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who can pick up a new angle for Broadway or Hollywood; or, more
indirectly, by early discoverers who stake out exclusive claims, and
bring indignant suit against all later arrivals who may wish to share
the pleasures of comment, or merely to enjoy. Kafka, like most original
artists in our time, serves as blood serum for critics, and there is not
enough to go around.
II
When Dante, in the
Convivio
and in his Letter to Can Grande,
describes his poetry as "polysemous," with literal, allegorical, moral,
and anagogic meaning levels, he at the same time insists that the
literal meaning comes first in comprehension. This priority is, in fact,
required by the Thomist principle that there is nothing in the mind
that was not first in the senses. In his poetry, therefore, the literal
meaning is complete in its own terms, its own logic. Through the
multivalence of his imagery, and the character of the dramatic and
narrative situations, the various allegorical meanings emerge naturally
-"analogously"-out of the literal. The allegorical meanings, more–
over, are themselves complete in their own terms and their own logic,
all of them dimensions of a world-view which has a beginning and
development and end, which answers the questions that it raises.
Kafka's writings are also, as everyone feels at once, polysemous.
If
we try to follow Dante's prescript, and begin our comprehension
at the literal level of meaning, we recover many qualities that are
often neglected in the account of the interpreters, who invariably
start at one of the allegorical levels. We notice the fluid prose, with
its remarkable freedom from literary devices or allusions. We can
enjoy quite simply the play of fancy, with its odd combinations that
range from the blithe or ludicrous to the grimly grotesque. We dis–
cover, at unpredictable and always surprising intervals, sudden pulses
of tenderness that warm us through the lattice of a dog's endless
investigations or a woodchuck's burrowed maze or the dreadful sor–
rows of a cockroach. And especially we find on almost every page,
even on those from which we derive also the most somber impres–
sions, a wit-lively, restless, gay. The wit is never a joke that can
be told or an epigram that can be repeated out of frame. It is the
mentally unexpected, the half-reversal of an idea, the interjection
of the routine and usual into the absurd.
There is also (though perhaps I record here a deficiency of my
own) a certain monotony, a sense of occasional boredom that weights
