Liebliche Lüge?: Philip Roth's "Looking at Kafka"

Had one to name the artist who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age that Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe bore to theirs, Kafka is the first one would think of.

—W. H. Auden¹

In 1941, Auden's bold assertion went largely unnoticed; Kafka was still a buzz in the ears of those in the know, an insider's tip. Within a decade, however, the poet's statement had been irrevocably validated. J. M. Coetzee has defined the test of a classic as one of survival: for all of the criticism that is thrust against it, the classic continues to endure because "generations of people cannot afford to let go of it and therefore hold on to it at all costs."² This is a precise depiction of the fate of Kafka's fiction, whose audience over the past century has proven immense. Der Prozeß [The Trial], Das Schloß [The Castle], and Die Verwandlung [The Metamorphosis] have not lost their gaunt contemporaneity for their readers (and would-be censors) around the world.

An author's predominance can be gauged by the degree to which his influence exerts itself on the preeminent writers of later generations. In 1911, Goethe was still a towering enough figure in German letters for Kafka to lament in his diary that the sheer strength of his precursor's corpus "hält [...] die Entwicklung der deutschen Sprache wahrscheinlich zurück" ["probably retards the development of the German language"].³ But influence need not be disabling, nor must it confine itself to the province of a single language. "Literary influence," Jeffrey Eugenides has noted, "is like genetics . . .":

Rushdie got some of his fireworks from Günter Grass and Gabriel García Márquez. García Márquez got things from Kafka and Faulkner. . . . Influence isn't just a matter of copying someone or learning his or her tricks. You get influenced by writers whose work gives you hints about your own abilities and inclinations. Being influenced is largely a process of self-discovery.⁴

Kafka has been instrumental in the self-discovery of countless authors across Europe and the United States. His "genes" can be detected in much of today's fiction via the physiognomy of literary allusion, thematic variation, and allegorical imitation.

Philip Roth has been one of the most self-reflexively literary writers of the past three decades. "I know of no other novelist," Martin Green has written, "who makes the discussion of books such a valuable part of his story's action."⁵ Roth's novels conflate art and life—the "written and unwritten worlds"—in a manner that not only upsets the traditional, modern dichotomy represented so obsessively in the early works of Thomas Mann but boldly (bold because in doing so they run the risk of dull, egocentric irrelevance) navigates the unexplored parameters of Cervantes's terrain, that universe where fictions pen the lives of their authors. While Mann, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, and Henry James have all been featured prominently in Roth's work, Kafka alone has surfaced with obstinate regularity since the publication of Portnoy's Complaint in 1969. He even dominates Roth's nonfiction: Shop Talk, a collection of interviews with and essays on other writers between the years 1976 and 2000, may well have been titled "Responses to Kafka." Of the ten authors considered, only two—an exchange of letters with Mary McCarthy (regarding her response to Roth's representation of Christianity in The Counterlife) and a conversation with the Irish author Edna O'Brien (in which the influence of compatriots such as Beckett and Joyce take precedent)—fail to allude to him.⁶

Roth has made repeated efforts to express his filial relationship to Kafka in print. He has always declared his indebtedness openly, crediting, for example, his reading of the latter's "tales of spiritual disorientation and obstructed energies" with enabling his composition of Portnoy: "The ways in which Kafka allowed an obsession to fill every corner of every paragraph," he wrote in 1976, "and the strange grave comedy he was able to make of the tedious enervating...