The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (125 page)

The two novels,
The Trial
and
The Castle
, that established his fame led W. H. Auden to describe Kafka as “the author who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age as Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe bore to theirs.” One near the beginning and the other near the end of his writing career, these were both excursions to the America within.

The Trial
, written in 1914, when he was thirty-one, became for Sartre, Camus, and others in France a parable of life under the Nazis. With the rise of Stalin and his successors in the Soviet Union, and the Cultural Revolution in China, the book retained the aura of prophecy. But when Kafka wrote the book, these gargantuan modern horrors were all in the future.

“Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K.,”
The Trial
begins, “for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning. His landlady’s cook, who always brought him his breakfast at eight o’clock, failed to appear on this occasion. That had never happened before.” Not knowing what crime if any he has committed, he is pursued by investigators and repeatedly interrogated. He has difficulty finding the court, is subjected to tortured legalistic technicalities, and is repeatedly beaten by a court functionary who simply says “I’m employed to beat people, so I beat them.” His respectable life as a middle-class bachelor is made to seem a kind of guilt. But since Joseph K. refuses to admit his guilt, he must die “like a dog.”

An unpleasant companion piece on the same multivalent theme and also written during the first months of World War I is “In the Penal Colony.” An officer of the Old Commandant has preserved a bizarre instrument of torture to extract confessions. The accused is put in this machine where a
set of needles incise into his skin the nature of his crime. There he can read his crime and confess in a final moment of truth. As the explorer arrives he sees a prisoner about to be put in the machine for his crime of disobedience, failing to salute a doorpost. When the explorer objects, the officer releases the prisoner. As an act of faith in the machine and a kind of act of “redemption,” he puts himself on the machine. The machine destroys the officer, who still shows no sign of redemption, then destroys itself.

The leitmotif of many of Kafka’s early stories—uncomprehended guilt and disproportionate punishment—is revealed in his undelivered “Letter to His Father” (1919), rich with Kafka’s autobiographical insights. “My writing was all about you,” he confesses to his father, “all I did there, after all, was to bemoan what I could not bemoan upon your breast. It was an intentionally long-drawn-out leave-taking from you.” We owe an ironic debt, then, to the brutal father who drove Kafka to explore the wilderness within.

Kafka’s works are so cryptic that it is hard to trace development in his thinking. When he began his last long work,
The Castle
(1922), the decade just past had been wonderfully fertile for him. No longer preoccupied with guilt, and even less realistic than
The Trial The Castle
for once features a hero who is not merely a victim or culprit of some unknown crime. This hero just reaches up and suffers the consequences. Arriving in a village in the Valley below the Castle he must have authority from the Castle to spend the night or to proceed. “K.” fraudulently claims that the Count has summoned him as a land surveyor. The inn initiates a fruitless effort to communicate with the Castle. Whenever K. seems to have succeeded in communicating, he remains baffled by the response.

Still K. cannot make himself at. home in the inn or dispel suspicion in the village, which is his base.

Max Brod, to whom Kafka first read the beginning of
The Castle
, saw it as an account of the Faust or Don Quixote in each of us, “a book in which each of us recognizes his own experience.… Kafka’s hero, whom he calls simply K., in autobiographical fashion, passes through life alone. He is the loneliness-component in us, which this novel works out in more-than-life-size,
terrifying clarity.” The word “Jew” does not appear in
The Castle
. “Yet, tangibly, Kafka in
The Castle
, straight from his Jewish soul, in a simple story, has said more about the situation of Jewry as a whole today than can be read in a hundred learned treatises.” Kafka seems to be confessing that inner resources are not enough. But the reach upward and outward brings no response—or only one we cannot fathom. And from whom? Is it perhaps, our own humiliating mistake to try to reach the Castle?

Where does Kafka the creator-artist fit? Kafka’s last finished story, and one which he himself destined for the printing press, was “Josephine the Songstress—or the Mice-Nation” (1923). Among the mice people Josephine is the greatest singer ever to emerge. But piqued by the refusal of her fellow mice to release her from her everyday citizen’s duties, she refuses to sing anymore. Then finally she goes into hiding, hoping she will be sought out and beseeched to resume her singing. “What Josephine really wants is not what she puts into words … what she wants is public, unambiguous, permanent recognition of her art, going far beyond any precedent so far known. But while everything else is within her reach, this eludes her persistently.” And she fails in her arrogant demand that, in return for the gift of her art to them, they guarantee her fame and immortality. “Was her actual piping notably louder and more alive than the memory of it will be? Was it even in her lifetime more than a simple memory?” In the long history of the mice people Josephine is destined to be redeemed not by fame but in quite the opposite way. She “will happily lose herself in the numberless throng of the heroes of our people, and soon … will rise to the heights of redemption and be forgotten like all her brothers.” “She hides herself and does not sing, but our people, quietly, without visible disappointment, a self-confident mass in perfect equilibrium, so constituted, even though appearances are misleading, that they can only bestow gifts and not receive them, even from Josephine, our people continue on their way.”

In Josephine the mice songstress Max Brod, who knew Kafka better than anyone else, found Kafka’s parable of the Jewish literary world and perhaps an explanation of why he wanted his works destroyed. Any artist is deceived if he thinks he alone is chosen. If there is “redemption” for the artist or writer it comes not from his work, but from realizing that, like Josephine, every artist is only “a tiny episode in the eternal history of our people, and our people will get over the loss.”

Finally with self-effacing wit, Kafka expresses his doubts about the superior performance of any artist. Perhaps the artist is only an unusually adept practical joker. Maybe he does the work no better than others but only more consciously, as Kafka noted in the mice nation:

Ambiguity is the enduring charm of Kafka’s wilderness within. Some would put Kafka in the tradition of Greek tragedy, others who see him as a surrealist wit complain that translators have left out his humor. The classic photograph of Kafka shows a man who never laughed. But those who knew him say he broke into uncontrollable laughter when he read his stories to friends. The absurd was Kafka’s delight, and he makes it ours. “It’s unjust,” he warned, “to smile about the hero who lies mortally wounded on the stage and sings an aria. We lie on the ground and sing for years.”

T
HE
discovery of the self as a resource of art let the writer bring time within, making his inward life a microcosm of the mystery, a personal laboratory where the vast expanses can be recaptured. Space had seemed manageable, mastered in buildings, in pictures, in words. But time, the elusive dimension, challenged modern creators to flex their ingenuity. In the effort they would demonstrate unsuspected resources of the self. And now, instead of complaining, with Wyndham Lewis, of modern man’s “morbid time consciousness,” we can marvel at what man has made of his most ancient enemy.

Marcel Proust (1871–1922) chose for his work “that invisible substance called time.” In the eight volumes of his fourteen-year lifework he created a new way of conquering time’s transience and evanescence. He was providentially qualified by both his capacities and his infirmities to show what could be made of the encounter of the inward self with time.

Born in Auteuil, a Paris suburb, he inherited a secure social position from his father’s distinction as physician, professor of hygiene, and eminent
government servant. Adrien Proust had come of an ancient Catholic family from Illiers, near Chartres. Proust’s mother came of a wealthy Jewish family, and he kept memories of his Jewish forebears alive by an annual pilgrimage to lay a pebble on the ancestral grave in the cemetery. Jeanne Weil Proust’s difficult pregnancy with Marcel during the Commune and the siege of Paris began a maternal bonding that shaped Proust’s life and work. For a person who saw art as his liberation into eternity, he remained strangely obsessed by his roots, and by his ties to his mother and his maternal grandmother. He spent his childhood holidays at a Normandy seashore resort with his grandmother. His sense of a divided Franco-Jewish inheritance would be intensified, even before he began his great work, by the appalling Dreyfus Affair, which brought out the worst anti-Semitic passions in French society. Proust himself collected petitions to vindicate the unjustly accused Dreyfus and bring him back from Devil’s Island.

His schooling was conventional enough. First to the elite Lycée Condorcet, from 1882 to 1889, where he made his lifelong friendships. There he remembered reading
The Arabian Nights
, modern French classics, and translations of Dickens, Hardy, Stevenson, and George Eliot. Already known for his personal charm and intellectual precocity, he dazzled classmates by his observations on the miraculous “effect of associated ideas.” Surprisingly, too, he enjoyed his year of conscript military service at Orleans in 1889–90. He might have enjoyed it less if he had had to serve the five years generally required. But under the law he was privileged to serve only one year by having attained his baccalaureate and by his parents’ ability to pay the fifteen hundred francs for his uniform and maintenance. He barely came under the wire before a rigid three-year conscription went into effect.

About this time, at the age of twenty, he gave revealing answers to a questionnaire:

After his year of service he went on to the École des Sciences Politiques, where he secured his
license
in law (1893) and then in literature (1895). There he was exhilarated by the philosophical ideas of Henri Bergson (his cousin by marriage), who also was obsessed by time. And he frequented the salons embellished by titles of various vintages. He published his first stories, essays, and reviews in a short-lived little magazine,
Le Banquet
, subsidized by wealthy parents of his Condorcet classmates. To his fellow editors he seemed “far more anxious to find a way into certain drawing-rooms of the nobility than to devote himself to literature.” His family’s wealth made it unnecessary for him to have a regular occupation. He used his diploma in law to work briefly for a notary, served as volunteer librarian at the Bibliothèque Mazarine, and began an autobiographical novel,
Jean Santeuil
.

Suddenly in 1899 he dropped his autobiography because of his new passion for John Ruskin’s “religion of Beauty.” At first it seemed a charming irrelevance, and was short-lived, but it became a focus and provided a vocabulary for Proust’s own quest to recapture Time. Proust and Ruskin (1819–1900) had come from similar backgrounds. Both were born into wealthy families who relieved them of the need for employment. Both had an overprotected childhood and doting parents. Ruskin’s father, a prosperous wine merchant and connoisseur, collected paintings and beginning when Ruskin was only fourteen took him on grand tours of the Continent. When Ruskin became a prize student at Christ Church, Oxford, his father staked him to collecting paintings by J.M.W. Turner. There, bored by the curriculum and frustrated in love affairs, he developed those lifelong passions for nature and the Gothic that prepared him for his battle against the industrial ethos and his championship of medieval ideals of chivalry. In a celebrated Victorian scandal, Ruskin’s wife secured annulment of their marriage on the grounds of Ruskin’s impotence in order to marry the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais. Haunted by fits of madness, the last twenty years of his life were a nightmare.