by Chuck Richardson
Parables and Paradoxes, Bi-lingual Edition, by Franz Kafka, Schocken Books, New York, 1958.
The Great Short Works of Franz Kafka: A New Translation by Joachim Neugroschel, Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1995.
And, how does it work, exactly—this book that takes us into hell? William H. Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life 1
Criticism is the highest form of autobiography. Oscar Wilde 2
A belief like a guillotine – as heavy as light. Franz Kafka 3
If K had rendered his own New Testament, his fictional messiah, profoundly alienated and ignored by His countrymen, being pressured by His Father to do something—even if it’s wrong, might have nailed Himself to a cross of His own making…out of necessity.
Of course, He would have had to engineer then construct an apparatus that would do His nailing for Him as He positioned Himself—forming an angel in the imaginary snows of Golfgully, His back chafing nigh the blasphemous rood, pleasing His sadistic Dad.
The contraption, naturally, would not work according to The Plan, but mete out justice by its own whim. Resurrection would be pointless, or worse: a Sisyphean nightmare. 4
As modest delusions exact small rewards, K would’ve got his kicks being evil for a while, playing devil’s advocate to the apparent organic damnation informing his environment and spirit. His devil writes to be lived.
By exposing the metaphysical horror of creation (the selective physiology of physicality) and mocking it, K reveals the absurdity of his evolutionary, existential dilemma: that he is sentient and therefore must participate in sentience, even if it seems awry.5 K escapes this conscious charge by fictionalizing it. Writing is a sinful pleasure that exorcises and projects his deepest sense of realness onto the page, revivifying him while, perhaps, vicariously weakening the pragmatic, worldly resolve of unwary, bureaucratic readers consuming his “story.”
Unlike his consumers, K is unconcerned with the nature of reality. For him, the reality of nature is quite enough, thank-you.
DEFENSE MECHANISMS
K deploys humor as an evasion tactic against the civilizing forces that oppose his escape from social reality to the other side, where existence might seem more credible and personal.
Fifty-eight pages into The Metamorphosis, I scribbled this note in the margin: “Too long! Dragging it out…why? Reader begins feeling like Gregor.” K then tweaks my evolving empathy on the very next page (talk about timing):
Was he a beast to be so moved by music? He felt as if he were being shown the path to the unknown food he was yearning for. 6
Alas, the unknown food may be Gregor’s escape from meaninglessness: death. The meaning of life—the story—is it stops. Somehow, when spirit evaporates signifiers inch closer to what they’re trying to say…like music. Bullshit stops and the visible absence of soulfulness, ethereality, make awareness more acute, allowing the perceiver’s mind to temporarily transcend itself before falling victim to memory. Many have had a similar sensation looking at a loved one’s corpse. Though dead, the flesh (or text—now a forever closed book) retains the power to trigger the perceiver’s imagination like a moving picture, sound or smell. The feelings are physical manifestations of absence, much the way an amputee still abides the throbbing of her lost limb. The anguish is real, though its source no longer exists beyond that which signifies it.
One of the underlying paradoxes of K’s work is that absence/escape is oneness and a means to spiritual nourishment, rather than a separation or dismemberment from it. Enduring life’s overall meaninglessness feeds his artistic expression, and despair paradoxically becomes K’s primary signifier and the existential vehicle for expressing his reality. The text revels in the black hole of magical nonsense and hocus pocus diction, leaving the reader’s empathy just as tweaked to K’s fictional universe as K’s sensitivities are attuned to his lived one.
As the reader’s absorption in Gregor Samsa’s existential torment reaches its saturation point, Gregor’s little sister, who has taken charge of the family, speaks for everyone, including this reader and her dung beetle brother:
“My dear parents, …things cannot go on like this. You may not realize it, but I do. I will not pronounce my brother’s name in front of this monstrosity, and so all I will say is: We must try to get rid of it. We have done everything humanly possible to look after it and put up with it; I do not believe there is anything we can be reproached for.” 7
As my friends had warned, here was the riptide, the current that washed away the façade of familial bonds—the chains of blood. Strings of loyalty, grown tenuous over time, now break in the most familiar fashion, as the sister continues:
“People who have to work as hard as we do can’t also endure this nonstop torture at home.” 8
It is now obvious that the desperation Gregor has so quietly endured, even as a cockroach, requires more stamina than his human family can muster.
Further belittling human selfishness (anthropo-, ethno- and egocentrism), K has Gregor’s son-sacrificing father respond feebly to his daughter’s harsh call for preemption:
“If he understood us,” the father repeated, closing his eyes in order to take in the sister’s conviction that this was impossible, “then perhaps we might come to some sort of terms with him. But as things are now—” 9
His daughter cuts him off: “It has to go…that’s the only way, Father. You simply have to try and get rid of the idea that it is Gregor. Our real misfortune is that we believed it for such a long time. Just how can that possibly be Gregor? If that were Gregor, he would have realized long ago that human beings can’t possibly live with such an animal and he would have left of his own accord.” 10
Gregor, of course, is Gregor, and he’s listening, as are we. Adding to the heartbreak is K’s description of Gregor’s death:
He could barely feel the rotting apple in his back or the inflamed area around it, which were thoroughly cloaked with soft dust. He recalled his family with tenderness and love. His conviction that he would have to disappear was even stronger than his sister’s. He lingered in this state of blank and peaceful musing until the tower clock struck three in the morning. He held on long enough to glimpse the start of the overall brightening outside the window. Then his head involuntarily sank to the floor, and his final breath came feebly from his nostrils. 11
We mourn for ourselves through the cockroach, for we have become Gregor Samsa. Humans are the real bugs, alien and cruel. Ironically, it is this realization that sensitizes the reader to her own humaneness, which she then perceives in opposition to civil society. She ends up taking life personally, as one should.
HUMOR
That said I was surprised by many ticklish passages, each appearing at the most intriguing moments. K’s humor is always subtle, ever showing but never telling.
An online associate writes that K “horrified me totally.” Another said K infected her psyche with a nauseating melancholy that exacerbated her depression. Each warned I was swimming into elusively deep waters agitated by wicked riptides, and they were right.
A good example of this is a peculiar story for K in that the narrator is in the position of power, similar to the narrator of Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener,” in that each voice is attempting to discover something meaningful in the actions of an odd inferior. 12
The piece under consideration is an early one, “Conversation with the Worshiper.” 13 Here, a non-believer (i.e.: outsider/alien/interloper) has been stalking a seemingly devout young woman he’s infatuated with at the church in the town square. A voyeur, the narrator grows offended by one of the worshiper’s effusive prostrations. Further infuriating the narrator is the young man’s more consistent attendance at mass over time than his original quarry— the woman. This fact agitates the prowler’s insensitive, bureaucratic soul (he later claims to be a member of the secret police), which is seeking escape through flights of sexual fantasy, which keep landing on “the worshiper:”
Finding his conduct unseemly, I resolved to accost him when he left the church and to question him about why he is praying in this manner [basically dry-humping the church floor]. Yes indeed, I was annoyed because my girl had not come. 14
After the young man escapes from the narrator’s first slapstick attempt at capturing him, the tramp is caught and, much like a leprechaun, agrees to answer his interrogator’s questions:
“Oh God, your heart is alive, but your head is a block of wood. You say I’m a lucky catch—how lucky you must be! For my poor luck is one that teeters, it teeters on a thin edge, and if anyone touches my poor luck it will fall on the questioner. Good night, sir.”
“Fine,” I said, clutching his right hand, “if you won’t answer me, then I’ll start yelling here in the street. And all the shopgirls who are now coming out of their shops and all their sweethearts who are looking forward to seeing them will come dashing over here, for they’ll think that a cab horse has collapsed or that something similar has happened. Then I’ll make a public display of you.”
He now tearfully kissed my hands, alternating between them. “I’ll tell you what you wish to know, but please, let us go over to that side street.” I nodded, and that was where we went. 15
It all goes downhill from there, at least for the narrator. Take, for instance, his very first rhetorical question:
“You are an utter lunatic, that’s what you are! How can you behave like that in church! It is so annoying and so unpleasant for the onlookers! How can people feel devout if they have to look at you.” 16
And the worshiper’s response:
“Don’t be annoyed—why should you be annoyed at things that aren’t relevant to you. I’m annoyed at myself when I behave imprudently; but if someone else behaves imprudently, then I’m delighted. So please don’t be annoyed if I tell you that the goal of my life is to be looked at by other people.” 17
The narrator, oblivious to the shifting diction of his interrogation, belittles his subject’s apparent situational stupidity, but ironically his words describe his own mental state (like those in power today):
“…your condition is a seasickness on dry land…You called the poplar in the fields the Tower of Babel,’ for you did not know or did not want to know that it was a poplar, and now it was swaying again without a name, and you would have to call it When Noah Was Drunk.’” 18
Yet, his captive rewards no touché: “I’m glad I didn’t understand what you said.” 19
His lack of pretension, and by extension the text’s authenticity, trump his interrogator’s (i.e.: reader’s) shallowness of perception. The worshiper is using language symbolically, as a means to construct metaphor, whereas the narrator, oddly enough, views language as a literal medium for the conveyance of meaning. The worshiper views the world as something in flŭ, the interrogator, on the other hand, is trying to pin down its meaning and hold onto it. The former sees perceived reality as symbolic, the latter sees it as actual.
The brief narrative ends this way:
He said that I was dressed nicely and that he liked my necktie very much. And what a fine complexion I had. And that confessions were the most informative when they were rescinded. 20
In other words, we have the author’s paradox stripped naked, not told: all authors are liars, “I” am an author; which can be extended to any Derridean form of writing (i.e.: all corporate politicians are liars, I am a corporate politician). 21 Truth is rescinded for the higher reality of life processes—the highest of which, for we humans anyway, is poetry. In the end, it is not the narrator who’s really writing or making fiction, communicating on a poetic level. The narrator is always in a position of power, but not the deepest one, which is inevitably reserved for K’s protagonists— and by extension the author and readers themselves, who share a perceptual advantage over their subjects and the possibility of deriving pleasure from the text.
Consider the ending of “A Hunger Artist,” whose protagonist, dying of self-imposed professional starvation for the amusement of others, confesses to the carnival owner, his employer, the only reason he became such an ignored spectacle:
“…I couldn’t find the food that I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.” 22
This confession rescinds the hunger artist’s professional validity and shreds the authenticity of his motives, while casting a hilarious light upon the comedy of errors committing his tragedy, which is, in the end, his antagonistic audiences’ inadequacies, and by extension the shortcomings of K’s readers and his own as a writer (in the way he feels them).
ONE FICTIONAL WORLD
A tool that cuts even more deeply than humor, however, is one deployed by K throughout his work: an intertextuality suggestive of an evolving personal unconscious that increasingly feeds the author-reader’s awareness. 23
Rather than viewing K’s texts distinctively, one might read them fruitfully as one narrative whose elemental aspects vary according to the situation, yet remain situated upon a single sensibility informing their private mythologies with the protean archetypes bubbling up from their minds’ interconnected recesses.
For instance, The Judgment, which K considered a personal breakthrough, has strong intertextual resonances with a much longer and later work, The Metamorphosis. 24
The Judgment begins with the narrator, Georg, having just finished writing a letter to an old friend in Russia, which K describes in a way that suggests Georg is smitten by his distant pal:
Having just finished writing a letter to a boyhood friend in a foreign country, he sealed the envelop with playful slowness and then, propping his elbow on the desk, he gazed out the window at the river, the bridge, and the sparely green rises on the opposite bank. 25
Just dreamy. Georg then goes to his father to tell him about the letter, and this of course turns out badly. K implies a sexual tension between son and father that pivots on the distant friend. Georg is engaged to marry, but it’s obvious from the start that the engagement is doomed. In the end, Georg’s father sentences him to death by drowning and Georg carries out the order by jumping from the bridge into the river dividing the town.
Upon closer inspection, what are its similarities to, or intertextual relationship with The Metamorphosis? To better understand their likeness to each other, let’s begin with a fundamental difference between them: in TJ the father seems to pass sentence, while TM has the sister collude with his judgment, which is thus somewhat feminized. Gregor’s father is not a “giant” like Georg’s pop, and unlike Georg, Gregor is terrifying. K appears to activate the various genders and emergent sexualities of his fundamental characters according to their situation, allowing an ebb and flow of sexual identities for protagonist and antagonist alike. Furthermore, K plays with the order of letters in his protagonists’ names—Georg, Gregor (The added letter suggests Gregor is emergent from Georg and also possesses more power, as his name has an extra “r,” yet each character seems somehow incomplete, at least in translation, by lacking an “e,” or silent vowel—breath, and sometime vowel “y” in the latter case). It seems that K’s protagonists are all the same person embodied within a specifically situated ethic. 26
The nuances of K’s intertextuality centers on power inversions within the nuclear family unit. Most “action” in TJ/TM occurs in bedrooms, the most private, unshared sanctuary within the walls of the “home.” The humor is active and mocking, almost sarcastic, as K explores alienation even here—in the womb of his existence. Parents and siblings usurp the protagonists’ primacy in their bedchambers. These familial interlopers desire recognition and acceptance or escape from their ontological crises just like their protagonist sons and brother. Implied incest and death, sex/intercourse and dying are symbiotic elements, one rising as the other falls according to the situation’s requirements.
Intertextual humor also reverberates in the characters’ confusions, making literary interpretation a comedy of errors (see Parables and Paradoxes below). Whereas TJ implies doubts about life’s normalcy by Georg’s unquestioningly carrying out his father’s word, TM does not question reality’s strangeness, which Gregor consistently accepts (as does the reader by the suspension of her disbelief). Georg is suicided, Gregor murdered—their fathers, however, are intimately involved in each outcome. The sister-fiancé are the primary rejecters of the protagonists’ physicality. Georg dies a bug, Gregor awakens as one. Simply put, TJ raises doubts about reality while TM accepts its weirdness. It is, after all, downstream from the protagonist’s initial plunge.
What “judgment” is implied by both pieces? What is the “metamorphosis” implied in both? How is TM a logical artistic extension of TJ?
WHAT MEANING MEANS
The above questions are good ones, but first a more fundamental inquiry might be made into the human need to categorize and construct information into meaningful sequences. What happens when these methods fail, and a lack of cause-and-effect data defuses our sensibilities’ power to attain sensitivity, enlightenment, or escape? Parables and Paradoxes occupies the interstice between deeper perception and utter madness, placing our species permanently on the brink between discovery and annihilation—memory and forgetting—while being in perpetual motion. P&P consciously resists all readerly attempts to elucidate its presented abstractions in a meaningful way.
One way of evading K’s evasions is to ride his narrative the way a surfer, after choosing her wave, navigates the ride on her “board,” her tool for apprehending her version of reality, or at-one-ment (the ride itself and whatever it morphs into). This decision—a combination of learning and instinct conjuring up intuition—embodies a shared emotional aspect with our uniquely human dilemma: the private struggle to cope with the particular qualities of one’ s singular mind that enables the individual to behave constructively in a destructive world without falling victim to Babel. Truth is not centrally located, nor is it particular or universally principled. Rather, it’s wherever and however meaning is derived from passing phenomena, the dreams informing the technology we invent to create an authentic experience of life. K begins TM with Gregor awakening from fitful dreams (downstream from TJ’s bridge) and teetering on the brink of collapse, a virtual, mirrored magnification of Georg and his father in TJ. Each is on the cusp of awakening, which is either arriving or leaving, depending on the place and time, or situation.
K reveals that parables and paradoxes, like TJ and TM, are abstractions of each other that form a yin-yang or, better, the Tao, symbolized by the river, in P&P as elsewhere throughout K’s oeuvre. TM is a parable because language equals reality, reveals the metaphysics of presence, and the hyper-real unreality of sentient beings. TJ, on the other hand, represents paradox. Presence equals reality, probing the metaphysics of language symbolized by Georg’s letter, which conveys, second hand, an unreal sense of reality.
K’s protagonists struggle privately with their ontological crises, heroically preventing their big jihads from overtaking the public sphere via their psychological projections. Paradoxically, the individual mind has the greatest freedom in societies that curb the means by which their privileged elite can project their neuroses downward onto the masses with spirit-numbing effect.
Consider The New Attorney, in which K presents a Dr. Bucephalus [sounds like a venereal disease], who was Alexander the Great’s Karl Rove [Aristotle under a different name]. 28 A man of privilege and historical significance, society is making room for him, and he studies ancient books to occupy his time. A living historical spectacle, Bucephalus assumes the cultural function of privileged celebrity. Society favors subjects and objects of diachronic authority, which it deems worthy and marketable for mass consumption.
Yet citizens now—in TNA’s universe—are overwhelmingly sensing the weights of their body: Today, no one can deny, there is no Alexander the Great. 29
This follows K’s assertion several pages earlier in Alexander the Great that the young emperor, despite the means and opportunity, might not have been motivated to conquer foreign lands:
It is conceivable that [he]…might have remained standing on the bank of the Hellespont and never have crossed it, and not out of fear, not out of indecision, not out of infirmity of will, but because of the mere weight of his own body. 30
Alexander might not have needed to escape his ontological situation, rejecting opportunity in favor of repose. This relates forward to Dr. Bucephalus in that he has learned through experience what his student could not, being young with fewer things to re-member and not yet having begun to forget (one of Gregor’s problems, and one of Georg’s father’s apparent difficulties). K’s protagonists, by and large, are struggling to re-member themselves midstream in life:
Today the gates have been shifted elsewhere and higher and farther away; nobody points out their direction; many hold swords, but only flourish them, and the glance that tries to follow them becomes confused. (TNA). 31
Bucephalus functions socially as living memory of what once seemed possible, which is now merely tragic; yet privately he’s escaped into his interior jihad, progressing backward in his mind. The ensuing friction titillates his spirit into organic bliss, finding pleasure in the text:
Free, his flanks unrepressed by the thighs of a rider, under a quiet lamp, far from the din of Alexander’s battles, he reads and turns the pages of our old books. 32
K himself famously said when he writes he serves the devil. His work is more devious and pleasurable than most of his critics—who feel there must have been something wrong with him—realize, in that it constantly emphasizes physicality’s trumping of idealism. Consider Georg’s initial impression of his father upon entering his bedroom:
“Ah, Georg!” his father said, promptly going toward him. His heavy robe swung open as he walked, and the skirts flapped around his legs. “My father is still a giant,” Georg thought to himself. “Why, it’s unbearably dark here,” he then said. 33
Georg’s mind may be more acute, but it’s put in place by the size of his father’s penis, or so K implies. Also, Gregor’s metamorphosis—the fact he’s become a bug—outweighs any morality or ethics his family may have had in their dealings with him. Again and again throughout K physical reality blocks all attempts by those with humane sentiments to correct or improve existence.
Ironically, this most mind-numbing author writes from his gut. His language is an underling’s vent—a bureaucrat’s way out. It opposes dis-ease. It is healthy and, perhaps, even therapeutic for the writer/reader and his consumers who share a creative aesthetic for cathartic jouissance. 34
For K—as it was for Nietzsche before him and will be for Roland Barthes later—literature’s function is to provoke people into being more alert, clever, intellectual and aloof in their pursuits of pleasure. As Barthes would ultimately say, “…the text is that uninhibited person who shows his behind to the Political Father.” 35
K’s output is more than an unlocked litany of sparked words. Literary jouissance emerges from its body’s tortuous development of and torturous hunt for its own physical-spiritual design. 36 Content never shares ideas with “you” or “I” because that which spawns “us” is ineffable.
BUREAUCRATIC AUTHORITARIANISM
K copes with the quotidian grind—opposing the banality of evil—by mocking the hypocrisy of everything that distracts him from his need to escape civilization [a process, in this case, not a thing].37 K uses subtle irony and morbid humor to find room for his own spirit to breathe amid the general smog informing the materiality of each unfolding situation. His vocation is a revolt against all forms of external and physical authority that serve their own necessity, which in effect multiplies material need and suffering, its life blood, among the living spirits that inhabit and inform the world.
Such authority is symbolized by the “apparatus” of “In the Penal Colony,” a term K repeats an astonishing thirteen times in the first three pages: “It’s a singular apparatus,” the officer said to the explorer, running his somewhat admiring eyes over the apparatus, with which he was after all familiar…”
The traveler had little interest in the apparatus and was almost visibly unconcerned as he walked down behind the condemned man, while the officer took care of the final adjustments, crawling underneath the apparatus, which was inserted deep in the ground, or scaling a ladder to examine the upper parts. These were chores that could have actually been left to the mechanic; but the officer performed them with great zeal either because he was a strong supporter of this apparatus or because there were other reasons why the job could not have been entrusted to anyone else…
“But now look at this apparatus,” he promptly added, drying his hands with a towel while simultaneously motioning toward the apparatus. “Up to this point, it requires manual labor, but from now own, the apparatus works automatically…”
“…After all, the apparatus has to keep working uninterruptedly for twelve hours…”
“I don’t know,” said the officer, “whether the commander has already filled you in about the apparatus.” The traveler gestured vaguely; the officer could ask for nothing better, since now he could explain the apparatus himself. “This apparatus,” he said, grasping a crank handle and leaning against it, “was invented by our former commander”…The entire setup of the penal colony is his achievement. By the time he died, we, his friends, already knew that the colony, as he had organized it, was so self-contained that it would take his successor many years to change anything, even if he had a thousand plans in mind. And our prediction was correct; the new commander was forced to realize it. Too bad you never met the old commander! But,” the officer interrupted himself, “I’m rattling on, and the apparatus is standing here in front of us…” 38
The “apparatus,” we discover, is a torturous method of executing witless victims. It’s an exquisitely complex contraption that, in the end, serves its own inhuman purposes.
K is well aware that repeating “apparatus” so many times is a way of hammering home the machine’s equivalence to the highly centralized and bureaucratized state. Replacing the terms “apparatus” with “bureaucracy” and “officer” with “bureaucrat” and “commander” with “office manager” illustrates the point. Of course, there’s the Russian term “apparatchik,” which K would have been familiar, referring to a professional functionary who’s a member of the governmental “apparat.” In other words, an apparatchik is a bureaucrat with political responsibility or politician with a bureaucratic function. According to Wikipedia, appartchiks were “associated with a specific mindset, attitude and appearance.”
But how do they become this unaware of themselves, so distinct in their behaviors in the eyes of others? “In the Penal Colony” examines these questions without answering them. We see that the officer is eventually made in the image of the apparatus, that his ego was formed by established social mores that imposed their forms on him, limiting his options. His mind was disciplined by his commander’s disciple system to be its subject. The fact he is eventually killed by the apparatus, its cold-blooded judgment etched in his flesh, the officer’s function is to perceive himself as a reflection of the machine. Trapped within the text, he becomes a word being reveling in his anguish. K, like few other writers, understands the need for the modern, civilized individual to escape their ontological situation and emerge from their crisis of perception.
The world need not be unjust and arbitrary, bound to some blind woman set in stone, whose torch is not a flame, but a sword. 39 Liberation involves asking what it means “to be,” and do we have an innate responsibility, due to our existence, that most of us ignore at our own peril? Do we wish a butterfly effect on the lives of those we love? Do our butterfly actions doom us to future regrets? What price must we pay to exist? Is death our only atonement?