194
PARTISAN REVIEW
not possible," there is already the desperate certainty that "that"
can be.
This is the whole secret of Greek tragedy, at least in one of its
aspects. For there is another aspect which, by an inverse method,
would permit us to understand Kafka better. The human heart has
an unpleasant tendency to call fate only that which crushes it. But
happiness also, in its fashion, is without reason, since it is inevitable.
Modern man, however, attributes to himself the merit of it, when
he does not disown it. There would be much to say, on the contrary,
about the privileged destinies of Greek tragedy and the favorites of
legend who, like Ulysses, in the midst of the worst adventures are
rescued from themselves. It was not so easy to find the way back to
Ithaca.
What must be remembered in every case is this secret complicity
which, in tragedy, unites the logical to the banal. That is why Samsa,
the hero of
Metamorphosis,
is a commercial traveller. That
is
why
the only thing which disturbs him in the extraordinary adventure
which reduces him to a bug is that his boss will be displeased by his
absence. The legs and antennae of an insect grow from him, his
spine arches, white spots appear on his belly, and-I will not say
that it does not astonish him, the effect would be missed-but it causes
in him a "faint vexation." The whole art of Kafka is in this nuance.
In his central work,
The Castle,
the details of daily life are what
appear in the foreground and yet in this strange novel where nothing
is concluded and everything begins again, it is the essential adventure
of a soul in quest of grace which is represented. This translation of
the problem into action, this coincidence of the general and the
particular--one recognizes them in the little artifices appropriate to
every great creator. In
The Trial,
the hero could be named Schmidt
or Franz Kafka. But his name is Joseph
K. ...
It is not Kafka and
yet it is he.
It
is a central European. He is like everybody. But he is
also the entity
K.
who poses the X of this fleshly equation.
Also, if Kafka wishes to express the absurd, he makes use of
coherence. There is the well-known story of the crazy man who was
fishing in a bath-tub; a doctor who had his own ideas on psychiatric
treatment asked him
"If
they were biting," and got the answer:
"Of course not, fool, this is only a bathtub." This story is a bit
baroque. But it makes very clear how the effect of absurdity
is
bound
up with an excess of logic. Kafka's world is truly an unspeakable
universe in which man allows himself the torturing luxury of fishing
in a bathtub, knowing he will draw nothing out of it.
