Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories – Edited by Nahum N. Glatzre, 1971 ★★

Kafka: Thinking Outside the Bug

The term “Kafkaesque” is part of our language. What does it mean? This comprehensive collection of Franz Kafka’s short fiction begs more questions than it answers.

One common definition is “darkly surreal.” In “The Metamorphosis,” Kafka’s best-known story and one included in this book, a guy wakes up one morning to discover he is a giant bug. Dark and surreal, right?

But actually reading “The Metamorphosis,” both by itself and as part of this book, forces reconsideration. I found myself time and again struggling not with a writer’s predilection for the dark and surreal, but by his defiant refusal to conform with the broadest parameters of what a story is supposed to be. Kafka’s stories are often not stories at all, but situations. Their weirdness is often more structural than about plot or setting. Stories often wander from one thing to something else.

Take the first tale here, “Description Of A Struggle,” in which our narrator deals with such things as a man who jumps on his back in mid-conversation or watching a retinue of litter-bearers march into a river to drown themselves. Later on, he meditates in a forest:

I lay down on a branch and, leaning my head against the trunk, went hastily to sleep while a squirrel of my whim sat stiff-tailed at the trembling end of the branch, and rocked itself.

Later on, he chats up a companion, referred to throughout the story as “The Acquaintance:”

He interrupted me: “I’m glad I haven’t understood a word you’ve been saying.”

Irritated, I said quickly: “Your being glad about it proves that you have understood it.”

My perplexity puts me in fine company. In an introductory essay tacked onto this volume in 1995, John Updike recommends the reader skip both this and the next story, “Wedding Preparations In The Country” until later, calling them “not merely opaque but repellent.”

But the problem doesn’t go away, not for me. Kafka never feels so utterly random again, yet narrative flow remains stubbornly elusive.

Let’s look at the big man in this line-up, or big bug, “The Metamorphosis.” Here the surrealism is not only expected but conditional to its stature in the world of letters. It’s not so much the surrealism that’s the problem, but the shadowy way it is handled.

For starters, it is unclear what kind of insect our protagonist, Gregor Samsa, becomes. The translation here, by Willa and Edwin Muir, has Gregor awakening one morning to discover himself “a gigantic insect.” Other translations say “some kind of monstrous vermin,” apparently closer in spirit to the original German but suggestive of a big rat, clearly not the situation here. Late in the book, someone calls him “you old dung beetle,” but since she’s a charwoman and not an entomologist, this is roundly dismissed as an inaccurate appellation.

Whatever Gregor is, it’s a problem for him and those who depend on him for sustenance. In the first of its three chapters, Gregor is more embarrassed than horrified, especially when his boss shows up 15 minutes after Gregor fails to show up for work to berate him. Gregor’s abject mortification is amusingly misplaced:

What a fate, to be condemned to work for a firm where the smallest omission at once gave rise to the gravest suspicion!

Once Gregor appears at his doorway, sending the boss away in flight and reducing his mother to tears, the story pulls hard into another direction. Samsa becomes a bug not just in body but mind and soul. His family feeds him scraps but otherwise leave him alone, which suits him. He diverts himself by scampering on the ceiling. At last his family decides they have had enough of him, whereupon he crawls into a dark part of his bedroom and dies. The end.

Franz Kafka as a young man, dapper and handsome. Hardly the image one expects reading his fiction, which is full of social isolation, female rejection, and of course grotesque zoomorphs. Image from http://www.vol1brooklyn.com/2013/06/20/so-you-just-trolled-franz-kafka/.

Sure, it’s surreal, but there’s something more disturbing in its failure to provide any kind of narrative arc. Gregor doesn’t struggle with his condition, he doesn’t even seem to resent it. He just lives aimlessly for a while until Kafka brings the curtain down.

The other notable pieces in this collection take a similarly vexing approach. “The Hunger Artist” is a description of a man making a living as a circus attraction who goes weeks without eating. He takes great pride in this ability but pushes it too far. Many ignore him. Others suspect him of eating on the sly:

…that was in its way the stupidest lie ever invented by indifference and inborn malice, since it was not the hunger artist who was cheating, he was working honestly, but the world was cheating him of his reward.

The situation we get with “In The Penal Colony” is an explorer watching a prisoner be tortured to death for a petty crime. He asks the presiding officer how he knows the prisoner is guilty. “My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted,” the officer replies.

“Penal Colony” is the most Kafkaesque story here in the traditional sense. It’s nightmarishly surreal and even a bit comic in the officer’s fussy fascination for his instrument of torture. You are again dealing with a situation more than a story, but structurally it flows well.

The same can’t be said of the few other works here which Kafka had published in his lifetime. “The Judgment” features a man about to marry who thinks of writing a friend living in Russia, wondering if it will be taken as an affront somehow. He takes up the matter with his father. At first the old man says he is unaware of the friend’s existence. Then he reveals he keeps in close contact with the friend by writing letters about his son’s perfidy, something to this point the story hasn’t hinted at:

“So now you know what else there was in the world besides yourself, till now you’ve known only about yourself! An innocent child, yes, that you were, truly, but still more truly have you been a devilish human being! – And therefore take note: I sentence you now to death by drowning!”

There is a surreal quality to how the son’s slightly odd apprehension about sharing his marital plans with a friend is transformed into a Spanish Inquisition with his father, who comes off as touched in the head yet speaks with the authority of Zeus on high. Updike in his essay notes Kafka’s ability to tap “a sensation of anxiety and shame whose center cannot be located and therefore cannot be placated;” this is in evidence here and throughout the book.

Kafka’s merit is hard to judge from this book alone. Most of his writings were never published in his lifetime, and he ordered friends to destroy his papers after his death. Because of this, what survives are often partial manuscripts, rough drafts, or even just outlines. A short piece called “Eleven Sons” winds up being a man’s static account of his 11 sons and the various ways they disappoint him. Kafka reportedly planned to develop this into a novel, but it never came to be.

How would other famous writers fare if more than half their available oeuvre consisted of scraps and fragments?

I also felt at times a victim of muddy translation. For example, the short piece “Unhappiness” is a first-person account of a man abed in his apartment when a young girl enters and begins speaking with him. She’s later described by a third-party as a ghost, and that seems to be Wikipedia’s version as well, but in the Muirs’ translation, she’s only described in passing as being “like a ghost,” suggesting a wispy-but-corporeal child at least while she is present in the story.

For Kafka loyalists, I suspect such muddiness is a feature, not a bug. The elliptical nature of his stories makes food for thought. Moreover, it serves the unsettled mood Kafka lovers want and expect.

Only once did Kafka hit a sweet spot for me, where he manages to be both elliptical and compelling, not to mention surprisingly accessible. It’s an extremely short piece called “A Fable” I reproduce below in full:

“Alas,” said the mouse, “the world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when at last I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into.” “You only need to change your direction,” said the cat, and ate it up.

I love how this captures a sense of childlike wonder and casual, cosmic cruelty in a single paragraph. I felt my life passing before me reading it.

Though I liked nothing else here half as much as that, there were other good moments. Even the dullest stories offer a clever turn of phrase, or a sympathetic note that sticks. Kafka’s sensitivity survives the ages for me far better than an understanding of what he meant. I suspect he would have liked this, from the evidence given at the end of his story, “The Test”:

He asked me several things, but I couldn’t answer, indeed I didn’t even understand his questions. So I said: “Perhaps you are sorry now that you invited me, so I’d better go,” and I was about to get up. But he stretched his hand out over the table and pressed me down. “Stay,” he said, “that was only a test. He who does not answer the questions has passed the test.”