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is Kafka's ambivalence on almost all questions. It is known that
Kafka had conflicting views, but Marthe Robert sees his contradic–
tions as the essence of his thinking-which makes it more difficult if
not impossible to pin down Kafka's ideas or even to give a clear-cut
account of his multiple meanings, as so many Kafka experts have
done. Ms. Robert points out that Kafka was both a Zionist and a
non-Zionist; a proud Jew and an embarrassed Jew; a socialist and a
nonsocialist; a believer in God and an agnostic; a German writer
and an uneasy German writer; a man of vision but without formed
ideas; a pursuer of women and a recoiler from them; a son both at–
tached to and hating his father; a believer and a nonbeliever in the
law; and so on . Hence the meanings of his fiction-and his
diaries - if we insist on squeezing meanings out of them, are always
double-edged and inconclusive. Incidentally, one of the things
Robert appears to make definite is that Kafka was impotent in nor–
mal sexual relations, but not with prostitutes . This would help ex–
plain his doubts about marriage and the broken engagements .
Though Robert does not make the point , her description of
Kafka's pendular thinking and feeling provides a clue to the quality
of his prose . So far as I can recall, no Kafka critic ever has noted that
the tone of his prose - in individual sentences - is marked by ab–
stractness and by a transcendental resonance that conveys verbally
the unresolved beliefs of the writer. It has been remarked that
Kafka's language has the detached, matter-of-fact surface of bureau–
cratic prose , the kind of writing he did for the insurance company
where he worked. But I think it is more accurate to say that Kafka
invented a prose that is at once abstract and concrete . Thus the most
simple and direct statements have a haunting implication of con–
flicts , meanings, frustrations, and anguish far beyond the palpable
references evident at a quick reading.
Let me give a few examples, chosen at random. The opening
sentence of
The Trial
seems quite ordinary: "Someone must have
traduced Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was
arrested one fine morning." The remark is plain enough. But it sug–
gests the feeling of guilt, the idea of a false but inevitable arrest, and
the sense of an uneasy and unresolved life that sets the stage for all
the mixed and ambivalent motives of the entire novel. The key word
is
traduced (verleumdet
in German) which invokes unseen accusatory
powers . Similarly, at the beginning of "The Burrow," we read: "All
that can be seen from the outside is a big hole, that, however, really
leads nowhere.. . . I can make no boast of having contrived this
