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."