Accordingly in the present book and The Trial the postulates he begins with are the barest possible; they are roughly those: that there is a right way of life, and that the discovery of it depends on one’s attitude to powers which are almost unknown. What he sets out to do is to find out something about those powers, and the astonishing thing is that he appears to succeed. While following the adventures of his heroes we seem to be discovering—almost without being fully aware of it—various things about those entities which we had never divined before, and could never perhaps have divined by ourselves. We are led in through circle after circle of a newly found spiritual domain, where everything is strange and yet real, and where we recognise objects without being able to give them a name. The virtue of a good allegory is that it expresses in its own created forms something more exact than any interpretation of it could. The Pilgrim’s Progress did this in its very circumscribed way; it is more exact in detail than any theoretical exposition of it could be; but indeed its interpretation, a banally simplified theological system, existed full-blown before it. Having admitted this, one may see better the extreme difficulty of Kafka’s attempt. For his allegory is not a mere recapitulation or recreation; it does not run on lines already laid down; it is a pushing forward of the mind into unknown places; and so the things he describes seem to be actual new creations which had never existed before. They are like palpable additions to the intellectual world, and ones which cannot be comprehended at a single glance, for there is meaning behind meaning, form behind form, in them all.
I have indicated less than a tithe of the things which may be found in this book and in The Trial, and that is all that I can do here, for Kafka’s writings have an almost endless wealth of meaning. His superb gifts as a storyteller, and his genius for construction, hardly need to be pointed out; it is obvious, however, that without them he would have been unable to introduce us to his strange world. In a recent issue of the Literarische Welt Herr Willy Haas remarks very finely of him that he has a tremendous power of deducing the real from the real, of starting from something concrete and sinking his thought into something which seems still more concrete. This is his method, and in the present novel with its consummate construction, few of those links between the concrete and the more concrete are left out; the progress of the invention coincides with the exploring and creating thought, so that in being carried forward by the action we are at the same time participators in the discovery and spectators of a world being built.
The unique quality of Kafka’s temperament is shown in his attitude to this world which he is investigating. That attitude may be best described by negatives. He avoided scrupulously the pose of the spectacular wrestler with God, which even certain great writers, such as Baudelaire and Rimbaud, have incomprehensibly assumed, but from which he was saved by the modesty of his view of his own place in the universe, and by his sense of humour. He avoided also the gesture of resignation, for what meaning could resignation have—except a pragmatic one—in face of the things he was investigating? Nor did he take refuge in irony, though certain episodes in his novels are saturated with it. Perhaps his temper is shown best in two axioms of his: that compared with the divine law, however unjust it may sometimes appear, all human effort, even at its highest, is in the wrong; and that at all times, whatever we may think, the demand of the divine law for unconditional reverence and unconditional obedience is beyond question. But—here again he surprises us—unconditional reverence and obedience do not seem in his eyes to have excluded the strictest scrutiny, or even the most acute comic observation. His descriptions of the Heavenly Powers are very curious. He notes their qualities and their foibles with something of the respectful appreciation of Plutarch writing of Alexander or Cato. To more ignorant eyes, it is true, those foibles might appear mere faults, but to him, as to Plutarch in somewhat analogous circumstances, they are worthy of esteem as the qualities of superior beings, qualities perhaps disconcerting and even incomprehensible to the writer himself, but qualities nevertheless which would be found to incarnate unquestionable virtues were his mind capable of understanding them. In Kafka’s descriptions of the conflict of his heroes with heavenly destiny there are, amid all the bewilderment and nightmare apprehension, interludes of the purest humour.
Of Kafka’s style one can get an adequate idea only by going to
