On Samuel Beckett's Objection to Franz Kafka

Someone had been telling the truth

In year of the centenary of Franz Kafka’s death, though having missed it by months, here’s something which if not piercingly critical is still a floating question.

This is a footnote from one of the volumes of Samuel Beckett’s letters —

As far back as 1962, SB had written to Ruby Cohn: “What struck me as strange in Kafka was that the form is not shaken by the experience it conveys” (17 January, University of Reading, Beckett International Foundation MS 5100)

Which, I think, is a very strange way of putting it.

If a fictional form is shaken, surely it stays essentially the same.

A can of Coke can be shaken, and the gush of brown fizz when it’s opened will humiliate the wannabe drinker, but the shaking does nothing to the can itself.

The narrator of a work of fiction could be a shaken first person speaker, shaken by their experience, and this could determine the forms they’re capable of constructing — the overall shape of the work but also the shapes of individual sentences.

And even a third person omniscient narrator might make their form mimetic of the fundamental shakenness of their main character.

(This reminds me of the Quakers, so nicknamed because as the founder of the religious movement, George Fox, told a judge to quake “before the authority of God”.)

Here I’m trying had to get at what Beckett was really saying.

Trauma creates a fragmentary or stalled experience of time. See Denise Riley’s extraordinary Time Lived, Without Its Flow. Surely one of the great books of recent years.

There are many novels that follow on from Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground.

I am a sick man, I am a spiteful man, I am an unattractive man.

Therefore, I am not a man capable of elegant constructions. Already, within my first sentence, I repeat myself three times.

However, the most extreme experience might not lead to the most obvious markers of degenerated writing (a breakdown in the capacity to perform social norms).

Nabokov, in Lolita, says —

You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

In each case I’m trying to imagine here, it’s the speaker that’s shaken, rather than — as Beckett says — the form.

But what would it mean to shake War and Peace or Ulysses? Is Molly Bloom’s monologue shaken by the day she’s had?

I think it’s something different.

Isn’t Beckett really meaning to say, in Kafka the form is not deformed by the experience it conveys?

Or, even more, that the form is not corroded, damaged or wounded?

This is a serious criticism. And it applies more on the level of the sentence than the overall construction of Kafka’s novels.

Unperturbed wouldn’t be a bad way of describing Kafka’s prose (as I understand it, having read only in translation).

But The Trial was left by Kafka as a collection of manuscript chapters with no given order. Damage, or the inability to construct, definitely applies to it.

I think the form of a later story such as ‘The Burrow’ is both shaken and deformed. In a way, it’s a dramatisation of the inability to make form, make sense, make a story. That’s why reading it — the being inside the reading of it — can be such a claustrophobic, traumatic and cathartic experience. The very boredom of it, with the constant expectation of attack (event), can shake you.

All of which isn’t just to watch one literary giant chuck a big rock at another.

Every writer, especially those of first person past tense narratives, needs to make a decision about how much the what of the experience being narrated affects the how of the language.

More and more, over the last century, the being-shakenness of a story is part of the expectation the reader brings to it.

And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

And not in elegant flowing prose where there’s a place for everything and everything in its place.

Yet the vast gap between the manner and matter of Kafka’s writing remains a great fascination.