1

In one of his books, my friend Josef Skvorecky tells a true story. Several years ago, an engineer from Prague was invited to a conference in London. So he went, took part in the proceedings, and returned to Prague. Some hours after his return, sitting in his office, he picked up Rude Pravo – the official daily paper of the Czech Party – and read the following: ‘A Czech engineer, attending a conference in London, has made a statement to the Western press which is slanderous to his socialist homeland, and he has decided to stay in the West.’

Illegal emigration combined with a statement of that kind is no trifle. It would be worth about twenty years in gaol. Our engineer can’t believe his eyes. But there’s no doubt about it, the article refers to him. His secretary, coming into his office, is horrified to see him: ‘My God, you’ve come back! I can’t understand – have you seen what’s been written about you?’

Our engineer has seen fear in his secretary’s eyes. What can he do? He rushes to the Rude Pravo office. He finds the journalist concerned, who offers his excuses, saying that, yes, it is a really awkward business, but that he, the journalist, has nothing to do with it – he got the text of the article direct from the Ministry for the Interior.

So the engineer goes off to the Ministry. There they say yes, of course, it’s all a mistake, but that they, the Ministry, have nothing to do with it: they got the report on the engineer from their intelligence service at the London embassy. The engineer asks for a retraction. No, he’s told, retractions aren’t ever made, but he should rest assured that nothing can happen to him; he need have no worries.

But our engineer is worried. He soon realizes that all of a sudden he’s being closely watched, that his telephone is being tapped and that he’s being followed in the street. He can’t sleep. He has nightmares until, unable to bear the pressure any longer, he takes a lot of real risks to leave the country illegally. And that’s how he became a real émigré.

 

2

The story I’ve just told (an almost banal story for anyone in Prague today) is one that we could immediately call ‘Kafkaesque’. This term, drawn from a work of art and based on a novelist’s images, stands out as the only common denominator of (real and fictional) situations that no other word allows us to apprehend and to which neither political nor social nor psychological science give us any key.

But what is ‘Kafkaesque’? Let’s try to describe some aspects of the phenomenon.

One: Our engineer is confronted by an authority characterized by an unending labyrinth. He can never get to the end of its interminable corridors and will never succeed in finding out who issued the fatal sentence. He is therefore in the same situation as Joseph K. in front of the court, or the surveyor K. before the castle. All three are in a world which is nothing other than a single, huge, labyrinthine institution which they cannot escape and which they cannot understand.

Novelists before Kafka often unmasked institutions as arenas where conflicts between different personal and public interests were played out. In Kafka, however, the institution is a mechanism obeying its own laws. No one knows now who set up those laws, nor when they were set up; they have nothing to do with human interests and are thus unintelligible.

Two: In chapter V of The Castle, the village mayor explains in detail to K. the long history of his file. In short: about ten years before, a village representative proposed that the castle should call in a surveyor. The request was soon found to be groundless and a second petition was sent from the village to the castle to cancel the earlier proposal. Unfortunately, the second file was lost somewhere between the offices and was only found again many years later, just at the time K. received his invitation. So he arrived in the village by mistake. More than that: given that within the logic of the novel the castle and village constitute the only significant universe, K.’s whole existence is a mistake.

In the Kafkaesque world, the file has the role of a platonic ideal. It represents true reality, while man’s physical existence is only a shadow thrown on to the screen of illusions. And in fact the surveyor K. and our engineer from Prague are but the shadows of their filing cards; and they are still much less than that: they are the shadows of a mistake in the file, shadows without even the right to exist as shadows.

But if man’s life is only a shadow and if true reality lies elsewhere, in the realm of the inaccessible, or the inhuman or the superhuman, then we enter directly the domain of theology. Indeed, Kafka’s first interpreters explained his novels as religious parables.

This kind of interpretation seems to me to be wrong (because it sees allegory where Kafka grasped the concrete situations of human life) but also revealing: wherever authority renders itself god-like, it automatically produces its own theology; wherever it behaves like God, it arouses religious feelings towards itself; such a world can be described in theological terms.

Kafka did not write religious allegories, but the Kafkaesque (in reality, in fiction) is inseparable from its theological (or rather: pseudo-theological) dimension.

Three: Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov cannot bear the weight of his guilt and, to find peace, consents of his own free will to his punishment. It’s the well-known situation of the fault seeking the punishment.

In Kafka, the logic is reversed. The punished does not know the reason for the punishment. The absurdity of the punishment is so unbearable that to find peace the person accused needs to find a justification for his penalty: punishment seeks the fault.

Our engineer from Prague is punished by intensive police surveillance. This punishment calls out for a crime that was not committed, and the engineer accused of emigrating ends up emigrating in fact. The punishment finds the fault in the end.

Not knowing what the charges against him are, K., in chapter VII of The Trial, decides to examine his whole life, his entire past ‘down to the smallest details’. The mechanism of ‘self-accusation’ – the psychological mechanism that implants a feeling of guilt in an innocent person – has been put into motion. I would call this mechanism ‘culpabilization’. The accused seeks his crime.

One day, Amalia in The Castle receives an obscene letter from a castle official. She tears it up in outrage. The castle doesn’t even need to criticize Amalia’s rash behaviour. Fear (the same fear our engineer saw in his secretary’s eyes) acts all by itself. Without any order or noticeable signal from the castle, everyone avoids Amalia’s family as if it were infected with the plague.

Amalia’s father tries to defend his family. But there is a problem: not only is the maker of the judgement unfindable, but the judgement itself does not exist! To appeal, to request a pardon, you have to be convicted first! The father begs the castle to proclaim the crime. It’s an understatement to say that the punishment seeks the crime. In this pseudo-theological world, the punished beseech recognition of their guilt!

It often happens in Prague nowadays that a disgraced person cannot find even the smallest job. He asks in vain for certification of the fact that he has committed a crime and that his employment is forbidden. The judgement is nowhere to be found. And since in Prague work is a duty laid down by law, he ends up being charged with ‘scrounging’; that means he is guilty of avoiding work. The punishment finds the crime.

Four: The story of our engineer from Prague is like a humorous story, a joke: it provokes laughter.

Two gentlemen, perfectly ordinary chaps (not ‘inspectors’ as some translations would have us believe) surprise Joseph K. in bed one morning, tell him he is arrested, and eat his breakfast for him. K. is a well-disciplined civil servant: instead of throwing the men out of his flat, he stands in his nightgown and gives a lengthy self-defence. When Kafka read the first chapter of The Trial to his friends, everyone, including the author, laughed.

Philip Roth imagined a film version of The Castle: he saw Groucho Marx playing the surveyor K., with Chico and Harpo as his two assistants. Yes, he was quite correct: comedy is inseparable from the very essence of the Kafkaesque.

But it’s small comfort to the engineer to know that his story is funny. He is trapped in the joke of his own life like a fish in a bowl, and he doesn’t find it funny. Of course a joke is only a joke if you’re outside the bowl; the Kafkaesque takes us inside, into the innards of a joke, into the horror of comedy.

In the world of the Kafkaesque, comedy is not a counterpoint to tragedy as in Shakespeare; it’s not there to make the tragic more bearable by lightening the tone; it doesn’t accompany the tragic, not at all: rather it destroys it in the egg and deprives the victims of the only consolation they could hope for – the consolation deriving from the (real or supposed) grandeur of tragedy. The engineer loses his homeland, and everyone laughs.

 

3

There are periods of modern history when life resembles the novels of Kafka.

As soon as the philosopher Karel Kosik was accused of counter-revolutionary activities and expelled from Charles University, crowds of admiring young women besieged his small flat in Castle Square. Kosik (‘Professor K. K.’ to his friends) had never been a playboy or a ladies’ man; and the complete change in his sex life after the Russian invasion prompted me to question a hairdresser in love with him. Half joking, half serious, she told me: ‘All defendants are handsome.’

That was a direct and conscious allusion to Leni, in The Trial, who uses those words to explain her erotic interest in the clients of the lawyer Huld, for whom she works. Max Brod cites this passage in support of the religious interpretation of Kafka: K. becomes more handsome because he begins to understand his fault; penitence gives him beauty. The hairdresser would have laughed if she’d had this theory put to her. ‘Professor K. K.’ was beautiful without the slightest penitence.

I mention my dearest friend only to demonstrate the extent to which the images, situations and even the individual sentences of Kafka’s novels are part of life in Prague.

Having said that, one might be tempted to think that Kafka’s images are alive in Prague because they are anticipations of totalitarian society.

However, that claim requires correction: the notion of the Kafkaesque is not a sociological or a political one. Attempts have been made to explain Kafka’s work as a critique of industrial society, of exploitation, alienation, of bourgeois morality – of capitalism, in a word. But there is almost nothing of what constitutes capitalism in Kafka’s universe: money is absent, as is the power of money, together with trade, wage-employment, property, owners, and the class struggle.

The Kafkaesque does not correspond to a definition of totalitarianism either. The party, ideology and its jargon, politics, the police and the army are all equally missing from Kafka’s works.

We should rather say that the Kafkaesque represents one elementary potentiality of man and his world, a potentiality that is not historically determined and which accompanies man more or less eternally.

But these corrections have not dealt with the questions how it is possible that in Prague Kafka’s novels merge with real life and why young hairdressers quote lines from The Trial to make sense of their desire. And how is it possible for the same novels to be read in Paris as the hermetic expression of an author’s entirely subjective world-view? Does this mean that the potentiality of man and his world that is called Kafkaesque is more easily realized in concrete terms in Prague than in Paris?

There are tendencies in modern history which produce the Kafkaesque in the broader dimensions of society: the progressive concentration of power, increasing its propensity to self-deification; the bureaucratization of social activity, transforming all institutions into unending labyrinths; and, resulting from this, a growing dehumanization of the individual.

Totalitarian states, as extreme concentrations of these tendencies, have brought out the close relationship between Kafka’s novels and real life. But if this relationship cannot easily be seen in the West, it’s not only because democratic societies are less Kafkaesque than Prague today. It is also, it seems to me, because over here, inevitably, the sense of the real has been lost.

In fact democratic societies are also familiar with the processes of dehumanization and bureaucratization; the entire planet has become the theatre of such processes. Kafka’s novels represent them in an imaginary, dreamlike hyperbole; a totalitarian state represents them in a prosaic and concrete hyperbole.

But why was Kafka the first novelist to grasp these trends, which impinged, explicitly and brutally, on the course of History, however, only after the novelist’s death?

 

4

There are no essential traces of Franz Kafka’s political interests. In that sense, he is a case apart from all his Prague friends, from Max Brod, Frans Werfel, Egon Erwin, and from all the avant-garde movements which, claiming to know the meaning of History, indulge in conjuring up the face of the future.

So how is it that it is not their works, but those of their solitary, introverted companion, preoccupied with his own life and his art, which can be received today as a socio-political prophecy, and are banned for that very reason in large parts of the world?

I thought of this mystery one day after I had witnessed a domestic scene in the family of an old friend of mine. The woman friend in question had been arrested in 1951 during the Stalinist trials in Prague, and convicted of crimes she hadn’t committed. Hundreds of Communists were in the same situation at that time. All their life they had identified themselves entirely with their Party. When it suddenly became their prosecutor, they agreed like Joseph K. ‘to examine their whole life, their entire past, down to the smallest details’ to find the hidden fault and, in the end, to confess to imaginary crimes. My friend managed to save her own life because she had the extraordinary courage to refuse to undertake (as her comrades undertook) the ‘search for her fault’. Refusing to assist her persecutors, she became unusable for the final show trial. So instead of hanging she got away with life imprisonment. After fifteen years she was completely rehabilitated, and released.

This woman had a one-year-old child when she was arrested. On release from prison she thus found a sixteen-year-old son, and had the joy of sharing her lonely, modest life with him from then on. That she became passionately attached to the boy is entirely comprehensible. When I went to see them one day, her son was already twenty-six. The mother, hurt and angry, was crying. The cause was utterly trivial – the son had overslept, or something like that. I asked the mother: ‘Why get so upset over such nonsense? Is it worth crying over? Aren’t you overdoing it?’

It was the son who answered for his mother: ‘No, my mother’s not overdoing it. My mother is a splendid, brave woman. She resisted when everyone else cracked. She wants me to become a real man. It’s true, I overslept, but what my mother reproaches me for is something much deeper. It’s my attitude. My selfish attitude. I want to become what my mother wants me to be. And with you as witness, I promise her I will.’

What the party never managed to do with the mother, the mother had managed to do to her son. She had forced him to identify himself with an absurd accusation, ‘to seek his fault’, to make a public confession. I looked on, dumbfounded, at this scene from a Stalinist mini-trial, and I understood all at once that the psychological mechanisms engaged in great (apparently incredible and inhuman) historical events are the same as those which regulate (quite ordinary and human) domestic situations.

 

5

The celebrated letter that Kafka wrote and never sent to his father shows very well that he derived his knowledge of the guilt-inducing techniques, which became a major theme of his fiction, from the family, from the relationship between the child and the deified power of the parents. In ‘The Judgement’, a short story intimately bound up with the author’s experience of his family, the father accuses the son and commands him to drown himself. The son accepts his fictitious guilt and throws himself into the river as submissively as, in a later work, his successor Joseph K., convicted by a mysterious organization, has his own throat cut. The similarity between the two charges, the two inducements of guilt and the two executions, reveals the link which runs unbroken from Kafka’s domestic, familial ‘totalitarianism’ to his great social visions.

Totalitarian society, especially in its more extreme versions, tends to abolish the boundary between public and private domains. Authority, as it grows ever more opaque, requires the lives of citizens to be entirely transparent. The ideal of life without secrets corresponds to the ideal of the exemplary family: a citizen does not have the right to hide anything at all from the Party, or the State, just as a child has no right to keep a secret from his father or his mother. Totalitarian societies project an idyllic smile in their propaganda: they want to be seen as ‘one big family’.

It’s often been said that Kafka’s novels express a passionate desire for community and human contact; it seems that the rootless being who is K. has a single goal – to overcome the curse of solitude. This interpretation is not only facile and reductive, it also turns sense on its head.

The surveyor K. is not in the least out to win people over, does not seek warmth and does not want to become ‘a man among men’, like Sartre’s Orestes. He wants acceptance not from a community but from an institution. To have it, he must pay a high price: he must renounce his solitude. This then is his hell: he is never alone, the two assistants sent by the castle follow him always. When he first makes love with Frida, the two men are there, sitting on the cafe counter over the lovers, and from then on are never absent from the lovers’ bed.

Not the curse of solitude, but the violation of solitude, is Kafka’s obsession!

Karl Rossemann is for ever disturbed by everyone else. His clothes are sold; his only snapshot of his parents is taken away; in the dormitory, beside his bed, boys fight and now and again fall on top of him; two hooligans, Robinson and Delaroche, force him to live with them, so that big Brunelda’s sighs thunder through his sleep.

Joseph K.’s story also begins with the raping of privacy: two unknown men come to arrest him in bed. From that day on, he never feels alone: the court follows him, watches him, talks to him; his private life disappears bit by bit, swallowed up by the mysterious organization on his heels.

Lyrical souls who like to preach the abolition of secrets and the transparency of private life do not realize what is the nature of the process they are unleashing. The starting-point of totalitarianism resembles the beginning of The Trial: you’ll be taken unawares in your bed. They’ll come just like your father and mother used to.

People often wonder whether Kafka’s novels are projections of the author’s most personal and private conflicts, or descriptions of an objective ‘social machine’. What is Kafkaesque is not restricted either to the private or to the public domain: it encompasses both. The public is the mirror of the private, the private reflects the public.

 

6

When I refer to microsocial practices which generate the Kafkaesque, I think not only of family life but also of the organization in which Kafka spent all his adult life: the office.

Kafka’s heroes are often seen as allegorical projections of the intellectual, but there’s nothing intellectual about Gregor Samsa. When he wakes up metamorphosed into a beetle, his one worry is: in this new state, how to get to the office on time. In his head he has nothing but the obedience and discipline to which his profession has accustomed him. He’s a functionary, a clerk, an employee as are all Kafka’s characters, an employee not just in the sense of a sociological type (as in the manner of a writer like Zola), but as a human potentiality, as an attitude, as a way of grasping the world.

In this bureaucratic world there is no initiative, no invention, no freedom of action, there are only orders and rules: it is the world of obedience.

Also, the bureaucratic clerk carries out a small part of a larger administrative action whose aim and horizons he cannot see: it is the world where gestures have become mechanical and where people do not know the meaning of what they do.

Finally, the bureaucratic clerk deals only with nameless persons and with files: it is the world of the abstract.

To place a novel in this world of obedience, of the mechanical and the abstract, where the only human adventure is to move from one office to another, seems to run counter to the very essence of epic poetry. Thus the question: how has Kafka managed to metamorphose such dull, grey and anti-poetical material into entrancing fictions?

The answer can be found in a letter the novelist wrote to Milena: ‘The office is not a stupid institution; it’s more in the realm of the fantastic than the stupid.’ The sentence conceals one of Kafka’s greatest secrets. He saw what no one could see: not only the capital importance of the bureaucratic phenomenon for man, for his condition and for his future, but also (even more surprisingly) the poetic potential contained in the fantastic aspect of the office organization.

But what does it mean: bureaucracy belongs to the realm of the fantastic?

Our engineer from Prague would understand. A mistake in his file propelled him to London; so he wandered around Prague as a veritable phantom, seeking his lost body, while the offices he visited seemed like an interminable labyrinth from some unknown mythology.

Thanks to the fantastic he saw in the bureaucratic world, Kafka succeeded in doing what had seemed unimaginable before: he transformed the profoundly anti-poetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel; he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job (which is, in fact, all the story of The Castle) into myth, into epic, into unknown beauty.

By his expansion of a bureaucratic setting to the gigantic dimensions of a universe, Kafka succeeded, without suspecting it for a moment, in creating an image which fascinates by its resemblance to a society that the novelist never knew and that is Prague today.

A totalitarian State is in fact a single, immense administration; and since all work in it is nationalized, everyone in every trade is an employee. A worker is not a worker, a judge is not a judge, a shopkeeper is not a shopkeeper, a priest is not a priest, but all are functionaries of the State. ‘I belong to the court,’ the priest says to Joseph, in the cathedral. Kafka’s lawyers also work for the court. No one in Prague today is surprised by that. No one would get a better defence counsel than K. because, over there, lawyers do not work for defendants, but for the court.

 

7

In a cycle of one hundred quatrains which explore the gravest and most complex areas with an almost childlike simplicity, the great Czech poet Jan Skacel writes:

Poets don’t invent poems
The poem is somewhere behind
It’s been there for a long long time
The poet discovers it only.

For the poet, writing thus means breaking down a wall behind which something immutable (the ‘poem’) lies hidden in darkness. That’s why, with this sudden unveiling, the ‘poem’ strikes us first as blinding light.

I read The Castle for the first time when I was fifteen and the book will never envelop me as fully again, even though all the vast understanding it contains (all the real import of the Kafkaesque) was not comprehensible to me at that time: but I was blinded by light.

Later on, my eyes adjusted to the light of the poem and I began to see my own lived experience in what had dazzled me; but the light hasn’t disappeared.

‘The poem,’ says Jan Skacel, has been waiting for us, immutable, ‘for a long long time.’ However, in a world of perpetual change, is the immutable not a mere illusion?

No, it isn’t. Any situation that is of man’s doing can only contain what is contained in man; thus one can imagine that the situation (and all its metaphysical implications) has existed as a human potentiality ‘for a long long time’.

But in that case, what does History (the non-immutable) represent for the poet?

In the eyes of the poet, strange as it may seem, History is in a position similar to the poet’s own: History invents nothing, it discovers. In new situations, History reveals what man is, what has been in him ‘for a long long time’, what his potentialities are.

If the poem is already there, then it would be illogical to grant the poet the gift of foresight: no, he ‘only discovers’ a human potentiality (the ‘poem’ that has been there ‘a long long time’) that History will in its turn discover one day.

Kafka made no prophecies. All he did was to see what was ‘somewhere behind’. He did not know that his seeing was also foreseeing. He had no intention of unmasking a social system. He illuminated the mechanisms he knew from private and microsocial human practice, not suspecting that later developments would put those mechanisms into action in the great theatre of History.

The hypnotic eye of authority, the desperate search for one’s own fault, exclusion and the anguish of being excluded, being condemned to conform, the ghostliness of reality and the magical reality of the bureaucratic file, the perpetual violation of private life, etc. – all these experiments which History has performed with man in its great laboratory, Kafka performed (some years earlier) in his novels.

There will always be something mysterious about the confluence of the real world of totalitarian states and Kafka’s poems, and it will always bear witness to the poet’s act being, in its very essence, incalculable – and paradoxical: the enormous social, political and ‘prophetic’ import of Kafka’s novels lies precisely in their ‘uncommittedness’, that is to say in their total autonomy from all political programmes, ideological concepts and futurological prognoses.

Indeed, if instead of seeking ‘the poem’ hidden ‘somewhere behind’, the poet ‘commits’ himself to the service of a truth known from the outset (which offers itself as truth and lies ‘before us’), then he has renounced the mission proper to poetry. And it matters little whether the preconceived truth is called revolution or dissidence, Christian faith or atheism, whether it is more correct or less correct; a poet who serves any truth other than the truth to be discovered (which is blinding light) is a false poet.

If I hold so firmly to the inheritance of Kafka, if I defend it as my personal inheritance, it is not because I think it useful to imitate the inimitable (and to discover again the Kafkaesque) but because it is such a formidable example of the radical autonomy of the novel (of the poetry that is the novel). Thanks to that autonomy, Franz Kafka (or the great, forgotten Hermann Broch) has told us things about our human condition (as it reveals itself in our age) which no sociological or political reflection will ever be able to tell.