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DESCRIPTION OF A STRUGGLE and THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA by Franz Kafka. (Secker & Warburg)

FRANZ KAFKA by Günther Anders. (Bowes & Bowes)

This latest volume of Kafka’s shorter stories, containing the translation by WiIla and Edwin Muir of The Great Wall of China and other stories which first appeared in 1933 together with a number newly translated by Tania and James Stern, is described by the publishers as completing his fictional writings in the English Definitive Edition. The term is misleading. The printed texts of Kafka’s works have been determined by Dr Max Brod, who frequently made up from varying manuscript versions what he considered to be Kafka’s intention but has not made available to scholars the manuscripts themselves, on which alone they could with any prospect of fruitful results base their investigations. The consequence of this lack of original sources is that the texts, for which we have to depend upon Dr Brod, are unreliable and there is no definitive edition in German, and therefore none in English. Not only are the three novels unfinished, but even the order of chapters has been questioned by Professor Uyttersprot and others. Many of the shorter stories are likewise fragments, and those which are presumed to be complete do not always give the impression of having been brought to a conclusion. The tendency of German critics, which in the case of Kafka appears to have infected those in other countries, to equate obscurity with significance has been disastrously encouraged.

     Kafka as a man presents a psychological problem of absorbing complexity. As a writer he grips the reader by a highly original style and his ability to create a grey world whose mysterious functioning is accepted by its inhabitants as a matter of course. The reader is fascinated, though he has only the vaguest idea what it is all about. Kafka’s world is warped, but his characters treat the plane on which they live as perfectly normal. When they attempt to discover reasons for what is happening, there is not so much astonishment that such things could be as anxiety to know why they themselves are suddenly being affected. Kafka himself records the situation with sober calm, and what the critics have been arguing about is whether his distortions are a successful literary device for revealing the truth about man and his society.

     Dr Günther Anders, a philosopher and writer of distinction, published his book nine years ago under the title of Kafka: Pro et Contra. It is an acute analysis of Kafka’s meaning and purpose, offering an interpretation which, though at times subtle rather than convincing, helps to disperse some of the cloudy speculation which has for so long confused the issue. He regards Kafka as to some extent an apologist of conformism and cites in illustration the situation in The Castle, where the ruling powers are represented as evil and K., the central figure, though he is aware of this, tries to accept and vindicate them.

     ‘The fashionable cult of Kafka,’ says Dr Anders, ‘is therefore to be viewed with considerable misgivings. His moral message is sacrificium intellectus, and his political message self-abasement.’ He concludes that Kafka did not wish to be free, that he had a ‘yearning for total belonging’, that he was a realist of the dehumanized world in which authority is right and those who have no rights are guilty. Kafka is not claustrophobic; he does not feel shut in, he feels shut out. Dr Anders makes an illuminating comparison between the conjunction of ‘horror and homeliness’ to be found in Kafka’s stories and the bourgeois parlours of the commandants at the Nazi annihilation camps. The industrialized mass-murderer and the comfortable family man are one and the same individual, and Kafka, describing his seemingly unreal world in concrete and meticulous detail, found nothing in this for surprise. We too, a few years later, learned to accept what before 1933 we should have regarded as a paradox.

     Kafka was something of a prophet and, like his fellow-countryman Rilke, he anticipated the age of Angst that was to come. He projected his personal predicament into his stories and endowed it with a certain universal applicability, but his important works are mostly unfinished and nobody can say with certainty what deeper layers of significance he was trying to convey in his ‘meaningful vision of the meaningless world’. Dr Anders utters a warning against the paralysing effect of this world on the reader. He might have added that if one reads too much of Kafka at a sitting the effect is also tedious.