Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA AND OTHER PIECES” by Franz Kafka (a selection of Kafka’s stories, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir and first published in 1933)

As I have remarked before on this blog (look up the postings on Metamorphosis and The Trial), I long ago came to the conclusion that Franz Kafka  (1883-1924) was better in shorter fiction than he was in his novels, which tend to be repetitive and ill-formed. Obviously their unfinished status at the time Kafka died has something to do with this. But the bright eye of nighmarish satire works best in the concentrated form of the short story.

There’s a problem with the provenance of Kafka’s works, related both to how Max Brod rescued them from oblivion and how they have been presented to us piecemeal over the years.

Kafka was first made available to English-speakers by the huband-and-wife translators Edwin and Willa Muir.

As well as translating all three of Kafa’s longer novels, the Muirs, in the 1930s, twice presented readers with selections of Kafka’s shorter pieces. One such selection was called In the Penal Colony, and consisted of all the shorter pieces that had been published in Kafka’s lifetime. This included a translation of Die Verwandlung, which the Muirs, the first translators of the tale, called The Transformation. Only later did other translators call it Metamorphosis, and subsequent editions of the Muirs’ own translation adopted this title too.

The other volume consisted of shorter pieces that were not published in Kafka’s lifetime – some of them incomplete. This collection the Muirs called The Great Wall of China and Other Pieces. I stick to my view that Metamorphosis is the greatest piece of writing Kafka ever produced. But I found much to attract me to the Great Wall of China volume, if only because of the oddly cheerful tone of the first selection.

            “Investigations of a Dog” is certainly the most whimsical long story by Kafka that I have read – almost a light-hearted parody of his more serious tone, as if he could no longer take these questions as seriously as he once did, because he now knew they admitted of no clear or simple answer. In the first person, an old dog recounts his earnest explorations of the nature of the world and of dogdom when he was young. He was scandalised by the sight of dogs dancing to music on their hind legs – and hence exposing obscenely their sexual organs. He is confused by “floating dogs” who live their days on cushions far above the heads of dogs and only ocasionally come down to the level of other dogs. He becomes obsessed with the question of where food comes from, as it seems simply to drop from the sky. So he experiments with starving and not taking food, and hence has the mystical experience that occupies the last page of the story. The story’s irony works in a number of ways: (i) The narrator dog nowhere acknowledges or seems aware of the existence of human beings [who presumably provide the food, train dancing circus dogs and carry about on cushions pampered pug-dogs etc.] This coud be a parody of human beings’ lack of awareness of God; or (ii)The dogs use of “incantations” (i.e, howling) to get their food, and their attempts at a “science” of food, could be a parody of human religion and attempts to explain the universe by rational science. Either way, the narrator dog’s existential bafflement both mirrors and echoes our own.

“The Burrow” is again told in the first-person, but this time, somewhat unnervingly, it is hard to tell if the narrator is human or not – probably human, as there is mention of doors in the construction of his labyrinthine burrow; but there is also mention of waking and feeling the taste of a rat he has killed, like a feral cat or some such. Be all this as it may, the tale as such is simply an account of his burrow and his feelings towards it – its construction; his care to keep its entrances and exits concealed; how he cannot resist feeding off his hidden store of food; where he sleeps; how safe he feels. He contemplates having a companion to serve as watchman, but gives up the idea as being too dangerous. Then gradually he becomes obsessed with small noises he can hear everywhere and continuously through his burrow Are they the souds of a powerful and unseen enemy trying to overcome him?

The impact of reading this story is the impact of hearing the confessions of a paranoid and obsessive mind, centred on finding an impregnable “safe space” and unable to engage with the world. There is also that notion of an unseen and invisible power at work – again, perhaps, one of Kafka’s ambiguous approaches to God.

Says the narrator: “It is comparatively easy to trust anyone if you are supervising him or at least can supervise him; perhaps it is even possible to trust someone at a distance; but completely to trust someone outside the burrow when you are inside the burrow, that is a different world, that, it seems to me, is impossible.” ”

According to Edwin Muir’s introduction, “The Burrow” was written very near the end of Kafka’s life and is almost complete. However it seems that the planned ending was going to have the “invisible enemy” appear, which would have changed the story’s tone considerably.

“The Great Wall of China” is a perfect sketch, told by a Chinese – an account of the wall’s construction in discrete sections and hence its method of controlling and separating the workforce. But then there is a reflection on why the wall is being built – clearly it is not to keep out the northern invaders as they would be swallowed up in the vast land anyway. Obviously its real purpose is an eternal condition exceeding the designs of any emperor… there follows the fable [which Kafka wrote separately]  of how long it would take a message from the emperor to reach any countryman. This means that in fact most Chinese don’t know who the current emperor is [“Long-dead emperors are sat on the throne in our villages, and one that only lives in song recently had a proclamation of his read out by the priest before the altar.”] This leads to Kafka’s clearest – and in fact profoundly conservative – political statement when the narrator condones Chinese villages who live “a life that is subject to no contemporary law, and attends only to the exhortations and warnings that come to us from olden times.” Political topicalities are less important than eternal verities. [However, reading a political commentary on Kafka, I discover that this tale can – or should – be read ironically as a condemnation of those who ignore the present.]

“The Giant Mole”, more clearly than the above, is incomplete. It is apparenty a satire on either science or literary production. The narrator tells of a village schoolmaster who gains brief notoriety for writing a pamphlet on a giant mole he has seen. The narrator, who has not seen the mole, writes his own pamphlet on it. It is ignored or ridiculed. The narrator withdraws his work from circulation. The [very incomplete] story might be about people who write on things sight unseen; or about literary rivalries, in the schoolmaster’s resentment of the narrator’s pamphlet, and the narrator’s residual guilt for writing it At one point the narrator tells the schoolmaster “Often as we listen to some learned discussion we may be under the impression that it is about your discovery, when it is about something quite different, and the next time, we think it is about something else, and not about your discovery at all, it may be about that and that alone.”

The rest of the Muirs’ volume is made up of much shorter pieces – most of them ironical fables of less than one page in length – and then two separate groups of aphorisms. Those gathered under the heading “He” seem to be notes Kafka made to himself in the year 1920. They are more about personal maladjustments than about philosophical questions. Rather more interesting are the aphorisms grouped under the heading “Reflections on Sin, Pain, Hope and the True Way”, which seem to date from 1917-19 and include the following excellent observations.

[38] “Only our concept of Time makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of Judgement by that name; in reality it is a summary court perpetually in session.”

[50] “In the fight between you and the world, back the world.”

[54] “There are questions which we could never get over if we were not delivered from them by the operation of nature.”

I do not think this is the most essential volumes of Kafka’s work, but it is a collection which often shows his less haunted side, even if the power of a malign force sometimes peeps through.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago. 

 

“THE TRIAL” by Franz Kafka (DER PROZESS written in 1914-15; first published, posthumously, in German in 1925; Willa and Edwin Muir’s English translation first published in 1935; many other translations since)

Some time ago on this blog I made a “Something Old” out of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis [look it up on the index at right]. I made the case then that the novella Metamorphosis, the longest of Kafka’s works to be published in his lifetime [1883-1924] was the most perfect of his works. After all, said I, it was a work of incredible concision and concentrated meaning, which he had given to the publisher in a finished state; whereas the three full-length novels for which he is as well known (The Trial, The Castle, America) were left unfinished and unrevised at his death. The possibility is that, had he lived, he might have polished them up somewhat. They are, all three of them, open to the charge that they repeat things in a way they might not have done had Kafka trimmed and edited them. As is well known, Kafka’s instructions to his friend Max Brod were that his unpublished works be destroyed when he died. Fortunately for us, Max Brod ignored Kafka’s request.

I stand by this view. I still regard Metamorphosis as his best work. But when I re-read The Trial recently, I had to admit that its repetitions are part of its nightmarish power. I also re-read the “Epilogue” that Max Brod contributed to the edition of Willa and Edwin Muir’s translation [the first translation into English] that sits on my shelf. Brod boasted that “nearly everything of Kafka’s that was published in his lifetime was rescued from him by dint of persuasion and guile on my part.” This implies that even Metamorphosis may not have been as “finished” as Kafka wanted, though I find this hard to believe. As a non-specialist, I am also aware that some of the very many biographies of Kafka that have now been published cast aspersions on Brod’s truthfulness about some matters and his suppression of some details of Kafka’s life.

A literary executor is not always the most reliable witness.

Anyway, as I say, I recently gave The Trial another go. I did so after having seen three adaptations of it. There was Orson Welles’ [modernised] 1962 film version of the novel, starring Anthony Perkins as Josef K. and Jeanne Moreau as Fraulein Burstner. There is, in my DVD collection, the solid and very literal 1993 film rendition of the story, scripted by Harold Pinter and starring Kyle MacLachlan as Josef K., Anthony Hopkins as The Priest and Juliet Stevenson as Fraulein Burstner. And – seen by me back in 2008 – there was a very good stage adaptation by the Auckland playwright Dean Parker, performed by an Auckland theatre company. I can forego my usual bitchings about adaptations by noting that all were very worthwhile, though Welles’ film now seems very dated.

I will not try my usual dodge of synopsising this well-known tale. Josef K., for no clear reason, is arrested and put through the fear of being suspected by the state. Or, as the opening sentence warns, “Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K. for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning”. But I will note that as I re-read it, I feared my mind might be overwhelmed by images from all the adaptations I had seen. This proved not to be the case. The novel itself has very many details that no adaptation has touched, and its style is the very opposite of the type of ominous gothic or film noir stylings that the film renditions give.  Despite the bizarre and irrational nature of the story, the tone (like that of Metamorphosis) is doggedly matter-of-fact.

I have to see it as a dream novel. There are all those intensely visualised settings in improbable places – the court room or the Advocate’s home in a slummy setting; the transformation from Titorelli’s studio to the Palace of Justice. As in a dream, things converge and coalesce in ways that defy waking reality.

I attach much significance to the fact that it is Josef K’s. 30^th birthday when he is arrested, and the eve of his 31^st when he is taken off to be killed. It also seems significant that Josef K. at first thinks that those who have come to arrest him are practical jokers and, one year later, that those who have come to kill him look like cheap actors.  This is a story spun from inside Josef K’s psyche and sparked by the existential fact of his age. Is not 30 (the age Kafka was when he wrote The Trial) when people first begin to wonder anxiously what they have done with their lives or what they should be doing? I believe that, decoded, we are getting the story of a man who is self-accused and aware that others are merely playing a role in the theatre of his mind. Practical jokers. Cheap actors.

I will not go here into John Banville’s theory that the story is really a psycho-drama about Kafka’s on-again off-again relationship with his fiancée. That would reduce it to no more than psychiatrist’s notes.

Of course there is some validity to seeing the story as a premonition of totalitarianism. (Don’t we tend to use the term “Kafkaesque” to mean the terrible, anonymous power of the state bearing down upon the individual?) We are encouraged in this interpretation by the fact of Kafka’s Jewishness, and by our knowledge that, twenty years after his death, members of his family died in Nazi death camps. But I am not sure that totalitarianism, as we now understand it, was Kafka’s intended target. The law which he depicts is daunting and irrational, never laying a clear criminal charge against Josef K. and never offering any clear path to a resolution. But compared with later totalitarianism, it is relatively benign. After his “arrest”, Josef K. is free to go about his business. Though there are the torturers-in-the-cupboard, and Josef K’s eventual murder, the satire that is offered could be valid even for an open society. It has most to do with the “law’s delay”, as satirised by Dickens in Bleak House.

Continuing in the vein of finding satire, it is possible to neatly divide The Trial into satire on police (the arresters), the law (the Advocate and Examining Magistrate), art (Titorelli) and religion (The Priest) as inadequate in explaining the human condition. Titorelli’s explanation that one can never be acquitted of a charge is the directest attack on the law as a human institution. I also wonder if the Priest’s complex glossing of his own enigmatic parable isn’t intended to ridicule over-ingenious biblical commentaries, midrash etc.

Yet, as I say, this is largely a tale from inside the head of the self-accused Josef K. who, even though he does not know what he is charged with, finds himself burdened with a sense of guilt anyway. Of course one can get lost in the badlands of Kafka biography and wonder whether the tale expresses fear of anti-Semitism, even if there is no reference to Jewishness in the book, or whether it expresses the isolation of German-speaking Kafka in Czech Prague. But I think the sexual element is more essential, with the landlady Frau Grubach and the tenant Fraulein Burstner and the Advocate’s mistress Leni and all the girls crowding Titorelli’s door. Josef K. rages silently with unfulfilled desire. (Of Fraulein Burstner, he “rushed out, seized her, and kissed her first on the lips, then all over the face, like some thirsty animal lapping greedily at a spring of long-sought fresh water” – end of Chapter One).

 This is one of those waking dreams in which we have to justify our most private life in front of a court of law – except that there is no real trial and death is arbitrary. In this respect, maybe it is about God after all.

Let us not forget Kafka’s deadpan humour, as when Joseph K’s landlady worries about her house being respectable and Josef K. retorts Groucho-esquely “Respectable! If you want to keep your house respectable you’d have to begin by giving me notice.” (Chapter One). Let us not forget the foretaste of “I was only obeying orders!” when the one of the arresters who wields a whip says to Joseph K’s objections “What you say sounds reasonable enough, but I refuse to be bribed. I am here to whip people, and whip them I shall.” (Chapter Five). And, in case we forget the scary and louring element, let us not forget Josef K’s suggestion that Titorelli’s painting of Justice “no longer suggested the goddess of Justice, or even the Goddess of Victory, but looked exactly a Goddess of the Hunt in full cry.” (Chapter Seven)

Like all good art, it is complex, resists a simple formula and, at least on a second reading, is not as flawed by its inconsistencies as I thought it was the first time I read it.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, Nicholas Reid recommends "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published five or more years ago.

“METAMORPHOSIS” by Franz Kafka (“DIE VERWANDLUNG” written 1912-13; first published in German 1915; various English translations)

            I have a number of problems with Franz Kafka (1883-1924).

The first and most obvious is the fact that I have only a phrase-book smattering of German, so I have to read him in translation. This is a great disadvantage when it is clear that Kafka indulged in a lot of wordplay and wry humour, quite at odds with the received image of him as a purveyor of dark nightmare.

The second is that, in the novels which were never published in his lifetime, and which he may sincerely not have wished to be published, he does have the tendency to flog allegorical ideas to death. Gore Vidal once made a complaint to the effect that “With Kafka you get the point early and then there is nothing further to get” (I’m quoting from memory here, but that was the gist of it.) That’s a little glib, but I do see what Vidal meant. Admitting that I have never read America, I did find that in both The Trial (Der Prozess) and The Castle (Das Schloss), the hero’s uncomfortable situation is established and then variations are played upon it, with no forward thrust – Joseph K. being meaninglessly victimised, harassed and interrogated; K. waiting and waiting in the village outside the castle. This hasn’t stopped people from dramatizing these novels, with variable success. Over the years, I’ve seen Orson Welles’s modernised and very-altered film version of The Trial (1962) as well as the more deadpan and true-to-the-novel remake, which Harold Pinter scripted in 1994; and also a very good stage adaptation of The Trial by the Auckland playwright Dean Parker. I’ve seen the 1968 film version of The Castle that starred Maximilian Schell and I’m aware that there have been many other stage and screen adaptations of Kafka more recently.

Even so, there really is something ragged about Kafka’s three full-length novels. Lack of development and repetition may be the essence of some nightmares (this horrible situation goes on and on without stopping….) and may be regarded as deliberate by some readers. But I would rudely remark that all three novels were left unfinished and unrevised by Kafka at his death, and the heretic in me suspects that had he lived, and had he actually decided to prepare them for publication, he would have trimmed them and tightened them up considerably. What we have are, essentially, drafts and not finished works.

Now what leads me to make this suggestion? (Especially as I am a non-specialist and in terms of your average tertiary Humanities Department have no right to an opinion on the matter.)

It is my awareness of how tightly-structured and carefully-crafted Kafka made the longest of the works that were published in his lifetime. Metamorphosis is about fifty average pages in length. I have read it in Edwin and Willa Muir’s venerable 1930s translation (which, rendering the original German title literally, they at first called The Transformation) and in Stanley Corngold’s 1972 translation. (There are many other translations available, too.) The Bantam Classics edition of the Corngold translation, which sits in front of me as I type, emphasises how much this tight and perfect tale has been subjected to analysis. Its fifty pages of text are surrounded by 20 pages of introduction and fully 130 pages of explanatory notes and exegesis. In other words there is three times as much apparatus criticus as there is text. This is one of those works that “everybody knows” without having actually read it, so the opening sentence was familiar to me even before I began: “When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin [ungeheures Ungeziefer]”. That opening has passed into the general cultural consciousness like such openings of novels as “Aujourd’hui, Maman est morte” or “He was a inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built…”.

Given that I couldn’t help having some foreknowledge of Metamorphosis, I decided to consult no commentaries whatsoever until after I had read it for myself and formed my own opinions. This is how it played out.

(A.)    What I took from my own reading.

1.) It is the story of a man, Gregor Samsa, who turns into a monstrous insect, and the consequences this has for his family (his parents and his sister) and himself. Gregor is essentially trapped in one room throughout the story.

 2.) It is written in the third-person limited style. This is a key to much of its power. It is only Gregor’s thoughts that we share, so that the reasons for the actions of the human beings in the story have to be guessed by us, or pieced together in inferences taken from the limited things they say. There is therefore a radical alienation of viewpoint – but by writing in the third person, Kafka is able to shift the viewpoint in the last few pages after Gregor’s death.

3.) It is highly schematised. Although the main “event” of the story – Gregor’s transformation into a “vermin” - has happened before the opening sentence, the “geography” of the story is like a stage play – there is Gregor’s room with the (condemnatory) voices of his parents and employer coming through a door on one side; and the (more conciliatory) voice of his sister coming through the door on the other side.

Equally schematised and ‘theatrical’ is the action of the story. It is in three acts. (i.) Gregor’s transformation and the loss of his job when his employer visits. (ii.) The family’s failure to adjust to his insect-hood, including his father’s hurling of the apple which becomes embedded in Gregor’s back and is implicitly one cause of his death. (iii.) The family’s finally rebelling against the conditions they have been reduced to by Gregor’s lack of earning power. They expel the lodgers they have taken in, and blatantly condemn Gregor as vile. And Gregor sickens and dies, rejected by them.

So much for my description of the most basic things I got out of Metamorphosis on my unaided reading. I found it very, very hard not to jump at once into interpretation and load the tale with perceived symbolism, especially as it is so potent a story and every phrase seems pregnant with meaning. Is it an allegory of alienation? Is it a psychological sketch of Kafka’s own sense of confinement in his bourgeois family, or as a German-speaking Jew surrounded by Czech speakers? Is it a caricature of the earning man (Gregor Samsa has been a travelling salesman) who is dehumanised by the capitalist system, reduced to being an economic unit, and discarded when he can no longer earn? Etcetera. Etcetera. Etcetera.

On reflection, I still think there is something to be said for each of these theories. But none really captures the visceral impact of the prose upon the page. For what I found most striking in Kafka’s telling was his insistence on the insect’s physicality – the complete reality of its body. I do now know the theory that the story is meant to be the projection of a neurotic character’s mind. This theory has been promoted by the fact that the original German-language publication of Die Verwandlung had on its cover an image of an anguished human being rather than an image of a disgusting insect. But I cannot buy this theory, for we are repeatedly told that while Gregor may have elements of human consciousness, he is also genuinely an insect. He chooses to eat what an insect eats (rotten food and mouldy cheese). He hides in the darkness (under the sofa) as an insect hides. He is almost incapable of walking backwards. And what makes this especially chilling is the absolutely deadpan way it is narrated. We expect some scene of horror or shock or disgust on Gregor’s part, but it never really comes. He is made happier by having the room cleared a little so that he can more freely scuttle around. When we expect him to have some profound philosophical thoughts on his condition, he instead has some animal instinct for food or warmth. The shock and horror is in his family’s reaction (as when he climbs up the wall), and not in his own reaction.

So what did I conclude the story was essentially “about”? I read it as a story about the strangeness of having a body that compels us to act as we act – insect or human being – and hence in a way as a dramatization of human duality: the ultimate alienation. Is my body the same as my mind? Does my body make my mind think as it does?

B.) And then I read some of the critics.

And what did the critics say it was mainly about? They seemed to be obsessed with the psychological nature of the story, and the levels of cognition and consciousness, which it expresses. OR they see it as an implicit critique of, or commentary upon, the traditional middle-class family unit.

THUS, they say, it is a story about duality – the division between the “real” and the “social” self. Gregor has surrendered his “real” self to the social demands of work and providing for his family. He has surrendered to what is only apparently human. The insect-form he takes is the perverse rebellion of his “real” self against the social demands made upon him. In his insect form he is not able to work, but he still wants to do so. The insect form he takes is his family’s judgement on his “real” non-working self. He is, in their view, a parasite. So much has he internalised their view that in the end he willingly dies to relieve them of the burden he has become.

OR, say the critics, the story is a symbolic Freudian psycho-drama of Oedipal conflict. By working and supporting his family, Gregor has usurped his father’s position. His father withers and becomes dependent. The insect form is Gregor’s punishment, which allows his father to once again blossom as an earner. Gregor liberates his family by dying.

OR…. well any number of things, actually. Academic critics do have to theorise. That is what they are paid to do. Some of these ideas may even be relevant to the story and some do add dimensions to it as I re-read it.

But it is still the physicality of the insect that most strikes me in Metamorphosis. If the story is really symbolic, then the symbolism cannot be neatly nailed down to any one thing. The deepest meaning of the story is the most literal, and the deepest impact of the story is of something that is physically horrible breaking in upon Gregor and his family. It is a masterpiece of horror. All the interpretations we impose upon it are simply our attempts to tame it and to make ourselves feel more comfortable with it. Gregor Samsa’s transformation still shocks the way Dali’s and Bunuel’s slicing of an eyeball does.