Notes and References 1 Descriptions of a Struggle 1. Max Brod, note to 'Letter to his Father' (WPC 441, n. 30). 2. The Czech word pavlatche 'signifies a long balcony of the kind which ran round the inner courtyard of many of the more ancient houses in Prague. It was generally shared by several apartments' (WPC 442, n. 34). 3. Two of the elements of this ordeal - the bed and the door - would later become trademarks of Kafka's fiction. 4. In Germanic folklore, the Erl-king is a bearded giant with a golden crown who abducts little children and transports them to the land of death. 5. This notion is perhaps most lyrically expounded in Wordsworth's 'Ode: Intimations of Immortality'. 6. In The Homecoming, Teddy, on entering his father's house, immedi­ ately recognizes the armchair as the seat of patriarchal authority (III 28). 7. Kafka left instructions for Brod to burn all his writings after his death. Yet Brod had told his friend in advance that, if appointed executor, he would never perform such a holocaust, and instead devoted much of his own life to the preservation and propaga­ tion of Kafka's legacy. See Postscript to the first edition of The Trial (T 291-6). 8. Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography (New York, 1960) p. 24. 9. However, in 1989, sixty-five years after the author's death, Schocken Books published a tetralogy entitled The Sons, comprising the three stories originally proposed by Kafka and 'Letter to his Father'. 10. 'The Judgement' carried this inscription on its original publication in the annual Arkadia. However, when the story was re-issued three years later in the series Der jiingste Tag (October 1916), Kafka had replaced 'the outdated dedication' with an even more discreet homage: 'To F.' (FEL 505). 11. Kafka's first impressions of Felice are recorded in his diary (DI 268-9). He portrays her in such a harsh and clinical light that she emerges as a belle laide of rare distinction. 12. On 14 August 1913, Kafka reflected in his diary: 'Conclusion for my case from 'The Judgement'. I am indirectly in her debt for the story. But Georg goes to pieces because of his fiancee' (DI 296). 13. In 'The Urban World', the father blocks a window when he gets to his feet (DI 48); while in 'The Judgement', the father, on rising from his chair, is described by Georg as 'a giant of a man' (CSS 81). 14. In a curious piece of authorial camouflage, the friend in 'The Urban 172 Notes and References 173 World' bears the same forename as Kafka himself. This device is also employed in The Trial, where one of the warders assigned to Joseph K. is called Franz. 15. Georg has, of course, already assumed the senior executive position in the family business. 16. Heinz Politzer, Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox (Ithaca, N.Y., 1962) p. 291. 17. Herbert Tauber, Franz Kafka: An Interpretation of his Works (London, 1948) p. 15. 18. The phrases quoted here are taken from a letter to Robert Klopstock, in which Kafka discusses Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. I shall touch upon the connection with Kierkegaard in the paragraph after next. 19. See also WPC 117-18; 438-9, n. 22. 20. We are reminded of how Jesus, at the moment of His betrayal, had ironically addressed the perfidious Judas as 'Friend' (Matthew 26:50). 21. Ben Jonson, Volpone, or The Fox, 4.5.113-14. 22. A charwoman is featured in the latter stages of 'The Judgement' and 'The Metamorphosis'. In both instances, there is evidence to suggest that she is being used to parody Mary Magdalene's visit to the sepulchre on the morning of the Resurrection (John 20:1-18). In 'The Judgement', the charwoman encounters the master as he is going down into Sheol, not after he has risen up from it; while in 'The Metamorphosis', the charwoman - in shades of Mary Magdalene's frantic report to the disciples - has a fit of the giggles as she tells the dead Gregor's family: 'you don't need to bother about how to get rid of the thing next door. It's been seen to already' (CSS 138). 23. This particular old master has inspired a number of literary works, including W.H. Auden's 'Mus£e des Beaux Arts' and William Carlos Williams' 'Landscape with the Fall of Icarus'. 24. The Greek word monogenes ('only begotten son') is applied to both Isaac and Jesus in the New Testament (Hebrews 11:17; John 3:16). 25. Identified in the travel diaries as 'H.', this gentleman - who appeared to have all the answers - came from Silesia and was a land surveyor by profession. In a wry touch, Kafka would later assign the same occupation to the benighted protagonist of The Castle. 26. See Coleridge's own explanatory note to the poem. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Selected Poems (London, 1959) pp. 142-3. 27. EUas Canetti has argued that, 'by virtue of some of his stories, Kafka belongs in the annals of Chinese literature' (Elias Canetti, Kafka's Other Trial (Harmondsworth, 1982) p. 72). And indeed Kafka himself once proclaimed: 'I am a Chinese' (FEL 594). 28. John Milton, Paradise Lost, bk 4, 1. 690. 29. Ibid., bk 4,11. 690-705. 30. There is a clear parallel here with the flamboyantly liveried liftboys at the Hotel Occidental in America (A 152-3). 31. Kafka had observed how his own father was often overawed by those who 'were for the most part only seemingly' his social betters (WPC 175-6). Correspondingly, in the course of 'The Metamorphosis', 174 Notes and References we witness Mr Samsa cringing - literally with cap in hand at one stage - before such tin gods as the chief clerk and the lodgers. 32. Interestingly, Kafka listed both carpentry and gardening among his own hobbies (DII 198). 33. Whereas Salome, the stepdaughter of Herod Antipas, had requested the head of John the Baptist as a reward for her Terpsichorean turn, Mrs Samsa, having performed her shambolic strip-tease, asks for Gregor's sconce to be spared. 34. The figure of Lilith is mentioned in Talmudic literature. She is said to have been created at the same time as Adam, but refused to recog­ nize his authority over her, and subsequently left him to become the Devil's dam. She is identified with 'the screech owl' in Isaiah 34:14. 35. It was perhaps because the ending of 'The Metamorphosis' dwelt upon events after Gregor's death that Kafka found it so 'Unreadable' (DII 12). (The problem was that any post-mortem finale inevitably involved a jarring shift in narrative perspective - since the rest of the story had been told entirely from the insect's point of view.) 36. In the Editor's Note to the first edition of The Castle, Max Brod recalls how Kafka had once told him how that novel was to end: 'The ostensible Land-Surveyor [...] was not to relax in his struggle, but was to die worn out by it' (C 8). However, Brod's assertion in the Postscript to America that Kafka's first novel was to finish with Karl Rossmann and his parents all living happily ever after (A 311) is wholly negated by a diary entry from September 1915, in which Kafka himself reveals that Karl was actually destined to share a similar (but harsher) fate to that which befeU the hero of The Trial: 'Rossmann and K, the innocent and the guilty, both executed without distinc­ tion in the end, the guilty one with a gentler hand [...]' (DII 132). 37. Kafka's euphoric conceit of a deathsong that fades 'beautifully and purely away' (DII 102) is echoed with a chilling twist in Pinter's One for the Road, where the despotic Nicolas exults: Death. Death. Death. Death. As has been noted by the most respected authorities, it is beautiful. The purest, most harmonious thing there is. (IV 379) The difference is that, whereas Kafka is fantasizing about his own quietus, Nicolas is gloating upon the extermination of others. 38. As the translators have noted, the German word for 'atonement' - Versohnung - also means 'reconcilation' (DII 323, n. 53). 39. Note the resonance here with Grete's comment that 'If this were Gregor, [...] he'd have gone away on his own accord' (CSS 134). 2 Return to a Father 1. Lawrence M. Bensky, 'Harold Pinter: An Interview', in Pinter: A Collec­ tion of Critical Essays, edited by Arthur Ganz (Englewood Cliffs, NJ., 1972) pp. 21-2. This interview was originally published in The Paris Review 10 (Fall 1966). Notes and References 175 2. Ibid., p. 22. 3. Pinter, interviewed by John Sherwood, BBC European Service, 3 March 1960; cited in Martin Esslin, Pinter: The Playwright (London, 1982) p. 40. 4. Beckett at Sixty (London, 1967) p. 86. 5. The first of Pinter's works to be submitted to Beckett for perusal was The Homecoming (CP 28). At the time of his death, Beckett was reading Pinter's screenplay of The Trial (CP 144). 6. This term was first applied to Pinter's work by Irving Wardle in an article which appeared in Encore in September-October 1958. 7. Ronald Hayman, Harold Pinter (London, 1980) p. 1. 8. Not surprisingly, the connection between Pinter and Kafka has been attracting more attention since the dramatist wrote his screenplay of The Trial. (See, for example, the articles by Francis Gillen and John L. Kundert-Gibbs listed in Works Cited.) I shall discuss the significance of The Trial in the opening section of Chapter 4.