HAWTHORNE
343
to Kafka as a
force,
speaking of him as a "dangerous" writer and
questioning whether it is "wise" to admire him. Anders tells us that
Kaf4 "provided exactly the mixture of sensation a certain class and
generation of readers . . . most desired, pandering to their self–
conscious sense of having reached the last phase of individualist
sensibility. For here indeed were stories about the individual in his
purest, most isolated role-yet told in a tone which showed how point–
less was his position in the world. The hero was still the center, but the
center of complete indifference."
In
another passage, Anders speaks
of Kafka's tone as transforming "men and things into a kind of
nature morte."
The "class and generation of readers" which was
given what it wanted by Kafka is said by Anders to be that which
flourished in 1925.
If
this dating is accurate for Europe, it is not
accurate for America, where Kafka, like James, made his strongest
impression upon our literary culture in the 'forties and continues
to stand well to the fore of our interest while James recedes into
the background.
The name of Kafka had to tum up sooner or later in any
discussion of Hawthorne, for our awareness of Kafka has done much
to license our way of reading our author. Everyone perceives certain
likenesses between Hawthorne and Kafka. They were similarly, al–
though not equally, remote from the public, and to the public view
they presented temperaments of which a defining element was a
quality of personal gentleness at variance with the subversive nature
of their work. There is a very considerable degree of similarity in their
preoccupations-"man's dark odyssey in an alien world" may serve to
describe Kafka's as well as Hawthorne's. They stood in equivalent
relations to religion: unbelievers both, their imaginations were capti–
vated by the faiths to which they were connected by family tradition
and from these unavowed faiths they derived the license for the mythic
genre which constitutes so much of their appeal, for the representation
of agencies of human destiny which are not of the actual world.
Then too, having in mind Kafka's negation of the world of actuality,
I think it can fairly be said that there is something comparable in the
way that Hawthorne deals with the world. He encourages the com–
parison when he tells us that he does not write novels but "romances,"
by which he means that his fiction does not make a very determined
reference to the concrete substantialities of life, the observation and
