FRANZ KAFKA
417
world, fabricated by men and constituted according to human and
not natural laws, will become again part of nature and will follow
the law of ruin, if man decides to become himself part of nature, a
blind though accurate tool of natural laws, and renounces his supreme
faculty of creating laws himself and even prescribing them to nature.
If
progress is supposed to be an inevitable superhuman law which
embraces all periods of history alike, in whose meshes humanity ines–
capably got caught, then progress indeed is best imagined and most
· exactly described in the following lines quoted from the last work of
Walter Benjamin:
The angel of history ... turns his face to the past. Where we see a chain
of events, he sees a single catastrophe which unremittingly piles ruins on
ruins and hurls them at his feet. He wishes he could stay-to awaken the
dead and to join together the fragments. But a wind blows from Paradise,
gets caught in his wings and is so strong that the angel cannot close them.
This wind drives him
irre~istibly
into the future to which he turns his back,
while the pile of ruins before him towers to the skies. What we call progress
is this wind.
In spite of the confirmation of more recent times that Kafka's
nightmare of a world was a real possibility whose actuality surpassed
even his atrocity stories, we still experience in reading his novels and
stories a very definite feeling of unreality. First, there are his heroes
who do not even have a name but are frequently introduced simply
by initials; they certainly are not persons whom we could meet in a
real world, for they lack all the many superfluous detailed charac–
teristics which together make a real individual. They move in a society
where everybody is assigned a role and everybody has a job; and
they are contrasted only by the very fact that their role is indefinite,
lacking as they do a defined place in the world of jobholders. And all
of it, whether small fellows like the common people in
The Castle,
who are afraid of losing their jobs, or big fellows like the officials in .
..
JI
The Castle
and
The Trial,
strive at some kind of superhuman perfec-:)sY
tion and live in complete identification with their jobs. They have nd
psychological qualities because they are nothing other than job–
holders. When, for instance, in the novel
Amerika,
the head porter
of a hotel mistakes somebody's identity, he says: "How could I go on
being the head porter here if I mistook a person for another ... In
all my thirty years of service I've never mistaken anyone yet." To err
is to lose one's job; therefore, he cannot even admit the possibility of
an error. Jobholders whom society forces to deny the human pos–
sibility of erring, cannot remain human but must act as though they
were supermen. All of Kafka's employees, officials and functionaries
are very far from being perfect, but they act on an identical assump-
tion of omnicompetence.
