Kafka wanted to know that he was accounted an ordinary person. The limit of understanding having constricted his every step, he is keen to constrict others likewise. Sometimes he seems close to Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor in saying [in effect]: ‘We thus face a mystery we cannot grasp. And the very fact that it is a riddle gave us the right to preach it, to teach people that what matters is not freedom, not love, but the riddle, the secret, the mystery to which they must place themselves in thrall – unthinkingly, even in defiance of conscience.’ The temptations of mysticism are something that Kafka did not always avoid. Concerning his encounter with Rudolf Steiner we have a diary entry that does not, at least in its published form, embody Kafka’s view. Was he being evasive here? The way in which he treated his own texts makes this seem by no means impossible. Kafka had a rare strength when it came to keeping himself supplied with allegories. Even so, he never pours his all into what can be deciphered; on the contrary, he took every conceivable precaution against having his texts interpreted. Circumspectly, meticulously, mistrustfully we must grope our way forward into their heart. We need to bear in mind Kafka’s peculiar way of reading as applied to interpreting the said parables. We are also permitted to recall his last will and testament. His injunction to destroy a legacy is on closer examination as hard to understand and calls for the same meticulous consideration as the answers given by the doorkeeper ‘At the Door of the Law’. Possibly Kafka, whom every day of his existence confronted with impenetrable modes of behaviour and announcements that were not clear, wished in death at least to pay back his fellows in the same coin.

  Kafka’s world is a world theatre. For him, man is in and of himself on-stage, the proof being that everyone is taken on at the Oklahoma Nature Theatre. The criteria governing such admission are unfathomable. A talent for play-acting, one immediately supposes, but apparently that is irrelevant. However, another way of putting it is: candidates are given no other task than that of playing themselves. That they may, when it comes down to it, actually be the person they are acting lies outside the realm of possibility. It is through their roles that such characters seek a place in the Nature Theatre, as Pirandello’s six are in search of an author. For both groups, this is the place of ultimate refuge; and that does not exclude its constituting redemption. Redemption is not a reward for existence; it is the last excuse of someone of whom Kafka says that ‘his own browbone blocks his path’ [Heft 2]. And the law of this theatre is implicit in a sentence tucked away in ‘A Report for an Academy’: ‘I [imitated men] because I was in search of a way out and for no other reason.’ For K. a glimmering of these things seems to arise before the end of his trial. He turns abruptly to the two men in top hats who have come to take him away and asks: ‘ “At what theatre are you playing?” “Theatre?” inquired one gentleman of the other, the corners of his mouth twitching. The other gestured like a mute struggling with an unmanageable animal’ [The Trial, ‘End’; tr. Idris Parry). They leave the question unanswered, but several things point to its having had an effect on them.

  At a long bench covered with a white cloth all who are henceforth at the Nature Theatre are served. ‘Everyone was happy and excited.’ Extras block in the moves for angels to mark the occasion. They stand on tall pedestals that, covered with billowing robes, have flights of stairs inside them. The trappings of a country fair, maybe of a children’s party, too, where the tightly laced-up, scrubbed-up boy we were talking about earlier possibly lost his sad look. But for their tied-on wings, these angels could be real. They have their precursors in Kafka. The manager is one of them, stepping up on the seat to reach the trapeze artist where he lies in the luggage rack afflicted by his ‘First Sorrow’ and stroking him and pressing the trapeze artist’s face to his own ‘so that he too was bathed in the trapeze artist’s tears’. Another, a guardian angel or simply a ‘guardian of the law’ [Schutzmann or police constable] takes care of the murderer Schmar after the ‘Case of Fratricide’, the same Schmar as has ‘his lips pressed to the shoulder of the policeman who nimbly leads him away’. In Oklahoma’s rural ceremonies Kafka’s last novel dies away.5 ‘Kafka’s work,’ writes Soma Morgenstern, ‘has the whiff of village air about it, as is the case with all great founders of religion.’ Here we are the more entitled to recall Lao-tzu’s portrayal of piety for the fact that Kafka provided the most perfect description of it in ‘The Next Village’. Lao-tzu wrote: ‘Neighbouring lands may lie within sight, / We may hear one another’s cocks crowing, one another’s dogs barking; / Yet folk ought to die at a ripe old age / Without having travelled there and back.’ Kafka also wrote parables, but he did not found a religion.

  Let us consider the village lying at the foot of Castle Hill from which K.’s alleged summons as a land surveyor is so puzzlingly and surprisingly confirmed. In his Afterword to this novel Brod mentioned that in connection with this village at the foot of Castle Hill Kafka had a particular place in mind, Zürau in the Erz Mountains. We, however, may be permitted to recognize it as a different village. It is the one in a Talmudic legend related by the rabbi when someone asks him why Jews prepare a festive meal on Friday evenings. It tells of a princess who, in exile, far from her compatriots, living in a village where she does not understand the language, finds herself languishing. One day the princess receives a letter: her betrothed has not forgotten her, he has set out, he is on his way to her. The betrothed, explains the rabbi, is the messiah, the princess is the soul, but the village to which she has been exiled is the body. And being unable to tell the village (which does not know her language) of her joy in any other way, she prepares a meal for it. With that village in the Talmud, we are in the midst of Kafka’s world. Because just like K. in the village below Castle Hill, present-day man lives in his body; his body eludes him, it is an alien presence. One day a person may wake up to find himself transformed into a verminous bug. What is alien (alien to him) is now his lord and master. The air of this village blows through Kafka’s work, which is why he was not tempted to found a religion. The same village contains the pigsty from which the horses emerge for the country doctor, the stuffy back room in which Klamm, cigar in mouth, sits in front of a glass of beer, and the courtyard gate, knocking on which brings in the end.6 The air in this village is neither pure nor free from all the unbecome and already overripe things that form so putrid a blend. Kafka was obliged to breathe it all his life. He was neither soothsayer nor founder of a religion. How did he survive in it?

  The Hunchback Dwarf

  Knut Hamsun, we learned a while ago, was in the habit of occasionally giving the letters column of the local paper in the little town near where he lived the benefit of his views. In that town, some years back, there was a jury trial of a girl who had killed her newborn baby. She was sentenced to a term in gaol. Shortly afterwards, Hamsun voiced his opinion in the local paper. He announced that he would be turning his back on a town that gave a mother who murdered her newborn anything but the maximum sentence; if not the gallows, then imprisonment for life. Several years passed. [Hamsun’s] Growth of the Soil came out, containing the story of a serving-girl who commits the same crime, receives the same sentence, and, as the reader can clearly see, had undoubtedly not deserved a heavier one.

  Kafka’s thoughts as handed down in Building the Great Wall of China7 prompt us to recall this sequence of events. Because hardly had this posthumous volume appeared than, on the basis of those thoughts, a reading of Kafka began to prevail that enjoyed interpreting the thoughts and took correspondingly little notice of Kafka’s actual writings. There are two ways of fundamentally missing the point of Kafka’s work. The natural interpretation is one, the supernatural the other; in essence, both interpretations (the psychological and the theological) shoot past the target in similar ways. The first is represented by Hellmuth Kaiser; the second by quite a few authors already – H. J. Shoeps, Bernhard Rang, and Groethuysen among them. Their number also includes Willi Haas, who in other contexts (we shall come across these later) has of course said some revealing things about Kafka. These insights were unable to keep him from laying a kind of theological grid over Kafka’s work as a whole. ‘The supreme power,’ he writes of Kafka, ‘the realm of grace, was portrayed by him in his great novel The Castle, the lower realm, that of judgement and damnation, in his equally great novel The Trial. The world between the two […], our earthly fate and its difficult demands, he sought to reproduce in severely stylized form in a third novel, America.’8 The first third of this interpretation can probably, since Brod, be seen as the common property of Kafka interpretation. In this sense Bernhard Rang, for instance, writes: ‘In so far as the Castle may be seen as the seat of grace, the meaning in theological terms of all this vain striving and seeking is that God’s grace cannot be arbitrarily and deliberately invoked and coerced by man. Restlessness and impatience only baffle and confuse the solemn silence of the divine.’ It is a cosy reading; that it is also an untenable one becomes increasingly clear, the further it ventures. Possibly, therefore, with the greatest clarity in Willi Haas, when he states: ‘Kafka comes […] from Kierkegaard as well as from Pascal, in fact he can be called the sole legitimate grandchild of Kierkegaard and Pascal. All three are basically driven by the harsh, utterly harsh religious motive: that man is always in the wrong before God.’ Kafka’s ‘higher world, his so-called “Castle” with its unpredictable, pettifogging, thoroughly lubricious staff, his curious heaven is playing a ghastly game with mankind […]; yet man is very deeply in the wrong even before this God’. This theology falls well behind the justification doctrine of Anselm of Canterbury in terms of barbaric speculations – which incidentally do not even seem reconcilable with the way Kafka’s text is worded. ‘I mean,’ we read in The Castle [19], ‘can an individual official grant a pardon? At best, that might be a matter for the authority as a whole, though even it can probably not grant a pardon, only issue a directive.’9 The path thus taken quickly petered out. ‘All that,’ says Denis de Rougement, ‘is not the wretched condition of mankind without God but the actual wretchedness of mankind stuck with a God he does not know, not knowing Christ.’

  It is easier to draw speculative conclusions from the collection of notes left by Kafka than to fathom even one of the motives that appear in his stories and novels. However, only they will supply some explanation of the primeval forces that harnessed and rode Kafka’s work; forces that can of course also, and with equal justification, be seen as secular forces in today’s world. And who is to say under what name they appeared to Kafka himself ? Only this much is certain: placed among them, he did not find his way home. He did not know them. All he could see, in the mirror that the primeval world held before him in the form of guilt, was the future as courtroom. But how is one to take this – is this not the Last Judgement? Does it not turn judge into defendant? Are not the proceedings now the sentence? To these questions, Kafka gave no answer. Did he have hopes in this direction? Or was it not like that at all, was he actually more concerned with postponing the sentence? In the stories we have of his, epic poetry means once more what it meant to Scheherazade: putting off what is to come. Postponement is what the defendant hopes for in The Trial – if only the proceedings did not gradually give way to the verdict. The Patriarch himself stands to benefit from postponement, even if he has to give up his place in the tradition in return. ‘I could imagine a different Abraham, who (he wouldn’t become a patriarch, of course, he wouldn’t even make it to old-clothes seller) though instantly ready, with the willingness of a waiter, to perform the sacrifice demanded, did not in fact get it performed because he cannot leave home, he’s indispensable, the household needs him, there’s always something to be done, the house is not finished, but until his house is finished, until he has this support behind him, he cannot get away, even the Bible accepts this, saying: “He is making his house ready.” ’10

  ‘With the willingness of a waiter’ this Abraham appears. There was always something that, for Kafka, could be grasped only in the form of gesture. And that gesture, which he failed to understand, forms the hazy spot in the parables. It is where Kafka’s writing proceeds from. We know how he kept this to himself. His last will and testament consigns it to destruction. That document, which no study of Kafka can avoid, states that it did not satisfy its author; that he regarded his efforts as failures; that he counted himself among those who must inevitably fail. What failed was his splendid attempt to carry writing into doctrine and, as parable, restore to it the tenability and inconspicuousness that in the light of reason he saw as the only properties befitting it. No writer so precisely obeyed the commandment: ‘You shall not make for yourself an idol.’

  ‘It was as if the shame should outlive him’ – these are the words that end The Trial. Shame, corresponding to his ‘elementary purity of feeling’, is Kafka’s most powerful gesture. But it has two faces. Shame is an intimate reaction on the part of the individual; at the same time it is a socially discriminating one. Shame is not only shame in the presence of others; it may also be shame on their behalf. Thus Kafka’s shame is no more personal than the life and thinking that it governs and of which he said: ‘He does not live on account of his personal life, he does not think on account of his personal thinking. For him it is as if he lives and thinks at the urging of a family […]. It is because of this unknown family […] that he cannot be released’ [Heft 12]. We do not know how this unknown family (of people and animals) is made up. All that is clear is that this is what compels Kafka to move aeons in writing. At the behest of this family he trundles the rock of what has happened in history as Sisyphus rolled the boulder. What happens in the process is that the underside of the rock is exposed. It is not a pleasant sight. Kafka, however, is able to bear that sight. ‘Having faith in progress does not mean believing that progress has already occurred. That would not be faith’ [Aphorisms II, 4, 48]. The age in which Kafka lives does not, for him, signify progress over against the beginnings of time. His novels play out in a swamp. The created world seems to him to be at a stage that Bachofen called ‘hetaerean’. That this stage has passed into oblivion is not to say it does not extend into the present. On the contrary: it is present as a result of having passed into oblivion. An experience that goes deeper than that of the average person will come up against it. ‘I have experience,’ runs one of Kafka’s earliest jottings, ‘and I am not joking when I say it is a kind of seasickness on dry land’ [‘Conversation with the Worshipper’]. Not for nothing is the first ‘Meditation’11 made on a swing. And Kafka is tireless in expounding the fluctuating nature of experience. Every experience has ‘give’; every experience blends with its opposite. ‘It was in summer,’ we read at the beginning of ‘The Knock at the Courtyard Gate’, ‘a warm day. I and my sister, on our way home, passed a courtyard gate. I forget: was it through high spirits or in a mood of absent-mindedness that she hit the gate or did she simply shake her fist at it without aiming a blow?’ The mere possibility of the turn of events mentioned in third place makes the first two, which had at first seemed innocuous, appear in a different light. It is from the soggy ground of such experiences that Kafka’s female characters arise. They are swamp creatures – like Leni, who ‘splayed the middle and ring fingers of her right hand apart, and the connecting membrane between them almost came up to the topmost joint of the short fingers’ [The Trial, ‘The Uncle – Leni’]. ‘ “Marvellous times,” ’ says the ambiguous Frieda, recalling her earlier life, ‘ “you’ve never asked me about my past” ’ [The Castle, 22]. The fact is, this leads into the murky depths, site of that coupling whose ‘ungoverned luxuriance [as Bachofen put it] is hated by the pure powers of heavenly light and justifies the description luteae voluptates used by Arnobius’.

  From this standpoint Kafka’s narrative technique becomes comprehensible. When other characters in the novels have something to say to K., they do so (regardless of how important it is or how surprising) in a casual, incidental way, as if basically he must have known this all along. It is as if there was nothing new here, as if the hero was being asked quite unobtrusively to allow himself to recall something he had forgotten. It is in this sense that Willi Haas, trying to make sense of what happens in The Trial, rightly states ‘that the object of these proceedings, indeed the real hero of this incredible book, is forgetting, […] the chief property of which is of course that it forgets itself […]. It has itself become almost a mute character here in the figure of the defendant – a character, in fact, of the most splendid intensity.’ That this ‘mysterious centre’ derives from ‘the Jewish religion’ is surely not to be dismissed out of hand. ‘Here memory as piety plays a most mysterious role. It is […] not a but in fact the most profound quality of Jehovah that he remembers, that he retains an infallible memory “into the third and fourth generation”, indeed into the “hundredth”; the most sacred […] act of […] our rite is the expunging of sins from the Book of Memory.’

  What is forgotten (and this discovery brings us to another threshold of Kafka’s work) is never a purely individual entity. Each thing forgotten blends into the oblivion of prehistory, enters with it into innumerable, uncertain, shifting connections with more and more monstrosities. Oblivion is the vessel out of which the inexhaustible intermediate world in Kafka’s stories thrusts towards the light.

  There, it is precisely the world’s abundance that constitutes the sole reality. All that is spirit must have material substance, must be distinct to have room here and the right to exist […]. The spiritual, in so far as it still plays a role, becomes spirits. The spirits become wholly individual individuals, each bearing its own name and having a quite specific connection with the name of the worshipper […]. Prompting no misgivings, their abundance further overbrims the world’s abundance […]. Causing no concern, the crush of spirits here increases; […] more and more new ones joining the old, each with its own name, each distinct from all the rest.