The Complete Stories (forword by John Updike)

no ordinary talent speaking, but a genius.' You who are picking up this volume in innocence of the author, however, might do well to skip these first two titles and return to them when initiated. Repeated readings of these grouped fragments have left them, for me, not merely opaque but repellent. 'Description' was composed no later than 1904 -5, when Kafka was in his early twenties. It is full of contortions both psychological ('I had to restrain myself from putting my arm around his shoulders and kissing him on the eyes as a reward for having absolutely no use for me') and physical ('this thought. . . tormented me so much that while walking I bent my back until my hands reached my knees'; 'I screwed up my mouth. . . and supported myself by standing on my right leg while resting the left one on its toes'). There is something of adolescent posturing here, or of those rigid bodily states attendent upon epilepsy and demonic possession. The conversation seems hectic, and the hero and his companions pass a mysterious leg injury back and forth like the ancient Graeae sharing one eye. Self-loathing and self-distrust lurk within all this somatic unease; the 'supplicant' prays in church at the top of his voice 'in order to be looked at and acquire a body.' A certain erotic undercurrent is present also, and in 'Wedding Preparations' the hero, Eduard Raban, is proceeding toward his wedding in the country. This narrative at least boasts a discernible direction; but we strongly feel that Raban, for all his dutiful determination, will never get there. The typical Kafkaesque process of non-arrival is underway. And in truth Kafka, though heterosexual, charming, and several times engaged, and furthermore professing that 'Marrying, founding a family, accepting all the children that come [is] the utmost a human being can succeed in doing at all,' never did manage to get married.

The charm that these disquieting, abortive early pieces exerted upon Brod and other auditors (for Kafka used to read his work aloud to friends, sometimes laughing so hard he could not continue reading) must have largely derived from the quality of their German prose. These lucid and fluent translations by the Muirs and the Sterns can capture only a shadow of what seems to have been a stirring purity. 'Writing is a form of prayer,' Kafka wrote in his diary. Thomas Mann paid tribute to Kafka's 'conscientious, curiously explicit, objective, clear, and correct style, [with] its precise, almost official conservatism.' Brod likened it to J. P. Hebel's and Kleist's, and claimed that 'its unique charm is heightened by the presence of Prague and generally speaking Austrian elements in the run of the sentence.' The Jews of Prague generally spoke German, and thus was added to their racial and religious minority- status a certain linguistic isolation as well, for Czech was the language of the countryside and of Bohemian nationalism. It is interesting that of the last two women in Kafka's life — two who abetted the 'reaching out' of his later, happier years — Milena Jesenska-Pollak was his Czech translator and helped teach him Czech, and Dora Dymant confirmed him in his exploratory Judaism including the study of Hebrew. He wrote to Brod of the problems of German: 'Only the dialects are really alive, and except for them, only the most individual High German, while all the rest, the linguistic middle ground, is nothing but embers which can only be brought to a semblance of life when excessively lively Jewish hands rummage through them.' Though fascinated by the liveliness of Yiddish theatre, he opted for what Philip Rahv has called an 'ironically conservative' style; what else, indeed, could hold together such leaps of symbolism, such a trembling abundance of feeling and dread?

Kafka dated his own maturity as a writer from the long night of September 22nd-23rd, 1912, in which he wrote 'The Judgment' at a single eight-hour sitting. He confided to his diary that morning, 'Only in this way can writing be done, only with such coherence, with such a complete opening out of the body and the soul.' Yet the story is not quite free of the undeclared neurotic elements that twist the earlier work; the connection between the engagement and the father seems obscure, and the old man's fury illogical. But in staring at, with his hero Georg, 'the bogey conjured up by his father,' Kafka broke through to a great cavern of stored emotion. He loved this story, and among friends praised — he who deprecated almost everything from his own pen — its Zweifellosigkeit, its 'indubitableness.' Soon after its composition, he wrote, in a few weeks, 'The Metamorphosis,' an indubitable masterpiece. It begins with a fantastic premise, whereas in 'The Judgment' events become fantastic. This premise — the gigantic insect — established in the first sentence, 'The Metamorphosis' unfolds with a beautiful naturalness and a classic economy. It takes place in three acts: three times the metamorphosed Gregor Samsa ventures out of his room, with tumultuous results. The members of his family — rather simpler than Kafka's own, which had three sisters — dispose themselves around the central horror with a touching, as well as an amusing, plausibility. The father's fury, roused in defense of the fragile mother, stems directly from the action and inflicts a psychic wound gruesomely objectified in the rotting apple Gregor carries in his back; the evolutions of the sister, Crete, from shock to distasteful ministration to a certain sulky possessiveness and finally to exasperated indifference are beautifully sketched, with not a stroke too much. The terrible but terribly human tale ends with Crete's own metamorphosis, into a comely young woman. This great story resembles a great story of the nineteenth century, Tolstoy's 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich'; in both, a hitherto normal man lies hideously, suddenly stricken in the midst of a family whose irritated, banal daily existence flows around him. The abyss within life is revealed, but also life itself.

What kind of insect is Gregor? Popular belief has him a cockroach, which would be appropriate for a city apartment; and the creature's retiring nature and sleazy dietary preferences would seem to conform. But, as Vladimir Nabokov, who knew his entomology, pointed out in his lectures upon 'The Metamorphosis' at Cornell University, Gregor is too broad and convex to be a cockroach. The charwoman calls him a 'dung beetle' (Mistkafer) but, Nabokov said, 'it is obvious that the good woman is adding the epithet only to be friendly.' Kafka's Eduard Raban of 'Wedding Preparations' daydreams, walking along, 'As I lie in bed I assume the shape of a big beetle, a stag beetle or a cockchafer, I think.' Gregor Samsa, awaking, sees 'numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk.' If 'numerous' is more than six, he must be a centipede — not an insect at all. From evidence in the story he is brown in color and about as long as the distance between a doorknob and the floor; he is broader than half a door. He has a voice at first, 'but with a persistent horrible twittering squeak behind it like an undertone,' which disappears as the story progresses. His jaws don't work as ours do but he has eyelids, nostrils, and a neck. He is, in short, impossible to picture except when the author wants to evoke his appearance, to bump the reader up against some astounding, poignant new aspect of Gregor's embodiment. The strange physical discomfort noted in the earlier work is here given its perfect allegorical envelope. A wonderful moment comes when Gregor, having been painfully striving to achieve human postures, drops to his feet:

Hardly was he down when he experienced for the first time this morning a sense of physical comfort; his legs had firm ground under them; they were completely obedient, as he noted with joy; they even strove to carry him forward in whatever direction he chose; and he was inclined to believe that a final relief from all his sufferings was at hand.

When 'The Metamorphosis' was to be published as a book in 1915, Kafka, fearful that the cover illustrator 'might want to draw the insect itself,' wrote the publisher, 'Not that, please not that!. . . The insect itself cannot be depicted. It cannot even be shown from a distance.' He suggested instead a scene of the family in the apartment with a locked door, or a door open and giving on darkness. Any theatrical or cinematic version of the story must founder on this point of external representation: a concrete image of the insect would be too distracting and shut off sympathy; such a version would lack the very heart of comedy and pathos which beats in the unsteady area between objective and subjective, where Gregor's insect and human selves swayingly struggle. Still half-asleep, he notes his extraordinary condition yet persists in remembering and trying to fulfill his duties as a travelling salesman and the mainstay of this household. Later, relegated by the family to the shadows of a room turned storage closet, he responds to violin music and creeps forward, covered with dust and trailing remnants of food, to claim his sister's love. Such scenes could not be done except with words. In this age that lives and dies by the visual, 'The Metamorphosis' stands as a narrative absolutely literary, able to exist only where language and the mind's hazy wealth of imagery intersect.

'The Metamorphosis' stands also as a gateway to the world Kafka created after it. His themes and manner were now all in place. His mastery of official pomposity — the dialect of documents and men talking business — shows itself here for the first time, in the speeches of the chief clerk. Music will again be felt, by mice and dogs, as an overwhelming emanation in Kafka's later fables — a theme whose other side is the extreme sensitivity to noise, and the longing for unblemished silence, that Kafka shared with his hero in 'The Burrow.' Gregor's death scene, and Kafka's death wish, return in 'A Hunger Artist' — the saddest, I think, of Kafka's stories, written by a dying man who was increasingly less sanguine (his correspondence reveals) about dying. The sweeping nature of the hunger