Kafka's Selected Stories: A Norton Critical Edition

by Franz Kafka, Stanley Corngold (Editor)

This Norton Critical Edition is based on new translations by leading Kafka scholar and translator Stanley Corngold. Thirty stories are included, accompanied by detailed annotations. "Backgrounds and Contexts" offers a glimpse of Kafka s creative process through extracts from his letters, diaries, and conversations. "Criticism" collects ten essays on the major stories by Stanley Corngold, Danielle Allen, Walter Hinderer, Walter Sokel, Nicola Gess, Vivian Liska, Benno Wagner, John A. Hargraves, and Gerhard Kurz. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included."

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Classics, Literature, Philosophy

376 pages, Paperback

Published August 1, 2006

About the author

Prague-born writer Franz Kafka wrote in German, and his stories, such as " The Metamorphosis " (1916), and posthumously published novels, including The Trial (1925), concern troubled individuals in a nightmarishly impersonal world.

Jewish middle-class family of this major fiction writer of the 20th century spoke German. People consider his unique body of much incomplete writing, mainly published posthumously, among the most influential in European literature.

His stories include "The Metamorphosis" (1912) and " In the Penal Colony " (1914), whereas his posthumous novels include The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926) and Amerika (1927).

Despite first language, Kafka also spoke fluent Czech. Later, Kafka acquired some knowledge of the French language and culture from Flaubert, one of his favorite authors.

Kafka first studied chemistry at the Charles-Ferdinand University of Prague but after two weeks switched to law. This study offered a range of career possibilities, which pleased his father, and required a longer course of study that gave Kafka time to take classes in German studies and art history. At the university, he joined a student club, named Lese- und Redehalle der Deutschen Studenten, which organized literary events, readings, and other activities. In the end of his first year of studies, he met Max Brod, a close friend of his throughout his life, together with the journalist Felix Weltsch, who also studied law. Kafka obtained the degree of doctor of law on 18 June 1906 and performed an obligatory year of unpaid service as law clerk for the civil and criminal courts.

Writing of Kafka attracted little attention before his death. During his lifetime, he published only a few short stories and never finished any of his novels except the very short "The Metamorphosis." Kafka wrote to Max Brod, his friend and literary executor: "Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me ... in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others'), sketches, and so on, [is] to be burned unread." Brod told Kafka that he intended not to honor these wishes, but Kafka, so knowing, nevertheless consequently gave these directions specifically to Brod, who, so reasoning, overrode these wishes. Brod in fact oversaw the publication of most of work of Kafka in his possession; these works quickly began to attract attention and high critical regard.

Max Brod encountered significant difficulty in compiling notebooks of Kafka into any chronological order as Kafka started writing in the middle of notebooks, from the last towards the first, et cetera.

Kafka wrote all his published works in German except several letters in Czech to Milena Jesenská.

Reviews

[Ajay Solanky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Effortlessly, the GOAT.

If I had to pick a top 5 from here, in order, they would be:
1) The Judgement
2) Jackals and Arabs
3) A Country Doctor
4) The Stoker
5) A Report to an Academy

I read some of the analysis essays at the end, but they were honestly a bit abstruse.

[Peter]

one of my professors edited and translated this volume.

[Jaak Seeberg-Gordon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Josephine the singer is about the social phenomenon of theatre kids, change my mind

[Jimgosailing · Rating 5 out of 5]

Preface
“In a famous image by the critic Theodor Adorno, Kafka’s sentences come at the reader with the force of an on rushing locomotive. ‘Each sentence of Kafka’s says, ‘interpret me’.* * *through the power with which Kafka commands interpretation, He collapses aesthetic distance. He demands a desperate effort from the allegedly ‘disinterested’ observer of an earlier time, overwhelms you, suggesting that far more than your intellectual equilibrium depends on whether you truly understand; life and death are at stake.’

“Two qualities can be felt immediately: on the one hand, an extraordinary intelligence, subtle and rational—driven by tireless, intellectual energy—as alert to its subject matter as to the condition of being a writer. Kafka inscribes his hyperconsciousness in the hero of the great story The Burrow who imagines ‘the joy of sleeping deeply and at the same time of being able to keep a close watch on myself.’

“A Word About the Translation:
‘God employs several translators.’
- John Donne

- Stanley Corngold

{for more on Kafka, see Bloom’s Novelists and Novels}

”The Judgment”:
“You have no friend in St. Petersburg…”. . . .
“At least twice I denied to you* that he was in the house when he was actually sitting with me in my room…”
FN: St Petersburg…also connotes the biblical Peter, who three times denied Christ and who,for his sinful hour, suffered thirty years of remorse and thereafter monstrous upside-down crucifixion.

“he just held one hand lately on the ceiling you wanted to cover me up. I know that you scamp*, but I’m not covered up yet and even if it is my last ounce strength, it’s enough for you too much for you.”
FN: in German Früchchen literally ‘little fruit’ which suggests, positively, ‘fruit of my loins,’ but negatively and much more commonly, ‘scoundrel, rascal, scapegoat.’

‘look at me, will you!’ Shouted his father, and Georg ran almost distractedly to the bed in order to grasp everything but halfway there stopped short.*
FN: literally ‘in the middle of the way’. compare the first words of Dantes Inferno, the first part of The Divine Comedy, which also unfolds from a moment of spiritual crisis ‘midway on this way of life we’re hard upon/I found myself in a dark wood, where the right way with wholly lost and gone.’

“‘he’s got pockets even in his nightshirt,’ Georg said to himself, thinking that with this remark he could make his father look ridiculous in front of the whole world. He thought so only for a second because he kept forgetting everything.”
FN: the first part of the sentence reads in German,…(Even in his shirt he has pockets). a familiar German proverbs says..(the last shirt you wear—i.e. a funeral shroud—has no pockets). Georg’s remark produces such extravagant thoughts in him because his words resemble the cruel proverb and, hence, conjure his father‘s death.

“ even as his grip weekend he continued holding on between the bars of the railing. He caught Site of a bus* that would easily muffle the sound of his fall and crying out softly, dear parents I really always loved you. He let himself drop.
At that moment, the traffic going over the bridge was nothing short of infinite.”
FN: the German word here translated as bus is ‘autoomnibus’ a capacious word if ever there was one, for it contains both the Greek root ‘auto’ meaning self-empowered and the Latin root ‘Omni’ meaning ‘containing all.’ Though much qualified by its alliance with motor exhaust and traffic (Verkehr)—the latter word also connotes sexual intercourse autoomnibus continues to suggest divinity, and it is this complex image that Georg glimpses now.

Researches of a Dog - see notes under separate title: Researches of a Dog

The Burrow - see notes under its own title


- see continued notes for Norton edition under Thomas Merton on Franz Kafka



In the Circle of “TheJudgment” - Stanley Corngold

“Kafka’s work is dipped in the color of powerlessness. The work develops out of a lifelong diary that keeps going by questioning itself.”
- Elias Canetti Dialogue with the Cruel Partnerd

To dramatize the struggle between these parties as the struggle to establish the literal and metaphorical dimensions of words: this technique is crucial to “The Judgment.” The word ‘dramatized’ is meant to be important. it points once more to the influence on the composition of “The Judgment” of the Jewish Theatre that captivated Kafka in the fall of 1911. but beyond this, it refers to the histrionics that flow into and intensify the inner Theatre of self-questioning in Kafka’s earliest diary entries.

In “The Judgment” the struggle between father and son turns on the son’s effort to make literal his father’s words, as if this were a way to turn him into a thing, and then to seize and possess him. their struggle is a contest for the power to make metaphors.

The struggle turns on* * * the word ‘Zudecken,’ meaning, literally the act of ‘covering with a blanket’…. ‘You wanted to cover me up, I know that, you scamp, but I’m not covered up yet.’ and here he seems to mean ‘I’m not dead and buried yet.’ the father is reading the word with elaborate metaphorical stress, which might also include such secondary meanings of ‘zudecken’ as ‘to cover’ a subject (so thoroughly as to bury it sense); ‘to heap meanings of one sort or another on someone,’ as ‘to cover with reproaches.’ . . .

And so it is with some shock value that the father trumpets out the son’s repressed metaphorical meaning: ‘you wanted to bury me! you wanted to have the last word!’ This is the first hostile act in the speech war that will amount to a fatal humiliation of Georg.

At this point, we are emphasizing the father‘s mischief. It is a cruelty of one who would trick or coerce another into taking his own figures literally. certainly one could also do ‘metaphorical violence’ to another—crush him precisely by inserting his literal features into a violet metaphor. this, as the novelist Saul Bellow has claimed, would lead to the sense that the hapless victim is owed ‘special consideration’.*

*FN: According to the narrator of Saul Bellows novel Ravelstein (read Alan Bloom or Wolfowitz’s mentor): ‘I had made the discovery that if you spoke of someone as a gross, belching, wall-eyed human pike you got a long much better with him thereafter, partly because you were aware that you were at the sadist who took away his human attributes. Also, having done him some metaphorical violence, you owed him special consideration.’ (New York, Viking, 2000)

And Georg, the literalist, is appropriately disarmed when his father issues him a death sentence: ‘and therefore know this: I now sentence you to death by drowning!’ where it would serve Georg to let his father‘s language assume only metaphorical resonance, he cannot. he has been turned into a creature who can only make his father‘s words thinglike, He is literally driven to his death by drowning, hoist by his own petard.

readers feel obliged to produce a hypothesis about the meaning of the end, quite as a philosopher Theodor Adorno warned: not to do so would mean to be destroyed as if by the force of an onrushing locomotive. ‘Each sentence of Kafka’s says ‘interpret me,’ and this is especially true of the conclusion of “The Judgment”.*

*FN: ‘ through the power with which Kafka commands interpretation, Adorno writes, ‘he collapses aesthetic distance. He demands a desperate effort from the allegedly ‘disinterested observer’ of an earlier time, overwhelms him, suggesting that far more than his intellectual equilibrium depends on whether he truly understands; life and death are at stake.’ Theodor W Adorno, ‘notes on Kafka’ in prism London: Spearman 1967)

(From Kafka’s diary): ‘Joy that I will have something beautiful for Max’s Arkadia.’ this judgment conveyed by joy tends to confirm the jubilant reading of the judgment as they wish dream that invokes eternal protection of the bachelor friend at the cost of the destruction of the fiancé, Georg, and here are both Kafka’s father and Max Borud function as ideal representatives of the public world.*

*FN: David Schur… concludes with a reading of “The Judgment”… the flow of traffic, which, in the moment of Georg’s drowning goes over the bridge propel, for Schur, Kafka’s afterlife. This is something of which Kafka was aware, to judge especially from the diary entry He wrote the morning after, in which he identifies the aura of estatic composition as the fulfilled pledge of literary achievement.

The story intuitively mimes a coming reality; This moment completes the exhilaration of the moment at the outset when the real comet in the telescope thrust itself into the journal—and completes the circle of “The Judgment.” with the annihilation of Georg, whose goal is marriage, we have the decisive fictional achievement: The empirical person of the diary entry is extinguished for the sake of the fiction he shall be become.

Weight falls again on the bliss of the dream come true that the father be the friend and support of the bachelor’s bizarre fertility; for the friend, as the ‘connection between father and son… [and] the major thing they have in common’, can mean only: their procreativity. the father, in this wish-dream wants his son to be the bachelor-writer and wants his first real ‘offspring’—The story itself—to be born into the world. in the sexual imagery of the closing sentence, “The Judgment” pronounces the judgment on the story itself as they warrant of Kafka the writer’s after life. Kafka foresees that with this story, he will survive Georg, his dreaded anti-self, exposed as a false and lying mask; and by his death Kafka the bachelor, his father‘s true son, will enter the stream of literary renown. That is the sense of the infinite stream of traffic that flows over the bridge. for all its demotic imagery, It is a being superior to the individual life; it is the confirmation of Kafka’s promise as a writer as the promise of cultural immortality. A gnostic truth, sheltered in a gnostic text.

[my own sense of at least the ending of the story Is that Georg, in one aspect, dies because he’s now engaged and he’s going to leave the friendship of his best friend and he’s going to leave his relation with his father, that marriage will alter these relationships so much so that they will have suffered a sort of death.]

In a period of despondency following the composition of “The Judgment”, Kafka wrote The Meramorphosis. The monstrosity of the vermin is the measure of its disparity from the son who bathed in his father‘s radiance, the son who was born some months before as a being who could walk on water. The Metamorphosis marks a transformation, indeed; the core transformation is Kafka’s being marked negatively as a writer, as a desolate fate. here, his plans to marry Felice Bauer acquires a higher potency and a higher danger: It can exclude his fulfillment as a writer. equally his father‘s plans for him as a factory manager: what of the plans his other father had for him? the conflict between the two fathers is extreme, is critical. the monster appears at the outset of The Metamorphosis is the transmogrified, the distorted, the damaged form of the new creature he has become: the writer in extremis. and if he is never to fulfill the promise of the new being affirmed in “The Judgment”—his genuine being?— he will remain until his death the monster, the family invalid.

The outcome of The Metamorphosis is appalling: Kafka paints the small bliss of the dissolution of Gregor Samsa next to the wide bliss of the dissolution of Georg Bendemann and the apotheosis of the empirical self of Kafka the author. it is as if even the empirical gloom impacted in the vermin were itself so diminished, so abject, that there is a little left to burn, and even the elation of death must be dim down in a being sunk so low.

“Researches of a Dog”:

“because of the loud music I had not noticed until now that they had truly cast off all shame; these miserable creatures were doing something that was at once most ridiculous and most obscene— they were walking upright on their hind legs. Ugh! They were exposing themselves and openly flaunting their nakedness. They prided themselves on it, and whenever they are bathed, they’re better instincts for a moment and lowered their front legs. They were literally horrified as if it were a mistake as if nature were a mistake, and once again they rapidly raised their legs, and their eyes seemed to be asking forgiveness that they had had to desist a little from their sinfulness.”

Nicola Gess: “the politics of listening: the power of song in Kafka’s ‘Josefine, the singer’”
“‘solving the riddle of its huge effects’—This is the task that the narrator of Kafka’s story sets for himself and every reader in regard to Josefine’s song. many of these effects are owed to a critical assimilation of a certain tradition of thought about Music prevalent and Kafka‘s lifetime: the belief in the power of music to create and represent a people. . .

In a famous diary entry, Kafka literally made the price of writing and necessary resistance to the lure of thinking about music and in this way, testified to the power of music over him. he wrote:
‘It is easy to recognize in myself a concentration on writing. when it had become clear in my organism, that writing was the most productive direction of my being, everything rushed in that direction and left empty all those abilities that were directed first and foremost toward the joys of sex, eating, drinking, philosophical reflection on music. I starved in all these directions.’

Nietzsche addresses the impact of Wagner‘s musics describing the transformative effect on the music of Greek tragedies and Wagner’s musical dramas on the crowd of listeners as persons they are transported, possessed. They lose their individualism and become part of a larger entity, the mass. This mass is then deemed to be itself creative: in a deep sense, it has brought forth the very music it is hearing; it is at once the result and the creative origin of this music. Nietzsche illuminates this paradox by interpreting the individual composer as the mouthpiece of the collective. the composer is always already a ‘song of the people,’ even though this people will be truly realized as a unity only through listening to his soul.

[Gess’s essay touches not only on Nietzsche, but Beethoven, Wagner, and Bruckner,as well as Freud…she even uses the title “the Fuhrer” at one point - which got me to thinking of how maybe prescient Kafka was in writing this about the relationship between a leader and mass crowds and how that crowd could be divided into different cohorts but once engaged in “the song” becomes unified as one, and the relationship between the crowd and the leader and who between them leads changes and is reciprocal. So this is somehow anticipate the rise of someone like a Hitler?]

(I think this story has been the most challenging story to parse of all the Kafka short stories I’ve read…so far; and it take Gess thirteen pages to discuss a fourteen page short story)

“at least since the early 19th century, German music critics have been eyeing musical performance with suspicion since it threatened not only to distort the musical essence laid down in the score, but also to invite mere sensual pleasure—and not the spiritual elation or the ‘essential refinement’ of the listener.this was thought to be true in particular of female performers, especially female singers, and even more so if they sang songs with musical flourishes. For the coloraturas written for the female voice were considered the epitome of mere sensual stimulation in Music lacking any kind of higher quality and purpose. German critics never tired of degrading, this kind of music in aesthetic and ethical terms. and in doing so, they served nationalistic agenda because they attributed this kind of poor Music to France, Italy, or the Jews, while proclaiming the German speaking lands as the home of ‘good,’ i.e. spiritually rich ‘essential’ music

Wagner, for example we approached the German Jewish Jakob (Giacomo) Meyerbeer, who worked mainly in France with striving for mere ‘effects’ in his music, famously defining ‘effect’ as ‘effects without a cause.’ Wagner portrays him as a manipulative hypocrite, tricking the listener into beliefs and feelings that have no reality or reason behind them and rarely reach beyond a superficial level.
It is precisely this suspicion that the narrator entertains in Kafka’s story. he suspects that there may be no ‘cause’ behind Josefine‘s ‘effects’, that far from being the greatest ‘beauty,’ her song is in truth, something even less than ordinary, indeed a mere ‘nothingness.’

According to the narrator, this kind of empty spectacle is so important to Josefine‘s art that ‘to understand her art you must not only hear, but also see her.’ this point demonstrates, on the one hand, her dependency on effects, and on the other, the ‘nothing(ness)’ of her song because it needs the visual spectacle as a cover-up. the narrator expends great effort on convincing the reader of this ‘nothing(ness)’ by repeating again and again that Josefine is not singing, but really ‘just squeaking’ like every other ordinary mouse or indeed even less competently than they. But the narrator not only calls into question Josefine’s art. he also portrays Josefine’s persona as a nerve-racking diva, hysterical and childish in her behavior, and thus not to be taken (and indeed not taken) seriously.

“Hence, once the people is established, the narrator takes pains to claim that the power has come from the people in the first place, not that the song, but the people ‘moved’ itself, that for this people, the song is not really necessary at all.*
*FN8: in music in the works of Broch, Mann, and Kafka, John A. Hargraves interprets ‘the narrator’s attempt* * * to tell Josefine‘s story,’ ‘criticizing,’ and finally ‘killing her’ as an attempt to ‘control and censor the emotions set loose by music,’ which Kafka appears to have been frightened of as well.”

meanwhile, the question remains, reaching beyond Kafka story in the scope of this text: why music? for the narrator is wrong to claim that Music is not necessary for the mouse people. It may not have a mysterious power, but it is necessary as a space of projection, but why use music as a space of projection and not, say, any other of the fine arts? the answer is a traditional one: ever since the late 18th century music had been labeled at first critically and later positively, as the art most difficult to decipher. it means something to the listener, but it seems impossible to pinpoint this meaning. this indefineability makes music into a playground of the fantasies and wishes of its audience, chief among them, the desire for an immediate kind of language with privileged access to deeper truths, such as the realm of the divine, of the will, or of the essence of the people.

Gerhard Kurz: ”The Rustling of Stillness: Approaches to Kafka’s The Burrow”

“The story fragment…is also about ‘institution’ or ‘construction’ of religion and art.

Kafka often compared himself and his life as a writer to the life of an animal…

The notion of the poet as master builder or Poeta Faber has a mythic archetype in the master builder Daedalus*, who created the labyrinth on Crete. and a deleted section of Kafka’s manuscript, The animal “I” says there was something of ‘a master builder’ in his blood, that ‘even has a child, I drew zigzag and labyrinth diagrams in the sand.’
*FN: Schmeling’s shrewd observations have the disadvantage that he, like the more than a few readers of Kafka, who have been taken with the labyrinth model, grasps the entire burrow as a labyrinth

[Esteban · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sí, entre todas esas metáforas de burocracias opresivas hay humor, tal como previenen el prologuista y sus referentes, Deleuze y Guattari. A veces apelando a lo onírico (Un médico rural), a veces a una sátira menipea poco lograda (En la colonia penal) y a veces a un slapstick lleno de dobles sentidos obvios (Blumfeld, un solterón). Entiendo que sus comentadores pretendían enaltecerlo. Percibir el destino cómico va más lejos que percibir el destino trágico. Pero se trata de un humor que nunca llega a la carcajada; menos aún en los pocos momentos en los que lo intentó. Como si Kafka tampoco hubiera encontrado en el otro lado resolución.

[Lilly Monk · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've finally read Franz Kafka's 'Metamorphosis' and I absolutely loved it. For someone that love bugs, I was a bit slow to join the party with this classic story. I've read a few more of the short stories in this collection but none of them have grabbed me in quite the same way. I find them a bit too short (requires too much thinking...). Apparently in the original German, it is never stated that Gregory - the protagonist - turns into a beetle but rather a small and dirty "vermin". However, it is widely agreed from the descriptions that Kafka intended him to be a beetle. The author allegedly said that the "bug" (confirming this interpretation of the reading) should never be drawn, so I'm quite disappointed that the cover illustration is that of a stag beetle. A stag beetle is also not at all what I imagined from reading the story either; it is too powerful.

I loved how the story was a metaphor for shame and stigma. How this affected not only Gregory, but his whole family, and the way in which they interacted with others. The burden of shame and taboo was amazingly presented to the reader: it's impact on family life, working life, and socio-economics. This makes the text timelessly socially relevant, for no human culture on earth functions without shame.
The descriptions of interaction in the story really made me laugh. I could picture them in my head as exaggerated stop-animation motions, like a Jan Svankmajer movie!

I'm really looking forward to reading more Kafka from this brief introduction

[Hermanni Hesse · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kafkalla on täysin erilainen tyyli kuin olin odottanut. Teksti on paikoin jopa runollista, virkkeet ovat pitkiä, kappaleet juoksevat sivujen yli ja puolipisteitä viljellään taidokkaasti ryppäissä. Tarinat ovat usein ahdistavia, unenomaisia, joskus painajaismaisiakin. Kertojista ei välillä saa otetta. Eläinkuvaukset ja -vertaukset ovat yleisiä. Kafkan tyyli vaatii keskittymistä ja varmaankin monia lukukertoja.

Mieleenpainuvimmat kertomukset: Muodonmuutos, Rangaistussiirtolassa, Maalaislääkäri, Yksitoista poikaa, Nälkätaiteilija, Erään taistelun kuvaus, Pesä.

[Jeremy Bullian · Rating 4 out of 5]

While not as many stories are included as in the Schocken Complete Stories edition, I believe I prefer the Corngold translations to the Muirs'. They just flow better and are less stilted. I did a few one-to-ones and each time preferred Corngold's. I'd already read a number of the more famous titles so I mainly used this edition to read some I'd not gotten to. The Judgement & A Dream were great.

[Garrison · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hunger Artist and Metamorphosis are two of my all time favorites. But some of the others in here are weak. Still enjoyably odd, like the animal stories, but some are just weird. It’s still fun Kafka.

[Vivian Littlefield · Rating 3 out of 5]

someone needs to analyze why kafka writes so much about being some sort of creature

favorites were in the penal colony and metamorphosis
the hunger artist, report to an academy, and the fratricide were also good

[Sean · Rating 2 out of 5]

Required for a college course back at NMT.

[Carlos · Rating 3 out of 5]

This had eerily similar Ups and Downs to Aira’s “The Musical Brain”, so I’ll give it the same rating.

Really wish these guys did better with their longer short stories.

[audrey isbela · Rating 5 out of 5]

I LOVE YOU FRANZ KAFKA

[Countess of Frogmere · Rating 5 out of 5]

I vividly remember reading "The Metamorphosis" as a college freshman and thinking it was the most stupid thing I'd ever read. Almost 20 years later, I read it again to teach it in a world lit class, and realized that it was a brilliant story about feeling alienated. Amazing what a little time and perspective will do for you!

[cafaco]

even when i'm not as invested in the writing or narrative, Kafka's ability to show the humanity in seemingly inhuman characters never fails to blow me away! although i'm not sure if it is the fault of the translation, some of the stories grew insufferably dull for me, so i'll keep an eye out for different versions of his stories, but reading this has cemented Kafka as one of my favorite writers.

[Sarah]

Read for a film and lit. course on modernism and modernity. Kafka can be depressing, but he always offers food for thought.

[Jesse]

Selected Stories of Franz Kafka by Franz Kafka