Art by Federica Pescini
Ian Ellison considers Selected Stories: Franz Kafka, translated and edited by Mark Harman (Harvard University Press 2024) and A Cage Went in Search of a Bird: Ten Kafkaesque Short Stories by Ali Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, Tommy Orange, Yiyun Li, Keith Ridgway, Charlie Kaufman, Elif Batuman, Naomi Alderman, Leone Ross, and Joshua Cohen, introduced by Becca Rothfeld
All quotations from the diaries of Franz Kafka are taken from:
Franz Kafka, The Diaries, trans. Ross Benjamin (New York: Schocken, 2024)
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In Kafka’s 1916 short story ‘A Report for an Academy’, the narrator is a monkey named Red Peter who has learned to mimic human behaviour and speech. Early on in the monkey’s tale, he describes where he was held after being hunted and shot in his native land: ‘I found myself in a cage in steerage aboard a Hagenbeck steamer,’ he recalls. ‘It was not a four-sided, barred cage, but only three walls attached to a crate, with the crate itself forming the fourth wall. The whole thing was too low for standing, and too tight for sitting. So, knees drawn and shaking constantly, I crouched, and indeed, since I probably did not want to see anyone at first and only wanted always to be in the dark, I turned towards the crate as the bars behind cut into my flesh.’ Trapped against his will, tormented by the narrow dimensions of his prison, Red Peter nevertheless manages to convey a sense of performance in this distressing recollection, with the wooden planks of the back of his cage forming an actual and proverbial fourth wall, later to be broken. ‘Keeping wild animals safe in this way during this first stage is considered very beneficial, and today, after my own experience, I cannot deny that this is from a human point of view indeed the case,’ he ironically notes. Despite its horrors, there is a certain playful theatricality to the recitation, and the story has, in fact, been staged as a one-person show on numerous occasions.
Kafka’s protagonists, both human and animal, often find themselves caged. One of the last short stories Kafka wrote, ‘A Hunger Artist’ (1922), explores the precarious relationship between a performer and their audience, with the titular artist being locked in a cage by his impresario collaborator to starve himself for public entertainment for forty days. It’s a striking set-up, but only the fact that the Hunger Artist is displayed in an animal cage, as Kafka’s best biographer Reiner Stach notes, is Kafka’s own invention. A common attraction at the circus or fairgrounds around the turn of the century, performances of fasting became less popular in the wake of the deprivations caused by the First World War — as Kafka notes in his opening line, ‘[i]n the last few decades the interest in hunger artists has declined significantly’. The Hunger Artist, nonetheless, remains deeply committed to his art and ends up starving himself far beyond the forty-day limit until he expires, unseen and forgotten, still in his cage. Beyond the artist and the straw he sleeps on and is eventually buried under, the cage itself contains nothing but a sign marking the number of days spent fasting and a ticking clock that slices off the seconds one by one. Art imitates life in this late story that interrogates the relationship between the two, a vexed issue that Kafka’s writing life and literary afterlife continuously grapple with.
Though Kafka’s cause of death would be recorded as cardiac arrest, he had been unable to eat for weeks before his death after the tuberculosis that he was suffering from had spread into his throat. Around midday on 3rd June 1924, Kafka died, weighing around fifty kilograms. His ability to speak in those final months was vastly reduced, too, partly due to his infected larynx and partly due to the direct injections of alcohol into it that his doctors administered. In between curative periods of silence and air baths on the balcony of a sanitorium just outside Vienna, Kafka finished correcting the galley proofs of a collection of short stories also entitled A Hunger Artist, whose publication he would not live to see. His illness, his writing — these were the bars of his own cage.
As the Princeton Kafka scholar Stanley Corngold has suggested, the phrase ‘Kafka’s cage’ would inevitably call to mind ‘the rib cage enclosing friable lungs gasping for clean air.’ Trapped in his own body, trapped in his own mind, Kafka had spent many of the forty years he lived performing his own confinement. In the excellent and exhaustive introduction to his newly translated Selected Stories, Mark Harman refers to the ‘compelling yet also stylized autobiographical persona that Kafka creates in his diaries and letters’. In a diary entry made on 3 January 1912, quite early in his writing life, Kafka asserts that ‘when it had become clear in my organism that writing was the most productive direction of my being, everything thronged there and left empty all the abilities that were directed toward the pleasures of sex, eating, drinking, philosophical reflection music [sic.] first and foremost. I wasted away in all these directions. This was necessary because my powers in their entirety were so slight that only gathered could they halfway serve the purpose of writing.’ For much of his life he felt suffocated by his family situation, particularly thanks to his overbearing father. At times, Kafka almost seems to have willfully caged himself within excessive dietary restrictions and fitness regimes, not to mention strict writing routines, more often than not only once his parents and sisters — whom he lived with until well into his thirties — had gone to bed. Kafka’s job at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute in Prague also kept him so busy during the day that he could almost only ever write at night or when travelling. In these stolen hours, he experienced some bursts of creativity punctuated by lengthy dry spells. Perhaps there is not so much distance between Kafka’s self-performed confinement and the persona he created for himself in his private diaries and in his letters to others. Despite the apparent confines of his family and work lives, or in an attempt to escape these, Kafka nevertheless encaged himself in his literary labours.
During the night of 22nd to 23rd September 1912, Kafka wrote what would become known as his breakthrough story, ‘The Judgement’, in a burst of feverish inspiration that would prove as much a curse as a blessing. ‘Only this way can writing be done,’ he writes in his diary immediately after having completed the story; ‘only with such cohesion, with such complete opening of the body and soul’. Yet this would prove to be an experience Kafka could never recapture, another cage of expectation in which he chose to trap himself.
When ‘A Report for an Academy’ first appeared in Martin Buber’s Berlin-based magazine Der Jude (‘The Jew’) in November 1917, Kafka wrote to Buber to describe the stark experience of reading his own work in print: ‘Always take a deep breath first after outbursts of vanity and smugness. The orgy while reading the story in Der Jude. Like a squirrel in a cage. Bliss of movement. Desperation about confinement, mad persistence, and feeling of misery despite the calm exterior outside. All this both simultaneously and alternatingly, a sunray of bliss still lingering in the excrement of the end’. Curiously, Kafka originally wrote ‘the calm view of the onlooker’ instead of the ‘calm exterior outside’, then crossed this out. He is caged; he feels seen. His creative expression as a writer is published, yet he feels trapped, pinned down, precisely because of this. This torturous dialectic of desperate confinement and mad persistence, the bliss of a story rollicking along and the misery of its ending, would dog Kafka throughout his writing life.
Stach describes such intentional self-confinement and self-restriction as a fundamental element in Kafka’s personal myth: ‘A life in a cell, in a cage, a life that threatened to suffocate by itself. A personal myth buttresses the individual by offering a theory of one’s own history and essence that literally makes sense, but Kafka’s myth came at a high cost.’ In his diary in early 1920, after several years without making any entries, Kafka writes aphoristically in the third person: ‘He would have reconciled himself to a prison. To end as a prisoner – that would be a life’s goal. But it was a barred cage. Indifferently, imperiously, as if at home, the noise of the world streamed out and in through the bars, the prisoner was actually free, he could take part in everything, nothing escaped him outside, he could even have left the cage, the bars were meters apart, after all, he was not even imprisoned. He has the feeling that by being alive he blocks his own way. From this obstruction, he then, in turn, derives the proof that he is alive’. The necessity of being trapped and the freedom to exit your cage seems as irreconcilable a tension as it is intolerable. As Stach notes, he ‘understood that he was keeping watch over himself, that he had the key in his own pocket’. Kafka’s high expectations for his writing constituted deliberate confinement and self-restriction, literary and physical discipline. Yet, ultimately, the consequences of this caged aesthetic existence were meted out in his ascetic lifestyle to the detriment of his health and many personal relationships. Such an intense commitment to art – not unlike that of the Hunger Artist – may perhaps have proved fatal for Kafka.
Yet to say so insists upon a position outside the cage, ‘the calm view of the onlooker’: that of a curious spectator, a gawping child, or one of the butchers in Kafka’s story who are brought in to check the Hunger Artist is not snaffling secreted morsels when nobody is looking. ‘If we regard Kafka from the outside, from the way he thought others saw him, his “attempts at writing” were only one of the many broken radii of the circle of his life, and his degree of success – little in print and a great many failures – did not begin to justify his immense psychological sacrifices,’ as Stach notes. ‘Seen through the bars of his own cell, however, writing was altogether different; it was the only way of proving himself according to his own rules, under a different law, on a different level.’
Kafka’s later fiction is deeply concerned with interrogating artistic vanity and exploring how the audience views the artist, while for Kafka himself the process of writing remained an expression of a desire to be viewed on his own terms – a rejection of artistic vanity. In ‘Josefine the Singer; or the Mouse People’, the final short story Kafka wrote and another that grapples with the vicissitudes of performance, he wrestles playfully with an audience’s perception of the figure or persona of an artistic diva who may or may not be a fraud. Kafka struggled with concerns about artistic vanity until the very end, editing the proofs of the volume this story would appear in on his deathbed, with the key to his cage in his pocket all the while.
The story ‘A Hunger Artist’ is one of a small number of Kafka’s very late writings to be included in Mark Harman’s wonderful new translation collection. Harman already has several notable Kafka renditions under his belt: his award-winning 1998 translation of Kafka’s final and unfinished novel The Castle – the German title of which (‘das Schloß’) also means lock, a cagey double-meaning in a book that lacks any interpretive key to unlock it, which Kafka plays with at several points during the novel. There is also Harman’s 2008 version of Amerika: The Missing Person, otherwise known as The Man Who Disappeared, or simply America, Kafka’s first, abandoned attempt at novel writing. Presented chronologically, Selected Stories is a useful introduction to the preoccupations and the progress of Kafka’s writing. Its first sixty-odd pages comprise Harman’s own detailed, scholarly, yet accessible introduction to Kafka’s life and work. This text is almost as valuable as Kafka’s own stories. The big hitters are all present: ‘The Judgement’, ‘The Transformation’ (Harman is adamant about refusing to refer to this story by its more familiar if excessively poetic title, ‘The Metamorphosis’, since Kafka could have chosen to call it ‘Die Metamorphose’ in German yet opted for the more prosaic ‘Die Verwandlung’), the disturbingly gruesome ‘In the Penal Colony’, as well as some choice pieces from Kafka’s first story collection Contemplation. Readers will also enjoy several shorter, less well-known pieces of short fiction, including ‘A Crossbreed’, which concerns a creature that’s half-cat and half-sheep, and the wistfully ironic ‘Poseidon’, in which the sea god is so officiously committed to calculating the oceans’ waves and currents that he can but dream of having the chance to surf the oceans in his chariot, trident in hand. Trapped between the duties of work, family, and art, Kafka – and, perhaps, any of us – cannot but empathise with this sea god who hardly sees the seas: ‘He was given to saying he would wait until the end of the world to do so, at which point there might well be a quiet moment right before the end when, after reviewing the last calculation, he could still make a quick little tour’.
It must have been difficult to choose these tales. My own favourites seem to change week by week, largely depending on which of Kafka’s stories I recently read and taught. Most of what Harman has selected and translated was published during Kafka’s lifetime as more or less finished works. This makes sense for an introductory selection such as this, which will be of immense use to anyone researching and teaching Kafka, as well as any particularly enthusiastic general readers. As a whole, however, the collection rather skews away from Kafka’s shorter, artfully aphoristic, puzzlingly playful, often unfinished or scarcely begun yet captivatingly evocative pieces, many of which deserve to be better known. (A short volume – scarcely more than a hundred pages – of so-called ‘lost writings’ appeared in English translation in 2020, drawn from the critical edition of Kafka’s Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente which stands at over a thousand pages). They are funny, frightening, puzzling in equal measure, beautifully distilling Kafka’s astute understanding of humanity and shot through with wordplay and deliciously ironic humour. The stories that take up most of the non-introductory pages in Harman’s volume are, by and large, the best-known works that Kafka produced. Some though by no means all of the stories from Kafka’s astonishing second short story collection A Country Doctor (published in the spring of 1920 though with the official date on the title page as 1919). While Harman’s Selected Stories do give some sense of the rich varieties of Kafka’s subjects and styles, for better or for worse they are still, by and large, those tales most frequently drawn on by eager readers and critics bent on turning the notion of the ‘Kafka-esque’ from a polyvalent mood descriptor into a tired cliché.
The late Pascale Casanova believed that Kafka stories ‘were traps for the unwary, throwing the reader off the scent with the use of unreliable and even deceitful narrators’. It is his deceptively clear and concise language that often constitutes such traps. One of Kafka’s very best short stories also selected and translated by Harman as ‘The Concern of a Family Man’, literalises this in its subject, the fascinatingly elusive and rambunctious Odradek, a spindly, giggling, star-shaped wooden spool entangled with bits of yarn. Just as Odradek is ‘impossible to catch’, so language is unable to particularise it (or him; Kafka uses both pronouns in his tale). The story opens by diving straight into a brief excursus on whether the etymology of Odradek is Slavic or Germanic, before concluding in a playful twist so typical of Kafka that ‘neither is helpful in determining a meaning for the word’. Harman is alive to the strangeness of Kafka’s universe. Cleaving closely to Kafka’s original German, at times at the expense of syntactic fluency and idiomatic expression in English, though seldom – if ever – without reason, he is an ideal guide to the multiple valences of Kafka’s prose and their implications. Yet the question remains of whether being restrained in one particular collection – the only new English translation of any of Kafka’s fiction published in the centenary year of his death – that conjures broadly familiar evocations of the Kafka-esque, in however helpful an explanatory framework, Kafka’s artistry risks being once more trapped in another cage of its own making.
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Between 1917 and 1918, Kafka composed what have come to be known as his Zürau aphorisms, while staying in the Bohemian village that has subsequently lent its name to this mysterious collection of over a hundred such pithy yet elusive pronouncements. The sixteenth of these – ‘A cage went in search of a bird’ – has recently become the title of a new collection of ten short stories inspired by Kafka’s fictional works. Written on 6th November 1917, Kafka’s first draft actually read ‘A cage went to catch a bird’. Revealingly, however, he changed the formulation when he copied it down for posterity, rendering it more superficial and more innocuous though also far more ambivalently meaningful. Kafka’s revisions suggest a unified and communitarian symbiosis between a bird and its cage, or indeed a cage and its bird. (It could be overreading the situation to make the hoary point that Kafka’s own name has avian undertones: the Czech for crow is kavka).
In her breezy and thoughtful introduction to this collection, Becca Rothfeld declares it ‘a fitting title for a collection of stories written in Kafka’s honour on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of his death, especially because so many of the ones in this volume treat precisely the kind of entrapment that obsessed him: the kind that follows us wherever we go.’ Now to be sure, no character in Kafka’s fiction is technically entrapped; nobody is induced or tricked into committing a crime, that is, which they otherwise wouldn’t have committed – quite the opposite, in fact, in the case of Josef K. Nevertheless, this collection is a fine homage to the ways in which Kafka traps his characters and his readers, moving between tributes to his expansive, at times almost breathless syntax, and contributions in more distinctively experimental forms of their authors’ own. Yiyun Li, who once wrote judiciously in Harper’s magazine that ‘nothing is more Kafkaesque than describing a mediocre creation with that adjective’ deserves special mention here for her tour de force contribution, ‘Apostrophe’s Dream’, a theatre script whose dramatis personae are ‘a small cluster of movable type’ who bicker about what the best collective noun for punctuation marks should be.
A Cage Went in Search of a Bird turns Jorge Luis Borges’s ideas about Kafka and his precursors on its head, making Kafka the precursor-in-chief. Citing works by writers as diverse as Zeno, Kierkegaard, and Browning, among others, Borges quips, ‘[i]f I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have listed resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other’. This goes to show, he proceeds to argue, that ‘Kafka’s idiosyncrasy is present in each of these writings, to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had not written, we would not perceive it; that is to say, it would not exist.’ In A Cage Went in Search of a Bird, Kafka’s idiosyncrasy is the driving – and perhaps somewhat homogenising – force. As a precursor, he alone seems to be as multifarious and thrilling as the immense range of predecessors conjured by Borges. In the same essay, Borges also observes how ‘each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.’ Is it also true that later writers create their precursors when their precursor is Kafka? In doing so, they modify his past and his future, attempting to corral Kafka’s teeming, incomplete œuvre within a recognisable or relatable framework. It is easy to forget that Kafka had no idea that there was anything called the ‘Kafka-esque’; that’s an invention that belongs to posterity.
Kafka’s work survives, not because it’s time-and-place-specific, or because of its ever-invoked relevance or relatability, but because of its time-and-placelessness. In this respect, he is always exceeding the bars of any cage he might have found himself in, even those he erected himself. Selected Stories and A Cage Went in Search of a Bird implicitly reflect on the question of whether the conventions of posterity and our familiar reception of Kafka are – however inadvertently – a means of pinning Kafka down, fixing him in position to be inspected and understood from all angles: making of him a spectacle in a cage. In the final passage of ‘A Hunger Artist’, after the expired protagonist has been disposed of, when – in an astonishing flourish – Kafka introduces the new denizen of the cage: a panther. This lithe and vigorous beast takes the place of routine, frailty, and demise: ‘The panther lacked for nothing. Without a second thought, the keepers brought it the food that it relished; it did not even seem to miss its freedom; this noble body, supplied almost to bursting with everything needed, seemed also to carry around its freedom, someplace in its teeth; and the joy of life issued from its throat with such a fiery glow that it was not easy for the spectators to hold their ground. But they braced themselves, crowded around the cage, and would not move on.’ Adored by his rapt audience, this powerful panther seems in possession of its own liberty, although this might be just as much of a front as the Hunger Artist’s own abstemiousness. Nevertheless, in spite of his laryngeal tubercular demise, it may not be much of a stretch to imagine Kafka, too, with the glow of joyous life bursting from his throat, rather than silent and caged.
IAN ELLISON is the post-doctoral research associate of the AHRC-funded ‘Kafka’s Transformative Communities’ project at the University of Oxford and a Visiting Fellow of Wadham College. He is, perhaps unsurprisingly, writing a book about Kafka.
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