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Book: Franz Kafka: Complete stories

This a kind of book everyone has to have in their house; Kafka is, no doubt, one of the most influential, intriguing and exciting figures of literature. Czech writer who wrote in German (to be exact, citizen of Austro-Hungarian empire), insurance clerk, passionate observer of early, silent cinema, Jew, citizen of Austro-Hungarian empire in time of rising anti-Semitism, Kafka inhabited dark corners of human mind better than any other writer. No wonder, 'cause he had such model in himself. Suffering from the inferiority complex forced on him by his obtrusive father, thus leaning to self-destruction, paranoiac, Kafka was still very analytic observing there states of mind in his stories. His more compulsive, orgiastic bursts of self-destruction, he left mostly for his diary that is today read and analyzed as much as his stories. Yet being sensitive and compassionate, Kafka's stories were often ruthless because he felt the need to write about his fears, not about his joys.

Collected stories, of course, don't contain two of his masterwork novels, "The Trial" and "The castle"; both trembled by the sense of inevitability, of rushing into disaster. In "The Trial", Josef K. is being trialed for an unknown crime and his first reluctance to take the whole situation seriously, is as if he's realizing the real nature of this court: that there is no crime, no charges and no evidences; the only method of this court is to convince him that he's guilty, to which he'll come to a death row with his own free and without asking question. As the trial goes on, K. is affected, and as he starts taking the trial more seriously, his doom is inevitable. Eventually, yes, he starts believing that he is guilty even thou still not knowing for what crime. In one later scene, a priest tells him a story of a man who is waiting in front of the door with a guard; waiting for years to be allowed inside, near the end of his life, man finds out that, not only he could go inside whenever he wanted, but those doors were his, placed specially for him. Does a man have enough self-confidence to make that leap, risking being killed by guard? Kafka thinks not; he believes that guilt is a feeling deeply rooted into human, though we don't even know the guilt of what. People often interpret "The Trial" as the critique of totalitarian regime, that's even the interpretation I was taught in school. But this is a wrong, simplified, cheapening interpretation, rare one that we can actually dismiss as incorrect; first of all, "The Trial" is too detached of any model from reality to be seen that way: to regime works like this. The court from "The Trial" isn't oppressive, not even aggressive. Inevitability of K.'s downfall is due to his mental state, not due to court's actions. "The Trial" is, before all, picture of his mental state, and court is just an outside agens that pushes him in the certain direction. "The Trial" in German means 'trial' and 'process', and this second meaning points to that K.'s conviction is rather a process than a single event.

"The Castle" is simpler in basic idea. This time, K. Is trying to reach mysterious ruler who lives in a castle above the village, but the barrier, although invisible, seems impenetrable. Again, there is sense of inevitability in the fact that it's clear that K. Won't reach the castle, but conclusions aren't there since "The Castle" remained unfinished; Kafka died before finishing it.

Some say that "The Trial" is a metaphor of life, while "The Castle" is metaphor of religion; this is one possible interpretation: in "The Trial", you are dead when you give up caring and fighting; in "The Castle", you never see but you never doubt the existence either.

Third novel, "America" , or "The disappeared" as Kafka originally named it, also can't be found in this collection. It's Kafka's only humoristic work a look at America through eyes of an average European, as a scary, mystic place, and Kafka easily satirized that provincial view. Even though "America" is, just like "The Castle", unfinished, it is, too, considered a classic.

Kafka was, too, one of writers with the most interesting biography. His diaries, full of horrible, suicidal imagery, as he describes his countless imagined deaths; his never sent letter to father is torturous, as Kafka hovers around the father's guilt, willing to bring them all out in sight but never quite able to fully take his own side. In one way or the other, Kafka's love/hate relation with his parent and dilemmas that come out of it, are illustrative of average modern man.

Now subject of legend, act in which Kafka requested from his friend Max Brod to burn all his scripts after his death. Kafka died of tuberculosis In 1924 and Brod didn’t obey his last will. Instead, he approached to a massive, tedious editorial work of putting Kafka's scripts together, one that made one lesser known half-amateur writer into one of the greatest writers of all times.

This act of Max Brod was, again, a subject of discussion: did he have right to act the way he did? How much of novels that were published were really the way Kafka intended them? There are lapses of Continuity in season changes in "Trial" that make some analyzers think that the order of chapters was not the one Kafka intended. Some go so far to claim that Brod added his own chapters and stories to Kafka's opus; and, of course, there is a movement of re-editing and re-issuing novels into something supposedly closer to Kafka's intentions. True is that Brod, encountered with bookcases of writing, had to apply some creative freedom in putting it all together. But who other than Kafka's closest friend could know best what Kafka actually had in mind? True is that, if it wasn't for Brod, most of Kafka's best work would end up destroyed. True, some of famous stories like "The Metamorphosis", "The Judgment", "In the Penal Colony", were published during his life, and there are certain unpublished stories that Kafka still wanted spared, such as "A Hunger Artist", but others like "The Burrow" would be lost forever. And then, there is Borgues' argument: "if he really wanted them destroyed, wouldn't he have done it himself?" Ironically, a certain amount of Kafka's writing, siding in the house of his lover Dora Diamond, was destroyed when Gestapo busted into her apartment, fulfilling his last wish.

First story from the book, "Description of a Struggle", is far from what we'd expect. Brutal, extravagant story of surreal imagery, it still bears beginnings of what made Kafka great: namely it's as if most of the story resides in main character's head, as if events around him are affected by his state of mind, thus often unexpected, irrational and dreamlike. Story tells about his unintended journey with a friend he just met on a party; but he soon leaves intriguing hate/attraction/jealousy/fear relation with his friend behind and wades into a series of digressive battles with inanimate objects, until it culminates in encounter with a strange human whose physical state doesn't even resemble human, and his Zen-like philosophy. Unfinished and never published, this story was probably abandoned in process; parts of it were later published during Kafka's life as separate stories and, with its digressive nature, it seems possible that Brod put more stories in one. However, it is visible why Kafka never published this story: his first writing effort, it bear no perfection and concentration of his later work and it's worth mostly as a curiosity, as a display of Kafka's literary growth.

Lots of Kafka's shortest stories represent a mindflow, starting from some mundane topic that quickly and inevitably turns into unexpected vision of the world, through series of paranoid but somehow logical and inevitable conclusions. It is, perhaps, alternative thinking that we all posses, but keep at the back of the head. In any case, Kafka formed basics of modern paranoia phenomenon, perhaps followed the best (or at least in the most clever, self-ironic way) in worldwide conspiracies prose of great postmodernist Thomas Pinchon.

One of the most fascinating stories of that king, "A Country Doctor", has a dream-like quality: have you ever has a dream where you are awaiting for something to happen and, even though you're terrified of it, it is inevitably stumbling upon you, you can't stop it, you're even unable to try.

"A Country Doctor" has this feel: at the beginning, as the old dirty pillager is trying to trade his horse (a horse that doctor desperately needs to drive to a patient) for doctor's young housemaid, doctor is found riding a wild horse through the wood before he even got to reply to the offer. Then the patient seems to be a hypochondriac, but his family looks at the doctor with such expectation, that they almost seem happy when he finds a gapping wound on patient's side. He's thrown into a bizarre ritual, as villagers expect him to be more than a doctor, to be a tribal magician who miraculously cures wounds. It is not surprising that the escape seems a more appropriate solution than attempt at healing a patient, and at the end, doctor is chased through the wood, while everything he knows boils into a gothic nightmare. But as always with Kafka we feel that his topic is the state of mind, that this world is inside a head.

"Transformation" may be Kafka's best known story; in starts with perhaps the most notorious first sentence ever: "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect...". Nowadays, this sentence is quoted as a scholar example of quick, swift introduction in a setup. It takes no more than one sentence for Kafka to set the stage, and he puts hid strangest premise in that first sentence; the rest of the story are consequences of the first sentence, in a social, crudely realistic environment. In first sentence, Kafka lets us know that he's not interested in hows and whys of the transformation. He cuts every explanation with the period of that sentence. He is interested in how this giant bug can live in this world, what changes in it's perspective of the world and in world's perspective of it, mental and emotional processes.

This is a story about the feel of being useless, excessive. Gregor, once a supporter of the family, is now a burden to them; a presence that they have to put up with, out of mercy and, perhaps, remains of the family love. And indeed, when Gregor dies, it is a new beginning for his family, pictured in his sister's mature youth, described in last sentence, a beginning of grown-up life.

This was a first of a string of stories in which Kafka assumed the shape of an animal, a part of his self-depreciating wish to disappear. "Transformation" contains lengthy descriptions of Gregor trying to take control of his movements or to do some usual actions using his bug limbs. No doubt, Kafka got a kick of imagining how a bug would act if it was equipped with sense. Later, he will turn himself into a monkey ("A Report to an Academy"), a dog ("Investigations of a Dog"), a mouse ("Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse folk"), a mol ("The Burrow").

It is interesting to read the story "Blumfeld, An Elderly Bachelor", that was abandoned soon after he started it. As it describes title character who is inexplicably being followed by two bouncing ping-pong balls, we can see the intention in describing the rejection by the world. It is, however, not surprise that Kafka rejected this idea soon, and wrote "The Metamorphosis" instead.

Particularly unpleasant story, "The Judgment" was emotionally torturous for Kafka as his first attempt to deal with his father, but also for his character, Georg. Georg, soon to be married, cannot enjoy as he is eaten inside by a guilt of leaving his father (though his father still seems capable of taking care of himself), which he transfers to a guilt for not informing his old friend of his marriage. But real reasons come to daylight as his father insanely preaches to him, while Georg has no strength to talk back; all he can do is hope that his father would fall down and crush like an egg. Father sentences him to death and he obeys the command. That is the guilt that Kafka is talking about in "The Trial" too; one you can not get away from, as you don't even know what you're guilty for. You have to face it and accept living guilty - or die.

"In the Penal Colony", unusual story of very violent imagery, describe machine intended for punishing convicts of even the smallest crimes, that carries The punishment by carving words of the sentence into convict's skin until he dies. An enthusiastic general attempts to demonstrate the machine to a foreign traveler, describing every segment of machine's work with great proud. But realizing that not traveler, nor anyone else, shares his enthusiasm, he decides that it's only right to use machine on him, carving words 'be righteous". But he doesn't get that satisfaction, as the machine starts malfunctioning, stabbing him into a bloody pulp with its writing needles, and finally leaving him hanging under the pit.

Is Kafka talking about impossibility of reaching a justice? Or about human urge of self-destruction? I can hardly tell; although of fascinating brutality, this story is of the most enigmatic of his, at least to me.

"A Hunger Artist", essential meditation on the topic of being unadjusted, tells of an artist who specializes in being hungry, and there is, no doubt, irony in this twist of the old "starving artist" cliché, but that's not the point; at first, starving artist is popular, many people come to see him starving; later, his glory fades and he's thrown into a marginal circus where he quietly breaks records in starving duration. Yet, nobody knows that he simply has to starve as he never found any food that he'd like. He is forced into his art by his outworldly nature.

Earlier story, "First Pain", tells of another artist, trapezist who can only live in air. It is easy to recognize first ideas of what will soon became "A Hunger Artist".

"The Great Wall of China" tells a story of building the title wall, from the viewpoint of an engineer, the people's man. His narration concerns details of the strategy of building the wall and how it affected people's moral, then later wonders to talk about the curious relation between villages far out in the south and their government, more personified than really present in that part of the empire.

It is interesting, concerning details of building the Chinese Wall, that many of them, pure product of Kafka's imagination, turned out to be true in some of recent historic findings.

Lastly, as I said, Kafka wrote numerous stories in which he put himself into a skin of an animal; most of them were concentrating on supposed mindflow of an animal, and Kafka seemed to be so amused with these extrapolations that he wrote these stories unusually long and monotonous. The most notable one, again unfinished, "The Burrow", tells of a mole; mole is building it's home in the ground, making it quiet, enjoyable, as secluded by the world as possible, enjoying it's every little pit and food stash. Building of it seems so tedious that it seems likely that mole enjoys the future security that it'll give, more than the one it's giving now. But paranoia kicks in again, and the mole hears noises, scratching behind the wall, digging, underground steps, awaits for arrival of the unknown creature and never actually gets to enjoy in it's burrow. Not without fear. This is one of the rare Kafka's works written in first person.

Franz Kafka is fascinating writer, both in his pseudo-detached style and in his deep self-psychoanalysis. While "Letter to his father", usually published with selected diary entries, is a curia for fans and those who want to understand Kafka's person better (and, in the end, for curious people), three of his novels and “Complete stories" round up this small but fascinating collection.

posted by Srdjan @ 1:06 AM