Northrop Frye and Franz Kafka: From Causality to Mythopoeia

Abstract

Northrop Frye and Franz Kafka:From Causality to Mythopoeia Robert D. Denham (bio) The incongruous and the inevitable, which are combined in tragedy, separate into opposite poles of irony. At one pole is the inevitable irony of human life. What happens to, say, the hero of Kafka's Trial is not the result of what he has done, but the end of what he is, which is an "all too human" being. The archetype of the inevitably ironic is Adam, human nature under sentence of death. At the other pole is the incongruous irony of human life, in which all attempts to transfer guilt to a victim give that victim something of the dignity of innocence. Northrop Frye Frye did not write anything extensively about Kafka, but he was widely familiar with the stories and novels. He owned two editions of Amerika, and his library contained copies of The Trial, The Castle, Letters to Felice, and The Penal Colony: Stories and Short Pieces, which was a collection, brought together by Kafka's friend Max Brod, of everything that Kafka published or intended for publication. It includes the stories published in The Judgment, The Metamorphosis, A Country Doctor, A Hunger Artist, and In the Penal Colony. The copy of The Penal Colony in Frye's own library, now at Victoria University in Toronto, contains his marginal annotations, as does his copy of The Castle. In preparation for a 1949 talk [End Page 49] on Kafka for cbc Radio, Frye read Kafka's stories (in his diary he does not record which ones) and Max Brod's biography of Kafka, which Frye calls "silly" (cw 8:148). He gave his 750-word talk on 20 March 1949. In his diary he keeps referring to his Kafka "paper," which seems to indicate that he read his radio talk from a manuscript. While the texts for a number of Frye's cbc broadcasts are extant, the one on Kafka did not survive, if in fact it existed at all. Still, on two occasions in his diary Frye recorded what amounts to an abstract of his paper. On 5 March 1949 he wrote, "my main points are the Chaplinesque figure at the centre & the Book of Job as the sun he revolves around" (cw 8:148). Three days later he remarked, "My Kafka paper says his main figure has three allegorical strands: the Jew in a Gentile community, the artist in society, & Kafka as the son of his father. Put them together & you have, besides Kafka, Joyce's Shem" (cw 8:150). In a notebook from the 1950s Frye wrote, "I know nothing about Kafka" (cw 15:67), but that is clearly an overstatement. He knew enough to say in a 1947 review of Angel Flores's The Kafka Problem, "a symposium of essays and critical studies on the great German writer, now one of the major influences on modern literature. How deeply he has penetrated into our culture is indicated by the names of the contributors, which include W.H. Auden, Albert Camus ["Hope and Absurdity"], Max Lerner ["The Human Voyage"], Franz Werfel ["Recollections"], and Denis Saurat ["A Note on The Castle"], to mention only the best-known ones, and which appear to represent at least a dozen literatures" (cw 29:52). In the late 1940s Frye outlined an elaborate series of studies that were part of a large, never-completed project called "Blake and Modern Thought." He projected one of the parts of this project to be a study of the symbolism of Kafka (cw 15:124). In 1960 he wrote, The powerful appeal of Kafka for our age is largely due to the way in which such stories as The Trial or The Castle manage to suggest at once the atmosphere of an anxiety dream, the theology of the Book of Job, and the police terrorism and bureaucratic anonymity of the society that inspired Freud's term 'censor.' It was the same appeal in the myth of Waiting for Godot that, so to speak, identified Samuel Beckett as a contemporary writer. (cw 29:159–60). Additionally, as regards Frye's knowledge of Kafka, he referred to "A Report to an Academy...