One gathers from The Trial that those proceedings are usually hopeless so far as the defendants are concerned – even where acquittal remains a hope for the latter. It may be that very hopelessness that makes them the only characters in Kafka to exhibit beauty. At least that would chime very well with a fragment of conversation handed down by Max Brod. ‘I recall [he writes] one conversation with Kafka that began with present-day Europe and the decline of humankind. “We,” he said, “are nihilistic thoughts, suicidal reflections arising in God’s mind.” At first this made me think of the Gnostic world-view: God as evil demiurge, the world as his Fall. “Oh no,” he said, “our world is only a bad mood on God’s part, like having a bad day.” “So there’d be hope, then, outside this phenomenon we know as world?” He smiled: “Oh, there’s hope enough, an infinity of hope – only not for us.” ’ The words form a link to those most curious of Kafka’s figures who are the only ones to have escaped the bosom of the family and for whom there is possibly hope. These are not the animals, not even the cross-breeds or fantasy beings such as the cat-lamb or Odradek. All these do still live under the spell of the family. Not for nothing does Gregory Samsa wake up as a bug right in the parental home, not for nothing is the peculiar animal that is half cat and half lamb an heirloom handed down on the paternal side, not for nothing is Odradek ‘The Householder’s Concern’. The ‘assistants’, however, do indeed fall outside this circle.

  These assistants [Gehilfen] belong to a group of figures that permeate Kafka’s entire work. They include not only the confidence trickster who is unmasked in [Kafka’s first published collection] Betrachtung [‘Looking to see’] but also the student seen on the balcony at night as Karl Rossmann’s neighbour as well as the fools who live in that city in the south and ‘don’t get tired’. The twilight that shrouds their existence recalls the wavering light in which the playlets of Robert Walser (author of the novel The Apprentice [Der Gehülfe], which Kafka adored) have their characters appear. Indian sagas tell of the Gandharvas, incomplete creatures, beings at the hazy stage. Kafka’s assistants are of that kind; not belonging to any of the other groups of figures but no strangers to them either; the messengers toing and froing between them. They look, Kafka informs us, like Barnabas, and he is a messenger. They are not yet quite free of the lap of Mother Nature, which is why they have ‘installed themselves on the floor in a corner, using two old dresses, it was their ambition […] to take up as little room as possible, to this end they tried various methods, always of course with much whispering and giggling, they crossed their arms and legs, they crouched down, the two of them, at dawn and dusk all that could be seen in their corner was one big huddle’ [The Castle, 4]. For them and their kind, the immature and inept, hope still exists.

  What is discernible as tenderly non-committal about the way these messengers are is in an oppressive, sombre fashion law as regards this whole world of creatures. None has its fixed position, its fixed, unexchangeable outline; none that is not in the process of rising or falling; none that does not swap places with its enemies or its neighbours; none that has not completed its time yet is immature, none that is not profoundly exhausted yet is only at the beginning of a long haul. All talk of orders and hierarchies is impossible here. The world of myth that this suggests is incomparably younger than Kafka’s world, to which myth itself promised redemption. But if we know one thing, it is this: that Kafka did not take its lure. A latter-day Odysseus, he let it slide away from ‘eyes fixed on the distance, the Sirens literally vanished away in the face of his determination, and precisely when he was closest to them he was no longer aware of them at all’ [‘The Sirens’ Silence’]. Among the forebears that Kafka has in the Ancient World, the Jewish ones and the Chinese ones that we shall come across later, this Greek one must not be overlooked. The fact is, Odysseus stands on the threshold separating myth and fairy tale. Trickery has slipped reason and cunning into myth; no longer are the powers of myth invincible. Fairy tales are a handing-down of this victory over them. And fairy tales for dialecticians are what Kafka wrote when he embarked on legends. He inserted little tricks into them; then he read from them evidence ‘that even inadequate means, indeed childish means can afford salvation’. It is with these words that he begins his story ‘The Sirens’ Silence’. With him, the Sirens do in fact employ silence; they possess ‘an even more frightful weapon than song – namely, their silence’. They used it against Odysseus. He, however, Kafka tells us, ‘was so full of cunning, he was such a fox, that not even the goddess of fate could penetrate his inmost being. Possibly, although this passes human understanding, he really had noted the Sirens’ silence and to parry them and the gods had held up this sham,’ as he relates, ‘merely as a sort of shield.’

  With Kafka, the Sirens are silent. Maybe, too, because with him music and song are an expression or at least a pledge of escape. A pledge of hope, which we have from that small, simultaneously immature and everyday, simultaneously comforting and foolish intermediate world in which the assistants are at home. Kafka is like the lad who set out to learn how to be afraid. He stumbled upon Potemkin’s palace but ultimately, in the cellars of that palace, upon Josephine, the singing mouse whose manner Kafka describes like this: ‘Something of our poor, short-lived childhood is there, something of a lost happiness we shall never see again, but also something of our busy present existence and its diminuitive, unfathomable, yet persistent and quite inextinguishable element of gaiety’ [‘Josephine, the Singer, or The Mouse People’].

  A Childhood Picture

  There is a picture of Kafka as a child, rarely did that ‘poor, short-lived childhood’ become a more touching image. It was no doubt taken in one of those nineteenth-century studios that with their drapes and palms, tapestries and easels occupy so equivocal a place between torture chamber and throne room. There, in a tight-fitting, somehow humiliating child’s outfit overloaded with lace trimmings stands the approximately six-year-old boy in a kind of conservatory landscape. Palm fronds stand stiffly in the background. And as if to make this upholstered version of the tropics even more suffocating and sultry, the model holds in his left hand a disproportionately large, broad-brimmed hat of the kind Spaniards have. An immeasurably sad gaze commands the landscape set out before it, into which the shell of one large ear listens intently.

  Ardent ‘Wanting to be a Red Indian’ may once have consumed this great grief: ‘Ah, if one were a Red Indian, on the alert immediately, and if leaning into the wind on one’s galloping horse one went quivering swiftly over the quavering ground, over and over again till one stopped using the spurs, there being no spurs, till one threw away the reins, there being no reins, and one scarcely saw the terrain out in front as a well-mown stretch of moorland without even a horse’s neck now or a horse’s head’ [‘Wanting to be a Red Indian’]. Much is contained in that wish. Fulfilment betrays its secret. He finds it in America. The fact that there is something special behind [the novel] America emerges from the hero’s name. While in the earlier novels3 the author never addressed himself otherwise than with the murmured initial, here he is reborn with a full name on a new continent. He experiences that name in the Oklahoma Nature Theatre:

  Karl saw a poster on a street corner, bearing the following inscription: Today, on the Clayton Racetrack, from six in the morning till midnight, staff will be taken on for the Oklahoma Theatre! The great Theatre of Oklahoma is calling you! It calls only today, only the once! Anyone missing the chance now misses it for ever! Anyone thinking of his future is one of us! All are welcome! Anyone wishing to become an artiste, sign up now! We are the theatre that can use everyone, each in his place! Whoever has plumped for us, congratulations right now! But hurry if you want to be admitted by midnight! At twelve everything closes, never to reopen. Be damned, anyone who disbelieves us! To Clayton, one and all! [America, ‘The Oklahoma Nature Theatre’].

  The person reading this announcement is Karl Rossmann [‘horseman’], the third and more fortunate incarnation of K., who is the hero of Kafka’s novels. Happiness awaits him at the Oklahoma Nature Theatre, which is an actual racetrack, as ‘unhappiness’ [in the story so entitled] had once overwhelmed him as he ‘began pacing the narrow carpet in my room as if it had been a racetrack’. Ever since Kafka had written ‘For Jockeys to Ponder’ and had ‘The New Attorney’ ‘[…] hoisting his legs up high […] with each footfall ringing out on the marble’ stride up the courthouse steps and his ‘Children in the Lane’ go trotting into the country, arms linked, taking great leaps, this is a figure he had come to know well, and it is indeed possible for Karl Rossmann, ‘distracted as a result of his sleepiness, [to make] frequent excessively high, time-consuming, pointless leaps’ [America, ‘Asylum’]. So it can only be on a racetrack that he attains the goal of his desires.

  That racetrack is at the same time a theatre, which gives rise to a riddle. However, the enigmatic location and the wholly un-enigmatic, thoroughly transparent and straightforward figure of Karl Rossmann belong together. Karl Rossmann, in fact, is transparent, straightforward, almost characterless in the sense in which Franz Rosenzweig says in The Star of Redemption [Der Stern der Erlösung, 1921]4 that in China the inner person is ‘almost characterless; the concept of the wise man, as classically […] embodied in Kung-fu-tzu [Confucius], disregards any possibility of distinctiveness of character; he is the truly characterless man – the average man, in fact […]. It is something quite other than character that distinguishes the Chinese individual: a wholly elemental purity of feeling.’ No matter how it is communicated intellectually (it may be that this purity of feeling is a particularly sensitive set of scales weighing gestural behaviour), in any case the Oklahoma Nature Theatre refers back to Chinese theatre, which is indeed a gestural theatre. Among the most important functions of that Nature Theatre is to dissolve events into gesture. One might, indeed, go further and say: quite a number of Kafka’s smaller studies and stories appear in their full light only when translated, as it were, into acts in the Oklahoma Nature Theatre. Only then will it be seen for certain that Kafka’s entire work represents a codex of gestures that do not, in and of themselves, possess any fixed symbolic meaning for the author; instead, in constantly changing contexts and ever-different experimental arrangements, they are asked to furnish such meaning. The theatre is the proper place for such experimental arrangements. In an unpublished commentary on the story ‘A Case of Fratricide’, Werner Kraft perceptively sees the unfolding of this little tale in theatrical terms. ‘The play can begin, and it really is announced by the ringing of a bell. This happens in the most natural fashion in that Wese leaves the building in which his office is situated. However, this doorbell (we are told explicitly) rings “too loudly for a doorbell, out over the city, upwards at the sky”.’ As that bell, which makes too much noise for a doorbell, rings up at the sky, so the gesturing of Kafka’s figures is too intrusive for the normal environment, breaking into one more spacious. The more Kafka’s mastery increased, the less often he bothered to match those gestures to everyday situations, to explain them. ‘Funny habit, that,’ we read in ‘The Metamorphosis’, ‘his sitting on the desk and talking down to his employees from a great height, especially since you have to step right up close because of his deafness.’ Such giving of reasons had already been left far behind in The Trial, in the penultimate chapter of which we read that K. ‘stopped by the first row of pews, but the distance still seemed too great for the priest, who stretched out his hand and pointed with a sharply bent finger to a spot right in front of the pulpit. K. followed this instruction too. From this spot he had to bend his head far back to keep the priest in view’ [tr. Idris Parry].

  When Max Brod says: ‘It was unpredictable, the world of the things that mattered to him,’ the thing that was least predictable so far as Kafka was concerned was gesture. Each gesture constitutes a process, one might almost say a drama, of its own. The stage on which that drama plays out is the world theatre, whose backdrop is the sky. On the other hand that sky is nothing more than a backdrop; studying it on its own terms would mean putting a frame round the piece of painted cloth and hanging it in a gallery. Kafka, like El Greco, tears open the sky behind each gesture; but, as in El Greco (who was the patron saint of the Expressionists), the decisive thing, the centre of the event, is gesture. They are bowed with alarm as they emerge, the people who had heard the ‘knock on the courtyard gate’ [in the story so entitled]. That is how a Chinese actor would portray alarm, not how someone would react to being startled. Elsewhere K. himself puts on an act: with semi-unconscious deliberation, ‘slowly […] turning his eyes up cautiously […] he picked up one of the papers from his desk without looking, placed it on the palm of his hand and gradually raised it to the level of the two men as he himself got to his feet. He had no definite thought in mind as he was doing this but acted only because he felt this was how he must conduct himself once he had completed the great plea which was to relieve him completely of anxiety’ [The Trial, ‘Advocate – Manufacturer – Painter’]. Maximum strangeness coupled with maximum simplicity marks this gesture out as animal. It is possible to read quite a long way into Kafka’s animal stories without realizing for one moment that these are not people. If one then comes across the name of the creature (monkey, dog, or mole), one is alarmed to discover, looking up, that one is already a long way from the continent of man. Kafka, however, is that all the time; he robs human gesture of its traditional props and then possesses, in it, an object prompting unending reflections.

  But they are also, oddly, never-ending when they proceed from Kafka’s epigrammatic stories. Think of the parable ‘At the Door of the Law’. Coming across this in [the collection entitled] A Country Doctor, the reader may possibly have been struck by the cloudy place deep within it. But would he have embarked on the apparently endless series of thoughts that spring from this parable at the point where Kafka sets out to interpret it? This happens through the priest in The Trial – and it happens at so marked a place that one might suppose the novel to be simply the parable unfolded. But the word ‘unfolded’ carries two meanings. The bud unfolds to become a flower, but so does the little boat that one teaches children to make unfold to become a flat sheet of paper. And it is this second type of ‘unfolding’ that actually suits parables, the reader’s pleasure lying in smoothing the parable out in such a way that its meaning becomes plain. Kafka’s parables, though, unfold in the first sense; they unfold in the way that the bud becomes flower. Their product, therefore, is not unlike poetry. That does not prevent his pieces from not fitting entirely into the prose forms of the West and occupying a position, as regards doctrine, similar to that of Haggadah over against Halacha. They are not allegories, yet nor do they want to be taken straight; they are so constituted that they can be quoted and told by way of explanation. But are we in possession of the doctrine that Kafka’s allegories accompany and that is explained in K.’s gestures and in how Kafka’s animals conduct themselves physically? It is not there; at most, we can say that this or that alludes to it. Kafka might have said: hands it down as relic; equally, we might say: paves the way for it as forerunner. In either case, the question at issue is the organization of life and work in the human community. This preoccupied Kafka with mounting constancy, the less comprehensible it became to him. Where Napoleon, in the famous ‘Erfurt Interview’ with Goethe, put politics in place of fate, Kafka (in a variant of this dictum) might have defined organization as destiny. And it is not only in the extensive official hierarchies of The Trial and The Castle that he sees organization but also, even more tangibly, in the difficulties and immensities of a building project, the venerable model of which he wrote about in ‘Building the Great Wall of China’.

  The wall was designed to provide protection for the centuries; so the most careful construction, drawing upon the architectural expertise of all known eras and nations, and a constant sense of personal responsibility on the part of those doing the building were essential prerequisites for the job. For humbler tasks, of course, it was possible to use ignorant day labourers from among the people, men, women, children, anyone available for good money; but to be in charge of even four day labourers called for someone sensible, trained in building work […]. We (I am probably speaking for many people here) found that it was only through actually spelling out the orders of top management that we came to know ourselves and made the discovery that, without management, neither our book-learning nor our common sense would have sufficed for the tiny office that we fulfilled within the wider whole.

  Such organization is not unlike fate. Metchnikoff, who in his famous book La Civilisation et les grandes fleuves historiques [‘Civilization and the great historical rivers’] outlined the subject, does so in phrases that might be from Kafka:

  The canals of the Yangtse-kiang and the dams of the Hoang-ho are in all probability a result of skilfully organized collective work on the part of […] generations […]. The slightest inadvertency in cutting this or that trench or in supporting some dam or other, the least bit of carelessness, a moment of selfish behaviour on the part of a person or group of people in the matter of preserving the joint water resource, will in such unusual circumstances become the source of some social ill and widespread collective misfortune. Accordingly, a tributary will under threat of death demand close and enduring solidarity among masses of the population that are in many instances strangers to one another, even enemies; it sentences Everyman to tasks whose common usefulness becomes apparent only with time and whose overall plan very often far exceeds the understanding of the ordinary person.