Collected Stories (6 page)

But it was not to last. For Kafka this rich creative period was only a moment on a fateful journey, only a point on the circumference of his dreams and desires. In 1917 he was found to be suffering from tuberculosis and broke off finally with
Felice. The precarious balance of these years was disturbed by the intrusion of his body and the stench of mortality. In his last stories the pain of ‘The Judgment’ and ‘Metamorphosis’ returns, but displaced, so to speak, no longer at the heart of the narrative but at the periphery. I am not sure if it is not the more painful for that.

‘A Hunger Artist’, the story whose proofs Kafka was correcting as he lay dying in Kierling Sanatorium in the spring of 1924, is the fullest expression of the change. ‘I always wanted you to admire my fasting,’ says the Hunger Artist. ‘We do admire it,’ says the overseer. ‘But you shouldn’t,’ says the Artist. ‘Well then we don’t,’ says the overseer. ‘But why shouldn’t we admire it?’ ‘Because I have to fast, I can’t help it.’ ‘What a fellow you are,’ says the overseer, ‘and why can’t you help it?’ ‘Because I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.’

Like Bucephalus and the ape the Hunger Artist has simply done what had to be done. In his case, however, it is not enough, for fasting, unlike the reading of old books or lectures to academies, kills.

But even this is perhaps still too close to pathos for Kafka. ‘Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk’, probably the last story he wrote, takes matters one step further. Josephine’s art, of which she has been so proud, is perhaps not even art, her singing no different from the cheeping of all the other mice when properly listened to. Her people will not miss her when she is gone, and, ‘since we are no historians,’ says the narrator, she will soon be forgotten, ‘like all her brothers’.

Many years before, Kafka’s uncle had taken the manuscript from his hands and declared to the assembled family that it contained only ‘the usual stuff’. In this story Kafka sends a final answer to that uncle. For it recognizes the human desire for song, for art, that will give meaning to our world and
bring the singer recognition. But it accepts at the same time that such desires are, from another perspective, absurd, childish, and unwarranted.

We are far, in this story, from the young Kafka’s mixture of self-confidence (‘I … could not forget that I was called to great things …’) and self-doubt (‘with one thrust I had been banished from society’). We are rather in the hands of a master who must have taken pride and pleasure in what he could do and yet who could also recognize its complete insignificance, and who had the skill and the imagination to convey this double perspective without self-pity and without denying the total validity of either.

The paradox is that, because he gives us food we need, Kafka himself will not be forgotten as long as there are books to read and human beings to read them. He lives for us in his fragmentary and living children more than he ever lived for himself in the bosom of his family, the Kafkas, and his city, Prague.

Gabriel Josipovici

Contrary to current belief, Kafka was as concerned as any author to see his works in print, and as careful as any poet about the order in which the stories in any particular collection should be printed. However, like Eliot, he was extremely fastidious and only published a very small number of works in his lifetime. In 1912, largely at Brod’s urging, and with considerable misgivings, he put together a volume of early pieces, which was published the following year under the title
Betrachtung
, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir as
Meditation
. 1913 also saw the publication of his two great early stories, ‘The Judgment’ and ‘The Stoker’, followed in 1915 by his longest and greatest early work, ‘Die Verwandlung’, translated by the Muirs as ‘The Metamorphosis’. In 1919 two more slim volumes came out, ‘In the Penal Colony’, which he had written in October 1914, and
A Country Doctor
, a collection of fourteen stories written between 1914 and 1917. He had originally intended to include ‘The Bucket Rider’, but eventually decided that it did not fit into the volume, and it was published separately in the ‘Prager Presse’ in December 1921. In the last two years of his life Kafka was planning a further volume, consisting of four stories, and this appeared shortly after his death, in 1924, as
Ein Hungerkünstler
, translated by the Muirs as
A Hunger Artist
. Everything else, including the three novels,
Amerika, The Trial
and
The Castle
, remained in manuscript, to be eventually published by Brod in a variety of formats.

The most readily available edition of the Collected Stories, edited by Nahum Glatzer (Penguin originally but now Minerva, 1992) divides the stories into two sections, ‘longer’ and ‘shorter’. This seems needlessly arbitrary, and in the present volume I have preferred to follow the procedure of the Fischer Verlag edition of the stories,
Sämtliche Erzählungen
, edited by Paul Raabe and first published in 1970. Raabe essentially divides the stories into those published in Kafka’s lifetime and those which remained unpublished. This has a number of advantages. It allows the reader of
Meditation, A
Country Doctor
and
A Hunger Artist
, to see these collections as wholes, made up of more than their parts; and it makes clear which stories carry titles given them by Kafka and which by later editors. One or two of the unpublished stories, it is true, such as ‘The Great Wall of China’, were given titles by Kafka, but even these do not, obviously, carry the authority of the titles of the published stories where, as in ‘The Cares of a Family Man’ (‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’), discussed in the Introduction, the title forms an important part of the meaning.

Like Raabe, but unlike Glatzer, I have included ‘The Stoker’, which Kafka subsequently intended should form Chapter I of
Amerika
. As I suggest in the Introduction, this remained an important story in its own right for Kafka and helps us understand his development. I have also naturally left in place in
A Country Doctor
two short pieces, ‘Before the Law’ and ‘An Imperial Message’, which Kafka incorporated into
The Trial
and ‘The Great Wall of China’ respectively. Since ‘The Great Wall of China’ is included here, ‘An Imperial Message’ appears twice. However, I have taken the opposite decision for two fragments from the early ‘Description of a Struggle’. Since Kafka published these in magazine form but did not see fit to include them in
Meditation
it seemed pedantic to print them twice in this volume. I have also refrained from including the play, ‘The Guardian of the Tomb’ or variants for some of the stories, as Glatzer did. We still await a full critical edition of Kafka’s writings, though that is under way, and it will be for that to provide us with all the versions and variants. What is needed at the present time is a full and clearly organized volume of the stories.

But what do we mean by ‘the stories’? Brod himself has admitted that the task before any editor of Kafka is in a way an impossible one, since it will always be a matter of personal decision as to which bits of the notebooks and diaries one chooses to regard as finished stories. I have added two stories to Glatzer’s selection which have been translated and published by Malcolm Pasley in
Franz Kafka: Shorter Works
, vol. I, Secker and Warburg, London, 1973: ‘The Proclamation’ and ‘New Lamps’; and eight stories which I have culled from the Diaries and Notebooks: ‘The Student’, ‘The Angel’, and ‘An
Ancient Sword’, from
The Diaries of Franz Kafka
, edited by Max Brod, translated by Joseph Kresh and by Martin Greenberg with the co-operation of Hannah Arendt, Peregrine Books, Harmondsworth, 1964, and ‘A Splendid Beast’, ‘The Watchman’, ‘Hands’, ‘Isabella’ and ‘A Chinese Puzzle’, from
Wedding Preparations in the Country
, translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser, Secker and Warburg, 1954. These are not the only stories I could have chosen, they merely reflect my own sense that they are as good as many of the pieces in the Glatzer volume and that they should be included in a volume of
Collected Stories
. The titles of these stories are, of course, my own.

It is often impossible to date accurately the stories Kafka did not choose to publish in his lifetime, but I have arranged them in roughly chronological order. The reader can thus follow two separate trajectories through Kafka’s writing life, from
Meditation
(1913) to
A Hunger Artist
(1924), and from ‘Description of a Struggle’ (1904–05) to ‘The Burrow’ (1923–24).

Gabriel Josipovici

About the editor:
G
ABRIEL
J
OSIPOVICI
is a novelist, playwright and critic, and part-time Professor of English at the University of Sussex. His many books include
The World and the Book
and
The Book of God: A Response to the Bible
and the novels
Contre-Jour
,
The Big Glass
and
In a Hotel Garden.

As with any writer, the best way in to Kafka’s stories is through other works of his. His novels, diaries and letters are all available in English.

There is no outstanding biography but Ronald Hayman’s
A Biography of Franz Kafka
(Weidenfeld, 1981) and Ernst Pawel’s
The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka
(Harvill, 1984) are both interesting and informative.

I have learnt most from the following books and articles:

Walter Benjamin, ‘Franz Kafka on the Tenth Anniversary of His Death’ and ‘Max Brod’s Book on Kafka’, both in
Illuminations
, edited and introduced by Hannah Arendt and translated by Harry Zohn, Cape, 1970.