Kafka L.O.L.

Notes on Promethean Laughter

Jean-Michel Rabaté

• Publisher: Quodlibet
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9788822909503
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

We are still debating whether Kafka should be considered as a tragic or nihilist author, a terrifyingly dark, sardonically bleak neurotic, or as a savvy comic writer with a taste for black humor. This quandary explains why I begin by wondering whether one can say that Kafka was "laughing out loud."

IV.

PROMETHEUS REBOUND

Here is Kafka’s parable on Prometheus, originally without a title, translated by the Muirs:

There are four legends concerning Prometheus:

According to the first he was clamped to a rock in the Caucasus for betraying the secrets of the gods to men, and the gods sent eagles to feed on his liver, which was perpetually renewed.

According to the second Prometheus, goaded by the pain of the tearing beaks, pressed himself deeper and deeper into the rock until he became one with it. According to the third his treachery was forgotten in the course of thousands of years, forgotten by the gods, the eagles, forgotten by himself.

According to the fourth everyone grew weary of the meaningless affair. The gods grew weary, the eagles grew weary, the wound closed wearily. There remains the inexplicable mass of rock. The legend tried to explain the inexplicable. As it comes out of the substratum of truth it had in turn to end in the inexplicable.1

Max Brod changed the original order and turned the last paragraph into the first, possibly thinking that examples should lead to a general law. Kafka thought differently. Here is my more literal translation:

The legend (die Sage) tries to explain the inexplicable (das Unerklärliche zu erklären); as it comes out of the ground of truth (Wahrheitsgrund), it has return to the inexplicable in the end.

There are four legends concerning Prometheus: According to the first he was clamped to a rock in the Caucasus for betraying the secrets of the gods to men, and the gods sent eagles to feed on his liver, which was perpetually renewed.

According to the second Prometheus, goaded by the pain of the tearing beaks, pressed himself deeper and deeper into the rock until he became one with it.

According to the third his treachery was forgotten in the course of thousands of years, forgotten by the gods, the eagles, forgotten by himself.

According to the fourth everyone grew tired of the groundless affair (wurde man des grundlos Gewordenen müde). The gods grew tired, the eagles grew tired, the wound closed tired (schloß sich müde).

There remains the inexplicable mass of rock. (Blieb das unerklärliche Felsgebirge.)2

As the commentators of the Franz Kafka Encyclopedia point out, Kafka planned to begin with a statement about the role of legends in general; their function is to explain natural phenomena; a spring, a tree, a river, all are pretexts for Greek myths that often entail metamorphoses, as when Niobe wept and turned into stone. The main issue is the riddle of the link between myth and nature if we define myth as an interpretation of a mute and alien nature.3 It is crucial to see why the story of Prometheus is adduced only as an example. Its sequence of four moments sketches a process of exhaustion that takes on a hermeneutic function: after the hero has turned into stone, after all participants forget what has happened, including the hero, after all are exhausted by the exhaustion of the myth, what explanation can be valid?

Two terms generate a theoretical clash: the verb to “explain” (erklären) and the concept of the “groundless” (grundlos), rendered as “meaningless” by the Muirs. Erklärung is never far from Aufklärung, meaning the “Enlightenment” with its rationalist critique of myth and religion: myth would simply be a human invention making sense of time and the seasons, of the death of seeds in the winter, and so on. The concept of Grund calls up a naturalistic reason, which fits Schopenhauer’s theory of the “fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason (Grund).” It sends us back to Leibnitz’s principle of “sufficient reason,” a principle that entails that nothing is without a “reason” or without a “cause.” Attempting to reach a primal “cause,” the parable achieves a drastic reduction—it reduces the whole of human culture to a series of fancy tales that explain next to nothing.

Another important term is Wahrheitsgrund. It alludes to the principle of truth, a truth that needs a secure grounding in order to be valid; but in the end, it is only the “ground” of the rocky mountain that stands as a substratum for truth. All the rest has been invented in order to make sense of the mountain. In a gesture often performed by Heidegger, here all the “ground” has been transformed into an Abgrund, which means an “abyss.” The German Grund derives from an archaic verb meaning “to grind” and originally referred to “coarse sand” or just “earth.” To say that something is grundlos (“groundless”) suggests that it provides no support. Here we perceive the connection between Kafka and Heidegger established by Anders. Indeed it was Kafka, not Heidegger, who wrote: “This feeling: ‘Here I will not anchor,’ and instantly to feel the billowing uplifting swell around one.” (GWC, p. 91) Or: “What it means to grasp the good fortune that the ground on which you stand cannot be greater that what is covered by your two feet.” (GWC, p. 82) Or again: “There is no having, only a being, only a state of being that craves the last breath, craves suffocation.” (GWC, p. 84)

The Urgrund that might offer a primal ground cannot be dissociated from a Grundsatz (a “principle”) doubling as a Grundstimmung (a “basic mood”).4 Kafka wants to prevent us from believing in the possibility of grounding ourselves in the natural world. It is better to see the abyss as Abgrund and stick to that giddy vision: “There was one who was astonished to see how easily he moved along the road of eternity; the fact is that he was racing along it downhill.” (GWC, p. 85)

The Heideggerian analysis of Grund applies here. If Grund is associated with archē as both a “first principle” and a “rule,” Kafka remains an “anarchist” to the end.5 He would agree with Heidegger’s final rewriting of his essay on “ground”: “If, however, transcendence in the sense of freedom for ground is understood in the first and last instance as an abyss of ground, then the essence of what was called Dasein’s absorption in and by beings also thereby becomes sharper. (…) The essence of the finitude of Dasein is… unveiled in transcendence as freedom from ground.”6 We understand why Kafka cannot side with Schopenhauer’s aesthetic rationalism. Brod and Kafka met the day Brod gave a lecture on Schopenhauer and attacked Nietzsche for having rejected the older German philosopher. Kafka defended Nietzsche with such fervor that Brod decided to become his friend and confident.

In Kafka’s version of the Prometheus myth, what stands out is not a general law defining reason and interpretation but a riddle, the stubborn presence of the mountain. If we can read the world as matter, and matter as a pure riddle, then unreason triumphs. This alogic statement underpins Kafka’s debunking of myth. It also triggers an endless phenomenological reduction in an effort at getting to the root of truth. This progressive debunking ends up by destroying itself, which calls up the logics of the text “On Parables.” Here is how it ends:

… One man then said: ‘Why do you resist? If you followed the parables, then you would become parables yourselves, and thus free of your daily cares.’

Another said: ‘I bet that is also a parable.’

The first said: ‘You have won.’

The second said: ‘But unfortunately only in parable.’

The first said: ‘No, in reality, in parable you have lost.’ (GWC, p. 184)

If one streamlines the dialogue and breaks it down into two points of view, it can be presented in this way:

(1) A says: “If you followed the parables, you would become parables yourself, and be free. Believe the myth and be free from worldly concerns.”

(2) B responds: “That is also a parable, for only a myth can teach you to believe in mythical freedom.”

(3) A responds: “You win. One can only be free in a mythical world but not in reality.”

(4) B replies: “Unfortunately I win only mythically: I have increased the power of the myth.”

(5) A rejects this, apparently winning a debate that could go on for ever: “No, you win in reality but lose in myth. Being able to distinguish reality from unreality, you have your Wahrheitsgrund and stick to it. However you won’t go far, for you are condemned to a tautology. Only the transcendence of an abyss will save you from sterile repetition.”

The first speaker addresses the utopia of learning, whether it be on the side of philosophy, religion or aestheticism. If the only life worth living is literature, as Proust suggested and as Kafka believed, then one could easily live happily ever after, for life is always be inferior to fiction. Yet, if the parables’ true meaning yields a tautology, like the idea that the in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• How Loud Is “Loud”
• I. Description as Struggle
• II. The Comic Grotesque in Kafka
• III. From Kafka: For and Against to “Promethean Shame”
• IV. Prometheus Rebound
• V. The Birth of Promethean Laughter
• Bibliography
• Abstract
• Biography