The outsider, the stranger, the foreigner — he wasn’t merely the constant protagonist of Kafka’s writing. He must have also been a secret companion, who appeared and reappeared, who accompanied him without being asked to. A few days after commenting on the last sentence of his letter to Klopstock, Kafka wrote: “I woke with a start from a deep sleep. In the middle of the candle-lit room, a stranger was sitting at a tiny table. He was sitting in shadow, broad and heavy, his unbuttoned winter jacket making him seem even broader.”
Foreignness is the background noise in Kafka. Everything presupposes it, everything leads to it. Kafka knew that feeling in its various aspects: from its most obvious, and even banal, psychological manifestations (the sense of being excluded by a group, by a certain type of people, by a community) to its extreme metaphysical figurations (the Gnostic as Stranger in the world and to the world). At the origin of such feelings lay Kafka’s hyper-acute sense of the singularity — even the untranslatability — of his own psychic experience. He didn’t take pleasure in this singularity but rather fought it, going so far as to seek out the humiliation of sojourns in naturist colonies such as Jungborn or Hellerau, where the prime attraction was offered by the illusion of blending in with a group. (He soon realized that he stuck out even more among nudists, even if only as “the man in the bathing suit.”)
All of Kafka’s work is an exercise (in the way that Chopin’s Études are exercises) on the many keys of foreignness. Karl Rossmann is the foreigner in the most radical and literal sense: the adolescent expelled from his country and thrown onto a new continent. K. is the foreigner in the traditional sense: the stranger who comes from the city to a closed and inhospitable town in the country. Josef K., as an ignorant outsider, is foreign with respect to the great organization that’s sucking him in. The hunter Gracchus is foreign with respect to all the world, traveling without reprieve in the middle zone between the earth and the realm of the dead. The traveler in “In the Penal Colony” is the foreigner who visits exotic lands and records their strange customs. Gregor Samsa is the most irredeemable of foreigners, since he has, in his own room, become the unrecognizable itself: not simply foreign but biologically extraneous. At the same time, Gregor Samsa finds himself in the most common of situations. It would be easy to recognize him in certain descriptions that Kafka left of his family life. But no story discourages commentary as much as “The Metamorphosis,” perhaps because of the extreme “indubitability of the story,” a feeling Kafka felt for the first time when writing “The Judgment.”
Before analyzing the text he had given his students at Cornell, Nabokov felt compelled to say a few simple and definitive words: “Beauty plus pity — that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual. If Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’ strikes anyone as something more than an entomological fantasy, then I congratulate him on having joined the ranks of good and great readers.”
Up until Franz’s death, Hermann Kafka — as far as we can tell from the surviving photographs — didn’t resemble his son. At sixty-two years of age, thus already twenty years older than Kafka would ever get, his father appears to be a hulking, strong-willed man, with short, grizzled hair and thick features. It’s easy to imagine him behind a counter, but no longer that of his father’s butcher shop in Wossek. He had his own wholesale fancy-goods store that now occupied the right corner of Palais Kinsky. Between his legs Hermann Kafka is holding his grandson Felix, whose birth he announced — Kafka wrote — by marching around the house in his nightshirt “as if the baby hadn’t merely been born, but had also already led an honorable life and had his funeral celebrated.”
Now let’s shift our gaze to a photo of Hermann Kafka in 1930, six years after the death of his son and one before his own death. He’s standing next to his wife, who in her long, dark overcoat seems to have grown into the ground. Hermann is thin, the neck of his shirt is too big, his overcoat is open and hangs from him, with a certain elegance, as if on a hanger. The face is that of Franz Kafka, had he grown old. Everything’s the same: the hairline, the protruding ears, the slight tilt of the head, the triangular facial structure, the quiet desolation of the gaze. Only the gaze doesn’t seem to correspond absolutely to his son’s. But it presupposes it.
VIII. The Blanket of Moss
“The Burrow” is the closest one gets in Kafka to a testamentary piece of writing; it was composed during his last winter, 1923–1924. The story’s tone is that of a scrupulous account, as if to say: if you really want to know what my life was like, you’ll find the logbook here, but stripped of every inessential thing, reduced to a geometry of movements, above and below the blanket of moss that marked the entrance to my burrow. The entire story is a deductive chain descending from a single utterance, four words from the Diaries, written at the beginning of 1920: “Meine Gefängniszelle — meine Festung.” “My prison cell — my fortress.”
What is “The Burrow” about? A subject Kafka touched on many times, in his Diaries and in numerous letters. Always allusively, never systematically. It had to do with a “way of life,” one that was — he came to think — irreducibly his, but that in the beginning had been almost a game, a challenge, a dare. By the end, though, it was clearly a necessity. That way of life — or rather that survival regimen — revealed itself ever more clearly and rigorously thanks to the action of what Kafka called the writing. But the writing in turn had simply brought to the surface that which already existed anyway: a lag, a caesura in the “current of life,” in which, he knew, he had “never been swept up.” He hadn’t succeeded in so being, wouldn’t have wanted to be, couldn’t have been.
Every so often Kafka got the urge to investigate how it all began, how that “way of life,” which would later become the only way of life for him, had first come into being. Once in the Diaries, in an entry from January 1922, he described those beginnings in language so calm and cool it sounds definitive:
The evolution was simple. When I was still happy, I wanted to be unhappy and drove myself, using all the means that my times and my tradition made available to me, into unhappiness, yet even so I always wanted to be able to go back. In short I was always unhappy, even with my happiness. The strange thing is that the whole act, if one performs it in a sufficiently systematic way, can become real. My spiritual decadence began with a childish game, however conscious I was of its childishness. For example, I would deliberately contract the muscles of my face, or I would walk down the Graben with my arms crossed behind my head. Annoyingly puerile games, but effective. (Something similar happened with the evolution of my writing, except that later the evolution of my writing came regrettably to a halt.) If unhappiness can be forcibly induced in this fashion, then one should be able to induce anything. However much subsequent developments seem to contradict me, and however much it conflicts in general with my nature to think this, I can’t by any means accept that the origins of my unhappiness were inwardly necessary, perhaps they had some necessity of their own, but not an inward one, they swarmed in like flies and like flies could have easily been driven away.