Some Notes on the Development of Kafka

Extract

It is obvious that Kafka is a ‘difficult’ writer; his work demands the closest attention before any kind of account of it is possible. Attention involves looking at, not looking for, and the inherent danger and temptation in Kafka criticism are to look for ‘clues’ and ‘keys’, or to fix all one’s attention on some particular subjective element in his work, and to offer an account of that as a substitute for a criticism of the artistic whole. Ideally, of course, the Kafka reader should be a philosopher, a psychologist, a student of comparative religion, and a literary critic, all rolled into one. In practice, however, such an ideal combination is rarely found, and in practice, too, it must be admitted that the critic or reader who does not possess any specialist qualifications is very limited in the range of his discussion of Kafka. The general reader does need help from the specialist, but the specialists who are not prepared to involve themselves in literary judgments must be prepared to offer their findings as footnotes to the study of Kafka, and not as in any way final judgments on his work.