The enigmatic Kafka and his continuing influence

[Part 2]

The sixth approach to Franz Kafka’s writings that I would like to delineate is what I term the engagement with Kafka’s Jewishness. Kafka was a Jew living in Prague, and writing in German. Hence, as I pointed out earlier, he was doubly marginalized, and this marginalization inevitably found expression in his writing. The engagement with Kafka’s Jewishness has to proceed along two tracks. The one would focus on his contemporary plight as a Jew in Prague and the social, political, cultural issues connected with this fact.

The other track should focus on his Jewish religion, his attitude to God and divine order. His friend and literary executor Max Brod was of the opinion that Kafka’s fiction should be understood in terms of his engagement with, and partiality to, the Jewish religion. Some of the observations of Gersholm Scholem, Harold Bloom (though to a lesser extent) point in this direction.

Kafka’s relation to Jewish Gnosticism is one important area. Gerhard Kurtz, who wrote a most insightful monograph on the death drive that animated Kafka’s texts. said that, ‘Kafka’s literature of existence speaks of border skirmishes between life and death – of anxiety, the experience of death, guilt, and suffering. Its recurrent metaphysical paradigms are….homelessness, the loss of orientations, impotence, “thrownness”, exposure, vulnerability, anxiety, madness, sickness, imprisonment, alienation. All are metaphors of Gnostic origin.’

Gnosticism

Another Kafka scholar. Corngold says that Gnosticism is literally present in Kafka’s writings, although much of it appears foreign to him. However, as a number of Gnostic features have a haunting relevance to the larger interests of Kafka, they can be characterized as a Gnosticism suited to a reading of his fiction. He goes on to say that Gnostic elements permeate Kafka’s work; however, they do not overwhelm it.

Franz Kafka

Therefore, it can be said that what we find in Kafka’s texts is a Gnosticism with a simple g. critics have found in many descriptions and imagery the influence of Gnosticism. For example, in the following passage taken from his story the metamorphosis, the image of the father is reminiscent of Gnostic formulations. ‘ Truly this was not the father he had imagined to himself…..and yet, and yet, could that be his father?……From under his bushy eyebrows his black eyes darted fresh and penetrating glasses….as he advanced with a grim visage.’

While commentators such as Gershom Scholem. Gerhard Kurtz and Max Brod saw direct connections between Kafka’s texts and Jewish religious thought, critics like Harold Bloom perceived indirect, but not insignificant connections. As Bloom remarked, ‘Kafka, despite Gershom Scholem’s authoritative attempts to claim him for Jewish Gnosticism, is both more and less than a Gnostic, as we might expect.’ Gnosticism underlines the fact that the presence of God remains in the deepest recesses of self and he is both alien and intimate. This fact, it seems to me, informs much of Kafka’s writings.

Comedy

The seventh is what I prefer to term the comic approach. There are those critics who argue that the best way of understanding Kafka’s baffling work is through the lens of comedy. The well-known American novelist Philip Roth once imagined film version of Kafka’s The Castle in which Groucho Marx played the role of K, the land-surveyor and Chico and Harpo Marx as his two aides.

As Milan Kundera emphatically stated, ‘the comic is inseparable from the very essence of the Kafkan.’ This might appear to be a strange remark in view of the fact that many of Kafka’s texts are somber, even morbid, infused with a darkness and terror However, when we delve beneath the surface we are also confronted by a pervasive comic imagination

In the humour of Kafka, one observes a curious blending of the comic and the horrific. Kundera says that, ‘but it’s small comfort to the engineer to know that his story is comic. He is trapped in the joke of his own life like a fish in a bowl; he doesn’t find it funny,’ Indeed, a joke can be considered a joke only if one is outside of the bowl. In the case of Kafka what happens id that he takes us into the belly of the joke. Kundera calls this the ‘horror of the comic.’ There is another important distinction to be made about the comic imagination of Kafka. As critics like Kundera have pointed out, in the world of Kafka, the comic is not presented as a counterpoint to the tragic. Unlike in the case of Shakespeare’s plays, the function of the comic is not to make the tragic more endurable by lowering the tone. On the contrary, it is an attempt to uncover the true shape and intent of the tragic.

The following passage from Milan Kundera, which is highly suggestive, captures for me a very important and defining element of Franz Kafka’s comic imagination. Speaking of the comic element in Kafka he says that, ‘it doesn’t accompany the tragic, not at all, it destroys it in the egg and thus deprives the victims of the only consolation to be found in the (real or supposed) grandeur of tragedy. The engineer loses his homeland, and everyone laughs.’

The eighth approach to Kafka’s texts that I wish to single out is what I term the post-modernist approach. Here I am using the term post-modernist in a very broad sense to include post-structuralism and deconstructionism as well. Kafka is regarded as representing the high watermark of modernism; he is invariably associated with the growth of European literary modernism.

However, in recent times, there have been attempts made to assimilate him into post-modernism just as much as Marcel Proust, a leading light of modernism, has been linked by some to the interests of post-modernism.

The way literary representation has been turned into a problem by Kafka as well his playfulness, border crossings, blending of reality ad fantasy, de-valuing history are all features that hold a deep attraction to post-modernist thinkers.

There are many ways in which efforts have been made to incorporate Kafka into the post-modernist fold. Let me, as one example, cite Roland Barthes’ effort. He makes a distinction between symbol and allusion. The symbol is, for him, a convinced sign that enforces the analogy between form and idea. There is a singularity of purpose, certitude in the symbol. Allusion, by contrast, seeks to undermine the analogy the moment it is established. Barthes is of the opinion that Kafka’s narratives are not woven around symbols, as many have claimed, but around allusions. Roland Barthes cites a passage from the trial.

Familiar image

‘ K is arrested on the orders of a tribunal; that is a familiar image of justice. But we learn that this tribunal does not regard crimes as our justice does; the resemblance is delusive, though not effaced. In short…. K feels he has been arrested, and everything happens as if k were really arrested.’ From this passage, Barthes extracts a dominant feature of Kafka’s art. ‘Kafka creates his work by systematically suppressing the as ifs; but it is the internal event which becomes the obscure term of the allusion.’

Barthes expresses the view that the shift from symbol to the allusion that Kafka has effected is the technical means by which the shift from assertion to interrogation is attained. This has clear post-modernist implications. Barthes seems to believe that the two phenomena assertion and interrogation are exclusive modes of reacting to the world and living. He says that the ‘allusive system functions as a kind of enormous sign to interrogate other signs.’ This interrogation of other signs is a preferred approach of post-moderrnists. Barthes points to the paradox at the heart of Kafka’s literary endeavor in the following manner.

‘ Kafka’s technique says that the world’s meaning is unutterable, that the artist’s only task is to explore possible significations, each of which taken by itself will be only a (necessary) lie but whose multiplicity will be the writer’s truth itself.

That is Kafka’s paradox: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisible, cannot know itself; to tell the truth is to lie. Thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speaks he lies.’ Barthes formulation is indeed complex and needs careful unpacking.

What I have sought to do, then, in this short essay is to identify what I think are some of the most important interpretive approaches to Kafka. The list is more suggestive than exhaustive; one can, to be sure, usefully add to it. My intention has been to present to Sri Lankan readers unfamiliar with the vast exegetical literature that has grown around Kafka’s work as clearly as I can its nature and contours.

It is, no doubt, a daunting task. The classifications and commentaries that I have presented here somewhat sketchily are based on my readings and my understandings of this exegetical literature generated by Franz Kafka’s texts. Kafka constantly challenges us to read him in new ways.

Concluded