But Not For Him

FRANZ KAFKA, PARABLE AND PARADOX (376 pp.)--Heinz Politzer--Cornell University Press ($6.50).

Franz Kafka died of tuberculosis in 1924, at the age of 41. In crippling distrust of himself, he had published almost nothing, and he died little noted, leaving instructions to burn all his work. His closest friend disobeyed his will and published Kafka's three unfinished novels, his letters, diaries, parables and tales. These included The Trial, The Castle and Amerika--in effect, the chief body of his work. The generation that has passed since then has been deeply marked by the friend's good sense in preserving these records of a genius that at first seemed obscure, then mysterious, eventually dangerous and, at last, chillingly prophetic.

Critics of two cultures have pronounced Kafka's novels both "pre-fascist" and "proto-Communist" Freudians have found in them classical symptoms of angst; theologians have seen a cold and brilliant statement of Kierkegaard's "either/or" maxim and Karl Earth's "theology of crisis.'' And like Freud's, his name has become an easy tag, employed by essayists and parlor annotators: Kafkaesque now suggests the small man confronted by a high and nameless menace, the humble man, anxious to cause no trouble, who finds that his heart has withered, the defeated man who wanders without hope through the streets of rotting cities.

The Impossibility of Crows. In the most trenchant and lucid study of Kafka yet written, Poet and German Scholar Heinz Politzer conducts a tireless search into Kafka's style and imagery for clues that tie the emptiness of the heart to the disfigurement of the world outside. In Kafka's dream landscapes and ghostly characters, he finds threads to the commanding theme--man's search for an absolute from which he has become estranged by an impersonal society.

The fault is partly man's own, as Kafka sees it, because the lonely life is a breeding ground for new and universal crimes: torpor, mediocrity, the avoidance of the dare of love. In The Trial, the absolute appears as The Law; in The Castle, as the warder who never appears; in Amerika, as a promise extended but never fulfilled. The bitter loneliness Kafka suffered, Politzer says, was in quest for "the hope beyond hopelessness,'' "the glimmer of light Kafka knew existed, but not for him."

Politzer spent 20 years with his study, and that was too long. But he is perceptive in ferreting out the "perplexing parables" of Kafka's style. Driven by visions of horror and forebodings of doom, Kafka's great obsession was man's alienation from himself, from other me, from the absolute. "The crows maintain." he wrote, "that a single crow could destroy the heavens. There is no doubt of this, but it proves nothing against the heavens, for heavens simply means: the impossibility of crows." Heavens that possess crows must stop being heavens; laws that touch men abandon justice.

The Inability to Laugh. Kafka's form was magic realism in which, as Politzer writes, "clefts and crags open to reveal depths beyond realistic detail." In breathless, frightened prose, Kafka built his ambivalent fears into ambiguities that empty the spirit. His heroes endure events that seem to mirror their experience, but in fact are tantalizing opposites that contradict everything they know. In The Trial Kafka's hero asserts his innocence until echoes of his own voice convince him of his guilt. Life becomes absurd in a universe whose nature is that guiltless men shall be punished. Kafka never knew the totalitarian state that his intuition prefigured. But he knew the weight and layers of a hostile environment. He was brought up in the ghetto of the German-speaking Jews of Prague, surrounded by hostile Slavs who, in turn, were under the thumb of the dying Austrian Empire.

The loneliness of Kafka and his characters misleads Politzer in his conclusion that Kafka stands alone in literature too. He pays little attention to the insights Kafka gained from Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Gogol and Poe, still less to the enormous influence of Kafka on such writers as Robbe-Grillet, Camus and Sartre. In a final chapter that judges Kafka against Camus (unfairly, and at Camus's great expense), he notes the obvious distinctions in the work of two writers often compared: what Camus says in Olympian detachment, Kafka says in nervous excitement ; where Camus needs crisis to show man's decay, Kafka is content with indolence; in Camus the characters are absurd, but in Kafka it is the universe.

But these are critics' tricks, performed for the pleasure of graduate students. What matters more is that both men shared with their characters despair, the inability to laugh, and the dark conviction that the age they spoke of was a time of weary men, victims rather than controllers of a society grown too big to be comprehensible in human terms.

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