FRANZ KAFKA: THE PARADOX OF JUDAISM

This paper of mine was published as Franz Kafka: Judaism and Jewishness in SPRACHKUNST, Jg. XXXIV, 2. Halbband, Kommission für Literaturwissenschaft, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wien, 2003, pp 233-47.

I.

Jews like Spinoza, Franz Kafka, Heinrich Heine, Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Karl Kraus, among others, have rightly been categorised as “conscious pariahs”, who earned dignity and prestige for their people through their creative abilities, by Hannah Arendt in her essay The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition, 1944. These poets and thinkers were ‘bold spirits’ who contributed their bit to make the emancipation of the Jews “what it really should have been — an admission of Jews as Jews to the ranks of humanity, rather than a permit to ape the gentiles, or an opportunity to play the parvenu.” The conscious pariahs were neither fully integrated in the European society nor at home in the Jewish community which was dominated on the one side by wealthy bankers and merchants and on the other side by orthodox Jews. According to Arendt, the conscious pariah is a hidden tradition because there are few links among these great but isolated individuals. The counterparts of conscious pariahs are the parvenus, the upstarts who for the sake of upward mobility or out of fear try to join the ranks of non-Jews. The pariahs use their minds and hearts whereas the parvenus use their elbows to raise themselves above their fellow Jews into the respectable world of the gentiles.[1] Hannah Arendt is too modest to count herself in the prestigious list of conscious pariahs but, taking into account the rising popularity of her books, she is certainly one in spite of her controversial relationship with her mentor, Heidegger. She initiated the publication of Kafka’s diaries in America. I would like to add to this list the name of Anna Frank, whose diary written in hiding (1942-44) at the age of thirteen-fourteen made her posthumously world famous.

This paper explores the role of Judaism and Jewishness in the writings of Kafka, one of the most famous Jews of the twentieth century. Interestingly, Kafka never tasted fame in his lifetime. Most of his works were published posthumous and the few publications in his lifetime were more often than not in Jewish journals. In the neighbouring Germany, writers of lesser talent were in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons such as taking a politically and morally correct position or writing pedagogically. In his autobiography Die Welt von Gestern, Erinnerung eines Europäers Stefan Zweig refers to Rilke, Hoffmannsthal and Stefan George as ‘literary sensations with a fanatic following’ amongst the youth in Vienna at the turn of the century.[2] Kafka is conspicuous by his absence in this extensive documentation of the first half of the twentieth century Europe. At best he was known in the so called Prague Circle of intellectuals and artists. In this context it is not difficult to understand why, in one of his early diary recordings, Kafka expresses his solidarity with the extras in the theatre who do not make it to the centre-stage. The title of the paper begets a clarification. The intention is not to uproot Kafka from the larger context of universal writers who transcend temporal and spatial thresholds and confine him to the narrow context of Jewish writers. The aim is to explore a particular aspect of his writing and connect it to his universal and secular motifs.

The two terms, Judaism and Jewishness, are technically different, for Judaism refers to the set of fixed religious beliefs and rituals whereas Jewishness is an existential concept and is, therefore, extremely personal and difficult to define. Quoting from Kafka’s own accounts, particularly Brief an den Vater, his father comes across as a hardworking, self-made man who had no time or patience for religious matters and who, it seems, believed assimilation in the dominating culture to be the key to professional success in the multiethnic, multi-religious and multilingual Austro-Hungarian Empire. The family would go to synagogues on special occasions only, and that too was more of a ritual visit than a serious interaction with the Jewish tradition. The entries in Kafka’s diaries reveal that Kafka was curious about the Jewish rituals and beliefs and also the Jewish mystic dimension, Cabbalah, even if he had not done any extensive reading of the Jewish scriptures and related texts. The diaries contain, for example, quotations from the Talmud and lengthy descriptions of the ceremony of circumcision of the Jewish male infants (to be specific, that of his nephew and that among the Russian Jews). The women in his life, Felice Bauer, Grete Bloch and towards the end, Dora Dymant, were Jews. Dora was, in fact, an Ostjüdin, a Jew from Poland, where the Jews were still, to a large extent, untouched by the Western Jewry’s eagerness to assimilate. Then there is his legendary but somewhat puzzling friendship with Max Brod, a Prague Jew who was also a writer but is today famous or infamous in the context of his posthumous publication of Kafka’s works. His friend, Löwy, the Polish stage actor, Martin Buber, the Zionist editor of Der Jude, who published some works of Kafka and Kurt Wolff, his publisher of the Rowohlt Press, Franz Werfel and Felix Weltsch, writers with whom he was friendly and corresponded regularly, were all of Jewish origins. Of course these relations were based on common interests that went beyond a common descent but it cannot be just a coincidence that much of his circle of acquaintances was predominantly Jewish. There are also substantial references in his letters, especially to Max Brod, that one of his plans or dreams was a trip to Palestine and eventually migrating there. Nobody can be certain that he would have actually carried out his plans had he lived longer. When he came to know that he was suffering from tuberculosis, he decided to dedicate his next book (Ein Landarzt. Kleine Erzählungen) in the year 1919 to his father, not in the sense of the biological father but in terms of the larger tradition that had brought him into the world. He wrote to Brod that with this gesture he would be travelling to Palestine with the finger on the map.[3] However, even when Kafka was very much conscious of his collective Jewish-German-Austrian-Slavic heritage, he was deeply conscious of his lonely existence as a writer. The following entries from his diaries and letters provide an insight into his complex alienated inner being :

24 October, 1911

Yesterday it occurred to me, that I did not always love my mother as she deserved and as I could, only because the German language prevented it. Jewish mother is no Mutter, to call her Mutter makes her a little comic (not to herself, because we are in Germany), we give a Jewish woman the name of a German mother, but forget the contradiction that sinks into the emotions so much the more heavily. Mutter is peculiarly German for the Jew, it unconsciously contains, together with the Christian splendour, Christian coldness also. The Jewish woman who is called Mutter therefore becomes not only comic but strange. Mama would be a better name if only one didn’t imagine ‘Mutter’ behind it. I believe that it is only the memories of the Ghetto that still preserve the Jewish family, for the word Vater too is far from meaning the Jewish father.[4]

8 January, 1914

What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.[5]

25 December, 1911

A close-knit family life does not seem to be so very common among and characteristic of the Jews, especially those in Russia. Family life is also found among Christians, after all, and the fact that women are excluded from the study of the Talmud is really destructive of Jewish family life; when the man wants to discuss learned talmudic matters — the very core of his life — with guests, the women withdraw to the next room even if they need not do so — so it is even more characteristic of the Jews that they come together at every possible opportunity, whether to pray or to study or to discuss divine matters or to eat holiday meals whose daily basis is usually a religious one and at which alcohol is drunk only very moderately. They flee to one another, so to speak.[6]

6 January, 1912

Yesterday Vizekönig by Faimann. My receptivity to the Jewishness in these plays deserts me because they are too monotonous and degenerate into a wailing that prides itself on isolated, violent outbreaks. When I saw the first plays it was possible for me to think that I had come upon a Judaism on which the beginnings of my own rested, a Judaism that was developing in my direction and so would enlighten and carry me farther along in my own clumsy Judaism, instead, it moves farther away from me the more I hear of it. The people remain, of course, and I hold fast to them.[7]

An Brod Mai, Juni 1921

. . . Eine Kleinigkeit genügt, um mich in diesen Zustand [Tür des Wahnsinns] zu bringen, es genügt, dass unter meinem Balkon mit dem mir zugekehrten Gesicht ein junger halb frommer ungarischer Jude im Liegenstuhl liegt, recht bequem gestreckt, die eine Hand über dem Kopf, die andere tief im Hosenschlitz und immer fröhlich den ganzen Tag Tempelmelodien brummt. (Was für ein Volk!)[8]

The first remark notwithstanding, Kafka’s descriptive yet ironic comments (I have only selected a few representative ones out of many) manifest his Außenseitertum, pariah status. The Other is not only the other people but also one’s own people despite the use of the possessive pronoun ‘my’. “my own clumsy Judaism” and other observations reflect his existential dilemma of being within yet without a people. His alienation from the Jewish orthodoxy is evident in many of his letters and diary recordings. These are somewhat sad but honest thoughts of a Dichter, a writer — Jewish by descent, Austrian by passport, a law graduate and a Beamter/bureaucrat by profession, speaking and writing in German in a Czech majority area, neither at home in his community nor in the society as such. Above all, he lived with a terminal illness for eight years (1917 to 1924), fleeing from one sanatorium or rural retreat to another. These disparate influences, however, need not be viewed as something negative or tragic, for they can also be an enriching experience. Even Nietzsche[9] remarks that the Jews know how to thrive in adversity, which actually spurns them to achieve more than a favourable milieu. Kafka, too, considered the despair of the German-Jewish writers over the lack of Boden (ground or footing) as their source of inspiration.[10]

And now a few remarks about Kafka’s relation to languages. Hebrew, the sacred language of revelation and Yiddish were already lost to much of the Prague Jewry. Even the German Kafka learnt and used in Prague was cut off from the mainstream German. Kafka once ironically described the parochial Prague German as Zigeunerdeutsch (Gypsy German)[11]! Apart from that was what he described as the sense of loss or “strangeness” or “contradiction that sinks into the emotions” in terms of German language as his mother tongue (refer to the first quotation above). Similar sentiments have also been expressed by other products of German-Jewish symbiosis, particularly after the Holocaust. One of them is Paul Celan, a Holocaust survivor, who described the German language contaminated by the Nazis as the ‘black milk’ in his poem, Todesfuge, which generated a great deal of discussion and debate within the post-war Germany. Another one is Gerhart (later Gershom) Scholem, considered an authority on Jewish mysticism, who went on to become Prof. Emeritus in the Hebrew University in Palestine. A Zionist by ideology (he migrated to Palestine in 1923 unlike his friend, Walter Benjamin, whom he was unable to convince of the necessity to migrate), Scholem described German language as ‘cold’ in contrast to the ‘warm’ Yiddish.[12] Kafka often went to the Yiddish theatre, more out of a sense of solidarity with his people than a desire to see good theatre. He is also known to have delivered a lecture on the Yiddish language in which he appealed to the westernised educated Jewry to take pride in Yiddish and own it up instead of pretending that it had nothing to do with it. Kafka described Yiddish, which draws much of its vocabulary from Hebrew and German as a restless language, in a constant flux. In the last years of his life he made, despite or because of his terminal illness, an extraordinary effort to learn Hebrew.

Above all is the existential predicament of pan-Judaism, for how could a Jew feel the same degree of reverence for and emotional attachment to any language other than the divine language, Hebrew? This is as much true of the German Jews as of the French or the Polish Jews or any other Jews elsewhere in the world. Does not a Muslim anywhere in the world have the same sentiments for Arabic irrespective of his mother tongue? It is, however, a different matter that the Germans mistook this existential predicament of the German Jews for lack of loyalty to Germany or Austria. In an article entitled ‘Deutsch-jüdischer Parnass’(German-Jewish Mt Parnassus), 1912, Moritz Goldstein described the relation of German Jews to Germany as unrequited love.[13]

There are umpteen references to the Jewish people and their concerns in Kafka’s letters and diaries, but when it comes to his fictional writing, he is discreet. His stories are conspicuous by the absence of a single Jew or even a remote derivative of the word, Jew. One explanation for this marked difference is clear. In contrast to the fictional writing, the letters and diaries were not written for public consumption. The only exceptions are the Animal in the Synagogue and Arabs and the Jackals (Schakale und Araber, 1917) where Jewish motifs can be located in the titles itself but even these texts are subtle and dense. Let us explore Kafka’s ‘Animal in the Synagogue’ and ‘Before the Law’ in terms of this discussion. The former is hardly known whereas the latter is one of Kafka’s most popular works.

II.

Animal in the Synagogue

In stark contrast to Before the Law, Animal in the Synagogue[14], 1920 a fragment text of Kafka, is almost unknown. For some inexplicable reason it was never included in the anthologies of Kafka’s works. Could its fragmentary character be the reason? Hardly, because so many other texts of Kafka, including his novels, are fragments. Only very recently some Kafka critics have discovered this interesting narrative and somehow it has gained the title ‘Animal in the Synagogue’. After searching in many anthologies, I finally found it in Das Ehepaar und andere Schriften aus dem Nachlaß[15]. The protagonist in the narrative is an animal that lives in a synagogue, hence the title. Let us first study the attributes of this animal.

It is almost as if an engraved image of a mythical creature has come alive, for it resembles no known creature. It has a terrifying appearance — long neck, triangular face, lidless eyes, upper teeth jutting out and apparently stiff hair on the upper lip. However the creature, the size of a marten, does not really terrify anyone as it appears to be extremely shy and harmless. This shy animal (shyer than even a forest animal) can be observed by the visitors to the temple from a minimum distance of two metres. If one tries to take a closer look, it runs away. So no one has ever held it, forget about touching it. It is the only one of its kind in the synagogue, without any colony. In fact it is the only creature in the synagogue. Its blue green colour, a shade lighter than the wall paint, functions as a camouflage. But this colour is probably only its “apparent colour” (sichtbare Farbe) since the dirt and the dust on its fur cover its “real colour” (wirkliche Farbe). It shows a distinct lack of respect for the prayers in the synagogue that it appears to consider as “noise”. Its restlessness during the prayers signifies that it perceives this noise, which is at its peak on festival days, as a threat to its being. It would prefer to see the synagogue converted into a granary so that few people come and startle it. According to the narrator of the text, this is a distinct possibility because the community of the hill town is becoming smaller from year to year and it is becoming difficult even to bear the maintenance costs of the synagogue. Of course there is no way of communicating this to the creature which would certainly draw some comfort from this bit of information. It is quite obvious that it is not interested in the prayers of the pious. During the prayer time, it indulges in naughty pranks like peeping into the women’s section from the meshes of the window grills. This seems to have become a fetish with it. The temple servant tries to shoo him away from the grills of the window under the pretext that it scares women but it keeps coming back to what appears to be its favourite haunt.

Life is not easy for this creature. It lives on a “narrow” ledge barely two fingers wide. Underscored is its precarious existence. The ledge is built on three sides of the temple. So at the end of the path it has no option but to turn back. Its about-turn is a sight worth seeing. Despite its age and the danger of falling, it does not hesitate to leap in the air like an acrobat for an about-turn in the air itself. Does this fantastic jump fail him? Never. It runs back on the same narrow path. Its survival on this narrow path is indeed a wonder. This seemingly ageless creature has lived in the temple for a long, long time. Chances are that it was there even before the temple came into being. Now it is as if it were the pet of the temple. The community does not take a serious note of it. The women are still a little interested whereas the men are more or less indifferent. But the animal does not take any chances and is still cautious. It is never seen on the floor of the temple and seems to prefer heights where it would be safe from a sudden attack. It is almost as if it has, at some point of time in its ageless existence, faced persecution and expulsion. It is said that once in the history of the temple, the reverend rabbis discussed the presence of the creature on the temple premises. They consulted the sacred law books. The opinions were divided but the majority came to the conclusion that the creature had no place in the God’s house. Hence the decision to expel it. However the creature was too smart for them. But this does not mean that its expulsion is impossible. The creature is aware of the lurking dangers to its existence or does it perhaps have a premonition of the events to come? At this point the narrative breaks off.

Let us try to arrive at the signification of these complex sets of signifiers which are dominated by the uneasy relationship between the creature and the worshippers. All the attributes of the creature — its unkempt and dishevelled appearance, mobility, seclusion, mysterious nature, camouflage, disregard for rituals, lack of respect for the prayers and the sanctity of the temple and acts of defiance point towards the relation and the opposition between the spiritual and the codified religion, the esoteric and the exoteric and, the liberal and the dogmatic. The tussle between the liberal and the orthodox elements is a hallmark of every religion, even in modern times. The phantasmic creature becomes a metaphor for the pacifist, liberal and mystical dimension of the religion. Mysticism is not settled or stationary, i.e. it is not codified but is always in the process of becoming. It is not collective but individual. Further it is considered unclean vis-à-vis the purity of the strict code of conduct of the orthodoxy within the community. It is spirituality per se the essence of religion that cannot be defined but can be experienced. It is elusive, unknown and unknowable. Emphasised is hence the opposition between apparent and real (sichtbar und wirklich), and narrow and enormous (schmal und ungeheuer). Important is the essence and not the external beauty. In the context of this narrative it would be relevant to mention an interesting anthropological detail — the ancient synagogues did have representations of animals depicting the metaphorical and metaphysical universe of their religion. In later Judaism, the rabbis condemned them as pagan and the tradition was discontinued. Kafka plays with these mythological details and creates a fictional text. Emphasised is also the threat to spirituality not from outside but from the orthodox elements within the parameters of the same religion. The orthodoxy ignores the spirit of the religion or even tries to crush or banish what it perceives as a challenge to its authority. At times the creature incurs the wrath of the religious authorities who declare it repugnant and heretical. The lonely and the restless creature thus becomes a metaphor for the precarious and vulnerable nature of spirituality. At the same time it manages to survive despite all the hostility and even manages, now and then, to mock at the religious law.

At the level of metaphor, multiple readings of the narrative are possible. The narrative could also be understood as the tussle between the liberal and the orthodox Jews. The animal, in this interpretation, signifies a liberal Jew who has a relation, albeit an uneasy one with the (ultra) orthodox Jewry. The animal then becomes Kafka himself and the likes of Kafka who are not comfortable with the orthodoxy and view it with unease from a distance. The narrative becomes a kind of introspection for Kafka. It is significant that the animal does not leave the synagogue despite threats to its existence for it seems to prefer this uneasy relation to no relation at all. The community does not succeed in driving it away from the synagogue nor does the animal succeed in scaring them into retreat. The hide and seek continues for all the times. In the wider context of this interpretation, the animal could represent any thinking being having problems with the fixed codes of one’s own traditions which one seeks for intellectual enquiry. Two good illustrations would be Spinoza excommunicated by the Amsterdam rabbis and Abélard incessantly persecuted by the medieval church; both were condemned for their ideas by their own peoples.

The two interpretations cited above are not radically different from each other and they intersect, in fact. The following observation from Kafka’s letter to Brod, 1913 sounds so much like the insolent animal in the synagogue:

Im Zionistischen Kongreß bin ich wie bei einer gänzlich fremden Veranstaltung dagesessen, allerdings war ich durch manches beengt und zerstreut gewesen und wenn ich auch nicht gerade Papierkugeln auf die Delegierten hinuntergeworfen habe, wie ein Fräulein auf der gegenüberliegenden Galerie, trostlos genug war ich.[16]

III.

‘Before the Law’

The legend or parable is immensely popular. That is why it has been analysed by several commentators without, however, exhausting it. Here is another attempt. First we undertake a Close Reading of this legend ‘Before the Law’ (Vor dem Gesetz first published in: Selbstwehr. Unabhägige jüdische Wochenschrift [Prag], 9. 1915, No. 34; thereafter in “Der Prozeß” [1925], Chapter 9) in which a man from the countryside seeks entry into the Law. Although most readers of Kafka would be familiar with this legend, it is important methodically to go step by step. This marvellous legend has no clear-cut corresponding myth but it draws bits and pieces from the mythology of ancient Israel, rabbinical as well as mystical. At the same time it must be emphasized again that the word ‘Jew’ or any of its derivatives does not appear anywhere in the text or for that matter in any other story of Kafka.

Before the Law stands a doorkeeper on guard. One day a man from the countryside seeks to gain admittance to the Law. He waits outside the open door of the Law, as the doorkeeper refuses to grant him permission to enter at that moment. The man thinks it over and then asks if he will be allowed in later. “It is possible,” says the doorkeeper, “but not at the moment.” The man tries to look through the door. The doorkeeper laughs, reminding the man of his power and warning him of terrible consequences in case of disobedience. He also mentions other, more terrifying and powerful doorkeepers inside. The man decides to be on the safe side and he waits. The doorkeeper even gives him a stool to sit by the side of the door. There he waits day after day and years. All this while he makes many attempts to gain permission to enter, but in vain. Sometimes they talk but the doorkeeper maintains his position of strength. He always rejects the pleas of the man for admittance with the remark that he cannot be let in yet. Neither does requesting help nor bribing. Gradually the man even familiarises himself with the fleas in the doorkeeper’s fur collar and begs them to help so that the doorkeeper changes his mind. He sacrifices all he has, however valuable, to bribe the doorkeeper. The doorkeeper accepts everything, but always adds: “I am only taking it to keep you from thinking you have omitted anything.” At the same time the door is always open. With passing years the man from the countryside gets old and childish. He curses his bad luck. Finally, when he is dying and his eyesight grows dim, he perceives a radiance that streams from the door of the Law. Before he dies, he beckons to the doorkeeper as he can no longer raise his body. The doorkeeper bends over him, the difference in height between them all the more pronounced and says: “What do you want to know now? You are insatiable.” The man asks him, “Everyone strives to reach the Law. So how is it that in all these years no one but me has asked to enter?” Realising that the man is about to die, the doorkeeper, in order to penetrate his growing deafness, bellows into his ear: “No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended only for you. I am now going to shut it.”

After telling the legend in its syntagmatic order let us make an attempt at understanding it by criss-crossing through the paradigmatic relations. The lack of structural unity of the myth makes the task of breaking it into constituent units difficult. However, it is clear that Kafka’s legend draws on many theological concepts, some common to all religions, but some specifically Jewish[17]. The allusions to the heavenly courts, the doorkeepers and the cosmic light at the end of the legend are too obvious to be missed. ‘Waiting’, as we all know, is a typical Jewish belief. The reference to the Law is also explicit. It is well known that in Judaism the ‘Law’ is fundamental to the religious system. Moses brought the Written Law from the Mount of Sinai for the children of Israel. Some scholars like Politzer, a Jewish migrant in America with knowledge of Hebrew, have pointed out certain interesting Jewish and linguistic sources that Kafka draws on. According to the Jewish Law, there are people who know the Law and people who do not know it. The second category of the ‘uncultured man’ or the heretic is called in Hebrew Am-ha’araz and in Yiddish, the language of many East European Jews, Amhorez, i.e. Man from the Land or Countryside, with the obvious allusion to a straightforward, somewhat naïve or ignorant person. The first doorkeeper even has the stereotypical physical features of an East European Jew — eine grosse Spitznase, den langen, dünnen, schwarzen tatarischen Bart i.e. a big sharp nose and a long, thin and black orthodox beard of Tartars[18]. Here the orthodoxy of the Semitic religions is asserted.

At the same time it would be naive to take the identification of Jewish elements in Before the Law or in some other narratives like Animal in the Synagogue, Investigations of a Dog (Forschungen eines Hundes, posthumous 1931) and Jackals and Arabs at their face value. As Lévi-Strauss explains, if there is a meaning to be found in narratives, it cannot reside in isolated elements or signifiers which enter into its composition, but only in the way those signifiers are combined, i.e. in the “bundle of relations”. The combination leads to a bricolage, a new conceptual construct. So it is not the presence of isolated signifiers that lend meaning to the narrative but the metonymic and metaphorical relations in the text that ultimately make the difference. In the structure of Kafka’s narratives, the “bundle of relations” similarly generates a new structural whole. Kafka inverts the basic premise of the ancient and sacred Jewish signs and symbols generating thereby an altogether new discursive formation. According to the Jewish belief, the way to the God is to knock at the doors of the Law to seek entry into it. God is the Father who dispenses justice. However in Kafka’s legend, the man from the countryside is eager to enter, but he has to deal with corrupt doorkeepers and so he ends up remaining forever outside the Law. Kafka plays with the terms ‘Law’ and ‘Waiting’, giving them a distinctly ironic, and modern, one can say a Kafkaesque twist. The transformation of Biblical and classical motifs, legends and parables is typical to Kafka’s narrative strategies. One has only to refer to other works of Kafka like Metamorphosis, The Silence of the Sirens (Das Schweigen der Sirenen, posthumous 1931), The Great Wall of China (Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer, posthumous 1931), Homecoming (Heimkehr, posthumous works), Tower of Babel (Das Stadtwappen, posthumous works), to name but a few. Kafka makes use of sacred symbols, myths and other such motifs and reconstitutes them to suit his universe of discourse. This sophisticated mode of presentation wherein one makes an asset of Europe’s common inheritance, ancient Jewish and ancient Greek, at the same time transcending it, requires genius as well as broadmindedness.

Let us return to the legend. Now the question arises how one understands this legend, this riddle, which makes many a reader feel as if he were himself the helpless ‘man from the countryside’ standing outside the door of this fascinating but confusing legend, seeking an entry into its labyrinth? The core of the legend raises the nagging question or the problematic: Did the doorkeeper deceive the man? Is the man innocent? Is the doorkeeper responsible for the failure of the man to achieve his goal? To be fair to the doorkeeper, he is friendly, respectful to his superiors and non-bribeable with a stern regard for duty, for he does not even once leave his post in all those years. Besides he belongs to the Law, so it is perhaps beyond the human beings to judge him. Doubting his integrity is doubting the Law itself. Then there is the naive man from the countryside. In his absolute innocence, he actually believes that the moment will come, when the doorkeeper will himself let him in and so he wastes his life waiting. Also, the doorkeeper instils fear in his mind. It is the fear of disobeying the instructions and the fear of the unknown that keeps the man from entering through the otherwise open door and therein lies his existential dilemma. This man, who represents pure faith, is simply unable to understand the mechanisms of the system. Should he have entered the open door without asking? Towards the end the doorkeeper reveals that the door he guarded all these years was meant for this man only. This bit of information he keeps to himself till the man from the countryside is on his deathbed.

Some modern interpretations of the legend, and I tend to agree to them, suggest that the legend, in the context of The Trial (Der Proceß, posthumous 1925) is an allegory of the tedious judicial system, the Kangaroo courts and the mechanisms that move or paralyze them. In this legend the celestial tribunal is transformed into an analogy for the corrupt earthly tribunal. The hierarchy of (good) angels who ultimately lead to God is transformed into the hierarchy of (corrupt) doorkeepers who stand between the seeker and the justice. Hope is transformed into hopelessness and the wait for the Messiah into the unending wait for justice. In the novel, The Trial, the artist Titorelli recounts three possibilities of acquittal, namely definite acquittal, ostensible acquittal and indefinite postponement. The first option exists only theoretically. The second option is no good, for it gives the accused a false sense of security. The third also does not suit the client, for it means the persistence of his trauma. No wonder the typical figure of justice with bandage over the eyes and scales is transformed by Kafka into the Goddess of Victory and eventually Goddess of Hunt, for the figure has wings and is in a flying posture accompanied by hunting dogs just like the Goddess of Hunt in full cry! Similarly the symbol of freedom in America, the Statue of Liberty, is described in Kafka’s first novel, the Lost One (Der Verschollene, posthumous 1927), holding not the torch of freedom but a sword of all things! Independent of the novel, the interpretation can be taken further to refer to the mechanisms that underline bureaucracy, be it of any system. The doorkeeper epitomises the modern-day bureaucracy, anonymous in character, which has forgotten the original purpose of its service. The doorkeeper represents a typical clerk or official in any society, in any system working in an impersonal bureaucratic style. The servant ends up becoming the master, and at the same time, he too suffers the same fate. Perhaps it wouldn’t be entirely irrelevant to mention that Kafka had a degree in Law and later in life he worked in an insurance office where workers would bring him their insurance claims and as supplicants wait patiently and innocently like the man from the countryside for what was rightfully theirs. The naivety, the child-like innocence of the man from the countryside, like Dostoevsky’s Idiot, is from my point of view the most remarkable and perplexing aspect in this surrealistic and esoteric legend. The sheer gullibility, the absolute faith that makes one look like an idiot binds most, if not all, of Kafkan characters. Günter Grass attempts to imitate Kafka’s technique of the interplay of the Real and the Surreal in his works, specially in The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel, 1959) In his essay, “Kafka und seine Vollstrecker” (Kafka and his Executors)[19], Grass shows that Kafka’s world does not subscribe to any particular society or system; rather there is something Kafkaesque about all systems of the world, of the right or the left.

The interpretation can be taken further to cover the human predicament of the crossing of the threshold that separates as well as connects. It involves crucial decision-making in the face of the unknown. The metaphysical and abstract universe of law and justice discourages man to cross the threshold. This unknown and unknowable world almost becomes surreal when one fails to gather enough courage to go through an open door.

In The Trial, this legend is narrated by a Christian priest, who appears to be a clever dialectician. He argues “the right perception of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other.” Further he adds “It is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary.” To this kind of reasoning the main protagonist of the novel, Josef K., replies “A melancholy conclusion. It turns lying into a universal principle.” In Prometheus (posthumous 1931), the last remark is: “The legend attempts at explaining the inexplicable. Since its origin lies in truth, it must again end in the inexplicable.” These remarks can be interpreted as a subtle explanation of legends and also as a justification of the apparent contradictions in the legends. One thing that is, however, certain is the ambiguity and the esoteric nature of all signifiers. The signification of the Kafkan paradoxes cannot be fixed, it multiplies infinitely. However much one interprets, there is always a nagging feeling that there is more to it. The meaning remains elusive and therein lies the secret of the long life of a legend or a myth for it defies simple solutions or answers.

An interesting comparative study between Kafka and Marc Chagall (1887-1985) has been made by Iris Bruce.[20] Kafka’s use of mythological and folkloristic motifs has been compared to Chagall’s anthropomorphic paintings, which also draw heavily on mythology and folktales. The comparison becomes all the more significant, as both the artists belong to overlapping generations and are Jews from Eastern Europe. Chagall was a Russian Jew who migrated, 1923, to France. But as Iris Bruce himself admits, Chagall’s images, despite some surrealistic features, are much more concrete, vivid and colourful than Kafka’s tortured souls.

Kafka’s mock theological disputation and specifically the caricature of an orthodox Jew or for that matter a Moslem (actually there is no difference between religions when it comes to orthodoxy) as the corrupt doorkeeper and the narration of the legend in The Trial by a catholic priest (it works as a camouflage over camouflage), shows that he was aware of the pitfalls of the Zionist movement.

IV.

“Before the Law” and Poe’s “Purloined Letter”

Kafka’s legend reminds me of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Purloined Letter[21] (1844/45). In this famous tale, a queen has a love letter (the exact contents of the letter are not disclosed to the readers till the end) stolen right under her nose by a daring minister who wants to take political advantage of it. The queen is unable to prevent the theft owing to the King’s presence in the room. This ‘purloined letter’ must be recovered at all costs. The Queen’s secret police, equipped with magnifying glasses and other sophisticated paraphernalia, search the minister’s place several times — his cupboards, desk, bed, arms and legs of the chairs, etc but they fail to locate the letter. Then the Queen sends Dupin, who enjoys a Sherlock-like reputation, with this assignment. His alert mind discovers the precious letter openly displayed in a card-rack. He steals it and restores it to the queen. These seemingly different stories have one thing in common and that is the ‘open’ signifier which is so obvious that the other party misses its signification. In Before the Law, the man from the countryside sees the open door for many years but fails to grasp its significance, for he is too taken in by the watchman. In Purloined Letter it is the police who is fooled by the obvious. They are trained to find what is hidden. Their training fails them when the object of search is not concealed but is openly and almost casually albeit deliberately displayed. The open display of the dangerous and important letter becomes its camouflage. The inversion of the obvious gives to both the stories a twist and makes them popular narratives. In Kafka’s legend the watchman dupes the man from the countryside; in Poe’s story Dupin ultimately dupes (note the pun in the name!) the minister who had duped first the queen and then the entire Parisian secret police[22]. In both narratives the object of desire is within reach. One only has to extend one’s hand and seize it. The two texts illustrate the dense textual layers and the complex nature of literary texts that explore some aspects of the complex human vagaries.

V.

Conclusion

One question may bother the readers of this paper. Why tinker with Kafka’s Jewish background when he was himself discreet about it? This is where psychoanalysis comes handy. One tries to forget or bury certain events, encounters and confrontations but they continue to inhabit the inner layers of the unconscious. They become a part of his psychic component. According to Lacan, man forgets his signifiers but the signifiers never forget him. The hidden signifiers are restructured and they manifest themselves in dreams, jokes or slips of the pen or the tongue. In case of a writer, they would invariably merge in his writing even if he tries his level best to cover them. They emerge with or without the conscious permission of the referent. It is the task of a literary critic to decipher this re-structuration in a writer without losing sight of the specificities of a literary discourse.

Kafka’s stories explore an astonishing variety of motifs. His fictional works can be broadly categorised into those that draw on his office work, his family life, his existence as a writer and his religious heritage. Texts like The Trial and The Castle (Das Schloß, posthumous 1926) or smaller prose writings like Poseidon (posthumous 1936) explore the modern bureaucratic phenomenon; Metamorphosis and Judgement (Das Urteil, 1913) are woven around the family; A Report for an Academy (Ein Bericht für eine Akademie, 1917) and The Hungry Artist (Der Hungerkünstler, 1922) explore the role of art and the artist ; Arabs and the Jackals, Animal in the Synagogue, Investigations of a Dog and some other narratives explore the tussle between the liberal and orthodox elements within a religion and the aphorisms and Mediations (Betrachtungen über Sünde, Leid, Hoffnung und den wahren Weg, posthumous 1931) are reflections on a variety of themes like modernity and life as such. Some works are, of course, difficult to place in any of these well-defined slots.

In my view, Kafka was articulating basically, what may be called ‘intertextuality’. He interprets the intertexts of cosmology, mythology and fiction, and the end result is a highly charged political discourse. On the one hand, his writing is atemporal, its truth is valid for all times, all cultures and all systems. Kafka’s indifference to the real time can be gauged from a remark in his diary dated 24 January, 1915 that his watch had been an hour and a half ahead for three months till one day his fiancée finally set it right to the minute.[23] Kafka’s observation is a quiet disapproval of his fiancée’s interference. At the manifest level, he was least interested in politics. There are two interesting, metonymically related remarks of Kafka in his diary, recorded on the same day. First he writes that Germany has declared war on Russia and in the next line he writes in a rather detached manner, that he is going for a swim.

2 August, 1914

Germany has declared war on Russia — Swimming in the afternoon.[24]

On the other hand, despite this distance from the political events of his day, which are conspicuously absent from his writings, his works were banned twice after his death — first by the Nazis in Germany and then by the communists in Eastern Europe. Obviously his writing is provocative and it has ruffled many feathers despite all the camouflage of fables, myths and legends.

Benjamin’s analyses of Kafka’s writing in his essay, Potemkin,[25] on the tenth death anniversary of Kafka and in a letter to Scholem[26], dated 1938, from Paris, where he had been hiding from the Nazis, are worthy of reference here. Unlike other German Marxists of his time, like Lukács and Brecht, who rejected Kafka outright, Benjamin was one of the first critics to realise Kafka’s worth (or was it the Jew in Benjamin, who was unconsciously attracted to a writer with Jewish roots?). In the last two years before he took his life, Benjamin had been reading a lot of Kafka. Whatever the reason, his analysis is an important contribution to the studies on Kafka that takes into account Kafka’s Jewishness without glorifying it. His interpretation is shorn of the ideological blinkers of socialist realism or the straightforward theological ones led by none other than Kafka’s life-long friend, Brod (which is why I call their friendship a puzzle):

[Kafka’s writings] do not modestly lie at the feet of doctrine, as aggadah [legends, anecdotes] lies at the feet of halakha [law]. When they have crouched down, they unexpectedly raise a mighty paw against it.[27]

Kafka was certainly a Jew, but he would not be a creative writer, a great storyteller, if he took the Jewish elements literally. The dense and rich literary signifiers of Kafka cannot be confined to religious or racial aspects alone, even if the Jews in Israel insist a priori on doing so. Many critics, particularly those of Jewish origin (Max Brod to start with, then the migrant Jews in America like Wagenbach, Sokel and even Hannah Arendt with her interpretation of Das Schloss, Scholem in Israel) have made this error. The pain and the sorrow of exile and the Holocaust perhaps inadvertently influenced their interpretation. As a Jew, Kafka was certainly a member of that group but as a creative artist he did not dissolve in that group. There is no real contradiction in his remark that he admired Zionism and was nauseated by it.[28] It would not be inappropriate to describe Kafka’s Jewishness in terms of the Self and the Other Self. One cannot deny or abandon what one inherits in terms of religion, language, history and culture but to remain confined to it would also be disastrous. This kind of confinement has paralysed many communities that were once upon a time vibrant and creative. The same also applies to the contemporary Jewish state of Israel. Kafka engages dialectically with the Jewish tradition and also with other concepts and ideologies of his times but those elements enter new combinations, and in the process lose all the earlier a priori cosmological and theological signification. He generates his own specific literary discourse, which is radically different from the sources from which it draws inspiration. It is indeed a new formal and conceptual construct and must be understood as such.

---

* This paper was presented in the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, 2003. It was published as Franz Kafka: Judaism and Jewishness in SPRACHKUNST, Jg. XXXIV, 2. Halbband, Kommission für Literaturwissenschaft, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wien, 2003, pp 233-47.

[1] Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah. Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, (ed.) R.H. Feldmann, New York: Grove Press, 1978, pp 67-90.

[2] Zweig, Stefan, Die Welt von Gestern, Erinnerungen eines Europäers, Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 2006, p 64.

Die neuen Dichter, Musiker, Maler aber waren alle jung: Gerhart Hauptmann …, Stefan George, Rainer Maria Rilke hatten mit dreiundzwanzig Jahren … literarischen Ruhm und fanatische Gefolgenschaft.

[3] Kafka, Franz, Briefe 1912-1924, (ed.) Brod, Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1975, p 275.

An Brod Ende März 1918

. . . Seitdem ich mich entschlossen habe, das Buch meinem Vater zu widmen, liegt mir viel daran, daß es bald erscheint. Nicht al ob ich dadurch den Vater versöhnen könnte, die Wurzeln dieser Feindschaft sind hier unausreißbar, aber ich hätte doch etwas getan, wäre, wenn schon nicht nach Palästina übersiedelt, doch mit dem Finger auf der Landkarte hingefahren.

[4] Kafka, F., Diaries. 1910-1923, (ed.) Brod, M., Kolkata: Hermes Inc., 2001, p 88.

[5] Ibid, p 252.

[6] Ibid, p 152.

[7] Ibid, p 167.

[8] Kafka, F., Briefe, Op. Cit, p 330.

[9] Nietzsche, F., Beyond Good and Evil [Jenseits von Gut und Böse, 1886], chapter 251, Cambridge: University Press, p 142.

[10] Kafka, Briefe, Op. Cit., p 337.

An Brod Juni 1921

. . . Weg von Judentum, meist mit unklarer Zustimmung der Väter (diese Unklarheit war das Empörende), wollten die meisten, die deutsch zu schrieben anfingen, sie wollten es, aber mit den Hinterbienchen klebten sie noch an Judentum des Vaters und mit den Vordenbeinchen fanden sie keinen neuen Boden. Die Verzweiflung darüber war ihre Inspiration.

[11] The so-called Prague German was somewhat underdeveloped and limited in vocabulary because of its isolated regional location. At times it was also grammatically incorrect. Fritz Mauthner called it “papierene Sprache” (paper-like, wooden in other words unnatural) language. If Kafka called it Gypsy German, it was probably meant to highlight the gap between the High German, the language of great German poets and thinkers, and the German dialect in Bohemia, where many gypsies, particularly the Roma-minority, were living. It is indeed a paradox that this so-called Zigeunersparache or papierene Sprache produced a remarkable set of poets like Kafka and Rilke! (Refer to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka. Für eine kleine Literatur, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1976.)

[12] In: Bloom, H (ed.), Gershom Scholem, New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987, p. 51.

[13] Cited according to Arendt, H. (intro) in: Benjamin, W., Illuminations, London: Fontana, 1992, p 35.

[14] In original without a title. In German anthologies cited as In unserer Synagoge.

[15] Kafka, F., Das Ehepaar und andere Schriften aus dem Nachlaß, Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1994, pp 34-38.

[16] Kafka, F., Briefe, Op. Cit., p 120.

[17] The Written Law or the Torah and the Oral Law or the Talmud build together a legal and ethical system which is meant to be a guide for the entire community. The Talmud comprises of commentaries, deliberations, disputations and discourses of the rabbinian scholars on the Bible. It is a Jewish reading of the Old Testament distinguished from the Christian readings as well as the scientific readings of the historians and the anthropologists. Interestingly it continues to be called Oral Law despite being in book form mainly for two reasons : in order to differentiate it from the Written Law, the Torah, but more importantly because the Talmud was originally a part of the oral narrative tradition. The Written Law of Moses was supplemented by oral explanations right from the onset. For a long time it remained an oral supplement with a mosaic of elements like spiritual reflections and discussions, interpretations of verses, rules governing the recitation of prayers, observation of Sabbath, circumcision, dietary disciplines, legal opinions and folklore. Finally it was penned down out of fear of forgetting as the persecution of Jews intensified and the community had to flee and disperse so many times that it gave rise to the metaphor of the ‘wandering Jew’. Many generations from 2 BCE to 2 CE, i.e. four centuries of Jews participated in the recording of the Babylonian Talmud which is considered a mine of folklore. Then there is also the Palestinian or Jerusalem Talmud (4 CE). Even in written form, however, the Talmud preserves its style of oral narration and oral teaching. It recreates the live atmosphere provided by a master addressing eager disciples who listen to him attentively and ask questions. It reproduces the clash of opinions and their diversity, the agreements and disagreements between scholars. The folklore of the Talmud reflects a high degree of creativity where parallels are drawn between divine institutions and riddles of human existence. The rituals in Jewish daily routine, the personal religious practices and the synagogue procedures are also largely derived from the Talmud. So it can be said that the entire narrative of the Written Law is expanded upon, clarified and enumerated through the Talmud. Both the Written Law and the Oral Law are equally sacred to the Jews although only the Written Law is considered divine in origin. Kabbalah is the Jewish mysticism, the esoteric Jewish tradition. (Cf. Adler, M., The World of the Talmud, New York: Schocken, 1966. Pearl, C. and Brookes, R.S., A Guide to Jewish Knowledge, London: Jewish Chronicle Publications, 1965.)

[18] Tartars are people in the interiors of Russia, present day Kazakstan and the Tartan mountains of former Czechoslovakia, who have, as their ancestors, the ancient and the remote nomadic tribes of the Mongol conqueror, Genghis Khan.

[19] Grass, G., ‚Kafka und seine Vollstrecker’ (1978), in: G.G., Aufsätze zur Literatur, Darmstadt und Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1980, pp 99-121.

[20] In Preece, J. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kafka, Cambridge: University Press, 2002, pp 150-168.

[21] Poe, E.A., Tales of Mystery and Imagination, London: Wordsworth, 2000, pp 132-148.

[22] Lacan has done excellent analysis of ‘The Purloined Letter’ Cf. Rabaté, Jean-Michel, Jacques Lacan. Psychoanalysis and the Subject of Literature, New York: Palgrave, 2001.

[23] Kafka, Diaries, Op. Cit., p 328.

[24] Ibid, p 301.

[25] Benjamin, W., ,Franz Kafka. Zur zehnten Wiederkehr seines Todestages’, in: Aufsätze. Essays. Vorträge. Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. II. 2, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1991, pp 409-438.

[26] Benjamin, W., Briefe, (hrsg.) Scholem, G. u Adorno, T.W., Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1993.

[27] Ibid, p 763.

In German: Sie [Kafkas Dichtungen] legen sich der Lehre nicht schlicht zu Füßen wie sich die Hagada der Halacha zu Füßen legt. Wenn sie sich gekuscht haben, heben sie unversehens eine gewichtige Pranke gegen sie.

[28] Kafka, F., Briefe an Felice Bauer und andere Korrespondenz aus der Verlobungszeit, (ed.) Heller and Born, Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 2003, p 598.

In German, to Greta Bloch: Ich bewundere den Zionismus und ekle mich vor ihm.

Kafka & Mythology: Transformation of Myths

This paper of mine was published in

‘Kafka and Mythology. Transformation of Myths’ in German Studies in India, Iudicium, München, 2006, pp 233-250; in Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla, 2004, pp 75-92.

Kafka and Mythology

Transformation of Myths

Sisyphus war ein Junggeselle.

(Sisyphus was a bachelor.)

Franz Kafka: Diaries (1910-1923)

I.

The beginning of the modern world in the seventeenth century was marked by spectacular developments in the natural sciences. The last four centuries have witnessed the grand march of the scientific revolution which includes the Industrial Revolution and the latest revolution in Information Technology. Flush with success and bolstered with its claim on absolute objectivity, the modern scientific community beginning with the early modern period in Europe, 1500-1650, lambasted and tore into shreds its mythical and mystical past, equating it with superstition, ignorance and illiterate primitive mind. It was considered incompatible with the rational mind and it was also repugnant to the sense of morality of the modern world. Tradition could not save itself from the onslaught of modernity which led invariably to a kind of rootlessness of the modern man, like a man without a shadow. Whether this schism, this tabula rasa with the past was necessary or not at the threshold of the scientific revolution is a debatable point. In A Handbook of Greek Mythology, Rose explains the connexion between science and mythology by citing the phenomenon of rains. A scientist would theorise that rains are caused by such and such atmospheric conditions. He would substantiate his answer with verifiable evidence. A myth-maker, on the other hand, would say, without any embarrassment, that it rains because Zeus is pouring down water from the heaven. The former uses reason, the latter imagination. These are two mental processes available to man in his interaction with nature. The more civilized he is, the more likely is he to reason or at least to realize when he is not reasoning but imagining. (Rose 1974: 11) Science works with concepts, whereas a myth (in the wider context, Art!) works with percepts. The point I am trying to make is that the two systems do not necessarily encroach on each other’s space. They can coexist in peace, for man, to start with, must have myths in order to doubt them over in the course of time. Myths are hence the precursors of science as well as art.

Now that the modern science has established its complete supremacy at least in the post-Renaissance Europe and America and the threat from the past has receded, certain specialists of the modern world have shown a belated interest in the mythical past that is otherwise more or less lost to the European world, atleast at the level of conscious. (Of course myths have suffered no loss of vitality at the level of the unconscious, but of that later!) The rift between the scientific thought and the mythical thought is gradually giving way to a dialogue between the two. Freud and, to a greater extent, Jung, devoted considerable attention to myths. Freud’s interpretation of the Oedipus myth is considered a classic. In 1941 Jung and C. Kerényi brought out a book, Einführung in das Wesen der Mythologie which contained two essays, Das göttliche Kind und Das göttliche Mädchen (The myths of the divine child and the divine maiden). Vladimir Propp was one of the first major theoreticians of Russian fairytales or wondertales (a more appropriate term as not all fairytales are about fairies) in the twentieth century. According to Propp, the wondertales appeared historically after myths. They are desacrelized myths. Despite his carefully formulated historical approach with a rich sprinkling of quotations from Lenin and Marx, he got into trouble in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Three decades later it was the social anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, who broke new ground by studying and interpreting Latin American myths in such depths that for the first time science was willing to accept the myths as objects worthy of scientific study. On the other hand there have always been modern artists, much before Propp and Lévi-Strauss, who have been making use of mythology in literature. If we look beyond the Romantic poets, Nietzsche, Kafka and Chagall, three original minds representing different genres, make good case studies for exploring the role of myths in modernity. This paper presents some literary-mythological motifs in the works of Franz Kafka, how he altered them and how these narrative strategies and techniques represent mental constructs of Kafka’s most intimate universe. ‘Silence of the Sirens’, ‘Prometheus’ and ‘Poseidon’ are very small but dense narratives by Kafka drawing on the remote pagan mythology. These texts are not so well known as they were not taken seriously in the initial years of studies on Kafka, perhaps because they constituted only a few unpublished lines, seemingly fragments, and that too without titles. Initially they were even excluded from anthologies of Kafka’s works because the most unusual ends gave the impression of unfinished texts. Two clarifications are required in this aspect. Firstly, these narratives are without doubt complete in themselves and secondly, even if they were fragments, their fragmentary nature would still represent the author’s signature. These three narratives are presented here.

The first section of the paper deals with the structure of myths and legends as proposed by Claude Lévi-Strauss. The second section deals with the above mentioned myths that interested Kafka and an attempt is made to apply on them Lévi-Strauss’ method of structural analysis of myths, at least in part if not wholly, in order to arrive at an understanding of these narratives. How far the project of applying Lévi-Strauss on Kafka is successful, can be decided at the end of the paper.

II.

Structure of Myth/Legend

This section is based on my interpretation of “The Structural Study of Myth” by Lévi-Strauss in his anthology Structural Anthropology, 1968 and his Myth and Meaning, 2001. It also refers to Lévi-Strauss’ monumental Mythologiques in four volumes as described by Harjeet Singh Gill in his essay “The Semiotics of the Myths”, 1996.

According to Lévi-Strauss, despite the ignorance in terms of the culture or the language of the people where a particular myth originated, a myth is still felt as a myth by its recipients. Lévi-Strauss detected some kind of “order” behind the fantastic stories which he decided to investigate. He could see that myths/legends all over the world have certain common features or a common “language”. Then he presented his astonishing findings, elaborating the common structural characteristics that constitute the “infrastructure” of a myth.

How does one define myths in terms of time? Myths always refer to events that took place or are supposed to have taken place long ago, but are in a position to explain the past as well as the present and the future. They are neither synchronic nor diachronic for they transcend both these Sausurrean categories. So an important feature of myths is their timelessness. Some myths are centuries old. Even the myths that can be approximately fixed historically are often so rich in their mythical value that traces of history are superimposed by a multiplicity of versions rendering historical facts to a large extent unreliable. No wonder much of folklore prefers the timeless quality of the propositions ‘Once upon a time’ or ‘Long long ago’. Historians would be quick to reject such ambiguity of time. A mythical discourse is marked rather by a mythological time. The myth or legend is chiefly “surrealistic” in content even if there are some historic residues as in soldiers’ songs. However in communities where there is no written tradition, mythology may acquire the same function as history. This concept of time in myths is largely ignored by many professional folklorists and, of course, mainstream historians who are hell bent on considering folklore as an alternate source of history. This applies particularly to mythico-literary discourses which fascinated Kafka in contrast to the majority of myths explored in detail by Lévi-Strauss like the ritualistic myths of American Indians for which one needs, according to Lévi-Strauss, a whole team of specialists from various disciplines such as botany, astronomy, zoology, geography, magic, religion, ethnography, linguistics and anthropology who can conduct extensive field work and sift through masses of data. The shortcoming of Lévi-Strauss’ model, which is otherwise charged with intellection, lies chiefly in underestimating the literary and existential content of the myths. He does not appear to attach much importance to scholars from the domain of literature in his team of specialists. After all myths ultimately deal with human consciousness; they shed some light on the complexities of the human mind that have, all said and done, less to do with the empirical world and more to do with the highly complex and abstract conceptual world. Human actions and activities are not as predictable and precise as science. Myths, hence, cannot be treated in the same way as “experiments” in a “laboratory”. Lévi-Strauss’ problem was that as an anthropologist at the turn of the century, he was trying to upgrade his discipline by making a science, a ‘hard science’ out of studies of myths. This is equally true of many other disciplines like history, linguistics and even pedagogy at the turn of the century which were queuing up in order to acquire the prestigious etikett of ‘new sciences’ so that they could also lay claims on scientific standards of objectivity, impartiality and value-free analysis. Things are slightly but not much different today in the sense that the literary critics are accepting cautiously that criticism necessarily involves value judgements and is hence subjective. Even the natural scientists are admitting, albeit grudgingly, that there can no such thing as absolute objectivity, for most of the experiments are valid only in certain ideal conditions and then there is always the observer who introduces a subjective factor in the whole enterprise. But this message has taken a long time to sink in.

To continue with the fine points that Lévi-Strauss made, he asserts that the so-called original text of a myth does not exist. A myth often has more than one version and all versions are equally valid. By the time a narrative attains the status of a myth, it is already a “translation” or an interpretative mediation of the original event, real or fictional. Hence there is no need for a quest for the true version or the earliest version. Lévi-Strauss demonstrates his model by breaking up the myth of Oedipus into smaller units taking into account all the known versions of it. Whether there was actually a person called Oedipus, which would make him into a historical figure, makes little or no difference to Oedipus as a mythical figure. This Greek myth has several versions, the more famous being those of Homer, Sophocles and Freud. Lévi-Strauss emphasises that even if Freud considered his interpretation to be the final version, and it still has prestige attached to it, from the point of the conceptualization of myth it comprises only one of the several layers of interpretations imposed on it. Later on Lacan added his version of the myth. Picasso also provides us with another version in his painting Blind Minotour Guided by a Little Girl where the image of the aged Minotour with a staff and the little girl is inspired by the blind Oedipus and Antigone.

Another vital point Lévi-Strauss makes is that the “repetition” (duplication, triplication, or quadruplication of the same core sequence) or multi-dimensional aspect of the myth and more generally oral literature which at times appears contradictory need not be considered a problem because it is this very repetition that ultimately renders the structure of the myth apparent. Quoting Lévi-Strauss,

Thus, a myth exhibits a “slated” structure, which comes to the surface, so to speak, through the process of repetition.

However, the slates are not absolutely identical. (...) a theoretically infinite number of slates can be generated, each one slightly different from the other. (Lèvi-Strauss in English 1968: 229)

Myths are dense depositions. So a myth is a combination of numerous residues of the past. A myth grows “spiral-wise”. The various versions and the transformations exercised by successive generations can also be described as complex wholes of structures within a structure. The structures of various versions of a myth explain each other. In fact, they “talk” to each other. In their various versions one observes the evolution of one structure into another. The fact is that myths are evolving all the time without our noticing it, just like the colour green evolves into blue and purple without anyone in a position to pinpoint the exact point of demarcation. To that extent there can be not exact “repetition” of the structure of a myth. It reminds us of the Heracleitan dictum that there can be no exact repetition and one can never step into the same river twice, for the water is always changing.

In this context the comparison of myth with music is also relevant. Music is translatable into many melodies. It can be transcribed in different tones. In music it is always a question of transformations of the same theme. But there are differences too. The versions of the myths often have different signification whereas the signification in music largely remains the same. Lévi-Strauss describes mythology and music as

two sisters, begotten by language, who had drawn apart, each going in a different direction — as in mythology, one character goes north, the other south, and they never meet again — (Lévi-Strauss 2001: 47).

This is roughly and very briefly the structure of myths as proposed by Lévi-Strauss. Mythology is hence a highly sophisticated genre and it is a challenge to the human intellect to decipher a text with a diamond-like crystallization, a mosaic of extremely fine pieces juxtaposed in intricate correlations that has undergone changes over the centuries. (Gill 1996: 184) The text itself is often fragmentary in nature and even the fragments are often lost leaving gaps in the narrative-text, so the task of the mythologist or the folklorist is indeed difficult. It requires skills of the highest order to collect and put together all the jigsaw pieces in their proper setting and then comprehend these structures that give us access to our past in a unique manner and help correlate past with the present and future (particularly when, in certain myths, there is no clear-cut distinction between ‘now’ and ‘then’). Myths often also explore the tension-ridden relation of man with nature. I quote at this point the last part of Lévi-Strauss’ remarkable essay which highlights the intellectual quality of our object of study:

Prevalent attempts to explain alleged differences between the so-called primitive mind and scientific thought have resorted to qualitative differences between the working processes of the mind in both cases, while assuming that the entities which they were studying remained very much the same. If our interpretation is correct, we are led towards a completely different view, namely, that the kind of logic in mythical thought is as rigorous as that of modern science, and that the difference lies, not in the quality of the intellectual process, but in the nature of the things to which it is applied. This is well in agreement with the situation known to prevail in the field of technology: What makes a steel ax superior to a stone ax is not that the first one is better made than the second. They are equally well made, but steel is quite different from stone. In the same way we may be able to show that the same logical processes operate in myth as in science, and that man has always been thinking equally well; the improvement lies, not in an alleged progress of man’s mind, but in the discovery of new areas to which it may apply its unchanged and unchanging powers. (Lévi-Strauss 1968: 230)

III.

Silence of the Sirens

In the short narrative, Silence of the Sirens (Das Schweigen der Sirenen, title given by Kafka’s friend and posthumous publisher, Max Brod), Kafka plays around with the mythology centered around sea inhabitants, the sirens, a product of the lively imagination of the myth-makers from the Greek antiquity. In this well known Greek myth, the beautiful and the irresistible sirens resting on the rocks lure the sailors astray with their enchanting voices causing shipwrecks, with the sailors ultimately perishing in the sea. In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus, determined not to fall for the singing of the sirens, ties himself to the mast so that he could hear the singing but not be pulled away and, at the same time, he plugs the ears of his people on the ship with wax so that they can row their boat past the sirens without being disturbed by the “burden of their song” (Kafka 1995: 86). In this manner Odysseus easily outwits the sirens. Hence in Homer’s version of the myth, the noble Odysseus saves himself with his superior intelligence and nimble wits. His innocent happiness and pride at the success of his mission are reflected in his face. Kafka provides the famous Odysseus saga with another interpretation or “version” if we use the terminology of Lévi-Strauss. In his version, the sirens remain silent when Odysseus passes by. Odysseus has no way of knowing that they are not singing for he had, in anticipation of the seduction, taken all the precautions i.e. stuffed his ears with wax as well as tied himself to the mast. Hence the title of the narrative. In Kafka’s version of the myth, Odysseus comes through as a fool. In fact it is the sirens, lacking a conscience, who appear to be mocking Odysseus, ridiculing the smug expression on his face. Let us now try to tabularise the differences in the two versions:

Homer’s version Kafka’s version

Sirens singing silent

Companions of Odysseus wax in the ears absent

Odysseus tied to the mast tied to the mast +

wax in the ears

hears the singing of sirens cannot hear singing

or silence

What emerges from this table is that the event in both versions is the same but the details are not exactly the same. Two elements have been changed in the structure — 1) Kafka’s Odysseus stuffs wax in his ears. 2) Kafka’s sirens are silent. When one element is transformed then the others elements have to be arranged accordingly. The “bundle of relations” between the nymphs and Odysseus is accordingly transformed in Kafka. In this case the new elements are so radical that they disturb the harmony of the Homeric version. The shift generates in the process another structure and thus a whole new field of signification. The legend comprises of the following oppositions and correlations: human beings and fabulous beings, man and woman, beauty and intelligence.

So even if the net result in both cases is that Odysseus survives the encounter with the sirens, in case of Homer his escape is a victory over destiny or fate, a result of a grand plan. It was said of Odysseus that even the Goddess of fate could not conquer him. He comes across as a great mortal who could achieve through his extraordinary deeds immortality, otherwise reserved only for the gods. In Nietzschean terms he could be described as the Super human being (Der Übermensch); in case of Kafka, the hard-of-hearing Odysseus is far from being a clever “fox”. The absurdity of his plan is highlighted. Kafka ridicules Odysseus’ absolute faith in a handful of wax and chains when the “mighty singers” have a weapon that is more “deadly” than their singing and that is their silence. Either ways it is a win-win situation for the sirens. Odysseus’ self-deception is complete when he mistakes the sirens with their long tresses for arians. The apparent victory of the human intellect over the fantastic world is hence parodised.

Both versions are an expression of the mental universes of Homer and Kafka respectively. Homer’s Odysseus distinctly belongs to the world of antiquity where people held gods in awe and reverence and they even showed a great deal of respect for their ancestors. It was at the same time a world of high-spirited, one could say happy people (or is this also a myth?), with a sense of healthy competition and heroism; whereas the Kafkan modern world, devoid of faith in gods and heroes, is teaming with ‘wax-in-the-ear’ characters, anti-heroes, who almost always find themselves elbowed out or crushed. Kafka comes across in this narrative as a subtle but sharp critic of modernity. European modernity, beginning with Descartes, proudly placed human being in the center of the universe but the obsession of the self with the rational mind and its capabilities has also lead nowhere. After four centuries of modernity, the Being finds himself decentred. Kafka’s absurd world has little to offer to those who are die hard believers of rationality, progress and realism. This reminds one of Nietzsche (he died in 1899, just before the turn of the century), who too had strong reservations about the modern man, his ideals and his institutions. In fact in the introduction to On the Geneology of Morals, 1887, Nietzsche very clearly states that his books are not meant for the modern man. Despite similar objections to modernity and a fondness for fables and aphorisms, however, both thinkers worked with different conceptual frameworks as a result of which their works are also very different.

At the same time following Lévi-Strauss, there is no “true” version of this myth of which the other is a copy or distortion. Every version belongs equally to the myth. In this case both the versions are creations of creative writers, Homer and Kafka, recorded in writing. The point to be noted is that for Lévi-Strauss, the various versions must have somewhat identical underlying structure. Kafka’s transformation of the myth, however, creates a new bundle of relations or a new configuration or structure, and hence an altogether different signification even if the characters remain the same; so only the point of departure is common but this point of departure is important and the choice of the genre of mythology is deliberate.

IV.

Prometheus

Using the same narrative strategies, Kafka’s fecund imagination produced another short and condensed narrative on the cosmological myth of Prometheus which is an intrinsic part of the fascinating Greek mythology. Kafka narrates four different versions of the fate of Prometheus who defied the gods in order to help the human beings. (Kafka 1995: 88)

According to the first version, gods punished Prometheus by binding him in fetters to a mountain rock and sending eagles to gnaw on his ever growing liver. Prometheus bears his punishment stoically. According to the second version, Prometheus, in terrible pain from the sharp beaks of the birds of prey, presses himself deeper and deeper into the rocks till he becomes one with them. In the third version his betrayal is forgotten after centuries have passed. The gods forget, so do the eagles and Prometheus himself forgets. According to the fourth version even the people get tired of his aimless and senseless act. The gods are tired, the eagles are tired and the wound also closes out of sheer exhaustion. In the end the author remarks that what remains is the inexplicable mountain cliff. The last proposition of the narrative reads as follows: “The legend attempts at explaining the inexplicable. Since its origin lies in truth, it must again end in the inexplicable.” With this exegesis, typical to the Kafkan discourse, the narrative of Prometheus ends.

The role of gods and that of the animal world in the human world is defined and redefined in the various versions. The myth is built on a series of oppositions which are at the same time also correlations: Prometheus and gods, human beings and gods, Prometheus and the eagles and finally the resolution of the various confrontations. The first version is, of course, the well-known Greek version. The god Prometheus, the creator of man out of clay and water with Athena breathing life into the images, is a well-wisher of man (Greek version of creation of man is different from the Jewish and the Christian versions of Genesis). It makes sense that Prometheus should have a soft corner for his creation. Zeus, on the other hand, has little love for man. So he is for ever creating umpteen problems for him and among other inflictions he also denies him access to fire. Prometheus comes to the rescue of his creation. He steals fire for man from the heaven carrying it in a dry, pithy stalk of fennel. It was no ordinary theft for ‘fire’ is the mediator between nature and culture. The shift from ‘the raw’ to ‘the cooked’ is the first decisive step towards culture. The gift of fire was to transform the life of man. It invariably invites the wrath of Zeus. He has had enough of this troubleshooter who has cheated him on other occasions too. The older god plots vengeance over the younger god. Prometheus is made to pay dearly for the theft. He is carried to a mountain, Caucasus, where he is chained to a rock. Eagles visit him daily tearing at his liver. At night the liver grows again, thus continuing the never-ending torture. Whether it is the myth of Prometheus or Sisyphus, it must be said that the Greek gods displayed a vivid imagination in handing down punishments. According to various classical versions, Aeschylus’ among others, Prometheus is finally ‘unbound’ by Heracles, released and reconciled with Zeus.

The second, third and the fourth are versions invented by Kafka himself. Interestingly, he ignores the ancient version in which Prometheus is finally forgiven, his eventual release and redemption. It is obvious that ‘happy ends’ are not in tune with what is described as typically Kafkaesque. The persecutor and the persecuted, both suffer in a vicious circle of cruelty. In Kafka’s versions the project of the gods is ultimately defeated but it does not imply a victory for Prometheus. It reminds us of Camus’ interpretation of the myth of Sisyphus in terms of his philosophy of the Absurd where he declares towards the end that despite the punishment by the gods, Sisyphus was a happy man, defeating thereby the whole purpose of the punishment. However, Kafka’s Prometheus is far from happy. His fellow gods have forgotten him. Even man, for whose sake he incurred the wrath of the mighty Zeus, has forgotten his existence and his bold act. The creation has forgotten its creator. Modern man is indeed strange as far as Kafka is concerned. The punishment is “aimless and senseless” but that appears to be the fate of the modern man. This is Kafka’s version of absurdity. Typically, Kafka’s Prometheus too forgets.

Greek version Kafka’s versions

Prometheus Tied to a rock. Eagles gnaw 1. Becomes one with the rock.

on his ever growing liver. 2. Gods, eagle, Prometheus forget.

3. People also tired of the act.

Wound closes out of exhaustion.

Punishment Ends with forgiveness and Eternal. Forgotten

reconciliation

As in Silence of the Sirens, Kafka has again transformed the elements of the Greek myth in such a manner that the sequence of their functions changes and the new structure ends up creating a modern version of the mythological text.

V.

Poseidon

Poseidon is the Greek god of seas, the brother of Zeus. Zeus after reaching maturity overthrows his father, Kronos, who, being an immortal, does not die but is all the same forced to retire from active life. Next, the ambitious Zeus divides the kingdom, their family property between himself and his brothers. The sisters do not inherit anything. The division of the conquered universe is more or less settled amicably. The three gods and brothers — Zeus, Poseidon and Hades cast lots for the three treasured possessions — heaven, sea and the underworld with Olympos and the earth in common. The stakes are high. Zeus manages to win the lion’s share — the sky i.e. the broad heavens high amid the clouds, Poseidon wins the sea and Hades gets what is left, that is the gloomy darkness of the infernal regions where the souls of the dead are taken. The jealousies between the brothers, however, continue. So what the myth-makers could not express through science was often articulated by mythologising the forces of nature. A good example is the rough, wild and angry god representing the rough and dangerous seas. Also the anthropological and the cosmological domains are closely linked so much so that they are in a dialectical relation. For example according to the ancient Greek law the sisters did not inherit paternal property. The same social and legal norms are superimposed on their creations, the immortals.

Poseidon is thus the Greek god of seas, the less known brother of Zeus. He is the marine god who presides over the waters, has the capacity to shake the earth and also fertilize it. Homer calls him the Earthshaker and the Girdler of the Earth. Poseidon builds an under-water palace for himself and his emblem is the trident. He is majestic and stately with the look and the strength of a horse. Legend has it that he created the first horse. He can also be wild and uncouth. With the trident in one hand, he travels through his empire of vast seas, rising and diving at will. He is known for his short temper, rough nature and numerous feats of destruction. His anger can cause the waters of the world to become extremely violent and treacherous, not only for the marine travellers but also for those who live on its banks. In Odyssey, Poseidon gives Odysseus many headaches by generating terrible sea storms and ship-wrecking him several times although he stops short of killing him. According to Homer, a stroke of his trident can easily smash a rock and drown the man standing on it. He is also known for his prodigious speed. He can cross the seas in four strides. He has complete control over the waters but he is no match for his more powerful brother, who controls the sky. His trident is no match for Zeus’ thunderbolt. Poseidon and Zeus have massive egos as a result of which they do not get along.

Now let us see how Kafka transforms this mythical figure. This is how Kafka’s narrative opens:

Poseidon saß an seinem Arbeitstisch und rechnete.

(Poseidon sat at his desk, going over the accounts.) (Kafka 1995: 91)

Kafka’s Poseidon is a pale shadow of the grand Greek god bearing his name. Kafka transforms Lord Poseidon into a modern civil servant, “employed” to look after the accounts of the waters. Like a typical modern day bureaucrat with administrative, financial or perhaps technical knowledge, he sits all the time at his desk, in the depths of the waters. He has no first hand knowledge of his work or his jurisdiction. He has never toured the area he administers for he remains in the depths of the waters. Everything is transformed into accounts and paper work which he takes “very seriously”. A characteristic feature of technocratic societies is to handle everything from one point. The idea of “cruising through the waves with his trident” only annoys him. At the most he has a fleeting look at them from far away when he makes “an occasional journey” to his brother at Mount Olympus.

He used to say that he was postponing [sailing the oceans] until the end of the world, for then might come a quiet moment when, just before the end and having gone through his last account, he could still make a quick little tour. (op. cit.)

Perpetual postponement is the hallmark of his job even if, at the manifest level, he gives the impression of being busy with “endless work” all the time. These new gods of the modern world are bored with and alienated from their monotonous work. The speed and the strength of the classical Poseidon are juxtaposed over the lethargy of the bureaucrat, who is glued to his seat, and whose files rarely, if ever, move from the desk. If the classical Poseidon was angry, he could generate, with his divine breath, violent sea storms. As a form of punishment he would flood the land with his salt waters and make it unfruitful. It made sense to appease him with prayers and sacrifices. So far as the modern Poseidon is concerned, when he is angry and upset, his famous divine breath becomes uneven and his strong bronze chest heaves

[sein] goetticher Atem geriet in Unordnung, sein eherner Brustkorb schwankte. (op. cit.)

If one takes some liberty with the interpretation it is almost as if he has an attack of asthma, which would not be unusual, for the offices in Kafka’s world are often stuffy. With all his administrative efficiency, the modern Poseidon can never accomplish anything similar to the classical Poseidon. At the most he goes over the mundane accounts. Missing is the dynamism, the fun related to the classical gods who completely identity themselves with their empire. They would never apply for a “more cheerful work” like Kafka’s Poseidon. Then there is the existential predicament related with his name. Poseidon is supposed to feel at home in the water department and transfer is not even considered nor is he suitable for anything else. In his characteristic style of writing, Kafka remarks towards the end,

As a matter of fact, no one took his troubles very seriously. (op. cit.)

The only thing he still has in common with his classical name-say is his jealously of his brother who ranks higher in the hierarchy and who manages a more prestigious department. After his visit to Jupiter, which is supposed to provide him with a break from his monotony, he always returns fretting and fuming. The modern Poseidon is thus caught in a typical Kafkan trap.

Greek version Kafka’s version

Designation god of Seas administrator of waters/ bureaucrat

(job, employment)

Place of work/stay underwater palace desk

Nature of work Many feats of destruction.

causes shipwrecks, storms, accounts; has hardly seen the oceans. earthquakes; fertilizes earth; never really sailed upon them.

rises from, plunges into,

journeys over the sea.

Relation to work Enjoys work Alienation, monotony, discontentment, seeks transfer, postpones work.

In this narrative, too, the author appears to be highlighting the crisis of modernity. Modernity, this noisy and vulgar age, has failed miserably to create harmony between the Being and his environment. The alienation of the workers on the conveyor belt has been explored by many artists but Kafka was, one could safely say, the first modern writer to explore the alienation in the technocratic societies in the new space of the office. It is not without relevance that so many Kafkan characters wear tight-fitting clothes, for a peasant or a manual worker could never manage in them. Kafka wrote in a letter that the office is not a stupid institution; it belongs more to the realm of the fantastic than of the stupid. This could be one reason why Kafka draws so many motifs from mythology in order to describe the phantasmic nature of a bureaucratised society where the Being is reduced to a mere instrument. The modern man with his reason, his inventions and institutions is belittled in all the three narratives. Underlined is the decline or the fall of the man from antiquity to modernity. On the one hand is the nostalgia for the old way of life, on the other hand is the unstable figure of the modern being with all his material progress, who only arouses pity. The grandeur of the ancient world is contrasted with the hollowness of the modern world.

According to Milan Kundera who is also from Prague and holds on ardently to the legacy of Kafka even if he now lives in Paris, Kafka captures beautifully the bureaucratisation of social and professional activity that turns all institutions into boundless labyrinths and results in the depersonalisation of the individual.

In the bureaucratic world of the functionary, first, there is no initiative, no invention, no freedom of action; there are only orders and rules: it is the world of obedience.

Second, the functionary performs a small part of a large administrative activity whose aim and horizons he cannot see: it is the world where actions have become mechanical and people do not know the meaning of what they do.

Third, the functionary deals only with unknown persons and with files: it is the world of the abstract. (Kundera 1993: 112-13)

Kundera is correct in his assessment that Kafka was the first modern writer who not only saw the enormous importance of the bureaucratic phenomenon for man, for his condition and for his future, but also (even more surprisingly) the poetic potential contained in the phantasmic nature of offices. (op. cit.: 113)

Jean-Paul Sartre describes the status of laws in a comparative study of Kafka and Blanchot:

You are violating it [the law] when you think you are following it, and when you rebel against it, you find yourself obeying it unknowingly. No one is supposed to be ignorant of it, and yet no one knows what it is. Its aim is not to keep order nor regulate human relationships. It is the Law, purposeless, meaningless and without content, and none can escape it. (Sartre 1955: 64-65)

These new but to a large extent anonymous forces of power assume cosmological dimensions which means that they display features which were once attributed to the divine like omnipresence and omnipotence. Kundera points out that power behaves like God. The stifling and the chilling ambiance of this world is often described as Kafkaesque. Similarly, Hannah Arendt, in her famous book On Violence aptly describes bureaucracy as the rule of Nobody, for it is the rule of an intricate system of bureaus in which no man, neither one nor the best (monarchy), neither the few (oligarchy) nor the many (democracy) can be held responsible. Arendt calls it the worst form of tyranny, a tyranny without a tyrant. (Arendt 1970: 38-9, 81)

The inversion of the Poseidon myth proceeds on the same lines as the inversion of the Odysseus and the Prometheus myths. Many aphorisms of Kafka also underline the same technique of inversion. One of them is as follows: “One who looks does not find, one who does not look is found.” It reminds one of the fate of Kafka himself who never got the recognition he deserved in his life time. He never went out of his way for publications, sending manuscripts only when they were specifically asked for. It is only many years after his death that his works were discovered or “found”. Or another one-liner in which he inverts the creation myth: “The world was created by the devil.” This also corresponds to Kafka’s mad world in which none of the characters are aware of what is happening to them, they are sucked into labyrinths that lead nowhere and such a world has to be the creation of none but the devil.

VI.

Conclusion

Kafka was, on the one hand, wary of tradition; at the same time he was also very respectful. In her introduction to Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations, Hannah Arendt states that “Kafka’s reaching down to the sea bottom of the past had this peculiar duality of wanting to preserve and wanting to destroy.” (Arendt 1992: 46) It means that Kafka draws on the rich imagination of the ancient world and administers transformations on the conventional mythological elements in order to evolve a new poetics of presentation, which is modern, grotesque, absurd and above all existential. In the words of Sartre, the fantasy is thus domesticated; it transcribes the human condition, albeit through the fusion of the Real and the Surreal. The pagans accepted their myths, pure and simple. Much of their mythology springs from the imaginative treatment of physical forces like Zeus representing the sky, Hera for air, Poseidon for the seas and so on so forth. So myths explore on the one hand man’s tension-ridden relation with nature and on the other hand myths also represent the juxtaposition of the anthropological and cosmological worlds of the myth-makers. Kafka, the modern mythmaker, transforms, however, these powerful myths into allegories, transforming the incredible into the credible by relating the myths to the realities of the modern man. The ancient myths are powerful narratives that can explain the past as well as connect to the present and Kafka shows how they can explain even the contemporary world. He, thus, makes the ancient world “talk” to the modern world. In the process, however, the sacred is rendered profane by addition of elements like irony and humour.

Kafka’s poetic imagery appears to be a critique of the dictatorship of scientific and technical reason and modern institutions governed by impersonal laws. What began with the grand idea of liberation of the individual resulted ultimately in the alienation of the individual who is not even conscious of his alienation. The idea of progress is typically modern. In his diary Kafka recorded that “the belief in progress does not necessarily mean that progress has actually been made. That would be no belief at all”. In Greek antiquity, tragic poets introduced historic names in their narratives in order to lend authenticity to characters and their acts. In total contrast, in the modern era, in these “destitute times”, as Hölderlin called it, when God has been expelled from the universe and the being has become a technological Being, when the being is outwardly civilized but his instinctive nature, his unconscious, is repressed, Kafka and some other poets and philosophers of his time like Rilke, Hesse, Nietzsche and Chagall were drawn towards the rich deposits of mythology to give expression to their experiences. In this sense, the poet or artist and myth-makers are intellectual cousins. Rilke makes sonnets out of the myth of Orpheus; Nietzsche makes use of the grand figure of the wise and old Zarathustra and Hesse similarly reverts to Siddhartha. Kafka’s Castle and Metamorphosis are structured as fairy tales. It would be naive to think that these poets were working with second-hand material. Nietzsche knew what he was talking about when he said that if one wants to take a great leap forward, one has to first go backwards. (Nietzsche 2002: 169) The science of psychology has proved that motifs of mythology can even be traced in dreams that occur in the unconscious condition of sleep. The only difference from the past is that they are updated. For instance, the eagle of Zeus might be replaced by an aeroplane but the signification of flight remains unaltered.

At the same time Kafka has contributed to the continuous process of the evolution of myths and their “spiral-wise” growth. He has added another “slate” to the series of already existing slates, even if this slate is not “slightly” but radically different in structure. The method of Lévi-Strauss hence helps, to some extent, in analysing the use made of myths by modern creative writers. It highlights the transformations administered by the author.

But it must be conceded that a complete analysis of the Kafkan discourse often remains elusive and the riddle often remains unsolved.

References

Aeschylus. (1959), Prometheus Bound, trans. Gilbert Murray, London: George Allen & Unwin.

Arendt, Hannah. (1970), On Violence, London: Penguin.

Benjamin, Walter (1992), Illuminations. Edited and with an Introduction by Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, London: Fontana.

Gill, Harjeet Singh. (1996), The Semiotics of Conceptual Structures, New Delhi: Bahri.

Gill, Harjeet Singh (ed.). (2002), Signification in Language and Culture, Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Studies.

Homer. (1998), Odysseus, trans. E.V. Rieu, London: Penguin.

Jung, C.G., Kerényi, C. (1963), Essays on a Science of Mythology, trans. R.F.C. Hull, New York: Harper & Row.

Kafka, Franz. (1995), Ein Landarzt und andere Prosa, (hg.) Michael Müller, Stuttgart: Reclam.

Kafka, Franz. (1995), Sämtliche Erzählungen, (hg.) Paul Raabe, Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer.

Kafka, Franz. (2001), Diaries. 1910-1923, (ed.) Max Brod, Kolkata: Hermes Inc..

Kundera, Milan. (1993), The Art of the Novel, trans. Linda Asher, New Delhi: Rupa.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1968), Structural Anthropology, trans. Caire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf, Middlesex: Penguin.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (2001), Myth and Meaning, London & New York: Routledge.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. (2002), Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Judith Norman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Propp, Vladimir. (1984), Theory and History of Folklore, trans. Ariadna Y. Martin and Richard P. Martin, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Rose, H.J. (1974), A Handbook of Greek Mythology, London: Butler & Tanner.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. (1955), “Aminabad or The Fantastic as a Language” in Situations I and III, trans. Annette Michelson, New York.

Singh, Rosy. (2001), Rilke, Kafka, Manto. The Semiotics of Love, Life and Death, New Delhi: Harman.