The Forlorn Dreamer of Prague

...Aside from an occasional sentence that goes thud in the night, it is written in an unobtrusive style which never threatens to upstage Kafka...

...losis, which slowly but surely ravaged his already frail body, and died, leaving behind a s c a t t e r i n g of published short stories and some longer manuscripts, with firm i n s t r u c t i o n s to his best friend Max Brod that they be destroyed...

...Just as the dream allows the dreamer to express himself in metaphors, the symbols he uses allow others access to the loftier import of those metaphors...

...But here I need to step back a moment...

...Close enough to Kafka's travails to recount them sympathetically, he manages to keep enough distance to avoid drowning in lachrymose sniffles...

...activities, our individuality would be much less colorful...

...So Kaika's art provokes an increasingly insistent demand: Just who was this Kafka...

...Nothing else will ever give me any satisfaction...

...His real work lies in pursuing his trial...

...It would be better, I think, to focus on the elusive nature of his n a r r a t i v e s , t h e i r ability to send our thoughts spinning off in ill-defined directions...

...feudalism...

...So there are social preconditions for freedom, and modern society realizes those preconditions to an everincreasing extent...

...Exceptional things must have happened to him...

...he is not even fully organic, but is flesh fused with metal...

...Surrendering the benefits of differentiation in the name of recapturing community or wholeness would mean surrendering our freedom and individuality, and so I can only marvel at f o e s - - r i g h t and l e f t - - o f modern society...

...And the role I want to nominate Kafka for is this: He dramatizes those costs in all their harrowing intensity...

...In pursuing such different activities, we each develop different capacities and inclinations...

...all I did there, after all, was to bemoan what I could not bemoan upon your breast...

...Nor may we simply retreat and say that what m a t t e r s is that Kafkafelt his father abused him...

...Joseph K. leaves the painter's unbearably stuffy apartment and finds himself somehow back in the unending corridors of the Court's offices...

...Were we all wrapped up in the same THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1982 19...

...I t ' s r a t h e r his never feeling he belonged...

...Instead, he poignantly dramatizes the inescapable sense of loss, ignorance, and harsh discipline we tend, defensively, to ignore or dismiss...

...Max Brod too could record that nothing interested Kafka but his dreams...

...What, then, of our desire for a link between K a f k a ' s life and his art...

...I may humiliate myself in the classroom, but I can still confidently go out to eat, or play jazz with some friends...

...She wanted to make Kafka into a prophet-of "the true nature of the thing called b u r e a u c r a c y , " which she reviled in turn as an unspeakable curse on modern society...

...Orthodox empiricist readers will lurch when they realize how far from human flourishing that self is...

...an individual i n t e g r a t e d in so many different contexts may feel wholly integrated in none at all...

...Anyone who has bulldozed his way through great marshmallow gobs of gently unyielding bureaucracy, or failed in the valiant attempt, will resonate immediately to much of Kafka's work...

...Out for a stroll with a newly met acquaintance, one fellow realizes "that perhaps my long body displeased him by making him feel too small," and so gradually crumples himself up until his head is almost on the ground...

...Judiciously, Hayman re"Kafka: A Biography, Oxford University Press, $19.95...

...The unresolved Oedipal scene--tyrannical fat h e r , cringing s o n - - h a u n t s Hayman's pages almost as diligently as it does Freud's...

...To start, we can appreciate the forms Kafka employs to cast his thoughts, however bizarre or ineluctably personal they may have been...

...Awake, we can laugh at it, or ignore it, and cheerily go about our business...

...when one of them touches the floor the other is in the air, a game they continue ceaselessly to play...

...The description is sparse: Often faceless characters move about in blank settings...

...The hesitation is literally Kafkaesque: Obsessed with visions of butcher knives and lacerations, Kafka could note in his diary, "The b e s t place to stab seems to be between the throat and the chin...

...But Hayman provides us with the materials to undercut both Wilson's summary dismissal and his own 0edipal reduction...

...Adding to the account the occasional obligatory nod that there was "something special about his talent," while doubtless true, is hardly informative...

...So consider a first cost, from Durkheim: Freedom t h r e a t e n s always to lapse into anomie...

...The project of analyzing Kafka's texts as dreams doubtless invites renewed skeptical rejoinders and charges of reductionism...

...Time and again, Hayman tells us t h a t Kafka is using his art to confront his father...

...Never whole, he is not a human being at all...

...I d o n ' t mean simply t h a t Kafka doubted his right to exist, though there is that: This is a man who could feel it was somehow illegitimate for him to wait for a tram...

...And a third cost comes from Freud: Modern society demands the painful rigor of cleanliness, o r d e r , discipline, and responsibility...

...Hayman's Kafka suffers a classic case of what R.D...

...paradoxically, t h e i r world was full of magic, but ours is full of mystery...

...A friend once raced all over San Francisco, seeking the quintessential San Francisco, resolutely refusing to agree that San Francisco was the bundle of experiences he had while looking for the uniquely totalizing one he never found...

...The bleak truth of Kafka's life is that he had no a d v e n t u r e s at all...

...Indeed, as Durkheim urged, it is extensive social differentiation which allows us to become individuals in the first place...

...In these respects, this is first-rate biography, which makes for appropriately unpleasant reading...

...And Kafka's "Investigations of a Dog" is not o n l y an ironic inversion of Talmudic exploration, but also a probing study of unshakable ignorance...

...But here we can reinsert some of the social content conspicuously lacking in Freud, and say that at least some of the stubbornly resistant elements of dreams are cultural symbols...

...Yet even a d e c e n t r a l i z e d d i f f e r e n t i a t e d society would wreak its psychic costs...

...Suppose, however, we refuse to follow Freud's suggestion that we strip away the manifest content of the dream to reveal its latent meaning...

...It seems we are back again at a tight, crude link between the art and the life...

...Indeed, Hannah Arendt, if l read her correctly, scoffed at the suggestion that Kafka's work had any theological portent...

...Even if we grant his uncanny psychological insight into the plight of those caught up in bureaucratic mazes, it seems there is more than a tottering Hapsburg bureaucracy animating his work...

...Yet the limpid sentences, marching past so effortlessly, disrupt the reader's expectations...

...To justify a biography Smith must have had adventures...

...And it is teasingly autobiographical art...

...Blumfeld, the innocuous elderly bachelor, returns home and finds "two small white celluloid balls with blue stripes jumping up and down side by side on the parquet...

...Here Hayman fails us, for he forges too tight and crude a link...

...Some of those concepts, in turn, serve as culturally pregnant symbols at the heart of our collective selfu n d e r s t a n d i n g , symbols we can never grasp quite completely...

...Here we see the dark underside of freedom and individuality...

...Had overuse not thrashed the concept to a vacuous death, we might call this sense of not belonging " a l i e n a t i o n . " ) At the end of The Trial, Joseph K. knows he should take the knife and stab himself, but is unable to do so, and dies all the more shamefully...

...In its evanescent grasp of concrete detail and its apparently sensible whimsy, it is art sculpted into dreams...

...Shaw's skittish encounter with his favorite subject, commences with some characteristically cheerful caveats: How am I to pick out and describe that pointfive per cent of myself that distinguishes me from other men more or less fortunate than I? What earthly interest is there in a detailed account of how the illustrious Smith was born at Number Six High Street, and grew taller and taller until he was twenty, when the obscure Brown, Jones, and Robinson, born at Number Seven, Eight, and Nine, went through exactly the same routine of growing, feeding, excreting, dressing and undressing, lodging and moving...

...He draws extensively on a long letter the 36-year-old Kafka wrote to his father, a pungent compound of accusation and self-accusation, feverish pride and haunting doubt...

...Trained as a lawyer, he worked in an insurance office, helping s e t t l e accident claims filed by workers...

...The events of his life play a carefully limited supporting role...

...But, like anything else, differentiation imposes its costs...

...Suppose instead we focus on the dream as it is dreamed...

...He reveals not simply the torment of a fragile child, not simply a critique of bureaucracy...

...That allows us freedom: The many spheres provide arenas filled with significant options...

...This just won't do...

...It has such symbolic overtones because it is part of who we are...

...we cannot lapse back into the slovenly comfort of those pursuing just a few activities, but we must sublimate our basic drives to provide the energy to navigate our way through a social world drained of sensuality...

...he is neither, but a contemptible animal, even an insect...

...He tells us, for instance, that Kafka was captivated by a traveling Yiddish theater troupe, and tinkered with traditional Jewish literature and scholarship...

...He frets, in letters, diaries, and dreams: He is nota man, he is a Jew...

...I t ' s quite clear, for example, that a radically decentralized society would be less shattering, and could preserve and even further the possibilities of freedom...

...A hasty sketch of modern society would look something like this: Differentiation is the key to the modern world...

...I want, however, to pursue Kafka in a n o t h e r direction, a direction Hayman notes only in passing...

...What were the sources of his poignant sense of exclusion ? We want a link between his art and his life, a link which will perhaps dispel the troubling aura of mystery surrounding the art...

...In that l e t t e r , Kafka gnaws away at his memories of a big bold tyrant, and claims, "My writing was all about you...

...Some of our concepts invite a kind of perversely abstract meandering, a refusal to rest content with concrete experience...

...Instead, he punished himself in his prose, fending women off with letters at once invitingly intimate and brusquely dismissive, even abusive...

...Somehow, though, casting Kafka as a foe of bureaucracy (and a champion of what...

...To make sense of someone's dreams, don't we need, as Freud urges, the dreamer's own associations...

...For it is a bit embarrassing to point out at this late date in the psychobiography game that plenty of people have risen from confined families with dominative f a t h e r s and have not written " I n the Penal Colony" or The Trial...

...What was new about Kafka's work, we learn on the very first page, "was the method of opening the t h r o t t l e fully to the autobiographical impulse...

...For tracking down that elusive element seems to me essential for coming to an illuminating reading of his art...

...And so it acts just as c e r t a i n elements of dreams, which Freud noted are immune to the technique of association and r e n d e r dream i n t e r p r e t a t i o n more difficult...

...He contracted tubercu...

...There are more and more well-defined spheres of social interaction, and the roles in each are more and more crisply delineated and distinguished from other roles...

...Here is a much more promising way of connecting Kafka's life and writing: The ironic search for knowledge of divinity, the pseudo-learning of "Investigations of a Dog," take on added significance when we see the traditions Kafka drew from...

...And here we see Kafka's artistic genius...

...But he did not possess sufficient resolve to act on any of his suicidal or masochistic fantasies...

...I don't mean to embrace any tragic pessimism about our problems...

...The famed m a n - t u r n e d - i n s e c t of "The Metamorphosis" is named Gregor Samsa, and it requires no literary detective to spy "Kafka" lurking in "Samsa...

...If it's necessary, we can still plead the authority of Kafka's own view: "My talent for portraying my dreamlike inner life has relegated everything else to the incidental, and it's becoming dreadfully and increasingly stunted...

...I say "inescapable" sense just because, however elusively, that sense is built right into our self-conceptions...

...He is always teetering uncertainly, worrying whether he is firmly seated in the world...

...for the plots are constructed with crazy angles and careening non sequiturs...

...With what seems like genuinely e x t r a o r d i n a r y p e r v e r s i t y , he managed never to marry the woman he was intimately devoted t o - - t h o u g h mostly by mail--for years...

...Hayman shows that while Kafka may not have had any swashbuckling, he possessed the neurotic's ability to transform the minutiae of everyday life into adventures of the inner self...

...Were Kafka's art nothing but, as Edmund Wilson put it, "the half-expressed gasp of a self-doubting soul trampled under," we should have to second Wilson's verdict: "I do not see how one can possibly take him for either a great artist or a moral guide...

...We can profitably replace Kafka the terrified son with Kafka the gazing dreamer...

...doesn't quite wash...

...Obliquely and subtly, but more fully, more openly and more boldly than before, he was using fiction to confront his f e a r of his f a t h e r , the big, burly, bullnecked, bullying, self-confident, successful businessman whose unpredictable outbursts of rage still frightened him...

...Sixteen Self Sketches, George Bernard Don Herzog is a teaching fellow in the Department of Government at Harvard University...

...Laing named ontological insecurity...

...One might think it is impossible to love a woman: One can love only this particular woman, or that one, and so never experience "love of a woman" itself...

...You raise the chin and stick the knife into the tensed muscles...

...And then won't the dream be nothing but a crazy quilt replay of the life...

...It is notorious that neurotics rewrite their childhood histories, and Hayman uses the letter quite uncritically...

...The best facet of Hayman's book is his portrayal of Kafka as a Humean s e l f , a loose-knit collection of divided principalities...

...The accused of The Trial is Joseph K. The stranger to the village of The Castle is simply K. In one story after another we find ominous authority figures threatening ever-hesitant narrators and main characters, or characters plagued with the sense they are irredeemably outsiders...

...decentralization...

...It echoes with larger and irreducibly intangible overtones...

...So, for example, the experience of authority in Kafka's work is not just the reflection of a menacing f a t h e r , nor even a concrete experience confined to bureaucracy...

...and our ability to take off and p u t on masks as we move from sphere to sphere preserves our autonomy...

...Add one vibrantly alive f a t h e r who apparently treated Kafka with crass insensitivity, one bunch of abiding uncertainties over what to make of his Jewish identity, pepper with morbid f a n t a s i e s , and it seems we have all the makings of a soap opera...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1982 17 frains from t r o t t i n g out the myth of the suffering artist for yet another trite run...

...A second cost comes from Weber: We may live in a rational world, but we know far less about how our own world operates than any primitive man or woman knew about his or hers...

...So it is much to Ronald Hayman's credit that he has taken these unpromising materials and fashioned a graceful biography...

...Joseph K.'s erotic encounters with Leni may be joltingly conc r e t e , but they are nonetheless only encounters...

...And so it is our fate to be living the nightmare Kafka dreamed...

...A reading confining K a f k a ' s thought to bureaucracy would be a 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1982 cramped and confusing reading...

...So for example Gregor Samsa is an insect partly because he cannot negotiate the yawning gap between the demands of his family and those of his job...

...But I don't think we can escape its confines, and we have in Kafka's writing a beautiful portrayal of our plight...

...Kafka is the drama of a man who probed himself relentlessly, ripping away at freshly healed psychic scabs and wrenching forth his a r t with reckless disregard for his health: Always a poor sleeper, he would write far into the night, allowing himself finally to collapse in exhaustion...

...The dog not only ignores men just as men ignore God, but he cannot even master the arcane windings of canine ritual and belief...

...Freud thought there were two classes of such elements: sexual symbols whose definition does not hinge on the i n d i v i d u a l ' s life history, and "navels" of the dream where association goes off in so many overdetermined directions that none can successfully be chased down...