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PARTISAN REVIEW
is very sombre. He understands very little of what is happening.
He supposes only that he is condemned, but he scarcely asks himself
to what he is condemned. Sometimes he doubts his condemnation as
well, and continues to live. A long time afterward, two well-dressed
and polite gentlemen seek him out and invite him to follow them.
With the greatest courtesy, they lead him to a desperate-looking
suburb, prop him up against a boulder, and thrust the knife into his
heart. Before dying, the condemned man says only: "Like a dog."
Clearly then, it is difficult to speak of symbols in a work whose
most perceptible quality is precisely its naturalness. But the natural
is a difficult category to understand. There are works in which the
events seem natural to the reader. But there are others (rarer, it is
true) in which the character accepts what happens as natural. By
a singular but evident paradox, the more extraordinary the adventures
of the character the more perceptible will be the naturalness of the
narrative: this is proportional to the separation that can be felt
between the strangeness of a man's life and the simplicity with which
he accepts it. This, it seems, is the naturalness of Kafka. Precisely
thus, we perceive what
The Trial
means. People have spoken of an
image of the condition of man. To be sure. But it
is
at once more
simple and more complicated. I mean that the meaning of the novel
is more particular and personal to Kafka. To a certain degree, it is
he who speaks, if it is we whom he confesses. He lives and he is
condemned. He learns
this
in the first pages of the novel which he
is
living in the world and if he tries to remedy this, he does so
nevertheless without surprise. He will never be astonished enough at
his own lack of astonishment. It is by these contradictions that one
recognizes the first signs of the absurd work. The mind projects its
spiritual tragedy into the concrete. And it can do
this
only by means
of a perpetual paradox which gives to colors the powers of expressing
the void and to our daily actions the power to translate eternal
ambitions.
Likewise,
The' Castle
is perhaps an actual theology, but it
is
above everything else the individual adventure of a soul in search of
grace, of a man who asks of the objects of this world their kingly
secret and of women the signs of the god slumbering in them.
Meta–
morphosis,
in its tum, certainly displays the horrible imagery of an
ethics of lucidity. But it is also the product of that incalculable aston–
ishment that man experiences in perceiving the creature he is capable
of becoming without effort. It is in this fundamental ambiguity that
the secret of Kafka resides. This perpetual counterbalancing of the
