Kafka and the task of interpretation

Kafka might be the writer who is the most sensitive about the concept of interpretation. He interprets his own story, allows characters to interpret their destiny, invite readers to interpret his story by being themselves to be part of an interpretation. Consider his story, Before the Law: Kafka sketched the fate of the man from the country side at the gate of law only to invite a different interpretation from the part of the reader. He initiates such an interpretation with his character Josef K. who tells the priest at the cathedral that the ‘Old man deluded the gatekeeper’ – an argument which exists only in an interpretation of the story.

Consider his story The Judgment. Georg Bendemann’s life is subjected to the interpretation of his father who finally pronounces the judgment, ‘death by drowning’ at Georg. The protagonist of The Judgement had never been in conflict with his own self. But when Georg's life was weighed by his father, the former was delivered nothing but the capital punishment. Would the story of Hunger Artist have ever been successful had different interpretations about the art of fasting not been focused upon? Hunger artist was there to perform his art at any cost. But what makes the story more attractive is the way in which different interpretations – of spectators in the story, of we readers and of the author – construct the whole matrix at which the Hunger Artist finally perishes.

In The Castle too, K. faces several interpretations about various incidents in his life – his affair with Frieda, his attempts to meet Klamm at any cost and his befriending of Olga. Frieda has an interpretation about it, Pepi – the new barmaid who substituted Frieda – has another interpretation and the village council chairman has yet another.

More on this topic later.

When ‘I’ lead the story

Let this sentence be pushed to the middle of this description, this deceitful, vague opening, let it be ignored, overlooked or forgotten. Rather than the author’s self being labelled as an immature literary object around which his/her story is destined to revolve, better diffuse it to the already present; allow it to meld in the crowd.

Notwithstanding the sanctity bestowed to a story’s lead or opening paragraph especially by those who are in journalistic profession, a lead is often a treaty between the author and all the unexpected events that are yet to see light in the story. It is also an anticipatory bail taken by the author at the very outset against the expectations, often false, of a reader; “I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease…” begins Dostoevsky his Notes from the Underground. Leads also reflect the hesitance of an author to enter a discourse. S/he wants to be someone sitting at the rear of a hall listening to a lecture or who glides through the lines of a novel at his/her own ease. This hesitance can also be pursued as a literary strategy that gives life to the whole narration. But when the story itself begins to interrogate the author along his/her way, s/he has to voluntarily withdraw from the exercise, in the way Maurice Blanchot did in The Madness of the Day: “A story? No. No stories, never again.” Here, a series of events befell the writer who began his story in as humble a way as, “I am not learned; I am not ignorant. I have known joys. That is saying too little: I am alive, and this life gives me the greatest pleasure…”, reached the point when all what he said folded onto themselves before being concluded the way just mentioned.

Different is the case of an author who is unable to partake the experiences of his own life. This enigmatic zone of ‘the author and I’ is deliberately kept a no-man’s-land by many a writer. “The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to”- Jorge Luis Borges begins his brief text, Borges and I. But for a voracious reader, the only concern is a story. One spends time to read a book; s/he pays for it, takes the effort to carry it home from the bookshop or library. The author ought to give full value to all the efforts a reader takes. Can anyone in this era of intellectual property rights and patents digest the idea when Borges concludes his Borges and I with “I do not know which of us has written this page”? Cut to the Content Writer who is always held responsible by the editorial ballast for whatever s/he writes for his/her site.

Another fair comparison is possible between an apparently trivial incident in Franz Kafka’s real life and his literary intent. Once in his friend’s place, the writer accidentally barged into the room in which his friend’s father was sleeping. Fearing that the old man’s sleep might be disturbed because of the commotion, Kafka whispered to him: “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to disturb you. Consider me a dream”. But often the stark realties of life do not allow the reader to consider any piece of text as a dream collectively shared by him/her and the writer. Which is why Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk had to snipe his readers’ conscience with a mind-boggling series of narratives in first person beginning with “I am a corpse” by a dead man, cheated and murdered, and who now awaits inevitable decay.

Freedom

Kafka's A hunger artist ends with the description of a panther put in a cage in substitute of the hunger artist. The author says that each and every muscle and movement of the beast was proclaiming the freedom it enjoyed. "The food he (the panther) liked was brought to him without hesitation by the attendants; he seemed not even to miss his freedom; his noble body, furnished almost to the bursting point with all that it needed, seemed to carry freedom around with it too; somewhere in his jaws it seemed to lurk; and the joy of life streamed with such ardent passion from his throat that for the onlookers it was not easy to stand the shock of it." A similar description of such an action is seen in Metamorphosis when the Samsas were moving to a new apartment. "And it was something of a confirmation of their (the family members') new dreams and good intentions when at the end of their journey their daughter got up first and stretched her young body."

Observing the freedom enjoyed by stretching muscles I feel the same.

A Hunger Artist

Metamorphosis

The Law and the Guilt

I have always failed when I try put in words the meaning of two sentences from 'The Trial.' Perhaps I do not want the world to know what I feel about these sentences, or perhaps I have never met anyone who shares the same feelings with these sentences:

'There is always an attraction between the law and the guilt.'

'An accused person is always attractive such that he can be easily identified even in a crowd.'

I don't know whether the sentences are the same. But these are enough to feel guilty.

Kafka and Imaginary Animals

Imaginary animals are very common in Kafka’s writings. Recall his famous stories Metamorphosis, Cares of a Family Man, Blumfeld: An Elderly Bachelor etc. I used to tell my friends, “Probably Kafka had been experiencing himself as an imaginary animal at times; like a gigantic insect, or like Odradek, an animal which is very insignificant in a familial context." For Kafka, an animal is always mischievous, unmindful of its own good intentions. Kafka’s narration is always from this angle: because animals are mischievous by nature, or rather humans consider them to be mischievous, they are destined to be tortured. Who ever sympathize with the ‘animal’ can join him. That is a minimum requirement and the least thing you can collect from his stories. But when we realize that the mischievous animal symbolizes human, the meaning implied calls forth a different sensibility. Hence animal is not the point of interest of Kafka. Instead his interest is to drive a point home using human’s perception of animal as a medium.


Future projects on Kafka