Collected Stories (3 page)

Here too his comment follows immediately:

This is very revealing. Here is Kafka trying to write a conventional ‘realist’ narrative, and his heart isn’t in it. The act does not involve him, only its aftermath. But note that the sentence and especially the word he picks out, ‘pour’ (
schütten
) is no more beautiful or interesting in itself than the words ‘threw’ (
warf
) and ‘took’ (
nahm
). It is just that it seems to touch on a truth the rest of the story lacks. I myself would have added the word ‘embarrassment’ (‘her eyes still closed because of fear and embarrassment’), and I would agree that there was just a glimpse of ‘something real’ in the closing description of the landscape, calm and unaffected by the human drama which has just occurred within it.

And yet there are other moods when he can write: ‘The firmness … which the most insignificant writing brings about in me is beyond doubt and wonderful’ (27 November 1913). It is even the case that, at times, he feels that his writing gives him a quite magical power: ‘When I arbitrarily write down a single sentence, for instance, “He looked out of the window”, it already has perfection’ (19 February 1911). Those early stories or gropings towards novels, the ‘Description of a Struggle’ and ‘Wedding Preparations in the Country’, on which he pinned all his hopes in his early twenties, are clearly written in an effort to maintain just this mood. Here what happens is governed not by the conventions of fin-de-siècle story-telling but simply by the feelings of the protagonist: ‘Because I love pinewoods I went through woods of this kind, and since I like gazing silently up at the stars, the stars appeared slowly in the sky.’ Here mosquitoes can fly through the belly of a fat man and the moon ceases to be a moon when given another name. As for the narrator, since the world immediately submits itself to his whims, it is difficult for him to retain any sense of himself as a person. At moments he is an all-powerful human being, at the next he is only an avalanche rolling down a mountainside.

Writing of this kind may initially feel promising, but it soon palls. If I have simply to write something down to summon it into being, if everything depends entirely on my mood as I write, then what is the point of writing anything at all? No wonder these early efforts got nowhere and were eventually abandoned by Kafka.

There is another theme running through Kafka’s early letters and diaries, a theme which Kafka at the time does not seem to know how to explain or exploit, but which is going to play a major part in his mature fiction. In a letter to Brod of 28 August 1904 he writes:

This is the world of Kafka’s febrile line drawings, which show ludicrously tall or squat people stretching, twisting, leaning towards or away from one another, in what would be grotesque if it was an attempt at realism but which instead conveys perfectly how we sometimes feel, both constrained in our bodies and lunging free, both playing a game and close to desperation. The early diaries are full of detailed descriptions of
gesturing
, which seems to be a sign of frustration when it is he himself who is doing the gesturing, but is clearly also as much a part of his extreme sensitivity to others as his response to words. These gestures are in fact the visual and physical equivalent of those words which suddenly take on a life of their own and burst free of the sentence in which normal, well-behaved words should quietly lie.

In a late diary entry (24 January 1922) Kafka, looking back at his life, mysteriously but quite specifically linked his writing with such gesturing:

By this stage in his life Kafka had begun to think of writing not as a form of salvation but, on the contrary, as ‘wages earned in the service of evil’, as he put it in a terrible letter
to Brod. But whether one accepts his judgment or not, it does not affect the clear link he makes here between writing and gesticulating. Just as excessive gestures were a way of escaping, even if only momentarily, the confines of his body and the behaviour required by society, so it was with his writing. The obverse of both is the image of the body turned to stone, the head sinking on to the chest, which recurs so often in the diary in moments of depression.

However, in order to grasp precisely what are the links between writing and gesturing we have to turn to a diary entry for 30 September 1911. There Kafka, after commenting on two well-known artists with whom he has obviously come into contact that day, Kubin the painter and Tucholsky the writer, focuses on a third figure:

But this talent for entering into and becoming another is not an actor’s gift. ‘My urge to imitate has nothing of the actor in it,’ he writes on 30 December. A good actor, he goes on, homes in on the essential details of the person he is impersonating, while the sign of the poor actor is precisely that he is overwhelmed by peripheral detail. Yet it is just such peripheral detail – ‘the way certain people manipulate walking-sticks, the way they hold their hands, the movements of their fingers’ – that he himself finds he can imitate with such ease.

And that fascination with peripheral detail, that ability to enter into the detail and live it, so to speak, is what immediately strikes us about even his earliest and most hesitant writing. The very first sentence of the diary, for example, runs: ‘The onlookers go rigid when the train goes past’ (the German avoids the repetition of ‘go’ and takes up only eight words: ‘Die Zuschauer erstarren, wenn der Zug vorbeifährt.’) Is this the jotting down of something seen that day or the start of a story? As usual with Kafka we cannot tell, and, indeed,
the writing forces us to abandon such apparently well-founded distinctions. Though seemingly just a note to remind himself of an incident he has witnessed, the sentence actually catches and conveys an event. The diarist has not just looked hard, he has empathized instinctively not with this or that person on the station platform but with the entire episode of onlookers-at-a-station-platform-as-a-train-goes-past.

Nevertheless, it was to be some time before Kafka discovered what to do with this gift of his for empathy and metamorphosis. In 1912, when Brod urged him to put together a volume of short pieces for publication, he knew only that he must avoid the realism of the rape fragment and the expressionism of the long unfinished stories. Better to choose modest and even rather muted pieces which felt ‘true’ all the way through than fill a volume with excessive noise and falsehood. Thus, like Eliot’s early ‘Preludes’ and ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, or the quieter pieces Schoenberg and Webern were producing at roughly the same time, the ‘stories’ which make up Kafka’s first published collection,
Meditation
(
Betrachtung
), are moving and disturbing precisely because they refuse to engage in narrative and yet are clearly more than simple descriptions. ‘Absent-minded Window-gazing’, for example, begins:

A drama is being enacted here, but it is secret, muffled, hardly aware of itself, as in Joyce’s ‘Eveline’. Elsewhere he retrieves a fragment from the diary entry for 5 January 1912 about suddenly deciding to go out for a walk and in another piece tells how, to lift himself from his miserable mood, ‘I force myself out of my chair, stride around the table, exercise my head and neck, make my eyes sparkle, tighten the muscles around them.’ In ‘The Wish to be a Red Indian’ the whole piece consists of a single sentence, poised between mundane reality and impossible desire:

Yet, interesting and original as these pieces are, they could clearly not satisfy someone who felt, like Kafka, that a thousand worlds were waiting to burst out of his head. If he was to let them out he would have, sooner or later, to solve the problem of how to write narrative without falling into the traps of either expressionism and realism, of a dependence on subjective whim which was self-defeating and a dependence on the themes and styles of his contemporaries which only struck him as unbearably hollow and false.

I have been talking so far as though Kafka were alone with his demons, though I did give a glimpse of him with Brod and his other friends as the ‘little motor-car story’ was read aloud. Much more important, of course, was the attitude of his family. Kafka has left us plenty of evidence about what his father thought of his work, but the main actor in what is perhaps the key episode in his development as a writer was not his father but an unnamed uncle. Kafka recounts it in his diary on 19 January 1911: