FRANZ KAFKA: "A MESSAGE FROM THE PEOPLE"
BARDIN, JOHN FRANKLIN
WRITERS AND WRITING THE NEW LEADER LITERARY SECTION FRANZ KAFKA: "A Message From the People" Review** fry JOHN FRANKUN MtpIN THE PENAL COLONY. SHORT STORIES AND SHORT PIECES. By Franz Kafka....
...This transformation takes place In the first sentence* and the story is the cruel, mercilessly logical development of this premise...
...to Kafka nor would 1 value him as highly as I do if I thought there were...
...That Kafka was aware of the congruence of these two constructions would seem to be obvious to anyone who has read him: almost everything he ever wrote, with the possible exception of the parables which are clearly metaphysical, was expressed in terms of both systems simultaneously...
...Tauber's interpretation of this story is more persuasive than some of his other analyses...
...Herbert Tauber's criticism of Kafka's writings, since it proceeds from a Kierkegaardian thesis (that Kafka intended to express the individual's fruitless struggle to attain an absolute correlation between his subjective and objective experience despite the inscrutability of God and the protean contingencies of Nature), is at many points confused between Kafka's personal dilemma and the dilemma he presents in his work...
...By Herbert Tauber...
...On (he other hand, Franz Kafka might not have been thinking *Just of Israel and of Yahweh's word, but of the mass of Western civilization which, even while attending to its artists, insisti'in finding in their art only the cliches of conventional life...
...Translated by G. Humpreys Roberts and Roger Senhouse...
...That in understanding the forces, both metaphysically and psychoanalytically, that contributed to his inability to function in the world as a paterfamilias,* he did ,not succeed in functioning, js nothing remarkable...
...he becomes less human and more louselike...
...However, the tales he created are imagined, they are not reported...
...He treats of the novels, Amerika, The Trial and The Castle at length, and 1 think his statements about the first novel, Amerika, while over-pedantic are the most successful as criticism of any in the Book...
...Is the power of faith...
...Other elements entered as well—the in-turning, cadential logic of the Talmud, the jurisprudential regard for contingencies, the obfuscations and encumbrances of Hapsburg protocol and the naturalistic respect for experimentally-proven data of the scientist Kafka'* own relationship to all these various currents of the Zeitgeist is the concern of his biographer., The critic should know of them primarily to dismiss ' them...
...TO TAKE ANOTHER of the great stories to be found in the latest volume of Franz Kafka's complete works as translated by Willa and Edwin Muir, The Metamorphosis, and to refer to Mr...
...As Louis Adeane ha* pointed out there are echoes of the heroic birthdeath-rebirth cycle here or in Robert Graves' language the Harrow would be another manifestation of the White Goddess, Erich Fromm might see in the story the yearning of man to sacrifice his liberty for a rigorous authority that cannot be questioned but must be obeyed...
...Franz Kafka had, personally, transcended his own predicament by understanding it...
...So we have no idea what singing Is, and1 Josephine's art doesn't really fit'In with this Idea...
...a a I SUBMIT THAT Mr...
...bibliography...
...old sayings tell of it and there are even songs which have been preserved, which, admittedly, no one can sing any longer...
...All the power of the initial image together with all the representation that devolves logically out of a vermin attempting to regain a human's place in the family bosom adds layer upon layer of meaning to the abstract concept behind the story...
...For The Metamorphosis is next to The Judgment the story of Kafka's with the clearest pathographlc content These stories, early ones, are still attached umbilically to their author's maladjustment in the family and society...
...Even so he ignores the patent sexual significance of the Harrow...
...His relationship to the tradition has been mentioned only when some reference in the Diaries or.in Max Brod's biography to another author such as Kierkegaard or Freud can be used as evidence to bolster the critic's interpretation of a specific work...
...And he insists that the author sings like himself...
...The Songstress, which I take to be a bitter satire of the artist's relationship to society, Kafka writes that the mouse songstress's "voice comes almost like, a message from the people to the Individual...
...it Is just, because Gregor's world does not,, hide any triumphant and - victorious love that such a thing as the metamorphosis is possible, that is, the estrangement is, in itself, as a test, the test that Is not passed...
...Tauber, and say like him that the torture machine in this story symbolizes "the repetition of existence under religious conditions...
...3.75...
...Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir...
...252 pages includinp...
...The creature is ostracized...
...In this remarkable story, an explorer from outer society visits a penal colony, now governed by a progressive commandant, but at which prisoners used to be executed by a weird torture device that slowly cut their sentences into their living bodies as it murdered them...
...in one aspect the plot of The Metamorphosis belongs, and not only formally, to' that genre of legends of the Middle Ages in which love is put to the test by means of an object of disgust Often love succeeds in transforming the object of disgust In the legend of St Julien Hospitator...
...The Penal Colony contains many other stories and pieces, some of them available only in scarce magazines or in the original heretofore...
...his father tries to kill him and eventually even his sister, who had loved him and attempts to love him even as a vermin, is disgusted and he dies...
...The Penal Colony, for example, is certainly about the struggle of man with his environment, as are the rest of Kafka's works...
...Tauber's explanation of it, is to discover further simplification...
...The small family does not know this love triumphant...
...He 1* a frequent contributor to The New Leader Literary Section...
...John Franklin Bardln Is the author of several books printed In England...
...In this story a young traveling salesman who is the sole support of his family wakesv up in bed one morning to discover that he has been changed into a louse...
...Tauber says, "The spiritual premises of this story can most directly be traced to Kafka's special position in his family...
...Evaluation is also ignored by all but the Stalinist critics, who come to Kafka with polemical intent and whose leveling are malicious and absurd...
...IN A STORY.- JOSEPHINE...
...And when the author, going a great step further, dramatizes the stasis of conscious and unconscious forces in his character's consciousness — using as a model his own understanding of the conflict that made his own obsessions — he has severed the stuff of the story from autobiographical phenomena and made it lead an existence of its own...
...When Kafka, in The Judgment, has the father condemn the son to death, the author is only reporting his own Oedipal situation in terms that any patient might use in describing his traumata to his physician...
...The technical criticisms of Kafka is also yet to be written, even though his technique is as revolutionary as Joyce's the exegetical critics seemingly accept the representation of conflicted states of mind that is the basis of Kafka's art as the miraculous achievement of the poet maudit...
...To demonstrate the Harrow, the officer ptaces a prisoner in it, but the officer releases the prisoner and places himself in It when the explorer is horrified by the device...
...He was bound to appear questionable even to himself in the — even if only striven after — uselessness of his world, its lack of connection with the world of his relatives, as compared with the .respect his father enjoyed, which...
...That is the central point...
...the guilt (of the condemned man) is always unquestion' able . . . can never be an individual guilt: it is-r-like Original Sin—the expression of the fact that mankind is in ' the wrong anyhow and can know nothing about justice", .through pain he learns to" know the text, that suffering brings ripeness to experience, the — divine — justice...
...Such behavior is among the more common disorders of the intelligentsia in our time and is of more interest to the analyst than to the reader...
...It is • the written work itself, the words as they exist on the page- and, the associations* they call forth in the critic's mind—-and their relationships to the critic's memory of previous aesthetic experiences — which should be judged, "Since this'work has - its metaphysical and psychoanalytical aspects, it is proper to consider it in terms of Kierkegaard and Freud—but it is Improper to confuse the narrative to be criticized with its author's conation, the abnormalities of his familial situation, his /castration anxiety and imputed sexual aberrations,' As these situations exist in these stories, they should be so treated...
...they should not be treated as" automatic,and uncontrolled projections of the author's own neuroses...
...When, in The Metamorphosis, the author has the son masochisticaly project himself'into the disgusting bug that he thinks his father sees him as, imagination has been at work and has resulted in a symbol with meaningful ambiguity...
...His highest efforts were directed towards an existence that to his father was nothing other than that of the insect in the story...
...A theologian may read into this tale and its central symbol a spiritual parable, as does Mr...
...old singing...
...J So Mr...
...Tauber sees in Josephine a prophet of Israel with mystical significance for the mouse people who have lived so precariously for so long and have somehow survived, although in- doing » they" have only obliterated...
...in the end^asserted Itself again and again...
...Both schools make the essential mistake of reducing the novels and stories to varied applications of a single formula which they say is Kafka's principal statement...
...Mr...
...He makes clear that Josephine's piping is like the piping of all the other mice, that it cannot be called singing although "In the old days of our people there was singing...
...New Haven: Yale University Press...
...love...
...their own identity and even deny that Josephine...
...FRANZ KAFKA'S CRITICS, by concentrating on exegesis, have abandoned their author to the charge of eclecticism...
...Anyone who has read the parables realizes that for Kafka the inability to know God and to measure Nature placed him in a continual crisis of doubt...
...The machine.falls apart as it engraves on the officer the sentence "Be Just...
...the latter is not a good story in consequence and the former is saved only because of the strength of its image...
...Mr...
...AN INTERPRETATION OF HIS WORKS...
...Otherwise, he could not have invented as keen an implement as his representational technique...
...320 pp...
...THIS IS AN INGENIOUS ANALYSIS and I would say that it Is a possible exegesis, but not the exegesis — but then I doubt that there is ever one certain meaning...
...Tauber finds in Kafka only the ideas which he brings to him and wishes to, find in him...
...Most of Kafka interpretations are psychoanalytical ' and metaphysical...
...Tauber invariably wears them-« finally has an effect of obfuscation...
...Tauber attempts, to his credit to fit all his interpretations into one critical whole...
...Like an authoritarian state, the torture machine does offer its victim sops for his hunger and is designed for his illusory comfort while its end is that of total subjugation...
...To interpret this story without mentioning the psychoanalytical aspect is to suppress information...
...The terms they use differ, of course, but the Kierkegaardian view of man's relation to divine authority and the Freudian view of the individual's relation to paternal authority seem to be different ways of talking about the same functional disorder...
...The explorer goes'to see the machine and has It explained to him by an officer who holds with the old commandant's views, that the torture device should still be in use, In the old days the death of a condemned man used to be a gala occasion, people came to see it and brought their families, it served as a moral example...
...singing differs from their own piping...
...The other riches he ignores...
...3.75...
...New Yorjp Schocken Books...
...It seems to me to be equally a horrible and mechanical symbol of man's fate to love woman and to be mangled by her, caught up in her machinations, created and destroyed by her...
...Going through Kafka's works with metaphysical blinders on —Mr...
Vol. 32 • May 1949 • No. 21
