Collected Stories (5 page)

Kafka put together this volume of fourteen stories with the care of a Yeats or a Wallace Stevens planning a book of poems. ‘The Bucket Rider’, for example, which he had thought of including, he dropped at the last moment, presumably because it did not fit in with the rest of the volume. As it now stands the first and last stories call out to each other across the intervening gap, and each story (including ‘Eleven Sons’) adds a new twist to the central theme.

‘We have a new advocate, Dr. Bucephalus,’ the first story begins. ‘There is little in his appearance to remind you that he was once Alexander of Macedon’s battle charger. Of course, if you know his story, you are aware of something.’ But even the usher at the law courts, who presumably does not know his story, though he is, it is true, ‘a man with the professional appraisal of the regular small better at a racecourse’, finds himself ‘running an admiring eye over the advocate as he mounted the marble steps with a high action that made them ring beneath his feet’.

However, this high-stepping urge is now kept well under control, for ‘[n]owadays … there is no Alexander the Great’. Of course, even in his day ‘the gates of India were beyond reach, yet the King’s sword pointed the way to them’. Today, however, no one even points the way – for in which direction would he point? Many, it is true, still carry swords, ‘but only to brandish them, and the eye that tries to follow them is confused’. So, ‘perhaps it is really best to do as Bucephalus has done and absorb oneself in law books. In the quiet lamplight, his flanks unhampered by the thighs of a rider, free and far from the clamor of battle, he reads and turns the pages of our ancient tomes.’

A loss has been incurred, yet the last little paragraph is neither pathetic nor anguished, but merely resigned: ‘Perhaps
it is really best to do as Bucephalus has done.’ His flanks are at least unhampered by the thighs of any rider – yet we recall the high action of his legs as he strides up the staircase of the law courts and feel the waste: a rider pressing into those flanks would at least have given him a goal, a sense of direction. Instead, he consoles himself by poring over ancient law books, though whether he does this out of a sense of duty or desire or merely to pass the time, the story does not say.

Resignation and its cost is also the theme of the last story in the collection, ‘A Report to an Academy’. In what is probably the funniest story this great comic writer ever produced, an ape addresses a distinguished gathering, recounting how he dragged himself by sheer will-power out of his simian condition and up to his present position. The reason he has done this, he explains, is not from any innate desire on the part of apes to achieve the level of men, but rather that, having been captured and stuck in a tiny cage, he understood that his only chance of escape lay in imitating the men he could see walking about unconstrained before him.

He cannot, he explains, really comply with the wishes of the academy and speak about his life as an ape; that closed behind him when he was captured and was lost to sight for ever when he decided to transform himself. He can only recount the stages of his transformation: ‘I could never have achieved what I have done had I been stubbornly set on clinging to my origins, to the remembrances of my youth,’ he explains, unconsciously echoing the tone of countless self-made men, Kafka’s father among them. ‘In revenge, however, my memory of the past has closed the door against me more and more.’ As he grew increasingly at ease in the world of men, ‘the strong wind that blew after me out of my past began to slacken; today it is a gentle puff of air that plays around my heels’. ‘To put it plainly,’ he tells the gentlemen of the academy, ‘your life as apes … insofar as something of that kind lies behind you, cannot be farther removed from you than mine is from me.’ And yet, ‘everyone on earth feels a tickling at the heels; the small chimpanzee and the great Achilles alike’.

He has transformed himself, he explains, because he had
no option. Not in order to find freedom, that is too large a word, associated perhaps with his early life in the forests of Africa, but simply in order to find a way out of his horrible predicament. It is solely for that reason that he has learned to imitate the ways of men – smoking, spitting, drinking, talking. As a result of this single-minded effort he is now able to command the best hotel suites and address such august assemblies as this. And ‘[w]hen I come home late at night from banquets, from scientific receptions, from social gatherings, there sits waiting for me a half-trained little chimpanzee and I take comfort from her as apes do’. And yet, ‘[b]y day I cannot bear to see her; for she has the insane look of the bewildered half-broken animal in her eye; no one else sees it, but I do, and I cannot bear it’.

So, like Bucephalus, he has managed to accommodate to new conditions without nostalgia and without recrimination. It is a decent enough life, even, perhaps, in the eyes of some (the animal in the zoo, the soldier at the front) an enviable one, but it entails a hardening of oneself, a willed denial of the breeze licking about one’s heels, of the look in the eyes of the half-broken animal.

Nevertheless, this new-found balance testified to a second great creative period in Kafka’s life. This is the period of the parables, the aphorisms, the re-telling of the myths of Poseidon and Prometheus, the meditations on Ulysses and the sirens and on Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and of the innumerable perfect, tiny, yet ultimately mysterious stories that are as much a part of Kafka’s legacy as the terrible stories of 1912–14. This is the period of the great flowering of his gift for impersonation, and no writer has ever managed to empathize with such a diversity not just of living creatures but even of bridges, and balls in wooden games. (‘If the ball was unemployed, it spent most of the time strolling to and fro, its hands clasped behind its back, on the plateau, avoiding the paths … It had a rather straddling gait and maintained that it was not made for those narrow paths.’)

No story of those years shows more clearly how far Kafka has travelled from his earlier concerns and practices than the one called ‘The Cares of a Family Man’. It tells of Odradek,
not exactly an object and not quite a creature, with a name which is not precisely Slav and not exactly German:

It is not that Odradek once had some sort of intelligible shape and is now only ‘a broken-down remnant’; it has always been like that and though ‘the whole thing looks senseless enough’, it is, in its own way, ‘perfectly finished’. In any case close scrutiny is impossible, for Odradek will never let himself be caught. He lurks in stairs and garrets and disappears for months on end, but always returns to ‘our house’. When you ask him his name he squeaks ‘Odradek’, and when you ask where he lives he squeaks ‘no fixed abode’ and laughs – ‘but it is only the kind of laughter that has no lungs behind it. It sounds rather like the rustling of fallen leaves.’

Not surprisingly he gets on the nerves of the narrator, that
Hausvater
or ‘family man’. What is going to happen to Odradek? he wonders. Can he possibly die? But only that which is living can die, and ‘that does not apply to Odradek’. Is he then always going to be rolling down the stairs ‘before the feet of my children and my children’s children’? And though he does no harm as far as one can see, ‘the idea that he is likely to survive me I find almost painful’.

Kafka has come a long way from that early reading by Max Brod of the ‘little motor-car story’, when he confided to his diary that despite his desire for ‘something large and whole and well-shaped from beginning to end’, ‘every little piece of my story runs around homeless and drives me away from it’. Odradek is completely himself/itself, yet is neither large nor whole nor well-made, and revels in the fact that he/it has ‘no fixed abode’.

So long as Kafka imagined that art would help him enter a more meaningful realm than the one he inhabited in his daily
life, so long as he imagined that the test of the quality of his art lay in the unbroken nature of the work he put into it, then it was inevitable that he would turn on himself and his surroundings in bitterness and frustration: he was lazy, he was weak, he was unhealthy, his family was suffocating him, his bachelorhood was crippling him, the office was destroying him, marriage would be the end of him. But now it is as though he comes to accept the romantic folly of such dreams and such despair. An art that respects the truth, he now comes to see, can only express its own and our human limitations, show that we become immortal only to the extent that we cease to be human and alive only to the extent that we renounce dreams of wholeness and of belonging.

Odradek is nobody’s son and nobody’s father. He does not know the cares of a
Hausvater
and is not graspable in his essence, only in his movement and his otherness. Odradek does not mean anything: he moves, gets in the way, disturbs. And accepting that writing stories is bringing Odradeks into being gives Kafka back the sense that there need be no end to the writing of stories and that the freedom from human cares lies precisely in such writing. As for us, we should cease to ask of them what they
mean
and ask instead how they
move
– both how they move in their own space and how they move
us
.

Here, for example, is a little piece that Max Brod did not even consider worthy of inclusion in any collection of Kafka’s stories. Yet if it was all we had of Kafka it would immediately strike us as unique and irreplaceable. Though it is barely six lines long it is not a fragment in the sense that the rape piece was a fragment. It is only a fragment in the way an aphorism is a fragment, that is, as a questioning of the very notion of wholeness:

The German is considerably denser than the English. ‘Ran past’ misses the sense of ‘overran’ in
überlief
; ‘then’ hardly
does justice to
Nachträglich
, which means ‘retrospectively’ or ‘retroactively’; and ‘you’ of course fails to convey the fact the German uses the familiar
du
, with its suggestion that the Watchman is both a figure of authority and one to whom the speaker is very close. But even in English this is a piece of writing which demands to be read at least twice; indeed, as so often in Kafka, the narrative mimics the way we are forced to read it.

A story which told how I ran past the first watchman, hid myself from the second, overcame the third, and finally entered the castle or finally escaped from it, might be exciting to read, but, once read, it would lose all interest for us. Its fire would burn only so long as the end had not been reached, and we would feel, in reading it, as we do in our lives, that everything had gone by too fast, that the experience was somehow thin – but we would not have any idea how to slow things down, how to thicken and deepen the experience. Kafka has managed to do that. But he has done it by dramatizing the fact that we always
run past
and so are always
looking back
. Thinness of experience is what we are condemned to. (We would, of course, destroy the story, make it merely thin again, if we were to substitute for it some generalizing comment, such as ‘to hesitate is to be lost’, or ‘human self-awareness will not allow us to act naturally’.)

This little story is almost totally free of the anguish and pain characteristic of ‘The Judgment’ and the stories that followed it. It opens a space and lives in it, a space which we too can enter and in which we too can live, though without Kafka we would never have been able to do so. Just as Ulysses escaped the silence of the Sirens by a mixture of luck, innocence and cunning, so it is with Kafka and these stories of his middle period: he sails unscathed across the sea of narrative and takes his readers with him.