Kafka's Metamorphosis

Kafka’s Metamorphosis: Place of Execution for the Genres of European Culture.

Silke Beinssen-Hesse

Monash University

We tend to approach our literature with fairly set ideas.  Thus a novel has to have an ending; if it lacks one it is a poor novel. But while it may be a poor novel, it is so only as long as a poor novel is not considered to be of itself poor literature. Not just literary style but also literary form rely crucially on significant departures from what readers have come to expect. To give just one example: you will notice that quotes in a work of literature have more often than not been meaningfully misquoted.

If one looks at the origins of German literature in the seventeenth century one will realize that expressive and creative literature could only develop once the local language societies had developed in the educated reader a sense of the apt and proper in language and in genre. The language societies also fostered translations of the major works of European literature. These contained stories and styles which authors could copy but from which they could just as well depart, along with a fund of notable passages which could be quoted, misquoted or quoted out of context with at least some probability of the reader noticing and reacting. It is with a view to this use and abuse of models that I would like to discuss Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis here.

Due to the vast amount of secondary literature that has been published on Kafka it is not even necessary for us to use our own ingenuity to discover genres Kafka’s story could be likened to. In addition to its novella-like quality The Metamorphosis, we are told by various readers, resembles a fairy-tale, a tragedy, a parable, a myth, a legend, a fable, a cautionary tale, an animal story, an allegory, and a vastly inflated metaphor.

This sounds very confusing. But why would a reader bother to place the story in the pidgeon-hole of its genre in the first place? Why doesn’t she or he just enjoy it for what it is? What difference does it make whether we call the story a novella or fairy-tale or fable? There are several reasons for this panicked resort to genre. In the first place the story is not what one would call enjoyable but extremely worrying and as the whole intensity of that worry is already contained in the shock-line of the first sentence of the story, the timid reader has no time to escape. Moreover, we can’t enjoy the story for what it is simply because we do not know what it is. The story is impossible and yet it moves us as only things that are possible can move us.  As we don’t want to be left at the mercy of this alarming paradox, it is essential that we prove the events to be either real or unreal.

But it is also a fallacy to think that genres are mere moulds in which any substance can be successfully cast. In literature all form is relevant to meaning. It makes a difference whether we describe a phenomenon primarily with nouns, adjectives or verbs for in doing so we place it either with the objects (a stable world), the qualities (a world of dubious reliability), or the movements (a world of change). So the genres too each have intrinsic to them a way of seeing things, a purpose, a philosophy, and a definition of reality that the reader accepts for the moment as his own. Once the reader has caught a piece of writing in the cage of its genre he feels safe and can settle back comfortably, knowing what is expected of him and what he can expect. So what a temptation for the reader of a story that begins with the sentence

            As Gregor Samsa woke one morning from uneasy dreams he found     himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect

to waste no time about putting this monstrous vermin which, who knows, could be of extreme danger to his mental health, in the next best available cage. ‘It’s a fairy-tale’, the reader comforts himself, only to discover almost immediately that this cage has only three walls and the creature is still at large.  For cages are, unfortunately, of use only if they are completely intact. Even a single bar bent or missing can make them useless.

Our apparently fanciful image is of course suggested by the story itself. Whatever genre may mean in other literary contexts, in this story the reader’s search for genre prefigures and amplifies the family’s attitude to the disturbing metamorphosis of one of its members.  When the breadwinner of the family turns into a monstrous insect their immediate reaction is to lock him into his room. Later they discover he may not be as dangerous as he seemed and that, for the sake of humaneness, they cannot ignore him completely. There are moments when they open the door to him, only to lock it again in panic as he becomes the cause of new disturbances. The reader follows train. How many cages the reader tries and with what determination he covers their gaps or inadequacies, often risking his integrity, his dignity or his clear vision, will vary from case to case.

Why is The Metamorphosis not a fairy-tale? It does resemble fairy-tales insofar as it takes the unreal for granted. The motif of humans turning into animals is common in fairy-tales. Some of the characters too fit the traditional pattern. The father as supreme authority, the sister as faithful and compassionate companion,

the potentially helpful mother incapacitated by frailty or death all seem at home in the fairy-tale. Unfortunately these simple and absolute figures soon break down. The authority of the father, far from being that of the wise king or even the wicked wizard, is in actual fact non-existent. He is a dishonest, mediocre, powerless man, a servile man dressed up to look authoritative. The sister’s faithfulness and compassion quickly wears out. And the mother stays alive, eternally useless. Too schematic to be quite like real people, these characters are nevertheless not consistent and ideal enough for fairy-tale characters. The most essential characteristic of the fairy-tale is the redemption of the hero and the happy ending. But in this story the hero suffers a devastatingly depressing destruction; it is his erstwhile friends and eventual destroyers that finally enjoy the prospect of happiness. In other words: there are enough similarities to keep the blessed prospect of the fairy-tale ever before our eyes and enough departures from the genre to rule it out completely as a ‘solution’. We are tricked into placing our hopes on the laws of fairy-tale only to be shown that each one of them is utterly deceptive. Nothing turns out the way we would like it to turn out.

So we resort to the next cage. Perhaps the story is a tragedy. In tragedy an incomprehensible and unexpected turn of fate (does not The Metamorphosis describe just this?) hurls the hero, whom we admire and with whom we sympathize, from a position of power and promise to the depths of utter ruin so that our emotions are caught between fear and compassion.  In the genuine tragedy we are spared despair because we are left with the prospect of new order to come. The Metamorphosis does give us this prospect of the world righting itself again. What it does not give us is the hero ascending to a climax of glory while our admiring respect for him steadily increases, only to fall a prey to some small flaw or weakness in his all too human character. Gregor begins as an insect and ends as an insect. We are never sure whether his metamorphosis is due to some flaw in his character or just a senseless miracle. If we admire him then this admiration has none of the elements of hero-worship. Where the steep curve to glory veering to sudden destruction is replaced by a gradual and uneventful drying up of the main character, the prospect of happier days is not comforting but seems an unseemly and callous disregard for the uncanny confrontation with nothingness we have just experienced. Similarly, a sudden turn of fate has meaning only if we experience it as a turn and for that we would have to empathize with Gregor.  Yet however many pieces of information about this travelling salesman we accumulate, the task of assessing their significance is hopeless, when we are not given the opportunity to form an emotional relationship with him. Again, the cage of tragedy has gaps through which the story escapes us.

Perhaps Kafka is trying to tell us a fable with a moral such as the following: Those who allow themselves to become dependent on others will find that they are harbouring corruption and decay in their apparently idyllic home. Or: if you allow yourself to be swallowed up by the relentless commercial world, you will end as nothing more than a dried up piece of rubbish. But creatures of fable are never former human beings. They are simple human qualities usually exemplified by a stylized animal. Gregor is much too human, much too complex, much too real.

Some East German writers have read the The Metamorphosis as a cautionary tale describing the downfall of bourgeois society. But one can hardly speak of convincing economic or social analysis; and does the ending really indicate a new and better form of society?

What about an animal story? In this genre the pretence is upheld that the animal has a full range of human thoughts and emotions and consequently deserves our sympathy and compassion. It is, however, essential that the animal be a real animal, not a monster. Men turn into outsized animals only in fairy-tales and myths. Even though we do sympathize with this insect as with a human, Kafka is obviously not writing an animal story.

A myth?  Perhaps the story is a fertility myth, the myth of the Egyptian scarab, the myth of death and disintegration that leads to rejuvenation and new life? Gregor’s parents do appear to be rejuvenated as a result of his decline and his sister –insofar as her name, Grete,  resembles Gregor’s name she seems almost a reincarnation of the ‘dying king’ – is shown beautiful in her expectation of marriage and procreation. Even the Orphean motif of music as a regenerating force is found in the story. But the one essential element of myth, that alone can give it plausibility, is lacking. That is the conviction of the cyclic nature of life. Gregor’s work took him senselessly backwards and forwards along the train-tracks; his death has nothing to do with the fertilizing of new and invigorating life forces but is simply a drying up, not earth to earth but garbage to garbage, sealed off in the hygienic bin.

So is the story a legend? Is Gregor a saint, a martyr whose courageously und unselfishly suffered death brings redemption? First ruthlessly exploited by his firm and his family alike, he is then imprisoned, misunderstood, maltreated, humiliated, wounded, neglected, starved and ignominiously disposed of. In spite of all this he never becomes resentful or revengeful; when his sister proclaims that his death is the only thing that can save the family he humbly submits to it and does, it seems, achieve for the family some kind of redemption. As Christ died in the third hour of the afternoon with darkness ensuing, so Gregor dies in the third hour of the morning with dawn approaching. As Christ, the New Adam, took on the aspect of a sinner for the sake of mankind, so Gregor carries in his festering flesh the rotting apple of the Fall. As the martyrs might have been comforted by the music of hymns that aroused in them premonitions of celestial music and sacramental nourishment, so Gregor listens to his sister’s music that promises him the unknown food he had always longed for. – But the story is not a legend either. Martyrs may be slain like sacrificial animals but never under any circumstances are they animals. The whole genre of the legend relies on the contrast between the utter humiliation of the human being, to the point where he is slaughtered like an animal, and the supreme glory of the resurrected martyr, whose bliss is far beyond anything man deserves or could envisage. Gregor is an animal. He is not slaughtered, but left to die. He is certainly not resurrected to a life of bliss. Finally, the one thing essential to the concept of martyr is that the redemption he brings be identical with man’s ultimate redemption through Christ and stand in no direct relationship to his removal from a real life situation. Gregor, however, dies because he is an impediment, a nuisance to his family. By taking all responsibility upon himself he had turned the other members of his family into useless and pretentious parasites.

Crime and punishment resulting from the violation of family laws and policies is the material of the Icelandic saga and determines its structure as a distinctive genre. The harshly exiled member of the family, condemned for some breach of family law, which is based on the dynamics of family life rather than on love or morality as we know it, does appear to bear some resemblance to the Gregor of Kafka’s story. The crude realism of the Saga is traditionally surrendered only at one point, when a violent man turns into a werewolf, an image of complete loss of temper and control that is likely to endanger all law and order. Gregor’s metamorphosis to a beetle is of an almost opposite nature. The Saga rambles on and on from generation to generation, presenting us with ever new variations of typical situations. It proves by recurrence – statistically, so to speak – the necessity of laws and illustrates the dire consequences of breaking them. With its focus on the family unit and its outcast son, who had prematurely and therefore unrightfully assumed the responsibilities of the father, Kafka’s story bears resemblances to the Saga. But the uniqueness of this family’s misfortune, which we feel could not recur in a million years, directly opposes the whole concept of the Saga, as does the unreality of the event. Even Dostojewski’s more sophisticated family sagas (with which Kafka was well acquainted) cannot give the Metamorphosis definition.

A parable? Maybe, but it lacks the simplicity and the definitive solution characteristic of biblical parable. If it is a parable, it is one without obvious application or explanatory interpretation, one that arouses our desire to know the true path to justice and then peremptorily dismisses us.

Allegory? Whatever structures we may impose on the story, the fine psychological shading of the beetle, Gregor, contradicts an allegoric intention on the part of Kafka. All the same, more than one Kafka interpreter has tried his luck with this genre, bending the story to suit his preconceptions.

An inflated metaphor? If this could be conceived as a genre it must rely centrally on a merging of image and reality to produce a constant flow of meaningful ideas. But the central point of Kafka’s story is that ‘reality’ and ‘image’ are successive stages, that they are mutually exclusive real states that cannot and must not be identified with each other.

A novella? In line with this genre we have a real life situation that gives stronger emphasis to event than to character. As in the novella the author economises by resorting to symbols (e.g. the picture of the woman in the boa as alluding to sex, the apple with which the father pelts his son with its biblical overtones, the hospital across the road as a pointer in the direction of sickness) to create an impression of depth in his story. The final episode can be seen in the nature of a novella frame that helps us to gain perspective on turbulent extraordinary events (though it is linked a little too closely to the story to fulfil this function adequately) and the story recounts an extraordinary event, ‘eine sich ereignende unerhörte Begebenheit’. But in essence the novella is a genre intent on making us realize that the near to impossible, the totally unlikely und unforeseeable is actually possible. It tends to insist on giving us plausibly sounding details concerning the time and place of occurrence, as though to offer us, the readers, the chance to check the accuracy of the account given. Where the Romantic novella appears to depart from this pattern and slide into fairy-tale, it is on the whole an artistically clumsy insistence on the reality of the occult and supernatural. Kafka’s story could have been written as a novella to warn us of the dangers of mental illness with its preposterous hallucinations. But it was not. If Gregor was suffering from hallucinations, his view of the family would show obvious distortions; likewise the family could not react as they do. The central and characteristic idea of the novella is missing. Kafka is not trying to nudge us out of our acceptance of a self-satisfied, stable Biedermeier world by showing us that the improbable is by no means to be confused with the impossible. Kafka’s story shocks far more deeply.

What then is Kafka doing? I think that this question need not necessarily be construed as meaning ‘what did he set out to do’ but rather ‘what does he, intentionally or unintentionally succeed in doing?’ In view of the literally thousands of reader reactions to Kafka that are available to us today, we tread on firmer ground here than if we delve into Kafka’s motives. And is there a writer who really knows and understands what he is doing to his readers?

There can be little doubt that a story like The Metamorphosis makes us painfully aware just how much our interpretation of the world relies on the conventions of literary genre. If we can place a story in a known genre it assumes meaning and our minds are at peace.  If this crutch is taken from us we flounder. The Metamorphosis forces us to search for a meaning independent of genre and we are as hopelessly lost as we would be if we tried to think without the aid of language. Of all Kafka’s stories none has the impact of The Metamorphosis, perhaps because none has hit at something so basic to the condition of man and so terrifying.

Is it likely that Kafka knew what he was doing? Memories of his own dreams, shaped partly by the dream structures described by Freud and then amalgamated with realities similar to those of his own daily life, to which the dreams obviously stood in some impenetrably complicated relationship, would have permitted Kafka to perform the apparently simple yet utterly revolutionary act of writing without regard to genre. Whether or not he then consciously allowed his memories of genre to influence the story insofar as they did not impede its natural course, whether he himself used genre in a futile attempt to understand himself as he wrote, must remain a moot point. Ultimately we can be nothing but readers. Returning to my introduction I would suggest that what Kafka does in this story is an extreme manifestation of what all great writers have done throughout the ages, namely broken down the set patterns of meaning that had established themselves with accepted genres by giving voice to experiences so original that they no longer fitted into conventional moulds.

While some writers did this by letting their stories wear conventional genres like a fancy-dress costume, missing no opportunities for drawing attention to outmoded fashions, others developed new genres in keeping with their new visions.  In The Metamorphosis Kafka is a radical of the former group. He doesn’t just ridicule, he destroys, and not one genre at a time but the whole wardrobe containing the dress-ups of European culture.  By doing this he faces his prudish and evasive readers to take their first look at naked reality, the animal in man, to pick up the images of the story. The Metamorphosis proclaims the revolution. Other stories follow it up.  And Kafka’s novels then lead the novel ad absurdum.

While it would be wrong to suggest that The Metamorphosis represents a true new genre, Kafka was certainly even at this early stage well on the way to developing one. The Trial , finished not very much later, could perhaps be considered in this light.

As it is difficult to speak about anything that has no name, I will tentatively call Kafka’s new genre a dysaction. The dysaction treats of disturbed, disrupted, inconsistent, inappropriate action.  Josef K’s actions have no obvious continuity; the chapters of the book seem to be placed in fortuitous order. They are disorientated in time and space, labyrinthine; one is never sure whether what happens is meaningful in itself or just as a gesture or symbol, whether it is hallucinatory or real, whether it is self-willed action or action determined by some force that cannot be controlled or understood. The story has no frame of reference, no underlying ideology, no plot. Though unlike many of Kafka’s works it has an end, it appears to be fragmentary because the end comes abruptly, as an annoyance rather than as a logical conclusion to what went before.

The genre of the dysaction shows that action cannot be abolished because it is the essence of life. The protagonist must do something; even doing nothing is refusing, or neglecting, or omitting to do something. The dysaction also shows that it is impossible for a human being to act without envisaging a meaning for this action. On the other hand it is impossible to prove any human action to be meaningless. The dysaction shows that men have to live in time and space, even though both these categories do not refer to reliably real phenomena.

As every genre should, the dysaction moulds the experience of the reader to suit its own assumptions. As the reader too is a human being he must do things in the process of living and reading is one of them. Kafka provides him with a fair amount of reading. As the reader too finds it impossible to act without envisaging a meaning for such action , Kafka stimulates him to look for meaning and satisfy himself. He forces the reader to accept the fact that anything material must occur in time and space, even if this makes no real sense, and therefore does not give his chapters the looser form of the cycle. Lastly no reader will find it possible to prove the chapters of this tale meaningless. In other words, the form of Kafka’s dysaction , its subject matter and themes, and the reader’s experience all amount to the same thing and reinforce each other. This is characteristic of the true genre.

What Kafka perhaps realized more than any other writer (though Goethe and Schiller were outspoken on this point they also did much to mislead the reader) is that the writer’s gift to the world is not the ideas he propounds but genre: a new, contemporary though by the nature of things also temporary form of solution to the besetting fears and problems of life. Kafka’s strange fusion of negativity and progressiveness finds expression in many of his aphorisms and it is with two of these that we will close this investigation.

Der Unterschied zwischen dem ‘Ja’ und ‘Nein’, das er seinen Zeitgenossen sagt, und jenem, das er eigentlich zu sagen hätte, dürfte dem vom Tod und Leben entsprechen, ist auch nur ebenso ahnungsweise für ihn fassbar.

Die Kraft zum Verneinen, dieser natürlichsten Äußerung des immerfort sich verändernden, erneuernden, absterbenden, auflebenden menschlichen Kämpferorganismus, haben wir immer, den Mut aber nicht, während doch Leben Verneinen ist, also Verneinung Bejahung.

Footnotes:

1. Eberhard Frey Franz Kafkas Erzählstil, Bern, 1970 has made this point very clearly.

2. viz. Benno von Wiese Die deutsche Novelle von Goethe bis Kafka, Bd. 2, Düsseldorf 1962, pp. 319-354.

3. A good summary of works that treat The Metamorphosis as a true or deviating fairy-tale is given by Peter U. Beicken Franz Kafka. Eine kritische Einführung in die Forschung. Frankfurt/Main, 1974, p.263 f. Edwin Honig Dark Conceit. The Making of Allegory. Evanston (Illinois), 1959 is one of the many who see the story as an allegory.  Heinz Politzer consistently speaks of the story as a parable. Beside von Wiese, M. Sonnenfeld “Parallels in ‘Novelle’ and ‘Verwandlung’” In: Symposium 14, 1960, No.3, p.221-225 also sees the story as a novella. Walter H. Sokel uses the term tragedy as relevant to Kafka’s writings. Kurt Weinberg’s monumental book Kafka’s Dichtungen. Die Travestien des Mythos. Bern/München 1963 paves the way for the use of categories such as myth, legend and allegory. Other genres are perhaps more often implied than actually named. Parable and fable aare both terms that Kafka himself applies to certain of his writings, though probably with ironic undertones.

4. Andre Jolles’ controversial book Einfache Formen, Darmstadt 1959, first published in 1930, is probably the earliest to develop a theory of genre suitable as a basis to our approach.

Silke Beinssen-Hesse

Monash University

The Wide Appeal of Franz Kafka

The Wide Appeal of Franz Kafka

Silke Hesse

Public lecture 1974 (revised)

This month sees the 50^th anniversary of the death of Franz Kafka. He died of tuberculosis, the artists’ illness. If he were still alive he would now be approaching his 91^st birthday.

An amazing thought that Kafka could still be alive today! It is, no doubt, a blessing that he did not fall into the hands of Hitler’s henchmen or

have to stand by helplessly and watch his sisters die in Nazi concentration camps. For Kafka was Jewish and came from Prague, a city in the very heart of the Austro-Hungarian lands that Hitler gained control of in 1934.

Perhaps it was also a blessing that he never saw his daring and nightmarish images and imaginings turn into realities. He might have worried whether his Penal Colony had dropped the seed of an idea into some torturer’s mind.

There are Kafka critics who feel he had no right to give voice to such horrors. But what writer can tell to whom his books will be a warning and to whom a temptation? What we know for facts is that Hitler banned his writings and that he was not widely known in Germany till some years after the war.

No one would deny that he had the terrible gift of foresight. Prophecy is of course the word more appropriate to the Jewish tradition in which he was steeped, even though he was not a pious Jew. Fifty years after his death one has reason to wonder whether history may not eventually give him the gigantic proportions of Old Testament figures.

So what did Kafka achieve in the ninety years since his birth? Strangely enough, perhaps the greatest achievement is that his work survived though it was earmarked for destruction.

The three novels and the two volumes of short stories he left behind were considered by his best friend, Max Brod, to be of greater importance than Kafka’s request to have them, or at least most of them, destroyed after his death.

It is possible that Franz Kafka, who subordinated his life’s happiness to his need to be an author, would have considered this a triumph and would not have accused Brod of betraying him. Today we are grateful that Brod insisted on preserving every relic of his friend,  including the most personal documents. For Kafka as a man as much as a writer can help us to understand many things that are characteristic of our times.

Unfortunately literary analyses frequently leave him rather resembling a slaughtered sacrificial animal. But then Kafka knew the value of martyrdom. In his diaries he sees his life at the crossroads between marriage and martyrdom and he chooses the latter. It is of course only human for the martyr to ask to be spared. But with the exception of one or two things he asked his final companion, Dora Dymant, to burn Kafka made no attempt to destroy his own writings. On the contrary, on his deathbed he was concerned with correcting one of his last stories. So he did not forestall the possibility of his posthumous ‘martyrdom’ and this can probably be taken as a form  of acquiescence. In view of this, literary analysts should feel they have a moral obligation to be gentle and tactful wherever possible and  it seems most unfortunate that some have shown an instinct for torture worthy of concentration camp practices. If Kafka escaped in life, he often did not escape in death.

Kafka’s writings survived.  This is the first of his achievements. But in addition to this mere survival they have fascinated unprecedented numbers of readers, and that in spite of their nightmarish images. As early as 1958, thirteen hundred titles of books, essays and articles on Kafka could be collected.  Today, sixteen years later, there are thousands. I do not know any other author on whom so many people have wished to comment in so short a span of time. The comments have come from all over the world, though American, French, English and German readers have been in the forefront of Kafka scholarship.  I have been told  that most English Departments in America, Britain and Australia include him in their syllabuses though he did not write in English.  But because his language is so beautifully simple and lucid he can be translated with almost no loss of impact. In the Socialist sphere, where Kafka’s writings were banned for many years, a politically significant congress was more recently convened to argue the importance of  having his works removed from the Index. Numbers of modern writers of stature have admitted to being inspired and influenced by Kafka.  It might almost be argued that he inaugurated a new era in world literature.

Why does Kafka have this wide appeal?

It is a question which at this stage of his reception seems to have almost more urgency than the direct interpretation of his works. Literary scholars often approach literature with a fairly set idea of what they think it ought to be.

This approach can be justified, up to a point, insofar as it emphasises context and tradition and tries to set standards of social responsibility.

Of course the secondary literature available on most authors is not extensive enough to provide a reliable critical consensus. In the case of Kafka, however, the dogmatic approach, which works with assumptions about an ideal literature, can now be supplemented with an inquiry into what educated readers have actually found interesting and appealing. This provides us with a unique opportunity, which should not be wasted, for we are still very much on the fringes of knowing what the importance of literature as a social phenomenon can or should be.

There are, for example, people who tell us that literature should eternalise what is worthwhile and timeless in life. Others contend that literature has a duty to comment on contemporary society and help us to live our lives in full awareness of the historical moment and the ethical demands it makes on us. Still others see literature as a medium of entertainment and personal enjoyment.

Why is Kafka read by so many people, how is he read and what is the basis of his wide appeal?

It is this question that I should like to consider tonight.

Looking at the titles and sub-titles of books and articles on Kafka one group emerges which is concerned with the emotional effect, better the fascination, Franz Kafka’s writings have for readers.

Tragedy and Irony in the Works of Franz Kafka.

The Objective Depiction of Absurdity.

The Grotesque.

The Indestructible Hope, are relevant titles here.

For the sake of brevity I shall sum up the findings: In the first place Kafka’s stories are, to use a slight exaggeration, thrillers.

They are of course not cheap thrillers that pander to the audience’s emotional appetites. They are thrillers, one might say, that help to refine the emotional make-up of readers.

All Kafka’s works depict situations of emotional stress.

His heroes find themselves in strange worlds where they do not feel at home. They are lost in labyrinthine places, in impenetrable darkness, ignorant of every law or causality that could explain or govern their situation, as in The Castle.

They are indicted without knowing what their crime is, as in The Trial.

They wake up to find themselves transformed into detestable sub-human creatures, as in ‘The Metamorphosis’.

They are condemned to death by their own fathers though no real offences seem to have been committed, as in ‘The Judgement’.

They are tortured by the fear of unknown enemies, as in ‘The Burrow’.

Or tortured by the fulfilment of their wishes. (‘Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor’)

They are systematically excluded and ostracised by society (The Castle)

They starve themselves to death because the world can offer them no acceptable nourishment (‘The Hungerartist’).

Horror, annoyance, perplexity, uneasy laughter, confusion, fear are typical reactions on the part of readers.

How does this compare with what we know as tragedy, a more conventionally accepted literary emotion?

We are aware, since Aristotle, that it is the aim of tragedy to purge our everyday emotions by arousing in us feelings of both fear and compassion.

Fear and compassion are at least to some extent incompatible emotions because they imply different perspectives on a situation. The audience is forced to cope with tension; an effort of self-discipline is needed. Herein lies the educational value of tragedy.

The reader of Kafka’s stories faces a far more chaotic emotional situation. He is caught between laughter and tears, screams and paralysed silence, hope and despair. To cope with emotional extremes such as these all at the one time is a feat of self-discipline many times as great as that demanded by traditional tragedy. And for those able to come to grips with the situation a far richer experience of life becomes possible. In a tragic view of life all potentially comic elements have to be ignored. Only one of these two mutually exclusive emotional modes can be assumed. In Kafka’s works, however, you have to cope with everything at one and the same time.

Kafka’s typical world is a world that is unreal but that we nevertheless experience as real. In its peculiar mixture of the everyday and the fantastic it is similar to the world of dream: an unreal world which we may nevertheless experience in a very real sense every night.

Dream in itself is something that tends to worry and puzzle us. Throughout the ages many attempts have been made to define its nature and purpose.  None have made our experience of dreams easier to cope with. For dream is the one area where conscious self-discipline is ruled out and we are at the mercy of the psychic powers that sway us. The possibility of dividing life neatly into, for example, the emotional modes of tragedy and comedy is taken from us.

As readers of Kafka’s short stories, of course, we are free agents and believe ourselves to be in command of our faculties.  But by luring us into an area of experience like the dream, in which there are no conventions to fall back on, Kafka urges us to doubt and question our certainties.  We are more likely to feel the need to come to grips with our emotional shortcomings.

Kafka gives us neither happy endings nor drastic catastrophes which would allow us to channel our emotions retrospectively. He gives us no answers to our questions either.

This is the point where his stories differ decisively from what we are accustomed to call a thriller. The thriller too may make use of the full range of emotional experience. But in the end it puts our minds at rest and leaves us stimulated, titillated and satisfied.

Kafka’s stories, however, usually have no ending. If they do seem to have one it tends to be an unsatisfactory ending that makes us uneasy, unable to shake the story off, haunted by it.

The only way to cope with Kafka’s stories is by genuinely mastering your emotions. More often, of course, the reader will be like the visitor to the circus in Kafka’s little story ‘On the Gallery’ who, baffled by the opaqueness of reality, sinks into something like a heavy dream in which he weeps without knowing it.

There will always be some people whom life itself offers the kind of experience that Kafka’s stories give to their readers. War victims, thrown together in fugitive camps, may come across the funny, the sad, the horrible, the absurd, the grotesque, the serene and the fearsome all in the course of a morning. Many are driven mad by such situations. Kafka’s writing does what perhaps only literature can do: create the playing fields and testing grounds in which we can train our emotions in readiness for such situations. Kafka’s contribution in this area is of unique importance mainly because it is such a significant extension to what was on offer before his time.

Kafka’s situations are abstract and anonymous enough to make it impossible for us to come up with ready-made solutions to ready-made real life situations.

You cannot approach The Trial with the formula: If I was accused of a crime I had not committed…”  The novel simply cannot be read in that way. The point is that Joseph K. does not know of what crime he is accused, does not know whether he is guilty, does not even know for sure whether he is accused and not by whom. The reader is given nothing at all to hold on to. He either drowns or learns to swim.

It is interesting to look at the many publications on Kafka in this context. The critics seem to be incorrigible. Again and again they try to force the stories into well-known patterns. In their annoyance they even condemn Kafka for not succeeding in putting their minds at ease. The minute their work is published, of course, other critics will pounce on them and point out the wrong-headedness of their efforts.

 Kafka was a man at the vanguard of his times. His era was increasingly becoming one of dictatorships and wars, concentration camps and refugee camps: the First World War, the Russian revolution, pogroms against Polish Jews and their flight to an unwelcoming Germany, the Armenian genocide all took place in the years when Kafka was writing his major works.  It was also an era in which the implications of modern technology, enormously boosted by the Great War, were becoming somewhat frightening. Where would all this lead? Will there be a time when we send our convicts to the moon?  The attics of Kafka’s Trial  where the air cannot be breathed by normal lungs, or the strange wintery terrain of The Castle, where one walks without ever making progress, might appear like an understatement to a convict on the moon.

For some readers of Kafka his stories may be thrillers.  But this group is actually relatively small within the mass of secondary literature on Kafka. We have to face up to the uncomfortable fact that Kafka’s works are read in many ways. Moreover, they seem to act as a kind of trigger to the creative urges of people who are not fully creative themselves. Innumerable writers on Kafka have used him as a pretext to inform the world of their own opinions and ideas. Even Germanists with a reputation for impeccable scholarly detachment are caught out when they begin to expound their ideas on Kafka. Kafka criticism has almost blown the bottom out of the very concept of detached and scholarly literary studies.

But this phenomenon of widespread personal interpretation can also be described more sympathetically. Kafka’s stories make people creative. And in the age of machines or, more recently, computers creativity has become an important value. We need people with the meaningful ideas that machines cannot generate. Computers have to be fed and the more computers we have the more input we need for them. It is therefore important that our society should train people to be creative.

But can one train people to be creative? How is this to be done? Supplying children with colouring-in books is now often frowned upon because of its dogmatic approach to shapes. Similar is the method of supplying students with the first sentence or paragraph of their compositions. In the performing arts – music, drama, recitation – we are concerned with a far more sophisticated form of colouring in, perhaps better described as collaboration. The performers give life, colour and personality to the ideas and structures another has conceived. Kafka was extremely interested in the performing arts. In the area of drama it was the semi-improvised Yiddish folk-theatre that aroused his unbridled enthusiasm. Here the actors were allowed more creative scope than in conventional drama. Kafka was also something of a performer himself; his recitations of his own works were described as brilliant by his friends.

There are other methods that stimulate creativity that Kafka knew and manifestly studied. One of them is the parable. The New Testament provides perhaps one of the best demonstrations of the parable as a teaching aid. But Jewish teachers, particularly the Hassidim, mystics whose religious attitudes and methods were very familiar to Kafka, were also well aware of the advantages of teaching by parable. The procedure can be described in the following way. A story is told to illustrate, enlarge upon or explain a general or abstract concept or problem. The relation between the story and the intention that triggered it off is however ambiguous. The pupil or disciple is then left to work out the connections. In the course of doing this he will draw on his experiences and attitudes, grapple with his own problems and try to find access to the superior mind of the teacher who provided the parable.  The solution which the teacher finally gives is then like the last sentence of a long essay.

One of the best known Biblical parables is that of the sower. It tells us that the word of God is like a seed which the sower sows on the land. Various things can happen to it. Before Jesus then utters his warnings the disciples are given time to delve into their own minds and search their souls for the mistakes they, as fallible individuals, would be prone to make. Kafka, however, wrote parables without clear-cut resolutions. The most famous of them is that uttered by the priest in his novel The Trial; it is entitled ‘Before the Law’. He also wrote a small piece of quasi theory entitled ‘Of Parables’. (And needless to say a Germanist has written a book on Kafka entitled Parable and Paradox.)

Another stimulus in the direction of creative thought is the fairy-tale. I have had the opportunity to observe creative reactions to fairy-tales in children. One child who was worried by the thought of death and trying to familiarize herself with the idea of resurrection dressed up as Snow-White for the better part of several months. For, resurrected by the kindly dwarves, this fairy-tale princess had managed to defy the murderous intentions of her wicked stepmother again and again. Another little girl who wanted to be kind and loving to a handicapped child of whom she was a little frightened had to have ‘The Frog-Prince’ read to her every night for weeks.  ‘Little Red Riding-Hood’ and ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ were also exceedingly popular fairy-tales at certain turning points in the lives of these children.

Kafka loved fairy-tales. He was particularly fond of the Yiddish fairy-tales collected by Perez. There are numerous fairy-tale motifs in his works. Typical are those of the castle or of human beings transformed into animals. As in the many fairy-tales that use the castle motif, Kafka’s castle is the symbol of authority. But unlike what we would expect in a fairy-tale, Kafka’s story never makes it clear whether this authority is good or bad, meaningful or senseless, actual or imagined. Again, Kafka is less explicit and therefore less restrictive to the reader’s imagination than his model.

Like the fairy-tale, with which it has much in common, myth helped early cultures come to grips with their problems. But the psychoanalysts of recent times  would also never have formulated their ideas so well had they not had Oedipus and other mythical figures to prop them against. In a number of Kafka’s short prose pieces too we encounter acquaintances from Greek mythology: Poseidon, Prometheus and the Sirens come to mind. Were it not for their names we might find it hard to recognise them. This has led one Germanist to suspect that more of these figures could be haunting Kafka’s work incognito. The Travesties of Myth he calls his book on Kafka. Other authors prefer to see Kafka as the creator of new myths that have more bearing on our times.

A further lubricant of creative motors well-known to students of literature is the fragment or unfinished work. In the German tradition one of these, the chapbook of Dr Faustus, a fragmentary, ambitious, yet muddled book that concerns itself with an interesting legend, has given rise to literally hundreds of plays, poems and novels. Among them is the most monumental work of German literature, Goethe’s Faust. A fragmentary, unfinished and muddled book that treats potentially good material cries out to be rewritten and fixed up. Kafka knew this too. All his novels and many of his stories are fragments. Occasionally when questioned by friends like Max Brod Kafka would venture an opinion on how his stories might be ended. But he never put these endings down on paper. Many readers, including his best friend Brod, have fallen into the trap and treated Kafka’s books as genuinely and unfortunately unfinished and incomplete.

If one looks at the four forms I have discussed, that is the parable, the fairy-tale, myth and, more specifically, the fragmentary and inconsistently written Faust-legend, one is surprised that they all fit into one category. They are all what is known as folk-literature. In essence, folk-literature is literature that people, even the quite uneducated, take up imaginatively and feel free to work on or tamper with because there is no recognized authorial ownership. This and not its anonymity as such is its distinguishing characteristic.

It seems to me possible and worthwhile to look at Kafka’s works in the light of their being modern-day folk-literature: a literature that stimulates the creativity of readers or better still, that actually invites them to be creative.  Perhaps I am not a good test case because my friends know that I have spent time studying Kafka, but again and again people have come up to me with remarks like ‘it’s been just like Kafka today’. If I then took the opportunity to ask them why, a neat little story would be produced. And what was originally, in many cases, a most annoying situation had turned into something fascinating, grotesquely comic or fantastically absurd, something which one could view in a detached way, of which one was no longer the victim but which one manipulated and mastered imaginatively. Read as folk-literature Kafka’s writings require a new and different yardstick. Maximum applicability making possible maximum initiative on the part of the reader becomes an appropriate standard to assess his stories.

Of course folk-literature too is about something. It is usually something that can be described in relatively general terms. It is not easy to say what Kafka writes about if you do not want to fall into the trap of either just recounting his stories or of giving them interpretations that are too specific. To me the best way to approach Kafka’s themes is over the bridge of Judaism. Kafka was intensely interested in all aspects of Judaism: Hassidic mysticism, Yiddish culture, Zionism, Anti-Semitism, the Kabala, Hebrew learning. There are certain recurring themes that we find in Judaist thought that we also find in Kafka.

In the first place there is the absolute authority of God and within the family of the father. Authority is the issue involved when we talk about the force of convention, the ethics of obedience, the generation gap and political dictatorship.  These are all modern problems and they are all problems Kafka concerns himself with. The force of convention is a theme in ‘Investigations of a Dog’. The ethics of obedience are a theme in ‘The Penal Colony’. The unquestioned authority of the father dominates ‘The Judgment’. The Castle is perceived as the seat of some kind of absolute rule.

Justice juxtaposed with the need to live according to laws that have no very apparent relation to everyday morality is another Judaist preoccupation that finds its parallels in modern thought. Kafka’s novel The Trial is concerned with almost every aspect of such questionable justice.

The mortal sickness of sin as described in the Old Testament attained new relevance in the twentieth century with Freud. While the close relationship between psychic and psychosomatic illness on the one hand and misdemeanour and immorality on the other has not been forgotten, the need to see sin in relation to the fundamental and inevitable imperfection of man and sickness as a universally active component of human nature has only been fully discovered in this century. In his meditations Kafka speaks a lot about the biblical Fall of Man.

Revelation through vision and dream have always been an important part of Jewish experience. Freud and Jung brought dream to the notice of modern man. Kafka’s world is a dream world.

Outsiderdom and persecution, homelessness and uprootedness have been the lot of the Jewish people for two thousand years; they have also been the fate of millions of Europeans in Kafka’s century.  All Kafka’s heroes seem to be homeless, uprooted, persecuted outcasts.

There are, of course, many analysts who prefer to turn to Kafka’s own biography for a description of his typical themes. And Kafka undoubtedly did have a father problem himself.  But he had it at least partly because he was a Jew. A writer’s biography is a difficult thing to assess. Vastly different interpretations are possible and, as was said initially, errors of tact can be committed that would make even a dead writer turn in his grave. After much consideration I am convinced that an investigation of Kafka’s Judaism gives us a better grip on his themes than his biography.

Of course we must be careful. Kafka did not write for Jews in the manner of a Jewish national poet. It was rather that he showed the general relevance of Jewish themes to the human condition and their particular relevance to the crisis of Christian culture in which his generation found themselves.  Throughout the ages Christian culture has never fully integrated the Old Testament and much that has gone wrong with Europe in the course of the centuries can be seen in the light of this inconsistency or failure.

And to mention here one more genre that might have influenced Kafka: The modern medium of film as it was developing in Kafka’s Expressionist generation would have helped his readers to imagine his world particularly vividly. Labyrinthine buildings, human animals, automaton-like humans, intricate machines, hierarchies of authority – and a complete absence of nature: these are the very modern filmic images through which Kafka speaks. Such images from a popular medium allow age-old concerns to find new expression and become accessible and relevant for contemporary readers once again.

Kafka wrote for a wide cross-section of readers from different spheres of society but , more specifically, he also wrote for three different types of readers. For the passively receptive his writings are a sophisticated thriller which they tackle emotionally. For the actively assimilating his writings are an impulse in the direction of a creative mastering of life.  And there is a third potential audience. For the informed reader his writings become comments on contemporary issues and contributions to new areas of understanding. Let us turn to the third audience, or better perhaps to the third group of audiences.

One of these small sub-groups of the informed audience can be imagined as consisting of sociologists and psychologists. Among the thousands of books on Kafka we spoke about initially there is one that bears the sub-title  The Modern Mind and another The Disinherited Mind. More than one writer has seen the characteristic traits of Kafka’s non-heroes in the light of what is typical of the modern mind. Lack of instinct, lack of humour, lack of insight, lack of affectionateness, lack of flexibility, lack of kindness and consideration, lack of faith: all these are characteristics of modern man if we give credence to the Kafka specialists.

In the author orientated character studies of modern man one error often crops up. We spoke earlier of critics making the rather dangerous assumption that Kafka was inadvertently portraying himself or perhaps worse, advocating himself.  The man his friends describe is, however, almost the exact opposite of Kafka’s heroes. For example, Kafka was a great lover of nature and natural living. (It is always a temptation for students of literature to muddle the realms of biography and the created work.) Read as a study of the modern mind Kafka’s work assumes importance as the exact and detailed description of a modern malaise on the basis of which diagnosis and treatment might become possible. Perhaps foremost among the social psychologists writing on Kafka is Erich Heller.

Another potential sub-group of the informed audience is the psychoanalysts or psychiatrists.  Kafka’s era was the age of psychoanalysis. Like many contemporary intellectuals he was interested in this field of study and had read Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams early in his career.  But he was also very critical of psychological approaches. There are cries in his diary of ‘psychology, never again!’. Kafka must be seen, I think, not as a disciple of the great psychoanalysts – Freud, Silberer, Ernest Jones, Jung, Adler are names that come to mind – but as an original contributor to this field of investigation. In many ways he was more honest and realistic than the masters, for whereas these often treated the myths concerning the human mind they took to inventing as plain realities, Kafka never for a moment suggests that his myths are not literature. I think it was Jung who saw the poet as the man who expresses in symbols that which can not yet be adequately described in scientific language. Kafka’s contribution to psychoanalysis can be seen in this light. There is an early not entirely successful story of Kafka’s entitled ‘Description of a Struggle’ which is an intricate, though for the reader somewhat confusing analysis of the levels of consciousness to be found within the human mind. Kafka’s last great novel, The Castle, reads like a description of what Jung would have called the process of individuation and can be a contribution to understanding it. That the notion of a ‘guilt complex’, another psychoanalytic formulation, has bearing on The Trial seems obvious.

One can distinguish a third sub-group of the informed audience, probably the smallest of them all. If one studies Kafka’s diaries and letters closely in conjunction with his works one stumbles upon the rather amazing realization that particularly one group of stories, the ‘Landarzt’ or ‘Country Doctor’ stories, and possibly others as well, can be read as a collection of allegories that discuss contemporary topics such as Zionism, Freud, the tradition of the humanistic high school, Darwinism, Nietzsche’s philosophy and the like. No reader who has not put a good deal of time and ingenuity into the study of these stories can be expected to become aware of such allusions. No sub-titles refer to them. It would seem, in fact, as though Kafka had made every effort to conceal such allusions. Perhaps he was playing a game of hide and seek with his friends, often the only ones who heard his stories during his life-time. Almost certainly ready access to these allegories would have limited the reader’s appreciation of other levels of these stories. But it is worth the effort of uncovering them for allegories of such intricacy and flexibility are not common in literature. It is interesting to take note of Kafka’s technique which may be based on certain mental experiments to induce hypnogogic hallucinations described by Herbert Silberer. Beyond this, Kafka’s comments on the topics he scrutinizes show a high degree of awareness and wisdom and deserve to be taken seriously.

A fourth potential audience of Kafka’s stories was of course the writer himself.  With the help of his letters and diaries one can deduce what his writing meant to Kafka.  Such an investigation would be a prerequisite for any biographical study.

Given an opus of this kind that allows for a variety of approaches the persistent reader has a great deal of scope. He can choose his approach. He can chop and change from level to level. He can graduate from one reading to another. And he can let one reading reflect on the others, providing that there is some kind of active and elucidating relationship between the various levels.

One way of overcoming the emotional shock which Kafka’s stories as thrillers give us is, for instance, by adopting the kind of creative attitude his writings, as folk literature, elicit. And once you have established your personal equilibrium by procedures of creative thought, you are probably ready to investigate theories and opinions on the human mind, the modern mind, and society in its various manifestations and definitions.  Of course it takes a habitual Kafka reader to arrive at this stage of reading. Kafka himself apparently had doubts on whether the levels could interact successfully. He was particularly afraid lest his negativity, so important on one level, should be interpreted as nihilism on another. For those who continue to be baffled by his writings it may be a consolation to know that Einstein sent back a Kafka volume to Thomas Mann with the comment: The human mind is not complicated enough.

But to return to our point of departure: the wide appeal of Franz Kafka. Many of the characteristics we have mentioned can help to explain this wide appeal. Kafka’s writing is closer to popular literature than most other serious literature written this century. His language is beautifully simple and accessible. Both the thriller on the one hand and folk-literature on the other, with which we have likened Kafka’s writing, do not provoke that instinctive horror-reaction which many inexperienced readers have when they sense something high-brow. Moreover, Kafka’s stories have a wide range of applicability, a generality that seems to exclude no one, coupled with striking and memorable images that one does not put away or forget. Thirdly one can turn back to these texts again and again because it is possible to approach them in such different ways. They also have some of the qualities of the bestseller because they cater for more than one audience. And lastly they are in almost every way more than usually relevant to our times. For the superficial reader they may remain horror stories but once a reader’s intellect has become engaged and he has opened himself up to the complexity of this opus, he is likely to become as fascinated as I have become over the years.