Sheer Strangeness

Jonathan Derbyshire, reviewing K., by Roberto Calasso, and Franz Kafka, by Sander L. Gilman:

. . .Unlike [Edmund] Wilson, both Calasso and Gilman are convinced of Kafka’s greatness. But they recognise that comprehensive, overarching interpretations such as [Max] Brod’s, more often than not, attenuate or simply miss the sheer strangeness of Kafka’s fictional world.

Calasso calls this Kafka’s “literary newness” and it is perhaps what Wilson had in mind when he suggested that Kafka is not an “organiser” of human experience in the manner of Proust and Joyce. Those two, for all their experiments with narrative form, remain committed to an idea of the novel as the representation of consciousness. But in Kafka, consciousness is never more than vestigial; “for the last time psychology!” is his watchword. Calasso observes that K., the central character in The Castle, is never properly described: we don’t even know the colour of his eyes. “Compared with other fictional characters,” he writes, “K. is potentiality itself.” What K. does, in other words, is wait - for an appointment at the castle, just as Josef K., in The Trial, awaits the verdict of an invisible tribunal. And whatever else these characters do, “their lives wear them down”. . .

. . .Many critics have sought refuge from such vertiginous effects [as are found in Kafka's fiction]. But Calasso takes seriously Elias Canetti’s assertion that some writers are “so utterly themselves” that interpretation of them can seem barbarous. There is a price to be paid for avoiding barbarity, however, and Canetti thought it consisted in a kind of slavish adherence to the author’s voice. Calasso’s remarkable book, which attempts to illuminate Kafka’s fiction by its “own light”, is a reminder that criticism doesn’t have to be strenuously analytical. Sometimes it succeeds by creatively redescribing what it criticises.