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SHOULD KAFKA BE BURNTSHOULD KAFKA BE BURNT
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[numbers in brackets refer to pages in Literature And Evil, London, Marion Boyars, 1985, and are at the bottom of the page.]
Soon after the War a Communist weekly paper, Action, opened an inquiry into an unexpected subject. Should Kafka be burnt? the editors asked. The question was all the more incongruous since it was not preceded by anything which might have led into it: should books be burnt? Or, what sort of book should be burnt? However that may be, the editors' choice was subtle. The author of The Trial is, as they say, ‘one of the greatest geniuses of our time’. Nevertheless the large number of replies proved that boldness paid. Besides, even before it had been formulated, the inquiry had received an answer which the editors omitted to publish – Kafka’s own answer. For he lived, or at any rate died, tormented by the desire to burn his books.
To my mind Kafka remained undecided until the end. To start with, he wrote his books, and we must imagine a period of time between the day when one writes something and the day when one decides to burn what one has written. Then his decision remained equivocal: – he conferred the task of burning his work on his one friend who had already informed him that he would never do so. Yet, before his death, he did indeed express a decisive wish that all he left should be thrown into the fire.
In all events the idea of burning Kafka, even it if was no more than a provocation, had a certain logic for the (151) Communists. Those imaginary flames contribute to the understanding of his books. They are books doomed to the flames: they are there, but they are there in order to disappear, as though they have already been annihilated.
Of all writers Kafka was possibly the most cunning: he, at least, was never had! To start with, unlike many modern writers, he wanted to be a writer. He realised that literature, which was what he wanted, denied him the satisfaction he expected, but he never stopped writing. We cannot even say that literature disappointed him. It did not disappoint him – not, at any rate, in comparison with other possible goals. For him, literature was what the promised land was for Moses. ‘The fact that he was not to see the Promised Land until just before his death is incredible,’ Kafka wrote about Moses in his diary. ‘The sole significance of this last view is to show how imperfect an instant human life is – imperfect, because this aspect of life (the expectation of the Promised Land) could last indefinitely without ever appearing to be more than an instant. Moses did not fail to reach Canaan because his life was too short, but because his was a human life.’1 This is no longer a mere denunciation of the vanity of one ‘aspect of life’, but of the vanity of all endeavours, which are equally senseless: an endeavour is always as hopeless in time as a fish in water. It is a mere point in the movement of the universe, for we are dealing with a human life.
Is anything more contrary to the position of the Communists? Communism is action par excellence, action which changes the world. In Communism the goal, the altered world, situated in time, in the future, takes precedence over existence, or present activity, which is (152) only significant in as far as it leads towards the goal: the world must change. Communism, therefore, raises no problem of principle. The whole of humanity is prepared to subordinate the present moment to the imperative power of a goal. Nobody doubts the value or questions the ultimate authority of action.
All that remains is an insignificant reservation: we tell ourselves that action has never prevented anyone from living … Thus the world of action never has any care other than its goal. The goals differ according to the intention, but their diversity, even their opposition, has always held a place for individual convenience. Only a deformed, almost insane man refuses one goal in favour of anything other than a still more valid goal. Kafka himself implies that Moses was only an object of derision because he had to die in accordance with the prophecy as soon as he reached his goal. But he adds, logically, that the underlying cause of his defeat was his ‘human life’. The aim is postponed in time and time is limited: this alone leads Kafka to regard the goal in itself as a lure.
This is so paradoxical – and so totally opposed to the Communist mentality (and not merely to the political belief that nothing counts except the revolution) – that we must examine Kafka’s attitude a little more closely.
The task is by no means easy. Whenever Kafka decided to express his ideas (in his diary or in his various notes), he made a trap of every word. He constructed perilous edifices in which the words had no logical order but were simply piled on top of each other as if they were only there to astonish and disorientate, as if they were addressed to the author himself who never seemed to tire of proceeding from astonishment to bewilderment.
(153)
What we cannot do is to attribute a meaning to Kafka’s truly literary writings. We frequently see something that is not there, or, at best, we see something that is there but at which we can no more than hint.2 Nevertheless we can follow a general direction in this labyrinth which only becomes clear to us when we find our way out of it. At that point I think we can simply say that Kafka’s work reveals a totally childish attitude.
In my opinion the weakness of the world we live in is to consider childishness a sphere apart which, though not alien to us, remains outside us and which is incapable of representing its truth – what it really is – on its own. Equally, nobody regards error as representing truth. ‘It’s childish’ or ‘it’s not serious’ are equivalent propositions. Yet we are all childish – totally, unreservedly, and, we should even add, in the most surprising way. It is thus (by childishness) that humanity, in its nascent state, shows its essential nature. In a way an animal is never childish, but the young human being connects – sometimes even passionately – the senses suggested to him by the adult to some other sense which he cannot connect with anything. Such is the world to which we adhered and which once intoxicated us with its innocence – a world where each thing temporarily rejected that which made it a thing within the adult system.
Kafka left what his publisher called the ‘outline of an autobiography’.3 The fragment refers solely to his childhood and to one particular trait. ‘You will find it impossible to persuade a boy engrossed in a fascinating story that he must go to bed, if you try to do so by proving that it is for his own good.’ Further on Kafka says: ‘The most important thing about all this is that I extended the condemnation which my exaggerated amount of reading had earned for me to a secret failure to perform my duty, and therefore arrived at the most depressing conclusions.’
(154)
The adult author insists on the fact that the condemnation was directed against tastes which constituted the ‘child’s particularities’. Constraint either made him ‘hate the oppressor’ or consider insignificant the peculiarities which he defended. ‘If I concealed one of my peculiarities,’ he wrote, ‘I ended up by hating myself or my destiny, and considered myself wicked or accursed.’
The reader of The Trial or The Castle will have no difficulty in recognising the atmosphere of Kafka’s romantic compositions. When he was older, the crime of reading was succeeded by the crime of writing. When it came to literature, the people surrounding Kafka, above all his father, were no less disapproving than they had been when they had caught him reading. And Kafka was equally desperate. As Michel Carrouges rightly said: ‘What he resented so terribly was the levity with which his deepest preoccupations were considered…’ Describing a scene when his family’s contempt became cruelly obvious, Kafka wrote: ‘I remained seated and leaned towards my family as I had done before, but in fact I had been banished from society with one stroke.’4
The odd thing about Kafka is that he wanted his father to understand him and to comply with the childishness of what he read and, later, of what he wrote. He did not want his father to banish from adult society, which alone was indestructible, the very thing which, since infancy, he had identified as the essential characteristic of himself. For him, his father was the figure of authority whose interest was limited to the values of effective action. His father symbolised the primacy of a goal, subordinating present life, which most adults respected. Like every true writer, (155) Kafka lived childishly under the primacy of his goal, as opposed to present desire. Admittedly he subjected himself to the torture of an office job, though not without complaining about his ill-fortune, if not about the people who compelled him to work. He always felt excluded from the society which employed him, but he considered worthless – childish – that very thing that was, basically, himself. His father obviously replied with the incomprehension of the world of action. In 1919 Franz Kafka wrote his father a letter 5 which, fortunately, no doubt, he never posted and of which we only possess certain fragments. He said:
I was a frightened child, but, like all children, I was obstinate. Undoubtedly my mother spoiled me, and yet I cannot believe that I was quite unmanageable that a kind word, a pat on my hand, a kind look, would not have obtained all you wanted from me. You can only treat a child in accordance with your true nature, that is to say with force and violence … You rose to such a high position on your own, through your own strength, because you had unlimited faith in your opinions… In your presence I started stammering … When I stood before you I lost all self-confidence and assumed, instead, an unbounded sense of guilt. It was with this unbounded sense of guilt in mind that I once wrote of somebody6 ‘He feared that the shame would outlive him…’ Whenever I wrote anything it was about you. What do I do but pour out the groans and laments which I was unable to release before you? Everything has been a leavetaking from you, voluntarily protracted.
Kafka wanted to entitle his entire work ‘Attempts to escape from the paternal sphere’.7 Yet let there be no mistake about it: Kafka never really wanted to escape. What he (156) really wanted was to live within the paternal sphere – as an exile. Basically he knew that he had been banished. We cannot tell whether he was banished by others or by himself. He simply behaved in such a manner as to be odious to the world of industrial and commercial interest: he wanted to remain within the puerility of a dream.
The escape he dreamt of differed essentially from the traditional form of literary escapism in that it failed – it had to fail and it wanted to fail. What common escape lacks and by lacking it is limited to a compromise, to a ‘sham’ – is the profound sense of guilt, of the violation of an indestructible law, the lucidity of a pitiless self-knowledge. The man who escapes in literature is a dilettante who knows that he is amusing himself. He is not yet free – he is not free in the true sense of the word, where liberty is sovereign. To be free, he would have to be recognised as such by the dominant society.
In the old-fashioned world of Austrian feudalism, the only society that could have recognised the young Israelite for reasons other than literary snobbery, was his father’s business world. The world in which the power of Franz’s father was incontestably affirmed, stood for the hard competition of work which yielded nothing to caprice and which, though it tolerated, and even loved childishness within certain limits, condemned childishness on principle, and confined it to childhood. This brings us to Kafka’s extremism. He wanted to be recognised by the authority least likely to recognise him and to which he was determined never to yield. At the same time, however, he never intended to overthrow this authority or even to oppose it. He did not want to oppose the father who had even taken the possibility of living from him. He, in his turn, never wanted to be an adult or a father. In his own way he struggled all his life, and with full exercise of all his rights to enter his father’s society, but he would only have (157) accepted admission on one condition – that of remaining theirresponsible child he was.
He pursued this desperate struggle relentlessly. He never had any hope: his only way out was to enter his father’s world through death, thereby abandoning all his peculiarities, his whims and his childishness. He himself formulated this solution – constantly repeated in his novels – in 1917: ‘I will confide in death,’ he said, ‘the remains of a belief. Return to the father. Great day of reconciliation.’8 The only way for him to become a father was by marrying, but he avoided this despite the
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