414
PARTISAN REVIEW
can hardly be said than the words with which Kafka concludes
The
Trial: ,
"It was as if he meant the shame of it to outlive him."
That
The' Trial
implies a critique of the bureaucratic regime of
the. Austrian pre-war government whose numerous and · conflicting
nationalities were dominated by a homogeneous hierarchy of officials
has been understood from the first appearance of the novel. Kafka,
an employee of a workmen's insurance company and a loyal friend
of many eastern European Jews for whom he had had to obtain
permits to stay in the country, had a very intimate knowledge of the
political conditions of
his
country. He knew that a man caught in
the bureaucratic machinery is already condemned; and that no man
can expect justice from judicial procedures where interpretation of
the law is coupled with the administering of lawlessness, and where
the chronic inaction of the interpreters is compensated by a bureau–
cratic machine whose senseless automatism has the privilege of ultimate
decision. But to the public of the twenties, bureaucracy did not seem
an evil great enough to explain the horror and terror expressed in the
novel. People were more frightened by the tale than by the real thing.
They looked therefore for other, seemingly deeper, interpretations,
and they found them, following the fashion of the day, in a mys–
terious depiction of religious reality, the expression of a terrible
theology.
The reason for this misinterpretation which in my opinion is as
fundamental, though not as crude, a misunderstanding as the psycho–
analytical variety, is of course to be found in Kafka's work itself.
It
is true, Kafka depicted a society which had established itself as a sub–
stitute for God, and he described men who looked upon the laws of
society as though they were divine laws-unchangeable through the
will of men. In other words, what is wrong with the world in which
Kafka's heroes are caught is precisely its deification, its pretense of
representing a divine necessity. Kafka wants to destroy this world by
exposing its hideous and hidden structure, by contrasting reality and
pretense. But the modern reader, or at least the reader of the twenties,
fascinated by paradoxes as such, and attracted by mere contrasts,
was no longer willing to listen to reason. His understanding of Kafka
reveals more about himself than about Kafka-reveals his fitness for
this society, even if it be the fitness of an "elite"; and he is quite
serious when it comes to Kafka's sarcasm about the lying necessity
and the
ne~ary_lying
as divine law.
Kafka's next great novel,
The Castle,
brings us back to the same
world, which this time is seen not through the eyes of somebody who
