even begin to cornPrehellt about it, is that they were perfectly 01din ar £1101; people, with families and hopes, fears and tions; and what was done to them was ( 013e,,,fiv the days and nights that lit or darkened the s°.P...c
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commonplace world of everyone who was 11',h at that time. Kafka's tale cannot encompass all, horror at all; his book is too private, too sr" too exclusive an affair altogether. Admittedly, this is an extreme case: what vi°.(irt of art can measure up to the demented hollv. of Hitler's Europe? But I have made the case because I believe it to show up clearly how little Kafka can be said to speak for Europe, even its most tormented aspect. Dostoievsky may have been a hateful man, and as diseased as Kafka in his private life; but if we set the fable of `The Grand Inquisitor,' from The Brothers Karamazov, against any of Kafka's fables, we have to grant Dostoievsky a kind of nobility as a writer which Kafka is altogether without. Dostoievsky's fable has the nobility of true protest, of true rebellion, of a spirit trying to beat through the walls of its own limitations, instead of merely walking around within the walls and examining them minutely, fanatically, even lovingly, having lost all hope of reaching the world outside itself.
What one can say about Kafka is that his fidelity to the nature of his own experience is astonishing; and all the more so when one con- siders the form in which he chose to record it. In the volume which concludes the publication of the English Definitive Edition of his works* there are gathered together fables, pieces and aphor- isms of varying lengths, dealing with such dif- ferent topics as the confusions to be found among the builders of the Great Wall of China, the claustral anxieties of a beast who digs a burrow for itself under the ground and then begins to suspect that a bigger animal is doing the same thing elsewhere in the burrow, the speculations of a dog as to where his food really comes from, the embarrassments of an elderly bachelor who finds himself accompanied by two little bouncing balls wherever he goes. Given the arbitrariness and caprice of the form, one might have imagined that Kafka would have been tempted to do anything with it; but all he does is to delineate and define the terms of his own imprisonment. (Significantly, Description of a Struggle, an early piece in which something else is attempted, for once, is the weakest in the book.) And the undeniable success that Kafka must be granted is of a most curious kind. 'One sheds one's sicknesses in books—repeats and presents again one's emotions to be master of them,' wrote D. H. Lawrence, and the sentence is often quoted nowadays because it gives so suc- cinctly the fashionable view of the relation be- tween the artist, his work, and his own dis- abilities. But no one can say that Kafka ever 'mastered' or 'shed' his sickness in his books, though he certainly repeated and presented it: presented it, moreover, in what are recognisable as true works of art, and not mere spewings-forth of illness. How can one present and analyse ill- ness, weakness and disability, without making some attempt to cure them, in the very act of analysis and presentation? I do not know; I only know that Kafka managed to do it.
And he did it not only in terms of allegory and fable, but discursively too, in his notebooks, letters and aphorisms. The most acute critic of Kafka is Kafka himself; and again one wonders how it was possible for him to have so much insight into his own condition without being able to put it to any further use. For instance, on the question with which we began, the relation of Kafka to his fellow-Jews, he could write very bluntly, 'What have I in common with the Jews, when I have nothing in common with myself?' And as for the larger question, Kafka wrote: As far as I know, I do not have any of the qualities required for life,. only the common human weakness. With this weakness—in this
* DESCRIPTION OF A STRUGGLE and THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA. By Franz Kafka. Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir and Tania and James Stern. (Seeker and Warburg, 25s)
respect it is an enormous strength-1 took reso- lutely upon me the negative elements of my epoch, which I have not the right to combat, but have the right, so to speak. to represent.
One must concede to him that single 'enormous strength': there is no one who is better than Kafka at describing, without shame or pride, the forms of our imprisonment. There is no dis- junction in his fables between the psychological, the political, and the spiritual—no more than there is in life—and this is one of the reasons for their power; this is one of the evidences of their truth. But in the nature of the case it is not surprising that Kafka's shorter works, like 'The Burrow,' are much more rewarding than his attempts at full-length novels.
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