Musil had hardly finished his massive work when he died, nearly destitute, in 1942, and the time it took for completion reflected his view that, in the wake of other developments, the novel had to change in the twentieth century. He thought that the traditional novel, as a way of telling stories, was dead. Instead, for him the modern novel was the natural home of metaphysics. Novels – his novel anyway – were a kind of thought experiment, on a par with Einstein’s, or Picasso’s, where a figure might be seen in profile and in full face at the same time. The two intertwined principles underlying experience, he believed, were violence and love, which is what links him to Joyce: science may be able to explain sex – but love? And love can be so exhausting that getting through today is all we can manage. Thinking about tomorrow – philosophy – is incommensurate with that. Musil wasn’t anti-science, as so many others were. (Ulrich ‘loved mathematics because of the kind of people who could not endure it.’) But he thought novelists could help discover where science might lead us. For him the fundamental question was whether the soul could ever be replaced by logic. The search for objectivity and the search for meaning are irreconcilable.
Franz Kafka was also obsessed by what it means to be human, and by the battle between science and ethics. In 1923, when he was thirty-nine, he realised a long-cherished ambition to move from Prague to Berlin (he was educated in the German language and spoke it at home). But he was in Berlin less than a year before the tuberculosis in his throat forced him to transfer to a sanatorium near Vienna, where he died. He was forty-one.
Few details of Kafka’s private life suggest how he came by his extraordinarily strange imagination. A slim, well-dressed man with a hint of the dandy about him, he had trained in law and worked in insurance successfully. The only clue to his inner unconventionality lay in the fact that he had three unsuccessful engagements, two of them to the same woman.102 Just as Freud was ambivalent about Vienna, so Kafka felt much the same about Prague. ‘This little mother has claws’ is how he once described the city, and he was always intending to leave, but could never quite give up his well-paid job in insurance, not until 1922, when it was too late.103 He often clashed with his father, and this may have had an effect on his writings, but as with all great art, the link between Kafka’s books and his life is far from straightforward.
Kafka is best known for three works of fiction, Metamorphosis (1916), The Trial (1925; posthumous), and The Castle (1926; posthumous). But he also kept a diary for fourteen years and wrote copious letters. These reveal him to have been a deeply paradoxical and enigmatic man. He often claimed that his primary aim was independence, yet he lived in his parents’ home until he left for Berlin; he was engaged to the same woman for five years, yet saw her fewer than a dozen times in that period; and he amused himself by imagining the most gruesome way he could die. He lived for writing and would work for months, collapsing in exhaustion afterward. Even so, he might jettison what he had done if he felt it was unworthy. He had relatively few correspondents, yet wrote to them often – very often, and very long letters. He wrote 90 letters to one woman in the two months after he met her, including several of between twenty and thirty pages, and to another he wrote 130 letters in five months. He wrote a famous forty-five-page typed letter to his father when he was thirty-six, explaining why he was still afraid of him, and another long letter to a prospective father-in-law, whom he had met only once, explaining that he was probably impotent.104
Although Kafka’s novels are ostensibly about very different subjects, they have some striking similarities, so much so that the cumulative effect of Kafka’s work is much more than the sum of its parts. Metamorphosis begins with one of the most famous opening lines in literature: ‘As Gregor Sams awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.’ This might seem as if the plot had been given away right there and then, but in fact the book explores Gregor’s response to his fantastic condition, and his relationship with his family and with his colleagues at work. If a man is turned into an insect, does this help him/us understand what it means to be human? In The Trial, Joseph K. (we never know his last name) is arrested and put on trial.105 But neither he nor the reader ever knows the nature of his offence, or by what authority the court is constituted, and therefore he and we cannot know if the death sentence is warranted. Finally, in The Castle K. (again, that is all we are told) arrives in a village to take up an appointment as land surveyor at the castle that towers above the village and whose owner also owns all the houses there. However, K. finds that the castle authorities deny all knowledge of him, at least to begin with, and say he cannot even stay at the inn in the village. There then follows an extraordinary chain of events in which characters contradict themselves, vary unpredictably in their moods and attitudes to K., age virtually overnight, or lie – even K. himself is reduced to lying on occasions. Emissaries from the castle arrive in the vidage, but he never sees any sign of life in the castle itself, and never reaches it.106
An added difficulty with interpreting Kafka’s work is that he never completed any of his three major novels, though we know from his notebooks what he intended at the time of his death. He also told his friend Max Brod what he planned for The Castle, his most realised work. Some critics argue that each of his ideas is an exploration of the inner workings of the mind of a mentally unstable individual, particularly The Trial, which on this reading becomes a sort of imaginative case history of someone with a persecution complex. In fact, one needn’t go this far. All three stories show a man not in control of himself, or of his life. In each case he is swept along, caught up in forces where he cannot impose his will, where those forces – biological, psychological, logical – lead blindly. There is no development, no progress, as conventionally understood, and no optimism. The protagonist doesn’t always win; in fact, he always loses. There are forces in Kafka’s work, but no authority. It is bleak and chiding. Jewish, and Czech, an outsider at Weimar, Kafka nevertheless saw where that society was headed. There are similarities between Kafka and Heidegger in that Kafka’s characters must submit to greater forces, forces they don’t truly understand. He once said, ‘I sometimes believe I understand the Fall of Man as no one else.’107 Kafka parts company with Heidegger, however, in saying that not even submission brings satisfaction; indeed, satisfaction, or fulfilment, may not be possible in the modern world. This is what makes The Castle Kafka’s masterpiece, for many people a latter-day Divine Comedy. W. H. Auden once said, ‘Had one to name the author who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age as Dante, Shakespeare or Goethe have to theirs, Kafka is the first one would think of.’108
In The Castle life in the vidage is dominated by the eponymous building. Its authority is unquestioned but also unexplained. The capriciousness of its bureaucracy is likewise unquestioned, but all attempts by K. to understand that capriciousness are nullified. Though obviously and perhaps too heavily allegorical of modern societies, with their faceless bureaucratic masses, verging on terror, their impersonality, marked by a pervading feeling of invasion (by science and machines) and of dehumanisation, Kafka’s works both reflect and prophesy a world that was becoming a reality. The Castle was the culmination of Kafka’s work, at least in the sense that the reader tries to understand the book as K. tries to understand the castle. In all his books, however, Kafka succeeds in showing the reader terror and the uncomfortable, alienated, disjunctive feelings that so characterise modern life. Eerily, he also prefigured the specific worlds that were soon to arrive: Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany.