Large print
After working for a year as a country doctor in Scotland, I came across a slim pale-green hardback in Hugendubel’s sixties-style bookshop overlooking the Marienplatz in Munich, and read it through my first winter away. It was a bibliophile edition of Franz Kafka’s Ein Landarzt (A Country Doctor) published by the small Berlin press run by Klaus Wagenbach, himself one of Kafka’s biographers, to celebrate thirty years in the book business.
The history of the book is a striking reminder that Kafka’s fame as a writer was not entirely posthumous. Written mostly in his sister Ottla’s apartment in the famous medieval Alchemists’ Lane in Prague as ‘the war to end all wars’ turned to disaster for the Dual Empire of Austro-Hungary, Ein Landarzt appeared in January 1920, and received a single notice in the Prager Tagblatt newspaper months after publication. Of the 1000 copies printed in outsize Tertia Walbaum typeface, few—very few—were purchased in Kafka’s lifetime (the other six books he published were also flops). The publishing house of Schocken Verlag, subsequently to relocate to New York, took over the unsold remainder copies in the 1930s.
Like the original, this new edition of the stories is printed in the large typeface opted for by Kafka’s original publisher; it was so large in the Walbaum Antiqua typeface of the first edition that hyphens had to be halved and punctuation marks omitted to fit the line. Kafka’s early writings—which often expand a single seamless paragraph into an entire story—are sometimes so brief as to impose the large format and spacious margins, not least if his publisher needed a book that could be marketed. That his few thoughts had acquired such lapidary scale was a source of occasional embarrassment: Kafka was reminded of Moses and the Ten Commandments.
A final bibliographic connection: this new edition is printed by the Offizin Haag-Drugulin in Leipzig, one of the most famous printers in Germany and the same house that produced The Penal Colony for Kafka’s original publisher Kurt Wolff.
Another genealogy
Kafka dedicated his book to his father. According to his friend Max Brod, his father is supposed to have muttered ‘put it on the table by my bed’; Hermann Kafka’s refusal to acknowledge his son’s literary activities is hardly one of the secrets of a well-documented fraught relationship. But the title figure of the collection—the country doctor—honours a different relative altogether, his uncle.
Siegfried Löwy was born in 1867, elder half-brother to Kafka’s mother and, following his MD at the University of Prague, possessor of the only doctorate in the family until his nephew’s, although many of Kafka’s mother’s family harboured scholastic, even talmudic ambitions. Significantly, Franz often thought of himself as a Löwy rather than a Kafka: his diary entry for 25 December 1911 contains a long list of colourful matrilineal begats, including a reference to his maternal great-grandfather, who was a miracle rabbi. ‘In Hebrew my name is Amschel, like my mother’s maternal grandfather, whom my mother, who was six years old when he died, can remember as a very pious and learned man with a long, white beard. She remembers how she had to take hold of the toes of his corpse and ask forgiveness for any offence she might have committed against him. She also remembers his many books, which lined the walls. He bathed in the river every day, even in winter, when he chopped a hole in the ice for his bath.’
In his famous Letter to His Father he defined himself as ‘a Löwy with a certain Kafka component which, however, is not pushed ahead by the Kafka will to life, business and conquest, but by a Löwyish spur that works more secretly, more diffidently and in another direction, and which often fails to work entirely’. One of the Löwyish spurs was his TB, which he tended to describe as if it were a conspiracy of organs: ‘Sometimes, it seems to me that my brain and lungs came to an agreement behind my back. Things can’t go on this way, said the brain, and after five years the lungs said they were ready to help.’ Even the unpleasant transformation of the travelling salesman Gregor Samsa, in Kafka’s most famous story Metamorphosis, into a hundred-footed insect covered with ‘sticky stuff’ seems morphologically related to Kafka’s tuberculosis: the repulsive appearance of the insect (which assures his victimisation) is in fact an inside: an eventrated respiratory tract replete with cilia and mucus carpet.
A doctor of law he might have been in life, but Kafka’s real doctorate was handed down by an imaginary guild, the Faculty of Concepts to Live and Die By. Despite Koch’s demonstration of the bacillary nature of tuberculosis in 1882, Kafka always interpreted his illness as a metaphor: what power could a bare fact have against a death sentence issued at birth?
An early speedster
While his nephew was in his last years at school, Uncle Siegfried took up a post in Triesch, a small town of 4800 inhabitants in a German-speaking enclave in Moravia called Iglau (known in Czech as Jihlava), about 130 kilometres south-east of Prague. Nearly half the local population was of German origin, and it boasted several small industries including wool and spinning factories, and a mine-works. He was to practise there for close on forty years.
Siegfried Löwy was a liberal (he almost had to be as a university-educated assimilated Jew) and man of his times; open to change and innovation, he created a sensation in the district when he became one of the first people in what was then an outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to acquire a motorbike. Franz came visiting many times in his summer holidays, the great attractions of staying with Uncle Siegfried being his horses, the billiard table and the library, which contained all the German classics. There were also the mechanical appliances—a photograph in the book shows his nieces, including Kafka’s sister Ottla, push-starting Uncle Siegfried on his brand-new bike across a forest path.
According to Hans Straße, Head Conservationist of the Motorcycle Department of the Deutsches Museum in Munich, the tin panniers behind the seat and the distinctive rear shock absorbers identify it as a NSU Cantilever, built in Ulm between 1909 and 1914: NSU (later amalgamated in the Audi concern) was one of more than fifty motorcycle manufacturers in the Europe of that time. Since the world speed record was set on this machine in 1909, it may well be that Kafka’s uncle, a ‘munterer Vogel’ (an oddball) as he might have called himself, read about the exploit and ordered a model for his practice rounds. Improved transportation was changing the nature of the medical profession, and speed would come to alter the very shape of the consultation. Doctors were among the first enthusiasts of vehicular transport, but most of them bought the rather stately sedans and berlins of the period. Dr Löwy’s speedster motorbike would no doubt have amused the wags in Triesch.
Holisms
Unlike Kafka’s father, the self-made man, Uncle Siegfried indulged Franz, and offered him advice and support at several junctures in his life. He was ‘progressive’ in his medical thinking too. On his recommendation Franz became a vegetarian, and for a time practised the obscure double-chewing technique (‘each mouthful to be masticated thirty-two times’) recommended by the American physician Horace Fletcher (1849–1919) along with Johannes Müller’s free air gymnastic techniques (developing the body was a cult, of course, long before the Nazis made it a key element of their cultural propaganda).
‘Fletschern’ and ‘müllern’, as they were rather rudely described, were the alternative therapies of the early twentieth century, and the physically slight Kafka seems to have hoped that such regular cud-chewing and callisthenics would deflect his conviction that his illness was prefigured, not just historically, but in a primordial sense—as if it were inscribed on his body. ‘My body is too skinny for its weakness, it hasn’t the least bit of fat to produce a blessed warmth, to preserve an inner fire, no fat on which the spirit could occasionally nourish itself beyond its daily need without damage to the whole.’
Uncle and nephew both travelled together to the German North Sea islands of Heligoland and Nordeney after the completion of Franz’s school exams. Much later, in February 1924, in the last months of his nephew’s life, when he was living a vie de bohème in Berlin with a young Jewish girl from the eastern marches called Dora Dymant (or Dora Diamant, as she called herself after she emigrated to Britain before the war), his uncle visited him and persuaded him to enter a sanatorium. This was the happiest period of Kafka’s life, according to Brod; it is known that Kafka wrote to Dora’s Yiddish-speaking orthodox father asking for permission to marry her: the rabbi prudently said no. Brod was a tireless friend: he even arranged the visit from Uncle Siegfried because doctors’ fees were proving too expensive: Dora mentions having to pay 160 crowns for a house visit at a time when all they had to pay the rent and buy provisions was Kafka’s invalidity pension of one thousand crowns a month.
Siegfried Löwy continued to practise in his house in Triesch until his retirement in the mid-thirties, when he moved to Prague and set up residence together with his nieces—the Kafka sisters, Elli, Valli and Ottla—and their families, in the large house in the Bilkova left by Hermann, Franz’s father. The night before the extended family was due to be deported to the death-camps in 1942, Siegfried Löwy drew up his will and injected himself with a lethal dose of morphine.
His nephew’s story A Country Doctor seems to be goaded on by its semicolons.
According to the literary critic Walter Benjamin, who recorded their conversations in Sweden while both were on the run from the Nazis in 1934, the dramatist Bertolt Brecht, famous in his lifetime for his agitprop theatre and Communist ideals, accused Kafka of having the ‘precision of an imprecise man: a dreamer’; it is apparent from A Country Doctor how Brecht could formulate such a dismissive statement, even if he does resort to Kafkaesque method to do so. Kafka uses one of the simplest grammatical markings to set up several layers of apparently banal realism in which quite bizarre things happen without fuss, as matter of fact; his famous sliding paradoxes actually begin at the level of parasyntactic notation, at what are usually termed the accidentals.
The first sentence announces: ‘I was at my wits’ end: an urgent journey lay before me’. A colon buffers the adjoining phrases, in which five semicolons marshall the subordinate clauses into separate stretches of time and action and necessity. The American writer Nicholson Baker has called the semi-colon ‘that supremely self-possessed valet of phraseology’; and the literary critic Erich Heller once drew attention to a ‘profound’ semicolon in a remark by the philosopher Wittgenstein: ‘The philosopher treats a question; like a disease’ where the profundity turns on whether the semicolon ought to play the comma and make questioning itself a kind of disease.
From his manuscripts, we know that Kafka had a fairly idiosyncratic system of notation when entering early versions of his stories in his notebooks. He used commas and periods; semicolons were added only when work was being prepared for publication. (In the case of his novel The Trial, they were added posthumously by his friend Max Brod, to whom he had given the loose manuscript.) But perhaps we should regard the semicolon more conspiratorially than Baker’s ‘valet status’ would suggest: commenting on his friend Isaac Babel’s laconic stories, Sergei Eisenstein, the great Russian film director, said—speaking of what literature could teach the cinema—‘no iron can enter the human heart with such stupefying effect as a period placed at just the right moment’.
If periods are bullets, then Kafka’s semicolons are spurs. They edge one phrase recklessly on to the next, and barely hold them all in check. They wink at the doctor’s cognitive disarray—he is hardly through taking the measure of one set of circumstances before another falls upon him.
Only a doctor
It all starts with the narrator, the country doctor, at wit’s end—‘in a dwam’, as some of my Scottish country patients would have said. A reportedly ill patient is awaiting his visit in a village ten miles off. He bemoans his lack of transport, his own horse having just died in the terrible winter weather. ‘But you just don’t know what you’re going to stumble across in your own house’, says the servant girl.
In the shortest possible grammatical time, the doctor has come across a groom, two horses which squeeze through the keyhole (from a pig-sty, a buried reference to the treatment reserved for the string of horses in the novella Michael Kohlhaas by the nineteenth-century German writer Heinrich von Kleist), abandoned his maid to the groom’s cannibalistic designs on her (he bites her cheek), and arrived through a snowstorm in a flash at his patient’s bed. Demons have been unleashed. These can only be Mephistopheles’ horses, on loan from Goethe’s Faust. The miraculous transport is itself described in a sentence with no less than eleven semicolons. It is a breakneck, lightning-speed journey that has a precedent in some of the Hasidic stories: Kafka would have known these from the famous collection published by the philosopher Martin Buber, in which the Ba’al Shem-tov (the honorary title of Rabbi Israel ben Eli’ezer, c. 1700–1760, the founder of Hasidism) is summoned to perform wonder cures at the drop of a hat. The Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer’s later stories are full of such dropped hats.
For Kafka’s doctor, however, any idea of a wonder cure is sheer parody. Already the patient is whispering into his ear, ‘Let me die.’ At first glance there’s nothing wrong with him; as the doctor gets ready to leave he notices a huge wound on the right side near the hip seething with what look like larval forms of the common house fly Musca domestica. Another tradition—the Greek, in the story of Endymion and Selene—tells us the fly was once a beautiful, if excessively talkative girl; and since so many other half-hidden things are happening in this story, we could be forgiven for assuming the patient laid low by the seeds of love. After all, in Shakespeare’s time love was still considered an ‘illness’ (morbus amoris).
Some critics have thought the wound an act of self-castration or self-division, like the wound that won’t heal in Parsifal, although it would seem more obviously related to the place where Adam, before God closed it again, might have had his fatal rib extraction; in any case it is difficult to miss the equation of the maid Rose and the horribly pink gap in the skin—the wound recalls the supposedly ancient male fear of the female genitals. Kafka, with his keen instinct for ambiguities, is confusing the absolute distinction that medical ethics tries to maintain between the roles of doctor and lover: this is a prerequisite to the art of effective diagnosis. Besides, remembering Rose during the consultation is a sure sign that the country doctor’s mind isn’t entirely engaged with the nature of his patient’s complaint.
‘Will you save me?’, pleads the patient, having evidently changed his mind. Under his breath, the doctor berates the community for its loss of belief; people are always expecting the impossible from the doctor’s healing hand. This is a community of our time, which ‘no longer believes in God’, as Nietzsche wrote in one of his extended aphorisms, though ‘there are still plenty of thinking people who believe in the saint’. The country doctor is indeed a kind of ‘saint’—an ascetic, self-denying figure in a material age—of whom miracles are expected.
Then a posse of villager elders arrives at the house with the school choir and teacher at its head, and sings a simple song denouncing doctors:
Strip him naked, then he’ll heal us
And should he fail to, kill him quick!
Only a mediciner, only a mediciner.
A saint is expected, but only a doctor turns up—a mediciner, a saw-bones. The country doctor is human, all too human, the title Nietzsche gave to the book in which he examined what might make for saintliness in an age of unbelief. Stripped of his clothes, the villagers lift him head and feet onto the bed, ‘on the side of the wound’. His patient complains he’s always had to grin and put up with things, and doesn’t appreciate having to share his bed; the doctor consoles him with false reassurance: such wounds aren’t uncommon in the wider world. And anyway, it seems to be a case of Munchhausen’s syndrome, a couple of self-mutilating blows with the blade of an axe. Self-knowledge was never easier; but there’s no cure for the wound that comes from the struggle between reality and reason.
Menaced, outmanoeuvred, and threatened by the massed ranks of the community, the hapless country doctor bears more than a passing resemblance to the epithet-title for the honest man in Henrik Ibsen’s suggestively named drama An Enemy of the People. Effect and cause are disjoined in much the same way as the doctor who fails his test of saintliness, revealing ordinary human vulnerability: Gregor Samsa’s offence, in Metamorphosis, is even less an operation of the will—he merely has to wake up to find he is what he dreamed he was. The country doctor’s fear that he may be ‘misused for sacred purposes’ is not entirely groundless: all persecutors attribute to their victims the capacity to do harm as well as its reverse. Then he catches himself: ‘But now it was time for me to think of saving myself.’
He runs from them, the children chanting a new song behind him: ‘Now be cheerful, all you patients, Doctor’s laid in bed beside you!’ In contrast to his coming, his going is sluggish. Fleeing his patients, unsure whether he’ll get back home, his maid seized by the groom, his shaman’s fur coat out of reach, cast out into an Arctic desert whose contours are similar to those glimpsed at the conclusion of one of Kafka’s eeriest one-page stories ‘The Bucket Rider’ (the final phrase of which reads: ‘And with that I ascend into the regions of the ice mountains and am lost never to be seen again’), the doctor’s closing words are no less extraordinary than the entire story: ‘Betrayed! Betrayed! Respond to a false alarm on the night bell—and it can’t be made good, ever again.’
Despite doing his duty, morally and professionally—indeed striving to fulfil it in sectarian conditions seemingly emptied of the usual ethical-legal content—he ends up stripped of authority, all his clothes and in bed with the patient, and even then might not get home because he has dared upset the natural order (despite trying to shirk off his responsibilities at one point by asserting that he is ‘no world reformer’). In doing his duty he has put Rosa, his own hidden wound, out of sight and mind.
One thing remains to be said about the country doctor and his sense of duty: Kafka allows the possibility that his fatal error was to deny his other duty—to himself. The alarm on the night-bell is described as ‘false’, and in following its bidding he takes an ‘Irrweg’—the wrong path. Only near the end does he recollect the life he has been missing; but it is too late. Kafka’s story holds up for inspection the Christian view of self-denial as a virtue, and then mocks it as a folly.
This is not Kafka’s last word on self-denial.
Medical euphemisms
As Erich Heller observed regarding that same quote by Wittgenstein, a semicolon may sometimes mark the frontier between a thought and a triviality.
Kafka offers us a pathetic sight, a parody of uprightness: a doctor stripped bare by his patients, even. ‘Certainly doctors are stupid, or rather, they’re not more stupid than other people but their pretensions are ridiculous; nonetheless you have to reckon with the fact that they become more and more stupid the moment you come into their clutches...’, he informs Milena Jesenská early on in their correspondence.
His diary entry for 5 March 1912 contains an unflattering portrayal of the kind of bullishly insensitive doctor who, together with his Pooterish judgement on the serving girl (presumably she couldn’t afford his full fee), has survived fairly intact into the era of can-do medicine, where he may be more of a menace: ‘These revolting doctors! Businesslike, determined and so ignorant of healing that, if this businesslike determination were to leave them, they would stand at sick-beds like schoolboys. I wish I had the strength to found a nature-cure society. By scratching around in my sister’s ear Dr K. turns an inflammation of the eardrum into an inflammation of the inner ear; the servant collapses while getting the fire going; with the fleet diagnosis which is his wont in the case of serving staff, the doctor declares it an upset stomach and a resulting congestion of the blood. The next day she takes to her bed again, has a high fever; the doctor turns her from side to side, confirms it is a throat infection, and runs away so that the next moment won’t refute him. Even dares to speak of the “vulgarly violent reaction of the girl”, which is true to this extent, that he is used to people whose physical condition is worthy of his curative power and is produced by it, and he feels insulted, more than he is aware, by the strong nature of this country girl.’
Kafka mistakenly attributes his sister’s ear infection to the ‘inner’ ear (it should be ‘middle’); his judgement on the Hausarzt—‘ignorant of healing’—strikes hard. Having consulted more than a few doctors in his time, Kafka was no doubt used to being treated by them as if his body were merely a fleshy appendage to his lungs—those ‘proud strong tormented imperturbable creatures’. His diary is peppered with symptoms (‘a new headache of a kind unknown so far’, ‘I had a slight spell of faintness’, ‘this past week I suffered something like a breakdown’) which are watched over with the fastidiousness of a true hypochondriac.
In June 1914, well before he first coughed up blood (which he experienced, significantly, as a kind of relief: ‘actually, my headaches seem to have been washed away with the flow of blood’), he had written to Grete Bauer: ‘undoubtedly an enormous hypochondria, which however has struck so many and such deep roots within me that I stand or fall with it’. Keenly observant of the theatrical aspects of his uncle’s practice, and of the euphemous sounds of doctors in general (‘catarrh of the apex of the lungs’), Kafka sets the country doctor up for what doctors routinely subject their patients to but undergo rarely themselves, and then only by peers, as humiliation and primal fear: defrocking.
A plague of doctors
Being familiar with doctors who suffer diseases for their patients in folk stories, how, we might wonder, forgetting that A Country Doctor was written in the early days of psychoanalysis, could a doctor suffer a wound for his patient? Is he being punished for his impatience by the spurs of those opening semicolons? Half a century before the French literary critic Michel Foucault deconstructed the power relations of the medical profession, Kafka identifies the surgeon’s able hand as dispensing with the need for the confessional, the redundant cleric—in a telling image—sitting down desolately to unravel his raiment. It is an abdication: the cleric embodies the collapse of a religiously-inspired idealism, but his renunciation prepares the way for the fall of the country doctor too. Kafka astutely sees that the Platonic idea of science as the quest for truth is bound to the decline of the transcendental affirmations of religion. Both are acts of faith, and the practical reason of science will also be undermined by the same empiricism that first displaced religion.
Doctor-baiting has long been a clandestinely popular activity in country regions. Despite the onslaught of progress and professionals with black bags it still enjoys a vogue in some parts of the world; my grandmother in Glasgow used to say, ‘that’s but ae doctor’s opinion’, meaning that one mere doctor still had a lot to learn about real wisdom. In country areas, where people have long memories, it is still remembered that doctors themselves were once a sort of plague.
As if to confirm her, the recently published writings of David Rorie (1867–1946), an Aberdeenshire doctor and amateur anthropologist who collected folk medical nostrums and maxims in rural Fife and Aberdeen in the first decades of the twentieth century, clearly show that doctors have only ever been one of several possible sources of reassurance in parochial communities, and that the transmission of learning and knowledge often work against the grain of common sense. It is not just a Scottish phenomenon. Indeed, Emanuel Strauss’ extraordinary Dictionary of Proverbs tells us that every European language has its saws against the saw-bones.
These are some of the variations on Strauss’ entry 1582. Latin: ‘errores medicorum terra tegit’: English: ‘physicians’ faults are covered with earth’; German: ‘junger Arzt, höckriger Kirchhof’; Dutch: ‘een nieuw medicijnmeester een nieuw kerkhof’; Danish: ‘ny læge—ny kirkegaard’; French: ‘de jeune médecin, cimetière bossu’; Czech: ‘nedospelý lékar, hotový záhubce’. All of them are variations on an original observation by the ancient Greek poet Nicocles. Rorie tells us the Scots rhyme on this is:
When the doctor cures,
The sun sees it.
But when he kills,
The earth hides it.
I don’t know if Uncle Siegfried had to go out on snowy nights to answer a call (surely he did), but the ditties quoted by Kafka in the story seem inspired by his uncle, who was a wisecracker and self-deprecating joker—quite unlike Kafka’s father. Kafka described him to his friend Max Brod as the ‘twitterer’—‘because such an inhumanly thin, bachelor’s, birdlike wit comes piping out of his tightened throat, and never abandons him’. The famous lines in the middle of the story—‘Writing prescriptions is easy, but otherwise coming to an understanding with people is hard’—have the ring of the horse’s mouth, indeed seem to propel the whole story which, on one level, is simply the enactment of a misunderstanding. Since prescription-writing in German is cognate with what cooks do in the kitchen—writing a recipe (Rezepte schreiben) being indisputably more art than science—the country doctor’s fate seems to depend on the unpredictable nature of the second half of the saying, on the burden he carries to make himself understood. This is clearer in the original, where the reflexive German verb imposes just such a condition on its grammatical subject (sich verständigen).
These days doctors ‘negotiate’ with their patients, just like Kafka’s doctor; and contemporary patients can be just as vague about what it was they wanted help with in the first place. What has happened to the power which the law itself confers on individuals to constitute a meaningful social life? Remove the plea for help, and the doctor has no business being where he is. Kafka underdetermines meaning in his stories to such an extent that potential readings multiply alarmingly when the reader, anxious to reach firmer ground, attempts to place the narrative in a context he himself has supplied.
My interpretation would be this. Nothing is harder to touch than the reality of our lives, and Kafka’s rider might be: hardest of all for doctors.
Hell for leather
Bizarrely enough (Kafka’s skill with syntax and small words has us driving the narrative on without stopping to question its economy of explanation) this story does have anthropological parallels.
In his diaries, the writer Elias Canetti—a very perceptive Kafkologist—records the following observation by the great German explorer Alexander von Humboldt. ‘In thirteenth-century Egypt, a mania for eating human flesh raged through all classes; doctors were the favourite prey. If a man was hungry, he feigned illness and sent for a doctor—not to consult him, but to devour him.’ This is confirmed with a note from a Baghdad physician’s description of his travels and travails in Egypt: ‘people used all possible dupes to waylay others or lure them into their homes on false pretenses. Three doctors who visited me later met with this fate...’
True or not, these observations replicate the internal dynamic of Kafka’s story very convincingly. Our hero might not be killed, but his nose gets rubbed in the presumption of wanting to help. Kafka often portrayed fools and clownish figures in his writing; they were beasts of meaningful burden for him as much as they were for the philosopher Nietzsche, who once wrote that fools were a disguise for ‘desperate, all too certain knowledge’. That would make Kafka’s uncle a Shakespearean nuncle. Some of the most famous English cartoons—Hogarth’s and Rowlandson’s—lampoon doctors in just the terms suggested by Kafka, as buffoons whose very ministrations were a menace to the bodies of their patients. Perhaps folly and care charge hell for leather out of the same stable; and little wonder if in his moment of adversity the diagnostician, clumsy as he is, has no tradition to shelter in. In a letter to Gershom Scholem in 1938, Benjamin wrote, as part of a critique of Brod’s queasily sanctifying biography of Kafka: ‘This much Kafka was absolutely sure of: first, that someone must be a fool if he is to help; second, that only a fool’s help is real help. The only uncertain thing is whether such help can still do a human being any good.’
Trust lost
As in so many of his stories of individuals thwarted by the forms of life they lead in society at large, Kafka himself seemed to weigh criteria for success in a superdimension where language bears a different charge of trust. Famously dissatisfied with his gifts as a writer, he actually confided to his diary, shortly after finishing A Country Doctor in September 1917, that he could still derive ‘passing satisfaction’ from works like this, provided he could continue to write such things at all; and happiness only if he could raise the world into ‘the pure, the true and the immutable’. Those are attributes of the absolute, which is where literature cannot go.
The genius of A Country Doctor—and it is not a benign one—resides in the fact that Kafka describes, without naming it, one of the most pressing issues of his society, and all the more of our media-manipulated ‘risk society’: the issue of trust. It is indeed odd that a man like Kafka, who worked in an insurance office, should have thought safeguards scarcely worth the paper they were written on. His little village in the snow is a world of faith abruptly and unaccountably infected by the language of suspicion. The only strongly individuated character in the story, the doctor, is exposed to a witch hunt. Should we be surprised at the tribal, scapegoating logic that pursues him? Perhaps trust is a kind of non-renewable precapitalist resource that, once depleted, can never be replenished. This concern would account for the lurch into cosmic anguish at the end of the story—‘and it can’t be made good, ever again’.
Every writer since the Enlightenment has been aware of being condemned to work in this atmosphere of suspicion, so mercilessly diagnosed by Nietzsche and Marx: without a craft tradition (loosely defined as the production and supply of articles needed by the community) the artist’s search for meaning is painful, inward, and often absurd. Trust for a writer like Kafka is a primal state that can be regained only by an act of will: that is why he wrote, ‘nothing is granted to me, everything has to be earned, not only the present and the future, but the past, too’. Or it can be seized by blind obedience; and Kafka’s family history shows how ruthlessly a world of will and illusion was exploited by Hitler, whose inversion of the moral order received shamefully wide support from the ‘caring’ profession: forty-three percent of German doctors joined the Nazi party in 1933. Trust has lost its pristine quality. At the close of Kafka’s century it may be that this quality of trust has eroded further, not just in the artist’s despair about ‘doing art’, but in the citizen’s sense of the solidity of those ‘substantial categories of state, family and destiny’.
Concluding his recent literary study of trust, Gabriel Josipovici provides a warning and a message of hope: ‘But what the art and thought of the past two hundred years teaches us is not the lesson the deconstructionists and post-modernists would draw from it, a lesson of our freedom to live as we want, to choose the stories and traditions we want to live by, the lesson of the hopeless entanglement of all culture and language in hidden struggles for power; it is, rather, that it is not possible to exist without trusting, that to walk and talk and, a fortiori, to write and paint and compose is only possible because of trust. When we grasp this we grasp too that denying trust is denying life itself as something that has to be lived in time and in the world of others, the world into which we have been born and in which we will die.’
Pain relief
In his last months, Kafka didn’t expect much of his own doctors. ‘Verbally I don’t learn anything definite, since in discussing the tuberculosis [...] everybody drops into a reticent, evasive, glassy-eyed manner of speech’, he wrote to a friend from the sanatorium at Hauptstrasse 187, Kierling, near Vienna, in April 1924.
He’d been brought there by his medical student friend Robert Klopstock, appalled at how he had been treated by Professor Hayek, the imperious Ear, Nose and Throat specialist who was also to operate that same year, with nearly disastrous results, on Freud’s oral cancer. That month Kafka weighed a mere 43 kilos (for a height of 180 cm). His TB was now extrapulmonary: it had colonised his larynx, which was acutely inflamed, and from there spread to his epiglottis, effectively preventing him from nourishing himself. Coughing and swallowing must have been searingly painful. ‘To think that at one time I could simply dare to take a large gulp of water’, he wrote on one of the slips of paper he handed to his friends, under doctors’ orders to talk as little as possible.
Those same doctors injected phenol into the superior laryngeal nerve in an attempt to provide relief from pain, but the procedure was only partially successful. To his parents he wrote wonderful, affectionate, cheerful letters, published in their original German only a few years ago after their chance discovery by a Prague bookseller. His letters belie any sense of estrangement or grievance. In them he recalls the swimming lessons his father had given him, the beer and sausages after, and he makes no reference to what he had formerly called ‘the disgrace of showing myself undressed in public’. This, a letter about drinking beer, when he was literally dying to have a drink of water but couldn’t because of the pain in his throat! He wanted, at all costs, to avoid worrying his parents into visiting him. Dora was there all hours, desperate for the slightest hint of an improvement. He corrected the galley proofs of A Hunger Artist, which had just arrived from the publishers. One of the several notes he wrote, perhaps a wry reflection on Hayek and his retinue of medical assistants, was collected and published after his death by Klopstock. It read: ‘So the help goes away again without helping.’
To the end, Kafka retained his lucidity; and he left us one of the darkest and funniest Jewish doctor jokes: ‘Kill me,’ he instructed Klopstock, with whom he had arranged long in advance for a dose of morphine when nothing else availed, ‘or else you’re a murderer.’
Antinomies
Many of Kafka’s stories are explicitly concerned with the individual’s relationship to the community (The Investigations of a Dog; The Chinese Wall; Josephine, the Singer); the enthusiasm he spasmodically feels for communal life, like his response to the troupe of Yiddish actors he saw in the 1910s, is fed by his criticism of what the writer does, feeding on the marrow of his race, doing ‘research’ as his sleuth-hound puts it. He turns suspicion on himself. Brecht might have scorned the exactly dreamed precision of Kafka’s stories, but he also noted that Kafka had all the attributes of a great teacher: without a society to inspire, his apparently ingrained Confucianism ended up as ‘mere’ literature. Kafka noted this about himself too, as a postcard in 1916 to his fiancée Felice praising the landscape around the spa town of Marienbad attests: ‘I think that if I were Chinese and were going home (in fact I am Chinese and am going home), I would soon have to find a way to come back here.’ The myth of the Way (the Chinese tao) was of overriding importance to Kafka, though once again he put a stumbling block in his way. There may be a goal, he told his notebook, but there is no way of reaching it.
Everything is weighed in terms of what we might call its social utility value, and writing is found wanting. Doctoring, too. The Enlightenment philosopher Diderot speculates, in one of his dialogues, about the secret kinship between criminals and artists (though it has always been easier, as the career of the Marquis de Sade illustrates, to commit atrocities in the head than write good novels); the villagers sketched out in A Country Doctor also seem to regard the doctor, despite his apparent bond to the life of the community, as a kind of miscreant: he rides across the social order, he flaunts his individuality in the face of common values, his opinions are dissentient. He is a kind of antinomian. Society punishes the doctor for the gratification he derives from his odd hours of service by making him an outlaw. Butcher, executioner, barber and surgeon used all to be trades which, dealing with blood and guts, carried a weight of social opprobrium. As dignified as he is ponderous, Kafka’s country doctor mimes solidarity with tradition even while knowing his acts follow—and sometimes even parade—the logic of enlightenment. His sense of impending persecution has the touchy tone heard so often in the confessions and letters of Rousseau, assertive even while it looks defensively over its shoulder: the citizen of Geneva may have contributed to the Encyclopédie, but he was also one of literature’s most thankless characters, and father to the very Kafkaesque conviction that the forms and conventions of civilised life occasion our ills.
In relation to the criminal or miscreant, the doctor’s moral vanity makes him even more of a target. He is, we realise with a start, brother to the man on the rack in Kafka’s terrible dramatisation of the condemned prisoner who learns his sentence on his person, The Penal Colony, a story we know to have been inspired in part by his reading of the infamous case of the French army officer Alfred Dreyfus, found guilty of a trumped-up charge of treason in 1894, and banished to the prison colony of Devil’s Island. In his story Kafka’s chosen instrument of torture appears to be a Gutenberg screw press.
It is hardly incidental, then, that the first bodies authorised by the Church for dissection in Renaissance anatomy theatres were those of the condemned, still warm from the gallows. Ontologically, and certainly in the mystical body of the Church, they would always be men, no matter how violently extirpated from the social body. Nonetheless, the logic of the grudging consent from the pulpit amounts to an imprecation: cut up your own then, Men of Science! Let your knowledge bleed!
Hidden in full view
Lastly, it strikes me that the patient on the bed bears his wound like Jacob who, after wrestling the night through with the angel on the mountain, calls on the angel to bless him—even if it might seem like a curse to Kafka. There seems to be a buried reference to the Biblical scene in his first ‘real’ piece of writing, ‘The Judgement’ (1912), in which the seemingly invalid father hooks up his shirt, aping his son’s fiancée, and displays his ‘war wound’. His act of indecent exposure seems calculated to call into question his son’s very manhood. Kafka mentions a similarly suggestive episode in his travel diaries. Planning to visit Paris in October 1910, he was forced to shelve his plans and stay in Prague due to a severe attack of furunculosis (boils on his backside) and writes, ‘a brief fainting spell deprived me of the pleasure of bawling the doctor out. I had to lie down on the sofa, and during that time—it was very odd—I felt so much like a girl that I tried with my fingers to tug down my skirt.’
The ‘wound’, in fact, was Kafka’s word for the experience of writing: his first story forced him to recognise his nature as a writer. He was one of those self-doubters, like his great predecessor, the Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard, who kept open ‘the wound of the negative’ so that trust might close it again in some kind of natural healing process. Kafka’s, however, was a mortal wound, since, as he wrote to Max Brod, a writer ‘dies (or doesn’t really live) and is perpetually sorry for himself’.
Most disconcertingly of all, for those of us who take pleasure in reading Kafka, in trusting him as a writer, is the extraliterary dimension his writing has acquired. Kafka is now a prophet. J.P. Stern, late Professor of German at University College London, has pointed out that there is a resemblance between Kafka’s description of the wound and the unappetising use of natural metaphors in anti-Semitic propaganda, the most notorious being a passage in Hitler’s Mein Kampf about scandals in Vienna before the First World War in which he talks about ‘the leech on the Nation’s body’. The German word for insect or vermin (Ungeziefer) which Kafka uses to describe Gregor Samsa in Metamorphosis is one of the terms the Nazis later used to stigmatise the Jews.
What is interpreted as Kafka’s clairvoyance is surely his ability to grasp the stock phrases and figures of speech conventionally reserved for conveying mental and emotional states with the mental equivalent of the country doctor’s forceps: not as metaphor, but as words of literal intent, however much they try to hide—like the hapless patient’s wound—in full view. That is what prophets do: they read the impersonal logic that stands behind the most commonplace utterances. And they have to be right if they’re not to be wrong.
Kafka shows us, sometimes in amazing detail, the intellectual contortions and special inner pleading that afflict people who try to make sense of the arbitrary. What is most striking perhaps about his victims is that they rarely take any steps to avoid the fate they seem to have expected from the first. The unthinkable is a category of monster: it is what we never care to think about.
A prosthetic life
These days the country doctor’s model patient can be found in any old family: he’s probably looking forward to being able to walk again in a few weeks now his hip is a vanadium and titanium sphere bonded to his femoral shaft, for a good fifteen years at least, with biocompatible epoxy resin. Writing to Brod from the sanatorium in the Erzgebirge just after he had completed A Country Doctor in 1917, Kafka dwells at length on his uncle’s imperturbable cheeriness and aptitude for life in the country, and suggests that this kind of life might have tempted him too—‘the way a slight rustling madness can make a person contented, thinking it the melody of life’. But at thirty-four, with questionable lungs and even more questionable relationships, he decides he has no right to such an expectation. And besides, flight from the paternal line is in that desire; the compelling nocturnal spectacle of Hope grappling with his Father.
Perhaps only the anorexic Kafka could have dignified his beefy middle-aged dad in such a way, as if he were calling the toss with the Wrestler of Genesis, ‘who touched the hollow of Jacob’s thigh in the sinew of the hip’.
The wound had done its work. It was a moribund man who rehearsed a normal life with Dora in the last few weeks of the only life he had. ‘Franz is cheery and in good shape’, appends Dora to one of Franz’s last letters; and a simple country doctor might wonder at the affection with which he addresses his parents, especially the father he made stand in so often as tormentor; at how he comes to accept his body and his manhood, even as his illness, and not its metaphor, kills him.
As for his uncle, we have a story that sees through him: the photograph reproduced in the Wagenbach book has him sitting on a metal skeleton with the power of about twenty thoroughbreds, thighs urging it forward, knuckles clenched on the throttle, while four female helpers, including Kafka’s favourite sister Ottla—the one who encouraged Franz so much to quit the parental house in Prague, and sustained him with regular food-packets in his last months with Dora in Berlin—smile triumphantly through the long exposure time in front of what may well have been Uncle Siegfried’s camera too.
In the photo Uncle Siegfried’s NSU Cantilever is actually resting on its rear stand—poised for a moment in time, like the four human figures in the picture, on its own two legs.