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."