ELIZABETH DALTON
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caught in the actual minutiae of experience. It is surely wrong to at–
tribute his view of the world, especially "unequivocally," to anything
so abstract and ordered as a philosophical system. The guilt that
weighs on the novels and stories like a physical pressure , a darkening
of the light and thickening of the air, can hardly be explained by so
universal and abstract a sin as "encroachment upon the peace of
nonbeing." Kafka's work does suggest a view of the human condi–
tion , but in the form of images and emotions rather than a coherent
philosophy. The primary effect, especially of the most successful
works, is of a claustral subjectivity, an obsessional imprisonment in
a world of individual thought and feeling from which there is no
escape into philosophy .
Monolithic philosophical explanations seem particularly inap–
propriate for a writer such as Kafka, who compels our interest not
only by his general sense of life but by the brilliant strangeness of its
details . These oddly vivid images torment and baffle us with their
enigmatic intimations of meaning, like fragments of our own
dreams. They are left untouched by philosophical explanations,
which seem to float at a considerable distance above them. Why, for
instance, do three bearded lodgers install themselves in the Samsa
household? Why are the father's underdrawers soiled in "The Judg–
ment"? Why is the Harrow made of glass in "In the Penal Colony"?
Heller tells us it is not only futile but wrong to ask the meaning of
these details . The point is that they have no meaning: Kafka is
writing about the disinherited modern world, where things happen
without meaning.
But this answer is not satisfying. These bizarre details, so
meticulously recorded, are not meaningless. On the contrary.
Kafka's images are incomprehensible because they are
too full
of
meaning. We aren't used to dealing with so much significance : the
interpretive capacity is overwhelmed and confused by this fictional
world in which nothing is innocent or accidental. It is a representa–
tion not of the external world, where events seem at times so random
or so remote from our interests that they have no special "meaning"
for us, but rather of the internal world, w1fere nothing is without
meaning, although the meaning may be unknown.
Heller characterizes the interest in meaning as "boorish curiosi–
ty in the company of tragic subtleties!" We are left to our bafflement,
to content ourselves with the cliched figure of the disinherited
modern man lost in the corridors of bureaucratic power, or the
patron saint of modern alienation. This empty vocabulary does
