K.
by Roberto Calasso translated by Geoffrey Brock
Jonathan Cape £18.99, 327 pages

FRANZ KAFKA
by Sander L. Gilman
Reaktion Books £10.95, 224 pages

In 1947, the critic Edmund Wilson wrote a “dissenting opinion” on Franz Kafka for The New Yorker. He complained that Kafka had been turned by over-zealous “cultists” into a “human shadow thrown on the mist in such a way that it seems monstrous and remote when it may really be quite close at hand”. Wilson argued that in treating the novels as parables of the human condition, the cult of Kafka had grossly overestimated them. In truth, he wrote, the books are messy and half-formed, and compare unfavourably with those of great modern “naturalists of personality” such as Proust or Joyce.

The founders of the cult were Kafka’s biographer and literary executor Max Brod, and his first English translators, Willa and Edwin Muir. Brod was responsible not only for posthumously publishing, against his friend’s wishes, three novels assembled from the drafts and fragments Kafka left behind when he died, but also for disseminating an essentially theological interpretation of them. And the Muirs colluded in this enthusiastically: they regarded Kafka as a sort of religious genius and read his novels and stories as allegories of unattainable grace in which man, in the eyes of God, is always in the wrong.

Wilson thought the influence of Brod and the Muirs on his contemporaries pernicious. He rejected the idea that Kafka’s fiction had any significant religious implications and found it absurd that the “self-doubting soul” from Prague should be taken either for a great artist or a spiritual guide.

Roberto Calasso’s extraordinarily rich study and Sander L. Gilman’s terser, less elegant critical biography suggest that the critical consensus has finally caught up with Wilson. Unlike Wilson, both Calasso and Gilman are convinced of Kafka’s greatness. But they recognise that comprehensive, overarching interpretations such as Brod’s, more often than not, attenuate or simply miss the sheer strangeness of Kafka’s fictional world.

Calasso calls this Kafka’s “literary newness” and it is perhaps what Wilson had in mind when he suggested that Kafka is not an “organiser” of human experience in the manner of Proust and Joyce. Those two, for all their experiments with narrative form, remain committed to an idea of the novel as the representation of consciousness. But in Kafka, consciousness is never more than vestigial; “for the last time psychology!” is his watchword. Calasso observes that K., the central character in The Castle, is never properly described: we don’t even know the colour of his eyes. “Compared with other fictional characters,” he writes, “K. is potentiality itself.” What K. does, in other words, is wait - for an appointment at the castle, just as Josef K., in The Trial, awaits the verdict of an invisible tribunal. And whatever else these characters do, “their lives wear them down”.

In making undifferentiated bureaucratic time the substance of his fiction - and this, surely, is the essence of the “Kafkaesque”, rather than some melodrama of transcendence - Kafka plunges the “sharpest Ockham’s razor into the substance of the novel”. Calasso appears to be saying that this is a kind of war on the novel in which Kafka tests, almost to breaking point (and certainly to the point at which it was impossible for him ever to finish a book), the resources of the form.

It is significant, therefore, that the centrepiece of K. is an interpretation, not of The Castle or The Trial, but of “The Judgment”, a story some 10 pages long which Kafka wrote in a single night of feverish creativity in September 1912. (Gilman also accords the story, and Kafka’s discussion of it in his diary, considerable importance.) The plot, described by Calasso as an “insolent absurdity”, is perfunctory: Georg Bendemann, a young merchant with a flourishing business, has just finished writing to a less successful friend who has been living in Russia for several years. He then crosses the hall to tell his father that he has informed his friend of his recent engagement.

Georg is taken aback when his father suggests that the friend in St. Petersburg is a fiction, only then to acknowledge that he exists and to accuse his son of deceiving him. The story ends with Georg’s father pronouncing a sentence of death-by-drowning on his son. Georg flees the room as if he were being “urged” to do so, runs to the river and throws himself from the bridge, declaring his love for his parents as he falls.

Calasso notes that certain important characteristics of Kafka’s fiction take shape in this story, principally the disproportion or lack of fit between the austerity and precision of the narrative voice (which prompted Wilson to compare Kafka with Flaubert) and the enormity or horror of that which is being narrated. What is distinctive is that the disproportion is unannounced, and it is this, in Calasso’s view, that separates Kafka from his predecessors. There is no warning, when Georg leaves his room to enter his father’s, that we are on the threshold of pure violence. The transition is such that Georg’s death, “so irrational in the telling”, arrives as if it were a conclusion entailed by the implacably logical steps in a theorem or proof.

Many critics have sought refuge from such vertiginous effects. But Calasso takes seriously Elias Canetti’s assertion that some writers are “so utterly themselves” that interpretation of them can seem barbarous. There is a price to be paid for avoiding barbarity, however, and Canetti thought it consisted in a kind of slavish adherence to the author’s voice. Calasso’s remarkable book, which attempts to illuminate Kafka’s fiction by its “own light”, is a reminder that criticism doesn’t have to be strenuously analytical. Sometimes it succeeds by creatively redescribing what it criticises.