 In Search of Today’s KafkabyGillian Polack
Every now and then, a review book is so strong it creates its own environment. I’m writing this at an unholy hour of the morning, while a complete stranger changes my intercom system. I didn’t ask for it and I certainly didn’t ask for the hour. The tradie didn’t ask to find a system a generation older than anyone else’s or to find someone whose boxes and books jostle his temporary workplace. If you take that situation and turn it into an allegory; if you strip it of details and add a deep sense of humanity where I have cups of tea and the door open to let the cold in and the intercom man free passage; if you change it from specific and cold to a parable about humanity, then you have the bones for a story by Kafka. And now I stop and think, almost any place and time, almost any situation has the bones for a story by Kafka. He was a rare writer in that the stories were undeniably by him and always took the ordinary and rendered it extraordinary, except where he did things the other way around. When Michael Weingrad announced “Why there is no Jewish Narnia” in the Jewish Review of Books, in the Spring volume, 2010, I read his article and thought “Of course there is a Jewish Narnia” and wondered “Hasn’t he read Kafka?” Ever since I was assigned The Castle to study (1976 is the date on my Penguin Modern Classic edition translated by Willa and Edward Muir, which means that I studied it in year 11) I knew it was the fantasy reality that mirrored what I knew and understood. I would totally love our Narnia to be a happy land where adventures are possible and good triumphs over evil and where one can come home to ordinary life (including tea and toast and buttered scones) at the end of it and be told reassuringly “Once a king of Narnia, always a king of Narnia”, but Kafka’s strange realities reflect the fundamental modern Jewish experience of other worlds and other places for me. Kafka wrote me a Jewish Narnia, and it’s not happy. How could it be? This wasn’t what I was taught to see in Kafka, however, nor why the text was allocated in Year Eleven. Jewish students were less than one percent of all students in my school, after all. There were two of us in my whole year. Instead of looking for a Jewish Narnia, I was taught to see the humorous, the impossible, the situations spiraling out of control, the unnamable and the dark. I was taught to look for many meanings and to look for the everyday. The Castle was the book, above all, where we learned that the intent of the writer doesn’t always appear on the surface of a novel. Kafka is many things to many people, which is impressive, considering that his writing is distinctive and always identifiable, even in different translations. His stories aren’t a simple formula of strip-bare-and-add-telling. This is why the volume Kafkaesque, edited by John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly, is so very good. It shows us that Kafka was an allegorist (like C.S. Lewis, although that comparison remains unmade) in the introduction and then presents eighteen stories with brief insights by their authors and by the editors. Each of these stories is good in its own right, and each of these stories illuminates different facets of Kafka’s writing and our perception of Kafka. Some writers see Kafka as I do: Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Lottery in Babylon” uses a Kafka-style narrative and a Kafkaesque jaundiced view of humankind to write a lottery that sounds far too familiar. Some writers take their ideas from Kafka and then spin different types of stories: about superheroes and car yards and strange transformations. What’s wonderful about this volume is that its whole shows how much Kafka means and how many ways we have of interpreting and how deep into our literary conscious his writing works. It’s not just The Castle that makes Kafka guilty of Jewish Narnia. It’s writing work that reaches out and makes other writers want to write their own stories. It’s fundamentally Jewish and early twentieth century Jewish that the stories should be dislocated and unhappy, deep, able to be interpreted and reinterpreted from many angles. It’s quintessentially Jewish and European that they be funny and dark and like nothing else until other writers, deeply influenced by him, also write stories that are funny and dark and like nothing else. That’s the best bit of all about this anthology. None of the writers are Kafka. Each story illuminates Kafka and also illuminates the writer. I understand Theodora Goss better and also Carol Emshwiller. Finding out that Emshwiller’s meanings intentionally shift puts her novel Carmen Dog in a different light, for instance. This is one of my favourite anthologies, for the way it’s put together shows the essence of Kafka. He had such a small life in many ways, and he made such big waves. He changed and changes the way many of us see the world and write about it. He explains the inexplicable and shows us how to live the unlivable. He is the prism that many writers use to create a rainbow. Kafkaesque is a beautiful compilation of some of the colours of the Kafka rainbow. Books mentioned in this column:
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