“What do I have in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself, and really ought to go stand myself perfectly still in a corner, grateful to be able to breathe.” (Diary, January 8th, 1914)
One hundred
years ago this week, Franz Kafka, just shy of his 41st birthday, lay
dying in a “small, friendly sanitorium” (his words) near Vienna. I say ‘his
words’, but he could hardly speak – he wrote about the sanatorium in a letter
to his parents in Prague. He was suffering from tuberculosis of the larynx, was
finding it to difficult to eat, to drink, to swallow, to breathe. “Grateful to
be able to breathe” was not, it turned out, just a turn of phrase.
Perhaps he already
knew in 1914, proleptically, something in him already saw the future – about
this, as about so much else. Kafka teaches us, amongst many other things, to
pay close attention to our intuitions. They
contain a special kind of knowledge about ourselves - which is to say they can
contain a special kind of knowledge about the human condition.
“Grateful to
be able to breathe “ – not only an intuition about his future, maybe our common
future, but teaching us not to take the everyday for granted. For that is where
the miraculous lies. The everyday miracles in a world where the old pieties of
religion no longer hold sway. “The ordinary is itself a miracle”, he
once said, in conversation, “All I do is record it. Possibly I also illuminate matters a little,
like the lighting of a half dark stage. And yet that is not true! In fact the
stage is not dark at all. It is filled with daylight.
Therefore people close their eyes and see so little” (CWK 44/5)
As we listen
in to Kafka’s words we hear a mind at work, a consciousness shifting moment by
moment as new thoughts arise. The quotation offers a luminous insight into Kafka’s
thinking as it unfolds. First the spark of an idea, simple but profound, maybe
even verging on a cliche: “The ordinary is itself a miracle”. And then
his relationship to it, slightly self-deprecating: “All I do is record it”. As if that
were completely straightforward - as if writing, finding the right words, is as
natural as - well, as breathing.
And then an
elaboration of the thought, hedged with characteristic caution, hesitancy,
maybe self-deprecation again: “Possibly I also illuminate matters a
little”. Followed by a simile that brings alive the idea in our mind’s
eye: “like the lighting of a half dark stage”.
That would
have been sufficient – the point is made, illustrated, we feel we can grasp the
simple grandeur of Kafka’s thought: “The
ordinary is itself a miracle. All I do is record it. Possibly I also illuminate
matters a little, like the lighting of a half dark stage”. Many writers,
thinkers, would have been happy to leave it at that.
But then -
and this illustrates Kafka’s fidelity both to emotional truth-telling, and to
the complex zigzagging of his mind at work moment by moment, revising, editing,
amplifying – he then doubles back on himself as a new, contradictory thought
arises: “And yet that is not true! In
fact the stage is not dark at all. It is filled with daylight”. What he
thought was the case – that his writing was recording the ‘ordinary miracle’ of
living, to which he added some extra illumination, while leaving some things in
the shadows as if on a half-lit stage – that thought is itself only one provisional
version of what he does, just a momentary grasping after what feels like a
truth. But there is another completely opposite truth, he now realises: that
the stage is filled with light but people just don’t see what’s there in front
of their eyes – i.e. he doesn’t see what’s there – indeed the problem is
there’s just too much to see: “Therefore people close their eyes and see
so little”.
Such a familiar
move, this, in so much of Kafka’s work, in his parables and longer fiction: the
working through of an idea, and images that comes to mind about it – and then the
ending on a down-beat note. (One exception is his magisterial parable ‘My
Destination’ which ends with the hope-filled paradox that that in spite of
their being no provisions available for the journey ‘Away From Here’, “…it is,
fortunately, a truly immense journey”). But here it’s the resigned realisation that
although there is so much to be seen, we nevertheless end up seeing so little -
as if we are dazzled by the superfluity of what the world reveals to us, as if
we can’t quite bear to see and know the full glory (but sometimes horror) of
what is present at every moment.
Implicit in
what I am doing here, spending this time unpacking a few words of his, is sharing
with you, illustrating for you, why for me Kafka remains an indispensable
companion. He both illuminates the human
condition and makes it strange - or,
rather, he reveals to us the strangeness hidden in plain sight. He shows how the familiar, the everyday, is
often more quirky, idiosyncratic, than we at first realise, or more packed with
potential meaning, or more puzzling, or more disturbing.
And, as we
know, (and don’t want to know), the everyday can be very disturbing. The benign
nestles so uncomfortably close to the sinister.
A sense of estrangement is always lurking, just around the corner:
“Someone
must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything
wrong he was arrested one fine morning.”
The opening
of Kafka’s ‘The Trial’, written in 1914, pre-empts our daily news. It not only points
towards Nazi and Stalinist times, but speaks to own benighted land where asylum seekers are scooped up from their
lodgings, just as it describes a reality for Covid scientists in China, for poets
and journalists in Russia, for Palestinian shopkeepers and academics in the
West Bank. Arbitrary unwarranted arrests on fine mornings. Impossible for Kafka
to see into the future - and yet the words came, the stories emerged, a
literature of scrupulous sensitivity, sometimes humorous, sometimes tortured,
but always pregnant with meaning.
So ‘The
Trial’ is also a narrative of a psychological state, that strange condition in our
inner world where we can be captured by feelings of being in the wrong, or feelings
of being misunderstood, or feelings of guilt - even if we aren’t sure what we
have done wrong, or even whether we have done anything wrong at all.
The critical
and persecutory forces within the human psyche are real – even if we have very little
insight into them. It’s as if our psyches were a dimly lit stage (which they
are): shadowy forces can emerge, can
haunt us, can arrest us ‘one fine morning’. Arrest us, derail us, lay
siege to us. Kafka knew this only too well in his own life; and yet managed to
transform, to give literary shape, to what he experienced in ways that compel
our attention. For example, he knew that
sometimes these inner forces can distort the image we have of ourselves: they
can make us grander than we are, more self-important, but they can also make us
seem more monstrous than we are.
“As
Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed
in his bed into a gigantic insect”.
This is no
longer ‘one fine morning’ but just an ordinary morning following ‘uneasy
dreams’ – already a ominous note, foreshadowing the waking realisation that all
is far from well. Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ (written in 1912, published in 1915) is not a
novella about body dysmorphia, although it might give as a particular angle of
vision into that state of mind, but it does speak about how alienated someone can
feel from themselves and the world around them.
Generations
of readers have recognised in the story – in Gregor’s feelings about no longer
belonging to the respectable everyday world he is accustomed to, and being
treated by his parents and others with prejudice, dismissiveness and emotional
cruelty – they have recognised themselves in this disturbing portrait of feeling
like an unwanted outsider. Yet although the drama allows for multiple
interpretations, no single interpretation ever fits, for as so often with Kafka’s
enigmatic creativity, the text hovers in front of us, just out of our grasp. His
texts, his images, don’t ‘stand for’ something else, they are not symbols of something
that need to be, or can be, deciphered, decoded – they are just what they are (like God’s
enigmatic self-description – ehyeh asher ehyeh, “I am what I am, I will
be what I will be”).
But for a
Jewish reader it is hard to ignore the fact that Kafka – writing as he always
did in German - describes Gregor in that first sentence (in spite of our
translations) not as ‘an insect’ but as ‘Ungezeifer’, which means ‘vermin’
– a word that of course was to take on a darker, annihilatory dimension within
a generation. That people could turn into ‘vermin’ overnight was not only a
dystopian literary fantasy, or drama of personal alienation, but just another
example of Kafka’s uncanny, unsettling gift for seeing further, seeing deeper, sensing
the as yet unthought about emerging contours of contemporary life. He had
intimations of the 'unthought known’: he saw what he saw, and recorded it,
without knowing fully what he was seeing, and how it would speak into our lives.
So often I
find that Kafka’s texts reverberate like a shofar blast summoning us into
greater awareness of life’s double-sideness, how heaven and hell are always here
and always now and always within us, and always just beyond our understanding. “There is an
infinite amount of hope in the universe…but not for us” was one of his more memorable paradoxes.
This was
recorded by his longstanding friend (and literary executor) Max Brod, from a
conversation in 1920, and captures the way Kafka’s optimism and his ability to
gain pleasure from the world – he was a natty dresser, enjoyed the theatre, the
cinema, European literature, swimming, vegetarianism, Yiddish theatre, Hebrew
scholarship (he attended lectures at the Berlin Hochshule and corresponded for
many years with Martin Buber) – all of this enjoyment of life and its
opportunities was real for him; and yet in the end, we hear that familiar note
of loss, of incompleteness, of the elusive nature of what is wished for. It’s
not despair that has the last word, but a rueful recognition that life’s pleasures
are transient, and something darker (or maybe just sadder) must inevitably be
reckoned with: “There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe…but not
for us”.
I can’t
remember a time when I didn’t know Kafka, I think I started reading him in my
mid-teens and he has accompanied me ever since. But you can know his work - his
novels, diaries, parables, aphorisms, letters - you can know all this, feel
close to his soul, his spirit, his very special consciousness – and yet one
still never knows him; you can come close to the biography of the man but his
texts retain an elusiveness, however often you read them. They offer themselves
up, but like the canonical scriptures of old they are endlessly suggestive,
tantalising, seductive, enigmatic. They ask to be interpreted, but in the end
they defy interpretation. They are what they are.
My own sense
is that if one wants to live with a developed Jewish sensibility in our own times
one has to live alongside Kafka, in dialogue with Kafka, in the illuminating
shadows of Kafka: his texts have become – for me – part of the very fabric of
my understanding of what it is to be Jewish, they are a sort of secular Torah, a holy literature that
will be read for as long as humanity survives on this planet, offering us intimations
of immortality although we know immortality is only another fable, another
story to live by. Kafka made storytelling a sacred act, a spiritual discipline:
“Writing as a form of prayer” he once said.
In the Austrian
sanatorium where he lay one hundred years ago this week, this relatively unknown
and mostly unpublished Czech-speaking, German-writing, Jewish accident
insurance investigator was looked after by the medical staff along with Dora
Diamant, his final girlfriend/lover – Kafka had never married. She was 25 and
they had known each other for a year. In that last week or so, he could talk
only in whispers, so he communicated mostly in written notes. He was a writer,
after all. A completely secular writer with the Jewish spiritual sensitivity of
the Hebrew poets of old. “Writing as a form of prayer”.
This is
prayer as devotion and – as the Hebrew for prayer, tefillah, literally means – prayer as self-judgement,
self-reflection. Kafka’s devotion to writing – and to writing as a form of devotion
– have been indispensable, foundational, for my own religious/spiritual sensibility.
And I don’t imagine I am alone in this. I’ll finish with one short numinous
text that I return to over and over again. It returns me to myself and to an
awareness of living in a world where revelation happens at each moment, if we can
allow ourselves to remain open to it.
“It is
not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not
even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world
will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it
will writhe at your feet.”
Franz Kafka
died on June 3rd 1924. Zichrono Livracha: may his memory
continue to be a blessing.
[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, May 25th 2024]
