Kafka and God

ROBERTO CALASSO HAS WRITTEN A book about Franz Kafka that concludes by celebrating the practice of magic and the worship of idols, calling for “an end to the atavistic struggle against the gods–a struggle that fails to understand that the singular is one modality of the plural, and the plural one way to catch a flashing glimpse of the veiled splendor.”

This is not the way books on the creator of Gregor Samsa are supposed to end–Kafka the neopagan? Kafka at Burning Man?–nor is this the way that a European intellectual is supposed to think. (Europe, we’re being told over and over, is secular to the core.)

In most respects, it’s true, Roberto Calasso appears to be perfectly cast as an exemplary representative of the European Mind. Presiding over Adelphi, the distinguished publishing house based in Milan, Calasso is a supremely cosmopolitan man of letters. He seems to have read everything, and usually in the original language–not only a dizzying range of European authors and the literature of classical Greece and Rome but also the canonical Sanskrit texts of ancient India–and he is himself a writer with a powerful, subtle intelligence and a seductive style. Dark-haired, hawk-nosed, infinitely urbane, he might have been invented by a novelist or drafted by a filmmaker to embody the European Union’s dream of itself.

And yet in one crucial respect, Calasso is spectacularly ill-suited for that role. For if, as George Weigel has written, “European man has convinced himself that in order to be modern and free, he must be radically secular,” and if to dissent from that consensus is not merely an offense against reason but a dreadful faux pas, then Calasso has soiled the E.U.’s elegant dining room table, by a series of books in which smug atheism of the contemporary European variety is treated with withering scorn. How much keener, Calasso suggests in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, was the vision of the Homeric Greeks:

In book after book–The Ruins of Kasch, The Forty-Nine Steps, Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India, Literature and the Gods–Calasso has pursued this argument. Are the gods real? Yes and no. They offer glimpses of a reality that will remain forever elusive. Driven underground by the narrowness of monotheism, the nihilism of Buddhism, the pretensions of the Enlightenment, they may take on terribly distorted forms, as in the totalitarian horrors of the 20th century: “Behind the trembling curtains of what passes for ‘reality,’ the voices tremble. If no one listens, they steal the costume of the first person they can grab and burst onto the stage in ways that can be devastating. Violence is an expedient of whatever has been refused an audience.”

Calasso reads the history of literature from the German Romantics to the present as a series of episodes in an ongoing revolt against the banishment of the gods. And thus Kafka, who in his diaries described writing as a kind of demon-possession, enters the story.

Like Joseph Brodsky’s essay on W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” Calasso’s study of Kafka is one of those all too rare performances that give literary criticism a reason to exist. Beginning with a sustained immersion in The Castle and touching in its course on much of Kafka’s work, K. invites the reader to pay attention, to enter into a state of hyperawareness that becomes almost intoxicating.

Kafka’s illness, his pathologies, his troubled relations with his father, his equally troubled relations with women, his Jewishness, his particular social location, his experience of the modern bureaucratic state as an employee of the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague: Calasso ignores none of this, but neither does he use it to “explain” The Castle or The Trial or “The Metamorphosis” or “The Burrow.” He is interested, rather, in how Kafka, given all that, given also an instinct for what Erich Heller called “the most obscure lucidity in the history of literature,” channeled forces engaged in a conflict that transcended any local circumstances.

What was at stake in that conflict? Heller, in his great contrarian essay on Kafka in The Disinherited Mind, saw in “Kafka’s World” the dilemma of “the modern mind” excruciatingly expressed, a mind that “knows two things at once: that there is no God, and that there must be God.” In Heller’s reading, Kafka is a disciple of Nietzsche, who gave himself consciously to the powers of darkness. For Calasso, in contrast, the powers to whose rustling voices Kafka attends are neither good nor evil. Kafka wanted, Calasso says, “to distinguish” his awareness of these powers “from any faith in a ‘personal God.’ Indeed, he went so far as to assert that ‘belief in a personal God’ is nothing more than ‘one possible expression’ of a widespread phenomenon: the tendency of ‘the indestructible’ to ‘remain hidden.'”

One of the greatest benefits of Calasso’s book is simply the reminder that we live among rival understandings of the world and our place in it. But do we really need reminding of this? Doesn’t any day’s news suffice? No, because most of the time that news just glances off us. All sensible people, we think, see things pretty much as we do. But a secularist who reads Calasso’s book–and reads Kafka at his instigation–must, if he’s honest, come to terms with the incredible notion that this wonderfully adept guide, who seems in so many ways a kindred spirit, is capable of talking rubbish about “the gods,” and enlists Kafka in his cause. A Christian or a Jew or a Muslim must reflect that this penetrating critic of secularism is also a polytheist, after a fashion, a neopagan (and there are many neopagans in “secular” Europe).

And Kafka? “At the beginning,” Calasso writes, “there’s a wooden bridge covered with snow. Thick snow . . . Kafka sensed by then only the minimum number of elements of the surrounding world ought to be named. . . . And why so? Because the world was turning back into a primeval forest, too fraught with strange noises and apparitions.” If that invitation doesn’t draw you into The Castle, if in fact it irritates you–too “literary,” too vatic–by all means go back to whatever it was you were doing. This book isn’t for you.

John Wilson is editor of Books and Culture.