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In Kafka's work we can distinguish a social
aspect, a
familial and sexual aspect, and finally a religious aspect. But such
distinctions seem slightly superfluous to me: I have hitherto attempted
to
introduce a point of view in which all these aspects are combined. The
social
character of Kafka's stories can no doubt only be grasped in a general
context.
To see the 'epic of the unemployed' or of 'the persecuted Jew' in The
Castle,
the 'epic of the defendant in the bureaucratic era' in The Trial; to
compare
these obsessive tales with Rousset's Univers concentrationnaire, is not
entirely justifiable. But this brings Carrouges, who does so, to an
analysis of
Communist hostility. It would have been easy, he tells us, 'to defend
Kafka
from every charge of being a counter-revolutionary if one had wanted to
say of
him, as of others, that he limited himself to depicting the capitalist
hell. 'If Kafka's attitude seems odious to so many
revolutionaries,' he adds, 'it
is not because it explicitly attacks bourgeois bureaucracy and justice
- an attack
with which they would have concurred - but because it attacks every
type of
bureaucracy and pseudoojustice.' Did Kafka want to criticise certain
institutions for which we should have substituted other, less inhuman
ones?
Carrouges writes again: 'Does he advise against revolt? No more than he
encourages it. He merely affirms man's collapse: the reader can draw
his own
conclusions. And how can one not rebel against the odious power which
prevents
the land-surveyor from working?' I believe,on the other hand, that the
very
idea of revolt is deliberately withdrawn from The Castle. Carrouges
knows this,
and says a little further on: 'The only criciticism one can level at
Kafka is
the scepticism with which he regards every revolutionary undertaking,
for he sets
problems which are not political problems, but which are human and
eternally
post-revolutionary problems.' But to talk of scepticism and to give
Kafka's
problems a significance with regard to the words and actions of
political
humanity, is not going far enough. Far from being incongruous, Communist hostility is essentially connected with an understanding of Kafka. I shall go still further. Kafka's attitude towards his father's authority symbolises hostility towards the general authorrity which stems from effective activity. Effective activity, elevated to the discipline of as rational a system as that of Communists, is apparently presented as the solution to every problem. Yet it can neither totally condemn, nor tolerate, in practice, a truly sovereign attitude in which the present moment is detached from those that follow. This is a difficulty for a party which respects reason alone and which sees those irrational values where luxury, uselessness and childishness occur, as masks on the face of private interest. The only sovereign attitude permitted by the Communists is that of the child, but in its minor form. It is granted to children who cannot attain adult seriousness. If the adult gives a major sense to childishness, if he writes with the feeling that he is touching a sovereign value, he has no place in Communist society. In a world from which bourgeois individualism is banished, the inexplicable, puerile humour of the adult Kafka cannot be defended. Communism is basically the complete negation, the radical opposite of what Kafka stands for. Georges Bataille: Literature and Evil |