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JOYCE CAROL OATES
life, because one lacks the strength to master the world. One flies
from the miraculous into one's own limited self. That is a withdrawal.
Being is most of all a being-with-things, a dialogue. One mustn't shrink
from that." And so he is never too busy to see the boy, never too un–
happy or too
ill.
One gets the impression that Kafka - quite in con–
trast to the Kafka of the fiction - is very much involved with other
people, sometimes absurdly considerate of them; he is good-humored,
witty, paradoxical, an antiegotist ("Suicide ... is a form of egotism
raised to the point of absurdity").
Kafka on expressionist poetry: "..• a frighteningly authentic
proof of disintegration. Each of its authors speaks only for himself.
They write as
if
the language was their own personal property. But
language is only lent to the living, for an undefined period. All we
have is the use of it. In reality it belongs to the dead and to those who
are still unborn. One must be c:areful in one's possession of it.
[fhe
expressionists] are language destroyers. That is a grave offense. An
offense against language is always an offense against feeling and against
the mind, a darkening of the world, a breath of the ice age." We sense
in Kafka's fiction a terrible burden of relatedness: the isolated K. who
must relate to the rest of the universe, who has no freedom. In Kafka's
conversation we encounter a different person, to whom the relatedness
of men is not oppressive, but a good. He identifies with the Zionists,
with · Walt Whitman ("he combined the contemplation of nature and
civilization, which are apparently entirely contradictory, into a single
intoxicating vision of life"), with Christianity, with the tradition of
art and language. For a while an anarchist (around 1910), he finally
rejected radical politics because the reformers "attempted to realize
the happiness of mankind without the aid of grace."
Kafka on women? Not so fashionable: "Women are snares, which
lie in wait for men on all sides in order to drag them into the merely
finite."
But Kafka on love - wise far beyond Schopenhauer: "Love al–
ways inflicts wounds which never heal, because love always appears
hand in hand with filth. Only the will of the loved one can divide
the love from the filth.... But [a young, disturbed friend of Janouch's]
has no will of his own, and so he is infected by the filth."
Kafka on sin: "Sin is turning away from one's own vocation....
The poet has the task of leading the isolated and mortal into eternal
life, the accidental into conformity to law. He has a prophetic task."
Of course, the book must be depressing: Kafka will die in 1924.
And he is always aware of his impending death, with a "steep declivity"
within him. But the dominant impression of Janouch's book is one of
