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FRANZ KAFKA AND ALBERT CAMUS: PARABLES FOR OUR TIME
Author(s): HEINZ POLITZER

Source: Chicago Review, Vol. 14, No. 1 (SPRING 1960), pp. 47-67
Published by: Chicago Review
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HEINZ POLITZER
FRANZ KAFKA AND ALBERT CAMUS: PARABLES

FOROUR TIME
In the 125th The Joyful Wisdom Friedrich Nietzsche
aphorism of
tells of a "mad man" who runs to themarket place in broad
daylight,
a his hand, crying "I am
burning latern in incessantly: looking for
God! I am looking for God!" He is a Diogenes twofold reversed: a
lunatic rather than a philosopher, he does not look forman but God.
On the market place he encounters disbelievers, who scorn the man
and theGod he is looking for.Thereupon the "mad man" is heard to
cry: "Where isGod? I shall tell you. We have killed him. You and I.
We all are his murderers . . .God is dead. God remains dead."1 Eric
who uses this to demonstrate the
re-emergence of
Voegelin, aphorism
Gnostic ideas inmodern science and politics, has pointed to the para
dox that lies hidden in this absurd anecdote: "The new Diogenes is
a but not the one. Rather
looking for God dead he searches for the
new God among the very who have killed the old one, this
people
new God being no other than Nietzsche's the
Superman."2 Indeed,
"mad man" represents the pathos of late 19th century nihilism which
he is roaming "as if through infinite nothing
produced Zarathustra:
a ... no one can
ness," looking for "comfort give him," for he has
47
come too a
early, "my time is
not
yet." And with gesture of true
symbolic grandeur the "mad man" takes his lantern and smashes it on
the ground.
This aphorism is distinguished by all the characteristics of amodern
classical the Hebrew mashal, it has a
parable. Like its predecessor,
direction. For even the statement that God is dead has
metaphysical
a its
religious meaning. The modern parable differs, however, from
traditional model in that it no longer carries a clearcut message, but
is built around a paradox. When, in theGospel according to St. Luke,
the prodigal son feeds on the hulls that the swine eat while his father
is fattening a calf to his hunger,3 the images of the hulls and
satisfy
the calf stand clearly for the son's fallen state, and the father's
forgive
ness. No such accepted is at Nietzsche's
imagery disposal. Instead,
he has to and to turn tradition
improvise parody, upside down and
invent a as as his "mad"
figure tragically paradoxical Diogenes. More
over, since the Biblical is told within an established
parable religious
context, the figures of prodigal son and forgiving father easily extend
to include such vast abstractions as on the one hand, and
Everyman
God on the other. This silent symbolism is likewise denied toNietz
sche. A he so turned his back
clergyman's renegade son, emphatically
on his both
origins, physical and metaphysical, that he grew to be
come the first of the modern "deicides," to borrow another
phrase
from Voegelin.4 His insight that God is dead is an abstract idea
To translate it into communicable was an under
negated. language
as as the idea which he wanted to
taking paradoxical express by it.
all modern are as
Basically, parables "phantasies," Dostoyevsky's
Alyosha calls the parable of the "Gand Inquisitor," when it is told
him by his brother Ivan Karamozov. Here, the intention at least is
clear: Ivan improvises his tale to make Alyosha think twice about a
which he, the narrator, rebels. And yet, the
religion against story of
a resurrected Christ who is and almost burnt
apprehended, berated,
at the stake so involved, multifaceted and, in the
by the Inquisitor, is
final analysis, inexplicable, thatAlyosha, at one point, exclaims: "Your
is in praise of Jesus, not in blame of Him as you meant it
phantasy
to be!"5This is resolved by a silent gesture: the kiss Jesus
parable, too,
presses on the "bloodless, aged lips" of the Inquisitor.6 Aloysha re
peats this gesture when he kisses Ivan. But what for him is a naive
and spontaneous imitatio Christi, appears to his brother as a trick of
Here even the to
literary "plagiarism."7 simple symbol has ceased
function
unambiguously.
Ivan's Christ remains silent and leaves the
Throughout parable
48
talking?prophesies, and contradictions?to his opponent,
harangues,
the Grand the
Inquisitor. Generally speaking, supernatural appears
in the modern
parable below, behind, and beyond the spoken word.
the semantic limitations of
Exploring language, the philosopher Lud
remarked: "There is indeed the
wig Wittgenstein inexpressible. This
shows itself, it is the mystical."8 The is
emphasis Wittgenstein's, who
italicized the word "shows" so as to
impress upon the reader the fact
that the but cannot be translated into the
mystical may appear logic
and grammar of coherent verbalization. Thus the second of
coming
Ivan's Christ assumes the form of a that is, a
negative epiphany,
Modern then, are statements of man's awareness
paradox. parables,
of the but rather than
supernatural, bridging the gap between the here
and the there, the rational and the irrational,
they reveal and perpet
uate this in an insoluble "All these set out
gap enigma. parables really
to say that the is and this
merely incomprehensible incomprehensible,
we knew Franz Kafka once said in his "On
already," aphorism
Parables."9
This statement is true of Kafka's own narrations: in his

uniquely
short story "An
Imperial Message" he describes the failure of a mes
senger to the last words from his deathbed to his
carry Emperor's
subtle allusions we are to understand that
subjects.10 Through given
this testament carries the of a revelation, and that
weight religious
the potentate now dying is no other than the
Supreme Being. But
we are never told the actual of the to
wording "Imperial Message";
us the remains as silent as Christ. Nor does
Emperor Dostoyevsky's
the messenger ever reach his destination. The center
capital city, "the
of the world, with the dregs of will forever
overflowing humanity,"
lie between the Imperial sun?which is now
setting?and "the lone in
dividual, themeanest of his subjects ... you." By addressing the story
to an Kafka seems to the
imaginary reader, imply that Emperor's
testament was meant for everyone who comes across his
story, and
that everyone misses it since it remains undelivered. "But
you sit by
your window and dream itwhen falls." the fate
evening Describing
of the parable in a time of the
depleted metaphysical truths, "Imperial
has turned into the a dreamer who
Message" subjective phantasy of
sits at a window with a view on a
darkening world. The only in
formation spread by this story is the news of the
Emperor's death.
This news, in turn, Kafka took over from Nietzsche, inwhose para
ble he could have found the image of the as
extinguished light well.
By smashing his lantern Nietzsche's lunatic Diogenes indicates the
breakdown of instruction and the of the Gods.
Twilight Similarly,
49
the in Kafka's Trial entrusts a small lamp to Joseph K. before
priest
he tells him the parable of the doorkeeper. The doorkeeper denies
a man entrance to the law. That this very entrance was meant for
him alone is the the man has to face in the hour of his death,
paradox
as the to close the door. After K. has thoroughly
doorkeeper goes
misunderstood this tale and come to the conclusion that "lying has
turned into a universal principle," Kafka mentions again the lamp
inK.'s hand which "had long since gone out."11 (T 267-278) This
is the darkness that inW. B. Yeats' vision of the
"drops again"
"Second Coming,"12 the eclipse that Franz Werfel to the
applied
absence of God in his poem "Gottesfinsternis."13 The resultant gloom
is a reason for the innate of many a modern
perhaps obscurity parable.
revelation of the
Against this negative supernatural, Kafka insti
tuted the trial of his Trial his
Joseph K. is arrested; paradoxically
consists in his to discover it.He tries to enter the inner
guilt inability
chambers of the court and to turn the secret proceedings into an open,
that is intelligible, hearing. He fails, yet he does not succumb. Turn
he blames his resistance on the authorities who perse
ing the tables,
cute him: "the for this last failure lay with him who
responsibility
had not left him the remnant of strength necessary for the deed."
Before his executioners actually thrust the knife into his heart, he
raises his hands and spreads out all his fingers.14 (T 286) This gesture
a
symbolizes negation and defiance of which Dostoyevsky's Ivan and
Nietzsche's Diogenes would have approved
heartily.
It is true that Kafka has obscured K.'s protest against his destiny
to:
by the ambiguous ending he chose give his story. But its pathos
to hail as a
sufficed for Albert Camus Joseph K.'s last stand "victory
of the flesh," and him an "absurd hero."
proclaim
In his Mythof Sisyphus Camus describes "the wisest and most
of mortals," whom the gods condemned to roll
prudent "ceaselessly
a rock to the of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back
top
of its own weight." Then follows the rock down to the
Sisyphus
plain.
"It is during this return, this pause," Camus continues, "that
Sisy
me. A face that toils so close to stones is stone
phus interests already
itself! I see this man going back down with a measured
heavy yet
step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. This
hour, which resembles a breathing-space, returns as
surely
as his
this is the hour of consciousness. (... cette heure
suffering; Sisyphus'
est celle de la conscience.) At each of these moments ... he is
superior
to his fate. He is
stronger than his rock."
50
And Camus concludes: "If this myth is
tragic, that is because its
hero is conscious . . . of the gods, powerless
Sisyphus, proletarian
and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his
misery: this is what
he thinks of his descent. The was meant to
during clairvoyance that
be his torture crowns at the same time his There is no fate
victory.
that cannot be surmounted scorn."15
by
The was too obvious a
image of Sisyphus metaphor
of modern
man's condition to have Kafka. On 19th, 1922, he
escaped January
bewails in his diaries the solitude of those who have been denied
children: "it concerns you, whether or no,
perpetually you will
every moment to the end, every nerve-racking moment, it perpetu
concerns
ally you, and without any result. Sisyphus was a bachelor."36
an
Typically enough, Kafka's Sisyphus is image of man's impo
tence, with sexual as well as metaphysical implications. As early
as
1911 the bachelor makes his in Kafka's diaries.
Sisyphus appearance
There the sees himself as "an old man
twenty-eight-year-old strug
to . . . to admire other
gling keep his dignity, having people's
chil
dren and not even allowed to go on 'I have none
being saying:
myself" of any progeny and hence of life's
deprived reality
(this "hence," this non sequitur, is the creative crux of Kafka's trou
bles), having nothing left but "a palpable body and a real head, a real
forehead that is, to beat against thewalls."17 Not
only does the image
of
Sisyphus the bachelor pervade the diaries, itsmyth-forming power
reveals itself in the fact that all of Kafka's heroes?with the possible
exception of K. in the Castle?are bachelors and remain bachelors to
their bitter ends.
Camus
resolutely replaced this image of barren humanity by what
he came to call the "absurd hero." His an
Sisyphus, who conquers
and cruel fate it, reinstates
unintelligible by consciously scorning
the an attitude which isboth
dignity of sufferingmankind by assuming
absurd and heroic. To be sure, Camus tried to
identify his vision of
Sisyphus with the tormented shadows of Kafka's principal figures.
He did so in a of
piece inspired self-defence which he called "Hope
and The Absurd in theWork of Franz Kafka," to the
appended
second edition of Sisyphus, and all editions. However,
subsequent
he did not succeed in driving this comparison home. For if he
quite
says that his Sisyphus "teaches the higher fidelity that negates the
a
gods and raises rocks," and ends up in triumphantly major key by
must to de
crying: "One imagine Sisyphus happy,"18 then he fails
scribe adequately Kafka's struggle against the authorities, divine, pa
ternal, or otherwise. And if Camus likens Kafka's work to the rock
51
his Sisyphus is perpetually and fruitlessly pushing uphill, then a glance
intoKafka's personal documents could have shown him his error. For
themoments when Kafka interrupted his work did not grant him any
relaxation, increased consciousness, or victory. Creative relaxation, the
was an idea to the obsessed
"schopferische Pause," congenitally alien
Kafka. He was doubly tormented whenever he had to abstain from the
work without which he was to exist. Yet Camus is
totally unable
entitled to having misunderstood Kafka: he never would have sur
him if he had understood him better.
passed
Camus was born in 1913, one year after Kafka had broken through
the gauche and confused style of his early writings and established
his unmistakably own form in the narrations, "The Judgment," "The
Metamorphosis," and "The Stoker." Camus's hometown is Algiers,
and its sunlight fills his first novel, The Stranger, just as cruelly as the
most of Kafka's narrations. Camus is
twilight of Prague submerges by
nature and education a "Latin,"19 Kafka at best a Hebrew fallen from
the Hebrew tradition and desperately trying to recapture it. Camus
fought with the French underground against the tyranny of a totali
tarian system which Kafka seems to have his cauche
anticipated in
mars. Camus, that is, braved in
reality all those persecutions from
which Kafka had suffered only in his fearful dreams, without ever
to
being forced experience them in their physical brutality. However
devastating the German occupation of France may have been, it had
its limits and it found its end. Thus the younger writer was spared
the limitless horrors the older had imagined in his eschatological
visions. Finally, Camus had spiritual ancestors: Nietzsche, whose
amor fati seems to accompany on his descent, and
Sisyphus Tolstoy
Dostoevsky, Melville, Gide and Proust, Malraux and Montherlant.20
And not the last among them was Kafka, the the man with
solitary,
out forebears and heirs.
However, while Camus claimed Kafka as his predecessor and tried
to his own views by basing them on Kafka's was
justify exploits, he
on his to him behind. This can be seen from the
already way leaving
which exist between the Stranger and Kafka's work. Since
parallels
theMyth of Sisyphusand itsappendixonKafka representa kind of
critical vindication of the Stranger, he himself invited such a
comparison.
Both the Trial and the Stranger treat of crime and
punishment.
In Kafka's Trial the
guilt of K., the hero, remains hidden. Camus's
Meursault, on the other hand, does commit a crime: he shoots an
Arab on the shore outside of Algiers. Meursault's senses are dimmed
52
by wine and dulled by the inexorable light.Moreover, he acts in a
kind of self-defence. The Arab has wounded one of his friends
just
and brandishes a knife in his hand. Yet, Camus scene
manipulates this
in such a way as to intimate that the crime did not a
originate in
conscious act of will but was set off forces the control of
by beyond
the murderer. We have only to follow his description of the act to
recognize the paradoxical innocence of Meursault's guilt: "Then
to reel before my a came from the
everything began eyes, fiery gust
sea, while the sky cracked in two, from end to end, and a great sheet
of flame nerve inmy was
poured down through the rift.Every body
a steel and closed on the revolver. The
spring, my grip trigger gave,
and the small of the butt And so, with
underbelly jogged my palm.
that crisp, whipcrack sound, it all began." (S 76)
Who commits this crime? Meursault or the
murderously blinding
too we find such an offence
light of the day? In Kafka perpetrated
on the
very threshold of consciousness. In the story "The Stoker"
we learn that
young Karl Rossmann was expelled from his father's
house and to a world full of and persecu
exposed misunderstandings
tions because he had committed the crime of making a kitchen maid
a round
pregnant. Again, the seduction scene is presented in such
about way that the reader is forced to excuse the from all but
culprit
the guilt of being there on the scene. For he does not
experience
woman had
anything beyond the vague sensation that the wronged
him in an "it was as if she were a part of himself,
inexplicable way:
and for that reason, was seized with a terrible
perhaps, he feeling
of yearning. . . .This was all that had . . ."21 Conse
happened.
quently, the whole mechanism of revenge released against the
young "sinner" appears to be For Karl Ross
greatly exaggerated.
mann's crime, if indeed it can be so called, is an unconscious one, and
does not lend itself easily to a definition in terms of "guilt" or
"innocence."
Camus too stresses the

incongruity of crime and punishment.
During Meursault's trial the Public Prosecutor wins the death
sentence of
by proclaiming the murderer guilty maltreating his
mother. "I accuse thisman of having buried his mother, with a crimi
nal's heart in his breast." (S 122) the Prosecutor's dam
Ostensibly,
as little relevance as the
aging words have sweeping gestures satirized
in his of French a
by Daumier caricatures justice. On deeper level,
however, Meursault's lack of affection for his mother is a symptom
of his character and a harbinger of his fate. He dies for the sake of his
indifference, and because of it.What seems to him?and
probably
53
seemed to young Camus?the utmost candor and is also a
sincerity,
of heart. This, in turn, relates him to
deep-seated sluggishness Joseph
K. in Kafka's Trial, whose
guilt is unexplained and inexplicable.
Paradoxically, the murderer Meursault appears to the reader less
than K. who has not hurt a hair of head.
guilty superficially anyone's
Meursault is persecuted his defiant death sets him free,
by society,
and cleanses him from the we
prejudices may have harbored against
him. Voila un homme. K. is to
persecuted by himself: succumbing
his own obsessions, he draws the reader into the torrent
along dizzy
of his misdirected self-accusations. The difference between the two
men is raised into on with
sharp relief by the conversations they carry
the priests sent to them by the masters of their trials.
Repeatedly
Meursault has declined the visit of the
prison chaplain, finally the
enters the death cell.
priest brushes aside all prison etiquette and
(S 145 ff.) K. chances into the Cathedral while he is on an official
errand. There the name
priest startles him by calling his through the
darkness. (T 262 ff.)Meursault's is proven but he refuses to see
guilt
more in it than a criminal offence for which he is to pay the
ready
penalty. (S 148) he resists the claim that
Adamantly clergyman's
human justice is only a vague manifestation of divine law, and he
has our we realize the social reasons that caused the
sympathy since
Prosecutor to clamor for his death in the name of as
justice. Just
Meursault's was distorted the court, so the little K.
guilt by Joseph
learns about his trial, a mere of justice. Behind this mock
mockery
ery, however, K. suspects not only the corruption of society but the
all-pervading chaos of the world. (T 276) If Kafka had intended to
satirize justice he could have
easily confronted K. with his judges
and the Trial. For him, however, the injustice inherent
completed
in human justice was but an image, the image of the
metaphysical
disorder that had befallen mankind. Thus his K. sees in the
corrupt
wardens and lewd magistrates the distorted faces of a once-divine
countenance. Because of their and lewdness he attacks
corruption
them (and thus allows them to set him one trap after the other);
because of their hidden can neither nor
divinity he escape conquer
them.
At the time of the Stranger Camus was convinced of the

godless
ness of the world and the man. Thus he raised Meursault
dignity of
beyond Good and Evil. Yet he was not
simply aping Nietzsche and
the anti-Christian ethics of his Superman. In the cellars of the
stifling
French underground he a more real, more more vital
acquired limpid,
sense of man's a
purpose in godless universe than self-tormented
54
Nietzsche could ever have hoped to attain in the rarefied air of the
Swiss Whereas Kafka's K. has nothing left but the protestations
Alps.
of his innocence (in which he himself the mur
only half believes),
derer Meursault insists on his right, even and in the face
especially
of the clergyman: "I'd been right, I was still right, I was always
acme of
right." (S 151) This self-assertion is, of course, the subjec
tivism, and yet it is the only answer left to a man condemned by the
collective subjectivism of a society that sends him to the guillotine
for reasons.
obviously subjective (Similarly, the masochistic night
mares of K. are but an answer to the unabashed sadism
displayed by
the officials who control his trial.) Only in a system like the one
a
professed by the two clergymen, only in pre-Nietzschen
world
where God was not yet dead, could K. and Meursault have accepted
their guilt and atoned for it. a
willingly have Only then "just" trial
could have been concluded, that is, a trial the laws of which
they (and
their readers) could have understood and As things are,
accepted.
however, Meursault and K. fall victim to arbitrari
proceedings, the
ness of which mirrors their own rootlessness and homelessness.
Both stories introduce the at their climax, and use them
clergymen
as them a sort of
pivotal figures. Through precarious inner balance
is re-established. men who
Confronting only rely upon themselves,
are and never
always right, guilty, these priests represent, however
and an
obscurely ineffectively, objective, supra-personal law. With
them an order, however shaken and touches
inapplicable, barely
the chaos which our forsaken heroes have grown to take for granted.
It is through these confrontation scenes that the authors add a para
bolic meaning to the two novels.
Characteristically, both Meursault and K. do their utmost to pre

vent the law from
supra-personal entering into their personal spheres
of to the end, takes
experience. Meursault, agressive and energetic
the priest by the neckband of his cassock, and chokes him in a fit
"of joy and rage," (S 151) vent to all the
giving thoughts which had
been in his brain. this outburst does not
simmering Ironically, produce
one new idea. an intellectual of sorts, is forced to
single Joseph K.,
listen to the parable, "Before the Law." K. loses himself
Thereupon
in intricate of the story without, however,
interpretations gaining
any new insight into his own problem. If the argument with the
to him, it is the of his
priest proves anything complete hopelessness
predicament.
Both Meursault and K. talk in order to drown out the words
to them. And as if he wanted
spoken yet Meursault jolts the chaplain
55
to shake out of him an answer to has
by physical force questions he
not even asked. K. uses his small, but vivid, to
Joseph intelligence
or otherwise obscure the command and obedience
bypass question of
which the chaplain had raised in his In both scenes a meta
parable.
men
physical truth reverberates in the conscience of congenitally
deaf to metaphysical truths. No communication is possible, because
the which the claims could have expressed
symbols through spiritual
themselves, have become equally unintelligible to Meursault and K.
Meursault seizes the chaplain's cassock, thus violating the sanctity
of the priest. The on which the first appears to K.,
pulpit, priest
reminds him of a torture instrument. (T 259, 260) Cassock and
pulpit
are treated as material are of their sym
paraphernalia; they deprived
bolic significance. Divorced from the mystery they were once meant
to reveal, have into meaningless contraptions, bi
they degenerated
zarre shells of conventions. The disbeliever who repudiates
petrified
them is entitled to ask what are at all. Neither
they doing here
Meursault nor K. can see that it is the two clergymen through whom
the "spirit projects into the concrete its spiritual tragedy," to use
another on Kafka.22
phrase from Camus's essay
In his Myth of Sisyphus Camus with Meursault.
distinctly sided
"A world," he says, "that can be even with bad reasons is
explained
a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe
suddenly
divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His
exile iswithout of the memory of a lost
remedy since he is deprived
home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man
and his life, the actor and his the feeling of ab
setting, is properly
Meursault is defined and vindicated as an absurd
surdity."23 Thus,
hero.
But even the defiance with which Meursault prepares to die, sounds
more radical than it to the last, he
actually is.To be sure, unrelenting
even in his finalwords the and corruption of the
challenges stupidity
which has condemned him to death: "For all to be accom
society
me to feel less whatever remained to was that
plished, for lonely, hope
on the of execution there should be a crowd of spec
day my huge
tators and that should greet me with howls of execration." (S
they
154) And yet, before he has reached such a high note of contempt,
Meursault remembers his mother, for the first timewith some
degree
of sympathy and his heart to the universe
understanding. He opens
which hitherto had seemed veiled in a mist of indifference, and sud
a to well up in his
denly feeling of "tenderness" threatens sluggish
heart: "Sounds of the came and the cool night
countryside faintly in,
56
air, veined with smells of earth and salt, fanned my cheeks. The
marvellous peace of the sleepbound summer night flooded through
me like a tide_" (S 153)
Is not this feeling which surges up in him "like the tides of the
sea" closely akin to the "oceanic feeling" which Sigmund Freud
once had as an of boundless identification"24
diagnosed "experience
with a world otherwise limited and definable? Does not
thoroughly
this night, with and with stars" (S 154), this "tender"
"spangled signs
the lie to the indifference Meursault was accustomed to
night give
not the
project into it?Does phrase "tender indifference" render
the
very paradox needed to the of human existence?
re-capture puzzle
The ending of the Stranger is a true statement of man's condition in
a so a critic could
mysterious universe. As such it is ambiguous that
ask whether Camus had conformed with his own ideas of "absurdity"
when he wrote it.25
The fascination both The Trial and The Stranger held for the
same who were young after the second
European generation?those
World War?arose from the books rather
questions posed by these
than from any answers were able to A multitude
specific they give.
of conflicting answers can be found in them, for neither novel is
satisfied with in terms.What contain is
copying reality simple they
the evidence collected by modern man in that parabolic trial which
he has instituted a It goes
against world deprived of any meaning.
without in this trial, he cannot for other verdict
saying that, hope any
than the pronouncement of the paradox on which his existence is
based.
Parables reach for the supra-real. into

By extending unreality they
conquer reality. This becomes obvious when we observe that the
element of the topic, time, is both books. Unfinished
suspended in
as it is,Kafka's Trial an air of the infinite. Its
acquires proceedings
go on indefinitely and are never completed. The year which passes
between K.'s arrest and his execution cannot be counted by months
or weeks or It can measured K.'s which
days. only be by experiences
follow one another like the rungs of a ladder leading down into an
ever exact sequence cannot be established
darkening abyss. Even their
with any of certainty.26 Meursault too arrives at the
degree finally
realization that time has ceased to be a reliable standard of
reality:
"From the dark horizon of my future a sort of slow, breeze
persistent
had been blowing toward me, all my life long, from the years that
were to come. And on itsway this breeze had leveled out all the
ideas that people tried to foist upon me in the years I was living
57
were This timelessness is
through, which equally unreal." (5 152)
a hallmark of all narration which does not to imitate
attempt reality,
but rather to it in the form of parables.27
interpret
Kafka's heroes are to an
perpetually exposed incomprehensible
fate, as to a sharp, cold wind. Camus, on the other hand, needs an
emergency, an extreme situation, to visualize and make visible the
In the Stranger it
meeting of the physical with the metaphysical.
was Meursault's death cell, in the Plague it is the city of Oran. Sud
stricken by the becomes the hotbed of extra
denly plague, this city
A whole in a
ordinary human decisions. community finds itself
situation which Kafka had anticipated in his "Country Doctor,"
written thirty years before the Plague: "They have lost their ancient
beliefs, . . . but the doctor is supposed to be omnipotent with his
tender surgeon's hand."28 Indeed, inmore ways than one, The Plague
is the story of Rieux, the doctor.
Both Kafka and Camus well knew that in our godless time the
a the
physician has assumed the stature of near-savior. The figure of
medical man has gradually become a leading one in the literature
of the post-Freudian era. It dominates the intellectual flights of fancy
inThomas Mann's Magic Mountain, as it holds the center of themore
human in Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. And it may
Odyssey
well be more than an accident that the Nobel Prize Committee has
out for its award Doctor Zhivago as well as Thomas Mann's
singled
novel of disease, love and death, and Camus's parable of Dr. Rieux's
that the image
struggle against the plague. They may have recognized
of the physicion holds just as much of man's hope for salvation and
as our materialistic age is to
redemption willing accept, and that it
is this hope which lends the three novels, however different they may
otherwise be, their common importance and distinction.
To be sure, Camus the distinction between religious
overemphasizes
and medical cure, so much so that he reduces his
redemption parable
at times to a mere between an
agnostic and a believer.
disputation
For in his novel the parson no at home "and unravels his
longer sits
vestments, one after another,"29 as he does in Kafka's "Country
Doctor." Camus's Paneloux, Dr. Rieux. The
priest, fiercely opposes
epidemic
drives the Jesuit into the
pulpit. Unashamedly he uses the
to the and stricken ones with a faith
plague re-inspire panicky they
had long since abandoned. He carries his missionary zeal so far as
himself to refuse medical as human and therefore suspect of
help
counteracting the will of divine providence.
The between Meursault and the is con
dialogue prison chaplain
58
tinued here, with the significant difference that Paneloux is no longer
a nameless
cog in the machinery of human justice but a determined
and sharply profiled crusader, as persuasive by his powerful words
as he is sets. Nor is Rieux an indifferent
by the simple example he
murderer like Meursault but a passionate man revolting against the
The Rebel, which
totality of human suffering. In his essay, is the
of the Plague, Camus recalls
philosophical justification Dostoyevsky's
Ivan Karamazov as "If the suffering of children . . . served
saying:
to sum of
complete the suffering necessary for the acquisition of
truth, I affirm from now onward that truth is not worth such a
price."30 Rieux says the same, but in a simpler and humbler way:
"A man can't cure and know at the same time. So let's cure as
quickly
aswe can. That's themore urgent
job." (P 189)
Rieux's seems indeed Umited to the awareness of
experience every
we
day emergencies when compare itwith Kafka's timeless peregri
nations through themaze of themetaphysical. His "Country Doctor"
is called to visit a boy, who appears healthy and yet has "in his right
side, near the hip, an open wound as big as the palm"31 of a hand.
The boy's sickness is genuine and imagined, visible and yet only a
pretence. In other words, it shows the ambiguity characteristic of a
neurotic symptom. Kafka himself was enough of a hypochondriac
himself to realize that "all these so-called
continuously observing
illnesses, however sad they may look, are facts of belief, the dis
tressed human being's anchorages in some maternal ground or other,
thus, it is not surprising that psychoanalysis finds the primal ground
of all religions to be precisely the same thing as what causes the
individual's 'illnesses'; true, nowadays there is no sense of religious
. .,"32 and hence a medical cure is as as
fellowships. just impossible
religious redemption. As everywhere, Kafka opens here the vista of
the and loses himself in it. He re-stated this
primeval and archaic,
one of his conversations
thought more clearly when he remarked in
with Gustav Janouch: "Sin is the root of all illness. This is the reason
formortality."33 If, however, sickness and sin are
mortality, basically
one and the same, then are also universal. Not
they only the patient
is afflicted the as well. Since Kafka's
by them but physician "Country
Doctor" finds himself unable to to
help his young patient, he tries
himself and, so, This is, of course, a
help by doing perishes. cruelly
poignant parody of Jesus's saying in the Gospels: "Physician, help
yourself!"
On the other hand, Camus's Dr. Rieux faces a disease, the
reality of
which is him statistics. When the
impressed upon by daily priest
59
suggests to him the identity of disease and sin, he recoils in revolt,
the revolt of the Rebel. He rejects all that passes human understand
we should love what we cannot under
ing.The priest intimates that
stand, but Rieux cries out: "No, Father. I have a very different idea
of love. And until my I shall refuse to love a scheme of
dying day
in which children are put to torture," (P 197) like the little
things
Othon who has justwrithed to death before them. And while Kafka's
is "misused for sacred ends,"34?
"Country Doctor" complains that he
and confuses his earthly task as a doctor with the holy office of a
limits himself to the human and secular. Since
priest?Rieux willingly
he is aware of his limitations, he remains a rationalist, and since he
comes to understand human nature, he becomes a as
skeptic well. The
means to him a "never
fight against the plague ending defeat," and
the source of his wisdom is "suffering." (P 118) Once he remarks
to his friendTarrou, who has decided to live as a "saint without God":
"I feel more defeated than with saints. Heroism
fellowship with the
and don't really to me.. .
.What interestsme is being
sanctity appeal
a man." (P 231) This a man" he has as a
"being long since defined
"matter of common decency." (honnetete) (P 150) To this drastic
reduction of man's purpose Camus adds a more ringing declaration in
the Rebel: "He who dedicates himself to the duration of his life, to
the house he builds, to the dignity of mankind, dedicates himself to
the earth and reaps from it the harvest that sows its seed and sustains
the world again and again."35
Undoubtedly Camus's vision of man is clearer and simpler than
any of Kafka's tormented dreams. But did he not have to pay for his
and a loss in con
clarity simplicity by stupendous sophistication? Our
temporary problems are, after all, more and subtle than
complex
those grasped by the good doctor, Rieux, and "in a certain sense the
Good is a desolate affair,"36 as Kafka once admitted in the Reflections.
Whereas Kafka seems at times to be obscure because he is unable to
control the shadowy throng of his nightmares, Camus's on
harping
the merits of humanity sounds flat and dull to our ears. Whereas
Kafka's around their own axle, and at their
images spin produce,
worst, a kind of soporific dizziness in even themost attentive reader?
Camus's symbols, more often than not, turn out to be mere
allegories
which can to them the
easily be deciphered by applying philosophical
terms his theoretical
provided in writings. Moreover, Camus commits
a novelist's worst mistake: he to be one of his
appears siding with
another: he is to Rieux and hostile to Paneloux.
figures against partial
On his deathbed the Jesuit is described as a "doubtful case"; which
60
ismeant to sound more like a moral judgment than a medical diag
nosis. For, on the last page of the book, Rieux reveals himself as
its chronicler. Thus the author identifies himself with his hero and
own
thereby endorses with his authority the insights and judgments
of his
protagonist. The doctor exits by a backdoor, as itwere, and
the author takes the stage, the center, the
occupying position held
thus far his
by principal figure.
Yet, paradoxically, this sleight-of-hand establishes Camus's crafts
as a teller of modern For if narrator and hero are
manship parables.
one, then Rieux has also in the name of his author when he
spoken
ends his disputation with Paneloux, the priest, by saying: "What I
hate is death and disease. . . .And whether you wish it or not, we
are allies, ... So see
facing them and fighting them together. you
. . .God himself can't us now." (P 197) Rieux is not the man
part
to pronounce name of the
idly the Supreme Being. If he, the agnostic,
ends the basic argument of his chronicle by speaking out the name
of God, then this self-styled humanist opens for himself a door into
is so closely related to his author, he
religious belief. And since he
as
opens this door for Camus well.
In the course of his novel the chronicler cannot refrain from using
overtones. Rieux has
images containing definite religious Lonely
struck up a with the saint," Tarrou. Almost inad
friendship "godless
the two men chance upon the idea of their
vertently sealing friendship
a in the ocean. On the surface this is a virile gesture
by night swim
meant to express their silent confidence in one another. On a
deeper
level it touches on associations with submersion in a sort of
baptismal
bath.37 Rieux, the chronicler, reports: "The air here reeked of stale
wine and fish. . . . Slowly the waters rose and sank, and with their
and flickered over the
tranquil breathing sudden oily glints formed
a
surface in haze of broken lights. Before them the darkness stretched
out into word "infinity" is bound to con
infinity. ..." (P 232) The
same "oceanic feeling" which enveloped Meursault at
jure up the
the climax of his career. Christian symbols like "wine," "fish," and "oil"
as to
are used here so
prominently suggest a more than realistic
intention on the part of the chronicler. The nocturnal ocean has been
turned into a font of rejuvenation, refreshing both body and spirit
of the night bathers. But the evidence does not stop here. In the
French original the central image of the plague is steeped in am
on the word "fleau" which, more
biguity by Camus's play distinctly
than its English equivalent of "scourge," means both a flail and an
is used as a leitmotif throughout the novel,
epidemic. This subtle pun
61
as on the
just Kafka plays many meanings of the title and key word
"Prozess" throughout his Trial.
Of course, this does not amount to saying that Dr. Rieux has been
converted, however unconsciously, to the orthodox rigidity of Father
Paneloux. However it does indicate that the chronicler has been tell
his story of human sufferingwith such a degree of and
ing honesty
that he has reached the limit of his own wisdom. At
completeness
this outer limit he is forced to ask questions for which the rational
humanism of Dr. Rieux offers no answer. The
symbols which he
cannot avoid here are word which extend into
using genuine images
where grammar and logic cannot penetrate. The borderline
spheres
they straddle is also the demarcation line defining the realm of the
modern
parable.
The itself is such a genuine symbol. At no point during his
plague
does Camus divulge itsmeaning. We was
narration only learn that it
not at all Rieux who it.The comes and goes
conquered epidemic
to its own will and law. It does not to the efforts
according respond
and pains of the man who stakes his life to stem its progress. In the
end Rieux is neither crushed nor rewarded. His only gain is the in
there are more things to admire inmen than to
sight "that despise,"
(P 278) and the reader is left to wonder whether this information
could not have been at much lesser cost. It assumes its full
acquired
value, however, through Rieux's realization that themen he is talking
about have now outgrown their physical Umitations, and are fed and
ken and beyond their grasp. No
judged by powers outside their
does the "flesh win out"; for the of Oran are full
longer graveyards
of the evidence of man's carnal defeat. Much rather does Rieux
reiterate his belief in the essential dignity of man on that vantage point
of human experience which Rilke must have had inmind when, at
the end of his Requiem of 1908, he asks: "Who talks of
victory?"
and answers: "To endure is all."38 To survive, that is, in utter iso
lation and exposure, and on a point of no return. Rieux lives to see
the end of the plague, but he is now alone and, as Germaine Bree
has put it, "dehumanized."39
The Plague is a parable, and parables are structurally akin to puz
zles. Just as adamantly as Kafka does Camus refuse to reveal one
unambiguous solution. He only betrays his basic view that every

is exposed to the or falls a
body plague, rises through it, is given
chance to succumb or survive, in other words, that is
everybody
faced with a decision through the plague. The means to
plague
his own doubt, his own exposure to and the
everybody destiny,
62
a stand. The
inevitability of taking only general insight Camus'
to the reader is the realization that there are no
plague conveys
to be Camus has taken over from Kafka the
general insights gained.
as Kafka has
very nature of his central parabolic image. And just
the "Before the Law" into the center of the Trial,
placed parable
so Camus concentrates the message of his one
plague chronicle in
central anecdote. "A hundred years ago," Tarrou tells Rieux, "plague
out the entire of a town in Persia, with one excep
wiped population
tion. And the sole survivor was precisely the man whose job
itwas
to wash the dead bodies, and who carried on throughout the
epi
demic." (P 119) For Camus as for Kafka, the* incomprehensible re
mains incomprehensible, and a paradox takes the place of any rational
maxim conveyed by the narration. It is a kind of meta-didactic prose:
at the core of the secret a new mystery is hidden.
Such a mystery opens the trial of Kafka's Trial, conditions the
strangeness of Camus's Stranger, and spreads the plague in the Plague.
It also causes the fall in Camus's Fall. The hero of this long short
a
story, the "judge-penitent" Jean-Baptiste Clamence, is neither peni
tent nor a His very name holds the of his existence.
judge. paradox
He is called after all that he is not: John, the
Baptist, Clemency.
(Translated into the French, Huld, the inclement lawyer inKafka's
Trial, would also be called "Clemence.")
Passively witnessing the
of an unknown woman into the Seine, comes
plunge JeanBaptiste
to be aware of his fallen state. If he had the
helped stranger and
followed her into the river, he might?perhaps?have received the
baptism of divine mercy. His passivity, however, is just as evil as
the misdirected activity of Kafka's "Country Doctor," of which it
is said: "A false alarm on the night bell once answered?it cannot
be made good, not ever."40 As far as Clamence is concerned, he pro
the salvation he may have found in
foundly doubts rescuing this
woman. He knows one the intellectual satisfaction he
only security:
finds in tormenting himself. A voluntary exile from his home, a
roams the streets of Amsterdam,
fugitive from his profession, he
his
scorning, ridiculing, parodying self-imposed despair.
For him the world has turned into a prison without bars. "A
hundred and fifty years ago," he says, "people became sentimental
about lakes and forests. Today we have the lycricism of the
prison
cell." (F 123, 124) What he means is, however, that he inhabits the
same universal and of which Kafka says in his
paradoxical dungeon
in 1920: "To end as a a
aphorisms, "He," prisoner?that could be
life's ambition. But itwas a barred that he was in. and
cage Calmly
63
as if at home, the din of the world streamed out and in
insolently,
through the bars, the prisoner was really free, he could take part in
that went on outside escaped him, he could
everything, nothing
have left the cage, the bars were yards apart, he was not
simply
even a For Clamence, too, sent to a would
prisoner.,,41 "being prison"
be "an attractive idea in a way"; (F 130) as a matter of fact, he lives
in a prison like Kafka's. He, too, is "not even a prisoner," and yet
remains a slave whipped through his life by the echo of themysterious
has ever since the incident on the
laughter which he kept hearing
Pont des Arts.
This turns into a veritable inferno. "Have you
laughter reality
noticed," he asks, "that Amsterdam's concentric canals resemble the
circles of Hell? The middle-class hell, of course,
peopled with bad
dreams." (F 14) The fits the lanes on which Kafka's
description shady
Trial is enacted as well as the houses, rather than
petty-bourgeois
rustic, that surround his Castle.
And yet, even Clamence, the contrite charlatan, is representative
of a which has lost its place in a God-created universe.
humanity
His self-accusations are a faint and distorted echo of man's confession
to the is a confession in a vacuum, however. Instead
original sin. It
of liberating himself from sin, he act of con
spreads it in the very
the true of all who are
fessing. Proclaiming democracy guilty (F
136), Clamence is obsessively articulate when he outlines the epidemic
he knows he is about to disseminate: "Covered with ashes, tearing
my hair, my face scared by clawing, but with piercing eyes, I stand
before all humanity recapitulating my shames without losing sight
of the effect I am producing, and saying: 'Iwas the lowest of the low.'
Then I pass from the T to the 'we.'When I get to
imperceptibly
'This iswhat we are,' the trick has been and I can tell them
played
off." (F 140) He is the to unburden
genuinely afflicted by compulsion
himself of his guilt; he cannot choose but talk. His is that of
make-up
a intellectualized but beneath
highly clown, the grease paint, the
wit and the he is marked like Cain, like
sophistry, Joseph K. Even
the Fall treats of and salvation.
perdition
The reader cannot escape the suspicion that the
plague Clamence
is intent on in his extreme
spreading originates egocentricity. What
Clamence suffers from and what he disseminates is the grotesque
an
misery of Ego hopelessly entangled in his self-reflections. He is,
in the true sense of the word, God-forsaken.
Turning back from the
Fall to the Plague, we can now Dr. Rieux's
fully appraise modesty.
His report was a chronicle, not a recit; hz was able to own
report his
64
not the first,person. From the
struggle with the plague in the third,
very firstpage of the book he has suppressed the Ego whose struggles
and sufferings he has been recounting, "I" a
replacing the by "they,"
the objective and self-denying pronoun. "They" is the city of Oran,
and the multitude of its inhabitants, with all their traits and
destinies. This, to be sure, is the behind Rieux's re
deeper meaning
mark that he had resolved to write his book "so that he should not
be one of those who hold their peace but should bear witness in favor
of those . . ." (P he has
plague-stricken people. 278) Consequently,
succeeded in breaking through his isolation and, as a chronicler, in
establishing dialogical situations among the individuals populating his
a friend. Lovers are
report. A man has lost his wife and acquires being
now that if there is one thing
separated and re-united. "They knew
one can and sometimes attain, it is human tender
always yearn for
ness." (P 271) It ismore than mere chance that here, as at the end of
the Stranger, theword "tenderness" ("tendresse") appears,
providing
a as itwere, to dissolve into
major key, harmony the dissonances
of man's condition. Thus the image of man is re-assembled while
the universe around him has its inscrutable
kept paradox.
Kafka languished "without forebears, without marriage, without
heirs,"42 his vitality constantly drained by the absurdity of a world
without grace. Camus faced this absurdity and braved the
squarely
ambiguities behind which the of existence is hidden. We
paradox
may miss in his books the tormented of Kafka's
nobility high style;
instead we find in them human relations re-established. The hero who
holds the center of the Plague, does not flee backwards, like K. in
Kafka's Trial, nor forwards, like K. in the Castle. Instead, he is a man
a low and dark
standing upright under sky, helping, curing, and
saving. "There are," Tarrou says, "pestilences and there are victims;
no more than that ... I
grant we should add a third category: that
of the true healers. But it's a fact one doesn't come across
many of
them, and anyhow itmust be a hard vocation. That's why I decided
to take, in
every predicament, the victims' side, so as to reduce the
done. I can at least try to discover how one
damage Among them
attains to the third category; in other words, to
peace." (P 230)
In this passage the contemporary
parable about the absurd iso
lation of man in an empty universe can be seen on itsway towards a
message which it could deliver from man to man, victoriously cross
all the of his existence.
ing paradoxes
65
NOTES
1The
Complete Works of Friedrich "Nietzsche, Vol. X (trsl. by Thomas Com
mon), London: 1910, pp. 167-9. Here and below I took the
liberty
of
changing
the whenever I felt the need of a literal version close to the
existing translations
German
original.
2 Eric Politik und Gnosis}
Voegelin, Wissenschaft, Munich: Kosel, 1959, p. 76.
3
Luke, xv, 16, 24.
4
Voegelin, pp. 65 ff.
5 The Brothers Kara?nazov,
Fyodor trsl. by Constance Garnett,
Dostoyevsky,
New York: Modern 1950, p. 309.
Library,
6
Karamazov, p. 311.
7
Karamazov, p. 313.
8 Tractatus New York:
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Logic o-Philosophicus, Harcourt,
p. 522.
9Franz
Kafka, The Great Wall of China, trsl.byWilla and Edwin Muir, New
York: Schocken, 1946, p. 258.
10 Franz The Penal trsl. and Edwin New
Kafka, Colony, byWilla Muir, York:
Schocken, 1948, pp. 158-59.
11 Initials and numbers refer to the pp. of the texts:

following
T = Franz Kafka, The Trial, trsl. by Willa and Edwin Muir, New York:
Knopf, 1957 (DefinitiveEdition).
S= Albert Camus, The Stranger, trsl. by Stuart Gilbert, New York: Vin
tage, 1954.
P = Albert Camus, The trsl. by Stuart Gilbert, New York:
Plague, Knopf,
1957.
F = Albert Camus, The Fall, trsl. by Justin O'Brien, New York: Knopf,
1957.
12 The Variorum Edition the Poems

Allt-Alspach, of of W. B. Yeats, New
York: Macmillan, 1957, p. 402.
13 Franz und Erwachen, Berlin: 110.
Werfel, Schlaf Zsolnay, 1935, p.
14 For a more detailed discussion see Heinz "Der Prozess das
Politzer, gegen
Gericht,"Wort undWahrheit, XVI (1959), pp. 289-92.
15Albert Camus, The
Myth of Sisyphus, trsl.by JustinO'Brien, New York:
Knopf, 1957,pp. 129 et pass, 119, 121.
ifiThe Diaries of Franz Kafka 1914-1923, trsl. by Martin Greenberg and Han
nah Arendt, New York: Schocken, 1949, p. 205.
17The Diaries
of Franz Kafka 1910-1913, trsl.by JosephKresh, New York:
Schocken, 1948, pp. 150, 151?This entry Kafka later culled from his diaries and
it,with only slight alterations, as "Bachelor's 111Luck" in his "Meditation"
placed
{?Penal Colony, p. 30).
66
i* 123.
Myth, p.
Franz et les lettres Frangaises (1928-1955), Paris: Corti,

14Maja Goth, Kafka
1956, p. 124.
20 Germaine New Brunswick:
Bree, Camus, Rutgers University Press, 1959, p.
124.
21 Franz trsl. by Edwin New York: New

Kafka's Amerika, Muir, Directions,
1946, p. 27.
22 126.
Myth, p.
23
Ibid., p. 6.
24 Abraham "Freud and Modern in: Freud and The 20th
Kaplan, Philosophy,"
Century, (ed. Benjamin Nelson), New York: Meridian, 1957, p. 228.
25 "Here one is inclined to wonder whether Camus lives up to the model of

Goth, pp. 127, 128.
the absurd novelist he has offered inhisMyth of Sisyphus,11
26Hermann Fine neue Or dung der Werke
Uyttersprot, Kafkas?, Antwerp:
De Vries, 1957.
27 See also Germaine Bree's discussion of time inCamus, 104-106.,

op. cit., pp.
2? Penal 141.
Colony, p.
2*>Ibid.
30 Albert The trsl. by Anthony New York:

Camus, Rebel, Bower, Vintage, p.
56.
31 Penal
Colony, p. 141.
32 Franz Dearest trsl. by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins, New
Kafka, Father,
York: Schocken, 1954, p. 300.
33 Gustav with Kafka, New York:
Janouch, Conversations Praeger, 1953, p. 85.
34 Penal 141.
Colony, p.
35 302.
Rebel,p.
36 Dearest
Father, p. 37.
37W. M. Frohock, "Camus: Influence and Yale French
Image, Sensibility,"
Studies, 2, pp. 91-99.
38Rainer Maria Rilke, Requiem, trsl. by J. B. Leishman, London: Hogarth,

1957, p. 141.
3*> 119.
Bree, p.
40 Penal 143.
Colony, p.
41Great Wall
ofChina, p. 264.
42Diaries
1914-1923, p. 207.
67

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FRANZ KAFKA AND ALBERT CAMUS: PARABLES FOR OUR TIME

Author(s): HEINZ POLITZER

FRANZ KAFKA AND ALBERT CAMUS: PARABLES

This statement is true of Kafka's own narrations: in his

Camus too stresses the

At the time of the Stranger Camus was convinced of the

Characteristically, both Meursault and K. do their utmost to pre

Parables reach for the supra-real. into

unambiguous solution. He only betrays his basic view that every

11 Initials and numbers refer to the pp. of the texts:

12 The Variorum Edition the Poems

Franz et les lettres Frangaises (1928-1955), Paris: Corti,

21 Franz trsl. by Edwin New York: New

25 "Here one is inclined to wonder whether Camus lives up to the model of

27 See also Germaine Bree's discussion of time inCamus, 104-106.,

30 Albert The trsl. by Anthony New York:

38Rainer Maria Rilke, Requiem, trsl. by J. B. Leishman, London: Hogarth,

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