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not compensated by his excursions into what he calls nomenclatural
symbolism. One of these deserves a prize of some sort. Talking about
the magistrate's books in
The Trial,
he says: "The title of the second
is meaningful:
How Grete was Plagued by Her Husband Hans.
Grete
(from Margaret) means pearl or child of light, Hans (from Johannes)
means the Lord graciously giveth or Jehovah is gracious. The noble
names suggest the nobility of the libido. The intention of the book is
thus not obscene." Noble names, indeed! All very Grimm.*
The Kafka literature is becoming as weird as the Lawrence litera–
ture, with about the same ratio of light to lucubration. Happy gleams
of the former can be detected in an essay in Austin Warren's distin–
guished collection. Warren understands that criticism, like politics, is an
art of the possible. One of his concluding remarks on Kafka is: "One
secular hope after another has failed ; Kafka
can be
the symbol of what
is left." I italicize that
can be
for the benefit of critics who claim to have
discovered, for all time, what a book
is
or
must be.
As with the other
writers he treats-Edward Taylor, Herbert, Pope, Hopkins, Yeats, Haw–
thorne, Forster, James-Warren speaks of Kafka as a poet with a "rage
for order," a "desire to perceive order for himself, [which] makes his
final creation a kind of world or cosmos"; and he conceives his critical
task to
be
the concentrated formulation of that cosmos and of the "lan–
guage and mythic structure in which it is incarnated." Here the critic
intervenes in the reader's behalf, not in what he takes to be the writer's.
He aids and guides the reader's perception, suggesting a point of view
from which a writer's work can be grasped as a unity, but not claiming
that this unity is or even explains the work; and then retires, leaving
the reader to make his own interpretations within a range of possibility
limited only by a passion for precision, for
justesse,
which the critic
hopes to have kindled in him by example rather than precept. This
tact enables writers of Warren's degree of elegance to be almost as il–
luminating about a writer as the writer himself. A case in point. Nothing
in Neider's book clarifies the nature of Kafka's quest half so well as
does a sentence he quotes from Kafka: "All these so-called diseases,
pitiful as they look, are beliefs, the attempts of a human being in distress
to cast his anchor in some mother-soil." How easy to identify this meta–
phor as a sex-symbol, and then "explain" it as a sign of the search for
the unconscious! And how much simpler, and closer to the unique
values of art, to say with Warren, "Kafka's 'mystery' is the apparent
*
There is a secret key to this sentence. It
will
be sent in a plain envelope,
on request.
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