(Agreeably, in ‘Advocates’, the two tropes are momentarily run together: ‘the prosecutors, those wily foxes, those nippy weasels, those invisible voles slip through the smallest holes and whisk through between the feet of the advocates’.) In either case, it is a markedly depleted, technical sort of life, beset with imperatives and hierarchies and limitations (‘The Married Couple’, ‘Investigations of a Dog’, ‘The Burrow’).
Family stories – ‘The Judgement’, Metamorphosis, ‘The Stoker: A Fragment’ – tended to be the ones that were drawn out for publication, in the seven short books that Kafka agreed to have published in his lifetime, collected in English as Metamorphosis and Other Stories. The pieces here are outlying, perhaps the outer, wilder ripples (‘The Vulture’) of Kafka’s disturbance. Thus ‘In the City’ is like an earlier version of ‘The Judgement’; ‘It Was One Summer’ stands in some relation both to ‘A Country Doctor’ and ‘In the Penal Colony’. Such pieces as ‘Building the Great Wall of China’ or ‘Our Little Town’ or ‘Our City Coat of Arms’ comment on a kind of empire-feeling (after all, Kafka was named Franz by his parents after the Emperor Franz Joseph), a strange apathy, often ignorance or disengagement: ‘like strangers in a city, like latecomers, they stand at the back of densely crowded side streets, calmly eating their packed lunches, while a long way in front of them on the market square the execution of their overlord is in progress’. Piranesian structures, great and small walls, corridors, courtyards, staircases, Towers of Babel await occupation. ‘I require silence in my passageways,’ says the animal in ‘The Burrow’, sounding strangely introspective, as if for an ECG or a sonogram. Chaos, starvation – light-headedness, light-bodiedness – and plain dread menace these structures, or hauntingly – think of Kafka’s TB – all their intricacies are levelled, swept aside by a tide of blood, as in the terrifyingly equivocal ending of ‘The Vulture’: ‘Now I saw that he had understood everything, he flew up, leaning right back to get plenty of momentum, and then, like a javelin-thrower, he thrust his beak through my mouth deep into me. As I fell back, I could feel a sense of deliverance as he wallowed and drowned in the blood that now filled all my vessels and burst its banks.’ They break off in brittleness and suggestion, like ‘Night’; they exhaust their idea like ‘The Vulture’ or ‘Poseidon’; or they weirdly and tenaciously adhere, like the ‘Investigations of a Dog’ or ‘The Burrow’.
Camus, in one of the places where he sounds most like Kafka – endlessly surprising, endlessly provocative, endlessly serene, the unmoved Mover – says: ‘One should think of Sisyphus as happy.’ Something about the making of these tumultuous stones – or stories – strikes me nonetheless as exquisitely happy.
MICHAEL HOFMANN,
Hamburg, June 2016
In the City
One winter’s afternoon, during a blizzard, Oscar M., an ageing student – if you looked at him from close to, you saw that he had terrifying eyes – Oscar M., in winter clothes and winter coat, scarf around his neck and a fur hat on his head, came to a sudden stop on the empty square. Whatever he was thinking was causing his eyes to blink rapidly. He was sunk so deep in thought that at one point he took off his hat and rubbed its coarse fur against his face. Finally he seemed to come to a conclusion, spun on his heel like a dancer, and headed home. When he opened the door of his parents’ flat, he saw his father, a fleshy-faced clean-shaven man, sitting at an empty table facing the door. ‘Not before time,’ he said, no sooner had Oscar set foot in the room, ‘and not a step closer, please, I am so furious with you that I can’t answer for the consequences.’ ‘But Father,’ said Oscar, and only then did he notice that he was all out of breath. ‘Quiet!’ yelled his father, and stood up, obscuring a window. ‘Quiet, I say. And but me no buts, all right?’ So saying, he picked up the table in his two hands and carried it one pace nearer to Oscar. ‘I can’t put up with your dissolute life a moment longer. I am an old man. I thought to have in you a support for my later years, but you’ve turned out to be worse than my illnesses. I’m disgusted by such a son, who by sheer laziness, prodigality, wickedness and stupidity is driving his old father to an early grave.’
At this point the old man fell silent, though his face continued to work as though he was still speaking. ‘Dear Papa,’ said Oscar, and cautiously approached the table, ‘calm yourself, everything will be all right. I have just had an idea that will make me the productive human being of your dreams.’ ‘What’s that, then?’ asked his father, staring fixedly into a corner. ‘Trust me, I’ll explain it to you over supper. Really, I was always a good son, only the fact that I wasn’t able to prove it to you so embittered me that, seeing that I was unable to delight you, I chose to annoy you instead. But now just let me take a turn in the fresh air to help me develop my thoughts.’ His father, who had initially been leaning against the table in growing attentiveness, stood up: ‘I don’t believe what you’ve just said is worth much. It’s just talk. But in the end you are my son. Come back soon, we’ll eat together, and you can tell me what’s on your mind.’ ‘That small indication of your confidence is enough for me. I thank you for it sincerely. But isn’t it apparent from my expression that I’m completely taken up with this serious plan?’ ‘I don’t know about that,’ said his father.
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