Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

is a bouquet set upon his grave.

PART EIGHT. Paths in the Fog

What Is Irony?

In Part Four of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Tamina, the heroine, needs some help from her friend Bibi, a young graphomaniac; to win her goodwill, she arranges for her to meet a local writer named Banaka. He explains to the graphomaniac that todays real writers have renounced the obsolete art of the novel: 'You know, the novel is the fruit of a human illusion. The illusion of the power to understand others. But what do we know of one another?… All anyone can do is give a report on oneself… Anything else is a lie.' And Banakas friend, a philosophy professor, says: 'Since James Joyce we have known that the greatest adventure of our lives is the absence of adventure… Homers odyssey has been taken inside. It has been interiorized.' Some time after the book appeared, I found these words as the epigraph to a French novel. I was very flattered but embarrassed too, because, in my view, what Banaka and his friend said were just sophisticated stupidities. At the time, in the seventies, I was hearing them all around me: university chatter cobbled together from scraps of structuralism and psychoanalysis.

This Part Four of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was published in Czechoslovakia as a small, separate volume (the first publication of any work of mine after a twenty-year ban), and a press clipping was sent to me in Paris: the reviewer was pleased with me, and as proof of my intelligence he quoted a line he considered brilliant: 'Since James Joyce we have known that the greatest adventure of our lives is the absence of adventure,' and so on. I took a strangely wicked pleasure at seeing myself ride back into my native land on a donkey of misunderstanding.

The misapprehension is understandable: I hadn't set out to ridicule Banaka and his professor friend. I had not made obvious my reservation about them. On the contrary, I did all I could to conceal it, to give their opinions the elegance of the intellectual discourse that everyone, back then, respected and fervently imitated. If I had made their talk ridiculous, by exaggerating its excesses, I would have produced what is called satire. Satire is a thesis art; sure of its own truth, it ridicules what it determines to combat. The novelists relation to his characters is never satirical; it is ironic. But how does irony, which is by definition discreet, make itself apparent? By the context: Banaka's and his friends remarks are set within an environment of gestures, actions, and words that relativize them. The little provincial world that surrounds Tamina is characterized by an innocent egocentrism: everyone has sincere liking for her, and yet no one tries to understand her, not even knowing what 'understanding' would mean. When Banaka says that the art of the novel is obsolete because the notion of understanding others is an illusion, he is expressing not only a fashionable aesthetic attitude but, unknowingly, his own misery and that of his milieu: a lack of desire to understand another; an egocentric blindness toward the real world.

Irony means: none of the assertions found in a novel can be taken by itself, each of them stands in a complex and contradictory juxtaposition with other assertions, other situations, other gestures, other ideas, other events. Only a slow reading, twice and many times over, can bring out all the ironic connections inside a novel, without which the novel remains uncomprehended.

K.'s Curious Behavior During His Arrest

K. wakes up one morning and, still in bed, rings for his breakfast to be brought. Instead of the maid, two strangers arrive, ordinary men, in ordinary dress, who nevertheless immediately behave with such authority that K. cannot help but feel their force, their power. So although he is exasperated, he is incapable of throwing them out and instead he politely asks them: 'Who are you?'

From the beginning, K.'s behavior oscillates between his weakness, prepared to bow to the intruders' unbelievable effrontery (they have come to notify him that he is under arrest), and his fear of appearing ridiculous. For instance, he says firmly: 'I shall neither stay here nor let you address me until you have introduced yourselves.' It would suffice to pull these words out of their ironic setting, to take them literally (as my reader took Banakas words), and K. would be for us (as he was for Orson Welles in his film version of The Trial) a man-in-revolt-against-violence. Yet it suffices to read the text carefully to see that this man said to be in revolt continues to obey the intruders, who not only never deign to introduce themselves but also eat his breakfast and keep him standing the whole time in his nightshirt.

At the end of this scene of odd humiliation (he offers them his hand and they refuse to take it), one of the men says to K.: 'You'll be going to the bank now, I suppose?' 'To the bank?' asks K. 'I thought I was under arrest.'

There he is again, the man-in-revolt-against-violence! He is being sarcastic! He is being provocative! As, by the way, Kafka's commentary makes explicit: 'K. asked the question with a certain defiance, for though his offer to shake hands had been ignored, he felt, especially now that the inspector had risen to his feet, more and more independent of all these people. He was playing with them. If they should leave, he planned to chase after them to the front door and offer himself up for arrest.'

Here is a very subtle irony: K. is capitulating but wants to see himself as someone strong who 'plays with them,' who mocks them by derisively pretending to take his arrest seriously; he is capitulating but immediately also interprets his capitulation in a way that lets him maintain his dignity in his own eyes.

People first read Kafka with a tragic expression on their faces. Then they heard that when Kafka read the first chapter of The Trial to his friends, he made them all laugh. Thereupon readers started forcing themselves to laugh too, but without knowing exactly why. What actually is so funny in this chapter? K.'s behavior. But what is comic about this behavior?

The question reminds me of the years I spent at the cinema school in Prague. During the teachers' meetings, a friend and I would always watch with a malicious affection one of our colleagues, a writer of about fifty, a man who was subtle and correct but whom we suspected of tremendous, incurable cowardice. We dreamed up the following scenario, which (alas!) we never carried out:

In the middle of the meeting, one of us would suddenly tell him: 'On your knees!'

At first he wouldn't understand what we wanted; or more exactly, in his clear-eyed cravenness, he would understand instantly but would think to gain a little time by pretending not to understand.

We would have to say it louder: 'On your knees!'

Now he could no longer pretend not to understand. He would be all set to obey, with just one problem: how to do it? How would he get down on his knees here, in front of all of his colleagues, without humiliating himself? He would look desperately for some funny remark to make as he got down: 'Will you permit me, my dear colleagues,' he would finally say, 'to put a cushion under my knees? '

'On your knees and be quiet!'

He'd do it, putting his hands together and slightly tilting his head to the left: 'My dear colleagues, if you have really studied Renaissance painting, this is exactly the way Raphael painted Saint Francis of Assisi.'

Every day we imagined new variations on this delectable scene, inventing more and more witty remarks for our colleagues efforts to preserve his dignity.

The Second Trial of Josef K.

As opposed to Orson Welles, Kafka's earliest interpreters were far from considering K. an innocent man in