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.
- The New Advocate
- A Country Doctor
- Up in the Gallery
- An Old Manuscript
- Before the Law
- Jackals and Arabs
- A Visit to the Mine
- The Next Village
- A Message from the Emperor
- The Cares of a Family Man
- Eleven Sons
- A Fratricide
- A Dream
- A Report to an Academy
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