Collected Stories (4 page)

This stands, with the equivalent episode of Monsieur de Norpois’ rejection of the young Marcel’s literary efforts, as one of the key moments in modern literature. It is not an episode Chaucer, Milton or Goethe would have made much sense of, I suspect, for in their day it would have been pretty obvious if a young man was gifted or not, and ‘the usual stuff’ would have been less of a put-down than ‘odd stuff’. In our world though – and in this respect Proust and Kafka inhabit our world – matters are different: few can spot what is truly original when it first appears, and the burden on the artist is for that reason much greater: should he trust his instinct, which has so often let him down, or the judgment of others, which seems so massively authoritative and yet is so often at odds with his own?

Of course what makes this moment so important in both Kafka and Proust is not only that they had the ability to describe it for us, but that they had the resources of character to react to it, not by simply dismissing the judgment out of hand, but by incorporating it into their work, thus at the same time accepting and reversing it.

Two and a half years after that terrible Sunday afternoon, on 24 May 1913, Kafka noted in his diary: ‘In high spirits because I consider “The Stoker” so good. This evening I read it to my parents, there is no better critic than I when I read to my father, who listens with the most extreme reluctance. Many shallow passages followed by unfathomable depths.’

‘The Stoker’ is also a story about a young man going to America. But this time Kafka does not wait for someone to wrench the page from him and look at it. He has grown in confidence to such an extent that he actually reads it out loud to the sternest judge of all, his father. And though he notes that his father listened ‘with the most extreme reluctance’, he himself is not in the least put out by this. As he reads he sees clearly that there are ‘many shallow passages’ in the story, but that these are ‘followed by unfathomable depths’.

What has happened to alter things in this way?

To put it simply, what has happened is the experience of the night of 22–23 September 1912. Under the date 23 September he transcribes the whole of a long short story and then comments:

All his life Kafka was to look back to this night as the fulfilment of his dream of writing. Never again was he to feel such total satisfaction: at last he was doing what he had long obscurely felt he had been put on earth to do.

‘The Judgment’ opens with Georg Bendemann sitting at an open window from which, as from Kafka’s window, a bridge can be seen, daydreaming and writing a letter to a friend in far-off Russia. ‘Absent-minded Window-gazing’ had stopped there. Kafka had perhaps sensed that the scene was a kind of metaphor not just for modern life but also for the work of the writer, dreaming at his desk. Now, by bringing writing and
window-gazing into the same orbit he discovers the way to move forward. Just as Kafka’s story of the two brothers had been dismissed in a single sentence under the judgment of his uncle, so now both letter and daydreams are banished by Georg’s father. The aged, enfeebled man suddenly rears up in bed where Georg had solicitously – as he no doubt put it to himself – tried to cover him up, and issues a judgment on the writer and dreamer: ‘An innocent child, yes, that you were, truly, but still more truly have you been a devilish human being! – And therefore take note: I sentence you now to death by drowning.’

The terrible sentence is a strange kind of release for both Georg and the narrative: ‘Georg felt himself urged from the room, the crash with which his father fell on the bed behind him was still in his ears as he fled … Out of the front door he rushed, across the roadway, driven towards the water.’ The force which drives him on makes all hesitation, all dreaming on his part, a thing of the past. He swings himself over the side of the bridge, ‘like the distinguished gymnast he had once been in his youth, to his parents’ pride’, and then lets himself drop. ‘At this moment an unending stream of traffic was just going over the bridge.’

The indifferent landscape of the fragment about the rape has turned into an image of the world going on its way as Georg’s individual life of desire, frustration and compromise comes to an end. In the earlier fragment the narrator had been guilty but seemed unwilling to recognize his guilt; here he is guilty of no single evil act yet accepts his father’s judgment, and so brings his own life and the story to its end. But it is as though the acceptance of that judgment has allowed a new kind of writing to be born.

Two days later ‘The Stoker’ was written. Karl Rossmann, as the rich long first sentence tells us, has been packed off to America by his parents for having got a serving girl with child, and the ship he is on has now entered New York Harbour. But if America stands – as it has for so many immigrants and writers – for freedom, for the chance to forge one’s own life, one’s own narrative, in the wide open spaces and the bustling cities, then the story promptly turns its back on it. Realizing
suddenly that he has left his umbrella ‘down below’, Karl turns back and, descending into the bowels of the ship, finds, in those constraining corridors and boiler-rooms, the space where Kafka’s narrative can function. From now on Kafka too will turn his back on the temptations of the free-floating novel (whether realist or expressionist) and concentrate on the stokers.

Yet free-floating narrative will always exert its pull (Kafka does after all go on trying to write an ‘American’ novel), and it is precisely in the tension between the temptation and its refusal, between the letter-writing by the open window and the self-immolation demanded by the tyrannical father, that Kafka will discover the ever renewable springs of his narrative powers.

Just as the narrative of ‘The Judgment’ emerges in all its power and inevitability out of a redirection of energy that had earlier been spent half combating and half agreeing with the judgments of his family, so the arbitrary bodily movement described in the early letters and taken up in
Meditation
, the arm-jerking and head-twisting and all the rest of it, here gives way to Georg’s rediscovery of his earlier gymnastic ability, once the pride of his parents, now the means of his self-destruction. Two months after writing ‘The Judgment’ and ‘The Stoker’ Kafka completed the greatest of his early works, ‘The Metamorphosis’. As he wakes from uneasy sleep Gregor Samsa finds himself transformed into a gigantic insect and thus having to come to terms with a body he cannot imagine and yet which is indubitably his (or should we say ‘indubitably him’?). Forced to lie on his back, he can only glimpse his domelike brown belly, while ‘his numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes’. This is no erstwhile gymnast; on the contrary, it is someone who has for too long tried to live without listening to his body, which now exacts its terrible revenge.

The long dense story which follows charts with dreadful precision the way in which Gregor is gradually forced to learn about what Donne, in a very different context, called ‘my new found land’. And, as with Georg Bendemann, understanding arrives for Gregor, and a kind of peace, only with the recognition that he must accede to the wishes of his family, even –
perhaps especially – if those wishes concern his own disappearance. And, like the early rape fragment and ‘The Judgment’, this story ends with the world going on its way regardless of the passion of the protagonist. Here, though, this archetypal story of the body has to end with a celebration of the body as, having taken a tram out into the country, the parents gaze fondly at their sole remaining child, the sister Gregor had so wanted to help, ‘And it was like a confirmation of their new dreams and excellent intentions that at the end of their journey their daughter sprang to her feet first and stretched her young body.’

In ‘Reading Kafka’ Maurice Blanchot has argued persuasively that that last sentence is in a sense the most terrible in the entire story. At the same time every reader has recognized, however obscurely, that our reactions to this, as to all Kafka’s mature stories, are profoundly ambivalent. We experience horror at what happens to Gregor but at the same time a kind of joy at the fact that the story exists and allows us to read it. And if the reaction of the parents and sister mime out in the fiction our own inability to give meaning to Gregor’s ordeal and death, then that too is a part of the meaning of the whole. And if Gregor finds himself constrained more and more by his horrible body, till death comes as a merciful release, then for Kafka the writing of the story was itself a merciful release from the frustration of years, even if he later had doubts about its ending, and a renewal of that sense that ‘everything can be said … for everything, for the strangest fancies, there waits a great fire in which they perish and rise up again’. For now at last the excess of gesture, the arbitrary jerking of arms and legs, has been made the subject not of observation but of narrative; now at last his ‘profound talent for metamorphosing myself, which no one notices’, has found an outlet. Other writers have had the ability to empathize with a wide range of human beings; Kafka has now discovered in himself the unique gift of empathy with everything in the world, even a gigantic insect. It is a gift of which he will make full use in the years that follow.

But before that happens there is one story in the vein of ‘The Judgment’ that still needs to be written, though that does
not happen till almost two years later, in October 1914. ‘In the Penal Colony’ is the most repulsive story Kafka ever wrote, for while there is a kind of serenity in the way in which both Georg and Gregor meet their deaths, and a deep sympathy with their bewilderment and despair, this story is glacial throughout. The peculiar horror of the two earlier stories lies in the combination of classic purity in the unfolding of the narrative and the almost unbearable subject-matter; that of ‘In the Penal Colony’ lies in the sense that not only is the subject-matter foul but the story itself, replicating the narrative, seems to have become a sort of malfunctioning machine:

Though in death the officer’s look is ‘calm and convinced’, this is the result not of understanding but of madness, for there is no visible sign of ‘the promised redemption’, while ‘through the forehead went the point of the great iron spike’.

The reason for this may lie in the fact that though Kafka was always to look back to his breakthrough as a wonder, a form of grace, he was also perhaps beginning to feel uneasy with the form it had taken. The narratives he had suddenly found it in himself to write and which had, for the first time, given him the kind of satisfaction he had always hoped for from his writing, may have struck him as too extreme, too full of anguish and pathos. It is as though he feels that the ambition of these early stories is too Utopian, too Romantic. ‘In the Penal Colony’ dramatizes the painful discovery that Truth cannot be written, not even on the body.

Other factors were perhaps also involved in the change of direction that now began to manifest itself, chief among them the growing realization of the ambivalence of his desire for marriage, and the coming of the war. Perhaps, he must have begun to think, it was not his job or his bachelorhood or his ill-health which were preventing the full outburst of his talents, but something else, something which had to do with what man is and what art can achieve. And if he suffered as a
consequence, what was his suffering compared to what those at the front were experiencing?

Be that as it may, the work he did in the years 1914–17, much of which is included in the 1919 volume,
A Country Doctor
, shows a marked and significant shift of emphasis.