However you want, of course. I read him literally, mostly, as a fantasy writer. Gregor turns into a bug; that is what Metamorphosis is about, first. I think of great fantasy writers as people who make metaphors literal. Thus reading literally is also reading metaphorically, poetically.
Many enthusiastic readers have wanted Kafka to be allegorical. They break his code and find that he is a religious writer, Jewish or possibly something else, some kind of gnostic. Or everything is psychological, really about Kafka’s father, or about his frustrations with or fear of women. Kafka has attracted totalizers. He is so complex that they never seem entirely wrong to me. Only the totalizing tendency is wrong.
It is always a pleasure to find people smarter than me who agree with me. Robert Calasso’s K. (2002, tr. Geoffrey Brock) is a three hundred page rearrangement of Kafka. The early chapters mostly put episodes of The Castle in different order. Eventually other Kafka texts are pulled in, all of the major ones. Another great temptation with Kafka is to dissolve his individual works, not just his fiction but the fragments, diaries, letters, offhand comments reported by Max Brod, everything, into one omni-text. I understand completely. The key to any given text may be somewhere in that other text. It feels like it should be. It never is, not quite.
Anyway, this is Calasso, who like me is not really looking for a key:
Kafka can’t be understood if he isn’t taken literally. But the literal must be grasped in all its powers and in the vastness of its implications. (25)
You tell ‘em. Maybe that second sentence moves towards meaninglessness. The rest of the paragraph is not much help.
It’s awkward to speak of symbols in Kafka, because Kafka experienced everything as symbol. It wasn’t a choice – if anything, it was a sentence. (118)
For Kafka, the metaphorical and the literal had the same weight. The passage from one to the other was smooth. The metaphorical could take the place of the literal and transform the literal into metaphor. (119)
Knowledge leads to the evocation of an image. And that image is immediately recognized as “only an image.” To move beyond it, it will have to be replaced – with another image. The process is never-ending. (122-3)
That last one, that is merely a definition of literature, right?
I am not sure of the source of Kafka’s metaphysics, but it is something like Schopenhauer’s. Kafka did not merely believe in the existence of a real reality behind the representation of reality in which he lived, he believed that he occasionally experienced that real reality. It was accessible, occasionally, by means of writing fiction. Or maybe it was just an image of the real reality, that’s fine too.
Tomorrow I will interpret Kafka a bit myself. He invites it. The climax of The Trial, the astounding “In the Cathedral” chapter, is mostly a piece of literary criticism, where Josef K. and the priest close-read and interpret the “Before the Law” parable to exhaustion.
K. said that with finality, but it was not his final judgment. He was too tired to survey all the conclusions arising from the story… The simple story had lost its clear outline… (The Trial, tr. Willa and Edwin Muir, rev. E. M. Butler)
But maybe the characters missed the one true interpretation. If they had only tried harder, or had access to Kafka’s diaries and letters.
