One Hundred Years Later: Kafka's (Comic) Legacy

Whitfield, Steve

ONE HUNDRED YEARS LATER: KAFKA'S (COMIC LEGACY) Bizarre as it may seem, a generation of American-Jewish comics is indebted to the author of "The Metamorphosis," The Trial and other...

...Reprinted with permission from The New tort Review of Books Copyright C 1969...
...In the title story of one of his collections— those messages in a bottle—Isaac Bashevis Singer sketched "A Friend of Kafka" (1970), a wry survivor of the Yiddish theater that Kafka so admired...
...In this case, "the outlawed [Czech] writer" after the 1968 Russian invasion presides over Roth's most mellow and sober novel to date...
...Albert Einstein, for example, used to cackle with delight upon reading choice passages in Emily Post's manual of etiquette...
...The stable nuclear family no longer generates such tension or commands such adhesive loyalty The lurking fear of the strangers outside has largely subsided, has become more a memory or an obligation, less an imperative or an instinct...
...A later West novel, A Cool Million (1934), can be interpreted not only as a burlesque of the American success story inaugurated in Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography (incidentally, a favorite of Kafka's), but also—so estimates Professor Jay Martin—as a comic version of The Trial, with Lemuel Pitkin as "an American Joseph K, so innocent he cannot know he is condemned...
...object...
...Even though David Levine's caricatures of Kafka usually show him to be all ears, the prose from "The Judgment" on is shaped with astringent care, as though hoarding every word...
...Half-biographical sketch, half-autobiographical reverie, by turns lyrical and documentary, poignant and witty, subtle and effusive, tender and scary, Roth's introductory essay on Kafka's literary distinction is suddenly sidetracked in the pursuit of a fresh hypothesis: What if the tubercular author had not died at the age of 41 but instead had been cured...
...And yet our fascination with a Czech Jew who wrote in German endures...
...Humor in Kafka's work is a local anesthetic, momentary relief from nightmarish displacements and incongruities...
...His most recent article in these pages, a review of George Steiner's The Return to San Cristdbal of A. H., appeared in December 1982...
...Kafka's tone is tentative, delicate, humble, mysterious...
...theology has become a subject without a modern moment contributing editor Steve Whitfield teaches American Studies at Brandeis University...
...manuscript ("Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a gigantic insect") before hurling the play to the floor...
...His baroque parodies of popular culture, for all their wacky brilliance, are neither dark nor deep enough to wind down Prague's mean streets...
...Marshall Brickman, Woody Allen's alter ego and the former top gagwriter for the Johnny Carson show, once invented (for The New Yorker) a Broadway musical based on "Metamorphosis" entitled Roach...
...Kafka's, Roth grew up into a novelist whose recent protagonist, in The Professor of Desire (1977), makes a pilgrimage to Prague and dreams of meeting a whore of Kafka's...
...Their punch lines are written in a desperanto, and seem calculated to induce an "ouch," not a chortle...
...But "Metamorphosis" and Miller's play as comedies...
...The spin-offs and the send-ups can be multiplied...
...Funny...
...It is more a series of gags, muggings, slapstick and shtick than a report to the academy, intended for intellectuals skilled at pumping irony and paradox into any situation...
...Of Kafka's three novels (all unfinished), only one taps a light vein...
...Within the past four decades, K has become the most important letter in the alphabet of anxiety, branded on the modern and especially the Jewish sensibility...
...Roth himself has amply testified to the compelling enigma of Kafka, for "the strange grave comedy he was able to make of the tedious, enervating rituals of accusation and defense, furnished me with any number of clues as to how to give imaginative expression to preoccupations of my own...
...and Jewish comics have frequently transformed that victimhood into a laughing matter, as in Woody Allen's childhood memory of having won two weeks at interfaith camp, where he was "beaten up by boys of every race, creed and color...
...Having imagined himself a Hebrew school pupil of Dr...
...By now, the comic spirit has come to seem, like the violin, a disproportionately Jewish instrument...
...Lenny Bruce was no innocent, but he paid a different kind of homage when, in 1963, upon hearing the news of his severe sentence for obscenity, he yelled "Kafka...
...Its narrator is denounced as "a loathsome vermin," and owns a canine named Joseph K.—as though unintimidated by its namesake's death "like a dog...
...And the Jews of that place have perhaps understood Kafka's deepest (though not darkest) intentions, for they have paid special homage to him in their humor, whose special style is a kind of pebble of tribute on Kafka's grave...
...If such revision of reality were ever to be granted, even our humorists seem to be hinting that the letter K would do rather nicely...
...Max Brod reported that his friend Kafka was a radiantly humorous man, whose stories provoked so much merriment among his friends that sometimes Kafka himself was helpless to continue reading them aloud, since he, too, was cracking up...
...West's surface realism," his major biographer has asserted, is "on close inspection . . . cracked and riddled by the incongruous and the bizarre...
...The waning of tradition and the erosion of faith are no longer so keenly experienced...
...It is fining that the first American novelist who was both of Jewish origin and of genuine literary importance was a black humorist—related by marriage to a Marx Brothers scenarist...
...The atmosphere is far less charged these days than it was at, say, the turn of the century, when a peculiar vulnerability and intensity informed the bourgeois culture of emancipated Western Jewry, when the incongruities of that culture were painfully sharp...
...Perhaps that parallel is too slight to be convincing, but it is worth recalling that when the calm surface of Joseph K. 's life is interrupted by his arrest, he first suspects "a rude joke" concocted by some of his colleagues as a birthday surprise...
...The affinity is puzzling at first glance, since the obvious contrasts in style, tone and subjects do not render very plausible Roth's claim to have found a Czech mate...
...The significance of the parallel would end there, were it not for a rather more striking coincidence...
...What if, unlike his three sisters and his mistress, he had also managed to escape the Holocaust...
...or Looking at Kafka" (1973...
...Perelman, perhaps because of his preoccupation with language itself...
...These then are some of the pebbles...
...it is a spirit which Kafka, born a hundred years ago on July 3, helped to shape...
...Requiring no roots and little capital, it is a way of life that many Jews have found congenial...
...and he is, if not the sole proprietor, then at least the most self-conscious fabulist of America's native-bom, lower middle class, metropolitan Jewry and its highly educated, emotionally crippled sons...
...Woody Allen once wondered why our days are numbered rather than, say, lettered...
...That influence has taken a comic turn...
...Kafka has posthumously exerted considerable force, at least among the American branch of the people from whom he felt as estranged as he did from himself...
...at the end of The Trial...
...NYREV inc...
...A few American Jewish comics have, however fleetingly, returned that smile, testifying to the tenacious hold that this fragile and impenetrable author still exercises on the imagination, exactly a century after his birth...
...K is the scarlet letter that now might stand for ambiguity...
...Yet there is no more affectionate memorial to Kafka's lingering presence than " 'I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting...
...Humor is notoriously difficult to define and to classify...
...Nathanael West had read Kafka's The Castle in translation as early as 1930, and Kafka's impact could be felt both during and after the composition of Miss Lonely hearts (1933...
...Nor has there been any discernible influence in West's inimitable brother-in-law, S.J...
...And was West not a master of parables and paradoxes—the title of one Kafka anthology...
...And he played the role of Joseph K. to the finish...
...A different version of this paper was published in European Judaism...
...This strange fantasy never allows self-reference to obtrude on reverence for the real Kafka, whose achievement becomes, with every re-reading and meditation, more precarious— and therefore more miraculous...
...And (contrary to popular belief) Roth's most important organ is his ear, which has picked up all the bizarre varieties and nuances of American speech and set them down with antic fidelity...
...Bruce's vulnerability before the law, his desperate negotiation through the maze of local authorities and arbitrary enforcement, his faith that a final appeal to the Supreme Court would vindicate him and, perhaps most important, his own failure to dissociate the irrationality of the social environment from the instability of his own orientation toward that,world— all suggest something out of The Trial...
...That may be an especially arcane joke, since, in Mel Brooks's film The Producer (1968), the flamboyant theatrical impresario played by Zero Mostel seeks, for tax purposes, the most awful play ever considered...
...ONE HUNDRED YEARS LATER: KAFKA'S (COMIC LEGACY) Bizarre as it may seem, a generation of American-Jewish comics is indebted to the author of "The Metamorphosis," The Trial and other surrealisms Gregor Samsa, before metamorphosing into a gigantic insect, and Willy Loman, before dying the death of a salesman, both pursued the same occupation—as travelling salesmen, peddlers updated to fit into a modern economy...
...And—equally eerie and surprising—Arthur Miller recalls that he laughed more while writing Death of a Salesman "than I have ever done, when alone, in my life...
...In a world without real sanctuaries, many modern Jews have learned of their powerlessness...
...Bert Lahr was a more tormented survivor of American vaudeville, an intensely lonely clown whose biography, written by his son, is burnished with an epigraph from "A Hunger Artist...
...The manuscript showed too much promise...
...Furthermore, homelessness and disinheritance so permeate Kafka's fictional world that nowhere in it did he find it necessary to mention the word "Jew...
...to the reporters...
...Still, scattered allusions can be detected in Without Feathers (1975), for instance...
...It is set in a country Kafka never visited, a place that even in the English translation is spelled with the trademark initial: Amerika...
...It is nevertheless surprising that, for example, Joseph Heller has not admitted to any affinity for Kafka's work, though the adjective "Kafkaesque" flew solo for many years before the phrase "catch-22" joined it to summarize the harrowing logic of the bureaucratic mentality...
...What if he had emigrated to a real Amerika, where he might have eked out a living teaching Hebrew in New Jersey to pre-bar mitzvah students like Philip Roth...
...Theirs is a shared perspective of ultimate senselessness and therefore of psychic paralysis, rendering irrelevant Vladimir Nabokov's charmingly off-center suggestion that Samsa, as a dung beetle, could simply have flown away when the maid opened the room...
...Roth's comic brilliance follows a self-sufficient, generally derisive logic of its own, and achieves its most characteristic formulation in satire, a genre quite outside Kafka's range...
...Though appearing to have committed himself to observation of a deadpan surface, West lets cosmic jokes explode through it and tear it apart...
...No wonder then that Brod once referred to Kafka's "metaphysical smile...
...He reads aloud the opening line of one Drawing b\ David Lfvine...
...Roth's writing is marked by his assurance, his cleverness, his clarity of intention and execution...
...they have reduced the cosmic— just a bit—to the comic, thereby making anxiety bearable...
...It is the hieroglyph that resists the efforts to decipher it, the symbol that represents nothing that can be conclusively decoded...
...The secret guilts and private torments, once locked in familial embrace or confined to ethnic enclaves, have been given a chance to breathe—and perhaps even to expire...
...Not all comic figures have succumbed to Kafka's spell, however, and acknowledgement of his totemic value in American popular culture is obviously intended to supplement, not in any way to supplant, our knowledge of Jewish humor...
...If Roth is the funniest of American Jewish intellectuals, Woody Allen is the most intellectual of American Jewish funnymen—yet on him the imprint of K is not easy to locate or specify...
...The only time Lenny Bruce and I ever met and talked," Philip Roth has recalled, "was in his lawyer's office, when it occurred to me that he was just about ripe for the role of Joseph K. He looked gaunt and driven, still determined but also on the wane, and he wasn't interested in being funny—all he could talk about and think about was his 'case.' " More in his life than in his art (insofar as by the end the two were separable for Bruce), he inhaled the almost suffocating spirit of Kafka...
...But Allen's affinity to Kafka is more a matter of atmospherics—the fantastic extensions of neurotic fears that are forged in the irrevocable bonds of childhood, that proceed down urban streets of insidious intent, darken in the presence of outsiders, qualify the assumption of adult responsibilities and finally struggle to encompass a universe made terrible by divine silence...
...The shadow of Joseph K. may be pertinent, but Danny Kaye is surely more typical...
...It is the key to an illegible world, whose absurdity is the only matrix of meaning and whose laws are the arbitrary projections of an absent God...
...That enterprise has been characterized more by physical than by metaphysical humor...
...Both writers exhibited the same combination of powers, though not in the same magnitude: an exactitude of description, and an awareness of the radical insufficiency and incomprehensibility of reality...
...By contrast, Roth's cultural curiosity cannot incorporate much besides the wondrous peculiarities of Jewishness and its discontents...
...For the Jewish comic has given utterance to the anguish of losers, has often sought to go no further than to fling a custard pie in the face of the malach hamoves, the angel of death...
...Such efforts to draw hilarity out of impotence cannot easily be absorbed into native American humor, particularly that of the Southwest, with its braggadocio, its exaggerations of cruelty, violence and physical prowess...
...These children of tailors and peddlers have devised an ingenious strategy for dealing with their anxieties...

Vol. 8 • July 1984 • No. 7


 
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