562
PARTISAN REVIEW
decisions of Kafka's life as a relentless struggle to sever his intimate
relations with the world while struggling to succumb to it - to sink
himself, had he been fully able, in the clay substance of
Ie vrai,
learn–
ing carpentry, horseback riding, swimming, gardening, Hebrew.
But all the time, in the very midst of the most decisive attempts to
share a portion of the real, he found the project at hand insupporta–
ble, ludicrous to boat on the Moldau or swim in Bohemian lakes. He
adored his own contrariety, although he wrote scathingly of antithe–
ses. What life presented in all its contradiction was ineluctable but
on that account deserved no elevation to principle. Life does what it
can; the real has no opinion. Everything is bespoken in another
realm and set forth matter-of-factly in ours. The sufferers are those
who have been rendered unfit by their origins. Kafka was finally one
who elected to transform the injustice of his condition and elaborate
it into a just order, obscurely merited.
Prague was, in its finality, a baroque
scenum,
the setting before
which the procedures of withdrawal and severance transpired :
Kafka was thrust out - recalling the childhood calamity in which his
father locked him weeping on the small balcony overlooking the
night city. Kafka was set apart, the oldest child (third after two
previous sons had died) who tried to cooperate but couldn't, who
wanted to be affectionate but could not bear the intimacy and naked–
ness. Kafka longed to master the culture around him, but he could
not make contact with its earthy immediacy : his body, he observed,
lying next to theirs at Bohemian summer resorts, seemed like their
own until it began to speak and its language made it the enemy.
Among Germans he was cut off as Jew, among the Yiddish traveling
players of the Cafe Savoy assimilated, and among the healthy sick to
death, obliged, as he wrote in 1916, to "struggle even in order to die."
In all things Kafka was beyond
Ie vrai,
much farther from its prospect
than Flaubert who at least had suffered the healthy misfortune of
venereal disease .
Throughout Kafka's writing, Prague is a deposit of memory,
not Proustian as some have suggested, for there is little comfort
taken in the remembered, few experiences worked and reworked
until they became ribbon and cakes laid out to offer at interior
shrines. Rather it is that Prague is made mythic, retraced into a past
where, as Kafka remarked, "we Jews are old the moment we come
into the world," more familiar with what is long gone than with what
is at hand, intimate with stones which have long since been
