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ARTISAN REVIEW
senseless or chaotic activity of a child - we are no longer sure whether
there is a world out there that the self is observing or whether the selfis
constructing the world out of the misshapen materials of its own most
alienated and uncontrolled elements. The literary representation of onto–
logical, psychological, or social alienation is of course common to several
currents of modernism, but it is given a quite different - literally inim–
itable, I think - sense in Kafka for two reasons into which Benjamin
has
shrewd insight. There is something eerily archetypal in the vista of the
Castle seem from the Village below, crows circling about its single visible
tower against the bright background of the chill winter sky. It is
this
haunting archetypicality that Benjamin addresses, in his aggressively cryp–
tic fashion, by speaking of the prehistoric character of Kafka's world. The
historically contextualized moment when the Young Man from the
Provinces arrived at the gates of manor or castle or grand metropolis
in
the nineteenth-century novel has been transmuted by Kafka into an im–
memorial scene: a man from elsewhere, confronting the folk in the
vil–
lage, who dwell under the shadow of the domain above inhabited by
those presumed to rule their lives. On the surface, this world possesses the
accoutrements of civilization in the historical era: people certainly know
how to write, there is even a telephone link, however questionable its
efficacy, between Castle and Village, so that we feel we are partly in the
Middle Ages, partly in the early twentieth century with its new technol–
ogy and characteristic bureaucracy. But underneath, this is an archaic
world because through the compulsively skeptical figure of
K.
everything
is called into question about its system of governance and restraints.
Existence is imagined as though the supposedly civilizing law were not a
given but an arbitrary and perhaps corrupt imposition on the unmanage–
able chaos that is the real constitution of things as they were experienced
in the prehistoric age. K.'s vocation ofland-surveying is a desperate joke,
for there are no dependable demarcations in this world. It is no wonder
that man easily descends into animal or that the animal erupts in man, as
in the animalistic or pet-like Assistants or in the act of sex between
K.
and
Frieda, where "like dogs desperately tearing up the ground, they tore at
each other's body."
What is equally peculiar about Kafka's fiction is that all this chaos is
conveyed with the calmest, most scrupulous deliberation, with a talmudic
patience of dialectical attention. Benjamin highlights this aspect of Kafka,
especially in his essay-letter to Scholem, by the emphasis he places on the
role of the Jewish ideal of learning in Kafka. I think he recognizes, at least
implicitly, that such learning is manifested both as an elaborated theme -
especially, I would say, in the shorter ficton - and in the
manner
ofKafka's
narrators and the mental habits of his characters. The self-alienated Kafka
