Dichtung und Wahrheit: Three Versions of Reality in Franz Kafka

The German Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 1. (Jan., 1957), pp. 20-31. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0016-8831%28195701%2930%3A1%3C20%3ADUWTVO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-F The German Quarterly is currently published by American Association of Teachers of German.

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DICHTUNB UND W A U R H E Z T : THREE VERSIONS

O F REALITY I N FRANZ ICAFKA

Des Menschen Leben ist ein ahnliches Gedicht; Es hat wohl einen A n f m g , hat ein Ende, Allein ein Ganzes ist es nicht. GOETHE

I t is the purpose of this article to examine three works by Franz Kafka, The Letter to His Father, The Judgment and The Jletnmorphosis. Using The Letter as an example of autobiography or Wahrlzeit, and the two stories as examples of Dichtung, we shall attempt to throw some light on the differences between a discursive, "factual" account, and two artistic representations of similar material in the form of fiction. Kafka wrote Tlte Letter to His Father in November 1919 and gave it to his mother, who, however, never delivered it. There is no indication that the letter was meant for publication. I t was intended to answer the father's questions why his son claimed to be afraid of him, and it deals frankly and explicitly with the relations between the father and son. The materials it contains can be divided, first, into examples of the father's behavior which caused his son to feel afraid of him: his father's carrying him out on the balcony when he asked for water at night; his unreasonable insistence that he was always right; his attacks on all people, Czech, German and Jewish; ridicule heaped on his son's friends, even when the father did not know them; reduction of the son's relations with his fiancee to a crude matter of sex; his prohibition of certain behavior at the table, such as drinking vinegar off a plate or chewing bones, which his father permitted himself. These and many other points do not in themselves differ markedly from the list which most Central European children with an overbearing father could compile. What difference there is consists in the manner in which they are presented: Kafka narrates them with great conciseness and precision, simply and unmelodramatically. But even that is

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something of which many persons would have been capable; it did not take a Franz Kafka to do it. The second category of content is composed of passages of analysis and evaluation, in which we discern a power of dissection reminiscent of Kafka's fiction. The analysis is mostly psychological: he explains that he could have accepted his father in other roles, as an uncle, friend or boss, but "as a father you were too strong for me, especially since my brothers died when they were little and the sisters only came much later, so that I had to endure the first impact all alone; for that I was f a r too weak" (p. 1641.' The incident of being carried out on the balcony is followed by the analytic comment: "I was not able to make a right connection between the senseless asking for water, which was something natural to me, and the extraordinary terror of being carried out. Years later I was still suffering from the torture of thinking that the giant, my father, the final authority, could come for almost no reason and carry me a t night from my bed to the balcony, and that I was therefore such a nothing to him" (p. 167). Kafka then proceeds to trace the development of his sense of insignificance from the time of that incident. The analysis of general issues is even keener than that of the individual episodes. There are passages of what are might call sociological interpretation. Kafka declares, for example, that his father's main belief was "in the unconditional correctness of the opinions of a certain Jewish social class," and tells him: "Since these opinions were yours, you therefore really believed in yourself" (p. 199f). The examination of the three means by which Kafka attempted to escape his father's domination-immersion in Jewish life, writing, and marriage-is brilliantly penetrating. Kafka shows an awareness of what his father was doing in first urging him to participate more in Jewish affairs and then raising objections when his son really became very much interested in Jewish life and thereby gained a measure of personal independence. The passages dealing with the psychological effects of his engagements and of his writing are crucial to a n understanding of Kafka's personality. They reveal 1 Page references followiug quotations from the Letter are to the text Kafka, Hochaeitsvorbereitungen auf d e m Lande ( N e w Pork, 1953) ; the translations are mine.

in

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self-knowledge as well as knowledge of his father and a remarkable ability to stand outside of himself and to analyze himself objectively. Relevant to Kafka's fiction is his description of the three worlds which were created for him by the discrepancy between his father's orders and conduct-his own world, where he was a slave subject to laws meant only for him but which he was incapable of observing; his father's world of anger and command, in which orders were issued; and the third world, in which other people lived freely and happily without a n y commands or obedience. From the sections of the Letter. mentioned thus far, we should form a picture of a sensitive young boy's reactions to his father, recollected and analyzed by him a t the age of thirty-six, and presented in a manner which would remind us of only a few traits of Kafka's fiction: the over-life-size reasonableness-withinunreasonableness of The Castle or The Trial; the precise, colorless diction and phrasing; the rapier-sharp analysis. W e might even conclude that the writing was characteristic not of a novelist's or short story writer's creation, but rather of a medical report, a lawyer's brief, or a case record from a psychoanalyst's files. I n three important features, however, Kafka goes beyond the detached, scientific manner. First of all, there are passages in which he creates with a few deft strokes such a vivid picture of his father in action that it can be compared to a brief sketch in the tradition of the Theophrastian character or even to a Dickensian thumbnail portrait. His main techniques here are dramatic speech (words put into his father's mouth which make him leap into life) and choice of the telling specific details suggestive of a whole complex of behavior: the father's taunting his daughter Ellie sarcastically for her table manners, "She must sit ten meters away from the table" (p. 178) ; threatening Kafka, "1'11 tear you into pieces like a fish" (p. 177) ; or, on the other hand, coming to see him when he was ill, looking in from the threshold with his neck stretched out and waving to him; and, during Kafka's mother's illness, shaking with weeping and holding on to the bookcase (p. 180). Few fathers have had the fortune, or misfortune, of being described by sons who had such talents of observation, recollection and recreation of the salient detail o r characteristic word. Secondly, there are a few powerful figures of speech, perhaps

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all the stronger because of their small number: "My writing dealt with you. I n it I only complained about things about which I could not complain on your breast. I t was a deliberately drawn out farewell from you" (p. 203). Here belong remarks such as "You became for me the enigma which all tyrants are whose justification is grounded in their person, not in their thinking" (p. 169), the likening of his mother's role in the family to that of a beater in a hunt, the observation about his writing: "Here a piece of me really became independent of you, even if it reminds one a little of the worm whose rear end has been stepped on and whose front end tears itself loose and drags itself off to one side" (p. 202), and the image "Sometimes I imagine the map of the world stretched out and you spread out over i t 7 ' (p. 217). Thirdly, there is the greatest departure from direct, discursive statement, the wonderful last three pages, in which Hafka comes closest to the devices of his fiction. Even without this passage, we should have understood that far from intending merely to blame his father, Kafka also wanted to point out his father's-as well as his own-innocence. But in the conclusion this point is clinched by Kafka7s switch from the essay form to dramatization. IIe has his father deliver a rejoinder which accuses Kafka of wishing to prove three things in the Letter, that he is innocent, that the father is guilty, and that out of the greatness of his soul Kafka is ready not only to forgive but even to prove and to believe that the father is innocent. Kafka, then, shows his awareness of the possibility of such an answer and includes this powerful counterattack as part of his own attack. He goes on to put into the father's mouth the description of his son as "the insect "2 which not only bites, but immediately sucks the blood for its own nourishment" and the assertion that "You are incapable of life, but in order to be able to manage comfortably, without worries, and without self-reproaches, you prove that I have taken from you all your fitness for life and put it in my pocket" (p. 222). I n a climax of drama and in the very characteristic metaphor of the pocket, Kafka permits his father 2 Similar references to insects (cf. the image of a worm quoted above) abound in the Letter, in Kafka's fiction, and atao in numerous letters and recorded conversations.

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to conclude that all his reproaches were justified by the Letter itself, and that one more fitting accusation, of insincerity and Schnzarotzertum, had been missing and now is supplied by the evidence of that same letter. Thereby he forestalls the father's answer and can emphasize triumphantly in the last paragraph that it was, after all, Kafka the son who had invented the father's ideas. The objections were of his own composition. "Your distrust of others is not even as great as my own distrust of myself which you bred into me" (p. 223), Kafka proclaims, and reaffirms that the explanations in the Letter are at least an approximation of the truth, even after his father's objections have been taken into account. This conclusion creates a dialectical situation between the author's attack, his father's rebuttal, and the author's re-rebuttal, which gains additional effectiveness through the fact that all of it, including the father's attempt at counterattack, is the creation of Kafka's mind. I t is a piece of dramatic dialogue inside a lengthy monologue. Yet even with this conclusion and with its occasional important characterizations and figurative passages, the Letter remains expository, discursive prose, not a belletristic work. I t contains brilliant psychological insights; it is perfectly constructed; but its constructions and its insights are those of the exemplary essay. The Letter concerns Kafka and his father and tries to add to the father's understanding of his son's attitude, but lacks an application wider than that. Let us look at our first chosen work of fiction, The Judgment, written during the night from September 22 to 23, 1912. Most of the story consists of a dialogue between the son, Georg Bendemann, and his father, and its theme is the relationship between them. Unlike the Letter, in which the basic idea is immediately and explicitly stated, The Jz~,dgnzent begins obliquely. Its nonchalant opening is neutral and deliberately conventional in its rendering of the setting and of Georg's ruminations about his friend in St. Petersburg. Indirectly and insidiously, under the guise of describing the friend, Georg himself is characterized for us in a way which will find its confirmation later: he is "wearing himself out to no purpose in a foreign country," does not "understand conditions in his own country any longer," and even if he returned, he would

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still remain "in a foreign country" (pp. 53-54).3 We are also casually and unobtrusively informed that his father used to insist on having everything his own way in the business. Yet the opening pages are on the whole a niodel of normality. The first note of something unusual is struck with the references to Georg's reluctance to inform his friend of his engagement. The lengthy justification of his hesitation is not convincing; on the contrary, the excessive stress on it is disturbing. The second part of the story begins with Georg's entrance into his father's room. Again, the first few conversational exchanges are almost ominously and obtrusively flat. The mention of the letter brings the sense of strangeness into the open: " 'Yes. To your friend,' said the father with emphasis" (p. 59). Vague accusations are insinuated by the father in negative statements which suggest the truth of that which they ostensibly reject: "Many things escape my notice in the business, nothing is perhaps being kept concealed from me, I do not now at all wish to assume that it is being kept concealed" (p. 59). Then like a sudden haminer blow comes the question, "Do you really have this friend in Petersburg?" 'The reader begins to realize that the apparently secure world in which the story is set is in reality very uncertain; almost anything might happen from now on. Georg also reveals some feeling of guilt towards his father, for he had not discussed with his fianc6e what arrangements should be made for his father in the future. The father is laid in his bed and covers himself with blankets, but the apparent withdrawal is really a preparation for a violent assault on his son. Having thrown the son (and the reader) off guard, the father resumes the initiative by accusing the son of wishing him "covered up," buried, insists that he sees through him, and refers to his bride in coarse terms: "Because she lifted up her skirts . . the nasty goose . . . you have disgraced your mother's memory" (p. 63; cf. the similar reference to Kafka's fiancbe in the Letter: "She probably put on some kind of a well chosen blouse, as the Prague Jewesses know how to do, and you naturally decided to marry her," p. 213). Completely irrational things now begin to happen. The father is suddenly well and

.

8

Page references to The Jwdgment and The Matamorphosis are t o the Kafka, Erzahlungen und kleine Prosa (Berlin, 1935).

text in

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stands up, radiant and unsupported. Far from denying the existence of the Petersburg friend, he states that the friend has not been betrayed; on the contrary, he, the father, is the friend's representative. He admits having played a comedy, attacks his son directly, boasts of his own strength ("I have your customers here in my pocket," p. 64, in a figure similar to that in the Letter), asserts he will sweep the fiancke from Georg's side-an open reference b his superior prowess wit,h women-and, to the accompaniment of nightmarish details (the newspaper he has in bed with him turns out to be an old paper with a name entirely unknown to Georg-nothing can be trusted to remain such as one expects it to be in a familiar solid universe), accuses his son of selfishness and devilishness, and declares to him: "I now sentence you to death by drowning !" The third scene of the story is only some twenty lines long, and surpasses the phantasy and terror of the culmination of the preceding scene. Georg immediately obeys his father's verdict. He rushes downstairs, vaults over the railing of a bridge like "the excellent gymnast who in his youth had been the pride of his parents" (p. 65f.), and throws himself into the river with the words, "Dear parents, I have always loved you, all the same" (p. 66). While he drowns, the indifferent world continues its rounds of everyday business, like the busy world in Breughel's "Fall of Icarus," ignorant and careless of the young man's death ("At this moment an unending stream of traffic was moving across the bridge ") .' The similarities between Th,e Judgment and the Letter are dear. I n both, the guilt feelings of the son are stressed, the strength of the father (in the story even in his old age and illness) is overpowering, there is conflict between them, and the son, despite some effort at independence, is impelled to obey the father's cornmands. The Letter, however, is a work of explanation; the events are narrated to illuminate Kafka's feelings and thoughts about his father. Hence its form follows the logic of th'e intellect. Kafka begins by stating his thesis and proceeds systematically to take up 4 Heinz Politzer, L i F r a n z Kafka's Letter to His Father," GR (1953), XXVIII, 173, makes an interesting comparison between this sentence and the third, happy world in Kafka's cosmography, referred to above.

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one subtopic after another, concluding with a section which is dramatic, but still confined to the realm of rhetorical exposition. I n the story, drama predominates. There is a great deal of dialogue, and the plot is constructed climactically. A deceptively quiet, slow and banal opening leads by several steps to the grand scene in which the father passes the verdict on Georg, and the story rushes with breathtaking speed to its denouement, which conveys the precipitateness of Georg's suicide and prevents the power of the climactic scene from being dissipated by a lengthy wind-up. The form of the story is set by the logic not of reasoning, but of its plot and symbolic meaning. Each scene is closely connected with the next, and the order of the various sections, unlike that in the Letter, could not possibly be reversed. The perspective on time is also different in the two works. The Letter is told from the vantage point of tEe writer's present, from which he surveys the past, ranging over it freely, back and forth, for his examples. The end of the Letter does not imply the end of the situation described; on the contrary, the relationship will continue to exist in the future. I n the story, the reader moves along with the fictional time of the events narrated, never running ahead nor lagging behind. This gives the impression of an unfolding of events whjch are still taking place. Hence a sense of immediacy and necessity prevails in The Judgment in contrast to the Letter, where the reader feels a larger body of material has been surveyed by the author, who selected from i t certain illustrations to which he now ex post facto draws our attention. One result of this difference is tEat the emotional impact of the story is f a r greater than that of the Letter. I n the fictional piece, Kafka has also been able to play on different modes of tone o r speaking voice, ranging from the calm beginning, throngh a gamnt of varying moods and intonations, to the hurried, commanding, prophetic, Old Testament tone of the father's command, and then to the swift conclusion with its note of panic, followed by the return of everyday normalcy in the final sentence. Kafka limits the number of details much more in The Judgment than in the Letfer. Instead of heaping u p examples, he presents us with a few significant ones-creating the person of the friend i n Petersburg, the engagement and the letter as the external objects

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which are to cariy the theme. Bloreover, the whole subject of father-son relations, stretching as it does into the past, is conveyed in a story the events of which only last a few minutes. I n addition to the concentration and intensification brought about by this double condensatioli of content and time, there is another consequence: it becomes impossible to limit one's interpretation of the story to its literal meaning. T h e Judgntent is a phantastic riddle, evidently absurd on a literal level and hence inviting a parabolic reading. Kafka himself, of course, put down in his diary comments about the story's relevance to himclelf (February 11, 1913) ;5 but the reader's primary interest will not be in what the story shows exclusively about Kafka's relation to his father (the center of the interest of the L e t t e r ) , but in what it says about the relations of fathers and sons in general and about a widening circle of related topics: the relations between those in authority and those below them and various possible situations of rebellion and suppression, self-subjugation and self-punishment, even if we do not feel justified in going so f a r as to apply it to the relation of God and man, as several commentators have done. I n the opening of T h e i%!eto~norphosis, written i n 1912, we find the reverse of the techniqile of T h e Jzidgment. W e do not start in a comforting, reassuring world and then gradually find ourselves i n a universe in ~vhichanything is possible. Instead, the very first sentence ("As Gregor Sainsa awolre one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself in his bed metamorphosed into a huge insect," p. 69) propels us into phantasy. From then on we are i n a world the apparent reasonableness of which clashes with the basic impossibility of the situation, parodies the cautious, normal concerns of our life, and points u p the horror of the transformation. Through Gregor's reminiscences and his reactions to his present condition 6 K a f k a frequently stressed the autobiographical nature of much of hie writing. E.g. his Diary for Aug. 6, 1914: ( ( T h e sense for the representation of Nothing my dream-like inner life has pushed everything else to the side. else can ever satisfy me. l 1 Politzer ("ICafkals Letter,'' pp. 165-179) a n d many other writers have commented on the autobiographical elements in the Letter and on its similarities with The Judgment and The Metamorphosis, without, however, noting the basic differences between the forms of the discursive letter and the artistic stories-the central concern of this article. I n his otherwise excellent discussion, Politzer fails to consider this distinction when he calls the Letter "a literary rather than a personal document" (p. 172).

...

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we gather what the family situation has been: Gregor's feeling of duty towards his family, his concomitant resentment of them, the father's harsh impatience, and the sister's gentle sympathy. Instead of a suddenly commanded and precipitately executed suicide, we have here a protracted process of gradual dying, a mixture of murder and suicide through lack of will to live, articulated by the various stages of Gregor's being chased back into his room, painfully pushed through the doorway, his failure to eat, and the illness causeci by the apple sticking in his body. What the so11 feels he is doing to his father and what his father is doing to him is not expressed analytically, as in the Letter, nor even directly and dramatically, as in The Judgment, but through, first, the parable underlying the whole story and, secondly, all the minor, incidental parables which pervade i t : the lodgers, for example, who seem to be parasites established in the family through Gregor's fault (his metamorphosis) and of whom the father can rid the family as soon as Gregor dies, or the warm sunshine and the various other indications of his family's rebirth after Gregor's death, such as looking for a new apartment, going for a walk and planning to marry off their daughter. The elements of phantasy, nightmare and fear are much stronger in The Meiomorphosis than in The Judgment. The horror of waking u p transformed into an insect brings in its train all our subconscious fears cf transformation (discussed among others in Freud's essay on The Unca?zny). I n The Jzidgment, we are a t least temporarily in a normal world, and nothing ever happens which is completely impossible; in The Netamorphosis we are never placed in an everyday world. The narrative has the tone of carefully evaluating all evidence, but the family's reaction to Gregor's transformation-their effort to behave in the most rational and acceptable way-only strikes us as a frightening incongruity. I t suggests to us that our own accepted world may be as unreal as that of the Samsas, and that painstaking reasonableness and conventionality may be as misplaced and vain as Gregor's and his family's. The failure of the characters to question the possibility of Gregor's metamorphosis, which is the most surprising thing of all and the basis of the action, makes the readers insecure in regard to things we consider so certain that we seldom even feel the need to think about them. More clearly than The Judgment, The Metamorphosis moves

THE GERMAN QUARTERLY from a beginning which ought to be a renewal of life (the awakening in the morning), but actually is moribund and catastrophic, to a conclusion which brings the death of the protagonist, accompanied by the promise of a n improved life for the survivors. When we look a t the line of development from Gregor's point of view, it is a steady decline leading to Gregor's extinction. When we look a t it through the family's eyes, it is a long effort to contain and to eliminate Gregor and the evils he has brought about-the lodgers, the cleaning woman's attitude-a struggle which is crowned with success in the end when he dies and his body is disposed of. The Judgment had a similar!^ tight structure, with a sharply marked beginning, middle and end, but the death of the son lacked the counterpoise which it has in The Metamorphosis, the brightening future of the rest of the family, which shows still more clearly the son's guilt and w~rthlessness.~ The still broader parabolic meaning of The Metamorphosis is its greatest point of difference from The Jz~dgment.If the Letter applies only to Kafka and his father, and The Judgment to the father-son relationship in general with overtones implicating other power-to-subject relations, then The Metnmorphosis has strong suggestions of many possible interpretations. Some of the situations to which it can be taken to refer are: man and the state; man and his subconscious feelings of guilt and inadequacy in general; totemistic fears of metamorphosis; the Jew in a Gentile society; man I t should be pointed out that in contradistinction to the two stories dishere, most of Kafka's writing, his novels as well as stories, is characterized by the absence of a clearly marked conclusion. This, however, does not mean that such works are inconclusive. Their construction, unlike that of T h e Judgment and The Metamorphosis, is multicellular, and each cell bears its own conclusion within itself. The series as a whole therefore needs none, since each unit composing it conveys the message of the unending series. This is the point missed by those who criticize Kafka for the frequency with which he left his works unfinished. Giinther Anders, Kafka: Pro uncl R o n t r a (Munich, 1951), pp. 34-36, has an interesting discussion of the cyclical and repetitive nature of Kafka's scenes, but errs in condemning Kafka's philosophy, besides other reasons, on the ground of his failure to complete his works. Wilhelm Emrich, "Franz Kafka," in Hermann Friedmann and Otto Mann, Deutsche Literatur im Zwanzigsten Jahrhundert (Heidelberg, 1954), p. 231 and passim, discusses interestingly the infinitely continuable series of Kafka's episodes, and Paul Goodman, T h e Struoture of Literature (Dhicago, 1954), pp. 173-183, analyzes the cellular structure of T h e Castle. a

cussed

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and grace ; or man and God. The mood of the story is precise, but the references made by it parabolically are multiple. As we moved from the Letter through The Judgment to The Metamorphosis we have found several differences. The range of technical means used in the Letter varies greatly from the stories: it consists of illustrations, analyses, generalizations, concessions, logical summaries, with some figures of speech and dramatic fictions. I n the stories, Kafka employed changes of tone (modulations, eontrasts between tone and subject matter, sudden shifts of speaking voice), development of plot (crescendo, climax, conclusion), and a narrative time synchronized with the time of the fictional events, all serving to heighten the emotional impact. Remarkable is also the contrast between the logical, discursive mode of discourse in the L ~ t t e rand the phantasy and dramatization in the stories, particularly in The ~~~~~~~~~~phosis. One of the most significant characteristics of the fictional works is the overriding importance assumed by the various symbolic details (characters, actions, objects) within them, as well as by the total image presented by the story. The greater unity and closer focus (including narrower physical setting) paradoxically accompany the broadening of the range of possible symbolic interpetations. The epigraph quoted from Goethe at the beginning of this article might apply to the Letter; its subject is a relationship in life which has not yet ended, in the presentation of which finality has not been achieved. One distinction between a work of fiction and an autobiographical letter is that the literary piece completes and imposes order upon the raw materials of life. Kafka's stories are the fulfillment of artistic potentialities, not through the creation of beauty in a narrow sense, but through the presentation of a concentrated, patterned picture of human guilt and fears. I n their high degree of organization and in their symbolic structure, The Judgment and The Metamorphosis exemplify several ways in which Dichtung is superior to flTahrheit. Smith College Northampton, Massachusetts