Literary Research / Recherche littéraire, nos. 39-40, 2003

LR/RL

Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 20.39-40 (2003): 424-427

Michael Wood, Franz Kafka. Plymouth: Northcote House Publishers/"Writers and Their Work," 2003; viii+104 pp.; ISBN: 0746307950; $22.45

In the strong tradition of wrong etymology, "moral" derives from "more"; in another tradition, less means more and from "less" derives "lesson." This circle is, of course, awfully vicious, yet truth comes from booze and a right conclusion may come from wrong premises. It so happens that the above statements may characterize Wood's book on Kafka.

It is not more, not even much (barely 93 pages of text), and has no moral. Instead, it ends rather anticlimactically, with commentaries on three renderings of Kafka, namely, Orson Welles' 1963 film The Trial, the work of Gillian Rose, and Philip Glass's "pocket opera" In the Penal Colony. On the other hand, this booklet contains an overview of all things Kafkaesque, from his complicated identity (a German-speaking Jew in Prague, which is in Austria-Hungary and yet is not, because it is not Vienna and because the empire is crumbling anyway; on the other hand, the son of a Jew, who sometimes would rather not be a Jew and who, most of the times, would rather be someone else's son), to the feeling of uncanniness, to the theme of justice and its confusion, to fatigue and the glimpse to an insomniac utopia. And Wood also offers a lesson, not necessarily in academic writing (for où sont les ennuis d'antan, moral-packed bricks of knowledge?) but definitely in the ethics of reading. His conclusion mimes a return to the cliché, for, after having skimmed the dictionaries and thoroughly looked under Kafkaesque, Kafkan, Kafkian, Kafkaish, he remarks:

What the name Kafka mainly suggests is a kind of rigged labyrinth, a labyrinth inseparable from ideas of oppression and power. This vision is an important part of what Kafka's work presents to us, but, as I hope this book has shown, it would be a little sentimental, even self-righteous, to leave it at that, as if we had no stake in the labyrinth ourselves, or did not know how we had got lost there. (80)

So how guilty should we feel for reading Kafka as if we had never been an insect?

Wood suggests that we get carried away by the experience, and start fantasizing about what it means to be an insect, how this changes one's life, what life was there to change.… Most pragmatically, the reader tries to cope with the situation, to act "naturally," thus following the example of Kafka's characters. We do not see anymore how extraordinary it is to be insect, and that, be it an act of justice or the fulfillment of a dream, it is still [end page 424] pretty weird. The lure into the delusion of normality is, for Wood, the main Kafkaesque technique, which he calls — should we see here the ghost of a famous shrew? — "the taming of the surprise," "the desperate reconstruction of ordinariness, of ordinariness as a last resort" (25). For example, is The Trial a critique of religion or of bureaucracy? A choice must be made in order to make sense of the book, yet any choice would normalize it: strange as it is, the text can be related to one of these familiar realities, and as such, the text can disappear behind our own spiritual or administrative traumas. But what is essential and easily overlooked is precisely the fact that we had to choose between the two, that they are usually not combined, and yet, that one text, one language could have been interpreted in both ways.

Our own reading creates the ordinariness of the book; similarly, Kafka's characters talk so much that the distinction between world and mind becomes questionable: what we are given is not a narration of events but rather the characters' own surprise-taming discourse. The text becomes a sequence of "ordinary" events that is provoked, nevertheless, by a disruption of ordinariness. The world ceases to be factual and becomes relative, or even better, relational.

Wood supports this point by referring to Wittgenstein's "wie es sich verhält," and Gregor Samsa's dream of "die Wiederkehr der wirklichen und selbstverständlichen Verhältnisse"; he concludes: "there are no facts in the German idiom, only connections and proportions" (40). It follows that no "fact" is extraordinary per se, but only in connection with our world, and it can be easily converted into "ordinary" — to the great delight of the authorities — if we construct a new world around this event, a new set of relations that we might call "ordinary." Contrary to what "they" say, this brave new world is not an example of intelligent adaptation to the environment — corpses of many Ks float on the rivers of the ordinary — but one of defeat, a sign of weakness, and a condemnation to death. The shrew should not be tamed, unless one is willing to sleep with a boa wrapped around his neck. And yet, dreaming to pet the world, we do tame it, so often.

So is there any hope for us? Surprisingly for a commentator of Kafka — and let us keep this surprise wild and dangerous! — Wood says that there is. He reaches this conclusion by analyzing The Castle, the only novel which, if Kafka had indeed written the end as he had recounted it to Max Brod (K remains in the village for his whole life; on his deathbed, he receives from the castle the permission to stay in the village), seems to be slightly positive: the door opens a moment before K's death. Yet even before this unwritten end, Kafka seems to indicate a possibility of hope, a help offer from one of the castle officials, an opportunity which tired K misses, but which the ever-[end page 425]wakeful reader notices, while cursing on K's unhealthy sleeping habits. But would K be K, and Kafka Kafka, and Kafka's readers Kafka's readers if this missed opportunity were taken seriously?

Wood seems to suggest that Kafka might have been different from the gloomy prophet of the Holocaust that we came to know, when he places on the front cover of the book the classical image of Kafka, with a melancholy gaze and a perfect hair-part, and on page ii of the book, he shows us "a photograph of young Kafka with a sheep" wearing a charming hat. There are several Kafkas, and several worlds, and Wood engages in altering Leibniz's proposition: we do not live in the best of all possible worlds, but in the most coherent, and the least surprising. We prefer to concentrate on K's sleep because we are used to Kafkaesque fatigue, and we overlook the unheard-of proposal of the castle official. We are better off without miracles.

Yet Kafka embeds precisely this situation in the novel, when he discusses the doom of Amalia's family. Wood points out that what really seems to condemn them is not Amalia's refusal of bureaucratic seduction nor the transgression of the village's morality, which praises women who satisfy the castle's needs, but "their own traumatized relation to their doom" (72), the fact that they never recovered from their fall — which does not mean that the recovery was deemed to be possible. They were doomed because they could not imagine a different world in which they would be — surprisingly — safe and sound, despite their obvious mistake; that is, a world without coherence, where punishment does not necessarily follow the crime — a world of administrative errors by which one can live.

Wood compares himself, in his early readings of The Castle, to the "player in a dangerous game who needs self-defense more than he or she needs morals" (67). Kafka pushes his readers to the edge where they need to fight in order to preserve their world: I am not an insect, although I sometimes feel like one, therefore I can understand Gregor Samsa, and I will prove it to you in a nice paper about pest control in the Austrian-Hungarian empire. But what if, against all hermeneutic odds, I cannot understand Gregor Samsa, because being like is very far from being, because he has nothing to do with all the insectness which I am ready to sense in myself and through which I can make sense of him? This is the moment where the player must debug the text and, unreasonably, let go of his aces:

It is not that "interpretation is nothing but the possibility of error," as Paul de Man elegantly said. It is that the possibility of error, in many cases, is the meaning, and to fail to see how one might be wrong is to fail to see the unalterable richness of the text, the [end page 426] residue of implication that allows us to look back and see what we left behind. Sometimes we do not despair over the text's unalterability — do not despair enough. (44)

Carmen-Mihaela Barbu

University of Western Ontario