Why Read Kafka?

MARTIN SWALES Why Read Kafka? At one point in The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, Tzvetan Todorov distinguishes between the fully resonant literary exploration of the fantastic and the compulsive outpourings of the schizophrenic . The crucial difference, he insists, is to be found in the fact that the schizophrenic 'in the place of a common language ... establishes a "privatelanguage"(which of course is a contradiction in terms, and hence an anti-language).' 1 From comments Todorov makes in this study it is clear that he regards Kafka as a major writer, as the user of 'public' language, and not as a charismatically pathological figure whose work consists of jottings in an intractably private code. From the sheer volume of secondary literature on Kafka2 one would assume that Todorov is not alone in this view. Yet it is remarkable how often Kafka criticism pursues in orie form or another a heavily biographical approach. I have no wish to deny that we owe certain insights to this kind of inquiry: my objection is, however, that such analyses implicitly suggest that the 'private' Kafka must be invoked in order to account for (and redeem) the 'public' inscrutability of the works he produced. I would suggest that in literary criticism - as in any form of linguistic communication - an unremitting interest in the personality behind the utterance suggests that that utterance has in someway broken down: that when a listener (orreader) elects not to explicate an utterance but to account for it, he is demonstrating the failure of that utterance to work as public communication. That such an attitude should prevail in Kafka criticism is particularly odd - because the biographical enthusiasm coexists (in most cases) with an article of faith which asserts the 'public' relevance, the sheer spiritual centrality of Kafka for the twentieth-century literary imagination. In this paper I want to examine an obvious test-case: the early story The Judgment (written in 1912). The story has particular importance within Kafka 's oeuvre for it marks the breakthrough of his literary creativity. Kafka tells us that the story emerged with the inevitability of a physical birth, that it was a wound opening. Moreover, The Judgment has a manifest closeness to certain facts and circumstances in Kafka's life, above all to the agonizing and exhaustively documented triangle of literature, the fiancee, the father. It is because the story is so clearly embedded in Kafka's 'private' agony that virtually all discussion of it has centred in UTQ , Volume XLVI, Number 2, Winter 1976/7 WHY READ KAFKA? 101 one form or another on the experiences from which it derives. The Judgment is, then, probably the best example of the 'literature as private code' syndrome within Kafka criticism. It is, for example, noteworthy that even a critic such as Erich Heller, for whom Kafka has an almost axiomatic universality, interprets The Judgment in exclusively biographical terms. 3 In one sense, he is being consistent, because he is prepared to assert that the 'private' agony in the Letters to Felice is 'apparently idiosyncratic but in its wider implications touching upon a universal irresolution of the modem sensibility," One would like a little more argument of how the 'private' generates 'public' implications - particularly as some of Kafka's 'public' utterances are, according to Heller, inadequate in the precise sense that they succumb te a 'private' pathology . He argues, for example, that The Trial 'fails in aesthetic and ... ethical logic. For a nightmare will not become a novel." Indeed, it is a work which, in Heller's view, affects the moral and aesthetic sensibility like 'the indiscretion of a sadistically bad dream told in public,'" I would suggest that Heiler'S critical waywardness is symptomatic of a general malaise in Kafka criticism, and that The Judgment is the paradigmatic text for our understanding of how this state of affairs should have come about. The biographical approach to this particular story has been pursued (with a vengeance) by Jiirgen Demmer in his recent study, Franz Kafka: Der Dichter der Selbstreflexion.7 After reading his study one can only ask oneself why anyone should bother with Kafka's text. There has, however , been one analysis of...