INTRODUCING KAFKA THE JESTER

I am writing to recommend R. Crumb's Kafka with art provided by Robert Crumb and a script provided by David Zane Mairowitz.

This book has also been published under the titles, Introducing Kafka, Kafka for Beginners, and simply Kafka.

Crumb, the granddaddy of the underground comics movement, brings Kafka's biography and work to life in a way I would not have thought possible.  If you ever wondered what Gregor Samsa looks like when he becomes a bug, this is your chance to find out!

Crumb also lends a hand in imagining scenes from The Penal Colony, The Trial, The Castle, and other Kafka works.

Perhaps the most noteworthy feature of the accompanying text is its interest in uncovering the less serious side of Kafka's art.  The book jacket of my edition compares Kafka's literary tradition to great Yiddish storytelling; and this is what Mairowitz has to say about efforts to read Kafka as a philosopher in earnest, and to identify him with a specific current in 20th century thinking:

"No writer of our time, and probably none since Shakespeare, has been so widely over-interpreted and pigeon-holed.  Jean-Paul Sartre claimed him for Existentialism, Camus saw him as an Absurdist, his life-long friend and editor, Max Brod, convinced several generations of scholars that his parables were part of an elaborate quest for an unreachable God.

[Also] 'Kafkaesqe' has come to be associated with the faceless bureaucratic infrastructure...[of] the Western world....it is an adjective that takes on almost mythic proportions in our time, irrevocably tied to fantasies of doom and gloom, ignoring the intricate Jewish Joke that weaves itself through the bulk of Kafka's work." (my emphasis)

I'm not sure Mairowitz is right.  Kafka seems to me about as serious as one can be while remaining ambulatory, and (obviously) caught in the grip of a horrible vision.  But, let it be said:  Crumb's artistry makes it much easier to entertain Mairowitz otherwise implausible suggestion, and, right or wrong as an interpretation of Kafka's intentions, R. Crumb's Kafka opens up new dimenstions of our most neurotic 20th century literary artist.  You won't read Kafka with the same eyes again.

KAFKA AND BUBER

Martin Buber and Franz Kafka

[intellectual and spiritual people] today know of no beginning—history eddies toward their feet from the whole of cosmically unchronicled time; they know of no ending—history foams past them into cosmically unchronicled time.  And what lies between has become so violent and trivial an interval! (1926) From Martin Buber's People Today and the Hebrew Bible


In raising the question of "chronicled time," Buber anticipates the many conversations people have today about the ways in which they do or do not belong to the Jewish past.


To be sure, he raises the question in a way one rarely hears outside of academe.  He raises the question "ontologically," that is, he asks how people participate "in time" and he roars about the emptiness of living and experiencing time "unchronicled."  Time is not just tic-toc, intimates Buber.  If it is really time, it comes willy-nilly with an unfolding and meaningful story.


Kafka's stories and parables present a provocative counterpoint to Buber's conviction, and are especially worthy of notice as Buber published some of them in his very own journal, Der Jude, in its second year (1917-1918).  Two stories appeared under the overarching title, Zwei Tiergeschichten.  The two have subsequently been translated into English as Jackals and Arabs, and A Report to an Academy.

Buber, in asking us to see our time on earth as "chronicled," sets the stage for his activity as a narrative artist.  He is letting us know that art imitates life, and indeed, sometimes, as in the case of the Biblical narrative, provides us with a better representation of life than we have in our misbegotten consciousness.

Buber's project, seen in this light, provides the strongest sort of contrast to Kafka's art.  Ruth Gross, in a much admired article, "Hunting Kafka: Enigmatics in the Short Fiction," brings out just the sort of contrast I have in mind:

Kafka, Gross writes, believed in an "absolute" chasm between life and art.

"Narratives, substantial, sequential, time-driven, mimic our illusory sense that we are living a story...The idea is to add meaning to the world.  [But] this is what Kafka does not allow...'All [my] parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already.' The reason for this is the absolute difference between life and art."

Athens and Jerusalem Redux

"I don't want to hear it," said R.  "It's of no account."

“But it’s always been taken by the cognoscenti as a key,” replied K.  “Even by the moderns.  How can we now leave it be?”

“Yes, two hundred plus years of that quest,” R said with a knowing smile, betraying just a touch of condescension.  “And to what end?”

“You expect me to say, a making-clear what is not, nicht wahr?" K spit back.  "But it's patience, not clarity, you will need at the gate.”

*******************

Compare Harold Bloom, The Western Canon, Riverhead, 1994, 9, quoting literary critic Kevin Hart.  'Western culture takes its lexicon of intelligibility from Greek philosophy, and all our talk of life and death, of form and design, is marked by relations with that tradition.'

Rainer Maria Rilke and Martin Buber: Sages of the Lord

Rilke and Buber combine a skepticism about the conventions of their religions (i.e. Christianity and Judaism, respectively) with a reverence for God.

It is worth noting that Rilke and Buber both recoil at the idea that God is merely a human projection.

In his Preface to Reden ueber das Judentum (Speeches on Judaism, 1923) Buber underlines the sincerity of his theological position with uncharacteristic wit:

if there were no religious reality, if God were only a fiction, it would be mankind's duty to demolish it; for I can hardly imagine anything more insipid and indecent than the sanctioned feigning that God exists, and whoever (in contrast to the honest atheist) programmatically proceeds as if God existed well deserves that God proceed as if he, the feigner, did not exist.

Arguably, Rilke dramatizes his own repugnance at atheistic theology--talk of God by people who see God-talk as a human fabrication--in his Geschichten vom lieben Gott (Stories of the Good Lord, 1900), a cycle of thirteen tales of God's immanent presence in ordinary life.  In one of the most captivating of these, "Wie der Fingerhut dazu kam, der liebe Gott zu sein" ("How the Thimble Came to be the Good Lord"), seven children conspire to "carry the Good Lord for a day; that way," they scheme, "we'll always know where he is at any given moment."

"...for the sake of beauty [a thimble] became the Good Lord...A single glance was enough to tell who happened to have the Good Lord on that particular day.  Because the child in question walked around a bit more erect and more solemnly, and put on a Sunday face."

The Lord, then, is in the eye of the beholder, a childish attitude, a behavioral effect?  Indeed not for Rilke, as I have said.  Rilke dangles such wholly modernist interpretations before the reader, only to decisively withdraw them.  When, on the seventh day, "little Marie was asked to produce the Good Lord (for it was her turn to carry the thimble and she had received it that morning), she emptied her pockets but it was nowhere to be found.  

After the other children went home, Little Marie remained behind, searching tall grass for the thimble. 

The story continues, in part, as follows:

"'You'd do better to go home; you know, a new [thimble] can be bought.'

Then another man arrived.  He stooped over the child:

'What are you looking for?'

Now Marie replied, bravely and defiantly, though she was close to tears.

'The Good Lord.'

The stranger smiled and simply took her by the hand; she allowed herself to be led as if everything had now been settled.  

As they walked, the stranger said: 'Just look here at this pretty thimble I found today.'"

[I thank my friend, Leslie Belay, for suggesting this interpretation]

Martin Buber: a man who is hard to understand!

The claim with which Scripture has approached and still approaches every generation is the claim to be acknowledged as a document of the true history of the world—of the history, that is, in which the world has an origin and a goal…[intellectual and spiritual people] today know of no beginning—history eddies toward their feet from the whole of cosmically unchronicled time; they know of no ending—history foams past them into cosmically unchronicled time.  And what lies between has become so violent and trivial an interval!

                        From People Today and the Hebrew Bible by Martin Buber (1926)

There was a time when intelligent people used literature to think.

                                                            From Exit Ghost by Phillip Roth (2007)

Martin Buber (1878-1965) has inspired interest for over a century.  But it is also true that Buber’s face and the title of his little book, I and Thou, are much more well-known than any of his ideas or his actual writing, which remain primarily the province of graduate students in Protestant theology.

Do Buber’s passionate interests in narrative/aggadah, in cultural crisis, in dialogue, and in Jewish Renaissance, still address people today?

To reach a conclusion about whether Buber is really worth our time--and his often turgid prose does take time to try to crack--I believe we need to do some serious spade work.  Many an enthusiastic reader, interest piqued by some glancing encounter with the famous author's book,  I and Thou, has run headlong into the problem I am pointing to.  We--many of us--don't know what Buber is talking about; and, we don't know, because we don't understand what's bothering him, what's moving and motivating him to write.  

If we want to understand Buber, the problems he's worried about are the places to start.  Paradoxically, in order to identify these, I believe we do well to leave Buber aside for a time, and look to some of his contemporaries, artists and writers who meditated on themes of cultural crisis, spiritual perplexity, and personal despair.

I believe asking what kind of narrative people today inhabit will pay particularly large dividends as we explore the background to Martin Buber's career as a writer.  This interest--in the storied lives of fin de siecle people, especially urban people of European descent--permeates writers and artists like Ranier Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, Leo Tolstoy, and Virginia Woolf.  It is evident in Rilke's Stories of the Good Lord and Others, Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and in less obvious ways, perhaps, in almost everything that Kafka wrote.

It is to these writers, and other writers like them, that I will turn in subsequent posts.