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Kafka's Other Vivian Liska Kafka’s Other Job Kafka’s work, although it never mentions Job by name, has repeatedly been read in terms of this biblical figure who challenges the claim of divine justice in the face of human suffering. In recent decades, critics have pointed out fairly convincing, concrete and detailed similarities between Kafka’s work and the Book of Job. Most notably, Northrop Frye, in The Great Code, regards the writ- ings of Kafka “as a series of commentaries on the Book of Job” and terms Kaf- ka’s most famous novel, The Trial, “a kind of Midrash” on this biblical book.1 Other critics consider this novel “a conscious parallel of the Book of Job,”2 if not its “true” and even “indispensable translation,”3 argue that “in this novel Kafka pushes the perceptual dilemma of Job’s story to its unrelenting and cata- strophic limit”4 and state that “the court in The Trial affirms the same set of moral values found in the Book of Job.”5 Indeed, Harold Fisch, who sees Kaf- ka’s writings as “a profound and sustained attempt to render Job for modern men,” has noted that “the analogy with Job” has become “a commonplace of Kafka criticism.”6 The most radical and daring, but also contentious parallels between Job and Kafka, however, were drawn in the late 1920s and 1930s by a group of German-Jewish thinkers who drew on the Jewish textual tradition in their re- flections on the fundamental predicaments of modern existence. These figures engaged and contested each other’s work, often echoing one other. Margarete Susman, in her 1929 essay “The Job Problem in Franz Kafka,” contended that no other modern work “carries as purely and deeply the traits of the age-old confrontation of Job with his God.”7 Likewise, Max Brod, both in his 1931 essay 1 Frye, Northrope, The Great Code. The Bible and Literature, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1982, 195. 2 Kartiganer, Donald M., “Job and Joseph K: Myth in Kafka’s The Trial,” in: Modern Fiction Studies 8 (1962): 31–43, 31. 3 Fisch, Harold, New Stories for Old. Biblical Patterns in the Novel, Macmillan Press, Hound- mills/Basingstoke/Hampshire/London 1998, 98. 4 Schreiner, Susan E., Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? Calvin’s Exegesis of Job from Medieval and Modern Perspectives, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1994, 181. 5 Lasine, Stuart, “The Trials of Job and Kafka’s Josef K,” in: The German Quarterly 63.2 (1990): 187–198, 187. 6 Fisch, New Stories for Old, 87, 89. 7 Susman, Margarete, “Das Hiob-Problem bei Kafka,” in: Das Nah- und Fernsein des Fremden. Essays und Briefe, ed. Ingeborg Nordmann, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/M. 1992, 183–203, 203. Fol- lowing references to this essay are quoted as (JP, page number). DOI 10.1515/9783110338799.123, © 2018 Vivian Liska, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License. 124 Vivian Liska “Franz Kafka’s Fundamental Experience” and in his biography of Kafka (pub- lished in 1937), suggested that “the old question of Job”8 lies at the core of Kafka’s life and work. In a letter dated 1 August 1931 to Walter Benjamin, Ger- shom Scholem wrote: “I advise you to begin any inquiry into Kafka with the Book of Job.”9 Martin Buber considered “Kafka’s work to be the most important Jobean commentary of our time.”10 In 1934 Günther Anders asserted – albeit without presenting concrete evidence – that the Book of Job accompanied Kaf- ka throughout his life.11 These German-Jewish thinkers, among Kafka’s earliest and most promi- nent interpreters, considered him the author who, like no other, captures the human condition in modern times. They analyzed Kafka in the course of their respective endeavors to conceptualize modernity in light of Jewish scriptures, rethink the foundations of Judaism in the face of the rupture with tradition, and, more generally, reflect on the possibilities of a divine order after the “death of God.” In doing so, each invoked central features of the Book of Job. In the figure of Job, a character who wrangles with God, they recognized not only a human voice addressing God against all odds, but also a precursor of modern man’s doubts about divine justice. The Book of Job’s multi-perspectival mode, narrative inconsistencies and myriad plot incongruities lent themselves particularly well to these thinkers’ desire to reconcile the Jewish biblical tradi- tion with the modern world rendered so keenly in Kafka’s modernist prose. The Book of Job’s hermeneutic difficulties and above all its deeply para- doxical nature contribute to making it a privileged companion to Kafka’s work. Like Kafka’s writings, the Book of Job yields no clear moral or message. More- over, its paradoxes and incongruities are manifold. First and foremost the Job question can, in itself, be regarded as a paradox: How, if there is no justice in the world – since the righteous and the sinners suffer alike – can it be claimed 8 Brod, Max, Über Franz Kafka. Fischer, Frankfurt/M. 1974, 182–188. Following references to this essay are quoted as (FK, page number). 9 Scholem, Gershom, Letter to Walter Benjamin, dated August 1, 1931, in: Benjamin, Walter, Benjamin über Kafka. Texte, Briefzeugnisse, Aufzeichnungen, ed. Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/M. 1981, 63–93, 64. Following references to this book are quoted as (BK, page number). 10 Buber, Martin, Darko shel mikra, Mosad Bilaik, Jerusalem 1964, 357; cited by Nahum Glatzer in: The Dimensions of Job. A Study and Selected Readings, Schocken Books, New York 1969, 48. 11 Anders, Günther, Kafka Pro et Contra, C. H. Beck, München 1951, 91. Although there is no explicit evidence that Kafka actually read the Book of Job, he was doubtlessly aware of it, not least through his reading of Kierkegaard’s The Repetition, as documented in his correspon- dence with Max Brod, and through plays by Yiddish theater troops that Kafka attended and which referred to Job. Kafka’s Other Job 125 that God is almighty? Yet there are other, more specific paradoxes inherent here. Job, unlike his friends and supposed comforters who justify to him the ways of God and variously explain the existence of evil as punishment, didactic ordeal, or trial, rebels against God and accuses him of injustice, indifference, and withdrawal from human reach. Job does so, however, in a most direct and intimate address that confirms God’s closeness. A related paradox is God’s surprising response: despite Job’s rebelliousness, God praises Job’s attitude and rejects the friends’ words as empty flattery. Finally, the resolution of the dialogue between God and Job remains puzzling. God, in his speech from the whirlwind, gives a most indirect, if not unsatisfactory, reply to Job’s accusa- tions, yet Job nevertheless eventually submits to God “in dust and ashes” (Job 42.6). Likewise, paradoxes and unsolvable hermeneutic puzzles form the very texture of Kafka’s work. There is no doubt that the paradoxes in Kafka’s work can be read in light of motifs from the Book of Job. Indeed, Job’s central ques- tion – about the justice of God who “destroyeth the perfect and the wicked” (Job 9.22) alike – is almost literally echoed by Kafka: a diary entry from 1915 notes, in reference to the respective heroes of America and The Trial, that “the innocent and the guilty [are] both executed without distinction in the end.”12 However, the guilt or innocence of Josef K. in The Trial is far from clear and has inspired endless discussions. The paradox of enacting closeness while claiming inapproachability is evident in many of Kafka’s texts, among them “Letter to the Father” and “Before the Law.” It is also discernible in certain lesser-known stories, such as “A Little Woman” and “Community,” where the narrators display proximity, even intimacy, with an adversary without ever re- solving the incongruity. Likewise, the paradox of Job’s treacherously virtuous friends who seek to bring him back to the right path can be likened to Kafka’s “Little Fable.” This brief text begins with a lamentation – “ach” – and then relates the story of a mouse who, upon following a cat’s advice to literally “turn around,” is promptly eaten by her.13 However, nothing in Kafka’s story indicates who the mouse and cat actually are and whether the anecdote is a political allegory or a religious parable. The paradox of Job submitting himself to God after witnessing a display of God’s might can be compared to the per- plexing – and unresolved – ending of Kafka’s The Judgment, in which the son 12 Kafka, Franz, Tagebücher, Fischer, Frankfurt/M. 2002, 757 (30 September 1915). I would like to thank Stanley Corngold for making me aware of this parallel. 13 Kafka, Franz, “A Little Fable,” in: The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum Glatzer, transs. Willa Muir and Edwin Muir, Schocken Books, New York 1971, 445. 126 Vivian Liska submits himself to his father’s demonstration of power and, following the fa- ther’s verdict, drowns himself in the river. These and myriad other parallels can be discerned between Kafka’s work and the Book of Job; however, these parallels are not unique to Kafka and do not capture the specific formal features of his prose, most notably a recurrent stylistic element manifested in his seemingly infinite “buts,” “yets” and “how- evers”. This particular quality – variously termed “infinite regress,”14 “chiastic recourse,”15 “oscillating negation,”16 and “rotating dialectic”17 – entails re- scinding every statement just made, only to immediately take it up again with a barely perceptible shift, and then, often, to retract it yet again within the same sentence.
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