KAFKAESQUE

- by W H Auden

"Kafka is a great, perhaps the greatest master of the pure parable, a literary genre about which a critic can say very little worth saying. '
'Sometimes in real life one meets a character and thinks, "This man comes straight out of Shakespeare or Dickens," but nobody ever meets a Kafka character. On the other hand, one can have experiences which one recognizes as Kafkaesque, while one would never call an experience of one's own Dickensian or Shakespearian.
'During the war I spent a long and tiring day in the Pentagon. My errand done, I hurried down long corridors eager to get home, and came to a turnstile with a guard standing beside it. 'Where are you going?' said the guard. "I'm trying to get out ," I replied. 'You are out," he said. For the moment I felt I was K. '
'In all previous version of the Quest, the hero knows what he ought to do and his one problem is 'Can I do it?' He must acquire an I. But K is an I from the start, and in this fact alone, that he exists, irrespective of any gifts or deeds, lies his guilt. If the K of 'The Trail' were innocent, he would cease to be K and become nameless... "
"The world of the traditional Quest may be dangerous, but it is open: the hero can set off in any direction he fancies. But the Kafka world is closed; though it is almost devoid of sensory properties, it is an intensely physical world. The objects and faces in it may be vague, but the reader feels himself hemmed in by their suffocating presence: in no other imaginary world, I think, is everything so heavy. To take a single step exhausts the strength. The hero feels himself to be a prisoner and tries to escape but perhaps imprisonment is the proper state for which he was created, and freedom would destroy him."
" It is clear that Kafka did not think of himself as an artist in the traditional sense, that is to say, as a being dedicated to a particular function, whose personal existence is accidental to his artistic productions. If ever there was a man of whom it could be said that he "hungered and thirsted after righteousness," it was Kafka. Perhaps he came to regard what he had written as a personal device he employed in his search for God. "Writing," he once wrote, "is a form of prayer"....
"Kafka may be one of those writers who are doomed to be read by the wrong public. Those on whom their effect would be most beneficial are repelled and on those whom they most fascinate their effect may be dangerous, even harmful.
I am inclined to believe that one should only read Kafka when one is in an eupeptic state of physical and mental health and, in consequence, tempted to dismiss any scrupulous heart-searching as a morbid fuss. When one is in low spirits, one should probably keep away from him, for unless introspection is accompanied, as it always was with Kafka, by an equal passion for the good life, it all too easily degenerates into a spineless narcissistic fascination with one's own sin and weakness."



- W H Auden -

'The I without a Self' in The Dyer's Hand