Collected Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

nerves of the narrator, that
Hausvater
or ‘family man’. What is going to happen to Odradek? he wonders. Can he possibly die? But only that which is living can die, and ‘that does not apply to Odradek’. Is he then always going to be rolling down the stairs ‘before the feet of my children and my children’s children’? And though he does no harm as far as one can see, ‘the idea that he is likely to survive me I find almost painful’.
    Kafka has come a long way from that early reading by Max Brod of the ‘little motor-car story’, when he confided to his diary that despite his desire for ‘something large and whole and well-shaped from beginning to end’, ‘every little piece of my story runs around homeless and drives me away from it’. Odradek is completely himself/itself, yet is neither large nor whole nor well-made, and revels in the fact that he/it has ‘no fixed abode’.
    So long as Kafka imagined that art would help him enter a more meaningful realm than the one he inhabited in his dailylife, so long as he imagined that the test of the quality of his art lay in the unbroken nature of the work he put into it, then it was inevitable that he would turn on himself and his surroundings in bitterness and frustration: he was lazy, he was weak, he was unhealthy, his family was suffocating him, his bachelorhood was crippling him, the office was destroying him, marriage would be the end of him. But now it is as though he comes to accept the romantic folly of such dreams and such despair. An art that respects the truth, he now comes to see, can only express its own and our human limitations, show that we become immortal only to the extent that we cease to be human and alive only to the extent that we renounce dreams of wholeness and of belonging.
    Odradek is nobody’s son and nobody’s father. He does not know the cares of a
Hausvater
and is not graspable in his essence, only in his movement and his otherness. Odradek does not mean anything: he moves, gets in the way, disturbs. And accepting that writing stories is bringing Odradeks into being gives Kafka back the sense that there need be no end to the writing of stories and that the freedom from human cares lies precisely in such writing. As for us, we should cease to ask of them what they
mean
and ask instead how they
move
– both how they move in their own space and how they move
us
.
    Here, for example, is a little piece that Max Brod did not even consider worthy of inclusion in any collection of Kafka’s stories. Yet if it was all we had of Kafka it would immediately strike us as unique and irreplaceable. Though it is barely six lines long it is not a fragment in the sense that the rape piece was a fragment. It is only a fragment in the way an aphorism is a fragment, that is, as a questioning of the very notion of wholeness:
    I ran past the first watchman. Then I was horrified, ran back again and said to the watchman: ‘I ran through here while you were looking the other way.’ The watchman gazed ahead of him and said nothing. ‘I suppose I really oughtn’t to have done it,’ I said. The watchman still said nothing. ‘Does your silence indicate permission to pass?’
    The German is considerably denser than the English. ‘Ran past’ misses the sense of ‘overran’ in
überlief
; ‘then’ hardlydoes justice to
Nachträglich
, which means ‘retrospectively’ or ‘retroactively’; and ‘you’ of course fails to convey the fact the German uses the familiar
du
, with its suggestion that the Watchman is both a figure of authority and one to whom the speaker is very close. But even in English this is a piece of writing which demands to be read at least twice; indeed, as so often in Kafka, the narrative mimics the way we are forced to read it.
    A story which told how I ran past the first watchman, hid myself from the second, overcame the third, and finally entered the castle or finally escaped from it, might be exciting to read, but, once