-Kafka, a Collection of Critical Essays. Edited by Ronald Gray (Twentieth Century Views)

While studying Dutch at Leuven University, I followed a lecture series in Film and Literature - mostly about what happens when you turn a book into a film. The highlight of the course was a case study of Orson Welles' film of Kafka's "The Trial". The film is a stunning work in its own right, but what was particularly rewarding was the opportunity of a serious reading of the original book. I had read "Metamorphosis" in my youth, remembering only the oddly prosaic portrayal of a man turned into a giant beetle. I knew and had shamelessly made use of the expression "Kafkaesque". I knew "The Trial" was a tale of non-specific guilt and uncomprehending and incomprehensible bureaucracy. What I now experienced in returning to the original was the strangely compelling atmosphere of the tale, the totally convincing way in which the author's rigorous and concrete prose depicts a situation of nightmarish absurdity. All one's instincts grope for a key to what one feels must surely be an analogy, a parable for the modern age, but plausible-seeming symbols ultimately remain contradictory and impenetrable. And yet "The Trial" is pregnant with the sense of a sincere and earnest pursuit of meaning perpetually frustrated. Above all it has, for want of a better expression, the ring of truth.

That a definitive interpretation of "The Trial" should remain tantalizingly beyond any intellectual grasp is surely the author's deliberate intention, but, coming across this collection of essays on Kafka in a second-hand bookshop, I delved straight into it in the search for clues to the Sphynxian riddle. To summarize brutally, there are three basic schools of thought about Kafka's writings. 1. He is a profound religious thinker. 2. He is seeking to give expression to the existential dilemma of modern man, alienated in the new mass society. 3. He is an oversensitive loser with a neurotic compunction to depict, in detail, his own state of loserdom. Of course, he is all of these things at once! I had read Nicholas Murray's admittedly rather workaday biography. [The crit-quotes on the back of the book remain priceless examples of how to damn with faint praise. My personal favourite is "Sound, compact, refreshingly judicious" which must be a euphemism for "Dull, short, hopelessly timid"!] Throughout his life, Kafka struggled with outer circumstance and inner demons - his scrupulous demands of his own writing, his recurring bouts of tuberculosis, his sense of personal isolation, his work as a lawyer for a workers' insurance society, his difficult relationship with his father, his complex attitude to his own Jewish background, his situation as a member of the German-speaking minority in Prague, his tormented relationship with his fiancée, his need to create the conditions in which he could write. It would be impossible for these influences on and resultants of his own temperament not to find their way into his writings. The state of society in general and the specific conditions in post First World War Czechoslovakia, as part of Kafka's experience, are inevitably reflected in his work. But the real point is ultimately a simple one, it seems to me. All of this material is processed through the artistic sensibility in order to be reshaped into the work. And the work is about a quest for order and meaning - in Kafka's case, apparently a fruitless one. But a fruitless quest is still a quest and any sincere quest, I would maintain, demands in and of itself a religious attitude. I mean, no attitude of quest is required to conclude that life is utterly devoid of meaning and purpose! And it may be that, in the final analysis, Kafka is less pessimistic than he appears on the surface. In an essay entitled "Hope and the Absurd in the Work of Franz Kafka", Albert Camus quotes Kirkegaard (much admired by Kafka): "Earthly hope must be killed; only then can we be saved by true hope."