The Complete Stories (forword by John Updike)

Hearing Kafka read aloud from his youthful works "Description of a Struggle" and "Wedding Preparations in the Country" instantly convinced Max Brod that his friend was a genius: "I got the impression immediately that here was 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 Jesenská-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?