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Franz Kafka Author: Walter H. Sokel Date: 1990 From: European Writers: The Twentieth Century(Vol. 9. ) Publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons Document Type: Biography; Critical essay Length: 19,022 words

About this Person Born: July 03, 1883 in Prague, Austria-Hungary Died: June 03, 1924 in Kierling, Austria Nationality: Czechoslovak Occupation: Writer FRANZ KAFKA WAS born into a German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, then capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia in the Austro- Hungarian Empire, on 3 July 1883. He was the eldest of six children, of whom two brothers died in infancy; Franz survived, along with three sisters. The father, Hermann Kafka, was a self-made man, born in bitter poverty in the South Bohemian town of Wossek, who had become the owner of a large dry-goods business in the center of the Old Town of Prague. Kafka's mother, Julie Kafka (née Löwy), was the daughter of a wealthy Prague brewer. Kafka later viewed the contrast between the paternal and maternal lines of his descent as a split within himself. While the Kafkas were robust, forceful, and self-assertive, his mother's ancestors, especially on the maternal side, tended to be reflective and introverted. They included rabbis, Talmudic scholars, pious sages, and eccentrics. His mother's grandmother, in a fit of depression, had taken her own life. Kafka later referred to himself as a Löwy with a certain Kafka-like foundation of tenacity and stubbornness. He felt that the powerful, self-righteous, and totally unselfconscious personality of his father had stamped him with an ineradicable conviction of his own inferiority and guilt. The many opportunities he found as a young boy to compare his own weak, skinny body with his father's gigantic frame and his own timidity and indecisiveness with his father's energy and aggressive will led him to renounce, at an early age, all hope of ever attaining success in the two areas of life in which his father excelled: business and marriage. The only hope left to him was, as he put it, to find a spot on the world's map that his father's enormous shadow had not reached · and that spot was literature. At the same time, he internalized his father's perspective to such a degree that he would never be free of guilt feelings for not living up to his father's expectations.

Julie Kafka, helping her husband in the business, neglected the boy in his early years. Appearing to mediate between her husband and her son, she ultimately always sided with the former, so that Kafka felt deserted and betrayed. On the other hand, she later smothered him with solicitude, engendering and fostering in him extreme dependence. Extending this dependence from family to native city, Kafka said that "little mother Prague" had her claws in him and would never let go. Kafka lived with his parents until the age of thirty-one and even after that took his meals regularly at their house. He was unable to move away from Prague until the age of forty, less than one year before his death.

Kafka received a sound humanistic education at the Old Town Gymnasium and subsequently enrolled in the law faculty of the German-language Karl Ferdinand University, where he received his law degree in 1906. He eschewed the practice of law as an attorney, but his law degree procured him a career as a bureaucrat with legal expertise in the Workmen's Accident Insurance Administration of the Kingdom of Bohemia, where he worked from 1908 until his retirement in 1922. This post represented a compromise between Kafka's desire to devote himself entirely to writing and the need he perceived for a bourgeois occupation that would support him. His work schedule was relatively undemanding and left afternoons free. Nevertheless it gave rise to a severe inner conflict between vocation and avocation that, aggravated by his father's demand that he devote himself also to a newly founded family business venture, drove Kafka several times to thoughts of suicide.

Shy and lonely by disposition, Kafka yet had a profound need for friends. In his early school years he was close to Hugo Bergmann, later a leading Zionist thinker and one of the early Central European settlers in Jerusalem. In his adolescence and young adulthood, Oskar Pollak, who was to become a noted art historian before he was killed in World War I, exerted a powerful influence on Kafka, who called him his "window on the world." Through Pollak Kafka came under the spell of the romantic, Nietzschean, and German- nationalist ideology of Ferdinand Avenarius' journal, Der Kunstwart. Subsequently, however, Max Brod was to become of the greatest importance for Kafka. Kafka first met Brod in October 1902, in the German Students' Reading and Lecture Hall, the meeting place of a liberal student union, where Brod gave a lecture on Schopenhauer that Kafka attended. They became close friends for life.

Brod's significance for Kafka's literary development cannot be exaggerated. Hailing from a cultured family, and socially more advantaged than Kafka, Brod, who at a young age had already become a literary celebrity, provided the gateway for Kafka's entrance into the literary world. Well aware of Kafka's unique genius, Brod encouraged and prodded him to write. He urged him to show his

writings to others, and by his own literary activity he provided a conscience for Kafka, goading him to produce more regularly and rousing him from frequent fits of lethargy and despondency. Brod also was instrumental in arranging Kafka's first publications. In 1912 he introduced him to the Leipzig publisher Ernst Rowohlt and his associate, Kurt Wolff. Wolff, who soon was to found his own publishing house, thought highly of Kafka's talent and became his publisher. Through Brod, Kafka also formed close friendships with the blind writer Oskar Baum and the philosopher Felix Weltsch. These four formed the nucleus of a coterie on Prague's cultural horizon. Together with Brod and other friends, Kafka made several extended trips from 1910 to 1912 that led him to Paris, Switzerland, the upper Italian lakes, Milan, and Weimar, the shrine of Germany's classical heritage. These journeys proved of importance to Kafka's development as a writer since they provided him with an impetus to keep journals. He joined Brod in beginning a novel about two friends whom they called Richard and Samuel; the first chapter of this common enterprise, "Die erste lange Eisenbahnfahrt" ("The First Long Railroad Ride"), was published in the Prague journal Herderblätter in May 1912. Sharing their admiration of Gustave Flaubert , the two friends read him together in the original French.

Before his so-called "breakthrough" in September 1912, Kafka had not yet found the manner of writing that was to make him the master we see in him today. Although he had been writing since childhood, his earliest extant work, "Beschreibung eines Kampfes" ("Description of a Struggle," 1936, written in 1904-1905, revised in 1909-1910), although an arresting example of modernism with striking passages, is disjointed and lacks coherence of focus. A novel, "Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande" ("Wedding Preparations in the Country," 1953), begun in 1907, was soon abandoned. For the rest, Kafka, before the age of twenty-nine, had written merely small vignettes, meditations or reflections and impressions, which appeared in book form under the collective title Betrachtung (Meditation) in 1913. He had also started the first version of his novel Der Verschollene (Amerika, 1927), which he later destroyed. The actual breakthrough to his inimitable literary style was preceded by three factors: the discipline afforded by his decision in late 1910 to keep a regular diary; his exposure to a Yiddish theater group from Lvov, in eastern Poland, which performed in Prague in late 1911 and early 1912; and his meeting Felice Bauer in August 1912.

In the guest performances of the Lvov Yiddish theater Kafka discovered his own Jewish roots · a discovery that gave his life a new direction. Hitherto, his attitude toward Judaism had been one of indifference. He found the conventionalized remnants of Jewish custom and religion in his family and social milieu pathetic and laughable. However, after exposure to East European Jewish culture, which the Yiddish theater and particularly his friendship with the Warsaw-born actor Yitzchak Löwy communicated to him, Kafka developed an intense interest in his Jewish heritage that · with a single brief exception, called by him his "anti-Zionist" phase · was never to wane; indeed, it deepened with time. He immersed himself in Jewish history; he underwent a period of socially oriented Zionist activism during World War I, when he followed with intense concern the educational work done with Jewish refugee children from Poland. The unbroken bond with one's religious and cultural past that distinguished East European Jews from their West European counterparts fascinated him. Eastern Jews provided his ideal of a true community. His friend Jirí (Georg) Langer, a convert to Hasidism, introduced him to the Hasidic world. In 1917, he took up the systematic study of Hebrew, a language in which he was able to attain a degree of fluency and reading comprehension. In 1917 and 1918 he occupied himself with the study of the Old Testament , with Jewish legends, folk tales, and mysticism, having received some knowledge about these areas from Yitzchak Löwy and Jirí Langer as well as from the lectures and writings of Martin Buber, in whose journal Der Jude two of Kafka's stories appeared. Near the end of his life, Kafka even thought of immigrating to Palestine. Finally, it was on the grounds of their common Jewishness that Kafka had hoped to gain the longed-for rapproachment with his father.

Kafka met Felice Bauer, a young woman from a Berlin bourgeois family, when she visited Max Brod's family in August 1912. She was a highly successful employee in a dictaphone business, energetic, lively, and efficient, possessing those qualities Kafka felt sorely missing in himself. A correspondence of approximately five hundred letters and cards developed, extending over five years and two engagements during which time Kafka pursued a clearly discernible strategy. Initially, he would woo Felice assiduously. However, as soon as she showed signs of yielding to his courtship and was beginning to press for physical encounters, Kafka started to draw back. He warned Felice about himself, projected married life with him as one that would be beset by monstrous difficulties, and presented himself as fanatically dedicated to writing, which would condemn his spouse to monastic loneliness. He made every effort to discourage her hopes for a life together. Yet no sooner did she show signs of heeding his warnings than he returned to the role of ardent and insistent wooer. After a long pause, during which the relationship became dormant, Kafka resumed his advances, encouraged by Felice's friend Grete Bloch, who had come from Berlin to mediate between them. Kafka established a relationship with Grete that was freer and in some respects closer than the one he shared with Felice · so much so that many years later, Brod was led to believe, wrongly, that Grete had borne an illegitimate son by Kafka.

Kafka finally asked Felice whether she would marry him, and they were officially engaged in Berlin in June 1914. Immediately afterward, Kafka confided in his diary that he felt like a chained convict. One month later, the engagement was dissolved in a Berlin hotel room that Kafka called his "courtroom." A few weeks later, he began to write his novel of accusation and punishment, Der Prozess (The Trial, 1925).

Kafka's literary productivity was sporadic and closely connected with his relationships to women, first to Felice and then to Milena Jesenská-Polak. Brief and intense periods of creativity were interrupted by years of relative or near-total sterility. Two days after his first letter to Felice had gone out, Kafka wrote "Das Urteil" ("The Judgment," 1913) in a single night (September 22-23, 1912). He always considered it his best work, and it was the only one that always satisfied him. He saw in the uninterrupted inspirational flow with which this story had been committed to paper an ideal that he could never again attain. Immediately after finishing "The Judgment," he began with tremendous enthusiasm the second version of his novel Amerika. However, after an initial spurt Kafka's inspiration flagged. He started Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis, 1915) in November 1912, and finished it in December. Thereafter, his creativity seemed spent. He left the novel · as he would leave all his novels · in a fragmentary state and abandoned creative work for nearly two years. He started The Trial in August 1914, interrupted it to write "In der Strafkolonie" ("The Penal Colony," 1919) during a brief vacation that October, and continued to work on The Trial until the end of the year. Then his creativity flagged once more, and he dropped his work on the novel. After writing the fragment "Blumfeld, ein älterer Junggeselle" ("Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor," 1936) in early 1915, he again experienced two unproductive years.

Since 1915, a rapprochement with Felice had begun that culminated in a second engagement in July 1917. During the preceding

winter and spring, Kafka had experienced a third period of intense creativity that resulted in numerous short narratives · parabolic or dreamlike vignettes · many of which he collected in the volume Ein Landarzt (The Country Doctor, 1919). With his renewed engagement to Felice and the purchase of furniture for their future household, Kafka again became oppressed by the actual prospect of marriage. As if in answer to his wish for a way out, he suffered a hemorrhage of the lungs in August 1917, which was diagnosed as tuberculosis. His illness serving as a reason, he suggested to Felice that they terminate their relationship, and the engagement was officially dissolved.

Having obtained an extended sick leave, Kafka moved to the village of Zurau in northwestern Bohemia, where his youngest sister, Ottla, lived at the time. Ottla was the only member of his family who was close to him; he had supported her in her struggle for independence against their father. He spent the winter of 1917-1918 in this rustic environment and perceived it as the happiest period of his life. It was then that he became deeply absorbed by metaphysical and religious problems and studied Arthur Schopenhauer , Leo Tolstoy , Søren Kierkegaard , and above all the Old Testament, Jewish legends, and Jewish mystical lore. Under those influences he wrote the largest number of his aphorisms. These meditations, written in octavo notebooks, contain the sole explicitly religious and metaphysical writings of Kafka. Evenso, their content sharply diverges from any traditional and denominational elements of either Jewish or Christian faith.

After the aphorisms, a period of four relatively unproductive years followed. In 1919, Kafka became briefly engaged to Julie Wohryzek, a Jewish girl from a quasi-proletarian family. Kafka's father objected to the connection on social grounds, considering it a misalliance for his son. Kafka, now thirty-six, gave in and obediently broke off the engagement. However, in November of that year, he composed the long letter to his father that represents his autobiography and is conceived in terms of his father's fateful role in shaping his life. Kafka did not hand this letter to its addressee, but asked his mother to transmit it, a request that she understandably refused.

Extensive sick leaves were granted to Kafka during this period, which he spent in various mountain resorts and sanatoriums. In the sanatorium in Matliary in the High Tatra Mountains in Slovakia, he met a young Hungarian medical student, Robert Klopstock, who became a good friend and later, toward the end of Kafka's life, would become his physician. While Kafka sojourned in Merano in South Tyrol in 1920, a correspondence began with Milena Jesenská-Polak, a beautiful young Czech intellectual who had translated several of Kafka's works into Czech. An emancipated woman, she had rebelled against her father's wishes by marrying Ernst Polak, a Jewish literatus of great personal magnetism whom she followed to Vienna. Polak "held court" in the Viennese café Herrenhof, probably the source for the name of the inn in Kafka's Das Schloss (The Castle, 1926) where the Castle officials lodge when they descend to the level of ordinary humanity. Polak's open unfaithfulness to Milena made her ready for the passionate affair that quickly developed between her and the author she admired. It culminated in a four-day visit from Kafka to Vienna in the early summer of 1920. Milena was the only non-Jewish woman with whom Kafka was seriously involved. Despite the happiness of those days together, and despite the beautiful intimacy that he achieved with Milena in his letters, Kafka, who referred to coitus as "the punishment for the happiness of being together," sought to avoid further physical contact with his beloved. Symptoms of anxiety tormented him at the prospect of an encounter, which Milena sought and Kafka tried to evade. At a final confrontation insisted upon by Milena in August 1920, she ended the affair.

Kafka's last great upsurge of creativity began soon after the termination of his intimacy with Milena. It resulted in "Ein Hungerkunstler" ("A Hunger Artist," 1924), "Forschungen eines Hundes" ("Investigations of a Dog," 1931), and above all, his most ambitious and longest work, The Castle, in which strong echoes of the Milena experience have been detected. All these works were written in the first half or two-thirds of the year 1922. In the late summer of 1922, Kafka broke off all further work on his novel, and an extended period of sterility set in again. Ironically enough, his request for early retirement had been granted in midsummer, which meant that for the first time in his life Kafka would now be free to devote himself fully to his writing. During a stay on the Baltic coast of Germany in the summer of 1923, he met and fell in love with Dora Diamant, a Polish girl from an Orthodox Jewish family who was twenty years younger than himself. His affection was requited, and he moved to Berlin to live with Dora. He called himself "a repentant Jew" when he asked Dora's father for her hand in marriage, but the rabbi whom her father consulted counseled rejection of Kafka's plea. In this last six months of his life, Kafka's late-won contentment with Dora was marred by penury, since his Czech pension was utterly inadequate to the inflation raging in Germany, and by his rapidly advancing illness. In these winter months, Kafka wrote "Eine kleine Frau" ("A Little Woman") and his great last fragment, "Der Bau" ("The Burrow"). His worsening state of health forced him to move back to his parents' home in March 1924, which he felt as a final defeat. He still had the strength to write his last story, "Josefine, die Sängerin, oder Das Volk der Mäuse" ("Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk," 1924). Because of excruciating pain in his throat, he was taken to Vienna for medical examinations. An advanced stage of tuberculosis of the throat was diagnosed. Kafka was admitted to a small sanatorium in Kierling, near Vienna, where he died on 3 June 1924. His last words, written to Dr. Klopstock, were: "Kill me, or you are a murderer." He was buried in Prague, where he rests next to his parents.

Few of Kafka's works were published in his lifetime. His first book was the collection of short pieces, Betrachtung (Meditation), published by Kurt Wolff in 1913. "Der Heizer" ("The Stoker"), the first chapter of Amerika, appeared in 1913, in Kurt Wolff's expressionist series Der jungste Tag (The Day of Judgment) with the subtitle "Ein Fragment" ("A Fragment"). In the same series, The Metamorphosis and "The Judgment" appeared as book publications in 1915 and 1916 respectively. In 1919, Wolff published "In the Penal Colony" and the collection of short pieces The Country Doctor, and in 1924, shortly after Kafka's death, his volume of four stories, Ein Hungerkunstler, was issued by the Berlin publishing house Die Schmiede. After Kafka's death, Max Brod brought out Kafka's three novels in quick succession · The Trial in 1925, The Castle in 1926, and Amerika in 1927. In 1931, a volume of unpublished stories and fragments appeared with the title Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer (The Great Wall of China), and between 1935 and 1937 Brod published the first edition of Kafka's collected works. Diaries, letters, aphorisms, and further fragments were published in subsequent volumes in the 1940's, 1950's, 1960's, and 1970's.

Most of Kafka's posthumous publications were edited by Max Brod. To counter the changes in Kafka's texts made by Brod, a critical edition based on the original manuscripts · most of which are in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University · is being prepared under the general editorship of Jurgen Born. So far, two volumes · The Castle and Amerika (Der Verschollene) · have appeared.

It is difficult to place Kafka in a literary tradition. To be sure, there are influences on his writing, foremost among them Gustave Flaubert, Heinrich von Kleist , and Feodor Dostoevsky . Charles Dickens ' David Copperfield played a decisive part in the inspiration of Amerika. Dostoevsky's "The Double" and The Brothers Karamazov left their traces on The Metamorphosis and The Trial respectively, while Crime and Punishment influenced both of Kafka's works. The nineteenth-century Czech novel The Grandmother by Bozena Nemcová, has been seen to have some bearing on The Castle. Kafka called Flaubert, Dostoevsky, August Strindberg , and the Austrian author Franz Grillparzer his "blood relatives." He found himself confirmed by Kierkegaard "as by a friend," even though he subsequently developed a highly critical attitude toward the Dane. Most important, perhaps, is the influence of Jewish thought and literature, which is noticeable from "The Judgment" on, but most conspicuous in "Before the Law," in the aphorisms, and The Castle. Kafka's main interest in other writers, however, was not in their work or their art, but in their lives. Kafka was an avid reader of life documents · autobiographies, biographies, letters, diaries, and memoirs.

Kafka was not totally unknown in his lifetime. Apart from his circle of Prague friends and acquaintances, who formed an intellectual and cultural avant-garde in his native city, German literary circles became increasingly interested in him. Carl Sternheim's donation to him of the money he received from the prestigious Fontane Prize in 1915 symbolized the respect in which Kafka was held even then, despite the paucity of his publications. Still he remained during his life, and for the first two decades after his death, a special property of the cognoscenti and the avant-garde. Hitler's accession to power made any spread of Kafka's fame impossible in German- speaking lands. Meanwhile, however, the French existentialists had discovered him, and their frequent references to him began his worldwide reputation. Even though an English translation of The Castle had already appeared in 1930, Kafka's real entry into American letters came, on the one hand, by way of the French existentialists, and, on the other hand, by way of the Central European intellectual emigrés. The most exciting phase of Kafka's American reception occurred in the 1940's; by the fifties he was becoming the classical modernist we see in him today.

Kafka's work can be called a spiritual autobiography in metaphorical disguise. In a diary entry of 6 August 1914, Kafka noted that his sense for the presentation of his "dreamlike inner life" had stunted all his other interests and talents and had become the only quality that could afford him full satisfaction. Indeed, the oneiric character of Kafka's writings strikes every reader, for their enigmatic suggestiveness is their most pronounced feature. They are like dreams in that they compel interpretation but seem to withhold the key. Sometimes his stories did grow out of dreams, and the dreams Kafka frequently relates in his diaries show a striking resemblance to his stories. Yet his writings differ profoundly from those of the surrealists, who jotted down their dreams in automatic writing. Unlike theirs, Kafka's narratives are thoroughly disciplined. They are by no means simple copies of dreams; rather, they are structured analogously to dreams in some essential characteristics.

One of these characteristics is the peculiar relationship of Kafka's narratives to metaphor. His stories tend to present enactments of metaphors buried in language, not only in the German language in which he wrote but also in the universal symbolism of pre-rational thought. Basic metaphors by which pre-scientific language expresses experiences, attitudes, and relationships become events in Kafka's tales. He reinstates or re-creates the pictorial expressiveness that the original metaphor, now frozen in a cliché or idiom, once conveyed. Thus Kafka's writing conforms to or repeats the activity of the dreaming mind. As Sigmund Freud has shown in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), a work with which Kafka was familiar, dreams speak in the pictorial language that speech once was. They take literally the metaphors hidden in speech and act them out as visualized events.

A few examples might help to clarify the preceding remarks. A decisive and profound experience is said to "leave a mark"; a lasting memory is "engraved" on one. Kafka's "The Penal Colony" depicts both metaphors as physical happenings. The penal machine slowly kills the condemned prisoner by literally engraving (einkerben) on his flesh the law he has transgressed. In fact, he dies remembering this legal lesson; "the mark left by the law" kills him. German usage applies the term Ungeziefer (vermin) to persons considered low and contemptible, even as our usage of "cockroach" describes a person deemed a spineless and miserable character. In Kafka's The Metamorphosis, the traveling salesman Gregor Samsa is "like a cockroach" because of his spineless and abject behavior and parasitic wishes. However, Kafka drops the word "like" and the metaphor becomes reality when Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself turned into a giant vermin. With this metamorphosis Kafka reverses the original act of metamorphosis carried out by thought when it forms metaphor; for metaphor is always "metamorphosis." Kafka transforms metaphor back into his fictional reality, and this counter-metamorphosis becomes the starting point of his tale. In a last example, German usage calls a sexually indecent and obscene character a "pig" or "swine" (Schwein). In Kafka's "A Country Doctor," the groom who assaults the doctor's maid walks out of the doctor's pigsty.

Kafka's narratives do not stop with reactivating single metaphors. They organically connect the enactment of one metaphor with the enactments of others, and together these metaphors establish a narrative development. "A Country Doctor" will serve as an example.

The swinish groom stands in a fateful relation to the protagonist of the story, the country doctor, through whose consciousness alone we witness the events. The doctor had lived next to his maid, Rose, without noticing her as a woman. As soon as she presents herself to him as desirable, the groom steps out of the doctor's "unused" pigsty and seeks to rape her. (The original text uses the German word for "unused" · unbenutzt · which the English translation renders as "uninhabited.") The unused pigsty belongs to the doctor; in the words of the story, it is "his own." The groom is, then, literally a dweller in the doctor's forgotten lower depths. He embodies the doctor's unused sex drive in a strikingly literal way. The doctor's consciousness does not acknowledge his responsibility for the event he himself calls forth when he kicks the door of the pigsty open "absentmindedly" and thus releases the groom. The sudden emergence of the "filthy" contents of the doctor's depths · the unacknowledged component of his self · now overpowers his humanity and makes the girl a prey of bestial desire. In Kafka's stories acts and omissions reveal what consciousness hides from itself. It is not consciousness · the explicit comments of the story · but the narrated events that show the true meaning of Kafka's tale. "A Country Doctor" begins with a call of the night bell summoning the doctor to a patient. However, his horse has died from overexertion, and he cannot respond to the call. In his dilemma he calls "absentmindedly" on his forgotten pigsty. (The original text uses the German word for "absentmindedly" · zerstreut · which the English translation renders as "confused," but "absentmindedly" is critical in showing that this is an unconscious call on the doctor's part.) When he does so he releases the swinish groom and a team of "unearthly horses" and allows the groom to take the girl. Contrary to his verbal protestations, the doctor does in fact leave Rose behind with the groom. She is the price for the groom's aid.

The images and plot of this tale enable us to see Kafka's works as pieces of an autobiography in metaphorical disguise. The call of the night bell can be understood as a translation into sensory terms of Kafka's call to literature, which he understood as an art of healing and self-preservation, a "doctor's" art. For Kafka writing was night work for two reasons: literally, because he had no time for it during the day; figuratively, because to write he had to delve into the nocturnal regions of his mind, the representation of which he called his fatal talent. The death of the horse shows that no normal and natural way is available for transporting the self to its calling, and as the doctor finds his self in absentmindedness, so Kafka notes that he had done his best writing when all rational control was lifted. In one night, with "an outpouring of his soul," he wrote "The Judgment," which remained his favorite work and the model for all others.

"A Country Doctor" presents in the hieroglyphic language of dreams a clear and exact presentation of Kafka's inspirational process and the problems it posed for his life. In a revealing letter to Brod written in 1922, he calls his writing "a descent to the dark powers, an unchaining of spirits whose natural state it is to be bound servants." This description fits the groom of "A Country Doctor," who, instead of serving the self, expels it and takes over its vacated house. In that same letter to Brod Kafka says that in order to devote himself to literature the writer must sacrifice fulfillment in life, and "the unearthly horses" of inspiration, called forth from the unsavory depths, transport the doctor away from life, woman, and home. He is shown literally "carried away," "in the transport" of inspiration, since his unearthly team of horses proceeds without his conscious will and carries him off instantaneously and miraculously to his vocational destination. This destination is an existential encounter, symbolized by his being undressed and put in the same bed with his sick childhood self, the boy patient to whom he has been called.

The two houses pictorialize the two poles of the doctor's existence. In his own house, the house of the self, the doctor abandons the possibility of erotic fulfillment; in the other house, the house of the patient, he dedicates himself to his art, which is the confrontation with the congenital wound of mortality. The hero's ambivalence is such that he cannot be content at either pole. At home he sacrifices the girl to his mission, but at his destination he regrets the price he has paid and wants to return. His split existence, his inability to choose, becomes pure image in the doctor's final condition. He is shown riding aimlessly between the houses; the distance between them has become infinite, and he cannot stay at either place.

"A Country Doctor" became the title story of a volume of Kafka's short pieces published in 1919 and dedicated to his father, which makes quite evident the importance Kafka attached to this particular work. The detailed examination of its plot and images has enabled us to understand the allegorical principle informing Kafka's writings: his images are pictorial translations of overriding personal concerns in which personal meaning acquires universal significance.

Any individual work by Kafka may baffle the reader when considered in isolation. If examined within the context of Kafka's other works and personal documents, however, the nature and meaning of his images become clear, and the individual work appears as a variation on a single theme · the inner autobiography of the author · and as a step in the development of this theme. Each work is aesthetically self-sufficient and, if written and published by Kafka himself, a complete and satisfying statement of one approach to the master theme.

However, Kafka's images possess different degrees of transparency in different works. The central images of his long narratives · Gregor Samsa's bug form, the court in The Trial, the Castle in the late novel of that name · are more opaque and denser than the symbols of his shorter pieces. The reason is that the central images of the long works have a variety of functions and meanings. Indeed, they unite mutually contradictory meanings and functions.

Gregor Samsa's metamorphosis, for instance, expresses a number of contradictory tendencies in the single image of the giant bug. Gregor's transformation gives shape to his wish to abandon responsibility as breadwinner and supporter of his family and thereby returns Gregor's father to his former position as head of the household. At the same time, however, his metamorphosis embodies Gregor's opposite wish to avenge himself on his family's parasitism by turning parasite himself. In the former case the metamorphosis functions as submission, in the latter as aggression and rebellion. The empirical impossibility of Gregor's form of existence serves as objective correlative of his spiritual and psychic contradictoriness.

In addition to the actualizing of metaphors, there are two further factors that make the structure of Kafka's stories analogous to the structure of dreams: unitary perspective and tension between a manifest content and a latent truth.

In fiction, ordinarily, the community of author and reader stands as an objective reality outside and above the points of view of the characters, forming a "true" frame of reference. The traditional storyteller or novelist maintains this division by one or both of these devices: he switches the point of view from one character to another and thus enables us to enjoy a relative omniscience since we can look into all minds of the story, which none of the characters can; or he keeps his own perspective separate, looks into his characters, and comments as narrator upon their thoughts and actions. These conventions are absent in Kafka's fiction. His stories know only a single point of view, that of the protagonist. Even in his third-person narratives · and his major works are all third-person narratives · we see objects, scenes, and persons only through the protagonist's eyes. An example from The Trial may illustrate the means by which Kafka replaces independent authorial comment with his protagonist's interpretation of the action.

The reaction of the Examining Magistrate to a demagogic speech by the defendant Josef K. is described as follows: "The Examining Magistrate kept fidgeting on his chair with embarrassment or impatience" [italics mine]. The word "or" shows Kafka's radical deviation from the conventional method of narration. Instead of giving us a single authoritative explanation, the author states his ignorance of his fictional world. He blocks and prevents the traditional communication of author to reader "over the head of the character." In this way Kafka achieves the most fundamental realism and removes the last vestiges of the author's presence as an independent, visible personality, thereby fulfilling Flaubert's ideal of an author who is as invisible as God is in his creation. However, he goes further than Flaubert by also taking away the reader's superiority over the protagonist. Together with the protagonist, the reader is thrown into the basic condition of every individual man: he remains imprisoned in the solitary confinement of a limited and subjective consciousness that can only infer, but can never know, the external world. Normally we accept on trust the "truth" of our fellow man's feelings and

motivations. The Kafka hero lacks this a priori trust; or if he does start out with it, events take it away from him, or at least from the reader. This loss of basic trust or faith in the interpretability of the world around the protagonist partially explains the peculiar effect of Kafka's fiction.

For reasons that we shall examine later, Kafka's hero must defend and assert himself or else be lost. Josef K.'s ambiguous interpretation, for instance, of the Examining Magistrate's fidgeting results from his need to calculate the effect of his speech. If it was embarrassment that made the Magistrate fidget, Josef K. has scored a victory. If, on the other hand, the Magistrate moved from impatience, K.'s speech has heightened the threat to himself. The fictional reality presented by Kafka is either threat or promise to the protagonist and is wholly determined by his fears, wishes, and hopes. Therefore there can be no presentation of facts in Kafka that is not, at the same time, interpretation. The situation of Kafka's protagonist reflects the fundamental insecurity of man's condition as prisoner of his own brain.

All aspects of Kafka's narrative form, from individual word and sentence to plot structure and thought, express this fundamental uncertainty of his protagonists, and it is this form that infects the reader and grips him with foreboding. Kafka's vocabulary is one of inference and conjecture. Favorite words are "apparently," "ostensibly," "maybe," and "actually." Kafka prefers "it seems" to "it is." His sentences often consist of two clauses: the first states a fact or a guess; the second qualifies, questions, negates it. The conjunction "but" is therefore most characteristic of Kafka's thought structure. The frequent use of "even if" clauses expresses the tendency to cancel expectations and refute inferences. Terminal certainty there is in Kafka, but it is usually of a negative kind, identical with death or final despair. The fact that most of his works do not end with the protagonist's death attests to the inability to arrive at certainty.

As stated above, the tension between a manifest content and a latent "truth" also contributes to the dreamlike effect of Kafka's narratives. Although the protagonist's solipsistic perspective, through which we experience the narrative, does not allow us to speak of authorial truth in Kafka's work, there is nonetheless an objective and verifiable authorial point of view in most of his writings. It is obliquely smuggled in without the awareness of the protaganist. In the contradiction between the reader's perspective, as given him by the protagonist, and the hidden point of view or "truth" of the work lies the fundamental concern of Kafka's art, the basis of its structure, and the secret of its unsettling effect.

Those who think that the protagonist's perspective is the whole of Kafka are victims of the subtle deception that this perspective perpetrates. In fact, in the two novels about Joseph K. and in several of the longer narratives, the protagonist's motivation is precisely to hide the truth either from himself or from the world, including the reader. To be sure, the protagonist's perspective operates for the purpose of blocking access to and comprehension of the truth, but in most of Kafka's works the truth becomes known through the defeat of the protagonist's consciousness. In one of his aphorisms Kafka defines truth as the light reflected upon the retreating grimace (of falsehood) and art as the condition of being dazzled by that light. This aphorism supplies the key to Kafka's poetics, always implicit in his works. The annihilation or refutation suffered by Kafka's protagonist, bearer of the lie, becomes the negative revelation of truth.

This structural principle of Kafka's narratives explains the profound difference between Kafka's method and the stream-of- consciousness technique. The latter assumes the identity of consciousness and truth. Operating within the framework of psychology, it assumes that to reveal character is to reveal the truth of the narrative. In Kafka's narratives, on the contrary, consciousness hides truth. Therefore Kafka must transcend psychology. His concern is not the mechanism of self, but its moral and spiritual justification. In order to express this concern he must unmask the mechanism, and in doing that he reveals a great deal about it. Kafka is a master in uncovering the subtle workings of rationalization, subterfuge, and self-deception. But for Kafka this unmasking is not the end of his art. The end is always the revelation of the negative truth in the defeat of the self.

All of Kafka's works deal with this relationship in one of three ways, each of which corresponds to one of the three distinct phases of development in his mature writings. In the first phase of Kafka's maturity (1912-1914) the protagonist represses his inner truth, but his truth erupts in a catastrophe · it accuses, judges, and annihilates him. This is the phase of the punitive fantasies, the powerful tales of punishment and death that are Kafka's most dramatic and most popular · "The Judgment," The Metamorphosis, The Trial, with important modifications, and particularly "The Penal Colony." To all of these Amerika forms an "innocent" and "utopian" counterpart. The second phase (1914-1917) begins after "The Penal Colony" and continues with the short parabolic pieces of the Country Doctor volume, which includes "Before the Law" and "A Report to an Academy." In this phase a detached perspective views and contemplates a paradoxical discrepancy between self and truth.

The final phase (1920-1924) is Kafka's greatest and most profound. It encompasses the four stories included in Ein Hungerkunstler, the lengthy fragments "Investigations of a Dog" and "The Burrow," and the long fragmentary novel The Castle. In the three most important works of that phase · "A Hunger Artist," "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk," and The Castle · Kafka presents the protagonist's deception of the world, inspired by his desperate need to create and fulfill his existence.

The punitive fantasies form the foundation for all phases of Kafka's maturity. With "The Judgment," he said, he had achieved his "breakthrough" to his own proper form of expression. We shall therefore deal with the punitive fantasies in greater detail than with the two subsequent phases.

The alienation of the protagonist from his true self forms the structural basis of Kafka's punitive fantasies. These fantasies are adumbrated in the early fragment "Wedding Preparations in the Country." Here the hero · Raban, cryptographic forerunner of Samsa and disguise for Kafka · dreams of literally splitting his self in order to avoid visits to his fiancée in the country and other burdensome involvements. His true self, transformed into a giant beetle, would stay in bed, while the unreal image of his body, his facade, would go into the world to represent Raban in the performance of necessary duties. This facade would be a slave, utterly dependent upon the commands of the powerful dehumanized self at home. This buglike true self corresponds to the bachelor self of other early writings and diary entries of Kafka's. Raban's facade body, on the other hand, burdened with the task of conducting his engagement, corresponds to the engaged young men who appear in Kafka's juvenilia.

This split prefigures the structure of Kafka's punitive fantasies, with one essential qualification. What the early work presents as a conscious wish becomes in the punitive fantasies a strange destiny, seemingly imposed upon the protagonist from outside and eluding his conscious understanding. What in the early work is a split between facade body and true self reappears in Kafka's mature work as a contradiction between consciousness and truth.

Kafka's punitive fantasies · leaving "The Penal Colony" out of account for the present · are related to Raban's wish-dream in the following manner: The facade tries to make itself independent of the true self by seeking to repress it, but punishment acts as a recall to the self: having tried to emancipate itself, the facade is arrested, battered, and dissolved. Thus, what in Raban's wish-dream is an open horizontal coexistence of two halves now becomes a vertical division of two layers; a visible surface layer stands on top of a deeper, submerged layer that the surface tries to "cover up." And along with the element of repression, time is introduced into this split as a structural element. The protagonist's true self · essentially his childhood self · lies submerged but erupts one day in a strange guise, arrests him in his course of self-emancipation, involves him ever more deeply and catastrophically in his unacknowledged truth, and destroys him.

Arrest is central fact and symbol in The Trial, Kafka's longest and most ambitious tale of punishment. The German word for "arrest" (Verhaftung) carries the additional meaning of entanglement and fatal attachment, and in this basic meaning Verhaftung is the theme of all the punitive fantasies. The protagonist's condition of attachment to his childhood self has been repressed and put out of mind but never truly overcome. The act or happening of his being arrested (literally, stopped in his advance) by a catastrophic event actualizes the invisible condition of entanglement that had persisted in him all along. Estranged from his conscious intention, however, his true condition, when it does erupt, manifests itself in an unrecognizable disguise.

The turning point and "breakthrough" to his mature form, which Kafka considered "The Judgment" to be, lie in two factors: the introduction of the father figure as the authoritative and effective voice of truth; and the consistent shift of perspective to the facade layer of the split. Kafka's juvenilia is uncertain about perspective and is therefore hampered by a subjectivism unable to push through to an effective objectification of the themes and problems he sought to express. For example, in Raban's wish-dream the authentic consciousness of the story looks upon the facade, and what the reader obtains is an unformed reverie. The revolution of "The Judgment" consists in the reversal of this perspective. Kafka made the facade the consciousness of the story, whereby he achieved the powerful alienation effect that we associate with his art. He was able to present consciousness estranged from itself in a way that involves the reader directly, from within the narration, instead of letting him look in from outside. Because of the thematic similarity, a comparison of Raban's wish-dream of transforming himself into a giant bug with Gregor Samsa's "involuntary" metamorphosis in the story of that name, written five years later, will highlight the difference between the juvenilia and Kafka's "breakthrough" to the first phase of his mature art.

In both stories the transformed self is the true self. However, whereas Raban's transformation occurs only in his dream, Samsa's transformation emerges from his night dreams and becomes reality. The text clearly refers to the subconscious origin of the metamorphosis by explicitly mentioning that Gregor finds himself changed into vermin upon awakening from "restless dreams." In the earlier story the transformation expresses what Raban wants to be; in the mature version truth is not what the self wants to be, but what it is. Also, in the perspective of the early version truth and consciousness are identical; in the mature version they are not. Furthermore, while both versions agree on the retrograde and inhuman nature of the true self, they differ as to the presentation of the facade. Whereas Raban's facade is a surrogate body, Samsa's facade is an evasive mind. It is consciousness finding itself imprisoned in a truth it cannot face. In the mature work the split between facade and true self is a discrepancy between a devious human mind and a non-human body.

Gregor pretends to himself, and tries to pretend to others, that his metamorphosis is a temporary inconvenience. At the same time he feels a vague uneasiness and sense of guilt for having reneged on his obligations toward his family. His stream of memories reveals that prior to his metamorphosis Gregor had indeed thought of giving up his distasteful job. However, for the sake of his family, who depended upon his income, he had to inhibit this wish and paid it no further attention. Viewed with this sequence in mind Gregor's metamorphosis appears and functions as the oblique fulfillment of a wish that had to be repressed. However, Gregor emphatically wards off such suspicions, claiming that he is "still around" and does not intend to abandon his responsibility. This is the manifest content of the story, which is identical with the protagonist's perspective. The reader tends to accept this content at face value, since he sees all happenings of the story through the protagonist's perspective and tends also to make that perspective his own.

However, Gregor's avowal to continue as his family's provider offers a glaring contradiction to his condition. The thought does indeed occur to Gregor that his situation must rule out his professed intention, and he allows himself the fleeting wish to be left in peace by his family. This wish accords perfectly with his new bodily state and resurrects his previously inhibited thought of abandoning his duties. At this point Gregor's physical change can be seen as a fulfillment of his wish for seclusion and irresponsibility; it is the abandonment of his family that he has indignantly denied in thought. When Gregor wishes to be left in peace his consciousness and condition meet harmoniously. They meet, however, only for a moment. Immediately thereafter Gregor's false consciousness · that is, thought inconsistent with condition · "covers up' and once more takes over the manifest content of the story.

In the punitive fantasies the repressed part of the self is identical with its childlike component. In a time now long past the protagonist enjoyed a harmonious relationship with his origins, his parents and family, and the loss of this harmonious past plays a very important part in bringing about the vengeance and punishment he suffers. This is most obvious in "The Judgment," least so in The Trial. Yet even in The Trial the hero's attachment to his family functions importantly in his punishment. At one point in the novel Josef K. feels that only the pressures of his family have so desperately involved him in his strange trial. Josef K.'s mother in particular has a vital function in the structure of the novel. On his birthdays Josef K. had been in the habit of visiting his mother, whom he had left behind in the country. Being preoccupied with his strenuous career at the bank he had become estranged from her and had given up his visits. On the third birthday after he had stopped seeing her, the mysterious court visits him to arrest him for an unspecified guilt. His estrangement from his family · indicated also by his annoyance at his uncle, whom he calls "a revenant from the country," and by his neglect of his cousin · vaguely troubles him. However, like all protagonists of the punitive fantasies, Josef K. easily represses whatever makes him feel uneasy and pays little conscious attention to it.

In all his works Kafka equates truth or objective reality with the family, first in its basic meaning and later in a more and more extended meaning, in which family becomes identical with society, the stream of the generations, or the totality of living things · "the entire community of men and animals," as he once termed this total community from which he felt he had defected. It is against this family that he contrasts the self of his protagonists. The representative or spokesman of the family is the father figure.

A close study of the attributes of all representatives of authority in Kafka's entire opus, no matter how universalized and abstract, clearly reveals that these derive from the attributes of the fathers in "The Judgment" and The Metamorphosis. From "The Judgment" to Kafka's last work, "Josephine," this father figure possesses a power that, however unseen, mysterious, and generalized it becomes, retains a fundamental effectiveness that plays havoc with the assumptions, opinions, and claims of Kafka's protagonist. It is the father figure who proves the hero's consciousness to be illusion.

In Georg Bendemann and Gregor Samsa, heroes of the first two punitive fantasies, Kafka created characters who try to rival and succeed their fathers, fail in the attempt, and are horribly punished for it. Indeed, in The Metamorphosis Kafka places his protagonist in a condition in which he literally becomes incomparable to his father by ceasing to belong to the same species. The father is allied with the submerged pole of his son's divided self. He enforces those tendencies in his son that crave for regression to a childlike existence, one that finds its radical objectification in Gregor's vermin condition. This form of existence combines self-elimination as a possible rival and threat to the father with self-indulgence in a narcissistic freedom.

The composition of the story makes clear this alliance between the protagonist's father and the son's subconscious self. Each of the story's three parts shows an attempt on Gregor's part to break out into the world and reassert himself as a responsible adult human being. Each part ends with his being rebuffed and chased back into his prison room. It is Gregor's father who, as spokesman of the family, administers the first of these rebuffs. Thereby he enforces Gregor's own tendency toward withdrawal and seclusion, which Gregor had expressed by locking himself in his room and emerging from his dreams as a creature unable to communicate. The father accommodates Gregor's unacknowledged wish for isolation and irresponsibility. In "The Judgment" Georg Bendemann's father explicitly calls himself "the representative" of Georg's estranged childhood friend, who exerts upon Georg an effect analogous to the force that erupts in Gregor's metamorphosis.

"The Judgment" shows the son literally "covering up" his apparently senile father after having put him to bed like a child. On the manifest level he acts from filial solicitude, but on the latent level, which Georg's later reactions show to be the true one, he seeks to bury his father and establish his own position as new head of the household. Georg thinks of himself as a good and dutiful son, and seeing him through his perspective we are inclined to agree with him. Actually, however, by his deeds he has neglected his father, has allowed him to live in the gloomy back room of the apartment while he himself occupied the sunny front (literally the facade), and has not set foot in his father's room for a very long time. By comparing Georg's explicit thoughts with his behavior, the reader is able to get another perspective on Georg. Georg thinks he has taken his father's place in the family business and prides himself on having greatly improved and reformed it. With his impending marriage Georg consciously plans to move his father to his new apartment and there, reversing the role of child and parent, "take care of him." But Georg is only deceiving himself. He has not succeeded in keeping his father "covered." His father shouts, "No!" and throws off his covers, leaps up in bed, and reveals himself in his true stature as the giant and supreme judge in the heart of his son.

Truth is revealed to be the opposite of Georg's imaginings. His father is not senile, but is "still a giant" whose fingertips reach the ceiling, and Georg's fiancée, whom he had thought to be so important in his life, matters so little to Georg that she no longer enters his mind. What counts in his soul is not the girl he wanted to marry but the friend he thought he had long outgrown and whom he had patronized. This friend now grips and "touches his imagination as never before." Kafka, in his own analysis of "The Judgment," called the friend the only common bond between father and son. Important is not the question of the friend's existence as an independent character, but his function in Georg's relationship to his father. The friend represents an alternative way of life that, in the distant past, had been a possibility which Georg had rejected. He could have renounced his ambition to succeed his father. He could have refrained from trying to take over his father's business and found a household of his own in which the father would be reduced to a dependent role. Like the friend, he could have fled the scene of his father's activity, remained unmarried, and stayed clear of economic success. Given a father intent on maintaining his authority, Georg would then have been "a son after [his father's] heart." This alternative, which his friend embodies and which Georg has eschewed, is his true self. This can be seen in the "uncovering" scene, when the father proceeds to demolish Georg's facade. Even though his father threatens to rob him of fiancée, business, status, and power, the only loss that now matters to Georg is the loss of his friend. From the moment Georg feels that he has lost him, he is lost.

The father's accusations prove the entire content of Georg's consciousness to be error and self-deception. They shatter his false consciousness, his wrong self-estimation, and through this shattered facade they reach to and lay bare Georg's hidden, childlike self. By rushing to obey his father's death sentence and execute himself, he becomes again the loving, innocent, and obedient child he had once been. The inner division is gone; the facade is removed; harmony has returned. As Georg climbs over the railing to leap from the bridge his consciousness of loving his parents is his whole truth. It is the truth that his father demands of Georg at the beginning of his cross-examination, and Georg is unable to give it except by destroying the untruth that his life has become.

The guilt of the protagonists of "The Judgment" and The Metamorphosis is clearly established. In "The Judgment" Georg's guilt is his defection from father and childhood friend, and the "devilish" lechery with which he has utilized a woman as his instrument for the repression of his friend and childhood self. His father uses a drastic metaphor, accusing Georg of trying to subjugate him so that he could "set [his] bottom on him." Georg's guilt above all lies in the unconscious hypocrisy with which he has attempted to displace his father while thinking himself a good son. Whether or not we accept the father's harsh judgment as justified is less relevant than the hero's active assent to his death sentence.

Less explicit than "The Judgment" on the verbal level, but equally lucid in poetic terms, The Metamorphosis supplies articulated reasons for accusing and condemning its protagonist. Gregor is clearly punished for trying to break out of the "otherness" that he has

made his fate. Gregor's sister articulates what amounts to the family's death sentence over him. Her argument is clear and convinces Gregor. She says that if the insect were truly her brother, it would have left them of its own accord. His wish for isolation and absolute withdrawal would then have spared the family his presence. If he had acted according to the inner law that found its visible fulfillment in his ghastly change, he would have continued to withdraw not only from the human form but also from the human community represented by his family. If Gregor had followed his true self · withdrawal and isolation · he would have gone into ultimate loneliness, and death would have been self-fulfillment. Then his family could have honored his memory. The disgusting monster and parasite is a compromise between his true self (we remember that Raban appeared as a "beautiful" bug) and the facade self that prevents him from letting go of his family. This creature refuses to die. It makes forays outside Gregor's room; it has erotic daydreams about his sister; it seeks to cleave to and exploit his family, thereby threatening to ruin it. It is this parasitic self that Gregor's sister exposes, judges, and condemns, with uncompromising cruelty.

The sister's judgment in The Metamorphosis corresponds to the father's in the earlier story. More clearly than there, however, it is the judgment of the family and of life itself that speaks through her. Gregor had withdrawn from the possibility of procreating even before his metamorphosis; he had remained a bachelor who loved to lock himself in when he dreamed. Therefore the hope for a renewal of the family in the next generation comes to rest entirely with his sister. As the scene after Gregor's death shows, it is through her that the family will continue and the stream of the generations will flow. It is the authority of life itself that judges Gregor through his sister's cruelty, This clear judgment speaks to him with the voice of his own inner truth. As Georg rushes to execute his father's verdict on himself, Gregor is convinced, more firmly even than his sister, that he must go. Both stories end with statements of inner assent to death. Both protagonists become true sons and truly themselves by dying.

In "The Penal Colony" Kafka systematized the underlying idea of the two earlier punitive fantasies. In a six-hour process of physical torture and laceration, the penal machine produces the assent to death that the judgment of their families produced in Kafka's earlier protagonists. In this later work the father's judgment and the family consensus have evolved into the law of a penal system. The Old Commander, who invented and operated the penal machine, constitutes the obvious link between the concrete fathers of "The Judgment" and The Metamorphosis and the abstract law and collective, anonymous authorities of The Trial and all subsequent works. The colony is the first step in Kafka's extension of the empirical family to the societies, nations, and species with which his later work is concerned.

The Old Commander's verdict is inscribed into the flesh of the condemned prisoner, who deciphers the sentence through his wounds. As he recognizes the text of the law on his body, he experiences a union with the paternal will more intimate · because physical · than Georg Bendemann's merely symbolic reunion with his father's will in suicide. The penal machine does not restore but rather creates its victim's true self. Before his arrest the prisoner was not much more than an animal. He lived in an unconscious state, ignorant of the law he had violated. His dawning recognition of the sentence, as the machine inscribes it into his skin, creates a comprehensible continuity between act and atonement. In connecting his pain with the law he transgressed, he acquires a destiny that is uniquely his, and at the same time he acquires an inward relationship to a superior will.

The continuity of self produced on the penal rack parallels Kierkegaard's idea of the self. (At the time of the punitive fantasies Kafka called Kierkegaard a "friend." He first became acquainted with Kierkegaard through an anthology entitled Book of the Judge [1905], a title spelling out a significant affinity between the two authors.) The authentic self in Kierkegaard is identical not with the organism but rather with a moral continuity that we create by our choices and actions and through a special and unique personal relationship to the absolute. In Kafka's penal system suffering and dying give birth to the same kind of existential self.

Their dying not only restores Kafka's earlier protagonists to their true selves but also reconciles them to their families, and through their families to the world. The sacrifice of Georg's false self re-establishes the harmony of life not in actuality but in principle. Georg's drowning in the river symbolically reunites him with "the stream of life" that proceeds above him in "the unending traffic" over the bridge from which he has leaped to his death. When at the beginning of the story he had looked out upon the bridge, a quiet emptiness, a kind of frozen suspension of life prevailed. His dying re-animates life; although only a short time could have passed since the beginning of the action, a symbolic resurrection has taken place. The German word for "traffic" (Verkehr) also signifies "intercourse," alluding to the sexual and procreative aspect of the "unending" stream released by Georg's death. A remark made by Kafka to Brod corroborates this allusion: as he wrote the word Verkehr, which concluded the story, Kafka, according to Brod, had thought of an ejaculation.

The end of The Metamorphosis is more directly explicit about the sexual and procreative liberation achieved by the hero's voluntary death. Gregor's demise frees his family from the guilt and shame that had become embodied in him; it allows thoughts of the future, of youth, of marriage, and of a new bloom bursting forth. Fittingly, the day of his death is the first day of real spring. Gregor Samsa dies as a scapegoat for humanity as represented by his family, and in a letter to Brod Kafka designated the writer a scapegoat for mankind: by taking mankind's sins upon himself and suffering for them, the writer allows mankind to sin in freedom.

The idea of the scapegoat led Kafka to find analogous insights in the anthropological research of his time and in the proto-totalitarian tendencies then becoming noticeable in Central Europe. Both the anthropological and political implications of Kafka's work are most obvious in "The Penal Colony." In the officer's report of the penal colony's past, the victim's torture and gradual transfiguration through dying figure as the ritual of a communal cult. Undoubtedly with anthropological discoveries in mind, Kafka presented the human scapegoat sacrificed for the benefit and edification of the community. On the other hand, the "brainwashing" of the subject, who is made to assent joyously to his own destruction, creates obvious parallels to the political and cultural irrationality of World War I ("The Penal Colony" was written two months after its outbreak) and to the nascent totalitarianism that transformed most of Europe into a huge penal colony less than three decades after Kafka had called his story as embarrassing "as our whole age."

At the same time "The Penal Colony" illumines the autobiographical character of Kafka's whole work. No matter how interesting and fruitful the anthropological, sociological, and philosophical implications of Kafka's writings are · and they are considerable · the intimate autobiographical meaning must never be lost sight of, since it gives rise to and shapes all the rest. Kafka's greatness lay in his extraordinary ability to picture the universal in the intimate and the intimate in the universal; a multiplicity of referred meanings

constitute the powerful allusiveness and suggestiveness of every image he created. The communal festiveness that surrounds the dying prisoner in the penal colony provides the external correlative to the inner illumination he experiences, and it also is an extension of the obviously personal conclusions of Georg Bendemann's and Gregor Samsa's lives. Georg Bendemann dies under a busy thoroughfare, in the center of city life, as it were. After his demise Gregor Samsa becomes, for a while, the center of his family's hushed attention, a scenic arrangement that anticipates the communal cult of death in "The Penal Colony" two years later.

In addition to systematizing in an image the whole first phase of Kafka's mature writing, the penal apparatus is also a metaphorical description of this writing itself. The machine transfigures and kills the prisoner literally by writing, by imprinting a sentence on the prisoner's flesh. The German word for "writing" (Schrift) that Kafka uses has the meaning of both "script" and "scripture," enabling Kafka to allude simultaneously to the literary and religious significance of his penal apparatus. Above all, the machine repeats Kafka's own activity as a writer of punitive fantasies who grants his characters illuminating insights as he kills them. In a diary entry of December 1914, Kafka indicates that the penal apparatus is like a pictorialized poetics of his writing. He confesses there that he savors his own dying in advance through the vicarious dying of his characters. Here Kafka attributes to himself the same attitude he depicts in the officer of the penal colony.

The officer exults in the executions he arranges and supervises; he envies the beatitude his victims seem to attain and craves to take their place. However, when he finally does so, the venerated machine merely "murders" him unceremoniously and instantly; he exhibits no sign of inner illumination. The whole penal system is reduced to the officer's subjective assertion about the effects of his machine · an effect that his own execution contradicts. The objective truth is withheld.

This withholding of the truth connects "The Penal Colony" with The Trial, which was begun a little over two months before the story and was left a fragment. Both Josef K., who in The Trial is accused and executed without specified charge, and the officer in "The Penal Colony," who executes himself to prove his claim for the penal machine and to savor the happiness he expects it to give, die meaningless deaths. Punishment there is; but it no longer shows the truth. Thereby the two punitive fantasies written in 1914 are profoundly different from those written two years before "The Judgment" and The Metamorphosis. This difference marks a turning point in Kafka's entire development. In "The Penal Colony" events are seen from the perspective of a detached observer, a traveler and explorer, who has included the penal colony in his study of penal systems. He listens to the officer with great interest but refuses to promote his cause. He will not lend his support to the officer's plea for the upkeep of the punitive machine, which has become neglected under the new commander of the colony. Its subsequent collapse comes as the objective correlative of his rejection.

The perspective of The Trial is still that of a facade personality. As in the earlier punitive fantasies, there is still a repressed past embodied in the protagonist's family, from which he has become estranged. However, the family is no longer central. An abstract authority, the Court, takes over the function of the accusing families of the earlier protagonists. It is no longer the intimate drama of father and son that shapes the narrative, but rather a conflict of principles.

Unlike the earlier punitive fantasies, The Trial does not specify the guilt for which its protagonist is arrested. The court that judges Josef K. withholds the clear message given by father and family in the earlier works. Indeed, the confrontation of the self with its judge fails to take place. Punishment and annihilation remain, but understanding and atonement are gone. The physical circumstances of Josef K.'s death reflect its subjective meaninglessness. Whereas Georg Bendemann dies in broad daylight, in the center of life, and whereas Gregor Samsa departs with the first gleam of dawn, Josef K. is knifed in darkness and silence on the deserted periphery of his city. The external darkness surrounding him has its complement in the darkness within him. He does not understand his death. As he fails to see his judges, so he fails to recognize himself. He does not discern within himself a conviction certain and firm enough to be his truth. His inner self remains as unfathomable as the Court.

The Trial is the only truly opaque work among the major writings of Kafka. Its opaqueness results from two factors: the total ambiguity of the Court and the total ambivalence of its hero. To understand the ambiguity of The Trial, a look at the fundamental ambivalence of Kafka's religious attitude will be helpful.

If we understand that the Absolute had two distinct faces for Kafka, we shall do greater justice to his complexity than if we dismiss it as pure paradox. We might define these two aspects of the Absolute by attaching to one the name of Plato , a philosopher Kafka held in high esteem, and to the other the name of Jehovah. In its Platonic aspect, the Absolute is pure spirit, and the physical world is illusion; engagement in the latter is fatally wrong. In its other face · the face of Jehovah, in which the features of Kafka's robust and vital father lurked · the Absolute is energy and incessant will, a stream of generations and unending continuity of life. From this ambiguity within the Absolute it follows that the self would become guilty in two opposite directions. It would become guilty before the Platonic aspect by getting "engaged," not merely sexually but economically and socially as well · by "wanting to snatch at the world with twenty hands," as Josef K. says of himself. On the other hand, the self would become guilty before the creator and progenitor of life by refusing "engagement" in the fullest sense of the word, by keeping itself pure in sterile virginity In one case the self is the engaged and striving facade; in the other the celibate true self sins and must be sacrificed as a result of its engagement. The fate of Georg Bendemann shows the former, and the fate of the misogynist officer of "The Penal Colony" or of the chaste sister of Barnabas in The Castle shows the latter guilt. The Trial, however, begun under the immediate shattering impact of Kafka's first break with his fiancée Felice Bauer, illumines the double and consequently total guilt of the self. In Josef K.'s Court the two faces of the Absolute combine to form the enigmatic mask of total ambiguity.

There is a further reason for the novel's ambiguity · Josef K.'s inability to decide between the forces battling within him. In Josef K. an unacknowledged homo religiosus clashes with the consciousness of economic man. His official impulse toward self-preservation and self-assertion resists the upsurge of his unofficial religious impulse, the craving for self-surrender and self-transcendence that is objectified by his arrest. It is of highest significance that the Court comes closest to him and appeals to him most directly through a priest. The protagonists of "The Judgment" and The Metamorphosis are arrested by the submerged childhood self within them, but in Josef K. the submerged childhood of man, rather than that of the individual, arrests the apparently emancipated facade of modern rationality.

By naming his protagonist Josef and adding the name Josef to the initial K. of his own name, Kafka may have been hinting at this vertical split in himself and in modern man. The "Josefstown" district of Prague, on the edge of which Kafka had been born, had in his childhood still been the site of the ghetto and the center of criminal life. As he once remarked to Gustav Janouch, a young acquaintance who subsequently published Kafka's conversations with him, the new "Josefstown," with its broad streets and bright, airy buildings, presented only a "cover-up" surface beneath which the dark, filthy, and frightful alleys of the ghetto lay merely submerged.

The careful reader becomes aware of this division within Josef K. Verbally, he seems to fight for reason, for man, as defined by the rational legal system of the modern state, and he denies the possibility of any extra-legal guilt. By his acts, however, he seeks out and in the end submits to the Court. In his mind he never comes to a clear decision for either one or the other. Consequently, the inner truth can never come to light. His conflicting pulls toward surrender, which would give meaning to his death, and toward resistance, which denies meaning to it, tear the whole concept of a true self apart. To be sure, the pull toward surrender and death does prove stronger, for K. lets himself be executed. He even awaits his executioners and leads them toward his place of execution. To the last, however, his consciousness withholds definitive assent.

The total ambivalence of the hero becomes the total ambiguity of the story. To appreciate the full extent of this ambiguity we merely have to compare the last thoughts of Georg Bendemann and Gregor Samsa with the last thoughts of Josef K. The last thoughts of Georg and Gregor express not only assent to their deaths but also affirmation of and affection for life as embodied in their families. The last thought of The Trial, however, is "shame." Shame, it seems, will survive the protagonist. This final noun of the novel not only emphasizes a desperate negativity in contrast to the tragic affirmation with which the earlier punitive fantasies ended; it also expresses a total ambiguity that makes it impossible to decipher the final meaning of The Trial. For it is entirely uncertain to what the noun "shame" refers. It could refer to Josef K.'s failure to resist his execution or to the senselessness of his murder and the shamefulness of a court that orders such injustices. In either case "shame" would express Josef K.'s mental defiance coexisting with his physical submission. However, it could also refer to his refusal to kill himself or to understand what the Court expects of him. Then the novel would have the opposite meaning: Josef K. would be justly punished for his stubborn rejection of the possibility of his guilt. Both interpretations are equally justified, even though they are contrary to each other. Therefore the unrelieved ambiguity of The Trial dissolves not only the idea of a true self but also the possibility of discerning a truth altogether.

Kafka excised passages that would have shown Josef K.'s craving to be united with the Court or his longing to be transfigured in death · passages that would have made him resemble the officer of "The Penal Colony." Kafka crossed out a reverie of Josef K.'s that would have opposed the meaning of his death in the novel's final scene. In the excised passage Josef K. succeeds in entering the courthouse whence the warrant of his arrest had been issued, and he experiences a transfiguration, symbolized by a new garment of perfect fit. By eliminating this radiant vision from the novel, that is, from the consciousness of his protagonist, Kafka himself enacted the process of repression in which his hero is engaged. Josef K.'s tendencies toward surrender and suicide form the powerful subterranean drift that counteracts his ever-conscious intention and action and pulls him ever further along toward destruction. His impulses drive him to look for the Court and provoke its verdict. These persist subliminally in fleeting thoughts, gestures, and unreasoned acts, to which Josef K. seems to be compelled. Except for the initial arrest it is always Josef K. who either actively seeks or welcomes contact with the Court. Josef K.'s longing for contact with the Court emerges perhaps most clearly in the Titorelli chapter. Josef K. rejects the painter's suggestions for compromise solutions and insists on absolute acquittal by the highest judges. His insistence amounts to a full recognition of their supreme authority over him and, beyond that, implies his wish to be accepted and approved by them. This is the limit to which Kafka allows K.'s wish for acceptance by the Court to become conscious.

In his preceding works Kafka revealed the strategies of repression his heroes engaged in and let the truth be known. In writing The Trial, however, he imitated his character and deleted anything that might reveal him directly and unambiguously. Thus, in the process of creating his protagonist Kafka himself performed the very activity that constitutes his fictional character. He excised and refused to show the "whole truth," expunging dreams that would have betrayed Josef K. to himself and to the reader. In The Castle, where he deals with a hero much more conscious of his purposes, Kafka leaves K.'s dream in the text and also allows him a revealing childhood memory.

The reasons for Kafka's excisions in The Trial are twofold. First, they show that he desired to make the division between the conscious surface and the subterranean level in his protagonist's character so complete that Josef K. becomes utterly unaware of one level of himself and the reader becomes unaware of what impels Josef K. toward his destruction. Josef K. thus becomes the precise image of the modern Central European bourgeois who was later caught unaware by the eruption of destructive irrationality around him; yet the work also makes clear that the tendencies that made this possible were to be found within the bourgeois himself. In this respect Kafka's own art did what he ascribed to the art of Pablo Picasso: it portrayed the distortions of reality that had not yet entered consciousness. Second, at the stage when he wrote The Trial Kafka could no longer bring himself to condone his hero's conscious assent to the judgment that would destroy him.

In one part of the novel, however, Kafka openly reveals the other side of Josef K., which the author elsewhere excludes. This is the parable "Before the Law," which the prison chaplain tells to Josef K. in the cathedral chapter. Here the radiance that streams from the Court in Josef K.'s repressed dream is allowed to shine forth openly, and the man from the country, who seeks entrance into the Law, is allowed to express freely what Josef K., who thinks of himself as a modern, rational man, can never bring himself to acknowledge: that the desire for union with the mystic Law is the fundamental concern of his existence. This parable, or "legend," as Kafka himself called it, presents the split within Josef K. as an explicit coexistence between desire and fear. The man from the country comes to join the Law but is prevented by the doorkeeper, who tells him that he cannot let him enter now. He adds that the man might try to go in, but he frightens him with the prospect of more dreadful doorkeepers farther along.

The Law thus presents an ambiguity that the man had not expected. He had thought of the Law only as highly desirable and enticing, but now it also shows a threatening face. It seems that this ambiguity of the Law, its having two faces, offers the key to the parable · but only if we restrict ourselves to the perspective of the man. However, as we shall see, here, in the second phase of Kafka's maturity, the perspective of the protagonist is not the perspective of the narrative, for a narrator has been placed between reader and

protagonist, that is, the man from the country. If we see the man from the perspective of the narrator, we find that the ambiguity of the Law is a tool and catalyst for making the man's ambivalence his destiny, since the ambiguity introduced by the doorkeeper merely brings out an ambivalence within the man: his desire for the Law is now complicated by his fear of it, and desire and fear begin to exist side by side within him.

What connects him with Josef K. and makes his destiny a perfect illustration of the novel is his inability to opt for either side of his ambivalence. He decides to yield to his fear without giving up his desire: he defers his entrance and begins to wait before the door to the Law, thus choosing a life of ambivalence. The consequences of his choice are degradation and lifelong frustration: he is literally lowered by having to spend his life crouching on a footstool at the feet of the forbidding sentry; he is morally degraded by resorting to bribery and cajolery; and he is intellectually reduced to begging the fleas in the doorkeeper's collar to intercede for him. In the end he dies without having attained his goal.

The relationship of the parable to the novel illustrates very well the different narrative principle of the second phase of Kafka's maturity. The rest of the novel was composed before the parable and indeed before "The Penal Colony," and both of these later parabolic stories help Kafka to clarify the problem of his novel. What the parable "Before the Law" accomplishes is to illuminate the basic problem of Josef K., his paralyzing ambivalence. In the narrative form of Kafka's punitive fantasies, which employ the perspective of the facade, this ambivalence could not be clarified since it could not enter the conscious level of the narrative; Josef K.'s proud rationality, his facade, could not permit his longing for the Court to show itself openly at any time. In the parable, however, there is no facade, and the two conflicting forces within man are clearly presented as existing side by side. In place of the vertical division of layers in the punitive fantasies, here there is again the horizontal split that we found in Raban's wish-dream, but without the separation of facade and true self.

The man from the country is Josef K.'s repressed truth exposed to view. This emerges clearly from the fact that when he hears the parable Josef K. spontaneously identifies with the man from the country. Josef K. shares with the subject of the parable an ambivalence of desire and fear. Unlike Josef K., however, the man from the country does not repress his desire; he merely defers it. In contrast to the opaqueness of Josef K.'s fate the parable, therefore, makes transparent the fatal incompatibility of man's desire for union with the Absolute and his fear for life and safety, by showing us the man's refusal to risk entrance not authorized by the doorkeeper. By its transparency the parabolic form, which characterizes Kafka's second phase, goes even further in elucidating the problem it presents. The parable "Before the Law" implies quite clearly that the man from the country could find a "way out" of his impasse by abandoning his fear and entering the gate regardless of the risks awaiting him; if he were to choose to go forward despite the injunctions of the doorkeeper, he would attain true self-fulfillment. However, the man in the parable could also do the opposite: he could yield to his fear, abandon his desire, leave the gate, and turn his back forever on doorkeeper and Law. Such a retreat would amount to an abandonment of self, insofar as his self is identical with its dominant concern. By the same token it would ensure not only his physical survival · that he ensures anyway by choosing not to go into the Law · but also a survival in dignity and independence. He would gain a life emancipated from obsession.

The choice open to the man in the priest's parable defines the problem around which Kafka's subsequent work revolves. In his second and third phases Kafka no longer describes the catastrophic eruption of a hidden truth and the resultant destruction of his protagonist; instead he presents a dilemma attendant upon his protagonist's attempt to realize his true self, a realization that would at the same time be a union with or recognition by a higher power, authority, or collective. In Kafka's late work the self of his protagonist is undivided and is openly dedicated to its craving or quest; the conflict is not between a facade and a true self but rather between the true self and an external power that disavows the self's claims or frustrates its expectations. Like the Law in the "legend," the external power in Kafka's later works both beckons and forbids entrance to itself. Between the protagonist's imaginings and the behavior of external reality there exists a discrepancy that is the subject of the self's reflections and comments. The protagonist hopes that somehow the contradiction will be resolved. He hopes that reality will conform eventually to his expectations, and this hope constitutes his true self and is the mission to and for which he subordinates and utilizes everything. If he were to give up his hope he would have to renounce his self and nature, as the ape does in "A Report to an Academy." All the characters of Kafka's later work cling to their missions yet are unable to change reality according to their desire. They spend their lives waiting in front of closed entrances, locked out from the goal they crave. Indeed, the title of Kafka's last and greatest novel, Das Schloss (The Castle), a marvelous elaboration and development of the theme of "Before the Law," carries in German the subsidiary meaning of "lock." For K. the Castle is literally a lock that locks him out. Unable to gain the entrance and likewise unable to resign and turn their backs on it, the protagonists of Kafka's late works stay doggedly loyal and true to their quest. But their loyalty or stubbornness immobilizes them. They waste their lives in visible or invisible cages, prisons of their own devising.

The cage, castle, lock, and underground fortress or burrow are dominant images of Kafka's last works. At the end of his second phase he presents the image of the cage in "A Report," which concludes the volume of parables that "Before the Law" initiated chronologically; and the cage appears again in "A Hunger Artist," title story of his last volume of narratives. The two stories are contrasting approaches to the theme of the cage. In the first, the captured ape who cannot stand life in the cage finds a "way out" by ceasing to be what he is, by becoming something else. The hunger artist takes the opposite course: he voluntarily enters and stays in the cage in order to express his true self.

The hunger artist does not achieve fulfillment of his wish to be recognized as the incomparable artist he is; the public first misunderstands, then neglects and ignores him. Looking at the narrative through the protagonist's perspective, we are inclined to accuse the public of callousness, vulgarity, and cruelty. Similarly, seeing through Josef K.'s perspective in The Trial, we are inclined to blame the Court for his fate. However, Kafka underwent a great change in the direction of analytic clarity and explicitness in the near-decade after he wrote The Trial. If we understand the story "A Hunger Artist" as an indictment of the public, Kafka's text convicts us of being wrong, for at the end of his life the hunger artist explicitly informs the world that he deserves no admiration. He had been a sport of nature, a freak, unable to find food that satisfied him and therefore incapable of doing anything else but starving. If he had found food to his taste he would have eaten like everyone else and led a completely undistinguished life.

Like the punitive fantasies "A Hunger Artist" presents a discrepancy between the official perspective of the story · given by the

protagonist · and the truth. The perspective of the punitive fantasies, which presents the protagonists as victims of external injustice and outrageous fortune, tends to prevent us from noting the submerged inner force that drives them to their catastrophes. Similarly, the hunger artist's perspective makes us sympathize with him as the victim of the public and encourages us to overlook the crucial fact that his exhibition is a fraud. He makes us accept as an admirable achievement something that, as he himself admits in the end, is nothing more than a necessity and, indeed, a debility, for which pity rather than admiration might be the proper response. Knowing his natural defect the hunger artist should not have expected admiring recognition; but he made us · the readers · believe that this was his due.

In Kafka's final phase we return to the deviousness and deceptiveness of a perspective that distorts and conceals the truth of the story and is defeated by it. Again the protagonist's claim and grievance against the world are unjustified; they are deceit. His frustration and final refutation or capitulation reveal the truth, and as in the punitive fantasies truth conquers and shines forth in the dying of the self: dying, the hunger artist unmasks the fraud his life had been. Like Gregor Samsa, with whom many analogies connect him, he finds in death the contentment that life had consistently denied him.

Yet there is an essential difference between the punitive fantasies and Kafka's final phase. The punitive fantasies unveil a contrast between the facade and the truth of the self whereas the late works oppose a unified self to truth. The hunger artist's self is not divided between facade and true self. On the contrary, his mission, symbolized by the cage in which it takes place, is the uncompromising and absolute expression of his true and only self. His starving is the full revelation of his inner truth. However, this inner truth is in itself a deception, and herein lies the paradox of Kafka's last phase, in which the self is a pretense and presumption.

The hunger artist's complete "otherness," his inability to eat and therefore to be like other men, would in itself not be a fraud but rather a mere eccentricity that would exclude him from humanity. The hunger artist, however, refuses to stay outside humanity. This refusal drives him to proclaim as art the defect with which he was born and to exhibit this aberration for public acclaim. Art and fraud are inseparable in him: he is an artist only by virtue of committing his fraud; or, to put it differently, his decision to treat his natural want as though it were a skill makes him artist and fraud at the same time. It is this decision that makes him enter the cage. The cage exhibits both untruth and art, yet it also symbolizes absolute subjectivity and otherness. No one but he can fast indefinitely; no one resembles him. His isolated existence in the cage dooms any hope for true appreciation and understanding from the public beyond his bars, for he is on exhibit as a freak. His "art," or, more truly said, his nature, is unique · so subjective, so different from the interests and feelings of other men, that the hunger artist's monstrous spirituality cannot possibly be more than a short-lived sensation in the life of mankind.

Whereas the hunger artist makes his fraud explicit, the immense deception perpetrated by the Land Surveyor K. in The Castle is never stated explicitly, and K. has therefore fooled most readers, critics, and exegetes of the novel. K. claims to have been called to and appointed land surveyor by the castle that controls the village into which he has strayed one night. He makes us believe that the Castle authorities, by refusing to honor his claim, treat him unjustly and deprive him of what by right is his. He presses his claim with such urgency and consistency that the reader feels compelled to accept it at face value and to see in K. a victim of soul less bureaucracy or to construct elaborate schemes of interpretation based on the "injustice" done to K. Consequently The Castle has appeared in critical literature as a satire on bureaucracy, an adumbration of totalitarianism, and an allegory of social injustice or of the religious problem of man's insistence on justice and God's grace. All these interpretations are the result of the critics' being duped by K.'s colossal fraud. A close reading of the text reveals that K. has no legitimate claim on the Castle because he never was appointed land surveyor. This truth of the novel is revealed by inconsistencies in the plot and by a brief passage of K.'s inner monologue. These allow only one conclusion: K. was never called by the Castle.

K. has no document to prove his call, but he promises that his assistants will soon arrive with his apparatus. They never come. Instead K. is given two new "assistants" by the Castle. These assistants know nothing about land surveying and have no apparatus. K. has never seen them before. Thus the "proof" of K.'s appointment, which the promised arrival of his old assistants and apparatus was supposed to be, never materializes. The fact that K. accepts his new assistants without waiting for his old assistants or ever thinking of them indicates that in all likelihood they do not exist.

A telephone inquiry at the Castle produces the answer that nothing is known of K.'s appointment. Immediately thereafter, a call from the Castle reverses this first answer and confirms K.'s claim. K.'s mental reaction to this information unmasks him as an imposter. Instead of registering with simple satisfaction the news that the "misunderstanding" has been cleared up, K. considers the Castle's recognition of his claim "unpropitious." He takes it to be a "smiling acceptance" of his "challenge," designed to "cow him" by "lofty superiority." The term "challenge," used by K. in this context, shows that he does not expect to step into a promised position but that he has come with the purpose of fighting the Castle and forcing it to yield something to him, either the coveted office or something else. It is clear that he was never appointed land surveyor and was never called to the Castle. He is a stranger who, for reasons that we shall examine, "challenges" the Castle to submit to his unfounded claim. The Castle seems to "accept" his "challenge" and plays a game with him that forms the plot of the novel.

This close reading of the text alters the whole basis of interpretation of Kafka's last and greatest novel. It can no longer be maintained that the conflict between justice and injustice, no matter on what level, is its theme. Rather, its theme is K.'s attempt to make everyone, including the reader, believe that justice is the problem and that the injustice inflicted upon him is his motive in struggling with the Castle. Kafka has K. conduct his campaign so skillfully and emphatically that he persuades most readers to believe him, contrary to the textual evidence he himself provides. In his richest and most profound work Kafka depicts the victory of fiction over reality. The deception perpetrated by his character triumphs not over the other characters · for no one in the novel really believes K. · but over the reader.

Kafka achieves this amazing triumph of art by the masterful application of a narrative perspective that misleads the reader into mistaking the protagonist's view for the truth. However, while creating this victory of fiction, Kafka at the same time exposes its falseness through his protagonist's own oblique self-revelations. Furthermore, the fact that the hero's claim never attains true recognition in the novel shows its vanity. In a letter to Brod written in 1922, at the time of The Castle's composition, Kafka defined the

writer's essence as "vanity." Kafka's late work, especially his artist stories, "A Hunger Artist" and "Josephine," depicts vanity both as narcissism and as futility. It shows that the attempt of subjectivity to impose its terms upon external reality must always fail.

The Castle answers K.'s attack with an ironically exact retribution: it meets his unreal claim with an equally unreal appointment. Klamm's letter appoints K. as land surveyor, and he is henceforth addressed as such; but he obtains no land to survey and is never established in an appropriate office. The title given him by the Castle is as gratuitous and empty as his pretended call. The Castle gives him assistants who are irrelevant to his professed profession, for they are no more capable of assisting him in his land surveying than the instruments he claims he has but is unable to produce. These assistants also cause him to do to them what he claims the Castle has done to him: just as the Castle locks him out and will not admit him, so he locks out his assistants and refuses to let them come to him. K. himself displays the cruelty and injustice he ascribes to the Castle. Moreover, even as he takes his mistress away from Klamm, his own chief, so he loses her again to one of his assistants. In this late work judgment appears not as destruction but as ironic retribution.

The Castle counters K.'s maneuver by presenting a universe in which there is no certainty and nothing is what it seems to be. This is the necessary consequence of the fact that the protagonist, too, is not what he seems to be. That is, K.'s self is not a fact but a pretense. His is a desperate experiment, an attempt to impose his fiction upon the reality that confronts and excludes him. He needs this fiction to break into and become part of the reality that he faces.

In The Castle Kafka describes the fundamental situation of modern man, for whom neither the world nor his own self is given and certain. Like every man, K., in order to be, must be recognized and must be related as an individual to the whole of society; he must have a specific calling. In order to get his call, he must already be someone, an accredited and required expert. However, K. knows he has no call and is therefore nothing. He is a stranger, utterly unconnected and superfluous · locked out by the Schloss, here functioning according to the word's basic meaning of "lock." Since a human being cannot live permanently outside humanity, K. desperately needs to enter it, to become someone needed and recognized. In order to live he must "unlock" the lock with which humanity excludes him. As the dominant necessity of life and the essence of desirability, the Schloss presents to him its other meaning in the guise of the magically beckoning and unattainable castle. It is K.'s staggering and superhuman task to create the call he needs. He has to pretend that he already possesses what he has come to get · the necessary prerequisite for beginning an integrated and authentic existence. Therefore his battle with the Castle is not a whim but a desperate necessity. Precisely because he has no objectively valid claim for recognition, he must force the Castle to honor his subjective pretense · his fiction · as the truth. K. fights to become in truth what he pretends he is · the land surveyor called by the Castle.

K.'s quest is a metaphorical statement of the lifelong struggle that Kafka's entire writing sought to describe. (In this regard the title of his first work, "Beschreibung eines Kampfes" ["Description of a Struggle," 1936], is significant.) At the time he composed The Castle Kafka wrote to his woman friend and lover, Milena, that he had been given nothing, that he must create not only his present and his future but his past as well. His task is therefore infinitely more difficult than that of other men, for not only must he fight the battle for his future that everyone must wage, but while engaged in that battle, he must also be acquiring a past, a ground on which he can stand and that all others can take for granted as their birthright and inheritance.

Kafka related this peculiar predicament to the fate of the Westernized Jew in Europe, who, already uprooted and cut off from his ancestral traditions, is not yet permitted to enter fully and truly into the life of his hosts. Beyond this personal and ethnic meaning, however, Kafka presents in The Castle the task facing modern man in general. Unmoored from his spiritual and social anchorage, expelled from his once secure place in the cosmos, modern man, as the existentialists pointed out, must make his own identity and project his own existence instead of assuming it as given. Kafka's fragmentary novel depicts the tragic irony and ultimate impossibility of this enterprise.

Selected Bibliography

EDITIONS

INDIVIDUAL WORKS

Betrachtung, (Leipzig, 1913).

Der Heizer: Ein Fragment, (Leipzig, 1913).

Das Urteil: Eine Geschichte, (Leipzig, 1913).

Die Verwandlung, (Leipzig, 1915).

In der Strafkolonie, (Leipzig, 1919).

Ein Landarzt: Kleine Erazählungen, (Munich and Leipzig, 1919).

Ein Hungerkunstler: Vier Geschichten, (Berlin, 1924).

Der Prozess, edited by Max Brod (Berlin, 1925).

Das Schloss, edited by Max Brod (Munich, 1926).

Amerika, edited by Max Brod (Munich, 1927). This novel is also sometimes referred to as Der Verschollene, Kafka's original title for it.

Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer. edited by Max Brod (Berlin, 1931).

Beschreibung eines Kampfes: Novellen, Skizzen, Aphorismen aus dem Nachlass, edited by Max Brod (Prague, 1936).

Beschreibung eines Kampfes, edited by Ludwig Dietz (Frankfurt, 1969).

COLLECTED WORKS

Gesammelte Schriften, 6 vols. edited by Max Brod with Heinz Politzer (Prague, 1935-1937).

Gesammelte Schriften, 5 vols. edited by Max Brod (New York, 1946).

Gesammelte Werke, 11 vols. edited by Max Brod et al. (New York and Frankfurt, 1950-1974).

Schriften, Tagebucher, Briefe: Kritische Ausgabe, edited by Jurgen Born et al. (Frankfurt, 1982 · ).

TRANSLATIONS

Amerika, translated by Edwin Muir (New York, 1962).

The Castle, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir (New York, 1954).

The Complete Stories, edited by Nahum Glatzer (New York, 1946).

Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings, translated by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (New York, 1954).

Description of a Struggle, translated by Tania and James Stern (New York, 1958).

The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1910-1923, translated by Joseph Kresh, edited by Max Brod (New York, 1948).

The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1914-1923, translated by Martin Greenberg with Hannah Arendt , edited by Max Brod (New York, 1949).

The Great Wall of China: Stories and Reflections, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir (New York, 1970).

I am a Memory Come Alive: Autobiographical Writings by Franz Kafka, edited by Nahum Glatzer (New York, 1974).

"The Judgment," translated by Malcolm Pasley, The Problem of the Judgment, edited by Angel Flores (New York, 1977).

Letters to Felice, translated by James Stern and Elisabeth Duckwork edited by Erich Heller and Jurgen Born (New York, 1973).

Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, translated by Richard and Clara Winston, edited by Max Brod et al. (New York, 1977).

Letters to Milena, translated by Tania and James Stern, edited by Willy Haas (New York and London, 1953).

Letters to Ottla and the Family, translated by Richard and Clara Winston, edited by Nahum Glazer (New York, 1981).

Letter to His Father, translated by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (New York, 1953), Bilingual edition.

The Metamorphosis, translated and edited by Stanley Corngold (New York, Toronto, and London, 1972).

Parables and Paradoxes in German and English, edited by Nahum Glazer (New York, 1958).

The Penal Colony: Stories and Short Pieces, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir (New York, 1948).

Shorter Works, translated and edited by Malcolm Pasley (London, 1973).

Stories 1904-1924, translated by J. A. Underwood (London, 1981).

The Trial, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir, illustrated by George Salter (New York, 1957).

Wedding Preparations in the Country and Other Posthumous Prose Writings, translated by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (London, 1954).

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES

BIOGRAPHICAL WORKS

Bauer, Johann, Kafka and Prague, text by Johann Bauer; photos by Isidor Pollak; design by Jaroslav Schneider; translated by P. S. Falla (New York, Washington, D.C., and London, 1971).

Binder, Hartmut, Franz Kafka: Leben und Persönlichkeit, (Stuttgart, 1983).

Brod, Max, Franz Kafka: A Biography, translated from the German by G. Humphreys Roberts and Richard Winston. Second, enlarged edition (New York, 1960).

Hayman, Ronald, Kafka: A Biography, (New York, 1982).

Janouch, Gustav, Conversations with Kafka: Notes and Reminiscences, translated by Goronwy Rees; introduction by Max Brod (New York, 1953). (Original German edition: Frankfurt, 1951.).

Pawel, Ernst, The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka, (New York, 1984).

Unseld, Joachim, Franz Kafka: Ein Schriftstellerleben-Die Geschichte seiner Veröffentlichungen, mit einer Bibliographie sämtlicher Drucke und Ausgaben der Dichtungen Kafkas 1908-1924 (Munich and Vienna, 1982).

Wagenbach, Klaus, Franz Kafka: Eine Biographie seiner Jugend 1883-1912, (Berne, 1958).

Wagenbach, Klaus, Franz Kafka: Pictures of a Life, translated by Arthur Wensinger (New York, 1984).

GENERAL CRITICAL STUDIES

Albright, Daniel, Representation and the Imagination: Beckett, Kafka, Nabokov, and Schoenberg, (Chicago, 1981).

Anders, Gunther, Frans Kafka, translated by A. Steer and A. K. Thorlby (New York and London, 1960). (Original German edition: Munich, 1951.)

Barthes, Roland, "Kafka's Answer," Critical Essays, translated by Richard Howard (Evanston, Ill., 1972) pp. 133-137. (Original French edition: Paris, 1964.)

Beck, Evelyn Torton, Kafka and the Yiddish Theater: Its Impact on His Work, (Madison, Wis., 1971).

Beicken, Peter U., Franz Kafka: Eine kritische Einfuhrung in die Forschung, (Frankfurt, 1974).

Beissner, Friedrich, Der Erzähler Franz Kafka: Ein Vortrag, (Stuttgart, 1952).

Benjamin, Walter, "Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death," and "Some Reflections on Kafka," In Illuminations, edited and introduced by Hannah Arendt; translated by Harry Zohn (New York, 1969) pp. 111-145. (Original German editions: Berlin, 1934 and Frankfurt, 1966).

Bernheimer, Charles, Flaubert and Kafka: Studies in Psychopoetic Structure, (New Haven, Conn., 1982).

Hartmut Binder, ed., Kafka-Handbuch, 2 vols. (Stuttgart, 1979).

Blanchot, Maurice, "Reading Kafka," "Kafka and Literature," and "Kafka or the Demands of Literature," in The Sirens' Song: Selected Essays, edited by Gabriel Josipovici; translated by Sacha Rabinovitch (Bloomington, Ind., 1982) pp. 21-42, 129-143. (Original French editions: Paris, 1949 and 1955).

Bridgwater, Patrick, Kafka and Nietzsche, (Bonn, 1974).

Camus, Albert, "Hope and the Absurd in the Work of Franz Kafka," in The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, translated from the French by Justin O'Brien (New York, 1955) pp. 124-138. (Original French edition: Paris, 1943).

Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix, Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure, (Paris, 1975).

Dentan, Michel, Humour et création littéraire dans l'oeuvre de Kafka, (Geneva, 1961).

Emrich, Wilhelm, Franz Kafka: A Critical Study of His Writings, translated by Sheema Zeben Buehne (New York, 1968). (Original German edition: Bonn, 1958).

Angel Flores, ed., Franz Kafka Today, (Madison, Wis., 1958).

Angel Flores, ed., The Kafka Debate: New Perspectives for Our Time, (New York, 1977).

Foulkes, Peter, The Reluctant Pessimist: A Study of Franz Kafka, (The Hague, 1967).

Ronald Gray, ed., Kafka: A Collection of Critical Essays, (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1962).

Greenberg, Martin, The Terror of Art: Kafka and Modern Literature, (New York, 1969).

Philip Grundlehner, ed., Kafka Centenary Essays, (Literary Review 26, Summer, 1983).

Heller, Erich, Kafka, (New York, 1975).

Heller, Peter, Dialectics and Nihilism: Essays on Lessing, Nietzsche, Mann and Kafka, (Amherst, Mass., 1966).

Heller, Peter, "Kafka and Nietzsche," Comparative Literature Studies 8:71-95 (1971).

Heller, Peter, "On Not Understanding Kafka," German Quarterly 49:373-393 (1974).

Kenneth Hughes, ed., Franz Kafka: An Anthology of Marxist Criticism, (Hanover, N.H., and London, 1981).

Kuna, Franz, Franz Kafka: Literature as Corrective Punishment, (London, 1974).

Franz Kuna, ed., On Kafka: Semi-Centenary Perspectives, (London, 1976).

Pascal, Roy, Kafka's Narrators, Anglica Germanica series 2, (Cambridge, England, 1982).

Politzer, Heinz, Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox, (Ithaca, N.Y., 1962).

Robert, Marthe, As Lonely as Franz Kafka, translated by Ralph Manheim (New York, 1982).

Robertson, Ritchie, Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature, (Oxford, 1985).

Rolleston, James, Kafka's Narrative Theater, (University Park, Pa., and London, 1974).

Sokel, Walter H., Franz Kafka: Tragik und Ironie-Zur Struktur seiner Kunst, (Munich and Vienna, 1964).

Sokel, Walter H., "Kafka's Poetics of the Inner Self," Modern Austrian Literature, 11:37-58 (1978).

Sokel, Walter H., "Language and Truth in the Two Worlds of Franz Kafka," German Quarterly, 52:364-384 (1979).

Spann, Meno, Franz Kafka, (Detroit, 1976).

Spilka, Mark, Dickens and Kafka: A Mutual Interpretation, (Bloomington, Ind., 1963).

Stern, J. P., ed., The World of Franz Kafka, (London and New York, 1980).

Sussman, Henry, Franz Kafka: Geometrician of Metaphor, (Madison, Wis., 1979).

Szanto, George H., Narrative Consciousness: Structure and Perception in the Fiction of Kafka, Beckett, and Robbe-Grillet, (Austin, Tex., 1972).

Thorlby, Anthony, Franz Kafka: A Study, (London, 1972).

Tiefenbrun, Ruth, Moment of Torment: An Interpretation of Franz Kafka's Short Stories, (Carbondale, Ill., 1973).

Alan Udoff, ed., Kafka's Contextuality, (New York and Baltimore, 1986).

Urzidil, Johannes, There Goes Kafka, translated by Harold A. Basilius (Detroit, 1968).

Walser, Martin, Beschreibung einer Form: Versuch uber Franz Kafka, (Munich, 1961).

STUDIES ON INDIVIDUAL WORKS

ON AMERIKA

Nicolai, Ralph, Kafkas Amerika-Roman "Der Verschollene": Motive und Gestalten, (Wurzburg, 1981).

ON THE CASTLE

Cohn, Dorrit, "K. Enters the Castle: On the Change of Person in Kafka's Manuscript," Euphorion, 62:28-45 (1968).

Gray, Ronald, Kafka's Castle, (Cambridge, 1956).

Heller, Erich, "The World of Franz Kafka," in The Disinherited Mind, (Cambridge, England, 1956) pp. 155-181.

Peter Neumeyer, ed., Twentieth-Century Interpretations of "The Castle," (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1969).

Philippi, Klaus-Peter, Reflexion und Wirklichkeit: Untersuchungen zu Kafkas Roman "Das Schloss," Studien zur Deutschen Literatur, vol. 5 (Tubingen, 1966).

Robert, Marthe, The Old and The New: From Don Quixote to Kafka, translated by Carol Coseman; foreword by Robert Alter

(Berkeley, Calif., 1977).

Sheppard, Richard, On Kafka's "Castle": A Study, (Worcester and London, 1973).

ON THE TRIAL

Jaffe, Adrian, The Process of Kafka's "Trial," (East Lansing, Mich., 1967).

Marson, Eric, Kafka's "Trial": The Case Against Josef K., (Brisbane, Queensland, 1975).

James Rolleston, ed., Twentieth-Century Interpretations of "The Trial": A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1976).

Ziolkowski, Theodore, "Franz Kafka: The Trial," in Dimensions of the Modern Novel: German Texts and European Context, (Princeton, N.J., 1969) pp. 37-67.

ON "BEFORE THE LAW"

Derrida, Jacques, "Préjugés," in Philosophy and Literature, edited by Phillip Griffiths (Cambridge, England, 1984) pp. 173-188.

ON "THE BURROW"

Henel, Heinrich, "Kafka's Der Bau, or How to Escape from a Maze," in The Discontinuous Tradition: Studies in German Literature in Honour of Ernst Ludwig Stahl, edited by P. F. Ganz (Oxford, 1971) pp. 224-246.

ON THE COUNTRY DOCTOR

Triffit, Gregory B., Kafka's "Landarzt" Collection, (Berne and Frankfurt, 1985).

ON "A HUNGER ARTIST"

Spann, Meno, "Franz Kafka's Leopard," Germanic Review 34:85-104 (1959).

ON "INVESTIGATIONS OF A DOG"

Ziolkowski, Theodore, Varieties of Literary Thematics, (Princeton, N.J., 1983) pp. 86-122, 240-245.

ON "THE JUDGMENT"

Ellis, John, Narration in the German Novelle, (New York, 1974) pp.188-211, 218ff.

Angel Flores. ed., The Problem of "The Judgment", (New York, 1977).

Sokel, Walter H., "Frozen Sea and River of Narration: The Poetics behind Kafka's 'Breakthrough,'" New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 17:351-363 (1986).

ON THE METAMORPHOSIS

Peter Beicken, ed., "Die Verwandlung" · Erläuterungen und Dokumente, (Stuttgart, 1974).

Corngold, Stanley, The Commentator's Despair: The Interpretation of Kafka's "Metamorphosis," (Port Washington, N.Y., and London, 1973).

Nabokov, Vladimir, Lectures on Literature, edited by Fredson Bowers; introduction by John Updike (New York, 1980) pp. 251-284.

Sokel, Walter H., "Kafka's Metamorphosis: Rebellion and Punishment," Monatshefte 48:203-214 (1956).

Todorov, Tzvetan, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to Literature, translated from the French by Richard Howard; with a new foreword by Robert Scholes (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975) pp. 169-175. (Original French edition: Paris, 1970).

ON THE LETTERS TO FELICE

Canetti, Elias, Kafka's Other Trial: The Letters to Felice, translated by Christopher Middleton (New York, 1974). (Original German edition: Munich, 1969).

BIBLIOGRAPHIES

Caputo-Mayr, Marie-Luise, and Herz, Julius M., Franz Kafkas Werke: Eine Bibliographie der Primärliteratur (1908-1980), (Bern and Munich, 1980).

Flores, Angel, A Kafka Bibliography, 1908-1976, (New York, 1976).

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1983, 1984, 1985, 1989, 1990, 1991 Charles Scribner's Sons, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) Sokel, Walter H. "Franz Kafka." European Writers: The Twentieth Century, edited by George Stade, vol. 9, Charles Scribner's Sons,

1990. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1479001230/LitRC?u=mill30389&sid=bookmark- LitRC&xid=5c11a680. Accessed 11 July 2021.

Gale Document Number: GALE|H1479001230