Abstract
The book of Job is more than a text to be interpreted and reinterpreted by writers in the West from the Middle Ages on. It is more like an archetype than a source, a mythic pattern indispensable for rendering a particular category of experience. Prometheus is such an archetype, Job is another. It would seem that no writer can begin to explore unmerited suffering and the posture of rebellion against whatever or whomever is perceived as the author of such suffering without turning this text to account. Job thus comes near to claiming the status of a universal point of reference. Even when not directly invoked, it is there. Dostoevsky, who had been introduced to the book as a child by an acolyte at a church service, “remained throughout his life devoted to Job, who dared to rebel against God.”1 It was a key to his major fiction. Ivan’s major speeches in The Brothers Karamazov turn out to be recapitulations and echoes of Job:
Listen, I took the case of children only to make my case clearer. Of the other tears of humanity with which the earth is soaked from its crust to its centre, I will say nothing... What comfort is it to me that there are none guilty and that cause follows effect simply and directly, and that I know it — I must have justice or I will destroy myself. And not justice in some remote infinite time and space, but here on earth, and that I could see myself. I have believed in it. I want to see it, and if I am dead by then, let me rise again, for if it all happens without me, it will be too unfair. Surely I haven’t suffered simply that I, my crimes and my sufferings, may manure the soil of the future harmony for somebody else. I want to see with my own eyes the hind lie down with the lion and the victim rise up and embrace his murderer. I want to be there when everyone of the world are built on this longing, and I am a believer.2
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Robert Payne, Dostoyevsky: A Human Portrait (New York: Knopf, 1961), p.13
Cf. M. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp.222–3, 256
E.g. G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), p.209;
Frank Kermode, Introduction to King Lear: A Casebook, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Macmillan, 1969), p.18; John Holloway, ibid., pp.213–17;
Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (New York: Doubleday, 1964), p.104;
Harold Bloom, Introduction to William Shakespeare’s King Lear: Modern Critical Interpretations, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), pp.1–2
Cf. Elizabeth Freund, “‘Give the Word’: Reflections on the Economy of Response in King Lear,” HSL, Special issue, 1982, 211–13.
On Edgar’s enhanced role in the Folio, see Michael J. Warren, “Quarto and Folio King Lear and the Interpretation of Albany and Edgar,” in David Bevington and Jay L. Halio, eds. Shakespeare: Pattern of Excelling Nature (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1978), p.105
Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p.42
Cf. Evelyn Torton Beck, Kafka and the Yiddish Theater (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971), p.77
Yaakov Gordin, God, Man and Devil (in Yiddish) (New York: International Library Publishing Co., 1903), pp.9–10
Erwin R. Steinberg (“The Judgment in Kafka’s ‘The Judgment’,” MFS 8 (1962), 23–30) interestingly points out that Kafka records having written “The Judgment” during the night of September 22–3, 1912. This means that it was written in the hours immediately following the solemnities of the Day of Atonement which fell in that year from the evening of September 21 to the evening of September 22. On that day (Yom Kippur) according to traditional belief the judgment is “sealed” for all mankind. It is determined “who shall live and who shall die . . . who shall perish by fire and who by water.” Georg belongs to the latter category.
Cf. Max Brod, Franz Kafka, trans. G. Humphreys Roberts and Richard Winston (New York: Schocken Books, 1960), pp.172, 175–6, 180–4;
David M. Kartiganer, “Job and Joseph K.: Myth in Kafka’s The Trial,” MFS 8 (1962), 31–43;
M. Friedman, “The Modern Job,” Judaism 12 (1963), 451;
Herbert Tauber, Franz Kafka: An Interpretation of his Works (Port Washington NY: Kennikat Press, 1948), p.86;
André Neher, The Exile of the Word, trans. David Maisel (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1981), p.28;
the critical discussion of the analogies is ably summed up by Rudolf Suter in Kafkas “Prozess” im Lichte des “Buches Hiob” (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1976), pp.12–20. Suter’s own contribution to the subject is to stress the important differences between Job and The Trial both in the matter of the ending and also throughout. Joseph K.’s relation to the Court is antagonistic whilst Job always sees himself in partnership with God. This Gegenseitigkeit (or what I prefer to call dialogue) is an essential dimension of Job lacking in The Trial. (See Suter, pp.29, 118–19)
On the likeness between these two works of Kafka cf. Heinz Politzer, Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), p.215n; Tauber, op. cit., pp.83, 88
Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), p.228; hereafter cited in text
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 120–1;
and cf. Karl J. Kuepper, “Gesture and Posture as Elemental Symbolism in Kafka’s The Trial” in James Rolleston ed., Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Trial (Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice Hall, 1976), pp.60–9; hereafter, cited as Rolleston
Gershon Shaked speaks of the transformation of concrete Jewish historical experience (for instance, that of persecution) into the unparticularized, abstract world of Kafka’s novels as an instance of “homology.” (The Shadows Within: Essays in Modern Jewish Writers, Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1987, pp.8–11)
On the genesis of this trope, see E.R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1953), pp.138–44
See Martin Buber, “Job” in Biblical Humanism, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (London: Macdonald, 1968), pp.195–6. (Cf. The Prophetic Faith, 1949, Chap. 8)
Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), p.195
Gerald L. Bruns, “Midrash and Allegory: The Beginnings of Scriptural Interpretation,” in The Literary Guide to the Bible, eds. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), p.634
Der Prozess in Franz Kafka, Die Romane (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1969), p.436
Harold Bloom raises the uninterpretability of Kafka’s fictions to a general principle. See The Strong Light of the Canonical (New York: The City College Papers, no.28, 1987), p.7: “My working principle in reading Kafka is to observe that he did everything possible to evade interpretation, which only means that what most needs and demands interpretation in Kafka’s writing is its perversely deliberate evasion of interpretation.”
Jacques Derrida, “Devant la Loi,” trans. Avital Ronell, in Alan Udoff ed., Kafka and the Contemporary Critical Performance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp.136, 146
Cf. Jill Robbins, “Kafka’s Parables” in Midrash and Literature, eds. G.H. Hartman and S. Budick (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1986), p.268 (on the ways in which interpretation — as also the impossibility of interpretation — is thematized in Kafka’s writings).
Copyright information
© 1998 Harold Fisch
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Fisch, H. (1998). Kafka’s Debate with Job. In: New Stories for Old. Cross-Currents in Religion and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230502352_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230502352_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-40322-6
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-50235-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)