All posts tagged A Country Doctor

Milan Kundera on Franz Kafka (1979)

In 1979 the Czech novelist Milan Kundera published a short essay about the works of fellow Czech and Prague inhabitant, Franz Kafka. The essay was titled Somewhere behind.

Throughout it Kundera uses the adjective ‘Kafkan’, which seems perverse of either him or the translator, because everyone else in the English-speaking world talks about the ‘Kafkaesque’.

Four elements of the Kafkaesque

Anyway, Kundera sets out to define what the ‘Kafkaesque’ consists of, and comes up with:

1. It describes a world which is an endless labyrinth which nobody can escape or understand, run according to laws nobody remembers being made, which no longer seem to apply to humans.

2. K.’s fate depends on a file about him which has been mislaid in the Castle’s vast and inept bureaucracy. Kafka’s world is one in which a man’s life becomes a shadow of a truth held elsewhere (in the boundless bureaucracy). Kundera says this notion of a supra-human realm begins to invoke the theological.

In his opinion this dualism led early commentators to interpret Kafka’s stories as religious allegories, not least Kafka’s friend and executor Max Broad, who saw his friend as a deeply religious writer. Kundera disagrees because this view ‘sees allegory where Kafka grasped concrete situations of human life’. I certainly agree that many of the scenes, especially in The Trial, are imagined and described in great and lucid detail.

He also makes the interesting point that when Power deifies itself it automatically produces its own theology. Thought-provoking…

3. The punished seek the offence, want to find out what it is they have done. Worse, the punished become so oppressed by the sense of their own guilt, that they set about finding what it is they have done wrong, so that Joseph K. sets out to review every word, thought and deed from his entire life. The punished beg for recognition of their guilt.

4. When Kafka read the first chapter of The Trial to his friends everyone laughed including the author. Kafka takes us inside a joke which looks funny from the outside, but in its core, in its gut, is horrific.

Against a sociological or Marxist interpretation

Just recently I read an essay by the Marxist literary critic György Lukács, who claimed that Kafka’s fiction was, at its heart, or root, a response to contemporary capitalism:

The diabolical character of the world of modern capitalism, and man’s impotence in the face of it, is the real subject matter of Kafka’s writing. (The Meaning of Contemporary Realism by György Lukács, p.77)

Kundera rejects this and it’s worth quoting his reasons:

Attempts have been made to explain Kafka’s novels as a critique of industrial society, of exploitation, alienation, bourgeois morality – of capitalism, in a word. But there is almost nothing of the constituents of capitalism in Kafka’s universe: not money or its power, not commerce, not property or owners or the class struggle.

Neither does the Kafkaesque correspond to a definition of totalitarianism. In Kafka’s novels, there is neither the party nor ideology and its jargon nor politics, the police, or the army.

So we should rather say that the Kafkaesque represents one fundamental possibility of man and his world, a possibility that is not historically determined and that accompanies man more or less eternally. (p.106)

Kundera’s rejection doesn’t have the conceptual depth of Lukács who, after all, doesn’t describe Kafka’s works as a critique of capitalism on the basis that they describe or analyse any specific aspect of a capitalist society. Lukács bases his claim on the notion that Kafka’s works, taken as a whole, convey the worldview of bourgeois alienation, which modern capitalism produces. Even if it doesn’t describe any of the details of a capitalist society (factories, banks, modern technology etc), it still conveys the mood.

Kundera’s quick paragraphs are a useful reminder of just how uncapitalist the settings and events of some ofKafka’s stories are: The Castle in particular is set in a sort of 18th century, pre-industrial Ruritania, completely remote from the modern world.

But Kundera is, in fact, wrong to say:

There is almost nothing of the constituents of capitalism in Kafka’s universe: not money or its power, not commerce, not property or owners or the class struggle.

In The Trial Joseph K works in a bank. He is a senior figure in a bank, in competition with the Deputy Director, lording it over innumerable clerks, and holds meetings with a number of businessmen clients. ‘Nothing of the constituents of capitalism’? Arguably, The Bank is the central institution in capitalism.

Similarly, in The Metamorphosis Gregor Samsa is not only a travelling salesman, but his father’s business went bankrupt owing large debts to the company which Gregor works for, and Gregor’s job there is based on a deal that part of his salary is deducted to pay off his father’s debts. He is a sort of debt slave, and this accounts for the tragi-comic way that, after he awakens as a giant beetle, Gregor’s first response is not horror at what’s happened to him but anxiety at the fact that he’s going to be late for work, and indeed the first incident after the transformation, is the arrival of the company’s Chief Clerk wanting to find out why Gregor is late.

So, no, Kundera is wrong. Of Kafka’s three great masterpieces, two of them are set in very capitalist institutions – a bank, and in the sales and marketing of a clothing company – and the second also features as key plot components the ideas of business, bankruptcy, debt, salary and commission.

On reflection many of the constituents of capitalism feature in Kafka’s universe: money and its power to shape individual lives, commerce, the ownership of property, business owners (Gregor’s Chief Clerk or the bank’s Deputy Director). Kundera seems oddly blind to these basic facts.

The nature of totalitarian society

Fundamentally, Kafka’s stories are about the dehumanisation of the individual by faceless powers, and Kundera compares them with his own first-hand experience of totalitarian society in communist Czechoslovakia. He pauses to focus in on a particular aspect of the totalitarian society:

Totalitarian society, especially in its more extreme versions, tends to abolish the boundary between the public and the private; power, as it grows ever more opaque, requires the lives of citizens to become entirely transparent. The ideal of life without secrets corresponds to the ideal of the exemplary family: a citizen does not have the right to hide anything at all from the Party or the State… (p.110)

(This, incidentally, is what terrifies me about political correctness; the way it holds everyone accountable to impossibly high standards of perfect, immaculate, blameless behaviour, while expanding its surveillance and judgement into every aspect of everyone’s private lives, stretching back decades, and raining down hecatombs of career-ending criticism on anyone who is caught out saying, thinking or doing the wrong thing. They think they are creating a utopian society; I think they are creating a total surveillance state.)

Kundera’s novels often address the theme of the abolition of privacy by the intrusive state, and it is interesting to have this element of the Kunderesque identified as being part of the Kafkaesque, too. Thus, as  Kundera points out, Joseph K. is in his bed when the two officers come to arrest him – what more personal place is there? And in The Castle, K. can never get away from his two ‘assistants’ who watch over him even when he’s making love to Frieda.

Death of privacy.

The phantasmal office

Kundera quotes a sentence from a letter by Kafka which contains, Kundera thinks, one of his greatest secrets:

‘The office is not a stupid institution; it belongs more to the realm of the fantastic than of the stupid.’

Kundera points out that Kafka saw what millions of other office workers failed to even though it was in front of their noses, which is the surreal and fantastic quality of office life: how individuals are converted into data which can be stored, lost, misquoted, fought over and generally come to distort every aspect of their lives. Our credit ratings, our passport and tax and National Insurance details, our criminal records, all of it is held on files which can be hacked or stolen. What we like to think of as the reassuring ‘reality’ of our lives can be twisted out of all recognition with the click of a mouse.

This situation is, when you reflect on it, bizarre, and Kafka perceived it to an unusually intense degree, and so:

transformed the profoundly anti-poetic material of a highly bureaucratised society into the great poetry of the novel; he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job (which is actually the story of The Castle) into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never seen before. (p.114)

The novel as discovery of aspects of the human condition

Lastly, Kundera is struck by the way that Kafka accurately predicted an entire aspect of man’s experience in the 20th century without trying to.

Many of his friends were deeply political, avant-garde, became Zionists or communists etc, and generally devoted an enormous part of their lives and thought and writings to commentary and speculation about contemporary and future society. And yet all of their works and most of their names have vanished into oblivion.

Kafka, by complete contrast, was a very private man who cared little or nothing about contemporary politics and barely mentioned it in his works or letters or diaries, a hypochondriac obsessed with his own personal life, oppressed by the domineering figure of his father, enmeshed in a complicated series of love affairs, and yet —

It turned out to be this shy, socially awkward and intensely solipsistic individual who, giving little or no thought to ‘the future’ or society at large, created works which turned out to be staggeringly prophetic of the experience of all humanity in the 20th century and beyond.

Thus, for Kundera, Kafka is a prime example of his central belief in the radical autonomy of the novel, his conviction that the really serious novelists are capable of finding and naming aspects of the existential potential of humanity in a way that no other science or discipline can.

— Obviously Kundera excludes most authors and fictions from this faculty; he is talking, in a rather old-fashioned way, about the Great Novelists. But I think he makes a good case that the serious novel is an exploration of human potential and that Kafka is a striking example of it, a man who failed to complete any of his three novels, who only wrote about twenty short stories, and yet who is universally regarded as a kind of prophet or discoverer of an entire realm of human existence.

Somewhere Behind

And the title of the essay, Somewhere Behind? It’s a quote from a poet Kundera quotes elsewhere in his works, Jan Skacel, which runs:

Poets don’t invent poems
The poem is somewhere behind
It’s been there for a long long time
The poet merely discovers it

Kundera goes on to suggest that History itself is like the poet in the sense that it brings to light, through new combinations of circumstances, aspects which were always latent and potential in human nature.

History does not invent, it discovers. Through new situations, History reveals what man is, what has been in him ‘for a long long time’, what his possibilities are. (p.116)

Thus Kafka experienced certain aspects of human nature to such an extent, so powerfully, that he described and portrayed them with an intensity no-one else ever had.

He shed light on the mechanisms he knew from private and microsocial practice, not suspecting that later developments would put these mechanisms into action on the great stage of History. (p.116)

The real poet, author, novelist discovers something new about human nature and human potential in the world, something

no social or political thought could ever tell us.

Kundera or Camus

I’ve just read a similar-length essay on Kafka by Albert Camus who, by contrast with Kundera’s cool, concise and cerebral analysis, comes over as much the worse writer. There is more food for thought in a page of Kundera than in all fourteen pages of Camus’s overblown, superficial and pretentiously name-dropping text.

Coda

Still, stepping back a bit, reading Kunder, Camus and Lukács  makes me wonder whether there are maybe two types of critic of Kafka: the ones which base their analysis solely on the novels and The Metamorphosis, and the ones who take into account the full range of Kafka’s weird and diverse short stories.

For although Lukács and Kundera fundamentally disagree about the possibility of a political interpretation of Kafka, they both refer solely to the novels and The Metamorphosis because this trio of texts are very much of a piece and convey a homogeneous message about paranoia, bureaucracy and totalitarianism.

Such interpretations are harder to sustain if you start to consider The Great Wall of China, the stories in A Country Doctor, or the final works with their weird focus on animals, such as The Burrow or Josephine the Singer or Investigations of a Dog.

Do critics like Lukács and Kundera completely ignore the stories because their greater variety and weirdness complicate and/or undermine the simplicity of the axes they want to grind and the points they want to make? For these works neither Lukács’ nor Kundera’s master ideas really fit.

There is, in other words, a kind of inexplicable surplus in Kafka’s oeuvre (relatively small though it is), an excess of meaning, or of vision, which goes – in my opinion – way beyond the scope of any rational theory to explain or analyse.

Related links

Related Kafka reviews

Dates are dates of composition.

Reviews of Milan Kundera’s books

1967 The Joke
1969 Life Is Elsewhere
1969 Laughable Loves (short stories)
1972 The Farewell Party
1978 The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
1984 The Unbearable Lightness of Being
1986 The Art of the Novel (essays)
1990 Immortality
1995 Slowness
1998 Identity
2002 Ignorance
2014 The Festival of Insignificance

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by Simon on October 5, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Literary criticism, Literature, Novel
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Posted by Simon on October 5, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/10/05/milan-kundera-franz-kafka/

A Hunger Artist and other stories by Franz Kafka

A Hunger Artist is a collection of four short stories by Franz Kafka published in Germany in 1924, the last collection that Kafka himself prepared for publication. Kafka corrected the proofs during his final illness but the book was only published several months after his death. The first English translations of the stories, by Willa and Edwin Muir, were published in 1948, in the larger collection titled The Penal Colony.

They are all relatively short stories (compared to the 60 or so pages of The Metamorphosis). They are all odd, peculiar, non-naturalistic stories, having the feel of dreams or fables. They all seem to point to a truth or meaning beyond themselves, just out of reach. And it’s noticeable that three of the four have a circus setting, or involve animals, as did some of the stories in A Country Doctor.

First Sorrow (3 pages)

An account of a trapeze artist, married to and obsessed by his trade. It is typical of Kafka that the man lives in his trapeze, that food has to be hoisted up to him in special containers, merely retiring to one side when other performers perform, that he loves the height, the sense of freedom, specially when the windows round the top are opened.

But he hates travelling of any kind, in the city will only submit to being taken anywhere if it’s in the manager’s sports car, and from city to city, when travelling by train, has such sensitive nerves that he and the manager take a whole compartment to themselves and the trapeze artist sleeps in the luggage rack.

On one train journey the trapeze artist surprises the manager by asking for two trapezes to be set up for him to use. The manager, who clearly pampers the trapeze artist, immediately agrees. Nevertheless the trapeze artist is sad, and for the first time the manager sees worry lines and tears trickling down his face as he sleeps.

So that’s what the title, First Sorrow, turns out to mean. It is an elusive, elliptical story.

A Little Woman (8 pages)

This is very reminiscent of the fabric and feel of Kafka’s longer fiction, The Castle in particular, in the way it consists of a long, convoluted and tortuous meditation on a relationship between the narrator and one other character.

It simply starts off by describing a thin woman known to the narrator, and then explains that, for some unknown reason, she is permanently vexed and irritated by him, and from there passes into ever-more complex over-thinking of why that might be, and what it might mean, and the many possible reasons for her vexation, and whether it’s a performance solely for public consumption, and so on and so on and so on.

It is all done in Kafka’s characteristic block paragraphs which I find challenging to read.

Perhaps she hopes that once public attention is fixed on me a general public rancour against me will rise up and use all its great powers to condemn me definitively much more effectively and quickly than her relatively feeble private rancour could do; she would then retire into the background, draw a breath of relief, and turn her back on me. Well, if that is what her hopes are really set on, she is deluding herself. Public opinion will not take over her role; public opinion would never find me so infinitely objectionable, even under its most powerful magnifying glass. I am not so altogether useless a creature as she thinks; I don’t want to boast and especially not in this connection; but if I am not conspicuous for specially useful qualities, I am certainly not conspicuous for the lack of them; only to her, only to her almost bleached eyes, do I appear so, she won’t be able to convince anyone else. So in this respect I can feel quite reassured, can I? No, not at all; for if it becomes generally known that my behavior is making her positively ill, which some observers, those who most industriously bring me information about her, for instance, are not far from perceiving, or at least look as if they perceived it, and the world should put questions to me, why am I tormenting the poor little woman with my incorrigibility, and do I mean to drive her to her death, and when am I going to show some sense and have enough decent human feeling to stop such goings-on — if the world were to ask me that, it would be difficult to find an answer. Should I admit frankly that I don’t much believe in these symptoms of illness, and thus produce the unfavourable impression of being a man who blames others to avoid being blamed himself, and in such an ungallant manner? And how could I say quite openly that even if I did believe that she were really ill, I should not feel the slightest sympathy for her, since she is a complete stranger to me and any connection between us is her own invention and entirely one-sided. I don’t say that people wouldn’t believe me; they wouldn’t be interested enough to get so far as belief; they would simply note the answer I gave concerning such a frail, sick woman, and that would be little in my favour. Any answer I made would inevitably come up against the world’s incapacity to keep down the suspicion that there must be a love affair behind such a case as this, although it is as clear as daylight that such a relationship does not exist, and that if it did it would come from my side rather than hers, since I should be really capable of admiring the little woman for the decisive quickness of her judgment and her persistent vitality in leaping to conclusions, if these very qualities were not always turned as weapons against me.

It amounts to a brief specimen of the kind of endlessly self-questioning, over-ratiocination which makes the novels so very long and, often, such hard going, a fine example of the way Kafka can spin an inordinate amount of verbiage out of the simplest relationship.

In a sense this short excerpt demonstrates the technique by which Kafka assembles the longer texts to create the structure of the novels: the technique being to line up a series of encounters with officials from the Court, and then subject each one to a mind-bogglingly over-elaborated, hyper-sensitive, and rather menacing over-thinking of every possible nuance and conceivable double, triple and quadruple interpretation of all possible permutations of thinking and worrying about it.

Until you end up with entire paragraphs which appear to be saying something but which are, on closer examination, almost empty, as the narrator himself at one point acknowledges.

And on closer reflection it appears that the developments which the affair seems to have undergone in the course of time are not developments in the affair itself, but only in my attitude to it, insofar as that has become more composed on the one hand, more manly, penetrating nearer the heart of the matter, while on the other hand, under the influence of the continued nervous strain which I cannot overcome, however slight, it has increased in irritability.

A Hunger Artist (11 pages)

As I’ve noted in my reviews of the novels, a key element of the Kafka style is entropy, meaning that everything, large and small, literal or symbolic, falls away, declines, decays and dies.

The protagonists of The Trial and The Castle and The Metamorphosis die in the end, the Officer of In The Penal Colony dies, the man waiting at the door of the Law dies. And thus it is that, following the general pattern, the Hunger Artist as well wastes away and dies.

And, just like in The Trial or the Penal Colony or the Door of the Law, his last words contain a message pregnant with meaning and poignancy.

The text is told by a narrator looking back wistfully at an earlier time, a tone which immediately reminds us of The Great Wall of China. Back in those days, back in the good old days, fasting was an art which was widely appreciated and the Hunger Artist was the leader in his field. He was paraded around in a barred cage, wearing a black swimsuit, his ribs sticking out, setting up in a new town or city every forty days, and charging admission to admiring crowds who came to point and ooh and mock or admire his heroic efforts to survive on no food for forty days.

Why forty days? Well, on an interpretative level this is obviously a number fraught with religious meaning, since Jesus went into the wilderness to fast for forty days and nights, and this story itself was possibly invented to mirror the forty days and nights of the Biblical flood told in the book of Genesis.

But in the story it is simply because the artist’s commercially minded manager has discovered that forty days is about as long as you can milk an audience in any given own or city before they start to get bored and he has to move on.

The middle part of the text describes the Hunger Artist’s unhappiness and disgust at the way people don’t believe he’s really fasting, the way the guards set to watch over him don’t really believe him, and so on.

But then the narrator describes how a great change comes over society, fashions change, pastimes change, and people lost interest in fasting as a spectator sport. The manager tries a last whistle-stop tour of cities to rouse audiences, but people just weren’t interested any more. Should the Hunger Artist take up a new profession? He’s too old to learn new tricks. And anyway, it is his life’s work.

So he signs up to join a circus, although he finds his cage being set up in the narrow walkways the crowds walk along to get to the far more exciting animal cages. He has become a back number. People hurry past his cage or stop to mock.

Strictly speaking, he was only an impediment on the way to the menagerie.

Children ask their parents what it means and what he does. But the parents struggle to explain:

You try explaining fasting to someone! Unless a person feels it he can never be made to understand it.

His keeper initially marks a record of the days fasted on a wooden plaque stuck on the bars of his cage, but eventually forgets to do this, then forgets about the artist altogether. See what I mean by entropy.

One day a new supervisor demands to know the purpose of this empty cage and no-one can remember what it’s for. Mixed in with the straw is a stick. When they poke it the stick it talks. It is the Hunger Artist. The rough proley nature of the workers is well conveyed in the J.A. Underwood translation, as the workers listen to the Hunger Artist’s last confession. He only fasted, he explains in a weak whisper, because he never found anything he wanted to eat.

And with this poignant confession he expires, the circus labourers clear out his cage and instal a virile young panther in it which draws the crowds with its awesome power.

The Hunger Artist feels like a fable or parable or allegory of awesome importance, with Biblical resonances and some deep meaning for all of us. But what is that meaning exactly, is it historical or psychological or political or sociological… Kafka has left a century of critics and commentators to discuss.

Coming with a deep interest in history I note that the final years of the Great War saw widespread starvation in Germany and Austro-Hungary due to the Allied blockade on all shipping which prevented the importation of foodstuffs. And one of the Axis powers’ grievances was that the blockade continued for seven months after the armistice of November 1918, up until the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919.

Thus real hunger, the actual starvation of men women and children was a spectacle Kafka and all Germans would have been bitterly familiar with.

Then again, those who prefer biographical explanations will point to the fact Kafka himself throughout his adult life subjected himself to an increasingly strict diet, which began with vegetarianism and became progressively more strict and self denying until he in fact died of untreatable laryngeal tuberculosis, which closed up his throat until he could neither eat nor drink and literally starved to death.

But you don’t need to know either of these background facts to respond to the power of the story. It is the way the subject has been turned into not just fiction, but into a story with the roundedness and finish and fairy tale perfection of a fable or allegory or parable, which counts.

Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk (19 pages)

The narrator writes like a person drafting a long critical essay examining a contemporary artist from a variety of sociological angles, except that, as the story progresses, the reader realises that the narrator is a mouse and that he is talking about the ‘famous’ mouse singer Josephine.

I’ve repeatedly mentioned the way things in Kafka’s stories decline and fall away, and the way this even happens within individual sentences, in the way a sentence sets off to make a statement and finds itself contradicting its opening, qualifying and balancing and introducing doubts and numerous clauses which successively weaken the opening until it is often abolished and erased.

Even Kafka’s sentences display a death wish.

That pattern is very visible in this, Kafka’s final story. The narrator opens by telling us that Josephine is the mouse people’s greatest and most popular singer and makes a few supporting statements about how important she is to her people.

But this breezy opening is then subjected to eighteen pages of criticism and undermining. It comes out that her ‘singing’ might in fact not be strictly speaking ‘singing’ after all. In fact it might very much be like the sound every other mouse makes, which is a common or garden squeak. In fact Josephine’s squeaking might, in fact, even be weaker and less impressive than the average mouse’s. If this is so, what on earth gives her the extraordinary power and influence she holds over mousekind?

And it is to the investigation of this apparent mystery, with long, multi-claused sentences, hedging his own conclusions, balancing interpretations and weighing possible theories, that the narrator turns to ponder with all the weighty orotundity of a learned German professor.

How to explain that at some public concerts, other mice have gotten excited and let out squeaks, and those squeaks were every bit as good as Josephine’s if not better? Is her popularity something to do with the history and struggle of her people, his people?

A thought which gives rise to a long series of reflections on the life of mice, how they are born into struggle, into a life of anxiety, small and weak and surrounded by enemies, by ‘the enemy’.

It was impossible, for me at any rate, not to think about Kafka’s Jewishness and wonder to what extent these repeated and heartfelt descriptions of a scattered, weak race oppressed by stronger neighbours, is a not very coded reference to his Jewish peers.

Our life is very uneasy, every day brings surprises, apprehensions, hopes, and terrors, so that it would be impossible for a single individual to bear it all did he not always have by day and night the support of his fellows; but even so it often becomes very difficult…

This mass of our people who are almost always on the run and scurrying hither and thither for reasons that are often not very clear…

Laughter for its own sake is never far away from us; in spite of all the misery of our lives quiet laughter is always, so to speak, at our elbows…

One might think that our people are not fitted to exercise such paternal duties, but in reality they discharge them, at least in this case, admirably; no single individual could do what in this respect the people as a whole are capable of doing. To be sure, the difference in strength between the people and the individual is so enormous that it is enough for the nursling to be drawn into the warmth of their nearness and he is sufficiently protected.

But for all the occasions that the reader can impose onto sentences like these a meaning to do with the Jewish community of Prague or Berlin or Central Europe, there are plenty of other sections which are patently just descriptions of mice, with their impatience, tendency to gossip and to squeak at the slightest provocation.

In other words, the narrative sometimes approaches what you could call a real-world interpretation but then veers away, into fiction, subsumed into the vividness of the allegory or fable.

Whenever we get bad news – and on many days bad news comes thick and fast at once, lies and half-truths included – she rises up at once, whereas usually she sits listlessly on the ground, she rises up and stretches her neck and tries to see over the heads of her flock like a shepherd before a thunderstorm…

The more you read on, the more you realise the text is as much or more an analysis of The Mouse Folk as of Josephine herself, and hence its sub-title. And, while you read on, the figure of Josephine becomes less and less of a singer and more and more of a unifying symbol of hope for an embattled people.

Josephine’s thin piping amidst grave decisions is almost like our people’s precarious existence amidst the tumult of a hostile world.

But by half-way through you have come to realise that the story is more like a parable about art and the artist and the artist or storyteller’s ability to give comfort and solace to his ‘people’ no matter how inadequate and ordinary his voice.

It is more the symbolism and the staging of the artist’s performances and what they mean for his or her listeners or readers which matters, it is the psychological unifying and healing it offers, than the actual ‘quality’.

Squeaking is our people’s daily speech, only many a one squeaks his whole life long and does not know it, where here [in Josephine’s performances] squeaking is set free from the fetters of daily life and it sets us free too for a little while…

And where he writes squeaking, he means speaking, and in fact means writing.

Related links

These are links to modern translations of the stories available online.

Related reviews

Dates are dates of composition.

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by Simon on September 26, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Germany, Great War, Literary criticism, Literature, Short stories
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on September 26, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/09/26/hunger-artist-stories-franz-kafka/

A Country Doctor and other stories by Franz Kafka (1917)

A Country Doctor is a collection of short stories written mostly in 1917 by Franz Kafka, and containing the story of the same name. It was published in 1919, the second collection of short stories published by the German publisher Kurt Wolff, following Contemplation of 1912.

The Contemplation pieces were very short, some of them less than a page long, and the stories here are of the same style, also very short and punchy and dazzling. Some have touches of humour but what characterises most of them is how weird, visionary or dreamlike they are.

1. The New Advocate

One page long. The new advocate is Alexander the Great’s old horse Bucephalus. With Alexander long dead and his great goal of reaching the gates of India now remote and impossible, yes, it probably makes sense for his favourite horse to take up a career in the law. After all, it’s a steady profession.

2. A Country Doctor

This really is a dream-like narrative: told in the first person the doctor is called to an emergency on a snowy night but can’t find a horse but then his groom finds two horses in the pigsty and attaches them to the cart and the horses race off before the doctor can warn or protect his housekeeper who he knows the groom wants to rape and watches run for the house and lock herself in but as the cart gallops off he hears the groom smashing the door down with an axe, the doctor arrives instantly (as in a dream) at the house of the sick man with his relatives gathered round and pronounces him perfectly fit, maybe overfull of coffee which his solicitous mother has given him, all the time worrying about the fate of Rosy the maid, the two horses push open the windows of the room and watch the doctor and a choir of local children gathers outside and sings a song about stripping the doctor and next thing he knows he is being stripped, held up then carried over to the sick man’s bed and thrown into it where he discovers the man has an enormous gaping bloody wound in his side which is infested with finger-sized worms and seems to attribute this to standing still in the woods and having been chopped at by men with axes as if he were a tree, then the doctor escapes from the bed, flees the house, throws his things onto the carriage and whips the horses to flee although they in fact plod off at the walking pace of an old man.

I’ll never come home at this rate. My flourishing practice is lost. A successor is robbing me, but to no avail, for he cannot replace me. In my house the disgusting groom is wreaking havoc. Rosa is his victim. I will not think it through. Naked, abandoned to the frost of this unhappy age, with an earthly carriage and unearthly horses, I drive around by myself, an old man. My fur coat hangs behind the wagon, but I cannot reach it, and no one from the nimble rabble of patients lifts a finger. Betrayed! Betrayed! Once one responds to a false alarm on the night bell, there’s no making it good again – not ever.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a literal transcription of an actual anxiety dream Kafka had had.

3. Up in the Gallery

A one-page description of attending the circus to see a lady in white and red come through the curtain and be lifted by the ringmaster onto a dappled grey horse and ride round the ring to tumultuous applause. But Kafka uses a technique he’s used in other stories, which is to open the entire description with a conditional phrase, making the whole thing seem provisional and dreamlike.

If some frail tubercular lady circus rider were to be driven in circles around and around the arena for months and months without interruption in front of a tireless public on a swaying horse by a merciless whip-wielding master of ceremonies, spinning on the horse, throwing kisses and swaying at the waist, and if this performance, amid the incessant roar of the orchestra and the ventilators, were to continue into the ever-expanding, gray future, accompanied by applause, which died down and then swelled up again, from hands which were really steam hammers, perhaps then a young visitor to the gallery might rush down the long stair case through all the levels, burst into the ring, and cry ‘Stop!’ through the fanfares of the constantly adjusting orchestra.

So it’s the gallery of a circus.

4. An Old Manuscript / A leaf from the past

Two and a bit pages. The narrator owns a shoemaker’s shop in some distant city from fable, from the same kind of fairy tale world as Kafka’s China. The nomads from the north have invaded and now control the city, which is a mystery since the frontier is so very far away (as in The Great Wall of China). They make free with the shoemaker’s stock, but they really infest the shop of the butcher opposite, and go mad when he brings to the shop a live bullock, which they promptly set about dismembering and eating live, with their bare hands and teeth. Occasionally you see the emperor at the windows of his palace but then, that can’t be right, he never leaves the inner gardens of the palace.

You can see how Kafka has reimagined China into his own image, a vast land which messengers can never cross, which has been inexplicably conquered by people no-one understands, whose leader has retreated to the innermost sanctums of his inaccessible palace…

5. At the door of the Law

This is a terrifying fable, barely two pages long, in which a man from the country arrives at the door of the law and asks the doorkeeper if he may enter. The doorkeeper says no, and the man spends the rest of his life camped out there, asking the doorkeeper repeatedly for permission to enter, until, in fact, he grows old and weak and, as he is on the verge of dying, the doorkeeper explains that this door was for the man alone, for him only, and now, as he expires, the doorkeeper will close it. He will never gain admission.

In its portrayal of the hopeless prostration of a victim-protagonist before implacable and unknowable higher powers , it is a two-page summary of the plots, or aims, of The Trial and especially The Castle.

6. Jackals and Arabs

Four pages. The narrator is a European camped in an oasis in the desert with some Arabs. they refer to him as master. It is a colonial situation. Austro-Hungary, despite being called an Empire, had no colonial territories so this is as much a fantasy projection as his stories about remote China or cowboys and Indians.

The story, such as it is, is that the jackals nosey up to the narrator and explain how much they want the Arabs to be cleared out of their land so it will be purified. Incongruously, they offer the narrator a pair of scissors (hanging from one of the jackals’ teeth). But at that moment an Arab appears and whips them back and recognises the scissors and says, ‘Oh yes, the jackals are always offering these to Europeans in the hope the European will use them to drive out or annihilate the Arabs (!)’

He drags over the corpse of a camel which has died in the night and the jackals start tearing it to bits, until the Arab starts whipping them. Both sides are trapped in a horrible hate-hate relationship.

7. A Visit to the Mine

The narrator is a miner. Some engineers have come to inspect his mine. That sounds like it ought to make sense, but it really doesn’t. Instead of giving any kind of account of what they do, the text simply lists each of the ten engineers, emphasising the way each one looks and behaves differently and is engaged on a different activity (exactly the format of the story titled Eleven Sons) then a concluding paragraph describes how they are all followed by an Attendant, formally dressed, inscrutable and superior.

8. The Next Village

This is a brilliant slice of…. of what? Fantasy? Dream prose? A sense of entropy and futility? Here’s the ‘story’ in its entirety.

My grandfather used to say: ‘Life is astoundingly short. To me, looking back over it, life seems so foreshortened that I scarcely understand, for instance, how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that – not to mention accidents – even the span of a normal happy life may fall far short of the time needed for such a journey.’

9. A Message from the Emperor

This is the one-page-long parable which is embedded in the longer story, The Great Wall of China about the emperor consigning a message to a messenger to bring to ‘you’ but how the vast and multitudinous challenges of even getting through the first courtyard of the imperial palace, let alone the second courtyard, let alone through the thronged streets of the capital means that the messenger will never arrive.

Placing the Next Village and the Message next to each other brings out their similarity, in fact the fundamental identity of the insight they deal with. It’s difficult to put into words what they’re saying – maybe you just have to ‘get’ it, but it feels like both of them are saying something very profound about human experience.

10. The Cares of a Family Man

Odradek is a weird creature which looks like a star-shaped spool of thread.

At first glance it looks like a flat star-shaped spool for thread, and indeed it does seem to have thread wound upon it; to be sure, they are only old, broken-off bits of thread, knotted and tangled together, of the most varied sorts and colours. But it is not only a spool, for a small wooden crossbar sticks out of the middle of the star, and another small rod is joined to that at a right angle. By means of this latter rod on one side and one of the points of the star on the other, the whole thing can stand upright as if on two legs.

The narrator tries to communicate with this creature and is troubled by him, most of all by the knowledge that Odradek will outlive him.

Am I to suppose, then, that he will always be rolling down the stairs, with ends of thread trailing after him, right before the feet of my children, and my children’s children? He does no harm to anyone that one can see; but the idea that he is likely to survive me I find almost painful.

11. Eleven Sons

The narrator lists his eleven sons and gives paragraph-long descriptions of all of them which start out positive and all end with the ways they disappoint him and fall short.

12. A Fratricide

This feels like the most ‘German Expressionist’ of the stories, because it describes the Expressionist subject par excellence which is a brutal murder. Schmar waits at a street corner on a moonlit night. Wese emerges from his work and walks down the street towards the fateful corner. What makes it so Expressionist is the way it is stagey, it could be played out on a stage with a crazy angular Expressionist set, for Mrs Wese stands at the door of her house further down the road waiting for her husband, while the private investigator Pallas, leans out of his window to get a better view of the scene.

Wese walks round the corner and right into Schmar who stabs him three times, twice in the throat and once in the belly, screaming at him, screaming about the joy of murder.

‘Done,’ says Schmar and pitches the knife, now superfluous blood-stained ballast, against the nearest house front. ‘The bliss of murder! The relief, the soaring ecstasy from the shedding of another’s blood!’

This irrational glee reminds me of any number of Expressionist painters (and writers and composers) with their mad murder lust; reminds me of the widespread topic in early Weimar Germany of the murder of women, and the utterly irrational way this was titled, by many artists, Murder, The Hope of Women.

13. A Dream

Two and a half pages in which Joseph K. (the protagonist of The Trial) has a dream. In it he arrives in a cemetery before a big mound of earth, two big men plonk a headstone down at the end of it and then another man, a roughly dressed ‘artist’ pops up, and, leaning uncomfortably over the mound, takes a pencil and begins writing words which become instantly deeply incised into the stone and burnished with gold, he writes HERE LIES but then becomes blocked, stuck, stymied and looks at Joseph K. in embarrassment, both of them unsure what to do next, until it comes to Joseph in a flash and he leans down and begins clawing through the earth which opens up to reveal a vault and he descends down into it as if by magic, turning till he is lying on his back and, looking up, watches the artist complete the inscription by writing his name and then –

He wakes up.

14. A Report to an Academy

The longest story at about ten pages, this is a spoof or parody of a presentation to a learnèd academy given by an ape who has transformed himself into a man. He describes how he was caught in the jungle by a hunting expedition, thrown into a cage on a ship and brought back across the sea and how he learned to be human from observing and copying the sailors. But that makes it sound too sensible. It is full of uncanny or strange details, for instance the thing which motivates him to transform is the layout of the cage which has iron bars on three sides but is bounded on the fourth by a crate. Something about this really upsets him and he repeats it again and again as if this was his prime motivation. Also he begins by imitating the lumbering walks of the rough sailors but there is satire in the fact that the decisive moment in his steps towards becoming a ‘man’ are when he learns to drink deep from a bottle of whiskey they give him.

Short and weird

Initially I based my definition of the ‘Kafkaesque’ on a deep immersion in the two novels The Trial and The Castle, which are long, long-winded, and focus on the nightmareishly impossible efforts of the young professional protagonists to understand the convoluted legal and bureaucratic processes administered by a vast hierarchy of officials, which they seem to have become embroiled in through no fault of their own.

Reading these stories makes me realise there is another entirely separate strand to Kafka’s output, which is the fantastical. If the characteristic quality of the novels is how long-winded they are, and how filled with immense, tortuous speeches about the inaccessibility of the Law and the Court then, on the whole, the leading feature of the stories is how short they are, how they manage to convey a whole hallucinatory scene, event or view of the world in a handful of, or even one, page.

Animals

Another striking element is the prominence of animals. The country doctor’s horses poke their heads through the windows to watch their master at work (that’s the detail from that story which really spoke to me, like the horse’s head in the paintings of Fuseli). More strikingly, Bucephalus the horse becomes a lawyer. Jackals talk to the narrator. And an ape addresses a learnèd academy. (And among his last short stories would be one about a giant mole and about an investigating dog.)

Two types

Broadly the stories can be divided in two types, the fables – which the reader understands straight away, which feel as immediate and accessible as Aesop’s fables – and the others, which are more troubling and perplexing.

Easy fables include Bucephalus becoming a lawyer, the message from the emperor, the nomads having conquered the city, and at the door of the law – these have the depth and resonance of ancient myths. The dream of Joseph K. falling into his grave is easily comprehensible as a dream-vision. These ones have a meaning and a point.

But what are we to make of the convoluted account of the country doctor? This also is a dream, I suppose but it is completely pointless, it amounts to a series of anxieties. Just as the account of the ape who became a man ought to resonate like an Edwardian science fiction story, but doesn’t: it’s more eccentric and odd than that, all the details seem off-kilter and troubling.

And then what to make of the two numeration stories, the list of eleven sons and ten engineers? These are not fables or dreams, they are something else again, something weirdly compelling. The page and a half about Odradek – is that a weird distorted comment on the relationship between fathers and sons? And the fratricide? That’s a rich slice of German murder Expressionism.

So there are more than two types. What a dazzling collection. What immense trouble and unease they convey.

Related links

These are links to the modern translations of these stories, some made by Ian Johnston and generously posted online for anyone to use, some from other sources.

Related reviews

Dates are dates of composition.

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by Simon on September 24, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Literature, Short stories
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Posted by Simon on September 24, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/09/24/a-country-doctor-stories-franz-kafka/

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