Kafka Education

USING KAFKA

By Stephen Wilson

 

How Kafka's stories may help people perceive their own problems from many different angles.

  

 

'People are tied together by ropes, and it's bad enough when the ropes around you loosen and he drops somewhat lower than the others into empty space: ghastly when the ropes break and he falls. That is why we should cling to others'.

 

Kafka's letter to Oskar Pollak, 1903

 

 

In Russia there used to be a strict custom dictating how a person told a story. The storyteller could not be interrupted or fail to finish his story. He had to complete the story to the end. Unless he told the story to the end misfortune would fall upon him. This was because the story was told not only to the living listeners but to the dead ancestors of the storyteller. The story was not just told for entertainment but to bring good luck and health to the listeners. Andrei Sinyavsky told of a legend held by the Khakasses, who live in the Altai mountains where a storyteller stopped midway between a story and went outside. He came across a bogatyr who had got stuck in a mountain with his horse. The deeply offended bogatyr scolded the storyteller with the words, "Why have you left me like this, inside the mountain?" Soon after the storyteller died, but warned other storytellers never to stop telling the story to the end. For the aim of telling the story was to also keep evil outside the community.

 

The Czech writer Franz Kafka is reputed to have failed to finish many of his stories such as 'The Castle' and 'America'. Of course he did not die of an illness for failing to end many of his stories. On the contrary, premature illness prevented him from finishing many of his stories by weakening him and Kafka was something of a perfectionist who was never completely content with his stories. This is why on his death bed he asked for many of his stories to be burnt. The reason for not finishing the stories was not because he adopted some anti-narrative perspective where he believed our lives don't mirror stories and are devoid of any inherent telos or meaningful structure.

 

The facts are that humans are endowed with a narrative identity. We are the stories we tell ourselves even if there seems at times a radical discrepancy between some stories and our lives. By stories we mean that there is a beginning where the hero has to fulfill some aim or purpose, an agreed criteria which allows us to distinguish between facts and falsehood as well as a resolution to some problem which has loomed up. Now some thinkers deny this. For instance, Louis O.Mink claims 'Stories are not lived but told. Life has no beginnings, middle or: endings: there are meetings, but the start of an affair belongs to the story we tell ourselves later,and there are partings only in the story" Life only seems like a story in retrospect after someone has written it. My response to this is, "Have any of those critics heard of death?" For death marks the end of any narrative.

 

When people fail to acknowledge their own narrative identity they are in danger of impoverishing their own self. They can be making one step into dissolving and breaking up their very identity! For a strong sense of narrative identity is essential to providing a person's life with a clear and coherent meaning which strongly motivates him or her to affirm life as an adventure. I believe that the stories of Kafka can help us to develop a more stable and secure narrative identity where life becomes dynamic rather than static. The stories, parables and letters of Kafka can help us to better understand why we should tell stories and how. Secondly, since Kafka compares our life as going on a journey through a complex labyrinth or maze it is worth asking what obstacles stop, impede or imprison us in this maze.

Thirdly, Kafka bravely grappled with all kinds of acute social and psychological problems such as isolation, low self esteem as well as a profound loss of meaning. He suggests how we radically transform ourselves through our relations with others and are easily exposed to losing our way and minds.

 

Some may argue that Kafka is the last writer one would want people who have problems to read. Isn't this author too dark, despairing and depressing? But this would be to misread his works. Since some of the stories are unfinished we might ask readers how they would want the stories to end. There is a lot of humor. In actual fact you might even argue that Kafka's works are not that dark as compared to horrific events after his death. The experience of the the main character in 'The Castle' is not as stressful as either being held and tortured in Guantanamo Bay or as an Englishman who has been born in Britain can't find his documents and so is deported to the West Indies. Just read Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine and you'll discover that Kafka is pretty tame. The main character in the Castle is not arrested, deported or relentlessly tortured.

 

1. Kafka offers wise advice on how stories should be told. Firstly, a story should be told from the soul. It should not be over descriptive and full of artificial metaphors which sound pretentious and artificial. Such needless descriptions often smother and stifle the narrative of unfolding events. If you can use three words to describe something instead of hundred then use three words. He avoided the errors of the Kunstwart stories which strove to shock people by narrating events by using the language in a false and insincere way. You just have to read the beginning of some of Kafka's stories such as 'Metamorphosis' As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed into a gigantic insect'. In one neat sentence Kafka takes the reader straight to the heart of the story. In his story 'The Burrow', it begins 'I have completed the construction of my burrow and it seems to be successful'. But this word 'seems' is so important because the mole feels endless anxiety about being attacked by predators. But Kafka's work as a lawyer made him well acquainted with the art of rhetoric. This very art encompasses storytelling as in many of his novels the drama which looms up involves acute arguments between the characters {the term for this is stychiomythia}. 

A performing storyteller should use rhetoric to interact with his audience by pausing and asking them questions as well as addressing them directly. That Kafka understood this is mentioned in one entry to his diary, in 1911, where he mentions meeting a lively American lawyer. Kafka stated the lawyer was a good storyteller because of his vivacious and steady speech as well as his interactive approach. He wrote 'The listener is personally drawn in, questioned, while alongside the plot of the story thickens ... the listener is flattered and drawn into the story and given a special right to be a listener'.{pages 74-76,The Diaries of Franz Kafka, edited by Max Brod ,Penguin 1972}

 

2. Some of the most important themes raised by Kafka are how a person's aims and aspirations are constantly thwarted by all kinds of insurmountable obstacles. Those obstacles might be all kinds of confusion, misunderstanding and farce. Two themes which emerge are how pointless many of our actions are because some of the tasks are impossible to finish. The task is impossible to finish because of oppressive authority, disorientation, lack of time or know-how. Life is essentially fleeting and fragile. We are ensnared in a labyrinth where any wrong turning can be fatal. I think that it is worth asking students in reading or discussion groups to examine Kafka's smallest works to illustrate a number of themes. You might get them to read 'A Chinese puzzle'. Kafka tells how children often bought an inexpensive toy which was a piece of flat wood painted reddish brown with blue labyrinthine paths cut in which they all led to a small hole. There was a tiny ball in this game and you had to shake the toy to get it into the hole. In this tale Kafka imagines a ball has a mind of its own and might not like going along those preconceived paths. The ball might want a break or prefer to go on another path. With this story you might ask what kinds of paths do you feel you are forced or obliged to go along? For instance, do you feel under pressure to go to university or to obtain a job with a particular level of income? Are there other paths we can find in the labyrinth of life? 

In the story of 'The Next Village ' the author narrates that 'My grandfather used to say: Life is astoundingly short. To me, looking back over it, life seems so foreshortened that I scarcely understand, for instance, how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that - not to mention accidents- even the span of a normal happy life may fall short of the time needed for such a journey'. I would ask the students 'What do you understand by the next village? and 'What kind of fears and accidents might be suggested by the author?'

 

3.  A teacher might ask his students how they would define success or failure and whether the price is worth paying. I think that the story 'Reflections for Gentlemen Jockeys' is relevant in this respect. Kafka begins the story, "When you think it over, winning a race is nothing to sigh for.' The success of winning is made bitter by the envy of your opponents and the insincere congratulations of people who have won bets on your horse. But the last line states, 'And finally from the now overcast sky rain actually begins to fall'. This indicates that things we can't control can render us ridiculous or impotent. The petty rudely ruins the profound. We might easily conclude that there is no 'total success' or 'total failure'. This is why calling someone 'a loser ' is so myopic and misleading.

 

The challenge of Kafka is that the readers should interpret the meaning of the stories in their own way and in deed, concerning his unfinished stories, why shouldn't the students be invited to invent their own endings? For example, in the unfinished novel 'The Castle', what if the land surveyor actually mended his relationship with Frieda or simply gave up his quest to take up a position in the Castle? What happens to the mole in 'The Burrow?' Does the unseen predator finally confront him? How does he react? What happens to the two mysterious alive balls which have turned up to haunt the' Elderly Blumfield?' Do the balls get on with the children he gave them to as a present?

How does one reach the next village? All too often we are faced with having no mentors, no guidelines or even a secure belief system or community from which to find a secure anchorage! In Kafka's stories you feel as if something terrible has happened to the characters before the story has even begun.

I think the main challenge is that we not only have to finish telling stories to the very end. We should also summon up the courage to go on the road and affirm life as an alluring adventure. Life should be dynamic, daring and audacious! We should at least attempt to reach the next village!