Kafka’s Job
Bertolt
Brecht:
‘In the battle between the self and the world, support the world.’
Thus
spake Franz Kafka.
Walter
Benjamin:
At least he didn’t think himself a saint. His office writings have such a defeated
air about them. As though he no longer believed in what he was doing, and that
to his horror made him all the more effective.
BB: The Tiger of Wrath got
you into trouble. So he bit his tongue and suffered in silence.
WB: Still in the office writings
his defence of Company interests is balance by the occasional ‘within reason’.
He presents two sides in some cases. The letter of the law isn’t always
reasonable when dealing with human beings. The possibility of rough justice was
the best he could offer, as much of it as the Company could take. He gave two
sides to some cases, the claim and counter-claim, and showed an impasse wasn’t
in anyone’s interest. It would save time and money to concede the claim that
threatened to go on and on.
Indeed,
one of his tasks was to draft the annual report. He did so as honestly as
possible, even showing it to his family and literary friends. I think when Max
Brod puts Kafka’s papers in order the ambiguities will be clearer, and we’ll
find his working life was a covert attack from within. But maybe I’m reading
too much into what amount to the doodlings of a dogsbody. Company policy was
his boss.
BB: It’s not possible too
read too much into what people do for a living. Max Brod, for instance, is
exploiting his job as literary executor by reclaiming for himself and posterity
the letters and journals Kafka wanted burned. He is justifying publication by
saying Kafka would not have named him as literary executor if he really meant
them destroyed. Which is a left-handed way of admitting Kafka didn’t trust him,
and with good reason. He was a friend. How right he was. Brod’s an old cod.
WB: And so are you. When it
suits your argument you cite the café gossip.
BB: We have to be grateful
for crumbs but don’t have to swallow them. I think your reading of Kafka is
fogged by wishful thinking, and Brod’s manipulations. You crave the man’s moral
redemption. But the evidence of Kafka’s out-tray is not encouraging. He was a
functionary in a Company dedicated to denying workers their rights. A suffering
soul, no doubt, trying to seep some spirit into the letter of the law. But,
who, under pressure from his bosses, didn’t hesitate to propose a biblical
solution when he had a one-legged man on the hop, dividing the poor forked creature
in two like Solomon’s baby.
It’s
fair to say that Kafka was working in the Dark Ages before Weimar’s little renaissance.
Accidents were within the law, but occupational diseases were cuckoos in
his in-tray’s nest. Industrial law didn’t yet apply to diseases caused by
chemicals in mining and factories. Most public health experts put them down to
bad nutrition in infancy, rather than working conditions per se. Medicine as
usual was running behind what was happening to the workers. Asbestos was a growth
industry, like cancer.
Kafka’s
in-tray was the assembly line of an ant-colony. His distancing from its
dehumanisations was necessary to get on with the job. However, he did not
dissociate himself completely. Writing about it in the evening was the escape
clause for his conscience. All right, he saw himself as a failed saint, all too
human. Like his clients. God rot the thought! But he couldn’t take that into
consideration, and at the same time hold onto his job. So the ambiguities took
over. In the dark night of the soul, which sweated out his writing, he
unambiguously confesses that serving two masters was on his conscious. In order
to forgive himself. Benjamin Constant’s dictum speaks to his condition:
explaining to excuse, wallowing in the harm done, expecting to be pitied, giving to self-analysis the time which
should be given to repentance.
That’s
Kafka’s position, and that it didn’t work to appease his conscience is not
surprising. You couldn’t keep your humanity happy by night by conjuring up literary
paradoxes while making human sacrifices to Moloch by day. The Implications of
that are sick-making. He always had a tension headache.
WB: It was an unhealthy world
that he inhabited. It rebounded on him.
BB: Not to mention his
clients. Tuberculosis must have come up often enough, and the claim refused. It
was the workers own fault. Or their parents. ‘Factories attract poor physical
specimens.’ It came back to haunt him. Kafka in his late twenties ran an
asbestos factory with his brother-in-law. He coveted an alterative source of
income, one that disturbed his evenings less. However the venture put him in
debt to his hated father, and very possibly lead to his death from consumption
a decade later. Asbestos can cause it, even in the well-to-do.
WB: There is no doubt Kafka
was aware of the risks. He didn’t expect to live long. You might as well dance
with death.
BB: It’s a way of controlling
your destiny. The wilfulness in his nature that his friends found exasperating
leads the dance. His state of mind and body were beyond medical attention. So
he became his own mind doctor, performing conceptual surgery with the knife of
irony to divide himself down the middle, Solomon’s Baby-like again. He had
accepted that the Big Ideas were not for him. Capitalism, Marxism, Anarchism.
And knew the Little Ideas, like leaching some softeners into the letter of the
law, could only end in failure. As the Bigger Idea in insurance, the small
print, always wins.
WB: He liked to think himself
as a Socialist. In a small way. On the side of the little man.
BB: Lending him a benevolent
hand in the Annual Report, but no leg up when it came to concluding a case.
WB: Not that it made him
happy.
BB: Kafka knew the score. He
was playing for the wrong side. That it would always win was his defeat, as a
match-fixer manqué. I could warm to him as one of those lowly little clerks in
Russian literature, Gogol meets Dostoyevsky. When they decide to enter into a
conspiracy arranging times to meet proves impossible with their work
commitments. Another failed revolution.
Though
I’ve never been a wage-slave myself, I can sympathise with Kafka and his
drudgery, though he was more upmarket than the unhappy clerks. The daily grind
continued into his nights. He didn’t sleep much. Drawing from case histories in
his claims office, he explored contingencies within them, turning the details
into stories, which gave the appearance of being parables, but were really
riddles. In effect, it was the reduction of human suffering to ‘a clear statement
of ambiguity’. A phrase he actually used in one of his reports. So Kafka ended
up writing the same story, over and over. Around and about human failure, and
carrying on despite. Acceptance and pragmatism. When you fail all you can do is
try again and learn to get better at it. It’s
bound to end badly, but there is no end to it. A dangling paradox
prevails.
WB: Kafka’s writing cannot be put down to a mere
gloss on his office duties. According to Max Brod, who has to be respected as
the closest witness we’ve got, Kafka recorded his dreams, and they went into
his writing, particularly the novels.
You’re right about his inherent fatalism and his pragmatic reaction to
it. This works itself out with the logic of a dream, most surely in Amerika,
sometimes called The Man Who Disappeared. The sense of failure is
given a kind of comic relief, releasing the peculiar purity that is the beauty
of his work. It’s a nightmare come true. The worst has happened. Exult. You
were right. Deep shame. And then you wake up. Ambiguity clears the air…