Introductory Note
To the First American Edition
Franz Kafka’s name, so far as I can discover, is almost unknown to English readers. As he is considered by several of the best German critics to have been perhaps the most interesting writer of his generation, and as he is in some ways a strange and disconcerting genius, it has been suggested that a short introductory note should be provided for this book, the first of his to be translated into English.
Kafka died in 1924 of consumption at the early age of forty-one. During his lifetime he published only a few volumes of short stories and novelettes, all of them characterised by extreme perfection of form, and most of them wrung out of him by the persuasion of his lifelong friend, Herr Max Brod, the well-known novelist. Before he died he destroyed a great number of the manuscripts he had been engaged on, but he left, among other things, including a number of aphorisms on religion, three long unfinished novels, America, The Trial and The Castle. He left explicit instructions as well, however, that these, along with all his other papers, should be burnt. As his executor, Herr Brod was in a very difficult position. In a note appended to The Trial he has given in full Kafka’s dying instructions, and set out with the utmost candour his reasons for not following them. These reasons are entirely honourable, and his decision to publish the three novels has been approved by every responsible critic in the German-speaking countries. The novels themselves, however, provide the best data for judging the wisdom of a choice so difficult; for they are the most important of Kafka’s writings, and two of them are masterpieces of a unique kind.
Herr Brod’s courtesy has provided me with a few particulars about Kafka’s life. He was born in Prague in 1883 of well-to-do Jewish parents, studied law at the university there, and after receiving his doctorate took up a post in an accident insurance office. After a love affair, which ended disastrously, he fell ill, symptoms of consumption appeared, and for some time he lived in sanatoriums, in the Tyrol and the Carpathians, but finally left them for lodgings in a village in the Erzgebirge near Karksbad, which was to become the original of the village in the present book. Having partially regained his health, he went to live in the suburb of Berlin with a young girl who seems to have made him happy. Unfortunately the years of inflation came, food was scarce and bad, and he finally succumbed and was sent to a sanatorium near Vienna, where he died. Those last years before the collapse were the happiest of his life. The three unfinished novels which he left are an imaginative record of an earlier phase.
Of these novels two, The Trial and The Castle, are in a sense complementary, as Herr Brod points out at the end of this book. Both may be best defined perhaps as metaphysical or theological novels. Their subject-matter, in other words, is not the life and manners of any locality or any country; it is rather human life wherever it is touched by the powers which all religions have acknowledged, by divine law and divine grace. Perhaps the best way to approach The Castle is to regard it as a sort of modern Pilgrim’s Progress, with the reservation, however, that the “progress” of the pilgrim here will remain in question all the time, and will be itself the chief, the essential problem. The Castle is, like The Pilgrim’s Progress, a religious allegory; the desire of the hero in both cases to work out his salvation; and to do so (in both cases again) it is necessary that certain moves should be gone through, and gone through without a single hitch. But there the resemblance ends. For Christian knows from the beginning what the necessary moves are, and K., the hero of The Castle, has to discover every one of them for himself, and has no final assurance that even then he has discovered the right ones. Thus while Bunyan’s hero has a clear goal before his eyes, and a well-beaten if somewhat difficult road to it, the hero of this book has literally almost nothing. Kafka does agree with Bunyan in two things: that the goal and the road indubitably exist, and that the necessity to find them is urgent. His hero’s journey, however, is a much more difficult business; for people’s reports, ancient legends, one’s own intuitions, even the road signs, may all be equally untrustworthy. If anyone wanted to estimate how immensely more difficult it is for a religious genius to see his way in an age of scepticism than in an age of faith, a comparison of The Pilgrim’s Progress with The Castle might give him a fair measure of it. Yet hardly a fair measure, perhaps. For Bunyan’s mind was primitive compared with the best minds of his age, and Kafka’s is more subtly sceptical than the most sceptical of our own. Its scepticism, however, is grounded on a final faith, and this is what must make his novels appear paradoxical, perhaps even incomprehensible, to some contemporary readers. His scepticism is not an attitude or a habit; it is a weapon for testing his faith and his doubt alike, and for discarding from them what is inessential.
Accordingly in the present book and The Trial the postulates he begins with are the barest possible; they are roughly those: that there is a right way of life, and that the discovery of it depends on one’s attitude to powers which are almost unknown. What he sets out to do is to find out something about those powers, and the astonishing thing is that he appears to succeed. While following the adventures of his heroes we seem to be discovering—almost without being fully aware of it—various things about those entities which we had never divined before, and could never perhaps have divined by ourselves. We are led in through circle after circle of a newly found spiritual domain, where everything is strange and yet real, and where we recognise objects without being able to give them a name. The virtue of a good allegory is that it expresses in its own created forms something more exact than any interpretation of it could. The Pilgrim’s Progress did this in its very circumscribed way; it is more exact in detail than any theoretical exposition of it could be; but indeed its interpretation, a banally simplified theological system, existed full-blown before it. Having admitted this, one may see better the extreme difficulty of Kafka’s attempt. For his allegory is not a mere recapitulation or recreation; it does not run on lines already laid down; it is a pushing forward of the mind into unknown places; and so the things he describes seem to be actual new creations which had never existed before. They are like palpable additions to the intellectual world, and ones which cannot be comprehended at a single glance, for there is meaning behind meaning, form behind form, in them all.
I have indicated less than a tithe of the things which may be found in this book and in The Trial, and that is all that I can do here, for Kafka’s writings have an almost endless wealth of meaning. His superb gifts as a storyteller, and his genius for construction, hardly need to be pointed out; it is obvious, however, that without them he would have been unable to introduce us to his strange world. In a recent issue of the Literarische Welt Herr Willy Haas remarks very finely of him that he has a tremendous power of deducing the real from the real, of starting from something concrete and sinking his thought into something which seems still more concrete. This is his method, and in the present novel with its consummate construction, few of those links between the concrete and the more concrete are left out; the progress of the invention coincides with the exploring and creating thought, so that in being carried forward by the action we are at the same time participators in the discovery and spectators of a world being built.
The unique quality of Kafka’s temperament is shown in his attitude to this world which he is investigating. That attitude may be best described by negatives. He avoided scrupulously the pose of the spectacular wrestler with God, which even certain great writers, such as Baudelaire and Rimbaud, have incomprehensibly assumed, but from which he was saved by the modesty of his view of his own place in the universe, and by his sense of humour. He avoided also the gesture of resignation, for what meaning could resignation have—except a pragmatic one—in face of the things he was investigating? Nor did he take refuge in irony, though certain episodes in his novels are saturated with it. Perhaps his temper is shown best in two axioms of his: that compared with the divine law, however unjust it may sometimes appear, all human effort, even at its highest, is in the wrong; and that at all times, whatever we may think, the demand of the divine law for unconditional reverence and unconditional obedience is beyond question. But—here again he surprises us—unconditional reverence and obedience do not seem in his eyes to have excluded the strictest scrutiny, or even the most acute comic observation. His descriptions of the Heavenly Powers are very curious. He notes their qualities and their foibles with something of the respectful appreciation of Plutarch writing of Alexander or Cato. To more ignorant eyes, it is true, those foibles might appear mere faults, but to him, as to Plutarch in somewhat analogous circumstances, they are worthy of esteem as the qualities of superior beings, qualities perhaps disconcerting and even incomprehensible to the writer himself, but qualities nevertheless which would be found to incarnate unquestionable virtues were his mind capable of understanding them. In Kafka’s descriptions of the conflict of his heroes with heavenly destiny there are, amid all the bewilderment and nightmare apprehension, interludes of the purest humour.
Of Kafka’s style one can get an adequate idea only by going to the original. It is a style of the utmost exactitude, the utmost flexibility, the utmost naturalness, and of an inevitable propriety. His vocabulary is small, but his mastery of it is absolute. By means of the simplest words he can evoke new effects and convey the most difficult thoughts. His management of the sentence is consummate. Flowing without ever being monotonous, his long sentences achieve an endless variety of inflection by two things alone, an inevitable skill in the disposition of the clauses, and of the words making them up. I can think of no other writer who can secure so much force and meaning as Kafka does by the mathematically correct placing of a word. Yet in all his books he probably never placed a word unnaturally or even conspicuously. His sentences are constructed so easily and yet balanced so exactly that, even when they are very long, he hardly ever needs the support of a semicolon, the comma doing all that is required. For the comma, indeed, with its greater flexibility, he shows a partiality; or he loves the sinuous line, the sentence which flows forward, flows back on itself and flows forward again before it winds to its determined end. His dialogue is untranslatable. It is not the realistic dialogue of which almost all contemporary novels are full; it is a separate form of art with its own laws. In sense of style there is no living English writer who approaches it, except Mr. Joyce in certain pages of Ulysses.
Edwin Muir