ROBERT ALTER
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been deeply engaged in one of these two writers have paid little attention
to or have even disparaged the other. (Thus, Edmund Wilson's apprecia–
tion of Proust was one of the most luminous chapters of
Axel's Castle,
whereas he would later dismiss Kafka's fiction, in
Classics and Commercials,
as "the half-expressed gasp of a self-doubting soul trampled under. I do
not see how one can possibly take him for either a great artist or a moral
guide.") It is an instructive measure of the parameters ofBenjamin's criti–
cal
world that he should have readily taken both Kafka and Proust for
great artists and moral guides while clearly recognizing the profound dif–
ferences between the two.
Let us call it a game of mirror-readings: Benjamin reflecting Kafka
and Proust, who thus obliquely reflect each other. But Benjamin's critical
reflections are often willfully presented as in a glass darkly. He was, in
both a positive and a negative sense, an oracular writer. His highly-packed
formulations often require interpretation, sometimes are powerfully
suggestive, usually leave gaps in the argument, and occasionally may be
quite wrong. The mirror-readings I shall attempt are intended to catch an
elusive but deep affinity that links these three modernists. The idea be–
hind the specular experiment of this essay is that modernism as a
phenomenon of literary history, crossing boundaries and switching
emphases, is so protean that it may come into clearer focus through
juxtapositions than through neat definition.
We need to register certain salient differences between Kafka and
Proust - not chiefly those that would meet the eye of the common reader
but those that are defined by Benjamin in the characteristically uncom–
mon readings of them which he proposes. In Kafka's fiction, the essential
movement Benjamin perceives is the
gesture;
in Proust, it is the
image.
Gestures have no preconceived meaning for Kafka; "rather, the author
tried to derive such a meaning from them in ever-changing contexts and
experimental groupings." Thus, the narrative struggle for meaning is the
dynamic that informs Kafka's writing, and whatever profundity there is in
his
"gestic" world exists, paradoxically, I would say, on the surface of the
narrated events. The Proustian image, on the other hand, is the main in–
strument of the French writer's "impassioned cult of similarity." The ex–
travagantly elaborated simile or metaphor, which often leads to an alter–
native or secondary metaphor, allows for a proliferation of meanings be–
low the sensuous surface of the narrative materials, in the inner depths of
the narrator's consciousness. The stylistic translation of these two diver–
gent impulses is spareness for Kafka; sumptuousness, syntactic convolution
for Proust. Proust's ultimate quest, Benjamin insists, is for happiness, at
least in its "elegiac form": Kafka's quest, I think Benjamin implies, is, in
