420
PARTISAN REVIEW
opportunity of seeing B. at once and explaining everything to him, A. rushes
upstairs. He is almost at the door, when he stumbles, twists a sinew, and
al–
most fainting with the pain, incapable even of uttering a cry, only able to
moan faintly in the darkness, he hears B. - impossible to tell whether at a
great distance or quite near him- stamping down the stairs in a violent
rage and vanishing for good.
The technique here seems very clear. All essential factors involved
in this common experience of failure to carry out an appointment,
such as: overzealousness (which makes A. leave too early and over–
look B. on the staircase), misconcentration on details (A. thinks of
the journey instead of his essential purpose in meeting B., which
makes the way far longer than it was when measured without paying
attention), and finally the typical mischievous tricks by which objects
and· circumstances conspire to make such failures final-are found
in the- story. These are the author's raw material. Because
his
stories
are built up out of factors contributing to typical human failure, and
not out of a real event, they seem at first like a wild and humorous
exaggeration of actual happenings or like some inescapable logic gone
wild. This impression of exaggeration, however, disappears entirely,
if we consider the story as what it actually is: not the report of a con–
fusing event, but the model of confusion itself. What remains is a
cognition of confusion presented
in
such a way that it will stimulate
laughter, a humorous excitement that permits man to prove
his
es–
sential freedom through a kind of serene superiority to
his
own
failures.
From what has been said so far it may become clear that the
novel-writer Franz Kafka was no novelist in the classical, the 19th
century, sense of the word. The basis for the classical novel was an
acceptance of society as such, a submi...<:Sion to life as it happens, a
conviction that greatness of destiny is beyond human virtues and
human vice. It presupposed the decline of the citizen, who, during
the days of the French Revolution, had attempted to govern the world
with human laws. It pictured the growth of the bourgeois individual
for whom life and the world had become a place of events and who
desired more events and more happenings than the usually narrow
and secure framework of his own life could offer him. Today these
novelists who were always in competition (even
if
imitating reality)
with reality itself, have been supplanted by the reporter. In our world
real events, real destinies, have long surpassed the wildest imagination
of novelists.
The pendant to the quiet and security of the bourgeois world
in
which the individual expected from life his fair share of events
