The New Lifetime Reading Plan

The original of Orlando, in the book so titled, was Virginia Woolf s great friend, the aristocratic Vita Sackville-West, wife of the writer-diplomat Sir Harold Nicolson. This elaborate fan- tasy glancingly recapitulates parts of English history from Elizabethan times to 1928. It seems to anticipate the Latin American school of magic realism [132]. An element of play enters; perhaps Orlando bears the same relation to Woolfs total production that Graham Greene's Entertainments bear to his.

The Waves is her most difficult novel. Six members of the privileged class, three of each sex, are carried rapidly from childhood through youth, university, and middle age. There is no movement in the usual sense, merely six souls soliloquizing

in turn. As one of them, Bernard, reflects: "There is nothing one can fish up in a spoon; nothing one can call an event." Not everything the characters say or think or feel is graspable by even the most sensitive reader. The effect is of beauty without clarity. Not her most successful book, The Waves is neverthe- less probably the most original development-novel of the first half of the century.

C.F.

112

FRANZ KAFKA

1883-1924

The Trial, The Castle, Selected Short Stories

If we think only of the West, there are perhaps five creative writers of the century who have most influenced other twenti­eth-century writers. Franz Kafkas name would probably be among them. He would be classed with Joyce [110], Proust [105], Yeats [103], and T.S. Eliot [116]. About two decades after Kafkas death the poet W.H. Auden [126] wrote: "Had one to name the author who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age as Dante [30], Shakespeare [39] and Goethe [62] have to theirs, Kafka is the first one would think of." Even less restrained praise was accorded him by the great French poet and dramatist Paul Claudel: "Besides Racine, who is for me the greatest writer, there is one other— Franz Kafka."

These judgments were expressed at perhaps the peak of the Kafka boom. I say boom because his reputation is in part cult- inspired. But it remains true that the dark anomie and spiritual hunger of our unhappy epoch are both classically reflected in the dreams and nightmares of Kafkas fictions.

None of this was apparent during his brief lifetime. His enormous reputation is almost entirely posthumous. It is based, furthermore, on very little actual production: three not- quite-finished novйis, a dozen short stories, and a scattering of brief parables, plus some correspondence. It may in part be explained, as in the cases of Stendhal [67] and Tocqueville [71], by Kafka's powers of prophecy. Though he died as long ago as 1924, his symbolic visions seem to us to foretell our own period, marked by the German near-imposition of a state of total terror; by the bureaucratic maze that is the essential structure of ali modern governments; by a sense that, as spiri- tual beings, we have lost our way and must rediscover it; by the invasion of our very souls by the machine; by a pervading feel- ing, hard to pin down, of universal guilt; by dehumanization. Borges [121] speaks of "the Kafka of somber myths and atro- cious institutions.^,>

Kafka's externai life, though not notably happy, was shel- tered, reasonably rich in interesting friendships, and untouched by war. (His three sisters, however, were murdered by the Nazis; he would not have been surprised.) His personal- ity was intensely neurotic. This neurosis he put to creative use in his disturbing fictions. He suffered ali his life from an obses- sive sense of domination by his materialistic father, a Jew who acted more like a Prussian. This obsession reflected itself in his two major works, The Trial and The Castle, though their sym- bolism is so intricate and multileveled that biographical inter- pretation becomes hazardous. Yet it is clear that these novйis turn on feelings of guilt and inferiority. The Trial tells the story of a man who feels guilty but is never able to discover just what he is accused of. The Castle is about a similar figure enmeshed in a bureaucratic system with which he can never make contact but which nevertheless represents some kind of redeeming authority.