BOOKS
69
deeply-planted, modern prejudices, as Kafka did; and few, accordingly,
have faced such creative difficulties. His art is one of dislocation, men-
acing, aggressive; a chemical art in which accepted values, ideas of
probability, and even the usual notions of esthetic logic, are all disinte-
grated as if by an acid solvent. As his medium for aggression Kafka
chose a form that approximates the fable. To rescue this genre from
archaism, to reanimate it without violating its nature, meant that he
must inject psychology into his characters, and contemporary detail into
his scenes; and yet at the same time keep the whole in a marginal
province, real and not real, where plausibility could be freely disre-
garded. Moreover, with themes so antipathetic, he was under continuous
pressure to anticipate and direct the responses of his readers. To all these
demands Kafka's art was equal, as
The Trial
once more proves. He knew
how to calculate his effects, how to command, first indignation and then
by degrees curiosity, and finally something approaching sympathy, to-
wards a situation which the modern mind would otherwise have rejected
instinctively. And meanwhile he was able, by all the devices of mystifi-
cation, to prevent the reader from grasping the real drift. He knew also
(though in. this case the process may not have been conscious) how to
suggestin his work his own singular sense of the moral life, its complex
but organic character. It is to this conception that we owe the tense
emotional equilibrium which is one of Kafka's unique literary effects.
Terror and laughter, reverence and blasphemy, cruelty and tenderness-
all are to be found here; but they do not clash with one another; they do
not occur separately and in sequence: they make up a complex of emo-
tions, steadily present, suffusing the whole work, and somehow har-
moniousdespite the many tensions. Yet for all the intricacy of Kafka's
mind, and all the artifice involved in his novels, their final effect in one
of a candor almost austere.
F. W.
DUPEE
MODERNISM IN ENGLAND
CIRCLE.
Edited by].
L. Martin, Ben Nicholson, N. Cabo. London:
Faber
&
Faber.
1 £, 1
s.
Circle
is the first adequate survey of the contemporary abstract (or
concrete) and constructivist movements in art. Such volumes as have
previoulytouched upon the subject were apt to stop with the pioneers
in their 1920 stages, and the student has been able to follow more recent
developmentsonly through periodicals and exhibition catalogues.
Circle
does not pretend to be comprehensive. It is a symposium com-
piled
by two English painter-sculptors and one architect, while most of
the featured contributors are artists or critics who have been at one
timeor another identified with London; there is also occasional homage
to their better known forerunners (photographs of work by Malevich,
Brancusi,Picasso, etc.). The volume is bound, illustrated and printed
with
such distinction that even the exacting critic can overlook the in-
frequentlapses in the editors' discrimination. (Why are there no repro-
