INTRODUCTION

Becca Rothfeld

In the inverted world of Franz Kafka, guilt precedes sin and punishment precedes trial—so naturally, the cage precedes the bird.

“A cage went in search of a bird,” he wrote with enigmatic flourish in 1917, when he was convalescing in the pastoral town of Zürau in the wake of his tuberculosis diagnosis. Two years earlier, he had abandoned The Trial, which begins with an abrupt arrest and ends with a roundabout admission of guilt; five years later, he would start The Castle, which begins with a series of vague recriminations and ends with a series of even vaguer wrongdoings, at least insofar as it can really be said to “end” at all. Strictly speaking, both novels are still unfinished: neither satisfied the famously implacable Kafka, whose perfectionism was a crucible, and both were incomplete at the time of his death. They are certainly cages—clenching, claustrophobic—and perhaps they are doomed to remain forever in search of their birds.

The Blue Octavo Notebooks, the journals Kafka kept during the seven idyllic months he spent in Zürau with his sister, are largely aphoristic: indeed, he later culled their contents into a slim volume of gnomic maxims, which were published posthumously, initially under a maudlin title chosen by his best friend and literary executor, Max Brod. Reflections on Sin, Hope, Suffering, and the True Way was eventually renamed The Zürau Aphorisms, probably because its contents are not reflections on “the true way” in the least. The brisk uplift conjured by Brod’s title, which would suit a work of self-help, is nowhere to be found in Kafka’s strange text. Instead, the aphorisms are obscure and oracular, cloudy as fables, ominous as curses. If they are short and spare, sheared of all extraneity, their austerity does not make them any easier to understand. One reads, “Leopards break into the temple and drink all the sacrificial vessels dry; it keeps happening; in the end, it can be calculated in advance and is incorporated into the ritual.” Another warns (or merely reports?), “You are the exercise, the task. No student far and wide.”

Confronted with lines as mystifying as riddles, we might begin to sympathize with the cage looking for a bird, for we, too, are desperate to catch the fugitive flutter of comprehension.

“A cage went in search of a bird” is a fitting title for a collection of stories written in Kafka’s honor on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of his death, especially because so many of the ones in this volume treat precisely the kind of entrapment that obsessed him: the kind that follows us wherever we go. In Kafka’s world, cages crop up in the most inconspicuous and deceptively innocuous places: a man in The Trial is whipped in an office junk closet, and in The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa’s childhood bedroom becomes his cell when he transforms into a giant insect and his family locks him in.

Like Gregor, the varied characters in A Cage Went in Search of a Bird are continually stumbling on prisons in the unlikeliest locales. In Leone Ross’s “Headache,” a woman is trapped first in her body, which subjects her to mysterious headaches; next, in an MRI machine, for what she believes is a standard procedure; and finally, at the hospital, in a room where “the window is hermetically sealed.” No one will tell her what is wrong with her, or when she can expect to be released. In Tommy Orange’s haunting contribution, a plague of desolation called “the hurt” afflicts people at random, driving them to writhe in agony—and even to commit suicide—on the streets. As a public service, handcuffs are distributed throughout the city, with the result that, at any moment, a person can come to—and find herself shackled to a park bench. Sometimes the chains in this volume even pursue the prisoners. In Ali Smith’s “Art Hotel,” a family who lives in a campervan discovers a red line drawn around the vehicle no matter where they park it, as if someone is trying to box them in.

Kafka knew all too well that it is often our homes that ensnare us—he complained incessantly in his diaries and letters of having to share an apartment with his parents and sisters—and homes are an uneasy consolation in many of these stories. In Keith Ridgway’s “The Landlord,” a tenant is trapped by a landlord who often imposes on him, subjecting him to interminable conversation from which he cannot politely extricate himself. Increasingly, he is also trapped in the landlord’s conception of him: “He mispronounced my name,” the tenant writes. “But he did it consistently and confidently, so that after some time I began to suspect that his pronunciation was correct and mine was not.” Ultimately, the tenant confesses, “I am not myself, entirely. How could I be? I am something else. I am an allocated life—here you are, live here.” The cage, it seems, invents the bird. The shackles come first, and we are only their afterthoughts.

What is the lesson of The Castle, The Trial, “The Burrow,” and so many of Kafka’s other works if not that your imprisonment predates you, that it was always waiting for you, that it in effect creates you? This, perhaps, was the fatalistic message that Kafka intended to memorialize in the journal he kept at Zürau, just months after he was diagnosed with the disease that would kill him exactly a hundred years ago: that birds are secondary to their cages.

It is odd that Kafka would write such a gloomy maxim in the town where by all accounts he spent the most blissful months of his life. The critic Roberto Calasso describes them as “his only period of near happiness,” and in letters, he was uncharacteristically ebullient. “I am thriving among all the animals,” he told Max Brod in October 1917. He effused to another friend several days later, “I want to live here always.” He was charmed by the trees, the animals, and the quiet (though, Kafka being Kafka, he did find something to agonize over: in this case, the mice that scurried in his room at night).

Yet it was here, in this picturesque village where he was so serene, that he took to reading Kierkegaard and brooding on sin. The Blue Octavo Notebooks are more overtly religious in theme and more sibylline in tone than any of his other writings. Even as Kafka was feeding the local goats and traipsing over the hills, he was worrying about Evil and our expulsion from the Garden of Eden. The incongruity is so acute that I wonder if the apparent gloom of his aphorisms is really something quite different.

In one entry of the Notebooks, he postulates that there is something worse than the wrath of a god or a monster. “The Sirens have a weapon even more terrible than their song,” he writes, “namely, their silence.” Far more punishing than a God who hates or condemns us is one who never thinks of us at all. The characters in Kafka’s fictions may be enmeshed in an alternative and nightmarish logic—one in which accusations give rise to transgressions and cages give rise to birds—but at least they are not plagued by an absence of significance. Explanations often prove elusive, but no one ever doubts that there are explanations available to someone, somewhere. It does not occur to the lawyers and defendants in The Trial that there may be no legal principle ordering the mad melee of arrests and summonses, and though the land surveyor in The Castle never lays eyes on the fortress he seeks, he is certain of its existence.

On the face of it, the Kafkaesque stories in this wonderfully weird volume are despairing. Many of them present dystopian dreams of a dismal future: in Naomi Alderman’s story, “God’s Doorbell,” a band of machines reminiscent of ChatGPT runs human affairs, and Joshua Cohen’s “Return to the Museum” is narrated by a sad Neanderthal at the Museum of Natural History in New York, where he witnesses a dramatic protest against climate change.

But despite everything, there is a glimmer of Kafka’s characteristically perverse optimism in A Cage Went in Search of a Bird. In Helen Oyeyemi’s “Hygiene,” a character who has become a germaphobic nomad, shuttling between health spas rather than maintaining a permanent residence, reports that she has “learned to exist more scrupulously.” In her new and antiseptically clean life, “steam enfolds us, inexorable angels with loofahs and three-thousand-carat knuckles knead our muscles and peel our old skin away.” She is on the verge of becoming a new creature, perhaps one that surpasses her former self.

It is clear that many of the alternatives to humans in A Cage Went in Search of a Bird are on the verge of outstripping us. The machines in “God’s Doorbell” set out to construct a Tower of Babel and seem perilously close to reaching the heavens; the Neanderthal in Joshua Cohen’s story, perhaps an homage to the simian narrator of Kafka’s “Report to an Academy,” retreats at the end to his display, where he lives with his wife and their “two pride-and-joy children—model children, truly—who are teething like there’s no tomorrow on a raw red gristly strip of what’s ostensibly prime mammoth.”

Reading these ambivalent stories, I recalled Kafka’s notorious conversation with Max Brod about God, in which he proposed that there is “no end of hope—only not for us.” This is as much a happy statement as it is a bleak one. We may never be able to interpret the world’s many dark mysteries, true, but other creatures (maybe the machines, maybe the specimens in the Museum of Natural History) can achieve what we cannot. Perhaps, then, we should strive to emulate Josef K., who believes in a system of justice for which he has no evidence. Another name for his brand of intransigence is faith.