More Alive and Less Lonely

by Jonathan Lethem

  Three years later, in a freshman Lit class, a professor had us read Kafka’s story of a father and son’s mortal struggle, “The Judgment,” in tandem with the writer’s undelivered epistle, “A Letter to His Father.” This was 1982, early in what has become a literary age of relentless psychobiographical curiosity about authors, yet it was hardly unusual to examine Kafka this way; really, it was deeply traditional. Has there ever been an author more embedded in his own personal context of letters and diaries—as well as in the image created by his neurasthenic gaze in the famous photographs, and by the biographical details of his pensiveness, suffering and early death? This may be the inevitable legacy of a literary genius who left such an epic disproportion of letters and diaries to intentional literary works. (And, if we recall Kafka’s instructions to his friend Max Brod to destroy the unfinished novels and a majority of the other writings, aren’t we violating Kafka’s privacy anytime we read beyond In the Penal Colony, that modest volume that assembles every piece of prose whose publication he approved?) Yet Kafka is luminescent in every mode and medium. His capacity for anticipating any response we find in ourselves as we read him, can tend to make us feel he has overmastered any commentator the moment they issue a single interpretation. As long as we keep our own mouths shut, and all theories at bay, we can assure ourselves that we alone have mingled with the “true” Franz Kafka.

  The history of Kafka studies is one of proprietary sniping among claimants for Existentialism, Judaism, antifascism and anti-Communism between Freudians and anti-Freudians and deconstructionists and anti-deconstructionists. The battles take place on ground struck by Brod and by Kafka’s early translators into English, the Scots Willa and Edwin Muir, against whom every subsequent commentator has been obliged to react. Brod and the Muirs preferred to see the writer’s teasing nightmares of futility and paradox as a vast allegory of Man’s attempted negotiation with an absconded and yet somehow menacing spiritual authority—call it God, if you like, though taking my college professor’s hint, it often enough resembles Dad. These debates, while in character seeming old as the Talmud, are, like terrorist cellphone chatter, boiling away any time we care to tune in: if you don’t believe me, visit the letters pages of The New York Review of Books. The irony is that Kafka may seem to resemble the invisible authorities lurking inside The Castle, or behind the operations of The Trial: impossible to approach without transgression, and without sinking into a mire of petty bureaucratic obstacles.

  Kafka’s presence in extra- or para-literary culture is also feverish, and contested. At this point, denouncing the adjective “Kafkaesque” as a travesty of Kafka has itself become a cliché. But then Kafka’s evocative persona and his most famous signifiers—particularly the insect of “The Metamorphosis”—seem to beg for travesty, for appropriation into icon and cartoon, into Philip Roth’s novel The Breast, Steven Soderberg’s movie Kafka, and dozens if not hundreds of others. (Mea culpa: in Kafka Americana, with co-conspirator Carter Scholz, I morphed Kafka with Frank Capra, Batman, and Orson Welles). The cartoonist R. Crumb, with writer David Zane Mairowitz, in Introducing Kafka, denounced Soderberg’s movie and the Kafka T-shirts sold in Prague as “kitsch,” even while offering up unsqeamishly detailed renderings of the insect Kafka fought to keep off the front jacket of the book edition of “The Metamorphosis.” In travesty, as in interpretation, only one’s own effort is likely to seem wholly excusable.

  Now, striding across this field comes the Italian essayist Robert Calasso, who proposes, by a single gesture of minimizing interpretive context or precedent, to restore the fragmentary Kafka to an immaculate wholeness. He also proposes Kafka as a visionary of ontology—an ontology which hints everywhere at theological traditions, though Calasso might be horrified to have his project described this way. Calasso’s brash method, established in the justly celebrated Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony and continued in Ka, is to reinscribe, persistently, the essential power of the myths and stories he considers, largely by the act of retelling them in his philosophically muscular prose. In Cadmus and Harmony he did this for the Greek myths, in Ka for the gods of the East, the Vedic and Brahmanic pantheons; in each case his encompassing awareness created for the reader a breathtaking immersion in the force and implication of these ancient stories, offering a series of epiphanies as to their relevance to contemporary literature and life. Rather than surrounding his subject with information, Calasso seems to cause it to glow from within, like fingers cupped around the bulb of a flashlight, so that that which has been taken for granted becomes translucent and revelatory.

  In Calasso’s Kafka, infinity is not a state of mind, let alone a version of obsessive-compulsive or manic-depressive oscillation, but a peek at the cosmos, the eternal order before which mankind inevitably shudders:

  Certainly it’s not the case, as some continue to maintain, that the religious or the sacred or the divine has been shattered, dissolved, obviated, by some outside agent, by the light of the Enlightenment…What happened instead is that such things as the religious or the sacred or the divine, by an obscure process of osmosis, were absorbed and hidden in something alien, which no longer has need of such names because it is self-sufficient and is content to be described as society…With Kafka a phenomenon bursts onto the scene: the commixture. There is no sordid corner that can’t be described as a vast abstraction, and no vast abstraction that can’t be treated as a sordid corner.

  It’s a measure of Calasso’s accomplishment that his readings feel familiar, as though his erudition were inside us, a pre-existing condition only waiting for diagnosis. His tone, while epic, is also welcoming. It’s a measure of Kafka’s genius, though, that Calasso’s book still feels like an interpretation, and therefore partial at best.

  What if, as in Henry James’s “The Figure in the Carpet”—that perfect parable of critics coming to grief in the attempt at interpreting fiction—the secret of Kafka is that there’s no secret? What if behind the machinations of The Castle lies not so much the ineffable mythos of Calasso’s reverent speculation, but the Great and Powerful Oz? In fact, anytime K. glimpses the Castle’s operatives they look a lot like a bunch of old guys smoking cigars and cavorting with trollops. It’s easy to complain that Calasso, like every critic before him, has missed Kafka’s humor (to read Kafka is to feel that everyone before you has missed his humor—hence the almost wearisome popularity of the anecdote that Kafka and his friends were convulsed with laughter when he read The Trial aloud). But Calasso, for all his transubstantiation with these texts, may have, in his bias for excavating Gods, missed Kafka’s grubby, self-effacing foolishness, his insistent embarrassment at grandiosity, his peculiar and magical refusal to keep his eye on the ball—in a word, Kafka’s shrug.

  All of this is only to say that the difficulty with Calasso’s K. is precisely that this great distiller of distant myths has taken as his subject not some vast and elusive array of ancient texts, but the readily available and eminently readable works of a modern author. It is useless to read K. before one has read Kafka. Indeed, to sample Calasso’s communion with Kafka is to feel the immediate need to reread the novels and stories, if only out of envy for the galvanic charge the activity has plainly put into Calasso. And to read Kafka is to locate one’s own intensely personal relationship to the writer’s glorious and terrifying conundrums. Your Kafka, however less brilliantly articulated, is unlikely to be exactly Calasso’s.

  My own Kafka does keep company with ancient archetypes, sure, but he’s also a fiction writer from the not-yet-irretrievable twentieth century (You caught me: I’m claiming him for my own tribe now). Manipulator of characters, scenes, dialogue and plot; painstaking emulator of Dickens and Flaubert; and self-taunting blocked writer, Kafka is as accessible to readers as he is esoteric to interpreters. In his communing with the unnamable, Kafka may be drawn into the company of gnostic seers, yes. But he’s also (Warning: I offer you now a bouquet of comparisons-as-travesties) as strange and cool as the best M.C. Escher drawing you ever
got cross-eyed over; as disconcertingly ribald as not only Philip Roth and Samuel Beckett but also the aforementioned R. Crumb; as toxic and shuddery as Poe and David Lynch. His prose, among the most exacting and incisive ever put on the page (hence the inevitability of his translators’ doubts, and our doubts of his translators), may be taken as a reproach to all us lesser writers. But it also takes the top of your head off, like a line of cocaine.

  If for most readers Kafka demolishes the quarantine between waking and dream, for working writers like Anita Brookner, who has reconciled Kafka with Jane Austen, or Thomas Berger, who appropriated Kafka for genres like the policier and the screwball farce, Kafka represents a writerly pressure on individual moments of lived experience, of lived consciousness, to a degree previously unknown in fiction. For anyone who has dared attempt picking up where Kafka left off it is the quarantine between realist and anti-realist methods in fiction that his writing has made seem permanent nonsense. Kafka grasped that language itself—even the very plainest and most direct—is innately metaphorical, fabulated, and grotesque. What’s worse, consciousness, being constructed from language, has that same unholy drift, like the staggering gait of a golem, or the puttering and sifting activities of the molelike creature in “The Burrow.” To follow where language and consciousness lead, to chart a mind’s self-devouring narcissism and anxiety as it encounters and defends itself from an indifferent universe, is the higher realism. Language itself dreams, and all thinking is wishful, or else morbid. Usually both. One of the most poignant moments in all of Kafka’s writing is when this compulsive epistolary filibusterer, whose volumes of brilliantly self-justifying and self-abnegating letters to his sweethearts rival his fiction in both volume and hypnotic power, remarks: “These letters do nothing but cause anguish, and if they don’t cause any anguish it’s even worse.”

  Kafka’s characters are both defiled and enraptured by the world. They defile and enrapture it in turn: Calasso isolates a perverse moment in The Trial, when Joseph K. recognizes the sexual allure that attaches to him because of his predicament: “Defendants are the loveliest of all…it can’t be guilt that renders them beautiful…It must result from the proceedings being brought against them, which somehow adhere to them.” Similarly, each of Kafka’s readers will be defiled and enraptured in the maze of the writer’s texts; no interpretation can protect one from the world’s grasp, or from the grasp of stories. One of Kafka’s parables concerns leopards breaking into a temple and drinking from the sacred vessels; after a period of years the leopards are relied upon as an aspect of the holy ceremonies. As with the leopards, so with this ritual of interpretation (and defense from interpretation) of Kafka’s writing. Kafka’s readers must become leopards and transgress in order to visit the temple in the first place.

  Three essential books: The Castle, The Trial, and The Collected Stories. Throw in Amerika for dessert. Kafka’s the greatest writer, by a long shot, who you can polish off in two or three weeks’ reading. And yet, a warning: As Kafka found it impossible to finish his own novels—some days, his diaries reveal, he believed he had not even begun his work—so you may find it impossible to be finished with Kafka. The Castle’s up there on the hill. Set out anytime you like. The horizon, you’ll find, recedes as you approach it; you may approach wearing a Kafka t-shirt, or not.

  —The New York Times, 2005

  The Greatest Animal Novelist of All Time

  I have a suggestion: Forget London. Forget, for now, the nineteenth century, forget the whole assertion that the value of the “late,” or “mature,” Dickens—a construction whose first evidence is usually located by commentators here, in Dombey and Son—rests on his staging his sentimental melodramas and grotesques within an increasingly deliberate and nuanced social panorama, of his city. Forget institutions, forget reform. Please indulge me, and forget for the moment any questions of confession or self-portraiture, despite Dombey’s being the book which preceded that great dam-bursting of the autobiographical impulse, David Copperfield (in fact, Dombey contains a tiny leak in that dam in the form of Mrs. Pipchin, the first character Dickens said was drawn from a figure from his life). Forget it all, and then forgive what will surely seem a diminishing suggestion from me, which is that you abandon all context, ye who enter here, and read Dombey and Son as though it were a book about animals.

  Read it as though the characters are all covered in fur, beginning with Dombey and his little newborn heir on the glorious first page: read this book as if it were The Wind in the Willows, or Watership Down, one of those droll stories about anthropomorphized creatures, clever eccentric badgers and rabbits and crows, as well as feral predators, foxes and cats, tucked into Victorian suits and dresses—read it as if Dickens were the greatest animal novelist of all times. If this seems impossible, note the head start Dickens has given you in naming Dombey’s characters: Cuttle, Chick, Nipper, Gills, MacStinger and, of course, The Game Chicken. Note the descriptions: “Mrs. Pipchin hovered behind the victim, with her sable plumage and her hooked beak, like a bird of ill-omen.” There’s Mrs. Skewton, “whose vigilance…no lynx could have surpassed.” Doctor Blimber “looked at Paul as if he were a little mouse”—then, a page later, “seemed to survey Paul with the sort of interest that might attach to some choice little animal he was going to stuff.” Mrs. Brown is shown “hovering about” Florence Dombey “like some new kind of butterfly.” Or consider the description of Mr. Toodle feeding his brood of children, which omits any overt animal reference yet still sounds like narration from the Nature Channel:

  In satisfying himself, however, Mr. Toodle was not regardless of the younger branches about him, who, although they had made their own evening repast, were on the look-out for irregular morsels…These he distributed now and then to the expectant circle, by holding out great wedges of bread and butter, to be bitten at by the family in lawful succession, and by serving out small doses of tea in a like manner with a spoon; which snacks had such relish in the mouths of these young Toodles, that, after partaking of the same, they performed private dances of ecstasy among themselves, and stood on one leg apiece, and hopped…they gradually closed around Mr. Toodle again, and eyed him hard as he got through more bread and butter and tea…

  Then there is of course our skulking white-collar criminal, Carker:

  …feline from sole to crown was Mr. Carker the Manager, as he basked in the strip of summer-light and warmth that shone upon his table and the ground…With hair and whiskers deficient in colour at all times, but feebler than common in the rich sunshine, and more like the coat of a sandy tortoise-shell cat; with long nails, nicely pared and sharpened…Mr. Carker the Manager, sly of manner, sharp of tooth, soft of foot, watchful of eye, oily of tongue, cruel of heart, nice of habit, sat with a dainty steadfastness and patience at his work, as if he were waiting at a mouse’s hole.

  Mary Gaitskill, in her introduction to Bleak House, describes the force such protean imagery stirs up from underneath the surface of Dickens’s ostensibly lucid stories:

  With all the roaring energy he summons…and all the ranting little heads popping out of his fantastic landscape, Dickens is excessive by modern standards. But modern standards have become excessive, and Dickens is excessive like Nature; like living things his creatures must twist and turn, expand out or tunnel in until they have utterly fulfilled what they are.

  Susan Horton, in The Reader in the Dickens World, takes the observation further:

  Although these images are called up in metaphors which presumably are meant to carry forward the plot action, they often seem to accumulate in such a way that they create an entirely separate and separable world…This beastlike world is a world of real mystery rather than contrived plot mystery…and it is in this figurative rendering of the experience of living…that Dickens’s power and his vision lie.

  Mark Spilka, in Dickens and Kafka, offers a comparison of Dombey and Son’s comic-grotesque leading-man, Captain Cuttle, with the obsessive digging creature who narrates Kafka’s long
tale “The Burrow.” Cuttle, through the middle of the novel, has taken flight from Mrs. MacStinger, and from his fears of marriage and children, to barricade himself inside Sol Gills’s anachronistic sea-instrument shop. As Spilka points out, “the enemy in each case is the prospect of adult involvement, and the defensive preparations are equally elaborate”:

  What the Captain suffered…whenever a bonnet passed, or how often he darted out of the shop to elude imaginary MacStingers, and sought safety in the attic, cannot be told. But to avoid the fatigues attendant on this means of self-preservation, the Captain curtained the glass door of communication between the shop and parlour…and cut a small hole of espial in the wall.