416
PARTISAN REVIEW
put it, that "men who suffered our kind of experiences, who are beset
by our kind of fear ... who tremble at every knock at the door, can–
not see things straight." And they add: "How lucky are we that you
came to. us!" The fight of the stranger, however, had no other result
than his being an example. His struggle ends with a death of ex–
haustion-a perfectly natural death. But since he, unlike the
K.
of
The Trial,
did not submit to what appe.ared as necessity there is no
shame to outlive him.
The reader of Kafka's stories is very likely to pass through a
stage during which he will be inclined to think of Kafka's nightmare
of a world as a trivial though, perhaps, psychologically interesting
forecast of a world to be. But this world actually has come to pass.
The generation of the forties, and especially those who have the
doubtful advantage of having lived under the most terrible regime
history has so far produced, know that the terror of Kafka is adequate
to the true nature of the thing called bureaucracy-the replacing of
government by administration and of laws by arbitrary decrees. We
know that Kafka's construction was not a mere nightmare.
If
Kafka's description of this machinery really were prophecy,
it would be as vulgar a prediction as all the other countless predic–
tions that have plagued us since the beginning of our century. It was
Charles Peguy, himself frequently mistaken for a prophet, who once
remarked: "Determinism as far as it can be conceived ... is perhaps
nothing else but the law of residues." This sentence alludes to a pro–
found truth. In so far as life is decline which ultimately leads to death,
it can be foretold. In a dissolving society which blindly follows the
natural course of ruin, catastrophe can be foreseen. Only salvation,
not ruin, comes unexpectedly, for salvation, not ruin, depends upon
the liberty and the will of men. Kafka's so-called prophecies were but
a sober analysis of underlying structures which today have come into
the open. These ruinous structures were supported, and the process of
ruin iLcelf accelerated, by the belief, almost universal in his time, in
a necessary and automatic process to which man must submit. The
words of the prison-chaplain in
The, Trial
reveal the faith of officials
as a faith in necessity of which they are shown as the functionaries.
But as a functionary of necessity, man becomes a functionary of the
natural law of ruin, thereby degrading himself into the natural
tool of destruction which may be accelerated through the perverted
use of human capacities. But just as a house which has been aban–
doned by men to its natural fate will slowly follow the course of
ruin which somehow
is
inherent in
all
human work, so surely the
