Collected Stories Read Online Free Page B

profoundly ambivalent. We experience horror at what happens to Gregor but at the same time a kind of joy at the fact that the story exists and allows us to read it. And if the reaction of the parents and sister mime out in the fiction our own inability to give meaning to Gregor’s ordeal and death, then that too is a part of the meaning of the whole. And if Gregor finds himself constrained more and more by his horrible body, till death comes as a merciful release, then for Kafka the writing of the story was itself a merciful release from the frustration of years, even if he later had doubts about its ending, and a renewal of that sense that ‘everything can be said … for everything, for the strangest fancies, there waits a great fire in which they perish and rise up again’. For now at last the excess of gesture, the arbitrary jerking of arms and legs, has been made the subject not of observation but of narrative; now at last his ‘profound talent for metamorphosing myself, which no one notices’, has found an outlet. Other writers have had the ability to empathize with a wide range of human beings; Kafka has now discovered in himself the unique gift of empathy with everything in the world, even a gigantic insect. It is a gift of which he will make full use in the years that follow.
    But before that happens there is one story in the vein of ‘The Judgment’ that still needs to be written, though that doesnot happen till almost two years later, in October 1914. ‘In the Penal Colony’ is the most repulsive story Kafka ever wrote, for while there is a kind of serenity in the way in which both Georg and Gregor meet their deaths, and a deep sympathy with their bewilderment and despair, this story is glacial throughout. The peculiar horror of the two earlier stories lies in the combination of classic purity in the unfolding of the narrative and the almost unbearable subject-matter; that of ‘In the Penal Colony’ lies in the sense that not only is the subject-matter foul but the story itself, replicating the narrative, seems to have become a sort of malfunctioning machine:
    The explorer … felt greatly troubled; the machine was obviously going to pieces; its silent working was a delusion … The Harrow was not writing, it was only jabbing, and the Bed was not turning the body over but only bringing it up quivering against the needles.
    Though in death the officer’s look is ‘calm and convinced’, this is the result not of understanding but of madness, for there is no visible sign of ‘the promised redemption’, while ‘through the forehead went the point of the great iron spike’.
    The reason for this may lie in the fact that though Kafka was always to look back to his breakthrough as a wonder, a form of grace, he was also perhaps beginning to feel uneasy with the form it had taken. The narratives he had suddenly found it in himself to write and which had, for the first time, given him the kind of satisfaction he had always hoped for from his writing, may have struck him as too extreme, too full of anguish and pathos. It is as though he feels that the ambition of these early stories is too Utopian, too Romantic. ‘In the Penal Colony’ dramatizes the painful discovery that Truth cannot be written, not even on the body.
    Other factors were perhaps also involved in the change of direction that now began to manifest itself, chief among them the growing realization of the ambivalence of his desire for marriage, and the coming of the war. Perhaps, he must have begun to think, it was not his job or his bachelorhood or his ill-health which were preventing the full outburst of his talents, but something else, something which had to do with what man is and what art can achieve. And if he suffered as aconsequence, what was his suffering compared to what those at the front were experiencing?
    Be that as it may, the work he did in the years 1914–17, much of which is included in the 1919 volume,
A Country