MARK HARMAN
"At least he could garden":
Beckett and Kafka
In
post-war Paris Beckett was stil l struggling to step out of Joyce's shad–
ow. Unfortunately for him, Kafka was all the rage, so much so that the
popularity of the Prague writer was interfering with the reception of the
great Joyce himself. Even in Dublin, as Beckett sadly informed Joyce, intel–
lectuals were too busy reading Kafka to show a belated interest in
Ulysses .
So Beckett went on the offensive
to
prevent his being perceived as a Kafka
epigone. His comments about Kafka in the
New York Times
give off a whiff
of the anxiety of influence while also revealing just how insightful he
could be about his Prague rival:
I've only read Kafka in German--serious reading... only
The Castle
in
German. I must say it was difficult to get to the end. The Kafka hero
has a coherence of purpose. He's lost but he's not spiri tually precari–
ous, he's not falling to bits. My people seem to be falling
to
bits.
Another difference. You notice how Kafka's form is classic. It goes on
like a steamroll er-almost serene. It
seems
to be threatened the whole
time-but the consternation is in the form. In my work there is con–
sternation behind the form , not in the form.
Beckett's remark that he found it difficult to get to the end of
The Castle–
a phenomenon not entirely unknown among readers of Beckett-doesn't
quite square with his acute perception that Kafka's form goes on "like a
steamroll er." With that simile Beckett captures a key feature of Kafka's
prose-its relentlessness-a stylistic trait that had passed unremarked in the
voluminous discussions of
The Castle
by German-language writers and crit–
ics. Beckett was the first to note the odd discrepancy in Kafka's third and
final novel between the lack of action-the hero
K.
goes round and round
in circles and never penetrates through to the mysterious Castle-and the
relentless momentum of the language itself which presses on and on in a
manner that anticipates Beckett's own version of the steamroll er effect in his
Molloy
trilogy. Sometimes it takes an outsider with the linguistic discernment
of a Beckett to spot essential characteristics of foreign masterworks.
